Other novels in the Evagardian Universe

Admiral

Free Space

The Glory of the Empress

Innocence

ALMAYER STATION

SEAN DANKER

Copyright 2020 by Sean Danker

Cover art by Ameshin

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

Prologue

The green drink fizzed and popped.

Artful twists of carbonation made pretty shapes that swirled through the wavy, asymmetrical glass, forming little hearts and stars. Time-release dye capsules burst like miniature fireworks, and pink and blue bubbles rose from the surface, giving off a citrusy scent. There were three curly straws to choose from, an umbrella, four slices of fruit—only two of which Deilani recognized—and a little swirl of spotted Luna cream topped with a cherry.

“Happy birthday,” the android said, smiling as she set the glass on the table.

Deilani tried to return the smile, but the serving unit was already gliding off to help someone else.

She was alone at a table for two by the window. Outside, the station’s main commercial path teemed with people. The little café was comparably quiet, its active sound dampeners muting the roar of station noise to almost nothing.

She picked up her slender spoon, which changed colors at her touch, supposedly responding to her mood. It went from light silver to deep purple. She scowled at it, then stirred her drink, gazing out the window.

This was it, note for note what she’d dreamed of when she joined the Service: sitting in a café, ordering expensive things but not caring about the cost, being someone, and having places to be. It was uncanny, the way it mirrored the things she’d dreamed for herself.

The future had been meant to have all of this, but not to be
like this.

The birthday cocktail was too sweet, and not nearly strong enough. Ethanol wasn’t a good idea anyway. She pushed it away after one sip and got up to leave. Her luggage rolled after her as she stepped into the corridor. She checked the time on her holo. There was still half an hour to kill.

She could brood in a cafe, or she could brood somewhere else.

Indifference was the best she could muster as she passed the unfamiliar shops and restaurants. Normally, she’d have been fascinated by what she was seeing. She had always wanted to be someone so seasoned and cosmopolitan that she could walk through a galactic station and not be impressed. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. At least, not yet.

She glanced through the viewport into the private flight lounge and stopped short.

A small woman in a crisp pilot’s jumpsuit was there on a sofa, absorbed in her holo. Her legs were crossed, and one foot bobbed spiritedly. ALMAYER stood out clearly on her shoulder patches.

Deilani checked her holo, but there were no new messages. All the same, this had to be her ride. She hit the release and went in.

“I think you’re here for me,” she said, waving her luggage back as it tried to squeeze past her.

The little woman looked up and killed her holo. She peered at Deilani with an expression of…what? Suspicion?

“You’re the Health and Wellness Inspector?”

Deilani lit up her ID, and the woman looked taken aback.

“I thought you’d be in uniform. And a mask,” the pilot said, gesturing at her face. “I thought you people wore masks.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Oh.” The pilot looked crestfallen for a moment. Then her glow returned. Deilani usually didn’t mind perky types, but today wasn’t the day for it. The pilot’s violently red hair was in a Martian style, but short enough to fit in a helmet. Not as short as Deilani’s, but still practical.

The pilot got to her feet. “Are you ready to leave, ma’am?”

“Yeah. Get me out of here.”

“Okay. I’m Pilot Officer Barry.” She did a little galactic salute. So was she from Mars? A Free Trader would’ve gone for a handshake.

Deilani didn’t care; she just nodded politely. “Lieutenant Deilani.”

“I’ve never met a real Imperial before.”

It wouldn’t have been constructive to ask if she ran into a lot of fakes.

“You’re not that scary, I guess.” Barry frowned up at her. “Kind of tall.”

Deilani kept her smile in place.

The shuttle was in a private slip on one of the station’s upper levels. She didn’t know much about spacecraft; she wasn’t one of those people that knew every make and model by sight. But the vessel looked high-end and new.

Barry’s uniform had nothing on it but the Almayer patches and a pilot’s insignia on the collar. Who did she actually work for? Was she under contract? The way these galactics did business was so strange.

“Is she yours?” Deilani asked as they approached, admiring the shuttle, which was a charming and fashionable crimson.

“Not in this lifetime,” Barry replied, but there was a note of pride in her voice. She pulled up her holo, and the shuttle started to power up as they approached. The ramp came down, and the lights in the bay changed.

Deilani climbed up after her but paused halfway through the hatch. There were only rows of padded seats lining the compartment, facing each other. “I thought your operation was at least a week away. I thought we couldn’t jump.” There were no sleepers in the shuttle, only seats. Did they expect her to ride
for a week?

“The rings are back up,” Barry said over her shoulder. “It was only about ten hours ago that they lifted the last of the quarantine. The thing at Oasis is over now. They’re kind of just acting like it never happened, now that it’s cleaned up. You Evagardians work fast.”

All Deilani knew about Oasis was that it was a galactic station in the Demenis System that was noted for attracting unsavory people. There had been some kind of catastrophic infection there; it was a major disaster, but the whole affair had been overshadowed by the destruction of Little Norwich, the capital of the Ganraen Commonwealth. Little Norwich had been the end of the war; with that on the news, nobody cared about losing a station full of galactic scumbags. Oasis was sanitized now, not that anyone would ever go back there. It seemed
that people were content just to forget all about it; the Empress’ upcoming peace talks with the surviving Commonwealth leadership dominated the news now. Those negotiations wouldn’t be easy or pleasant—not with the destruction of Little Norwich hanging over them.

But if the quarantine was lifted, that was good. It was one less thing for Deilani to worry about, and a whole category of things she no longer had to assess during the inspection.

“Two jumps,” Barry told her, strapping into the pilot’s seat and twisting to look back at her. “We’re leaving early, so we may have to queue dodge. Call that twenty minutes. And about twenty minutes’ flight time. So it’s not a long trip, but make yourself at home.”

“Will the cabin be stable?”

“No. Strap in as soon as we clear the field.”

Deilani’s head spun. She’d expected a journey, time in a sleeper. It was a good thing she hadn’t actually drunk her birthday goblet, because it sounded as though she would be at work in less than an hour.

While Barry negotiated release permissions, Deilani changed out of her civilian clothes and into her whites. She’d wear fatigues for the actual work, but for first impressions, she needed to look the part. The cramped lavatory had a vanity feed to show her from every angle, so she was able to get the uniform looking close to perfect.

At least she was dealing with galactics; they wouldn’t notice the lack of decorations on the breast of her jacket. She straightened her rank insignias, smoothed it all out, checked herself over one last time, and went back out into the passenger bay.

“Two hundred seconds.” The hatch between the seating and the cockpit was closed to give Deilani privacy, so the pilot’s voice was coming through the main feed. “I can walk us out as soon as you’re secure.”

Deilani took a seat at the end of the row on the port side; at each end was a small table. The shuttle’s interior had been polished and cleaned with obsessive attention to detail. If the technology hadn’t been so primitive, one could almost mistake it for an Evagardian vessel.

It even smelled good.

She strapped herself in, mindful of creasing her uniform, and leaned back. After forty hours of traveling in galactic business class, this wasn’t so bad. Her luggage had already attached itself to the bulkhead.

“Ready when you are,” she said, closing her eyes.

She felt the shuttle start to move, and the change in gravity, but everything was gentle. The jumps were tame enough that they didn’t even interfere with her breathing exercises, which was good, because she needed them.

It had been an unplanned trip to the Demenis system that had thrown her life into chaos in the first place—and of all the places to be sent now, it was back to Demenis. There were a thousand coping skills that were healthier than grinding her teeth, but none of those were going to happen today.

Barry’s voice brought her back.

“Ma’am, you should consider coming up front. It’s worth it.”

Deilani cleared her throat and straightened up in her seat. She checked the time and undid her straps, grabbing a handhold and floating out of her seat. She opened her holo and reversed it to get a look at her appearance. She was all right, somehow.

More or less.

She pulled herself into the cockpit, putting a hand on the empty copilot’s chair.

She’d spent enough time off-planet that space was not entirely new to her. Yet the sense of wonder, of profound smallness when looking at the vastness of the void had never worn off for her. She’d been sure it would once she got out of Cohengard, that she would start to take it all for granted. So far, that hadn’t happened.

But now it wasn’t the ocean of stars or the dark crescent shape of Almayer Station that had her attention in a chokehold.

It was the thing behind the station.

She swallowed and shook her head to clear it; just looking at it for a moment had all but put her in a trance. The closest thing she could liken it to would’ve been a dark, murky nebula, but that didn’t do it justice. She blinked bright green stars from her eyes.

Barry glanced at her. “Don’t look at it for too long. I take it you know what we do here. Or what Yagami’s people do, I guess. I’m just the chauffer.”

“I’ve read about it.” Deilani tore her eyes away from the mass of swirling gloom and shook her head again, focusing on the station. “What kind of cycle are you on in there?”

“We’re plus eight hours.”

Deilani lit up her holo and adjusted her chrono. This was perfect; it was evening for these people, and that suited her.

“Are they worried about me?” she asked curiously.

Barry shrugged. “Should they be?”

“How would I know?”

The automated docking procedure had already begun; the viewport showed the pathing from their location to the bay, which was already lit up and open. Barry didn’t have to do anything at this point, but Demenis was under Evagardian dominion now, and the law said she had to stay in her seat, prepared to take control if she had to. That was probably a tough law to enforce; Deilani couldn’t even remember the last time she’d heard about automated docking going wrong, and a fair number of pilots probably wouldn’t know what to do if it ever did.

She was ready for the gravity, and the transition was smooth.

The design sensibilities in the bay were Isakan, so there were a lot of hard angles. Most of it was gray, accented with blue and orange. Not Evagardian, but not ugly. It was clean and open, and she liked that.

She put on her mask and took her place in front of the hatch, watching the feed on it count down while the bay went through its decontamination procedure.

Barry powered down the shuttle and unstrapped, giving Deilani an admiring look.

“That’s what I wanted to see,” she said, a little pink in her cheeks.

Normally, Deilani might have bristled at that. Imperial uniforms didn’t exist to entertain people, but she wasn’t really paying attention to the pilot. The question of how she was going to make all this work was a lot more pressing. She tugged on her white gloves, then folded her hands behind her back.

The hatch opened, and the ramp deployed. A man and a woman were already heading across the bay toward the shuttle. She started down with all the poise she could muster. It really would have been nice if she could’ve gotten some rest before this part.

So much for that. There was nothing she hated more than trying to concentrate when she was fatigued.

She halted when she reached the deck. The man approaching was around thirty, and the woman was older. She was small like Barry but carried herself with considerably more confidence. Her features might have been augmented, but her complexion had definitely been tweaked. She wore clothes that cost more than Deilani’s entire wardrobe, and in combination with her conspicuously artificial-looking skin, she embodied quite a few galactic clichés.

The man beside her was also on the shorter side, but broad. He wore casual civilian clothes and an official-looking crew jacket. He was visibly tired, and a little grumpy.

“Welcome,” the woman said briskly. “I’m Yagami. This is Suarez, my overseer.”

“Lieutenant Deilani. Imperial Service, Demenis Affairs.”

Yagami held out her hand. Instead of taking it, Deilani started forward, forcing them to follow her toward the hatch. It wasn’t rudeness, just policy. A captured image or footage of that handshake could be spun all sorts of ways; it was best not to let it happen.

It was
rude, honestly, but she wasn’t here to make friends.

“Tell me about your operation,” she said without looking back.

Yagami fell in beside her. “This is a mining facility, Lieutenant,” she said, annoyance in her voice. “We collect the particles that are attracted by the anomaly, sifting out what has value.”

“You also collect data on the anomaly,” Deilani noted.

“Naturally.”

They left the bay and entered a corridor. It was wide, clean, and brightly lit. She didn’t know what she’d expected. Cramped, dingy, rusty, ancient facilities? Not all galactic designs were as abysmal as old Ganraen ones. Not every ship outside the Empire was as ugly as Captain Tremma’s freighter, just like not every planet was as awful as Nidaros. She didn’t cringe at the memory, but she would never forget that freighter, and she would never forget the black surface of that planet. Maybe in time, her prejudices would ease up a little.

This station was relatively new, and Yagami had built it herself. She’d done business in the Golden Worlds and in the Kakugo System, but the Yagami Group’s corporate entity existed mainly in Free Trade territory.

This was, according to the dossier, her only operation in unregulated space. Well, it wasn’t unregulated anymore, but the annexation was so recent that it didn’t feel much different. Yagami was generally painted as a benign, genteel sort of thug, a businesswoman who occasionally toed the line between entrepreneur and gangster.

This operation was her most ambitious play to date. She had gone to great expense to claim the rights to the anomaly before the annexation. Yagami had rushed Almayer Station into existence, and the cost must have been staggering.

“Crew of sixteen,” Yagami was saying. “Plus Pilot Officer Barry, and myself.”

Deilani paused at a viewport. “What’s that?” She pointed at a ship a short distance from the station. It was a small vessel, barely larger than a jump shuttle.

She hadn’t known there was anyone else here.

Yagami’s eye twitched.

“That’s Doctor Rigby’s yacht,” she said. “My organization allows him to study the anomaly.”

“On whose authority?”

“Excuse me?” Yagami looked puzzled. “He was here before the annexation, and the rights belong to the Yagami Group. It was a decision for the board of directors.”

“That’s why I’m not going to cite you, but now he has to follow the law, just like everyone else. This is a controlled area. That means any research he conducts has to go through Science Division for review. He needs permits and oversight, the same as you. Don’t panic,” Deilani added, folding her arms. “It’s just another inspection. There aren’t any financial repercussions as long as nothing problematic’s going on and there’s nothing worrisome in his data.”

But Yagami wasn’t worried about fines—she was worried about Science Division taking an interest in her data and seizing it. It was a legitimate concern, but the Empress wasn’t in the business of taking private property without providing compensation.

“I see,” she said levelly. “Lieutenant, I’m going to leave you in Mr. Suarez’s capable hands. I’m only here on a bit of an inspection myself. He’s the one that runs the place. He’ll see that you’re taken care of. Everyone has instructions to make sure you get whatever you need.”

Then she was striding away at a pace that was, considering the length of her legs, impressive.

Deilani let her go without a word.

She was alone with Suarez. Through the viewport, she could see the massive shape of the refinery, and other wings of the station. It was impressively large; building all of this while the Demenis system had still been completely lawless? That had taken some nerve. This sector had probably been crawling with pirates and freelancers. Yagami must have paid out another fortune to keep all that away.

Suarez leaned on the viewport, squinting at her mask.

“You going to wear that the whole time you’re here?” he asked.

Deilani pulled it off and rolled her eyes.

He smiled. “Did you shift time coming over here, or are you going right in?”

“I’ll rest first.”

“I’ll take you to your quarters.”

She motioned to her luggage. “Do you know what I’m here to do?”

“Make sure we’re not doing anything you Imperials wouldn’t do?”

“This is a Health and Wellness Inspection. I’ll be looking at your facility, protocols, and equipment for safety issues, and I’ll be examining all your people.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“And a tech?”

“No, but I don’t have to be. You’re in a controlled area and exposed to anomalous radiation and particle activity. My priority is the health of your crew. If I find safety issues, I’ll shut you down here and now.”

“Does she know you have the authority to do that?”

“I don’t care. I can also issue you fines and citations that compel you to make any changes that I deem necessary.” She gave him a look. “So take this seriously.”

“What’s the appeal process if we don’t think your take is fair?”

She gave him a pitying look. “Appeal process? That’s cute. This is Evagardian space now.”

“Yagami doesn’t like the annexation.”

“I’m sure it’s very inconvenient for her. She wanted unregulated space. Now it’s regulated.” Deilani shrugged. “I’d be mad too.”

“No, honestly.” Suarez rubbed at his face and looked out the viewport, leaning in to look up. She tried to follow his gaze, but it wasn’t clear what he was interested in. “It’s good for us that you people are here.”

“How? Now you have to pay taxes, and all of this is technically the Empress’ property.”

He left the viewport, and she followed him toward the junction.

“The Empress doesn’t care about this anomaly,” he told her, stifling a yawn. “And the taxes are less than Yagami would be paying for protection. She’s saving money, and even people like you are really only here to help. We’re all on contract here. We’re just doing our jobs. This isn’t our show.”

“I’m not here to interfere with your workflow. After someone gives me a complete tour, I’ll operate alone. You’ll need to start pulling together all the documentation for an inventory of your equipment.”

“Sure.” Suarez paused, flagging down a woman in coveralls. Like Deilani, she was tall and a little bony, but closer to Suarez in age. She was chewing something and carrying a heavy mug. “This is Miller,” Suarez told Deilani. “Refinery shift lead. Hey, can you get a technical order database and bring it to CQ?”

“You can just send it to my holo,” Deilani said, but Suarez shook his head.

“Some of this,” he said, motioning vaguely, “is proprietary. Yagami owns all the patents, mainly for the harvest panels. But we won’t transfer that technical data. You can look at it. You can’t take it with you.”

The hell she couldn’t, but she didn’t actually want it, so it wasn’t an argument worth having.

“Sure,” Deilani said.

“Get on it,” Suarez told Miller.

She didn’t look thrilled, but she nodded.

Suarez gave her a smile, but she was already stalking off. He stared after her for a moment, then sighed.

“There’s something we need to get out of the way,” he said. “A couple things, actually.”

Deilani raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah. That’s a hell of a uniform, by the way,” he said.

She snorted. “Oh, Empress. Spare me.”

Suarez grimaced, looking up and down the corridor. “We’ve got a bit of a situation here. One we didn’t plan on, and it’s a little awkward with you here.”

“There is nothing awkward about this, Mr. Suarez. If you’re in compliance with the law and with the standards you were provided with, you have nothing to worry about. I’m not here to give you trouble.”

“We’re not in violation of any laws,” he said quickly. “But it’s complicated.”

Deilani didn’t like the sound of this. She let her expression do the talking, and Suarez quickly went on.

“Doctor Rigby has—had
a lab assistant that he brought with him. A younger guy. Very educated, we don’t know much about him. Apparently Rigby caught him trying to steal data from the work they were doing.”

“And?”

“And we’ve detained him.”

Deilani rubbed her chin. “What kind of data are we talking about? Where are you going to press charges?” In Free Trade space, where the intellectual property claim was, or in Evagardian court, because the theft had occurred here?

“That’s the thing.”

Deilani narrowed her eyes. Suarez looked at the floor.

“We don’t want this guy leaving. We haven’t called it in.”

She stiffened. “You can’t hold a man indefinitely on your own authority. You were required to notify the Peacekeepers the moment you thought something was wrong. I can shut you down permanently right now
, Mr. Suarez.”

“Whoa.” He raised both hands like a shield. “Whoa. Stop, slow down. I’m trying to tell you that we’re not
holding him against his will.”

“Consensual
detention?” Deilani didn’t hide her skepticism.

Suarez was perfectly serious. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I mean it,” he added. “This guy doesn’t want to go to prison. He really
does not want to have problems with the Imperial justice system. Do you understand?”

“I’m starting to,” she replied, troubled. “What? So he’s consenting to staying cut off, and in exchange, you want to keep what he did off the record?” She folded her arms. “Is that supposed to be it?”

“It’s an arrangement. He didn’t steal
anything that you can make an issue of,” Suarez pointed out. “We’re required to report a crime, but this isn’t a crime unless we decide to frame it as one. I mean, we did
run it by legal.”

“What did they say?”

“They didn’t love it.”

“Yeah, no shit. It’s not Yagami’s data. It’s the Empress’ data, which Yagami is allowed to have and use.”

Suarez swallowed. “Then you’re going to arrest him?”

“Not if I can help it. I’m not a Peacekeeper. How long are you going to hold him?”

He hesitated. “We don’t know. Not more than another month.”

“You’ve already had him locked down that long?”

He nodded.

Deilani shook her head. Galactics. These people were insane.

“Look,” she said slowly. “If you lot want to handle this internally, ethically
, I may be able to allow it. But I can’t turn a blind eye to even the possibility
that this man is being held against his will without charges. We’ll need something in writing. There’ll have to be documentation and accountability for everything you’ve done. I’ll need to hear it from him, too. I’m a physician, Mr. Suarez. I have ways of knowing if he’s under duress. And even if this situation is
as you’ve described it, I won’t leave this station without measures in place to legitimize this arrangement. Haven’t you heard of non-disclosure agreements?”

“It would be an agreement with a thief. The man’s a pro. Look, maybe you don’t get this, but this was free space just a few weeks ago. It’s Evagardian space now, but we don’t just all start thinking like Evagardians. That’s not how this works. We’re cooperating, but all that’s changed out here is the name and the uniforms of the people coming around to shake us down.”

Deilani gazed at him. “Are you done?”

He snorted. “Yes.”

“Do you understand what I’ve said?”

“It’s all fine. I just didn’t want you to be shocked when you see that we have someone locked up. Like I said, it’s awkward.”

“I’m plenty shocked,” Deilani replied tiredly. She pointed. “We’re going this way?”

Suarez strode forward and began to speak, but an audio broadcast began, welcoming visitors to the station. He fell silent. Deilani put on an expression of stoic patience. The broadcast was still going. Suarez rolled his eyes. Deilani massaged her temples.

It finally ended.

“We don’t even really have visitors here,” he confided.

“Get on with it,” Deilani said.

