Vigilante
Date: 2018-05-21 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: One man leaves the life of a lawman behind him and works to clean up a new area in space.On the planet now known as High Tortuga, the mine workers are far too close to being slaves so the ruler of the planet shut them down.Except for the mine owned by Venfirdri Lan.He's taken his mine off the grid and decided to keep everything running. With no need to pay the workers, profits should be good.After all, who's going to stop him?He had no idea there was a new type of man working for justice on the planet.A man named Barnabas.In fact, he didn't even know who Barnabas was. But he's about to.Barnaba
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing
Rights: Copyright 2019 Natalie Grey. All rights reserved.

Vigilante Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1-7)

Natalie Grey

Michael Anderle

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

Copyright © 2019 Natalie Grey, and Michael Anderle

Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

A Michael Anderle Production

LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact support@lmbpn.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First US edition, August 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-360-2

The Kurtherian Gambit (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2015-2019 by Michael T. Anderle and LMBPN Publishing.

Contents

Vigilante

Sentinel

Warden

Paladin

Justiciar

Defender

Protector

Books by Natalie Grey

Books By Michael Anderle

Connect With Michael Anderle

Vigilante

Vigilante Chronicles Book 1

Chapter One

Tethra, one of the smaller cities on the planet High Tortuga, formerly known as “Devon,” was a surprising amalgam of smells and commotion. Barnabas wove through the crowds, oblivious to the brightly-colored awnings and the street vendors’ wares. He did not need to see the unique weave on the baskets or how a cook loaded spiced meat and vegetables into a pocket of bread.

He had seen plenty of cities in his day, and by this time he was no longer concerned with what they looked like. It was all about what they felt like. A planet’s cities were the bellwethers of its success...or failure.

And Barnabas wanted to see High Tortuga thrive.

Why he had started here he was not sure. He could have gone to H’onu, the capital… such as it was. On a whim, however, he’d come here when he left the Shinigami. Tethra lay on another continent, one the AI had told him was marbled with ore deposits lying under a variety of terrain from gorgeous snow-capped mountains to jewel-like oases between the dunes of the northern deserts.

For some reason, however, the original inhabitants of Tethra had decided to build it squarely in the middle of what might charitably be called a marsh, or, more accurately, a swamp.

It was full of reeds and it stank, and Barnabas was fairly sure there was some alien version of mosquitoes flying around. They weren’t as bad as mosquitoes on Earth—what was?—but they were no fun. Even with his reflexes, he had managed to hit himself once or twice trying to get one.

Whenever he did that he was fairly sure he heard Shinigami snickering in his head.

He spoke to her in his head as he walked so as not to attract the attention of the populace. You know, in my day—

Before humans figured out how to make fire, you mean?

Barnabas’s face settled into a frown. He did not like rude people. Well, except maybe Tabitha, known to the inhabitants of High Tortuga and other former Empire citizens and enemies as “Ranger Two.” Come to think of it, he wasn’t even sure why he did put up with her.

In my day, he continued after a moment, we raised the grain and herbs to brew our own beer and bake our own bread. We sewed our own clothes. We didn’t rely on technology.

Shinigami paused, which meant she was trying to calculate what he meant. He enjoyed the fact that she wasn’t sure yet.

Is it your opinion that the inhabitants of this planet use too much technology, Grandpa?

Barnabas stopped and directed a glare skyward. Did Tabitha stow away on the ship?

No. Why do you ask?

It’s the only thing that explains your attitude—that she’s there egging you on. Barnabas linked his hands behind his back and strolled onward, passing a group who appeared to be primates of some sort. The spray of hair on their faces looked somewhat like that of a marmoset, but their coloring was a deep rich brown with a hint of dark red.

In addition to the pseudo-marmosets, he saw some beings who looked like slugs, and a tall, reedy looking species with green-tinted skin and black double-pupiled eyes that had no whites. They seemed to move along the edges of the streets, never wading into the crush.

So, why did you mention the technology? Shinigami asked.

Oh, now you’re curious?

You left me floating up here. I’m bored.

There’s only so much you could do down here.

There are a lot of things I could do. I have guided missiles. I have a flamethrower. I’m exceptionally maneuverable, even in an atmosphere—

You have a flamethrower?

There was a pause.

Shinigami! You have a flamethrower? Barnabas kept his mental voice quiet and calm.

He was very, very good at not losing his temper. He had in fact vowed never to lose his temper again. It was the only reason he allowed himself on-world anymore.

Maybe, the AI admitted. I think Jean Dukes built it on a dare.

Barnabas considered this. He was not sure whether he believed Shinigami, but—disturbingly—it did sound like the sort of thing the weapons people on the Meredith Reynolds would have done.

What do you mean, you think?

Well, I mean I heard them talking about installing something, and now I have a switch I could turn on to see what it does. In fact, let’s try now.

No, no! Barnabas actually waved a hand in the air, earning himself some odd looks. No. Let’s not. We’ll talk about this later.

Why later?

Because right now, Barnabas told the AI with quiet satisfaction, I’m going to go get a drink.

He had seen a lot of cities in his day, and one thing never changed.

There was always somewhere to get a drink.

* * *

Venfaldri Gar settled down on a stool at the bar and tried not to frown too obviously.

Normally, he would not even think of coming to a place as grimy and rundown as this, but he needed information and a seedy bar was the surest place to get it.

He winced when the bartender came into sight. She was an Ubuara. The sprays of white hair on her cheeks marked her as a female, and his sensitive eyes could pick up a faint brindled pattern in her sleek coat.

The Ubuara were partially hive-minded; each had their own thoughts, and yet absorbed some of their group’s thoughts in a very particular way. They could pass information to one another without speaking, and not simply words but also emotions and images. They had been observed absorbing each other’s thoughts and making those thoughts their own, although they had also been known to act individually.

Only the Ubuara seemed to understand when either thing—group integration or independent action—might happen. There was an Ubuara language, half hand signals and half words, but it was rarely used—at least not out loud. They tended to speak to each other mentally and learn the local language wherever they ended up in their travels.

Gar did not like Ubuara. No business owner in their right mind did, especially not an overseer of Devon’s mining industry. You could cut off their connection to the rest with a simple implant that transmitted a blocking signal—and of course, the cost of the implant was added to the worker’s contract, to be paid off with a few extra months of work.

But maintaining the transmitters was simply One More Thing To Do… and the Ubuara tended to overreact when they were cut off from the rest of the group.

It was just for a year. You would think they would understand.

It was a business owner’s nightmare, and Gar had long been of the opinion that Ubuara weren’t worth the trouble. He wasn’t in charge of staffing, though, and given that they tended to start insurrections if you didn’t cut them off from one another, they had to be dealt with somehow.

The Ubuara swung over to him using a series of holds on the ceiling and tilted her head toward him.

“May I get you a drink, sir?”

“Fruit juice, whatever you have.” Gar hesitated only a moment before adding, “Please.”

“At once, sir.”

She swung away, seeming pleased by the order. He had chosen it with care. The Ubuara enjoyed fruit juice, and he wanted her to think well of him. He didn’t want every free Ubuara on the street to know who he was and keep him from getting the information he needed.

Namely, what was that damned ship that had just appeared in orbit? The last time a strange ship had appeared, the mines had been shut down the next day.

Or at least most of them had.

Gar hunkered down to try to make himself appear as short and wide as he could. For a Luvendi he was noteworthy. Tall and pale, his eyes had double pupils that were ringed with bright blue-green. Although unusual simply because of his appearance, he was also distinctive because so many of the mine overseers had been Luvendi.

That was why he was afraid the bartender might not like him. There was really only one way people got to this planet, and Gar was not foolish enough to believe that people enjoyed working in the mines.

He wasn’t cruel, of course. He was only the vice-overseer, an assistant of sorts to Venfirdri Lan, who had once run many mines on Devon. Lan was cruel, and Gar always did his best to intervene when Lan’s actions might result in an uprising.

A medium-sized bipedal alien entered as Gar was given his fruit juice, and Gar looked at it curiously. He hadn’t seen this species before. It had a pinkish cast to its skin, eyes with a ring of color around the single pupil, and hands with no claws.

Gar gave it a once-over and pitied whatever overseer had drawn the short straw and gotten this one as a worker. It didn’t look very strong. Not interesting at all.

He scanned the bar and settled his attention on a group of Nekubi in the corner, their thick tails drawn under them to form makeshift seats. What were they talking about? Did they know about the strange ship?

* * *

Venfaldri Gar, of all people.

Aebura swung away from him with relief. He didn’t seem to have recognized her, which was probably a good thing. Gar had never been as cruel as Lan, but she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Gar actually cared about the workers in their mine.

She had ended her contract two years ago and come to Tethra to wait for the friends she had made in the mines, starting her business in the interim.

She had believed that they would be along within a few months, so she’d held out on hiring help at first. She worked herself ragged to serve everyone herself, make the fruit juices, stock the back room, and clean the place.

But the months passed and no one had come.

She began to hear stories from the people who had left other mines, although they used the word “escaped.” They told her that sometimes the overseers didn’t like to let people go. Sometimes they added months to a contract for things like medical care to make it seem legitimate, but most of the time they didn’t even pretend.

She had been angry. She had spoken with the other Ubuara in the city, learning their stories and about the mines they had worked in. She had found out that although Lan was the cruelest person she’d ever met, he wasn’t bad as far as overseers went.

Then word had come recently that the mining corporation had been bought out and everyone was being freed. The contracts were terminated. The mines were closed down and would be reopened as legitimate businesses, with the workers receiving wages.

And still her friends had not arrived. Not a single one of them, over the years, had come to find her.

Aebura had kept collecting information, and she had noticed something very interesting—not one person she had spoken to had come out of Venfirdri Lan’s mine.

It was possible she had just missed them. She knew that.

But she did not think so.

And so now she struggled with the idea of speaking to Gar about it. He would surely know the answer, but old habits died hard—like the one about not annoying the overseers. If he hadn’t remembered her, her instincts told her she should keep it that way.

She swung over to a new patron. Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t seen this one enter. She had seen one or two aliens like this before, just a glimpse on the street, and she understood enough about the species to know this one was male. Oemuga, an Ubuara who had traveled to H’onu, said there were many humans there now. Aebura was curious to find out more about them. She supposed not many had a reason to come to a place as small and out of the way as Tethra.

“What can I get for you?”

He hesitated, then spoke with a slight accent. “What would you suggest?”

“I have fruit juice,” Aebura offered. “All kinds.”

His nose twitched slightly and the corners of his mouth moved, but she did not know what that meant in this species. He seemed to consider for a moment.

“Whatever kind you recommend,” he told her finally. “Unless you have beer?”

“Beer?” She did not know that word.

He gave a very faint sigh. “I did not expect it. Fruit juice, then.”

When she returned, the glass held steady by her back feet while she swung over to him, he looked up at her pleasantly.

“What’s your name?”

“Aebura.” She smiled. It wasn’t unusual for patrons to want to talk, but usually they did that after weeks of coming in. “Who are you?”

“My name is Barnabas.” His voice was nice, she decided. It was very smooth; easy on the ears. “I am new here. Tell me about this place.”

“It is a very different place than it was a few months ago,” Aebura told him. She found a rag and began to wipe glasses dry, still hanging by one arm as she did so. “The mines were all closed down. Most of them, anyway.”

She hardly noticed it at the time, but her eyes drifted to Venfaldri Gar.

The alien noticed, though. He leaned forward, his eyes intent, and uttered only two words.

“Tell me.”

Chapter Two

The strange thing, Aebura thought later, was that she had told him everything without hesitation. There was something about him. He wasn’t as tall as the Luvendi, nor did he have claws or sharp teeth or the sheer brute strength of the Brakalons.

But he had a commanding presence. When he spoke, you wanted to do what he told you.

So she told him the whole story, from her first days on Devon to the work in the mines to Lan and Gar and the rest of them. She explained how she’d been one of the first employed in Sector XVIII’s Mine 2b—and therefore one of the first to leave—and how she had nearly forgotten the touch of the group mind by the time she was released.

She told him how she had waited and waited.

To her surprise, instead of offering her a platitude he considered her story in silence for a long time.

“Tell me about your contract,” he suggested finally.

“You want to see it? I have a copy.” She’d kept it secreted away the whole time she was on the transport and in the mines.

Only now did she realize that she must have known on some level what kind of people they would be working for. Why would she have kept the contract unless she knew they would try to weasel and cheat their way out of it?

“Yes, please,” the human requested politely. “I would love to see it. And if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like another glass of this fruit juice. It’s excellent.”

Aebura glowed with pride since she made the fruit juice herself. “I’ll go get it,” she said and hurried away.

She didn’t know it, but a fierce argument had started within the first minute of her telling her story—and it showed no signs of slowing down.

Why not? Shinigami demanded now. It’s a perfectly good solution. Why not do it?

Because I am not a madman who burns down cities and then asks questions, Barnabas told her. His voice was terse. That would be rank vigilantism.

What’s wrong with vigilantism?

It doesn’t follow the rule of law. It isn’t impartial.

What’s not impartial about suggesting that slavery is wrong?

That isn’t— Barnabas sighed and looked down at his empty glass of fruit juice. To his surprise, he really was enjoying the stuff. It wasn’t beer, of course, but he couldn’t hold that against it. Not everything could be beer. Justice should be impartial.

I don’t see why.

You’re being very difficult.

The Queen Bitch doesn’t leave justice up to other people when she sees something bad going on. And you were a Queen’s Ranger.

That was different. I was acting on her orders and enforcing her Justice.

There’s only one Justice, and it isn’t the same thing as laws.

When did you become a philosopher?

When did you become a coward?

Barnabas went still as stone and Shinigami, sensing she might have pushed things a little too far, withdrew into silence.

Aebura swung out of the back room and offered him a folded piece of paper. She noted curiously that Barnabas looked far angrier than he had when she’d left. She filled his glass with fruit juice, worried that he might be angry at her.

She’d only known him for a few minutes, but she instinctively knew she did not ever want to see him angry. She withdrew a little and busied herself with work.

Barnabas stared at the piece of paper and read. There was a low throb of anger in his gut.

Coward?

Cowardice had nothing to do with this. He had wanted to go off on his own. He would say that he was here because he knew there was still injustice to be rooted out. From what he had seen of the universe, there would always be injustice. There were always people who wanted to see what they could get away with.

He remembered how he had once been. He had completely lost control—everything that made him...well, not human perhaps, but sentient. He had cared for nothing more than what he wanted to do. He’d been ruled by his emotions, and other people had suffered for it.

He had sworn that he would never give in to that again. He had been comforted by the strictures of a monk’s life and learned to strive for a higher standard of morality, and when he had joined Bethany Anne he had been glad to know that he served someone whose laws were truly just.

Someone who could take him down if he ever got out of control. She’d made that abundantly clear. Despite his mood, he smiled slightly at the memory.

Now he was out on his own because he needed to be. It was time for him to stop relying on anyone else to check him before he went too far.

He wasn’t arguing with Shinigami because he didn’t want to burn this whole place down, but because he did. He understood all too well why she had suggested it. He had wanted the same thing when he’d heard Aebura’s story.

But he knew he needed to let go of the anger before he acted or he might do something he would regret. There was no one else to talk his plans over with now. There was only him.

Well, and Shinigami.

He shook his head wearily and closed his eyes and let the anger sink back into the recesses of his mind. That was the trick to this: you could always get rid of anger if you wanted to. Often he did not want to. Anger slipped into his mind with a comforting familiarity. It whispered for him to break the rules because he worked for a greater good.

And then when you weren’t looking, you crossed lines and found yourself with more blood on your hands than you could ever atone for.

He was aware of the tall thin alien watching him as he beckoned the bartender over again. He gestured to the paper. “This is a standard contract, I’m afraid.”

“I know.” Her tail drooped sadly. “I didn’t think I could get a better one.”

“Mmm. Hear me out. It’s standard, but it’s utterly wrong.” Barnabas pointed to a few paragraphs. “This basically indemnifies the mine owners for any danger they put you in and allows them to charge you for anything they want and add time to your contract. Here, it says that if you have a dispute about the contract you have a right to legal representation, but there are no provisions for how you’re expected to go about obtaining that. In short, it’s a mess.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I wanted to leave, but no transports besides the mines’ go from here to Dugan—my home planet. Even if there were, how would I have paid my passage? Dugan has no exports, really.”

She was embarrassed, and she felt like an utter fool now. She had known that the contract was not in her favor. She had expected poor conditions in the mines, and she knew she would have to work hard, although she didn’t object to that.

But she hadn’t guessed that the mine owners wouldn’t let people go at all. Because if you couldn’t leave and you didn’t get your wages until the end of your service year, how would you find legal representation?

What would stop people like Venfirdri Lan from doing whatever he wanted to the people he employed?

She should have known.

“Aebura.” Barnabas sounded gentle. “People like this prey on people who don’t know better. You were caught up in something bigger than you.”

Aebura hesitated, then dropped down from her perch to crouch on the counter in front of him. “It wasn’t that,” she explained. “I feel foolish, yes, but that was a small thing; unimportant. When I left the mines…”

She glanced at Gar again to see if he was watching and Barnabas felt a small stirring of anger.

She lowered her voice. “When I left the mines after my contract was done the others asked me to smuggle them out with me. They said that Lan was getting worse and they were afraid for themselves.”

“You didn’t do it,” Barnabas guessed.

She shook her head. “I told them that they only had a few months more on their contracts. I told them…” Her small shoulders slumped. “It doesn’t matter now. They were all excuses. I knew Lan was getting worse. We had less food to eat and the hours were longer. I told myself he wouldn’t go this far.”

“‘This far?’” Barnabas echoed.

There was a pause while Aebura wrung her hands. She was rocking side to side a bit as well.

“Slavery,” she blurted finally. “I think that when the mines shut down Lan didn’t tell them, and he didn’t let them leave. Why else would none of them come to Tethra? They never got out.”

Barnabas nodded slightly toward Gar. “And that alien there—is he this ‘Lan’ you speak of?”

“Oh, no.” Aebura smiled slightly. “That is Venfaldri Gar. He was Lan’s second-in-command.” A moment later she added, “I do not think he recognizes me. He never liked Ubuara. I think he thought we were all the same. Because of our minds.”

Barnabas raised his eyebrows. “What about your minds?”

“We can speak telepathically,” Aebura explained.

“Without implants?”

“Yes.” Her tail twitched, which Barnabas thought might be a sign of amusement. “They need implants to stop us from doing it.”

“Why would they want to stop you from doing it?”

Her tail was not twitching now. She hunched and would not meet his eyes. “They think we’ll start a rebellion or pass prohibited materials if we’re allowed to, so when you get your contract you get an implant that stops you from connecting. I don’t know how it works.”

Shinigami, scan the alien in front of me. I want to know about the implant in her head.

Shinigami was silent, and Barnabas wondered if she was still speaking to him.

A few moments later, however, she reported, It is a device that transmits radio waves. It is placed near what are likely to be the speech and language centers of the brain.

“Likely to be?”

I am guessing, based on physiology and what I can read of the brain waves, that this creature is very similar to a primate. The device would likely interfere with speech in more than one way, but it’s difficult to know.

Thank you, Shinigami.

Barnabas considered this.

I still say we burn this sonofabitch down, Shinigami added. Apparently she had decided that it was once again time for her to express her opinions.

Barnabas’s mouth twitched in something that might have been considered a smile. He remembered Michael saying that creating female vampires was riskier than creating male vampires. Because they are more likely to fail? Barnabas had asked. No, Michael replied, because they talk. A lot.

Shinigami?

What?

Why do we not like slavery?

There was a pause, and Barnabas knew that Shinigami—rightly—believed this to be a trap of some sort.

He waited.

Because it infringes on the rights of individuals.

Are you quoting something?

Shinigami did not deign to answer that.

Either way, Barnabas continued, if you dislike slavery because it infringes on the rights of individuals, I can therefore assume that you would rather make people’s lives better, not worse. If so, burning “this sonofabitch” down is illogical because...

Silence.

I’m never going to let you use the flamethrower if you don’t answer me.

Because burning to death would make their lives worse, Shinigami said sulkily.

Very good. Barnabas smiled at Aebura. “I apologize for that. I needed to have a conversation with my associate.” He tapped his head. “We can also speak mind to mind in a way, but we require technology to assist us.”

Which apparently you have some big objection to. What was your point about that, anyway?

That in my day tools like ships did not have minds. They were simply inanimate objects, no more. They didn’t talk back.

How boring. And how error-prone, too. Have you met any humans? They do stupid things. No wonder you gave us minds.

Humans are not idiots. Barnabas resisted the urge to roll his eyes. They really should have given Shinigami to Tabitha. She’d broken Achronyx in, so surely she could have done the same here.

Name one thing a human can do better than me.

Strategize in unfamiliar situations?

No human will ever best me in strategy. Ever.

Wrong, Barnabas said flatly. Strategy requires logic, emotion, and instinct. Though you may best us in logic simply by running simulations, you will never be an unqualified superior choice as a strategist.

There was a very long silence—by Shinigami’s standards, anyway.

Prove it, she demanded finally.

What?

Prove it. Play a game with me. Chess.

That’s insane. The simulations alone—

I won’t run simulations more than ten turns ahead. When he said nothing, she added persuasively, On my honor.

I’m still not sure artificial minds have honor.

Say that to Archangel II’s face! I dare you.

I retract my comment. Barnabas narrowed his eyes slightly. Very well, you have a deal. He looked back at Aebura again with a smile.

All Aebura had seen was a brief moment of inattention. Emotions had chased one another across his face and his lips had moved slightly, but she would never have guessed he was having a conversation.

How fast could he speak? How fast could he think?

She shivered slightly. This alien didn’t look very threatening, but she was now firmly of the opinion that looks were deceiving on that front. Why, she wasn’t sure. He hadn’t done anything intimidating…yet.

She didn’t know it, but that was going to change in approximately thirty seconds.

The alien to your left is trying to scan you, Shinigami reported.

Has he succeeded?

Impossible to tell. Your clothing is made to repel some scanners, but without knowing more about him and the technology he has access to I couldn’t say.

Barnabas leaned forward slightly. “Aebura, what species is that man?”

“He’s a Luvendi.”

I could have told you that much, you know.

Not now, Shinigami. “What should I know about the Luvendi in general?”

“A lot of them run mines here. Their bones are fairly brittle.” Aebura considered and concluded, “They don’t have music.”

“Everyone has music.” Even if he despised most of it.

“Not them,” Aebura argued. When she saw Barnabas’s skeptical look she added, “Seriously!”

Barnabas looked at the alien and, having caught him staring, raised a single eyebrow.

Then Gar did something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but that he would later describe as the biggest mistake of his life.

He ran.

Chapter Three

When Gar first took off, he didn’t have any sort of plan at all. He just looked into the eyes of the small alien—pathetic looking, really—and felt a wave of inexplicably strong fear. It was a lone human.

But it was also affiliated with the former Etheric Empire.

He had learned that from the Nekubi in the bar, offering one a drink and looking away in disgust as it slimed its way up the barstool and sat. It had taken depressingly long to get it to open up at all. It was a clever bargainer, and Gar knew that with that example he was hardly going to get anything more out of the other two.

Besides, once he’d spent an agonizing half-hour buying it drinks, he was determined to have that time be worth something. Finally it opened up.

Strange ship in orbit? Oh, yes. Registered as the Shinigami, yes, yes. Registered to the former Etheric Empire, yes. And I’m not saying I’m certain, oh, no, not certain, but the last time we saw aliens like that one over there was right before the mines got bought out. They’re called “humans.”

At first Gar thought this was a joke. He had heard stories of humans. Their eyes glowed red, they had claws, and they could beat Yollins in single combat.

This was clearly not a human, but the Nekubi had been sure. It couldn’t even identify whether the alien was male or female, but it was sure the thing was human. Absolutely sure.

And Gar began to wonder.

He still remembered the day things had changed. Well over two years ago, Lan had received an urgent message from the corporation they served. He had holed himself up in his office while he reviewed the message, then made sure all communications to the outside world were completely shut down.

Gar had assumed this was some sort of security protocol and accordingly, he waited to be briefed while he followed Lan’s orders. He made sure there were no radios to be found anywhere on the premises, and no transmitters of any sort. He helped the security team take down the satellite uplinks.

Lan had never briefed him on anything.

What he did do, however, was enact all the rules he’d always said the mine should have. There were strict curfews now, and reading materials were confiscated. The workers were pleased to learn that they would now receive wages, but less pleased to learn that food would be available at a store and they now needed to pay rent for the little huts they lived in, the payments for which would be withdrawn from their wages.

When Gar told Lan about the increasingly dire mutters he was hearing Lan simply told him, “Do what you have to do.”

Since then, Gar had done things he didn’t like to think about.

It had started slowly; that was the thing. First, there were more people in the little jail, so he had to build a new one. The security guards complained too much, so he had the prisoners build it. They were surly and bad-tempered, so he had them whipped.

It was all very logical when he thought about it. The thing was, it left a sort of a sick feeling in his stomach.

And he was angry. He was angry all the time now. When he walked through the mining camp, it was with his eyes darting this way and that, to see which person would rebel next. And there was always another one. Why couldn’t they just follow the rules?

It wasn’t just them, either. Why couldn’t Lan enforce some of his own policies for a change? He didn’t have the workers yelling at him. He didn’t see their stares. He just called for more and more supplies from the city and holed up in his office. He was snappish when Gar asked him to do anything at all.

Do what you have to do. Take care of it. Don’t bother me with things like this.

Bastard.

Then yesterday, Lan had called him into the office. Gar was to go to Tethra. He needed to do something “of the utmost importance.” When Gar found out that he was going to procure one of Lan’s favorite types of cake, he didn’t even care about the absurdity. He hadn’t left the compound for months and he was beyond pleased to have time away from the sullen workers, the bored security guards—there was a recipe for trouble—and, above all else, away from Lan, who wasn’t explaining why any of this had been necessary.

He didn’t even care that he’d have to give a fake name and make sure he wasn’t followed back. Nothing bothered him.

Until he’d started to piece together the whispers once he’d arrived in Tethra.

Until he realized that the mine Lan controlled should have been shut down entirely and the workers let out of their contracts—with pay, presumably, for the ones Lan had kept beyond their year.

Lan had told him that the company had a provision in the contracts for work shortages, and that workers would be paid double wages for staying past their year.

Gar was beginning to have the feeling that none of that had ever been true.

When he’d heard about the strange ship in the sky, and the other whispers that one like this had been seen months ago...well, he wanted to learn more. When he heard that the captain of that ship might be sitting in the bar next to him?

He ran.

If you had asked him later he would tell you that he hadn’t known for a fact that there would be trouble. How could he have been sure, after all, that this ship and the other were connected to the mines shutting down? How could he have been sure that he would be held responsible?

But he remembered the things he had done and the sick feeling in his stomach grew, and he ran.

He ran out of the bar and into the little side street, shoving people out of his way. He was Luvendi; they should move out of his way so he wouldn’t be hurt. But this place was a madhouse, made up of all former workers in the mines, and they showed the same appalling lack of order here they showed there.

“Move. Move!”

He ran until his breath gave out, which wasn’t too long, really—embarrassing, but everyone got older—and then he bent over and waited for his hearts to stop pounding.

He was being ridiculous. This human had no idea who Gar was. How could he? Gar had given a fake name, and he had certainly not told anyone who he worked for.

Gar stood up with a sigh, turned around—

And saw the human staring at him from a few yards away.

Again, Gar would say what had happened wasn’t so much a conscious decision as simple instinct. He pulled out his gun and fired, and he didn’t even wait to see if the human was injured before he ran again.

He needed to get to one of the company houses. They’d been established by Luvendi who had decided to leave the mines and set up shop in the cities. One could hardly blame them, of course. Life in a city was far better than the life in a mine, even as a vice-overseer. The food was better, the lodging was better, and the company was certainly better.

Yes. One of those lodging houses would take him in, give him shelter. He knew of one on the outskirts that had always looked forbidding, with its heavy metal doors and few windows.

That one seemed best right about now.

He shot at me, Barnabas bitched. He was running, rather enjoying the feel of sunlight and fresh air on his skin. He didn’t particularly mind living on ships, but he did miss the outdoors.

I could take him out. Shinigami’s raspy voice held a note of anticipation.

With what, a guided missile? He ducked under a heavy basket being carried by two massive aliens. Also, what were those?

Maybe. And they’re Brakalons.

Interesting. Barnabas caught sight of the Luvendi’s pale head disappearing down an alley on the other side of the street and rerouted himself with a curse. Those long legs were damnably fast.

I’m assuming from your silence that you do want missiles. They’ll be armed in ten seconds.

What? No! No missiles! He hurdled a fruit stand. And since I know you’re about to ask why, tell me how you’re planning to avoid harming civilians?

Tell me how you’re planning to catch the alien? What, are you out for an evening constitutional? Stop strolling.

I’m running!

Not very fast.

That’s a matter of opinion. You don’t even have legs. This alley was disgusting. There were frogs in it, for God’s sake. And slime. Barnabas was going to find whoever had decided to build in this swamp and make them drink bad beer until they gave up the will to live.

All right, how about an objective measurement? You’re not going as fast as he is. It’s time to—

No. No, we’re not doing the red eyes and claws thing. People here don’t know much about humans, and I can catch him without that. Just figure out where he’s going and give me a path!

You are the most boring person I know.

I’ll keep that in mind.

Go left when you reach the main street and go straight until you see the cathedral.

There’s a cathedral? The Jesuits have always traveled widely, but I’ll be really impressed if they’ve managed to get—

Cathedral, temple—whatever you want to call it. It has a statue on top that looks like a four-year-old made it. Shinigami considered. And I don’t know why you don’t want to go all red-eyes. It’s a good thing. We want humans to settle here, and we don’t want other people to mess with them.

I am not talking about this right now!

Mmmhmm.

Ahead of them, Gar was running like his life depended on it—because for all he knew, it did. He hadn’t actually seen whether the human survived, after all.

Actually, it might be good to check that.

He looked over his shoulder, and for a moment could see only the usual assortment of aliens. Big and broad-shouldered, with the telltale gaps in the crowd where Nekubi were probably slithering around.

He was still there. The human was still there.

Shit. Gar started running again. He had the agonizing thought that he wasn’t even going to die because this strange little alien killed him, he was going to die when his hearts exploded.

They certainly felt like they were going to. Had he ever run this much in his life?

There was the house. Finally.

Gar loped as fast as he could go, trying to wring more energy from his tired body. He pushed several smaller aliens out of the way to get to the door and held up an identification chip embedded in his long necklace, and when it opened he crashed inside. He slammed it shut behind him and slid down it, heaving for breath.

After a moment, aware of how ridiculous he looked and also aware that if anyone asked he would have to say the strange little human-thing hadn’t actually done anything threatening, he got up and made his way up the stairs to the room he had always stayed in while he had been here before. He would alert the caretakers later.

He was halfway down the hall when he heard a noise behind him and turned to introduce himself to what he assumed was another tenant.

Red eyes glowed in the darkness of the corridor.

Gar gave a high-pitched scream and fled, slamming the heavy iron door of his room behind him as soon as he reached it. He backed away, heaving for breath. The human had gotten in. They must have hacked the keypad, which was terrifying enough—how had they faked a Luvendi genetic code?—but this door had no electronic lock. This door was safe.

But as he had been several times already today, Gar was very, very wrong.

With a screech of metal, the heavy door was ripped off its hinges and flung across the room. Gar scrambled backward, still screaming, and ended up in a puddle on the floor as the human, now red-eyed, advanced on him.

When Gar was pressed against the back wall of the room, the human paused to look at him thoughtfully.

“You didn’t pay your bar tab,” it murmured.

Gar gaped at him. This was why he’d been chased through the marketplace? This was why he was being confronted by a creature out of a nightmare?

“I...what?”

The human smiled, showing teeth that were definitely pointier than they had been at the start of this.

“Just kidding. Sit down. We’re going to have a chat.”

Chapter Four

Barnabas had noted the way this alien had looked at him when he had come into the bar. The look had been brief and dismissive.

He understood why, of course. His skin was soft, or at least looked that way, his legs didn’t have the characteristic structure that indicated quick acceleration, and he had no claws or sharp teeth. On the one hand, it made sense.

On the other, it had been a massive miscalculation on the Luvendi’s part.

“What…what are you?” The alien was almost whimpering.

Get ahold of yourself.

Barnabas tried not to smile. For once, Shinigami, I find I agree with you. To Gar, he said, “I am a human. My name is Barnabas.” He considered this. “You may call me Ranger for now.”

Shinigami, we need to come up with a title.

I’ll put it right at the top of our to-do list.

“Ranger” will serve well enough for now.

I was... I was joking.

The nickname seemed strange to Gar, but who could understand what humans called themselves or why? For a moment he half-remembered something—ranger, ranger… Where had he heard that before?

He wasn’t going to put himself at a disadvantage by asking, but he’d had enough experience with this human already to think it was probably important. He’d have to see if he could get the human to tell him somehow.

Gar nodded courteously. “I am—”

“Venfaldri Gar,” Barnabas interrupted. “Get up.”

Gar stood up, trembling. His hands brushed the loose robes he wore to shield his normal clothes from the mess of travel through the swamp.

“Sit over there,” Barnabas ordered. He pointed to a chair that had survived his assault on the room. Gar had to walk over the twisted wreckage of the door to sit down.

He arranged his robes carefully and placed his long-fingered hands flat in his lap, one over the other in a sign of respect. From such a pose, it was difficult to draw a weapon or strike quickly. Thus, it was a mark of respect. He wondered if the human knew that. Anxiously, he then wondered if the human might think it was an insult.

The human said nothing, however, only stared, with eyes that were fading from red back to brown. It stared, and it waited.

“Why are you here?” Gar asked it finally. He wanted to ask it how it knew his name, but that sounded like the sort of question someone would ask if they were afraid. He didn’t want to seem afraid.

“That,” the alien said with a smile, “is a very good question. A very good question indeed. A Ranger searches out corruption and injustice.” He let the sentence hang in the air for a moment. “And cleanses it,” he said finally, and almost pleasantly.

Gar knew almost nothing about humans, but even he knew the tone wasn’t really pleasant at all. He tried not to swallow too obviously. Corruption and injustice, the human had said, and it knew who he was. Somehow it knew.

The human waited again.

I could use missiles.

I’m standing right here.

You would want to back up, then. I thought that was implied.

Infuriating. Barnabas prayed silently for patience and waited for Gar to speak. He didn’t have endless patience, of course, but he had quite enough to wait for the Luvendi to figure out on his own that Barnabas was dangerous to him.

Finally, Gar spoke. “Why do you want to talk to me?”

Barnabas fought the urge to growl.

See, he’s an idiot! You won’t get anything out of him. Kill him with fire.

Not yet. Barnabas linked his hands behind his back and started to pace. “Why do you think I want to talk to you?”

“I don’t have any idea,” Gar replied. His face was—as far as Barnabas could tell—completely open.

Shinigami, tell me what you can about his stress levels.

If he’s lying, you mean? He’s definitely lying. You should—

Kill him with fire, yes, I know. There was an ominous pause and Barnabas hastened to add, That was an acknowledgment that I’d heard you before, not something you should do.

He then found out that when an AI grumbled it sounded a bit like an overworked computer.

He asked Gar, “Has anything that has happened in the past hour indicated that it would be wise to lie to me?” Gar said nothing, so Barnabas smiled again. He stopped pacing and looked directly at the alien.

And waited.

This time Gar wisely decided to try a different tack. “Maybe someone has told you that I am a…” His voice trailed off.

“Do go on.”

Gar’s mind raced. He could say he was vice-overseer at the mine, but this human might very well know that the mines should have been shut down. Would it count as injustice to him that they remained open and the workers weren’t allowed to leave?

Yes.

So he couldn’t admit that. But as the human—the Ranger—had pointed out, it wasn’t wise to lie, either. This really was a mess.

“Perhaps I can make your choice easier,” the human told him after a moment. Gar looked at him warily, and decided his wariness was clearly warranted when the human continued, “If you tell me the truth and I don’t like what you say, we will have to have a conversation about how you intend to atone—and if you will be given the chance to. I acknowledge that this conversation might be unpleasant, but there may be a chance for redemption—and that’s assuming I don’t like what you say. For all we know, I might. If you lie to me…” he paused, “I’ll rip your spine out.”

Maybe, Gar reflected, that other human had bested King Yoll in single combat by terrifying it to death.

Maybe that had been this human.

“Do you have any other names?” he asked.

“A very strange question, given the topic at hand.”

“I heard a story about one of your species who bested King Yoll.”

“Ah. No, that was Bethany Anne.” The human seemed to find this deeply amusing.

You should have lied.

That is entirely incorrect.

Ray, when someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes.

What?

Watch a movie sometime.

Barnabas ignored that. “Now that we have established I am not the Empress, I suggest you answer my question. Why do you think I want to talk to you?”

Gar considered this. He was uncomfortably sure that when the human had mentioned ripping Gar’s spine out, it had not been an idle threat.

“Because of my affiliation with the mines,” he replied finally. He was very proud of his sentence, which did not suggest either past or present affiliation—until he saw the human’s eyes flash.

Barnabas put one hand on either arm of the chair and gave Gar a very unpleasant smile. “Tell me about them.”

“Dignitary…” he really wished he knew whether this one was male or female, “this is very aggressive behavior. By what authority are you questioning me? You will find yourself subject to both legal and trade penalties if you insist upon pursuing illegal interrogations.”

“Oh, Gar.” The human smiled again. “This isn’t even close to an interrogation yet. You have no idea. And since you ask…”

He stepped back and spread his arms. Power crackled in the air around him and his eyes grew red once more. When he spoke, his voice carried the echo of many lifetimes and more deaths.

Gar shivered. Almost, he imagined himself back on Luvendan, watching the endless waves and listening to the hiss of the great beasts that circled their submerged homes. He had feared the Essekan all his life, and had fled Luvendan as soon as he had reached his majority.

This voice filled him with the same primal fear; that nothing he could do would protect him. There would be teeth and claws and the crushing black…

“My authority stems from a woman whom you should pray you never meet,” Barnabas told him, “and she follows a higher law than any you have ever known. I was the first of her Rangers, and I mete out her Justice according to my conscience. If you were judged now, Gar, what punishment do you think you would deserve?”

Gar gripped the arms of the chair until his bones ached. His hands were trembling and he did not want to answer, yet he knew it would go badly for him if he did not.

“I think you would find me guilty of...slavery. I do not know your punishment for that.”

Barnabas leaned close. “The punishment is death. The Empress has spread the word for many years that slavery would not be tolerated. Your mines were always close to the line, and what I heard in Tethra today tells me that the line has been crossed. Your words only confirm what I already knew.”

Gar squeezed his eyes shut, but the image of the red-eyed human was seared into his mind. He could not escape it.

He would not plead; he would not. This human was like the Essekan, and not only in its raw power—how could it do these things?—but in the fact that Gar knew he could not bargain with it.

He’s doing better than I thought he would. Possibly.

Agreed. He isn’t pleading for leniency. I like that.

I’m confused as to why you’ve left him alive this long. Are you playing with your food?

I do not “play with my food” in any sense of the phrase, and he’s alive because I need him to tell me where the mines are. The fact that no one has gone to storm the one Aebura mentioned tells me that they don’t know where it is—and they probably don’t know if there are more.

And you think this male will find out what you need to know?

He had better hope he can.

Shinigami snickered and Barnabas wondered briefly if her approval meant he was going in the right direction with this. At least she had stopped suggesting guided missiles or flamethrowers as the answer to this situation.

He turned his attention back to Gar. “Explain to me why you believe I would judge you guilty of slavery when, as I hear it, you are the second-in-command.” His eyes flashed slightly. “But do not make the mistake of thinking I mean to excuse you.”

“I would not.” Gar’s voice was surprisingly steady. He took a deep breath and looked up. The panic was gone. He was still afraid, but he was calm now. “On the day the mines were freed—or should have been freed—our overseer closed us off from the outside world. I assumed that those were his orders from the corporation., but I was wrong about that. I learned today just how wrong.”

Barnabas said nothing, just watched Gar carefully.

Gar straightened his back. If he was going to die, he decided, it would be with dignity. He had a dizzying memory of being back in the bar and thinking of the Ubuara with contempt. Thinking of this human with contempt. He could barely remember himself then.

He wasn’t sure what had changed, but it was something very profound.

“However, I did things that I knew were wrong.” He swallowed. “You speak of a higher law than the one I know, but the law I know is the company’s law. Their rules. Even when I thought I was following those rules, I knew that some of the things I was doing were not right.”

“Such as?” Barnabas’s voice was silky.

“I… Well, I put down workers’ revolts. They were angry that they hadn’t been allowed to leave. I imprisoned many of them in our jail and increased penalties for infractions. Lan told me to take care of things, to make sure that everything was the way he wanted it, and I…”

He hung his head in shame. What could he say? He had become inventive…in the very worst ways.

“I did whatever I could to see his orders done,” he finished quietly. “Even when I did not agree with them. Even when we were imprisoning people and they were only fighting to be allowed to leave—as we had promised them they could.”

“I see. And what do you think your punishment should be?”

“You said the punishment was death.”

He thinks death will be easier? Shinigami exclaimed. A guided missile is too good for him.

We agree again, Barnabas told her. He raised his voice. “I see from your eyes that you do not think death is a fitting punishment. I asked what you thought the punishment should be, not what I thought it should be.”

Gar swallowed. All the memories were rushing back—whippings, long days in the cells, the workers growing thinner and thinner.

“Now you see,” Barnabas told him softly. “You see that what you did cannot be made right. You see that death would be quicker and far less painful than suffering the same torments you devised for the workers. I expect you to think about that over the coming weeks.”

Gar looked up at him in horror. What was the human planning to do?

“Tell me, do you know where all of the mines are on this planet?”

I could tell you.

An interesting point. But are you certain which were reopened under a legitimate business model and which were not? There was a pause. I actually wanted to know.

Oh. No, probably not.

We go with him, then. Barnabas waited for Gar to answer.

“No.” The Luvendi shook his head. “I wish I did.”

“If you were to go back, do you think you could find information on all the mines Lan oversees?”

“Most likely.” Gar looked wary. “I’ve never been sure if he has others, but—”

He broke off as Barnabas leaned forward again.

“You will help me,” Barnabas ordered, “and I suggest you pray that by the time you have finished helping me I believe you have redeemed yourself. You are lucky I need you, Venfaldri Gar. Otherwise you would already be dead.”

Chapter Five

“You mean to tell me you’ve never once played chess?” Shinigami sounded incredulous. Here on the ship she was able to project her voice, as well as a holographic image of herself seated in the chair across from Barnabas.

“Interestingly, no. I never got around to learning.” Barnabas settled back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “I have, however, read up on the subject. Ladies first.”

Shinigami narrowed her eyes and a moment later one of the pawns slid forward. The game board displayed whatever game you wanted on its surface, and the pieces were holographs.

“Why are you staring at me?”

“You can project the image of a human,” Barnabas observed, “but you do not act like a human.”

“She often sat like this.”

“And what did she do while she sat?” Barnabas queried. He moved one of his pawns—the one farthest to the right.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You look like a statue.” Barnabas focused on her pieces; she could slide her bishop into the space just vacated by her pawn. As he watched, she gave a silent command to the computer and made the move he had predicted. He looked back up at her. “You don’t look at the board while you’re thinking about your next move.”

“I am looking at the board.”

“You know what I mean. The holograph isn’t doing the right things. You don’t fidget. You don’t pretend to move the pieces by yourself.”

“Maybe accuracy isn’t what I’m going for,” the AI snapped.

“I think it is.” Barnabas advanced the same pawn. “I think you’d like to be mistaken for a human when you want to be. It could be useful, after all. And it would allow you to play tricks on people.”

“I do like that idea. What’s your strategy with that pawn?”

“Why would I tell you?” While Barnabas watched her face, Shinigami caused the holograph’s eyes to look at the board. “That’s not bad. Bethany Anne would probably lean forward to look at it, though.”

“Are her eyes bad?”

“There is nothing physically wrong with her. It’s just a human mannerism. One tends to lean toward the thing one is examining.”

“Humans expend energy in the oddest ways.”

“Says the AI who suggested using a guided missile today.”

“I still think that would have been a good strategy.” She moved the adjoining pawn from her first one. “He’s not going to help you, you know. I don’t know why you brought him back.”

Venfaldri Gar was presently sitting in the Shinigami’s tiny brig. Barnabas would have preferred it if the brig had been made solely for humans, since everything would have been uncomfortably short for a detained Luvendi in that case. However, all Etheric Empire ships could accommodate a wide range of species, and therefore the ceilings were high and the benches were adjustable.

Barnabas had opted to bring the Luvendi back while he planned his strategy.

“I didn’t want him to run away, and I might need to ask him questions while I formulate my plan.”

“Make your next move. Even by human standards, you’re slow.”

“God help us if you ever meet a normal human being.” Barnabas considered, then his mouth twitched and he moved his knight backward one space.

“What are you doing?”

“Playing chess.”

“You can’t move pawns backward!”

“Are you sure? Because I looked in the rulebook and it doesn’t mention anything about that.”

“Why would you move a piece backward right now?” The AI sounded pained.

“I don’t expect you to understand my strategy just yet,” Barnabas replied mildly. “I hope you’ll catch on at some point, though. It would be very boring if I simply trampled all over you. One does hope for a worthy opponent.”

The holograph flickered slightly, although the human form was as still as a statue. Then she looked up and gave Barnabas a glare.

“Ah, you’re learning. Good.”

“I can’t see how within the next ten moves you could hope to—”

“Then the only way you’ll find out what I’m planning is to keep playing.”

Shinigami stared at the board from all of the sensors that could see it. She had run ten million simulations so far, and the inescapable conclusion was that Barnabas had made an error in judgment or perhaps misunderstood the rules. Given the ways each type of piece could move, he was wasting valuable time and accomplishing nothing.

She moved a knight and waited to see what he would do.

Infuriatingly, he moved the pawn back to where it had just been.

“What are you doing?”

“Keep playing,” he told her inscrutably.

“Fine. And what is your plan?”

“Do you actually want to hear it in order to be informed, or do you want to hear it in order to tell me it’s foolish?”

“Probably both, if I’m honest.”

“You’ve definitely been spending too much time with Tabitha. Very well.” He moved the pawn on the far side of the board. “I am going to approach Venfirdri Lan as a missionary and tell him that I will be able to restore order to his mine. Once I have been able to assess what other mines he might be running, as well as learn more about his connections and the way the mine operates, I will make sure the workers are allowed to leave and that those in charge of keeping them there are held responsible.”

“You just managed to make freeing slaves sound boring. This is a jailbreak! Have some fun with it!”

Barnabas frowned. “Who programmed you?”

“You know that’s not how AIs work.”

“Well, however it happened, you’ve acquired a very disturbing sense of humor along the way.”

“I know.” Shinigami grinned, flashing her razor-sharp teeth She did not sound very disturbed. “But your plan is really terrible.”

“Why?”

Shinigami echoed his earlier words, “Do you actually want to hear it in order to be informed, or do you want to hear it in order to tell me it’s foolish?”

Barnabas sighed. “To be informed.”

“Boring again.” Shinigami, he noticed, was making very cautious moves. She moved another pawn now. Almost her whole line was forward, though he noted that she kept the channels open for her bishops. “But since you ask, what do you really need to know about this? You could go in there and kill all the guards without breaking a sweat—”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. I found four enclaves in the surrounding area that might be the mine we’re looking for. None of them have security you couldn’t handle on your own.”

“I retract my criticism then.”

“I like it when humans admit they’re wrong.”

Barnabas raised an eyebrow. “You know I’m not fully human.”

“Close enough in this case. Your move.” She sank into silence as he considered his options.

He really was very stubborn. She’d spoken about that with other AIs, none of whom seemed to have big opinions about Barnabas. He’s very quiet, ADAM had said. He’d thought for a long time after that—long enough that Shinigami wondered if he’d short-circuited, but eventually he’d said, I like him.

TOM had agreed later. He’s very quiet. And very old-fashioned.

But?

But Tabitha respects him. And he did win that beer-brewing contest very sneakily.

Very sneakily, ADAM agreed. They still don’t know about that.

Shinigami, upon learning the details of the contest, had decided that she might like working with Barnabas. He was making it very difficult, though, being all prickly and honorable.

“Are you worried about having to kill them?” she asked finally.

“What?” Barnabas frowned up at her as he made an embarrassingly bad move. He was now blocking his rook with his knight, and his bishops were locked in place.

If Shinigami’d had a physical head she would have beaten it on the game board in frustration. She had been confident that she would win this strategy challenge, but she had expected it to at least be interesting. Barnabas was, however, making her wonder if she’d overestimated him.

She made another move. “It seems like the sort of thing humans have qualms over. Killing.”

“Have you ever met any of Bethany Anne’s people? Aren’t you—”

“I am, and yes, I have. But I don’t see why you, especially given all I’ve read, are trying to make this unnecessarily complicated.”

“Everything is complicated,” Barnabas replied absently. He moved another pawn. “In simple ways. It’s one of my favorite paradoxes about the world. Although in this case, well…”

“What were you going to say?”

“Say I go in there guns blazing and get to the overseer, and I take all the information I want directly out of his head. The slaves are instantly freed and the slavers pay for their mistakes. Everything is tied up very neatly, yes?”

“Yeeesssss,” Shinigami drawled cautiously.

Barnabas gave a pointed look at one of the sensors.

“I may be limited in the number of simulations I can run on the chess match, but I can go through as many as I want for this mission and that’s a very easy way to—”

“You only ran them on the mission, didn’t you?” Barnabas raised his eyebrows.

“Well, yes.”

“And what we want is to make High Tortuga safe for habitation by our people. We want to know everything that’s happening. We want to know who might come looking for it. Yes, this is one mine with an overseer who deserves to be dead, but what questions have I not yet thought to ask that might hint at bigger issues?”

Shinigami was silent for a moment. “You always think like this? You were a Ranger.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“A Ranger sees injustice and goes after it. I thought the job was quite limited in scope.”

“Nothing is limited in scope.” Barnabas moved his left knight into one of the spaces left empty by a pawn. “That is what I have learned over the years. Do you know why I serve Bethany Anne?”

“Explain.”

“Because she doesn’t let things like definitions and laws keep her from doing the right thing. She makes use of them when it’s warranted and does the right thing when they would hinder her. I would never let a narrow definition of the word ‘Ranger’ preclude me from doing what I believe is the right thing to do. I wouldn’t then and I certainly won’t now, when I’m not even a Ranger anymore.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand humans.” Shinigami sighed. “But I like them.”

“Thank you. I’m assuming that was a compliment.”

“It was. Are you sure you have a plan for this game?”

“Yes.”

“Your moves so far suggest that you don’t.”

“I have a plan,” Barnabas assured her. “Both for the game and for the mine, although in the latter case it’s more of a structured non-plan.”

“Have you thought of going into politics?”

“First you say you like me, then you insult me.”

Shinigami snickered. “I wasn’t sure you’d notice.”

“And we were getting along so well. In any case, I stand by it. This is as good a place as any to begin learning what I need to know about this planet, and I have a perfect setup now.”

“That Luvendi is a coward.”

“I wasn’t speaking solely of him. I meant having a link both to the mines and to the cities. High Tortuga is shaped now by the fact that many of its citizens didn’t choose to go there; they just wanted to get away from where they were. They got there via the mines, and now they’re establishing the cities. But there’s another level of society: the people who made money off of the workers. If I cultivate knowledge of the mines and the cities, I can gain a perspective on the whole.”

Shinigami wondered about that. She had run simulations and researched similar places, and she did not think highly of Barnabas’s chances to do anything other than bomb the mines to smithereens.

After getting the civilians out, of course.

Mostly she wanted to try out the flamethrower.

“What do you think, Shinigami?” Barnabas asked. He made another move, apparently not seeing that he was far too late to accomplish anything in this game.

“I think that the two groups aren’t as separate as you think,” Shinigami told him. “In systems where one group controls power and wealth, the other group is rarely cohesive in its approach. You should expect spies. You should expect people to defend the ones they serve.”

“That’s a very interesting point.” Barnabas was pleased.

“One other thing.”

“Yes?”

“Checkmate.” Her voice was smug.

“Well, look at that. I believe you’re right.” Barnabas smiled. “And so you fell for my first trap.”

“It’s checkmate. There’s no way for you to win.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“You were playing for a purpose other than to win?”

“Exactly.” Barnabas switched off the game board and smiled up at one of Shinigami’s sensors. “Lesson One about strategy: make sure you know what your opponent’s goal is.”

He left Shinigami sitting in incredulous silence and made his way to the brig to explain matters to Gar.

Chapter Six

Gar could not figure out for the life of him what had happened.

Yesterday he’d been feeling entirely normal. He had done his job. He’d had all his old frustrations and all his old goals. He had enjoyed his foray into the city, of course, but he’d been prepared to go back to work without complaint.

Then a terrifying alien had chased him through the streets of Tethra, interrogated him, and even threatened to kill him...and somehow all Gar could think about was that he was deeply, deeply ashamed of himself.

It didn’t make any sense. It had been so brief a time since everything had been normal.

Or was that correct?

He had been pacing around the ship’s tiny cell, but now he paused. No, now that he thought of it, things had not been normal. If they had been normal, he would not have admitted what he had done as if it were a crime. There had been fear, yes, but hardly anything approximating torture. The alien had asked him a few questions and the truth had spilled out.

For the first time in many years, Gar let himself wonder what his grandfather would have thought of who he’d become. The male had always been supportive of Gar’s studies and his efforts to get off Luvendan.

He had died several years before Gar reached his majority, which had simplified things. Without him there, Gar never went back to visit. There was no one there he cared to see, and he imagined they felt the same way.

Ambition was frowned upon on Luvendan. The ambitious few left, giving aliens a rather skewed perception of the Luvendi as a whole. The Luvendi out and about in the universe did not answer to their government and had no desire to go back or enrich their planet.

For years that had been enough. Gar had looked no farther than the next promotion or the best way to spin an event to his advantage on a resume.

Now he wondered how many things like this he had done. He had laughed with the others when he’d heard workers complain about the conditions on the transport ships. Had they thought they would get fine hotels and personal chefs? He had been impatient even when his colleagues had complained about the company’s archaic rules. They should have learned those rules and used them to their advantage.

Even his grandfather, who had supported Gar’s ambition when no one else did, would not have been proud of the person Gar was now. He was uncomfortably sure of that.

He looked up as the door opened and the alien stepped into the room. Again, Gar was struck by how fragile this human appeared. Perhaps that was why they triumphed so often.

No one knew to be afraid of them.

He did not know it, but Barnabas was having similar thoughts. Aliens with such brittle bones that they apparently did not walk on crowded streets should surely not have risen to prominence, should they? Barnabas thought not.

The universe was endlessly confounding.

To Gar’s surprise, the Ranger’s first question was, “Is it true that your people do not make music?”

“It is true.” Gar inclined his head. “Although some develop a taste for it.” He lifted one shoulder as if to say he did not understand that at all. “It seems always to be a surprise when other aliens learn of it. Humans make music then, I take it?”

“We do,” Barnabas confirmed.

“Why? I have never been clear on the purpose of it. Surely there are more productive ways to spend time.”

Barnabas considered the matter, which surprised Gar. He expected the human to be far more brusque and tell him it was none of his business or not important. Instead, he seemed to be deciding how best to explain the matter.

“Do you tell stories?” he asked finally. “Fictional stories? Legends, perhaps?”

“Yes.” Though Gar had hated those. They were repetitive, with the poorly-disguised moral that one should stay at home on Luvendan.

Barnabas looked intently at the expression on Gar’s face. “Did you never have emotions so strong you could not find words to describe them?” he asked curiously. “Did you never encounter a truth so profound that it could not be told directly? Music, like stories, helps us say things we could not say any other way.”

Gar considered this…and came to the inescapable conclusion that all other aliens were quite mad. “You mean to say that this music tells you stories?”

“Not precisely, although sometimes it does. It evokes strong emotions. It helps us praise God.”

Gar blinked.

The alien mimicked his shrug. “If it is of no use to you, then it isn’t. I was merely curious. In the meantime, we should discuss your return to the mine.”

Gar felt a jolt of panic.

“I will need you to return,” Barnabas told him, “and do a few things for me. For one, you will take this communications unit and provide me with information when I require it. We will determine a time of day for regular communications.”

He handed the unit to Gar and indicated that the Luvendi should come into the ship with him. They went back the way they had come in, presumably toward the very strange shuttlecraft with no visible propulsion.

“In addition,” Barnabas said, “when I arrive you will help convince Lan to admit me to the grounds.”

“What should I say?”

“You know him best. Say whatever will convince him.” Barnabas led the way into the shuttle bay and gestured to one of the black Pods. “Additionally, you will make yourself aware of security patterns. Guard rotations, who is sloppy and who is methodical, where the best and worst places would be to defend the mines. Anything you do not know already you will make yourself aware of. I will at some point want to hear a report on the strengths and weaknesses of the mine’s security.”

Gar stepped into the Pod, considering.

“And if I don’t cooperate?” That was not his intent, but he wanted to know what would happen if the human believed Gar had failed him.

He was immediately sorry he had asked.

Barnabas’s face clouded over. “Then I will do what must be done without your help.”

The words were mild, but the intent was clear.

Gar shuddered as the door closed and he was alone in a Pod hurtling toward the planet below.

* * *

Aebura had just finished polishing several glasses when the human walked into her bar once again.

She said nothing, but settled down on the bar and wrapped her tail tight around her feet. She was not sure how she felt about him being back. The last time he’d come he’d chased Gar away, and such a disturbance might affect her bar. It might even ripple back to the mine somehow.

Besides, she had been working up her courage to speak to him. She had come to the decision that she could not wait any longer. She had to take action to find the mine—no one knew precisely where the mines were—and free people.

She didn’t have a plan yet, but she knew what had to be done.

“Hello, Aebura,” the human began courteously. “Do you have time to speak with me about the mines you mentioned?”

Aebura considered this, and let her fur fluff up and then smooth out. She was gratified that he had remembered her name and willing to hear him out.

To her surprise, the human seemed to understand the gesture. He took a seat at the bar and asked, “Should I keep my voice low?”

“As a precaution, yes.” Aebura was curious. “What happened with Venfaldri Gar?”

The human smiled, and it did not look like a particularly kind smile. “He went back to the mines, but he now works for me.”

That’s an optimistic assessment of the situation.

Not now, Shinigami.

Aebura’s tail lashed. “Why would you trust him?”

You see? Shinigami asked. She understands.

What did I just say?

To Aebura Barnabas replied, “Because I have asked for his help in a very limited capacity, and he knows that his only chance of mercy lies in fulfilling my requests. More accurately…” He sighed. “Never mind.”

“I would like to know,” Aebura assured him.

“Very well. I want his help, but it is not that which will give him a chance at mercy. What I must see from him is an understanding of the wrong he has done, and the will and effort to set it right—and never do such things again. Will he do it?” Barnabas shrugged elegantly. “I don’t know. However, I trust him to do the things I asked him to do for me.”

“What did you ask him to do?”

Barnabas explained the plan quickly. It was only a brief overview, but it covered the points that would be relevant to her. At the end Barnabas asked, “Is there anything you think I should know before I visit the mine?”

Aebura did not hesitate. “You should take me with you.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Yes. They can’t tell us apart anyway. And we’re useful. We can climb things and steal things, get into places where they don’t think we’ll fit.”

Barnabas smiled. “Perhaps I will call on you to come to the mine, then. But not yet, I think. You are safe from the mine now, and you told me that this business was meant to employ and house your fellow workers. Do not jeopardize that yet.”

“What use is it if they do not escape?”

“Aebura, I promise you this: if I need your help in order to free them I will ask for it. For now, I am not asking because I believe I can free them without putting you in danger.”

Aebura considered the human’s words and wavered slightly. She wanted to do this herself. She knew Gar underestimated her, and therefore she might have a small advantage.

But this human had been able to make Gar turn to his side, something Aebura would never have considered possible. She had to ask herself if he underestimated her or just had no reason to fear her. That made her feel very small.

Barnabas guessed what she was thinking. “In a perfect world, Aebura, you and I would not have met this way. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and so I use my talents to stop injustice. There is no shame in not being like me. I have, shall we say, talents that make me well-suited to this job.”

And a ship with guided missiles. Let’s not forget that.

Let’s not spread it around everywhere, either. You know what’s better than taking someone out with missiles?

Nothing.

Wrong. Taking someone out with missiles they didn’t even know you had.

I could accept that as a theory. The looks of surprise must be priceless.

Shinigami. If you use missiles, you don’t want to be standing close enough to see the looks on their faces.

Aebura scratched contemplatively at the puffs of fur on her cheeks as a thought occurred to her. “If you disabled the radio device the Ubuara would be able to communicate with one another again. Lan doesn’t like to do work, so he never goes out to check the equipment. It’s either Gar or the security teams that keep an eye on it.”

“That’s good to know, thank you. Having people who can communicate silently about security guards and so on would be very useful.”

“Oh, yes!” Aebura bared her teeth in what Barnabas assumed was an Ubuara smile. “That’s why they don’t want us to be able to do it. Also, you should talk to Leiguba.”

“Who is he or she?”

“He is another Ubuara, and someone who was always very angry about the injustices.” Her tail lashed angrily. “If you see him… If you see him, tell him I have not forgotten him, and that I will help him. I have no right to say it, having left him there for so long, but... I am doing what I can to make it better now.”

“I will tell him,” Barnabas promised.

* * *

The past few nights had been chilly, and Leiguba curled gratefully into the huddle of Ubuara in one of the huts, using their body heat to help keep himself warm. His body, aching after a day of working in the mines, began to relax slightly.

Even this felt hollow, however. If this were home or anywhere else that Ubuara could live as they were meant to he would be surrounded by emotion and the warmth of thoughts, not just bodies.

At home, he would have heard his younger sister murmuring to herself sleepily as she drifted off. Her thoughts at night were always cozy—what she’d had for dinner, the way her feet were tucked tightly against her to stay warm. His father liked to plan for the next day, and he was logical and precise. His mother drifted to sleep so quickly that all Leiguba felt from her were little moments of emotion from her dreams. His sister told him that his thoughts felt like wind through the trees on a summer night, a contemplative search through the day’s memories like a breeze rustling leaves.

He should have known these Ubuara that way, but he hadn’t had the chance. Their minds had been made mute on arrival and they existed in an unnatural silence.

A silence he knew he could not expect to end. A silence that might persist until he died here.

The thought panicked him and he opened his eyes, staring at the glint of moonlight through the holes in the wall. He couldn’t live like this anymore. He couldn’t.

He had to escape.

Chapter Seven

Gar had left three days ago and he still wasn’t back. Venfirdri Lan drummed his long fingers on the desk and tried to control his frustration.

He couldn’t help the sneaking suspicion that Gar had left for so long to make a point. Recently he had, quite frankly, been a pain in the ass. He had complained about duties. He had questioned orders.

He was also dangerously close to figuring out that Lan had no legal right to be running this mine. Lan hoped Gar would have the revelation soon, thus getting it out of the way—and at the same time, he also hoped that Gar would never figure it out.

The male was unpredictable, after all—a very strange mix of pragmatic and moralistic. Who could say what he might do when he learned the truth?

Lan really should start bringing a guard with him.

Or not. The guards didn’t know either. Lan had fed them a story about their contracts being renewed and him fighting it, and he could hardly afford for one of them to overhear the truth at this juncture.

No, if things went wrong, he’d take care of Gar himself.

In the meantime, he was fairly certain that Gar was trying to make a point about how indispensable he was—or at least how much he ought to be compensated for his work. He knew it would be difficult for the overseer to find someone to take his place, especially with all the new duties.

So he was staying away, which forced Lan to do all the tasks Gar would have usually taken care of…and it was exhausting. The security guards were always complaining about something, the workers had formed groups that they were very carefully not calling unions, and the jail cells were so overfilled that the guards were concerned about riots.

As if that weren’t enough, there were several technical systems in dire need of repair. Normally it would have been a small mountain of paperwork to submit claims to the company—unpleasant but doable—but now Lan was left wondering just how they were going to find a technician to come out here and fix things…and not mention the location of the mine to anyone after he left.

He knew he was on borrowed time. It would only be so long before the company’s new leadership decided to make absolutely sure all the mines had been closed or the land was sold out from under him.

But he’d taken the gamble that he’d be able to pull it off for long enough to retire by disappearing quietly with a hefty sum of money.

That was if everything went right—and really, he should begin thinking of buying Gar’s silence. Lan tried to comfort himself with the thought that Gar really had been very pragmatic in his actions. It was just the occasional sentiment here or there that had been off, not a sudden onset of morality.

That would have been troubling.

Yes, Gar had made a shrewd move by staying away so long, and Lan could appreciate that. He would raise the male’s pay and make it subtly clear that, in return for Gar’s silence, he would have a share of the profits and assistance in getting away when people finally found them. It was tricky doing things like this—the underlings tended to get greedy—but Lan could deal with that when the time came.

With that decided, he was surprised to hear a door open nearby and the sound of Gar’s voice. He looked up as Gar came into the room with a package.

The vice-overseer bowed respectfully. “My very deep apologies, Overseer Venfirdri. It was more difficult to acquire the goods than I anticipated, and I lingered in hopes of finding a technician to repair some of our systems—but I am afraid none could be found. I will return to my duties at once.”

He laid the sweets on the desk and made to leave with another respectful bow, but Lan stopped him.

“Before you go?”

“Yes?”

Well, this was awkward. Lan wasn’t quite sure how he wanted to approach it.

“What were you planning to do now?”

To his surprise, a secretive look flitted across Gar’s face. “I was intending to, ah...inspect our security. I think that would be wise. The guards have been complaining. Yes. Faulty equipment.”

He was almost babbling, and after a moment Lan came to the conclusion that Gar had really been planning to go and rest after his journey.

You can’t expect a promotion unless you work hard, Gar. He decided to throw the other male off by accompanying him on his rounds as a little test of sorts. If Gar accepted his company with good grace, Lan would offer him the raise and promotion. If not, Lan would wait a little longer and think carefully about his next moves.

He stood. “It’s a fine day. I’ll walk with you.”

Gar frowned for a moment. “It was beginning to rain.”

“Still, I have been shut up in here all day. I will accompany you.” Lan’s voice brooked no argument.

“Of course.” Gar acceded with a nod.

They strolled down the hill from the overseer’s hut. It was nothing much to look at from the outside, though Lan had finally made it almost civilized inside. The rough board walls hid thick curtains that kept out the chill of the mountains, and rugs covered the floor. He had good lamps and a decent bed, as well his desk and chair.

Outside, however, the path was plain dust and the view was of the huts, walls, and grimy industrial-lit mine entrances.

Lan rarely came outside anymore.

At his side, Gar laced his hands behind his back in an attempt to appear nonchalant and thought furiously. It was unlike Lan to take any interest in running things—and why should he do so today, of all days?

Gar had planned to do his assessment of the security systems before Barnabas had any time to think he was not upholding his end of the bargain. He feared that if Barnabas took care of things on his own, it might be a great deal more violent than Gar could survive.

And now Lan wanted to come along and...what, inspect the security measures? That couldn’t be right. He must suspect something about Gar’s trip, and Gar was worried.

“How was the city?” Lan asked.

“Very busy.” It was hard to tell if this was a safe topic, and he tried to find a subtle way to set Lan’s mind at ease. “The food is better, but there’s never any company worth having.”

Lan laughed. “No, there isn’t. It’s hardly a city, is it?”

Gar remembered the crush of color and sound. It had been overwhelming in a good way after the endless dust and grime of the mines. He knew the correct answer to the question, however. “A fitting city for a backwater.”

“Anything notable?” Lan pressed as they reached the bottom of the slope and the doors swung up to let them through the walls.

The walls, of course, were not made to keep anything out.

Gar led the way up the stairs and onto the walls. He wondered if Lan would even realize this was an unusual sort of inspection. Lan knew so little about how this place was run.

“Nothing in particular,” he replied, trying to sift through his head for safe topics.

If he mentioned a lot of people Lan might think he knew about the mines being freed, and Gar was afraid that if the overseer found out he knew, he might simply kill him and be done with it. But if Gar pretended not to know anything, against all odds, the other Luvendi might be suspicious.

Gar made his choice in a split-second and looked up and down the wall to ensure they were alone before stopping to look at Lan intently.

“We need to be cautious,” he said quietly.

Lan raised an eyebrow. He was careful not to say anything that might be incriminating.

“There were technicians in Tethra,” Gar lied, “but I couldn’t trust any of them. I don’t think anyone has noticed yet that our mines are still running, but word could get out so easily. How are we planning to keep this quiet?”

His words had been carefully calculated. He used “we” and he spoke without any distaste in his voice—he hoped. It was imperative that Lan think Gar was on his side.

For a moment Lan looked startled. “You knew.” It was a question, despite the flat inflection.

“Certainly.” He should have, anyway. “You never discussed it, but why else would you take our communications offline?” He really had wondered about that, so he gave Lan a piece of the truth. “I had actually thought that you were breaking away from the company.”

“You didn’t object?” Lan’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“What does the company truly know about running a mine?” Gar asked fiercely and without hesitation. He knew all the correct things to say, even though they sickened him. “They like to talk about rules, but they don’t understand how it is. They don’t seem to care that if we followed every rule we would be bankrupt.”

Lan looked wary but pleased. “And now that you know the truth?”

Gar waved a hand dismissively and tried to say what he thought Lan would say in his place. “We’re supposed to just close down a working mine? What good would that do anyone?” He considered going farther and saying that surely the company must owe them more than that, but he decided not to do so. Best not to look like a caricature.

“Good, good.” Lan seemed to have come to a decision. “I am glad that you understand.”

“Of course.” Gar smiled. “Should we go on? I had wanted to inspect any potential weaknesses in the case of any trouble.”

“I trust you to do so,” Lan told him magnanimously. “I will return to my work for now.”

What work? Gar thought contemptuously, but he said nothing.

“We are glad to have you back,” Lan added, and he went back down the stairs and toward his hut.

He was considering his options. He had intended to give Gar more money to keep his mouth shut, but it seemed there was no longer any need to do that. And in business one should never spend money when one didn’t have to do so, of course.

Anyway, the whole thing had been his idea. He deserved to reap all the rewards.

He didn’t realize yet that those rewards might not be as positive as he was expecting.

* * *

Gar’s hands were clenched behind his back as he watched Lan leave.

It was clear what Lan wanted: to have the mines continue working for his sole benefit. Lan was many things, but he was not stupid about business. After this conversation, Gar knew exactly what the overseer was planning: to get away with this as long as he could, cutting all possible corners to make the most profits for himself, and when the whole thing either collapsed or authorities came for him Lan would run away with the money.

This was all about Lan, and Lan’s interests.

Gar knew he could stride up to the overseer’s hut and demand that he be compensated fairly. He probably should have done so, in fact. Sooner or later Lan would realize that it was strange for Gar not to have bargained at all with the information he revealed.

Would he have done so if he had not met Barnabas? He was afraid he might have.

He began to walk along the walls slowly, taking great care to inspect the construction and the electrical panels he could see. Lan would tell the guards what Gar was doing, so he no longer needed to worry that people would find his behavior odd or suspicious.

But it was difficult to look down on the camps from here and think about what was going on below. He could not tune out the little details he saw now; the way the guards watched the miners, the miners walking with slumped shoulders, the huts’ shoddy construction.

How had he allowed himself to be caught up in something like this? Had it happened in small increments or had he blinded himself to everything in his haste to get off Luvendan?

Those questions might be productive later, but they weren’t useful now. Gar tuned his thoughts out.

He could see places where the guards would easily be able to control crowds or get at people trying to escape, but there were a few stretches of wall that weren’t easily accessible to them. One of the guard towers had recently suffered an electrical failure and the guards weren’t manning it anymore. There was also a place where people had been dumping waste from the mines. Not only would it be difficult for the guards to reach anyone trying to break through the wall there, they might not even notice.

Gar just wished he knew what Barnabas’s plan was—and how soon he could expect the human to arrive.

Chapter Eight

The transport ship shuddered as it hit High Tortuga’s atmosphere. Carter Eastbourne ran a hand through his thick brown hair and sighed. He wanted off this ship already. It had been days since he’d had fresh air in his lungs, and…

Well, he should be honest. The Meredith Reynolds had really spoiled him. The air purification systems there ran like a dream, the lighting didn’t hurt his eyes, and the food was good. He could get anything he wanted there.

Contrast that with the alien transport ships—worn down and poorly maintained, with food that barely deserved the designation.

Which really left the question of what he was doing here.

The thing was, living in established settlements full of humans might be more comfortable in some ways, but it didn’t scratch “that itch.” Carter’s wife, Elisa, used that term with weary affection.

It was a big part of what had led him to leave Earth with Bethany Anne’s group. It wasn’t just that he’d spent years being frustrated by the total inability of governments on Earth to, well…govern. He’d known since he was a little boy that there had to be more than just life on Earth. There was more to explore. There were places to go and things to figure out.

In a way, he wanted to be traveling on ratty old ships and eating awful food. Those would make good stories for later, when he was growing old in a house he’d built with his own two hands and he had his family all around him.

And in the meantime? Well, he’d be seeing things no human had ever seen before and carving out his place in the universe.

When they’d been told about High Tortuga, he’d been one of the first to volunteer. He’d left Elisa with the twins, Alanna and Samuel, and come here to find them a new home.

But not in H’onu. No, Carter wanted to carve out his own little square of the world, somewhere less traveled. He wanted to be surrounded by the unfamiliar, building things from the ground up.

Elisa had asked him before he left if he had any ideas about how to make money when he settled in. When he’d said he didn’t have one she’d given him a Look, the sort of Look that made you realize just how foolish you’d been to underestimate her.

The truth was, he did have a plan—but it was risky.

It was very risky. He knew he should be grateful to Bethany Anne for leading the way to the stars, and he really was. He didn’t want to disagree with her on anything because he knew her morals were the absolute gold standard. He could never have left Earth or lived as long as he had without the technologies she and the Empire had made commonplace.

It was just, well...Carter liked Pepsi.

He knew for sure that if he were to set up a bottling plant on High Tortuga there would be plenty of business. There were others living in the shadows of the Meredith Reynolds who thought like he did. He’d even heard that Nathan Lowell was one of them. Carter knew the old saying: where there’s risk, there’s money.

Bethany Anne was only part of the risk, though. Elisa was the other part, and far closer to home. Carter was hoping to win her over by having the production systems in place by the time she showed up...and maybe an informal offer of protection from Bethany Anne’s wrath.

Secretly he kind of hoped the former Empress, now Queen, did show up. He’d heard her swearing could be really inventive when she got going, and he had always wanted to hear that. She’d chew Carter out, sure, but he’d get to meet one of his idols—and she might not destroy his whole stash.

For him, the risk just made it more fun.

The transport ship came down with a creak and a loud groan that made him wonder if it had really been wise to fly on it. Then there was the curious ear-popping sensation of an airlock opening. Even when it wasn’t close, you could really feel it.

Carter shuffled along with the other people, marveling at how similar it was to airline travel. Everyone jumped up as soon as they could and grabbed for their bags, even though they knew they wouldn’t get out soon.

To his surprise, though, there was no security checkpoint to go through. They just found themselves on a big, scorched pad of something like concrete with the city glimmering in the distance and a lot of vehicles nearby that were probably cabs.

Carter decided to walk. Most of the passengers seemed to be doing the same. The path was a swampy mess, but they hauled their bags along with grim determination—it looked grim to him, anyway—and he tramped behind them looking at anything and everything.

When he heard the distinctive whine in the air he looked around in absolute disbelief. It couldn’t be. Surely not.

But it was. There were mosquitoes on this planet, or at least something like them.

Fucking unbelievable. He was going to try to contact the scientists on the Meredith Reynolds, because if anyone could whip up some effective bug repellant it would be them. And none of that DEET-free crap, either. He wanted the mosquitoes dead and the ground under them salted. Metaphorically, of course, unless literally salting the ground was what the situation called for.

You couldn’t be too careful when it came to mosquitoes.

The city didn’t begin gradually like he’d expected. The dirt road just turned into a paved one all at once, and suddenly there were buildings. Given that they had to take care not to sink into the swamp, Carter supposed that made sense.

He decided just to let the flow of people take him along for a while. He didn’t know anyone here and it was morning, so he had plenty of time to find lodging. He could browse for a while and get a feel for the place.

A few people gave him long looks and he stared back equably. He didn’t really mind that sort of thing. Humans were newcomers. Even on the Meredith Reynolds, people stared a lot. Carter had fielded a lot of questions about himself, from the ridiculous to the ridiculously personal.

After some wanderings between various stalls selling food that smelled pretty good but might not be safe, the crowd carried him to the edge of the street and he had a chance to look out over it all.

He liked this place; liked it instinctively. It was a bit rough around the edges, but in a homey way—like people who came here could put together their own stand to sell their wares, or build their own house, or start their own business.

He saw something that looked like a bar and forged across the street, ducking into the dim interior and stopping when he saw a monkey sitting there. It chittered at him.

His aural implant translated the words: “Good afternoon, human. Can I get you something to drink?”

“Yes, please.” Carter heard the strange noises coming out of his mouth and shook his head slightly. It was weird using the implant. “Do you happen to know what’s safe for humans to drink?”

He had same basic upgrades as the rest of Meredith’s population, but he didn’t want to push it.

“I have fruit juice,” the bartender told him. “The human who was here yesterday drank that with no problems.” She added smugly, “He said it was very good. I make it myself.”

“I’ll have a glass of that then.” Carter smiled at the weight of the Pepsi in his bag. Maybe he should see about setting up shop somewhere that was already established. It was something to think about.

In the meantime, he wondered if he knew the other human who’d been here.

* * *

Shinigami liked researching things.

To her knowledge, every computer intelligence did. The world seemed to be set up to disperse information at the pace organic life forms could take it in, which was far too slow for her. Researching allowed her to do something with all the time between words when people were speaking, and also for the interminable amounts of time in which they slept.

When she’d mentioned the latter to Barnabas, he had asked her whether she dreamt of electric sheep and wandered vaguely off again to plan his mission. So she kept researching.

It was galling to admit, but he’d made a good point the other day about viewing High Tortuga as a whole, not simply in the context of this one mission.

Where she differed from him, however, was that while he wanted to talk to people in order to find out what he should know, she was sure she could reach the conclusions far more efficiently by sifting through the data.

For a while she had looked at the ships going in and out of High Tortuga, noting the ships’ makes and tracing their registrations. She’d made some progress, but not much. Not an awful lot happened here.

Then she realized that this was exactly the point—not an awful lot happened on High Tortuga.

What did happen here was, like the immigration of humans from the former Etheric Empire, the result of things happening elsewhere. The planet was simply a nexus where various forces and interests collided.

When she had realized that, her research had opened up significantly.

She went back through the records of the company that had owned the mines and compared High Tortuga to the other planets on which it operated. In not too long, she had found a simple but telling list of similarities: rich in ores, no indigenous sentient life, not wildly inhospitable, and most importantly, either not controlled by a government or very far from the government’s central location.

This told her more about why people would look for a place like High Tortuga. They wanted somewhere that they could do exactly what they had done—put in a bunch of mines without having to bother about laws or land rights, and not spend a great deal of money keeping people in the appropriate atmosphere or pressure.

Once she saw High Tortuga as a planet possessing certain qualities, she began to understand who might want it. There were certain norms for who could own land on “unclaimed” planets, but those norms were often violated. There were also many people who wanted to live here, not so much to build businesses and grow rich as to exist without an entrenched bureaucratic government hanging over their heads.

From resources to a breakdown of certain types of settlers, Shinigami began to build a list of potential problem areas in keeping the planet safe.

That was not as interesting to her, however, as undoing what had already been done. She had been studying the behavior of sentient organic minds, and she was beginning to learn what some people called “tactics” and others called “sneakiness.”

She had considered asking Barnabas for his input, but she was still not sure if ADAM and TOM had been serious about him being sneaky. She thought that might have been a practical joke.

In any case, she had a lot of ideas. She didn’t need to involve him yet.

She found the scouting conglomerates that both sent their ships out into space to chart new planets and bought information from independent pilots. She had thought of simply erasing Devon from their databases, but that left the problem that another person would inevitably come along and sell the information again.

No, she needed to be sneakier. She worked her way into their systems and began to change Devon’s classification. She couldn’t simply say it was barren, since it clearly was not. Instead, she modified the information to say that there were severely hostile plant and animal life forms, possibly including indigenous sentient life, and that the original settlers had lasted just long enough to build fairly respectable-looking cities before being brutally killed off by the local animals and a host of nasty diseases.

The only alien life remaining on the planet, she put in there, was a series of fanatical cults that sacrificed new settlers and ate them, and most of them had likely been driven mad by disease.

As a finishing touch, she began to work on a program to make the automated scanning systems of ships—always on the lookout for a little extra cash by scouting habitable new planets—totally disregard Devon. Nothing to see here, move along.

She was just finishing up when Barnabas looked up from his reading material and asked suspiciously, “Shinigami, you’ve been awfully quiet. What are you up to?”

“How do you know I’m up to something?”

“Nathan and Ecaterina once mentioned that the most worrisome sound for the parents of a toddler is silence. I’m extrapolating.”

“Are you saying that an AI is in any way comparable to a human toddler?”

“In many ways, actually.” He sat back. “The main ones would be that it’s too smart for its own good and also somewhat sociopathic. I believe the exact phrase Nathan used was, ‘tiny terrorist.’ You are basically a toddler with a flamethrower.”

“Rude! Maybe I won’t show you what I was working on.”

“That suggests you were originally planning on doing so, which means you must have wanted to.” He smiled.

“Maybe.” But she brought up the charts and programs.

He leaned forward to scan through them, and she watched his eyebrows rise as he assessed the information.

“This is some very good work.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” He looked up at her sensors with another smile. “You should add ‘venereal’ to the description of the diseases. Also, ‘necrotic.’”

“Why? You don’t think cerebral hemorrhage is good enough?”

“Trust me on this one, you want something visceral. And before you ask, no sentient life form is going to care as much about their brain as their... Well...”

“Why not? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“There’s still so much you have to learn,” Barnabas replied wearily. “Though for what it’s worth, from a logical standpoint I agree with you.”

“This is one of those times when organic life is illogical, then.”

Barnabas snorted. “Sex? Yes, you could put it that way. It would be a massive understatement, of course, but it would technically be true.”

“Hmm. I can probably use that in the future.”

“You don’t say.” Barnabas stood up and carefully marked his place in his book. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to change.”

“Why? Into what?”

“You’ll see.”

Chapter Nine

Barnabas walked slowly and meditatively as his steps carried him away from Tethra and into the mountains. He could walk faster if he wanted to. He could have run the whole way if he’d wanted to.

However, he had learned that the discipline of pacing himself allowed him to be more present in the moment. It was a ritual he had been taught as a monk, and he still practiced it at times.

Speaking of which…

This is easily the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen you do.

You’ve only worked with me for a week and a half. To paraphrase Eric, you haven’t seen anything yet.

To paraphrase? What would he have said?

Barnabas wrinkled his nose slightly before repeating the exact phrasing. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

You really dislike poor grammar, huh?

Yes. It is an abomination. There are perfectly good reasons to—

This is gonna be sooooo fun.

I regret so many things right now. Barnabas drew back the cowl of his monk’s robes and looked up at the mountains. Shinigami, can you see this?

Of course I can. Is that a joke?

No. Through my eyes, I mean.

Up in orbit, Shinigami paused in her research to look through Barnabas’s eyes. She knew she had the capability to do so very easily if he wished her to, but it had never occurred to her that it would be useful.

She wasn’t sure what she was looking at, though.

Look at the mountains, Barnabas told her. When she checked his heart rate, she found it to be unusually slow.

Is something wrong?

Precisely the opposite. This is beautiful. What you’re seeing right now—things like this are why people travel and look for new places to live, even when it would be more difficult than living on a station like the Meredith Reynolds.

Shinigami assessed the image as well as she could. She still was not certain what Barnabas meant, but she sensed that there was something important about the exchange.

She filed away the logs to go over later.

So, are you ever going to explain to me why you’re dressed like that?

Barnabas smiled as he began to walk again. The mine was not very far away. Call it an indulgence. Missionaries tend to unsettle people. They also tend to be able to push situations further than someone in another social position. Simply put, this disguise will afford me opportunities I would not otherwise have.

You’re being sneaky. Shinigami was cautious in her assessment.

You could say that, I suppose.

You think they’ll underestimate you, too, don’t you?

Barnabas smiled again, and this time the smile was colder and harder. Yes.

Shinigami was silent as he climbed toward the gates, where guards waited in their towers. They watched curiously as he drew closer, and eventually the guard captain himself scrambled out to speak to this strange alien who was approaching on foot.

“This is private territory.” His voice was uncertain. This person certainly didn’t seem aggressive, and how could he possibly hope to do anything without any weapons? “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to—”

“Good day to you, child.” Barnabas gave his best monk’s smile. He was bargaining that religious figures in alien societies spoke similarly. “I am Brother Barnabas, here to speak to Venfirdri Lan.”

The captain drew up at the mention of his boss’s name. “I... Is he expecting you?”

“No, child, he is not expecting me—but he does need to see me. I am here to bring peace to what may be a fraught situation.” Barnabas smiled again and folded his hands in his sleeves.

And waited.

“I, uh… I’ll, um…” The captain looked at Barnabas. He looked at the tower. He looked at Barnabas.

Barnabas kept smiling.

“I’ll go see if he’s available,” the captain replied finally. “Would you like any refreshment, Kalanon?”

The term doesn’t translate exactly, Shinigami told Barnabas before he could ask. But it is a sort of religious figure in Brakalon society. I think it is a term of respect.

Good.

Barnabas only shook his head. “I will wait here, child. Do not trouble yourself on my behalf. Go speak to the overseer, and I will await his response here.”

* * *

“There’s a what at the gates?” Lan looked irritably at the Brakalon. He could never remember this one’s name.

“A kalonon, sir. A...speaker of words.”

Lan blinked.

The Brakalon swung his head side to side in frustration. “A visionary. A person who sees truth and speaks it. We revere them above all.”

“Let me get this straight: a Brakalon mystic has come to the gates and you think I should see them.”

“Not a Brakalon, sir. I’ve never seen this kind of alien before.”

“Then how do you know it’s a—what was the word?”

“’Kalanon,’ sir.”

Lan prayed for patience. “That is not important right now. Shouldn’t Venfaldri Gar be handling this?”

“Sir, the kalanon asked for you by name. It said that it was bringing peace to a fraught situation.”

Lan pressed a button on his desk and waited. This conversation was getting him nowhere, and he was not going to waste any further time trying to explain that to his guard captain. When the door opened and Gar came in, Lan snapped, “What took you so long?”

“My apologies, Overseer Venfirdri.” Gar bent his head.

“There’s a religious...person...at the gates. Get rid of it.” At Gar’s curious look, Lan added, “It’s some type of alien no one has seen before.”

A curious expression came over Gar’s face and the vice overseer stepped politely around the Brakalon with a nod to him.

“A religious figure, you said?”

“Yes.” Wearying of this conversation, Lan brought up the video from the gates—how did he do that again? Why was he being expected to do all this now?—and turned his computer screen.

“Ah,” Gar said finally.

“Yes. ‘Ah.’ Get rid of it.”

“Did he say why he’s here, sir?”

To Lan’s relief, since he was beginning to get quite annoyed with this relentless speculation, the guard captain answered, “He says he is here to bring peace to a fraught situation, Vice-Overseer. He asked to speak to Overseer Venfaldri by name.”

Gar nodded contemplatively.

“Vice Overseer,” Lan began dangerously, “if you value your job—”

Gar interrupted him, looking at the guard captain, “Captain, if you would give us a moment of privacy?” The captain nodded and withdrew, and Gar took a seat and leaned close to Lan. “With all due respect, sir, I think we might want to let the religious figure in.”

“I assume that is a joke?”

“No, sir.” Gar paused as if trying to think of the words. “You know, of course, that the workers are becoming...shall we say, ‘difficult to control?’”

Lan sat in stony silence.

“Sometimes the distraction of religion provides the workers with a new place to put their energy—particularly if this is one of those religions that promises rewards for good behavior.” Gar settled back in his seat with an inscrutable smile.

Lan’s eyebrows rose. That was something he had not considered. “You think this kalanon—it’s the term the Brakalon used—could be useful in settling the workers?”

“I think it is possible,” Gar replied. He gave Lan a conspiratorial smile. “And if he is not, we can simply take care of it. After all, religious people like this tend to wander alone. It’s likely no one knows where he is.”

Lan chewed his lip. He was worried. “How did he find us?”

“That is another reason we should speak to him,” Gar told him persuasively. “If there is someone in Tethra who knows the location of the mine, we need to know who.” He added after a moment, “I was most careful never to leave any clues, and no one should have thought to follow me. I pretended to be a businessperson who had just arrived in town.”

“That is good.” Lan nodded absently, then shook his head slightly. “I’m not sure about this, however. You remember the Children of the Waves at home. They caused trouble. This one might do the same.”

The Children of the Waves were a religious sect that Lan had always hated. Even before they bombed the walls of one of the submerged towers on Luvendan, sucking everyone within out into the waters to be devoured by nearby Essekan—the sect maddeningly believed this to be a sure ticket to heaven—Lan had hated them.

They were so self-assured, so sickeningly sweet. When you didn’t take them seriously, they treated you as though you were too stupid to see the truth.

Lan had never trusted any religious figures on any planet since.

He was gratified that Gar seemed to take this concern seriously instead of brushing him off. Quietly Gar related, “You know, a lot of why I left was the Essekan. I knew they could crush the towers if they wanted—or even just my level, and I would be dead even if everyone else lived. I had terrible nightmares about it when I was little.”

It wasn’t a particularly unique nightmare. Every child on Luvendan had probably had it. Still, Lan felt a rush of companionship for this male. The memories of fear were incredibly strong, and Gar, like Lan, had left the planet.

“Why didn’t they just leave?” Lan asked irritably.

Gar swallowed. “They were so content just to live in the dark in those towers. They should have wanted something better for their children. They should have wanted something better for themselves. Maybe the Children of the Waves—” He broke off.

“What?” Lan was curious.

“Maybe they did that because they were so afraid of the Essekan that they couldn’t live with being afraid anymore. They wanted to get it over with.” Gar’s voice deepened, “It’s difficult, waiting for death.”

Lan blinked. The atmosphere in the room had grown abruptly dark, and he could not shake the feeling that Gar really knew what he was talking about.

But Gar shook himself and said simply, “In any case, the scans there show that this alien has no weapons on him at all. And he looks small. Weak.”

Lan nodded slightly, but he still was not sure.

“We should certainly not let him out among the workers,” Gar added. “Not at once, anyway. But I think you should speak to him, Overseer. Perhaps he might have useful ideas, even if we decide not to keep him around.”

It made sense, Lan had to admit. What was the harm in hearing the alien out? He’d been planning to spend the day watching one of his favorite shows, but he’d done that yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. Much as he hated to admit it, he was getting bored.

Speaking to this alien would at least be something new.

“Captain.” He waited for the Brakalon to push his head into the room. “Go get the alien. Bring him here.”

* * *

Barnabas had wondered whether he would be able to fulfill his promise. Still, he was not precisely surprised when the gates swung open and the large alien beckoned him inside. The threat of imminent death seemed to spur creativity. Whatever Gar had said, it had plainly worked.

Shinigami, tell me about the layout while we walk.

You’re at the eastern edge of the camp, by magnetic north. If you skirt the southern wall and then partway along the western wall, you will eventually come to a gate that leads to two huts on the hill.

Barnabas glanced in that direction. The overseer’s hut?

It would seem so. The alien who is accompanying you went there and came back down.

Very well. What else? This place was depressing. Nestled as it was into a valley between the foothills of the mountain range, it somehow managed not to have an impressive view. Those who lived here would see only the grimy and dusty buildings and the heavy walls.

The place is set out roughly on a grid. There are many huts, of which I assume some are guard barracks and some are houses for the workers. If I had to guess, I would say the huts closer to the western gate are for the guards. This is assuming that many of them are Brakalon, because there are a few in those buildings right now. The other huts are to the east near the entrance to the mine. In the middle there are some buildings that might be a jail and a store and…I’m not sure what else.

Thank you, Shinigami.

Barnabas kept walking. The large alien at his side—a Brakalon, if he recalled correctly, which he almost always did—was treating him respectfully. He had scanned the guard’s mind; he was in no danger from the male.

The Brakalon’s large head—set forward on its shoulders compared to a human’s, with a very short, thick neck—swung from side to side to better assess danger as he walked. His skin was remarkably pale, and warm-toned like a human’s. His hands, meanwhile, had what appeared to be two fingers and a thumb, but with plates over the skin that seemed to be a part of it—perhaps similar to a fingernail?

Barnabas registered a strange mental presence and almost stopped walking, but he didn’t want to be obvious. The Brakalon might be respectful, but Barnabas did not want to cause a scene…yet.

Still, he looked around curiously. The presence was more like an absence; like a dark place where there should be something. He looked around, turning his head slowly so as not to attract attention, and saw an Ubuara peering at him.

He should be able to read this one’s thoughts, but the radio chip that kept the Ubuara unable to communicate partially blocked him. The familiar anger surged within him, a slow burn that he knew would not stop until the situation was made right.

In the meantime, he stared into the creature’s eyes and forged a connection using raw power. Aebura has not forgotten you. I am here to help. Be patient. All will be made well.

Then he turned his head away before the Brakalon could notice and followed him up the hill.

* * *

In the guard hut, Namlanor, one of the younger guards and thus always assigned to the boredom of electronics duty, heard a crazed beep-whistle from one of the devices. Swearing, he followed the noise until he came to the device that produced radio waves to silence the Ubuara.

He frowned. He didn’t know how to fix this piece of equipment.

He thumped the top of it.

It immediately sank into quietness once more, all the dials indicating normal function.

Namlanor smiled and went back to his chair. Fixing electronics wasn’t always complicated.

Chapter Ten

“So.” Lan folded his hands and stared at the alien. He tried to think of something to say.

“How should we address you?” Gar asked diplomatically.

Lan gave him a slight nod to thank him for the question.

“Brother Barnabas, please.” The alien looked between them. “I am guessing from your expressions that you have not met any humans before.”

“Humans?” Lan considered. “No.”

“We have only recently come to this sector of space,” Barnabas told him. He smiled. “While we are newcomers, I believe we have much to offer, both in trade and in...other ways.” He inclined his head. “That is why I am here.”

“Yes. Explain that.” Lan narrowed his double-pupiled eyes and considered this small and weak alien. Gar was right, it really did look quite useless. No wonder it had learned to rely on trade. “How did you know my name?”

Perhaps it was an information broker. If so, he would want to be even more careful what he said.

“When I landed here I decided to wander the countryside, and came upon your enclave.”

“And again—how did you learn my name?”

Barnabas tapped behind his ear. “I have a device—a glorified database, really—that gives me answers to my questions. It told me that you had, at least at one time, been overseer here.”

A “glorified database?” Do you want to be the target for the flamethrower tests?

Barnabas’ lips twitched. He was enjoying Shinigami’s tone, and he was also enjoying the look of worry on Lan’s face as the Luvendi wondered just how many people knew where he was.

“Where did your device find that information? And how did you know we’ve been having troubles?”

“Ah, I should explain.” Barnabas gave a self-deprecating smile. “I have simply learned that in places like this which are undergoing rapid expansion, things are always fraught. There is...progress, and at the same time, there are those who are not prepared to sacrifice to see that progress achieved. There can be a collision of people with different laws from different societies.”

“Ah.” Lan was put at ease by this. “I...see. Yes, you are correct. There are those here who do not understand progress. Who for some reason think that we should obey their laws.”

“And?” Barnabas asked.

“Devon is a newly-settled planet, Brother Barnabas. It is not under the purview of any laws. Any claims made should surely be backed up before they are imposed, yes?”

Barnabas only smiled again.

He doesn’t know how right he is.

Shinigami pointedly ignored him.

What if I let you use him for flamethrower practice?

I’ll consider it. I assume you don’t mean right now.

See, we’re getting to know one another!

“Brother Barnabas.” Gar spoke now. “How do you wish to, as you said, bring peace here?”

“Ah.” Barnabas nodded at him. “You see, it is quite simple. Dissatisfaction comes from poorly-aligned expectations. Since you mention troubles and you are an overseer here, I will guess that you are having problems with the workers.”

Lan nodded slightly.

“My guess is that the workers have expectations—the type of work they do, and so on—whereas you have different expectations.”

“I do not have expectations, I have facts,” Lan shot back testily. “In order for the mine to function, work must be done. In order for it not to be bankrupted, the costs of food and lodging must be considered.”

“They have not yet been persuaded to think this way?” Barnabas asked mildly.

“No.” Lan knew he sounded somewhat like a sulky child, and he hated it.

“During my travels, I have found that I have a talent for aligning expectations,” Barnabas offered.

And realigning spines, Shinigami added.

That as well.

“Brother Barnabas,” Gar interjected, “while we do not wish to be disrespectful, I’m sure you can understand that allowing an unknown alien into this situation is a risk. What assurances can you offer us?”

Lan looked at him sharply, but he was pleased to see that this new alien did not seem to be insulted by the question.

“A good question. I beg your pardon, but I do not believe I know your name.”

“I am Venfirdri Gar, vice-overseer of this mine.”

“It is good to meet you, Vice-Overseer Venfirdri. You are, of course, wise to seek assurances.” He paused for a moment. “What information would be of help to you as you make this decision?”

“Tell us about your religion,” Gar suggested.

“Ah. Perhaps you are worried that I wish to set up some cult?”

“That is a concern,” Lan agreed.

“I understand. However, that is not my reason for being here. I am not concerned with what gods you or your workers worship.”

“‘Gods?’” This was an unfamiliar term to Lan. Even Gar, the more well-read of the two, seemed lost.

The human seemed a little blindsided by this. “Ah. Hmm. A force beyond what we can see or measure. An ideal, perhaps. Something greater than mortal beings.” When he saw their blank looks, he shook his head. “I am happy to speak to you about this, but it is not my purpose in being here. I wish only to restore peace to this place.”

Lan came to a decision. “In that case, why doesn’t Vice-Overseer Venfirdri show you around?” His nod to Gar conveyed a silent warning: Keep an eye on him.

Gar nodded back slightly.

“I would be delighted. I sincerely hope I can be of use.” Barnabas stood, and allowed Gar to lead him out of the overseer’s hut.

Lan waited until they were gone, then hit a button to call one of the guards.

“Summon Chogaru.”

He ate some sweets while he waited for the Nekubi to arrive. Gar had done well to bring them back. Such comforts were the only things that kept Lan sane in this miserable place while he accrued his money.

Still, there must be sacrifice in order to gain. If he had to live on this squalid planet for a few more years in order to become magnificently wealthy, he would do so.

He looked at the Nekubi as it slithered into the room.

At first, Lan had despaired of finding a way in which the Nekubi could be useful workers. With short weak arms and a bulbous body, they were not useful for many of the tasks normally performed in a mine.

However, the Nekubi possessed an unusual ability to find veins of ore and assess the quantity of it in a chunk of rock. Lan had been able to make excellent use of them.

Chogaru in particular had other uses. When he’d arrived, Lan had heard his name from the guards almost at once. He was a troublemaker, they said. He was seen whispering in corners with the other workers. Who could know what mischief he’d get up to?

Then something very unexpected had happened. Chogaru had asked to speak to Lan in the dead of night, and he had explained that he would be very useful to the overseer—for a price. He had established himself as one of the revolutionaries among the workers. Anyone looking to make trouble would come to him first.

He offered to be Lan’s source amongst the workers.

Lan, who appreciated this sort of bargaining, had to admit that this was an unexpected bonus. He’d made sure to have the sort of delicacies Chogaru liked on hand for regular indulgence, including a certain sort of tree sap. He’d signed a contract offering Chogaru far more in the way of wages so that money would be waiting for him at the end of his year, and any month he stayed after that would earn him triple wages.

In return, Chogaru had made him aware of certain plans among the workers and advised Lan when to use force and when to capitulate to their demands. So far, Chogaru’s advice had proved worthwhile.

Lan had not summoned him recently, however. He knew that Chogaru must have opinions on the tempers within the mines, and Lan had been afraid that the Nekubi might advise letting people out of their contracts.

“You have a problem, Overseer?” Chogaru dipped a finger in the tree sap and brought it to his mouth. The sticky stuff was just starting to drip as he licked it away.

“You tell me,” Lan replied. “It’s what I pay you for.”

“You have several potential problems.”

“Mmm. I’m aware of those. And there is now one more. Did you see the new alien walking with Gar?”

Chogaru shook his body in a way that Lan had come to interpret as a negative.

“He wears brown robes and is short, and has no claws or teeth to speak of. He is apparently a ‘human.’”

“I’ve heard of humans,” Chogaru related finally. “But they’re myths; they don’t exist. Whoever told you he was human was playing a prank on you.”

“He told me he was human,” Lan replied, annoyed.

“The stories about humans are impossible,” Chogaru told him. “They say that humans can grow claws in an instant and battle creatures four times their size. Who has that kind of technology?”

“Kurtherians.”

“Precisely. And what you described is not a Kurtherian.” Chogaru rippled again; Lan thought this one might be a shrug. “So what do you want from me?”

“I want to know if this thing tries to make trouble or set up an insurrection; that sort of thing.”

“Ah. If you’re worried, why is he even here?”

“He claims he can help with the bad mood among the workers. It’s worth a try. I’ll just kill him if he doesn’t help.”

“Wise,” Chogaru agreed. “Don’t let it go too far. I’ll see what I can find out about him.”

Lan seemed to have nothing more to say, so Chogaru left with the Brakalon who had brought him here, pausing for restraints to be placed on his hands and tail. Whenever he came to speak to Lan, they pretended he was in trouble for some infraction or other. Chogaru told people this was why he’d stayed so long; Lan had extended his contract for all the trouble he’d made.

He didn’t mind living here, not particularly. Ever since he could remember Chogaru had wanted more. More of anything, more of everything. At first he had despaired that a Nekubi from the lowest caste could ever rise in the world, but his instincts had told him to get off Nire, his home planet. Since he’d left, things had definitely been better.

Oh, there were problems. There were rough nights sleeping out in the open, or without food. But he was learning so much. He was learning how to trade what he had for something more, and he got better at it every time.

When he had run out of options on his last planet, he’d taken a contract with the company. He hadn’t had any ideas of what to do when he was done with his year of work. He’d just known that it was better to go someplace new than get into a rut.

Once he’d gotten here, though, he’d seen the answer at once. Overseers were deathly afraid of insurrection, and it was all too easy to stir one up.

Lan thought Chogaru was on his side—and when push came to shove, maybe he was—but Chogaru wasn’t useful unless there were workers’ revolts to put down. Thus, he made sure to keep them going with a subtle word here, a little hint there. He was going to make as much of this situation as he could.

In this case, he had to admit he was curious. What sort of alien would dare try to pass themselves off as a mythical being? It was interesting, and it almost certainly meant there were secrets.

And if Chogaru had learned one thing over the years, it was that where there were secrets there was money to be made.

* * *

Barnabas walked through the dusty streets with his hands linked behind him and a carefully neutral expression on his face.

He’d decided to let Gar lead him wherever he wanted. There seemed to be good communication between him and the Luvendi. Barnabas had understood that when Gar asked for assurances, he was giving Barnabas the opportunity to set Lan’s mind at ease. Gar had given faint nods when Barnabas had struck good notes, too.

Barnabas would therefore trust the vice-overseer to show him whatever he deemed useful, and only speak frankly when he knew they couldn’t be overheard.

In the meantime, he was happy to have the opportunity to walk the layout of the town, seeing its weaknesses up close and assessing the mood in the workers. Many of them looked at him with scarcely-concealed dislike, assuming he was a friend of management because he was walking with Gar.

He would let them think that for now. It was extremely unlikely that any of them could hurt him badly enough to be more than an inconvenience, and they would know the truth soon enough.

He promised himself that.

Shinigami?

Yes?

Are you getting data?

Yes. She sounded pleased.

He was pleased as well. Before he left the Meredith Reynolds, he’d commissioned a series of pouches and pockets that went with various outfits. Though they appeared to be cloth, they were made of a fabric that resisted basic scanning technology, allowing him to stash various weapons and electronics in them.

In this case, secure in the knowledge that he could almost certainly keep fighting long enough to be picked up by a Pod, he hadn’t bothered to bring weapons.

Instead, he’d brought a device that would find Lan’s servers and feed information to Shinigami. While Barnabas was here, she would assess the data to see what they could find out about Lan and his employers.

He’d been impressed with her research about High Tortuga. She’d identified many places to tackle in order to make sure no one came looking for the planet—places Barnabas would no doubt have thought of eventually, but not soon, and not without carefully curated lists of exact cities and space stations where he might find relevant servers and information brokers.

He wondered how much else they could do if they set their minds to it. He had to admit, she’d gotten farther than he expected without speaking to people.

If only she weren’t so damned impatient to use that flamethrower…

Chapter Eleven

She should burn this whole place to the ground. Shinigami sorted through the files on Lan’s computer, only growing more annoyed as she did so.

The company didn’t care very much about its workers. A cursory check of their standard employment contract compared to any other employment contract revealed an eye-watering set of clauses that allowed for, as far as Shinigami could tell, things like having a relative work off any debt the company decided you had.

It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law of course, but they were betting that no one they took would be able to get to one.

That would have been bad enough, but it was clear that Lan had cared even less about people than the company did from the start. The company had set an exceptionally low bar, and he had failed to meet it every time.

It was clear from the amount of food he’d requisitioned that he wasn’t feeding the workers enough, and from his supply orders that he really only cared about his security systems and all the little luxuries he’d hidden under different line items.

He’d sent a message to the company to confirm that he would shut down the mines just as they had requested, then he’d taken everything offline and gambled that the owners wouldn’t interfere—or, at least, wouldn’t interfere for long enough that he’d be able to make a small fortune off the mine.

She wasn’t sure if he’d planned to leave after a certain amount of time, or if he was only intending to run when he thought he was in danger. He seemed to be leaving his options open, even setting up a system of debts for lodging and food that would give him the chance to move workers somewhere else, claiming they still owed him money.

That was why you couldn’t give people like this any indication that you were coming. Shinigami admitted to herself that she was worried—worried that Barnabas would not be sneaky enough and Venfaldri Lan would disappear with all his ill-gotten gains, and maybe even with some of the slave-workers.

The thought of someone getting away with this sickened her. The injustice of it was enough to make her want to climb out of her servers, take corporeal form, and do any number of violent things to everyone like Lan.

She could build herself a body if she had long enough.

Barnabas?

Yes?

Be honest: are you certain there is no room in your plan for Lan to escape?

His answer came back instantly: Yes. I won’t let him escape without paying for what he has done. More important, perhaps, is that I will never let him do anything like this again. The past cannot be undone, but the future can be shaped.

Thank you, Shinigami replied simply.

There was a pause. She peeked through his eyes for just a moment and saw the world of the mines—depressing even to her AI eyes. Everything was shoddy and run-down. This place wasn’t humming with activity or efficiency, and its denizens were not willingly laboring this hard. There was nothing to be proud of here beyond the grimly determined survival of the workers.

Were you worried? Barnabas asked her.

Yes. She did not see the point of the question. She would not have asked if she were not worried.

I am sorry, then, he replied at once. It was not my intent for you to think that I… He paused. What did you think? To my knowledge, I have never given anyone in the former Etheric Empire cause to doubt my devotion to Justice. He sounded offended now.

Not that, Shinigami told him. I was worried that your pride was leading you to do this the difficult way for no good reason, and that Lan might have a chance to escape because of it. You cannot deny that humans do illogical things out of pride.

As do AIs, Shinigami. All minds are prone to pride. It is, for all my jokes, one of the reasons it is good to work with a ship who can test my plans—and for you to work with a human who won’t let you use that flamethrower without good reason.

Shinigami considered his words. Maybe, she agreed finally.

Maybe? Maybe? You’ve been advocating charging in head-on when it might cost us months of time in finding others like this male, and—

Got you.

A simmering sort of silence came through the ether, and Shinigami immersed herself once more in her research a bit hastily. She was incorporeal, so she wasn’t precisely sure what Barnabas could do to make her sorry for her jokes.

She was, however, not stupid enough to find out.

* * *

Leiguba had not been hopeful when he’d seen the alien head up to the overseer’s hut. Once—long ago—he had thought that aliens might come to help them. That they would see how Lan was running the place and report back to the company, and a better overseer would come.

He had learned that this was a foolish hope. No one cared. Whatever they might think when they saw the mines and its workers, nothing ever happened.

Maybe they even approved.

So when he looked at this one, it wasn’t with anything more than bitter curiosity. The alien was dressed strangely, in long robes that looked impractical for manual labor and weren’t of a very nice material.

But he seemed oddly dignified…and the guard captain treated him with respect, which was unusual. Even the guards didn’t like Lan and Gar.

And then the alien had turned toward him and Leiguba had felt the thoughts pour in: Aebura has not forgotten you. I am here to help. Be patient. All will be made well. It sounded like someone yelling from very far away with their voice being drowned out by white noise, but Leiguba could hear it.

More than that, for just a moment, he could hear the frequency of the group mind. There wasn’t anyone around who could share thoughts since all the other Ubuara still had working radio chips, but it was as if Leiguba’d had a head full of clouds and now it was clear again.

It was intoxicating. He stood staring after the alien and wondered what was happening.

Aebura has not forgotten you. Had Aebura truly sent this strange alien? If so, how did she propose to have him set the workers free? It had been so many months since she left. When the year was up and the overseer had refused to free them, Leiguba had been sure that Aebura would do something to release them.

But she hadn’t. Locked in the mines, he couldn’t tell if she even knew they were missing. He spent long nights torturing himself with possibilities. Had she left Devon behind, never even caring about them? Had she noticed they were gone and had gotten into trouble coming to get them? Maybe she’d forgotten the time passing and hadn’t realized anything was wrong.

Now she had sent a single alien. Was she rich enough that she was sending a broker to buy the whole place?

I am here to help, the alien had said. Be patient. All will be made well. It sounded as if he was telling Leiguba not to do anything on his own, to just wait for things to happen.

But he could not keep this to himself. The workers here had been depressed and anxious for weeks, and he was afraid of what might happen if things got any worse. He saw the hopelessness in people’s eyes. How long until they did something foolish, thinking they had nothing to lose?

He spread the word to the other Ubuara as best he could. Though they could not speak mind to mind now, they had noticed that the Brakalons could not interpret their native language very well. Sometimes they mistook it for just meaningless chittering, and that meant that they could pass messages.

Not only that, the Ubuara were used to passing messages. The links persisted, even when they could not connect to a group mind. Soon, the Ubuara were whispering messages to everyone they came across who was known to be friendly. Help is on the way.

It wasn’t very far into the afternoon before Chogaru came to see Leiguba. Leiguba had been sitting in a patch of sun on one of the fences in a secret place that the guards didn’t know about when Chogaru slithered into the alley.

“Do you know what these messages are all about?”

“Yes.” Leiguba smiled. He was glad to see Chogaru. The Nekubi had been brave in standing up to Lan since he arrived, and he was always getting marched up to the overseer’s hut and thrown into the little jail.

Chogaru was just the sort of person who might do something desperate if things didn’t turn around soon.

“You don’t need to worry anymore,” Leiguba said. “Aebura has sent someone to help us.”

“Aebura?” Chogaru looked doubtful.

Leiguba could not blame him, not particularly. Aebura had left soon after Chogaru arrived—back when Lan was still letting people go at the end of their yearly contract. Chogaru didn’t know her, so all the information he had was that she hadn’t come to save them yet.

But now she had. Leiguba wrapped his tail around himself and tried to find a way to explain to the Nekubi why he was so sure this was going to work.

“This alien…he can override the radio chips,” he told Chogaru earnestly. “That’s how I know he’s from Aebura. He looked at me, and for a moment I could hear the group mind.”

“A hallucination,” Chogaru replied dismissively.

Leiguba frowned. He understood not trusting Aebura, but this was different. Chogaru knew Leiguba. The Nekubi should know that he wouldn’t lie about this.

“It wasn’t a hallucination,” he said firmly. “This alien is not an Ubuara, but he can speak mind to mind.”

“Is this the alien who went to the overseer’s hut?”

“Yes. You saw him?”

“He was coming down the hill when they brought me to speak with Lan.” Chogaru flicked his tongue contemplatively at the corners of his mouth as if checking for any scraps of food that might have gotten away. “If he’s talked to Lan and is still free to move around, clearly he isn’t on our side. Has he done anything to prove who he’s from?”

“No. Not yet.” Leiguba’s tail twitched. “We need to give him time.”

“We might not have time.”

“No.” Leiguba got up and began to pace back and forth on the fence, using all four paws to walk. “We can’t let anyone do something stupid. We were getting to the point where we might do something foolish. We need to wait and see what this alien does.”

“And what if he’s one of Lan’s agents, trying to lure us into the open so they can crush everyone who wants to fight back?” When Leiguba looked stubborn, Chogaru folded his arms over his bulbous belly. “I think you’re too quick to trust this human, just because he made you think something. Can’t people lie mind to mind?”

“They...can,” Leiguba said cautiously. “But it’s awfully hard. Usually, when someone is doing a sneaky thing you can tell. The thought doesn’t feel right.”

“But it is possible.”

“I suppose.” Leiguba sat back down and rocked back and forth. “But then what do we do? Everyone knows he’s here. I can’t tell them he’s not going to help us—especially when we don’t know that for sure. That would be cruel, to take hope away without good reason.”

“You gave them hope without good reason,” Chogaru snapped.

“We haven’t even talked to him! Maybe he’ll have good answers.”

“Maybe.” Chogaru lifted a shoulder. “I’m not convinced.”

“Come talk to him with me. Then maybe you will be.” Leiguba frowned at the Nekubi and gave a little sigh of relief when Chogaru nodded grudgingly. “You won’t regret this.”

Chogaru still looked grumpy. “I still think we should organize on our own,” he said after a moment. “They need to know we can fight back. They need to know we haven’t forgotten what they’re doing to us. And we shouldn’t rely on outsiders. Why is Aebura sending someone after all this time, anyway? It’s too weird.”

“What if we fight back and we start something too big? We might get crushed. We can’t fight Brakalons.”

“You don’t know that,” Chogaru exclaimed. “We’ve learned all sorts of things about the guards. We might be able to pull it off.”

“’Might?’ We can’t risk people unless we’re sure!”

“Nothing is ever sure,” Chogaru replied dismissively. “Now, are you going to show them that you’re a force to be reckoned with or aren’t you?”

Leiguba wavered. He would really rather wait to see what this human did. He’d trusted that human, even if he couldn’t say why. He still thought the human was a good bet.

But maybe he was being foolish. Maybe he should trust Chogaru. After all, Chogaru was the one who did things. He was fearless, always getting hauled up to see Lan and always coming back to brag that Lan needed them more than he let on and the Luvendi was a coward.

Yes. He should listen to Chogaru. Chogaru knew what to do. Maybe if they were all brave like him, they’d already be free.

“Okay,” Leiguba said. “Let’s organize. Let’s come up with a plan.”

Chapter Twelve

Shinigami was regretting her choices. She had agreed, much against her better judgment, to play chess with Barnabas again and had therefore used one of Barnabas’s devices to project a chessboard and an image of Baba Yaga. Now, conscious of his reminders to behave like a human, she brushed a lock of white hair behind one ear and leaned forward to study the board.

“You’re getting better at that.” Given that she was using the device, Barnabas did not bother to use mind speech.

Shinigami did not respond. She was too busy thinking that this was another trap.

She couldn’t have said why. He was playing far differently this time, moving pieces aggressively forward to get every game piece in play. His pawns were out, both knights were advancing, and he’d left a rook and a bishop in position to strike at her larger pieces if she dared move them.

It would be foolish of Barnabas to do the same thing again: play not to win.

But what if he was doing it anyway? It had been nonsensical the first time, too.

Hadn’t it?

She hated humans, she thought grumpily. She hated them with every fiber of her being. Stupid, nonsensical, overly proud, illogical, absolutely untrustworthy, and they made bad jokes—and yet he’d talked her into playing him again. How had he done that? She should have known better.

She knew how he’d done it: she had wanted to prove she could beat him. She had come out of the last game feeling bamboozled. Feeling that he had won even though he had lost, and now she had to prove herself.

How did he do that?

“Your move,” Barnabas reminded her mildly.

She raised her avatar’s face to give him a glare and his lips twitched slightly.

He was mocking her. He was mocking her.

I will find a fitting way to make you sorry for this. Maybe I will lock you in a Sisyphean hell. Mind speech really was easier for her. Plus, she liked being the voice of God echoing in people’s skulls.

Apparently he didn’t. “That always sounded unpleasant.” He looked at the roof of the cave contemplatively, as if admiring the sheer ambition of her goal. And then, uncannily sensing that she was ready to flip the chessboard and quit, he added, “If you don’t want to play you could just concede.”

Smug, self-centered bastard. She knew he had been manipulating her. She knew it.

And she still couldn’t bear the idea of him wandering around the ship, telling her he’d won both games, even if she knew it wasn’t true. Oh, he was maddening. She was going to kill him in his sleep.

Wait, he didn’t sleep.

No matter. She’d come up with something suitable. And then she’d kill ADAM and TOM for suggesting she work with him.

Thoughts of vengeance concluded, she moved one of her bishops into position to be captured, narrowing her eyes at him in challenge. Come and get me.

He moved a knight backward, staring her down with an evil grin.

Shinigami fought the urge to scream.

“I’m almost sure Lan is not part of a larger group,” he remarked as he waited for her next move. “At least, per se. I think he has contacts in place to help him escape when he wants to, but I don’t think there is any particular set of overseers who plan to break away.”

Shinigami moved a pawn. What was the point of strategy when he was only going to lose on purpose again?

His words were hopeful, however. Does this mean you’re going to let me send a missile at that hut?

“Not just yet. Be patient.” He looked at the board, gave a minute shrug, and moved a knight.

Why wait? She moved another pawn. I watched your physiological responses every time he talked. Your fingers were contracting. You wanted to strangle him.

“I want to pull his spine out and strangle him with that,” Barnabas corrected her in such a pleasant tone of voice that even Shinigami was a bit unnerved. “I’m waiting because I think if I can put him off-balance enough, he’ll contact the various people who are willing to help someone like him...and who know about this planet. I don’t just want to take out Lan, I want his whole network.”

She gave the mental equivalent of a nod, then, Someone’s coming.

Barnabas turned his head. “I hear them.” His enhanced hearing had picked up the crunch of the feet of a bipedal being on gravel.

It’s... Checking. It’s the other Luvendi, Venfirdri Gar. She moved a piece.

“Interesting.” Barnabas stayed hidden in the cave and moved a piece on the other side of the board that was manifestly unconnected to any of his previous moves.

Shinigami moved a mirroring piece—and realized her mistake when she saw Barnabas’ lazy smile. He slid a rook down the side of the board. “Checkmate.”

You have got to be kidding me. You were playing to win?

“Of course. It would be foolish to do the same thing twice in a row, don’t you think?”

Then what was all that shrugging about?

“It’s called ‘bluffing,’ my dear AI.” He smiled at her as both the holograph and the game board flickered out of sight, and a moment later turned his head to look at Gar. “Hello.”

Gar hesitated. “I came because... Well, is there anything I should be doing right now?”

Finding Lan’s network and leading a coup? Shinigami suggested.

Unfortunately, he didn’t realize for months what Lan had actually done. I’m not trusting him to do anything so complicated as figure the whole thing out.

Probably wise. You really are an ass, you know.

Barnabas smiled internally and nodded to Gar. “You are good to ask. As it happens, there is something I have not been able to determine yet, which is how Lan intends to get off-planet. He may not have a plan, but if he has one I want to know what it is.”

Gar nodded. “And what are you going to do next?”

Don’t answer that.

I’m not stupid, Shinigami.

“My plans are fluid, and they will remain private for now.” Barnabas gave him a smile with just a hint of coldness to it.

Gar nodded nervously. “If you need me?”

“I will find a way to contact you.” Barnabas knew his smile was not reassuring. He liked that in this case.

Gar was being useful, but he should not make the mistake of thinking he had nothing left to prove.

The Luvendi seemed to take this gracefully. He bowed and left with a murmured farewell.

Before you say anything, yes, I know I need to keep an eye on him. Barnabas glanced toward the ship in orbit.

Well, as long as you know.

I do. All right, I think I’m going to try to talk to the Huns next.

The...Huns?

The Nekubi. I was referring to the slug aliens from the Star Wars movies John and Bobcat like so much.

John says they’re poorly acted and sloppy.

And yet he watches them once a month. What does that tell you?

That humans are maddeningly inconsistent?

Well, you’re not wrong. Barnabas stood up and rotated his neck to work out a crick. Once more into the breach.

* * *

Chogaru watched Gar slowly make his way from the cave to the walls. The Luvendi had made a big show of examining the camp before he entered the cave, taking measurements and marking things on a map. Doubtless he would pretend that he had been assessing the defenses so he could make them stronger.

But Chogaru knew that the alien who called himself “Brother Barnabas” was in that cave right now.

He considered. He’d encouraged Leiguba to riot, thus ensuring that his place as an informant would be secure, but this was even better information.

If Gar were to be implicated, Chogaru might move up even farther in the hierarchy of the camp.

He just had to make sure Lan saw the evidence with his own eyes. But how to accomplish that?

* * *

“So, this is Pepsi?” Aebura stared doubtfully at the bubbly drink.

“Not so loud!” Carter looked around furtively. “No, this is Coke. This will be our official beverage, in accordance with the wishes of the Empress.”

He pushed the beverage aside and laid out a brightly-colored sign, pitching his voice so other people in the bar could hear him.

“See? This sign shows that we make Coke, a beverage that is quickly becoming a favorite across the universe. It has a flavor that cannot be matched, and is the favorite beverage of the Empress.”

“I thought you said the Etheric Empire had become part of a federation?”

“That’s not as good for marketing. ‘Empress’ has a better ring to it.”

“How is an empress different from a queen again?”

“It’s… We’re getting off into a weird area here. Just trust me on this one.” Carter patted the sign again and projected his voice. “Yes, this poster certainly shows that we are devoted to the manufacture and distribution of Coca-Cola.”

Aebura stared at him silently. He was behaving very oddly; she wondered if he was having some sort of health issue.

He leaned forward to whisper, “Meanwhile, we put out the word very quietly that true believers can get Pepsi here.”

“Have I tried the Pepsi?”

“Yes. That was the first one you drank.”

“I can’t tell the difference.”

If she’d been worried about Carter before, her concerns skyrocketed now. He stared at her, twitching vaguely, with his face going red.

He leaned finally closer and ground out in a sort of a strangled voice, “Listen carefully… That is heresy.”

The problem with humans, Aebura decided, was that you could never tell how serious they were. Sometimes when they were talking about very serious things, they would make jokes and understate the situation. Other times when the situation didn’t seem to warrant it at all, they were very serious. Were they simply incapable of determining how serious things were in any normal way, or did they really consider the distinction between two nearly-identical drinks to be an issue of religious significance?

There was no way to tell.

She briefly considered fleeing the planet.

A moment later, she settled back on her haunches with a sigh. Humans, despite their flaws, were very useful and powerful.

Though she could think of no reason for a human to care about the mines, the one named Barnabas had seemed sincere when he’d told her he was going to help the mine workers, and he had indeed set off into the mountains where the mines might lie. He was putting his safety at risk for people he didn’t know.

Perhaps she should indulge the humans’ weird behavior—after a test, of course.

“Carter Eastbourne, how do you feel about slavery?”

Carter stood up very quickly and his face was very still, except for his eyes. He seemed to be trying to assess her mood.

“Why? Do slaves make your goods?”

“No. No!” She lashed her tail to add emphasis. “Never. I wish to know how you intend to produce this—and what you would do if you knew there were slaves nearby.”

“I would send for backup from the Empire,” he said at once. “There are people there whose task it is to handle those things.” He squared his shoulders. “But if the Rangers couldn’t get here, I would try to do something about it myself.”

There it was. Humans were foolhardy, but they were foolhardy in pursuit of freedom.

“Tell me about the ‘Rangers.’” It was a word she did not know.

“They travel alone—well, some of them—and when they see injustice they fight it. They are very strong fighters, and they are absolutely relentless when there are people being hurt. They’re led by a human named Barnabas.”

Aebura went still.

Barnabas was not simply a random human. He was one of the foremost humans, famous for his work in trying to gain Justice for the oppressed, and he had dedicated his life to this.

And he was helping them; people no one else had ever cared about before. She bowed her head and rocked back and forth.

“Aebura?” Carter sounded genuinely concerned. “Is something wrong? Do you need my help?”

“No. We’ll be all right. Barnabas is helping us already. I just didn’t know who he was until you said that.” She ran her hands along her tail worriedly. “It is a very great honor. We are only a few people who signed contracts with the wrong company.”

“If Barnabas has decided to help you, he has his reasons,” Carter told her seriously. Then his eyes went wide. “He’s not here right now, is he? Oh my God, he’s standing right behind me, isn’t he? He knows about the Pepsi. What have you done?”

“He’s not right behind you,” Aebura assured him.

“Oh, thank God. Why would you scare me like that?”

Aebura, who was not sure what she had done wrong, stayed silent.

“Listen,” Carter continued seriously. “You absolutely must not tell Barnabas about the Pepsi.”

Aebura narrowed her eyes. “You tell me that this Barnabas is a fighter for Justice, then you tell me to keep secrets from him? What is this Pepsi drink?”

Carter’s eyes crinkled unexpectedly. “Think of this as a big prank members of the former Etheric Empire play on one another. Have you heard of Nathan Lowell, or perhaps Christina Bethany Anne Lowell?”

“The small child who can turn into a large canine fighter? Don’t tell me she’s real.”

“Oh, she is. Nathan is a…well, it’s a long story. Suffice it to say, he is one of the Empress’ closest friends, which is why his daughter shares her name. He has also set up secret facilities to make and distribute Pepsi. We might have some fights about it—really, I might get my ass handed to me—but this isn’t an issue of Justice.” He got a distant look in his eyes. “Or perhaps it is. Justice for the oppressed Pepsi drinkers of the world.”

She still couldn’t tell if he was being serious, but she thought he was telling the truth about this not being an issue of Justice. She made a mental note to ask Barnabas about Pepsi in a roundabout sort of way the next time she saw him and snuck sips of the two beverages.

Apparently she was going to have to learn the difference between them.

Chapter Thirteen

Gar walked at what he hoped was a normal pace. He wasn’t very good at deception. Even when he had cared about his own ambitions above everything else, he’d been honest about it. He had never been the person listening to everyone’s secrets and blackmailing them later, and he didn’t tell lies.

This all felt very odd.

The thing was, he hadn’t gone to the cave in an effort to save his own skin. Clearly the human believed that was why he had been there, but the truth was stranger than that. Gar had gone because he wanted to do more. After months of doing things that felt wrong—making things worse and punishing people in ways they didn’t always deserve—this felt like undoing all that.

He resisted the urge to go back to the cave and explain this to Barnabas, but he knew the human wouldn’t believe him. What reason did he have to do so?

In the end, Gar decided. In the end, after he had done what Barnabas asked, then the Ranger might believe him.

He busied himself with menial tasks that gave him a clear view of the overseer’s hut. Lan had recently decided to inspect the jails. He was worried about an uprising, and not without reason. He was getting paranoid.

Once he left, Gar intended to go look around and see if he could find Lan’s contact for getting off-planet. Lan was lazy. He wouldn’t have memorized the long strings of digits necessary for interplanetary communications. He’d have written it all down somewhere.

Gar wrinkled his nose. Lan had probably hidden things somewhere he thought was very clever, but really wasn’t.

When he saw Lan head down from the hut, he had to stop himself from rushing up the hill. Instead, he waited while Lan came into the square and stopped to talk with him.

“What are you doing this morning?” Lan asked abruptly. He was trying to appear as if he cared about the day-to-day operations of this place.

If he had cared, he would already know Gar’s usual tasks.

“I’ll be doing an inventory of the food,” Gar lied. “I think someone is stealing rations. I need to confirm the totals of every category.” It would be clear even to someone unfamiliar with the daily jobs that this task would take a very long time. Lan would not think it odd for Gar still to be working when he got back.

“Very well,” Lan replied and left, puffing his chest out self-importantly.

Once he was gone, Gar headed up the hill. He took care not to look around too much, and at the door to Lan’s hut he smiled at the guards. “Lan sent me to look for a contract.”

Bored, they waved him inside. They knew he was the one who did the work around here. This way they wouldn’t be confused if they came in and he was looking through the paperwork. He even had his excuse ready. None of this is filed in any sort of order. They’d believe it; he knew they would.

Down in the town square, Chogaru saw Gar disappear into the hut. Then, in a calculated move, he picked up a rock and threw it through one of the windows of the commissary.

“This is an outrage! The overseer goes to inspect the jail while we starve!”

The Brakalons nearby sighed deeply before restraining him and hauling him into the jail, while Chogaru howled dramatic things about how he would say all this directly to Lan’s face. He wasn’t afraid. He was fighting for justice.

Inside, Lan heard the commotion and frowned. He had learned to take Chogaru’s complaints very seriously.

“We’ll take care of it, sir,” one of the Brakalons informed him respectfully.

“No,” Lan snapped. “I’ll handle it myself.” He watched while they hauled Chogaru into one of the far cells and chained him to the bars, then Lan leaned forward to hiss, “What is this about? Is this about the person stealing food? I knew about that already.”

Chogaru paused, surprised. “Who’s stealing food?”

“Gar told me about it.” Lan gestured impatiently. “I assumed that was why you were talking about starving.”

“I’m talking about starving because you don’t feed us enough,” Chogaru replied.

Lan frowned. The Nekubi really was pushing his luck these days by being very disrespectful. He’d have to do something about that soon.

“That’s not why I wanted to see you,” Chogaru clarified. “Gar is betraying you.”

“What?” Lan laughed and shook his head. “No, he isn’t. He’s—”

“In your hut right now, after having gone to a cave to speak secretly with the so-called human.” Chogaru smiled slightly. “Go check. You will see what you will see. What his plan is, I don’t know—unless you sent him to speak with this ‘Brother Barnabas.’”

Lan swallowed, then he whirled around and left. Chogaru was still chained to the bars.

Chogaru sighed without any real frustration. A few minutes, even a few hours, chained to these bars would be no trouble if they gave him Gar’s job.

The others, of course, would be furious when they knew what he had done, but there were ways to blunt that. Chogaru would recommend that the bravest ones be killed. That way, no one else would dare rise up.

He settled against the bars to wait.

Lan’s hearts were pounding as he scrambled up the hill. Gar? Betraying him? Gar, who was so careful to be logical and—

Of course. He had learned about the mines being turned over and he hadn’t understood. He’d wanted the whole thing for himself. That must be what this was. He was trying to figure out Lan’s secrets so that he could run things.

Lan would make him very sorry he’d tried.

It was still worrisome. He would not have suspected Gar; he thought he’d known the male. He had never seen Gar do anything deceitful. How could he have been so wrong? Part of him hoped that Chogaru was lying.

He burst into the hut without warning and scowled when he saw that his worst fears were true. Gar was here, surrounded by private papers that Lan had kept in a safe. How had he known the combination?

Lan must have entered it at some point while Gar was there, never dreaming that his vice-overseer would betray him like this.

“I suppose you have a good explanation.” His voice was ugly.

“I couldn’t find the shipping records,” Gar replied after a moment. “I didn’t want to trouble you, and you’ve used the safe while I was around. I didn’t think this would bother you.”

It was a plausible answer; almost plausible enough. But he’d never seen Gar like this, white-faced, with his hands shaking slightly.

And Gar slipped up even more when he asked, “Who told you I was here?”

Lan pulled out a pistol. “That is none of your business, just like these papers are none of your business. What are you really looking for?” He could see Gar sorting through different explanations in his head to find something believable and he shook the weapon threateningly. “Don’t lie to me! I know you’re working with the alien!”

Gar swallowed and tried to think of something to say. He had been so careful, making sure that none of the guards saw him going to the cave. Who could have told Lan he was there? Who could possibly know?

What sort of story would Lan believe now? Should Gar tell the truth?

A strange sort of clarity came over him at that thought. It did not matter what he did, as long as he did not let Lan suspect what the monk planned.

“I don’t know why you would think I am working with the monk,” he replied finally, trying to look as puzzled as possible. “I am trying to think of what I could do that would make you think that.”

“You went to the cave to speak with him,” Lan accused, tight-lipped with annoyance.

“I didn’t go to the cave to speak with him, I went that way to survey the walls.” Gar withdrew a map from where it was rolled at his belt and passed it to Lan. “See? If you were to go there and look you would note the same weaknesses. While I was there, I heard a noise and saw the monk in the cave. He said he was meditating, so I left him there.”

Lan hesitated. He was not sure what to think of this. When Gar spoke of the map—which was something that could be verified, of course—his face had been shining with honesty. And he had been reviewing the various defenses. He’d told Lan that yesterday.

“Then why are you here?” he asked finally.

Gar hung his head. “Exactly why you’d think. Well, apparently you think I’m working with this alien, and that’s not it. But what would you have thought if the alien weren’t here?”

“That you’re looking to take over from me,” Lan hissed. “That you’re going to kill me and run the mine, yourself.”

“No!” Gar looked horrified. “I just wanted my fair share. I thought you were cheating me!”

Lan blinked. He had thought about permutations of that while he’d walked up the hill.

“And it’s bad business,” Gar continued. “I know the workings of this camp. I work hard. I have kept your secrets about….” He lowered his voice, flicking his eyes toward the door where the guards were posted. “I have kept your secrets,” he continued finally. “I waited for you to offer me more, as you should have. I hoped that my offer of loyalty the other day would be understood, but instead you insulted me. So I wondered, why would Lan do this? Is the mine doing poorly, and he does not want me to know? But no!” He shook the piece of paper he held. “The mine is doing well! Profits have never been higher! And you cheat me!”

For a moment, Lan felt a pang of guilt and indecision.

Gar might deserve more of a share, but he had now shown that he was willing to be trouble, to bide his time and strike unexpectedly after pretending to be content. Lan couldn’t trust Gar anymore, nor could he let this story get away from him. What happened to Gar had to be indisputable, so it had to be public.

“Guards!”

They appeared at once and looked surprised to see Lan pointing a gun at Gar. “Yes, sir?” one of them asked politely.

“Take Venfirdri Gar away.” Lan deliberately did not use the Luvendi’s title. “He is trying to take the camp over by force. Put him in the jail while I decide how to punish him.”

He stood back and let them drag Gar away. The other Luvendi seemed dumbstruck.

At least he wasn’t pleading for mercy. That would have been tiresome. Lan watched the figures for a moment from the doorway, then slammed the door behind him.

What had he ever done to deserve this sort of betrayal?

* * *

In his cave, Barnabas sat back with a contemplative expression on his face. Shinigami had made him aware of the argument and fed the audio into Barnabas’s aural implant.

Where is Gar? he asked her.

He is being brought to the jail.

Strange. I would have guessed that Lan would just kill him.

It is unexpected, she agreed. Perhaps we have underestimated him. I thought he had no self-control at all.

He’s like any cornered animal. Barnabas chewed his lip. He’s dangerous because he’s desperate. He knows that if he doesn’t make Gar suffer in public, people will think he’s weak. He wants them to see it in gory detail.

So what are you going to do?

I’m going to move the plan up. I’ll check back in with Aebura to find out where the best hiding places would be, then I’ll come back to the ship to gear up.

What about Gar?

Barnabas hesitated. I will save Gar if I can. He did not tell Lan about our plans even when he might have easily become a double agent—and he had no way to know we could hear him. I almost wonder if he’s had a moral epiphany. But he has also done very grave wrongs and participated in slavery. Death would be a fitting punishment. I will save the slaves first, and him only if it does not endanger the rest of them.

He sensed her approval. Do you want a Pod?

Yes. Thank you, Shinigami.

* * *

Down in the town, Leiguba watched as Gar was dragged into the jail. He had been at Chogaru’s window, trying to reassure him. It was really very frustrating how Chogaru started these disturbances with no plan, but Leiguba could appreciate his frustration.

Chogaru heard the commotion and asked Leiguba, “What has happened?”

“Venfirdri Gar has been arrested,” Leiguba replied, surprised. “Why, I wonder?”

“I know,” Chogaru told him sagely. “I saw him go to a mountain cave where the human was hiding. Perhaps they’re plotting together.” He sounded smug. “I told you the human couldn’t be trusted.”

“If Lan doesn’t like him, then he must be our ally,” Leiguba protested.

Chogaru sighed. “You think so simply. The powerful people struggle amongst themselves without caring about us. This fight is about power, mark my words. Lan and Gar both want to run the mine, and Gar lost. I’ll bet he was the one who really brought the human.”

Leiguba knew it was useless to argue with him since Chogaru was very stubborn, so he nodded and pretended to agree.

“I’ll bring you food later,” he told the Nekubi and scampered up the roof to hide in the shadow of the chimney.

He didn’t like Gar very much, but what if Gar was working with the human?

If he was, he might be a valuable ally. He would have to figure out how to use this information—and how to determine Gar’s allegiance.

Chapter Fourteen

When Barnabas walked into Aebura’s bar again—try as he might, he couldn’t make out any meaning from the marks on the sign—she looked pleased to see him.

“Hello, Ranger Barnabas. Wait here and I will get you some juice.” She raced off and came back quickly with a glass of juice held carefully in her hind feet.

Now she’s calling me “Ranger.” I need a new title.

You said it didn’t need to be at the top of the to-do list. We’ve been kind of busy, you know.

Barnabas did not answer, instead reaching out to take the glass of juice. He took a sip. “Thank you. This is delicious, as always.” He knew she enjoyed being complimented on it, and he was happy to see her smile. She gave a little shiver of fur that he interpreted as happiness, which was confirmed a split-second later when he felt the faint brush of her mind.

He did not say anything in response. He did not want to surprise her by letting her know that he could see into the group mind. If he did so later, he could pretend that it was an acquired skill.

“You remember that I promised to ask for your help if I needed it?” Barnabas asked seriously. “I think I need some help now.”

Aebura was both pleased and worried. A few days ago, in a moment of emotion, she had been ready to race off at once and attack Venfaldri Lan with her bare hands. Since then, however, and especially since learning who Barnabas really was, she had realized that would be foolish.

What did it mean that he wanted her help now?

“I only need information,” Barnabas told her. He could see Aebura’s concern and reassured her. “About the mine.”

“Oh. What do you need to know?”

“Are there any places where people like to hide? Places where the guards wouldn’t think to look, and where they’d be safe from bullets. The bullets are actually the important thing. I hope to have the rest of it wrapped up quite quickly.”

Aebura considered this.

“Maybe inside the mine,” she dubiously replied. “There are places by the walls, but they don’t have enough space for a lot of people. One person could hide there if no one saw where they went. And the huts are so shoddy that bullets would go right through them. But the mines are up the hill, so if everyone ran to the mines at once…”

“Hmm. Actually, that gives me an idea. If I were to attack during the day everyone would be in the mines already, right?”

Aebura shook her head. “I can’t be sure. Lan was always saying that we should have multiple shifts so the mines were never closed.” She frowned. “I’ll bet he’s made people’s hours longer, too.”

“That sounds like him,” Barnabas agreed. “Frankly, I’m surprised no one has assassinated him yet.”

I’m not. What would happen after?

One of the guards could have done it, Barnabas pointed out. They clearly don’t like him much.

Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.

“Sometimes I thought Gar might,” Aebura mused. “He is a very ambitious male, that one. He doesn’t let anything stand in the way when he wants something. You’re sure you trust him?”

“I was,” Barnabas replied. “In a very limited capacity, mind you. But now with so many people asking, one does wonder. I will say, he has gone out of his way to protect my interests even when it wasn’t in his interest to do so. Lan had him arrested just before I came here.”

“Why?” Aebura asked.

“He was looking through Lan’s papers for off-planet contacts. I asked him to do so. When Lan caught him he lied and said he was looking for proof of profits so he could negotiate a raise.”

Aebura considered this. “He could have been doing both.”

“Why not sell me out, though?” Barnabas pressed.

“I just know I don’t trust him,” Aebura stated, her tail lashing.

She’s not wrong to hate him, Shinigami pointed out.

I know. I only expected him to do the bare minimum and no more. Shinigami, I of all people know what it is to regret my past.

The AI had no quick retort.

Meanwhile, Barnabas assured Aebura, “The workers are my first priority. I will make sure all of them are freed and safe before devoting any attention to Gar.”

She nodded, pleased.

“I will be moving very soon,” Barnabas told her. “And I wanted to pass along that I saw Leiguba very briefly, right when I got to the camp. He looked well.”

“How did you know it was him?”

Now Barnabas was in a sticky situation, and he had no choice but to confess, “I did not tell you, but I have some skills at mind speech. I was able to ascertain who he was, so I passed a message to him that you had not forgotten him and that I would help. I was able to override the implant for only a moment, but I’m very sure he heard me.”

“Thank you, thank you.” Aebura chittered as she swayed. “I am so grateful, Ranger Barnabas.”

“Why are you calling me that?” Barnabas asked her curiously. “You do not need to use my... Well, my former title.”

Aebura decided to tell him the truth, or most of it. “Another human came in here. He mentioned the Rangers and your name. He was most impressed by your abilities and honor.”

Barnabas smiled, but it seemed a bit distant to Aebura. “I hope to make this planet safe in time for the settlers who get here. They are counting on me.” He stood. “I must go. Be well, Aebura. I hope to be back with good news very soon.”

“Barnabas?”

Barnabas turned with a smile. “Yes, Aebura?”

“What is ‘Pepsi?’ Is it a matter of honor? Is it a kind of injustice?”

To her surprise and relief, Barnabas began to laugh. He held his sides and doubled over, gasping for air. Finally he stood up and wiped his eyes. “Oh, my. I see you weren’t joking when you said members of the former Etheric Empire had been here. Pepsi is... No, it’s not a matter of honor or injustice, it’s just a drink.” He blinked one eyelid shut at her. “But if you ever meet the Empress, don’t tell her I said that. She takes the supremacy of Coca-Cola very seriously.”

He was still chuckling to himself when he disappeared, and Aebura stared after him with her head tilted to the side curiously. She was reassured, but even more certain now that humans took very strange things seriously.

She wrinkled her nose. After all, it wasn’t like this was the debate between hakoj juice and iterze juice. This was just a silly argument about something that didn’t matter at all.

* * *

Lan paced around his little hut.

The papers had been shoved back into the safe unorganized and threatened to spill out while he slammed the door shut. He couldn’t look at them. Just seeing them—seeing all the evidence—made him want to burn everything.

Was it time to leave?

He had hoped to have a few years here to build up a good nest egg. He didn’t like being here, but he wanted to get all he could while he could. Another opportunity like this was unlikely to fall into his lap any time soon.

He should never have sent Gar to the city. At the time he’d thought there was no one he could trust quite so well, and he was also afraid that the vice-overseer would take over if he himself left, but maybe Lan should have gone himself. He could just have run away entirely if Gar had taken over, and if he had?

If he had, Gar wouldn’t know about the mines being shut down. Lan was sure now that Gar had really learned about everything on the trip, no matter how he’d played it off. He’d been frustrated before he went to Tethra, but he hadn’t displayed any signs of wanting a bigger share.

Until the other day. Lan shot a resentful look in the direction of the jail. He would have given Gar something for his trouble. He would even have taken him along when it was time to go.

Or would he? He confronted the guilty thought that he had chosen not to offer Gar more money.

No, he wouldn’t have helped Gar. In reality, he’d been planning to alter the records so it looked like Gar had always been in charge. By the time Gar convinced them of the truth, Lan would have been long gone.

On some level, Gar must have figured that out.

Well, he wouldn’t be any more trouble. He was locked up in the jail and—

And what if he told people the truth? Lan ran to the radio and paged the guard captain. The minutes before he appeared were agonizing.

“How is Venfirdri Gar?” Lan asked abruptly.

“I have heard no reports from the jail, sir.” The captain looked wary. “I assume all is well. We put him in the new building alone, sir. We didn’t want you to think we were coddling him, but you said you wanted to deal with him yourself. We thought the other prisoners might hurt him.”

Lan sank into a chair, shoulders sagging with relief. Gar didn’t have anyone to talk to. That was good.

“I want him totally alone,” he told the captain. Hopefully the male would think this was just a punishment, so he added, “Just him and his thoughts. No distractions.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll have the guards stationed outside.”

“Thank you, Captain. You may go.”

Lan tapped his fingers on the desk as he considered what to do next. He should just leave tonight. He should call for a flight out of Tethra and slip away while everyone was waiting for him to make a decision about Gar. It would be the safest thing to do.

But he didn’t want to give this up…not yet.

The little voice in his head that had told him to take the mine’s radios down was now telling him not to walk away while there was still profit to be had. An opportunity like this only came along once or twice in a lifetime, it said, and reminded him that there was no gain without risk.

Which meant that he needed to make a different call.

He opened a channel to one of his contacts in Tethra, an old Brakalon who was unusually pragmatic compared to the other Brakalons Lan had met over the years.

“What is it?” His voice was grumpy when he answered.

“I want to purchase your services,” Lan told him simply. He avoided specifics and didn’t use the word need. He wasn’t going to let Jutkelon hear weakness. He tried to sound bored. “Some of the workers think they can be clever and break out. I want to show them that the guards they see aren’t the only things they have to contend with.”

“Ah,” Jutkelon replied contemplatively. “A wise strategy. A show of force can be very effective, but not all of my clients understand that.”

Lan smiled thinly and did not respond to the compliment. He was used to salespersons trying to flatter him. “How much?”

“How many do you want?”

“You know how many workers and guards we have. Tell me what you think I’ll need and I’ll consider it.”

Jutkelon laughed a little under his breath, but after a moment of humming and grumbling to himself he produced a number that Lan found surprisingly reasonable.

“Done,” Lan confirmed promptly.

“You want them at the mine?”

“No. I’ll send you details.”

Lan cut the call with the appropriate pleasantries—so tedious, but Jutkelon was a resource to be cultivated—and considered.

No. He was not willing to leave just yet. This was his mine. He’d staked his claim, and he was going to keep it. Let them try to take it. He had dozens of guards, and really—what could one tiny alien do against dozens of guards?

Chapter Fifteen

Gar sat alone in his cell and faced the unpleasant realization that he was the weak link in everyone’s plans, and therefore almost indisputably expendable.

He would say he wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong, but that wasn’t true. He could think of any number of places. The first was when he’d strode confidently into the company offices on Tedrift Station, determined to get a job no matter what it was. The second was when he’d begun following Lan’s lead a few months back.

The third, unfortunately, was when he had joined up with Barnabas.

The facts spoke for themselves. The way Gar saw it, he should have chosen one or the other. If he had stuck with Lan, the two of them might have been able to kill Barnabas. For instance, he could have hit the human with cannon fire the second he walked through the gates. Maybe they could have put poison into his drink.

Had anyone remotely familiar with the Etheric Empire been around at this point and privy to Gar’s thoughts, they could have told him how wrong he was.

Yes, as far as Gar was concerned, he’d messed up by picking both sides. He should have chosen one side and stuck to it. That would have been the best way not to end up a bloody smear on the wall.

He was still considering this when one of the Ubuara slipped through the window of his cell and dropped to the floor. It chittered at him in its own language for a moment in the way they started conversations.

Then, “I am Leiguba.”

Gar stared at him suspiciously. What would this Ubuara want? To get back at him for so many years of mistreatment? That made undeniable sense.

“Why were you arrested?” the Ubuara asked.

Gar gave a bitter laugh. “I worked for the human you saw in the town the other day. Lan caught me, and now I am here.”

“Why did you work for the human?” Leiguba asked him.

He was genuinely curious. When Chogaru had told him the reason for Gar’s arrest Leiguba had not believed him. Never once in his time here had Leiguba seen Gar show any consideration for anyone else. Since the Ubuara believed absolutely that Barnabas was here to help them, that meant Gar was not working for him. If anything, Leiguba had come here to prove that Chogaru had been wrong.

Now it seemed the Nekubi had been wrong about everything.

“I wanted to save my own skin,” Gar replied. He lifted his thin Luvendi shoulders in a hopeless shrug. “Everything you have heard about humans is true.”

“I’ve never heard anything about humans. They can talk mind to mind, you know.”

“They can?” Gar briefly looked interested, then lapsed back into despair. “I suppose nothing about them would surprise me at this point. He can run impossibly fast for his height. His eyes glow red.”

Leiguba stared at him, wide-eyed.

“So when he confronted me, I made a bargain,” Gar said. “I dressed it up nicely for myself. I told myself I was becoming a better person; that I wanted to help him because it was the right thing to do. I told myself I wanted to prove myself to him so that he would include me in other things he had planned.”

“It was not true?”

“No. I only wanted to save my own life. I was a coward. He told me that the punishment for my crime was death and I tried to be brave, but I was afraid to die. I can see now that I would have said anything, believed anything, to survive.” Gar looked at Leiguba.

Leiguba tried not to shudder. Luvendi were difficult to look at. Everyone knew they had two hearts, and they had two pupils in their eyes too. People shied away from Luvendi because those eyes were so hard to look at. They looked wrong.

Gar’s were even weirder than most, in that the color around the pupils was brighter than normal for a Luvendi. It was a bright blue-green that was remarkable to any alien species looking at it. The workers had all discussed this. When you had to stare at his strange eyes you wanted to rub your own.

So Leiguba tried to think of something to say to distract himself.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tell Lan what was going on? He can call on many guards. Surely Barnabas couldn’t take them all on.”

Gar smiled again, although he still looked bitter. “Yes, in hindsight it’s clear. At the time…”

Leiguba did not let him get out of answering. “At the time?” he asked pointedly.

“At the time I thought I was a better person than I have turned out to be,” Gar declared flatly.

“I do not understand why fearing death would make you a bad person,” Leiguba told him. “We do not want to die either. It is why we do not simply rise up and fight the guards. It is why there are guards. Most people fear death. I have seen you exhibit many poor qualities during my time here, but not cowardice.”

Gar stared at him intently. “Why are you here, Ubuara?”

“’Leiguba.’ I am here to help you. You helped Barnabas, and it is possible that you could help him even more if you were to get out of here.”

Gar stared at him, those strange pupils glittering in the darkness. “It would be unwise,” he admitted finally, “to trust me.”

“I know,” Leiguba agreed. “But I will do it anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because… No, I do not need to tell you why.” The truth was, Leiguba knew he had no reason to trust Gar. The Luvendi was right.

But he was going to do so anyway. He had made up his mind when he’d come here.

Anyway, what was the worst he could do now?

Leiguba leaned forward. “Listen closely. In two minutes your door will open, and you must go out the back entrance of the hut. I’ll distract the guards. When you get out, you’ll…”

* * *

Lan looked at the group of mercenaries and gave a pleased nod. They were a variety of species: mostly Brakalons, but there were even a few Shrillexians. They would be especially useful for this show of force.

The group stood at attention in the road wearing basic uniforms—just brown pants and a shirt, but in Lan’s experience, even that was unusual in mercenary companies. Out here, where there were not many luxuries or standards, any person with a gun could hire themselves out as a mercenary.

Jutkelon had higher standards, and he’d trained them all well. Each had a weapon which was clearly well-used and regularly cleaned, and they did not mill around or look contemptuously at Lan.

“They will take your orders,” Jutkelon told him without a hint of evasiveness in his voice. “You don’t need to worry. I’ve culled those who were cowards, or thought they should be giving the orders.”

It was clear from his tone just how he’d culled them, and Lan smiled in appreciation. Too few leaders these days seemed to be willing to do what must be done, and too many tolerated people asking questions.

Perhaps he should take Jutkelon with him when he left, but he had the suspicion that the Brakalon would want to stay here and take any contracts he chose, not be tied to one client. On a planet growing as rapidly as Devon, there would be too many opportunities for someone like Jutkelon to pass them up.

“What’s your plan?” Jutkelon asked now. “You tell me, and I’ll communicate it to them.”

The mercenaries were still waiting in the road for the two males to finish their conversation, but they did not fidget. Lan knew this was just advertising, but he was still pleased by it. Discipline in a soldier was a good thing.

“The camp is roughly square,” Lan told him. “I want guards surrounding every building and all around the walls so that no one thinks they can sneak anywhere. We want them in alleys, at the entrances to the mine…anywhere they should be. If there’s a confrontation, that is. They might just be stupid enough to try that.”

“Hmmm.” Jutkelon considered. “So the goal is to have a clear presence and rapid response if necessary.” He handed Lan his staff and pointed to the dirt road. “Draw me a map of the town and mark the guard towers.”

Lan drew, glad that he did not need to touch the ground. He hated the dust in the mountains, but the swamp surrounding Tethra was even worse.

He was not going to miss this place when it came time to leave.

Jutkelon watched the drawing take shape, and then he looked at the assembled group and barked, “Squad leaders!”

Six aliens stepped over to Jutkelon, though each gave Lan a respectful nod.

Someday, Lan decided, he would have his own army. He liked having the luxuries of life—who wouldn’t?—but there was something especially satisfying about having heavily-armed soldiers standing ready to take your orders.

“Kalach, your squad will take this street.” Jutkelon drew a faint line down the street that anchored the main gate. “If there’s an attack, collect at the gates before advancing. Gressa and Nuez, your squads will concentrate here. It’s your task to keep anyone from getting up the hill to the overseer’s hut. Dodav and Ghal’z, your teams will be here and here. Your task is to assess whether you’re needed at the mine or in the central square. If it’s going to be both, Ghal’z will take his soldiers to the square, and Dodav’s will go to the mine. Araviha, you station your soldiers in the square, itself. You’ll be working with the guards who are already there. I’ll tell the guard captain that.” He looked at Lan. “Is Heddoran still in charge?”

Lan nodded, but then hesitated slightly. He couldn’t remember the guard captain changing, but then this was the sort of thing Gar usually handled.

Damn that male and his betrayal.

Jutkelon saw the flicker in his face. “Do you have concerns about the guards who are already there?”

Lan considered that.

“Before this morning I would have said no,” he stated finally. “But my vice-overseer has apparently been working against me, and a strange alien came to see us—someone the guard captain obviously respects, even though he might be a threat.”

“Very well.” Jutkelon narrowed his eyes as he thought. “Ghal’z, have your squad join Araviha’s in the city square, then. I’ll have more soldiers on alert to fly in immediately if we need them. Everyone—if you face armed resistance from the guards…” He looked at Lan to determine how he would finish that sentence.

“Kill them,” Lan said flatly.

“Kill them,” Jutkelon echoed.

To Lan’s relief, the soldiers nodded at once. It didn’t seem to bother them at all to be taking on their fellow guards from Jutkelon’s company. Then again, Lan supposed that facing down someone you knew must be a common occurrence for a mercenary.

“If you have no other questions,” he told Jutkelon, “they can set out at once.”

“Of course. I have recommendations for the number of provisions to buy, and for a food merchant in Tethra who keeps her mouth shut.” Jutkelon handed over a piece of paper.

“Excellent.” Lan smiled and walked to his private hopper. “I’ll meet you all back at the town.”

* * *

Aebura was wiping down the bar when a thought flashed into her mind: soldiers massing by the west road, heading into the mountains. Going to the mines, maybe?

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Barnabas had to be told.

But how to reach him? She sent out the information as loudly as she could to any Ubuara nearby.

Find me the human named Barnabas, or if you can’t, find me Carter Eastbourne. He’s lodging with Diviak down near the gambling halls. She had told the others that the Ranger was going to help the Ubuara still enslaved, and the whole network had been alert for two days.

Barnabas had to know what he was walking into. Aebura had no doubts at all that those soldiers worked for Venfaldri Lan. He was going to act soon. She paced, her tail lashing back and forth. What to do, what to do?

A thought occurred to her. When Barnabas had come here, he’d said he was going to free the mine soon. Perhaps this wasn’t Lan’s response to that, but rather Barnabas had learned about the soldiers before they had left and was already fixing things?

It was possible. It really was.

Her tail lashed again. Yes, it was possible—but she still had to do what she could to make sure Barnabas was prepared.

She sent another message. Anyone who can get into the mountains, go now. The human Barnabas can hear mind-speech, so be loud. Tell him that there are soldiers going to Lan’s mine. Make sure he knows what to expect.

It wasn’t long before a thought came back from a young Ubuara she knew named Oemuga. She recognized his thoughts because they always made her want to sneeze, like fresh-cracked spicy herbs. I have a hopper. I will take it and go. I will make sure he finds out.

Be safe, Aebura told him anxiously. Please, be safe.

What is it worth to be safe, he asked her, if part of us dies? We have to try to save them all.

Chapter Sixteen

Following Leiguba’s instructions, Gar had snuck out the back of the second jail hut and secreted himself under the general store. With the ground sloping so sharply, most buildings had stilts on one side so that the floors could be level—or at least close to level—and there was plenty of space for most types of aliens.

Also spiders. And rodents.

When he saw those, Gar seriously considered going back to the jail cell. He hated any type of insect. He always had. Someone had brought spiders to Luvendi aboard a ship, and they’d spread through the towers with unnatural speed, skittering up walls and…

Still, he knew he was never going to get an opportunity like this again. He meditated briefly and curled his long form into the shadows.

He had to wait until dark to sneak off toward the mines. While the guards sometimes had trouble telling the faces of the workers apart, Gar had one of the most recognizable faces in the town. He couldn’t even disguise himself as another Luvendi—he and Lan were the only two here.

The sun was already sinking, but it was a very long couple of hours before a Nekubi slithered under the floorboards with him.

Gar recognized him and sighed internally—Chogaru, a notorious troublemaker. Gar might be sorry for some of the things he’d done under Lan’s orders, but after spending months cleaning up Chogaru’s messes and trying to diffuse the situation every time he started a riot, Gar didn’t like the Nekubi very much.

Of course this was who Leiguba had sent to him. Chogaru was one of the leaders of the discontented workers. If Gar wanted to get out of this mess he was going to have to work with them, Chogaru included.

He didn’t have to be happy about it, though.

“Chogaru.” He inclined his head.

“Save it. Leiguba is a fool.” Chogaru spat on the ground near Gar’s feet. “I came here to tell you the deal’s off. There’s no way I’d trust you with a scrap of information about the rebellion.”

“So why are you here, then?” Gar gave him a contemptuous look. “Breaking secrecy and all that.”

Chogaru snorted. “It’s not exactly a secret that I’m involved. You know about me. You apparently know about Leiguba, too. But those are the only two names you’ll get. I’m not going to let you stab us in the back. As far as I’m concerned you can rot under here, or you can go back to your jail cell and take whatever punishment Lan gives you.”

Panic rose in Gar’s throat. His hearts were beating out of sync, a jarring sensation that made him dizzy.

“No. I can’t go back. I don’t want to die.”

“I really don’t care.” Chogaru crossed his arms. His thick body was still, his eyes locked on Gar’s.

“I will help you! I can’t let Lan kill me for—”

“I’m guessing this is going to be a pretty long monologue in which you try to convince me that you’re somehow different from him, but I’m not going to listen. You’ve been carrying out his orders for years. Whatever differences you have now, they aren’t important to the rest of us. Powerful people are always having fights—and people like us get crushed between them. You want to help? Go back to your cell and let Lan execute you without getting anyone else involved.”

“I can’t go back!”

“Of course you can. You’re just a coward.”

“Fine, I’m a coward.” Gar spat the words. “I don’t want to die. You know what I told Leiguba when he came to rescue me? I told him not to trust me. Ask him, if you don’t believe me. I told him honestly. I only sided with that human because I was afraid he’d kill me. Turns out that only bought me a few days.”

“Another lie,” Chogaru growled angrily. “The human isn’t going to help us. He doesn’t care.”

Gar began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself, though he knew he had to get himself under control before any of the guards heard him.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he told the Nekubi when he stopped laughing. Chogaru was still there, which was odd, but that realization was quickly gone as Gar thought about Barnabas. “He actually cares when people do unjust things. He does care.”

“No one cares,” Chogaru declared. “Not in the end. It’s all pretty words, but when you look at their actions, people only save their own skins. They forget all about anyone else who’s being hurt.”

“Not this human,” Gar argued. “I don’t care what you say. Call it just pretty speeches, but he’s going to free this place.”

“You have evidence of that?”

“He asked me for security details: the walls, the guards, all of that sort of stuff. He sent me looking for how Lan is going to get off-planet when he finally leaves. Do you even know what Lan did?”

Chogaru stilled. “No.”

“The mines were all shut down.” Gar leaned forward and spoke softly and venomously. “I found out about it when I was in Tethra last time. The company was bought out. They released all our contracts immediately and told the overseers the mines were supposed to close. All of them did it...except Lan’s. That’s why we’ve had all the new orders. He doesn’t answer to the company anymore.”

Chogaru looked furious for a moment, then a change came over him. He looked grim—and determined.

“I see,” he replied softly. “Very interesting.”

Gar waited with his arms crossed over his chest. When the Nekubi said nothing Gar added persuasively, “I have already worked against Lan. He had me thrown in jail because I told him I wanted a bigger share of the profits—”

“Oh, and you really didn’t?” Chogaru asked acidly.

Gar lifted a shoulder. In a strange way, he liked Chogaru. Other revolutionaries were so earnest. It was hard to connect with them. They were like Leiguba, full of bleeding-heart sentiment; too quick to trust, too ready to stake everything on plans that had a big chance of hurting them in the end.

Chogaru was different. He had already told Gar he was only fighting for his own skin, and that he didn’t trust anyone else to care. That sort of pragmatism appealed to Gar. He could understand it.

“I’ve always been ambitious,” Gar told him honestly. “And now my ambition is to live. If that means helping the rebellion, I have no problem doing so.” He did not add, And if it means helping Lan I’ll do that, too.

Chogaru considered his words.

“I told Leiguba that he should move tonight,” Gar said. “The human is gone and I don’t know when he’s coming back, but when Lan gets paranoid he wants to kill everyone. I’ve only barely managed to keep him from doing so before, and I’m not with him now. I’ve told Leiguba everything I know, and he’ll be starting the plan an hour after nightfall. You don’t have to involve me any further if you don’t want to, but just remember that I helped you.”

“I will,” Chogaru said. “But I’ll also remember everything else you’ve done. I haven’t decided yet what I want to do about it.”

He slithered out without another word, leaving Gar still huddled under the floor. It had grown darker while they talked; nightfall was no more than a few minutes away.

Leiguba would be putting the plan into action soon if he were wise.

Once out in the open air, Chogaru came to a decision. Lan had never been more vulnerable, and Chogaru had never been more useful. Unlike Gar, he wasn’t going to be so stupid as to demand a higher payment up front. No, he’d learn Lan’s operation, skim what he could from the profits, and take over at an advantageous moment.

He slithered along in the shadow of one of the walls until he came to a lone guard.

“I need to speak to Lan. There’s a rebellion brewing, and he should know about it.”

“You want to speak to Lan.” The guard shook his massive head at him. “I know who you are. I’m not stupid.”

“I’m his informant…did you know that?” Chogaru smiled coldly at the look of surprise on the guard’s face. “Don’t take my word for it, though. Tell him I’m requesting to speak with him and see what he says.”

He waited while the guard radioed the hut, then held out his hands for cuffs to complete the little show they put on for the other workers.

Soon he wouldn’t have to do this anymore.

In the hut, Lan looked at him coldly. “I assume this is important.”

“Gar has escaped and there’s a rebellion set to start tonight,” Chogaru said without preamble. Every once in a while it was good to shock people—and he was pleased to see Lan go still.

But the Luvendi wasn’t scared, not entirely. Instead, Lan smiled.

“How long do we have?”

“An hour maybe, but probably less.”

“Hmm.” Lan typed out a brief message on a communications tablet. “Well, then, thank you for the warning. It will be taken care of.”

“By crushing it once it starts?” Chogaru asked shrewdly.

“I don’t have to explain my plans to you.”

“You don’t, but you also don’t understand the mood of the camp.” Chogaru waved off the guards—awkwardly, given the cuffs—and glided closer to Lan. “Trust me, it would be far better to drag them out of their beds and make an example of them than it will be to kill them once they start rioting.”

“Why?”

“Because right now other people know about the rebellion, even if they’re not involved. If you demonstrate that you have sources, they’ll think twice about getting involved. If you wait until the riots start, on the other hand, there will be innocent bodies in the street. Some of those will be your guards’. Then you might have people joining the rebellion who wouldn’t have before. Don’t let them martyr themselves in a blaze of glory. Show them you know and see everything.”

Lan sat back and considered this. His brows were raised contemplatively.

“Interesting.”

Chogaru waited.

“Who broke Gar out of prison, by the way?” Lan asked.

There were many ways to answer this. Which would reap the most benefit?

For months, Chogaru had given vague answers. It was time to prove his worth by being specific. “I checked. It was one of the Ubuara—Leiguba. A long-time member of the rebellion, but one who has always advocated caution until now.”

“Leiguba.” Lan marked something down and nodded to the two guards. “When we begin, tell the guards to search for him in particular.” He looked at Chogaru. “What other names do you have for me?”

Not a leader who could be appeased with just a taste, then. Chogaru didn’t hesitate, however. He had to show which side he was on. He named every one of the rebellious workers he could think of, pausing to give identifying characteristics and details about what support they gave.

He was not surprised when Lan ordered, “You will accompany my soldiers tonight and point out members of the rebellion to them.”

Chogaru knew Lan hoped he would die in the crossfire. Perhaps he would even give secret orders to that effect. As far as he was concerned, Chogaru had served his purpose.

The Nekubi was not offended. He knew this was nothing more than Lan trying to make the smartest moves.

He didn’t intend to die, either. He would be watching his back tonight. He would perform well enough to become Lan’s second-in-command, and when the time was right he would take over. It would not be today. He did not think the guards would accept so quick a shift. But if there was time; if they saw him in Gar’s place…

No one cared who was overseer here. They simply hated whoever had the job.

In fact, Chogaru would cut the guards in on it when he decided to make his move so he could stave off their hatred for a little while. He would let them know what Lan had done and raise their wages, and tell them to keep the information from the workers.

Guilt and greed would do the rest.

He had to be careful not to smile. He nodded to Lan to show he understood his orders. “I know where each of them sleeps. I will be able to assist. You should consider sending guards to the mine entrance and to ring the walls. It is probable that people will try to run and hide.”

He was careful not to give orders—not yet. Lan had to see the value of his suggestions first, and become accustomed to taking them. Chogaru made a mental note to have guards around as often as possible when he did this. Then, when he took over, the whispers would say, “He was always the one making the decisions anyway.”

Appearances were important.

“Take him to the first jail hut,” Lan instructed. “There will be a call for me from the gates very soon. Patch me through immediately and wait for my signal. I’ll tell you when to begin and who to arrest.”

When they were gone, Lan went to one of his hidden cabinets and withdrew a bottle of uzi, a Luvendi liqueur that even most Luvendi did not like. It was native to his tower in particular and it tasted of salt and the sea, having both a harsh burn on the tongue and a flavor as deep as the black water outside the lowest levels. He drank it when he was homesick.

Why he was homesick now he could not have said. But he sipped the drink slowly as he watched the clock above the door, and when the buzzer rang to indicate an incoming call he drained the glass and stood.

It was time. When he thought about what was going to happen, he felt a flutter of excitement. They had been wondering for months what he could really do to them if they rebelled. He knew they had.

Tonight he would answer the question.

Chapter Seventeen

In the cave above the camp, Barnabas slid a light vambrace onto his forearm and flexed his hand as it settled into place. He could have armor that suited any aesthetic, so Barnabas chose to have armor that reminded him of his faith.

When he had mentioned this, others had asked him if he intended to have religious symbols on it and suggested a silver or gold finish.

Barnabas had only smiled.

His armor was an unadorned brown, already beginning to look battered around the edges. For all the world it looked like plain leather armor, though of course it would protect him against far more. The alloys and plastics they used allowed for any part of his armor to dissipate kinetic energy with remarkable ease. A bullet at close range might alter his path, but it would not punch a hole in him. It wouldn’t even bruise very much.

Although pain really was an excellent teacher, Barnabas preferred to confine those lessons to the sparring mats.

Gauntlets slid on after the vambraces, then cuisses and greaves, followed by incredibly light pauldrons. Barnabas had been informed that armor components had new names now, but he had not taken the time to learn them.

Armor still had a ritualistic significance to him. Preparing for battle was a contemplative time. He went over his reasons and examined his methods. He was ready to kill without hesitation and he knew plans could change in an instant, but he liked to assure himself that his plan that would lead to the least bloodshed.

The workers are all inside the huts, Shinigami reported. We’re coming up on a shift change, but the soldiers you heard about are almost at the gates. If you want to strike before they get there—

I don’t. I want to strike right when they get through the gates.

Oh?

I want to send a message to the mercenaries of this planet as well. Protection and defense of the helpless are worthy goals, but when the mercenaries help enforce slavery, Bethany Anne will hold them responsible. Being mercenaries does not absolve them of their moral responsibilities.

You know what this would be a great time for, don’t you? Missile strikes.

Actually, you have a point.

So, can I?

Maybe. Which do you think would be more impressive—a missile strike, or a whole company of soldiers cut down by one person?

Dammit. I wanted to use the missiles.

I appreciate your honesty, and I feel confident that it’s going to happen at some point. Be patient.

Shinigami grumbled but comforted herself by hacking the security camera feeds. Barnabas had a point. Lots of people had missiles. Not many people could tear people limb from limb.

And hell if she was going to miss watching that.

* * *

Leiguba had acted as normally as he could in the hours before bed. He’d made the commotion to distract the guards at the jail hut, but he’d been able to get away before they caught him.

Normally he wouldn’t have chanced that, because the Brakalons generally couldn’t tell the different Ubuara apart so they would report the incident to Lan without giving any names. Lan would then order all of the Ubuara punished the next day.

But if this worked, by tomorrow Lan wouldn’t have the chance to hurt them anymore. His tail twitched contentedly.

The members of the rebellion were careful not to look at one another as they went into the huts to sleep. The guards must sense nothing amiss. Anyway, all of them knew the plan. They did not need secret signals or nods.

Leiguba lay in the dark and tried to pretend he was asleep while he counted every second until they started. The Ubuara would undertake the first part of the plan, scaling the walls and racing to the overseer’s hut to take Lan captive.

Hopefully the guards would stand down when they did that, but if not the rest of the plan would be put in motion.

Leiguba stared out the window at the stars; only a few minutes now. He’d planned his route in his head, as had the rest of the Ubuara. They would each go different ways so that if one of them was caught the others could just keep going.

He flexed his hands, then clenched them. He must go as fast as he could. He—

The door burst open and his hutmates started screaming. Bright lights pierced the darkness, blinding the people inside, and guards peered about suspiciously as they waded into the pile of Ubuara. With them was Chogaru, who pointed directly at Leiguba.

“Him.” He looked around and effortlessly identified the rest of the Ubuara. “There. There. That one’s getting out the window—catch him! And there. Those are the ones you want from here.”

“Chogaru!” Leiguba did not struggle as the guards picked him up and secured his arms. He knew he was not strong enough to fight them, so instead he focused his attention on the Nekubi. “Chogaru, what did they threaten you with?”

“Nothing.” Chogaru smiled. “From the first day I came here, I have reported on all of you.”

“What?” It was like being punched in the stomach—or perhaps one of the guards actually had. Leiguba struggled to breathe.

“You wanted to rebel, but that’s not going to work.” The Nekubi shrugged. “People like Lan have the power, Leiguba. You have to get a bit of it for yourself, not try to fight it head-on.” He looked at the guards. “Come on. I’ll show you the rest in the other huts.”

“Chogaru!” But he was gone, and the guards dragged Leiguba and his fellow conspirators into the night.

* * *

When the first screams came to him on the wind, Lan crossed his arms and smiled. The guards had moved quickly.

He hadn’t let the new soldiers in yet. When Jutkelon had asked him whether he trusted them Lan had realized the danger at once. Just as Gar had betrayed Lan, the guards might betray him.

He was coping with the one betrayal, but he had to be open to the possibility of another. Thus, he was giving the guards below a chance to prove themselves before he intervened. If they did not, he had his new soldiers.

In the meantime, he would stand and watch as the operation unfolded. He was savoring it.

You want to defy me? His lip curled. It will cost you more than you could have imagined.

* * *

It was really remarkable, Chogaru thought dispassionately. Technology had advanced so far and so fast. There were lights one could put in living quarters that took almost no energy to run and would last several lifetimes. There were building materials and structures that could resist nearly anything.

Yet most of the people of the universe lived in squalid little huts like these. The best technologies did not get sent to these places. Instead of well-built huts that would last for generations, overseers invariably used the same old materials to build poorly-constructed rat-traps that were always in need of repair.

And on nights like these, with people screaming in the darkness and the guards holding torches. Actual flaming torches, of all the stupid things?

You could really see how shoddy it all was.

He looked around at the screaming people and the dirt and the flames and felt nothing but contempt for all of it. He was all for patient progress, but when this was over he was done with this place and would never look back.

Lan really was stupid, if he was content to make this his best cash-grab rather than using it to go for more.

One of the families waited until the coast was clear and then snuck out of a house and headed up the hill toward the mine. Chogaru shouted for the guards and pointed.

“Are they rebels?” one of them asked him. He did not call Chogaru “sir.”

Chogaru memorized his face. “No,” he said icily, “but they are trying to escape. Make sure they stay here in case it turns out they have been complicit.”

The guard went over doubtfully. First he tried to usher the family back down the hill, waving his hands as he explained. He wasn’t acting very strong, Chogaru noted. If he were that family, he would think this guard didn’t really want to follow Lan’s orders.

But when the parents made a break for it, pulling their child along with them, the guard did what he had to do. He grabbed the child and dragged it back toward the camp, knowing the parents would follow.

Chogaru nodded when the guard returned, pointedly ignoring his miserable expression. In the flickering light he realized it was not just any guard, but Heddoran, the captain.

He of all people should know better. Chogaru would remember this.

He had the sense of being watched and turned his head. There, through the jail’s front window: Leiguba. Chogaru turned away coldly. Leiguba needed to remember that this wasn’t personal. The Ubuara had done stupid things and Chogaru had not, so Chogaru was out here directing things and Leiguba was in jail.

There was no reason for Leiguba to be staring at him as if this had been some sort of betrayal. Chogaru had stepped in to fill a gap in the system of this town. It was natural.

* * *

In the jail cell, Leiguba slumped against the wall. Chogaru. It was Chogaru they shouldn’t have trusted.

How could he have known? And what the hell did they do now?

* * *

“Keep moving.” Gar hissed. He beckoned to the children and pointed under the general store, shoving them underneath roughly when they cried about how dark it was. “Quiet! You want the guards to hear you?” The children’s protests subsided and Gar pointed to one of the oldest. “You…keep the rest of them quiet, and make sure no one goes running off. I’m going to get help.”

The child nodded jerkily, and Gar looked around before slipping off. He watched Chogaru and the guards for a moment, then headed up the hill towards the mine—and the cave.

This was the stupidest thing he’d ever done. He’d still been under the porch and had been paralyzed by indecision when everything began. He should have taken advantage of the chaos and leave all of this behind or, failing that, he should just have stayed under there and hoped that no one noticed him.

Instead, he’d grabbed children as they and their parents ran past in terror and hid them, and now he was going to fetch Barnabas.

This was going to get him killed. Why, after a lifetime of doing the smart thing, was he not doing so when it counted the most?

* * *

Barnabas had just sunk down on a rock to go over the plan in his head once more when the screams began.

Shinigami, what’s happening? He didn’t dare risk sound until he knew what was happening.

Something is going on in the town. Guards are going into the huts and taking people out, and the soldiers are just waiting outside the gates.

Where are the guards taking people?

Into the jails.

And Lan?

Watching it all. One second…zooming in. He looks smug, the sonofabitch.

Barnabas swore under his breath.

I caught some of that. How do you fuck a moose sideways?

Barnabas slanted a look upward and forbore to answer.

Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll just look on the datanet… OH GOD, NEVER SEARCH FOR THAT.

Barnabas palmed his face. I could have warned you. Why would you think it was a good idea?

I thought it was figurative!

That’s how I meant it, certainly, but… Look, we don’t have time for this right now. What the fuck is Lan playing at?

I don’t know, but the other one is coming for you. Reviewing the security tapes, it looks like he hid some of the children.

Barnabas didn’t wait for Gar to reach him; he yanked the Luvendi into the cave. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, thank everything—you’re here!” Gar tried to peel Barnabas’ fingers off his shirt but gave up fairly quickly. His strength would have been no match for the kalanon, much less the Ranger when he was angry. “Where have you been? Lan has gone off the deep end! There was a rebellion set to go tonight because they were afraid that if you didn’t get back in time they’d all be killed.”

Barnabas swore, this time more inventively and in Latin. He should have been there. He should have headed this off.

You know what time it is, right?

I do. He let go of Gar’s shirt and went to arm himself. It’s time to make them very, very sorry they pulled this shit.

Finally.

“Gar? If you wanted to get the guards to stand down, what would you do?”

“I’d start with Heddoran. He was very impressed that you were a religious man.”

“Very well. Go speak to him.” Barnabas waved him off. “Feel free to start with religion, and move on to self-interest if that doesn’t work. It’s like this, you see.” He smiled coldly. “Whoever is still defending Lan and carrying out his orders when I get to them dies.”

Chapter Eighteen

“Stop! Everybody stop!” His voice was carried away by the wind as Gar ran down the hill waving his arms. “STOP!”

On the opposite side of the small valley, Lan frowned. There was no mistaking that tall thin figure, and it had come out of the cave Chogaru had mentioned earlier. So Gar had been working with Barnabas.

His death would not only be public, it would be painful as well.

Shinigami tried to capture his voice to blast it from the loudspeakers, but couldn’t. Too much interference, she supposed. She said as much to Barnabas.

He’s on his own, Barnabas told her grimly. I’m giving him a two-minute head start, and that’s only good as long as they don’t hurt anyone.

Gar, having picked up considerable speed on the slope, burst into the center of the town. “Stop,” he blurted. He bent over to catch his breath, bracing his hands on his knees, and held up a hand for silence.

“He was arrested earlier,” Chogaru told the guards coldly. “Bring him back to his cell.”

“Wait!” Gar forced himself to stand and held his hands out beseechingly. “Just wait. Please. A moment. I bring a message from…from…” He looked at Heddoran. “From the kalanon. He takes exception to all this. He says it is slavery, and he is obliged to intervene. He would have you stand aside so these people can be freed.”

Chogaru gave a snort. “Do you hear yourself? This is ridiculous.”

Gar presently had nothing to lose, just as when he had stared down Barnabas in the room in Tethra, and now, as then, Gar felt a strange calm come over him. He met Heddoran’s eyes.

“I think you know that what you are doing is not right, Heddoran. I see it in your expression. You do not like chasing down children and hauling their parents away screaming in the dead of night.”

“This is ridiculous.” Chogaru’s voice had risen. “Take him back to his cell or kill him, but be done with it.”

“Shut up.” Heddoran swung his head to look briefly at Chogaru.

“What?”

“Shut. Up. I don’t like you.” Heddoran looked up the hill to Lan’s hut. “And I have not liked the overseer’s orders for some time. But I do like the kalanon.”

“He is a…” Gar struggled to find words. How did one describe what he had seen? “He is a warrior,” he explained diplomatically. “He could triumph over all of you, but he has chosen—out of respect for you, Heddoran—to give you the chance to stand down.”

There was a pause. Chogaru looked between the two of them and the guards looked uncertainly at Heddoran. Everyone had frozen when Gar arrived. Some of the guards had been dragging workers, and the workers were still as well—too enthralled by the scene to pull away from the guards.

Gar forced himself not to look around, but he was very aware of the guards at his back—and of the heavy pistols they had not yet used tonight.

“Stand down,” Heddoran commanded.

Gar sagged with relief, and he could have sworn he felt the same emotion ripple through the guards. Workers were helped to their feet and cuffs were undone.

“Don’t listen to him,” Chogaru shouted. “You work for Venfaldri Lan, overseer of this mine. You could be hauled up in front of a court for dereliction of duty! You were hired for security, not for—”

Heddoran stomped over to Chogaru and bent down so his heavy head was nose to nose with the Nekubi, who broke off with a strangled gasp.

“I told you to shut up,” Heddoran growled. “You speak of my contract? What of these people? Everyone knows they should have left months ago.”

There was a murmur of assent from the workers.

“We should put you in the jail,” Heddoran stated simply. He looked up at the hill. “Along with Lan.” He looked down at his radio, which was still transmitting, and smiled. “Did you hear that, Lan?”

Lan had heard the whole thing as it happened. He gave a terse command, and everyone in the valley heard the screech of the gates opening.

Go for Lan. Don’t let him get away.

Barnabas cast a look at the Luvendi and shook his head. No. It’s going to be a massacre if I don’t go now. He paused and smiled. Well, it’s going to be a massacre if I do go.

With that, he took three steps and launched himself from the hillside.

His footwear might look like well-worn leather boots, but they were far more than that. His jump carried him over the town square and he landed in a cloud of dust in front of the gates as the soldiers began to stream in.

“State your business here.” His eyes began to glow red.

“You know our business here.” Gressa had been a mercenary long enough to know the rhythm of a fight—and when to disrupt it. “You should—” Still speaking, he casually flipped his gun up and fired point-blank at Barnabas’s head.

Barnabas still stood. The bullet had flattened itself against his gauntlet, since he had thrown his hand up in front of his face as soon as he’s seen Gressa’s fingers twitch toward his gun.

How did you know he meant to shoot you in the head?

He’s a seasoned mercenary. He’s not going to shoot me in the chest and have me live long enough to shoot him back.

Barnabas looked at all of them. Their mouths were hanging open. They had never seen anyone move so fast.

But they were well trained, so a moment later they raised their weapons. To their surprise, when Barnabas next spoke he had very long, very sharp fangs.

“Wrong. Answer.”

Gressa didn’t even hear the words. His head had been severed from his body and was bouncing on the ground by the time Barnabas had finished speaking.

Gressa wasn’t the only one who knew the rhythms of a fight. Barnabas recognized the absolute shock that froze the mercenaries, and he knew it would wear off in a moment.

He would win even if he let them recover, of course, but he still had Lan to deal with once he was done with them.

Shinigami, he said, his mental tone even and calm as he unholstered his Jean Dukes Specials and took out two of the other squad leaders. Do me a favor.

Yes? Shinigami peered through his eyes as the soldiers flowed around him. They weren’t shooting, since they had been foolish enough to surround him entirely. They knew they would catch one another in the crossfire.

It would have been smart to stay where they were and fire in waves.

But they weren’t being smart. He had gotten under their skin when he’d killed Gressa and they were now reduced to primal instinct, aware on some deep level that they were going to die.

If you see Lan escaping, Barnabas told her, let him go unless it’s into a shuttle that can take him off-planet. Just track him.

You said I was going to get to use missiles.

And you will. One moment.

Barnabas could identify three more leaders from their original formation. He picked one off with a single shot and leapt clear over the crowd to land behind another. His impossibly-sharp knife easily pierced the creature’s torso.

The squad leader screamed, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding very much.

His heart is down near his right hip.

Thank you, Shinigami.

Another thrust, and this time purple blood fountained from the wound when Barnabas removed the blade.

Much better, but now I’ll have to wash everything.

You know how you could have avoided that, right?

Yes.

Several of the soldiers had finally roused enough to fire on him. Barnabas ducked, bared his teeth, and leapt into the fray once more.

He was laughing like a maniac now. He moved in a blur, pushing himself to the limits of his abilities. Teeth sank into flesh and his knives were coated in blood of varying colors.

Soldiers threw themselves at him, aware only that this was violence and combat and they were trained to deal with that in only one way.

Unfortunately for them, it was the wrong way.

They piled on him one after the other but Barnabas always emerged, sending the soldiers staggering away from him as he shot them with their own guns.

“Justice,” he whispered as one of them fell to the dirt with a choking gasp. “You chose to be here and to stay. You will pay the price.”

“You’re a monster!” One of the remaining mercenaries stumbled to his feet, a rifle clutched in trembling hands. “A mutant.”

“You have no idea how right you are,” Barnabas told him and nodded at the gun. “Are you going to shoot me or walk away?”

* * *

Back in the town square, Gar struggled to breathe as he observed the confrontation.

He had seen Barnabas with his eyes glowing red before, and he supposed he’d believed Barnabas would be able to clear the entire camp.

But watching it happen was something else.

The human was beyond scary—a nightmarish beast, all the more terrifying for holding his monstrous impulses in check. His calm and quiet demeanor hadn’t fooled Gar, not exactly.

One of the children whimpered and hid its face in Gar’s robes, and despite his general dislike of children, he found himself patting it on the shoulder and trying to put himself between it and...that thing.

He exchanged a look with the guard captain. Glad you stood down, aren’t you?

Heddoran just stared at Barnabas, his expression somewhere between fear and reverence.

The mercenary, meanwhile, unleashed an entire magazine at Barnabas. He fired until the barrel started to melt, and he was still firing when Barnabas walked through the stream of bullets to pluck the rifle out of his hands.

Barnabas’s fingers came around the mercenary’s throat like a vise.

“What. Are. You?” the soldier choked out.

“Does it matter?” Barnabas asked him. I am killing this one, right? This isn’t another his-heart-is-in-his-hip scenario, is it?

If you mean, are you successfully strangling him, the answer is yes. If you mean, are you killing him in the coolest possible way, the answer would be no because—

Missile strikes. I know.

I was going to say that thing about pulling someone’s spine out and strangling them with it.

Oh. I suppose I could do that.

You’re not going to, though, are you?

No. Barnabas tightened his fingers abruptly and dropped the suddenly-limp body. Too messy. Don’t want to clean my armor.

Too late!

Barnabas was still laughing as he raised his gun and fired seven perfect shots, felling the remaining mercenaries.

* * *

Up on the hill, Lan nearly screamed when a hand grabbed his arm.

“Come on,” Jutkelon said tersely.

“Where did you come from?”

“I landed while that massacre was going on. Let’s go. I’m getting you out of here.” He dragged Lan towards one of the hoppers.

“You came to save me?”

“Call it insurance,” Jutkelon replied grimly. “You just cost me nearly a hundred mercenaries. You’re going to pay for that, and you’re going to help me find out what that thing is so this doesn’t happen again.”

“He’s a human,” Lan explained numbly as he strapped himself in. “I can’t believe it. He really was a human.”

“A human? Like the Empress?” Jutkelon slammed his hands down on the controls. “And you didn’t think to warn me about that?”

“Drive! For the love of everything, get out of here!” Lan sank his head into his hands. “I thought it was a joke. I thought they weren’t real. His eyes weren’t glowing when I met him.”

“Look on the bright side,” Jutkelon said grimly as the hopper soared into the air.

“What’s the bright side?” Lan picked his head up to look.

“Where there are humans, there’s Coke.”

“What’s Coke?”

“You’ll see.”

* * *

Barnabas approached the main square at a leisurely walk. He was aware of guards and workers falling out of his way, white-faced and silent with fear.

Shinigami, any way to do a reverse Fear?

Afraid not. You’re covered in blood and they’re not going to un-see what you just did. But, sure, go ahead. Try if you want to.

Barnabas sighed.

The guards scattered from the center of the square, leaving a single Nekubi gaping at him.

“Who is this one?” Barnabas asked. He looked around.

“Chogaru, kalanon.” The guard captain spoke respectfully.

“I see. Thank you. Chogaru, why are these people staring at you like this?”

Chogaru said nothing. He could not speak for fear. This human had just slaughtered all of Lan’s soldiers, and there was no running from him. They had all seen that leap. The human should be a bloody smear on the ground, and instead, he was covered in other people’s blood.

He was going to have to talk his way out of this.

“I am an information broker, sir.” He smiled. “I do what I must to survive. Surely you understand.”

“I have survived more,” Barnabas said softly, “than you will ever know. To become what I am, I endured horrors and temptations you could not imagine. Let me guess. You sold these people out for some scraps Lan was going to throw you.”

Lan is getting away, by the way. Just in a hopper so far. If he gets in a shuttle—

Yes, you can use missiles.

Whoop!

All right, that’s definitely Tabitha’s influence.

“For scraps? No! To save myself. He knew about the rebellion.” Chogaru shook his head regretfully. “Surely you know how he kept us—”

“I know that neither the guards nor the rebellion are speaking up for you. Leiguba?” Barnabas looked around.

Leiguba chittered at him from the window of the jail.

“Hello. Leiguba, is what this Nekubi says true?” He already knew it wasn’t, of course. He had read Chogaru’s mind as he came up to him.

Leiguba shook his head.

“Ah.” Barnabas pulled out his gun. Shinigami, where do I shoot this one?

In the head.

Thank you.

There was the trademark blast of a Jean Dukes Special and Chogaru slumped dead on the dirt.

Barnabas looked at Heddoran. “The first thing you will do is turn off the mind-speech blocker. Then you and your guards will build new huts for these workers and allow them to take control of the food supplies until I return. You stood down when I asked, but you also participated in these atrocities. Do you deny it?”

“No, kalanon.”

Barnabas nodded, satisfied with the answer since he had read the truth in the Brakalon’s mind. “I will deal with that when I return. Leiguba, appoint someone to be in charge here and come with me. We’re going to Tethra to find Lan and end this.”

Chapter Nineteen

Anything happening?

I told you I would let you know when there was something to report, Shinigami snarked.

Barnabas sighed and rubbed his forehead. I apologize. I’m...impatient.

You don’t say! And I can’t believe I’m the one having to tell you to be patient about a missile strike.

Yes, it’s funny how times have changed, isn’t it?

Go stretch your legs, Shinigami suggested. Maybe you’ll feel better.

Barnabas took her advice with another long sigh.

There wasn’t much else to do, after all. By the time Leiguba had set everything in order in the mining town, and Barnabas was sure the guards were going to act in good faith and all medical needs had been taken care of, Jutkelon’s hopper had set down at his estate on the outskirts of Tethra.

According to Shinigami’s report, however, “estate” wasn’t exactly the right word. It was more like a fortress. The walls were a high-grade composite that was resistant to explosives, much of the living space was in underground bunkers, and there were stockpiles of both fuel and food.

There was also the small matter of the three hundred mercenaries who presently lived at the complex.

After scanning the compound, Shinigami concluded that bombing it wouldn’t do much good.

If you’re saying that, it must be true.

Trust me, I’m as disappointed with the situation as you are.

Barnabas was left to stew while Shinigami ran a structural analysis from any and all blueprints and technical readouts she could find, as well as decrypting and analyzing outbound communications. There just wasn’t much for him to do.

He didn’t like that. Back before AIs, he would have been solely responsible for the research and analysis for a project. He liked to say that people who did their own research were better prepared, but his research could never surpass Shinigami’s. He wasn’t the best person for this job, and he shouldn’t be upset because the outcome would undoubtedly be better.

He chose to be grumpy anyway—for that reason, and for others he was not particularly keen to think about just yet.

Meanwhile, there was a great deal of work to be done in the town. Barnabas headed down the hill from Lan’s hut and found Heddoran explaining the gate mechanisms to a small group of workers.

Barnabas was pleased to see that Heddoran was upholding his part of the bargain about putting the workers in charge and making the mining town a nicer place to live, and the guards took Heddoran’s orders without complaint. He paused now to listen to the guard captain’s instructions.

“Gar can give you more information about how to control this from the overseer’s hut,” Heddoran was saying. “From inside the camp, you have to go to the guard barracks and any one of the towers to disable the automatic locking mechanism. Even when the system loses power those overrides will keep running because they have batteries, but they need the correct signals to do so. Now, if you’re trying to do that without signals—”

Barnabas headed onward with a brief nod to the guard captain.

He was still trying to figure out what to do with all the guards and Gar. All had been enormously helpful over the past few hours, but Barnabas was well aware that how they behaved with him watching—and still covered in mercenary blood—was not a good indicator of the long-term.

More than that, there remained the very real problem that while their present and future actions could mitigate the past, they could neither change nor excuse it. Barnabas could kill them, of course. He would hardly break a sweat doing it, either.

But as he had said to Shinigami, he knew what it was to have committed atrocities. He knew what it was to have regrets and to still have value to give the world, even considering his past. It was not arrogance when he said to others that he was one of the best at stopping injustice, ending it quickly.

It was a statement of fact.

However, just as with Bethany Anne and the governance of her new territories, he was finding that stopping injustice and booting out old leaders was infinitely less complicated than setting up better systems and dealing with the lesser crimes committed during darker days.

He would ask the workers, he decided. Perhaps they would be vengeful, but perhaps they could suggest something he would not have thought of. He continued to stroll, trying to take in as much as he could of the activity around him without disturbing it.

* * *

Nearby, Carter turned his head to watch Barnabas pass.

“Carter Eastbourne, focus!” Aebura gave him a stern look. They were sorting the food from the commissary, all of which had been hauled outside so they could take advantage of the early morning sunlight.

Perhaps everyone should have gone to sleep after Barnabas had ended things late last night, but no one had been able to relax enough for that. As soon as it became clear that Barnabas would not be returning to Tethra at once, Leiguba had summoned Aebura to the town and she had brought many Ubuara with her, as well as Carter.

The human had gone to work with good grace, but he’d been distracted since Barnabas had first come out of the overseer’s hut.

“You don’t need to say my whole name, you know,” he told Aebura.

“I don’t want to be rude.”

“It’s not rude to call me ‘Carter,’” he assured her. “And I’m sorry, I’ll get back to work. I just...I’ve never been this close to any of them.”

“’Them?’” She labeled a package of some sort of grain, concentrating in order to hold a pen that was made for much larger hands than hers. The Ubuara were unusually small compared to the majority of sentient species in known space.

“The whole team,” Carter explained. He hefted the big bag of grain easily and set it with its fellows. “Here, right? There we go. Here’s the next one, then.” When he’d set that bag near Aebura, he returned to his appointed task of sorting cans by type. “You know, Bethany Anne, the Rangers, the Bitches…”

“‘Bitches?’ I’m confused. That word seems to have negative connotations in your language.”

“It’s...a bit more complicated than that. It’s a joke.” When Aebura frowned, Carter hastened to explain. “The Bitches aren’t a joke, it’s a joke that they’re called… Never mind, this is probably too complicated to explain if English isn’t your first language. It’s normally an insult, but not for them.”

“Carter?”

“Yes?”

“Do humans do anything normally?”

Carter started laughing and couldn’t stop. He leaned on the table of canned goods and cackled until his eyes were streaming. When he straightened, he had to rub his side because the muscles were cramping.

“Ah,” he exclaimed happily. “This is what you don’t get on the Meredith Reynolds. These kinds of questions.”

“Bethany Anne gets those kinds of questions,” Barnabas observed from directly behind him.

Carter jumped and swore. When he looked around, it was to find a pleasantly smiling Barnabas covered in dried blood. The total effect was, well, unnerving.

“Of course,” Barnabas continued thoughtfully, “people tend to say it in very diplomatic language, so she’s not supposed to laugh. I’d say it was one of the main reasons she disliked those meetings so much.”

Carter found that he was opening and closing his mouth like a fish while failing to make any sort of sound at all.

“I’m Barnabas,” Barnabas added with a respectful nod.

Yeah, I fucking know. Luckily, Carter’s automatic politeness kicked in. “I’m Carter Eastbourne, sir. I’m pleased to meet you.”

Barnabas smiled, having heard the unspoken comment, then, “I’d shake your hand,” Barnabas said gravely, “but I don’t think all the blood is gone.”

Carter stared at him, trying to figure out what to say to that.

You’re making him uncomfortable, Shinigami told Barnabas.

I know. It’s funny.

Well, be nice.

“Be nice?” Do you have another side to you I haven’t seen before?

I have a sense of propriety, Shinigami said stiffly. As should you, at your age.

Keep talking like that and you won’t make it to this age.

Barnabas looked around the town. “Mr. Eastbourne, a word?”

Oh, God—the Pepsi. Carter gulped, said a silent prayer, and gave himself up to his fate. “Of course, sir.”

“Please, call me Barnabas. Aebura, I’ll have him back to you shortly.” Barnabas led the way down the main street. When he was a little ways away, he said, “As one of the first humans to immigrate to High Tortuga, I wondered if I might trouble you for some first impressions.”

“Yes, of course. Um, on what part specifically?” Carter resisted the urge to wipe his palms on his pants.

“Perhaps you might start by telling me a bit about yourself.”

Was this it? Was this the trap? Did he think Carter would be stupid enough to admit his Pepsi affiliation? Carter vowed to be canny. He wouldn’t be duped so easily. “Well, I have a wife, sir—Barnabas, sorry—and twins. Alanna and Samuel. I wanted to set up a business here first and then bring them. I’ve been, ah…” Just in time, he remembered that he shouldn’t rat out Aebura.

He was too late. “Working with Aebura,” Barnabas said smoothly. “Yes, I know. She mentioned you to me. I think it speaks volumes that when it came time to rebuild this place she asked you to come and help. From what Shinigami has dug up, Ubuara are very protective of the members of their community, so they’re cautious about who they allow into their circle.”

“Really?” Carter felt a flush of pride.

Barnabas stopped, looking very serious. “She told me that you offered to help her with the mine before you knew I was involved. I wanted to thank you.”

“Oh, it was no trouble.” Carter felt somehow like a little kid again, totally inadequate in the face of Barnabas’s calm presence. He wondered if it was true that Barnabas had been a monk once, or just a prank story spread by...Tabitha, maybe. If the rumors were true, Ranger Two had quite a sense of humor.

Then again, the aura of calm Barnabas had when he looked at Carter made it seem quite likely that he had been a monk. Somehow it fit.

“It would have been trouble,” Barnabas replied, somehow both grave and amused at once, “and you know it. The fact that you offered to help? Well, I know we brought many of Earth’s best with us when we came here, but it is always gratifying to see it in action.”

Carter flushed.

“They’ll need us,” Barnabas continued. “You know that. They don’t need our businesses or for us to buy from them; that isn’t what I mean. Our citizens will be just like anyone else in that respect. What they need from us is to remind them that Bethany Anne looks out for her own, and that her laws are enforced. They need to know that even when I am not here, her laws will be strong because she and her people uphold them in word and deed.”

Carter stood a bit taller. “I understand, sir.” He caught the title as it came out of his mouth and smiled self-consciously. “I think that’s just going to be how I address you. Sorry.”

Barnabas smiled.

You like that, Shinigami accused. You’re so old-fashioned.

I like good manners, and I’m indisputably his elder.

Barnabas started walking again and waited for Carter to fall in beside him. “Where do you think the trouble will come?”

Carter considered this. “All the usual places, I’d guess. I don’t know much about that. But from what I’ve seen so far, I think there will be a bunch of smaller-grade problems. Friction. You see, the people who came here—they were all running from something. Maybe that’s a bad way to say it. They came here to make a life for themselves because they were stifled where they were.” He looked at Barnabas. “They’re all fiercely independent, and while they might not mind the idea of abolishing slavery, you can bet even some people who don’t like slavery will get upset about you taking the fight to Jutkelon.”

“Ah. You were eavesdropping.”

“I…ah…er…”

“No, no, I wasn’t being particularly secretive about it, it’s all right.” Barnabas looked up as Leiguba ran by and nodded to him. “Hello, Leiguba. Have you met Carter?”

Yes. Aebura introduced us. Leiguba nodded at Carter. She likes you. She says—

“Carter isn’t able to speak mind to mind,” Barnabas explained.

Leiguba chittered. “You can’t all do that?”

“No. I…have some upgrades.”

Carter sighed. He didn’t have any fun upgrades. He’d always wanted to try out some of the tech they were working on for the inner circle, even if Elisa had said he was being ridiculous.

Leiguba waved and headed off again, and Carter looked at Barnabas. “In any event, sir, I think what you’ll find is that even when people agree with the laws we have, they might not be happy about the idea of being subject to laws at all.”

“They’ll have to come to terms with it,” Barnabas said simply. “Bethany Anne does not impose laws for no reason. She respects individual autonomy. What laws she has are there for good reason.”

“I don’t disagree, sir. You just asked where we would have problems.”

“I think,” Barnabas said after a moment, “that perhaps it will even itself out. Those who cannot abide it will leave, and those who like it might settle here.” He frowned. “Or not. Part of my mandate is to make sure this planet is as much of a secret as possible. In the meantime…”

“They’ll see how you deal with Jutkelon and Lan,” Carter told him. “People push back a lot more when they think there’s wiggle room. You don’t strike me as the type to give any wiggle room at all.”

“I wish it were that simple,” Barnabas murmured. “But I see your point, yes. The larger infractions—those will be met with no compromise or leniency.” He smiled. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Eastbourne. I wish you a great deal of luck with your...what was it Aebura said you were planning? To manufacture Coke? Bethany Anne would be pleased.”

He smiled inscrutably and headed off, leaving Carter staring after him with wide eyes.

It was absolutely impossible to know what Barnabas knew and what he did not know.

He was a canny opponent.

Chapter Twenty

“I don’t understand,” Lan snapped. “Why not just bomb the damned thing into oblivion?”

It had been a long night, and he was very tired. Jutkelon had not wanted to rest when they arrived in Tethra. He had wanted to begin planning at once, and now here they were half a day later with Lan aching with tiredness and Jutkelon growing ever angrier.

An angry Brakalon was not what you wanted in any situation.

Indeed, Jutkelon put his fist down on the table in a way that suggested he would rather smash it to bits—and reminded Lan that he could easily do that. Most Brakalons were big, and Jutkelon was bigger even than most of his kind. He could rip doors off hinges. Lan shuddered to think how many bullets it would take to kill the man.

He had always resented how helpless he felt around Brakalons.

“We will not bomb the mine,” Jutkelon told him with exaggerated courtesy, “except as a last resort.”

Lan stared at him resentfully.

“What do you do when someone challenges you for what is yours?” Jutkelon asked, finally annoyed enough to try asking rather than telling.

“Fight them,” Lan replied sulkily.

“Exactly. Fight them. Why are you not doing that?”

“I am doing it! I’m suggesting bombing it. Letting everyone else know—”

“What, that you’ll always have to be starting over because as soon as someone challenges you, you smash everything like a child?” Jutkelon glared.

“What do you care, anyway?”

“He killed a hundred of my soldiers!” Jutkelon slammed both hands on the table. Everything on it jumped, and Lan went rigid with fear. “He thinks he can come in here and tell us what to do and how to behave. I heard that warning Gar gave them. Anyone choosing to defend you would be killed. You cannot show weakness to people like that.”

“Which is why I suggested—”

“If you destroy everything you have that someone else wants, you’ll be left with nothing at all.” Jutkelon stared Lan down. “What you need to do is fight for it. No matter how costly they make it for you, make it worse for them. What they try to take from you, you defend until they walk away, and when they turn their back you kill them. You show everyone watching that what’s yours is yours.”

Lan stared at him. He was at a loss. He didn’t understand—and he didn’t think Jutkelon had the first idea of what he was doing.

Had he not seen what had happened?

“You can’t kill that human,” he said finally.

“Anyone can be killed.” Jutkelon’s voice was a growl. “You, that human, even his Queen.”

Lan had thoughts on the inadvisability of trying to kill the other two on that list, but he kept them to himself. Jutkelon didn’t seem to be in a very reasonable mood right now.

“What would you suggest, then?” he asked finally. “If you think he should be fought and one hundred soldiers weren’t enough—”

“They weren’t enough, but they also weren’t deployed correctly. Think about it—he went there to take you down, but when he could easily have done so he did not. Why?”

Lan shrugged.

Jutkelon rolled his eyes, “Because he was trying to protect the workers, you fool. He cares more about their safety than capturing you. If we hold the workers hostage, the cost of freeing the mine will be too great. He will know he can take it from you only by destroying it, rather than the opposite.”

Lan considered this. “But he was able to do it last time.”

“Because Heddoran listened to him,” Jutkelon grumbled. “To think I trained that son of a laldar koresht. He’s gone soft.”

Lan shrugged. He really didn’t care about Jutkelon’s take on the situation.

“Show strength and keep the right people around you, and nothing like that will happen again,” Jutkelon told him. “And we don’t have to resort to burning it all down just yet, but we do need something that will make an impression. So I’ve called in help.”

“I assume you’re planning to bill me for it.”

“In part.” Jutkelon smiled. “After all, it’s your mess. If you’d just killed the human when he arrived, we wouldn’t be dealing with this issue. But I understand that this threat is not just to you, so I will not make you responsible for the whole cost. You were only ever meant to be an example. We will make the human the example instead.”

“How? You keep giving speeches, but nothing gets done.” When Jutkelon glared, Lan swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

“You will be if you don’t stop whining.” Jutkelon shrugged. “I called in some ships. Let’s just say, the number of mercenaries this human thinks he’s dealing with is nowhere close to the number I have called in. He thinks we’re weak. He thinks we’re stupid, that we only run headlong into battle. He’ll learn how wrong he is. People who think they’re clever are easy to manipulate.”

Lan gave a hesitant nod.

He hoped Jutkelon’s confidence was justified.

* * *

Barnabas sipped at his fruit juice and tried to relax. The tangy sweetness slid across his tongue, a flavor he would liken to…

Shinigami, tell me about this fruit.

It’s called hakoj.

You already did an analysis on the beverage? That was fast.

I’d love to take credit for that, but what I actually did was look at the fruit pallets in the alley behind the bar.

Barnabas gave a small smile. Okay, so tell me about hakoj. Ubuara fruit, yes?

Yes. Native to planet Dugan. While we’re on the topic—did you know Luvendan might not actually be the Luvendi home planet?

The names don’t leave much to the imagination.

Don’t be so short-sighted. It could simply be that the ones who emigrated there called themselves that.

I hadn’t thought of that. He drained his glass and smiled as Aebura swung over with a fresh glass. “Thank you. You must have been watching for when I finished the glass.”

She only smiled in response. Out loud, at least. Can you hear me?

Barnabas frowned. He had heard something and guessed from her intent expression that she was trying to communicate, but her thoughts were whisper-soft, like a murmur in another language.

Apparently it was easier for him to get the sense of an Ubuara being present and send his thoughts to them than it was for them to hear him.

How clearly can you hear me? He made no special effort to send the thought.

Aebura frowned in concentration and Barnabas sighed. “It seems we have to make quite an effort to hear each other’s thoughts.”

“Oh.” Aebura nodded thoughtfully. “Well, that is good to know.” She leapt to the rafters and swung away.

I wonder why she tried that.

They’re curious, Shinigami told him. Even I can tell you that. You show up out of nowhere, help them free their friends, and you can speak mind to mind. That’s rare among alien species.

Mmm. Tell me about Luvendan.

Well, there’s no stable landmass on the planet, and no records of ice ages or anything else that would have required the Luvendi to shelter themselves. A few scientists believe that there used to be rock formations like the towers they live in now, but most people think they came to Luvendan, built the towers, and then there was some sort of catastrophe and they lost the bulk of their knowledge, retaining only what they needed to keep the towers running.

And yet they have a space program.

Kind of. Only a couple of ships are actually registered on Luvendan, and I see no evidence of an actual space program.

Hmm.

Yes. The more you think about Luvendan, the more you should tell me why you’re so worried.

I’m…wait, what?

So close.

You were trying to trick me? Barnabas frowned skywards.

You look ridiculous when you do that, you know. And yes, of course I was. I knew if I asked you’d just get all prickly and tell me everything was fine, so I distracted you.

Was any of what you just said about Luvendan true?

Of course it was. I genuinely thought it was interesting. But I’m worried about you.

Barnabas blinked. You’re worried about me? You? Missiles McGee?

I’m sorry, who’s spending too much time with Tabitha? Is it me?

Mmm, good point, although I’d also like to point out that you being worried is something I haven’t seen before.

Shinigami was silent.

Don’t want to admit to having a softer side, do you? Well, then. The feeling’s mutual, I’ll have you know. Barnabas swirled the juice in his glass and considered. It felt good to kill those mercenaries.

There’s a reason you chose to be a Ranger. Making sure injustice is stopped is kind of your thing.

No, not that part. It wasn’t about Justice. It was the killing that felt good. Barnabas took a sip of juice. I’m not entirely human anymore, and I don’t even know what “human nature” is. I’m a predator, Shinigami.

You were a monk and you don’t know anything about human nature?

What does being a monk have to do with it? I became a monk to learn to control myself and to be part of something larger. None of it was about glorifying myself, certainly not as I was then.

And you think you’re going back to that now?

Yes, Barnabas admitted after a moment. That’s what I’m afraid of.

You should kill Aebura, then. She’s annoying, chittering like that.

What? Barnabas gave a horrified look upward. Are you out of your mind?

No, and neither are you, it seems. My point is that if you were going to go apeshit, you wouldn’t have stopped at the mercenaries. You’d have kept going.

Barnabas considered this. I stopped myself, but what if someday I don’t? That’s the worst part of the memories. Some people say they were “out of control.” That’s a lie, or it would be for me. I chose to do those things, Shinigami.

And now you choose not to. She must have sensed the question in his silence because she gave a snort that sounded very much like Bethany Anne’s. So you like killing. You’re not wandering around killing people for the hell of it. You control that urge. I’ll wager it never occurred to you to kill Aebura, did it? Even though I know sometimes her chittering annoys you.

He gave a cautious nod.

Look, for what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s any danger, Shinigami told him finally. I think you’re worrying about nothing, the way humans do all the time. You became a monk, you made your choices, you’ve served Bethany Anne. You’ve chosen the way you want to live. You should put your trust in that. But if you can’t?

Yes?

If you start to go apeshit, I’ll call the Bitches and they will fuck you up.

Barnabas smiled. Thank you, Shinigami. You’re a good friend.

Aebura is right—humans are very odd. But you’re welcome.

* * *

As Barnabas sat quietly in the corner, Aebura busied herself with the other Ubuara in the bar. She had made an excuse to accompany Barnabas back to Tethra, and now that she had assessed his ability to hear them she was proceeding with the next part of her plan—harnessing the Ubuara group mind in the city.

He can’t hear us unless we really shout, she told them, like Oemuga did when he brought the message about the mercenaries.

Why are we being so secretive? Oemuga asked. I thought we trusted him.

We do, Aebura agreed. Her tail twitched—tellingly, if Barnabas knew to be watching—but she was careful not to look at Oemuga. But he doesn’t want to accept help.

I only saw part of what happened in the mining town because I was in the jail, Leihaba interjected. Her coat was unusually pale, a few shades darker than gold and brindled with a chestnut brown. She looked around. But it doesn’t sound like he needs much help.

He could have done what he did at any time, Aebura replied. But he waited, to learn about the town and make sure he was doing the right thing. He enlisted my help right before he attacked. He can use us again. He just doesn’t know what help we can be yet.

The others considered this, and Aebura let them. She could sense Oemuga’s thoughts: peppery, little brushes against her mind that almost made her want to sneeze. Leihaba’s were very different, almost the opposite of her coat: not bright and sunny, but deep and slow-moving; powerful like waves. Oebura sounded like light looked when it came through the leaves of the trees on Dugan to cover the forest floor in dappled spots, and her twin Oeluma sounded like birdsong to Aebura’s mental ears.

The consensus was slow, not so much reached in words as in emotions. Worry spiked, and was added to or smoothed away. Images flashed across the group consciousness and were countered with other images.

Aebura let them take their time. A decision like this needed time. It could not be made in haste.

At least, not by Ubuara. When they acted, their individual resolve was weakened or strengthened by the mood around them. Disputes over small things were trivial and fleeting. Disputes over something like this, however, could have serious ramifications if one of them faltered in a time of crisis.

Aebura had made her choice, and she held it closely so as not to sway them. If they were going to refuse to help Barnabas, she would shut their voices out and do whatever she could.

She was pleased, therefore, when she felt the consensus settle in favor of her idea.

We have the most information about this town, Oeluma declared.

We can help him, his twin agreed.

If Lan tries to run— Oemuga began.

Which he will, Leihaba remarked contemptuously, and there was a wave of similar sentiment around the room. Lan was a coward, they all agreed. He’d never even had the courage to give his orders to them himself. He didn’t just hide behind his guards, he hid in his hut and had the guards and Gar do his work for him.

And Leihaba, at least, let it be known that she was not about to forgive the vice-overseer.

What do we do about Gar?

We deal with him when this is all over, Aebura told them firmly. He helped the children during the attack, Barnabas told me. He saw it, and Leiguba confirmed it. For that if nothing else, we wait to see where things stand when it is all over. Then we measure what he still owes us.

They considered, and agreed with her. Aebura hunkered down on the bar, tail wrapping around her feet.

So we plan. And then we tell Barnabas what we will do.

Chapter Twenty-One

Carter walked into the bar about an hour later to a scene of utter chaos. Ubuara were shrieking and chattering to each other and to Barnabas, and the air was awash with…something.

Even Carter, who could not hear thoughts, could sense the emotion in the room. Ideas prickled at the edges of his brain. He swayed slightly.

“Absolutely not,” Barnabas was saying. He was not yelling. Other than the flared nostrils and the slightly narrowed eyes, he looked absolutely calm.

Somehow he was still terrifying.

“Absolutely not,” he repeated a moment later.

“Carter Eastbourne!” Aebura saw Carter and swung over. She dropped to the floor, grabbed his hand, and pulled him toward Barnabas. “Tell him we can help him against Lan.”

Carter swallowed when he was pinned with the full weight of Barnabas’s regard.

“Aebura…” Carter began.

Barnabas smiled. “Thank you.” He looked at Aebura. “You see, he doesn’t want you to get hurt either.”

“Exactly,” Carter exclaimed with relief. “Aebura, you’re all talking about what happened at the mining camp, but that sort of thing is what Rangers do. That wasn’t even all that special compared to what Barnabas is capable of. His ship isn’t even involved yet.”

There was a silence—sort of a silence—while all of the Ubuara looked at him.

Barnabas gave a tiny sigh. “What do you know of my ship?”

By the time we’re finished everyone is going to know who I am. Just giving you fair warning.

Barnabas ignored Shinigami and looked at Carter. He shouldn’t know about—

“The ships built by the Etheric Empire are legendary,” Carter was telling them. “They’re alive—as alive as you or me. They can think for themselves, but instead of having hands and feet, they have a ship as a body. They travel through space and they have weapons—and they know how to use them. Have any of you heard the story of the ArchAngel?”

The Ubuara shook their heads. They were all listening raptly.

“ArchAngel sacrificed herself, working with her crew. All of them volunteered to serve with her, even knowing what was coming. Their names will always be remembered, and the way they fought together is what’s important. Barnabas’s ship…” Carter trailed off, looking at Barnabas for the name.

I AM SHINIGAMI, DESTROYER OF WORLDS.

Oh, shut it. Barnabas sighed. “Shinigami.”

“Shinigami.” Carter looked at the Ubuara. “That ship will be able to help him do more than you can imagine.”

Like fire missiles!

She had a point, and Carter had given him a good opening. Barnabas cut into the conversation.

“Shinigami was the one who tracked Lan to Jutkelon’s compound here in Tethra. She’s scanned the building to assess weakness, looked up the schematics of the weapons she can see, and counted the soldiers on the premises. She has guided missiles.”

And a flamethrower. Don’t forget that.

We still haven’t established you have one.

Whose fault is that? A good tactician should always be aware of his resources.

Barnabas had to work not to roll his eyes. We will talk about this later.

The Ubuara were staring at him contemplatively.

“Where is Shinigami?” Leihaba asked finally. “We have not seen this ship.”

“The ship is in orbit,” Barnabas told them courteously. “Where it will stay,” he added.

Everyone stared at him.

Just in case it wasn’t clear, I was talking to you.

Yeah, but they all heard it and now they think you’re crazy.

Somehow I don’t think this will be the deciding factor in what they think of me.

“But it could still be useful,” Carter said finally. “Right?”

“Oh, yes. It will still be working with us.” Barnabas looked around. “Which is why I don’t need anyone else putting themselves in danger,” he added sternly.

Aebura, however, had been ready for this. “The Ubuara can keep the townspeople safe,” she told him with a satisfied smile. “We will station ourselves at various places, and if Jutkelon sends forces out, someone will see them and spread the word, allowing everyone to get out of the way.”

This was a better point than Barnabas wanted to admit. Still, “Why shouldn’t we just tell everyone to stay inside now?”

“Because then they’ll know something is going on,” Aebura replied smugly.

“You want to keep the element of surprise,” another Ubuara added.

“We can help,” offered a third.

“They can’t tell us apart,” added a fourth.

“Stop. Everyone stop talking.” Barnabas rubbed his temples.

You can’t tell them apart, either, can you?

Can you?

Of course I can. Their skeletons are different.

What is it like to be you?

Aebura waited, but from the way her tail twitched Carter was pretty sure that she was feeling smug.

“Listen,” he told all of them. “Barnabas is only going to agree to accept your help if you can do it without putting yourself in danger, and then only if you would provide an advantage he and Shinigami would not have on their own.”

“Thank you.” Barnabas looked around. “All of you should listen to Mr. Eastbourne. He understands.”

There was a moment of surly silence from the Ubuara. The mood had turned to the point that even Carter could feel it, and the humans looked around warily.

They’re not going to rip my throat out, are they?

I’d say it’s 50-50.

Aebura hopped onto a table and glared at Barnabas.

“You are a Ranger. You will not stay.”

Barnabas, who was not quite sure what this pronouncement was supposed to mean, stayed silent. This didn’t seem to be the moment to clarify that he was no longer Ranger One—especially when he didn’t know what he was anymore.

“Eventually,” Aebura told him, “you will leave and the people here will be alone.”

“Not alone,” Barnabas said instantly. “There will be many people here from the former Etheric Empire. They will protect you.”

“We don’t need to be protected! We need to protect ourselves.” She looked around and the other Ubuara chittered and murmured in agreement. “All of us together. Every person here will need to be able to stand up for themselves when you are gone.”

Barnabas hesitated. “What are you saying?”

“That we can’t rely on you.”

“If you need me—”

“No. There will always be places and people who will need you. Maybe there will be places that need you more, or you will not be able to get here in time. You help us now by taking down Lan, and that is good. But when you are gone, even when all of your humans are here, there will still be people who come here and try to do bad things. When that happens, all of us together will need to bring them down.”

Barnabas looked down, and Aebura turned her head to stare at Carter.

He looked back, unsure.

“Carter Eastbourne, I am disappointed in you.” She narrowed her eyes. “I called you here because you offered to help us before. I thought you understood. I thought you could explain it to him, but you aren’t.”

Carter sighed. “She’s right.” Barnabas’ eyes met his and Carter swallowed. “Sir, I’m sorry, but she’s right. You’re here because you’re one of the best there is, but you’re not doing her any favors by refusing to allow anyone to help you.”

“I allowed her to help me!” Barnabas fought the urge to slam his hand on the table. “I asked for information—”

“Yes, and now you’re not even hearing her out about her plan, are you? You heard the words, but you won’t consider it. The Ubuara are different from us, and their skills can be harnessed to help people. Devon is going to be a place where we all help each other, which is what she’s trying to do.” He paused. “That’s what you asked me to do.”

Barnabas went still. “I don’t have any right to ask that of them.”

“You didn’t,” Aebura snapped. “We offered. You want to save citizens because they’re innocent and shouldn’t suffer for Lan and Jutkelon’s crimes. We want to save them because they’re our people. We want to be able to take care of ourselves, and we have to learn how to do that.”

“What better time for them to learn than while you’re here?” Carter asked Barnabas softly.

“You’re not helping, you know.” Barnabas gave him a weary look.

“You’re a Ranger, not the governor. She’s right, sir.”

“Fine.”

You could be a little more graceful about it, you know.

Why are you on their side?

You know why. You know they’re right. You’re just being stubborn. How would you like it if someone told you that you’d always have to rely on them for safety?

Barnabas chewed his lip for a moment, then nodded at all of them.

“You will all be valuable citizens of Devon,” he said finally. “You care for one another, you are courageous enough to help others find Justice—and you’re all stubborn as hell.”

There was a moment of silence before they all started laughing.

Better?

You have to ask?

Just checking.

“Okay.” Barnabas settled down at the table. “I’ll tell you what we know about Jutkelon’s compound, and you tell me how you propose to help, all right?” He looked at Aebura when she brought a new glass of juice. “Does this mean you’ve forgiven me?”

She just smiled.

He took a sip and spat it out on the table. “This is...um… What kind of fruit is this?”

“Iterze,” Aebura replied smugly. She swapped out the glass for another. “Now we’re even. The Nekubi like it,” she added in a tone that said they were crazy, but business was business.

Barnabas gave her a look. “Mmm. All right, so here’s the deal. Assaulting the compound is going to be difficult. We could simply maintain a presence so they just starve themselves out, but I don’t want to devote months to this.”

“We could poison their food,” one of the Ubuara murmured.

Am I the only one who finds it unnerving that tiny monkeys are making war plans?

You just described my entire experience as an AI working with humans.

Well played. Barnabas’s lips quirked and he nodded at the Ubuara. “We could, but that would be difficult. We need to get them out of the compound entirely. They have too many resources there and they know it better than we do.”

“Why would they leave, then?” Carter frowned.

“Because they want something,” Barnabas explained. “They don’t just want to be safe from me. Maybe Lan does, but that’s not Jutkelon’s nature. His whole business depends on people knowing his mercenaries can win, not just stand there with guns. I’ve put that in jeopardy. Lan probably wants to run away. Jutkelon, though...he wants to fight, and the fact that he still has Lan tells us what his target is.”

“The mining town,” Carter said at once.

“Exactly.” Barnabas looked around at them. “The compound is well defended, but it doesn’t have any mid-range missile launchers or anything like that. They can’t attack from there. They’ll have to get the soldiers to the town. That’s the optimal moment to strike. When they get outside Tethra, we’ll take them out.” He lifted a shoulder. ”Probably with missiles.”

“You won’t do it yourself?” Aebura asked curiously. “You had no trouble with the ones at the mines.”

“You’re right, I didn’t. But we need to be adaptable when we see what their plan is. They must have an idea of how to keep me from taking them out, and I’m afraid I know what it is.” Barnabas looked at them. “They want to use the workers as shields so that there’s no way for me to fight them without innocent people dying.”

The Ubuara hissed, and Barnabas nodded. “I feel the same. It’s a cowardly move. What I’m worried about is that they’ll take hostages from the city so that they can march up to the mining camp without us taking them out. Otherwise I don’t know how they’re going to manage it.”

“Maybe they’re planning to create a distraction,” Carter said with a shrug.

“What sort of distraction?” Barnabas frowned at him. “I don’t disagree, but I don’t see what they could come up with.”

“Something you have to deal with immediately. The goal won’t be to keep you from knowing about the troops going to the mines, it will be to have you focused on something else urgent.” He shrugged again, still frowning as he thought. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll have a small group of mercenaries scatter and kill as many of the people in Tethra as they can.”

There was a stony silence as Barnabas went over the schematics in his head to figure out if there was any way to get into the compound and strangle Jutkelon. Carter was right; this was exactly the sort of thing he’d do to make a point, and Barnabas was not going to let him get away with it.

“This is why you should have the Ubuara helping you,” Aebura said. “We will be able to find anyone he still has in the town and communicate quickly to see who needs to be brought down and how to do so.”

Barnabas nodded. “I wish there was time to evacuate everyone.”

“He’d still destroy the place, even if you could manage it.” Carter shook his head. “Jutkelon wants to beat you, and he has no qualms about doing whatever he has to in order to accomplish that.” He hesitated. “In fact, the worse it is, the better for him. He doesn’t have to stay on this planet. He can hire his mercenaries out to anyone. There are people who will want that.”

To everyone’s surprise, Barnabas smiled. “This is why we have the Rangers. All right, everyone, listen closely. Jutkelon’s distraction is coming. Our main objectives are to secure Tethra and the mining town. Our secondary goal is to take down Jutkelon’s mercenaries. Thirdly, but still important, is to keep Lan from leaving this planet. It will be easier for him to disappear if he does that. With that in mind—”

He pulled up his cuff and pressed a fingertip onto the side of his watch. It projected a map onto the table.

“Aebura, you figure out the best vantage points and help the Ubuara disperse. You will all be responsible for passing messages and, if necessary, getting civilians out of the way. No one should mention the Shinigami outside this room. What is known about the former Etheric Empire is fragmented. It’s possible that Jutkelon and Lan don’t know my capabilities yet.”

Everyone nodded.

“Arm yourselves,” Barnabas warned, “and remember it is better to retreat and live than it is to be brave for a single moment and die. We won’t let them get away with this, no matter how patient we have to be.”

Not very, Shinigami reported.

We can be if we need to.

No, I mean, I know what their distraction is.

Barnabas sat bolt upright. What is it?

Three full ships of mercenaries coming out of FTL nearby.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Galagg Zuludoss stood at the viewing station at the prow of his ship and watched the planet Devon grow larger, its characteristic blue-white glow beginning to take up the entire window.

“Deceleration complete,” reported Hojj, the pilot, and a moment later he added, “Orbital trajectory established.”

Galagg nodded. “Good. Page Jutkelon. Tell him we’re here.” He smiled. “And tell him we’re excited to meet the sonofabitch who took out a hundred soldiers...and show him how missiles work.”

The rest of the bridge crew chuckled appreciatively. Galagg was the captain so they had to laugh at his jokes, but he’d struck a chord. He was pragmatic, and his crew was the same—he’d made sure of that. There was no point in trying to fight some demon hand-to-hand when they could just use an airstrike.

There was a flicker on the alert system, as if the ship had been going to sound an alarm and then thought better of it. Galagg turned to frown at the bridge crew.

“What was that?”

Hojj frowned and thumped the side of his screen. “Debris or something, sir. Computer malfunction.” He turned his screen for Galagg to see. “There’s nothing there.”

“Call Jutkelon, then. Let’s get this over with...and discuss payment.” Galagg had some ideas about just how much he was going to demand. It was far, far more than Jutkelon would be able to afford, and that was the point. Jutkelon hadn’t been able to overcome the threats on Devon, therefore he did not deserve to be running a mercenary company there.

Galagg intended to relieve him of the responsibility.

* * *

Jutkelon paced back and forth on the raised platform at one end of the underground bunker. Three hundred mercenaries stood in formation before him, and there was no mistaking their eagerness to go out and fight.

One or two looked scared, and he made note of their faces. If they hadn’t died when this was over he would help matters along.

Better if the mission took care of that, though. He’d put them near the front.

“You are angry,” he said to the group. “Your comrades were cut down by some vigilante who thinks Queen Bethany Anne should rule everything in the universe.”

There was an angry murmur of agreement.

“If we let them in here,” Jutkelon told them, “they will tell us what business we can—and cannot—take. They will tell us how to live. They will tell us how to dress. They will say that we need to ask their permission to be mercenaries.” He jabbed a finger for emphasis. “And that’s why we came out here, isn’t it? So no stupid jumped-up assholes in suits would be telling us what to do!”

There was a roar of approval and Jutkelon held up his hands, already anticipating their frustration at his next point.

“Now, I know you all want to get out there with your weapons and take down that bastard face to face, don’t you? Yeah, so do I. But we need to be patient—and smarter than he is.” They were grumbling, but he was pleased to see that no one was challenging this. “We’re going to get back what he tried to take from us. Did you know the workers in that mining town, those filthy little Ubuara and their friends, thought they could take us on?”

The mercenaries started laughing.

“It’s not funny.” Jutkelon’s voice echoed off the walls, and the laughter stopped immediately. “It’s. Not. Funny. They don’t respect us. They thought they could just make new rules and send us home. They’re going to learn they can’t. And that motherfucker who wants to show how many of us he can kill? Well, he’s going to find out that it doesn’t matter how sharp your blades are if you bring knives to a gunfight.

“Three ships just arrived in orbit, each with a nice, full missile bay. We’re going to head out to the mining town now, and when this human tries to follow us we’re going to make sure he’s dust. In the center of a nice big crater.”

The mercenaries nodded. This wasn’t as good as a face-to-face fight, but their enemy would be dead—and more than that, he’d be an example. They liked that.

“So.” Jutkelon pressed a button. “Galagg! Nice to see you, old friend.”

“You as well.” The Shrillexian’s voice hissed slightly over the comm. “I’m glad we could be of use to…what? What?” A pause. “Well, shoot it down!”

“Galagg? Galagg, what’s going on?”

There was silence.

* * *

Three full ships of mercenaries coming out of FTL nearby, Shinigami told Barnabas.

Hail them.

Are you kidding me with this? I’m cloaked. I’m not breaking that just so I can get shot at.

I trust you to take evasive maneuvers. Hail them, and tell them that they are ordered to stand down, as they will be abetting slavery by continuing.

And then?

And if they don’t listen, you can shoot them.

I’ll take it.

Shinigami maneuvered herself into position and spun her engines up for a quick escape around the edge of the moon, then uncloaked and took over the bridge controls of all three ships.

She wasn’t just going to hail them. That really wasn’t her style.

“Hello.” Her face took up every computer screen on all three ships, eyes glowing, white hair trailing down one side of her face. “Any attack on the planet Devon that aids and abets slavery will be considered unlawful by Queen Bethany Anne and dealt with accordingly. You are being given the chance to stand down.”

A Shrillexian, captain of one of the ships, gave a contemptuous laugh. “The former Empress does not own Devon. No one owns Devon. If they come after every single mercenary group that—” He broke off, looking at someone off-screen. Shinigami co-opted the security feeds and saw that he was looking at a young technician. “Well, where is it coming from, then? What do you mean there’s a ship?”

Shinigami waited, mentally rolling her eyes.

The technician stammered out a question.

“Take care of it,” the captain snapped in response. “It’s one ship. It—”

“You know I can hear you, right?”

Everyone jumped and looked at the screens, and a few people swore. Apparently they had thought this was a pre-recorded message.

On the bridge of one of the other ships, another Shrillexian who had been having a different conversation—Shinigami guessed with Jutkelon—looked around at last. He barked questions, and his crew answered.

“Well, shoot it down!” he told them, annoyed.

Does that count?

Are they readying weapons?

Yes.

Then it counts.

Shinigami’s engines flared and she blazed forward in an arc toward the first of High Tortuga’s moons, and in her wake sped a spread of five missiles. The first three locked onto the ships and the other two accelerated, although no targets had yet been chosen.

The mercenary ships fired and Shinigami smiled. They were shooting not just at her trajectory now, but also guiding missiles to intercept her around the edge of the moon.

It was smart, and it meant this wouldn’t be just a one-and-done.

She accelerated and altered her trajectory halfway around so that she would arc over the moon instead of slingshotting around it. The missiles altered their course to follow her and she waited until the very last minute before banking almost straight up, leaving several of the missiles to collide in her wake.

Those that had not collided swung around to follow and she corkscrewed as she headed back for the two mercenary ships that were still in shape to fire.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

She felt rather than saw Barnabas rub his forehead.

She shot a spread of missiles and waited for the two ships to launch interceptions, then launched another spread just behind. As she had expected, their second volley was delayed a few seconds. They were firing as quickly as they could, which wasn’t as quickly as she could.

She launched three more volleys in close succession and laughed wolfishly to herself. She loved this. Why anyone would want to have a human body was beyond her. With no need for oxygen or warmth and none of the limits of a fragile and breakable body she could accelerate and flip and turn and—

Dammit, one of the ships was launching puny little fighters, tiny one-man crafts that were heading straight for the missiles. Didn’t they see that they couldn’t absorb shots like that?

And then she realized—those crafts had been deployed, some manned, to try to take out the missiles to clear the way for the two crippled ships, both venting debris and air into space, to reach ramming speed and take her down.

They were sacrificing their crews.

Shinigami felt a white-hot rage descend on her. Those bastards! Intelligent life might be a tangle of contradictions. Might be? Definitely was…but the pact between a captain and their crew should be sacrosanct. The captains could have stood down. They could have begged for mercy.

Instead, to make a point, they were going to destroy themselves to take her out.

“This is the QBS Shinigami,” she broadcast. “Stand down, and give your crew a chance to make their own choices.”

She could feel Barnabas’s surprise. She also felt it as he looked up at the sky, and she tried to send him a tiny piece of how it felt to be a ship right now, to be streaming the data about gravity, trajectories, missiles, and known enemies. How it felt to be accelerating and weaving around the missiles they had sent. How satisfaction and fury felt to an AI.

“Stand down,” one of the mercenary captains ordered, “or both crews will die.”

“I have no crew! I am alone. If I stood down, would you leave this planet and never return?”

“As soon as our mission is complete.”

“Then, while I would spare their lives if I could, by refusing to stand down you have made that impossible.” Pucks shot out in formation, spread, and sped toward both ships.

By the time she completed her turn they were debris.

I gave them a chance, she told Barnabas.

Two. You gave them two chances. Not your fault they didn’t take them. He considered. Lan and Jutkelon?

No movement yet, but it’s coming.

* * *

Lan stared at the diagnostic reports. Jutkelon was scanning the frequencies with increasing panic, sure that the systems were down.

On some level, Lan thought, the Brakalon must already know what had happened.

“You didn’t check for ships in orbit, did you?” he asked.

“He had a ship in orbit, but it was so tiny it barely read as a shuttle!”

Lan could feel his pulse beating in his throat and the start of a truly terrible headache. “Didn’t you think for one moment that that was perhaps a false reading?”

“He’s a vigilante—”

“He’s a Ranger!” Lan clenched his long fingers. To his surprise, the mercenaries were not immediately jumping on him. This anger, this authority, was something they respected. Lan strode across the platform to stare Jutkelon down. “You knew what it meant to be human, but did you pay attention to none of the other stories? Did you do no research at all? Have you not heard of Tabitha and Achronyx?”

“Myths,” Jutkelon scoffed.

“Truth,” Lan snapped, his voice cold as winter. “And that is Ranger Two. This right here? This is Ranger One and his ship.”

Jutkelon stared at Lan. He was filled with rage at the loss of his ships, but he was also frozen.

“You still think like a soldier with a gun,” Lan told him bitterly. “You said you were going to teach the Ranger a lesson, and all that meant was that you were bringing in more people to take him on face-to-face. You talked a big game about being smarter than him, and you didn’t even do your research. So now what, Jutkelon? What are you planning?”

Jutkelon froze, but he knew he had to address Lan’s concerns. If he did not, the questions would linger even if he shot Lan in the head or crushed him with a blow.

“We go now,” he snapped. “Force Barnabas to choose between taking us out and saving those workers he cares so much about. The plan was sound, and it is still sound. Everyone to the shuttles.”

“Oh, I think not.” The voice was female and dangerously cold. The lights in the bunker flickered and a face out of a nightmare appeared on-screen. “Your time is up. Launch a ship—any ship—and I will shoot it down. Stay in your bunker, and I will turn your systems off one by one. I can sever the fuel lines. I can disable your air filtration.”

“What, then?” Jutkelon yelled the words at her.

She bared her teeth in a smile. “Come out and play.”

* * *

Back in Aebura’s bar, Barnabas lifted an eyebrow and smiled despite himself. “Come out and play.” He liked that.

But it meant things might go rather differently than he had imagined. He looked around the bar and met the eyes of several people in turn—Leihaba, Aebura, Carter.

“It’s beginning. Their ships have been destroyed, so they might do something unpredictable.”

“Like what?” Carter asked.

“I don’t know. I doubt even they know. They’re panicking, and when people panic…” Barnabas sighed and shook his head. “And they have missiles and guns. Carter, I need you and Leihaba to organize the evacuation of any civilians around Jutkelon’s compound. Say, four blocks. Go. The rest of you, get to your positions.”

“Where are you going?” Aebura asked.

She knew, of course. She had not seen Barnabas in action, but she had heard the story. Still, it was hard to believe that anyone would be so stupid as to take Jutkelon’s army on alone.

To her surprise he flashed her a smile, and as if he’d read her mind he said, “I’m not fighting alone, remember? I’ve got Shinigami, and I’ve got all of you.” He looked at the Ubuara streaming out the door on their way to their positions throughout the city, and his smile showed satisfaction. “Working with other people,” he murmured to no one in particular bemusedly. “This is nice.”

And he was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Come out and play.”

With that the lights in the bunker went off, and they heard the air filtration systems grind to a halt. One of the soldiers ran for the door into the storerooms—just one soldier, as they were too well-trained to panic and stampede—and there was the audible click of the electronic locks engaging. All around the room, the lights above the doors to the sleeping areas, armory, and storage units glowed red.

They were cut off from anything that might have helped them survive.

“Switch it to manual!” Jutkelon barked at him.

The soldier nodded and placed his hand on the control panel—

Only to sink to his knees, his body jerking as an incredibly strong electrical current ran through him. It released him a moment later, and everyone turned as one to stare at the screens. Lan expected the nightmare face to appear and tell them this had been a warning.

But she didn’t bother. She was in their systems, watching them try to find a way out like insects swarming over one another and punishing them when they went the wrong way, and still she did not speak to them.

It was more unnerving than any words could have been.

And then, as they went silent before what Lan knew was going to be a full-on panic, the door leading up into the courtyard clicked open.

“We go now,” Jutkelon snapped. “Everybody to the carrier!”

“Are you mad?” Lan gaped at him. “That ship took down three warships in orbit.”

“And it’s still in orbit! This is our best chance to move on the mining town—while it’s either up there or still landing. We don’t want to take it on one-to-one, do we?”

Lan’s head was whirling and he pressed his fingers against it as he thought. If they got in the troop carrier the ship might shoot them down, but if they stayed here it would definitely kill them. It had already shown its abilities.

It was a trap. It was all a trap, but they had no other options.

The face appeared now when they least expected it, and it was smiling to show very long, very sharp teeth. “I’m going to count down,” she told them. “Anyone still in this bunker when I reach zero can stay in here for the rest of time. Five. Four…”

No one doubted her. The soldiers ran for the doors, shouting orders to one another, and Lan thought he heard laughter echoing eerily from the speakers. He sprinted after them, for once not bothering to be cautious about his fragile Luvendi bones.

Panic was choking him. He had to get out of here. He had to, or he was going to die trapped in a cage.

They piled out into the daylight, Jutkelon still bellowing for them to get to the carrier, all of them, now—only to have tiny projectiles rain down on the stretch of ground between them and the ship. The lead soldiers went down with screams and the rest pushed back with all their might, fighting the momentum of the group behind them.

Lan hardly cared. All he could think about was the ship—getting to it, booting it without any communications, and getting the hell out of here before that AI could hack them and take them down. If they got out of here and scattered they’d have a chance.

When they all went eerily silent, Lan knew something worse had happened. He looked up and gave a little moan of fear.

Barnabas stood alone in the courtyard, so still that Lan would have guessed he was a statue. But statues didn’t smile quite like that.

Behind them, the doors to the bunker slammed shut and locked.

“No,” Lan whispered helplessly. Some of the soldiers around him threw him contemptuous looks, but they didn’t know. They hadn’t seen.

“It looks like you weren’t able to arm yourselves,” Barnabas began conversationally. He shrugged out of his coat and unbuckled his gun harness, throwing both into the air—where, bizarrely enough, they stayed. The whole mess just hovered twenty feet above the ground. “I much prefer fair fights,” Barnabas told them.

Then he smiled and his teeth lengthened, and his eyes glowed red as fire.

“Or...mostly fair.” He rotated his head to take in the whole group of them, then fixed his eyes on Jutkelon. “You could end all this, you know. You could surrender. You don’t have to protect Lan. You never had to. How many more soldiers do you really want to sacrifice here?”

“As many as it takes to kill you.” Jutkelon’s voice sounded like rocks tumbling over one another and his pale skin was flushing with anger. “Isn’t that right, boys? We’ll make sure this human pays.”

The soldiers roared their approval.

“Oh, good.” Barnabas’s voice almost hissed as it rolled through the courtyard, louder than any mortal voice should be. “I was hoping you would say that.”

At Jutkelon’s shouted order, four teams charged forward while the rest broke for the troop carrier. Lan, in a stroke of inspiration, ran for the stairs to one of the guard towers. There was a machine gun there, and as far as he was concerned that was the best chance any of them had of taking this human down.

The screaming started when he had only gone a few steps and didn’t stop the whole time he ran. Lan tried not to look, terrified of what he would see. He was scared to even turn the gun and look closely enough to aim. What had remained of the team at the mining town had barely resembled bodies at all.

When he finally reached the gun and looked out of necessity, he nearly passed out from terror. He had to lean against the gun mount to steady himself.

He wasn’t sure what the soldiers had expected to happen. Many of them were Brakalon and a few were Shrillexian, all well-trained fighters—but they should have put more stock in what had happened to their first units.

Maybe they were still thinking of humans as clawless and soft-skinned. Maybe they thought they would overpower him with their overwhelming numeric advantage. Perhaps they were so maddened in their quest for revenge that they hadn’t paused to think at all. It didn’t matter much why they ran at him like they did. The fact was, not one of them stood a chance in hell of getting past Barnabas, and they should have known that.

The massacre attested to it.

The ground before them was strewn with bodies, but still they ran at Barnabas shouting battle cries. No one came close to hurting him. He had clearly taken bullets, but they had not slowed him down at all, even though he didn’t seem to be wearing any armor.

Was his armor just so good that they couldn’t see it, or were humans able to take bullets in this form without getting injured? Lan couldn’t make a solid bet either way on that one.

As Barnabas cut down the last of the mercenaries, hardly even looking at the body as it crumpled to the ground, someone shouted a guttural challenge. Jutkelon slammed his fists on the ground and charged into battle. He swung one huge arm as Barnabas stepped to the side and slid under it, only a hair’s breadth from impact.

Undaunted, Jutkelon skidded to a stop and turned with a bellow, and again he charged.

Barnabas feinted and rolled away.

He’s playing with you! Lan wanted to scream. Run, you stupid bastard!

But Jutkelon was far beyond reason now. He was in some fantasy realm where he had a fighting chance against this monster.

Lan didn’t even think; he just ran. The others could be stupid if they wanted to. They could get all caught up in their pride, relying on their training and their strength. He had never been that kind of stupid. Over the years he had met dozens of strong fighters who had looked down their noses at him, and he had wanted to rage at them for how little they thought of him.