Suarez cleared his throat. “The other thing is Rigby himself. I don’t really know a tactful way to say this, but he’s not under your purview. Your orders here concern the station, not him. We don’t care if you call someone in to inspect him, but you’re not getting on that ship. I have to make that clear here and now.”

“I have no desire to get on that ship,” Deilani replied. “But you realize that what you just said sounded suspicious as hell.”

“Yeah, but it’s not me talking. It’s Yagami. She doesn’t trust you people.”

“Does she think I’ll try to steal something?”

“She might.”

There were footsteps behind them. They turned to see a thin man with long hair come jogging up. He was wearing colorful, flamboyant civilian clothes.

“Hey,” he said. “You want the big TO pad?”

“Where is it?” Suarez asked.

“We’re trying to find it. Can you use the old one?”

“It’s for her,” Suarez said, jerking a thumb at Deilani. “This is Telkin, by the way. He’s our system tech.”

“Hi,” Telkin said, flashing her a quick smile. “Um, look. The guys that actually built this place weren’t us. Okay? They were Trigan contractors, and they’re all gone. I’ve got all the system data and all the technical orders, but it’s kind of sensitive. See, some of the collection technology is very new,” he said, pointing at the nearest viewport, through which Deilani could see the dark shapes of the collection arms. “Okay? It’s very fancy. Bespoke, you know? Yagami’s people hold some of those patents, so we have to control those schematics and specs.”

“He already told me,” Deilani said, motioning for him to get on with it.

“Okay. So if you’ll just give me a couple hours, I’ll put those files on something you can use, but it has to be something secure, something you can’t copy or send off, you see?”

“I get it.” She checked the time. “Can you have it ready in nine hours?”

“Yes. That’s plenty.” He was already walking away.

“See?” Suarez gave her an exasperated look. “We’re trying.”

She just shook her head and motioned for him to keep moving. They passed a lounge with a large feed, where a big, blond man was swearing animatedly. Two men in jumpsuits grappled desperately on the broadcast.

“That’s Dawkes,” Suarez said without stopping.

“Was that the prison thing that galactics all like to watch?” Deilani asked, wincing as one of the men on the feed was bashed against a wall. Then they were past the doorway, and the sounds were fading behind them.

“I don’t know. A couple of the guys are into all that Baykara stuff.”

“Charming. What’s he do?”

“He’s the chief of security.”

“It’s good to feel safe.”

“I know. That’s Roth, he’s our acquisitions guy.” Suarez pointed out a tall figure crossing at a junction ahead. “That’s some nice luggage. Will I get one for free if I become a subject?”

“Sure, if you join the Service.”

They entered a lift and rode down, emerging in a corridor lined with hatches.

“Here’s crew quarters. We’re only at about half capacity, so you’ve got your pick. But they’re all the same.” He stopped in front of a door with no name and hit the release. “I’ll have Telkin give you access so you can do your own code for however long you’re here.”

“Should be about seven cycles.”

“Then get comfortable.”

They seemed to be alone. Deilani leaned against the doorframe and looked down at her mask in her hand. She hefted it.

“Look,” she said, “maybe this is my prejudices talking. But I’ve been on this station for ten minutes and it already looks dodgy. Rigby. This thief guy. Yagami. She’s not much of an actress. She obviously panicked when I said Rigby had to be inspected, and that doesn’t look good for any of you.”

Suarez didn’t say anything to that.

“I’m here to check your health and make sure your people don’t run with plasma cutters. There will be more inspections. Other people. Teams. People who know what they’re doing,” she said. “People who can’t be lied to. If there’s something going on here, the Empress will find out, even if I don’t. If there’s something that belongs to her that Yagami is trying to keep for herself, I promise you, the Empress will
get it. It might not be pretty, but that is how it will end. But that’s not my
problem.”

“You’re just a nurse.”

“Doctor,” she corrected. “And if there’s something here I shouldn’t know about... just make sure I don’t. Do you understand?”

He grinned. “We’re not as shady as we look.”

She sighed. “Show me the guy you’ve got locked up.”

Suarez keyed his holo and called up a feed. The room looked clean, and the man in it didn’t appear distressed or injured. He was leaning back in a chair, gazing at a feed without much interest.

“Okay.” She waved a hand, and he cut the feed. “We can deal with that later.”

She stepped into the cabin. It was tiny, but efficient. Bunk, desk, some cabinetry.

“Hey,” Suarez said, and she looked over her shoulder at him. “Who’d you piss off to be here?”

Deilani hit the release and shut the hatch in his face. Her luggage chirped at her to indicate its charge was low.

“Shut up,” she told it, switching it off and deploying it to reveal her traveling belongings.

The cabin was about the same size as her berth had been aboard the Julian
, but that berth had carried with it at least a measure of prestige. This berth, this assignment—there was nothing here but shame and regret.

A sudden, intense craving for ethanol washed over her, but that wouldn’t do her any favors. Not now, and not when she woke up. She drank a cup of water, then threw off her whites and sprawled on the bunk with her VR collar.

This wasn’t like being stuck on a dead ship on a dead planet, but a station full of galactic crooks wasn’t much of a step up.

She fixed the collar around her neck, closed her eyes, and wondered if her life could become any more of a disaster.

One

Emergency lights were supposed to help you see, but these barely lit up anything at all.

The sleeve of her coveralls was so crusted with sweat and grime that it was like a jagged piece of plastic. Using it to wipe her brow had long ago ceased to be helpful, but Deilani kept doing it anyway.

She squinted in the glare of her hand light, shifting in her harness. The connector squeaked alarmingly, and she looked up at it, then down. The drop to the deck was about four meters, more than enough to cause injury if something slipped.

She turned back to her work, but the cover for the panel kept falling closed. She pushed it up again and adjusted her light, reaching in to feel around. There was a little more urgency in her blind groping now, and she was more conscious of the sounds and feelings from her straps.

The emergency lights flickered, and there was a sudden burst of static and audio. She startled in the harness, looking around in panic, but silence fell. A broadcast had begun, then been cut off, and there had been some interference.

Heart thudding, she withdrew her hand from the panel. The harness constricted her chest, making it hard to breathe. She wasn’t wearing it correctly, but it was counterintuitive to the point that it was genuinely offensive. Common Evagardian wisdom was that safety equipment should be simple enough for even a child to use. Common galactic wisdom, evidently, did not exist.

She got her hands in the straps and pulled hard, trying to give herself some space, but all she did was knock her tool bag askew. It tipped open, and at least two objects slipped out before she could grab them, clattering to the metal grating below.

She snatched the bag and righted it, causing the carabiner to squeak again.

This maintenance section was unnecessarily large and convoluted, although the refinery’s maintenance facilities were even worse. She was still praying that she wouldn’t have to go in there
.

She shone her light into her bag. All she needed was her cutter, and she still had that.

The harness caught on her spare light in the pocket of her overalls, pinning it hard to her thigh. Pain shot through her leg, and a telltale tingle meant she was losing circulation.

There was a reason
she hadn’t become a tech.

The smell of silicon-based static-reducing lubricant was starting to make her lightheaded. She’d knocked a protective panel loose inside the compartment when she jerked her hand out. She didn’t know what it had been covering, but from the smell, it had to be something delicate.

So that wasn’t good.

She gave up on making the harness comfortable; it wasn’t going to happen. She pulled off her gloves with her teeth and spat them over her shoulder one at a time. They made her fingers too clumsy; she’d never get done at this rate.

For what seemed like the thousandth time, she consulted the technical order database. She’d already performed this operation three times. This was the fourth and final connection she had to break.

The blocky rubber-coated device hung on a strap around her neck, and there was glare from her light on the screen.

The database didn’t look like much. It was old-fashioned to the point of being primitive, but it was still her lifeline. She made sure it wasn’t going to fall, then reached into the panel again, searching.

This compartment felt different from the last three, but she knew she had the right place because she’d spent half an hour fumbling around in the dark to make sure. Her fingers found plastic that was warm to the touch, and that gave her hope.

She followed the warmth, locating a familiar bundle of cords. To be sure, she traced along those to a smooth, cylindrical shape. Perfect.

She withdrew her hand and gripped her cutter carefully, keeping her thumb poised over the trigger. She pulled herself closer to the panel, closing her eyes and putting her hand back inside.

Probing gently, she located the cords and pressed the trigger. The cutter’s blade began to vibrate, and she made a point to breathe. A mistake here could mean lost fingers. A tool like this wasn’t even remotely safe to use blindly.

The harness dug painfully into her sternum. She was burning up and soaked in sweat. Her muscles trembled from the exertion of keeping the harness where it needed to be for her to work.

She severed the cords.

The emergency lights went out without a sound, plunging the chamber into darkness. Only her work light remained, attached to the side of the panel.

She let out a long groan and relaxed, sagging in the harness. She’d done it. It still hurt, but she didn’t care. It wasn’t very dignified to just hang there in the dark, sucking in deep breaths, but that was the least of her problems.

Gradually, her heart rate slowed, and she began to get the oxygen she needed. She was still too hot, but the strain was off her muscles, and that was enough. Pain was still abundant, but now it was almost a good pain.

The footstep startled her so much that she nearly fell. She grabbed the harness and held herself up, swinging. There was only black below her; her light wasn’t pointing down.

The steps were still coming.

“Hello?” she called out, steadying herself. She reached for the light, but her carabiner gave another little squeal, and she froze.

There was no reply, but the steps were fading. Someone had just passed beneath her.

She snatched the light, pulling it free of its clip and pointing it down. There was no one there. She pointed it to the left, then the right.

Throat tight, she opened the clasp and undid her safety knot to let herself down slowly. She hadn’t even bothered to close the panel.

Once safely on the deck, she kept the light up as she struggled with one hand to get the harness open. The buckles came loose, and the rig slid to the ground, letting her step out and kick it off. She could still feel the lines on her body where it had squeezed her.

She put her back to the turbine, still looking either way in turn, listening intently.

“Hello?” she repeated, listening to the echoes. When there was no reply, she closed her eyes and slid down to sit. Her fingers massaged her arms, working them experimentally. After holding herself up for so long, they felt locked and dead, like they weren’t even hers anymore. Even during her years of military training, her muscles had never felt ruined this way. It went beyond soreness.

Her entire body was sticky with oily sweat, mixed with the grime and chemicals coating everything she touched. She rubbed her face, and her hands came away smudged.

Sitting forward, she unzipped her coveralls and got her arms out, letting the upper portion of the garment hang. This was something she’d seen real techs do, and now she understood why. The air wasn’t moving, but it felt good anyway. She tugged at her soaked undershirt, peeling it away from her skin, but the moment she let go, it snapped back into place, tingling and itching.

She wanted to sit and rest, but if she did, she’d fall asleep.

That couldn’t happen, and she couldn’t sit in the dark. It was time to find out if all this had been for nothing.

She picked herself up and grabbed the database. It weighed almost five kilograms. An Evagardian one wouldn’t even weigh five grams
. It shouldn’t have weighed anything; it should’ve been data in the holo already on her wrist.

But she wasn’t complaining; unlike her holo, the database was one of the very few things left on the station that still worked. She hoisted her tool bag over her other shoulder and picked up her light.

It was a long trudge back down the maintenance canal to the ladder with the blue checkered grips. She looked back the way she had come, wondering if those footsteps had even been real. Perhaps the machinery had made some sound, something she might’ve misheard.

But if she’d imagined it, that was the worst-case scenario, and of course no machinery was making any noise without power. So the sounds had been real, or she was hallucinating. Which was worse?

She shook her head and mounted the ladder, her heavy tool bag making even that an ordeal. She clambered over the lip and got to her feet in the disorienting darkness, but the beam of her light found the main panel. Relieved to see it was exactly where she remembered, she wiped her forehead with her hand.

Now her hand was wet. She wiped it on her stomach, but that was wet too. She wiped it on her thigh, and now it was sticky.

Swearing, she slapped her palm to the wall and dragged it across, leaving an oily residue behind. Let a cleaning android handle it.

As though there were still any of those still working.

She froze.

Still half on the ladder, she held on with one hand and touched her chest with the other. For a moment it was as though something else had touched her, something warm.

Fingers gripped her ankle and pulled. She was just fast enough to throw her arm around the rung before she could be jerked free. Pain shot through her ankle, and she kicked out instinctively.

The hand let go, and she scrambled up, heaving herself over the top and pushing away from the edge. Desperately, she felt for the tool bag, searching for her light. She got it out and turned it on the trench, expecting someone to appear over the top of the ladder. All there was to hear was the blood pounding in her ears.

The beam of the light shook madly. She rose and held it out, sweeping it left and right. The trench was just deep enough that even a tall person still needed the ladder, so that was where she kept the light as she approached, moving a safe distance to the right.

She pointed it down, but there was no one climbing up. She shone the light up the trench, then down it, experimentally working her sore arm.

Nothing.

She opened her mouth, but she didn’t know what to say. Her throat was tight and painful, but she hadn’t imagined that, had she? No, it hadn’t just been a feeling; there had been a pull.

Someone had been down there. A distant, metallic noise echoed faintly from the bulkheads. Retreating footsteps?

For more than a minute she stood, pointing the light and listening.

No more footsteps, and no sign of anyone.

She swallowed and set her jaw, turning to pick up her bag and the database. She set them on the console and felt for the database’s rubber buttons. The tiny display was grainy and weak, but a relief to see all the same. She navigated the station’s technical documents until she found the section she wanted.

With her light, she searched the console for identifying marks. The beam fell on a discolored patch of metal in the shape of a rectangle, and her heart sank.

If the ID decal was missing, she couldn’t get the serial number. Without that, she couldn’t find this unit in the maintenance files. And she certainly couldn’t guess
how to do this bizarre workaround.

She caught herself a heartbeat or two before the panic could really get going. There wouldn’t be just one serial number. She continued to search, finally finding one on the underside of the shield concealing a panel of buttons she had no idea what to do with.

Her database promptly identified the console when she fed it the numbers, but the little screen was giving her a headache. She found the technical order and began to follow the steps.

Unlock twin V-clasps. Open panel beneath console keypad. Remove insulator caps. Locate safety pin.

There was a diagram, but it was too small to see.

She had to lie down on her back and worm her way in. The lip of the cavity was about four centimeters off the ground, and it dug into her spine.

There was a sound in the dark, and she stopped to listen. Silence.

Apply pressure to tension wires to remove safety pin.

Carefully

, the manual specified, remove protector to reveal current reset.

Turn the analogue wheel.

That part was hard; it took muscle. She groaned with the strain, but it finally began to budge. Gasping, she wrenched it in a full circle. Apparently one turn was enough to generate just enough power to get this thing started.

Keeping hands clear, pull the emergency release.

She froze, mouth open. Where was it? The absurdly low-resolution image on the screen of her reader had no color. There were two handles that looked right, and they weren’t labeled.

She tried to gauge their position in the tangle of unidentifiable tech nonsense. A real tech would’ve known instinctively. A real tech wouldn’t bother with the technical orders.

Swearing under her breath, she took the one on the right and jerked it down. The lever fell easily, and the wheel she’d turned abruptly spun free, snapping back around in reverse. The plastic safety tie was still attached, and it slashed by too quickly for her to get her hand away in time.

Warm blood struck her face, and she hissed in pain, pulling her hand back.

The console hummed to life on localized emergency power.

Nausea bubbling, she squinted at the ferociously stinging cut across her knuckles in the glare of her light, watching blood run down her arm. Even the effort of whimpering seemed like too much.

She got out from under the console, dragging herself upright. Praying silently to the Empress, she threw the final switch and pressed her forehead against the screen, willing it to work.

The lights came on.

She looked up, eyes wide, disbelieving.

These were the real lights, not the emergency ones. The reset process had worked; it really had been hung up by something in the system, just like she thought. It had taken her twenty hours
to diagnose it.

And thirty to fix it.

She’d been afraid the problem was in the equipment itself, not the software. That
, she would not have been able to fix.

She looked at the reader’s chrono. Fifty hours. Fifty hours of labor later, power was restored.

She’d done it.

Tears were on the way, and her breaths were coming in short gasps. The urge to laugh came out of nowhere; it hadn’t just been fifty hours of work, it had been fifty hours of work without sleep.

Raising her arms in triumph would’ve taken too much effort, so she just smiled at the gray bulkhead.

The station’s computer had sensed a radiation spike during the explosion and cut the main power out of concern that it was a reactor leak—but the reactor hadn’t been the source of the radiation. There was no threat. The power should
have come back right away, but it hadn’t. She didn’t know if that was because of the radiation, or something else.

That was all in the past, and it didn’t matter how stupid the computer was.

She had power.

There was light everywhere. She could almost feel it, like a cleansing shower.

Her hand light slipped off the console and fell to the deck. She gave it a kick, watching it fall into the maintenance canal. She wouldn’t be needing that anymore, although it had served her well.

She was still bleeding.

A medical kit was mounted on the wall above the control console. She pulled it down, disinfected the wound on her hand, and sealed it with automatic, practiced movements. It didn’t matter if she was critically exhausted; she could treat this in her sleep.

The tears threatened to come out again. She was grateful for the injury. She was a doctor, not a tech. She wasn’t supposed to be doing that, she was supposed to be doing this
.

It wasn’t lost on her that she was lightheaded. She let the tool bag slip from her shoulder, and it thudded to the deck. She wouldn’t be needing that
anymore, either.

Her eyes fell on her database. That, she wasn’t so sure about. She might be needing that again. She picked it up by the strap and put it over her shoulder, turning to look back at the turbines. They didn’t look nearly as intimidating with the lights on. With the lights on, she could’ve fixed all this in a fraction of the time. It was a pity the gravity drive had dragged its feet spinning down; weightlessness would’ve made the job easier. Now the gravity would be getting stronger again.

It was the ladder’s fault. The ladders for the first three pylons had deployed correctly. The fourth hadn’t. That was why she’d had to teach herself, on the spot, how to use a maintenance harness for vertical operations. Learning that
had been almost as much work as fooling the systems into bringing back power.

This was life outside of Evagardian space. Except this was
Evagardian space now, hard as that was to believe.

The hatch hissed open as she staggered toward it.

Directly across the corridor was an air vent. She could almost see
the airflow. She stepped up to it and leaned close, letting the cool air blow over her face. Moving air, and the white noise it created, was even better than light.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “Thank you, Empress.”

She wanted to just let her eyes close and go to sleep.

That thought sobered her. No sleeping. She straightened up and focused. Power was back, but her troubles weren’t over.

She rubbed her eyes, taking a breath and letting it out slowly.

She turned to move away and slipped, nearly falling. Arms out for balance, she froze, looking down at the red smear on the deck.

Deilani knew blood when she saw it. The bandage on her hand was doing its job.

This wasn’t hers.

Two

It could only have been a few drops to begin with. Not a lot
of blood.

She peered down at her heavy maintenance boots and the streak of red. Now that she’d stepped in it, there was just a smear.

Blinking, she looked in either direction. The corridor was now refreshingly bright, but quite empty. Another few drops marred the deck just a short distance away.

She took a step back, then another. It was probably best not to go that way.

She turned around and headed in the opposite direction, making sure the database’s strap was secure on her shoulder. She didn’t care if it was coated in rubber; she couldn’t risk dropping it.

The trailing sleeves of her coveralls nearly tripped her up, so she took a moment to tie them around her waist. She looked
like a real tech, dressed this way.

Sleep was coming on even as she walked. Her mind wandered alarmingly.

The air was already getting cooler, and that at least was a good feeling.

A voice stopped her in her tracks.

“...on Almayer Station, nothing means more than shareholder value...”

She had heard this recording before, and dozens like it. When she first started her inspection, she’d had to explain to half the crew that she was not a corporate quality assurance worker, but rather an officer of the Imperial Service. These people didn’t even know what the Department of Demenis Affairs was. She remembered their bewilderment, and their appalling ignorance of Imperial law.

This was Evagardian space now. What about that did they not understand?

That felt like ages ago.

At least these barbarians had a decent sense of aesthetics. The highlights on the bulkheads gave the station some personality. The lines of the place weren’t too hard, or too old-fashioned. Only the actual refinery was ugly.

She reached a long panel of viewports and looked out at the enormous swath of black and gray that blocked out most of the stars in view. The anomaly. It looked like a massive, boiling gas cloud, but that wasn’t what it was. Deilani hadn’t had the time or the inclination to learn about it. It wasn’t her job to worry about space anomalies; that thing shouldn’t have been her problem.

Now it was too late.

She went through the main junction and up the ramp to the bridge. She paused outside the hatch, looking back at the corridor, scanning the deck for blood. She didn’t see any.

“...committed to making the most of this find, and giving back to our shareholders with the same generosity that...”

Even the promotional messages were music to her ears, even if they were mostly lies. She could’ve stood there and listened to the messages and the recyclers going through their cycles for an hour.

But that would put her to sleep.

She’d cooled off quickly, and her skin was drying out. She pulled her coverall top back on and zipped it up, shivering.

The bridge was lit up beautifully, and she wanted to melt with happiness. The elation was strange and uncomfortable, almost orgasmic. This kind of high didn’t come along often, and it couldn’t be a good sign. She hadn’t even felt this euphoric when she woke up in an Evagardian infirmary after her narrow escape from Nidaros only a few short weeks ago.