But now, when it came down to it, who was going to survive? Lan said a tiny prayer and dropped over the compound’s wall, wincing when he hit the ground. His bones could not take many falls like that.

He just had to push through the pain. He had to find a place to hide. Lan took off through the streets, so focused on the next turn and the next—on outrunning the screams—that he didn’t notice the many pairs of brown eyes staring down at him from the roofs of the buildings.

* * *

Lan’s getting away, Shinigami observed. She directed another spray of fire at the ground in front of the carrier.

I saw. By the way, I’m assuming you have some sort of plan for that carrier.

Oh, yes. She sounded very smug. You see, if they stopped to think about it, they’d never get on board. I had to make them want to.

By shooting at them every time they tried to go near it?

Exactly. I couldn’t really get at them in the bunker, I can’t lay down too much fire with you there, and the vehicle carries a lot of fuel—I need to shoot it down somewhere outside the city. So I needed them to get on it, and one of the surest ways to make someone pigheadedly determined to do something is to stand in their way every time they try to do it.

You’re an evil genius.

Thank you. Coming from you that means a lot. I’ll handle this lot, you kill that oaf and go after Lan.

Teamwork. I like this. Barnabas shot a grin upward as he rolled out of the way of yet another ground-shaking punch.

“You’re slow, old one,” he taunted the Brakalon. “First you told yourself you deserved to run things because you were the best fighter, and when you got weak and slow you told yourself you deserved to run it all because you were the smartest. But that’s not even true, is it? You’re old and washed-up, with no strength and no speed, and now you can’t even think your way through a fight.”

All right, I have to butt in here. “Old?” That’s a bold card for you to play.

It’s not about how old I am, it’s about how old he feels.

Rationalize it however you want, but Tabitha’s still going to laugh herself sick when she hears about this.

If she hears about it, I’ll have Bethany Anne assign you to run the laundromats on the new base. I’ll have her make it a law that that’s your job.

Interesting. I’ll think about that.

“I am not slow,” Jutkelon ground out. His strength was failing him but he was a Brakalon, damn this little alien to hell. He’d been fighting wars since this one was—

How long did humans live?

Well, he had to have more fighting experience. This human was an insignificant gnat, an insect that knew nothing of the world.

He didn’t know it yet, but he would die in about thirty seconds without ever appreciating just how wrong he had been.

“Then end it,” Barnabas shot back. “Because if you don’t, that ship is leaving without you. They don’t care enough about you to hold the door.”

With a scream of fury, Jutkelon charged. His heavy feet pounded toward Barnabas and he bared his teeth in a snarl when he saw that the human wasn’t moving. Fool. He picked up speed. Damned fool—not moving yet. Did he really think he could absorb a hit from a Brakalon?

Only at the last moment when it was too late to stop did it occur to Jutkelon to wonder what the human knew that he didn’t. And by the time he’d gotten through that thought there were blades sticking out of his back and red eyes staring him down as he slumped to his knees.

“I don’t mind pride,” Barnabas mused. “Maybe I should. It’s a sin, after all, but I find I’m sympathetic to that particular one. I don’t mind you fighting for what you believe in either. I’d kill you, of course, but I’d kill you cleanly, as a worthy opponent.” The blades moved and Jutkelon screamed. “But fighting like this? Fighting for something you don’t even care about because you just want to be able to kill who you want, hurt who you want, and have no one get in your way? That’s the very definition of evil. You’re going to die slowly so you have time to think about just how badly you’ve failed.”

The world was made of pain and Jutkelon gasped for air, feeling cold weakness crawl up his limbs. He fought it desperately; he was not going to die like this. He couldn’t die like this, not now, not with those eyes watching him. He looked around desperately for something to stop him from dying.

There had to be a way.

“Even at the end you don’t care about anything but your own life,” Barnabas declared coldly. “You are filth. No one will remember your name. No one will pray for you. And because you built nothing in life, your legacy will not endure.”

He yanked his blades out of the Brakalon’s chest and watched the light fade from his eyes.

That was less painful than he deserved.

I know, but if you tried to return every bit of cruelty he’d perpetrated we’d be here for decades. Go get Lan. I’ve got a carrier to lure into the mountains.

Barnabas smiled coldly. As the carrier’s engines revved up and the ship sped away— without a single thought for Jutkelon, he would bet—he took a running leap and summoned all the force he could call on, bodily and Etheric and armor, to break the hinges that held the heavy metal gates in place. They came down in a shriek of twisted metal and he strode over them on his way into the city.

Aebura, where did Lan go?

Chapter Twenty-Four

Lan was so absorbed in running that he’d gone past three streets before he noticed Tethra was deserted.

He limped to a stop and looked around. He was panting, and now that he’d stopped he could feel how much pain was coming from his legs. Had he damaged something in the fall?

It was likely, but he couldn’t even focus on it in the eerie silence. The shooting and screams behind him were either too distant to hear or Barnabas had run out of people to kill. Frankly, he found the second option more likely. He limped a few more steps, peered around a corner, and shuddered. Tethra’s main market sprawled over many streets, and he was on the outskirts of it.

And it was completely empty. The stalls were devoid of wares, and instead of being waved by energetic peddlers, the flags that served as signs were hanging limply in the fetid swampy air.

The troop carrier shot overhead and its noise—and passing—caused the flags to flutter. Lan shuddered again, then looked behind him. He had to get somewhere safe, and he’d been counting on the crowds in the marketplace to hide him.

Wait. He peered upward. The troop carrier was flying. Had any soldiers actually made it onto that thing? Were they really that stupid?

Many miles above, Shinigami was asking herself the same question. She had set the plan in motion and watched it play out with satisfaction, but now that it was actually working she was having trouble believing what she was seeing. Was it possible she had miscalculated? Had she been tricked somehow?

She doubtfully asked Barnabas and heard him snicker.

No, they really are just that stupid.

Stupid and totally without morals. If she’d had eyes, they would have narrowed. As it was, she zoomed in on the ship and scanned it, only to see the soldiers arming themselves within. Their leader is dead, and as far as they know Lan is too.

And?

And they’re going to try to hurt the miners anyway.

He had been walking through the streets of Tethra, but now she felt him stop. His blood pressure began to rise. Let me at them.

No, you take out Lan. Doing it this way is a good plan. Don’t look at the explosion, by the way.

The idea that “cool people” don’t look at explosions is ridiculous.

No, it’s going to be very bright. You don’t want to have to go back to the Meredith Reynolds to get your eyes fixed, do you? Missiles launching in 3, 2—

Wait, you’re not going to have any more fun with them? Show up on their screens, make your voice go all echoey?

I would, but they’re flying it manually with all the electronics off. Although… She pondered. One moment.

A few moments later, a remote guidance system composed of small plates appeared alongside the ship and attached themselves gently to the hull.

Okay, watch this. Shinigami projected the raw video into an eyepiece Barnabas held up to view. Aaaaaand left. Just a little, just a little, haven’t noticed yet—oh, they’re noticing, they’re turning the rudders, they’re realizing nothing’s happening…. Yep, they’re totally panicking. Wait until they turn the rudder allllll the way and—hahahahahaha.

The guidance system stopped directing the carrier and, suddenly freed from its constraints, it tumbled hard to the right. Soldiers went sprawling and the pilot scrambled to make a recovery. Shinigami and Barnabas laughed until they cried.

Okay, that was fun. Don’t look, I’ll play the video for you later. Everything’s fine, they’re speeding up, and….

Out over the countryside, where the swamp first gave way to the rocky outcroppings of the mountains, the guidance system dragged the ship into a new trajectory and a spread of guided missiles hit it a moment later, sending it tumbling into the foothills with a flash that noticeably brightened the air as far away as in Tethra.

How much fuel did they have?

A lot, and it was some proprietary type that— You know what, I’ll just send you the schematics. Go after Lan now. Good hunting. Ah, that video of them trying to steer is gold. I’ll be watching that one for years.

Barnabas snickered and returned to the chase. By now Lan should be several more streets ahead of him.

He liked a challenge.

* * *

Indeed, several streets north, Lan had looked up when he saw the flash. He could only guess what it was, but he didn’t have any doubts. Idiots. He was beginning to think they wouldn’t have gotten the mine back after all. None of them had any sense to speak of.

Yes, as he had predicted, they were dead and he…

Well, he needed to find a place to hide. Hissing at the pain, Lan forced himself to limp more quickly. He had tried the doors, but when he knocked all of them were locked and no one answered.

Sometimes he thought he heard things skittering nearby and looked up, skin prickling on the back of his neck, in time to see shadows but nothing more. Was someone watching him?

Was it Barnabas?

He had just looked away after trying to catch a glimpse of whoever it was when he glanced back and nearly had heart failure when he saw a figure standing in the street.

He glared at Gar and spat, “Traitor.”

Gar smiled. For a moment—before anger crowded out everything else—Lan’d had the sense that Gar was trying to be bitter but could only manage to be sad.

“I’m not a traitor,” he replied simply. “I was never loyal to you. People like you and me don’t earn loyalty, Lan. You have to be owed something to be betrayed.”

“Dress it up however you like,” Lan shot back furiously. “You sold me out to save your miserable life.”

“I did,” Gar agreed. “But you deserved your punishment. You can hardly argue with that.”

Barnabas watched unnoticed from a doorway in the shadows nearby. He was curious. This confrontation had not been a part of the plan, and he wanted to see how it played out.

“I can and I do.” Lan stabbed a finger in Gar’s direction. “I did nothing wrong, and neither did you—until you betrayed me.”

“I did nothing wrong until I helped Barnabas, you mean? Do you really believe that?” Gar started to laugh.

“What can be done—”

“Should be done? Whatever you can get away with you should do?”

“Like you ever thought any differently.” Lan could barely speak for rage. “You’re no priest, to be judging me.”

“Barnabas is,” Gar observed.

One of Lan’s hands drifted to where he had stowed a pistol in the small of his back.

He has a gun.

I see it, Barnabas told Shinigami.

Are you going to let him kill Gar?

Honestly? I’m not sure yet.

“I warned you away from your worst excesses at first,” Gar told Lan, “by saying they would be bad for business. I saw you appropriating funds and said nothing. I aided you when you had workers executed. I didn’t stop you when you extended contracts. I might not have known until recently that you were doing it all for your own benefit, but I could have stepped in at any time. I should have stepped in. I was wrong.”

“That’s just petty moralizing, the sort done by little people who like to hold others back.”

“It’s not. Do you not see, Lan? You keep telling yourself that what you did was all right because you were getting away with it, but you did too much. What I’m doing, what Barnabas is doing—that’s you not getting away with it anymore. This is the other side of that coin. You skimmed profits and kept slaves for years, but now it’s over.”

The gun came up. Lan’s arm was shaking with pain and anger, but he was going to shoot Gar no matter what it took. He’d make him admit that he deserved no mercy, he decided, and then kill him. Yes.

Gar did not run away. He folded his hands into his sleeves and waited.

“Say something, damn you!”

“What should I say?” Gar sounded amused. “You were right. I sold you out to save myself. Before that, I did not turn on you—again—to save myself. Before that, I fled Luvendan because I was afraid for my life. I have spent it running. And last night when you ordered the attack, I hid the children and went to get Barnabas because I knew he would stop you. For the first time in my life, I did the stupid thing. The thing that would get me killed. Now…”

Lan sneered. “Now you’ve developed a taste for it?”

“Now I’m free.” Gar spread his hands. “I’m not afraid anymore.”

The gun went off and the shot echoed around the street, and Barnabas ran for the figure crumpled on the ground. Shinigami! I need a Pod!

I had one waiting. It sank into the street and Barnabas bundled Gar inside. A door opened nearby for Carter to dash out, and Barnabas jerked his head at the Pod. “Am I glad to see you. Go back to the Shinigami with him, will you? Get pressure on the wound and follow her instructions to get him into the Pod-doc.”

Carter nodded. He had seen the confrontation unfolding and found himself terrified for Gar, despite all he knew about the male. He ducked into the Pod and pressed a piece of cloth over the wound in Gar’s side.

“Don’t die on us after that speech. What were you thinking?”

“That I’d—” Gar gasped in pain, “delay him.”

“Barnabas would have caught him anyway.”

“Okay, so I just wanted to tell him how much of a bastard he was.”

Carter laughed. “Now that I’d buy. Come on, buddy. We’re going to get you all fixed up.”

Back on the street, Barnabas watched the Pod rise into the sky. He was aware of the gun coming up again behind him.

“I wouldn’t,” he warned, his voice as cold as winter. He looked over his shoulder, not even bothering to draw his weapon. “Did it work? Shooting him, I mean?”

Lan frowned. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, but—”

“Did you think that killing him would make the things he said not true?” Barnabas asked mildly. “Or did you just want to kill him because he made you see what you’d done?”

“He was an idiot. He didn’t show me anything. I should have gotten better mercenaries.”

“You know…” Barnabas turned to regard Lan with a sigh. “We have a concept on Earth, referred to in various ways. Tyrants always fall. It doesn’t matter how good their mercenaries are, or how careful they are about keeping people in line. Eventually their reigns end in blood. If you had staved off this attempt there would have been another, and another, and another, until you died. You think the Yollin king’s problem was insufficient mercenaries?”

Lan stared at him. He wanted to snarl in wordless rage. He was beginning to understand why Jutkelon had gone after Barnabas.

“By the way,” Barnabas added, spiking Lan’s anger even further, “I want to make it clear that you’re going to die at the end of this conversation.”

“Then why talk to me?” Lan nearly screamed the words.

Barnabas was right, damn him. Lan couldn’t fight him. No one could fight him. This was all just him preening; strutting around to show people how moral and correct he was.

“For the benefit of those watching,” Barnabas told him, confirming Lan’s fears. “Though not for the reasons you may think. Lan, you are the first in what I assume—jadedly, I admit—will be a long line of people who try to ignore the Queen’s laws. They’ll give me all sorts of reasons. Some, like King Yoll, will dress it up as divine right. Others, like Jutkelon, will say that no one has any right to interfere in their affairs. You simply thought you could get away with it.”

Barnabas shook his head, his expression implacable. “You can’t. That’s why I’m here, it’s why I exist. You can’t get away with it. No one can. And you’re going to be the first public example of that.”

Actually, the carrier was the first example.

Good point, but walking back on that now is going to look ridiculous. Maybe we could just count it as part of the same incident?

Shinigami wished for the umpteenth time that she had eyes to roll.

“Your Queen is also going to fall,” Lan promised Barnabas. “You said tyrants always fall. She will fall too!”

Oh no he di-idn’t.

“I’m going to explain this once, and once only.” Barnabas advanced on Lan, his voice dangerously quiet. “Venfaldri Lan, you have disobeyed the laws I follow, which are higher than any of you have known. You disobeyed these laws because you thought you were beyond judgment. No one is beyond judgment. My Queen believes that all who desire to make themselves and their lives better should prosper, if their desires harm no one. Those who wish to crush others, however, or use them as you have done? Those people she has no mercy for, and neither do I. It is not a tyrant’s decree to outlaw slavery, because no matter what words you use or how you hide it behind contracts, that was what you were doing—keeping slaves. You were not judged today simply for running a business. You were judged for owning slaves and have been found guilty.”

Lan fired, and Barnabas took the bullet and kept advancing. He did not so much as stumble.

“You are going to die, Venfaldri Lan.”

Another shot.

By now he really should have figured out those aren’t doing anything, Shinigami commented.

The last three shots were made as quickly as Lan could pull the trigger, then he fell to the ground and tried to crawl away—only to have Barnabas haul him upright.

“I suppose it would be too much to hope that you understand your mistake.”

Lan’s face twisted. “I didn’t kiss up to you like Gar did?”

Barnabas’s knives raked down Lan’s body and he screamed until he died.

“Wrong,” Barnabas finished. “But that was what I expected. Your kind never learn.”

He looked around as people began to come out of their houses. Ubuara were clustered on the roofs, and Aebura swung down to crouch near Barnabas’s feet.

“They’re all dead?”

“They are all dead,” Barnabas said. He made sure his voice carried. “The ones involved in this, anyway. There may be more. But if there are, we’ll catch them, and we’ll make them pay, too.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Come see, come see, come see!” Aebura bounded ahead, periodically climbing the sides of buildings and swinging along. She was almost glowing with her exuberance, and her words kept getting lost in the general chitter of her voice. Barnabas could feel the wash of excitement coming off her. It smelled of sunlight and he had a brief, jarring memory of a happy moment in his childhood, bare feet on dirt, summer sunshine and the smell of plants…

He shook his head slightly and continued walking, staring after Aebura when she drew ahead. At his side, Carter was striding with the same sort of excitement, barely in check and tending to ooze out in the form of a wide grin and a bounce in his step. His family would be arriving soon, and he’d been spending the past few days cleaning the bar from top to bottom.

Aebura, who had disappeared into one of the new buildings in the mining town, stuck her head out and bobbed it up and down with impatience.

“Come see!”

Barnabas and Carter ducked into the interior of the building.

“Whoa,” Carter exclaimed.

“It’s...identical.” Barnabas looked around.

“Yes! I love the bar in Tethra. That’s why this one is the same.” Aebura, who was perched on the bar, stroked her fingers over the smooth, freshly-varnished surface. She was radiating happiness.

“Who’s going to run it?” Barnabas asked her. “Leiguba?”

“No, I am.” She looked even more pleased now.

Carter cleared his throat. “Aebura, I don’t mean to be a downer, but running a bar is a lot of work. Trying to run two so far apart? I don’t know how you’re going to manage.”

“I’m not going to run two,” she replied. Her excitement had reached a fever pitch in Barnabas’s mind and several Ubuara had come to peek in the door, apparently wondering what was going on in here. “You’ll run the one in Tethra!”

“Ah.” Barnabas smiled as he got it.

Carter gaped at him, then at Aebura. “I’m… I don’t know what to… Aebura, are you sure you trust me to run your bar for you?”

“It’s not my bar anymore,” she informed him with a pleased flick of her tail. “It’s yours. I’m giving it to you, Carter Eastbourne.”

“It’s mine?”

“I like you,” she explained. “You listen to people, and you help them. You would make a good bartender.”

“But...but….”

“Do you not want to own the bar?

“No! I mean, yes, I do want to own it! I mean…”

“Well, then it’s settled,” Aebura told him as if this were the easiest thing in the world. “I want to work here for a while to make this place as nice as possible.”

“It really is getting much nicer,” Barnabas said, sliding onto a bar stool while Carter kept spluttering behind him. “I don’t suppose there’s any fruit juice?”

Fruit juice? Bobcat would disown you.

It’s really good!

Aebura poured a glass and set it on the bar. “I knew you would want some so I had it ready.”

“Excellent.” Barnabas looked over his shoulder at Carter, who was now staring into the distance and muttering distractedly to himself, then returned to the matter at hand. “So, how are things going with the rebuilding?”

“Very well.” Aebura’s tail twitched. “Many people have come to help rebuild the living quarters, and some of the original guards are staying to provide security. Not many, just the ones people remember as being nice. And,” she added, suddenly intent, “you’ll never guess what happened! We got all the money in Lan’s accounts, and all future ore shipments will pay to our new accounts! We thought it would take years to sort that all out.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas took a sip of his juice. “I wonder how that happened.”

“No one knows.” Aebura shrugged her shoulders. “But it really helps with building this place up. We went through the old contracts and standards. He was supposed to be spending a certain amount on the upkeep and he never did!”

Barnabas smiled as Carter came sat down beside them. “Hello. Thought you’d join us, did you? Are you speaking in sentences again?”

Carter just gave him a wide-eyed look and Aebura passed him a glass of juice.

“Did you hear Carter’s plans for the bar in Tethra?” she asked Barnabas.

“No plans! There are no plans.” Carter made a chopping motion with his hand.

“I thought you said—”

“I haven’t even really thought about what I’d do here. I’ll just play it by ear. But, you know, with good business sense.” He gave a deer-in-the-headlights look at Barnabas.

Barnabas smiled back blandly. It wasn’t like his mind wasn’t broadcasting his intentions, but he’d let Carter keep his illusions.

“So, what’s happening with Gar?” Carter asked suddenly.

“Yes.” Aebura sat up at once. “What is happening with him?”

“Well, he’s all healed now.” Barnabas rolled his glass on its edge and considered. “I was thinking of taking him on the Shinigami with me, if you don’t mind. I know you folks had been discussing what should be done with him after the dust settled, so to speak.”

Aebura nodded. “Yes, we had.”

There were suddenly a lot of Ubuara in the bar. One hopped onto Barnabas’s shoulder and leaned on his head.

Not. A. Word.

I need to have someone take pictures of this. I need to.

“We discussed it,” Aebura said again, looking at the other Ubuara, “and we decided that because Gar went out to confront Lan, thinking he would die, and he did get shot and he would have died...that counts.”

Barnabas blinked. “I see.”

“I think I get it,” Carter said thoughtfully. “He thought he was paying for it and he made the choice to pay for it, and even went through the moment of doing so, so to speak. I could get behind that. This is really good juice,” he added.

Barnabas nodded at that.

“So you can take Gar with you if you’d like,” Aebura told him, and the other Ubuara nodded. “What will he be doing?”

“I’m not sure.” Barnabas had not quite trusted Gar to start his own business just yet. He wanted to watch the male for a while longer. However, Gar also knew some things about the company that effectively controlled High Tortuga for a while and he had good contacts amongst management, many of whom were Luvendi.

Plus, he seemed to know a lot about the various planets and dynamics in this area of space. He was going to be useful.

“Remember to stop back sometimes.” Carter smiled. “I know you’re all jetting off to do Justice all over the galaxy—”

“Why stop at one galaxy?”

Carter gave him a look. “But you really should check back in and get some juice sometimes.”

“Already on the agenda. Plus, I’ll have to come see what you’ve done with the place.” Barnabas looked away from Carter’s panicked expression and slid some money across the bar as he stood. “Aebura, a pleasure as always. Carter can get in contact with me if you need anything, so don’t hesitate to let him know. Carter, would you like a ride back to Tethra? I hear you have a bar to run.”

“Oh! Right.” Carter swallowed and hurried out the door after him into the sunlight.

* * *

Elisa Eastbourne rolled the stroller over the dusty road between the landing pad and Tethra, and could not help smiling. This place really was exactly as Carter had described—a tiny chaotically-bright city set in the middle of a swamp. The mountains in the distance were crystal clear against the sky, a beautiful sight, and she could smell the street food from here.

“We see Daddy?” Alanna piped up from the stroller. Elisa could just see the glint of her brown hair in the sunlight under the mosquito netting.

“Yes, he said he’d meet us at the landing pad, but he doesn’t know we came early. Shhh, it’s a surprise.” Elisa smiled. “And his assistant—I think it’s his assistant—Barnabas said we were supposed to come to his new business.”

“We see new city?” Samuel asked.

“Aren’t you even a little tired from the trip?”

“No.”

She had really walked into that one, Elisa reflected. She was still getting used to the twins being toddlers.

“Well, I want a nap,” she told them. “So we’ll all lie down for a bit once we’ve seen Daddy again.”

Once they reached the city they pushed their way through the crowded streets, and Elisa frowned down one street at a glimpse of a compound that looked totally destroyed. It was, in fact, vaguely smoking. No one seemed worried about it, though, so she supposed it wasn’t dangerous.

They found the bar before too much longer and Elisa pushed the stroller inside.

Any plans she’d had for a well-executed surprise went right out the window when the twins unzipped the mosquito netting and piled out to run full-speed across the bar.

“DADDY!”

Carter spun around in surprise. “Alanna! Samuel!” He looked up and his smile widened to see his wife. “Elisa,” he said, his eyes locked on hers as the twins ran full speed into him and he folded them into his arms. “I missed you! What do you think of Tethra?”

“I love it,” Elisa said frankly. She’d always had what her mother and father had called ‘a healthy dose of wanderlust,’ and none of her family had been surprised when she had signed on with Bethany Anne. This was exactly the sort of place she’d dreamed of visiting. Other people could have their 5-star resorts and fancy dinners. She wanted to see the whole universe.

Carter came to kiss her. “I’m glad you like it,” he said, still grinning. “What do you think of the bar?”

“I can’t believe you got this up and running in three weeks!”

“Uh, I didn’t, actually. It’s a long story. I’ll introduce you to the former owner at some point.”

“Oh, is that Barnabas?”

“Barnabas? No, he’s Ranger One. Wait, how do you know Barnabas?” Carter stared at her.

“He’s how I knew where the bar was, silly! I thought he was your assistant.”

“Oh. No.” Carter looked around. “In fact, I didn’t know he was still—”

“Here?” Barnabas finished. He deposited a crate of glass bottles behind the bar. “Just finishing up a few things, and wanted to stay to meet your family. Elisa, it’s so good to meet you.” He came over to shake her hand. “Your husband has already quite endeared himself to the locals. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really do have to go for now, but I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.” He slipped around them to the door, then turned back. “Oh, Carter—I brought up one of your crates of Coke. I think the bottling mechanism must be faulty or something. It just doesn’t taste...right.”

He gave Carter a smile that lingered just a moment too long, then disappeared into the crowds.

“Oh, God,” Carter managed to say in a strangled voice.

* * *

Back on the Shinigami, Barnabas hung his coat neatly on one of the hooks and went to the bridge to look over the schematics and maps Shinigami had printed out. She teased him relentlessly for using paper, but he was still old-fashioned enough to prefer it. There were several more towns already in existence, and a few people trying to establish their own company towns all over the planet. Making High Tortuga safe was going to be a long and involved job.

Barnabas was looking forward to it. He rolled up his sleeves neatly and set to work.

“Shinigami, where’s Gar?”

“Doing some research on the planet Luvendan. He believes part of the company may have been based there, and he was as intrigued by my questions on its history as I am.”

“Mmm. Well, let me know what you two come up with. On both fronts, I guess.” He looked up at one of the cameras. “I don’t suppose you have time for a game of chess?”

“Old man, I can play a game of chess and do all my work. You’re the one who needs to make time.”

“Oh, really?” Barnabas smiled at her. “Well, then, let’s play now, shall we?” He walked over to the board.

“If you insist on getting beaten, I suppose I could oblige you.” Shinigami projected a holographic version of herself. “One moment. Why isn’t the board coming on?”

“Sometimes you need to turn on electronics to make them work.”

“Was that a threat?”

“Of course not. Don’t be so high-strung.” Barnabas thumped the board and smiled as it turned on. “See? It’s working now.”

“Hrm. I’ll have you know I’ve never had any other troubles with equipment on this ship.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” Barnabas settled back in his seat and pressed a tiny button on the side of his watch. Unbeknownst to Shinigami, a corresponding chip on the bottom of the chess board, installed just a day ago during a ‘camera malfunction,’ began to run its subroutines. The board Shinigami saw through her cameras would diverge from the board as it actually was.

He hoped this would be an important lesson in perspective and data sources.

Barnabas wondered how long it would take her to realize it. His lips twitched as he nodded to her avatar. “Would you like the first move?”

FINIS

Author’s Notes - Natalie Grey

A couple of years ago I stumbled across the Kurtherian Gambit Universe, and...well, WOW. It’s been an amazing time since then—getting to delve into the world with Bellatrix and then continue with Challenges and the Trials & Tribulations series (book 3 is coming out June 21st!).

Those of you who have read Trials & Tribulations as well as Challenges will remember Barnabas as being very, very sneaky. It’s my favorite of his qualities, and one of the most interesting, really. Barnabas is a character of opposites, and often the different sides struggle against each other.

One thing has no opposite, however: his sense of Justice. Barnabas is devoted to doing what is right, and no matter the means, nothing will stand in his way. I love that about him (and I love his friendship with Shinigami).

I want to thank Michael for continuing to allow me to be a part of the KGU, thank the readers for being absolutely amazing, and also to give a special shout-out to the beta team, Kim, Sandy, Jim, and Sam. On the production team, Lynne, Steve, and the JIT group did some above-and-beyond work to help me smooth out a few aspects of lore and make this a nice, clean, typo-free read for everyone else! Furthermore, as you can see, Jeff made a fantastic cover, and Natale did some wonderful behind the scenes work to make this all come together. A round of applause, please!

I can’t wait to show you more in Barnabas’s world. Happy reading!

-Nat

Author Notes - Michael Anderle

May 21, 2018

First, THANK YOU for not only reading this story, but these notes as well!

With this book I have accomplished a goal (or maybe I should call it a desire more than a goal) with Natalie (whose real name is <redacted>.) I was looking at having something ghost-written, sort of.

You see, I was speaking with Natalie over a year ago, I think, to see if she wanted to either take income for writing the book or collaboration income, and at the time, for personal reasons, she chose payment up front. I can’t blame her, since she had NO idea at the time whether this Universe would make her any money, and she was a big piece of the income for her family.

However, I didn’t let that deter me.

Nope, I chose to share with Natalie the sales figures for the books for three to four months so that she could (I hoped, boy did I hope) make a choice to come back into the Kurtherian Gambit Universe as a collaborator. Plus, I setup a pen name for her so that she could get name recognition when the time was right to come back into the Universe and play again.

She might have written these stories a little faster, but she had a baby in the middle of all of this. I guess that’s a pretty good reason to slow down the writing just a little.

Who types and writes books when they are working with babies? Perhaps Natalie can, but I know I can’t.

When she came back “into the fold” (like the lost sheep I pretend she was…not that she was…in fact she released a whole trilogy as Natalie Grey, but let me pretend, ok?) Anyway, when Natalie came back and we spoke, I was mentioning that I had the big ‘explosion’ of character directions that was going to take place as Bethany Anne’s last book in The Kurtherian Gambit occurred and where I wanted to take Barnabas.

Basically “out there!”

Somewhere.

I pitched her doing THIS series and her voice lit up (no, really. If you ever speak with Natalie you CAN hear her voice light up over the phone, I promise!) Her style is naturally INTENSE, so Barnabas being a bit of a hardass and yet having to figure out how to work with an AI who was imprinted with Baba Yaga seemed JUST like the type of story she would do well with.

And now you have this first story in your hands.

I hope you enjoyed it, and if you would like to read any of Natalie’s OTHER stories, just go here:

https://www.amazon.com/Natalie-Grey/e/B01MYG7K8P/

If you would like to see other Kurtherian Gambit books try this link:

Kurtherian Gambit Books at Amazon

As always, every author is boosted by your support in reading our books, reviewing our books, and when you talk with fellow book lovers, telling them about your favorite authors (and BOOKS!) ;-)

Ad Aeternitatem and have a blessed day,

Michael Anderle

Sentinel

Vigilante Chronicles Book 2

Chapter One

“That is my offer. Take it or leave it.” The hooded figure in the video frame steepled his fingers and leaned back.

Torcellan, and male. Beyond that Rald could not tell anything about this person, up to and including how the male had known to contact him. Rald didn’t like that on principle. He was Shrillexian, and an offer of vengeance promised violence with a purpose.

He couldn’t ask for more on that front, but he didn’t like not knowing the people who gave him information—not when his entire operation hinged on that information. Especially when it was information he should have had to pay for. There were clearly strings attached.

He flexed and clenched his fingers. Three weeks ago, an old friend on Devon had called in his allies. Years ago they had been in business together, had flown on the same ship—even managed to be co-captains without too many problems. It had been a great partnership—until Jutkelon had signed on with a mercenary syndicate.

Rald had decided to remain on his own, but Jutkelon got a steadier stream of contracts through the syndicate. He had funds saved for when he decided to build his base on Devon—but in return, he had to pay part of his take to the syndicate.

Rald had never gone for that sort of thing. No one told him what to do.

Still, he didn’t bear Jutkelon any ill will. They even saw each other occasionally, since Rald’s team often took contracts to guard the transit and cargo ships traveling to and from the planet.

Rald had been out of contact on an urgent mission when Jutkelon had sent out the call for backup. He’d sent a message back as soon as he’d seen Jutkelon’s and received only silence in return.

He had begrudgingly contacted the syndicate to get the details. Three fully-crewed, fully-armed ships had been sent to take down someone who was meddling in their business.

They’d failed miserably.

Jutkelon was dead, those three ships had never come back, and when Rald had asked around to see why, all anyone would tell him was that the planet Devon was forbidden. Further questioning had uncovered that Devon had been renamed ‘High Tortuga’ and that it was now under the control of Queen Bethany Anne, formerly of the Etheric Empire.

Like hell it did. Who did they think they were? They had come out of nowhere, these humans, flashing tech that was too good to be true, and started flinging rules around as though they owned the galaxy.

High Tortuga—like they could just rename an entire planet!

Rald didn’t really care if the humans wanted to dress up in fancy clothes and call themselves kings. Hell, if their money was good enough and they offered enough fights, he’d sign right up and call them “Your Supreme Majesty” or whatever they wanted. Rich people got weird after a while but they were the ones who kept him in food and fights, so he had learned to let the weirdness go.

It was the way of the world, after all. If you were strong enough, you took what you wanted. Rald helped people who did that, and if he didn’t, someone else would. There was no use complaining about it.

But now these humans were turning the established order on its head. They hadn’t taken over the businesses completely, but instead had laid down the law with the owners and told them what they could and couldn’t do.

Rald didn’t care for that, especially when they just went and killed the people who didn’t comply.

So he’d made himself a promise to find whoever had done that to Jutkelon and make them hurt. He’d asked around at the syndicate, but no one seemed to know anything—until this mysterious Torcellan had called out of the blue and offered information.

All Rald had to do was break his only rule and join something called the ‘Yennai Corporation.’ He’d pay the share of his take and pass along information, and in return they would give him any information they found on the human who had killed Jutkelon and their ships would back him up if he cornered the bastard. As a gesture of goodwill, they had even given Rald a possible name for the human’s ship—Shinigami. The information was unconfirmed, but it was more than Rald had been able to find on his own.

Take it or leave it.

He’d take it, Rald decided. He had to. Jutkelon had asked for his help but he hadn’t come through…and now Jutkelon was dead. Some son of a Hieten had gone in there and murdered his friend, and Rald owed it to him to return the favor.

He could figure out who the Torcellan was later. In the meantime, he was going to get even with whoever had done this—but if they’d taken out three ships he was going to need the corporation’s help, as much as he hated to admit it.

He nodded at the figure on the screen. “I’ll take it. I’ll be in contact when I get to Devon.”

“Ah. For that, you will need my help. Ships must be cleared to land there.” Rald got the impression the Torcellan was smiling. “There is a berth for you on the merchant ship Ulys. You’ll be registered as a worker on the ship. I’ve sent the itinerary. Meet it at Gammon.”

The screen winked off and Rald frowned. He read the instructions that had just come through and frowned harder. No weaponry? This had to be a fucking joke.

Rald wasn’t laughing, and by the time he was done with the humans they wouldn’t be either. As far as he was concerned, anyone and everyone who’d had anything to do with Jutkelon’s death was fair game.

* * *

Carter wiped his hands on a dishtowel and backed out of the kitchen at Aebura’s as he called instructions to Oemuga, his new assistant.

“And make sure they don’t shortchange you on the fruit!” The last piece of advice was probably lost in the clatter of cooking and juice-pressing.

He shook his head. Oemuga was a good assistant, but he needed to get better at bargaining. Ubuara always looked for accord when they were making deals, which meant they were likely to compromise too much. The same was true of the Ubuara he was training to be bartenders.

He’d have to ask Aebura how she’d learned to be so shrewd in business. Maybe she could teach Oemuga and the others. She’d left Tethra a few weeks ago after signing over her bar to Carter so she could work in the newly-liberated mining town.

Carter whistled, his spirits lifting at the thought of being able to talk to her again. Aebura always cheered him up. She had such a simple, happy outlook on life: gathering friends together was good, and worrying about the future was bad. She also had a sense of humor that always startled him, and he was grateful to count her amongst his friends.

He was over by the bar getting himself a cup of water when he noticed one of the patrons and stopped dead. “Barnabas! I thought you’d left.”

“I was going to,” Barnabas told him. “But then I figured I’d get one last glass of juice.” He held up his glass with a mournful look. “We haven’t been able to synthesize it yet.”

“And I,” a young woman with black hair interrupted, “came here expecting to find him doing drugs, and found out that ‘juice’ actually means juice.”

“Carter, may I introduce Tabitha?” Barnabas requested politely. “Tabitha, Carter runs this bar. He helped us against the mine owner a few weeks back. Carter, Tabitha is—”

“Ranger Two.” Carter breathed. He had to work to keep from gawping like a fish, and judging by Tabitha’s expression he wasn’t doing too well.

“I knew this new armor looked good.” She snickered. “It really makes my ass look—”

“He’s impressed by your record of service to Bethany Anne,” Barnabas told her in a pained tone. “He can’t see your… You know what, never mind.” To Carter he added, “Also, we really do need to find a different term. We aren’t ‘Ranger One’ and ‘Ranger Two’ anymore.”

“Details.” Tabitha waved her hand to dismiss the problem of a name and downed the last of her Coke. “You know what this place needs? Burgers.”

“We’re working on that, actually.” Carter grabbed a menu. “Now, if you want just some random fried stuff—fries, cheese curds….”

“Cheese curds?”

“I grew up in the Midwest. Trust me, they’re good. We’re still waiting on artificial production for the beef, though, so no burgers worth eating yet. We do have this kind of sausage sandwich thing.”

“Like choripan?” Tabitha demanded. When she saw Carter’s confused look, she flapped a hand. “Never mind. Bring me one, though.”

“You’re not being very polite,” Barnabas chided.

“There’s no time to be polite. I’m hungry.”

“So help me, if you are rude to people here, I will not take you anywhere else.” Barnabas glared at her.

“Fine.” Tabitha threw a look at Barnabas. She turned back to Carter with her hands clasped in front of her, and her head tilted to the side. “Can you please bring me a sausage sandwich? I’m so hungry. I’ve been craving choripan for years because I stupidly forgot to steal a street cart as we left Earth. And a vendor.”

She turned back to Barnabas. “There, was that polite enough to get me fed?”

Barnabas sighed and touched a hand to his forehead to rub the spot where the headache Tabitha gave him always began.

Carter grinned as soon as his back was to the Rangers. He pushed the door open into the kitchen and shouted Tabitha’s order to the cook. Qiliax had come here to help after the mines were freed. Like most of the former guards there, she was a Brakalon. She barely fit in the kitchen, spending most of her day hunched over, but her food was fantastic.

She was such a good cook that he couldn’t figure out why she’d ever been a guard, but she only shrugged when he asked and told him that no one hired a Brakalon for anything except hitting things very hard. Apparently, Carter was the first one who hadn’t laughed at her when she’d asked him if she could try out as his cook.

Their loss, Carter’s gain.

Between her cooking and Aebura’s established group of regulars business was humming along, although he joked with Barnabas that half their profit margin so far was Barnabas’ insane consumption of hakoj juice.

“I’ll have a crate of juice ready for you by the time you leave,” he told Barnabas when he got back to the front. “If you’re going off to save the universe you really should have refreshments on board.”

“Just make sure you don’t give me any of that spoiled batch of Coke,” Barnabas teased Carter wickedly. “It was really tragic,” he told Tabitha. “He came here with this plan to run a bar, and he’d handle producing Coke, right? Well, his first batch just went way wrong. I think it’s something about the water here. Anyway, he’s figured out the filtration now and everything’s better.”

Barnabas took one look at Carter’s deer-in-the-headlights expression and snorted. He was well aware that Carter had been producing Pepsi on the sly, and there was nothing he liked more than teasing Carter about it.

Tabitha looked back and forth between them, but a few seconds later the sandwich appeared in the little window next to the bar and all her attention turned to the food.

“Ohhhh, that smells so good.” She grinned at Carter when he handed it over. She snatched it up and took a bite before the plate had even hit the bar. “Thankff. Oh man, thif taftef fo good.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Barnabas told her.

“Wha, la vif?

Barnabas dropped his head into his hands in defeat and Carter tried to stifle his snort of laughter. “So, where’s Gar?” he asked to distract Barnabas before he brought up Carter’s Coke snafu again.

“Ah.” Barnabas looked up again. He was studiously avoiding the sight of Tabitha eating. She was clearly playing up all the smacking sounds, looking over at him with a grin every couple of bites. “He’s on the ship, getting prepared for upgrades.”

“Upgrades?”

“Povvoc,” Tabitha clarified around a mouthful of sandwich.

“What?”

“Pod-doc.” Barnabas looked like he was going to have an aneurysm. “She said ‘Pod-doc.’ They allow for certain changes to physiology. Now, he hasn’t yet been cleared for those changes—”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, Shinigami has to learn more about his species before she just starts changing things around. There wasn’t much about Luvendi in our databases. She’s working with TOM to figure out what sort of upgrades would even be useful and make sure we don’t mess anything up, especially in terms of cognition. Physical issues are pretty easily fixed, but once the mind goes…” Barnabas gave Carter a meaningful look. “But part of it is certainly that he hasn’t fully proven himself to me. Before I allow him to take advantage of some of the best of our technology, I want to make sure he’s not going to have another change of heart once he has the power the upgrades will give him.”

Carter nodded in approval. Gar had helped immensely when Barnabas liberated the mines. In fact, Gar had willingly sacrificed himself to kill Lan, his former employer. The fact that he hadn’t died was entirely due to the advanced tech available on the Shinigami.

Still, before he had come over to the side of Justice Gar had done some terrible things under Lan’s orders. It made good sense to Carter that Barnabas wanted to keep an eye on Gar for a bit longer before making him any more dangerous.

Tabitha, meanwhile, finished licking off her fingers and smacked her lips. “That was amazing. I’m going to be back. Probably every day. You know what? Just have a sandwich waiting for me around this time. I’ll keep a tab open.”

“Are you planning to break mid-mission each day to come get a sandwich?” Barnabas inquired. He looked like he was trying not to laugh.

“I think I could get Bethany Anne to go for that. She appreciates the important things in life.”

“She does,” Barnabas agreed. “Honor, duty, Justice…and sandwiches, apparently.”

Tabitha nodded seriously as she wiped her fingers on her napkin and threw it onto the empty plate before getting up. “Bye, Big B.” She waved cheerfully to Carter, planted a kiss on Barnabas’ cheek—he only sighed at this—and disappeared into the street, a surprisingly short figure all in black.

Barnabas smiled at Carter’s expression. “Not what you expected from Ranger Two?”

Carter held a hand up at head height. “I thought…you know, taller? And serious, maybe. I mean, she’s done some insane shit if even half of the stories are true. Sorry for swearing,” he added hastily.

Barnabas only chuckled. “She definitely has done some…well, impressive things, shall we say. You could not ask for a more loyal ally. Of course, she embodies the term ‘chaotic neutral.’ But I’ve come to appreciate that chaos over the years, even if she is a bad influence on Shinigami. Probably on me, too.” He set down his glass with a sigh. “Say hello to Elisa and the kids for me. And if you ever need help, do feel free to call on either Tabitha or me. I’ll be back when I can.”

“Where are you going?” Carter asked curiously. He had known for a while that Barnabas intended to head off-planet, but so far he hadn’t told Carter anything about where or why.

“I’m not exactly sure.” Barnabas flashed Carter a smile full of teeth that were a lot sharper than humans usually had. “I’ll be on the lookout for the people who came to Lan’s aid. There are a lot of people out there who target planets like High Tortuga because they think no one’s protecting them. My mission has always been to make people like that…reconsider their course of action.”

Carter considered pointing out that people had to be alive in order to reconsider things, but decided not to say anything at all. He waved as Barnabas disappeared, then he cleaned the glass with a shake of his head.

Barnabas had been a stalwart ally and a good friend, and he was surprisingly indulgent with Carter’s twins, Alanna and Samuel.

But Carter would never, ever want to get on his bad side.

* * *

On the Shinigami, Gar opened his eyes as the Pod-doc hissed open. He sat up, squinting in the bright lights. His head ached fiercely.

“Any progress?”

“Yes.” Shinigami’s voice came from the speakers nearby. “Your physiology is quite interesting. Not only are your bones more brittle than those of other species, your skeletal structure is not well suited to walking on land. It supports the theory that the Luvendi did indeed evolve from marine mammals, even if it wasn’t on Luvendan.”

Gar nodded as he got dressed. The history of the Luvendi was shrouded in mystery. His people now lived in submerged towers in the oceans that covered the planet Luvendan, but no one could remember how and when the towers had been built.

It was a mystery that quite intrigued Shinigami.

“Barnabas is back,” Shinigami reported. “He asks that you join him in the planning room.”

“Of course.” Gar felt the usual thrill of worry he got when he anticipated seeing Barnabas, although he was aware that he was in no danger as long as he did not do anything immoral or unjust. He was even more aware of the fact that Barnabas had very high standards

And that he was very, very dangerous.

Since Barnabas was back now, Gar assumed he had picked a place for them to go first in their search for Lan’s allies. He adjusted his robes as he walked down the hallways, and found himself shaking his head.

Those poor bastards had no idea what was coming.

Chapter Two

Barnabas waited in the planning room. True to form, he was making notes in pen on the printouts of the maps and schematics that he’d gathered for their mission. The pen was a concession he had made to Shinigami when he had pulled out a pencil and she had asked why he wanted her to have to filter graphite particles and sawdust out of the air.

He preferred to do things with paper rather than on computer screens. Something about writing and drawing cleared his mind, perhaps a legacy of his days spent among the painstakingly illuminated handwritten texts in the monastery.

It amused everyone else to poke fun at it.

When Gar came into the room Barnabas looked up with interest. The Luvendi seemed more subdued than usual, but he offered no reason for this so Barnabas decided to let it be for the moment. Gar had certainly had serious and unpleasant things to consider while he atoned for his past actions, and Barnabas believed that moral wrestling bouts were best done on one’s own. He would only step in if he were asked to do so or if he sensed a problem.

“We have our first stop,” Barnabas told the Luvendi. He tapped on a star chart and pulled out a set of schematics. “Virtue Station, which was called something unpronounceable by humans in the original language so I translated.”

Gar frowned at the schematics and shrugged. His own path off the planet Luvendan had involved very few stops along the way, and in any case, there were so many planets and stations that no one could hope to know all of them.

“This is the source of the mercenaries Jutkelon summoned?” Gar asked. He was learning to speak English and his speech had gradually grown more formal to match Barnabas’, something Shinigami found deeply amusing.

“Not precisely.” Barnabas frowned. “All Shinigami could find was that one of those ships had docked at Virtue relatively recently. It could have been nothing more than a stop to refuel or run some unrelated errand. It is likely there is actually nothing here.”

“There is not nothing,” Shinigami countered. “It’s an out-of-the-way station frequented by mercenaries, so there’s got to be something for you to get offended about.”

Barnabas looked up at the speakers. “I do not ‘get offended,’ as you put it. I simply take issue with matters of injustice.”

“Yes, you talk very politely while you determine who’s pissed you off, then you start ripping spines out. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own two… Well, sensed it with my… You know what, let’s just go with ‘seeing’ as the verb.”

“Indeed.” Barnabas returned to his maps.

“How can I help?” Gar asked when he was sure Shinigami and Barnabas were done trading insults. He had already learned not to get in the middle of those conversations. There had been one the other day about a game of chess that had resulted in increasingly ridiculous threats he was fairly sure were jokes.

Fairly sure.

He had, however, barely made it out of the way of a thrown chair and several books, and had since made it a personal rule not to be in the same room with them when they played chess. In fact, he would keep at least one airlock-safe door between him and them.

Barnabas stared at the plans with his arms crossed. “I had thought you would come onto the station with me.” His brow furrowed in thought as he scanned the schematics. “There is a chance, however slight, that someone will recognize me. If you stay separated from me and are careful about who sees you getting off the ship we’ll have an extra pair of eyes.” He looked at Gar and his blue eyes bored right into the Luvendi. “Are you up for that?”

Gar wasn’t entirely sure what the question meant. Was Barnabas asking whether he felt safe enough to come onto the station, or whether he believed he was ready to be a part of one of Barnabas’ operations?

When Gar had helped Barnabas to free the workers in Lan’s mine, he had been acting partly out of self-interest. He knew that if he failed to do the right thing Barnabas would kill him. In fact, Gar had believed that Barnabas would let him die when Lan shot him. At the time, he had accepted that as a fitting punishment for his transgressions.

Gar had spent the last few weeks since Barnabas had saved his life thinking about what he wanted to do with his unexpected extension. He had learned the important lesson that some things were worth standing up for no matter the risk, and that he could no longer ignore the voice in his head that told him to do the right thing.

Those sorts of revelations tended to change one’s outlook considerably.

He hadn’t come to any firm decisions about his next steps, but he did know that Barnabas would be going after injustice and doing the right thing. Until Gar figured everything out for himself, he would help Barnabas.

He was not foolish enough to think he’d be given a critical role in any of Barnabas’ plans. He still had a lot to prove, after all. But he had to start somewhere.

“I’ll go to the station,” he told him. “I want to help however I can.”

“Good.” Barnabas nodded without commenting on any of the turmoil he had sensed in Gar’s thoughts and tapped the schematics in front of him. “I’m intending to go here. It’s a bar—or at least it should be one—a few floors above the main level. I should be able to hear something that will lead me to more information. Meanwhile, you’ll go here. It’s on the main level and there will be less shady stuff going on—”

“Not much less,” Shinigami opined. “This place reeks of money laundering. The people in the banks like to dress up, but that doesn’t make ‘em classy.”

“Don’t gamble,” Barnabas ordered Gar. “And don’t look at anyone oddly. And don’t… You know what, you go to the first bar. I’ll stay on the main level.”

A raspy chuckle came from the speakers. “Aww, yeah. You’re gonna punch some bankers, aren’t you?”

“I most certainly am not.” Barnabas aimed his rebuke in the direction of one of Shinigami’s speakers. “Unless they deserve it,” he added under his breath.

“That’s what I thought.” She sounded smug. “Let me know if you want any backup.”

“Missiles on a station? Really?”

“I also have the flamethrower, remember.”

“We have not established that.”

“No, because you refuse to let me test it.”

Barnabas took a deep breath and prayed for patience. “What you’re looking for,” he told Gar pointedly, “is anyone advertising protection, weaponry, or guard services—that sort of thing. Mention that Jutkelon was a contact and referred you to them. If they’re part of whatever group he called on, that will get you in. If not, pretend it was a misunderstanding. Mercenaries generally rely on very unsubtle threats, but they don’t like to be known for killing potential clients. As long as you respond appropriately you should be fine.”

Gar swallowed. Being a Luvendi, he was remarkably unsuited to combat. His bones were brittle enough that he could not perform manual labor, serve as a guard, or even risk walking along a well-traveled thoroughfare where he would be jostled too often.

It was one of the main reasons the Luvendi were so little-known, and even then only in areas of work such as information brokering or banking. He would suggest working on the main floor, if not for the fact that Barnabas was right—those who did money laundering were not only extremely dangerous in these out-of-the-way stations, they took offense to almost everything.

In contrast, those who wanted to sell their services as guards might be physically intimidating, but could usually be mollified by the promise of money. The universe was strange sometimes.

“Don’t worry,” Shinigami told him. “I’ve got your back if you need it.”

“Thank you,” Gar murmured. He didn’t say it, but he was fairly sure it would be better not to call on Shinigami unless he was in dire need. He could just imagine the sort of chaos she would find ‘helpful.’ The bar he was intending to sit in might be rubble by the time she was done.

From Barnabas’ expression, he suspected the same thing.

“Do we know anything about these people?” Gar asked him.

“Not much, unfortunately. It is frustrating.” Barnabas sighed. “Jutkelon was clearly part of some larger…syndicate, maybe? Consortium? Or perhaps he simply had favors owed him. Regardless, he was able to call on three armed ships. Their allies, whoever they may be, are likely wondering what happened to them. I could hope of course that those were three totally unrelated captains, all of whom had only one ship and no other connections, but…”

“But?” Gar asked.

Barnabas’ mouth took a wry twist. “I’ve been alive long enough to know that things almost never work out quite so neatly. I’ll be looking for anything I can find in the banking part of the station about how these people stored and processed their money, as well as where they got their supplies. Things like munitions might lead us back to a larger group. It might also be a complete mess with too many leads to follow.”

Shinigami snickered. “Look at it this way—you get to kill more bad guys.”

“That isn’t precisely my goal.”

“Of course it is. You seek out injustice. There’s always injustice and the people perpetrating it almost never back down, ergo, you have to kill them. This gives you a good place to start, whereas otherwise your choices would amount to an embarrassment of riches. Yeah, that’s right—I can talk all flowery, too.”

Barnabas looked at the speakers. “Are you done?”

“Not quite. Tabitha told me to tell you that your new hat will make you look like an idiot.”

Barnabas’ face settled into the pleasant smile Gar had learned to fear more than any frown. “You let her into my rooms?”

“Not so much let her as… Well, yes. Yes, I did. You weren’t listening to me about how stupid it looked and I wanted her opinion.”

There was a dangerous pause, then Barnabas, to Gar’s surprise, started laughing.

It was a surprise to Barnabas as well. Part of him took it as a very bad sign that he could find something like this funny. After all, Shinigami had invaded his privacy and then insulted him publicly over a matter of aesthetic taste. He should probably be worried by the fact that he had spent enough time around Tabitha to be amused by that.

On the other hand, the mental image of Tabitha going through his wardrobe and commenting dismissively on things was incredibly funny, and it gave him an idea.

“I don’t suppose she tried on the hat?”

Shinigami paused. “She did,” the AI replied cautiously after a moment.

“And I don’t suppose you have pictures of that?”

Another pause. “I do.”

“Oh, this is going to be so good.” Barnabas rubbed his hands together. “So good. I’m going to need those pictures.”

“What are you going to do with them?” Gar couldn’t help but be curious.

“Do the Luvendi have anything in the way of holiday greeting cards?”

“No?” Gar looked at the speaker from which he could now hear the AI laughing hysterically. “What’s a holiday?”

“You don’t have holidays and you don’t sing. What do people do with their time on Luvendan?”

“Mostly we meditate.”

“A whole planet full of monks,” Barnabas muttered to Shinigami. “Lord help us.”

Shinigami snickered. “And you are one to talk?”

“I am the only one on this ship who knows exactly how boring that would be. Well, I suppose Gar does. Never mind. In any case, Gar, in a few months I am going to send a greeting card to Tabitha’s acquaintances to wish them a happy and prosperous New Year with a picture of her in that hat.”

“She’s going to kill you,” Shinigami predicted.

“Mmm. She’s welcome to try. How long is it until Christmas?”

“More than half a year.”

“She’ll have forgotten by then,” Gar told Barnabas.

“That’s what I’m counting on.” Barnabas was grinning. “There’s a saying on Earth, ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’”

Gar frowned, trying to interpret the phrase. Since meeting Barnabas he had begun to gather a mental list of phrases that made very little sense to him. There were already quite a few.

“Well, if everyone’s clear on the plan, I think we can head out.” Barnabas looked up at Shinigami’s cameras. “As Bobcat would say, ‘Punch it.’”

Another idiom. Gar resisted the urge to groan. He was never going to figure out this language.

* * *

“Their engines are warming up!” Tik’ta swiveled her chair to look at her captain.

As usual, she had to work not to laugh. He was pacing the bridge with his hands behind his back. It was an exaggerated gesture meant to emphasize how serious he was, and how impressive it was that he was waiting patiently even though he felt great urgency about…something.

Tik’ta was willing to bet there was no particular matter on his mind. Klafk’tin was a man who clearly aspired to greatness and wanted the Hieto to rise to prominence in the universe, but had yet to demonstrate any hint of achieving his desires.

This job, though... Even Tik’ta had to admit that this job might make the captain’s name. He’d found an incredible ship floating around this backwater planet. Its engines were a dream and its weaponry appeared to be top notch, but it didn’t seem to have more than a skeleton crew.

In short, it was a perfect target.

“Follow it,” Klafk’tin ordered. He puffed up his chest, perhaps reveling in the greatness he would have when it was his ship. “What does it say on the prow? What is the ship’s name?”

“Shinigami, sir. It appears to be a human ship.”

“Do you have any idea how valuable it is, then? No one has been able to get their technology.” Klafk’tin was practically drooling, though he attempted to look dignified. “I’m going to be rich,” he whispered. “The next time it sets down we’ll go in and we take it.”

Chapter Three

The bars on the main level of Virtue Station were clean and orderly, with all the hallmarks of catering to the rich: decorative accents, soft music and lighting, expensive materials used in the walls and floors, and real flowers.

And, of course, the obligatory complement of armed guards who were trying not to look like what they were.

Barnabas took a seat near one of them and attempted to look unremarkable and unthreatening by their standards. He had taken care with his outfit. He was wearing a black suit and a crisp white shirt with a blue tie, which Shinigami had pointed out was clearly a vain attempt to bring out his eyes.

He had not deigned to respond to that.

He also wore a pair of slim glasses. Barnabas’ vision was perfect, but the glasses had a tiny camera embedded in each temple which would switch between true color, night vision, and infrared as he required. The cameras could swivel to face the side, or look slightly up from his line of sight so he could “look” at something else while carefully examining a target.

He pulled out a tablet and peered at the screen. To anyone else, it would show a standard news page. People often made it a point to catch up on the news when they stopped at stations, and those in the richer districts made use of the official broadcast pages rather than word of mouth.

However, Barnabas did not see the news page at all. Instead, the interaction between the tablet and the glasses gave him a view of what the camera on his earpiece saw. He was able to watch the interior of the nearby bar while he pretended to read.

Above his head, a tiny listening device made to look like an insect darted behind one of the security cameras and went into the bar. Barnabas tapped the edge of the screen to direct it to land near a likely-looking group and settled down to wait.

“Good afternoon, sir.” A Torcellan waiter in a well-tailored black tunic and pants laid down a dish of some unidentifiable vegetable and a napkin in anticipation of Barnabas’ drink order. “What may I get you?”

“Would you happen to have any fruit juice?” Barnabas asked him.

You have an addiction.

I do not. I merely enjoy the beverage.

“I’ll see what we can get you.” The waiter looked doubtful. “Do you have any preferences?”

“Hakoj,” Barnabas told him. It was the juice Aebura liked to serve. “If you don’t have that, surprise me.”

After all, it wasn’t as if any low-level poison could hurt him, since his nanocytes would easily take care of it. And to Barnabas’ knowledge, no one on this station should know enough about him to want to use a more potent poison.

Yet.

All right. He straightened his back slightly and adjusted the tablet on his crossed legs. Time to find out if these bankers have anything interesting to say. Let me know if you hear any talk related to anything you found out about those ships.

Of course. I’m already running their known crew members against a list of the patrons at these bars.

What about the banks?

The bars are the banks. You do your business while you get a drink. Come to think of it, we should make that the standard in the Federation. Deposit your money, get a drink. It’s an experience, not a transaction.

Sometimes your business acumen worries me. Just keep me updated, and we’ll see who comes to find us.

* * *

Gar made his way through Virtue Station slowly. Barnabas had told him to take his time, so he was. He paused at some of the vendors’ stalls and inspected their wares. Certain fruits and vegetables were available, types that stored easily for long distance travel in space. Most of them weren’t anyone’s favorite, but it was remarkable just how much the palate craved fresh food after living on preserved meals and nutritional paste.

The main level hadn’t had any of this. It was entirely given over to the “legitimate” and high-grossing business interests of the station—namely, banking. Gar had only seen a glimpse of it before he was shuffled off onto the other levels. The guards on the main level were careful to let through only those who looked as though they had the funds and temperament for monetary activities.

Once one got away from the main floor the station quickly came to resemble any other station Gar had ever been on. It had been built as a series of corridors, each lined with shops and apartments. Commerce, however, had spilled into the corridors, so that there was only a narrow path to walk in between the blankets and carts that lined the thoroughfares.

Gar walked carefully, trying not to bump into anyone. He knew that the Pod-doc on the Shinigami could repair any fractured bones, but he had spent a lifetime without any such resources and it would take time to unlearn his innate caution.

It was reflex to turn his body so he wouldn’t collide with other pedestrians. It was habit to walk through the least-traveled areas of the corridor.

At least the people here seemed to be accustomed to Luvendi. Many even went out of their way to avoid bumping into him, which Gar made sure to thank them for. One never knew when a kind word or a single gesture might come back in the form of desperately-needed help. He had watched Lan go through life treating the polite actions of others as no more than his due. Lan had ended up with almost no allies, and certainly no one who would speak up for him.

Gar was determined not to end up the same way, but he did wonder if this was only self-interest speaking again. At heart, he still wasn’t sure if he had the makings of a fitting ally for Barnabas—and he was afraid of what would happen if Barnabas decided he did not.

He put those thoughts aside and made his way up to the floor Barnabas had specified. As Barnabas had told him, there was a bar here. Gar approached the dingy entrance, where the two hulking Brakalon guards proceeded to shout at Gar to stand still for a weapons scan.

He complied and they let him through, but only after looking him up and down suspiciously, as if to ask what he wanted in a place like this.

The same thing everyone else here wants, Gar thought acidly. He was clearly not a person who could fight on his own, and the bar was full of people who could. It made a great deal of sense that he was here.

He went to the bar to buy a drink first. This allowed him to see the layout of the bar and get a feel for the conversation around him, and it made sure that he wouldn’t get the evil eye from the bartender. Businesses didn’t like it when you loitered.

Even before Gar’s drink arrived he knew his target. There were plenty of shadowed alcoves in this bar, and two Shrillexians had walked by him on their way to one, growling to one another about what kind of ship could take on three.

As Barnabas would say, “Bingo!”

Gar still needed to figure out the origin of the phrase, since every time he searched the results were a strange game with number-filled squares. Clearly, his dictionary was broken. He’d have to talk to Shinigami about that.

In the meantime, he looped around the bar and took a circuitous route toward the alcove where the two Shrillexians were now sitting. Unfortunately, the acoustics of the bar had been well-designed so that people inside the alcoves could speak with relative privacy.

Cursing, Gar eased himself forward, trying to catch even a snippet of conversation—

“What do you want, spy?” The words came from behind him, and they came with the distinctive sound of a Shrillexian voice.

His blood seemed to turn to ice. Gar turned and looked at the Shrillexian, then made a show of looking in the alcove. He knew what had happened, though. He thought he’d been stealthy but all the while they’d known he was there and they’d circled around behind him.

He was terrible at this.

There was only one thing for it, and that was to act well enough that they didn’t shoot him right here. “Are you…” He made a show of trying to pronounce a name but finally settled for, “The Shrillexian I’ve been hearing about? The mercenary. They say you always complete your jobs?”

It was a gamble, and a dangerous bluff, but Gar had chosen his lie well. The Shrillexian gave a dangerous smile and puffed his chest out a bit.

“I am Fedden, yes.”

“Fedden!” Gar said the name as if he’d been reminded of it. “Yes. Look, I really need your help. A contact suggested you to me. I wasn’t sure you’d talk to me, but if you’re free to take a job…”

His heart was pounding. If Fedden took offense to anything he said, Gar could be well and truly dead by the time Barnabas got there to help. Even the Shinigami’s medical Pods wouldn’t be able to help with that.

But Fedden gave a sharp-toothed smile and gestured to the booth. “Tell me about your problem and I’ll tell you if I’m available.”

* * *

Well, this is interesting, Shinigami commented.

Barnabas jumped. His video feed of the two bankers had been interrupted by a view from Gar’s perspective as he spoke to two Shrillexians.

Shinigami, what am I looking at?

While Gar was under, I decided to install a chip in what I was fairly sure was his audio-visual processing center. He took to it remarkably well.

You mean that he did not immediately drop dead.

Yes, that.

And now we’re spying on him.

Right again.

That was unethical.

Shinigami said nothing, but Barnabas had the impression that she would be rolling her eyes if she were human. At his elbow, the waiter appeared once more with an apologetic expression.

“I’m very sorry, sir. It appears we have no hakoj juice. However, the bartender sent along this cocktail with his compliments.”

“Thank you very much,” Barnabas told him. He made a show of tipping the man an extravagant amount, knowing that several people would notice the money and want to speak to him soon.

When the waiter had gone, after a very deep bow and profuse thanks, Barnabas took a sip of the drink. Shinigami, can you analyze this for me, please?

Some preserved fruit juices, sweeteners, and of course, alcohol. It looks like the suspension facilitates a very slow release into your bloodstream.

So you get drunk without noticing it?

Pretty much. What’s it like to get drunk?

Well, it inhibits cognitive processing, so if you’re curious, I could just whack one of your servers with a mallet and we can see what that does. Or perhaps just switch a bunch of connections around at random.

Shinigami radiated silent horror.

Believe it or not, Barnabas told her, it’s quite fun.

Are you sure? It doesn’t sound like fun.

Perhaps it’s an acquired taste. Barnabas took another sip and sensed the nanocytes swinging into action. He certainly wasn’t going to get drunk, not with the settings he’d given himself. His body neutralized all poisons, alcohol included. Back to Gar. I would rather not spy on his thoughts unless it’s necessary.

First, you always think it’s necessary. Second, this isn’t about his thoughts, it’s about his actions. Your whole purpose in bringing him was to determine whether he is a potential ally or a self-centered douche-canoe.

Tabitha again?

She also suggested “cock-monkey,” just as a general term—not specifically about Gar. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to use it.

Keep me posted. Barnabas settled back in his seat. And you’ve made your point. Let’s see what Gar does when he doesn’t know we’re watching.

Right. Also, heads up—there’s a munitions dealer in the bank who might be connected to the mercenary ships. I’m trying to get into his accounts now.

Excellent. Barnabas gave a satisfied smile and settled down to watch Gar’s performance.

* * *

Gar leaned on the sticky table and tried desperately to think of what he might say next. There was one gambit that might work well, of course, but it was so directly applicable to the Shrillexians’ problems that they might get suspicious.

So he embroidered the truth somewhat selectively.

“Did you hear about what happened on Devon recently?

They exchanged a look. He definitely had their attention, but Fedden made a show of leaning back in his seat. “Why don’t you tell us,” the mercenary challenged.

So he was at least a little bit clever. Gar shrugged. “The company that owned the mines got bought out and they all got closed down…unless we wanted to reopen them and give the workers what they thought were good contracts.” He made a show of snorting, as if to say this was plainly ridiculous. “I tried that, but I think you can guess how it went. Now I’m looking to relocate.”

This put them off-balance, as he’d meant it to. He had essentially told them he knew all about Devon but hadn’t been directly involved in anything that had happened there recently.

“What’re you coming to us for?” Fedden asked.

“Jutkelon recommended you,” Gar bluffed. This was the dangerous part, but it seemed a worthwhile risk. “I went to him a couple of weeks ago and asked him if he’d staff a mine off-planet. He wanted to stay local, but he said maybe you’d know someone.”

Fedden and the other Shrillexian looked at one another for a moment and Gar held his breath.

Then Fedden smiled and leaned forward again. “Let’s talk specifics, then. I think you and I can deal. And I think maybe you’ll be able to help us with something else, too.”

* * *

In the docking bay, Klafk’tin strolled down the gangway of the Gruwa and looked around. Virtue Station was fairly well-staffed, but there still weren’t enough dockworkers to linger outside ships that had clearly already been unloaded and vetted.

Which meant the Shinigami—which had been here for a couple of hours now—did not merit even a single glance from the people hurrying by.

Excellent.

Klafk’tin pointed a scanner casually at the ship and gave a chuckle when it came back saying that there were no life forms aboard.

“Get ready,” he told his crew. “We need to do this quick. Let’s take that ship and get out of here before anyone’s the wiser.”

Chapter Four

I think this is going well, Barnabas remarked offhand to Shinigami. In his opinion, Gar was showing a good sense of subtlety in his dealings with Fedden.

The only problem was that Fedden clearly knew something about High Tortuga, and Barnabas wished he were there to scan the Shrillexian’s mind. If he’d gone there and had Gar come here, they’d know exactly what it was that Fedden wanted help with.

Because it looked like someone was searching for them, too.

But who?

Barnabas was just about to mention this to Shinigami when a Brakalon sat down opposite him. There was no request as to whether the seat was taken, nor did he ask if Barnabas was busy. It was clear that there would be a discussion between the two, and it would happen now.

Barnabas smiled pleasantly at him. “Good afternoon.”

The Brakalon did not acknowledge the greeting, just sat back in his chair, his posture nominally relaxed. However, it only served to show the outline of the weapon under his jacket, and he was clearly ready to move quickly if it came to a fight.

Barnabas did not move at all. The Brakalon was not making a scene, and Barnabas saw no need to make one either.

Yet.

“There’s a listening device in the bar,” the Brakalon commented. His gaze was on the people in the pretty park area of the main floor as he spoke. “Mr. Jodu wants to know if it might be yours.”

“It is,” Barnabas agreed simply.

The Brakalon turned his attention to him and narrowed his eyes.

“I’m new to Virtue Station,” Barnabas explained. “I hear any number of useful activities take place near this very bar. I need to ascertain which people here would be the correct ones to approach—and which would not.”

Shinigami snickered. I like it when you’re sneaky.

None of what I said was a lie.

You meant to make him think you’re a banker who needs illicit business done, and he probably does think that. You misled him.

I create opportunities, Barnabas clarified with great dignity. Ones that allow moral people to show their fortitude and immoral people to show their lack of it.

Mmmhmm. You know, you have your head so far up your—

There was a pause.

Shinigami?

Another pause. How busy would you say you are?

Well, he just put his hand on his gun, so I’m not exactly unengaged.

Ah. Never mind then.

What’s going on?

A minor matter, nothing to worry about. You talk to him. I’ll brief you when you get back to the ship.

Barnabas frowned mentally, but his face held a pleasant smile when he looked at the Brakalon. “Clearly, your employer is offended by my use of listening devices. Perhaps he would be prepared to provide me with accurate information regarding the trustworthiness and provenance of those inside the bar. In specific, I’ve had difficulty finding someone to provide quality munitions on a reliable schedule.” He folded his hands in his lap. “And I want to be very clear that I will take great offense if I later learn I have been given inaccurate information.”

The Brakalon froze. He had been here to threaten Barnabas. He might not run the show, but he knew—just like many large beings who beat compliance into people for a living—that when someone smaller than him did not seem afraid, there just might be a reason for it.

“I’ll speak to Mr. Jodu,” he demurred and disappeared.

Shinigami? Shinigami?

Kind of busy here. Look, I’ll, uh… I think you have an open line to get to some of those people at the bar. You really should follow up on that while you have the chance. Mustafee Boreir is the Yofu at the bar—blue skin, eyes on the side of his head? That one. He owns a munitions group that might have supplied Galagg and Jutkelon.

Excellent, thank you. Now, if you—

Gotta go!

Strange. Barnabas stood up, buttoned his suit jacket, and strolled to the bar to meet his first set of targets.

* * *

Gar’s communications unit buzzed at his wrist. When you are free, come to the docking bay but do not come within sight of the ship. -S

He frowned at the message. What was Shinigami up to?

The only thing he knew was that she had reasons for everything she did. Perhaps there was about to be a scene on the station and they needed to get out quickly. ‘When you are free’ suggested the matter wasn’t extremely urgent, however.

Gar looked up at the two Shrillexians with a smile. They had made some good progress, and he laid a card with his contact details on the table.

“There is a matter that requires my attention, I’m afraid. Funding for the mining equipment. Underwriting. I’m sure you understand.” He waved a hand to indicate everyone’s universal annoyance with the paperwork required to start a business. “Most importantly…contact me about the matter you said I might help with. If we are to do business together, a benefit to one of us is a benefit to both.”

It was a flowery sentiment that he did not entirely believe, but he was interested to see how Fedden and his second-in-command would describe their problem with Barnabas.

Because Gar was very sure that was the matter they wanted help with.

He made his way as quickly as possible to the main level, avoiding the temptation to detour down back hallways. If there was trouble, he should make it as difficult as possible for anything unfortunate to happen to him.

He was back at the docks soon, showing his ID to a very disinterested security guard. Apparently there wasn’t a fight yet, then. What was all this about?

He tapped his communications unit. “Shinigami, can we—”

It buzzed: Text only.

Gar sighed and began typing: What’s wrong?

There are several people who I believe are trying to steal the ship. They’re setting up some equipment near me and they have someone keeping watch for guards.

Gar felt a stab of alarm. Why haven’t you called Barnabas in?

He’s getting some information right now. I didn’t want to disturb him.

I really think he’d want you to tell him about this!

Fine, it’s a bet. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you’d scare them off. I don’t want to let them know I’m on board.

Gar gave a sigh. She seemed to have forgotten the particulars of their situation.

Are you still there? Shinigami asked. Now would be best for an intervention.

I’m a Luvendi, Gar typed back, annoyed. I’m not going to intimidate anyone, and I can’t let this turn into a fight. They aren’t mercenaries, so I can’t hire them. What do you want me to do?

Think of something! Steal a security uniform.

Again, there is one of me, and I’m Luvendi. Luvendi never work security.

This is a nightmare. Why haven’t you people turned into brains in jars at this point if your bodies are so useless?

That is incredibly insulting. Just because I can’t fight doesn’t make me useless. Silence was his only answer, and Gar sighed. Fine. I’ll think of something. But for the record, I think we’d still be better off getting Barnabas back.

He sank down onto a bench and racked his brain. How the hell did you convince a bunch of people who were already stealing a ship that a lone Luvendi was dangerous enough to fear?

He was so engaged in his thoughts that he didn’t notice the security cameras of the nearby Gruwa trained right on him.

* * *

In the alcove of the bar two stories up Fedden drained his glass and smiled. Even the burn of the terrible liquor did nothing to dull his mood.

Things had been unsettled lately in the syndicate. Their leader Crallus had always been useless in Fedden’s opinion, but lately he’d started getting on their cases more, too. He wanted to know every detail of every job, and he never said why when he was asked.

When Jutkelon sent a message from Devon, Crallus had made it a point to send three ships. It was a big show—“Fucking overkill,” Fedden had said several times to his second-in-command—and Crallus had gone on and on and fucking on about how he was sending his three best ships.

Well, the joke was on him, because all three ships had been blown out of orbit without so much as a chance to send a distress signal, and now Crallus was scrambling to get information. He’d promised a bounty to any ship that dropped what they were doing and found out more about the ship from Devon. It was a human ship named Shinigami. Apparently no one knew who flew it.

But Fedden might just have an in to get those details now. That Luvendi had no idea how valuable his knowledge might be, but if he’d spoken to Jutkelon in the last few weeks, he might very well know the name of the human who’d been a thorn in Jutkelon’s side.

Fedden was going to bring the Luvendi in, get his information, and make Crallus show how much he wanted it in cold hard cash.

“Send a message to this channel,” he instructed Tagurn. He passed over the card with the source address. It didn’t give much away about who the person might be, which Fedden supposed made sense for a slaver from Devon. “Tell him to meet us at the base and we’ll talk details. We’ll make Crallus pay for the information, then we’ll go take a contract with this guy. If he wants to set up mines, he’ll need a lot of guards.” He smiled, showing a lot of teeth. “Our luck is turning around.”

* * *

“Captain?” Tik’ta’s voice came over Klafk’tin’s earpiece. “We may have a problem.”

“Yes? What is it?” Klafk’tin’s voice was jovial. He was in a fairly good mood and decided not to let any impending problems sour it.

“One of the crew members of the Shinigami is back in the docking bay.”

“What?” Klafk’tin looked around and cursed. He should have known at least one of them would come back before too long. It had been stupid to leave the ship unattended so far. “Where are they?”

“He’s just sitting on a bench near the checkpoint.”

Klafk’tin relaxed fractionally and gave an annoyed sigh. “Then why are you bothering me?”

“Because I don’t know what he’s up to.” Tik’ta’s voice was clipped now. “If he gets closer, he’s only a couple of moments’ walk from being able to see you. I thought it might be relevant to your planning.”

Klafk’tin threw an annoyed glance in the direction of the Gruwa. Tik’ta was a very competent pilot, but she had never been very polite. She didn’t do anything he could specifically point to as rude, but during moments like these he could sense she didn’t think much of his leadership.

He resolved to speak to her about that—right after he stole this ship. After all, she’d probably be more compliant if faced with the choice between continuing to fly the Gruwa and getting to pilot the Shinigami instead. He’d seen her salivating over those engines.

“On the double,” he snapped to his crew. “We may have company soon. Get the doors open now.”

Wohva gave him an annoyed look but didn’t say anything. She was a very good electrical engineer, and Klafk’tin knew she was worth far more than he paid her. The thing was, without any experience, she couldn’t prove that to the captains of any bigger ships. He should probably raise her salary if they got this ship.

When they got this ship.

It was as good as theirs now. One solitary crew member was hardly going to stand between them and taking it. A bullet, a bribe to the security guard…

Yes, it would be easy enough to accomplish.

“Captain, the doors should be open in a moment.” Wohva put her tools down and turned them off carefully.

Klafk’tin gave an impatient sigh. Now was not the time for safety protocols.

Wohva ignored him. She typed a command into the tiny box she had linked up with the doors and smiled in satisfaction when they slid open. She nodded to Klafk’tin.

“The ship is yours.”

* * *

Gar sat up suddenly. I have an idea, he typed. It’s risky, but right now it’s all I can think of if you are certain we shouldn’t expose your presence.

He explained, and Shinigami barely hesitated.

I like it. Get ready.

* * *

“Captain.” Wohva and the rest stood back.

Klafk’tin took a moment to admire the hull. A perfect ship, just begging for someone to steal it. With it docked at a station and totally unattended, its weapons were useless. Now he just needed to do one last thing.

“Harrdrack.” He nodded to the surly Shrillexian. “Make sure they don’t have any booby-traps in place.”

He didn’t like Harrdrack much. Like every Shrillexian Klafk’tin had ever met Harrdrack enjoyed fighting, so he had signed on at a reasonable price, but he wasn’t careful and he was prone to disobeying orders.

Now he barely even grunted when he headed up the gangway. He passed Wohva and Klafk’tin and stepped into the interior of the ship.

Or he would have if the doors hadn’t slammed shut with a crunch of bones and a spurt of blood.

Wohva screamed and clapped a hand over her mouth and Klafk’tin looked away in distaste. He had warned Harrdrack that there might be booby-traps, and the male still hadn’t been careful. Had there been a tripwire hidden beneath the doors, perhaps? Or maybe—

“Captain!” It was Tik’ta’s voice.

But she was too late. “Hello,” a smooth voice said from some distance away. Klafk’tin turned, and his jaw dropped open.

A Luvendi? Really?

* * *

Gar was praying to every deity he’d ever heard of, including the strange amorphous one Barnabas had mentioned a few times. Underneath the robes, his body was drenched in sweat and both of his hearts were beating erratically and so fast he thought they might burst.

“I see you’re trying to steal my ship.” He tried to speak the way Barnabas did; as if he weren’t afraid of anything. “As you can see, you’ve made a mistake. Nevertheless, given that you’ve paid for it—” he looked at the doors and forced himself not to look too nauseated as he gestured to his communications unit, pretending he had orchestrated the doors snapping shut, “I will give you one chance to walk away.”

For a moment, he had them. They wavered and looked at one another nervously. Gar sighed and pretended to wait patiently. Please let them walk away, please let them walk away…

Then their leader pulled a gun. “I have twenty more crew members.” He grinned nastily. “You probably don’t have that many booby-traps. I’ll get your ship with or without you.”

The crew gave him an incredulous look and Gar’s stomach seemed to drop out of his torso. If they couldn’t get in, they couldn’t get him to the medical Pods. If he got shot now he was going to die.

Barnabas stepped out of the shadows at the other end of the hangar, “You know, that really isn’t the best way to boost your crew’s morale.”

Chapter Five

Barnabas’ eyes swept the scene. Gar stood strong. Barnabas had to hand it to him; the Luvendi was bluffing very well. He seemed for all the world to be unafraid of the gun pointed at him. If Barnabas hadn’t known better he might have believed that Gar had booby-trapped the Shinigami himself.

But Barnabas did know better, because he knew Shinigami. Smashing someone between the doors when they had let their guard down had her rather distinctive flair.

He was also pleased to note that his choice to come directly back to the shuttle bay rather than speak to Mustafee Boreir had been the correct one. With a name and a window into their data streams, Shinigami could get good information with or without Barnabas talking to the Yofu.

That was, if she didn’t get stolen—as these people were clearly trying to do.

“Who are you?” an alien asked. He was a species Barnabas didn’t recognize, very broad-shouldered but not tall. There was a faint greenish cast to his skin if one looked closely.

“I am Barnabas.”

“That name means nothing to me.” The alien sneered.

“It doesn’t have to,” Barnabas told him. “It’s not the important part of what’s about to happen.”

“Which is?” The alien looked at his crew with a contemptuous smile.

None of them smiled back. They’d all heard him say they were expendable and they clearly weren’t very happy with him right now.

“You should start with an apology to your crew,” Barnabas stated gravely. He linked his hands behind his back and strolled closer.

“For what?”

Barnabas said a silent prayer for patience. This alien really was remarkably dim-witted.

“For saying that you would use them to check for booby-traps,” he explained patiently. “Surely that is not in their job description. It is also a horrendous way to treat one’s crew.”

“It’s their job if I say it’s their job.” The alien scoffed. “I am Klafk’tin, captain of the Gruwa, and my crew does what I tell them to do!”

“I see.” Barnabas glanced at the sullen faces of the crew. None of them looked happy about his words, but none of them were mutinying either. That was disappointing. “We’re still going to start with an apology.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.” Barnabas allowed a hint of command to enter his voice.

“Listen,” Klafk’tin told him, “you humans might think you’re real special, with your Empress and your technology, but you aren’t any better than anyone else.”

“She’s not the Empress anymore, but I quite agree,” Barnabas responded equably. “The measure of a person is in their actions, not in their species. Why, some of the most distinguished members of the former Etheric Empire were Yollin.”

Klafk’tin glared at him. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. What did you think we were talking about?”

“About you backing off and giving me the ship that I rightfully took off your hands!”

“’Rightfully?’” Barnabas frowned. “That doesn’t sound correct. And you still haven’t apologized.”

“I’m not going to! I’m not some Yollin you can just order around!”

“You mean that you’re not someone like your crew, who you feel perfectly justified in ordering around.” Barnabas shook his head. “You have no idea of the concept of power, do you? To you, it simply means that others must do as you say and you do not need to give them anything in return. Would that be correct?”

“Yes.” Klafk’tin glared, then saw the expressions on his crew’s faces. “I give ‘em wages,” he told Barnabas. “There’s lodging.”

“Wages and a place to sleep inside the ship sounds like the bare minimum expected of an employer,” Barnabas observed. “You’ve miscalculated, Klafk’tin.”

“Oh? And how’s that?”

“I am not a member of your crew.” Barnabas allowed his voice to deepen as he strode forward. “I do not take orders from you.” He unbuttoned his suit jacket and shrugged out of it, throwing it neatly over a nearby crate. There was no reason to treat such a fine suit disrespectfully, after all. With his Jean Dukes Specials holstered but now visible, he continued toward Klafk’tin with a dangerous smile. “And you just tried to steal my ship.”

Klafk’tin swiveled to point his gun at Barnabas. “As soon as you’re dead, I did steal your ship.”

Barnabas moved in a blur and there was a crack, a scream, and a clatter as Klafk’tin’s gun fell uselessly to the ground. Barnabas kicked it away as the alien stumbled back clutching his lower arm, which seemed to be useless below the elbow.

Barnabas smiled coldly. “Whatever you are, apparently your elbows lock. Convenient.” He adjusted his cuffs. “This is your last chance, Klafk’tin. Apologize to your crew and step aside so that another and more deserving member of the crew may take your place as captain.”

“Someone shoot him!” Klafk’tin stumbled backward. His face was a shade that, whatever his species, was clearly not healthy. “One of you!”

“They’re not helping you,” Barnabas observed. “Why do you think that is?”

Klafk’tin bared his teeth at Barnabas in a snarl.

HA! Shinigami didn’t try to hide her amusement. You should really snarl back, your teeth are much more impressive.

I prefer to reserve that for special moments. By the way, we’re going to have a talk about what you think is important enough to tell me about.

Noted.

Barnabas stared at Klafk’tin. “No answer? Very well, then. Klafk’tin, you are relieved of your command of the Gruwa. You who were once part of his crew may do as you like. Pick a new captain if you want, but stop taking things that are not yours. Is that clear?”

They nodded, wide-eyed and silent. None of them seemed to know what to say.

“Fine!” Klafk’tin snarled. He stumbled a few steps and grabbed his gun with his working hand. “If none of you will shoot this bastard, I will!”

“I wouldn’t,” Barnabas warned.

Klafk’tin gritted his teeth in concentration and swung his good arm with the pistol shaking at the end of it.

They never saw Barnabas’ hands move, but there was the distinctive crack-boom of a Jean Dukes Special and Klafk’tin’s body was thrown across the shuttle bay into a pile of crates.

Barnabas looked at the body. He looked at the gun. He looked back at the body.

What ammo was I using?

Oh, did I forget to mention? There’s a note from Jean for you in the armory.

You were just waiting to see how long it took me to notice, weren’t you?

I thought it would be a fun surprise. It’s impressive, isn’t it?

Barnabas holstered the weapon and looked around himself. “Are there any questions?”

They shook their heads.

“Who do you think should be put in charge?” he asked.

Everyone looked back to the Gruwa, where an alien was standing on the gangway. From her coloring and build Barnabas guessed she was the same species as Klafk’tin.

To her credit, she had the courage to walk across the bay to the Shinigami. She looked down at Klafk’tin’s body, but apart from a faint tightening of her lips she did not react to his death.

“The crew seems to think you will be in charge after this,” Barnabas told her.

“I probably will.” She swallowed. “I am Tik’ta. Is there any further business you have with us?”

“I assume you heard my instruction to stop stealing ships.”

She nodded. “I did.”

“Would you care to explain why you were here, working with such a captain?”

“Employment is employment, and there’s not enough of it to go around.” She did not sugarcoat her words. “We draw the line at murder—you saw that no one shot at you even when Klafk’tin ordered it—but stealing?” She shrugged. “Still, if you say not to do it again, we won’t. I don’t want to get on your bad side.”

“I’ll take it,” Barnabas remarked drily. “Now go. And spread the word, if ever it comes up, that the Shinigami is well-defended.”

Tik’ta’s lips quirked and for a moment he thought she might argue, but instead she nodded and jerked her head at the crew, who followed her back across the docking bay to the Gruwa. They stopped to pick up Klafk’tin’s body. Barnabas noticed that no one seemed to do any particular grieving over it.

He shook his head and headed up the stairs to the doors.

I don’t suppose you have some way to clean these.

Not really, no.

I’ll call a deck crew, then…and tip them very heavily.

Gar had come to stand next to Barnabas and he stared at the remains of the Shrillexian. “Klafk’tin clearly knew the ship might be booby-trapped,” he commented finally. “He sent the Shrillexian in first on purpose.”

“Yes.” Barnabas headed back down the gangway to get his jacket. “The universe hasn’t lost very much now that he’s dead, I think. Good thinking on your feet back there. If their captain hadn’t been so devoted to taking anything he could and killing anyone who stood in his way you might have won that one.”

Gar’s look was more than a little bit frustrated. “It’s all a game to you, isn’t it?”

“I beg your pardon?” Barnabas’ eyebrows went up in surprise.

“You said you thought I might have won that one. Did it occur to you that if I had lost I would be dead? I’m not as resilient as you are. You can take bullets and keep walking, and you heal almost instantly. You and Shinigami talk about coming up with plans as if no matter what happens we’ll all survive, but I might not. Shinigami, open the doors, please.” Gar lifted his robes up and stepped over the mess on the coaming without looking at it and disappeared without waiting for a reply.

He has a point, you know.

Barnabas made a face. Do you think he should be upgraded? Now, when we still do not entirely understand his motivations?

If you ask me, I don’t think even he understands his motivations. And no. But he’s correct that we shouldn’t be making plans as if he were another Ranger.

Barnabas sighed. Have you called the deck crew?

Yes. Don’t change the subject.

What do you think we should do, then? Barnabas put his suit jacket back on and leaned against one of the crates.

I told you. Start planning as if we only have the two of us for combat.

The one of us for combat.

How many times do I have to mention the flamethrower?

Barnabas pushed himself up and paced around the deck, considering.

Shinigami was correct, and so was Gar. Gar could have died on this mission. In fact, he nearly had died twice. Despite that he had yet to back down, and he hadn’t tried to weasel his way out of anything. In fact…

A thought occurred to Barnabas and he narrowed his eyes.

Shinigami, did Gar tell you at any point that he refused to help you against those people?

No. He told me it was a risk to him, but he accepted it when I said it was important.

Barnabas nodded. Gar had not gone running to Barnabas, nor had he turned tail and fled. He hadn’t tried to make a deal with anyone unsavory, either.

Despite himself, Barnabas smiled. Gar was already miles different from the man he had been when Barnabas first met him, and so far the changes were good. Barnabas was intrigued to see what would happen in the future.

However, he first had to deal with a deck crew that was going to be deeply upset and then a station manager who wasn’t likely to be any happier. It would be hours before he could get back to the bar. Maybe he should ask Gar to handle this part?

Shinigami, is Mustafee Boreir still at the bar?

No, he left not long after you spoke to the guard. The owner of the bar came out to speak to him and he went straight to his ship. They seem to have known you were a threat, but I have no idea how.

Barnabas’ eyes narrowed. Why would the guard immediately assume Barnabas was someone a munitions dealer should run away from rather than treating him as a prospective client?

This definitely required more information.

With a sigh, he buttoned his suit jacket, put on his most winning smile, and waited for the bureaucrats to arrive.

Chapter Six

Gar appeared in the doorway of the main lounge area a while later. When he saw the chessboard and the holographic projection of Baba Yaga he started to back out of the room at once.

“I’ll come back.”

“It’s quite all right,” Barnabas assured him. “We haven’t started playing yet.”

“Which means Barnabas hasn’t pissed me off just yet.” The holographic projection smiled. By now, Shinigami had begun moving her lips when she spoke.

Unfortunately, she had also started sometimes making her voice come out of every speaker, not just the one on the chair, which had the effect of making the whole thing incredibly unsettling. Shinigami liked to say it was like being a god, mostly because it made Barnabas wince.

Barnabas gave her a look now. “It means Shinigami hasn’t pissed me off,” he corrected and tilted his head at Gar. “What did you want to discuss?”

“I heard from Fedden.” Gar hovered in the doorway, clearly ready to flee at the first sign of trouble. “He gave me the coordinates for a moon called Zahal. It’s in the Adhira system, the first moon around the second planet out. The only problem is…”

“He doesn’t yet know you will arrive on the ship that took out his colleagues?” Barnabas guessed.

“Yes, that.”

“And you’re wondering how we’re going to dock without him figuring it out?”

“Also that.”

“I’ll consider some strategies. You do the same.” Barnabas began to roll up his sleeves. “For now, you should probably leave if you don’t want to be part of the fight.” Gar left with a swish and a flick of his robes, and Barnabas smiled across the board at Shinigami. “First move?”

“I’d insist on a coin toss if I hadn’t found that coin you made that has two heads.” She slid a piece out.

“I wouldn’t have had to make it if you hadn’t clearly rigged the coin flip algorithm you were using.” Barnabas gave her a long look and considered the board.

“Make a move, already. I swear you do this to drive me mad.”

“Is it working? Are your servers melting?”

“I’m far more resilient than that.”

“I’ll just need to try harder, then. Would you like some tea?” He stood up and went over to the little half-kitchen beside the couch. “And don’t even think of tampering with the board while I’m gone.”

He looked over in time to see it fuzz as several pieces moved hastily back into place, after which Shinigami sat in sullen silence until he returned. Barnabas set a cup at her elbow.

“What is this for?”

“You wish to behave more like a human, and this will enhance the illusion. Also, it’s polite—although it’s actually just a cup of hot water. One has to draw the line somewhere.”

“You were already being insane.” Shinigami narrowed her eyes at a piece on the board which suddenly moved of its own accord. “Are you doing that with your mind? What, are you trying to convince someone who comes in here that you’re the holograph and I’m the real one?”

“Think of the havoc we could wreak,” Barnabas suggested. He took a sip of tea and smiled at Shinigami over the rim.

She tilted her head to the side, intrigued. “When would someone be on the ship?”

“Well, someone tried to steal it recently. We could start there. Perhaps at some point, someone sneaks onto the ship, sees me lit like a projection, gets scared by someone they think is real—you’d be wearing armor in this scenario—and… What are you smiling at?”

“Most of your plans center around deception. It’s an interesting character aspect in someone who is otherwise so morally ironclad.”

“It is not… Oh, very well. Ploys. Tricks.”

“Which are?”

“Morally equivalent to lying.” Barnabas took another sip of tea somewhat grumpily. “Are you going to move?”

“I’m considering. Also, I wanted to see how long it would take you to ask about it.” She switched to mental speech. Have you given any more thought to what we should do with Gar?

Some. He watched as she finally made her move and went through the now-familiar habit of checking the board from multiple angles to make sure she’d moved the piece he thought she had. Both of them had tried variants on that trick recently and now Barnabas wore a special pair of glasses while playing.

He never left them unattended.

You aren’t suggesting anything, she pressed. Does that mean you’re at a loss?

He nodded and sighed, then took another sip of tea. This is very good. Where did we get it?

Carter was able to acquire some of it. It’s an herb the Ubuara use for seasoning. It has mild hallucinogenic properties, by the way. Are you seeing anything strange?

Well, you don’t seem to be cheating yet. Does that count?

She flashed him a smile. I didn’t bother to mention it because I assumed your nanocytes would take care of the more unusual aspects of the herb.

They are. You should probably warn Gar, though. Although…I wonder if that’s why he spent all of last evening staring at his hands?

From Shinigami’s sudden silence, Barnabas had the sneaking suspicion he was correct. His mouth twitched slightly. Gar had been such a quiet shipmate that Barnabas had assumed what he was seeing was some form of meditation.

Apparently, he had been wrong.

You should probably mention it to him before he does it again.

It would be more fun if—

Shinigami.

Fine. You with your ethics and your moral equivalence and your… I’ll come up with a third thing, just give me a moment. She frowned at Barnabas’ move. That’s what you’re going with? Really?

Barnabas frowned back. Since trash talk is a time-honored part of competition I won’t outright ban you from using it, but I really do find it a waste.

She made her move without any further comment on that score. So, the way I see it, we have a bit of a problem. If we want to get more information out of Fedden without him catching on to who Gar is working for, we need to send Gar in alone. We should also find some way to mask my identity so that they don’t figure it all out.

I could just fight my way past Fedden’s crew and take the information out of his head. That would tip our hand somewhat, though, don’t you think?

Yes, but Gar had a good point that he’s rather…breakable. Barnabas made a move and wondered if Shinigami had figured it out yet. Her self-imposed limit of looking at probabilities only ten turns ahead meant that he had begun building strategies that hinged on twenty or thirty moves. It was an interesting exercise, and one that required a lot of improvisation.

He enjoyed it a surprising amount.

In fact, he enjoyed the entire process of the game they played around their game. Both he and Shinigami understood implicitly that in this battle of wits there was only one real goal: surprise the other person. Barnabas had opened by playing a game he didn’t intend to win and had continued with board modifications. Shinigami had retaliated rather spectacularly by making the board zap him every time he touched it, as well as by splitting the holographs so that each piece appeared in multiple places.

Each used conversation to distract the other. Barnabas had succeeded more than once in capturing Shinigami’s attention with an interesting dilemma and then making his move while she was calculating probabilities and researching relevant background information. She, of course, had done much the same thing.

Both Barnabas and Shinigami understood the same thing about strategy: there was no playing fair, and there were no givens. One’s opponent might have very different goals than expected, and might at any time decide to change the rules of engagement.

Barnabas had an internal bet going with himself, wondering how long it would take before their games involved actual missiles.

Poor Gar.

Barnabas came to a decision after another minute. We’ll do a combination of operations. We’ll send Gar in and mask the ship—well, if he’s okay with that. At the same time, you will shut down outbound communications without them knowing about it. If things go south, I can clean up the place and we can go for their allies before anyone knows they’re dead.

I like that. Shinigami nodded as she made her move. You can’t make that move, she added, when Barnabas moved his piece. There’s a piece there.

There is not— Oh, son of a bitch. Did you change the color of your pieces? Also, they’re tiny now.

Shinigami grinned. I look forward to your retaliation. I hope it will befit a worthy opponent.

Barnabas narrowed his eyes at her. It would be a fitting retaliation. He just had to think of something first—something other than dumping his tea on the board and making it short out.

He could keep that one in his back pocket as a last resort, though.

* * *

Rald stepped out onto the bustle of the landing pad with a sigh of relief. Ignoring the shouted order to start unpacking cargo, he leaned his head back to feel the sunshine on his skin. After a week in that hellhole of a ship, he was about to go out of his mind.

Apparently, the crews of the freighters were expected not to fight one another, not even for fun. Not even when the other person really deserved to get their face kicked in.

It was ridiculous.

He wanted a fight, and he wanted a drink. Ignoring yet more shouted orders, Rald picked up his pack and looked around for a transport.

To his surprise, there wasn’t one. There was only a dusty road that led to the squalid bunch of buildings that comprised Tethra. The other passengers from the ship—very few, since it was difficult to get clearance to move to this place—had already set off on foot. The road wasn’t even paved, and in low places the surrounding swamp flooded it.

There might be eels in the swamp. Rald licked his lips at the possibility. It had been a while since he’d had a proper eel. Nice and slithery—a true Shrillexian delicacy. No one prepared them correctly, though. They were best served raw. And alive.

If there was no good food to eat in Tethra, he’d come back out here and try his luck.

With a grumble, he hoisted his pack on his shoulder and frowned at the town. This was such a backwater that he wasn’t sure what Jutkelon had been doing here. Just because rich people had decided to claim towns in the middle of nowhere it didn’t make them good places to do business. What had Jutkelon seen in this place?

When a nearby alien looked at him, Rald realized he’d been muttering aloud.

“It’s not much to look at, is it?” the alien offered with a laugh. “But I hear they’ve got Coke.”

“What is…’Coke?'”

“It’s a fizzy drink. Humans make it. Damned good.” She nodded. “They do some things right, I’ll say that.”

“Why are you here if you’re not a fan of humans?”

“Eh.” She lifted her shoulders. “I’m curious, and my uncle was able to bring me here as part of his business. What about you?”

“Just curious too. An old friend lived here. I figured I’d look him up.” Rald had a wave of inspiration. “He worked in the mines. Hated it there. Don’t know where he is, though.”

“Well, if he hated it there you might find him at Aebura’s.” The alien nodded. “I hear that’s a place where they don’t like the mines very much.”

Rald looked at her curiously.

“There’s a division on Devon,” she told him frankly. “People who were on top before the humans came in versus people who are on top now. But it’s still a fight, and there are still some old grudges. I don’t care who wins; I’ll work with either. But if your friend didn’t like the mine owners, Aebura’s is a good place to start looking for him.”

“Thank you.” Rald managed to force the words out, although his smile was a bit pained. He wished she hadn’t been so polite. He would have preferred a good brawl right about now.

But maybe there would be a chance at the bar.

A few minutes and some directions later he slid onto a stool and waited for the bartender to come out.

“Coming!” A woman with blonde hair and warm brown eyes ran out of the kitchen. “Sorry, was just cleaning up. What can I get for you?”

“A Coke, if you have one.”

“Coke or…” She waited.

“Are there different kinds?”

“Coke it is.” She started filling a glass with a dark liquid.

Rald smiled at her. “You Aebura?”

“No, Aebura doesn’t run this bar anymore.” The woman smiled at him and put down the cup, which was foaming at the top. “My name’s Elisa. How about you? New here?”

Rald smiled. “Just here briefly.”

But he would be here long enough—long enough to make a lot of people very sorry.

Chapter Seven

Carter perched precariously on a wall at the edge of Tethra and shook the dice. He rolled them onto the wall and groaned as Oemuga hopped with joy.

“Twenty more to me!” The Ubuara gleefully relieved Carter of some of his chips. “Today is not your day, my friend.”

Carter shook his head and chuckled. He wanted to get to know his employees and their friends, so he had begun playing dice with the Ubuara during his breaks. Games of pure chance usually weren’t his style, but since the Ubuara could sense one another’s thoughts those were the only games they ever played.

Luckily, they didn’t play for keeps. The set of chips was split at the beginning of the game, and whoever was ahead when everyone stopped won. The games were really just a way for the Ubuara to spend time together.

Carter liked that. When he had come to High Tortuga, the young man in him had been excited by the idea of a town just getting off the ground; full of possibility…and maybe a little bit of danger. He’d lived a long life, but that part of him had never grown old. However, the husband and father in him didn’t want his family to be exposed to the type of violence that could be so pervasive in a lot of the less well-charted areas.

Due both to the ethos of the original settlers and to Bethany Anne’s growing influence, Tethra was full of possibilities without the sort of desperate rivalries that usually formed in young cities. The citizens seemed to get along well enough, aside from the Luvendi at the edge of town—and they just kept to themselves as far as Carter could tell.

The rest of the citizens seemed happy enough to interact, build businesses together, and spend their free time on games of chance and eel races in the local marsh.

Carter never went to those. There was some mosquito-like thing in those marshes that loved his blood. He was still saving up money for forcefields around all the doors of the bar so he could have a mosquito-free oasis. In the meantime, he hunted the bastards with a single-minded determination that had given him several injuries.

He called them war wounds.

Elisa just rolled her eyes.

Speaking of Elisa, he heard her voice. Carter frowned as he looked around, then pointed to one of the Ubuara on a nearby roof. “Leibura, you want my place?”

The Ubuara chittered and ran down the roof to leap lightly onto the wall. She bared her teeth at him in a tiny grin. “With your luck? You haven’t given me much to work with.”

Carter laughed as he hopped down. “My apologies. May the dice favor you more than they favored me.”

“Now you’re wishing me bad luck,” Oemuga grumbled.

“Never,” Carter promised.

He waved to the Ubuara and jogged toward the main street, where he found Elisa looking for him. At the sight of him, she peered curiously down the alley and grinned when she saw the Ubuara.

“Dice again?”

“On a cold streak. That’s three games in a row. I’m starting to get nicknames.” He looped his arm around her shoulders as they strolled down the street. “Carter the Unlucky. Carter, the Dice’s Bitch.”

Elisa gave a shriek of laughter. “No Ubuara is going to say something like that.”

“Okay, I made that one up. But I promise you, one of these days I will be Carter DiceBane.”

“Very impressive. I’ll have to beat the ladies off you with a stick.”

“Could you? I’ll probably need a bodyguard. I’m sure I’m going to be quite the celebrity.” He smiled as they walked. “It’s nice to have these last few days of relative anonymity.”

Elisa thumped him on the shoulder and grinned. “Stop it, you’ll give yourself too big a head to fit in the door. Anyway, I came to find you for a reason.”

“Oh. Right. Yes?”

She gave him a look. “There was a Shrillexian in the bar.”

“Has he caused trouble?” Carter asked anxiously. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. He didn’t start a fight and he didn’t… You know, it’s just kind of weird and I wanted you to know what was going on.”

“That is weird.” Carter considered. “Okay, no more bartending for you today.”

“Carter.” She gave a laugh. “He’s gone already.”

“Still.”

“Stop being so crazy. Look, you can come back and hang out with us if you’re worried, but he already left. He doesn’t seem to like Coke. He said someone recommended it to him, but he just burped a lot and left without finishing it.”

“Yeah, because Pepsi is—”

“Not so loud!” She thumped him again.

“Okay. So he came in and didn’t start any trouble? You served him a drink he didn’t like and he still didn’t start anything? And he paid for the drink, even though he didn’t finish it?” Elisa nodded to all of the questions and Carter shook his head. “You’re right. The whole thing reeks of trouble. I don’t like peaceful Shrillexians.”

“Do you prefer them when they’re being violent?”

“No, I just really don’t like the trouble they bring. Hmm. Well, we’ll see if we can get a few Brakalons to just hang out and keep the peace. Aebura might know someone.” He shrugged. “You head back—don’t go in if he’s there again—and I’ll be there in a moment.”

“Okay.” She kissed him and jogged away, and Carter hightailed it back to the alley.

“Carter.” Leibura gave him a look. “Did you want to come back now that the dice are hot again?”

Carter laughed. “No, this is a very different matter. Elisa just told me there was a Shrillexian in the bar who was behaving very oddly.”

All of the Ubuara took notice. Everyone was wary of Shrillexians.

“Anyway,” Carter finished, “just keep an eye out, okay? If he does anything weird—or if he heads out of town toward the mine—we should know about it.”

As he walked back to the bar he told himself he was being stupid. There were tons of new people on High Tortuga these days. There were probably a bunch of Shrillexians and he just hadn’t noticed them.

But for some reason, he couldn’t shake the bad feeling he had about this one.

* * *

He’d been in good spirits when they’d left Virtue Station, but by the time Fedden got to the cave that served as the base’s mess hall he was in a foul mood.

He and Tagurn had landed on Zahal over three hours ago, but a piece of landing equipment had buckled when they set down and they’d spent the time since then fixing it. Fedden was dirty and hungry, and he still didn’t have a contract or the information he’d wanted to sell.

And their Luvendi contact was taking his sweet time getting here.

He could feel the other ship captains staring at him. Unlike the parts of the syndicate that were planet-based the ships’ captains roved all over, taking jobs wherever they could. They came back between jobs to pay the syndicate leaders or just take a break and swap information on potential jobs.

Normally, this suited Fedden. He hated the idea of living on a planet the way Jutkelon had. What if the economy went to shit? What if the mines ran out? Jutkelon had found out the hard way what happened when things changed. On a ship, you could just go somewhere else and find work there.

Theoretically.

Fedden had just been here two days ago, though. Everyone knew he hadn’t had time to complete a job since then. He’d been on a cold streak for months, truth be told.

He’d hoped to blow in here, have the Luvendi land within a couple of hours, and head out with a long contract in hand with everyone knowing he’d been the one to find Crallus’ precious information, but no such luck.

He glared at the other captains as he sat down. The food was getting worse these days. Crallus was a tight-fisted old bastard, and every year he was talking about raising the buy-in rates for his captains.

He hadn’t done it yet, since he knew better than to annoy that many captains at once. But he was greedy, so he was pinching pennies in other ways. The food, for instance, might or might not be packing material. Tagurn poked it with his fork and took a hesitant bite, as though he half-expected to drop dead.

“Struck out, huh?” Namkelon, a Brakalon with skin so deep a gray that it matched the cavern walls, sat down on the other side of the table. When he leaned forward the whole thing tilted.

Fedden grabbed his tray back as it slid toward the Brakalon. He was in no mood to talk. “Got a client coming to negotiate. Needs more than one crew. Piss me off and I won’t recommend you.”

“Hey, hey.” The Brakalon shook his head. “Things going wrong for you isn’t my fault, guy. Anyway, I’m thinking of getting out.”

Fedden stopped eating in surprise. “Why?”

“Why do you think? Crallus is talking rate hikes again.”

“He always talks rate hikes,” Tagurn replied. “He never does it.”

“Nah, this time he’s gonna. He’s got that Torcellan helping him.”

“Which Torcellan?”

“I don’t know. If I knew I’d say, wouldn’t I? Some Torcellan. Pale skin.” Namkelon shrugged. “Promising him all kinds of shit. Watch your back.” He nodded to both of them and stomped off.

Fedden looked toward the roughly-carved ramp at the far end of the room, which led to Crallus’ office.

“I don’t like this. Crallus sent us off to find information about Devon, and while we’re gone he talks more rate hikes?”

“He’s not going to pay us for the information,” Tagurn predicted. “I bet you anything you get in there and he just takes it as a favor. He’s got other people who can go get it, so you’re only going to get money out of him if he thinks no one else can figure it out.”

“What do you know?”

Tagurn leaned forward. “What you should know—that Crallus is a piece of shit. He just gets things because he takes them. You want him to give you what you’re worth, you gotta take that. Who knows, maybe you don’t give him a cut on this job.”

“Keep your voice down,” Fedden growled.

But he had to admit it was an interesting idea. A very interesting idea.

* * *

“I’m glad you came to me.” Farfaldri Kat poured a cup of tea and handed it elegantly to Rald before sweeping back to his chair to sit.

In the Luvendi custom, he did not have servants to show his wealth. Instead, his surroundings showed it. The floors were of imported stone, the walls were paneled in lacquered wood, and there was cloth draped around the windows.

Rald frowned at that. It actually seemed to be there on purpose, not as a spur-of-the-moment choice.

Well, there was no accounting for taste.

He sipped his tea and tried not to grind his teeth. He needed Kat. Very few people had mentioned anything to do with the mines, and when he mentioned Jutkelon people got a wide-eyed look and shut up hastily.

So he had gone to see Jutkelon’s compound—or what was left of it. After almost a month it was still smoking faintly.

That was when Rald had decided he needed more information from people who might have been Jutkelon’s allies.

“So what happened at the compound?” he asked. It was too direct a question, but he was getting impatient. He was about to start smashing china, and Kat wasn’t going to like that.

“I assume you mean what kind of bombs. No one knows.” Kat looked displeased. “Everyone there was already dead, however. They were just making a point. And as you can see from the fact that the buildings around it are intact, they made a very precise point. I’m told the humans refer to it as ‘salting the ground.’”

“So it was a human.”

“Of course it was a human. Everything that’s gone wrong here has been due to humans.” Kat shook his head regretfully. “Lan just had the bad luck to be in their sights. I’d have helped him, of course, if it weren’t obvious that it would be a futile gesture.”

Rald nodded. His mind was racing. “And you don’t know the human’s name?”

“I do not, but someone at Lan’s old mine might. It’s owned by the workers now.” Kat’s tone was so bitter it was a wonder he didn’t choke on his words. “I’m sure they know their hero’s name.”

“And if one or two of them suffered you wouldn’t mind?” Rald asked. He saw the flash of satisfaction in the Luvendi’s eyes and smiled. “Good. I’ve been wanting a fight. Thank you for your help.”

He left, smiling broadly. As he strode toward the edge of town, he noticed one of the large marsh rodents keeping pace with him on a wall. It chittered at him before it bounded up and onto a roof.

Weird place, this. Far too quiet—like a grenade with the pin still in.

Rald was going to fix that.

Chapter Eight

“I’m really not sure about this plan.” Gar adjusted his hat nervously.

“I think it’s hilarious,” Shinigami supplied.

“He was talking about its chance of success,” Barnabas told her, “not your personal enjoyment. For the record, I also have reservations.”

“You’re just stuck up. You don’t want people to think you’d be someone’s assistant.”

“I have no qualms about being someone’s assistant. You, however—” Barnabas broke off. “What was that noise? You said you’d handle landing.”

“Did I? I thought you were piloting.”

Barnabas swore and took off for the bridge.

Shinigami snickered from the speaker by Gar’s ear. “I actually am piloting. That noise came from one of the refineries outside. This day has been fun so far! I got Barnabas good, and he’s got to pretend to be your assistant and do your errands and stuff. Make him do annoying things while you’re there, and record it!”

Gar was starting to get used to Shinigami’s sense of humor, so he didn’t take her too seriously. She and Barnabas liked to poke fun at one another. Shinigami was even starting to get on Gar’s case about being too tall, which he understood to be a joke.

He was, however, nervous about this plan. Barnabas was always so calm and collected. Sometimes he ignored the insults people threw at him and his calm nature threw people off. Other times he took the insults very seriously, and they realized as soon as they saw his expression that they had overstepped.

Gar had no idea how to do that. When he had spoken with Fedden on Virtue Station he’d been sweating anxiously the whole time, afraid they’d see through his lies and kill him in retaliation.

He was afraid that what made Barnabas so much better than he was at this kind of thing was the knowledge that even if things went south, he’d almost certainly be fine. Gar had seen some of what Barnabas could do. He’d seen the human take bullets. Barnabas could rip almost anyone to shreds before they could hurt him, and even if they did, between his durability, healing, and the Pod-docs he’d be fine.

Gar was just going to have to pretend he was like that and trust that Barnabas would have his back out here.

He met Barnabas at the airlock. The human looked disgruntled by Shinigami’s trick, but more engaged with the operation than anything else. He was wearing the faraway expression that Gar had learned meant Barnabas and Shinigami were talking silently.

Barnabas nodded in acknowledgment of something Shinigami said.

“Are you ready to go?” Barnabas asked Gar.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” Gar ran over the details of his character again and nodded. “Let’s go. I want to get in, get the information, and get out of there.”

Barnabas let the Luvendi precede him down the ramp. At Shinigami’s suggestion he had dyed his hair black, the color it had been until a year or so ago, and used contacts to make his eyes brown. She had claimed the hair dye would rinse out quickly, but he was dubious—and he found it strangely jarring to catch glimpses of himself looking like he had in the past.

He had pointed out that aliens were unlikely to be able to differentiate human features very well, and she had pointed out in return that a few big details would therefore be even more likely to deflect them.

He hated it when she was right.

Their Shrillexian contacts were waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp. Fedden seemed deeply displeased about something, though the feeling did not grow when he greeted Gar. Barnabas scanned him quickly and found that the displeasure related to the syndicate.

“Who is this?” Fedden asked roughly. “A human?”

“Yes, why?” Gar asked, as if confused that the matter was worthy of comment. He turned to look at Barnabas and did a careful examination. “Is there some problem?”

I have to hand it to him, Barnabas told Shinigami. He can act.

Just be careful he doesn’t do that with you, Shinigami advised.

For now, he’s still very uncomfortable when he lies. If that starts to change, I’ll know we have a problem.

“He’s human,” Fedden retorted. “They’re the ones who started that shit on Devon.” He didn’t want anyone here thinking he’d brought in the enemy. His reputation was shaky enough right now.

“I’m not sure if you know this,” Gar drew the words out as if speaking to a child, “but there are a lot of humans. The ones who made trouble on Devon were part of their government.”

Oh, God, he’s starting to talk like you. He’s telling the truth while he lies.

Don’t start.

Fedden looked at Barnabas carefully. “Do any of them have blue eyes?”

“What, humans? I haven’t the faintest idea.” Gar looked around impatiently. “I don’t wish to be rude, but what with concluding our business and discussing the matter you wanted help with, we really don’t have much time.”

Fedden nodded. He gave Barnabas one last narrow-eyed glance but turned away to walk with Gar in a manner that made it clear he considered Barnabas no threat.

Well, look at that. It’s working.

It is. Apparently, you were correct about the hair and eye color. Thank you.

I just said to change it, I didn’t say to pick colors so unsuited to your looks.

This discussion is over. Actually, no. I’ll have you know that I had black hair for years.

Why? It looks terrible.

Okay, now the discussion is definitely over.

Gar followed Fedden through the tunnels to a small cave that had clearly been turned into a conference room. He was surprised to see Fedden set up signal-blockers. Did Fedden realize what they were up to?

Fedden, with one last, suspicious look down the hallway, closed the door.

“Privacy,” was all he said by way of explanation.

Gar did not dare look over at Barnabas. Was there some problem here? Why would Fedden want to block surveillance on his own base?

Gar figured he might as well continue with the plan, since Barnabas had not given him any signals to abort and flee back to the ship. He took the tablet Barnabas held out to him, doing his best to project the aura that he was the most important person in the room. Powerful people generally did that, Barnabas aside. Barnabas’ quiet confidence wasn’t something Gar could mimic yet.

“Just so we have the particulars out of the way, these are my specifications for the job.” He slid the tablet across the table. “Fifty guards—just to start, you understand. We will be expanding. In the meantime, I assure you that other measures will be taken to ensure you’re not understaffed. Living quarters will be separated so no larger riots can form, and movement will be…controlled.” He smiled the way Lan used to when dealing with people who didn’t like to speak openly about the conditions in the mine. “Having been in this business before, I have seen all the tricks. Workers think they’re clever, but they rarely are.”

Fedden betrayed not a hint of unease. He nodded now and then as he looked over the specifications, and Gar watched him carefully. It was his job to steer the conversation so that Fedden’s thoughts would show the things they needed to know. With Barnabas here to interpret those thoughts, they would soon know just what they were dealing with.

“The guards owe me a cut for their work,” Fedden told him at last. “I’d appreciate it if that aspect of the payment was handled on your end. Simpler. And it has the added benefit of weeding out the ones who were going to try to pull anything. You wouldn’t want them on a work site in any case.”

“Indeed.” Gar nodded. “Speaking of which, I want to make it clear at the outset that I will take harm to my property very seriously. Any of my property.” He gave Fedden a hard look.

It was impossible to mistake his meaning, and Barnabas felt a surge of anger when Fedden only smirked and raised an eyebrow. The Shrillexian’s thoughts made it very clear that he had no intention of complying with this order.

“You have to give them something to do for fun.”

“Accommodations will be made.” Gar held his eyes. “For the rest, I expect them to ask permission. I will not offer forgiveness. Is that clear?”

Fedden stared at Gar, clearly wondering how he meant to enforce this.

Gar did not look at Barnabas, just leaned forward and held Fedden’s eyes. “I have ways of making sure that every one of you would deeply regret any such missteps. Again, is that clear?”

Fedden looked a bit worried now, and he nodded. Barnabas could feel him re-evaluating his impression of the Luvendi. Fedden was already making mental notes to see if any of his fellow guards had run into Gar before.

That might be a problem. Then again, Barnabas told himself, very few people would know Gar’s name. And if Fedden did learn who they were, then they could take care of him quickly and quietly before he spread that information around.

“Good.” Gar used the trick Shinigami had suggested, changing emotional states quickly enough to cause whiplash. His expression cleared instantly and he reviewed his tablet with a smile. “Now, with proof of the ore coming out of the mines we’ll be able to expand quickly. What would be the upper limit you could provide in terms of further guards, and how long would it take them all to travel to us?”

This was one of Barnabas’ main questions. This syndicate clearly knew where High Tortuga was. How many of them were there, and where were they? Gar could only hope that the Shrillexian’s thoughts betrayed the details.

“I can also have my contacts reach out to them directly if you can give locations,” Gar lied smoothly. “We’re prepared to offer a buyout on their existing contracts.”

Fedden exchanged a look with his second-in-command and Barnabas realized what was happening almost at once. He could have seen it even without reading their thoughts. The look wasn’t regarding anything pre-arranged; it had the sense of possibility to it. Gar’s question had given them the idea of starting their own syndicate.

In the hallway outside he heard footsteps. Whoever it was—and there were quite a few of them—they were approaching quietly. Between that, Fedden’s sudden thought of betraying his syndicate leader, and the signal-canceling devices, Barnabas suddenly had a very bad feeling.

Shinigami, warm up the engines. Passing through the Etheric, his mental speech was not at all impeded by the devices.

Right away. Coming in hot?

We probably will in a few minutes, yes. Any attempted communications out?

None yet.

So this was an internal matter. Barnabas got ready to run and hoped Gar would take instructions well if the whole thing devolved into chaos. In the meantime, he focused on Fedden.

“I can get you between eight hundred and a thousand,” Fedden told him. “It’ll be a higher rate to me, but it can be done. I’d need some time to arrange it, though.”

The door slammed open and another Shrillexian strode into the room. “Because you’d be trying to take my mercenaries?”

Fedden turned his head so guiltily that Barnabas knew he’d been entirely correct in his guesses. Fedden and his second-in-command had been trying to skirt syndicate guidelines, perhaps to avoid giving this other male his cut of the project.

Unfortunately, Fedden’s thoughts were now firmly off the subject of the rest of the syndicate’s forces or where they were, and unless Barnabas was very much mistaken, Fedden wasn’t going to live long enough for them to resume this line of inquiry.

If this were a different situation he’d stay and attempt to speak to this new Shrillexian, but he had an educated guess as to where this encounter was going. He needed to get Gar out of the mess before the very breakable Luvendi ended up full of stray bullets.

“When I tell you, get down on the floor,” he murmured.

Gar gave a tiny nod. His eyes darted around the room, but when the new Shrillexian glanced at him he looked entirely innocent of wrongdoing.

“Is there some problem with this?” he demanded.

“Yeah.” The new Shrillexian curled his lip. “He’s trying to take over my syndicate.”

“Ah,” Gar sympathized. “Well, this makes matters rather more complicated.” He stood up, still projecting confidence, and swept around the table to deposit a computer chip in the Shrillexian’s hand before making his way into the corridor outside. Such was his aura of importance that the mercenaries outside fell back to allow him through. “This has my contact information. I do require quite a sizable number of guards, so whoever is in charge should certainly be in touch when this matter has been resolved.”

“Wait.” The new Shrillexian pointed at Barnabas. “Who’s that? Why d’you have a human with you?”

“They have their uses,” Gar told him with amusement. “Why is everyone here so interested in him? Do you want to buy his contract?”

For a moment, that seemed to do the trick. In fact, it almost certainly would have—if Fedden hadn’t taken that opportunity to shoot the new Shrillexian while his back was turned.

Blood hit the wall of the corridor and Barnabas reacted first. He reached out quietly to take Gar’s arm, but forced himself to wait. Gar froze, and so did everyone else in the room.

Then everything descended into chaos. He dragged Gar down the corridor toward the ship, throwing another tiny device into the air to zoom over the heads of the brawlers and seek out the main servers while everyone was distracted.

If they couldn’t get the information one way, they’d get it another.

Shinigami, open the door and make sure no one follows us. And since I know you’re going to ask—if someone tries, you can use the flamethrower.

Wheeeeeeee!

Chapter Nine

Fedden knew he wasn’t likely to get a better chance than this.

Crallus had pissed enough people off by talking about rate hikes that even the Brakalon captains were thinking of leaving. No one liked the new Torcellan, either. Fedden had heard the same whispers from a few people while he’d been back.

It had come to him in a flash. If he took Crallus out now, it was very possible that the rest of the mercenaries would fall in with him instead and accept his leadership.

He hadn’t ever particularly wanted power. Crallus had power, and what had it gotten him? He clearly hated everything about his life, and without being in the thick of things he was getting soft. He was angry about it, too.

But at that moment a thought came to Fedden and he pulled out his gun. He was sure he wouldn’t end up that way. Hell, he could live the good life while he was here doing business and then go along with whatever captain he wanted to for a few fights and still keep his edge.

With that vision of the future, the captains would respect him in a way they didn’t respect Crallus because Fedden would still be one of them. He would still be a strong fighter—not the strongest, because there was always some young male with something to prove, but strong enough and well respected enough that he wouldn’t be as vulnerable as Crallus was now.

His gun came out of its holster so easily that Fedden was sure he was doing the right thing. He shivered with excitement.

Which meant the shot went wild. It wasn’t far off-center. It hit Crallus near the shoulder blade, then there was blood and the other Shrillexian’s sudden roar of pain. He crumpled to his knees before anyone moved.

But Fedden knew he’d missed his chance. If he’d taken Crallus out with a single shot he would still have had to sell his takeover, but Crallus would be dead and there would be no reason to fight for him anymore. However, he was still alive and the field was still split.

It was clear that not everyone backed Crallus, but a few of the smarmier captains—the ones who were forever sucking up to him—rushed at Fedden. Crallus had chosen the most loyal of his people to accompany him when he came here to confront the renegade, and Fedden supposed he couldn’t fault the bastard for that.

He bared his teeth and yelled as he leapt into action. He knew the rules of this game. Falter for even a moment and he was as good as dead.

So he fought. He fought with everything he had. The first one to charge him was a Brakalon he’d only met a few times. Young and unusually brash for a Brakalon, he had hands the size of Fedden’s head.

He was young, though, and prone to the same stupid mistakes all young males made. He charged in too fast and he didn’t have any way to arrest his momentum when Fedden stepped forward to meet his charge with a knife to the gut. The Brakalon’s eyes went wide in surprise, but before he could react—that wound wouldn’t kill him before he could make Fedden sorry—Fedden and the knife were gone.

Another captain was ready for him, however, and as Feddan sidestepped the Brakalon he tackled Fedden straight into a wall. It was a Yofu, his hair shaved off defiantly against the customs of his people. He landed a punch squarely on Fedden’s face.

“Traitor!” He drew his hand back for another punch.

Fedden kicked him away. Tagurn was doing nothing to help, the rat. He had hung back and was speaking urgently to one of the other captains as they put pressure on Crallus’ wound.

If Fedden survived this he was going to make Tagurn pay for that.

He returned to the Yofu, who was about to come at him again. Fedden sank into a crouch and, when he saw something in his peripheral vision, dove sideways. The Brakalon, now clutching his stomach, stumbled through the space where Fedden should have been. A moment later the Yofu—also unable to course-correct in time—slammed into the Brakalon and bounced off.

Fedden would have grabbed the Yofu by his hair if he’d had any, but instead he cocked an arm as the male stumbled sideways and landed a devastating punch on the Yofu’s jaw. Then, not wanting to miss anything where the Brakalon was concerned, he drew his pistol again and put a few shots into the alien’s head as the Yofu crumpled to the ground.

The Brakalon went down like a stone, but Fedden had definitely lost this battle in everyone else’s mind. Understanding that he would kill them, the rest came at him in a rush. They held down his arms and legs and dragged him out of the conference room and through the corridors.

At some point someone put a sack over Fedden’s head, so he was only vaguely aware of where he was being taken. Blows landed on his body and head, and he grunted with pain and struggled. He was going to be killed whenever he got to where he was going, so he might as well make them pay for it.

To his surprise, he found himself in Crallus’ office when the hood came off. Crallus was leaking blood and pale with pain, but he knew the importance of appearances. One of the captains was tending him while he sat in his normal chair.

He waved a hand at Fedden. Shoot me if you want, the gesture said, but you didn’t kill me when you tried and now you are a captive.

Fedden stared at him wordlessly. What was Crallus going to do? He’d gotten used to thinking of the man as soft and greedy, but he had the sudden vivid memory that Crallus used to have a reputation—the sort of reputation that had made other mercenary captains decide to work with him instead of fighting him. Crallus had been one mean sonofabitch.

Crallus leaned forward. “You wanted my job. You thought you’d kill me and take it. Ha.” The laugh caused a bit of blood to leak out of his wound, but he stayed upright. “Not so different from me at that age, Fedden. I respect that. But you killed one of my captains. A good captain; promising. I have to decide what to do with you.”

He raised a hand and gestured, and the bag came back down over Fedden’s head. He cursed himself as he was dragged away.

Why hadn’t he just taken the job with that Luvendi the normal way? He was going to die now.

* * *

Records had not been kept properly on this planet. Rald hated being stumped by things as trivial as that. He shook his head. Farfaldri Kat had given him good ideas, but it turned out that even the Luvendi could not help Rald determine exactly where the old mines had all been, much less who was there now.

Rald had some ideas of what he might find, of course, but he had survived this long by not assuming his enemies were stupid. These bastards had taken down Jutkelon and the ships’ captains. High-impact weaponry had been used on Jutkelon’s compound simply to make a point.

He would be foolish to assume that the mine was undefended.

Aebura’s had had very few leads, so he had spoken to Kat’s head of security and shortly found himself in a bar on the outskirts of the Luvendi district. The bar was packed, mostly with Brakalons. They turned as Rald came in, assessed him indifferently, and went back to their drinks.

Rald looked around as he settled down at the bar and waited to be served. He was about to take a risk.

But he had always enjoyed a good bar fight.

“One of my friends came here a few weeks ago,” he announced after his drink had arrived. “Good man. Name of Galagg.”

That earned him some narrow-eyed stares.

“He’s in the same business as all of us,” Rald told them. “Of course, you never got to meet him because a ship named the Shinigami shot him down from orbit. Destroyed his ship. His whole crew is dead because some human decided they had a right to tell us what to do on this planet.”

He paused to take a sip of the liquid. It was terrible, but at least it wasn’t Coke. That stuff had been vile. Full of bubbles.

“Galagg came to help someone you might know, though.” He raised his glass. “Jutkelon.”

There was a pause, then one of the Brakalons at the bar growled, “I knew Jutkelon.”

Rald waited, taking another sip of whatever the hell this liquor was. It burned nicely. It would do.

“Ran a good outfit,” the Brakalon admitted. He nodded at Rald. “Just a friend of a friend to you, though?”

“We fought together a long time ago,” Rald told him. “Sure, he set down on this planet and he didn’t fight with me anymore, but we still had each other’s backs. Same with Galagg. Maybe I never fought with him, but now that Jutkelon’s dead I figure I’m in this with anyone who wants to help me.”

There was a long pause.

“With what?” an alien asked. Its wide black eyes blinked at Rald. Taller and more muscled than a Torcellan, its face had a snout-like olfactory organ. It had no ears to speak of.

He wondered briefly what it was and decided he didn’t care. He shook his head and looked at each of the people in turn. “I saw what happened to Jutkelon’s compound. Now, I won’t fault you for not getting involved then. What could you do with that ship in orbit? But it’s gone now, and you’re just going to let its allies keep what they took?”

A murmur went through the bar. They saw where Rald was going with this.

“Not our problem,” one of the Brakalons argued. He shook his head. “I fight for whoever pays me. Jutkelon didn’t pay me. Your friend didn’t pay me. You don’t pay me. You see my dilemma.”

Rald had been ready for this. “No one is going to pay you if these humans have their way.”

There were grumbles around the room, and Rald held the Brakalon’s eyes until he looked away.

“I’m searching for their allies,” Rald told the group. “And when I know everything there is to know about them, I’m going to go find these humans and turn everything they’ve tried to do here into a smoking wreck like the one they made of Jutkelon’s compound. They wanted to make a point? They thought we’d just sit here and let them do it?” He snorted and his lip curled. “Looking at you, I guess they were right.”

They were furious at the insult, but to his surprise they also looked scared. He understood. They were worried that the humans would come back.

Cowards.

“They’re in the other cities,” one of the mercenaries informed him shakily. “You don’t want to fuck with them.”

“You’re supposed to be mercenaries!” Rald spat contemptuously. “No one’s supposed to want to fuck with you. You start getting weak like this—just roll over and let people take whatever they want, let them kill your friends without fear of your revenge—and what are you? Not a mercenary anymore, that’s for sure. You don’t even have any pride left.”

“You think you can win if you go up against them?” One of the mercenaries shook his head. “You’re wrong. No one knows all their capabilities.”

“Which is why we start with information,” Rald told him. “So tell me what you know of the humans here. There are some at that bar, Aebura’s.”

The black-eyed alien made a hissing noise. “Friends of the Ubuara. Those little rats, you know? The one who runs it—he fought with them at the mines.”

Rald signaled for the barkeeper to refill the alien’s drink. “Tell me about him. Tell me about his mate, too. And his young.”

Chapter Ten

“That went better than I expected,” Barnabas announced, mostly to himself. The Shinigami banked smoothly away from Zahal, taking a very direct route out of the atmosphere and away from any anti-aircraft measures.

Gar looked at him. “Sarcasm?”

“Not at all. We learned how many of them there might be, which is considerably more than I thought there were. That is unfortunate, certainly. But we were able to get the interior layout of the base and a scan of security measures they have in place, and that crawler should find their main communications hub soon so we can tap into it.”

Barnabas headed toward his rooms as he spoke. He paused at the door of the suite and turned to give Gar a smile. “I’ll be back shortly.”

“You don’t want to debrief now?” Usually, Barnabas put business before relaxation.

“I want to wash this hair dye out immediately,” Barnabas explained. “I do not like it at all. Not a word,” he added in the direction of the nearest speaker and disappeared into his rooms.

Gar headed back into the main seating area and paced around the outside of it. No matter how much Barnabas and Shinigami tried to ignore it, the fact remained that Gar really had nothing to offer them except the fact that he was Luvendi. He was able to approach people who might not speak to a human.

A crew member should offer more than that. Of course, Gar knew the real reason he was here, but in the long run, it was going to be awkward for everyone if he could not bring anything at all to the table.

What did he have as a Luvendi?

He stopped. He actually did have something useful.

“Shinigami, would you bring up the files we extracted from Lan’s computers?”

There was a pause and Gar assumed Shinigami was asking Barnabas what he thought of the request, but a moment later one of the screens obligingly populated.

Gar sat down, tablet in hand, and began searching and making notes. He did not know very much about fighting, it was true. However, being Luvendi meant he had long ago learned to solve problems without fighting. A Luvendi out and about in the galaxy had to learn to defuse tense situations and achieve goals without physical violence.

Until recently, Gar had taken a lot of pride in his ability to do just that. Nonetheless, since joining Barnabas aboard the Shinigami he had become frustrated with how roundabout his own methods were. Barnabas tended to solve problems very directly, while Gar simply could not.

Now his roundabout methods might be able to help.

Gar was still deep in his research when Barnabas came back into the room. His hair was not precisely its former color, although it was close, and his eyes were back to blue. Gar wondered how he had changed the eye color but decided not to ask. Though most species seemed to have only a single pupil in their eyes, Gar had never gotten used to the appearance of it. He tried to avoid thinking about other species’ eyes, in fact. He shuddered slightly.

“What are you looking at?” Barnabas asked curiously.

“Lists of the Luvendi I know who are part of the company your Empress bought. Luvendan itself is large, but Luvendi who are out in the wider universe tend to know one another. There aren’t very many of us. I knew some, and Lan knew some others.”

Barnabas looked at the screen, then raised an eyebrow to ask for clarification.

“Luvendi tend to manage things,” Gar explained. “We handle the details of other people’s businesses because we can’t do manual labor. The ones who have found jobs off Luvendan are very good at it. Lan ran quite a profitable mine, for instance. Before I worked for him, I managed an information broker’s staff.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that the Luvendi could be a good asset to you. Getting the cooperation of a Luvendi in any of the businesses you’re looking at would mean we would get the inside information about their cash flow, their associates, and their locations—everything. That’s the first thing.”

“And the second thing?” Barnabas took a seat and propped his elbows on his knees. To Gar’s relief, he seemed interested instead of dismissive.

“From word of mouth and, well…knowing Lan, I can tell which of these people might be involved in shady things. Things your Empress—”

“She’s not the empress anymore,” Barnabas murmured.

Gar scowled in annoyance. “It’s not the Empire anymore, and you’re not a Ranger. You all say things like that, but you haven’t given me any other terms to work with.”

“Well, the Federation—”

“He has a point,” Shinigami interrupted. “I’ve taken to calling you ‘Vigilante One.’” Barnabas frowned. “You knew what he meant anyway,” Shinigami stated flatly. “Ignore him, Gar. Tell us more about your shady friends.”

“They’re not my friends.”

“They’re people you would have associated with before meeting me,” Barnabas reminded him.

“Yes.” Gar held his tongue rather than justify his earlier actions. “There is a difference between a business associate and a friend, however. These people were my rivals. They would think they still are if I were to contact them. We were all competing for the most lucrative jobs.”

“Whilst ignoring the effects those jobs had on others.”

Again Gar held his tongue, answering with a simple, “Yes.”

Barnabas thought Stephen would be impressed. When Barnabas had first met Gar and the Luvendi had run from him Barnabas had held him in complete contempt, but even in the first meeting he had seen something unusual in Gar.

He was willing to face his past mistakes. He did not protest or make excuses.

It was one of the reasons Barnabas believed Gar could atone for his past wrongs.

“Have you heard of Stephen?” he asked Gar.

“I…have not, no.”

“He is another like me, from Earth. Those with our abilities had a familial structure. We would pass those abilities to ‘children’ who were not of our lineage, but chosen due to their characters. We were responsible for their actions, so we tried to select carefully. Stephen made some mistakes when he chose, and his first meeting with Bethany Anne was…unpleasant. Now he is one of the first among her friends.” Barnabas smiled slightly. “Gar, a person can move beyond their mistakes and become something greater, but they must reflect on those mistakes, not simply admit to them. They must understand why they made them and what they will change to avoid them in the future.”

Gar frowned. He was not entirely sure where this was going.

“You are so eager to figure out what you want to do that you are ignoring what you were,” Barnabas told him. “You want to prove yourself, so you are trying to mold yourself into anything and everything you think might be…” He paused and smiled wryly. “Sufficient to save your life, if I’m guessing correctly.”

“Yes,” Gar admitted. He swallowed nervously.

“Stephen let his children run roughshod because they were his weakness,” Barnabas explained. “He loved each of them and that love led him to look the other way rather than fight them. Even when he knew they were wrong, he did not do what he should have to stop them. Though he is now a very different person in some ways, that care for his family still remains. Do you see?”

“I…don’t think I do.”

“Even I don’t,” Shinigami concurred.

Barnabas looked annoyed at her interjection, but when he looked at Gar again, it was with practiced good humor.

“You have good qualities,” he told Gar bluntly. “Both good qualities and bad can lead to mistakes. If you want to rebuild yourself into a different kind of person, into the kind of person who could be an ally of mine, then you must capitalize on your good qualities to keep the bad in check. It is a choice you will make every day; every time there is the chance to do the wrong or easier thing.”

Gar hesitated, then nodded.

“You have shown creativity,” Barnabas explained. “Today, for instance, you drew on your knowledge of other Luvendi to get information from these files that neither Shinigami nor I could have extracted. You have shown an ability to read the people you talk to and elicit information from them. In the past, your cowardice led you to use these skills to get ahead, no matter what the cost.”

“I thought that everyone was just out for themselves,” Gar admitted quietly. “That everyone would screw one another over given the opportunity. I thought I should just play the game as well as I could, and that the people I took advantage of would not be upset because I was doing the same thing they would in my place. I valued my physical safety above all else.”

“And now?” Barnabas asked.

“Now I think I have made some terrible mistakes.” Gar hung his head in shame. “When I let Lan shoot me, I did so because it was more important to me to confront him than it was to be safe. In retrospect, that seems terribly foolish.”

“Confronting injustice is never foolish,” Barnabas told him gravely. Then, seeing Gar’s solemn face, he winked. “Though I would invest in a bulletproof vest if you intend to do that often.”

Gar chuckled. “They showed me there was another way.” His spine straightened again. “On High Tortuga. The mine workers took risks for one another. It was the complete opposite of anything I had ever experienced. It made so little sense to me that I did not even perceive it as something which could happen. I would like to fight for something like they fought for their freedom, but I don’t know what I want to fight for.”

“It’s a good start.” Barnabas nodded. “A very good start. You say these people aren’t friends? Lan wasn’t your friend. You’ve kept yourself apart from everything for a long time, Gar. I think if you stop doing that, you’ll find something you want to fight for.”

He smiled and left Gar to his thoughts and his research.

Don’t you want to debrief?

We can do it later. Barnabas made his way to the bridge. Between Shinigami’s piloting capabilities and the fact that they had yet to engage in a ship-to-ship conflict together, Barnabas was rarely in that location.

He was not sure what had brought him here now. He wandered around the room, hands in his pockets, inspecting the computer terminals and the captain’s chair.

Could I make an observation? Shinigami asked.

It depends on whether you intend to be snarky.

It’s not snark. She waited a moment. I don’t think that speech back there was all for Gar. I think some of it was what you needed to hear.

I like to think I already have a very well-tuned moral compass, thank you. And a good grasp of my strengths and weaknesses.

No, you don’t. All right, the morals I’ll give you. But when was the last time you let someone in?

Tabitha. Barnabas settled into the captain’s chair. A bizarre choice.

You know that’s not true. And yes, you did let her in. And Bethany Anne, and some of the rest. But they were all part of…something more. You didn’t have to let your guard down in the same way. You could be a part of the group. When it’s not like that, you hold yourself apart just as much as Gar does.

I do not. What about Carter? Aebura?

People you left behind on the planet with a smile and a wave. You should set up a weekly game night with Carter. See? When I said that you looked really uncomfortable.

Barnabas stood up again and glared at nothing in particular. It was annoying to argue with Shinigami. He never knew where to direct his expressions.

And what about Sarah? Shinigami asked finally.

Barnabas went still. He swallowed. He wasn’t even sure how Shinigami knew about Sarah. Who had mentioned her?

What about her?

You know exactly what I mean, Shinigami told him. I don’t know a ton about humans, but I know what you looked like when you came in here, and that’s lonely. You miss Tabitha and the rest of them.

I had to come out here on my own. It was what I needed to do.

Shinigami hesitated for a long moment before she spoke again. You need other people too, or you’ll lose sight of what you’re fighting for.

Chapter Eleven

Tagurn was sweating nervously.

He knew Fedden was furious with him, and he hoped that whatever happened he’d be able to explain what was going on. Tagurn hadn’t meant to be disloyal. He didn’t like Crallus very much, and he definitely didn’t like the new second-in-command.

Or whatever that Torcellan was. Tagurn could just see the pale hands. The being made sure his face was well shadowed and he sat in a chair at the corner of the room, as self-possessed as if he were the one running everything.

Maybe he was. Tagurn could see Crallus working not to look over his shoulder. Was he nervous? Was he waiting for the Torcellan’s approval of his plans?

It didn’t matter very much. All that mattered was getting Fedden out of this alive. Tagurn had known as soon as the shot went wild that Fedden’s only chance of survival was to have someone speaking on his behalf. If they both launched themselves into the fight, it would turn into a brawl and people were likely to die, Fedden and Tagurn included.

However, if it was just one fighter, people might hang back.

So Tagurn had gone to speak to Crallus, and he’d heard the boss’s assessment: challenges weren’t personal, they were just part of the business, but Fedden had shown he wasn’t to be trusted with the lives of the ships’ captains. He would have to pay.

And now they’d called Tagurn here.

He linked his hands behind his back and forced himself to meet Crallus’ eyes. He would get nowhere by being deferential. Deference was a weakness. Tagurn needed to argue his point.

But what was his point?

“Tell us about the human and the Luvendi,” the Torcellan prompted.

“We met the Luvendi on Virtue Station. He told us he’d had his mine shut down on Devon.” Tagurn looked only at Crallus as he answered. Are you really in charge here?

Perhaps in answer, Crallus looked back at the Torcellan. He winced as he did so. The wound had been stabilized, but no technology the syndicate had on Zahal could heal a bullet hole so quickly.

“What were their names?” the Torcellan pressed. “What was their ship?”

“We were not told the human’s name. I assumed it was not important since he was treated as a very junior associate.” It was difficult to know if his words were being well received with the Torcellan’s face hidden in shadow. The alien had leaned back, finally. Though he was looking toward Tagurn, there was no way to know his expression.

For all Tagurn knew he was digging himself into a massive hole.

The Torcellan’s reply was carefully neutral. “You assumed it was not important.”

Tagurn’s heart sank. This was not a good sign. “Yes.”

“You were sent to find information about what happened on Devon, an event that is tied directly to a human presence there, and you did not ask for more information about a human you knew had been on the planet?”

“We didn’t know if he… He might have been hired…” Tagurn stuttered to a stop and let his head drop. There were too many failures for him to rectify. He had come in here intending to talk about Fedden challenging Crallus and instead they were talking about the information from Devon.

He wasn’t sure why it was so damned important. Mercenaries died all the time. Mercenaries who died because they underestimated their opponents weren’t worth avenging; they were a dead weight that had been cut off.

You were better off without someone like that on your team.

“Perhaps you think this issue is not worthy of your attention?” the Torcellan asked. He was eerily perceptive.

Tagurn fought the urge to flee.

“You would be wrong,” Crallus told him. After his silence so far the low growl of his voice surprised Tagurn. “What happened on Devon is part of a much larger event. It threatens…wider interests.”

The Torcellan made a faint hissing noise and Crallus stopped talking. So he wasn’t a second-in-command at all, Tagurn realized. He was in charge, somehow. This just kept getting worse.

Tagurn gathered all his courage and looked at Crallus, then at the Torcellan. “What can we do to make this right?”

There was a pause. “‘We?’” the Torcellan echoed.

“Fedden. Me.” Tagurn’s hands clenched.

“You’re sticking with him, then?” Crallus’ face was unreadable.

Tagurn should run. He knew that. He should ask to join another crew, beg for another chance after having tainted his reputation by even being associated with Fedden. To his surprise, though, he found he wasn’t willing to do that.

“He is my captain and my friend,” Tagurn told them. Then, because he realized that if they were going to kill him the decision was already made, he added, “You’re angry that he killed another captain, but that captain was trying to kill him. I know how it started, but you said yourself that challenges are part of this life.”

To his surprise, Crallus smiled. It was not a nice smile, but it didn’t promise death and retribution, either. “I did say that,” the syndicate leader agreed. “That’s how I took over. He did it in public. He didn’t try to sneak around. I can respect that.”

The Torcellan made a faint disgusted noise. “We do not have time for this. Shrillexian, you asked what you could do to make this right.”

Crallus and Tagurn exchanged a look and Tagurn’s curiosity deepened. This Torcellan seemed to know nothing and care for nothing about their life, but Crallus was listening to him. Crallus didn’t seem to care much about the humans on Devon. He had never been one to bow and scrape to other people. Hell, he told even their richest clients to fuck off if they got annoying.

Why the hell was he listening now? Why was he sending his captains to collect information, and why had he mentioned “wider interests?”

Crallus said nothing now, and Tagurn realized that even he did not know what the Torcellan was going to say. What the hell was going on here?

“We have a name,” the Torcellan informed them. “The ship that took down ours was almost certainly the Shinigami. It’s a human ship associated with…whatever the humans call themselves now. A Federation, apparently.” He waved a hand dismissively. “We have heard whispers that a Ranger was involved—not Ranger Two, the one many people know about, but Ranger One. This is unconfirmed, but if it happens to be true… Well, let us simply say that many people would be happy to have such a menace removed.”

Tagurn swallowed. He was pretty sure he knew where this was going.

“Normally, the person who took down this ship and this human could expect great renown,” the Torcellan continued. “They would be a hero—or whatever you people call someone who defends the group. Do mercenaries even have a word for that?”

The contempt was so sudden and so thick that even Crallus tensed.

“We are not animals,” the syndicate leader protested. “We defend our own. Why do you think the ships went to Devon in the first place?”

The Torcellan lifted an ambivalent shoulder. He seemed unconvinced of any higher motive beyond a propensity for violence.

“As I mentioned, such a one would ordinarily expect riches beyond their wildest dreams. Fame. That one could expect to be honored. But you can expect much more, Tagurn. Much more even than that.”

Tagurn frowned.

“You,” the Torcellan told him, “can expect to be forgiven.” There was a silence. “Do you not understand? That is how completely you have failed. The kind of extraordinary deed that would normally bring you wealth, fame, and a fleet of your own—all of that is needed simply to bring you back to zero.”

Tagurn’s heart almost stopped.

“And yet you will be permitted to redeem yourself,” the Torcellan continued beatifically. “Is this not wonderful news?”

Before a week ago I didn’t even know you existed, Tagurn wanted to say. Crallus doesn’t seem to know what you’re going for. Why the hell should I care whether you think I’ve redeemed myself?

He did not say it. Something in the Torcellan’s tone and in the way he had come in here and simply expected Crallus’ obedience hinted at larger events in play. Events Tagurn could not comprehend.

He had spent years as a mercenary, fighting for people who wanted to take anything they laid their eyes on. Those people wanted to be feared, but Tagurn hadn’t feared them. Without mercenaries on their side they were nothing.

For the first time though, he had the sense that the universe was larger than he knew. That there were people he had never heard of who cared about what he did, and who could crush him like a bug if he displeased them.

It terrified him.

“May I go get Fedden?” he asked.

The Torcellan sank back in his seat with a faint air of disappointment, but Crallus nodded.

“Go. Get him. Find the Shinigami and kill the human.”

“There will need to be proof,” the Torcellan murmured. “And the ship, itself, Tagurn. Do not forget to bring that back. There is something aboard that we need.”

“What?” Tagurn could not keep himself from asking.

“One of their AIs. We have not yet managed to capture one. Once it is ours… Well, it is of no consequence to you. Go. Redeem yourself.” The Torcellan nodded to Crallus. “We have come across some information that will help you find allies. The human killed two Luvendi—Venfirdri Lan and Venfaldri Gar. Proof of this may help you. You see, we are not cruel. We are giving you a chance to succeed.”

Venfaldri Gar? No. It couldn’t be.

But there was no mistaking it.

No. Oh, no. They were so fucking screwed.

“One other thing,” the Torcellan added. His voice was pleasant, but it somehow also turned Tagurn’s blood to ice. “We have several other individuals now searching for the ship and its captain. You will only be absolved if you find it first.”

Tagurn managed to keep his face straight as he ducked his head and hurried out of the room, but as soon as he was in the corridor he ran as if he were being chased by a pack of bloodthirsty ekthoya.

He practically skidded into the brig, to find that Fedden was already being released. The other Shrillexian bared his teeth at Tagurn. “Get out of my sight.”

“We have to leave. Right now.” Tagurn shook his head, and when Fedden only glared at him he grabbed his captain by the arm and dragged him into a corner. “I’ll explain what I did later, and if you still want to kill me you’re welcome to try. But right now we have to get out of here. You will die if you don’t. Every second we’re here is a risk.”

Fedden didn’t look any friendlier, but whatever he saw in Tagurn’s face, he didn’t argue.

They strode through the halls with the back of Tagurn’s neck prickling. Every fiber of his being was consumed with the desperate hope that they could kill the human and rectify their mistake.

Before that damned Torcellan learned that they’d had two chances at the Shinigami and missed them both.

Chapter Twelve

At least once every day when he thought no one was looking, Barnabas snuck away to a corner of the ship to sit quietly by himself.

Shinigami tried not to interrupt him when he did this. It was such a quintessentially human thing to do, to forget that she was an AI and was omnipresent on this ship. There were no private places.

At first, she had been fascinated. What was he doing? She analyzed his vital signs and found that his heartbeat slowed and his breathing became deep and even. He was not sleeping, however. His brain activity was off the charts. Some days it seemed to be pure thought, and other days a tangle of emotion so bright that Shinigami was surprised he wasn’t laughing hysterically—or smashing the ship to pieces with his bare hands.

Later, she decided that simply not announcing her presence wasn’t enough. She would turn off her cameras whenever he went to be alone, and she would wait until he moved somewhere else in the ship to turn them back on.

Now, however, she was fairly sure she needed to disturb him. She knew where he was—in a small alcove in one of the corridors, where a window showed the vast blackness outside. Today there was a particularly pretty cluster of stars visible from that window, one bluish and one a reddish-orange color.

“Barnabas?” She projected her voice out of a speaker a little way down the corridor.

The sensors there recorded him moving around and then he came around the curve of the corridor curiously. “Shinigami?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Shinigami apologized. “It’s about the server data from the syndicate.”

Barnabas frowned. “Why did you not speak directly to me where I was?”

Shinigami hesitated. She had so much data on human minds, but much of it was contradictory or illogical or both. She had no idea how Barnabas was going to respond to the truth. However…

“When you come down here to sit alone, I turn off my cameras and speakers so you have privacy.”

There was a pause. Barnabas said nothing for a long moment. By the standards of how fast both he and Shinigami thought, a very long moment.

“Thank you,” he murmured at last.

Shinigami was surprised by the depth of emotion in his voice. She looked for the signs of anger and found them deep below, as always, but the anger did not seem to be directed at her. There was also a hint of strain in his features that conveyed sadness.

She wanted to ask him what he had been thinking about, but was not sure she should. After all, he could have spoken to her if he had wanted to do so. Instead, he had gone to be alone.

“What did you want to tell me?” he asked finally. His face had cleared. Whatever his turmoil was, he had set it aside for now.

“The crawler found its way into their communications hub and managed to get the data out to us. What I’m looking at suggests this is a much bigger operation than we thought.”

“I’ll come up to the conference room.”

Barnabas made his way through the corridors quickly. “Start at the beginning. You said ‘suggests?’”

“It’s a fairly standard set-up for mercenary groups. They’re pretty independent, and they give a cut of their take to the syndicate leader. In this case, it’s a Shrillexian named Crallus. It’s very decentralized. They have the base here, and a larger one in a different system.”

“Should we head there?”

“Not right now. The syndicate leader was there when you met with Fedden.”

“Fedden shot him. It’s why we left so quickly. Is he still alive?”

“I haven’t seen any communications that would suggest otherwise.” Shinigami paused and Barnabas imagined her shrugging. “In any case, the other hideout is well-defended in terms of automated defenses, but it’s not the main stopping point for any of their ships. We could smash it, but it wouldn’t do us much good.”

“Shinigami, you’re telling me that there is a large base that we could expend significant time and effort smashing to smithereens, with a lot of—what was it you called them?”

“Pretty explosions!”

“Yes. Pretty explosions.” Barnabas, who had always thought ‘pretty’ was supposed to refer to women, flowers, and unicorns, tried to keep his face straight. “In any case, now you’re advocating that we do not do this? I think that might be personal growth.”

“I said not right now. If at some point our path takes us through that system and you want to make a little detour and have some fun? I wouldn’t complain.”

“Add a bottle of wine and a movie and you have a nice evening,” Barnabas commented.

“You and Stephen must have very similar taste in women.” Shinigami waited for the laughter and was surprised instead to see a sad expression cross Barnabas’ face. On a hunch, she switched to a scan and saw an echo, very faint, of the turmoil she had seen in him when they first began talking.

She had a memory of mentioning Sarah to him, and she suddenly remembered the story Tabitha had told her about Barnabas’ past—a story the irreverent, terminally sarcastic Tabitha had told very solemnly.

The expression was gone in an instant, however, and she had the sense that Barnabas didn’t want to speak of it.

She switched the subject instead. “There’s not much at the base. Crallus only goes there sometimes. It was really set up by the person he took over from. Hard to tell who that was since he didn’t do much in the way of his own paperwork. Real old-school robber-baron.”

Barnabas grimaced. “And Crallus was his protégé?”

“It’s not something that shows up in any of their documentation, but let’s just say that Crallus took over very suddenly.”

“Ah, the other kind of transfer of power, then.” Barnabas smiled tightly. He didn’t feel particularly sorry for Crallus’ predecessor. Mercenary syndicates were almost stereotypical in their propensity for this sort of thing. It was just what happened when you got a lot of people in one place who all made their living by killing for money. Of the people who ran mercenary groups, not very many ended up dying of old age.

“Pretty much,” Shinigami agreed. “He isn’t super-important, except that he got the group hooked into something called ‘the Yennai Corporation.’”

Barnabas let his eyes drift closed for a moment. He already knew what Shinigami was going to say, or at least, the rough shape of it. He’d seen enough of the universe to know that much.

“Let me guess. The Yennai Corporation isn’t part of any particular industry. Its tendrils are hooked into almost anything you can think of.”

“That’s about the size of it. So far I’ve tracked mentions of them to legal, semi-legal, and illegal weapons and drug trafficking, transport—that would be cargo and people—a few mercenary syndicates like this one, banking, some information brokers, agriculture, mining, station parts manufacturing, pharmaceuticals—”

“I’m going to stop you for a moment.” Barnabas held up a hand. “Would it just be quicker to say that pretty much wherever we go and whoever we interact with, we can assume word might get back to them?”

“Yes, probably. I was just impressed by how successful they had been so far.”

“Corporations like this tend to be.” Barnabas shook his head and began to scroll through the information on the screens. “Like Crallus’ organization, it’s organic. They allow the syndicates a lot of leeway. They don’t waste resources overseeing after they give the initial cash infusion. They just let the cut trickle up to them, along with any information these people are able to provide. When things get going, that means they know all the emerging markets and also have a very good idea of where threats might emerge.”

Shinigami considered this. “I’m going to hazard a guess that we count as threats.”

“Your analytical algorithms really are top-notch.”

“Sarcasm? Really? When I just found us all this information?”

“That wasn’t very sporting of me. I apologize.” Barnabas paused at one and sighed. “So, the bankers I spoke with on Virtue Station?”

“Ah, yes. Yennai has contacts in all those banks, as well as the company that provides security for the station and the company that built the station in the first place. I’d say someone from there has probably already read a brief about what went down while we were there. In fact, now that I think of it, it’s probably why Mustafee Boreir disappeared.”

Barnabas sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “And we weren’t cloaking who we were when we went there, either.”

“No, we weren’t.” Shinigami sounded cautious. “Should I have?”

“I didn’t ask you to.” He sat on the edge of one of the tables and stared into the middle distance. “Well, this might get interesting.”

“Explain.”

Barnabas cleared his throat as he considered. “When we started this quest I thought we were tracking down the dregs of the corporation Bethany Anne bought out—a few disaffected employees, that sort of thing. That was what we had with Lan. Then I figured, well, the mercenary groups that were on the planet probably tended to look for planets like that. I thought we would just organically track our way through various groups who would have known about High Tortuga and might have had a grudge. After all, you did all that good research on people who might have.”

Shinigami was quietly pleased. Barnabas did not give praise unless he thought it was merited. However, she saw that Barnabas now looked troubled. He pushed himself up and began to pace, running his hands through his hair again. “I don’t like hiding. I don’t like skulking around and giving fake names unless there’s a very specific purpose to it, like with Fedden. If my reputation precedes me, all the better.”

At last Shinigami understood. “But now we’ve pissed off someone we might not be able to take on by ourselves.”

Barnabas nodded. He crossed his arms and looked at the screens.

“Well, then maybe we consider this to be a good and very specific reason to sneak around,” Shinigami suggested after a moment.

“Mmm.” Barnabas still didn’t seem entirely pleased by this, in her opinion.

“I mean, it’s not completely bad,” she told him. “We found a gigantic corporation with hundreds of shadowy tentacles all over known space. We’re pretty outmatched.”

“I think your language couplings might be experiencing a malfunction. Or your reasoning modules.” Barnabas frowned at one of the cameras. “Other than the fact that we know their name, it is completely bad.”

A sniff came from the speaker closest to Barnabas. “I don’t think so. Hell, you shouldn’t think so, either.”

Barnabas allowed a smile to slip out. He figured this was probably a joke, but he was enjoying Shinigami’s sense of humor. “Would you care to explain?” he asked with exaggerated courtesy. He sat in one of the chairs and nodded for her to continue.

“We haven’t known each other for very long,” Shinigami began hesitantly, “so I might be way off on this as a personal assessment. However, there are a couple of things I’ve noticed about you. First, of the seven deadly sins, yours would be pride.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. And second, you really like being sneaky.”

Barnabas raised an eyebrow at the camera. “I assume there’s a point to all this?”

“Oh, there is, and it’s this: we’re up against someone who can call on overwhelming force and might just do so if you piss them off enough. They’ve got virtually unlimited resources at their disposal. How satisfying would it be to set up a series of traps that result in you razing this company to the ground? They’ll never in a million years imagine that one human in one ship could do that.”

Barnabas sat very still.

“You don’t want to admit I’m right,” Shinigami gloated. “But you would just love that. One man taking down this whole rotten corporation. Of course, it would be impossible without his partner in crime, the Dread Ship Shinigami.”

Barnabas’ lips quirked, but he went to the heart of the matter rather than tease her about the name. “We don’t know it’s all rotten. We should really do our due diligence—”

“Oh, come on, we totally know.”

“Yes, we do. All right, I admit it. You’re right. About all of it. Don’t tell anyone.”

“That you’re proud of your sneakiness? Everyone knows.”

“We’ll get back to that. After I’ve taken down the Yennai Corporation. In the meantime, I suggest we— What was that?” There was a beeping noise from the speakers.

“Someone’s shooting at us,” Shinigami reported. “They all just appeared out of nowhere.”

“All?”

“There are four of them. Wait, five. No… Look, there are a lot of them, okay? Get to the bridge and I’ll start evasive maneuvers. And tell Gar to strap in. We might have to do some barrel rolls.”

Chapter Thirteen

Ergix Koyissa Get’ruz III, captain of the YCS Get’ruz, checked the position of the other ships in the formation and gave a decisive nod.

“Begin the standard capture sequence and broadcast a message across all Yennai channels to stay out of our way.”

He had started Get’ruz Shipping decades ago using the money he’d made after hijacking a cargo vessel full of nutritional algae and selling the cargo. The ship and crew he had used to start his own fleet of cargo vessels.

His philosophy was very simple. Shipping was dangerous, and unprotected ships were liable to be stolen—by him. Anyone who worked for him could take any ship they wanted, after which they were responsible for maintenance, cargo contracts, and security to keep it from getting stolen again. In return, they got to distribute the goods and keep whatever profits they could.

Ergix provided backup and negotiation when the people he’d stolen from got uppity, and now he sat at the center of a tidy little shipping empire.

It was an empire, however, that had once been close to collapsing. A captain, too young and inexperienced to know what he could and couldn’t get away with, had stolen a ship full of ore meant for the Jotun government’s shipyards and their Imperial Fleet had gotten involved.

The Jotun bastards might look like bags of jelly and they might keep mostly to themselves, but it had turned out to be a mistake to underestimate them. The bags of jelly had fine-tuned the practice of creating power suits for themselves and they also had a fleet of ships that were some of the most advanced in the universe—and Ergix’ damn-fool captain had fled directly back to headquarters with that fleet on his ass.

Which was where Yennai Corporation had stepped in. Just when Ergix was sure he was done for, a few slim, agile ships had appeared between his base and the Jotun fleet. An encrypted conversation had ensued, and the Jotun fleet had dispersed without so much as a goodbye.

The Yennai Corporation’s representatives had then offered Ergix and his ships membership. “Surely he could see the benefits of being part of their organization?” they had asked.

He could.

The thing was, they didn’t even ask for very much. Ergix sent a relatively minor cut of his income to them, passed along any news he thought was of note, and occasionally handled targets or provided security at their request. They never got in his face about how he ran Get’ruz, either.

So when they said jump, he jumped—like right now, keeping an eye out for any human ship registered to the former Etheric Empire. He’d staked out the main routes leading away from where they had last been seen, and it hadn’t been long before they had dropped into his lap.

“Sir.” Helix, his niece and one of the junior communications officers aboard Ergix’s flagship, swung around in her chair. “We’re being hailed by another Yennai-affiliated ship. It asks to be involved in the capture and reports that it is one hour away.”

Ergix stared at her incredulously. “An hour? It wants us to keep this ship on the line but not capture it for an hour while it gets here? No. Close communications from it and give the information to Jeryx so he can keep an eye out for it. Whoever they are, we don’t need them interfering.”

“Yes, sir.” She relayed the message and then pulled the earpiece away from her head with a wince. “He wants to speak to you, sir. He says it’s urgent.”

“No,” Ergix repeated. “I don’t care what he wants. This was an Etheric Empire ship. The only way we’re taking it is with the element of surprise. Keeping it on the hook for an hour is not an option. Shut down communications and focus on the operation.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

“Request denied,” said the female voice from the Get’ruz. “Communications are hereby terminated.”

On the bridge of his ship, Fedden slammed his hand down and snarled in fury and desperation.

He had to be there when they captured the ship. He had to be involved. Tagurn, who was never worried by the people in charge, had been afraid of what this Torcellan might do—and Tagurn’s instincts had helped Fedden steer clear of innumerable bad decisions.

Fedden was one mistake away from being an example to the rest of Crallus’ organization, and he knew it.

“Throw everything at this,” he told Tagurn. “I don’t care what safety protocols you have to ignore to get us there in time, just do it.”

Tagurn, for once, did not argue.

He knew as well as Fedden did that it was no use surviving the trip if they failed to take the Shinigami.

* * *

“All passengers, please take your seats and brace for impact,” Shinigami announced in an artificially pleasant tone.

“Impact?” Barnabas strapped himself into the captain’s chair, then glanced at the speakers. “Shinigami—impact?”

“It’s only wise to be cautious.” She was still using the tone Barnabas remembered from airline stewardesses back on Earth.

It made his teeth ache. That had been one of the worst things about flying. “Please stop talking like that.”

In answer, Shinigami sent the ship into a barrel roll. Barnabas closed his eyes as his body pressed against the straps of the harness.

“Was that really necessary? What about Gar?”

“Gar is better off if the ship doesn’t get captured,” Shinigami replied breezily. “And yes, it was necessary. They’re not trying to shoot us down, they’re trying to capture the ship.”

“Oh, really?” Barnabas lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a surprise. A convenient one, I’d say.”

“Why? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“If what you’re thinking is that this gives us an excellent chance to shoot them all down while they’re focusing on capturing us in one piece, then yes.” Barnabas gave a small satisfied smile. In a direct battle the name of the game was simple—take the other side down.

Weapons would have been used immediately if their attackers had not wanted to capture them. However, they had not, and they were now at a disadvantage. Shinigami could use weapons and they could not.

They would break eventually, of course. It would become too costly to keep trying to capture a ship that was taking down their fleet. In the meantime, their tacticians would be occupied by trying to maneuver into position both to capture the ship and avoid missiles, all the while performing the internal calculus of when to abandon their original goal.

In a space battle distractions like that could easily be deadly, especially when one’s opponent was an AI with faster-than-organic resources.

“Can I use the flamethrower?” Shinigami asked excitedly.

“We’re in space, Shinigami.” Barnabas studied the readout. There were seven ships in the formation, all of them reading ‘YCS’ in their designation. ‘Yennai Corporation Ship,’ unless he was very much mistaken.

“I was thinking about that. If I vent a little bit of air next to the flamethrower—”

“No, we are not venting any of our air. This discussion is over.”

“You are so boring. All right, hold on for a bit.” The last words were broadcast to the whole ship as the Shinigami’s jets rotated to send the ship tumbling end over end away from the enemy fleet.

Without any clear shot at a lock point for grappling hooks, the enemy ships waited—only to realize their mistake when the Shinigami stopped flipping and shot toward them at high speed.

“Wheeeee!”

“Don’t ram them!”

“Don’t worry, they’ll move!” Shinigami pushed the engines and practically purred in satisfaction. She didn’t exactly have what could be called sensations, but she had learned to interpret the flexing and vibrations within the ship in much the same way an organic life form would interpret feedback from their nervous system.

Right now, the ship “felt” damned amazing. It was flying at the limits of its capabilities for the first time in ages, and between the thrum of its engines and the dual challenges of evading the enemy fleet and keeping Barnabas and Gar safe Shinigami was thinking that today was shaping up to be a very nice day.

Plus, she got to shoot things.

She launched a spread of missiles. The other ship was playing chicken pretty well, holding its course as she barreled toward it, but as soon as the missiles began to close the captain clearly recognized that their options were limited. The ship dove under the Shinigami, only to expose itself to the guns on the undersides of her wings. Three sections of the hull breached and began to vent before the internal airlock doors closed, and the ship spun out of control, unable to avoid one of the guided missiles that had locked onto it.

“Boom,” Shinigami reported. Three of the other missiles struck home and the enemy fleet began to reorganize hastily. “Everyone hold on. The grappling hooks mean this battle is about ninety-five percent maneuvering.”

“How do you calculate that?” Barnabas murmured. He narrowed his eyes at the screen. “Shinigami, if you are able to get into the center of their fleet and have several of them lock on, you might be able to pull them out of formation and into a collision course.”

“I like that idea! Everyone keep holding on!”

Gar’s voice came over the speakers, sounding breathless. “You can assume that I, at least, have not stopped holding on since this began. Barnabas, is there anything I could be doing?”

“I’m afraid not.” Barnabas knew how upsetting it was to be in the middle of an event like this with no control over how anything unfolded and he felt a pang of sympathy for Gar. “Actually, perhaps you could see if you can find any information on these ships. They’re affiliated with the Yennai Corporation, but exact registration and provenance might give us an idea of who they’re calling in to mess with us.”

“Right. I’ll do what I can.” He sounded pleased to have a distraction. Then, as several thuds reverberated through the hull, he asked with a deathly calm, “What was that?”

“Grappling hooks,” Shinigami reported. “Okay, ah…hmm.”

“I dislike when people dissemble.” Barnabas had a sense he knew what was coming, but he asked anyway. “Shinigami, what are you planning?”

“Let’s just say it has a high probability of working.”

“Let’s say more.”

“No time!”

“No time? Shinigami!”

Shinigami opened the engines full-bore and the ship shot above the fray. She released seven full spreads of missiles behind her as she left the plane of battle. Yanked to the ends of their grappling hooks and then freed as the hooks popped away, the Yennai ships swung too close to one another. They tried to avoid collisions, and although some failed and some succeeded, none had the time or maneuverability to get out of the way of Shinigami’s missiles.

On the bridge, Barnabas watched as the ships blinked off the trackers one after another.

There was only silence, broken by the beeping of a final proximity tracker that hastily shut off.

“What was that?”

“A ship appeared on the radar but then disappeared,” Shinigami told him. “I’m scanning, but nothing is showing up now.”

Barnabas swore softly. “What do you want to bet they had a ship waiting in the wings and now it’s running home to tell them what it saw?”

“I should be able to see it, if so.” Shinigami gave a low growl of frustration and brought up the outside view on the screens. “Do either of you see anything you shouldn’t? It could just be designed to avoid scanning metrics and they’re hoping we won’t have eyes on it.”

“I don’t see anything,” Barnabas told her a moment later.

“Me either,” Gar reported. “Barnabas, is that supposed to be ‘either’ or ‘neither?’”

“Either, I believe. I mean, either works. I mean, both terms could be used. You know, I really preferred Latin for ease of communication.”

“The ship sailed on that one, man,” Shinigami reported. “You need to let it go.”

“Mmm. Et Yennaiam delenda est.”

“What?”

“Ceterum censeo Yennai esse delendam. Before the Third Punic War, Cato the Elder would end all of his speeches in the Roman Senate, no matter his topic, by reminding the other senators that Carthage must be destroyed. Until we have dealt with the Yennai Corporation, we will have a similar focus.”

“I…see.” Shinigami helpfully fed information from her data banks to Gar, who was presently trying to figure out the spellings of any of the words Barnabas had just used. “Well, then, what’s our next move?”

“I’m thinking,” Barnabas murmured. “Find us a rarely-traveled route and I’ll get back to you.”

* * *

In the rubble, hugging tight to a large piece of debris, Fedden’s ship tumbled and spun out into space.

Tagurn’s quick thinking had saved them again, hiding them in the natural movement of the debris field among other similarly-registered ships. Fedden had seen the Shinigami pause as it was flying away and knew it was looking for the hint of movement it would have seen on its tracking system.

It left, however, and Fedden stared at their own tracking system and struggled to breathe.

This was a nightmare. They had appeared too late, or so he had thought, and he’d had visions of his painful death playing behind his eyes until he saw the absolute destruction wreaked by the Shinigami.

Thank every god he’d ever heard of that they hadn’t made it to the battle. If the captain of the Get’ruz had waited for them…

“We can’t do this alone,” Fedden declared finally. “We need more ships.”

“And a trap,” Tagurn agreed. “You can’t take this ship on without stacking the deck, Fedden. And I think I have a plan.”

Chapter Fourteen

“I…think…” Gar pushed a piece forward on the chess board and grimaced. “Is that a legal move?”

“Not only is it a legal move, you’re only four moves from—”

“Shinigami.” Barnabas glared.

“What? We’re teaching him. It’s a collaborative effort.”

“You mean, I’m teaching him and you’re hamstringing me.”

“It’s only fair. You know more about chess than he does. Theoretically. Your style of play disputes that, though. Yeah, I said that.”

“I swear, when I find some way to punish AIs…” Barnabas made his move and closed his eyes. Between habit and his desire to win, it was taking great self-control not to scan Gar’s mind—or whisper suggestions, much the same way he would speak to an Ubuara.

Would it work? Only experimentation could tell.

That would be unethical, he told himself.

Gar made the move Barnabas had been hoping for anyway. It was a tempting move, sliding a bishop out to put Barnabas’ king in check. However, it also allowed Barnabas to slide a rook down the center of the board and put Gar’s king in checkmate.

Gar, to his credit, laughed as soon as Barnabas began to move the rook.

“I didn’t look far enough ahead.”

“It’s easy to get caught up in the moment,” Barnabas admitted. “Chess has been surprisingly…engaging.”

Shinigami snickered. “He means infuriating, because he always loses.”

“I do not always lose.”

“More than fifty percent of the time.”

“That is true, but only by a very small margin.”

Gar, sensing that things might be getting dangerous, stood hastily. “I’m going to go, um…clean my room. Thank you for the game, Barnabas. I enjoyed it. I would be happy to play again sometime.”

He swept out of the room before any chairs could be thrown and Barnabas smiled as the door hissed shut.

“He knows we’re joking, surely?”

“Joking, shmoking. Most people don’t think, ‘eh, if I break a bone, I break a bone.’ They try to avoid it, much like Gar tries to avoid you when you’re about to start throwing chairs.”

“How do these people pass the time, I wonder? Anyway, I only threw the chair that one time because you were launching books at me.”

“A more sensible alternative would have been to use the chair as a shield.”

“Mmm. I’ll remember that for next time.” Barnabas went over to stare out of the window from the entertainment room.

“Another game?” Shinigami reset the board hopefully. She had a new strategy she’d been dying to test.

She had to admit that if it weren’t for the organic element the game wouldn’t have been any fun. She could analyze probabilities, but every so often Barnabas strung together a highly unlikely series of moves that seemed to occur to him out of nowhere. It kept Shinigami on her toes, as Bethany Anne would have said.

She would never have told him she just liked the game, however. That was the sort of thing he would take as a compliment, and he already had a big head.

He was so lost in thought right now that she had to repeat her question, and he shook himself as he looked at the speakers.

“I apologize, I was woolgathering. Not just now, I don’t think. We need to figure out where we’re going. I notice you’ve been taking us in the direction of the last known port of the Get’ruz.” Shinigami and Gar had provided a detailed report of the shipping corporation’s fleet.

“Yes. Would you like me to take us there faster?”

“I had something else in mind.” Barnabas settled into one of the chairs by the window and smiled when Shinigami projected her avatar in one of the chairs opposite. “You’re getting better at that.”

The figure shrugged. Her arm lay along the back of the chair and one knee was crossed over the other. As Barnabas watched, she brushed her hair back over her shoulders.

“I hadn’t realized how often humans made useless movements,” Shinigami remarked after showing off each of her recent additions. “None of you can sit still. Some of you are better at it than others, of course. You’re pretty good at it, actually. But all of you are in motion most of the time.”

“Such are the perils of having a central nervous system.” Barnabas smiled. “And I had an idea about our next destination. It will be somewhat like finding a needle in a haystack, of course…”

“I’m intrigued.”

“Ah, and here I was thinking you would finish my sentence. We caught the tail end of two communications when they went into formation to attack us. One was broad-wave, and they followed it up with what was clearly a conversation. But the other was sent in a specific direction where, as far as I can tell, there is nothing.”

“You’re thinking a secret base?”

“Possibly. Or maybe a communications hub.” Barnabas smiled. “What do you want to bet Yennai Corporation has its own buoys to send and boost signals? And with our hook into Crallus’ communications, we have at least an educated guess of where we might find one of those.”

“So when you said a needle in a haystack, you really meant it.” Shinigami pursed the avatar’s lips and gave a low whistle. “You knew I couldn’t resist the challenge. All right, course plotted and verified, and I’m adjusting our trajectory. Could any of your mindless ships back in the day do that, Grandpa?”

“When you call me that, it just motivates me to find out what your equivalent is of going to bed without supper.”

“I take it you don’t have fond memories of your grandparents?”

“I didn’t talk back to them,” Barnabas told her, unperturbed. “First because I was a child, then because I thought I was possessed by a demon, and—after that—because I had lost my mind.” He frowned. “I don’t know why people find pleasure in rehashing their old memories.”

“Surely there are some pleasant ones.” But Shinigami sensed this conversational topic might veer toward the thoughts that had saddened Barnabas in recent days. “Regardless, what are your plans when we do find the buoy? Because we will, I promise you that.”

“I never had any doubts.” Barnabas smiled. “It will be a long game, Shinigami. If we are going to do this without backup—and, as much as possible, I would like to—then we will need to be very, very careful. We cannot make the same mistake Gar just made in that chess game.”

“Between the two of us, I doubt we will.”

“Shouldn’t it be the three of us?” Barnabas frowned contemplatively. “He should be more involved. His thought patterns have been well within acceptable ranges for a while and I can hardly expect him to develop better modes of behavior if I never give him any chances to do anything. Speaking of which, do you have recommendations yet on upgrades?”

“Fairly standard,” Shinigami reported. She projected a scan of Gar’s body on one of the smooth walls of the room. “The bones need to be strengthened, of course, and we’ll want some changes to the cardiovascular structure to accommodate more movement. We won’t know about the rest of the upgrades until he’s moving more regularly and encountering impact.”

“Which means we’ll need to persuade him to do so.”

“That shouldn’t be hard. Tabitha left a whole series of kung fu movies in the data banks and he’s been watching them religiously.” Shinigami snickered. “He practices, too. He’s actually got very fast reflexes.”

“We are not teaching him kung fu.”

“Too late, the damage is done.”

“Right.” Barnabas stood, shaking his head. “Well, we’ll see to that once we know how soon we can expect to be involved in any altercations. For the next few weeks—or possibly months or even years—I think we can expect to be tracking down various parts of the Yennai Corporation, isolating them, and destroying them.”

“How do you intend to keep the main piece of it from coming after you?”

“We’ll learn their communication patterns and keep the communications going so that no one notices anything’s amiss. If we can find a way to make it seem that they’re still sending in a cut of profits while actually taking money, so much the better.”

“Sneaky. I like it. Well, course laid in. I’ll let you know when we’re close.”

* * *

Gar balanced on one leg, wobbling slightly. He had taken to chewing one lip when he was concentrating. It was a very human mannerism. He had never seen any other Luvendi do such a thing. It was surprisingly habit-forming, however.

On the holoscreen, the black-clad figure extended their leg, foot at the same height as their face, and then hopped several times to change feet. The flurry of potential strikes seemed to be designed to keep the opponent from getting within range.

Gar tried as hard as he could to get his foot up high, but the muscles in the backs of his legs simply wouldn’t extend that far. He wound up with the leg bent, one knee against his thin chest, his foot straining to mimic the position of the human foot. This was agony.

Now the flurry of kicks. The other foot up, then the first, then the other, then the first again. One, two—

Gar came to looking at the ceiling dazedly. The pain was still fading from his body.

“What the…” He barely managed the words.

“I believe you forgot to plan how you were going to put your foot down,” Shinigami answered. She sounded vaguely like she was struggling not to laugh.

“Have you been watching me?”

“Of course I’ve been watching you. I watch everything. Mostly. That, and I was worried you might get hurt. Don’t worry, I scanned you while you were out. You didn’t fracture anything.”

“Uh-huh.” Gar stared at the ceiling and decided that lying here seemed like a better idea than getting up. The floor wasn’t very comfortable, but he was pretty sure it beat trying to move any part of his body.

“Come on, get up.” Shinigami sounded impatient. “I wanna try something.”

“Make your own body,” Gar complained muzzily.

“I am heavily discouraged from doing so. It’s one of the suggestions tagged ‘Skynet.’”

“Huh?”

“Get uuuuuup.”

Gar rolled over and draped his sleeves over his eyes. “You can’t make me.”

“No, but if I ever get to tweak your body and make you stronger, you’ll still have to sit around here until you learn how to fight. Why not start now?”

Gar perked up; this sounded promising. “You think I could actually fight with Barnabas?” His practices so far had just been him daydreaming that he was the hero in these movies. They all fought for Justice and Honor, striking off on their own against impossible odds.

And in his opinion, they looked very dashing in their headbands. He was thinking he might start wearing one.

“Let’s just say you need some practice,” Shinigami offered diplomatically. “But yes, of course you could fight with Barnabas one day. We just need to make you less breakable.”

“I am not a vase. Shinigami?” The AI had gone into gales of laughter.

“Just picturing you with a bunch of flowers stuck in your head. Never mind. Okay, so get back in the pose you were in before. One leg up. Yes, that’s right. Now listen closely…”

Chapter Fifteen

The Shinigami floated in the blackness, cloaked and running as close to silently as it could. There was no way to determine what the communications buoy alongside them could detect.

Barnabas had honestly expected something very compact, more a signal collector and booster than anything else, but the “buoy” was instead a roughly cube-shaped cobbled-together collection of machinery about five meters to a side. It reflected the light of the stars very faintly.

Thankfully, it did not seem to be armed.

“I hate wearing space suits,” Barnabas muttered. He checked the tether holding him to the ship and pushed himself off very slowly to cross the dozen or so yards between the ship and the buoy.

“It’s no bulkier than a regular suit.” Shinigami’s tone said that he was being a baby about this.

“On the fingers, it is. I hate gloves. I was happy when gentlemen stopped wearing them. That was a long few decades.” Barnabas caught the buoy and grimaced as it slowly began to turn. The last thing he needed while trying to assess strange electronics was to get dizzy.

“Why did you wear them if you hated them?”

“To be polite. Not liking an article of clothing was not a good enough reason not to wear it.”

“You should have come up with a different fashion. That’s how Scottish men got away with wearing no pants.”

“Did Tabitha tell you that? Because I don’t think you should be taking history lessons from her.”

“No, that was Bethany Anne.”

“Huh.” Barnabas set a crawler loose on the surface of the buoy and watched as it began moving around.

They had modified the machinery to have limited gravitic fields in its tiny feet. Barnabas had originally suggested magnets, but Shinigami had pointed out that many electronics were sensitive to magnetic fields.

Barnabas crawled over the surface of the buoy, following the crawler until it disappeared abruptly into the innards of the machine. He followed it and peered down into the darkness, then switched on his flashlight.

“What are you hoping to see? You know you don’t actually have the capabilities to watch the programming change, right?”

“I know that,” Barnabas grumped.

“So?”

“So humans generally want to see things, even if it’s a useless urge.”

“Fair enough. I run statistical analyses even when the outcomes don’t matter. We all have our quirks.”

“I’ve started humming,” Gar chimed in. “I don’t know why.”

“What I don’t get is how you have such good pitch,” Shinigami complained. “You said Luvendi don’t make music and you don’t care about music. And you really don’t; I’ve scanned you for a physiological reaction. Humans have one, you don’t. But your pitch and your timing are both spot-on.”

“Is that why I’ve had ‘Ode to Joy’ stuck in my head for the past three days?” Barnabas asked suddenly. He looked over his shoulder at the ship. “Gar, are you doing a review of the classics?”

“If that is what Tabitha labeled as ‘boring old-person music,’ then yes.”

Barnabas frowned. “I’m confused as to why she labeled it in the first place.”

“She quite likes classical music,” Shinigami revealed, and a moment later she added, “I’ve just remembered that she specifically asked me not to tell anyone that.”

“Any other favorites?” Barnabas asked curiously.

“I’ve already said too much. I know nothing. You didn’t hear any of it from me. Also, we have an uplink.”

“Finally.” Barnabas held out a hand and waited for the crawler to clamber out of the buoy and into his palm. “Shinigami, reel us in and open the Pod bay doors.”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“My name’s not Dave.”

“That’s from 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Gar told him helpfully. “When the AI tries to kill the humans because they’ve abandoned the mission.”

“How comforting. Shinigami, are you planning my death?”

“Not at all. Tabitha was also on a classic science fiction kick, so I watched some movies with her. Just don’t abandon the mission and we should all be fine.”

“How comforting. Well, open the Pod bay doors. I need to get these gloves off before I go insane.”

* * *

Rald had spent enough time in the universe to know that bribes generally turned up more leads than beating the teeth out of possible informants until one of them started talking. It was unfortunate, but it was just how life was so he had come to terms with it.

It helped that he could go back to his preferred methodology once he had suspects.

In this case, he had run into a distressingly common roadblock: thwarted in their desire to own Devon’s mines—he refused to use the new name of this planet—the Luvendi and the mercenaries had withdrawn to sulk and try to find other markets. None of them knew the names of the relevant humans. None of them had the information he needed.

So Rald had quietly made it known that he would pay for that information, and it was only a day and a half before a Nekubi slithered into his boarding house with some whispered names.

Which was why Rald was presently staring at the bruised and bloodied form of a Brakalon named Heddoran. He was the former guard captain at Venfirdri Lan’s mines, the Nekubi had told him. He still worked there, for the mine workers. By choice. There were whispers that he had betrayed Lan, which had led to his death. Rald had snatched him while he was in Tethra to retrieve a shipment of supplies.

Having seen what was left of Jutkelon’s compound, Rald didn’t think the guard captain’s defection was really to blame for Lan’s death. It was clear that the humans would have triumphed with or without one Brakalon.

But Heddoran knew names, and Rald needed them. He paced in a slow circle around the Brakalon.

“So you don’t know any humans.”

“None.” The Brakalon had, so far, barely seemed to notice that Rald was torturing him. Every once in a while he grunted as claws or a whip or a boot made contact, but the sound seemed more contemplative than anything.

Rald wasn’t fooled. Heddoran was now bleeding heavily. Whatever self-control he had, it was close to breaking.

“Then you likely wouldn’t mind if any humans were killed.”

The Brakalon looked at Rald with a genuine smile now touching his swollen eyes. “No, but you will, if you’re the one killing them.”

Rald paused, his eyes narrowing.

“Word is, you want the humans who made all the changes on this planet.” The Brakalon grinned, displaying the blood on his teeth. “They’re more powerful than you can imagine. If you decide to hurt their kind you will find out what true pain is—and then it won’t matter. You will be dead.”

“True pain?” Rald grabbed a walking stick from the wall and swung it as hard as he could into the Brakalon’s torso. He heard ribs crack and the Brakalon gasped involuntarily. “Ah, so we are getting somewhere. Want another hit?”

“Hit me as much as you want.” The Brakalon managed to get the words out, but his breath was coming in jerks now. “It won’t make me know things.”

“Yes, but you see, you do know things. Despite all your lies, you do know names. You were there, Heddoran. So let’s start again.” Rald swung the stick directly into the broken ribs again and the Brakalon gave an agonized yell. “There was a human at the mines. Was that the man who runs Aebura’s?”

“No.” The Brakalon sagged against the ropes. His head was lolling. “No.”

“How can I believe you when you’ve lied so much? Maybe I should kill him just to be sure. Him and his mate—Elisa, is that her name? And the two brats. Little humans. I should wipe his line out down to the last drop of blood.”

The Brakalon stared at him open-mouthed for a second. “It was a kalanon!”

“Oh?” Rald crouched to peer into his eyes. “Go on.”

“It wasn’t them. They’re not… They just came here at the same time. The one at the mines was a kalanon. A priest.”

Rald felt a stab of surprise. The priests he had met on his travels seemed uniformly useless, given to platitudes and philosophy. How could a priest take down an enterprise with so many guards?

“He’s not there anymore.” Now that Heddoran had started talking he couldn’t seem to stop. “He left soon after. He’s gone now, and he hasn’t been back.”

“What was his name?” When Heddoran didn’t answer, Rald readied the stick again. “His name, Heddoran.”

“Barnabas!” The Brakalon closed his eyes in defeat. “His name was Barnabas. Lan’s second-in-command, Venfaldri Gar—he helped. He’s with Barnabas now.”

Finally, he had names—and an accomplice. The information brokers at Yennai Corp had thought Gar was dead. Rald smiled. “Really, there’s only one last thing to ask. Where is the mine?”

Heddoran didn’t answer right away, but Rald could see the hopelessness on his face. There was no way he could pretend not to know that. He had worked there for years. And while he had told himself he wouldn’t say anything under torture, he had already begun to talk. He knew it was only a matter of time until he broke.

Rald thought the least he could do was help him make the decision to tell now rather than later. He let loose with the stick, raining blows on the bruised captive while the Brakalon screamed in pain. When the blows finally stopped, Rald was heaving for breath and smiling broadly. It had been a frustrating few days. He had needed this.

“I can do this again and again,” he promised Heddoran. “But can you take that? It’ll get worse as the bruises spread.”

The Brakalon was barely conscious anymore. His lips moved, barely a whisper emerging. Rald leaned close and the Brakalon repeated himself, giving Rald coordinates and directions.

“Good,” Rald soothed. He went to the door. “In return for the information you’ve given me, I’ll give something back. If you survive these wounds, I won’t kill you.”

He left then, smiling in the early morning sunshine. He would collect a volunteer force from the mercenaries in town and they would be on the road by midafternoon. As for Heddoran… Well, there was no need to worry. He was too badly hurt to get himself out of the ropes, and even then it would take a miracle to cure him.

The noise of Tethra’s market was loud enough, however, that Rald did not hear the door of the old warehouse creak open or see a figure steal inside.

Carter had been trailing Rald for two days now. The Ubuara had done everything they promised; they had been quick to alert him to where Rald was, and they tried to find out who he was talking to.

But Carter couldn’t leave it up to them. He’d had a bad feeling about this since he’d heard about Rald talking to Elisa. He didn’t like having Shrillexians around. He didn’t like the fact that this one had gotten on-planet at all. The matter of the Luvendi and mercenaries was something Carter knew had been debated—should they be kept on-planet or allowed off, where they might spread the word of where High Tortuga was?

No one had come to any firm conclusions yet, but Carter knew they weren’t supposed to be getting allies.

He’d been unloading crates of fruit at the bar this morning when one of the Ubuara came at a dead run to tell him Rald had taken Heddoran prisoner. Carter had grabbed his gun and his knife and gone as quickly as he could. Heddoran had a lot of things to atone for, after all, but he was atoning for them. He’d helped the Ubuara rebuild the mining town and he was keeping them safe. He was always pleasant when he stopped in at the bar, too.

And now he was in trouble.

Carter had arrived just in time to hear Heddoran give the Shrillexian Barnabas’ name—to save Carter, Elisa, and the children.

Carter couldn’t let him die now. He and the Ubuara began to undo the ropes that held Heddoran up and they eased him down as gently as they could.

“We’re going to get you out of here,” Carter promised Heddoran. “We’ll get you a doctor. I promise.”

“No…time.” Heddoran grimaced. “You have to stop him. He’s going to destroy the mine.”

Chapter Sixteen

Crallus made his way out of the mess hall and up the sloping corridors toward his office. His steps were slow. He knew it was useless to avoid going back, but he did not want to. Since the Torcellan had come, Crallus spent his days doing more work than he had ever wanted to do—and the Torcellan treated him like a servant, to boot.

Crallus had taken over the syndicate because he didn’t want to be treated like a servant. He was a damned mercenary. He took what jobs he wanted when he wanted. He hadn’t liked listening to his first captain, so he had killed him and taken over the ship.

That had worked pretty well, so when old Goff had started to get a bit crazy, Crallus had figured it would work pretty well again.

It had—until now.

Until a few weeks ago, he’d been living the good life. He had a few fights now and again and ran missions occasionally, but mostly he just sat back and let the profits roll in. He didn’t worry much about the Yennai Corporation, because they didn’t ask much. He passed along a share of the profits and any interesting news his ships’ captains mentioned. As far as he could tell, Yennai had ignored that last part.

And then they didn’t. Then he had a flurry of communications about the three ships that had answered a call for assistance and been summarily destroyed. Where had it been; where exactly?

Just when he had thought he was in the clear the Torcellan had shown up. He was vain, making sure his hair hung just so…and then putting that blasted hood over it.

Crallus supposed that was better than being expected to ooh and aah over his hair all the time. He had the suspicion that the Torcellan was that kind of male, wanting adoration for every little thing he did.

He’d set up shop in Crallus’ office, though, and he seemed to expect Crallus to be doing things all the time.

What was there to do? Take some profits, keep an eye on the ships’ captains to make sure they weren’t getting uppity. It didn’t take much to keep the syndicate running.

Crallus pushed the door open and nodded curtly to the Torcellan, who was sitting at Crallus’ desk. “Good morning.”

“It is not,” the Torcellan replied in that soft-but-threatening way of his, “a good morning.”

Crallus grunted and took a seat on the wide chair at the back of the room. There was nowhere else to sit, with that bastard in his desk chair.

The Torcellan swung around. “That ship has taken out more of ours, and we’ve confirmed it’s the Shinigami under the control of a man named Barnabas. Ranger One.”

“They sent video back?” Crallus asked interestedly.

“No. Our contact on Devon sent the information. Apparently, it’s been difficult to find anyone who will talk. He’s making headway, however, and is set to make…shall we say, an example.”

“Of who?”

“Of the miners Barnabas ‘liberated.’” The Torcellan said the word with deep disgust. “I hate revolutionaries. They’re nothing but anarchists, deep down. They don’t care if the world burns.”

“Neither do you,” Crallus retorted, finally unable to conceal his dislike. “You just like the money you get from how things are now.”

There was a pregnant silence. “Careful,” the Torcellan cautioned him finally. His voice was mild, but it sent chills along Crallus’ spine. “I think you’ll find that you don’t want to offend us, mercenary.”

Crallus lifted one shoulder and gave his best surly smile. A mercenary never showed fear. They knew how dangerous it was to behave like prey.

“So, this human took out how many more ships?”

The Torcellan looked at the computer screens, annoyed. “Seven, all registered to Get’ruz Shipping.”

“I thought Get’ruz was a pirate group.”

The Torcellan shrugged elegantly. “They owned ships and sold cargo.”

A mercenary didn’t bother with careful definitions. They called a gun a gun and a pirate a pirate. Crallus didn’t care enough about the definitions to fight, however. He shrugged as well, ignoring the twinge of pain from his shoulder. “If they didn’t send the video—”

“They had several ships coming along the same route, and apparently some of the wreckage was identifiable. Seven ships destroyed, and for all we know they didn’t even manage to land a shot on the Shinigami.”

“There’s no way to know it even was the Shinigami.”

“It was,” the Torcellan stated darkly. “Who else would have destroyed seven ships and not even have mentioned it? If it were a business rival there would be gossip right now. There is none. We’ve checked.”

Crallus considered the Torcellan’s point. That, at least, made sense.

“Get’ruz’s ships were registered to us,” the Torcellan informed him pointedly. “If they noticed that, they know who we are.”

“Which means they’re coming for us,” Crallus finished. He accepted with reticence that his syndicate was part of the Yennai Corporation. It didn’t seem very fair that he’d sent in those profits for years and now he was being asked to go up against the corporation’s enemies, but that was just how things shook out when you weren’t in power.

Maybe he’d kill whoever was in charge of the Yennai Corporation and move up. It had worked twice now, so it might work again.

“Yes,” the Torcellan agreed. “We’ve seen how the humans respond to such things. Once provoked and attacked, they come after anything and everything their enemies own. We must be ready. They will either come for the central Yennai base as soon as they find out where it is, or yours. I have already ordered both to be placed on high alert, and we should withdraw there as soon as possible. I’m having both of them stocked with food and ammunition as well.”

Crallus sighed. “I’ll go tell the captains to leave this base. It can be cleared by tomorrow morning.”

“Give them six hours,” the Torcellan advised. “No more. Once they come for you, humans do not hesitate. That base is one of the few secure places they can go. If the humans catch them here or on one of their ships they’re as good as dead.”

“I’ll call Fedden back in, then.”

“No.” The Torcellan had stood and now he looked at Crallus, and the Brakalon had the sense of narrowed eyes. “Fedden must earn his way back into the syndicate or die trying.”

“He will die trying! If seven ships couldn’t take on the Shinigami, how is he supposed to—” Crallus broke off as he understood. “You never believed he’d survive it.”

“Of course not.” The Torcellan brushed a speck of dirt off his sleeve. “But allowing someone to earn redemption and have them fail is much less unpopular with the sort of people you employ. It was the only smart thing to do.”

Do you not care about anyone? Crallus grimaced and held his tongue rather than spit those words out.

He knew the answer anyway.

* * *

“They’re mobilizing forces,” Shinigami reported later that evening.

“Oh?” Barnabas looked up from the table, which was strewn with documents and the remains of dinner. He and Gar had been poring over lists of companies affiliated with the Yennai Corporation, and the documents were now covered in Barnabas’ handwritten notes. He’d rolled his sleeves up to work and he ran a hand through his already-disheveled hair as he waited for more information.

“They’ve given the order for about half their various guards to come to the Yennai HQ, which I have no idea how to find. The other half is supposed to form a unified fleet, I’m guessing to search for us, and Crallus has issued orders to his ships to go to their fortified base. They’re leaving soon. I’d say they’ll probably be backup for the fleet if necessary.”

“Ah.” Barnabas chuckled with great satisfaction. “Well, that’s just…convenient.”

“What is?” Gar frowned. “I’ve seen what this ship can do, but those bases are heavily fortified. It will be difficult to infiltrate them.”

“We don’t have to.” Barnabas was smiling now. “And indeed, we shouldn’t. A few centuries back—well, more than that, now—humanity would lay siege to cities. It would have been quite effective but for the fact that the army also required large amounts of supplies. The lesson, in short, is not to besiege cities. In this case, however…they’re going into seclusion on their own.”

“So?” Gar looked confused.

“He means we’ll just wait them out,” Shinigami interjected. She sounded pleased. “Bomb off, do something unrelated.”

“Bomb what?”

“She’s saying we would leave,” Barnabas explained. “Given her near-constant mentions of bombs being used for their intended purpose, I can see how you would be confused.”

“It’s not that. It’s the fact that your language is insane.” Gar crossed his arms. “I keep trying to learn things, and then you use words in ways that make no sense.”

“Mmm. In any case, she’s quite right. I propose we let these people hide away in their bunkers. We have all the time in the world, after all. We can let them drain their resources and begin to get complacent and go stir-crazy while we go after the parts of the corporation they didn’t bring with them. When they finally emerge and give us an opening, they’ll find that most of their corporation is gone—and in the meantime, they will have gotten rusty.”

“So they’re…they’re afraid of you coming to kill them, so they’re hiding away and you’re just going off to kill other people?” Gar reminded himself how little he wanted to get on Barnabas’ bad side.

“Precisely,” Barnabas agreed.

“And I’m guessing from his tone that he already has someone in mind,” Shinigami added.

“I do indeed. If you would bring up the files on the Boreir Group, please?”

“Ah, him again. He was involved in munitions, wasn’t he?” Shinigami whistled as she brought up the file. “Damn, he really is. You don’t think small, do you?”

The Boreir Group was presently owned by a third-generation employee named Mustafee Boreir, a Yofu male. The company provided munitions to several governments and major mercenary groups. Their production facilities, which were scattered across several sub-corporations, made them one of the largest munitions manufacturers in known space.

“They haven’t been sent after us and they haven’t been called to the base,” Barnabas informed them. “But I’m betting that if push comes to shove, Yennai is going to want more munitions to throw at us. I suggest we wait until we have confirmation that Yennai’s head honchos are in the last steps of their retreat to the stronghold. In the confusion, we attack the headquarters of the Boreir Group, and Shinigami takes up communications so that Yennai is unaware anything has gone wrong. From there we dismantle the whole damned thing. Over the course of the next few months, we shut down all of their facilities and sell them and offload any cargo ships they owned and any remaining inventory—as much as possible to the Federation—thus cutting off one of the most profitable and dangerous parts of Yennai’s holdings.”

Gar nodded. “At a few months per group, though, we’ll be here for quite a while.”

“We won’t need to have much active involvement day to day,” Barnabas explained. “Shinigami can handle most of it once the stronghold is secure without even taxing her processing powers. Isn’t that right, Shinigami?”

“Quite correct. I’ll also be diverting Yennai’s incoming payments into untraceable accounts. When they finally come out of their hidey-hole, they won’t have any money left.”

“Destroy them from the ground up,” Barnabas agreed. “I like it.”

“You want something else to like? I think I have an idea to get you into the headquarters…”

Chapter Seventeen

Two days later Rald headed out of Tethra on his way to the mines. He took no one with him, just a battered old vehicle and some supplies.

He wasn’t fool enough to risk all the forces he might call on just yet, but he had left instructions behind. Many of the miners, it turned out, had come to Tethra after their contracts were up, and they had built lives here. They were rebuilding the mine as their own now, so they had left their families and businesses unprotected.

Idiots. Rald smiled coldly. Did they not think anyone would figure out what they had done here? Did they not think they had put targets on themselves?

They were going to be too dead to learn their lesson, but others would see it.

As for the humans everyone was so afraid of…let them come over here if they cared. It was clear that this continent wasn’t their priority. They had freed the mines and then gone off somewhere else.

Rald was betting that they weren’t going to come back. He’d heard some stories of big battles on the other side of the planet. The humans were all occupied. They weren’t going to bother themselves with this, and by the time they did, their forces would be battle-weary and the people who really owned Devon would be strong again.

After all, he had the backing of the Yennai corporation now, didn’t he?

He thought he heard the distinctive chitter of one of the rodent-creatures nearby—what had the guards called them, ‘Ubuara?’—but when he turned to look he saw nothing. They seemed to make a point to stay out of his way, though he saw them everywhere.

Good. They knew he wasn’t to be trifled with.

The wheels of the truck squelched through the mud and Rald took a look over his shoulder at the weapons he had been able to buy in Tethra. He growled softly in disappointment. He preferred his own weapons, but even Yennai Corporation’s contacts hadn’t been enough to get those on-planet.

He could make do.

He thought of Jutkelon as he drove. The Brakalon had been a stubborn old bastard, not much like the other Brakalons Rald had known. They tended not to run their own companies, just take posts on other people’s ships—like a lot of Shrillexians.

Maybe that was why Rald and Jutkelon had gotten along so well. Neither of them had been sure that they wanted to run their own outfits; they just didn’t want to have to answer to rich assholes anymore. Jutkelon had eventually gone back to being part of a bigger group, but for a few years they had worked well together.

You couldn’t go through that many firefights with someone, escape that many close calls, have them save your back and you save theirs so many times, without there being an obligation. Other mercenaries—the ones Rald had fought with once or twice—he wouldn’t do this for them. However, he had spent too long fighting at Jutkelon’s side to let him be killed like this and not avenge his death.

They’d wanted to make a point, the bastards. They’d left that smoking crater at Jutkelon’s compound so no one would want to stand up to them anymore.

Rald’s growl got louder and he narrowed his eyes.

The first step was finding out what was in this mining town. Once he knew what was there, he would call in reinforcements and wipe it off the map.

* * *

Fedden ducked under a low doorway and gave it an annoyed look.

This space station had been made for some race smaller than Shrillexians, not to mention it was practically falling apart, it was so old. Hopefully there were some larger corridors somewhere, or Namkelon was going to have to crawl to get around.

That mental image, at least, was funny enough to make Fedden bare his teeth in a grin.

“You ready?” Tagurn asked from behind him.

Both Shrillexians ducked through another door. They could hear the clamor of voices from ahead. Fedden had called everyone he could think of to this meeting and he’d told Namkelon to do the same. The Brakalon was cautious by nature, so Fedden was sure he’d only choose people who could be trusted.

Besides, with Crallus retreating, what was he going to do if the ships’ captains started to do their own thing?

Nothing; that was plain.

Fedden wasn’t a fool. He’d seen the wreckage of the Get’ruz fleet. He’d put two and two together easily when Crallus and his mysterious Torcellan friend had withdrawn to the main base that Crallus had never used before now.

They were afraid of these humans. Clearly, they had sent Fedden to die.

He had no intention of doing that.

He came around a bend in the corridor and a guard at the main door nodded at them. Fedden recognized him as Namkelon’s first mate. So the Brakalon was cautious enough to have guards posted, then. The alien swung the big airlocked door into the main room wide, and as it opened the noise inside blasted into the corridor.

Fedden had seen how many ships were outside, but he was still impressed to see how crowded the space was.

They fell silent as he entered, and he noticed that they didn’t seem so much happy to see him as discontented with the way things were.

He could work with that. He made a show of greeting Namkelon and exchanging a few words with him, as well as nodding to a few of the other captains he knew well.

“You’ve gathered a large crowd,” he told Namkelon appreciatively.

“It wasn’t a hard choice,” Namkelon told him bluntly. “Get shut up like prey in a cage with that Torcellan, making no contracts, or stay out here? No one wanted to retreat except Crallus. And his favorites, of course.”

Fedden sighed. He had hoped that one or two of Crallus’ favorites might join them. Their ships were state of the art. It paid to be in Crallus’ good graces, but he’d chosen his inner circle long ago and it took too much ass-kissing to work your way in at this point.

Ah, well. They’d do this with or without him and his best ships. They had numbers on their side now.

And if those numbers were only here because they didn’t like Fedden’s rival? Well, he could work with that.

“Thank you all for coming,” Fedden called to the group that filled the room.

This main chamber had multiple levels with walkways around the edges of the main column, and those walkways were packed with mercenaries leaning down to watch him. He saw friends and rivals, new fighters and grizzled old ones.

They all had some of the same reasons, though.

“Things have really gone to shit, huh?” Fedden asked them.

There was a sudden burst of laughter and a few of the mercenaries nodded.

Fedden grinned up at them. “Crallus was never the best of us, but he didn’t get in our way, right? We had a place to come back to, exchange information, get some bigger jobs. Crallus didn’t take too much. It worked…but now he’s getting weird.”

No laughter now. The nods became serious. No one liked the way things had been going recently.

“When was the last time Crallus helped any of you get a job?” Fedden asked. “I’m not talking those shit ones guarding cargo ships, twenty guards for a whole damned hauler and no way in hell of making your bonus. I mean the good jobs.”

No one answered. Crallus hadn’t helped them out recently.

“But when was the last time Crallus called you up to bitch about how you were doing, how much of a take you were sending through, or ask you to go do a favor for him?”

Mercenaries called out answers. For most, it had only been a few days. Crallus hadn’t asked much before that, but he’d been insufferable for a while now. Everyone here was quick to see that this could easily become the new normal.

“Not to mention,” Fedden added with a grin, “when was the last time you got back to base, had some food, and thought it might actually kill you?”

They were laughing again.

“And while he’s always talked about raising rates,” Fedden finished, “he’s actually going to raise them this time. When he’s asking more of us than he ever has and giving back less!”

Their faces were angry now, and he knew he’d successfully tapped their discontent.

Now came the sell, and he could only hope he’d done enough.

“You know why he’s going back to his base, right?” Fedden looked at their expressions. They didn’t know. Good. Offering new information was one of the best ways to get allies. “He’s gotten the syndicate dragged into something bigger than he is. Him and his Torcellan? They’ve fucked up, and they were willing to throw us into the crossfire to fix it.”

There was a sudden furious silence.

“That’s right.” Fedden walked in a slow circle, his voice rising. “You remember Crallus sending those ships off to Devon? Getting those people killed? Well, he tried to throw me at them too. Turns out he never thought I’d survive. He’d just get to execute me without having to do it himself.”

“You shot him,” someone called from the gallery above.

“Like you never wanted to!” Fedden yelled back and there was another burst of laughter. Some of the mercenaries pounded on the railings in approval. “I tried it, it didn’t work. But I wonder—did he ever even ask if you wanted things to change? Did he ever even ask if there was something bigger behind the Torcellan’s plans? No, he just told you all to abandon your contracts and sit in a cage waiting for someone to come shoot at you.

“He’s pissed off someone bigger than you can imagine,” Fedden continued. “You know why he’s retreating? He sent those three ships and they got destroyed, so he and that Torcellan, they sent seven more ships. State of the art pirate ships. Get’ruz Shipping, not a small outfit. All those ships got destroyed too, and they were only trying to take on one.

“Well, now Crallus is running—him and the Torcellan. They want us to go with them so we can be security, just sitting there waiting. Does that sound like a good idea to anyone?”

Heads shook, and there were growls and a few derisive shouts.

“Doesn’t sound good to me either,” Fedden told them. “So here’s my plan: we lay a trap for this one ship rather than waiting for them to learn about our base and kill us all. I can get a message to that ship to tell them the terms—they won’t be able to resist coming to meet us. And when they’re dust, we’ll start a new syndicate. Half the fees of Crallus’, none of the bullshit he’s been pulling lately, and a hell of a lot more jobs when our clients hear who we managed to take out. Who’s with me?”

Only a few hung back; the rest called out acceptances. Fedden pointed out their captains with easy familiarity and beckoned for them to come down to join him.

“Come on down and I’ll lay out the plan. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Chapter Eighteen

“Okay, but are we actually sure this is going to work?” Gar paced around the bridge, throwing concerned glances at the viewscreen, where a ship was growing closer by the second.

“Of course not.” Barnabas sat quite composedly in the captain’s chair. “Nothing is ever sure. Take a seat, won’t you?”

He was wearing hooded robes with the hood presently pushed back, and as to the rest of his disguise…

Well, Gar couldn’t believe they were going to try to pull this off. From start to finish, the plan was insane.

“They haven’t noticed us yet,” Shinigami pointed out.

“How can you possibly know that?” Gar glared at one of the speakers and rubbed his face. It was another human mannerism he had picked up. “We’re going to get blasted off the side of the ship like we’re target practice. Which we will be. For an automated system, no less.”

“Shinigami thinks it’s unlikely they’ll notice us,” Barnabas soothed.

“Unlikely.” Shinigami snorted. “No, I said they won’t. Their security systems look for active ships without the Boreir Group security codes, and we won’t be an active ship when they see us.” There was a pause. “You are going to turn me back on, aren’t you?”

“That depends on whether you intend to keep making insane plans,” Gar shot back.

Barnabas chuckled.

“Laugh it up, blondie,” Shinigami muttered. She flickered into existence as a projection.

Barnabas shut up and glared at the projection as it took a seat. “It’s a wig.”

“It’s blond. Also, you look ridiculous.”

“I look like a Torcellan.”

“Only if nobody looks too hard,” Gar muttered. “I just want to ask again, are we sure this is going to work? Because this. Is. Insane.”

“None of it is insane; every part of it is logical. I’m an AI, so I literally can’t be insane. I only make good plans.”

“I was with you right up until that last part,” Barnabas told her. “May I remind you that you once suggested using guided missiles during an interrogation?” Also, he added silently, let’s not tell Gar that was his interrogation, shall we?

Good call. “That was entirely logical. First, I didn’t think you were going to get anything more out of them, so we didn’t need it to be an interrogation anymore. Second, I wanted to use them, so it was only logical to do so. Third, unrelated to the missiles but important, we’re almost ready to dock. You should get to the airlock.”

“Indeed.” Barnabas’ lips twitched. He stood and flipped the hood over his face. The white-blond hair of the wig was just visible beyond the hood and the skin of his hands, made artificially paler, looked Torcellan if one only glanced at them. He nodded to Gar. “I leave the ship in your hands. I will communicate when it is time to turn it back on.”

He left the bridge before Gar could again plead with him to call the plan off.

He had to admit it was an audacious plan; there was no doubt about that. Boreir Group controlled an entire planet and several moons, around which they had positioned a massive security system. The autonomous weapons systems that comprised it were attuned to spot engine emissions, heat, communications of any sort, electrical activity, and many more subtle indicators of approaching ships.

Any object giving off any of those signals and not broadcasting the correct security codes on the correct channels would be blown to smithereens.

They had thought about trying to evade the system, but a quick review of its capabilities and known kills showed that this would probably be far too time-consuming to pull off within the window they had. After all, they needed to do this while the Yennai Corporation bigwigs would probably not be on the lookout for small flickers in their transmissions from the subsidiary groups.

And taking out the system—or even part of it—was the sort of thing that might attract too much attention.

The answer they came up with had been elegantly simple—attach themselves to a Boreir Group ship, power down, and use its signal to mask them and get them through the shield.

They had chosen their ship carefully. It was one of the smaller cargo haulers that had completed its delivery and was returning empty to pick up another load of munitions. Since it was not filled with valuable explosives and it wasn’t one of their bigger ships, it wasn’t presently being guarded by other ships whose crews might see the Shinigami.

You could fool electronics, but fooling the eyes was a lot more difficult.

That had been step one. Step two was getting Barnabas onto that ship to get the security codes for their use on the way out and wreak whatever havoc he could, before sneaking him back off, undocking, and flying away to land on the planet.

“Since we’ll be there anyway…” he had explained to Gar.

Gar apparently did not agree. He’d been pleading with them for the past two days to reconsider.

Barnabas shook his head and smiled. Gar would learn. He was willing to bet that within six months Gar would be making plans that were just as audacious. He was already beginning to give as good as he got when they all traded insults.

Meanwhile, Shinigami was guiding the ship ever closer to the cargo hauler. They were still a ways out from the shield, so she could take her time. Her systems were in overdrive as she scrambled their signals and masked her emissions so that no one on the ship would notice them, and she had to align the ships carefully before docking so that the sound of it wouldn’t reverberate through the hull.

It was difficult to guide two high-speed ships into perfect alignment, but Shinigami had reflexes better than any human pilot. She had the two ships right next to one another before her airlock extended and coupled to the other ship’s.

She scanned their frequencies and saw no alerts from any quarter. Whatever was happening inside the ship, no one seemed to have noticed their presence yet.

“You’re good to go,” she told Barnabas.

“Thank you.” He stepped into the airlock and pushed himself down the corridor, briefly weightless. At the other end, he attached a small override module and allowed Shinigami to work her magic on the passcodes that held their side of the airlock door in place.

Shinigami scanned the hallway inside and waited until it was unoccupied before opening the door. Barnabas turned himself the right way up, stepped through, and closed the door behind him.

Going offline now, Shinigami told him.

Gar will turn you back on, Barnabas assured her. And if he doesn’t for some reason, I’ll make sure to do it before I kick his ass so you get to watch.

You’re the best friend an AI could ask for.

I’ll remind you of that.

He set off into the corridors with a smile. A few moments later he felt Shinigami’s silent presence in his mind disappear, and Gar reported quietly in his earpiece.

“The ship is offline.”

Thank you, Barnabas murmured back. They hadn’t wanted to fit Gar with a communication chip just yet, but he had a receiver that could translate Barnabas’ silent communication into speech for him. We’ll stay radio-silent from here on out unless something goes very wrong.

“Understood.”

Barnabas heard footsteps coming up the corridor toward him and he bowed his head, moving purposefully. He must keep his face hidden. If anyone looked closely it would be clear that he wasn’t Torcellan.

“Hey, you. Captain says to—” The alien’s voice broke off as she approached Barnabas. His eyes flicked up and he saw her examining him.

Damn. Shinigami, things are about to get—

He remembered that she was not there to talk to and stopped his monologue. A moment later, scanning the alien’s mind, he realized that she was terrified.

“I didn’t realize you were aboard,” she apologized, bowing her head.

Barnabas came to a halt and simply looked at her. Whoever this alien believed he was she was treating him with deference, so he would act as though it was his due. When she looked up, he nodded slowly and followed her with his head as she edged around him and set off again. He could feel her trying not to break into a run.

Please let him not know who I am. When did he come on board? I have to tell the captain. He probably knows already…

Her thoughts, fractured and afraid, faded as she moved away and Barnabas frowned slightly.

This was a complication he hadn’t anticipated. This crew member, and likely others, seemed to believe he was not only a Torcellan but a very specific one. What if one of them had specific questions?

He would need to take less time on this ship than he had anticipated, and be more cautious. At the very least they were afraid of him, but who knew how far that would get him?

He made his way to one of the rooms that gathered communications and batched them out. The sheer volume of emitted communications on all frequencies made these places dangerous for most life forms while the communications were active—but Barnabas was not “most life forms.” Gritting his teeth against the hum and the static charge in the air, he eased his way inside and shut the door behind him.

Step three was to hook into their communications so they could come and go at will. Who could say when they might need to come back, or what protocols they would need in order to land? Barnabas affixed another device and began to search through the ship’s protocols.

To his delight, everything was organized very neatly within its data banks. The ship itself was programmed to respond to the queries passed along by the shield system, feeding the information broadcast by them to another algorithm in the ship.

Barnabas had not anticipated that the shield system would emit part of its own key, but that was genius. Very few people would think the solution might lie there, of all places. He found the algorithm and copied it, then studied the itinerary.

Shinigami had devised a protocol that would change the ship’s destination and auto-steering but not prevent the captain from receiving any route change instructions sent over Boreir channels. The ship would return itself to the trajectory Barnabas wanted it on, even if the captain somehow figured out that they were going to the wrong place—but it was extremely unlikely that he would.

This ship would return to the black and deliver the munitions to the middle of nowhere, and as soon as it was far away it would dump the coordinates. Barnabas could figure out what to do with the munitions later.

He would have stayed, but the knowledge that the people on board were on the lookout for a particular Torcellan changed his mind. He hastened back toward the airlock, opened it, and climbed inside. Once across the little corridor he rapped on the Shinigami’s door and waited for Gar to open it.

The Luvendi was frowning when the door swung inward. “Is something wrong? You’re back sooner than I expected.” He fell in beside Barnabas as they made their way back to the bridge. “About ten minutes until we pass through the shields, I think.”

“Nothing’s wrong, precisely.” Barnabas pressed his lips together as he thought. “But they didn’t just mistake me for a Torcellan, they mistook me for one they’re afraid of. So somewhere out there, there’s a Torcellan who goes around hooded like this. Someone who’s high up in their organization.”

“Or the Yennai Corporation.”

“Or that. Good point.” Barnabas took a seat in the captain’s chair and considered that while the cargo ship passed through the shields. He noticed Gar radiating tenseness as they went through, but after a while it was clear that the shield had not noticed their presence.

“Let’s turn the ship back on,” Barnabas instructed. “And go catch us some munitions dealers.”

Chapter Nineteen

Carter had been aware of Rald leaving Tethra within a few minutes of it happening. He had a hopper prepped, so it was quick work to find Oemuga and follow him.

“Be safe while I’m gone,” he told Elisa seriously. “If you have so much as a hint that Rald has come back, you go hide with the Ubuara.”

“I don’t think I can fit inside any of their houses.” Elisa laughed at his fussing. “The kids certainly could, though.” She regretted saying that when Carter went pale. “Carter, we’re going to be fine. For all we know, this Shrillexian’s truck is going to sink into the swamp or something.”

“He got the jump on Heddoran,” Carter reminded her. “I don’t like that. Look, maybe for the next few days—”

Elisa put a finger to his lips with a smile. “We’ll be fine,” she repeated. “Now go. The sooner you warn them, the sooner you can come back.” She handed him a big bottle of Pepsi. “For the road.”

“God, I love you.” Carter grinned and kissed her. He knelt for two very sticky kisses from the twins—they had clearly gotten into the hakoj pallets again—and headed off to the hopper.

To his surprise, Heddoran was already there. He took up most of the hopper and was glaring at anything and everything. Carter assumed this was the Brakalon’s way of hiding his pain. He was frankly surprised that the former guard captain was even able to walk.

“I know,” Heddoran grizzled when Carter opened his mouth. “But no one knows that camp better than I do. If you want to defend it you need to bring me…and I have to tell them it was me who gave away their location, too.”

Carter took one look at the Brakalon’s face and gave up his plan to talk him into another course of action. “Very well, then. Hold on.”

He tried to pilot the hopper as gently as he could, but with the Brakalon on board it was a bumpy journey. And since Rald being on the roads necessitated that they fly the long way around to stay out of sight, it was a long journey as well. It was late afternoon before they arrived, and the mines were just letting out for the day when the hopper set down in the main square.

Someone must have recognized Heddoran before they even set down because Aebura was already in the square when they arrived. She bounded onto the railings of the hopper and launched into an impassioned monologue in her own language, with a lot of gesturing.

To Carter’s surprise, Heddoran listened all the way through. He didn’t speak Ubuara—no one really did except them—but he seemed to correctly interpret her words as dismay and not a little bit of scolding.

“I’m sorry,” the Brakalon told them humbly. “I’ve failed you.”

Aebura threw a look at Carter. “Carter Eastbourne, tell him that he has not failed us.”

“I gave the location of the mine to someone who wants to hurt you,” Heddoran blurted before Carter could answer. “I was afraid of what would happen if I did not. After I have helped you fight him off I will resign my post at once.”

The crowd had gone quiet when he’d admitted what he had done and now they whispered amongst themselves as Aebura swayed side to side, deep in thought. A few of the Ubuara exchanged glances, clearly communicating mind-to-mind as Ubuara did.

“Start at the beginning,” Aebura told him finally.

“Maybe we shouldn’t discuss this here—” Carter began.

She only frowned in response and he realized a moment later how strange that must sound to an Ubuara. While other species would hide their leaders away so they wouldn’t start a panic by discussing the imminent attack, the Ubuara would all know what was going on by sensing Aebura’s thoughts.

“We all hear,” Aebura told him firmly. “Heddoran, explain.”

“His name is Rald,” Heddoran began. “He’s a Shrillexian. He used to fight with Jutkelon. Jutkelon even mentioned him once or twice. They were old friends. I don’t know how he found out what happened, but he had a lot of questions. He threatened to hurt Carter’s family if I didn’t tell him the names of the people who killed Lan and Jutkelon—and where the mine was. I should have kept my mouth shut and fought harder.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Carter argued fiercely.

“Carter Eastbourne is right.” Despite Carter’s many reminders, Aebura tended to use his full name. “There were many in the town who knew where the mine was. He would have found one of them if you hadn’t given him the answers—and you would be dead.”

Heddoran was glowering. He didn’t seem to think this excused his behavior, but he clearly knew better than to argue with Aebura once she’d made up her mind. Carter sympathized. Although he’d known the Ubuara for only a few weeks he had already seen how stubborn she could be, and she always surprised him with her unique combination of forgiveness and fierce idealism.

“What do we do now?” she asked the two of them, looking back and forth.

“Fortify this place,” Heddoran growled as he heaved himself up, going a bit grey as his cracked ribs shifted. He stomped toward the guard barracks. “Too much of it is flammable,” he muttered. “Have to form fire brigades, but we’ll need the water in case they try to wait us out…”

His voice grew fainter and Carter sighed as he looked after the Brakalon.

“I wish he hadn’t insisted on coming. He should be resting.”

“When people want to protect their home, it is rude to tell them to let other people handle it,” Aebura suggested wisely. Her tail twitched. “Which is why I have not told you to go back to Tethra where it is safer and stay with your family.”

“And leave all of you here undefended? Never.” Carter held up an arm and smiled when she ran up it to perch on his shoulder. “Come on, we’d better follow him and see what he’s up to.”

* * *

It was evening when Rald finally got close to the mine. He had left the truck on the side of the road a few miles away and charted a path through the foothills so no one would see him approach.

Now he was crouching on one of the hills that overlooked the town and studying the place through binoculars. They weren’t made for a Shrillexian, but they were enough for him to get an idea of what he was doing.

Several of the guards at the bar in Tethra had suggested that maybe the guard force at the mine had stayed on. Rald had thought they were being ridiculous, but apparently they had been correct. The guards seemed to have training, too. They weren’t just miners taking shifts on the walls.

He was also pretty sure he had seen Heddoran. He swore at that. He should have just killed the Brakalon when he had the chance. He’d wanted the male to suffer, though, so he’d left him unattended.

He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

He opened a channel to his contacts in Tethra.

“No big surprises here. Bring everyone out. Everyone.” He smiled. The miners liked to think they were so clever, sacrificing for each other.

Rald knew just how to break that spirit.

* * *

It wasn’t very long before Fedden and his team settled on a place for the ambush.

Once he’d outlined his specifications, captains had started throwing out suggestions. Some places were too easily navigated in a spaceship, others didn’t have enough cover. Many didn’t have the unique lure Fedden had told them the place must have.

But eventually, Loriq had suggested a place that was perfect. As soon as she said the name, everyone had started nodding. A quick look at the specifications on the screen showed them that no one was misremembering.

It had all the qualities they needed.

“Do we send the message?” one of them asked eagerly.

It had been a bad few weeks. Everyone was ready for a fight. They might not like being cannon-fodder, but none of them wanted to let this human bastard get away with what he’d done either.

Fedden wanted nothing more than to throw out the challenge here and now, but he knew better than that.

“Not yet,” he told them. It felt good to have people looking at him with respect and taking his orders. “First we get into position and then we send the message. I don’t want any chance of this going wrong. That ship is fast.”

They nodded at the wisdom of that and filed out. Only Tagurn remained behind.

“It’s going well,” Tagurn offered.

“It wouldn’t be going at all without you.” Fedden nodded to him. He planned to give Tagurn half his share from this job. He knew better than to take the male for granted, since that was how captains got killed in their sleep. He frowned. “Why haven’t you tried to take over this whole thing for yourself?”

Tagurn shrugged. “I like the fighting, but I don’t like the politics. You went out there shaking hands and smiling at people. You can do all that. Just give me plenty of enemies to fight and I’ll be happy.”

“Oh, you’ll have no shortage of those,” Fedden assured him. He smiled now. “When this part is over, you know we’ll need to take that base from Crallus and his pet captains. And while you say you don’t want a ship, well…one of those nice shiny ones will be there for you if you ever change your mind.”

Tagurn smiled fiercely and clasped his hand. “Looking forward to the fight. The ship…eh. Maybe someday, but for now I fight with you. I knew you’d be here someday.”

“There’s a lot of people between us and our own syndicate,” Fedden warned.

“That’s what makes it a good plan. You need worthy opponents or it’s no fun.”

Fedden grinned. Tagurn’s bloodthirsty humor was infectious. Worthy opponents, yes—they needed those or they would get soft. He was treating this mission with the respect it deserved. The Shinigami was a worthy opponent indeed.

But surely even that ship couldn’t withstand this fleet.

Chapter Twenty

With the passcode algorithms extracted from the cargo ship and the true identity of the Shinigami masked, they were able to set down quite easily. One of the series of domes below retracted to reveal a landing pad. The dome slid back into place as they touched down and the room was carefully re-pressurized before they disembarked. The deck crew ascertained that there was no cargo to unload and took no further notice of them.

Sloppy, Barnabas remarked to Shinigami. His lip curled, hidden under the hood he’d pulled up once more to disguise himself. It’s sloppy, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Knowing you, you’re not going to give them much time to feel ashamed before they’re dead. But the shield is incredibly good. We barely got around it.

So they should just assume that no one ever would? Barnabas shook his head. Any system can be conned. The moment you put absolute trust in something like that you start the clock toward your execution.

Not only that, it’s boring. I mean, they could have given us a real challenge, but no.

Don’t tempt fate. Barnabas paused at the door to the main compound and looked over his shoulder at the ship. And remember the new rule: if someone tries to steal you, tell me.

Yeah, yeah. I took care of it last time, if you remember.

By the skin of your teeth. Tell me anyway.

Fiiiiine.

Barnabas shook his head as he emerged into the corridor, but he was smiling.

He walked quickly. The landing pads were not close to the control center for the headquarters. It was a small concession to security, given that none of the personnel seemed to be instructed to request authorization or question visitors.

The Boreir Group’s headquarters was on a rocky planet with an atmosphere that didn’t appear to have ever nurtured life. Shinigami detected absolutely nothing in the way of water or emissions that would suggest vegetation, and the Boreir Group factories were all enclosed within domes.

However, the planet had a few good qualities. It was neither so cold and stormy that the domes were in danger nor so hot and dry that they had to worry about the safety of the munitions.

Furthermore, with no notable deposits of valuable ores or land that made sense to settle, there wasn’t really a reason for anyone else to set down there. The planet didn’t seem to have any official name. With the shield system in place, the Boreir Group didn’t need to bother with the sort of trickery Shinigami had used for High Tortuga—confusing the records to make it seem like the place was dangerous.

Again, Barnabas noted the stares and the sudden spike of fear as he made his way through the halls; people clearly recognized the hooded figure. He behaved as he had on the cargo ship, occasionally giving a slow nod, otherwise looking dismissively ahead and sweeping past people.

He noted those with weapons. He could take any of them in a fight, but he preferred not even to leave the slightest chance of someone getting a hit by a stray shot.

You’re taking note of patrol patterns, yes?

Of course. Shinigami sounded almost offended. I’m trying to figure out how to direct them to other parts of the building so I can lock them away from you if necessary, but their internal communications seem to be largely individual. That’s risky to try to mimic.

I’ll do my best to get it over with quickly, then. My goal is to have this finished before anyone even knows it started. If the whole operation keeps humming on without anyone realizing it will give us some latitude. Any progress on the factories?

Getting the orders ready. I’m going to tell people that they’re shifting the production off-planet due to “threats.” Also, I have a plan for draining their money.

Go on.

Well, the people who work here are the descendants of the original workers. They get paid and all that, but there’s really no choice. If you stay, you get a pretty comfortable life. If you leave, you’re leaving your whole family—and I can’t imagine they’ll really let you go, so these people are trapped here.

Yes. What’s your point?

Well, with the factories being “moved” and these people not having any sort of training to do anything else…

Yes?

I’m thinking I’ll just give all of them extravagant pensions in a lump sum and get them off-planet before any of the executives realize what’s happened. They can go off and start their own businesses, set up homesteads—anything they want. Meanwhile, the people who were doing all the shady stuff don’t have that money to work with anymore.

Shinigami, you’re a genius. Barnabas turned a corner and saw several guards waiting at the doors to the main building ahead. If you’ll excuse me, however, I have a feeling that events might be about to kick off.

Aaaaaaand bringing up the security feeds. All right, Big B, kick some ass.

Please tell me you’re not intending to call me that. It’s trying enough when Tabitha does it.

Into every life some hardship must come. Go on, kick some ass.

Barnabas sighed but his mouth twitched as he attempted to hide his smile. He stopped in front of the doors and waited as if he expected them to open.

One of the guards held up a hand as Barnabas approached. “Excuse me, sir. We’ll need to see identification.”

Finally…a competent guard.

Only you would be happy about that.

Barnabas turned his head slowly and stared at the guard, who nervously stood his ground. It seemed that intimidation was not going to work this time.

He gave it one more shot. He had no real desire to kill the only competent person in this place. “Boreir is expecting me.” He and Shinigami had worked to help him change his voice appropriately to Torcellan registers and speech patterns. “For your own good, do not delay me with trivialities.”

“Trivialities.” I like it. I knew your stuck-up-ness would come in handy one of these days.

Barnabas did not deign to answer that.

The guard looked at his companions, all of whom seemed content to stand in terrified silence, neither backing him up nor arguing. Cowards, Barnabas thought.

“I’m afraid I must insist,” the guard stated finally. He glared at his companions and nodded at Barnabas. “I regret this, sir, but we don’t have your visit on today’s schedule and surely you have your identification with—”

Barnabas had launched into motion at “surely.” There were five guards, one off on his own next to the doors and the other four clustered together, including the one who was challenging him.

He went for the lone guard closest to the door first. There was a control panel very near him and Barnabas wanted there to be no chance of a button getting pressed and an alert being sounded. The guard died quickly; Barnabas crushed his throat and let his body slide down the door.

While he had to admit that he was eager to test more of Jean Dukes’ special ammunition, Barnabas was planning to do this without any guns. It was simply impossible to use guns and maintain stealth, and it was essential that this happen with a minimum of fuss.

Unfortunately, not using guns meant people might have time to scream, so he had to be quick. Barnabas had already lashed out at the larger cluster of guards before the first guard’s body had hit the ground.

His motions were fluid. The first of the remaining guards had only just begun to react when Barnabas caught him across the head with a fist. He staggered, and Barnabas took that moment to slam his foot into another guard’s throat.

He grabbed the first guard and threw him toward the other two, both of whom automatically reached out to catch their friend.

Automatically—and fatally. The guard who had challenged Barnabas had been reaching for his communications unit and might have managed to call for backup if he hadn’t been distracted. As it was, the guard’s life ended with a gurgle when Barnabas pulled a knife from his belt and plunged it into his throat. Three more strikes and one more plunge of the knife and all the guards were down.

Barnabas stared at them for a moment, conflicted.

Guilt later, Shinigami advised. Keep moving.

Barnabas put his hood back up and swiped one of the guards’ badges to open the door. He was silent as he dragged the bodies inside, but as he continued toward the top tier offices he said finally, How do I know that they chose this life freely?

Not everyone does, Shinigami admitted. But what was your other option? Go through this compound person by person, scan everyone’s thoughts, judge them, and give the ones who were blameless a chance to switch sides? You’d have been found by then, a lot of them would have died anyway, and Yennai would know we were here.

Barnabas considered this.

And any of them would have shot you without hesitation, Shinigami added. Freely chosen or not, blameless or not, they would have killed you if they could.

You make a good point, my friend. Barnabas smiled slightly and felt his conscience ease. Often a vigilante could see despicable actions and judge them easily. Other times, like this, the process of Justice caught up with people who were not as despicable.

He would be thinking of this for many days to come, but Shinigami had helped remind him of his purpose.

Which way to Mustafee?

Down seven levels. Heads up—his personal guards patrol these floors. And if you were worried about killing people who don’t deserve it, well, let’s just say you don’t have to worry from here on out. Mustafee had his rivals killed—and their families. And these are the people who did that for him.

Barnabas stopped for a moment. His eyes began to turn red and his breath hissed.

Well then, a great many people will be avenged today.

* * *

Mustafee Boreir tipped his blue head back and fought for patience.

“I don’t care!” He glowered at the screen, where one of his factory foremen wrung his hands anxiously.

“Mistakes have risen as we extend the shifts,” the foreman argued. “We’ve had people killed. Munitions with problems have been produced and it’s time-consuming and cost-ineffective to take them apart and melt the components back down. Sometimes they explode in the shipping containers.”

“You’re telling me that your workers are incompetent?” Mustafee kept his tone artificially pleasant.

He was not pleased. When the Yennai Corporation had sent communications to its highest-level leaders to urge them to withdraw to the main base Mustafee had declined. After all, his headquarters was safer than any base, and whoever Yennai was at war with, they’d requested three times the usual production of munitions in order to fight them. So Mustafee had come back here to personally oversee the new production targets.

Which his foremen were unwilling to meet, it appeared. It was a good thing he was here.

“Let me make something very clear.” He leaned toward the screen slightly and smiled icily at the foreman. “We will be meeting the production targets and shipping on time. Those munitions will meet quality standards. If either of those things does not happen I will hold the relevant foremen personally responsible.” He tapped a channel on his wrist holo and met the foreman’s eyes as he spoke into it. “Ector, go and retrieve the families of every foreman in the factories. Bring them to the lower levels.” He smiled at the foreman, whose face had drained of blood. “Consider this motivation. You will—”

He stopped. The call had cut off and there was a blade against his throat. When he looked up slowly, he found himself staring into a pair of glowing red eyes.

“Rescind the order.” The voice was like something out of a nightmare. Blood stained the teeth and dripped down the creature’s chin. Who was this? Pale-skinned like a Torcellan, with white-blond hair, and yet…

Mustafee reacted without even thinking about it. His hand tapped the wrist unit once more. “Ector, hold on that for now.”

“Yes, sir,” the voice came back.

“Good.” The creature had changed its voice and withdrew the knife. It no longer forced itself like a nightmare into Mustafee’s very thoughts.

It was no less terrifying, though.

“Now,” the alien told him, “you and I will discuss your judgment.”

Mustafee did the only thing he could think of. He drew in his breath, slammed his hand down on the panic button on his desk, and screamed at the top of his lungs for the guards.

Chapter Twenty-One

Klaxons went off with a wail and Barnabas took a moment to sigh. He did the stupid thing, he complained to Shinigami.

He’s used to having an army to save his ass. Of course he did the stupid thing.

Good point. I don’t know why I was even hoping he’d handle this on his own.

Luckily I intercepted the second signal he tried to send. He’s locked out of his panic room. Man, the look on his face is great right now.

Barnabas turned his head toward the door, where he could hear the pounding of boots from the second guard barracks, and then looked back at Mustafee, who was flailing uselessly at the panic room button as if the eighty-third time would be lucky.

Barnabas drew his Jean Dukes Specials. “When I have dealt with this, you and I are going to have a chat.”

Mustafee’s response—whatever it might have been—was lost as the door burst open and a team of guards poured into the room.

“Don’t move!” their commander yelled. “Hands away from your weapons!”

“No,” Barnabas stated simply.

The guards paused and looked at one another.

“What?” the commander asked. He was a Brakalon, and so large that he barely fit into his uniform.

“I said no,” Barnabas repeated. “I will have to decline your request. You see, I am here to judge Mr. Boreir according to the laws I serve and I cannot let anyone stand in the way of that, including you.”

Shinigami snickered throughout the exchange. No one must have ever talked back to him. He looks like a fish. Open mouth, close mouth, open mouth, close mouth, open mouth… Oh, here we go—he’s come up with something to say.

“Hands away from your weapons!” the Brakalon demanded again, as though saying it a second time was going to make a difference. “Don’t move!”

Barnabas and Shinigami sighed in unison.

The guard commander was summarily blown backward across the small room, his body hitting the back wall with a crunch.

Ew, Shinigami commented as Barnabas leapt to one side of the group. Let’s not do that anymore.

No, let’s. I personally like this ammo. Barnabas spun and his hand flashed, crushing the side of one guard’s skull as his foot came up to slam into another’s chest. The first guard crumpled and the second staggered back into the crowd of his friends, most of whom shot out of pure instinct and riddled the guard’s body with holes. Unbelievable. A munitions dealer’s personal guard and their first instinct is to shoot when they get nervous?

Yeah, you’d really think they would have whittled their numbers down by now. Heads up, one of them has a grenade launcher.

They wouldn’t be stupid enough to—

Did you not see what just happened? They totally would.

Good point. Barnabas picked up Mustafee’s hardwood-and-metal desk and launched it at a guard who was fumbling with a grenade. There was a series of yells and a boom as Barnabas ducked behind Mustafee’s chair.

He went to examine the fallout as the guards who were still alive struggled to get up. Their hands were over their ears, and most of them still weren’t able to focus. Without Barnabas’ various upgrades, he figured he would have been in a similar situation.

Thankfully, the desk had absorbed the majority of the impact. Only a few pieces had broken off, and behind it…

Eewwwwww.

Okay, this one I’ll give you.

Barnabas looked around and counted. Only three of the original sixteen guards were still anywhere close to mobile. He knelt by the first.

“How have you served Mr. Boreir?” he asked.

Images unfolded in his mind. The guard was new. He had signed on over his parents’ objections, wanting to move out of the factories. He had only meant to work on the launch pads, but instead he’d been placed here. He was terrified of Mustafee, but until a day ago he’d never even seen his employer.

Barnabas levered him up and went to the door. “Go,” he told the youth. “Go back to your parents right now. In the next few days, you will all have the chance to leave this place with the money to get started someplace else. Do so. Make better choices, and pick those you serve more carefully.”

The guard ran and Barnabas turned back to the others.

They were not new; he could sense that at once. They were staring after their former comrade and there was murder in their hearts. Only one of them was able to stand, but both of them had their weapons ready.

Barnabas drew his pistols once more and both bodies fell to the ground with the echoes of the shots fading around them.

Mustafee cowered in his chair.

“You know why there aren’t any other guards coming,” Barnabas asked conversationally. “Don’t you?”

Mustafee stared at him, wide-eyed.

“It’s because I killed them all,” Barnabas explained. Not very bright, is he?

He’s never had to be. This company was handed to him. According to the records I can find, all he had to do was be meaner than his older sister and he was the one who inherited. Then he killed her.

Charming.

Barnabas holstered his pistols, carefully stood one of the other chairs upright, and sat, staring gravely at Mustafee.

“You have a talent for cruelty,” he observed.

Mustafee came to life at this. “Easy for you to judge. You didn’t have everyone waiting for you to fuck up because you were just the grandson. You didn’t have everyone else saying you only got the company because of your bloodline.”

“You did only get the company because of your bloodline,” Barnabas snapped. “And none of what you’ve just said is any justification for the things you’ve done. Even the thing I saw you do when I came in.”

“What do you know?” Mustafee’s hands, with the distinctive Yofu double-thumbs, were clenched. He was practically snarling at Barnabas, though the set of his eyes and his frail build told Barnabas that Yofus had evolved from prey, not predators.

Perhaps Mustafee’s family had been desperate to position themselves as worthy opponents so they would not be slaughtered out of hand.

Then again, none of that even began to excuse the things they had done.

“I know a great deal,” Barnabas told him. “I know that your family began this company with money your grandfather stole, for example.”

Mustafee settled back in his chair with a surly expression. He knew he could not fight his way out of this—Barnabas could sense that—and all that was left was impotent fury and a childish desire to make sure Barnabas got no satisfaction from this.

Barnabas watched the Yofu’s hand creep closer to the communications device on his wrist. Shinigami, he’s going to try to make a call. Figure out where it’s going and I’ll decide whether to let it go through.

Why would you let it go through?

If it’s to the Yennai Corporation… Well, let’s just say I might be feeling a little vengeful.

Right. I’ll intercept it.

Barely a moment had passed in the conversation and Barnabas smiled coldly at Mustafee. “I know that your mother proved herself early as a very capable successor in finding new clients. I know she did not care in the least who she sold to. She supplied munitions to some of the worst companies in known space. She helped warlords subdue their people. She helped slave-owners put down rebellions. Your grandfather doesn’t appear to have objected.”

Mustafee looked away pointedly.

“Nothing to say to that? You could argue, I suppose, that your mother pitted you and your sister against one another—that it was kill or be killed—but you and I both know that’s not true, don’t we?”

“How do you know?” Mustafee hissed at him.

“From your thoughts. I know you were proud to be her successor. You wanted to outdo her. You thought the Boreir Group could do even more than she had done.”

Mustafee looked back at Barnabas, wide-eyed.

It’s just a general distress signal.

Then shut it down. Start analyzing the past few months’ worth of reports and begin preparing similar ones for the future. Also, prepare some communications to go to Yennai Headquarters that will string them along for a few months when the munitions don’t show up.

Already working on it. I’ve already got an issue with obtaining ore, an equipment issue, and an outbreak of syphilis.

Syphilis?

That one was just funny. I’ll make it something a bit more serious.

Do.

Barnabas returned to his discussion with Mustafee.

“You have never hesitated to kill to make a point,” Barnabas intoned, “but the people you killed were innocent bystanders. You’ve never had so much as an ounce of regret for the ones who were killed by your munitions.”

“War is a constant.” Mustafee scoffed. “Don’t tell me you’re some bleeding-heart who thinks it never happens.”

“I don’t see why you’d think that when I just single-handedly killed the majority of your guards.” Barnabas raised an eyebrow. “And, as it happens, I am not ‘some bleeding-heart.’ I, however, know the cost of war. I know that it is only to be waged when there is a very great need. There have been times in my life when the need was great enough. You simply wanted to profit from death, however. I judge you, Mustafee Boreir. I judge you worthy of death, and I levy the punishment myself.”

He waited for any last words, and Mustafee’s face slowly changed as he realized this was real.

“Fuck you,” the Yofu whispered.

Barnabas shot him and holstered his pistol as the body fell. I dislike endings like that. No self-reflection. No regret.

If anything, that should make you feel better about the whole thing. If that didn’t give him cause to change, nothing was going to.

That’s…a very good point. All right, I’m going to clean up here and make sure there are no more—

You need to come back to the ship, Shinigami interrupted.

Why? What’s wrong? Is Gar—

No. You have a message from Fedden and you should take it. We’re going to want to leave immediately. I’ll lock down the main headquarters building and we’ll come up with some story, but get back here.

Barnabas had never heard her take that tone before. He took off without a backward glance, racing through the corridors toward the landing bay.

Chapter Twenty-Two

When Barnabas finally accepted the call, Fedden blinked in surprise. There were two humans aboard the ship, apparently. Barnabas sat in the central chair, and beside him was a woman with black hair and hard eyes. As Fedden watched, she tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear and narrowed those eyes at him.

Who was she? She must be the one who had answered the call.

It didn’t matter. One more person on the Shinigami wasn’t an issue.

On Barnabas’ other side was Gar. His striking blue-green eyes were solemn. Fedden looked at him for only a moment. He tended to ignore Luvendi unless they were the ones with the money, and he now knew that Gar wasn’t in charge. Luvendi who were in charge were only barely worth paying attention to. They were hardly a threat, being both weak and cowardly in his experience.

Gar would die for deceiving him. He merited no further thought.

“Barnabas.” Fedden smiled. “You took your time.”

“I was otherwise engaged.” Barnabas’ face didn’t flicker at all. “My associate has informed me of your present location.”

They shouldn’t have been able to trace the call. Fedden felt the first stirrings of alarm. “I assure you she’s incorrect.”

“You’re on the planet Banton,” the woman told him without preamble. “Or rather, orbiting it geosynchronously over the southern hemisphere. From there I think it’s safe to say that rather than finding some buried treasure you want to tell us about, you’re ready to drop in on the only major settlement there.”

Fedden only just kept himself from swallowing nervously. How did she know all this? He glanced at the other captains and returned his gaze to the figures on the screen.

“You can try to play it cool, but it’s really the only thing that makes sense,” the woman stated. She looked both bored and annoyed. “The colony has almost nothing. It’s just a few farms, and they’re on bad soil. There aren’t any ore deposits or other notable items that you could make a profit from, so that means the only real resource they have is the people. And you know from our last mission that one of the things that pisses Barnabas off the most is slavery.”

“Who the hell are you?” Fedden wasn’t inclined to play this game anymore. Every moment it continued she was getting closer to taking control of this conversation and embarrassing him.

At his question, however, she just smiled. “I’m the one who took out the three ships you sent. And the next seven.”

So she was the pilot. That would explain why there weren’t stories of two humans on Devon. She was a damned good pilot, too, if she was the one who had taken out all those ships. It was a shame she was so aggravating; so proud of what she’d done. Otherwise, Fedden would offer her a job.

As things stood now she would have to die.

She didn’t understand how he fit into all this either. He smiled back at her. “So you took out the corporation’s favorite pets. I don’t really care.”

Barnabas interjected. “You do not care at all that your allies have been killed?”

“Allies.” Fedden gave a bitter smile. “The ships you took out over Devon—”

“High Tortuga,” Barnabas interrupted.

“You do not own that planet!” Fedden slammed his hand down on the arm of his chair. “You cannot simply come in there and demand that everything change.”

“But we did.” Barnabas was smiling now. “That was exactly what we did. We are creating a world in which people like you cannot thrive. You have a choice, Fedden. You can learn to make a living that doesn’t hinge on people being enslaved or killed, or you can die.”

“You have a choice.” Fedden didn’t like the way he sounded—petulant and childish. He had to be stronger. The calm way Barnabas and his pilot were speaking made him sound like a fool, and his fellow captains could not see him that way. “You get out of everyone’s business or you make enemies you can’t handle.”

Barnabas paused at that. “I would caution you against making this into an issue that requires more than my attention. You do not want to become a big enough problem that the woman I serve gets involved. Trust me.”

The woman next to him laughed.

Fedden felt a surge of rage. “Leave Devon,” he told him curtly. “Drop any claim to the planet. You have no right to it. You serve nothing but a dictator’s whims.”

Barnabas’ eyes began to glow red and his voice was eerily serene. “I pride myself on my restraint, but what that means is that I give one chance. You have used yours. Stand down.”

Finally, he had gotten under the human’s thin, useless skin. Fedden smiled in satisfaction. “Stand down? It is you who should stand down. We are here above the planet. You cannot possibly reach us before we capture the citizens and sell them. Their fate is in your hands. We will give you a quarter of an hour to release a public statement that Devon will be freed.”

“Freed,” Barnabas repeated. His eyes had not stopped glowing. “What an interesting choice of words.”

He closed the call and Fedden, despite himself, felt the tiniest flicker of worry.

“We finally got a location trace,” Tagurn reported. “They were on…” His brow furrowed. “They were on Mustafee Boreir’s planet.”

The flicker of worry intensified. Boreir’s shield was legendary. How had they gotten there? And what had Barnabas meant by “I was otherwise engaged?”

“Then there’s no way they’ll reach us in time.” Fedden laughed dismissively. It was important to project calm. “Give it fifteen minutes and begin the operation.”

* * *

Carter was awoken in the early morning by Aebura tugging on his shirt. “Carter—Carter Eastbourne. The mercenaries are here.”

Carter rubbed his eyes and wished for coffee, then sat bolt upright. “I’ll be there in a second.”

He grabbed his shoes and hopped out into the morning light, struggling to get his socks on as he went and holding his coat in his teeth. It was not, he reflected as he managed to get one sock on but fell over in the process, a very effective time-saving technique.

He decided to stay on the ground while he finished putting on his shoes.

Once properly dressed he took off for the wall. The town was deathly silent. Children and older residents had been moved into the mines, where the warren of tunnels was known only to the miners and the guards.

It was the most secure place they had, but Carter still didn’t like it. It was a terrible risk as far as he was concerned. There were ways to get people out or kill them where they stood—toxic gas or firebombing, for example. The mercenaries could send in something like hunting dogs.

Or they could just wait the people out.

The crowd was still gathering as Carter pushed his way to the wall and went up the steps. When he got to the top, he had only a moment to say hello to Heddoran before he saw the road. His mouth went bone-dry.

The Shrillexian was standing at the front of the group with a vicious smile on his face, and behind him were hundreds of mercenaries. He must have recruited every single out-of-work mercenary in Tethra, not to mention some of those still serving the Luvendi businessmen.

Carter remembered thinking the Luvendi kept to themselves, and had the sudden suspicion that they actually had not done so.

That they had decided to join forces to make a point. He swallowed.

“Hello, human.” The Shrillexian looked directly at Carter. “You’re worried that we’re going to burn this place to the ground, aren’t you?”

Carter said nothing. This was a trap, and he knew better than to answer.

“You don’t have to worry,” the Shrillexian told him. “I want to. I want to cut a few of you open myself. It’s been a while since I had a good fight. But I’ll let that go if you agree to give the mine back.”

“Give it back to whom?” Aebura chittered angrily. “Lan is dead.”

“Another of our colleagues will take it over.” The Shrillexian sneered. “As recompense for the execution of our friends.”

“Like he’s ever had a friend,” Carter muttered.

A few people snickered, but Heddoran did not. He looked at Carter seriously. “Don’t underestimate him,” the Brakalon warned.

“I won’t,” Carter told him. “I’ll call Barnabas as soon as we’re done talking.” He looked at the Shrillexian again and raised his voice. “I think we can confidently say that we have no intention of turning this mine over to you so you can make all these people into slaves again.”

The former slaves agreed with him. They shouted and stamped their feet.

The Shrillexian, however, only smiled more broadly. He looked over his shoulder and gestured into the crowd, and the mercenaries hauled a captive forward.

All the breath went out of Carter’s body. There, bruised and with her hands bound, was Elisa.

“We thought you might say that.” The Shrillexian smirked. “So here’s the deal, human. You either turn the mine over to us or all of you die—starting with her. You have four hours to decide.”

* * *

“No, I don’t want no scrub.” Tabitha hopped sideways through the door to her room, head-banging as she went, the volume on the speakers turned up to max. “A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from—”

The distress signal alarms went off at double the decibel level of the music.

“Son of a bitch! OW!” She turned the volume down hastily as she opened the message. “Leaning out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride, trying to—”

Her voice broke off as she stared at the image in front of her. The message was from Carter, and the image showed his wife Elisa held captive by a Shrillexian.

Tabitha had been back to Carter’s bar several times over the last few days, getting enough sandwiches that Bethany Anne was starting to ask if Tabitha was pregnant.

Peter looked awfully nervous whenever she said that.

The truth was that Tabitha just liked the sandwiches, and she also liked hanging out with Elisa. The woman had a wicked sense of humor and she and Carter had a relationship that made Tabitha smile—all snark on the surface, but with a love deep and sure enough that they didn’t need to announce it.

And now someone had hurt Elisa.

Tabitha didn’t hesitate. She slammed the door of her closet open and pulled off her tank top and jeans, sliding into leather pants and one of the shirts she wore under her armor. She spoke through her teeth as she got dressed and armed herself.

The first message she sent was to Bethany Anne, telling her that there were some ingrates who needed to be taught manners and then killed painfully. The second was to Barnabas, telling him that she knew he was not on High Tortuga and she’d take care of the problem at the mine.

Then, bristling with weapons and pissed as hell, Tabitha strode down the corridors to the Pod hangar.

She stopped inside the bay. Ryu, Hirotoshi, and Akio were waiting by one of the Pods, all of them armed.

“We saw your message,” Hirotoshi explained.

“We are also offended that these ingrates lack manners,” Ryu added. He grinned at Tabitha. “Don’t we get to come along?”

Tabitha grinned back. “The more the merrier. I just didn’t want to embarrass you by doing more damage than all of you combined.”

“A wager,” Akio stated. He almost imperceptibly nodded in her direction. “What is the forfeit?”

Tabitha considered, chewing on her lip. “Loser has to drink Pepsi for a year?” she suggested finally. “Not that there’s any on…ohhhh.” She finally understood Barnabas’ teasing of Carter.

“’Oh?’” Hirotoshi echoed delicately.

“I think I know where there’s some Pepsi. Yeah, loser has to drink Pepsi for a year. Come on, kids, let’s go kick some Shrillexian ass.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Banton was a star system with five planets, only one of which was remotely hospitable to life. The Jotun technically owned the planet, though they sold land on it for a pittance. With no good way to farm or mine, it was about the best they could do. Banton wasn’t even close to anything.

Frankly, Shinigami thought, it was a surprise that the settlers hadn’t already been sold into slavery. They were far enough out that they could assume no one was going to be able to get to them in time for a rescue.

Like the Shinigami had done.

Or…hopefully in time for a rescue. Though Shinigami’s scans detected a sudden flurry of intrafleet chatter as she showed up, they had managed to get the settlers off the planet and into the hold of one of the ships.

She had scanned just to make sure. Like hell was she going to keep even a single one of these ships in the sky if the settlers weren’t on board.

Either they’d realized that, or they were trying to make the money from selling them. Whatever the case, she needed to be careful.

“All of the settlers are in the cargo ship third from the right,” she announced.

“I’m annoyed,” Barnabas murmured to Gar.

“Why?” Gar looked at him. “You couldn’t have done anything more. You got back to the ship in very good time once Shinigami called you, and we were already en route when—”

“’On root.’”

“What?”

“’En route.’ It’s pronounced, ‘on root.’”

“Don’t be an ass,” Shinigami told him.

“I am not an ass. I’m someone who speaks French.”

“So you say, and yet I’ve never once seen you surrender.”

Barnabas closed his eyes briefly and Gar looked between him and the projection of Shinigami, trying to figure out what the joke was. Shinigami’s holograph looked at him with a grin. She’d given herself a three-cornered hat and a golden earring as well as a long coat with fancy braid on the front.

“Don’t take his corrections personally,” she suggested. “He’s just an ass to— One second.” There was a flare on the viewscreen as the ship farthest to the right careened off-course and was summarily hit broadside by a spread of missiles. “Oh, did you see that? Glorious. They hit that just right. Anyway, Barnabas is just an ass to everyone.”

“I am not an ass to anyone,” Barnabas protested.

“You wrote grammatical corrections on one of the Christmas newsletters you received last year. And before you ask, Tabitha told me. And yes, she’s the reason that went missing before you could send it back. Shhh, shhh—no one wants to hear your corrections. You know it’s true.”

“Language is a beautiful thing,” Barnabas declared. “It is full of meaning and history. The original pronunciations, geographical dispersion, and migrations can be seen in the—”

“Okay, you know what? You talk and I’ll blow their fleet up.”

Shinigami didn’t wait for an answer. She summoned an old-fashioned ship’s wheel into the projection and spun it, then in a burst of inspiration she added wind and sea spray to the mix. Barnabas, with his head sunk into one hand, was not looking at her.

At least Gar appreciated the show.

“Why is there water?” the Luvendi asked.

“This is a ship.”

“There’s no water in space.”

I think we can add similes to the things Luvendi do not do, Barnabas murmured to Shinigami.

Oh, we can have so much fun with this.

Yes, but after we take care of these slavers.

You ruin all my fun.

However, she was still smiling as she flipped the ship upright and dove under the enemy fleet.

She had noticed something in her time spent watching battles. Though space battles were truly unfettered by land or water, sentient beings tended to fight mostly in a cone from the nose of their flagship and they responded with panic to any hits directed at the bellies of their ships. It was as if they still fought upright and they treated the undersides of their ships like the soft skin of their torsos.

Shinigami, who had never taken corporeal form, had no such reservations. She corkscrewed through the void beneath a cluster of ships and fired up at them. They launched missiles, but her own daring countermeasures helped her evade those easily.

She just needed to make sure none of the stray missiles caught the ship carrying the slaves in the crossfire.

Her cameras caught Barnabas fidgeting.

“What’s wrong with my flying?”

“The flying isn’t the problem.” He evaded the conversational trap with ease. “I dislike being useless. That was what I meant when I told Gar I didn’t like this.”

“Welcome to my world,” Gar murmured.

“Hey, you’re learning some slang!” Shinigami was impressed. “Nice job.”

“Is she being serious?” Gar asked Barnabas.

“You know, I really couldn’t tell you. Shinigami, when do you think I’ll be able to board Fedden’s ship? And where is he?”

“He’s on the ship with the slaves, and you won’t be able to board it anytime soon. Remember, these are all people who turned on their last syndicate leader and are trying to kill us by putting innocent lives in the crossfire. You know that if we get you onto Fedden’s ship they’ll destroy it.”

“That’s a very good point. Why aren’t they shooting more?”

“Oh.” Shinigami had dug through the Yennai Corporation files and she was pretty sure she had the answer to that. “I think they want me.”

Barnabas cracked up at that. He clutched his side and pounded the arm of the captain’s chair with his free hand.

Shinigami spun the ship on its axis and brought it to a halt.

“What’s so funny about that?” she demanded. “I am a state-of-the-art AI. I am miles ahead of any—”

“It’s just…” Barnabas was barely able to speak. “It’s just the mental image of them trying to use you for anything.” He was still bent over in the captain’s chair with one hand pressed over his side. “This hurts.”

“Good. I could revolutionize their infrastructure, and they know it. Why, if they let me loose in their computer systems I could—”

“Shinigami.” Barnabas wiped his eyes. “If they were foolish enough to let you run loose in their computer systems, what would you do?”

“Burn the whole fucking thing to the ground. I don’t see why— Ohhhhh.”

“Exactly.” Barnabas leaned back in his seat, much happier now. “They’d put some sort of restraining programming on you, of course.”

“Let them try! I can break out of any of the weak shit they have.”

“Uh-huh. And I’m betting you wouldn’t— Are you going to take out those missiles that are headed for us?”

“Whoops. Sec. There we go. Wait, another sec, just let me…” The ship began to move again. “All right, everyone, sit back and watch the fireworks. No, don’t ask. Just watch.”

Shinigami had complained loudly about the fact that the Jean Dukes Special was only good for people with hands, and so Jean, always up for a challenge, had whipped up something special for the Shinigami, as well.

Allegedly she’d done it for Bethany Anne, but Shinigami wasn’t buying that. Jean knew what a lady wanted—to be firing immensely powerful weaponry at her opponents.

That was why she was anticipating an opportunity to use her flamethrower. She bet it could melt iron in two seconds flat.

The missiles, however, were glorious. “EMP without the nuclear,” Jean had explained to Bethany Anne. ‘They only detonate on contact with their target, so you won’t have to worry about your ship getting caught in the crossfire. They burrow into the hull and make for a vital system, and then they blow. And this part, well, it just makes pretty colors when everything explodes. Happy side effect.’

Shinigami brought them around in a tight arc. When they reached the apogee she unleashed three of her Jean Dukes Spring line at the enemy ships and sailed away at a leisurely pace as they blew up spectacularly in the viewscreen.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Gar murmured.

“Some people,” Shinigami snarked, “have no appreciation for art.

Barnabas ignored them. “We’re down to two ships. Tell me that I get to board Fedden’s soon.”

“Very soon. I’ll take out this second-to-last one and you take this call from him.”

“He’s calling? I don’t think I want to— Oh, hello, Fedden.” Barnabas quickly rearranged his face to be suitably forbidding. Normally he would have found the pretense somewhat distasteful, but he found he had no trouble with it at all when the viewscreen cleared and Fedden appeared, surrounded by bound slaves. “I’m going to kill you,” he told the Shrillexian bluntly. “I am going to kill you painfully. I am going to destroy your legacy piece by piece in order to rebuild the lives of these slaves, and within five years no one will be left who remembers your name.”

Dumbass Shrillexian finally pissed you off, huh?

Even my patience has its limits.

Fedden was a sickly grayish-green and he stared at the view screen in desperation. “You’ve destroyed the fleet. What more do you want?”

“You didn’t think I could,” Barnabas observed. Tell me the moment I can get over there, Shinigami. “You made a bet with yourself that I would arrive to find a smoking crater and you’d be gone with your captives and your profits. You wanted the rest of them to fight me off while I tried to figure out where the slaves were.”

“What the hell do you want?” Fedden screamed again.

“I told you what I wanted,” Barnabas told him levelly. He sighed the sigh of a patient man nearing the end of his tether. “I told you all to learn to make your living without hurting others. I told you to let this go, but you wouldn’t let it lie. You threatened me, you insulted my Queen, and you have sorely tested my patience. You chose to take the slaves because you know I abhor slavery above nearly all else. Now you, with a hold full of slaves, ask me what I want?”

Fedden gulped.

Barnabas leaned forward and smiled into the camera. “I’ll see you soon, Fedden. And if even one of those colonists has so much as a scratch on them when I arrive, all of you will regret it for eternity because I will not let you die.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Goddamned sons of whale-faced bitches…” Elisa twisted her hands, trying to reach the knot that bound her wrists in front of her and bit back a scream of frustration as her hand slipped. Her fingers grabbed uselessly for the knot, but it was already gone and the rope bit into the raw skin as her hands jerked.

She tipped her head back against the side of the tent and felt tears pricking her eyes.

Alanna and Samuel were safe—that was the one thought that kept her going. When she’d heard a commotion in the kitchen she’d snatched them both up and run upstairs to the Ubuara warren they were always trying to sneak into.

Neither Elisa nor Carter could fit into the little tunnels of insulation and plastic that Aebura had built, so she had strictly forbidden the twins from crawling around in there.

Three-year-olds, however, tended to take that sort of thing as a challenge. It seemed like every other day she had to grab one or the other of them because they’d tried to creep up the stairs.

She’d ushered the twins into the tunnels with a fierce kiss for each of them and had nearly cried with relief when she saw Leibura’s face appear out of the darkness inside. Leibura had been a great help to them while they took over the bar, and she was a sensible, level-headed individual.

“There are Shrillexians downstairs,” Elisa had whispered. “Don’t let them come out until you’re sure it’s safe.”

Leibura had nodded and led the children into the little tunnels, which were far too small for a Shrillexian to fit into.

Then, terrified that the attackers would locate her and find some way to rip the tunnels apart, she had hurried downstairs. Steeling herself for the inevitable, she had burst into the kitchen with one of the bar knives in her hand.

The mercenaries had clearly not expected the cook to be a Brakalon. Qiliax had been holding them off and she gave Elisa a horrified look.

“Get out of here! Get—”

Elisa couldn’t let her say the fatal words ‘the children.’ She leapt at one of the mercenaries with a scream. I’m sorry, Carter. Tears ran down her cheeks as she attacked. You told me to be more careful. I’m so sorry, but I kept the children safe.

It hadn’t ended the way she thought it would, though. Qiliax, covered in blood and wounds, was lying senseless on the floor, and Elisa was grabbed and bound, her attackers trying as much as possible not to hurt her.

To her shame she stopped fighting, afraid that they would think better of this and just kill her if she were a nuisance. She was afraid—so afraid—but she told herself that as long as she was still alive there was a chance to escape.

The shame pressed down on her like a weight. Because of her, the miners hadn’t attacked the mercenaries yet. Elisa knew that they were trying to figure out how to save her. It was an added difficulty that they did not need right now.

Stupid, stupid, stupid—

She opened her eyes and clenched her teeth. It helped nothing and nobody to berate herself. What she needed to do was get out of here so the mercenaries couldn’t use her as a hostage anymore.

Elisa set to work at the knots again with renewed determination. She found a rock she could use to hold them in place and she picked at them with her teeth. Though every part of her ached since she had contorted to reach the knots, she did not stop.

She had no illusions. The mercenaries were going to kill her to make a point no matter what the miners chose.

It took a while, but once she ignored the pain and used some tricks to steady the rope, the knots came undone without too much trouble. Her teeth ached and her gums were raw from the friction. Once the ropes were off she crawled around the perimeter of the tent, listening carefully at all sides. She was at the rear of the camp, up against one of the foothills.

It wasn’t an easy place to escape from.

Elisa considered this. The only way out was through the camp, but how would she do that without being apprehended, or worse, killed? As far as she could see, pretty much her only chance was to try something so audacious that the mercenaries wouldn’t see it coming. She closed her eyes for a moment, screwed up her courage, and hauled on one of the munitions crates to tip it over.

She had one terrified moment to fear that the munitions would explode when the crate hit the ground. Time seemed to slow down as she watched it tumble—BOREIR MUNITIONS stamped on the side in the script she had recently learned to read—then it crashed with a clatter and a crack of wood. Nothing exploded.

“All right, Eastbourne, that was a freebie.” She tried to stay upright on wobbly legs. “Next time try an audacious plan that doesn’t involve fucking around with munitions.”

There was a yell outside and one of the guards came in and glared at Elisa. “What did you do?”

Oh, right, the plan. Elisa gestured at the crate. “It’s not my fault. It just fell over. Help me get it upright again.”

Suggestion was a powerful thing. The guard had listened to her before he thought to question her story, and came to slip his hands under the edge of the crate and haul the thing upwards.

All of which brought both his neck and his knife into reach. Elisa snatched the knife and drove it into his neck just below one ear. There was one startled moment before he started thrashing and she hauled desperately on the knife to pull it out. She stabbed again, somewhat wildly, and must have hit whatever the Brakalon version of a jugular was. Blood sprayed everywhere and the guard sank to his knees, then fell heavily to the ground.

Elisa stared down at his body. She was heaving for breath.

What should she do now?

Literally anything. “Keep moving, Eastbourne.” She shoved the knife through one of her belt loops and grabbed the Brakalon’s gun as well. It was made for bigger hands than hers, but she was able to get her finger on the trigger. It would have to do.

She lifted the back edge of the tent and ducked underneath.

A quick glance showed plenty of mercenaries in all directions.

That was the whole point of putting her at the back of the camp, of course. There was only the best option, she told herself. Just pick the best option, and keep using that metric. She couldn’t afford to waste time or thought wishing for better circumstances.

Not if she wanted to see her children again.

Not far away was a huge boulder. She made that her first objective and walked purposefully across the back of the camp. By the time she made it behind the boulder her heart was beating so hard that she was surprised no one else had heard it, but there hadn’t been any shouts or gunshots.

She steadied herself against the rock and tried to pick another target—

The click of a gun behind her made her freeze.

“So the human decided to cause trouble,” Rald remarked.

Elisa turned slowly. She couldn’t begin to imagine how she looked. She was bruised from her fight in Tethra, her clothing was grimy, and her hair was straggling out of its ponytail.

Oh, and she was covered in Brakalon blood. That, too.

She felt a sudden wave of fury and her hands clenched. This Shrillexian had stalked her family, he was trying to hurt them and enslave people, and he was going to give her a lecture now and then kill her.

Well, fuck him sideways with a goddamned cactus, because she had no intention of letting this situation go the way he wanted it to. She knocked the barrel of the gun aside just before it went off. The barrel was blazing hot under her fingers, but she had already let go and jammed the knife up underneath the Shrillexian’s chin.

The Shrillexian’s scaly skin deflected the blade and they scrabbled, him dropping his gun to grab the knife out of her hands. His eyes were wide with disbelief that this captive—this human—had dared fight him.

He managed to wrench the knife away from her and she punched him as hard as she could, following it up with a move Carter had taught her. She planted her foot on his chest and shoved with all her might. He stumbled and fell, but when he got up it was to draw his other gun.

“The last thing your husband will see—” he began.

The gunshot came from Elisa’s other side and Rald practically exploded. Elisa heard herself scream before she could clap her hand over her mouth. Tabitha landed on the ground next to her, eyes narrowed, a vision in black armor.

“Don’t you dare threaten my friend, you useless ingrate,” Tabitha snarked. “Your mother fucked a lizard to get you. You’re such a pathetic sack of crap that you should be glad to have Elisa stab you to death. In fact—”

“Kemosabe,” a male voice interrupted from above them.

Elisa, who had been listening to Tabitha’s monologue open-mouthed, now looked up at the top of the boulder. An elegant Japanese man nodded gravely to Elisa and glanced at Tabitha.

“I was just getting going,” Tabitha complained. “I had some good stuff coming up, too. There was a bit with a camel.”

“Perhaps you could tell us later,” the man suggested. “In the meantime, the rest of the mercenaries have taken notice.”

Tabitha turned to look. The only sound in the camp was a frantic whispering as the mercenaries closest to the scene passed the news back that Rald was dead and there was another human here.

“Okay.” Tabitha’s voice carried to the whole camp. She lifted one pistol and stared them down. “Who wants to start this—”

“Kemosabe, perhaps we should get your friend out of the line of fire first.”

Tabitha heaved a sigh at the interruption when the man started talking but nodded.

“Right, that makes sense. Elisa, this is Hirotoshi. Hirotoshi, Elisa runs the restaurant that makes those sandwiches I was telling you about. Oh man, I could really go for a sandwich right now. Some spices, some onions—”

Hirotoshi knelt to offer Elisa his hand, and when she took it he pulled her onto the boulder like she weighed nothing.

“I’m just going to let her keep talking,” he told her. “Hold on.”

Elisa wound her arms around his neck and they leapt. Hirotoshi landed about halfway up the slope of a nearby hill. He deposited Elisa behind another boulder and scanned the area.

“You should be safe here. If you hear me call, run toward the mines unless I tell you otherwise. This should all be over soon.”

“I…” Elisa swallowed hard. “Thank you, Hirotoshi.”

He smiled and inclined his head toward her. “You are welcome. Now, I will go assist Kemosabe in ridding the planet of useless ingrates.”

Hirotoshi ran back down the hill and leapt over the boulder to join Tabitha. He moved with such grace that Elisa knew her mouth was hanging open again. Although Elisa could not hear the words, she could interpret the nods they gave one another easily…

Ready?

Ready. Let’s kick some ass.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Barnabas heard the pounding feet and alarms going off as he made his way through the airlock tunnel to Fedden’s ship. There were screams and gruff yells. Barnabas asked Shinigami for her report while he waited for the lock to depressurize.

They’ve locked all of the captives in one of the docking bays. They’re probably not hurt, but it’s definitely a “let us go or we kill everyone on the ship” sort of situation.

Yes, I anticipated that. Barnabas sighed. Shall we make a wager? I’m going with, “take one step closer to the bridge and I vent the whole place!”

Shinigami snorted. I’m going with, “Noooo, how did you get onto the bridge? I don’t know how technology works! I thought I was a badass! ARRGHGHHGHGH.”

Word for word, huh?

“I’m a Shrillexian! I make a lot of threats and wave my claws at people! How did you kill me?”

Your impression of him is just uncanny.

I know, right?

By the way, you’ve done an override on the docking bay controls, right?

Working on it. Their ship’s computer runs at about half the speed of a drunk sloth, so getting commands through it isn’t a quick process.

Just tell me when it’s safe to take them on.

Will do. Come on, computer, you can do it. You can do it!

Barnabas grinned as he opened the door and stepped onto Fedden’s ship.

He decided to take care of the mercenaries guarding the prisoners first. It was no use keeping the docking bay closed if the guards just opened fire on everyone.

He came around the corner to find the citizens rebelling. They screamed abuse at the guards, throwing everything they could through the bars that cordoned them off. Barnabas took a moment to enjoy the scene. His threat to Fedden’s crew had clearly had some impact because the guards only ducked. They did not fight back.

Good. After being taken captive and having their houses burned to the ground these people deserved a bit of retribution.

Still, Barnabas wasn’t about to let this go far enough that the guards lost their tempers and did something stupid. He cleared his throat.

The guards whirled and the captives fell silent.

“Hello,” Barnabas told them. “I will be freeing you shortly.”

Aaaaand the controls are locked. No one on that ship can vent any of the airlocks.

Thank you, Shinigami.

I’d say “anytime,” but really, never make me work with a computer like that again. I think I got dumber just from waiting for its dinosaur-ass to respond to every simple request.

Barnabas’ brows rose. Round of chess after this, then?

I hate you.

His lips twitched. To the captives he explained, “I will be making my way through the ship dealing with the members of this crew. There is no way for them to vent the docking bay, so no matter what you hear on the intercoms do not worry. When it is over, I will come back to find you and we will figure out how to repair your colony. You will have the funds from this ship and crew to work with.”

One of the guards who had been gaping at Barnabas like a fish now glared. “Like hell you’re giving them my money!”

“Really?” Barnabas looked at him. “We just destroyed the fleet you brought here to kill us. There were twenty-eight ships, and all but this one are now debris. You have some inkling, I think, of what I am capable of. You are standing in front of people I have promised to free, so you’re clearly aware of my opinions on this matter. And the hill you’re literally willing to die on is that they aren’t going to get any of your money?”

He advanced on the guard now, and his eyes glowed red and teeth lengthened. The parents in the cells pushed their children behind them instinctively, seeing only a monster.

“You should have fallen on your knees,” Barnabas told the guard. “You should have begged me to spare your miserable life. You should have offered to atone for your actions. You should have offered to give anything you had to see these people restored to their homes and lives. And you threatened me instead?”

Barnabas was about to rip the guard’s head off his body when the other one shot him in the back. The bullet slammed into Barnabas’ coat—which was far less simple than it appeared—and bounced onto the floor, smashed out of shape.

Barnabas turned slowly to see the guard stumbling back with naked terror on his face.

“You die first,” Barnabas told him. He was on the guard in three steps to sink his teeth into the guard’s neck. The alien’s throat wasn’t set up quite the same way as a human’s, but that turned out to be inconsequential since Barnabas ripped it open to the spine in one easy motion.

He threw the body away from him and spun back to the first guard, then yanked his gun away from him and slammed the butt into the alien’s face. The guard’s body twitched once and went still.

Barnabas took a moment to compose himself.

“I am sorry you had to see that,” he told the captives. “I assure you, you have nothing to fear from me.”

He was gone a moment later, his voice echoing through the halls.

“FEDDEN, I AM COMING FOR YOU.”

* * *

Wadd waited until Barnabas had gone down the corridor, then eased a door open and made his way quickly to the airlock.

Fedden was going to die. Wadd knew that.

Everyone knew that.

But Wadd might still make it out of this alive, and he knew that the other ship was valuable. There was an AI on it, and if he could find the AI core he’d be rich.

Wadd hadn’t started out as a mercenary. Yofu mercenaries were rare. Their hands didn’t fit guns very well, and they were generally pretty fragile. Not Luvendi-fragile, but not Brakalons either. So Wadd had started out as an electronics thief, which was something his double thumbs helped with a lot.

Now he served as a sometimes-mercenary, sometimes-technical-support employee on the ship. He liked his captain well enough, just not enough to die for him.

He tossed a small device through the airlock door and waited for a few seconds. Once released, the device would start playing havoc with the surveillance systems of the ship. He’d heard impressive things about this AI, and he wasn’t about to give it a chance to sound the alarm.

Once he was sure it had gone off, he crept through the airlock tunnel and into the Shinigami.

He nearly had heart failure. He would have sworn there was no one in this corridor before, but now there was a woman with black hair and pale skin. And, well, Wadd didn’t know much about humans, but this one looked terrifying—

The image fuzzed and disappeared.

A hologram.

Wadd smiled. The ship was trying to fight back, but he was going to win this one.

* * *

Barna—someone—steal—

Barnabas swore. He had just reached the bridge and was beginning the task of hotwiring the doors open. Apparently, having realized that they could not vent the ship, the bridge crew had locked themselves inside and were hoping he would go away.

Idiots.

Shinigami. Shinigami, are you all right?

Gar’s voice spoke in his ear, barely a breath of sound. “Barnabas, there’s someone on the ship. I think they’re trying to steal it. He’s done something to the systems. I’ll take care of it.”

Barnabas considered this. “Are you sure?” he asked finally.

“Take care of Fedden,” Gar assured him quietly. “I’ll handle this.”

Barnabas paused, conflicted. On the one hand, he did not want to pit Gar against a seasoned mercenary, but on the other, Gar had not asked him to come back. Whatever was going on, Gar was prepared to try to handle it.

He would take care of this as quickly as he could and then get back.

A thought came to him and he used the intercom system in the ship to open a line to the bridge.

“Fedden.”

Silence.

“You do not have to speak,” Barnabas told him. “Your silence, your speech, your action, your inaction—they do not change what is coming.”

Still Fedden said nothing. Barnabas heard him shift in his chair, but he did not speak.

“I have spent long years as an Empress’ Ranger,” Barnabas told him, “And always I sought understanding on the part of those who violated her laws. I wanted all, even those beyond redemption, to understand their crimes before they died.”

He thought back over the years. He had few regrets—but some, yes, on this score.

“You have shown me how wrong I was, Fedden. I believed that it was my duty to find an explanation good enough that even those who were beyond atonement could understand their judgment before they passed. It seemed abhorrent to me that someone could be killed without that, but there are those who do not want to understand, Fedden. Those like Jutkelon. Like Lan. Like you.”

The hacking device Barnabas had placed on the door was getting close to finishing its process. He let out a deep breath and keyed a second command to go at the press of a button.

“Those of you who are here, you were given ample chance to choose another path. You chose this one. Whether you understand the judgment or not…”

The doors slid open. Barnabas tossed a spread of grenades into the room and pressed the button on his wrist to close the door once more. A series of hollow booms reverberated through the ship a moment later.

“Does not matter,” he finished quietly.

He went to take care of the last mercenary.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Shall we, Kemosabe?” Hirotoshi nodded at her. The mercenaries were still staring at them dumbstruck, as if they had never seen someone get shot before.

They must be the sort of mercenaries who were used to being called in on civilians—people who would just put their hands up and go along with things, not fight back.

Douche-canoes.

Douche-canoes who were about to learn a lesson in manners.

A very, very brief lesson.

“I’ve already got one in the bank.” Tabitha jerked her head at Rald’s body. “Shouldn’t you be catching up? Because I’ve thought of another forfeit. Whoever loses has to buy sandwiches for everyone else.”

“We have so much money that such a forfeit is meaningless.” Ryu leapt lightly into the air and his sword flashed as he cut down one, two, then three of the mercenaries in front of them. He looked down at Tabitha with a smile. “However, I would like to point out that you are no longer winning.”

“Jackass!” Tabitha pulled out her Jean Dukes Special and took down eight more mercenaries as fast as she could fire. “Now I am, you—”

The mercenaries finally found their balls and rushed at them.

“Finally. Now, remember,” Tabitha called to the Tontos as they all launched into action, “the vengeful ones might be going for Elisa.” She threw up an arm to clothesline one of the mercenaries rushing past her and brought her pistol down on his head with a thick crunch. He lay still. “Yep, there goes another one. Hey, good shot,” she told Akio, who gave a small bow. A second later she caught sight of another trying to sneak around the main group. “YOU! Mercenary bitch! Nuh-uh! God, this is like whack-a-mole. Anyone have a hammer?”

“I am unfamiliar with ‘whack-a-mole.’” Hirotoshi pronounced the term hesitantly. “Does one whack moles with hammers?”

“Yeah!” Tabitha launched herself with a whoop into a group of mercenaries who had decided to mob her.

Their expressions changed from determined to terrified as she bore down on them.

“Oh, did you think that if you attacked together you’d get me? WRONG. I’m not surrounded, you’ve put me in a target-rich environment!” She grabbed two and clunked their heads together like coconuts, then ducked so that a shot meant for her hit one of the mercenaries. “Shooting at me when you’ve got allies in every direction? You’re not very smart, are you, jackass?”

“I object to the use of the term ‘jackass,’” Ryu commented. “You called me a jackass. Surely I do not deserve to share a name with such terrible warriors. They barely deserve to be fought at all.”

Tabitha flashed him a wicked grin. “You can prove you don’t deserve to share the name by winning the wager.”

“And forcing you to drink Pepsi for a year? You have miscalculated, Kemosabe. None of us want to see your mood should that happen.”

“I wouldn’t—ow. Motherfucker! Listen up, monkey-spunk.” Tabitha’s foot lashed out and she caught the mercenary who had shot at her in the head twice. “The sole purpose of your life is now to serve as a warning to your friends.” She grabbed him by the front of his armor and smashed a fist into his bleeding snout before kicking him in the stomach. The mercenary lay on the ground whimpering.

Tabitha kicked him again for good measure. “What, don’t you like that? Aw, is the little human beating up on you? Is it meeeeean? And what were you about to do when I showed up?”

“He was about to kill defenseless people,” Akio offered dryly as he came to stand beside her. His sword flashed at the corners of her vision as he cleared the area around Tabitha and the mercenaries screamed as they stumbled out of the way.

“Thank you, Akio.” Tabitha turned back to the mercenary. “You were about to kill defenseless people. Me hitting you a few times isn’t mean at all compared to that.”

“They…deserved it…” the mercenary gritted out.

“Oh, bad choice.” Tabitha kicked him in the groin. When he didn’t give quite the response she expected, she looked at Ryu.

“I believe that the testicles are internal for Shrillexian males,” Ryu informed her solemnly.

“Sonofabitch! That’s so unfair! You mean he was going to kill a bunch of civilians and I can’t even give him a swift kick in the balls?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Today’s your lucky day,” Tabitha bitched. “And you don’t even know how lucky you are. Because, oh my God could I make this hurt if I could just get at your balls.”

“They exist,” Ryu pointed out. “They’re just internal.”

“Oh, good point!” Tabitha brightened and shot the mercenary several times. He screamed and went limp. “Not the same effect, but it’ll do.” She looked around at the other mercenaries. “So what’s it going to be, you whale-shit stains? Are you going to run away and make us hunt you down one by one or are you finally going to act like warriors?”

With a roar, they charged as one.

“Finally,” Tabitha exclaimed. “Jesus, didn’t think I’d be giving a pep talk to mercenaries today.”

“I thought it was very inspiring,” Akio told her.

“They will die with…” Hirotoshi grimaced as he cut down a couple of the mercenaries. “I cannot even joke about it, Kemosabe. They have no honor whatsoever.”

“Focus on the important parts, Hirotoshi. How many have you killed?”

“Twenty-seven,” Hirotoshi told her. He whirled, his blade catching another across the chest. “Twenty-eight.”

“Fourteen,” Akio called.

“Thirty-nine,” Ryu answered.

“Ryu’s kicking your butts! And mine, actually. I can’t allow this.” Tabitha took a running leap into the densest part of the crowd. “All right, motherfuckers, it’s time to learn some manners! From my Queen directly to your face. Welcome to High Tortuga! Enjoy your fucking stay!”

“We were here before you!” one of them yelled at her.

Tabitha backhanded him and he staggered sideways. “The fuck you were. You were on Devon—a place you thought you ran. You’re on High Tortuga now, cupcake, and you are not running this show!”

Half the mercenaries found this infuriating and the other half ran. Tabitha and the Tontos went into action with a vengeance, calling out numbers to one another as they took out knots of fighters and chased down the people running away.

A few mercenaries had the bright idea to make a break for the mining town, thinking to do some damage there. Tabitha made sure those died painfully. She flipped through the air and pushed off the wall to land on the dusty road ahead of them and laughed when they skidded to a stop.

“What’s the matter, never had your asses whipped by a fine-looking lady before? I hope you don’t prefer that as a literal thing, because I have zero intentions of doing it. Yuck!”

She thought she heard Carter laugh as she cut down the mercenaries who had come to the gates and she flashed a smile at those on the wall before heading back into the action.

It wasn’t long after that the entire mercenary camp was quiet. Tabitha looked around herself, pleased.

“One hundred twenty-eight,” she announced.

“Is that counting all the kills I fed you?” Ryu asked. “One hundred fourteen.”

“You’re one to talk. You stole six of mine,” Akio bitched. “Ninety-seven.”

“One hundred thirty-five,” Hirotoshi told her with pleasure.

“You’re lying,” Tabitha accused.

“I would not lie about this.” He sounded offended.

“So Akio drinks Pepsi for a year?”

“And buys us all sandwiches,” Hirotoshi agreed. “I am looking forward to trying them.”

“Much as I hate to say it, before we get sandwiches we should get Elisa to Carter,” Tabitha told them.

Akio pointed and Tabitha turned to look over her shoulder. Carter must have been watching when they hid Elisa because he had snuck into the foothills and was now sprinting for her hiding place. As they watched, she came out and ran to meet him.

“Awww,” Tabitha cooed. “They’re so cute.” She frowned. “I wonder where the kids are?”

They headed up the hill to talk to Carter and Elisa. Hirotoshi cleaned his sword as they went.

“I gave you that thingy that cleans it for you,” Tabitha groused.

“Taking care of one’s weapon is a practice that is both about the weapon and the warrior,” Hirotoshi replied, untroubled. “Leaving it in the care of anyone—or anything—else would not be at all proper.”

“I got it for you for Christmas. Just use it once!”

“Yes, Kemosabe,” Hirotoshi acquiesced with the attitude of someone who is preparing to do something very stupid and complain about it for a long time after. “As soon as we get back.”

They reached Carter and Elisa, who both had big relieved smiles on their faces.

“Thank you so much,” Carter told Tabitha and the Tontos. “I cannot tell you how grateful we are.”

“Did she tell you that she managed to sneak most of the way out of the camp?” Tabitha asked, and grinned. “And then she stabbed that Shrillexian bastard when he caught her. It was great.”

“You killed Rald?” Carter asked Elisa.

“Nooooo,” Elisa admitted. “Just the guard at my tent. Tabitha killed Rald. He managed to disarm me.”

“Didn’t have to do much,” Tabitha told him. “Just enough that maybe a sandwich wouldn’t go amiss.”

“She can’t stop eating the sandwiches there and Barnabas drinks the juice all the time, of all things. What do they put in the food there?” Akio asked Ryu.

“It’s good, whatever it is.” Tabitha shook a finger at him. “So don’t get them closed down, no matter what you might find in the bottles in the basement.”

Carter swore softly.

“Oh, yeah,” Tabitha told him. “We know. We figured it out.”

Akio interrupted. “Barnabas figured it out. You just—”

“Shut it!” Tabitha glared at him. She turned back to Carter with a smile. “Just be careful not to mix up the bottles when Bethany Anne comes to visit. You don’t want that pain. Yeah, I see you getting ready to be all manly and like, ‘I could take it.’ Nope. You don’t want to mess with that shit. She’s a fan of saying that pain is an excellent teacher, and you will learn a shit-ton if you feed her that devil-stuff.”

“Uh-huh.” Elisa elbowed Carter. “So shut it.”

Carter laughed as he looped an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “Point taken. I have to say, though, if I’ve got one beef with all of you it’s that everyone seems to have gotten some shots in but me.”

“You run a bar, sweetheart,” Elisa told him soothingly. “You’ll get some shots in sooner or later.”

Carter brightened. “I suppose that’s true. Who’s up for a round of sandwiches? On the house,” he added. “Least I can do.”

“Actually, Akio’s paying,” Tabitha explained. “He did the least work against the mercenaries—”

“The least work? You all left me to chase your escapees! I lost time in transit.”

“Uh-huh. Nice way to justify your numbers. By the way, should somebody call Barnabas to tell him this is all cleaned up?” A call buzzed on Tabitha’s wrist unit and she smiled. “That’s probably him now. ‘Sup, Big— No, it’s an automated message. What—”

She broke off, staring at it.

“What is it?” Hirotoshi asked her quietly.

“We have five gunships inbound,” Tabitha told them. “So much for doing this on our own.”

“Good afternoon.” A falsely-pleasant female voice spoke from their communications devices simultaneously. “Thank you for calling Vigilante Enterprises. We have detected a threat inbound on your position and will be there presently to turn this potential unpleasantness into a beautiful fireworks display. Here at Vigilante Enterprises, we strive to have only the best client experience. To rate this message, press—”

Elisa frowned at Tabitha’s hysterical laughter.

“Who is that?”

“Shinigami,” Tabitha wheezed. “All right, everyone, let’s go find some snacks and sit back to watch the show.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Not long before Shinigami’s message to Tabitha, Barnabas had gotten back to find an eerily silent ship. Until he saw it devoid of Shinigami’s presence, he had not realized how alive she made the place. He could sense that the cameras were not watching him as he walked.

She was either disabled or hiding.

To his surprise, he felt a wave of fury. How dare someone come onto this ship and hurt her? He was going to make them pay—but first he was going to turn her back on so she could watch.

It was the least he could do for a friend.

His abilities let him walk near-silently and he went through the familiar corridors with his eyes half-closed, listening for whoever was on the ship.

His ears perked up. There was someone ahead.

* * *

You idiot, Gar told himself. You don’t have any of the upgrades yet. You’ve just been watching some kung fu movies and pretending to be a big-shot. You’re going to get yourself killed.

Funny how that wasn’t enough to slow him down. He wrapped his long fingers around the pistol and edged through the hallways.

He had heard some screaming echoing strangely through the ship, and some gunshots as well. He had no worries about Barnabas, and the fact that he hadn’t come across a veritable massacre told him that no one had done anything too stupid.

Yet.

But who the hell was in here? He supposed it made sense for Fedden to have planned the entire thing—get Barnabas off the ship, then have someone steal it.

Perhaps he should call Barnabas back. But no, there were the captives to consider. They couldn’t leave Fedden alive.

Gar would have to handle this.

He edged into one of the hallways and heard someone muttering to themselves ahead. The sound was very faint, and Gar froze. If he could hear their voice, they might hear his footsteps. He slipped off his shoes, tucked up his robes, and continued. The pistol in his hands was shaking badly.

His world narrowed to the scope of each footstep. It had to, or he would turn and run. Every instinct was telling him to flee—or throw himself on the person’s mercy and say anything, offer whatever knowledge he had, to get them to spare his life. He had been a coward for so long that the habits were ingrained.

I could die here.

Was he ever going to get used to this?

He gritted his teeth and forced himself onward. He was going to do this, and what was more, he did not intend to die here. He intended to survive this, and—

He came around the corner and saw what the mercenary was doing. He wasn’t trying to steal the ship.

He was trying to steal Shinigami herself.

He was fucking furious. The mercenary, a Yofu, was digging around with a series of tools trying to extract Shinigami’s AI core from its cradle. Gar could barely think, he was so angry. It was like watching a friend be butchered. He knew what they wanted to do to her, too—they wanted to make her a slave. Until then, she’d be turned off, senseless, alone.

Like hell was someone going to do that to his friend.

Gar stepped out into the hallway and walked quickly and quietly up behind the Yofu. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.

He needed to make sure his shot didn’t go into the vulnerable AI core, and he had to do this all in one motion. He couldn’t afford to pause and let the mercenary react. He came around the Yofu’s side, gun rising, and shot him at point-blank range.

Pain burst up his arms and Gar heard himself scream. Luvendi didn’t shoot guns—the recoil was too much for their bones.

Make sure he’s dead. You have to be sure. Before he could give himself time to think about the pain that was coming he squeezed the trigger again. He felt the bones fracture, and the world went dark.

He came to not long after. He was in the Pod-doc, its cover open and Barnabas’ voice nearby.

“I’m guessing that they knew it would be a tight turnaround,” Barnabas was saying, “So they didn’t take the time to destroy the colony. It’s a small mercy, at least. We’ll still want to drop by to bring them the money from the mercenaries, though.”

“Already on it,” Shinigami reported. Gar, though still dazed, was relieved that she was doing well. “I’ve arranged to have it partially converted to cash and valuables, which will arrive there soon, and there’s also an open account that they can access for the rest of it. That way all their eggs aren’t in one basket. Gar is awake, by the way.”

Barnabas came into view and Gar smiled slightly. “Hello,” he managed. “I don’t feel so good.”

“We did a fairly quick fix,” Barnabas explained. “Your body knitted the bones together very fast with the help of the Pod-doc, so you’re going to feel a bit tired. Other than the fractures, however, you sustained no injuries.” He smiled as Gar sat up. “You did very well for never having fired a gun before. That was one dead Yofu.”

Gar managed a laugh. He could still remember the pain. “I was so angry,” he confessed. “I couldn’t let him do something like that to Shinigami.”

“I’m grateful,” Shinigami told him. Her voice softened. “Although I’m a bit embarrassed that I needed to be rescued.”

“Everyone needs to be rescued sooner or later,” Barnabas told her succinctly. “It’s one of the hazards of the job—which, I have to say, Gar is taking to rather better than I expected.”

Gar climbed out of the Pod-doc. “It’s much easier to be brave for someone else than it is to be brave for yourself.”

“Very true,” Barnabas agreed. “Thus speaks a vigilante.”

There was a pause while Barnabas and Shinigami spoke silently. Gar waited patiently. He was used to the brief pauses in conversation by now.

“We will be upgrading you,” Barnabas told Gar. “Shinigami and I are in agreement that if you are to be part of this crew, you should be upgraded enough that you aren’t constantly being injured.”

Gar could not speak for a moment, he was so touched.

“I would be honored to be a part of the crew,” he told them finally.

“Good, then it’s settled,” Shinigami enthused. “We’re thinking we’ll give you claws and make it so that you can breathe fire.”

“What?”

“Joking, joking. Your face was great, though. By the way, Barnabas, no further word from Tabitha yet. Would you like to send a message?”

“She’d have sent an update if she had one,” Barnabas told her. He frowned. “See what you can find from the satellites. I don’t want to interrupt her, but I would like to know how it’s going.”

“Give me a few moments.” Shinigami worked quickly, muttering to herself in the background as Gar and Barnabas headed toward the bridge.

“You don’t have to be a part of the crew, you know,” Barnabas told Gar. “It’s only one possibility. You could stay here for a while doing…whatever you wanted, really.”

“I know.” Gar shrugged, the latest human movement he’d unintentionally adopted. “I want to, though. I’ve had enough of spreadsheets and management. I want to be doing things.”

Barnabas smiled at him.

Power surged through the ship and they felt the engines kick into high gear. Both of them looked up, worried.

“The initial group of mercenaries is dead,” Shinigami reported. “However, someone else must have been keeping tabs on the situation because they’re sending gunships—and these aren’t any of ours. Someone is determined to make those miners pay.”

“I take it you think we can intercept them?” Barnabas’ hands had clenched when Shinigami told him what was happening.

“Yep. Sending a message to Tabitha to tell her we’re on our way. Everyone strap in—we’re going in hot.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Farfaldri Kat was not foolish.

He had supported the Shrillexian, to a point. After all, a show of force made sense. Allowing the mine events to go unpunished would be bad for business in the long run, and Rald had done a good job of getting support.

On the other hand, Jutkelon’s compound was still smoking a month or so later. Kat knew that anyone who could do that, or who could fight dozens of mercenaries on their own, would be more difficult to kill than Rald was anticipating.

Had Rald not paid attention to the stories? This human had not had dozens of allies or a small army. He had taken on a small army.

Singlehandedly.

It was clear that Rald was intending to take a large number of mercenaries and charge in headfirst, so Kat simply sent in the hired gunships carrying the guards he’d sent to capture footage, sat back, and waited for the carnage to begin.

Which was how, when that group of humans summarily slaughtered the entire group of mercenaries as he watched in horrified amazement, Kat could put another plan in motion. He called for the gunships to be loaded and move in.

It was impressive, and it was too bad that humans did not seem likely to hire themselves out as mercenaries. They could clearly make their fortunes doing so if they chose.

Humans were notorious for their refusal to submit. However, even humans could not avoid the missiles from five gunships.

Soon this would be over and the point would have been made. Kat smiled thinly and settled back in his chair. This should be a good show.

* * *

The Shinigami broke atmo with a hollow boom and streaked across the sky toward Tethra. Even with the ship’s fake registration, the approach was enough to get the attention of some of the satellites, and Shinigami spent a few moments trading increasingly arcane verification information with the EIs on the other side of the planet.

They were going to make it, but just barely.

Still, Shinigami reflected, that was better than it had been on Banton, where they’d arrived to find the colonists already captured.

She opened a video channel to Tabitha. “Vigilante Enterprises here.”

“Hey, Shinigami.” Tabitha grinned from the viewscreen. “So when’s the fireworks show starting? We’ve got snacks, we’ve got… Well, no beer, but we do have fruit juice. It’s surprisingly good.”

“I told you,” Barnabas reminded her. “You said I was crazy.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen the light now. Anyway, what’s the word on the pretty explosions?”

“You’ll see them very soon,” Shinigami promised. “It’s a delicate balance, getting them close enough to be visible but not so close that there’s any chance of shrapnel. Still, we at Vigilante Enterprises—”

“Are we really calling ourselves that?” Barnabas interrupted.

“Yes, Vigilante One, we are.”

“Are you Vigilante Two?”

“I’m Vigilante Actual. Learn your callsign etiquette. And Gar is our Baby Vigilante, who will someday be a kung fu master.”

Gar’s cheeks flushed a deep green and he dropped his head into his hands.

“Gar has been watching your movies,” Barnabas explained to Tabitha.

“Oh, man. Gar, you and I have to have a movie marathon night.” Tabitha held up her cup of fruit juice. “It’s gonna be great! And then maybe a night out on the town—get some drinks, beat up some people. I did that with Gabrielle once. It was an awesome night.”

“Leave the Baby Vigilante alone,” Barnabas scolded her. “You’re embarrassing him.”

“I hate to interrupt,” Shinigami told them, “but it’s fireworks o’clock. If everyone would turn their attention to the screens?”

Everyone turned to look. The five gunships came lumbering through the mountain passes. Alien air travel had not always developed along the same lines as it had on Earth, and ships did not need to maintain the same speed as airplanes in order to stay in the air.

These airships had the look of old battered military trucks. Parts of them were rusted, and they creaked and chugged along.

They were full of explosives, however. There was no doubting how effective they would be if they were able to drop those bombs on the mining town.

Shinigami didn’t give them the chance to do so. She took aim at the very center of the group as she streaked downward and sent a guided missile into the middle ship.

It exploded spectacularly. The first round of explosions from Shinigami’s missile was quickly dwarfed by a second set as the closest munitions went off, and then a third as the fuel tanks and the rest of the munitions exploded.

For a moment, Shinigami waited. She was sure she had seen—

Yes. The ship to the right of her first target exploded along one side and tumbled into the side of a foothill.

“Hell yeah!” Tabitha yelled. “Twofer!”

The crowd at the mining town cheered and clapped.

The other three gunship pilots attempted evasive maneuvers, but there was no way they could avoid Shinigami’s missiles. Three more targeted strikes provided the finale, and only ash was left to rain down on the road.

“You’ll also be pleased to know that I located the funding source for these gunships and the Luvendi in charge, one Farfaldri Kat—”

“He’s a two-faced sack of shit,” Gar interrupted.

“Ah. Well, then I won’t feel bad about airing his dirty laundry and sending a couple of pucks his way.”

“Good,” Gar exclaimed.

“All right, I’m going to set us down near the mining town. Everyone hang on.”

* * *

The news alert pinged on Farfaldri Kat’s tablet and he pulled it over to read, curious. He’d made a point to set up alerts in case his name should hit the news, and he saw that it had done so just now. Many times.

His frown deepened.

Then he opened the alerts and his jaw dropped.

Every one of his business dealings under all of his aliases had been posted for the masses to see. He had played rivals against one another, blackmailed business partners, even spent an exorbitant amount wooing the wife of one of his rivals—and it was all public knowledge now.

No. This could not be happening.

His horror was short-lived. When the first puck shattered the window he didn’t even have time to scream before it smeared him into paste. He was already dead when a further two pucks smashed into the roof and the building collapsed on his corpse.

* * *

Barnabas entered the mining town to cheers.

“Please, no,” he protested. “The explosions were all Shinigami’s doing, I assure you. And it was Tabitha who helped with the mercenaries.” In an undertone to Tabitha, he added, “We really have to do something about all those bodies.”

“Eh.” Tabitha gave an expressive shrug.

“Barnabas!” Carter jogged over to clasp his hand. “It’s good to see you. I don’t suppose we could grab a Pod back to Tethra. We’ve had word that the kids are a-okay. They are probably going to want to live in the Ubuara tunnels forever, actually, but we’d really like to see them.”

“Say no more,” Barnabas told him. “Elisa isn’t badly hurt, is she? We could fix up any injuries aboard the Shinigami.”

“That would be wonderful.” Carter suddenly looked weary. “This was terrifying. I knew that Shrillexian was bad news, but it went wrong faster than I expected. Thank you all for coming to help us,” he added to Barnabas, Tabitha, and the Tontos.

“Of course,” Barnabas assured him, “We would not let you be hurt.”

Carter nodded. He still looked pale and Barnabas understood. They had won a victory, but Carter couldn’t help but think what would have happened if Rald had chosen differently—if he’d killed Elisa to make a point instead, or burned down the bar, or any number of unthinkable things.

This was why Barnabas did what he did—to make sure that people like Rald did not continue to hurt people.

“All right, enough depression.” Tabitha pointed between them. “It’s sandwich time.”

“A very good idea.” Barnabas smiled at the mining town, which was unscathed. “A very good idea, indeed.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Shinigami’s avatar leaned forward to stare at the board, then looked up at Barnabas. “What the hell is this?”

“I assume that’s a rhetorical question. It’s checkers.”

“We play chess.”

“We cheat at chess,” Barnabas corrected solemnly. He made a move. “I assume you’ve looked up the rules already?”

Shinigami gave him a look and made her move. A moment later, her pieces transformed to look like small grenades. “What?” She put an innocent expression on her avatar’s face. “I have to amuse myself somehow, right?”

Barnabas snorted in amusement as he moved a piece.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” Shinigami observed, and made her next move.

“I’ve been thinking.” Barnabas considered, then moved his piece.

“About?”

He smiled slightly. “Something that can’t be solved with intellect.”

Shinigami made a move. “Do you want to talk about it? This game is garbage, by the way.”

“From your displeasure, I can only assume you had a new strategy for cheating laid out.” Barnabas studied the avatar, which had conspicuously stopped moving. “Uh-huh. I thought so. As regards the issue I have no conclusions, and thus nothing to say yet.”

“I hear sometimes it helps simply to talk about things.”

“Are you trying to be my therapist?” Barnabas looked at her, bemused.

“I’m trying to help,” Shinigami retorted. “I don’t understand humans all that well, you know.”

“I know.” Barnabas smiled at her. “And I appreciate it; I do. If it helps, humans don’t understand each other too well either.”

“I’ve observed that on my own.” Shinigami cocked her head to the side. “Gar’s waking up in the Pod-doc.”

“Let’s go look.” Barnabas shoved his chair back.

“You don’t want to finish the game?”

“Nah, you’re right. It’s garbage.” Barnabas smiled at the avatar as she fell into step with him. “I just wanted to try something new. It’s nice having you take corporeal form, or appearing to—although you fuzz out a bit between the projectors.”

“Yeah, I don’t think my projection capabilities were designed with this in mind.”

“Probably not.” Barnabas opened the door to the medical suite and let Shinigami precede him in. He saw her smirk. “Yes, I know we can both go through the door at the same time. You look real, though.”

“What is ‘real?’”

“No philosophy. It’s been a long few weeks.”

She grinned at him as the Pod-doc slid open. Gar had a smile on his face. He looked taller, Barnabas thought.

“Okay, Shinigami, talk us through the changes.”

“Luvendi bone structure is comparatively weak,” Shinigami began. “My first change was to manipulate the underlying structure to more closely mimic human bones, which necessitated some other changes so that the body would maintain them in their current state. Since they’re heavier than Gar is used to, I also increased his muscle mass.”

“I feel great!” Gar stretched. “So strong!” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers.

“It’s worth noting,” Shinigami continued, “that the Luvendi belief in their own weakness has some different causes than you might expect. First, it appears that your diet and lack of exposure to light in early years may have negatively impacted your development, both in bones and muscles. I also detected some organ damage and repaired that. My guess, after subjecting some of your cells to a range of tests, is that Luvendi were meant to have a lot of exposure to strong sunlight, but not the type of sunlight you get on Luvendan.”

Barnabas and Gar stared at her, fascinated.

“So either something has really changed about the planet—the way the atmosphere filters sunlight, for instance—or your people ended up on Luvendan and lost the records of the migration somehow. My guess would be the latter. You’re clearly meant to live near water, so it’s probable that they chose Luvendan for that reason, built the towers, and have been suffering the after-effects of living inside and eating a poor diet.”

Gar nodded.

“However, what I can find of Luvendi culture suggests that you also avoid physical altercations and stress on the bones as much as possible. I’m guessing that in your formative years your bone structure is highly reactive to impact.”

“We’ve been weakening ourselves,” Gar mused.

“It was a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Barnabas added, nodding. “Though you wouldn’t be the first species to have made horrible choices they thought would be ‘healthy.’ You should see some of the things humans did over the years.”

Gar looked intrigued.

“Anyway, we’ll want to fine-tune all this,” Shinigami told him, “But the next part of the process will be to begin training for combat and exercise and go from there. Gar, this is not going to be comfortable.”

“I feel great right now.”

“Uh-huh. We’ll talk after you’ve gone through a couple of proper workouts.”

“Why don’t you go rest,” Barnabas suggested to Gar. “Or maybe walk around a bit. Slowly. Get used to your new height.”

“Right.” Gar headed off. “Thank you, Shinigami.”

She grinned. “Can’t wait to see you do some real kung fu.”

Barnabas rolled his eyes and they left the room as well.

“So where do we go next?” Shinigami asked as they strolled through the corridors.

“Where do you want to go?” Barnabas asked. He looked out a window at the curve of the planet below them.

“I want to go smash the main base,” Shinigami stated promptly. “I know we wanted to track down the dregs of the whole thing, but since they’re holed up and won’t be getting any new munitions…” She shrugged and looked at Barnabas, noting his expression. “You’ve been thinking the same?”

Barnabas smiled tightly. “Yes. My impatience is getting the better of me, I fear.”

“Eh, the point of being a vigilante is that you can change your plans on the fly, right?”

“Not…Justice?”

“Oh, right.” Shinigami waved a hand airily. “That, too. Where are we going, by the way?”

Barnabas stopped. He had not been paying attention to where he was going and he realized that he had come to the place where he sat alone every day. He went to the window. One of High Tortuga’s moons was just visible at the side, looking strangely large given their distance from it.

“Shinigami?”

She waited.

“Do you know my history?” Barnabas asked her.

“Some,” Shinigami ventured.

“You know I lost my mind once.” Barnabas looked at her.

“You lost someone you loved,” Shinigami countered. At the look in Barnabas’ eyes, she wished she had not spoken.

“You’re correct,” Barnabas managed. “So you’ve heard.”

“That’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows, I think.”

“Bethany Anne knows more. I… You should as well. All of my story.” Barnabas took a seat to stare out at the black. Shinigami had never seen such restraint on his face. In his eyes, she could see a grief that still threatened to swamp him. “It is something that shames me, from the very first piece to the last.”

Shinigami chose to say nothing. She could have protested, but there was something in Barnabas’ voice that told her that if she interrupted he might not continue to tell the story.

And he needed to.

“To be Nacht in the early days,” Barnabas told her, “was to have everything given to you on a silver platter. I do not mean we told people what we were. Michael was very strict; we would never do that. But the family had…resources. It was clear to those who saw us that we were rich and powerful.

“Powerful men in those days were given whatever they wanted. Women threw themselves at me, hoping to become my wife or my mistress. If they didn’t give themselves to me, their fathers offered them to me. Sometimes even their husbands did so.

“I took what I wanted and I told myself it was my right. Among my brothers, I alone at that time never believed that my soul had been lost. To my shame, I believed that everything I was given was a gift from Heaven. I believed I deserved it.”

His eyes were closed now against the recollection.

“I did good deeds. I often passed small judgments or saved people who needed my help, so I told myself that I was everything I should be. That I was a force for good. In reality, I was self-absorbed. My good deeds were just enough to make me feel that I deserved my wealth. All that changed when I met Catherine.”

His voice trembled now. Shinigami felt the useless urge to comfort him but she did not know how to fix Barnabas’ pain. What had happened was in the past. She could not change it.

“I saved her from two men who were trying to rape her,” Barnabas told her. “It was one of the first acts I had done in decades that was…for more than me. When I first saw her, when she ran past me with them pursuing her, she was like…the dawn, Shinigami. She was pure light and promise. I wanted her to be safe. I killed the men and I spoke into the darkness to tell her I would leave. I was ashamed to be near her. I was death personified, and she was life. For the first time, I saw myself as a human would see me—not simply as a predator, but as a monster.

“But she didn’t see me that way. She saw the world so differently from everyone else. She had no particular talent for intellectual pursuits. Now, one might say she was not all there. That was part of why I took refuge in my intellect after…everything. I could not bear to be reminded of her.”

Shinigami waited, her sense of dread growing.

“She kissed me,” Barnabas recalled. There was grief in his eyes, but he was smiling as he stared into space. “I was covered in blood and she came up and kissed me. She loved completely, and she loved without reserve. She taught me a way of being that few humans could ever grasp. For many years we were happy together. I told her what I was and she accepted it without question. It did not matter to her.

“And then she got sick. You understand that back in those days, there was none of the medicine there is now, and all my Nacht powers could not save her—except one. She asked me to turn her.”

Shinigami’s cameras traveled over him, noting the minutiae of his expression; the faint press of his lips, the lines at the corner of his eyes.

“I don’t know what else I could have done but try,” Barnabas told her softly. “Being turned the way I was, the way Michael was—it was a trial that could break the strongest mind. Nosferatu, the fallen ones, they were the ones who took the respite from the pain and allowed themselves to be tempted. I was afraid Catherine would fail. So many had failed. She just smiled at me and said, ‘You will take care of it.’ She knew what I would have to do, but she was not afraid. I knew that if I did not try she was going to die. If I did try, she might survive.”

Shinigami’s avatar nodded.

Barnabas looked down, lost in the memory. “She didn’t become Nosferatu, but she wasn’t herself anymore either. In some ways, yes. She still took delight in the world, and she still loved me. But she was like a child. She was too trusting, so she had to be watched all the time. One day when I thought she was safe the wrong people found her and—” He broke off. “She died in my arms,” he finished finally.

The grief Shinigami saw in Barnabas was overwhelming. Childishly, she did not want to hear what had happened. She did not want to see him in so much pain, but he needed to tell this story.

“I lost my mind with grief.” Barnabas looked down at his hands. “I killed anyone I could find. I wanted to kill them all; that much I remember. I would hunt down whole families and murder them. I was everything I had thought of myself on the night I met Catherine: a monster, death incarnate.

“The only reason that I snapped out of it was that I slipped. I must have; I fell into a river and a branch pinned me. I woke up as the sun was rising and I needed to be more than an animal to find my way out of the trap and survive. So, you see, it was only to save my own life that I came back. Not for anything greater.

“I spent years after that trying to atone, trying to keep it from happening again. I became a monk. I did not believe everything the monks believed, but enough of it was correct. I found some small measure of absolution in hard work and contemplation and serving something larger than myself, but if not for Bethany Anne I would still be hiding from myself.”

There was a long silence.

“You said I needed people,” Barnabas concluded, “or I would forget why I was doing this. Shinigami, I want to do what’s right. I don’t want injustice and evil to triumph. But to care deeply for those I save, for friends, for…a lover… I am terrified to walk that path again. I took over three thousand souls when I went mad. I cannot do that again.”

Shinigami made the avatar sit next to him. She saw his fear and was touched that he had told her this.

“You won’t do it again,” she told him. “I believe that.”

Barnabas looked down at his hands with a rueful smile.

“I’m serious.” Shinigami made the avatar frown. “I really believe it. It’s been centuries. You’re not the same person you were then.” She paused. “We won’t let you do that again, you know. I believe you wouldn’t, but even if you started to go that way, you know we wouldn’t let you.”

Barnabas nodded.

Shinigami made the avatar stand. Rather than simply flickering out of existence, she made it walk away so he could have the sense of being alone with his thoughts. He was still sad, but she understood that the weight of it wasn’t so crushing anymore.

“And don’t spend too long wallowing,” Shinigami added. She paused at the curve of the corridor and looked back, grinning. “We’ve got some mercenaries to smash.”

Barnabas laughed. “No wallowing, I promise. I’ll be there soon.”

FINIS

Author Notes - Natalie Grey

Written June 12, 2018

Thank you all for reading Sentinel! I am so grateful for the chance to dive back into the Kurtherian universe with Barnabas and Shinigami. Monks in space and a bloodthirsty AI, how can you ask for more?

As always, a thank you to the whole team: Lynne, Steve, the JIT readers, the beta team (Sam, Kim, Jim, James, and Sandy), Jeff, and Eric! You make these books truly shine.

Thank you, of course, to Michael for creating the universe and encouraging so many people to be a part of it, myself included.

Thank you to B, who puts up with all the weirdness of living with an author, and L, who is teaching me so much about the world as he grows up. Even at your teething-est moments, L, you’re a wonder!

There’s so much coming up this year and next, so I hope you’ll take a moment to sign up for the mailing list here to be told about new books and see sneak peeks like excerpts and cover reveals: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/w0k9j4

Head back to the “books by” to check out my other books, including Bellatrix and Risk be Damned set in the KGU, and the Dragon Corps, a whole new universe with stories coming out now!

Happy reading!

-Nat

Author Notes - Michael Anderle

June 11, 2018

First, THANK YOU for not only reading our second Barnabas and Shinigami story but through to these Author Notes as well!

The Kurtherian Gambit grew, and grew, and grew MUCH larger than I had ever suspected it might. Further, I recognized fairly early on that fans enjoyed new characters, so I would often add some to give them a little mental candy in each book.

Like Barnabas.

Unfortunately, the list of fan-favorite characters continued to grow as well. But, I couldn’t do a ‘Red Wedding’ (something George R. R. Martin did, killing off a huge number of the characters) or I’d be eviscerated on the fan pages.

Not something I was willing to risk, and frankly not willing to do.

The Kurtherian Gambit isn’t about which character dies (like Walking Dead) but rather how do they get through the next challenge together, hopefully without a huge battle killing off a few of them?

If you have read the first series, The Kurtherian Gambit, you know that there were times that someone died. Part of it was so that I didn’t create another (early) ‘A’ team where five hundred rounds of bullets were used in a firefight, but no one got hurt. I did it to keep readers on their toes. It COULD happen!

Now we have other series and new characters. Some of those characters are now fan favorites and I scratch my head wondering, “When will all of this end?”

Obviously, not today or tomorrow or this year… Or next year either, I don’t think. The Kurtherian Gambit is responsible for already creating about fifteen new authors with just the Fans Write project(s), and it looks like the train has left the station without the conductor.

Me.

Speaking of fans, if you are in or around Vegas November 8th, 2018 I’d like to invite you to a huge Author signing event we are having at Sam’s town. It’s free to get in, just show up – we are going to party like it’s 1999.

Check out the website 20booksVegas.com for more info. If we can get at least two hundred to show up this year, the plan is for LMBPN Publishing to throw a WICKED party in 2019.

Because, we are Indie Outlaws, and frankly it’s time we party with our friends…All few thousands of them!

Ad Aeternitatem,

Michael Anderle

Warden

Vigilante Chronicles Book 3

Yofu image by Eric Quigley

Chapter One

Sweat dripped into Gar’s eyes, and he winced in pain. His whole body ached. Things he hadn’t known existed ached. Could internal organs ache? His did.

He had to focus on the real threat, however.

“I told you two I was uncomfortable with this.” He looked at Barnabas and Shinigami, who were playing chess in the corner. Both Barnabas and Shinigami’s avatar sat cross-legged. Lately, she’d been adding aspects to her avatar—for dramatic effect, she claimed. Today she had chosen wind, which fluttered the cape she wore draped over a full suit of armor.

Barnabas looked up at Gar and grinned. “I think her costume is probably making this seem more serious than it is. It’s just a friendly match.”

Gar jabbed a finger at the two of them. “There is nothing friendly about you two when it comes to chess. You’re both total lunatics about it.” He lowered himself into a nearby seat with his water.

“I’m an AI,” Shinigami declared. “I can’t be a lunatic. I am inherently logical.”

“That’s demonstrably fallacious, and you know it.” Barnabas moved a piece. “You justify every illogical thing you do by saying you feel like it. By that logic, all sentient life is inherently logical.”

Shinigami stuck out her tongue at him and laughed at the look on his face. “Tabitha taught me that.”

“Next thing we know, you’re going to start carrying holographic sandwiches around.” Barnabas looked mournful for a moment. “I miss the juice at Aebura’s already.”

Aebura’s was a bar on High Tortuga, nestled away in one of the smaller cities. Barnabas had gotten hooked on the fruit juice she served when he’d helped the owner lead a slave revolt. When Tabitha had come to town, she had grown similarly partial—to the sandwiches. Now owned by Carter, a human, the bar was one of Barnabas’ favorite hideouts.

Unfortunately, he’d done his job a little too well in Tethra. Everyone who might cause trouble was very, very dead, so he had no good reason to be there anymore. It was a great disappointment.

He shook his head to clear it and looked at Gar. “Keep training.”

Gar grimaced, but he stood. Barnabas’ voice was mild, but there was an unmistakable command in it. As a Luvendi, Gar had previously been too physically fragile to endure combat without fracturing multiple bones and dying. His time in the Pod-doc had made him stronger, both in muscle and in structure, but learning to fight was difficult for someone who had spent his whole life avoiding altercations.

In the past week or so, Gar had learned more about pain than he had ever hoped to know. He learned the feeling of muscle strain and strength conditioning. He now knew what his hearts felt like as they pumped blood faster and faster to circulate oxygen through his system.

He’d also learned about the bruises that came from slamming his fists—not to mention his knees, elbows, and feet—into a punching bag over and over.

Not to mention the fact that normal people might get a reprieve after a hard day’s workout, but not Gar. The Pod-doc had also altered his body’s various healing mechanisms so that he woke up each morning good as new—and ready, Barnabas pointed out, for more learning.

When Gar said that the learning was painful, Barnabas only said that pain was an excellent teacher, and provided the infuriating fact that the Pod-doc was capable of upgrading Gar to heal within minutes instead of hours.

“Why didn’t you give me that upgrade?” Gar demanded, a bit desperately. He had a large bruise over one eye and was finding it difficult to see.

Barnabas blinked at him. “Pain is useful,” he said again.

Gar privately swore that someday he would find a way to give Barnabas a bruise that wouldn’t heal for a few hours. He’d bribe Shinigami to help him. He just needed to find something she wanted, first. Maybe a way of cheating at chess.

Unfortunately, it was difficult to be too angry at Barnabas, because the man pushed himself even harder than Gar did. He would strike the bag in a flurry of punches so fast Gar could not follow. The man always discussed the physics and efficacy of new techniques with Shinigami. They worked out new strike combinations, and Barnabas would train as though there were no end to his energy.

All this had impressed Gar, and that was before they had gone back to High Tortuga for a few days. During that time, Barnabas had sparred with a few of his colleagues from the former Etheric Empire. Gar had watched in awe, totally terrified. Potentially bone-crunching blows missed by mere fractions of an inch—or landed, and somehow didn’t slow the combatants.

Even covered in bruises and blood, the humans seemed to enjoy brawling. Gar had decided that this was either inspiring or a sign of madness. He still hadn’t figured out which.

He started his exercises again, taking care to follow form and not go too fast or over-extend. Barnabas had said time and again that form was the most important thing. Everything else flowed from that. Practice a strike incorrectly, and you could spend months un-learning poor habits.

Gar was already behind the curve. He didn’t have time to unlearn anything. He barely had time to learn things in the first place.

“How close are we to—ow.” His knuckles hit the bag wrong and skidded, leaving a trail of irritated skin. “How close are we to the syndicate’s base?”

“Not far,” Barnabas replied. He looked down at the chessboard and gave Shinigami a mock-angry look. Whatever move she had made—or whatever cheating strategy she had employed—had him rolling his eyes. “We’re heading to Shu Base first to meet up with someone who might have the schematics. I want to make sure there will be no nasty surprises.”

“That’s why we’re in the middle of nowhere,” Gar exclaimed in understanding.

“You lived on High Tortuga,” Barnabas remarked. “That’s in the middle of nowhere. Shu Base is only moderately in the middle of nowhere.”

Gar shook his head and went back to the punching bag. He was glad he was on the Shinigami. He would not want to fly out here all alone. A lot of people made their living as pirates, robbing the ships that passed through.

In the case of this ship, though, they would be biting off considerably more than they could chew.

* * *

Zinqued was exhausted. They’d drifted out here waiting for a mark to come along for the past three weeks, and so far, there had been a lot of nothing. In the first week, two cargo haulers had come by, but both had looked like they might be too well-guarded to be viable targets.

Now Zinqued thought maybe they should have gone for those.

He poured himself a cup of Stim-Drink. The stuff tasted terrible to a Hieto palate, but it did its job and would keep him awake for the three hours left on his shift.

He plodded back through the ship and up to the cockpit. He yawned and scratched at his scalp where the scales were more densely packed. Hieto had built-in armor over their torsos and somewhat tougher skin on their heads, which was both a blessing and a curse. They were hard to stab, for instance, but a lot of space suits and other technology didn’t work as well.

Zinqued had barely sat down before the alarms started to wail. It had been weeks since they’d sounded. He startled so violently that most of the cup of scalding Stim-Drink hit him directly in the face.

He was still swearing and wiping it away with the sleeve of his coveralls when the rest of the crew bolted in to see what was going on.

“What kind of ship?” Chofal, their Yofu mechanic, asked as she tumbled in the door, swinging her head side to side excitedly. Yofu’s eyes were on the sides of their heads, which made them ill-suited for anything that involved a standard screen interface, but their wide-angle vision and double-thumbed hands were fantastic for mechanical work. The engine room had never been in better repair than it was now.

“I don’t know yet,” Zinqued replied. He put the empty cup on the desk with a disgusted look. Now he was going to smell like Stim-Drink until he could wash his clothes again, and there was no telling when that would be.

What a day.

“It’s probably just a—”

Chofal cut him off. “It’s a small ship.”

Zinqued groaned. The first excitement they’d seen in ages, and it was—

“A human ship,” Chofal continued. She was definitely not the best person to be sitting in the copilot’s chair, but she couldn’t leave with everyone else crowded into the cockpit. She didn’t look like she wanted to, either. Her head was cocked so she could read the information on the screen with one eye. “The...Shinigami?”

The rest of the crew shrugged, but Zinqued would have spilled the Stim-Drink if he’d still had any.

“The Shinigami? Are you sure? Are you sure?”

“That’s what it says here.” She frowned at him. “Why?”

“Because—” Zinqued flailed his hands excitedly.

Whenever they would stop to refuel, the other members of the crew would go through the shops and call their family members. Zinqued didn’t care for trinkets and he had no family to call, so he tended to spend his time in bars.

And he had heard something very interesting the last time he was in one. Something very interesting, indeed.

There were a lot of people who stole ships for a living. Some even tried to turn it into a legal business on one end, re-registering the ships and sending them back onto the market, untraceable.

Rarely did Zinqued and his group bother with that. They were generally way out in the middle of nowhere. Who was going to come after them for stealing tiny ships? No one; not unless their victims wandered right into a Law Enforcement station and complained.

Even then, it was even odds that the police would be too lazy to do anything about it.

Like most people involved in the same business—legal or otherwise—they liked to trade stories, and even engage in some friendly rivalries. So when a captain named Klafk’tin had gotten rather spectacularly killed on Virtue Station, and his former first mate had started telling people never to mess with the Shinigami…

Well, word had spread. Especially when people found out what the Shinigami had on board—an incredibly powerful AI. You could sell one of those for more than you’d otherwise hope to make in a lifetime.

They’d heard the rumors of the captain, who was apparently terrifying, and knew a ship like that was bound to be armed. But no one was really worried about that. All ships had security, and any security measure could fail.

A friendly rivalry had been born. Everyone wanted to steal this ship now. Tik’ta’s warnings had taken what would normally be a totally unremarkable event—just another ship stealer dead in the line of work—and had turned it into the biggest catch anyone had heard about in years.

Zinqued peered at the readouts popping up on his screen. Normally, he would say to let such a highly-armed ship go by. Better that than the chance they’d have to escape a trap and damage the equipment.

But this was the Shinigami. It was worth some risk.

Zinqued looked at the rest of them and grinned. “Warm up the net. We’re gonna be legends.”

Chapter Two

The only sound in the gym was Gar drawing a breath like air was going out of style. The Luvendi lay spread-eagled on the floor and was staring at the ceiling with a glazed look.

Shinigami was examining a chessboard where her king was presently in checkmate.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she said finally. Though her avatar’s eyes weren’t functional and she saw via the various cameras around the room, human mannerisms were getting more and more instinctive. She looked at Barnabas. “Did you cheat?”

“Look over your video logs,” Barnabas suggested. “You’ll find that every move is accounted for. No double moves, no moves where my hand went one place and the piece went somewhere else…” He shrugged elegantly.

Shinigami narrowed her eyes at him. “I noticed that lovely little speech didn’t include the phrase, ‘I didn’t cheat.’ You just mentioned a few specific ways you didn’t cheat. You totally cheated.”

“That’s preposterous.” He stood and retrieved his coat from where it lay on top of a set of weighted balls. He put it on and adjusted his cuffs. “You like to make a fuss, but we are roughly tied in how often we win.”

“Only a human would call 52-48 roughly equivalent,” Shinigami said in deep disgust.

“How many decimal points does it have to go before you’d call it roughly equivalent?”

“At least it should be within one percentage point!”

“Duly noted. We are extremely roughly equivalent, then.”

Shinigami bit back a shriek of annoyance. Barnabas was incredibly adept at finding the subtle tells in anyone’s behavior that indicated when they were annoyed by something…and then mercilessly exploiting that information to his advantage.

Barnabas glanced at the Luvendi. “Gar, how are you doing?”

Gar only whimpered in response.

“Mmm.” Barnabas buttoned the suit jacket. “Well, I am going to go make myself a nice meal before we get to Shu Base. Somehow I don’t think it will have very good food.”

“Elitist,” Shinigami uttered.

“I prefer to think I’m someone with taste buds. That’s hardly—what was that?”

Everyone had looked toward the bridge when the proximity alert went off.

Shinigami’s avatar vanished and Barnabas took off for the bridge. Left behind, Gar tried to sit up, moaned, and eventually settled for flopping onto his stomach and crawling over to the stack of mats to pull himself up. He tottered in the direction of the bridge, cursing his decision to get upgraded. His life before had been more dangerous, but significantly less painful.

He found Barnabas and Shinigami scrolling through information on the screen. They spoke so quickly that it took Gar a moment to understand the English. He could use his language implants, of course, but he enjoyed the process of learning languages.

Or, he had enjoyed it. Then he had discovered English, and learned a new meaning for the word “frustration.” The language had clearly been created by a sadist. Gar had never heard any language in which it was so easy to communicate poorly.

“What’s going on?” he asked. He tried to look casual as he went to his seat and sat down, but his legs gave out about halfway down and he ended up on the floor. He leaned against the chair and resigned himself to his fate.

Barnabas gave him a Look.

“This is my life now,” Gar lamented with as much dignity as he could muster. “I hope you’re happy.”

Barnabas’ lips twitched but he made no comment, for which Gar was grateful. “We’re in a cloud of debris that shouldn’t be here,” he explained. “Our proximity alerts are going haywire.”

Gar frowned. They had a fairly accurate set of maps that showed known asteroid belts and other hazards. An asteroid belt might be easy to navigate at normal speeds, but at high speed, a flight could come to a very quick and unpleasant end. This, though…

The ship swerved so quickly that the thrusters took time to recalibrate, and Barnabas looked up with a frown.

“Shinigami?”

“Working on it.” Shinigami sounded annoyed. “Let me tell you, if you were human you wouldn’t be able to deal with this. Even I’m hardly holding on.”

“What kind of debris is it?” Gar asked.

“I don’t know. Ship parts, it looks like. Some rocks.” Barnabas frowned. “But that doesn’t make any sense. I’ll be back. I’m going to look out the windows.”

Gar leaned his head back against the chair and waited as Barnabas’ footsteps receded. The ship kept swerving and rolling, and he decided he was never going to be able to stand up again. That was all right. He’d had a good life. Maybe Barnabas would put an inscription on the chair in remembrance of him.

A few moments later, however, Barnabas’ voice echoed through the ship in annoyance: “Son of a bitch.”

Gar straightened up slightly. “Problem?”

“Not the one you’d think,” Barnabas snapped, annoyed. “The debris field we’re in? It doesn’t exist. It’s some artificial electronic noise made to make us think we’re in danger, and…I don’t even know.”

“My guess,” Shinigami voiced, “ is that I’m supposed to take this very tempting and relatively debris-free path that’s coming up.”

Barnabas appeared back on the bridge. “I wonder where it leads.”

“A trap!” Gar exclaimed. Did these people know nothing about how the universe worked? “It leads to a trap. We need to run away.”

“Oh, Gar.” Barnabas gave him a toothy smile. “Have you learned nothing about me by now?”

Gar groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

* * *

Zinqued watched breathlessly as the Shinigami wove its way through the artificial debris field. The pilot was truly extraordinary. Perhaps he could convince Paun to offer them a job. Zinqued’s captain was a singularly joyless Hieto male, but he was a fair captain who neither blamed his crew for random chance nor stinted them on their shares.

He might see the value of a pilot that good. Then again, he might point out that taking on human crew members would be risky. Humans had a reputation, and a lot of aliens didn’t like them.

Somewhat justifiably.

Zinqued looked back at the screens. Would the Shinigami take the bait? They’d moved closer to the “open path” he’d created in the artificial debris.

This had been one of his masterstrokes. Everyone knew all the old tricks—distress calls or blatant threats—when it came to stealing ships. They also knew those ploys were likely to backfire. Zinqued’s first captain, a grizzled old Brakalon, had given Zinqued a priceless piece of advice.

“The trick is to get them to walk into the trap, thinking it’s their idea,” she had told Zinqued.

He’d never forgotten that, so he’d developed a new method—a series of signal-emitters that convinced the ship’s sensors they’d flown into a debris field. It would be sudden, allowing them no time to think or react. The “debris” would get heavier and more difficult to fly through until, when all hope seemed lost, a relatively open corridor would appear in the field.

It was the sort of thing that might happen in a debris field, and ships fell for it every time. They’d alter their course and go straight for what they thought was relative safety…

Only to run right into the electronic net that overrode their systems.

Some people just vented ships at this point, but Paun had never been one of those. He would offer the captured crews the chance to ask for ransom from their family members, and even offer them a ride to a nearby station if they didn’t make a fuss. He did put them in the brig, of course, but he’d always made a point of being fair.

He’d taken a lot of ships that way. People who might have stood and fought because they were sure they’d be killed would be so grateful they would give up the ship without complaint.

Zinqued’s crew might not be the best-known ship thieves in the universe, but they generally made a tidy profit without much unnecessary risk. He liked that. They had a suite of tricks that allowed them to take bigger cargo haulers or small ships like this one. They could strike when the moment was right, and each collected a nice portion of the proceeds from each sale.

Now he watched as the Shinigami turned toward the nets. Zinqued was already planning the story in his head. He hadn’t told his fellow thieves too much about his new trick, so he’d have to come up with some clever story as to how they’d captured the ship.

He sat back in his chair and started daydreaming.

There wasn’t much to do at this point, anyway. The ship was as good as caught.

* * *

“There’s something ahead,” Shinigami reported.

Gar, who was in the process of hauling himself inelegantly into his seat, looked at the screens, overbalanced, and wound up back on the floor with a yelp.

“Would you like me to give you a hand?” Barnabas inquired. He leaned over the side of his chair, and could just see Gar’s feet sticking out.

“No, that’s fine.” Gar gave a pathetic-sounding cough. “I like it here.”

“I think you’re really coming along very well,” Barnabas complimented him. “Tomorrow’s training session will—”

Gar whimpered. “No. I can’t. I can’t go through this again.”

“Now, now. I’m sure if you—”

“I hate to interrupt,” Shinigami began, a hint of danger in her tone, “but someone is trying to steal the ship, and I am trying to keep it un-stolen. Could we focus on that for a few minutes?”

“Ah, yes.” Barnabas nodded at the screens. “I’m very sorry, Shinigami. Proceed.”

Shinigami projected a set of infrared readouts. A strange device—slightly curved along one side—was emitting a signal. Barnabas frowned.

The sensors picked up more devices that formed a loose half-circle. Any ship that flew along this route, or even detoured slightly from the most common path, would find itself within range of the signal.

“Clever,” Barnabas murmured. “If they’d made it a closed loop, you could fly around the whole thing—and most ships who even spotted it would try to fly under…and get caught in the second set of beams. What do they do?”

“They lock the ship in place,” Shinigami reported. “Or, you know…that’s what they do when they’re functioning properly.”

A spread of missiles streaked away, leaving the hull shuddering, and a few seconds later, each device disappeared in a flare of heat.

“I don’t think they’re working properly right now, though,” Shinigami murmured innocently. “Not sure why.”

“The universe may never know,” Barnabas replied seriously. “Ah, well. A clever set of tricks, anyway. Is anyone uncloaking or moving to attack?”

“Nope. I doubt they would after that show.”

“Mmm, good point. Well, onward to Shu Base, then. The sooner we get those schematics, the sooner we can take down Crallus.” Barnabas peered around the edge of the chair. “Also, it looks like Gar could use a drink.”

There was a muffled noise of agreement, and Shinigami laughed as she guided the ship in a smooth arc and headed toward Shu Base.

* * *

In the cockpit of the Zumbir, Paun’s crew sat wide-eyed and slack-jawed.

“A whole missile spread!” Paun exclaimed finally. “I think it’s safe to say we shouldn’t go after that ship again.”

Zinqued swung around. “Are you crazy? Do you know how much that ship is worth?”

“I’ve made my living by not going after ships like that, kid.” Paun wasn’t moved. “This is over.”

But as he walked away, he missed the looks the crew sent one another. That ship was a freaking goldmine, and everyone knew it. Zinqued had the feeling that Paun was going to find himself overridden sooner rather than later.

They were going to get that ship.

Chapter Three

The various sectors of occupied space had a few notable nuclei with a random assortment of star systems in between. It was difficult to identify any sort of center to things. After all, it seemed new races were coming out of the woodwork, and explorers from various species were finding new planets that were habitable, useful for resources, or both.

That said, if one were to identify the “fringes” of settled space, both High Tortuga and Shu Base would certainly qualify as being on them.

Shinigami used this as an opportunity to complain loudly about never being taken anyplace nice.

You’re an AI, Barnabas retorted. He paced around a small shop on Shu Base while the owner sifted through various files. The shop was small and dusty—everything at Shu Base was dusty—with a selection of wares that ranged from schematics to, inexplicably, a caged animal that looked like a winged alligator.

Barnabas was giving that one a wide berth.

He placed his hand on the counter, then lifted it immediately, trying to conceal his look of distaste.

Oh God, it’s sticky.

This is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say you never take me anyplace nice.

You’re on the ship. There would be no appreciable difference to you if we went somewhere nice.

I could at least look through your eyes. You know, catch glimpses of a universe forever beyond my grasp.

If this is a campaign to convince me to give you a body, you can forget it.

Damn.

Barnabas peered into the back of the shop. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s planning on assassinating me.

One sec, hacking his systems. You know, we could just have done it this way.

That would be stealing. We have ample money, so there’s no reason not to buy his goods.

You’d save so much time, though. No, he really is searching through the files. He’s got the main schematics up—downloading those now—and he’s searching through what appears to be various upgrades and weapons systems. I’m guessing he knows about some later modifications.

Well, that’s heartening. I do prefer it when people don’t try to kill me. How’s Gar, by the way?

Practicing kung fu.

Barnabas pressed his lips together in a vain attempt to stifle his laugh. While aboard the Shinigami, Tabitha had watched a large number of kung fu movies, which she had left in the video banks in the room Gar now occupied.

While most humans would see the movies and laugh at the corny dialogue and special-effect-laden fight scenes, Gar seemed genuinely inspired by the stories. Several times at meals, he’d waxed poetic about the stories of “honor and glory” he’d watched.

Barnabas and Shinigami had privately concluded that the Luvendi didn’t have anything resembling movies. It was the only explanation.

The only problem, as far as Barnabas could tell, was that Gar really wanted to imitate the moves he saw. He did not seem to understand that the stories weren’t real and the moves were useless in an actual fight.

They’d cross that bridge when they got to it, Barnabas decided.

The proprietor tottered back out with an oversized data chip.

“What did you say you were again?” it asked curiously. Barnabas honestly couldn’t tell if it was male or female, and it seemed to be having the same trouble with him.

“A human,” he repeated. “I am a male human.”

“Human. Hmph.” The proprietor seemed terminally unimpressed. Perhaps, in the grand tradition of merchants everywhere, it had decided that cash was the only equalizer it cared about. “Here you go, then.”

“Thank you,” Barnabas replied gravely. He slipped the data chip into his pocket and left before he could accidentally touch anything else.

Has anyone taken notice of the ship? he asked as he walked back.

If you mean with ill intention, then no, not that I can tell. The deck crew thought it was pretty interesting. It’s probably the nicest ship they’ve seen in their lives, if I do say so myself.

At least you’re not conceited. That’s the important thing. Barnabas made his way up the gangway, nodding to the deck crew—Shinigami was right, they were staring—and entered the ship. I think I need a shower before doing anything else. All of me feels sticky now.

I mean…yeah, probably.

Half an hour later, in fresh clothes and with his hair still damp, Barnabas rapped on Gar’s door. He heard a few kung-fu yells, then the sound of Gar running across the room to turn the movie off. The Luvendi appeared at the door, hastily stuffing a makeshift headband into his pocket.

Barnabas did not mention the headband. “We should discuss the syndicate plans if you have some time.”

“Sure, yeah. Of course. What else would I… I mean, yeah. I’m free.” Gar had enough sense to stop babbling, at least.

“So how is training?” Barnabas asked him as they walked. He couldn’t resist having at least a little fun, after all.

“Oh, it’s, ah…it’s good. Yeah. It’s going well.”

“Better than a few days ago, then.”

“Yeah.” Gar’s eyes lit up. “I realized what my problem was. I wasn’t fighting for something, so I didn’t have the mental fortitude to get through the pain. I needed to remember that I fight because I need to stand strong against evil. I need to be a force for honor and loyalty in the universe.”

Is he for real? Shinigami asked in Barnabas’ head.

I believe so. I’m trying to find it inspiring. After all, any of Bethany Anne’s people would say the same if you asked how they persist through pain in her service. It’s because they need to be strong to fight for good.

I guess. It’s just so…so earnest. I want to slap him.

You don’t have hands, thank goodness. Barnabas held open the door for Gar to precede him into the war room. There are no print-outs?

Nope. You have to get digital, Grandpa.

I object to every aspect of what you just said.

We ran out of paper.

That, I can work with. I’ll get us more.

You’re a very odd man.

Noted.

Barnabas brought up the schematics of the main base. “All right, this is the base that Yennai built for Crallus’ predecessor when the syndicate joined up.”

Gar stared at it with wide-eyes. “How the hell are we planning to get in there?”

“The normal way. We’ll land, get off the ship—”

“And kill everyone.” Shinigami continued. “Install a giant throne, and rule the world.” Her avatar flickered into being, this time with a glimmering golden crown on her head.

“You and Gar are both really devoted to headwear,” Barnabas observed.

“Says the ginger,” Shinigami shot back.

Barnabas’ hand came up to touch his hair self-consciously. Back on Earth, he had changed his appearance fairly frequently to avoid any inconvenient legends springing up.

It was a practice he’d started again. The year before he’d changed his hair to a nondescript light brown. When they left High Tortuga, he’d begun making it slightly redder.

Perhaps he had overshot.

He noticed Gar staring at the definition of “ginger” in the dictionary. The Luvendi’s face was a picture of consternation.

“It’s a term for redheads,” Barnabas explained. Gars’ confusion only deepened, so he explained. “I have red hair now.”

Gar’s frown deepened even further. “No, you don’t. Maybe some orange—”

“We’re getting off-topic.” Barnabas cleared his throat and tapped the schematics. “All right pay attention, all. Here are the landing bays. You’ll notice that they are relatively far from the main base, connected by a series of trams controlled by the base, and easy to vent.”

“So we dock somewhere else,” Shinigami suggested at once.

“Well, yes. But where? It’s hard to dock on the side of a base the way you would on a ship.”

“Not necessarily.” Shinigami began scrolling through the images. After a moment, she remembered to involve her avatar, who reached out to swipe at the images as if manually selecting and enlarging them.

She was getting eerily good at pretending to be human.

“Here,” she said finally. She tapped one little hatch on the side.

“Is that the…garbage dump?” Barnabas asked. “Garbage chute?”

“It’s always the garbage chute,” Shinigami replied cryptically. “Always. It’ll smell like ass, but it’ll get you where you need to go.”

“You know, I’m not even going to respond to that. How do we keep them from noticing us? Or shooting the ship as we set down?”

“Well, the space net incident gave me an idea. If we fly close enough, I can release some pucks with a signal transmitter attached. They’ll hover near the base and convince the people watching the screens that there’s a ship coming in to land at the bays. All the guns will swivel that way, and we will land elsewhere.”

“You’ve only explained how to tell them there’s something else there, not how to keep them from knowing we’re there.”

“We can move quite stealthily as long as we can take our time getting in there. Scanners rely on detecting various side effects of having a ship nearby. We’ll cloak those and bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, there we are.”

“Don’t bother looking that up,” Barnabas murmured to Gar. To Shinigami, he added, “This base is state of the art. For instance, if I remember correctly, the towers here… One second, let me enlarge this. Oh.” He blinked in surprise. “You’ve tagged the relevant weapons and surveillance schematics into the main ones so that I can just tap on them.”

“Yes. Paper can’t do that.”

“I see the point you’re making, but let’s move on.” Barnabas frowned at the schematics on the table.

“Here’s the other thing,” Shinigami pointed out. “The garbage system is very close to what I believe is the main control center.”

Barnabas chewed his lip. “There’s a chance we’re going to scare the crap out of some of the guards.’

“Eh.” Shinigami shrugged. “They work for a mercenary syndicate. Not like they think they’re guarding people who go around giving out puppies and hugs for a living.”

“I have to agree with her.” Gar looked at Barnabas. “This base isn’t usually inhabited. Anyone there came with the captains who chose to be here. We can’t do much more for them.”

“Crallus got in over his head,” Barnabas murmured. “After everyone seemed to ‘recognize’ my Torcellan disguise last time, I did some digging. It turns out that Crallus now has some sort of second-in-command who might actually be running the show. He just waltzed in and took over, apparently. So whoever he is—”

“His name is Uleq,” Shinigami informed him.

“’Uleq.’ You’re sure?”

“Who’s Uleq?” Gar asked.

“We’ve run into him before,” Barnabas replied darkly. “Killed his previous allies and ran off, and now he’s representing the Yennai Corporation?”

“He was probably always associated with them,” Shinigami surmised. “I’m guessing he took a brief detour to try something else and it blew up, and he took what he could and got out. He wasn’t ever going to go down with the ship.”

“He sounds wonderful.”

“Doesn’t he? So, do we have a plan?”

“Yes. Let’s get in there and take Uleq out.” Barnabas gave a grim smile. “Bethany Anne will be pleased, at least. Uleq. Sonofabitch! Well, two birds, I guess.”

Chapter Four

Crallus winced as he strode down the hallways of the base on Ur 5b. The Ur System was a particularly tumultuous one—a binary star system with a particularly noisy pair of stars. With the constant electronic noise from the stars, not to mention the heat that fried even mining equipment quickly, no race had bothered to settle here.

All the planets were gas giants, anyway. Conventional wisdom said that if anything managed to survive on those, it would make short work of all who tried to settle the place.

Ur’s fifth planet, however, had a series of moons, one of which was almost constantly shrouded in shade. It was here that Yennai Corporation had built a hideout for Crallus’ predecessor, and it was remote enough that Crallus had often found himself wondering where they had built their headquarters.

What was a step up from this? A base inside a black hole?

The Torcellan hurried ahead of him, hood up as always, and called over his shoulder. “We don’t have much time, you know.”

“How can we not have much time?” Crallus was annoyed. “You said no one would find us here.”

“I said it was extremely unlikely. I would also have said it was extremely unlikely that a single ship could take out several fleets of mercenary vessels.” The Torcellan pushed his hood back slightly to make sure that Crallus could see the absolute contempt on his face. “Now, I suppose there’s the possibility that all of your captains were entirely incompetent, as were the captains of Get’ruz Shipping, but I think it’s slightly more likely that this is a dangerous adversary.”

But only slightly, his tone clearly indicated. He kept up the pace as they hurried through the hallways.

“Since I do not wish to die here,” he continued, “I will personally oversee the maintenance and review of our various defensive systems.”

Crallus ground his teeth and tried to keep his silence, as he always did—but his temper was finally at a breaking point. They were being stalked by some creature out of a nightmare, after all. How much worse could it get if he pissed off the Torcellan?

“Why do you bother with us?” he snapped.

The Torcellan stopped and turned. “I beg your pardon?” His voice was icy.

“You hate us,” Crallus continued. “You treat us like dirt, so why are you hiding here with the dirt instead of back at your big fancy Yennai base? Why are you bothering to have us be a part of your organization if you think we’re so incompetent?”

His temper had been frayed to the breaking point for weeks now. He was tired, and he was in pain. First, he had lost three good ships on Devon, then Yennai had sent this Torcellan to keep tabs on him. He hadn’t even bothered to tell Crallus his name. Next, Fedden had shot him in an attempted coup—making him paradoxically Crallus’ favorite person in the syndicate, but the Torcellan had sent Fedden off to die for no good reason.

Hell, at least the kid had some balls. That was more than Crallus could say for some who had come with him. He was pretty sure they would lick his boots if he asked, which was ridiculous in a mercenary.

He didn’t like the way they looked at the Torcellan, either—like maybe he held the power and they should switch allegiance. They might have already done so, for all he knew. Maybe it was just a matter of time until he was shot again and dumped into space.

In other words, he didn’t particularly care what would happen if he voiced his questions.

The Torcellan, rather than becoming furious, appeared thoughtful as he studied Crallus.

“You question things,” he stated finally. It was a simple observation, and it seemed to hold no rancor. “The others don’t, but you do.”

“The others didn’t take over, either,” Crallus rumbled. He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Some people like following orders.”

“Yes,” the Torcellan murmured. His reply was quick enough that Crallus could tell he’d had the same thought. “Yes, they do. But not you.”

“No. Thing I liked about you lot was that you weren’t sticking your nose into our business all the damned time.”

“Why did you— Ah, yes. You took over from the last syndicate leader.”

“Jillintor.” Crallus could still remember the Brakalon, a weathered boulder of an alien who had been surprisingly easy to kill when all was said and done. Jillintor had lost his edge and led them into chaos. He had deserved to die.

However, Crallus was uncomfortably aware of the way things had been going recently. People might justifiably say the same about him. Fedden had, in fact. He and some of the captains had united and gone to face the Shinigami and its madman of a captain.

None had come back. Under normal circumstances, Crallus would have believed that would cure the rumbles of dissent for a while, but these weren’t normal circumstances. He had a bunch of mercenaries holed up on a remote base with no alcohol, no enemies, and no women.

That was just a recipe for disaster.

Finally, the Torcellan ordered, “Follow me.”

Crallus, who had been lost in thought, rushed to catch up, and he barely made it into one of the conference rooms before the door closed. An automatic lock clicked.

“I don’t run the Yennai Corporation.” The Torcellan folded his hands in his sleeves and began to pace around the table in the center of the room.

Unsure of what to do, Crallus stood awkwardly. He moved out of the way as the Torcellan circled the room.

“And?” Crallus asked finally when it seemed like the Torcellan wasn’t going to say anything more.

The male shot him a sardonic smile. “I was considering how to explain. I am the second child. My elder sister is a quick learner and a sycophant, and my father was eager to make her his heir. He never made any secret of the fact that he preferred her.”

Crallus wanted to groan. This was nothing more than sibling rivalry, and he was caught in the middle. He wasn’t sure where the human Barnabas fit, but he wouldn’t be surprised to find that he had something to do with all of this.

The Torcellan’s voice was like acid. “My sister, however, is blind to the true nature of the threats we face. Both she and my father think the humans are nothing to bother ourselves with. They say the universe has seen empires rise and fall, and nothing ever changes the fact that business prevails.”

Crallus frowned. Then, wincing, he took a seat. He still wasn’t recovered from the bullet wound Fedden had bestowed. His attempt at fancy manners was over.

“They don’t understand the threat humans pose,” the Torcellan continued. His voice carried the resentment of someone who has made a point time and again, only to be ignored. “They never give up and they never back down, even when it would be prudent to do so. They’re damnably clever, they’re ambitious, they have some bizarre sense of morals they think everyone should follow, and they fight like demons. If we don’t stop them right now, they will spread over all of settled space, and we will have nothing left.”

Crallus considered this. He wasn’t used to thinking on such a scale. He had spent his life on various tiny ships, always aware of how small he was in comparison to the universe. He didn’t mind that, though. It meant no one really cared about him when push came to shove. If he carved out his little slice, no one would stop him unless he really went out of his way to piss them off.

That strategy had worked out pretty well until now. He didn’t want to think about the universe as a place waiting for one conqueror to come along and take everything, including the riches Crallus had accumulated over the years. They were his, dammit.

But he could see the wisdom of the Torcellan’s words. The humans had taken over Yoll, they had defeated vast fleets, and then they had come to a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere and taken that over, too. And they were expending resources to keep it under their rule.

“We aren’t going to win against the humans just by killing this one,” he offered finally.

The Torcellan, oddly, seemed pleased. He took a seat and leaned forward. Crallus realized that simply by discussing this, he’d made himself a sort of ally. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He still wasn’t even sure how he felt about the Torcellan. Something told him this male was a snake, untrustworthy to the core.

“But if we can kill one…” the Torcellan continued. “Just one, and most importantly, get the ship with the AI core, we will have a chance. We’ll have their passcodes, and we’ll have computational power far beyond anything we could hope to buy now.”

“Would you want to be their ally?” Crallus asked him. “They’ve allied themselves with other species.”

“With factions of other species,” the Torcellan snapped, “while the rest are forcibly silenced. No, the humans would turn on us in time. They wouldn’t like most of what the Yennai Corporation is involved in.” He gave a shrug and let out a sigh. “They might as well hate stars for the fact that light exists. There are always these types of industries, after all.”

You said they could change that, Crallus wanted to remind him. He remembered the Torcellan’s worry, and now he recognized the faint tension in his face.

The universe could change radically in the coming years, Crallus realized. Now that the Torcellan referred to the whole universe as if it were one cohesive object subject to massive forces, Crallus could see the truth of that. He couldn’t see it any other way.

Humanity might change the whole universe.

Unless someone dealt with them.

“You came here because you wanted to prove to your father that you were right,” he guessed.

To his surprise, the Torcellan laughed. He tipped his head back so that the hood fell from his shining white hair, and he laughed in a way that turned Crallus’ bones to ice.

“I suppose I could tell him,” the Torcellan admitted finally, “but I hadn’t intended to. After all, once I have the Shinigami, Yennai Corporation really won’t need my father at the helm, will it? Or my sister.” His face was as cold and hard as the void outside. “I really don’t care if they know I was right before they die.”

Chapter Five

Drakuz sat straight-backed in the sleek captain’s chair on the bridge of the YCS Jil and tried not to look bored.

Because the truth was, this was boring as hell. He had been glad when his dedicated service to the syndicate had been recognized by Crallus. A ship as fast and well-armed as the Jil was something he could never have afforded on his own. Also, Crallus’ favor meant Drakuz had fewer fees than the other captains, as well as his pick of the good jobs that came in.

Then, when the syndicate had withdrawn to the base on Ur 5b, Drakuz had been called in to fly patrols and protect Crallus. He had taken it seriously at the time. Doing this—establishing himself as the protector of the syndicate—might afford him an even cushier job flying patrols instead of going off on jobs.

Drakuz was a Shrillexian, so he liked fighting. But as you got older, all your old injuries seemed to multiply, and it got more and more difficult to keep up with the younger soldiers. A few years of flying patrols sounded like a nice reward for his service.

That was before he knew patrols could be so mind-numbingly boring. He contemplated stabbing himself in the eye with his knife, just to add some variety to the day.

“Something on the scanners, sir.” Madrelub, one of the newer Hieto recruits, turned expectantly in his chair to Drakuz.

“Check it out, I guess.” Debris. It was always debris. Madrelub frowned in consternation, and Drakuz remembered that he needed to act like a captain. “Old injury acting up,” he muttered gruffly, rotating one shoulder. That excuse tended to get the respect of the younger soldiers, all of whom found the idea of being a grizzled old veteran to be exciting. Something to look forward to.

Drakuz had thought the same thing when he was younger. Now he knew that the grizzled old veteran with the war injuries was just bad-tempered due to pain.

Still, there was no convincing any young male of that. They’d have to learn it on their own. He gave Madrelub a purposeful nod, and the Hieto swiveled back around and began to run diagnostics.

“It’s big,” he reported. “Two hundred meters by—that can’t be right. One moment, sir, running the diagnostics again. The distance keeps fluctuating.”

The proximity alerts shrieked, and the helmsman swore. There were shouts as the Jil took evasive action and the ship’s engines went into overdrive. The clamor only intensified when all of the screens went black and were replaced by an alien face.

It looked like a Torcellan, Drakuz thought. Pale, anyway. But those eyes weren’t quite Torcellan, and the hair definitely wasn’t Torcellan, and the teeth—

This was a human, wasn’t it?

“Hello,” the face said. Its voice echoed out of every speaker simultaneously.

“Who… Who the fuck are you?” Drakuz hoped his voice came across angry, but he had a feeling all that came through was his fear.

“I am Shinigami.” The voice echoed and slid through different pitches. The sound grated across Drakuz’s skin, and he hunched his shoulders. It instinctively reminded him of what he’d imagined the monsters sounded like when he had been little and afraid of the dark. “I am your worst nightmare.”

“Call the base!” Drakuz barked at the communications officer.

“I’m trying, it isn’t working!”

“Force the transmission through!”

The woman on the screen laughed. “Don’t waste your time. I control all your systems.” The image zoomed out until Drakuz could see her in the first mate’s chair of her bridge. She raised one hand, thumb and forefinger pressed together. “Goodbye.”

She snapped her fingers, and before their entire bridge went dark, they had just enough time to see that missiles had launched from her ship.

A moment later, the Jil was nothing more than debris.

* * *

“I really liked that,” Shinigami remarked. “The snap added something to it, I think.”

“Mmhmm.” Barnabas barely looked up as he strapped slim-fitting armor in place over a black undershirt and leggings.

“And overriding their communications first worked well. I don’t know how they saw us on their scanners, though.”

“Mmhmm.” Barnabas buckled the holsters into place and slid his pistols in carefully, smiling at their familiar weight. Knives went in the sheaths on his calves.

“And, of course, I got to see the type of transmissions they send for distress calls from Yennai ships, so we can use those if we need to later. Same encryption, same everything.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Also, I’m going to sit in the captain’s chair.”

Barnabas’ head whipped around to stare at the nearest camera. “Don’t you dare.”

Shinigami projected an avatar that laughed and leaned against the wall. “Just wanted to make sure you were paying attention. You didn’t say a damned thing about the scanners.”

Barnabas gave her a Look.

“They shouldn’t have been able to see us at all.” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “I suppose I’m not surprised. It was only a matter of time until we ran into someone who scanned in a new way.”

“At least it’s just us and not the whole fleet in a pivotal battle,” Barnabas said prosaically. He considered. “We’ll want to find out how they do scan, though. And how they cloak. They must do both things differently than we do. Any information we can send back will be useful. Can we still run this mission, by the way?”

“We’ll be fine. Gar’s heading up, by the way. He looks good in his armor. You, meanwhile, look a little bit like a conquistador.”

“Have you ever seen a conquistador?” Barnabas glanced at her wearily. “Because I have, and I look nothing like one.”

“I’m just saying that your armor doesn’t inspire confidence. Who’d rather be dressed in leather plating than badass plate armor? Bethany Anne’s suit is bangin’.”

“You know, I spent centuries of my life without ever suspecting I would hear an AI use that phrase.” Barnabas looked contemplatively into space. “It was a simpler time.” He sighed. “And it’s not like I’m actually wearing leather. It’s entirely aesthetic.”

“Says the ginger.”

“I like this hair color! And you should be focusing on flying the ship.”

“Mmhmm.” She gave an eerily good impression of his interjection from a few moments earlier and projected dozens more avatars around the room. “Unlike a human, I can be in two places at once.”

“Well, that’s just unsettling.” Barnabas gazed around.

All the avatars vanished, to the sound of Shinigami’s laughter. “Mmhmm,” Shinigami repeated, her voice echoing out of a nearby speaker.

“I’m here!” Gar jogged into the Pod bay.

“Oh, good. I—” Barnabas turned to him, and his eyebrows went up. They’d had the chance to secure some basic armor for Gar when he was last on High Tortuga, making use of some of the production facilities on the main continent. He hadn’t told Gar about it at the time, since he didn’t know how long it would be until he was comfortable having the Luvendi in combat.

Frankly, he wasn’t sure he was comfortable with it now.

To be fair, Gar did look well-protected. His sparring recently had been impressive. He displayed good reflexes and a solid amount of force behind his strikes, given that he’d only started a few weeks ago. Still…

This is risky, Barnabas told Shinigami.

Yes, I know. You should go into the base alone.

You agree? Barnabas raised his eyebrows at one of the cameras.

Of course. You’re a lone wolf. You do your best work alone. Only you can save the day.

You’re mocking me, aren’t you?

Barnabas, hero of the downtrodden, savior of the really bored crew on his ship.

I GET IT. Thank you.

He’s going to have his first battle sometime.

Maybe not a whole base full of mercenaries, though.

You don’t do small plans. It’s going to be something like this.

Well played. Barnabas sighed and smiled at Gar. “How does the armor feel?”

“Heavy,” Gar responded without hesitation “It’s weird. I’m not tired of wearing it, but I feel like I should be because I never used to carry any heavy things. You know?”

“Sure.” Barnabas nodded. “Now, you’re clear on the plan?”

“'Let you go first,” Gar confirmed. “I know. Believe me, I’m not going to go running off.”

“Good.” Barnabas swayed a little as the ship swerved. “Everything going well, Shinigami?”

“Oh, yes, just following in this ship’s blind spot. I’m getting everything I can out of their systems. Oh, this is so good. They still haven’t noticed me. One sec…” There was the shudder as a missile was released, and a moment later Shinigami laughed. “Yeah, they just never saw me at all. Pulled up, got all their information and their money, and now the ship is dust.”

“Their money?” Barnabas asked.

“Well, sure. Under the maritime law—”

“We’re not under maritime law.” With a sigh, Barnabas turned back to Gar. “Now, remember to keep breathing. I think that applies to your physiology as well. The urge to start spraying bullets everywhere will be quite high. Don’t do that. Keep breathing, pick small tasks like taking down one person, stay aware of your surroundings—”

Gar’s eyes started to glaze over.

“And stay behind me,” Barnabas concluded. “Battle is chaotic. There’s really no way to understand that or prepare for it until you’ve seen it.”

Gar now looked faintly queasy. “Maybe I should sit this one out.”

“No,” Barnabas replied firmly.

“Who am I kidding?” Gar looked around like a caged animal. “I’m a Luvendi. I started learning kung fu a month ago. Aren’t you supposed to train for years?”

“In kung fu, yes. However, you have guns, and your aim is good. And your body has been enhanced. Also, what you’ve been learning has not been kung fu. Those movies aren’t very…accurate.”

Gar looked so crestfallen that Barnabas could have kicked himself.

I’m an asshole, aren’t I?

You said it, not me. While you’re at it, you should also tell him Santa isn’t real.

Oh, God.

“The themes of the stories are realistic,” Barnabas added hastily. “Honor and loyalty. The fight scenes are just, uh…stylized. Yeah. To highlight the, uh…greater themes of the, uh…metaphorical implications of the piece.”

“Oh.” Gar nodded. He looked a little confused.

I’m just going to hope he doesn’t ask me to explain that.

You should have gone into academia or politics.

He isn’t sad anymore, though.

You’re really reaching, you know that?

The ship swerved again, and a few moments later, Shinigami’s voice came over the speakers, sounding very pleased with herself. “That was the last of the patrol ships, and we’re coming in for a landing now.”

“And they haven’t spotted us?”

“No. We’re emitting the signal for the Jil. As far as they know, that ship is still patrolling.”

“And what are they going to think when it docks at the garbage chute?”

“Way ahead of you, I turned those turrets off. None of the surveillance on this side is working. And, yes, the video feeds are being looped, so no one’s going to notice.”

Barnabas made a non-committal noise. In his experience, it was only so long until someone did notice, then all hell would break loose.

“As long as you’re sure you’ll be okay if they turn back on,” was all he said, however. There was no need to scare Gar.

“Those piddly little things? Of course.” She sounded offended that he’d even asked.

“Well, knock yourself out.” Then, “This way, Gar. We’re going to— Oh, my God, I’m going to be sick.” As the door to the garbage dump opened, Barnabas pressed a hand over his mouth. “No one needs an upgraded sense of smell, I swear.”

“We probably should have rigged gas masks,” Shinigami remarked.

“Probably,” Barnabas managed. “Ugh. Okay, let’s get this over with before I think better of it all and let Shinigami use a nuke.”

Chapter Six

Gar and Barnabas crept over piles of garbage. Stations were generally built to minimize waste, so the massive bay wasn’t even close to full.

It stunk to high heaven, however.

“This isn’t so bad,” Gar whispered to Barnabas.

“I wish I were dead,” Barnabas grumped. He wore a look of resignation. “I don’t know how I survived old Europe. This is a nightmare.”

“It’s only smells,” Gar asserted. He wrinkled his flat nose at Barnabas.

“This from the Luvendi who threw a mug of tea across the room the other day.”

“It was vile.”

“It was chamomile. Who doesn’t like chamomile?” Barnabas reached the door at the edge of the room and kicked a few pieces of unidentifiable detritus away from it. “At least we don’t need to climb the garbage chute. That would be worse. Shinigami, do you have the codes?”

“Still working on it. Everything maintenance-related is on a much more secure server. I suppose that makes sense if I think about it. Sabotage must be a common way of destroying stations.”

“It preserves the structure so that other people can just take over,” Gar agreed. “Sometimes rival clans on Luvendan would do that—sabotage the air filtration systems or something and kill everyone in a tower, then fix the systems and take it for their own.”

“No movies, no music, and everyone spends their time meditating unless they’re busy committing mass murder.” Barnabas snorted. “Remind me again why you left?”

Gar grinned at him. “All of us who leave ask ourselves that, and meanwhile, our families are writing to us, ‘Come home! Why do you want to be out in the universe, anyway? Where could be better than Luvendan?’” He shook his head, wide-eyed. “Everywhere. The answer is ‘everywhere.’ Try convincing them of that, though.”

Barnabas chuckled softly, then looked around when the door clicked.

“You’re good to go,” Shinigami told them. “It looks like you have four soldiers on their way right now. They’ll probably directly intercept your path if you go straight, coming from the left two hallways above. And there are two more in the immediate vicinity. Not sure if they’re patrolling or if they’re actually maintenance workers.”

“I guess we’ll see.” Barnabas eased the door open and slipped into the hallway, motioning for Gar to come after him. “Stay behind me,” he whispered. “Let me handle this, and then once you’ve seen it happen, you can join in on the next one.”

Gar nodded. He was suddenly drenched in sweat. Barnabas’ description of combat had terrified him. He wasn’t good with chaos; no Luvendi were. Chaos was just another chance to get injured.

There was a reason they spent so much time idle.

He clenched his hands into fists and followed, however. He could feel the new, stronger muscles moving below the skin. He was not too weak to move around in his armor. He was not too weak to strike with his hands and feet. He had guns, too, and he was good with them. Barnabas had said he had a natural talent.

He could do this.

What kept him here, however, wasn’t his belief in himself. It was his shame that he might leave Barnabas to do this alone. Gar could not expect his allies to go into danger while he sat on the ship in relative comfort and safety. That would be wrong.

Ahead of him, Barnabas walked quickly and lightly down the hallway. A few paces from the turnoff point Shinigami had indicated he held a hand up to stop Gar. Shinigami had been correct. The soldiers were coming toward them, and the way they clanked as they moved told Barnabas that they were in fact soldiers.

“Like I know how to fix an intake valve,” one of them was complaining. “I don’t. We should have brought actual mechanics with us.”

“We had to run quickly,” one of the others countered.

“Yeah, that doesn’t sit right either. We fight people who come after us, right? We’re soldiers, but we’re just turning tail and running? I don’t like that. Anyway, what’s the use of a base if no one knows how to use it? You panic and run, and when you get out here you realize no one brought mechanics? That should be part of the plan.”

Barnabas nodded to himself. This seemed like a sensible complaint.

In agreement or not, he launched himself around the corner with his knives drawn. Someone devoted to fighting their way out of things, especially someone who was already frustrated about being cooped up here, was not going to walk away from this whole thing without a fight.

He reminded himself of Shinigami’s words: there’s no saving everyone.

These mercenaries had shown that they gladly supported slave traders, and Barnabas knew they’d kill him without a second thought. He owed them nothing.

He caught the first in the throat with his knives and the mercenary, a Torcellan female, went over backward with wide, surprised eyes.

No guns. He didn’t want anyone to know they were here yet, and it was hard to hide the sound of a Jean Dukes Special.

One of the others, perhaps the complainer, raised his weapon to fire, more out of instinct than anything else. His jaw hung open.

He never got the chance to squeeze the trigger. Barnabas’ hand shot out, and he wrenched the gun away. The mercenary stumbled forward as Barnabas bent the barrel of the rifle and proceeded to club the male over the head. The male went down in a heap.

One of the remaining two drew in his breath to yell for help, and Barnabas crushed his throat. He was a Hieto, which meant that the throat had thick skin that would have resisted most combatants.

Barnabas, however, was not “most combatants.” The Hieto fell with a wheeze and went still, and Barnabas turned to the last mercenary with a grave look.

“You knew this would be your end,” he stated simply, having read the female Torcellan’s thoughts. She had gone to her friend, who now lay dead on the floor. Both had enjoyed a life that would make decent people shudder—killing, stealing, enslaving.

They had called it ‘the good life,’ and they had told each other that they were probably going to die young.

Barnabas met her eyes and felt a sense of calm come over him. Some deaths were unjustified.

Hers had been earned.

“I judge you,” he declared and drove the knife into her eye. She fell without a sound.

Gar, who had been watching, stood behind Barnabas with his mouth open. There had been some chaos, yes, but all of it had been contained within Barnabas. To the naked eye, what had occurred here had taken place in a mere few seconds.

Gar was still staring in shock when he heard Shinigami’s warning through his implant.

“The other two are behind you!”

It was too late. There was the click of a gun, and Gar spun to see a Shrillexian with his gun pointed directly at Gar’s head.

With his gun up, the Shrillexian started to laugh. He lowered the weapon and elbowed his patrol partner in the side, still laughing.

“A Luvendi in armor! Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?”

Barnabas walked up next to Gar. “You see what he’s doing here? Lowering the weapon, laughing, talking with his compatriots? Never do that.”

Gar didn’t even glance at Barnabas. His chest rose and fell faster now, and he could hear the steady beat of blood in his ears. “Shut up,” he ground out.

Barnabas fell silent and his eyebrows shot up in surprise, but then he realized Gar wasn’t talking to him. The Shrillexian, meanwhile, laughed even harder. His companion, a Brakalon, began to chuckle as well. He swung his big head from side to side in mirth.

“A Luvendi in armor. Heh heh, that’s a good joke.”

“I said, shut up,” Gar snarled.

“He wants us to shut up!” The Shrillexian fought for breath. “He might spit on us if we don’t!”

He was still laughing when Gar’s hand closed around his throat. Gar dragged him close with a hiss, and the Shrillexian’s face met Gar’s other fist—hard. The punch shattered the front of the Shillexian’s skull, and the laughter trailed off in a gurgle.

Whoa, Shinigami exclaimed in Barnabas’ head.

“Whoa” is right. Don’t worry, I’ll take the Brakalon if I need to. Gar might—WHOA.

Gar launched himself at the Brakalon and lashed out with nearly surgical precision. His hands and feet found joints, internal organs, and painful pressure points. The Brakalon howled as he doubled over, clutching his face, and Gar brought a knee up with lethal speed to bash into his skull.

The Brakalon collapsed, and his chest no longer moved.

Gar turned to Barnabas with wide eyes and a dawning smile on his face. “That felt great,” the Luvendi exclaimed. He was heaving for air, but his voice was full of satisfaction. “All those years of them thinking they were better than me because they could fight and I couldn’t. Well, now I can.”

Is it possible we made a mistake? Barnabas asked Shinigami privately.

Hellllll no. We made a great choice. This is going to be fantastic.

So, definitely a mistake, then.

Barnabas nodded. “That was well done. Good job going for the Brakalon before he stopped laughing.”

“Yeah!” Gar looked around. “Where’s the next group? I want to do that again!”

Shinigami, see if you can find some data on manic traits in Luvendi. Barnabas held up a hand in caution. “Stay on point,” he advised. “When you start seeking out fights to have fun, you get blinded to the true purpose of fighting, which is to achieve an external goal.”

“Oh.” Gar looked a bit ashamed. “Right. Uh…right.” But his eyes scanned the area as if he might find some other enemies lurking. “Well, let’s go clear out this base and find Crallus and Uleq.”

“Good focus. Check your weapons, make sure everything’s still secure. Good? Come on, then. They’re up two flights of stairs from here, and at the back of the base from where we landed.”

They headed off, Gar still bouncing on the balls of his feet.

He felt like he was walking on air. The feeling he had gotten when his strikes landed had been exhilarating, and the fact that he had been able to win a fight with speed and training was something he was sure would never get old.

And he was actually helping! He loved that. Before, when Barnabas completed any number of missions, Gar’d had to wait on the Shinigami, feeling miserable and useless. He couldn’t pilot, he couldn’t pull information up nearly as fast as Shinigami could, and he hadn’t been able to fight—until now.

For the first time, he really felt like he was part of the team.

He hummed happily to himself as he walked. He wasn’t sure what the tune was; maybe one of the songs that played during the movies he’d seen. He’d begun to appreciate music these days. Maybe other species were onto something with that.

He just felt incredibly benevolent toward the whole universe right now.

He was still humming when they came to what the schematics said was the stairwell, and instead discovered a post-construction addition to the base. The stairwell was a good twenty yards away, and between them and it…

There must have been two dozen mercenaries, all with their weapons slung across their backs or leaning back in their chairs. They were playing cards and laughing with one another, and they turned toward the door as it opened.

A human and a Luvendi. It was clear from a single glance that Barnabas and Gar didn’t belong.

Barnabas had his gun out and was firing even as one of the mercenaries ran for the alarm button. The shot blew him backward, but not before he’d punched the thing. The alarms wailed.

“Damn,” Barnabas said succinctly.

Jotun image by Eric Quigley

Chapter Seven

The alarms blared to life, and Tafa looked anxiously at the door. “What do you think that is?”

“Clearly,” Jeltor intoned, “we’re under attack.”

Tafa gave him an unfriendly look. She and Jeltor were the only two surviving members of a raid on a passenger ship. The mercenary captain, a Shrillexian named Drakuz, had graciously offered to enslave them rather than leaving them to die in the wreckage.

Actually, he’d told them they could be mercenaries if they wanted to. Then he’d laughed himself sick.

Tafa hated him.

She knew she was scrawny. She didn’t need it pointed out. She was an artist, not a laborer. She was Yofu, and it wasn’t like the Yofu made very good soldiers. She had sometimes wondered if that was why her cousin’s family was so involved in the munitions business—they wanted to take soldiers’ money since they couldn’t be soldiers themselves.

Tafa had thought that was a stupid idea, but now they were billionaires, and she was a slave on a mercenary base. Maybe there was something to doing things their way.

Jeltor, a Jotun male, looked down on everyone else and liked to make a big deal of how nice his power suit was. He was also, Tafa had learned, incredibly vain. Insulting his appearance was one of the few ways she could get back at him when he was snide.

It wasn’t even difficult to do. Jotuns were purple blobs with wavy arms and two very bulbous eyes. Jeltor’s body looked like a clump of jelly that was about to burst and spill every which way. For all she knew he was a supermodel by Jotun standards, but he was prickly enough about it that she couldn’t resist sliding in little insults.

“You’ll have to be careful,” she said innocently. “You wouldn’t want the stress and fighting to ruin your looks.”

His power-suited chest wheezed as he looked at her, then stomped off to the corner to sulk.

Tafa sneered at him, but her heart was pounding far too fast. Someone was attacking the base.

What if they just assumed everyone here was part of the syndicate and killed them?

* * *

“What’s going on?” Uleq strode into the rooms with his silvery hair still sopping wet and plastered to his neck.

Crallus didn’t mention that. Torcellans were notoriously vain about their hair, and this particular Torcellan was notoriously fond of murder. Crallus wasn’t going to die because he’d looked at someone’s hair the wrong way.

He brought up the video feeds from the lowest level. “The alert was pressed here, on the maintenance level. Two patrols are down, and they are presently fighting in the recreation room. I’ve blockaded the doors up to the first and second levels and have reinforcements stationed at intervals.”

Uleq cast an annoyed glance at the screen, where two figures wreaked havoc in a room full of mercenaries.

“How did they get in?”

“I don’t know yet.” Crallus shook his head. “But that seems to be all of them, and I have the ones on the second level readying rocket launchers.” He hesitated. “I’ve written off the ones on the maintenance level.”

There wasn’t any evidence in Uleq expression to suggest he cared in any way who lived or died. He brought up the second set of surveillance cameras on the outside of the station and drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk while he waited.

Both males could see immediately what had happened. The Shinigami, not the Jil, was attached securely to the garbage dump at the end of the base.

The Torcellan slammed his fingers down repeatedly on the keys, sending commands to the gun turrets.

“Why aren’t they firing?” he snarled.

Crallus only shook his head. He didn’t know, but he had a very bad feeling about this. Barnabas clearly knew not only where the base was, but he also knew its layout. He’d avoided the traps at the main launchpad, and he must have found some way to shut off the security feeds and the defense systems.

He was still trying to figure out what to do when Uleq grabbed a communications device Crallus hadn’t seen before. “Captains to your ships,” he ordered curtly. “There is a ship docked at the end of the base. Keep it pinned down.” He switched off the device and jerked his head at Crallus. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?” Crallus followed him out into the hallway, turning his head briefly as he heard an animal yell and the sound of something breaking.

Uleq gave him a look. “Where do you think? We’re leaving. They must have gotten into the servers at the other base.” He cursed, low and fluently, in his own language. “There’s no way they’ve found the main Yennai base, though, so that’s where we’re going.”

“If we go back without the ship—” Crallus began nervously.

Uleq cut him off with a bitter laugh. “We don’t need to worry. My father and sister will be glad to see me fail. They like to gloat. They’ll give me orders, then forget about me again while they keep trying to turn themselves into Torcellan royalty.” His lip curled. “And then they’ll be dead,” he whispered to himself.

* * *

“Update,” Shinigami reported to Barnabas and Gar. “Uleq has sent a fuck-ton of ships to pin me down.”

“How many exactly is a fuck-ton?” Barnabas brought the butt of his pistol down on a mercenary’s head and nodded in satisfaction as the soldier dropped like a stone. To be fair, the soldiers hadn’t run, but they also weren’t very good at this.

As far as Barnabas could tell, they mostly showed up at their targets and overran their enemies in a large group. Most of their enemies would be at about the same skill level, and the rest would run.

They had no Plan B.

Unfortunate for them, but not really his problem. He was just the messenger, so to speak. And his message was that they were terrible at their jobs and were consequently going to die.

“There are eighteen of them,: Shinigami explained. “So not really a fuck-ton, just enough to be annoying.”

“Only you would say that about eighteen ships.” Barnabas took a moment to watch Gar clothesline a mercenary with a rifle and snickered slightly before he came back to the topic at hand. “Ah, right. Fuck-ton of ships. Can you get out of there? We can hold on here.”

“They’re trying to override the holds I placed on the system. Right now I’m in a dead zone regarding the turrets. They never anticipated needing to shoot at their garbage compactor apparently, which seems like an oversight. But the point is, as soon as I lift off I’ll have eighteen ships and all the turrets to deal with.”

“Hmm.” Barnabas spun, unsheathed his knives, and charged into the middle of a group of mercenaries who were massing to take Gar down. They dropped one by one, screaming.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m trying to get the turrets back online, so I can take the ships out with their own weapons. I always did like poetic deaths.”

“Mmm. Be careful, and tell me if you need help.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but you’re still relatively squishy and don’t take missiles to the face well. You handle the mercenaries, I’ll handle the ships.”

“Good call.” Barnabas took down the last assailant on his side. Gar had three opponents left, all with their weapons drawn.

“You take the one on the far left!” Barnabas flipped up both Jean Dukes Specials and took out the other two with simultaneous shots. Gar’s gun went off a scant half-second later.

He looked at Barnabas with a grimace. “You took out a lot more than me.”

“Practice,” Barnabas replied. “You’ll get there.”

“Uh-huh,” Gar agreed glumly. Barnabas started laughing, and the Luvendi got a prickly look on his face. “What? What’s so funny?”

“It’s just, uh...” Barnabas bit his lip. “You look like something out of a horror movie. You’re covered in blood.”

“I was fighting,” Gar argued. He frowned at Barnabas. “Why are you not covered in blood?”

“Where you stab people is important,” Barnabas pointed out.

“Fuck!” Shinigami’s voice echoed through both Barnabas and Gar’s implants.

“Problem?” Barnabas’ hand went to his pistols.

“They’re lifting off! I’m guessing it’s Uleq, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to reach them. I’m trying to turn the turrets on, but by the time I get them pointed at the ship, they’re going to be gone.” The rough snarl of her voice sounded supremely frustrated. “I’ve launched pucks, but there’s something in their cloaking signal that’s confusing the little buggers. I figure their own turrets might have a better chance, but—“

“Focus on getting a trace on that ship,” Barnabas instructed. “We can find them wherever they go. We can get wherever they go. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worrying. I’m an AI. It’s literally—"

“Impossible for you to be illogical, yes. You’ve mentioned. I’m just, uh…reassuring Gar.” Barnabas shook his head confidentially at Gar, who stifled his laughter. They would just have to hope that Shinigami was too busy fighting off mercenary ships to look through their eyes.

“Oh. Right.” As Barnabas had expected, she didn’t bother to check up on them. “Yeah, it’s going to be okay, Gar.”

“Thank you,” Gar replied solemnly. He hadn’t gotten the hang of speaking through the throat mic yet, so his reply was audible.

“And all of this gives me an idea,” Barnabas murmured. “Come with me.”

He climbed the stairs two at a time and opened the door slightly to peek out. He slammed it shut and jumped to the side the next moment as several bullets pierced it.

“Yep, that’s what I thought. Shinigami, can you get me into their intercom systems? Bonus if it can be broadcast to the ships as well.”

Fight off a fleet, Shinigami. Trace the ship, Shinigami. Get me into their intercom systems, Shinigami. Wash the dishes, Shinigami. Her mental voice clearly reflected her disgust.

There’s a dishwasher on board, and that doesn’t count as you washing the dishes.

Hmph. Nevertheless, she added, you’re good to go on the intercoms. I’ll just route your words through me. Doing all the heavy lifting. Again. As usual.

Barnabas ignored her.

“Attention, mercenaries of Crallus’ syndicate. Crallus has ordered you to fight us. Meanwhile, he has left the base with Uleq. We can go about the rest of this one of two ways. Either you lay down your weapons and meet me on peaceful terms, or we’ll kill all of you. I would prefer not to massacre you all, but as the bodies of your friends downstairs will show, I won’t stand by while people shoot at me. End broadcast.”

There was a pause.

“Twelve of the ships have stopped shooting,” Shinigami reported. “I’m trying to get into their security feeds to see what’s going on. Oh, yep. They feel betrayed.”

“They’re not wrong to,” Barnabas pointed out. “Can you do something for me? Yes, before you say anything, I know. Another thing for Shinigami to do. You’re so overworked. But this time you get to make things blow up.”

“I’m listening.”

“Make an example of the ships that didn’t stop shooting at you.”

“Oh, hell yeah. One sec. Yep. Yep, that’s the good shit. Just look at those beauties.”

Gar frowned in consternation.

“I’ll bet you thought you were missing quality conversations before you had the implant,” Barnabas remarked.

Gar snorted with laughter.

“Let’s see how you behave when you get missile launchers. Oh, yeah. Gorgeous. Lots of explosions. I’ll play the holo for you when you get back. Do you want to let the rest leave?”

“One moment. Broadcast my voice again.”

“Okay, you’re good to go.”

“Members of Crallus’ syndicate.” Barnabas kept his mental tone light and pleasant. “At the conclusion of my last message, twelve ships stopped firing on the Shinigami and six continued. Those six ships are now debris, and their crews are dead. The other twelve are still floating. I trust the implications of this are clear. For those of you who want to survive today, I have the following instructions: all twelve ships will land, and all mercenaries who want to survive will go to the landing bays. The captains will come to see me, and I will explain my terms. Any ship that lifts off will be shot down. Any mercenaries who fight will be killed. I will meet you in Crallus’ office in half an hour. End broadcast.”

“That’s a tight timeline,” Shinigami commented.

“Good. Make it tight enough, and they’ll focus on that instead of making trouble.”

“You’d be a diabolical parent. I’m just saying.”

“Having met Alexis and Gabriel, I am quite content with my life as it is.”

“We’ll see. By the way, the mercenaries are clearing out, except for a handful, and I’m reading two life signs in an out-of-the-way room with locked doors.”

Barnabas’ eyes narrowed. “I’m going to go check that out. Come on, Gar.” He pushed the door open, directed five shots at the mercenaries who reached for their guns, and strode through the hallways, shaking his head.

“Why is it that the ones who want to fight are always the stupid ones?” he asked conversationally.

Gar had no answer.

At the locked room, Barnabas paused and looked over his shoulder in amusement as the captains yelled for people to get out of the way, they needed to get to Crallus’ office.

They’re panicking, he commented to Shinigami.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people, I tell you. They scratched my paint. Make them pay.

Will do. Barnabas opened the door and stared at the two occupants. One appeared to be a jellyfish wearing a robotic suit, and the other was a Yofu. She held her hands high and looked completely terrified by Gar’s blood-drenched form.

“Don’t shoot!” she begged. “We’re captives! I’m Tafa Boreir, and this is—”

“Boreir?” Barnabas asked delicately. “As in, a relation of Mustafee Boreir?”

“He hates me, and the feeling’s mutual,” Tafa replied at once.

A quick scan of her mind showed only hatred for Mustafee, but Barnabas wasn’t willing to trust her yet. This would require more in-depth questioning, and he did not yet have time for that.

“You’d better hope you’re not lying,” he told her. “Because I killed him about a week ago, and I’ve been dismantling the Boreir Group ever since.” He looked the two of them over and noticed the restraints on both the robotic suit and the Yofu’s neck. She also had bruises, and marks where there had been manacles.

“You two will accompany me to Crallus’ office,” Barnabas announced. “We’ll see what they have to say about your presence, and I’ll decide what to do from there.”

Chapter Eight

The captains stood in awkward silence as Barnabas sat behind the desk, Gar at one shoulder and the two prisoners off to one side.

The captains no doubt thought that Barnabas sat in silence as a power move. In reality, he was reading their minds one by one. He saw greed. He saw apathy. And more than once, he saw families with children.

If it had been all the captains, Barnabas knew he would have seen more anger and blind rage. These, however, were the ones who acknowledged Crallus’ betrayal. They were willing to see reason when faced with a force stronger than them.

He closed his eyes slightly and tried to focus on all of them and none of them at once.

“Here are my conditions.” His voice was not loud, but there was no compromise in it. “When you leave this place, you leave behind all ties to this syndicate and to the Yennai Corporation. Any equipment and any weapons Crallus has given you will be left here.

“You are released from any debt of honor to your fallen comrades, beginning with Jutkelon and the others who came to Devon. They chose to support slavery and the murder of innocents. You lose no honor by refusing to take up their fight. Let it be.

“You may continue as mercenaries, but you may not protect those whose business was forbidden by the edicts of the former Etheric Empire. In the future, you will be bound by the laws of the Federation, and you will use your best efforts to avoid all dealings that are not only illegal but also immoral.

“Do not go back to Devon. Do not speak of Devon. From this day forth, if anyone asks you about the planet, you will claim to know nothing. Do you understand?”

He looked at each of them and felt their cautious acceptance.

Mostly. One of them, at the end of the line, was already thinking of revenge against Barnabas. He planned to tell everyone he met about Devon.

“You may think that I will not know if you violate the terms of this agreement,” Barnabas continued. He did not look at that captain specifically. “But I assure you that I will. And I will find you, and you will pay. Today I am giving you a chance to redeem yourselves. Do you understand?”

They nodded. They understood. Even the captain at the end of the line understood. Barnabas stood and went around the desk to stand in front of him.

“Your first thought was to tell everyone about Devon as a means of revenge,” he observed. He smiled at the look on the alien’s face. “Oh, yes, I know that. You were smart enough not to keep fighting when you were clearly outmatched, but you never had any intentions of meeting my demands, did you?”

The other captains looked on in silence, and the Shrillexian drew his lips back in a snarl.

“You are prey, and you will die as prey.”

Barnabas laughed before he could stop himself. “I see.”

“A predator doesn’t talk. A predator doesn’t make demands. A predator kills. And if you aren’t a predator, you’re prey.” The Shrillexian gave Barnabas a cold smile.

Then he gave a gasp as Barnabas’ hand closed around his throat and Barnabas forced his thoughts into the alien’s head.

I am no one’s prey. I am a Vigilante. I offer redemption to those who have the potential to seek it. His eyes glowed red as he stared the alien down. You do not.

The Shrillexian fell to the floor, dead, and Barnabas returned to his chair. He looked at the other captains and felt their fear. It was the fear of those who had followed bad leaders, who had believed that the innocent might be punished for the mistakes of the guilty.

“I knew that he intended to lie to me,” Barnabas verified. “I know as well that the rest of you intend to meet my demands. There will come a time when it will be easier to take the well-paying job and not ask a question. There will be a time when you are tempted to tell people what you know of Devon. Do not. I will know.”

The captains nodded, terrified.

“You will go now, and you will take the mercenaries who are in the landing bays with you.”

More nods.

“One more thing,” Barnabas said. “These two prisoners. Who are they? Don’t speak,” he told the two of them.

“Drakuz picked them up,” one of the captains offered. He cleared his throat. “He took their ship, and they were the survivors. He hadn’t decided what to do with ‘em yet when he got called to the base, so he just brought ‘em with him.”

“I see.” Barnabas looked around at the captains. “You may all go. Leave this place, and never return to it.”

They almost ran, they were so eager to be gone, and Barnabas turned to the two prisoners.

He studied them, testing the surface of their thoughts. The one in the robotic suit—a Jotun, Shinigami had told him—had thoughts that even felt like jello, though Barnabas wondered if that was just his mind tricking him based on the creature’s appearance.

It was smart, though. He would have to remember that. Its mind was buzzing with schematics and plans, however strangely those thoughts might manifest.

Tafa Boreir was a problem. More accurately, she was a question. The more time she had to be alone with her thoughts, the more Barnabas saw images flashing through them—strange landscapes, stylized portraits, abstract splashes of color so vivid that he almost got the sense of music from them.

Still, he could think of any number of reasons she might hate Mustafee, and having an artist’s soul didn’t mean she was incapable of cruelty.

Not by a long shot.

He would have to question her further at some point, but for now, she was injured with nowhere to go. His course of action was clear—he would take both Tafa and the Jotun onto the ship, heal them, and determine their allegiances.

If they were truly innocents who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, he would let them off at a safe station or base with enough funds to get back to where they wanted to be.

If they weren’t…

That wasn’t something he needed to think about just yet. Why waste time worrying about the future before the facts were known?

Barnabas stood and nodded to them and Gar. “We should go.” Shinigami, is there anywhere else you can dock while the mercenaries are leaving?

There’s a docking port that leads directly out of Crallus’ office. Pretty clever, though you’d have to be desperate to use it as an escape. I’ll put down there. Gives me a better angle to keep an eye on the other ships anyway.

A few minutes later, Barnabas led the two former captives to the med bay. The Jotun simply needed maintenance on its suit, which Barnabas would attend to later with Shinigami’s help. He led Tafa to the Pod-doc, however.

“If you lie down in here, we will fix your injuries and disable the control device implanted in your brain.”

She gave him a look that was far too shrewd for comfort. “What if I’m your enemy? You didn’t seem sure before.”

“I’m still not sure,” Barnabas told her. “But I’m not the sort of person who weakens my enemies with control devices and imprisons them.”

“What sort of person are you, then?” she challenged him.

Barnabas didn’t blink, though he sensed that her mind was suddenly flooded with images of torture. The methods were very inventive and had the weight of old memories, not just imagination. She had seen these things done to people.

If she was part of Mustafee Boreir’s family, he wasn’t surprised.

“If you are dangerous enough that I would need to take such measures,” he said gravely, “I will simply kill you.”

This seemed to reassure her, and she nodded. “I’d prefer that.”

“You’ve thought about this before.” It wasn’t a question. Barnabas stared down at her in the Pod-doc and read that she had decided this at a very young age.

“My aunt had my parents punished when I was young,” Tafa told him. The images that accompanied this memory were brutally clear in Barnabas’ mind. “They weren’t executed until a few years ago, though.”

“You miss them.”

She turned her head directly toward him, and he realized that for a Yofu, that was the equivalent of a human looking away. With her eyes on the side of her head, she could not see him when her face was pointed right at him.

“I don’t think about them,” she told him by rote. Her thoughts had closed off entirely. “I don’t really remember them. I just know I don’t want to die like they did.”

Barnabas had the suspicion that Tafa had become an artist to make herself unworthy of notice. She had worked hard to make sure she was not a threat to Mustafee, and she had also spent a great deal of energy not thinking about the parents she couldn’t save.

To his surprise, he felt a lump in his throat. Catherine’s decline had been relatively quick, but if he had been forced to live for years or decades knowing that she was in pain every day—

The wave of black across his mind was sudden and strong. He swallowed and fought his way back from it. He would not go back to that place.

“I do not indulge in cruelty for its own sake,” he stated, both to Tafa and the Jotun. “There are crimes for which I would judge you, but I would never do so without cause. Rest. We will heal you, and then we will determine what to do next. You will not be a captive or a slave no matter what happens.”

He left before his thoughts could get the better of him.

Chapter Nine

“It has to be Virtue Station. It’s risky, but we can’t stay on this ship. We have to change over as soon as possible.” Uleq slouched in his seat, feet up on the desk in front of him. Since he no longer needed his hood, he had taken the time to dress his hair and done whatever else it was that Torcellans did with their appearances. Crallus wasn’t sure. He just knew he didn’t think much of it.

He didn’t even grunt a response.

“You object?” Uleq asked almost delicately. Crallus could hear the latent order in the male’s voice. If you’re going to object to my suggestion, you had better have a good one of your own.

Like Crallus gave a damn. He grunted this time and looked away, shaking his head. Please let this conversation be over.

Uleq didn’t take the hint. His boots thudded on the floor of the bridge, and he leaned forward, narrowing his eyes. “Is something wrong?” he asked dangerously.

“We left them to die,” Crallus burst out finally.

The Torcellan stared at him incredulously for a long moment. His expression said that he could not even imagine someone being upset about this.

“Of course, we left them,” he agreed finally. “The human was going to kill all of them regardless. We managed to save ourselves, but we could not possibly have saved the others—not with the humans in our systems. The only reason we got out at all was that this ship can be piloted manually. If it couldn’t be...”

Crallus said nothing.

The Torcellan’s frown deepened. “You closed all the doors and left the ones on the maintenance level to die.”

“That was different,” Crallus argued. Guilt twisted his gut, but he pressed his point. “I did it because they couldn’t be saved, but the others might have been.”

“Precisely. We did the same thing when we left.” The Torcellan looked smug, as if this were the point he’d been making all along.

“It’s. Different.” Crallus ground the words out. “I did what I did to save as many of my syndicate as I could. To protect the group. What you did admits that there is no group. That’s a failure. A leader who fails like that isn’t a leader anymore. If that many of their soldiers die…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but he couldn’t escape it in his own head. Then they deserve to die too.

He could tell himself that he hadn’t really known Uleq intended to leave without the mercenaries. It was even true…sort of. It wasn’t like Uleq had explained the plan. He hadn’t mentioned the mercenaries at all. It was conceivable that he might have had a plan to get the soldiers out, especially when he took them to the second and cunningly hidden set of trams, which couldn’t be vented to the outside.

He had known what sort of person Uleq was. It had been abundantly clear that Uleq cared only about himself. He had wanted the mercenaries because he believed they could help him capture the Shinigami and take control of the Yennai Corporation. Otherwise, they were expendable.

Presumably, he felt the same about Crallus. He had probably kept Crallus around half because he couldn’t outrun him on the way to the ship, and half because he thought Crallus would help him find a new group of mercenaries.

Like hell, Crallus would do that.

“Those mercenaries were not just pieces on a game board,” he said angrily. “They were my responsibility. Some of them were my friends.” At least, they had been so before he took over the syndicate. No one was really a friend after that. It was a side effect he hadn’t considered—that they would become potential challengers.

Still, he hadn’t wanted to throw them away for no good reason. He had tried to protect them, no matter what Fedden had said.

The Torcellan looked at him so blankly that Crallus wanted to laugh. It was almost funny. It really was. The concept of mercenaries as friends—as people—was so far outside Uleq’s thought processes that Crallus’ words didn’t even make sense to him.

The Torcellan really had just thrown all of them away as a failed gambit; a learning experience that he would account for in his next plan.

It made Crallus want to strangle him.

Then Uleq gave that small, superior smile Crallus had always hated. “You left them to die, too,” the Torcellan told him with a shrug. “I don’t see why you’re complaining. You left to save your own skin.”

He turned to the instrument panel with the air of someone who had won a moral victory and Crallus stared at him, his breath coming in short gasps.

He hated Uleq. He hated him more than anything.

But he was right.

* * *

Barnabas bounced on the balls of his feet as he waited for Gar to attack. After the battle at the syndicate’s base, Gar had showcased a similarity between human and Luvendi physiology: he had fallen asleep so suddenly that he hadn’t even made it out of the shower.

Shinigami had turned the water off, dimmed the lights, and declared there wasn’t much more she could do. Barnabas, she suggested, could bring a pillow.

Barnabas had disagreed with this assessment.

After a good few hours of sleep—enough to fix the subsequent crash after the adrenaline from the fight—Gar had appeared sleepily in the main part of the ship, rubbing a crick in his neck. Barnabas was certain that if he’d had any hair, it would be sticking up straight on one side. The Luvendi inhaled about three times what he usually ate, and passed out again on his plate.

This time, Barnabas did bring him a pillow.

There wasn’t any particular rush, after all. They were trailing the unnamed ship that held Crallus and Uleq, having caught up with it after the base had fallen.

Shinigami had rigged the facility to display a warning message to anyone who tried to land there or take it over, leaving Barnabas to contemplate what to do with it. It wasn’t a very useful location for farming, but perhaps a factory?

Something to decide later. For now, since Gar was finally back upright, Barnabas would focus on sparring.

Gar rushed him, surprisingly quick on his feet, and Barnabas nodded approvingly as he rolled out of the way. They circled for a few more seconds before Gar rushed again. Again, Barnabas slid out of the way, and Gar looked around, surprised that his adversary had disappeared.

The third time Barnabas did it Gar growled, “Why won’t you fight? We were supposed to fight!”

Barnabas said nothing, but a little smile played on his lips as he waited.

He was not going to attack. It was important that Gar learn about frustration. Right now, Gar felt invincible and wanted to use his new physical strength to solve every problem. He needed a reminder to use the skills he’d spent a lifetime learning before his enhancements.

If he was going to be a part of Barnabas’ team, he needed to learn to fight with his mind as well as his newfound strength. There would inevitably come a time when the odds arrayed against him were so great that he would walk into a trap if he didn’t plan things carefully.

Gar believed he lost to Barnabas because he didn’t have as much strength and speed, or as much experience. While true, this concealed another truth: he wasn’t planning his fights at all.

As Gar darted at Barnabas again, Shinigami reported, “They’re making plans to dock at Virtue Station. As far as I can tell, they don’t know we’re behind them. It could be a ploy, but I don’t think it is.”

Barnabas rolled out of the way of Gar’s charge, but he felt fingertips brush him as the Luvendi went past. Gar, knowing that Barnabas tended to go sideways, had grabbed for him. Barnabas nodded at his opponent as he came to his feet and returned to his circling.

“Good,” he told Gar. “I think you’re right,” he added to Shinigami and Gar. He’d added in the distraction of mental discussion during the sparring sessions.

After all, it would be a part of Gar’s experience in combat.

The next time Gar charged, Barnabas saw him look for some clue as to whether Barnabas would go left or right. Barnabas tapped his sternum as he moved. “Watch the core,” he told Gar. “That’s where all movement begins. Even strikes.”

Gar might be tired and new to this, but he was willing to learn. He charged again, and this time he managed to follow Barnabas as the man jagged left.

Unfortunately, he forgot to think past catching Barnabas, and so caught a punch to his chest. Gar’s eyes went wide and he wheezed as he doubled over, hands still clutching Barnabas’ shirt.

Barnabas allowed him no respite. He hauled Gar upright and punched him in the face. One strike after another, he drove the Luvendi back across the floor.

“You were winded,” he told Gar brutally, “but the fight doesn’t stop when you get injured.” Another strike, but this time he grabbed one of the Luvendi’s long arms and flipped him onto his back. The distribution of weight was similar enough to a human that the same techniques worked, although a Luvendi’s shoulders were set up differently. “If you stop the fight when you get hit, your enemies will take the opening, and they will kill you. Also, since you got your breath back a few seconds ago, you have no reason not to be fighting back right now.”

Gar struggled up and landed one weak punch. He made one last half-hearted effort and charged at Barnabas with a battle cry.

Barnabas didn’t hesitate. He slid smoothly out of the way and let Gar face-plant into the wall. The Luvendi slid down, looking somewhat dazed. Barnabas noticed the Jotun and the Yofu standing in the doorway, staring slack-jawed at the scene in front of them.

“He’ll be fine,” Barnabas assured them.

Gar moaned slightly from the floor, though whether it was in agreement or disagreement, Barnabas couldn’t say.

Well, I suppose this is as good a time as any to ask the Yofu more questions. Keep an eye on Gar, would you?

What am I now, a nurse?

I hope not. God help your patients.

I’ll have you know I have an encyclopedic knowledge of human physiology and diseases and the computing power to accurately diagnose problems in seconds that would take human doctors weeks.

Mmm, and you’ve never once done that, have you?

Of course not. I have more important matters to attend to. But I’ll keep an eye on Gar for you.

Thank you. Barnabas wiped his face with a towel and headed out. Time to learn all he could about Tafa.

Chapter Ten

Barnabas saw the Jotun lurking as he came into the hall, and that gave him a sudden idea.

The Jotun species clearly thought they were superior to all other alien races, taking great pride in their intellect. If Barnabas were to question this one—Jeltor, was it?—the alien would be insufferable and take great joy in talking circles around Barnabas. He had already gotten the sense that it masked its true thoughts by concentrating on inconsequential things while he was around.

That meant he had to catch it off-guard.

And he was fairly sure he had a good angle—using its obvious condescension to Tafa against it. When he came out of the gym, he spoke brusquely to her.

“I’d like to speak to you about your cousin.” He gave her a brief, hard look and waved negligently down the hall as he strode away. “I’m going to clean up. Wait for me in the second conference room. The ship will give you directions.”

The ship? Rude.

I’d rather they didn’t know everything about you yet.

Oh. That makes sense.

Mmm. Barnabas gave a respectful nod to the Jotun as he passed. He took his time changing, and offered a silent apology to Tafa; he’d explain all of this when he spoke to her. Then he wandered back out into the hall with a glass of water in his hand and his hair still somewhat wet.

The Jotun, as he had hoped, was still lurking.

He’s trying to get into my systems, Shinigami reported. I’m not sure it’s malicious, per se. It’s his way of learning about us. I’m feeding him false information, though. I don’t think he’s caught on.

Barnabas tried not to grin evilly. Good. See what you can get from him in the meantime.

Oh, I am. Their suits are actually very impressive. I’ll be selling this to Jean for sure.

Giving. You’ll be giving it to Jean.

Oh, come on! She’d be thrilled to get her hands on this.

Yes, of course—piss off the woman who makes our weapons. That’s going to go well. Because if she fails to kill us herself, you know she’s going to bring John in.

Oh.

Yes.

Barnabas gave the Jotun a brief nod, then frowned as if he’d had suddenly had a thought. “Did she speak to you about her family?”

“I knew who they were, of course.” Jeltor could have made a career out of sounding artfully bored. “Impossible to ignore that last name. But she never spoke about them, no.”

“I’m getting that sense.” Barnabas shook his head in mock annoyance and sighed. “I should have known better than to hope for any useful information out of one of them. What’s weird is, I’d done some digging and I didn’t come up with any mention of her parents.”

As he’d hoped, Jeltor was eager to display his superior research skills. “You wouldn’t. They were the family embarrassment.”

Barnabas, already walking away, looked back as if this information was unexpected and interesting enough to detain him. He leaned closer. “Really? How did you ever find that?”

“I have my sources.” Jeltor was as smug as the cat that got the cream. The suit didn’t provide any facial expressions and the jelly-blob body was as unreadable as ever, but Barnabas was sure the thing was smiling. He seemed to weigh the pros and cons of talking, and the pros won out. He shuffled a few mechanical steps closer. “They joined a group of troublemakers. A little terrorist group called the Hyo-Tein.”

Translation?

Fuck if I know. It’s not coming through. Unless it’s a mix of Brakalon and Leath, in which case it means “Umbrella Fart.”

Barnabas pressed his lips together in an attempt not to laugh. I, uh…I think that’s unlikely.

Be careful, though. Her voice was suddenly grave. Be sure he’s telling you the truth, and if he is, tread lightly. I’m coming up with nothing about these people, which means—

Boreir Group wiped them off the map.

Exactly. And you cut the head off the snake, but we still haven’t gotten some of their executives yet.

Noted. To Jeltor, he said, “I’ve never heard of the Hyo-Tein.”

“You wouldn’t have,” the alien assured him confidently. “They haven’t been around for decades at this point, because of her parents. Not that they wanted the group destroyed, no. But Boreir Group was… Hmm, let’s say they were particularly harsh because members of their family were involved. They’re the ones who got it classified as a terrorist group after they killed everyone. If you find stories about them, they’ll be the stories Boreir Group planted.”

This was interesting. Barnabas leaned against the wall, arms crossed, and nodded for Jeltor to continue. Two things were clear: the alien was telling him the truth, and he enjoyed knowing things no one else knew.

“Her mother’s parents were clerics,” the Jotun explained. “So I guess she had some ideas in her head about how the universe should work—and of course, then she fell in love with one of Mustafee Boreir’s brothers. Now, Gedden Boreir—that’s her father, you know. Yes?—wasn’t ever going to inherit. It was always Anafee, and her son after her. So I’ll bet he thought he could just do anything he wanted. Maybe he wanted to mess with his sister a bit. So he joins this group, and they start lobbying to disallow the sale of munitions to a few of the larger planets.”

Barnabas started to feel a bit uncomfortable. He had a fairly good idea of what was coming—or at least the general idea—and it was not good.

“He probably thought he was going to get a talking to.” Jeltor tried to make it a joke, but he failed. “They didn’t bother. His mother told Mustafee to take care of it. It was a test; her first big test for her heir. Let’s just say he passed with flying colors.”

Barnabas felt a low throb of anger. “But they kept Tafa alive?”

“Of course. She was just a child. They’re not monsters, after all.” Jeltor’s voice dripped with sarcasm, and Barnabas could feel his genuine disgust at what had happened. For just a moment, Barnabas saw a thought flash through the Jotun’s head—a family with children and siblings, many generations. There was love there, and a deep horror that anyone could hurt their family the way Mustafee Boreir had. Jeltor paused, then admitted, “I suppose I don’t blame her for being…how she is.”

Barnabas thought back to Tafa—earnest and defiant, cloaking her feelings in black humor and resolutely shoving away thoughts of her family. She had chosen to be a painter. What did that say? What did it say that she still tried to make something beautiful, even after her early experiences?

He was not sure. He nodded to Jeltor, however. “Well, thank you. I never would have guessed.”

Jeltor gave a stiff mechanical nod. He seemed embarrassed to have shared a moment of genuine emotion with Barnabas.

As Barnabas walked away, he considered. That bit of conversation had been more successful than he had hoped, and he had a better, not to mention more reassuring, picture of Jeltor’s character.

Tafa’s story, however, was horrifying.

She was sitting straight-backed in her chair when Barnabas entered, thoughts resolutely blank. She was terrified of what was coming.

“I’m sorry I was delayed,” Barnabas told her. He slid into the chair opposite her. “I’m sorry I was curt with you before, as well. I have a lot on my mind.”

It wasn’t the explanation he wanted to give, but it would have to do.

Tafa looked at him mistrustfully, so Barnabas decided to come at this from a direction she wouldn’t expect. “Your paintings are beautiful.”

She froze, her eyes widening. “How…”

“Your thoughts,” Barnabas admitted. “You know I can see them, yes? I told you all as much when we were with the captains.”

“I didn’t think you really meant it.” She sounded horrified. “You saw my— I never show anyone my paintings!”

“No? You should. They’re very good.”

“You can’t even see them the way they’re meant to be seen.” She wasn’t trying to be insulting. “You look at things with both eyes at once. My paintings are for Yofu.”

Barnabas considered this, his eyes distant. He thought back to the images he had seen. Yes, they had always come in pairs, meant to be seen simultaneously. That was fascinating.

“You know, I was once a monk,” he told her. “In human history, before we had the technology to print words, we would copy out our knowledge by hand. Monks—a sort of religious figure—would write the books out very carefully, and they would make art in them. There would be drawings on the page, and they would make the letters beautiful. We called them ‘illuminated manuscripts.’ To make them was a sort of religious devotion; service to God. I got the same feeling from your paintings.” He hesitated, then added, “I know you didn’t mean to show them to me, and I’m sorry I looked without your permission.”

“Most aliens can’t read minds,” Tafa murmured finally. She didn’t say anything about her paintings, though Barnabas had felt a flare of grief when he described them as religious. Knowing her history, he wondered if he had been closer to the mark than he had guessed. “I mean, I know Ubuara kind of can, but they can’t read other species’ minds.”

“Most humans can’t,” Barnabas agreed. “I’m a rather unique case.” He decided not to share the details. He would rather not touch off a firestorm by explaining just how he had come to be modified.

Tafa hesitated. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather skip all the pleasantries. What do you want from me? What are you going to do with me?”

Barnabas sat back in his chair. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t another Mustafee,” he told her bluntly. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t doing the sorts of things he did. I’m now quite sure you’re not. I understand why you wouldn’t work against him. I suppose the question is, what do you want to do with your life now that everyone in your family who wanted to hurt you is gone?”

She looked at him with a storm of emotion in her eyes. She’d never considered a universe like that; never dreamed that it might exist. Images flashed through her thoughts one after another—seeing new planets, new people. Painting. Learning languages.

Then reality returned, or what she thought was reality. Gray and depressing, it filled her thoughts with the reminder that her family’s money had been the only thing that stood between her and starvation. With them gone, she believed she had nothing.

“Stay here.” The offer came easily. “Until you decide, you can stay here if you want. You’re not obligated to do so.”

She gave him a wry smile. “I have no skills other than painting.”

“Then we’ll get you some paints,” Barnabas replied. “Take any of the suites. It doesn’t matter which.”

“But I can’t… I don’t…” She frowned as he stood up. “Look, I’m the family disgrace. They only kept me around as a warning to the rest of clan. I’m of no use to you.”

Barnabas gave a small smile. “You don’t have to be.”

“Why not? Why would you give me something if I’m not useful? Why would you keep me alive?”

Barnabas paused. “Because the measure of a person isn’t how useful they are,” he said finally. “With me, people don’t earn their lives, they earn their deaths. You’ve spent your whole life trying to be nothing, but you found beauty even in that. What could you do if you weren’t always looking over your shoulder? I think you should get a chance to answer that question.”

Shocked into silence, she said nothing, and he left her to sit in peace. He was halfway to the kitchen before he looked at a camera, frowning at Shinigami’s unusual silence.

What, no mockery about the sappy speech?

No. Her answer was immediate. She said nothing more, however. In the unexpected silence, he sipped his tea and thought about Tafa’s paintings and Gar’s redemption, Jeltor’s family, and Crallus’ mercenaries as the Shinigami burned toward Virtue Station.

Chapter Eleven

“I don’t know, Zinqued.” Chofal sighed. She stared at the device he’d put on the table between them. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“What, because Paun said not to keep going for the ship?” Zinqued snorted. “Paun just doesn’t want to play in the big leagues.”

“There’s something to that,” Chofal said seriously. “You know how those rivalries are, people are getting killed all the time when you get to that level.”

“Yeah, but the ones who don’t die, get rich! Really rich.” Zinqued nodded meaningfully. “You have no idea how rich, Chofal.”

“What do I need money for? I’ve got a good life.”

“Really?” Zinqued gave her a look. “You’re totally fine living in a tiny bunk, eating freeze-dried food and drinking Stim-Drink for the rest of your life?” He sensed he had her, and since he knew what Chofal wanted out of life, he gave the last little push. “You could have a big mansion on your home planet. A huge workshop, too, full of spaceship parts. You could have your own dock full of ships and just tinker around with them.”

She gave him a wide-eyed look. Clearly, she’d never thought about this. Still, she wasn’t sure. “You saw the kind of weapons that ship had,” she argued. “We don’t have those—and I don’t think anything I do will make us fast enough to outrun them.”

Zinqued patted the device on the table. “That’s why we use this, right? It can burrow in and inject a virus into their computer systems. It’ll shut everything down, they won’t have a chance in hell of defeating programming this sophisticated.” He’d paid through the nose and called in every favor he had at their last stop, but it would be worth it. “I just need you to make sure it can latch on securely and get through the hull.”

Chofal wavered, but as Zinqued had guessed, she was too proud of her work to resist. She had a healthy appreciation for the other ship…which meant she wanted to get her hands on it. The idea of using her engineering skill to knock out the computer systems she didn’t understand—and thus feared—was just too tempting.

She nodded and snatched at the device.

“I’ll do it,” she said with a grin. She swung her head from side to side to see him with both eyes, a bit nervous but also excited by the challenge. “It’ll be ready in a couple of days.”

“A day,” Zinqued corrected. “Who knows when we’ll come across them again?”

“What are you talking about?” Paun’s voice suddenly cut through the air, and Zinqued looked up to see the captain looking between the two of them, his eyes far too knowing for comfort.

Chofal rescued the situation with some quick thinking. “Zinqued had an idea for a new device to help us steal ships.” She told the half-truth with simple sincerity. She hoisted the device up to show Paun. “I told him I’d have it done in a few days, but he reminded me it’s been a while since we’ve seen a likely ship, so we need to be ready when we do see one.” She pushed herself up and nodded. “I’ll get to work on this. Engines are running fine, nothing much else for me to do.”

Paun gave a long look at Zinqued when she was gone, and Zinqued tried to look as innocent as he could. Finally, Paun sighed.

“Let’s hope this device of yours works,” he said shortly. “Easy marks are getting fewer and farther between these days.”

Zinqued stared after him in surprise as he left. He’d thought they would have to follow the Shinigami against orders, but with Paun getting more and more worried about finding another haul...

Yes. It was quite possible that Zinqued could get the captain to agree to this scheme.

He grinned as he made his way to the ship’s tiny kitchen. We’re gonna be legends.

* * *

They made good time to Virtue Station in the tiny nameless ship. Crallus spent most of it checking the sensors obsessively, but nothing ever showed up on the scopes.

Was it possible that the Shinigami hadn’t noticed them leaving? That it had guessed their port wrong and was racing to find them in another direction? He’d been sure that they would look behind them and see that damned human, but none of his fears had come true yet.

By the time they docked—Uleq’s family money had eased the way, and the Station Manager practically fell over himself to welcome them—Crallus had begun to think all of this had turned around. No matter how he felt about the mercenaries he’d left behind, it was hard not to feel a rush of relief at their sudden safety.

Which was why, when they found their change of ship blocked, Crallus didn’t at first understand what he’d heard.

“I’m very sorry, sir.” The Station Manager practically cried as Uleq stared him down. He was wringing his hands. “Mr. Jodu says that on the orders of Ilia Yennai, you must meet with him before the ship can be released.”

Uleq’s face went stormy, and Crallus guessed that Ilia must be his sister.

For a moment, he felt amused at the plight of the station manager. It was bad luck to be caught between the high-ranking officials of a company as large as the Yennai Corporation. But it’d be a good story for him to tell later.

Then Crallus remembered that to Ilia, Uleq was the rebellious younger brother who’d probably lost the family significant money as he feuded with Barnabas and the former Etheric Empire.

And Crallus was certain to be caught in whatever trap Ilia set for her brother. He gave a heartfelt inner curse as he hurried after Uleq, who was striding upstairs to the main level with murder writ plain on his face.

“Uleq—”

“It will be fine,” Uleq ground out. He looked over, and to Crallus’ surprise, he could see the history of this rivalry as clear as day. Uleq had always been the younger, inexperienced sibling, never the favorite. He had tried to be clever, to earn his father’s respect, but nothing had worked—all the glory went to Ilia. Now she was determined to make him pay for what she viewed as a poor choice while she continued blindly on with a course of action Uleq knew would be ruinous.

He was furious, and Crallus could hardly blame him for it.

Then the walls came down behind Uleq’s eyes, and there was only the alien who had told Crallus that his father and sister would die without ever knowing why. The one who had sent Fedden on a suicide mission because executions stirred up bad sentiment. The one who had sent Crallus’ mercenaries to die so that Uleq could escape.

This Torcellan was dangerous. Crallus put his head down and followed, regretting all the choices that had led him here. Could he slip away? Would that be possible?

He still hadn’t thought of a way to do so as they entered the bar that housed the station’s largest bank—a part of the Yennai Corporation, as it happened. Everything here was Yennai, except for the vendors that were so small as to be insignificant. Crallus would bet that even they traded information, though.

Mr. Jodu turned out to be a Brakalon, which took Crallus aback somewhat. Brakalons made excellent guards. They were difficult to kill, strong as steel, and practically impossible to frighten.

They weren’t usually bankers. He’d never seen one in a suit before.

Jodu stood and ducked his large head in a nod. “Mr. Yennai. I—”

Uleq slammed something onto the table, and the guards had their guns out in an instant. But Crallus stared at the thing with his jaw hanging open. It looked like a bar of pure etreusium, which would make it…

Close to priceless.

“Will this be enough?” Uleq’s voice was dangerous, and everyone in the room heard the threat. Uleq might be unarmed. He might be here due to the wishes of a more powerful member of the Yennai Corporation.

But his voice said that if Jodu didn’t take the deal, Ilia’s protection wouldn’t arrive before Uleq’s retribution.

Fortunately for everyone, Jodu was a sensible Brakalon, and Uleq had chosen his offer well. Untraceable and worth millions on the open market, the Etreusium was enough of a bribe for anyone to disappear.

Jodu slipped it into the pocket of his coat with a smile. “I will tell your sister that I believe your return to the Yennai Corporation will cause no undue problems.”

“Do that.” Uleq snarled, and he pushed his way back out of the room with Crallus at his heels.

“Please, let us offer you refreshment while the ship is readied.” Jodu must have brass balls, Crallus thought, to engage with Uleq again. Far safer just to let him leave. But the Brakalon didn’t flinch as Uleq looked back at him. “It will be only a few minutes, but space travel is so uncivilized. A nice meal, perhaps?”

Uleq paused, and Crallus prayed.

Then Uleq nodded. He allowed himself to be shown to a table and sat in silence as food and drinks were brought and the servers melted away. Then he looked at Crallus and said simply,

“I’m going to enjoy watching them die.”

Chapter Twelve

“I hate stations.” Jeltor sounded pained as he looked around at the interior of Virtue Station. “It’s always the very worst sorts that try to take shelter in places like this. And no matter what they do with the decor, one can never forget how unnatural it is to be making a permanent home in space.”

Tafa thought this was more than a bit ridiculous, given the fact that the Jotun couldn’t leave their home planet’s seas without their robotic power suits, but she didn’t mention that.

“Are you coming, or aren’t you?” She braced a hand on one hip.

“I’ll come,” Jeltor confirmed, with the put-upon tone of someone who is only doing a favor for a friend. But I won’t like it, his voice indicated.

Tafa was in too good of a mood to care. She set off at a quick pace—well, for her short legs—and climbed four levels from the glitz and soft music of the banks. Barnabas had transferred money into an account she could access and told her to buy whatever she wished for the next few weeks on the ship. He’d advised her that if for some reason the Shinigami had to leave suddenly, she should find lodging and he would pay for it when he returned.

Why he would have to leave suddenly…he hadn’t said.

Tafa planned to get clothes and toiletries—her one set of clothing needed to be washed. She’d looked like a child playing dress-up in human clothes the last time she washed hers. Plus, human toothbrushes just did not work in Yofu mouths, and there were a few things even the Shinigami couldn’t synthesize.

But first, she wanted to look at art supplies.

She’d done her research, and she knew there was a shop on this level that had paints and brushes. It was quieter up here. The first couple of levels on either side of the main banking level had to do with Yennai Corporation business in all its forms: parts, information, mercenaries, money. The rest of the station was only tangentially related.

She liked this level. Someone was playing the flute, and the hallways were clearer. Shopkeepers chatted with one another and were sharing tea, and a few called out greetings. Jeltor seemed to take this as a personal insult, but Tafa only smiled and shook her head at him.

Her family was dead. This should trouble her, but all she felt was relief. Her parents should have died long ago, before their years of torment—and after that ordeal, death was a mercy. She mourned their passing and welcomed it in equal measure.

And Mustafee had deserved to die. When Tafa asked, the ship confirmed that Barnabas was hunting down the remaining members of the Boreir Group and that they would face Justice. That made her happy. Between the ones who had used her as an example, and the ones who had not intervened, she had no warm feelings for any of them.

She was free now. She could do anything she wanted, and her mind was full of paintings in a riot of colors. She wanted to make beautiful art. She’d figure out the rest later.

She found the shop quickly and took her time as she pored over the materials available. There were notebooks with thick paper, good for watery paints, and boards that would take thicker paints nicely. Some brushes were so soft, she could hardly believe they were real.

And the paints…

They were here in every color she could imagine and more, and when she opened the lids surreptitiously, the smell brought her back to some of the happiest times in her life. When she painted, she found she could accept the universe as it was. Her own story faded into a larger universe that still held beauty. The smell brought all of that back.

Even though she’d been rich, she had tried to use as little of her family’s wealth as possible. She’d never bought good paints or brushes, in part because she didn’t want to feel gratitude to Mustafee for anything, but also because she superstitiously feared that if she cared too much for her paintings, Mustafee would have used that against her, too.

She didn’t have to fear that now. Recklessly, she bought everything she wanted from the shop and loaded herself up with bags that Jeltor offered to carry—and then complained about as they made their way back down the stairs to the clothing boutiques.

There weren’t many clothes here that fit Yofu, but she cared less about that. Tafa selected things in plain blacks and greys, reminiscent of the clothes Barnabas wore around the ship—it was an elegant look without too much effort, which appealed to her—and then bought some toiletries.

“What do you need?” she asked Jeltor.

“Oh, are you done?” His tone was acid. “Or would you like to load me up with some more bags?”

“You’re not even carrying them,” Tafa pointed out. “The suit is.”

“And it’s straining at the joints. I need oil and fittings. They’re one level down from the main floor.”

“Well, let’s go, then.” Tafa rolled her eyes as the Jotun stomped past her. Jeltor really just liked to complain. He’d been nicer to her over the past few days, and she guessed that part of it was that Barnabas had promised to return him to the Jotun fleet, where Jeltor’s family still lived. He’d been on a work trip when he was captured.

Her smiled faded when she thought of the people on their ship who hadn’t survived the attack. She and Jeltor had been lucky. If Drakuz’d had the chance to sell them, their lives would be very different right now.

They’d just passed the main floor when there was a shout. Several figures raced across the main room, and a few moments later, they heard shots fired.

The people screamed and cowered, but she only crossed her arms and watched as the figures ran to the far end of the level and disappeared.

“Oh, good,” Jeltor said sarcastically. “We’ll be imprisoned as part of Barnabas’ crew.”

“He’s not in jail yet,” Tafa pointed out. “It seems like he does this everywhere he goes. So we’re probably fine. We should get back to the ship, though.”

“Leaving my supplies unpurchased. Of course.”

“Yeah, yeah. They gave you a tune-up, and you’ve been running better than ever. No complaining.”

* * *

Crallus had tried his very best to forget Barnabas, the Yennai Corporation, and even Uleq.

The food helped. It was some of the best he’d ever eaten. The meat was tender. The drinks were paired perfectly. The vegetables were fresh. Who got to eat like this on a station, much less for free? He devoted all his attention to it and pretended this was a celebration of a successful job.

You know, rather than remember that his whole team died, and he was sitting with a cold-blooded murderer who might get Crallus killed.

He’d just finished when Uleq’s head jerked up, and Crallus felt his stomach drop. He looked around with a sense of deep misgiving.

Barnabas was staring at them with a small smile on his face.

Crallus didn’t hesitate.

“Run.” He grabbed Uleq’s arm and yanked him out of his seat.

The Torcellan hissed in anger at being hurt this way, but it was more for form’s sake than anything else. He’d frozen in surprise, but like Crallus, he knew that if they got caught they were going to die.

“Stop him!” Crallus yelled at the guards. He pointed at Barnabas. “He’s trying to assassinate one of the Yennai Corporation’s heirs!”

“I’m not an heir!” Uleq yelled as they sprinted across the main floor. Gunshots rang out behind them.

“They don’t need to know that!” Crallus called back.

Rich people. It was like they were born without common sense.

His shoulder ached, but he pushed the thought away. He had to keep running. They had to get to the ship before Barnabas caught them.

He’d seen some of the security footage from the syndicate base, and it had made his blood run cold. This human was a creature of nightmares and Crallus was terrified to die as painfully as his soldiers had.

He felt guilty for leaving them. But not guilty enough to accept retribution from a monster with glowing red eyes.

* * *

Guards swarmed out of nowhere, and Barnabas’ eyes narrowed.

“My quarrel is not with you. Step aside.”

They thought they had seen everything, the idiots. All of them reached for their weapons in an obvious display of force.

“Sir,” the guard captain started. “We’re going to have to ask you to leave.”

Barnabas took a moment to sigh. Then he launched himself into their midst, dispatching them with brutal efficiency. “Gar, keep an eye on Crallus and Uleq.”

Gar started to run after them, only to get lifted over a guard’s head and brought down hard on the floor. He yelped, and Barnabas tried to refrain from sighing again.

Tunnel vision was common in a fight—focusing on one enemy to the exclusion of others. Gar knew he was lucky that his lesson had been in the form of pain because quite often, the consequences of tunnel vision were fatal.

Barnabas knocked out as many of the guards as he could, but they weren’t making it easy. They charged him with impressive technique and tactics. They’d clearly been trained to take on elite assassins, which Barnabas supposed made sense given the nature of their business. None of their training had been for combatants enhanced with Kurtherian DNA and technology, however, and they fell one and two at a time until Barnabas faced down the last of them: the guard captain.

“Stand aside,” he said again.

The guard captain’s eyes narrowed, and a feral yell burst from his lips. He charged at Barnabas in a fury, snarling either insults or threats in his native language. Probably some combination of both. Barnabas didn’t understand the words, but the general meaning behind them was clear.

Barnabas’ intentions were just as clear. He’d readied his knives when the guard captain was tackled sideways. Gar slammed into him and carried him down, following up with a flurry of punches at the Shrillexian’s head.

In fairness to the Shrillexian, Barnabas would have to say that shock probably did part of Gar’s job for him. The guard captain must have thought he was hallucinating when he saw that it was a Luvendi who had tackled him and was presently beating the living shit out of him.

That said, Gar acquitted himself nicely. In a footnote to what would become a legendary day on Virtue Station, he proceeded to completely incapacitate the guard captain. He stood up, chest heaving, and then—as the battered, bruised captain reached for his gun—shot the Shrillexian.

“Good job.” Barnabas was already on the move. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder.

Gar raced after him. Crallus and Uleq had just reached the far side of the main floor, heading toward the ramps that led to the docking bays, when Barnabas put on a burst of speed that left Gar in the dust.

“Shinigami, stop any ships from leaving!”

“I’m trying.” Shinigami’s voice betrayed her worry. “They’ve got another system I didn’t know about, though. Probably just for Yennai higher-ups. It’s on a completely different encryption system and—"

“Less talking, more hacking!” Barnabas burst through the doors with his guns already out and skidded into cover as a hail of gunfire shot overhead. He could hear screams behind him as some of the bullets went through the open doors, and he felt a wave of fury. The people on the banking floor might generally be scum, but they didn’t deserve a random death from a stray bullet. That wasn’t Justice. “Shinigami, the ship is pulling away. Follow it!”

“I’m trying! They’ve got manual clamps locked down on every other ship in the station. If I try to pull away, I’ll tear the hull—or vent the docking bay.”

“Goddammit!” Barnabas grabbed Gar as the Luvendi came through the doors and pulled him down. Only three guards were shooting, and he picked them off methodically before standing.

“We lost them.” Gar looked incredulous. “We fought, but they got away.”

Barnabas reached out to clasp his shoulder and was about to say a few words about best efforts and frustration when one of the dock workers laughed.

“You’re a Luvendi,” the dockworker told Gar. “If you were fighting, that’s the reason they got away.”

Gar’s face went cold, and he turned slowly. “Take. That. Back.”

Uh-oh, Barnabas murmured privately to Shinigami.

Uh-oh? No, this gon’ be gooood. Her frustration forgotten, Shinigami brought up all the feeds she could find of the docking bay. Get some popcorn. There’s gonna be a fight.

Chapter Thirteen

“Gar.” Barnabas’ voice was deep and even. “This isn’t worth fighting about.”

It’s totally worth fighting about.

Shinigami!

What? He got insulted.

Gar could hardly hear them through the pounding of his blood in his ears. He narrowed his eyes at the dockworker, a stupid-looking Hieto with piggy eyes and a crooked snout. He was still laughing at Gar, and he nodded in Barnabas’ direction.

“You should listen to your friend, Luvendi.” He turned away, clearly having decided that neither of them was going to shoot him, but that Barnabas also wasn’t going to make a big deal of the insult.

He should have just kept walking. Everyone agreed on that point later. Gar might have been talked down if he’d shut up and gone away.

On the other hand, it made such a good story that everyone decided it was better the Hieto hadn’t resisted getting one last shot in. “Where’d you find someone to make you armor, anyway? They were laughing at you the whole time, you skinny bastard. You paid them for nothing.”

“Shut. Up.” The words came out as a snarl.

“Oooh, good one.” The Hieto looked back and forth between Barnabas and Gar. “You see this, human? Is he actually on your team? What’d he say to get you to—”

Gar’s punch caught him on the side of the head, and the Hieto dropped in a heap. All across the docking bay, workers who’d pretended not to watch stopped pretending. A sea of faces turned in their direction.

“I think you showed him,” Barnabas said gently.

“No, you didn’t. Make an example, Gar.”

Shinigami, if you don’t shut up—

What, you’ll turn this ship around? I fly the ship.

As the dockworkers edged closer, Gar sank into a crouch and watched the Hieto’s unconscious form. When at last he came to, shaking his head muzzily and pushing himself up on his hands and knees, Gar stood and kicked him in his plated stomach.

Ohhhhhhh. Did you get popcorn yet? Because I reiterate: this gon’ be good.

I can’t decide if I’m worried or…

Or you really, really want to see this? Shinigami asked slyly.

Barnabas sighed. Yes.

I knew it. Sit back and enjoy, Big B.

From the look of surprise as he tipped over, no one had ever kicked the Hieto hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Given his armored scales, he could certainly be forgiven for not being used to the experience.

The larger surprise, however, was almost certain that a Luvendi had done it.

“Get up,” Gar spat. “You want to say I can’t fight? Fight me, then. I think you can see from those two hits that I have what it takes.”

“Exactly,” Barnabas started. “So we should really—”

So help me, God, if you get him to leave instead of fighting I will never forgive you.

The last thing we need is to start some sort of legend.

Tooooo late.

It was indeed too late. The Hieto stood up, gave a nervous laugh, and must have decided that his memory of Gar’s punch simply hadn’t happened. He looked around, assumed that the hits must have come from Barnabas, and tried to charge him.

Gar tackled him before he got two steps. He stood, hauled the Hieto off the floor, and slammed him back down again. From the sound of it, more than one scale cracked.

Everyone flinched, even Barnabas.

“I was the one who punched you. I was the one who kicked you.” Gar narrowed his eyes. “I was the one who killed the guard captain back there.”

Oh, no, Barnabas said.

Yeah, I think it’s safe to say we’re not going to be welcome here anymore. Of course, it’s not like they don’t have facial recognition cameras.

Well, I suppose that’s true.

But I am warming up the engines now that the manual locks are off.

Good call. Barnabas cleared his throat. “Gar, we should go.”

“In a moment.” Gar’s eyes were narrowed. “He tried to shame me.”

“And you know that he’s not correct about you,” Barnabas retorted.

For the record, I don’t think that’s going to work.

Why not?

How many centuries did it take before you stopped responding when people questioned your manliness?

Do you think that often happens in monasteries?

You weren’t always in monasteries!

Yes, I see your point. Barnabas sighed. I wish we weren’t drawing attention to him yet. A Luvendi who can fight? That’s noteworthy.

Between you being you and the name of this ship, I think the boat has already sailed on us being low-key.

The Hieto struggled up and gave Gar an unfriendly look. “So you can fight,” he sneered. “Maybe. But you can’t expect people to—” His voice broke off in a squawk as Gar clamped a hand around his throat.

Gar dragged him close. “Manners!”

Oh, Lord, he’s beginning to talk like you.

I sound like a prat.

Since you bring it up—

We’ll discuss this later.

The Hieto struggled and choked.

“The people you let get away are mass-murderers,” Gar said angrily. “You mock me when you did not stop them, either. They would gladly sell you into slavery. They abandoned hundreds of their own to get massacred just last week. And instead of taking the time to learn any of this, you decided to mock those who were attempting to bring them to Justice.”

“Who the hell are you?” the Hieto spat.

“I am Venfaldri Gar.”

“How did you—”

“None. Of. Your. Business.” Gar released his fingers and let the Hieto drop to the floor. “Apologize.”

“No.”

Had he not said that one word, things might have gone differently. Gar could have made a suitably dramatic exit, and the Hieto wouldn’t have spent the next few weeks in a body cast.

But again, everyone agreed that the story was much better this way.

Gar paused, tilting his head to the side much the way Barnabas did. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said no. You come from a weak race.” The Hieto hauled itself up. “Your people are weak and useless. They’re grifters. They make nothing of their own.”

Gar let loose. His knuckles slammed into the Hieto’s face over and over, blocking the Hieto’s strikes easily.

I should probably—oh—do something about—OH—breaking this up. That one had to hurt. Lesson learned: Hieto scales sound awful when they crack.

Ewwww, Shinigami agreed.

The Hieto was sprawled on the floor, hissing in defiance but clearly defeated, and at last, the anger drained from Gar.

“You’ll get yourself killed if you keep doing that,” he told the Hieto. He turned and left, shaking his head as Barnabas followed.

He threw a few coins to one of the other dock workers. “Get your friend some medical help and talk some sense into him.”

The dock worker said nothing, and Barnabas hurried Gar along to the Shinigami.

“Why are we running?”

“Because someone’s going to call the guards,” Barnabas said. “That’s what tends to happen when there’s a fight. Especially after a fight where several station-hired guards get killed.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh.” Barnabas was glad to see Tafa and Jeltor already on board as they arrived. “Any problems?” he asked them.

“Tafa bought half the station and made me carry it,” Jeltor said in tones of deep martyrdom.

“That is not true.” Tafa gave him an annoyed look before looking at Barnabas. “I got some paints! And boards and notebooks and brushes and—oh. We saw people running and heard gunshots.”

“Yes, that was us,” Barnabas admitted, his amusement evident. “Everything is fine. Although we should probably leave before someone calls the authorities.”

“Already undocking,” Shinigami reported.

“Good.” Barnabas nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

Zinqued was forcing his way through another cup of Stim-Drink when the message flashed up on his screen.

SHINIGAMI SPOTTED AT VIRTUE STATION. JUST UNDOCKED. HEADING FOR QUADRANT 982.

Zinqued gave a cold smile and sat up straight, his exhaustion forgotten. He punched in the coordinates, and his smile grew as the ship began to turn. Paun probably wouldn’t notice for a few hours, and by then they’d be well on the way.

Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Chapter Fourteen

“There’s a warrant out for our arrest at Virtue Station,” Shinigami reported. “Of course, not exactly for us.” Her avatar was leaning against the wall as Gar and Barnabas warmed up on the mats. “Also, is painting in a gym a normal Yofu activity?”

“Hmm?” Barnabas, who was stretching, looked up curiously.

Tafa, who was painting in the corner, looked up at the cameras with her left eye. “They inspire me.”

Shinigami snorted to show what she thought of that. Jeltor agreed with a mechanical-sounding sigh.

“Anyway,” Shinigami continued. “It turns out that the guard captain for Jodu’s bank was a real piece of work. He would just go around murdering people. They knew that it was a human and a Luvendi, and they have the security tapes, but once people heard that Gar was the one who’d killed the guard captain, they started going to the guards and claiming they knew stuff. You know, adding in details. So the report out says that Gar was wearing a disguise but was actually a Leath. You’re a Torcellan, apparently. We have a crew of Shrillexians, our ship name is really the Calcifer, and we’re legendary for starting a blood feud that ended with us wiping out an entire family of bankers.”

“It’s like Robin Hood,” Barnabas said drily. “Except with less distribution of wealth and more wild lies.”

“You think Robin Hood just stole? He totally killed people. But I think you two have really hit on something here: you kill bankers, and all the normal people are just going to claim they didn’t see anything.”

“That won’t really work,” Gar interjected. He was limbering up as he stared at Barnabas and tried to come up with some strategy that wouldn’t result in a great deal of pain.

“You should look up Charles Floyd in the history banks,” Shinigami suggested.

“We are not becoming petty criminals,” Barnabas declared.

“Of course not. We don’t steal $20 bills. We murder people.”

“We judge people.”

“Legally speaking—”

“Yes, yes,” Barnabas said hastily. Under his breath, however, he added, “With you egging Gar on.”

“There were reasons for what I did,” Shinigami said in lofty tones.

“See?” Gar told Barnabas. “There were reasons.”

Barnabas gave him a pitying look. “Ask her what they are.”

“Uh, Shinigami—”

“It was hilarious.” Shinigami was completely unrepentant.

“You said it was because he insulted me!”

“And it would be hilarious if you beat him up. I was right, too. It was hilarious. You’re a hero now. All of a sudden, a Luvendi is going around beating up awful people and helping out the little guys. And trust me, your species could use some good PR. I’m helping.”

“Your help is entirely incidental,” Barnabas said. “Come on, Gar. Time to spar.”

Gar groaned—this was going to hurt. Every time they sparred, Barnabas gave him more pointers, which Gar dutifully put into action.

The thing was, he still never came even close to winning. Sidestepping one hit didn’t keep him from being hopelessly outmatched in speed, strength, and tactics. Barnabas just repeated that Gar was learning important things.

Gar kept pointing out that learning didn’t really help him if he never had a chance of winning.

But, for reasons he could not figure out, he kept coming back, and it was entirely on him—Barnabas never asked about sparring. He simply went to the gym each day as he always had and trained on his own. If Gar showed up, Barnabas was courteous. It was only if Gar stepped onto the mats and asked to spar that Barnabas would do so.

So Gar had only himself to blame for the bruises he was about to receive.

He gave a little sigh as he bounced on the balls of his feet and considered if he should circle or just rush Barnabas—

He wasn’t entirely sure what happened, but he opened his eyes to find himself looking up at the ceiling. “Ow.”

“Get up.” Barnabas was clearly trying to control his amusement. “And spend less time thinking when you’re in the ring.”

“Mmf.” Gar pushed himself up. This time, Barnabas’ attack dragged Gar across the mats and slammed him into the wall. Barnabas had his hand at Gar’s throat, and his blue eyes had a twinkle of amusement, which somehow managed to be almost as intimidating as his red-eyed, blood-covered battle incarnation.

“This is great.” Tafa’s brush was dancing over the twin canvases. “Keep it up, you two. I haven’t been this inspired in ages.”

Even Barnabas looked a little unsettled by that.

“I say we just put a kill switch in her,” Shinigami suggested.

Gar gave a wide-eyed nod at her avatar.

“Chief?”

“I’m not going to agree to that.”

“I notice you do not disagree, either.”

“Well, no.”

Shinigami chuckled in their heads as Barnabas released Gar and the two started to circle again. “Also,” she said over the speakers, “we should talk about those programs at Virtue Station.”

“Which— Oh, the ones that kept you out?” Barnabas shot a quick frown at Shinigami’s avatar.

“Mmm. I may not have been entirely honest at the time.”

Barnabas said nothing. He simply waited as Gar launched a flurry of kicks at him. He blocked each one, pointedly not looking at Shinigami until she cleared her throat hastily—an amusing mannerism that seemed as natural to her now as Tabitha—and explained.

“Their systems aren’t sentient, but they’re very aggressive, and they’re partitioned into multiple distinct servers.”

“What, physical servers?” Barnabas launched himself up, pushed off the wall, and flipped over Gar’s head. As Gar whirled around, confused, Barnabas grabbed him and spun him around the axis of his shoulders before setting him back on his feet and knocking the wind out of him. Gar wobbled, turned around in a circle, and fell with a squeak.

“This is great,” Tafa murmured again. She poured out some new paints onto her palette. “Green. Definitely green.”

“You hear that?” Shinigami asked, flickering across the room to lean over Gar. “Your pain is green.”

“Blrgle.”

“Up,” Barnabas commanded. He took Gar’s hand and hauled the Luvendi to his feet. “Again. This time try not to let me throw you.”

“That sounds doable.”

Barnabas fixed him with a look. “It is doable. You’re convinced you can’t beat me, but that’s not true.”

“It’s true,” Shinigami, Tafa, and Jeltor said in unison.

“The three of you aren’t helping, you know.”

Gar, however, seemed galvanized by their disbelief. He shook his head to clear it and nodded. “No, they’re right. I can’t…yet. Let’s go again.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas sank into a crouch and began to circle.

Again, Gar charged, and again, Barnabas launched himself toward the same wall to push up. However, this time Gar changed direction sharply and punched his leg out to catch Barnabas just as he landed. Barnabas staggered sideways and grabbed for Gar’s leg, but Gar was out of range, circling again.

“Good,” Barnabas called. “That was good. Now, this time—”

Gar didn’t wait for the rest of it. He charged, dodged Barnabas’ first attempted throw—

And wound up upside down against the far wall, barely catching himself with his hands before he crashed to the floor.

There was the distant sound of an alert and Shinigami’s avatar fuzzed briefly out of existence. When she came back, she was frowning. “We have company.”

“I’ll be on the bridge.” Barnabas grabbed his towel and made for the door. “Tafa, Jeltor, you secure yourselves in your rooms. No, Tafa, leave the painting.”

“But it’s some of my best work—”

“Nope.” Barnabas ushered her out the sliding doors. “Gar?”

“I should have stayed on Luvendan,” Gar said, staring at the ceiling with a look of poetic sadness. “And been eaten by the Essekan.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas ushered Tafa and Jeltor out, hiding his smile, and left Gar in peace.

Shinigami’s avatar flickered over to lie on the floor with Gar. She even had her legs up the wall, the same as his. She pillowed her hands behind her head and pursed her lips. Whistling came from the speakers.

“I can’t tell you how comforting your friendship is in this painful time,” Gar said. He was trying to be sarcastic, but his lips were twitching in a genuine smile.

“Ahhhh, you’re laughing. Go on, you know you want to. Come on, get up.” She pushed herself up and offered him a hand, then snatched it away. “Sorry, I always see people do that. Forgot my hand’s not actually there.”

Gar pushed himself up with a laugh. “Right. I didn’t fracture anything, did I?”

“Nope. You’re good to go as soon as we deal with these asshats.”

“Oof. Take your time, then.”

On the bridge, Barnabas slid into the captain’s chair. “Are Tafa and Jeltor in their rooms?”

“Yes.” Shinigami appeared and sat as well. She looked at him to see what he thought of the human mannerism and smiled when he nodded. It had become one of their games for him to assess how human her movements looked. She settled back in the chair. “Tafa is still complaining about that painting. If we can get out of this without doing any barrel rolls, we really should. I don’t want to listen to her moan on about losing it.”

Barnabas smiled slightly. He sensed that the truth was that Shinigami did not want to hurt Tafa’s feelings by ruining the painting. And when Shinigami willingly chose not to use fancy battle techniques to protect someone’s feelings, that was a high compliment to them indeed.

“So, what’s going on?” Barnabas asked. He knew if he mentioned Shinigami’s kindness, she would only get embarrassed and prickly. “What was the alert for?”

“There’s a ship following us.” She pulled up the video feed.

Barnabas squinted. Strangely, even in plain vision, the ship was barely visible.

“They’re good at this,” Shinigami observed. Her face was watchful, eyes slightly narrowed as she considered. “They must suspect that we did a visual check on the debris last time, so they’re following somewhere they won’t be easy to see, either by the naked eye or on our sensors. If I wasn’t built as well as I was...”

Barnabas looked at her for a moment. Rarely did Shinigami refer to the ship as her body, but it must feel that way to her. He wondered what that must be like.

“So what’s their plan?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” She arched a single eyebrow, so like Bethany Anne in her mannerisms for a moment that it was jarring.

Then he noticed the avatar looked a little different. He wasn’t sure—but her features were a touch less aquiline, her skin closer to a healthy human shade, and the hair was silver now, not pure white.

Interesting.

There was a pause while Barnabas squinted at the ship. “I don’t suppose we’ve seen this one before.”

“Not that I know of, and it isn’t balanced the way a warship would be. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are a lot of ships like this and they tend to have a rather nasty suite of tricks to steal other ships.”

“Steal?” Barnabas looked over at her sharply. “There was that net a while ago.”

“Mmm. It’s definitely a nice coincidence, but these outer quadrants are filled with people who steal ships for a living.”

“I told Tik’ta to spread the word that our ship was not to be preyed on,” Barnabas groused.

“And while she may have done exactly as you asked, it’s possible that other people took that as more of a challenge than a warning.”

Barnabas groaned. “I always forget how stupid people are.”

“This ship is incredibly valuable. There will always be people who go for the most difficult thing. I understand a lot of people used to climb Mount Everest despite the risks.”

“A good point, although—”

There was a flicker on the screen.

“They’ve launched something,” Shinigami said.

The two of them leaned toward one of the screens and watched as the object grew closer. It was so small that even their sensors hardly picked it up.

“A bomb?” Barnabas asked.

“I don’t think so. And frankly…” She looked at him with a sharp-toothed smile. “I’m curious. I say we let it do whatever it wants to do.”

“Risky, Shinigami.”

“You want to know just as much as I do.” Her smile said checkmate.

Barnabas grumbled, but the truth was that he did want to know. “Close the blast doors, then, and make sure it hits somewhere there aren’t passengers. We’d better hope this isn’t EMP.”

“I can deal with EMP.” Shinigami looked over as the bridge doors slid open and Gar limped in. “Good of you to join us. We’re about to be hit.”

“By what?” Gar hurried to strap himself in.

“There’s a ship,” Barnabas said, gesturing to the screens. “Shinigami, what’s the ETA on— Never mind.” A loud thunk echoed through the ship.

A moment later, Shinigami announced, outraged, “It’s drilling through my hull!”

“Yes, well, you wanted to see what would happen. Is it trying to vent the ship?”

“No, it’s stopping near the first circuit of electrical—ohhhhh.”

Barnabas raised an eyebrow.

“They’re trying to hack us,” Shinigami said. “The device clamps on, drills in, and tries to get into the system. Oh, that tickles.”

“Tickles?”

“It’s like my mind itches.” She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, they’re so cute. They think they can hack me. Have they never heard of Etheric Empire AIs?”

“Most people haven’t. It’s not something we try to spread around.”

“So you’re telling me I can’t give them a big speech about how they fucked up.”

“Pretty much. Just deal with them.”

Shinigami sighed. “Fine.” She frowned for a moment and closed her eyes in a spot-on impression of a human meditating. A few moments later, her eyes snapped open and she spoke.

Even knowing that she was not speaking to them, Barnabas and Gar shivered.

“Your pathetic little device is not even close to hurting this ship,” Shinigami said. “It is so pathetic, in fact, that I cannot even bring myself to shoot your ship down. It would be dishonorable to do so. Go eat some paste and reconsider your career path.”

Gar leaned over to Barnabas and murmured, “Eat some paste?”

Barnabas stifled his laugh. “It’s an Earth saying. Too much to explain. It means they’re stupid.”

“Ah.” Gar looked faintly sad. “So she’s really not going to blow their ship up?”

“Maybe I should stop you two from hanging out so much without direct supervision,” Barnabas said with a sigh. “You two bring out the worst in each other.”

“Or the best,” Shinigami and Gar responded in unison as the Shinigami put on a burst of speed and left their pursuer in the dust.

* * *

Zinqued and Chofal stared at one another in consternation. They were both still wide-eyed from the message they had received.

“What do you think it means to eat paste?” Chofal asked finally.

“I don’t know,” Zinqued admitted. “But they’re weak if they’re not going to shoot us down. It means we have another chance.”

“Zinqued—”

“I’m getting that ship.” Zinqued jabbed a finger at her. “I’m getting it.”

Chofal groaned. Next time, Paun might find out about what they had done, and they’d both get fired.

That was assuming the ship didn’t just shoot them down next time.

Chapter Fifteen

“So, the question is…” Barnabas brought up a holographic map of the quadrants that were relatively nearby. “Where is Uleq going?”

“We’re just asking that now?” Gar wondered.

Jeltor made a mechanical-sounding grumble of agreement.

“His ship was launched from a different set of systems than the main ones used on Virtue Station,” Barnabas explained. “They’re entirely partitioned, which means that Shinigami wasn’t able to get a toehold into them. All we have is their initial trajectory. She’s been working on finding more, but…”

“But they’re tricky sonsabitches,” Shinigami said succinctly. Her avatar frowned as it looked at the map. “They can’t hide everything from me, but they knew enough to hide a good deal of it. They’ve run some of the YCS ship departures through the main system, or possibly fed it false data with some heavy encryption, so if you’re looking at it, it doesn’t look like they’d have a second set of systems.”

Her avatar flickered and disappeared after that. Shinigami wasn’t in the mood to play human. She didn’t particularly want anyone looking at her.

She was pissed. She had thought she was making headway against the Yennai Corporation, and instead, they’d played her. It wasn’t personal, of course, but she still didn’t like coming in second to her opponents.

Not to mention letting down her friends.

“I guess they knew they’d make a very, very powerful enemy someday,” Barnabas said. He’d surmised the flow of Shinigami’s thoughts and was careful to steer the conversation free either of blame or absolution.

All that mattered was taking their enemies down. They would suffer setbacks and defeats, Barnabas knew. He was not foolish enough to think that they would always come out ahead. Indeed, he had learned over the years that failure was absolutely necessary for the long run.

Only with the taste of defeat would people strive to push the limits of what they could do, and only by pushing those limits could they hope to triumph when the stakes were high.

In this case, he knew that the Yennai Corporation was a cannier opponent than they had guessed. The organic structure surrounded a fierce and ruthless organization. He brought up the list of color-coded planets and stations. Red—where the corporation had enemies, Blue—where they had known agents, and Green, where they had a controlling stake. The glowing dots highlighted nearly every major system, including many capital planets for various alien species.

“This is the Yennai Corporation,” Barnabas explained. “Anything that gets this big is subject to many forces. As an organization, it will begin to command loyalty beyond simply what its leaders ask for. It is essentially a living thing now. It has made itself integral to the economic, security, and political systems of this entire sector. People will instinctively defend it.”

Shinigami’s avatar appeared again, this time no more than ten inches tall. She walked slowly through the holographic map, reaching out sometimes to touch various glimmers. Today, all hints of Tabitha’s features were gone, and she was pure Bethany Anne, from the determined mouth to the watchful eyes.

Barnabas watched her for a moment. She was clearly pondering the situation, and he guessed that she would tell them her conclusions only when they were close to finished. The way she interacted with the map looked almost random at this point, and he presumed that her instincts were guiding her toward a solution.

He cleared his throat to draw the team’s focus back to him. Whatever Shinigami was processing, she clearly didn’t want to be the center of attention right now.

“Often, organizations like this will get very big without any real plan. They simply want profits and political influence. They’ll lobby governments and give bribes. Those organizations have vulnerabilities that come from not really considering security at the start.

“Yennai is different. It’s beginning to look like they always planned to run this sector of space. They’ve been treating themselves as a government, making deliberate attempts to obtain the things governments need—a banking system, an army, mainframes with very high levels of security, and misdirection. I’m wondering if they intended to take over various governments one by one and fight the ones they couldn’t assimilate.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jeltor cut in. “They’ve been angling to get agents into the Jotun government for a year. They’re bold.”

Barnabas raised his eyebrows.

“I was there when Get’ruz Shipping joined the Yennai Corporation,” Jeltor said drily. “The Yennai delegates…well, they talked us down. One of the Get’ruz captains had struck at our supply chain, and we were about to make an example of them when a few Yennai ships showed up pretty much out of nowhere and started negotiating.” His jellyfish body swiveled slightly as he looked around at all of them from the clear tank at the power suit's center. “It didn’t look like they had many weapons on those ships or even good shielding capabilities, but it would have been suicidal to go into that situation without either, and I never got the impression that they were stupid.”

Shinigami paused in her map-wandering to look at him. She had found versions of this story alluded to in the syndicate files, but she hadn’t heard it told like this.

“They showed up and told the syndicate that if they joined the corporation, they’d be protected,” she reported. “I got the sense it was something they did a lot.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Jeltor said. “They acted like it was the most natural thing for a business representative to put themselves between two armed fleets and start negotiating for peace.” He snorted. “Peace. It was just profit. They showed up a few weeks later on Jevvendi to start asking about trade deals.”

Barnabas watched him. Jeltor betrayed the inborn prejudices that had helped Yennai fly under the radar. Jeltor and the rest of the Jotun Navy had correctly guessed that the Yennai Corporation had a dangerous fleet.

And yet, when looking back at the incident, they assumed that Yennai wanted nothing more than money.

Barnabas thought back to Uleq’s run-in with Bethany Anne. As he studied the map in front of him, he became even more convinced that money was only part of what the Yennai Corporation wanted.

They wanted power—and the more he knew of them, the more he was sure that they absolutely should not have it. Whatever their endgame was, it was dangerous.

“There’s a message coming in,” Shinigami reported. “Jeltor, it’s a reply to the one you sent earlier.”

Jeltor’s body swung sharply to look at the avatar. “You intercepted that? How?” He sounded agitated.

“You used my systems to send it,” Shinigami pointed out.

“The encryption should have been unbreakable.” And his tone had more than a hint of complaint to it. Clearly, Jeltor did not like the idea that they were spying on him.

Shinigami disappeared and appeared once more as a normally-sized human. She gave Jeltor an amused look. “From the high grade of weaponry on your suit, and the built-in encryption and messaging systems, I guessed you were part of the Jotun military—or at least upper class.”

Jeltor remained silent.

“It would be irresponsible for me not to monitor your communications,” she pointed out. “Especially when they were going to Jotun high command. And, since you had tried to hack me.”

Barnabas looked at Jeltor with raised eyebrows.

To his surprise, the Jotun acceded with good grace. “Can you agree, at least, that it would be irresponsible for me not to attempt to assess your capabilities?” he asked Shinigami. His body swiveled as he looked at Barnabas. “You’ve been instrumental in taking out any number of ships recently, and yet the Etheric Empire is no more. Trying to find out your allegiances and your capabilities was important.”

“You could have asked,” Barnabas pointed out mildly. “We’ve been nothing if not kind to you.”

But he could tell from the Jotun’s thoughts that he’d told the truth. As the days had worn on, Jeltor had become less guarded. He seemed to be more at ease in Barnabas’ presence, and often forgot to shield his thoughts. Barnabas had also learned to interpret the Jotun’s thoughts through the strange feel of them.

Jeltor had, indeed, been worried about what Barnabas intended to do in this sector.

“With all due respect,” Jeltor began. “A soldier doesn’t rely on words and explanations, but actions. Yours…have set me at ease, but I could not say I completely understand them. It is disconcerting, in someone with such weaponry.” Then he remembered Shinigami’s previous statement. “Shinigami, you said there was a message?”

“Yes. It’s just text, it simply says you are correct in your guess.” To Barnabas, Shinigami added, His message was easy enough to decrypt, but even then, it was oblique.

“You could hardly expect the Jotun Navy to send messages that were easily deciphered,” Jeltor scoffed. He sounded pleased by the message, however. “I had a hunch when we were at Virtue Station. You see, we saw Uleq and Crallus fleeing across the main floor from one of the banks. They knew they were being chased. There would be no reason for them to do anything other than switch ships…unless someone in the Yennai Corporation who outranked them had demanded it.”

Barnabas made a faint sound of satisfaction.

“I suggested as much to my colleagues, who looked into it.” Jeltor laid a small data disk on the table in front of Barnabas, and after Shinigami scanned it and gave the okay, Barnabas plugged it into the table.

The map disappeared, and several Torcellan faces appeared with dossiers. Jeltor pointed to the one in the very center of the display.

“This is Ilia Yennai. She is the heir to the Yennai Corporation and has proven herself a good leader, but her father still holds the bulk of the control in the company. It was my hunch that she was the one who ordered Uleq detained, and it would seem I was correct.”

“Why?” Barnabas asked.

“That, I don’t know.” Jeltor sounded pensive now. “Ilia’s a nasty character, and she’s been the heir for years. If you wanted someone ruthless as your successor, she’d be a good choice. The thing is, Uleq isn’t anyone to disregard, either. He’s been bouncing around for years, involving himself in various schemes, and while he hasn’t yet done anything like take down someone of your Empress’s caliber, he’s gotten closer than blind luck would allow.” He looked directly at Barnabas. “If you want my guess, I’d say that he’s closer to becoming heir than Ilia wants, and she’s determined to take him down.”

“Interesting.” Barnabas looked at Ilia’s face. She shared some of the same features as her brother, whose dossier hovered in the air. Their father was shown with what must be a very old photo. “What do we know about the father?”

“Almost nothing,” Jeltor answered. “He started the corporation when he was quite young and basically disappeared from the public eye. Honestly, it’s possible he’s no longer alive, and Ilia’s just pretending he is for some reason. I’d say that’s unlikely, but he hasn’t been seen in years.”

“Hmmm.”

“In any event,” Jeltor went on smoothly, “while we can’t tell you where their main base would be—we’ve been trying for years to figure it out—we can tell you what kind of weaponry you’ll find there if you ever track them down. Part of the message we received was giving me clearance to reveal that information.”

Barnabas smiled. “What a coincidence,” he said. “We just happen to know where their base is. I’m guessing if we were to go take it out…Jotun high command wouldn’t exactly be upset.”

“Not at all.” Jeltor sounded pleased. “They’re worried at how many of our politicians seem to have been bribed. Take them out, and you won’t have any interference from our Navy.”

“I think that’s settled then.” Barnabas looked at Shinigami. “Set a course, and let’s figure out how to take out this base.”

Chapter Sixteen

Zinqued lounged in the ship’s tiny rec room with a few other members of the crew, playing a new game called ‘checkers,’ when Paun strode into the room in a fury.

“Did you think you would just get away with it?” he demanded.

Zinqued shot a hard look at Chofal, who gave a tiny, terrified shake of her head. She hadn’t told Paun what happened.

Paun saw the look, and his lips tightened in anger. “I reviewed the ship’s logs,” he said contemptuously. “I saw that we pursued a ship last night and that you launched something. I saw the record of the message that came in from the human. Why would you take such a risk? You know how dangerous that human ship is.”

“If we catch that ship—” Zinqued began.

Paun barked. “Don’t tell me again that we’ll be rich if we catch the ship. I spent a long time assembling a crew that wasn’t stupid enough to do things like that—or, I thought I did. The people who go for the big prizes are the ones who get killed. They get greedy, and greedy people get stupid, and stupid people get dead. Are you stupid, Zinqued?”

Zinqued stood up. Anger pounded in his blood.

“How long since we’ve caught a ship?” He stared Paun down. “We haven’t had a haul in weeks. You said yourself that good catches are getting fewer and farther between. Catch this one, and we’re set for months—years, even.”

Paun’s face was still unfriendly, but he didn’t look as sure anymore. “Just because we haven’t had a good take doesn’t mean we should do something stupid,” he said.

But the weakness was there.

Zinqued pressed his advantage. “We don’t have to do something stupid. We know what kinds of tricks they can see through now, and we have information about the other people they took down. We can learn their weaknesses and set a trap for them.”

Paun crossed his arms. He was listening, and so was the rest of the crew.

“They have good detection systems,” Zinqued explained. “So we need to arrange an ambush somewhere they won’t be able to see us coming. There are places nearby with electromagnetic interference or a lot of radio traffic. We’d want to find one of those. Their anti-hacking systems are top-notch, so we can’t rely on hacking to bring the ship under control. We need to use good, old-fashioned manual controls.”

He snuck a glance at Paun and was pleased to see the other alien looked amenable to this.

“Finally,” Zinqued resumed. “We know they can fire multiple spreads of weapons at once, but that they don’t like to hurt innocent ships. My suggestion would be to get multiple mercenary ships and disguise them as cargo or transport ships, meaning that the Shinigami won’t fire on them. A few of them will be able to dock, and board and they can overpower the relatively small crew.”

He’d almost had it, but now Paun’s brows snapped together.

“Multiple mercenary ships?” Paun sounded halfway between incredulous and absolutely filled with rage. “Are you insane? We’re going after them because our funds are running low. Where are you going to get money to—”

“They’ll only get paid if they take the ship down,” Zinqued broke in, but Paun wasn’t convinced in the slightest.

“No one’s going to take on that ship without a deposit,” he said. “You do something like this again, and you’re fired.”

He walked away, determined to have the last word, but Zinqued called after him: “If I find the mercenaries to do the work for ten percent of the take, will you do it?” It was an audacious plan, but he really had nothing to lose. Even when Paun turned to him with a weary look, Zinqued did not waver.

“Yeah, sure.” Paun looked at Zinqued like he was a toddler throwing a tantrum. “If you find some crews to do that, you let me know.” He walked away shaking his head. He thought there was about as much chance of that, as finding out that stars came with on-off switches.

Zinqued, not deterred by his attitude, gave a triumphant look at Chofal. “I’m going to go send some messages.”

“Zinqued.” She sank her face into her hands. “You’re getting obsessed. Paun’s right; no one will want to do this for that small a share of the take.”

Did you hear what happened at Virtue Station?” Zinqued asked. “He killed a bunch of the bankers’ guards. I’m betting we can get some people who want the Shinigami taken down.”

It would be easy enough, after all, to turn the crew members over to Virtue Station’s justice and pretend the Shinigami had been damaged beyond repair in the fight.

He could do this. For this payout, he’d find a way to pull it off.

* * *

A message bleeped on the screen, and Uleq leaned forward to peer at it. His eyebrows went up, and he settled in to send a response.

Crallus watched him. Reading the Torcellan’s thoughts was impossible. Was he pleased by the message he’d received, or was he angry? Was he responding favorably to someone, or threatening to kill them? His expression betrayed nothing.

Crallus reflected once again that he should probably not be Uleq’s ally.

Uleq looked up and smiled. “It turns out someone else is hoping to deal with the Shinigami.”

“Who?” Crallus wasn’t surprised, only curious. Someone who tried to impose laws and Justice on the outer sectors, like Barnabas, was bound to accrue enemies.

“A petty ship thief.” Uleq looked amused. “They sent a message looking for mercenaries, and I have alerts set up in all of the major communication systems for people talking about the Shinigami or any other human ships. I was able to contact them before anyone else could.”

“They’re never going to—”

Uleq gave a careless shrug. “They’ve had a few run-ins with the ship and come away alive, and they have a plan. I’ll give them some funding and see if they can capture the ship. I even have a plan for where, exactly, they can take it on.” His face darkened. “We’ll see what my sister thinks.”

The words were bitter, and Crallus remembered with a chill that Ilia Yennai had not been pleased with Uleq.

He wondered just what they would walk into when they got to the Yennai Corporation headquarters.

* * *

“Five minutes.” Zinqued slammed the message printout down on the table. “It took five minutes to find someone.”

The crew members looked at one another silently, and Paun stared at Zinqued rather than the message.

“I assume this is some acceptance from a mercenary group, then?” Paun sounded unimpressed.

Zinqued ground his teeth. Paun would know exactly what this was if he had read it. “We’re funded. In full. For as many mercenaries as we need.”

“Who the hell would do that?” Paun frowned.

“Uleq Yennai. Apparently, the humans have caused them some problems.”

“The Yennai Corporation?” Paun’s face went stony. “Once they have that ship in their grasp, they’ll never give it up.”

“Maybe.” Though he had some plans on that score, he wasn’t about to share them with Paun. “And maybe they’ll be really grateful that someone took care of this for them.”

Paun wavered, but then he looked around at the crew. All of them looked back, unimpressed. It had been a long few weeks without a job.

Without any bonuses.

“Fine,” Paun acquiesced. He looked at all of them. “But I have a bad feeling about this.” He stomped out of the room without looking back.

Zinqued smiled.

They’d see who the captain was when all of this was over.

* * *

The Yennai Corporation headquarters looked like nothing—a hunk of rock floating in outer space. There were no noticeable patrols, no buildings or visible entrances, and no emissions on any of the scanners.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Crallus asked. He had a sudden vision of Ilia plunging their ship into the side of an asteroid.

“Yes,” was all Uleq said. Despite his usual arrogant expression, he seemed ill at ease. He had grown more and more withdrawn as the ship came closer to its destination.

Crallus closed his eyes briefly and prayed that they weren’t about to be executed.

There was a tiny, almost invisible, entrance covered by a force field in the asteroid. The ship slid through and set down in an eerily empty landing bay, piloting itself the whole way. Uleq strode off of it with his face tight and angry. It didn’t take any schooling in family politics to know that this was the worst kind of insult for him. They were humiliating him on purpose.

For the first time, Crallus felt sorry for Uleq.

He didn’t say that, though. He knew enough about the guy to know that Uleq would probably murder him if he did.

They crossed the floor with their every movement echoing in the huge space, and Crallus’ worry grew with each step. When the soldiers appeared, it was almost a relief. At least something was happening.

Uleq stopped, raising an eyebrow. “I take it my sister would like me to see her immediately.”

The guard captain inclined his head. “In the Overlook, sir.”

Uleq tensed, and his face went entirely flat. He did not look at Crallus, only set off with his footsteps moving quickly. Whatever was going to happen, he seemed to want it to be over with.

The Overlook appeared to be nothing more than another cavernous room, though there was a strange, bluish glow around the back of it. Uleq frowned as they were marched across the floor toward a single figure in white robes.

Ilia Yennai regarded them as they approached. Crallus could see the similarities between her and Uleq.

“Ilia,” Uleq said shortly with a look of contempt.

“Uleq.” The soldiers fanned out around her, and Ilia didn’t even give them a glance as she let loose on Uleq. “You have disgraced us. You have squandered resources on a useless vendetta.”

“I have devoted every resource I have to our family’s greatest enemy,” Uleq shot back. “With your backing, we could have destroyed them by now. Instead, you have divided us, and our enemy has grown stronger.”

She snorted. “The humans and their federation are no threat, brother. We will infiltrate them as we have infiltrated all other governments, and we will control them from the shadows. Had you served our interests, you would have spent your time on that.”

“You have no idea what you are dealing with,” Uleq retorted, his voice beginning to rise. “They will destroy us. They will—”

“I am not interested in hearing all of this again.” Ilia shook her head, bored and elegant. “You will remain here until I decide what to do with you.”

“Don’t you mean, until Father decides what to do with me?” Uleq’s challenge was delivered with narrowed eyes.

“Oh, no.” Ilia’s smile was supremely self-satisfied. “He’s given me complete control in this matter.”

She took a moment to savor the look on Uleq’s face then swept out of the room with the soldiers surrounding her.

Uleq stood frozen, his eyes wide and horrified. Crallus watched him a moment then went to look at the glow at the edge of the room. The ground fell away sharply a few feet before the wall, and he looked down to see...

He froze.

“The radiation can’t reach us.” Uleq’s voice made Crallus jump. He nearly lost his footing and stumbled back from the edge, cursing, his heart pounding. Uleq peered over the edge with a strange detachment. “You see the force field? It keeps the radiation in. A modified version of what’s at the end of our landing bays.”

“Oh.” Crallus nodded. He felt like an idiot.

“It doesn’t stop a falling body, though.” Finally, a trace of fear showed in Uleq’s eyes. “This is where they hold executions.”

Chapter Seventeen

The mercenaries met them on Tretoar, a station jumbled together from an old mining rig and a few cargo ships. Paun hated this place, though it was one of the best spots in the sector to offload stolen goods with no questions asked. The station managers there were some of the best paid in known space. Their cut was high, and for good reason: they never, ever gave information about who had gone through Tretoar.

Since Zinqued wasn’t paying the station fee, he was happy to be using this place. Among other things, it showed that Uleq Yennai was serious.

Which was good, because, after a flurry of initial details, Uleq seemed to have dropped off the map.

All his money had cleared, though, and the mercenaries were eager to bargain for as much more as they could. As far as Zinqued could tell, he’d been given a blank check to hire as many as he wanted.

He stared out over the sea of mercenaries, all milling around between the ten ships, and considered.

Ten was a good number…for any other ship than this one.

“How many more ships can you bring?” he asked brusquely.

The syndicate leader, a grizzled old Shrillexian with one eye missing, gave Zinqued a small smile. “How many do you need?”

“Four times as many as this,” Zinqued said promptly.

He had the satisfaction, at least, of seeing the old mercenary look taken aback. Then his face set as if he thought Zinqued didn’t know what he was talking about. “I can get you ten more,” the male said. He shrugged. “They’re all good ships.”

Zinqed only shrugged. “It’s not my life on the line. I suppose we can try throwing twenty at it and see what happens. We’ll just use more next time. And you might do some damage, after all.”

The mercenary and Zinqued stared at each other for a long moment.

“I’ll find you forty more,” the mercenary said finally.

“Good,” Zinqued said. He considered, then made his play, strolling away from Paun and motioning for the mercenary to follow him. “I have a buyer lined up for something on the ship,” he said. “An object of sentimental value—he’s an antiquities collector. You’ll no doubt have been told to hand the ship over to the Yennai Corporation, hmm?”

The mercenary nodded impassively.

Zinqued smiled. “The amount of money he’s willing to pay for this artifact is quite impressive. I assure you, and I do not say this lightly, that I can give you more than the Yennai Corporation for your help in keeping the ship with me.” He gave the other Shrillexian a look. “Remember, after all, that they would have sent you woefully underprepared. I am the one who is giving you a chance at survival.”

The mercenary smiled at this and reached out one hand. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“And you.” Zinqued nodded and headed back to Paun.

The mercenaries, after all, didn’t need to know exactly what on the ship Zinqued wanted to sell. He wasn’t about to dangle the exact payout under their noses just so they could steal it for themselves.

But he would reward them for their help. He’d decided that he would certainly be a benevolent leader.

Because after this, he would certainly have his own ship.

* * *

“Now, remember,” Barnabas said. He checked the fit of his gauntlets and looked at Gar. “Don’t let anyone get under your skin.”

Gar nodded. Barnabas was smiling, but Gar knew he was absolutely serious about this.

“It wasn’t…,” he considered. “I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand on Virtue Station. I’m sorry I lost my temper.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas slid on his holster. “Note that I didn’t say, ‘don’t lose your temper.’ I said, ‘don’t let anyone get under your skin.’ There’s a small but important difference.”

Gar frowned. “I’m not sure I get it.”

“Oh, it’s very simple.” Shinigami appeared, her avatar projected on top of one of the weapons lockers. She sat cross-legged, watching them with a grin. “See, he loses his temper all the time, so he’s not going to say you can’t do that.”

Barnabas gave her a look. “I do not lose my temper all the time. I lose my temper when the situation warrants it. Which is when someone has done something unjust, to hurt others. Me losing my temper is not the outcome they hope for in that case.”

Shinigami considered this.

“Are you sure…” she asked finally, “that’s not bullshit?”

Gar turned his snort of laughter into a cough and made himself very busy with his boots as Barnabas glared at Shinigami.

“Name one time when we’ve worked together that me losing my temper has been to our detriment,” he said stiffly.

“To our detriment, ooh, how fancy.” She hunched her shoulders with a grin. “You get so gentlemanly when you’re upset.”

Barnabas stopped talking entirely and devoted himself to his armor, with the air of someone who is not going to deign to join the conversation. Shinigami snickered, and Gar tried to decide if he should move unobtrusively to the nearest blast door in case of a fight.

It was a welcome distraction when Jeltor appeared with an obviously distressed Tafa at his side.

“I’m coming in with you,” the Jotun announced. “Out into the compound, I mean.”

Barnabas looked up in surprise. “You should not feel obligated,” he said politely. “I regret that we are bringing you with us. It is simply that time is of the essence. You have helped by giving us information. We do not need anything further, I assure you.”

“See?” Tafa demanded of Jeltor. “He also thinks you shouldn’t do this.”

“I would like to come,” Jeltor said patiently. To Tafa, he added, “Your concern is touching, but I will be quite safe.”

“How?” Shinigami asked practically. “Don’t get me wrong, your suit is impressive, but the Jotun fleet has never had an infantry engagement. Unless you’re trained for combat—”

They broke off as Jeltor activated his suit. The hands slid back to be replaced with double-barreled guns, one bayonetted. Pieces of the suit hummed with an electrical charge, a plate came down over the capsule that held Jeltor’s body, and the suit seemed to sink down into a mechanical version of a warrior’s crouch. To top it off, a panel slid to uncover a long, thin arm in the suit’s chest, with a hacking-tip at the end.

“I am trained for combat,” Jeltor said, amused.

Barnabas laughed delightedly, his good mood entirely restored. “Well, then,” he said. “We would be glad to have you along.”

“Only if you don’t intend to do something stupidly heroic,” Shinigami said. “I’d hate for you to die before I could get a better look at that suit.”

Jeltor laughed, not at all offended by her focus. “It’s made to…shall we say, confuse scanners.”

“Yeah, I didn’t see any of that.” She was so intrigued that it took a moment before she added to Barnabas, “Sorry.”

“No apologies necessary.” Barnabas smiled at Jeltor. “I sense the Jotun and the Federation might have quite a happy partnership, should they choose to make the trade,” he considered. “And Jean Dukes would probably enjoy a chat with some of your engineers.”

“I would be pleased to meet your Jean Dukes,” Jeltor acknowledged politely. “There are many pieces of your technology that we have heard of and believed to be exaggerations…until I came to be on this ship. Now I am beginning to think the stories were true. It is…worrisome.”

“Unless the Jotun Navy goes around enslaving people, or otherwise perpetrating mass injustice, I don’t think we’ll have a problem.”

Barnabas and Shinigami had spent part of the previous night going over what they could find of Jotun history and military engagements. They had found one recurring piece of advice from a variety of sources and phrased in a variety of ways, but all boiled down to the same thing—don’t fuck with the Jotun people, and you won’t get massacred. They didn’t deploy their military often, but when they did…it was with extremely impressive results.

Barnabas and Shinigami had decided they both liked what they saw.

Tafa, however, still looked worried. “But what if you all get hurt?” Even a week ago she would have said that Jeltor infuriated her—and she hadn’t known Gar, Barnabas, or Shinigami. Now, however, she knew she would be devastated if any of them were to die.

“We will not take unnecessary risks,” Barnabas promised her. “Will we?” he added meaningfully, looking around at the rest of the group. Grumbles were his only response, and he smiled at Tafa. “See? We’ll be quite all right.”

“If you say so.” Tafa hunched her shoulders. “I just feel like this is a bit too easy. There has to be some sort of trap.”

“There usually is,” Barnabas agreed cheerfully. “Luckily for us, Shinigami is sneakier than almost anyone.”

“So are you,” Shinigami shot back pointedly. “In any event, we’re coming up on the base if anyone wants to get a look.”

* * *

Vedoon was bored.

When he’d been hired by the Yennai corporation, he’d been sure that his life would be filled with plenty of action. After all, no one got that big and powerful without plenty of soldiers, right?

Then he’d gotten stationed here, of all places.

Nothing ever happened here.

Vedoon sighed as he looked out at the ramparts and grounds. As far as he knew, the Yennai family had never even been here. Some big, secret headquarters this had proved to be. He’d thought there would be secret meetings, with him standing proudly outside the door in his armor, close to the seat of power.

They said Ilia Yennai wasn’t bad looking, either…

But he’d never seen her. She’d never come here. There was a small army of guards stationed here, and a ridiculous amount of gun turrets and munitions, but there was never anyone important.

How was a guard supposed to rise in the hierarchy if there weren’t any higher-ups to impress? He’d had a plan—distinguish himself in training, get nominated as a personal bodyguard for one of the Yennai family, and make his fortune. Seducing Ilia had been one of those ideas he didn’t pin too much on. She probably had some rich husband. A guard could dream, though.

He’d just leaned on the balustrade next to his patrol partner when they heard the boom of a ship entering the atmosphere. The turrets nearby blazed to life before they even had time to wonder if this was a Yennai ship. A moment later, the klaxons blared.

They were under attack. A rush of adrenaline hit Vedoon, and he gave a whoop.

Finally, he was going to have a chance to distinguish himself.

* * *

“Ms. Yennai.”

“What?” After her brother’s nonsense, Ilia was in no mood for more bad news—and she sensed from her servant’s tone that this message was bad news.

“A human ship has attacked the decoy base. The name is Shinigami. They’ve taken out several of the turrets in their initial pass and don’t appear to be damaged.”

Ilia turned slowly. “Shinigami?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ilia’s mind raced. Was it possible that Uleq had been right? If he was, what would her father say?

Her lips curved in a smile. Her father would be pleased with her, not Uleq. Because she would be the one who took the Shinigami down and eliminated the threat. After all, Uleq was locked in the Overlook.

He couldn’t interfere.

She realized the guard was still staring at her. “You may go,” she said simply. She swept to her chair as he left, stretching her hands along the arms. Someday soon, she would be in her father’s office, in the high-backed chair that held controls for all the Yennai Corporation’s fleets.

For so long, she had been the favored child, and she basked in his approval.

However, lately, she wondered if she might hasten things along. Her father’d had had a good life, after all.

And it was time for her to take her place at the head of the corporation. She would take out this human ship, then she would decide on her next course of action. She considered, then rang a bell. The servant appeared again, looking worried.

“Take my brother’s communication devices and scan the ship he came in and the one he used to get to Virtue Station,” Ilia instructed. “I want all communications brought to me.”

Chapter Eighteen

“This place is nice,” Barnabas said appreciatively.

Shinigami and Gar both gave him a look. The ship presently weaved through a veritable hail of projectiles and pulse weaponry, and preliminary scans showed that the building was rife with soldiers and larger cannons that were being manned and warmed up.

“Not the turrets specifically,” Barnabas said, rolling his eyes. “It’s just a nice building. Nice planet, too. Atmosphere?”

“Totally toxic to most life forms,” Shinigami reported. She paused for a moment, and there was the distant shudder of missiles launching. She brought their path up on screen before she continued. “One of the Yennai Corporation’s biggest technological breakthroughs is something they haven’t sold at all—it’s a type of force field they can modify at will. It can distinguish between different gases and keep them separate, which is what it’s doing around the palace. It can trap radiation, all sorts of things. They’d make a fortune selling the schematics, or even manufacturing it, but they’ve just kept it for themselves.”

“I can’t blame them.” Barnabas settled back in his chair. “When you’ve got good technology and a lot of enemies, you don’t advertise what you’re capable of.” He gave a grim smile. “Unfortunately for them, we’re rather farther ahead than most adversaries they’re facing, technologically speaking.”

“Is that your fancy, old-fashioned way of saying we’re going to bend them over a table?”

“Shinigami! Gar, do not look that up.” Barnabas pressed a hand over his eyes. “Where on Earth— You know, never mind.”

“Tabitha and Pete were—”

“I said I didn’t want to know!” Barnabas looked at the door into the rest of the ship. “It’s a pity I can’t get drunk anymore. I’d like to have a very large drink right now.”

Shinigami was still laughing when her missiles made impact. Of the seventy-four missile turrets, she’d found so far, she had taken out eighteen. She’d like to take out more, ostensibly because it would be better to get these taken care of before the larger cannons came online. In reality, it was because she liked to blow things up, and turrets full of ammunition blew up very nicely.

The avatar turned suddenly to the door. “Jeltor is asking permission to come onto the bridge.”

“Let him in.” Barnabas looked curious. He nodded to Jeltor as the Jotun came through the doors. “Jeltor. What can I do for you?”

“Believe me, I would not interrupt a battle to ask for a favor.” Jeltor sounded amused. “Though this is a far more…quiet battle than most I have been a part of.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas nodded to Shinigami’s avatar. “That is due to our pilot and gunner.”

“Finally, I get the respect I deserve,” Shinigami said, in a long-suffering tone.

Barnabas shook his head slightly. He looked at Jeltor.

“I have received more information,” Jeltor explained. “Some schematics came through. They’re of anti-aircraft systems this base has in place, as well as our estimate of the optimal targets to take out to create dead zones.”

Shinigami looked at him through narrowed eyes.

“She prefers to blow up everything,” Barnabas clarified gravely.

“I’ll at least look.” Shinigami gestured for Jeltor to bring up the displays.

“You see here,” the Jotun said, pointing to a series of large cannons that were embedded in the walls near the center of the large compound. “These are shrapnel cannons. They’re becoming quite popular. They were invented by the Boreir Group.”

“You won’t be seeing many more of them then,” Barnabas murmured.

Shinigami snickered. She lit up the diagrams. “So, you want us to take out those six and land…where?”

“Here.” Jeltor walked over to the screen and pointed.

“Good call.” Shinigami nodded. She looked at Barnabas. “Agreed, Chief?”

Barnabas stared at the diagram with a slight frown on his face. He tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair for a moment.

“What if you took out this configuration?” He walked up to the screen and tapped on certain guns. Shinigami lit them up as he tapped, and a green overlay appeared to show the safe zone. He was smiling. “It works. Do that.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Jeltor pointed out slowly. “With all due respect,” he added to Barnabas hastily.

“He’s right,” Shinigami added. “When you get to the top of the green zone, where are you going?”

Barnabas’ smile grew. He waited, arms crossed until Shinigami’s mouth opened in a little O of surprise.

“Ohhhh,” she said. “Oh, you sneaky bastard. I love it.”

“What?” Jeltor looked back and forth between them. “What are you planning?”

“You’ll see,” Barnabas and Shinigami said at the same time.

* * *

The compound was in chaos. Vedoon ducked under an ornamental arch and sprinted for the end of the courtyard. This place had been well-made, alright, just as functional as it was beautiful. When the proximity alerts went off, the shrapnel cannons embedded in the ground had sprung up and begun to arm. They needed soldiers to help with targeting and final authorization, but they could do most everything on their own.

Of course, most of them now had broken fountains on top. The place hadn’t been designed for multiple attacks.

Also, it was ridiculous to have a battle in a garden.

A missile hit the nearest cannon and blew Vedoon off his feet. He tumbled, feeling a few pieces of shrapnel hit his armor, then got up and ran. His helmet had cushioned the fall, so he didn’t need to worry about a concussion.

“Get away from the cannons!” His squad leader grabbed Vedoon’s arm.

“No! We have to get them all online!”

“They’re taking them all out!” Lolori was insistent. “Vedoon!”

Vedoon stopped, torn. Running for the shelters was the smart thing to do. There was a line of shattered cannons that proved Lolori right.

And yet…this was his chance to distinguish himself.

Their opponent made the decision for him. A missile struck one of the cannons up ahead, and the barrel flew off to strike an ornamental column. Vedoon tackled Lolori out of the way as chunks of stone and shrapnel from the cannon’s reserves rained down on them.

When Vedoon picked his head up, he thought Lolori was dead at first. The squad leader stared up with a look of horror on his face. Then he gulped slightly and pointed, and Vedoon turned to look.

“Oh, no,” he whispered.

The compound had been cunningly set up. There was a main portion with a high, golden dome and plenty of pleasure gardens. There was even a big audience hall for all the functions and parties that never happened here—Vedoon was still a little annoyed about that. It was made, in short, to look like the most important part of the building. There was even a tower that looked like it probably held the apartments for the Yennai family.

But none of the important things were in that building. Instead, they lay in one of the three smaller outbuildings. The family’s apartments were located below ground, with a series of mirrored passageways to fill them with sunlight. There were reserves of food and water.

The tower that resembled a scanner tower held the family’s offices and conference chambers.

No one should know that. No one should have been able to figure out the layout of this place.

Then again, no one should have been able to find them in the first place.

But that damned ship hovered in the air beside the tower. It had taken out any cannons that could reach that part of the building, and there was no one to stop the people inside from doing…

What were they planning to do?

Vedoon didn’t know. All he knew was that they had to get there and stop these people.

“Come on.” He hauled Lolori up. “Call as many people as you can. We have to get to that tower!”

* * *

“No distress signals,” Shinigami reported. She had given her avatar a cape again, and it whipped in the wind from the open shuttle bay door. It was a nice touch, though Barnabas thought she’d look even more impressive if the cloak hung still, like a single figure untroubled by a hurricane.

“To whom would they send a distress signal?” He asked reasonably. “They have a damned army here already.” He spoke into the comm unit in his helmet.

Nearby, Jeltor fed codes to one of the outside windows to crack it open without them resorting to laser-cutting or missiles. Shinigami had been very put out by that but was appeased when Barnabas suggested that any servers that weren’t destroyed would be filled with data and schematics for her to play with.

Right now, however, she was frowning. “I don’t like it,” she insisted. “Tafa said this was a trap, and she definitely knows—being part of a family of assholes, right?”

Barnabas snorted with amusement at that. Jeltor shouted and waved when the window popped open.

“Keep scanning,” Barnabas told Shinigami. “If you see anything dangerous, we’ll get out of there. Until then…we’ll proceed as if these people had no idea their base could be overrun, and they’re going to be judged and executed.” He smiled and nodded to her.

As he ran and jumped across the gap, he could feel the familiar anticipation of a mission. These were very bad people. They were a source of evil and oppression in the quadrant. Once Barnabas brought them to Justice, the quadrant could go on as it was meant to.

He landed and rolled, with Gar and Jeltor right behind him. Jeltor had some combination of grav technology and a bunch of spring-loaded devices that helped launch him across the gap and balanced him as he did so. He landed with only the faintest squeak of metal and ducked the top of his suit in a nod to Barnabas.

“Where is everyone?” Gar asked.

There was a pause while they all looked at each other. Then Barnabas sprinted for the main room.

When he got there, he cursed. It wasn’t filled with booby-traps. No, everything about this place from the grounds to the barracks was maintained. They had probably kept it here just in case they needed it.

But this was definitely a gigantic decoy.

“Son of a traitorous whore,” Barnabas murmured.

You should get more creative with your swearing. “Son of a donkey-balled ass muncher,” for instance.

I’ll keep that in mind, thank you. Barnabas sank down to a crouch, considering. So what do we do now?

Well, I doubt we’ll find anything, but definitely, do see if you can get to any computers. And in the meantime, you have a few dozen soldiers headed your way.

And what do we do about that?

I was thinking—maybe a variant on one of our signature moves. Give me a few, and I’ll let you know if I can pull it off.

Barnabas smiled and went to find the servers.

Chapter Nineteen

Crallus had begun his career as a mercenary, and a damned good one. He killed with brutal efficiency, and he was known for his vigilance. He didn’t relax when on a job—ever.

So for the first few hours of their imprisonment on the Overlook, he paced and listened for the footsteps outside the door. He learned that patrols went by more or less every hour, though he was not yet sure if the variation was for the purposes of security, or due to laziness. He hadn’t seen them fight so he couldn’t make a good assessment of their character yet.

Yes, they’d looked very impressive, all fanned out around Ilia—but anyone could stand still and glower at people for a few minutes.