Power for the station. Without power, there was nothing. Life wasn’t worth living without power, and she wasn’t ever going to take it for granted again. For a moment, she masochistically wondered what it would feel like if the station’s power failed on her again. It didn’t take long to reach a decision: she’d kill herself. No question.

She’d never seen this room with power on. There were some consoles, a large viewpoint pointed directly at the anomaly, and a hatch leading to Suarez’s office.

Deilani was a scientist and a doctor, not a command officer. Still, how hard could it be? How were corporate systems different from military ones?

She slumped into the nearest chair and reached for the console, but stopped herself, and swiveled to look suspiciously at the hatch to the executive office.

The bridge was still and silent, and the seconds ticked by. The recyclers didn’t even whisper in here, and none of the sound from the promotional audio repeating in the corridors penetrated the hatch. A mug sat on the arm of the next chair over, and she reached out to touch it. It was cold.

She opened her mouth, then shut it. Almayer Station had no vocal systems; this was all manual or remote by holo. Holos weren’t working; the radiation had made sure of that.

The screens glowed, and she examined the system menu. It seemed straightforward. This wasn’t like pretending to be a tech; this was just navigating a computer. She didn’t need instructions, just common sense.

But she wasn’t kidding herself; she hadn’t slept in almost three days. Even common sense was a lot to ask at the moment.

She touched the screen, poking buttons and swiping menus. What did she need? What was the priority?

There was no easy answer. How could she know? She didn’t know anything about this station. She didn’t know anything about any
station. What mattered? She shook her head. She had to get back to basics. Air mattered. Her time on Nidaros had taught her that much.

Status. Station status. Diagnostics. Damage reports. Yes, this was the right track. The power loss following the explosion had made it impossible to determine the extent of the damage. Now the power was back, so it was time to find out where she stood.

Black spots crept around her vision. This couldn’t go on forever; she had to sleep sometime.

But not yet.

Basic diagnostics.

Structural integrity.

Temperature control.

Air filtration.

Power levels.

Reactor sensitivity.

It all blurred together, but she kept swiping, kept reading.

Recycler efficiency.

She stopped, blinking. That couldn’t be right. The reading was—it couldn’t
be right. It was too low; this was a station with a new reactor and a fancy bespoke molecular processor. The processor was solid; that was one of the things she’d been sent here to check on.

There were still some operations out there, old facilities and ships that needed actual bottled oxygen to stay in the black for air, but this wasn’t one of them. There was no reason for O2 reserves to ever fall below ninety percent on a station like this.

Almayer Station was showing sixty-five percent and dropping by... she groaned in frustration and shook her head. She needed a stimulant. She needed something. The levels were dropping by roughly a hundredth of a percent per period of... she wasn’t sure.

It didn’t look like an urgent shortfall, but it was still a shortfall. The station was losing oxygen.

It was Nidaros all over again. First no power, now no air.

She leaned back, wishing she could just enjoy this padded chair, but the station was bleeding. This was no time to relax, but she was
relaxing. She didn’t care.

Not in the slightest.

But at this rate, she would fall asleep. She sat bolt upright and focused on the screen.

Oxygen. What else was wrong? What else needed to be fixed?

Maybe it was a moot point; she couldn’t make sense of half of these readouts, but that
didn’t make sense. Exhausted or not, she was still a competent human being. She wasn’t brain-damaged. At least, not that she knew of.

This readout was corrupted. Some of these pages and menu branches were obviously messed up. The computer was broken. Were they really
leaking O2?

She began to swipe through the menus more rapidly. She wasn’t imagining it: there were faulty, half-formed characters appearing in the midst of letters and numbers.

This was data corruption, plain and simple.

It didn’t make sense. Had the explosion done this? The physical housing for the system was here, at this end of the station. It wasn’t anywhere near the blast. It couldn’t have been meaningfully compromised.

She stopped swiping. The radiation? It made sense that it would knock out sensitive tech like personal holos, but the main system? Surely it was shielded.

Surely. And she was losing focus again.

It seemed she’d used up the last of her reserves to get the power back. Now that the job was done, it was like her body knew, and her exhaustion was beating down the doors, rushing in on her from every direction. It was ganging up on her. This wasn’t a fair fight.

She groaned. Why couldn’t she just concentrate?
Why wasn’t force of will enough?

She slammed a fist down on the console, immediately regretting it. She clutched her aching hand, trying not to whimper in pain.

“Empress damn you all,
” she moaned to no one in particular.

There weren’t any alerts, no alarms. The computer didn’t seem bothered by the fact that oxygen was getting low. She made herself stare at the readout. The numbers continued to tick down, so this was actually happening. The computer could be wrong, but it believed
that it was right.

She couldn’t ignore that.

Where were the O2 reserves? Schematics. Station layout. Those were the things she needed. She set her database on the console and began to search it, wondering if there was anything the database could tell her that the system couldn’t. The database
wasn’t corrupted. Perhaps it was so old that its data storage was too primitive to be affected by radiation.

She had to trust the database and the technical orders it contained. Without those, she couldn’t have restored power. If she was being perfectly honest, it was the only friend she had at this point. And if she didn’t get some rest soon, she’d probably give it a name and start planning the wedding.

A compromised system was one more familiar face from Nidaros, except there it had been sabotage. Here, it was natural causes. No, that wasn’t true.

There was nothing natural about what had happened to Almayer Station. She wasn’t so far gone that she couldn’t recognize that.

This O2 situation had to be dealt with. She swiveled the chair around, but froze in the act of getting to her feet. A man stood in the doorway. For a moment her blood went icy, but it wasn’t Dawkes.

It was Suarez. Heart thudding, Deilani straightened. She hadn’t heard him coming; she’d been completely focused on what she was doing.

She let her breath out. How long had it been since she’d seen Suarez? Not since before it all went to hell; she hadn’t found his body, but she’d been pretty sure he was dead, his corpse just lying somewhere in the dark.

She put her hand on her chest and swallowed.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said, but he didn’t react to that. He wasn’t even really looking at her; his eyes were on the viewport. She glanced over her shoulder, and it looked like he was more interested in the anomaly than anything else.

He didn’t look good; his clothes were rumpled, he needed a shave, and he hadn’t showered lately. She was surprised she hadn’t smelled
him sooner.

Her heart sank. He wasn’t okay, but that was no surprise. She licked her lips.

“Chief?” she said hesitantly. He just stood there.

Deilani was covered in minor injuries, but she had one fairly serious one: a nasty bruise on her back, and she hadn’t forgotten how she got it. She had to be careful.

“Chief, have you seen Barry?”

He didn’t answer, and the loop wasn’t playing at the moment. It was dead silent.

“What about Dawkes?” she pressed, but it was clear he wasn’t talking. “Chief Suarez, I’d like to help you. Would you please go to the infirmary? If you wait for me there, I’ll do what I can for you,” she promised. “But we have an O2 situation, and I have to deal with that first. Okay?”

He looked up and met her eyes, squinting. Seconds went by.

“Okay,” Deilani said, nodding. “That’s what we’ll do. Just take it easy. You’re going to be fine,” she lied.

No reaction.

Chances didn’t seem good that he’d go, but more importantly, he was blocking the doorway. She took a deep breath and picked up the database, slinging it over her shoulder. Slowly, she moved closer to him.

“Suarez, I’m just going to go by you here, okay?” She pointed. Sometimes being bony was a good thing; she could probably slip past him without even touching.

She paused, frowning. There had been a sound.

Deilani raised an eyebrow. “Was that your stomach?” she asked, but as she did, a sudden flash of warmth on her chest startled her, making her flinch. It came out of nowhere, and it was so bizarre that for a moment she was at a loss.

Suarez grabbed her, and without thinking, she staggered back.

“What?” she demanded. “What is it?”

He didn’t answer, and she barely jerked her head and neck away. His teeth found her collarbone instead of her throat, and there was nothing mysterious about this
feeling. She automatically hit him inside the elbow to break his hold on her, knocked his arms away, and struck him squarely in the face with the flat of her hand.

Blood exploded from his nose as he reeled back, and she followed up with a kick that sent him tumbling into the corridor.

Deilani wavered, clamping a hand over her wound, which bled freely.

She dropped the database and squared herself, or tried to, but another flash of heat startled her, and this time she fell to her knees. Her palms left sweaty smears where she caught herself on the ground, and she looked up in panic, but Suarez wasn’t there.

The feeling was gone, but so was her breath. Sucking air, she scrambled back from the door, hissing in pain.

For a moment she was still, eyes on the doorway, waiting for that sensation to return, but it didn’t. Hesitantly, she got to her feet, glancing at the blood on her hand. She listened, then went to the door and leaned out.

The corridor was deserted. He had bitten her, and the shock was bad enough that it didn’t even bother her. He had really done that.

That was new.

She went back onto the bridge and staggered to the hatch leading into the executive office, palming it open.

There was a large desk and a surprising number of luxurious touches, but she wasn’t interested in any of that. She stumbled to the hatch to the private lavatory and hit the release, nearly falling through.

There was a mirror above the sink inside. She tore open her coveralls and yanked up the remains of her undershirt, doing the same with her supporter to probe the sweaty skin with shaking fingers.

There was nothing there. No rash, no discoloration.

Nothing.

She was still bleeding from the bite, but the bite was a wound that she understood. Where had that heat on her chest come from?

There was no vanity feed here, only a mirror, and her breath fogged the glass.

She pulled back, straightening. Already the tingling was almost gone. She’d felt something like it a few hours ago, but it hadn’t been nearly that strong.

Irritation from chemicals? She’d been spending a lot of time in places she didn’t belong, places only techs were supposed to go. What if she had an allergy she didn’t know about? An allergy that wouldn’t come into play anywhere remotely civilized, but here, where materials were more loosely regulated, it could be an issue? It was possible.

But she didn’t think so. It wasn’t like she’d been crawling around in maintenance naked. Skin irritation would be on exposed
skin.

She stared for a moment longer, then settled her supporter back in place and pulled down the undershirt. The skin beneath her eyes was blacker than the station without power. It looked like she was wearing cosmetics, like she had done herself up explicitly with the intention of frightening people. She looked like she was on death’s door.

Gently, she touched the spot on her chest where she’d felt the burning. It felt normal.

Whatever normal was supposed to be now.

Three

There was another medical kit stowed beneath the sink. As she broke the seal and opened it, she reflected that if here was a single kit left on this station that she hadn’t gotten into yet, that was a small miracle. She didn’t believe in miracles, but then again, she had
gotten off of Nidaros alive.

The bite was harder to look at than it was to treat, and her adrenaline was gone as quickly as it had showed up. She didn’t know which was worse: the ugliness of the wound, or the strangeness. He had bitten her. Who did
that? A man with severe radiation poisoning, clearly. And Suarez had seemed pretty strong for a dying man. Her queasiness growing, she disinfected the wound and applied a patch.

Suarez wasn’t himself. Just like Dawkes.

Probably Barry as well.

There were painkillers and stimulants, but nothing very strong. She needed to get into the infirmary to get at the good stuff. Perhaps it would be possible now that power had been restored.

The chems weren’t even in hypos. She picked up the little packets of pills, eying them with suspicion. There was no ingredient listing, no approval stamp from any Imperial regulatory authority, nothing. Who had made this kit? Where had it come from? She picked it up and turned it over. Even the case was made of cheap plastic. Of course the contents were cheap. It was mass-produced Commonwealth trash, made with profits in mind, because there were still backward corners of the galaxy where wellness was a business.

For all she knew, the tablets in these packets were nothing but chalk. Who would know? It was all about shareholder value, right?

She got her arms into her sleeves again and zipped up. Then she turned on the water, and water actually came out. Power. Power
.

She drank five little cups. Every time she swallowed, it felt as though her esophagus was trying to crush gravel. She was hungry, and now the water was causing some nausea.

Muttering curses, she tore open a packet and tipped stim pills into her palm.

Almayer Station didn’t even have consistent first aid kits. If there was one thing an operation like this needed to prioritize, it was medical supplies.

Normally, she would’ve felt a Darwinian sense of satisfaction at seeing galactics who would cut corners with something like this. But now she was the one facing the consequences of their terminal stupidity.

The pills were bitter. Maybe they would work, keep her on her feet long enough to take care of this O2 leak, then get to the infirmary.

She paused, turning back to the hatch. Just the memory of those flashes of sensation on her skin brought back an itch. It had to be the radiation. There was no other explanation, and if her dermal cells were affected, what else was?

Maybe the infirmary needed to be her first stop. No, that wasn’t true. Air first. Always air first. That was a lesson she would never forget, no matter how fatigued she was.

She left the lavatory and grabbed the database. At least this was something she knew how to do; anyone in the Service could patch a leak.

She paused outside the bridge, looking in either direction. No sign of Suarez.

“...our cooperative effort with the Rigby LLC Deep Space Anomalous Laboratories gives Almayer Station a distinct advantage over other comparable mining operations...”

There weren’t any fucking Rigby LLC Deep Space Anomalous Laboratories; there was only a man named Rigby, and the shell businesses the Yagami Group had to fabricate to legitimize his work. Not that it mattered now.

If she was going outside, she’d need her luggage. The prospect didn’t thrill her, but there was no way around it.

She got moving, annoyed at the way her borrowed boots clunked on the deck. She was making enough noise for ten people. She’d never noticed extra noise from real techs. Maybe they just knew how to walk in these things; maybe there was a trick to it.

“...our state of the art spectrum analysis technology has enabled the Yagami Group to scout unprecedented potential in the anomaly...”

That part might be true.

She actually liked the voice of whoever had recorded these messages. Whoever he was, he sounded like her type. He seemed mellow, like a guy who wouldn’t bite people.

She paused at the lift. Power was back on, so why not? She called it, watching the readout. It flickered. Frowning, she stepped back as the doors hissed open.

The light was on inside, and the promotional display was playing on the feed that formed the lift’s rear wall.

“...shareholders enjoy an extraordinary level of security with our percentile match program, backed by Tenbrook Holdings. Clean money, insured by the Free Trade...”

It had been subtle, but she hadn’t missed it.

The lift doors had hitched, shuddering as they slid open. There was no reason to think that the damage from the radiation ended with the command system. Nothing could be trusted. If something changed at the wrong moment, she could be trapped inside the lift.

Deilani wasn’t about to let what might
happen dictate her moves; these things were out of her control, but right now, the lift seemed like an unnecessary risk.

She hit the release, and the doors closed. Their movement was smooth and easy this time.

It was probably safe, but probably wasn’t good enough. Just the thought of being stuck in the lift if something went wrong was enough to bring on an anxiety that threatened to send her to her knees.

No. No lifts.

Sighing, she went a few steps further and mounted the ladder, climbing down to the next deck. From there, she went past the galley, then the canteen, and through the fitness center.

It was incredible to see it all lit up again.

“...don’t let the annexation spook you; our operation functions with the full knowledge and approval of the Imperial Entrepreneurial Ethics Committee, and the number of Evagardian investors has risen sharply since Demenis became Imperial space...”

Deilani was used to the unverifiable nonsense and outright lies that filled Yagami’s promotional audio. A feed on the wall beside her listed everything that was nearby, with arrows pointing helpfully. Around the corner to her left was lodging.

She listened, waiting for the audio to repeat. There was a delay between loops, and during that time, the station was silent except for the sounds of the recyclers.

There was nothing else but her heartbeat, which was starting to speed up again. She leaned around the corner to peer down the corridor. The row of hatches looked pristine. She let out her breath and moved on.

Outside her door, she keyed her palm lock on to enter her access code, but the hatch slid open before she could enter a single number.

That was unexpected. So the locks had reset with the power. Son of a bitch. Well, that could be more helpful than inconvenient.

It was still irritating that they hadn’t given her some kind of VIP room. On the bright side, there was nothing stopping her from taking one now.

She stripped out of the sickening coveralls and the heat-protective leggings. Three days of sweat and grime had reduced her undergarments to a biohazard. She peeled them off and threw them on the deck in disgust.

For a moment, she eyed her supporter. It was too disgusting to wear, but it was also the only civilian one she’d brought. Her only clean ones were service issue, and no matter how well they fit, the bands would always dig into her sides after a while. There was no one around to enforce dress and appearance regulations; she’d go without.

She eyed the door to her little shower nook longingly, but if she went in there, she wouldn’t want to come out.

Air first. She kicked her cast-off clothes out of the way and got down on the deck to drag her luggage out from under the bunk. It took a moment to flick her combination into the analogue locks to open it.

Her EV suit was on the very top, and it looked all right. It was still in the sterile sheath from its last service.

She tore off the wrapper and swiped her thumb over the nub on suit’s collar to bring it online. Nothing.

She swallowed and tried again.

“Please,” she pleaded, trying a third time.

The suit didn’t respond.

The more delicate the technology, the more susceptible it was to a radiation flare, but an EV should’ve been able to survive it. It was designed to withstand anything
. What kind of radiation could do
this?

The same kind that could get through to shielded system hubs.

She put her face in the nanofabric. It was not lost on her how unsightly it was to get emotional at a time like this, how disgraceful and unproductive.

The EV smelled like home, and she really had thought she could count on it.

After a long moment, she put it back in the case. Her knees hurt, so she levered herself onto the bunk.

This was a setback. How was she supposed to go outside with nothing to wear? She’d have to borrow something—and hope that the suits on Almayer Station were better than the medical kits.

They were, of course. She’d inspected them.

Her VR collar was sitting on the bed beside her. That was even more tempting than the shower, and also totally out of the question. If her EV didn’t work, what were the odds the collar still did?

Air. Air first.

She put on clean fatigue trousers and a Service-issue t-shirt, then padded into the corridor with her database. The deck was icy underfoot, but that was all right after the clunky tech boots, which had been like sweaty ovens. She’d had to wear those insulated socks that were itchy but also somehow smooth, almost slimy, as though they’d been engineered to feel as distracting and alien as possible.

Clean clothes were almost as good as a shower.

“...patents in the fields of biomechanical and pharmaceutical...”

She paused in the junction to consult her database for a schematic of the hull. The system had given her the location of the breach, but that didn’t actually tell her how to reach it.

It looked like the leak was on Connection B, one of the structural supports that attached the station to the refinery.

A break in a line like that wouldn’t drain the station even if she left it alone for a year, but the shortage had been critical. She went deeper into the schematics, looking at the life support system more closely.

So the recycling process actually took place in the refinery, not the station. Breathable air was piped back through a large artery that ran through the connector. Maybe that was efficient in terms of power, but from a safety perspective, it was asinine.

It was natural to assume that this facility had been designed with some common sense, but that kept coming up wrong. If something meaningful broke, it was probably going to be in the refinery, so the station, where all the people were, needed to be able to jettison the refinery in the event of an emergency.

And maybe Almayer Station could, but apparently they’d also be cutting loose their air supply. The engineers behind this must have been under incredible pressure to keep their bid down; there was no other explanation for these decisions.

This was exactly the sort of thing she had been sent here to discover and cite.

The best way to reach the leak would be to go out the airlock down by the tram dock. There was an automated personnel capsule that ran between the station and the refinery. If the tram was at the far dock, the nearer one could be used as an airlock. That would give her the shortest trip to the connector.

That was down near Maintenance Supply, where she could get what she needed. That was convenient.

Perfect. This would be easy.

Her luck was finally starting to turn around.

Four

At least there was one thing the station didn’t skimp on.

Maintenance Supply had something for any conceivable need. There were a dozen more tool kits like the one she’d left in engineering, and everything else a tech could ask for.

She pulled down a bag and began to fill it with things she might need. Heavy adhesive and a handheld vacuum welder were the main things. O2 was pretty chemically benign; it wasn’t going to eat through her patch. As breach jobs went, this would be a simple one.

All she had to do was find the breach, install a force shield over it, cover the shield with adhesive, and forget all about it. A child could do this.

Hauling the bag and her database, she left the supply depot and headed for the tram dock.

The wide doorway that led to the staging area was flanked by a pair of feeds displaying safety reminders for the workers getting ready to transition from the station to the refinery.

Even when the refinery was functioning, there were no workers. The facility was almost completely automated. The only reason for anyone to go over there was to fix something when it broke down.

She had made the trip a couple times already for her inspection and hadn’t turned up any major problems.

She dropped her things in the airlock and called up the tram control. The carriage was lit up and waiting on the other side of the airlock doors.

There were niches for eight tech suits; seven of them were there.

She eyed them with disgust. Bulky. Ridiculous. How was anyone supposed to do anything with a massive globe on their head? These suits were reliable, but she’d been spoiled by Evagardian technology. She could wear an EV to bed, or for a spacewalk. Wearing one of these galactic suits was like wearing a building.

Scowling, she pulled down the nearest one and looked it over.

The stims were working, at least. She was awake.

It would be foolish to count on the tech suits’ AI to work. If her EV hadn’t survived the radiation, these certainly wouldn’t have. That wasn’t an insurmountable problem; the suits would still perform their basic function of keeping her alive outside, but she wouldn’t have navigation or a heads-up display.

The suits were simple to operate. Put it on, pressurize, check integrity, seal helmet.

She stripped down and pulled on the orange thermal bodysuit that went under the tech suit. There was guilt about putting on all these different clothes; all she was doing was getting them dirty. It was wasteful. She should’ve bathed when she had the chance.

Her thoughts were wandering again already.