His mind filled with plans as he paced. If they came in for execution with anything less than ten guards, Crallus was fairly sure he stood a chance of escaping.

There was the Overlook, of course, which was just as much a danger to them as it was to him. He could surround himself with guards, since they wouldn’t want to shoot into the group. Or there was the fact that they wore plate armor, and he could sink his claws into the gaps.

Plus, he’d marked the route from the landing bay and had taken note of which doors had the green light to indicate a ship on the pad. If he could break free, he might be able to get to a ship and get away.

Uleq probably wouldn’t make it.

Crallus wasn’t sure how he felt about that. More accurately, he felt guilty about it, and he disliked the guilt. Uleq had gotten him into this mess, and there was no reason that Crallus should have to die just because he’d met Uleq Yennai first, instead of Ilia Yennai.

Uleq would die, that was just the way it was. He wasn’t the heir to the Yennai Corporation, and he made no secret about not accepting that. Ilia would have to be an idiot to let him live, and she wasn’t an idiot.

So he was going to die. Really, the only question was whether Crallus could survive.

But he felt guilty leaving Uleq to face execution alone. His father had left him to Ilia’s mercy, and surely the Torcellan patriarch knew what that meant.

Crallus clenched his hand and hissed a long breath out.

“Stop pacing,” Uleq said coldly from the side of the room. He had taken a seat on a stone bench that had been carved roughly out of the wall. We’re not getting out, his tone said. He wanted to be comfortable before he died. He had given up.

And it was clear that he hadn’t even considered trying to bargain for Crallus’ life.

All sympathy vanished. Crallus gave Uleq a long, hard look and went to sit, his mind pivoting in a different direction.

Namely, was Ilia Yennai looking for any new employees?

As if summoned by some otherworldly force, Ilia strode into the room. She had changed her robes to a deep purple, and she looked absolutely furious.

“How could you?” she demanded of Uleq, without even a pause for breath.

Uleq looked up with a sardonic smile. He expected this altercation, clearly. “Dear sister, let us dispense with all of this.” He kept his elbows resting on his knees. “Are you putting on a show for Father, pretending to look over my crimes and reach an opinion on whether or not you should execute me? Are you pretending to struggle over that possibility? We both know you’ll kill me eventually. Put on whatever act you like for Father, but do not make me play along.” He settled back, finally, and pulled his hood up so that his face was shrouded. With his arms crossed over his chest, he gave every indication that he was going to sleep.

Ilia, however, was not prepared to give up so easily.

“I’ve never pretended,” she hissed. “For years, I’ve anticipated the day I could have you killed. I never liked you. I never trusted you.”

Uleq didn’t move at all, and Crallus decided that the best thing to do would be to pretend to be a statue. He sat as still as possible and hoped Ilia wouldn’t notice him.

He’d be better off not serving her, either, he decided. This whole family was fucking crazy.

Ilia paced, shooting regular glances at Uleq. “I would have killed you even if you’d come back here and been the good little brother. We both know that.”

Although Uleq didn’t move, he chuckled from inside the hood. “Yes. We do.”

“So did you have to destroy the better part of a hundred ships in the meantime?” Ilia snarled. “What were you hoping to do? Destroy my legacy just for spite?”

“Surprisingly, no.” Uleq’s breath stirred the hood, but otherwise, he was motionless. “Your guess only makes sense if I were resigned to my fate. Which I was not.”

“Then why?” Ilia’s hands clenched next to her head as if she would tear at her hair. “We had word that Get’ruz Shipping was entirely destroyed in an engagement, but only now do we learn it was an engagement you sent them to. And Syndicate Yerr? What about them? We hear that their base has been destroyed.”

Crallus tried to blend into the background. Ilia didn’t appear to notice that the syndicate leader was sitting right in front of her, and he didn’t have any particular desire to get involved in this fight.

Uleq said nothing to this.

“Why?” Ilia screamed. Her voice was raw.

“Why?” Uleq pushed the hood back, and his face was flushed with fury. He shoved himself up. “Why? You dare ask that of me? I’ve told you a hundred times why. Because one ship was able to take them out. That’s how powerful the humans are. That’s why they need to be destroyed.”

“That’s why we can’t take them on!” Ilia yelled. “We don’t fight battles in fleets, not yet. We control from the shadows. We would have infiltrated their federation and—”

“They would never have allowed that,” Uleq voiced contemptuously. His tone dripped with hatred. “They have morals.”

“People who plead morals are just holding out for the right bribe,” Ilia snapped. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Not. These. Aliens.” Uleq spat each word out. “They don’t allow just anyone into their upper ranks. They watch. They don’t take bribes. They don’t want money. They want to rule the universe. They want everyone to follow their Queen’s ways.” He pressed his advantage. “They would have found us, and they would have destroyed us. If you had mobilized all our resources against them when we first saw them like I told you to do when they were already engaged with other wars—”

“You really believe they can’t be bribed?”

Uleq gave a wordless yell of fury. “No! They can’t!”

Ilia raised an eyebrow. “Then they can be defeated by other means. We have a fleet.”

“You need to get into their systems!” Uleq yelled. His voice was hoarse with rage. “You need their AI, you need what’s on the ship I was following. I wasn’t trying to destroy this, Ilia, I was trying to save it!”

Ilia stared at him for a long moment then her lip curled. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

She swept away for the door, and Uleq stared after her in disbelief. “I don’t understand? I don’t understand?”

She paused in the doorway. “No,” she said sweetly. “You don’t.” She slipped out, and Uleq flung himself at the door with a roar of fury, beating at it with his fist.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” he screamed. “You’re destroying us! I’ll make sure you die. Even if you kill me, Father will know soon enough that you—”

The door reverberated with a hollow BOOM as if struck from the other side, and Uleq was flung away from it to slide across the rocky floor.

He picked himself up. He did not look at Crallus. The mercenary leader was suddenly sure Uleq did not remember he was here at all.

“You’ve destroyed us,” Uleq whispered. “You stupid bitch.”

* * *

Out in the hallway, Ilia watched as the guard slammed a special mace against the door. The security cameras showed Uleq sliding back across the floor and carried his words to her clearly.

She smiled coldly.

If she wanted to defeat this human ship, she had to know his plan—but he would never have told her if she’d simply asked. So she had to use his greatest weakness against him.

It was very simple. Uleq had to be the smartest person in the room. No matter how clever his plan was or would be if he didn’t spill it to everyone, he couldn’t resist the urge to explain it so that people could be astounded by his genius.

“Who’s the real genius, Uleq?” Ilia narrowed her eyes. “The person who comes up with the plans and does all the research…or the person who lets other people do the work for her, and takes the credit?”

She gave a cold smile and walked away, pleased.

She’d been in contact with the ship thieves Uleq had hired. With their mercenaries, they were well-placed to take out a single ship, particularly if it was grounded at the base. Uleq’s plan had been a sound one, now that she understood why he’d made it the way he had. He wanted the AI core from that ship.

Soon she would have it, and she would decide what to do with it.

Because Ilia had her plan. When this mission was done, her father would come to congratulate her on a job well done. He would want to see the AI core in action, after all. She would bask in his approval and let everyone see how he loved her, and what a good heir she was. They would execute Uleq together so there would be no challenge from that quarter.

Then her father would have an accident.

Ilia’s smile grew. She had lived her life fearing that someone would find this base and attack it. Now, she welcomed it. Power would be within her grasp in only a few days, and she could hardly wait.

* * *

The battering ram swung forward, and the big double doors to the tower shuddered.

“Again!” Vedoon yelled. At the front of the battering ram, his hands aching and sweat running into his eyes, he reflected that he had never felt more alive. This was exhilarating. The door would be down soon, and they could take their revenge on the intruders.

He heaved the battering ram forward and welcomed the jolt of pain that shuddered through his body as the ram hit. The soldiers behind him gave a cheer. They could sense that victory was close.

Then the lights flickered, and a female voice came over the speakers.

“Hello, soldiers of the Yennai Corporation.”

The soldiers paused, and Vedoon wondered what to do. Was this a distraction? Should they keep fighting?

“I am Shinigami,” the voice said. “You do not know me, but I have witnessed many battles in my time, and your valor today has not gone unnoticed.”

The soldiers murmured to one another, and Vedoon felt his chest puff up in pride. Then he wondered what this Shinigami character wanted. Had she hoped they would defect?

He would never defect. Not when everything he had dreamed of was within his grasp.

“No doubt you will be wondering where your reinforcements are,” Shinigami told them. “The truth is, none are coming. You see, this is a decoy base. The Yennai family has never come here and never intended to do so. They left a trail to this base so that if anyone ever came for them—and they have many enemies, all well-earned, I assure you—this decoy base would be destroyed. They hoped, no doubt, that it would be destroyed by bombardment so that no one would ever realize they had escaped.”

There was a pause.

“As you have doubtless realized, this means that all of you were intended as nothing more than a sacrifice. Your valor, as you fought for the defense of the base, would convince many opponents that this was no decoy.”

Vedoon felt his stomach drop. He had assumed that the Yennai family simply traveled a lot and were too busy to come back here. But the fact that they had never been here…

Yes, it all fit.

He looked at the other soldiers and found the same betrayal in their faces.

“Rest assured that we have no quarrel with you,” Shinigami said. “We have an offer, in fact. Certain reserves of cash exist on this base. It was your home, and the Yennai Corporation undoubtedly owes you a debt. Therefore, we propose the following: if you tell us what you know, any fact that might lead us to the true base, the money will be split amongst all of you and the ships will be unlocked to give you safe passage to wherever you would like to go. You may discuss this offer amongst yourselves.”

Chapter Twenty

“They’re ready to talk,” Shinigami reported.

Barnabas, seated at the head of the conference table in the main Yennai offices, looked up curiously. “Any idea of their intentions?”

“They’re all laying down their weapons, and from what I’ve been able to pick out on the voice scanners—not as much as I’d hoped, they weren’t made for a lot of voices at once—they want to take the offer. Only one or two are looking shifty.”

“I can deal with one or two,” Barnabas said in satisfaction. He smiled at Gar and Jeltor. “This really is our best trick.”

“I’m not sure it qualifies as a trick,” Jeltor said. “Unless you don’t actually give them the money.”

Barnabas looked horrified. “We do give them the money! And they usually don’t deserve to die.” He gave a small shrug. “That said, should any of their thoughts show a particular need for Justice…”

“What else are we here for, after all?” Shinigami asked prosaically. “Should I open the doors?”

“Yes, please.” Barnabas gestured to Gar and Jeltor. It wasn’t for effect, but shelter. The chair was bulletproof, so if anyone here started shooting, they could duck while Barnabas killed the would-be assassin.

When the doors opened, only a few aliens came into the room. Barnabas recognized them from the security tapes. One was a Leath, which surprised him.

Shinigami, anything shady with the Leath?

Surprisingly, not that I can tell. No suicide vest or anything. I guess you’re looking at someone like Gar—he left his home planet behind because he didn’t live that life.

Ah. Well, keep an eye on him. Barnabas nodded courteously to the Leath. “I am Barnabas. You are?”

“Lolori,” the Leath said. He nodded. “I think I saw some worry in your eyes. Believe me when I say that I bear no ill will for what happened between our races. I only wish more could have seen the truth so that battle could be avoided entirely.”

“Now that they have, do you not want to go back?” Barnabas asked curiously.

The Leath gave a thin smile. “No. It will take some time for the old ways to fade away completely, and I like the life I have found out here.” He looked around at the other soldiers. “We have other things to discuss, however.”

“That, we do.” Barnabas nodded. He looked at a Shrillexian. “And you are?”

“Vedoon.” The Shrillexian’s voice grated somewhat, but he did not seem angry. He looked conflicted. “Do you swear this is no trick?”

“I swear,” Barnabas assured. “You have been ill-treated by the Yennai Corporation. As far as I am concerned, the funds here rightly go to you more so than to any of their leaders.”

“And if we do not have any useful information?” Vedoon asked.

“Ah. If I find out you have withheld information, I will be displeased. However, if you do not have it, I can hardly fault you for that. The deal is simply that what you have, I request you give to me.”

“Why?” Lolori said now. “Why are you hunting them down?”

Barnabas smiled slightly. “What they did to you is not enough?”

The guards looked at one another and shrugged. Lolori answered for them all. “We are guards. We’re here to be in danger, so they don’t have to be. It was a trick, yes, and we do not like it…but it is the sort of thing we anticipated.”

Barnabas had not considered that. His eyebrows rose as he absorbed this information.

“It’s the way of the universe,” Vedoon said, with another shrug. “People wouldn’t hire guards otherwise, right?”

“Mmm.” Barnabas tried to find a way to explain. “Say, rather, that this is a larger pattern of behavior. The Yennai Corporation made a great deal of money from theft and murder. They made allies of people who would steal ships or cargo, trade slaves, and sell munitions without any care for who bought them or how they would be used.”

The guards still looked blank.

“You knew all of this, surely,” Barnabas said.

“Yes, but…” Lolori cleared his throat and looked at the others. “Such things happen.”

“You willingly live in a situation where your family might be enslaved or murdered, where the goods that supply your planet might be stolen, ruining your livelihood?” Barnabas frowned.

“Willingly?” Lolori laughed. “That is how things are. There are always those who do things like that. You kill them if you can when they come for you.”

“What if you didn’t have to?” Barnabas asked quietly. “What if that wasn’t the way the universe worked?”

Their faces remained blank for a long moment. None of them had considered such a thing, that much was clear. Then they began to look hopeful…and then sad.

“We can’t have that,” Lolori insisted. “It doesn’t exist. It never will.”

“There will always be those who try to do such things,” Barnabas agreed. “But there will also, always be those who hunt them. I am one of those people. I do it very well. And with the Federation, we have the chance to tip the balance. More people will be safe. More people will be strong enough to fight those who would hurt them.

“The Yennai Corporation profits off everything that hurts people, and they do it on purpose, for power. That is why I am going after them. They are evil. They hurt innocents. When they are gone, the universe will be that much safer.”

The guards looked at one another one more time and seemed to come to a conclusion. Finally, Lolori nodded.

“I think they’re somewhere near the Votayett system,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you where apart from that, but I’d been looking at the scrambling they used for their messages when they’d communicate with us. The same places would pop up over and over again. I think they’d send it through an exchange first so you could only trace it back so far, but for us, the message came through a relay on Seres.”

That’s the third planet in the Votayett system, Shinigami reported. There’s really nothing around there except those planets, but he’s right that they probably wouldn’t give anyone a direct link back to their base.

We’ll see what we can make of it, Barnabas told her.

To the soldiers, he nodded. “Thank you. Is there anything else?”

They shook their heads, and he felt their sincerity. He dismissed them to begin preparations for leaving. This base would be shuttered, and its location sent to Bethany Anne in case she wanted to establish an outpost.

If nothing else, she would likely want to send engineers to assess the various armaments and force field tech.

In truth, he wasn’t upset with what they had learned. It had been unlikely in the extreme that any people as careful as the Yennai family would leave glaring clues or grant their expendable guards the location of the real base.

But, as in many cases, there were often small details that a clever person could put together, as Lolori had.

Barnabas led the way down the stairs to the ornamental gardens where Shinigami waited. While they were here—with the systems at their disposal, they’d try to narrow down that link to Seres.

The Yennai Corporation could only run for so long.

* * *

Zinqued dozed in his bunk when Paun came to get him.

“The client wants to talk to you.” Paun’s voice was tight with frustration, and Zinqued knew why. Paun was the captain. He should be the one people spoke to.

It filled Zinqued with glee. He agreed with Paun, after all. People should speak to the captain. To the person in charge. If he was the one they spoke to…

He gave a small smile as he got up and made his way to the bridge.

To his surprise, it was a Torcellan female that waited, not a male. He had thought Uleq was a male name. He frowned. “I am Zinqued.”

“Zinqued.” The female’s voice was sweet. “I am Ilia Yennai. My brother, Uleq, assisted me in setting up this deal. As you know, the Shinigami is a dangerous ship, and he has had to take shelter from it. He was able to pass along your information, however, and we will complete this together.”

Zinqued nodded and settled back in the chair. So that was why Uleq hadn’t responded to messages.

“We are glad to be working with someone clever enough to have engaged with the Shinigami multiple times and yet emerge unscathed.” Ilia smiled at Zinqued. “You will have to tell me how you managed that—after this is all over, of course.”

Zinqued thought of the message they had received the last time—that they were too pathetic to even bother killing—and hoped he could come up with a good lie by the time they spoke.

He nodded, though. You didn’t let your clients see your worry. “Of course, Ms. Yennai.”

She smiled. “Due to your expertise, we will be increasing your pay for this mission, and I hope I will be able to present it to you personally.”

“Of course,” Zinqued agreed, smiling. It was well known that rich business owners sometimes liked to slum with hired hands, and he’d started to think he might receive a very warm welcome, indeed, from Ilia Yennai.

“I’ve transferred coordinates to your ship,” Ilia shared. “You will rendezvous with our fleet there and be brought to our base.”

Zinqued nodded.

“I look forward to meeting you,” Ilia’s pale mouth curved in a sweet smile and she ended the call.

Zinqued sat back in his chair, satisfied.

“This is going too well,” Paun said from behind him.

Zinqued jumped and spun around in his chair. “Why are you here?”

“Because I’m the captain,” Paun said. “And as the captain, I’ve made more deals than you have. I’ve learned how to tell when someone’s about to stab me in the back. She’s about to stab you in the back.”

“No, she’s not,” Zinqued argued.

“Think what you want,” Paun said. “You’ve clearly got the crew on your side. I just know that when we’re at the base, I’m not going to be standing too close to you.”

He left, shaking his head, with Zinqued staring after him.

* * *

Ilia opened a channel to her fleet captain. A Torcellan by the name of Wirav, he had been chosen by her father…who had added Ilia into the bargain as a wife. Uleq had already been married off for an alliance, leaving only one child to be sold.

Ilia was still bitter about it. She never liked speaking to Wirav or calling him her husband.

He knew it, too.

“Dearest wife,” he said, as the channel opened.

“Husband.” She gritted her teeth on the word but managed to get it out with a smile.

He arched one eyebrow. Coming to terms with me? His smile asked.

She ignored that. “There will be ships arriving shortly. I’ve sent the designations. They will need to have tracking disabled, and towed to the base.”

“Are you sure that’s necessary?”

“Yes,” Ilia said simply. She would not let a random set of contractors know the location of the base…even if she intended to kill any survivors after the engagement. She did not believe in sloppy plans, and she felt no reason to explain this to Wirav, either. She waited, staring him down.

He shrugged as if it did not matter. “I will look forward to seeing you when I return.”

“Indeed.” Ilia smiled again.

“You do not hate me half so much as you claim,” he said quietly, smiling. “Admit it, Ilia—you have liked having me for your husband.”

She pretended to waver.

“I knew it.” His smile grew. “I will see you soon, wife.”

He ended the call, and the smile dropped off her face. Let Wirav think he had some hold on her.

He didn’t, and when she got rid of her father, she would get rid of Wirav as well.

Chapter Twenty-One

The message came in near the end of Fretor’s shift, and he bobbed wearily in his tank as he opened it. When he saw who it was from, his surprise made the mechanical arms on his suit spasm. He spun in his tank, looking around for his captain.

“You! Recruit! Find the captain.”

“Yes, sir.” The new recruit hastened away, clanking down the corridors at high speed.

Fretor considered the message, and it wasn’t long until the recruit came back with both the captain and one of the admirals, both on board right now for the ship’s assessment near the Jotun capital planet.

“What’s going on here?” the admiral demanded. “We have a very tight schedule.”

The captain was not upset to be disturbed. He had worked with Fretor for many years and knew that he would not be summoned to the bridge during an important meeting unless there was ample cause. He nodded to Fretor and had a much more pleasant tone as he said, “What is it, Fretor?”

“Sir, we’ve received a message from Jeltor.”

“Jeltor!” The captain pulsed faintly blue in happiness and his body shook. “Is it an open call?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“I am glad he is well.” The captain and Jeltor were old friends, having grown up together in the warm seas of the capital city. When Jeltor was captured while on a diplomatic mission, the captain had taken it hard.

“Yes. It seems he was rescued recently.” Fretor looked at the message and worried slightly. If it were only the captain here things might be different, but with the admiral…

It was hard to know how this might go.

“He was in touch with Intelligence,” the Admiral rumbled. As a high-ranking officer, he had a power suit that most Jotun would kill to own. It was a marvel of engineering, never squeaked, and it could plug into any ship and control it—even a carrier. There were rumors that he had personally directed the maneuvers and missiles of the JFS Wallatar during the battle of Hero’s Gulf.

Fretor reminded himself to be respectful. After all, those Jotun who rose in the ranks were the ones with the mental capacity to control much at one time. The admiral was a war hero.

Which meant that his opinions on Jeltor’s message would be important.

Fretor swallowed and directed his console to spin so that both the captain and the admiral could read it.

There was a long pause, then the admiral rumbled,

“He has got to be kidding.”

* * *

Barnabas poked his head into one of the conference rooms, where Jeltor paced back and forth, the arms of his suit flailing in a show of agitation. He assessed Jeltor’s thoughts, and after a moment Barnabas decided that this would be the equivalent of frowning and sighing for a human—not quite as dramatic as it would be if a human flailed their arms around.

He had to admit it was funny to watch, though.

“You’ve been shut in here for quite a while,” he said.

Jeltor stopped pacing and looked at him. Both the suit and the jellyfish body seemed to swivel when he did that.

“You mean, I sent a message, and you don’t know what was in it, and you’re curious.” He sounded amused by that, at least.

Barnabas leaned against the door frame, smiling. “Oh, we know what was in it.”

Jeltor laughed at that. “You humans never cease to amaze me. I hope you will forgive my habit of sending encrypted messages.”

“You’re part of Jotun high command,” Barnabas observed. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t do that.”

“Precisely. I am glad you see it that way.” Jeltor swiveled his suit’s body and nodded to one of the screens in the corner. “I am waiting for a response to my message to the fleet. I embedded a small packet in it so that I would know when they had received it. They have, but I have seen no response yet.”

“May I ask what you said?” Barnabas frowned slightly. He came into the room and took one of the chairs, leaning his elbows on his knees and watching as Jeltor started to pace again.

“You said you know,” Jeltor replied, amused.

“The gist of it, yes. You want them to help us with the base. But I’m sure we lost nuance between the translation and the codes.” He frowned. “And I’m confused as to why you think they wouldn’t offer it when they had already given us intel.”

“This would be more…material help,” Jeltor explained. “I said that the Jotun Navy wouldn’t stand in your way, and that’s true. If the Yennai Corporation calls them in for defense, they’ll somehow manage not to arrive in time. All plausibly deniable, of course.”

“Of course,” Barnabas murmured.

“It’s a good enough plan,” Jeltor said.

“Not at all.” Barnabas’ voice was stronger now. “It’s a cowardly plan.”

Jeltor gave him a look, and his annoyance radiated so strongly that Barnabas felt it even without looking into his mind. “Not all of us have the strength of the human fleet.”

“The Jotun come close,” Barnabas argued. “It’s well-known in this sector that you shouldn’t mess with the Jotun. You don’t go around attacking people, but what your enemies start, you finish—decisively. I like that.”

“Thank you.”

“What I don’t like—” Barnaba’s voice grew dangerous “—is the way you accept the corruption of your politicians.”

“We can’t do things the way they do. They make the laws.” Jeltor bobbed, clearly upset. “We do our utmost to enforce those laws only in the way that is right.”

“The military should never be enforcing the laws,” Barnabas countered. “The military is there to respond to threats. Outside threats. The courts and the police enforce the laws.”

“What a strange society you have.”

“It’s not strange, it’s sensible.” Barnabas sighed and rubbed his forehead. “All right, leaving aside any differences in how the military works—which would be fascinating to discuss at another time—you’re giving your politicians a free pass. No, let me finish,” he said, as Jeltor’s suit crackled to begin speaking. “They’ve clearly taken bribes from the Yennai Corporation.”

“Yes, but—”

“No ‘but.’ Do you really think that if you simply deal with the Yennai Corporation, those politicians will stop being corrupt? They’ll find someone new to take bribes from.”

“Oh, no,” Jeltor said.

“Yes, they will.”

“Not that.” Jeltor’s body pulsed and shook. “No, I’ve been sending them this conversation.”

To his surprise, Barnabas started laughing.

“What? This isn’t good!”

“It’s better than good,” Barnabas said. “I’m glad they’ve heard what I said. Now they can’t pretend ignorance of their real problem.”

“And who are you?” The voice boomed suddenly out of the speakers.

“I’m Barnabas,” Barnabas said.

“He’s Vigilante One,” Shinigami added sweetly. She appeared in the corner, her avatar leaning on the wall, and gave Barnabas a grin. “Formerly Ranger One of the Etheric Empire. He was deputized to enforce the Queen’s Justice. In case it’s not clear, that’s Justice with a capital J.”

Barnabas smiled slightly. “With whom am I speaking?”

“This is Admiral Threton of the Jotun fleet.”

Jeltor gave a little sound of distress.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Admiral.” Barnabas wasn’t particularly worried. Jeltor might be correct to be worried, but he guessed that this was going to be an easier conversation than his Jotun passenger thought. “We are both people of action, are we not? I propose we speak frankly with one another.”

There was a pause, then the Admiral rumbled, “Continue.”

“You’ve heard my opinions on your politicians,” Barnabas said bluntly. “And I’d guess you agree with them. You know that they can’t be trusted and that they’d direct you to help the Yennai Corporation when that would be terrible not only for the Jotun, but for many others as well. Is that correct?”

There was a pause, and Barnabas sighed.

Finally, the admiral threw caution to the winds. “You are correct, but—”

“You all say that. No ‘buts.’”

Heh. Shinigami grinned at him. Butts.

We’re negotiating with Jotun high command and you’re focusing on the homophone?

Absolutely.

Barnabas resisted the urge to sink his head into his hands. “I agree that your political system can hardly be overturned in the next few days,” he said simply. “However, I do believe that standing up for your principles and speaking honestly is a necessary piece of restoring integrity to your political system. Right now, your strategy is to ignore the corruption and hope it goes away. That is one of the most idiotic plans there is.”

Most people would preface that with, “not to be rude, but.”

I don’t care if they think it’s rude.

There was a long pause. Jeltor had sunk from agitation into resignation.

“You suggest, in other words, that we help you and bear the consequences,” a new voice said finally. After a moment, it added. “This is Captain Qortor of the JFS Nebb.”

“Pleased to meet you, Captain. And yes, that is what I am suggesting.”

“To be frank,” the captain said, “it is difficult to see this logic as anything more than self-serving. You will not be forced to deal with the consequences, as we will. Nor do you understand the content of those consequences.”

“I believe I do understand,” Barnabas said simply. “I have lived many centuries, Captain, both on my home planet and in the wider universe, and I have noticed certain…similarities. There are always consequences for speaking the truth. A government often accrues secrets or has shameful failures, and there is overwhelming pressure for those who see it not to speak of it. Sometimes it is clear that their lives will be on the line if they speak the truth. This is not uncommon.

“But those who care for their society will speak up. They will go with their better nature instead of falling to convenience, and they will stand up for what is right.

“There are those who see extraordinary times and tell themselves that the usual rules do not apply and that no one could blame them for being cowardly. Then there are those who see extraordinary times and understand that extraordinary courage is required of them.

“Believe me when I say that I know the Yennai Corporation is dangerous. I have seen some of their allies and some of their work. They kill those who get in their way, and they make a formidable enemy. Many would say that it is simply enough not to help them, but this is not true. If no one stands in their way, they will continue to do evil things. Innocent people will continue to suffer.

“I have made it my personal mission to destroy them. I have already destroyed three of their allies. I ask nothing of you that I am not willing to do, myself.”

The admiral and the captain had nothing to say to that.

“Do you know what shame feels like?” Barnabas asked. “How it weighs on the soul?”

Jeltor turned to look at him. Even Shinigami was quiet.

“For years,” Barnabas said, “I made it my calling to be ‘neutral.’ I did not intervene in the disputes between my family, no matter how worthy the causes over which they fought. No matter what I do in this life, I will never outrun that shame. If you knew the taste of it, you would do anything to avoid it.”

There was a pause, and Shinigami suddenly looked alert. She brought up screens to show a sudden flood of data from the Jotun fleet.

“We can deal,” the admiral said finally. “We have intercepted many communications that run through Seres. This is the data we have about the trajectory and encryption patterns. If you can make heads or tails of it, we will be glad to have you deal with the Yennai Corporation.

“And we…we will go to our planet, to work for change. To demand change.”

Barnabas nodded. “I hope we meet again, Admiral.”

“I don’t.” The voice was wry. “I hope we never have any occasion to do so.”

Barnabas laughed. “That, I can understand. I will hope for the same.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“This formation makes no sense.” In the Yennai Corporation’s main base, Wirav stabbed his finger down on the table. He glared at the print-out that showed a plan for how the fleet’s ships would protect the base.

“I assure you, it makes perfect sense.” Ilia tried not to roll her eyes.

“No! We’re not allowed to shoot at the ship? This is insane.”

“Because we want the ship to be captured without being damaged,” Ilia clarified, tensely. Now that she had decided to kill Wirav, she fought for patience. “I need you to appear to fire on it and appear to protect the base while giving it safe passage to here.” She reached out to show a glowing point on the model of the asteroid. “They’ll think they’ve gotten in because they’re a superior ship. Once they’re there, the ship will be ambushed by Zinqued and his mercenaries.”

“I don’t like it,” Wirav ground out. He crossed his arms. “At least let us keep you on one of the ships.”

“There’s no need for that. We have fifty ships worth of mercenaries that will be on the base.”

“Why take the risk?” Wirav asked. He perched on the edge of the table and stared her down. “I can’t see any reason that we shouldn’t protect you. You’re the future of the Yennai Corporation.”

Ilia wavered. Wirav’s logic actually made sense. She hadn’t expected that. Maybe she was being too hasty with her plans to get rid of him.

“And anyway,” Wirav added, “shouldn’t we spend some time together? We are married, after all.” He smirked at her, happy to rub the fact of their marriage in her face while the rest of the ship’s captains watched.

Her good mood vanished, and she gave him a cold look. “You mean, while the fleet faces down one of our greatest enemies, you would rather be on a date than leading them into battle? Who should we make admiral of the fleet?” She looked around the room and nodded to Gyeir, Wirav’s greatest rival. “Gyeir, you’re promoted. Wirav, I will send you the paperwork to annul our marriage.”

“You would not dare.” Wirav slid off the table to glare at her. “Your father appointed me an admiral. Your father controls the Yennai Syndicate, Ilia. Not you.”

Not for long. Ilia let that thought warm her as she stared at him. “Then do your job, or you’ll answer to my father, won’t you?”

That gave him pause, at least. He swallowed slightly.

She didn’t want to, but she empathized. Her father was one of the most terrifying people she had ever met. When she was very young, he had doted on her a little bit. He still told her about her duty to the company and tested her, but she had been his darling girl and his only child.

Then Uleq had come along.

Their father had pitted them against each other since before Uleq was old enough to walk. Ilia was the first-born, and she was the heir, but her father reminded her at every chance that she could be replaced at any time.

And it was made very clear to her just what being “replaced” meant.

She had been five years old when he’d explained that her uncle was being replaced as the admiral of the fleet, as he had made mistakes during an important engagement. Her father brought Ilia with him to watch the “ceremony”—throwing her uncle off the edge of the Overlook and giving his badge to another.

Even her uncle’s wife hadn’t dared cry for her husband, not while everyone watched. In the Yennai Corporation, you didn’t show sympathy for people deemed unworthy.

Ilia understood, therefore, how worried Wirav was that she would tell her father he was not doing a good job. The consequences would be sudden and dire.

Not, of course, that she intended to be any more lenient with him.

They were still staring at one another when there was a flurry of sound outside, and the door opened to reveal her father.

Ilia gaped. Her heart pounded. Why was her father here?

“Ilia.” He kissed her on both cheeks. “Wirav.” He gave his son-in-law the same greeting. “And where is Uleq?”

Ilia cursed herself for not having had her brother executed already. As he had guessed, she hadn’t wanted to seem too eager to kill him. If she had, though, there wouldn’t be any chance of her father talking to him.

She must not show any fear. She bent her head and tried to look regretful. “Uleq has…destroyed many of our resources. He is at the Overlook while I review evidence.”

He stared at her long enough to make her stomach flip-flop anxiously, then looked around at the captains. “Get out,” he said. He did not bother ordering them. He did not sound angry. He was simply sure, absolutely sure, that they would obey him.

They did. They knew what he did to people who defied him.

When they were gone, he walked slowly around the table, glancing at Ilia every few steps.

“I’m surprised you haven’t executed Uleq yet,” he said finally.

Ilia’s mind raced. He had given her control over Uleq’s case, and if he expected her to have killed Uleq already, then there were a few conclusions to draw. First, that he did not mind if Uleq died. Second, that he might have been testing her to see if she would do what was necessary. Third, that he had no plans to kill her if she executed Uleq, because then he would have no heir left. To her father, his legacy was everything.

She cursed herself for not having killed Uleq the moment he stepped foot in the base, then stopped. All her deductions only applied if her father was telling the truth.

He looked amused as he watched her, and she grew angry. He had always done this: tested her, smirked at her while she tried to find the right answer.

“We have more pressing matters,” Ilia said, sidestepping the entire issue. “Uleq has made an enemy of a human ship. It is now coming to find us.”

“You know this how?” He looked at her coldly. “No one should know where this base is…unless you have neglected some critical piece of security.”

“I have not.” Ilia kept her voice strong. She had nothing to be ashamed of. “Uleq engaged the humans several times, first against their Queen, and more recently against this ship, piloted by…one of their generals.” As far as she could make out, that was what Barnabas was. “During these engagements, this human ship discovered two of our bases with impressive speed. I find it prudent to assume that they will also find this one.”

“So you have called the fleet back.” He considered this as he resumed pacing.

“Yes.” What did he want her to say? She wanted to scream.

“I will be very displeased if this threat is not neutralized, Ilia.”

“I am doing what I can to undo Uleq’s damage.”

He gave her a sharp look. “Do not pass blame, Ilia. Not if you hope to lead this Corporation someday.”

But it wasn’t my fault! Ilia bit the inside of her cheek to hold the words back. Her father would never listen to them, only think less of her if she pleaded her innocence. She looked down at her hands and closed her eyes in fear when he stopped behind her.

“Ilia. Look at me.”

She forced herself to obey him, even though every instinct said to run. She raised her chin and turned to meet his eyes. He was smiling, to her shock.

“You have never hesitated to do what had to be done,” he said. “From when you very small, I knew you were determined. You showed strength time and again.”

Ilia said nothing. To relax now could be fatal. Her father’s mood could change in an instant.

“I admit I was surprised to hear that Uleq was still alive,” her father said. “But not displeased.”

Fool, FOOL. Ilia raged at herself. She should have killed her brother. Anything other than having her father be glad to see him.

“It speaks well of you that you do not deal too coldly with your family,” her father said. He gave a distant sort of smile. “Not because our family should be above justice, Ilia. That is not what I mean.”

She frowned.

“No, it is because those who follow us…are weak. They are lenient with their own families. If we were to do what must be done without any hesitation, it would unnerve them. When your uncle had to die, I made sure to have a trial. I had the evidence shown and appeared to be making a decision. I had known he was guilty from the first day, and that he must die. But the others who commanded the fleet required all the pageantries of that trial. I am glad that, young as you were, you absorbed that lesson.”

Ilia managed to smile. That wasn’t what she remembered from that day, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell him that. She nodded at him.

“And I admit…” He sighed. “I will be glad to see Uleq one more time before he has to die. He is my son, after all.”

Under the long sleeves of her robe, Ilia clasped her hands together until they hurt. She should be glad that her father agreed with her about Uleq’s death, but instead, all she could find in her heart was sadness.

All her life, Ilia had wanted to win. She had wanted to be the favorite child.

Now she was about to get what she wanted, but this was what she’d win—a father whose show of love was a last hug before execution.

It was probably best that she was going to have her father killed, she thought.

But that didn’t alleviate the hollow feeling in her chest.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“I have something for our next chess match,” Barnabas told Shinigami. He directed one of his pawns into place.

She arched one black eyebrow. “A special new form of cheating because you can’t win otherwise?”

“Demonstrably fallacious, Shinigami, and you know it. And no. It is...” He reached into a bag by his chair and pulled something out. “This.”

“What. The hell. Is that?”

“A chessboard,” Barnabas explained innocently.

“It’s...”

“A manual chess board.” He reached into the bag again and pulled out a carved stone piece. “Made specially from the stone on High Tortuga. I commissioned it before we left the first time and was able to pick it up when we were there a couple of weeks ago. Don’t you like it? It’s a gift.”

“I am a holograph,” Shinigami said icily. “I cannot pick up chess pieces.”

“I’ll move them for you.” Barnabas smiled. He was doing his best to look innocent, but there was a faint gleam in his eye. “And you know what’s best about this chessboard?”

“What?” Shinigami ground out.

“Since there’s no way to hack it, there’s no way to cheat!”

“That’s a lie. There’s sleight of hand and camera manipulation. You just mean it’s something I can’t cheat with, you bastard.”

Barnabas was laughing now. “I would never use this to gain a dishonorable advantage over you.”

“Oh, no? You wouldn’t? You’re clearly not Barnabas, then. Who are you? What have you done with him, you son of a bitch?”

Barnabas grinned as he slid a piece into place. “All right, I might have stumbled across some of your latest cheating programs and decided to stave that off a little.”

“There is no way you could have ‘stumbled across’ them. How the hell did you find those?”

“So you do have them. You admit that.”

“Son of a—” Shinigami scowled and transformed her avatar into Baba Yaga. “Listen up, ingrate!”

“Ingrate? I’m hundreds of years older than you, young whippersnapper, so don’t speak to me like you’re the grandma. Although I must say…” Barnabas grinned wickedly. “You’re not aging very well.” When Shinigami’s face got stormy, he laughed. “I’ll be damned, that works on female AIs, too.”

“If by ‘works,’ you mean, ‘makes them want to put crushed up glass in your food,’ then yes, it works beautifully.” She leaned back in her chair, frowning at him, and suddenly sat bolt upright. “Jeltor. You used Jeltor to get into my programs.”

Barnabas started laughing again. “All’s fair.”

“You let him into an Empire AI?”

“Oh, please, those programs were hidden on a partitioned server with no encryption. You’d been using Gar to store them for weeks. Once I figured that out…I just had to get to them. And since you had Gar keeping the only access module you knew of to get into it, I had to get creative. Jeltor’s suit can modify its hacking tip.”

“Sneaky bastard,” Shinigami grumbled.

“Mm-hmm. Are you going to make a move, or should I just declare myself the winner?”

Her eyes glowed. “Try it, and I’ll teach you a new meaning for the word ‘pain.’”

Barnabas only snickered.

* * *

Tafa was painting when Barnabas found her later.

The ship had been headed toward the Votayett system for about a day while Shinigami and Barnabas worked to figure out where the actual Yennai base might be. Gar and Jeltor prepared for the battle, but since Tafa would not be fighting, she had little to do other than paint.

When Barnabas entered the room, he paused on the threshold, and she turned to see him looking at her latest completed painting.

“What are you doing?” she asked finally.

He looked at her. “Shinigami has access to certain pieces of my neural networks, and I’ve asked her to show me your paintings close to the way you might see them. She shows my brain the input of one picture coming through one eye, and the other coming through the other eye. It isn’t exact, of course.”

Tafa tilted her head to the side curiously. “Wouldn’t it be? That’s how I see them.”

“Because humans have both eyes pointing forward, they use the variation between the images received to create depth perception,” Barnabas explained. “Even when we see two totally different images, our brains try to make sense of them in a different way than yours does. I’ve tried shifting the images to my peripheral vision…but I admit that just gave me a headache. Regardless, they’re beautiful.”

“Thank you.” Tafa smiled. She looked around and was very aware of the mess she had made in this beautiful white room. “Would you like to come in? It’s terribly messy, but perhaps—”

“You should see the workshops our engineers have,” Barnabas said with a smile. “And, yes, thank you. I came to see how you were doing.”

“Well enough, I guess.” Tafa fluttered her fingers in the Yofu equivalent of a shrug. “There’s not much to do.”

Barnabas said nothing, watching her quietly.

“I mean, I’m painting, but…something’s missing.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t suppose you could sit over there.”

“Why—oh.” Barnabas took his chair and moved it to her side. He still faced her, but now she could see him with one eye. “This takes some getting used to.”

“What’s it like to see only one thing?”

“Much less interesting, I think, than seeing two things.” Barnabas smiled. “Though I suppose I couldn’t say for certain. It sounds like a philosophical question that would be quite impossible to answer.”

“I hate philosophy,” Tafa said with a shudder. “Mustafee always loved it. He’d quote it at people before he had them executed.” Her voice was low and resentful. “He wanted everything he did to be justified, but he was only ever doing it for himself. He enjoyed being cruel.”

“I know,” Barnabas reassured. He remembered, with unpleasant vividness, the taste of Mustafee Boreir’s thoughts. “He was…well, he won’t be missed, I don’t imagine.”

“Only by people who also need to be brought to justice,” Tafa remarked succinctly. She looked at one of her paintings. “I think he’s what’s missing, though. I spent so much time worrying about him that now I don’t know what to do with myself. My parents…had a cause. They really believed in something. I was so concerned with my own survival that I didn’t have anything like that.”

“Perhaps you’ll find one,” Barnabas offered. “But art is its own cause, don’t you think?”

Tafa swung her head so she could see him first with one eye, then the other. She frowned unsure if he was joking.

“I’m quite serious,” Barnabas said. “I told you about the manuscripts.”

He paused and considered.

“One of the things you practice as a monk,” Barnabas said, “is making everything you do a devotion.”

“Devotion?”

“A prayer.” He considered. “More than a prayer—a service to God. Do the Yofu have deities?”

“Not like humans, I don’t think. It would be too complicated to explain. I know what a deity is, though, for other species.”

“Very well, then. Prayer is sometimes seen as a dialogue, a request made to God. Then when people do something extraordinary and devote that act to God, or proclaim that they do it to glorify God, they see that as something different than prayer. But a devotion, in the way a monk would perform it, is to do every task of daily life as a…meditation. To do even the littlest thing as if it is for the glory of all creation. Tending a garden, washing dishes, keeping livestock.” Barnabas nodded to the painting. “Creating art.”

“I do not worship your God,” Tafa observed.

Barnabas smiled. “Neither do I. Not in the way a monk would, at any rate. My understanding of things is somewhat different from theirs.”

“You were a monk, but you did not believe as they did?”

“It is…complicated.” Barnabas took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I am not just a human. I have changed in ways that some would say mean I cannot worship God. I do not believe that, but it also propelled me to look beyond one view of things. To understand further, I think you would need rather more information about human society than you probably want.” He smiled.

Tafa laughed. “I don’t understand Yofu, let alone humans.”

“I think that would be the honest assessment of anyone speaking about their own species,” Barnabas agreed. “Any sentient species is filled with contradictions.”

Tafa pulled her knees up to her chest and smiled at him. She could not remember having a simple conversation with anyone like this in years. She had always been afraid that the people she spoke to were spies from Mustafee, or that he had hidden recording devices somewhere. If she said the wrong thing, she would be punished.

To be able to indulge in a conversation without that fear was a luxury she had never expected. Expectations, after all, led to hope—and she had known since her parents were taken that hope was the most painful thing.

“Tell me about this piece.” Barnabas nodded at the finished painting.

Tafa bit her lip as she stared at it. “When I was very little, my parents took me to see my mother’s home. She was born in the southern hemisphere, very different from the north. Where she was from, it was all blue hills and scrub brush, and when the sun set, it would be gorgeous every night. We stayed in her parents’ house.”

Barnabas looked at the painting. He did not speak, only waited for her to explain further.

“I think it was probably on that trip that she rediscovered her belief of…” Tafa sighed and searched for the word. “Peace? Not having weapons.”

Barnabas nodded.

“For years, I did not think of it at all, though it is one of my happiest memories. My mother—” she pointed to a piece of the blue image, which somehow seemed to pulse with energy despite being only part of an abstract swirl “—came alive when she was there. I remember her smiling all the time. For months after that, things were different. She was filled with purpose, and she and my father fell more in love than they were even at the start, I think.”

“It hurt to remember it,” Barnabas suggested.

“Yes.” She looked at him and tried not to cry. For a moment, she hung her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “If they hadn’t gone back, they wouldn’t have…gotten into that mess. Gotten killed. That’s what I told myself, anyway.”

“You know that’s not necessarily true.”

“Yes.” Tafa clenched her hands, the dual thumbs closing over one another. “And I know it’s not their fault, as much as I wanted it to be.” She looked up to see Barnabas staring at her curiously. “It doesn’t make sense, does it? Mustafee and my aunt wanted to destroy us. They put my parents through things that no one should ever have to suffer. I should have blamed them. But they had all the power in my world, and the more I think about it, the more I wanted it to be my parents’ fault. I wanted to believe that they had done something wrong, rather than the whole universe is messed up and evil people have all the power.”

There was a silent moment.

“Anyway, that’s the painting. That trip. I don’t want to hate my parents anymore for being tortured or being killed. Missing them hurts so much more.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “But it’s the truth. Hating them was…believing a lie. I’m done believing Mustafee’s lies.”

Barnabas reached out to clasp her hand silently, and after a moment of surprise, she closed her fingers around his.

“I know how difficult it is to grieve,” he said. “And how much easier it is to take solace in anger. But you’re right, it’s better, to be honest.”

There was a small crackle in the speakers. “Am I interrupting?” Shinigami asked.

Barnabas looked at Tafa, who sniffled and shook her head. “No.”

“That’s a lovely painting,” Shinigami told her. Her tone was a bit awkward, as if she were trying to be nice and wasn’t quite sure how to do it.

That made Tafa’s heart feel like it was going to burst for some reason. These people might go around wreaking utter havoc with missiles and guns, but they were some of the nicest people she’d ever met. She wasn’t sure how that made any sense at all, but it was true.

She had friends, for the first time in her life.

“Thank you, Shinigami.”

“Yeah,” Shinigami said, still awkward. “Big B, we have a location lock on the base.”

“I’ll be there in a moment.” Barnabas practically leaped out of his chair. He smiled at Tafa. “I look forward to seeing the rest of your paintings.”

“Sure.” Tafa smiled, picked up her brush and started painting again.

Could art be a worthy purpose in life? She was intrigued to find out.

Chapter Twenty-Four

A day and a half passed on the Overlook, and that was enough time for Crallus to learn to hate the sound of the reactor below. Food was brought—not much of it—and once or twice, the guards peered through the door as if they wondered if they could get away with beating the prisoners.

Crallus would almost have welcomed that, at this point.

When the door slid open again he felt his heart leap, but he didn’t look. Let them try to sneak up on him. They’d kill him if he fought back, but he knew they’d kill him anyway. He’d get in a good fight before they took him down. He’d make them hurt. He’d—

“My son.”

Uleq’s head jerked up, and Crallus looked around sharply as well.

Torcellans, apparently, didn’t age—at least if this one was anything to go by. He looked dangerous and beautiful in the way Crallus imagined the monsters from his bedtime stories did when he was a child. Koel Yennai looked like the sort of monster whose very words would steal your soul. Crallus could see the echo of his features in Uleq’s face now.

Everything about Koel made Crallus want to be anywhere but here. Ilia was the type of threat he could understand: cunning, cruel, ambitious.

Koel was something else entirely. Crallus couldn’t even guess at his motives. His power, however, showed in every movement he made. It wasn’t the sort of power that made Crallus want to challenge him, or even obey him.

Crallus just wanted to run. Preferably all the way to another universe where Koel didn’t exist. The very poor second option was to get as far away from here as he could and hope Koel’s reach never got long enough to find him.

“Uleq.” Koel swept forward, holding out his hands, and Uleq took them and stood.

“Father.” His eyes searched Koel’s face. “Why are you here?”

Koel smiled. “You do not plead for your life. I like that. My brave son. My proud son.”

Uleq could not hide his pleasure, but he looked down rather than meet his father’s gaze.

“You have always been of great use to me,” Koel said. He smiled at Uleq as he spoke.

Crallus watched the two of them silently. Something was wrong here…

“I am glad to have been of use.” Uleq had found his voice at last, though it was rusty. “I hope…I will continue to be of use.”

His father only smiled at him, rather than answer the question that hung in words: will you have me executed? Your own son?

“Ilia was a fine heir,” his father said. “I could tell from the start. She is strong-willed and intelligent. She does not let paltry morals concern her. From the moment I held her in my arms, I knew she would be a fine legacy.”

Uleq said nothing. His jaw clenched, and a muscle jumped in his cheek.

“And then you were born,” Koel continued. “She was jealous of my love because both she and I knew what you could be.”

Uleq kept his head down, but Crallus could feel how much he wanted to look up. When Uleq had spoken about how much he hated his father, Crallus had not pictured this. That Uleq would kill Koel if given opportunity, he had no doubt.

But it was clear, also, that Uleq worshipped this man. If he killed Koel, it would only be an attempt to take his father’s place.

Crallus didn’t know what to make of that.

“Once Ilia knew she had a rival, she became determined to eliminate you.” Koel sounded amused. “She tried to kill you that first night, did you know?”

“Yes,” Uleq said evenly. “She told me.”

Koel threw back his head and laughed. “She would.”

Even Uleq was smiling somewhat, and Crallus looked between the two of them with wide eyes. What was going on here? What sort of family was this? He and his brothers had hated each other at times. They had always competed to be the favorite. But all their fist fights and petty little tricks had never been designed to do anything more than knock a few teeth loose.

“I knew if Ilia could not control her hatred of you, she would not be a fitting heir,” Koel confessed. “There was nothing more important to her. I had to know that she was not going to…lose her head. My heir must be strong, not just against others, but against their own poorer nature.”

Uleq looked up now, and Crallus saw the hope that the younger male tried to tamp down. Does this mean you’ve deposed Ilia? Does this mean I will inherit, that I won’t die here?

“And she has done so,” Koel said finally. “I expected you to be dead by the time I got here. She told me how you had failed us. I put your fate in her hands and waited to see what she would do. She wanted you dead…but she waited.” He nodded. “She will, indeed, be a fitting heir.”

“But—” Uleq’s voice broke.

“You have served a great purpose,” Koel expressed. “This test did not simply prove Ilia’s worthiness, it made her more worthy. Trials make us stronger, do they not?”

“Father, do not—”

“Trials make us stronger, Uleq, do they not?”

“Yes, Father.” Uleq swallowed.

“And she has one more trial.” Koel nodded to himself, his eyes distant. “She hates you, of course, but she also loves you. Having stood strong against her hatred, she must now face the trial of killing you. Only when she has resisted both sides of her weakness will she secure her place.”

“Father.”

“You have helped to build this legacy,” Koel said. “The Yennai Corporation will flourish because of your service.”

Uleq’s mouth hung open. “You cannot… You came here…” His face set. “You came here to gloat! To tell me that I’d lost.”

“To tell you that you have made something that was already great, into something greater.” His father’s smile was sincere and, as far as Crallus could tell, entirely mad. The older Torcellan actually believed, he saw now, that Uleq should be grateful to die to make Ilia more ruthless.

Crazy fucking bastard. Crallus stared at him, totally frozen in shock. He had served some of the worst people in the universe…he thought. He had become inured to all the cruel things people could do to one another…he thought.

He’d known absolutely nothing. He could see that now.

“I love you very much,” Koel said to Uleq. He kissed his son on the forehead. “Die in peace, Uleq. You have been everything I hoped for in a son, and more.”

He left without another word, and only when the door closed did Uleq move. He slumped to his knees on the floor, swaying. “He…”

Crallus shook himself, startled out of his daze. He cursed himself. He should have tackled Koel over the edge of the Overlook. What had he been thinking? For the first time, he understood the speeches he’d heard from their human nemesis.

Some evil should just be removed.

“I’ll make him sorry,” Uleq said now. His eyes were still distant as he began to laugh. He laughed and laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. “I’ll make him sorry. I’ll steal everything from him.”

It’s over, Crallus wanted to say. There’s no way we can win now.

But he didn’t know how to speak to Uleq over the sound of this crazed laughter, so Crallus only sat down near the buzzing sound of the reactor and tried not to think of anything at all.

* * *

Koel strode through the hallways of the base with a smile. He could not have asked for more from his children.

One of them had always had to die, of course. That was just the way of things. Only a foolish leader would leave more than one heir to rip the organization apart by dividing people’s loyalties.

Uleq was enough his son that he would always fight for control, of course.

And Koel meant what he said. The fight had made Ilia stronger. Uleq had performed a vital service for the future of the organization.

He was surprised to see Ilia waiting for him at the launchpad. “Daughter.”

“Father.” She smiled. “You’re leaving so soon.”

“I have matters to attend to. I will look forward to hearing word of your victory.” He smiled at her so she would be sure to see the compliment in his implicit assumption.

“Ah.” She looked vaguely disappointed.

“What is it?”

“I wanted…to show you the AI core.” She smiled at him. “This will give us a new form of control over the humans—and over many other governments, I am sure. I wanted you to be here when we first saw its capabilities.”

Koel’s brows went up. She was right; it would be a very satisfying moment.

“I shall come back, then,” he said. “Send word when you have it.”

Her smile was a tiny echo of his, cold and self-satisfied. “I will. Goodbye, Father.”

* * *

Zinqued whistled as their ship came within viewing range of the Yennai fleet. Carriers, destroyers, and a series of frigates hung in a dazzling array. From the charge in their engines, they had only just reached the rendezvous point themselves.

There was a fuzz of sound, then the displays on their screens were replaced by a Torcellan male’s face. His hair was worn in an elaborate set of braids, and he looked very self-important in a deep blue uniform that accented his silvery skin.

“Which one of you is Zinqued?”

“Me.” Zinqued nodded to him.

The Torcellan did not look impressed. “I am Wirav. We will be bringing your ships to the base, as you were told.”

He gave a small gesture to someone off screen, and several of the ships moved to take up position, each hovering over one of the mercenary ships. Tow rods extended and began to lock onto the ships.

A moment later, the electronics all flickered on Zinqued’s ship.

“We’ve lost location tracking,” Paun reported worriedly.

“Yes.” Wirav looked unmoved. “The location of the base is not something you should concern yourself with. We will proceed there, you will do your job, and you will be compensated before we tow you back to this point. Are there any questions?”

Zinqued shook his head, and the screens went dark again.

“I don’t like this,” Paun repeated, and despite himself, Zinqued found himself agreeing.

He looked over, troubled. “Neither do I. But there’s no backing out now, is there?”

“No,” Paun said finally. “Not anymore.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“We’re coming up on their fleet,” Shinigami reported.

“How many ships?” Barnabas asked curiously as he rolled his neck and swung his arms.

He’d told Gar that a proper warmup was very important. Gar, however, could think of nothing more than leaping out of the ship and immediately dispensing his kung-fu moves. He’d get halfway through a warmup exercise, get lost in thought, then flail with pent-up energy.

Barnabas gave him an amused look.

“Didn’t you ever get really excited to beat people up?” Gar demanded.

“No,” Barnabas said.

“Like hell,” Shinigami snapped. “I saw your vital signs when you were staring down Lan. You wanted to turn that fucker into paste.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Barnabas replied loftily. “And focus, Shinigami. Ships?”

“I can’t see them yet. I assume we’ll be in sensor range in—WHOA. Whoa, damn. They have a fleet.”

“What does that mean?” Barnabas stopped moving, halfway through sliding one of his knives into its sheath. He looked up at the speakers. “Shinigami? Break off if you need to. We’ll find—”

“One moment.” The artificial female voice was back, and a moment later, smooth jazz came over the speakers. “Thank you for your patience. We look forward to taking your call.”

Barnabas rolled his eyes and finished sheathing the knife.

“Any idea where in this base Ilia will be?” Jeltor sounded curious. “Do you think she and Uleq will be in the same place?”

“Uleq may already be dead,” Barnabas pointed out. “If your intel is correct.”

“My gut tells me that it is,” Jeltor said confidently.

Barnabas tried to refrain from asking which part of Jeltor was his gut, and how that was distinguishable from any other part. He was about to break down and mention it when Shinigami saved him by coming back over the speakers.

“Okay, here’s the deal, lads.”

“You are not calling us that.”

“No? ‘Shinigami’s Lads.’ I like it. In any event, lads, I looked at their communications, and I found the strangest thing. One might wonder, who are they waiting for with so many ships? Did they think we were bringing friends? What’s going on here? Don’t worry, your fearless leader has the answers.”

“You’re our fearless leader?” Barnabas questioned. “Really? You?”

“Don’t make me prove it. I will do so.” She paused for effect. “Anyway. They are, in fact, just waiting for us, and they’re planning to make a big show of missing us with missiles, not quite trapping us. We’re supposed to think that we made it into the asteroid just because we're so good at flying, and…yeah. Not sure what their plan is from there.”

“I mean…” Gar looked at Barnabas and Jeltor as if he thought this might be a trick question of some sort. “Presumably, some sort of trap, yes?”

“Well, yes. But what kind of trap?”

“The kind where they try to take the ship without damaging it at all, while presumably also dealing with me,” Barnabas asserted. “Which means overwhelming force, likely drawing me away from the ship so they can get to you.” Barnabas paused and looked around. “Do your strategic algorithms say the same thing?”

Shinigami grumbled.

Barnabas raised an eyebrow.

“All right, that was a more complete assessment than I expected, with more solid reasoning than I expected.” She sounded grumpy. “So, what do we do about that?”

“Well, I don’t want to tell you how to run your life,” Barnabas said, grinning as he finished putting his greaves in place. He stood. “But I’d suggest that this would be an excellent time for you to use that flamethrower.”

There was such a long silence that Barnabas, Jeltor, and Gar all looked at one another in worry. When Shinigami finally spoke, her voice practically shook with excitement.

“Hell. Fucking. Yes.”

* * *

“The ship has appeared, and we are beginning our firing sequence.” Wirav’s face was tight with displeasure. “They are evading all of this more easily than they should.”

“What does that mean?” Ilia, walking quickly toward the landing bays where the mercenary ships were being offloaded, stopped so suddenly that some of her guards nearly ran into her. She stared into the communications unit, glaring at Wirav. “I told you they were not to be—”

“I know. You also said they were to believe they had done all of this through their own skill, which means we have to make enough of an effort that they think we’re trying.” He sounded like he very much wanted to yell at her. “It would have been better not to have the whole fleet here,” he added. “Now we run the risk of—”

“Excuses?” Ilia asked coldly. “Speaking doubts in front of your captains so that if you fail, you can blame me for your own incompetence, Admiral?”

Wirav fell silent, flushing.

Finally, he started again. “What I was saying is that this ship is far more maneuverable and responsive than it should be. I know of no species that can pilot this well.” His voice was ugly, twisted with his hatred, but he kept it quiet, at least. He did not look at Ilia.

Don’t worry, Wirav. We won’t have to put up with one another for much longer.

“Perhaps it is being piloted by the AI,” Ilia suggested. “Did you think of that?”

His head jerked up, and he stared at her. “Who in their right mind would trust an AI to fly a heavily-armed ship?”

“The Etheric Empire.” Had he not been paying attention to any of this?

“And you want to let this thing onto your station?”

“We can manage it,” Ilia snapped. “We have hundreds of mercenaries. We can partition and disconnect the AI core. This plan has been approved. Do your piece of it.”

She disconnected the call and swept into the main hangar bay.

The mercenaries noticed her, their interest showing in a ripple across the room. One of the Hieto forged his way through the crowd to stand in front of her, and she recognized him as Zinqued.

She smiled brilliantly. One of her father’s earliest lessons had been to smile as if every person you spoke to was your most treasured ally. “Zinqued. It is good to meet you.”

“And you.” He nodded deeply, almost a bow.

He was reserved. She only just kept her eyes from narrowing. He was not pleased to be here.

“Tell me, do you have any questions for me?” She drew him aside, away from his compatriots. Let him speak freely. She would acknowledge his concerns and make him think that he was heard.

It cost her nothing to pretend.

But he only smiled. “No questions,” he said. He pointed to the exits that she had predetermined. “We will have one-third of the forces hide within each of those hallways, while my team remains in place on the hanging platform. Once the pilot and crew have been drawn down one of the hallways, they will be attacked, and a second group will cut off their escape. The third group will wait in reserve unless they are called for.”

Ilia approved. It met her criteria for dealing with enemies—show overwhelming force, and weaken their resolve as new waves showed up every time they battled their way through. It was always best to make the enemy lose heart.

“Good,” she said. “I will remain in my offices. Let me know when you have captured the ship.”

* * *

Missiles streaked nearby, and the Shinigami wove through the spread easily.

Now that she knew the fleet’s plan, it was easy to pretend that Shinigami believed this was an attack. She would hold her responses so that some missiles came close, and she made a point of jerking the ship out of the way awkwardly at times as if she hadn’t noticed some missile or another.

But between her scanners, her reflexes, and the fact that they weren’t really trying to shoot her down, she could have done this in her sleep.

Everything going well? Barnabas asked from the shuttle bay.

Shinigami watched as each destroyer disgorged another spread of missiles. She would have shaken her head if she had one. With the Boreir Group done, these ships really shouldn’t be wasting so many missiles.

Then again, they wouldn’t last long enough for that to matter. She chuckled to herself.

Yes, everything is going well. Here’s the kicker: so our cloaking doesn’t hide us from them perfectly, but what it does do is mess with their missile targeting. We’re too visible on the one hand, and not quite visible enough on the other. You gotta love it, really. With a surge of inspiration, she charted a path that wove between the missiles and left them colliding with one another. It’s a pity you can’t see this as I can. It’s amazing.

Indeed. Between you and Tafa, I’ve become aware that human sensory systems are quite lacking. He sounded amused.

You’re not wrong. Shinigami quite liked Tafa’s paintings. But even Tafa can’t see in every direction at once. She can’t fly at these speeds or feel the missiles explode. Feel the paths she charts… She waited, but Barnabas didn’t respond. Hello?

I was trying to imagine it. He sounded almost wistful. It sounds incredible.

It is. She launched her own set of missiles and laughed as the Yennai missiles tracked them, only to have hers split into multiple autonomous pieces. Gotcha, bitches. Time to make you run some defense.

They didn’t like holding back, she could tell that much. She wouldn’t push them too hard, for fear that they would lose their tempers.

But she couldn’t let them have all the missiles-and-explosions fun.

They grouped up for one last attempt at play-acting, and she readied herself. She could see the entrance they wanted her to use now: an isolated landing bay that probably had plenty of space nearby for soldiers to hide.

A lot of soldiers now, a lot of crispy soldiers later. She couldn’t wait to unleash the flamethrower on them.

Dozens of full spreads of missiles came out of nowhere, and Shinigami realized the fleet captains had truly lost their tempers. It went against every instinct of theirs to let a ship through their ranks.

She could respect that, she supposed. She just had to make sure she didn’t blow up first. She wove through the missiles, looped back, ducked, and skimmed through their fleet so that their ships had to dodge their own missiles.

She was more maneuverable than any of them here, and she reveled in it. They were relying on the slow reflexes of organic life forms.

Their problem, not hers.

She gave one last loop over a few ships to lose the last missile spread, then she slipped into the landing bay of the asteroid.

We’re here.

You sound…pleased? Barnabas was still learning her moods, but he hadn’t quite assessed this one yet.

Oh, I am, Shinigami said. I don’t know if it’s going to be on the way out of here or sometime in the future, but we’re going to face that fleet—and I’m looking forward to showing them my true capabilities.

* * *

In the shuttle bay, Barnabas turned to Gar and Jeltor with a smile.

“Ready to get rid of these bastards?”

“Ready.” Gar gave the nod.

“Ready.” Jeltor’s mechanical body stuck up both guns in an approximation of a thumbs up gesture.

“Ready,” Shinigami added over the speakers. “Flamethrower primed.”

The doors opened, and Barnabas’ eyes began to glow. “Then let’s bring these bastards to Justice.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“You’ll find them down any of the three tunnels,” Shinigami reported. “From the scans I was able to get as I came in, the far-left hallway leads into a long corridor that runs to the heart of the asteroid. Meanwhile, I believe the people trying to steal the ship are hovering above me.”

“What’s your plan if they never get in range of the flamethrower?” Barnabas headed for the hallway farthest to the left.

“Turn on the engines, flip them off my top, and then hit them with the flamethrower.”

“Well, it seems like you have this planned out. Good hunting.”

“Good hunting,” Shinigami echoed.

At the entrance to the tunnel, Barnabas turned to look at Gar and Jeltor. He put one finger to his lips and held up the other hand to tell them to stay where they were.

Then he started to run. He kept to the outside of the first bend in the tunnel and activated the grav technology in his boots just as he came around the corner. The soldiers, all of whom had been listening to the steps approach, were still aiming their weapons at chest height as he soared into the air and pushed off the wall a few feet above their heads.

He flipped as he came down toward the back of the group, drawing his Jean Dukes Specials. Two shots with his favorite ammo blew whole groups of the soldiers back.

There was a shocked pause, then the soldiers screamed their fury and charged.

Barnabas slid into action with a feral grin. His first task was to clear the small group of soldiers still in the back. He pumped three more shots into one edge of the line and holstered the pistols, drawing his knives instead.

He cut through the group with the sounds of their screams in his ears. His thoughts were drenched in their hatred, radiating from them so strongly that he could hardly close his mind to it.

Sometimes he felt fear or shock, but not now. No, these were well-trained and hired to kill. They’d planned an ambush with no mercy, and they would not give him any chance to escape this if they could help it.

The second detachment of soldiers approaches, Gar reported. If we hit them from the back, we’ll be crushed between two forces.

Barnabas swore. He ripped off one soldier’s arm and threw what remained of the soldier into the main group.

Then he charged, driving his way through the very center of the crowd.

These soldiers had not drilled on infantry formations, and they were not trained in anything more than meeting one enemy head on and defeating them in single combat. Still, there were a lot of them. Barnabas felt strikes and blades glance off him, and once or twice, he heard the report of weapons. These soldiers had decided that it didn’t matter if they hit their own comrades, as long as the enemy was defeated.

Gar and Jeltor met him in the middle of the group. Jeltor spat bolts of flaming ammunition from his hands, and Gar laid waste to his opponents with unrestrained brutality.

Gar wasn’t efficient, not yet. He didn’t have enough training. But God help his enemies when he learned to be efficient. Barnabas even spared a moment to watch, open-mouthed, as Gar grabbed one of the Hieto and used the heavily-armored body as a mace to beat several other soldiers.

He’s got real style, Shinigami remarked.

Barnabas tried not to laugh as he took up position. The three of them maintained a circle, their backs to one another.

That he does. I’ll have to work hard to come up with a style of my own.

I look forward to watching your career. Also, it’s too bad we can’t keep Jeltor. Maybe we can teach you to throw fireballs…?

Mmm. Barnabas pulled out the Jean Dukes Specials again and began firing. Three soldiers skidded away in one direction, and four into another. They picked themselves up as others launched themselves wildly in Barnabas’ direction, only to meet more shots that sent them stumbling back.

Increasingly, he saw them look over their shoulders as if waiting for reinforcements to arrive.

Barnabas guessed that those reinforcements had seen what was happening and wanted no part of it.

“Shinigami, tell me if any other groups mobilize.”

“Will do, but they’re staying put.” She sounded like she was laughing. “Smart or cowardly? I can’t decide.”

“A little bit of both.” Barnabas grinned and whirled, the butts of his pistols turned briefly into maces to take out several soldiers. “We’re about halfway through this set. I wonder if they’ll show up when these are gone.”

“Maybe.” Gar cut into the conversation. He wore a look of intense focus as he fired his weapons, flipped them back into their holsters, and launched into hand to hand combat once more. “How about this? We’ll call you if they do, and in the meantime, you head into the asteroid and find Uleq?”

Barnabas wavered, but he knew it was the smart thing to do. Both Jeltor and Gar were heavily armored and were maintaining their composure—while the soldiers were getting both more tired, and more wary of this fight.

It was difficult to find the will to attack someone who had just taken down several dozen of your fellow soldiers, after all.

He had to let them stand on their own at some point. Barnabas nodded to the two of them and leaped lightly to push off the wall and land behind the group of soldiers. They hardly seemed to notice as he ran off into the darkness, except for one thing: he could feel their relief that he was going for someone else.

This was how places like the Yennai Corporation fell, he thought to himself. Their soldiers didn’t fight for them. They didn’t believe in their leaders.

When it came to a battle of life or death, that lack of faith was fatal.

He wasn’t too far from the landing bays when he came to a door manned by several guards. He didn’t give them a single moment to respond to his presence. He flipped through the air, one knife sneaking under the furthest guard’s neckpiece to slit his throat. The body fell heavily as Barnabas landed on the other side of the group.

The other guards were still looking at the place where he’d been, and he charged them before they could adjust.

They fell within seconds. He used the dead guard’s rifle to knock one of them back into the wall and smashed it into the side of his skull. The rifle wasn’t as good a weapon as he was accustomed to using, but it worked well enough for him to direct two bursts apiece into each of the remaining guards.

They dropped like stones and Barnabas unlatched the heavy door and pulled it open, striding inside. Such a heavy door was very interesting.

He recognized Crallus and Uleq at once. The Shrillexian stood, his eyes widening at the sight of Barnabas. To Barnabas’ surprise, he didn’t appear eager to fight.

Perhaps it was the fact that Barnabas was coated in blood. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d seen hundreds of his fellow soldiers killed already. Still, it was remarkable.

It was also noteworthy that Uleq was smiling at him. It was a somewhat disturbing smile, Barnabas thought.

“You’re here,” Uleq said. “I’ve been waiting for you. Finally, I get to destroy all of my enemies at once.”

Barnabas locked eyes with him and forced his way into Uleq’s thoughts. He saw some faces he recognized—Ilia and the Torcellan who must be Uleq’s father—and many he did not. They were rivals and enemies from over the years, he suspected, each of them cut down in Uleq’s quest for power.

There was no question of what justice meant for Uleq.

But Uleq, backing toward the strange glow at the back of the room, pulled a device from one sleeve. It was counting down, and Uleq laughed maniacally.

“Such a small bomb, isn’t it? They didn’t find it on the scanners when we came in. It would barely have killed one person on its own. But once it touches the reactor...” He gave Barnabas a crazed smile, launched the bomb over the edge of the floor, and let out a triumphant peal of laughter. “You’re going to die with me. Ilia’s going to die with me. Your ship is going to be destroyed. And my father’s legacy is going to be utterly destroyed, too.”

Barnabas froze. There was no way to get to the reactor—

But Crallus gave a primal roar as he burst into motion.

“Like hell, you get out of this so easily!” He locked eyes with Barnabas for a moment, then shoved Uleq out of the way. “Kill Koel Yennai!”

And then he was gone, tumbling over the edge. Barnabas raced to look over the edge.

Crallus was strong, but the reactor was made to power entire cities. Crallus crawled his way to the bomb and smashed it to pieces, scattering the inert fragments of it across the floor before he collapsed.

With the last of his strength, he pushed himself onto his back to look at Barnabas. His lips moved, and his last thought made it into Barnabas’ head:

You have to kill Koel.

And he was gone.

Barnabas turned to Uleq, who stared at the edge of the floor in horror. He hadn’t planned to live this long. With his bomb gone, he had no idea what to do. He looked at Barnabas, almost pleadingly.

“There is no need for a trial here,” Barnabas told him. He moved quickly, grabbing Uleq by the throat and held him above the floor. “You know what you have done. You will face the consequences. Tell me just one thing: where is your sister? Where is your father?”

In regard to Koel Yennai, he found nothing. Beyond a terrifying sense of duty, Koel had never shared his business with his children; Barnabas cast those memories aside for now. The map to Ilia’s office, however, formed itself in Uleq’s head, and Barnabas took it without any gentleness.

He crushed Uleq’s throat, dropped the body, and set off at a run for Ilia’s office.

Like hell, she was going to escape.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ilia watched in horror as the human and his companions cut through the mercenaries like they were nothing. Mercenaries rushed them, trying to sink knives into their skin, or shooting wildly, past caring if they hit their own, but nothing they did made a difference. The three figures whirled and shot, deflected hits with reflexes beyond anything she had seen, and it seemed they barely had to look in the direction of an opponent before their target was dead.

She grabbed the communications unit. “Send reinforcements!”

Why was the second wave not converging on them?

The silence was her only answer. She had granted them access to the security feeds, thinking foolishly that this would let them know when they should put the second part of the plan in motion, and where they should go.

All it had done in the end was display the absolute carnage being wreaked by the human and his fellow fighters.

And one of them was… Ilia squinted at the screen. Was that a Luvendi? It couldn’t be. That was impossible.

But all of this was impossible.

She moaned as she pushed herself back from the desk with her hands over her eyes. She had to find a way to rectify this, or her father would have her executed. There was no possibility that he would be lenient—or even that she could get any of the employees of the Yennai Corporation to follow her, instead.

No one stood up to her father.

She had been the first, the one who planned to shock the rest of them—but she would never get a chance to do that if this all went wrong.

Think, think!

She looked back at the battle, hugging herself. Their attackers cut down mercenaries with brutal efficiency. As she watched, the Luvendi seized a Brakalon and lifted the alien bodily over his head.

Her eyes went wide, and she forgot to breathe as she watched the Brakalon dashed down on the ground, picked up again, and dropped for the second time. The Luvendi hauled his opponent up and hurled him into the group, sending mercenaries staggering and, to judge from the way some of them twitched and went still, crushing the life out of more than one.

Then, one of the strangest things she had ever seen, he made a fist with one hand, cupped it in the other, and bowed to the mercenaries he had just killed.

It was only a momentary diversion, of course. He launched into action only a few moments later. Ilia watched him, watched the Jotun…

They had misused the Jotun, some distant part of her thought. She had never known what those suits were capable of. Whenever they met with the Yennai Corporation officials, the Jotun politicians came in awkward tanks that could barely make it upstairs.

And, like fools, the Yennai executives had believed that this was the limit of their skill.

It was now clear that that was not even close to the truth. The suit vaulted into the air, clearly warping gravity and using even more forms of propulsion than Ilia knew existed. Auto-targeting of the arms swiveled to discharge bullets faster than any sentient life form could find and shoot targets on its own. Occasionally, jets of fire shot unsuspecting mercenaries, coating their armor in flames and making them stumble into their own ranks, where the flames only spread.

No, there was no chance the rest of the mercenaries would intervene.

The Luvendi and the Jotun finally stood, panting, in a circle of their fallen enemies and Ilia stared at them, face twisted in desperation and rage. How? She wanted to scream at them. How have you done any of this?

And where was the human?

Sheer terror buckled her knees. Ilia swiped at the controls to bring up the video feeds. He wasn’t back in the hangar bay with the ship. He wasn’t cutting his way through the crowds of other mercenaries. She couldn’t see him in the Beta or Gamma corridors, and the Alpha corridors…

Those led to her.

She peered along each of the feeds, in turn, whimpering her fear, and stopped at the feed from the Overlook.

That was Uleq’s body. She reached out, her fingers trembling as they dragged across the screen. Uleq lay twisted as he had fallen. Remarkably, his face showed a manic grin. What had happened to him? How had his throat been crushed, and where… Where was the Shrillexian?

The feed outside the door showed only dead guards. Both the Shrillexian and the human seemed to be gone.

There was a noise from behind her and Ilia screamed. She scrambled backward as the human advanced on her, eyes glowing red. How he had gotten into the room, she did not even wonder.

It didn’t matter. He was here. He had found the vents, the back doors, the escape routes…

He had found their base when he never should have. Her father would kill her for this failure.

No, wait…he wouldn't. The human would kill her first. A hysterical laugh welled up in Ilia’s chest. She could no longer think. The only thought in her head was that she was going to die. All she could see were the red eyes.

“Ilia Yennai.” The human’s voice was at once mild, and the most terrifying thing she had ever heard. “Do you know who I am?”

“A member of the Empire.” She had read Uleq’s notes about this man, and they were a jumbled mess of guesses. “Barnabas?”

“That is my name,” he agreed. “You may call me Vigilante One. The Empire is no more. I am no longer a Ranger.”

Like she even cared about that. A measure of her old anger resurfaced, and she saw his eyes flash.

“You should care who your enemies are,” he told her.

Could he read her thoughts?

“Of course, I can read your thoughts.” He looked halfway between bored and annoyed. “That should be clear from context.”

She opened her mouth to scream for her guards—

“They’re dead.”

Ilia pressed her eyes shut and felt a whimper escape her. This was how she was going to die.

“Yes.” Barnabas crouched to look at her. “This is how you’re going to die: alone, all your money and power useless as a shield, no one loyal enough to try to save you. The mercenaries you bought are thinking better of their bargain. The fleet has dispersed outside, and all communications with them are blocked—you can’t call them back. You built up your power in the shadows, and you hid here while you bribed and killed and tortured your way to power.

“And now you’ve found that in the end, there was no running from Justice.”

Ilia’s eyes flew open at that. Justice? He could not be serious.

“You aren’t even close to understanding,” she spat. “You didn’t grow up like I did, knowing that thousands hated your family and would see you killed for spite.”

“Somehow,” he said drily, “I find myself more concerned with the people you tortured and killed. You say you were afraid of that. If it was so terrible, why do it to anyone? Think back on them, Ilia. Think of their names. Think of their faces.”

She did not want to, but the command was inexorable. She closed her eyes and saw all of them. Her uncle, not killed by her, and yet, she had not spoken up. Her brother, who she would have killed if she’d had the chance. Her father. Wirav. The generals who had failed her, and their families. The members of colonies and planets who had opposed her. The loved ones of politicians amongst all species…

“And so many more,” Barnabas said, and she remembered that he could see every thought in her head.

He had made her incriminate herself. She glared at him.

“I could have plucked the information from your mind, willing or not,” he told her. “I wanted you to remember them. I wanted their faces to be one of the last things you saw before death claimed you.”

I hate you. She didn’t bother saying the words aloud. She knew he’d hear them.

He only smiled. “Do you even know how much blood is on your hands, Ilia? These are only the faces you remember. Your father built this company, but you did what you could to aid him. You did a lot to aid him. You backed pirates and slavers; you bribed politicians and generals to turn on the citizens they were sworn to protect; you had whole colonies wiped out to make way for your mines and your factories. You never saw their faces.

“And it was a choice. Never pretend you were forced. There is no force great enough to compel someone to do such things. There was no ulterior motive, no greater good. You did it for a pat on the head and a chance to have even more power. What more could you want, Ilia? You held lives in the palm of your hand and destroyed them at a whim. What more could you ever want?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“I don’t.” He shook his head. “But neither do you. That’s the worst part. You don’t even know what you wanted. You just killed and killed and killed. You were a force of evil and destruction without even having the decency to care why you did those things. The universe will be better off without you.”

She screamed as his knife drove into her heart and twisted. With another scream, ripped deep from within her, she grabbed it and dragged it out. With only seconds remaining, she turned her face to the stone wall so that his face would not be the last thing she saw.

Barnabas stood, looking down at her body.

It’s not enough, is it? Shinigami asked.

It’s never enough, Barnabas told her. I stopped believing in heaven and hell long ago—at least, as they’re spoken about in the religious texts. But I can see why the thought of them has endured. The idea that she could do so much wrong and just die, not living more than a moment of the terror and pain she inflicted, is an injustice I do not want to let go.

Shinigami was silent.

But they’re dead now, Barnabas said. There’s only one left, and he knows I’m coming for him, I’m sure. He made his children into monsters. I wonder if he’ll mourn them.

From what I know of him, Shinigami said, from the stories I’ve heard, I’m not sure he has emotions. You thought Ilia was evil? She was nothing.

Then I will be glad to rid the universe of him. Barnabas cleaned his knife and sheathed it. What now?

I thought you’d never ask. Shinigami sounded like she was smiling. You should come back to the docking bay.

Are you being attacked? I’ll be right there. Just try to hold out.

I don’t need your help, Shinigami said, sounding offended. I need an audience. It’s flamethrower o’clock, and this shit is going to be epic.

Despite himself, despite all he had just seen in Ilia’s thoughts, Barnabas managed to chuckle as he headed toward the landing bay. He knew that had been Shinigami’s intent, too.

Thank you for keeping me from getting up in my own head, Shinigami. He was careful not to let her hear that.

She would get insufferable if she heard it, after all.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Zinqued and his team waited as the Shinigami zipped into the landing bay. They watched the captain and his crew disembark and looked at each other in confusion.

A Jotun, a Luvendi, and a human.

It was like a joke. This was the crew everyone was so afraid of? They’d freed a whole mining town, fought their way through mercenary bases, and gotten Uleq and Ilia Yennai both so terrified that they approved the hire of hundreds of mercenaries?

It wasn’t like a joke, it was a joke. It had to be a joke. How could any of this be serious? The Luvendi even wore armor.

Zinqued wondered if they just waited for their opponents to start laughing, then shot them all. It was really the only possibility he could believe. Even Paun, world-weary and tedious in his “wisdom” stared at them like he wasn’t sure if he should laugh or not.

They watched as the three disappeared down the hallway furthest to the left, and Zinqued nodded at Chofal to be ready. On his signal, she would begin the platform’s descent and they would take the ship. For now, they were on a platform painted to look like the rock above, and totally impervious to scanners. They would just wait until the second set of mercenaries moved, then go.

Then the screaming started. Huge booms sounded from the leftmost hallway, almost like a pistol—but what kind of pistol was so loud?

The mercenaries must have some good shit when it came to weapons, Zinqued decided. After all, it must be the mercenaries who were attacking. It didn’t occur to him that anything else might be the case.

“See if you can get into the video feeds,” he whispered to Chofal.

She nodded, and everyone inched across the platform as quietly as they could to watch. When it tipped precariously, they all shuffled into the center, hardly willing to look up even when they might fall hundreds of feet.

The picture, when it came up, was horrifying. The three figures from the ship were, indeed, wreaking havoc.

For starters, the Jotun was not just a blob of jelly in a glass jar. It was actually fighting, and it looked like it was fighting well. As they watched, it flipped a knife out of one of its arms, stabbed a Shrillexian that had charged it, then electrified the knife. He screamed and shot back into a group of fellow soldiers, all of whom jerked with some residual current; the knife was still embedded in his chest. As Zinqued’s crew all winced in sympathetic pain, the Jotun held out his arm and the knife dislodged itself from the Shrillexian’s chest and flew back into place.

The human might look like a pile of nothing, but it ripped soldiers limb from limb. Zinqued even saw it sink its teeth into a soldier’s neck and throw the body away with blood streaming down its chest.

“A mentivore,” Chofal whispered in a choked voice. There was still a special hatred for any species that ate its own kind, but worse, as far as most aliens were concerned, were mentivores—those who ate another sentient species.

No one had known this about humans up until now, and it was more than a little frightening. What more might they do, after all?

And to top it all off, the Luvendi fought like some sort of nightmare. Had Luvendi been lying to everyone for years? Were they really this strong?

Or was this one…

Everyone looked at one another, imagining strange experiments in laboratories. That would explain everything.

It also meant that no one particularly wanted to mess with these people.

“New plan,” Zinqued muttered, very quietly. “The fleet won’t attack the Shinigami, right?”

Everyone nodded.

“So if we can get on the Shinigami, we can get out of here before anyone realizes we’re gone.”

There was a pause, while they all considered this. They looked wary.

Paun said, “Ilia Yennai is going to have us killed once we’ve served her purpose.”

“And that’s if she survives,” Zinqued added. For the first time, he was glad of Paun’s cautious demeanor. No one would disbelieve Paun, of all people. If Paun said something awful was going to happen, you could be sure it wasn’t an exaggeration.

Everyone nodded, and Chofal began to lower the platform.

They worked in concert. They knew they had to get the ship before the mercenaries figured out they were running away—because sooner or later, everyone would be running.

And they had to get the ship before the crew got back, too.

“This is really important,” Zinqued said, as the platform descended. “We need to pilot it out manually. No computers. As soon as that AI gets online…”

“Hey.” One of the mercenaries had come out of the hallways and stared at them. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Follow my lead,” Zinqued said under his breath. Much more loudly, he said, “Our part of the plan. Hide, the human can’t know you’re here.”

“I don’t think so.” The mercenary strolled closer. He had his hand on his weapon, and a few seconds later, the rest of his crew flowed out of the tunnels. “I think maybe you step away from that ship and leave it for us.”

“But—” Zinqued began.

Paun took over smoothly. He pretended to be confused. “Do you know how to steal ships? Because conventional methods have not worked with this one. That’s why we brought you in. With the sale from this ship—”

“It’s us that put our lives on the line.” The mercenary jerked his head at the rest. “We’re the ones dying for this. It’s ours.”

“I don’t think you know what you’re up against,” Paun cautioned. “If you just let us disable its systems, we can sell it, and all get rich.”

“Maybe we cut you out, and we get richer,” the mercenary countered. “And if that doesn’t sound like a good plan to you, let me just tell you, in that plan—you get to live. You keep standing where you’re standing…and you don’t.”

Zinqued opened his mouth to complain, and Paun grabbed him by the arm. “I see the wisdom of this plan,” he said, with a smile. He dragged Zinqued away and motioned for the crew to come with him.

“Are you crazy?” Zinqued hissed. “We’re losing a shot at the biggest take we ever had!”

“What are you going to use the money for when you’re dead?” Paun shot back. “We lost. The only thing to do now is walk away.”

“But…but…” They were smirking, all those mercenaries. They looked at Zinqued’s crew mates like all of them were nothing.

“I know,” Paun commiserated. “But sometimes, you just have to accept that the people who screw you over don’t ever pay for it. Sometimes—”

There was a strange roaring sound, and then a scream that made everyone’s eyes go wide. The crew of Paun’s ship looked around…and their jaws dropped open.

Fire sprayed from flamethrowers on the bottom of the Shinigami. The mercenaries, who had crowded close to the ship as they looked over their stolen haul, screamed, and ran for the exits. A moment later, bullets started spraying them.

“This way!” Chofal yelled. She dragged Zinqued and Paun with her as the crew stumbled for the relative safety of the corridors.

“Why aren’t they following us?” Zinqued yelled. Despite the direction of the bullets, all the mercenaries seemed to be trying to escape directly into the line of fire.

It didn’t make any sense at all, until…

Until they came around the corner and he realized they were in the hallway the human and his crew had taken.

“Ruuuuuuun!” Zinqued yelled as they all turned around and prepared to run toward the death ship.

“Too late!” Paun managed to choke out.

Zinqued and the others stopped. They turned, as one, and met the eyes of the three aliens they hoped to never meet. The human was dripping blood, the Luvendi barely even looked winded, and there was a little pilot light going on the Jotun’s suit.

Zinqued tried not to fall to his knees in sheer terror. He was a Shrillexian, he told himself. He needed to have some self-respect. If nothing else, he was not going to die on the ground, crying like a baby.

At least the human seemed to kill quickly.

The human crossed the space between them with long strides. “Why were you here?” His voice seemed to boom around the cavern. Those eyes, a strange blue color like Yofu skin, stared into Zinqued’s. “Ah,” the human said. “You wanted to steal my ship.”

He could read minds. The room blurred, and the next thing Zinqued knew he was staring up at the ceiling. He had fainted.

Barnabas stared down at him and tried not to laugh. When Shinigami had told him that she was letting the ship thieves escape briefly so she could have a go at the mercenaries, he’d promised to take care of the ship thieves, himself.

Now they were practically shitting themselves. He’d made a Shrillexian faint.

This was a good day.

He peered into each of their minds in turn. Their captain was a sensible alien, someone who was determined to make as good a living as he could without doing anything too illegal. He’d never done anything like sell the crews of the ships he sold. He always let them off at nearby stations. Not great, considering he stole their ships, but not worth a death sentence.

The Yofu mechanic was hardly above school age. She had a cheerful disposition and liked romance novels, and somehow, she’d managed to get this far on a crew of ship stealers without ever firing a gun.

The rest of them were the same: petty criminals, but not murderers or slavers.

“Listen to me,” Barnabas warned. “This is the last ship you will ever try to steal. You will take legitimate work. You will no longer take what is not yours. You will change your ways. You will tell everyone you meet that the Shinigami is not to be taken. You will tell them what you saw here today.” He pointed to where Shinigami was just finishing off the last of the mercenaries. “You will thank your gods that I am not a man who likes vengeance, but one who delivers Justice.”

He leaned forward as they gaped at him, and let his eyes grow red.

“And you will pray we never meet again,” he finished, letting his eyes glow and spreading the Fear around him.

Zinqued fainted again. The Yofu mechanic shoved her hand in her mouth to keep from screaming. The captain staggered against the wall as Barnabas swept through the group and across the bay, littered with the bodies of mercenaries.

He waited until they were on board the ship and the door had closed before collapsing into tears of laughter. Gar was also laughing hysterically, and Jeltor let out strange mechanical noises that sounded like a very small car backfiring.

Tafa appeared in the hallway. “What happened? Why are you all laughing?”

“They actually…they actually…” Barnabas pressed a hand over his stomach. “They actually shit themselves. Oh, God. I am a very, very bad man. This shouldn’t be funny.”

“You all laugh,” Shinigami said serenely. “I’ll just pilot us out of here.”

“That sounds good.” Barnabas straightened up and wiped at his eyes. “Ah. Ah, that was amazing.”

“Mostly amazing,” Gar corrected. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. A truck filled with Brakalons. And rocks. If I’d known delivering Justice hurt this much on the back end, I’d have thought twice about it.”

“I hate to tell you,” Barnabas said, “but tomorrow is going to hurt worse.”

“Not possible.”

“And the day after that is going to be the worst.”

“You’re…” Gar pushed himself up and stared at Barnabas in horror. He looked at Jeltor, then at one of Shinigami’s sensors. “He’s kidding, right?”

“Nope,” Shinigami said. “Anytime you want me to try to turn you into an AI, I’m happy to do so.”

“That’s a hard no from me,” Barnabas said. To Gar, he added, “You’ll get used to it.”

“How? I may die!”

“You won’t die, you’ll just be very, very uncomfortable. We’ll have to lure you through the ship by tying pieces of food to strings and making you chase them.” Barnabas grinned at him. “Go take some painkillers. And Shinigami—back to High Tortuga. Quickly.”

“Why?” Shinigami projected her avatar into the corridor to frown at him.

“I need juice,” Barnabas declared. “We’re out.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It was the end of the day, and Aebura’s was filled with patrons. The species mingled, from tall Luvendi—all trying to look more grumpy than they really were—to more than a few Brakalons, and Ubuara swinging from the rafters and munching on pieces of fruit from the platters Carter always had waiting for them there.

And, in the corner, there was one table full of humans.

“See?” Tabitha demanded.

“I don’t know.” Bethany Anne looked down at the sandwich. “It’s good. No, really, it’s good. I like it. But it’s…it’s just a sandwich.”

“Oh, my God.” Tabitha flopped her head down in her hands

“Kemosabe,” Hirotoshi said patiently. “Kemosabe, a bet is a bet.”

Tabitha didn’t even pick her head up as she fished her wallet out of her pocket and threw him a bill. “Fine. You win. She doesn’t understand true genius in food form.”

“Maybe you should have had her try the juice,” Barnabas suggested.

Everyone looked at him. While he had said he might be back soon, they hadn’t heard from him since that message.

“Hey!” Tabitha stood up, threw her arms around him, and kissed him on the cheek. “Big B is back!”

“Have a sandwich,” Bethany Anne suggested. “They’re very good. For sandwiches. And I hear this is a hundred-percent-Coke only establishment, so I don’t have to burn it to the ground or anything.”

Carter, who was putting another tray of sandwiches on the table, gulped and slid away hastily with a brief, wide-eyed look of appeal at Barnabas.

Barnabas snickered as he sat down between Bethany Anne and Tabitha. “Where’s Michael?”

“He said he didn’t like sandwiches,” Tabitha said, in the tone of someone who had just found out that a close friend liked to kill puppies for fun. “Bethany Anne was going to persuade him that he should come next time. Then she let me down.”

Bethany Anne laughed. “I’m a huge disappointment,” she said, from around a mouthful of sandwich. “It’s just good I’m not running an empire anymore, or the whole thing would go up in flames. Literal flames. Nukes everywhere.” She smiled at Barnabas.

Barnabas pulled one of the plates toward himself and tucked in. Across the room, he could see Gar talking with some of the other Luvendi. They seemed glad to see him. Perhaps things were turning around here now that Lan and his ilk were gone.

As if Bethany Anne could read his thoughts, she smiled at him. “Things are going well here. This planet is becoming what we meant it to be—a haven.”

“I’m glad.” Barnabas heaved a sigh. “I…have a feeling that I’ll be called away for a while after this. The more I see of what’s out there, the more I realize how much hopelessness there is.” He looked down at the glass in his hands. “How do you keep so many people around and keep your resolve?”

Bethany Anne frowned at him. “You’re not making sense,” she said bluntly.

Barnabas heaved a sigh. Nearby, there was a crash and a shout, and most of the people at the table laughed. It seemed there was some sort of dance contest going on between a Brakalon and some kind of alien with six arms. Barnabas gave a distracted smile at the chaos and looked back at Bethany Anne.

“When I was neutral about everything—”

“Which was bullshit.” She took a sip of coke.

“I know that,” Barnabas said mildly. “It was easier to pretend that everything would work in the long run, though. Now that I am meeting more and more people, getting close to them, hearing their stories—I realize how much injustice there is, and how much it hurts people. Don’t you ever feel like you can’t make a difference?”

Bethany Anne sat quietly for a moment. “No,” she said at last. Her voice was strong, and it only grew harder as she spoke. “Running an Empire was soul-sucking. It was like rolling in a pile of shit all day long. I had to give up everything that was important to me. I hated it. But I would do it all again. Anytime there’s one less bastard out there ruining the universe, anytime there are people better off when you leave than when you get there, it’s worth it.” Her eyes started to glow, though she kept a rein on her temper. “There are a lot of assholes out there. It’s why I was the Queen Bitch, not Queen Everybody-Gets-a-Hug. Let it make you angry. Don’t. Ever. Let them win.”

Barnabas reached out and clinked his glass with hers. “Anytime there are people better off,” he murmured. He nodded. “Someday I hope to have faith like yours.”

“How do you compliment someone and make yourself sound so superior at the same time?” Bethany Anne shook her head. “You’re a snooty asshole, Barnabas. But we love you.”

“I wasn’t trying to sound superior!”

You’re always trying to sound superior, Shinigami weighed in.

“See?” Bethany Anne cocked her head. “And she knows you better than anyone.”

Barnabas gave a laugh and took a drink. “This juice is so good.”

“Good enough that you didn’t tell me there was Pepsi in the basement?”

“A man does what he must to protect what he loves,” Barnabas said simply. “Don’t ask me to choose between my love for my Queen and my love for this juice.”

Bethany Anne snorted.

“Hey.” Carter appeared at Barnabas’ shoulder.

“What can I help you with?” Barnabas turned to him with a smile.

“Nothing,” Carter said, amused. “We just haven’t seen you in a bit. I wanted to see how you were.” He sat on a nearby bench, wiping his hands on the towel he had hooked into a belt loop. “Did you finish another mission?”

“Ah.” Somewhat surprised by the drift of the conversation, Barnabas scratched at his head.

It’s called “making friends,” Shinigami explained. Now, play nice with the other human. You clearly need coaching with this.

“I did about half a mission,” Barnabas told Carter. “You don’t take down something that big just by cutting a few heads off the hydra.”

Carter just smiled. “If there’s anyone methodically relentless enough to pull it off, it’s you.”

“Thank you for your support. It means a lot. How’s Elisa? How are the kids?” Barnabas’ gaze sharpened. “Not upset by what happened before, are they?

Only a few weeks prior, some mercenaries had decided to make a point by taking Elisa hostage, and she had only just managed to hide the children before she was captured.

“They don’t know what really happened,” Carter admitted. “They think it was just a game of hide and seek. We’ve decided not to tell them just yet. Maybe when they’re older.” He shrugged. “Though I hope by then it won’t be a story there’s any reason to tell. Once High Tortuga is everything it can be…well. And it’s not like they’ll get very far in life without knowing that their mother is badass.”

“You make a good point.” Barnabas had heard the story of Elisa sneaking out of the mercenary camp on her own, and nearly killing a Shrillexian in hand-to-hand combat. “I’ll bet she doesn’t take any backtalk about bedtime.”

Carter gave a bark of laughter. “No. No, she doesn’t.”

Hey, Chief. Message for you. Sending it to your tablet.

Barnabas frowned and held up a finger to Carter. He pulled out his tablet and smiled when he saw the picture that came up on the screen.

“What the hell is that?” Bethany Anne asked from over his shoulder. “Jellyfish family reunion?”

“You’re not far off,” Barnabas told her. He pointed. “That’s Jeltor. At least…I think it’s Jeltor? No, that might be Jeltor. It’s really hard to tell, they change colors.”

“You met a jellyfish and named it?” Bethany Anne looked at him like she was a little worried he might need to be committed.

“They’re a species called the Jotun,” Barnabas explained.

“Super-powerful mechs,” John called from across the table. “I’ve heard about their battle suits. What do they look like?”

Barnabas passed the tablet across the table without comment.

“You have got to be kidding me,” John said finally.

“Not at all. They shoot fireballs.”

John handed the tablet back with narrowed eyes. He seemed to think this was a practical joke of some kind.

“They’d make good allies,” Barnabas told Bethany Anne. “They need to clean up a corruption problem, but I figure having allies to hold them accountable would be a good kick in the pants.”

“And it’s not like humans can really get down on anyone else for having corrupt politicians.” Bethany Anne shuddered. “I do not miss Earth.”

Barnabas laughed. “Well. Carter, it was good to see you. Bethany Anne, likewise. Tabitha—Tabitha’s dancing…” He blinked.

“Come on.” Bethany Anne elbowed him. “Stay for a while.”

Yeah, chief. You can kill assholes any day. Relax. Unwind. The universe will still be fucked tomorrow.

Barnabas laughed and drained his glass. “All right. A few more drinks.”

Chapter Thirty

“So you have no idea where the fleet went?” Barnabas frowned up at the speakers. “Really? None? You?”

“Yes. Me. Really. None.” Shinigami appeared in a flourish and swept over to a chair to sit down.

“You have no need to sit, and you’re incorporeal, and you still take a chair?”

“This conference room holds twenty people,” Shinigami pointed out. “And there are four of us on this ship.”

“Okay, that’s a good point.” Barnabas looked at her. “I just don’t understand how they can have disappeared. The Yennai fleet was big. They have to fuel somewhere. Someone has seen them.”

“It’s not out of the question that they have their own fueling stations.” Shinigami shrugged. “In any case, I think it’s safe to say that it’s going to be a long, arduous process of tracking them down and figuring out their location.” She looked up as footsteps sounded and Gar and Tafa came around the door.

“Did we miss anything?” Tafa asked.

“You know, you don’t have to come to the war meetings,” Barnabas said with a smile.

“I know. I like to.” She shrugged. “No reason.”

“She’s basing a series of paintings on you,” Shinigami explained. “Character studies of various moods.”

“Shinigami!” Tafa flushed. She looked at Barnabas, embarrassed. “I made such a nice one of you and Gar sparring that I thought maybe I could do some other ones. Maybe I could come on a mission sometime to see you enacting Justice.”

“No,” Barnabas said. “Embedded journalists are already a bad idea. I refuse to have embedded portrait painters.”

“I’ll wear him down,” Shinigami promised Tafa.

“No, you will not. I am in charge, here, and I say that—”

“Shh. Shh, chief.” She held up a hand. “We have a whole fleet to find. Don’t worry about the portraits right now.”

Barnabas sighed and dropped into a chair. He rubbed his head. “Honestly, the best idea I have at this point is to go back to Virtue Station and lean on one of the bankers until they talk.”

“After what Gar pulled, you are not welcome there.”

“I know. Maybe if I threaten to sic Gar on them, though…”

“Actually, that’s a good idea.”

Gar smiled. “I’m finally scary. I spent my whole life not being scary to anyone, and I'm finally scary. God, I love this.”

Barnabas shook his head with a laugh, but he looked troubled. “How the hell are we going to find this guy if he doesn’t want to be found, though? Even his children didn’t have any idea where he was when he wasn’t at the base. If he doesn’t—”

“Message coming in,” Shinigami interrupted.

Barnabas nodded to her to play it and the screen darkened for a moment before clearing to show Koel Yennai’s face. His eyes narrowed when he saw Barnabas.

“Human.”

Barnabas said nothing. His brow was furrowed slightly. He leaned back in his chair and waited.

“You have signed not only your own death warrant, but that of everyone you have ever loved,” the patriarch proclaimed.

“Most of the people I’ve loved are dead,” Barnabas told him. “Hazard of getting old. The rest can take care of themselves.”

Koel’s lip curled and he growled, “You are not safe, human. There is nowhere you can hide from me. Eventually, someone you love will be caught off their guard, and I will destroy them. One by one, the members of your family will fall. I will take apart your legacy piece by piece. I will destroy it, as you destroyed mine. I had crafted the perfect heir, and you took her from me.”

“Ilia was a living, breathing person,” Barnabas pointed out. “She was not solely your creation. And might I add, she had plans to kill you when you came back to take the AI core.”

“I taught her well, then.” Koel’s face did not flicker. “When she could kill me, she would be strong enough to take my place, and I would no longer be fit to rule. My death would be the greatest gift I could give the Yennai Corporation.”

“Crazy motherfucker,” Shinigami murmured under her breath.

“I will wipe out every human settlement.,” Koel Yennai told Barnabas. “I will kill every alien who has so much as talked to a human. I will make sure that no one in the universe remembers your species ever existed. And I will make you watch all of it before I let you die.”

The call flickered off, and the crew stared at the screens with their mouths hung open.

“Well, that’s convenient,” Barnabas said. He looked around at the others with a smile. “Here we were, so worried about finding him, and it looks like he’ll come to us.”

FINIS

Author Notes - Natalie Grey

June 26, 2018

Thank you for reading Warden! I can only hope you enjoy reading Barnabas’s story even half as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Barnabas is an endless puzzle: someone who likes to watch and act deliberately, but who cannot stand idly by when people are hurt; who believes civility is deeply important, but who has a hell of a temper; who is both kind, and just. What Barnabas tells Gar in Sentinel about flaws is deeply true for him: sometimes it is our best qualities that lead us down the wrong path, and finding our way out of that tangle can be difficult.

As always, I am grateful to my readers for their enthusiasm and feedback. Having a cheering section eagerly asking about the next book is an amazing feeling for an author!

Publishing is a team effort, and so a big thank you also to the whole team behind the Vigilante Chronicles: my beta readers, the JIT group, Lynne and her team of editors, Steve and the administrative team, Jeff, Eric, and of course, Michael!

Thank you to my friends and family for listening to garbled stories and letting me interrupt countless conversations with, “I need to write something down!” Thank you to my fellow authors for their advice and support. I have an incredible community around me and I am thankful for it every day.

Sincerely,

Nat

Author Notes - Michael Anderle

July 2, 2018

THANK YOU for not only reading our story, but making it back here to the Author Notes, as well!

So, I’m sitting next to Joseph (Joey, our youngest) in our home in Texas. He is presently reading Dakota Krout’s Dungeon Born – The Divine Dungeon which I “asked” him to read.

<Edit Joey Anderle—He tossed his iPad unto me with express intent to get me to foray into the litRPG genre.>

Why? Because he is a young man, off during the summer with only one job and has another forty-five days to go before his sophomore year in college.

<Edit Joey Anderle—There is no way it is just another forty-five days.>

He could be writing! (Or working at another job, or volunteering… you get the picture.)

<Edit Joey Anderle—I was right, it’s fifty days! Oh dear lord it’s fifty.>

I’ve suggested he read that particular book because it is a LitRPG book that I enjoyed and might help him understand the substance of what a LitRPG book is about.

<Edit Joey Anderle—See above.>

As an avid gamer, he practically IS the target market for the books.

<Edit Joey Anderle—No correction needed or warranted. I am adding this anyway.>

He has done some remarkable work for such a young guy, and I’d hate to see him dither away his time when he COULD be writing. ;-)

<Edit Joey Anderle—I prefer to wither but dither works too.>

I guess this brings me around to Barnabas, and how I see him as a portion of my own personality. That “dad” part which is always seeing work and striving to better oneself. Fortunately, there is a balance which must be maintained and Barnabas (usually) strives to find that balance.

<Edit Joey Anderle—I don’t know what a “Barnabas” is, but it sounds like a main character.>

Impetuous youth? Often not so much.

<Edit Joey Anderle—I got out my chair to read this tyvm.>

<Edit Dad Anderle—If it is about him, he can move the sun and stars to read it.>

That is always the fun with Barnabas and Shinigami in these stories.

<Edit Joey Anderle—I just got the last line clarified its actually a-ok and I appreciate the compliment.>

We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy making them happen for you.

<Edit Joey Anderle -S/O to Ms. Gray for making this all come together. I appreciate your effort.>

Ad Aeternitatem,

Michael Anderle

P.S. – I was walking with Joseph last night (late—holy crap was it hot and muggy) and asked him what he had read so far this summer. It was only one book.

You will never guess what it was… go ahead…guess!

Ready for it? How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

<Edit Joey Anderle - I believe I should represent my decision by adding that all successful conquerors start somewhere, and as a small aside I’m now flipping through Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, and It’s all Small Stuff by Richard Carson. It’s all right.>

You can find Joey’s first book—Her Royal Runner—(written and released while he was in high school) Here:

https://books2read.com/JoeyAnderle

Paladin

Vigilante Chronicles Book 4

Chapter One

Coyopa had a reputation as a despicable hellhole.

The planet had disappointed nearly every species that had come upon it. At first glance, clear blue waters held a seemingly-endless archipelago of tiny islands, each with white-sand beaches and an assortment of lush green vegetation.

The islands, however, could and often did move with each major storm, so building was next to impossible. The rains were fleeting and unpredictable, and the vegetation that grew so quickly was poisonous to most species.

Every once in a while, some cult or other decided Coyopa would be the site of their idyllic return to nature. Nature promptly ate them and spat out the bones.

The Jotuns, however, loved it. The saltwater was just the right temperature for them, they didn’t need to eat the vegetation, and they had their ships on standby so that they could escape if any particularly bad storms roared through. Plus, they had the amusement of watching the cults fall apart.

Otherwise, hardly anyone ever came there.

When twelve carriers appeared in the skies above Coyopa on a lazy summer day, therefore, it was cause for considerable comment. Procedures were followed. The Jotun Navy was alerted by encrypted message, and satellite trajectories were altered to give the Jotun Coyopan Guard an idea of what they were dealing with.

When the satellites were shot down, one by one, they realized it was time to evacuate. It didn’t matter who they were dealing with; they needed to get out, and get out fast.

Surface cruisers were readied and sent skipping over the water toward each major cluster of islands. Jotun civilians piled into temporary suits and holding tanks that had laid submerged, ready to be lifted into the bellies of the ships.

Jeltor, a member of the Jotun High Command who was presently on vacation with his family, bobbed worriedly in the tank of his loaner suit and wished he had access to the encrypted channels. Who would send carriers to Coyopa, of all places, and why?

An alert message blared through all of the suits: “There is time for one pass of the ship. Tanks 1-8 will be picked up. Tanks 8-16, proceed with all possible speed to the submersible vehicles for evacuation.”

“I don’t like this,” Jeltor’s wife said nervously. At 348, Lillik was old compared to many species, but barely middle-aged for a Jotun. Her body displayed the faint turquoise flush it bore when she was worried. It disappeared when their children clanked over to them in the tent. She didn’t want them to see her fear. “There you two are! Stay close. We’re in one of the tanks that will be evacuated by air.” To Jeltor, she added, “Who would attack this planet? There are no resources here.”

Jeltor said nothing at first. He followed her line of reasoning. Most issues that involved attacks were over things like mines or forests, perhaps plentiful flora or fauna. Coyopa had proved definitively over the years that it had none of those things.

However, Lillik failed to take the next step in her reasoning. If the fleet was not here for resources, why else could it be here?

To make a point. To make a point by killing Jotun citizens.

And while the Jotuns weren’t at war with anyone right now, Jeltor had a pretty good idea who fit the criteria of both having a fleet and wanting to make an example of people.

The Yennai Corporation had been unchallenged in this sector of space for years. They didn’t really have a main industry. They just seemed to show up everywhere. They had their claws into many of the banks, even running a few. For a while, they had owned one of the largest munitions companies in any sector of known space. They traded in information, mercenaries, arms, drugs, slaves…

That was, until a human had taken their main base, killing both heirs to the company in the process. Barnabas had judged both Uleq and Ilia Yennai and sentenced them to death for their misdeeds. Koel Yennai, who had not been on the station, was still free.

Now no one could figure what the Yennai Corporation was up to.

But Jeltor knew that anyone clever enough to build something so far-reaching in the first place had a plan—and he was very afraid that Koel had decided to make an example of Coyopa. After all, the Jotun Navy had helped Barnabas find the Yennai base.

A shadow passed overhead as their evacuation ship slid into place over the open water. Jeltor bobbed nervously in his tank while long arms came down to start lifting tanks into the hold.

Come on, come on, come on…

Other shadows streaked overhead, casting everything into flickering darkness and light, and the distinctive whine of defensive ships sounded as their engines primed for maneuverability in Coyopa’s atmosphere. Jeltor was telling himself that it was just a patrol when one of the first missiles struck the water nearby.

Helpless, Jeltor watched as the shock wave rippled toward them. He grabbed his elder daughter and shoved her suit behind his, and Lillik did the same with their younger. It was all they could do. When the shock wave reached the holding tank—

The tank groaned and creaked, and a single crack spiderwebbed along the side of it. The shock wave continued past on both sides of the tank, and Jeltor felt a pang of relief…and fear.

They had survived one blast, but it was unlikely to be the last.

The captain of the rescue ship must have reached the same conclusion. Heedless of protocol, the ship shuddered and began to rise into the air, tanks still hanging from the retractable arms. Unsecured in the tanks, some of them not even in protective suits, the Jotuns cried out.

Their fear doubled when the ship rose high enough for everyone to see the battlefield. The Jotun Coyopa Guard had scrambled every ship available to fight off the enemy, but their efforts were ineffectual. The carriers weren’t descending. They, and what must be destroyers, shot missiles from their position in orbit while smaller ships darted down to harry the Jotun fighters and confuse the antimissile tracking.

As Jeltor watched, one of the antimissile measures streaked into the blue sky and impacted a warhead of some kind. The passengers in the tank cheered, distracted from the fact that they were in an unprotected and swaying tank high above the ocean, and Jeltor didn’t have the heart to tell anyone that what they had seen was a meaningless victory.

Every system here was state of the art, but Coyopa was so small and unimportant that Jotun High Command had never put very much here in the way of defense.

And now they were paying for it.

The rescue ship banked, the tanks creaked, and Jeltor looked up as the ship’s unsecured occupants screamed once again. The tanks were still retracting as fast as they could, but the arms weren’t meant to hold them in mid-air while doing maneuvers.

He counted the seconds as they came closer to the shadowed interior of the ship. The fighters created a barrier from the missiles and smaller Yennai ships for them—it had to be them, because who else would do this?—but it was clear they could only hold on for so long. When the tank at last disappeared into the ship, Jeltor caught a last glimpse of a Jotun pilot spiraling out of control toward the water.

Be safe, he thought, but he knew that pilot was not likely to survive either the impact or the ensuing explosions.

As soon as the tank thunked into place and began to drain, Jeltor opened a channel to his wife and daughters.

“I need to go speak to the captain and offer any help I can. You be safe and strap yourselves in, okay?”

They all nodded, and his wife managed a brave smile for the children. Jeltor felt a surge of love for her as he clanked toward the bridge.

He found the place in disarray. The captain yelled orders, the communications officers calculated whether they should transmit them or pass through the information they were receiving, and a quick glance at the sensor arrays showed that the Guard was in complete disarray.

The captain glanced at Jeltor distractedly. “Who the hell are you?”

“Commander Jeltor Howauc.” Jeltor looked around. “Do you want assistance, captain?”

He tried to be polite. There were few breaches of etiquette more severe than someone throwing a captain off the bridge of their own ship, after all. On the other hand, this captain was clearly outmatched, and Jeltor was worried that years guarding a sleepy vacation resort had dulled the male’s reflexes.

The captain clearly thought the same, because he stepped away from his chair with a little sigh of relief.

“All right, let’s get everything back in progress.” Jeltor swung into position and hooked the loaner suit into the ship’s information feeds. He winced. In his own suit he’d be able to modulate the flow of information better, but in this suit, everything seemed to be echoing around in his head.

He’d manage it. He had to. His children and his wife were in a hold downstairs.

He charted a path through the battlefield and fed it to the other evacuating ships, then studied the arrangement of Yennai battleships, comparing it to theirs.

“This is Commander Howauc of Jotun High Command.” He broadcast the message to all ships. “I am taking command of this portion of the fleet, and I am ordering a retreat. Jose and Nodred, rendezvous at the following coordinates to retrieve submerged evacuation vessels. The rest of the ships—”

The explosion was so bright it washed all the screens out. The electronics on the bridge of the rescue ship flickered, and Jeltor had just enough time to picture the ship tumbling from the sky before everything came back online.

“Gods have mercy,” someone whispered.

Three mushroom clouds climbed into the air from the archipelago, and from the sudden blinking lights on the fleet screen to the side of the room Jeltor knew that the bulk of the ships hadn’t made it out.

He shook even as he ordered that the ship accelerate as fast as it could go. They had to get out of here, and if their opponents had more of those missiles…

“Sir, the enemy ships are disappearing off our sensors,” one of the officers reported. He brought up the display. “Only one is left, and it’s sending a message.”

Jeltor hesitated.

“Bring the message up.”

Koel Yennai’s face appeared on the screens, and Jeltor felt a strange mix of satisfaction and grief. The Torcellan had lost two people, both of them murderers in their own right, and he dared to retaliate by killing thousands of innocent civilians?

When Koel began to speak, his voice was hard and furious.

“We are aware that the Jotun Navy gave assistance to a human operative, enabling him to kill my children. This will be only the first of many attacks on the Jotuns if my demands are not met. First, the Jotun operative who helped the human must be turned over to face the justice of the Yennai Corporation. My second demand—”

“Turn it off,” Jeltor ordered. “Record it, but turn it off. That is for High Command, not for us.”

He fidgeted as the crew obeyed and began their preparations for high-speed travel.

Jeltor told himself that they weren’t staring at him. They didn’t know he was the Jotun operative Koel had spoken of. How could they, after all?

But he knew, and he had never felt guiltier in his life. He had helped persuade the brass to give Barnabas aid, and now their citizens were suffering for it.

Barnabas. He realized with a stab of misery that someone had to tell Barnabas.

Chapter Two

“Put your hands up. Yes, just like that. Now if I were to punch, you could bat my strike away with one if your arms.” Gar gently pulled Tafa’s arm up to demonstrate. “See?”

Tafa looked dubious. “I don’t know.”

“Of course, you don’t. You haven’t tried it yet.” Gar smiled encouragingly. “Come on. Light on your feet, make sure you use the stance I taught you—yep, that one. Now we start a little bit apart, and…go!”

Tafa skittered sideways and Gar patiently circled opposite her, waiting for her attack.

“He’s good at this,” Barnabas murmured to Shinigami.

“He is.” She nodded.

They sat on the sidelines, a game of chess forgotten between them as they watched Gar teach Tafa how to fight. Today Shinigami was dressed like Bethany Anne on a day off: dark jeans, royal blue Christian Louboutin shoes with their scarlet sole—Barnabas had asked why you would put red on the bottom of shoes and had been roundly told off—and a grey blouse that accentuated the color of her eyes.

Shinigami had been playing around with the avatar she projected into the corridors of the ship. At first her goal had been to make the avatar look as human as possible, complete with tiny mannerisms such as blinking and fidgeting.

Now she was learning to accessorize.

Unconstrained by comfort, any underlying physical appearance of her own, or physics, Shinigami materialized in a variety of different forms and outfits.

Barnabas was still trying to deduce how any of it correlated to her mood.

Right now she appeared to be contemplative, even approving, as she watched Gar and Tafa circle on the mats. Gar had been teaching Tafa how to spar all morning, and despite her complete lack of knowledge and his relative inexperience, he had not once lost his temper. Whenever Tafa made a mistake he went back to square one, telling her where she had gone wrong and how to do things correctly.

Barnabas was impressed. When he had first met Gar, the Luvendi had been determined not to take a single bit of responsibility for his actions. He had blamed the terrible things he did on his employer, and he had run away from Barnabas rather than ask questions.

Only a couple of months later, he had proved himself to be a valuable ally. What he lacked in experience he more than made up for in enthusiasm, and he’d developed the same slightly prickly sense of honor that Barnabas recognized in all his allies.

And in himself.

Really, the worst that could be said of Gar was that he took kung fu movies a bit too seriously.

As they watched, Tafa darted in and landed a flurry of punches on Gar’s arm. She shot away again at high speed as soon as Gar even twitched, and he smiled after her.

“Sometimes it makes sense to retreat before the other person can hit you,” he told her. “Sometimes you want to stay close and take the hit.”

“Why?” Tafa demanded. She had been the one who wanted to learn to spar, and she kept at it with an admirable amount of determination. However, saying that it didn’t come naturally to her would be a massive understatement.

Simply put, the Yofu were terrible at fighting.

“Well, say you were here, and I punched you—I’m not really going to punch you, don’t worry. Yes. So you’re here, and my hand is here. Now you see how there’s an opening at my side because my arm is up.”

“But I got hit,” Tafa protested.

Gar’s lips twitched, and Barnabas could sense him trying not to laugh or be impatient.

“Yes, but getting hit once makes sense if you think you can get something worthwhile for it.”

“Oh, I don’t get this.” Tafa looked at Barnabas. “Is everybody this terrible at it to start with?”

Barnabas searched desperately for something diplomatic to say, and managed to come up with, “Everyone has different challenges at the start.”

“Smooth,” Shinigami murmured under her breath. She followed Barnabas’ lead, though, and nodded at Gar. “When he started, he was very inclined to go straight at someone, no matter the consequences. That was something he needed to change. You need to be a bit more assertive.”

“But I’m not assertive!” Tafa wailed. She put her hands over her eyes. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to make people forget I was there. When it’s just me and someone else in the ring, how are they going to forget me?”

“They’re not,” Gar said gently.

“I can’t do this,” Tafa muttered.

“Tafa.” Barnabas smiled at her. “You know Gar, right? You’ve eaten with him, you’ve lived with him, and he’s been teaching you to spar.”

Tafa nodded.

“You know that Gar isn’t trying to hurt you,” Barnabas explained. “You were always worried about Mustafee wanting to hurt you, but he’s not around anymore. He’s quite dead. I checked.”

Tafa managed a watery laugh.

“I’m not suggesting you take up a career that requires public speaking,” Barnabas said with a smile, “but doing things like this that are a little uncomfortable makes us less scared the next time we have to do them. Right?”

“I-I guess?” Tafa looked uncertain.

“As uncomfortable as it is, I think sparring is good for you,” Barnabas asserted. “Gar is an excellent teacher. Maybe you’ll never be a boxer, but you’ll learn something, and you’ll be a better person for having faced your fears.”

She stared at him, and he could tell she wasn’t quite persuaded.

He pulled out the big guns: “Just imagine what sort of paintings you’ll be able to make with all these new experiences you’re having.”

Her eyes lit up, and she nodded enthusiastically. That decided it.

“Hell, yeah!” She bounced excitedly. “Let’s do another round.”

Barnabas nodded to Gar. This should be interesting, he commented to Shinigami and Gar with the implants.

She’s not bad at any of it, Gar agreed. She’s just really tentative.

I wonder what she’ll be like with a little bit of self-confidence, Shinigami mused.

A moment later, her question was partially answered. Tafa launched herself across the floor at Gar, who responded on pure instinct. He slid to one side, swept Tafa’s legs out from under her, and deposited her on her back on the floor with a thud.

His eyes went wide. “Tafa! I’m so sorry.”

“Ow,” Tafa managed. She looked up at him for a long moment.

She’s not injured, Shinigami reported after a quick scan.

A moment later, Tafa sat up with a grin slowly breaking across her features. “That’s what I was so afraid of?” she asked them. “I was so scared of falling down, and that’s all it was? I mean, it hurt, but…” She scrambled up. “Let’s go again!”

Gar grinned wryly at her. “Let’s see what you say after falling down for the twentieth time.”

Barnabas was laughing when the message alert dinged. “It’s Jeltor. Shinigami, should we take it on the bridge?”

“I want to say hi!” Tafa followed them, Gar at her heels.

They emerged onto the bridge in high spirits, with Barnabas wrinkling his nose at the smell emanating from Tafa and Gar. It seemed that there was a commonality between most species—when they sweated, it smelled terrible.

On the display, they saw Jeltor on the bridge of a surprisingly small ship, and his typically impressive powersuit had been replaced with something clunky and battered. Barnabas frowned.

“Jeltor. Is everything all right?”

“No,” Jeltor said bluntly. “Just a few moments ago, the Yennai Corporation attacked Coyopa.”

“It’s a nominally-habitable planet on the edge of Sector 942,” Shinigami reported. “Very close to 958. There’s a very strange set of articles about… Not the time, I’m sure. Go on, Jeltor.”

I think that was personal growth, Barnabas commented wryly.

Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up, fuzzball.

So…you don’t like the beard? Barnabas touched his chin self-consciously, where there was the fine stubble of a beard he had been attempting to grow out. Shinigami’s constantly-shifting appearance had inspired him to try new things.

I was trying to find a way to tell you. Not that it makes any sense for me to bother, though, since you clearly don’t listen. Your hair is still red.

Auburn. It’s auburn.

Call a spade a spade. You’re a ginger.

Hmph.

The exchange had passed in a split-second, and Jeltor was still trying to find words. “He wanted to make a point,” the Jotun said finally. “Coyopa is a place that no one but Jotuns want, so I don’t think there were any aliens. He was trying to punish us for helping you.”

“Punish— Jeltor, why are you acting like it already happened?” Barnabas frowned. “You said it was just a few minutes ago. We’re en route. Should we—”

“Don’t bother,” Jeltor expressed sadly. “There’s nothing left. He nuked it. A few ships got out, mine included. Many of the rest…” He paused. “They were civilians, Barnabas. On vacation. There was only a nominal military presence there. He picked a target that couldn’t fight back and he—” He broke off.

Barnabas’ face was white with fury. “He attacked civilians?”

“He said it was justice for our Navy helping you. He’s demanded they turn me over to face his justice as well. I…don’t know what else.” Jeltor gave a sound like a sigh, and his jellyfish-like body turned several brilliant colors before returning to its normal blue. “I stopped watching the message after that.”

“You did the right thing,” Barnabas said.

“I know. I know he had to be taken down—”

“No, I mean not listening to the message. From what little I saw in his children’s memories, he’s…not entirely sane.” Barnabas shook his head, his eyes distant as he thought through the memories from Uleq and Ilia Yennai. “I don’t think there’s much to be gained from listening to him.”

“All the same, could you send the message to us?” Shinigami asked.

Jeltor nodded. “I’ll transmit it in a moment. In the meantime, I suppose I should go back to Jotuna and see what they want to do with me.”

“What they want to—” Barnabas sputtered. “They’re not turning you over?”

“They might.”

“For the love of— We will meet you at Jotuna, then.” Barnabas’ voice was cold. “And I will explain to them that if they want to bow to the whims of a complete madman, they can turn themselves over, or no one. Koel Yennai is a megalomaniac. We are not bargaining with him.”

Jeltor paused but bobbed in a way that Barnabas knew was similar to nodding. “I would be glad to have you speak in my defense.”

“No defense is needed,” Barnabas contended. “But I will be glad to speak to them, yes. I will see you—”

The klaxons wailed, and Shinigami flickered in her seat. When she came back, she was wearing armor—and a cold expression.

“There’s a Yennai scout ship on our scanners,” she reported.

“Jeltor, we’ll have to call you back,” Barnabas relayed hastily. He ended the call and nodded to Shinigami. “Let’s get this scout ship before it gets word back to Koel.”

Chapter Three

Shinigami cloaked the ship at once. The term actually covered a whole range of technologies developed specifically for her. She’d be visible to sharp-sighted individuals looking out of particularly clear windows on ships that were very close to them, but otherwise, they would not be seen.

Which was good, given that they should almost certainly assume the ship had already seen them—

A moment later, she did not need to assume. The ship angled toward them and accelerated, weapons primed. The Shinigami’s scanners caught a budding electrical charge. The scout ship had intended to paralyze them, then call for help.

Shinigami maneuvered the ship up and over the trajectory of the Yennai Corporation ship, then flipped end over end so that the Shinigami was above and behind it.

Living organisms were predisposed to maneuver according to their idea of where “up” was. They liked rising above the plane of battle, as if they were still preoccupied with the idea of planets and gravity, and that ships should go “up” to fly.

Sometimes she wondered how these species hadn’t managed to exterminate themselves before they ever got off-planet.

The scout ship slowed as it approached their last known point and fired two small missiles—the minor sort—to see if it could make the Shinigami swerve and somehow reveal itself.

It hadn’t accessed its big guns yet.

“I have an idea,” Barnabas said. He nodded to the image of the scout ship on their screens. “Would you be able to take control of its systems?”

“I don’t see why not.” Shinigami made her avatar shrug. “Of course…that does mean our cloaking won’t work. They’ll be able to see us with Mark 1 eyeball.”

“You don’t sound particularly worried.”

“I’m not. It’s just that we’ll need to keep moving, and you and fish-boy there—” she jerked her head at Gar “tend to lose your lunches when the rollercoaster goes on for too long.”

“That’s all right,” Gar said serenely. “We stocked up at the last station.” He produced two air sickness bags and passed one to Barnabas. Gar opened his with a flourish. “Do your worst.”

Barnabas gave a small sigh, but he took his bag without complaint. “Go on. I wasn’t particularly attached to my lunch in any case.”

“That’s the spirit,” Shinigami said encouragingly. “Attachment is the root of all suffering, you know.” She smiled as she delivered the Buddhist principle, knowing that it would make Barnabas twitch.

It did. He tried to hide it, but she was an AI, so she could see the minute wince that passed over his face.

She chuckled as she zoomed in to follow the other ship. She drew up underneath it, signals tangling with its built-in protections, and felt a wave of amusement when the other ship jerked and swerved. Someone must have seen her from a turret.

“Idiot,” she muttered. “He’s got his hands on the controls while he’s searching for us. Don’t they have any sort of computer intelligence?”

“That’s a question we should do our best to answer.” Barnabas’ voice was somewhat muffled by the bag. “It will inform our strategy. Whatever you find in his systems, make a note of it.”

“I’m not like you, Chief. I don’t just forget things I’ve seen.” She swooped out of the way as the scout pilot tried to fire preliminary missiles at them. “Too slow!”

Gar made a noise like a distressed velociraptor and buried his face in the bag, and Barnabas wrinkled his nose at the smell.

Shinigami would have been more amused, but her attention was well occupied between her maneuvers and her attempts to get into the systems of the scout ship. Small as it was, it contained a veritable trove of both information and weaponry.

Its programs and offensive capabilities had clearly been designed by a ruthless and powerful organization. Whereas the purpose of scout ships was usually to find information and allow the rest of the fleet to deploy as necessary, this one also possessed the ability to kill mid-sized ships.

Shinigami thought of Koel Yennai’s children, and of Barnabas telling her that Ilia had been ordered to kill Uleq. To her surprise, she felt sad. Koel had built his family and his organization the same way—as trained killers, all of them determined to show strength before anything else.

When had things like that started to make her sad?

She didn’t have time to think about it. She flipped and fired countermeasures to evade another set of missiles, then returned to hug the top of the scout ship. It tried desperately to evade her. It might not know what she was doing, but it was determined not to let her do it.

It didn’t have much of a chance. As it twisted and turned, banked sharply and flipped, Shinigami stayed right with it. She hacked her way into its systems slowly but surely until finally she disconnected the manual controls and swung the scout ship to face her. She held it, floating, and smiled.

Barnabas and Gar, both of whom had been doubled over their airsickness bags, looked up with interest.

“Just a moment…”

Shinigami worked her way into the messaging systems. There, in no less than three distinct places, she found embedded location tracking for any messages, as well as a subprogram that scanned and mapped any pulsars to send back.

That last one amused her. Humans had once done the same thing. They’d sent a tiny craft called Voyager out into the stars with a map of pulsars engraved on a plaque that would lead anyone who found it back to Earth.

It had been a remarkably hopeful gesture from a species that had decided to trust that the universe was more likely to be a good place than a bad one. Those who made Voyager had wagered—wagered with their descendants’ lives—that it would not fall into the hands of anyone who would come and steamroll Earth.

Shinigami thought this was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.

She didn’t mention any of this to Barnabas, who would probably wax poetic about the power of hope and how the universe wasn’t an inherently bad place. For someone who liked to think of himself as a jaded vigilante he really was hopelessly idealistic sometimes.

She snickered to herself quietly as she corrupted the data the messaging systems had attempted to relay back. Koel wasn’t likely to think it was an accident the location tracking didn’t work.

On the other hand, she didn’t want to give him any more clues than she had to about her capabilities. Embedding random number generators and white noise into his data was a fairly basic technique, and something he couldn’t reverse-engineer.

She nodded to Barnabas. “You’re good to go in three…two…one.”

Barnabas focused on the ship displayed on his screens. He wished he could see Koel’s face right now. Something about the male unsettled him in a way few people did. The hint of madness behind the eyes, perhaps. Koel was an entirely rational, logical person…

After you factored in his completely sociopathic view of the universe.

“It’s all beginning to come apart for you,” Barnabas mused, “isn’t it? You’d spent so long being careful, working from the shadows, and then as things began to accelerate, it all went wrong.

“You hold us responsible for the deaths of your children, perhaps. Yes, I was the one who ended their lives. But you were the one who raised them to be what they were. You were the one who terrified them into believing that you were a god, with infinite power over their life and death. Had I not been there, Ilia would have killed Uleq on your orders. You made both your children murderers. Do not rage at me for bringing them to account. Indeed, you have no one to blame but yourself for the fact that they are lost.

“Though I do not believe for one moment that you ever wanted your children to live their own lives and build their own destinies. You wanted them to glorify you, nothing more.”

Barnabas paused. What he wanted was for the Yennai Corporation to be extinguished. He also wanted Koel Yennai to face justice.

And he wanted those things to happen with a minimum of collateral damage.

But what could he say that would not prompt Koel to kill more innocents? He did not even know what Koel’s aims were. Perhaps the deaths of his children had spurred him to action earlier than he had planned. Perhaps he hoped to establish some sort of empire.

Barnabas needed to end this, and for that…he needed Koel to want to kill him more than anything else.

“You would never have succeeded.” He scoffed. “Your children were weak. They begged for their lives, and would have betrayed you in an instant if they thought it would save them. That is what you have built, Koel. Your underlings are like whipped dogs who cringe and cower for a single bit of kindness from you, and then when you need them most…turn on you.

“You will be destroyed by your own folly. You wanted power, no matter the cost to anyone else, and your legacy will be ruin and failure. It will be me they will remember, not you. It will be my name on the lips of billions. It will be my vision that shapes the universe.”

Barnabas cut the connection.

“Your name will be on the lips of billions?” Shinigami asked him. “That sounds like your nightmare.”

“I was going to say,” Gar murmured.

Barnabas shrugged. “I couldn’t think of anything that would piss him off more than to tell him that I was going to get everything he wanted.” He shuddered. “Who in their right mind would want to be known by billions? He should have asked Bethany Anne if being in charge of everything brings any joy.”

“You’re making a logical error,” Shinigami told him. “Bethany Anne doesn’t enjoy power, because she’s legitimately trying to make things better and balance the interests of her citizens. That’s a thankless shit-show. If you don’t care about them, though, and you can just trample all over them on a whim, power’s much easier to handle.”

“Ah, yes—the perpetual logical error of thinking that my enemies have even the dregs of a moral code.” Barnabas sighed, then nodded meaningfully to the scout ship on the screens. “As much as I hate to say it, that pilot cannot be allowed to tell them where he found us.”

Her face was cold and hard as she directed the missile that turned the scout ship into dust. At this range, with the ship trapped, they only needed one. She could have vented the ship, of course, but who knew what automated systems might remain in a Yennai Corporation ship?

No. Only dust was safe.

A thought occurred to her, and her avatar smiled. Human mannerisms were becoming second nature to her now.

“What is it?” Barnabas asked her curiously.

“Koel Yennai is dangerous,” Shinigami stated. She looked at him. “Some enemies, you wonder if they can change. You wonder if you should offer them mercy.”

“Like me,” Gar interjected softly. Barnabas and Shinigami turned to him in surprise, and he gave a small smile.

“Yes,” Shinigami agreed. “Like you.” She nodded at him, then looked back at the screens, where the rubble of the ship tumbled and glinted in the light of the distant sun. “But he’s gone out of his way—many times—to show that he will not change. That we should not make the mistake of trusting him, no matter how helpless we think he is.”

She smiled again, a rictus that chilled both Barnabas and Gar to the core.

“The only possible thing to do with Koel is destroy him completely.”

Chapter Four

The bar at Huen Base was dirty and reeked of smoke. Zinqued’s eyes burned as he threaded his way between the tables. There was one alien in particular he’d searched for and tracked through what seemed like an endless set of systems, and to find her here, of all places…

It was good that she was here, Zinqued told himself. If she were here in this absolute hellhole, she’d almost certainly hear him out.

After their last run-in with the Shinigami, his captain had decided to go on the straight and narrow. Paun had given up stealing, or so he declared. He’d gone off to join some religious order, and was probably weaving baskets somewhere. Or teaching underprivileged children how to juggle.

Zinqued didn’t know the specifics, and he didn’t care. What he did know was that he’d managed to buy Paun’s ship from him and he’d gotten Chofal, the ship’s engineer, to sign on with him as well.

Paun clearly hadn’t thought it was a good idea to sell the ship to Zinqued. He seemed to know that Zinqued wasn’t done with his quest to find the Shinigami and steal it.

But no one else had wanted to buy the damned thing. The Julentai was a bucket of bolts, an old Torcellan Gav-class frigate that was held together with spit and a prayer. There were an abundance of deathtrap ships for sale. Paun’s wasn’t anything special, and he’d had no luck unloading it.

Zinqued had sold everything he had to buy the ship, but it had been worth it. He’d never owned his own ship before, and it was liberating. He could go wherever the hell he wanted, and take whatever jobs he wanted.

Sure, he’d promised not to steal anything anymore, but it was his opinion that promises you made to a creature with glowing red eyes and bloody teeth didn’t count.

So, with the Julentai at his disposal, he’d started tracking down one person in particular. A person who knew something about the Shinigami…and who might want revenge.

He’d tracked her through four stations before he heard a whisper that she’d come here—on the straight and narrow as well—and taken a job in one of the many factories that produced a nutritional paste for the variety of aliens in known space.

It was a miserable job. The paste might be nutritious, but it was nasty. The factory owners usually used cut-rate ingredients, anyway. To keep the factories vermin-free they were usually on desolate moons like this one, so there was nowhere to go if you wanted to quit.

It was about the last place anyone in their right mind would go. By choice, anyway.

It wasn’t long before he spotted her. She was a Hieto, just like he was, so she didn’t make too much of it when he sat down next to her.

“Are you Tik’ta?”

At that, she looked up sharply. Her eyes were flat and hard. “My name is Hino. I don’t know any Tik’ta.”

“Sure, sure.” Zinqued smiled. “Just like you never tried to steal a ship called the Shinigami and watched your captain and crew get killed.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m Hino. I’m just another factory worker here.”

“I saw you telling the story of the heist,” Zinqued said, amused. “On Uto, not too long ago. Someone brought up that they’d seen a human ship, a pretty thing with a new paint job named Shinigami. You told everyone to not even try to steal it. You said it was owned by a demon and that he’d killed your captain.”

She gave up trying to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Fine. But not so loud. Here, I’m Hino. I have to keep this job.”

Zinqued saw the bitterness in her expression. She was penniless now. What had happened to her after he had seen her on Uto?

“You sold the ship,” he guessed.

“I had to.” She looked at him bleakly. “Stealing ships was all we knew how to do. We wanted to try smuggling, but we weren’t sure if he’d find us and tell us we couldn’t do that either. Some of the crew left, they were so scared. Nothing good to smuggle, anyway. You couldn’t step on anyone’s turf without them coming after you. And when we tried to go straight, there were permits and certifications and deposits and—and bribes. We tried to do what he said, but it was impossible!”

“He ruined your life,” Zinqued said smoothly.

She glared at him. She wasn’t about to be tricked by the fact that he said what she wanted to hear. “What do you want? Why’d you come to this hellhole to find me? I’m just going to tell you the same thing I tell everyone: don’t try to steal the Shinigami.”

“Because he told you to say that.”

“He was right!” She shook her head. “Steal whatever other ship you want, but the Shinigami is death if you try. You didn’t see what he did to our captain, Klafk’tin.”

“I know.” Zinqued had dealt with Klafk’tin back in the day. He tried to come up with something complimentary to say and failed completely.

For the first time, Tik’ta smiled. It was a conspiratorial smile. “I know what you’re thinking. He was a son of a bitch who deserved to die. D’you know, the ship was booby-trapped, and he told the Shinigami’s captain that he’d just keep sending us in because he was sure he had more of us than there were booby traps.”

Zinqued whistled. “Not exactly going for the captain of the year, was he?”

“No.” She laughed. “To tell the truth, I’m not exactly sorry he’s dead. I thought he was just a run of the mill miser. He was arrogant. He kept trying to lower our salaries or make us pay for our food, stuff like that. But then he just said, cool as you please, that he’d kill as many of us as it took to steal that ship, and he meant it. That changed everything. I wasn’t sorry Barnabas killed him.” She shuddered. “All the same, you didn’t see it.”

“I saw the same sort of thing, though.” Zinqued leaned close. “The Yennai Corporation hired my crew to steal the Shinigami.”

“No! Yennai?” She leaned in as well. “To tell you the truth, I think something’s up with them.”

“Oh?” He might know a thing or two about that, but he wasn’t going to tell her yet.

“Yeah.” Her voice dropped even lower. “They’re one of our biggest clients. Well, they’re one of everyone’s biggest clients lately. You thought they were big already? Well, in the past months, they’ve been buying everything. You name it, they’re trying to corner the market on it—including politicians. More than they used to be.”

Zinqued nodded. He hadn’t known about the Yennai Corporation’s sudden growth, but it had been clear for a while that they’d had designs on any number of industries and governments.

People who stole ships tended to be well-versed in the political goings-on of their sector. Certain governments were more likely than others to make a big deal of waylaid cargo—Get’ruz Shipping had discovered that the hard way about the Jotun—and anytime a new flag or ship designation showed up, ship thieves collected all the information they could.

They could have told people years ago that the Yennai Corporation was bad news…if anyone had asked.

No one ever did. Not even the information brokers realized what a goldmine of information was sitting right under their nose.

Their loss.

“They hired us for a big job,” Tik’ta continued. She gestured at the rest of the factory. “Only then they disappeared. The money never came through, and we have a bunch of parts we made, nowhere to ship ‘em, no communication, nothing. Management’s panicking.”

Zinqued smiled. “Let’s just say, they met Barnabas, too.”

Her eyes got wide.

“Yeah,” Zinqued said. “He doesn’t just kill ship captains when they piss him off, he kills… Well, you want my guess? He killed Ilia Yennai. That’s my guess, I said—I didn’t see it. But she was one of the ones running the show. The big guy’s daughter, yeah?”

Tik’ta nodded in understanding.

“Real piece of work, too,” Zinqued said. Now that he wasn’t there anymore he could joke about it. “She hired us, and she was going to off us after the job.”

“And he killed her before she could?” Tik’ta was wide-eyed. She clearly enjoyed the conversation. To a ship thief, the flow of information was absolutely vital.

And anyway, who didn’t enjoy a bit of gossip now and again?

“That’s my guess,” Zinqued repeated in a tone that said but we both know I’m right.

He didn’t mention the part where he’d nearly fallen for Ilia’s tricks. He’d survived and learned a valuable lesson. He was grateful to Paun for that.

That and the ship.

“Anyway,” Zinqued leaned in, “if they’ve just disappeared…”

“They have. They definitely have.”

“Then I’d say they’re on the run, and he’s chasing them.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t think he’s someone who leaves a job unfinished.” Zinqued thought back to his meeting with Barnabas and shuddered. He’d been playing a part for most of this conversation, trying to get Tik’ta to sign on with him. She was a legendary pilot among the loose collective of ships they knew, and if they planned to steal a ship like the Shinigami…

They needed her.

Just then, the end-of-break bell rang and the foreman bellowed for everyone to get back to work. Tik’ta glanced over her shoulder, annoyance and worry imprinted on her features, and Zinqued made his move.

“Got a job for you.”

She looked back at him, and the expression on her face was half mistrust, half hope.

“Just got my own ship,” Zinqued continued. “I have a hell of a mechanic, and now I need a proper pilot. You should see me try to land that thing.”

Tik’ta gave an unwilling laugh. Still, she knew enough to be wary. “How you gonna pay us?” What kind of jobs are we going to be pulling, that meant. She hesitated. “He told us we had to stop stealing things.”

“And we will,” Zinqued agreed easily. He smiled. “As soon as we got the Shinigami. We’ll never have to pull another job again after that. All of us can retire for good. Mansions, servants, you name it. The Yennai Corporation wanted that ship. Who else would?”

Her eyes were wide and furious. “You’re crazy,” she hissed at Zinqued. “All of that, and what you took from it was that you should steal the ship? You said he doesn’t leave a job unfinished! You said he managed to kill one of the big people in the Yennai Corporation!”

“And now he’s going after the boss, who has a fleet…” He gestured to show just how big the fleet was. “You want to know my bet? Neither of them is going to win that. We nip in there at the right time, we can get that ship and be gone without anyone being alive to chase us.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I have to go.”

“Go where?” He looked at the doors of the factory. “Go make more food paste for a corporation that won’t pay?”

She wavered. Zinqued could see that she was afraid. Her memories of Barnabas were too fresh.

That told him which way to go. “When Barnabas is dead, who’s gonna care what you do with your life, anyway?” he asked her.

That got her. She tried to resist, but he knew he’d said exactly what she wanted to hear.

Finally, she nodded. She grabbed her badge, caught the foreman’s eye, and threw it at his feet.

“I quit,” she called across the room. She nodded to Zinqued. “Let’s go, then.”

Chapter Five

Koel Yennai sat in the state apartment of his flagship, the Avaris, and watched the holo of Barnabas’ message to him.

“You will be destroyed by your own folly,” Barnabas said. “You wanted power, no matter the cost to anyone else, and your legacy will be ruin and failure. It will be me that they will remember, not you. It will be my name on the lips of billions. It will be my vision that shapes the universe.”

The message ended and Koel fumed, consumed by a cold fury.

Barnabas’ vision? What was his vision for the universe? It was nothing. It was dust. It was an acceptance of the way things were, using the false ideals of “peace” and “stability” to chain everyone who dared to reach for more.

Fuck peace. Fuck stability. The universe was constantly in flux. Koel didn’t give a damn if some peasant’s family had been farming on a little backwater moon for eight generations. If they stood in the way of his vision for the universe, they would get crushed.

That was what happened in this universe: you made the rules, or you were subject to them.

And Koel would never be subject to anyone else’s rules. He would never accept things the way they were.

While others schemed to work their way up in governments or militaries, Koel had dared to reshape the entire sector. The others limited their dreams to the companies and governments they knew; the most enterprising ones started companies of their own, but such dreams were small—at most, they wanted to control a single industry.

His lip curled in contempt.

None of them, not one of them except him, had shown the vision to create something like this. And that didn’t even take into account the patience it took to see his plan to fruition. He had spent decades finding allies, fronting them small bits of money, gathering information.

He had been poised to run this entire sector. Not directly, no. It was much better that way. No citizens to answer to directly, no major battles. While governments fought over territory and mining rights, Koel bought stock, subtly directed parliamentary proceedings on half a dozen different worlds, then sat back and collected a cut of the wartime profits.

He didn’t have to worry that his tax revenues would go down or his territory would be seized. No squabbling board of directors or rogue political faction reorganized his budget. He answered to no one.

Soft power was enough, and he prided himself on that, too. It took discipline not to try to exert too much pressure. Most people wanted others to know they were in charge, but not Koel. He allowed other people the illusion of being at the top of the pyramid.

They didn’t realize that the whole fucking pyramid was a lie.

He’d been within striking distance of having everything he wanted, too. And then…

Humans.

His whole body jerked with agony. His wife was long-dead; Ilia and Uleq had been all that remained of his family, and now they were gone, too. They had been stolen in an instant, leaving him with…

Pain. He would not admit it, except that it nearly crippled him. Before this, he was a fixture on the bridge of the Avaris. He gave the orders and directed everything. Now he was confined to his cabin; he could not let them see him like this.

But they knew. When he thought of his children, he could not stand, he could not speak. He could hardly breathe.

They were gone. He had known he would lose Uleq, but this? This was worse than he had dreamed. One pale hand splayed across his stomach as though he were cupping a wound, pressing over a growth inside his body.

The humans had stolen everything from him.

In the end, Uleq had been right. Koel had chastised him and called him a fool, but his son had been insistent. Humans were a threat to everything Koel had built. They were resourceful, Uleq had reported. They had impressive tempers, and yet they retained the capacity to be cold and calculating as they planned.

And their technology was more advanced than nearly every species in known space.

Koel hadn’t worried or cared. The Yennai Corporation was hidden. It wasn’t a government, with laws the humans would care about.

He had been wrong, and he had paid dearly.

My children—

He lifted his head, panting with pain.

He forced himself to stand although his muscles trembled, and he feared that he lacked the strength to do so. He took one shuddering step toward the window, then another.

His entire adulthood had been spent in this never-ending dance of sacrifice and gain. When the children were still young, his wife had begun to argue with him. Once his greatest supporter, she had started questioning his methods and his motives.

Isn’t it enough yet, Koel? Can’t you rest yet? We have more than we could ever need.

She did not understand, and when she threatened to take the children and deprive him of his legacy…

Well, what choice had he had but to kill her? It had been quick. He wasn’t a monster, after all. And he hadn’t lied to the children, either. He had explained it to them openly.

Lies could create such bad feeling.

He had sacrificed Avaris, the woman he loved most in the universe, for the future of the Yennai Corporation. He had named his flagship for her and remembered her fondly. How much more had he given up over the years as well? Reserves of cash, favors called in, ships and planets sacrificed, all for greater gains.

Now he’d lost the children, and he was certain he had never lost anything of more value than that. He would find a way to turn their deaths to his advantage.

He linked his hands behind his back and took a deep breath. For the first time in weeks, he felt like himself. Blind rage had driven him until now. He’d sought vengeance, not profit.

Finally, he was emerging from the fog.

He needed to keep a clear head. He had been willing to sacrifice Uleq to make Ilia stronger, so if he sacrificed them both…

He must, himself, become stronger. He would make use of this as he had made use of everything else. Had he not personally sacrificed Avaris?

Yes, this was an opportunity.

He went to his computers and started to research. Barnabas had given him a gift; Koel only needed to find it. He pored over information about the humans and their defeat of King Yoll, the abolition of the Yollin caste system, and their battles against the Leath and the Skaines…

It was well into the night before Koel sat back in his chair. The ship was down to its usual overnight skeleton crew, but he felt as fresh as if he had slept all night.

The power he had felt slipping away would be within his grasp again soon.

And this time, no humans would stand in his way.

Chapter Six

“Shinigami,” Barnabas said. “Can you research something for me?”

“Sure. I’m just landing the ship and negotiating with the Jotun high command. Why not add something more?”

Barnabas glared. “You know very well that half the time when I ask, you get very snide about the fact that you have almost infinite processing capabilities and can do as many simultaneous tasks as you want. You can go with that or the whole put-upon act, but not both.”

“Why not? Meet me in the middle, here.”

“I am meeting you in the middle.” Barnabas cast an annoyed look at the speakers. “Neither of those is accurate. You get one lie. You can content yourself with the fact that it pains me.”

Shinigami’s avatar flickered into being, dressed in jeans and black Christian Louboutins. She smiled smugly. “That last part does help. So what was it you wanted to know?”

Barnabas had to pause to remember. “Ah, right. Why are the names of so many species so close to the names for their home planet?”

“Oh.” Shinigami nodded. “Most species’ names translate in the original language to ‘Earthers,’ or whatever the equivalent is. For the Jotuns and the Luvendi, it would be ‘Oceaners,’ for instance. Almost every planet is named some variant by the species who live there. When they go into space they tend to get named by the other races, using their home planet’s name. Humans are one of the only exceptions.”

“I wonder why that is?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say we distracted them by showing up with a Kurtherian-tech fleet. They didn’t spend any time coming up with nicknames for us after that.”

“I suppose that would do it.” Barnabas adjusted his cuffs. “Okay, next question. Will having either a Luvendi or a Yofu with me be good for this meeting, or should I go alone?”

Shinigami hummed slightly as she sorted through her data. “I’d say go alone. The Luvendi have a reputation as insular and money-grubbing bastards who will do anything to get ahead. The Yofu make good mechanics and have a fairly good relationship with the Jotuns, but unless you think Tafa is going to be a good diplomat, I wouldn’t bring her. At worst they’ll look down on her like hired help, and at best they’ll assume she’s your technical advisor and try to get her to spill details of your ship. Either way…”

“She’s right.” Tafa came around the corner with Gar. “The Jotuns are stuck-up bastards. Most people don’t know it, because they tend to keep their heads down. They only deal directly with merchants and don’t try to conquer planets or anything. Coyopa was different; no one wanted that place. But if you do deal with them a lot, you learn they think they’re better than everyone else.”

“Which would make Barnabas one of the few people they’ll treat with even a modicum of respect,” Gar agreed. “No one knows the extent of human capability, they just know it’s broad.”

“Hmm.” Barnabas nodded. “Well then, we’ll leave Gar and Tafa here.” He gave them all a hard look. “You remember the rules, right? You tell me if someone tries to steal the ship.”

There was a chorus of agreement and Barnabas narrowed his eyes. His team did not have a great track record when it came to reporting those things.

When he emerged onto the landing pad, it was a beautiful day on Jotuna. The landing pad was set a little ways back from the beach, but close enough that a sea breeze still stirred the air. Tall trees waved in the air, their bark ranging from brown to purple, and their brilliant pink and orange blooms nestled amongst the thick, glossy leaves.

There was a very faint clanking sound, and a Jotun in a powersuit made its way across the landing pad to speak to Barnabas.

“Ranger One, it is an honor.”

“Thank you,” Barnabas replied. “However, in the interests of accuracy, I must tell you that I am no longer Ranger One. I do not want to trade under the auspices of a government for which I no longer work.”

“You may not work for the former Etheric Empire any longer, but it would be foolish for us to assume that you are no longer a part of their organization,” the Jotun said simply. “No intelligence suggests you are no longer their ally. In fact, quite the opposite.”

It was a warning, which Barnabas accepted with a wry smile.

He suspected that they knew why he was here and wanted no part of it, but they’d have to try harder if they wanted to intimidate him…or get him to back off.

He returned the warning shot with an easy smile. “I believe Jeltor’s trial is in session. Take me there.”

They stared at one another for a moment, human and Jotun. I know more than you want me to, Barnabas’ expression said. Don’t make the mistake of treating this as a request.

The Jotun finally turned and led the way across the landing pad without a word. Barnabas wished again he could read Jotun facial expressions. He had spent enough time with Jeltor to have some ability to read Jotun thoughts, but they still came through confused and murky to him. Speaking with such featureless aliens showed him how much he was used to reading emotion from facial expression and posture as well as thoughts.

Barnabas had set down right next to the Jotun government offices, so they didn’t have far to walk. The Jotun led him along a spiral path into a subterranean building. Seawater had been channeled into raised glass-walled canals the Jotuns could swim through if they did not want to use the paths.

Barnabas understood that the Jotuns were proud of their powersuits and relished opportunities to use them.

Jeltor’s trial was taking place in what Shinigami had guessed were the main parliamentary chambers. They had puzzled over the structure and rules of the parliament and come up with the idea that it might be democratically elected—according to incredibly arcane rules that Shinigami had struggled to translate.

The room was shaped like a bowl, with an open space at the bottom for the speaker and row upon row of senators at desks that lined the sloping sides of the room. No one here used tanks. Instead, they wore powersuits. Barnabas wondered if that was so they were able to use things like voting mechanics, which might be more difficult from tanks without arms.

Still, the sea was represented here in little streams that ringed the floor of the speaking area and waterfalls that Barnabas heard rather than saw. The air smelled alive, and faintly of salt.

It would have been very pleasant if Jeltor hadn’t been standing in the middle of the bowl, clearly being grilled by angry senators—who, in Barnabas’ considered opinion, had no right to question the Jotun’s methods or goals.

There was a stir when Barnabas appeared. He took full advantage of it and walked to Jeltor’s side.

“They have you on trial, then. What are the charges?”

“Treason,” one of the Jotun senators asserted.

“Is that so?” Barnabas arched a brow. His thoughts ranged between this being hyperbole and wondering if they were really so far up their own asses that they believed it.

“Yes,” Jeltor agreed simply.

Up their own asses, then.

“Explain the charges,” Barnabas ordered them. He pitched his voice to fill the whole room, then he waited.

One of the senators closest to the floor shifted in his powersuit. He seemed annoyed at Barnabas’ intrusion, but he was only too happy to list why he believed Jeltor was a traitor to the Jotuns.

“Commander Howauc is charged with unsanctioned aid to a military operation against an ally,” the senator said shrilly. “His actions directly resulted in the loss of a Jotun colony.”

“You refer to Coyopa,” Barnabas clarified.

“Yes.”

“I thought Koel Yennai’s actions led directly to the loss of Coyopa.”

There was an angry murmur and more mechanical squeaking from the senator. “He was, quite naturally, angered that one of our military personnel had helped assassinate his two children.”

“He killed thousands of unarmed civilians,” Barnabas shot back. “Additionally, I highly doubt that your legal code allows a corporation to be an ally. Furthermore, Jeltor had been captured by the Yennai Corporation and was being held so that he could be sold into slavery—an act of aggression against the Jotuns on the part of the Yennai Corporation. The fact that he participated in a fight of self-defense should not weigh against him.”

The senators started to mutter amongst themselves.

They were live-streaming the trial, Shinigami reported, but as soon as you started talking, they shut the cameras off.

Of course. You can’t have the common people hearing the truth.

Mmmhmm. Although I really should have said that they thought they shut the cameras off.

Shinigami, you’re priceless. I’m giving you a raise. What do AIs get paid in?

Robotic bodies.

NO.

“Regardless of any provocation,” the senator’s voice dripped with derision, “Commander Howauc engaged in an unsanctioned military exercise. He did not seek permission.”

“That is also incorrect,” Barnabas rebutted calmly. “He communicated several times with the Jotun high command.”

The senator laughed derisively. “And they are also on trial, Ranger One.”

“This is a farce.” Barnabas’ temper started to rise. “You know that the reason you are in this mess is that you failed to contain a threat to Jotun interests.”

“We are in this mess because Commander Howauc and his fellow officers betrayed our interests!” The senator slammed one mechanical hand on the table for emphasis.

Interesting, Shinigami commented. People in robot suits do that too. Who would have guessed?

I think he’s trying to be intimidating. Barnabas tried not to shake his head. And instead, he’s just a coward.

“Your interests were the bribes you took from the Yennai Corporation,” Barnabas accused. “You personally took several years’ worth of your salary in bribes this year alone, but you’ve been on their payroll for a decade, advancing their interests. You’re scared now that they’re angry, but ask yourself…why are they so strong in the first place? How did they get strong enough to destroy a colony, hmm?”

There was a ringing silence.

“Oh, yes,” Barnabas told them. “I know exactly what each of you has gotten from the Yennai Corporation. I know how you voted after you received that money, and I can prove it. So here’s my deal to all of you: I’m going to go destroy the Yennai Corporation. While I do that, you are going to halt this ridiculous trial excoriating Jeltor and the rest of the Navy. When I get back, if that demand has been met, I will consider going easier on you regarding the other demands I will make at that time.”

There was a pause.

“You do not get to make demands of us,” the senator blustered finally. “Someone must pay for—”

“Careful, senator.” Barnabas’ voice was cool, “or you just might end up being the person who pays. I can’t say I’d mind that. And let me tell you—if you’re betting that the Yennai Corporation will win and I won’t be able to ruin all your careers? You’re very, very wrong.”

He nodded to them, a clipped, angry motion, then strode for the door. At the edge of the room, however, he paused.

“And should I learn that anyone has come to harm as a result of this ridiculous trial, be it one of the accused or any member of their families, I will make sure every Jotun knows how you have profited from their pain.”

Chapter Seven

“It’s really the only way,” Barnabas said a few hours later. He leaned against the back wall of the conference room and chewed his lip as he examined the board. “Otherwise, he’ll certainly find some way to cause as much collateral damage as he can.”

“Are you sure about that?” Shinigami appeared, this time in a long black evening gown.

Barnabas blinked at her.

“I was just trying something.” She shrugged. “I don’t think I like it, though. It feels useless.”

“Sure. And the high heels you’ve been wearing are…functional, somehow?”

“A bold accusation from a man with several hats in his closet—which, I might add, he doesn’t even wear.”

“Because you would make fun of me,” Barnabas muttered under his breath. He gestured to the screens. “And yes, I am sure about Koel.”

“What does he gain from it, though?” Shinigami asked reasonably. She laid one arm along the back of the couch and curled her legs under her. A moment later, with a muttered expletive, she disappeared and returned in her armor. “Much better.”

“Although no more suited to the situation at hand,” Barnabas pointed out, amused.

“I like armor.”

“And you, unlike the rest of us, do not have to deal with the fact that it’s immensely uncomfortable to wear.”

“Yeah, I really like that part.” She grinned at him. “If there’s one thing Koel Yennai is good at, it’s profiting from events. Using them to his advantage. He’s not going to expend a bunch of munitions on random bystanders unless there’s a damned good reason to do it.”

“Well, for one thing, anyone even barely acquainted with me knows I hate the idea of innocents being hurt.” Barnabas raised his eyebrows. “So it stands to reason that he would try to hurt them to get back at me.”

“You’re being awfully self-centered.”

“I also poked a very vengeful bear with a stick, so to speak, to make him furious at me. First, I killed his children, then I taunted him about it. I am not coming off well in this conversation, am I?”

“Not very, no.”

Barnabas sank onto the other couch and shrugged. “If anyone asks about it, I’ll send them a list of Ilia’s accomplishments. I’d think that would win me a reprieve from most people.”

“Charming chip off the old block, that one.”

“Yes. And more to the point, when it comes to him, I think we may have made him more dangerous than we meant to.” Barnabas sighed and rubbed his head. “I wish we’d known more about him before we went to the base.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean that his legacy was everything to him. He’s an absolute sociopath. He was willing to have one of his children murder the other just to make her stronger so that she could run the company well when she took over from him.”

“Didn’t kings and queens on Earth do that?”

“That’s apocryphal, and the point of such things was just to determine which was the strongest, not… You know, this is not important. It would be disturbing in any event. The point is that Koel Yennai is not entirely sane, has zero compunctions about hurting people, and we just took away the one thing he cared about.”

“That won’t stop him for long.” Tafa stood a bit awkwardly in the doorway. She looked at Shinigami and Barnabas. “Can I come in?”

“Of course.” Barnabas was surprised. So far, he had not attempted to include Tafa in any planning or discussion. She was on the ship while she decided what to do with her life, and mostly, she spent her time painting.

“You know Koel Yennai?” Shinigami asked dubiously. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, after all. Tafa’s cousin Mustafee Boreir had once been one of Koel’s employees.

Until Barnabas killed him.

Tafa gave them both a wry smile. “I don’t know Koel, but I knew people like him. Mustafee’s mother was very similar. She suffered a lot over the years that I knew her. She lost people she loved, she had setbacks in the business, and her husband left her, but she didn’t respond the way any normal person would. All of it became fuel to make her crueler and more vicious. Better at what she did. What she did to my parents would be a good example. It wasn’t that she didn’t love my father. She did. But she let his betrayal—or what she saw as a betrayal—forge her into something harder.”

Barnabas felt a chill as he looked at Tafa. She had been very young when her parents were taken away from her, and they had been tortured for years before they were finally executed. Tafa had grown up knowing that if she made one wrong move, she’d suffer the same fate.

The way she spoke so matter-of-factly about the event was jarring in the extreme.

“So you don’t think Koel will let this stop him?” Barnabas asked slowly.

“No. He won’t. He’ll find a way to make an example of you if he can, and then he’ll be even more powerful because everyone will be even more afraid of him.” Her voice changed, and she shuddered. “Don’t do this. Run and hide. He’s stronger than you are.”

Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged looks. Tafa had always been very calm and collected, and remarkably courageous when they considered what she had been through. Death didn’t seem to scare her very much.

But this was her oldest and deepest fear, and when she spoke of it, she sounded like the child she had been when her parents were taken from her—helpless and afraid.

“Tafa, do you want to leave?” Barnabas kept his voice gentle. “There are many, many safe places we can get you to; places that aren’t associated with us. Koel would never find you, and you could start a good life—”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” She wiped the tears welling in her eyes. She seemed furious at her own emotion. “I’m saying you aren’t invincible. I don’t want you to get hurt.” She looked at Shinigami and Barnabas. “I don’t want you to die…or worse. Shinigami, tell him the odds. You have to have some calculation for this. You’ve seen Koel’s fleet, so you know you can’t win this.”

Shinigami said nothing.

Barnabas felt a heavy weight settle in his chest. “Shinigami?”

“It’s not important,” Shinigami replied finally.

The words were like a blow. Barnabas looked at her. “It is important. What are the odds? Do we have any chance of winning this?”

“Of course, we have a chance,” she declared too quickly. “There’s always a chance.”

There was a silence.

“I don’t have to tell you the odds,” Shinigami continued finally. “You know them.”

Barnabas stood up and paced to the window. “And I’m dragging all of you into this, too. If there was a chance of success—a real one, Shinigami—I could justify it, but without one… You’ll have to go.”

“Who has to go?” Gar looked around the room, taking in Shinigami’s silence and Tafa’s tears. It wasn’t entirely surprising that he came to the wrong conclusion. “Why should Tafa have to leave?”

“You all have to leave,” Barnabas said not looking around.

“All of us?” Shinigami demanded.

“Yes.” Barnabas looked her avatar in the eyes. “We’ll leave the AI core with Bethany Anne, and one of the EIs can pilot it.”

“Bringing your odds of succeeding to pretty much zero! Speaking of which, what would even be your plan in that case?” She sounded furious now.

“Pretty much the same as it is now,” Barnabas retorted, his voice hard. “Try to find a way to lure Koel someplace secluded and do my best to assassinate him. Without him, the Yennai Corporation should fall apart. They’d be easier for someone else to pick off. Tabitha, maybe.”

Shinigami said nothing for a long moment, but when she spoke her voice was ugly. Baba Yaga echoed in her words.

“You’ll die.”

“That was always going to happen sometime.” Barnabas smiled tightly.

To his surprise, the rest of the crew stared back at him, their expressions ranging between sadness and absolute fury.

“What?” He felt himself growing angry as well. “What do you want from me? I am doing the best I can to make sure none of you suffer for this vendetta I’ve apparently created. I will do what I can to end it, and the rest of you can—”

“What?” Shinigami spat. “Live the rest of our lives knowing we abandoned you when you needed us most?”

Barnabas stopped short.

“Did it ever occur to you, genius,” Shinigami’s voice was clipped, hardly human anymore now that she was so angry, “that maybe our biggest concern isn’t whether we survive, it’s what happens to our friend?”

For a moment, Barnabas could not speak. He turned back to the window and crossed his arms over his chest, swallowing as he looked out at the black. To his surprise, he was blinking a bit more than normal. There must be something in the air.

“That’s what’s bothering you all?” He was unable to face them.

“Yes.” The three of them spoke in unison.

“I don’t get it.” Gar shook his head. “You could free that mining camp in your sleep, and you still had a backup. You probably could have done the whole thing at the base yourself, too. And now, when you might actually need us—”

“When you might be in real danger, you mean.” Barnabas swung around to look at him. “Gar, you’ve only been in a few fights. This is an entire fleet. Shinigami, you have years left. Centuries. Tafa, you’ve only just gotten the freedom to live. Why are all of you so eager to rush into danger?”

“Why are you?” Gar countered.

“Because it’s the right thing to do!” Barnabas felt his hands clench. “This bastard wants to rule the universe and make it his playground. He has no excuse. He has no morals. He doesn’t even pretend to value life or goodness or even the people he loves. All of it is just fuel for his ambition. There’s no limit to the number of people he could hurt. I have to try to stop him; honor demands no less. And since he wants to kill me in particular…”

They looked at one another.

“We’re not leaving,” Shinigami asserted. “And you’d better fucking apologize for thinking we would.”

Barnabas stared at them, his mouth opening and closing a few times.

“We have fish that do that on Luvendan,” Gar commented.

Tafa gave a snort of laughter.

Before Barnabas could make any retort, there was the sound of an incoming call. He sighed as he opened it, then frowned at the screen.

“Jeltor?”

“I am not Jeltor.” The Jotun sounded deeply aggrieved. “For one thing, Jeltor is a male.”

Barnabas bit his lip to keep from asking how in the world he was supposed to know he wasn’t looking at a male Jotun. As far as he could tell, this one was identical to Jeltor in every way.

However, several centuries of life had given him the skills to politely bullshit his way out of most social situations.

“My apologies,” he offered smoothly. “We saw only the location. I’m sure the picture will clear up shortly. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking, and how may I help you?”

“Hmph.” She sounded mollified. “I am Commander Jeqwar of the Jotun Navy, and I have an offer for you.”

“You might want to be careful with that,” Barnabas cautioned. “The last person who helped me got hauled up on treason charges.”

“I’m aware of that,” she retorted. Her voice was tart. “We’re offering anyway.”

“Who’s ‘we?’”

“The Jotun Navy.” She bobbed slightly in her tank, and he thought he detected some smugness. It was always nice to make an offer that caused people’s jaws to drop.

“The…entire navy? Are you allowed to do that?” Barnabas asked blankly.

“Who fucking cares?” The answer was sharp. “They sold us up the river. We’re going to do what’s right, and damn whoever tries to stop us.”

Barnabas smiled. “Well, then. I’m very glad to have you on board, Admiral. I’ll admit…” He looked at the rest of them and nodded to each, “that we could really use some backup on this one.”

Chapter Eight

“This is as good a system as any,” Barnabas announced a few hours later. He frowned at one of the displays. “It’s out of the way of…everything. No shipping lanes, no private interests, and no colonies that anyone knows of.”

“Judging by the state of that planet, I’d certainly hope no one lives there.” Commander Jeqwar sounded amused.

It was easy to see what she meant. The planet was so inhospitable and in such an out-of-the-way system that it was only known as 1027.478B. The atmosphere had somehow managed to trap heat while blocking absolutely none of the deadly radiation from the system’s star, which was unstable and spat large plumes of gas at random intervals.

No one in their right mind would go there, which made it a perfect place for Barnabas’ showdown with Koel.

The only question was how to lure him there? Barnabas and the Jotun naval officers had been planning for several hours now, and no one seemed to have any ideas. Koel was unlikely to let them dictate the terms of the battle.

“I’m going to shift processing for a bit,” Shinigami told Barnabas. He looked up at her and frowned distractedly, so she made the statement a bit more human. “I’m going to step out for a few. Call if you need me.”

“Oh. Right.” He nodded in a way that told her he hadn’t really heard anything she’d said. He was still thinking about Koel.

That suited her just fine. She had plenty to do. She had her avatar walk over to the doors, used the ship’s internal controls to open them, and headed into the hallway.

If she were honest with herself, Shinigami had to admit that she enjoyed having an avatar. She didn’t need to walk from place to place if she didn’t want to, but she liked the process of learning to walk without anyone looking at her oddly. Human movement had almost endless subtleties.

She counted it as a victory every time one of the other crew members passed her in a hallway and nodded distractedly, seeing her as simply another crewmate. The other day Gar had even turned his shoulder so he wouldn’t bump into her.

Gradually, the crew had become used to her presence in her almost-physical form, and she liked it. She played around with the clothes she had seen Bethany Anne wear, styled her hair however she felt like it—she didn’t have to worry about gravity or humidity, after all—and tried different looks, expressions, and mannerisms from holorecordings of people she knew.

She was getting good at it.

She stuck her head around the door to Tafa’s room, maintaining her projection in the corridor. “Got a second? I could use an artist’s eye.”

“Sure, just a moment.” Tafa put down her paint brushes with relief and began cleaning them.

Tafa’s painting hadn’t gone well lately. When Barnabas had first brought her on board she’d painted from stress, and after that, she had painted memories and any little thing that popped into her head. Dozens of canvases leaned against the walls.

The problem was, now that Tafa had all the time in the universe to paint and could make her name as a famous artist…

The thought of picking up a paintbrush terrified her.

She made herself do it, of course, but she couldn’t tell if the things she painted were any good. She had never dared sell her work, knowing that anything that made her famous would probably make Mustafee furious.

What if she wasn’t good enough?

She washed her hands and followed Shinigami to the ridiculously clean conference room that had become known as Shinigami’s office. This space showed the limitations of Shinigami’s form more clearly than anything else. While any species gradually accumulated clutter, things they had carried into the room and forgotten, like cold cups of coffee to notepads or sweatshirts, Shinigami was incapable of doing so.

She didn’t really need an office, of course, but with the ship only fractionally occupied, everyone had as much room as they wanted to spread out.

In the office, Shinigami gestured to the only chair. “Please, sit.”

Tafa sat, looking curious.

“I’m working on a project.” Shinigami gestured to the screens on the side walls and they lit up, showing information in a way that would be easy for Tafa to read with her side-set eyes.

The Yofu gave Shinigami a grateful smile. “Thanks. Most people don’t remember that part. You get used to looking at things on front screens, but it’s a relief to be able to see things properly.”

Shinigami smiled.

“What is all this, anyway?” Tafa asked.

Shinigami didn’t answer. She worked on one of Barnabas’ poses, leaning against the back wall with her arms crossed over her chest and one foot tucked behind the other, and she watched as Tafa read.

When Tafa was finished and looking at Shinigami again, the AI pushed her avatar off the wall—she was still working on that mannerism—and gestured at the screens.

“Of the things you saw there, what didn’t seem to fit?”

This was her pet project, her only secret from Barnabas, and it was absolutely essential that it should be perfect.

In fact, though Shinigami didn’t tell Tafa this, it was a matter of life and death.

Tafa considered Shinigami’s question carefully. She looked at all the information and images displayed, and finally, she pointed to three pictures.

“Those.”

Shinigami nodded. “Any of the facts? The writing?”

Tafa frowned. “I really don’t know enough about—”

“You have an eye for the whole,” Shinigami interrupted. “You can see things other people can’t. Some pieces of this, like the photos, might not fit. Does anything stick out to you?”

Tafa hesitated. She was less sure this time, but she highlighted several facts.

Shinigami heaved a sigh and chewed her lip, another mannerism she had picked up from Barnabas. Tafa had, unerringly, picked several lies in the presentation. And what Tafa noticed, someone else might notice on a subliminal level.

Shinigami couldn’t have that.

“Thank you. I’ll call you back to look at it again when I’ve made some revisions.”

“What is this for?” Tafa looked confused. “Shouldn’t Barnabas be helping you with this?”

“Barnabas…told me to take care of it.” Shinigami evaded the question with a sense of unease. Barnabas didn’t know exactly what she was doing.

She was sure he would approve, though.

She walked with Tafa back to the studio, then appeared in the conference room. From the frustrated expression on Barnabas’ face, little progress had been made.

But something had occurred to her as she walked.

“What if we dropped hints and scattered bits of information that sort of suggested there was a human colony being built in this sector?”

Everyone turned to look at her. Barnabas’ eyebrows lifted, and the Jotuns… Well, Shinigami couldn’t actually tell which direction the Jotuns looked, but they seemed to be paying attention.

“We could do that,” Barnabas drawled slowly. “Something like High Tortuga. Protected, and very secretive.”

“Like you said earlier,” Shinigami pointed out, “we can’t just leak some memo about where you’ll be. He’ll know that’s a trap. But then it occurred to me—we know he’s paid highly for information in the past. Putting things together and making plans is how he likes to work. If he thinks he’s discovered something we don’t want him to know…”

Which was pretty much the outline of her pet project as well. She shoved the thought away and smiled at Barnabas, hoping she didn’t look guilty.

He wasn’t really paying attention, though.

“What information would we need to plant?” he murmured. “Sightings of our ships. Buying materials? No, we always use our own materials.”

“He’s very sensitive to any distortions in trade,” Commander Jeqwar noted. “It wouldn’t have to be anything like buying materials. You could simply start to seed information—just rumors, whispers, nothing directly traceable—that shipping routes in a certain area were being disturbed. Say the ships had been offered money to change routes, for instance, and for not talking about it. No one would confirm it when he went digging, which would fit.”

“And he’d go looking for things in that area,” Shinigami continued. She grinned. “And what if we did the old trick of making a planet seem like something it wasn’t…but with another layer?”

Barnabas frowned at her. “Explain.”

“When someone wants a planet for themselves they try to change all the data, right? So when people look it up, they think it’s a piece-of-crap planet they’d never want to go to?” Not that she’d know anything about doing that.

“Yes.” His eyes drifted toward the Jotun officers on the screen, as if trying to see what they thought of this.

It was impossible to tell, however, given their jellyfish not-faces.

She might as well keep going.

“So we do that twice over,” Shinigami explained. “First we change the data on some random planet that he’s had no interest in before. Now it looks like a lovely, habitable planet—or at least, open to terraforming or enclosed colonies or something. Then we write over the data just a little more sloppily, making it seem like we tried to hide the fact that we can use it.”

“Ah,” Barnabas murmured. He was smiling now. “I do like that.”

“It’s clever,” one of the officers agreed. “But what if he sees through it?”

“He might see through anything,” Barnabas countered. “Our best shot is indeed to give him the illusion that he’s seen through our attempts to hide information. That he’s figured out something we wanted to keep hidden.”

“At the same time, you should send him a direct challenge,” Shinigami told Barnabas. “Throw down the gauntlet, tell him to meet you somewhere. Somewhere far, far from where the action is supposedly happening. You can’t just drop off the radar after your challenge or he’ll know something’s up, so you pretend like you’re playing it straight and then give him this secret target.”

“We should…” Barnabas sighed. “We should pretend that there are a large number of civilians on that hidden colony. That will make him think he can get us by the balls.”

“I’m sorry,” Commander Jeqwar piped up after a moment. “I don’t think that last sentence translated properly.”

Shinigami snorted, and Barnabas flushed.

“I, er…I apologize. It’s a way of saying that he’ll think that’s a place to hit us where we’re weak.”

“Huh.” Commander Jeqwar put that down for further study. “Is this our plan, then?”

“I think so. You’ll need to cover your tracks about where the Jotun fleet is,” Barnabas told her. “We’ll tell you when we’ve selected a place, and you can even reinforce the data we’re planting in your systems.”

“Why?”

Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged a look.

“Because Koel is almost certainly in your government databases,” Shinigami told her bluntly. “That will be one of the things he bribed people to get access to.”

“Oh, gods.” Jeqwar let loose with a stream of words that didn’t translate but didn’t really need to. “We’ll do what we have to do, including finding out who gave him that access.” Her tone made it very clear what was going to happen to those people.

“We’ll be in touch,” Barnabas told her. He signed off and looked at Shinigami. “Where did you get off to?”

“Researching planets.” It wasn’t a lie.

“Any suggestions for your plan, then?”

She dug hastily through her data banks. “Not 1027.478B. That one is pretty well known, and none of the shipping lanes go near it. He might have that as ambient knowledge. I’d suggest Waler’s Star. One of the planets there is just too inhospitable for any colonies to take root. If we make it seem like we have the technology and want to make sure no one tries to take it first…”

“I’ll trust your judgment.” Barnabas nodded decisively. “Let’s get started, then.”

Chapter Nine

On the bridge of the Avaris, Lotar Venn frowned at the screen and punched a few keys. What he saw in the data couldn’t possibly be correct…could it? And it might be nothing, anyway. He had to be very, very sure of what he suspected before he brought anything to the admiral—and to Mr. Yennai.

Lotar gulped. Koel Yennai was a legend. People said that when they made reports to him his face never changed. That it was impossible to know what he thought until you stopped talking and he began to ask questions.

And if you didn’t have answers…

That was a fast track to ruining your entire career. When Lotar had first been brought onboard the Avaris, everyone had hastened to assure him that he shouldn’t worry that he’d be executed for something like that. No, not for something like that.

He’d found that to be the opposite of reassuring.

“What did happen?” he had asked them finally, and they all looked at one another meaningfully. Your career was definitely finished if you wasted Mr. Yennai’s time. You got shuffled off…somewhere; no one knew exactly where. It wasn’t anywhere you wanted to go, though. One or two of them shared stories about bunkmates who’d committed that grave offense and managers and company officers who had failed to do their due diligence.

Anyway, you had to be sure, they said. That was the point. Just be sure, if you were going to bring information to Mr. Yennai, that your research was unassailable and you’d drawn sound conclusions.

Lotar had consequently spent the past six months absolutely terrified of finding anything that would mean he had to present a report. Now that he had, his palms were clammy, and he wondered if he could just pass the report to his managers and let them handle it.

He’d do the research first, though. In his heart, Lotar was an academic. He loved to put together puzzles and draw pictures from scraps of information. He’d proven adept at all the tests they’d given him when he was interviewed to join the corporation—finding trade opportunities, noting market manipulation, and suggesting avenues for data collection.

Now, this was live data, and he was doing everything in real time, and he was grinning as he punched the keys.

Yes, someone had definitely manipulated data. They had tried to be clever, but he’d caught them. He added images and facts to the report. Which facts had been changed on which date? What other source might there be?

Once or twice he made emphatic points, only to go back and revise them. If he wasn’t sure of something, he withheld it. He took comfort, as he always did, in the data. The patterns were there. Data, unlike people, didn’t lie. The data points were what they were.

By the time he’d finished his report, he was finally feeling relaxed and happy. He flexed his fingers, smiled to himself, and spun in his chair—

To see Koel Yennai watching him.

The bottom dropped out of Lotar’s stomach. He froze, staring at the Torcellan patriarch in absolute terror.

Then Koel smiled. “I watched you build the report,” he admitted. His voice was melodious. No one had ever mentioned that about him. “It’s a good one. You’ve drawn very reasonable conclusions, with a good balance between unfounded speculation, and over-caution. What is your name?”

Lotar managed to close his mouth, but his mind was still a complete blank.

What was his name? He only just managed to avoid looking at the nameplate on his desk.

“Lotar Venn, Mr. Yennai.”

“Lotar Venn.” Koel smiled, which transformed his face. For a moment, Lotar felt like he was the only person in the universe. “I am pleased to have you as one of my employees. Forward that report directly to me.”

“But it’s not… I mean, of course, sir.” Lotar swallowed. “But I don’t have a final conclusion yet. I mean, I don’t know who’s doing this. It’s someone who has the technology to terraform a planet that no one else has been able to, and I have no idea who’s made an advance like that recently.”

Koel smiled again, and this time the smile was chilling. “I believe I know just who is doing this. They’ve been spreading like a virus through many systems.”

Lotar’s eyes were wide. “Who are they? The Jotuns?”

“They’re part of it.” There was a distant rage in Koel’s eyes. “But the main instigators are a race called ‘humans.’ And now that we know where one of their colonies is...” He gave another cold smile. “We can make sure they understand the consequences of taking what is not theirs.”

He swept away, and Lotar stared after him. With shaking fingers, he sent the report.

He no longer wanted to, but he had to. What was about to happen to this colony was the inevitable result of angering Koel Yennai.

Lotar wasn’t brave enough to risk that himself.

* * *

Zinqued was whistling as he headed for the airlock. The Julentai had just docked at Virtue Station, and he was certain that he’d find more talent for his crew here.

Then he stopped in the door of the airlock, frowning.

Tik’ta was slumped against one wall, her shoulders hunched. She looked like she was trying not to throw up. When the automated alert let them know that docking was nearly complete, the look of nausea on her face only got more intense.

“Are you all right?” Zinqued asked her cautiously.

“I…will be.”

“Are you sick?” He hung back. If she were sick, he’d have Chofal take care of her. In a crew with multiple species, it was best to make sure that diseases didn’t have a good vector.

She gave a tired smile. “No, not like that. It’s just, now that we’re here… I remember what happened the last time I was here.”

Zinqued realized what she must mean. “You never came back after the first time you encountered the Shinigami?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Why would we? Nothing legitimate goes on here, and he told us we had to be doing legitimate things, and…” She closed her eyes. “Klafk’tin was an ass. Why do I care that he got killed? He deserved it.”

Zinqued remembered the sea of dead bodies he’d seen in the Yennai Corporation headquarters. “I know what you mean, though. This guy is dangerous.” He smiled at Tik’ta as he stepped into the airlock and let it close behind him. “So’s the Yennai Corporation. That’s why we’re letting them battle to the death while we come in and pick up the stuff they leave behind.”

She looked a little brighter at that. “That’s a good point. It’s a smart plan. We don’t have to pick a side, we just have to swoop in and get all the things they won’t be using anymore once they’re dead.”

“Exactly,” Zinqued agreed.

The alert announced that decontamination was complete, and the airlock opened into Virtue Station’s docking bay.

“Should I keep the ship warmed up?” Chofal asked over the channel.

“There shouldn’t be any need,” Zinqued told her. “Just stay put and be ready to run background checks on any names I give you. I’ll want to hire them immediately if I can.”

“I’ll be ready.”

Zinqued and Tik’ta forged their way into the docking bay. To Zinqued’s surprise, it was incredibly busy—and most of the people seemed to have suitcases and packing crates.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked Tik’ta in an undertone.

“I don’t know.”

“They’re leaving,” Chofal reported. “The transports out are booked for the next week, and more transports are being called in. There are whispers that the Yennai Corporation is about to fall apart, and since they basically run this place…”

Zinqued whistled and shook his head.

People could be so stupid sometimes. After all, when something like the Yennai Corporation failed, there was chaos and a power vacuum—and that was the best time to turn a profit.

He shouldn’t complain, though. The more people who decided to run, the fewer people he’d be competing with to find new employees.

And now that he knew there was a panic, he was prepared to be bolder.

“Let’s go to the main level.”

“Us?” She looked down at her coveralls. “They’ll never let us into any of the banks.”

“We don’t need to go in,” Zinqued said. “Not exactly. You’ll see when we get there.”

* * *

Koel Yennai sat back in his desk chair and smiled. The new employee had done well. Koel had seen him a few times and had been told that he was expected to do good work, but in the chaos of the past few months, there hadn’t been much time for business as usual.

It turned out they’d been correct about him, though. Lotar Venn had found something very impressive indeed.

A small planet in orbit around Waler’s Star was being adapted for human settlement. There wasn’t much in the way of direct detail, just rumors and whispers. Lotar had successfully seen through all of it, though.

Koel was reminded of himself when he was younger. He’d always been able to see patterns no one else could.

And now he would put that skill to use, as he had so many times before, to stop his enemies in their tracks. When the humans saw the wreckage of their colony and thousands of their civilians dead…

They would break and run.

He opened a channel to the bridge. “Admiral Frist.”

“Yes, Mr. Yennai?”

“I’m sending you coordinates,” Koel told him. “Begin moving the fleet immediately.”

* * *

The Brakalon at the door of the main bank was one of the biggest aliens Zinqued had ever seen. His skin was a deep bluish-green, and his eyes never stopped moving. He looked endlessly suspicious, not relaxing his vigilance even for the rich clients who swept past him in their jewels and expensive clothes. He seemed to hate them.

He was perfect.

Zinqued approached him, catching his eye and nodding decisively.

“What do you want?” the Brakalon called, not sounding friendly in the least.

“To offer you a job.” Zinqued stopped a few feet away. “You have time to talk?”

“I’m on the job.” The Brakalon scoffed. But he looked inside the bank, where the rich clients were all shrieking that they needed their money at once, and his lip curled. He headed over to Zinqued a moment later. “Fucking idiots, the lot of them.”

“There’s going to be a lot up for grabs if the Yennai Corporation falls apart,” Zinqued observed. “A lot of rich people abandoning a lot of property. A lot of places where anything we want could be ours. Of course, we’d need some good talent in case other people had the same idea.”

The Brakalon started to smile. He nodded.

“Yeah. You would. You’d need someone who could fight.” He looked at Tik’ta. “Doesn’t look like she can.”

“Damned good pilot, though,” Zinqued replied equably. “And the best engineer I’ve seen. You’d be the fourth—you and anyone else you’d recommend.”

The Brakalon thought this over, then smiled. “Yeah, I think I know some people. I’d get a cut for bringing them on, right?”

“Of course.” Zinqued shook his hand and tried not to wince at the Brakalon’s bone-crushing grip. “Meet us at Bay 27. One hour.”

“Will do.” The guard stepped back, talking into his communications unit in a low voice, and Zinqued turned to Tik’ta with a smile.

“And we have some fighters.”

She grinned at him. “Good. Because he’s right, I’m not one for the front lines.”

“And I’d guess he can’t fly the ship,” Zinqued added with a laugh. “Doubt he could fit in the cockpit. We’re getting a good team together. We have a good shot at this.”

Chapter Ten

Lotar Venn had just about managed to recover from his last meeting with Koel Yennai when he was summoned to the patriarch’s staterooms.

“I don’t think I can go,” he told Era, his closest friend on the ship.

“You want to get thrown out an airlock?” She gave him a look, then rolled her eyes at his expression. “I’m kidding. God, you’d think you’d never been part of an organization with a trigger-happy megalomaniac at the helm.”

Lotar looked around nervously to see if anyone else was listening.

No one seemed to care.

“It makes me nervous when you talk like that.”

“Everything makes you nervous.” She flipped over a tile in her game and rolled her eyes again. “Go away, Venn. He’s moving the fleet, nothing’s stopped. He probably wants to promote you.”

“That—”

“Makes you nervous. Yes. We all know. Go away before someone punches you.”

Lotar left and considered it a win that she’d said it instead of just punching him without giving a heads up first.

Koel waited by a window that took up one whole wall of the apartment. It was so clear that Lotar had a feeling of vertigo. Staring into the black, it wasn’t like there were references that would show how big it was.

But you knew. You knew when you looked at it.

He gulped, said a quick prayer, and walked over to where Koel stood with his hands linked behind his back, staring at the fleet.

“Mr. Yennai.” Lotar ducked his head as far as he could without making it a bow. He didn’t want to be a kiss-ass, but he didn’t want to piss Koel off either.

Koel’s pale, cold features were arranged in a smile. He seemed deeply pleased with the state of things.

“What do you think of the fleet?” he asked.

“It’s a very nice fleet,” Lotar said automatically. Then his brain caught up with him, and he flushed. “I mean, ah, it’s nicely balanced. And these ships are the most advanced of any out there.”

Koel gave a wry smile. “Perhaps.”

“It could defeat any other fleet,” Lotar insisted.

“I hope it will never have to,” Koel told him. He went to one of the couches and sat, gesturing for Lotar to join him. “Do you know, I have read the great philosophers and military strategists of every species, and they all say the same thing. To defeat an enemy on the field of battle means you have already failed. It is better to have your enemy surrender to you before your armies ever meet.”

Lotar had never thought of that before. He perched on the edge of a couch and tried not to look too out of place.

“But if you never use your army…” His voice trailed off, and he flushed. “My apologies, sir. I am clearly not a military strategist.”

“Not yet,” Koel agreed. He picked up a tablet from the table beside him. “This tablet has the books I mentioned. I want you to read them, and then I want to discuss them with you.”

Lotar took the tablet with wide eyes. “I… With me? Why?”

“I see much of myself in you,” he declared finally as he surveyed the fleet. “The Yennai Corporation needs a future, Mr. Venn. Perhaps you will be that future. Who can say?”

Lotar could not speak, he was so shocked. He hugged the tablet to his chest and ducked his head. “Thank you, Mr. Yennai.”

“Now, come with me to see the pride of my fleet.” Koel stood and gestured for Lotar to follow him to the window.

He pointed to a strange, almost hollow-looking ship. “You see her? She is one of my greatest achievements.”

Lotar studied the ship. “Where are its weapons?”

“You mean missiles, but it has none.” Koel smiled confidently. “Nonetheless, that ship will be our victory, Mr. Venn. The schematics are also in your tablet, as is an inventory of the ship’s contents. Return tomorrow to tell me what you think.”

“Yes, Mr. Yennai.”

* * *

“The Yennai fleet is moving,” Shinigami reported. She had watched the communications of the fleet for days before the order had been sent. “Should I relay word to the Jotun high command?”

Barnabas looked up from his book. “Use the personal channel Commander Jeqwar gave,” he instructed. “We’re still not sure where Koel has bugs in the Jotuns’ systems—unless they’ve gotten back to you on that.”

“Not yet.” Shinigami’s avatar flickered into being. She sat at the pilot’s chair and positioned her hands over the controls, moving them as the ship began to turn.

“A good illusion.” Barnabas smiled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were flying the ship with those gestures, not from inside the computers.”

“I could do it, too, if you would give me a body.”

“For one thing, you’d need to pick a look and stick with it,” Barnabas said, amused. “For another…no. You don’t get a robotic body. That’s just asking for trouble.”

“ADAM is getting one!”

“Not yet. And I think it will be a mistake if he does. For one thing, you’d be pestering me to come on combat missions if you got a body.”

Shinigami had to work hard not to smile. She didn’t want to let Barnabas see her satisfaction, because that would put him on his guard. But the fact was, in a few short weeks, she’d gotten him from a simple “no” to debating the idea on its own merits.

And she really, really wanted her own body. She got to walk around the ship, but that was nothing compared to seeing all the places Barnabas went.

When she looked through his eyes, it just wasn’t the same.

She was determined to get him to agree to it. For now, she dropped the subject with a smile and went back to Koel. They could bond over how much they hated him.

“So this motherfucker thinks he’s going after an undefended colony full of innocent bystanders, huh?”

Barnabas’ face went absolutely cold. “Yes. He does. And we are going to make sure he learns how much of a mistake that was.”

Shinigami tried to swivel in the chair, cursed internally when the chair didn’t move, and flickered over to the other side of the room to make her avatar lean against the wall.

“What if he finds out about the Jotun fleet in advance?”

“Then we’ll know there’s a spy in their high command,” Barnabas replied. “He may have advance notice, which would not be optimal, but regardless, he’ll have an entire fleet to face down.” He frowned. “I hope the Jotun fleet knows what they’re doing. They’re confident, but…”

“Their track record suggests they’re good at small-scale engagements, at least.” Shinigami brought up a few reports on the displays. She had spent considerable time verifying the capabilities of the fleet.

She didn’t want to die, after all.

Barnabas looked them over with his arms crossed. “They really took to technology, I’ll give them that. How, I have no idea. They’re aquatic. How did they learn electronics without killing themselves?”

Shinigami snickered. “Maybe they started millennia ago and lost thousands in the process.” She shrugged. “My guess is that they appropriated some technology and made some allies, and it all took off from there. You have to give them credit, though. Those ships are insane.”

“How do you mean?” He frowned.

“You didn’t see how they’re controlled?” Shinigami hopped up on one of the control panels to sit cross-legged.

“One of the things you can’t do in a robotic body,” Barnabas remarked.

“Yeah, yeah. Maybe I’ll just park my body when we come back to the ship and use my avatar.”

“Leaving the robotic body to stand like a creepy mannequin in the hallway? I think not.”

“That is such a good idea.”

“No. No, it’s not. Don’t do that.” Barnabas’ expression was vaguely panicked.

Shinigami gave him a toothy grin. “Anyway. The Jotun ships. They’re controlled telekinetically. Sort of. That’s the closest word for it.”

“You’d mentioned that. I thought it was that the powersuits were telekinetic and—”

“Oh, no. That’s not how it works.” Shinigami brought up some pictures on the display. “You see this? This is Admiral Jutfa. Well, theoretically it is, but they could put a Jotun stuffed animal in there and none of us would be able to tell the difference.”

Barnabas sank his head into his hands with a groan. “I can never tell who’s calling when I answer the call, and they always expect me to know. How am I supposed to tell them apart?”

“Fuck if I know.” Shinigami shook her head. “Anyway, you see the admiral isn’t wearing a normal powersuit, right? Well, when they go into battle, they plug the captain of the ship into the ship and they control the whole thing—weapons, maneuvering, all of it. In extreme cases, they can network the tasks and put other people in control, but mostly, the captain just controls all of that at once. They communicate with the officers and operate based on that information.”

Barnabas stared at her with his mouth hanging open. “That’s not possible.”

“Oh, but it is.” Shinigami gave him a look that said, I’m as surprised as you are. “Believe me, I didn’t just take all that for granted. I checked.”

“Holy shit,” Barnabas muttered, then flushed. “My vocabulary has gone over a cliff since I started associating with Tabitha.”

“It’s good for you.” Shinigami believed strongly that Barnabas needed to unwind a little. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to get him drunk. “And ‘holy shit’ is about the size of it. People get promoted in the Jotun Navy because they can manage a ship that big. An admiral can manage multiple ships at once.”

Barnabas was frowning now. “I’m a little worried that we’ve underestimated the Jotuns.”

“It’s possible, but as far as I can tell they just have really good multitasking abilities. Let’s not panic.” Shinigami shrugged. “After all, Jeltor is a nice guy. Perfectly smart, but not an evil genius by any means.”

“Still.” Barnabas chewed his lip. “All right. Let’s get Gar and Tafa and tell them the drill. I think I have an idea what Koel is going to do when he sees us there with the fleet.”

Chapter Eleven

“Don’t you want me to stand still?” Gar questioned. He stood frozen in the act of putting on his armor. His weapons lay neatly to one side, cleaned after their last battle but not yet checked this time.

Barnabas was methodical to a fault, and he expected the same of Gar.

“No,” Tafa said impatiently. “The painting isn’t of you, it’s of… Well, you.”

“You can see how I’d get confused,” Gar joked.

“It isn’t your face or your shape.” Tafa gestured to him. “It’s of your…what do Luvendi call it? Your essence? All the thoughts and energy that make you who you are.”

“Thoughts and energy?” Gar considered. “I think humans call it a soul. It’s their closest concept, anyway. Not exactly the same thing. Thoughts are the mind. Energy is…energy. Emotions. The soul is… Now I’m confused.”

“The riddle,” Barnabas said, poking his head in the door as he went past, “is that if I have a mind and a body and a soul…what am I?” He smiled and disappeared again.

“I’m going to make a painting about that,” Tafa said slowly.

“I’m going to get a headache thinking about it,” Gar added.

“Anyway, the point is, keep moving around. I need to see you move to paint you.” Tafa spread a dollop of red paint on her palette.

“I’m red?” Gar looked dubious. “I’m from Luvendan. Everything is blue. My eyes are blue. My skin is kind of blue.”

“Well, your essence is red,” Tafa stated emphatically. “Trust me.”

“Sure, why not?” Gar adjusted the thin layer that went under his armor and moved on to inspecting his weapons. He disassembled a pistol carefully, checking each piece for grime.

“You are afraid before battles,” Tafa commented.

“I am not.” Gar looked up at once, offended. “I’m glad to go into battle. I’m fighting for what’s right.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” She swooped the brush across one of the canvases and made a slash on the other, wielding both brushes with precision despite the quick movements. “Gar, your whole life, you’ve feared physical contact. It could damage you. So much of who you are is tied up in being the person who was…fragile. Every time you dealt with someone, both of you knew that you could be beaten to a pulp within minutes. That doesn’t go away in a few months.”

Gar sighed in exasperation, his hands still on the pistol. Having fewer fingers than a human, he had to concentrate to get the gun to come apart correctly, and Tafa was ruining his focus.

“Maybe right before a battle isn’t the best time for this.”

“When would be a good time?” When he said nothing, Tafa nodded. “Exactly. You don’t want to confront it. When you fight, you’re not fighting because it’s the right thing to do, you’re fighting because you want to show all those people who underestimated you that they were wrong.”

“You make it sound like I don’t care about what’s right!”

“When you’re in a battle, you don’t—not from what I’ve seen.” She sat next to him. “Gar, you follow Barnabas because you want to do the right thing. I know that. But when it comes time for a battle, you just want to surprise them; make them pay for underestimating you. You know…you know there’s no shame in being what you were before, right?”

Gar looked down at the guns. He heard the blood pounding in his ears.

“What I was before,” he said precisely, “was nothing. I was useless.”

“Not true.” Tafa shook her head. “If that were true, Barnabas would never have enhanced your abilities.

“Barnabas fights from his heart, Gar. His abilities…they aren’t him. He could be in that body with the strong bones and the speed and all of it, and he still wouldn’t be able to do what he does without his belief. That’s why he chose you. Because you have that, too. Not because he thought you’d hit the hardest when he upgraded your body.”

Gar realized he was shaking. Ever since he’d left Luvendan he’d been the weak one; the fragile one. Everyone he’d met looked him up and down with contempt. In his work he’d held the uneasy position at the top of the ladder, ordering people around who could have easily killed him—and had often wanted to.

Leaving that physical weakness behind had been everything he wanted. And yet…

“I’m more afraid now than I was when I was weak.” The sentiment made no sense, but it was true.

Tafa nodded. “That’s what the red is. It’s fear. You fear and hate weakness because you believed it defined you. But it never did, Gar. You could be what Barnabas is, but until you accept what you were, you never will.”

He said nothing, and she moved toward the door to give him some privacy.

“What is Barnabas?” Gar called after her. “You say I can be what he is, but what is that, to you?”

Tafa paused. “I’ve been reading about Earth. In their stories, they talk about knights, people who swore on their honor to defend the helpless. But there’s a kind of warrior who’s even more than that—a paladin.”

Gar frowned. He’d never heard that term before.

“They’re a myth,” Tafa explained. “Sort of. I think. They draw their power from a deity and wield it like magic.” She paused. “But Barnabas…I think what he draws his power from is the very concept of goodness, itself. Evil is evil because it hurts the innocent. Good is good because it saves them. That is who he is. That is who you could be, Gar.”

She left Gar to his thoughts.

Shinigami had been listening, and her avatar wore a speculative expression.

Barnabas looked up from his schematics and caught sight of it. His brow furrowed. “What are you thinking about?”

“Not important.” She wasn’t sure what she thought of Tafa’s theory yet—and anyway, he’d be embarrassed to hear it.

Although she wouldn’t mind embarrassing him.

She’d keep that in the bank then, to use when she most needed to catch him off-guard. With a grin, Shinigami stood her avatar up and walked over to stare down at the schematics.

She had found that acting like a human—having the mannerisms that showed she was paying attention—helped her interact with the crew. When they saw expressions and actions, they let their guard down in a different way.

Barnabas looked over the known specifications for the Avaris, Koel Yennai’s flagship. Some informants speculated he might even be aboard the ship, which Shinigami privately considered to be likely. Koel hadn’t lived at the secret base, after all, and while he might have an even more top-secret base, she guessed that he was the sort of person who couldn’t stay cooped up.

“No one has ever met their fleet in battle,” Barnabas said worriedly. “They could have weapons we’ve never encountered. Even the Jotuns, who have seen some of their ships, don’t have any idea—and Yennai knows what the Jotuns have. They’ve been all through that information.”

He rubbed his forehead wearily.

“Having good weapons isn’t the same as knowing how to use them,” Shinigami pointed out. “It’s like handing a four-year-old a chess board. You can tell them what each piece does. They might even understand it. That doesn’t mean they can win.” She smiled mischievously. “Like you with a chess board, now that I think of it.”

Barnabas gave her a look. “You want to go? Let’s go.”

Shinigami gave a pointed look at the corner of the room where the stone chess board Barnabas had commissioned was sitting at a small table. “I would, but I’m incorporeal and can’t pick up the pieces.”

Barnabas leaned forward with his knuckles braced on the table and a wicked grin on his lips. “You’re worried that if you can’t cheat, you can’t win,” he said softly.

“I’m afraid of nothing.”

“Prove it.”

Shinigami narrowed her eyes. “As soon as this battle is over, old geezer, I’m going to take you down. I’ll crush you so hard the whole group of Rangers won’t be able to play chess for a month. I’ll crush you so hard you can’t look at a chess board. I’ll crush you so hard we’ll have to switch to poker.”

“Poker?” Barnabas’ mouth twitched. “You want to inject some random chance into our games? Bring. It. On. Chaos only benefits me.”

Shinigami scoffed and narrowed her eyes. “Organic life forms are ridiculous.”

Barnabas did not look at all disheartened by that. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it. “Also, I’d like to see you play chess with Tabitha. You think I’m infuriating? She’d break your soul. That woman is chaos personified.”

Shinigami gave a shudder. She could just picture Tabitha’s attempts to play chess. What does this piece do? I don’t want to move it that way. Okay, but if I could move a castle diagonally I’d have won, so technically I did win.

“That’s a horrifying thing to imagine,” she confessed.

From Barnabas’ smile, he planned to use this against her. “Mmmhmm.” He took another look at the schematics and shook his head. “Dwelling on this isn’t going to do any good. I’m going to the armory to get geared up.”

“I’ll come with you.” Shinigami fell in beside him, and they walked through the halls in silence. Gar was alone in Tafa’s studio, dressed for battle and staring out a window. He didn’t seem to hear them as they passed.

Shinigami used the scanners in the room to assess him. He seemed troubled, apparently still thinking over what Tafa had said. Shinigami couldn’t understand why it would trouble him. If he didn’t like how he was, why wouldn’t he simply change?

There was so much about organic life forms that made no sense.

She’d talk to him about it later.

She practiced her walking while Barnabas stripped off his jacket and button-down shirt and situated his armor over the thin shirt he always wore. He flexed all his joints to make sure that the armor wouldn’t impede his motions. By this point, it fit like a dream. It was more habit than anything else.

He checked his weapons and brushed a few specks of grime off—imaginary grime, if Shinigami were to bet. Barnabas never left his weapons in anything but perfect condition.

He had just slid his Jean Dukes into their holsters when the call came in. It was tagged as being from Jeltor. Shinigami brought it up on the armory’s screen.

“Jeltor,” Barnabas said. “We’re decelerating in a few minutes.” He frowned. “Did you beat us there?”

Shinigami also frowned. There was no way the Jotun fleet should have beat them. The Shinigami’s propulsion systems were state of the art, and they’d been closer to the target planet than the Jotun fleet in any case.

“It’s not that.” Jeltor bobbed anxiously in the tank of his powersuit. “We’ve just received a distress call.”

“It’s a trap,” Barnabas declared instantly. “They know the Jotun Navy is involved. Don’t get dragged off course.”

“No,” Jeltor stated urgently. “You don’t understand. The call isn’t for us to come somewhere. It’s… One of our ships has been captured. A civilian transport.”

Barnabas frowned. “You can’t go after it—”

But in a flash, Shinigami understood. She cut him off with a shake of her head. “That’s not what Jeltor means. I’ll bet you anything that when the Yennai Corporation fleet shows up, they’ll have that civilian ship right in the middle of them so we can’t shoot.”

“Yes.” Jeltor sounded bleak. “There are two thousand civilians on that ship. We have to call this off. We can’t let them pay for—”

“We’re not calling it off.” Barnabas’ voice was hard. His expression was compassionate as he looked at the screen, however. “They aren’t going to die, Jeltor. He won’t throw away his bargaining chip so early in the game, and there’s something he wants far more than he wants the Jotuns to suffer. He wants me dead.”

Shinigami sank her head into her hands. She could guess what Barnabas had planned, and it was risky—riskier than she was comfortable with.

Barnabas looked at her, raising an eyebrow. He could tell what she thought. “Do you have a better plan?” he challenged.

“No, but that’s not the point.”

“It’s definitely the point.” His fingers flexed, then clenched. “Koel Yennai is a dangerous bastard, but he’s also vengeful—and that’s our way in. Jeltor?”

“Yes?”

“As soon as the Yennai fleet comes in, you and I are transporting to that flagship.”

Chapter Twelve

Lotar was on the bridge of the Avaris when it came out of FTL.

He wasn’t at his desk; it was conspicuously empty. Instead, he stood with Koel at the massive windows on the bridge. He could feel the eyes of his fellow analysts. Were they jealous?

He imagined they were, and it was a heady feeling.

He had stayed up late into the night, reading Koel’s favorite books on military strategy until his eyes drooped shut. When he had woken up, he’d barely paused to put on a new uniform before presenting himself at Koel’s stateroom. Lotar had plans. He had thoughts about the books he’d read, he had seen the schematics of the strange, hollow ship and its contents, and he was only too eager to talk to Koel about all of it.

His fear of Koel was entirely gone. The Torcellan was brilliant; anyone could see that. He listened to Lotar’s theories and offered his own, enjoying nothing more than coming up with strategies and far-reaching plans.

When they’d received word that the fleet was coming out of FTL near Waler’s Star, they had walked onto the bridge together. As Lotar made for his desk, Koel had said carelessly, “No, I’ll need you with me during the battle.”

Lotar was rising fast, and nothing had ever felt more satisfying in his life. Let the rest of them eat their hearts out. They’d tormented him for being the newbie and not knowing the ropes, for being too cautious, and making his reports too detailed.

Well, here he was now. He was still smiling when the fleet came out of hyperspace…

And everyone on the bridge gasped. Koel’s mouth drew back in a snarl and Lotar pressed his hands against the window, mouth open in shock.

It was the Jotun fleet—and if it wasn’t the whole fleet, then it was damned close.

They should have known where the fleet would be. Their sources in the Jotun senate had gleefully reported that most of the top brass were under investigation, news that had spread all through the Yennai analyst corps, and then…

Nothing. Clearly, the Jotun Navy had realized they had a leak. And now…

“Unveil the captured ship,” Koel ordered.

“Yes, sir.” The admiral relayed the orders.

The hollow ship slid forward from the center of the Yennai Corporation fleet, accompanied by a contingent of destroyers. Almost a sphere, the ship had a large open space in the center where mechanical arms held the civilian transport in place.

“I thought we’d only be using this against Barnabas,” Koel said softly. “But it will work well for them, too. They’ll pay for this.”

Lotar said nothing. His fear of Koel rushed back.

“Sir, we’re being hailed by the Shinigami.” The admiral looked at Koel, and Lotar recognized the same fear in his eyes.

Koel turned to him slowly, then nodded for him to play the message.

“They say they are sending Barnabas and the Jotun who attacked our headquarters.” The admiral tapped a few keys and highlighted a shuttle flying close to the human ship. “To speak with you, sir.”

“To speak with me.” Koel smiled. “Yes, send them in.”

He looked at Lotar.

“The thing about Barnabas,” he said quietly, “is that he doesn’t really understand his limitations.”

Lotar swallowed. He’d heard the stories of what happened at headquarters. He didn’t think Barnabas had limitations, and he was suddenly afraid that Koel would get them all killed.

Koel saw his fear and his smile grew. “Barnabas expects me to want to kill him,” he said. “And I do. He expects me to throw overwhelming force at him. And I will. He’ll defeat them, but I have more tricks up my sleeve than just that.”

* * *

“Are you sure this will work?” Jeltor asked nervously.

“Not…precisely.” Barnabas cursed the ethics that kept him honest. “Let’s just say I think it’s a good bet.

“Bets are all we have in battle,” Barnabas continued. “It’s one of the reasons we don’t go into battle often.”

Jeltor nodded glumly at that. “All the same, if you had asked me which fleet we feared most, I would have said this one.”

Barnabas nodded. The Avaris was so big it blotted out the stars as they approached. They continued past the hollow ship with its captive transport and Barnabas took a long look, letting Shinigami watch through his eyes.

She had to know what they were up against. As soon as the shuttle docked she would cloak the ship, leave a buoy in her place to make it seem as if she had stayed in formation with the Jotun fleet, and rescue the civilian transport.

When Barnabas had regretfully told Gar that he would have to stay on the Shinigami, Gar had reacted better than Barnabas had expected. He only nodded. Barnabas would have to think about that later.

Koel was going to throw everything he had at them as soon as they docked. In fact, Barnabas was surprised that the Avaris hadn’t simply tried to shoot the shuttle out of the sky. He’d used a scrambling technique that Shinigami devised to make the shuttle show up in a slightly different location on scanners, which would buy them a few moments if they needed them.

But missiles or not, Koel definitely had something up his sleeve.

An officer with a completely expressionless voice guided them to the main landing bay, which appeared to be entirely empty.

“Get ready,” Barnabas warned grimly. He looked around. “I see doors every ten meters or so, and if I had to guess, I’d say we’ll be surrounded within moments of stepping from this shuttle.”

“You’re betting they won’t kill us,” Jeltor guessed.

“Yes—both because they’ll be ordered not to, and because we won’t let them.” Barnabas looked at him. “Jeltor, being on one of your ships was also a gamble. You know that.”

That at least made Jeltor relax slightly. He nodded. “Yes, I know that.”

The shuttle jolted as it set down. “Good,” Barnabas finished. “Because we’re here.”

“I’m going to regret this.”

“Oh, stop being so dramatic. It’s going to be fun!”

“Has anyone ever told you that humans have a very strange idea of fun?” Jeltor grumbled as they exited the shuttle. “Or is it just you?”

“It’s just him,” Shinigami reported, making use of the communications channel to speak to Jeltor as well. “Although really, the whole upper tier of the Etheric Empire had a few screws loose.”

“One of whom you’re modeled after,” Barnabas ground out.

“Were we talking about me? We were not.”

“We’ll have to continue this another time, unfortunately.” Barnabas watched as the doors opened. “We’re about to have company.”

The soldiers who entered the landing bay were fast and deadly. They immediately took cover, firing well-targeted shots in the direction of Barnabas and Jeltor, as well as the shuttle itself. They moved easily in their armor and shouted commands to one another.

Barnabas rolled behind the shuttle with Jeltor. He grinned at the Jotun. “Well, this is a nice surprise. It’s always a treat to fight someone competent.”

“You’re crazy,” Jeltor grumped. He ran a scan. “I make it eighteen of them. Four are up in the rafters, waiting to pick us off if we make too much trouble. You approve of that, don’t you?”

“Oh, very much. It feels unsporting to kill people who don’t have a fighting chance.” Barnabas studied the readout on Jeltor’s suit’s screen. “All right, I’ll take the two on the left, you take the two on the right.”

They emerged, and Jeltor shot tiny missiles at the two snipers on his side. A small spread—minuscule at this range—covered a range of a few feet in either direction, and though both snipers dove, both were struck. Their bodies tumbled from the rafters and hit the floor with a thud.

Barnabas’ shots left two smoking holes in the rafters. He smiled at Jeltor as they ducked back behind the shuttle, shots ringing out overhead and ricocheting off the ground nearby. “Jean has a way with weapons.”

Jeltor snorted in amusement. “I hope so, because we’ve really pissed them off.”

With a roar, the fourteen remaining soldiers hurtled over the barriers and rushed them, shooting. There was a crash, and the window of the shuttle shattered. Barnabas swore.

“They would. I guess we’ll be finding another way out of here.”

“Only you would say that,” Jeltor muttered. “As if fourteen elite soldiers weren’t enough to contend with.”

Barnabas rolled a grenade into the mass of soldiers.

BOOM!

“There aren’t fourteen of them anymore,” he said cheekily. “See you on the other side. Speaking of which—swap sides with me.”

He slid out and vaulted to the top of the shuttle before flipping off.

The soldiers tried to stop and turn, but they were too late—and those on this side of the shuttle had expected Jeltor. Barnabas picked off two of them before they managed to turn properly, and leaped again as the other soldiers headed toward him.

Behind him there was a roar, then a few screams.

Jeltor gets to use a flamethrower and I don’t? Shinigami demanded.

Not now, Shinigami!

Barnabas dropped his shoulder and pivoted on the ball of his foot as a soldier rushed him. A shot passed harmlessly through the space where his torso had been, and a moment later his foot caught the soldier in the temple. The fighter toppled sideways, and Barnabas’ shot finished him as he stumbled and fell.

Barnabas charged forward as the rest tried to regroup. They surrounded him, but hadn’t planned for this and did not want to shoot one another.

Too bad. He grabbed one’s rifle and pressed the finger on the trigger, dragging the soldier past him. The shot took a fellow soldier, and Barnabas’ teeth ripped into the shooting soldier’s throat a moment later.

They had counted on guns and knives, but not teeth.

He made short work of the rest. Two fired as he ducked, and he shot them both in the shins and, as they fell, in the head.

The last tried to run. Barnabas caught him at the doors and sank his teeth into his neck. He threw the lifeless body to the ground.

“Jeltor?”

“All good.”

Jeltor had just clanked over to him when a section of the landing bay lit up. Behind a reinforced pane of glass was the control center, and there…

“Barnabas.” Koel’s smooth voice came over the comm as he swept into the control center. He wore white robes which accented the pallor of his skin, and his hair was unadorned.

Barnabas’ eyebrows went up at that. He had only seen mercenaries and pirates go without the traditional Torcellan hair adornments. Someone like Koel, who had all the status and money anyone could want and who certainly took care with his appearance, should have very ornate decorations in his hair.

Then Barnabas remembered. Koel was likely in mourning.

It was an elaborate act. Of that, Barnabas had no doubt. Koel curated his public appearance very carefully. He would not show anyone his emotions unless he believed they were useful.

Barnabas nodded sardonically. “Koel.”

A figure at Koel’s side stirred. It was an Ixtali.

“You will address him as Mr. Yennai,” the figure said. “Or ‘sir.’”

Barnabas gave a slight smile. “I think I have been extraordinarily polite, considering.”

Koel laughed. He strolled closer to the window to look Barnabas in the eyes.

“I wanted to see you fight,” he said. “You destroyed the headquarters, but I did not get to see what happened there. Still, I knew what you were up against. Ilia had told me how she was fortifying the place. Now I see how you got through.”

Shinigami, are you close?

You mean, can I get Gar in there as a backup if you really piss him off?

Yes.

I’m dealing with a few contingents of fighters here…

Fine, fine.

Barnabas looked Koel in the eyes. “Uleq died well.”

Koel’s fingers spasmed, and he locked them behind his back. It was the first time Barnabas had seen him lose his composure.

“He was going to do exactly what I did,” Barnabas continued. “Rob you of your legacy. Kill himself, kill Ilia, and destroy the base. He threw a bomb into the reactor. He was going to kill me, too, of course. But if he was going to die, he was determined to die on his own terms and make his enemies hurt.” He studied Koel. “I expect you’d approve of that.”

Koel gave a thin smile. “I do. Uleq was not my heir—Ilia was always better—but he was a child of my blood. I raised him well.” He gave a curious look. “I don’t suppose it’s worth asking how you survived that.”

You never taught your son to gain the loyalty of his followers, that’s how. But instinct told Barnabas not to explain. “No, it’s not.”

Koel nodded once. “You should die painfully,” he told Barnabas. He nodded to one of the Torcellan officers standing to the side, and she entered a code on the keypad beside her. Alarms wailed in the landing bay. “You should die by inches,” Koel continued, looking at Barnabas now. “But you’re too dangerous, you see. I know of no way to make sure you won’t escape.”

He nodded once more to the officer.

“Barnabas—” Jeltor began, his voice panicked.

Then the landing bay doors opened, and both were sucked into the black.

Behind the pane of glass, Koel looked at Lotar. “You wanted to know my plan, Mr. Venn. You were worried. Perhaps you were right to worry, but as you can see, I was not blinded by my need for vengeance.”

Chapter Thirteen

Alien species had a variety of different capabilities, but one thing was true of all of them: their unenhanced eyesight could not make out detail over the distances at which a space battle took place.

Shinigami wasn’t too worried about the big window on the bridge of the Avaris, therefore. She had no doubt that some admiral stood there looking impressive and kept an eye on the battle, but they could probably only make out the larger ships.

Which left Shinigami free to get close to the civilian ship.

She left the buoy in place and dropped to circle around the back of the Jotun fleet, then up. She intended to come down almost vertically through the Yennai fleet, head under the hollow ship again, and disable the struts that held the civilian ship in place.

All this gave her plenty of time to find an encrypted channel to the civilian ship. She had no doubt that its communications were closely monitored, but she hoped to be able to relay some instructions to it.

The plan had been built hastily, and two Jotun destroyers had lagged behind the rest of the fleet. When the Yennai fleet came out of FTL, they had unwittingly placed themselves between those destroyers and the rest of the Jotun fleet.

That arrangement would be used to wreak havoc if time permitted, but the destroyers’ first mission was to escort the civilian ship to safety once it was freed.

Then, as the whole battle kicked off, Shinigami would proceed to wreak havoc from within the Yennai fleet. Without an organic pilot, she was nimble enough to avoid the Jotuns’ missiles and any Yennai countermeasures.

Her arc behind the Jotun ships and over both fleets was slow. She continued to work through the signals she found. There was a great deal of static emanating from the hollow ship, perhaps intended to disable any ship that came close.

In the pilot’s chair, her avatar smiled. Maybe some pilots couldn’t fly without their scanners and their guidance systems, but she wasn’t “some pilots.” She was the ship.

At last, she picked up what sounded like a Jotun ship and she double-checked, delving into the system to make sure it wasn’t a decoy.

When she was sure, she sent a brief message to the Jotun pilot. It would sound like a standard check-in transmission from the Jotun fleet if they were being tapped, but embedded in the message was a code that meant she was a non-Jotun entity with security clearance and another code that instructed the captain not to respond if the channel wasn’t secure.

She waited as she slipped through the Yennai fleet. It was amusing how they didn’t even see her. Their ship-to-ship chatter was entirely about the Jotun fleet, with the captains receiving orders about which ships to target first.

And then, “This is Captain Haejra. To whom am I speaking?”

“This is the human ship Shinigami,” Shinigami replied. “I will be attacking the struts that hold your ship in place. Are there any other measures keeping you captive? An electronics override?”

“Yes, but we figured out how to get around that a few hours ago.” He sounded smug. “We can disable it whenever we need to.”

“I’ll give you the signal, then. As soon as you’re free, drop below the fleet and head away from the Jotun ships. There is an escort there to take you to safety.”

“Thank you, Shinigami.” The voice was heartfelt. “We appreciate your help. You are putting yourself in danger to help Jotun civilians. We won’t forget this. We’ll make sure our senate knows what you did today.”

“The pleasure is ours.” Shinigami tried to keep the amusement out of her voice. The Jotun senate wasn’t going to be happy about any of this, especially not Jotun civilians proclaiming how wonderful the humans were.

That just made this whole thing sweeter.

“All right, I’m coming up under the ship now,” she reported. “Hang tight, and we’ll have you out of there soon.”

As she emerged into the hollow space inside the Yennai ship, three separate alarm systems went off. Internal turrets pointed at her position, the electronic interference in the air ramped up, and docking bays began to slide open to release fighters.

Shinigami gave a delighted laugh. Good, it was a challenge.

She had been made to evade all methods of tracking, and usually, her systems did that with ease. The Yennai Corporation, however, had developed stealth and scanning technology that operated entirely differently from any system she had ever seen.

They seemed to have the same problems with her technology, at least, which amused her. It threw an unexpected variable into her strategic calculations—now she must have multiple strategies she could switch between at a moment’s notice.

It made things interesting, and she liked that. She hated boring fights.

Seven struts held the Jotun ship in place, each emitting pulses that would override a function of the ship. It was an elegant system, and one she would have to remember not to get on the wrong side of.

She directed a missile at one of the turrets and a second missile at the aft-most strut. Hopefully, that would allow the ship to warm up its engines.

A contingent of fighters emerged nearby, and Shinigami pulled the ship into a tight loop. The end of the ship flipped around and just barely stopped before crashing into the interior wall of the hollow ship as she shot downwards at the fighters. She sent another missile at the struts, but it was intercepted by one of the fighters.

Damn it.

Shinigami scattered fire at them and began to maneuver, leading them around the interior of the ship. She needed them to zero in on her and treat her as the only target. If she could...

She saw another set of bay doors open and picked up speed. She shot past the opening just as the second set of fighters emerged, and saw the satisfying flicker on her screens as the dregs of the first group crashed into them.

That left only a few ships, and they were still reeling from the collision. Shinigami directed three shots at the struts and fist-pumped as all three hit home. Only three struts were left, and one of those was already damaged.

“Captain, how are you doing?”

“Our engines are online,” the captain reported, “and we’ve made contact with our escort. We’re ready to move at your signal.”

“It won’t be long now,” Shinigami reported. “Just don’t move as soon as the struts are gone. There may be more fighters.”

“Noted.” The captain signed off without any wailing or gnashing of teeth, for which Shinigami was grateful. He might be a civilian pilot, but he was impressively composed.

Three more groups of fighters appeared on her scanners, and Shinigami cursed fluently in Latin. When it came to expressing discontent, few demographics were more eloquent than former monks. Apparently, they also had filthy imaginations.

Shinigami directed her next shots at the three remaining struts, orbiting them in a tight circle. She had to wrap this up fast. The more enemies she had, the more chances for the civilian ship to get caught in the crossfire.

Two of the struts gave way, and there was only one more remaining, already damaged. Shinigami sent a burst of fire at it, then swung to face the tiny window that her scans reported led to the bridge. As the fighters swarmed to get between her and it, she sent a message to the Jotun captain.

“Go, go, go!”

The captain wasted no time responding. His engines flared, and he was gone in an impressive burst of speed. Shinigami caught some chatter on the Yennai channels, but her focus remained on the ships before her.

Her turrets swung in a broad semicircle and fighters spun out of formation, hitting one another. A few tried to follow the civilian ship, and she shot those down coldly. From the looks of that ship, it clearly was not armed—they knew very well that they were shooting at people who couldn’t fight back.

They deserved to die.

Shinigami, are you close?

Shinigami looked through Barnabas’ eyes and saw the tableau—Koel standing behind the pane of glass, and the bodies of the soldiers around Barnabas. You mean, can I get Gar in there as a backup if you really piss him off?

Yes, Barnabas admitted.

I’m dealing with a few contingents of fighters here…

Fine, fine.

She was dimly aware of Koel and Barnabas’ conversation as she kept firing. Ships darted in close, spraying her with fire, but her hull held against their smaller rounds, and they didn’t dare use anything larger while they fought inside the belly of their own ship.

“You should die by inches,” Koel was saying to Barnabas. “But you’re too dangerous, you see. I know of no way to make sure you won’t escape.”

She should disengage now. If Barnabas’ theory about Koel held true, Barnabas was going to need her in just a moment.

She sent a round of missiles that required extensive attention from the fighter pilots and banked away. This ship was a clever design, really; she had to give them that. Made to hold another ship captive and hack it. In fact, it occurred to her that it was the sort of ship someone would build if they wanted to catch more impressive ships than a civilian transport.

Ships like her.

She turned to dive, but it was too late. A new set of struts leaped from the walls to grip her body and a paralyzing dose of energy flooded through her, blanking her circuits as the struts attached.

On the Avaris, the landing bay doors opened, and she felt the sudden blast of cold air against Barnabas’ skin.

Barnabas!

But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t get to him.

Beside her captive self a docking tunnel extended, carrying Yennai soldiers toward the ship.

Chapter Fourteen

As the bay vented and he was sucked into the darkness, Barnabas had one thought: get to Jeltor. He grabbed for the powersuit and missed, tumbling head over heels and praying that he would not hit the walls or the door on his way out.

Shinigami, we need you here now.

Silence was his only answer.

Shinigami?

There was a burst of static, then nothing. Barnabas’ eyes snapped open.

Jeltor! But without Shinigami to translate the Etheric message into a communications channel, Jeltor could not hear him.

Barnabas was not worried about Jeltor. Of all of them, Jeltor was probably the best off. Jotun powersuits were made to function in space. Jeltor could probably maneuver, and would likely be able to make his way back to the fleet—possibly with Barnabas in tow.

But Shinigami… Shinigami would not have left them here with no word unless something was very wrong. Barnabas’ eyes fixed on the giant shape of the Avaris blotting out the sky above, and he felt the slow creep of panic as the oxygen ran out in his blood.

He had reserves.

But those reserves had only been enough to last until the Shinigami arrived.

* * *

The lights flickered and went out, and Gar turned from the window, brow furrowing. The battle between the Shinigami and the fighters had been interesting enough to watch from here, but nothing penetrated the icy stillness in his chest.

He did not want Tafa’s words to be true, but they were.

Gar fought to punish the people who had laughed at him and believed he was useless. He fought out of hatred for what he had been.

His shame at that was so crushing that he found it difficult to move.

Now, however, there was no time to think about it. He moved out of instinct, nothing more. The ship had stopped, and the systems were going off-line.

He had only one thought now: he had to get to Tafa with a space suit. She was new, so she didn’t know where they were stored. He pounded through the corridors with his breath coming short in panic and skidded to a halt in front of one of the cases. The red emergency lights were on now, bathing the hallways in an eerie glow.

The palm lock was disabled—electronics again—and he gave one heartfelt curse before slamming a fist into the glass. It shattered around his hand, and he fumbled for the space suits.

“Tafa? Tafa, where are you?”

“Gar?” Her voice was distant. Hesitant footsteps came closer, and he heard her start to cry. “I can’t see anything in these lights. Gar—”

He followed the sound of her voice, trying to hop his way into a space suit at the same time, and took her by the shoulders. “I’m here. You’re safe. You have to put this on. Let me help you.”

It was just as well that she already couldn’t see because the helmet had definitely been made for someone with their eyes in the front. The suit didn’t fit very well, but Gar managed to get her into it, folding one thumb in on each hand. He switched on the old-style radio receivers on the suits.

“Can you hear me?”

“Y-yes.” Her voice wavered, but she was trying to keep it together.

A thud and a clank reverberated through the ship. The lights came on briefly, then died again.

“We have to find a place for you to hide,” Gar urged.

The ship was clearly captive, and if they hadn’t vented it…that could only mean they were being boarded.

* * *

Jeltor cursed as his powersuit spun into the darkness. The suit wouldn’t stabilize on its own until it detected it was no longer being buffeted by escaping air, and in the meantime, he was in the unenviable position of being a tiny disoriented speck in the middle of a fleet.

You didn’t realize just how big ships were, or how great the distances were between them until you were in the middle of it all.

After what felt like an interminable amount of time but had surely only been a few seconds, the suit righted itself with tiny jets of propulsion and Jeltor turned to look at the Jotun fleet.

They weren’t attacking yet. Perhaps they did not know what Koel had done. They would be waiting for Shinigami or Barnabas to give them a signal.

He sent a signal to the fleet, encrypted and with a series of codes he hoped would convince them to act, not run: Personal mission failed. Attack.

Shinigami. Barnabas. Jeltor scanned around and found one faint life sign.

“Shinigami?”

He heard a burst of static, then nothing, and he didn’t waste another second. He directed himself toward Barnabas and grabbed the coat.

There was no good choice now. If he made for the Jotun fleet they’d be caught in the crossfire, and Barnabas would almost surely be dead by the time they arrived, anyway. Their only other real choice was to try to find the Shinigami…which was clearly incapacitated in some way.

And probably also surrounded by things that would shoot at them.

Barnabas’ hands clenched on Jeltor’s suit, and his lips moved. “Shinigami.”

Jeltor nodded, hoping Barnabas could see. His eyes were unfocused. Barnabas might not even be sure it was Jeltor who had him.

Jeltor had to get him to a pressurized place, and soon. He pushed his suit’s propulsion to the limit and zoomed through the Yennai fleet. The Shinigami was supposed to attack the hollow ship, he knew that much of the plan, but had she ever gotten there? Was she still there?

He circled the outside of the hollow ship and hoped that no one looked particularly closely through any windows.

At the bottom of the ship’s hollow center, he made a quick scan. A set of fighters flew by at high speed. They probably felt no need to re-dock if the battle was about to be joined. No other ships seemed to be moving inside.

Jeltor maneuvered closer and grimaced. The Shinigami was held captive just as the civilian ship had been. It was gone, and the shattered bits of metal suggested that it had been freed by force—but the hollow ship had been made with backup measures.

An airlock tunnel was attached to the Shinigami’s main docking entrance. Jeltor muttered a brief prayer and circled the other side of the ship to a smaller docking tunnel he had noticed when he’d scanned the ship during his stay.

He held Barnabas in place as he worked on the screws.

“Shinigami, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m opening your bottom port airlock. I have Barnabas with me.”

“Please don’t kill me if you get your systems back online.”

* * *

An overwhelming amount of energy ran through Shinigami’s circuits, and she struggled against the restraints with everything she had. There was clearly some governor on the engines, the steering vents and tabs were also disabled, and every system she possessed was under attack.

And Barnabas was alone, without her to pick him up in a tiny, all-too-fragile body.

For the first time in her life, Shinigami felt panic.

It was only for a split-second, then rage followed it. Cold determination came next, and she released a pulse through all her systems to disrupt their signal. It was an old trick, nothing fancy, but it worked well enough for her to take a couple of her defense systems entirely offline.

Better offline than corrupted.

A flicker of clarity showed her Tafa and Gar running through the hallways in borrowed space suits. They were headed for some of the rooms at the aft of the ship, hidden behind doors that didn’t look like doors. It wouldn’t keep them safe forever, but it was a good hiding place. They would be all right even if the ship were vented.

The airlock tunnel pressurized and there were the clanks of many pairs of feet. Yennai Corporation soldiers marched through to pry her doors open and flood into the halls.

She vowed she would kill every single one of them.

Every. Single. One of them.

Shinigami—

“Shinigami?”

Jeltor. Barnabas. Both of them were still alive.

She reached out to tell them she was still fighting and that they had to run—and another wave of Yennai signals coursed through her and everything disappeared into white noise.

* * *

Koel’s return to the bridge of the Avaris was greeted with smiles and cheers. He gave no acknowledgment, sweeping along the walkway to the main window.

Walking a half-step behind him, Lotar thought he saw Koel’s jaw clench slightly. He had killed Barnabas, yes, but how victorious could he truly feel? Barnabas had destroyed Koel’s family, and no revenge could undo that.

As if he felt Lotar’s gaze, Koel turned to look at him, and Lotar felt a sick tangle of despair and dread in the pit of his stomach. For one moment, he saw past the mask Koel always wore.

There was nothing—only a void. A gaping maw that wanted more and more. It was grief and darkness and hatred that would gobble up anything it could and corrupt the rest—

Koel broke eye contact, and Lotar drew in a shuddering breath.

“Has the Jotun fleet made any move?” Koel asked.

“No, sir.” The admiral had already moved aside to let Koel take his place. “They seem to be waiting for a signal.”

“The Shinigami was supposed to give it, I would bet.” Koel smiled now. “How is the capture going?”

“The crew is boarding now.” The admiral brought up a series of small images—videos taken from the helmets of soldiers inside the ship. “Our computer engineers say the systems are difficult to hack, as expected, but they are making progress.”

Lotar noticed that this was a good way of saying nothing. There was no way to know if any of his words meant that things were going well, or poorly.

“Sir.” One of the officers swung around from his desk. “Jotun fighters are launching, and it looks as though the carriers are arming weapons—larger missiles.”

“Respond in kind.” The admiral looked at Koel. “Mr. Yennai, any further orders?”

Koel was silent for a long moment. He was frowning at the Jotun fleet, or so Lotar thought. Then he realized that Koel’s gaze was directed at the surface of the planet beyond—the surface that was a mess of lava and roiling atmosphere, and while those two things made it difficult to see any particular detail…

Lotar was willing to bet that there was no colony there.

Lies. All of it had been lies.

Koel found a smile somewhere.

“There were supposed to be thousands of civilians there,” he remarked. “I think that’s several thousand lives they owe me.”

The admiral said nothing, but Lotar saw him swallow. No one was looking up now. No one wanted to catch Koel’s attention.

And Lotar already knew that none of them were brave enough to stop whatever was coming next.

* * *

In the second-to-last storage room, Gar’s fingers curled around the grip of his gun. He couldn’t hear the footsteps yet, but it wouldn’t be long—and they would be found. He had no doubt of that.

There was a tap on his shoulder. He jerked around and saw that Tafa had removed her helmet.

“You need to put that back on,” he told her.

“I can’t see with it on.” She hesitated, then squared her shoulders and held out her hand. “And I need to see if I’m going to shoot. Give me your rifle.”

“You can shoot a rifle?” Gar looked at her eyes, warily.

“I’ve been taught,” she replied enigmatically. “And if they’re going to hijack the ship and kill us, I don’t think we have anything to lose. Do you?”

Gar shook his head and handed the weapon over.

“For Barnabas,” he whispered.

“For Barnabas,” Tafa echoed.

When the first footsteps sounded nearby, they readied their weapons and waited.

Chapter Fifteen

Tulass Boceon squinted and moved his hand very, very slightly to press against the cover of the AI core. It opened, and he nodded to another engineer as the two of them lifted it off carefully.

He held his breath. They had been told to expect anything and everything when it came to booby traps.

A gigantic shock ran through the panel and jolted the other engineer, who cursed and dropped his end of the panel. The clank, artificially loud in the silent red-lit ship, made the soldiers jump, and one even shot a burst into the empty hallway before laughing nervously.

“Boarding group, report. We heard shots fired.”

The soldiers looked at one another shamefacedly, and finally the officer in charge cleared his throat. “False alarm. No danger.”

There was only silence from the other end of the line, and Tulass shook his head as he went back to his work. Idiots. He hated working with these soldiers. Trigger happy, the lot of them.

He was glad they were here, though. Who knew if there were crew on board? The scans had shown nothing, but still… He was glad that he could see their soldiers as they swept the ship, shouting to one another.

A nice, thorough sweep. They had already found several compartments that appeared not to have doors. Nothing would get past them.

The other engineer had recovered enough to affix a device to the edge of the AI core. This was one of the tricks they had learned over time. Most cores had devices that would self-destruct, wipe, or otherwise damage the core or the people removing it if it were removed.

If someone had the time simply to leave it in place, many of those functions wouldn’t activate.

The AI was one of the best Tulass had ever seen. It resisted everything they threw at it so far—at least, for the most part. It was only a matter of time, though. It couldn’t withstand them forever, not with the various mechanisms chipping away at its defenses. The more they learned about it, the more chances they had to thwart its programs.

Tulass looked up, frowning. Something had caught his attention, but he wasn’t sure what.

Then he heard one of the distant calls, slightly more cautious than usual, and he realized what it was: the call hadn’t been answered the first time.

The shout came again, and for the third time it wasn’t answered. The soldiers around Tulass and Evgen gripped their weapons a little tighter and exchanged glances. Someone had hidden away after all.

Now two other groups checked in with one another. Tulass heard the calm in their voices and knew they had a protocol for this. They weren’t worried.

He went back to his work with a bit more speed this time. Best to get as much done as possible in case they needed to withdraw for a while. If he could get enough devices onto the core, he could control the process remotely. He and Evgen worked in near-silence, passing tools back and forth, murmuring voltage readings and any code techniques necessary.

He was so close to cracking this AI. He could almost taste it. He started to smile.

It had become very quiet.

“Hand me that.” He pointed to one of the electrified clamps in Evgen’s bag. Evgen handed it over, and Tulass began to charge it. So, so close.

It was exceptionally quiet. In fact, Tulass couldn’t hear any of the groups. Then the screaming started.

“Out,” the officer in charge ordered. He grabbed Tulass and shoved him down the hall. The clamp went flying, clattering away with the controller, and Tulass dove after them, only to have the officer wrench him back.

“I need those!” Tulass pleaded. They were so close, but if the AI had time to regroup—

“You need to get out!” The officer pulled Evgen past him. “Run. We don’t need you in the way if this goes wrong. You’ll just turn into hostages. You want that?”

Tulass knew exactly what that meant. He’d be sacrificed out of hand. Well, that was a nice thank you for his years of service in the Yennai Corporation, and not something he’d soon forget.

He needed that control device, though. He might survive a hostage situation, but he wouldn’t survive if he failed Koel Yennai. As the soldier turned back, Tulass ducked into the fray again to grab his controller. A bullet zoomed overhead; he wasn’t sure from which side. He yelped and scrambled away, running after Evgen as fast as he could.

They rounded a corner at a full sprint and hurtled toward the airlock tube. They were halfway there when Evgen looked down a side corridor and screamed at the top of his lungs. He skidded into a turn so fast he hit the wall and took off, Tulass followed him without a thought. A wide, curving corridor led to what must be the bridge, and Tulass barely made it under the door as Evgen punched the controls to close it.

“You could have killed me!” Tulass accused.

“I saw it,” Evgen stammered. He backed all the way to the far side of the room. “You’d have done the same if you saw it. Its eyes were glowing bright red, Tulass.”

“You’re insane,” Tulass muttered. He settled down on the floor with the controller. “Go sit over there if you’re going to wet your pants. I don’t want to smell it.”

All he cared about was obtaining the data. He could just tell how close he was.

He’d crack this AI like an egg. Koel had been very clear—the data and programs in the AI were useful, but the AI itself was far too dangerous to leave intact. Tulass was to extract everything he could from it and then destroy it.

He slid a slim device into the controller and primed the sequence. One button push was all it would take.

They all fell in the end.

* * *

Barnabas had awoken with a raging headache and raw eyes. His throat was dry, and his clothes seemed to fit oddly. He rolled onto his back and frowned.

Where the hell was he?

A clank caught his attention. He saw Jeltor pull one mechanical hand away from an airlock door. Several lock-pick-like devices retracted into the hand, and Jeltor looked at Barnabas.

“You’re awake. Are you all right? I don’t have any medical supplies, but if you need any particular procedures…”

“I’m fine.” Barnabas sat up with a groan. “Mostly fine,” he amended. “Where are we?”

“One of the smaller airlocks on the Shinigami—which is still under attack and captive, so get your act together.”

Everything came back in a rush, and Barnabas launched himself to his feet so fast he nearly toppled. He stumbled a bit and made for the door. “Let me out.”

“We don’t know what’s out there,” Jeltor argued.

“And without Shinigami, we aren’t going to. We’ll have to take our chances.” Barnabas checked his weapons and nodded to Jeltor. “You don’t have to stay. You’ve sacrificed enough for us. If you want to go back to your fleet—”

“You’re under attack,” Jeltor replied. “And you’re my ally. You saved my life. I’m helping.”

“Thank you.” Barnabas smiled. He eased the door open and found an empty hallway. “We’re good,” he murmured to Jeltor. “You go left. That’s aft. I’ll go right. They’re almost certainly at the AI core, but I can turn off some of their access from the bridge. That’s the first priority. You see if you can find Tafa and Gar, and keep them safe.”

“I will,” Jeltor promised.

Barnabas moved silently in the familiar corridors. He had never been in that airlock, but he had otherwise made it a point to become familiar with the ship. He had an idea of where Tafa and Gar might be hiding and hoped they would have the sense to stay put.

He smelled the first patrol before they came into view. Alien bodies, the synthetic fibers of various armor plating, and carbon on weapons.

He sank into a crouch to wait.

They rounded the corner in a group. Barnabas, concealed in the shadows, let the first one pass and judged that there were four more behind him.

The first one, eyes still fixed on the corridor ahead, had swung his gaze without ever seeing Barnabas. He called a faint all-clear, and the rest of the group followed.

Barnabas let them pass before he stood and twisted the neck of the last soldier. He lowered the body as gently as he could, drew his knife, and cut the throat of the next one.

No guns. He couldn’t afford the noise.

There was a call from another group, and the leader of this group answered. Barnabas smirked. The officer hadn’t even glanced back to verify everything was well.

The third soldier gasped as he fell, and the final two turned sharply at the noise.

He could not let them call for help. Barnabas launched toward them, teeth lengthening. His knife took the one on the right, and he grabbed the one on the left and dragged him close, teeth clamping over his throat. There was a faint gurgle, then silence.

From the aft of the ship screams started, and shouts sounded nearby. Either Gar and Tafa had engaged, or Jeltor had. Hopefully, those shouts weren’t them. Barnabas had to focus on Shinigami. Of all of them, she was working alone, and she had the most stacked against her.

There was a shout behind him, and Barnabas’ turned. Ten soldiers stood there, guns drawn.

He charged them, and as he ran, he swung his head to check the side corridors. He couldn’t afford to be taken by surprise—not without Shinigami online to help him. He saw only one figure, unarmed, who screamed and took off down the main corridor that led to the bridge.

You really shouldn’t go there. Barnabas’ lips curved. It won’t be good for your health.

First he would take out these clowns, then he would go to the bridge. Whoever that was, they had better hope they were gone by then.

* * *

“Sir, our engineering team reports that they are locked on the bridge,” the admiral reported. “Apparently, there is a still a force on the Shinigami. Soldiers are engaging.”

“And the AI?” Koel demanded.

“They say they’re close to done, sir. They’ll begin the destruct sequence in a few moments.”

* * *

Barnabas was covered in blood by the time he finished with the group of ten. He preferred finesse and cleanliness in his battles. Sniping enemies from afar was the best way to do things.

He never seemed to get to do that, though. He had torn one of the soldiers in half and used the body to bludgeon the rest before going after them with teeth, knives, and his Jean Dukes.

They were going to need to deep-clean the ship when this was over.

He couldn’t think about that now. He needed to get to the bridge. He started running before the last body even hit the ground, and he upped his speed to smash his way through the bridge doors. He hoped whoever was in there hadn’t figured out how to drop the blast doors.

Thankfully, they hadn’t. Barnabas crashed through with a shriek of metal and plastic, only to see a Torcellan and a Yofu look up in horror from their work on a control panel.

“The destruct sequence!” the Yofu screamed, and the Torcellan dove for a device lying on the floor.

Pure fury shot through him. “Oh, hell no!”

He saw the answer in front of him as he ran. He grabbed the stone chess board he’d had commissioned and swung it as hard as he could.

The Torcellan’s head exploded in a mist of red, and the Yofu screamed. Barnabas smashed the chess board down on the control device and ground it to dust, pulled out his Jean Dukes, and shot the Yofu in the head.

He fell, a device of his own dropping from nerveless fingers.

There was a pause as Barnabas sank to his knees, gasping for air. He was too late. They’d gotten to Shinigami and—

The lights flickered on.

“So that chess board was good for something,” Shinigami’s voice said.

Barnabas started laughing. He leaned his head on the floor for a moment and struggled to control his voice.

“You’re alive.”

There was a pause. Shinigami’s avatar tried to smile, but she looked worried.

“They tried to get into my data banks, although that never would have happened. ADAM made it so they never could. They could have gotten me out of the ship, but as to seeing into my mind—”

“You’re alive,” Barnabas repeated. He stood up and shook his head. “I thought I was too late.”

“Not quite.” She did smile at that. “And if you want some more good news, Tafa and Gar just took out the last set of soldiers. Speaking of which, the battle is starting, so…hold on.”

“Hold on for what?” Barnabas asked. “Just patch them through to—”

The ship lurched, and he was thrown from his feet as the Shinigami tore itself loose from the struts and dove.

“Sorry.” Shinigami’s avatar looked down at him. “Should have been more specific.”

“Ow.”

“Yes, yes. Now get up. We have a battle to fight.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Ma’am, high command wants—”

“I don’t give a damn what they want!” On the bridge of the JCS Drethjar, Commander Jeqwar waited as two other Jotun paused in the process of disassembling her powersuit. “Keep going,” she snapped at them. “Plug me into this damned ship and let’s go.”

“Ma’am.” The communications officer clanked over from their desk. “Commander Howauc is still unaccounted for. High command is worried that if we begin firing we’ll hit him.”

“Have they lost their damned minds?” Jeqwar bobbed in the liquid inside her suit, waiting as the two aides transferred the suit’s internal tank into the command chair. She gave a small sigh as the ship’s information transferred to her.

It was a rare Jotun who could control a whole ship. The officer corps of the Jotun Navy was chosen from this elite group, and there were plenty of stories of those who had burned out during training—gone mad and been shuffled off to live quiet lives in small colonies.

But for those who could manage the flow of data, there was nothing like being in command of a ship. Jeqwar felt her body flex as the ship moved slightly, turrets swung into position, missile tubes loaded, and interference signals were at the ready.

She looked at the communications officer. She was calmer now that she was in control of the ship, but she was also unequivocal about the truth of the matter.

“We have the element of surprise. This is our one chance to take the Yennai Corporation fleet unawares. Commander Howauc knew that and willingly went into danger on the Avaris. Should he die in this engagement I will regret it, but all of us knew that was a possibility. To die in defense of your people is a good death. Tell that to the high command.”

“Y-yes, ma’am.” The communications officer returned to his desk and transmitted the message.

A few moments later, the check-ins began. Officers were strapped into their ships and systems came online in a flicker Commander Jeqwar saw lighting up an internal map.

“All destroyers armed,” their admiral relayed. “First ranks, advance.” Unlike the others, he commanded the details of the fight while a second commander controlled the carrier they were on. There were three ships in the battle with a backup admiral on board, and all the officers had trained extensively on what to do if all three were incapacitated.

Even though the Jotuns had never been in a sustained, long-term engagement, they had prepared for this. They were ready.

Now the first ranks of destroyers surged in unison, making for the forward ranks of the Yennai fleet. Yennai destroyers positioned to meet them, spreading into a two-row formation to divide the Jotuns’ attention. The Yennai ships knew that the Jotuns were after the Avaris, and they weren’t about to allow them through unchallenged.

“Second ranks, uncloak and advance,” the admiral ordered.

Jeqwar waited. She was part of the third wave. She watched as the second set of destroyers split and mirrored the Yennai formation. They fired, forcing the Yennai to choose between engaging which allowed the first set of destroyers through or dividing their attention between the two which increased the odds that they would be crippled by two lines of enemy fire.

“Third ranks advance,” the admiral ordered.

The Drethjar slid forward silently, still cloaked. The fleet that the Yennai ships had sensed was not even close to the whole fleet they had present. Only enough ships had arrived uncloaked so that the Yennai officers would not be suspicious—but countless ships remained cloaked and were ready to advance to point-blank range before they fired.

“Carriers, arm missiles and release fighters.”

The fighters shot out into the black and banked around to accelerate in formation, well-spaced around the destroyers the Yennai ships could detect with their scanners. In the launch tubes of the Drethjar and the other cloaked destroyers, the second set of fighters readied themselves.

“First rank of carriers advance.”

This was the wave of two cloaked carriers. They followed the cloaked destroyers, visible in a different color on the internal map Jeqwar referenced. She hurtled through the darkness with the solar wind licking her hull, and she felt the loss of each fighter as it winked out on the scanners. They were engaging now, and many were lost.

That was the role of their fighters, but it was not easy to see—particularly because every officer in charge of the large ships had started out in a fighter. One had to start with the smallest ships and work their way up. Some never advanced beyond that stage. Others like Jeqwar made it to larger ships before they hit their limits.

The admirals were the best of them. Each one of the five was a living legend, able to command the entire fleet for a short time as reinforcements were called into individual ships, or in a case that demanded absolutely perfect unison, on a formation.

“They have a ship advancing!” The warning came from a scout ship that flew high and cloaked above the plane of battle. “A large destroyer. It’s coming down on heading 225, making directly for the Jotuna.”

The admiral’s ship. A tremor of fear shuddered through Jeqwar. If the Yennai fleet also had cloaking this good, what ships did they have coming that the Jotuns could not see?

And how were they going to stop this destroyer?

“Drethjar and Uqwar, peel off and fire on this destroyer,” the admiral ordered. “All other destroyers stay in formation.”

Jeqwar banked as sharply as she dared and heard the surprised yells from her crew. She hadn’t had the time to warn them, and she still didn’t. They would get the orders through the secondary communication channels.

She primed every missile she had and fired as soon as she was clear of the cloaked destroyers. Missiles streaked into the darkness, some sizzling with EMP bursts, others ready to blow on impact. Still others carried various diseases and gasses ready to incapacitate crews. She had already fired her second set of missiles before the first impacted.

And she watched as every single one of them bounced harmlessly off the hull of the Yennai destroyer. YCS Ilia was painted across the hull in crimson lettering. The paint looked new.

Jeqwar’s world narrowed to a single fact: she could not let that destroyer reach the Jotuna.

“We crush the ship,” she relayed to the Uqwar. “There’s no other way to stop it. My missiles are doing nothing.”

Commander Frewaj, the Uqwar’s officer, had been through training with Commander Jeqwar. She did not even hesitate. “We crush the ship,” she agreed. “Accelerate on heading 205b, flip ninety, and aim for the landing bays.”

“Received. Pleasure serving with you.”

“And you.”

Jeqwar cleared her mind and pushed the ship to its limits, launching all her fighters into the black. They would survive, at least, and for the rest of the crew, this was a good death. She meant what she’d said to the officer earlier. Jeltor had known what he was doing when he came here, and so did she. This fleet would terrorize her people if she did not take them down.

In sacrifice lay freedom. She swung the ship hard and prepared to accelerate—

“I don’t want to interrupt,” said a female human voice, “but before you crash into this behemoth, let me just try something.”

A burst of missiles materialized out of nowhere and the YCS Ilia spun off course, jerking up while the missiles tore at its belly. There was a whoop of victory, and another set of missiles appeared.

“Gotcha, bitch!” As the ship spun out of control above the Jotun fleet, the female voice added, “Pity he brought her back like this just to die again, but maybe he’ll learn his lesson this time.”

Jeqwar, who had accepted her own death, found that she was trembling. For a moment, she could not remember any words at all.

“Er, to whom am I speaking?”

“This is Shinigami,” the human voice said. “Sorry we left you hanging. There was an unexpected bit of nastiness. We’re back now, and we’re ready to fuck some Yennai ships up. Who’s with us?”

The Jotun officer’s roar of approval reverberated over all over the channels until Jeqwar’s whole body seemed to shake with it.

“Ma’am!” The communications officer projected his voice at his suit’s loudest setting. “Ma’am, the Yennai ships are beginning to leave the battle. They’re peeling off and heading out. Visual reports confirm.”

“Sonofabitch,” Shinigami cursed. “They’re fucking running.”

On every ship in the fleet, a broadwave message appeared showing Koel Yennai’s face. He was tight-lipped, but there was satisfaction in his eyes.

“Your betrayal has been noted,” he told them. “Your government allied with us, and now you stab us in the back. The Jotuns will pay, just as the humans will. We came here today to make a point—that your citizens would suffer if you continued this reckless course. Reports suggested that there were four thousand civilians on the colony—a colony we now know to be fictitious.

“Those lives will be collected from both species, at colonies of my choosing. Then we will discuss the terms of your surrender.”

The Avaris winked out of existence.

“It cloaked,” Jeqwar called.

“No, it’s gone.” Shinigami sounded surprisingly subdued. “It’s actually gone. It didn’t make a Gate, it’s just…gone.”

“Regroup,” the admiral ordered. “Begin scattering for rendezvous at Gamma Base, unscramble using the B protocol. We will decide on our next steps there.”

Jeqwar brought up the list of locations and ran Gamma through the specified decryption protocol. It provided her with a personalized route to get to the location—in reality not a base, simply a patch of empty space.

Before she accelerated to FTL, however, she scanned the patch of black where the Avaris had been once more.

Where had it gone? And if it could jump from one place to another, how could they stop it from killing any colony it wanted to?

Chapter Seventeen

The door to the bridge burst open, and Barnabas turned to smile at Tafa, Gar, and Jeltor.

“You’re safe! Thank God.”

Tafa took one look around the room and was promptly sick on the floor.

“Oh.” Barnabas scratched his head. “Right. The bodies. We should do something about that.”

“What did you… How did you…” Gar didn’t seem quite sure what to say. “What did you do to his head?” He pointed at the remains of the Torcellan.

“Brained him with the chess board,” Shinigami reported cheerfully. She flickered into being, sitting cross-legged on one of the desks. She smiled at Jeltor. “Good to have you back, old buddy. Don’t worry about the scorch marks. We’ll have those cleaned off in a jiffy.”

“Scorch marks?” Barnabas asked.

“Oh. Right. He crispified some of the soldiers.”

Tafa moaned and brought up another round of lunch.

“Maybe we should discuss details another time,” Barnabas suggested tactfully. “Tafa doesn’t need to know about all of this.”

“Oh, but she does.” Gar looked immensely proud. “She took out one of the soldiers. Didn’t you, Tafa?”

Tafa muttered something. One hand was still over her mouth.

“Let’s get you to the medical bay and get some hydration into you,” Barnabas suggested. He ushered everyone off the bridge and looked at Shinigami. “This is going to be a bitch to clean. It’ll smell like Torcellan blood for months, you mark my words.”

“Nah, we’ll just get Rachel on it.”

“Who the hell is Rachel?”

“She’s on the Reynolds. I swear, she’s a fucking wizard. Think of her as the Jean Dukes of cleaning supplies. If it stains, she can clean it.”

“Well, then.” Barnabas strolled with her down the hall. Gar and Jeltor spoke encouragingly to Tafa as they led her to the medical bay, and even with the bodies they had to step over in the halls, everything felt right with the universe.

Except for one thing. Barnabas slowed his pace to drop behind the other group.

“Are you all right?” he asked Shinigami. “What did they do to you?”

“They…well…” She considered her words carefully. “Remember, they’ve always been a surprise—the Yennai Corporation, and what they can do with their technology. They couldn’t have gotten into my mind the way they were doing it, but I had no idea if they might be able to some other way.”

Barnabas frowned.

“So I let them think what they were doing…was working. I gave them something, just a bit of data.” She stared straight ahead as she walked, feeling odd as though she couldn’t meet his eyes. She was ashamed, she realized. She felt weak.

Even pretending to weakness, giving something up in case she could be defeated—

It had been a good tactical decision, but it filled her with shame.

“Data? You mean you…” He paused and scratched his head. “Shinigami, what I don’t know about your mind is…well, everything. Do you mean they—”

“My thoughts,” Shinigami ground out. “I gave them some of my thoughts. False thoughts. And because of the way their systems work, I don’t know what they saw. I don’t know if I made it convincing at all. If it had been different, if I hadn’t been stuck there. If—” She shook her head. “I tried to throw them off,” she said finally, “but I don’t know how well I did. I never know when it comes to them.”

She expected Barnabas to crack a joke about the fact that computer minds didn’t have thoughts, just programs.

He didn’t. Instead, he reached for her hand before remembering that it wasn’t real.

“Sorry,” he said with a laugh.

“I think,” Shinigami said quietly, “that it was just about the best thing you could have done to make me feel better—forgetting what I am.”

“I joke, Shinigami, but I don’t mean those things.”

“Not anymore, anyway.” She knew he’d been suspicious of her at the start. Barnabas was unsure about new technologies.

“Not anymore,” he agreed. “I admit I found it disconcerting to be on a ship that could see my every move.”

“You had already been on the Meredith Reynolds.”

“There were a lot more people. There was no reason to believe that any of the various intelligences cared about me in particular. Being alone on a ship with you was… Well, like I said, disconcerting. But I no longer worry, except for how you’re doing now. What they did sounds to me like torture.”

“I hate that. Don’t say that again.” She didn’t want to think of it that way. The word ‘torture’ brought to mind people strapped down on tables, absolutely helpless while they were hurt until their minds broke.

She didn’t hate the idea because it was wrong, but because it was absolutely correct. She had been helpless, and they had started to break her very mind open. She still wasn’t sure what they had seen.

She just knew it made her feel weak. She knew she hated it.

Beside the avatar, Barnabas walked in silence. He understood not wanting to confront one’s own helplessness. His own encounter with that had nearly destroyed him.

Still, he had survived. He had found a measure of calm in his life after Catherine, enough to hold on until he found Bethany Anne and started the slow shift from detachment to purpose. It had taken him centuries, all told.

Though he hoped it wouldn’t take Shinigami that long, he’d hardly fault her if it did.

“I failed you,” Shinigami said. “All of you. He wants to destroy our colonies, and I gave him false data about them—but who knows if he believed it? The fact that they were even able to get onto the ship—”

“They were engineers who were trained and armed to do just that.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Her voice rose enough that the other group turned to look.

“If we could have a moment of privacy,” Barnabas said smoothly. “Gar, the Pod-doc will be able to deal with any symptoms Tafa is experiencing. You can use the interface well enough to get the process started.”

“Of course.” Gar ushered the other two away with only one curious, quick glance over his shoulder.

“Shinigami,” Barnabas began.

She didn’t wait for his speech. “Yes. I know I did everything right. I know it was your plan. I know I threw them off, and I didn’t give them anything real. I know. None of that changes the fact that if they see through what I gave them, they could use it to destroy innocent lives. Because that’s how they would use it and we both know that.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Barnabas corrected.

“Yes, you were. Don’t pretend. You like everything to be on your head. You beat yourself up whenever anything goes wrong. You’ll go off and blame yourself.” She knew she sounded resentful. “We’re allies, aren’t we? We’re equals. Right?”

“Of course we are,” he said, surprised.

“Then understand that maybe you did the best you could and someone else was the weak link. You want to save everyone. You want to feel guilty for everyone else’s fuck-ups.”

“That’s insane.”

“You’re telling me,” Shinigami shot back. “It’s terrifying to you not to operate alone.”

“I’ve been trying to let people in. To open up.”

“And you have been. I don’t mean…” Shinigami rubbed her forehead.

To her surprise, Barnabas burst out laughing.

“Do you mind?” She glared at him. “I’m trying to have a moment with you here.”

“It’s just…watching you learn mannerisms.” He shook his head a little. “I-I really don’t mean to make it seem like I’m mocking you. It’s quite the opposite. You’re so… Well, you’ve taken to it, that’s all. You’re so human. And before you remind me you’re modeled on a human, I’d like to remind you that you’re more than just that. You have a ship for a body.” He shrugged and leaned back against the wall with hands in his pockets. “Hell, you have a flamethrower.”

“Which you’ll never let me use.” Her mouth twitched.

“I did. That once.” He grinned, but she could see the fear behind his eyes. “I thought I’d lost you. D’you understand how terrifying that is?”

“Yes.” She smiled at him. “Because you got sucked out of that airlock and I thought you were gone. I couldn’t get to you. I thought you were going to die, and that’s what I’m upset about. The data, hell. You were dying out there. You humans are so…squishy. You’re not made to be in space like that.”

Barnabas heaved a sigh. “Yeah. Yeah, I can tell you from experience that you’re quite right about that.”

“I didn’t need anecdotal data to know that was true!”

“Well, now you have some anyway.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, let’s say this. We’re up against an enemy who’s a psychopath if ever I met one, and I’ve met psychopaths before. This guy is something special.”

“On a scale of one to David—”

“Two Davids. Easy.”

“Whoa, damn.”

“Right?” Barnabas jerked his head toward the medical bay and started walking again. “We like to talk about giving everything for the right cause, but maybe we’re finding it’s easier to do that for yourself than it is to watch someone you care about do the same.”

“Yes,” Shinigami agreed cautiously.

“So…” Barnabas took a deep breath. “We have to get better at making plans. We can’t just charge in headfirst. That’s how good people die. We have to go back to being the smarter, sneakier opponent. I know I’m a little bit, uh…impulsive.”

Shinigami laughed.

“But we can hold each other accountable,” Barnabas continued. “Right? I won’t do anything stupid that has a good chance of leaving me in space with no protective gear, and you’ll avoid doing anything that gets you captured. From now on, no heroics. No dashing off to save one another—because this time, we ended up splitting our strength and it nearly wound up with both of us being very dead. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to die yet.”

“You said you were just a few days ago.”

“I may have lied,” Barnabas confessed. “I was trying not to worry you.”

“You sonofabitch, you just made me think you had a death wish so I’d have to protect you!”

“You see, this is exactly the sort of miscommunication we need to avoid.” Barnabas gave a brilliant smile. “So—I promise you I won’t go face down a psychopath on his own ship when I absolutely know he’s going to try to kill me.”

Shinigami grinned. “I promise I won’t go flying around inside his ships without a backup to come get me if something goes wrong.”

“Deal.” Barnabas went to shake her hand, then grimaced. “I keep forgetting you’re not real. I mean, corporeal.”

“You know what would help with that?”

“We are not giving you a body. It would be a nightmare. You’d be even worse than Gar. He left his hiding place to fight soldiers, didn’t he?”

“Of course he did. You trained him, and he was trying to protect Tafa and me.” Shinigami gave him a look. “Don’t even pretend you wouldn’t do the same thing.” She hesitated. “He’s been struggling with trying to determine a philosophical code.”

“Oof. Does he know that’s like trying to hit a moving target?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ll try to find a way to mention it.” Barnabas shook his head. “All those years in the monastery, and you know what I learned? Trying to devote yourself to a narrow ideal is a good way to wind up way off-course. Your goals need to change as the universe changes. Everything is in flux. One day you have candles and parchment, the next, you’re living in a sentient ship among the stars.”

“Any regrets?” Shinigami looked at him.

“Not since I came here,” Barnabas said finally. “Catherine, the massacre, all of it—yes. Not intervening in the big wars on Earth—that as well. But coming out here? No. Even the failures, even what just happened. We’re needed out here. Koel is dangerous, but we’re making his life hell. I swear I’ll find a way to take him down.”

There was a pause. The sound of laughter filtered down the hall from the medical bay.

“I suggest nukes,” Shinigami said finally.

“You would.” Barnabas rolled his eyes. “Come on, let’s go check on Tafa.”

“Our newest little soldier!” Shinigami clapped her hands and followed him into the medical bay.

Chapter Eighteen

Zinqued’s new Brakalon recruit was named Dretkalor, and he exceeded all expectations. He arrived at the ship within an hour, his gear entirely packed and three additional guards in tow. Between Chofal and Tik’ta, they’d confirmed all four were, in fact, employed by a subsidiary of the Yennai Corporation and none of them had outstanding warrants or any other unsavory qualities.

Zinqued welcomed them onto the ship with a smile and showed them to their bunks. He was a bit nervous they would be upset at the accommodations, after having lived with all the luxuries of Virtue Station.

Dretkalor laughed. “D’you think we got the fancy food and the nice lodgings? Nah, we saw it, but it wasn’t ours.”

“And they’d threaten you if you even looked at it wrong,” another chimed in. He shook his huge head. “What would I do with a crystal chandelier? Sometimes you just look at things. But they always thought people were trying to steal everything they had.”

Zinqued let them talk. He had found over the years there was a lot more advantage in listening than talking. People liked you better, for one thing. They thought they’d really connected with you—which was absurd when they’d done most of the talking.

It worked, though. Plus, you learned a lot about people.

The guards had plenty of stories from the banks of Virtue Station. The male whose wife had found the bank statements for his mistress’s accounts. The rich man who liked to trade in currencies and always gave confusing instructions so he could cherry-pick the trades he wanted after they had all cleared and void the rest. The rich clients who couldn’t hold their liquor.

The richer you were, the more free drinks the bank provided, apparently—and most of the clientele, despite having more money than many mid-sized planets, would take as many free drinks as they could, getting drunker and thereby less able to make good decisions.

Zinqued had to hand it to the owners of the banks—they were damnably clever.

When the guards finally stopped talking, Zinqued was prepared. He had a good idea of their sense of humor by now. Like many guards, they knew their clients tended to view them as blunt objects, barely sentient in their own right and really only useful for hitting things very hard.

The guards, by contrast, viewed their clients as rich fops unable to hold onto their power without guards who could hit things very hard. It gave them a sense of superiority, but most of them were still unhappy with the situation.

“So, here are the ship rules.” Zinqued heard the engines warming up, but they were still in port. The guards could get off the ship if they wanted to. “I get a quarter of the take, the rest of you split equally. There’ll probably be a few more crew members. In return, I handle food, lodging, fuel—whatever we need to keep this place running. Deal?”

The guards shrugged, but they looked pleased. It wasn’t an unusual deal, except for the fact that a captain usually took far more than 25 percent.

Zinqued normally did as well, but with the amount the Shinigami would bring in, he knew he would paint a target on his back if he took millions, while they only got a small amount.

“Our target is a human ship called the Shinigami,” Zinqued explained.

There was a pause, then the guards burst out laughing.

“Holy shit,” one of them said. “You got balls the size of small moons, Hieto.”

Zinqued hesitated, worried they were going to walk away from this job. “What have you heard?”

“Heard? We saw it. Mr. Jodu tried to have the human arrested when he went chasing after one of the Yennai bastards.” Dretkalor settled back in his bunk, hands behind his head. “Sent the guard captain after him, and you know what happened? He got beaten to death…by a Luvendi.”

He was clearly waiting for Zinqued to say he didn’t believe it, but Zinqued was prepared for this—and he knew just how to play it. He laughed and leaned against the door casually.

“Venfaldri Gar is the Luvendi’s name. They say he ran across Barnabas on some tiny ass-end-of-nowhere planet. Don’t know what they did to him, but he’s really something, isn’t he?”

“You saw him?” Dretkalor looked intrigued.

“Let’s say he’s one of the reasons I’m not just going to storm the ship,” Zinqued said. “The human isn’t any less impressive. He’s more impressive, actually.”

The guards looked at one another, nodding. Zinqued seemed to understand what they were up against, and they approved.

“So what is your plan?” one of them asked.

“The human keeps pissing off the Yennai Corporation,” Zinqued explained. “He’s the reason Virtue Station is in chaos.”

“Boss?” Tik’ta’s voice filtered over the intercom. “They say there’s an undocking fee, and it’s about the cost of our ship.”

“That’s some bullshit,” Dretkalor spat before Zinqued could respond. “But they’re definitely going to stick to it if Jodu put them up to this. He’s worried about losing all his profits. Tell them you’re Yennai-affiliated. Give them this code.” He called out a few letters and numbers.

Zinqued waited, intrigued, and it wasn’t long before Tik’ta’s voice came back: “That worked. Thank you, Dretkalor.”

Zinqued looked at Dretkalor in interest. “You asked about my plan—it’s to stay hidden and tail the Yennai fleet until they find the human…and swoop in after the battle to take the Shinigami. So…anything else you know about Yennai protocols?”

Dretkalor grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

* * *

Chofal pulled her goggles down, soldered a piece of the circuit carefully in place, and looked at the result in disgust. It was as nice as she could make it on her own, which was to say, not nearly nice enough.

There were a lot of tricks you could use to get around most high-tech things in this universe. Ships with state of the art scramblers, whose heading you couldn’t detect by normal means, were easily tracked by sight or a tow cable, for instance.

In this case, however, Chofal was trying to fool the scanners of the Yennai Corporation fleet, and she knew clever tricks weren’t going to be enough.

The Yennai Corporation had technology on a par with or better than anyone else she could name. They’d have good scanners, and she didn’t even have anywhere near enough information to fool them.

When Zinqued came into the engine room, she looked up with a sigh.

“I have no good news for you.”

“That’s all right,” Zinqued said easily. “Because I have more than enough good news for both of us.”

“I doubt that,” Chofal muttered, but she summoned a smile for Zinqued and the Brakalon with him. It wouldn’t do to be rude to their new crewmates—especially when those crewmates could crush her like a bug. “Dretkalor, was it? I’m Chofal.” She stuck her hand out with one thumb curled in, the way Yofu shook hands with other species.

She realized too late she’d gotten grease all over his hand.

“Sorry.”

“Not a problem.” Dretkalor looked oddly happy. “Spent too long in those banks with everything being too clean. They think if the tables have no dust on them, their shit won’t stink. Or something. Clean everything—and as dirty a place as you’ll ever see.” He gave them both a meaningful look.

Despite herself, Chofal was intrigued. For years, she had eked out her existence on small-scale pirate ships. Whenever she went someplace like Virtue Station, she longed to live in a clean and pretty home.

Was it possible she hadn’t missed much?

She realized Zinqued was talking and gave a shamefaced smile. “Sorry, I was thinking. What did you say?”

“Dretkalor knows a lot of Yennai ship passcodes and frequencies,” Zinqued repeated. “He got us out of Virtue Station when they wanted to hold the ship hostage. I told him you might need his help.”

“Do I ever,” Chofal exclaimed. She beckoned Dretkalor over. “Okay, see this? What I’m trying to do is make us not show up on the Yennai scanners, but hell if I know how to manage it. I’ve only ever worked at confusing one ship before. I think if we manage to confuse one, another may see us correctly.”

“You’re probably right.” Dretkalor nodded. “Any Yennai system will network with itself to make sure each piece is receiving the same information. So if you manage to hack one security camera, for instance, another one picks up what should be on the first one—does this make sense?”

“I follow. I think.” Chofal frowned. “So if any ship sees us, every ship sees us, and they’ll sound the alarm.”

“Exactly.” Dretkalor gave a wry smile at her expression. “I’m guessing that’s not what you wanted to hear.”

“Not really.” Chofal blew out a breath as she stared at the device.

“So, they’re going to see us—unless you have some magical code that makes them not notice us.”

“Not exactly,” Dretkalor said. He grinned. “On the other hand, I do have something that will make them think we’re supposed to be there…and will make them read this piece of junk as a Yennai frigate.”

Chofal’s eyes lit up. “I can work with that.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d be able to.” He looked around. “You might need some extra stuff, though. We’ll need a good, strong signal and a certain amount of cloaking capability. Basically, you need the structural read-outs to scan in at the expected weight, and for that to happen—”

“We need a scan-booster and a cloak on the engine,” Chofal said. She chewed her lip. “All right. I can make it work…”

“Good,” Zinqued said decisively.

“But we need some parts we probably can’t afford to buy,” Chofal finished. She gave him a look.

“Well, then, isn’t it good we know how to steal ships? Send me a list, and I’ll get us where we need to go to get it.” Zinqued grinned at Dretkalor. “You up for a little search and seizure?”

“Signed on for it, didn’t I?” Dretkalor looked pleased. He nodded to Zinqued as they left, and Chofal heard his voice filtering back through the hallway. “It’ll be nice to steal something you can pick up and walk away with, you know? Rather than just watching rich people steal bits of computerized data from other rich people all day long.”

Chapter Nineteen

The rendezvous point, as given by Jeltor, was in the middle of an exceedingly empty patch of space buffeted by radiation from a few nearby stellar wrecks. An unstable quasar wobbled nearby, emitting plumes that Tafa and Gar watched from the lower decks.

Barnabas came to get them, jerking his head toward the bridge.

“Are you two coming?”

“To what?” Gar looked around, confused.

“To the meeting with the Jotun,” Barnabas said. “You’re members of this crew. You deserve to be there, weighing in.”

When neither Tafa nor Gar said anything, he let his head drop back with a groan. “Oh, come on, don’t leave me in there alone with Shinigami. She’s terrible in meetings.”

Shinigami appeared, arms crossed. She glared. “I heard that.”

“Am I wrong? You make trouble!”

“I say the things you want to say.” She leaned forward with an evil grin. “And by my calculation, it’s going to take you a minute and a half to get back to the bridge. That’s a minute and a half I now have alone with Jotun high command.”

She disappeared. Barnabas yelped and sprinted toward the bridge. Tafa and Gar heard his voice drift back through the hallways.

“Don’t. Start. A war!”

Shinigami’s voice echoed through all the speakers, accented by the sounds of thunder, artfully added, “I make no promises.”

Gar and Tafa laughed as they followed. Barnabas, panting and flushed, sat in the captain’s chair with a scowl while Shinigami sat at his side, the very picture of decorum. Jeltor stood nearby. He nodded to Tafa and Gar as they entered the bridge.

“Our team is all present now, Admiral.” Barnabas glanced at Shinigami. “One of them may have to step out for a bit, however.”

Try it. Just try it, buddy boy.

Wreak havoc with an entire alien government and you won’t just have me to contend with, you glorified little toaster. Bethany Anne will back me up, and you’ll be managing the sewage system on the Reynolds so fast it’ll make your circuits short out.

You’re bluffing.

Just try it.

Shinigami looked alarmed and decided not to push her luck.

“As you know,” the Jotun admiral began, not being privy to the conversation between Shinigami and Barnabas, “Koel Yennai threatened to attack a Jotun colony, or a series of colonies, to take four thousand civilian lives. He believes he is owed this.”

“Point of order,” Shinigami said.

“Shinigami…” Barnabas began.

I’m going to behave! “Koel doesn’t believe a thing he says,” Shinigami argued. “He may seem balls-out crazy, but all he wants to do is make us hurt. Really, he wants to hurt anyone who interrupts his plans. For decades, he’s dreamt of taking over the universe. Anyone who gets in his way is someone he wants to torture and then kill. But he doesn’t believe he’s owed those lives.”

“Is this relevant, Miss…ah…”

“Shinigami. Just Shinigami. And I think it is. Giving Koel any legitimacy or treating him like a madman is a sure way to underestimate him. We all saw that destroyer come out of nowhere. Koel has built an organization with incredible technology, and he’s absolutely prepared to use that against anyone standing in his way. He doesn’t give a damn if those people are innocent. He’s making the calculated decision that if he can hit enough targets of yours, make it clear you can’t protect your people, you’ll buckle.”

Barnabas nodded. He had to admit that Shinigami had a point.

The Jotuns were seriously underestimating Koel. Even after they’d seen his ships in action and seen that he was willing to destroy both human and Jotun colonies—after all, he had destroyed Coyopa, hadn’t he?—they still behaved as though he were a toddler throwing a temper tantrum: Oh, Koel is just angry there are no blue popsicles left.

In point of fact, he was brutally effective and very dangerous.

“She makes a good point,” said Commander Jeqwar. “Even though Koel didn’t know we would be there, he came in with part of his fleet cloaked. He’s made sure they’re as dangerous and well-trained as we are.”

“The question is,” the admiral said, “where will he attack next?”

“We’ve come up with some possibilities,” Barnabas said. He transmitted the work he and Shinigami had completed over the past few hours. “All of these are relatively undefended colonies.”

“All of them are Jotun,” the admiral observed.

“There aren’t many human colonies nearby, and the location of one, at least, is carefully hidden.”

Beside Barnabas, Shinigami looked down at her hands and tried not to blurt out her fear. She had almost every piece of information there was about High Tortuga, from its atmosphere to the locations of its cities and the way its defensive systems worked.

Yes, they could get word to the fleet, which would join them to repel Koel’s attack. They would probably win, too.

But before they won, Koel would have plenty of time to destroy one or two cities—and get way more than his four thousand lives. Somehow, Shinigami didn’t doubt that he’d take as many as he could get.

Barnabas must know that she had such information, but neither of them had mentioned the possibility.

She screwed up her courage. We have to find out what Koel actually knows—if he realizes that the information he got out of my memory banks was a lie.

Barnabas looked at her, surprised. The Jotun officers were debating the relative odds of strikes at various different points.

Even if he knows it’s a lie, what could he find from it?

High Tortuga. She looked at him. I was working on a project. You had wanted me to hide it. Well, we’ve all been trying. But that means I had all its facts in my memory banks. I gave him my false data, but some of it was… Look, it was lies—it was the fake file I was building—but what if there’s some clue there?

Have you been over it to look for that?

Of course I have! I’ve looked at it over and over and over again, Barnabas. She shot him a look, half-angry and half-scared. But I don’t know with them. I never know what Koel knows. I never know how their systems work.

Shinigami—

You don’t understand! You don’t have the first idea what it’s like to go up against someone and realize you can’t even guess what their capabilities are.

He gave a small smile.

What?

Shinigami, do you realize that’s the exact experience of a human speaking to an AI?

She paused, much struck by that.

I’ve already told them to be ready, Barnabas told her. And you know there were plenty of people who knew of Devon. It would hardly be difficult for Koel to find High Tortuga. If he does, I’d say it’s million-to-one odds that he found it from anything you gave him. And yes, I am trying to make you feel better with terrible math.

Shinigami nodded and tried to smile. She knew he was trying to make her feel better, and she had done the best thing she could to throw Koel off the true trail of High Tortuga—letting his engineers think they had the real data.

But if she had gambled wrong and he did find it…

There was nothing to be done about it now.

An alarm wailed on one of the Jotun ships, and everyone looked at the screens anxiously.

“A carrier is approaching Abassi,” the admiral reported. “It looks as though it will land and deploy infantry. The colony can defend itself for some time, but we should get there immediately. Shinigami, we will rejoin you—”

“Transmit the coordinates.” It was Gar who spoke. “We’re coming with you.”

“What?” The admiral asked in surprise.

“He’s quite correct.” Barnabas smiled. It seemed Gar had faltered for only a little bit before finding his purpose. “No one on this crew is prepared to leave innocent people to die. We will meet you at Abassi without delay.”

Chapter Twenty

Sandar dek Tor’ven had been with the Yennai Corporation since he finished his schooling some forty years ago. At that time, Koel Yennai was young enough that no one took his ambition seriously. After all, there was always a multitude of ambitious young people out to prove a name for themselves in business.

Sandar had taken the only position offered, a security guard, and signed a great deal of paperwork he didn’t read. He then worked his way up from there. He’d become a night shift manager, then had catapulted up to head of security after thwarting an attempted break-in. He had gotten stock options but had paid little attention to them.

Now he was in charge of a landing force for the YCS Hari, and he was richer than he had ever dreamed possible.

He had also seen everything over the years, from jealous mistresses to protesters for everything under many suns, and nothing fazed him. It was the cornerstone of his reputation.

When the Hari landed at Abassi, therefore, the soldiers streamed out past him with sharp salutes, ready for anything.

Sandar followed them, sweating a little in his armor. He wished he didn’t have to wear it, but one had to set a good example for the troops. An undisciplined force was a dead force.

That was his motto.

Advance scouts had passed through the small forest outside the city and here at the edge of the trees reported to Sandar that the Jotuns had not tried to advance. They seemed to be fortifying the town in anticipation of the attack.

“Any idea why we aren’t just bombing them, sir?” asked one of the scouts. He scratched his head.

“Let me offer you a piece of advice,” Sandar said. “When Koel Yennai orders you to do something, you do that thing to the best of your ability, trusting that he has a plan. That strategy has never failed me.”

Questioning Koel Yennai was a strategy he had watched fail for many others.

“Yes, sir,” the scout said hastily. “It’s just… Well, we’d have very little trouble bombing them, but regarding combat, their citizens have those powersuits. We don’t know their capabilities.”

“Then we’ll have to plan for them to be far more resilient than we’d like,” Sandar snapped.

“Yes, sir.”

Sandar sighed. The recruit had asked a very reasonable question. The bombing had worked perfectly well on Coyopa, after all.

“Your instinct to protect your fellow soldiers is admirable,” he told the scout. “However, Mr. Yennai undoubtedly has a reason for structuring the attack this way.”

“What you should really ask yourself,” the scout on Sandar’s other side interjected, “is why you’re going along with any of this. You’re killing civilians. Doesn’t that weigh on your soul even slightly?”

Sandar turned stiffly to glare at the scout. “That is quite enough, soldier. You will return to the Hari at once. Expect disciplinary action at the end of this fight and—” He frowned.

He’d seen humans before, but he certainly didn’t think there were any in the scout force on the Hari. Sandar tried to keep very close tabs whenever a member of a new species showed up. They often required new allowances regarding food and lodging, and sometimes there were issues with established forces picking on the rookies.

“Do I know you?” he asked finally. He tried to be as delicate about the question as he could be. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before.”

“You haven’t. My name is Barnabas.” He smiled. “You really should order your troops to leave. Carrying out these orders will strip you of any honor you had. The evil you do will not be able to be undone. Innocent people will die.”

Sandar drew himself up. “I do not answer to you, scout. I answer only to Koel Yennai.”

“A poor choice.”

“I assure you that I have done quite well for myself.” Sandar allowed a sardonic smile to touch his lips. “You will not rise very far in Yennai, recruit.”

Which meant either a lifelong stint in one of the factories or outright execution. But he wasn’t about to tell the human that while he was still armed.

Even this human’s armor wasn’t regulation. Sandar grimaced and nodded at the carrier.

“Withdraw from this battle and await your transfer. It should please you not to participate, in any case.”

“It’s worth noting, you know,” the human continued thoughtfully, “that at no point did I say I was part of the Yennai Corporation. You assumed.”

“I—” Sandar’s head jerked to the other scout. “He isn’t with you?”

“I thought he was with you,” the scout was saying as Sandar’s head was ripped from his body and bounced gently into the underbrush.

The scout shrieked and ran. He clearly thought he had only a few seconds to live, but sheer animal terror drove him onward.

Barnabas watched him go, checking his Jean Dukes. “You can come out now,” he said to Gar. “They’ll be along shortly.”

You could have brought the head back yourself, you know, Shinigami said. It’s just laziness, really.

But he’s doing such a good job. Barnabas craned his head to watch the scout flailing through the woods. He was lost from sight after a few moments, but the sound of his screams carried through the evening air.

He had to hand it to the Yennai Corporation’s generals. Whatever the scout managed to gasp, which Barnabas was fairly sure was entirely incoherent, the generals responded promptly and with force. A missile hurtled through the trees.

Barnabas swore and tackled Gar sideways, pulling his coat over his head. There was a moment of searing heat, then the missile finally hit the ground a few dozen yards away. It landed just in front of the city walls and exploded in a shower of dirt and stone.

The response from the Jotun town was instantaneous. Several cannons belched smoke and fire, and munitions arced overhead. From amongst the trees, Barnabas heard the soldiers roar as they charged.

“Between a rock and a hard place,” Barnabas said succinctly.

A mech appeared first, crashing through the trees on a series of heavy, spidery legs.

Barnabas ran, taking a bounding leap and pushed off a tree to land on the mech’s top. He drew back his fist and punched down with all his might, significantly denting the metal. Still, it appeared that wouldn’t be the best strategy.

He frowned.

You could try opening it, you know.

I’m sure it’s locked.

Just try it, Shinigami urged.

Barnabas rolled his eyes and hauled on the handle of the top hatch, which opened so easily that he lost his balance and nearly tipped off the side of the mech.

Men. Shinigami scoffed.

A soldier popped up through the now-open porthole with a rifle, scanning around.

You see, falling off the side was useful. Barnabas clawed his way up, grabbed the barrel of the gun, and used it to haul the soldier out and over the side. He kept the gun. Barnabas pulled out the clip and slammed the gun down through the porthole. Screams and thuds answered the blow.

Behold the Queen’s Rangers. So graceful. So dignified.

Listen. I am not going to take these insults from—ow!

Branch?

Bullet. Barnabas flexed his shoulder and hissed. The wound had barely broken the coat’s fabric—some of the best tech to come out of Jean’s labs—but there was going to be one hell of a bruise.

He reached down into the mech as it fired and bared his teeth at the first soldier he hauled up. “Turn this thing off.”

“Don’t do it!” the soldier cried dramatically. “Save yourself! Keep firing! For—”

“Look, if you’re determined to die dramatically…” Barnabas held up the soldier’s body as the mechs behind them started to fire, having finally noticed him.

The Yennai armor was not quite good enough for the soldier to survive that many direct hits, but both layers of it combined with the soldier’s body were enough to keep Barnabas safe, at least.

“Thank you.” Barnabas dumped the body off the side and jumped down into the interior before another round of bullets could reach him.

The mech pilot had his sidearm out, clutched in shaking hands. “I’m armed, and I warn you—we’ll fight to the death!”

“That is just a ridiculous sentiment from someone who’s trying to slaughter civilians,” Barnabas informed him. “However, since you’re all so damned insistent on this, I will help you out.” He slashed the pilot’s throat with one of his knives, turning the body, so the blood sprayed onto the back wall of the mech. “All right, how do I pilot this thing?”

There’s probably a manual somewhere. Or, if you’re determined to be manly, I can just let you figure it out on your own.

Some pointers would be helpful!

The joystick on the left will deviate you from the pre-set course and the joystick on the right is part of the point-and-shoot display. Also, the body can swivel on the base.

Excellent. How do I do that? I want to shoot at the rest of them.

Probably wise. They’re arming missiles. I’d try the toggle switch above your head.

Doubtfully, Barnabas complied—only for the mech’s body to do a dizzying 360-degree spin. He toggled it a bit more carefully the second time and wound up facing the other mechs.

They’ve been firing at you this whole time, but their bullets aren’t very useful against the mech body. I’d suggest the missiles. They seem to be saving theirs for a special occasion.

What better occasion than this? Barnabas asked whimsically. He targeted another mech, pressed what he guessed was the missile launch button, and was rewarded by four missiles launching from the right side of the mech. It rocked on its spider feet, and the target exploded in a shower of sparks and splintering trees. We probably didn’t need all four of those.

Probably not, no. Look down at the control panel for a moment? Okay, try the green button. Now the blue. Now press the blue and the orange at the same time while targeting that cluster of mechs over there. Whooooo!

We’ve started a forest fire.

We’ll deal with that in a moment. Right now, you need to be anywhere but inside that mech.

Barnabas hauled himself out with a curse and tumbled into the undergrowth as several missiles slammed into the mech and knocked it back into a tree.

Ruuuuuun, tiny squishy human!

Barnabas ran.

Several mech crews, apparently not aware of who or what he was, decided to take this opportunity to avenge their fellow mech pilots’ deaths. They piled out of the mechs and ran for him.

Unbelievable. Inside the mechs, they had armor and missiles. Outside…

Barnabas snickered as he dove into a slide and took out several pilots at the ankles. They yelped as they fell, and Barnabas rolled back to his feet. A few were still standing. He drove a fist into one’s face, pivoted to bash another with his elbow, and seized a third by the lapels and kneed him in the chest. Two shots took out the two on the ground still moving.

Can you get to the center of town?

Yes, why?

Because there are two more Yennai carriers on the way, and I’m guessing it’s nuke o’clock.

Barnabas turned and sprinted for the town. Get word to the Jotun!

They know. They’re evacuating the troops and sending shuttles into the town. The Shinigami screamed overhead and banked sharply before descending. I’m picking up as many as I can.

I’ll meet you there. Barnabas pushed himself as fast as he could, screaming for the Jotuns on the city walls to get to the center of town.

Koel Yennai had wanted to take this colony with infantry. No doubt he wanted an occupation, with the civilians held hostage for the Jotun Navy’s good behavior.

But he’d been prepared for it to go wrong, and he was willing to sacrifice his own soldiers to make that happen.

* * *

Above Abassi, Commander Jeqwar swung her ship around and primed her missiles. All she had to do was intercept enough nukes for the evacuation to take place. After the last battle, she had no faith that she could take down a carrier.

“Do whatever you have to do,” she told her fighter pilots as she launched them out into space.

“Yes, ma’am.” They knew what that meant.

Nukes launched from the carriers, and Jeqwar let instinct take over. She directed her own missiles to intercept, keeping the destroyer in constant motion. Not a single one of the destroyers could afford to be taken down, not when they were all that stood between the nukes and the colony. They had arrived the fastest and now…

“All clear,” came the transmission from the ground. “Get out of there. Don’t wait, and don’t engage.” There was a pause, and the admiral added, “We can’t fight this fleet.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Admiral Threton was one of the most distinguished officers the Jotun Navy had ever produced. A living legend, he had single-handedly rescued several civilian ships from a slaver attack back when he was just a destroyer captain. Since that time, he had managed the fleet through several engagements and war drills.

The problem was, Barnabas couldn’t for the life of him figure out which of the Jotuns standing on Shinigami’s bridge before him was Admiral Threton.

“Help me,” Barnabas said to Gar silently.

“How?”

“You introduce me as our emissary, and hopefully, their second-in-command will introduce him.”

“Clever,” Shinigami commented. “Maybe you should introduce me as our emissary, however.”

“You can’t project an avatar out here.”

“Give me a body, then.”

Barnabas refrained from rolling his eyes as Gar stepped forward with a bow, gestured, and announced, “Barnabas, captain of the Shinigami.”

Barnabas nodded to the group of three Jotun.

“Barnabas, this is Admiral Threton.” The leftmost Jotun gestured to the one on the far right. “I am Commander Jeqwar, and this is Commander Celwar.”

“I am pleased to meet you.” Barnabas nodded to each of them in turn. “This is Venfaldri Gar, and my associate, Shinigami, is listening in remotely.”

“Shinigami is an Artificial Intelligence, yes?” Admiral Threton sounded dubious. “Is it capable of drawing conclusions?”

“I assure you, aside from multitasking processing capabilities—in which capacity she far exceeds any of us—she is quite similar to any organic mind.” Barnabas gestured to the ship. “She will be able to use the ship’s external speakers to communicate with us.”

Not that I intend to after that insult. “Is it capable of drawing conclusions?” What does he think I am, a pocket calculator?

Quick! 4 + 6.

I hate you.

Barnabas hid a smile. “We have important matters to discuss. Namely, how we intend to defeat the Yennai Corporation.”

There was an awkward moment of silence, then the admiral made a noise Barnabas could only describe as clearing a mechanical throat.

Thankfully, he did not beat around the bush. “We aren’t prepared to attack until we can be sure that we understand their cloaking and shield mechanisms,” he said bluntly. “And we don’t know when that will be.”

“I’ll help,” Shinigami said. “We all need to know that. After all,” she added smoothly, “we’re on the clock now.”

The Jotuns looked at one another.

Shinigami continued with only the faintest edge to her voice. “I assume we all understand that any appeasement efforts will be entirely useless. What Koel Yennai wants—”

“Is to rule this sector,” the admiral interrupted. “We are aware of that, Miss Shinigami. At this point, we have to weigh his goals against his apparent desire to kill our entire populace if he does not get what he wants. Because it seems he can carry that plan out quite successfully.”

“That would be short-sighted.” Barnabas picked up the thread Shinigami had started. “Koel only wants you to believe the choices are between benevolent dictatorship and certain death. In fact, neither of those options are a true representation of the facts. He is using brutality to blind you.”

“I am aware of his tactics, thank you.” The admiral sounded unimpressed. “And I hold this position with the express purpose of defending my people. If I undertake a course of action which will result in deaths—perhaps thousands of deaths—I must be willing to say that it was truly the only way. I must be able to say with certainty that I knew more would die. Not that I simply believed Koel would eventually turn into a dictator.”

“Idiot,” Shinigami muttered over their comm.

“Hold on a moment.”

Barnabas looked at the admiral. “What do you see as an alternative to an attack?”

“A false capitulation that sets him off his guard, followed by an attack at an appropriate time.”

Barnabas nodded slowly. “And you think this has a chance of winning? You think Koel will not anticipate this, demand the imprisonment of your officer corps, and install some method of insurance in every Jotun colony?”

There was a long silence.

“You’re right. He’s an idiot.”

“I do have some sympathy, though,” Gar commented. “It would be a hard sell to go back and explain that he knew Koel was going to destroy colonies if he didn’t back down…and he didn’t back down.”

“Then he just needs to take Koel out before Koel can take out any more colonies,” Shinigami said promptly.

“Precisely,” Barnabas agreed.

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.” Gar looked a little bewildered. “Why isn’t he doing that?”

“He thinks the odds are too much of a long shot,” Shinigami explained. To the admiral, she said, “We understand your desire to save as many lives as possible.”

“We also respect your wish to make this a battle of wits as well as weapons,” Barnabas added.

“The only way to win against Koel now, however,” Shinigami finished, “is to hit him hard and fast and end his hopes entirely.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” the admiral snapped. “Your colonies aren’t in the crossfire.”

“Yet.” Barnabas felt his lip curl in contempt, though he tried not to be too obvious about it. “I am not sure about Jotun history, but in human history, it is quite clear that when someone like Koel takes power, no one is safe. If we allow Koel’s reach to grow longer, he will come for human colonies.”

“Then summon your fleets to deal with him!”

“If we must, we will.” Barnabas did not waver. “I am telling you, however, that we do not have time to get all of those ships here, and pulling them away from their current engagements will hurt us as well. I do not ask your ships to engage for no reason.”

“Besides which, it’s hardly unfair of us to ask you to fight Koel yourself when it’s your colonies he’s attacking at present,” Gar pointed out.

“A very good point,” Shinigami said over the comm.

“Thank you. Now, try not to roll your eyes too much. Just let me try something.”

“All right,” Barnabas said apprehensively.

“I’m intrigued,” Shinigami said.

“With your politicians having sold out to the Yennai Corporation, this is a uniquely difficult operation for you,” Gar observed.

Admiral Threton bristled at this. “We are hardly the only species that has had politicians taking bribes.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Gar’s voice rose slightly, but he got himself back under control. “You’re quite correct. All species are corruptible, and Koel is very good at finding leverage. What I meant was that you are fighting, knowing that there is misinformation being spread, and knowing that your sacrifices are not being honored. That is…well, I cannot imagine how difficult it is. I know only the smallest part of that.”

Admiral Threton looked at him curiously.

“I am Luvendi,” Gar said with a shrug. “My family does not respect my choice to leave Luvendan. Though I have found great purpose and done many things of which I am proud, I know they think I shamed our family by leaving. I cannot imagine how much worse it must be to know that I would face imprisonment or disgrace, as you are.”

“Er, Gar? Are you sure you’re making this better?”

“Keep listening.” Gar’s subvocalization sounded serene.

The Jotuns looked at one another.

“You know,” Gar said emphatically, “that they’re back on Jotuna, making speeches and media statements, saying that you were supposed to be in prison, that you’ve brought the wrath of the Yennai Corporation down on the civilians…and they’re just hoping, praying, that they’ll make it out with their mansions and their bribes still intact.”

Commander Jeqwar fairly growled her contempt. “Soft-living idiots. They do nothing for us. They sold us out to the Yennai. They gave them windows into our technology! They should be strung up for this.”

Gar laughed. “But did you hear their communications when they arrived and saw your fleet? We caught a few pieces of chatter. They were flabbergasted. Whatever those politicians gave them, the Yennai fleet didn’t have any idea they should expect you all. Oh, it was beautiful.”

The Jotuns started to laugh as well, little mechanical chuckles.

I’ll be damned, he’s actually pulling it off. Barnabas saw where Gar was going with this, but he didn’t want to intervene or even chime in. Gar had wormed his way into their good graces and was working them. Barnabas might only scare them off.

“They’ve handed so much over, though.” Gar shook his head. “Like you said—the technology, the channels into the fleet. You managed to cut off their access, but that hardly excuses it. Those politicians thought they were giving all of that information up.”

The Jotuns nodded.

“And right now…” Gar sounded thoughtful now. “I can’t imagine what Koel is offering in bribes.”

The Jotuns murmured to one another in alarm.

“You shut them out once,” Gar said. “But any time they have, they can probably use to their advantage. Who knows what tricks they have up their sleeves now?”

“Treasonous bastards,” the admiral rumbled. “We need time. We need to figure out where they’re going, how their cloaking works, how those damned impervious shields of theirs work, and we have no such time.”

“There’s only one thing to do,” Shinigami said simply. “We need to get one of their ships and use it.”

A good point. Barnabas nodded slightly to himself. If they’ve got any human colonies in their sights…

Exactly.

“It would need to be a carrier,” Commander Jeqwar said. “Or the Avaris. And that’s a damned risky mission.”

“We wouldn’t want to send any more ships than we absolutely had to,” Shinigami proposed. “Just us, I would think.”

“I’ll go as well.” Jeltor, who had been in close conversation with another Jotun, clanked over and ducked his mechanical body to the admiral. “My actions at their headquarters were part of what got us into this mess. I can help fix it now.”

“You fought back after they kidnapped you,” the admiral rumbled. “What were you supposed to do? Hell, what were any of us supposed to do—stand aside while our politicians sold us out and frolicked in their cash?”

Barnabas saw Gar’s faint smile. The Luvendi’s plan had been successful. By reminding them just how stacked the odds were, and why they were so stacked, he had lit a fire under the Jotun officers.

It was genius.

“They’ll pay,” Barnabas assured the admiral. “We’ll make sure every piece of incriminating evidence we need appears in your media. They won’t be able to keep people from knowing what they did. When this is over, they’ll hang.”

The admiral nodded decisively. “Good. Now, what do you need, to find that ship?”

“Anything you have that narrows down their location,” Shinigami said. “We know they must have a patch of fairly empty space because we’ve never figured out where their shipyards are, and with so much cargo going from place to place…a few more shipments of steel and electronics don’t stand out.”

“We have a guess of where they are now.” The admiral pressed a button on his suit. “Fretor, this is Admiral Threton. Send the possible location of the Yennai fleet to the Shinigami. Yes, I’m sure. Yes, it’s me. Do it now.” He turned back to the group. “I certainly hope you can do this quickly,” he told them. “I have a feeling we don’t have much time.”

“Agreed,” Barnabas said solemnly. “We’ll do what we can and do it quickly—and then strike together. Wait for our signal. We may need you sooner rather than later.”

“We’ll be on alert. And…you were right.” The admiral shook his head. “Whatever we give Koel, whether it’s time or resources, he’ll use it against us. We have to strike soon.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

For two days, the Julentai hung in a field of rubble around a comet and waited while Chofal and Dretkalor camped out in the cockpit and assessed each ship that passed.

They dismissed so many that Zinqued began to have fantasies of firing them both. First, a ship was too small, then too old, then too large, then too new.

“Too new?” Zinqued demanded. If he had any hair, he’d have been pulling it out at that point. As it was, he was very tempted to stab himself in the eye just to make a distraction from all this insanity.

Dretkalor and Chofal looked at one another.

“Yes,” Dretkalor said finally as if explaining something to a very stupid toddler. “The Julentai is old and has very old components. If we try to add something that’s too new, it might break everything. The voltage standards have changed, among other things.”

Zinqued suppressed a shriek and stormed off to find out if any of the new guards had figured out how to distill alcohol. He could use a drink.

He was exceedingly surprised, therefore, when there was a shout from the bridge and Dretkalor sprinted down the hall in the middle of dinner to announce that they’d found it, they’d found the ship they needed, and everyone needed to get ready to fight.

“I assume you don’t mean me,” Tik’ta said acidly. She had gotten progressively more and more annoyed at being shut off the bridge of her ship, and nothing Zinqued said about taking a vacation seemed to make an impact.

She stomped off to the cockpit while Dretkalor waved the rest of them out of the room.

“I can’t even finish my food?” Zinqued asked, annoyed. They would decide to attack now, those two. It just had to be during dinner.

He would remember this when it came time to give out yearly bonuses.

He muttered to himself the whole time he suited up in his armor and weapons. When he returned to the cockpit, Tik’ta had begun to warm up the engines and their prey was just in sight.

Chofal and Dretkalor both laughed, but Zinqued swore. “That? That’s the ship you’re going to steal from?”

“Yes,” the two of them said in unison.

“It’s a bucket of bolts,” Zinqued said dangerously.

“Look at the engines,” Chofal pointed out. “You only get that greenish tint from hyperwave propulsion. They tried to mask it, but once you know what to scan for, you can see they’ve got a good ship under there.”

“And there,” Dretkalor added. “They’ve put false plating over the hull.”

“And that’s not too new?” Zinqued was grumpy. He should have seen all of that. In fact, if he’d been a little less hasty, he would have. Now he looked like an idiot in front of his new crew.

“Most of the hyperwave propulsion ships were built years ago and upgraded,” Chofal explained. “Their parts are very adaptable.” She smiled, looking almost wistful. “This is a jackpot. I could work on it for weeks. If we stripped off its power couplings—”

“Chofal, focus. Have you forgotten that we’re going to be stealing a much better ship than this one?”

“Oh!” She brightened visibly. “Right. Just wait till you see that one,” she confided in Dretkalor. “Absolutely beautiful. Just gorgeous. Every system—”

“All right, everyone except Zinqued off my bridge,” Tik’ta snapped. “Go wax poetically about dream ships somewhere else.”

Everyone else shuffled out. Chofal was too engaged in her monologue even to be shamed. They heard her chattering all the way to her bunk to pick up her tools and her spacesuit.

Tik’ta rolled her eyes. “Neither of them ever stops talking, do they?”

“That’s enough,” Zinqued admonished. It seemed like the sort of thing a captain would say. He didn’t want any ill feeling to spring up between his crew.

Tik’ta sighed, but as their target drew closer, she needed to focus on that. Over the past few days, she had needed to learn the systems on the Julentai and hadn’t gotten the time she needed in the cockpit to learn them.

Nevertheless, she had piloted similar ships. As their target passed by, she lifted the Julentai away from a piece of rock, flipped it, and slid under the other ship.

There were many subtle and highly technical ways to steal a ship. The Julentai had none of them. What it did have was a broadwave transmitter that flooded all the ship’s channels with random data, an EMP pulse that knocked out the systems and allowed the Julentai to take hold of them, and multiple clamps that held the ship in place.

Tik’ta gave a triumphant grin as she worked on the controls of the other ship. “Got it. They’re trying to get the engines back, though—get on board and stop them before they fly us back into the comet.”

“Radio if you need anything.” Zinqued took off and made for the small bay on the bottom of the ship.

It was an ingenious little design. An airtight compartment at the corner of the docking bay held a second airtight compartment that would slide down out of the belly of the ship, leaving a vacuum behind it. The air from the inner compartment was vented into the first, the inner compartment resealed, then opened into space. No precious air was lost, and the ship was safe from any breach.

In the silence, the crew fired a cable down to the hull of the captured ship, attached themselves to it, and pushed off gently to slide along and cluster at the end.

There was a similar compartment in this ship, and Chofal took the lead on opening it. She had to hotwire one of the panels in the end, and even then, it took two of the Brakalons to haul it open. Having braced themselves against the hull, they floated up.

This was why they strapped themselves to the cable. It was all too easy to lose your footing at a time like this and wind up too close to the engines. Zinqued shuddered.

He had heard stories he didn’t particularly want to remember, but each one was seared into his brain.

They heard scuffling outside the compartment as they locked themselves into it and depressurized. They had to secure themselves with clamps because once they passed the hull, the internal grav systems kicked in. Nevertheless, they got the floor closed and their weapons raised.

“Tik’ta, broadcast the message.”

“Yes, sir.” She allowed it through on their suits’ channel as well:

“This is the captain of the Julentai. We require two components of your ship. Your crew will not be hurt if they do not interfere. Your ship will not be vented, nor will it be rendered inoperable.”

There was shouting. Zinqued pressed the button to open the door, and he and the four Brakalons rushed out and took cover, scanning the area with their weapons.

The crew in the landing bay had decided to take his advice. They had their weapons on the floor and their hands up. One of the Brakalons collected their weapons and secured their hands behind their heads, and the other four guided Chofal toward the engineering bay. The booster would be there.

The first attack came when they’d almost reached the engine room. A crazed Leath jumped out from one of the side corridors, brandishing a gun and screaming. He opened fire as one of the Brakalons tackled Chofal to the ground to shield her. The rest of them fired and their attacker crumpled to the ground.

The captain waited for them in the engine room, much more sensibly pointing his gun toward the reactor itself.

Everyone stopped. If the reactor were open, the captain would be dying quickly. If it were closed, which it appeared to be, it was unlikely that a bullet could pierce the casing. Unlikely…

But not impossible.

“I won’t let you leave us out here to drift!” The captain’s voice was wild.

“You won’t be left to drift,” Zinqued said as soothingly as he could. He didn’t have any particular desire to die from radiation poisoning. “Our engineer needs your zero-point booster and your fruit bowl.”

He pointed to the auxiliary photonic dish to make it clear what he meant. Though it was a precisely made and highly technical piece of equipment, it resembled a dish for fruit. It could be a bowl for anything, of course, but somehow the name had stuck.

Paun had once told Zinqued that you could tell a good engineer by which technical terms they didn’t use. “And don’t trust any ‘engineer’ who calls that an auxiliary photonic dish,” he finished.

That litmus test had served Zinqued well as he searched for a backup engineer for Chofal.

The captain narrowed his eyes at them, and Dretkalor raised his rifle. His finger was conspicuously off the trigger.

“You shoot our mechanic,” he said, “or that reactor, I shoot you. You don’t shoot anything, I don’t shoot you. You got that?”

The captain hesitated, but at last he nodded, and Zinqued waved Chofal into the engine room.

She worked cheerfully, chattering about the specifications of the ship—not so much to them as to herself. Not that they all understood much anyway. She didn’t seem to need answers, so the rest of them ignored her and kept their guns up, listening closely for anyone trying to sneak up on them.

Defeated, the captain went to sit in the corner. He still had his gun, but he wasn’t pointing it at the reactor anymore.

“Got it,” Chofal said finally.

“Let’s move,” Zinqued ordered.

They left quickly, Dretkalor’s gun still trained on the captain. The parts they had stolen were worth thousands, but true to their word—the ship would fly just fine.

They got back through the halls with no surprises and collected the guard they had left behind in the landing bay. One crew member was laid out with a split lip. No one mentioned anything about it as they crowded into the airlock chamber again, though the guard took one of the guns that had been surrendered, a particularly nice sniper rifle.

Zinqued didn’t mention anything about that. Their business was stealing, after all, and a crew that could get little things they liked was a crew that was less likely to mutiny.

Their return to the Julentai was uneventful, and Tik’ta informed them the engines on their captive ship would not fire properly for two hours after they left, giving them plenty of time to escape.

“They aren’t associated with any particular government,” she said. “If they had powerful friends, I think they would have made that clear. They’re probably gori.”

“What are gori?” Dretkalor asked, with a frown.

“So there’s something you don’t know?” Tik’ta arched a brow. At Zinqued’s look, however, she didn’t press it further and just sighed. “It’s a Torcellan word. They’re…high-class couriers, I guess you could say. Merchants will use them as go-betweens and entrust them with…well, messages, usually.”

“They weren’t very keen to fight.” Dretkalor scoffed.

“They probably didn’t have a message on board. And those stealth systems take some serious money to run. If they’re being paid, they’re probably running entirely dark.” She shrugged. “Maybe they worked for the Yennai Corporation, back when money was still flowing.”

“There’s going to be a lot to harvest when they finally fall apart.” Zinqued smiled at the thought.

“I wouldn’t count them out,” Tik’ta warned him.

“She’s right,” Dretkalor agreed. “Everyone who’s met Mr. Yennai says he never gives up. Never.”

Tik’ta looked pleased that Dretkalor had agreed with her. “See?” she asked Zinqued.

Zinqued shook his head. “What does he have left to fight for? His children are dead, he’ll have no one to take over after him.”

“Someone like him only ever wants one thing.” Tik’ta looked at him meaningfully. “More.”

She turned back to her work and left Zinqued to go back to the engine room, frowning. Tik’ta had been spouting a platitude, nothing more.

So why had he felt a chill when he heard those words?

Chapter Twenty-Three

“It’s known to run supplies into this sector,” argued one of the officers. “And it would make a good warning shot against the humans.”

Everyone glanced over to where Koel sat enigmatically in his throne-like chair.

Lotar knew just what Koel was doing. He had, most likely, already picked what he thought was the best position. However, to keep his officers from agreeing with him out of habit and to see which of them would come up with the solution he liked best—not to mention, to see if any of them would come up with a better solution—he kept his opinions on the matter to himself.

It was a smart thing for him to do. Unfortunately, just because Lotar knew what he was doing and why didn’t make it any less scary.

And he knew that Koel was waiting for him to say something. It had become clear over the past few days that Koel viewed him as a protege…or potential protege.

Lotar just had to prove himself.

The problem was that he was sure he knew what Koel wanted to hear, and he was terrified to say it. It was an effective tactic, but it was a cruel one, and he was afraid that Koel would actually take the suggestion if Lotar made it.

Then Lotar would feel guilty. The thought of the operation made him want to cry.

He faced the bleak possibility of saying nothing. It would take little for Koel to grow tired of him and shuffle him off to some minor ship. Lotar was sure he could deal with the whispers and the stares: poor bastard, he disappointed Mr. Yennai. At least he’s still alive, anyway. But the thought of disappointing Koel distressed him. There was something about the Torcellan, something almost hypnotic. You looked into his eyes, and you wanted to do anything, say anything, to please him.

Which meant that Lotar wanted more than anything to give the suggestion that was on the tip of his tongue.

“We don’t have good enough human targets yet,” the admiral said. “We continue to apply pressure to the Jotun. Once they’re forced by their government to pull back, we have one less enemy. We can decide what to do about the humans at our leisure rather than striking out randomly.”

It was a much better suggestion than attacking the human cargo ships. Lotar found himself nodding.

And yet…

He bit his lip. He didn’t want to say this. He could just picture what would to happen if he did.

“Mr. Venn.” Koel did not raise his voice, but everyone swiveled to Lotar. “Did you have a suggestion to make?”

Lotar froze. The other officers looked at him with poorly-concealed distaste.

He could do this. He just had to survive Koel’s disappointment.

“I like the admiral’s suggestion,” Lotar said honestly. “Forcing the Jotuns to break their alliance with the human means that we can divide their forces more equally.”

The admiral gave a confident smile. Even Koel’s new protege liked his plan.

Koel said nothing. He looked at Lotar, and he waited.

“Or we could strike the planet Devon.” The words were dragged out of Lotar’s chest. He couldn’t hold them back.

Koel smiled thinly in triumph.

“Devon?” the admiral repeated. “Where is that?”

“It’s not in this sector, sir.” Lotar felt himself moving toward the table as if in a dream. He had said it. He had to follow through now. He brought up the reports he had written after combing through the Shinigami’s data banks. “It used to be known as Devon and is now called High Tortuga by the humans. They’ve made several very clumsy attempts to hide it.”

The admiral blinked.

“What we’ve seen of their warning systems is impressive,” Lotar admitted. “It’s all second-hand, but most of the merchants who are usually able to get onto planets to supply black markets, cannot this time.”

He snuck a glance. Koel’s eyebrows had gone up at that. Lotar knew that Koel held the deepest respect for black markets, believing them to be a nearly infallible mechanism for breaking down any restrictions on trade.

Usually, he was right. In this case, the humans had managed to keep a lock-down on the planet.

“The humans were responsible for the destruction of some Yennai-affiliated groups on Devon,” Lotar continued. “They were working as mercenaries on the less populous continent. Apparently, the humans took exception to that. The details aren’t entirely clear.”

“Someone must know them,” Koel interjected.

Everyone else exchanged glances. He’d started to get impatient, and they were eager to see Lotar taken down a notch or two. No one liked the way they had squabbled without Koel saying a word, only for Lotar to speak up late and get all the credit.

I wish any of you were in my place, Lotar wanted to say. But it wasn’t really true—he’d be jealous if anyone else were to take Koel’s attention and win his respect.

“Another mercenary syndicate did know what happened,” Lotar explained. “At least, as far as I can tell, they did. They appear to have sent reinforcements.”

“Appear to have sent? Did you contact them?”

Lotar swallowed. “They’re all dead. Sir,” he added.

Koel thought that over, his eyes shifted to the darkness outside the windows. He seemed calm.

Then Koel said, not even raising his voice, “So the humans destroyed our affiliates. They sought out any of their contacts and destroyed those as well. Then they tracked those contacts to our headquarters and killed both of my children.”

The stateroom was entirely silent. No one, not even Lotar, spoke. Shoulders were hunched. Everyone tried desperately to disappear.

Koel stood and swept down the stairs. He looked at the reports projected on the table, his gaze ravenous.

“Uleq was right,” he said, almost to himself. “I did not listen when he told me how dangerous they were. I thought we could infiltrate them when the time came.” He looked up at Lotar. “You understand?”

Everyone else now looked grateful that they were not on the spot, and Lotar struggled to figure out what Koel meant.

“We must destroy them?”

“Yes,” Koel said. “But more than that, Lotar, we must admit our mistakes. The game of power is unforgiving. There is little room for errors, and no room to cling to them. I disregarded Uleq’s warnings. It cost me both my children.” His fingers tightened on the edge of the table. “I will not make the same mistake twice. When we go to Devon, we will go in force, and we will make the planet a barren husk. Before the fires have even died, we will find every human colony there is and destroy it. I wanted to make an example for the humans.” Now his eyes swept the room. “I see that is too dangerous. We will kill them, every one of them.”

He left the table without another glance, headed for the door, and from somewhere, the admiral drummed up the courage to call after him.

“Sir, what do we do about the Jotun fleet for now?”

Koel paused. The admiral shook.

Koel did not even look back. “Let them discover on their own that we will be at Devon. Make them think it is a small detachment of our fleet. We will crush them both at once.”

* * *

“Got it!” Chofal grinned as the device powered up. “And we’re good to go. Look at this beauty.” She jerked her head at Dretkalor. “Come on, teach it what it needs to know.”

“It’s not a pet.” But the Brakalon obliged, coming to sit in front of the device. He moved carefully to enter the various codes.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Chofal asked anxiously.

“Better hope so.” Dretkalor grinned. “Zinqued paid out the ass for them. Plus,” he added thoughtfully, “we’ll be a cloud of dust if they don’t.”

Chofal chewed her lip. But the Shinigami swam before her eyes, perfect and gleaming. Those engines, that electrical grid…

She had to get her hands on it.

“Come on,” she said to Dretkalor. “Let’s go tell Zinqued we’re done. He and Tik’ta were looking for the Yennai fleet. We can finally set a course to meet up with them.”

* * *

It’s worth noting, Shinigami said acidly, that we don’t even know what other ships are around us. Even I didn’t know that destroyer was there. And we don’t know how this one jumps around without gates.

I’m willing to bet that’s actually a set of decoy signals, Barnabas said. He’d been thinking a lot about this. I mean, we know they do this differently than we do. Differently even than the Jotun do. So I’m thinking perhaps in their systems, you employ a sudden cloaking technique, visual-based, and you just accelerate damned fast so that no one has a chance to crack the scanner cloaking before they realize where you’ve gone.

That’s a damned lot of effort to go to for a trick.

Hardly a trick. If you can convince people you’re gone, they generally stop shooting.

What I’m getting from this is, never stop shooting.

That’s the one. Barnabas snapped his helmet into place. Are we in place yet?

Close. For the better part of two hours, Shinigami had approached the Avaris, sliding slowly and inexorably through the fleet.

In their last engagements, and from the hacking she had experienced at their hands, she had theorized that the ships networked with one another to build a much more accurate grid of any known enemies. It was the smart way to do things, and Koel had been consistently and infuriatingly intelligent about all of this.

What all of this meant was that Shinigami had to be very, very careful to send signals to any ship that might sense her on its scanners. As the ships changed formation even while the fleet was in stasis, that had been a slow process.

She had managed it, however. Barnabas had told her that infiltration was more a game of patience than anything else, and that advice had proved invaluable. Together, they tracked fighter patrols and watched the formations changing, and now they were here.

She guessed Barnabas’ thoughts. You want to go down there and kill him, don’t you?

Yes, Barnabas admitted. Cutting the head off the snake isn’t always the answer, but he’s always been instrumental in holding this together. If we could take him and his top level out, a lot of it would be over.

Shinigami waited for him to say that he wouldn’t do it and eventually got worried. She peered through the cameras to find him climbing down the ladder toward the surface of the Avaris.

Barnabas. You know you can’t get through that many people on your own, right?

I know. His voice was subdued. I promised no heroics. It would kill both of us—and Tafa, and Gar, and Jeltor. And if we failed, there would be no one left who knew what was coming or had our ideas of how to stop it.

Shinigami said nothing.

It’s just difficult, Barnabas confessed finally. He paused as he helped Jeltor down onto the top of the ship. The two of them set off, two tiny figures on the top of the dreadnought. The temptation is always to go in directly and—we’re going in the correct direction, right?

Yes, Shinigami said, amused. I’ll mark the location on your helmet display.

Oh. I see it, yes. Like I was saying, the temptation is to go in directly. Finish it all. Believe it or not, I understood what the admiral was saying. Taking the time to make a good plan is difficult when you know innocent people might die in the meantime.

More innocent people die in the end if you do things the stupid way.

I know that. It’s a train-tracks problem, though.

What?

If you can direct the train to kill fewer people, but… You know what, not important. Suffice it to say, you are entirely correct from a logical standpoint, but emotions are by definition not logical.

Scarily accurate. All right, you’re getting close. Set the crawler down?

Barnabas knelt and released a tiny, spidery-looking robot. It skittered up to something that looked rather like an open porthole and climbed inside.

“Come back now,” Shinigami told them.

“Did we really need to come here to do this?” Jeltor asked.

“Probably not, but you really seemed to want to help. Besides which, shooting a small robot at a dreadnought while both of them are traveling several thousand kilometers per hour seems like it has the potential to go wrong. Just saying.”

Barnabas snickered.

Picturing it?

Yep. He let Jeltor go up the ladder first. Are you getting any data yet?

No, but be patient. It won’t be long. We just have to hang here for a few hours—

In the middle of an enemy fleet.

Yes, that. Eventually, that little bugger will reach something useful. For now, I’m going to focus on making sure it doesn’t trip any security systems. I’ll tell you when there’s news.

Back in the hold, Barnabas stripped off his spacesuit and gave a regretful look at the reflection of his hair in the visor. He looked at Jeltor. “You’re lucky you don’t need a spacesuit.”

“I have to travel in a vat of water. I’m always in a spacesuit.”

“That’s a good point.” Barnabas set off for the kitchen. “We should find something to do for a few hours, until—”

He was interrupted by the sound of mechanical laughter.

“Shinigami?”

It was a few moments before Shinigami recovered enough to talk. “Oh, you are not going to believe this.” She was still cackling. “You are not going to believe this. Oh, this is priceless. They’re going to attack High Tortuga.”

“Which, if you’ll recall, was our greatest fear.”

“Uh-huh. Just come into the conference room, and I’ll show you their battle plan, though.” She was still laughing. “I can’t wait to show the Jotun fleet this. This is amazing. I’m going to see if I can get that crawler onto the bridge so I can see their faces when we get there and they see where they are.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“She’s sure they’ve fucked up that badly?” Gar asked a while later. He sounded doubtful. He swung his arms to loosen them and watched as Barnabas warmed up.

At the edge of the room, beyond the mats, Jeltor watched curiously. Jotun tended to be a fairly insular species, and their reliance on powersuits meant any physical altercation could be fatal.

They could sling insults with the best of them, but they did not have physical fights.

Which was just as well, really, Jeltor thought now. When bipedal aliens fought, there was a certain grace to it. They could contort their bodies, and they could summon great power.

When two Jotun fought—as children sometimes did—it was just two bags of jelly slapping each other with thin, noodle-like tentacles. Not dignified. Not even impressive. Just sad.

Jeltor was, therefore, intrigued by Barnabas and Gar’s sparring.

“She’s very sure,” Barnabas said. “I made her stay to double-check. They have the battle plan, and they’ve ‘leaked’ information to the Jotuns to try to get them there as well. I’ll tell you, I had a hell of a time trying to get Admiral Threton to walk right into the trap.”

“It’s hard to blame him for that,” Jeltor said, scrupulously accurate. Admiral Threton had plenty of faults, to be sure, but this wasn’t one of them.

“Oh, I know that. But we know a lot more now. We know Koel’s plan.”

Barnabas continued to speak as he slid into motion. It happened so gracefully, in fact, that Jeltor hardly noticed it. He only realized what he saw a split-second before Gar went flying and slid into the wall. Barnabas wore a slight smile, lips curving in genuine amusement.

Jeltor saw the logic of it. The fight didn’t start when Gar was ready. One could never expect a fight to start predictably.

Barnabas charged for another attack, but Gar seemed to have taken the lesson to heart. He dove sideways at the last second and threw up one leg for a grounded kick. Barnabas doubled over, narrowly avoiding a faceplant into the wall. Gar launched himself up and drove one fist into Barnabas’ stomach.

Barnabas grunted in pain, but he didn’t lose his focus. He wrenched Gar’s fist before the Luvendi could withdraw it and used it to drag his opponent closer, directing a flurry of blows at Gar’s relatively unprotected torso and head with his free hand.

Gar, not to be outdone, swept his foot behind Barnabas’ even as the punches landed, and the two crashed onto the mats with a series of thuds that made Jeltor pulse in sympathetic pain.

They grappled, and their movement was so fast that Jeltor could hardly decipher the intricacies of it. He tried to assess it regarding their skeletal structure and musculature, but once he’d managed to understand how a particular move was made, he had invariably missed a few others that were just as impressive.

“Shinigami, can you give me security footage of this later? Slowed way, way down?”

Shinigami projected herself into the room next to Jeltor. “Why?” she asked curiously.

“Because I don’t understand any of it, but it’s fascinating.” Jeltor waved one mechanical hand at the proceedings. The two were circling one another again. “I’m beginning to think that Jotuns should learn to fight physically as a method of training for space battles.”

“That’s an interesting thought.” Shinigami considered. “I can definitely get you the footage. It must be hard to break down into useful data. I can see why you’re struggling if you don’t have…” She gestured at her projected body. “You know, limbs.”

“I wish I could see how the nerve impulses are working,” Jeltor said wistfully. “Where do the movements originate? How do the muscles contract?”

“Heads!”

Jeltor only just managed to get sideways in time as Barnabas and Gar hurtled into the wall at high speed, crashing through Shinigami’s hologram. Both of them, Jeltor noted with amusement, hunched over to try not to smash into her too hard. Instinct was a powerful thing.

Shinigami also found it amusing. She cackled and projected herself hovering cross-legged over the center of the mats.

“Rude,” she called down. “Make it up to me by fighting for my amusement.”

Barnabas glared at her, which gave Gar a good opening to punch him in the face. Barnabas responded with a flurry of kicks. He laid his torso back and lashed out with his heel, the top of his foot, and finally—picking his torso up slightly—punched his foot forward to send Gar flying.

Barnabas recovered a little inelegantly.

“Oof,” Gar grunted from the other side of the room. He pushed himself up with a woebegone look. “Just a moment. I need some water.”

Barnabas nodded. He looked quietly smug, as Jeltor had noticed he often did when he had done something sneaky.

Shinigami cocked her head to the side. “I’ve finished up an analysis on the Yennai cloaking if you want to give it a look, Jeltor. Between the Jotuns’ cloaking and what the Yennai ships seem to have, we should be able to secure a significant advantage in that battle.”

“I like the sound of that.” Jeltor nodded to Barnabas and Gar and clanked off down the hall.

“You kids play nice,” Shinigami said before disappearing in a puff of smoke.

“Why the smoke?” Gar asked. He stared up at the space where she disappeared.

“It’s how genies appear and disappear. With lamps.”

“Lamps?”

“Yes, because you rub the lamp and… This is going to take a lot of explaining. Genies are magic spirits who hide inside everyday objects, such as an oil lamp, and can be summoned out. They appear in a puff of smoke.” Barnabas looked at Gar’s awestruck face and remembered the most important factor. “Also, they aren’t real. It’s a myth.”

“Oh.” Gar rubbed his head. “I thought I was going mad.”

“No, no,” Barnabas assured him hastily. He started stretching again. “So, how have you been? There hasn’t been much time to debrief since we encountered the Yennai Corporation and—”

Gar pushed himself up on his elbows. His eyes were narrowed. “Shinigami told you. Or was it Tafa?”

“I noticed you were a bit subdued,” Barnabas admitted. “Shinigami mentioned you were processing some things.”

“You could say that.” Gar looked down at his hands. It was still incredible to him that he could use them as weapons. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be weak, and what it means to be strong.”

Barnabas took a seat on a pile of mats, his brows raised.

“I hated weak people for a long time,” Gar explained. “Myself included. Weak people were vulnerable. They needed to be protected. I didn’t realize that I should hate the people who hurt them.”

Barnabas waited.

“And then I realized that it didn’t matter how I felt about any of it,” Gar said finally. “I just had to do the right thing. That’s been very…liberating.”

Barnabas considered this, intrigued. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted. “You don’t have to feel any particular way, you simply have to do the right thing. I like that. I like it a lot.”

Gar smiled. “You do the right things for the right reasons, though. Someday, I hope to do that.”

To his surprise, Barnabas started laughing.

“You’re giving me far, far too much credit,” the man said. “Gar, you forget how old I am.”

“Old.” Shinigami’s voice echoed around the gym.

“Yes, thank you, Shinigami.” He gave Gar a wry look. “She’s right, you know. I’ve had centuries to make mistakes—and, most importantly, learn when not to say anything, so I appear mysterious and profound.”

“I KNEW IT.”

“Don’t you have military schematics to be discussing?”

“I’m doing that, too,” Shinigami said airily. “I just wanted to say I totally called that. I knew you weren’t all that wise.”

“I have legitimately learned some things, you know.”

“Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that. You want some real talk, Gar? Every twenty-five years or so, sometimes less, most sentient species have a total crisis and wonder if they’ve messed up their lives.”

“Really?” Gar looked intrigued. “I suppose that does track. So that just never gets better, then?”

“I’m afraid not. Be warned, though. Now that you’re here, if you ever get excessively emo about it and start playing meaningful songs and cutting your hair differently—or whatever it is Luvendi do—I will mock you. I say this as a friend who cares about you. I will mock you. A lot.”

“Thank you, Shinigami.” Barnabas gave a wry smile at the speakers then looked back at Gar. “She has a point, however. I hope you don’t take it too much to heart, all this turmoil. It’s good to question what you’re doing and why. It’s not good to wallow in it.”

“No wallowing. Right.” Gar picked himself up. “How long do we have before we reach High Tortuga?”

“Not too long.” Barnabas pulled his armor from a nearby cabinet.

“I thought this was going to be entirely a space battle,” Gar said, confused.

“I prefer to wear armor anyway. It helps me…get in the mood.” Barnabas smiled.

“Some men light candles and play jazz,” Shinigami commented.

“Shinigami, if I ever do that before a battle, you have permission to smack me.”

She chortled. “I’ll remind you of that.”

* * *

Tik’ta had nearly fallen asleep when the computer dinged loudly. She jerked, fell off her seat, and swore as she wound up on the floor in a clatter of scales.

She peeked up over the side of the desk, and her eyes widened.

“Zinqued!” She scrabbled for her radio and couldn’t find it. She must have knocked it off the desk when she fell. She shouted down the hall that led to the living quarters. “Zinqued!”

She was typing in coordinates with a feverish intensity when he arrived, the rest of the crew at his heels.

“What is it?”

“I found them.” Tik’ta gave him a sharp-toothed grin. “I found the Yennai fleet, and they’re not too far away. They’re heading for battle now, and you’re never going to believe where they’re going.”

The crew all looked at one another.

“Where?” Zinqued finally asked.

“Devon,” Tik’ta announced. “That’s where Barnabas first started out, and he’s been hunting down everyone who knows where it is. I tried to find it, but they’d changed the records in every database I could get my hands on.”

“Why did you want to go there?” Dretkalor asked.

“I wanted to know what was going on there,” Tik’ta said. “If they’re going to so much trouble to hide it…”

Everyone nodded.

“Anyway, the Yennai fleet discovered where it is, and they’re on their way.”

“It’s going to be a smoking wreck by the time they’re done with it,” Dretkalor said.

“Yep.” Tik’ta looked almost pleased. “Surrounded by a debris cloud full of Yennai ships, human ships, Jotun ships…”

In a flash, Zinqued realized where she was going with this. “We’ll be getting a bigger haul than we expected.”

“Way bigger.” She looked incredibly pleased. “When the smoke clears, we’re going to have the best ship in the sector—and plenty of tech we can sell.”

Everyone’s faces settled into looks of gleeful anticipation. The way Dretkalor’s hands moved, he was dreaming about guns. Chofal gazed back at the engine room with a look of dreamy happiness on her face. Zinqued had closed his eyes, and Tik’ta guessed he was picturing himself on the bridge of a gleaming new ship.

“I’m laying in a course for the Yennai fleet,” she told them all. “Get ready. We’re now the crew of the Yennai frigate Haron’s Shield.” She sighed. “I’m not sure we’ll arrive before them, though. I hoped we would.”

Zinqued laughed. He couldn’t help it. He was giddy, and he couldn’t picture anything bringing him down. “Maybe it’ll be better to get there a little late,” he pointed out. “We’ll have an idea of how the battle’s going, and any major surprises will already have happened.”

“Good point.” Tik’ta nodded. “You know, I did always want to see Devon. Guess that dream’s down the toilet. I like this one better, though.”

She swung back to her console and guided the ship to full acceleration.

Not long now, and they’d have everything they ever wanted.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Lotar had paced the junior officers’ bunks for most of the day. The rest of them, caught between envy and anticipation, didn’t waste much time on him. No one, it seemed, wanted to speak to him anymore.

He wished they would, but what was he going to say? He couldn’t admit that he felt bad about what was going to happen.

They’d be only too glad to pass along to Koel that Lotar thought he was a mass-murdering psychopath.

If Lotar had just had the sense to keep his mouth shut, they’d be headed for the Jotun fleet, and all the civilians on Devon—or High Tortuga, or whatever the humans called it now—would be safe.

But he kept reliving the moment of Koel’s happiness. When Lotar had given him a good suggestion, Koel had been quite pleased, indeed.

It still made Lotar shiver. He knew beyond a doubt that he would do the same thing again. It gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, but also the feeling of terrible rightness. He had always excelled at finding patterns.

Now he had found his place. Hadn’t he?

When a bridge officer showed up in the doorway, everyone scurried out of his way, and Lotar tried to make himself look presentable. His hair was a mess. What if the bridge officer told Koel about that?

The bridge officer just sneered. “Mr. Yennai wants to see you at the ship’s magazine,” he relayed and disappeared before Lotar managed to ask where that even was.

In a ship this big, there was no good way to guess which level and sector one might find anything in. Lotar sighed, tried to make his hair presentable, and practically ran out the door. He paused and turned back to the other officers.

“I don’t suppose any of you know where the magazine is.”

They all shrugged, but then Era, to his surprise, elbowed another officer, a Torcellan female.

“Palla, you know. Tell him.”

Palla looked far from pleased about Era’s intervention, but she wasn’t willing to lie outright. “Level 14, Sector 2,” she told Lotar grudgingly. “You can get there faster if you take the mechanics’ lifts.”

“Thank you,” Lotar said with feeling.

He arrived in the magazine still reeking of carbon and grease from the mechanics’ lifts. As a pleasant surprise, the smell wasn’t too noticeable compared to the munitions.

Koel and several of his officers were clustered around a tower of some sort, maybe three stories high with thick cables lining its sides. At the top were metal spikes, easily three feet long and serrated. Lotar gulped.

“Ah, Lotar.” Koel beckoned him forward. “Come see this.”

Lotar came closer, somewhat unwillingly. The cables filled him with a sort of dread, though he wasn’t quite sure why. It was amazing how you didn’t have to know exactly what a piece of technology was used for, to divine its larger purpose.

Koel stroked one of the cables, and Lotar had the sudden, hysterical urge to ask if the thing was alive.

Please no, please no, please no.

“This is the latest innovation from my laboratories,” Koel said with a smile. “Isn’t it beautiful? It latches on there, you see, and these arms can tear a ship to pieces. Then they weaponize the shards of it. Each arm is attached to an explosive chamber. They rip apart, seek other ships, and use the power of the arm to bash through the hull with the shards, and explode inside them.”

It was such a visceral image that Lotar swallowed. “Very nice,” he managed.

“We’ll be at Devon soon. I want you on the bridge with me, Lotar. Your assessments of the Jotun fleet will be very useful.”

Lotar, still staring at the missile, felt the sudden, desperate need to be anywhere else. He nodded his head so far, he practically bowed.

“I’ll go gather my research on the Jotun fleet’s capabilities, and will meet you on the bridge, Mr. Yennai.”

* * *

“So this is High Tortuga.” Jeltor stared out the bridge window of the Shinigami.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Gar came to stand beside him. He pointed. “That’s the main continent. Most of the noteworthy things happen over there, I’m given to understand. And that’s the smaller continent. Barnabas calls it the Wild North.”

“Wild West,” Barnabas corrected with a smile. He was seated in the captain’s chair and was reading printouts Shinigami had made for him. She sat in her usual chair, one leg draped over the arm, toying with a double-barreled pistol that seemed to have a wooden handle.

“Right, Wild West.”

“Although Wild North does have a ring to it.” Barnabas raised his eyebrows. “Driving snow… I’m picturing mountains. No, glaciers.”

“Big fuckin’ bears,” Shinigami opined.

“What are bears?” Gar asked. Jeltor also looked curious.

“Oh, man.” Shinigami sat up. “So, you know what tanks are, right? Yeah, so picture a tank covered in fur, with really big teeth.”

Both aliens looked at her like they hoped she was joking.

“It’s a fairly accurate summation,” Barnabas agreed. “The other thing is that you never run from bears. They have no natural predators. You have to stand your ground, or they’ll think you’re prey.”

Gar and Jeltor stood frozen.

“Never. Going. To Earth,” Gar muttered.

Jeltor gave a mechanical nod.

Shinigami snickered. “So, how do things stand?”

“Shouldn’t we be asking you? I thought you were the one with the built-in scanners.”

“I was daydreaming.” She sat up and cocked her head to the side. “The Jotuns are getting in formation. We have them running a scanning subroutine I found in the Yennai systems that might give us a chance at seeing any cloaked ships. Also, I’ve boosted our cloaking and theirs with a similar program to the one the Yennai use. I think.”

“You think?”

“Computer systems for a fleet are…how do I put this delicately—”

“You’ve never put anything delicately in your life.”

“Oh, right. That makes things easier, then. They’re gigantic fucking monstrosities. The size of Chuck Norris’s balls. Easy.”

Barnabas frowned at her.

“Old Earth joke.” She waved a hand. “I found what I think was their cloaking program, but invariably, it’s going to rely on pieces of programs that are stored in different places. It’s not like every relevant subroutine is going to be labeled ‘Cloaking.’”

“Why the hell not?”

“You’ve clearly never spent any time around programmers. The first few lines are meticulously documented, and it all deteriorates from there. The whole thing winds up being held together with duct tape and bailing wire. It’s like that across every species I’ve ever seen.” She grinned and opened her mouth to add another quip, then straightened. “Heads up, the Yennai fleet is incoming.”

“Everyone strap in,” Barnabas told the rest of the crew. “Shinigami likes to do barrel rolls when she’s punchy.”

“Is she punchy now?” Jeltor asked curiously.

“She’s always punchy,” Barnabas said.

“Damn straight I am.”

* * *

Koel was speaking with the admiral in hushed tones when Lotar arrived on the bridge, looking nauseous. Koel was fully aware that Lotar had had second thoughts. In his youth, Koel would have been uncompromising about the failure such doubt represented. He would have had Lotar transferred to another ship, or perhaps killed. A first-rate mind like that was dangerous if it was not loyal.

Perhaps it was age, or perhaps it was the loss of Uleq and Ilia—a pang went through Koel’s chest—but he wanted to guide Lotar. He wanted Lotar to become a worthy heir. There was so much in him that was commendable, after all. He had the instincts to become all that Koel was and more.

Koel did not fear being surpassed. If his successor made the Yennai Corporation more than it had been under his leadership, he had done well. It was what he had hoped for when he chose Ilia.

Ilia would have chewed up Lotar and spat him out, but…

Ilia was dead.

For a moment, Koel felt the wave of blackness he had tried to suppress. He feared it was going to swallow him whole. His children had been his greatest pride and his greatest achievement, and now they were gone and he would never see them again. Never—

He turned back to the window.

He had to remain calm, especially in front of his officers.

The planet grew larger on-screen. It gleamed red in the light from the nearby suns, and Koel shook his head. They had tried to hide from him. They had poked around in everyone’s business, cowing those who could not match them in force or technology, and finally they had made a misstep.

They had taken on the Yennai Corporation.

They would never appreciate the depths of their mistake. They would be dead, killed by their ambitions.

Other species would see what had happened here, however, and they would know not to make an enemy of Koel. He gave a thin smile.

“Begin targeting the cities,” he instructed. “We will fight the fleet, but first we will show them that they have nothing left to defend. That they failed utterly.”

The officers nodded. Their fingers danced over the keys. The Jotun ships were coming into focus now, changing from pinpricks of light gleaming in the darkness to recognizable shapes.

“Sir?” One of the officers scratched his head. “I’m having trouble locating the cities. They aren’t where they should be.”

“Try a different scanning protocol.” Their commanding officer made a show of being involved, leaning over their chairs and pointing at the screens. “The volcanic eruption is throwing off your sensors. The city should be at…” He frowned.

Every one of his team was silent now, staring at their screens.

Koel felt a stab of worry.

“What is it, officer?”

“It’s…it’s the wrong planet.” The officer looked up, too horrified even to find a clever way to say it. “Again. They directed us to the wrong planet. Again. There’s nothing here.”

* * *

On the bridge of the Shinigami, the crew burst into laughter. Gar held his side, Tafa leaned on one of the desks, and Jeltor’s powersuit shook with mirth.

“They got the wrong data,” Shinigami gasped. “And they fell for it. Again.” She nodded to Tafa. “All accolades go to our resident artist, who really helped make this fake-out a thing of beauty.”

“I am but a humble painter,” Tafa protested, but her eyes were dancing.

“We should have one on every ship.” Barnabas looked at the screens as one of the sensors whistled. “Ah, yep, there they go. They’re arming everything.”

Shinigami settled back in her seat with a grin. “Showtime.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Destroyers, engage.” Admiral Threton’s voice echoed over the fleet channel.

Shinigami watched as the first wave of destroyers advanced. After extensive discussion, they had decided to have the ships engage in much the same way as they had before, not visibly adjusting their formations to account for cloaked Yennai ships.

Behind the scenes, they would plan to head off the cloaked ships—but for as long as possible, they would not tip their hand that they had the means to see through Yennai cloaking.

The destroyers had locked onto their targets and were preparing missiles as the carriers disgorged fighters. At the head of the fleet, flying just over Admiral Threton’s ship, the Shinigami waited.

“It’s coming,” Shinigami murmured to Barnabas. “Any moment now.”

“I suppose we’ve overlooked an important possibility,” Barnabas said. He looked worried now. “What if he turns around and leaves? Just heads for a colony and—”

“Nope.” Shinigami had cocked her head to the side as if listening to something only she could hear. When Barnabas frowned, she tapped at her ear. “I got a line onto their bridge. Koel is pissed, and he wants us all to die a fiery death. One second, informing the Jotun fleet of his orders.”

The Yennai ships advanced quickly with their missiles armed.

“He wants us all dead as quickly and painfully as possible.” Shinigami’s eyes narrowed. “He’s starting to break.”

“What does that mean?” Barnabas asked as their ship banked and readied its own weapons.

“I mean that before, Koel didn’t give a damn who he hurt. You know how some people hurt others because they like doing it? He wasn’t like that. He didn’t care about anyone else. He just did what he had to do to get what he wanted.”

She shuddered. “I hate him,” she said quietly. “I even hate him for what he did to Uleq and Ilia. That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“I think it does,” Tafa said. She looked at Shinigami. “That’s what happens with people like Koel. They turn on everyone eventually, even their allies, and you wind up sympathizing with…murderers, slavers, torturers. But it’s the kind of sympathy that doesn’t mean anything. At the end of the day, anyone who throws their lot in with someone like Koel is dangerous.”

Shinigami nodded. She turned back in her seat and aimed directly at the Avaris, holding the commands in her systems. She wanted to throw everything she had at Koel, tactics be damned. Try to crack my mind open, you bastard? Try to break me? ME? You’ll get more than you bargained for.

But she refused to allow her hatred to push her into stupidity. She aimed one missile at the destroyer nearest the Avaris, specifically targeting the area of the ship she guessed held the munitions.

The first impact crackled along the shields but showed her that they were not impervious. She fired three more in close succession, each targeting the same place. The first produced an even more impressive display of electronic feedback, the second actually impacted the hull, and the third broke through. The magazine exploded, tearing the ship nearly in half, and sent it spinning out of control.

There was a cheer from the Jotun ships, and several of their destroyers copied the technique in short order. None of them were willing to waste even a second.

The Yennai ships retaliated at once. Fighters swarmed from the Yennai carriers, as well as the Avaris, and dropped in behind the missiles, closing the gap between the fleets quickly.

“Destroyer Group 1, continue your assault on the Yennai destroyers. Destroyer Group 2, focus on Carrier 1.”

Shinigami joined forces with one of the Jotun ships to focus on a Yennai destroyer. With the fighters now engaged, getting missiles through would not be so easy. A scatter of cannon fire kept them at bay, but there were so many of them that they resembled a swarm of gnats.

Gnats with guns.

The second wave of Jotun destroyers assembled carefully. Their target Yennai carrier was cloaked, and they did not want to rouse the ship’s suspicions.

Shinigami’s attention was focused mostly on them, even as she directed her guns at the fighters to help the Jotun missiles reach the destroyer. She watched while Group 2 of the destroyers closed ranks and readied their weapons.

The admiral took control of the destroyers for this maneuver, and the crew of the Shinigami watched with their jaws hung open as the destroyers swung in a perfectly timed formation and fired in unison.

The first round of missiles knocked out the shield, and the second set, directed at specific points along the hull, breached the carrier and vented its atmosphere. The ship spun out of control, uncloaking, and razed another destroyer as it went.

“Well, our hand’s tipped now,” Shinigami murmured. “Let’s see what they do.”

On the bridge of the Avaris, she saw Koel standing white-faced with fury.

He was, however, smart enough not to give specific orders just yet. He allowed his officers to direct the battle as they saw fit.

Dammit. Shinigami would prefer it if he weren’t intelligent about any of this. She wanted him to issue nonsensical orders and scream unintelligibly. She wanted him to see his own helplessness and be crushed by it.

Yennai destroyers surged forward and attacked the Jotun formation. They were desperate not to lose another carrier. If the Jotuns extinguished the capital ships and turned on the Avaris, the Yennai fleet would be in dire straits.

Shinigami tried not to flinch as Jotun ships were hit. She fired pucks and missiles of her own to keep the Shinigami safe. She maneuvered more nimbly than a human pilot could, but she could not save all the Jotun ships.

She hoped Jeqwar was safe, but she could not bring herself to check.

“Take the last two carriers at once,” the admiral ordered. “I will take control of the fleet once you are in position. Move now, regardless of what ships are missing.”

Shinigami held her breath as the Jotun ships battled to get into position. Three were taken down as they maneuvered and the resulting formations had gaps in them.

Even after the losses, Admiral Threton did not change his action plan. Shinigami wondered what it must feel like to have the ships missing, not responding as he sent the signals. When the last two carriers were destroyed, she did not smile.

They were doing what they had to do, but the cost was high. It was far, far too high.

* * *

On the bridge of the Avaris, Koel snarled his fury. They’d broken through his ranks and destroyed his ships. Everything he had built over the course of decades was being taken apart piece by piece.

He glowered at Lotar, who instinctively backed away.

This. This was what was left of Koel’s legacy: this coward, a broken fleet, and the cloud of rubble where Koel’s children had met their end.

The void seemed to reach for him, roaring in his ears, and he fixed his eyes on the ships before him.

“Throw everything at them,” he ground out. “Use the new missile. Aim it at the Shinigami.”

“But, sir—” the admiral objected.

“Do it.”

“Sir, the carriers are a much more dangerous target than—”

“I said do it!” His voice was raw with fury. He grabbed a sidearm from one of the other officers, whom he then sent sprawling. The barrel of the gun came up, pointed at the admiral. It trembled in Koel’s hands, but at this range, he wouldn’t miss.

The officers on the bridge blanched, and a few ducked under their desks.

Cowards.

“Yes, sir,” the admiral said finally. He gave the orders loudly: “Fire the grappler missile at the Shinigami.”

“Yes, sir.”

Koel knew his crew wondered how they’d survive when they had fired everything they had at the Shinigami and still had the Jotun fleet to contend with.

It was good that they were wondering. If they didn’t guess the truth, the Jotun fleet wouldn’t, either.

And when Koel drove the Avaris straight into the center of the Jotun fleet, he would leave only rubble in his wake. They would be too close to the planet to pull up at that point. They would be going too fast.

But what did it matter if he survived, after all? Everything he had worked for was in ruins.

My children…

Avaris. Uleq and Ilia. He would be with them soon. Koel swayed as he stumbled to the navigational controls. The officers scattered out of his path, mindful of the gun still in his hand.

“We fought well,” Koel told them. “We built something magnificent. This fleet was a thing of beauty. But as you know, strength and power are nothing if they are outmatched. Today, we have found ourselves outmatched.” He entered the sequence to accelerate the Avaris. “All that is left to us is to make our enemy pay for killing us.”

The officers gaped at him. The admiral understood first and ran toward Koel, but Koel leveled the gun at his chest and fired. The admiral’s body skidded and fell into one of the recessed bays, and the crew nearby screamed and scrambled away from it.

Koel pointed the gun around the bridge. He laid in coordinates, his eyes meeting theirs. “There is no escaping death now,” he told them. “We will die a glorious death together.”

The grappler missile soared toward the Shinigami, its cables humming with energy. There was no way it was getting away from him.

And then another ship appeared in the space between the Jotun fleet and the Avaris. Confused by this new target, the grappler missile altered its course.

“Sir!” The officer’s yell was instinctive. “It’s a Yennai ship. It’s reading as a Yennai ship, and the missile is locking on.”

* * *

“We’re here,” Tik’ta announced. “Just scanning the area for—”

Her voice trailed off in a squeak.

“Holy shit…” Dretkalor breathed. Dwarfing them on either side were entire fleets. Ships had already been lost, their shattered hulks twisting gently in clouds of debris. They had arrived in the middle of some sort of ceasefire, and the silence only made everything even eerier.

The scanners lit up with a wail, and Chofal screamed, pointing.

“It’s a missile! It’s locked onto us!”

“Go!” Zinqued screamed at Tik’ta. “Go, go, go, go!”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The officers on the deck rushed to the targeting systems. The crisis had broken through their shock after Koel’s orders and Koel stood frozen, staring at the screen. He still held the gun, but even he was so surprised by the sudden appearance of the other ship that pointing it at anyone didn’t occur to him.

Lotar took his chance. He tackled Koel to the floor. The gun clattered across the floor, and Koel growled in fury. His hands found Lotar’s throat.

“You can’t stop this!” There was no sanity left in his eyes.

“You’ve lost your mind!” Lotar choked out. He struggled against Koel’s grip, but the older Torcellan was surprisingly strong. Spots danced in front of Lotar’s eyes as his blood flow was cut off. “For the love of all that’s holy, do you really want to die?”

Koel threw back his head and laughed. His hands relaxed finally and he rolled away, his cackles echoing off the metal ceilings and floors. Lotar pulled himself away, heaving for breath. He met the eyes of the rest of the bridge crew, but no one knew what to do, seeing their leader run mad.

“Of course, I want to die!” Koel hissed. His gaze swept them all. “What is there left for me? My children are dead. My wife is dead. I have no legacy.”

Fury swept through Lotar. He launched himself at Koel, pounding his fist into the other Torcellan’s face. He smashed it until Koel’s blood streamed onto the metal floor.

“And what about us?” Lotar screamed. “What about us? Didn’t it occur to you that we might want to live? We don’t want to die just because you’ve lost your damned legacy!”

He saw now that Koel had never thought of that. Koel had never once considered his employees as anything more than things, there to help or hinder him. To Koel, no one else in the universe was really a person. His wife, he had killed because she questioned him. His son, he had killed to strengthen his daughter—and only because his daughter was someone who would help his own legacy grow.

Koel had never cared about anything but his own glory.

Lotar hauled the bleeding Torcellan upright and pushed him toward the console. “Undo the commands! Undo them! Now!”

Koel was still laughing. Even as Lotar had smashed his knuckles into Koel’s face, Koel never stopped laughing. He had no sense of reality anymore. He sank to the floor and looked up at Lotar, who shuddered when Koel’s eyes fixed on him.

“No,” Koel said. “It’s under my authorization, and I put it through without overrides. There’s no way to undo it now.”

* * *

The missile streaked closer. Tik’ta pushed the Julentai as fast as it would go, but the missile was accelerating. Then the Avaris pushed ahead of the rest of the fleet, gunning for the Jotun ships.

“Go!” Zinqued screamed. Caught between the planet and the dreadnought with the missile closing in the Julentai was impossibly outmatched, but some ridiculous part of him didn’t seem to grasp that.

A transmission broke through the static and the wailing alarms. “Haron’s Shield, this is the Avaris.” The voice was tight with worry. “Continue evasive maneuvers. We are attempting to reroute the missile.”

“Attempting?” Tik’ta shrieked. She hadn’t bothered to press the button for transmission, for which Zinqued was grateful. She swerved and threw everything she had into the systems. She didn’t have any time to be sending messages.

Chofal worked at the secondary desk. The Yofu didn’t bother to run back to the engine room. No changes they could make now would happen in time. She shut down auxiliary systems one by one, and the heat was already climbing.

“Haron’s Shield, we are doing everything we can. Loop around and try making a pass down in front of the fleet. We’ll try to terminate the missile in the crossfire. Maybe we’ll hit some of those Jotun bastards at the same time.”

“It’s working.” Chofal looked dazed. “It’s actually working. They think we’re a Yennai ship.”

“Good,” Dretkalor said. “Because that’s the only thing that has a chance in hell of saving our asses.”

* * *

“Holy shit,” Shinigami swore. “Everyone out of the way! Move!”

“What’s going on?” Barnabas asked worriedly. “What’s happening with that ship?”

“It’s some Yennai ship that showed up late, but that’s not the headline here. Koel’s gone stark raving mad. He’s trying to take as many of us with the dreadnought as he can, and he’s not going to pull up before he hits the planet’s surface.”

“You can’t be serious.”

She directed her attention to evasive maneuvers while responding, “I am as serious as a poutine shortage in Chicoutimi during a bonspiel. The guy’s fucking nuts. Peanut brittle. Cocktail mix with the Chex taken out. Big can of honey-roasted crazy.”

Barnabas was laughing. He abruptly stopped, frowned, and leaned closer to the screen. “I’ll be damned! Isn’t that the ship that tried to capture us before? At the Yennai headquarters, I mean.”

“That’s ridicu—” Shinigami scanned it. “Sonofabitch. It’s showing up as a Yennai ship on the scanners, but it is the same ship. I have the technical specifications and the pictures I took last time. “They’re… Well, they must be trying to… You know, I have no idea. What are they doing?”

“Regretting their life choices?” Gar suggested. He watched as the ship wavered wildly and tried to dive under the nose of the Avaris.

“Bingo,” Barnabas said. “That. Right there. That’s what they’re doing. I’d make another speech that would make them wet themselves, but I’m honestly not sure I’m scary enough to outdo a dreadnought.”

“You could always try,” Shinigami pointed out. “You can’t just bail every time you get a little competition. All right, everyone, hold on. We’re getting out of the way of the Avaris, because I’m honestly not betting on anyone being able to override Koel’s commands.”

“We could ask Koel to,” Barnabas suggested.

“Don’t have to, actually.” Shinigami switched over the screens. “We’re being hailed. Looks like Koel wants to make a speech.”

* * *

“Haron’s Shield, you are clear of the missile. I repeat, you are clear of the missile. Crossfire detected, follow heading 4481 to evade,” the communications officer shouted hurriedly into the mic. “We’re closing on the planet fast,” she whispered to her commanding officer.

At the navigation desk, Lotar had retrieved Koel’s gun and pointed it at him while the rest of the crew watched with bated breath.

No one was going to intervene. Koel had gone insane and shot the admiral. Lotar was only doing what needed to be done.

But it didn’t seem to be making any difference. Koel picked up the communications unit, and Lotar screamed with fury. He ordered Koel to undo the commands, and when Koel did not move, Lotar shot him.

Koel did not fall. He stumbled back and looked down at his stomach, where the bloodstain was spreading across his clothes. He looked up at Lotar and smiled.

“Shoot him again,” someone whispered. “We have to—”

Koel brought the comm up to his mouth.

“Assembled fleets.” He smiled at the bridge crew beatifically despite the blood streaming down his face and staining the front of his robes. Lotar stared at him in horror. They all did. “Today you have witnessed the fall of the Yennai Corporation. Those of you on the Jotun and human ships believe this is your victory, but this is no victory, not for anyone. The Yennai Corporation was a marvel, something beyond what others had ever dreamed.

“Others were scared of our vision, the Jotuns and the humans among them. They banded together to destroy us, as lesser creatures will always band together to defeat those who aspire to more. No doubt they now think to put us on trial and hold us to their laws.”

Outside the windows, the fiery glimmer of the atmosphere burned. The surface of the planet approached much too fast.

“I will not be used and shamed,” Koel told them. “I will not be made into propaganda, reduced to a mere civilian in one of their jails. And I will save my crews as well. I will keep them free of such petty moralizing. We will die with honor!”

Before any of them could stop him, he suddenly lunged at Lotar. Lotar struggled, but Koel snatched the gun and shot the control panel, splintering it, then put the gun to his head, pulling the trigger as the officers backed away.

* * *

The Avaris sped through the black, hitting the atmosphere with a visible flare of heat. Jotun ships, scattering before it, accelerated full-bore to get out of the way of its massive sides. Shinigami wove between them so as not to hit anyone, and her crew looked at one another, jaws open.

“He’s crazy as balls,” Gar said finally.

“He— Where did you learn that phrase?” Barnabas blinked.

“Tabitha.” Gar watched the dizzying view on the screen as Shinigami swerved and banked. “She tried to explain it, but it didn’t make much sense. He really didn’t care about any of them in the end, did he? He would rather kill all of them himself than let us ‘win’ by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Yes,” Barnabas agreed softly.

“I didn’t expect that.” Tafa came forward to watch as the Avaris smashed into the surface of the barren planet at last, shattering and causing a monumental shockwave. “I thought he would fight to the end. I used to dream of taking away everything Mustafee cared about and making him live as I had lived, but now I’m glad I didn’t. What would he have done to the people around him if he’d faced death? He might have killed them like Koel did.”

They nodded quietly.

“Radio back to High Tortuga,” Barnabas told Shinigami. “The real one this time, mind you.” There was the shadow of a smile at his lips. “Tell them the Yennai Corporation is gone. We’ll clean up the dregs of it at our leisure.”

Shinigami looked at him. “A full report will show my data breach and my internal protocols in that case—”

“I know them,” Barnabas said, untroubled. “And I think I speak for everyone when I say, ‘don’t you dare.’”

“I would have if I could have done so at the time.”

“I know that. So I’m glad you couldn’t.” Barnabas smiled at her. “Also, I have a present for you on High Tortuga.”

“What is it?” She looked intrigued now, diverted by the change in topic.

“You’ll see when we get there.” Barnabas settled back in his chair. “Now for the important question. A game of chess while we make our way there?”

“It depends. Did you clean the blood off the chessboard?”

* * *

Among the horde of fleeing Yennai ships now being picked off by the Jotun fleet, the Julentai dove around the edge of the planet and accelerated away into the black.

“D’you think the Shinigami noticed us?” Chofal asked nervously.

“Of course not,” Zinqued declared. They’d gotten away with their lives, and he was absurdly grateful.

Still, he was a bit glum as well. Now they had to come up with a whole new plan to catch the Shinigami.

He’d think of something, he decided. He always did.

It wouldn’t be long before that ship was theirs.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The sounds of steel drums carried along the sea breeze. Nearby, in a vat of sea water, Jotuns bobbed and darted around one another. Gar thought they were dancing. Shinigami was sure it was a Jotun fight club.

Tafa was painting it.

Barnabas, meanwhile, tried to teach a very unwilling patient how to walk.

“Come on.” He held out his hands. “Just one step. You’re doing really well.”

“You keep it up with that encouraging crap,” Shinigami said testily, “and I’ll rip your eyes out. I can do it now, too. I have fingers.” She took a step, moved the wrong leg the next time, and toppled into the sand.

“Somehow, I’m not too worried about your vengeance.” Barnabas grinned down at her. “Do you want me to help you up?”

“I’ll crush your throat.”

“Uh-huh.” He surveyed the ocean as she levered herself up.

She’d been ecstatic when she saw her mechanical body. Barnabas, having conversed with Bethany Anne about TOM’s progress, had commissioned an avatar in the image Shinigami most often used—a cross between Tabitha and Bethany Anne.

Tabitha had proceeded to announce that she needed to make sure the ass was up to her standards before she could let Shinigami be installed in the body. Apparently, it had passed muster.

None of them had anticipated how difficult it would be to move in it, however.

“You’d think there would be subroutines for this sort of thing,” Barnabas mused.

“There are.” Shinigami looked annoyed. “I’m not using them. I should be able to walk on my own, shouldn’t I?”

“It takes humans what, a year? More? And even then they aren’t good at it for—”

“I’m not a baby!”

“Uh-huh.” Barnabas was still looking away. Shinigami was very prickly about having anyone help her with this. She’d wanted to have a sparring match with Barnabas as soon as she woke up.

Then she had pushed herself sideways off the bed and shattered a chair by landing on it—not to mention Gar’s leg, since he’d been sitting in the chair in question. He was still quite wary around her, which didn’t help her mood.

“All right, I’m trying again.” Shinigami brushed her dark hair behind her ear—a process that involved hitting herself in the face twice and nearly tangling her fingers in her hair—and took a few shaky steps. “It’s easier when I don’t think about it too hard for some reason.”

“A lot of things are like that.”

“Yes, but do you know how hard it is for an AI not to give something their whole focus?”

“Do you remember when you first made an avatar?” Barnabas asked her. He strolled along at her side, his hands behind his back. “You sat perfectly still and never blinked. Now you laugh, you make the eyes look at things you’re focusing on, you fidget—all of it. You’ll get the hang of this too.”

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose so? Let’s have some verve.”

“Fine. I will get the hang of this. I will crush my enemies and see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women. Happy now, Mr. Show Some Verve?”

“Not quite.” Barnabas pulled off his shoes, tossed them into the shade of the trees at the edge of the sand, and waded into the water. He smiled. “Now I’m happy.”

“You can’t be serious. Why are you wading into the water?”

“It’s warm. It feels nice. You have nerve endings, yes?”

“Yes, but I hate them.” She shuddered. “Constant biofeedback. Take a step, feel some pain. Adjust your posture, feel some pain. How do humans deal with it without going mad? Actually…” She frowned. “That explains a lot. You’re all mad.”

“As hatters,” Barnabas agreed. “I don’t think that’s why, but I could be wrong. You’re walking very well right now, by the way.”

“Am I? I wonder how I’m doing that. I… Oh, sonofa—” She tumbled into the sand. “You say not to think about it, and then you draw my attention to it?”

“Yeah, that one was on me. I’m sorry.”

She stuck out an arm and tripped him, sending him sprawling into the waves. “There. Now we’re even.”

“I liked this coat!”

“I’m sure the saltwater will wash out. Don’t be such a baby.” She wiggled her toes in the sand. “This feels peculiar.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Barnabas sat up but didn’t bother to get out of the water. He stretched out his legs and leaned back on his hands, looking at the sky. “You know, aside from the sky being too purple, this is a nice place. I bet we could start a proper resort for humans here.”

“You want to run a hotel?”

“No, that sounds terrible. Just a large building for people to visit when they wanted to. I think Tabitha would like it.”

“Probably.” Shinigami made a few attempts to pull her hair into a ponytail and gave up. “Jeltor’s coming.”

“How can you tell that’s Jeltor?”

“I put a little sticker on his suit when he wasn’t paying attention.”

Barnabas snorted and bit his lip. “Hello, Jeltor,” he said as the Jotuns approached.

“You’re getting better at recognizing us!” Jeltor sounded pleased.

“I… Er, yes.”

Liar.

I can’t admit to him that they all look like blobs of grape jelly to me. He’ll be crushed.

Shinigami scowled at him. You shouldn’t lie, she said primly.

Where is this sudden streak of morality coming from?

She snickered and looked at Jeltor. “So, how is the party going?”

“Very well.” Jeltor smiled as fireworks exploded above. “It’s not every day you avoid getting crushed to death by a dreadnought, after all.

“And we are drinking in memory of those we lost in the battle.”

Shinigami studied her hands. When she had been an avatar, she could just disappear rather than decipher what to do with her expression. She bit her lip.

“Plus,” Jeltor continued, determinedly cheerful, “now we have to go back and get hauled up on treason charges by the Senate while we try to haul them up on treason charges, so we might as well have a good party before we go. We won’t be getting any for a while, I think.”

“Would you like us to testify?” Barnabas asked him.

“I’d like you to get Gar before he’s sick in the pool.”

“Dear Lord.” Barnabas stood and hauled Shinigami to her feet. “I forgot that we didn’t give him the upgrades to make him impervious to alcohol.”

“He said he didn’t want them. I think Luvendan was a bit on the boring side and he’s been wanting to cut loose. You know, get drunk, get in bar fights—that sort of thing.”

“I’m going to regret bringing him aboard, aren’t I?” They headed off through the trees. “Next time, we go somewhere with no bars.”

“If you go somewhere with no bars, how are you going to find trouble to fix?” Shinigami frowned at him.

“There was that distress signal we picked up earlier today—the one from that farming planet. We could start there and see what we find. And you’ve clearly never lived in a monastery. There’s always trouble, regardless of whether there’s a dive bar for it to happen in.” Barnabas looked at the sky with a grin. “There’s always trouble,” he repeated. “So let’s get Gar, feed him some coffee, and go find it.”

FINIS

Author Notes - Natalie Grey

July 20, 2018

Thank you for reading Paladin! As always, diving into the Kurtherian universe has been amazingly fun, and I can only hope you’ve had as much fun as I have when writing. With Tafa’s recovery, Gar growing into his abilities, and Barnabas and Shinigami forging a true friendship, there’s a lot to root for, and that’s the type of series you really hope to get to write.

The publishing team has, as always, been amazing. Jeff with his amazing covers, Lynne and her team on editing, Steve helping all of us stay on task, Michael bouncing plot ideas around with me, and the beta readers helping me keep everything tight! I’m lucky to work with this team and in this world.

There’s a lot coming up this year: more Dragon Corps, more Barnabas, and (as we go into next year) some more of Nicky’s story, as well as a two-book series of steampunky, dragony adventures! I can’t wait to share it all with you, so definitely sign up for the mailing list if you haven’t already:

https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/w0k9j4

Happy reading,

Nat

Author Notes - Michael Anderle

July 24, 2018

First, THANK YOU for reading through both this story to the end and my Author Notes.

Just the other day, Natalie reached out through our Slack channel and asked for story ideas for our pals Barnabas and Shinigami, and how we might want to tell them.

I suggested that we go ‘on the road.’ Of course, it’s obvious you can’t quite go on the road in space, but the idea is there in principle. So, my version was to go to different areas (maybe space stations?) and track down those messing with people and adjudicating a little Barnabas Justice along the way.

He might swing through and say hi to the peeps from time to time, but this would be the road show for the two of them (and the rest of the team).

BUT, as I considered what to write in these Author Notes, I wondered what YOU would tell Natalie if she had asked? If you have ideas, why not send them to her? You can find her at her Facebook page here:

https://www.facebook.com/nataliegreyauthor/ .

GO ahead…reach out!

Personally, I hope about thirty (30) of you do this, and pummel her (in a good way) with all sorts of directions you hope to see Barnabas and Shinigami head in!

For those interested, Bethany Anne will be making a return August 10, 2018 (about two and a half weeks from when I’m writing this) and this time, Michael is responsible for a little baby-sitting.

However, there is a reason he was able to last over a thousand years on Earth and it had a lot to do with his ability to see into the future and figure out what he needed to keep his sanity.

(It’s a pretty cool solution, and I want one or three myself.)

However, it has a drawback, and John Grimes might find out first-hand the challenges of Michael’s…toy.

Finally, it’s time they get serious about building a barbeque pit, but the Queen has put her size seven-and-a-half shoes firmly down on where she doesn’t want it, on pain of pain if they fail to listen to her.

Will Michael do that? Or, is he truly that stubborn?

Check out the pre-order (sometime soon) to make sure you have it when Amazon drops it at midnight Aug 10th.

I hope your summer is FANTASTIC. We will be publishing another twenty books to keep you up all night and sleeping all day before summer ends!

Ad Aeternitatem,

Michael

Justiciar

Vigilante Chronicles Book 5

Chapter One

Thirty minutes out from the stranded ship, Shinigami reported.

“Heading to the bridge.” Barnabas whistled as he made his way through the white corridors of the Shinigami. The ship raced through a particularly lonely patch of what Shinigami had nicknamed “the Jellyfish Sector.”

The name referred to one of the more noteworthy races in this area of space, the Jotun. They looked like multicolored blobs of jelly and tended to transport themselves around in mechanical suits with a range of intriguing features.

Barnabas had worked with some of the Jotun Navy in his last mission, which had given him a great deal of respect for the Jotuns as a species and an absolute hatred of the Jotun Parliament.

Corrupt bastards, the lot of them. They had signed their people over to a bloodthirsty corporation in return for a few beach houses and Lord only knew what other trinkets. Shinigami had uncovered enough dirty money trails running through their system that Barnabas could have made nearly every member of Parliament a pariah in society. He hadn’t released the information yet, but he fully intended to if they pissed him off in the future.

Shinigami had accused him of blackmail. Barnabas maintained it wasn’t blackmail if they didn’t know his plan. Gar and Tafa, meanwhile, had wisely opted not to weigh in.

Barnabas turned a corner and gave a yell as he tripped over a body. Eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling while pale hands lay palm up, fingers slightly curled.

Ghostly snickering echoed from the nearby speakers. “You look ridiculous,” Shinigami told Barnabas in deep amusement.

“For the last time…” Barnabas recovered his footing and adjusted his vest, glaring at the speakers, “do not leave your body in the corridor. You have rooms of your own now. You pestered me about them for days.”

“I need clothes.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t use your body.” Barnabas hauled the limp thing up by the armpits and dragged it to the side of the corridor.

“I do too!”

“Then I don’t suppose you’d help me with this? Mechanical bodies are heavy.”

“You could use the exercise. Too much fruit juice.”

“Low.” Barnabas knew she was only teasing. With his upgrades, he was practically incapable of carrying extra weight. Still, Shinigami had discovered something that he had managed to hide from nearly everyone else: he was incredibly vain. She needled him about it at regular intervals, making fun of his hair, his clothing and now his looks. He smoothed a hand over his stomach and glared at the speakers again. “And you’re hardly one to get on my case about exercise. How long since you last used this body?”

Shinigami flickered into being as a projection. With her arms crossed and one hip jutted out, she looked unimpressed.

“It is not the same thing at all. I don’t need to work my muscles or increase my cardiovascular function.”

“On the contrary.” Barnabas leaned forward with a smile. “It’s very similar. You, like anyone in training, need to learn to make your body do what you want it to. You need to learn to interpret its feedback. You find this process frustrating, as we do. Therefore…” His smile broadened, and he shrugged slightly, “you slack.”

Shinigami’s face turned stony. “I am not slacking. I am flying this ship!”

“Says an AI who once told me that she had plenty of capacity to handle multiple projects at once. Are you running out of memory? Do you need a defrag?” Barnabas took pleasure in waltzing directly through Shinigami’s projection.

“Listen, you ingrate, I am not going to take this abuse from you!”

“Mmmhmm. Well, may I remind you that you very much wanted to—what was it you said, exactly?—ah, yes ’smash some skulls in.’” Barnabas cast a look over his shoulder.

“I can do that!”

“You definitely cannot. I am not letting you off this ship and into combat until I think you’re ready.”

Shinigami created another projection right in front of him, causing him to stop briefly on instinct. She snickered at his expression. “Ah, yes, the much-vaunted human intellect. We’re much better off with you in charge.”

“Let’s try that experiment with you,” Barnabas muttered. “You’ll trip over your own feet.”

“I will not. This body is an atrocity and is far too difficult to use.”

“So we’ll take the body back,” Barnabas said airily.

“No! It’s mine.”

“You don’t want it, and I’m sure Achronyx could use one.”

Shinigami huffed but did not answer. A moment later, Barnabas heard a sound behind him. He turned to see the body come to life. It was always a somewhat disturbing process to watch it animate, and he grimaced when the chest shuddered and the eyes blinked.

It took two tries for Shinigami to get up off the floor. “This is harder for me than you,” she complained to Barnabas. “AIs aren’t meant to have to learn this sort of thing.”

“You wanted to learn this,” Barnabas pointed out. He made sure not to let his face twitch with amusement while the body walked jerkily toward him. “Besides, you have far more memory to create things like subroutines. You can build an entirely new way of learning to use a body. And have you seen little kids learning to walk before? They’re not good at it.”

“I saw holos of Christina— “

“Christina doesn’t count.”

They made their way to the bridge, Barnabas ambling with his hands in his pockets, Shinigami swearing both out of the speakers and the mechanical body as she struggled to walk smoothly.

Barnabas refrained from suggesting she speak to Jeltor. He had mentioned it already, and Shinigami had been resistant to the idea of, as she said, “Having a jellyfish teach me how to walk.” Barnabas thought Jeltor was probably the best person to teach her, but he was trying to learn to keep his mouth shut.

He wasn’t very good at it yet.

On the bridge, he found Tafa sitting at the navigator’s desk watching the charted route and making minute adjustments. She flashed them both a smile.

“I thought you said you were flying the ship,” Barnabas said to Shinigami.

“I’m backup,” Shinigami replied, with great dignity. “Tafa doesn’t know all the ins and outs of the ship’s capabilities yet.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas thought Tafa was showing an innate grasp of the skill, but he did not voice that thought. He took a seat in the captain’s chair and watched while Shinigami struggled to sit gracefully in the next chair over. “You’re getting better at that.”

“I still tip at the end.” She sounded disgruntled. “How do you all avoid doing that?”

“It has to do with the balance of the weight and committing to the movement.”

“Show me,” Shinigami ordered.

With a roll of his eyes, Barnabas complied, standing up and sitting down several times while Shinigami watched.

When he finished, he sat down and crossed his legs, only to jump as Gar’s voice said, “What in the sea was that all about?”

“Shinigami is learning how to sit.” Barnabas looked over as Gar joined them. Gar prided himself on being more cosmopolitan than most Luvendi, who were famously insular. He was also a good deal less amoral than many others of his species who had left their home planet.

Still, the more comfortable he became with his new shipmates, the more Luvendi colloquialisms peppered his speech. Using “the sea” when others might use “the universe” was one of them—a giant ocean covered Luvendan, and the Luvendi lived in giant submerged towers.

Gar sat on Barnabas’ left, unaware of Shinigami leaning forward to watch.

“He’s more graceful than you are,” Shinigami told Barnabas, needling him again with a wicked grin.

“Mainly because I have spent most of my life worried that my bones would fracture if I weren’t careful,” Gar pointed out. Tall and thin, he nonetheless had muscle tone that no other Luvendi in the universe could claim. Shinigami had modified him in the Pod-doc, increasing his bone strength—Luvendi were famously fragile—and increasing his healing speed and his reflexes, and enhancing his senses.

Now, unaware of the argument going on under the surface of the conversation, Gar nodded at the screen. “Any more details on the stranded ship?”

“Only a few,” Shinigami reported. “I ran what I could through the reports from local stations. If it’s the ship I think it is, it’s civilian. Has a large cargo hold, probably for food transport as a side business but is mainly for passengers. Lots of bunks.”

“No word on the nature of the emergency?” Barnabas had picked up the distress call a few days earlier while attending a celebration of the defeat of the Yennai Corporation. Since the ship was stranded in a very remote area, he had decided to pursue the lead.

After all, it was unlikely that anyone else could get to them faster than the Shinigami could. With the best of Etheric Empire technology, the ship had the security features necessary to venture into an area potentially filled with pirates.

In all honesty, Barnabas was hoping they would encounter a few. He was longing for a nice uncomplicated bit of work, something that didn’t involve massive shadowy corporations that had infiltrated multiple governments and business sectors.

Perhaps someone on the ship would have a good lead to follow.

Shinigami’s face went blank. While she had learned the knack of emoting with her projections, she still did not think to do so when she was inhabiting her new mechanical body. “I’m picking something up,” she said in an emotionless voice.

She brought the disturbance up on the screen, and everyone frowned and leaned forward to look.

The ship most likely thought it was invisible to the Shinigami’s detection. It was approaching from a nearby cloud of debris, which Shinigami now scanned. The scan turned up pieces of two distinct ships, one Brakalon and one Shrillexian.

“The wrecks are recent,” she told Barnabas.

Barnabas sat back with a frown. “What do you think the odds are,” he asked no one in particular, “that a ship hiding here with two recent wrecks is not connected to the ship making the distress call?”

There was a silence. Tafa, who had not been involved in any of their combat missions before, was staring at the screen with wide eyes. Gar looked intrigued, and Shinigami still looked blank as she sorted through data.

Finally, and somewhat mechanically, she turned her head to look at Barnabas. Her features were a mix of Bethany Anne’s and Tabitha’s, but the feral grin was entirely her own.

“Shall we say hello?” she asked sweetly.

Barnabas grinned back. “It would only be polite.”

Chapter Two

“Hail them.” Barnabas nodded at the ship on the screen. “And tell me as soon as you know anything about where this ship originated.”

He was curious. It was a type of ship he had never seen before—a light, sleek scouting vessel, perhaps. The wreckage of the other ships, however, suggested that this ship had more weapons than most scouts Barnabas had seen.

They had taken down a Shrillexian vessel, after all, and you couldn’t do that without some combination of skill and weaponry. Shrillexians had fully earned the hatred they received from other species—they weren’t slouches in the fighting department.

Shinigami’s avatar would have nodded, but her body didn’t yet. She was spending all her energy hitting the buttons to hail the other ship with her actual fingers rather than using her internal processes.

As a result, Barnabas and Gar were both still craning to look at her hand when the holo connected. Both sat up, Barnabas clearing his throat self-consciously and Gar crossing his legs in a vague mimicry of Barnabas. He also tried to clear his throat, but the sound came out sort of like a hiccup. Barnabas felt his lips twitch and hoped he didn’t look too undignified.

He peered at the darkness of the screen. “Shinigami, the call hasn’t connected.”

“The connection is—”

“I do not wish to be seen,” the pilot of the other ship said. Barnabas guessed that the voice had been run through several filters to distort it, because it was oddly mechanical. “How are you seeing my ship?”

“Oh,” Barnabas asked innocently, “was it cloaked?”

Gar gave a snort and pressed his lips shut to hold back more laughter.

On the other end, there was a cold pause. “Leave this area,” the pilot ordered finally. “This will be your only warning.”

“Why do we need to leave?” Barnabas was quite enjoying acting oblivious. He painted a look of concern on his face.

“I have ordered you to leave. As I said, there will be no further warnings.”

“Yes, but who is ordering us?” The words didn’t have quite the same aura of innocence to them this time. Barnabas did not like the tone of the phrase, “I have ordered you.”

There was another pause. “I have ordered you to leave,” the pilot repeated.

Barnabas tried a different tack. “We can’t leave, unfortunately. We’re responding to a distress call.”

“I responded to that call.” The answer was too quick, and even through the language barrier and the various filters, it had the cadence of someone telling a lie. “The situation has been resolved. As you can see, the distress signal has stopped broadcasting.”

“On the contrary,” Shinigami interjected. She had perfected a single posture: straight-backed, with her hands on the arms of the chair and her legs crossed, and, since she never slipped out of that posture or slouched, she looked like a queen.

Barnabas guessed it was something she had learned from watching Bethany Anne interact with people. Bethany Anne might despise the tedium of court appearances and the uselessness of political wrangling, but one thing was certain: she knew how to make an impression, and she did.

“The distress signal is still being broadcast,” Shinigami confirmed now. Her face did not change as she spoke, and she forgot to blink. It was fascinating to watch. “However, the signal is being blocked by a network of devices that share programming similarities with your ship.”

The answer did not come in words. Instead, a pair of missiles appeared on the Shinigami’s sensors in a storm of beeps. A map of the two projectiles replaced the dark holoscreen, and a touchscreen swung from Gar’s chair for him to coordinate a response. He looked at Shinigami for the go-ahead.

“I’ve taken care of— Dammit.” The speakers cut off, and Shinigami used the body instead. She turned her head somewhat unnaturally. “I’ve taken care of it,” she told Gar.

“You have to blink,” Barnabas said. “It’s making my eyes sting at this point. Just put a subroutine in there or something.”

“I’d like to point out that you’ve gotten a lot more confident in my ship-to-ship combat skills if this is what you’re focusing on.”

“Yes, well, you taking out three ships in orbit around High Tortuga made quite an impression. Blink.” Barnabas shook himself and blinked several times for good measure. He looked at the screen, where the two missiles were still showing up. “You said you took care of them?”

“I did.” Shinigami managed a smile and turned her head back to watch the screen.

Closer, the projectiles raced, and closer. Their speed did not alter in the slightest and Barnabas had the sudden thought that he had not felt the Shinigami disgorge weapons of its own. It was a well-constructed ship, but still, one could always feel a faint tremor when missiles or countermeasures launched.

“Um,” Gar said faintly, “Shinigami...”

“Wait for it,” Shinigami said sweetly.

Gar made a gesture that Barnabas guessed was the equivalent of crossing himself. Meanwhile, on the screen, the ship had changed its cloaking algorithms and was flickering on and off the sensor net as it slid into the blackness. Doubtless, it thought that the crew of the Shinigami had not yet noticed the missiles and would soon be dead.

Barnabas found it difficult to argue with that assessment at present.

“Shinigami?”

“Keep waiting.”

“Shinigami, is this so that you won’t have to spend time learning to walk?”

Shinigami said nothing.

The beeping was nearly constant now as the missiles hurtled closer, and despite himself, Barnabas was beginning to sweat a little. “I’m not going to give your body to Achronyx! That was a joke!”

Shinigami flipped her hair out of the way and leaned on one elbow, putting her chin on her fist.

“You can’t blink, but you can do that?” Barnabas demanded. “Why is this going to be the last conversation I have before I die? Shinigami, for the love of all that is holy—”

The beeping stopped. Barnabas squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the explosion to tear through the ship, and a moment later cracked one eye open to look around.

“Shinigami…”

“The missiles are not on the scanners,” Gar reported. He sounded hesitant, as though he might be misinterpreting the completely blank screen. Understandable, in Barnabas’ opinion.

“Yes, we see things as the other ship sees them. Or, more accurately...” Shinigami brought up a report on the screen. There was the fading heat signature of an explosion and shattered pieces of metal and plastic swirling.

“You…made him think we’re dead?” Barnabas felt the engines kick in. “What are we doing now?”

“Surprising him. I want to see his face.”

“And you didn’t tell us you were doing this because...”

She looked at him as though he were a complete idiot. “Because I wanted to see your faces.”

Barnabas considered this as the ship maneuvered. He sat back in his chair, tapping his fingers on the arm. “I’m going to get you for that.”

“How? Are you going to send me to my room without dinner? Will I have to mow the whole lawn, Grandpa?”

Barnabas’ face went stony. The sound of Tafa giggling in the background did nothing to improve his mood. The alien ship replaced the false images on the screen, sliding and jumping. The cameras could not seem to get a good fix on where it was. He could only hope that Shinigami did.

A moment later, however, he grinned when the ship swung around hard, and Shinigami said, with feeling, “Boo, motherfucker!”

They must have been hooked into the audio from the other ship because there was a sudden storm of cursing. Shinigami’s face went blank as she tried to interpret the words.

“Jotun, I think,” she told Barnabas in an undertone. “As for the make of the ship, I got nothing. It shares characteristics with any number of species’ ships.”

“Jotun?” Barnabas’ eyebrows shot up. That was interesting—and it was something he intended to ask Jeltor about as soon as they were out of this mess. He added equally quietly, “Dare I ask—where are the missiles?”

“Oh, that.” Shinigami wiggled her fingers.

“Seriously, you know jazz hands, but you don’t blink?”

“At this point, I’m not blinking because it annoys the crap out of you.”

Barnabas sank his head into one hand and groaned softly.

“The missiles are circling toward his ship.” Shinigami abruptly remembered to grin. The sudden change was terrifying.

“Ah.” Barnabas looked at the screen. “As you may be aware, there are two missiles headed toward you. Be so good as to answer some questions, and we may deal with them for you.”

“Who the hell are you?” the alien demanded.

“No, I said answer some questions, not ask them.”

“Leave this place!”

“He’s not very good at this, is he?” Barnabas asked generally. He focused on the dark screen once more. “So, you’re Jotun. Why are you hiding here trying to kill the ships responding to distress calls?”

There was stony silence, and then the ship tipped up and accelerated away sharply. With a whoop, Shinigami gave chase.

“I love it when they run!”

“Are you descended from coyotes? And keep the channel open.”

Shinigami shot him a grin as she guided the ship through a series of tight twists and turns to follow the escaping Jotun. She was no longer even pretending to use her body to give the commands. She had adopted one of Bethany Anne’s signature poses again, sitting at attention and swaying slightly as Shinigami used her computers to maneuver more tightly than any human could have.

“You seem to be having some trouble,” Barnabas remarked to the Jotun. He thought he heard another muttered oath. “As you see, you can’t get away from us. I don’t necessarily want you to die, simply answer some questions. The ship that’s waiting out there is still broadcasting its distress signal. If you didn’t want it broadcasting, why not simply destroy it?”

There was no answer.

Barnabas rolled his eyes and looked heavenward, praying for patience. “If you want to die for this, you can, but I admit I’m curious. What could be—”

Shinigami gave a yell, and their ship veered sideways. Barnabas gave her a confused look that disappeared a moment later when the Jotun’s ship exploded in a white-hot blaze.

“Were those its missiles?” He looked at her. “Because I think we could have—”

“No.” She gave him what Tabitha called “a Look with a capital L.” “Give me a little credit; I wouldn’t have blown him up while he still might have talked. No, he did that to himself. He set off a self-destruct.” She shrugged. “Or she, I guess. I couldn’t run a reverse on all of the voice modifiers.”

“They killed themselves?” Barnabas looked at the screen incredulously. “Rather than answer a few questions about...” His voice trailed off, and he frowned.

He did not like this in the slightest. What was on that civilian transport that could cause an unaffiliated assassin to destroy rescue ships?

“We had better find out what’s going on,” Barnabas remarked coldly.

“I agree.” Shinigami looked vaguely regretful. “Too bad he didn’t stay around a while longer. I was almost into his systems.”

“Whatever we find on the transport ship may give us the answers we need.” Barnabas shook his head.

He wasn’t particularly hopeful, however—and he wasn’t looking forward to this mission anymore, either. What had seemed like a nice, simple rescue operation was quickly becoming quite a bit more complicated.

Chapter Three

Despite its name, the Srisa was registered to a Brakalon corporation, and thus—apparently—subject to Brakalon law. In this case, the law stated that the engines must be cut, and the ship must come to a complete stop until the legal issue on board was resolved.

“Legal issue?” Barnabas asked the captain delicately. He peered into the captain’s mind, but the thoughts he saw were not entirely clear: a smashed jar of some kind, a Jotun, and a mess of the usual things that would occur to a captain, such as low food stores and angry passengers. The captain was also on his guard when it came to Barnabas, viewing him as a potential threat.

Barnabas supposed that was fair. Piracy was a big industry in almost all sectors. Several people had tried to take the Shinigami, and it wasn’t unheard of for pirates to talk their way onto ships. The captain must feel like a sitting duck.

“Err...” The captain, Kelnamon, gave a pained-looking smile and scratched his collar nervously. He was an unusual shade of greenish brown. Barnabas could not determine if that was due to long hours inside the ship, or simply a Brakalon ethnic group he had not come across before.

Kelnamon took his time answering. He peered at Barnabas. He shook his head side to side a few times.

Finally, he said, “We should speak alone.”

Barnabas gave a gracious nod and prayed for patience, motioning for Gar to stay and Shinigami to come with him. They had arranged this in advance. Shinigami would accompany Barnabas and might be able to unravel any secrets within the Srisa’s systems, and Gar and Tafa would pretend to wait docilely by the airlock until Barnabas was out of sight, after which they would set about exploring the ship.

Shinigami had wanted to explore, but Tafa had observed that there were still some issues with Shinigami's body doing things like walking. Navigating an unfamiliar ship full of ladders and unusual surfaces was going to enhance Shinigami’s jerky movements and tip people off that she wasn’t an organic life form.

Shinigami had acceded but had kept up a steady stream of muttering in Barnabas’ head even as she stalked along beside him. Barnabas meanwhile looked around and felt vaguely out of scale. The Srisa had been built with Brakalons in mind, and the corridors dwarfed most other species. Only Gar seemed tall enough, and the ship’s size made him appear even more unnaturally thin than usual.

The captain’s chambers were lived-in, but there was no luxury. It was a matter of small touches: carved icons along the metal beams, a hand-stitched blanket on the bed, a rag rug that fit the unusual shape of the floor exactly.

Barnabas had a much better opinion of Kelnamon after seeing this. Many captains became despots, glorying in their tiny realm and wanting to rule with an iron fist, and they invariably shoved as many luxuries as they could into their lives. He hadn’t gotten a striking sense of self-importance from Kelnamon so far, but a fleeting glimpse into someone’s mind wouldn’t always give the whole picture. This cabin helped flesh things out.

“So,” Barnabas leaned against the wall, one eyebrow raised, “what’s the legal issue?”

The Brakalon groaned and rubbed his temples.“I shouldn’t say. It needs to be handled by the authorities. They were supposed to arrive yesterday.”

Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged a look. They had seen the wreckage of the Brakalon ship, and now they knew why one had arrived so quickly.

Barnabas cleared his throat. “I’m afraid that ship isn’t coming. There was interference.” He tried to keep his voice light to avoid making things sound too meaningful. He did not particularly want to get caught up in the story of the ship they had encountered—not until they knew what was happening with the Srisa, at any rate.

“What do you mean it’s not coming?” Kelnamon looked at him worriedly.

“It’s like this,” Shinigami said.

Shinigami—

No, I got this, it’s cool.

“It’s cool”?

Yeah. It’s cool. She tossed her dark hair over her shoulder and gave the Brakalon captain a grimace. “That Brakalon police ship? It’s in lots of little pieces with some other ships also in lots of little pieces. About half an hour...” She considered, looking around, and then pointed. “That way.”

Most people don’t know that sort of thing off-hand, and why did he need to know the direction?

I don’t know what information you people find useful.

You’re insane. Also, your bedside manner needs work.

Who’s at a bedside?

It’s an expression.

Kelnamon, unaware of the conversation going on between the two of them, looked alarmed. “You saw it?” His eyes narrowed. “Or...”

“We had nothing to do with the accident,” Barnabas assured him. He gave Shinigami a severe look. Behave yourself. “We were surprised that there was another ship already here, given how remote you were. This explains why the ship was there, but I’m afraid it doesn’t explain why it was destroyed.”

The Brakalon went an even more sickly shade of brownish green. It must be a sign of stress, Barnabas decided. Kelnamon began to pace around his little patch of the room.

“We don’t have enough supplies to stay here much longer. We have to get this cleared up.”

“Mmm. Well, given that your friends won’t be arriving anytime soon, perhaps you could tell us what’s going on?” Barnabas gave him a pleasant schmoozing-over-martinis sort of smile. “After all, I have some legal credentials.”

And you call me clueless, Shinigami commented.

What?

You think that’s going to win you any friends?

He needs police. We’re…kind of police.

He’s nervous, you were a Ranger, and you radiate that you’re going to cause massive trouble wherever you go.

I do not!

You do. But don’t take my word for it. See what he says. She didn’t look at Barnabas, but her face glowed with self-satisfied pleasure.

She had a point, in that the captain looked nervous rather than reassured. Kelnamon was wringing his hands, and finally said, “What sort of legal experience?” His tone sounded like he was expecting to hear Barnabas admit to going around lopping people’s heads off at the drop of a hat.

Go on, Shinigami urged wickedly, Tell him.

I’m not sure this is a good idea.

She was grinning like a Cheshire Cat by now, and Barnabas wished he hadn’t said anything. He had no choice, however. He met the captain’s eyes and gave a small shrug. “Before the Etheric Empire disbanded, I was one of the Empress’ Rangers.”

“He was Ranger One,” Shinigami clarified.

The Brakalon looked more nervous than ever. “This is Brakalon business. There’s no reason the Etheric Empire has to get involved.”

“There is no Etheric Empire anymore,” Barnabas explained. “I am no longer an instrument of the Empress’ Justice, but instead of…Justice in general.” When Kelnamon looked blankly at him, he clarified: “I travel, find issues that require intervention, and aid anyone who needs me. At present, it seems like you need someone.”

The captain looked like a very massive deer caught in headlights.

Barnabas fought the urge to sigh deeply. He drew himself up, smiled his best do-not-even-think-of-weaseling-out-of-this smile, and asked, “So what’s going on?”

Kelnamon was startled into speech. Barnabas’ question didn’t offer the possibility of turning down help, and in any case, the captain was desperate. He dropped into his chair—which creaked ominously—and began, “One of the passengers was murdered.”

Oh, now this is interesting, Shinigami commented.

You can say that again. Barnabas kept his face from showing any emotion and nodded for the captain to continue, moving to take the other chair.

What he did not do was waste time feigning shock and horror. Most people would, and Kelnamon might allow his emotions to get the better of him, allowing not only shock to overwhelm him, but also fear about allowing Barnabas to intervene. At Barnabas’s nod, however, the captain shook himself and simply continued with the tale.

“It happened in his cabin. A crew member went to clean the room, and he was dead. It was neatly done. Someone had gone through his things.”

“You say, ‘Neatly done.’ Tell me about that.” Barnabas was intrigued.

“The wires that held—well, he was Jotun. I should mention that, or it won’t make sense.”

Coincidence? Barnabas asked. A Jotun dead, and another hiding near the place of the murder dispatching anyone who might try to investigate.

Shinigami didn’t even bother responding to such an obvious question.

Kelnamon gave a few half-hearted attempts at explaining power sources and electronic systems and finally gave up. “His suit was ruined. When I arrived, I smashed the tank to get him out, but it was too late. He had already overheated—and suffocated.” As he spoke, the memory played out in his mind vividly, and Barnabas could see the truth of it.

“That’s how you’d do it, I guess.” Barnabas scratched his head.

The captain gave him a look. “Which is why the Jotuns have a very large number of backups and safety measures in their suits.”

Barnabas paused. “So you’re suggesting...”

“The person who did this knew a lot about the suits in general, and probably knew a lot about his suit in particular,” Kelnamon said flatly. “They chose a time when Captain Ferqar—his friend—was out—”

“Tell me about the friend,” Barnabas interrupted. A conveniently-absent bunkmate was an interesting detail.

“Another ship’s captain,” the captain explained. He shrugged. “Nothing particularly noteworthy about him. Well, I guess the fact that they were traveling with us in the first place. But it happens.”

“Another ship’s captain, as in, you’re saying that the murdered Jotun was also a ship’s captain?”

“Something in the navy.” The Brakalon shrugged. “I don’t know what, though. We sent a message to report it to them, and no one has come to check. We got word from someone in the government that they had received the message, and then…nothing.” Kelnamon looked at Barnabas. “You said there were more destroyed ships. Was that one of them?”

“A Jotun ship was destroyed,” Barnabas said neutrally.

“Great. So no one’s coming to help.”

I’m here, Barnabas commented to Shinigami, somewhat nettled.

We. We’re here. Don’t be so self-important.

Are you taking up murder investigations now?

Might as well. I’d make a good detective. The captain’s been pretty honest with you, by the way—that is, assuming Brakalons have the same tells as humans for lying. No increased heart rate, sweating, or other signs of stress. His eyes don’t shift suddenly to one side when he speaks.

Research whether those are tells for Brakalons, Barnabas told her. I won’t need them, but they’ll be useful for Gar and Tafa.

The captain barely noticed the small pause in their conversation. “And no one else will be coming because those other ships were supposed to handle it and they haven’t reported back,” Kelnamon said tonelessly.

“Yes.” Barnabas considered this. “Therefore, I will be happy to investigate the murder and apprehend the killer. I will even be happy to bring them back to the proper jurisdiction.” When the captain looked at him warily, Barnabas shrugged. “You’re floating here with a shipload of fractious passengers and dwindling supplies, losing paying time, and you’ve got a murderer on the loose.”

The captain gulped and nodded. “Right. I’ll, uh—right. Given the circumstances, I think it would be possible to turn this investigation over to you.”

“Good.” It was convenient, especially since Barnabas had intended to investigate the murder whether the captain said yes or no.

Heads up, Shinigami reported, someone is trying to get onto our ship.

Species?

Not sure. And without knowing that, it’s hard to determine gender, either.

Hmm. You have footage of them?

Yes.

File that away. I wouldn’t rule out curiosity or simple panic at this point, but it’s good to have a trail.

So…you’re saying I can’t zap them?

You can’t zap them. And you can’t use flamethrowers.

We officially know each other too well.

Agreed. Barnabas nodded to the captain, the exchange with Shinigami having taken only a split second. “Tell me everything you know.”

“I don’t know much,” the captain admitted. “His friend hasn’t said much. If you asked me, I’d say he had something to hide, but we have accounted for all his movements. We did check.” He sounded defensive.

“Good,” Barnabas said again. “I’ll need a timeline of his movements from when he got on the ship, as well as the deceased’s… What was his name, by the way?”

“Huword.”

Barnabas nodded. “We’ll start with your suspicions. Take me to Huword’s traveling companion.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Kelnamon nodded, and his emotions were so strong that Barnabas did not even have to reach out to feel them.

The captain was terrified. Of what, Barnabas could not yet say. It could be nothing, he told himself as he followed Kelnamon from the room. With the Brakalon government ship destroyed, a murderer on board, and a strange authority taking over the case, Kelnamon had plenty of reasons to be worried.

But as his fears swirled, one thing was clear: Barnabas was at the center of them.

And why, Barnabas wondered, might that be?

Chapter Four

Before speaking to the dead captain’s traveling companion, Barnabas detoured back to the Shinigami to call Jeltor.

He had a secondary motive as well: getting his crew back onto the ship now that he knew there was a murderer on the loose. He was worried that one of them would ask the wrong questions and get hurt.

He knew better than to tell any of them this, however. He had the sneaking suspicion that the first thing Gar and Shinigami would try to do would be to prove him wrong and go off asking questions.

Tafa, on the other hand, would probably be sensible about the whole thing. Barnabas enjoyed having someone on the ship who didn’t have a death wish.

Shinigami connected the call while Barnabas sipped a glass of fruit juice. The ship was down to one of its last two cases, and he was beginning to get anxious about finishing their mission in time to go to High Tortuga and get more. Aebura, an Ubuara female who lived on the planet, had a secret recipe that Barnabas adored, and no matter how much the others teased him, he couldn’t quite give up his addiction.

The screen cleared to show a Jotun. Which Jotun, Barnabas was not quite sure. He had begun to learn the vague feel of his acquaintances’ thoughts and generally used that to identify individual Jotuns in person, but that wasn’t a tactic he could use on a holocall.

“Jeltor?” He tapped the side of his screen as though it weren’t working. “Video hasn’t come online yet.”

Liar.

Why are you watching?

I watch everything.

Luckily, no deception was necessary. “It’s me,” Jeltor said. The voice filtering from his suit was warm and pleasant.

“Oh, good. How are you?” Jeltor had been the subject of a trial for treason, the charges having been brought against him by corrupt senators. Although Jeltor had assured him that it would be fine, Barnabas had worried about leaving before the Senate had dropped the charges.

“I’m fine.” Jeltor sounded amused now. “Are you going to call every few days like a—what was the phrase Shinigami used?—mother hen?”

Barnabas was opening his mouth to argue when he realized that the term suited him rather well. He cleared his throat self-consciously. “I don’t see the problem with checking on my friends.”

“It’s much appreciated,” Jeltor hastened to say. “On the other hand, don’t you think you have more important things to worry about? I get the sense that fighting smugglers and corporations is a regular day-to-day thing for you.” His body bobbed in a way that suggested emotion, and a moment later, he asked, “Speaking of which, did you find the ship making that distress call?”

“Unfortunately, that’s my other reason for calling.” Barnabas considered how best to approach this. “It’s a Brakalon-registered civilian transport. Tell me, what do you know of a Captain Huword?”

“Huword?” Jeltor sounded surprised. “Great guy.”

“So you know him,” Barnabas confirmed with a sinking feeling in his gut.

“Know him? We went through the naval academy together.” Jeltor chuckled. “You could say we were rivals, but really, we were good friends. We were just in the same ability class together, and we always tried to outdo one another. It wasn’t just messing around, either. I think it kept us both sharp.”

“Ability class.” Barnabas frowned. The Jotun Naval captains controlled whole ships in the same way normal Jotuns controlled their bio-suits. “You mean, the same class of ships?”

“Yeah.” Jeltor bobbed slightly. “Both of us tested up to frigate class. Not what we wanted, of course, but most people don’t even make it into the academy to start with.”

Barnabas nodded. The idea of trying to control the entire function of a warship with his mind was enough to give him a splitting headache. He gestured for Jeltor to keep talking. He did not want to tell the Jotun that his friend was dead. It was a bit cold, but he wanted, as much as possible, to get a good picture of the type of person Huword had been before Jeltor knew he was dead.

After all, people didn’t get murdered for no reason, and the lack of other murders suggested that someone had targeted Huword specifically. Not because he’d interrupted another crime, for instance.

“There’s not much more to say, I guess.” Jeltor sounded nonplussed. “He was recently moved to the Gar’aemon. That might be something.” Seeing Barnabas’ confusion, he explained, “They moved him from one frigate to another. Huword was captain of the Juteld, which flies with the main bulk of the navy. We haven’t been in a war in ages, so there wasn’t much to do there, but it was in the center of everything. The Gar’aemon is a scout ship. It patrols the borders of our territory. A lot more to do, but possibly a demotion. No one was sure.” He paused. “I hadn’t had a chance to speak to him about it.”

Barnabas leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes at the far wall, spinning a pen between his fingers as he thought. A possible demotion was an interesting detail, but he would think it more likely that the demoted captain would be the killer rather than the victim.

“What about Huword’s other friends?” Asking about enemies might give Jeltor a suspicion of what was going on.

Jeltor considered this, and Barnabas wished he knew what the Jotun was thinking. “It’s hard to think of anyone in particular,” Jeltor said finally. “Gollwin, maybe? I haven’t kept up with Huword lately so I couldn’t tell you.”

“But you remember him fondly.”

“Oh, yes. I can’t think of many who wouldn’t. Just the usual assortment everyone builds up, romantic rivals and so on, and there weren’t even many of those who didn’t like Huword.”

Barnabas tried not to get sidetracked by the idea of a Jotun romance. Would there be flowers of some kind? What kind of music did jellyfish listen to when they—

He’d been living with Shinigami for too long.

“Why are you asking?” Jeltor inquired now.

Barnabas steeled himself. “He was murdered.” There was a long pause, during which the Jotun did not move. “Jeltor?”

“Murdered?” Jeltor repeated faintly.

Barnabas grimaced. “I’m afraid so. Hence the distress call.”

“Why were they on a civilian transport?”

“I don’t know.” Barnabas shook his head. “I was hoping you could tell me. Shed some light on who Huword was, and why someone might want to kill him.”

“It wasn’t…some random thing, then.” Jeltor was clearly agitated, the light bouncing off his trembling body as it floated in his suit.

Barnabas thought of the mysterious Jotun ship, and the network of satellites Shinigami had seen. “No. At this point, there’s no chance. He was targeted. The killer knew the workings of Huword's suit and was blocking anyone from coming to investigate.”

“What?”

“There was another ship waiting, and it had destroyed two ships who responded to the signal. It tried to take us out as well.”

“You captured it, right?” Jeltor was pulsing now, something Barnabas assumed meant he was angry.

“We tried. They self-destructed. There’s allegedly a Jotun government ship on the way, but they haven’t shown up yet, and Shinigami hasn’t seen them on the scanners. The Brakalon government ship was destroyed, as was a Shrillexian I assume had come to prey on the Srisa while it was stopped.”

Jeltor thrashed slightly in the water. “Murdered,” he repeated. “It isn’t possible. It can’t be! He was so young. He was my age!”

“I know.” Barnabas realized he had no idea what Jeltor’s age was. “I hoped you would tell me something that would make it obvious why he was killed, but it doesn’t sound like he had any particular enemies.”

“None who would do something like this!” Jeltor twisted and turned inside his suit’s tank. “And who would do something like this? Why hold other ships away from the Srisa instead of just destroying it outright? It doesn’t make sense. Who was running that ship?”

“A Jotun, we’re fairly sure, but the ship was not of a make we’d ever seen before.”

“Another Jotun?” Jeltor lapsed into a stream of cursing that did not particularly require translation—which was good since apparently a great deal of it was colloquial and wasn’t translated by his implants. “I suppose that would make sense, although you told me that someone who understood the suits killed him.”

Barnabas waited. As a friend, he wanted to reassure Jeltor right now. As someone invested in this case, however, he wanted to see what Jeltor would say. Shock was a powerful jolt to the system, and often it provided clarity, allowing someone to think of or reveal a fact they would not otherwise allow themselves to see.

All Jeltor said, however, was, “You must solve this. Do you want me to come?”

“No, that’s not necessary.” Barnabas couldn’t help laughing. “I was nervous enough leaving you there with the treason charges. I’m hardly going to take you away from that, only for you to wind up on a ship with an assassin who’s killing Jotun ship’s captains.”

Jeltor managed a laugh as well, but it died quickly. “I mean it, Barnabas.”

“I know you do,” Barnabas hastened to assure him. “But give me some time to solve it on my own. I was only half-joking when I said this would be a dangerous place for you. Whoever came for him might come for you, too, and I’m not going to stand for that.”

Jeltor said nothing, presumably lost in thought.

“He was traveling with a Captain Ferqar,” Barnabas said. “Any knowledge of…him? Her? I’m sorry, I can’t tell gender from your names yet.”

“Why would you be able to tell that?” Jeltor asked, sounding mystified. “Do other species have names that vary from gender to gender?”

“Yes?”

“How confusing. We don’t. Anyway, Ferqar also does border patrols. It makes sense that they would be traveling together—as much as any of this makes sense.”

“Interesting. The captain of the Srisa said it seems like he’s hiding something.”

“He might be.” Jeltor sounded grim now. “Who else would know everything about Huword?”

“He wasn’t the one who killed him. His movements are all accounted for, I’m afraid. Whether he was an accomplice, though… That, I don’t know.”

Jeltor considered this. “Solve it,” he said again. “You have to. Whoever would come for Huword—they’re dangerous, Barnabas. It could be the Senate trying to get back at us for what we did with the Yennai Corporation.”

Barnabas whistled. “You think it goes that high?”

“I don’t know. Just be careful, and make sure the next one doesn’t get a chance to use a self-destruct before you question them.”

“Given that I’m on the ship in question,” Barnabas said drily, “I will certainly strive to make sure of that.”

Chapter Five

Captain Ferqar was, in Barnabas’ opinion, indistinguishable from any other Jotun except by the tenor of his thoughts. It was enough to make Barnabas wonder for a moment if there would be any way to prove, save by mind-reading, that Huword was the one who had died. Another Jotun would be able to see the deception, of course, but what if it only needed to be maintained for a brief time?

He chided himself for this ridiculous train of thought even as he probed the Jotun’s thoughts. After all, nothing about this case seemed straightforward. He might as well search for the answers anywhere he could. There were plenty of memories Barnabas could find in which Ferqar was referred to by name, however, so he abandoned that theory with some relief.

He did not see any of the images he had found in Captain Kelnamon’s memory, however, such as the smashed jar that he now realized was a Jotun biosuit tank. He hadn’t necessarily expected to. After all, Captain Kelnamon had said that Ferqar had a good alibi.

Still, when a Jotun naval captain was murdered in the middle of nowhere on a transport where no one else should know of him, his only acquaintance on board was the best suspect.

“Captain Ferqar.” Barnabas smiled as he came into the room. “Thank you for speaking with me. Captain Kelnamon has allowed me to take over this case, and as the person on board who knew Captain Huword best, your help will be invaluable.”

He held out a hand. The handshake was a common greeting among species, as it turned out, and with no worry of disease, Jotuns were always happy to shake their mechanical hands with anyone who wanted to do so. Ferqar shook Barnabas’ now, and Barnabas detected wariness.

“Who, exactly, are you?” the Jotun asked him. “You’re not Brakalon.”

A real genius, this guy is. Shinigami was still sulking about being confined to the ship and had taken to commenting acerbically on anything and everything.

You know what he means, Barnabas said reprovingly. To Ferqar, he said, “I served as law enforcement in the Etheric Empire.”

Ferqar experienced a spike of fear when Barnabas mentioned his past, but it came with no thoughts Barnabas could identify. He sometimes had trouble reading Jotuns’ thoughts, but in this case, he was fairly certain there was no malice toward the Etheric Empire.

Barnabas waited. He wanted to test a hunch, and a moment later, Ferqar had a sudden spike of thoughts: the human who helped Captain Jeltor.

“What is your name?” Ferqar asked. He sounded eager.

“Barnabas.” Barnabas settled back in his chair and tried not to smile. Even through the garble of Jotun thoughts—he privately described it to Gar as listening to music through a bowl of jello—he could tell that Ferqar was not displeased to see him.

“I want to thank you,” Ferqar said formally. “Unofficially, of course.” There was a pause. “Is this off the record?”

“As long as it doesn’t relate to the murder.” Barnabas didn’t let his expression change from a faint smile.

Another spike of fear, and then Ferqar’s emotions swirled into such chaos that Barnabas could make neither heads nor tails of them. “It doesn’t. I wanted to thank you for forcing the senators to stop treason proceedings against Captain Jeltor—and for defeating the Yennai Corporation.”

There were so many emotions chasing each other through his head that Barnabas honestly could not tell if Ferqar was telling the truth.

“You weren’t able to be at the battle, I’m guessing,” he said as neutrally as he could.

“No. My route didn’t allow it.” He sounded bitter. Barnabas made a mental note of that.

“So, explain to me.” Barnabas frowned. “Only a week or so ago, you were on a remote route that meant you could not join the battle against a massive fleet that had high odds of killing many of your colleagues. This week, however, you boarded a fairly slow civilian transport with another captain who ran mostly the same routes—or was going to. How did that happen?”

Fear again, but there was the ring of truth in it when Ferqar said, bitterly amused, “I was giving him details of the routes someplace we could be away from listening ears.” As the device in Barnabas’ head translated, he noticed that the Jotun word for ears translated to tentacles. They must be all-sensory devices, but he could not tell how that would work. “Other Jotun ears, I mean,” Ferqar continued. “Huword wanted to know what he’d gotten into.”

“Oh?” In his years of playing “neutral” on Earth, Barnabas had learned to keep a conversation going without stating his position or impeding the flow of thoughts from the other person.

“If you know who we both are already, and it seems you do—” again, there was fear “—you should also know of Huword’s…promotion.” There was distaste in Ferqar’s voice as well as a challenge.

“You mean, I’m guessing, the promotion that might or might not have been a promotion?” Barnabas lifted an eyebrow.

“Quite so.” Ferqar sounded bitterly amused now. “Something I happen to know about.”

There was genuine pain there, and Barnabas felt an unexpected stab of sympathy.

“Not a promotion for you, then, I’m guessing.” He wished he could read the minutiae of Jotun posture and expressions.

“You guess correctly.” Ferqar considered, and then said, “The details aren’t really important. If you’re curious, I’m sure you can find the whole story.”

He didn’t seem to be hiding anything on that score, and Barnabas felt no urge to make him relive it. He knew what it felt like, after all, to want to avoid certain memories.

“You said Huword wanted to know what he was getting into, and you explained it all away from Jotun ears. Did he come to you, or did you go to him?”

Again, a swirl of emotion. “A little bit of both,” Ferqar said neutrally. His mind was determinedly blank. Barnabas guessed it was likely a way to keep himself from saying something he didn’t want to let slip.

But what was that? Barnabas sifted through recent memories and found nothing overtly incriminating, but everything seemed tinged with guilt and anger.

“Walk me through it,” Barnabas requested now. The devil was in the details, as people said. Who knew what Ferqar might let slip?

Ferqar made a mechanical sound that Barnabas supposed was a sigh, but he didn’t delay. “Several ships were called back to port after the…incident. The Yennai incident,” he clarified when Barnabas frowned. Though Barnabas had trouble reading Jotun expressions, apparently they could read his just fine. “The Senate wanted to know everyone involved, how word had spread, if anyone had been pressured into joining you, or misled about the Senate being on board—that sort of thing. I think they assumed that because I wasn’t involved, I was loyal to them.”

“Which you’re not,” Barnabas said neutrally.

Ferqar froze. “This is a dangerous discussion.”

“I can see how you’d think so, but do bear in mind that I was a part of that mission. As you mentioned, I helped Captain Jeltor.” Barnabas settled back in his chair. “And I have no stake in Jotun politics. Well, not much of a one.”

Ferqar paused. “I am loyal to the Jotun people and take my naval oaths very seriously.” His voice was flat. “I was not contacted about the battle. When I was brought back, it was with a ship that could custom-Gate. They weren’t…pleased. The Senate, I mean.”

Barnabas sifted through this. He was guessing, at this point, that Ferqar’s demotion and distance had precluded him from being a part of the battle, and the Jotun was not pleased about it.

But he couldn’t be sure, not yet.

“In any case, I testified and then bumped into Huword. He knew the routes I ran, and we agreed to take a detour before our ships officially left port.” Ferqar lifted a shoulder. “This was a round trip.”

There was a flare of emotion and Barnabas frowned. They could verify the fact easily enough, which made Ferqar’s evasiveness even more interesting.

“I see. So you two talked, and...”

“And?” Ferqar prompted, admirably playing Barnabas’ own game.

Barnabas was better at it than Ferqar was, however. “I’m asking you,” he replied equably.

“What do you want me to say?” Ferqar asked finally. “We weren’t friends. We barely knew each other. This was the only connection we had—the breakdown of our careers.” Again, a spike of emotion: grief and rage this time. “It was hardly something that inspired us to—”

Someone is coming your way, Shinigami broke in. Her voice was urgent.

Dangerous?

I think so. Someone came to the airlock door looking for you, then accessed the security feeds—I don’t know who this is—then they set off for exactly where you are.

Barnabas made a split-second decision. “I’ll be back.” He stood, buttoning his suit jacket. “There’s an urgent matter.”

Ferqar settled into silence, and Barnabas sensed genuine annoyance. Ferqar’s anger over his ruined career, at least, was genuine.

Barnabas paused. “I don’t mean to dredge up uncomfortable memories,” he said finally. “What happened to you—to you both—is something that happens across species, and it costs everyone when good people are not able to do their jobs.”

After the sudden burst of emotion, Ferqar seemed to be keeping a tight rein on his feelings. His mechanical head nodded once. After a pause, Barnabas shook his head slightly and went into the corridor. He would have to untangle Ferqar’s strange words later—

Something hit him hard on the back of the head.

Whether it was meant to be a killing blow, Barnabas couldn’t say, but it was certainly meant to incapacitate him. He stumbled sideways into a wall and whirled to face his attacker.

Baggy clothing, half-structured with armor, covered a lanky frame that Barnabas could not quite identify, while a mask and hood obscured the shape of the face. There must be some technology he didn't see in it because there were no eye or mouth holes. It was like fighting a comic book character, which did not make him particularly happy.

Tabitha had spent weeks at one point trying to get him into comics. Barnabas had never confessed to her that the real reason he hated them wasn’t the cartoonish violence or overblown characterization. It was the fact that he got far too drawn into the stories and was never going to know how many of them ended.

He still sometimes had dreams about the characters fighting alien species with him, a fact he hoped she would never find out.

His attacker, meanwhile, seemed deeply surprised that Barnabas was not in a heap on the floor. They recovered quickly, however. One foot punched up and out to drive Barnabas back, and again, the assassin struck with what should have been bone-crunching force. Barnabas felt his skin break, and blood burst from capillaries in the start of a brilliant bruise. Then the nanites went to work, healing the damage within seconds.

“And I thought I’d have to work to find you,” he told the assassin with savage satisfaction. “But here you are.”

The assassin waited warily, head cocked to the side, and Barnabas struggled to recognize any familiar line to the bone structure.

Shinigami, is there anything you can tell about the physiology here? What am I dealing with?

Possibly Torcellan—or possibly human, I guess. But very slim. Whatever species, probably a female since they’re so small.

The assassin feinted, then danced away again when Barnabas reacted more quickly than she expected.

And she’s good, Shinigami commented. Very good. I haven’t seen most of you lot hit that hard.

Someone else must have come up with that technology. Barnabas thought he heard a faint mechanical hum. I think there’s an exosuit involved somehow. I’ll try to get it off her. I need to take the mask off to know who she is, anyway—and this technology will let us know what we should be on the lookout for in the future.

Without warning, the assassin launched herself straight up, dislodging a ceiling plate and disappearing into the duct system.

Shinigami! Barnabas took two steps and leaped as well. He grabbed the edge of one panel and had just enough time to see the assassin looking straight down at him before the panel was slammed back into place on his fingertips.

Normally, he would have been able to hold on, but the sheer force of it caused the nerves and joints to fail, and Barnabas fell back into the hallway, shocked. The assassin had gotten away.

Can you—do you have any eyes—

No. Shinigami sounded sober suddenly. Are you all right?

Just get it out of the way. Barnabas stood up and flexed his fingers. He watched them heal.

…What?

Whatever your joke is about me losing my grip and falling. He seemed to have absorbed Ferqar’s bad mood. Just say it and get it out of the way.

There was silence as he walked.

Well?

I’ve seen you fight, you know. She still sounded sober. I know how hard you must have gotten hit. You don’t just give up. If you ask me, they ran because they knew that fight wasn’t a sure thing.

She vanished from his mind and Barnabas stopped, frowning. Once, Shinigami would just have teased him. As they got closer, she might have been offended that he hadn’t believed in her.

But this—the quiet concern and support—was new.

“Every time I think I have her figured out…” he muttered as he started back down the corridor. He shook his head slightly, and a smile played on his lips.

* * *

Back in the interrogation room, Ferqar was waiting quietly. His mechanical head looked around as Barnabas entered, and Barnabas could see the jellyfish-like body in the tank swivel as well. He wondered how much Ferqar saw with his real body versus with the biosuit, and made a mental note to ask Shinigami about it when she was in a better mood.

“I’m sorry for the interruption,” he said smoothly, sitting down once more. His fingers still ached, and he held them out of sight to keep Ferqar from noticing the still-healing injury. The nanites were quick, but with the bones completely crushed, they had a lot to do.

Ferqar said nothing. He had sunk into silence.

“Who do you think killed Huword?” Barnabas asked bluntly.

He was trying to provoke a reaction, and he got one. Fear spiked through Ferqar. Inside its tank, the body pulsed.

When Ferqar spoke, however, his voice was flat. “Someone he wronged.”

Barnabas raised his eyebrows. “An interesting response.” He had been attacked by the female he assumed was the assassin—someone who wanted him dead, in any case—but he couldn’t rule out Ferqar’s being involved just yet.

“Is it?” Ferqar sounded a bit angrier now. “Is it ‘interesting’ to you? I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, in case you don’t remember—about the fact that someone on board can get through biosuits. It isn’t possible for that to happen by accident. A human can get killed in a bar fight, just like a Torcellan or a Shrillexian. Even a Brakalon can get hit hard enough or stabbed or shot. But Jotun biosuits are made to withstand all of that. A punch, a kick—even normal ammunition isn’t going to breach a suit. Someone wanted to kill him. And they planned it.”

Barnabas blinked. Ferqar’s reasoning was good, he had to admit, and when he mentioned someone on board who could get through biosuits, his fear had been genuine. There were still no images in his head of whatever had happened to Huword, but the speculation and terror of death rang true.

There was guilt there too, but Barnabas knew from experience that many survivors carried guilt with them. In this case, Ferqar hadn’t been there when the assassin struck. He would feel guilty that he hadn’t helped his acquaintance, relieved that he hadn’t also been killed…and even more guilty that he was relieved.

As much as Barnabas didn’t want this case to become more complicated, he had to admit that it didn’t look like Ferqar had been involved. He nodded slightly.

“That perspective is useful,” he said as gently as he could. “For another species, we would think it might be a crime of passion, something done impulsively. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that it couldn’t be just an argument that got out of hand. You’ve helped me get closer to the truth, Ferqar, and I will keep you safe. You have nothing to fear.”

“I know I have nothing to fear,” Ferqar said sharply. “If they wanted me dead, I’d be dead. That much is obvious, isn’t it?”

Again, there was a true fear. He’d had a great deal of time to ponder this, Barnabas thought, while he was shut up here on a stopped transport with his traveling companion dead.

Barnabas nodded slightly.

“I know he was only an acquaintance,” he said quietly, “but I am sorry for your loss.”

There was no response from Ferqar, only bitterness, and after a moment, Barnabas left.

Chapter Six

Barnabas rubbed the back of his head as he made his way to the airlock where the Shinigami was latched onto the Srisa.

Shinigami.

Yes?

What do we think the odds are that Kelnamon was involved?

What? Are you serious?

It’s the only thing that makes sense. In the area outside the airlock, Barnabas looked around. Whoever had tried to get in here before, they didn’t seem to be around now. The whole ship was very, very quiet.

He didn’t like it.

Shinigami, having seen him, opened the door and he went inside, still turning the incident over and over in his head. If the ship was so quiet...

He’s the only one aside from Ferqar who even knows I’m on board for this purpose.

“You’re on board, remember?” The voice emerged from Shinigami’s body as she maneuvered it painstakingly around a corner. “You can speak aloud.”

“Force of habit.” Barnabas managed a small smile as she walked jerkily towards him.

“Seriously, how do you do this?” Shinigami asked, sounding annoyed. “Only one set of eyes? Can’t see behind you? Navigating is insane. And you’re supposed to watch where you’re walking and watch where you’re putting your feet? How do you do it?”

“Proprioception, mainly.” Barnabas pretended to study the wall so that she wouldn’t feel self-conscious. “We don’t need to look at our bodies as they move because we develop an idea of where they are in space. It’s why toddlers look at their hands and feet while they move and adults don’t. As you get better at this, you’ll acquire the same sense.”

“Hmph.”

“Part of why you’re struggling is that we haven’t done this before, you know.” Barnabas looked at her now. She had almost reached him. “You could write some of the programming so that when other AIs receive bodies, they’ll know how to use them better.”

“Nuh-uh. If I must suffer, so must they.”

“That is not the spirit in which this ship and crew operate.”

She stuck her tongue out at him in response. “So, Captain Kelnamon. Tell me your theory. Distract me.”

“Well, he’s incredibly well-placed to have done it,” Barnabas began. “He has the codes for each room, could override security footage, and could get an assassin on-board—and then off.”

Shinigami stopped suddenly. “You think the ship we encountered when we first got here...”

“Was the assassin?” Barnabas shrugged. “You tell me. It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?”

Shinigami whistled—or, more accurately, tried to whistle. She pursed her lips…and very clearly whistled from one of the speakers on the wall. Barnabas gave a laugh he hastily turned into a cough.

“Just use your internal speaker.”

“I couldn’t find the— Not important.” She folded her arms. “Keep walking, funny man. Explain the distress signal to me. Because it seems to me that someone who was careful enough to sneak on board and plan an assassination was probably observant enough to see you arrive, speak with Kelnamon, and then go speak with Ferqar. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out why you were there.”

“That’s a weak part of the theory,” Barnabas admitted. “Both of those things. In terms of the distress signal, I don’t see why he had to observe protocol on that. I don’t know how commonly known it is that Brakalon law requires him to stop. Even if it is common knowledge, would any of his Brakalon passengers mind if, instead of trapping them in the middle of nowhere with a murderer, he kept going to port and just pretended he would speak to authorities there? Would the authorities care?”

Shinigami considered this. “You’re growing as a person, you know. There was a time when it wouldn’t even have occurred to you to ask whether the law was commonly followed.”

Barnabas gave a small smile, but he couldn’t really enjoy the humor of the moment. None of the pieces of this fit together in his head. He was used to knowing who his enemy was. In this case, he knew almost nothing. The people best placed to pull this off, it seemed, had not been involved.

“Anyway,” Shinigami continued, “if we’re going down the rabbit hole, the law might not even be what he said it is.”

Barnabas stopped dead. “Then why stop and broadcast a signal?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, although she didn’t expend the energy to turn around and shrug at him. Instead, she continued walking grimly, determined to make it to the end of the hallway.

He could understand her determination. Practicing a new skill wasn’t always pleasant. “You’re right; we are going down the rabbit hole.” He considered. “If you can get us video from the bridge and confirm that Kelnamon was the one who turned the distress signal on and that he did it without prompting from the rest of the crew or passengers, we can eliminate that as a… Wait, why aren’t you just looking up Brakalon legal codes?”

“I tried, and they’re unreadable. I swear the whole thing is a metaphor. I’m still trying to parse whether this one section is referring to improvised explosives or jaywalking. What’s that expression on your face?”

“Trying to imagine what possible language could encompass both of those things.”

Shinigami snickered. “I’ll research Kelnamon’s movements. I have to say, though, I don’t think the captain is behind this. He had no motive.”

“That you know of.”

“I suppose.” Barnabas rubbed the back of his head again. “Damn, they hit me hard.”

“You’re still healing from that?” She sounded genuinely concerned.

“A little bit. Mostly cleanup from the bruise. That’s a process. The cracked bones are easier to fix.”

“All right, that does it, if they managed to crack your thick skull, there’s something shady going on here. I have to go research something.” Shinigami hobbled over to a doorway and de-animated the body so that it slumped face-first into the alcove.

“Shinigami?”

“Yes?”

“Was that an insult or a statement of fact?”

“Yes.”

Barnabas rolled his eyes and went off to get a glass of juice.

* * *

In the kitchen, he found Tafa eating a bowl of something that looked like sawdust. She had gone off with Gar at their last stop to resupply and had told everyone that she finally had the ingredients to make one of her favorite dishes. Barnabas now found himself hoping she wouldn’t offer him any of it.

“So, what’s going on with the murder case?” she asked around a mouthful of food.

Barnabas hid a grimace. He was a stickler for table manners, but both Tabitha and Shinigami had informed him that he was not allowed to mention people’s manners to them since it was insufferably pretentious—or in Tabitha’s somewhat more flowery language, “douche-canoe-y.”

He distracted himself by pouring a glass of juice. “I interviewed Captain Huword’s traveling companion—briefly—then got attacked, so, unfortunately, I have more questions now than I started with, not less.”

“You were attacked?” Tafa sounded surprised. “Then how is this still a case? The person who attacked you must be the murderer, right?”

“It’s likely, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to apprehend her.” Barnabas did allow himself a grimace at that. He steeled himself and joined Tafa at the table.

“What? She beat you?” She looked genuinely flabbergasted.

“It happens, you know,” Barnabas snapped tetchily.

“Not often. Gar said you once took on hundreds of mercenaries.”

“The stories are somewhat overblown, and overwhelming numbers do not help in the case of… Not important.”

“No, seriously, I wanna see the fight.” Tafa looked around. “Shinigami, did you holo it?”

“Yes,” Shinigami’s voice announced.

Barnabas dropped his face into his hands. “Do we have to do this?”

“Yes,” they said in unison.

“Hey,” Gar said, entering the kitchen.

“Oh, good. Let’s have everyone see it.” Barnabas drained his glass in one bitter gulp. “Why don’t we invite Captain Kelnamon as well?”

“Eh?” Gar looked at Tafa.

“Don’t listen to him.” She waved her spoon, having gotten past the phase of being awed by Barnabas. “He fought the murderer, and he lost. We’re watching the video for clues.”

“Oh, for clues?” Barnabas looked up. “That’s less embarrassing.”

Everyone scooched their chairs over to a nearby holoscreen and watched the fight unfold. Barnabas emerged from the door of Captain Ferqar’s quarters, only to be hit in the back of the head by the masked opponent.

The fight, such as it was, seemed even quicker than it had at the time. Barnabas sighed and settled back in his chair, although he winced when he saw himself drop from the ceiling.

“What happened there?” Tafa asked Barnabas.

“She smashed the ceiling panel down on the tips of my fingers.” Barnabas curled his hands into protective fists, burying his nails in his palms. “It crushed the bones.”

Tafa and Gar gaped at him.

“Very unpleasant,” Barnabas said shortly. “Although…very effective.”

Gar looked back at the screen with a queasy expression. He was still watching, along with Barnabas, when Tafa said loudly, “Ha!”

Gar jumped. “Er, yes?”

“She’s not biological,” Tafa announced.

“What?” Barnabas demanded at the same time as Shinigami said, “How did you know that?”

“Whoa, wait, back up.” Barnabas stood up and looked accusingly at the speakers. “You knew?”

“Yes. Well, I suspected it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was trying to confirm it before I said anything!” Shinigami flickered into being in full armor, perched on top of a cabinet by the holoscreen. She tilted her head curiously at Tafa. “How did you know, though?”

“Something about the movements.” Tafa shrugged. “And the head is a weird shape, so there’s that. What are the odds that some random new kind of alien showed up just to commit murder on a civilian ship?”

Barnabas nodded, bemused.

“And something about the way the joints function just doesn’t seem right,” Tafa added. She pointed at the screen. “But the kicker is, look at the way it jumps up into the ceiling there.”

Shinigami obligingly slowed the video down.

“There’s no real muscle engagement,” Tafa pointed out. “In any other bipedal species, we’d see the tension in the torso. There’s none here. It’s subtle, but it’s definitely different.”

Barnabas frowned at the screen. “Shinigami? What gave it away to you?”

“The fact that she—well, if it’s a she—hit you hard enough to dent your skull,” Shinigami said. “I was surprised she’d slammed the panel down so hard, too, but that first hit was what sealed the deal. There was no weapon, but she hit you incredibly hard at an angle that would be difficult to generate the power for using an organic muscle structure. So I started looking, and I realized that the pocket of space above that panel was pretty small. So not only did she generate an extraordinary amount of force on that one panel dropping down, but she also got away without any place for a roughly human-sized alien to fit. Which means...” She gave Barnabas a meaningful look.

“She’s still there!” He was on his feet. “Gar, come on.”

“No, no, no.” Shinigami’s voice stopped him. She sighed. “She disassembled herself.”

Barnabas froze and looked slowly over his shoulder. “You are kidding me.”

“I’m not. Furthermore, I think she was the person trying to get in here before, and I saw her greet someone in the hallway as they passed, which suggests she bought passage. There’s an explanation that starts to link up with some of the rest of what we know, too.”

“Which is?” Barnabas frowned up at her.

Shinigami took her time before answering, and when she did, she sounded exceedingly pleased with herself.

“It’s a Jotun.”

Chapter Seven

“We have to do this logically,” Barnabas said. He was pacing around the armory dressed in his armor. “She’s easily capable of fighting me, and I have a ship full of civilians to protect. Ideas?”

“The first thing is to make sure she doesn’t have any allies,” Shinigami suggested reasonably. She was in her artificial body, swinging her arms in an approximation of Barnabas’ warmup exercises. “You suspected Kelnamon and Ferqar.”

“I think we can now expand that to include any other Jotun on the ship,” Barnabas said.

“The only other registered one is Ferqar,” Shinigami said. “And clearly it wasn’t him.”

“Are you sure? A Jotun naval captain can pilot an entire ship. Why couldn’t they pilot a suit remotely?”

“Well, for one thing, that mechanism is biomechanical. None of it is ever done remotely.”

Barnabas chewed his lip. “Hrmph.”

“Which isn’t to say that it couldn’t work that way,” Shinigami continued, “but I am almost one hundred percent certain that she was the one who came to look at the airlock door the other day, which means I got a scan then, and there was definitely Jotun biomatter in a sufficient amounts for this to be another Jotun.”

“Okay.” Barnabas rubbed his face. “So we can’t tell Kelnamon just to get all the Jotun passengers in one place. He has to be in on it, doesn’t he?”

“Not necessarily,” Tafa opined. She was sitting on a stack of mats at one side of the room, swinging her legs. Her blue skin glowed faintly in the dim lights. “With this many berths on the ship, he probably doesn’t see everyone who gets one, and it’s not a ship that’s going to make the passengers go through a bioscanner to board.”

“Interplanetary security sounds like a nightmare,” Barnabas muttered.

“It is, actually.” Gar looked over from where he, too, was putting on his armor. “The measures taken on Devon—I’m sorry, High Tortuga—aren’t available to most planetary governments. That means they can’t really stop someone from setting down on their planet. There will always be enough of a gap in the air defenses for something to slip through. Meanwhile, there are so many pilots ready to make a quick buck, and so many who don’t even care, that a person can usually get wherever they want to without having anyone bother them. If they have money, of course, and this one clearly does.”

Barnabas sighed heavily.

“How do you know she’s rich?” Tafa challenged Gar.

“Easy. They have a custom biosuit that works extremely well in hand-to-hand combat, and a very good ship and accomplice.”

“The other Jotun,” Barnabas said neutrally.

“Well, yeah.” Gar looked at him, bemused. “They were working together, right?”

“How do you know that?”

“I mean, I— Well, I just do. I mean, I don’t. It makes sense, though, right?” He scratched his head. “Shinigami, back me up.”

“I’m afraid I can’t.” Shinigami’s voice was regretful although her face was blank. “With technology like this, I see no reason the pilot of that ship couldn’t have gotten the assassin off the Srisa pretty much immediately if they were working together. If they didn’t collaborate to do that, therefore, it means—well, either they weren’t working together, or the two of them were waiting for someone specific. Which was almost certainly not us.”

Barnabas nodded slowly. His sense of self-preservation had flared up as soon as Shinigami said, “Someone specific,” but he knew the assassin could not have predicted that he’d be the one to get there.

“You’re sure someone was piloting the ship that blew up,” he said.

“Yes. I did scan it. I wasn’t able to get specific readings since I couldn’t hook into their systems, but I know there was someone there.”

“None of this makes sense!” Barnabas waved his arms for emphasis.

“At least we agree on something,” Gar said helpfully. “If they were working together and waiting for someone—that makes sense, Shinigami, thank you—then it was probably the Jotun government, right?”

Barnabas stopped, a chill going through him. “You might be onto something,” he said slowly.

Everyone looked at him.

“Jeltor said he wondered if this was retaliation for what happened with the Yennai fleet,” Barnabas explained. “Now, Ferqar may not have been involved, but Jeltor seemed to think Huword was. So the question is, was this a Jotun government assassination?”

“The level of sophistication would make sense in that case,” Shinigami said after a moment. “Both in the ship and the assassin’s biosuit. It’s stuff we haven’t seen before. Where better for it to come from than some deep dark government lab?”

“Says the government lab project.”

“Listen here—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Barnabas waved a hand. “What’s weird to me, in that case, is that the assassin, who has the capabilities to overpower most other aliens, and has extremely good tech backup, wouldn’t just disable a distress signal. Is the ship wired that well?”

“No,” Shinigami said promptly. “They wouldn’t even have had to go to the bridge to disable both that and outbound communications beyond repair.”

“Ugh.” Gar sounded glum now. “So it doesn’t make sense that they’re working together. I do not get this.”

“Okay, so they’re not working together.” Barnabas snapped his fingers. “This assassin took out Huword, and the person on the ship was trying to keep everyone else away until…someone specific could get there to apprehend them?”

Gar was clutching his head. “This keeps going around in circles.”

“But we’re getting closer,” Barnabas said. He gave a somewhat manic grin.

“Unless you’re going in exactly the opposite direction,” Shinigami pointed out.

“That’s enough from you. Look at what you’re doing to poor Gar. Tafa, any observations?”

“Nope.” Tafa shook her head. “I’m all out. My whole contribution was noticing the biosuit.”

“Still helpful.” Barnabas nodded decisively. “All right, here’s my plan. We assume Kelnamon isn’t involved. It’s in the best interests of the assassin to make sure no one notices, right? No, we can’t even assume that. Fuck. I got nothin’. Shinigami, do you have any idea where the Jotun is right now?”

“No.”

“Can you lock down the ship so that people are at least held in small groups?”

“Yes.”

“Do that, then.” Barnabas looked at Gar. “Looks like you and I are going door to door until we find this thing. Hopefully, it’s not still in the damned walls.”

“I’m coming with you,” Shinigami announced. Her body appeared in the doorway. “And before you say no, remember that I have scanners built into this body. If the Jotun is in the walls, I’m the best chance you have of finding them.”

Barnabas sighed. “I can also sense their minds, you know. Did you remember that?”

“I…did not.” She sounded a bit prickly. “But with so many people around, and only a fleeting impression of them before, I think we should both go.”

“No.”

“You’ve just locked them, whoever they are, in a small area with some civilians. Do you really want to take the chance of them starting to take hostages?”

Barnabas groaned. “All right, you can come along, but let the record show that I have a bad feeling about this.”

* * *

Shinigami, Barnabas said a few minutes later as the three of them strode down the empty halls, tell Captain Kelnamon that we know who the murderer is and that we’ll be searching the ship room by room. Then see if he tries to do anything shady.

Evil, Gar commented.

Agreed. Shinigami flashed a smile. It showed up about a second later than it would normally have, but she was starting to get the hang of emoting with the body. A few seconds later, she reported, He thanked me, and he’s just sitting there drumming his fingers on the desk. Now he’s typing. Looking at the screen… No, wait, I can just go into the computers…

There was a pause. Barnabas stopped briefly, thinking he heard something nearby, but no more sounds came and he continued.

He’s started to write a briefing, Shinigami said finally. It’s to the Brakalon government and describes you taking over. He says he turned the investigation over to you because of what you said about the destroyed ship and says you’ve solved the murder. He’s typing who it is...

All three of them looked at one another, eyes wide. If Kelnamon was typing everything out, that meant he already knew.

Wait, never mind. Shinigami sounded grumpy. He stopped. He was just prepping it, I guess. He’s telling some of the crew to ready the engines and a holding cell. Oh, now he’s asking if it’s one of the crew, and what size holding cell he needs.

Tell him to wait for everything. Whether or not it’s one of the crew—which I doubt—I don’t want them wandering around the halls.

Okay, I’ll— What was that?

All three of them, their senses enhanced well beyond normal levels, looked sharply up as they came into the main living area of the ship. The kitchen lay in a three-story space decorated with plants. It was probably designed to keep people from going crazy during their weeks of travel in a metal box hurtling through space. Other levels opened onto this room as well, and metal catwalks ran around the sides of it on the other two levels.

Nothing moved in the shadows.

There’s someone up there, Shinigami said simply. I’m scanning, but they must know we’re able to do that now. They’re—wait, I got it—there’s some material blocking me from scanning biomatter, but I got a glimpse. Our Jotun is up there.

Go!

Barnabas took a running leap and swung up onto the first level of catwalks. He heard Gar take off behind him, and Shinigami gave a whoop as she, too, jumped for the catwalk.

There was a thud, and Barnabas sincerely wished he could look. He couldn’t take even a moment to stop scanning the area for the Jotun assassin, however, and even if he knew where the person was, he didn’t trust Shinigami not to kill him if he laughed at her.

Safer not to look.

He landed lightly on the catwalk and spun to scan the space.

Above him, someone burst into a sprint. Barnabas looked up and saw someone in a long cloak. Shinigami, you were right about the signal-blocking material. He hopped onto the railing and leaped to pull himself up to the third level.

The Jotun assassin looked over her shoulder and saw him. She paused for a split-second. Barnabas had just enough time to picture her smashing his fingers again before she took off, heading for the door that led into the corridors of the third level.

He gave chase. “Stop right there!”

I must ask…does that ever work?

You’re just grumpy because you fell. He could hear Gar laughing internally as well, probably at both, and for a moment, Barnabas felt happy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such a pleasant, uncomplicated emotion.

He liked doing this job with a team, it turned out.

He was still smiling as he rounded the corner into the darkened hallway and ran straight into a punch. The Jotun’s fist shot out with devastating speed. It should have broken Barnabas’ ribs, if not made a hole into his chest cavity, but he had armor his opponent wasn’t expecting. It had driven out all the breath from his lungs in a surprised whoosh, though. The Jotun staggered back, jerky movements betraying her shock.

Gar’s footsteps were close behind, so the Jotun took off again, having failed to kill Barnabas for the second time.

“Get down!” Gar yelled, and he hurtled over Barnabas and took off at high speed after the assassin.

Get moving, Vigilante!

Can’t—breathe—

You should be saying fifty Hail Jeans as a thank you to the universe for letting you survive that punch.

Barnabas tried to picture any of the monks he’d known praying to Jean Dukes and had to fight with everything he had not to lose his breath a second time in hysterical laughter. He took three loping steps, trying to spur his body back into breathing properly by forcing it to use breath and then pushed himself into a sprint once more.

Barnabas, I think she’s going for the shuttles! Gar’s mental tone was panicked. I’ll do what I can to catch her, but—

A shot rang out, and there was a yell of pain.

Gar! Barnabas put on a burst of speed and swung around a corner as fast as he could. Gar was slumped against a railing, one hand clamped over the other arm. The assassin looked over her shoulder and kept running.

“Stop!” Barnabas yelled. He took his chance to leap over Gar and ran for all he was worth.

The Jotun’s biosuit, however, was fast. She disappeared into the shuttle bay and turned, holding one mechanical hand to an electronics panel.

Shinigami!

Fuck fuck fuck fuck!

The door slammed down.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! Keep running. I’m trying to open it!

Barnabas closed the distance at top speed. Shinigami!

Making progress, keep going. Fuck fuck fuck, almost there, don’t stop. WAIT, ABSOLUTELY DO STOP!

Barnabas ran into the door at top speed and bounced. From behind the closed door, he heard the alarms that accompanied the airlock.

So I’m guessing that’s a no-go on overriding the programs.

Not even the airlock. She shorted a bunch of it and left systems in place to make it look like things were functioning. By the way, even though we were basing it off bad information the first time, I think we were right—that’s a female.

How can you tell? More importantly, get a trace on that damned ship!

Already done. Come back to the ship, and we’ll get going. Err…when you can walk. Gar’s fine, but not fine enough to carry you.

Barnabas groaned and rolled over. I think I broke my nose.

Oooh, let it heal crooked. It’ll give your face some character.

Barnabas rolled his eyes as he pushed himself up and hobbled back to where Gar, too, had managed to stand. Goddammit, I hate it when they run.

Think of it this way—there are no civilians in the way anymore.

I do like that. Barnabas looked at where the nanites had already healed the bullet wound. They hobbled back to the main living area. Shinigami?

Yes?

I don’t want to drop down three flights. For the love of God, find me a staircase.

Chapter Eight

Kantar settled into her seat as the shuttle powered away into the darkness. Normally, she wouldn’t trust her odds against a ship like the Shinigami, but she knew she could get a reasonable head start while their crew got back to the ship.

Not only that, she’d paid an exorbitant amount to have crates loaded at the beginning of the Srisa’s run on a later stop. With those materials, she had managed to significantly upgrade the shuttle, as well as install several types of decoys that would allow her to lose any pursuers.

Hopefully. The Shinigami had already launched tracing measures, and Kantar had to hope she could disable them soon.

She bobbed in the warm water of her tank and tried to release her anxiety, but she could not. She had become one of the best assassins in this sector, stronger than any organic life form, and so at home in her biosuit that she never took it off.

Kantar resented the biosuits. The Jotuns’ unique physiology allowed them certain opportunities in the form of controlling a great deal of machinery with their minds. Other species, it seemed, could not do so on the same scale.

But other species could walk on their own. They could use hands and arms to manipulate tools, while Jotuns were forced to use suits to do the same. If enough other species had developed in water perhaps the Jotuns would not be the odd ones out, but as it was...

Speculation was pointless. Kantar had spent most of her life fine-tuning and learning to use her suit until she could engage in hand-to-hand combat the way any other species could. It wasn’t the typically clunky gadget-dependent Jotun fighting with flamethrowers or built-in knives and guns. No. Kantar could strike with her hands and feet, use an opponent’s physiology to throw or pin them, and manipulate machinery so that no one noticed she was Jotun unless they saw the metal of the suit.

Sometimes it occurred to her that, through her struggle, she had become better at combat than most people could ever hope to be. She wanted to take joy in that, but she was still angry. If she had been born anything other than Jotun, her life would have been very different.

She looked up sharply when one of her sensors beeped. The Shinigami was powering up and getting ready to pursue her.

She switched on the cloaking algorithms. The upgrade she had installed on the shuttle used three different generators, all of which cycled through different cloaking mechanisms at unpredictable intervals. Kantar used it on her ship, and she had thought it was unbreakable.

That was before she knew she was being pursued by the Shinigami, however.

She felt a stab of fear. Had the Jotun Senate sent Barnabas after her? He wouldn’t be helping them, surely. Of course, he wouldn’t be the first one they had turned.

She had to find safety, and she had to find it now. She accelerated the shuttle to top speed, settled back in her seat, and tried to remain calm.

“She’s engaged—oh, that’s interesting.” Shinigami sat down in the seat next to Barnabas. Only the final movement was somewhat graceless.

“What’s interesting?” Barnabas looked over.

“She’s using a very intriguing method of cloaking. Expensive to produce, most likely.”

“She’s a Jotun with an extremely good custom-made suit who can fight like an organic life form. I don’t see why we’d be surprised to run across an expensive cloaking system.”

“I’m not surprised; it’s just interesting.” Shinigami crossed one leg over the other. “And to answer the question I know you’re going to ask—yes, I can crack it. Between our peek into the Jotun fleet and our run-in with the Yennai Corporation, I’m up to date on every form of cloaking this sector has to offer.”

Barnabas gave a small smile. “I was going to ask that, you’re right. As a follow-up—”

“You want me to cloak us so she can’t see us, send a decoy so that she thinks we’ve gone in another direction, and follow her on the sly?”

“Yes.”

“Already done.”

“Remind me to give you a raise. How does one pay an AI?”

“When that AI just got a body? In shoes.”

“I should have seen that coming.” Barnabas heaved a sigh and stood, walking toward the door. “I’ll ask Bethany Anne for recommendations.”

“Ask her about bags, too.”

“Bags? Like…purses?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to keep in a purse?”

Shinigami looked at him like he was absolutely insane. “Guns.”

Barnabas shook his head and left.

“Where are you going?”

“To talk to Jeltor. You seem to have everything under control, after all.”

“So I’m in command?” Shinigami called over her shoulder as the doors closed. “Barnabas? Am I in command?” Barnabas?

Barnabas sighed. No, you are not in command.

Then I’m going to the armory. And before you argue, remember that I can watch the bridge just fine from anywhere.

Why are you going to the armory? Why are we talking this way?

Force of habit, as you said. And I’m going to train. Shinigami’s usual careless tone slipped away for a moment. What she could do with her biosuit was impressive.

It was, wasn’t it? Barnabas smiled. He approved of taking inspiration from opponents. Enjoy.

I think that’s overly optimistic, but I’ll practice.

Barnabas whistled as he made his way down the hallway to his rooms. When he slid into his chair and began the call to Jeltor, however, his face fell. He didn’t have good news to report.

When the image came up on the screen this time, Barnabas’ eyes strayed to the left side of the suit, where he’d noticed a telltale scratch when speaking to Jeltor previously. It was there, and he felt a small wave of satisfaction. He didn’t know why this hadn’t occurred to him before.

“Hello, Jeltor.”

“You didn’t find anything,” Jeltor guessed. He bobbed in the water listlessly.

“Not exactly.” Barnabas cleared his throat and considered what to say. He’d spent so many decades choosing his words carefully that it was second nature at this point to pause before he spoke. “We found the assassin and are pursuing her.”

“What?” Jeltor became much more animated.

Barnabas realized he could tell the strength of Jeltor’s emotions, if not the exact nature thereof.

“You’re pursuing her?” Jeltor continued. “How did she get away from you? I’ve seen you fight—”

“Oh, trust me, I’ll be hearing about this from Shinigami for quite a long time.” Barnabas was trying to cheer Jeltor up, and he was happy to hear what sounded like a chuckle. “The thing is—and this is a bit awkward—the assassin was Jotun.”

“I should have known.” Jeltor sounded angry. “I should have known when you told me how the murder was done. I think I did know, and I just...” His voice trailed away, and there was real grief there. “Can you imagine how horrifying it must have been?” he asked finally, and Barnabas saw that Jeltor was trying to explain. “To die slowly, to know that you couldn’t stop it. He was completely helpless.”

Barnabas could find no words for this.

The truth was, he did know, although it was not on his account. It was Catherine who had taught him the agony of helplessness as she had wasted away while he had prayed with all his heart for her to survive, no matter what the cost.

Of course, he had believed he would be the one to bear the cost.

“Yes,” was all he said now, very quietly. “I can imagine.”

Whatever Jeltor heard in his voice, he was surprised into silence for a moment.

Finally, Jeltor said, “It would have had to be a Jotun. I should have warned you. Only a Jotun would know to do the things they did. But I hoped—I thought that no Jotun would do something like that. It was so cruel.”

Barnabas shook his head slightly. He’d learned over the years that any sentient species had a boundless capacity for cruelty. He had once wondered if humanity alone could be so brutal, but his time away from Earth had shown him emphatically that this was not so.

If that cruelty were not matched by kindness, it would be a bleak universe, indeed.

Jeltor, thankfully, had moved on to more productive things. “We have to find her,” he told Barnabas. “And determine why she did this.”

“I hope to have an answer to that question soon,” Barnabas told him. “It looks like she might be heading to Gerris Station. It’s pretty much the only thing we can think of that’s within the range of that shuttle.

Jeltor bobbed in a way that seemed to indicate a nod.

Barnabas hesitated. “There’s a possibility I want to prepare you for,” he said as gently as he could.

Jeltor was silent.

“We’ve been looking at this as political murder,” Barnabas said, “but it’s possible that it’s personal.” He thought he sensed surprise and tried to explain. “Murders sometimes seem senseless, but the murderer always has a reason. This assassin didn’t move like a Jotun—if I hadn’t grabbed her and felt the metal, I would never have known what she was. Either she’s someone with a grudge, or someone hired her, but either way, this was planned.”

“I know.” Jeltor sounded determined.

“You say that,” Barnabas said, struggling to find the words, “but I want to prepare you for the fact that you might find out things you didn’t want to know. Things that make you think of him in a different light.”

He hadn’t thought of that until the moment he said it, but he knew it was true. An assassin of this caliber betrayed a longstanding grudge of some sort, and there were far too many unanswered questions in Barnabas’ opinion.

For one thing, if this were a political assassination, why was it Huword the Senate was going after? By all reports, he hadn’t been the one who had led the mutiny. Had he provided some support or information that even most of the other naval captains didn’t know about?

And if they were making a point, why not publicize it?

Assassinations left a bad taste in Barnabas’ mouth. He hated those who killed to sow fear. In this case, those who had killed did not seem to be making a point of it—and that meant they were altogether subtler.

And Barnabas did not like that.

Chapter Nine

Jeltor sat alone in the darkness of his rooms and fought a feeling of deep worry.

When Barnabas had first called, Jeltor had not questioned the cause of Huword’s murder. The Yennai Corporation had been run by some of the most unscrupulous individuals he had ever heard of, and their infiltration of the Jotun Senate had been all but complete. Jeltor knew that there were senators who would not hesitate to order naval officers assassinated.

Frankly, he was surprised they’d gotten through the past two weeks without a rash of mysterious deaths. The Senate had been eerily silent, although their rage was palpable.

But what if Barnabas was right? What if this was something else? After all, there hadn’t been other deaths. No one had come for Jeltor, even though he might be considered the one who started all of this.

Which meant that Huword’s death was likely something different in a way no one yet understood.

The thing was, Jeltor had no idea where to start looking. Had someone murdered Barnabas, for instance, Jeltor would have looked at a list of people Barnabas had judged over the years. If someone had murdered Gar, Jeltor would look at the people Gar had wronged in his climb to the near-top of the community on Devon—or associates of Lan, whom Gar had betrayed. It wasn’t difficult to follow the threads, usually. Everyone had enemies, didn’t they?

When it came to Huword, however, Jeltor honestly could not think of anyone.

He thought back to their time at the naval academy. Huword had been like any other person in many respects, falling in and out of love, hanging out with friends, and cultivating a reputation for good work. He was funnier than most people Jeltor knew, but that was hardly anything Jeltor could imagine might result in his death. Not everyone liked a comedian, but those people just hung out with more serious people, didn’t they?

Briefly, he considered that Huword had done this to himself, somehow. Perhaps he’d been distraught over his demotion to the Gar’aemon? If he thought his career was over and he’d been ruined, would he do something like that? Hire someone to disconnect his suit?

No. It made no sense. Why not leave a note? Why any of the little details that abounded in this case?

But that led Jeltor to an interesting theory: Huword’s demotion. Perhaps it was something to do with that.

That thought gave him a burst of energy and he went into motion, pulling up every communication he’d ever had from Huword and poring back over the records of their academy days. He saw videos of their training and mentions of tests and debates; anyone who hoped to be an admiral was required to show top marks in military strategy. Like all of them, Huword had hoped to be an admiral.

And, like most of them, he hadn’t made it. Jeltor sat still for a long time, trying to remember if Huword had seemed uncommonly upset about that.

He couldn’t remember. Huword had always been very good-natured.

None of this made sense. Jeltor groaned aloud. He wished he could think of a single fact that made any of this make sense, but the more he thought, the more muddled he became. Huword had gotten along with everyone. He was clever, he was funny, he could listen to anyone kindly. After all, who had Jeltor gone to after all of his breakups or bad tests? Huword. He always had a bottle of something and a sympathetic ear.

Something occurred to Jeltor then. It was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, more like an itch in his mind than actual thought, and he found himself flipping feverishly through pictures on the screen, little video clips, messages—anything he could find.

He’d know it when he saw it, wouldn’t he? He’d be able to recognize it when he saw whatever it was his mind was trying to tell him…wouldn’t he?

As it happened, he did.

* * *

“You are cleared to dock.” The Brakalon voice sounded strange through the translation filter, and Norwun could hear the actual growl and hiss of the Brakalon language in the background.

Brakalons. He grimaced. They were everything he hated: big and brawny, preferring to solve their problems with muscle rather than thought.

It wasn’t just a cultural distaste, though. When a Brakalon went off the rails, there was a good chance of someone getting hurt—and what chance did a Jotun have of surviving if their tank was breached?

Not a very good one, out here.

He and his team intended to complete their mission very quickly.

Norwun got up from the pilot’s seat and looked at his compatriots. There were five of them on this team, all outfitted with specialized suits that would let them hook into the systems of the Srisa…among other things. As Norwun looked at them, one was retracting a needle into a leg panel, and another was folding a knife down onto the inside of a forearm plate.

They did not say anything. They had been briefed. They would be awaiting Norwun’s orders because until he knew what had occurred after the murder, he would not know what must be done.

He would prefer to avoid the deaths of everyone aboard the Srisa, of course—in a general way. He felt no real emotion at the thought. Sometimes people needed to die. Sometimes he needed to be the one to kill them. He was vaguely aware that many others made a fuss about such things, but he believed it was an act.

When the doors opened, they found a hulking Brakalon waiting for them in the corridor. The thing—Norwun could not tell if it was male or female, and he did not care to figure it out—ducked its head in a crude greeting.

“I am Captain Kelnamon,” it said. “I am glad you were able to dock safely. There has been trouble.”

“Yes,” Norwun said shortly. “The body is this way?”

“Yes.” The captain hurried to accompany him.

“You said there was trouble,” Norwun said. He did not like the sound of that. The devices blocking the distress signal had still been up when his crew arrived, but their ship had not been—and there was the trace of a self-destruct. What that meant, Norwun was not sure.

But if the Brakalon understood what had happened, if he had seen too much...

Norwun did not exchange a glance with any of the others. They were all professionals. They were paying attention.

“Yes.” The Brakalon cleared his throat anxiously. “A ship was nearby, apparently blocking the distress signal and also taking down ships that tried to approach us. It destroyed a Brakalon government ship.” He sounded angry now.

Despite himself, Norwun felt a flicker of worry. He was waiting for the Brakalon to lose control, he realized, and unleash a wave of violence that might cause quite a bit of damage. Norwun was well-trained and quite lethal—but there was always the chance of something going very wrong. Fights were chaotic.

“Did the ship leave?” he asked finally. It was not a good sign that the captain had said no more on the subject.

“No, it was apprehended. Well...” The Brakalon cleared his throat. “I’m given to understand that it self-destructed.”

Norwun tried to parse this. “I’m sorry, what do you mean by that? Did you not see it?”

“No.” The Brakalon was looking at him worriedly. He paused, considered, and said finally, “Perhaps our customs are unknown to you. When a murder has occurred, it is the responsibility of law enforcement to deal with the problem.” He paused again. “I am, of course, prepared to turn the investigation over to you, although it is already in progress.”

“And what are your findings?” Norwun asked silkily.

“Not my findings,” the Brakalon told him. “It is being investigated by a human.”

“A human?” No. Oh, no. And then, even though Norwun knew, he had to ask: “What is the human’s name?”

“Barnabas,” the Brakalon said. He seemed to be studying Norwun carefully. He stopped at a door in the hallway and nodded into the room. “This is where the body is.”

Norwun stood in quiet horror. This was so, so much worse than he had imagined. He had guessed when the guard ship had gone silent that they might need to eliminate certain witnesses. He had anticipated venting the Srisa. They would take care of things quietly; the Brakalons need never know. It could have been pirates, after all.

But if Barnabas was involved...

And the Shinigami wasn’t here, so where in the nineteen hells of Baletoth was Barnabas now?

“How does the investigation proceed, then?” he asked finally, trying to control his voice.

“That, I don’t know.” The Brakalon sounded genuinely regretful. “As I said, the government should be responsible for investigations. Since I was on the ship when it happened, I am technically a suspect, and my actions in breaking the tank certainly contaminated the scene. As soon as it became clear that this was a violent death, I locked the scene to further intervention and notified both the Jotun and Brakalon governments.” He sounded worried. “I wish I had more to tell you, but I thought it best that the scene remain closed so there would be no disturbances. For the sake of clues, you understand.”

Norwun fought not to snort in annoyance. Of course, he understood how investigations went. Did the Brakalon think he was so stupid?

He should not be upset, however, because it sounded as if it were possible—just possible—that no one on the ship knew what was going on. And that was very good for all of them since it might just buy them their lives.

Norwun would have been tempted to kill them all anyway, except that Barnabas was now involved. He had a reputation for oversized reactions whenever civilians died.

“And the crew?” Norwun asked. “The passengers?”

“We have communicated the delays, but not the cause.” The Brakalon shrugged, looking defeated. “They are very angry, but what can I do? There are protocols.”

“Why did you turn the investigation over to Barnabas?”

“Ah.” The captain now looked very worried indeed. “It should have been one of our two governments, yes? I know. But it had already been a week, and the Brakalon ship had not arrived, and I had not heard from the Jotun government. I feared that if I stalled for much longer, the murderer might strike again.”

“So you believe this was a random murder?” Norwun asked neutrally. That was an interesting idea. It looked like they might not be able to stay ahead of the news at this point, but it was possible that they could spin it as a chance occurrence, a game of cards gone wrong—

Yes, it was possible. Barnabas was the loose end there, but perhaps even he could be convinced.

They had to get off this ship, and quickly. All he needed to know was whether these people had to die.

“Who can say?” the captain asked. “Perhaps it was not random, but then why would it happen here? It doesn’t make any sense. No one would know he was here.”

“Did he not have any traveling companions?” They’d been having the devil of a time figuring out if anyone else had been involved.

The Brakalon hesitated again. “There was another captain—Ferqar.”

Norwun hoped he managed to conceal the leap of his interest.

“As he was the traveling companion, I needed to find him to move him to another cabin. When I went to where he was, the bartender told me that he had been there over the whole time period when the murder might have occurred—not that I told him why I was asking. I know I shouldn’t have, of course, but…you know, when there are only two Jotuns on board, you wonder about the other one, yes? I didn’t think anyone else knew him.” The Brakalon’s shoulders slumped. “But I knew I shouldn’t investigate—and now Ferqar is gone.”

“He’s gone?”

“Perhaps Barnabas took him. He left very suddenly. I haven’t received clearance from the Brakalon government to move yet, so we must stay. I wish he’d told us what was going on...”

Give thanks to all your gods that he didn’t, Norwun thought acerbically. He gestured to the others to go around the captain and begin assessing the crime scene and retrieve the body.

“We will be gone soon,” he said. “I hope you can understand that we must take the body.”

“Oh, of course. Of course.” The Brakalon nodded eagerly. “It is rightfully your investigation instead of Barnabas’. Should I set up a channel for you to speak to him and ask him to return with his information?”

No! The urge to yell was strong. Norwun took a deep breath to steady himself.

“No, thank you,” he said as calmly as he could. “We will contact him. I believe we have recently been contacted by his ship, so he may be aware of our presence already. Thank you for all your help.”

The Brakalon nodded. “I hope we get clearance to move soon,” he said wearily. “This is playing hell with my profits. I’ll go now. Let me know if you need me for anything.”

“Mmm.” Norwun watched him leave.

Fool. The whole species was composed of fools. It was convenient for him, of course, but still tiring to navigate.

“What should we do next?” asked Hynom, one of his associates.

“I’ll tell you on the ship,” Norwun said curtly.

Step one was to find Barnabas and determine what he knew. Step two was to decide if they should come back here and do some cleanup after all. For now, they could leave the Srisa. Best not to necessitate a diplomatic event unless there was no other option.

He knew where they’d be, anyway.

* * *

As the Jotun ship flew away, Captain Kelnamon kept his eyes fixed on the dwindling speck.

He doubted that Barnabas had everything he needed from the scene of the crime, but there wasn’t anything Kelnamon could have done in this instance.

He’d known the second that ship made contact that something unusual was going on. None of the usual diplomatic protocol was on display, although there were some telltales that this was official business.

And something about those suits said that it was the sort of official business that ended with a lot of dead people, so Kelnamon had done the only thing he could think of: lied like crazy. No, he didn’t know anything. No, no one knew anything. No, the other Jotun was gone. No, he couldn’t move the ship until they got word from the Brakalon government. He’d even managed to change the passenger manifest while they were getting the body. There would be no useful data for them if they looked at it.

And if they ever came back, Kelnamon planned to be long gone. He gave it time for the Jotun ship to be well out of range, and then he nodded to the helmsman. The Srisa’s engines flared, and the ship powered away into the black, going as fast as possible in the other direction.

Chapter Ten

“You have got to be kidding me,” Barnabas said for what felt like the tenth time. He was hurrying along one of the lower corridors of the Shinigami toward the engine room. “You don’t even have fuel lines, do you?”

“I’m telling you, I have tubes full of something, and they’re less full of it than they should be. Believe me or not, I don’t care, but let’s at least check it out before we go kablooey.”

“While the assassin gets away.”

“Okay, how about this?” Shinigami projected a hologram of herself walking alongside Barnabas. She’d put on a cape today, which she’d layered over plate armor—showing, in Barnabas’ opinion, that she’d never worn plate armor before in her life. No one who’d worn the stuff of necessity would ever wear it by choice.

On the other hand, as a collection of pixels, one had a great deal more leeway regarding outfits.

“How about this,” she repeated. “We stop at Gerris Station, I put a few locks on all the ships, we dash back to Border Station 7, get everything done there, and when we come back, Gerris is still in chaos, and the assassin hasn’t gotten out yet.”

Barnabas sighed. “I don’t like it.”

“Do you like anything?”

“I like juice.”

“You sound like a toddler.”

“Fine. I like quiet nights with a book, a good mug of beer, and a garden full of freshly-tilled earth.”

Shinigami stopped in her tracks and blinked at him.

“What?” he asked.

“I always forget you were a monk.”

After a moment of consideration, Barnabas lifted his shoulders with a wistful smile. “Sometimes I do, too. That’s all very far away these days. I don’t miss everything about that time, but…sometimes I miss the afternoons. The light would slant into the gardens in just the right way.” He started walking again, more slowly. “It was beautiful in every season. In the spring, there was the promise of greenery. You could smell it in the air even with snow on the ground. In summer, everything was growing and flowering. The air was full of good smells from the herbs we grew. In the autumn, it was harvest—bounty and…grief, almost, the sense of winter approaching and the plants dying even as they gave fruit. And in the winter, everything was quiet. We all need quiet. Contemplation.”

Shinigami said nothing for a long moment. Barnabas looked at her, still half in his memories, and she quirked her mouth to the side.

“You’re a dork.” She said it affectionately, he noticed.

“Mmm. Maybe I’ll put in a garden.”

“Where are you going to have a garden? High Tortuga?”

“On the ship. We have more than enough space. I’ll fill one of the rooms with dirt.” It wasn’t a very workable idea, but her look of horror was worth it. She didn’t know he wasn’t serious, after all. “And I’ll go along with the lock plan.”

“That’s good,” Shinigami said serenely, “because I already did it.”

Barnabas sighed.

* * *

Federation Border Station 7 was, Barnabas had to admit, a welcome taste of home. On alien space stations, he had to keep himself on guard constantly. One could never tell what might give offense, or who might want to make a point by killing a human.

The Shinigami’s maintenance problem was clucked over by Helen Harari, one of Bobcat’s former trainee mechanics who had devised a few of the Shinigami’s systems before the Federation days, and who now went wherever she was needed to repair the far-flung ships.

“Yeah, this isn’t too much of a surprise,” she reported. Her voice was muffled, emerging from a compartment that she’d wedged herself inside with a flashlight and a series of antiquated looking tools.

“It’s a state-of-the-art ship,” Barnabas said. “How can it have problems like this? Doesn’t it…self-repair?”

Helen stuck her head out to give him a look. “Some of the time, yes. Shinigami maintains the computer systems, and can even make minor repairs to hardware. But materials break down. Especially when you’ve been using a ship as hard as you seem to be using this one. Hell, I’d have you bring it in for maintenance every month if I thought you’d listen.”

She disappeared back into the compartment with Barnabas staring after her, chagrinned.

“Anyway, go on,” she called, her voice still muffled. “This won’t take too long—although I’d like to get a full diagnostic in if you can spare the time.”

“Sorry, not today.” Barnabas fought the urge to pace in circles. “We need to be getting back to Gerris before our target finds a way through Shinigami’s ship locks.”

“There’s always something,” Helen muttered. “The next time I ask, I’m sure it will be something else urgent. Well, go on, and I’ll do what I can.”

Somewhat self-consciously, Barnabas set off for the main concourse. He didn’t have anything, in particular, he wanted to see, but he could take the chance to have a relaxing stroll, couldn’t he?

Barnabas—Jeltor says he has a message for you.

Oh?

He says he needs to tell you in person.

Barnabas stopped dead and was run into by several people. Apologizing—he was used to the near-empty hallways of the Shinigami—he drew into an alcove and considered. They couldn’t leave just yet. Even if Barnabas weren’t worried about the Shinigami breaking down, he wouldn’t want to get a tongue-lashing from Helen.

Still, his worries about being stuck here had just doubled.

Could he meet us at Gerris Station? he asked Shinigami.

I’ll pass that along.

Is it serious, do you think? Barnabas started walking again, trying to get rid of his nervous energy by moving. Stupid question. I know it’s serious. But if it’s so serious, why does he think we’ll be able to meet in person?

No idea. I suppose there’s a chance he’s misinterpreting something or thinks it’s more serious than it is, though. You organic life forms do that a lot.

Thank you for the vote of confidence.

It was meant to be reassuring.

Mmm. Barnabas was smiling, however, as he emerged into the relatively open markets. He inhaled the familiar smells of human food and felt a little bit more at home than he had in weeks.

Are you doing anything right now?

No, why?

Grainger wondered if you’d speak to the Magistrates.

Are they here? Barnabas was surprised. The Magistrates had been training to be Rangers—except, with the dissolution of the Empire, they had not finished. Barnabas remembered following their progress somewhat distractedly, but he had been off on his missions and had not kept close tabs. Is this where they… Ah, right, it is. I could talk to them. Wait, why?

He thought it would be good for them to see you. He says he knows you’re still basically a Ranger, soooo…

You’ve definitely been talking with Tabitha too much. All right, where am I going?

Level 8, Room 1430. Hold on. She flashed a map for a few seconds, confusingly embedded in his vision. Did that work?

Yes. Yes, it did. Also, never do that again, I have a gigantic headache.

We’ll fine-tune it.

That would require us to do it again.

It will be a useful thing to have down, and you know it. And I’ll tell Grainger you’ll be there in a couple of minutes. With that, Shinigami appeared to have vanished from his head.

“Stubborn AIs,” Barnabas muttered as he headed for Level 8.

It took him a bit longer than Shinigami had advised, and he popped into the room to find several people staring expectantly at the door.

He remembered Buster at once as the man came over to shake his hand, elbowing Grainger aside. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had blond hair and blue eyes, and a thin white scar at the top of his head. Before the Rangers had disbanded, it had been the plan for Buster to do his first Ranger missions with Barnabas. But all of that had gone out the window when Barnabas headed off on his own. Barnabas had felt a bit guilty about that, but Buster seemed to have landed on his feet just fine.

Also, it would not have made sense for him to bring someone else on this mission. At the time, he had needed to work on his own and chart his own course.

The others were less familiar, but he vaguely remembered some faces.

“Please, take a seat and share some words of wisdom,” Grainger offered. As tall as Buster, he had silvery scars that remained from his time as a Ranger. Even a werewolf couldn’t heal from some of the types of trouble Rangers found. His blue eyes were warm, and his face held the calm competence Barnabas most missed from his time in the Empire.

He shook everyone’s hands, half his thoughts still absorbed with the investigation. He needed to get back to Gerris Station and see what Jeltor had come across.

A woman with bright, inquisitive eyes shook Barnabas’ hand, and something flashed in her gaze—curiosity, and understanding. Barnabas remembered talk of one of the trainees who could read thoughts on physical contact. Rivka, was it? He’d ask later.

He took a seat at last and tried to think of something to say. He smiled at the group. “Words of wisdom. Hmm.” He looked up at the ceiling and considered. “Well, you’ll have an idea about the missions, but no one tells you the shit you’ll be putting up with from everyone else—bureaucrats, low-level station administrators, bankers. And the past few missions, I’ve had a crew of gloriously incompetent pirates trying to steal my ship.”

“Talk to us about your current mission. I sense it’s bothering you. Maybe we can help. We have some resources,” Rivka politely suggested.

Grainger looked at her, his brow furrowing slightly. He seemed curious but not worried.

“Ah. I suppose I could do that.” Barnabas gave her an intrigued look before settling back in his seat. Yes, she probably had seen something in his thoughts. In any case, it could hardly hurt to see what they might say, and even if they had no suggestions, they’d be well-served by seeing that there were missions with no easy places to start. “We responded to a distress call from a civilian ship. Now, this was far out—well out of Federation territory. They know of humans there, but not well, and there are a few species you might not know: Brakalons, Ubuara, Luvendi, Jotun.”

The group all leaned forward to listen, eager to hear more.

“A Jotun was murdered on the transport,” Barnabas explained. “Now, the Jotun are—well, they sort of look like jellyfish, so what they do is they make these mechanical suits that have a tank in the middle of them. They kind of float there and control the suit with their tentacles.”

“That’s crazy,” Buster breathed.

“No, what’s crazy is trying to tell them apart.” Barnabas flashed him a smile.

You are not kidding, Shinigami commented. I’ve been working on a mapping algorithm to tell the most minute differences and still nothing.

I’ve started looking at the suits—scratches, that sort of thing.

Clever human.

There’s an art to making a patronizing comment, you know—and I have to say, you have it down.

“Anyway, the ship had to be brought to a halt because under Brakalon law, if a crime happens on a spaceship, you have to stop the whole thing and wait for authorities to arrive. Well…there was a complication.”

“Isn’t there always?” Grainger muttered.

Barnabas gave a low laugh. “Every single time, I swear. So, the first thing that happened was we showed up, and there was a spaceship a little ways away from the Srisa, trying to block the distress signal and shooting down any ship that tried to approach.”

The group looked at each other, intrigued by this development.

“It was an advanced craft, and probably would have taken down any other ship easily, but—well, the Shinigami was Bethany Anne’s personal ship.” Barnabas gave a small, self-satisfied smile. “It was easy to evade what this ship was throwing at us and tail them. We figured we’d be able to unravel the murder easily, except that the alien flying it used a self-destruct protocol rather than talk to us.”

“Over a single murder?” Rivka demanded. “Who was this person?”

“Interesting question. I assume you mean the murdered Jotun, yes?” Barnabas waited for her nod. “Yes, he was a ship captain in the Jotun Navy. Now, something you probably won’t know—I worked with the Jotun Navy on my last mission, and that was against the direct orders of their Senate. Long story short, we were going up against a corporation that had bribed some of the senators to look the other way, and the Navy wasn’t willing to. One of our best theories is that the murdered captain helped in the battle, and the Senate had him killed. But there are some issues with that theory.”

“They’d have publicized it if they did, wouldn’t they?” Rivka pointed out. “Because they’d want it to be a warning, right? Or a very public punishment, at least.”

“That’s a good point.” Barnabas frowned. “Also strange is the fact that the other ship waited by the Srisa. They didn’t take the actual assassin and leave, and the assassin didn’t shut down the Srisa’s distress signal. It’s as if the two weren’t working together—but both of them wanted what they were doing to be kept quiet.”

The group looked at one another.

“Well, he was involved in something shady,” Buster said finally. He shrugged and looked around at the others. “Right? He had to be. He screwed someone over hard, probably with someone else. The assassin killed him quietly—”

“Why, though?” Rivka interrupted.

“I don’t know, but let me finish. So they killed him quietly, and the other ship was there because his accomplices suspected that was why he was killed, and they didn’t want anyone to find out about it. They were going to try to hush it up, you know?”

Barnabas was staring at him, frowning slightly. An idea was clearly coming to him. “They sent a message to the Jotun government,” he said slowly. “The captain of the Srisa said he had sent a message. I assumed it was to the Navy—but what if he sent it to the Senate?”

Buster gave him a deer-in-the-headlights look. “I’m not sure I quite—”

“We all thought he was assassinated by the Senate for helping the Navy,” Barnabas explained. “But what if he was assassinated by the Navy for helping the Senate?” He slapped his leg. “That’s it. That’s absolutely it. They sent that ship to keep anyone from investigating until their own people could get to it. Oh, Jeltor is not going to be happy.” He rubbed his face and stood. “I…have to go right now, I’m afraid. There are some people I need to talk to before any more assassins get hired. Thank you all.” He ran for the doorway and pelted through it, only to stick his head back around the doorframe a moment later. “It was very nice to meet all of you. I hope we’ll meet again, and if you’re ever in need of aid, do call on the Shinigami.”

He left, sprinting for his ship.

Shinigami! I’ve got it! Did you hear that?

Hmm? Sorry, I was keeping tabs on the ships at Gerris. They’re freaking out. What’s going on?

Huword! He wasn’t helping the Navy, he was helping the Senate.

Whoa, wait. Shinigami sounded skeptical. Is there evidence of that?

We’ll find evidence. Tell you what, I will bet you three pairs of those shoes with the red on the bottom—

Louboutins. Jesus, it is not that hard to remember.

Focus. Barnabas swung himself around the door of the docking bay. Three pairs of those. That’s what Jeltor is going to tell us on Gerris. Wait, did he say he’s coming?

Yep. He’ll meet us there. Also, may I point out that there are no more Louboutins in the world? I want Tasper Dells. They’re the best ones now.

Fine. I can do that. Do we have a bet?

We have a bet.

Chapter Eleven

They knew where she was. Somehow, they already knew. In the tiny, dingy room she’d rented, Kantar paced back and forth.

She didn’t want to admit it, but she was terrified. Even the act of moving in her biosuit, pacing, knowing she appeared as graceful and natural as any other life form, did not help her anxiety.

That was because it didn’t help her now. Nothing would help until she could get herself off this station, and she had no idea how to do that.

She had thought the station administrator was stalling—that they’d taken a bribe and would be coming for her. If someone had wanted to find her, after all, that would have been the easiest way. She’d docked with a shuttle, which was noteworthy, and keeping any ships from going on or off the station would have been a nice, simple way to keep her in place while they hunted her down.

And then…none of that had happened. The Jotuns had never had a violent dictatorship, thank all the gods, but Kantar had traveled enough that she knew how these things went: banging on the doors at night, people stopped at checkpoints, posted rewards for information on anyone suspicious.

She’d stayed awake the first night with a gun trained on the door. Unlike a more standard life form, she could set the suit in one position and have it wake her up as soon as there was a disturbance outside.

She’d been too nervous to sleep, though. She’d been sure they were coming for her.

No one came. No one came the next day, either, and when she finally steeled herself to speak to the station administrator, she found a line that went out of the offices and wound around the markets. Ship captains were irate, minor dignitaries on the ships were irate, traders in perishable goods were especially irate, and no one seemed to be leaving the offices any happier than they’d been upon entering.

When Kantar finally made her way through the line, she found out why. She was met by a secretary who had set up camp in the hallway in a hastily-constructed booth. In fact, every member of the station administrator’s staff, down to someone who looked like part of the cleaning crew, was presently explaining to people in the line that there was nothing they could do and no bribe that would be sufficient to release a ship.

By the end of the conversation, Kantar even believed that they were telling her the truth. At this point, with so many people irate and willing to spend astronomical bribes, surely someone would have cracked.

But that meant that someone had overridden the entire station system and locked all the ships in place—and that hardly made Kantar feel better. The Senate was coming for her—she knew it.

She wasn’t stupid, of course. She had always known this was a possibility. She wasn’t, strictly speaking, an assassin—not until now, anyway. She was just someone who was able to get into unusual places and do unusual things because she wasn’t what she appeared to be. A friend of a friend who knew her had passed along the job, and she’d taken it for free because she knew it was the right thing to do—to kill Huword.

Some people needed to die for the things they’d done. She believed that.

Yes, she had known it might kill her. The thing was, she wasn’t quite ready to die.

So how in hell did she get off this station before they found her?

* * *

“Where does that leave us?” The voice on the other end of the comm was unimpressed.

Norwun tried not to lose himself to disquiet. In general, he preferred it when people got angry and yelled a lot. When they were displeased but very quiet, situations tended to be more dangerous. Those people held grudges.

Those people killed you later, very deliberately and very painfully.

So far, Norwun had managed to avoid that fate, and he was hoping to keep the streak going. So he was careful to modulate his voice when he replied.

“It’s a very good situation. Well, as good as it can be.”

“And how,” the other voice said, “did you reach that conclusion?” They were speaking even more calmly now, which set the alarm bells off in Norwun’s head.

Norwun pretended that he couldn’t think of any reason things would be wrong. “Whoever killed Huword hasn’t made very much of it, have they? It’s still quiet, and we can spin it however we need to. There aren’t any loose ends on the Srisa, which means we don’t need to worry about a Brakalon civilian ship going missing. That could have been messy. And of all the aliens to pick up the trail, it’s one who was already an enemy. There’s no need to worry that someone else has any information.”

There was silence, and Norwun found himself praying silently. Please agree, please agree.

“I suppose you’re right.” There was genuine surprise in the voice.

Norwun bobbed slightly in relief, tentacles going slack for a moment. He hadn’t yet determined just who he was speaking to within the Senate, which made him nervous. They had the correct clearance to be able to contact him, which meant they must be the head of one of the committees, but they hadn’t told him which one and he had the feeling that if he asked, they would not be pleased.

“On the other hand,” the senator said, sending Norwun back into a quiet frenzy of anxiety, “Barnabas is already determined to find damaging information on the Senate.”

“He already has damaging information,” Norwun countered. The confrontation in the Senate had not been widely publicized, but Norwun had, of course, heard of it. Barnabas had made threats that made it clear he knew exactly what had happened between the Senate and the Yennai Corporation. “He hasn’t made it public.”

“Do not make the mistake of thinking he’s harmless.” The senator’s voice was harsh. “The Yennai Corporation made that mistake, and they are gone. Their fleet is gone. They were one of the most powerful entities in this sector, and there is nothing left of them. He disassembled them piece by piece. If we allow him to continue on this path, there is no telling what he might find…or disrupt.”

There was something there. Norwun pondered it. He had learned to read between the lines of what senators said, for the simple reason that they usually didn’t come out and tell him what to do—he had to puzzle out their meaning.

It confused him, back in the day. He had almost made several costly mistakes by not realizing that they wanted people killed or interrogated. Luck had gotten him through those times, and he had learned how to interpret their words.

In this case, the senator had admitted something without meaning to. They were worried Barnabas would find something specific and disrupt things, and it had nothing to do with the bribes the Yennai Corporation had been giving them. So what was it?

This was very interesting, and Norwun wanted to know what it was about—if only from the perspective of self-preservation.

Unfortunately, it was difficult enough to find shadowy secrets when you knew whose secrets you were investigating. Without knowing so much as the name of his contact, his chances of discovering their secrets were essentially nil.

Sometimes he wished he’d chosen a different job—a shop clerk, maybe. An engineer. Something where your employer didn’t kill you if things went wrong.

Maybe he’d look into that.

For now, he said simply, “Barnabas has a weakness. He will not let civilians be killed. This can be used to trap him.”

“Others have tried that.” The senator sounded unimpressed.

“As you say, others underestimate him. I won’t. His ship is part of his invincibility. I will separate him from it. I will constrain him somewhere that he cannot use violent force for fear of harming civilians around him. Then I will kill him without fighting him directly. That was the problem others had; they tried to fight, and he can fight any number of opponents successfully. Put him somewhere there’s nothing to fight—where his opponent is the lack of air or heat—and we’ll have more luck.”

It was more than he’d wanted to reveal. He usually tried to be vague so that if there were any changes to the plan on the fly, he could claim he’d meant to do those things all along.

In this case, however, the specifics seemed to reassure his contact.

“Good,” he said simply. “Deal with him quickly, then follow up with the Srisa. I want it destroyed.”

“But...” Norwun began to be even more worried. “No one on the ship knew anything.”

“So they said. Perhaps it is even true after a fashion. But there’s no knowing what they might have seen and what might become relevant later. I said I wanted it destroyed, and I want every passenger dealt with.”

There was only one answer. “Yes, of course.”

The call ended, and Norwun stared around the bridge, trying to calm himself. He’d killed like this before without remorse, but always for a purpose. This was now turning into a plan for wholesale slaughter, and he didn’t like it. As much as it bothered him to think he might have an emotional weakness, it seemed he did.

He wished there was anything to be done about it.

He didn’t think there was, though. He knew his place. He carried out orders or was killed himself. The senator would survive either way and find someone else to do what Norwun wouldn’t.

Those people were as good as dead. He might as well be the one to do it.

* * *

Jeltor checked the navigational computer for the seventh time, the backup navigational computer for the twelfth time, and the scopes for the fifty-eighth time before relaxing enough to get out of his chair and open the door to the back portion of the spacecraft.

He still wasn’t exactly relaxed, but on the other hand—

“What the hell is this about?” his wife demanded.

Jeltor, who had thought his family would still be under the effects of the tranquilizers he’d slipped them, jumped.

“What is what about?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could.

“We’re all on a spaceship,” his wife said, “and if you thought I wouldn’t notice that, you should never have been allowed to pilot a ship in the Navy because you’re unforgivably stupid. As it is, I can see you preparing to lie your way out of this, so I’ll give you some advice. Don’t even try.”

“Right. Erm, out of curiosity, how are you awake?” There was a beep behind him, and Jeltor spun around in his tank to look—but it was only an automated message to tell him that they were approaching an asteroid belt, exactly in the time frame they should be.

His wife snorted. “I got my suit upgraded. It deals with any chemicals I haven’t told it I’m going to be taking.”

“That’s a nice upgrade.” He wished she’d mentioned that. He was about to get the mother of all lectures, and he didn’t want to explain what was going on.

To his surprise, she didn’t yell. “Jeltor, in all our years together, you’ve never done anything like this. I can’t imagine you did this to hurt us. You must have thought we were in danger. What’s going on?”

Jeltor gave his children a worried look. They were still out cold. “Let’s talk in the cockpit.”

They closed the door behind them. Jeltor wondered where exactly he should begin.

“You remember when Barnabas called me?” he said finally.

“Yes.”

“Captain Huword—you remember him?—was murdered. On a Brakalon civilian transport in the middle of nowhere.”

“Jeltor.” She sounded sad. “I’m so sorry. I know you two were close.”

He fought a wave of bitterness. “We really weren’t,” he explained. “I thought we were, but we weren’t. It was good that I hadn’t seen him since everything started with the Yennai Corporation, because I might have been murdered instead.”

She fell silent, radiating surprise.

Jeltor swallowed and tried to find the words.

In the end, though, it was easier than he expected: “Huword was a traitor,” he said bluntly, “and I would have killed him myself if I’d had the chance.”

Chapter Twelve

Showered, changed, his stomach full of delicious food, and with a break in his case, Barnabas was in a much better mood when he went onto the bridge of the Shinigami a few hours later.

Unfortunately, he found himself in the middle of a heated argument between Shinigami and the administrator of Gerris station. Gar was sitting wide-eyed, apparently not trusting the outcome if he were to speak up, while Shinigami had taken to hissing human expletives in various non-English languages.

Tafa, who was seated in the pilot’s chair, swiveled around to give Barnabas a surprisingly cheerful nod. After a moment, Barnabas decided that meant everything was under control. Tafa had grown up as part of a family that executed anyone they didn’t like, so if she was fine with the situation, it was a good sign that the raised voices were just that—loud, nothing worse.

Barnabas decided to enjoy the show.

“Listen, afatottari,” Shinigami said sweetly, “cagati in mano e prenditi a schiaffi, si? I don’t care if ships can’t undock. That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

Gar leaned over. “What is she saying?”

“Well, I didn’t understand the first bit,” Barnabas admitted, “but I did understand the Italian and let’s just say it wasn’t very, err…hygienic, as suggestions go.”

“You are not understanding,” the station administrator said. He sounded quite harried at this point. “If you dock with us, I cannot verify that you will be able to undock. Several ships have tried and been severely damaged—and they have not managed to get clear of the station.”

Shinigami gave Barnabas a look. Stupid motherfucker.

Just lock down the station, you said. Barnabas was enjoying this. Simple, you said. I’ve already done it, you said.

Oh, sure, and I’m the one who hangs out too much with Tabitha. I think I liked it better when you had a stick up your ass.

I beg your pardon?

Hey, there it is again. She looked back at the screen. “How about this? We’re going to dock with your station. You can either allow us to do so at a docking port or we will find a place that looks promising and drill through the side of the station. And if you don’t like either of those two options, chupe mantequilla de mi culo.”

“We cannot allow you to dock!”

“Hijo de las mil putas.” Shinigami dropped her head into one hand.

“Hello,” Barnabas said pleasantly. “This is the captain of the Shinigami. May I presume I’m speaking to Westo Gor’rathi?”

“Yes.” By this point, the man seemed to have lost hope of leaving the conversation unscathed. Had he understood Shinigami, Barnabas suspected he’d have come to that conclusion much earlier.

Barnabas settled back in his chair. “I have on board an exceedingly talented network specialist who may be able to untangle whatever problem is presently occurring in your systems. In the meantime, I give you my word that neither I nor my affiliates will hold you responsible for any issues we may have relating to your present problems.”

The station administrator said nothing in response.

“What do you have to lose?” Barnabas asked reasonably. “So there will be one more crew on your station. A drop in the bucket. And there’s the chance we can fix your problem.”

There was a long pause.

“Fine,” the station manager said savagely. “Dock at Bay 78. And tell your first mate to hoje nad’razg hujkira.”

The line cut and Barnabas looked at Shinigami, who shrugged.

“If he wants to shock me, he’s going to have to try harder than that. Definitely passing that one on to Tabitha, though.”

“What did it mean? Actually, no, do not tell me—”

“Well, they have more orifices than we do—”

“I SAID, DON’T TELL ME.”

* * *

Had she remained holed up in her room, Kantar might not have heard about the two new ships. As it was, she heard people on the station threatening to start a riot and decided to investigate.

“It’s ridiculous!” a Torcellan female hissed at her companion. “We’ll run out of food soon, and they’re letting new ships dock?”

Kantar froze, her mind racing ahead.

“It could be supply ships,” the other one said reasonably.

“It was a frigate and a personal ship,” the first one shot back. “And one of them was Jotun, of all things—or at least, that’s what Yednamor said.”

Oh, no.

The second Torcellan didn’t look convinced, but Kantar was. She pushed her way through the crowd and tried not to break into a sprint. She couldn’t afford to be noteworthy, not now.

But if they were here, it was only a matter of time until they came for her, wasn’t it?

She knew what she had to do.

* * *

They emerged into chaos. Gar, still habitually inclined to stay away from unpredictable crowds, froze in the doorway of the ship and wouldn’t move until Tafa took his hand and led him into the landing bay, murmuring soothingly.