She threw her clothes out of the airlock and climbed into the tech suit. Once it was tightened down, it wasn’t uncomfortable, but her range of movement was poor, and the suit weighed at least twenty kilograms.

She got the helmet on and sealed it, powering up the suit. The readout was dead, but there were safety lights. Interesting; she hadn’t even expected that much. She took a few breaths and checked her reserves.

“Okay,” she said, and the bowl-like helmet made her voice sound strange and hollow.

She toddled over to the panel and began the cycle, then picked up her tools, making sure the bag was securely closed. A sturdy clip attached her database to her chest. The device was designed to be worn this way for easy reference outside.

The tram slid away from the station. That was an automatic response to the cycle; you couldn’t use the airlock this way if the carriage was blocking it.

The refinery looked much larger from the outside. There was a large section that people were meant to see, but the facility was really a hundred times that size. Deilani’s inspection had been cursory; she was more interested in core safety features and the health of the crew than the technical specifications of the station. She wasn’t expected to go poking through every nook and cranny of it. That would be a job for a proper inspection team, but it would be some time before the newly formed Department of Demenis Affairs would have one free to send to such a low-priority site.

The cycle finished and the airlock opened.

Making sure her tools were secure, she walked out, climbing through the outer hatch. She had to adjust her perception of up and down as she clambered onto the station’s hull.

The connector was directly in front of her, only about fifty meters away. Faint movement was visible beyond it, and that could only be the leak.

The station was underfoot as she made her way forward, and the refinery was above her, creating the impression that she was in a room with no walls, only a ceiling. She could see the stars and the billowing shape of the anomaly.

It looked massive, perhaps because it was so close to the station. The swirling black and gray blocked out so much space that it might have been
space. From certain viewports on the station, you couldn’t even see stars, just the cloud.

She stopped. What had that been, right there? Pink? In the cloud?

It might have just been her eyes, but she’d seen that a few times before, but never clearly. It was a suggestion, a whisper—she always noticed it when she saw the anomaly from the corner of her eye.

She reached the connector and had to adjust her perspective a second time to climb on. Now the station was behind her and the refinery was ahead. She made her way around the conduit until the leak came into view. It was obviously substantial; the O2 reading hadn’t been faulty.

That was heartening. Sort of.

The white gas floated off silently toward the black and gray clouds.

The hull stretched away to her right, and a slight corona of starlight was visible on the curvature. Twisted wreckage from Doctor Rigby’s research ship and the massive scar on the side of the station stood out clearly.

When she’d pressed Suarez for information about the doctor, he’d joked that Rigby was a mad scientist. He probably hadn’t expected Rigby’s ship to explode less than a week later.

Deilani had been in the refinery at the time. She still wasn’t sure why that had afforded her so much more protection from the radiation than the others, but she knew that without it, she’d have ended up just like everyone else.

Movement caught her eye: the three massive arms were rotating. Those were the collectors, repositioning. Each arm housed hundreds of panels to harvest both the particles being drawn into the anomaly and the particles that emerged from it. They had to move periodically to get better concentrations as the anomaly deformed and shifted. What they collected was sent back through the arms to the refinery. That was all she’d had time to learn before Rigby’s ship did its supernova impression.

There was work to do. It wasn’t clear why the O2 relay hadn’t switched to the backup when the breach was detected. That wasn’t an electronic function, it was a mechanical one—radiation shouldn’t have interfered with it.

The access hatch was malformed; it must’ve been struck by debris from Rigby’s ship. She used her cutter to slice away some of the plating, revealing the controls. There was nothing to stop her from hitting the release and redirecting the O2 flow to the other channel.

Or she could patch the leak and let it continue as it was in the main conduit. She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. It would have been nice to rub her face, or throw a little water on it. It had been the same when she’d trekked across Nidaros with the Admiral and the others. She was quickly growing to despise helmets, and the buzz from those stims had come and gone so quickly that she needn’t have bothered.

There was no profit in patching the leak. In the best-case scenario, it would be the same outcome as rerouting. More likely, in her exhausted state, she would make a mistake. Then she’d have to come back out and fix it again later.

It was better this way.

She reached in and twisted the handle. The shutoff was instantaneous: the choke clamped down, halting the flow. A few final clouds dispersed, and in only seconds, it was as though there had been no leak at all.

She should’ve been able to do this from the bridge, but those menus in the computer had been a mess.

In any case, the job was done for now.

She started the long walk back, with no choice but to use an almost outrageous swagger just to get the suit to move. Because she wore no safety line, she had to make sure her magnets activated for every step. A part of her was glad there was no one to see this.

She reached the airlock and swung inside to hit the release. Gasses vented, and the cycle began. She looked back. The track that the carriage followed between the station and the refinery stretched away into the gloom, lost in the dark shape of the refinery.

This would be an awkward time for the carriage to return; if it did, she would be crushed. This airlock wasn’t meant for this. It would’ve been safer to use the tech discharge, but that was on the other side of the station. She’d have to spend half an hour walking along the hull to get to the connector.

The carriage wasn’t coming. Luck had to be on her side once in a while.

She stiffened as the heat returned to her chest. It was like a wide, burning tongue dragging over her skin. She grabbed a handhold, clenching her jaw and closing her eyes. The sensations weren’t all unpleasant, but that only made it worse.

It wasn’t what it felt like. It couldn’t be. She was sealed in a tech suit and wearing a skin-tight thermal bodysuit beneath. This was just some kind of bizarre skin irritation.

She shuddered, choking on the air she was trying to breathe. The feeling wasn’t painful, but it was intense, almost overwhelming. If she hadn’t been in zero g, she wouldn’t have been able to stay on her feet. There were twinges from other parts of her as well, and it didn’t make any sense.

In an instant, it was over. It couldn’t have lasted more than a moment, but it had been enough to put her entire body into overdrive. Her temperature was up, and so was her heart rate.

The hatch opened and she hauled herself through, gasping. Gravity felt good. She turned over and scrambled away as though there were something dangerous out there.

Her back hit the bulkhead and she stopped, letting out a long breath as the outer hatch closed. Everything was all right. It was skin irritation. She had just been startled; there was nothing abnormal about being a little jumpy.

That was all. Everything was fine.

She struggled out of the suit as air was pumped into the room. The inner hatch had a small viewport, and as she tossed her helmet aside, a figure moved past.

Her breath caught and she flinched. It had happened quickly, just a dark shape going by. So quickly that she’d nearly missed it altogether.

Yet she wasn’t sure she’d seen it at all.

The cycle finished. Still frozen, she watched the hatch slide open. Several moments went by before she was able to make herself step out into the corridor.

There was no one there.

Had that been Roth? It had looked
like him. That, of course, was impossible.

Medical. She needed medical.

Five

She didn’t wait around.

Her alertness, such as it was, wouldn’t last forever. There was no time to waste hesitating, or letting her nerves get the best of her.

She went back into the staging room and finished stripping out of the tech suit. There were no alarms wailing, no klaxons as she put on her clothes; she took that to mean that she’d successfully redirected the oxygen flow.

A few minutes ago, that would’ve been good news.

But now she was hallucinating. She was a doctor.

You could either enter Imperial Service training as a realist and graduate as one, or you could enter as something else and graduate as a realist. There was no third option.

Phantom sensation, hallucination. That wasn’t very ambiguous. She had optimistically hoped that because she was still alive, she was unaffected by Rigby’s radiation. So much for that.

Power was restored, and the station had air.

She tried to think. Radiation that could interfere with solid state systems had to be... she stopped herself. She didn’t have to diagnose. She’d already done that.

The tech suit lay in a heap on the deck, along with her tools.

This wasn’t the time to be tidy. She hurried into the corridor, carrying her maintenance database. The rubber was cold to the touch after the time outside, and she could smell the pungent, acidic decontaminant still clinging to it from the cycle in the airlock. Galactic decontamination measures were certainly quaint.

The infirmary was on the middle deck, positioned near the personnel dock. A rare instance of the station engineers getting something right: an infirmary needed to be centrally located.

“...spearheaded by award-winning Theoretical Physicist, Doctor H.R. Rigby...”

One of the feeds flickered, delaying the audio and causing an unnerving echo.

Deilani didn’t slow down. That thermal bodysuit had done a good job of keeping her warm, but now she was getting chilly, and the icy floor no longer seemed quite so refreshing. It was time to put on some socks.

She skidded to a stop, catching her breath and holding absolutely still. In front of her was the doorway to the executive lounge at the corner of the main junction, just a short walk from the bridge.

The lounge was for the station’s administrators, but with a working crew so small, Almayer Station had never needed that distinction between the showrunners and the working class. The hatch had been locked open long before Deilani arrived. Anyone could drink at the executive bar, although the radiation had fried the bartending android.

A man was sitting on a stool, his back to the door. He wore a familiar jacket with the word ALMAYER
printed on the back.

“Chief,” Deilani said, checking over her shoulder to make sure she was alone in the corridor.

Suarez didn’t reply. She entered the lounge, but kept her distance. Her collarbone throbbed where he’d bitten her.

“Chief Suarez,” she repeated. “It’s me, Lieutenant Deilani. How are you feeling?”

His arm moved, and there was a slight tinkling of ice cubes in a glass. She watched him take a drink. His jacket was a little rumpled.

He didn’t appear to be bleeding, so that blood she’d seen on the deck earlier had come from someone else.

She took a cautious step to her right, thinking of positioning to get a look at his face, but decided against it.

“Chief,” she repeated, more firmly. No response. She licked her lips. “Chief, have you seen Pilot Officer Barry?” She checked her holo, which wasn’t working, but it was habit. “I believe I saw her about... eighteen hours ago. She didn’t look good, but I couldn’t get her into the infirmary. It was locked down because there was no power. Have you seen her? I told her to go to her quarters, but I checked a few hours ago and she wasn’t there.”

He continued to ignore her. It was best not to bring up the bite. She stared at his back, remembering the figure passing the viewport.

“I saw Roth a minute ago. I thought he was dead. I know
he’s dead. I might be hallucinating. If that’s the case, there isn’t anyone else to keep an eye on things, unless Dawkes can do it. And I don’t think he can. He’s— he’s not himself. I restored power. Which you know, obviously. Because you used that ice maker,” she said, watching him closely for a reaction. “And I took care of the O2 leak. So we’re not in any immediate danger. We should be able to just... ride it out. Wait for rescue.”

There might’ve been a twitch there, but she couldn’t swear to it.

She stayed quiet for a moment, but he didn’t say anything.

“How’s your side?” she asked. “I can dress it again for you.” The promotional audio started up again behind her. “If you’d like.”

“Welcome to Almayer Station...”

“Have you seen Dawkes?” she asked halfheartedly.

“...one of the most exciting investment opportunities...”

No answer.

Slowly, she backed into the corridor. She started to walk and didn’t look back.

There was more blood on the deck outside the infirmary, but it wasn’t much. Was Barry the one bleeding? No, it was probably Dawkes.

Or Roth?

She closed her eyes and tried to picture what she’d seen through the airlock’s viewport. The man that had walked past in the corridor could only
be Roth. She didn’t know anyone on Almayer Station terribly well; there hadn’t been time, but the man she’d seen had been tall. Barry was petite, and Suarez was shorter than Deilani herself. Dawkes was only slightly taller.

It could only be Roth, but Roth was dead, and there was no one else who could be walking around the station.

At least, there wasn’t supposed to be.

It looked like her work wasn’t done yet. She let out a loud groan of frustration and opened the infirmary hatch. The interior was cramped but bright. It was well-equipped for a galactic facility.

The hatch closed behind her, and she eyed it warily.

Suarez was just down the corridor. She swallowed, then keyed the door for a quarantine exercise. She couldn’t count on the lock, but perhaps the infirmary would take a quarantine seriously. Just for a moment, she wanted to be able to let down her guard.

A heavy metal bar clunked into place, and there was the vague shift in the feel of the air as the door sealed.

That was as secure as the place was going to get.

The medical android was seated on a stool in the corner, another casualty of the radiation. If it had been functioning, it would’ve greeted her.

The automated systems were down. Whatever she wanted done, she’d have to do herself.

The chemical locker was sealed. She tapped her knuckles on the transparent shielding; it wasn’t something she could just smash. She might be able to cut through it, but that might not be necessary. She gazed at the android. It wouldn’t work correctly, but it still had power. That meant it was, after a fashion, alive.

She hoisted it off the stool as she might an injured crewmate. The android was made to look like a young man, and it didn’t weigh as much a real human would have. She pressed the android’s palm to the reader, and the chemical locker unsealed. Androids didn’t have fingerprints, but a palm reader needed a palm, and the android was the nurse.

She dumped the android unceremoniously on the deck and yanked the shield aside, leaning in to read the labels on the bottles.

Radiation poisoning was her first priority. She couldn’t treat it unless she identified it.

All she had to work with was a selection of isotopes and a pad of culture strips. This was beyond primitive, but it would be more trustworthy than anything from a scanner at the moment. She smoothed a strip on the counter and added the isotope.

And there was a second check she could perform while she waited.

She had been able to stay calm until now, more or less, but it was catching up with her. If she really was seeing things because of the radiation, there wasn’t much she could do about it. The damage was done. There was no stasis here, and no hope of jury-rigging anything comparable to it. Not even a real tech could do that. In the state she was in, she’d be lucky to get coffee out of a combiner.

She blacked out as she stepped away from the counter.

It was only for a heartbeat, just a flash. She caught herself before she could fall, and spots swam in her eyes.

First things first. Turning away from the microscope, she looked past the bottles in the locker to the pre-loaded hypos.

Without knowing exactly what was in all those stims she’d been gulping down through these long hours, it was impossible to do this responsibly.

So she’d do it irresponsibly. Her heart might pop like a bubble, but she’d be awake when it did. She found a powerful stim that she recognized. The dosage was keyed for a man; that was fine.

Death by overdose wasn’t even close to the worst thing she could think of.

She pulled up her shirt and injected herself in the hip, pushing in the full dose.

The stimulant took less than five seconds to hit her brain. It was as though she’d been underwater but was now coming up for air.

Her fingers began to tremble, and she sucked in a long breath through her teeth. She let out a little groan as the tremors passed. Not healthy. Not even close, and she was a doctor.

A giggle began and died somewhere in her chest, but she really did feel much better.

To think there’d been a time when she’d judged people who were dependent on chemicals.

She went to the microscope and ejected the tray. Using the point of the expended hypo, she pricked her finger and squeezed a few drops of blood onto a fresh slate, then pushed the tray back in and switched on the viewer.

She glanced back to check her culture strip. It wasn’t glowing; that was probably good.

Everything she saw through the microscope looked normal. There didn’t appear to be anything in her blood that didn’t belong there. She plugged the isotope bottle directly into the injection unit and put her eyes to the viewer again, her hands on the control.

She watched for a reaction.

There was none. Of course, if her blood was so irradiated that it would react in this situation, she’d have been dead long ago, and her corpse would have made an excellent night light.

So far so good. She powered down the microscope and went back to the cabinet. The culture strip had faded to a light blue. She didn’t know what that meant.

She fumbled with her database, hoping there were medical manuals in it. She was a doctor
for the Empress’ sake. This was ridiculous.

She scrolled through the tables, double-checked the isotope, and crossed it against the spectrum of radiation known to be associated with the anomaly.

If she was right—and the stim was working well enough that she believed that she was—then there was radiation present, but the levels were low. What the culture strip was reacting to was already deeply decayed. That would mean the anomalous particles dispersed by Rigby’s ship had a short half-life. That supported Deilani’s theory that her insulation from the initial exposure was the reason she was still alive, if not exactly well. She’d missed the worst of it. But why? Why would the refinery offer a different level of protection from the rest of the ship? Now that the power was back on, that question probably deserved a little more attention.

If she was just sleep-deprived, not brain-damaged, that meant she had a fighting chance, but it didn’t mean she hadn’t imagined seeing Roth walk past that viewport. Visual and auditory hallucinations—at a certain level of fatigue, all bets were off. She was just surprised her psychotic break hadn’t come sooner. But now it was here, and she would have to sleep soon. There was no escaping it.

Roth was dead. That was a fact. She couldn’t clearly remember his body; she just remembered a lot of dark, a lot of fear, and a lot of toil. But he was
dead. She didn’t believe it; she knew
it. It couldn’t have been Barry or Suarez passing that viewport, and she was convinced it hadn’t been Dawkes.

She gazed down at the drop of blood welling from her pricked finger and prayed to the Empress that she’d imagined what she’d seen.

Because there was one more man left alive aboard Almayer Station, but he wasn’t supposed to be walking around.

Six

She perched on the examination table and pulled her shirt over her head, revealing the bandage just beneath her collarbone. She peeled it back for a look.

It had taken a full hour to unlock the tram between the station and the refinery after the initial explosion. She’d felt the station shudder, and the comms had died along with everything else.

Without any idea what was going on, she’d made her way back across to find nothing but flashing lights and blaring alarms.

Bleeding, Suarez had stumbled out of an airlock. He’d been in Barry’s shuttle when Rigby’s ship went up. The shuttle’s shields had probably saved his life, but he hadn’t been as lucky as Deilani. He had a piece of shrapnel in his side, and worse, he’d been exposed to the radiation. The shrapnel wound wasn’t mortal, but it was nasty. She had gotten him treated, put him to bed, and gone off to figure out how to restore power.

She’d caught a glimpse of him staggering through the corridors some time later, but with no power and a long list of repairs to make, she hadn’t chased him. There was nothing she could do for him without the infirmary, and she’d needed power to get that door open.

Then he’d shown up and bitten
her.

There still wasn’t much she could do. Even with Evagardian facilities, all she could think of was to put him in stasis until some specialists could look at him.

The bite wasn’t pretty. She’d have a scar that would be very impressive but not very attractive. The Service would pay to have it removed, of course—that was, if they ever bothered to show up.

They were already overdue.

The loss of power should have automatically activated Almayer Station’s emergency beacon; that technology would take more than radiation to knock out. This was Imperial space, so Demenis was now regularly patrolled. Someone should’ve arrived by now, and that was just one more thing about all this that didn’t line up.

She disinfected the wound and applied a new bandage.

Anything that affected the brain, or even just body chemistry, could directly affect cognition and behavior. She had never heard of radiation affecting people this way, but she had no other explanation. It was making them unpredictable. Dangerous. She thought about Suarez, then Dawkes. Very dangerous.

But they were sick, and they weren’t thinking straight. They weren’t much of a threat, but she couldn’t let her guard down. Suarez had bitten her once. There was no reason to think he would do it again, and no reason to think he wouldn’t.

She pulled her shirt back on and left the infirmary. The deck no longer felt cold underfoot; in fact, she’d started to sweat because of the stimulant.

Suarez was no longer in the executive lounge.

There was a glass with a little water in it on the bar, and an empty bottle.

There was also a holo, still active. It belonged on someone’s wrist, but it was here instead. Deilani glanced back at the hatch, then slipped onto the stool and picked it up. It had to belong to Suarez. Why would he take it off? Probably because it wasn’t working correctly; she could tell at once that it was damaged—but not destroyed, like hers was. Part of the holographic display was badly discolored, but there was still enough to see what was queued up. It was a recording.

Curious, Deilani activated it.

It was an interview on some galactic talk program.

“...I’m used to that kind of skepticism,”

Rigby confessed to the interviewer. His face was hidden by the distortion, but she recognized his voice. “All the signs are there. At its heart, my work is simple. Professor William Belle’s early papers on Harbinger are what inspired me in the beginning. Our existence functions according to rules, rules that we mostly agree on. But there are still things we don’t understand, things that don’t fit into our framework. Things like gravity. We accept gravity, and we can even fake it convincingly. But in many ways, it’s still an unknown. The fact that there are forces and phenomena that we don’t have exhaustive explanations for is a fairly solid indication that our existence is larger and more complex than we give it credit for. That’s it. It’s fine to give me funny looks, but at the end of the day, that’s all I’m saying. That there’s more out there to think about. For reasons that I understand and appreciate intimately, historically, we in the scientific community have chafed at having to admit that we don’t have all the answers. We’d much rather talk about what we do understand than what we don’t, and that’s led to certain things being—well, I’d say slept on.”

“Your work’s been called dangerous,”

the interviewer said.

“It’s easy to say that there’s something out there. Getting at it isn’t so simple. I’ve proposed some pretty radical stuff, and I’m right there with anyone who thinks it’s dangerous. It is. I’m not arguing that. What I’m arguing is that it’s worth it.”

“You say with such certainty, but all along you’ve struggled to articulate exactly what you’re trying to find out there.”

“I don’t think we’re alone,”

Rigby replied, shrugging. “That I can articulate easily enough. I believe there’s more at work around us and inside us, and we don’t even realize it. I
knowthat this is true. I haven’t proved it; this is science, and in science, we don’t prove things. We collect and present evidence. And the evidence? I’ve collected it.”

“You’re talking about your ghost signals. Impulses that you pull out of the vacuum and turn into data. I know there’s some skepticism about that.”

“That’s an understatement, but it would be irresponsible if I let myself be deterred by a lukewarm academic reception. In certain systems, where certain phenomena appear, it is possible with the right equipment to perceive things that otherwise would go unnoticed. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past five years. My findings so far are like footprints. They are very clear, and no one who examines my findings has been able to dispute that. Unfortunately, this raises more questions than it answers. The next step is to go forward, push harder, and find whatever’s leaving these footprints behind.”