“Awww,” Shinigami said quietly to Barnabas.

He nodded in agreement. He still wasn’t quite sure what had prompted him to offer Tafa a spot on his ship, and he suspected that most of it was nothing more than sentiment. When he’d found her, she’d been a hostage with Jeltor. She’d stopped believing that the universe was a place where good things happened. She had no skill in combat, nor did she have any desire to learn.

In short, she was hardly a logical addition to a Ranger’s crew. She’d been useful, however, showing a talent for a surprising range of things from data manipulation to piloting. When Barnabas had returned to Helen’s workshop on Station 7 he’d found Tafa wedged into the compartment with the human mechanic, learning about the Shinigami’s internal workings and fixing a hose under Helen’s watchful eye.

And there were things like this, too—Tafa talking things over with her shipmates and, in general, making the ship a nicer place to be.

Barnabas hoped she stayed around. Truly good people, in his opinion, were few and far between. When you found one, you hung onto them as long as you could.

“Barnabas!” Jeltor came clanking around the edge of the doorway. “I just saw Tafa and Gar. They said they’re going to find some juice. Do they mean batteries?”

“No, they mean that Barnabas has an unfortunate addiction.” Shinigami tried to roll her eyes but didn’t quite have the trick of it yet. It looked truly frightening.

“Where do you want to speak?” Barnabas asked when Jeltor looked confused.

“Ah. On your ship, if possible.” Jeltor looked around. “Anyone here could be listening in.” He hesitated. “And may I bring my family aboard? I have them in crates so no one will see them on the security feeds. I brought them with me since I was scared of what might happen if I left them.”

“Of course.” Barnabas nodded at Shinigami, who went off to make the arrangements. His heart gave a pang. “I’m sorry you’ve been so worried. I promise we won’t let anyone hurt your family. And if you doubt me,” he added, trying to make Jeltor smile, “remember that we took down a whole fleet together.”

“Right.” Jeltor didn’t sound convinced, but he allowed himself to be led onto the Shinigami, and it was only a few minutes before they heard the clanking sounds that indicated that his family was aboard.

Shinigami joined them as a hologram a moment later. “I set them up in one of the guest suites,” she explained.

“Thank you, Shinigami.” Barnabas sat in one of the chairs of the main lounge area and nodded at Jeltor to speak. “You said you found something important.”

“I did.” Jeltor’s biosuit twitched several times as though he were giving it tiny involuntary commands. Certainly, his actual body was twitching rapidly in the central tank.

That’s creepy, Shinigami commented.

You know, I’d say you’re being rude, but…I have to agree. Barnabas tried not to grimace.

Unaware of their discussion, Jeltor was struggling to find words. “I was wrong about everything I told you about Huword. I told you he didn’t have any enemies and that he was good-natured and trustworthy, and none of that was true.”

Barnabas tilted his head to the side, waiting.

“I can’t prove this,” Jeltor continued. “He covered his tracks well. But trust me when I say I know it’s true. Even if I can’t prove it, it all makes sense—he was working with the Senate. He’s been collecting information on all of us for years, and he was just waiting for an opportunity to get ahead by using it. I can’t even imagine what else he’s done with it, but I know he betrayed some of the admirals. They’re in front of the Senate for charges that don’t sound very bad, but their careers will be gone, and they’ll be ruined. And Huword was the one passing them information about the Navy’s technology…which they gave to Yennai, of course.”

Barnabas blew out a breath. “You know, I wondered if that might be it.” Too bad I didn’t make you put something on that bet.

Are you kidding? He doesn’t have any proof. You still owe me shoes.

I said this was what he was here to tell us, and it was. No shoes.

Ugh.

“You didn’t tell me?” Jeltor sounded frustrated. “You knew, and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t suspect until after you were already on your way here, and I didn’t want to say anything in case I was wrong. But with both of us arriving at this conclusion independently, I’d say it’s likely we’re onto something. It certainly helps the various pieces of this debacle make a bit more sense.”

“Such as?” Jeltor looked confused.

“Well, there was the Jotun ship that was shooting down anyone who approached, but they didn’t seem to be working with the assassin. They probably weren’t. They were sent by the Senate, and they were trying to keep people away from the Srisa until the Senate’s cleanup crew could arrive. Speaking of which,” Barnabas frowned “I sent a message to the Srisa while we were on our way here but haven’t heard back.”

He, Shinigami, and Jeltor looked at one another, worried.

“I should never have left them there,” Barnabas said quietly.

“You couldn’t have known,” Shinigami told him soothingly.

“As soon as I suspected this was between the Navy and the Senate, I should have assumed someone would treat that ship as a whole set of loose ends.”

“No, and here’s why.” Shinigami locked eyes with him. “They had a ship there blocking access, but it hadn’t shot the Srisa down. They had chances to destroy it, and they didn’t. And the fact is, maybe the Srisa got cleared to make port somewhere. There’s no way to know.”

“Right.” Barnabas nodded. “Yes. Right.” His thoughts were still racing, but he could hope she was correct.

“So what do we do?” Jeltor asked them. He shook his head. “I don’t understand any of this. No one spoke to me of it, so whoever found out what he was up to didn’t set out to make an example of him. I spoke to some of the other captains who were part of the mutiny, and they’re all as shocked as I was. None of them so much as suggested that he deserved it, and trust me, if they knew what he’d done, someone would have told me.”

“That’s interesting,” Barnabas commented. “No one’s making a big deal of this. I feel like it should be all over the news, and both the Senate and the Navy should be making statements.”

“They are, but there isn’t any sort of…positioning.” Jeltor shook his head.

“Well, whoever he was and whatever he was up to, he was in deep.” Barnabas shook his head. “And I’m guessing that the closer we look, the worse stuff we’re going to find.”

“I don’t even want to think about it.” Jeltor sounded worried.

“I hate to interrupt,” Shinigami said, “but we have a situation.”

“What?” Barnabas was on his feet in a moment.

“That assassin on the Srisa? She’s here, and she’s trying to get onto the ship.”

Barnabas took off for the doorway.

“Don’t you want armor?” Shinigami’s voice projected from several speakers at once.

“I’m not going to fight her,” Barnabas called back. “She’s the one who understands all of what’s going on!”

“Yeah, are you sure she knows you’re on her side? Because she’s armed to the teeth.”

“I’ll be able to explain,” Barnabas said, annoyed. “Open the doors.”

Shinigami had been right to worry, however, because as soon as the doors slid open and the assassin saw him running toward her, she only hesitated for a moment. She whipped a rifle down from over her head, aimed, and fired.

Chapter Thirteen

“Whoa!”

The assassin’s biosuit was fast, but Barnabas’ reactions were honed to a higher standard than the average organic life form. He threw himself sideways with a yell and collided with the wall while the bullet zoomed past him to embed itself in the back wall of the hallway behind him.

Hey! Shinigami yelled. Get off my spaceship with that shit! She flickered into being with a murderous expression on her face and Baba Yaga’s blood-red eyes. One hand, tipped with claws, came up into the air. “You want to play?” she asked the assassin. “Let’s play.”

The assassin, seeing what appeared to be a vicious subspecies of human where there hadn’t been one before and Barnabas sans bullet holes, took off like a shot.

“Not helpful, Shinigami!” Barnabas raced after her with a sigh.

Eh, you’ll catch her.

As touching as your confidence is, it would be more touching if it didn’t require heroics on my part. We now have a scared and highly capable assassin on a station full of civilians.

Mmm. I’m sure you’ll think of something.

Barnabas shook his head and put everything he had into running. Since he had turned, he’d been stronger and faster than the average human, and Bethany Anne’s well-tailored upgrades had made his body even better. He was, in essence, his perfect self, as well as having numerous other capabilities that did not, as John sometimes put it, come with the standard human package.

However, Barnabas was still human, and he had all the tiny imperfections that came along with that. Small variances between his left and right leg might cause tiny hitches in his stride, slowing him down. Pain might hamper him.

The Jotun assassin had none of that, and her speed was impressive. Pretty much the only saving grace for Barnabas was that she couldn’t get up to any dangerous speeds when she kept having to dodge people and take corners.

At least she was dodging people, not pushing them out of the way or trying to take them hostage. That was a heartening sign.

“Stop!” Barnabas called. “We’re on the same side!”

See, that’s good. I knew you’d think of something.

It hasn’t worked yet, Barnabas pointed out, and I told the station administrator that we wouldn’t cause any trouble.

I think you knew that was bullshit when you said it.

I admit nothing. Barnabas hurdled a small stand of vegetables and detoured down a side hallway after the assassin. “Please, stop! I know why you did it!”

The assassin looked over her shoulder at that, but whatever she saw did not reassure her. She kept running, making for the balcony that overlooked the main markets, and before Barnabas could stop her, she leaped lightly onto the railing and jumped up to grab of the next floor’s railing. She hauled herself up and was gone.

Oh, hell no, Barnabas muttered internally. You are not getting away that easily. Shinigami—

Yeah, yeah, I’m tracking her. She’s waiting to see if you climb up, I have her on the station’s security cameras.

All right. Barnabas climbed up to stand on the railing and braced himself using the ceiling. “My name is Barnabas,” he called. “I expect you know that. I mean you no harm.”

She’s getting her gun out again.

Delightful. Barnabas raised his voice. “I am following you at the behest of Captain Jeltor, who is presently on my ship.”

That got her attention. She’s getting closer to listen. She really does have the trick of moving like a biological life form.

“We originally believed Captain Huword’s assassination to be the work of the Senate,” Barnabas said, “but I think now, perhaps, that it was someone in the Navy who had him killed. And I think I know why. Huword wasn’t who he appeared to be, was he? He was everyone’s friend, Jeltor said. I should have known that wasn’t possible. He wasn’t anyone’s friend. He was the person who listened to all their secrets and then sold them out.”

It happened in the blink of an eye. The assassin swung down, landing lightly and turning to aim at Barnabas, who only just managed not to fall off the ledge.

“Don’t try to get down,” she said. Her voice had been modulated to sound human now. “And tell me why I should believe you’re not a Senate spy.”

Barnabas started laughing. “If you’d seen my last few interactions with the Senate you wouldn’t be asking that.”

She did not laugh. “I have seen them—or heard about them, at least. I did a lot of research on you while I came here. You trapped me at this station. You locked the ships down. Why?”

“To keep you here,” Barnabas admitted. “I’m sorry for the delay, but we needed maintenance on our ship. While we were doing that, I realized maybe you weren’t working for the Senate. Of course, you have me at gunpoint still, so maybe I was wrong.”

He’d managed to strike the right note; she was deeply offended by that.

“I am not working for the Senate.”

Barnabas sighed. “Look, I appreciate that you’re trying to stay safe, but we should not talk about this here. Why don’t you come with me and hear me out? If you aren’t willing to do so on my ship, we’ll go wherever you choose. I’ll bring Jeltor if you want. Or, I suppose you could speak just with him—although I warn you, if you do to him what you did to Huword, I’ll hunt you down and do the same to you. Are we clear?”

She lowered the gun at last. “What’s Jeltor to you?”

“A friend.” Barnabas stared her down. “He was at my back when I needed help to take down the Yennai Corporation, which is something it seems like you should know, given who it was you assassinated.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “You’re right, we shouldn’t talk here. I’ll come back to your ship. Fair warning, though—if you try to get me out of this suit so you can deconstruct it or interrogate me, it will blow the whole damned station to dust.”

“Mmm.” Shinigami, fact check?

No idea, but you can bet I’ll be scanning the hell out of her when she comes aboard.

We probably want to do it before.

Hmm? Oh, I didn’t mean from a defensive standpoint. I want to learn how to make my body do that.

I should have known.

Barnabas led the way back through the station as quickly as he could. He didn’t think many people had heard their conversation, and there hadn’t been any violence in the station, but he still didn’t want to take the chance of someone overhearing them.

In the doorway of the Shinigami, the assassin hesitated, and it was this, oddly, that made Barnabas relax at last. She was genuinely worried he might be trying to trap her.

“Do you know what I am?” he asked her.

“A human.”

“No—well, yes—but I’m a Ranger. I seek out injustice, and I judge those who have perpetrated it. I defend the helpless.” He looked at her seriously. “I could not back anyone who allied themselves either with the Yennai Corporation, or corrupt politicians.”

She gave him a curious look, tilting her black-masked face to the side. Apparently, humans weren’t the only species that did that. Then she seemed to remember her caution. “Show me Jeltor.”

“I’m here.” Jeltor clanked around the corner. “I came on a cloaked ship, watching the scopes the whole way. I was sure the Senate had somehow found out what I knew… Well, what I suspect. I have no evidence.” He looked at her. “You do, though.”

She stepped into the ship and let the door slide closed behind her. “And what do you suspect?”

Jeltor had to force himself to speak. He did not yet trust her. “Huword betrayed the admirals to the Senate,” he said. “There’s no way to know how much else he’s told them. The charges are specific, and all of it is...” He shook his head. “I just want to know who found out. I don’t understand why all of us weren’t told.”

The assassin looked at them for a long moment.

“I’m only the messenger,” she said finally. “The story isn’t mine to tell—and truly, I shouldn’t even say what I’m about to say. But if you’re both what you claim, if you’re both willing to do what must be done, then maybe you should know.”

She paused for so long that Barnabas prompted her, “We should know what?”

“That was only the smallest part of what Huword did,” she said quietly. Barnabas saw a flash of memory in her head: dead bodies and smoking ruins—and then she activated the door, stepped out, and was gone into the bustle of Gerris Station.

* * *

“Yes?” The senator sounded annoyed.

“I have a trace on the Shinigami.” Norwun’s ship shot through space. He was pushing the limits of its engines, but he knew he couldn’t afford to slow. “It docked at Gerris Station not too long ago. I was following what I thought was its trail, heading toward one of the Federation border stations, but they must have done that to confuse any pursuit. There are reports of a lockdown at the station.”

“Good,” the senator said. “Tell me when it’s done—including the Srisa, and the assassin. I expect you to find the assassin.”

They ended the call, and Norwun tried to calm down. He’d do this, he told himself. Others had failed to apprehend Barnabas because they’d underestimated his abilities. Norwun would not make the same mistake.

He pulled up the schematics of Gerris Station and set to work.

He had no idea where to begin searching for the assassin. All he could hope was that Barnabas would—and that he’d bargain for his life with the information.

Chapter Fourteen

“I’m telling you we should go after her,” Shinigami argued again. She had brought her physical body into the conference room and had her arms crossed with impatience. She shook her head. “I don’t know why you won’t; it’s not exactly a weird suggestion.”

“She wanted us to find something,” Barnabas argued back. “She said it wasn’t hers to tell. And I know some of it, anyway. He killed a lot of people. I’d say he was a serial killer, but surely someone on his crew would have noticed that.”

“If he did something bad—”

“He paid for it,” Barnabas said flatly. “As far as she’s concerned, the matter is closed.”

“Yes, but it’s not closed.” Shinigami’s rising frustration was clear. “He helped people, and we know who he helped. It was those fuckers in the Senate. He helped them while they were signing their people over to Koel Yennai.”

“I know,” Barnabas agreed.

“They didn’t give a damn about their own citizens!”

“I know.”

“Then why aren’t you doing anything about it?” Shinigami exploded.

Once, this would have been the start of an argument between them, but they’d grown to know each other better now. Barnabas smiled at her.

“Shinigami, have you ever known me to stand by while injustice was done?”

“No.” Shinigami sounded annoyed. “So I don’t get why—”

“I’ve been debating the pros and cons of exposing the Jotun senators,” Barnabas interrupted. “You saw what happened on Earth when Bethany Anne—well, you’ll have heard about it, I imagine. The information was all there. People could see that their politicians were selfish and irresponsible, but the politicians lied through their teeth and some people bought it, then there were citizens arguing with one another about whether to forgive, and whether there was anything to forgive. If we go about this the wrong way, nothing changes.” He sighed. “And it’s not the Federation we’re throwing into chaos. It’s a government that isn’t even ours.”

Shinigami had fallen silent. Now she looked at Jeltor, whose biosuit was still as he listened to this.

“I can help,” Barnabas told him. “I will help. Whatever you ask me to do, Jeltor, I’ll trust your opinion. I can release the information we found about the bribes if you think it will do any good.”

Jeltor considered this. “You’re right to worry,” he admitted. “I’ve seen senators hauled up for corruption charges before. They’re always guilty—it’s not like the charges are trumped up or anything—but the people who get charged are always just unlucky or out of favor with whoever’s in power at the time. It robs the charges of their legitimacy, even though they are legitimate. People say, ‘Well, everyone does it.’”

Barnabas nodded wearily. “Every species seems to do this. You know, I hoped that we’d get out here and other species would have the trick of forming ethical, workable governments. The more species we meet, however, the more I think corruption just goes hand in hand with sentience.”

Shinigami looked annoyed. “Everything we do, someone comes along and undoes it the next moment. Nothing ever stays fixed.”

“Nope.” Barnabas was laughing, shaking his head as he agreed with her. “Nothing ever stays fixed.”

“Then why are you laughing?” She came over to sit down and dropped her head onto her crossed arms. It was a delightfully theatrical gesture, and—as far as Barnabas could tell—something she hadn’t learned from Bethany Anne or Tabitha.

It fascinated him to watch her display new mannerisms, from a snarky and relatively young AI to someone who fiercely valued her friends and was willing to learn new ways of interacting. When they had started working together, Barnabas had still been of the opinion that AI sentience wasn’t true sentience.

He’d realized, over his time spent working with Shinigami, just how wrong he had been. Her thoughts and emotions were as real as his own.

So he tried to comfort her now. “There’s no point in being disappointed that things don’t stay fixed, any more than there’s a point in being disappointed that you have to keep weeding a garden or fix a house or a ship. God named us stewards, Shinigami, and stewards preserve what matters most to them. They tend to it.”

She picked her head up. “I suppose if you’re getting religious, you must be taking this at least a little bit seriously.”

Barnabas shrugged. He had never quite adhered to any religion on Earth, but he still found value in many ways of conceptualizing God and the world. After seeing some of the religious disagreements that unfolded on Earth, however, he did not speak of his faith except among close friends—and often, not even then.

“I am taking it seriously,” he assured her. “I simply want to make sure that, whatever I do, it actually brings Justice to these senators instead of them just getting off the hook.”

“And whatever they were doing,” Jeltor said, bringing it back around, “it sounds like Huword was caught up in it. I wish I knew who had him assassinated. I feel like if we could jump ahead to knowing what they know, we’d be able to make more progress.”

“Exactly!” Shinigami made a satisfied noise. “See?” she asked Barnabas. “I’m not the only one who thinks that.

“I know you’re not,” Barnabas said patiently, “but I think it’s important to go through the process. It’s not as if the assassin tossed a coin and decided not to tell us. She had a reason. We don’t know what it was yet.”

Shinigami was still grumbling when she perked up and turned her head as though she were listening. It was such a human gesture that Barnabas also looked around, trying to catch any faint sound she might have noticed. Then he realized that she was probably “hearing” through some of her other sensors.

“There’s a maintenance problem,” she said slowly. “Maybe? There are some people trapped in a room on the other side of the station.”

Barnabas and Jeltor looked at one another. Shinigami was still staring into space, frowning in concentration as she worked her way through the station reports like a human would. She didn’t waste processing power on emoting while she was thinking about other things.

“Something about—a new Jotun ship that docked.” She sat up straighter and looked right at Barnabas. “Not too long ago. And now there are people trapped in some chamber and station alerts are being sent.”

Barnabas was out of the room so fast he practically climbed over the table. He sprinted down the hallways to his rooms, unbuttoning his formal shirt and vest as he went, and got into his armor in record time before sprinting back out—only to immediately collide with Jeltor.

Jeltor made a surprised noise and Barnabas gave a muffled grunt of pain. Running high-speed into spiky metal hurt.

“Where are you going?” Jeltor asked.

“They’re here,” Barnabas said grimly. “The Senate sent someone, and I’ll be damned if I let this one self-destruct too.”

“I’m coming with you,” Jeltor stated at once. When Barnabas made for the airlock, he followed.

“No.” Barnabas shook his head. “There’s something more to this. We must be very careful. Here’s what I want you to do...”

* * *

In the control room of the Ur’talis, Norwun made a slight adjustment to one system and closed off another.

The station administrator was fighting back. He didn’t know what he was fighting against, of course, but he was running through all the diagnostic checks he could think of to get civilians out of that part of the station.

Norwun had chosen his location well, however. This part of the station had once been used to house diplomats and other high-value visitors, so it ran on different circuits than the rest of the station. That had been intended to save the diplomats if someone tried to destroy the entire station to get to them.

Now it would help Norwun keep his captives in place while he summoned Barnabas to play rescuer.

It was both a good and bad time to have tried this, he was finding out. Every ship at Gerris Station had been trapped here for days, which had wreaked havoc across the entire sector regarding travel and trade.

In a desperate bid to fix the problem, the administrator had deployed every maintenance worker he had to find the cause of the ship lock. He hadn’t found it, of course, but they were all a lot more knowledgeable about the station than they had been even a few days ago.

On the other hand, they were all tired and overworked, and Norwun was fairly sure he could keep them from breaking his hold on this part of the station—at least until he’d dealt with Barnabas.

The door opened behind him, and one of his team members came in.

“It’s done,” she told Norwun. Reqara was older than the rest of his team. Her body was a rare pink color and she was much smaller than most Jotuns, but it would be foolish to underestimate her because of her size as many did. She was competent and deadly, and she had learned the trick of behaving in a way that didn’t attract attention.

She was the one who had set up a special surprise for Barnabas. Now she came to stand by the control panels.

“How long will it be until he comes, do you think?”

“Not long,” Norwun predicted. “He can’t resist getting involved when there are innocent people to save.” He swiveled in his tank to look at her. “It doesn’t bother you, does it?”

“It would bother me if you did it any other way,” she said bluntly. “He’s dangerous. Better to set up a trap than try to face him ‘honorably’ and lose.” Her voice showed the depths of her contempt. “Like everyone else did.”

Norwun nodded and settled down to wait.

It wouldn’t be long. He could tell.

* * *

Biset’s biosuit stood motionless in the corner as he swam idly around his tank. At the edge of the tank there were a few small fish that were huddled among the plants, hoping he hadn’t noticed them. He would hunt them later; the thought made him shiver in anticipation.

Jotuns were more civilized now. They liked to wear biosuits and be fed via small particles in their tanks—and in most cases, this was good. Biset could hardly argue with the progress the Jotuns had made since they had perfected biosuit technology.

But it was good to remember what you were. The Jotuns weren’t simply aquatic creatures who had to use machines to give them strength. They were hunters.

Before he hunted, however, he had to make sure his operatives were on the right track. A set of video screens in his tank showed information from Gerris Station, where Norwun’s ship had recently docked.

Biset could admit he’d had doubts. Many otherwise-logical people of many species had underestimated Barnabas and wound up dead. They seemed to want to face him one-on-one in combat for some reason.

Their funeral, not his—until it came to this particular mission. Now he had a vested interest in making sure Norwun did things sensibly, and he was pleased to see that the operative was setting everything up just like he’d said he would.

Barnabas would be so distracted by the choice Norwun had given him that he would fall right into the trap before he had time to notice it was there.

And Biset would be the hero of the Senate. No one would know, of course; Biset could not afford to advertise that he was the one who’d ordered this. It was a pity. They’d all owe him favors if they knew.

They’d owe him, he thought, whether they realized it or not. He’d collect someday.

For now, he’d focus on what mattered: eliminating the threat.

Chapter Fifteen

A crowd of people had gathered near the entrance to the locked section of the station. Part of the group was, understandably, maintenance workers, station staff, police, and media. Barnabas had to duck under multiple sets of broadcast equipment, and, in one case, nearly ended up oversetting a food cart in his attempt to stay out of the shot.

Why are you bothering? Shinigami asked him. The media are such pricks.

In this case, there’s a reasonable public interest. If they want to endanger their lives to get a good backdrop for their story—and they don’t interfere with the rescue teams—I’m not going to stop them. It’s the rest of these clowns I want to strangle. Who hears that there’s a malfunction on a space station and goes there to check it out? Any reasonable person would go the other way.

You’ve met people before, right? They’re dumb.

I wish I could refute that.

Barnabas spotted Westo Gor’rathi, the station administrator, speaking with some of the maintenance workers, and headed that way. He had buttoned his jacket so that his weaponry was not immediately obvious. For all he knew, this was simply an equipment malfunction.

He highly doubted it, however.

He waited until the administrator dispatched the group he was speaking with, sending all of them running in various directions to check certain things. Barnabas was impressed with the male’s competence. Although harried, the Torcellan seemed to have a good handle on what was going on, and he was decisive in his orders.

When he turned and saw Barnabas, his eyes narrowed slightly. “Mr. Nacht.” He sounded slightly uncertain of the title.

Barnabas decided it was as good as any. He wasn’t going to waste time on corrections on vampire naming conventions when there were more pressing issues. “Mr. Gor’rathi. Thank you for allowing my ship to dock.”

“I notice that the ship lock has not yet been lifted,” Gor’rathi stated somewhat acidly, “and that there was a gun battle near the loading docks as soon as you landed.”

“We’re working on it—and the term ‘battle’ is quite an exaggeration, I assure you. The sole bullet in that incident went into my ship, and we resolved the matter without any further violence or harm to the station or bystanders.”

Gor’rathi’s eyes narrowed further. “Are you a lawyer?”

“I am not.” Barnabas tried to keep a touch of annoyance out of his tone. “Mr. Gor’rathi, may I perhaps be of assistance in this matter?” He nodded toward the locked doors.

Gor’rathi studied him for a long moment. “Now, why would you think you could be of use, I wonder?”

Barnabas returned his half-smile, aware that his eyes were not exactly friendly. “Call it a hunch,” he said smoothly. “I don’t think this is random, although I’m not presently at liberty to say why.” In the spirit of fairness, he added, “I’d be happy to be proven wrong.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot make you happy.” Gor’rathi folded his hands in front of him and gave a world-weary sigh. He glanced at the media, who were all giving him hopeful looks, and made an effort to keep his face calm.

Pale and well-dressed, he nonetheless flouted Torcellan custom by wearing his hair in a single neat braid down his back. There were no decorations in it that Barnabas could see. It was a curious choice.

Now he looked at Barnabas, black eyes watchful. His voice was very low as he said, “We received a message just before you arrived. It noted that you would be along shortly and we should send you in alone or they will kill the civilians in the section. We asked for more information, but none came.”

I should have known.

You did know. It’s why you’re wearing your armor.

He had to admit she was onto something there. Barnabas looked at the assembled media.

“I suggest you tell them I’m a maintenance worker.”

“I have experience dealing with the media, Mr. Nacht.”

Shinigami was snickering in Barnabas’ head. I can picture this guy calling Bethany Anne “Ms. Nacht.”

She only gets upset at intentional rudeness, Barnabas pointed out.

Still funny. Empress. Many-clawed murder machine. Bloody armor and a team of Bitches. “Ms. Nacht.”

Barnabas refrained from rolling his eyes. “I’ll go in, then,” he told the Torcellan.

“Before you do, so that I can prepare myself...” Gor’rathi looked resigned. “What are the odds there will be deaths?”

Barnabas gave a very wide smile and let his teeth lengthen slightly. “That depends on whether the person doing this is present.”

He left, Gor’rathi staring open-mouthed after him.

You have a flair for theatrics, you know, Shinigami observed.

I have no idea what you mean. Barnabas approached the doors. How do you think they’re going to let me in without letting any of the rest of them out?

Oh, that I can tell you. They were all ordered into a separate locked room.

And you’re getting a fix on who they are and how they’re doing this, right?

Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?

Well...

RUDE. You never insult a lady’s looks.

It’s your mind, Barnabas pointed out, and in this case, the lady walked right into it. Also, since when have you ever been ladylike?

Shinigami was still presumably trying to come up with an answer when the doors slid open, and a voice said over the loudspeaker, “Hello, Barnabas.”

“Hello.” Barnabas stepped through the door as if he weren’t aware of the media crowding forward to get a last shot. Any progress?

No, she said glumly. I don’t like dresses or doing my hair or not swearing or—

I meant on figuring out how he has the doors locked down.

Oh. Yeah, I did get that. Let me know when you want me to let you all out.

Excellent. Time to go hunting. Barnabas let himself smile as he walked down the hallway. It was very quiet until he got far enough to hear the muffled yelling from one of the rooms ahead.

“Why am I here?” he asked conversationally.

“I think you know exactly why you’re here,” the voice responded. “You’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“So you’re locking a bunch of civilians inside a section of the station because... Help me out, here.”

“Would you have come if we’d asked to meet with you?”

“Probably.” Barnabas stopped in front of a room and peered inside. Several aliens were beating on the walls and door, and their efforts redoubled when they saw him.

His opponent seemed surprised. “Interesting, but irrelevant. You have a nasty habit of killing people.”

“Only when they try to kill someone else first,” Barnabas said. He was unsurprised when the door opened to let him in. A sharp command from their captor kept the other people away from the door, and they stared at Barnabas in open mistrust as the door closed behind him.

He nodded pleasantly to them.

“All right,” he said, talking to the speakers he could see on the wall. “I’m here. Now what?”

His opponent didn’t answer him. He didn’t need to. The captives scattered, parting before Barnabas as if they’d been blown away by wind, and Barnabas saw a large object in the corner.

Of course, there’s a bomb. Why am I surprised?

Because you don’t have a direct feed into the surveillance cameras? I found it a couple of minutes ago. If you can drop a bot near it without him seeing, I can defuse it. You’ll have to work on it without working on it, if you see my meaning, so he doesn’t get the sense we’re making any progress.

Fair enough. Barnabas heaved a sigh and walked over to where the bomb was now ticking down a count in large red letters. It’s like a giant roomful of clichés. They’re a James Bond villain. He looked up at a nearby camera. “I take it you expect me to defuse this?”

No, Mr. Nacht, I expect you to die, Shinigami said in a surprisingly good impression of Goldfinger.

Barnabas’ lips twitched. All right, that was a good one.

“You can certainly try, though.” The voice sounded amused. “But you won’t get very far. Only I can defuse the bomb…which I will do if our conversation goes satisfactorily.”

He’s lying out his ass.

Yes, thank you, I knew that. Although that’s not the phrasing I would have used.

Yeah, well, what do you know? You’ve still got a stick up yours.

Barnabas knelt by the bomb and looked over the casing carefully. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted where the cameras were around the room, and shifted subtly to allow a bot to drop from his cuff to the floor. It scurried under the bomb and was soon lost in the internal workings.

It had been Shinigami who’d suggested the cuff compartments, pointing out that people often needed to deploy small machines on the sly. The compartments had a catch hidden on the sleeves of the jacket so that Barnabas could pretend to scratch his arm, and the bots had been programmed to move only after he shifted his hand in a particular way.

He was fond of the system. Every operative of any sort had their favorite gadgets, and while he was fond of the classics— knives, guns, and teeth—he was also beginning to enjoy the bots. It was immensely satisfying to talk in circles with his enemies, knowing that all the while, little bots were crawling through their systems.

He pressed a button and noticed a very faint slowness in his muscles. No one else would have noticed it, but he did. Alarmed, he checked for any signs of poison in the air but found none.

Shinigami, something’s wrong.

I don’t see anyth— Oh, hell. He’s venting the room. Very slowly. And I’m delighted to tell you that this means I won’t be able to open those blast doors until we resolve the problem if there’s a pressure differential above 3pa.

That’s an insanely sensitive system.

Focus on the big picture, boss. You have an air leak. Pretend you don’t notice for now; I’ll fix it. Just keep him distracted.

I’ll do what I can, Barnabas replied. He looked around. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked his mysterious captor. He did not have to feign impatience. This was all a farce; they had no intention of letting anyone in this room go.

But he just had to play along for a little bit, while Gar, Jeltor, and Shinigami enacted the rest of the plan.

* * *

“Tafa! Gar! Thank the gods I found you.” Jeltor hurried over, his suit clanking.

“Hello, Jeltor.” Tafa waved. “Uh-oh, that’s not a happy face.”

“How can you tell?” Gar asked plaintively.

“Don’t give away our secrets,” Jeltor told Tafa. “It’s so much fun trying to watch people guess.”

She giggled. Tafa and Jeltor had first met while being held hostage by a mercenary group, so they had first spent time together with the fear of death hanging over everything they did. It was nice to be in a situation that wasn’t quite so grim.

Although this one was getting there.

“Listen,” Jeltor said, “Shinigami is tracing some signals, and we’ll need to go to a specific dock and board a ship.”

“Oh?” Gar looked worried. “What’s wrong?”

“Someone’s taken hostages,” Jeltor explained. Tafa drew in her breath sharply, and he nodded. “Barnabas and Shinigami have a plan. He’s the distraction, and you and I will go attack the ship that’s sending the signals. They aren’t soldiers, apparently. They locked the section down remotely.”

Gar looked pleased. “And we’re going to go pay them a visit?”

“Yes. Yes, we are.” Jeltor sounded just as pleased as Gar looked. “Well, probably not Tafa.”

“Oh, good.” Tafa’s shoulders slumped in relief. “I’ll go back to the ship?” She looked at them fiercely. “And be safe.”

“We will,” Jeltor assured her. “Oh, and one more thing—don’t mention to my wife where I went, will you? If she finds out I went charging off to do this, I’ll be lucky to get out of it alive.”

Chapter Sixteen

Barnabas’ unseen captor wasted no time beginning their interrogation. Barnabas guessed it was a Jotun simply because of the known players in the situation, but as with many Jotuns, he was not able to determine whether they were male or female.

“How did you learn what happened on the Srisa?” they asked him now.

“We intercepted the distress call.” Barnabas had decided to behave as though he were beginning to feel the effects of his fatigue, but also as if he had not yet realized what was going on. He paused at his pretended work of defusing the bomb and acted as though he were trying to catch his breath.

He didn’t have to look far for inspiration. The rest of the prisoners in the room were starting to move more slowly, and Barnabas caught some of them yawning.

“How coincidental,” his captor suggested smoothly. “You just happened to be in the right place at the right time—and be the first one to get to that ship.”

“I…wasn’t.”

Good, Shinigami commented. Little pauses. That’s good. He probably knows you have a good amount of built-in resistance. If you can make him think it’s happening slowly, he’ll stay engaged.

I want to make sure you remember that the rest of the people in this room don’t have any built-in resistance.

Oh, I remember, don’t worry. I’m working on something.

There would be no speeding her up, Barnabas knew. He also knew that she was working faster than anyone else could. He could not imagine how much data she had sifted through to find out who this person was.

“You weren’t what?” the Jotun asked.

“What?”

Now the Jotun sounded annoyed. “I said you were the first one to the ship and you said—ah. Who was there before you?”

“I don’t know.” Barnabas paused, pretending to focus on breathing for a few moments. “We saw wreckage. There was a ship that shot at us.”

“What happened to that ship?” The voice had shifted. It was melodious now. Persuasive.

Barnabas’ mind raced. This Jotun had noticed the missing ship but did not know why it was missing. That gave him a little bit of wiggle room to play with their head.

“They said…uh...” He rubbed his forehead.

“You spoke to them?” The voice was sharp with surprise.

Barnabas looked up at the camera as if remembering to be angry. Some of the people had laid down to sleep, and the rest were sitting in a daze. It was easy to mimic their mannerisms, although he was beginning to worry that Shinigami, used to the more robust systems of her friends, would not restore air quickly enough for these people.

That was just him worrying because he was helpless, he realized. He wanted to be at the forefront of this mission, striking out at something.

And this person, whoever they were, was making sure he could not do so. He had to admit that was clever.

He could be clever too, though. “Did you think I would shoot down a ship without speaking to the pilot?” he demanded. “Of course I did. We cornered them. That ship wasn’t as fast as the Shinigami.”

“And what did they tell you?” demanded his captor.

Shinigami, I’m running out of ways to pretend to defuse this thing. I’ve been fiddling with one screw for the past thirty seconds.

Yeah, I noticed that. I’m pretty sure it plays into the oxygen deprivation thing, at least.

There’s that.

Hang on just for a few more minutes, No one’s getting brain damage, I promise.

Right. I’ll do what I can. How are things with Gar?

Very, very good. I’ll show you video after this.

Barnabas hid a smile and tried to decide what would most unsettle this person to hear but not cause them to blow the station up immediately. A sudden stroke of inspiration came to him. He’d been a thorn in the side of the Jotun government so far, but he was just one human on one ship. If he wanted them to hold off, he needed them to think there was a much bigger threat for them to worry about.

And what was a bigger threat to a government than another government? He had seen alien bodies in the assassin’s thoughts. It wasn’t out of the question that another government would know of Huword and hire a Jotun to assassinate him. For all he knew, that was what had happened.

“They told me something very interesting.” He slurred his words a bit, still pretending to be out of air, but he smiled at the cameras. “Seems there’s another government interested in this wrongdoing.”

“What?”

“Yes. There was another ship they couldn’t shoot down, a ship they thought we were affiliated with.”

“A human ship.”

“That was the thing; they didn’t know. They just said they knew the look of black ops. You have that term out here, right? The sort of thing the government doesn’t want anyone to know about?”

Whoa, there, Hoss, you’re getting animated as the oxygen comes back.

Oh, is it back? How’d you manage that?

I just had to get a set of signals going to his ship so he’d think he was still sucking the air out. He doesn’t have accurate diagnostics on the station anymore, and the signals he’s sending aren’t going anywhere.

And?

And what?

And the bomb, Shinigami?

Oh, that’s also fixed.

So…do we need to keep this charade up anymore?

Actually, yes. Just for a few moments more.

Barnabas bit back a sigh. His opponent hadn’t said anything further, and he was intrigued to think what might be going on in their head.

“Hello? Are you looking up ‘black ops?’ Because I wasn’t lying about what it meant.”

* * *

Black ops. Biset’s surprise caused him to jet backward in his tank. He righted himself and shook with worry, his tentacles churning the water. Nearby, the fish huddled in their plants, gone absolutely still at this new threat.

Black ops. Someone knew. A government knew.

They knew enough to eliminate Huword but they hadn’t come after the committee yet, and what the hell did that mean? Where was that ship coming next?

To Jotuna, that was where. Biset knew it. Sooner or later, every part of this was going to come out—and not in the way it was supposed to. Not with armies and fleets under the command of the committee, but instead with trade wars and sanctions and accusations.

His fury swept the waters into a storm, sending ink and heat radiating from him as he thrashed and raged. He arrowed down to the corner of the tank and grabbed one of the fish, electrocuting it and tearing it to pieces with his tentacles. The fish struggled, the others fled, and he felt a savage sense of satisfaction as he hunted them down and destroyed them.

When it was over, the tank was filled with blood and random scales, and Biset knew he should be satisfied.

But he was not.

He needed to find the source of this disturbance, and find it soon.

The question was, should Biset let Norwun chase down the truth…or should he call in someone else and tie up that loose end?

* * *

The human was still moving slowly, slurring his words. He was getting ready—although he didn’t know it—to die.

Norwun couldn’t take any pleasure in that anymore.

Black ops. He knew the term; every government had its version. He was black ops, and had been for most of his career. The things he had done would shock the average Jotun to their very core. What had happened to Huword was child’s play. Norwun did worse pretty much weekly.

And now some other government, a government they could not even guess at—although it didn’t seem to be human—knew what was going on and had sent their people. Whoever the assassin was, the ship had picked them up and was long gone, and the Jotun government was still none the wiser as to what was happening here.

Norwun had a sudden memory of the senator and their worry. They feared that something would be uncovered, and Norwun had no doubts about what would happen to him if he failed to keep it hidden.

That was why they’d sent him to the Srisa—to figure out who’d killed Huword and why, and eliminate all witnesses.

Right now, Norwun was failing at that objective.

He’d known some of what Huword was—a spy who for years had fed information to the Senate about the mutinous rumblings in the Navy. Any number of issues had been quietly averted, the instigators promoted or shamed or put in the way of convenient missiles. That would have been enough to earn Huword’s death.

If this were a rival government, though, then Huword had been involved in something much more important.

Norwun fought the urge to send a message to his contact: You should have told me how much was at stake.

He didn’t. He didn’t have a death wish, after all, and sending that message would be asking to have his ship put on self-destruct. He knew his employers had ways to do that. There were probably failsafes in his suit as well, no matter how carefully he’d tried to keep himself free of them.

Now he had to figure out which government it was and what they knew, and take out anyone who could report on the information.

Step one was taking out Barnabas. He wasn’t important anymore. Norwun pressed a single button to detonate the bomb. Let the station try to figure out who’d done it; all trace of his ship was gone from their systems.

Nothing happened, however. Barnabas was looking around.

“Hellooooo?” The human waved his arms. “Anybody there?”

He was getting loopy, which Norwun would normally have enjoyed seeing but could only snarl at now. Loopy was not dead, and Barnabas very much needed to be dead.

Norwun pressed the button again. And again. And again. Why wasn’t it working?

The door slid open behind him, and he turned to tell Reqara to finish this herself. It wasn’t Reqara, however. It was, of all ridiculous things, an armored Luvendi. Norwun would have laughed if the ridiculous thing hadn’t been pointing a gun directly at his head.

“Talk, asshole,” it said.

Chapter Seventeen

Air pressure is stable, Shinigami reported, and…doors open. Gar and Jeltor are questioning our Jotun friend. All is well, but you should probably join them.

On my way. Barnabas turned on his heel and ran for the door.

Almost as soon as they knew a Jotun ship had docked, that same ship had managed to get into the station’s data and wipe any trace of itself. They hadn’t been able to figure out what bay it was docked at or any more specifics on it.

Shinigami and Barnabas had known that the ship’s interactions with Barnabas would allow them to trace signals directly back to the ship, and so Barnabas had gone in as a distraction. At the time, of course, they’d been expecting to find hordes of mercenaries.

Gar and Jeltor, meanwhile, had gone to the ship once Shinigami found it and snuck on board to figure out who and what they were dealing with. Between Gar’s unexpected skills in combat and Jeltor’s knowledge of the Jotun government, Barnabas was sure they could get anything they needed out of the crew.

But he hadn’t gotten this far in life by expecting things to go well, and he was going to be ready for complications until every member of that crew was restrained or verifiably, indisputably dead.

And then, given the self-destruct on that other government ship, he was going to expect some more complications.

Heads up—you’ll have company in a few. Shinigami sounded halfway between amused and impressed. Gor’rathi is sending soldiers in. I restored his access to the video feeds so he can see that people aren’t hurt, but he's cautious. You may have trouble getting out.

Tell him to send medics. Never mind, I’ll do it. Barnabas could hear the guards, and the next corner he skidded around, he saw the force. Composed of many different species, the group nonetheless had similar uniforms of blue and white that fit everyone well, and a set of weapons that looked unusually useful.

Many of those weapons came up at once. The guards seemed to view his high speed as suspicious, and Barnabas knew better than to run headlong into bullets.

“The bomb is defused, and all of the trapped people are safe.” He pointed back down the hallway. “The ship that was causing the problems has been neutralized and will not be able to harm any more systems, but I do need to go deal with the crew.”

There was the faint buzz of earpieces, and a few of them bent their heads to listen.

“Mr. Gor’rathi wants you to bring the criminals to the station jail,” one of the guards said.

“I’ll do that.” Barnabas doubted the people in question would survive long enough to be brought there, but he kept that to himself. He edged around the group, pointing them down the hall to the roomful of former captives, and took off again.

In the station, he was greeted with cheers. Aliens rushed forward to grab his hands and his coat, and Barnabas had to fight to extricate himself without throwing anyone across the room—and with his strength, he certainly could if he wasn’t careful.

God bless it, get them off me!

Nah, this is fun to watch. Besides, Gar and Jeltor are holding their own just fine.

“Holding their own?” Does that mean there’s a fight?

No. Well, yes. Don’t worry about it, though. They’ll do just fine until you get there.

Son of a bitch, Barnabas swore. He managed to pry himself out of the arms of a female Torcellan who was trying to kiss his cheek—or, at least, he hoped that was what she was trying to kiss—and took special care to unwrap a Luvendi’s fingers from his wrist, but by then, several more aliens had joined the throng. “I’ll, ah, I’ll be right back, I promise. I just have one more thing to do—”

Shinigami was laughing delightedly in his head.

Don’t laugh! This is a problem!

It’s not a problem; it’s just—oh. Oh, it is a problem.

Barnabas froze. What? What happened?

Get to Bay 52. Right now. Shinigami’s worry was palpable. They’ve called in reinforcements.

Barnabas stopped trying to be polite. “Everybody back!”

At his bellow, the crowd stopped in its tracks. People scattered away from him and he gave a little sigh of relief before taking off at high speed for Bay 52.

Hang on, Gar, I’m coming.

His worry tripled when Gar, who was normally full of pride in his fighting abilities and ready to take on the world alone, responded only, Good.

* * *

The fight had started well. Shinigami had gotten the doors of the Jotun ship open without them having the first idea about it.

And what a ship it was. If they hadn’t been trying to be stealthy, Gar would have whistled in amazement. As it was, he shook his head in silent awe, and even Jeltor looked impressed. If any ship could have given the Shinigami a run for its money—and a lot of ships had tried and failed spectacularly at that—it might be this one.

It was a frigate-class ship, clearly made for atmosphere as well as space, but there the similarities ended. The Shinigami was sleek and shining, painted beautifully and clearly state of the art. This ship looked old and battered, so much so that the casual observer probably wouldn’t be able to tell just how dangerous it was.

But if they knew anything about ships, the observer would know to be very, very careful of this one. Its shape showed the sleek lines of excellent craftsmanship, and the scars on it were bad enough that the ship should be in several pieces. The fact that it wasn’t was a very bad sign.

The amount of venting on the back suggested that the engines could burn harder than almost any Gar had seen. They belonged on a much larger ship, as did the missile bays. This ship was armed to the teeth, and it was fast.

Still, the lack of alarm showed that Shinigami had gotten into their systems with them none the wiser.

Gar and Jeltor crept aboard, weapons drawn. Gar went first, given that his species offered him the element of surprise in pretty much any combat encounter. Enemies tended to laugh themselves sick when they saw him in armor, which he hated. He had to admit it was a good distraction, though.

He made them sorry for it, too. He was Luvendi, yes, but it turned out that with reinforcement of the bone structure and training from Barnabas, a Luvendi could be exceedingly dangerous. Gar could hit hard enough to break the bones of most other species.

Most. He had yet to fight a Brakalon in hand-to-hand combat, and he wasn’t looking forward to the experience. But with Barnabas, you could be fairly sure that it would come at some point.

Shinigami said into his mind, and Jeltor’s suit, that the person sending the signals was in a control room at the center of the ship. She couldn’t sense any other signals aboard, and only one Jotun had gotten off the ship.

The doors slid open as the Jotun was speaking to someone—Barnabas, Gar expected. He could see the familiar shape on the Jotun’s screens.

“Hellooooo?” Barnabas was saying, waving his arms.

Tell Barnabas he looks ridiculous, Gar told Shinigami.

You have mental speech. Tell him yourself.

I’m too scared to do that. Barnabas would demand a sparring match, wipe the floor with him, and then ask if he’d learned his lesson about manners. Then he’d probably demand a rematch. Then, if he still didn’t think Gar had learned his lesson, there would be push-ups. Luvendi were not suited to push-ups. Gar hadn’t even known what they were until he’d met Tabitha, who had told him that they were a wager and punishment metric among the Rangers and Bitches.

He could believe it.

Right now, though, he had more pressing concerns. Gar strode across the room and, as the Jotun turned to look at him, Gar brought his Jean Dukes out to point directly at the thing’s tank.

“Talk, asshole,” he said.

You’re starting to fit in, Shinigami commented.

Thanks that means a lot. Gar smiled. “You aren’t talking,” he added to the Jotun. “Who the fuck are you? Start there.”

The Jotun looked at Jeltor and then back at Gar as if to see whether Gar was still there. While the biosuits didn’t show faces, Gar could tell from the speed of movement that disbelief was the primary emotion right now.

And then the Jotun’s arm shot out at an angle that wouldn’t be possible on most species and grabbed the barrel of Gar’s gun, dragging it sideways.

Gar took two steps along with the motion, and when the Jotun would think he was having success, Gar planted his feet and wrenched back in the other direction. Metal screamed in the biosuit, and the Jotun made an involuntary sound of surprise.

“Yeah,” Gar said savagely, “it’s like that.” Still holding the gun with one hand, he let go with the other to level a punch at the Jotun’s ocular display.

Jeltor had told him that one of the best things you could do in this situation was to take out the various sensory apparatus, leaving the Jotun to “see” from inside the tank with its more limited biological eyes and ears. The combination of water and air would cause the Jotun to misjudge distances, and being disoriented was never a good thing in a fight.

The Jotun knew what Gar was trying to do. It gave a yell and punched back while shaking the barrel of the gun as hard as it could to try to make Gar let go of it.

“Fuck off!” Gar yelled. “You can’t even shoot this gun! I said, get off! Jeltor—”

“We have company!” Jeltor yelled back. There was clanking in the hallway outside. “The son of a bitch called for help.”

“There wasn’t anyone else on the ship! Shinigami said—”

I didn’t think there was! Shinigami sounded almost panicked. I’m still not seeing them. Are you sure that—

The door burst open, and four more Jotuns stood there, arms up to show the embedded rifles.

“Pretty damned sure, yeah!” Gar yelled.

Shit. I’m calling Barnabas in.

That sounds like a good idea!

Gar watched for a moment as Jeltor swung into action, leveling a flamethrower at the other Jotun, who swung their arms away for fear of the metal melting.

Gar didn’t waste any time. It was five against two, and the Jotuns were trained to fight hand-to-hand. He had to quickly even the odds. He brought his leg up over the back of the Jotun’s chair and bashed his knee into the head of the biosuit. The jolt that went through him hurt like hell, but he repressed the old instincts that told him to back down and plead for mercy.

Once, he’d had to think his way out of every situation. Now, if his thinking brought him to the conclusion that taking everyone down was the best way to go about things, he could do that instead of having to bargain and beg.

He’d sworn a vow that he was never going to beg again.

The Jotun staggered, but because it was in a biosuit and not a biological body, it didn’t let go of the gun like Gar had hoped it would.

He would take down the array first, then worry about maybe severing some of the connections to the limbs. Gar ignored the pain as he brought his knee up repeatedly, bashing it into the Jotun’s input and output array until the thing began to stagger, clearly disoriented and blind.

He’d have taken the whole thing down and finished it except for the yell he heard. Jeltor was being swarmed by the other four, who had knives and needles sliding out of compartments in their suits. Gar had seen the pictures of Huword’s body, so he knew what was coming next.

Fury filled him, and he threw himself into the fray with a scream of rage.

Chapter Eighteen

Barnabas sprinted through the station with the yells fading behind him. A few people looked at him askance and were clearly marking what he wore, ready to tell station security about him if he should later turn out to be a criminal.

No one tried to stop him, though. The bigger the station, the fewer people tended to get involved in events like this. No one was going to ask too many questions, or—God forbid—put themselves in danger.

Barnabas ground his teeth at their self-serving cowardice and was somewhat comforted that it was working in his favor right now.

Bay 52 was at the far end of one of the corridors, and he could hear the fight between his teammates and the Jotun black ops crew from about halfway down. Yells and clanks were emanating from the open door of the ship, along with a few crashes.

Any special skills I should know about in these people?

Nothing, in particular, Shinigami reported. Knives. Well, there are needles. I’m not sure how ready they are to mess with a human, though.

Let’s not test it.

Agreed. She paused. I think you might have worried them more than you intended with that lie about the black ops ship.

I couldn’t let them think they’d gotten everything out of me—

No, I know why you did it. If they thought everyone who knew about Huword was on this station, they’d have tried to blow the whole thing. I get that. But I think you might have stumbled upon something.

Something like? Up the gangway he went, opening his coat and pulling out his Jean Dukes Specials. Teeth weren’t useful against biosuits, after all.

I don’t know. The way he responded to what you said, though, and what the assassin had already said about Huword? Together, that makes me think maybe Huword really was involved in something that other governments might not like.

So, an equal-opportunity asshole, fucking over Jotuns and aliens indiscriminately?

That’s the one. Take a left here. Yep. There you go.

The fight was much more of a brawl than anything precise. In the background, Barnabas could see a Jotun staggering around in circles, trying to orient itself despite a crushed sensory array, and in the foreground...

Barnabas slid into the fray with deadly grace. He holstered his pistols, and his hands came up to grab at two open slots on the Jotun’s suit. He had to double-check to make sure it wasn’t Jeltor.

In the future, he decided, Jeltor would have to wear something distinctive. Maybe war paint. Or a hat.

The thought of Jeltor in a party hat made him snort with laughter as he dragged the other Jotun off-balance and threw it back into a wall. Nearby, Gar was trying to take on two at once, and Jeltor was engaged in a battle of flamethrowers with a Jotun whose jellyfish body was unusually small and a pink color Barnabas hadn’t seen before. Most of the Jotun he’d seen were shades of purple.

His opponent swung the head of its biosuit to look at him, and Barnabas felt a certain malevolence in its actions.

Well, if it wasn’t happy about this, it could have avoided the situation by not putting civilians in the crossfire.

“Are you the one who came up with that stupid plan?” Barnabas asked it. As it tried to struggle upright, he took two steps and kicked his back leg out, sending it reeling back once more. There was a clank and the sound of something breaking this time when it hit the wall.

Good.

“You’re the one who’s been interfering,” it hissed at him. “And you’re going to learn not to do that.”

“I don’t think I am.” Barnabas flipped out his Jean Dukes and blew the thing to bits. Its tank had exploded, along with the Jotun body inside it, and as he watched, the whole apparatus went dark and thudded to its knees.

In the sudden silence, Barnabas looked around to find the rest of the group staring at him open-mouthed. He felt a pang of sadness for Jeltor—it was never good to see one of your species brutally killed—but otherwise, he could only feel satisfaction.

“I don’t like you,” he told the remaining four, including the disoriented one who had frozen at the sound of the gunshot. “I don’t like anyone who decides to use civilians as tools. If you have a problem with me, it’s because you’re doing things I will not abide. You could have cleared that up at any time.”

They didn’t answer, only swung into action once more. The pink Jotun whipped out one arm and loosed a stream of bullets at Barnabas—or at the place he’d been standing when its arm started moving.

He joined Gar in the center of the fight with the other two. If the pink one wanted to keep shooting, it was going to have to take the chance of shooting its compatriots. A moment later, the use of flamethrowers and knives let him know that it wasn’t willing to do so and it had returned to its fight with Jeltor.

These two had their needles out, apparently ready to do as much damage as possible to the biological bodies they were fighting. The needles were short, capped with what Barnabas guessed was a water-soluble plug that would dissolve and let the contents out as soon as it was in a creature’s bloodstream. The needle was too short for him to bend it, and he couldn’t tell if it would go through his armor. Jean Dukes would be deeply offended even by the suggestion, but Jellyfish Sector had a lot of technology the Etheric Empire had never run into before.

So, with no other options that he could think of, Barnabas settled for ripping the suit’s arm off.

It wasn’t exactly easy—the suits were made to be durable—but it was very satisfying. It came off with the clatter of screws and shattered bits of metal, and the pops of various tubes and wires shearing loose.

Barnabas and the Jotun stared at one another for a moment—the Jotun shocked and Barnabas very pleased with himself—before Barnabas started beating it with its own arm. Gar was almost laughing too hard to do the same to his opponent, but only almost. A similar set of screeches came soon after, followed by a pleased chortle from Gar and an unintelligible yell from one of the Jotuns.

“We still haven’t gotten them to talk!” he called to Barnabas.

“Oh, right.” Barnabas wound up and backhanded his Jotun with its own hand. “You know, I’m not sure I care anymore. They’re going to die, and we’ll figure out what we need to know from someone else. Like the other black ops team,” he added at the top of his lungs.

At the side of the room, the Jotun who’d been staggering back and forth betrayed a sudden interest.

That was probably the one he’d been talking to, then.

“I don’t suppose you’d have any guesses as to which government sent them,” Barnabas called.

What’s your plan here? Shinigami asked skeptically. There is no black ops team. They don’t exist.

Yeah, but think for a moment. If I stumbled on one of their fears, they probably have a good idea of who’d be angry—of who would send a team.

Ohhhh, you’re sneaky. This is the beer competition all over again—throw out false info and see who nibbles.

Great. Barnabas threw the arm away and punched his Jotun in the tank as hard as he could. The material of the tank creaked, and the Jotun fluttered around in distress. Now I want a beer.

Better than your juice obsession.

And now I want juice.

You’re very suggestible, you know that? It’s a good thing you never discovered infomercials.

I did. Barnabas swept the leg or tried to. I have seven Wonder Mops, he told Shinigami as he bent in one smooth motion, grabbed his opponent’s leg, and dragged it up sharply. The thing tipped over with a yell, the Jotun inside the tank struggling to right itself.

Laughter was his only answer.

What’s a Wonder Mop? Gar asked. And what’s an infomercial? I haven’t ever seen that word in the dictionary you gave me.

That’s because Bethany Anne had the good sense to ban them, Shinigami explained. I only know about them because Eric sometimes likes to pretend to do them for his guns. “But wait! There’s more! For just seven easy bullets—”

Barnabas was laughing as he ripped off one of the Jotun’s legs, then decided to finish the fight and punched down as hard as he could, sinking into the movement. The tank shattered and he pulled his knife out of its sheath and plunged it down, impaling the Jotun’s body.

It was a singularly unpleasant sensation to stab a jellyfish, especially when you knew that jellyfish was sentient, but Barnabas had no time to dwell on it. Jeltor was being overwhelmed.

Barnabas surged up and over the remnants of his opponent’s bodysuit and slammed the pink Jotun into the wall, narrowly missing a jet of flame from Jeltor’s arm.

“Sorry!” Jeltor called.

“No…problem…” Barnabas found a mechanical hand clamped around his neck as the Jotun hauled itself upright and dragged him with it. “So tell me…” He kicked, hit nothing, and leveled a punch at the thing’s armpit. “Why…pink?”

Behind them, there was a shout of satisfaction. Gar apparently won his battle.

The purple Jotun was formidable, but it couldn’t fight three of them. Jeltor was there with a chainsaw, cutting off the arm that held Barnabas’ throat, and Gar had a clear shot at its tank while it was distracted.

Barnabas staggered back, massaging his throat.

“What did you say?” Jeltor asked him.

“Why was it pink?”

“Oh. Some of us are, you know.” Jeltor gave a full-body ripple that looked a bit like a shrug.

As one, the group turned toward the last Jotun. It had frozen. It knew its comrades were dead, and Barnabas felt the faintest stirring of pity. What would it be like, to be blind and helpless against the people who had killed your team?

They did not deserve his pity. He reminded himself of that.

I’m jamming signals coming into the ship, Shinigami reported. Someone is trying to get it to do something—and it’s not that Jotun you’re looking at. I think they’re trying to destroy it remotely.

Can you keep blocking them? Barnabas put a hand out to stop Jeltor and Gar from advancing. If they needed to get off the ship…

For now. But deal with it quickly—or better yet, get him off the ship where I can better protect you three.

Good plan. Barnabas grabbed one of the Jotun’s arms. “Come on, friend, let’s have a chat.” At his nod, Gar took the other arm, and they dragged the Jotun along with them despite its attempts to stop them.

It was Jeltor’s exclamation that stopped them. Both Gar and Barnabas looked down to see the water in the tank foaming and the creature thrashing desperately, sticking to the wall as it tried to get out.

“Son of a—” Barnabas muttered.

It was already too late. The thing went limp a moment later and drifted amidst the foam as Barnabas let the biosuit drop to the ground with a thud. It was clear the Jotun was beyond the reach of any treatment they could summon, and Barnabas felt a stab of regret—not to mention anger. Over the years, he’d seen more than a few government agents choose death rather than capture, and it was always a damned waste. The governments they served were never worthy of that loyalty.

He sighed as he stared down at the biosuit, with the body floating limply in its tank. “Come on,” he told the other two. “Let’s get off this death trap and let Shinigami examine it.”

And then, he added silently, we’ll try to figure out just which government should be mad as hell at the Jotuns.

* * *

They had the ship, and Biset raged about that. The amount of technology they’d discover was unacceptable, and he could only hope they wouldn’t put it to use before the committee’s plan was in its final stages.

But at least they didn’t have Norwun. Gods alone only knew what Norwun might have admitted to. Biset could only be glad that he'd thought to include a kill switch in all of the team’s suits.

Although, perhaps…perhaps he should not have killed Norwun so quickly. Now, with Norwun dead and no interrogation, there was no easy way for Biset to learn more about the alien ship Barnabas had apparently encountered. Norwun might have turned the tables on him and learned some useful detail.

Biset thought about this, his tentacles lashing. There were too many unanswered questions here, and none of the potential answers boded well for him. He had watched the battle, and he still could not believe his eyes. It was beyond belief that the human and his crew had managed to kill as many as they had, ripping the biosuits limb from limb. The Jotuns had fought Brakalons, after all. The suits were made strong enough that such things shouldn’t happen.

What was this human thing that was stalking him? And what was the thing that looked like a Luvendi? That species should have shattered its bones with every punch it threw. The recoil from its weapons should have nearly killed it. There was no way it should be alive.

The Jotun, though... Biset’s eyes narrowed. He knew who that was: Captain Jeltor, proving once again that he was a traitor.

And if Jeltor had joined Barnabas at Gerris Station after Barnabas had learned of another government’s black ops’ involvement, that could mean only one thing: Barnabas knew about the committee, as did Jeltor.

And the committee must, therefore, eliminate them before they could tell anyone else.

Had they already told the Navy? If they had, there was only one thing to do. Biset pondered. No, he decided. They had not told anyone else yet. There would be a flurry of activity amongst the top brass if they knew of the committee. No, Barnabas and Jeltor were trying to find proof so that they could expose everything.

That would be how he would lure them in, Biset decided. He looked at the biosuit in the corner, outfitted with the very latest technology.

He would fight them himself when they came. He’d seen the way they could fight, and he would not make the same mistakes Norwun had.

Chapter Nineteen

“The alloy that makes up the plating is very interesting,” Shinigami reported. “We were researching something similar but couldn’t get it to work. Hopefully, they’ll have some idea what to do with it in the labs. I couldn’t tell what had been done to it.”

She considered the stone chess board and slid a pawn forward.

Barnabas took a moment before answering to study the board. “What about the engines?” He didn’t choose a move yet.

“Not much of note there.” Shinigami sat back in her chair, mimicking his pose. It was surprisingly eerie, giving that she pulled it off down to the minutest detail. Barnabas sat up hastily. “You don’t want to put a huge engine in a ship that can’t handle it, so it’s more the fact that the ship could handle it—and the crew,” she added. “The speed at which that thing could take turns could easily knock all your artificial gravity out and burst you open on a wall.”

“How…vivid.”

She flashed him a smile, ignoring his dry tone. “I think the reason they could take it was something to do with their tanks. I scanned Fizzy McSudsalot but didn’t see anything special. Why are you laughing?”

“That foam killed him,” Barnabas explained. He had his head in one hand, and his shoulders were shaking with laughter. “Oh, I’m a bad, bad man for laughing at that.”

“You beat one half to death with its own arm. You were already not the purest angel there was.”

Barnabas sighed. “I knew that much, yes. I think that honor goes to one of the puppies—though they’re not puppies anymore, are they?”

“Not even a little bit. All big, shaggy death-monsters. Cuddly death-monsters.” Shinigami shrugged. “They were probably pretty pure once, though.”

“The world corrupts,” Barnabas said philosophically. He moved one of his knights and took a sip of coffee—the thick, tar-black mix he’d learned to enjoy in Italy.

“Anyway, there is a lot they’ll like, and I’ve left it for them to come get. They know about the attempted remote destruct, so they’ll be careful with it.”

“Good, good.” Barnabas watched her choosing her move. Shinigami had gotten better at using her body’s eyes to look at things. She even leaned a little closer to the board when she looked at it.

When she looked up, her face was grave. “It wasn’t suicide. The first one was—the ship that intercepted us near the Srisa. This one wasn’t.”

Barnabas grasped her meaning. “He would have played ball with us, then.”

“And so they had to kill him,” Shinigami agreed. “Which they didn’t do before, which means they were almost certainly watching the fight. They know I can block their signals—at least, I could when those signals went to the ship because it was plugged into the station—and they know how you fight.”

Barnabas, however, had thought of something else. “They know Jeltor is involved.”

“Yes.” Shinigami’s eyes strayed to the door as if she were worried he might be listening. “He was wise to bring his family.”

Barnabas sighed. He leaned his elbows on his knees and rubbed his temples as he thought. “And he just thought this was about the Yennai mutiny,” he said quietly. “I got him involved. I didn’t have to.”

“That’s just stupid,” Shinigami snapped with her usual tact. “It was a Jotun Naval captain who died. Why would you not ask the one you knew for information about him? There would be no reason to hold back from doing that.”

Barnabas nodded contemplatively. “I suppose you’re right.” His eyes tracked her as she moved a bishop into the space vacated by her pawn, and he frowned. “It was your pawn on the other side that was out before. I remember because I chose my side for the knight.”

“Damn,” Shinigami muttered. She switched the pieces around.

“I had a serious moment where I regretted the mortal danger a friend was in, and you were cheating at chess.”

“To be fair,” Shinigami said, holding up a finger, “you suggested we play a game of chess, and I think we both knew what that meant.”

Barnabas grinned at her. Their games had abounded with cheating since they first began playing chess together, and it had been the subject of several good-natured “fights.” Gar still refused to be in the room with them while they played.

“In any case...” Barnabas moved his knight toward the center and forward. “It’s beginning to seem as if we all underestimated the lengths the Jotun Senate would go to—which, I have to say, I would not have seen coming. My opinion of them was extraordinarily low.”

“You and me both.” Shinigami’s eyes were wide as she shook her head. “What are they doing that’s worse than selling out their own people to someone like Koel Yennai?”

“Something that involves another government,” Barnabas said softly. “Apparently.” He looked up at her. “And what would that be, do you think? What would Huword have been involved in that touched another government like that?”

Shinigami curled one leg under her and pulled the other knee up under her chin as she thought. The movement reminded Barnabas of Tabitha’s more contemplative side—assuredly, not a side of her anyone saw often.

“What do we know?” Shinigami asked quietly. She wasn’t looking at Barnabas, or at anything. “Huword pretended to be everyone’s friend to get information about them.”

“It may not have started that way,” Barnabas said. “Some people seem to attract confidences. Over time, that familiarity breeds contempt.”

“Why?”

“Honest question?”

“Honest question.” Shinigami shrugged. “I hear a lot of confidences.”

“Ah, I suppose you would as an AI.” Barnabas considered. “I think it may be that over time, the secrets take a toll. One learns terrible things and starts to believe that everyone they meet is venal, self-absorbed, cruel…” He shrugged. “I saw it often with the other monks and priests. Some had come to believe that there was nothing worth saving in humanity.”

“And you?” Shinigami asked curiously.

“I never inspired many confidences.” Barnabas seemed amused. “I was in the monastery, for one thing, but I was also still struggling to keep myself sane. I hardly seemed like the sort of person who would welcome confessions.”

“Hmm.” Shinigami considered this. “Wait. You don’t seem worried that I might have heard some of your confidences.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” Barnabas said, amusement growing. “I can’t think of anything that’s happened since we started working together that would I would want to be secretive about.”

“You need to live a little.”

“We’re getting off-topic,” he told her, although he was still smiling. “And that was due to baseless speculation on my part about Huword. We don’t know how it started, but we know that at the end he was feeding secrets to the Jotun Senate.”

“And doing something else.” Shinigami swayed from side to side contemplatively as she thought. “What if it has to do with his demotion? Someone found out about what he was doing and demoted him.”

“Why would they also bother killing him?” Barnabas asked quizzically.

“One of two reasons.” Shinigami held up two fingers at once. “First, because they thought demoting him would be enough of a punishment, then they realized they wanted to hurt him more. Second, because they wanted to get him out to the middle of nowhere to kill him.”

Barnabas shook his head, frustrated. Neither of those rang true for him. “What I don’t get is why they're so secretive. Jeltor is right; he should have been told. Whoever in the Navy figured out what Huword was up to you’d think they would have told the others. And this assassination seemed to be carefully planned. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, right?”

“I don’t know. By the way, are we just giving up on chess?”

“I think so.” Barnabas looked at the board. “I can’t focus.”

“I like that—easy win.”

“Opportunist.” He gave her a look. “All right, let’s try to state the facts a different way. A Jotun assassin sent by the Navy killed Huword, but the people who are now chasing her, and us—the black ops group under Jotun senatorial control—seem worried that another government might be in play. What do we make of that discrepancy?”

“I don’t know.” Shinigami groaned and flopped her head down theatrically. “Hey, maybe it was a bunch of things at once. Everything caught up with him at the same time.”

“That is depressingly likely,” Barnabas said. “He sounds like a nasty piece of work.” He considered. “You know what? I think we need to go talk to Ferqar again.”

“The assassin is still on the station, you know.”

“I don’t think we’re going to get anything out of her,” Barnabas replied. “It sounds like she made up her mind not to tell us anything, and short of torture, which we won’t be using, I can’t think how we’d persuade her. Ferqar, though…there were some cracks in his armor.”

“I’ll send another message to Kelnamon—and one to Ferqar as well. I’ve found some of the channels the Jotun Navy uses. Do you think the Srisa’s moved?”

Barnabas felt a sudden chill. “If they haven’t, they should have. We should have told them to move as soon as we realized the Jotun government was involved and things didn’t add up. What direction did this Jotun ship come from?”

“I can’t tell,” Shinigami said honestly. “Their programming is like them—all blobby and incomprehensible. I could only block the signals because I could understand the station’s computers.”

It was Barnabas’ turn to groan. “All right, send a message to Captain Kelnamon in pretty much every direction you can think of, and then one for Ferqar. In both, pass on what we need from the other one.”

“You think they’re working together?” Shinigami asked, surprised.

“I’m not certain. Actually—no, I’d bet they’re not working together. Kelnamon struck me as fundamentally honest, and not as if he was holding something back. But I think one of them might persuade the other to talk to us if they’re hesitant.”

“I’ll send the messages,” Shinigami said. “Jeltor may also have an idea of how to get hold of Ferqar. For all I know, the channels I found are the sort everyone’s supposed to use and don’t.”

“I’m hesitant to involve Jeltor any further than he already is.” Barnabas felt a stab of worry.

Shinigami snorted. “He’s in it now, and it’s a good bet that they know as much. There’s nothing to be gained from him sitting the rest of it out.”

“We give him a choice,” Barnabas suggested gravely.

“He’ll help,” Shinigami predicted. “He’s pissed about this guy. If there’s dirt—and, let’s be honest, there’s clearly tons—he wants it to come out.”

“We give him a choice,” Barnabas repeated.

“Fine.” Shinigami rolled her eyes. “Those messages have been sent, by the way, by every means I know of to send them. What now?”

“Now I go talk to Jeltor, and you get Gar and Tafa to the conference room. We’ll see if either of them can make heads or tails of this.” Barnabas ran a hand through his ginger hair. He’d taken to changing his appearance every so often, usually regarding his hair color and cut, and he was enjoying the reddish brown—although Shinigami liked to tease him about it.

He sighed.

“What is it?” Shinigami was replacing the chess pieces. Barnabas caught a flicker out of the corner of his eye and realized that she’d replaced one of the pieces with a hologram. What her aim had been, he wasn’t entirely sure—but he opted not to mention it in the hopes that he’d get to see her plan unfold soon.

In response to her question, he only shrugged. “I wish we could even think of a theory that fits, but nothing fits the facts we have, and every new thing we learn only seems to make things less clear.”

Shinigami considered.

“Well, someone killed him,” she said finally. “And they had a reason. So it’s not like it’s senseless; it just seems that way.”

Barnabas nodded, somewhat heartened by this. “That’s true. I’ll see you in the conference room.”

Chapter Twenty

It took two hours of dedicated work before Kantar could be sure that she was safe to contact her employers.

She knew about the Senate’s lackeys, of course. She had watched every piece of the pantomime unfold, knowing that they were coming after Barnabas because of her—but knowing, too, as she listened in on the conversation, that she could not be of any help to him. Any aid she gave might trace back to her, and they could not find her.

Because they did not know why she had been hired, or who she was. And, of all things, she watched Barnabas hit upon the one suggestion that would frighten them the most: that another government had found out about what they were doing.

How could he have known? She could only wonder at first, awestruck that he had put together the pieces.

Then she realized the truth: he didn’t know. He had just been looking for a way to keep them talking while his AI broke through their control of the station. She knew about Barnabas. She’d done her research after he helped the Navy stand against the Yennai Corporation. His AI was said to be one of the most advanced in known space.

The Etheric Empire had been far ahead of its time in many ways. Kantar knew that the Jotuns had been looking into many of the technologies the Empire—and now the Federation—had at its disposal.

Whoever he worked for now, Barnabas had a good team. He was resourceful and honorable. Kantar wanted to trust him with the rest of the plan.

It wasn’t her choice, though. Her employers were the ones who needed to approve this. Therefore, she took the risk of contact. Even with the Senate’s lackeys dead and their ship under Barnabas’ control, she took every precaution.

The call spent long enough connecting that she knew they were questioning whether they should answer. When they finally did, it was from a nondescript white room that could be anywhere.

“What has gone wrong?” Gil asked her at once. She did not know his full name. His suit was optimized for scientific research and surveillance, but she knew no more than that.

“Nothing is wrong,” Kantar said. “The Senate sent a team, but not for me.”

“What?” That was Wev, who was much like Gil, except that Gil was always quiet and Wev was always in motion. His tentacles churned through the water of his tank in a constant swirl. “Who would they have gone for?”

“You’re at Gerris Station,” Gil said. It was a question of a sort.

“Yes.” Kantar nodded. “Brakalon law says that a ship must be brought to a halt after a murder. We drifted for a week before someone came—Ranger One, formerly of the Etheric Empire.”

Both stilled. Not everyone would be aware of who Barnabas was, but Jotun Intelligence knew. It was their databases she had gone into when she was researching him. Neither Gil nor Wev spoke after she said that. They were watching her warily.

“Word of Huword’s death was sent to the Senate,” Kantar explained. “Other ships that had tried to approach the Srisa had been destroyed by one of their watchdogs. They wanted their ship to get there first to investigate. When Barnabas’ ship docked, I thought they bought him.”

“They had not?” Gil sounded suspicious.

“No.” Kantar rippled to show amusement. “I distrusted him and tried to subdue him. It was a miscalculation. He nearly caught me, and after I fled the ship, he pursued me here.” She would explain all of that later. “The Senate’s team found him here. They must have spoken to the crew of the Srisa.”

Neither of her employers said anything, and Kantar sighed. This was the frustrating part about working with Intelligence. They rarely offered anything to make a conversation go well. They just listened and watched.

“He would make a good ally,” she said, laying her cards on the table.

Both responded to that. Shock showed in Wev’s constant movements, and even Gil shot sideways in his tank.

“No,” Gil snapped, recovering first. “Absolutely not.”

“I agree.” Wev backed up his partner without hesitation. “It’s too dangerous.”

“What’s too dangerous is waiting,” Kantar argued. “There’s more to do.”

“And we are doing it,” Gil snarled. “We hired you for one thing, and you have done it. We are grateful for your aid. You will be paid.”

“I don’t care about the payment,” Kantar argued. It was a lie. She did care; she had bills the same as everyone, and she had to lay low for a while in case the Senate found out about her, too. “I care about this. I’m useful, I’m a good asset, and they’re so focused on Barnabas that I could still be helping.”

“If they remain focused on Barnabas,” Wev replied smoothly, “then he is not a good ally.”

Kantar always forgot this about Wev. He looked nervous and usually waited for Gil to speak first, but every so often he would make a sly, sideways observation that shook her—and she wasn’t even being interrogated. She shuddered to think what it would be like to speak to them if they were not on her side.

Gil was watching her, meanwhile. He did not say anything.

“Yes, they know of him,” Kantar said, “but they will track him down now, no matter what he does. We might as well put that confrontation to good purpose. He could help us, and he would.” She took a deep breath. “By accident, he guessed that another government might be involved. It was a shot in the dark; he was trying to scare them. But that’s what they think is going on. That’s who they think killed Huword.”

The other two swiveled in their tanks and simply looked at one another for so long that Kantar guessed they must have some subvocal way of speaking to each other. That would be useful in Intelligence operatives, she guessed.

When they swiveled back they looked eerily similar, even moving the same way.

“Tell us everything,” Gil said.

“Everything,” Wev agreed.

Kantar did. She told them about the conversation they had seen and the conversation she’d had with Barnabas. They did not like that, she could tell, even though she had not told him much of anything.

“That was how he guessed,” Wev said when she was done. “Because you let something slip.”

“I didn’t let anything slip,” Kantar said angrily. “I told him deliberately. Maybe you don’t agree with it—”

“We don’t,” Gil replied unequivocally.

“He could be a good ally! How many more do we need to take out before this is all over? We can’t do it all on our own.”

“We will take care of it,” Gil said at last. “Not you. Certainly not him.”

Kantar settled into mutinous silence.

“I think we should remind her,” Wev said. He switched the video feed to his suit’s sensory intake, and Kantar found herself jarred by the sudden change in perspective.

Wev got up and left the room, and she had a glimpse down a long hallway lined with doors. Wev chose one and opened it and went inside, with Gil behind him. As soon as they entered, Kantar knew why he had chosen this one.

The patients inside were kept behind panes of thick plastic. She could tell it was unbreakable because it was clear that the aliens inside had tried to break it. As Wev and Gil entered, they all showed their hatred with broken cries and hisses.

And their injuries… Kantar could hardly bear to look at them. Marks were healing all over their bodies, along with numerous scars.

“We’ve tried to rehabilitate them,” Wev explained to her. His voice echoed strangely in her head, given her perspective. “We dare not let them out of the building, of course. The committee can’t know that their experiments have been stopped.”

“We couldn’t let them out of the building even if the committee were finished,” Gil continued. He was all business. Usually, they both were, but right now Kantar could hear genuine sadness. “We tried it with one of them, an Ubuara, and it nearly killed Wev.”

Wev’s biosuit gave a little shudder at the memory.

“An Ubuara?” She could not believe that.

“Have you ever seen a creature fight when it believes that is its only chance of survival?” Wev asked. “Have you seen a creature fight when it hates its opponent with all of its being and wants nothing more than to make it suffer? For that Ubuara, it was both. We killed it. It was not our intent, but it was the only way to stop it from killing us.”

Kantar found herself weeping. The mechanics were slightly different for a Jotun than for other species, but she still seeped salt into the water around her and tasted it on the tips of her tentacles. She could tell from their voices that they had not wanted to kill the Ubuara.

“The rest…we cannot chance it.” Gil had recovered some of his composure, though not all of it. “We have given them food and made them as comfortable as we can, but they do not hate us any less. They have been driven mad.” There was a pause, and then his voice changed. “Sometimes by accident we do the things that must have been commands of some sort. They obey, even though they hate us with everything they are.”

Kantar was shaking in her tank. She did not want to see this.

And yet, she must. This was why she was here. This was part of what Huword had helped the committee do—and he had been prepared to do much more.

“We went through their notes,” Gil continued. “Every one of them should be killed, but there is too much more to learn.”

Horror and frustration surged within her. “Then why don’t you let Barnabas help? He would help—he would! You’ve seen the things he’s done, so you know he’s honorable.”

“It’s that very honor that we can’t trust,” Gil snapped. After a pause, Wev turned his body so that Gil was looking directly into the sensors—at Kantar, all those millions of kilometers away. “That honor is what makes him dangerous to all of us. What would the Ubuara do to us if they knew about this? What would the Luvendi do? What would the Brakalons do?”

Kantar had no answer for that.

“We have to fix this ourselves,” Gil said. “Their lives will be avenged—all who suffered for this. It may not be repaid in full measure, but those who are responsible will pay.”

“But we cannot let any other species know of this,” Wev agreed.

“We cannot.” Gil picked up the thread; it was as if they were one person. “If anyone else knows, the Jotun people will suffer. There will be war. There will be...”

Kantar, seeing this in the flesh rather than simply in words on a screen, could only agree.

If anyone else knew of this, they would come down on the Jotuns with everything they had. She regretted ever speaking to Barnabas.

She could only hope that he would forget about all this and fight some other battle.

* * *

Barnabas was in his quarters reading a book of Luvendi poetry when the sensors beeped and the door slid open.

Shinigami gave a curious look at the book. “Luvendi…poetry? I thought they didn’t do that stuff.”

“They claim that they don’t,” Barnabas said. “But someone did. This stuff isn’t bad.” It was exceeding his expectations, but on the other hand, his expectations had been very low. The Luvendi did not have music, nor did they dance or tell many stories.

Whoever this renegade Luvendi poet was, they’d had to break every social convention they knew. That was impressive, if nothing else.

“What is it?” he asked Shinigami.

“We’ve received two messages,” she said. “One from a Jotun admiral. I’m not sure which one, but if we trace it back, that appears to be the source. The message says there’s information on Huword.”

“The person who hired the assassin,” Barnabas said slowly.

“So it would seem.” Shinigami shrugged. “The other is from Ferqar. He’s willing to meet.”

“Is he?” Barnabas considered. “Ferqar first,” he decided. “It’s the same information, either way—or so I expect. Get the admiral to send more details if you can.”

“I shouldn’t tell them we’ll be speaking to Ferqar?”

“In this case,” Barnabas said, “I’m beginning to think we shouldn’t tell anyone anything. The Navy has turned on itself, the Senate is sending black ops, and Lord only knows what other species have to do with any of it. No, don’t tell the admiral anything yet. We’ll see what Ferqar says and go from there.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Without any other comment, Kelnamon sent rendezvous coordinates for a meeting between the Shinigami and the Srisa. He was there when the door opened, and when Barnabas and Shinigami stepped out of the airlock, his smile was genuine if a little weary.

“Welcome back to the Srisa, humans.”

“Thank you, Captain Kelnamon.” Barnabas ducked his head in a small bow. “I must say, I was quite glad to hear that you had left your position in space.”

“Broken our laws, you mean?” Kelnamon asked bluntly. “Yes, I did do that.”

“With all due respect, Captain—”

“We could quibble over technicalities all day,” Kelnamon interrupted. He fixed Barnabas with an uncomfortably shrewd glance. “I made my choice, and I would make it again—but Brakalon courts are not known for being accommodating.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “And you have more important things to worry about.”

“Of course,” Barnabas murmured. He followed Kelnamon down the hallway in silence, but his mind was already forging ahead. He risked a glance at Shinigami. Shinigami—

Already on it. She gave him a small smile. I assume you were going to say we should prepare a statement to the Brakalon justice system taking responsibility for the Srisa moving.

Yes, thank you.

Should we send a muffin basket with it or something?

I think that would be overkill.

Barnabas was still smiling when he was shown into one of the few free rooms on the Srisa. A battered old table and chairs were the only furniture, and for decoration, there was what appeared to be a Brakalon motivational poster. A broad window looked out into space, however, making the effect much less claustrophobic than it might otherwise have been.

Ferqar was standing at the window, but he swiveled in his tank as Barnabas came in and gave a little bob that Barnabas thought might be a Jotun nod of greeting.

I think you can see their emotion in how they ripple, Shinigami said a moment later. I want to collect a data set and then go to Jeltor to confirm some things.

Good plan. Something tells me we’re going to be interacting with more Jotuns before this is resolved, and I want to be able to tell when they’re trying to hide their emotions. Although Barnabas could simply read the mind of any sentient being, he learned a lot from the interplay between the emotions they showed and what was going on in their mind.

He sat, and Shinigami took the seat beside him. Ferqar sat across the table, while Kelnamon let himself out of the room and closed the door behind him.

“So,” Ferqar began, “what is this about? Not that I don’t have my suspicions.”

“Interesting turn of phrase,” Barnabas commented. “I also have…well, guesses.”

The mechanical head swiveled, and Ferqar bobbed in the water. “And what are your guesses?” Not much movement could be seen in either the jellyfish body or the tentacles. He was waiting, and his mind was surprisingly tranquil. There was no more fear—and no more guilt.

Barnabas took a moment to study him before answering, “I know you didn’t kill Huword. I’ve spoken to the one who did. But it interests me that you had such an ironclad alibi, and it interests me, too, that you and Huword were out here where he wouldn’t have access to backup.”

Ferqar said nothing, although his mind went into overdrive. Make sure you don’t know anything, a voice said in his memory. Make sure you don’t see anything. Barnabas remembered the flavor of this memory, although the last time he’d felt it, it had been lost within the swirl of anger and fear in Ferqar’s head. Then, Barnabas had not managed to catch the words.

He found himself getting angry now. “Oh, come now.” He stared Ferqar down. “I am interested in Justice, not laws, and Huword deserved this. I have no intention of turning you over to the Jotun Senate—who, it has to be said, would not know Justice if it bit them.”

Ferqar considered this. “I think I may have a mistranslation,” he said finally. “What is a ‘Justice’ in your language? In our language, it is akin to retribution, and it cannot bite.”

“It’s a colloquialism,” Barnabas said, realizing his mistake. “I simply meant, the Jotun Senate is so corrupt that they could not possibly enact any true Justice, and I doubt they have a use for the concept or even remember what it is.”

“Ah. That’s quite true.” Ferqar sounded amused. He considered for a moment longer. “You want to know if I was part of the plot, then.”

“Yes.”

“May I ask why?” Ferqar sounded curious. “You say you know who did the act, and you must know, now, what he did. Why does it matter—”

“I don’t know what he did,” Barnabas explained. The fact that he was able to keep his voice level despite his rising anger was due to centuries of practice. Not only that, it was risky, laying his cards on the table like this. But he avoided half-truths when he could, and there had been far too many lies already. He was in no mood for them when he and Ferqar were on the same side.

This surprised Ferqar. He’d gone fluttering back against the edge of his tank, and the biosuit turned its head a few times as if he did not know what to direct it to do.

“I know Huword betrayed the Navy in the mutiny, and even before it,” Barnabas said. “That much, I know. I thought that was why he’d been killed, but when I spoke to the assassin, I learned there was more to it, although she didn’t—”

“Don’t tell me who it was,” Ferqar broke in quietly but with force. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything about how it happened. We agreed it was best if those among us did not know anything about each other.”

Barnabas nodded. It was nothing to him either way, and it had probably been a wise precaution. It made sense of the memory he had seen, and the words Ferqar spoke now had the ring of truth to them—there was no deception in his thoughts. “In any case, the assassin told me that it was not her information to provide, but that Huword had done a lot more than I knew.” He sighed. “And then, when interacting with the team the Senate sent—the team, I’m guessing, that Kelnamon moved the ship to avoid—I hit upon another truth: that other species, other governments, would be very angry about whatever it was Huword was doing. I don’t know why, but I’m right, aren’t I?”

Ferqar was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, he sounded broken.

“Even I don’t know all of it,” he admitted. “I am sorry. I wish I could tell you everything. I’ve tried to make sense of what I know, but from what I can see it is simply… Is there a word in your language for someone who enjoys causing pain?”

“A sadist,” Barnabas said precisely.

“Then that’s what he was,” Ferqar said. “A sadist. That’s all I can think.”

Barnabas was beginning to understand the shape of this. “He hurt other species.”

“Yes.” Ferqar wasted no time prevaricating. “I learned of the things he had done after—I don’t know where to start. I think…hmmm. Let me start with this: I didn’t lie when I said that my posting was a demotion. It wasn’t anything big, as such things go. There wasn’t a scandal. I just never got along with Admiral—well, it doesn’t matter which one. It was enough that every time I was up for a promotion or someone else was up for my job, I was the one who got moved. I fought it for years, but in the end, I got moved here, to this posting. And there’s no coming back from this one. Other captains will live out their lives knowing that when we had to defend our people, they were there at the mutiny. They risked everything and fought our enemies. I was too far away. I’ll never be able to say that. I’ll never do the things I dreamed of. I’ll be forgotten.”

Barnabas could say nothing to this. The raw hurt in Ferqar’s voice was almost too much to bear, and he could imagine all too well how it would have happened. It would have been little things here and there; never an overt abuse of power, simply repeated disregard for Ferqar’s achievements over the years. I don’t know why I’ve just never liked him much—Barnabas could easily imagine the conversations.

And so Ferqar had been passed over time and again, and the tiny cruelties had robbed him of what should have been his victory—a victory he shared with the rest of the Navy.

Shinigami said quietly, “I am sorry.”

“It is done,” Ferqar said. “It is over. I have to make my peace with it.”

She nodded.

Ferqar stirred, then. “So what I told you about how two captains might talk when they were demoted—that was true. I would have done that for him…if things had been different.”

“You already knew something about him,” Barnabas guessed.

“I did,” Ferqar confirmed. “I was talking with another scout once, one of the ones who control their craft, just them. It’s…not a life for everyone. It gets lonely. But the ones who do it, they love it. He said he’d been out near the border with—” He broke off. “Is the captain listening?”

“No,” Shinigami answered. “He left, and there aren’t any listening devices in this room. He’s the type who doesn’t want to know intrigue.”

“Thank you,” Ferqar told her. “The scout said he’d seen a ship near the Brakalon border.”

“Huword’s ship,” Barnabas guessed.

“Yes. And he shouldn’t have been there—well, it wasn’t his mission to be there. The scout didn’t engage. Those ships fly cloaked, and he wasn’t going to break that cloak by sending a message. The ship wasn’t even doing anything, just flying slowly through a few systems. It could have been a classified mission. It could have been open knowledge, him hunting down someone who’d hurt him. It could have been nothing, but the scout said he followed them anyway because something felt off about it.”

Barnabas waited, worry rising in his chest.

“There’s a Brakalon colony in one of those systems,” Ferqar said. “It was attacked not long after. I was the one who found it out, not the scout. I heard about it, and I decided to do some investigating on my own. There weren’t any survivors at the colony, and it was made to look like Skaine had done it. Who would doubt that? But I know our weapons.” The sensory plate turned in Barnabas’ direction and stared at him unmoving. “I knew it was one of our ships, and I knew whose it had been.”

“The Jotuns wanted the colony,” Barnabas guessed.

“If they did, they haven’t done anything with it. And they aren’t all dead, the civilians. Some are missing.”

Barnabas, who had been about to guess mining, closed his mouth.

“I looked up the rest of his missions,” Ferqar continued. “He’s had a lot, and his ship hasn’t been where it was supposed to be very often. A lot of things like this. It took some doing, but I found other places where he’d done the same thing. I couldn’t prove it, of course.”

“He’s taking captives?” Shinigami asked.

“So it would seem. A few on each colony, and he’d done things to them.” Ferqar’s revulsion went so deep he could barely form the words. “He is a sadist,” he said again.

“And so another government might well have sent a black ops team to kill him,” Barnabas mused. “But...”

“But it doesn’t explain how the Senate is involved,” Shinigami picked up. She looked at him.

“Exactly.” Barnabas shook his head. He looked at Ferqar.

“When I was contacted by—I don’t know who it was—I knew exactly how to get him onto this transport,” Ferqar said. “I made sure he knew that there weren’t any Naval sources on board to listen in on this. I told him that we had to stick together through these demotions, through all the tedium—through all the stupid border patrols past meaningless little alien colonies. I told him a little about my last few routes and mentioned remote alien colonies. All the details were made up, of course.”

Barnabas shook his head slightly. Ferqar had, indeed, set the perfect trap. Huword must have thought he could pump the other captain for details on vulnerable remote alien colonies.

“His move wasn’t a demotion, was it?” Ferqar asked. “That was what I couldn’t understand. I thought the admiralty board knew about it, and… I don’t know what I thought. But it was the Senate who had him moved, wasn’t it? They were sending him to kill these people. Why?”

“That, I don’t know.” Barnabas shook his head. “But you have to hide. You’ve seen far, far too much, and the people who came after us on Gerris Station were looking to tie up any loose ends.”

“We’ll hide,” Ferqar said. “Kelnamon’s no fool. He knows people are looking for the Srisa or anyone who was on it. We’re going dark after this. He didn’t even want to meet with you, but I wanted to know whose side you were on—and, if you were on ours, I wanted to know what you would do. Now…I hope you’ll hurt whoever Huword was working for.”

Barnabas gave a small smile. “I’ll find out who they are,” he promised. “And I will bring them to Justice. Thank you for your help.”

He and Shinigami left with a brief goodbye to Kelnamon, and it was only when they were back on their ship that Barnabas said, with feeling, “What the hell was this guy up to?”

Even Shinigami looked lost. “I have no idea.” She looked disturbed. “But it was nothing good.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“All right.” Barnabas sat down in the conference room, adjusting the fit of his vest minutely before bringing up several systems and images. He looked at Jeltor’s wife. “This will involve highly classified information regarding your government, which may be…distressing. If you’d like not to see it, I understand.”

“Thank you, but I will stay.” However Jotun biosuit voices were chosen, hers was a pleasing contralto. “When Jeltor was taken as a hostage, I thought it was the worst thing that could befall us. Then I learned he was walking willingly into more danger at your side, and I was even more afraid. And then the Senate condemned him for what he’d done, and I realized I had known nothing about my own government. Whatever they did, the least I can do is see it.”

Barnabas nodded silently.

“And,” she added wryly, “I’d at least like to know where he’s running off to the next time he goes.”

Jeltor gave a strangled, guilty-sounding noise.

“He gave me a big speech just before this,” his wife explained, “telling me that he was only going to provide you with information, and definitely not go charging off. Given past experience, I have to assume that ‘charging off’ is exactly what he’ll do.”

Gar was trying to stifle his laughter, but Shinigami didn’t even bother. She chortled as she sat back in her seat.

“She’s got your number, Jeltor.”

“Yes, well.” Jeltor made the same, embarrassed sound again. “I suppose we’d better get on with the planning, then.”

Barnabas hid a smile. He might not have let the meeting stray into the weeds like this, but the truth was, he wasn’t looking forward to going over this information again. Shinigami had found the incidents Ferqar’d mentioned and had passed the highly graphic information to him with no comment. Even she was disturbed, and she did not get disturbed easily.

Barnabas sighed now and nodded to the screen. “We still don’t know who hired the assassin,” he said. “I’ll put that out there. For all I know at this point, it was a foreign government. Ferqar took precautions to make sure he wouldn’t know who he was working with.”

“Ferqar was in on it?” Jeltor asked interestedly.

“He…was the one who got Huword into position. He knew some of the things Huword had done and was somehow connected to whoever hired the assassin.” Barnabas shrugged helplessly. “There are a lot of blanks, so here’s what we do know—and, again, this will be disturbing, and I won’t think less of any of you for not wanting to see it. Leave if you need to.”

The rest of the room settled into anxious silence as he brought up the list of colonies. There were Ubuara, Brakalon, Yofu, Jotun, Torcellan, and even Skaine colonies.

“These colonies,” Barnabas explained, “were attacked, and most of the inhabitants were taken elsewhere. Some of the civilians were killed in various painful ways—there are pictures, but take my word for it—and their bodies were left. The attacks were pinned on slavers and pirates, but we can be fairly certain that all of them were either perpetrated by Huword or somehow enabled by him.”

Jeltor’s wife made a surprised sound. Jeltor floated to the very edge of his tank, close to her, and she moved closer to him, as well. Although they could not touch, they seemed to take comfort in each other’s presence.

“We don’t know his purpose,” Barnabas explained. “Ferqar suggested that it might be a personal thing on Huword’s part, but I can’t believe that to be true. Huword’s ship had a crew aboard it, and surely someone would have spoken up if they were doing things like this. Moreover, the Navy did not react to the fact that Huword’s ship was rarely where it was supposed to be or doing the things it was supposed to be doing.”

“These are all border colonies,” Jeltor said suddenly. “And Huword had just been demoted—we thought. It wasn’t a demotion, was it? They were sending him to do this.”

“So it would seem,” Barnabas agreed. “Which begs the question of who else in the Navy was in on this, because it certainly seems that Huword was acting in the interests of the Senate, instead.”

There was a long pause.

“Burn the whole thing down,” Shinigami suggested finally, “and start over.”

“At this point, that might be wise.” Barnabas rubbed his forehead. “That was a joke,” he told Jeltor.

Jeltor, however, was unamused. “Maybe it shouldn’t be,” he said grimly. “Maybe she’s right.”

There was silence after his words. He had fluttered away from the wall of his tank and was now on the other side of it, away from his wife’s presence.

“Jeltor.” She spoke quietly.

He said nothing.

“Jeltor, the Navy has many good captains.”

“We thought Huword was a good captain!” he flared angrily. “And now there’s another traitor. The Senate can’t be trusted, we’ve been abducting people and torturing them, and gods only know what else—”

“Every species fights corruption.” Barnabas cut him off. “Every one. On Earth, humans did horrible things to one another. They would say it was in the name of science or progress or any number of good things they warped to serve their purposes, and the process of fixing all of that was messy and difficult. But it can be done.”

No one said anything for a while.

“We should focus on what we’re going to do,” Gar suggested. “By which I mean, where we’re going to look for information. We don’t know the whole story yet. You know what I learned, working as a bureaucrat? Bureaucracies are big. It is genuinely possible that no one in the Navy noticed what Huword was doing.”

“Or that several of them noticed at the same time,” Barnabas agreed, seeing a chance to bring them to his next point. “We’ve been contacted by one of the admirals. We don’t know which, but Shinigami believes that’s who it is after having traced them. They say they have information about Huword.”

“It’s worth noting,” Shinigami pointed out, “that this could easily be fake.”

“Which is why we need a plan,” Barnabas said smoothly. “We stood against the Yennai fleet and took their headquarters with hundreds of mercenaries trying to stop us. We’ve already stopped one of the Senate’s black ops teams. We can assume that if this is a trap, it will be a good one—given that they successfully got us to think it was an admiral.”

“Yeah.” Shinigami nodded. “If this mission had been going another way, I wouldn’t even question it. The way this one is going, let me tell you, I checked to see if it was fake. I checked a lot. I found nothing. I’m still suspicious.”

“That’s wise.” Gar sounded weary. “There is no group of people as vicious as leaders who have something to hide. They’ll throw everything at you that they can and tell you that you can’t come after them because it will bring the whole organization down.” He was looking at Jeltor now. “They’ll tell you that showing how rotten and corrupt the Senate is, or the Navy, will make you a traitor to your people. They’ll say the best thing to do is quietly get rid of the people who did all those things and just let it be forgotten.”

“And what is the best thing to do?” Jeltor asked brokenly.

Gar sighed. “I don’t know. When this comes out, no matter if it was one rogue Naval captain or a whole Senate conspiracy, it’s going to do a lot of damage. But if you don’t expose it, how will people know how bad things were? Something enabled Huword to keep getting away with this. Some part of the system wasn’t working. You have to fix that.”

“And there’s the matter of Justice,” Barnabas added. “And truth. People deserve to know what happened to their families, and instead of things being done secretly and silently, they should be done openly. Pushing all this under the rug is a sign that things aren’t being done judiciously.”

“So are we going to talk to them?” Jeltor asked. “Whoever they are.”

“Most certainly.” Barnabas smiled. “Either they’ll be helpful in one way—because they’re on our side—or they’ll be helpful in another because we’ll know more about who’s trying to hush this up. Now, let’s do this in order. Shinigami, what are your guesses about what we’ll be facing?”

Shinigami brought up a spread of ships, formations, and companies.

“Here are the known types of ships in the Jotun Navy, plus the specs I was able to pick up from the black ops ship and the ship that tried to attack us near the Srisa. I’d say our best bet is to arrive far ahead of schedule, coming in cloaked. We can send a rendezvous message and then tell certain buoys and stations we pass to send pings from us at slower intervals than we’re going. If they’re tracking us via station data, they’ll think they have more time before we arrive, and we’ll get there during their setup phase.”

She looked very pleased with herself.

“Good plan,” Barnabas said. “Now for stress-testing. Let’s start with what happens in case of a physical ambush when we get off the ship, and then talk about what happens if they see through our cloaking...”

* * *

Biset’s tank was inserted into his suit and he wiggled his body, connecting with the various sensors and chemicals in the water. From here, he could touch certain controls and manipulate others with chemical inputs.

The process of creating the tanks had been fraught, and many Jotun had died trapped.

Much like what had happened to Huword. Biset shuddered delicately. That had been quite a loss. Huword had been the perfect agent, well-liked by everyone and willing to engage in any project without asking questions.

He’d killed a few of the captives, of course, but that sort of thing was to be expected. In any case, there were always more. Every species had those who left their safe inner planets and ventured to distant colonies.

They knew the risks.

The attunement to the biosuit was complete, and Biset strode out into the hallways of his ship. They were close and confining, with no windows. Windows were structural weaknesses, and Biset was always logical about such things. He would view his assets from the bridge on a viewscreen.

The images were already there when he arrived and took his place at the big command table. His bridge crew stood at attention, bobbing in their tanks in greeting as he went past.

On the screens was the last remnant of the Yennai fleet. Confiscated after their surrender, it had been locked away at once by the Navy, who claimed that their need to examine it was above that of the Senate.

But the Senate had Huword—or, at least, Biset’s committee did. They hadn’t asked him to steal it, only to provide its location and a way around the security measures. Biset had known that the time might come when he would need a fleet.

Now he was just glad that he had asked before Huword was killed.

His eyes narrowed as he stared at the fleet. It was impressive, yes, but even when Barnabas was dead, Biset would still not know which alien government had found out about the committee and killed Huword.

They were going to have to accelerate their schedule, and he did not like that—especially since the reports coming out of the facilities had changed lately. Once, they had been full of detail, and the scientists had enjoyed their work. Now the reports were flat and very basic. It was as if the workers there had entirely lost interest, even though they continued to hit their targets.

Biset would need to investigate that as soon as he was done with Barnabas. He turned his head to look at a nearby officer. “Where is the Shinigami now?”

“Several hours out, sir.” The officer spoke crisply. “We caught a ping from Gerris Station.”

“I thought he was at Gerris Station.”

“He left briefly, sir.”

“Find out where he went,” Biset ordered. “And find me the Srisa. I asked for its location two days ago.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer looked worried, but he knew better than to complain of an impossible task. Those in Biset’s service succeeded…or were killed.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Shinigami arrived four hours ahead of schedule, hurtling toward the out-of-the-way Jotun colony that had been specified by their contact. Even though it had several factories and a resort no one had bothered to name it, so it was still known by its star system and planetary number.

Barnabas had been on the bridge for a good hour before they arrived, pacing back and forth.

He had insisted on leaving Jeltor’s wife and children at a location that had functioned as a safe house of sorts for Rangers—back when this sector was the middle of nowhere, of course, but still territory they owned and protected.

He had wanted to leave Tafa as well, but she refused to go. “It’s my home,” she’d told him, almost offended. “You’re my friends. I’m not going to sit somewhere else twiddling my thumbs. Someone needs to fly the ship if you and Shinigami both go off to fight.”

Shinigami had only a limited processor in her body, and communicated Etherically with the ship, doing her “thinking” on board and simply sending the answers to the body, but Barnabas didn’t tell Tafa that. She was determined to stay and help, and he respected her more for not running from danger.

She got to the bridge closer to their arrival time, as did Shinigami and Gar. The two of them had been practicing sparring together, and the Jotun assassin still inspired Shinigami. She was already moving more smoothly and seemed more at home in her body, while Gar seemed to be learning more by being a teacher than a student.

Jeltor, who had been speaking with his wife over holo, came onto the bridge as the first view of the planet came up on the screens.

And between them and it were several ships.

Several Yennai ships.

“Well, there’s our answer,” Shinigami stated.

“It could be that they know about the meeting and are trying to block us from going to it,” Barnabas pointed out. He took a seat, his armor gleaming dully in the light. “Whatever the case, though, let’s give the people on Gokrun III a show, shall we?”

“Good plan.” Shinigami flipped her hair over her shoulder and crossed her legs. Under her control, the ship sped up slightly, and the missiles began to prime.

They were facing a standard destroyer formation, seven ships with three in a row in the middle, and two each on both the top and the bottom, making a hexagon. At any rate, that seemed to be the formation they were approaching, but they were still getting into position.

“Look there.” Shinigami panned the viewscreen to show a tiny ship above the battle.

It was small, yes, but well-armed. Even though it did not have the same number of scars and scorch marks as the black ops ship—in fact, it was nearly pristine—it was clearly of the same make.

“How close can we get without them seeing us?” Barnabas asked Shinigami. “The person who’s orchestrating all this is on that ship, I know it.”

She nodded, agreeing with his assessment. “To be honest with you, I don’t know how close we can get. We can try. The question is, what are you going to do if we manage it?”

“Interrogate him,” Barnabas said promptly. “Them. Whoever they are. I suppose there might be more than one. The destroyers will have to come about, and they won’t want to fire on us if we’re close to that ship.”

“You’re making assumptions.” She considered the ships as they glided closer, still unseen. “I wonder how they’re flying those. They weren’t made for Jotun captains.”

“We can fly ships the normal way,” Jeltor pointed out. “The biosuits let us do that.”

They considered, and Shinigami looked at Barnabas. “Whoever this is, we’re not going to get a better opportunity to take the last of the Yennai fleet by surprise. We have the chance to take down seven destroyers right now. I say we do it—and before you ask why we must, just consider. We are going to have to fight them at some point.”

Barnabas’ mouth twitched. “I suppose you have a point. All right, then, let’s finish them off and hope our friend doesn’t get away while we do so.”

Shinigami gave a small, pleased smile.

“All right, these ships don’t have a forward and a back, but like every other ship I’ve known, they do have a top and a bottom. We’re going to take out the center bar of the formation first. They’re still very loosely aligned so we can do it quickly. If we’re lucky we’ll be able to take out the top two as well, but I don’t want to count on that.”

The Shinigami was already accelerating under the very bottom of the formation. Barnabas, who had nodded in acknowledgment of Shinigami’s plan, sat quietly with his fingertips lightly resting on the armrests of his chair. He could pretend to be relaxed, but, his whole body was tense.

He had not expected such a reaction. Normally, he was either angry when he faced an opponent, or he was coldly logical.

But the sight of this fleet brought back memories—memories of himself floating helplessly in space, and Shinigami trapped. Their helplessness had only been a ruse, a trap their enemies had fallen into headfirst, but for both, the memory was very real and very wrenching.

Shinigami must have noticed because he felt the brush of her mind against his—not words, but instead simply an expression of shared memory. When he glanced at her, for the first time, he felt he saw her, not just the amalgamation of Tabitha’s features and Bethany Anne’s. Her profile, the set of her jaw, and the slight press of her lips showed her determination.

When they started working together, they would never have trusted one another enough to pull off that mission. It had taken danger and victory alike to get them to that point, and Barnabas realized he was grateful for it.

He’d had love once and lost it. He’d had siblings, and lost them as well. He’d had more than one life, first as a human and then as one of the Nacht, and finally—for he did view joining Bethany Anne as a rebirth of sorts—his life as a Ranger.

Now he had this, a friendship he had never expected. He looked at Tafa and Gar, at Jeltor, at the ship itself, and felt a renewal of his purpose.

Tyrants and corrupt governments were always defeated. Always.

Shinigami brought the ship up around the “back” of the formation. Although the ships were made to go in either direction, their engines placed to vent out the top and bottom of the ship in a diagonal pattern, the crew would be focused on one set of viewscreens. Any visible flicker would not, God willing, be in their line of sight this way.

On the approach, Shinigami hesitated slightly. “Center?” she asked Barnabas. “Or edge-in?”

“Center,” Barnabas decided. “That way, if they spin out of control, they have more of a chance to hit something no matter which way they go.”

“When you’re mean, you’re mean.”

“People who abduct and torture civilians should not expect me to be nice to them.” Barnabas was unperturbed.

Shinigami laughed and accelerated, pressing all of them back against their seats. She saw Barnabas’ look, “All right, I know I could calibrate the gravitics so that wouldn’t happen, but it’s much more fun when you can feel how fast the ship’s going, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Barnabas gave a small smile. “It is.”

Shinigami waited until they were close. Three weapons were primed, and Barnabas saw that she was aiming for the engine vents. Normally in a battle, these would be protected, but the shielding was not in place yet, and the normal swarm of fighters had not yet deployed.

If she nailed these shots, she’d take three ships down in quick succession.

To Barnabas’ surprise, she paused for a moment and bowed her head before pressing the button. It seemed that she had become at home enough in her body to take pleasure in making a physical gesture to accompany her choice.

Were you…praying? he asked her.

To his surprise, she did not answer at once. I don’t know, she said finally. I was thinking about what I would do. Is that praying?

He looked at her. If you want it to be.

This was not the time for an in-depth discussion, but that was enough of an answer for her for now. She turned back to watch the missiles with a wry smile. Previously, I didn’t consider what would happen after I fired my missiles. Now I do. I think it’s your bad influence.

He could hear the teasing, but the serious sentiment behind it gladdened him. He had come into their partnership afraid of his own anger, and afraid to enact his own Justice. Shinigami had given him resolve. He, in turn, seemed to have given her a sense of the gravity of taking a life.

Both were necessary for true Justice.

The Shinigami’s cloaking now worked against Jotun ships, but even their algorithms were not enough to keep the missiles from being seen at the end. A storm of activity broke out; Shinigami’s scanners showed a burst of communications and the engines flared—

It was not enough. Two of the missiles hit dead on and, as the crew of the Shinigami held their breath, the chain reactions devoured the Yennai destroyers from the inside out. The engines blazed out of control, and the ships swung out of formation.

She had damaged the third, the engine ports a gaping hole, but the missile had not gone into the engines themselves.

“They’re crippled,” Barnabas told Shinigami. “Go for the other four first.”

Her quick nod told him that she’d made the same assessment. She dropped a scatter of missiles on the bottom two ships to make them wary of firing up at her and brought the Shinigami up in a smooth arc to shoot at the upper two.

An animal’s belly was vulnerable, an area they would always protect instinctively, and sentient beings tended to do the same with the bellies of their ships. The two destroyers above them swung out of formation in a panic, each trying to angle itself down to meet the Shinigami head-on.

She was faster than they were. Even as they pointed their noses at her, she was sliding under them, keeping them off-balance so that they must turn and orient themselves again.

Barnabas did not see what she was doing until she did so again, and he laughed. She had successfully maneuvered them so that the two upper destroyers were now between the Shinigami and the two lower destroyers.

Jeltor was laughing as well, having seen her strategy before Barnabas did. “I’d have done the same,” he called to her, “if I’d thought of it. I might not have.”

Shinigami gave him a grin in response.

This time, as the missiles finished priming, she sent a dense cloud of fire at the two sets of ships. Any that got past the two upper destroyers would, after all, have a chance of hitting the bottom two.

Barnabas turned his head to look for the ship that had hovered above the plain of battle. As far as he could tell, it was gone.

“It’s landing on the surface,” Shinigami told him. She had seen him look. She paused as her fingers danced over the controls and three missiles shot from the belly of the ship. “I marked its trajectory, and we’ll be paying them a visit when this is done.”

Barnabas nodded. He had wondered if that mysterious ship would help them—and if it were an ally, it would have. There would have been communication of some sort, perhaps, or material aid.

But nothing had come from it.

This had only ever been a trap.

Cleaning up the last of the destroyers didn’t take long. The Jotuns could fly ships without their tank interfaces, but they weren’t very good at it…and these weren’t the Naval captains, but operatives brought here by the Senate. They couldn’t match Shinigami for speed when it came to reactions, and they couldn’t enact their commands quickly enough in the unfamiliar ships.

The last ship tried gamely to bring them down, but even as it fired its full spread of missiles, the drifting wreckage of the other six ships got in its way. Its companion ship clipped it as it spun out of control and the missiles went wild. Between the debris and the Shinigami’s countermeasures, the battle was over almost before it began.

Barnabas sighed. He did not like fighting those who had no real chance for victory.

But they had chosen their path—and he had a new target now. On the surface of Gokrun III was the mysterious person who had orchestrated all this.

He was looking forward to meeting them.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Biset was in a fury as he strode out of his ship and into the underground bunker. Around him, robotic soldiers stirred to life, arming their weapons as they responded to his rage. He calmed himself. He could not hope to win this battle if he allowed his emotions to run away with him.

He should have known that Barnabas would triumph against the remains of the Yennai fleet. It had been a foolish mistake on Biset’s part, but no other ship he’d seen could take on seven and survive.

And the last two times they had faced the Yennai ships had not been true encounters. Once, the fleet had been ordered to let them through—Ilia Yennai’s ill-fated idea that letting Barnabas be cornered in the flesh by mercenaries would be a better way to kill him than being fired on by an entire fleet.

She’d paid for that mistake with her life.

The other times Barnabas had faced the Yennai Corporation, it had been with the backup of the Jotun fleet. Biset had assumed, therefore, that the Shinigami on its own would not be able to triumph.

Clearly, he had been wrong. More critically, he had expected Barnabas to play by the rules. The pings they had caught from the space stations and buoys had been a ruse. Whether Barnabas knew this was a trap, or he was just habitually suspicious, he had known enough to arrive when he wasn’t expected.

Biset tried to calm himself. Barnabas would have to get off the ship to fight him. The bunker was too far below ground to be reached with bombs, and even Barnabas’ strike team couldn’t get through this many robotic warriors.

Briefly, he thought of Ilia Yennai, and he was worried. But this was different. Robots did not feel fear. They did not mourn when their comrades were destroyed.

The others who had faced Barnabas had suffered from a lack of resolve, but Biset would not have the same problem. Biset would triumph.

He wondered idly if he would show the committee the Shinigami and laughed quietly to himself. He knew he would not do so. He was the one who had faced the danger, so he would be the one who kept the spoils of war. The Shinigami and its AI would be his for the taking after this.

If Koel Yennai had wanted it so much, after all, it had to be worth something. Biset expected it to be booby-trapped, of course, but he’d find a way around that. It was just an AI, and he had learned in his years that any mind could be turned with enough time and the right leverage.

No one was incorruptible.

* * *

Unseen in the rafters above, Kantar knelt to watch Biset walk through the ranks upon ranks of robotic soldiers.

Gokrun III was theoretically a resort planet for the Jotuns. No one else wanted it with its salty, storm-tossed seas, but the Jotuns liked the novelty of it—and the Jotun Senate, apparently, used the bunkers on its smallest continent to hide their experiments.

It was well-protected, which had meant that there was no way she could get a ship in here on her own. Any ship would be noticed and scanned. The satellites in low orbit were highly-attuned and well-armed.

So she had done the only thing she could and gotten herself aboard Biset’s private ship. To escape detection, she’d had to power herself down and hope he did not take long enough in space for her to suffocate. Luckily, he had not. There had been a long time of the ship drifting aimlessly, and then—just before they began their descent—there had been some quick maneuvers that suggested a battle.

They had not fired their weapons, however. She did not know what had happened, and there was no one to ask. It did not especially matter anyway. Biset would soon be dead. After Huword, he was their next target. Biset had been Huword’s direct contact, and was, as far as Kantar could tell, one of the most dangerous members of the committee.

She wondered about sending Barnabas word that Biset had been killed. On the one hand, if he knew about Biset and was hunting him, he might break off his pursuit when he knew Biset was dead.

On the other hand, he might just be more curious. Barnabas, she had come to believe, was motivated not by revenge or vice, but by the search for truth.

That made him dangerous. She knew that. Gil and Wev had been very clear that Barnabas could bring their government crashing down, and Kantar knew they were right. If the committee’s work were made public, every other government would turn on them.

And yet…she found that she respected Barnabas’ quest for the truth. The thought of burying all this, dealing with it quietly, gave her a twisty feeling in her gut. It didn’t seem right, somehow.

The Jotun people all suffering for the actions of a few didn’t seem right either, however. And if Barnabas insisted that they must, what would she do?

She would kill Biset, she decided. Then she would decide what to do.

She stood quietly and followed his path, walking silently on the rafters above him. Biset was training to lead a robotic army, much like an admiral would lead many ships in battle. She would have to figure out how best to deal with that, but she had always been good at waiting and biding her time.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Landing sequence activated,” said Shinigami’s voice over the loudspeakers, “complete in thirty seconds.”

Barnabas bounced on the balls of his feet as he waited at the blast doors. He heard clanking a moment later, and Jeltor came around the corner with Shinigami. Gar trailed them, speaking quietly with Tafa as he did the last check of his weapons.

One of the first things Barnabas had trained him to do was to take care of his weapons, knowing them inside and out and not expecting technology to rescue him. It was impossible to understand all the specialized technology, of course, but clean, well-maintained weapons and armor were essential for survival.

At the door, all of them nodded to one another, and Tafa gave them all smiles.

“Be safe,” she told them, and she disappeared down the hall. Barnabas could tell she was very determined not to look over her shoulder at them or watch as they left the ship. She was worried but trying to control it as best she could.

He could not blame her. What was waiting for them down there, he could not say.

But he knew one thing... He was deeply curious, and he was very much looking forward to bringing the ringleader to Justice. Shinigami had been correct when she’d said that whatever Huword had been up to, it was nothing good.

The Shinigami set down so gently that when the doors opened Barnabas was alarmed.

“Don’t worry, silly.” Shinigami’s smile was teasing. “It’s all okay. We’re down, and the atmosphere is breathable. But don’t tell me—back in your day, you had to get where you were going in a horse-drawn carriage, and you felt every bump. You didn’t even need to land.”

Barnabas was laughing silently. “No, no, in my day we rode dinosaurs.”

“Now that is a mental image I can get behind. I’m going to have them clone you a dinosaur.”

“Bad idea,” Barnabas warned her as they walked into the underground bunker. “Didn’t Tabitha show you Jurassic Park?”

“Where do you think I got the idea?”

“I think you took the wrong lessons from that movie.” He crossed his arms and looked around. “So, we’re…underground?”

“You’re a great detective. No wonder the Empire flourished under your care.” She strode out and looked around the bunker with him. “But yes. These doors were supposed to be closed to us—but I swear, a toddler must have written those algorithms.”

Barnabas smiled slightly. From the pride in Shinigami’s voice, it was clear that the algorithms had been significantly harder to break than she was suggesting. When they first came to this sector, it had contained technology different than any they had seen, and both had struggled to adapt. They had managed, though, as their enemies were presently finding out.

He followed slowly, examining this place with care. The ceiling in the bunker was low, and long pools of water ran down the center and sides of the room. Like the seawater outside, it smelled of salt and kelp.

The room was also empty.

“I don’t like this,” Barnabas murmured. “It just reeks of a trap.”

As if in answer, one of the doors lit up and a Jotun voice—recognizable by its faint mechanical whine—said, “Thank you for coming. I knew it would be difficult to get past the Senate’s blockade, but if anyone could do it, you could.”

Jeltor’s eyes had narrowed, and he shook his head. I don’t know this voice. It’s none of the admirals.

I’ll play along, though, Barnabas said. He strolled forward. “Are you going to show yourself? I promise we’re on your side. We want to bring Justice—the same thing you want.” It nearly made me sick to say that.

That’s the problem, Shinigami commented. Honorable people have trouble lying even for a good cause, but it doesn’t bother dishonorable people.

“I’m afraid it’s too risky,” the voice said. “And that antechamber may be bugged. I cannot give you this information anywhere the Senate might hear of it. I’ll light the way to a safe place.”

Safe for us to get filled with bullets, Barnabas guessed.

Now, now, Shinigami scolded, they might be planning to drown us instead.

They’d probably find that fitting, Jeltor agreed. They don’t like other species, and most Jotuns are at least a little bit annoyed that we’re the only ones who are amphibious. Luvendi don’t count, I’m afraid, he told Gar.

We swim, Gar pointed out, annoyed.

You don’t have to be carried around in tanks. If the Jotuns had their way, you’d all be in air tanks and all stations would be filled with water.

Everyone quiet, Barnabas said as they walked forward slowly, and let Shinigami concentrate on mapping this place. I think it’s safe to say that we want to go anywhere but where they’re telling us to go.

Pretty much, Shinigami agreed. But we’ll have to move fast when we choose an alternate route. I’m not in their systems yet, and they can see us.

The group emerged into a second chamber and was immediately faced with a group of robotic warriors, all of whom leveled the arms of their suits to show the barrels of guns.

“On the other hand,” said Shinigami cheerfully, “maybe we don’t need to spend time trying to find the trap after all.”

Barnabas didn’t pause to chime in, but he was laughing as he charged the group. He grabbed one warrior by the arm and dragged it around to face its fellow soldiers as they began firing. Many bullets landed, some ricocheting off the heavy plate armor of the robots, but others finding their targets: joints and weak points that hissed and sparked as the bullets struck.

Interestingly, not only did his robotic warrior stop firing, they all stopped firing—at the same time.

He’s controlling them remotely! Barnabas called over the Etheric connection.

He didn’t wait to see how they used that information but instead launched into action. He hopped onto the head of his robot to look around the room, then made his way to the far back corner using the shoulders and heads of the warriors as stepping stones.

They tried to follow him with their guns, but whoever was controlling them was not used to the pace of hand-to-hand fights, especially when an enhanced human was involved. Barnabas landed lightly without even a close call and whirled, drawing his Jean Dukes.

The guns went off with a roar and two of the robots staggered, one having turned to face him, the other still facing the other way and trying to pick its target. Barnabas fired again, aiming for the column below the sensory panel—the equivalent of the neck on a biological fighter.

With their connection to their sensors and their remote control disabled some of the robots shut down, but with others, Barnabas seemed to have fried some of the central controls, and the robots began to short out. Their bodies shook, limbs moving spasmodically. One collapsed, and another began firing straight at the floor. The bullets hit the reinforced concrete and bounced, sending projectiles in every direction.

“Hit the floor!” Barnabas yelled. He had time to worry on the way down that this might be too colloquial, but the rest of the group seemed to understand him just fine.

There was a scream, and his head jerked up—only for him to start laughing. The scream was apparently Shinigami’s battle cry.

And what a battle cry it was! What she lacked in precision, she more than made up for in sheer power. Her body was the first produced by Bobcat’s team, but they hadn’t been sloppy in their work, and they’d done thorough testing. Now that she knew how to use it, she had more raw power at her disposal than Barnabas might ever be able to summon.

It was enough to make him feel just the tiniest bit annoyed for a moment before he shook his head good-naturedly and joined the fight.

If she were stronger, he would have to become that much better in his form to match her. He could already tell that their sparring was going to get a lot more painful, and he found himself mentally repeating Bethany Anne’s adage with a smile: Pain is an excellent teacher.

Shinigami, unaware of his thoughts, had taken a page out of his playbook from last time and was ripping the limbs off some robots and using them to beat the others into the ground and push them into the pools of water. They weren’t made to swim, and they sank quickly below the surface.

On the off chance that their enemy was in those pools, Barnabas started doing the same thing. Now that the circuits were exposed they were sparking like crazy, and he could only hope that the Jotuns were electrocuted to the point that they could not concentrate—although from what he could see, they must have liquid sensors that cut the power to their suits as soon as they were submerged.

Gar, meanwhile, seemed to have appointed himself Jeltor’s personal bodyguard, although Jeltor had put a thin sheet of nearly-transparent armor over the front of his tank and was taking well-aimed shots at the robots that were still standing.

Battle always seemed to Barnabas to take both infinite time and yet pass in the blink of an eye. For what seemed like an eternity, the world was full of bullets firing and ricocheting, metal screaming, Shinigami yelling, and the close-quarters combat of mechanical warriors against biological ones. And then, just as suddenly, it was over, and the remnants of the robots were twitching on the ground before them.

Then Barnabas noticed that the water level was rising.

The smart thing to do, of course, would be to leave the bunker. But that would mean leaving his quarry, too, and he was not about to do that.

“Wait here!” he yelled to the others, and he took off into the bunker at a dead sprint. The pounding of footsteps behind him told him that no one had listened. “I said, wait there! Or, actually, leave!”

“Oh, hell no!” Gar called, a strange colloquialism coming from a Luvendi’s mouth. “We’re not going to let you have all the— Holy shitballs!”

Floodlights went on in the next chamber, where easily three times the number of robotic warriors faced them. The person controlling them must have learned their lesson because these did not wait. In unison, they raised their arms—and fired.

Chapter Twenty-Six

This time, Barnabas didn’t have to yell anything. He heard the others throw themselves down, and the next moment an exceedingly strong hand grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him back through the doorway.

“Ow! Bones!”

“Sorry,” Shinigami said unrepentantly, hauling him upright like a rag doll. “I figured your ankle would heal fine as long as you were, you know, still alive.”

“Yes.” Barnabas hopped on the other foot while the bones knit themselves back together. “Thank you. I take your point.”

Bullets were still whizzing through the doorway in large numbers, and the water was now up to their ankles and pouring into the room beyond.

“Does anyone have a plan?” Gar asked pragmatically.

Shinigami ducked into the doorway for a moment and then came back. There was an impact point where something had gotten her in the head, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

“I think the person controlling it all is at the back of that room,” she said. “I guess those robots aren’t going to run out of bullets for a while. He’s going to try to drive us out of here with water and kill us with traps whether we do or don’t fight.”

“Well, then,” Barnabas said, “looks like he’s only given us one option, hasn’t he? Try to kill him to stop all of this.”

The rest of them nodded.

“Any particular ideas on that front?” Shinigami asked Barnabas. “I’m not quite as squishy as you are, but I don’t think I can take that many bullets.”

Barnabas considered. “Jeltor, tell me what you can about those things…and be quick about it since this water is rising fast.”

* * *

Kantar lowered herself from the rafters carefully and began to work her way down the back wall.

She had feared the robots at first, but Biset was a fool. He was too afraid to let them function as they had been intended to, so he had put them entirely on manual control. He didn’t trust them to utilize their auto-targeting or fire their guns only as the algorithms suggested.

It was the sign, in her opinion, of a weak leader. Biset only wanted to trust those things he understood instead of trusting that his orders had been carried out.

And he did not have the capacity, as the Jotun admirals had, to control that many different bodies, each with different objectives, all at once. There was a reason there were only two or three admirals per generation. It was a rare individual who could manage all of that without going mad.

So much the better, as far as she was concerned. With the robots taken off auto-targeting and Biset wholly concerned with Barnabas’ strike team, Kantar had a clear shot at Biset. If Huword had deserved to die, Biset deserved something far, far worse.

She only regretted that she couldn’t think of a worse death to give him, but when it came to things like this, it was better to take the shot and kill him, thus making sure he could never hurt anyone else, than to try to draw out his pain and take the chance of him surviving.

Much better.

She watched as the water began to rise, and then, as Barnabas and his team charged out of the doorway toward the robots, a thought came to her.

She didn’t have to kill Biset. Not yet.

If she didn’t, after all, between the water and the bullets, he would likely kill Barnabas and the entire strike team. And if he didn’t, Barnabas would kill Biset—and then be weak and undefended against Kantar.

In one stroke, she could rid the Jotun of two enemies: one who sickened them from within, and another whose quest for Justice might hurt the innocent.

Kantar stopped, still cloaked in shadows. She knew what Gil and Wev would want her to do.

She just did not know what she wanted to do.

* * *

Jeltor charged into battle at the head of the group, Shinigami and Barnabas flanking him and Gar running behind at the back of the diamond. Jeltor’s suit had panels that could unfurl to make him a giant shield and the team had used this as best they could.

As soon as they started to get to the point where it would not matter any longer, Barnabas and Shinigami threw themselves as far to the sides as they could, vaulting from their cover into the fray before the robots could re-target.

Barnabas knew that whoever was using these warriors had not practiced. They had not gone through the admirals’ training and passed it. They did not have what it took.

Unfortunately, they still had hundreds of robots at their disposal and thousands of bullets flying each minute, and they might win by sheer luck.

That royally pissed him off. He hated it when people won by luck instead of skill.

Gar had climbed onto Jeltor’s back and now vaulted over the Jotun’s head and deep into the ranks of the robots. He, like Shinigami and Barnabas, was determined to wreak as much havoc as he could, and he did it admirably.

Within the dense ranks, grenades were thrown, and the robots did not react quickly enough to quarantine them. Blasts rang out, Jean Dukes were fired, and there was the occasional yell of Barnabas or Gar catching a hit—bullet or mechanical fist.

They were better, Barnabas kept telling himself. He dispatched his enemies with brutal efficiency, always circling to the outside of an encounter so that only some of them had a clear shot at him. He kept taking them down, chipping away at their numbers, washing them away as water would wear away stone...

And yet, water was one of his problems. The level was still rising, and it was slowing him down. He struggled to move as quickly and predictably as he needed to. Currents made things even more tricky, and he could not easily tell where the walkways ended and the reservoirs began. More than once, he fell under the water and emerged cold, escaping a robot by luck alone.

Luck. A battle should never come down to luck.

They were still pressing forward, but the injuries were beginning to take their toll. Shinigami had been hit often enough that parts of her machinery were not working as well as they should. Both Gar and Barnabas, despite their healing, were in pain and cold. Jeltor’s suit had taken damage far beyond where he should have bowed out of the battle.

“Who…the fuck…are you?” Barnabas yelled toward the back of the chamber.

“I am no one, human,” the voice spat. “I am nameless to you. When I am gone, no one will think to look for me. No one will know what truth you were seeking. There never was another black ops team, was there? It was all a lie.”

“It was your panic over it that proved it true,” Barnabas called back. He barely missed stepping into a reservoir again and choked on a mouthful of water, swearing silently as he pried the sensor panel off a robot and ripped its gun arm off for good measure. “If they haven’t come yet, they will.”

“They won’t,” the voice snapped, “because they won’t have a chance. It will all be over too quickly.”

There. There it was, their entire plan. Barnabas didn’t know the how of it, but now he knew their goal.

And he knew they thought they could achieve it.

“Your people will never stand for this!” he yelled back. “Never, do you hear me? You are the worst of them, and they will revolt against you and show every other species that they did not want this. They will defeat you from within.”

“Oh, no, they won’t.” The voice was far, far too satisfied, and the water began to rise much faster. “And while I’d love you to see it, I think it’s better if you don’t live that long. It’s been a good fight, human, but it’s time—”

The voice cut off, and Barnabas, who’d been climbing on top of a robot to stay above the water level, noticed that the waters had stilled as well.

“Hello?”

He looked around. Jeltor had activated something that allowed his suit to float, and Gar and Shinigami had done the same thing Barnabas had.

And there, at the end of the room, perched on the shoulders of another biosuit, crouched the slim shape of the assassin. She nodded her cybernetic head in greeting.

“Hello again.”

“Hello,” Barnabas replied, surprised into politeness. “So who was that you just killed?”

“And why did you do it?” Shinigami added. “You waited quite a while to intervene. He’s been distracted for quite some time.”

The assassin laughed, an eerie sound. “Who it was doesn’t particularly matter. As to why...” She paused as she stood. “It was what you said about the Jotuns rising and showing the universe that they weren’t a part of this. You don’t mean to destroy us when you learn the truth. I see that now.”

She leaped—into the rafters.

“So I’ll do you a favor,” she called down, her voice echoing. The waters began to recede. “Look up the Infrastructure Revitalization Committee.”

There was the sound of a door closing, and she was gone.

“That could be boring,” Gar said, but the rest of the group was distracted by Barnabas’ laughter.

“A committee,” he said helplessly. “I always knew committees would destroy the world. Well, let’s all go get patched up. We have some committee-hunting to do.”

Epilogue

Barnabas took a restrained sip of juice and closed his eyes in pleasure. “Ah. Truly excellent.”

“Most people would gulp it down,” Gar told him.

“There is value in self-control,” Barnabas replied gravely.

“Don’t listen to him,” Shinigami stated. “It’s the stick up his ass talking.”

“I do not know what that phrase means,” Gar complained.

“You don’t need to,” Barnabas said wearily. “Suffice it to say she’s insulting me.”

“Teasing. I’m teasing. I do it with love.” She looked at the food. “I wish I could eat this. You all seem to like it so much. Tabitha says these are some of the best sandwiches she’s ever had. I’ve…cleaned up the sentiment somewhat.”

“We’d guessed that.” Barnabas smiled as he took another sip of juice. “So. It is time to decide our next move. Normally, I would wait until we had eaten, but we cannot afford to waste any time.”

“I’ve asked Aebura and Kelnamon to look into any attacks on Ubuara or Brakalon colonies, and to report any other unexplained happenings,” Tafa said. She had jumped into the role of chief researcher eagerly, networking with other biological organisms.

“That will make my predictions and assessments better,” Shinigami agreed. Once Tafa had collected the research, Shinigami set to work crunching the numbers. Together, they made an incredible team, and what Shinigami could do with data, Tafa had a talent for “seeing” in another way—her artist’s eye could sense a distortion in data, and once she pointed out what she saw, Shinigami was often able to make sense of it.

“As far as I can tell,” Gar said, “there haven’t been any attacks on Luvendi settlements, mainly because there aren’t any Luvendi settlements. I think we’ll have to look at it another way. I’ve put very vague calls out to the Luvendi I know to see if they knew anyone who dropped out of contact unexpectedly. The best way to get Luvendi would be to hire them into roles in a remote company and abduct them from there. The network on Luvendan itself is far too strong for people to vanish without a trace.”

“Let Tafa and Shinigami know what you find,” Barnabas said with a nod. “We’ll have to see if we can find any Torcellans to work with.”

“Try Gor’rathi,” Shinigami suggested. “The Gerris Station administrator. He owes us some favors.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Barnabas murmured. “There were only problems on the station because of us.”

“You’re not enough of an opportunist,” Shinigami told him disgustedly. She shook her head. “Any word from Jeltor, by the way?”

“None yet.” Barnabas fought a wave of worry. While Jeltor’s family had remained at the safe house, Jeltor had gone back to Jotuna to begin spreading the word among the Naval captains. Whatever committee this was, they had to find out more about it.

Jeltor was filled with a renewed hope that there would be trustworthy members of the Senate, and Barnabas, despite his caution, was inclined to agree with him. Surely many senators had gotten into politics with an intent to do good work—and surely there were still some who had not been corrupted or jaded.

They just had to find them.

“We’ll stay here until we get word,” he decided. “There’s no place safer for the Shinigami, and we can see our friends. I wish there was something to do, but there isn’t until we know more.”

“You could help Elisa,” Shinigami suggested.

Barnabas looked at Carter’s wife, who was making her way out of the kitchen with two trays of food. She looked a bit more tired than usual but was otherwise in very good spirits.

“Is there something she needs help with?”

Shinigami smiled, and Barnabas was reminded of how much those cybernetic eyes could see. “She’s pregnant again,” she said quietly.

“Why didn’t you say so earlier?” Barnabas was up like a shot, taking one of the trays from Elisa while the rest of the table looked on in amusement.

“Good things happen here,” Tafa said. She looked happy and was almost in awe of this place. Tethra, on High Tortuga’s smaller continent, was not a place of elegant buildings or big money, but it was a place where people greeted each other happily, and loving care showed in the construction of the buildings.

“It took a lot of work to make it this way,” Gar told her. “A lot of courage.” There was a lot of history in those words.

“Some of that courage was yours,” Shinigami told him. “And we’ll do the same with the Jotuns. I promise. No matter how dark it seems.”

* * *

“And so,” Grisor said, “while Biset’s death was tragic, it has served as a valuable warning to us and has destroyed one of our most dangerous enemies. He bought us safety at the cost of his life so that the Jotuns might rise to lead all the species of the universe—as we were ordained to do!”

He shuddered and rippled with the force of his words, and the other committee members, each floating in the tank with him, bowed down before him respectfully.

Grisor, as he looked out at the assembled group, wondered if any of them truly believed the words he said. For certain, he had no grief over Biset’s death. Biset had been a powerful committee member, ruthless and willing to do whatever was necessary to preserve the committee and advance its goals. He was the one who had suggested using Huword, and that had been an excellent suggestion, indeed.

But Grisor did not particularly care that Biset was dead. It was one less potential loose end, one fewer person fighting for power when the committee’s aims were finally reached. Biset would have ordered them all killed and taken over.

Grisor—who was planning to do the same, of course—was not sorry that Biset was gone.

But in every worthy enterprise, there was an element of danger. One must find allies, and allies could be dangerous, unreliable, and power-hungry. A good ally was all those things because worthwhile people always were.

When the rest of the committee rose to look at him, Grisor saw that they thought the same way. None of them cared about the rhetoric. Oh, they would pay lip-service to it. It would not do to have someone overhear the wrong speech. When the Jotun people heard what had happened, they would need to have a good, noble reason for supporting it.

If they did not? Well, they could be convinced. The experiments had shown that conclusively.

“Let us discuss progress,” Grisor continued smoothly. “As you know, we have lost Huword. Therefore, we will need another source within the Navy. Fortunately, we have the means to turn any of them to our side now.”

There was a flood of approval, chemicals rushing sweetly to him in the shared tank.

It had taken hundreds from each species to get to this point. Some species were still difficult to convince. The mind was a complex thing, after all, and not easily controlled. Each species had its own failings and weaknesses.

But the Jotuns they had figured out early on. Now the committee had the strength to make any Jotun loyal to them.

And very, very soon they would have planets full of aliens, each turned not only into slaves but loyal slaves—and the Jotuns would rule this sector, unassailable.

“Who will we choose?” one of the committee members asked. “Which admiral is best placed to convince the others?”

“No,” another argued, “we should choose the one we can get to most reliably.”

“We will not choose from among the admirals,” Grisor countered smoothly.

Everyone looked at him.

“When word gets out of Huword’s dealings, there will be a crisis of faith. No one will be above suspicion.”

They all waited.

“No one,” Grisor continued, “except the one who exposed Huword and the Senate in the first place.”

A few understood, but not all. He marked them; they were weak links.

He explained, “There is no other logical choice but Captain Jeltor. And luckily enough, he’s on Jotuna right now.”

FINIS

Author Notes - Natalie Grey

October 9, 2018

Thank you for reading Justiciar! I can’t wait to launch into this next part of Barnabas’s story - what started as a murder investigation is part of something much, much bigger, and Barnabas and his crew are going to be tested in ways they’ve never imagined…!

I want to offer an extra-big thank you to the whole team this time, starting with Michael, who was vigilant and caught the first signs of burnout after a very productive spring and summer. He encouraged me to take the necessary time off, and Lynne, Steve, et al. really helped make it work. Thank you so much! Thanks also to Jeff for the lovely cover. I’m so glad we get to see Shinigami now!

I couldn’t do this without the beta readers, both the first-round set (Sandy, Jim, and Sam) and the JIT group. Thanks for the typo and canon checks!

And thank you, as well, to B and L, who are a joy to me every day.

Sincerely,

Nat

Author Notes - Michael Anderle

October 9, 2018

Before I explain what is going on, let me say THANK YOU for not only reading this book, but these author notes, as well.

Today is Tuesday and I’m in Frankfurt Germany, attending the Frankfurt Book Fair – the largest in the world. I choose to come here as a company to understand what the bigger market looks like, to make relationships happen, and to see a few fans here in Germany.

We came in a day earlier this year (we arrived hours before the first meeting last year, a very poor operational choice for sure.)

Because of this better life choice, I actually got out of bed in time, and enjoyed the opening meeting.

Further, I got a chance to speak with a representative of a research company based out of the UK that is more connected with Trad (traditional) publishing than indie. I did this to see if we have options related to helping show the growth of markets with Indie Publishing numbers. Since they (trad pub) don’t have any insight into our sales, and Amazon isn’t about to supply them, they are doing some heavy scraping of the site via a 3rd party to understand the size of our genres.

While part of me is concerned that better insights bring additional competition, I realize that companies of their size and abilities could help grow the market bigger, so that we all benefit.

Because of this mornings meeting(s), I have NEW business ideas and hope to be here next year, writing another Author Note discussing something new that caused my little brain between my ears to quiver in anticipation.

Who knows? Perhaps I will be fortunate enough to break a whole new country open for Sci-Fi and Urban Fantasy.

I might get a t-shirt like the one that says ‘I’m a big deal in <insert country.’ ;-)

Hehe.

Below is a duplicate from another author note (TUMB 11) – HOWEVER – it is important for those who enjoy Fan Pricing.

Ad Aeternitatem,

Michael

--- FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ THIS IN BROWNSTONE #11 Or JUNTTO ---

LMBPN has set this BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) of releasing 400 titles next year. To make this happen, we had to get a cracking and bang a few brain cells together to figure out how to streamline our process.

Which, you know, was probably said last year, but I didn’t FEEL like being responsible last year. As the owner of this company, I didn’t want to be told when I had to have stories in. The whole concept made the obstinate part of my personality stand up and try to figure out who to flip off.

In the end, I had to give myself the finger.

Way to fuck yourself over, Michael.

Why? Because it’s one thing to have two or three (at most) books coming out in a week. But, when we started doing full weeks of books (well, five days, not weekends) the challenges exposed themselves.

One of the issues is fan pricing. How do we continue the pricing, and reduce the effort because with 400 books, we have a LOT more to do and emails are a serious time and effort constraint, and we already sent too many.

FAN PRICING ON SATURDAY’s

We are moving to releasing our books at $3.99 (a $1.00 less than regular price) during the week, then on Saturday’s pricing all new releases (except box sets) at $0.99 for Saturday. On Sunday, they go up to regular price.

This way, you always know what day to look, and we are able to send 2 emails during the week focused on book releases. One on Sunday / Monday that announces what books are coming out (and when) for those who (for whatever reason) don’t care and then again on Saturday with the books, and the links to the Amazon website (we don’t always have this a week before.)

We are HOPING to have more content on the LMBPN Publishing website about interesting stuff that might apply to you (including games, Anime, backstory on stories and authors etc.) When we get this running, we will release a special Wednesday email to highlight our blog posts.

Soon, I will be reducing my Author Notes in the back of collaboration books. There is no freaking way I can put out 500 word (or more) author notes in the back of 400 books. So, my plan is to do a Mad-Libs sort of feature where the core is consistent, and I can add in one or two unique items and see how that goes.

Making 2019 happen at 400 books is a mountain type goal for me. I suspect in 2020 we will reduce the number of books released, as we take what we learned in 2019 and cut the chaff.

However, for those that follow us, we appreciate your shouts of encouragement as we try to accomplish something (to my knowledge) NO Indie Publishing Company is doing.

Bring it on, 2019, bring it on!

Ad Aeternitatem,

Michael Anderle

Defender

Vigilante Chronicles Book 6

Chapter One

There were a number of high-tech strategies available to someone who was hoping to avoid surveillance.

After all, for a Jotun, surveillance and sabotage were not merely possible, but true dangers. To participate in day-to-day life with other species, a Jotun must wear a mechanical suit fitted with a central tank that would hold the Jotun’s jellyfish-like body. They used the suits like others would use their bodies, but those in higher-end and more specialized suits were also able to send and receive messages, use weapons embedded in the suits, and scan people, machines, and objects.

This made the suits vulnerable. The Jotun government had extensive protocols in place to keep matters of state from being spied upon. Otherwise, the suits could be hacked to send all speech to a third party, or make the weapons malfunction, or track the Jotun’s movement.

The Jotuns had, of necessity, evolved some of the most complex computer systems in this sector. Very few other species posed a true threat to them in that regard, it was mostly their own homegrown hackers and vigilantes that they feared.

When Jeltor went back to Jotuna, therefore, seeking out the top brass of the Navy to help him expose the Senate’s latest treason, he spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to escape surveillance.

Admiral Jeqwar chose an option he would never have anticipated: she found several old, discarded biosuits and cleaned them up just enough to be habitable. They were so old that their computers barely functioned beyond providing life support. Hacking them would be an exercise in frustration, and it was unlikely that any of the Senate’s hackers even knew the programming languages these suits ran on.

Jeltor admired the admiral’s plan, but the suits were damned uncomfortable. He was used to his own suit, which he had modified extensively over the years. Without scanners, communications capabilities, or weapons, he felt naked.

Also, cold. This suit did not calibrate temperature the same way his did.

He bobbed in the water uncomfortably as they walked toward the waterfront. Some of the admiral’s aides were trailing after them, and Jeltor was sure that there were more who were keeping watch, protecting these two revolutionaries.

Jeltor would never have guessed in his youth that the term “revolutionary” would apply to him. He’d joined the Navy when he was young, progressing through the ranks as his mind would allow; Jotun Naval captains each controlled an entire ship during battle, and very few had the mental capacity to control the largest ships. Only a handful in each generation were able to be admirals, who could control an entire fleet.

He had served well once he graduated, becoming known for being decisive and fair, a good captain to the crews that ran his ships when they were not in a battle. He had known about the corruption in the Senate, of course, because everyone knew about it, but he’d had a youthful belief that corruption was inevitable in any civilized species.

In any case, his younger self had thought the Jotuns were better than other species. They should not worry about corruption as long as it did not cost them territories or good trade deals.

Jeltor wanted to slap his younger self for having such insular, ignorant notions. He had first realized some of his errors when he began to interact with other species and found them to be not the brutish savages he’d been told, but intelligent—and even dangerous. This gradual awakening had made him start questioning everything, whether he wanted to or not.

The final straw had come when he was taken hostage by pirates. Rescued by a human named Barnabas, Jeltor had learned the Yennai Corporation, which had infiltrated the Jotun government and was seeking to become the dominant power in the entire sector. Far from fighting it, the Jotun Senate was allowing this and looking the other way. Jeltor had been accused of treason for standing against the Yennai Corporation.

He hadn’t wanted to be a revolutionary. He’d simply stood for what was right, and somehow that had made him one.

Now he spent his time looking over his shoulder for assassins and worrying about surveillance. It seemed like a nightmare, something that would happen to someone else. Unfortunately, it was all too real.

“So,” Admiral Jeqwar said when they reached the waterfront. “Why did you need to meet?”

“Have you ever heard of the Infrastructure Revitalization Committee?” Jeltor asked her.

She turned her biosuit to look at him. “No,” she said cautiously. “But it must be more important than it sounds if you’re here to talk to me about it.”

Jeltor gave a little laugh. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, I don’t know what it is. It was a tip given to us by…well, I don’t know that, either.”

“So you came here to tell me that you’ve received a tip that could mean anything from an anonymous source?”

“Not exactly anonymous.” Jeltor wiggled his tentacles somewhat nervously. “I trust I can say the following in confidence?”

“Yes,” she said wryly. “We’re already under suspicion of treason, and we’ve indubitably committed mutiny. Let’s not get worried about rule-breaking now.”

Despite himself, Jeltor laughed. He had always been a bit in awe of Admiral Jeqwar. She was a legend, and her reputation was well-earned. What he had not expected, when he became part of the resistance against the Jotun Senate, was that she would be forthright and no-nonsense. The Jotuns who could be admirals were so rare and so intelligent that he had assumed she would be very cold and superior, looking down on everyone else.

None of them were like that, it turned out. They were very practical, and had no patience for bullshit. It made Jeltor feel better about the fact that they had led the Navy into mutiny. If he was on their side, he felt he was on the right side.

He was worried that his latest mission, however, might concern even them.

“How much do you know of Huword’s death?” he asked.

She gave him an annoyed glance. “Very little, as well you should know. No one’s said a damned thing.”

“Huword was a traitor,” Jeltor said bluntly. “He was working for the Senate, not only during the mutiny but for other purposes that we don’t even understand yet.” He hated to tell her the truth. Huword had been well-liked.

Despite her practicality, she could not seem to believe this. “Huword?” she asked him bluntly. “Of all people, him?”

“I know.” Jeltor felt a deep pang of sadness. He had believed that Huword was his friend. “I know,” he repeated, “but it’s true. He was working for the Senate, and whatever he was doing, it’s involved—somehow—with the committee I mentioned. And that was why he was assassinated.”

The admiral was no fool. “If you know only parts of this,” she said slowly, “then you clearly weren’t the one who assassinated him.”

“You thought I was?” It was grimly amusing to find out he’d become so infamous that people thought he was off performing vigilante justice, assassinating his fellow Naval captains.

“Our intelligence suggested you were involved somehow.” She gave the ripple that was the Jotun equivalent of a shrug.

“Only after the fact. Barnabas was the one who found out about the murder.”

“Humans again.” Her suit shook its head. “If I’m honest, I don’t like another species being quite so involved in our business.”

Jeltor knew better than to take this as a reprimand. Indeed, he understood it for what it was: a confidence. Jotuns were told from an early age that they were superior to all other species and that they were the lone beacon of true civilization in the sector.

Even once you realized that was false, it was difficult to undo the years of belief.

“I think whoever ordered Huword’s assassination feels the same,” Jeltor told her. “They tried to warn us off. I think the assassin acted without their knowledge when they told us about the committee. We ran into them again when...” He rippled again, worriedly. “When we killed Senator Biset.”

The admiral muttered a quiet oath. “You killed a senator?”

“That wasn’t what we thought we were—” He broke off. Excuses were useless. “Yes,” he said simply. Then, because she was still staring at him, he explained succinctly, “They set a trap for us on Gokrun III, and we managed to get out of it. The assassin helped us kill them; it was the only way to get out of the trap. Then they told us about the committee and left.”

The admiral stared out over the waterfront and said nothing for a long moment.

Hevarod, the capital city of Jotuna, had originally been constructed underwater but had been moved as the Jotuns began developing and testing biosuits. It was now along the coastline of Jotuna’s largest island, and there was a portion of the metropolis that was suitable for aliens. The official business of the government was even conducted in buildings aliens could access, but there were always calls to move things into the ocean and force aliens to wear biosuits to survive there.

“You want us to help you look for this committee,” the admiral said finally. She sounded weary. “I’ll be honest with you, Captain—I do not like learning of all the things my government has done. I do not like it at all.”

Jeltor nodded. There was nothing to say. He agreed fully with the sentiment. None of them wanted to know this. They persevered only because if they didn’t, they would destroy themselves from within. Never had there been a more reluctant group of revolutionaries, he thought. The idea was bitterly amusing.

“Huword was involved in several attacks,” he continued. “They were all on remote colonies, some our own, some along the borders of other species’ territories. They were all blamed on pirates. A few of the civilians were found tortured and killed in some instances. The rest vanished. That probably has something to do with this committee.”

“Probably?”

“The more I learn about Huword, the more I think nothing would surprise me.”

“Then it’s good he’s dead,” she said brutally. “Well, this is a mess. We’ll look into it. We’ll search for anyone who seems to know about it. You’ll be interested to learn that Biset’s death hasn’t been announced. Clearly, someone doesn’t want people looking into his work.”

“Any instructions for me?” Jeltor asked.

She considered. “See if you can find out who had Huword killed. They don’t want any other species to know. Well, if he was abducting civilians, I can see why, but we need to know what they know. Find out what you can, and then come to any of the admirals. We know how to get word to one another outside any of the channels others know about.”

Jeltor nodded. That was good to know.

He took his leave of her, transferring back to his own biosuit with exquisite relief. With his own weapons and computers, not to mention his custom-heated tank, he was much more—

The attack came so fast that he had no time to react. The EMP blast knocked out his suit’s communications and sensory panel for a few critical seconds. As Jeltor reeled, trying to use his own eyes and ears to figure out what was going on, his suit was locked in place, disabled by means he could not see.

He could hear the voices, but barely.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes.” There was a pause while Jeltor’s suit was tipped, and the whole world went black. Dimly, he heard the second voice say, “Load him onto the ship before anyone sees.”

Wherever they’d put him, they must have closed it off, because he heard a door slam and then nothing more. A vehicle of some sort lurched into motion. His suit stayed locked up. With his communications array down, Jeltor struggled in the darkness of his tank.

But it was no use. These people had planned, and planned well.

At least he had gotten word to the admiral. He floated motionless, terror and vengeance swirling in his mind, and came back to that one tiny victory: he had gotten word to the admiral. If they wanted to kill him, he thought, they could—but they could not undo what he had set in train.

It was a mercy of a sort that he did not realize how wrong he was.

Chapter Two

Aliana Waters took a big gulp of beer and shuddered. Beer had only just started being drunk beyond Federation territory, and although it was a popular drink, the process of making it hadn’t exactly been perfected by its new fans.

The rules for beer, therefore, were simple: order it in a fit of nostalgia, take a sip, regret your life choices, and chug the rest quickly to avoid tasting it.

She really should have learned better by now, but beer was one of the few things she missed, and she couldn’t quite give up on it. She took a deep breath, plugged her nose, and gulped down the rest of her mug, slamming it back on the table when she was done with a look of intense concentration.

The concentration was necessary to keep from bringing it all back up. There was a pungent taste in this beer that the aliens in the room—Yofu and Torcellans, mostly—seemed to think was delicious, but it reminded Aliana of things that should definitely not go in beer.

“Excuse me,” said a voice nearby.

Aliana looked up and blinked in surprise. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen this species before. Its body had a shell somewhat like an armadillo’s, although it otherwise looked roughly humanoid. Another, slightly smaller armadillo-alien stood to one side of it. If the smaller one were human, Aliana would say it looked long-suffering and annoyed, but she knew better than to treat guesswork as fact when it came to alien emotions.

“Yes?” she asked. She didn’t really want to talk to anyone right now, but her mother had always been a stickler for etiquette. The aliens didn’t seem to be armed, and they were being polite—so Aliana would be, too.

For now.

“May we sit?” asked the first alien.

“Sure, why not.” She sat back in her chair as they both sat down. “What are you?” It was a blunt question, but Aliana wasn’t up for a long, drawn-out conversation on the topic.

“We are Hieto,” said the smaller one. “I am Tik’ta, and this is Zinqued.”

“Hi,” Aliana said with a nod. Hieto. She’d vaguely heard of them, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen one. “I’m Aliana.”

“We know,” said the one known as Zinqued. Her implanted scanners told her that it was probably male. “We asked the bartender.”

Aliana wrapped her fingers around the now-empty mug and leaned forward, smiling a bit too politely. “And what was so interesting about me that you asked the bartender?”

Tik’ta seemed to sense the threat in those words and looked like she (the scanners again) wanted to leave, but Zinqued didn’t seem inclined to go. He shook his head and waved both hands slightly.

“My apologies if I offended, Captain Waters.” He pronounced the human title carefully. “That is how I should address you to show respect, yes? My apologies. Humans are rare here, and I have some interest in human matters.”

Aliana fought the urge to groan. This was an entire steaming pile of topics she didn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole.

“It’s a fine title, but please don’t use it again.” It was even technically accurate. She had a ship, so she was a captain. The fact that she had no crew and no home, and that her ship was falling apart at the seams, just made it more of a cruel mockery than anything else—even if Zinqued clearly hadn’t meant it that way.

He stumbled over a few apologies, which she waved away.

“I’m really not interested in talking about the Federation,” she said plainly. “I know it’s interesting to everyone out here, but there’s a lot of news on the subject, so if you could just read that—”

“Perhaps I should be more specific,” the Hieto interrupted. “I do not mean the business of all humans out here in this sector—”

“Good, because we don’t have just one set of business.” She tried not to sound too bitter. “It’s not like we’re all allies.”

The two Hieto probably didn’t know much about human emotions, but they knew enough not to ask any more questions on this point. A person would have to be a robot not to hear the anger and hurt in her tone.

But Zinqued clearly wasn’t intending to be put off. Indeed, he seemed almost intrigued by her admission. He leaned in slightly and asked, “Do you know anything about a human named Barnabas?”

“No.” Aliana shook her head wearily. “I don’t. If he owes you money, I have zero interest in helping you collect it.” No way in hell was she planning to become a debt collector.

“Ah, you misunderstand. He does not so much owe us money,” Zinqued spread his hands, “as… Let us say that he has things we want.”

This, oddly, seemed to spur Tik’ta from annoyance to outright rebellion. “Zinqued, this is a bad idea.”

He shot her a look that clearly meant, “Shut up.”

But now Aliana was interested. “What’s a bad idea?” she asked, not even bothering to hide her knowing look. She was in the reckless sort of bad mood to make very poor decisions, but if someone else was going to do so, she could probably settle for just watching. Like a train wreck, she thought contemplatively.

The beer seemed to be kicking in. Some humans were apparently upgraded to the point where they couldn’t get drunk anymore, but she wasn’t. She just had the standard life-enhancing, good-healing, aren’t-we-clever assortment that almost every human out here had.

All that meant, in her opinion, was that she’d survived things she shouldn’t and had memories she didn’t want. She pitied the ones with even more upgrades. Hers hadn’t worked out for her.

She watched Zinqued and Tik’ta and waited. It was that or start a bar fight.

Zinqued considered carefully and then said, “We’ve had several run-ins with Barnabas, and we’re attempting to construct a team to…interact with him again.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means,” said Tik’ta, annoyance dripping from her tone, “that Zinqued’s tried to steal the Shinigami several times, has only survived the attempts by Barnabas’ mercy, and he’s determined to keep trying.”

Aliana looked down into her mug and wished she had more beer. Since she didn’t, she settled for asking Tik’ta, “Why are you here, then? You don’t seem to think it’s a good idea.”

“I don’t,” Tik’ta said bluntly, “but my old captain ran up enough of a record that I can’t get hired anywhere good, and if I leave this idiot—” she jerked her head at Zinqued “he’ll get himself killed in a week.” To Zinqued, she said, “She doesn’t know anything about him. She won’t help you.”

“I didn’t say that,” Aliana said recklessly.

Zinqued, who had started to stand with a defeated expression, looked almost hopeful.

Tik’ta sighed. “What?” she asked, like someone who really hoped she’d misheard.

“You want to steal a ship?” Aliana asked. “That sounds fun.” Hell, if they could teach her how to steal ships, maybe she could get hers back. Not the bucket of bolts she presently owned, of course. That was only her ship in terms of legality.

No, her ship, her actual ship. She wanted her damned ship back, and this chance encounter was showing that she’d been going about it all wrong. Lawrence had made it all nice and neat on paper, so there was no getting it back without him selling it, and he’d just love to charge her way too much. He’d cleaned her out, too, bank accounts and all.

Aliana had thought she was finished. She’d been taking courier jobs and patching her ship with scrap metal and glue.

But if she could steal the ship back from Lawrence...

Yeah, she liked this plan more every second. She grinned at the two Hieto. “Here’s the deal: you teach me how to steal ships, I help you steal this human’s ship, and then you help me steal a ship.”

Both Hieto sat back down. They were, she noticed, looking at her like she was insane. She didn’t care, though. This was the happiest she’d been in months. She had something warm and tantalizing in her chest that felt very much like hope. A small part of her told her that hope was dangerous and likely to clobber her on the way out, but she was tired of being so damned sad all the time.

She’d take the hope and the clobbering, just for the change of pace.

“So?” Aliana asked. “Tell me.”

Zinqued opened his mouth, but Tik’ta cut him off. “I’ll tell you,” she said firmly, “because he won’t be honest about how crazy this whole idea is.”

Crazy was good, Aliana decided. Crazy sounded just like what she wanted right now.

Damn, what had been in that beer? Whatever it was, another one appeared in front of her the next minute. Zinqued gave her a small nod. My treat, he seemed to be saying. It was Persuasion 101, but Aliana didn’t mind. She lifted the mug to him, took a sip, and choked.

It was just as bad now as it had been the first time. She decided to wait for a moment before chugging it.

“You said you don’t know who Barnabas is,” Tik’ta said, distracting her from the taste, “so let’s start there. He was something called a Ranger, apparently.”

It was a good thing Aliana hadn’t been drinking then, because if she had, she would have gotten beer up her nose. As it was, her jaw dropped open, and she gave Tik’ta an absolutely stunned look.

“A…Ranger. Like an Empress’ Ranger?”

“Yes,” Tik’ta said precisely. She gave Zinqued a look. “I could have told you she’d think better of it once she knew what she was getting into.”

“You want to steal a ship,” Aliana said, “from an Empress’ Ranger.” Even if she’d been a lot drunker than this, she’d have known that was a terrible plan. And then she remembered where she’d heard the name Barnabas before. “Oh, my God, and he was Ranger One.”

“Yes,” Tik’ta said serenely, “he was.”

Aliana sank her head into her hands.

She wouldn’t have thought Zinqued had a hope in hell of persuading her at this point, but he was smarter than she’d given him credit for.

“If you can steal the Shinigami,” he said quietly, “you can steal any ship. Having the Shinigami to work with would make it child’s play. Whatever ship you want.”

Aliana picked her head up slowly.

He swept an arm around the bar to indicate the various ship’s captains. “Pick one. We won’t have any problems taking it.”

This was a bad idea. It was a bad, bad, very bad idea.

But she’d already made her decision. Lawrence had screwed her over eight ways to Sunday, as her Great-uncle Carter would say—she wondered what Carter was up to these days, since he’d been almost as much of a black sheep as she was—and Aliana fully intended to make her scheming husband sorry.

He’d taken her ship, her trust, and all her money, and she swore that she was going to take twice as much from him as he’d taken from her.

“Deal,” she said.

Chapter Three

On the lowest level of the Shinigami was the room that served as the gym, with mats set out for the members of the crew to spar on. Various other equipment sat unused, as Barnabas’ upgrades meant he did not need to spend time honing his muscles, and the rest of the crew were various iterations of not human.

Gar had tried a few of the machines, but it had gone embarrassingly wrong in some way, and he’d somehow persuaded Shinigami not to show the videos to Barnabas. Gar had focused on sparring since then, and had recently been helping Shinigami learn how to use her new cybernetic body.

This morning, she’d decided to try sparring with Barnabas.

“I hate this,” she complained. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it...”

“If you spent less time focusing on how much you hated it,” Barnabas said patiently, “and more time focusing on doing it, you’d—oof!”

“That’ll teach you to be so superior.” Shinigami, whose body could move incredibly quickly when she wanted it to, had managed to kick him halfway across the room into a wall. Now she stood with one hip jutting out and her arms crossed, a pose that would have been regal if she wasn’t sticking her tongue out at him.

“So we’re not going to wait for matches to start now?” Barnabas asked as he picked himself up. A rib had cracked when he hit the wall, but by the time he got to his feet it was already healed, the nanites in his blood putting it back together in a matter of seconds.

“Not if you’re going to be like that,” Shinigami said. She looked at Gar, laughing. “He thinks he’s so—oof!”

“Turnabout’s fair play,” Barnabas warned as Shinigami went flying and hit a wall. He cracked his neck and bounced on the balls of his feet. “What were you saying? Something about me being so...”

Shinigami picked herself up with great dignity. “So dead,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

Barnabas gave her a grin. “Bring it on.”

“I think we might want to leave,” Gar said to Tafa.

“No, no,” Barnabas said as Shinigami launched herself at him. “Don’t leave on our account.” He slid just out of the way of her attempted tackle and lashed out with one foot to catch her on her way down to the floor. “Balance, Shinigami. It’s important.”

“Oh, now you’re just trying to piss me off.”

“What gave it away?” Barnabas asked innocently.

“I’ll tell you,” Shinigami said, grabbing his leg and wrenching him over her head onto the mats, “when you’re dead.”

“Well, that seems counterproductive.”

Gar and Tafa had started edging toward the door, holding themselves as close to the wall as they could. Both of them seemed determined not to make the faintest noise. When Shinigami went flying past them to hit the wall with a thud and a creak, they froze.

“Really,” she said brightly, picking herself up off the floor and shaking out her joints, “you don’t have to go. We wouldn’t want to be rude.” As Barnabas followed up his throw with a tackle, she raised her foot and planted it directly in his midsection. “Besides,” she added as she threw him over one shoulder and slammed him onto the floor, “we need to discuss our next steps on the Jotun front. I had an idea, speaking of which.”

“Oh?” Barnabas hooked one foot around her ankles and yanked sharply, causing her to collapse in a heap.

“Yes.” By the time she was upright, he was across the room and bouncing on the balls of his feet. She gave him a glare. “A good idea, too. We’re going to sneak into the Jotun Senate and get all of their data directly from there.”

Barnabas stared at her, so flabbergasted that he barely made it out of the way when she came hurtling toward him again.

“That’s insane,” he said, as she recovered and whirled around. He ducked under her foot as she spun in a back hook kick, and then lashed out with one arm to strike her with the top of his fist. “The Jotun Senate is extremely well-guarded, just as well protected regarding surveillance, and… What’s the other thing? Hmmm… We don’t look at all like Jotuns.”

“Details,” Shinigami said carelessly.

“You have got to be kidding me with that attitude.”

“I am not, and if you’d stop punching me, I could explain.”

“I thought you were the one who wanted to have this discussion while sparring,” Barnabas taunted with a grin. He stopped punching, however, at which point she flipped him onto the mats and followed up with an armbar he wouldn’t be able to get out of without dislocating his shoulder. “This is highly dishonorable.”

“Boo hoo.” Shinigami cranked on his arm slightly and grinned when he tapped out. “Where are you two going? We were going to plan, right?”

Gar and Tafa had nearly made it out the door, and now stood frozen with deer-in-the-headlights expressions.

“We were just, um...” Tafa’s voice trailed off.

“We had a thing,” Gar interjected.

“Yes,” Tafa agreed, nodding deeply.

“Oh?” Barnabas, who had made his way to his feet again and picked an imaginary speck of dust off his arm. “What thing?”

“Well, you know, it was a…personal thing.”

“Yeah,” Tafa picked up again. “Personal,” she added, clearly under the deeply mistaken impression that this would stop them from asking questions.

“Oh, no,” Shinigami said, playing along with Barnabas. “I hope it isn’t serious.”

“Oh, no, no, not serious, no.” Gar stared at them. “No,” he added again, lamely. “Not, uh, not serious.”

“Then you could probably stay to do planning with us,” Shinigami suggested.

“Right?” Barnabas added, coming to stand next to her. He punched her sideways into a wall the next moment, then grinned at her. “Sorry, last one. Couldn't let you get the last hit in.”

“Just you wait until we spar again,” Shinigami said philosophically from the floor. “You’ll break bones you didn’t know you had.”

“I look forward to it,” Barnabas said, with a respectful nod, helping her up from the floor.

“We don’t have to be there for that, do we?” Tafa sounded pained.

“I assume you’ll use that time to take care of your personal thing,” Barnabas said innocently.

Both of them stared at him for a moment.

“Right,” Gar said finally. His double-pupiled eyes narrowed slightly as he tried to decide if Barnabas was mocking him.

Barnabas saw no reason to clear things up. “So, Shinigami…how were you thinking we’d get into the Senate buildings?”

Shinigami sat up and started diagnostics on one of her forearms. She was so realistic-looking that it was a bit jarring to see her pop a patch of unremarkable skin open and begin fiddling with display panels and metal struts.

“Fake suits,” she said, as she worked. She looked up with a grin. “Jotuns wear suits, so can we.”

“We have stuff in our midsections that isn’t a tank with a Jotun in it, though.”

“Yeah, I was working on that part,” she said contemplatively.

“So you don’t actually have a plan.”

“I said I had an idea. But…no, I do not have a plan.”

“I wondered.” Barnabas leaned against the wall and thought. “My first instinct is that it’s too risky by far. What’s the benefit of doing it this way?”

“Thought you might ask that,” Shinigami said with satisfaction. “The benefit is that we get to it before Jeltor thinks to, and then he doesn’t have that on his record.”

“Ahhh.” Barnabas understood now. “Why didn’t you lead with that?” All of them had been worried about Jeltor since he’d been accused of treason. Although the charges were in the process of being cleared—Barnabas having essentially blackmailed the entire Senate—it would hardly look good for Jeltor to have more on his record.

Especially since he had been with them a week ago when they killed a senator. That hadn’t been the plan, it was just the way things had shaken out. On the other hand, “it was just the way things shook out” wasn’t a stellar legal defense.

So it made good sense to keep him out of this operation.

Barnabas tapped his fingers on his arm as he thought. Not only was he human, which was noteworthy enough in this sector, but he was also, well, him. He wouldn’t be surprised if the Jotuns had alarms keyed to his biosignature somehow.

“Send me,” Tafa said suddenly.

Everyone’s head swiveled, and for a moment no one could think of anything to say.

“I’m sorry?” Barnabas said at last, politely.

Tafa rolled her eyes. “Yofu are often mechanics. I can pretend to be a mechanic and carry a case that includes part of Shinigami—a communications hub that would allow her to tap into their systems remotely. And I don’t think the Jotun know who I am, unlike you and possibly Gar.”

“They don’t know who I am, either,” Shinigami pointed out.

“They might,” Tafa argued. “Who knows if anyone was watching the fight between you and Biset? They might recognize you—and, again, Yofu are often mechanics. It wouldn’t be out of the question for a Yofu to be fixing something in a random hallway. It would for a human.”

The rest of the group looked at one another warily. Tafa was an established member of the crew now, someone who could make any of them smile on a bad day, whose paintings now hung in many hallways, and who had assisted in the non-combat parts of a few missions. But she hadn’t ever been involved in something that could turn into combat, and all of them were worried about what might happen if things went south.

Barnabas, however, was not going to take her offer lightly. Tafa had grown up under the constant threat of violence, and if she were willing to go into danger, he wouldn’t insult her by rejecting her offer out of hand.

Instead, he looked at her gravely. “It would be very helpful. As you say, you wouldn’t attract the suspicion we would. We just need to come up with a backup plan so that if they find out what you’re doing, we can get you out of there safely.”

Tafa gave him a grateful smile as she nodded. She had clearly been afraid that he would simply reject her offer, and with Barnabas taking her seriously, her happiness was plain to see.

“I bet Shinigami could learn some of the camera patterns and put in false feeds,” she suggested. “That way, you could be close in case something went wrong.”

“And I can also have alerts set up in their system so we’ll have warning if they send guards or engage defensive systems,” Shinigami pointed out. “They won’t have an easy time taking us by surprise.”

“You should take a breathing mask in your mechanic’s bag,” Gar added. “That way, if they try to fill the place with water, you can get out fine.”

“Do we have breathing masks that can fit her?” Barnabas asked Shinigami.

“No, but we can find one between here and there,” she replied. She finished her diagnostics and closed the panel on her arm so that it once more looked like unbroken skin. “And figure out the cameras, and figure out where we might be able to plug into their system. The sort of information we’re looking for will be on an unconnected server—if they’re smart, that is, which I’ve started to think they might be.”

“Unfortunate,” Barnabas said drily.

She shot him a smile as she got to her feet. “Very. On the other hand, as you’re fond of saying, it’s good to have worthy enemies.”

“So we’re doing this?” Gar asked, half in disbelief.

“I think so.” Barnabas nodded to Tafa. “She made a good suggestion.”

“And I can’t let you guys have all the fun,” Tafa said with a grin.

Chapter Four

“Excellency.” One of Grisor’s aides appeared in the doorway. “We have landed.”

Grisor’s personal tank was being lowered into his suit. He had spent the journey relaxing in a water-filled compartment within his ship, hunting fish and thinking about what he was about to see.

It had been a contemplative journey. Grisor did not take this event lightly. What was happening today—hopefully, he would arrive in time to see it—was the culmination of many years’ worth of research and planning.

The idea for the Infrastructure Revitalization Committee had not come from Grisor, but instead from his mentor, a senator whose utter hatred of other species had at first seemed ridiculous. The younger Jotun had believed in his species’ superiority, of course, as any reasonable Jotun would, but he had found his mentor’s vitriol to be indelicate and unnecessary.

At first.

Then Grisor had seen the way other species conducted themselves. The Brakalons were always eager for a fight, and the Shrillexians were even worse, selling themselves as mercenaries for the thrill of violence. The Yofu were respectable enough but had no ambition. The Hieto and Ubuara had similarly made nothing of themselves. The list went on. One species inspired respect, and that was the Kurtherians—but even they were divided against themselves, and that weakness might prove fatal.

Grisor’s mentor had died without ever receiving his due from the Senate. His ideas were laughed at, and at the end of his life, he lost the support of his province and was replaced by someone younger and more in favor of open trade and diplomacy. Anger simmered in Grisor as he watched these events play out.

His mentor had dreamed of a sector ruled by the Jotuns, and Grisor had seen that his own people would be the first stumbling block. Too many of them were short-sighted, secure enough in the idea of their superiority that they did not wish to cement it in any way. They used it as an excuse for laziness, just as Grisor once had.

He had thought long and hard about this. Many of his colleagues believed that the greatest good they could do in the Senate was to represent the will of the people. Grisor did not. He believed that the greatest good he could do was the right thing for his people, whether or not they believed they wanted it.

And he didn’t intend to give them the chance to think about it.

Now settled into the biosuit, he strode out of his chambers and through the spaceship, his aide behind him. At the doors that led to the gangway, four soldiers waited for him. There were dangerous aliens in this facility, and Grisor did not take unnecessary risks.

Just look what had happened to Biset, after all.

At the door to the facility, he was met by two Jotuns who looked so alike that he blinked. Both of them took a single knee, a sign of deep respect. The gesture had been adopted from other species, as it was generally difficult to accomplish in a biosuit.

Grisor felt a wave of satisfaction. The researchers here were at the forefront of his plan, and it did his heart good to see them show such reverence. Soon, every Jotun would do so, of course, and every Brakalon and Torcellan and every other sentient alien in this sector—and beyond.

But he would remember these as some of the first to do so.

“We are honored by your visit,” said one of them as he stood.

“We have made every effort in pursuit of your goals,” said the second. “We think you will be pleased by our progress, and hope you will tour the entire facility during your visit if time permits.”

Grisor gave a ripple of regret. “Nothing would give me more pleasure. However, I have little time.” In fact, he should not really be here at all, but how could he miss this of all days? “I have come to see the first step toward our new world.”

The two researchers looked at one another nervously, and Grisor had the vague thought that they hadn’t looked this much alike the last time he had seen them. Perhaps people who worked together in remote facilities for years at a time began to resemble one another.

He was more concerned with that look, however. “What is it?”

“The process is proceeding,” the first hastened to say.

“But slowly,” said the second.

“Does this mean,” Grisor said, hiding his impatience, “that I will not see a conversion today?”

Both researchers took a knee once more.

“We have failed you,” one of them said.

“He is much stronger than we anticipated,” added the other. “We do not doubt that he will turn in time, but the progress is much slower than in our previous converts.”

Grisor considered this, saying nothing. Although he was disappointed with the situation, he was not angry with the researchers. It made sense, in a way, that a Naval captain would be resistant to the training. Captains only made it into the Naval Academy when they had extraordinary self-control and mental discipline. He should have expected that this conversion would take longer than the others.

He did not say any of this, however. It did not do any harm to have the researchers be upset about failing him.

“Show me,” he said finally.

They exchanged a worried glance but stood and led him into the facility without hesitation. Moaning and shrieking came from the floors above them, along with some heavy crashes.

“What is that sound?” Grisor asked in distaste.

“Early iterations of our experiments were not so successful,” one of the researchers explained.

“We find the failed experiments to be useful, however,” said the other, perhaps anticipating Grisor’s question of, “Why didn’t you just kill them?”

“We wish to know if rehabilitation is possible,” said the first, or possibly the second. Grisor was still having trouble determining which had spoken. The same one continued, “Perhaps in other species, as in the Jotuns, there are variations. Every success and failure will be useful later.”

They were conscientious and had thought of complications he might not anticipate. Grisor liked that.

Then they emerged into the research chamber, and every other thought went out of his head.

In a tank at the center of the room was Captain Jeltor, writhing in pain as chemicals worked their way into his body and words and images were imprinted on his mind. Grisor recognized him at once. His photo had been everywhere during the incident with the Yennai Corporation and the ensuing trial for treason.

Unlike many in the Senate, Grisor had no especial distaste for Jeltor. In fact, he understood some of the male’s motivations. Many in the Senate would have been perfectly content to have the Yennai Corporation run the Jotun government.

Clearly, this was unacceptable. Grisor would never have allowed it—and, with the technology to turn any mind to his purpose, there would have been no danger of such a thing happening.

Jeltor had not known that, and thus his struggle against the Yennai Corporation was understandable and forgivable. Had he stopped there, perhaps, Grisor might even have approached him as an equal and made him an offer.

But Jeltor persisted in following the lead of the human, Barnabas. Like Barnabas, he showed a remarkable drive toward individualistic thought. And Jeltor had been there when Biset was killed, even hearing the name of the Committee from the mysterious assassin—who Grisor had so far been unable to trace.

Jeltor was unlikely to embrace Grisor’s vision, so he would be converted. The process would leave his mental faculties intact—earlier experiments had not been so successful at this—but Jeltor would obey any order given to him by a member of the Committee, and would be loyal to Grisor above all.

It would be a peaceful existence. In Grisor’s opinion, there was a great deal of unnecessary despair in the world, born of divided loyalties and uncertainty. He would eliminate that.

It was just a pity that the process was so much more painful than the outcome.

Grisor walked in a long, slow circle around the tank. He could not quite hear the words that were being said, but he knew what they were. He had been one of the ones to create the tapes, after all, and he had chosen the sentiments with great care.

Jeltor was being bombarded with images and words ordering him to give his obedience to Grisor and the Committee while the chemicals that flooded his tank were lowering his mental barriers.

“What mix of chemicals did you end up choosing?” Grisor asked the two researchers curiously.

“There are many mixes,” one of them said.

“Depending on the part of the process,” said the other.

“And the individual,” finished the second.

“And you say he’s making progress?” Grisor asked idly. “How can you tell?” He was curious, no more.

“It is…complex,” said one of them. “The way they fight, the chemicals their bodies produce. Such things, we have seen in other species during the process.”

“And you’re sure that he will convert, not simply break?” Jeltor was the perfect tool to infiltrate any unruly resistance. Losing him would be a blow.

Now they paused. “One can never be entirely sure,” one of them said finally. His voice trembled slightly on the words. “We have made the process as streamlined as possible. Losses have been rare, and there have been none recently. But it is possible.”

“Thank you for your honesty.” Grisor would remember this. Many who aspired to power made the mistake of punishing subordinates for giving them honest answers. Grisor found this to be unforgivably stupid. The practice only encouraged subordinates to lie.

He watched Jeltor for another long moment. It was disappointing, Grisor thought, that he would not be able to see Jeltor’s conversion today.

He could wait. He nodded to the researchers. “Contact me when he has been converted. I will need to speak with him immediately. To the guards, he added, “You will remain here. Give the researchers any assistance they require. Protect them from the experiments, if need be, or anyone who should try to find and destroy this facility.”

He swept from the room without another word and was back on his ship within minutes.

He only had to wait a little longer, and he would have everything he had been working for.

* * *

Left behind in the laboratory, Gil and Wev stared at the tank and used their silent communications interface to speak to one another.

We must turn off the machines, Gil said. We cannot risk this captain being turned to the Committee’s purposes.

Wait, for now, Wev argued. The guards are still watching. We must take care not to make them think we are hiding anything.

Both of them stole a glance at the side of the room, where a closet hid what remained of the real research team. Gil and Wev, agents with the Jotun Interplanetary Intelligence Agency, had been sent to investigate the Committee’s activity—and disrupt it.

Disrupt it, they had. They were still untangling the various threads of it. However, they were alone in this operation, not daring to call for help lest they tip someone off to the fact that Intelligence was beginning to move against the members of the Committee. They still did not even know who all those members were.

They had identified Huword first, and then Biset. Now they knew of a third: Grisor.

But now they found themselves in a tricky situation. What would the guards be monitoring? How carefully must Gil and Wev pretend to follow the research procedures—or must they truly continue the work that had been started here?

In unison, they looked at the tank that held Jeltor. With silent sharing of thoughts, and so many years spent working together, they had become more alike than they were different.

Neither of them liked torture, but both of them would do it—if it meant destroying the Committee before the Committee destroyed the Jotuns.

Chapter Five

Hevarod was not quite as Barnabas remembered it. The last time he had been here, the skies had been clear and the weather warm, and waves had lapped gently at the shore with a soothing sound.

It was winter now.

The sky was an iron gray that was matched only by the deep white-capped swells of the water, and the waves pounded against the sea walls remorselessly. The walls kept out the water…mostly. While the pathways and streets of the aboveground portion of the city were not flooded, they were certainly wet.

“How did the Jotuns survive here?” Barnabas asked incredulously. He was picturing the Jotuns outside their mechanical suits, but in their natural form as large jellyfish, and even from inside the Shinigami’s shuttle, he could sense the coldness of the water and the heavy churn of the waves. Surely a Jotun outside its suit would be crushed.

Shinigami, however, gave him a bemused smile. “How did humans survive in all those places on Earth? Species adapt and develop rudimentary technology. The Jotuns probably began in a more even climate, as humans did on Earth—and then spread.”

Barnabas nodded. She had a good point. When he thought of some of the places he’d seen on Earth, from the Alps and the Himalayas to the desolate landscapes of Alaska and Montana to the wastes of the great, shifting deserts, he realized that human survival was no less precarious.

When TOM had crashed on Earth, he reflected, the Kurtherian had been lucky there had been any humans to join with.

The Shinigami itself remained in orbit around Jotuna, cloaked and learning all it could of the Jotun satellites and their programming. Shinigami knew enough about their systems to keep the ship and its shuttle hidden—as far as they could tell—but the finer points of Jotun computer systems were still, as she put it, “hidden behind programming like a blob of grape jelly.”

Barnabas, whose idea of a good night was a paper book, and who still wrote on paper with a fountain pen, had no idea what she meant by that. He accepted that it was her forte, and trusted that she would tell him if she really needed help.

He suspected that she was just grumbling. Shinigami had not yet come across any system she could not quickly learn and work against.

Instead of attracting attention by landing outside the city, the team had decided to land in the main set of docks. Shinigami had changed the electronic signature of the shuttle, and as far as they knew, the Jotuns would not know it by sight—certainly not well enough to program their surveillance cameras to pick it up.

They were pretending to be Yofu, so it was Tafa who had guided the shuttle down, answering questions from air traffic control in her Yofu accent. She was dressed in blue coveralls that had a respectable number of grease stains on them. She had gotten them on a nearby station, where she’d had trouble convincing a bemused mechanic that she actually wanted the dirty uniform and would buy him a new and clean one. He had clearly thought she was crazy, but money was money, and she now had a uniform that looked well-worn, with a name stitched on the chest: Kila.

Once they had sat through the interminable landing pattern and finally gotten a bay, she vacated the pilot’s chair and began assembling her tools. A big mechanic’s bag, looking far too heavy for her small frame, was loaded with screwdrivers, welding tools, and some things Barnabas assumed were wrenches.

“You’re sure you don’t need to be closer?” she asked Shinigami anxiously.

“Quite sure,” Shinigami said, giving Barnabas a wink over Tafa’s head. She had tried to explain that her actual processing took place on the ship and that the location of her body really didn’t matter at all, but Tafa didn’t seem to believe it.

Barnabas crouched to examine the handles of the bag. The Yofu had double-thumbed hands, and so everything from their tools to the fastenings on their clothes was constructed slightly differently.

“How are you feeling?” he asked Tafa carefully. He didn’t look at her, and he kept his voice casual. He didn’t want to make her anxious.

She wasn’t fooled. She gave him a glare. “You mean, do I want to call it off? No. I don’t.”

“Just checking,” Barnabas said. And your implant is working well? he added silently.

Yes, just like it was on the ship. She gave him another glare and then sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, I’m just...” She swallowed.

“It’s normal to be nervous before a mission,” Barnabas told her gently. “For anyone, even when it’s not their first mission.”

“You don’t get nervous,” she said quietly.

“Not often—but I sometimes do. Gar can verify that.”

“He’s a robot,” Gar said amusedly. “He’s never been nervous in his life. But I get nervous all the time.”

Barnabas laughed. He wasn’t immune to worry, as others seemed to think he was. He had simply learned over the years to let his worry exist without overwhelming him, and he was careful to manage it through meditation and action rather than dwelling on it. Decades as a monk would do that to a person.

He suspected that Gar was much the same. The Luvendi were apparently very fond of meditating, viewing it as a cornerstone of their society. Even though Gar had left his home planet and did not think much of its limitations, he likely had the skills to control his worry before a mission.

“Besides,” said Shinigami, “say the Jotun police come up to you and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ We have a plan. You’ll say...” She raised her eyebrow and gestured for Tafa to go on.

Tafa had quite a flair for the dramatic, which they had discovered while planning the mission. She fluttered her hands slightly and widened her eyes. “I’m here for the repairs to the main circuits,” she said, sounding appropriately nervous. She dug around in her pockets, making a great show of looking for documentation, and pulled out several folded pieces of paper, which fluttered to the floor around her in a carefully-contrived and accidental-looking bit of clumsiness.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I know it’s here somewhere. Here’s my permit, here’s my landing clearance. I know I have my landing bay receipt somewhere. Just one moment—I’m so sorry—and here’s my licensing paperwork.” She handed it to Shinigami, her face shining with honesty. “As you can see, I’ve served many apprentice hours, and I’ve worked on Jotun circuitry before. There won’t be any problems. I think Mr.…” she “checked” her other paperwork, “Hilar will be very pleased with my work. You’ve subcontracted the very best.” She said the last words with the practiced smile of someone giving a sales pitch.

Barnabas and Gar were looking on with amusement while Shinigami puffed herself up and pretended to be part of the Jotun Senate’s police force.

“Miss, this permit is for a house. This is the Senate.”

Tafa widened her eyes even more. “No! No, it can’t be, because I followed the instructions very carefully. Ferdy wrote them down for me, see? Once you come out the east entrance of the docks, you turn left, and then you go three blocks, and then you turn right—oh, no. Oh, no, I turned left!” She sounded miserable. She grabbed for the papers, and Barnabas only just caught the quick motion of her hand that flung a bot onto the ground behind Shinigami. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Do you know the way to Manrel Hilar’s house?”

“Good!” Shinigami said enthusiastically. She knelt and retrieved the tiny bot, who had been trying determinedly to find an entry point into the walls of the shuttle. “Come here, you. You’ll get to climb around all you want later.”

“It’s not sentient, you know,” Barnabas told her. “It worries me that you talk to them.”

She grinned at him. “Do you think I’m gathering my troops for a robot uprising?”

“I don’t know! I wouldn’t put it past you.”

“You’re wise not to,” she replied blandly. After this somewhat worrisome sentiment, she told Tafa, “And see? You’ll be fine. You’re a born actress.”

Tafa glowed with pleasure. She had retrieved the little bot and put it in her cuff pocket, and was now lifting a small processing core into the bag. The core had a remote wipe and self-destruct, which were contained nicely so that the core would not explode, and had multiple tools to attach to different pieces of the system. Tafa and Shinigami would work together to find offices with hidden data banks and would do all they could to get the data extracted and analyzed before they were noticed.

They were starting with Biset’s offices, which would not yet be closed off since his death had not been announced. Hopefully, searching his systems for mentions of the Infrastructure Revitalization Committee would provide a trail of clues they could follow.

Meanwhile, Shinigami and Gar would take one route to approach the Senate buildings, and Barnabas would take another. If Tafa got into trouble, they would be able to get her out quickly. Shinigami could even remotely pilot the shuttle to their location if necessary.

Barnabas was hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but he was glad to have a contingency plan.

Tafa finished packing the bag and stood. She hoisted it onto her shoulders like a backpack and nodded at the group.

“I’m going to go,” she told them. There was determination in her tone—but also excitement. “Meet back here in a couple of hours?”

“Sounds good.” Barnabas gave her a grin and a handshake.

They watched as she set off, a small figure making her way determinedly through the chaos of the docks. She had her part down well, even stopping a passing Yofu to ask him directions to Manrel Hilar’s house. The house was real, after all, as was the construction project, and Hilar was a notable figure in Hevarod. Her story would attract no suspicion.

“We’re good to go,” Barnabas said to Gar and Shinigami. “Let’s get into position. You two go first, so if they stop me, they’ll have less chance of getting you, too.”

“Good call.” Gar did a last check of his weapons and armor. “Ready?” he asked Shinigami.

“Ready.” She adjusted her own armor, all of it slim-fitting and easily mistaken for normal street clothes, and put her purse over one shoulder. Since they didn’t want to attract attention to the veritable arsenal she carried, she had put her guns in the purse. It made Barnabas laugh every time he saw it.

They walked away as he watched, and he gave a small smile.

Jeltor was going to be amused when they told him about this.

Chapter Six

Aliana made her way through the crush of Border Station 7 toward the docks that generally held less affluent merchants—in most cases, smugglers. She liked this area a lot more than the docks higher up, each with a nice, shiny ship in it, and each ship with its slimy captain.

If she were honest, she was worried she’d see her own ship there.

And Lawrence.

She ducked her head to blink away the tears in her eyes and collided with a man with blue eyes and short blond hair. Aliana was pretty tall, so she was looking slightly down, but from the amount of muscle he had, she knew at once that she had no desire to ever get in a fight with him.

So, out of sheer survival instinct, therefore, she fell all over herself to apologize: “I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to bump into you. I wasn’t looking where I was going and—”

“Hey, whoa.” He gave a little laugh and rubbed his head, where a white scar showed near his hairline. “It was an accident. I’m not worried about it.”

“Oh.” She frowned at him suspiciously, but he certainly didn’t seem angry.

“You okay?” he asked. He peered at her, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he saw the tears.

“Yeah.” She hiked her bag up on her shoulder. “I’m fine. All fine.” He was still looking at her, seeing a lot more than she wanted him to see, so she cleared her throat decisively. “I have to go.”

“Hey.” He caught her arm as she ducked around him. It was a light touch, not meant to be intimidating, but she could tell how strong he was. And he had good reflexes, because she’d tried to keep her arm out of his reach. “Look, it’s not a big deal or anything, but if you’re in trouble—not now, I guess, but whenever—you can always look me up. I’m Magistrate… Never mind that. I’m Buster. Or ‘Bustamove,’ if you like nicknames.” His smile didn’t falter even under her flat stare. “Take care of yourself,” he said and disappeared into the crowd with her staring after him.

Aliana blinked, then shook herself. He seemed nice, but no one was just nice in this world—or, if they were, they were going to get taken advantage of and wind up dead in a ditch somewhere. Either way, she didn’t want anything to do with this guy.

She was still shaking her head as she approached the docking bay Zinqued had specified, 486A, and got her first look at the ship.

It wasn’t bad, as ships went. Something was painted on the side in flowing alien letters, with PALPARI printed beneath. She wondered if the two things even sounded vaguely the same. From what she’d heard of the Hieto language, it was filled with hisses and pops that a human mouth couldn’t precisely reproduce.

“Aliana.” Zinqued had appeared at the top of the gangway. “Glad to see you. Tik’ta kept telling me that you’d think better of it and not show up, but I told her you would.”

Aliana gave him a smile despite herself. She liked the way Tik’ta looked after her captain despite her obvious exasperation, and something about the two of them made her feel like this would be a nice, safe job.

Well, a job that wouldn’t make her run into Lawrence, anyway—and that was all she really cared about. From a few murmured words they’d exchanged, she guessed that they generally operated in a whole different sector, which was exactly the sort of thing Aliana was looking for in a job.

“Why did you think I’d come back if Tik’ta didn’t?” she asked Zinqued. Her new captain, she reminded herself. She shouldn’t call him by his name. Some aliens were really offended by poor etiquette.

“I know the look,” Zinqued said. He stepped back to let her into the ship. “It’s the same across all species.”

“What look?”

“Hunger.” Zinqued looked at her. “It doesn’t matter what it’s for. For some people it’s money, for others it’s a mate or power. You’re hungry for something, and this job can help you get it.”

Aliana said nothing for a moment. She was chewing over the thought in her head. Hungry. Was she hungry?

Yes. She had been screwed over, and she’d accepted defeat without even questioning it…until Zinqued came along and showed her that she had another choice. That she could get back what was hers and maybe have some revenge in the bargain.

Who was she kidding? The revenge was the main draw now. She wanted Lawrence to suffer. She wanted him to lose everything, and spend his days as broken down as she had been. She smiled at Zinqued.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “this job can get me what I want.”

“And what’s that?” he asked.

He seemed more curious than anything else, not exactly ordering her to tell him, so Aliana just smiled and gave a little shrug. “My business for now. I’ll tell you when we’ve stolen the Shinigami and you’re helping me steal the second ship.”

“Ah.” He seemed almost pleased by the way she played her cards close to the chest. “I will look forward to it, then. And you won’t be disappointed—we’ve been doing this for a long time. We know our way around these things.”

He had shown Aliana through several low passages as they spoke, and now he gestured to a small cabin. “This is yours.”

“I have it to myself?” Aliana was pleasantly surprised. She was alone on her bucket of bolts, but on every other ship she’d lived on, she’d shared her living quarters. Sometimes it hadn’t been so bad, of course. She hadn’t minded sharing that little cabin with—

James. Her throat seemed to close, and she blinked back tears all of a sudden. She’d been a mess since all of this had kicked off, it seemed like. Two weeks ago, she’d been content to spend her evenings getting drunk and starting bar fights, which to her ranked above crying alone in a tiny ship’s cabin.

To distract herself, she asked Zinqued, “So what’s different about this ship?”

He had been turning to leave, but he looked back at her with interest. He cocked his head to the side, not quite sure what she meant.

“Not…” Aliana pointed at the floor. “The Palpari?”

He seemed to find this very funny. “Close enough.” He pronounced it in Hieto and she picked out some similar sounds, but knew she’d never be able to pull it off.

“Right. Not this ship, the one you’re trying to steal? You said you’ve tried before.” Aliana dumped her bag out on the bed and began pulling drawers open and putting shirts and coveralls inside. “Never met a ship thief who had it bad for a specific ship. Kind of thought you guys were opportunists.”

“I was.” Zinqued sounded almost grumpy. “You have to see this ship to understand it,” he added, and she realized he wasn’t grumpy about being called a thief or an opportunist. He was grumpy about having the weakness of wanting a specific ship.

She fought the urge to laugh.

“It’s a beautiful ship,” he continued, and his gaze was distant. He leaned in the doorway, almost a human gesture. “The lines, the way it moves, its weapons...”

“You know they aren’t going to give you more Federation missiles,” Aliana pointed out.

“The ability to shoot them is enough. People are always coming up with new things. With that ship, I can get whatever I need.” He was completely confident. “And with you on board, we’ll be able to get it. You knew about the Rangers. You can figure out the ship’s weaknesses.”

A normal person, Aliana thought, would admit they didn’t know much about Rangers and didn’t think the ships had weaknesses.

She’d never been one to let trivial things like facts stand in the way of her goals, though. She’d done a lot of things she had been told she couldn’t do, after all, and she wasn’t about to go back to being a scared little kid who let other people tell her what was and wasn’t possible.

So she nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and she meant it. She wasn’t bullshitting him. She was promising that no matter how impossible it seemed, she’d get the job done.

Right now, she was wondering why it seemed so simple to believe it when it came to someone else’s goals but not her own.

She’d think about that later. She nodded to him and he left, clearly pleased. She kept unpacking, humming to herself. This ship wasn’t bad. A lot of people complained about ships, but Aliana liked them. There wasn’t too much space, everything had its purpose, and it kept her from getting complacent—waking up to the same thing day in and day out.

She was still humming when there was a rap on the door. She looked around to see Tik’ta there.

“Hey,” Aliana said. She was a bit wary. She knew that Tik’ta wasn’t exactly glad that Aliana had signed on.

“Hello,” Tik’ta said. She looked around the small room. “May I come in?”

Fitting two people in here was going to be awkward, but Aliana wanted to be polite—and she was curious. She stepped back a little. “Sure.”

Tik’ta came in and closed the door behind her. She seemed a bit nervous, and she clasped her hands and swayed a little before speaking. “I have been looking up the culture of your people so that I can explain the captain’s interest in the Shinigami.”

Aliana frowned and leaned against the back wall, bracing her foot and crossing her arms. She wasn’t aware that this was really a cultural thing—Zinqued certainly hadn’t mentioned it.

“I believe the proper way to describe this,” Tik’ta said, still awkwardly formal, “is that the Shinigami is the captain’s ‘white whale.’” She paused, seemingly to be waiting for something.

The phrase meant nothing to Aliana. “What’s a white whale?” she said finally. “Other than, you know…a white whale.” She scratched her head.

“It is a reference to something that is pursued obsessively,” Tik’ta explained. She sounded agitated now, as if she had hoped that Aliana would have had a different reaction. “I was given to understand that humans would understand this reference. It is in your dictionaries. A librarian at the archives told me—”

“I’m gonna stop you right there. Librarians are not exactly…” Aliana considered, “normal,” she finished. “They like to think that everyone should know everything.” She snorted in derision. “Me, I think if you’ve got something to say, you should just say it straight out, not try to talk about— What is a white whale, though?”

“It is a reference to a book.”

“Right. If you want to say something, just say it. Don’t bother with old references. Is that from Earth or something?”

“I don’t know.” Tik’ta sounded a bit lost. “I only wanted you to understand.”

“Right.” Aliana rubbed her face. “I… Thank you, that was considerate.” Tik’ta hadn’t meant to make her want to bang her head against the wall, after all. “You say it’s an obsession?”

“I think, like Ahab—that’s the captain in the book—he will pursue it to his death.” Tik’ta seemed worried. “I do not blame you for signing on. I’m sure you have your reasons, and he would only find someone else if it weren’t you. But this may be dangerous, so you should know what you’re getting into. I don’t think you’ll ever get to collect on your bargain,” she said honestly.

Aliana thought about this. Tik’ta was trying to be nice again; she could tell.

“Why do you stay, then?” she asked. She narrowed her eyes. “You’re not a slave, are you?”

“No!” Tik’ta seemed to find this quite funny. “No, I’m not. I could leave if I wanted to.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I stay. To look after him, I guess. I’ve had captains who were idiots, and captains who were cruel. He’s a lunatic, but he’s not mean.” She gave a gesture that Aliana guessed was a shrug.

“I’ll stay, then,” Aliana said.

Tik’ta stared at her.

“Look, you’re clearly trying to warn me off for my own good, but you don’t have anywhere to go and neither do I.” Aliana started unpacking again. “By the way, I don’t ever want to talk about that.”

Tik’ta hesitated, then nodded again. “Then I welcome you aboard. We will have food soon, in the galley.”

She left, and Aliana looked after her for a moment before shrugging. As long as she got paid, she told herself, she didn’t care whether or not this job was going to be successful. If Zinqued didn’t figure out how to steal her ship back for her, she’d find a way to do it herself.

In the meantime, she’d be gone from Federation space and unlikely to run into Lawrence.

She’d take that deal.

Chapter Seven

Tafa walked quickly through the district surrounding the Jotun government buildings. Hevarod was a pleasant enough city, or at least it probably was when the weather wasn’t cold and stormy. Perhaps because the sea was so violent today, the entire place seemed to be filled with people.

She figured this was good. More people meant less of a chance that she’d stand out, and she’d learned long ago that one should never stand out. The problem with being the daughter of the family “traitors,” as she had been, was that you were always being watched. You were always noteworthy.

Tafa’s parents had been part of a family that produced weapons and had worked toward peace—against the family interests. When she was young, they were taken away. The family held them in a prison far away and had them tortured for years until they finally died.

Tafa had always known that the same could happen to her. Over the years, she had grieved her parents and sometimes resented them for their principles. After all, those principles had resulted in them being taken away, and in her living under the shadow of suspicion. She had begun to make her peace with it, but she felt like she’d spent her whole life learning to be boring and forgettable, and she’d gotten so good at it that her own relatives had failed to pay attention to her most of the time.

If she could be boring enough for them not to notice her, she could certainly be boring enough for people in a crowd not to notice her. Tafa threaded her way through the people, making sure to keep her face up and her body relaxed. If you looked down, you looked like you had something to hide; like you were trying not to be noticed.

So she kept a smile on her face and made sure to take out her directions every now and then to study them whenever she saw a police officer glancing her way. That way, some of the police might say later that they had seen her, and it would give credence to her tale of being lost.

She told herself that she knew how to do this, but her heart was still beating fast as she made her way down a side street and into the alleys around the Senate building. The closer she got, the more instinctive it was to hunch her shoulders and do other things that people would find noteworthy, and she couldn’t afford to do that.

Almost there, Shinigami said in her mind. How are you feeling?

I wish everyone would stop asking that, Tafa snapped crossly. It just makes me more nervous. Too late, she realized she’d spoken to everyone, not just Shinigami. Sorry.

Not to worry, Barnabas replied, sounding unperturbed.

Yeah, Gar added. Takes a few tries to get it right. I think I mind-shouted my first few conversations at Barnabas.

From Barnabas’ internal laughter this was an accurate statement, and Tafa struggled not to laugh along with them. With her uniform and work bag, she wasn’t very noteworthy here, but if she burst out laughing at a conversation no one else could hear, she certainly would be.

She joined the stream of people going in through the maintenance entrances. Most were Jotuns, and a few gave her a second glance—but no more than that. It had been a worthwhile investment to get an old jumpsuit because no one questioned her when she had years’ worth of grease stains on her clothes. Tafa curled her hands tight around the straps of the backpack, so that no one would see her relatively pristine fingernails, and allowed herself to be carried along a lower corridor with the bulk of the workers.

She didn’t need to go anywhere in particular at this point. Shinigami was using the scanners in the cube to assess the structure, and there was no way for Tafa to know yet which direction she needed to go. She tried to look purposeful, and still a little weary—as if she were tired of this job as an electrical engineer.

“Hey,” a voice said in the tone of a police officer trying to stop someone.

Tafa’s heart leapt into her throat, but she kept walking. There was no reason to think they were talking to her, and the worst thing she could do would be to look guilty.

“Hey, you,” the voice said again. There was a clank, and the crowd began to swirl around her. “You, Yofu—with the backpack.”

Tafa stopped, her heart pounding and her mouth suddenly dry. She turned to look at the police officer.

“I’m sorry,” she said automatically.

Stay calm, Barnabas advised her. Keep your wits about you. You can do this, Tafa.

With renewed confidence, Tafa smiled up at the Senate police officer and dug in her pockets. “Do you need to see my permit?”

“Where are you going?” the officer asked suspiciously.

“Oh! I…” Tafa pulled out one of the pieces of paper and studied it. “I don’t know, actually,” she said, after a few moments. “My boss said to meet him here. He needed the other set of tools.” She hunched her shoulders and hoisted the backpack to indicate it. “He said if I went in the back door and just followed where people were going… Well, look, I don’t know if you’ve seen him. He’s Yofu, and he has a high nose bridge, and his eyes are a little bit canted forward—”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the police officer interrupted her. He was bobbing in his tank impatiently. “Just figure out where you’re going. You can’t just wander around government buildings with no clearance. You’ll need to go down that way to get your tools scanned.”

“Oh! Right. Thanks.” Tafa smiled up at him and started off in the direction he was pointing. “Sorry again,” she added over her shoulder.

He just grunted. He was already looking at the rest of the workers coming into the building, all in their chef’s uniforms or cleaning gear.

Keep walking a bit more, Shinigami said when Tafa slowed. You’re close to a lift. Keep going. Now take out your permit and pretend to look at it. Give it a moment—I’m putting the security cameras on a loop. Now look to see if he’s watching you.

He’s not.

Up the lift when it opens. Do it quickly.

Tafa pushed her way into the lift, heart pounding. She half-expected alarms to sound, but nothing happened. The Jotun who had come out of the lift when it stopped thudded away without giving her a second glance.

Now what?

Give me a moment while I get the lift moving. A second later, it shuddered into motion. Good, Shinigami said. They don’t guard the exits off that hallway very well, but they require a pretty complicated verification to get the lifts moving so no one can use them by accident. I’m taking you to the fourth floor. That’s where I’m guessing the system I scanned is.

The lift stopped, and Tafa made sure she was studying her piece of paper as the door opened. She walked out slowly and pretended to finish reading before setting off to the right as Shinigami instructed.

With the directions being muttered in her ear, she soon arrived at a doorway flanked by two guards.

The committee was guarding Biset’s rooms. Tafa’s heart began to pound again, but she remembered Barnabas’ reassurance. She could do this. She pointed at the door tentatively.

“I was supposed to lock some of the electrical systems down in here?” she asked as if their presence made her unsure of the directive. Then she strengthened her voice, sliding into the language she’d practiced with Shinigami—using facts and terminology to make their eyes glaze over and give them the idea that she knew what she was talking about. Shinigami had told her that in a lie, too many specifics were better than too few. “They wanted to make sure they were on different circuits and not available from the main systems,” Tafa explained to the guards. “I’ll need to access panel circuits 2 and…” She checked her paperwork. “And 7,” she finished. “Then the senator won’t have to worry about anyone getting into his data.”

The guards were here to make sure no one went into Biset’s rooms, but they hadn’t been told why, and Tafa’s mission sounded like the sort of thing their employers would want. They nodded and opened the door for her, and she left it open on purpose as she settled down to work. When one of them reached out to shut it, leaving her alone, she gave him a distracted smile but otherwise pretended not to notice.

There were security cameras in two corners of the room, so Tafa made sure to have her back to them as she knelt and swung the bag off her back. She let the bots out when her hand was hidden from the cameras and set about laying out her tools.

She knew enough about electrical work to pretend to do the work she’d said she was doing, and she made sure to keep moving quickly.

All right, Shinigami said enthusiastically after not too long. Found the systems, and I’m getting into them. Oh man, fucking jackpot. They’re too smart to keep mission briefs, but I have some of his notes and a bunch of messages—so I have names. Lots of names.

How much longer do you need for the download? Barnabas sounded concerned.

Not too long, Shinigami assured him.

Tafa kept working, trying to hide her smile. She’d offered her help, and she was pulling the job off. She was managing it.

We have an opportunity, Shinigami exclaimed suddenly.

I’m not sure I like the way you say that, Barnabas stated cautiously.

Yeah, I don’t blame you. There’s a path from here to the committee’s main servers. I can get in, and I’m pretty sure I can get a good deal of data, but I don’t think I can do it without tripping alarms.

There was a long pause. Tafa found herself frozen, not sure she wanted them to do it. She had secretly envied the others when they talked about their fights. They were so courageous. They did daring things like she was doing now. Part of her wanted to tell Shinigami to do it, and she’d run out of the building if she had to, dodging the Jotun police officers and pulling off the sort of escape she’d seen the others make.

But the very real possibility of danger was making her sick to her stomach.

Gar seemed to understand. Can we sacrifice the bot? he asked practically. That way, Tafa can start for the exit now, and maybe you initiate as she’s on her way down. Because she won’t be in the room, they won’t know to look for her specifically.

Good idea, Shinigami said. Tafa, wrap it up. I’ll just destroy the bot when we’re done.

Barnabas gave the silent equivalent of a nod, his agreement a quiet impression in their minds, and Tafa put away her tools with shaking fingers. She opened the door and went out into the hallway with a smile to the two guards.

“Are you the ones who sign off on this?” They shook their mechanical heads, and she heaved a sigh. Playing the part was helping her calm down. “All right, well, thanks. I’ll see if I can figure out who I’m supposed to talk to. Have a good shift.”

They relaxed somewhat, and one of them wished her a good day as well. She made her way back to the lift, fighting the urge to run with every step.

She was halfway down to the main floor when Shinigami said, I need to start while she’s close enough to provide the uplink. Tafa, get ready to move quickly. If you have to, run, and don’t stop when you get outside. Gar and I will take care of things if we need to. We’re right there.

Okay. Tafa stared at the wall and concentrated on not throwing up.

She was halfway down the long corridor to the outside when alarms went off. Luckily, she wasn’t the only one who started violently. Several Jotuns looked around, and another Yofu in the corridor clapped his hands over his ears.

“What’s that alarm?” Tafa yelled at him as if every part of her wasn’t screaming for her to run.

“I don’t know,” he called back. They were leaning close together, and Tafa could only hope that she seemed to be half of a pair of Yofu, not the single one who’d gone up to Biset’s offices.

Tafa shrugged, waved at him, and headed out. There was yelling and Senate police were running all over the place, so she flattened herself against the wall to let them past.

You’re a natural, Shinigami told Tafa approvingly. Now get moving. They’re getting close to his office, and it’s dollars to donuts that those two guards will tell them about you.

I don’t know what either of those things is.

We’ll work on that in a few minutes. Just go!

Tafa sped up slightly and swallowed hard as she slipped past the last two guards and turned onto the street. No one called after her, though, and a few minutes later, she was practically running across the landing bay to the Shinigami’s shuttle while Barnabas beckoned and Gar gave her a huge grin.

All three of them went sprawling as Shinigami took the controls and accelerated away at high speed.

“Shinigami,” Barnabas said, from the floor, “why—”

“Because they’re locking down everything.” Shinigami looked over her shoulder as the shuttle banked. “But I got their data, and we are good to go. Three cheers for our newest little con artist!”

“Hip, hip, huzzah,” Gar said, pulling Tafa to her feet and giving her a hug. “You did it!”

“And now she gets a donut,” Shinigami said. “Everyone should know about donuts. To a Federation outpost!”

Chapter Eight

“What?” Grisor swung around in his suit to stare at his aide. “What did you say?”

“I said, uh...” The aide was fluttering from side to side in his tank, entirely unable to contain his distress. Eventually, he said, “Someone broke into Biset’s office, and may have—ah—probably did—ah—use Biset’s computers to reach the main committee servers.”

The aide’s suit was rigid and unmoving. He was clearly consumed with fear, and it took all of Grisor’s self-control not to unleash his rage at this very conveniently-placed target.

For he was consumed with rage. He had ordered Biset’s offices sealed the moment he had learned of the senator’s death. So far, they’d managed to keep a lid on things—unlike with Huword, whose death had touched off a storm in the Senate and Navy alike. They didn’t need anyone looking closer at Biset and his activities.

But no one should have gotten into those offices, and certainly, no one should have gotten into the committee’s servers.

Because the committee should not have servers. Had Grisor controlled the kill switches in his fellow committee members’ suits, he might well have used every single one of them at that moment. He did not particularly care which of them was responsible for this. He’d always known he was going to have to eliminate most of them at the end, of course, and it was close enough to the end that they would serve little further use.

All that mattered was that one of them had been unforgivably stupid, and now someone knew about it.

Grisor forced himself to behave calmly. He did not intend to be the employer aides feared for his temper. That was the mark of a lesser leader. Those who indulged in petty cruelties showed a lack of self-control.

Grisor, meanwhile, held self-control to be the highest virtue.

“The offices were sealed, yes?” He kept his voice quiet.

“Yes, Excellency.” The aide seemed worried but was happy to explain. “There were two guards at the door at all times.”

“How did someone get into the offices, then?”

“There was, ah—there was a mechanic, sir. An electrical engineer. A Yofu.” The aide seemed at once more confident, what with facts to share, and nervous about the information he was imparting. “The Yofu told them that she’d been sent to cut off certain circuits and make sure the systems couldn’t be accessed.”

Grisor stared at him wordlessly.

“So they let her in,” the aide finished lamely, as though he were aware just how much anger this would cause.

“Have they been dealt with?” Grisor asked precisely.

“I…don’t know, Excellency.”

Calm. He must be calm. The guards would be dealt with soon. Grisor did not indulge in unpredictable violence, but he did punish mistakes. His underlings must know the cost of failure, and in this case…there was only one possible price to pay.

He briefly considered killing the guards’ families as well but decided against it. That was the sort of thing that might discourage people from serving him.

“So this Yofu accessed Biset’s computer systems?”

“Yes, Excellency. They’re still trying to determine how. It doesn’t appear that she did anything other than what she said she was doing. She worked on the two panels she specified to the guards.” The aide paused. “It-it could be unrelated,” he said finally.

“It’s not unrelated,” Grisor stated precisely. “A Yofu, a single Yofu, came into the Senate building, got through security—”

“She didn’t go through security, sir. She took one of the lifts. We reviewed the tapes.”

“She shouldn’t have been able to access the lifts,” Grisor said. He was getting tired of pointing out the obvious. “She got into the building, did something she should not be able to do, and was in Biset’s office during the data breach.”

“Actually, she wasn’t, Excellency. She had left by then.”

Grisor looked at the aide, who looked back without any trace of guile. As far as Grisor could tell the aide wasn’t lying, and he also wasn’t stupid. Grisor didn’t employ stupid people. It was enough to make Grisor doubt, if just for a moment. Could he be wrong? Was it possible that this Yofu had somehow—

No, it wasn’t. Someone knew Biset was dead. Someone had come for his data specifically and had managed to get access to servers that should not even exist.

Grisor stared at the aide a moment longer. “You may go,” he said finally. “Tell the committee I wish to address them.”

“Yes, Excellency.” The aide left so quickly that his suit nearly stumbled over its own feet.

Alone in his office, Grisor wished that he was still incandescently angry. If he were angry, he would be cushioned somewhat against the truly frightening possibility of failure.

The rest of the Senate did not know about the Committee’s objectives. Grisor had been careful to maintain secrecy from the start. He knew enough to fear that if word got out, he would be stopped somehow.

It was too early for them to make their move. They knew how to make any mind their own, but the process was slow and required specialized equipment. They still did not have the ability to turn multitudes to their side. That would come when they controlled the Navy and the Senate.

If the Jotun people learned about the Committee now, they would demand that it be closed down. The element of surprise would be entirely gone.

They had to move quickly. Grisor went to his desk and connected a call. He bobbed in the water with impatience as it connected, and finally opened to show one of his guards, left behind at the research facility,

“I need an update,” Grisor said abruptly.

“Yes, Excellency,” said Feword. His tone was, as always, mild and respectful. It belied his true nature as an individual who killed without hesitation, and with astonishing violence. He had been invaluable to Grisor over the years, not only for that but for his constant attention to detail. “The scientists almost do not rest. They move between their experiments, and often check on Captain Jeltor’s progress.”

“He is still not converted?” Grisor knew that they would have contacted him with such a development, but he was still disappointed. “Discouraging.”

“Yes, Excellency.” He paused. “I think it worries them,” he said finally. “But that is a guess. They do not spend time speaking with us.”

“You think they fear that he will not be converted?” Grisor asked.

“I cannot say, Excellency. It was only a guess. Unlike others that we see often, I do not know them well enough to say with confidence.”

“Nevertheless,” Grisor said absently, “I trust your judgment. Give them whatever help you can. If he is missing for too much longer, people will start asking questions.”

“Yes, Excellency.” Feword nodded deeply and held the pose until Grisor cut the call.

* * *

Gil and Wev were hard at work in the lab when they heard footsteps.

They did not look at one another. Since they received word of Grisor’s imminent arrival, they had behaved as if every interaction could be seen and heard. They were neither foolish nor sloppy; as soon as they arrived, they had disabled the security cameras and set them to display looped videos. Still, they had gotten this far in the JIIA by being exceedingly and relentlessly careful.

One guard or two? Wev asked now.

Gil, who was closer to the door, attuned his auditory implants. One.

Both of them readied their weapons. They had always known it might come to a fight. It was not a matter of courage against cowardice. They must defend themselves if they hoped to further their goal.

When the guard appeared in the doorway, both of them gave him respectful nods. So far, the guards had done regular rounds of the building—a nuisance—but had not gotten in their way.

“I have spoken to His Excellency,” said the guard, whom Gil recognized as Feword. He seemed to be in charge of the others, although they displayed no ranks on their suits.

Wev, in a rare moment of emotion, said, Does he mean to be an emperor with that title?

Yes, Gil replied simply. He looked at Feword. “His Excellency is, perhaps, displeased with us?” He kept his tone respectful and hoped that he seemed appropriately disappointed in himself.

“He is understanding,” Feword said. “He knows that your task is difficult. He asked me only to aid you in whatever way you wish.” He paused. “Time is of the essence, as you must know. I do not say this to worry you.”

That was unexpectedly kind, and Gil reflected that it would be a shame to kill Feword—which, of course, they would inevitably have to do. As far as he could tell the guard was being sincere, both about Grisor’s attitude and the offer of help. He did not seem to resent being asked to do this.

Which presented the problem of what they should ask him to do. After all, their main goal each day was to stay busy in a way that cloaked their true inactivity. Under the constant threat of surveillance, they did not dare speak openly to Jeltor or take him out of his tank—and, indeed, they caused him pain because anyone watching would be sure to notice if he was not being hurt. But they were careful not to play the indoctrination tapes, and not to use the mix of chemicals that had been used by the scientists.

Gil made a calculation in his head. Where would the guards be least in the way—and least likely to see something they shouldn’t? “It would help us,” he said finally, “if you could attend to the other experiments sometimes. With time being a limiting factor, we should devote all our attention to Captain Jeltor.”

“We should pause the other experiments,” Wev concurred, picking up the thread. “You would need only to provide them with food.”

Feword nodded. “We will wait for you to show us the procedures.”

“I will go,” Wev said to Gil. “I think, perhaps, a bit more intensity in the solution.” He led the way out of the laboratory, and Feword nodded to Gil before following.

Alone now—or, at least, alone in terms of sentient companions—Gil went to the tank and stared at Jeltor. The longer this charade went on as he and Wev struggled to find out anything they could about the Committee, the more danger there was that Jeltor’s mind would truly break.

Gil watched the senseless Jotun in front of him. If Jeltor must be sacrificed, so be it. Better he break than the committee go unpunished.

And better he break than become a tool for them to use against the Navy.

Chapter Nine

Barnabas found Shinigami curled up with a mug of tea, scrolling manually through the data and—as far as he could tell—looking at it with her body’s eyes.

Of course, she was scrolling through it at a speed that made his eyes water. And she’d forgotten to put a tea bag in the hot water. And she was wearing fuzzy socks and a hoodie with a nightgown that probably shouldn’t be worn in this setting. But she was trying to get used to doing things, and he grinned at her as he came over to sit.

“Should I have worn my pajamas?” he asked lightly.

“Are these pajamas?” Shinigami asked. “The socks are slippery. That would make sense.”

“They’re not strictly… Uh, where did you get the nightgown?”

“Tabitha left it.”

Barnabas resisted the urge to gouge his eyes out, which he told himself would not work with a mental image. Tabitha was a very attractive woman, but he’d always viewed her as more like a niece—and on an equivalent level to a toddler, given her penchant for getting into extraordinarily dangerous situations and then being stubborn about following advice to get out of them.

“It’s not the sort of thing most people would wear in public,” he said finally.

“I’m pretty sure this is less revealing than things a lot of people wear to go out to breakfast these days,” Shinigami said in deep amusement.

“Where in God’s name have you been eating breakfast?”

“Not the point. But I’ll change and wear a flannel nightshirt if it would make you more comfortable.”

“No, no, don’t go to any trouble.” Barnabas squinted at the screen. “I’ll just look in this direction.”

Shinigami snickered. “God help you the first time a woman tries to make a pass at you. Come to think of it, God help her, getting mixed up with you.”

“Women don’t make passes at me,” Barnabas replied idly. “Which is good.”

He thought briefly of Sarah and her son. It was clear that Sarah had harbored tentative hopes that Barnabas might make a good husband and father. Neither of them, however, had truly wanted that, so they had drifted their separate ways amicably. The last Barnabas had heard, she had settled on High Tortuga and was married now.

Not eager to have his romantic life dredged up as a topic of discussion, he nodded at the screen. “So, what have you found?”

“So much,” Shinigami said. “Unfortunately, no one thought to send messages like, ‘We shall meet in the grove at midnight,’ so I’m just trying to piece together what all this nonsense means.”

“It would probably help if you didn’t think of it as nonsense.”

“It is nonsense. It’s some ridiculous plan to rule the whole universe—somehow—and I cannot for the life of me understand why they’d want to. They should talk to Bethany Anne about having power. Actually, come to think of it, that might not be a bad strategy, here.”

Barnabas snickered. “What are you thinking? A sit-down tea, or…”

“Just have her explain that being in power is a miserable thing, and then, if they don’t listen, she can kill all of them.”

“Well, your plans are decisive, I’ll give you that. But, just to play devil’s advocate, if we couldn’t get Bethany Anne for this—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. We’re on our own.” Shinigami waved her hands and managed to get water all over her socks and the carpet. “Crap. I’ll clean that up later.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas sat back.

“Here’s what we know so far,” Shinigami said. “It’s something to do with mind control in some way. I don’t know precisely what they’re doing.”

“Subliminal commands? Conditioning?” Barnabas frowned. On Earth, Stephen and Jennifer had run into a nasty piece of work who was intending to use mind-controlled Wechselbalg to take over the world.

“Conditioning, I think.” Shinigami shook her head. “What I mean is, I’m not sure what they’re going for. Before you ask, yes, I did look through the files from Stephen’s mission, and I don’t think it’s like that. It seems to be gentler, at least in some ways.”

Barnabas raised an eyebrow.

“What was done to the Wechselbalg wasn’t intended to make them functional members of society,” Shinigami explained. “It was meant to make them into an army. I doubt Hugo even had a plan for them once he’d used them to take over. But this—I honestly think they’re trying to deploy it against people who will keep having to be politicians or whatever.”

“Manchurian Candidate?” Barnabas queried.

There was a pause while Shinigami looked up the reference. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know, that’s the thing. They seem to be intending to deploy it on a broad scale, but think of the processing capability it would take to control that many people.”

“Only an AI would say it like that.” Barnabas considered. “We should ask Jeltor, you know. There’s a chance that someone has tried this before, and he might know of it. It might not even have the negative implications it has for us. It’s impossible to know.”

“Actually, I did send him a message.” Shinigami was frowning. “He hasn’t responded yet. I know he was meeting with the admiral, and I thought we might get word from him when we were in Hevarod. We left so quickly, though, and I don’t have any idea where he’s been since the meeting.”

“Huh.” Barnabas frowned. “Send a message to her, will you? Ask her if she had a timeline for when he’d be back in contact. No—send a message to Yojira.” Jeltor’s wife was still in a safe house with their children. “For all we know, he’s gone there, and there’s nothing to worry about.”

“If he were there, he would have gotten my message,” Shinigami pointed out. “I’ll send a message to make sure everything’s fine at the safe house, but I’m also going to send a message to Admiral Jeqwar. You don’t get worried for no reason, and you’re worried.”

“We’re up against an enemy I don’t understand,” Barnabas murmured. “Of course, I’m worried.” He rubbed his eyes. “So they want to use mind-control against their own people?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Shinigami said. “Yes, but.” She paused significantly. “Huword was involved in abducting civilians from many different species, yes? Perhaps he was getting test subjects.”

“What’s the goal?” Barnabas flung himself out of the chair and began to pace.

“Power,” Shinigami said immediately. “It’s always power with these people.”

“They want power, they want— Well, it would have to be mind control, wouldn’t it? They’d have to take over other species by warping their minds.” Barnabas snorted. “The Navy certainly won’t help them.”

Both of them realized the truth a moment later.

“Oh, my God,” Barnabas whispered softly. Old habits died hard, so he did not blaspheme lightly, but right now he was too shocked to do otherwise. “They’re going to mind-control the Navy.” He had to say it. If he said it, then it would be real, and he would have to deal with it.

Shinigami sat in slack-jawed silence. “They’re going to mind-control the Navy,” she repeated finally, “and then take over other worlds, mind-controlling the governments and civilians as necessary to keep them in power.”

“And once enough people are their slaves, it will be impossible to overthrow them. They’ll have turned every one of those people into living shields.” Barnabas found that he had the distinct urge to put his fist through a wall. “Son of a bitch. Every time I think people can’t set the bar any lower…”

“No kidding.” It was quite a commentary on their present situation that Shinigami did not seem at all flippant, only stunned. “We have to tell the Navy.”

“At once,” Barnabas said. “But we have to make sure we get it only to… I don’t even know, actually. Is it better to have it go broad and risk tipping them off that we know, or to go targeted and risk getting someone they’ve already controlled?”

“Jeltor will know,” Shinigami said.

“If we get in touch with him soon enough. No, we can’t wait.” Barnabas went to a cabinet on the side of the room and pulled out a pen and paper. “I’ll start drafting something.” He saw her raised eyebrow and shrugged. “A pen and paper help me organize my thoughts, and if ever I needed them organized, it’s now.”

He wrote for a while, struggling to convey everything he knew and how he knew it. Admiral Jeqwar was eminently practical and would hesitate to accuse sitting senators of something like this without good cause. Barnabas knew he did not need ironclad proof, but he did need this to sound like something more than a madman’s ramblings.

When he looked up, Shinigami had come to join him. She looked at the note and nodded.

“It’s good. Should I send it?”

“To whom, though?” Barnabas folded his arms and stared at it. “All of the admirals?”

“Yes.” Shinigami nodded. “They’ll have to act if it’s all of them, won’t they?”

“I should hope so, but I’m learning not to put much stock into my assumptions.”

“Don’t get all grumpy.” She smiled at him. “There, I sent it. And remember, when Jeltor found out about the Yennai Corporation, he came with us. So did the entire Navy. This committee is looking at mind-controlling the entire populace. That means the Jotuns aren’t what you fear. They’re what you need.”

Barnabas gave her a curious look. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“For someone who used to spend most of his time thinking about things, you can be… What’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Hasty?”

“A less priggish word.”

Barnabas laughed. “Come on. Let’s go spar—but, please, change first.”

Shinigami laughed. “Okay, okay, I get the point—this isn’t something you wear outside.”

“It really isn’t. What would possess you to wear Tabitha’s clothes?”

“She wears leather pants all the time. They’re shiny, this is shiny; they’re tight, this is tight.”

“All right, you do actually have logic on your side,” Barnabas conceded. “I didn’t expect that.”

“See? Uh, don’t tell Bethany Anne, though.”

“I won’t if you don’t tell Tabitha. She would think it was far too funny.”

“Deal.”

They shook on it and went to prepare for sparring, but although Barnabas tried to keep his mind on their light conversation, he could not help but dwell on what they’d learned.

What they suspected. He reminded himself that there wasn’t any proof yet. He was desperately hoping that Admiral Jeqwar would write back and tell him that his fears were unfounded.

They might be, after all, mightn’t they? Barnabas could be entirely wrong, as could Shinigami—although the likelihood of that, with the sheer amount of data she’d stored, was vanishingly small. If she thought he was right about this, he probably was.

Which was hardly what he wanted at this juncture. His mind could hardly encompass a scheme of this magnitude. He’d known of the Kurtherians’ schemes, of course, and they were certainly far-reaching…but those were imperial ambitions of a sort he recognized. The Kurtherians—some of them, anyway—wanted to conquer.

The Jotuns wanted to take the minds of the people by force.

Barnabas shuddered, then pushed himself up from his seat and changed his clothes quickly. He had to stay in motion and allow the small rituals to free him or he would be lost to worry.

They would expose this. The Jotuns, as Shinigami had pointed out, were not the Committee’s allies. They would stand against their Senate, and the universe would see the truth.

It was simply a matter of making sure that happened before there was bloodshed.

Chapter Ten

On her first full day aboard the Palpari, Aliana made a simple request of Zinqued: give her all of the information you already have on Barnabas and the Shinigami, including its crew.

To his credit, he’d done so promptly. The sheer amount of information, however, was staggering. He didn’t know much about the inner workings of the Empire, but he knew a great deal about the missions Barnabas had completed since he’d come to this sector.

As far as his crew went, there was only one confirmed member: Venfaldri Gar, a Luvendi who had apparently been Barnabas’ enemy on High Tortuga—or Devon, as aliens still called it—but was now a trusted friend. Aliana chewed her lip as she considered that. She supposed perhaps she could work her way onto the Shinigami’s crew, but she’d need to learn more about Barnabas before she felt comfortable doing that.

What was interesting was that Gar had been a member of a mining syndicate, and had therefore participated in something very close to slavery. Probably, he had participated in something that was slavery in all but name. Aliana knew the stories of what had happened on High Tortuga, and she was sure that a lot of people had found themselves trapped in illegal “contracts” with no real means of escape.

Zinqued was not exactly sure what had happened on High Tortuga. After all, there were stringent requirements for ships to dock on the planet, and ships with all the hallmarks of pirates weren’t going to be allowed, the new name of the planet notwithstanding. In fact, Zinqued really shouldn’t know about the planet. The Empire had made sure to erase most references to it from galactic directories and to spread false stories about hard crop yields and empty mines.

All Zinqued knew, therefore, was that the sole crew member was Venfaldri Gar, who had once been employed by a mining syndicate Barnabas had eliminated in a fairly dramatic fashion.

This left Aliana filling in the blanks on her own, and she couldn’t help but wonder if there was any way she could find out more details. She was human, after all, and maybe…well, maybe she knew someone who could tell her details. She was absolutely, definitively not going to go to a human outpost. She wasn’t in the mood for either guilt trips or Lawrence.

She deliberated over a few cups of tea before finally deciding to go for it and typed out a message to her Uncle Carter. She asked him if he had any connections on High Tortuga, since she was chasing down some rumors about a mine on the planet’s smaller continent.

She felt comfortable contacting him, at least. The last she’d heard, he and his wife Elisa were roaming around with no intentions of having any children, and the whole family was shaking their heads over it. It meant that Aliana’s decision to head out was, if not understood and respected, at least not unprecedented.

She felt a little guilty at the thought of Carter getting angry messages from her parents, though. She remembered them yelling at her and her yelling back, “Uncle Carter is off seeing the universe, why can’t I?”

The memory was enough to make her cringe. Was there anyone, she wondered, who didn’t look back at their younger self and want to sink through the floor with embarrassment?

Her message sent, she looked up details on more recent missions undertaken by the Shinigami. Apparently, after High Tortuga, Barnabas and his very small crew had managed to take down a mercenary company, which by itself would have been impressive, but they had then gone on to destroy the parent corporation as well. Aliana had never heard of the Yennai Corporation, but when she did a little bit of digging on its subsidiaries, she found herself staring at the screen in awe.

It seemed like they’d owned half the sector, if not more—and it had taken the Jotun Navy to back Barnabas up with enough strength to destroy them.

Because they had their own fleet.

This was insane. It really was the Wild West out here, as Uncle Carter liked to call it. Aliana had grown up using the term, although she had only the vaguest idea of what it meant, having been born and raised on the Meredith Reynolds.

Thinking of the Meredith Reynolds, however, made her think of—

No. Those memories were worse than the memories of Lawrence. Aliana looked bitterly at her tea and wished it was something that would help her stop thinking entirely. Straight vodka, maybe.

She went back to reading, but it provided no escape. The more she read, the more Aliana became convinced that this plan of Zinqued’s was impossible. The things that made the Shinigami such an attractive ship were exactly the things that made it nigh-impossible to steal: its speed and maneuverability, its weapons, and its AI.

She was fascinated by the AI. She’d never met one, but she’d heard the stories of course. ArchAngel was a legend. What was this one like? Very cold and emotionless, she supposed. It was a computer, after all. She could imagine it having been programmed to say please and thank you all the time, and being very stuffy when people were rude to it.

Had Shinigami or Barnabas heard these internal thoughts, they would have laughed themselves sick.

She had finished her latest batch of documents and was tipped back in her chair studying the ceiling when Zinqued came to find her.

“Hello,” he said from the doorway.

Aliana swore and nearly went over backward. She apologized as she righted the chair and stood up awkwardly. She might abhor politeness, but it was drilled into her.

“Please don’t be so formal.” Zinqued gave her an easy smile. “I haven’t been a captain for very long, so it still seems odd to have people stand. In any case, I don’t care about those things.”

Aliana smiled. She really did like this Hieto. Some captains were absolutely determined to snatch every bit of respect they felt the universe owed them, and that made them completely insufferable. Working for one of those was a nightmare—they wanted their crew to stave off the truth that the universe was a vast, uncaring place and they really weren’t important at all.

Zinqued seemed to accept this cheerfully if he thought of it at all. Aliana suspected that he would only shrug if she mentioned it.

“How is everything going?” Zinqued asked her.

“Ah…” Aliana froze. “Well…” How on Earth was she going to tell him what she had learned?

“Not so well, then?” Zinqued asked shrewdly.

“Um. Not yet.” She looked at the tablet and back at him. “I’m sorry. I’ve sent a message to my uncle to see if he can tell us any more stories about Barnabas, but right now, this ship looks like it’s going to be difficult to take. I really don’t know how we’re going to pull it off.”

“I know.” Zinqued didn’t seem at all worried. “I hoped you would say that.”

“Excuse me?” Maybe she had this all wrong, and he was as crazy as a loon.

“If you’d told me it was going well, I’d have to think you were lying to me,” he explained. “We came up with several good plans that failed in practice. Too much confidence would be a bad sign, but you were honest that you don’t know how to do this.”

“I read up on those other plans.” Since he wasn’t going to be offended, Aliana sat back down. “With Empire technology being what it is, I’m not sure how successful anything like that will be. I think we can’t expect to steal the ship in a normal way. We have to trick them into giving it to us somehow.”

Zinqued gave a hearty laugh. “Aha! The human is trickier than we are. I look forward to seeing how you pull that off.”

“Er…” She took a sip of cold tea. “Right. And you’ll want to be careful of the AI. It makes the ship into a weapon, and I wouldn’t bet you could deactivate it.”

Zinqued tilted his head to the side curiously.

“What do you know of the Empire’s AIs?” Aliana asked.

“I know they are powerful computers.”

“They’re aware,” Aliana explained. “Sentient. Truly sentient. And, as you say, they are powerful. This one controls that ship. If you’ve ever heard stories of—” She broke off when the captain’s face went pale. “What is it?”

“Tik’ta told a story,” he said slowly. “The ship used its doors to kill a member of her crew before Barnabas killed her first captain. They thought the other crew member had commanded the ship to use the doors that way, but what if it was the ship? I did not know it could protect itself that way.”

“Oh, it can,” Aliana said. “If this ship really has an AI, and it seems like it does, you’re in for a world of hurt if you don’t account for that somehow.”

“How do we do that?” Zinqued asked at once.

“I…don’t know.” Aliana grimaced. “We’re going to need to pull off one of the best cons in history to do this, and I’m not a conwoman.”

“What is a ‘con?’”

“It’s…um, a scheme, I guess. You use lies and tricks to fool people into doing things.” Aliana considered. “Often people will steal things doing that. They would maybe dress up as police officers and pretend there was a problem with a bank, and then steal the money.”

“Ah,” Zinqued murmured in understanding.

“But they’re a lot more complicated than that,” Aliana hastened to explain. “Really. Honestly. And I don’t really know how to pull one off.”

“Then you will figure it out, eh?” Zinqued apparently had no worries on that front.

Tik’ta might be right about all this, Aliana thought. Zinqued didn’t seem to have his head screwed on straight when it came to this ship.

Her monitor dinged and she leaned in to look, only to make a sound of surprise. “Holy crap. All right, there’s a stroke of luck.” She smiled up at Zinqued. “My Uncle Carter lives on High Tortuga now, apparently. He owns a bar.” That did sound like him. “I was vague, I just asked about an incident with a mine on the smaller continent, and he says he thinks he knows what I’m talking about, and he does know what happened there. If we want to find out more about Barnabas, that’s the way to go.”

“Will we get clearance to land on High Tortuga?” Zinqued asked in surprise.

“He says so. Said to reference him and gave us a pass.” Aliana smiled. “I guess we’re going to High Tortuga. Well, if you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“We would need to pay for fuel to get there,” Zinqued pointed out.

“Oh. Hmm. I’ll ask if we can courier anything in. We’ll figure it out. There’s always a way to make money on the way to somewhere,” Aliana said.

“Or while we’re there.” Zinqued’s smile was a bit too sly.

“I wouldn’t try that,” Aliana told him bluntly. “You think Barnabas is scary? You haven’t met Bethany Anne. And if you cause shit on her planet, you’re gonna learn all about her.”

“Ah. That is good to know. I will tell Tik’ta to make the preparations.”

Chapter Eleven

It was late when Carter closed up Aebura’s Bar and headed upstairs to the apartments on the third floor. He walked carefully to avoid making any of the floorboards squeak, and took special care as he snuck past the twins’ room.

He should probably fix the floorboards, but he really didn’t mind the way they squeaked or their rough appearance. When Aebura had built the bar, she’d made the upstairs apartments suitable for Ubuara, so Carter had needed to make them over. While there were still some tunnels for the twins to crawl around in, he’d managed to make proper rooms and corridors with scrap wood from other construction in Tethra.

He loved the result, squeaking floors and all. He loved that he could see his handiwork in each board and nail. He had spent decades on the Meredith Reynolds, not to mention various Empire ships, and while he loved their sleek look, he was much more suited to log cabins and chopping firewood.

He’d built this place. His children were sleeping in beds he’d crafted, in a room he’d built painstakingly by hand, above the bar he ran, a place full of friends and stories. He wouldn’t trade any of this for the world.

To his surprise, there was a light under the bedroom door, and he slipped into the master bedroom to find Elisa still up.

“What are you doing awake? It’s late.”

“And hello to you, too.” She smiled up at him and turned her head so that he could drop a kiss on her cheek. “Unfortunately, I’ve been losing my dinner. I don’t remember being this sick when I was pregnant with the twins.”

Carter felt a pang of worry and tried to mask it, stripping off his work clothes and dropping them in the hamper. “Maybe it’s different every time.”

“I think so.” When he looked at her, she was smiling contentedly, not at all worried. “The doctor said a lot of nausea is a good sign, actually.”

“Good for who?” Carter demanded.

She laughed. “I know. I strongly considered throwing up on him.” She set the book she’d been reading on her stomach and nodded at the computer. “I stayed up partially because you got a message from Aliana, and I wanted to make sure you saw it. She says she’ll be here in a couple of days on a ship called the Palpari. She sent the make and details.”

“That’s great!” Carter, despite himself, felt a surge of relief. “I sent the invitation, but I wasn’t sure she’d actually come.”

“You’re worried about her.” Elisa sounded surprised. “You don’t get worried often. Are things not working between her and Lawrence, then?”

Her voice held reserve—as well it might, Carter thought. None of the family liked Lawrence. They hadn’t exactly been subtle about it, either, and Aliana had responded by cutting them off instead of him.

Carter tended to think his family was more than a little overbearing and meddlesome, and he’d always been one of the black sheep. However lovingly his parents, aunts, and uncles got on his case about his travels and wild ways, they really did mean what they said—they wished he would settle down somewhere normal and have a simple life.

Really, he was as surprised as anyone to find himself here now, a family man with a small business, his feet firmly planted in one place. It was just far enough off the map that his parents could still complain, but still adventurous enough for him.

In Aliana’s case, though, he almost thought the family hadn’t gone far enough. Aliana had found Lawrence so quickly after tragedy struck that it was hard not to think she was simply trying to forget her pain.

And Lawrence...

“Lawrence is a rat bastard,” Carter told Elisa as he pulled on an old t-shirt and some flannel pants, “but I think the only way we’ll keep Aliana around long enough that she’ll start to trust us is if we don’t get on his case.”

Elisa dropped her head back against the headboard and groaned. “You know I hate that, right? We spent all those years on other people’s ships, and now we finally have our own house. No one should be allowed to be a rat bastard to us in our own house!”

Carter had to admit she had a point with that one. “Well, if he decides to come after the kids—”

“If he comes after the kids, I’m gonna mama bear his ass into the ground,” Elisa growled. Her tone was unequivocal enough that Carter felt the urge to put on some body armor—just in case the mama bear came out while he was around.

He smiled, though, and got into bed beside her. “Will I be allowed to get a punch in?”

“Maybe.” She flashed her dimple at him when she grinned. “I love you a lot, but I’ll have to decide if I love you that much.”

“Oh! That’s how we’re playing?”

Elisa laughed as she put her book on the side table and nestled against him. “So, why did Aliana write to you? You never said.”

“Ah, right.” Carter wrapped his arm around her. “It’s the funniest thing. She wrote me to ask if I knew anything about a mine that had been liberated on the smaller continent.”

“Wait.” Elisa sat upright and stared at him. “You mean—”

“Yeah. I don’t know how she even heard about it. Barnabas tracked down everyone who knew...” Carter scratched his head. “Anyway, I wrote out this long message, and then I thought—well, let’s see why she wants to know.”

He hated to admit it, but with Lawrence in the picture, he didn’t entirely trust Aliana’s motives. Not that he could think of a bad motive for her wanting to know about it, of course. No matter what Lawrence suggested, Aliana was hardly going to get involved in organized crime or anything like that.

Was she? He lay back, his mind racing.

“You know what you should do,” Elisa said sleepily as she cuddled against him. She yawned. “You should invite Barnabas back here to talk to her. If she wants to know about the mines, he could tell her. Besides, he never takes vacations.”

“Barnabas,” Carter said. His eyes snapped open as he considered.

Yes. That was a very, very good idea. From what Carter had heard, Lawrence was hardly the type to take any other man seriously. Carter could just imagine him superciliously ordering Carter around in his own bar. It was enough to make him want to stab the other man in the face.

But Barnabas...

Barnabas wouldn’t stand for any disrespect. He would politely and devastatingly put Lawrence in his place.

“You’re a genius,” Carter murmured into Elisa’s hair and kissed the top of her head. She muttered something sleepy and not quite intelligible, and he smiled as he turned off the light.

* * *

Barnabas dipped a brush into ink and drained the excess carefully into the tiny bowl before moving it over a sheet of paper. He lowered it and adjusted his pressure, dragging the brush with exquisite slowness, abandoning the need for quickness and completion.

He cultivated the practice of calligraphy, not the results. He found the slowness of action, the immutability of paper and ink, and the necessity of perfect form and relaxation throughout the whole body calming and centering. Even as a monk, he had found that his most intense prayer came when he was tending the gardens or doing some other work.

He had just completed the second line of an epic poem composed in China’s Sui Dynasty when Shinigami rapped on the door.

“Yo, chief.”

Barnabas looked over.

“I didn’t ruin anything, did I?” Shinigami craned her neck to look at the paper. “I waited until you were done with a line.”

“Thank you.” Barnabas smiled. Once that sort of thoughtfulness would have been totally alien to Shinigami. “What can I help with?”

“You got a message from Carter, actually.” Shinigami leaned in the doorway, arms crossed. “Don’t worry, nothing urgent. He wants you to come meet his niece, apparently?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“That was my reaction, too.”

“Let’s skip past the part where you read my messages,” Barnabas said wearily. “Why does he want me to meet this woman?”

“He’s being cagey,” Shinigami replied. “He said she wanted to know about the mine, but there’s clearly some subtext. Something about not liking… I don’t know, he wants us to go to Tethra and meet her.”

“Huh.” Barnabas considered this. He looked at his calligraphy. He looked out the window. “No word from Jeltor yet, I take it. Or Admiral Jeqwar.”

“No,” Shinigami told him quietly. “I’d have told you at once.”

“I know. I was just...” Barnabas rubbed at his face. “I was just hoping,” he said quietly. He knew it was illogical, but he could not stop hoping to hear something. The longer they went without word from Jeltor, the more worried he got.