The video ended. Deilani frowned, trying to remember her interactions with Rigby before all of this, but she’d barely seen him. They certainly hadn’t talked about anything like this.

Why would Suarez have been watching that interview on his holo? What had Rigby been doing that made his ship explode? She still didn’t have an answer for that. It seemed important, yet it wasn’t. Air was important. And who could she ask?

Well, there was one person.

She left the lounge and climbed down to the lower deck, then followed the outer corridor back to the tram’s airlock.

Outside the staging room, she paused to look in either direction. This was where Roth, or someone as tall as Roth, had walked past. She chewed her lip for a moment, then called the tram.

“...every member of the Almayer team is like a part of the Yagami family...”

Only three members of the Almayer team had survived; at least, that had been the case a few hours ago. By now, Suarez might be the only one left. It had been long enough since she’d had a sighting of Barry or Dawkes that their odds didn’t seem good. They could easily have succumbed while she was focused on restoring power.

But if they were still alive, then finding Barry was a priority. Deilani had to locate her before Dawkes did. Now that power was restored, that might be feasible, but not until she’d put her mind at ease about what she’d seen.

The carriage arrived, and the trip across to the refinery was short. She gazed out at the black and gray turmoil that surrounded the station. It was a bit like watching a storm, except instead of forming a ceiling above, the clouds were everywhere, all around.

The arms were moving again, and lights came on in sequence as they rotated into position. So that system was working perfectly. What a relief.

More lights shone on the top deck of the station she was leaving behind.

She frowned, uncertain. Which windows were those? Someone had to be up there. Suarez? Most likely, but he hadn’t reacted to her at all when she spoke to him. He probably didn’t have long to live.

The bite on her collarbone ached, and so did the awful bruise on her back. Even if she didn’t particularly want to, it was her duty to help these men if she could. Radiation poisoning wasn’t something she could fix, but she might be able to keep the survivors alive until help arrived. At the very least, she could make them comfortable.

She’d honestly believed that restoring power would be the hard part. It was a good thing she’d gotten all of her tears out a while ago, because there was a feeling welling up in her chest and throat that she didn’t particularly care for.

The tram locked into place and the airlock opened. She stepped inside, and the cycle began. Beyond lay the refinery’s foyer. A promotional message began as she stepped through the hatch. She ignored it and hurried into the admin corridor.

The emergency lock was still in place over the conference room keypad. Seeing it, she let out her breath and leaned against the wall. Even if the doors couldn’t be trusted, that big manual lock wasn’t going anywhere.

She looked through the viewport.

The man inside turned toward her, and she moved out of sight on reflex, but that was silly. She was perfectly safe. Feeling a little foolish, she straightened up and faced him.

He was by the table, and she had a feeling he’d been pacing. He was tall, but not nearly as tall as Roth. This was only the third time she’d laid eyes on him. His hair was disheveled, and he was visibly tired, but he looked good. Indeed, Deilani didn’t remember him seeming quite so attractive the last time she’d seen him. That seemed like an odd thought to have, but she was having plenty of those. Was this what isolation and exhaustion did to her? She wasn’t the only survivor, but she was the only lucid
one on the station, and it had worn her down.

This man’s name was Mabry, and he was a prisoner. Almayer Station had no brig, so he was confined to this conference room. According to Suarez, he was accused of what amounted to corporate espionage. She didn’t have all the details, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them. The whole affair was suspicious, but Rigby’s ship had blown up before she could even give serious thought to getting to the bottom of it.

For a moment, she had feared that Mabry had gotten loose somehow, that he was the one walking around, but that clearly wasn’t the case. Was he dangerous? Did he deserve to be locked up? She didn’t know the first thing about him. Once she’d been convinced he wasn’t being mistreated, she’d sent a report on his situation, with a request for guidance. She’d planned to check on him periodically until she got definitive orders on how to deal with his situation.

But things had happened.

He approached, looking curious. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he needed a shave.

He still looked good, but also concerned, and that was telling. Deilani didn’t want to think about what she looked like.

“Morning,” he said.

Was it? Did it matter? Deilani didn’t reply.

“Are you okay? You don’t look good.”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

“I’m sure you’re not here to let me out. But it’s been a really long time
since I’ve eaten,” he said frankly. “I’m not trying to be high-maintenance.”

She blanched. Of course no one had fed him since the explosion; the crew had been busy dying, or in the case of Suarez, Barry, and Dawkes, losing their grip. Deilani had been busy trying to restore power.

No one had been thinking about this guy. He’d been Suarez’s responsibility before it had all gone to hell.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she told him. “Have you seen anyone since the power came back on?”

“Just Roth,” Mabry replied.

It was as though he’d punched her in the gut. She placed her hand on the doorframe to steady herself and swallowed. “When?”

He shrugged and gave her a helpless look. “An hour ago? I don’t know.”

Nothing felt better than talking to someone, really talking to them. Mabry seemed normal, and he was the only other person who’d been on the refinery side when Rigby’s ship exploded.

But Deilani didn’t like what she was hearing.

“You’re sure it was him?”

He shrugged. “What happened? Did somebody hit us?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who would hit us?”

“Mercs, I would think. There are a couple guys in Free Trade space that know enough about this place to try something.” He rubbed his face. “What did they look like?”

“Nobody attacked us. Rigby’s ship went up on its own.”

Mabry blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The ship blew up.” There was no other way to put it. “There was no warning. The station sustained some damage, and that was why we lost power.”

He didn’t look happy. In fact, for a moment he looked unfriendly, but then he seemed to deflate, and he just shook his head.

She caught his eye. “Did Roth say anything to you?”

“He just looked at me, and did something with the door.”

“Did what?”

“I don’t know, I can’t see,” he replied, annoyed. That was fair; the little viewport didn’t offer much of a field of view. “I tried to ask him if he had a calorie bar. He just left, and he didn’t look like himself. Who are
you?”

“I told you who I was.”

“I didn’t believe you. You said you were a doctor, but you were asking questions like a cop. I don’t like cops.”

She groaned. “I really am a doctor. And an officer in the Service,” she added. “I came here to do a Health and Wellness inspection.”

He stared at her face. “How’s that working out?”

She ignored that. “Did he go that way? What’s down there?” She pointed down the corridor.

“That’s the personnel entrance. The only other way in is through the maintenance shafts. He’s probably still in there. I mean, he’s Yagami’s money guy. He’s not a tech. What’s he doing over here? And do you need to lie down? I think I already said this, but you really
don’t look good.”

“Neither do you,” she snapped, although it wasn’t true. He did look good—he was looking better every second, and that wasn’t right. That wasn’t like her—at least, not during a crisis. “Stay here,” she snapped.

“As opposed to what?”

That was a good point. She stepped away from the door.

What she needed was a holo with access to the security feeds, but only Dawkes would have that if it even still worked, and she didn’t want to see him. There was also Dawkes’ office, but that was over on the station. She’d have to take the tram back, then do a lot of walking and climbing to get there.

Her temper was rising.

She took one last look at Mabry, then jogged toward the pressure doors, which hissed open as she approached. She emerged onto the viewing deck. This was a fixture intended to show off the refinery, which looked appropriately vast and impressive. There were four processing cores, plus a lot of machinery that wasn’t supposed to be her problem.

The systems didn’t require much human participation, but they all had to be maintained. There were robots for that, but those
had to be maintained. That was where the station techs came in.

There were walkways and trenches, even tracks for some of the larger robotic components.

It was all hidden by the dark, though. The refinery was still on emergency power.

If Roth was in there somewhere, how was she supposed to find him, even with light? It was a maze of corridors and crawlspaces. There would be break rooms, lavatories, storage rooms, supply depots—it was massive.

All the techs that had worked the refinery were dead, yet apparently Roth had chosen to come in here.

The master console was no use to her. Even if she knew how to operate it, it probably wouldn’t help her locate Roth, if he was really here.

She was growing increasingly confident about what she’d seen, and Mabry had no reason to lie about this.

Who was
he, though? Was he really some kind of criminal? Probably. She had known from the beginning there were things that Suarez and Yagami were hiding from her. Before all this, that hadn’t bothered her much. Galactics couldn’t be trusted; that was a given, but it was beginning to look like she should have dug a little deeper.

She stood at the railing and gazed out at the dark refinery. It was a lot to take in. The machinery was breathtaking in its scale.

“Roth,” she said, and the name echoed in the space. “Mr. Roth, are you here?”

She leaned on the railing, straining her ears.

“Roth,” she repeated, much louder this time.

Nothing. She could climb down; she could check these walkways, explore these corridors, poke through these rooms. She could open closets and lockers, she could look under the bunk in the crash room, and maybe she would find something. Anything was possible.

But it would take time she didn’t have. There were plenty of things to be afraid of, but none terrified her more than sleep—and it was the one thing she couldn’t stop. She was running out of ways to fight it, and no matter what, it was a losing battle.

Seven

As the carriage took her back to the station, the panic rising in her chest was getting harder to fight. There was no stopping her brain from working, trying to triage, but like the rest of her, her brain wasn’t at its best. She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t know how costly that could be.

Yet there was so much to do.

She prayed to the Empress that the stim she’d taken could carry her a little farther, because her heart was racing, and another dose would be a bad, possibly fatal idea. The last
one had been risky.

The carriage docked, and she paced the airlock for the ten seconds it took to cycle, then darted into the corridor. Bare feet pounding the cold deck, Deilani ran to the nearest ladder and climbed up as the promotional audio echoed through the empty station.

“...with a diverse crew of highly-specialized personnel, only the finest...”

She kept on at a jog, knowing perfectly well that her priorities were in an even sorrier state than she was. She didn’t care.

Roth. Roth
. Why him? This was where her stubborn refusal to sleep was coming back to bite her: she couldn’t remember his body. She remembered him from when he was alive, but that felt like a long time ago. She hadn’t seen
much of him; she had been inspecting the station, and he had been Yagami’s accountant.

He was still dead. She was sure of it.

She pushed her way through the dining room and into the galley. She yanked open the door to the freezer and stepped through, immediately regretting it.

The floor froze her feet, and she felt her entire body turn to gooseflesh.

Almayer Station had no morgue. There were a mere two preservation units in the infirmary for bodies, and they were both unoccupied because she hadn’t been able to get in there when she’d been dealing with the dead. Thanks to the chems stored there, it wasn’t uncommon for galactic infirmaries to be the most secure rooms of all.

But she’d still needed a place for the bodies, and the freezer had seemed like the obvious choice. Even without power, the temperature there would remain lower for some time.

There were probably people who would object to having bodies stored with food, but Deilani was a doctor. She wasn’t superstitious.

She had put women on the left, and men on the right. The bodies weren’t laid out with much ceremony. Dignity for the dead hadn’t been high on her list of priorities when she’d been trying to piece together what had happened and sort out the immediate aftermath of the explosion.

Every corpse that was in the freezer, she had carted there.

Now, walking in and seeing it for the first time in proper light, she was grateful for the stims and the fatigue. She wasn’t herself, and she probably wouldn’t remember any of this. At least, that was what she hoped.

In the dark, everything had been flashes, images, still shots captured by her brain in the glare of her hand light. It wasn’t easy to suppress those and put them away, but she had done it.

Now it was right in front of her. She could see their wounds, their faces, their expressions, frosted over.

Roth’s body wasn’t there.

She shivered in the doorway, scanning the row of dead men a second time. She was tired and horrified, but not blind. Roth wasn’t there. Had he ever been there? She couldn’t be sure. Could she have overlooked him somehow?

She backed out and slammed the door, breathing hard and rubbing her arms vigorously. It wasn’t possible. If she hadn’t imagined seeing Roth, then she had imagined that he was dead. Either way, her brain was telling her something that wasn’t true.

She recalled the first hours following the explosion. It wasn’t out of the question that she’d somehow messed up, lost count, failed to find Roth. But then why was she so sure?

No. He was dead
. She had checked his pulse, dragged his body, and dumped him in the freezer with the rest of them. Roth was lean, but he was well over two meters tall. He was twice her weight, and she’d nearly thrown out her back moving him on and off the cart. There was no forgetting that.

It had been chaos, people dying and Deilani struggling to make sense of it, to understand. She had been confused and afraid, but she refused to believe that at any point, she had been unable to tell a living man from a dead one.

She left the galley and entered the pantry across the corridor. Beneath the coolant lines were bags of combiner gel. She’d put them here to keep them out of the freezer, but also to keep them cold. She wasn’t superstitious, but she still didn’t want to eat food that had been stored with corpses if she could help it.

She heaved a bag onto her shoulder and carried it back into the galley, laying it down on the counter. It took a moment to get the combiner open, and she resealed the bag of gel that was already inside. After so long without power, it couldn’t be trusted. She hoisted it out and replaced it. That done, she inserted a tray and began punching in codes.

With two overloaded containers of food, she headed back to the tram. There was no sound but the looping welcome messages and her own footsteps.

She saw no one.

It wasn’t safe to assume that Dawkes and Barry were dead just because she hadn’t seen them in a while. The bruise on her back hurt even more now than it had when it was fresh. She couldn’t let her guard down, and whatever edge she’d gotten from her latest stim was already softening.

She wished the carriage would move faster.

The black and gray anomaly moved and shifted, but it didn’t really change. It was a constant presence outside the viewports, part of the scenery.

The clouds tricked her eyes into appearing to boil as the airlock cycled on the refinery side, and she was left with an impression of pink without actually seeing it. The anomaly was just darkness, nothing else. She blinked rapidly and shook her head.

Mabry was at the far end of the conference room when she got there. He was leaning with his arms folded, watching the anomaly through the viewport. He noticed her.

“Face the wall,” she ordered. “Hands on the bulkhead.”

He obeyed without a word. She put the containers of food on the deck and keyed the lock. The hatch opened, and she pushed the food through with her foot, then sealed the room.

“Can I move?”

“Go ahead.”

He turned away from the wall, his eyes immediately falling on the containers. In a different state of mind, Deilani might have found the look of naked gratitude on his face humorous.

He tore his eyes away from the food. “If you’re still looking for Roth, I just saw him.”

She stiffened. “Here?”

“He came back through. Finally. Don’t look at me like that. I have nothing else to do but watch for someone to show up. Where is
everyone?”

“They’re dead.”

He stared at her, but she wasn’t going to repeat herself.

Mabry moved closer to the door.

“I thought you said Rigby’s ship blew,” he said slowly. “He should’ve been the only one aboard.”

“He was. There was a release of radiation; that’s what got us over here. It happened quickly.” It was true; the radiation alert was the last thing her holo had shown her before it stopped working. She studied Mabry’s face. He wasn’t faking that look of disbelief.

“Radiation?” he said, as though he’d never heard the word before.

“Seems like it. It’s the only explanation.”

He wasn’t even looking at her. She watched him put a hand over his mouth.

“Where’s Rigby?” he asked finally, meeting her eyes. He was composed, but Deilani didn’t like this look. He knew something.

“I assume he was on his yacht.”

“Is anyone else left?”

“Suarez, Dawkes, and Barry. Myself. You. I’m not sure about Dawkes and Barry now, but I saw Suarez less than an hour ago.”

“They’re okay but everyone else is dead?”

“They have severe radiation poisoning.” There was probably a more tactful way to say that, but she didn’t care.

“What about us?”

“Our exposure was less severe because we were over here, but I don’t know why. The refinery must have some shielding that the station doesn’t. I don’t know. Or maybe it decayed so quickly that it was less potent by the time it got here.”

“Radiation,” he repeated, staring at his feet.

“Maybe it’s not from the ship. Maybe it’s from the anomaly. But it’s the only way I can explain the damage to the station and
to the crew.”

“Okay, but there was no source of radiation aboard Rigby’s ship.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m in private security.”

She was taken aback by his candor. A mercenary. “What were you doing here?”

“Spying on Rigby. You’re an Imperial.”

“I identified myself, didn’t I?”

“Then I’m not your problem.”

“Everything
is my problem right now,” she hissed. “Look me in the eye and tell me you saw Roth.”

“Why are you so hung up on that?”

“Because he’s dead
,” she snarled, and he flinched. Had he not picked up on that? She’d told
him who was still alive, and Roth wasn’t one of them.

“What?”

“He dropped from the radiation with the rest of them. I put his body in the freezer, and you’re telling me he’s over here walking around.”

“Look, I don’t know what you think is going on, but he’s not dead. I’m losing my mind in here, not my eyesight.” He shrugged. “It’s Roth. There’s nobody else that tall.”

That was the response she had been hoping not to hear. Mabry wasn’t lying. She didn’t know if he’d actually seen Roth, but he believed he had.

It should’ve been good news. She’s seen Roth as well, and this meant she hadn’t imagined him.

But it wasn’t
good news.

“It was him,” Mabry repeated, searching her face. “You and him are the only two people I’ve seen since the lights went out. Well, someone was out there in the dark a while ago, but I don’t know who. Or what they were doing.”

“Did Roth say anything?” she asked desperately.

“No. He just looked at me and moved on. Just like last time. So what do we do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said everyone’s dead. Who’s coming, and when do they get here?”

“Comms are down like everything else. I activated the beacon,” Deilani told him. It was the first thing she’d done when people had started dying.

And it had struck her as odd when four hours later, there was no rescue.

Now quite a bit more than that.

He was staring at her.

“Wait, are you serious?”

“Did I say something funny?” she asked.

“You know
there’s no one coming.”

She had been beginning to suspect that, but she’d also been doing her best not to dwell on it.

“Would you like to tell me why?” she asked civilly.

“It’s not a real beacon.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know.” He leaned against the doorframe, gazing at her through the viewport. “It’s a toy.”

“What?”

“Like a toy holo that you give your kid. They can punch anybody’s call code into it, but it only actually calls mom and dad.”

She licked her lips. “So who’s mom and dad?” Who had she really tipped off when she activated the beacon?

Mabry had already looked worried. Now he was mortified.

“You don’t get it,” he said, stepping back. “You don’t know what this place is.”

Her emotions were, to put it politely, dysregulated. Coping skills were the last things on her mind.

“Enlighten me,” she ground out, and he blanched.

“This is Imperial space now. Everything in it belongs to the Empress. You think Yagami would just give it up because the sector name changed?”

“The Empress doesn’t give a damn about some corporate mining profits.”

“Mining profits,” he said softly, his eyes widening as she turned and stalked away. “You believed
that?” he called after her.

She kept walking. It bothered her how much she wanted to trust him, but she wasn’t that far gone yet.

“Hey,” Mabry’s voice echoed down the corridor. “Are you having the dream too?” he demanded.

Deilani stopped.

She turned and looked back, although she couldn’t see the viewport. It was almost like she could feel the universe crumbling around her.

He didn’t say anything else. There was a dull thump from inside the conference room, like he’d just slapped his palm against the wall.

Teeth grinding, she turned back to the airlock and froze.

The carriage wasn’t there. She rushed to the viewport, and there it was, a hundred meters out, gliding away.

There was someone aboard.

Eight

The carriage docked, and the distant silhouette vanished. Whoever it was, he was back on the station.

Deilani kept hitting the call command, but the carriage could only respond so quickly. She looked back toward the conference room.

Mabry knew things. He was a criminal, and he was already caught. Was he being honest out of desperation? Or trying to throw her off? It was hard to say, and the only certainty was that he’d say anything to get out of that room.

The carriage was finally coming back toward the refinery.

She’d known that these people were dodgy, but that wasn’t what she was here for. She’d never met anyone dodgier than the Admiral, but in retrospect, making an issue of that on Nidaros hadn’t been constructive. What did it matter if he was dodgy? What mattered was survival. The Admiral had understood that.

Deilani’s job was to keep people healthy. Criminal activity was someone else’s problem. She didn’t care what these people had been getting up to as long as they were getting up to it safely.

Which, obviously, they hadn’t been. She would’ve liked to stay in her lane, but they’d been hiding something, apparently something even bigger than she’d suspected.

It was time to find out what.

The tram came into dock, and she was wide awake for the moment, but there was no telling how long that would last.

Mabry knew about the dreams. She rubbed at her eyes as the doors shut. She was a realist, but she didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about the dreams themselves, and she didn’t want to think about the implications of Mabry’s words.

There was also the detail that if she didn’t sleep soon, she’d black out.

She watched the anomaly flow by for the fourth time in two hours. It never got any less hypnotic. She could see flashes of light in it, arcing patterns that presumably signaled some kind of release of energy. The source of the phantom radiation?

There were those colors again, but when she looked closer, they were gone.

Mabry had seriously believed the radiation wasn’t Rigby’s doing. As far as Deilani knew, that left only the anomaly as an alternative.

Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t about money. An operation like this could afford Evagardian taxes. It was something else they were trying to keep for themselves, something more valuable.

The Empress would allow people to collect resources and trade commodities as they pleased in exchange for taxes, but that ownership would always be there. If suitably inclined, the Empress could simply take whatever she wanted, because it was all hers to begin with. Deilani didn’t own any of her possessions; technically, she was simply borrowing them from the Empress.

That was what Yagami had been afraid of, and that was why she’d tried to hide the truth. Whatever she had here, whatever this really was, Yagami had believed it would prove to be an irresistible temptation to the Imperium.

The carriage locked into place.

Roth was up and about. There was no other explanation, and if Roth could operate the tram, maybe he could hold a conversation.

She left the airlock.

“Roth?” she called out loudly, immediately regretting it.

Moments passed. There was no reply.

She hefted her database. At least it
would never lie to her. The shortest way to the bridge was through the fitness center, then up the ladder. In a moment, she was climbing.

Everything was just as she’d left it. She still wished there was a way to lock the hatch, but wishing wouldn’t help. She took the main chair and pulled herself up to the center console, waking it up. Last time, it had been visibly corrupted. Now it looked correct, but it was running in safe mode. Maybe that would be an improvement.

Even in safe mode, emergency functions would be accessible. Deilani wanted the beacon. She’d told Mabry that she’d activated it, but that wasn’t exactly true. She’d pulled an emergency alarm. In a rational universe, that would trigger a beacon and signal the relevant emergency response agencies. In this case, that would be any Peacekeeper patrols close enough to respond.

She swiped through the menus, her heart sinking. Mabry had every reason to lie. The obvious play for him was to tell her that help wasn’t coming and present himself as someone who could be useful, all so she would let him out. Indeed, she was surprised he hadn’t pushed harder on that angle.

But Mabry had the evidence on his side. If Deilani’s alarm had correctly triggered the beacon, help would have been here ages ago.

This was unthinkable. And this couldn’t be blamed on radiation or system problems; it had to be deliberate.

She found it. There was
a beacon, and it was active.

But it wasn’t an SOS.

She accessed the data, and a viewer opened. Lines of code began to fill the holographic readout. It was encrypted. But it wasn’t a call for help; it couldn’t be. SOS signals were short and frequent, a simple pattern repeated indefinitely. This was something else; the beacon was writing a novel. There was no repetition that she could see.

She checked the frequency, finding it isolated. Isolation and encryption. What kind of beacon sent a signal that would only be picked up by someone who was looking for it?

Mabry wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling her everything.

These people weren’t just being greedy; they were taking some bold steps to keep their secrets. Or they had been. Yagami was dead; her
body was still in the freezer.

The beacon had been on Deilani’s inspection list. Maybe she should have done it first.

It was a pity that Yagami was dead; Deilani would’ve liked to rub that smug galactic’s face in her own idiocy. Yagami had sponsored the refinery, but what about Rigby? There had to be a connection. Rigby was obviously the key to whatever Yagami had been trying to do.

Deilani wasn’t a systems expert. She couldn’t tell who this encrypted data was meant for, but since Almayer Station seemed to begin and end with Yagami, it was probablygoing to her partners.

Perhaps it would’ve been a better idea to withhold the food and use it as leverage to get Mabry talking. He’d get hungry again eventually, and when he did, maybe then there’d be some real answers.

In the meantime, if the beacon wouldn’t send a message on Deilani’s behalf, she would send one herself.

Twenty minutes later, she was at a loss. Almayer Station had a comm array and a broadcast interface, but she couldn’t access it. Suarez probably could, but she had mixed feelings about that idea. She wasn’t sure she could find him, much less convince him to help.

And there was the detail that he’d bitten her. It hadn’t been a love bite, and it still hurt. She’d taken stims, not painkillers. Suarez was dangerous, probably every bit as dangerous as Dawkes. Approaching him was not in her best interests; she was better off to keep her distance.

And she still had to find Barry before Dawkes did.

The bridge didn’t have what she needed. There was surveillance all over the station, so much of it that it had caught her attention when she first boarded. Why did a mining operation need eyes in every room? These people weren’t Evagardian, so Deilani’s natural prejudices had reflexively painted them as unscrupulous scum.

For all the good it had done.

She needed the surveillance system to find Barry and keep track of Dawkes, so she could avoid him. To get eyes on Suarez, and most importantly, closure on Roth.

A new wave of fatigue swept over her as she left the bridge. As expected, Dawkes’ office was sealed. No one but Dawkes could let her inside, and there was no telling where he was. Even if she could find him, he was an unknown quantity. He might be docile and helpful, or he might not. It wasn’t worth gambling on. Besides, what were the chances the surveillance system still worked? Hardly anything else did.

Time was jumping; the world was skipping frames.

She blinked and shook her head, then staggered away from the security office door. Time was up. No matter what happened, she would always be a doctor. That meant there were a few things she couldn’t even pretend to lie to herself about. She wanted
to defy that, but she wasn’t sure she knew how.

She nearly fell when she climbed down the ladder to the lower deck, trying to remember the way to her quarters.

“...nothing is more important to our team than professionalism and transparency...”

Something else crowded through the fog in her mind. She must have blacked out on her feet as she stood in front of the security office. Time had passed without her realizing it.

There was a thump. She tried to focus and listen. Another thump, and a voice.

“...to help...”

Her breath caught, and she halted in her tracks, just short of the intersection.

“It’s not him,” Dawkes said. He was just around the corner, outside the door to Deilani’s berth.

Suddenly hot and short of breath, she pressed her back to the bulkhead and inched closer. After a moment, she risked a glance.

He was there, and fully dressed, unlike the last time she’d seen him. His trousers were open, and he was missing one of his gloves.

The holster on his hip appeared to be empty.

He leaned against her door, halfheartedly pounding on it with his fist. The locks were disabled, but he clearly didn’t realize that. All he had to do was hit the release. But he wasn’t doing that. He was hitting the door.

“I was just trying to help,” he said.

He could call it trying to help; Deilani called it attempted rape. The bruise on her back hurt even more than the bite on her collarbone.

“He’s not real,” Dawkes repeated.

She wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean.

“Open up,” he repeated.

She swallowed. This time, the lights were on, and he didn’t have the drop on her. Although her mind wasn’t at its sharpest, the memory of their last encounter was perfectly clear, particularly the feeling of the wrench coming down across her back, smashing her to the deck in the dark. Then Dawkes’ smothering weight.

Luck was the only reason she was still alive. If he’d gotten her in the head, she’d have been in no condition to fight him off. She’d barely gotten away.

He was big, and he had training. Even at her best, that might not be an easy fight. She had training as well, and hers was unquestionably superior, but it wouldn’t necessarily make up for the difference in size and strength.

Right now, she could barely walk.

Careful not to make a sound, she backed away, retreating down the corridor to Miller’s quarters. It was hard to imagine that anyone would look for her there. She slipped inside and tried to lock the hatch behind her, but the keypad didn’t even light up.

If she’d been a little more coherent, she might’ve picked up Miller’s pillow and given it a thrashing. At the moment, she didn’t even have the energy for a rude gesture.

She dumped the database on Miller’s bunk, wanting nothing more than to just curl up with it, but that wasn’t safe. Dawkes could still stumble in here. He couldn’t be at full strength in his condition, but it didn’t matter, and she didn’t have the brainpower to think about it. She got down and crawled under the bunk. At least here, she’d be out of sight if someone came in.

She didn’t want to do this, but there was no choice.

Her mind was a mess. There was no order. She no longer had the luxury of choosing what to think about. Thoughts, images, and memories all swirled wherever and however they liked, and her mind made bizarre leaps from topic to topic. There was no relevance, no priorities, no triage. What was important no longer mattered, only what floated past her brain at any given second.

She swallowed, set her jaw, and shut her eyes.

Nine

She woke up feeling good, blinking at the dark above, which was the underside of Miller’s bunk. For a moment, she feared she was waking to the station without power, or worse, the black of the dream, but that vanished when she recognized the beautiful sight in front of her for what it was: dull gray polymer.

She lay there in wonder. She hadn’t dreamed at all. That was what she’d been hoping for, but there at the end, she hadn’t been at her most rational. Maybe that dream had been an isolated incident.

Maybe she’d been afraid to sleep for nothing.

There was more pain than she’d ever felt before. Muscle strain. Her back. The bite from Suarez. A pounding headache, which was probably related mostly to dehydration.

But her mind was back in business.

She rolled out from under the bunk and picked herself up, shuffling into Miller’s closet-sized lavatory. She was terribly hungry. During the campaign to restore power and evade Dawkes, she’d wolfed down a few calorie bars, but that was all. Then she’d tried to sleep, and after that, her appetite had vanished. Now it was back.

She emerged from Miller’s quarters, rubbing at her eyes and trying to think.

There was no sound in the corridor, not even the promotional audio. Did that mean that someone had shut it off? She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept.

The galley was deserted, and she tried to make herself a tray of food and watch the door at the same time. It probably wouldn’t be long before she was resorting to stims again, but for now, she decided to see if coffee was enough.

Trauma wasn’t new to her; she’d gotten her share on Nidaros, and even during her painfully brief stint aboard the Julian
, she’d had multiple opportunities to treat it. She’d picked up on several hypersensitive responses in herself—something that hadn’t
happened after Nidaros. That annoyed her; she’d never thought of herself as the type to rattle. The doctor in her was well aware that had nothing to do with anything, but she could never fully shelve her pride.

This was different; the dream
was different. It was worse, and she had a feeling she was only seeing the beginning of the trauma symptoms from it.

She put the coffee on the tray and carried it out, feeling ridiculous in her wrinkled fatigue trousers and t-shirt, but there was no one to see. Bathing, a change of clothes—there were a lot of things she wanted, but they would all have to wait. Power and oxygen were the basics. She had those covered, so the station could keep her alive indefinitely.

That didn’t mean there was nothing to do. She was finally rested; she had to make the most of this opportunity. She took her tray to the bridge and looked to see if there were any recent alerts. If anything new had gone wrong with the station while she slept, it should show up here.

There was a single warning: the alternate collection system was at capacity. Deilani didn’t even know what that was, and she didn’t care. Mining was the last thing on her mind.

She ate slowly. The coffee was strong, and hot enough to burn her tongue. It was incredible.

She glanced at the hatch. Anyone could walk onto the bridge at any time, but without that looping audio in the corridors, the station was much quieter. When the recyclers switched off, it was almost uncomfortably silent. If someone was coming, she would probably hear them.

The only person she wanted to see was Barry, but something was bothering her. The phrasing. Alternate. Not secondary. Not primary. Alternate.

Alternate.

The feed in front of her glowed softly, and there was a noticeable delay when she prodded the display. The system wasn’t at its best, but this didn’t look like a glitch. She didn’t understand the mining operation in detail, but she understood the basic idea of how the refinery’s collection arms worked.

Frowning, she put her database in her lap and keyed it on, bringing up the collection system. It was just as she thought: there were panels of nanomachines on both sides of the collection arms, but they all fed into the same system. There was just the one system. It was like a net: the station moved the net to grab things it wanted—in this case, particles relating to the anomaly.

One system.

It looked like this alert was talking about something else. Something no one had mentioned to her.

It made sense that the collectors would be overwhelmed; it had been nearly three days since any form of service had been performed on anything relating to mining. The systems were automated, but they had to be cared for. No one was doing that.

She accessed the alert. There were sixteen flags: sixteen collectors that needed to be purged and serviced before a new collection cycle could begin.

What were they collecting? Sixteen wasn’t a random number, and there were far more than sixteen panels on each arm. And nothing was collected in
the arms; the particles were transported to the refinery.

She swiped the menu away in favor of the schematic, connecting the alerts and mapping them.

Now she could see the sixteen points of interest on a representation of the station. The collection arms reminded her of the blades of a windmill on Old Earth. Red indicators pointed to four objects on each arm, one at each corner. These weren’t the panels that filtered particles, but something else.

She had never noticed them. When she looked out through the viewports, her eyes were always drawn to the anomaly. She hadn’t spent a lot of time looking at the exterior of the station.

The mysterious objects were all on the side of the arms that faced the anomaly. They were, according to the database, sensors. So why was the system calling them part of a collection system? How could they be at capacity? You couldn’t fill up on signals and impulses. There had been a time on Old Earth when it was possible for digital storage to fill up with data, but that had been a long time ago.

There was something out there, and just the positioning of those things was suggestive. If they were filling up with something, it wasn’t something being drawn toward the anomaly—it was something coming out of it.

She had only managed to swallow a few bites, but she was done eating. She pushed the tray away, finished her coffee, and squinted at the schematic. It was hard to get an accurate sense of scale, but the alternate collectors didn’t look very big.

From the main viewport, she could see the refinery, the struts, the tram line, and three of the four arms, all silhouetted against the anomaly. A pair of analog binoculars rested on the console. Perhaps Suarez had used them to watch the maintainers when they went out to perform service on the arms.

At least, that was what Deilani had thought
they were doing out there. Maybe they were really going out to these secondary collectors to bring back whatever was collecting in them.

She picked up the binoculars and took a look, but it was no good; she was looking at the arms from the wrong side. She shifted her attention to the anomaly beyond.

The waves and bubbles of black and gray were even more breathtaking under magnification. Even the crackling energy pockets that streaked through the storm were black. There was no hint of color this time.

She could feel herself getting lost in the dark, and she quickly put the binoculars down. For a moment, it had looked as though there were shapes moving in there. Not the usual fluctuations, but something else. It was her imagination, though. She had to stay on task.

Everything she’d done up to this point had been in the interests of survival; that was what air and power were all about.

But her life was still in danger. Whatever had been going on here, it was worse than she’d thought. It was looking increasingly likely that she had not been intended to leave the station alive. Her inspection wouldn’t have uncovered anything damning, but if she’d been allowed to carry it through to completion, it would’ve raised questions. Those questions would’ve led to a more thorough investigation, and Deilani had a feeling Yagami would not have liked that.

Yagami had been wealthy, and a private citizen in Free Trade space. Who else was involved? Who else stood to lose if the truth about Almayer Station got out? Yagami was no longer a threat, but if she had associates who shared her business interests, chances were good they wouldn’t want to see Deilani report back to Demenis Affairs with her findings. Killing her wasn’t exactly a long-term solution, but if these people had the ability to think ahead, they’d have chosen another line of work.

The station’s comms array was broadcasting a message to whoever else had a hand in this.

With no way off the station, her only chance was to try to find some kind of high ground. Some leverage, maybe—anything she could bring into play if the wrong people showed up first.

Or she could try to get a broadcast out that would bring the Imperium. That would be a technical task on par with restoring power, if it was even feasible. If the station had been built with secrecy in mind, it was possible that no amount of technical expertise short of building some kind of beacon from scratch could draw Evagardian attention.

She wouldn’t be overdue for another seventy hours. She could survive Dawkes for that long, but what about when Yagami’s people arrived? That was another matter entirely.

She shook her head and turned back to look outside.

At the other side of the crescent-shaped station, a light was on in the refinery’s admin section. Deilani picked up the binoculars. It was Mabry’s conference room, and she could just barely see his arm and shoulder as he leaned against the viewport, probably just staring out.

For better or worse, he was her responsibility now. The conference room had an attached washroom, so it made a convenient place to hold someone. Mabry would need food, but Deilani had just fed him. He’d keep for a while, so she was free to worry about other things.

He shifted into view, and to her surprise, he appeared to be looking straight at her. She couldn’t be more than a distant silhouette to him, but he was pointing at something.

Puzzled, she looked at the solarium. It was a small observatory and relaxation lounge near the dining room and fitness center. It wasn’t clear to her why they called it a solarium, but that didn’t matter now, because there was someone inside it.

She focused the binoculars. Barry was there, gazing out at the anomaly.

Her heart leapt. The pilot was alive. Barry had to be affected by the radiation, but if she was still on her feet after this long, maybe it wasn’t a lethal dose. Maybe she could still be helped. That would go for Dawkes too, but Deilani had already made up her mind that Barry was her priority.

She turned away from the window, intending to go straight to the solarium. She would knock Barry out and drag her to the infirmary if she had to.

But there was movement, and she turned back, raising the binoculars again.

Someone was in the corridor on the third deck, making his way toward the solarium. He was walking past viewports, not fast, but still too quickly for Deilani to get a good look at him.

He was too tall to be anyone but Roth, and he was headed straight for Barry.

Deilani didn’t hesitate. She dropped the binoculars and left the bridge at a run.

She didn’t know
that Barry had anything to fear from Roth, but her own experiences so far hadn’t been encouraging. Even if it only came in episodes, Suarez and Dawkes had both shown how dangerous they could be. Before all this, she had truly been starting to like Suarez, and Dawkes had been crude but harmless.

The radiation was doing something to them. It was almost as though it was stripping away their ability to think and focus, giving way to something more basic and primitive. That, or just reduced neurocognitive function. It was only a theory, but it bothered Deilani that of all the things Suarez could have tried to do, he had chosen to bite her.

None of it felt right.

She tore through the corridors, which were unnervingly quiet. In the dark, she’d taken every step with caution, even fear, because she never knew where Dawkes was lurking. That hadn’t changed; he could be around the corner in the light just as easily as in the dark. Running this way and making all this noise wasn’t a good idea.

That didn’t stop her.

Roth didn’t mean Barry any harm. He might not even reach her. He might wander off somewhere else; there didn’t seem to be a particular pattern to where Suarez and Dawkes turned up. Why would Roth be any different? What had he been doing aboard the refinery? He had no business there. His mind had to be gone.

He needed help.

She leapt onto the ladder and slid down two levels, dashing onto the walkway that joined the administrative wing of the station to the personnel section. She sprinted around the curve, entering the long corridor that ran the length of the wing. It was here that she’d seen Roth, and there he was, twenty meters ahead, walking stiffly toward the solarium entrance.

She paused, stunned to actually see him there, right in front of her. She lunged forward, pouring on all the speed she could, but a sudden flash of heat and sensation shocked her out of the steps she wanted to take. She lost control of her legs and crashed to the deck, sliding to a halt and rolling onto her back.

Where before there had only been a single patch of sensation flaring up on her body, now there were several, and they were larger and more intense. These didn’t so much drag across her skin as squirm over it, covering her legs and abdomen, burning.

She couldn’t stop a cry, but it came out choked and strangled. She wanted to pick herself up, but there was no longer any connection between her mind and what her body was doing. She had no strength. Unfamiliar ripples and spasms shot through her, and she gasped for breath as she felt herself squeezed, almost crushed by invisible pressure. Pain she was used to; pain wouldn’t have thrown her this way. This wasn’t pain; this was great
, or it would’ve been under different circumstances. As it was, it was just a thousand times more confusing, and that only fed her panic.

In the right time and place, there was nothing wrong with getting lost in this kind of stimulation, but when it was happening without explanation, it was just terrifying. There wasn’t anything pleasurable about it.

The sensations faded, and she was able to breathe and open her eyes.

She was splayed on the deck. Her trousers were undone and pushed down around her thighs. Had she
done that?

“Empress,” she gasped, seeing the state she was in. She yanked the trousers up and fastened them, dragging herself backward, away from that spot. The heat on her body was fading quickly, and a chill was setting in as the air on the station reached the sweat on her skin.

She wiped damp fingers on her shirt and grimaced as the quivering subsided. What had just happened?

Her back hit the bulkhead and she sat, trying to get her breath.

Skin irritation? Like hell it was.

Baffled, she lurched to her feet, wavered, and staggered after Roth. She couldn’t see him anymore; he must’ve reached the solarium.

Up ahead, Barry screamed.

Ten

She ran despite the wobbliness in her legs and everything else her body was doing to stop her. Force of will was all she had going for her; every part of her felt weak, but she didn’t care.

She reached the end of the corridor and pounded up the short staircase, emerging into the solarium.

It was deserted.

New dizziness struck as she took in the sofa, the beverage combiner, and other modest amenities, all exactly where they belonged. The console on the wall offered a selection of music and dramas that could be projected as holograms or on the viewing glass. The domed circular chamber was only about ten meters in diameter. There was nowhere to hide and nowhere for anyone to go.

She had seen
Barry, and there was no doubt in her mind this time. Mabry had seen her too; he’d pointed her out. Less than a minute ago, that scream had echoed down the corridor. She hadn’t imagined that.

None of this fit together.

She turned in a circle, staring at the solarium harder, as though it might become self-conscious and try to explain itself.

Putting aside the scream, it was conceivable that Barry could have rushed out of the solarium before Deilani got to the corridor, but then what about Roth? There was nowhere he
could’ve gone.

She went up to the dome and looked out at the refinery. The light was still on in Mabry’s conference room, but there was no sign of his silhouette.

She went back out into the long corridor.

“Barry?” she called out. “Roth? Anyone?
”

Nothing but echoes.

She spread her arms and caught a glimpse of her own hand. It was shaking.

Her temper snapped.

“Are we serious right now?” she demanded of the deserted hallway.

Change of plans; she wasn’t waiting for Mabry to get hungry. She wanted answers.

But there was something she had to do first.

There was no sign of Roth or Barry between the solarium and the infirmary. There was no sign of anyone at all except an empty food tray lying on deck in the junction on the second deck. That meant that at least one of the people still upright was lucid enough to operate the combiner. Probably Suarez; he’d fixed himself a drink earlier.

She hurried past the tray and got inside the infirmary. It took a moment of searching to find a manual surgery kit. Surgery was supposed
to be performed by the medical android, which had most of its tools built into its hands.

But beneath a rolling cart of supplies was a stack of thin, flat cases: disposable operations materials for field kits.

She tore the plastic off one and set it on the examination table, lifting the lid. The scalpel was of the variety that used heat to cut instead of vibration. Everything else on this station was second-rate. Why would this be an exception?