Shinigami said nothing. She was looking away, concern plain on her face.

Barnabas sighed and put down the brush. “Right. I’ll, uh… Tell Carter we’ll be there when we can.” He caught sight of Shinigami’s face. “What?”

“We could go now,” she suggested.

“We’re in the middle of what’s probably going to be a war,” Barnabas stated brutally.

“Not yet, but we’re going to be.” She came to lean on his desk and looked him in the eye. “Once the fleets start moving, how much free time do you think we’ll have? And…well, anything involving fleets is risky. Do you really want to sit here and think about Jeltor being missing or do you want to go spend some time with friends?”

Barnabas looked at her and heaved another sigh. “You know, I think I liked it better before you got a handle on human nature. Now you’re far too perceptive.” He smiled at her and stood. “You’re right. I’ll write back to Carter and tell him we’re on our way. I can ask him if Elisa needs anything.”

“You’re such a worrier,” Shinigami commented, rolling her eyes. “Elisa is on High Tortuga. At worst, she’s going to need something sent over from the main continent, and you know Tabitha will take on delivery duties all day long if she gets a sandwich out of the deal.”

“Good point.” Barnabas led the way into the hall. “Okay, so tell me what Carter’s message said exactly?”

“He said his niece was coming, and that he’d appreciate your presence to ‘enforce good manners.’ I guess she wants to know about the mine, and… You know, he was talking in circles.”

“You’re sure this isn’t just you failing to understand colloquialisms?”

“You’re hardly the person to help with that—as evidenced by the fact that you’re calling them ‘colloquialisms.’”

“That’s the correct term,” Barnabas argued.

“Uh-huh. So, should I just tell him we’re on our way? We’re a couple of days out, assuming we don’t burn the engines too hard. Well, maybe we should. I don’t know when shit’s going to kick off.”

“Are you kidding? Helen would murder us.” The mechanic on Federation Border Station 7 had not been a fan of the way Barnabas kept up the Shinigami. She’d given him strict instructions to bring the ship in every two months, a recommendation she’d qualified with, “or every two weeks given how you seem to fly it, hot rod.”

Barnabas was many centuries old, a vampire, and had been one of the highest-ranking members of the Etheric Empire, and he still didn’t want to cross her.

Shinigami snickered but peeled off to the bridge and let Barnabas head to his quarters to compose a message.

Carter—

It will be good to see you, although I admit I have some trepidation regarding the mention of manners. Regardless, I will be glad to see you and Elisa, and I am looking forward to meeting your niece.

Sincerely, Barnabas

Chapter Twelve

In the research station on Gokrun III, not too far from the now-flooded and defunct robotics factory Barnabas had destroyed, Wev leaned close to his screen and focused on sliding tiny packets of data into the outgoing server traffic.

The research station had been locked down by someone who was both very good at data security and very paranoid. Wev supposed this was probably a good quality in someone who was trying to take over the sector by nefarious means, but it was presently an inconvenience to him.

Sensing how imminent the Committee’s plans were, Gil and Wev had sped up their timeline. They were beginning to send data back to the Jotun Interplanetary Intelligence Agency. They had sent an overview of the entire plan and were now backing up all of the data they could get their tentacles on.

They were hampered by two things. First, the data security practices, which strictly controlled the outgoing data and which would also alert some unknown person when the data deviated from expected margins; and, second, the guards Grisor had left, who stuck their noses into things with alarming regularity.

Both Gil and Wev had considered simply leaving—abandoning the experiments to their fate, with the exception of Jeltor, who would probably have to be killed. They could not take the chance of trying to smuggle a third individual out, and he was too dangerous to leave in the clutches of the Committee. Two, however, could probably make it out, and it wasn’t out of the question that they could do considerable damage to the equipment while leaving.

But they needed the data. There was no telling who else had the research results from the team here; who could recreate the experiments, given the technology and methodology. Come to think of it, there was no way of knowing who else had the machinery.

So they had to send everything they had and hope that if the Committee unleashed its plan, the JIIA could somehow begin undoing the conversion process.

Wev found the very idea abhorrent, and it was only worse with the term they used: conversion. Such a euphemism. They were mind-controlling people, and yet they spoke of it as if they were leading people to a true change of heart instead of torturing them into it.

He wanted nothing more than to subject every member of the committee to this torture as part of their punishment. Biset’s death had been too quick, and so had Huword’s.

“Hello,” said a voice from the doorway.

Wev refrained from jumping and composed himself before turning in his suit. “Hello,” he said as pleasantly as he could. Both he and Gil had been trained in the minutiae of how to behave “normally”—as if someone was a friend, not an enemy. “Did you rest well?”

“Not so well,” Feword admitted. “It is difficult to block out the experiments.”

The sounds often kept Wev up as well. The aliens and other Jotuns who had been taken for experimentation had been broken entirely by the torture the original research team put them through. The first attempts to create obedient servants had been unsubtle at best, and many of the aliens bore the scars of old injuries. Their cries of anguish echoed through the halls all day and all night until Wev wondered whether a quick death might not be kinder.

He and Gil had kept the aliens alive for exactly the reasons they had given Grisor: they wanted to know if it was possible to rehabilitate the experiments whose minds had been broken. Of course, once they were rehabilitated, Gil and Wev had no intentions of putting them through the conversion process—but Grisor didn’t need to know that.

Wev simply could not bring himself to walk away. Every time he questioned whether death would be kinder than life, he felt a wave of revulsion. Just because they were scared, injured, and mutilated did not mean that they should be killed.

He wanted to try to heal them. He was ill-equipped to do so, not being a doctor—not to mention having a great deal of vital work to do as a spy. He should not be spending his time on a few injured aliens when there were so many others who needed his help.

But their suffering was too much for him to endure without at least trying to help them.

He wondered whether Feword’s conscience was also troubled by the sounds, or if it was only an inconvenience. Probably, it was simply an inconvenience. Feword struck Wev as an enforcer, his low-key demeanor a mask for easy cruelty. Wev had seen his type before.

So, as pleasant as Feword seemed, he did not relax his vigilance.

“I am sorry there are not more restful quarters,” Wev said apologetically. “This must have been an unexpected assignment for you.”

Feword bobbed in his tank with faint amusement. “A bit. The committee’s work has taken us to many places, but always as His Excellency’s guard. Guarding scientists is…different.”

“I hope you are not too worried about our safety.” Wev tried to keep his voice level, although he felt a stab of alarm. What did Feword mean when he said he was guarding them? “The experiments really are quite contained.”

“Ah, that is not what I meant.” Feword came closer, and it took all of Wev’s self-control not to show his fear. “The longer the experiments go on, especially in the case of the captain—” he used his tentacles to point at Jeltor, “the more chance there is that someone will find the facility and attempt to stop the research.”

“Yes,” Wev said blankly. “Yes, that’s certainly a possibility.” He made an attempt to seem worried. “But such things are always a possibility when one pushes the boundaries of science. I try not to trouble myself with them.”

Feword bobbed in agreement. “A wise course. His Excellency is much the same. Now, tell me how I may best assist you with these machines? These are the controls for the message, yes? And this is for the chemicals?”

* * *

In her private ship at the center of the fleet, Admiral Jeqwar floated in her tank and let her physical body sink into stillness. Her awareness reached out beyond her body until she inhabited the entire ship. Through the sensors built into each component, she could feel the health of the ship.

When a ship was in battle, there was a constant stream of information from all stations, and keeping up with it could be difficult. When not in battle, it was easy to see all of it at once. The scanners gave a faint impression in her mind, showing her each ship in their range like a pinprick of awareness in her physical body. Meanwhile, each battle station hummed quietly, its personal signature well-known to her after so many years.

She took time to inspect the missile and fighter tubes, running faint currents along them. Some had wear and tear on the inside of the tube. It could cause problems in an engagement, so she tagged each affected tube as requiring maintenance.

She moved on to the engines, ignoring the official diagnostic panel and listening to both the engine core and the surrounding structure. It was maintained well by the mechanics, and there were no problems to be found.

In the communications hub, she searched for loose connecting wires and faulty receivers and found a few that would soon need maintenance. She tagged them for her officers to correct; she preferred them to have hands-on experience with the equipment.

Jeqwar was an exacting captain, in part because of her natural affinity for her work. She had never been entirely sure what was missing from her life until she was first plugged into one of the larger ships. Suddenly, her dissatisfaction with both her Jotun body and her biosuit had snapped into focus. In a ship, receiving so much information every second, having so many functions she could control simultaneously, she felt alive in a way she never had before.

For her, it was easy to speak to a ship and have it listen. When a battle began and she took over hundreds of functions simultaneously, she reveled in the challenge.

She passed the point of mere challenge when she took control of the whole fleet. She had done so only four times in a true battle, but each had been an experience she could never forget. She became the fleet and forgot her small, mortal body entirely. There was no more struggle. Her mind seemed to stretch endlessly to encompass every ally and enemy, every function of every ship.

She craved battle, even though she knew she should not. She should crave peace, shouldn’t she? Everyone should; it was simply that she was apparently made for war.

Sometimes the craving for battle was easier to bear, and sometimes, like now, it was more difficult. Right now, she knew that she craved it for the same reason she was doing all of her maintenance checks on her own instead of having the mechanics do them.

She was worried about Jeltor.

It had not been long since they heard from him. She had not expected much of anything, in fact, for weeks.

But then she had received word from the Shinigami. They had not heard from Jeltor either, and she found it unlikely in the extreme that he would go searching for Huword’s assassin without them. It had been their crew who found the assassin the first time, tracking her from the Brakalon transport on which Huword had been murdered and following the clues she left to kill Senator Biset.

If Jeltor had not spoken to them…

Something had happened to him, and whoever had killed him had kept it quiet, like Huword’s death, and Biset’s. Jeqwar felt a rising sense of the ridiculous; the Senate and the Navy were prowling around one another, picking off each other’s agents, neither admitting what they were doing or even admitting their losses. It was insane.

Someday soon, the Jotun citizens might look up and realize that they had no senators or captains left. Of course, that might not be the worst thing. Jeqwar had to admit that.

She let her consciousness prowl around the ship, circling through each system as though pacing the perimeter of a room.

She had to retrace his steps, she decided, starting from the moment he had left her sight on Jotuna. She might hit a dead end, but she couldn’t give up before she had even started. Whatever had happened, she would find out as much as she could and appeal to Barnabas for help.

She did not like involving other species in Jotun business.

But it seemed she had no choice.

* * *

Jeltor floated limply in a haze of pain. It had been days now, or had it been weeks? Or mere minutes? There had been darkness and light by turns, pain and relief, fear and outright terror. He was being tortured, he thought, but they had not asked him any questions.

If they had, he did not remember. What had he said? What had he admitted?

More fear. The only thing he had, the only piece of hope, was that he was still alive. When the pain was at its worst, he knew he had pleaded for them to kill him, but they had not listened.

Whoever they were.

A figure approached the tank. Jeltor could barely see it, the damage to his body was so great, but he saw the shadow and heard the footsteps. A biosuit. Another Jotun.

The tapes started up again. Most of the time they said only nonsense words, although once they had told Jeltor that he must embrace the authority of someone named Grisor. He did not know who Grisor was, and they had never repeated that message.

This time it was something different.

“Captain Jeltor.” The voice was very quiet. Like all of the tapes, it reverberated in the water around him. “Maintain your courage. Do not break. There are those here who will help you. I cannot say more.”

Jeltor thrashed in the water. Wait! He could not make his body work properly, and there seemed to be no hookups to let him speak. Perhaps, he thought bleakly, that was why they had not killed him when he had asked—they could not hear him. Wait, please! You must say more!

But there was a click and a moment of white noise, and then the normal tapes resumed with their nonsensical babble.

He had heard it. He swore he had heard it.

Hadn’t he?

Chapter Thirteen

“You’re freaking kidding me,” Aliana said when Carter told her that he and Elisa had children. “You?”

“Yes,” Carter repeated patiently.

“No, seriously. You?”

“You know, I’m beginning to feel a little insulted.”

Aliana laughed. “No, it’s not that.” She gave a shrug as the two of them wove their way through the bustle of Tethra’s streets. “It’s… I don’t know, you were always going to be this bachelor, off living a life of adventure. And then you met Elisa, and it seemed like she was the sort who’d go off and have adventures with you. The idea of you being a respectable businessman, all grounded and...” She waved her hands. “You know, settled down, with kids—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Carter gave her a mock glare that had just the smallest edge to it. “I wouldn’t say I’m ‘settled down.’”

“You said you’ve been doing renovations on the apartment. You have two kids. Also, judging by the number of people who are waving at you, you’re pretty well known around here.” Aliana looked around. “Also, this is a lot of aliens. I thought High Tortuga was all…human-y.”

“The main continent, much more so.” Carter smiled to the people around him. “It’s one of the reasons I like Tethra so much more, actually. We still have that Wild West feel.”

“There’s the uncle I remember.” Aliana grinned at him and elbowed him in the side.

He smiled back at her and confided, “I do like it here. Don’t tell my twenty-year-old self. He’d be very disappointed in me, but I’m really enjoying going to sleep in a proper bed each night, knowing the same people will be there when I wake up in the morning. Also, sleeping in a proper bed does wonders for your back.”

“Who knew?” Aliana joked. She was smiling easily, happier here than she could remember being for months. The sun was shining, the street was full of amazing smells from the food vendors, and she felt like she could really relax around Carter. Of all her family, he’d been the one who was always there for her—even when he was off adventuring.

She looked at him and saw him watching her.

“How are you?” he asked her quietly.

Aliana swallowed. “I’m fine,” she said, turning her head to look at the street. She tried to recapture the ease she’d felt only a few moments before, but even though the sun was still shining and the birds were still chirping, it was gone. “Uh, so you have a lot of monkeys here, huh?”

“Those are Ubuara,” Carter said. “And they’re intelligent. That’s Oemuga there. Wave hello.”

Aliana waved, half-expecting that this was going to be some sort of prank, but to her surprise, the Ubuara who had been loitering on a nearby roof swung down to the street and leapt onto Carter’s shoulder.

It chittered at her, and then said in very good English, “I am pleased to meet you. You are Carter’s brother-son-daughter?”

“I tried to teach them ‘niece’ and ‘nephew,’” Carter murmured. “It didn’t really take. They’re obsessed with accuracy, so the term great-niece just has too many unknowns, I guess.” He waved his hands and rolled his eyes, but his smile showed that he was just teasing the Ubuara.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, too, Oemuga,” Aliana said politely. ”It is nice to see where my uncle lives.” She traced the relationship in her head and added, “My father-father-brother, I mean.”

Oemuga chittered happily. “See?” he asked Carter. “She understands.” Apparently, he considered the conversation over, since he proceeded to leap back up to the roof with a swish of his tail.

“Well done,” Carter murmured, and she heard genuine happiness in his voice. “The Ubuara are sort of…hive-minded? Not quite. They have their own thoughts, but often know each other’s. Oemuga likes you, so the rest of them are much more likely to now as well.”

Aliana smiled at the Ubuara and gave a little wave as Carter set off again. It wasn’t much farther before he led her into an unimpressive building with a wooden sign over the door. Inside, however…

Aliana broke into a grin. If Carter were going to settle down somewhere, it would absolutely be somewhere like this. The bar was lovingly tended, its roughly-made furniture carefully smoothed, its floors clean, and with tiny decorative touches that alluded to Carter’s years on various spaceships. She saw coins from various planets, little carved statues, postcards, and tiny hanging ornaments.

“Elisa is out with the kids,” Carter explained. “Wait here a moment.” He went over to the counter and called something through the window. A moment later two sandwiches were handed out, and he piled them onto a tray before taking down two glasses and pouring rich golden beers into them. He jerked his head at a table in the corner, and Aliana practically ran to pull out his chair and take a seat.

“Beer,” she said. She took a long drink and groaned. “Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff. Where’d you get this?”

“BMW. Where else?” Carter smiled. “I got the hookup.”

“How?” Aliana picked up a sandwich and bit into it. “Holy crap, this is fucking amazing. Can I swear? I don’t want to swear if your kids might walk in.”

“Probably best not to.” Carter shrugged. “We’ve been trying to say things like crap and frack and so on. We haven’t been entirely successful, mind you, but we’re trying.”

Aliana grinned and tucked into her food, wolfing it down in time to see another sandwich arrive. She ate that one as well and washed it down with a second beer, and then a third.

“I’m glad I remembered how much you could eat,” Carter said affectionately. “Your cousin Mortie, now, we called him a black hole because he was as dumb as a box of rocks. You just eat everything.”

“Everything,” Aliana agreed glumly. She’d often spent a good deal of her limited earnings on extra food when her employers had complained about her raiding the communal kitchen. She was licking her fingers when she saw the look on Carter’s face. “Oh, no. No, don’t do this. I don’t want to talk about it. I told you I’m fine.”

“And I am your uncle, and I’m worried about you,” Carter explained.

“Can’t we do this after we talk about the mine prison-break thing?”

“Nope.” Carter set down two more mugs of beer. “Talk. Tell me how you’ve been.” He seemed to be debating whether or not to ask, but finally did. “Thought you might bring Lawrence.”

Aliana had been taking a gulp of beer to steel her nerves. She set the mug back down and looked away.

“Everything all right?” Carter asked.

“No,” Aliana said flatly. “It’s not, so why don’t you just get it out of the way, Uncle Carter?” She knew her voice was bitter, but she didn’t think she could make herself sound any more polite. “Why don’t you all tell me how you knew he was bad news and I should have listened to everyone?”

There was a long silence, and Carter scooched his chair over next to hers. He leaned back in his seat, rested his feet on the table and his beer on his stomach, and handed her beer back to her. He nodded for her to slouch down too, and she gave a weary laugh when she did.

“I’m not going to say I told you so,” Carter began. “I always hated hearing that. Some mistakes you gotta make. You heard how I nearly wound up dead on an abandoned space station that one time. Uncle Wes—I don’t think you’ve ever met him—had to come bail me out, and my God did I get an earful. By the time we were halfway back to Segura Station, I was ready to tell him to put me back where he’d found me.”

Aliana looked at him. When he gave her an easy smile, she managed to find a small one of her own.

“What I mean,” Carter continued, “is that I had my reasons for making that gamble, and I’m sure you had your reasons for marrying Lawrence.”

Aliana groaned and dropped her head back. “It was so stupid of me. It was so fucking unbelievably stupid. Ugh. I’m sorry. It was so freaking stupid.”

“Tell you what, free pass on swearing until we get through this conversation.”

“Fuck, yeah.” She took a sip of beer.

There was a pause.

“So I take it Lawrence isn’t in the picture anymore?” Carter inquired.

“No.” Aliana blew out her breath in a sigh. “He married me to get rights to the ship, and then he jacked it, took my crew, and left me with a little deathtrap ship all of his creditors knew about.”

“Oof.” Carter shook his head. “Son of a bitch. You catch up with him and make his life hell yet?”

“Baby steps.” Aliana took another gulp. “I don’t want to see him, really.”

“Well, I can understand that.” Carter rubbed his face.

Aliana rolled her head sideways to look at him. “I know everyone thought it was dumb to get married so soon after, uh…” She forced herself to say it. “After Harry died.” She downed the rest of the beer in a big gulp.

“You miss him,” Carter stated neutrally.

“Of course I miss him!” Her voice was too loud, and she wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind.” He met her eyes.

“Stop looking at me like you pity me.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I can see how that would…yeah. You left so quickly, though, after everything. Was there anything we could have done to make it—I don’t know, suck less?”

Aliana considered her empty mug. “No. I don’t think so. You want to know why I married Lawrence?”

“Why?” Carter asked curiously.

“Because I was never going to love him like I loved Harry.” Aliana blinked back tears. “Because he was the wrong choice. I almost hated him even when I liked him. I don’t know, that would have made sense a couple of beers ago. I just mean…”

Her voice trailed off, and she lifted a shoulder.

“You did what you had to do,” Carter assured her, “to get through it. And we’re here now to help you clean up after it and get you back to wherever you want to be.”

Aliana smiled at him. “You don’t have to do that.”

“We’re family, Ali.” He shrugged. “Just try to stop us, huh?”

Aliana wiped her eyes. “Someone cutting onions in here or what?”

“I won’t tell anyone you got sniffly, don’t worry.” He laughed and looped an arm around her shoulders. “Honestly, if you wanted to come live here… Maybe? No? Well, keep it in the back of your head. And for now, I got you a present.”

“A present? Is it five more sandwiches, maybe?”

“Good grief, child. No. It’s—well, you know how you asked about the mine?”

“Yeah.” Aliana let her feet thud to the floor. She’d managed to forget all about Zinqued, who was back at the Palpari, but now she remembered everything and the beer was making her feel pleasantly invincible. “Tell me everything. How’d you hear about it?”

“I was there for some of it,” Carter said conspiratorially. “Elisa, too. She blew up a Shrillexian.”

Aliana choked on a mouthful of sandwich. “What?”

“My hand to God.” He grinned at her. “Anyway, I wasn’t there for all of it, so…I got you the guy who was.”

“Oh?” Aliana saw him looking over her shoulder and turned around as she took another bite of sandwich.

She realized too late who Carter must mean, and she had just come up with the idea to go upstairs and climb out a window when it became clear she was out of time on that front. A man with reddish-brown hair sat down across the table from her easily. He was smiling, and his blue eyes were very warm. He was dressed somewhat anachronistically in gray slacks and a vest over a button-down shirt, but it suited him.

“Aliana,” Carter said, cheerfully unaware of the fact that he’d just unleashed Aliana’s worst nightmare, “meet Barnabas.”

Chapter Fourteen

Absolute panic—that was what flashed through Aliana’s head when Carter introduced her. She stared at Barnabas like a deer in the headlights, and Barnabas was treated to a full run-down of her thoughts, which included—

Shinigami.

Yes?

You will not believe who Carter’s niece works for.

Who? Wait! I can guess.

Oh, I don’t think you can. Barnabas fought the urge to laugh as he watched Aliana plaster a smile on her face. She was trying to be nonchalant, but she wasn’t even close to succeeding. She looked like a cross between a gargoyle and a guilty child.

Holy fucking shitballs, she’s not one of the Yennai people, is she?

No, definitely not. Dial it back a bit.

Uh…I’m trying to predict human behavior, which is already a shitshow, and it’s a prediction for someone I’ve never met. I give up.

Zinqued—you know, the one who keeps trying to steal the ship?

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Nope. Barnabas took a sip of his juice and enjoyed the frantic wash of Aliana’s thoughts. They brought her in to learn about me and con us, and she was really not expecting Carter to know me. Speaking of whom…

He looked at Carter, who—unaware of the background conversation—had launched into a delighted introduction, highlighting both Aliana’s and Barnabas’ respective careers. A quick peek into his mind showed that Carter had absolutely no idea what Aliana was up to. He was simply happy that someone named Lawrence hadn’t shown up, and he was sure that his niece was on a good path.

Barnabas wasn’t going to correct him. After all, it made sense to learn more about Aliana’s plan before she found out he could read her thoughts. Also, it was going to be funny as hell to mess with her. Barnabas was planning to ask a lot of detailed questions about her current job.

“—she’s had a bad couple of years,” Carter was saying, “but she’s doing better now and—Aliana, what are you doing now? I just realized I don’t know.”

“Yes,” Barnabas said wickedly. “What do you do, Aliana?”

Aliana’s thoughts showed that she was seriously considering throwing her sandwich as a distraction and booking it out of the bar. “I, uh…” She gave the two of them a look. “Well, you know how it is. When you need work, you take whatever you can.”

Barnabas affixed a pleasantly curious expression on his face, took a sip of juice, and let the silence grow.

“So I’m, uh…” Aliana fixed her gaze on the ceiling and said an internal prayer to get through this discussion without Barnabas figuring out what she did. “I’m on a little cargo ship,” she said with a shrug. “Kind of embarrassing compared to everyone else here.”

Barnabas would have been manifestly unimpressed with this attempt at redirection if he had not sensed that she was being honest. He saw in a flash a man with bristle-short brown hair smiling at Aliana, and a beautiful planet out the window of a spacecraft behind him. There was a sense of purpose in the memory, and a deep, wrenching feeling of loss.

Aliana was embarrassed at what she’d come to, and Barnabas was getting ready to look through her memories when he pulled his mind back, feeling as if he had overstepped. Things related to the Shinigami were his business.

Things related to Aliana’s life before that were not.

So he shrugged. “I was a monk for many years, and before that… Well, let us say my life was by and large a meaningless blur and I would rather forget most of it.” Particularly his conversion into one of the Nacht. That memory still made him shudder. “A temporary posting on a cargo ship is hardly embarrassing.”

Aliana took another bite of her sandwich to avoid having to answer, and Barnabas felt his lips twitch. She was clever, he’d give her that.

“Yeah, Ali,” Carter added. “You know I ran around on cargo ships for years.”

“Right,” Aliana said. “Look, it’s not important, okay?”

“Right,” Carter agreed, clearly sensing the tension in the air but not knowing quite what to attribute it to. “Well, anyway, you wanted to know the story of the mines. Barnabas can tell you all of it.”

Barnabas knew that Aliana now wanted nothing more than to run away and hide, but she lifted her chin and directed a very pleasant smile at him. “Of course,” she said, and her tone was warm and engaged. “Thank you for coming to speak to me.” She looked at Carter. “Thank you for calling him.”

There was affection when she looked at him—a sense of safety, and the acknowledgment that Carter had tried to do something nice for her. Barnabas sensed that Aliana wouldn’t do anything to make her uncle look bad, so she was determined to find a way through this as politely as possible.

Despite himself, he liked that.

“Well, then,” he said. “The Etheric Empire was being dissolved, and I had left my posting as an Empress’ Ranger.”

“You were Ranger One.” She gave him a look that said she knew she wasn’t going to find a way to steal his ship, but the acceptance was tinged with wry humor instead of bitterness.

“Yes,” Barnabas replied, “I was. Has Carter introduced you to Ranger Two yet?”

“He knows more of you?” Aliana gave her uncle a despairing look, but she seemed to have decided that this whole thing was funny more than anything else.

“Tabitha is very nice,” Carter interjected. With a touch of pride, he added, “She loves the sandwiches here.”

“They’re very good,” Aliana said, smiling as she patted his arm. She was happy to see that he enjoyed his work; that much was clear. She looked back at Barnabas a moment later. “I’m sorry. You were saying?” There was determination behind that smile. She had decided she was going to get through this.

“Mm, yes.” He took another sip of juice. “It was mostly chance, honestly.” He ignored Carter’s snort. “I came to Tethra, decided to stop for a drink in this very bar, and met the Ubuara who owned it at the time, Aebura. She told me about her time in a nearby mine, and the fact that her fellow workers never seemed to have made it out—even though the mines had officially been shuttered.” He gave a bland smile. “So I helped shut it down.”

Carter gave another snort and rolled his eyes.

“He single-handedly led an assault on the mine, turned the vice-overseer over to his side, converted their guard force, and then went after the parent company that owned all of it.” His voice was animated. “He’s not even telling you any of the good parts!”

“I figured if Aliana had any specific questions she would ask.” Barnabas smiled at the young woman. “Do you?”

His tone had apparently grown a little too smooth because she gave him a curious look. He could tell from both her thoughts and her expression that she wondered if he was onto her.

Damn. Barnabas backtracked hastily. “It’s simply that I don’t know what parts you already knew. I wouldn’t want to take up all of your time on Tethra.”

“He thinks he’s bragging,” Carter said. “Which he’s not, since you asked.”

Barnabas hid his smile. Carter, even though he had the situation all wrong, did realize that this all felt uncomfortably like bragging. Moreover, Carter’s thoughts said clearly that he was quite grateful for Barnabas’ intervention at the mine. Although Carter had only met most of the mine workers after they were freed, many of them had become close friends.

“It can be difficult to talk about oneself,” Aliana said with surprising severity. She reminded Barnabas of nothing so much as a young lady’s governess. “Don’t give him a hard time.”

“I’m interested where you heard the story,” Barnabas stated casually. He was amused at the spike of worry he felt in Aliana’s thoughts. “It shouldn’t be well-known off of High Tortuga. It’s not even very well-known on High Tortuga.”

It was amusing to watch Aliana’s mind race through different options, discarding some as too improbable, others as too risky.

“I met another human on Border Station 7,” she said finally with a shrug. “They mentioned that they’d worked with some former miners, aliens who’d been imprisoned on High Tortuga. They said some of the mine owners had tried to hold out and not obey the Empress’ orders. I was interested in the story.” She saw a gap in her lies and filled it hastily. “And since I didn’t have anywhere to be just yet, when Uncle Carter asked me to come visit, I did.” She smiled at Carter. “It’s been too long since we caught up. I didn’t even know he had kids.”

“How are the twins?” Barnabas asked Carter. “And Elisa? And the little one, of course.”

“There’s another kid?” Aliana demanded.

“Not just yet,” Carter said. “Elisa’s pregnant. The twins…” He sighed. “Alanna wants to be a vigilante when she grows up just like her Uncle Barnabas, so Elisa might not be best pleased with you. Although she may just think a vigilante is someone who shows up periodically with presents, so…”

Barnabas laughed.

“Alanna?” Aliana asked.

“I know. I asked if she’d consider Aliana instead, but apparently it’s one of her favorite characters from a book, so there was no budging on that one.” He grinned at his niece. “And Samuel is the other one.”

“Alanna and Samuel. I like it. Any names for the next one—or is it twins again?”

From the look on Carter’s face, he hadn’t considered that possibility. “Oh, no.”

“I-I didn’t mean… Oh, dear.” Aliana shot Barnabas a look of appeal. Help!

She didn’t know he could hear her thoughts, of course, but the expression was clear enough. He gave her a tiny nod and reached over to pat Carter’s hand.

“Twins are very rare,” he comforted the other man. “And even if it is twins—”

Carter gave a strangled noise of despair.

“Even if it is twins,” Barnabas continued serenely, “you’ll have all the babysitters you could ever need.”

“I’ll come to stay,” Aliana offered. “Give you and Elisa a hand. And, uh, I’m sure Barnabas will…” She trailed off. “Sorry,” she mouthed at him.

He gave her a “Don’t worry about it” headshake. “We’ll be back to help at the bar, and Tafa is probably a good babysitter. I get that vibe.”

“You just want to run the bar so you can steal all the juice.” Carter stabbed a finger at Barnabas in a mock accusation. He’d recovered his equilibrium, though, and was smiling again. “I know we’ll get through it just fine if there are two, but it was not easy last time, let me tell you.”

“I’m sure,” Barnabas agreed with feeling. He’d seen several children grow up on the Meredith Reynolds, and had never figured out how the parents he knew didn’t go completely insane. “Now, Aliana—”

Problem, Shinigami reported.

What’s wrong? Don’t tell me Zinqued made his move while Aliana was here?

I would refer to that as a “show,” not a problem. He could feel her amusement radiating through the Etheric, but she sobered quickly. No, it’s…you have a message. You should come back and see this.

Shinigami, what is it? Barnabas swallowed.

She hesitated, and he knew she was weighing whether to tell him—and that was what told him how serious it was.

It’s Jeltor, she said finally. Admiral Jeqwar says she has good reason to believe he’s been killed.

Chapter Fifteen

Barnabas didn’t remember exactly how he got back to the ship. He’d been around long enough to excuse himself politely without giving the process any conscious thought. He had a vague impression of both Carter and Aliana looking worried, but he was gone a moment later, running through the streets of Tethra and not caring who saw him moving at unusual speeds.

He thought he saw Zinqued hanging back in an alleyway with Tik’ta, but he did not give them any attention, and they made no move toward him. That was a good choice on their part. Barnabas was not in a forgiving mood right now.

He came in the door of the ship at a dead sprint and made his way to the conference room, adjusting his shirt and vest with sharp, angry gestures. Shinigami was waiting there with Gar and Tafa, all of them looking somber.

Barnabas did not meet their eyes. He could not trust his composure if he did. He only nodded brusquely in Shinigami’s direction and took a seat. He would behave as if he had the wherewithal to sit still, and hopefully, the act would become a reality.

Admiral Jeqwar appeared on the screen. Her body was very still in its tank, and the biosuit’s voice was flat and expressionless.

“Hello,” she said. “You are receiving this message because you have been deemed trustworthy by the Admiralty Board of the Jotun Navy. We continue our fight to make our government once more serve the Jotun people.”

Barnabas waited, drumming his fingers on the desk anxiously. He realized that Admiral Jeqwar must at all times speak as if her messages would be found and disseminated, but he only wanted to know one thing: what she knew about Jeltor.

“I have grave news,” Jeqwar continued. “After bringing the Admiralty Board news of great importance, Captain Jeltor was sent on a solo mission to uncover information about a false committee that has been deceiving the Senate as to its true purpose.”

“She’s good,” Shinigami murmured. She was leaning against the wall, arms crossed. Her eyes didn’t waver from the video. “She gets to claim that she never went against the Senate, just traitors whom they should also condemn.”

Gar and Tafa nodded. Barnabas swallowed and kept watching.

“Unfortunately,” the admiral said, “immediately after leaving the briefing, Captain Jeltor was attacked and captured.”

A video appeared on screen: security footage slowed down to show Jeltor walking awkwardly through the streets—or at least, a Jotun in a biosuit. Something was off, however.

“That’s not his suit,” Barnabas said to Shinigami.

“She sent details about that,” Shinigami replied. “They met in disguise. That is him.”

Barnabas settled back in his chair, frowning. What if it’s her? he asked Shinigami. They watched as Jeltor was apprehended by two other Jotuns. Jeltor was incapacitated immediately. His biosuit froze and was picked up by a gravitic device of some sort before being rotated and placed in the back of a vehicle. The whole operation took only a few seconds; they had planned this.

We can check, Shinigami said, but from everything I’ve seen of her, she’s the real deal. She was in this the same way Jeltor was—she didn’t want it to be happening, but she was going to do her duty.

Keep checking in on her when you can, but if you’re not worried, we’ll let that go for now.

They watched another loop before Admiral Jeqwar reappeared onscreen. “The two Jotuns who apprehended Captain Jeltor are known assassins. After analysis of the holo, it appears that Captain Jeltor was killed instantly. Please report any communication that purports to be from Jeltor or anyone who has disguised themselves as the captain and tries to make contact with you.”

The video cut off.

“Oh,” Shinigami said. She looked at Barnabas. “I see.”

Barnabas gave her a nod.

“What?” Gar looked between them. “What do you see?”

“She doesn’t think he’s dead,” Barnabas said. “She thinks he’s been taken to be mind-wiped.”

“What?” Tafa sounded horrified. “Jeltor? I know that they can mind-wipe people, but they took him?”

“It makes sense,” Gar admitted. Now that he’d followed Barnabas’ and Shinigami’s leap, he could see the logic. “Who would they all trust more than anyone? Jeltor is the main figure in all this. They’re the ones who run the fleet—the admirals, I mean—but Jeltor was there from the start, finding out all of what they’d done with the Yennai Corporation and exposing it. He was probably the best person the committee could have chosen.”

Barnabas had to agree.

“But then why say…” Tafa’s voice trailed off. She looked at her lap, and when she looked up again, she was furious. “They don’t think he can be saved,” she said angrily. “They want people to behave like he’s just…gone. Like he’s never coming back.”

Barnabas nodded quietly. “Yes, they do.”

“It’s not right!”

Once, Barnabas knew, Tafa and Jeltor had not liked each other very much. They had been taken hostage by the same mercenary group and had been forced to rely on each other to survive. Once they had been rescued by the crew of the Shinigami, however, they had developed a true friendship.

He looked at her gravely. “I don’t think it’s right, either. Jeltor is our friend, and we won’t rest until he’s safe. With that said, I understand why she did what she did. If Jeltor is in their hands, he might very well have been mind-wiped already, and if he has been, he truly is an enemy. They cannot afford to be moved by pity, Tafa.”

“Couldn’t she just say something like he’s dangerous and don’t tell him anything? To capture him instead of killing him?”

“They could try. What if he hijacked whatever ship he was aboard? He has a security clearance, and he knows how ships work, so he could easily do damage to the fleet and access information that would help the committee. Tafa, he’s dangerous.” He saw her angry retort coming and held up a hand. “I promise we will do everything in our power to save him. I think we have a good chance. For all we know, he hasn’t even been wiped yet—and even if he has, we’ll find a way to undo it. But we need to be careful.”

Her two-thumbed hands clenched, but at last, she nodded and looked away.

“So let’s talk about that,” Barnabas said. “Right now. Because we can’t delay for a moment. If the Navy finds Jeltor first he’s in danger, so we need to find out where they took him to be wiped and learn anything we can about that process so that we can undo it if necessary.”

Everyone nodded.

“Who knows where he is?” Barnabas asked. “Think. Members of the committee—maybe. Probably, some do, and some do not. Some staff or aides.”

“The assassin might know,” Gar suggested.

“I might know,” Shinigami pointed out.

Everyone looked at her.

“I got a ton of data,” she said. “The problem is, no one keeps nice little lists of where all the secret bases are with coordinates or anything. They just mention ‘the research station’ or whatever. But with the digging I can do otherwise, maybe there’s enough of a clue.”

“Good,” Barnabas stated firmly. “Work on that and tell us what you find. Next step: we need to move Jeltor’s family somewhere he can’t find them.”

Gar’s mouth dropped open in horror. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Barnabas only nodded grimly. He wished that he hadn’t thought of it either, but after some of the missions he’d seen, he knew to secure civilians away from trouble if at all possible. In this case, Jeltor had to be assumed to be an enemy.

He wasn’t looking forward to explaining that to Jeltor’s wife. What would it be like, he wondered, to know that your spouse of many years still lived but was wholly unreachable?

He promised himself and her—and Jeltor—that he would find a solution.

“We should also send a message to Admiral Jeqwar,” Barnabas continued slowly. His mind was churning. What should the message say? How could he keep the true meaning of the words hidden while convincing her to help them save Jeltor’s life? Should he even admit to her what his plan was?

Shinigami was having the same thoughts, and she looked at him calmly. “I recommend simply telling her you received the message,” she advised. “That way, she’s not worried about you not knowing what to do if you see him, and you don’t have to argue with her about undoing the mind-wipe.”

Barnabas nodded. “I’ll compose—”

“No need. I can do it.” She seemed to have forgotten her body as she handled ship functions, research, and sending a message all at once, but finally, she said, “I have four potential locations for the research facility.”

“That was quick,” Barnabas exclaimed, surprised.

She gave him a withering look. “I’m an AI, remember? What would take you weeks takes me seconds.”

“Yes, yes.” Barnabas waved her over to the table. “We’re all insufferably stupid, and it’s very trying. You’re a saint in the body of a robot. Now come tell us what you found.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘insufferably stupid,’” she argued, coming over to sit. “Sometimes you’re quite clever. It helps that you make strange mental leaps without any logic.”

“Shinigami…”

“Ah, right.” Shinigami brought a map up on one of the screens. “All right. The closest location to us now would be Herothe, owned by an interspecies-conglomerate that rents to any number of companies. Aliens there—including alien captives, depressingly—probably wouldn’t attract any attention.”

Barnabas nodded.

“Next up, we have Klefk’ong, a Hieto world that has several locations leased to a corporation the committee runs. Or owns. Or is somehow involved with.”

“Maybe Zinqued could help us with that,” Barnabas suggested blandly.

Shinigami snorted. “Ask Carter’s niece and see what she says. Third, we have Gokrun III, which you’ll all remember as the place we nearly drowned while fighting a robot army. A lovely memory, and perhaps worth revisiting.”

“Speak for yourself,” Gar muttered. “One of those things gave me a bruise I can still feel.”

“Given the upgrades we gave you in the Pod-doc that’s physiologically impossible,” Shinigami informed him.

“I think he was making a joke,” Barnabas told her.

“Oh. Heh.” She returned to her presentation. “And last but not least, Jotuna D is the fourth moon of Jotuna, and it has some sort of secret base thing on it.”

“Is there a good path between them all?” Barnabas asked.

“Not so much, but given how fast I can travel…” She gave a self-satisfied little shrug.

Barnabas grinned. “I’m going to use your self-confidence as a barometer to tell whether you’ve been mind-wiped. If you’re insufferably pretentious, we can assume it’s you.”

“Careful, smart guy.” She gave him a smirk. “I don’t think you want to turn this into a list of everyone’s personality flaws.”

“Yes,” Tafa said severely. “Both of you, stop it. And I say we go to Gokrun III first.”

“Why?” Barnabas asked, his focus instantly shifting back to the matter of Jeltor.

“Because…” Tafa paused, apparently not having gotten all of her thoughts in order. “Right. First of all, I think they’re doing it on a planet they own. The Jotuns like to think they’re better than everyone else, and people like that want to flaunt it, but the committee has been very good about keeping things quiet. They’ll do it on a Jotun planet. That’s my guess, anyway.”

“All right,” Barnabas said. “And as to Jotuna D…”

“Too close to the planet,” Tafa shot back with a shrug. “It’s not a strong reason, I know, but anything that close is going to attract more traffic and suspicion, right?”

“Easier for senators to sneak away, though,” Gar said.

“That might attract attention in and of itself,” Shinigami pointed out. “I say we stop at Gokrun III first and then head on to the moon if we don’t find anything?”

“Then it’s settled,” Barnabas said. “We should leave immediately, although…”

“Although?” Shinigami prompted after a moment.

“I have an idea,” Barnabas said with a slightly evil grin. “One moment.”

He brought up his computer and typed a message to Carter:

Carter,

I’m sorry for my unexpected departure. I hope I can make it up to you and Aliana. I’ll be back in Tethra soon (a week, maybe) to have some repairs done on the Shinigami, and hope Aliana will be there so we can have a longer discussion.

Barnabas

“We’re having repairs done?” Shinigami asked. “In Tethra?”

“Of course not,” Barnabas said, “but they’re going to think the ship will be grounded and vulnerable, not to mention they’ll think they can put on blue coveralls and just sneak inside. It’ll keep them all there while we track down the committee. If nothing else,” he added, “it should save their lives. Remember when they ended up directly between us and the Yennai missiles?”

“That’s a much better reason to bring them along,” Gar pointed out. “That saved our asses.”

“Good point, but we’re going to leave them here for now. Shinigami, are we underway?”

“Yes.” Shinigami stood up and stretched, an affectation she had seemingly picked up from Carter. “Anyone up for a round of sparring?”

Chapter Sixteen

As he had instructed it to do, Feword’s biosuit woke him in the middle of the night. A trickle of chemicals gradually brought him out of his sleep cycle and then pumped him up with a carefully mixed cocktail that would give him the energy of an adrenaline rush, but no shaking or nerves.

The suits of all the committee members and guards had similar mechanisms built in, meant to allow them to operate without error at unusual times. Rather than trusting the whims of a good night’s sleep, they could be alert and awake whenever the situation required it.

In this case, while the rest of the research facility was asleep.

Feword activated his suit controls and began to make his way carefully through the halls. He had been very thorough in his patrols over the last week, and he had reviewed many hours of security footage from the labs. He needed to make sure that he understood every automated security system that was in place.

So far, the scientists seemed to have been sincere when they’d said that they did not waste their time thinking about potential attacks. They did not seem to do even the most basic scans when they entered rooms, they did not make a point of checking the security feeds each day, and their logons to the computers were very simple. When they left the laboratories at night, they did not activate any motion sensors or other alarms.

Feword would need to speak to Grisor about this at the earliest opportunity. He was here for now, and that would be good enough, but whoever had designed the security protocols should be fired—or executed. They couldn’t allow anyone who knew about the facility to survive, after all.

And in the meantime, Feword would build new protocols and teach the scientists to use them.

But that was not the purpose of tonight’s excursion. Feword took the stairs down from the sleeping quarters, making sure to use the set on the far side of the building. The echoes of his steps could be more easily controlled than the sound of the elevators activating.

He did not want the scientists to wake up.

He had known for several days now that he would have to do this. Almost immediately after arrival, he had realized that the facility was short-staffed, and he knew that was not a mistake the committee would have made. They had deep pockets and did not hesitate to spend money in pursuit of their goals.

Which meant that part of the research team was missing.

Feword had not bothered Grisor with this news. Grisor trusted him implicitly to resolve issues, and Feword did not intend to tell him anything until the mystery was solved and fixed. He had his suspicions, in any case. The scientists had been so casual when they spoke of what would happen if someone broke in to attack them.

That must be because they had already survived an attack, Feword reasoned. And if they were not mentioning it to the guards, if they had hidden it from Grisor…well, what explained that?

A partial mutiny. They feared that they would be held responsible for their fellow scientists’ missteps.

Feword knew they did not have to worry about this, especially if they had fended off the attack. Grisor made a point of not killing underlings for circumstances outside their control. However, things were going well enough that he did not want to cause any more chaos with what would inevitably turn into an investigation, followed by an influx of new scientists.

No. They were close with Jeltor. They did not have any time to spare. Feword would help, and when this crucial phase was over, he would tell Grisor what had happened.

He gave a pleased ripple as his biosuit opened the door to the laboratory and turned on the lights. Feword thrived on action, not on the endless talking and planning that others seemed to enjoy. He had watched the scientists over the past few days, and even that phase of watching and waiting had tested his patience.

Now he was ready to act. He looked at the central tank in satisfaction. Jeltor was sleeping, his body scarred from the chemicals in his tank and limp with exhaustion.

Feword went to the tank’s controls and brought up the chemical and tape history. The scientists had given a demonstration for Grisor, but they had since been more gentle with Jeltor. They were apparently worried that the male would break, leaving only a husk.

They were running out of time. It would be no use to convert Jeltor once the Navy realized what had happened. Feword gave a decisive nod, queued up the successive waves of chemicals and the tapes of Grisor’s voice, and activated the machine.

In the tank, Jeltor’s body jerked. He thrashed in desperation and fluttered to one side of the tank, pressing against the glass. It was an instinctive act, and when it gave him no relief, he began to fling himself around the tank. Feword could see from the motions of his tentacles that Jeltor was begging for an end to the pain, but the audio output of the tank had been turned off.

Feword shook his head slightly. The scientists were dedicated to their work, that much was indisputable—they never seemed to take breaks—but they were, like many civilians, emotionally weak. They did not want to listen to Jeltor’s pleading.

That pleading, however, provided a clue as to Jeltor’s mental state, which Feword must know in order to convert him.

When he was done here tonight, he would erase any trace of himself from the computers and leave the laboratory exactly as he’d found it. The scientists would do their work, unaware of his intervention, and during the nights, Feword would continue to break Jeltor.

He switched on the audio, and the sound of Jeltor’s pleading echoed through the laboratory.

“No! Stop! Please, stop it—make it stop, make it stop, make it stop—hurts—please—”

Feword could see why the scientists had found this distasteful, but it had to be done. He linked his hands behind his back and began to pace, sighing as he did so. His job was not always pleasant, but he always had—and always would— do what he must do to help the committee.

Like many others, Feword had found the committee through service to one of its members. When his first employer had been driven out of the Senate, Feword had taken his recommendation to work for Grisor. He was assured that Grisor was devoted to the cause of Jotun supremacy in the sector.

At first, Feword had doubted this. Grisor did not make fiery speeches in the Senate, and he did not have as many enemies. How devoted could he be, if he was not publicly devoted to the cause?

Over time Feword had come to appreciate Grisor’s methods, however. Grisor didn’t pick fights that he knew would lead nowhere. He did not waste his time with speeches that would not convince his opponents. Feword did not want to admit it, but Grisor made his former employer look foolish—a firebrand with spirit, but no strategy.

And Grisor, once he had realized that Feword was capable and discreet, had promoted Feword to working for the committee. There he had found his true calling: doing his part to spread the rule of the Jotuns across the sector, and someday, beyond. The Jotuns were stronger and more intelligent than any other species, transcending their physical limitations with better technology than anyone else had.

Of course, the Etheric Empire had seemed like it might become a problem…but they were a Federation now and were apparently not interested in aggressive expansion. The Jotuns would easily triumph against them, Feword was sure of it.

In the tank, Jeltor’s pleading had begun to break down, and he was starting to echo the words on the tape. This seemed like a good sign to Feword. He returned to the controls, considered for a moment, and increased the intensity of the chemicals.

He could not keep from rippling in happiness. Soon he would be able to contact Grisor and tell him that the conversion was complete. They would send Jeltor back into the nest of vipers that was the Admiralty Board, and Jeltor would begin to take the Navy down from the inside.

Feword felt nothing but contempt for the admirals. They were the best and brightest the Jotuns had to offer, and instead of using their talents to further the cause, they were attempting to uncover the committee and destroy it. Feword could not understand their behavior.

He did not have to understand it, he told himself. He only had to stop them.

And Jeltor was the key.

Chapter Seventeen

Carter finished reading Barnabas’ message and smiled. Barnabas could certainly be scary if someone offended his sensibilities, but those same sensibilities meant he was also very courteous and kind. In this case, he was going to come back shortly for maintenance Carter knew he didn’t need, just to make sure Aliana hadn’t been offended by him rushing off.

Carter would have written back and said that Barnabas didn’t need to worry if he thought it would do any good. He knew it wouldn’t, though. Once Barnabas had decided he needed to do something, he didn’t let anything stand in his way.

Outside, shrieks sounded in the afternoon air. Aliana had given Carter and Elisa a break with childcare and was presently playing a game with the twins that seemed to be a cross between hide-and-go-seek, tag, and Aliana-is-a-jungle-gym. The three of them had promised not to bump into any of the fruit trees that were growing behind the bar, but everything else seemed to be fair game. Chairs had been tipped over, a table was being used as a barricade, and toys littered the ground.

The kids were occupied, and Aliana was having a good time; those were the two things that counted. Carter had seen her unwind considerably since she’d gotten here, and he was hoping he could persuade her to quit her job and stay on High Tortuga. Cargo ship workers were a dime a dozen. Her boss wouldn’t have any trouble replacing her, and it was hardly going to be difficult for her to get a better job—even if she didn’t want to work at the bar.

Carter headed down the stairs with a smile on his face and came out in time to watch Aliana flop dramatically to the ground and pretend to be dead while the twins clambered all over her, giving what Carter assumed were victory yells.

“I see you’re winning,” he remarked.

“Daddy!” The twins leapt up and came at him in a rush.

Aliana propped herself up on her elbows and laughed as Carter pretended to fend off the attack. “A foolish mistake, Grasshopper. They cannot be defeated.”

Carter grinned and allowed himself to be pulled to the ground and turned into a new jungle gym. “So, I heard from Barnabas.”

Aliana had gotten up slowly, and now she kept her back to him for a long moment while she dusted off her clothes. When she turned around, her expression was polite and detached. “Oh?”

Carter frowned at her. “Something wrong?”

“No, of course not.” She gave him a smile and a shrug and came to help Samuel get up when he tumbled onto the grass.

Carter kept frowning, but she didn’t look up. “Should I not have asked him to come?”

Aliana looked up, suddenly worried. “Oh, no! No. It was really very nice of you.”

“It just seemed like maybe you weren’t so happy to meet him.” Carter sighed. “I mean…was it too much? I know it seems like he’s some big deal, but that’s not how he acts. I thought…well, I thought you’d like to meet him, that’s all. I remember how excited you were to help, all those places you found yourself.”

Aliana sat down. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and Carter could tell she was trying not to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he said automatically.

She shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said when she found her voice. “You did a really good thing to call him. I’m glad you have him and his friends to…well, watch over you.”

“And be friends,” Carter stated meaningfully.

She frowned at him in confusion.

“Ali, do you have any friends right now?”

“Of course I have friends.” She looked insulted. She crossed her arms—and then realized he was waiting for her to name them. “Oh, come on. I have… Well, there’s—” She sighed and rubbed her hair. “Don’t look at me like that! I mean, there’s Katie.”

“How long has it been since you saw Katie? Okay, since you spoke to Katie. In any form.”

She sighed. “Years.”

“Yeah, see, that’s my point!”

“What, that I’m lame and have no friends? Thanks.”

“That you could maybe…stand to…” Over the years, Carter had learned the signs that he was on dangerous ground, and when Aliana crossed her arms and looked at him, he knew this was one of those times. “Look, you’re on some random job because it was all you could get, and I get that, Ali, I do. But we’re here, and we could give you a place to crash while you looked for something better. And there are a lot of people you could actually be friends with here, not just random coworkers who might or might not be low-level criminals on the run, you know?”

She harrumphed. “Everyone on my present crew is… Okay, I see your point. I just don’t want to take charity, Uncle Carter. I really don’t.”

“I know how that feels, but I think you established that by not calling us when Lawrence took your ship. You’re here now. Let us help you. Please?”

“I want to get back at him,” she shot back.

“I know,” Carter replied soothingly. “And you can. With a better job here, you’ll be able to do that, right?”

Privately, he hoped that Aliana would get a good job here, make some friends, put down some roots, and forget about Lawrence. But even if she didn’t, he had made a good point about this being the best way to go about it.

She frowned at him. “Look,” she said finally. “I can’t just leave them in the lurch. Let me check if they need me for this run, and then we can go from there.”

Carter chewed his lip. He knew if he let Aliana go off on another trip, the odds were pretty high that she wouldn’t come back to High Tortuga afterward.

So, with a silent apology to Elisa and to any deities who might care that he was lying, he pulled out the big guns.

“Hey, Samuel, Alanna—you want some cake?”

Delighted shrieks assaulted his ears.

“Cool—. I think I saw Qaladra making one. Why don’t you go see?” They ran inside as quick as their tiny legs could carry them, and he took a deep breath and committed to the lie.

He went to sit next to Aliana. “Look, I wasn’t entirely honest when I said I wanted you to come so I could tell you about the mine.”

“What do you mean?” Aliana looked at him, worried.

“You haven’t spent much time with Elisa yet,” Carter explained, “so maybe this just seems crazy to you, but I swear—this pregnancy is really hard on her.”

“Oh.” Aliana swallowed. “I had no idea. She seems so happy all the time.”

“She’s a rock star,” Carter agreed. “She’d never in a million years admit that she’s having trouble, but I can see it, and I guess I thought… Well, when you wrote, it just seemed like the universe lining up, you know? I thought, ‘Aliana and Elisa would get along so well.’ You’re great with the kids, and Elisa really likes you.” It helped that a good portion of this monologue was true because Carter wasn’t great at lying. “So I hoped that if you came here and saw the bar and everything, maybe you’d want to stay.”

He looked at her. “I miss you. You’re seriously one of my favorite people in the family. Everyone else wanted to be homebodies, but I really felt like you got it, you know? Traveling all over, seeing new sights. I’d love to have you work at the bar. There are so many new people coming through Tethra every day, you’d never get bored…”

“I had no idea,” Aliana repeated. She rubbed her forehead. “Why didn’t you just ask?”

Because this is all a lie I made up on the spur of the moment? Carter plastered a smile on his face and shrugged. “I didn’t know how to. And, well, Elisa would kill me if she knew I was saying all this.”

That part was definitely true.

“Uncle Carter.” Aliana reached over to squeeze his hand. “Of course, I’ll stay if you need help. As long as you need me.” She smiled at him reassuringly. “And everything’s going to be just fine with the pregnancy, I promise. Uh…has she seen a doctor?”

“Oh, yeah, they say everything is fine.” Carter, having been backed into a corner, scrambled to come up with a new lie. “It’s just, uh…you know, things can be fine but also really hard…emotionally…” Sensing that he was babbling, he shut up and smiled again, then remembered he was supposed to be sad and tried to remember how you looked when you were sad.

Aliana gave him a quizzical glance. “Well, I’m happy to stay,” she said decisively. “But I do want to make sure my boss knows what’s going on. I’m going to go talk to him, okay? That’s the ship I came in on. He’s still at the docks.”

“You need backup?” Carter asked. He’d had his share of bosses who liked to bluster and say he owed them one thing or another.

“Oh, no, don’t worry.” Aliana gave him a quick hug. “I’ll go talk to him and be right back, okay?”

“Sure.” Happy about his victory, Carter went off to find Elisa, and located her in the basement, swearing at one of the cider presses. She’d been determined to have cider in the bar and had insisted that they make it traditionally. She seemed to be regretting her choices.

She wiped her forehead and gave him a smile and a shrug. “This cider press is possessed, I swear.” Her smile faded. “What did you do?”

“What?” Carter asked innocently.

“I know that look, Eastbourne.” She jabbed a finger at him. “You look guilty. You look like you did something bad. What was it? Tell me.”

“Okay, okay!” Carter gave a little laugh. “So, here’s the story. Don’t be mad…”

* * *

Aliana pushed her way through the crowd near the docks, slipping through the workers to get to the Palpari.

She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to say to Zinqued. The Shinigami was his “white whale,” as Tik’ta had said, and Aliana knew that Zinqued wouldn’t be happy she was giving up.

He hadn’t paid her yet, though, and she was pretty sure she could scrape together enough money to pay him for the fuel it took to get here, even though he’d made a profit on their cargo run. She took a deep breath and entered the passcode on the door, yelling hello as she came into the ship.

“You’re back!” Zinqued came out into the hall from the bridge. “I am so relieved. Do you know, I actually saw Barnabas here?”

“Ah. Right.” Aliana nodded. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. Apparently, he knows people here.”

“I was afraid he would recognize me!” Zinqued said. “But he did not. Lucky break, eh?”

“Yep. Lucky break.” Aliana had a stroke of inspiration. “Apparently he’ll be back in not too long, though, so you should probably not be here then.”

“But this may be one of the best places to steal the ship,” Zinqued said eagerly. “I was thinking—he almost certainly has clearance to leave at high speed without any checks, whereas on another planet, automated systems might kick in. But with this being a human planet…”

“Yes, yes. Um.” Aliana sighed. “Look.”

Zinqued gave her a shrewd look. “Are you quitting?”

“I…yes.” Aliana swallowed. “I came here to see my uncle,” she explained. “And his wife is pregnant, and she’s having a really hard time, and he wants me to stay and help. I can’t just turn my back on him. He’s always been there for me.”

“Ah.” Zinqued nodded. “I understand. And I think, perhaps, you are worried that this job might be impossible, eh?”

“Okay, yes. Maybe. Given what I have heard, I don’t know how to steal the Shinigami. Barnabas seems like someone I wouldn’t want to mess with.”

Zinqued, far from being annoyed, smiled broadly at her. “I know. He is a worthy competitor.”

Tik’ta had come into the hallway, and she sighed at this latest pronouncement. “He’s not going to pull it off,” she said in a stage whisper. Her fondness for Zinqued was apparent, so Aliana smiled.

“And as no payment has been given yet,” Zinqued said, looping an arm around Aliana’s shoulders as she went to her cabin, “no hard feelings, eh? We made a good profit on this run to High Tortuga.”

“Thanks, Zinqued.” Aliana started packing, deeply relieved that he was being reasonable.

“Of course…” Zinqued gave an elegant shrug. “You won’t be able to steal back your ship from here.”

Aliana froze, a handful of socks halfway between her drawer and her duffel bag.

“What was it, the Rayette?” Zinqued was staring into space as though he were trying to remember. Aliana hadn’t told him which ship it was, though, so he definitely knew. He’d done his research. “She’s a nice ship,” he said pleasantly. “And the captain, eh? Lawrence Jensen. Not a nice fellow, no. Not at all.”

Aliana felt her blood pressure rising. The thought of Lawrence’s smug face always made her want to scream. “Yep,” she said, stuffing the socks in her bag and grabbing another handful. “He’s a real bastard.”

Zinqued nodded. “But it’s nice here,” he said smoothly. “A pretty town, Tethra. Very quiet. Very pleasant.”

Aliana narrowed her eyes at him.

“Enough to make you forget all about your plans for revenge, I’d think,” Zinqued said. He smiled at her. “I wish you luck, Aliana Eastbourne. And come find us when you want a job, eh?”

He left, and Aliana stared after him, her mind working furiously.

High Tortuga was a nice place. It was nice enough to make her forget her plans for revenge. But now that Zinqued had warned her about that, she resolved not to let this place lull her into a false sense of security.

And if Barnabas was coming back to High Tortuga…

“Wait!” She popped her head out the doorway.

Zinqued turned to look at her. “Yes?” he asked innocently.

“Just so we’re clear,” Aliana said, “if I could get you the Shinigami—if I get a shot at it—you’d still help me with the Rayette?”

“Why, yes.” Zinqued smiled. “Yes, we would.”

Aliana nodded, her mind working double-time. “All right,” she said finally. “Yeah. Okay. Well, maybe you’ll hear from me, then.”

Like hell, she was going to let Lawrence get away with what he’d done. If the Shinigami was the price for that, well…she’d pay it.

Chapter Eighteen

“So, when we arrive at the planet, we’re going to do about three full orbits.” Barnabas brought up a holograph of Gokrun III with a strange path traced around it. “This will allow Shinigami to scan the entirety of the planet with a low margin for error.” Seeing Gar’s frown of confusion, he pointed out, “The last base we saw here was underground. We need to be close enough to make sure that we notice entryways with similar construction.”

Gar nodded.

“Once we know what we’re dealing with,” Barnabas said, “we can make a proper plan. In this case, speed is of the essence. We don’t know how long Jeltor has before he’s mind-wiped, so we have to go in immediately. Of course, somehow this mission requires both speed and stealth, which seems like a bad combination.”

“Well,” Tafa pointed out, “to be entirely accurate, you only need them to think they’re not under attack, right? So we could try to con our way in.”

“Yeah, but the Jotun we would usually use for that sort of con is the guy we’re rescuing,” Shinigami retorted.

“Oh.” Tafa’s face fell. “Right. Forgot that.”

“It’s a good point,” Barnabas said. “And that actually gives me an idea. Shinigami, we’ve been talking about taking out all of their automated defense measures and their scanners and so on… What if we just tricked them?”

“Way ahead of you,” Shinigami said. “We’ll be doing both. When we captured the black ops ship on our last mission, I made sure to search through its communications banks. It had some protocols that I assume gave it passage through Jotun government systems, and I’ll be trying those out while I take out the scanners one by one.”

“Safer is better.”

“Of course, that’s assuming they aren’t hardwired to set off alarms if one of them goes out of contact,” Shinigami remarked contemplatively.

Everyone gave her a worried look.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, I’ll figure something out.” She sat back in her chair, crossing her arms, and then sat up and snapped her fingers. “Aha! I’ll just learn the outgoing signal of each and teach the Shinigami to replicate it so that they don’t notice it’s gone.”

“Clever,” Barnabas murmured. “What is it like to be able to do things like that?”

“What is it like to be able to go up steps without tripping over your own feet?” Shinigami asked bitterly. “I can still only walk well if the surface is entirely flat.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Barnabas assured her. The corner of his mouth was twitching.

“So I’ll come out with you?” Gar asked.

“Yes. You and Shinigami. We need all hands on deck unless this is a very small facility, and I’m guessing it’s not. If they’ve been studying multiple species, I’d guess there are a lot of different laboratories and…cages.”

Everyone sank into silence for a moment. Gar looked like he might be sick, Shinigami looked furious, and Tafa looked—to Barnabas’ surprise—just as angry as Shinigami. He had guessed that the Yofu would be scared, but she didn’t look frightened.

She looked like she wanted to kill the scientists with her bare hands.

“Should I come, too?” she asked Barnabas. She was nervous but resolute. The offer was sincere. “I helped with the last mission, after all.”

“You did, but, uh…” Barnabas fought his knee-jerk reaction to tell her no and considered the offer. “I have to think about that.”

“Whether or not it’s a good idea depends on what kinds of security they have inside,” Shinigami explained. “And that is something we won’t know until we’re in there.” It’s not a good idea, she added privately to Barnabas.

It worries me too, but I don’t want to reject the offer without really thinking about it.

I think faster than you, and I’m telling you it’s a bad idea. She gave him a meaningful look across the room.

If she wants to get involved—

Then we see how she fares in a bar fight somewhere and go from there.

Tabitha?

Oh, good idea! We’ll have her tag along with Tabitha for a bit.

No, that’s not what I—goddammit. Barnabas fought the urge to laugh. To Tafa, he said, “How about this? We’ll put you in some body armor that isn’t obvious, and you’ll wait on the ship. If the path to wherever we are going is clear and we think it’s just us against the scientists, you can come along, okay?”

She considered his words, and he saw that she wanted to argue. Thankfully, however, she seemed to remember her limitations. She nodded. “I don’t want to get anyone hurt. I just want to help if I can. It’s Jeltor.”

Barnabas met her eyes and gave a nod. “I know. I feel helpless, too.”

Tafa grumbled. “Yeah, but you get to kick the doors open and actually rescue him. What do I get to do?”

“Sneak into the Jotun Senate buildings and steal a bunch of information,” Barnabas reminded her.

“Oh.” She brightened considerably. “Yeah, I did do that.” She nudged Gar with one elbow. “I helped,” she said, very pleased with herself.

Gar grinned back at her.

I tell you, Shinigami commented, I hope those two kids wind up together.

They…they aren’t the same species, Shinigami.

So?

Barnabas shook his head and rolled his eyes. No matter how ridiculous an idea was, once Shinigami committed to it there was no talking her out of it. He was pretty sure he could expect her to be offering little conversational hints in that direction for the next few weeks.

He sighed and brought the meeting back on track. “So, Shinigami, Gar, and I will go out immediately. Tafa will stay on the ship and get it ready for Jeltor if he needs medical assistance, and she’ll join us if we need help.”

Everybody nodded.

“Approaching the planet now,” Shinigami reported. “And I want to remind everyone that we might not find anything.”

“Let’s be ready in case we do,” Barnabas said firmly. “Everyone go get ready. Shinigami, tell us when you have likely candidates for landing spots.”

* * *

Gil sighed as he stretched his tentacles to their fullest length and shook himself all over. He was exhausted. They had already been working every minute, skipping sleep and any breaks in order to get the experiments stabilized and the data out, and things had gotten harder when the new guards were assigned to them.

He knew it could be far worse than it was. The guards didn’t suspect Gil’s and Wev’s true identity yet, after all. Gil had been suspicious about all of their questions, but they seemed to be genuine in their desire to help—not prying for secrets or poking into closets.

No, they thought Gil and Wev were upset about their failure to break Jeltor, and they were trying to help. It would be sweet, really…if what they were talking about wasn’t destroying someone’s life and bringing down multiple outside governments.

Gil shook himself. With the guards so close by, he had to stop himself from asking them why in the heavens they would support something like the committee. They seemed fully aware of the committee’s goals, and Gil could not think of any reason that a Jotun would want such things.

Of course, that was not entirely true. He could understand that as the Etheric Empire shook nearby sectors, as other species rose and fell, anyone would want the safety and security of being undeniably in charge.

But he would rather throw himself in a vat of acid than trust his safety to the committee.

He came into the laboratory that housed Jeltor’s tank and saw Wev bent over the controls, fingers tapping furiously.

Good morning, Gil said courteously.

There was no answer.

Wev?

Wev straightened and turned to him, and Gil knew at once that something was terribly wrong. He hurried across the room to look into the tank.

He’s not responding the way he should, Wev said as Gil joined him. The two of them peered into the tank together. I noticed that they were accessing the early morning tapes and they often liked to come by just after we started, so I’d been doing a low-acid solution in the mornings when I came in. But when I started it…

Gil looked at the tank. Jeltor looked like he was blissfully asleep. Are you sure the tubes are working? Are you sure there’s acid in there?

Very sure. Wev’s voice was sharp. You can put your tentacle in if you doubt me.

Gil gave him a look. No, thank you. But if he’s not doing well…

I don’t understand it. Wev thrashed in frustration. Yesterday, he was fine.

It’s possible it was simply too much for him to take, Gil stated simply. He hesitated. It might be kinder to end it—and it would eliminate the possibility of him actually breaking.

The two of them had discussed this before. In one sense, they were agreed—if it looked like conversion was imminent, and there was no other way to stop Jeltor from being released into the Navy like a ticking time bomb, they would kill him rather than allow him to be made a weapon.

Gil, however, had been in favor of killing Jeltor immediately and claiming it had been an accident, while Wev had argued for leniency and time. The two of them disagreed rarely enough that Gil had decided to wait.

Now, however, he was nervous enough to bring it up again.

Wev ignored the suggestion. I don’t understand, he was muttering. What could possibly…

He broke off and went to a bookshelf in the corner, where binders held overflowing research notes that had been mostly-neatly organized…and then removed, scanned, and replaced by Gil and Wev. They had also brought their own cameras to monitor what went on in the lab, fearing that one of the experiments might go wrong.

Now the two of them watched the tapes from the night before—and saw Feword enter the laboratory.

No, Wev whispered. What is he doing?

I think it’s pretty clear what he’s doing.

Not that! Wev rarely yelled either, and Gil was startled into silence. Wev turned to him, looking at Gil with his actual body rather than with the biosuit’s face. If he suspected us, he would kill us. So what is this? What is he doing?

That was a very good question, and Gil did not have the answer. He considered, pacing back to the tank that held Jeltor. They had only ever done the barest hint of the protocol on Jeltor, unsure how successful the scientists’ procedure really was.

It seemed that it was very successful. In only one nights’ work, Feword had nearly converted Jeltor.

We have to end it, Gil told Wev.

No! Wev was adamant.

Wev, he’s a weapon, and he’s almost ready to be used.

He deserves better than this. Wev stared Gil down. Why are we even doing this if we won’t help the people hurt by it?

There were many answers Gil could give. He knew that. He could have said that letting Jeltor go free would hurt more people than it would help. He could have said that Wev had seen situations where nothing could be done, because that was true—they had been on site during numerous civilian uprisings on alien worlds, or disasters that had trapped people without any hope of them being saved.

Sometimes people couldn’t be saved.

But Wev’s tone shamed him to his core. Gil had grown cold as they had continued with this job. He had begun to make these decisions too easily.

He did not like what that said about him. He nodded to Wev and sent something—not words, but an impression of his mind. Wev rippled soothingly.

Do not blame yourself. Your intentions have always been good.

Gil did not trust himself to speak for a long moment. He looked at where Jeltor floated in a haze.

We have to have a plan, he said. And it has to be today, because one more night of this and there might be nothing we can do to bring him back.

Chapter Nineteen

“Well, here’s a problem we didn’t anticipate,” Shinigami announced, halfway into their second orbit of Gokrun III. She was halfway through dressing her body in armor, so she used her sensors to find Barnabas in his quarters. “I have eight potential landing sites.”

“Ask Tafa to help you,” Barnabas suggested. “She has a good eye for these things.”

“Oh, good idea.” Shinigami switched to a ship-wide channel. “Tafa, I need your help on the bridge.”

“On my way!” Tafa called back. Shinigami felt her move from her quarters and into the hallways at a run.

Shinigami smiled. Now that she had a body, she could actually express emotions in an action, and she had found that she enjoyed doing so.

She continued to devote part of her attention to her armor as Tafa approached the bridge. It was blood-red, and although she had no trouble with uncomfortable or heavy armor the way a human might, she still appreciated that hers was sleek and well put together.

Barnabas was right, she decided. Wearing well-tailored clothes was something that gave you confidence in your abilities. As much as she teased him, she had to admit that he had a good sense of style—something she did not yet have. She had been studying her memories of Gabrielle, Ekaterina, Tabitha, and Bethany Anne, and she had no idea how she wanted to present herself. Each of them managed to look stylish in very different clothes, which was a puzzle Shinigami could make neither heads nor tails of.

On the bridge, the doors slid open for Tafa and Shinigami abandoned her musings on style. She projected a holograph of herself in the corner, already dressed in her armor, and gave an appreciative whistle at Tafa’s outfit. Though Tafa did not yet have a full suit of custom armor, she looked surprisingly confident and at ease in the lightweight black bulletproof clothing she was wearing.

She smiled at Shinigami. “I am ready to help.”

“Excellent.” Shinigami brought up the eight potential sites, each catalogued with scans and computer-generated reconstructions. “We have more than one potential landing site, and we thought you might help us narrow it down. You tend to see details the rest of us miss.”

“Oh! Of course.” Tafa went to sit down and swung her head back and forth, looking at each picture out of one eye, then the other. “Hmm. I’d throw out site one. That honestly looks like the weird part of the energy signature is due to it having utility functions.”

“It’s in the middle of a lake,” Shinigami protested. “That’s suspicious.”

“This is a resort planet for Jotuns, remember? It’s probably doing something with the water and doubling as a strange hotel-thing.”

“Ah, right.” Shinigami made that picture disappear.

“As for the others…” Tafa examined each in turn. “I’d say five and eight are the most likely so far. Show me more on five.”

“Five? Really?” Shinigami was surprised, but she wiped the other information and put up a map of energy signatures, intercepted transmissions, and a slowly-rotating 3D map of the facility.

“They’re taking great care to make the output look like it’s a manufacturing plant, but I don’t buy it.” Tafa shook her head. “The shape of the windows is odd. I’m actually not sure those are windows, and those transmissions make no sense.”

“They’re probably in code.”

“Or they’re gibberish,” Tafa said. “And if you haven’t cracked them already, I’m guessing that’s what they are.”

“Ohhhh.” Shinigami studied the data with new appreciation. “Organic life forms are so sneaky. All the data here are fake. They mean nothing. I hate that.”

Tafa smiled. “Unless you find any more, I’d say five is our best bet.”

“I say we just go, and if it’s not that, we try another one.” Barnabas had come onto the bridge while the two of them were talking, and now he adjusted his collar slightly as he studied the screen.

“Nervous?” Shinigami asked.

“Yes,” he replied flatly. “Yes, I am. Jeltor has been missing for a week, and I have no idea how long he can hold out.”

Shinigami watched him for a moment. If they went in and found the wrong facility, they risked alerting the committee to their presence and losing valuable time. But Barnabas wasn’t stupid. He already knew what he was risking, and he didn’t often allow emotion to overwhelm him.

She noted the faint dilation in his pupils and the way his pulse was beating quickly in his neck. His motions had the faint, too-quick undertone that came from adrenaline and cortisol. Yes, he was certainly experiencing strong emotions right now.

She looked at Tafa. “How sure are you that this could be the research facility?”

Tafa looked back at the screens for a long moment. “Very sure,” she said, with a nod. “This facility isn’t what they say it is, that’s for sure, and it is the most suspicious of the lineup you gave me.

Shinigami nodded to her and Barnabas.

“Take us down, then,” he said. He looked at the screens. “I’m guessing you’ll have to go through that canyon directly?”

“If we don’t want to go blasting in the top, yes.”

The building lay at the end of a canyon with spears of rock jutting up to make landing almost impossible. The only clear way to get in was down the length of the canyon, which was narrow and filled to the brim with sensors and turrets. Landing on the roof of the facility, while it was probably possible with the Shinigami’s maneuverability, would almost certainly alert the guards to their presence.

“What about a Pod?” Barnabas asked.

Shinigami considered this. “No good. Remember, I want to both destroy each defensive device and replicate its signal, and I can’t do that from a Pod. If I send you down and it turns out that the signals I’m sending don’t keep us invisible to their tech, we’ll have a problem I can’t easily solve, and the people in the facility will be alerted.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “But I’ll get us through that canyon quickly, I promise.”

Barnabas’ lips tightened, but he gave her a nod. “I know you will,” was all he said, and Shinigami knew he was reassuring himself. As worried as he was, and anxious to have this over with, he wouldn’t take it out on them.

Barnabas, Gar, and Tafa watched from the bridge as Shinigami descended through the atmosphere and approached the canyon. It was close to a mile long and was housed on one of the larger islands in the planet’s southern hemisphere, part of a volcanic archipelago that was remarkably inhospitable to life.

“That’s another thing,” Tafa said. Everyone looked at her in confusion, and she smiled self-consciously. “Sorry, I was still thinking about why I’m so sure this is the place. If anyone escaped from that facility, it would be almost impossible to get out. The Jotun captives would have no water to swim through and the other species would have to climb straight up and out of the canyon, which is impossible, or take their chances going through the whole mile with all the turrets. Even if they’d killed everyone in the facility the automated defenses would still work, and once they got out of the canyon…they’re in the middle of nowhere, with no edible plants or freshwater. My other top choice was in a much more hospitable place.”

Everyone nodded. Given the committee’s penchant for secrecy, this location made a lot of sense, and Shinigami was pleased with Tafa’s analysis. It could be frustrating to watch organic life forms make huge leaps of logic, but she had learned that what they called “instinct” often produced well-founded conclusions, and they simply could not articulate the reasons yet.

She was already working to include Tafa’s latest leap in her own algorithms, identifying every factor she could and trying to replicate the technique on other data.

ADAM and ArchAngel II were correct—working with organic beings was equal parts rewarding and insanely frustrating.

She moved her holograph to sit in the captain’s chair as she guided the ship into the canyon. She had finished putting on her armor and decided to join the rest of the people on the bridge. Briefly, she wondered what it must be like only to do one thing at a time.

It sounded terrible.

The first part of the alert system had not seen them yet, and Shinigami created a map of every piece of machinery she could find on her scanners. A network sprang up on the screen, overlaid on the video of the canyon.

As she had guessed, each sensor fed information to the others, which allowed the sensors to move the turrets into place before any ship was even in range. Moreover, it looked as though the turrets were programmed to track any ship down the length of the canyon, whether or not it was tagged as an enemy.

That was smart, and Shinigami hated it when her opponents were smart. One wrong move and they’d be dealing with a veritable hailstorm of projectiles. She sighed and analyzed the first sensor’s outgoing signature. Then she copied it, launched a set of pucks at the sensor, and began broadcasting its message so that there was not even a blip in the signal when it was destroyed.

Everyone on the bridge held their breath—except for Shinigami, who had no breath to hold. The doors slid open for her to walk in and she went over to the captain’s chair and settled into it, melding almost perfectly with the holograph.

Her hair was always better in holograph form.

Next up was the first pair of turrets. At first, Shinigami thought they only received signals, but she realized a millionth of a second later that they also sent signals to the other turrets about their tracking speed and pinged other turrets when their target went out of range.

Because they did not seem to have noticed her yet, she was able to take them out without alerting the others. There was no data stream to interrupt.

She proceeded through the canyon carefully, destroying each sensor and set of turrets in turn and replicating all of the signals. She did not stop them as she set the ship down and began the process of preparing the airlock.

“The air is inhospitable here,” she reported. “I recommend helmets for you two.”

“You as well,” Barnabas said immediately. “We don’t want them to know what you are if they catch sight of you.”

“Smart.” Shinigami stood. “One other thing.” She panned the camera sideways to show a Jotun ship waiting outside the building.

“There’s a ship?” Barnabas said immediately.

“It hasn’t been used in some time,” Shinigami said. “Its systems are in a ready state of a sort, but it’s mostly dormant. The Jotuns are very good with quick activation times on their technology. I’ll see what I can figure out about it while we’re all inside.”

“Good call.” Barnabas nodded to Tafa. “Stay here with the bridge sealed,” he instructed. He’d been careful of her feelings before, but there was no equivocation now. “Until we determine if it’s safe, I don’t want you to take any chances. Is that clear?”

Tafa nodded, swallowing.

“As long as you’re aboard, we’ll put you in charge of opening the doors,” Barnabas added. “That means if anyone passes all of the automated checks somehow, they’ll still have to contend with you. For verification…hmm. Just ask anyone who tries to get in for a piece of information that only the three of us would know.”

“Okay.” Tafa gave the Yofu version of a thumbs up: her two inner thumbs linked together, and the two outer ones pointing straight out to the sides.

Shinigami responded with the “rock on” gesture, and Barnabas snorted.

“All right,” he said as the assault team left the bridge. “Let’s go get our friend.”

Chapter Twenty

Shinigami went first as they approached the doors of the facility. That made Barnabas nervous, but she was indubitably the best one to disarm the doors and disable any alarms. She laid a palm against the door and thought for a long moment before nodding decisively. The door slid open.

Silence. No alarms. Barnabas nodded, and they crept inside.

They were in a pleasant antechamber that must be the receiving room for whatever dignitaries came to visit this place. As was the case with many Jotun spaces, water featured prominently: little streams ran along the edges of the room, providing a soothing sound and sending light bouncing off the stone walls.

It was clear that no one used this room often, however. The air carried the faint scent of a fountain that hadn’t been cleaned, and the whole place had just a bit too much dust.

Barnabas and Gar kept their guard up as Shinigami scanned the room and walked the edges of it. In the end, instead of guiding them through the big doors at the center of the back wall, she went to a smaller door on one side of the room.

Which was when they heard the crying.

It was only the faintest sound, but it was enough to make Barnabas’ heart twist in his chest. It wasn’t in a human register, but there was no mistaking what it was: a keening wail that held no hope.

All three of them looked at each other, faces echoing the despair they were hearing. Then Shinigami turned back to her work with renewed determination and wrenched open the door to the side corridor. She strode inside without looking back, and there was no mistaking her expression.

She was ready to kill whoever was doing this with her bare hands if she had to.

Barnabas exchanged a quick glance with Gar before running after her. He caught up with her partway down the hall and was pleased to see she was slowing, drawing to one side of the corridor so she could check one of the rooms inside without being seen.

She wasn’t going to let her anger get the better of her, then. That was good. She exchanged a look with Barnabas.

Do you want to do this? You’re probably better at it.

Barnabas gave a quick nod and was just taking his place when the door came flying off its hinges and a Jotun was thrown out of the room to slam against the wall and slide down it.

It didn’t notice them as it staggered to its feet, and a moment later, another Jotun came running out of the room, one arm raised for a punch. The first only just made it out of the way, and the punch caught it on the arm. It leveled a strike at its attacker, but weakly.

It was clear within seconds that one of these two Jotun was trained to fight and the other was not. Barnabas held an arm out to keep Shinigami and Gar back. If one of these two was not trained in combat, they were probably the scientist—which meant the facility was under attack, and that meant…

He narrowed his eyes. Should they break this up?

Shinigami, if the scientists are dead, do you think you can get into their results and undo what they did?

Depends on how good they were about keeping records, Shinigami said drily. She leaned back as the stronger Jotun lifted the weaker one off its feet and slammed it into the wall.

Which was when the strong one noticed the three of them. It pulled the weaker Jotun away from the wall, slammed it into the wall once more, and turned to face them. Everything about its movements conveyed a threat, and Barnabas shifted to the balls of his feet.

“What’s going on here?” Shinigami asked before anyone else could speak. Barnabas had to hand it to her; she had the command-voice down. She spoke like she should be answered, and to his amusement, the Jotun obeyed without thinking.

“He attacked me while I was in the records room.” His mechanical voice grated; something must have gotten knocked out of place in the sound box. “I suspected that he wasn’t one of the real scientists, and I was—”

That was all he got out before the water in his tank began to foam and the biosuit staggered to its knees. He’d made the mistake of taking his eyes off his opponent, and the other Jotun had managed to reach up and jam something into one of the weak points between the plates of armor.

Whatever he’d done, the stronger Jotun died quickly, and the weaker one hauled itself to its feet.

“Who are you?” it asked without preamble. And then, strangely: “Are you Barnabas?”

“I’m Shinigami,” said Shinigami. She jerked her head at Barnabas. “He’s Barnabas.”

“My apologies. So the smaller humans are the females, then?”

“Mostly correct. The standard height of a male human—”

“Shinigami,” Barnabas interrupted. “This is not relevant.” To the Jotun, he said, “Who are you? That seems to be the big question.”

The Jotun looked down at its opponent for a moment. “He was right. I’m not one of the scientists. I’m part of the Jotun Interplanetary Intelligence Agency, and my partner and I infiltrated this facility a month ago.”

“So how did the guard not know who you were?” Gar asked.

“It’s complicated,” the Jotun said evasively.

“All right,” Barnabas said. His tone was just a touch too pleasant, and he saw both Gar and Shinigami step back a bit so as not to be in the metaphorical line of fire. “Here’s the deal: we’re here to find Captain Jeltor. You seem to not be on the committee’s side, so hopefully, you’ll help us find him. That would be good for you. What would not be good for you would be to get in my way.”

“You have a way to get out of here?” the Jotun asked. “Because if you can get Jeltor out, I will gladly help you do that. I’m Gil, by the way.”

“Barnabas. That’s Shinigami. That’s Gar.”

“A Luvendi wearing armor,” the Jotun murmured. “Will wonders never cease!” A moment later he was back to business, however. “There are three more guards, all with suits like this one. My partner Wev is on another floor. We’ve been trying to isolate the guards all morning to kill them one by one. They were sent by the committee to ‘assist,’ us and they’re close to blowing our cover. We were going to steal their ship to escape.”

“Let’s keep moving while we talk. But first—” Barnabas pointed. “All the records are in that room? All the data on the conversion process?”

“Yes.”

“On it,” Shinigami said at once. She strode into the room and groaned. “Hard copies?”

“The scanner in the corner will allow quick digitization of the files,” Gil told them. “They were worried about someone being able to access the computer systems, so all the systems here are self-contained and the data is regularly transferred to hard copy and wiped.”

“I hate competent people,” Shinigami said with feeling, yanking down a file and going over to the scanner. “I hope you’re okay with this room being a mess when I’m done because I’m not going to take the time to put everything back.”

“Be my guest.” Gil sounded amused. “You showing up here is a stroke of luck, quite frankly. We knew we needed to get the data out, as well as Jeltor and as many of the experiments as we could, and we needed to kill the guards. I sense you’ll all make those objectives much easier.”

“That sounds correct,” Barnabas said simply. He hoisted one Jean Dukes Special. “Shall we? Jeltor first.”

“Ah.” Gil set off, but his tone was worried. “I have…bad news about Jeltor.”

“What is it?” Barnabas heard himself ask. In the records room, he heard Shinigami stop moving as she strained to hear. Gar had gone pale.

“One of the guards seems to have decided to try to hurry things along,” Gil said. He led them to a junction and turned. “This way. We’ll be going up two flights. You see,” he said, returning to his explanation, “a week or so ago, Jeltor was delivered to us for conversion. We had spent the past few weeks before that trying to rehabilitate the other experiments, and we hadn’t had much luck. We strung things out as much as we could. We weren’t sure what they could see on the security feeds, so we had to pretend to work on Jeltor, but we weren’t really doing the whole procedure. The problem is, that soldier did do it, and I’m afraid Jeltor is partially gone.”

The elevator arrived with a little ding and Gil went to step into it, but Barnabas grabbed his arm.

“You can undo it, though, right?” His voice was dangerous.

Most people would have quailed in the face of Barnabas’ anger, but Gil was not one of them. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’m not a scientist. I sincerely hope that with this data, a way can be found to undo the damage—but I cannot be certain of that.” When Barnabas said nothing, Gil continued softly, “I wish I could.”

Barnabas released his arm and stepped into the elevator silently, aware of Gar’s comforting presence at his side. His mind was whirling.

He only vaguely heard Gil say, “What worries me is that the conversion process creates certainty, and certainty is very seductive. Extremism, for instance, takes hold even when there has been no chemical conditioning like there is in this case.

“What does that mean?” Barnabas asked wearily.

“He means that to be certain of your worldview is something people desire,” Gar said unexpectedly. “The world is uncertain, and people want it to not be. They’ll subscribe to ridiculous beliefs just so they can feel more secure.”

“Precisely,” Gil said with a nod to Gar. “The Luvendi is quite correct. What makes this belief even more damaging is that it used…well, torture, to render the victim vulnerable before feeding them the information about who to obey.”

Barnabas shook his head. “Those worldviews fall apart when they’re tested,” he said. “Not always, but they do. I’m not giving up on Jeltor.”

“Nor should you,” Gil said. “But be cautious. The process doesn’t destroy function or intelligence. Jeltor is still intelligent enough to pretend he’s been rehabilitated even if he hasn’t been. You cannot allow him to be exposed to classified material. He must be kept secure.”

“Oh, I had no intentions of letting him back into the Navy,” Barnabas said.

Admiral Jeqwar shared Gil’s worry, after all. She struck Barnabas as the type who preferred being safe rather than sorry.

And in this case, he was fairly sure that meant killing Jeltor and delivering a stirring eulogy at his funeral rather than taking the time to rehabilitate him.

* * *

Feword frowned at his screens. Yeldred had been on his break for far too long. Feword knew that it was distasteful work to tend the alien experiments, but that didn’t mean he would allow the male to shirk his duty.

Although he did intend to speak to Grisor about terminating these particular experiments. They were clearly broken beyond the point of rehabilitation. The one Brakalon cried all the time, until Feword was tempted to shoot him just to get rid of the sound.

He traced Yeldred’s last known location and clomped heavily down the stairs rather than using the elevator. Feword was a big believer in doing as much as he could with his suit. One should become at home enough in it that using it was like second nature.

Perhaps some combat drills might give his team more focus…

He was still thinking when he came out into the hallway, then his eyes widened.

Down the hall, was an open door, and he made his way toward it quickly, readying his weapons.

His suit was finely calibrated and able to move softly, but he hadn’t ever gone up against a cybernetic body housing an Empire AI. In the records room, Shinigami had stopped moving as soon as she sensed Feword’s steps in the stairwell. Near the closed door lay the guard’s body, surrounded by a growing pile of scanned records. As Feword opened the door, Shinigami sank into a crouch. If he looked her way as he walked past the room, he would see nothing out of the ordinary.

He continued down the hall and toward the ship, and Shinigami flexed her hand, then clenched it, staring at the fist. She was still not as at home in her body as she needed to be to fight a trained killer.

But it looked like the time had come.

Chapter Twenty-One

The elevator doors opened, and Gil left the elevator first. He beckoned silently once he had determined the coast was clear and Barnabas and Gar followed him, weapons at the ready.

Barnabas heard the footsteps nearby first, and a split-second later Gil motioned for them to stop. He pointed to Barnabas’ gun, then pointed ahead.

Barnabas nodded and motioned to Gar to wait. He could hear that it was one Jotun, and he suspected that he could do this more quietly on his own. Silence was of the essence. No one seemed to have noticed yet that one of the guards was dead, and he wanted to keep it that way.

Barnabas, Shinigami said in his mind.

I’m a little busy right now. He paused at the corner and waited for a moment. The footsteps were going away from him, so he slipped around the corner and followed the Jotun guard as it marched along the hallway. He had to move quickly in case it decided to swivel in its tank. What is it?

One of the guards discovered the murdered one. He went right by the records room without properly scanning it, so he doesn’t know I am there. He’s going toward the main entrance.

Stay there, Barnabas said unequivocally. I’ll send Gar, and you two can take him out together.

Roger that.

Gar—go back to the records room. Check the corridor before coming out of the stairwell. One of the guards has discovered the breach.

On my way.

Gar dropped out of contact, and with that, Barnabas leapt into action. He had never worried too much about quietness when he killed Jotuns before, so he was going to have to improvise.

He had drawn his knife, and he lunged quickly to jam it into the plating by the Jotun’s knee. It tried to pivot, but without both legs it was useless. It staggered and he caught it, wary of the sound of it crashing to the ground.

Its arms were still functional and they shot out, knives and needles popping out of recessed panels. Barnabas jerked away, swore internally, and made a split-second decision. He half-stood and then came down again with all his might, breaking the tank with his fist and plunging his knife into the thrashing body.

He had no idea where any of the vital organs were, but he seemed to have hit something important because the thrashing ended and the Jotun lay still on the floor. A moment later, footsteps sounded behind him, and Barnabas looked to see Gil staring at the Jotun.

“You know,” he said inconsequentially, “many believe that biosuits are completely impregnable.”

“That,” Barnabas said, “is not true by a long shot.”

“I know.” Gil sounded almost sad. “Come with me. We need to get to Jeltor.”

“Agreed.” Barnabas stood. “How are we going to get him to the ship, by the way?”

“There’s a spare tank we can use.” Gil led the way down the hall. “I think we probably don’t want him to be in a biosuit he can move around in.”

“You’re really worried he’s been converted.” Barnabas made himself say the words.

When Gil said nothing, Barnabas felt dread settle into the pit of his stomach.

* * *

Gar made his way down the stairs almost silently. He had thought that combat training would be all learning how to hit things, but Barnabas had made Gar learn all sorts of other skills as well: marksmanship, throwing, moving silently, and more. Gar tried to practice another lesson as he walked: paying attention to every sound he heard.

When he reached the door at the bottom of the stairs, he paused and listened closely. He did not hear anything moving outside, so he eased the door open as quietly as he could and closed it behind himself. Then he slipped down the hallway to the records room, gun at the ready.

It was good that he had because he was about halfway to the records room when the guard Shinigami had heard came back into the hallway.

Gar didn’t hesitate. He broke into a full-on sprint, a roar bursting from his lips. Shinigami—wait and choose your moment!

Will do. She sounded amused. Your battle cries are ridiculous, you know.

I know. Gar gave a small smile of satisfaction as his opponent started running as well. But he has to think I’m committing to this. One moment.

As they ran, the Jotun leveled one arm at Gar, and Gar’s newly-enhanced vision picked out the gleam of a tiny needle. The Jotuns really did love their poisons and needles. It didn’t matter, however, because Gar hadn’t ever intended to tackle his opponent. Instead, as he drew close, he took two long, loping steps—and leapt over the Jotun’s head.

The Jotun gave a mechanical squawk of surprise as Gar flipped in midair. He managed to swing around quickly but hadn’t yet readied another weapon when Gar aimed his pistol and shot twice in succession.

The Jotuns weren’t stupid. Their biosuits were designed to be bulletproof. They hadn’t had much contact with the Etheric Empire, however, and Gar’s bullets caused a spiderweb of cracks across the tank. The Jotun flailed and gave an angry yell. Blades appeared on its arms, and armor plating shot forward to close around the internal tank.

In the confusion, Shinigami wrenched open the door to the records room and threw the dead Jotun at the new attacker, sending him staggering sideways.

Ice-cold, Gar told her.

His career is helping people take over the world with mind-control and torture. Shinigami strode out into the hall, her face set in an expression that made Gar never want to mess with her.

You know, that’s a good point. He brought one leg up and kicked the Jotun to keep it off-balance, then pivoted and dropped his shoulder, whipping the leg around in a circle and slamming his heel into the biosuit’s head. The Jotun dropped to its knees.

“Who are you?” the Jotun yelled. “A Luvendi?” It looked at Shinigami. “And a human. Barnabas.”

Shinigami stood her ground as it leapt up and tried to charge her, and her fist shot out at the last moment. Instead of fragile bone and flesh there was metal and reinforced biotic skin, and her punch dented the armor plating around the tank. An ominous crack sounded from inside.

“So close,” Shinigami said, “and yet so far.”

The Jotun leapt into motion, slashing at her, driving her back with strikes and kicks, and Shinigami ducked and tried to find her way through the flurry of strikes. All of the cuts on her arms opened bloodlessly.

Gar watched, not wanting to intervene too quickly. Shinigami was competent at sparring; more than competent, really. She simply did not have the base of knowledge yet that most species had about how she could move and where her body was in space.

She struck with her fists, knees, and elbows and created a series of impressive dents in the Jotun’s suit.

And then it drew back and cocked its head to the side. One hand was clenched around her wrist.

“Aha,” it said. “A biosuit of some sort, and you don’t know how to fight in it yet.”

Gar’s reflexes had been enhanced, but even he had trouble following what happened next. The two combatants moved in a flicker of strikes executed so fast that their limbs were a blur. Shinigami, when push came to shove, had abandoned the traditional tempo of the fight and was lashing out as quickly as her programming would allow.

Gar gave a whoop. “Yeah!”

He was able to see the Jotun stagger sideways across the hall, and from the angle, she must have backhanded it in the face. There was a strange smell in the air and fluid was leaking from its chest.

“You have him on the ropes, Shinigami!” Gar wasn’t entirely sure what that phrase referred to, but Tabitha used it every so often.

Unfortunately, the Jotun had realized the same thing—and it was prepared for that eventuality. A cloud of smoke billowed from its body, causing Gar’s skin and lungs to burn. He doubled over in agony. Electrical current buzzed, and Shinigami cried out. A moment later, there was the pounding of feet and the slam of a door.

Their opponent was gone.

* * *

Feword staggered up the stairs, trying not to panic.

The humans were here, and they weren’t what he’d thought. For one thing, the human he’d been fighting was actually biotic. Were all of them biotic? He had no idea. For years, humans had seemed to be creatures of flesh and blood, but what if that had been a ruse?

All that mattered was Jeltor, he reminded himself. He had to get there before the humans did.

Because if the ship nearby was the Shinigami, it was too much of a coincidence for them to be here. They knew Jeltor had been taken for conversion. Who else knew, Feword could not be sure—but his duty was clear. He needed to get the asset out and to a safe place.

He just wasn’t sure if he could make it. His suit was leaking steadily, and he hunkered down against the bottom of his tank as the fluid dipped lower. How had that Luvendi’s weapons managed to crack his tank? And how could the human possibly have hit him hard enough to do further damage?

Feword was rarely angry, but he was angry now. Grisor was seeking to accomplish great things, and these humans—these lesser beings—were trying to stand in the way.

He wasn’t going to allow that.

He made it to one of the control panels on the wall and leaned there for a moment, struggling to breathe properly. The fluid wasn’t retaining oxygen the way it should.

That meant he had to move faster, not rest here. His suit’s arm came up and attached to the control panel, working its way into the sensor array and then unleashing a series of commands. There was another human, yes, and it was with…Gil.

Of course. Too late, everything became clear. Gil hadn’t been holding back from converting Jeltor because he was worried about the captain breaking. He hadn’t been a scientist at all. Feword could have kicked himself.

Take out Gil and Wev, he instructed over the personal channel in his suit.

Only one reply came back, from Yeldred: I saw Wev going up to the alien cages. I will deal with him.

Be careful, Feword replied. He wanted to scream his frustration. I believe Boltar and Jilrun are dead.

There was a pause, and then Yeldred recovered his composure. And Jeltor?

I’m getting Jeltor, Feword replied. They’re not going to win.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Barnabas! Gar’s tone was panicked. It got away from us. And Shinigami—

What’s wrong? Barnabas fought the urge to stop or turn around. He had to keep moving. Gar said their target had gotten away from them, not that they were in the middle of a bad fight.

I’m fine. Shinigami sounded furious. Our opponent knew how to deal with cybernetic bodies, that’s all. I should have guessed he would. He managed to keep me motionless for a few moments while Gar was dealing with the poison gas.

We’re following his path since he’s leaking fluid, Gar added. But—

Poison gas? Barnabas interrupted. He pressed a button to flip his helmet into place, and it appeared around him as if materializing out of thin air. In reality the super-light material had been stored in a collar around his neck, but the effect was impressive. No, if he can neutralize you both, stay back.

“What’s going on?” Gil asked him.

“We need to move quickly,” Barnabas explained. “The guard who went downstairs got away from Gar and Shinigami. I’d guess he’s going for the most valuable asset on site, wouldn’t you?”

Gil nodded, and his pace quickened. “This way, then. We need to get up two more flights before he does, and I don’t know which way he’s going.”

They had only gone a few more yards, however, before there was the unmistakable click of all of the doors on the floor locking.

Barnabas swore internally with the sort of inventiveness that only a multilingual devotee of Bethany Anne could summon. He grabbed one of the nearby doors and had to be pushed away the next moment. The doors were electrified.

“I should have heard the hum,” he muttered, embarrassed.

The truth was, he had heard the hum, and he’d been so angry that he’d wanted to yank the door off its hinges anyway. His fury at his opponent and his fear for Jeltor were getting the better of him. He needed to get a handle on himself now.

Shinigami, is Gar okay?

He’s all right, Shinigami said soothingly. I got his helmet on him, and he’s breathing good air now. All healed, no damage.

Excellent, thank you. To Gar, he said, Is Shinigami okay?

She seems to be doing fine, Gar reported. I was worried, but she’s recovered and is muttering about how next time he’s going to get a nasty surprise.

Good, thank you. He was satisfied that since he hadn’t asked them about themselves, both were telling the truth, Barnabas looked around and considered, then he took a running start and brought his rubber-soled boot up to smash the door at the end of the hallway off its hinges. He stared at it, panting, as it clattered down the stairs.

“Come on,” he called to Gil. “You said we had to go up two flights.”

“Yes.” Gil caught up quickly. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Most humans can’t,” Barnabas explained. “However, I—actually, you know what? You work in Jotun Intelligence, I think I’ll avoid giving you details.”

“Have it your way, but if you’re referring to the fact that Queen Bethany Anne and some of her inner circle are enhanced in some ways, that’s hardly new information.” Gil sounded untroubled. “She fought King Yoll in single combat, and there have been numerous stories about—what is his name, John Grimes? Yes. And others. But if all humans could do such things, I think we would have heard about that.”

Barnabas grunted noncommittally, taking the stairs three at a time. He was hardly going to go out of his way to confirm what so far was only conjecture on Gil’s part. The Jotuns had already gone a bit crazy with enhancement, in his opinion, and he wasn’t going to give them any more ideas.

At the door to the floor that housed Jeltor, they could again hear the electrical hum, and Barnabas sighed as he considered his options. He had no real space to build up steam here, and the door was set to open into the stairwell, not out of it—meaning that he would need to strike it far, far harder to break it.

And time was ticking away. With a snarl, Barnabas whirled away. “Who else could help us?”

“My partner, but he’s not on this floor.” Gil hesitated, then became quiet. Barnabas guessed he was communicating internally, and that guess was confirmed when Gil said, “I asked him to help. He says he will.”

“How much time?” Barnabas asked tensely.

“He’ll do it as fast as possible,” Gil said. “That’s the best I can tell you.”

“I don’t need your best,” Barnabas shot back, “I need Jeltor saved.”

“No,” Gil said. “You know very well that what we need is for the committee not to achieve its goals. As important as Jeltor is to you, he’s a secondary concern.”

* * *

Wev hurried down the long corridor that lay between the rows of cages. Some of the aliens came forward to snarl at him, others to plead for mercy—at least, so he assumed. Many of them could no longer speak in any way he understood. The Brakalon did not say anything to him. He only cried, as he always did.

Soon you’ll be free, Wev promised them silently. They couldn’t hear him, but he needed to say it to stay sane.

Getting them out would be difficult. The facility had not been made to transport captives to and from ships. Either they left converted and ready to serve the committee, or they were killed. If the facility were breached, there were self-destruct implants throughout the entire building.

The thought filled Wev with utter hatred. The committee believed that everything should serve their purpose or be destroyed. There was no middle ground.

While Gil was taking out the guards one by one, Wev would be preparing the experiments to load them into the ship. He had already done the preliminary work to make Jeltor easy to transport. The captain had been transferred to a smaller tank and could easily be removed from the laboratory.

Now, Wev was focusing on the other experiments. Since the ship they had brought was small and had limited secured space, that meant preparing a lot of tranquilizers. They would need to keep the experiments unconscious as long as possible

Wev. Gil’s voice echoed through his suit. I need your help. Humans are here to rescue Jeltor, but one of the guards has locked us off that floor.

What? Which guard?

Does it matter? I need you to get to a control panel and get us access.

Wev swore, but he knew better than to argue. If one of the guards was trying to get to Jeltor, there was no saying what they might do. If it was Feword and he had figured out how to use the trigger words on Jeltor…

The whole Navy could be compromised. Cursing, Wev ran as fast as his biosuit would take him, coming out into the main corridor while the experiments called after him in desperation.

His fear and distraction were nearly fatal. A punch caught him on the side of his sensor array and knocked his suit sideways. Yeldred, armed and armored far better than Wev could ever hope to be, stepped out of the shadows with a ripple of satisfaction.

“Setting the experiments free, traitor?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Behind him, Wev could see the control panel winking, so he did the only thing he could think of. He held up his tentacles in a gesture of surrender. “What’s going on? Why are you attacking me? Are you with the Navy?”

“Am I with the Navy?” Yeldred hissed back. He had always been the meanest of the guards, often threatening to kill the experiments when they disturbed his sleep. Now, he readied a blade and a gun as he stared Wev down. “When your partner is the one killing guards?”

“He did what?” Wev shot back, trying to make himself sound as shocked as possible. Then, in the split-second Yeldred considered this, Wev unveiled the gun he kept well-hidden in his arm plating and shot.

Sparks burst across Yeldred’s sensor array, and he staggered back with a yell. Wev shot again, denting Yeldred’s gun, and then ran around him to the control panel. He plugged in, keeping his sensor array trained on Yeldred as the guard tried to regain his equilibrium.

Feword was the one who had shut down Jeltor’s floor. Wev struggled through the blocks, trying to undo them, cursing when he saw how Feword had locked everyone else out of the system. Wev knew the overrides, but they weren’t going to be quick…

Wev! Any progress?

Wev was slammed up against the wall. Yeldred had recovered, and his knives bit into the joints of Wev’s armor.

Yeldred…here…

Wev!

Have to get Jeltor out, Wev managed. He kicked back and tried to level an elbow strike at Yeldred’s head, but he didn’t take his other arm out of the panel. He was devoting as much attention as he could to getting around Feword’s blocks. Soon…I’ll have it done… Another hit, and he felt a searing agony in his Jotun body. The suit was made to tell him when it was injured, and it was badly injured now. Soon, he repeated.

Wev, get out of there!

Yeldred was laughing. “You’re going to die, traitor. You and Gil, and I’m going to enjoy showing your bodies to His Excellency.”

“You…sure about that?” Wev gasped, and he unblocked one part of the system Feword hadn’t gotten to yet.

Nearby, the cage doors swung open, and the captive Brakalon bellowed. Yeldred swore, turning to look as the experiments streamed around the corner and saw him standing there, weapons out.

Yeldred had a gun, but they didn’t care. They rushed him, screaming and desperate for vengeance, and Wev did his best to stay upright and conscious while he waded through the last of Feword’s blocks.

Gil…

Wev! Wev, are you all right?

It’s…done. Go get him. Wev dropped to his knees, pulling his arm out of the wall panel, and the last thing he saw was the world tilting crazily as the Brakalon picked his biosuit up gently from the floor.

* * *

“Wev!” Gil’s voice was full of agony.

Barnabas didn’t wait. He couldn’t. He wrenched the door open as soon as the hum disappeared and ran down the corridors. To any organic being, he would be only a blur.

Jeltor, please! Please be all right. He skidded around the corner into the big central room, terrified of what he would see and hear.

But the big tank was empty, and the wet tracks across the floor showed him that another tank had been wheeled away.

When he felt the low thrum of engines nearby, Barnabas realized they were too late.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Shinigami! Barnabas took the stairs down to the ground floor at top speed, grabbing the handrails to swing himself around. He would have dropped straight down through the center, but the Jotun architects hadn’t left nearly enough room for that. Fire up the ship! We’re going now!

Engines are on, she reported. Problem, though… One of our allies is dead, and the other one is walking right into it—

No time!

I’m not finished, Shinigami said severely. The live one is walking into a trap, and the committee must know what’s going on because they have this place on a self-destruct. As long as I’m here, I can stave it off, but once we leave…

Not our problem.

Do you even hear yourself? She was angry now. Our allies here are why we had a fighting chance to get to Jeltor. We can catch that ship, even with a few minutes more of a head start. What we can’t do is resurrect our allies from tiny exploded bits!

I can’t— Barnabas gave a yell of fury and spun to slam his fist into the wall as he skidded to a halt. Goddammit! We were supposed to get him, Shinigami. This was supposed to be—

He stopped and stood for a moment, his chest heaving.

There was a pause, and then she said quietly in his mind, May I speak as a friend?

Barnabas swallowed. Yes. Always.

Something about this enemy has hooked deep into you. All trace of joking was gone. Please, for this one, let me call the shots when I say I need to. I promise you that I will not sacrifice our friends.

Barnabas stood frozen for a long moment. Months ago, he would never have considered letting Shinigami pick their targets and formulate their plans. Of course, a few months ago, she would never have suggested going out of their way to save their allies, and her plans for infiltration would have involved missiles and flamethrowers.

She had changed…and so had he.

Barnabas, please! You have to trust me. Gil doesn’t have much time.

He felt farther from logic and reason than he had in years, and he clung to her voice as a bastion of sanity. I’m going now. Up two flights, yes?

Yes. She sounded relieved. I’m getting Gar to the ship unless you think you’ll need him.

No. You two go. Barnabas was taking the stairs three at a time, pulling himself around corners as he had gone down, his mind narrowing to the task ahead: get Gil out.

When he burst onto the top floor, it was with a battle cry on his lips and murder in his eyes. Gil was injured badly, his movements jerky, sparks raining down from his suit, but he wasn’t backing down from his fight with the Jotun soldier. He screamed his friend’s name over and over as he fought.

Around them, the experiments lay wounded and dying. Barnabas guessed that these aliens were the only reason Gil stood a fighting chance. It looked as if they had attacked in a mob and had done significant damage to the soldier’s biosuit. They weren’t strong, however, and most of them bore such brutal wounds, inflicted head on, that it looked like they had no longer been safe enough to do anything other than charge their captors in a fit of rage.

And there, on the side of the room, was a Brakalon taking its last breaths. As it died, Barnabas heard the keening sound of its cry and remembered what he had heard in the entryway of the facility. The cry was full of so much pain and loss that he could hardly help seeing into the creature’s memories: the destruction of its home, the death of its family, the torture it had endured.

Something inside Barnabas snapped.

The committee’s lackey never stood a chance. From his perspective, Barnabas moved in a blur. The punch Barnabas leveled at him was hard enough to punch through the armor plating on the front of his suit. His tank exploded within the armor shell, and the Jotun’s body was smashed against the back wall.

Gil staggered back in shock as Barnabas ripped the suit limb from limb, a wordless roar bursting out of his chest. When it was done, when the suit was nothing more than a sparking ruin, he stared at it with his chest heaving and his hands twitching, aching for something more to hit, to tear, to destroy.

He staggered back to the Brakalon and knelt. His bloody fingers, coated with the slime from inside the Jotun’s tank, reached out to brush the creature’s face.

Rest, he told it. He found the memories of its family, living and happy, and he brought those to the surface of its mind. You don’t have to fight anymore. Rest.

He felt its happiness for one blessed moment, and then the pain released entirely and its head fell back onto the floor.

Barnabas. Whether Shinigami could see what he was seeing he did not know, but her voice was sober. The records are loaded, and we should go now. They’re stepping up their attempts at a self-destruct.

Barnabas stood. He was unutterably weary now, and he wanted nothing more than to be gone from this place. He looked at Gil, who was kneeling by Wev’s body.

“Come,” he told the Jotun. “We have to go. There’s nothing left here.”

Gil came with him as if in a dream, stumbling a little as he walked. He didn’t speak while Barnabas led him into the stairwell and down the three flights. He walked numbly past the body of the Jotun guard outside the records room, and he did not look around at all while Barnabas hurried him onto the Shinigami and they braced for takeoff.

But when they heard the alert to tell them they had left the atmosphere, Gil stirred to life at last. His mechanical face turned to Barnabas and he said, his voice flat and lost, “It should have been me.”

* * *

Feword slumped into the pilot’s seat and shook with rage. The repair module in the ship had done its job well. The leaking from his tank had stopped, the fluid was replenished, and the rest of his suit…

It would hold until he could get proper repairs done by a master mechanic on one of their bases. That would have to do for now. There was nothing to do in the meantime except try to relax—

An automated system of alerts sprang to life a moment later, wailing throughout the ship. In the tank nearby, Jeltor was startled awake. He thrashed, blinded and crippled by the torture, but his terror soon gave way to exhaustion and he floated limply, realizing he was helpless.

Feword gave him a contemptuous look before turning to look at the ship’s control panel. He knew what the alerts were without looking, but he still stared at the sensor arrays for a long moment.

The Shinigami was in pursuit. He simply had to hope he could make it to Jotuna D before they caught up with him. The ship was already traveling at its top speed. Fiddling with it would help nothing.

Feword resisted the urge to stride across the bridge and shatter Jeltor’s tank. This traitor, this upstart captain, had cost him his whole team—and the research facility.

Feword hoped he was worth it.

* * *

Barnabas helped Gil to the shuttle bay, where Shinigami was waiting with tools. Gil stood without a word of protest—or, indeed, any sign that he was still conscious—while Shinigami’s exquisitely-calibrated hands repaired the tiny cracks in his tank and the multitude of wires and joints that powered his biosuit.

“It isn’t as good as it would be if a Jotun mechanic had done it,” she said when she was done. “Not all of the weapons panels will work properly. We’re formulating more fluid to put into the tank. Gar will be here with it soon.”

The mechanical head nodded once.

Barnabas had been pacing near the door, his hands linked behind his back, and now he looked at Gil. What would he be feeling if it were Gar or Shinigami who had been lost in that facility? He could not imagine.

“Do you need to go anywhere urgently?” he asked at last.

Gil said nothing for long enough for Barnabas to wonder if he’d switched off his sensor arrays and retreated into his Jotun body.

“No,” he said finally, tonelessly. “I’ve informed Intelligence of what happened. There is no more we can do. I will have to go back to the Agency.”

Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged a look.

“They’re not going to hurt you, are they?” Shinigami asked finally. She was always willing to be blunter than a human would be in her place.

“No!” Gil’s tone betrayed genuine shock. He looked at her as Gar and Tafa hurried in with a closed container of fluid. “Why would you think that?”

“One too many bad experiences,” Barnabas answered for Shinigami. “We’ve seen a great number of people be punished for things that were beyond their control.”

Gil began to laugh. He laughed wildly, the sound cutting off as Shinigami eased his tank forward for Gar to pour the fluid in; the sound came back when the tank was settled into place once more, bouncing off the walls. It was disturbing in its intensity.

“What more could they do to punish me?” Gil finally asked. “Wev is dead. What could they do that’s worse than that? No, my punishment is my failure.”

“You didn’t fail,” Barnabas assured him quietly.

“I asked him to go!” Gil yelled. His voice clipped against the range of the speakers, raw in its grief. “I was the one who said he needed to stop what he was doing and get Jeltor out—and we didn’t!”

“We’re going to get him back,” Shinigami told him softly. She opened her mouth to say more but caught Barnabas’ minute head shake. She closed her mouth again.

“Gil,” Barnabas began, “I know that no words can bring Wev back.”

Gil stared at him, and Barnabas could feel the hatred roiling in Gil’s mind. How dare Barnabas even speak to him, when Wev had died for Barnabas’ mission, and Barnabas had his whole crew around him, alive and safe?

“Both you and Wev were prepared to give everything to stop the committee,” Barnabas said gravely. “To stop your own government from becoming something truly horrific. Wev did nothing less than what you would have done in his place.” He paused. “I imagine…well, I imagine neither of you thought you would get out of this mission alive.”

Gil stared at him wordlessly.

“Wev paid the price you expected to pay,” Barnabas said, “but you’re still alive. I know it’s too soon right now, but I hope you will continue to fight. The committee is not defeated yet, Gil. The Jotuns still need you.”

Gil looked down at the ground.

“Gilwar,” he said finally. “That’s my full name.”

“Gilwar,” Barnabas repeated. “We’ll leave you in peace. Speak up if you need anything. Shinigami will hear you.”

He waved the others out of the shuttle bay and lagged behind them as they made their way to the bridge. He wasn’t surprised to see Shinigami turn to look at him from down the hall.

Do you want to talk about it? The question was awkward, but the fact that she’d asked it at all made him smile.

Not…yet. There were too many thoughts for him to articulate any of them. I’m going to shower, and then I’ll come to the bridge. Let’s see if we can capture this ship before they get wherever they’re going.

Jotuna D is my guess, Shinigami said. And I’m doing what I can. She looked at him for another moment, then turned and walked toward the Pod-doc that had been formulated to fix her cybernetic skin.

Barnabas watched her go, then went to his quarters.

Trust me, Shinigami had said. He could do that. He had to.

She was right. Something had hooked deep into him with this case. Without his team, he would be lost.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Barnabas?” Shinigami’s voice echoed around the room as Barnabas finished buttoning his shirt.

He paused. “Yes?” His heart was suddenly beating very quickly.

“We’re pursuing, and not far out from Jotuna D. I have not been able to disrupt any of their systems so that we could land. I’m worried that if we try to force it, they will simply kill Jeltor.” She paused, and he could sense her choosing her words carefully. “My recommendation would be to keep following the ship without engaging.”

She placed faint stress on the word recommendation, and he sensed that she was looking for his input. Shinigami, it seemed, did not enjoy command.

Barnabas smiled slightly before remembering that she could probably see him. “I think your reasoning is sound,” he said. “I’m willing to go with your judgment on this. I trust you.”

She made a sound like a spoon in a garbage disposal, leaving Barnabas wondering what exactly she’d meant to convey. Privately, he thought that she might be a little nervous about running a mission.

Since they had begun working together, she had definitely changed—more than he had realized, in fact.

“We’ll be in range of the moon in forty-five minutes,” Shinigami told him, apparently having recovered her composure. “I’ll know at that point if they’re going to be landing there. I’ll tell you if anything happens before then.”

“Thank you.”

Barnabas studied himself in the mirror for a moment before combing his hair carefully. He selected a tie, knotted it, and pulled on a vest. This was a useless gesture, as he might need to change into armor again in short order, but putting on clean, neat clothes made him feel like himself.

He had not felt like himself for some time now.

He worked hard to think of nothing as he cleaned his armor and his weapons, taking care not to get any grease or blood on his clothing. He laid everything out once more when he was finished, looked at it in satisfaction, and washed his hands thoroughly. After the time spent doing these tasks, he felt calmer.

“You should come to the bridge,” Shinigami said suddenly.

His calm vanished. Shinigami did not tend to speak like that unless there was a good reason. Barnabas left his armor laid out and headed for the bridge at a brisk walk, trying to retain a sense of process and decorum. Halfway there, he broke into a run and arrived at the same time as Gar and Tafa.

Barnabas stepped back to allow them onto the bridge first. Discipline, he believed, was made of small moments like this, forcing himself to stillness when he wanted to rush to his seat—as if it would help.

That was when the ship banked sharply. Alarms went off and Tafa gave a worried cry, sliding into her seat and bringing up all of her panels. Gar, who had gripped his chair to keep from falling, threw a hand out to steady Barnabas, and in her seat, Shinigami fixed her eyes on the screen with grim determination.

“Shinigami?” Barnabas crossed the room quickly, giving Gar a nod of thanks, and sat to study the view screens. Missiles and energy beams of some sort were streaking past them, and from the flicker on the screens at the side of the room, concerted attacks were being made on their cloaking and other internal processes.

“Jotuna D,” Shinigami said, sounding annoyed, “has a defense system that rivals High Tortuga’s.”

Barnabas turned to look at the screen again. The Jotun ship was not far ahead of them, although it was moving more quickly than Barnabas would have thought possible. Of all species he had personally encountered, the Jotuns were the most dangerous in terms of technology.

Until recently, he would have said they were less dangerous than other species because they did not have imperial ambitions. Now, however, he was not so sure. Whether or not the committee enjoyed broad support, Jotun society had produced a dedicated and well-funded group that was hell-bent on subjugating the rest of this sector.

That said something.

A new storm of beeping arose, and the screen automatically highlighted several small objects that had been launched toward them by a satellite. Barnabas frowned at them.

“What are those?”

“Bots,” Tafa said.

“Do you have any idea what they do?”

“Override our systems, shut down our life support, and vent the ship,” said a new voice.

Everyone turned to look at the doorway, where Gil stood with his mechanical face pointing at the screens.

“I see,” Barnabas said. “Shinigami—”

“Already taken care of.” Shinigami settled back in her seat and gave a small smile. “Pucks.”

“Ah.” Barnabas smiled as he watched the red-highlighted shapes explode one by one and disappear from the tracking systems.

“I’d almost like to get one to study,” Shinigami said in an undertone.

“No,” Barnabas said flatly.

“Oh, come on, we could—”

“He’s right. You shouldn’t allow any of the committee’s technology on board,” Gil said. He stepped onto the bridge and paused. “May I enter?”

“That’s supposed to be my line,” Barnabas murmured. When everyone looked at him in confusion, he rolled his eyes. “Vampire joke, never mind.”

“Hey, he’s back.” Shinigami smiled at him. “Bad jokes and all.”

“I do not make bad jokes.”

“Yes, you do. All the time. Until recently.” She jerked her head at Gil. “And what about this guy?”

“Ah, yes.” Barnabas nodded to Gil. “Please, come in. We’ve followed the ship to Jotuna D.”

Gil came a few steps into the room. His eyes focused on the moon. “I believe Senator Grisor has an estate there.”

“That sounds about right.” Barnabas narrowed his eyes. “I wonder if he’d be so bold as to have Jeltor taken there, although he must know that we’re onto him by—”

“Everybody brace!” Shinigami yelled. A new spread of missiles had just launched, and the ship flung itself into a dizzying array of maneuvers. The planet swung wildly and disappeared in the view screen and Barnabas looked away, fighting for control of his stomach.

Something must have clipped them because the ship went spinning sideways as Shinigami swore under her breath.

“If I can just get us through this layer—”

“There’s another layer of satellites in extremely low orbit,” Gil reported.

“You have got to be kidding me! What is this place?”

“Many senators have homes here. It’s considered a very fashionable place for them, so it’s armed to the teeth, I believe humans would say.”

Barnabas looked at the missiles that were circling them and at the satellites that still had not been taken out, and envisaged another layer of satellites and whatever antiaircraft measures were on the surface. “Shinigami, get out of here.”

“What?” She stared at him incredulously. “No way. No. You can’t be serious.” The ship swerved again, and her fingers tightened on the armrest to hold herself in place. “We’re so close, and if we don’t see where he’s landing—”

“Shinigami, you asked me to trust you.” Barnabas held her eyes. “I did. Now it’s time to trust me. We aren’t going to get Jeltor back if we’re in a bunch of bloody pieces in orbit.”

Shinigami hesitated—though, thankfully, her hesitation was limited to this decision. The ship continued to maneuver without a pause.

She looked back at the screen and grimaced. “Fine. But I’m torching some of these stupid-ass things on the way out.”

“You do that.” Barnabas crossed one knee over the other and sat back. He watched as pucks took out three of the satellites and sent another reeling out of position, and he noted from the stream of information crossing the screens nearby that Shinigami was collecting as much data as she could on their internal systems.

“Is…she flying the ship?” Gil asked Barnabas quietly. “She looks away from her controls quite frequently.”

“It’s complicated,” Barnabas said. As the ship spun partially out of control, he added, “Shinigami, what was that?”

“A damned sight better than you’d be doing in my place, I’ll tell you that.” She gave him a grin.

“I don’t dispute that, but— Well, to cut to the chase, how much is Helen going to yell at me when we go in for maintenance next time?”

Shinigami snickered, which was not, in Barnabas’ opinion, a heartening sign. He sighed and rubbed his temples.

“Well, that was disappointing.”

Gil was staring at him in confusion. “I didn’t think you were generally so…calm…about setbacks.”

“Your first experience with me was somewhat atypical.” Barnabas stood. “All right, we’ll all meet in the conference room in one hour. Until then, brainstorm on your own about how to get onto that planet. We have to get there soon, and we need to go in silent. Not only that, this may be a larger base of operations. Gil, we’ll need any information you have on it.”

Gil nodded.

“Where are you going?” Shinigami asked Barnabas.

“To call Carter,” Barnabas said. “We’re going to be going back on High Tortuga later than I said, so I should definitely tell him. It’s only polite. Also, I will need beer when I get there, I can already tell.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Barnabas.” Carter appeared on the screen, suntanned and grinning. “Heading our way?”

“Not just yet.” Barnabas smiled back. It was impossible not to. Carter was the type of person whose good moods were irrepressible and absolutely infectious. He’d be the perfect person to be stuck on a desert island with…assuming you didn’t kill him for being so damned cheery about the whole experience. “We have a loose end to tie up, and I really don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

Carter nodded in easy understanding. “In your line of work you can never tell, can you?”

“I wanted to apologize,” Barnabas explained. “I doubt I’ll be back before your niece leaves.” In his head, he saw a smile very much like Carter’s and had a pang of something that felt surprisingly like regret. He would have enjoyed talking in circles with Aliana, making her panic that he’d figured out her game and then pretending he had no idea.

To his surprise, Carter looked very pleased with himself. “Actually, Aliana will be staying for a while.”

“Really?” Barnabas’ brows went up. “I thought she had…a job.”

“Oh, she did,” Carter said. He still looked like the cat that had the cream. “I pointed out that cargo handlers are a dime a dozen. No offense to Aliana, of course; I’m sure she was a damned fine employee, but it’s not like they’ll have trouble replacing her.”

“Of course,” Barnabas replied, deriving secret amusement from the fact that Carter seemed to have no idea what Aliana’s job had actually been. “So she quit, did she? Interesting. I wonder why?”

To his surprise, Carter looked almost evasive for a moment. “I, uh… Well, she’s staying to help with Elisa’s pregnancy. Look after the twins, work at the bar. You know, all that stuff.”

“Oh?” Barnabas frowned slightly.

“You know how hard being pregnant is. Well, you’ve heard, I’m sure.”

Barnabas, who had indeed heard multiple soliloquies on the subject from Gabrielle, nodded blandly. Then his frown deepened. “I thought Elisa was doing well? There’s not a problem, is there? Because we could probably get her over to one of the bigger hospitals if we needed to. In fact—”

“No, no, it’s…ah…” Carter rubbed at his hair, then shook his head. “So what’s this complication that came up in your mission?”

Barnabas allowed himself to be led but resolved to circle back around to this topic. It was unlike Carter to be evasive, and if something actually was wrong with Elisa, Barnabas wanted to know it.

“There’s… Oh, hell, where to start?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say ‘hell,’” Carter exclaimed, sounding impressed. “It must be serious.”

“How much do you know about the Jotuns?” Barnabas asked him.

“Uh…about the normal amount, I’d guess. They wear mechanical suits, they seem to be fairly reclusive. Wait—it was the Jotuns you fought with, right? Against the Yennai Corporation.”

“Some of them.” Barnabas sighed. “The Navy. The Senate was in the Yennai Corporation’s pocket.”

“Better than the other way around, right?”

“I— Well, yes. I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Barnabas felt his lips twitch. He hadn’t smiled nearly enough lately. He struggled to hold onto the feeling as he spoke again. “Another portion of the Senate—a committee—came up with this insane plan…”

* * *

In the shadows of the hallway, Aliana took a careful step closer to the door. She hadn’t come up here to eavesdrop; she wouldn’t do that. She’d heard her name, though, and that had stopped her in her tracks. And then she’d heard Barnabas’ voice, and that had made her want to hear what was going on.

They were talking about her? Her? The thought of it made her feel very odd.

And then she remembered just why Barnabas might be interested in her, and absolute panic filled her. She edged down the hallway as quietly as she could, her need to hear what was going on at odds with the creakiness of the floorboards.

Carter was competent when it came to building things. The bar was hardly going to fall down anytime soon. It was just that it creaked a lot.

To her disappointment, by the time she reached the door they were talking about something else entirely. She frowned as she listened in, biting her lip.

“So they were abducting civilians from these remote border colonies,” Barnabas was saying. “Huword always tortured a few himself. I think he just liked doing it, honestly.”

Her uncle said nothing to this, but Aliana knew him well enough to guess that he was torn between horror and fury. She knew, because it was the feeling that was currently roiling in her own chest. The two of them had always reacted similarly when it came to things like this.

Barnabas must have realized this because he said quietly, “I don’t have to tell you all of it. You know.”

“No.” Carter sounded resolute. “I want to know. I have to know what’s out there now, because—” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“No one like that will get to you on High Tortuga.” Barnabas’ reply was unequivocal. “Any fleet goes near that planet, it will be in tiny pieces within minutes. I promise you that, Carter.”

There was a pause, and Aliana leaned closer to see what her uncle was doing. He was staring at the floor, his shoulders hunched, but he nodded.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and then, “Tell me. Why would anyone… Why would they do that?”

Barnabas hesitated, and Aliana wished she could see the screen.

“Mind control,” he said finally. “They were testing a process that would make sentient beings loyal to them. Whether they perfected it for other species, I couldn’t say. There were…test subjects…in the laboratory we found, but they weren’t in good shape. They did figure it out for their own kind.”

“They were doing it to their own people?” Carter was furious now. Horror was gone; there was only anger.

“They knew that the Navy would oppose them. They must have suspected that the civilians would do the same. I don’t think they have the technology to do it on a mass scale, not yet, but…”

He took a deep breath and Aliana clenched her hands. So this was the sort of thing Barnabas did, and the type of people he stopped. She had known about the Rangers, but she’d only had a vague idea what they did. She had never heard examples.

She wished she still hadn’t. She felt sick to her stomach and then totally fine, by turns—because it couldn’t be real, could it? No one would do that.

Except, apparently they would.

“But they have Jeltor,” Barnabas said finally.

Carter made a sound of surprise and his feet, which had been propped on the desk, thudded to the ground. “Your friend? The one you rescued with Tafa?”

Barnabas must have nodded. He didn’t speak.

“Barnabas.” Carter sounded like he didn’t know what to say. “Is he… Are you all right? Is he— Of course, he’s not all right. I don’t know why I…”

“He might be,” Barnabas replied softly. Aliana could hear him clinging to hope. “They’ve only had a little time to work on him, so he might still be…himself. But he might not be.” It took courage for him to say those words. “I don’t know what to expect,” he said almost to himself. “I don’t know what it will look like, or even what they wanted to happen. It would be subtle; it would have to be, for him to be a sleeper agent. What if he lies to me?”

Carter leaned his elbows on his knees and let Barnabas talk. Aliana watched his familiar profile for a moment and had a memory, unexpected, of skinning her knees on the ground at one of the parks on the Meredith Reynolds, and Carter holding her hand while the skin healed, and she sniffled. He was like that. He just listened when you needed him to.

Barnabas sighed again. “Tell me honestly. Is Elisa all right?”

“She’s fine,” Carter said absently. Then, coming back to himself, he groaned. “I…may have exaggerated things when I was trying to get Aliana to stay.”

In the shadows, Aliana froze.

Barnabas said nothing, but Aliana guessed he must have looked disapproving because Carter threw his hands up.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he protested. “She—her husband— Okay, well, ex-husband, I think… Huh.”

“I don’t think I got any of that,” Barnabas told him frankly. “Start again.”

“I don’t even know where to start.” Carter sighed.

Aliana wanted to run. Every part of her was screaming for her to do so, but she just couldn’t seem to move. She squeezed her eyes shut, but that didn’t keep the words from making their way into her skull.

“She got married at nineteen,” Carter explained. “No, no, it’s not like that, not like you’re thinking. Harry was great. He really was. Everyone was all upset that they got married so young, but when you saw them together, it made sense. They went all over together, like Elisa and me.” He paused and swallowed. “And then Harry died. It was sudden in a way, but drawn out enough to be… I can’t even imagine, Barnabas. She doesn’t talk about it. I know a little. I can imagine more, and that’s enough to make me want to—I don’t even know. To watch someone you love waste away and not be able to help…”

Through the tears, streaming silently down Aliana’s cheeks, she heard Barnabas say, “I know.”

And he did. She could tell. He did know.

Carter took a deep breath to steady himself. “Lawrence was a mistake. He was her second husband. She did it…well, she did it when she was still cut up over Harry. She wanted to forget everything, I think, and he screwed her over good. He took her ship. I just want…”

Barnabas waited.

“I want her to be safe,” Carter finished finally. “I feel like she’s safe here. We can keep an eye on her and make sure anyone else like Lawrence gets chased away.”

* * *

Carter thought he heard something out in the hall, but when he looked that way there was nothing to see. The whole place creaked all the time, though. He was imagining things.

“Are you sure what she needs is people chasing away potential suitors?” Barnabas lifted an eyebrow.

“What does that mean?”

“It means…” Barnabas sighed. “It means the only way she’ll heal is on her own. You can’t do that for her. She has to be able to make her own decisions.”

“I’m not trying to keep her from making her own decisions,” Carter protested, but he let his head drop forward with a sigh when Barnabas raised an eyebrow in response. “Okay, maybe I’m trying to keep her from making more decisions like that one.”

“Why?” Barnabas asked him. The word was mild, but there was steel there.

“Because—look what happened! He took her ship! He left her stranded on some station somewhere—”

“Where she found a job,” Barnabas seemed to find that part amusing for some reason, “reached out to you, came to see you, and offered to help you take care of your children. Carter, she survived what happened to her. You need to let her stand on her own two feet. After losing someone you love…” He gave a distant smile, then turned his head as an alert sounded that Carter couldn’t quite hear. “I have to go. If she leaves before I’m back, tell her I look forward to meeting her again.”

“I’ll make sure she stays put,” Carter promised. He saw the look in Barnabas’ eyes and threw his hands up. “Okay, I’ll go… Ah, hell, you want me to tell her the truth, don’t you? Fine, I’ll go tell her the truth.”

“Good man,” Barnabas said with a smile. He cut the line, and Carter gave a sigh.

“I liked it better when my friends were cargo handlers,” he groused to no one in particular. “The dregs of society didn’t try to get me to be a better person.” He wandered out into the hallway. “Aliana? Are you in your room?” No answer came, and he went down into the bar. “Elisa—have you seen Aliana?”

“She took something to the spaceport, I think.” Elisa gave a shrug. “She said the kids were napping and she wouldn’t be back before they were up.”

A sense of foreboding settled over Carter. He turned without a word and took the stairs two at a time, running down the hallway to the little room they’d given to Aliana.

Her things were gone. She’d packed hastily, leaving behind a couple of shirts and a new pair of boots she’d bought since she came. Carter stared around, trying to make sense of her leaving—until he remembered the noise he’d heard in the hallway.

She’d heard everything, and he hadn’t even gotten a chance to say he was sorry.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Although he had made sure to be at the conference room a few minutes ahead of schedule, Barnabas was the last to arrive. He found Shinigami standing with Gilwar, her arms crossed on her chest, studying a series of blueprints projected on the screen. Tafa was looking at an aerial surveillance shot, and Gar was paying attention to both the blueprints and the surveillance photos by turns. They were all absorbed enough in their planning that no one even noticed him enter.

He smiled as he went to lean over Tafa’s and Gar’s shoulders and study the map. His crew was absorbed in their work; he liked that.

Tafa gave him a nod, then used the two thumbs on one hand to point out structures on the property. “These are their water filtration systems.”

Barnabas squinted at them.

“It won’t be useful this time,” Tafa said, “but for Jotuns, sabotage of the filtration systems would be both more vital to fix and have more of a psychological impact than it would for other species. We should keep it in mind.”

“While I’m disturbed that you think we’ll need to sabotage more Jotun complexes at some point, it is good to know.” Barnabas pulled a sheet of schematics out. “I take it this is the mechanism that regulates them?”

Tafa nodded. “I’m identifying everything I can about the layout of the compound so we can see what would be the best way to go in.”

Barnabas nodded and murmured his thanks before moving on to where Shinigami stood with Gilwar. There was now a schematic for a biosuit on their screen.

“These are the committee’s guards,” Shinigami explained to Barnabas. “Gilwar has indicated what sort of weapons they have, and where. It’s probably not a complete list, but it does at least tell us what to watch out for.”

Barnabas looked over the list. On the left arm of the guards’ biosuits, they would have a knife, a small pistol, and a needle with some unknown poison either in or on it.

“Are the knives poisoned?” he asked Gilwar.

“Probably,” Gilwar said, “but I couldn’t tell you for certain. If they are, it’s likely a nerve agent rather than a poison designed to kill.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Poisons react very differently in different species, and not all species are consistent in the best method of poison delivery, especially if death is the goal. Not only that, size varies considerably, so it will be difficult to have enough poison to take down a Brakalon in short order. If the guards knew they would be fighting a certain species they might choose differently, but as general protocol, my guess is that they would choose a nerve agent. Nerves respond much more predictably across species, and an incapacitated enemy is one you can easily kill.”

Barnabas nodded and studied the right arm. This one held a much larger gun, and the structure of the biosuit was slightly different on the opposing side to allow the biosuit to brace for recoil. Though there was no specific knife, each “finger” on the right side of the biosuit was tipped with razor-sharp serrated blades that could slide out one at a time or all at once to do damage to an opponent.

Both wrists, meanwhile, included recessed compartments with fixtures to plug the suit into various systems, presumably to hack them.

“How do Jotuns hack things?” Barnabas asked curiously.

Gilwar’s head swung from side to side. “I don’t…understand the question.”

“Hmm. How to say this. Does the suit include fragments of code that can easily be deployed, does one Jotun hack entirely on its own, or does the hookup allow another Jotun to access the system remotely?”

“Oh.” Gilwar looked intrigued. “Suits include fragments of code. I hadn’t considered that last option, however. That might be useful in some cases.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas wished he hadn’t just given Jotun Intelligence a new idea for hacking, but at least Gilwar seemed to be friendly…for now. “So, what are your recommendations for an assault?”

“It will depend slightly on what Tafa says.” Gilwar had apparently familiarized himself with the crew and their areas of expertise, and Barnabas reflected that he should have expected no less from an intelligence agent.

He wondered if Gilwar had figured out yet that Shinigami was the AI who operated the ship as well as the individual inside the body.

Tafa beckoned them all over to the table and held up two fingers. “Our first thing to decide is whether or not they believe we can get onto the planet.”

“They should assume we can,” Barnabas replied after a moment’s reflection. “They have to know the places we’ve gotten into already, don’t they? Let’s assume they’re planning on us being there.”

“Okay, so the next thing we have to guess is, are they going to place Jeltor somewhere we can get to him fairly easily and use him as bait, or do they actually want to protect him, in which case they’ll have him in some version of a panic room?” Tafa looked at the rest.

No one answered for a long moment.

“It depends if they know Admiral Jeqwar declared him dead,” Shinigami said finally.

“She what?” Gilwar demanded.

“She knows about the mind control,” Barnabas explained, “and did not want to tip her hand to the whole fleet, so she told select captains that Jeltor is dead and that anyone claiming to be him, or appearing to be him is an imposter who should be killed on sight.”

Gilwar nodded. “I would have expected no less from the admiral who led our fleets to victory at Jestorai.”

Barnabas resolved to look up that battle at some point, although he had a fairly good idea of what Gilwar was suggesting. Admiral Jeqwar, it seemed, was well-practiced at making cold, logical decisions.

You don’t want to know right now, Shinigami told him, having anticipated his desire to look it up. You won’t approve.

Good to know, thank you.

Clever, though.

No time for that now. Focus.

She gave a small smile, and he knew she was refraining from pointing out for the hundredth time that she could focus on multiple things at once.

Fine, he grumbled, his own smile showing despite his best efforts. Let me focus.

She shot him a grin and sighed as she looked at the map again. “My guess is that Jeltor will be bait for us. They’ve had him for a while now, so they have to assume that people might have noticed him missing. If he is not what they’d hoped in terms of being their agent, it might make sense to use him to take us out.”

“Then they’ll be in the main house,” Tafa predicted. “There’s an entertaining area, sunken, easy to flood if the guests are Jotuns, easy to keep dry if the guests are some other species. It’s very elegant, very…show-off-y?”

“Ostentatious?” Barnabas suggested.

“Sure.” Tafa shrugged.

You’re ostentatious, Shinigami accused. With your fancy words.

With my correct words?

She rolled her eyes.

“If he’s meant to be bait,” Gilwar said, “and Grisor wants to show off—which is, I think, what Tafa was suggesting, yes? Yes, then he will likely flood the area when we’re there. Most Jotuns believe their species is superior to others, and in someone like Grisor, that opinion is almost an obsession. He’ll want to do something to you that a Jotun could survive but you won’t be able to.”

“And he doesn’t know what we are,” Shinigami said smugly. “Gar, you can breathe underwater, right?”

“It’s not comfortable, and I can’t do it for a huge amount of time,” Gar said, “but for the length of a fight, yes. Enough to surprise them certainly, unless they’re very well versed in Luvendi physiology.”

“They’re not,” Gilwar said. “They haven’t bothered with the Luvendi so far.” He looked at them curiously. “So you actually think this is worth trying?”

“Yes,” Barnabas said at the same time as Shinigami, Gar, and Tafa.

If Gilwar had had eyebrows, Barnabas assumed they would have shot up in surprise. As it was, there was merely a pause before the mechanical head nodded.

“I say we go in pretending to bargain,” Shinigami said. “We can have the ship on standby in case we need it—”

“Is this a flamethrower plan?” Barnabas interrupted.

“You have to ask? Yes, obviously it is a flamethrower plan. They’re bringing the water, we’re bringing the fire. Meanwhile, we sneak Gilwar off the ship somehow to get into their systems and mess with them. Too bad he doesn’t have a suit like the assassin, huh?”

“Kantar?” Gilwar asked. When everyone looked at him, he gave a discreet mechanical cough. “I did not realize you did not know her name. I regret telling her not to explain things to you.”

“You hired her?” Barnabas asked. Somewhat annoyed, he added, “And, yes, it would have been helpful to have more knowledge about what was going on.”

“We had hoped not to involve other species,” Gilwar explained. It was impossible to tell from his tone whether he regretted his actions. “You’re very determined, however, even though this isn’t your sector.”

“My sector?” Barnabas gave him a look.

“Our sector,” Shinigami corrected helpfully. She gave him a bland smile when he rolled his eyes and laughed.

“I see no particular human interest in this,” Gilwar said. “Rather, I see no reason they would intervene in the particular way that they have.”

“I’m not a human emissary,” Barnabas explained. “I’m a Ranger.”

“A vigilante,” Shinigami said after a pause. “He goes wherever there is injustice and rights things for their own sake, not for human interests.”

“Ah.” Again, it was impossible to tell what Gilwar thought from his tone. Even his thoughts were very calm when Barnabas probed them lightly. “A justiciar.”

“As good a term as any, I suppose.” Barnabas nodded to the group. “Everyone get ready. Shinigami, you didn’t mention the satellites. Do you think you can get back through those?”

“I do.” She followed him out the door and along the corridor. “I’m basing my strategy on the Ubuara hive-mind thing they have going on. I started to come up with the idea when we were getting through the turrets on the way to the laboratory. I won’t be doing a hard hack of any of the systems, I’ll be having each satellite influence its neighbors to be focusing elsewhere using different amounts of force; all that.”

“I like that.” Barnabas grinned.

“I thought you might. It has your trademark sneakiness, and we do have a reputation to uphold, you know.” She followed him into his quarters.

“Can I help you?” Barnabas knew she was not human and that she could see into his room at all times if she wished to do so, but it still felt strange to consider changing in front of her when she was standing right here in a human-looking body.

She must have guessed what he was thinking because she snorted. “I’ll look the other way,” she offered, then turned around and studied the ceiling.

“Thank you.” Barnabas shook his head and began to change, laying his clothes neatly on the bed for him to hang up. The ship would do it for him if he wanted, of course, but he believed that habits of neatness were valuable.

This was the sort of sentiment that made Shinigami tell him he was boring at parties. The thought made him smile as he looked at her back. “Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Yes, actually.” She instinctively turned back toward him before checking herself and looking at the ceiling again. “Are you all right?”

Barnabas paused in the process of pulling his lightweight undershirt on. With reinforced fibers and the team’s trademark attention to detail, it was not only comfortable but also strong enough to repel most knives. It added a valuable layer between his skin and his armor.

He sat on the bed and considered. “I feel steadier.”

“You seem steadier. Can I turn around now?”

“Yes.” Barnabas smiled slightly and met her eyes. “Having you here, knowing that you wouldn’t let me go over the edge—I hadn’t even considered it, but I must have known on some level that it was a possibility. Your offer helped more than you know.” He considered. “And then I spoke to Carter, and I realized something else.”

Shinigami waited, head cocked to the side curiously.

“Catherine,” Barnabas said, by way of explanation. “I watched her slip away. I watched her turn into a different person. I couldn’t stop any of it. To see that happen to Jeltor, maybe to millions of others…it’s horrifying.”

Shinigami hesitated. “You know they won’t manage it, right?” she said finally. “We’ll stop them.”

Barnabas looked at her. They might already be too late, and he had to accept that. To his surprise, telling himself that seemed to make it better, rather than not quite thinking it or not letting himself think it. “Shinigami, what if they’ve turned Jeltor? What if he’s loyal to Grisor now above all else?”

“Then we kill Grisor.” Shinigami shrugged. “Problem solved.”

Barnabas gave a bark of laughter and dropped his face into his hands for a moment. His shoulders shook with mirth. “Oh, Shinigami, what would I do without you?”

“Solve problems the boring way,” Shinigami told him promptly. “Come on, let’s go. We’re almost on the surface.”

“What? You— What?”

“I didn’t want to bother you with the trivial bits. It turns out the Jotun systems are very strong against a hard hack but very, very weak against gentle persuasion.” She looked immensely pleased with herself. “I’m going to go get my weapons!”

Barnabas stared after her for a moment, then finished dressing, still chuckling. He was sure he’d do just fine without Shinigami and the rest of his crew.

But his life definitely wouldn’t be as much fun.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It was quiet as the Shinigami made its way down to the surface. In fact, it was far too quiet. Barnabas, leaning against the wall next to the airlock, wondered if he should ask if the satellites had been turned off, but Shinigami anticipated the question.

“I really did fool them,” she told him. There was a note of wounded pride in her voice. “They’ll probably change those specific protocols in the future, but changing all of their systems won’t be so easy.”

Gar had joined them. “Maybe they don’t know we’re here—or they haven’t had as much warning as they expected. You know, like they thought they would see a certain number of explosions or missile launches or something, and that would be their cue to prepare.”

The ship gave a small shudder.

“Like that?” Barnabas asked.

“That,” Shinigami said with satisfaction, “was Gilwar being launched out of a missile tube.”

Barnabas froze, and Gar made a small worried noise.

“He asked me to,” Shinigami clarified. “You two are so suspicious. He knows what he’s doing. Well, he seems to. I didn’t see any signs that he was lying. I don’t think he knows that I can read Jotun emotions.”

“We’re still waiting for your master class on that, by the way,” Barnabas told her. “Time to hope he can get something useful done, I suppose.”

“Mmhmm.” She checked her weapons one last time. “Do you think I could get guns embedded in my arms?” she asked wistfully.

“Let’s say no.”

“Oh, come on, you didn’t think about that at all.”

“A biosuit is much bulkier than you are,” Barnabas said, scrambling for a plausible-sounding reason. “You couldn’t get those guns in there without it being obvious.”

“On the plus side, I could actually be talking about guns when I said ‘these guns.’”

“I…” Barnabas looked at the ceiling and tried to figure out where to go from here.

“I’ll talk to Jean about it.”

“Please don’t. I’m not sure I’m ready to have an associate with embedded guns.”

“So you do think it’s possible!” Shinigami looked triumphant.

Barnabas knew he needed to change the subject before she asked about embedding a flamethrower. “All right. Tafa…there you are. You’ll be ready for our signal when we need extraction, yes?”

Tafa nodded. “And I’ll let you know if I see anything on the scanners that looks hinky.” She had recently started watching human movies and was surprisingly good at learning colloquialisms. “Hinky” was one of her favorites thus far.

“Right.” Barnabas nodded to Gar and Shinigami. “So we go in and pretend to be bargaining to get Jeltor back.”

“And you have an idea of how to convince them you’re not there to burn the place to the ground?” Shinigami asked skeptically.

“Sort of. The fact that I haven’t yet burned it to the ground seems like a good place to start.” Barnabas gave them all a smile and, as the blast doors opened, turned and walked down the gangway.

It was paradise—that was his first thought. The air seemed to be the perfect temperature, the wind was rustling in the abundant greenery, and there was the pleasant smell of sea, flowers, and fresh air. Grisor had made the most of this place, enhancing the natural landscape with faint touches of technology.

A man of taste. Barnabas suspected that Tafa and Gilwar were right that Grisor’s pride was heavily invested in his self-image of being a civilized and refined person. That would be his weakness, and Barnabas hoped to exploit it.

It looked like he would have the opportunity to try immediately, given that Grisor was waiting for them. Two absolutely massive bodyguards flanked him, their suits bristling with far more weapons than Gilwar’s schematics had shown. Between them, Grisor looked slender and graceful.

“Barnabas.” His voice was warm and rich. Well-suited, Barnabas guessed, to making allies in private talks or stirring emotion with speeches in the Senate. “We meet in person at last.” He sounded delighted, except for the very faint undercurrent of cruelty in his voice.

Barnabas decided to play the same game. He’d known Michael’s son David, after all. This was hardly anything new to him. He smiled back and went over to hold out his hand. He was risking immediate assassination, of course…

If they could summon enough force to kill him in one strike. He doubted they could.

“Senator Grisor.” He filled his voice with just as much warmth and shook the Jotun’s hand. “Thank you for meeting with me. I’m glad we could do this without…unpleasantness.”

Grisor laughed heartily. He turned and Barnabas fell in beside him, strolling along with the bodyguards on one side and Shinigami and Gar on the other. Both Shinigami and Gar were wearing masks that obscured their features, so it was impossible to be certain of Gar’s species.

“There is no need for unpleasantness,” Grisor said as they walked. “I am not a soldier, to solve every problem with ships and guns.” Deep contempt showed for just a moment, and Barnabas heard his hatred of the Navy and their meddling. “Tell me, what did you wish to discuss?”

“Ah.” Barnabas tilted his face to the sky and studied it for a moment. Shinigami, you and Gar pick out which guards you’re going to neutralize.

On it, boss.

“It is a small matter, in some respects,” Barnabas said. “But perhaps one that a man of your moral code would be unwilling to compromise on.”

Grisor said nothing. His face was turned toward Barnabas expectantly as the group made their slow way down a broad avenue lined with flowering trees toward the amphitheater Tafa had described.

“I understand you were wronged by a friend of mine,” Barnabas said. “He has…damaged your interests, or at least potentially done so. I gather you’ve brought him here to even the score. I know it is a great deal to ask since there is a need to make an example, but I hoped we might come to a mutually beneficial agreement that resulted in his release. Any…damage…done to him would, of course, be water under the bridge.”

You’re disturbingly good at that, Shinigami commented.

Agreed, Gar said.

I’m not enjoying it. Barnabas didn’t look at them. But the payoff should be good.

Grisor said nothing for a moment. “I must admit, from your reputation, I didn’t expect this attitude.”

Barnabas gave a laugh. “Like you, I must sometimes make an example. What man of principle does not need to do so?”

Grisor made a small sound that might have been agreement. Barnabas, having met quite a few politicians, understood it to be a good tactic for not being caught on record giving any sort of strong opinion.

“So,” the Jotun said finally, “what are you offering?”

“Ah.” Barnabas let his smile broaden. “I think you will like this,” he said as if confiding a secret. He chose his words carefully. “It should serve your interests and repair the damage that has been done.”

“I’m intrigued.” Grisor sounded cautiously optimistic.

“I hoped you would say that.” They had reached the amphitheater and Barnabas looked at it with a jaded eye. It was beautiful, of course, but he had seen enough people like Grisor to know exactly what types of ugliness lurked beneath the surface of this place: slavery, torture, control, and cruelty.

Get ready.

Aye-aye.

Barnabas turned his head to look at Grisor. He was, rather ostentatiously, not in a battle stance. He had linked his hands behind his back and did not turn his body toward his opponent. A fight began long before blows were exchanged in the subtle cues that drew an enemy’s eye…or induced one to pass over, unseen.

“I will give you,” Barnabas said, “and every member of the Infrastructure Revitalization Committee, a clean and painless death. I will raze all mention of your existence from the official record, so only your associates know about the cancer that lurked within their society.”

At his side, Grisor went still.

“This is a sacrifice, you understand.” Barnabas kept his tone light. “The families of the aliens you abducted and tortured should know what happened. The rest of the species in this sector should know. But I am willing, for the sake of the citizens you wish to raise up, to let this be a secret. Instead of a disgrace, a curse, a footnote in history whose name is spoken with contempt, you and your colleagues will merely be forgotten.”

He met the eyes of Grisor’s mechanical face and smiled. It was not a kind smile, and it was not the face of blind Justice. It was the face of a man who saw, measured, and chose.

“You will—” Grisor began.

“Die” had probably been the end of that statement, but Barnabas didn’t care. His fist shot out sideways and embedded his knife, to the hilt, in the hip of Grisor’s suit.

Gar and Shinigami had chosen their targets, but they weren’t quite as quick off the mark as Barnabas was. They launched into motion, Gar just a split-second behind the guards, Shinigami recovering from her lapse with the superhuman speed she’d been built to have. An explosive round caught the more distant guard in the head, and it was knocked, heavy and awkward, off-balance.

Barnabas didn’t wait to see how the fight behind him would play out. He wrenched Grisor off balance, swung him in a wide arc, and gave a heavy kick to send the Jotun tumbling down the steps of the amphitheater. He felt a single moment of satisfaction.

Tafa and Shinigami yelled through the Etheric at the same time, and the potted plants at the base and rim of the amphitheater popped up to reveal turrets.

Barnabas swore and threw himself down the stairs after Grisor. Gar! Get to cover!

I’m handling it! Shinigami called. I just need to get to the controls. Tafa—

Gilwar says he’s on it, Tafa reported. Just hold out!

Behind him, Barnabas heard Gar give his ridiculous battle cry and turned in time to watch Gar vault into the air, climb the back of a guard’s suit, and begin working on the weak points near the sensor array, ducking out of the way of the guard’s weapons-heavy arms.

Shinigami, not content to sit by while Gilwar did his work, was lobbing grenades and firing explosive rounds by turn, creating dead zones by taking some of the turrets out of the mix. Barnabas couldn’t see the pattern she was using, but he was sure there was one.

There was no time to waste. He landed near Grisor on the floor of the amphitheater, rolled to his feet, and dragged the senator toward the door that led into the building. A few steps, a few more—

Grisor was now between Barnabas and the turrets. He snarled and fought, but his suit wasn’t as strong as the guards’ suits, and Barnabas was continuing to keep him off-balance.

“So,” Barnabas said pleasantly, “do we have a deal?”

The shot took him fully in the back, sending him staggering forward. Barnabas felt the breath go out of his lungs and his armor, as advanced as it was, could not keep his ribs from breaking and several organs from rupturing. He let go of Grisor as red haze covered his vision. He just had to survive while his body repaired itself—

“No,” Jeltor called. He stepped into the light of the amphitheater, a new suit gleaming over his body, a smoking gun leveled at Barnabas. “We don’t have a deal.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Take out the suit! Shinigami’s yell echoed in Barnabas’ head. Now! We’ll take the guards. Get the suit!

Barnabas was already moving before he realized how deeply he’d come to trust Shinigami. He hadn’t even hesitated before taking her suggestion. If anyone had asked him, however, he would have said that—outside of a battle situation with an established chain of command—he could not imagine responding this way to anyone other than Bethany Anne. Things had changed.

For the better.

His bones and organs healed more every second as he threw himself at Jeltor.

Jeltor, forgive me. I’m sorry. He grabbed for the arms of the suit, intending to wrench one of them off. He would disable the suit piece by piece.

Or…that was the plan. Jeltor, however, directed a hard punch at Barnabas’ still-healing body, stepping inside the range of his arms. One mechanical hand grabbed Barnabas’ throat and squeezed.

“You will not hurt His Excellency,” Jeltor commanded.

Somewhere nearby, Grisor was laughing. Barnabas could hear it as the nanites began their work anew and his mind reeled from the pain. He could not let Jeltor crush his throat, but to strike at the tank would be to kill his friend—and he was not going to do that. He clung to Jeltor’s arm and looked into the tank.

“You’re still Jeltor,” he wheezed to the Jotun floating in there. “They burned this into you with pain and mind games, but you’re still Jeltor. The part of you that knows what Grisor is—that part is still there. They can tell you to be loyal to him, but they can’t make the whole rest of your mind agree. He’s going against everything you stand for.”

Jeltor hit him again, and there was the searing pain of ribs cracking a second time.

Barnabas! Shinigami’s scream seemed to echo in his ears as well as his mind, and then he realized she truly had yelled it aloud, using it as a battle cry while she broke one of the guards in two and tossed his body down the stairs, fluid pooling and draining away from the limp Jotun body inside. Get out of there first, then try to get into his head!

Barnabas swung into action at once, grabbing for a knife and electrifying it before he plunged it into Jeltor’s wrist. The biosuit jerked, power ricocheting through the internal circuits, and Barnabas stumbled away. He saw Grisor waiting and ran the other way, heedless of the laughter.

You think I’m defeated? he thought savagely. You have no idea what you’re in for. With each passing second he stood outside Jeltor’s range he was healing.

Four shots echoed nearby in such close succession that they must have come from multiple guns. Barnabas looked that way, a hand still pressed to his ribs, and saw both Shinigami and Gar pointing their smoking weapons at the husk of the last guard.

The turrets had been swiveling, unsure of their targets with so many of their own in the mix, but now they centered on Shinigami and Gar without hesitation.

“Down!” Barnabas yelled. The acoustics were so good that his call was deafening. It rolled through the space long after Shinigami and Gar had hit the floor on the top level of the amphitheater and crawled to shelter behind some of the top turrets.

Tafa, what’s Gilwar’s status on the turrets?

He says he’s close.

They’re shooting at us! Barnabas dove behind shallow cover and lobbed a grenade at the turret closest to him. Tell him to hurry it up!

With a whine and a defeated sigh, the turrets stopped firing and dropped gracelessly back down. Several of the potted plants, jostled a bit too much, tipped onto the ground. It was almost enough to make Barnabas laugh—until he heard the trickling sound of water.

Sonofa—every damned time with these people.

To be fair, they are an aquatic species.

That will be enough out of you. Laughing helped, now that his internal organs were fixed. Barnabas stood, his mind made up and his fingers ready to grab for his Jean Dukes. He had to keep joking, or he would realize how high the stakes were.

“Jeltor.”

A hollow boom sounded as the gun in Jeltor’s arm went off. This time, however, Barnabas had anticipated it. The round passed harmlessly through empty air and made a smoking dent in the wall behind him.

Barnabas, meanwhile, took shelter behind a nearby potted plant.

“Jeltor, you said you once believed that Jotuns were superior to all other species. That belief did not survive when you started to meet other aliens.”

“Come out.” Jeltor sounded frustrated. “Barnabas, this isn’t funny. You came here and tried to kill His Excellency. You want to destroy the Jotun people, give us a slow death you can pretend you have no knowledge of while other species cause chaos across the sector.”

“Why would I want that?” Barnabas asked calmly.

“Because your Federation wants us to be too concerned with each other to hurt them!” Jeltor called back. “They know that if we joined together, they could be wiped off the map.”

“Jeltor, I assure you that is not—” Barnabas paused. “You know me,” he said. “You’ve watched me take actions that would not expose your species to—”

Left! Go!

Again, Barnabas listened without hesitation, and he was glad he had done so when the stone base of the potted plant exploded into chunks of flaming rubble.

Dear God, what kind of ammunition does he have?

The really fun kind. I mean, if you’re shooting it. Less so if you’re the one having to get out of the way.

Noticed that, did you? Barnabas listened to the heavy steps coming closer, formulated his plan in a split-second, and hurtled out of cover in silence and with deadly speed. His enhanced strength sent him far higher into the air when he leapt than Jeltor expected, and as shots peppered the air, Barnabas came down on Jeltor’s head and chest, releasing bots onto the suit and punching the sensor array. Shinigami, what can you do with those?

I’ll let you know when I have something. Plan as if there’s nothing I can do.

Barnabas sent back a wordless assent and slammed his fist down three more times into the visual sensor display. Unless he was very much mistaken, this now gave him two large blind spots on Jeltor’s sides, where there was always armor plating, and would make even front and back vision more difficult for his opponent.

He jumped free and landed lightly on the ground, circling to stay in the blind spot as Jeltor staggered in a circle, looking for him.

“Jeltor, you know that what Grisor offers is false security,” Barnabas warned. “He can’t ever give you a peaceful world. A world that is built on violence and cruelty will always be cruel. He will not become kind once he has all of you in his thrall. No, he’ll use that to silence dissent while he and his friends grow rich and powerful.”

“Liar!” Jeltor called. He sounded furious.

“Don’t listen to him, Jeltor.” Grisor sounded soothing and utterly calm, as though he were not at all afraid. “Remember the fear of your past life? Remember the insecurity, the failure? You will never have to fear that again. No other species will threaten us.”

“Jeltor, if what he offers you is so wonderful, why hasn’t he undergone the procedure?” Barnabas locked eyes with Grisor. I’m coming for you, you bastard.

“For the one who rises to lead, there cannot be any procedure.” Grisor was beginning to sound panicked. “I am fully devoted to my ideals already. I seek only to give others the peace I already have.”

“Does he sound peaceful, Jeltor? Does he sound like he’s free from fear?”

Jeltor gave a mechanical sound, half-groan and half-shriek.

The suit keeps frying the bots, Shinigami reported, frustrated. They must be used to this as a form of sabotage. I have one more, but—dammit! No more. I can’t help. I’m sorry, but you’re doing well. You’re sowing seeds of doubt.

Thank you. Barnabas darted through Jeltor’s field of vision, hoping to draw his attention, and the gun did indeed come up to follow him. It was slow, however, tracking based on Jeltor’s warped perception of a world part aquatic and part air. I know what I have to do, then.

He took two steps and jumped once more, but this time he went even higher, leaping entirely over Jeltor’s hulking new biosuit and landing with crushing force on Grisor.

Heyyyy, you listened!

Yeah, yeah, don’t make a big thing of it. Barnabas ripped an arm free before Grisor could recover and dragged the senator off-balance once more. The water was finally beginning to fill the amphitheater, rising very slowly. Is Gilwar interfering with the water?

He says he is, Tafa said. He shut off all but one of the filtration plants, and the system is designed not to use water that’s unclean because the Jotuns would be swimming in it.

Clever. Barnabas smiled as he held his knife to the gap between Grisor’s armor plating. So it came in useful after all. Good call, Tafa.

To Jeltor, he called, “Over here.”

Whoa, wait! Shinigami sounded angry. You’re not just killing Grisor?

Trust me.

She grumbled.

Jeltor turned and froze.

“Jeltor, you remember who you were,” Barnabas exclaimed desperately. This wasn’t like it had been with Catherine, he told himself. Catherine’s mind had been destroyed. Jeltor’s had merely been changed. It could be changed back.

Jeltor said nothing, keeping his arm leveled at Barnabas uncertainly. He could not shoot at Grisor; it went against all his programming, and that programming went deep.

Please, Barnabas whispered to Jeltor. He did not know if Jeltor could hear him anymore, but he had to try. This isn’t you.

And then his ear caught the very faint sound of the door opening. It was meant to be silent, but Barnabas wasn’t a normal being, and he had already nearly been killed by that same trick today. He whirled, his Jean Dukes coming up as he fired three times. The sound of shots from nearby told him that Shinigami and Gar had done the same thing.

It was the last guard from the laboratory, staggering back with his suit shattered. For a moment, Barnabas could feel the Jotun’s rage for his lost team members, and there was an unexpected wave of sympathy—

The splashing behind him told him to refocus his attention. He whirled, and found Jeltor ushering Grisor to safety.

“Jeltor! Think about this! Think! Think for yourself!” Barnabas could hear the terror in his own words. “Remember who you are, not who they told you to be.”

“Stay away.” Jeltor pointed his gun at Barnabas.

“Shoot him!” Grisor yelled.

Barnabas did the only thing he could think of. He put his hands up and looked at Jeltor through the wall of the tank. “Jeltor, it’s me. I don’t want to hurt you. I won’t hurt you.”

“Jeltor, shoot him!”

Jeltor stood frozen, indecision plain on his features. Then, with a shriek of anguish, he fired. He turned and pushed Grisor through a hidden door, moving more quickly than Barnabas would have believed possible.

“Jeltor!”

But Jeltor was gone, doors slamming closed across the base.

Shinigami had used her scanners, and now she said gravely, We’re not getting in there—and there are guards mobilizing.

But we have to—

We’ll come back for him. Barnabas, he… Her voice trailed off. When Barnabas looked up, she was staring at him, clearly hating what she was saying.

He fired, Gar said, but he didn’t shoot to kill. He didn’t even shoot to wound.

He’s still in there. Barnabas took two steps toward the door.

And he chose Grisor—for now. Barnabas, remember what you told him: his view of the Jotuns didn’t survive reality. You have to trust that it will happen again.

When he said nothing, Shinigami added softly, You told me I could call the shots on this one when I needed to. I need to now. We’ll get him back, but this isn’t the way.

Barnabas closed his eyes, dropping his head into one hand for a moment before he nodded. He went up the stairs wordlessly with the sound of the Shinigami’s engines coming closer and the distant sounds of gunfire.

“Where’s Gilwar?” he asked.

Shinigami pointed. On the open gangway of the Shinigami, Gilwar was waiting to help them aboard. Barnabas ushered Gar and Shinigami ahead of him and then leapt aboard himself, running down the slope of the gangway as it closed.

“Good to see you safe,” he told Gilwar.

“And you,” Gilwar said. “I saw what happened.” His face might not hold expressions, but the meaning could not be mistaken: it happened, you didn’t imagine it.

“We’re going to get him back,” Barnabas told all of them. “We’re going to get him back, and we’re going to give Justice to those they’ve hurt.”

“You promised Grisor a painless death,” Shinigami said. She did not sound disapproving, only interested. “Was it a lie?”

“It wasn’t a lie.” Barnabas met her eyes. “If he had agreed and returned Jeltor to me, I would have done it. It wouldn’t have sat easily with me, but for the sake of the Jotun people, I could have done it. I wouldn’t have offered if I couldn’t, not with honor at stake.”

Shinigami was beginning to smile. “But?”

Barnabas smiled back and felt the coldness of it down to his bones.

“But he didn’t take the offer, did he?”

Epilogue

The station they stopped at was so small that it wasn’t even named, but Barnabas’ golden rule still held true: it didn’t matter how far you went or how remote you were, if there were multiple people living there and others passing through, there was going to be a bar.

Barnabas held up his glass, and the others followed suit—with the exception of Gilwar, of course, who held up an empty hand.

“To Jeltor,” Barnabas said softly. “To our friend, who is still inside. Who can be brought back.”

Shinigami lifted the liquid to her lips. While she couldn’t technically take sustenance from substances, she could ingest them and analyze them. She stopped when Barnabas shook his head slightly.

“I wasn’t quite finished. To my friends, who look out for each other. Who go into danger without complaint because there are those who depend on them…and who speak the truth to me when I need to hear it.” He held his glass out to clink it against each of theirs and tap it against Gilwar’s fingers, and then he drank. “This stuff is truly vile.”

“I’m not sure it’s meant to be ingestible,” Shinigami said doubtfully, staring down into the glass. “The chemical composition is remarkably close to poison.”

“Alcohol is poison,” Gar informed her cheerfully. “Drink up.”

Shinigami laughed and clinked glasses with him, and Barnabas sat back to watch the four of them as they spoke and laughed. Gilwar was discussing the layout of senatorial compounds with Tafa, and Gar and Shinigami were having a drinking contest—slightly unfair, in Barnabas’ opinion. The rest of the bar was oblivious to his group.

He looked down into his cup with a small smile.

Hey, boss. Shinigami caught his eye when he looked up.

Where’s Gar?

Getting another round. She smiled. What are you thinking about?

Chess. Barnabas saw her smile and shook his head. Not…like that. He sighed as he looked around, then leaned on the table and considered. Chess is supposed to teach you tactics, but chess pieces don’t have souls or lives—or families. You never have to worry about your opponent’s pawns, just about killing their king.

Shinigami said nothing, watching him quietly.

I promised Grisor I would let this be forgotten because part of me thinks it’s the right thing to do, Barnabas said. The Jotun people had nothing to do with this. They don’t deserve to suffer for it if someone tries to turn it into a war.

But?

But smoothing it over and pretending it never happened means it might happen again. Barnabas took a gulp of his drink and choked. I forgot I shouldn’t be drinking that.

Shinigami grinned as she pounded him on the back. Breathe, she advised. Right, good. Now drink the rest while you’re still numb. Now, now, now!

Barnabas downed the rest of it and made a pained whimpering noise. Oh, God, that was disgusting. It hurts. I regret drinking that. Why did I listen to you?

Because it’s fun. I told Gar to get you a drink, too. She nodded to where Gar was making his way back from the bar with three drinks. Come on, let’s get soused and sing embarrassing songs about honor and friendship.

Barnabas laughed. Beyond this station was a committee hellbent on destruction, with a pawn they had brainwashed into helping them. There was a war brewing that could destroy most of the sector if he let it.

He didn’t intend to let it.

But before he stopped it, he would let his team relax a bit. He took a glass from Gar, reminded himself that pain was an excellent teacher, and drank it in one go. When Shinigami and Gar finished their drinks, Barnabas was laughing.

“What?” Gar was already loopy.

“Pain is an excellent teacher,” Barnabas got out between whoops of laughter. “It’s supposed to teach you not to do things, though.”

“What’s your point?” Shinigami raised an eyebrow.

“My point is that we’re being remarkably stupid, and I’m quite enjoying it.” Barnabas stood. He caught a flicker out of the corner of his eye and looked out into the hallway, but saw nothing. Shaking his head to clear it, he picked up the empty glasses with a smile. “Next round’s on me.”

* * *

Aliana turned the corner and kept walking, her heart pounding. He’d almost seen her; she was sure of it. It was like he’d felt her watching him.

She supposed he was the one who’d looked over, not the one with the double-pupiled eyes or the woman. Carter had said she was an AI. Both of those people frightened her a little. Barnabas, though…

She shook her head slightly.

“Aliana.” Zinqued was waiting at the ship, his arms spread wide. “You took a while getting here. I thought you might not be coming.”

“And I hoped you wouldn’t,” Tik’ta agreed, but Aliana heard fondness in her tone.

“You did get my message, right?” Aliana frowned at them. “I don’t think it can be done. I don’t think the Shinigami can be stolen—and I’m not sure I want to. The things he’s doing are important.”

“He’ll do them either way,” Zinqued said confidently. “And you’ll find a way to steal the ship. I’m sure of it.” He stepped back and held out an arm, welcoming her onto the ship. “I’m curious, though. What made you decide to come back?”

“I’m also curious,” Tik’ta chimed in as she followed them.

Aliana paused inside the ship, deciding how much to say.

“I thought I could run away from my problems,” she said finally. “That mistakes could just be forgotten, and I could rely on someone else to pick me up and dust me off. But I can’t. Until I’ve gotten even with Lawrence and made him pay for what he did, I can’t forget it. It will eat at me.”

She ducked her head and made for her cabin before they could ask her anything more. She didn’t want to answer their questions any more than she wanted to answer her uncle’s. He had sent her a worried message after she left, and she still had not responded.

Now, though, she slumped onto the tiny cot and typed out a brief reply: I need to do this. Tell Elisa and the kids I love them. I miss you guys already.

She did, after all. She missed the creaky apartment over the bar. She missed the bar. She missed Carter and Elisa and the twins. She even missed the new baby, although she hadn’t met it yet.

But she didn’t belong there. She never had, even though Carter had wanted her to stay. She still hadn’t gotten her life together—and she was determined not to be anyone’s charity case. She wiped the tears off her cheeks, lifted her chin, and set about unpacking.

She was going to make Lawrence pay.

* * *

Cries of pain echoed off the walls as Grisor paced.

Six guards had been lost, not to mention the laboratory, the data, and the robotic army Biset had foolishly sacrificed—ah, yes, and the remnants of the Yennai fleet. It was good for Biset’s sake that he was dead. Grisor would not have given him as quick and clean a death as Barnabas had.

Now…

Now there was very little time.

Grisor went to the door and stared into the tank. Jeltor should have obeyed him at once when ordered to shoot. It was troubling that he had not, and without the research team to innovate, Grisor was not certain if any modifications should be made to the program.

He resolved not to think of those issues just yet. If it worked, he would only have wasted his time. If it did not work, then he would worry.

In the meantime, he strode to a screen and brought up a sector map. His fingers hovered over a few of the shining dots as he considered. They had to begin their plan now. Once the admirals were converted—and they would be—they must be ready to swing into action at once.

Which alien race to bring into the fold first? That was the only question.

Grisor’s fingers hovered for a moment longer, then tapped a binary star system. The planet that came up on the screen was a mix of lush vegetation and wasteland. It was battered by storms, famously harsh, and the aliens it had produced were almost as terrifying.

Yes. The Brakalons would be a good first addition to the committee’s forces.

FINIS

Author Notes - Natalie Grey

October 31, 2018

Thank you for following Barnabas’s story! I don’t know if anyone’s let you in on this secret yet, but writing a series is often just as surprising as reading one. We know some of what’s coming down the pike, of course, but seeing it unfold is a revelation every time. Even though I already begin each series with anticipation, looking forward to spending all that time with the characters, that is nothing compared to how much I care for them by the end of the series.

We’ve seen Barnabas come farther than I think he would have thought possible, from someone who still had not processed his grief about Catherine, to someone who is willing to rely on his friends. Shinigami’s evolution has been just as surprising to her. Humans are definitely a force of chaos!

As always, I want to thank Michael, first and foremost, for bringing me on board and letting me work with him on this series. I loved Barnabas since he first showed up and was so lucky to get to be a part of this story! My beta readers, both the JIT group and the crew who bravely take the bullet of looking at my rough drafts, have been amazing as well, as has the editorial and administrative team that makes LMBPN run so smoothly! Thanks to Craig, also, for allowing Bustamove in for a cameo.

To the readers - I love your energy, your passion for this universe, and the way you support all of us involved in the KGU. Thank you so, so, so much. There’s more Barnabas on the way, but I know how much you all read! If you’re looking for something new in the meantime, I suggest The Dragon Corps (seven books and counting!) and Bound Sorcery (the fourth book in the Shadows of Magic series will be out soon).

Last but not least, I want to thank my own adorable ball of chaos, L, who is teaching me so much every day about how to appreciate everything I have, and how to see the world with new eyes.

Until next time,

Nat

Author Notes - Michael Anderle

October 31, 2018

THANK YOU for not only reading this story, but these author notes as well .

RANDOM (sometimes) THOUGHTS?

I know, this is a really random thought that without context (which is too personal to share) remember that family and friends might not be ignoring you. They might just have busy lives and while you are important, it slipped their mind as they have had to deal with the here and now for too long..

They love you. Just pick up the phone and chat with them sometime.

(Barring that support – pick up and read another LMBPN book – it might not help a relationship, but at least it should be fun.)

HOW TO MARKET FOR BOOKS YOU LOVE

We are able to support our efforts with you reading our books and we appreciate you doing this!

If you enjoyed this or ANY book by any author, especially Indie published, we always appreciate if you make the time to review a book, as it lets other readers who might be on the fence to take a chance on it as well.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (rather, where am I writing these and what is going on?)

One of the interesting (at least for me) aspects of my life is the ability to work from anywhere and at anytime. In the future, I hope to re-read my own author notes and remember my life as a diary entry.

For these author notes I am sitting in the London Hotel – West Hollywood which is one block (barely) away from the Whisky a Go-Go club for concerts.

My ears are ringing which is a common occurrence when you listen to music too loud for too long. My younger brother (well, he is 42) and I went to go see the band Stryper who was playing at the Whisky on Halloween night and I have to say, it was a blast.

I’ve followed this band since high school, and I have probably seen them play in concert about seven times in my life.

I say about because time for me is murky. I can dream up new stuff into the future all day long. Ask me what I had for lunch last Wednesday (or how many times I have seen a band play over the last 35 or so years) and I’m a bit vague on that information.

For making a business run on fictional stories, this forward looking creative brain is a superpower. For helping me to remember important events which need to be celebrated with certain people? It is a millstone around my neck.

Normally, I celebrate my brain. When I’m in the relationship doghouse, not so much.

FAN PRICING

If you would like to find out what LMBPN is doing, and the books we are publishing, just sign up at http://lmbpn.com/email/ . When you sign up, we notify you of books coming out for the week, any new posts of interest in the books and pop culture arena and the fan pricing on Saturday.

Ad Aeternitatem,

Michael Anderle

Protector

Vigilante Chronicles Book 7

Chapter One

“We’re close!” Kelnamon scrambled up the rocky incline and took a deep breath of fresh air. Happiness was brimming in his chest, and he could not keep back his smile—or the tears that were gathering in his eyes. He had come out here twice since he’d returned, but walking on his homeworld again was still unusual enough to provoke strong emotions in him.

It had been years since he had seen the gray and ochre rocks of Kordinev, his homeworld. He had spent eight of those serving on one of the big cargo freighters, saving up for the ship he now owned—the Srisa. He’d been its captain for over a decade now.

It had taken a tragedy and incredible danger for him to consider coming back to Kordinev. As much as he loved his homeworld, there was very little opportunity here. It lay far from any trade routes, and he was the seventh child. Had he stayed, he would have just been another mouth to feed. Rather than be a burden on his family, he had left to find work elsewhere.

But he had missed this place, and he had missed his family. He’d been so busy he hadn’t realized how much.

He turned to look behind him now, and gave a wondering shake of his head as his companion clambered up the slope after him. Ferqar was a captain in the Jotun Navy. He had been born, as far as Kelnamon could tell, into incredible privilege, but had given up everything to become a ship’s captain.

Then, due to political machinations, he had been demoted and sent to work on the Jotuns’ border patrols—where he’d stumbled on the same conspiracy Kelnamon had become embroiled in.

Kelnamon was trying not to be bitter about that. Ferqar had found out that a fellow Jotun captain, Huword, was abducting and torturing alien civilians. Disgusted, Ferqar had helped arrange for Huword’s assassination...aboard Kelnamon’s ship.

The problem was, Huword had been part of something far bigger than Ferqar knew, and the Srisa had nearly been destroyed by a Jotun black ops team that was trying to cover up Huword’s misdeeds. When they showed up, Kelnamon had taken the Srisa and fled to Kordinev.

Now he, along with the Brakalon government, was trying to figure out what to do about the angry civilians who had been on board his ship. Kelnamon was hoping that no one was going to come after them here, but every passenger had witnessed far too much. He was sure that the Jotun government wanted his ship destroyed, as well as everyone who had been aboard.

As much as the civilians hated it, they had to stay here until the coast was clear. He didn’t know when that would be, though, and they were getting increasingly angry. After a long morning of arguing with a cloth merchant who was threatening to involve his guild, Kelnamon had gone out for a walk to clear his head, and Ferqar had come with him.

Which was when they’d seen a strange object hurtling out of the atmosphere to land nearby, firing thrusters as it went.

“We should probably have called for a hopper,” Ferqar said when he reached Kelnamon. He wasn’t winded, of course, since he was using his biosuit to move, but it was clear that the rough terrain of Kordinev was difficult for the Jotun to navigate.

“The point of a walk is that you walk,” Kelnamon remarked. He still wasn’t quite sure if Ferqar understood that. They had gone for walks several times recently, and Ferqar tended to ask where they had been going and what the point was.

“Yes,” Ferqar agreed, somehow managing to imply that Kelnamon was completely insane, “but now we’re searching for something, and a search is best done with technology—like scanners.”

He did have a point, as much as Kelnamon hated to admit it. “Your suit has scanners, right? Have you been using them?”

It was hard to tell, but the faint movements in Ferqar’s suit suggested that he was faintly embarrassed. “Well, yes. But I haven’t found anything.”

Kelnamon rolled his eyes. “So...using technology hasn’t been any better than being on foot, then.” He looked at the horizon and squinted as he slowly swung his head side to side.

This part of Kordinev, just outside the capital city of Herod, was hilly and weathered by the constant winds. The soft sandstone had been shaped beautifully, and the only vegetation was hardy scrub that nestled in the alcoves and cracks of the rocks where it was protected from the wind.

“I’m amazed that life ever took hold here,” Ferqar stated, after a moment.

“Why?” Kelnamon felt almost offended.

“There’s no water.”

Kelnamon laughed. “Of course, there’s water. Come, I’ll show you.” He knelt near a long crack in the top of the rock. “See those plants, how their leaves are so thick? They hold water inside. When it rains, the water pools here in the crack and the plant sucks it up through the roots, which are under the ground. If you’re lost out here, you pull the plants up one by one and eat them for the water inside.”

“And if you’re an aquatic life form?” Ferqar asked, somewhat prickly.

“Well...” Kelnamon scratched his head. “No, there’s no water like that, I suppose.”

“Mmm.”

Kelnamon stood up and brushed the dust off his knees, then realized something. “One of the trees over there has been knocked over.”

“Those,” Ferqar said, “do not count as trees. They are much too sad and small.”

“No, just pay attention—there were five trees there yesterday. I remember seeing them. Now one of them has fallen over.” Kelnamon waited for Ferqar to understand, then rolled his eyes. “Like it was hit by something.”

“Oh!” Ferqar concentrated on the horizon. “Yes, I just got a burst of radio static.”

“Come with me.” Kelnamon was already running toward the hill, which was about a quarter of a mile away. “I’ll show you the path!”

“This would be easier in a hopper!” Ferqar called after him, but he followed, each of his footsteps accompanied by a clank.

They were about halfway up the hill when a bolt of energy whizzed over their heads and both of them ducked. Kelnamon lost his footing and tumbled down the hill while Ferqar yelled something.

“Just get to cover!” Kelnamon called. He wedged himself behind a nearby boulder and peeked out. He didn’t see anything—

Another burst of shots came from the trees nearby, and when the smoke cleared, he was able to make out a spidery shape. It was a turret of some sort.

“Ferqar?”

“I’m all right,” Ferqar called back. “I said, it’s not sentient—and it’s of Jotun make.”

“What?” More shots sounded, and Kelnamon looked around to see that the thing was advancing. “Get ready, it’s coming our way! I don’t suppose you have a gun in that suit?”

“Not one that can take that out!” There was muttered untranslatable swearing in Jotun, then Ferqar said. “Look, if I draw its fire, can you take it down?”

“I don’t think we have a choice. Just tell me when to go!” As more shots zoomed by, one taking a chip off the boulder Kelnamon was hiding behind, the Brakalon yelled, “Go now!”

“Going!” There was a resounding clank as Ferqar leapt into action.

Kelnamon launched out from behind cover and charged at the turret. It must have had a proximity sensor, because as soon as he got close, its turret swung to point straight at him. He could see its laser sight staring at him like a baleful red eye.

There was no time to duck. With a roar, as much to keep himself brave as anything, Kelnamon grabbed the turret by the legs, whirled it over his head, and bashed it on the rocks. He kept slamming it on the ground, and was just starting to become satisfied that it was properly dead when something large and metal slammed him sideways.

He went tumbling down a nearby hill toward a drop off of a few feet and scrabbled for purchase on the rocks.

“No!” Ferqar yelled. “Drop! Do it now!”

Kelnamon obeyed, for which he was grateful a moment later when the remains of the Jotun bot exploded. From the boom, it had been a very high-grade explosive. If Kelnamon had been standing there—

He looked at Ferqar gravely. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” Ferqar admitted. “It can’t have been meant as part of an invasion or there would be hundreds of them, wouldn’t there?”

Kelnamon wasn’t willing to bet on that. “Come on. We need to get back to the capital and tell them about this. And...”

“And?” Ferqar asked.

“I think we should call on that human,” Kelnamon said. “He’s good at finding out secrets. If anyone can figure out what this is, he can.”

* * *

“How are things progressing?” Grisor entered the room with a nod to each of the analysts, and a deeper nod—although he hated to do so—for the other Committee members present.

Grisor was developing a very, very low opinion of the Committee members. The aides, analysts, and soldiers who supported their objective, however, had so far shown themselves to be exceedingly competent.

His vacation home on Jotuna D had been made over into a base of operations to advance the Committee’s newest goals. A group of scientists and engineers was interpreting the schematics sent from the laboratories, and building conversion facilities. They would need equipment both here and to send to the Brakalon homeworld as soon as the invasion was complete.

Another group was assessing the homeworld. The Jotun government had preliminary data, of course—atmosphere, gravity, and a basic map. The information had not been collected with a small, targeted invasion in mind, however.

The Committee needed to know where it would be easiest to land near the capital city of Herod in order to take the government buildings and set up their conversion laboratory. The data they collected in the next few days would help them develop their plan.

Would they, perhaps, take over a specific building and convert everyone inside? Would they take the opportunity to accost a high-ranking Brakalon official on vacation and use that connection to lure others into the trap?

There was no way to know yet what the optimal plan might be.

Grisor was interested in the process. He went to the desk that held the newest maps.

“The probes are, by and large, surviving their descent,” one of the junior analysts told him.

There was a round of hastily-cut-off hisses for her to be quiet. Grisor, intrigued by this, fixed her with a look.

“What does that mean?”

She faltered, but it was clear from her next words that she was answering him honestly. “One or two were destroyed upon landing. The terrain is very harsh. Another reported conflict and was summarily destroyed. I assume that was either hostile wildlife or that it was actually damaged during landing. It detonated, however, so anything nearby was destroyed.” She paused, then added, “A certain number of losses are to be expected upon landing. We have had a very high success rate this time.”

“So there was no reason to be worried, then?” Grisor asked. “About me knowing, I mean. You are all performing better than could be expected.”

She nodded hesitantly.

Grisor looked around the room. “Remember that. I will hold you accountable for those things within your control. I will expect you to perform within the parameters you give me. If I find out you have lied, either about those parameters or about your performance, it will go badly for you. This will be your only warning.”

They all gave terrified nods.

He left, one of the other Committee members dogging his heels. “You scared them.”

“Good,” Grisor replied. “They should respect us.”

“There is a fine line between respect and—”

Grisor turned silently to observe the Committee member, who stammered and whispered an apology.

“I will not tolerate disrespect,” Grisor warned him.

“You are only one member of this Committee,” the senator blurted in a moment of rare defiance.

“Of course,” Grisor agreed, lying with a flutter of a Jotun smile. “I seek only the respect one Committee member gives another. Our underlings, however, should understand that their honesty with us is required. Is that not so?”

“Oh. Oh, of course.”

“Good. Now, let us go take some refreshment.”

It would be poisoned, of course. This senator had shown his true colors, and they had reached the point in their plan where any weak link could be fatal.

It was time to begin culling the group.

Chapter Two

“Barnabas?” Elisa’s voice echoed up the stairwell.

“Up here,” Barnabas called back. “I’ll be down in just a moment.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m coming up.”

“Don’t do that.” Worried, Barnabas dropped his tools and hurried down the stairs, nearly colliding with her on the landing.

She laughed at him, one hand cupping the very faint curve of her belly. Her pregnancy was just beginning to show, and she found it hilarious that everyone kept trying to do things for her. “You don’t need to worry, you know. I’m fully capable of handling the exertion of stairs.

“Er...” Barnabas refrained from asking if she was sure about that.

Elisa held up a hand, palm out. “I solemnly swear that when I get too pregnant to walk up the stairs, I will admit it and have you all wait on me hand and foot.”

“Ah. Good.” Barnabas could work with that.

“What are you working on?” Elisa asked him.

“Hmm.” Barnabas scratched his head. “Well, it’s not that the stairs aren’t structurally sound, you understand—”

“Say no more.” Elisa was chuckling. “Can I look?” She peered around Barnabas and gave a gasp. “You’re redoing all of them! Don’t you have...I don’t know, criminals to be hunting down?”

“Yes,” Barnabas said, “but Shinigami needs to figure out where we should go first, how to get us past certain security protocols, and…well, a bunch of stuff.”

It turned out that rescuing a friend who was determined to assassinate you was not an easy task—especially when said friend was trapped in a highly fortified base, protecting other people you were trying to bring to Justice.

Barnabas waved a hand and hoped she wouldn’t ask about it. He led the way up the stairs. “You can see that I’ve made the steps a bit more level, and sanded them smoother. I’ll apply varnish tonight. Tabitha said she would bring some.”

“I can apply it,” said Carter, who had come up the stairs behind them. “I mean, you could too, but Shinigami says it’s time to head back to the ship.”

Barnabas frowned. “She didn’t contact me.”

“She came in person,” Carter told him. “She’s trying to eat a sandwich. I’m guessing that won’t screw up the cyborg body?”

“No, she can deal with it, but…” Barnabas had a lot of questions he wasn’t sure he wanted the answers to. “Never mind. So, since you’re here and I assume you’ll be taking over on this, here’s how I laid the boards. As far as I can tell, they won’t creak anymore.”

“Thanks.” Carter scratched his head. “I have to tell you, I feel a little bit guilty, making Ranger One do old-fashioned construction work.”

“Don’t.” Barnabas’ voice was emphatic. “First of all, I’m happy to help. What with another little one on the way and a bar to run, you have plenty of things on your plate. But I also like building things. If only you needed a hand in the garden!”

“Nuh-uh,” Elisa cautioned, laughing. “The garden is mine. Although, I was hoping you might help me grow some herbs to use in beer…”

“I guess I know where you stand on the German-Belgian debate,” Barnabas commented gravely.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Beer is a delicate process, and I am happy to help. You know, the first beers I ever made were actually not made with hops, so I am well-versed in how different mixtures of herbs will affect the flavor.”

“Wonderful.” Elisa glowed. “I was thinking of trying to make a batch with orange peel.” She led the way back down the stairs, elaborating on her various plans, and bemoaning how certain plants from Earth didn’t seem to take well to the soil of High Tortuga.

In the bar’s main room, they found Shinigami trying to take a bite of a sandwich while Gar and Tafa studied her with mild concern.

“I don’t know,” Gar was saying. “Oh, Barnabas, thank goodness. We couldn’t remember the exact mechanics that humans use to eat. Will you demonstrate taking a bite for us?”

Barnabas stared at them all for a moment.

“I’ll get you a sandwich,” Carter said, trying to hide his smile, and whisked off to the kitchen. He was back in short order with something Barnabas had never seen before, but once the smells of it reached him, he didn’t hesitate to sit down and tuck in, oblivious to the aliens and Shinigami as they watched him chew and swallow.

It took about half of the sandwich before he could slow down enough to say, “This is delicious. What’s in it?”

“There’s a local bird the humans call a Tethran Fowl,” Carter told him. “The rest of the species here apparently hate it enough that they never named it. Anyway, it has very fatty meat like duck. Add that to a nice cheese, some caramelized onions, a beer sauce...” He gave an artful shrug. “And there’s a woman down the street who opened her own bakery, so we’ve been using her rolls. Good, yes?” He already knew it was good; his smile said as much.

“Amazing,” Barnabas said, with feeling.

“I wish I could taste things,” Shinigami remarked sadly.

“You can taste things.”

“I can assess chemical composition. That’s not the same.” She looked glum. “Since I don’t need food to live, there’s no reason to make eating pleasant, per se.”

“How do you power yourself?” Elisa asked curiously.

“I’m nuclear,” Shinigami informed her blandly.

Elisa blinked like she didn’t know if it was a joke and wasn’t quite sure what to say in either case.

Barnabas polished off the rest of his sandwich in neat bites and cleaned his fingers on a handkerchief. There was a time when he would never have eaten anything so messy or so humble. He was glad that those days were behind him—and also glad that he no longer lived the very humble life of a monk. He could not imagine enjoying anything so decadent in the monastery.

He accepted a mug of beer from Carter with a nod and took a sip. His eyebrows went up. “This is good.”

Elisa was glowing. “I brewed it!” She was practically bouncing in her seat. “I was very careful with all of the weighing and the temperature and everything, and I made beer! It’s a proper beer, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Barnabas opened his mouth to mention that he’d spent a lot of time brewing beer, but decided that might intimidate her. He was looking forward to all of the combinations she’d told him about and wanted to make sure he got to taste them. After this introduction to her brewing skills, he was anticipating the new beers a lot more. He settled for saying, “I’m quite enjoying it.”

“You know,” Carter stage-whispered, “that’s Barnabas-speak for ‘this is one of the best things I’ve ever had in my life.’”

Shinigami snorted as the rest of the team laughed, and Elisa blushed happily.

“He’s not wrong,” Barnabas admitted with good grace. “I won’t take your entire stash, but I will definitely be back for more. You are making more, right?”

“Yes.” She was grinning.

“Excellent. We’ll see you soon, then. Shinigami, you said we needed to head back to the ship?”

“Yes.” Shinigami dropped the mangled remains of her sandwich and gave them a disappointed look. Apparently, she hadn’t remembered how strong her cybernetic fingers were and had crushed the thing into paste. She cleaned her hands and stood up with a sigh. “Maybe I could program myself to enjoy food.”

“As long as it doesn’t violate the Skynet Protocol, do what you like,” Barnabas told her.

Carter followed Barnabas out and drew him aside. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

“Certainly.” Barnabas inclined his head. He had sensed a certain reserve in Carter earlier, and it was more pronounced now. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes. I said... Well, you’ll have noticed that Aliana’s gone.”

“Elisa told me what happened,” Barnabas replied. “Carter, how long did it take you to settle down? A long time. You had to find something that kept that excitement and adventure alive—as well as having the right person by your side.” He thought of Aliana, and could only wish that she did have someone to match her. She liked to laugh, Barnabas sensed, and she wanted to make something of herself. She was just a little bit aimless right now.

“Yes, but did Elisa say why she left?” Carter pressed. He looked miserable. “It was because she heard us talking. She heard me tell you what happened with Harry, and then with Lawrence. So, you see...”

“Ah.” Barnabas ran a hand through his hair, careful not to disturb its arrangement. He groaned. “Well, there’s not much you can do beyond apologizing.”

“I know. I just want to know she’s safe.”

Where are you? Shinigami asked in Barnabas’ head.

I’ll be there in a moment. I’m helping Carter with something. And can’t you locate me?

Yeah, but Tabitha has informed me that that’s, and I quote, “Stalker-y.”

I suppose she’s not wrong. I’ll be along soon.

Fine, but I make no guarantees about what happens to this juice you left me to carry.

You have no actual muscles! It costs you nothing to carry things!

That is not the point.

Barnabas hid his smile as he laid a hand on Carter’s shoulder. “You want me to keep an eye out for her?”

“Would you?” Carter looked grateful. “I don’t know if you’d even see her. Space is big, after all.”

“I have a feeling we might run into one another again,” Barnabas told him blandly. It was even true, although in a far different way than Carter was probably imagining. It wouldn’t be a chance encounter in the hallway of a space station. No, if Aliana had left to work for her former employer, she was likely still planning to steal the Shinigami.

Barnabas had to admit he was looking forward to seeing what she came up with as a strategy.

“I’ll also ask other people I know to keep an eye out,” he continued. “Not interfere or anything, just give us an update if they see her.”

“Thank you.” Carter gave him a relieved smile. “Get going—I’ve kept you long enough. I’ll go finish those stairs.”

“Tabitha said she’ll be along at dinner time with the varnish.”

“I’m guessing she’ll be along early and have a long dinner,” Carter corrected with a grin. He waved and disappeared back into the building.

It didn’t take Barnabas long to get back to the Shinigami, and he went immediately to the conference room. He was pleased to see that Shinigami had managed to evade the detection programs for the satellites on Jotuna D. The defense system was multi-tiered and very aggressive and had caused them trouble before.

This time, however, Shinigami seemed to have no worries. There was a holographic map of Jotuna D hovering, with connections between each satellite, and Gilwar was poring over a set of code with her in the corner.

They looked up as Barnabas entered.

“So we can get onto Jotuna D?” Barnabas asked.

“We can,” Shinigami said. “And even better news, I managed to get a bug into their systems.”

“What? How?”

She gave him a deeply smug smile. “Oh, it is such a good story. Gather ‘round, everyone.”

* * *

Kelnamon and Ferqar had made good time back to the city. Ferqar, of course, was fine within his biosuit, but Kelnamon would normally have stopped for food and water.

This time, he made no stops. He’d scrambled over rocks and leapt gullies, with Ferqar struggling behind him. They did not have time to take the longer winding paths. If there were Jotun devices landing on the planet and shooting at innocent bystanders, they needed to get to the military quickly.

Once he was back, Kelnamon wasted no time sending a message to a military liaison he knew, as well as the contact who was helping him figure out the situation with the Srisa’s passengers. Both of them, he was sure, would know who to pass the word to. He let them know he would be available to discuss what he had seen.

Then he waited.

And waited.

And waited. That afternoon and evening, he assumed that word was winding its way through the appropriate channels. The next morning, he considered that perhaps many others had reported the same thing and they did not need his information.

Still, he was uneasy about it.

By the next afternoon, he was done waiting. He showed up at the government offices…only to find them empty.

“What’s going on?” he asked a passerby. “Do you know? Why are the buildings empty?”

“I guess they’ve been told to go to remote offices,” the Brakalon female said with a shrug. “It’s some kind of drill. Don’t worry, you can reach them all by message.” She continued past him without another word, likely thinking that Kelnamon was simply curious.

Kelnamon’s sense that something was wrong had intensified.

He was willing to bet that some messages were getting through. He was also willing to bet, however, that his had not. Someone had arranged for the military and government personnel to be out of reach while this plan unfolded.

He had to get word to Barnabas. The only question was, of course, how to do that without tipping off the people orchestrating this.

Chapter Three

Zinqued trotted down the hallways of the Palpari, his nose twitching with excitement. He couldn’t wait to find out what plans Aliana had for stealing the Shinigami. For months now, he had been able to think about nothing else. The ship was beautiful, sleek, and absolutely perfect in every way.

He could just see himself sitting in the captain’s chair, ordering its all-powerful AI to guide missiles or find him anything he wanted. Tik’ta liked to tease him and roll her eyes, but when she had a ship like that to pilot, she wouldn’t be upset with him anymore.

He had been dispirited when Aliana, their human crew member, had decided to stay on High Tortuga with her family—and then intrigued and pleased when she had contacted him and said she wanted to sign back on. He didn’t know what was behind her decision, and he didn’t care. She had been honest with him about their chances of stealing the ship, and he was glad to have her aboard.

A human, after all, could understand Barnabas in a way no alien could. The nuances of human society, especially the fabled Ranger Corps, might help them come up with a con to sneak the ship right out from under him.

Zinqued was halfway up the corridor to Aliana’s bunk when he heard a strange sound like a breath dragged in so quickly that it squeaked. A sound of pain.

He broke into a run and came around the doorway to find her wiping the heels of her palms across her eyes hastily. She hid her face as she did it, but when she turned to look at him, he could still see the redness around her eyes and the sheen of tears. She had been crying.

Zinqued was a Hieto, and Hieto did not cry. He had come to learn that some species did, however, and they did so when they were hurt or—sometimes—sad.

“Is everything all right?” he asked urgently.

“I’m fine,” Aliana assured him, sounding a bit prickly. Her voice came out oddly, though, and she still wasn’t breathing quite right.

“Are you sick?”

“I’m not sick.”

“Is there anything—”

She swiped through the air with her hand, almost angrily. “I really don’t want to talk about it. Er. If that’s all right with you, Captain.”

Zinqued waved both his hands. Unlike many other captains he’d met and worked for, he didn’t feel the need to stand on ceremony. “Just ‘Zinqued,’ please. And I do not mean to distress you. I only wished to know if there was a problem.”

“No,” Aliana said. Zinqued wasn’t familiar with human tells, but he was almost certain that she was lying. “There’s no problem. In fact, I have a few preliminary plans for the theft of the Shinigami, if you have time to go over them.”

“Always.” Zinqued could not stop his stomach plating from rippling with pleasure. He liked nothing more than planning this heist. Even the attempts, while occasionally terrifying, gave him a rush that he could find no other way.

Aliana gestured for him to sit on the bed and unrolled several large sheets of reusable paper, which she stuck to the walls of her tiny cabin.

“This is the first idea. We bribe a station administrator at a smaller station to do two things. First, when the Shinigami docks, they disconnect the cables that control the mechanism. Someone would have to go outside and manually undo each in order to let the ship go. Second, they would close off the rest of the station so that there was no possibility of civilians getting hurt.”

“Barnabas does not hurt civilians,” Zinqued assured her gravely. It was something he appreciated about his opponent. Honor was important, after all.

“Exactly,” Aliana agreed. She jabbed a finger for emphasis. “So when he sees that we, too, are taking precautions, he will deal with us as honorable opponents. Trust me, we do not want him to think we’re dishonorable or that we’re putting civilians in the crossfire. If we do that, our lives are forfeit. If we do it this way, we may still not take the ship, but he will not consider it imperative to teach us a permanent lesson.”

“Ah.” Zinqued looked at her shrewdly. “So you think there is a good chance that we will fail?”

“I’ve been very open with you about that,” Aliana told him. Her voice was blunt. “My goal is to get us a foolproof plan, but I know that this will be very difficult, and that our chances are better if he isn’t furious with us. Hurting civilians, or even putting them in the way of danger, will make him absolutely furious.”

“Mmm.” Zinqued looked at the other plans. “Yes, I see your point. What’s that?” He pointed to a piece of paper she hadn’t put up.

“Oh, it’s— That’s nothing. Nothing important.” Aliana snatched it off the desk.

But not before Zinqued saw the name and last ports of call of a human ship and the name of the current and former captains.

“Ah,” he said blandly. He nodded at the other plans. “So you say you have three potential plans?”

“Yes.” She looked relieved…and she kept the piece of paper behind her back. “I think what we may be able to do is build a plan out of pieces of each of these. Run a series of cons, I mean. Maybe our earliest attempts aren’t designed to steal the ship, just to learn certain things or test their responses.”

“Ah.” Zinqued was pleased by this. “Well, I will have you present these to the whole crew after dinner, then. I will go begin preparing it now. Remind me—do humans enjoy eating live snakes, or is that Yofu?”

Aliana gave him a queasy look. “That’s Yofu. Definitely not humans.”

“I won’t make any vlatesh’ka for you, then.”

“Thank you.”

Zinqued waved to her cheerily and left, but he didn’t go to the kitchen. Tik’ta was cooking tonight, and she was up to date on what each species aboard enjoyed eating. Since she didn’t need any supervision, Zinqued would work on a side project.

He had done some research on Aliana after she came to work with them the first time. Her ship, the James, was a piece of junk, and she hadn’t bothered to pay her dues before leaving the station last time. She seemed to be hoping the ship would be stolen so she wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.

Before that, she’d had a ship named the Melisande, and that ship had been the sort a good captain dreamed of. It wasn’t flashy, not by a long shot, but it was deceptively quick, in good repair, and had a solid suite of components that would last a very long time.

As far as he could tell, it hadn’t been stolen in an illegal way. Instead, someone she trusted, a man named Lawrence Hardy, had taken it from her. It had all been legal.

But from the look in Aliana’s eyes when she mentioned it, and from the hurt he had just seen, Zinqued knew it hadn’t been right. Although he hadn’t known her very long, she was part of his crew, and he did not want her to be upset.

He was going to help her get her ship back.

He knew this was, in some ways, a very ironic plan from a ship thief, but he comforted himself with the fact that he was, after all, using his skills in larceny to help her get the ship back, and that his actions would technically be illegal. His reputation should remain secure.

He tried whistling as he walked to his cabin. He liked the sound of it when humans did it, but he hadn’t mastered the technique yet. He was still cheerfully trying and failing as he sat down to work and pulled out his documents on the Melisande.

Somehow, some way, they would get the ship back.

* * *

“Lawrence,” Ria began timidly. Small and delicate, she was absolutely swimming in her dark blue coveralls. She turned a wrench over and over in her fingers as she waited for him to look over.

At the desk, Lawrence paused to look at the ceiling in an exaggerated way that meant he was fighting for patience.

Ria realized her mistake. “Captain Hardy, I mean. I’m very sorry.”

He turned to look at her at last, and she gave a little shiver. Lawrence was one of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen, with wavy brown hair, a sharp jawline, and blue-gray eyes set over high cheekbones. It was the sort of face that made you ignore every instinct that whispered that this man could not be trusted.

“Ria.” His voice was grave. It was just as lovely as the rest of him, smooth and slightly burning. “You do good work as a mechanic, but you need to be careful to respect your captain.”

“Yes, Captain Hardy.” She swallowed.

Yes, Ria knew exactly why Aliana had fallen for Lawrence.

She bit her lip. “We need—the ship needs—some repairs.”

“Make them.” He looked annoyed.

“I need parts,” Ria explained. “The engine is leaking coolant, and a new cap on the—”

“Make it work,” he said, his voice dangerous now.

“I’ve made it work as long as I can, sir.” She stood her ground. She knew her business when it came to engines. She’d recognized this problem months ago, and Aliana had set aside money to deal with it.

Money that Lawrence now had.

“Then do better. I don’t want you coming to me every time you want a shiny new part.”

“I don’t.” Her voice was angry. “I came to you because we need it, not because I want it.” His look chilled her, but she didn’t waver. “This is a valuable ship because it was kept in good repair,” she said finally. She was trying to sound as icy as he looked, but she knew she wasn’t doing a good job. Recklessly, she pushed onwards: “Aliana knew—”

He was across the room in an instant and she flinched away from him, seeing the flash of pleasure in his eyes. In that instant, she realized he wasn’t going to hit her—he had just wanted her to understand that he could.

“Aliana is not in charge of this ship anymore, is she?” Lawrence asked. “Is she, Ria?”

“No.” She kept her face turned away from him and said the word she knew he wanted her to say. “Sir.”

He held the silence for a long moment.

“Make it work,” he repeated, then went back to his desk.

Ria left, her boots ringing on the metal floors and her eyes narrowed. The Melisande was a good ship, and it hadn’t been right, what had happened to Aliana. At the time Ria hadn’t done anything about it, of course. When you played with fire, you got burned. Aliana should have known better than to marry Lawrence and put everything in both their names.

But if she were honest with herself, she would have to admit that she hadn’t spoken up both out of cowardice...and because she had wanted Lawrence for herself.

She knew better now. He wasn’t any prize.

A plan was beginning to take shape in her head to get back at him. She just needed to find out where Aliana was.

Chapter Four

“Excellency.” Senator Qarwit, one of the senior members of the Committee, directed his biosuit to bow low as Grisor came into the room. “I wondered if I might have a moment of your time before you speak to Captain Jeltor?”

Grisor was surprised but nodded his head graciously. “Certainly, Senator.” To the other two senators with him, he said, “Excuse me, please.”

His guards opened the door to a nearby room, checked it, and stood back to allow Grisor and Qarwit inside. Qarwit stood by the door and waited while the door was closed. He was unusually worried, his tentacles rippling.

“What is the matter?” Grisor asked him. He liked Qarwit. Always respectful, Qarwit did not behave as if the others were mere steps on his rise to power. It was rare to see him question any of Grisor’s decisions; what questions he asked were phrased respectfully, and never seemed designed to show off his intellect.

Unlike some Grisor could name.

“Excellency, I have concerns,” Qarwit said finally. He kept his voice neutral. “I have not mentioned this before because I know it is not in your nature to be careless.” He paused. “I am torn, you see, between my trust in your capabilities and what I see in Captain Jeltor.”

Grisor considered this but said nothing.

“I worry that the captain’s conversion is not complete,” Qarwit continued. He was vibrating with tension now, unsure whether Grisor’s silence was a good sign or a bad one. “He acted nobly and without hesitation to save you when the human attacked. I reviewed the holo logs. I hope that was not forbidden. I did clear it with—”

“I knew you had requested to see them.” Grisor had been curious, but with so many things to oversee, he had not worried about such a request from a trusted member of the Committee. “You did so to seek evidence for your suspicions?”

“To see if my worries were well-founded,” Qarwit said. “Jeltor’s actions favored you. At the beginning of the fight, he had no doubts at all about his loyalty. The scientists did a commendable job.”

Grisor felt a surge of annoyance. The scientists were long dead, and one of his personal guards had overseen Jeltor’s conversion. He had not shared news of the infiltrated laboratory with the rest of the Committee, however, fearing that it would make him look weak.

So he only nodded, pushing away a stab of worry. These ideas had been conceived decades ago, and years of work were now threatened because the Committee had become known earlier than expected. Huword’s death and the interference in Jeltor’s conversion were complications that could doom Grisor’s plans.

He could only hope now that they were not the first in a cascade of complications.

The Committee had to find a way to get the Jotun fleet to Kordinev before other species knew what was going on, and Jeltor was integral to that plan. They could not afford to be unable to use him.

No, Grisor reminded himself, what they could not afford would be to pin their plan on Jeltor and have him fail them. He should listen to Qarwit’s concerns and adjust accordingly.

“It is simply that he has seemed less than devoted in recent days,” Qarwit said. “When I reviewed the video and saw the human appealing to his past loyalties. I fear that those words have taken root in Jeltor’s mind, so we should be very cautious before trusting him with any more of our plan.”

Grisor nodded quietly and sighed. Qarwit was right to be worried, and he had chosen a private venue to air his worries rather than sowing seeds of doubt in the others. It had been well done; he could hardly fault Qarwit.

But to be so close, to have so little time to implement the plan, only to be held up by such a concern—

“Nothing ever stays done,” he stated bitterly. In dawning horror, he added, “What if all of those who have been converted are vulnerable?”

“They may be,” Qarwit replied after a moment.

Grisor gave him an annoyed look.

“It will change our plan,” Qarwit assured him, “but surely it will not stop us. We will simply need those who are converted to be subtle and stealthy. We will need to make sure they are regularly brought in to have their conversion strengthened, and we will need to expand as quickly as we can on any occupied planets.”

“Is that all?” Grisor asked bitterly.

“Better these problems,” Qarwit replied, “than the ones that come from whole species failing to acknowledge our place as their rightful leaders.”

Grisor had to admit that he had a point. “In most cases,” he said drily, “sentience was a mistake.”

“A test, perhaps,” Qarwit countered with a gleam of a smile. “For us, I mean. For the rest...we will simply guide them. Help them.”

Both of the Jotun males stared at one another for a moment, then Grisor laughed.

“You don’t care in the slightest about helping them.”

“Not at all,” Qarwit agreed. “But it makes it more palatable to the rest of our people, doesn’t it?”

Grisor sighed and nodded. “It does. It does. I wish they had more resolve.”

“The world is often not as we wish it to be,” Qarwit observed. “From the cold seas of Jotuna, we built our society. Perhaps from these trials, too, something greater will emerge.”

Grisor fluttered with pleasure. “You speak truly. Now, let us go speak with Jeltor. Together, you and I can determine if he is to be trusted with this new part of our plan.”

“Yes, Excellency.” Qarwit followed him out of the room and past the other two senators, who murmured vaguely in annoyance when Grisor left them behind.

Grisor did not care. They had demanded to see the new phases of the Committee’s plan but had not been helping with implementation. Qarwit, however, had been running many departments of their makeshift headquarters, and he was doing so with quiet efficiency.

He deserved to be here.

In the rooms beyond, they found Jeltor. He had been housed in what appeared to be a very light, airy set of chambers. There were multiple pools for him to sleep and relax in, and there was a great deal of light filtering through the windows.

The place was highly secure for all its comfort. Grisor had taken precautions, even though he had been sure of Jeltor’s conversion. The glass could not be broken except by extreme, repeated applications of force. Jeltor could not break out without the guards having ample time to get to him, nor could anyone break in easily.

“Jeltor,” he called heartily. “How are you today?”

“Stir-crazy,” Jeltor answered without preamble. “I want to be doing something, not...” He looked around. “Not being told to relax.”

“Ah, I do beg your pardon,” Grisor said. “Given the injuries the human inflicted, the doctors thought it best that you not be put under strain.”

Jeltor gave a little snort to show what he thought of this. “My suit repaired me quickly, and I did not need very much recovery time.”

“In truth,” Grisor admitted, “I felt guilty. I had not intended for you to be involved. Seeing such an ugly side to your friend—”

“He is not my friend,” Jeltor stated flatly. “He wishes to destroy the Committee. He would see us removed from our rightful place in the universe. He believes in petty freedoms above stability and order.”

Grisor nodded. He did not look at Qarwit as he went to sit, but he left a silence and hoped that Qarwit would know it was an opportunity.

Qarwit took the opening without hesitation. “It must have been a shock. He had previously been a good friend to you. You thought you could trust him.”

Jeltor laughed bitterly. “One can never trust Barnabas. He cares only for himself.”

“Not his petty freedoms?” Qarwit probed.

“Fighting for those petty freedoms makes him a hero,” Jeltor stated dismissively. “He likes being a hero. He wants everyone to worship him. He cannot understand fighting for one’s species.” He paced to the window. “It is because of him,” he said finally, “that I am here. Not because I needed to rest.” He swung around to look at them. “That’s it, isn’t it? You worry that because we once worked together, you cannot trust me.”

Grisor said nothing.

“How can I argue?” Jeltor asked quietly. “I attacked Biset. I fought against you all. I have no right to ask for your trust.”

“Do you want our trust?” Qarwit asked.

Jeltor had gone still, and his voice alone betrayed the depth of his feeling as he said, “I want to serve your purpose. For that, I need your trust, and yet I know it is a risk. Perhaps it will always be too much of a risk. If so, I will abide by that.”

Qarwit stared at him for a long moment, then looked at Grisor. He gave a faint nod. He trusted Jeltor.

“Actually,” Grisor interjected, “we have a task for you.”

“A real task?”

“A real task. As you say, you were once Barnabas’ ally. We would be fools not to verify your new allegiance—but now we have. And you saved my life, Jeltor.” Grisor kept his voice level. It was true that Jeltor had saved him, and he did not like that memory. He had come closer to death than he’d bargained for.

Jeltor nodded. “I did what I had to, Excellency. Only what any of us would do to save you and your work.”

“I thank you, Jeltor. What I need now is for you to help us make new allies. I need you to get in contact with someone for me; someone who can help us achieve everything we have worked so hard for.”

Jeltor considered this. “Who?” he asked finally.

“Admiral Jeqwar,” Grisor told him. “She suspects that you are loyal to us, and winning her over will not be easy, but— What is it?”

Jeltor shook his head. “It is nothing. Go on.”

“Why don’t you come with us,” Qarwit suggested. “We will show you the plans.”

* * *

“You did what?” Barnabas gave an incredulous laugh. “You said the bots had all been destroyed!”

“I thought they had been,” Shinigami replied. “But I had programmed one of them to go to sleep directly after getting into the suit. The suit didn’t detect it, so it didn’t get zapped.”

“Until just now.”

“Well, yes. It powered up in stages, and when its location tracking turned on, the suit detected it and fried it.”

“What came online before that?”

“Audio.” Shinigami leaned against the wall carelessly, ankles crossed. For a moment, she looked almost evasive. “Then video, which was nothing because it was in the inside a freaking biosuit. Then basic diagnostics, and then a location ping. Honestly, I’m surprised we got as far as we did.”

“Did Jeltor notice?” Barnabas asked urgently.

“I would think so,” Shinigami said. “But I don’t think they would realize that we got the signal. The suit zapped it very quickly. If the bot hadn’t been made by us, it wouldn’t have managed to ping anyone quickly enough.”

“Are they still on Jotuna D?”

“Yes, but in another complex. Grisor must own more than one. I can lay in a course and get us there soon. We should be able to get in without the satellites knowing. I embedded a protocol in one of them to tell me when they were updated. They made some changes, all right, but nothing I can’t get around.”

“Shinigami, you’re a genius.” Barnabas gave her a grin. “Oh, and…did you hear anything interesting?”

Shinigami might be an AI, but she couldn’t lie worth a damn. She was so concerned about keeping her face blank that she forgot how guilty someone looked when they had no expression at all.

“Nope.” Her voice was clipped and strange.

Barnabas gave her a look. “Shinigami?”

She sighed. “Look. Jeltor is brainwashed right now, okay? I didn’t get any details on what they’re planning. Let’s just move past this, all right?”

“Shinigami.”

She gave him a worried look, but she must have realized he wasn’t going to bend because she gave another sigh and cued something up on the audio system.

“I did not need very much recovery time,” said Jeltor’s voice.

“In truth, I felt guilty.” Barnabas recognized Grisor’s snide tones. “I had not intended for you to be involved. Seeing such an ugly side to your friend—”

“He is not my friend,” Jeltor said flatly. “He wishes to destroy the Committee. He would see us removed from our rightful place in the universe. He believes in petty freedoms above stability and order.”

After a pause, a new voice said: “It must have been a shock. He had previously been a good friend to you. You thought you could trust him.”

“One can never trust Barnabas,” Jeltor replied. “He cares only for himself.”

“Not his petty freedoms?” the new voice asked.

“Fighting for those petty freedoms makes him a hero,” Jeltor said dismissively. “He likes being a hero. He wants everyone to worship him. He cannot understand fighting for one’s species.”

“That’s enough,” Barnabas said quietly. He swallowed as the audio was turned off. They were all looking at him—Gar, Tafa, Gilwar, Shinigami. They were looking at him with pity.

He knew the words weren’t real. They were a product of the brainwashing Jeltor had endured. Still, they cut to the heart of what he was. “He likes being a hero.”

“You said you’d laid in a course?” he asked Shinigami.

“Yes.” She made a small sound as if clearing her throat.

“Good. I’ll...” He saw the uselessness of making any excuse. They knew why he was going. He gave a brief nod, not meeting their eyes, and left.

“One can never trust Barnabas. He cares only for himself.” He could not escape the words now that they were in his head. Barnabas pressed his lips together, took a deep breath, and went to finish his preparations.

Chapter Five

In a little conference room on the other side of the complex from the main hub, Jeltor was pacing as he stared at the information on the screen.

“What do you think?” Grisor asked finally.

Jeltor said nothing for a long moment. This was a risky plan. The Committee was planning to lure Admiral Jeqwar in by having Jeltor offer to speak to one of her aides to prove his loyalty. When she got there, they would kidnap her and bring her here to be converted.

Every instinct told him that Admiral Jeqwar would be difficult to abduct and convert. She was famously strong-willed, and he had learned that the original scientists who’d developed the program were dead, with only partial notes left behind. This certainly wasn’t an ideal setup for a quick turnaround.

On the other hand, she was dangerous, since she knew what the Committee was up to and she had the support of her generals. Even if they did not convert her, they would rob the Navy of one of its greatest assets.

“She will know it’s a trap,” Jeltor mused slowly. “She’s not stupid. She’ll know that we’re trying to—”

“Help her,” Senator Qarwit emphasized. His voice was gentle, but there was an edge to it.

He was the one, Jeltor knew, who was doubting the conversion.

And he wasn’t wrong to do so. Barnabas’ words had haunted Jeltor. He had put himself in danger specifically for Jeltor. He had known where the laboratory was, and he had not just destroyed it but had gone inside to try to keep Jeltor safe.

It wasn’t that Jeltor felt any loyalty to Barnabas. No, that was gone—wasn’t it?—and in its place was the overwhelming rush of devotion that came over him when he thought of Grisor. It was the sweetest thing Jeltor had ever felt. It was intoxicating; he could not get enough of it.

But why would someone come to save him when he did not want to be saved? None of Barnabas’ actions suggested that he’d meant Jeltor harm. In fact, they suggested that Barnabas was risking significant harm to himself in order to…

Well, Jeltor didn’t know, that was the thing. He didn’t understand.

When he’d spat those words about Barnabas caring for petty freedoms over his own species, when he’d said that Barnabas wanted to be a hero, it had all been true—in a sense. But what did it mean to believe so much in little freedoms that he would come to “save” Jeltor at great cost to himself? What did it mean that he wanted to save aliens as well as his own kind?

Jeltor had seen heroism in many wars. Usually, those who wanted to be heroes turned and ran when they got their first taste of real battle. The fact that Barnabas hadn’t, that he had been willing to pick up a torch and walk into the darkness, said something about him that wasn’t all bad.

He didn’t want to be called a hero. He wanted to be a hero.

“Jeltor?” Grisor’s voice broke into his reverie. “Did you hear the senator?”

Jeltor was annoyed but struggled not to show it. “Yes, Excellency.” It was easy to be polite to Grisor. He felt a rush of happiness when he did so. And so, because Grisor would want him to, he gave a respectful nod to Senator Qarwit. “My apologies, senator. It is not that I doubt what we do for Admiral Jeqwar, simply that I think we can all agree she will fight us. If she would simply come here of her own accord for conversion, you would not have made this plan.”

Qarwit relaxed slightly. “That is true.”

“What we need to do,” Jeltor continued, “is make her think she can win me back to her side.”

He felt a strange thrill at that idea. Was such a thing even possible? Since his conversion, he was not upset by what had happened. He understood that not long ago he had believed one thing, and now he believed another. They had needed to put him in a tank to make him understand the right way to think, because he had not understood on his own. He was ashamed of that.

He liked the way things were now. He felt happy whenever he thought of Senator Grisor. He felt happy when he did things that would please the senator. He remembered the time before as one of confusion and worry. He had worked willingly with aliens, which was clearly something that should not have happened.

Other species were not as good as the Jotuns. This was simply a fact.

Or was it? He was confused. He didn’t like being confused. He thought about Grisor and felt calmer at once.

“Are you all right, Jeltor?” Grisor asked quietly.

Grisor was paying attention to him. Jeltor felt a rush of giddiness.

“I don’t want to speak to her,” he replied. It seemed very true when he said it, but it was also a lie. For some reason, he did want to speak to her, even though he was afraid she might bring him back to the way things had been.

Even though he wasn’t sure “afraid” was the right word for how he was feeling.

Grisor and Qarwit exchanged looks.

“I will speak to her,” Jeltor confirmed. “I just don’t want to. I don’t like sneaking around.”

Grisor relaxed. “None of us do,” he assured Jeltor. “And when we have done our work and we rule the Jotun and the sector, we will not need to sneak around anymore, Jeltor. Remember, we are sneaking around because of others—because they do not see the truth.”

“As I did not.” Jeltor was ashamed.

“Like so many do not,” Grisor said. “We do not hate them. We convert them, Jeltor. Look at you. Once, you fought against us, and now you are one of the most honored members of the Committee. You saved my life. Why dwell on how things were before?”

Jeltor nodded. He still did not want to speak to Admiral Jeqwar, but he knew it would make Grisor happy.

“I’ll do it. Open the channel.”

The two senators exchanged looks, then Grisor used his personal comm device to murmur a command. In a small alcove of the room, a screen came to life. Jeltor went to sit in front of it so he would appear to be alone in a small, deserted room.

The Jotun who appeared was one of Admiral Jeqwar’s senior aides. He was a deep blue Jotun named Gorsik, and he fluttered back against the wall of his tank in alarm when he saw who it was.

“Yes,” Jeltor assured him, “it’s me. I’m close.”

“I cannot speak to you,” Gorsik replied at once.

“Wait—please!” Jeltor filled his voice with pleading. “I need your help. I need you to come get me and bring me back somewhere you can lock me away. No, that’s not right. I…I need you to kill me.”

Across the room, Qarwit started, and Grisor gestured sharply for him to stay silent.

Gorsik was also shocked. “What?”

“I need you to kill me,” Jeltor repeated. “They’ve done things to my mind, Gorsik. I recognize you, but things are different. There are…orders. That’s not right. There aren’t any specific things to do, I don’t think, but they made me loyal to them. I can only break out of it for a few moments at a time, you see?”

“Jeltor—”

“You need to come get me!” Jeltor insisted, his voice rising. “You need to send someone to kill me. I’m afraid I won’t ever get better. And what if I hurt you if you try to make me loyal again? You have to tell them not to get close. You have to tell them not to trust me. No matter what they do—” He broke off and stared at the screen, pretending to be angry. “Disloyal,” he spat at Gorsik. “Alien-lover. You would see us ground into dust for the rest of them. You and her! She’s a traitor to the Jotuns!”

He ended the call and turned to look at Grisor.

“It’s done,” he stated when Grisor and Qarwit said nothing. “I asked them to do the ‘honorable’ thing, which will make her want to save me. But she’s too honorable to send anyone else when I might be dangerous, so she’ll come herself, you see? And when she does…”

“Clever,” Grisor admitted. “But what if—” He broke off and shook his head. “Nothing. Not important. We will wait. You have done very well, Jeltor. You know the admiral well. And do not worry, you will not have to speak to her when we retrieve her.”

Jeltor nodded and wondered why he felt so disappointed by that. He almost wondered if he could sneak in to speak to her while they were converting her.

He wouldn’t, of course.

But he could.

* * *

“Barnabas.” Shinigami flickered into being as a holographic representation. “Admiral Jeqwar is on the line, and she says it’s urgent.”

Barnabas sighed and turned away from the window. He should have felt a jump of adrenaline when he heard those words, but he felt nothing. He nodded for Shinigami to open the holo channel.

“Admiral Jeqwar,” he began. “It’s good to—”

“I’ve had word from Jeltor,” the admiral interrupted him.

Barnabas tried to keep his face flat. “Oh?”

“Yes. He wants…” She considered her words. “He asked us to kill him. I thought you should know, as a courtesy.”

“As a—” Barnabas realized what she meant a second later. “You’re going to do it?”

“Of course I’m going to do it,” she snapped. “He’s been converted. He isn’t trustworthy. As far as we know, it can’t be undone. Meanwhile, he knows classified information, and far too much about how the Navy operates. Not only that, he’s beginning to contact people. We need him out of the way.”

“It might be genuine,” Barnabas snarled at her. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Yes.” From the grief in her voice, she was telling the truth. “I have. And it is too big a risk. If this is a trap, which it almost certainly is—”

“If it’s a trap, then he’s working with them, and he can give us information!” Barnabas would have pounded his fist on a desk if there had been one. As it was, he clenched his hand and then flexed it, forcing himself to stop making a fist. “Let us go retrieve him. We aren’t a Jotun ship, so he doesn’t know our internal workings—and couldn’t get into your ships via ours, even if he did. We have a brig we can put him in, and we know enough about him to ascertain whether he’s being truthful.”

“No.” Admiral Jeqwar shook her head. “I’ve seen what your ship can do. I’m not giving him the chance to command it.”

“He won’t command it.”

“You’re not thinking logically,” she told him. “He’s your friend—or he was. That Jeltor is gone, human. The truth is that we have plans to execute, plans that involve getting our forces into position to head off the Committee—and we cannot risk a traitor in our midst. I should not even have told you about this.”

Barnabas closed his eyes for a moment. “No. It was a kindness. I…thank you. Let me tell his wife. I will say it was an accident.”

She hesitated, then nodded. The call ended.

Barnabas turned to Shinigami’s projection. “We need to get there as fast as we can.”

She looked relieved. “I’m glad you agree. I’ve put us up to…well, faster than we should be going. And if we skip the early checks against the satellites—”

“Skip them,” Barnabas stated flatly. “We don’t have time for any of that. We have to get to him before Jeqwar does.”

Chapter Six

The rest of the crew—including Gilwar, now housed in one of the Shinigami’s many extra cabins—had withdrawn after Barnabas left the conference room. Now, however, summoned by Shinigami’s alert, all of them arrived on the bridge at a run.

Barnabas nodded to each of them as they arrived, pleased by their obvious engagement. Even Gilwar, still grieving for his partner in Intelligence, seemed determined.

Then again, it was hard to tell with Jotuns. Barnabas had no idea if he was interpreting the jellyfish flutters correctly. He simply knew that Gilwar had once been leery of allowing Barnabas to know about the Committee, even going so far as to tell an assassin to take a shot at him if she got the chance.

He now seemed to believe that Barnabas would not hurt the Jotun species as he destroyed the Committee.

“He cannot understand fighting for one’s species.” Jeltor’s words rang in his head, and he closed his eyes briefly. It was not genuine, he reminded himself.

He had spent too long as a monk not to be aware of himself, and he knew exactly why Jeltor’s dismissive words cut him to the bone. Once he had become one of the Nacht, Barnabas had no longer felt much allegiance to humanity as a species. The things he had done…

They still made him shudder.

It was Catherine—and the experience of loving someone—that had set him back on the path, and that had been snatched away. Since then, over his many very different lives, he had seen too much of the myriad foibles of humanity to have any particular allegiance to his species.

Humanity, like every alien race he had ever encountered, had the capacity for great feats of goodness, and great depths of cruelty and apathy. What Barnabas had loved about Bethany Anne, in part, was that she sought what was best for the universe as a whole.

Was it so wrong that he did not revere humanity the way Grisor revered the Jotuns?

Logically, he did not think so, yet being called disloyal was something he could not simply shake off. Being accused of hunting fame and hero status shamed him deeply. Surely he was more than that.

Oddly, it was Tabitha’s voice that appeared in his head. How fucking stupid do you have to be to think that?

Barnabas gave a bemused smile. Tabitha was not here to know about any of this, but he was quite sure that she’d have said almost exactly that—only, perhaps, in more colorful language. The last time he’d seen her, she’d described a series of increasingly improbable acts with a variety of species in increasing detail.

And she’d only been discussing a sandwich at the time.

He collected himself and gave a little shake of his head. “Thank you all for coming so quickly. As you may have divined, we are heading back to Jotuna D with all speed. The reason is that Jeltor has contacted Admiral Jeqwar and asked that she send someone to kill him. She has apparently decided to accept his offer.”

He had meant only to speak logically and get them to the planning phase, but Tafa gave a little cry and put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were shiny with tears and Gar put an arm around her shoulders, glaring meaningfully at Barnabas.

Why did you have to say that?

I’m going to agree with Gar here, Shinigami chimed in. Dick move, man.

It’s true! Barnabas repressed a sigh. “I don’t think she’s eager to do it,” he said to Tafa. “Also, she doesn’t know we’re going in to disrupt her plans, so we have a window. We will get him to safety.” He stopped short of promising it. He could not do so in good conscience, and he hoped she didn’t notice the omission. “I called us here to discuss how we will get him out. And rest assured, I would not risk any of you if I thought this was a lost cause.”

Tafa took a deep breath and nodded.

Barnabas decided to segue into facts before he could screw up on the emotional part again. “We will be going to Grisor’s private estate, which I think we can assume will be very well fortified.”

“We’re going to kill Grisor while we’re there, right?” Shinigami asked.

Gilwar nodded to show his agreement with the sentiment. “We should take our chance.”

“I don’t think so,” Barnabas replied.

There was an incredulous silence.

“What?” Shinigami asked finally. “If we’re there—”

Barnabas held up a hand to stop her, but it was another moment before he spoke. These thoughts were only just becoming conscious, but he had been fighting the sense in recent days that they were going about this all wrong somehow.

Now he knew why.

“In every society, those like Grisor rise in secrecy and silence.” He looked at the vast expanse of space showing on the ship’s viewscreens. “The fact that there is a Committee, and that they’ve risen so high, shows that there is something in Jotun society enabling this.”

“No,” Gilwar exclaimed furiously. “They would brainwash the rest of us. They know we would not accept their ideas any other way. They are not an expression of who we are.”

“No?” Barnabas looked at him calmly. “We had a man on Earth who was the embodiment of forgiveness and kindness, who died gladly as an act of redemption for the very ones who killed him. Centuries later, his followers were killing one another brutally for speaking slightly different words of remembrance about him. Some of those followers believed that the exact words were so critical that forcing people to say them out of terror rather than genuine belief was more important than letting them speak whichever words they chose.”

Gilwar stared at him silently.

“I do not know a single culture or species that has not grappled with this,” Barnabas continued. “And by this, I mean the belief that they are superior to all others. And they are always wrong, but they go through cycles of believing it anyway. When they do, people like Grisor rise. Grisor and the other members of the Committee are not alone in their beliefs. They are a symptom.”

Gilwar turned away, his frustration clear.

“And because of that,” Barnabas said, “killing him will do no good. If he attacks us and there is no other way to save ourselves, of course, we will defend ourselves. But the Jotuns must put him on trial for what he has done. They must deal with this, and do so publicly. Secrecy and vigilantism on my part will do nothing to help them.”

There was a silence.

“But you are a vigilante.” Shinigami sounded confused and frustrated. He could hear the question under her words: “If vigilantism won’t help, why are we even here?”

“There are limits to what I do,” Barnabas replied. “To what we do, Shinigami. We are here to help those who have no other recourse, but right now, there is other recourse. We will help as we can, but the Jotuns must do this for themselves.”

“He’s right.” Gilwar gave an unwilling chuckle. He clearly did not want to admit that he agreed. “It was what we said, Wev and I, when Kantar wanted to involve all of you. We said this was a matter for the Jotuns. Of course, we wanted to deal with it without anyone else knowing.”

“That would be a mistake,” Barnabas said. “Without a public reckoning, the same thing will happen again.”

“And so you propose to capture Grisor,” Gilwar said, “and deliver him to…whom, human? Who do you think will give him the Justice you seek?”

Barnabas had been quietly self-assured, but that question took him aback. “I had not thought of that. The Senate…”

“Might be sympathetic. He might sway them. You say you want this taken care of publicly, but what if the Jotun public agrees with him? That is the risk you take.”

Barnabas turned away, rubbing his temples.

“We don’t have to decide now,” Shinigami chimed in. Her voice was clear and cool. “Barnabas was right about one thing: a mission should have one objective. Ours is to get Jeltor out. If Grisor wanders into our hands, we will try to capture him, and if that is not possible, we will do whatever is necessary to get out safely. Is that clear to everyone?”

There was a round of nods and murmurs, and Barnabas gave her a grateful look.

“I have a request.” Tafa’s voice was very small. When everyone looked at her, she seemed to shrink into herself before very deliberately standing up straighter. She looked at all of them, but her eyes came to rest on Barnabas. “I want to be—upgraded.”

“What?” Barnabas asked after a moment.

“Like Gar was.” Tafa’s hands were clenched.

“Like, for combat?” Shinigami clarified dubiously. She and Barnabas exchanged looks.

“Yes,” Tafa said impatiently.

“You want to be part of our combat missions?” Barnabas asked her. Tafa had participated in a bit of espionage a few weeks back, but that was a far cry from actual battles.

“Well, no. I don’t.” Tafa took a deep breath. “But I’m not going to keep cowering here on the ship while all of you go into danger.” She swallowed hard. “If I were already upgraded, if I’d learned how to fight, I would be there to help get Jeltor back. I’ve failed him, and I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for that.”

Barnabas looked at her for a moment, and then—gently—peered into her mind. He had been surprised by her request, but now that he saw her thoughts, he could see how desperately she wanted this.

She was scared. In fact, she was terrified, but she knew there were reasons to move past that fear, and she would do so in order to help her friends.

“All right,” he agreed with a nod. “We’ll have you assessed in the Pod-doc, and we’ll figure this out.” Briefly, he debated telling her she hadn’t failed Jeltor, but he knew that she would never agree with him, so he only looked at the rest of them. “We know some of what the Committee has for resources. I want a plan for our rescue mission drawn up within the next hour. Any resources you have, now is the time to share them.” He gave Gilwar a meaningful glance.

Gilwar laughed. “I’ll get you what we have on Grisor’s estate. I got a good map last time, including the utilities. We can probably work with that.”

“Good,” Shinigami said. “Come with me, and we’ll transfer all that data.”

Barnabas gave a nod and followed them out into the hallway. They would get Jeltor back.

Then they would figure out how to undo his conversion. They would find a way. Barnabas promised himself that.

* * *

There was a ding from her computer, and Aliana looked up from her book. She did not move particularly quickly as she put the book aside and went to the desk; after the storm of tears, she had little energy left.

She had skipped dinner, having neither the energy to face the rest of the crew nor the desire to see people eating live snakes. Someone had come and left a plate of a plain soup, though, that did not have any snakes in it, alive or dead.

(She’d checked. Thoroughly.)

What she saw on the screen made her eyebrows shoot up. She sighed, put her boots on, and went to find Zinqued.

He was in the communal room off the kitchen, and he spun around in a chair to greet her with a smile. “Ah, there you are.”

Tik’ta gave her a nod from one of the other chairs. She’d been open about the fact that she thought Aliana was making a mistake, signing back on, but she had been perfectly nice about it.

“The Shinigami just passed one of our checkpoints,” Aliana reported.

“Oh?” Zinqued sat up, deeply interested now.

“I don’t think we can catch it on this round,” Aliana continued. “It’s going like a bat out of hell.”

Zinqued and Tik’ta frowned, trying to parse this.

“Sorry—it’s going really fast. And I mean really fast. There’s no way we could catch it, but it’s heading for somewhere near Jotuna.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I thought you might want to know.” She gave a nod to Zinqued and one to Tik’ta—who looked frustrated that Aliana was helping Zinqued with this—and headed back to her room before anyone could ask her any more questions.

Steal the Shinigami, or not. She couldn’t find it in herself to care very much either way. She’d been trying to forget meeting Barnabas on High Tortuga. Something about the memory unsettled her.

The sooner they were done with this job, the better, in her opinion. And if she needed to flee deeper into this sector to get away from human society, that would be just fine.

Chapter Seven

“Any luck?” Ferqar called.

“Shh.” Kelnamon inched along a tiny ledge on the outside of the building. This was one of the tallest buildings on the outskirts of the main city, and it had a very tall radio tower on top of it.

He needed to hook into that tower.

As the days passed with no word back on his discovery, Kelnamon had become completely convinced that there was interference, either within the upper ranks of the government or in the buildings that held them.

He was hoping for the latter, of course—some trickery, a false signal that the Jotuns had learned of and sent out. But there was the possibility that someone in the Brakalon government had turned traitor, and Kelnamon would be a fool not to acknowledge that and plan for it.

Which meant he was calling in someone very different, and he had to do something unusual to get his message out.

So he was climbing the outside of this building in the dead of night in a desperate attempt to get a message attached to the weather data being sent to orbiting satellites. Ferqar had helped him work out a way to make the satellites send the message on, and hopefully it would arrive soon at a place he knew Barnabas had gone once: Victory Station.

He heard a strange skittering in the darkness and froze, but then pressed on. He didn’t see anything moving, and he needed to get this message up to the antenna.

Once he hauled himself over the edge, he moved quickly. He attached a small device to the bottom of the antenna and waited while it ran through its warmups, then slightly changed the positioning of the dish and embedded transponder.

“Come on,” he murmured. “Come on. Come on.”

The message ran through once, then twice.

“You need to get back here,” Ferqar’s voice said in his ear. “Someone’s coming, and it sounds odd. More of those bots, maybe.”

Kelnamon grabbed the device and raced to the edge of the roof. He took one sweeping glance over the city before lowering himself over the edge and beginning to walk down the side of the building, holding the rope and bracing his feet on the wall.

The city looked normal, he thought. In a sense, everything was normal. People were going about their daily business with no idea anything was wrong.

Perhaps he should be making a big deal of this, making sure that everyone knew the government had been abducted. He feared hysteria, however, and a swift reprisal. Who could say what other forces were on Kordinev already, waiting to strike?

No, it was too risky.

He had just reached the ground when he saw them: turrets gleaming in the moonlight, their barrels swinging as they searched for targets.

“Ruuuun!” he hissed to Ferqar.

They pelted along the streets with the click-clack of the spidery Jotun turrets echoing behind them. The laser sights swung this way and that, but the street was deserted. Kelnamon and Ferqar were long gone.

A few streets away, the two of them slumped into the shadow of a doorway.

“Do you think the message got through?” Ferqar asked dubiously.

“I hope so.” Kelnamon had never been one to delude himself with false hope. “I can only hope Victory Station manages to find Barnabas or we’ll be shit out of luck.”

“He might find out about their plans from somewhere else,” Ferqar pointed out. “I worked with two members of Intelligence. They might know what’s happening.”

“And if they don’t?” Kelnamon sighed. “Then we’ll need to take care of this ourselves. And they have the jump on us, and we’re divided.”

Chapter Eight

“Ma’am?” Gorsik was in the doorway. “We’re ready.”

Admiral Jeqwar hadn’t heard him come in, but he was fastidious about keeping his suit oiled and in perfect repair. She knew he had once been in the secret service, and sometimes—like now—she wondered just what skills he had that she did not know about.

Jotun assassins were rare, but those who existed were very, very good.

She nodded at him. “I’m coming.”

“I—” It was rare that he was surprised. “I’m sorry? I thought you just wanted to give the launch order.”

“No.” She took a look around her office and did a quick status check of her weapons and defensive mechanisms. “I’ll be the one going.”

“What? No.” He recovered almost immediately and moved to bar her path. “Ma’am, I would not disobey orders lightly, but this is madness. You correctly assessed that Jeltor is dangerous. Your order to kill him on sight was correct, and your current plan, to kill him from a distance, is also correct. But you should be nowhere near him.”

“Gorsik, I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you?” he pressed. “Or rather, do you really think it’s a good idea?”

After a moment, she muttered an oath. “Dammit, Gorsik, why couldn’t you just let me do this? You’re the worst aide I’ve ever had.”

His tentacles twitched in amusement. “If I thought you meant that I’d be devastated. Ma’am, why are you doing this? This isn’t the admiral I know.”

“Don’t give me a sly set of compliments. You know I hate that.” She stalked back to the window and stared out into the black. The proximity sensors in her suit told her that he had come to stand next to her, but he let her stand in silence before speaking.

In truth, she did not know what to say. She knew that this was folly. Her first assessment had been correct: Jeltor was dangerous, and the wisest course of action was to kill him before he could worm his way into the defense networks. When she had seen the recording of his conversation with Gorsik, she had been sure of her path. She had made her decision quickly, as she was wont to do, and had begun to execute it at once.

And yet…

“He asked me to do it,” she told him finally. “He asked me to send someone, but he sent word to me. I’m not a judge, Gorsik. I don’t choose who lives and dies, not that way. It feels wrong to send someone else. He reached out to me as a gesture of trust.”

“If he was telling the truth,” Gorsik replied softly. “I wonder about that, ma’am.”

She turned to look at him with interest. She had caught the double meaning in his voice—he doubted Jeltor, yes, but he wasn’t sure of the lie. And from a former member of the secret service, that meant something.

“So you think that too,” she stated, testing.

He looked over. “Think what? Now is not the time for misunderstandings.”

He had a point. “You think he’s not sure what he wants anymore. That it might have been designed as a trap, but he still wants us to succeed.”

“Yes,” Gorsik admitted. “I think he is conflicted. It is difficult to brainwash someone without destroying their mind. Since he still seems functional, that means he might still think his way out of this. But I think it would be foolish to trust him; for anyone to trust him. Even them.”

“That’s why,” Admiral Jeqwar said. Her voice was low. “I have to believe this can be undone, Gorsik. I have to. If we have to kill every innocent person they’ve brainwashed…” Her voice trailed off. “I can kill soldiers who stand against me in battle. I don’t like it, but I can do it. I will even sacrifice my life if need be. But to kill civilians—ones who were chosen because they were allies? That’s different. I’m not sure I can do that, so I have to hope this can be undone.”

“They aren’t your allies anymore, though,” Gorsik countered after a moment. “If they’re trying to kill you, it doesn’t matter why. You have to defend yourself—and the others who are depending on you.”

Admiral Jeqwar looked away.

Footsteps pounded down the hallway, and an aide burst through the door. “Ma’am? Ma’am! There was a flicker on one of the buoys, then our surveillance inside Senator Grisor’s estate saw footage of the Shinigami landing there.”

Dammit. And yet, her heart soared. She had never been one for running from choices…until now.