Yesterday, or before her nap, she had been exhausted and on such a ludicrous cocktail of chemicals that the phantom sensations hadn’t seemed quite as much of an issue. She’d blamed radiation, or all the stims, but it hadn’t mattered. There had been other things on her mind.

She took a blood sample and put it in a reader.

What she’d felt in that corridor hadn’t been anything minor. There were no words for it.

Sex was the last thing on her mind right now, but her body clearly didn’t feel the same way. She’d been trying to ignore it, crediting the bizarre state of arousal to a bad choice of stims, but that wasn’t going to work anymore, not after what had just happened.

After all the sweating she’d been doing, she was having a hard time staying hydrated, which made this unprecedented amount of moisture that much more upsetting. It was as though she were in heat, and she’d been in and out of this state for an abnormally long period of time. It shouldn’t have been physiologically possible.

She opened a mirror feed and undid her trousers to perform a cursory examination. Things seemed normal. The redness, swelling, and extreme sensitivity weren’t exactly unnatural
; they were just more pronounced than she’d ever seen before. It was like her reproductive system was having a rebellious phase, like a child that came home one day a completely different person. It was a stranger to her, but she was still a doctor, and she knew the human body.

Hers was in a mating frenzy. That didn’t explain the phantom sensations, but she’d worry about that later. This state of arousal certainly wasn’t coming from her mind, and that meant it was a chemical problem. Her implant had to be the problem.

Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? If all the electronics on the ship were malfunctioning, surely this was vulnerable as well. If the explosion had killed her EV suit, of course it could damage something as tiny and delicate as the implant.

For most Evagardian civilians, the implant was a simple contraceptive that could be disabled by the Imperium if a licensed individual wanted to conceive the old-fashioned way. In the Service, members were given a more sophisticated model that could affect a wider range of changes in body chemistry.

She could’ve cracked her skull when she fell in the corridor. This wasn’t just a strange and undignified situation between her legs; it was a safety hazard. People had died from hormonal imbalances resulting from implant malfunctions.

It had to go.

She pulled her shirt off and perched on the examination table, probing at her right hip. She couldn’t actually feel the implant, but she knew exactly where it was. After applying a patch of local anesthetic, she held up her left hand in front of her eyes. It wasn’t completely steady, but with her body in this state, she was just glad to be thinking straight. It wasn’t a very difficult procedure; she didn’t need to be steady as a rock, she just had to get it done.

Using the scalpel, she made the incision about three centimeters long. She got a retractor in there and used the mirror feed to zoom in and check her work. She was on target. The forceps gripped the implant easily. She hadn’t thought to get a basin, so she just dropped it on the examination table. A thin trickle of blood ran from the incision, but the coagulant in the anesthetic patch was already working.

She removed the retractor and applied a disinfectant adhesive.

Done. She leaned down to look at the implant itself. It was a cylinder, about eight millimeters by two. It could generate hundreds of electrical impulses that could stimulate all sorts of responses in the body. Deilani was guessing it had drunkenly found the wrong gland and started using it as a punching bag.

With a little luck, she would start to calm down soon. Until then, she’d just have to deal with the physical consequences of a body so out of touch that it found Mabry attractive and thought her groin was a better place to send blood than her brain during a crisis.

If she got off this station alive, she would have to give a report. Maybe she could leave some of the details out.

She picked up the reader with her blood sample and her mouth fell open. She was ovulating
. And if this reading was correct, she was way off schedule.

Lovely.

Fifteen minutes later, she was standing outside Mabry’s conference room. His back was to her.

She pounded on the hatch. He flinched in surprise, then made his way over.

“Shut up,” she snapped as he opened his mouth. “You saw that over there. What happened? What happened to Barry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do better,” she snarled.

“She moved away. Look.” He pointed toward his own viewport, the one he’d been using to look outside. “I can only see a little bit of it. I didn’t see anything until you showed up. I swear.”

She searched his face. Why would he lie? What could he be hiding?

“Did you see me?”

“What?”

“Did you see me?
” she ground out.

“Did I see you what?
”

“When I fell.”

“You fell?”

That was a relief, at least.

“Look into my eyes,” she ordered. “You’re going to tell me what you know, or I am going to vent this room and kill you. I’m an officer in the Imperial Service and I’m authorized
to perform a field execution. Yeah. I can do that,” she said, holding his gaze. “I’ll have to justify it later, but that won’t do you any good, and something tells me an Evagardian review board isn’t going to lose much sleep over you.”

For a moment he just looked shaken.

“Damn,” he said, frowning. “Execute me for what?”

“Withholding critical information! Do you think that’s not a crime?” Deilani was on shaky ground with the Uniform Code of Evagardian Justice, but this was the Demenis System. “I’d be in trouble if you were an Imperial subject, but you’re just a galactic. I think I could sell it.”

“Don’t bullshit me. You can’t kill an unarmed man in cold blood. Even galactic scum,” he added, giving her a maddening look. He tapped the viewport. “You’d be in even more trouble than you already are.”

“I’ve been in trouble before,” she said coldly. She wouldn’t have
this bullshit assignment otherwise.

He sobered, searching her face. “I guess you have.”

“Barry could’ve gotten past me. Maybe. In theory. But Roth couldn’t
have. He literally disappeared. He went in there, and then I went in there, and he wasn’t there. You’re going to tell me how that’s possible. You know something.”

He put his hands up. “I’ll talk,” he said. “But I need food.”

“What?”

“Food. I’m starving in here.”

She frowned. “I just brought food,” she said. She had; right before her nap. Her nap hadn’t been that
long.

“I need more. I’m starving. I’m hungry like I’ve never been.” He held up the empty food trays.

She was taken aback. Was this a ploy to get her to open the door? Of course it was.

“You’re not getting anything until you talk,” she said.

He grimaced, but he didn’t waste time whining. “Fine. But I didn’t see what happened to Barry. That’s the truth. She got out of my line of sight and that was it. I swear.”

“You better give me something
. What’s in those collectors?”

“What?”

“Collectors. There’s a second set of collection gear on the arms. What are they bringing in? They aren’t on my schematic,” Deilani said, holding up her database. “But they’re in the station systems, and I know they’re out there.”

“I don’t know what that’s about,” he said, putting up his hands again. “I worked with Rigby, not the miners.”

“You said you knew what this place really was.”

“I know what it’s not
.”

“What was Rigby working on? Why’d he blow up his ship?”

“Okay. Look,” Mabry said, pointing toward his viewport. “There’s something out there. Something inside all that that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s like a... a signal.”

“I know about the anomaly.”

“You don’t
. Not really. You don’t know what it really is. Look, Rigby specialized in dimensional studies. The building blocks of reality. He was a genius, but did you ever wonder what he was doing out here with shady people like Yagami? Because no one else would work with him. He was doing stuff that people thought was too dangerous, trying to get cascade reactions out of dark matter to see if five-space law would hold up. He was out there. He pioneered modern spectrum theory.”

Deilani had an excellent education, but she was only vaguely familiar with the topics Mabry was listing.

“What is that supposed to be?”

“That perception is reality, and that reality also exists outside perception.”

“I don’t know what means.”

“We only see a fraction of the full spectrum of light,” Mabry said, folding his arms. “But that’s just light; take that concept and apply it to everything we perceive: sight, sound, feel, and more than anything else, rays, impulses, all of it.
How do you define what’s real?”

“Anything supported by peer-reviewed data.”

“Wrong. There’s no basis for universal verification. How do you determine if a thought
is real? Or a feeling? Information can’t be quantified outside of abstracts, but it can still affect us just as profoundly as a physical force can. You tell your wife you’re cheating on her; it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, that information affects her. She receives it and reacts. Good news, bad news: spectrum theory talks about how blurry the line is between data and matter, and how both of them play into the way we perceive our existence. Don’t look at me like that, it’s not my theory. This is Rigby talking, not me.”

“What the hell
does this have to do with the anomaly?”

“Look, we can only perceive so much. We have machinery that can perceive more. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, in there, that signal, whatever’s in there, it’s broadcasting things we’ve never seen before. Rigby called it a window.”

“A window to what?”

“To another set of rules. Another world, you could say.”

“Go on.”

“The window is small. Very little data came through. Rigby wanted more. So he set up signal generators to harmonize with the signal. To use the resonance to widen the opening.”

“Is that what happened? He miscalculated?”

Mabry shrugged. “When I was there, he was only increasing the resonance gradually. He was being careful.”

“How do you blow up a ship with that?”

“I honestly don’t know. But I’ve been in here for weeks. I don’t know what was going on recently.”

“Radiation?”

“If he did
widen it too much, then yes, maybe. Maybe something like that could come through. I don’t know. I was his assistant, and I was more interested in copying the data than interpreting it.”

“We’re talking about a wormhole,” Deilani said.

“No,” Mabry replied quickly. “No, we are not. Wormholes are real.”

“How is this not real? How is this different?”

He groaned. “There’s no way to say
it. It’s a different plane of existence. Something that’s beyond Euclidean space. It’s alien.”

“Parallel existence.”

“No, not parallel. Overlapping.”

“What did you see through this window?”

“It’s not just a window. It’s a lens. I didn’t see anything,” Mabry said, waving a finger. “We never saw
anything. We were able to take it and turn it into ones and zeroes. Then we had to try to interpret that. But there was life.”

Deilani swallowed. “What?”

“Life. Life forms. Rigby said that his perspective through the window was like looking through a microscope. He was only seeing a sliver of whatever was out there. Lady, I think that’s what’s fucking with our dreams.”

“Explain.”

He rubbed at his face. “Look, this stuff is all around us. We exist with it all the time. But our perceptions don’t align. Or at least, we can’t perceive it
. Maybe it perceives us. But it’s different here. With the resonance window open, it’s brought us closer together. The signal resonates with living cells. We
are like the comms array for this other place, or for the stuff that lives there. It comes straight to us.” He tapped his chest. “It doesn’t come to metal; it comes to living tissue.”

Deilani was having trouble keeping up, but she listened intently as Mabry went on.

“I think when we’re asleep, we’re more primed, more receptive, and we can actually experience it. I’ve had two of these dreams and I can’t deal with another one. I can’t do it.”

“I slept all right a little while ago. I didn’t dream.”

“It fluctuates with the anomaly. If the signal’s weak, we’re not going to pick it up. It comes and goes. That’s my guess, anyway. If we could predict that, we’d know when it was safe to sleep—but I don’t think we can.”

“Tell me how this explains Roth disappearing from the solarium.”

Mabry looked at her helplessly. “I don’t know. But I don’t think we’re alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the window is open—and from what you’re telling me, I’m assuming it is—then we’re coexisting with the other side right now.”

“So?”

“Rigby did nothing but watch the data and map the patterns. All he wanted was to figure out what he was looking at. That’s probably why he got carried away and opened the window too far. He said that the life he was seeing was like single-celled organisms.”

“What does that mean?”

“That the behavior he was observing was pretty basic. He said all these things do is eat and reproduce. Of course, we’re not equipped, able, or possibly even mentally capable of perceiving their
full range of expression. So we have no idea. I might be crazy, but... I think that’s why I’m hungry.”

“The food I brought had to be like eight or nine thousand calories,” Deilani told him bluntly.

“I know
. I know. I’m not stupid. I just remember some of the stuff he said, and I think it’s connected.”

“You’re saying these things have a need to eat, and because now we’re so close to them, as you put it, they’re influencing you.”

“Yes and no. That’s a good way to put it, but it’s not completely in line with the way Rigby made it out to be. If we’re right, they’re not influencing us, they are
us. There’s only one reality, one existence. They are another part of it. They occupy the same space as us, the same conceptual real estate.”

“What you’re talking about isn’t a new idea,” Deilani pointed out. “It’s been around forever. It’s called superstition. The spirit world or whatever. It’s Old Earth stuff. It’s nonsense.”

“I’m just trying to answer your question. I’m trying to understand this myself. Now, you
said that Roth disappeared. All I can tell you is that if Rigby was right, then here, at this point in space, near that anomaly,” he said, pointing, “there is more in play than the four dimensions that we know and understand.”

She swallowed. “This is insane.”

“Come on, it can’t just be me,” Mabry said. “You were there too, weren’t you? When you slept? At first it was just me and Rigby, but that was when the resonance was low. Now it’s all of us, isn’t it? What else have you seen? I know you have. You look just like me right now.” He did look desperate. “Are you hungry too?”

“No,” Deilani replied absently. “I’m not hungry, I’m...” she trailed off.

“What?”

She shook her head. It was
her implant. She stared at him, then narrowed her eyes. “You think these things are pushing their behavior on us? Their sensibilities?”

“No, they’re becoming
us. Or we’re becoming them. Or we’re the same, and we have been all along, and we’re just now noticing. When the window’s open, their reality and our reality mesh.” He held up his hands, fingers spread, and laced them together. “That’s how Rigby spelled it out to me. I don’t think we can
describe what this is.”

Deilani thought about the phantom sensations and swallowed.

She heard Mabry’s stomach growl. Loudly.

She thought about Suarez. He had tried to bite her, but then he hadn’t later on; he’d just been sitting at the bar. But Mabry said that it came and went as the anomaly fluctuated.

She thought about Dawkes, and what he’d been after.

Mabry was saying his body was overcome with an unnatural, overwhelming hunger.

Deilani knew
that her body was overcome with an unnatural, overwhelming desire to reproduce.

“Look,” Mabry said, catching her eye. “You have to believe me. All I know is what Rigby told me. I’ve had a lot of time to sit in here and think about it. And the dream. Think about the dream. It lines up, doesn’t it? Maybe I’m the crazy one. I don’t know.” He shook his head and shrugged. “But I know this.” He pointed at the anomaly again. “There is something in
there. I don’t care what you want to call it. It’s there. And at the other end of it there’s something else. Something that isn’t human.”

“What is it?”

He just shook his head, then rubbed his abdomen.

“I don’t know. But I think it’s hungry. Because this isn’t me.” He patted his stomach. “This
isn’t me. It’s not coming from me.”

Deilani was afraid that she knew exactly what he meant.

Eleven

It wasn’t as though she’d never encountered anything out of the ordinary.

Her first experience as an officer in the Imperial Service had been highly irregular. That ordeal had forced her to accept things she didn’t like, things she didn’t understand, and things that she would have previously believed to be impossible.

Mabry had been locked in that conference room for weeks with nothing to do but think. He might be a mercenary by trade, but he didn’t come off as a blunt instrument. She didn’t know his story, and she didn’t care about it. He’d stewed in his suspicions and arrived at his own conclusions. And now he’d passed them on to her.

It was too much to process, let alone buy into, but there was no denying that it had struck a chord with her.

Mabry said that both he and Rigby had the dreams, but Deilani hadn’t told him. He had broached the subject, and that gave him some credibility.

She stared at him through the viewport.

“I need to think,” she said at last.

“Think fast.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t like this yesterday,” he said, placing his hand on his abdomen again. “It wasn’t even this bad this morning.”

“So?”

“It’s getting worse. I take that to mean that they’re getting closer.”

“Closer to what?”

“To us.”

“What does that mean? What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know.” He gave her a funny look. “But we’re talking about something way beyond our comprehension, so I think it would be naive to assume that we’re compatible with it.”

“What does that mean?
” Deilani repeated, annoyed.

“A virus doesn’t talk. You can’t ask it not to kill you.”

She saw what he was getting at. “So this thing doesn’t have to be hostile to be a threat to us.”

“Hostility is a human thing. When you step on an insect by accident, you’re not being hostile. The insect still doesn’t survive the experience.”

“You think we’re the insect.”

“It’s not out of the question. We’re certainly due. All I know for sure is that the way I feel right now, I think I could starve to death in an hour.” He looked at her helplessly. “Who’s to say I won’t?”

“You said it comes and goes with the anomaly. You better just hope it goes,” she told him.

“I guess so.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat.”

“Thank you.”

“But don’t blame me if you eat too much and hurt yourself. That’s on you, and I’m not taking on new patients right now.”

“Yeah.”

Dazedly, she left the refinery. On the ride back to the station, she made a point of not looking at the anomaly. Instead, she looked at the point off the hull where Rigby’s yacht had been. There was nothing left but twisted metal. Answers, if there were any, would’ve been aboard.

Mabry had been Rigby’s assistant. He’d known what was going on at one time, but things had obviously changed since he’d been locked up. His information was outdated.

Her body had cooled off somewhat. If Mabry was right, that could be an indication that the signal was ebbing slightly.

She hadn’t been able to tell if he was joking or not there at the end. Did he really think that phantom hunger could kill him? If so, could she die from phantom lust? What was it going to do, make her go home with the wrong guy? No, it wouldn’t have to. Her own glands were more than capable of killing her if the body’s delicate balance was compromised, and if it wasn’t
her implant behind this, then this thing, whatever it was, was up to its elbows in her body chemistry.

Maybe there was still a chance that Mabry was lying or insane. She vaguely remembered the interview with Doctor Rigby that she’d seen on Suarez’s reader. Suarez had presumably been the one to queue that up. It meant he had at least enough presence of mind to speculate about what had happened. Maybe Suarez wasn’t as far gone as she thought. She lightly touched her chest where he’d bitten her. Maybe his madness was like Mabry’s hunger, or her libido. Maybe it came and went.

It was worth looking into.

She climbed to the top deck. Most of the station’s crew had little closet-sized rooms, but Yagami, Suarez, and a couple other higher-ranking people had suites one level higher.

She paused outside Suarez’s door, looking at his name printed on the metal. One name, one man, but there was no telling which Suarez she would find. Or the state she would find him in.

She knocked. Nothing. Where else could she look for him?

Deilani eyed the palm reader by the door. She was going to be angry if her door lock was broken and Suarez’s wasn’t.

The door hissed open at her touch. The apartment was roomy compared to the crew’s quarters but a step or two short of luxurious.

Suarez wasn’t there. She checked the washroom and the closet, but there was no sign of him. Drumming her fingers on her thigh, she considered the suite. It was a little messy but hardly out of control.

The sink was dry. It was hard to say how long it had been since anyone had been there.

Suarez had initially struck her as competent, but only out of habit; she hadn’t gotten the impression that he cared deeply for what went on at Almayer Station. He’d always seemed tired, like he just wanted his time here to be up so he could go home.

Apparently, he was a father: there were images displayed on a feed on the desk. Some were corrupted, but a few were still discernible. It looked like he had two boys and a girl. There was no mother in any of the pictures, but from the clothes and architecture on display, Suarez had spent some time on New Earth. He was a long way from home, a long way from his kids.

She hoped he was still alive.

But it wouldn’t be in her best interests, or his, if he found her poking around his quarters.

If he was still on his feet, she might run into him. If he wasn’t, then it didn’t matter.

His earpiece lay on the desk.

Deilani picked it up and looked around, spotting the case beside the lamp. It was a set of ten units; seven were missing.

She put on the earpiece and keyed it. A light flashed, so it wasn’t dead. It was a simpler device than a holo. Was it still functional despite the radiation?

“Hello?” She waited. “Suarez? Dawkes? Hell, Barry, Roth, anyone. Is anyone wearing one of these?”

She picked up the case and looked it over. This kind of communicator prioritized security above all else; there was a built-in signal encryption that would make them difficult to listen in on. That seemed like typical Yagami. People with nothing to hide would just use their holos to communicate, like everyone else in the galaxy.

She held an earpiece to her ear and spoke into another. The signal was there. They worked. There was a burst of white noise and something touched her thigh. She looked down, afraid she was about to have another episode, but nothing happened.

Letting out her breath, she pocketed an extra earpiece and left Suarez’s suite.

In the galley, she got to work putting together more food for Mabry. As she punched codes into the combiner, her body started to heat up again.

She stopped what she was doing and turned away from the combiner, taking the sampler from her pocket and pressing it to her wrist. She pulled up the readout and scrolled through her results.

Her estrogen levels were elevated, but only a little. Still within normal, healthy parameters. Her heart rate was up, but she already knew that. Blood flow wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. All of her symptoms were in line with being tired, but also aroused. The exhaustion was understandable enough, but there was no obvious reason for the arousal. There was nothing erotic about putting food on a tray.

At least she was female; she felt ridiculous enough running around in confusion as she was. If she had to do it with a stubborn erection, that would be too much.

She put her hand on her abdomen. She was sorry to disappoint her uterus, which was obviously on a crusade, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not until she was married, and she wasn’t going to be getting married during her first tour under commission.

“Five more years,” she said apologetically. “At least.”

That was, assuming she kept
her commission. Which was by no means certain with the way her career was going.

Her body wasn’t interested in her opinion, though. She needed to bathe and change clothes, but she just sighed and got back to work.

The ride from the station to the refinery took over a minute. It was relaxing, and she needed that. She was by no means safe, not from Mabry’s otherworldly enemy or from the threat posed by Yagami’s friends, but those were problems that she was capable of thinking about calmly.

She was good under pressure, and always had been. She’d never have made it through her training if she was weak enough to crack when the heat was on; those people washed out in the first few weeks.

But willpower wouldn’t necessarily beat out the rest of her. As a doctor, she understood the profound power that chemistry wielded over the mind. That when circumstances inside the body aligned, judgment could go straight out the window.

She couldn’t let that happen. She’d already caught herself having some dangerous thoughts. Even without knowing what was really going on, the situation seemed manageable—as long as she kept her wits about her. If her body would just get on board with that, it would all work out.