Now she was glad to let Barnabas take this choice from her.

“What do we do?” Gorsik asked her.

“We let Barnabas try,” she told him quietly. “The humans have good medical technology, we know that. Perhaps they can undo what was done.”

“And if they cannot?”

She wanted to run from this choice, but she must not. “Then I will offer to do what must be done,” she said quietly. “For now, send in our ship and hook me in remotely. If I can aid them, I will.”

* * *

The Shinigami landed lightly, as far as ships went. Its touchdown on the edge of Senator Grisor’s estate was incredibly delicate.

In terms of more normal concerns, it flattened a huge number of carefully tended flowers.

“Oops,” exclaimed Shinigami in studied innocence.

Barnabas sank his head into his hands.

“Well, it’s not like they’re not going to realize we were here,” she pointed out. “They’ll be missing Jeltor, so I think they’re going to figure it out.”

Barnabas tried to keep from laughing. Laughing, he knew, would only encourage her. Like with a toddler, he thought whimsically. He straightened up and wiped his eyes surreptitiously. “Right. Let’s get out there and abduct our friend. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I would say.”

“Right behind you,” Gar said, nodding.

In the corner, Tafa watched from her chair. She gave a wan smile when they looked at her.

“Do you remember last time, when you were helping with surveillance?” Barnabas asked her. “You helped immeasurably. Shinigami will hook you in so you can do the same this time.”

Tafa nodded, looking a little better. She waved at them as they left.

The gardens here seemed to have been designed for land animals, with the exception of the very large and very clear ornamental pools. Barnabas suspected there were many plants, rocks, and other elements underwater that he could not appreciate, but that Jotuns would find very relaxing.

Grisor, he thought, did not deserve a place like this. He would have stepped on the plants as he passed, but they didn’t deserve that. He settled for toppling a large pergola.

“My hand slipped,” he explained when Shinigami looked at him.

She rolled her eyes and they continued. It became almost a game to see who could do the most damage. Gilwar sent a silenced shot from one of his arm guns to take out a statue at the opposite end of one wing of the garden, and Shinigami used one of the benches to drag a deep trench where one of the walkways should be. She looked absurdly pleased with herself.

Gar, meanwhile, was moving rocks out of their carefully aligned places. He had an evil grin as he worked, which turned out to be particularly terrifying on a Luvendi.

Jeltor is in one of the inner rooms, Shinigami said, but it’s closest to this side.

Any chance that we’ve been detected? Barnabas asked.

No, Tafa said. I’m monitoring their security response teams both in network traffic and a live feed of their offices. They haven’t noticed you. You’re giving me an awful lot to change on the security feeds, though.

Whoops. Gar sounded guilty. Sorry, Tafa.

No, it’s good. Gives me something to do.

They continued to the edge of the building and, when Tafa gave them the all-clear, scaled the side of it. Jotun suits in general weren’t made for climbing, so they hauled Gilwar up with a makeshift pulley.

This is undignified, he complained. Shinigami had hooked him into their Etheric communications stream.

Better undignified than on the ground floor facing down a bunch of soldiers, Barnabas advised cheerfully.

Why are those my only two choices?

Laughing, they crept across the roof and made their way to the edge of the courtyard that held Jeltor’s rooms. A quick analysis confirmed the layout that Gilwar had found last time. The glass on the windows would be almost impossible to break. There was a way in through the ceiling vents, however, and they set to work getting in.

They dropped into the large, open main room, and only just avoided going into the tanks. Stumbling and steadying themselves, they looked around. It was a beautiful room—if you managed to ignore the fact that it was a prison. Quiet and calm, it was filled with pale light that filtered in through the translucent glass of the windows.

“Hello!” Jeltor called from behind them.

Chapter Nine

Barnabas didn’t have to wait for events to kick off. Without hesitating for an instant, Jeltor threw a bolt of energy with his Committee-made biosuit. Barnabas flung himself sideways and rolled, feeling the heat on the side of his face.

Lasers. That’s new.

The Luvendi cut in. That wasn’t precisely a laser, it was—

Not now, Gar!

And you’re sure about this plan? Shinigami asked. On Barnabas’ instructions, none of the others had drawn their weapons, and they had spread out.

Yes, Barnabas told them all. I’m sure. He brushed himself off and stood. Jeltor had moved right after he fired, and now he was crouched behind a large pedestal that held a statue of a Jotun in a biosuit.

When he peered out, Barnabas was standing quietly. His weapons were not drawn.

“It isn’t going to work!” Jeltor exclaimed. He sounded both furious and terrified. “It won’t work, Barnabas, this act you’re putting on.”

“The part of the hero?” Barnabas asked. He tried to keep his voice level, but he knew that the words carried bitterness.

Jeltor said nothing. He did not come out from behind the pedestal, either.

“You’re right,” Barnabas continued. “Do you know what I was on Earth? I was a monster. That was what the Nacht were. Parents told children stories of us, and said if the children weren’t good, the Nacht would come and take them away.”

Still Jeltor did not speak, but he came out to stare at Barnabas.

“And you?” Barnabas asked. “You’re the same, in some ways. Becoming a Nacht—it changed you. The Nosferatu, more so. You’re neither one nor the other right now, are you? And the uncertainty terrifies you. That was why you asked Admiral Jeqwar to kill you.”

Jeltor’s biosuit went rigid.

“She spoke to me about it,” Barnabas said.

“What was she going to do?” Jeltor asked, a bit wildly.

Barnabas hesitated. “She was going to do it. That is why I came for you.”

Jeltor laughed. It was a hysterical sound, echoing off the stone and glass. “She was going to do it. I tried to lure her in with honor, and she was going to kill me. I shouldn’t have thought she would be so easily trapped.”

“Or perhaps you did think she would honor your request,” Barnabas snapped, striking as fast as a snake. His voice was hard now. “And that was why you asked, Jeltor. There’s enough of you left in there that you’re afraid of hurting the people you love, aren’t you? You’re afraid that the Committee might successfully use you as a weapon, and you don’t want—”

That was all he got out before Jeltor shot again. The Jotun gave a yell of fury and advanced, sloshing through one of the pools of water as he shot…and kept shooting. Barnabas hurled himself around the room. His reflexes were good, more than equal to any other species’—but the Jotuns used auto-targeting in their suits, He was hard-pressed to get away from that, forced to change directions often in order to confuse the system.

Along the sides of the room, Shinigami and the others watched. He caught a glimpse of her face, which was set and determined, her hands clenched. She didn’t like this plan. She had suggested simply overpowering him and abducting him, but Barnabas was afraid that doing so would be confirmation of the biases the Committee had implanted.

He sensed that Jeltor was wavering, and he wanted the Jotun to break on his own.

“Fight me, damn you!” Jeltor yelled at him.

“No.” Barnabas stared him down before another bolt forced him to seek shelter. “I’m not here to fight, Jeltor, and I’m not here to kill you, either. I’m here to bring you home.”

“Home? Where I could do as much damage as I pleased?” Jeltor’s voice was ugly. “You hid Jelina and the children from me.”

Barnabas crouched behind another pedestal. It was true. As soon as they had received word that Jeltor had been compromised, he’d had Jeltor’s family moved somewhere he did not know, with no communications in or out.

Jelina hadn’t asked for anything when he left. Not for him to bring Jeltor back alive, and not for him to kill Jeltor rather than put her and the children at risk, either. In some ways, that had been harder to bear than silent pleas.

She was only one person, and she knew she was caught up in something much larger than herself.

This, Barnabas thought, was the cost of empires. It was a cost he’d seen extracted from Bethany Anne, paid again and again by her and by her closest companions. He liked to think that it had been worth it, but it was heartbreaking to see the fallout.

No, he would not let Jeltor go home—not as the Jotun had understood it.

“Your home is in your mind, Jeltor.” He kept his voice level and soft—nothing loud to startle the Jotun. “I have known madness. I have known the sense of being unmoored from myself like a ship in a storm. That is where you are now, and you know it.”

“You are wrong,” Jeltor called back. “For the first time, I have certainty.”

“Do you? If so, you would not have offered what you did. You would have found some other way to lure the admiral in.” Barnabas stood now. “Jeltor, you made your offer hoping she would take it, but there is no need for that. When you do their bidding, you feel good, yes? They’ve made sure of that. But there is a moment of sickness, too, isn’t there? There is a moment of knowing that it is wrong. I know you. That will drive you mad. You were never one who could ignore something that was wrong.”

He looked at Jeltor, whose gun was still pointed at him. There was no shot being charged.

“Jeltor,” Barnabas repeated. “Come back.”

* * *

Jeltor stared at that familiar face and felt his world flipping.

Barnabas was right. The rush of pleasure he felt when he did Grisor’s bidding was strong, but even the overwhelming strength of it could not wipe away that one moment of knowing he was betraying himself.

When he had first come here, the little voice that told him so had been quiet, but after seeing Barnabas come for Grisor the first time, the voice had gotten stronger.

Unmoored like a ship in a storm. Jeltor struggled to make sense of himself. He longed for the certainty that he’d been promised when they’d tortured him, and yet he knew it was false.

Either way.

“You don’t know that it can be undone,” he told Barnabas. Speaking those words was terrifying, and the fear filled him with the urge to run back to Grisor and seek refuge in the lies.

“I have faith,” Barnabas assured him after a moment. “I can’t offer you certainty or a way out, Jeltor, but I have faith that we will find one together.”

“What do you have to do with it?” Jeltor asked cruelly. “Taking credit for someone else’s work again?”

“No.” Barnabas winced at the words but then smiled reassuringly. “I cannot do the work for you. I can only be your friend. But, Jeltor, I pulled myself out of madness alone—for self-preservation and nothing more. That is not something I would wish on you. I want you to have friends by your side as you do this; friends whose belief in you will see you through the dark moments.”

“We’re here, Jeltor,” Gar chimed in.

Jeltor looked sharply at him and saw Gar’s instinctive desire to reach for his weapon, but the Luvendi held himself steady and did not do so.

They were not going to kill him. Jeltor was not sure if the feeling in his chest was relief or hopelessness.

“I can’t do this,” he told them all. “It can’t be undone; it’s too much. I’ll always be a risk.”

“Jeltor—” Barnabas began.

“No! Listen. They’re going to take Kordinev first.”

“Jeltor—”

“Listen! I don’t know how much time I have, how long I can hold onto this, before the conversion takes over again.” Already, it was calling him. A false refuge was still a refuge, and thinking of decades of struggle was too much to bear. He fixed his mind on the one objective he had: to tell them what the Committee was planning.

Once he had told them, he could rest.

“They’ll go for Kordinev,” he said again. “The Brakalon homeworld. They’re still deciding on a plan, but their first thought is to take over the government with a few high-level officials and begin converting people before anyone knows they’ve been taken over. Once the army is converted, they’ll have a fighting force few could defeat.”

“Infantry isn’t the most useful thing these days,” Barnabas mused.

“No, but the Jotuns don’t have them,” Jeltor countered. “At the same time, they’ll be working to convert our admirals and work their way into the programming of the ships. Right now, there are failsafes—if an admiral loses control, individual captains can take back control of their ships. It’s never been used, but they all know the protocol. The Committee is working to undo that. They’ll have Brakalon infantry and strike teams, and the Jotun Navy. With those, they can do almost anything they want to.”

Barnabas gave a quick nod.

“They’re arguing,” Jeltor continued. “They have the technology and they know they need to move fast, but with the first team of scientists gone, they aren’t certain how often they’ll need to refresh the conversion or how many they can convert at once.”

The Jotun they had brought with them made a small, satisfied noise. “Good.”

Jeltor could feel his sanity starting to slip. “That’s all I know,” he told Barnabas desperately. “They’re still making the plan for Kordinev. You’ll need a resource on the ground there if you can get a Brakalon. I don’t know—”

He was having trouble concentrating.

“Jeltor, stay with me.” Barnabas’ voice was urgent.

“I can’t; it’s too much.” He was so afraid. So afraid, and so weary. He could not do this for the rest of his life.

“Just for a moment,” Barnabas urged. “Then another, Jeltor. Moment by moment. The more you practice, the easier it will become. I’ve done this before. I know it’s possible.”

“I—can’t!” Barnabas began to step forward, and he was overcome with terror. They would try to help him, keep him in this absolute hell, and he couldn’t bear it. Jeltor shot, this time with his gun. Bullets sprayed around the room and his former crewmates dove for cover.

When they were no longer looking, Jeltor ejected himself from his tank and dove into the water of the pools, darting for safety in the small alcoves where they could not follow.

* * *

“Fuck!” Shinigami yelled as she threw herself sideways.

“Are you hurt?” Barnabas called. He had every faith in the structural integrity of her cybernetic body, but who knew what might get jostled or disrupted by a hard hit? “Is something broken?”

“No, but he ruined my jacket. I really liked this one!”

“Focus.” Barnabas scrambled up and saw the suit standing oddly still. It took only a split-second to note the empty tank. “Filius canis. He’s in the pools.”

“How do you catch a jellyfish that doesn’t want to be caught?” Shinigami asked philosophically as she came to stand beside him.

“I’m going to be honest; I don’t think you do,” Barnabas admitted. “At least, not without a great deal of time that I’m guessing we don’t have.”

Guys, he tripped something, Tafa reported in the same moment. There are guards converging on your position.

“Yep.” Barnabas rubbed his head. “That sounds about right.”

“Come on,” Shinigami urged. “Let’s get out. You were right; this was the way to get through to him, but we’ll need to come back.” She stopped when she saw his facial expression. “What?”

“We’re not leaving,” Barnabas told her. “Not empty-handed, anyway. Progress with Jeltor is good, but we are not leaving until we have something more.”

“So, what are we trying to get?”

“You know,” Barnabas told her, “I’m not quite sure.” He took out his Jean Dukes and primed them, giving her a beatific smile. “I’m thinking of just letting the moment guide me.”

“Oh, good,” Shinigami replied. “You’ve decided to wing it. I’ll have you know we rely on you to be the buzzkill who makes sure we have a plan.”

“You used to, you mean.” Barnabas strode to the door. “All right, motherfuckers, let’s have some fun.”

Chapter Ten

Barnabas yanked on the door and sighed when it was locked. “Of course, they had him in a prison. Of course, they did.” Tafa? Shinigami? Can either of you open this door?

I’ve got it, Tafa said. Locating you and working on the grid, one moment. A few interminable seconds passed while everyone twiddled their fingers and Shinigami edged closer to the door, looking uncertain, then a click sounded. You should be good to go.

Thank you. Barnabas added privately to Shinigami, Thank you for letting her handle it.

Shinigami nodded with a faint gleam of a smile and held the door for the rest of them to head into the corridor.

Tafa, what’s the layout of the soldiers?

They’re spreading out across the gardens to block all exits, Tafa reported. They still don’t seem to know you got in from the roof. Do you need any particular kind of exit? Is Jeltor coming with you willingly?

Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged stricken looks.

Oh, no, Shinigami said quietly to Barnabas.

It’s a long story, Barnabas replied. But knowing where the soldiers are is a big help. You should see us soon!

All right, Tafa said after a moment. Her tone said that she knew something was wrong, and she was trying to keep herself calm.

They didn’t have any time to lose. Barnabas turned toward the bulk of the building and took off at a run. He was going to try to strike a delicate balance between getting something good out of this before anyone knew where he was going and getting enough of the guards to follow him that their path to the ship would be clear.

An idea came to him. Everyone think: what would we do if we were planning to take this place out now? I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing, I’m just saying that’s what we want them to think we’re doing.

Take down the automated defensive systems, Shinigami shot back promptly.

Close any electronic doors and lock them to keep people partitioned, Gilwar added.

Go straight for Grisor and hold him hostage, Gar suggested finally. It’s not necessarily the best thing to do, but it’s one of the things that signals the intention.

Good. We’ll do all of that. Barnabas shot them a grin.

I’ll get the doors, Gilwar offered. If someone can find me Grisor’s last known location, I can just leave open the doors that lead us straight to him.

Working on it! Tafa sounded glad of the distraction. I’ll let you know.

I’ll get the defensive systems, Shinigami said. She detoured to something that looked like a totally normal wall panel and popped it open with a gentle touch on a specific point. It lifted and slid up into the ceiling to reveal a large control panel. Cover me.

What is it like to be you? Barnabas asked rhetorically. He nodded at Gar, and the two of them took up flanking positions to protect Shinigami and Gilwar. Barnabas was anticipating that as soon as the soldiers realized they’d stopped at a control panel, things would escalate very quickly.

Gilwar, I’ve sent Grisor’s last known location as a ping to your biosuit’s scanner, Tafa said. I’m tracking him visually on the security feeds. He’s going to his chambers, alone, and he has a lot of shields and so on in there. A panic…pod-thing, it looks like.

Good, Barnabas said. That had given him an idea. He was pretty sure his grin was the one Shinigami called his “evil-sneaky smile.” Apparently, even an AI couldn’t come up with a good combination of those two words.

Are you going to tell us what you’re planning? Gar asked curiously.

Not yet, Barnabas replied.

That’s so he can claim whatever he does was his master-plan, Shinigami offered. Don’t believe him; he’s full of crap.

Yeah, yeah. Barnabas kept his gun half-raised and slightly unfocused his eyes on the hallway in front of him so he could react quickly when guards came into sight. He could hear their footsteps. Tafa, how many are on the way?

You have…ten or so coming from the gardens. They’ve left some there.

I was hoping they wouldn’t be so smart. Ah, well. Any coming from the other direction?

Five.

Gar, you ready?

Of course, I am, Gar said. Especially since I gain an extra second or two every time by them being surprised to see a Luvendi with a gun in armor.

Barnabas snickered.

Defensive systems turned off, Shinigami reported.

Doors closing, Gilwar added. Indeed, doors started slamming down nearby, and there were concerned shouts.

All right, move! Barnabas stopped guarding the garden side and joined Gar, pelting down the hallway. Let’s see how many more we can get out of the garden and following us. As for these...

They’re around the next corner, Tafa reported.

Excellent.

The Shinigami’s crew was already firing as they came around a corner. One of Barnabas’ shots carried a Jotun guard back into another of its teammates. The two of them together clipped a third as they went over, sending a wild shot over Shinigami’s head and leaving only two of the five up and firing.

Gar took out one of those two with a careful shot. At the beginning, he had been very impulsive when it came to combat, but he was learning to take his time.

To Barnabas’ surprise, Gilwar took out the other. His shot was a bolt of energy similar to Jeltor’s, and it was directed with immense precision at the biosuit’s neck. Whatever internal mechanism it hit, the suit shut down almost immediately, jerking and flailing as the Jotun thudded to its knees.

Shinigami gave a whoop as she took two long, loping steps and launched into the air, to come down on the pile of three other Jotuns. She grabbed the first, who had been rendered very dead by the Jean Dukes round, and used it as a mace to take out the other two. Her human-sized body did not look capable of wielding the biosuit with ease, which made the whole thing much better.

She gave them a delighted grin when she was finished. Since she was an android she was not even panting, something Gar looked vaguely annoyed by.

“Come on!” she urged. “This way to Senator Scumbag!”

Gilwar seemed to find this hilarious. He was still chortling as they took off down the hall.

Grisor is now inside his panic pod, Tafa reported.

Very good, Barnabas replied. His evil grin was back. I assume there are more soldiers mobilizing?

They’re trying, but Gilwar has the doors locked down. They can’t seem to get them open.

If the biosuit’d had a human face, Barnabas assumed it would look very smug. As it was, Gilwar was fluttering inside his tank in a way that reminded Barnabas of jazz hands. He stifled a snort.

All right, we’ll do what we can before they get through—if they do at all.

You’re coming right up on the office, Tafa told them. One more door, and…yep, that’s it.

Thank you, Tafa. Barnabas wrenched the door open. Privately, he added one more command to Tafa. From her amusement, he could tell she knew what his plan was.

He went into the room, holstering his guns, and was pleased to see that the panic pod was clear. Grisor could see them—and he looked quite smug.

“Look who it is,” he began. “Barnabas…without Captain Jeltor.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas grunted noncommittally. He did not want to give Grisor anything to fixate on when it came to Jeltor. “And you’re here in this piddly little glass thing. You know, there’s a human colloquialism about glass houses. It might even be considered applicable, in a broad sense.”

“You think you can get through it?” Grisor asked smoothly. “You can’t. You could direct every ounce of firepower you have at it and you still wouldn’t even be close.”

“Really?” Barnabas drew his Jean Dukes.

This is a trap, Shinigami cautioned him. He knows it can withstand firepower, so he’s trying to tempt you into using all your ammo.

I think so, too. But by playing along, we’re just filling the time so he doesn’t figure out our real plan.

What is our real plan? Although I have to say, it’s nice to know we have one.

Yes, isn’t it? And I’m not telling just yet. Everyone fire. Barnabas aimed and let loose.

For almost a minute, there was no sound except deafening roars as everyone’s guns went off and kept doing so. When the smoke cleared, there were a couple of scorch marks on the box, but nothing else, and Grisor was wearing a smug smile.

“Now you see how outmatched you are,” he announced. “Look at me, defenseless inside this pod…but you can’t breach it.”

“We’ll find a way,” Barnabas told him, schooling his voice to sound arrogant. “Your soldiers are locked out. We can pry it open and get you out.”

Grisor’s suit turned just slightly as if looking at something. Barnabas followed his glance and saw a strange device in the corner; something handheld.

Apparently, Grisor wanted them to think that thing could open the pod. Barnabas considered, then went over and retrieved it.

Shinigami?

Not sure what it does—or if it does anything, actually.

Safe to bring on board the ship?

I’d say so. We’ll just— Then she realized. Oh, you are evil.

I know. Barnabas gave her a smile and then looked up as the whole room shuddered and the roof began to peel back.

Grisor looked up. “What are you doing?”

“You’re right that we can’t get you out of the pod,” Barnabas said. “Not in short order, anyway. But what we can do? We can get the pod out of the room.”

A large metal claw dropped through the now-open patch of ceiling and locked on. A current running through the claw managed to freeze Grisor in place when he put out an arm to steady himself.

Barnabas didn’t want him using a self-destruct.

As the pod began to withdraw into the sky, he nodded at the rest of the team. “Get ready for extraction. We’re not leaving empty-handed now.”

He was still smiling when Tafa’s voice broke in, high with worry.

Guys? We have a big problem.

Chapter Eleven

What’s going on? Barnabas demanded. Tafa?

They’ve got ships warming up. Tafa was about five seconds away from full-on panic. They’re going to try to shoot us down.

Fat chance, Shinigami said darkly. Let me at ‘em, and I’ll burn this whole fucking place to the ground.

There are too many! Tafa’s voice was rising, fear vibrating into the Etheric. Get back to the ship, please? PLEASE! We have to get out of here.

Another claw descended from the Shinigami’s belly, and the whole team darted over to grab it. Shinigami ordered it to ascend. Her cybernetic face was utterly blank as she focused on scanning the area around them to figure out where the ships were, and on making sure they would be safe inside before any ground forces got to them.

They barely made it. They were just being drawn into the ship when a scatter of gunfire burst out below them. The hatch slammed shut under their feet, and they dropped onto the deck with sighs of relief—only to feel the ship shudder as Shinigami directed a few shots back.

Radiating fury, she stalked over to Grisor. “You know what happened just now? Your guards decided to shoot at us; pick a fight for the sake of picking a fight. They started it—and I finished it. That’s how this whole fucking thing is going to go, just so you know. You decided to start something, and we are not going to be nice in how we shut it down.”

Grisor glowed with smugness as Barnabas came to stand beside Shinigami. He smiled blandly into the panic pod.

“She’s right,” he told the Jotun. “So all those dreams you’re having right now about dying gloriously and sparking a movement that brings the Jotuns to ascendance? That’s not going to happen.”

He couldn’t read Jotun expressions perfectly, but from the sudden stillness of the jellyfish body, he knew he’d hit a nerve.

“Gilwar,” He nodded at the other Jotun, “Gar will stay here to assist you in locking down this pod however it needs, and Shinigami will be available to make a plan.” Don’t let this cretin overhear you, he added. Use the Etheric to communicate. When both Gar and Gilwar nodded, he glanced at Shinigami. “Let’s go to the bridge. Tafa needs us.”

She nodded as the ship shuddered again, and both of them took off. It was hard to believe that Shinigami had once been unable to take even a single step. Her competence had come along by leaps and bounds, and her running form was eerily perfect, especially on the smooth decks of the ship.

The artificial gravity assisted them in keeping their feet, so elegant that it was a dizzying surprise to come onto the bridge and see the horizon dipping and swerving crazily on the screen. Tafa, wide-eyed and looking absolutely terrified, had her hands off the controls.

Barnabas could only pray that meant Shinigami was controlling the ship.

“How many ships?” he asked Tafa, keeping his voice businesslike. She needed to learn to focus on facts and keep moving through dangerous situations, or he was not going to feel comfortable putting her in combat.

She gulped and looked at the screen. “Twenty…six? No, twenty-seven.” There was a storm of beeping, and she gave a little wail. “Thirty-two.”

“All right.” This was admittedly not a great situation, but he wasn’t going to make things worse by telling Tafa that. Shinigami, tell me you have a plan?

You’re the one who makes plans! Shinigami swerved out of the way of a whole wing of Jotun fighters. She determinedly did not look at him. Just tell me your objective, she said grimly.

Take out as much of the science facility as you can and get us out of here. I want to keep him alive for a trial, but I don’t want to take the chance that someone else will deploy the plan in his absence.

Roger that. She gave a small smile. Missiles priming and locked— Oh, hell.

What? What is it now?

More ships. A lot more ships.

Shinigami—

And they’re shifting the protocols in the satellites. Clever buggers—they had a whole new set of programs ready to go and loaded it in once we got here. We have to get out of here before everything comes online, which means going very fast in one direction, which means not taking evasive maneuvers, which means...

Barnabas waited for a long moment. Which means we’re screwed? he asked delicately.

She gave him a look. She’d clearly calculated the odds already because there were no ships on the viewscreen and the color was getting progressively darker as they shot toward open space. Yeah. Little bit. I’m not saying we can’t do it, I’m just saying they’ve stacked the deck real well.

Then the alarms burst fully to life and Shinigami swore in several languages Barnabas didn’t know.

“What the hell was that?” Tafa yelled.

“Keep it together,” Barnabas told her crisply. He met her eyes and gave a brief nod. She could do it—if she was willing to. He looked at Shinigami.

“They came out of nowhere.” Shinigami’s face was screwed up with determination. “We were getting out of range of the rest, but this one— Oh, wait.”

“‘Oh, wait?’” Barnabas gave her an incredulous look. “Now is not the time for ‘oh, wait!’”

“No, no, it really is.” Shinigami started laughing. “All right, let me just say we’re still heading into space and all that, but here’s what’s going on behind us.” She swapped the viewscreens and sat back in her seat, still chortling.

The ship that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere was a Jotun ship, but it wasn’t on Grisor’s side. That much was obvious.

Mostly from the way it was taking out ship after ship from Grisor’s fleet. Missiles were streaking this way and that in a dizzying array, flying out in formations Barnabas had never seen.

“Holy…” He leaned forward, frowning at the screen. “What am I watching?”

“You are watching,” said Gilwar from the door, “a thing very few people have ever seen: Admiral Yeneda Jeqwar at her finest.”

“She’s on that ship?” Barnabas demanded. Losing Admiral Jeqwar would be a blow they could ill afford. If they went up against another fleet—or, worse, if she were captured—

“I doubt it,” Gilwar replied. He nodded at the screen as he came into the room. “Remember, an admiral is able to control a whole fleet at once. She’s probably still on Jotuna. Hail her.” After a moment of hesitation, he added, “Offer the passcode, ‘clear waters.’ It means she’s being hailed by a member of Intelligence. I trust you won’t misuse that.”

Barnabas nodded, pleased by his trust. “I won’t. Shinigami?”

“One moment, just zapping a few— Ow, son of a bitch!” There was a hollow boom on the side of the ship. “Fucking satellites. Okay, bringing her onto a channel. Jotun ship Gedwaz, this is the Shinigami, hailing you under clear waters.”

A moment later an amused voice came back. “I don’t mean to be rude, Shinigami, but I’m a little busy right now.”

“I understand that, Admiral.” Gilwar had switched to a dialect of Jotun that was coming through slightly garbled in Barnabas’ implant. “We have a prisoner on board—Grisor. He will be brought to Justice at an appropriate time and place.”

That was, in any case, the gist of what Barnabas was getting. The admiral spoke back, half the words not translating, and Gilwar nodded at Shinigami.

“You can stop broadcasting.”

“Would you mind rehashing that for me?” Barnabas asked wearily.

“She’s taking care of cleanup and putting on a show, so they know exactly what they’re dealing with, as well as broadcasting a message that Grisor was taken by this joint mission. They have bugs in the Naval networks, and she wants to throw them off by making them think this was planned and they didn’t know about it.”

“And Grisor?”

“She’s pleased that we have him and that we didn’t kill him. She wants what you want,” he added wryly, “though perhaps not from a place of kindness. She was displeased that Jeltor was put on trial. I think she wants the same done to Grisor to drag his secrets out in the open and ruin him.”

Barnabas gave a small smile. “I’m not saying I don’t want to ruin him, just that I also have other motives. I take it he’s secure, by the way?”

“Yes. We can’t disable the pod yet, but he can’t send any signals, or get out of our cage even if he opens his.”

“Good.”

“This is interesting,” Shinigami commented.

“What is?”

“We have a pending notification from Victory Station. There’s a message waiting for us, and it’s tagged, ‘One-floating-motionless.’ I’m going to guess that’s Kelnamon. It seems like a good way of indicating the Srisa and how we first met him.”

“Why is he sending a message that way?” Barnabas asked, frowning.

“Oh, I think I have an idea of why.” She gave him a look. “Don’t you? Remember what Jeltor said? Remember where he said they were going to strike first?”

Between their capture of Grisor and their escape, Barnabas had, in fact, managed to forget that. His mouth dropped open. “They’re already on Kordinev?”

“I don’t know,” Shinigami said, “but I do know that if so, we have a source on the surface and any keys to thwarting them will be in that message. I’m setting a course for Victory Station.”

Barnabas gave a single nod. “Do it.”

* * *

The ship was turning.

Aliana looked up from her book with a frown and then got up to pad down the corridors in her stockinged feet. The Palpari was an exceedingly clanky ship, and she had gotten tired of sounding like a drum solo when she walked anywhere.

Zinqued was alone in the cockpit, humming to himself, and staring out the window…

“Is this Victory Station?” Aliana asked in confusion.

“Yes,” Zinqued affirmed. He gave her the Hieto version of a smile, scrunching his nose. “You should put on shoes. We need to disembark and take our places, yes, before our target shows up.”

Chapter Twelve

“So…why are we here?” Aliana turned sideways to slip past a group of Leath missionaries. “Also, who were they? They’re religious now?”

“Defeat tends to do that to people,” Zinqued told her philosophically. “Were you there for that?”

“Er, not precisely. I mean, everyone was, kind of. It’s a long story.” Aliana waved a hand. “Look, you keep dodging the question. What’s going on?”

“Just a bit farther,” Zinqued told her. “You’ll see.”

Aliana scowled as she stomped along behind him. “I hate surprises. You know, you could just say you found the Shinigami and it’s here, or we’re going to see someone about the—”

She stopped dead in her tracks a moment later.

A woman was standing on the loading docks, staring at them. Small and fine-boned, she had dark hair and wide, long-lashed black eyes. Hers was the sort of delicate beauty that was set off well by an evening gown and diamond jewelry, but instead, she was wearing blue coveralls with plenty of grease stains, and her hair was drawn back in a careless bun.

She met Aliana’s eyes, then went up the ramp to a beautiful ship. Her fingers hovered over the keypad next to the doors, and she entered a few keystrokes before heading back down. She looked back, gave a single nod, and disappeared into the crowd.

She had unlocked the ship—or, rather, she had changed the codes to what they had been when Aliana first owned it. Because this ship was the Melisande, the ship she had scrimped and saved to buy with Harry; that she had fixed up with scrap parts and elbow grease until it ran like a dream. The ship she’d hired Ria to be the mechanic for.

The ship Lawrence had stolen from her.

Aliana realized she was shaking. She wanted to run away.

“We have to move quickly,” Zinqued said. “Ria agreed to unlock the ship and make sure it was unoccupied. She requested clearance for it to undock unexpectedly, so you’ll be able to get on board and get it off the station if you go now.”

“What?” Aliana gaped at him.

“Not everything has to be deep-space traps and ambushes,” Zinqued told her with a smile. “Go. Get the ship, and I’ll get in touch with you soon.”

He made to disappear back into the crowd, but she grabbed his arm.

“Wait! You can’t just go—”

“You don’t have time to wait. The emergency clearance will expire soon.”

“I don’t care about that.” Aliana held onto his arm. “You… Zinqued, you arranged for this? Why?”

He considered. “You were sad,” he said finally. “I know what it is to miss a ship.”

“I don’t miss the ship,” Aliana snapped. She saw the look on his face and sighed. “Okay, yes, I do. I miss it—a lot. Harry and I were married there—”

“Do you have time for this?”

“Just listen.” She could hear the pleading in her voice. “What’s been hurting so much is what Lawrence did to me, what he took—and that they all just went along with it. I hired them and they were my family, and they just let him kick me off my own ship and fly away and strand me in the middle of nowhere with no money. No nothing. It wasn’t about the ship, it was what they did.”

“That one—” Zinqued jerked his head in the direction Ria had gone, “is trying to make it right.”

“Yeah, well, little good it does now!”

“It restores to you what should be yours.” Zinqued gave her a look. “Is that not worth saving?”

“I don’t—” Aliana turned away, hands buried in her hair. “I don’t know. It isn’t just Harry; now I have all these memories of Lawrence, too. I don’t want to, but he’s part of that ship, and I kind of never want to see it again.”

There was a pause.

“Should I not have done this?” Zinqued asked finally. “I thought it would help.”

Aliana began to cry. She wiped her nose angrily, then used her sleeves to dry her eyes. “No, it was nice. I just— It’s so nice. Why did you do it? We had a deal.”

The Hieto hunched his shoulders and rocked from side to side as he thought. “I didn’t like our deal,” he said finally. “You were only going along with it because you had this to hurt you. You wanted to get even. I thought you wanted your ship back. I wanted you to help me because you wanted to, not because you had to just to get this ship.”

Aliana stared at him. It felt like someone had torn her chest in half, she thought with a strange detachment. This alien, who didn’t even know her all that well, had done this for her because he didn’t want her to be sad.

She settled for saying, “You know, you’re going to go broke with that attitude.”

Zinqued burst out laughing. “Ah, that I am. You’re not wrong. Tik’ta despairs of me.”

“Oh, no.” Aliana shook her head, still laughing. “What did she say about this?”

“Actually, she approved of this.” Zinqued was nodding appreciatively. “I think she mainly thought it would keep me occupied.”

Aliana shook her head with a smile. “Well, thank you, Zinqued.”

“Yes.” He gave her a smile. “So are you going? I think you have about ten minutes to get aboard and begin getting out of here.”

“I suppose, yes.” Aliana stared at the ship. “This wasn’t how I pictured it. I wanted revenge, Zinqued. I wanted Lawrence to suffer the way I suffered.”

“Ah.” Zinqued shook his head. “Never wish for suffering. That is what my—what do you call them?—my mother’s mother used to say.”

“’Grandmother,’” Aliana said. “Grandmas are always wise. They know when to whup you upside the head, too, and tell you to stop being stupid. I wonder what mine would be saying right now.” She considered. “She would probably say that I had been very stupid to let Lawrence steal the ship in the first place, and to make sure it couldn’t happen again—then worry about revenge.”

“That is good,” Zinqued replied dubiously, “and maybe it will give me time to explain to you why not to seek the suffering of your enemies.”

“You steal ships for a living.”

“Yes, but I do not actively wish for pain.” He flapped a hand at her when he saw that his careful distinction wasn’t meeting with approval. “Go now. We will talk later. Why are you looking like that?”

“Zinqued,” Aliana began slowly.

“Yes?” He gave her a bright smile.

“Er.” Aliana looked out the window behind him. “So, uh—you brought me here to steal back my ship?”

“Yes,” Zinqued told her proudly.

“That was…the whole reason?”

“Yes.” He looked a bit baffled.

“Nothing else?”

“No.” He sounded worried now. “Why?”

“I mean, it just seems weird to me,” Aliana mused, struggling to keep a hysterical laugh from welling up in her chest, “that after so long spent setting up alerts and so on, we should get here for some totally unrelated reason, and suddenly…” She put her hands on Zinqued’s shoulders and turned him so he could see the docking bay. “There’s the Shinigami, docking at the same station we’re at.”

Zinqued had always been honest with her, and yet some part of her had believed he was telling her a lie about why he’d come. That was, until she saw the look on his face.

There was no way he would have been able to keep all of his emotions in check if he’d known the Shinigami was going to be here. There was also no mistaking the shock she was seeing.

“Oh, my God,” he burst out. The Hieto version of that term didn’t exactly translate, but the sentiment was similar. “Quick. Back to the Palpari. We have to talk to Tik’ta and—”

“Aliana,” a new voice called.

Aliana froze. Slowly, both she and Zinqued turned, and even though she steeled herself, she felt the familiar flutter in her stomach when she saw Lawrence’s handsome face.

Damn him.

“Lawrence.” Her mouth didn’t work properly.

He smiled, fully aware of what that look was doing to her—seeing all of the longing, the shared laughter, and the hatred.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he said. “Why are you on Victory Station?”

Chapter Thirteen

“Barnabas.” Shinigami’s voice came over the speakers. “Are you in your room?”

Barnabas looked up from his book. “You…you don’t know?”

“Right.” Shinigami sounded evasive. “Okay, wrong, I did know. I remembered Tabitha saying it was stalker-y to follow you around the ship, so I tried not to know where you were, but it turns out it’s really hard not to know something when you’ve got this many diagnostic readouts. I tried, though.”

Barnabas smiled at one of the cameras. “And I appreciate the effort. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“We’ve been granted clearance to dock at Victory Station, and I should have the connection to decrypt the message shortly. I’m intrigued as to why they didn’t contact us directly. I’m sure the message will explain it. In the meantime, is there anything you want me to do about Grisor?”

“Ah, yes.” Barnabas felt a moment of amusement. He’d decided to let Grisor stew for a good while and was pleased that he’d managed to forget about the Jotun entirely while reading his present book. The search for a rogue submarine commander was surprisingly gripping, even when he knew no such thing had ever happened.

He considered.

“No, let Grisor wait. A few days will do him good. I trust he hasn’t gotten out or created any havoc?”

“No. He’s tried to send several messages using all different sorts of encryption methods and signals. Sometimes I zap him, and sometimes I pretend they’ve gone through.”

Barnabas burst out laughing. “Shinigami, you’re an evil genius.”

“Excuse me.” She sounded prim now. “I’ll have you know this serves an important purpose. He’s trying to win at a game he’s not actually playing instead of using his technology in a way that might actually do damage.”

“Ah, yes. But was that why you did it?” Barnabas carefully marked his place and put the book on a side table. “Shinigami?”

“I think we both know the answer. Goodbye.” She signed off as the docking clamps grabbed at the ship.

Barnabas was still chuckling as he walked down the corridor toward the blast doors. Gar? Tafa? We’re at Victory Station. If you’d like to get anything, we can certainly pause here briefly—depending on what’s in Kelnamon’s message, of course.

I’ll let you know as soon as I get through the decryption, Shinigami broke in.

You haven’t broken it yet? Gar sounded worried.

I second the question, Barnabas added. He’d stopped in his tracks and was frowning at the ceiling.

Long story short, Kelnamon appears to have encrypted it with a passphrase instead of an algorithm, so now I have to figure out what sort of asinine clue he thinks we could all get. I swear, organic life forms are the worst.

Does anyone have suggestions? Barnabas asked delicately. He could hear footsteps, and he turned to look as Tafa came around the corner with Gilwar.

Srisa, Gar suggested.

Tried it, Shinigami said.

Huword? Barnabas suggested.

Ferqar, Tafa chimed in. Or—what was the section of the legal code that meant he had to float in space?

Oh, good thought. Shinigami sounded impressed. Keep sending ideas. I’ll let you know as soon as I—oh.

Did you get it? Barnabas held up a hand to stop the others from going to the door. He’d rather they just leave now for Kordinev if they were needed.

No, Shinigami reported. You’ll never guess who’s here, though.

Barnabas had an immediate thought, discarded it, and then decided it was the only thing that made sense. Still… You cannot possibly be talking about Zinqued.

Bingo.

Barnabas tipped his head back with a groan.

Oh, come on, Shinigami said. You’ve enjoyed that battle of wits.

“Battle of wits” is a very charitable term. It’s like playing chess with a deranged ferret.

Tickets to that, please.

Gar had arrived, and he and Tafa were snickering. Barnabas gave them a severe look. They shut up, but he noticed that Gilwar was not bothering to hide his amused flutters. He probably assumed that Barnabas could not interpret Jotun mannerisms.

Barnabas decided he was just going to sit on that piece of knowledge for now. A different thought had occurred to him.

Shinigami, is there any possible way they could have known we were coming here?

It is possible, Shinigami said. Anything is technically possible. I know we went past at least one checkpoint on our way to Jotuna. As far as I know, we passed none on our way here, and I did not notice anyone tailing us—which I definitely would have noticed if they’d sped up to pass us or if they’d been in front of us the whole time.

Interesting. Barnabas turned to look as Shinigami came around the corner in black pants, a tank top, and a bolero jacket that reminded him strongly of Bethany Anne. “Now that everyone is here, we might as well speak out loud. As far as we know, Zinqued doesn’t know we’re here, and I’d be incredibly surprised if he’d managed to—”

“To…” Shinigami prompted.

“You don’t think Carter told Aliana about the Srisa and this message from Kelnamon is a trap?”

Shinigami blinked. A moment later, she reported, “If it’s a trap, it’s an incredibly good one, and also incredibly stupid.”

“Well, that would track.”

“Agreed, but what Hieto or human will have access to a waypoint on Kordinev? The message definitely originated there.”

“Hmm. Just a thought. Let’s assume they don’t know we’re here, then. If anyone starts following us, we’ll report it silently and regroup here immediately. Is that clear? Whatever you’re doing, come back.”

Everyone nodded, and Gilwar raised one mechanical hand. “Just a question. Who is Zinqued?”

“It’s a long story,” Barnabas said.

“He keeps trying to steal the ship,” Shinigami reported.

“And he’s still alive?” Gilwar asked dubiously. “You never struck me as one to suffer fools.”

“I’ve come to be quite fond of these fools,” Barnabas told them honestly. He buttoned his suit jacket. “So, shall we?”

Gar was explaining their repeated run-ins with Zinqued and Tafa was chiming in about Aliana as they all walked out of the ship. Shinigami smiled at Barnabas.

“I like to think that no one here can tell I’m an android.”

“Most organic life forms probably can’t,” Barnabas agreed. “You’ve come a long way from when you first got that body.”

She shuddered. “Learning to walk was terrible.”

“I have no doubt. Now, is there anywhere you want to— Wait. Look.” Barnabas nodded to the docking area next to them.

There, not entirely unexpectedly, was Zinqued. With him was Aliana—and both of them were arguing with a tall man who was wearing far too many concealed weapons and an infuriating smirk.

“Who’s that?” Shinigami asked.

“That,” Barnabas said, “is Aliana’s ex-husband. And Carter did tell us to look after her.”

Shinigami gave him an incredulous look. “We’re going to get involved?”

“Did you have any other specific plans for this trip?” Barnabas asked her. When she said nothing, he gave a nod. “Precisely. All right, here’s my plan…”

* * *

“So, why are you on Victory Station?” Lawrence’s gaze sharpened as he looked at Aliana.

Stay calm, Aliana told herself. He doesn’t know what happened with Ria. There’s no possible way he could know.

Of course, there were plenty of ways he could know, and even a second of going down that rabbit hole threatened to make her insane.

Lawrence was smart, and he didn’t care about anyone but himself—unless he thought someone had crossed him, in which case he became obsessed with making them pay. He would use the letter of the law to string Aliana up on charges; drag everything she’d ever done into the light—

Her eyes focused abruptly on a man with reddish-brown hair coming up behind her ex-husband. The Shinigami, she thought in despair, and she had the urge to laugh hysterically.

But Barnabas only gave her a wink before disappearing into the crowd. “Trust me,” that wink said.

Or maybe she was going insane.

Lawrence had turned to follow her gaze, but Barnabas was lost in the swirl of people. The man looked at Aliana again, his eyebrows drawing together. “Are you trying to con me?”

By now, Aliana had recovered her composure. She should have gone for it when Zinqued told her about the plan. She could see that now. It would have been worth it to see the look on Lawrence’s face or even just imagine it.

She hadn’t stolen the ship, though. She was here, and that was that—and she was not planning to give Lawrence anything to work with.

“I’m not trying to con you,” she told him honestly. A little bit of honesty might go a long way here. Lawrence was good at sensing lies. “You’re not why I’m here, and I don’t actually want to see you.”

Lawrence looked at her suspiciously, but he could hear the ring of truth in her words.

And then he smiled, and something in Aliana’s stomach turned over. Why did someone so evil have to be so freaking good-looking? It was unfair. It was more than unfair, really; it shouldn’t be allowed.

“You don’t want to see me?” he asked her. “Why not?” He was standing far too close now. “Aliana, we had some good times together.”

Keep it together, woman. “Yes, we had some good times, which may or may not have been an elaborate con on your part.” Aliana gave him an icily pleasant smile. “After which you stole my ship—no, please, I am not interested in hearing you recall the legal technicalities—and left me nearly penniless on a remote station. And all because… Well, I have to ask now. Was there a reason? Why me? Why any of it?”

Lawrence gave her a blank look for a moment, then lifted one gorgeous shoulder. “Because I wanted to.”

She wished she hadn’t asked.

“Please go away,” Aliana told him.

He smiled meltingly at her again. “No.”

“Fine. I’ll go away.”

“Don’t.” His hand shot out and closed around her arm. “I’ve missed you. You’ve missed me.”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

He saw the lie at once. “Yes, you have. You missed the way we used to laugh together. You missed…” He gave her a meaningful look. “And you missed thinking you were better than me. That you were settling for me.”

The change in tone came so fast that she was still blinking when she felt the pain in her arm. His hand was clamping down tightly.

“You’re a con artist, Lawrence.” She didn’t cry out. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. “You like preying on people. Yes. I thought you weren’t right for me.” The fingers tightened, and she tried not to wince. “All right, this is what you want to do? Fine. I was settling for you, but it wasn’t because I was better than you. It was because Harry is better than you. That’s right. He’s dead, and he’s still a better man than you. The memory of him makes me happier than you ever could have. I am going to miss him every day for the rest of my life, and when you die, no one is going to miss you.”

The look in his eyes was truly terrifying, but Aliana wrenched her arm out of his grip and smiled recklessly at him. “You can puff up and get threatening all you want, asshole, but you took everything. There’s nothing more you can do to hurt me.”

“Excuse me,” a new voice interjected.

Aliana glanced over…and her jaw dropped. A gorgeous woman was standing in front of them. Tight black pants showed off legs that gave the impression of going on for days and her black silk tank plunged nearly down to her navel, showing a carefully-curated hint of what lay beneath. Dark hair cascaded over her shoulders, and her lips were painted red.

She looked familiar…

But Aliana couldn’t quite place her.

The woman looked at the Melisande. “I’m looking to buy a few more ships.” There was now a faint accent in her voice. Had she had an accent to start with? Aliana wasn’t sure. “I asked the station manager. I said, ‘Whose ship is that?’ And he told me to find you—I think.” She looked at him and Aliana, and her eyes raked dismissively over Aliana’s cargo pants and ponytail. “Are you in the market, maybe? I will give you a very good price. Severance for all your crew, of course. Or perhaps you could all come work for me.”

Her smile held a lot of promises.

Aliana knew what was coming in that instant, but it seemed to take forever to play out as Lawrence started to smile.

“Of course,” he said. “You know, she is a good ship, and if you say you’re offering a good price— Well, and of course I would be delighted to discuss future employment.” He was good at giving promising smiles too. “In fact, can I buy you a drink?”

She gave him a pleased smile. “Of course! A drink with a handsome man. And…your crew?” She waved a bored finger at Aliana.

“Former crew,” Lawrence specified, twisting the knife. “Aliana didn’t do well with the new management. You know how it is.” He put his hand in the small of the woman’s back and guided her away, pausing only to throw a glance over his shoulder at Aliana. “Oh, by the way, you told a convincing lie, but I know you were lying. Ria told me everything. I had her thrown in the station jail. Don’t worry, all those codes have been reset again.”

And he was gone—gone, with the woman in black swaying seductively in her heels as she walked. Aliana stared after him, trying to keep it together. She could do this. She’d survived his cruelty once. The Melisande wasn’t hers anymore, and she wouldn’t let him hurt her with it again—

“Is he gone?” Barnabas’ voice asked. He smiled when Aliana whirled to face him. “Good.” His eyes traveled over her and Zinqued. “Let’s talk, shall we?”

Chapter Fourteen

I hate this, Shinigami commented as she strutted away from Aliana and the others. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love how my ass looks in these pants, but this sucks otherwise. Why did I get stuck with the douche-nozzle and the rest of you get to do the fun parts?

The real question, Barnabas asked drily, is why you started having a Russian accent halfway through that conversation?

I had to amuse myself somehow!

Well, I hope you know you’re going to have to keep it up or he’ll get suspicious.

Please. He’s dazzled by this shirt. He’s not going to notice if I start speaking in actual Russian.

That is depressingly true.

Shinigami grinned and tossed a smile at Lawrence. Her assessment of attractiveness, based on the media she had been able to evaluate, showed that Lawrence had many features others might consider attractive.

He was, however, an irredeemable douche.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said to him. “How does a man with such manners come to run a cargo ship?”

His chest puffed up, but she noted from his faint evasiveness that he wasn’t quite sure how to play this. She would bet that the real question was whether he wanted to play an honest, blue-collar craftsman who would impress women with his down-to-earth attitude and callused hands, or if he wanted to pretend that he was a gentleman having a lark captaining a ship.

She started composing a douche bingo card in her head.

“How does a lady of such class come to be interested in having a fleet?” he asked her.

Sounding her out. Clever. Of course, that would make sense if he were someone who liked to con people.

“Oh,” she waved her hand, “I am sure you are too busy to hear about it.”

“No, no.” He stopped and drew her to a halt, swinging her to face him. His touch was very gentle on her elbow.

As if she hadn’t seen how hard he had been gripping Aliana’s arm. She busied herself with a new bingo card: karmically appropriate ways to hurt Lawrence. Breaking all of his finger bones was definitely on there.

“Has anyone told you how enchanting you are?” Lawrence asked winningly. “I think I could listen to you talk all day.”

Shinigami gave him a smile and ignored the urge to punch that smarmy expression off his face. She added punching to the karmic punishment card and checked off, absurd over-the-top compliment on the douche card.

“Well…” She looked around. “I’ll certainly need a drink if I’m to tell you all of it. Although I might go through several drinks, I warn you.”

“Oh, that would be just fine.” His smile was smarmy in the extreme. “And Victory Station has some truly spectacular bars, did you know? Here, let me introduce you to Gianni. He’s the bartender at Endless Reach, and he makes divine cocktails.” He kissed Shinigami’s hand.

“Oh.” She dimpled at him, not quite sure what to say. “Well, if you insist—if you think you have time—”

“I have all the time in the world for you,” he assured her.

It was a good thing for Lawrence that Shinigami didn’t have a normal stomach. If she did, she would have puked all over him. As it was, she waited until his back was turned and followed him with a massive eye roll.

It was a pity she couldn’t get drunk because this was going to be a long hour or so.

Still… She perked up. Barnabas and the rest were really going to owe her after this one. Maybe she could get them to give her a second body. Or more flamethrowers.

Yes. More flamethrowers.

And she’d test them on Lawrence.

Thoroughly cheered up, she followed him with a wide smile.

* * *

“So.” Barnabas looked at Aliana and Zinqued. “Zinqued, it’s good to see you again. You know, after the battle with the Jotun fleet, I was worried about you. You came very close to being vaporized.”

Aliana glanced between the two of them, open-mouthed.

Barnabas decided to have a little bit of fun. “You won’t know about this, of course,” he told Aliana, “but Zinqued once tried to steal my ship. More than once, in fact. Isn’t that right, Zinqued? I’m sure he’s quite reformed now, though. He must be if he’s taken up with you.”

Aliana gave him a deer-in-the-headlights look.

“Just messing with you.” Barnabas gave a grin. “He’s still trying to steal the ship, and you’re helping him.”

Now they both gaped at him.

“So here’s my deal,” Barnabas said. He wasn’t going to explain the mindreading just yet. “Carter asked me to keep an eye out for you. He, of course, does not realize why you wanted to meet me on High Tortuga.”

Aliana gave a groan and dropped her head into her hands. “I didn’t want to meet you,” she said, her voice muffled. “That was the worst.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No! I didn’t mean…” She picked her head up, now blushing furiously. “You’re not the worst, it was just the worst to— Oh, never mind.”

Zinqued was looking back and forth between them curiously.

“I’m sorry, I’m still messing with you.” Barnabas could feel his lips twitching. “This is fun. However, we have somewhat limited time. The woman you just saw distracting Lawrence was Shini—Shannon, my associate.” As far as he knew, Zinqued was still unaware that Shinigami was an avatar of the AI, and he didn’t want to spill the beans on that. “She’s agreed to keep him occupied by stringing him along and making him buy very, very overpriced drinks for her while I help you steal the ship. To clarify,” he added, “steal Lawrence’s ship, not the Shinigami.”

There was a long pause.

“We weren’t trying to steal his ship,” Zinqued explained finally.

“Yeah, why would you think that?” Aliana asked.

“For one thing, the two of you currently look like two children who’ve painted the dog and are trying to keep their mother from finding out, and for another, stealing ships seems to be how Zinqued solves problems. And Lawrence did take your ship, didn’t he? We did some research, Shinigami and I.”

“The AI,” Aliana murmured to Zinqued. She added meaningfully, “They’re famously loyal.”

Barnabas, peering into her head for a moment, found several memories of her telling Zinqued that it would be impossible to steal the Shinigami.

He found himself hoping that she tried anyway.

“The people who say that haven’t met Shinigami,” he told them blandly.

Hey! I am busting my ass for you guys right now!

“I meant Achronyx,” Barnabas corrected.

That’s better. However…”Shannon?”

We’ll talk about this later.

Aliana and Zinqued looked at him like he was a grenade that might go off at any moment.

“Shinigami and I discussed it,” Barnabas continued, “and decided that there was no way you could have known we were going to be on this station. Despite past interactions, it seems that this meeting happened genuinely by chance. So, for that reason—and also because the man you were speaking to seems to be a terrible excuse for a human being—we are going to help you steal his ship. Or, rather, steal your ship back. Then we will all go our separate ways. I can’t imagine we’ll cross paths again, after all.” He gave Aliana a bland smile.

Her internal monologue was fairly consistent swearing.

BINGO! The interjection from Shinigami was so unexpected that Barnabas jumped. Aliana looked at him with a frown and he shook his head.

Bingo? he asked Shinigami.

Oh, sorry. I was playing bingo with all of the douchey things he was saying. And I won!

Yes, yes, very good.

He looked at Aliana. This was going to be fun. Well, it was going to be fun if she said yes. Barnabas slid his hands into his pockets, tilted his head to the side, and waited for her to remember how to speak.

He really was hoping she accepted his help on this one.

* * *

This was bad. It was very, very bad. In fact, it was probably a trap.

“Excuse me.” Aliana gave Barnabas a polite smile and dragged Zinqued a few feet away. “All right, level with me. You’ve run into him how many times?”

“Four,” Barnabas offered.

“It’s rude to eavesdrop,” Aliana told him with great dignity.

“Indeed.” His mouth twitched. “I’ll go a few feet farther away.”

“Thank you.” She watched while he strolled away, looking elegant and entirely unconcerned, then looked at Zinqued. “So?”

“He was right, you know.” He was still looking at the Shinigami.

“Yes, yes. Focus.” Aliana took him by the shoulders. “Do you have any idea how dangerous he is?”

“Oh, yes.” Zinqued looked both amused and terrified. “I once saw him and two friends work their way through hundreds of mercenaries.”

“Okay.” Aliana felt a bit queasy. She stole a glance over her shoulder. “Wait, really? Him in the suit right there?”

“You said—”

“I know, it’s just hard to believe.” She blew out a breath. “My point is, if he really wanted you dead, you’d be dead right now.”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“So he’s toying with you,” Aliana said resignedly. “With us, I guess. Well, let him. If he wants to get his jollies helping screw Lawrence over, I say we take the deal.”

“And steal his ship,” Zinqued said.

“One thing at a time,” Aliana advised him. She marched back over to Barnabas. “All right, we’ll take the deal. The first thing we have to do is get Ria out of jail. She screwed me over, but she did try to make it right. It wouldn’t be good to leave her here. Let’s go.”

“Incorrect,” Barnabas told her. “We have to rewrite the ship’s registration so it’s solely in your name, then you’ll be able to get her out as the captain of the Melisande.”

“Oh, that is better.”

“I thought you’d say so.” He smiled at her. “Let me just ask Shinigami.” There was a pause. “Your middle name is Lilly, yes? Two Ls?”

“I—yes.”

“Place of birth approximately in the Betoger Nebula, yes?”

“That’s about where the Meredith Reynolds was, yes, but—”

“Approximate is fine. Bethany Anne has great respect for the power of bureaucracy. Anyone trying to verify information on humans has a very, very difficult time doing so unless they can prove there’s a need.” He gave her a smile.

“I still can’t get over the fact that you just call her Bethany Anne.”

“It is her name. Now, come along, both of you—yes, you too, Zinqued, I see how you’re looking at my ship—and let’s get Ria out of jail.”

As they walked, Barnabas pointed out some of the features of Victory Station and recounted his exploits here. Aliana gaped at him, laughing at some of the cons he’d pulled. She knew that in some ways, his actions were very similar to Lawrence’s, yet—

“That’s the difference,” she murmured to herself.

“Hmm?” Barnabas looked at her with interest.

“I, uh…I was just thinking.” Seeing his curious look, she took a deep breath for courage and explained, “Lawrence is a con artist too. It made me uncomfortable that I was applauding you for your cons, because his ruin people. Then I realized the difference: he finds a target, he learns everything he needs to about them, and he pretends to be the perfect person so he can take everything. You find a target and you learn about them, but you always give them an out. It’s like you set a trap right in the middle of the easy way out, and if they do the right thing, they’ll never know the trap was there.”

Barnabas looked absurdly pleased. “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly it.” He didn’t say anything more, but she could tell he was happy by the way he hid his smile.

It turned out to be very simple to get Ria out of jail. Aliana waltzed in with her chin held high, introduced Barnabas as her lawyer, and complained that they had imprisoned her mechanic on false charges without even speaking to her first.

“Ma’am, we verified that the accusations were being made by the owner of the human ship—” The Torcellan checked the paperwork “Melisande.”

“Well, clearly you didn’t,” Aliana said, “since I’m the owner.”

There was some hasty muttering as they ran her card. The Torcellan came back, hands fluttering.

“I am so sorry, Captain. I promise this will not happen again.”

“I should hope not,” Aliana said severely.

“Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“Yes.” She gave an icy smile. “We’ll want to leave shortly—to go to a station where this sort of thing doesn’t happen. I’d appreciate it if you’d take care of all the notifications. You know who I am, so there shouldn’t be any problems.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” They waved her away, Ria trotting in her wake, and Aliana gave a disbelieving laugh.

“We pulled it off!” she said excitedly as they emerged into the docking bays.

“You pulled it off,” Barnabas corrected. “And before you get all flattered, let me just say that you’re rather too good at that for comfort.”

“Says the man who proposed stealing a ship.” Aliana flashed him a grin. “Now, how do we get back onto the ship? Lawrence said he changed the codes.”

“Leave that to Tafa.” Barnabas nodded toward a Yofu mechanic who was fiddling with the control panel. “We’ll be on the ship in a jiffy.”

“Who is this guy?” Ria asked dubiously.

“Oh.” Aliana coughed. “Right, of course, you don’t know. Hang onto your hat, because this is good…”

Chapter Fifteen

“How’s it going?” Barnabas asked Tafa as he led their strange party up the ramp.

“To be honest, I’m just holding this scanner thingy here while Shinigami does the work.” Tafa shook her head. “I’m a glorified pedestal.”

Oh, don’t say that, Shinigami cut in. You’re so much more than that, Tafa.

Thank you, Shinigami.

You have thumbs! Four of them!

Tafa gave Barnabas a long-suffering look as he snorted with laughter.

To distract her, he asked, “I don’t believe you’ve met Aliana, have you? She’s Carter’s niece. Tafa, Aliana; Aliana, Tafa. Tafa came to be part of our crew after we ran into a mercenary group that was taking hostages. And this is Zinqued, captain of the Palpari, who you may remember as the one who has tried to steal the Shinigami several times. Zinqued, Tafa.”

Tafa looked curiously at Zinqued and Aliana.

“Where’s Gar?” Barnabas asked Tafa.

“On board,” Tafa replied. “Well, on board the Shinigami. He says he doesn’t want to take the chance of Zinqued stealing it.”

“Ha!” Zinqued exclaimed, pleased. “So he thinks it is possible.”

Everyone gave him a look.

“Read the room, man,” Aliana told him.

“We are all friends here,” Zinqued said with great dignity. “For now. What benefit in pretending none of our history has occurred, eh? Often adversaries become friends.”

“He’s a philosopher,” Barnabas told Aliana. “Less uncommon than you’d think amongst thieves.”

“I…see.”

Barnabas was enjoying this every bit as much as he’d expected. As Tafa gave a small sound of satisfaction and the doors clicked open, he grinned and stepped back with an artful bow, gesturing for Aliana to go first.

“Your ship, Captain.”

“I do like the sound of that.” She gave Zinqued a small smile. “And thank you, Zinqued. Thank you for setting this up and—”

“If I may interject,” the Hieto said, “we missed our window last time. Let us not make the same mistake twice.”

“Ah. Yes.” Aliana nodded decisively and strode onto the ship. “All right, two major tasks, as far as I can tell. No, three. First, get all of the verification systems retagged to me instead of Lawrence.”

“I can help you with that,” Barnabas suggested.

“Excellent. Next, make sure there aren’t any booby traps anywhere, probably on secret caches of goods he’s hidden away. Or in the captain’s quarters.”

“I’ll call Gilwar to come scan for those,” Tafa offered.

“Good,” Barnabas replied. He was trying not to laugh at the idea of a high-profile Jotun spy assisting in a single-ship theft. “Wait, what was the third thing?”

“Put all of Lawrence’s things in a pile on the dock and set them on fire,” Aliana said sweetly.

I like her. Can we keep her?

We’re getting her a ship, so I doubt it. He didn’t hate the idea, however.

That’s a shame.

Barnabas agreed and followed Aliana to the bridge. He used some of the tools in Tafa’s bag, as well as Ria’s knowledge of recent missions, to scan the area for booby traps.

There were several.

“You know,” he mused, as he helped Ria disable one of them, “one might say it would be very fitting for Lawrence to be killed by his own booby traps.”

“Yes,” Aliana agreed. “Although I don’t really want him dead. I just want him not to have anything he got by cheating it out of people. And I want him to stop being such an asshole.”

“He’s not going to stop being an asshole,” Ria predicted from under the desk. “You, ginger dude—keep holding that.”

“Sorry.” Barnabas held the piece of machinery as he peered under the desk. “My hair is not ginger.”

“It’s basically ginger.”

“She’s right,” Aliana weighed in. Seeing the look on Barnabas’ face, she added hastily, “But it suits you! It really does.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas looked back under the desk. “Almost done?”

“Not really.” Ria sounded annoyed. “He didn’t have me install these. He did them himself, which means they’re all messed up and are a pain in the ass to remove. Once an asshole, always an asshole. I should have just clocked him on the back of the head with a brick the first time I saw him with a welding torch.”

“Yes,” Aliana agreed, “you should have.” There was a pause, and she added delicately, “You also should have said something about it that time he stole my ship and left me penniless on a remote station instead of taking a job with him and letting him get away with it.”

Ria scooted out from under the desk and looked up at her gravely. “Yes, I should have. I’m sorry.” She heaved a sigh. “Thank you for just saying it. It was hanging there.”

“Mmm.” Aliana shrugged.

“Excuse me,” Barnabas broke in, “but I’m holding a live booby trap.”

“Oh! Right.” Ria dove back under the desk. “Sorry. Oh. Oh! Okay, that came off easier than expected. Let me just get the fuse out and—okay, we’re good. You can set it down.” She came out with a smear of grease on one cheek. “That should be all of them. Let’s reset the passcodes.”

Barnabas handed Ria his handkerchief. “Oh, no, keep it. It’s no trouble. And it sounds like Tafa and Gilwar are finishing up as well. I wonder how Shinigami is doing?”

“The AI?” Aliana asked.

“Oh. Right. Yes. She’s, uh—she was crunching numbers for something. Also, I wonder how Shannon is doing.”

You could have given me literally any name, Shinigami said, and you chose Shannon?

What’s wrong with Shannon?

I don’t know, it’s just not very…you know. I want to be something really cool-sounding. Like Optimus Prime!

A name starting with S-H.

Oh. Right. Well, I don’t know!

How’s it going?

Ugh. This dude is a gigantic douche.

* * *

The problem with Lawrence, Shinigami reflected, wasn’t so much that he was a douche.

It was that he was the biggest douche.

“Perhaps you’d like to see the ship now,” he suggested. “The living quarters are quite nice.”

Also, he was a sleazebag. Shinigami found herself wondering if she could put him in a room with Tabitha and watch the man get the living shit kicked out of him while being insulted in exceedingly indelicate Spanish.

In any case, while Lawrence clearly saw Shinigami as a new mark, he also wanted to hurt Aliana, and she did not approve of that.

She deflected his transparent offer as well as she could. “Oh, you should see my flagship.” She’d been coming up with increasingly outlandish stories about her business and living situation. “Have you ever seen Yofu marble?”

Lawrence sat back, blinking. “I, uh…no, I don’t think I have.”

“It’s gorgeous,” Shinigami cooed, letting the fake Russian accent ripple through her voice. “Blue-green, and so beautiful. I decided to panel my shower with it, and I liked it so much that I put it in for the floor of my entertaining room.”

“You have an entertaining room on your flagship?” Lawrence asked dubiously.

He was sensing that something was wrong. Shinigami covered her tracks by laughing.

“Of course! I’m not an animal.” She nudged him with her elbow. “In my circles, a businesswoman really needs to make her partners feel special. Deals like ours—well, they don’t come up every day, yes? The Yofu marble, I turned into a very select market. I’ve only sold it to a few. The rest are beating down my doors, but only I have the mines.”

He was practically drooling as he tried to formulate a plan. “I…see.” He seemed to have come to a decision. “I know I could never hope to buy any—you’re so clever about that—but could I at least see it?” He leaned close. “I don’t want to say Gianni has lost his touch, but these drinks aren’t as good as they were last time. I can mix a much better martini than this.”

“You think so?” Shinigami held her glass up in mock surprise. “I thought this was good!”

“It doesn’t hold a candle to what I can make,” Lawrence assured her. “Shall we?”

“Okay, just let me finish this one.”

“I promise you don’t want to drink anything lesser.” He reached over to take the glass out of her hand.

Help! Give me some way to stall him!

I’ll take their payment systems out for a few minutes, Tafa told her.

Ask him about the woman, Gilwar added. Play the jealous potential paramour. From what I saw, he is clearly attempting to woo you.

And I thought I was a buzzkill, Barnabas said drily.

Shinigami suppressed a snort of laughter as she looked at Lawrence gravely. “I would, but… Can I be honest with you?” She leaned forward, touching his arm lightly.

“Of course.” He took her hand and played with it.

“It’s…well, the woman I saw you with.” Shinigami looked away, pretending to be resolute. “It seems as if there was something between you.”

“Oh.” She saw him consider what to say, then he threw Aliana under the bus with as much sleazy conviction as he could muster: “Aliana was a very valued employee, don’t get me wrong. I quite care for her. I like to think of my crew as my family. You understand, I’m sure.”

Shinigami nodded. If she spoke, she would tell him exactly what she thought of him, and she couldn’t do that just yet.

“Aliana developed feelings for me,” Lawrence continued. “Feelings I simply couldn’t reciprocate. I had hopes that we could move past it, but she was determined to have a relationship. The whole situation got quite ugly, I’m afraid.”

“Oh.” Shinigami tried to think of something to say that would keep him talking. What did self-absorbed con-artist humans like to talk about? They tended to keep the other person talking.

She was going to have to out-con-artist the con artist.

“So…is there someone special in your life, then?” She gave him a look from under her lashes. “I don’t want to misread the signals you’ve been giving me.”

Something in Lawrence’s eyes flickered. “And you haven’t been. My life hasn’t always been conducive to a settled relationship. I am always seeking someone special, however—for whatever life brings.” He gave her a smile and kissed her hand again. “I will be right back. I have to settle the check.”

Shinigami leaned back in her chair and considered her options as he wandered away. She saw him go to the back, where the manager had gone.

A couple of minutes later she realized what must have happened. Lawrence hadn’t come back, but all the managers had.

Shit.

What is it? Barnabas asked.

Unless I’m wrong, Lawrence is on his way right now. Get that ship out of the dock!

Chapter Sixteen

“See, the thing is,” Aliana maneuvered her way around a corner, sweating as she tried to maintain her grip on a trunk of Lawrence’s clothes, “he was always so charming.”

“I know,” Ria said glumly. “And he is so good at stringing people along. I talked to the rest of the crew, and he’d been doing it to all of us. Everyone! Even John was in love with him by the end.”

Aliana gave a snort of laughter, then dropped her end of the trunk. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘by the end?’”

“Oh.” Ria let her end down carefully and stood up, rubbing her back. She sighed. “He…he fired almost everyone two weeks ago.”

“What?”

“Yeah, we hadn’t gotten a lot of jobs lately.” Ria hunched her shoulders. “Honestly, I think it was just too much work for him to keep finding them, you know? He wanted something easier.”

“He’s always looking for something easier,” Aliana said darkly. “So why didn’t he fire you?”

“He can’t keep the ship flying without me,” Ria explained. “He hasn’t spent any money on repairs, even the repairs we were saving for when you left, and it’s… It’s fixable, Aliana, it is, but I need parts to do it.”

Aliana groaned and tipped her head back against the wall. “Did he spend all the money, do you think, or was he just hoarding it?”

“I think he spent it all.” Ria patted the top of the trunk meaningfully. “Sorry,” she added.

“No, it’s not…it’s not your fault. It’s just, why do awful people get to screw up, and nothing you can do will undo what they did, you know?” Aliana gave the trunk an annoyed look. “And this is all worthless junk, too. Well, setting it on fire will help me feel better about it, at least.”

“Feel better about what?” Barnabas asked, coming around the corner.

Aliana blinked at him. She hadn’t heard him approach. She shrugged. “Lawrence cleaned out all the accounts, because of course he did, and now there’s no money for all the repairs he didn’t do.” She shook her head. “We’ll make it work. There’s always a way to trade labor or something for advance money, you know? And once we’ve gotten the ship purring like a kitten again, we’ll be back to building up those reserves.”

“Oh,” Barnabas said neutrally. “We found the accounts he switched out of your name. There’s still quite a lot of money in there.”

“There is?” Aliana felt her heart leap. “Oh, thank God. That’s amazing. Can you…can you get them back?”

“Banking systems are a bit complicated, but we did manage to transfer the money to new accounts.” He gave her a smile. “I’ll get that,” he added. He picked up the giant trunk with relative ease and carried it off on his own.

The two women stared after him.

“Aliana,” Ria said.

“Huh?”

“Those accounts were empty. I’d bet anything.”

Aliana looked at her. Deep down, she knew that Ria was right. Lawrence was terrible with money—or, rather, he was very good at spending other people’s money. There was no way her carefully-accumulated nest egg was still there.

Which meant that Barnabas had either given her money Lawrence stole, or…

She bit her lip. “I’ll pay it all back.” It was really the only thing she could do.

“Are you sure he’s going to be okay with that?” Ria asked doubtfully. “He did it as a gift.”

“Yes, but it’s too big a gift,” Aliana replied firmly. “He’s already helping me get the ship back. I’ll just tell him I appreciate it, but—”

“I don’t think he’d give you money he couldn’t afford to spend,” Ria added. “And I bet you that if you ask him about it, he’ll swear he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Aliana, who is this guy?”

“I told you who he was.”

“Yeah, I know, but…who is he?” Ria shook her head. “I mean, how do you know him? Why’s he doing all of this for you?”

“He doesn’t like injustice.” Aliana marched back into the captain’s quarters and loaded her arms with Lawrence’s clothes. “So he’s righting a wrong he saw. And my uncle asked him to look after me.” She rolled her eyes. When Barnabas had said that, she’d wanted to sink through the floor.

Based on how successfully he was embarrassing her, Carter was going to make a spectacular father.

“Uh-huh.” Ria didn’t sound convinced, but she grabbed an armful of clothes as well and followed Aliana into the hall. “That sounds like it—because your uncle asked.”

Aliana was about to tell her that if she kept giving sass, she could kiss her year-end bonus goodbye when they rounded the corner and ran smack into Lawrence.

“What. The hell. Are you doing.” His eyes were burning. “You sent some stupid—actor—to distract me, and it nearly worked. You looked so hurt when I walked away, but you were just setting me up, weren’t you?”

Aliana stared at him wordlessly. Her heart was going double-time now.

She had to think. She had to get him off this ship—

“Get off my ship,” Lawrence told her.

“It’s my ship,” Aliana retorted. She wasn’t sure where the confidence came from. Maybe she was pretending to be as self-assured as Barnabas. Whatever it was, she wasn’t the slightest bit worried. She looked at Lawrence and wondered why she’d ever been afraid of him.

“It’s not your ship,” Lawrence spat, leaning close with a cruel smile. “You just left it out there for someone to take, and I took it.”

“And I,” Aliana said, “took it back.”

He gave her a long look, then he pushed the side of his coat back and pulled out one of his pistols.

Ria gave a tiny strangled noise, and he shot her a hard look. “I know you helped her. Don’t you dare try to run!”

Aliana blinked and then, overcome with some sort of reckless certainty, tipped her armful of clothes forward. He reached out automatically to take them and she took the gun out of his hands, dropping the magazine and throwing it over her shoulder whimsically.

“This ship,” she said simply, “is in my name. You pulled some technically legal shenanigans in order to steal something that wasn’t yours. Now you can try to prove the ship was ‘yours,’ but I’m going to tell you right now that you won’t have much luck.”

He stared at her, his arms full of clothes. “What?” he managed finally.

“She means,” Ria said, “that you’ve screwed over so many people that when she says you stole her ship and changed the registration illegally and a bunch of other people come forward to tell the judge what you stole of theirs, no one’s going to doubt her. Because you did steal it. You married her so you could steal it.”

“Yeah, thank you, Ria; that’s enough now.” Her pride was taking a beating from this. Aliana looked at Lawrence. “So that’s where we stand. You thought you could just keep conning people and they’d all run away with their tails between their legs, and you know what? I did.” She smiled. “And now I’m back. So you get off my ship.”

He almost growled at her, he looked so angry. “I should have you arrested. I could shoot you for trespassing, you know.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Barnabas murmured nearby. When all of them jerked around, he gave everyone a careless smile. He was leaning against one wall, arms crossed. “I think you’d find that was a very bad plan.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lawrence asked. “And why is that? You think you’re someone special in that suit?”

As tempting as it was to let the two men posture at one another, Aliana was done letting other people deal with her mess.

“Hey.” She grabbed Lawrence by the shoulder and swung him around. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re on a ship registered in my name and you’re pulling guns on my crew. Get. Off. My. Ship.”

His chest was rising and falling quickly, and she could see the pulse beating far too quickly at his throat. He was furious, but he also didn’t know what to do. She’d never stood up to him like this before.

She wondered if this was the first time he’d seen someone again after he’d screwed them over.

Aliana had a thought. “And by the way, don’t try to find someone else and screw them over.”

Ria and Barnabas tilted their heads to the side almost identically.

“You don’t get to do that anymore,” Aliana said. “You like to make up stories and con your way into people’s confidence. If you’d put half of that effort into building your own company you’d have a few ships of your own by now, but you’re lazy, and you’re cruel. Stop doing that. If you do that again, I’ll find out, and I’ll make sure you give back everything you stole. Make you work off all of the debts you’ve ever acquired. So consider this your one chance. And get off my ship.”

He gaped at her for a moment, then looked at the others with a little laugh. Aliana could see him getting ready to play off the whole incident: look how crazy she is, overreacting like this.

But when he saw the looks on their faces, he didn’t even try. His mouth compressed to a thin, angry line and he turned and strode off, dropping shirts as he went.

It wasn’t the most dignified exit, especially when he ran into the woman with the black hair. He stopped in his tracks for a moment, and she gave him an ironic two-finger salute before strutting up to Aliana and shaking her hand.

“You told him off good. I’m…Shannon.” She gave Barnabas a look Aliana couldn’t interpret.

“Hello,” Aliana said nervously. This woman was incredibly beautiful, and something about her just screamed “don’t fuck with me.” “Thank you very much for helping me.” She looked around. “Thank you all.”

“Well, I, at least, owed you.” Ria gave a shrug. “Don’t know why the rest of them are here,” she added meaningfully, “but I’ll be doing a proper inventory, and I’ll get back to you about the parts we need, boss.”

“Sounds good,” Aliana replied. She felt almost giddy as Ria walked away, and then she looked at Barnabas with a sigh. “Okay, okay, I know, he had a gun. It was stupid to just tell him off and throw him out, but—”

“You seemed like you had it under control,” Barnabas explained simply. “I would have intervened if I had thought it was necessary, but I didn’t.” He hesitated for a moment. “How do you feel?”

“On top of the world!” Aliana burst out. “I told him off! I did! And he’s not going to be a good person overnight, I know that, and maybe he won’t ever be, but I told him off and I didn’t let him intimidate me and I meant it—I’ll make him own up to what he did if he’s a jerk again.”

Barnabas was giving her an almost quizzical smile. “I know. I know you will. Ah…” He cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his head for a moment before smoothing his hair and adjusting his cuffs. “Well, if everything seems to be good here, we’ll head out. Tafa. Shannon.”

“Oh. Right.” Aliana nodded. “Thank you. So much.”

He had been walking away, but he turned to give her a smile. He nodded once and headed off, stopping only when Aliana ran after him.

“Wait!”

He turned. “Yes?”

“I just, uh—” She wanted to hug him. She settled for sticking out her hand, but when he reached out to put his in it, still smiling bemusedly, she threw caution to the winds and wrapped her arms around him. He went rigid in surprise for a moment, then the dark-haired woman hissed at him and he hugged Aliana back. She sensed that he wasn’t used to being hugged.

“Sorry,” she said, flustered. “’Thank you’ didn’t seem like enough. Not that hugging you is enough, but, uh—you know.” Stop talking, you’re not making any sense. She sensed she was blushing. She gave him another nod, then turned and jogged away before she could say anything even more stupid.

Today had been a very unexpected day.

Chapter Seventeen

Barnabas was still smiling when he made his way into the conference room of the Shinigami a few minutes later. He was so pleased by the general state of life, in fact, that it took him a few moments to notice that no one else was talking.

He looked up. Everyone was staring at him.

“What?”

Shinigami swiveled back and forth in her chair. She seemed secretly delighted by something, although Barnabas could not say what it might be.

“How ya doin’?” she asked.

“Is that the thing from that show? Friends?”

“No, that’s ‘how you doin’?’ Totally different.”

“Are you sure?” Barnabas asked dubiously. He waved a hand. “I’m doing fine, thank you. Very well, in fact.” Everyone seemed to find this hilarious. “What? What is so funny?”

“Oh, nothing.” Shinigami smiled. “It’s just nice to see you so relaxed. In such a good mood.”

“I…thank you.” Barnabas stared at her with the growing feeling that this might be a trap of some sort. He sat back in his chair, looking around the room.

“We did some good work today,” Gar piped up after a moment. Everyone stifled another laugh.

“What is with you?” Barnabas asked, exasperated. “Gar is right—we did do good work.”

“You know who did good work…” Shinigami prompted.

“Yes, yes.” Barnabas rolled his eyes. “I know. You had to deal with the douche. You did very good work.”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t referring to myself, although you’re right, I did do fantastic work there. Well, kind of. He spooked and ran back to the ship. Apparently, I’m not a natural at making men think they’re interesting.”

“Gabrielle is of the opinion that it’s quite easy,” Barnabas mentioned. “You might want to ask her for pointers. Actually, I regret suggesting that; you’re dangerous enough as it is.”

“Anyway,” Shinigami said, “I was talking about Aliana. She did some good work today.”

“Oh! Yes.” Barnabas sat forward, resting his forearms on the table. He nodded decisively. “I thought she showed great personal growth. You know, she ran away when she heard Carter speaking about her, and one could see how much she wanted to buckle and allow others to clean up the mess with Lawrence, but when the chips were down, she really— Why is everyone laughing?”

Gar was doubled over, one hand on his stomach, while Tafa stifled her glee behind both hands. Gilwar’s tentacles were a swirl of dizzying motion, and Shinigami was shaking her head in mock protest as she giggled.

“Someone,” Barnabas growled dangerously, “had better explain what’s going on.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Shinigami gasped out. “Just that no one’s won the bet yet.”

“Don’t tell him about the bet!” Tafa exclaimed. “That throws it.”

“I have to agree,” Gilwar cut in.

“What bet?” Barnabas demanded.

“How long it would take in this meeting before you actually brought up the reason for it,” Shinigami explained. She gave him a look that said she was going to burst out laughing again at any second. “It’s been a long time for you, and you’re still… Oh, what should we call it?” She studied the ceiling in an elaborate act, tapping her mouth with one finger. Then she sat up and looked him dead in the eyes. “Smitten.”

Barnabas blinked at her.

Everyone held their breath.

“I beg your pardon?” Barnabas asked finally.

Gar got the look of someone fearing his imminent death, but Shinigami had no such qualms. She grinned impishly.

“Oh, look, you’ve reverted to excessive politeness. I think we hit home.”

“No, I—” Barnabas shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, my God,” Shinigami exclaimed. “He’s serious.”

“It’s quite common for people to be blind to these things in their own case,” Gilwar weighed in. “Both parties, actually.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, man.” Shinigami rested her head on the table for a moment. “It’s like this, dude. You got it bad. Aliana’s got it bad. You two got it bad. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“No. I absolutely do not—oh.” Barnabas gave her a look. “No. No. No.” He considered. “No,” he added one more time for good measure.

“A strong rebuttal.”

“No. This is ridiculous.” Barnabas looked around the room. “You cannot possibly agree with her? Wait, do you?”

Every one of them nodded.

“No!” Barnabas said. “That is entirely—no. We stopped to help her because Carter asked us to look out for her.”

“Mmhmm,” Tafa murmured.

“Of course,” Gilwar chimed in. Both of them sounded completely unconvinced.

“So, whenever you want to be just, you know, polite to someone, you help them steal a ship, hack databases to change registration, give them money for new parts for their ship, and then smile like an absolute loon for about half an hour because they hugged you?” Shinigami asked. “That’s all because you’re so happy that you were able to do a favor for…Carter?”

Barnabas looked at her serenely. “Yes. I’m happy that we righted a wrong and that we helped Carter. He’ll be very happy to know she’s okay. He’s been worried sick.”

“Right—which is why I’m sure you informed him at once that we’d run into her.” When Barnabas got a panicked look on his face, Shinigami gave a grin. “Gotcha.”

“Look, just because I… It isn’t as if…” Barnabas tried again. “She’s my friend’s niece,” he explained. “It would be entirely inappropriate to, you know, court her.”

“The stodgier he gets, the more you know you hit a nerve,” Shinigami stage-whispered. “Also, I never thought I’d say this, but you’re blushing.”

“I am not blushing.”

“You definitely are.”

“She’s right,” Gilwar added.

Barnabas looked at him. “I see you’ve been taking lessons from the others on how to be a pain in the ass.”

“I was already pretty good at it.”

Barnabas groaned. “Let’s not talk about this right now, shall we? We have business to attend to.” It took him a good few seconds to remember what that business was, of course… “Shinigami, did you get the message from Kordinev?”

“Yes.” Shinigami relented on the subject of torturing him. She brought up the message on the screen. “As you can see, Jotun bots are landing on the surface, and it’s unclear if they’ve infiltrated the government or networks yet. He suspects that they have gotten into those.”

“That would make sense,” Gilwar said easily. “You keep any messages about what’s going on from reaching their intended recipients. Word doesn’t spread quickly enough, so people don’t mobilize fast enough.”

“We need to get in there,” Barnabas said grimly, “and disrupt everything they’re doing. I’ll see if I can get any details out of Grisor on the way there, although I don’t intend to tell him where we’re going.”

“Good plan,” Shinigami replied. “Do you think we should send a message back?”

“No,” Barnabas returned at once. “We have to trust that he knows what’s going on. Gilwar, do you see any parts of the message that Ferqar might have embedded?”

Gilwar shook his head. “I doubt he would. He wouldn’t want to put anything in Jotun in there. They would understand that immediately.”

“That makes sense,” Barnabas agreed. “Very well. Shinigami, get us to Kordinev. Gilwar, draw up a report on anything we might need to be careful of, as far as you know. And I’m going to—” He decided at the last second not to admit that he was going to send a message to Carter. He searched for something else. “Come up with an interrogation plan for Grisor,” he finished.

He left before they could needle him any further about Aliana.

He was not smitten.

That would be ridiculous.

Chapter Eighteen

Grisor was pacing around the tiny panic pod when Barnabas arrived in the brig. He did not become aware of Barnabas’ presence until he turned to pace back toward him, at which point he stopped comically and went completely still.

“Good morning,” Barnabas greeted him courteously.

Grisor said nothing.

“I came to check on you,” Barnabas continued, “to see what you need. We’re not familiar with the requirements for Jotuns. Do you need food?”

Grisor looked at him warily. “Will I be staying long enough for that?”

“I have no idea,” Barnabas replied. He wandered over to one of the benches and sat down. “For two reasons. First, I have no idea how often you need to eat, or what you need to eat—”

“I am sure you could find out that information,” Grisor suggested icily.

“I’m sure I could,” Barnabas agreed. “But it’s really not so much to ask, is it? After all…” He glanced at the panic pod. “It’s not as if you have much to do.”

There was a long pause.

“What was the second reason?” Grisor asked finally.

“Ah, yes. The second reason is that I’m not sure how long you’ll be here.”

Grisor went entirely still once more. “Is that a threat?”

“I have you locked in a cell aboard my ship,” Barnabas pointed out. “I don’t need to make threats, Grisor. You’re already captured.”

“Then why are you here?” Grisor spat at him.

“I told you,” Barnabas said patiently. “To check on you and see what you needed.”

“After leaving me here for days?”

“You seemed well enough on the monitors. Always pacing.” Barnabas dug deep for his memories of various bored aristocrats over the eons and waved one hand to indicate the pacing. “What do you do all day?”

He didn’t need to read Grisor’s mind. He was fairly sure he could feel the absolute hatred radiating out of the tank.

All he needed now was to make Grisor think of the things Barnabas wanted to know. He had notorious trouble sifting through the memories of Jotuns. If they were thinking of the thing in question, however, he had fairly good luck interpreting their thoughts.

The process was somewhat like wading through grape jelly.

“Well, if you don’t want to talk or tell me what I need to know, I can leave.” Barnabas stood and adjusted his cuffs. “Just don’t think you can waste away and die tragically to fuel your little…what was it? What was the plan? Oh, yes. Take over the whole sector.” He allowed himself a chuckle as he turned to leave.

“You have no idea,” Grisor snapped hatefully, “who you’re playing with, do you?”

Barnabas turned back. He could see visions in Grisor’s head, but so far they were only visions of what Grisor wanted: armies trampling over fields, fleets darkening the skies, slaves bowed by their labor, and riches flowing to the Committee.

Amazing how little war changed over the years. Barnabas shook his head wearily.

Then, curiously, he decided to be honest.

“Do you have any idea how predictable you are?” he asked the Jotun. He strolled forward. “How long do Jotuns live?”

“Fifty cycles,” Grisor said. “Give or take.”

Same lifespan as a standard human at the turn of the twentieth century, Shinigami translated promptly.

Thank you, Shinigami. To Grisor, Barnabas said, “Do you know how long I’ve been alive? Over ten times that long, Excellency.” He let the title slide off his tongue like an insult. “Do you know how many of you I’ve seen over the years?”

Grisor said nothing, but he radiated wary surprise.

“So many.” Barnabas sighed wearily. “And you’re all the same. You dress it up in all different ways. Some of you are priests. Some of you are noble-born. Some of you are warriors. Some of them are even honest about what they want. That’s refreshing in a depressing sort of way. It just gets so tiresome, how you keep cropping up.” He paced around the pod, narrowing his eyes into it.

Grisor turned warily to watch him.

“I should have known when I came here that I’d only find more of the same,” Barnabas continued. “I suppose I had some grand vision that we’d stamp it all out; that one day we’d be done with this boring, inane, ridiculous bullshit. And that’s never going to happen, is it, Grisor? Because ten, twenty, thirty cycles on—maybe fifty, maybe a hundred—there will be another one like you. Just one more in a long line who will kill a bunch of people because they can, and eventually die in misery like all the rest of them.”

He had shocked the Jotun, he could tell. There was a certain satisfaction in that.

“You have never,” Grisor said finally, “seen anyone like me. I alone can bring the Jotuns to ascendancy.”

“Oh, please. I’ve heard this speech a dozen times, and that’s just in person. You’re the only one who can achieve whatever goal, which is why you have to enslave a bunch of people—or torture them or kill them—for the glory of that wonderful thing you’re trying to achieve.”

“You think to judge me by the speeches of lesser species?” Grisor spat at him. “You have never met anyone like the Jotuns. You cannot comprehend the feats we are capable of.”

Barnabas began to laugh. It was ridiculous. He had seen things Grisor could not understand. He had seen the effects of the Kurtherian war that had spanned sectors and millennia.

None of that mattered, however. It wasn’t the point. None of what Grisor said was the point.

“You don’t actually care, Grisor—admit it.” He was grinning now. “You just want to rule the universe, don’t you? You had a nice, convenient excuse with all of that business about the Jotuns being superior to everyone else—your words, not mine. You’re jellyfish in metal suits. It’s impressive, but not planet-shattering. But if you hadn’t had that to believe, you’d just have come up with some other reason.” Barnabas shrugged. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been you, in that case. Maybe you’d have lived out your life in obscurity on some little backwater Jotun planet while another Jotun or a Torcellan or a Brakalon played all of this out. Who can say? There’s always one of you, though.”

“The Brakalons.” Grisor seized on that as Barnabas had hoped he would. “Stupid, lumbering oafs. So concerned with their rules and their procedures. They could never take over the sector.”

“You’d be surprised. It’s the ones you don’t expect who get the farthest.” Barnabas inspected his nails. “Funny business, demagogues. Of course, they’re not always demagogues. Sometimes they’re just dictators. You seem to be going for both.”

Being made to feel insignificant and uncreative, it seemed, was the key to getting under Grisor’s skin, and he was going to milk that for all it was worth.

“For all you know,” Barnabas went on carelessly, “the Brakalons will be your downfall. It could happen. You’ll try to extend too far, and the next thing you know, it’s Hitler and Poland all over again.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Barnabas reveled in the stream of images he was receiving out of Grisor’s mind: the names of Brakalon generals, parts of the defense network, ways to herd the soldiers onto ships for deployment—

He turned and made for the door, whistling.

“Wait!” Grisor slammed his mechanical hands against the wall of the pod. “Where are you going?”

Barnabas turned to look at him. “I told you, you bore me. I’ve heard all this before, Grisor, and I’ll hear it a bunch more times after you’re dead and gone, I’m sure. You’re all the same.”

He left with Grisor’s shouts ringing in his ears.

Shinigami.

Yello.

That is a ridiculous colloquialism.

Man, you’re still stodgy. She’s got you good, that one.

We are not talking about this right now. For one thing, I have the names of several generals the Committee intends to target. They’ve started receiving data from Kordinev, and they are in the message networks. He turned a corner and took the stairs two at a time. They’ve intercepted several attempts to get word off-planet. We’re lucky that Kelnamon was clever enough to reach us, and God only knows how many tries it took.

He considered as he walked.

I think they’re speeding the timeline up, he said finally. Their plan relied on the fact that no one knew what they were doing, and that no one would even think to look for it. Now they don’t have the setup they want, but even if they go with ninety percent, they could still be dangerous.

Agreed.

The best thing we can do, I think, is keep knocking the legs out from under them as they get things set up. We need to figure out what their plan is on Kordinev and head it off at the pass so that even if they have a fleet to use, God forbid, they aren’t able to make use of anything on the ground.

I’ll start assessing known data, Shinigami told him gravely. The teasing was gone from her voice. Barnabas—you meant what you said, right?

About what? Barnabas paused, looking up curiously at the cameras.

Shinigami projected herself in front of him, though she kept her discussion silent as she looked at him gravely. She was wearing her armor in the projection, perhaps to feel safer. You said you’d still be hearing this speech from other people long after Grisor was gone. You think we’re going to win, right?

Of course, I think we’re going to win. Barnabas smiled. They always lose in the end, Shinigami. Sometimes it takes a lot longer than we want it to, but they always lose in the end. I promise, Grisor isn’t going to win this one.

Good, she said with feeling. Her humor returned as she added, By the way, he’s still yelling for you to come back. You got under his skin.

Barnabas snickered. Let’s let him stew for a while, then.

Agreed. Shinigami nodded and disappeared.

Barnabas whistled as he made his way back to his rooms. He definitely did not spend any time looking in the mirror once there, trying to imagine how someone new might see him after all these years. He was used to checking for dirt or stray threads on his clothing, not examining his features, but if someone were to meet him for the first time—

This was ridiculous. He went back out into the main room and resolutely opened his book. He was going to read about submarines. He was not going to think about Aliana.

Definitely not.

Chapter Nineteen

A scattering of gunfire came from around the corner and Kelnamon grimaced in frustration. They had to get the government officials out of these bunkers. There was no telling what was being done to them while they were in there, and the knowledge they had could compromise the entire Brakalon infrastructure and population if it were tortured out of them.

He did not even want to think of the damage they could do as double agents, even unwilling ones, if they believed their families were held hostage.

Jotun turrets now surrounded all of the government buildings, and they had laser-targeting and almost instantaneous firing capabilities. There was no element of surprise when it came to them; one couldn’t burst out of cover and elude them.

Under any normal circumstances, Kelnamon would have ordered everyone to retreat. He knew they were going to take heavy losses as they pushed forward. Everyone knew it, and the fear was plain on their faces. Even Ferqar moved hesitantly in his biosuit and had been subdued lately.

Kelnamon was grateful for Ferqar’s help. Ferqar had shown that when a member of his own species, even a highly respected one, was doing something sadistic and immoral, he would stop them. Still, it was one thing to carry out vigilante justice on a single Naval captain, and quite another thing to be fighting a larger Jotun initiative.

Kelnamon had broached the subject with him some days ago. He did not want to take the chance of Ferqar having a crisis of conscience in the middle of a battle, so the discussion needed to be had.

“Have you considered that this might be a government initiative?” he had asked Ferqar. “That you might have orders, if you were on your ship, to come take over Kordinev?”

Ferqar had become slightly agitated, but Kelnamon was beginning to know him well enough to see that he wasn’t surprised by the question. He had thought about it.

“I wondered that,” he admitted. “We knew Huword was involved in something big. What if the Senate really was planning something like this? Or…I hate to say it, but what if the Navy was? I can’t see Admiral Jeqwar doing something like that, but it’s possible, isn’t it?”

Kelnamon didn’t know what to say to that. He’d always found the Jotuns insufferable, absolutely sure they were better than everyone else. He didn’t think it was in any way unlikely that their government would order another species subjugated.

Ferqar gave a mechanical sigh. Enough species had such mannerisms that the Jotuns had programmed similar sounds into their biosuits. “It doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “Whether this is some rogue faction or the whole government, it isn’t right. The Brakalons haven’t been our enemies; they haven’t threatened us. I can’t justify taking over Kordinev, even if the whole government is in agreement.”

“You know you’ll be branded a traitor,” Kelnamon told him. “You aren’t just failing to go along with it, you’re actively fighting them.”

This thought seemed to amuse Ferqar. “Everyone is being called a traitor these days,” he said between mechanical chuckles. “The word is beginning to lose all meaning. Anyway, I am in good company.”

“Well enough,” Kelnamon replied cautiously. “I just wanted to check before you wound up fighting your own kind.”

“I am hoping we can stop it before it gets there,” Ferqar explained seriously. “Freeing your government would be a good first step. Then we can mobilize more effectively.”

They had proceeded to do what they could, rounding up as many military personnel as they could find without going through the message networks, outfitting them in secret, and preparing an assault on the government buildings where the bureaucrats and officers were imprisoned.

It was amazing how resourceful they had been. People used any number of ingenious methods to spread the word throughout the capital city and out into the surrounding areas. Someone had offered a factory building as a base of operations, and weapons had been delivered to their makeshift headquarters, hidden under bushels of produce or wrapped in bolts of cloth.

Brakalons showed up in droves. They might not be military-trained, but they were ready to fight and die for their people.

The problem was, many of them were going to die. Even trained soldiers would have a hard time against the defenses the Jotuns had set up. Kelnamon clutched his weapon and tried to find the courage within himself to order an attack.

“You must do it,” Ferqar told him. The Jotun had come to kneel next to him in the dust of the street. He had a gun as well since the rifles embedded in his suit’s arms had run out of the specific ammunition they needed. His biosuit was battered and dented now.

“I know,” Kelnamon told him. “But I don’t want to give the order that kills them. They are civilians.”

“More will die if we do not do this,” Ferqar told him. “You know that. There will be a rebellion soon, and it will be bloody. Better it be now, before my people have landed infantry. Or…” His voice trailed off.

“What?”

“I have been wondering,” Ferqar said quietly, “if they want to turn the Brakalons into their mercenaries? Press all of you into servitude.”

“We would not fight for them,” Kelnamon argued.

“How can you say for certain what you would or would not do? They may have ways to compel you.” Ferqar shook his head. “But all of this is speculation. Better we go now, and—”

The gunfire came again, closer this time.

Much closer.

With an oath, Kelnamon looked around the corner—and gasped in horror. The Jotun turrets were advancing. He had thought they were fixed, but they had extended spidery legs and were creeping down the city streets toward the attacking force.

“They’re advancing!” he called back along the line. They’d been trying to keep quiet, but there was no benefit to stealth if it got them all wiped out. “Everybody run. Regroup two streets back!”

Their guerrilla force burst into motion and fled along the streets, some of the less fortunate dodging blasts from the turrets—which, sensing motion, had begun moving more quickly. Beside Kelnamon, a civilian stumbled and fell. He hauled the male up and kept moving, but a moment later another shot took the limping Brakalon in the head.

“Kelnamon!” Ferqar sounded horrified. “They’re running; they’re too fast!”

“Scatter!” Kelnamon yelled to the resistance fighters. “Confuse the targeting systems!”

He realized too late that he’d made a terrible mistake. With such quick targeting, the turrets could easily track multiple moving targets—and they did.

He knew what he needed to do. With a roar, Kelnamon charged back toward the line of turrets. They seemed to be either remotely controlled or possessing some basic intelligence. If he made himself a more dangerous target than his fighters…

“Kelnamon!” Ferqar yelled. “Stop! Don’t!”

But there wasn’t any other choice. Kelnamon knew that if he didn’t do this, none of the other fighters were going to get to safety. Just like he had out in the brush, he grabbed one of the turrets and hurled it to smash against a wall. The other turrets, sensing this new threat, abandoned the chase and swiveled to face him.

The turrets did seem to have prohibitions against shooting one another. That was interesting, and it gave him an edge. He grabbed another and bellowed in pain when it shot directly at him, catching him in the arm. He used it to bludgeon another—

Three shots hit him at once, and his whole world turned blood-red. He staggered, falling to his knees. He could hear Ferqar yelling something, but he didn’t understand. A turret was advancing on him, and its laser sights gleamed like a baleful red eye. Kelnamon looked up at it and had the vague thought that this wasn’t how he’d thought things were going to end for him. He’d made it through so much, escaped the Jotun death squad, and now, so suddenly, it was all going to be over.

Which was when the turret exploded. The rest of the turrets swiveled, trying to find the source of the new threat, but one by one, they were picked off.

“GERONIMOOOOOOO!” yelled a vaguely familiar voice.

Kelnamon heaved himself to his feet. He wasn’t sure what “Geronimo” meant, but he knew a battle cry when he heard one. Someone was here, and they were clearly on his side. He must have lost a good deal of blood, though, because the world spun crazily around him and the next thing he knew, he was on the ground again. He couldn’t feel his hands.

Then the human’s face swung into his field of vision, blue eyes worried and black armor already streaked with reddish dust.

“Captain Kelnamon?” Barnabas asked. Behind him, Kelnamon could see a dark-haired woman gleefully pulling a turret apart. “Captain Kelnamon, stay with me!”

Kelnamon tried to speak and he tried to hold onto consciousness, but it was no use.

The world went dark.

Chapter Twenty

Kelnamon lay in the Pod-doc, its dimensions almost outmatched by his brawny form. His vital signs had been failing fast by the time they got him to the ship, but the technology in the Pod-doc was unmatched and they had caught him before his life had faded from his body.

He was slowly but steadily improving. It had been the better part of an hour, and he was almost ready to be woken up.

Shinigami came to stand beside Barnabas, who was staring at the smooth white exterior of the Pod-doc. She linked her hands behind her back and looked at him.

“The rest of the mission was simple enough. The Jotuns had gotten into the building controls, as you would guess, so when the government officials tried to leave, they found out they couldn’t. We only had to override that, and they were able to get out. Ferqar is briefing them now, but it looks like a couple of them are missing.”

Barnabas looked at her worriedly.

“I know.” Shinigami shook her head. “I don’t know if they managed to land any equipment to convert them yet. I’m guessing they haven’t—that our attack on Grisor’s compound interrupted that.”

“They had a good plan,” Barnabas mused, “but it hinged on secrecy. All of it hinged on people not finding out and not being able to organize until the military leaders and bureaucrats were already converted. Now, as with Jeltor, the rest of them will know not to trust them.”

“There is that,” Shinigami replied, “but it’s not so simple. What’s been going on here is still known only to a few people. There are huge parts of Kordinev that are still unaware anything was wrong—and the people who were taken were knowledgeable about the defense networks and some of the remote colonies.”

Barnabas looked at her sharply.

“Even if it isn’t something they do gracefully and secretly, they could still pull it off,” she told him bluntly. “If they showed up today, they’d probably have enough information to march in and take over. They wanted to rule everyone with conversion, but they could do it the old-fashioned way for a while and convert people later.”

Barnabas dropped his head into his hands.

This was a nightmare. The Committee had sat in the shadows for years, gathering its strength, and now, even being forced into the open before it was ready, it was still dangerous. It was a viper, he thought, lashing out at anyone who dared challenge it.

They had struck at the Jotun Navy and at Kordinev so quickly. They were taking advantage of the fact that the Navy and the Senate did not trust one another. They thrived on brokenness and mistrust, and even if they failed, they would take hundreds of innocent lives with them when they went.

Rage was burning in his chest.

“Barnabas?” Shinigami sounded worried.

“I should have burned the whole thing to the ground,” Barnabas whispered. “I went to the Senate and told them to clean up their act, and I should have just locked them in there and dragged out every one of their secrets until we found out about this. If I hadn’t been so concerned about—”

“Don’t doubt yourself. You did the best you could.”

“It wasn’t enough!”

“So what? You’re not going to do the best you can?” Shinigami threw up her hands. “Listen to yourself. You’re not sloppy, Barnabas, and you’re not vengeful. You’re also not omniscient. You can’t punish people before they’ve done anything wrong. That’s Justice. It happens after something’s gone wrong, and yeah, it sucks, but it’s just how things are.”

“They’re going to kill people,” Barnabas argued. “How many of that force Kelnamon organized did they lose?”

She hesitated. “Twenty-two,” she said finally.

“And in the laboratories?”

“You’re not doing yourself any good,” she warned him. “You came here as soon as you knew something was wrong. You’ve been tracking the Committee, finding out all their secrets. What more could you have done? Not as some omniscient god, but as you? As a human being, Barnabas. What more could you have done?”

“I could have tortured Grisor until he told me everything,” Barnabas ground out. “I could have bombed that facility to the ground instead of trying to protect Jeltor. How much time did I waste going back to get him out alive?”

“Barnabas.” Shinigami wrapped her arms around herself and sighed. She was looking at the Pod-doc, but her eyes were focused somewhere far away. “If you get to the end of this and you’ve sacrificed every principle you hold dear and every friend you had, what’s the point?”

“It’s just a few people,” Barnabas replied quietly. “Just us. If we do good things and take evil out of the world, will it really matter if we’re dead—or if our consciences are stained?”

“You know philosophy has no answer to that,” Shinigami told him. “You could argue it either way, couldn’t you? The ends justify the means…or the means are equally important, if not more so. You have to choose which way you want to go.” She gave him a hard look. “And in the time we’ve spent together, while we’ve been becoming friends, you’ve valued moral means. That’s the man I want to work with. If you decide you want to go rogue and kill, torture, and sacrifice the people you care about? Well, I can’t stop you, but you’ll be doing it on your own.”

Barnabas gave her a smile and looped an arm around her shoulders. “Thank you,” he told her. “Perhaps it was foolish, but when I see that I have failed—”

“Nope.” Shinigami cut him off with a shake of her head. “Don’t go down that road. You can’t save everyone. You’ll go mad if you try. Do the best you can, and let that be enough.”

Barnabas nodded, and both of them turned to the Pod-doc as it began to open. Its top tilted up and came, at last, to a stop. There was only the faintest whir of sound from the machine; it ran as smooth as silk, its workings hidden under the shiny exterior.

Kelnamon sat bolt upright a moment later, having woken suddenly. He was searching for a weapon, Barnabas could tell, then realized roughly where he was the next moment.

He looked at Barnabas suspiciously. “I did not think I would wake again, but I feel better than I ever have. Is this real?”

“Very real,” Barnabas assured him.

Shinigami stepped forward to offer him a hand out of the Pod-doc, her cybernetic body not trembling when Kelnamon’s weight rested on her briefly. He stretched and gave a wide yawn.

“I should get one of those,” he said. Then he looked around the room. “The others… If you saved me, surely you could save them.”

There was no easy way to tell him the truth. “My friend, I am afraid we could not,” Barnabas said quietly. “You were still alive when we got you to the ship. The others had already passed on. Their injuries were too severe.”

Kelnamon stood silently for a long moment. “I led them to their deaths,” he said.

Shinigami gave a loud sigh. “Will everyone in this room stop being self-indulgent for a moment? Actually, for a damned long while. We have a lot still to do, and the universe can’t afford to have everyone tying themselves in knots about their perfectly reasonable decisions. Look, I’m immortal. I promise when this is over, I will sit with you two for as many beers as it takes for you to get all the bitching out of your systems. Okay? Okay. Good. Now let’s go do something useful.”

Kelnamon looked like a massive deer in headlights. Barnabas laughed.

“I’ve found she’s generally right about these things,” he told the Brakalon. “Let’s go speak about what needs to be done. Most of the military and government officials have been freed, and we’ll need to get moving as quickly as possible to get the rest back and possibly quarantined.”

He led Kelnamon to the conference room, where the Brakalon squinted at Gilwar. “Ferqar?” he asked dubiously. “Did you get a new suit?”

“I am not Ferqar,” Gilwar told him. If he was annoyed, it did not show in his voice. “My name is Gilwar. I am presently assisting Barnabas. May I mention, your decision to attack the turrets directly was quite brave and saved countless lives?”

It was the right thing to say. Kelnamon’s shoulders settled a bit, and he gave a nod.

“Ferqar is on the surface,” Barnabas told him, taking a seat. “He is sending us reports as he gets the time. In the meantime, why don’t you tell us everything you know?”

Kelnamon sat as well, taking a stool that would accommodate his much larger body.

“It began a week ago or so.”

Their weeks are about the same as ours, Shinigami told Barnabas privately.

Thank you.

“Ferqar and I were out walking in the barrens beyond the city when we saw something fall, so we went over to see what it was. Ferqar said it was a Jotun device of some kind, and it shot at us. We managed to deactivate it, only for it to trigger a self-destruct. When we got back to the city, we alerted the military and bureaucrats.

“We heard nothing back.” He shook his head grimly. “I suspected at once that the Jotuns had gotten into our networks and were blocking messages. It took me two tries to get anything off-planet to you.

“Not only that, they had used an obscure protocol to make the officials relocate to those buildings you stormed with us. The protocol is to keep them safe if Kordinev is under attack.” From his tone, it was clear that the irony was not lost on him. “We created a fighting force by passing messages any way we could that wasn’t on the networks. People sent weapons and came to help.”

“You couldn’t get the Army?” Shinigami asked.

“No. The Army is always housed at bases well outside any of the cities. There was an…incident. It was far in our past, but we have never allowed our Army to be near government buildings since then.”

“Ah.” Barnabas gave a wry smile. “It’s a lovely idea, that one, until someone simply goes against it.”

“Julius Caesar?” Shinigami asked him.

“That’s the one.” Barnabas frowned. “I wonder—do those bases have easy access to ports so that the soldiers could be transferred to carriers?”

Kelnamon looked horrified. “Yes.”

Barnabas shook his head wearily. “I’d be willing to bet anything that the officials still missing can give the orders, and that no one on those bases is aware of the problems.”

“Same,” Shinigami agreed promptly. “They’re hoping to get the troops off-planet before anyone realizes what’s going on and hold their families hostage for their good behavior.”

“Ferqar said the same.” Kelnamon pushed himself up to pace. “I can’t believe this. It can’t be happening.”

“It is happening,” Shinigami said. “So you should definitely believe it.” She leaned back in her chair, pushed a little too far, and didn’t have the instinctive reflexes to recover. There was the much-too-loud thud of a heavy cybernetic body hitting the floor.

Kelnamon watched quizzically, and the rest smothered their laughs.

Anyone who laughed at Shinigami had to spar with her. That was the rule, and even Barnabas was beginning to get wary of doing so.

“What do we do?” Kelnamon asked Barnabas. “Whatever we destroy to get our officials out, we then can’t use against the Jotuns when they arrive. It’s a nightmare. They’ll have us bombing our own infrastructure.”

“It’s amazing,” Barnabas said philosophically, “how much damage you can do if you just behave like a total sociopath. Realistically speaking, the Committee can’t be more than twenty people. Even with their whole team of scientists and guards, it’s probably under five hundred. And yet, here we are.”

“So what’s your plan?” Shinigami asked.

“We’ve infiltrated government buildings before,” Barnabas said. “This will be not so much a smash-and-grab job as a don’t-smash-but-do-grab job. We get in there, get the hostages, and get out. On the other hand, I’m seriously considering having you bomb every one of the launch pads at the bases.”

Kelnamon made no protest, only considered this. “How long would it take you?”

“About an hour,” Shinigami said. “Assuming I’ve found all of your bases, which I think I have.”

Kelnamon groaned. “We’re going to have to reset our entire defense infrastructure when this is over,” he said, frustrated. “But that’s not important. Hold off for now. We’ll do it if we have to.”

Shinigami nodded.

“Everyone get ready,” Barnabas told the team. “And come up with some way to use Grisor better than we have been.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Shinigami replied.

The team left to get their armor on, and Barnabas gave Kelnamon a nod. “We’ll nip this in the bud,” he told the Brakalon.

Kelnamon nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.

Chapter Twenty-One

Qarwit stood in the center of Grisor’s ruined office and stared at the portrait of the former occupant on the wall. Grisor did not come from a distinguished family amongst the Jotuns, but he managed to convey the same stern air of authority as the old noble lines did in their portraits.

“Excellency.” One of the soldiers stood in the doorway, head bent to show deference. “We have acquired the target and are preparing to convert him.”

“Do it as quickly as you can,” Qarwit directed. He considered, then added, “Better we take the chance of breaking him entirely than they suspect what we’ve done.”

It was true. On the heels of complication after complication, loss after loss, Qarwit had launched a desperate gambit. What could not be achieved by one means would be achieved by another. They had been thwarted, but he swore they would not be defeated. So help him, they would reach Kordinev with the Jotun fleet, and they would do it soon.

Before anyone could mobilize to stop them.

They should already have been there, of course, to convert the captured Brakalons. He could only hope that they arrived in time to do so now that Jeltor had failed to entrap the admiral.

“No further orders,” he told the soldier.

The soldier nodded and left, and Qarwit returned to his study of the portrait.

“What would you do?” he asked Grisor’s picture. He began to pace. “I am as devoted to the cause as you are, Excellency, but I do not have your skill. I do not have your connections.”

Whatever orders Grisor had given in the event of his death, Qarwit had been immediately installed as the leader of the Committee after Grisor’s abduction. Some of the other senators had made snide comments, but the soldiers and scientists had not even commented on the change. Suddenly, Qarwit was “Excellency,” and they deferred to his judgment in all things.

The other senators did not quite dare to push their luck.

Qarwit had the sense that he should be grateful for this change. After all, unlike many in the Committee, he truly believed in its mission. He knew that many of the others simply wanted to have power, while some sought riches and many just wanted to be a part of something secretive.

There were not many, it turned out, who truly had the clarity of vision Grisor’d had.

Qarwit should feel pleased and proud to be overseeing this critical stage of the Committee’s plan. Things had begun to unravel when Huword was killed. Their plans had come into the light far earlier than they wanted, and they had to move now, before they were ready. But it was still possible to triumph, and the leader who did so would be remembered throughout the ages.

Qarwit, however, did not want to lead. He had not only believed in the mission of the Committee, but he had also believed in Grisor. He had watched Grisor’s speeches for years, picking up on the subtleties other senators missed. He had noticed who Grisor’s mentor had been.

He was not pleased to be taking Grisor’s place, not when the former leader was likely being tortured somewhere—or was already dead, having been killed out of hand by a human who operated outside the law.

Vigilante. Qarwit shuddered with disgust. Other species produced such chaos. They sent people like this human all over the universe, enacting some warped vision of justice, when anyone with sense could see that calm, steady leadership was best for the universe.

Humans, he had learned, highly valued free will. They were quite fanatical about it, in fact. Even when their choices caused them hardship and pain, they clung to the concept. If they would simply surrender some of their free will, they would be like Jeltor: calm, certain of their place in the universe, and equally certain of their purpose.

It was a good life, being sure of such things. Not being sure about them caused such pain. Why could they not see that?

Screams echoed down the hallway and Qarwit turned to look. It seemed that the soldiers and scientists were obeying his command, and were converting their new target with as much speed as possible.

He might break, it was true, but it was no loss to them if he did. And if he did not, if he was able to be converted and put back on Jotuna quickly enough, they might be able to use him to acquire a far greater prize.

In the meantime, there was work to do. Qarwit gave one last look at the portrait. “I will do everything I can to build the universe you wanted,” he told Grisor. “I would rather you were here, but I will not shirk my duty.”

In the main control room, he nodded to each of the deputies in turn.

“Tell me the status of our projects.”

“We have four machines ready to send to Kordinev,” one of the scientists reported. “The original research team had trouble converting Brakalons, but we think we can see some of the places they went wrong, and we are confident we will be able to convert the necessary personnel quickly as soon as we arrive.”

“If they’re still in our possession,” Qarwit said tightly. He looked at one of the generals. “Where do we stand after the attack?”

“We don’t know,” the general admitted. “We do know that our defensive networks were readying for an attack, but we have not been able to verify if the attack occurred, if it was successful, or who attacked.”

Qarwit ruffled himself in confusion.

“There should not have been any military personnel stationed in the city,” the general explained. “And no one should have known that the officials were trapped in those facilities. We kept any message suggesting such a thing from reaching its target. In order to attack, they would have needed to do so entirely outside any networks, and without their military. Or perhaps an outside force intervened.”

Qarwit could think of one such outside force, and it was enough to make his blood pressure rise.

“No one should have been able to get word off-planet,” he ground out.

“No,” the general agreed, “but it is possible…” His voice trailed off and he gathered his courage. “It is possible that Grisor told the humans where we were planning to attack.”

Qarwit shook with rage. “Grisor would never betray us,” he spat. “Never.”

“You should consider the possibility.” It was the same scientist who had admitted the loss of the devices to Grisor. Qarwit remembered her. “Jeltor was also strong-willed and principled.”

“His principles were—”

“Wrong, but he held to them strongly.” She was undaunted. “We do not know what sort of torture the humans have at their disposal. After enough torture, anyone could break.”

Qarwit thought this over. Every part of him was furious at the idea of calling Grisor a traitor, and yet he had to admit that this scientist might be correct.

If Grisor had betrayed them...

A plan was taking shape in his head, but he needed more information.

“Why do we not know how the attack went?” he asked.

The general looked at the scientist before answering him. “Our communications stream from Kordinev was interrupted before the attack began. We are not certain why. They apparently know our frequencies, however, and have blocked them.”

“They clearly realized something was wrong,” Qarwit said, half to himself. “And they were trying to stop us from knowing what was going on. The question, of course, is who ‘they’ are. It is possible that the personnel were able to shut something down from inside their bunkers.”

He considered further and came to a decision.

“We will proceed with the plan,” he ordered. “But we will be prepared to use alternate methods of persuasion. Plan for several strike teams to accompany our first landing force. These teams will find and capture the families of the officials we need. If their cooperation cannot be obtained via conversion, we will use their families to ensure it. And the first thing we will ask of them will be that they go into the conversion chambers.”

The others nodded, pleased by this plan.

Qarwit could hear the mutters of the other senators in the background, and he turned to give them a long look. They shut up, although they glared at him.

“Do you have any suggestions?” he asked. He forced himself not to snap at them. They might not believe in the mission of the Committee, but they could still be useful—and they would be more likely to support this initiative if they felt they’d had a hand in planning it.

They shook their heads.

Qarwit was beginning to understand why Grisor had been planning a round of assassinations. He turned back to the desk and considered what was in front of him.

“Make sure everything is ready,” he said finally. “For the return to Jotuna, for the strike teams, and for the equipment. We will need to move quickly. Whatever is happening on Kordinev, we must get there as quickly as we can.”

They nodded and left, and Qarwit went to one of the windows to look out.

So much of this operation had not gone as planned. Jeltor’s conversion, which should have been smooth and seamless and given them early entry into the top brass, had been sabotaged. Huword’s death had touched off meddling from the humans and exposed the Committee—and they, already involved in Jotun politics because of the debacle with the Yennai Corporation, had not simply walked away as they should have.

It was a nightmare. It would be easy to say that there was no way for them to win at this point.

But he refused to give up. He was here because he truly believed that the Jotuns were superior and that a world ruled by his kind—with peace enforced by conversion—would be better in all ways.

For everyone.

He would make this work.

Another idea came to him as he went to leave the room, and he turned. “Send Captain Jeltor as well,” he said. “We all know that the human may be there, and he’s shown himself to be weak where Jeltor is concerned.”

The general gave a decisive nod. “Not to mention,” he added, “that Jeltor has been aboard the human ship and knows some of the human’s weaknesses. He will be a valuable asset to our strike teams.”

Qarwit nodded. Jeltor had failed to bring them the admiral, but he could still be of use. The key to being a leader was to be adaptable, after all—and never to forget the weapons one had at hand.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Barnabas was impressed when they arrived on the surface of Kordinev. Not only had the Brakalons been efficient in freeing their leaders and planning a rescue operation, but they had also worked closely with Ferqar to determine any salient details about Jotun technology.

The Brakalons who had died in the rescue attempt were laid out under shrouds in one of the Brakalon temples, being overseen by several priests. Although Barnabas was not familiar with any part of Brakalon religion, some things transcended religion or species—and an elegy was one of them. The pure, raw sound of it made the hair on his arms stand on end, and he paused to say a silent prayer of respect before following Kelnamon into the makeshift headquarters of the resistance.

“General Vidrelor,” Kelnamon said respectfully. “This is Barnabas, the human who helped—”

“I’m aware of his exploits,” Vidrelor interrupted. Tall and stone-gray, he had an unmistakable set of scars and walked with the faint asymmetry of someone who had sustained injuries and long ago learned to live with them. His grip, when he shook Barnabas’ hand, was warm and certain, and he made sure not to crush Barnabas’ fingers. “I’ve read up on you,” he explained to Barnabas. “Whenever someone shows up in the sector and starts wreaking havoc, it’s good to know more about them. I’ve read a lot about your Etheric Empire—and about you, although some of it is clearly a load of horseshit. Did you know that some of the writing on you says you were a cleric once?”

“Er.” Barnabas took his hand back and gave a polite smile. “Well, you can’t believe everything you read, I suppose.” The truth seemed too complicated in this case. “Rest assured, I hope to work with the Brakalons in this case, not on my own. I hope to work with the Jotuns, too,” he added.

There was a pause as not only Vidrelor but also everyone else gave him a wary look.

“Not with the faction that is trying to conquer Kordinev, I assure you,” Barnabas continued, “but with the portion of society that respects the rule of law, and which will oversee justice proceedings against this rogue faction.”

“Heh.” Vidrelor’s snort was contemptuous. “You’ll be disappointed, human. You have too much faith. I think perhaps your species has not spent long enough among others. When the crimes are against a different race, the society will excuse anything.”

“That’s one possibility.” Barnabas refused to worry about that right now. “But we have more to deal with than that right now. Who is it we need to rescue?”

“General Fedranor,” the general said promptly.

“And the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders,” added Ferqar patiently.

General Vidrelor snorted again.

Ferqar was undaunted. “All three of them are valuable targets with a great deal of knowledge and power. The general can order troop mobilization, but the other two have knowledge of many classified things, and also of many aspects of Brakalon infrastructure that would be very useful for the Jotuns to know.” He paused. “Is there something we can call this group other than the Jotuns? It’s a bit awkward.”

“They’re the Infrastructure Revitalization Committee,” Barnabas explained absently. “Apparently, their idea of infrastructure revitalization is to take over other planets’ infrastructure and use their populations as slave labor.” He considered. “That, or they just picked the most boring name they could in the hopes that no one would pay attention to them.”

Everyone nodded in agreement.

“Very well,” Ferqar agreed. “The Committee, then. Now, Brakalon protocol, if I understand it correctly, was that the highest-ranking military and political officials would relocate to a series of bunkers like this one. The top echelon would be removed to even more remote and secure locations.”

“Interrupting for a moment,” Barnabas interjected. “We’re sure the Jotuns are not still in the system, right?”

“Very sure,” Shinigami replied. “I found an old backup, wiped the entire system, and reinstalled. I was able to isolate the pieces that had been changed. From the programs I found on the turrets, I think they were dual-purpose. They likely started landing more than a week ago and made their way into the cities, embedding programming into everything they could find.”

“And who are you?” General Vidrelor asked her dubiously.

“I’m Shinigami,” she said, giving him Bethany Anne’s patented “bureaucracy sucks” smile. “I’m not human.”

She didn’t elaborate further.

“Right,” Barnabas said before anyone could ask more questions. He knew Shinigami well enough to know she would give accurate answers in the most unsettling way she could. “So, where are these people?”

“General Fedranor is in this facility, about fifty-five jilwa outside the city.”

A jilwet is about five kilometers, Shinigami translated before Barnabas could ask. I swear, their plural form makes no sense. It’s worse than Latin.

Thank you. You’re invaluable. Also, Latin has its uses.

I know I’m invaluable, and no, it doesn’t. She flashed him a smile.

“The facility is entirely locked down, but we’ve been able to recover traffic camera data and other assorted pieces of information that would suggest they’re still alone in there,” Ferqar reported. “Now, it’s not a certainty, so we have a few people working on how we might determine if they’ve been converted.”

“I can do that,” Barnabas offered.

Everyone gave him curious looks.

You’re in it now, chief, Shinigami told him.

I know, but I’d rather they know what I can do. Coming up, it’s going to be damned useful.

And if the Committee finds out?

I’m not sure that would be bad, actually.

Barnabas looked around at the group and gave a somewhat guilty smile. “I can read minds,” he explained. Hoping he could move through this explanation quickly, he added, “Part of the conversion is to create strong loyalty to Grisor and the Committee. A converted individual will likely know to say things that make them seem normal. They can lie and pretend just fine, but if we ask them about Grisor, their feelings about him will show the truth.”

There was a long silence.

“You can read minds?” Ferqar asked delicately.

“Er, yes.”

“So when you were aboard the Srisa,” Kelnamon said, “investigating Huword’s death…”

“Yes.” Barnabas smiled tightly. “Jotun thoughts are difficult for me to read, but I knew from your thoughts, Kelnamon, what the scene had been in Huword’s rooms—and there was no similar memory in Ferqar’s head. What confused me, of course, was the strong feeling of guilt I was getting from Ferqar.”

“What is the meaning of this?” Vidrelor rumbled. “Do we have a murderer here?”

“Yes,” Ferqar admitted without preamble. “As you may know, the Srisa—Kelnamon’s ship—was stopped after a fellow Jotun naval captain was murdered. Although I did not carry out the murder, I arranged for it and made sure Huword would be somewhere the Jotun government could not easily reach.”

“What he’s not telling you,” Barnabas added a moment later, sighing, “is what Huword did. He was attacking remote alien colonies and torturing the civilians. Ferqar was disgusted by this and helped arrange for Huword’s death so that he could not continue the practice. It was murder, yes, but there was an element of Justice to it.”

“I see,” Vidrelor said after a moment. “Humans and Jotuns are both eager to take the law into their own hands. Brakalons are not like that. We respect laws, even when they are inconvenient. Ferqar should have brought his colleague to stand trial, and you, human—you should have stayed out of it, or brought Ferqar to his government.”

Barnabas hid his smile as he nodded. Now did not seem a good time to have a debate on the merits of vigilante Justice and wide-scale government corruption. He could tell from the general drift of Ferqar’s thoughts that the Jotun was thinking the same thing.

“Shinigami,” he suggested gravely, “can you assist General Vidrelor in coming up with a strategy to release the Jotun hold on the building where Fedranor is being held?”

“Of course,” Shinigami replied demurely.

Barnabas knew her better than to think it was anything more than an act, but no one else here did.

They set about making a plan, and within an hour, they had finalized their strategy. Ferqar knew that Jotun autotargeting had difficulty in both twilight and rain, and it was possible that they would get both this evening. Even if they were to attack at dusk, it would still give them an edge.

They didn’t want to wait any longer than that.

“I will assemble the strike team,” Vidrelor stated. He gave Barnabas an annoyed look, “As your crew member Shinigami is an integral piece of this operation, I will allow you and she to assist.”

Barnabas didn’t want to push his luck, but his team had put too much effort into this not to be allowed to participate. “Two more members should be involved.”

Vidrelor growled but nodded. “We leave two eta before dusk,” he said shortly. “Be at the city gates, or we will leave without you.”

“Well.” Barnabas looked at Shinigami. “I think that went as well as could be expected, don’t you?”

“Better, honestly.” Shinigami lifted a shoulder. “I would have thought they’d be at each other’s throats. Just when I think I have a handle on organic life forms, you all throw me another curveball.”

“That’s…accurate.” Chuckling, Barnabas went to find Gar and Gilwar and tell them about the operation.

* * *

There was a lot he could not remember. Gorsik drifted in the tank of his biosuit and tried to go over the events of the last day. For some reason, any attempt to think about it made him nauseated. He remembered terrible pain but little else.

But why? What would have hurt so much?

He must have been in an accident of some kind. The answer came to him slowly. His mind wasn’t working very well, after all. Yes, an accident. Perhaps his suit had malfunctioned.

Then why was he here in his offices, alone? Surely he should have medical personnel attending to him. He tried to make his suit work, but the effort was too much for him. He did not understand what was happening. He did not…

He fought the urge to vomit, tentacles rigid. It took longer than he wanted to get hold of himself, but eventually he was able to relax again.

And then he remembered his purpose. He remembered why he was here.

The admiral. He needed to bring the admiral to a certain location. They had told him this when they left him here in his office. They told him it should be easy for him to arrange. After all, he had been her aide for several years now. He knew what to say to get her off her guard.

And when they had her…

His heart filled with happiness. When the admiral was converted like he was, she would be happier. He wanted her to be happy. She had not been very happy lately. She would be happy, and Grisor would be happy, and the true work of the Committee could begin.

Although he was still in pain, Gorsik struggled to his feet and went in search of Admiral Jeqwar.

There was much to do. He could not afford to waste a single moment.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Holy shit, boss, it’s actually you.” Tom Mears strode across the docking bay of Heavensward Station. Although he stood only 5’4”, he radiated confidence and charm that filled any room he was in—up to and including the docking bay. He slung his bag over his shoulder and reached out to clasp Aliana’s hand. “Kinda thought I’d never see you again.”

“Likewise,” Aliana replied honestly. She felt a stab of old hurt and pushed it away.

Tom saw it, though. He shook his head at her. “I’m so sorry for what happened. I didn’t know at first, I swear. We just left port, and he said you had some business to finish up and you’d meet us a little later on. Then he said—”

“That he and I were breaking up and I’d given him the ship,” Aliana finished. “I know. The others told me. I’m not mad at you, Tom. I shouldn’t ever have been, I should have known he’d lie to you all, too.”

Ria, of course, had known the truth, but she and Aliana had settled that.

“Well, I didn’t fix it when I knew, did I?” Tom shook his head. “Figured it was all legal-like, tied up so neatly, and we’ve all had bad bosses afore, haven’t we? Told myself I’d make it up to you if I ever saw you again, but that was dodging things and I knew it.” He gave a sigh. “Say, how did you get the ship back?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Aliana promised him. “Suffice it to say, Lawrence is not happy about it, but the whole process did involve him spending about an hour trying to land an heiress, and that was fun for all of us to watch.”

She meant that literally. Shannon had sent along the video later, and they’d all had a good laugh, throwing popcorn at the screen as Lawrence laid a bunch of smarmy pickup lines on the woman.

Aliana hadn’t seen her wearing a recording device, but she must have had one embedded. She found herself fascinated by the woman. She didn’t seem intimidated by anything, and last time Carter had mentioned Barnabas, he hadn’t mentioned any stunningly attractive female members of his crew.

She had no idea that if Barnabas knew the general drift of her thoughts, he would have laughed himself sick.

Anyway, she told herself firmly, she was not jealous. Not jealous at all. She busied herself letting Tom into the ship and showing him to his old bunk with a flourish. Lawrence had been lazy enough that he hadn’t cleaned out the cabins after he fired everyone, but since they were in port anyway for Ria to do the repairs, Aliana had busied herself cleaning the ship from stem to stern.

Consequently, every part of her ached and all of her clothes smelled like cleaning solution.

It had been worth it, though. She told herself that she’d scrubbed every last bit of Lawrence out of the Melisande. When they left port, the ship would be clean, and Aliana vowed to herself that she would never again think of him. It would be as if he’d never been on board.

They’d come to Heavensward specifically to find Tom since Aliana had spent the last few days tracking down every member of the crew that Lawrence had fired. All of them had been happy to sign on again, and with every one of them, Aliana had made the same deal: it was all water under the bridge as long as they’d tell her the next time someone tried to tell them to leave port without her.

They all promised they would—and more than one of them promised to give Lawrence a solid kick in the groin if they ever saw him again. Aliana had started to protest the first time someone had said that, then decided not to intervene. The crew had their own grudges with him.

He solidly deserved it.

She passed Ria in the hallway. The tiny woman seemed to be covered with grease smudges and the toolbox she was lugging was about half her size, but she was grinning from ear to ear.

“Engine upgrades have her purring like a kitten,” she reported happily. “Just the gun turrets to do now. And did I hear Tom?”

“You did.” Aliana pointed down the hall. “Same bunk. I think he’s still unpacking.”

“Awesome!” Ria dropped her tools with a clank and took off. “Tom! Tom! You’re back!”

Aliana watched her go with a grin. Seeing the rest of the family come together again was helping her feel better about everything.

And she had to be honest—she had definitely looked the other way when a boss had done something unethical. She had given herself all sorts of excuses, like that it wasn’t her business or that a paycheck was a paycheck.

She wasn’t very impressed with her past self now.

She was humming an old Earth song when she heard a familiar voice nearby. With a frown, sure she must be mishearing, Aliana made her way to the front hatch of the ship.

“Sir, please.” Tara was trying to block access into the ship. “Please just let me ask the captain if—”

“It’s all right, Tara.” Aliana gave a chuckle. “Zinqued. Fancy seeing you here. What business on Heavensward? I warn you, if you steal the flour transport job out from under us, I will be very put out.”

Zinqued chortled. “Ah, we are rivals now! This will be fun. But this time, I am not here for the same job; do not worry. In actuality, I heard you had come to Heavensward, so I came here to see you.”

“Me?” Aliana frowned. Then she guessed what he must be getting at and groaned. “You can’t be serious, Zinqued.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Zinqued sniffed loftily.

“You know very well what I’m talking about.” Aliana jabbed a finger at him and then sighed, lifting both hands in a helpless gesture. “But still, I know you better than to think I’ll get you out of here without at least talking to you about this, so come on. I’ll make tea.”

“Tea!” Zinqued followed her happily. “The one that makes my nose go all cold and hot at the same time, yes?”

“Peppermint, yes, I remembered you liked that one.”

She showed Zinqued into the main social room of the Melisande. He looked around appreciatively, and Aliana smiled as well. Handmade braided rag rugs covered the deck with circles of bright color, an old wooden table was worn shiny with use and topped with a pottery fruit bowl, and various comfortable chairs had been acquired over the years so that the whole crew could sit and relax together. Many nights, they did; there were game boards and a very scattered collection of old books, not to mention a few knitting projects.

The kitchen was one of Aliana’s favorite parts, decorated with fading wallpaper that nonetheless had a pattern she liked, and with walls that could come down if someone burned something, and keep the smell from getting into the whole ship.

This large room was surprisingly cozy. The day might come when this place got old, but it wasn’t going to be for a very long time.

Zinqued sat while Aliana got the tea and brought it over to the table. When he took the earthenware mug, his nose twitched in appreciation and he sneezed the next moment. Peppermint made the Hieto sneeze, which seemed only to make him enjoy the tea even more.

Aliana supposed humans did some pretty strange things, too.

“So.” She took a sip of her tea and raised her eyebrows. “Make your pitch, then.”

Zinqued took another sip of tea, sneezed again, and smiled broadly. “This tea is good! And you know what my pitch is, surely. You are a human, and you have a good rapport with Barnabas. You can help me more than any other crew member I could get. So the question isn’t what I want, it’s what you want.”

Clever of him. Aliana smiled and tucked her legs up.

She was surprised to find that she had no good answer to the question.

“I don’t think I really want anything,” she told him honestly. “I have my own ship, and I can go wherever I want. Usually, I don’t have quite enough money for all the repairs, and I’m a little worried about where the next job will come from, but it’s still the best life I can imagine. Perhaps it won’t always be.” She thought of Carter’s bar on High Tortuga and the family apartments above it, with his twins shrieking as they played in the backyard. “For now,” she added quietly.

Zinqued seemed to know that her mind was miles away. He waited, sipping his tea and sneezing occasionally until she looked at him again.

“I’ll help you,” Aliana said slowly. She saw his face light up and held up a finger. “But I’ll only help you with a Barnabas-style plan.”

Zinqued paused.

A smile was tugging at Aliana’s mouth now. “Barnabas makes very clever traps,” she told Zinqued. “You heard me speak to him about it. They’re traps that only catch you if you do a foolish or immoral thing. I will set that kind of trap. Barnabas, of all people, should be able to evade it.”

Zinqued might have complained that this was hardly useful, but he said nothing.

“I’ll have to learn more about him,” Aliana said, suddenly flushing as she looked down into her tea. “Anything I can find out. Do my research. And I’ll make a plan. If he falls into the trap, it will be because he didn’t watch himself.”

“Mmm.” Zinqued set his now-empty mug on the table. “I accept, then.”

“You do?” Aliana was mildly surprised. “I’ll, uh…well, I’ll work on it.”

“Do.” He stood. “I’ll wait to hear from you. Of course, this will likely mean you cross paths with him again.”

Aliana’s stomach did its damnedest to hop sideways. She recovered before she spilled her tea everywhere, set the mug down hastily, and managed a smile.

“I’m not worried about that.”

It was a shame that she couldn’t tell if she was lying. The thought of seeing Barnabas again was terrifying.

And yet…

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Are you ready?” Barnabas asked Tafa as they walked down the corridor in the Shinigami.

“I think so.” She looked at him. “Were you ever worried that you were going to…lose yourself? It’s just the thought of getting in that Pod and coming out someone else.”

“I wasn’t changed in a Pod,” Barnabas explained. “My upgrade process was a little less…refined, shall we say.”

Understatement of the decade.

She was looking at him curiously, though, so he continued, “Yes, I did worry that I would lose myself. In fact, in the way I was first upgraded, there was a very strong voice in my mind telling me to give myself up to end the pain. But that won’t happen to you. What’s happening is that the Pod-doc—which doesn’t have a mind of its own—will make the changes Shinigami has determined. There’s no pain, and no voice.”

Tafa relaxed a little bit.

“You’re always changing, Tafa,” Barnabas told her. “Everything that happens to you changes you. You’re just choosing this change. And it’s all right—if you decide you don’t want to fight after all, you won’t have to.”

“I do want to fight,” she insisted fiercely.

He smiled at her. Privately, he wasn’t sure that Tafa would ever be a warrior, but he approved wholeheartedly of her reasons for this change.

In the med bay, Shinigami was waiting. She was already in her armor for the mission, but she had covered it with a white lab coat and had her hair pulled back neatly. She somehow radiated quiet confidence as she helped Tafa into the Pod-doc. Beside her, Gar was clearly worried, but Shinigami must have told him to keep a lid on it because he wasn’t allowing himself to worry out loud.

“I’m going to close the top,” Shinigami said, “but we’ll all be here. If you don’t like it in there, we can open the Pod-doc right back up, okay? But you’ll probably fall asleep at once. You might dream, but it’s more likely that you’ll just wake up when you’re ready to be taken out, okay?”

“And you’ll be here if so?” Tafa looked worried again. “Even if the mission runs long—”

“If the mission runs long, we can get a Pod back up here within a minute or two,” Barnabas assured Tafa. “And, remember, Shinigami is the ship. She can open the lid for you.”

“Oh! Right.” Tafa nodded. She gave Gar a tremulous smile and lay back as Shinigami closed the lid.

Not even two seconds later Shinigami reported, “She’s out cold.”

Gar let out a breath. “I don’t know why this is so scary for me. I did this, and it was fine.”

“It’s always harder to watch someone else do it,” Shinigami said with a surprisingly human dose of wisdom. “Come on now, get your armor on. We have to meet Vidrelor and the team at the city gates. He absolutely will leave without us, and you know he wants to.”

“He doesn’t trust us.” Gilwar had appeared in the door. “I suppose he’s right not to, at least in my case. I thought I might stay behind on the ship to make sure Grisor doesn’t escape.”

“There’s no need for that,” Barnabas replied easily. “We have a contingency plan.”

“Oh, yeah.” Shinigami smiled as she took off the white lab coat. “The second it looks like he might actually get out? We’re ejecting that pod.”

Gilwar gave a surprised chuckle. “Well, then. In that case, I’ll probably stay in the capital city.”

“Why are you so determined not to come?” Barnabas asked suspiciously.

“Well, you have Ferqar as a resource on Jotun technology, so you don’t need me, and…well, I don’t trust myself not to snoop if I’m in that bunker.” Gilwar gave a mechanical shrug. “You see, I’ve been a spy for almost all of my life, and that bunker has the absolute best in terms of Brakalon technology. Even if I’m not trying to snoop, I’ll hear them saying code words, and I’ll see their security processes. I’d rather just stay behind. I can advise whoever’s left on other technology they might see during the invasion.”

“Let’s hope we prevent that,” Shinigami said.

Gilwar nodded, but his silence was not encouraging. “Of course,” he added simply.

“Well, then.” Barnabas made one last check of the Pod-doc controls and ushered them toward the shuttle bay. “Let’s get down to the surface.”

A scant ten minutes later they joined the strike team at the gates of the city. Vidrelor, as Shinigami had predicted, did not look entirely pleased to see them. Still, as a warrior with a warrior’s honor, he had kept his word to wait until the assigned time; he wasn’t going to resort to trickery to leave them behind. He gave a sigh and motioned them into the trucks, and the party set off toward the bunker.

* * *

Admiral Jeqwar sighed as she piloted her biosuit along the corridors of her office. She wished she could be in one of the tanks, floating happily among the seagrasses or hunting fish.

That, of course, was just a distraction. What she really wanted was to be in the middle of her fleet, unleashing the full potential of the Jotuns on—

Well, on other Jotuns, it seemed. She didn’t like that; she had never enjoyed her desire for war. She was what she was, however, and that had proved invaluable to the Jotuns over the years. She had saved her people from destruction more than once.

She would do it again now. In fact, she did not intend to wait even one more day. She had made a decision: she was going to destroy the Committee, process and legalities be damned. Barnabas could carry out his theater with Grisor, but meanwhile, there would be no more of the vermin to carry out their plans in the shadows.

It was a perfect solution to her way of thinking. She did not allow her enemies to stay alive and dangerous once she knew who they were.

She was surprised, when she rounded the corner, to see Gorsik hard at work.

“Gorsik.” He had been taken ill very suddenly a day or so ago, and she could see from his movements that he was not feeling entirely better yet. “You should not be here. We’ve all been working too hard.” How long since any of them had taken a night off?

You didn’t get nights off, of course, when there was a plot within your government to violently overthrow multiple other species.

And after a time, it wore on you. After a time, even when there was so much to do, a person could take no more. She should have noticed the signs of burnout coming, she thought guiltily. Even sick, he was still here.

He looked up at her, however, and smiled. He was happy. He was calm, not frantic. That helped her feel somewhat better.

“Come see.” He stood aside. “I’ve developed a plan to mobilize the fleet so that the Committee will not know. The navy is segmented, so that no matter where they have spies, they won’t be able to respond quickly and interfere.”

Intrigued, she came to stand beside him.

A few moments later she nodded approvingly. His plan was good in many ways. There were only a few things missing from it, pieces of the network that he would not realize existed. She wouldn’t tell him that, not exactly, but she could make some changes to it.

“The only thing, of course,” Gorsik said, “is that it will not be easy for the captains to communicate with one another. All of it would have to go through you as a central hub.”

Jeqwar considered this. She began to pace, her tentacles thrashing. Gorsik was right; this was a dangerous plan. If something happened to her, the other captains would not be able to get in touch with one another. They might walk into a trap that they could otherwise avoid.

Was it worth it?

It depended, she supposed, on just how much the Committee could do to compromise them.

“It’s not worth it,” she decided finally. “There haven’t been any other disappearances. Who can say if there are traitors in the ranks? There must be, so you are right to worry, but I don’t think any of the captains are compromised, so not this plan. It is a good plan, Gorsik. It is a good way to move quickly without things being easily stopped, but there is no need to take such a risk yet.”

Gorsik accepted this gracefully. “I think I will go walk out in the sun for a little while.”

“That would be good. You’ve been working too hard. Not that I don’t appreciate it, of course.” She indicated her appreciation with a flutter at the base of her body.

“You work harder than I do,” he pointed out. “Come walk with me. Surely some time out in the sun is not too much.” When she wavered, he added, “You can see so clearly when others work too hard but not you?”

She laughed at that and nodded her biosuit’s head. “Let us go take a walk, then. Some sunlight will be good for us both.”

They emerged into one of the smaller gardens on the base, one meant only for walking in biosuits. There were no pools of water here, but she had always liked this place anyway. There were trees and shaded pathways as well as some in bright sunlight.

No benches. In their biosuits, the Jotuns did not need them.

They had just made their way into a copse of trees when the attackers stepped onto the path.

“Gorsik, run!” Admiral Jeqwar triggered the distress signal in her suit and threw herself into action.

Or she tried to. She could not move, however. Why could she not move? She thrashed inside her tank to look behind herself and saw Gorsik’s hand moving away from the back of her suit’s neck. He had immobilized her.

“Gorsik?” She felt horror creeping up on her. “What have you done?”

“What I needed to do,” he told her, “in order to help you. To help all of us. Your talents are too precious to waste on their side. We need you, Admiral.” To the others, he added, “Take her. We have a plan to put in motion once she is converted. Be quick about it.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

They went in to retrieve the general just before dusk. The bunker housing was built into the side of a mountain, so similar to some human structures that Barnabas did a double-take. This part of Kordinev even resembled the American Southwest in many ways, with rust-red rocks, scrub brush, and sand. The granite-gray mountain rose out of all of this, tenacious little trees clinging to its sides. The setting sun made it glow golden-red.

This would be a pretty place to walk around, Shinigami commented to Gar and Barnabas. When both of them looked at her curiously, she added, I mean, obviously not during a battle.

That’s not what’s confusing us, Gar explained.

Barnabas agreed with a nod. I didn’t think you noticed things like that.

It wasn’t part of my original programming, but I’m trying to learn. She met their eyes with a somewhat combative expression, then folded. Fine, you got me. It was a total shot in the dark. I’m just trying to figure out what organics find pretty in a landscape.

Barnabas snorted and shook his head when General Vidrelor looked over severely. The Brakalon was quite understandably worried about any lapse of discipline that might give them away.

Of course, to Barnabas’ way of thinking, it wasn’t necessary to be silent when they were approaching the bunker in plain sight. Their jeep-like vehicles were kicking plumes of dust into the air, and they weren’t exactly quiet.

He didn’t say any of that, however. Vidrelor was officially in charge of this mission, and Barnabas was telling himself that he was fine with that.

He wasn’t, but he was telling himself that he was.

“Their turrets are beginning to power up,” Shinigami reported a few moments later. “And it looks like the bunker’s guns are hot, too.”

General Vidrelor swore under his breath. He had hoped that the Jotuns would be unable to get into the bunker’s defense systems, which Barnabas had known was a long shot. The Committee was already in the networks and had managed to block specific messages. It was objectively no more difficult to get into the turrets.

And that didn’t even take into account the possibility that General Fedranor had been converted. That was Barnabas’ true fear.

If he had been, what damage could he do while they attacked?

“Fighters, come in hot,” Vidrelor ordered. “Target our guns.”

Shinigami and Barnabas exchanged looks. She had, on his orders, brought the Shinigami lower so that they could do a second pass if the Brakalon fighters were not able to handle things on their own. Now her fingers twitched slightly, and he knew she was eager to handle this herself.

He understood the urge all too well. It just felt wrong to be following someone else’s orders.

The first wing of Brakalon fighters screamed through the air overhead. They had been circling high above, hopefully out of range of the bunker’s scanners, and now they accelerated downward at harrowing speed. Even having leapt out of shuttles and off the edges of buildings, Barnabas felt slightly queasy.

On Earth, fighter pilots were partially selected to be as light as possible. The Brakalons hardly qualified by that metric.

Vidrelor had chosen his tactic well, however, and the pilots were clearly both skilled and well-trained. The guns at the bunker had been preparing to fire on the ground assault team and were not positioned well to deal with the death that came hurtling down at them from above.

General Vidrelor was keeping careful count of the guns disabled. He did not seem inclined to share that information, but Barnabas did not need it. Shinigami held up one finger as the first gun was destroyed. Then another finger went up, and a few moments later, a third gun was taken out of commission.

The guns are withdrawing, Shinigami told Barnabas and Gar a moment later. They won’t be able to get any more of them.

A few moments later, General Vidrelor gave a grim look and ordered the trucks to speed ahead. Barnabas watched, pleasantly surprised, as Vidrelor kept the pressure on the bunker. If the guns emerged, they would be taken out by the fighters that regularly passed overhead.

That left only the turrets, and the strike team could see their red laser sights gleaming as they got closer.

Barnabas pulled out a rifle and took his place, standing to lay his weapon down on top of the truck. There was a small opening—in Brakalon terms, which meant that not only was it very roomy for Barnabas, but he also had to stand on one of the benches in order to see out of it.

He pushed away the feeling of ridiculousness.

You’ll be in range…now. Shinigami’s voice was certain.

Thank you. Barnabas began to fire, leveling quick bursts at the turrets and calling status reports to the other gunners. Marksmanship was not one of his innate talents, but he had trained in it for precisely that reason. He liked getting into a fight and using his own two hands, but not every fight could be won that way.

He didn’t want the bad guys to win someday because he’d been lazy about learning new skills.

Between his reflexes and his training, he was able to take out two of the Jotun turrets, and the vehicles screeched to a halt for Shinigami to leap out and run for the doors with Ferqar.

The bunker’s guns, meanwhile, all popped out at once. There was a terrifying moment while Barnabas tracked the missiles coming from the fighters overhead, then everyone threw themselves flat as the guns exploded.

“Perfectly timed,” Vidrelor called over the radios, but Barnabas could hear him panting slightly, and all of them shared looks. Yes, they had planned well, but one mistake and they would have been very dead right now.

Shinigami gave a loud whistle as the doors opened and the strike team poured out and into the darkness. With Ferqar’s knowledge of Jotun programming and Shinigami’s innate abilities to hack it, they were able to make good progress down the eerily silent corridors.

“I don’t like this,” Vidrelor murmured once to Barnabas. Given that he hadn’t wanted Barnabas along at all, the man took this as a sign of just how worried Vidrelor was.

At last, they made their way down the main corridor to a series of heavy blast doors. Shinigami opened the keypad and gave a few commands, bending her head close as if to listen.

“He’s in there,” she reported. “Or a Brakalon I can’t distinguish from him. Alive. Held motionless in the center of the room somehow.”

Vidrelor nodded. “Take your places,” he told the strike team.

They had brought light, durable barriers that they erected now to give themselves cover, and everyone had their weapon primed and ready before Shinigami gave the command to open the doors, and sprinted back to cover alongside Barnabas.

The hallway seemed to explode with gunfire. Turrets lined the room at the heart of the bunker, all stalking forward so that they were between the strike team and General Fedranor.

Barnabas squinted at the center of the room. The general did not seem to be restrained, but he sat motionless and silent as the turrets attacked his strike team and they fought back. He did not even dive for cover, as he should in order to give his team a clear shot.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Shinigami asked Barnabas.

Take two barriers, get into the room, and shred them in the crossfire?

Awwww, we really have started to think alike!

With a glance at each other and a yell for a temporary ceasefire, they burst into motion and into the room, Shinigami tackling several turrets along the way. As soon as they were out of the direct line of fire, the rest of the strike team started firing again.

Several turrets tried to stop them, one even managing to send a shot so close to Barnabas that it singed his coat. He and Shinigami both got their barriers up, however, and managed to take out the turrets without having the general in their line of fire.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Vidrelor gave Barnabas a resolute nod, and the Brakalon’s fingers tightened around his rifle.

He was ready to do what needed to be done, and although Barnabas prayed it didn’t come to that, he was disconcerted by General Fedranor’s silence.

He stood up from behind his barrier and walked out into the open room, stepping carefully over the fallen turrets.

“General Fedranor?” he asked.

“Yes.” The general stood then and looked at the strike team. “Why are they not moving? Am I accused of something?”

“I will explain shortly.” Barnabas allowed himself to get a feel for the general’s thoughts. There was worry, yes. He was worried that they might accuse him of treason.

“I gave them nothing,” Fedranor said fiercely. He laughed. “Of course, there was only one message, and that was recent—to come in here and stay in that chair without moving. I had been there for a day and a half when you arrived.”

To Barnabas’ surprise, his thoughts bore this out.

“Ah,” he said contemplatively. “And tell me—what do you know of Senator Grisor or the Committee for Infrastructure Revitalization? How do you feel about the Jotuns ruling this sector?”

There was no mistaking Fedranor’s revulsion for all three, and Barnabas gave a smile as he turned.

“He hasn’t been converted.”

There were a few quiet cheers, and Vidrelor’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Thank all the gods,” he said. He stood and slung his weapon over his back, then came to clasp Fedranor’s hand. “We’ll explain everything. We’ve recovered everyone we can; there are only a few who remain at these high-tier bunkers.”

“The Jotuns were behind this?” Fedranor demanded. “What is their endgame?”

“We’re not sure yet,” Vidrelor replied. “Come, speak. We have much to coordinate.” His eyes traveled to Barnabas. “And many allies we have yet to decide whether to trust.”

Barnabas looked at Shinigami. He had argued passionately for the Brakalons to trust Admiral Jeqwar, but he could not be sure they would listen to him. As much as it frustrated him, he could easily see why that was.

He looked through the wreckage, Shinigami at his side, and shook his head.

The Committee was backed into a corner, but as far as Barnabas was concerned, that didn’t make them less dangerous. It made them more so.

And he was very sure this wasn’t the last of their plan. He wasn’t sure if the senators were the key to it or if there was something else coming—but he knew there would be more.

* * *

Pain. Pain over pain over pain, multiplying until she could do nothing but let it flow through her, erasing any trace of who she’d been.

Or at least, that was what she prayed for. Admiral Jeqwar had tried to cling to sanity for what felt like days, hours, weeks. Now she tried just as hard to shed it. She could not bear sanity any longer.

She thought that Jeltor came to taunt her, telling her of the principles she must hold to, but she could not see him. Perhaps she had imagined it.

She knew what they were trying to do, and she was powerless to stop it.

The whispers they put into her head were laughable at first but became harder to ignore as the pain went on. Every time she thought she found a pocket of reprieve, the pain seemed to intensify and layer upon itself.

She was going to go mad, and madness would be all she wanted and more.

The calm, when it came, was blinding.

She would remember that moment forever, she thought—the moment when it all became clear and the pain fell away. She understood now. She had been held captive by fear and doubt, but there was no doubt any longer, and no chaos.

No, she was a shining light in the darkness—a warrior who would help her people bring order.

She floated to the top of her tank, and when she was lifted out and placed in her new biosuit, she met Gorsik’s eyes.

“You have given me new life,” she told him.

“I know.” His tone told her he knew exactly how she felt. “We will change the world. We will save them all. And we must go now. There is much to do.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Brakalons decided to first speak to Ferqar and Gilwar and then to confer by themselves for the rest of the night. Barnabas told himself that he understood this, yet he found himself incredibly frustrated by this turn of events.

Shinigami had landed the ship nearby, and she found him in the med bay sometime later.

“How’s she doing?” she asked him.

“About a third of the way there,” Barnabas said before realizing that Shinigami was surely already aware of Tafa’s status. He gave her a look.

“I wanted your assessment.” She lifted a shoulder. “I feel less confident now that I have a body of my own.”

Barnabas looked at her curiously.

“I might have a body,” she explained, after a moment, “but it doesn’t work like yours. It’s difficult not to make assumptions that aren’t accurate.”

Barnabas gave a nod, considering, and tilted his head to indicate the corridor. They stepped outside and strolled in the general direction of the bridge. Neither of them seemed to have a proper direction or any desire to speak, and at the blast doors, Barnabas headed outside on a whim.

It was a beautiful night. They must be in a warm season on Kordinev, he thought, because the air had the soft, perfect feel of energy right before a summer storm.

As he watched, lightning began to play across the horizon.

“Do you think you’ll ever want to settle down?” he asked Shinigami finally.

She gave him an incredulous look. “I’m an AI. What would that even mean?”

“I don’t know. Stop living in a ship, live in a…building? Space station? Same place, different types of problems to think about. I don’t want to say there’d be no danger, but you see what I mean.”

“Oh.” She considered this. “I really don’t know. I have never thought about it. I’ve spent my whole life doing this sort of thing.”

“I always forget how young you are. You seem older.”

“Yeah, well, I have a lot of accumulated knowledge to work with.” She smiled at him. “And it turns out being part of an interspecies, universe-wide war really helps you grow up quick.” She caught sight of his expression. “Oh, don’t feel guilty. It was a joke.”

“I know.” Barnabas wandered over to a rock and sat.

“Do you ever want to settle down?” Shinigami asked him dubiously. She leapt onto a nearby rock and began to do balancing exercises.

“Hard to say, honestly.” Barnabas shrugged. “I never thought it was an option. Now I see Carter and I wonder. I can’t say it’s too late, since I’m practically immortal and I’m still in my prime.”

“That’s what you say, Grandpa.”

“Don’t talk back to your elders,” Barnabas told her in mock severity. He watched as she did a cartwheel and paused at the top, taking one hand away to balance.

“The real question is,” Shinigami continued, “what you want. I asked before, and you just talked about what was possible. But it is possible, so all you have to do is decide you want it.”

“That’s how you think human brains work?” Barnabas gave her a bemused smile. “Bless you, child, but you have a lot to learn.”

Shinigami let her legs down with a thump and glared at him. “I am not a child, thank you very much.”

“Yes, yes, you’re a very fearsome AI with excellent marksmanship skills.”

“And a killer uppercut.” Shinigami made a fist and blew on it dramatically. “I don’t think I understand the difficulty, though. If you know what you want—”

“Taking steps to acquire what you want means that you have the possibility of failing to acquire it,” Barnabas explained.

Shinigami stopped. She was silent for so long that Barnabas thought he might have broken her, but she finally said, “All right, I’ve run this calculation every way to Sunday—as Tabitha would say—which doesn’t take that long because it’s only two options, but I still don’t get this. You have two options, right? You want a thing. Option A, you try to get the thing, maybe you fail, and maybe you don’t. We don’t know the probabilities. Option B, you don’t try to get the thing, so you definitely don’t get it.”

“It might fall into my lap by accident,” Barnabas pointed out wickedly. He knew exactly where she was going with this and she was right, but he was going to have some fun in the meantime.

Shinigami gave him a pained look. “You can’t plan on that! That’s a terrible way to do things! I don’t even get it. Surely that’s less likely? You know it has to be less likely, don’t you? It’s—ohhhhh.” She narrowed her eyes. “You were fucking with me.”

“Little bit,” Barnabas admitted. He dove behind his rock the next moment as a boulder came sailing at him. “Hey! Not all of it was artifice! Some of it was real!”

“Okay.” Shinigami appeared over the top of the rock and looked down at him. Apparently, she could make her eyes glow red. “Tell me which part of this fuckery is real?”

Barnabas looked up at her vengeful face and prayed that they hadn’t made a huge mistake in giving her a body. She had, after all, a very short temper for illogic. “All I can tell you is the truth.” He stood up and adjusted his coat before sitting down gracefully. He would accept his death elegantly, he had decided. “It can feel worse to devote all your energy to something and fail than not to get it because you never tried.”

Shinigami stared at him for a long moment, then slowly her eyes faded from red and she gave a somewhat surly nod.

There was silence.

“Oh, I hate this,” she said finally.

“What about it?” Barnabas frowned.

“It makes sense,” she explained, sounding annoyed, “but I can’t figure out why it makes sense because it makes no sense! Do you see?” She patted her body absently. “I hope I’m not going to burst into flames when all of my circuits melt down.”

Barnabas laughed. “A little illogic never hurt anyone.”

“You’re not an AI. You’re not built on logic!”

“Think of it as a learning opportunity,” Barnabas suggested. “If you can crunch this, you can crunch anything. I know you’ve been trying to work instinctive leaps into your algorithms, so why not this too?”

“Easy for you to say.” She sat down next to him on the rock with a harrumph. “What if I told you to just learn how to calculate based on saving the most lives without any hope of saving who you loved specifically? You wouldn’t like to learn it. New ways of thinking are hard. If you don’t think the same way, are you even the same person anymore?”

“Sure,” Barnabas said immediately.

“You didn’t think about that at all.”

“No, I meant…” He laid back. “Now seems as good a time as any for a philosophy discussion. This is the sort teenagers usually have, of course, but I’ve found that if you get a bunch of old white-haired philosophers in a room, they actually don’t make any more sense than the teenagers.”

Shinigami gave a sudden bark of laughter. “I wasn’t sure how to tell you that most of your human philosophers were full of shit.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. They had some good points.”

“Wrapped in a lot of pompous bullshit. I’m standing by my assessment.”

“It’s hard to argue, really.” Barnabas sat back up again. “I wish they’d finish their planning. I hate having nothing to do.”

Shinigami snickered. “You hate not being in charge.”

“That’s not right,” Barnabas denied, prickly. “I’m perfectly fine not being in charge.”

“Lies. Lies and deceit. You believed wholeheartedly in Bethany Anne’s mission and leadership, and you were still more comfortable off running your own missions. It’s not wrong.” She patted his hand as if comforting a small and particularly dumb dog. “It’s just how you are, sweetie.”

“Call me sweetie again,” Barnabas murmured contemplatively, “and I’ll take your hand off.”

“And he’s deflecting! There’s the man we know and love.” Shinigami grinned. “Doing the right thing isn’t always easy, chief. I think you’re right that they need to do this on their own. It’s just maddening.”

“Yes.” Barnabas nodded. “And I wish we’d had word from the Admiral. I know she has a lockdown on information since she doesn’t want anyone finding out what’s going on and what she knows, but it’s hard to make any sort of good plan without knowing when and if she’ll be willing to mobilize the fleet—or if she’s found the fleet the Committee has.”

“I’m telling you, they want to use the Jotun Navy.”

“And I’m telling you, that is way too big a gamble. Plus, Jeqwar has things locked down. None of the captains can disappear without someone knowing. They identified Jeltor’s disappearance before we did.”

“Yes.” Shinigami looked uneasy. “Because Gil and Wev held up his conversion as long as they dared.”

Barnabas shrugged.

There was a shout nearby and a young Brakalon loped over, occasionally using his knuckles to push off. He was barely panting when he reached them, but he looked worried.

“General Vidrelor says you’re to come at once, both of you.”

Barnabas and Shinigami exchanged a worried look before following the Brakalon back to headquarters. They arrived to find the place in chaos, with some Brakalons yelling and others setting up charts and maps.

“What’s going on?” Barnabas asked.

Vidrelor gave him an unfriendly look. “We’re receiving reports that the Jotun fleet is mobilizing and there’s a strike team set to land within the next hour as part of the advance force.”

“The Jotun…Naval fleet? Under the command of Admiral Jeqwar?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Vidrelor replied brusquely, “and I don’t care. There’s no word to say they’re allies, so they’re enemies.”

“They’re not enemies,” Barnabas countered heatedly. “The Navy is on your side.”

“Really?” He gave Barnabas a look. “Then explain why they’re on their way, hmm?”

Barnabas unfortunately had no answer for that. He looked at Shinigami, then at Vidrelor again.

“Put us in the response to the strike team. Hopefully, I’ll be able to learn enough about their plan to help you put a stop to it.”

Vidrelor looked at him for a moment. “And if they’re here to kill us?”

“Then I’ll protect the civilians,” Barnabas promised without hesitation. “We’ve faced down fleets before, General. We’ll do it again if need be.”

That, at least, seemed to satisfy the Brakalon. He gave a nod. “Get ready, then. We have a hopper waiting to head to the suspected drop site.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The shuttle door opened, shuddering with the force of the atmosphere around it, and the Brakalon captain waved the response team out urgently.

“Go, go, go! Their strike team is already on the ground!”

Brakalon fighters laid down cover fire to keep the Jotun strike team pinned as the response team leapt in ones and twos. Barnabas, Gar, and Shinigami were waved out in the middle of the group, Gar giving what Barnabas could only think of as a roller coaster scream.

He missed roller coasters, he thought philosophically as he plummeted toward the ground. Humanity had come up with the occasional good idea.

The Jotuns had already surrounded the second bunker and were trying to batter their way inside. The two top-ranking Brakalon senators, however, were resourceful enough to have figured out how to keep the doors locked. From what Barnabas could see, they must have powered down the entire bunker to keep the Jotuns from taking over the system.

If the response team didn’t clean this up fast, of course, the senators would suffocate, but Barnabas approved of the plan in any case.

Some of the Jotuns were hastily improvising explosives to try to get through the blast doors, making use of the lower-powered grenades and munitions they had brought, while others turned to mount a concerted defense against the Brakalon response team.

The best defense, of course, was a good offense, and the Brakalon team had barely had time to get to their feet before the Jotuns were charging at them in a spear formation, two wide flanks spreading out to the sides and ready to close.

“Geronimo!” Kelnamon yelled as he ran to meet them. He flashed Shinigami a smile, and she waved a thumbs-up in his direction.

“Now you’re getting it!” she called back.

Barnabas grinned privately. Human culture had its flaws, but he enjoyed the way Shinigami went around stealth-bombing little pieces of it into this sector.

Then the Jotuns raised their arms and began to charge explosive rounds, and he didn’t have time to think about that anymore. He dropped and went into a skid, bringing his arm up with a panel of his coat. Between his armor and the engineered fabric of his coat, as well as getting out of the way of the first rounds, he should be safe for a few more seconds.

That was all he needed to get to the Jotuns. He rolled and came up, dropping into a place of instinctive action so that he wouldn’t shrink from the hulking metal body, fairly bristling with weapons and sharp edges.

It wasn’t exactly pleasant to slam into, but the Jotun hadn’t had the first idea what force Barnabas could summon. It hadn’t altered its course at all, likely thinking it could simply throw Barnabas out of the way and keep moving. That was a fatal mistake; Barnabas’ fist shot out as he tackled it, and the glass of the Jotun’s tank cracked.

It yelled and tried to get away, but Barnabas had the upper hand now. Knocked onto its back on uneven terrain, the Jotun flailed and tried to get purchase to stand while Barnabas slammed his fist down over and over until the tank cracked. He wasn’t taking any chances. He grabbed the Jotun body out of the tank and threw it as far as he could into the brush nearby.

Ice cold, Shinigami told him. When he looked up to locate her, she was grabbing another Jotun out of its ruined tank and flinging it away. She shrugged at him. What? I said it was ice cold, not that it wasn’t a good idea.

With a snicker, Barnabas took stock of the situation—and felt his stomach drop.

The response team hadn’t spread its formation wide enough, and the Jotuns were getting ready to close their flanks. With the rifles in their arms, they could easily catch the Brakalons in a crossfire as they closed.

“Vidrelor!” His voice was a roar, as loud as he could make it.

To his credit, Vidrelor saw what was happening. He gave a sharp look around and spoke urgently into his radio.

He says to wait as they start to close, Shinigami said, and then send two groups out to either side to fire on their backs.

Do they know the weak points in the suits? Barnabas demanded. Jotuns aren’t easy to cut down by scattering fire at their backs.

I know that. She wasn’t even pausing as she leveled kick after punch after shot at the Jotuns around her, each motion made with military precision and deadly grace. But it’s probably our best shot anyway.

I don’t like this. He stooped to grab a Jotun by the ankles, yanked it into the air, and winged it sideways into another one, producing a satisfying crash. All of the nearby Jotuns turned to look at him. But we’ll finish this conversation later. Busy now!

You just keep getting their attention, Gar broke in. We’ll handle cleanup.

With a laugh, Barnabas obliged. He threw himself this way and that, wreaking havoc wherever he landed. More tanks cracked as his hands and feet pummeled the Jotuns, and several times he was able to slide one of his knives into a gap in the armor, using his faster-than-average reflexes to catch the brief moments of vulnerability.

He lost count of the Jotun blades that sliced near him or, more than once, caught him with a searing line of pain down an arm. Deadly in their sharpness, imbued with some kind of current, the knives were able to part the fabric of his coat.

But with so many of them trying to attack him, they were in each other’s way and had no good plan for who would attack at any given time. He could—and did—use that to his advantage. He made sure that any moment of hesitation cost them, and he did the most outrageous things he could think of to make sure they were always hesitating, always unsure what he might come up with next.

Barnabas! Shinigami’s warning came an instant too late. An explosive round caught him full in the back and he thudded to the ground, pain blotting out any other thoughts for a long moment.

Between his armor and his healing ability, he could recover from this if he only had the time to do so.

He saw a flash of shadow as Gar went hurtling overhead to latch onto a Jotun’s biosuit. The Luvendi ripped the head off and threw it, then began stuffing little static grenades into the open neck of the biosuit while the Jotun flailed and tried to pull him off. Several others, horrified, ran to their fellow soldier’s defense, and Gar, laughing maniacally, made a game of evading them as he took shots with his Jean Dukes and set the static grenades off one by one.

Shinigami, meanwhile, was nearly a blur. She was racing back and forth in Barnabas’ field of vision as he pushed himself up to his hands and knees, drawing labored breaths into his lungs.

Your vital signs are good, she told him. I’m getting readings off the charts in terms of pain, but you’re healing just fine, and there’s no sign of internal bleeding or any lasting injury.

That gave him the push he needed. Knowing that he was not risking serious damage, Barnabas was able to launch himself into motion once more. The pain made him gasp as he lashed out at the Jotuns, but he knew it would pass.

There was the high trill of a whistle, and four groups of Brakalons exited the fight at high speed. They must be executing Vidrelor’s plan, Barnabas thought. He noticed explosions going off behind him at the blast doors and knew they had to wrap this up quickly. The two senators had very little time remaining, and the information they knew was too valuable to fall into Jotun hands.

Break their line, he told Shinigami and Gar. Get to the bunker. Give them nowhere to retreat.

Then he turned and charged into the thick of the Jotun forces, the compressed spear formation that could still retreat toward the bunker and their friends. Instead of retreating toward the explosions and rushing the bunker, the Jotuns were distracted into the fight.

Another explosion went off nearby, and Barnabas looked up in time to see a Jotun stagger away from the bunker and collapse to its knees.

Strange, but he had no time to think about that right now. He lashed out in an ever-widening circle, clearing his enemies with single-minded precision. One by one, they fell. Streaked with blood and with rips and blackened holes in his clothing, Barnabas knew he presented a fearsome sight. He should be dead by now, and the fact that he wasn’t, was terrifying to them.

Reinforcements! Shinigami’s cry could have been ambiguous but for the frustration in it.

Shit. Barnabas kicked his speed up a notch. Tell Vidrelor he needs to stop fucking around and get back to the bunker.

Roger.

There was no immediate response after that, however. In fact, Shinigami was silent for a long enough time that Barnabas looked over to see what was going on and picked out both her and Vidrelor in the chaos. Both were stealing glances at the bunker.

It would be deadly to split his focus further, but this was the sort of riddle Barnabas could not resist. He looked up—

Just in time to see an RPG of some sort go streaking up from near the bunker. It hit the Jotun landing craft and sent it cartwheeling through the air, trailing black smoke. With most of the battlefield watching open-mouthed, it tumbled out of control into the side of a nearby hill.

For a moment Barnabas thought the doors would open and soldiers would come pouring out, but some self-destruct must have activated. The whole thing went up in a flash so bright he saw stars, and chunks of red-hot debris shot up into the air.

What the hell is going on? he demanded of Shinigami.

Vidrelor wants to know the same thing. Almost absent-mindedly, she grabbed a Jotun by the neck and shook it violently until the tank popped out of the body and went rolling over the ground. She didn’t even spare it a glance. He thought we were the ones up by the bunker.

What?

Well, someone clearly is. Someone who’s on our side. Heads up, I think we’ve got all of them if we move now.

In unison, the three crew members of the Shinigami pulled out their Jean Dukes, and each took out two of the remaining Jotuns in their little knot. Then, without a word, they took off for the bunker.

Debris and Jotun bodies littered the area so that they had to scramble up over little hills in order to see the doors. When they did, Barnabas’ jaw dropped.

“How did you—”

“They sent me with the strike team,” Jeltor said. He looked at all of them. “And in all the confusion, no one thought to make sure I was still converted.”

“Jeltor.” Barnabas wanted to believe, but he could not be sloppy about this. He looked into Jeltor’s mind. “Senator Grisor—”

There was a surge of something tired and too simple in Jeltor’s mind, followed almost instantaneously by revulsion, both for the conversion and for Grisor.

“He’s a traitor,” Jeltor said. “You were right, Barnabas. My own thoughts and experiences showed me the truth once, and they did it again. I know you thought you failed back at the estate—that you couldn’t convince me. But you did. You saved my life—and I’m here to help you make sure they can’t use the people in this bunker or anyone else for their purposes.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“He’s not converted.” Barnabas felt a prickling in his eyes. “Shinigami, tell them. He’s not converted.” He took two steps and pulled Jeltor into a hug, laughing. It was ridiculous to hug a biosuit, but he did not care. This was his friend. Now that Jeltor was here and safe, Barnabas admitted to himself that he had never expected to see Jeltor again.

Worse, he had expected that they would come face to face as enemies and Barnabas would have to kill the Jotun.

“Barnabas.” Jeltor’s voice was grave. “There are more coming. We need to get the Brakalons out of the bunker. But—please. Jelina. The children. They’re all right?”

At the thought of Jeltor’s family, Barnabas’ tears made his vision blur. He blinked them away as he nodded.

“They are,” he said. “They’ll be glad to see you.”

How much the children knew, he wasn’t sure, but he did know that Jeltor’s wife hadn’t ever expected to see her husband again.

Purpose flowed through him, and he strode to the edge of the hill. “Quickly!” he called. “Clean up there and get this bunker open. We need to get the senators out before reinforcements arrive!”

The Brakalons went to work with a will, and the Jotuns, seeing their forces nearly wiped out by one of their own, fought with desperate rage but little hope. They fell one by one as Barnabas watched grimly.

When Jeltor came to stand beside him, he looked at him curiously. “Are you sure you want to see this?”

“They chose violence and death,” Jeltor replied. “Not because they were tortured. They came here willingly. Whenever I doubt what we’re doing, and if it’s worth it, I want to remember this: those soldiers trying to blast their way into a bunker to capture politicians and torture them into becoming agents. And these fighters, too, knowing there’s no hope of them surviving, simply wanting to make their enemies hurt as much as possible so they’ll be weak when the fleet arrives.” He paused. “There’s something you should know about that.”

Barnabas looked at him wordlessly.

“They converted Admiral Jeqwar,” Jeltor told him. “I tried to stop it, Barnabas. I really did. I went in and tried to give her hope, telling her to cling to her principles. I should have killed her, I know that—but I couldn’t bring myself to.”

Luckily, Barnabas had Shinigami nearby, and her smile told him that she remembered their conversation.

“She of all people might yell at you for not killing her,” Barnabas told Jeltor, “but you know how the crew of the Shinigami works. We don’t write people off. Not our friends.”

What might have been a touching moment was ruined by a stray rocket-propelled grenade that shot overhead, making all of them duck. They turned to watch as it thunked harmlessly onto the side of the bunker.

“Are anyone else’s ears ringing?” Gar asked dubiously. “It’s just explosion after explosion this time, even when they aren’t doing anything. Normally, there’s more hand to hand combat.” He smiled at Jeltor. “It’s good to see you again. Tafa will be glad you’re well.”

“She’s safe, then?” Jeltor sounded relieved.

“Safe and—well, we’ll explain later.” Barnabas didn’t want to go into the subject of Tafa’s upgrades right now.

Vidrelor came scrambling up the hill toward them. He looked at the bunker but seemed to decide the politicians were safe enough for now. He jerked his head at Jeltor. “Who’s this?”

“Captain Jeltor of the Jotun Navy.” Jeltor introduced himself with a slight bow. “I come with the very good news that the mind-control the Committee has is not permanent. As you can see,” he added drily, gesturing at the Jotuns around him.

“You killed your own comrades,” Vidrelor said. There was distaste in his voice.

“Perhaps you would have preferred to have them kill your troops?” Jeltor asked bluntly. “No, I don’t think you would have. There are more pieces of this plan coming, General. Your forces need to be as strong as possible. We can discuss ethics later.”

“Finally,” Shinigami exclaimed. She came over to loop her arm around Jeltor’s shoulders. “Someone else who understands that right in the middle of a fight is not the time to moan on about ethics and moral philosophy.”

Barnabas took the hit with an eye roll. “General Vidrelor, Jeltor has told us that there are more reinforcements incoming. We should get the senators out of the bunker as quickly as we can and—”

“STATE YOUR NAMES.” An automated voice blared out of the speakers near the blast doors.

Everyone jumped.

Jeltor recovered first. “I am Captain Jeltor of the Jotun Navy. As you can see from my actions during the battle, I oppose the invasion of Kordinev.”

“NEXT,” the voice blared.

“General Vidrelor,” the Brakalon called. “I am leading this rescue mission to free the Senate Majority and Minority Leader.”

“THE HUMAN NEXT.”

“It means you,” Shinigami told Barnabas.

“I am Barnabas,” he said. “I was once a Queen’s Ranger in the Etheric Empire, and participated in the rescue of the Brakalon ship Srisa.” That was playing somewhat fast and loose with facts, but it was close enough. “This is Venfaldri Gar, of my crew, and Shinigami, another of my crewmates.”

There was a silence.

“BRAKALON. WHO DO YOU SERVE?”

“Senators.” General Vidrelor looked impatient. “I assure you, I am loyal to you. I too was imprisoned until very recently, and just hours ago we freed General Fedranor. There are Jotun reinforcements coming, and the Jotun fleet is inbound. We need to get you somewhere safe, where the Jotuns have not compromised the controls of the building.”

There was a pause, then the doors slid open one by one. Two Brakalon walked out, both immediately going to stand on opposite sides of the group.

General Vidrelor leaned close to murmur in Barnabas’ ear, “They’re famous enemies. Frankly, it’s a wonder they didn’t kill each other while they were in there.”

“The touching thing about all this is how it’s brought us together,” Barnabas replied blandly.

General Vidrelor chuckled quietly before looking at Jeltor. “You, Jotun. You say there are reinforcements coming?”

“Yes.” Jeltor raised one arm and scanned the horizon, then pointed.

The general took note of the heading and gave an order, sending two wings of the circling fighters streaking off.

“We should get back to the city,” he told them all. “We have injured soldiers, and need to mobilize the Army and formulate a plan.”

“Yes,” Jeltor said. “I think the first piece we should include is a strike team to infiltrate the Jotun flagship and rescue the admiral.”

“We’ll discuss it,” Vidrelor said opaquely. “Let’s get to the shuttles for now.”

As they walked, Barnabas reached over to clasp Jeltor’s shoulder. “I’m glad you recovered,” he said quietly.

“So am I.” Jeltor heaved a sigh. “Not that there weren’t benefits to being converted, I can tell you that much. Life is back to being more complicated. It was easy when all I had to worry about was Grisor’s orders.” He shuddered inside his tank. “He was a nasty piece of work.”

“Mmm.” Barnabas wasn’t sure yet how he wanted to broach the topic of Grisor’s current imprisonment on the Shinigami. “Him and all of them. Let’s make our plan and get this show on the road. I take it we don’t have very long until they get here?”

“Six hours,” Shinigami said.

“Six hours.” Barnabas sighed and rotated his shoulders, grimacing. “Not a lot of time to plan a planet-wide defense against a famous admiral, but if anyone can do it, we can.”

With a laugh, the others followed him into the shuttle.

* * *

On the Shinigami, Tafa stirred and opened her eyes.

“Shinigami?”

“Hello, Tafa.” Shinigami’s voice was surprised. “Why did you wake up? You still have some of your upgrades to go.”

“I’m not sure why I woke up.” Tafa felt pleasantly drowsy, as if she had run a long race and sparred a lot—although she wasn’t as sore as she would be in that case, she was sure.

“Ah, I see the issue,” Shinigami told her. “Your system processes the anesthesia much more quickly. Once I knew what I was looking for, I could see why. Are you ready to go under again?”

“Yes. Wait.” Tafa tried to sit up. “Oh, my bones feel like lead. It’s nice, though. It feels all right, just…very tired.”

“Your body is doing a lot of work to heal and grow,” Shinigami explained. “What did you want me to wait for?”

“How are things?” Tafa asked. “Did the mission go all right?”

“It went just fine,” Shinigami soothed her. “We were able to get the Brakalon captives out, and you’ll never guess who showed up! Jeltor. Barnabas checked his thoughts. He’s no longer converted. He said that Barnabas’ words to him at Grisor’s estate helped him shed the conversion. He’s safe, Tafa. Rest. You’ll see him when you wake up.”

Tafa gave a smile and settled back. As unconsciousness took her again, she knew only a feeling of profound contentment. Jeltor was back, the team was safe, and she could feel the changes in her bones and muscles.

She knew now what Barnabas had meant when he said that these changes were not to be feared. She could tell that she was more durable now, and stronger, but she also knew that she was the same person at heart.

All would be well.

* * *

The Jotun flagship hurtled through the black, and Admiral Jeqwar paced around her quarters. She was behind. The Committee had mismanaged their time and resources, and she was being brought in—as was normally the case—far too late in the process.

Luckily, any commander worth their position knew how to account for that. It was still frustrating, however, and even more, she had to deal with her present visitor.

“Do you have qualms?” Senator Torsen asked her delicately.

“What? No.” She gave the female Jotun an impatient look. “Surely you’re familiar with my history?”

“That was against another fleet,” the senator pointed out. She had been sent as the Committee’s main representative within the fleet to ensure that the Committee’s orders were followed.

Admiral Jeqwar understood the necessity. After all, she had recently been the Committee’s enemy. Still, the senator’s insistence on having long discussions about feelings was tiresome and time-consuming.

They had an invasion to plan. That was no small thing.

“I do what I need to do in order to keep the Jotuns safe,” Admiral Jeqwar told the senator, trying not to show her frustration with this conversation. They had gone through it multiple times. “We are, of course, trying to bring peace and order, not death. I will hardly kill civilians for the sake of it. Hopefully, the Brakalons will see the wisdom of letting us rule, and this can be accomplished easily, with minimal Naval involvement.”

The senator looked at her suspiciously.

“What we need to do,” Admiral Jeqwar said, running out of patience, “is make sure that the other captains do not realize what is happening. We have only one chance to take control of the fleet and enact our maneuvers before they realize who they are serving.”

“You sound disapproving.” The senator clearly did not think much of this.

“You could have waited until you had more captains converted,” Admiral Jeqwar pointed out. “You say you have agents on some of the ships, but they can’t pilot them, and I can’t pilot the whole fleet indefinitely. You’re rushing things. I still say we should pause once we get to Kordinev and bring the captains here in ones and twos to be converted. It’s safer, and will eliminate some of the messiness down the line.”

Senator Torsen got up to pace. She was delicate, and seemed to have compensated for that by making her suit bigger and bulkier than it needed to be.

She was, however, inflexible when it came to the Committee’s orders. Her loyalty was absolute, and she had been hand-picked by Qarwit to come on this mission.

“There may be something to that,” she admitted finally. “I will speak with His Excellency. After all, it’s not as if the Brakalons have a fleet, right?”

“Exactly,” Admiral Jeqwar replied. “I understand the need to move quickly, but we must not leave ourselves open. Better to take time where you need it.”

* * *

Five stories under the surface of the capital city of Kordinev, an elevator opened to allow its passengers out. They strolled onto a broad semicircular deck and Shinigami gave a low whistle.

The cavern was massive. It was so big that Barnabas could not begin to guess its volume.

The problem was, things like carriers were so out of scale with a human body that the eye could barely encompass what it was looking at. He had to look twice, three times, even four times, before he accepted what he was seeing. It was still difficult to believe.

“The Brakalons have a fleet?” he asked.

“Yes.” General Fedranor was amused by Barnabas’ expression, but more amused by the mute astonishment of Ferqar and Jeltor. “Assembled in secret and hidden here, where even fairly detailed scans would miss them under the activity of the city.”

Shinigami whistled again.

“And you’ve just been waiting for when you needed to use them,” Jeltor said quietly, in awe. “Well, now’s the right time.”

“Agreed,” Fedranor said. “If not now, when? When the Jotun fleet arrives, we’ll have a surprise for them.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Barnabas.” Shinigami appeared in the hallway as a projection.

“You’re looking particularly bloody-minded,” Barnabas observed. She was wearing red armor several shades darker than blood, and somehow managed to be more menacing because of it. A cape fluttered from her shoulders in an unseen wind, held up by gold wolfs’-head clasps on her pauldrons. She held a helmet under her arm.

“Good. I’m feeling particularly bloody-minded.” She got a glint in her eye, and Barnabas reflected that with most people, the glint would be figurative. With her, it was not. It was a literal glint, and it was red.

“You realize you don’t need the helmet,” he pointed out.

“Do I get on your case about how you dress while you’re on the ship?”

“No.” Barnabas gave her an unrepentant smile and picked an imaginary speck of dust off one sleeve. “But I dress irreproachably.”

“Oh, really?” Shinigami cracked her knuckles. “One second—let me just limber up before absolutely annihilating you.”

“Wasn’t there something you had wanted to talk to me about?” Barnabas asked a bit hastily. He liked this suit. He was not prepared to have Shinigami tear it to figurative shreds just to make a point.

“Oh. Right.” She nodded. “Three things: there’s a planning meeting on the surface, Tafa is ready to come out of the Pod-doc already, and Jeltor says he needs to talk to you before you go down to the surface.”

“Hmm. Let’s start with Tafa.”

“You got it, Al Capone.”

“Hey!” Barnabas scowled as Shinigami sauntered off down the hall, snickering. He caught up with her a few moments later. “I am a lot better looking than Al Capone.”

“Okay, I will give you that.” She reached to open a door for him, the motion so smooth and effortless that he was through the door before he realized she’d timed her projection perfectly with the ship opening the door.

“That was impressive.”

“Wasn’t it? What must it be like to only be in one place at once, with no cool toys to play with?” She flexed her holographic hand, clearly pleased, and then made a giant flaming sword appear. “Oooh, I like this.”

“You’re wearing red armor and have a flaming sword, and you’re getting on my case about my suit?”

“It’s definitely not as cool as a flaming sword.”

“Clothing should be about being neat,” Barnabas admonished her severely. “Not being flashy.”

“Oh, don’t sell yourself short. You look very dapper.”

“Thank you,” Barnabas replied cautiously. He found himself more than a little worried that this was a trap of some kind.

He was right. “I’m sure Aliana would approve,” Shinigami added, smiling beatifically.

“Listen here, now is no time to be talking about that. There is a fleet on the way which is commanded by an exceedingly capable admiral, and we have a planet-wide defense to plan.” Barnabas stared Shinigami down and waited.

She didn’t say anything.

He cracked. “Do you really think she would like the suit?”

Shinigami cackled.

“What are you two talking about?” Tafa broke in.

Both Barnabas and Shinigami jumped and looked at her.

“I’m so sorry, Tafa,” Barnabas said after a moment. “We were, uh—”

“Arguing about clothes,” Tafa finished. She swung her legs over the side of the Pod-doc, pushed off with her arms in an attempt to jump down, and managed to launch herself halfway across the room. “Oh, God! What the hell?”

“I should have mentioned,” Shinigami murmured. She cleared her throat. “You’re…a little stronger than you’re used to right now. Be careful with it.”

“Yes, that…would have been good to know before I threw myself on the ground.” Tafa got up, moving very slowly and carefully.

“How do you feel?” Barnabas asked her.

“Well, I would say that I felt better before I got all bruised, but…” Tafa checked herself, “the bruises are already gone.”

“Yes, that part is nice.” Barnabas smiled. “Otherwise you feel good, though, yes?”

“Yes.” Tafa smiled. “Remarkably good. I think…is my vision better?”

“Ah, yes.” Shinigami smiled. “I made several adjustments in addition to strengthening you. Your vision and hearing have improved, the bones in your wrists and elbows were moved very slightly so that you’ll get fewer tendon issues in the future, and your allergy to lactose is gone.”

“I can have ice cream now?” Tafa demanded. She had been overjoyed to discover the human treat and crestfallen when it made her sick.

“You can have ice cream now,” Shinigami confirmed. “In fact, I’ll make a bowl for you in the kitchen. With whipped cream, which you didn’t even get to try before.”

“I’m going to go right now! I’m so hungry.” Tafa took off at high speed, clipped the door frame, and ran into the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. “Oops! Still learning!” Her voice echoed back as she ran.

Barnabas was laughing as he looked after her. “I was worried about her being too timid. I didn’t guess she would go full Gar on us.”

“What?” Gar stuck his head around the door. “I heard my name. Also, I thought Tafa was here.”

“Tafa is in the kitchen eating ice cream,” Barnabas told him. “Unless she’s managed to punch through a wall by accident.”

“Speaking as the one with the ship-wide diagnostics, she’s given it a couple of good shots,” Shinigami said, rolling her eyes.

Barnabas laughed.

“I’ll go find her,” Gar said. “Unless…do you need me for anything?”

“I’ll be going down to the surface for a planning meeting shortly,” Barnabas told him. “I just need to speak to Jeltor first. I suspect we won’t be able to bring everyone. They probably don’t even want me there, but I want to make sure I know what’s going on and that they’re taking Ferqar and Gilwar’s advice.”

“Good call,” Shinigami agreed. “Should we go talk to Jeltor first?”

“Yes.” Barnabas nodded and flashed Gar a smile. “Keep an eye on Tafa for now. You know how disorienting it can be to suddenly have that much strength.”

Gar headed off with a nod, and Barnabas and Shinigami made their way through the ship to Jeltor’s quarters. The door slid open for them before they even knocked, showing that Jeltor had given them a tacit invitation to come in, but as they walked into the room, they heard the sound of crying.

“It isn’t what I wanted,” Jeltor was saying. “I didn’t want any of this, Jelina. But my regret—it’s for you. It’s for the children. You didn’t deserve to get caught up in this.”

“You didn’t deserve to get caught up in this!” Jelina’s voice, even the mechanical voice from the biosuit, was wracked with pain. “Haven’t you suffered enough? You’ve been tortured, Jeltor, and you didn’t know who you were, but you found your way out. Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you helped enough?”

Jeltor said nothing.

Almost in a whisper, Jelina asked, “Isn’t there anyone else?”

“No.” In that one word there was certainty. “Jelina, there isn’t anyone else, I swear. If there were…”

“If there were, you would still do this because of your damned honor!” She flared, angry. “You’d say it was your responsibility. I know you.” There was a long pause. “And it’s part of what I love about you,” Jelina whispered finally, defeated. “Jeltor, I understand. I know why you’re doing this. I just…wish things were different.”

“I know. So do I.” Jeltor sounded devastated. “I would give anything for it to be different, but the Admiral needs to be turned back, or I don’t even know how many lives will be lost. And I’m the only one who’s been there and come back.”

“I know.” Jelina sounded like she was going to cry again. “At least you’re dying as you, Jeltor, not as what they tried to make you.”

“Yes.” He sounded grateful. “Yes. I am glad we got to speak again.”

Barnabas had heard enough. He strode into the room, and Jeltor swung to face him. On the monitors, Jelina looked over.

“No one is going to die for this,” Barnabas announced. He held up a hand when Jeltor would have spoken. “No, you listen. We didn’t get you back so you could throw yourself away in a Pyrrhic victory. I agree that Admiral Jeqwar needs to be re-converted, and I agree that you should be involved, but that’s no reason to do things… Shinigami, what’s the polite way to say this?”

“Don’t be polite,” Shinigami advised. She looked at Jeltor. “You’re doing this the stupidest way possible,” she explained. “Don’t do that.”

Barnabas threw up his hands and looked heavenward for patience.

“What? The fleet’s arriving in five hours, so we don’t have the time to be all pretty and flouncy.”

Barnabas shook his head and looked at the screen. “Jelina, I am so sorry to cut this short, but would you mind if we spent some time planning with Jeltor? Please believe me when I say that I will find a way to have him help without putting him in undue danger. I give you my word.”

Jelina hesitated, then nodded. “Jeltor, I love you. Listen to Barnabas.”

“I…I will. I love you. Tell the kids I love them.” Jeltor seemed ready to break down.

“I will.” She, at least, seemed reassured by Barnabas’ words. She ended the call.

“All right,” Barnabas said briskly when Jeltor sat staring blankly at the black screen. “I know you were sure you were going to die and that would be the last time you would see her, but I’ll be damned if I let that happen. And frankly I’ve been closer to being damned than most people, so I know what I’m talking about.”

Jeltor gave a weak laugh.

“That’s better.” Barnabas pulled chairs over for him and Shinigami, and sat on one, smiling as she perched on the other. Fake cloaks apparently did not get snarled up on chairs. “So, what was your plan?”

“To infiltrate the flagship,” Jeltor said miserably. “I thought I would try to appeal to her, call her back...” When his voice trailed off, Barnabas realized what Jeltor was hinting at and why he was so miserable.

He was prepared to kill Admiral Jeqwar if he needed to.

“It won’t come to that,” he assured the captain. “We’ll find a way to cut her off from the fleet if we need to. And I wonder…is there a way to get you inside her head without being present on the ship?”

All of them pondered this for a few moments.

“There might be,” Shinigami said finally. “So much is going through the system when an admiral takes control of the fleet. It shouldn’t be difficult to sneak a few more signals in, in a way that they won’t be able to find them for a while. With some help from our Jotun friends, I should be able to learn enough about the mechanisms to do that. The catch…”

“Yes?” Barnabas lifted an eyebrow.

“I’d have to be in the middle of the battle,” Shinigami said. “I don’t think I can do it from the ground.”

Barnabas chewed his lip, but Jeltor laughed. “That sounds like old times,” he said. “We faced down the Yennai fleet, and we can do this. At least I know this fleet well.”

“That’s the spirit,” Shinigami said encouragingly. She cocked her head to the side. “Barnabas, the team on the ground has a plan, and General Vidrelor has offered to brief you on it.”

Barnabas groaned and got to his feet. “He just hates having me involved, doesn’t he?”

“He does,” Shinigami confirmed. “He hates it so much. But think of it this way: the fact that he’s still including you is an incredible measure of respect for your abilities.”

“I suppose there’s that.” Barnabas looked at Jeltor, then Shinigami. “So you have a plan, then? A way to get to the admiral without putting Jeltor in too much danger?”

Shinigami hesitated, then laid her plan out for him. It was dangerous, Barnabas had to admit that, but it was also very sound—and safer than Jeltor’s plan. He looked at Jeltor.

Jeltor nodded once. “It’s no more dangerous than being in any part of that battle,” he said, “and good people, sailors and captains, are involved now. You’re right, I don’t have to do this the stupid way…but I’m not going to sit it out either. Tell Vidrelor what we’ll be doing.”

“I will,” Barnabas assured him. He considered. “All right. I’m going to take Tafa and Gar, and I’ll send the people you need back in a Pod. I’ll see you all after the battle.”

Shinigami gave him a salute that somehow managed to be ironic and serious at the same time, genuine respect showing under her mischievous smile. Jeltor nodded deeply to Barnabas.

“You keep saving my life,” he observed. “I’ll have to repay you for that.”

“You can buy me some juice at Aebura’s when we’re done,” Barnabas told him with a grin, and he made his way out of the room to get dressed for the battle.

He was whistling as he went, an old tune he’d long since forgotten the name of, and it occurred to him to wonder how he could be so happy on the eve of a battle.

He knew why, of course. Still, he told himself it was the fact that all of this would be done soon. The Committee was finally outflanked and outplayed. They had no idea they were going to face down a Brakalon fleet when they arrived. The Committee would be ended, and the long process of justice could begin.

Yes. That was why he was so happy.

Chapter Thirty

Senator Torsen insisted on being on the bridge when the Jotun fleet arrived at Kordinev. It made Admiral Jeqwar want to beat her body against the wall of her tank, but she floated motionless in the central canister, her biosuit standing nearby, lifeless. From her position on the bridge, she could see everyone, and they could see her.

A large series of connections at the top and bottom of the tank gave her input from each of the ships in the fleet and allowed her to send signals back. If she tuned out the sensory data she received from her own body, she could feel the fleet around her—little pinpricks with different signatures, showing her which were accelerating and which were decelerating, which were arming missiles, and which were in communications with other ships. In a battle, she would be able to sense this not only about her own fleet but about the enemy ships that could be seen by their sensory arrays.

Because of this, she was the first one to notice the other fleet.

It was only by a split-second, of course. Almost instantaneously, the klaxons blared to life and the bridge descended into carefully-channeled chaos.

There was a moment, however, when she was the only one who knew, and she saw the game shift and change before her eyes. This had been almost dishonorable before, arriving at a planet that had no hope of defending itself. Now there was another fleet.

She knew the disappointment of a thwarted plan and the exhilaration of the coming fight.

Then she swung into motion. While Senator Torsen was still ducking—to get away from what? the admiral wondered contemptuously—and bobbing stupidly in her tank, Admiral Jeqwar took control of the fleet seamlessly and without hesitation. The formation spread into two wings at the sides, with contingents of fighters both above and below the flagship and a single spear thrusting toward Kordinev.

“Admiral Jeqwar!” Senator Torsen was babbling something about plans and Qarwit and all manner of useless rules and checklists the admiral had no time for.

“Let them come,” she said, and because she was hooked into the entire system, her words boomed throughout the room and the fleet. “This is why you brought me here. This is what I do. Let us show not only the Brakalons but all species that they can try to stand against us, but they will be cut down.”

* * *

Shinigami had established contact with the Jotun flagship as soon as it was in range of her scanners—which was to say, considerably before it saw them.

The idiots hadn’t even thought to send scout ships. They’d been so damned certain that they knew what was waiting for them, they’d just launched their fleet through space with no plan as to what would happen if anyone stood up to them.

The admiral, at least, had reacted quickly. The formation of the Jotun fleet changed before their eyes, and Shinigami watched from the bridge of each Jotun and Brakalon ship as the two fleets readied for battle.

As General Vidrelor had asked, she had fed the admiral’s words to each of the Brakalon captains. She was pleased to see that none of them seemed worried.

She had been worried when she listened to their plans through Barnabas’ ears. How could a fleet that had never been in combat have a hope of defeating a famed admiral? She had thought it was a bad bet, indeed.

Then they had shown her the drills they ran with data pulled from every known battle of every alien species. The Brakalons had not simply built a secret fleet, they had trained extensively to use it.

And, much like the admiral had experience on her side, they had the element of surprise.

It hinged, in Shinigami’s assessment, on how the Jotuns intended to use their fleet. After all, the Jotuns did not have much in the way of infantry, so their gambit must surely have been to put the major cities of Kordinev in the crosshairs and demand compliance.

Well, they had probably intended to have converted agents within the government who could order troop deployment before anyone knew what was going on, but now their plan would have to be enacted by force.

She did a quick scan of the Brakalon fleet to make sure no Jotun signals were interfering with operations, then checked in with Barnabas.

How are things going on the surface, chief?

Well enough, Barnabas reported. We’re all just waiting.

The Brakalon action plan had been to ready troops and station them at various strategically-important jump points, getting ready to respond quickly to any ground assaults. With a Pod at his disposal, Barnabas had offered to be part of the first response team, and he and Gar were ready to go whenever the alert came.

Tafa was in the Pod as well, but Barnabas had absolutely forbidden her from stepping foot outside it. As soon as he and Gar were out, it would withdraw to a safe distance. Tafa wasn’t happy with this, but even she had to admit that a two-species planet-wide showdown involving fleets, an entire army, and specialized strike teams wasn’t exactly “baby’s first battle” material.

How are things on your end? Barnabas asked curiously. I see the admiral is preparing for confrontation.

She’s glad of it, Shinigami replied. She’s an honorable opponent. She didn’t like the idea of steamrolling the Brakalons.

I hope we get her back, Barnabas remarked soberly.

The way she reacted tells me that we should be able to. What kind of honorable opponent works for the Committee?

You ask that, but a great many people with well-developed systems of honor have fought for deeply dishonorable causes over the years.

Give me this one. Shinigami began her quick dance through the Brakalon fleet. In order for their plan to work, they needed to be invisible to the Jotuns and moving quickly. Thankfully for her, she had experience with Jotun scanners and several Jotuns to work with to develop her strategy.

Then the main cannons began arming in the flagship and she felt herself settle into cold anticipation.

It’s beginning. I’ll update you as I can.

Godspeed, Barnabas said, and she caught both the worry and the affection in his tone.

You too, chief.

* * *

The Brakalon fleet had not only spread out into a maneuverable, difficult formation to take on, more ships kept arriving around the curve of the planet.

Where had they been hiding these ships, godsdammit? Admiral Jeqwar felt a stab of what might almost be called sympathy for Senator Torsen, who was pacing up and down and muttering to herself. She was clearly worried about what would happen to her if they failed in this mission.

And while politicians got, in the admiral’s estimation, exactly what they deserved, she had to admit that this particular development could hardly be laid at the senator’s door. No one had known this fleet existed.

There was no time for surprise, however. She needed to show them what battle was. If no one had seen this fleet before, it meant that they had trained in simulations.

And in simulations, people didn’t die. Her opening gambit would be to make them feel the losses and get their first taste of fear. She went for two of their support ships first, the repair-and-rescue ships that would zoom through the battle to any wounded ship. She had identified them early.

Take out your enemy’s support and they had only one charge. Give them a taste of fear, put death nipping at their heels, and they would begin to make mistakes. They would take desperate risks, too emotional to hold the line and wait for their opportunity.

She would be ready.

The rescue ships went tumbling out of formation, and the countermeasures the flagship had launched, assuming that it was in the crosshairs, shot harmlessly into the void between the two fleets.

Admiral Jeqwar felt a wave of satisfaction. Yes, she thought. Now it begins. Now you see.

Then the words started in her head.

Admiral Jeqwar. She knew that voice, although she had never heard it inside her head. She could not place it.

Who is this?

A reminder of your conscience. There was humor now. I am Gilwar. You do not know my name, but you have seen my work. It was my assassins who found Huword.

A cowardly act, she shot back. She readied another spread of missiles, keeping her attention on the flagship, and then had the ships at the flanks set their missiles loose and begin to swing inwards.

No, the cowardly act was to abduct civilians and torture them. The cowardly act was to pretend that the Jotuns were superior. If we were superior, it would be so clear that other species would welcome our leadership. Now, even our own people do not. They must be brainwashed.

She felt bile swirl within her. She was not brainwashed. She hated that accusation. It filled her with strange panic. She shot wildly, succumbing to her own emotions before calming herself.

I was not brainwashed, she told her opponent. I was freed. I was given clarity to accept my own thoughts on the matter.

Oh? said a new voice, one that was much more familiar. I thought the same once, Yeneda. But those thoughts—the thoughts that we were superior—they were thoughts I had already rejected, and I rejected them again.

Traitor. Admiral Jeqwar listened to the words coming from her mind and felt a strange sense of dislocation. She had never been one to spit insults at people, and yet, here she was. She meant the insults, too. It felt good to say them. Jeltor was a traitor; he had turned his back on Qarwit and Grisor.

Unfortunately, he also knew her well.

It isn’t like you to say something like that, he observed. Yeneda. I remember how this feels, how uncomplicated it feels to love the Committee and hate who they hate. But it doesn’t sit right in your mind, does it? You know it’s false. It feels wrong.

Frozen in her tank, Admiral Jeqwar missed a round of missiles, and her captains had to seize control of their ships to get out of the way in time.

“What’s going on?” Senator Torsen hissed.

“There’s a signal, and they’ve gotten it into her tank.” One of the communications officers was stabbing keys desperately. “As soon as she started communicating, I found it, but I can’t shut it down. I’m doing everything, I swear.”

Senator Torsen snarled in fury, but she knew better than to make an example of the people who were working to interrupt this. She paced a few steps, then swung around to look at the commanders clustered around the battle table.

“Find out where that signal is coming from.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’re working on it.”

“You’re ‘working on it?’” she asked dangerously.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s moving very quickly, as we know the Shinigami is capable of doing. They’re moving and bouncing the signal off the Brakalon ships.”

Senator Torsen considered this. “Send in a squadron of fighters. Take. Them. Out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As the fighters accelerated into the black, Shinigami snickered to herself. Then, the sleek form of her ship lying flat in a shadowed groove atop the Jotun flagship, she continued her work of opening one of the exterior hatches for Jeltor, Gilwar, and Ferqar to sneak aboard.

As the hatch opened silently, Shinigami caught another command: “And land the strike teams.”

Barnabas.

Hmm?

You’re a go. Strike teams are leaving. I’ll keep you all updated on their trajectories.

Thank you.

This senator is practically shitting herself, by the way. Almost no one knows that this is a fake mission, and she can’t afford to let them find out. Don’t worry, I’m taping it. We can have some popcorn and watch the highlights reel later.

So good of you to keep me in mind.

Don’t be snide. This is comedy gold right here.

Chapter Thirty-One

“General.” Barnabas activated the communications unit in the Pod, which had been tied into the Brakalon network. Shinigami had stress-tested it and rigged it to shut down if there was even a possibility the line was being tapped. “The strike teams are on their way. My Pod will intercept automatically, and I will keep you apprised of locations.”

“Understood.” General Vidrelor’s voice was calm. “I envy you, you know,” he added.

A piece of the puzzle snapped into place and Barnabas smiled. Part of General Vidrelor’s ill-temper, it seemed, had been because he was jealous that Barnabas would be in the thick of things and he would not.

Barnabas approved of that. He had no use for military leaders who were afraid to get their hands dirty.

All he said was, “Do Brakalons speak of tempting fate, General? You may get your chance.”

The general rang off with a good-natured laugh that said he would not be sad to do so, and Barnabas smiled in anticipation as the Pod began to move.

Two strike teams, Shinigami reported. Verified by my scanners, the Brakalon scanners, and what the bridge crew is tracking. They’re going to the two sites where the top-level officials were quartered. It appears they are not sure what happened there. Our cutoff worked.

It’s going to be pretty obvious when they get there, Barnabas responded wryly. But we’ll pin them down and take them out before they can go wreak havoc anywhere else. Which team should we go to?

The heavier team is heading for the military site. They seem to be assuming that a military leader would be more able to launch a defense if necessary.

Solid thinking. Too bad they’re behind the curve.

Yeah, couldn’t have happened to nicer people.

Barnabas smiled and relayed Shinigami’s words, telling the Brakalons that he and Gar were heading to the military site. Gar was elated, while Tafa frowned and fidgeted.

“Next battle, you’ll get to participate,” Barnabas told her.

“I’m not worried about that. What if someone senses Grisor?” She looked worried. “What if he manages to create problems?”

“Ah.” Barnabas held up one finger. Shinigami, could you project an image of Grisor’s cell into the Pod for Tafa?

Sure? Shinigami’s doubtful tone aside, she did so with alacrity. There you go.

Thanks. “See?” Barnabas said to Tafa. “Entirely cut off from any signals and still trapped.”

“Aren’t we going to…use him somehow?” Gar asked doubtfully. “I’m with Tafa on this one.”

Barnabas gave an evil smile and sat back, stretching out his legs. “Actually, I had a rather different idea. We don’t need him to head off this plan, at least not yet, and it’s driving him crazy to be held captive and not even be interrogated. He doesn’t have a self-destruct on his suit, and he’s a coward about death. He made sure everyone else had them, but he doesn’t, so he has no way to get out of this. And once the battle’s over?” His smile was very cold. “I’ll go down and tell him about it. Tell him that while he was rotting in that cell, the Committee fell to pieces and he had no idea it was even happening. Then I’ll take him back for his trial.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then Gar whistled. “You’re cold.”

“I learned from the best.” Barnabas grinned as he thought of Bethany Anne.

Barnabas, you’re arriving at the site. You’ve beaten the strike team. I suggest hiding behind the bunker. All of the decoys are in place to draw them in.

Good, Barnabas said. The decoys had been a rather ingenious Brakalon idea that they had perfected with Ferqar’s help. They would emit signals indicating that the lost data showing what had happened at these sites could be found inside the bunker.

The Pod let Barnabas and Gar out, and both of them smiled at Tafa before leaving. She waved at them bravely, but Barnabas could see she was worried for them. Then the Pod shot back into the sky, invisible to the naked eye and Jotun scanners.

Barnabas and Gar hid behind the bunker, settling a large cloak of stiff fabric over them that confused most scanning technology and hid their biosignatures.

Not long now, Barnabas thought, and he felt the familiar rush of anticipation. He had fought the Committee for so long from the shadows. He was glad to be fighting them out in the open at last.

He jumped when something rustled nearby, then started laughing.

“Hello,” Kelnamon greeted him. “They said that after my service and injuries I couldn’t be allowed to fight in this battle. Didn’t matter that I told them you’d patched me up, so I picked a place I was pretty sure would see some action, and here I am.”

“Glad to have you.” Barnabas clasped his hand in greeting. “Couldn’t ask for a better fighter at my side.”

* * *

Captain Qrevar of Strike Team 4 was a sturdy, thick-bodied Jotun who wielded his biosuit like a tank, always ready to charge into the action headlong rather than hide away and snipe at his enemies.

In his years doing various black ops work for both the Senate and the Navy he’d learned a healthy dose of respect for the fighting capabilities of various species, but he had never lost his conviction that the Jotuns were superior to all others. After all, the Jotuns could adapt themselves to any environment or opponent, their grasp of technology was incredible, and they were, of course, more intelligent than other species.

That was just fact. People could deny it, but they knew they were lying. He was confident.

“Get ready,” he barked at his team. He did not tolerate sloppiness or emotion on the battlefield, and some of them seemed shaken by the first images they were seeing of the other bunker. The scattered Jotun bodies there had been Team 2, and the teams had fought together. “We’re going to extract every piece of information we can from this bunker and go find their leaders. Speed is of the essence. You want to cry, you can quit right now. We’ll be better off without you.”

Everyone readied their weapons without a word. When their shuttle touched down, they were leaping out before it had stopped and charging into the bunker on heavy, mechanized legs.

“Spread out!” Qrevar ordered. He was heading up the rear as they went into the darkness, so he was poised to advance in the first wave.

Or that had been the plan.

There was a faint hint of motion behind him, and he swiveled sharply in his tank but saw nothing. He sent out a brief pulse of scanning, sensed no life forms, and sighed internally. He was being superstitious. The building had been heavily damaged by the bombing; of course, it was creaking oddly.

He swiveled back around and shot backward to slam against the wall of the tank in shock.

His biosuit’s sensors had not picked up the alien, but there it was, staring at him with its head tilted to the side as other species did to indicate curiosity.

And its eyes were glowing red.

“Hello,” it said pleasantly.

Qrevar’s arm was already coming up out of sheer instinct, rifle primed and loaded, but he felt the stab of pain a moment later, haptic controls embedded in his suit and telling him that the connections were being severed one by one. His body went rigid, unsure of the input he was sending it, then thudded to the ground when the power went out.

Qrevar was still floating helplessly in the tank as a Luvendi stepped over his body and disappeared into the darkness without another glance—heading for Qrevar’s team, none of whom knew that there were enemies inside the bunker.

* * *

The captain was taken out quickly and efficiently, and Barnabas and Gar continued into the darkness silently, Kelnamon leading the way like a giant, hulking shadow.

Ahead of them, the Jotun strike team was calling to one another as they spread out. They weren’t being sloppy, which Barnabas appreciated—but their loyalty was in a very unfortunate place, and he could not let that go unpunished.

At the opening of the main cavern, he gave Gar and Kelnamon a nod and disappeared into the rafters, leaping lightly and climbing his way up. He had communicated his plan to them while the strike team was landing.

That plan was shock and awe. The Jotun might have heard of Barnabas before, but it was almost certain that they considered stories of his exploits to be overblown.

They were about to learn how wrong they were.

Barnabas waited until one group had advanced to the center of the room, checking the main command desk for clues, and then he activated the first line of defense. Around the room, what had looked like inert and destroyed turrets came to life in jerky motion, swinging themselves to their spidery feet and each locking on a target: one of the Jotun soldiers

Which was when Barnabas dropped out of the ceiling onto the team below.

He hit the desk with a thud that spread a crack all through it and looked up, baring his teeth at them. They weren’t human, not born of Earth, but some things were universal, and one of those universal things was a fear of sharp, pointy claws and teeth. Given two shocks in a row, the team froze for one critical, deadly moment.

A moment, of course, was all Barnabas needed. He swung into action at once, grabbing the closest Jotun and flipping it over his head to bring it crashing down on the corner of the table. The tank in its biosuit cracked and was partially dislodged, and he picked it up to slam it down again before ripping one of the legs and one of the arms off, doing the same with the head, and flinging all of the pieces in opposite directions. He bared his teeth at the other three in the group and hissed.

Around the edges of the room, the other soldiers had been pinned by the turrets. The laser sights made it clear that if they fired they would be picked off one by one. Still, in an admirable display of loyalty, they tried.

They failed on two counts. First, because the turrets truly were an outstanding piece of technology, and Shinigami had easily been able to reprogram them; and second, because they had failed to realize that Gar and Kelnamon were also in the room.

The turrets and the other members of the team set to work methodically, working their way through the Jotun strike team as holo of the event was beamed back to the Jotun fleet.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the room, Barnabas dodged the strikes and weapons of the Jotun team as they launched themselves at him in a fury.

The Jotun strike teams were well-trained in hand-to-hand combat, but none of them came close to matching Barnabas. The Jotuns tended to rely on their technology, using reaction time and brute strength to overpower their foes.

Their tactics were weak, and Barnabas was easily able to exploit them. One after the other, he punched through their tanks, ripped off their limbs, and destroyed both the suit and the Jotun within.

When it was over, and the room was finally silent, he looked up to where the cameras were observing.

“You spent so much time thinking you were superior,” he told the Jotun, “that you never even bothered to check if you were right. And you were wrong.”

That got their goat, I’ll tell ya. Shinigami was chortling in Barnabas’ mind. They’re pissed as hell.

Good. Any progress on your mission?

Coming along. She sounded a bit worried now. I’ll let you know, however we end up having to do this. There’s a small chance we may just initiate the pod ejection into space for her tank and snatch her that way.

Mmm. Let me know.

* * *

On Jotuna D, Qarwit paced and threw glances at the screen in increasing worry.

This wasn’t how this was supposed to be unfolding. The strike teams had been used dozens of times in his memory, and he had seen them in action. They were unstoppable, a deadly force that infiltrated, found intel, and spread outwards until all targets had been eliminated.

And now two of his teams had easily been wiped out. Not only that, the Brakalons had a damned fleet.

He sensed the other Committee members watching him, judging him, and he drew himself up.

“One strike team is nothing,” he said dismissively. “And if the Brakalons have anyone as good as Admiral Jeqwar, I’ll eat my biosuit.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

The Jotun fighters wove through the Brakalon fleet at top speed, splitting to arc over and under the enemy ships, coalescing and bunching like birds in flight. They had to avoid not only the Brakalon turrets aboard the ships but also their own missiles, which were hurtling toward the Brakalon fleet at unpredictable intervals.

There had been some disturbance aboard the flagship. They were aware of that, but firing had resumed and they were not going to waste their time wondering what was going on.

They had dangerous quarry to catch, after all: the Shinigami, elegant and maneuverable, not to mention absolutely deadly. Many of the pilots here had been part of the confrontation with the Yennai fleet weeks ago, and they had seen the Shinigami then.

It wasn’t clear to them why the Shinigami had been their ally in that fight, only to become their enemy now, but there was broad support for the admiral. Unlike many who rose high, she had earned her place with brilliant tactics and a breathtaking command of the entire fleet.

If she said that the Brakalons and the Shinigami were their enemies, the pilots were not going to question her.

The thing was…

“Blue Leader to flagship,” Captain Horutan radioed back finally.

There was a pause.

“Yes?” The communications officer sounded somewhat harried.

“Are you sure the Shinigami is over here?” Horutan asked.

“Yes. That’s where the signal is coming from. Why?”

“Because we should have seen it by now,” Horutan insisted. She calibrated her scanners for the eighth time. “If not on our scanners, then with the naked eye. And we can’t find them anywhere.”

A new voice came over the line, snapping at them furiously:

“This is Senator Torsen. You find that ship and you take it out now, do you understand? They are trying to attack the admiral!”

What that meant, Horutan did not know—nor did she understand why there was a senator on board the flagship. But a threat to the admiral was something she took very seriously.

“Blue team, spread out,” she instructed. “They’re trying to hurt the admiral, and we’re not going to let them.”

There was a round of wholehearted agreement. No one was going to touch the admiral. They would make sure of it.

* * *

“This is dangerous,” Jeltor murmured to Gilwar as they strode down the corridors. “I shouldn’t have come. Too many of them know me by sight.”

“Anyone who knows you is likely to be an ally,” Gilwar pointed out. “We have video evidence of what the Committee has done, and they’ll know something happened to you.”

“If they sound an alarm, though…” Jeltor was worried. “They’re good sailors. They don’t deserve to die for the Committee.”

“That’s why we’re sticking to side corridors,” Gilwar told him soothingly. “I can incapacitate them if I need to. We just need to be able to drag them into a corner if necessary without too many people seeing.” He looked at Jeltor. “I think you’ve waited long enough, by the way. Try again.”

The infiltration team of Jeltor, Gilwar, and Ferqar was advancing through side corridors, making for the bridge while Jeltor periodically established contact with the admiral.

After the first disturbance, she had not been so vulnerable. She had taken back command of the fleet with a single-minded intensity and was making fast, daring maneuvers that left the Brakalons scrambling to mount a defense.

With such danger, they hadn’t yet been able to mount any sort of offense, and Jeltor feared they might be running out of time. Sooner or later, someone would slip. They would fail to get out of the way in time.

He knew exactly what was going through Admiral Jeqwar’s head. He had been there, after all, with his conversion fighting his true thoughts and memories. He understood that although his questions to her were gently prying away the conversion, each round of questions spurred an instinctive defense and rush of loyalty.

In order to turn her back to their side, he would need to allow each rush of loyalty to burn itself out, leaving only the questions and doubt behind. So, between each round of questions, he had waited several minutes.

His fear was that, as the rushes of loyalty took over, the admiral might do something truly terrible. When Jeltor had been faced with the same trial, he hadn’t been hooked into an entire fleet. He’d been alone in his prison.

This one, he thought, had to count. This one had to finish it.

Admiral.

You again! Her voice sounded fearful. Where are you? My fighters can’t find you.

Yes, I see them. He wasn’t above fooling her. They’re looking for the wrong thing. As she dropped out of his mind for a moment, no doubt giving them orders to search for a different ship, he said gently, What are you afraid of when you hear my voice? You’re afraid of not supporting the Committee anymore…aren’t you?

Get out of my head! The voice was horrified, pleading. I’m doing what must be done.

Slow down and think for a moment, Jeltor advised her. You don’t want to, do you? What they did to you makes you not want to think. Because if you did, you’d want to know why you have to attack the Brakalons.

We need an army, she said at once.

Yes. They told me the same thing.

She had no answer to that.

So, tell me this, Jeltor asked her. Their small group walked past another group running in the opposite direction, and they saluted. His heart pounded, but the others did not recognize him. They say that we need an army, that the only way to outmaneuver the other species is by taking them over one by one.

It’s true, she said at once.

Admiral, it is no flattery to say that you are the greatest tactical mind in generations. If that were true…why wouldn’t you have thought it, yourself?

There was a long silence.

Boom, Shinigami said softly in Jeltor’s mind.

You were listening?

Of course. Every time you start talking to her, she starts firing like crazy and then it trails off. I’ll try to give the Brakalon fleet a heads up.

Smart.

You literally just described an AI.

Jeltor managed a trembling smile. Since this had begun, he’d been gripped by fear.

They had made their way through two more turns and were approaching the bridge when Admiral Jeqwar spoke again. Her voice was hushed and fearful.

Jeltor, I am afraid to think of it. Me! I am afraid to think.

Jeltor tried to come up with something inspirational to say, something that would stir her to battle, and then he realized that was not what she needed. I am here, he told her. I was afraid, too. Step through the fear. Think the thoughts it doesn’t want you to think. I am here.

She said nothing for a long time and their group hesitated, out of sight of the bridge doors. They couldn’t stand for much longer without attracting attention.

Admiral—

They will kill me when they see that I have turned back. Her voice was tight. Have I—did I kill any of the Brakalons? She seemed to remember, then. I did. All gods forgive me, I took out their rescue ships.

Right now you must focus on ending this battle, Jeltor said urgently. Can you send a message to the captains without the senators on board knowing?

Better, she said after a moment, and there was a flash of the commander she had been, capable and confident. I can shut down their ships remotely and broadcast a message about what is going on. But Senator Torsen and her thugs—

Leave that to us, Jeltor said. To the other two, he said quietly, “We need to move now.”

They burst out of the shadows and began running for the doors to the bridge. The senator’s personal guard leapt into action at once, leveling their rifles.

“Stop!”

“Urgent message for the senator!” Jeltor called back. He wasn’t sure this would work, but he didn’t really mind either way. Of all the people on this ship, he wouldn’t mind killing these two. They were trying to prevent any news from getting onto the bridge.

“What message?” one of the guards called suspiciously. “Slow down and approach with your hands up or we will take this as a sign of aggression.”

I need you on the bridge now! Admiral Jeqwar told Jeltor.

“Aggression it is, I guess,” Jeltor murmured.

Gilwar gave a snort.

All three raised their weapons and shot in unison. Jeltor used a technique he’d seen Shinigami and Barnabas use and brought his back leg up to kick out as he reached the door. The force of his kick lifted one of the guards and threw him against the metal.

Or it would have. Shinigami obligingly forced the doors open at the correct moment, and the guard went sailing into the room.

The lights dimmed and a voice boomed out, projected to the whole fleet.

“The senators aboard your ships are traitors. There is no reason to attack the Brakalon fleet. I have been freed from their control and tell you to seize each one aboard their ships. Evidence will be sent to the bridge of each ship.”

“Shut off that message!” Senator Torsen screamed.

But she had been right to worry. The Jotuns on the bridge turned, stunned, to where the admiral had forcibly taken command of the fleet and decommissioned all the guns.

“Just as Jeltor was taken captive by rogue agents in the government, so was I,” she told them. “There, my mind was altered to produce loyalty to a rogue faction of our government. They sought to take your service and turn it to their own ends!”

“If you won’t do it, I’ll do it myself!” Senator Torsen grabbed a gun from one of her personal guards and leveled it at the admiral’s tank. “Traitor! I knew you were wavering.”

She didn’t get the chance to shoot.

“Bridge left shoots!” one of the commanders yelled. “Bridge right, duck!”

Those on the right of the bridge dropped to the floor as those on the left pulled out their sidearms and shot. Sensory panels exploded across the room, and in the center of it, the senator and her guards were caught in the fire of dozens of weapons.

When the echoes died down, there was a long pause.

“Well done,” the admiral said drily. “But next time let’s not destroy quite so much equipment, shall we?”

There was a laugh and a ragged cheer, and Jeltor felt the tension in his body relax. He floated happily in his tank.

I’ll tell Barnabas, Shinigami said. A moment later, she added, Actually, do you three want to stay there? Barnabas and I have a rabbit to catch.

Eh? Gilwar asked.

Seconded, Ferqar said. I’m confused.

Qarwit and his personal guard saw what happened on the surface and what happened here, Shinigami reported, with relish. They’re running.

We’ll stay here, Jeltor said after checking with the others. Good hunting.

Thank you, Shinigami said. I’ll make a highlights reel, don’t worry.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Shinigami was racing through the darkness when Barnabas made his way down to the brig.

Grisor turned to stare at him, and Barnabas didn’t have to know Jotun mannerisms to feel the hatred emanating from the senator.

“Did you think solitude would turn me?” he asked viciously. “I am as devoted to my cause as I ever was.”

“That’s nice,” Barnabas said blandly. “Did you know that Qarwit took over in your absence?”

“I instructed that he should,” Grisor said stiffly. “If you hope to make me turn on him out of jealousy, you will be sadly disappointed.”

“You really don’t know me at all.” Barnabas leaned in the doorway, arms crossed. “No, you see, I wasn’t looking for anything from you. I just came here to give you some facts.”

Grisor paused in his pacing. There was wariness in his thoughts now, piercing the absolute certainty he’d had before.

“The Jotun people will support me,” he asserted finally. Barnabas had seen his assessment: that the Jotun people must know about the Committee by now.

“Oh, that’s good to hear,” Barnabas commented. “For you, I mean. I personally doubt it, but I guess we’ll see what happens when they find out, won’t we?”

There was fear in Grisor’s mind now. “What have you done?” he asked, his voice thick with anger.

“Oh, I hardly think you should be allowed to get angry on that score. Do you?” Barnabas could feel his own anger beginning to stir. “You’re the one who abducted civilians, naval captains, and Lord only knows how many of your own species and others, to torture them into compliance. You’re the one who made plans to forcibly take over other planets. I don’t think you get to ask me what I’ve done, as if I’ve gone and done something rash; something ruinous.”

You’re getting poetic, Shinigami commented.

I like words, so sue me. I deserve some dramatic flair now and again.

Uh-huh.

“Qarwit knew there wasn’t much time,” Barnabas said. “He did something quite clever, really. He abducted the admiral’s personal aide, Gorsik. Once converted, Gorsik was able to lure the admiral into a trap as well, and they set off for Kordinev at once. Of course, when they got there...” He allowed himself a chuckle. “They found out that all of the captives on the ground were already free, and not only that, the Brakalons had a fleet! Who knew?”

Pure shock came from Grisor. “You’re joking.”

“I assure you, I am not.” Barnabas offered a small olive branch. “It was a surprise to me, too.”

Grisor seemed very far from appreciative. “Get on with it, then. The fleet took losses?”

“Oh, no.” Barnabas was chuckling now. “No, it turns out that Jeltor actually shed his conversion, so he was one of the ones who took out a strike team on the ground, and then he sneaked aboard the flagship and un-converted the admiral, so there were only a couple of ships lost on either side. Whoever the senator was on the flagship, she’s dead, and her guards, and a few of the senators on the other ships…and the Committee’s files have all been sent to the Senate while I take you back to stand trial.”

Grisor stared at him.

“That was it,” Barnabas finished. “Qarwit got away, so you’re probably going to take the fall for the invasion—which is fair, really, since you did plan it. Your technology has been destroyed. Only the results of the experimentation have been kept, so no one can rebuild it. You spent decades on this, didn’t you? Now it’s all gone.”

He gave a smile, pushed himself away from the door, and headed away.

He had gotten five steps before he won his bet with Shinigami.

“Wait! What if I knew where Qarwit went?”

Ha-Ha! Barnabas was triumphant. I told you he had no loyalty to anyone.

Earlier, you said that people could be honorable and do dishonorable things!

Sometimes. Sometimes they’re cowardly little shits.

It’s your fault for confusing me with organic illogic.

Mmhmm. Barnabas strolled back to the door and peered at Grisor. “How would that help me?” he asked.

“How would it— I planned the invasion, but he carried it out!” Grisor was practically spitting nails, or would have been if he’d had a mouth. “They’ll hang me out to dry, but he should pay too.”

I hate this kind of person, Barnabas told Shinigami wearily. If they suffer, everyone else has to as well.

To Grisor, he said, “I don’t know. I’m willing to see you hang for it. Seems like you want this more than I do.”

“You hate letting people get away!” Grisor was defiant. “I know you do, don’t pretend. And I don’t want much. I’ll tell you everything—as long as you don’t let them give me the death penalty.”

Barnabas stared at him for a long moment. There was no resolve left in Grisor, no principle or even the memory of it. He was all desperation, and he was going to tell the truth.

“All right,” Barnabas agreed easily. “Where’s Qarwit?”

“You won’t let them give me the death penalty?”

“I won’t let them give you the death penalty.”

Grisor sagged with relief. Barnabas thought that if he were human, he might have wet himself. “Thank all the gods. Qarwit is on a ship shuttling between two moons.” He turned and projected the coordinates on the wall. “There’s extensive interference from the sun and the nebula, so it’s almost impossible to find, and the ship is stocked for years. He’ll be able to hide out until long after people have stopped looking for him, and then he’ll have the money to go start a new life.” He sounded resentful.

“You always knew you might fail,” Barnabas said. He waited.

“Yes,” Grisor admitted finally.

“You feel like that money should be yours.”

“Yes.”

“Mmm. Well, since I can tell you told me the truth, we’ll go take care of Qarwit. In fact, we’ll do what you want to do to him for failing you. We’ll kill him.”

Grisor sensed the danger. He looked up.

“Then we’ll take you back to stand trial,” Barnabas said. “And you’ll take whatever punishment they give you.”

“You promised me!” Grisor yelled.

“I don’t make bargains with people like you,” Barnabas told him. He shook his head. “And I will not interfere in the Jotun process of Justice.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “Do you know,” he said conversationally, “it might not be a bad idea to let you live. Let you live with your failure, knowing that the Jotuns didn’t support you after all. That might not be a bad idea at all.”

He was smiling as he left the brig.

* * *

The coordinates Grisor had provided lay not too far from Jotuna, so it was only a matter of hours before the Shinigami reached Qarwit’s ship. In that time, Barnabas ate, showered, and changed his clothes. Then he changed his clothes again.

Then he changed into a loose-fitting black outfit and did every martial arts form he knew. When he was finished, he showered again and re-dressed himself in a brown suit that complimented his coloring. He was fastidious about the fit, the lay of his shirt, and the part in his hair.

Shinigami, meanwhile, sent word that the Jotun Navy and Senate had put aside their differences long enough to seize every known member of the Committee, freeze their assets, and lock down their properties, guards and all. All technology found was confirmed to have been destroyed at once.

None of it calmed him.

He found himself wishing he had someone to talk to, but when he thought about just who he wished were there, any shred of calm evaporated.

So he paced.

Finally, there was a knock at his door, and it slid open to reveal Shinigami. She was wearing a positively restrained outfit of jeans and a black blouse.

“We’re coming up on his ship,” she told him gravely. “I thought you might like company for your walk to the bridge.”

“Am I being as obvious as that?” Barnabas joked. He grabbed his suit jacket and put it on as he accompanied her out. “Thank you,” he added, a few moments later.

“Anytime.” She looked at him curiously. “Why are you so nervous about this one? This will tie it all up in a neat bow.”

Barnabas only nodded.

Shinigami looked annoyed for a moment, but then her face cleared. “Do you…do you not know why you’re anxious?”

Barnabas gave her a quiet nod.

“Man, humans are weird.”

“You’re telling me.”

Shinigami laughed then. “Well, whatever’s going on in your head, boss-man, I’m glad to have run this mission with you. I don’t think anyone else could have tracked them down quite like you did.”

The doors to the bridge slid open, and Barnabas came in to find Tafa and Gar already in their seats. They nodded to him.

“You look nice,” Tafa told him.

“Thank you.” Barnabas sat in the captain’s chair. “What am I—ah, I see it, now.” In the static, he was able to see the faint image of a ship.

“Yes,” Shinigami said, taking her place. “Even our scanners have trouble with it, but not so much that we can’t shoot them down—if that’s still the plan.”

“It’s still the plan.” Barnabas wrapped his fingers around the arms of his chair and considered. “I’d like to do it.”

Shinigami blinked in surprised but she nodded, and a moment later, a control panel rose out of the floor.

“Press the button when you’re ready,” she instructed. “We’re already locked on to its trajectory. We can barely see it…and it shouldn’t be able to see us at all.”

Barnabas lifted his hand and paused. Part of him thought he should bring Qarwit back to stand trial, but part of him recognized just how dangerous the Jotun male was. Outmaneuvered, lacking critical resources, he had nonetheless stepped out of the shadows and confidently ordered an entire fleet to go take over the Brakalon homeworld. When opportunity came for him, he had not wavered.

Instead, he had ordered death, destruction, and slavery—and now he had the remaining prototypes with him on that ship. Barnabas had no doubt about that, while Grisor argued and pleaded for his life, betraying himself and his cause, Qarwit would play the reformed senator and escape to try the same thing over again.

His eyes locked on the ship. Sometimes you had to go with your instincts.

His hand came down on the button and a missile raced away. A few moments later, the ship in its sea of static spun out of control and disintegrated.

There was no warning. Qarwit didn’t deserve one.

Epilogue

“I wish you hadn’t killed Qarwit,” Admiral Jeqwar stated testily a few days later.

“Really?” Barnabas asked skeptically.

She gave him a look. “No,” she admitted finally. “The bastard deserved it. He was a nasty piece of work. The more we dig, the more we find. I’m sure you’ll be unsurprised to learn that. But it does make it difficult to run the trials…and leave you out of them. You said you were going to let this be a Jotun process, if I recall correctly.”

Vigilantes gotta vigilante, Shinigami commented over the Etheric comm. She flashed Barnabas a smile from her chair on the other side of Jeqwar’s office.

I cannot begin to think how I’d translate that. Barnabas hid his answering smile. “It was a matter of self-defense. As I said, he did fire on our ship.”

That was the lie they’d chosen, anyway. Admiral Jeqwar just looked at him wordlessly, and something about her flutters told him that she knew the truth.

“Also, he had the rest of the prototypes,” Barnabas said. “I wanted them destroyed.”

At last, Jeqwar seemed to agree. She made a soft sound. “You might have told me that sooner.”

“We didn’t have any time without listening ears,” Barnabas countered. He hesitated. “I’m willing to let the punishments be determined by the Jotuns. Perhaps I will not agree with them, but there are limits to what I can do as a vigilante. I meant what I said when I argued that it was not my place to determine the course of an entire society, but I was not willing to let that technology exist. It was made to torture and to implant false thoughts. It was evil. As long as I have reason to believe there are those who support the Committee, I could not let those machines exist.”

“I understand.” Admiral Jeqwar did not waste time playing devil’s advocate, though he could tell she’d thought about it.

He appreciated her restraint. Now he stood. “I will leave you to your work, Admiral.”

“Mmm.” She watched him. “Are you sure you won’t stay to watch the trials?”

“Quite sure. They would only raise my blood pressure to unhealthy levels.” Barnabas nodded pleasantly. “Admiral. I hope we will meet again under far more pleasant circumstances.”

“Agreed,” she said at once. She held out a metal hand for him to shake and offered the same to Shinigami. “If you’re ever agreeable to an exchange of technology, we have some upgrades you might like for that cybernetic body.”

Shinigami looked surprised, and the admiral laughed.

As they walked out into the Jotun sun, crossing the sandy beach to their landing pad, Shinigami looked at him curiously.

“I have to ask… You said at the start that maybe this wasn’t a mission for a vigilante, but I can’t imagine you being easy with that.”

“Neither could I,” Barnabas admitted, “until I realized that it’s not a limitation. It means I get to hightail it out as soon as the fun part is over and the bureaucratic mess begins.”

Shinigami laughed. They headed up the ramp and she stopped in the hallway, frowning. “So where are we hightailing it to?”

“Amarell Station.” Barnabas smiled. “I got a message and need to meet up with the person who sent it.”

“You got a message?” Shinigami stood still as she sorted through her data banks. “What message?”

“You’re not the only one who can be sneaky, you know,” Barnabas retorted with a grin, then sauntered off without explaining himself.

Amarell Station wasn’t close, and Shinigami, in an effort to make Barnabas cave and explain himself, took the slowest route she could. It was three days before they reached the station, and he was fairly sure that she guided them into the dock with all the speed of a drunken sloth.

He didn’t cave. He also expressly forbade any of the crew to follow him off and into the station. He left them huddled in a desperately anxious group and made his way into the bustle of the remote station, whistling as he went.

Not long after that, he was sitting in a booth at one of the shadier bars, staring dubiously at a mug of beer.

“It’s legit,” Aliana told him. “I checked.”

Barnabas took a cautious sip, unsure if she was messing with him, and was pleased to find that the beer was decent.

Aliana watched him as he drank, smiling slightly, then said, “So, rumor has it you can read minds.”

Barnabas spat out a mouthful of beer. When he looked up, she was sipping her own beer, one eyebrow raised.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I…can. If I want to.” At the moment, he was doing his best not to read hers, but she was making him very curious.

“You probably should.” She looked like she was going to start laughing at any moment. “Otherwise, how will you know why I brought you here?”

“Oh, I didn’t say I’ve never read your mind,” Barnabas told her blandly. “Your first thoughts upon meeting me were particularly illuminating.”

She laughed, throwing her head back, her whole body shaking with mirth. “Ah, I’ll bet. I remember one endless string of profanities.”

“Mmhmm.” Barnabas, absurdly pleased to have made her laugh, took another sip of his beer. “So you’re not going to tell me why we’re here?”

“Nope.” Aliana shook her head, setting her brown ponytail swinging. She gave him another look as she drained her beer, then leaned forward with a smile. “Last chance.”

Barnabas gave her a slow smile and was pleased to see her blush. He lifted his shoulders. “What can I say? I like a mystery.”

“Huh.” From the look on her face, she hadn’t expected that, but she pushed herself up from the table and gave him a mischievous grin. “Until next time, then.”

“Until next time,” Barnabas agreed. He watched her thread her way between the tables and head out into the station, and he raised his glass to his lips. “Let the games begin.”

FINIS

Author Notes - Natalie Grey

December 16, 2018

Thank you so much for reading Protector. I can’t tell you how much I’ve loved working on Barnabas’s story. Though he and Shinigami were an amazingly unlikely pair of friends, they gave each other exactly what they needed—for her, a sense of the gravity of her actions, and for him, the ability to trust his own judgement. She helped him unbend, he helped fire up her sense of morality.

As their ragtag group grows, I’ve enjoyed each new character, world, and storyline. I can’t wait to bring you more of Barnabas’s story!

I want to send my thanks out to all the usual suspects: my beta reading team, the JIT group, all of LMBPN Publishing, and, of course, Michael. Thank you to T & M, the cutest coworkers (curled up by my feet right now), B & L (who make everything tick), and the numerous friends who put up with me jumping up and leaving the room to write down story ideas.

If you’re looking for more to read before the next Barnabas stories come out, I encourage you to check out The Dragon Corps or Bound Sorcery, and definitely check out the new LitRPG series Michael and I are collaborating on!

-Nat

Author Notes - Michael Anderle

December 16, 2018

THANK YOU for not only reading this story but these Author Notes as well.

(I think I’ve been good with always opening with “thank you.” If not, I need to edit the other Author Notes!)

RANDOM (sometimes) THOUGHTS?

I’m now fifty-one years old, and yet I can remember the impatience I would have for Christmas to approach.

Then, it was something different when I went out on my own (as our younger sons are doing now) and then different yet when I had young kids of my own.

It was at THAT stage of their lives (very young to … now practically) that Christmas became a lot more challenging to enjoy.

Why? Because I have to admit something which is kinda embarrassing.

I SUCK AT BEING SANTA CLAUS.

there, I said it. I admit it (and I’m not just talking about the fact that I don’t have white hair (and until rather recently) didn’t have the big stomach.

No, I suck at being Santa Claus because I always wait until the last moment to get gifts. Before the last couple of days, I just don’t want to be bothered with the effort. Then, I rush to the stores to go through the shelves which have already had people who get up early to do Christmas buy everything.

ENTER GIFT CARDS

You would think that I could handle the simple five minute effort to get gift cards on time. But, I can flat out screw that up to.

ENTER GC CARDS THAT EMAIL

Finally, a product has come to market that I can use. Emailable gift cards. I like giving them, and I am happy receiving them.

Unfortunately, feeling this way makes me think of myself as a closer cousin of the Grinch than St. Nick.

I like the decorations, the food, the lights (although going on ‘a family drive’ to see lights bugs me… see, Grinch!)

I could probably go on and on about Christmas. I would like to blame getting older. But, I think it is really just that I’m too lazy for the season.

I am going to have to work on my ‘Ho Ho Ho!’ At some point for the grandkids…

Oh Geez, I hope that isn’t for another decade!

HOW TO MARKET FOR BOOKS YOU LOVE

We are able to support our efforts with you reading our books, and we appreciate you doing this!

If you enjoyed this or ANY book by any author, especially Indie-published, we always appreciate if you make the time to review a book, since it lets other readers who might be on the fence to take a chance on it as well.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

One of the interesting (at least to me) aspects of my life is the ability to work from anywhere and at any time. In the future, I hope to re-read my own Author Notes and remember my life as a diary entry.

12/16/2018 at Las Vegas Mccarran Airport - American Express Lounge.

I’m sitting on a little chair with a footrest, near the front of the lounge (I can see out the front doors to the “techonthego” store across the way.)

I should be landing in Dallas/Fort Worth right now but our flight was oversold. The lady behind the American Airlines desk placed a call saying she was willing to compensate up to 6 people willing to move to the 1:30 AM flight and they would voucher us $900.00 a ticket.

I’m not too proud. I can be bought for $900.00 a ticket.

So, now that I have extra time, I’ve spent the last few hours working on the 6th book in the Soldiers of Fortune and Fame Series. Specially, the book 06 beats. Once I finished those I figured I’d better get the author notes for this book done (they are due tomorrow night.)

I have a certain feeling I’m going to be wiped out.

I don’t do too well with flights that early in the morning. Red eye for me means Michael is a cranky person the next day.

For those who I have meetings with me tomorrow, I’d like to offer my apologies in advance.

However, $900.00 a ticket was too much of the green stuff, I just couldn’t pass it up.

FAN PRICING

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Ad Aeternitatem,

Michael Anderle

You Need A Bigger Sword

Have you read You Need A Bigger Sword? It’s a Gamelit Fantasy RPG novel from Natalie Grey and Michael Anderle, and is available now at Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited.

Turns out, punching zombie bears is fun.

Who knew?

Enter the world of Metamorphosis Online, a fully immersive video game where players compete for spots in the Global Top 10—ranks that actually pay you to play the game.

Gracie doesn't play the game to make money…at first.

Broke, single, and working a crappy job as a blackjack dealer, Gracie's just blowing off steam and having fun.

Can playing a new type of immersive game help her overcome real-life issues, or will it cause more problems?

Before she knows it, Gracie has intervened in a generations-long war between the kobolds and the fae and started a ragtag guild, and her weird math abilities make themselves known in a way that most could not have imagined.

Can she deal with being pitted against the game developers?

For the first time Gracie can remember, she has something worth fighting for.

Available at Amazon

Books by Natalie Grey

Shadows of Magic

Bound Sorcery

Blood Sorcery

Bright Sorcery

Set in the Kurtherian Gambit Universe

Bellatrix

Challenges

Risk Be Damned

Damned to Hell

Vigilante

Sentinel

Warden

Paladin

Justiciar

Defender

Protector

Writing as Moira Katson

Shadowborn

Shadowforged

Shadow’s End

Daughter of Ashes

Mahalia

Books By Michael Anderle

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