“Hey,” Mabry said as she arrived. “You just missed Roth again.”

“What?” She almost dropped the food trays. “Where’d he go?”

“Into the refinery—wait, don’t—don’t
,” Mabry said quickly, slapping the viewport to get her attention. Deilani had been in the act of turning to go after him.

“Why not?” she demanded, turning back.

He hesitated. “Because I don’t think it’s him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think it’s him
,” Mabry repeated. He leaned close to the viewport, trying to see into the corridor, as though he thought someone might be sneaking up behind her. “Look, you told me you thought he was dead.”

“I was wrong. I moved a lot of bodies,” Deilani snapped. “I moved them all. I could’ve messed up. I was tired. It was dark. You haven’t been sleeping either; you know what it’s like. I was confused.”

“You’re not crazy.” He pointed a finger at her. “Maybe I am, but you’re not. You didn’t just think he was dead, you knew
it. You believed it. And I believe you.”

“So what? You’re telling me there’s a dead man walking?”

“I don’t know what I’m telling you. But he’s not himself. I was looking this time. He looks weird. It’s him, but it’s not him
.” He rolled his eyes. “This was a guy who wasn’t exactly overflowing with personality, but still. It’s not
him.”

“No shit. He’s suffering from radiation poisoning.”

“I don’t think he’s sick. I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think you should go in there.”

“You think he’s dangerous?”

“I think he was heading for Barry a little while ago, and neither one of us has seen her since,” he said, spreading his hands. “Or am I wrong? Have you?”

“No.”

“I don’t know how to convince you. I’ve been in here a while. I’m not at my best. And you tell me everyone’s dead. I feel like I should be glad to see anybody, you know? But I was not glad to see him.”

Deilani swallowed. “That’s a little vague.”

“Go in there if you want. But if something happens to you, how am I going to eat?”

“Go ahead and go to the other end of the room. Put your palms on the wall.”

He shook his head and obeyed. She removed the lock and opened the hatch, putting the trays on the floor. She took the earpiece from her pocket and tossed it onto the table, then sealed him up again.

“You’re good,” she said, and he stepped away from the wall.

“Thank you,” he said.

She wasn’t listening. She was staring down the corridor at the main entrance to the refinery.

The refinery itself was massive. It was a labyrinth, and its power was still off. That was a task that no amateur could handle.

She thought about what Mabry had said, and about what she’d seen. She remembered Roth walking down the corridor toward the solarium.

How could he not be himself, though? What was the alternative?

She turned back to the viewport. Mabry was staring at her.

“Do you know what a Proetus is?” he asked.

“No. What is it?”

“It’s a bioweapon. Or it was, a long time ago. Hundreds of years ago, on Old Earth. I studied it in school. You made it.”

“What?”

“You know. You Evagardians. It was before the Unification. It was this thing that you people had built that would mimic its objective. It would look like whatever it was going after. It wasn’t made to go after people—it was made to mimic animals that might inadvertently carry a parasite that these people were trying to keep under control. But when people picked up the parasite, the Proetus went after them too, and they mimicked the people, but they weren’t made to do people, so they weren’t very good at it.”

Deilani cocked her head. She’d read about something like that, ages ago. It was ancient history, a footnote in textbooks.

“So?”

“I always thought it was creepy. And I thought about it a lot when I was a kid. It scared me, you know? Something that could look like us but was actually something else. You know? Scary stuff.”

“Get to the point.”

He gestured impatiently and groaned, then pointed toward the refinery. “I always thought that if the Proetus was real, and it was pretending to be somebody, it would act a lot like that.”

Twelve

“Proetus, huh?”

“Don’t look at me like that. It’s just what came to mind.”

“I hate this,” Deilani snarled.

“What?”

“That a galactic has to be my voice of caution. You’re right. It’s not efficient to go looking for him in there. He has to come back this way. You can let me know when he does, and then I’ll be waiting when he gets back to the station. He has to take the tram.”

“How will I tell you?”

“There.” She pointed at the earpiece. “Use that. I don’t know how reliable it’ll be, but it’s worth a shot.”

“I can help you out. I can see the whole view-side from here. You keep those lights on, and I can tell you if anyone moves.”

“You’d better. It’s like you said: if something happens to me, it could be a while before your next meal.”

“You could let me out.”

“Yeah, that’s what this party’s missing,” Deilani said, swirling a finger to indicate the station. “A galactic criminal running around.” A twinge came from her collarbone. Her back still ached. “Trust me, you’re lucky to be in there.”

“What’s your plan?”

She shrugged. “I’m going to find out what’s going on. Then I’m going to figure out what to do.”

“You’re not going to leave me behind, are you?” he asked worriedly.

“Nobody’s going anywhere. Rigby’s ship is gone, the shuttle’s damaged, and with what’s going on with the systems, would you want to get in an escape craft?”

“I guess not.”

“We’ll find a way to call for help. Or I’ll find a way to have the upper hand when someone shows up. That’s the plan. One thing at a time. Keep your eyes open. I want to talk to Roth. Do not miss him when he comes back.”

“I won’t.”

As she headed back to the tram, Deilani knew exactly what she needed to do.

She could walk into anyone’s room that she wanted to. That included Yagami’s.

If anyone on Almayer Station knew what Rigby was up to, it would be the showrunner.

The tram chimed as she stepped in and hit the release.

She pinched the bridge of her nose as the doors began to close, but there were running footsteps behind her. She turned in surprise as Dawkes slammed against the hatch, the cutter in his hand leaving a long scratch in the transparent carbon.

She recoiled, hitting the back of the carriage. Dawkes clawed at the release, but the cycle had already begun. The inner doors closed, and the tram began to move.

She let out a choked breath, slumping against the side of the tram—then she straightened up and hurried to the hatch, but Dawkes had already gone.

“Uh—lady, I think you have company,” Mabry was saying in her ear.

Dawkes had looked wild. Sweating. Bleeding from the mouth.

Exactly what had he been planning to do with that cutter? And where had he gone?

Deilani touched her ear. “Mabry, stay away from the viewport. Don’t let him know you’re in there. Anyone can open that lock from the outside.”

“Way ahead of you. I’m turning off my light.”

“Don’t do that; if he sees it go out, you could draw his attention.”

“Good point.”

“How did he get past you?”

“I’m locked in. How would I stop him?”

“You didn’t tell me he was on the refinery side,” Deilani accused.

“I didn’t see him. Maybe he didn’t come down here.”

“You didn’t see the tram run?”

“He could’ve taken the skywalk,” Mabry suggested.

Deilani looked up. It was less a skywalk than a sky crawl. She’d inspected it for safety on her second day. It was safe in that it had integrity. But it was little more than a tube that techs could use to reach the refinery without the use of suits or the tram. It was sealed at either end with a pressure hatch.

Her heart was thudding. Talking to another human. Delivering food. Getting a few hours of sleep.

She’d forgotten the reality of her situation. That was the second time that Dawkes had come at her. It was probably time to just reclassify him as an enemy. She wasn’t in a position to help him, and she didn’t want to die on Almayer Station.

“You see him?” she asked.

“No. He must’ve gone into the lounge or something. You know, he can get into the refinery without coming past me.”

“But that’s the sublevel door. Nobody’s going to go down there when they can just walk through the office to the viewing deck.”

“I’m just saying they can
get past me without me seeing. And I can’t watch the window and the door at the same time.”

“Stick to the window,” she told him. “Just watch for the tram. If it moves, I have to know.”

“Okay. You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t expect that.”

“What?”

“You to scream.”

“I didn’t scream.”

“You made a noise.”

“I was startled.”

“I will vent this room,
” he said in an obnoxious imitation of her voice.

She rolled her eyes. If Mabry had gotten a good look at Dawkes just now, he wouldn’t have wanted to joke.

“Are we going to do something about him?” Mabry asked, sobering.

“I don’t know,” she replied honestly, looking back toward the refinery. “Don’t ask me to let you out of there again.”

“I wasn’t going to. But it’s not like I’m a murderer or something.”

“How do I know that?”

“This is why nobody likes Imperials.”

“Don’t worry about Dawkes,” she told him with confidence that probably wasn’t justified. “If he’s over there with you, he’s not my problem while I’m on the station. I only have to worry about Suarez.”

“And Roth and Barry.”

“I don’t think Barry’s a threat. And Roth hasn’t tried anything with me yet. He’s about the only one. He’s a hard guy to find, though.” She wasn’t fooling herself. Talking big wasn’t going to make her stop sweating. Mabry could tell from her voice that she was shaken.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I’m fine. I’m tired.”

“I know the feeling. You always dress like that?”

She looked down at her damp, grubby, rumpled outfit. She snorted.

For a little while, she had been able to forget that she was in hostile territory. Fatigue. Hormones. Simple preoccupation.

But now Almayer Station’s empty corridors and junctions looked the same as they had when the power had been off: the wrong kind of empty.

She remembered what it had been like, trying to find her way around, hauling tools and the maintenance database, with nothing to see by but her hand light, not knowing where Dawkes and Suarez were. Those endless hours had been the hardest of her life, worse than anything that had happened on Nidaros. At least there she’d had the Admiral to count on.

She shuddered. The lights were on now, and that helped, but the problem hadn’t gone away.

She was still carrying the database. There wasn’t really a use for it now, but it was still her faithful companion, like a good luck charm. She had never been superstitious, but she’d never been one of two lucid people on a space station gone to hell, either.

It hurt to admit it, but she missed the gentle lull of the promotional audio. It had done a good job filling the corridors, masking the sound of her footsteps. It had made the place feel at least a little bit alive, a little normal.

But now she could talk to Mabry; that would help.

She climbed up to the executive section, bypassing Suarez’s quarters and going all the way to the end of the corridor. Yagami’s door looked fancier than everyone else’s, but the lock was the same.

The suite was what Deilani had hoped for when she came to Almayer Station. Perhaps it had been a foolish hope, but it had been there all the same. She’d assumed that the people she inspected would do their best to pamper her; getting on her good side would be an advantage for them, but Almayer Station hadn’t taken that approach.

Yagami’s suite was beautiful. Deilani choked and almost tripped when she saw that she wasn’t alone.

Except she was: the figure in the chair by the viewport was just an unpowered android. The secretary android was shaped like a slender woman, and well-dressed. Deilani let out her breath and moved on. She stared at Yagami’s oversized bathtub, flanked by a massive bed and what appeared to be a sophisticated massage chair.

The bed was made, and on a fashionable little table beside it sat a VR collar and a variety of holos.

Yagami didn’t even have a desk. Maybe she handled all her business from the tub.

Deilani picked up a towel from the end table and tossed it over the android’s head; she didn’t like the way its eyes were staring.

She checked to make sure the hatch was closed, then dropped the database on the bed and stretched. Yagami had been enormously rich. If this was how she liked to do business, maybe there was something to be learned from that. She climbed up and crawled across the bed, pushing the pillows into a pile and settling back in comfort.

It was obscene. It would’ve been nice to close her eyes and just lie there for a while, but she couldn’t waste time unless she knew for certain that she had time to waste; that was another lesson she’d picked up from her brief tour on Nidaros.

She picked up the collar and hefted it. It was top of the line and exactly what she needed, but it wasn’t an option. Going into VR with faulty equipment could be suicide, and odds were good that most of the equipment on this station was faulty right now.

On a whim, she reached over and keyed open the drawer of the table at the bedside, hoping for some files in hard copy. Instead, she found a pistol. She scowled and shut the drawer. Galactics.

She tossed the collar aside and picked up the nearest reader. It was a rugged model, similar to the maintenance reader, but much smaller. It was in a hard case, and there was a Genham Mining Technologies emblem on it. Most of the refinery equipment had been supplied by GMT. Maybe this reader allowed Yagami to monitor her facility’s workings in real time. It was probably also linked to Almayer Station’s executive network.

She tried powering it on, and it actually came to life.

There were productivity reports, work orders, repair logs, and personnel files.

It was a long shot, but she was comfortable. She wasn’t going to deliberately drag her feet, but she wasn’t in a hurry to leave Yagami’s bed.

She pulled up Barry’s profile, and her eyes widened. The reader was not as primitive as she’d thought. There was a status readout, and it was active.

It was showing Barry as deceased.

There wasn’t much data, but it was something. So all the Almayer contractors were either wearing or implanted with a personnel monitoring system. She swallowed, trying to think.

Could she trust this? She pulled up Miller. Deceased—so that was correct; Miller’s was the one body Deilani would never forget having to deal with due to the gruesome nature of the wounds that had killed her. Miller was definitely dead, so the system had that right.

Were there locators? There had to be, but she didn’t know how to access them. She wouldn’t have minded knowing where Dawkes and Suarez were at the moment. Their files showed them as still having steady vitals.

Were the signals from the personnel monitors being sent directly to this reader, or was it part of the station’s larger network? She couldn’t even guess. An Evagardian operation would have one system, not half a dozen of them. And that one system would cover everything.

Here, it seemed like there was a different network, a different set of comm protocols for every day of the week.

Dawkes and Suarez were both showing multiple med pings. She didn’t know how much information the monitor was able to collect from them, but obviously it was enough for the system to know that they weren’t well. It was urging them to seek medical attention.

She pulled up Roth’s file.

Deceased. Time of death: 57 hours ago.

Scowling, she put the reader aside and picked up the holo that was obviously Yagami’s personal unit. It was small but extremely high-end: an Evagardian model. It wouldn’t power on, and even if it would, she didn’t have Yagami’s access credentials.

The third reader had power, but it was malfunctioning. A toggle was locked, and the open readout was constantly trying to scroll away. Deilani struggled with it, managing to navigate to Yagami’s inbox, but without her credentials, she couldn’t access the unread messages, only the ones that were already open and displayed.

Ma’am,

I’ve logged a second observation enough times that I’m comfortable putting it in the log. This one is smaller, with less signal impact than the last, but more potent. It’s following my single-cell model, but it exists in a much larger ecosystem, so to speak. It breeds, or at least, that’s what it looks like. The organism attaches itself to other readings, always larger ones, and I’ve logged no fewer than 71 unique signatures. That’s versatility; this thing doesn’t use its own caste to procreate, it uses other things. Is that enough to meet xeno criteria for you?

v/r

There was no name.

Was this from Rigby? Almost certainly. He’d been keeping Yagami posted on the things that he was observing through this window that Mabry had talked about. Again with the single-celled organism thing. She chewed her lip. She wasn’t a xenobiologist, but there was enough scientist in her that she was getting curious about what Rigby had been seeing and doing. If he really had discovered something truly new, she wanted to know more.

She slogged through the flickering menu to the next open message.

Ma’am,

Here’s what we’ve got:

-

Nina Louise Deilani, Age 22, Third Lieutenant / Imperial Service, Demenis Affairs, formerly First Fleet

-

Graduated Marragard Naval Prep, won the Skaarvold Award for Excellence in Academics

-

89th Percentile in Service Training, 91st in Bio, first stage training at the Rothgard Campus, second on Tressgard, Aiopea (the big continent) third stage OJT tour under the command of the 5th Group Cultivation Initiative, whatever that is. There was some kind of incident during that training, and it had to conclude early, but she wasn’t involved in the bad stuff.

-

Graduated on time; full Bio certification on the first try. (Apparently that’s rare.)

Parents:

Father: Mellbich Deilani (Died nine years ago from Strickler’s Disease)

Mother: Denial Deilani (Died twenty years ago, no details)

Raised by the father after the death of the mother, then she was briefly with the SDA Foundation before an aunt and uncle got her. She went straight into Service Prep.

Something happened on the way to her first assignment, but that’s a closed file. Classified. After that she was removed from active duty aboard that new flagship for security reasons. She must’ve done something that brought her loyalty into question, and that’s why she’s coming here instead of doing what she’s supposed to be doing. She’s on an Imperial Security watchlist, but there’s nothing in her background connecting her to New Unity terrorists or anything.

I got nothing. She didn’t cheat on her tests, she didn’t sleep with her professors. No kids, no partner, not much family, just the career. I talked to her a little, and she seems okay. Your best bet is this disloyalty thing. That, or buy her off. Your call.

Again, no name. It had to be Suarez.

So they had
been troubled by Deilani’s visit. That was gratifying. And they hadn’t been planning to kill her, so that was decent of them. Awkward as it was to think about, killing her probably would’ve been the best option. It wouldn’t have solved their problem, but it might’ve bought them time if they’d gone about it the right way.

There was one more open message.

Ma’am,

I understand we can’t move anything as long as this inspector is there, but I have a buyer, and I need a timetable. He won’t wait. People who want to buy H1 tend to be a little twitchy, for some reason.

Deilani raised an eyebrow. She’d had no idea just how inconvenient she was being. She felt awful about it.

And H1? That was the name that Galactics used for Harbinger. She sank back on the pillows, thinking hard. She knew what Harbinger was; she had studied it. It was a controlled substance, but it wasn’t supposed to exist anymore. It was a parasite that had been found on Old Earth before the Unification, but only in very limited quantities. In fact, it had something to do with that Proetus thing that Mabry had mentioned, but that was all ancient history.

Different parties had tried to use it for different things. There had been some deaths involved. After the Grand Duchess united Earth under Evagardian rule, she had the last samples of Harbinger destroyed. At least, that was how the story went. They had only touched on it briefly during her medical training. If there was no Harbinger around anymore, she didn’t really need to know how to deal with it.

She sat up, staring at the message. It was just a word. It could be a code name, or even a coincidence. Or maybe not.

Harbinger had both combat and medical applications. She hadn’t cared enough to study it deeply, but a couple hundred years ago, it had been critically important. For the Grand Duchess herself, the first Empress—the Eternal
Empress—to go out of her way to eradicate it, it must’ve been pretty dangerous.

Of course, in all likelihood, there was still a sample or two in the Empress’s Garden.

That wasn’t Deilani’s problem.

She gripped the reader hard, staring at the smudges her oily fingers made on the screen. The easiest way to interpret this was that Yagami had discovered a source of Harbinger, and she was using the refinery to gather and export it.

Who was she selling it to? It sounded like this was separate from Rigby’s work; at least, she hoped it was. Her head hurt enough as it was.

She had to be sure.

Thirteen

Outside the viewport, beyond the arms of the refinery’s collection net, the anomaly boiled in space. Was there really something in there? Something like these life forms that Rigby talked about in his updates for Yagami? It was hard to believe.

“Any movement?” she asked Mabry over the comm, still on Yagami’s bed.

“Nothing.”

She rested put her chin in her hands and wondered. Back on Nidaros, they hadn’t known
that danger was imminent, they’d only suspected—but they’d proceeded as though they’d known.

That sense of urgency was the only reason she was still alive.

It was possible that she was in a similar situation now, so there wasn’t time to lie around.

Besides, she’d just found her ticket off Almayer Station.

Yagami’s people were going to arrive before any sort of Evagardian rescue would. Someone out there was counting on Yagami to supply them with Harbinger, or whatever they were calling Harbinger.

That

person might be showing up very shortly. Yagami had been dead for more than sixty hours, so it had been at least that long since anyone had heard from her. She was too important to go dark without anyone getting curious.

Deilani got off the bed and left the suite.

Before the explosion, these people had been ready to put forth some effort to keep her alive. They didn’t want the scrutiny of having an Imperial die on their watch.

That was then.

At this point, no matter how she looked at it, she knew too much. Playing dumb wouldn’t work; she wasn’t a criminal, or an actress. She wasn’t going to beat these galactics at their own game.

There hadn’t been any word from Mabry, so Roth and Dawkes were both presumably still on the refinery side. Barry was dead. So was Roth, but apparently that wasn’t slowing him down much.

Suarez was still alive, and he was somewhere on the station with her. She had to be careful.

She mounted the ladder and climbed down to the main deck, making for the viewing side of the station.

“I can see you,” Mabry said.

She waved absently at the viewport, still deep in thought.

It was only a short walk to the tram airlock, but she was getting tired again already. The agitated state of her body couldn’t counteract such a massive sleep debt.

She put her face in her hands. Slowing down might get her killed, but refusing to rest would guarantee it. But she didn’t have time
to sleep.

Frustrated, she thumped a fist on the viewport, then stopped herself as she reached for the call keypad.

Dawkes was still over there. When a tram was coming into lock, the nav system announced it, at least in the administrative portion of the refinery. Dawkes might hear that, and he might be lucid enough to understand it.

Taking the tram could force a confrontation.

She looked up. The sky walk was just a thin gray line against the backdrop of stars, but she didn’t have a choice unless she wanted to go for another walk outside.

She climbed back up to the top deck and jogged down to the sealed hatch. She checked for warning lights, then started the cycle.

Butterflies fluttered in her belly as she twisted the manual release, pulling the heavy hatch open. The airlock beyond was hardly larger than her quarters. There was nothing in it but a pressure suit, two tool sets, and the inner hatch.

She fell to her knees and checked the readout. The tube had temperature control and atmosphere, so she wouldn’t need the suit. She peered through the tiny viewport; the lights inside the sky walk were on, illuminating the hundred-meter passage.

She was still sore all over from the bruises and strains she’d picked up when she’d been doing her tech impression. Her spine was going to love this.

The phantom sensations were there as well, but they were faint. She knelt, taking long, even breaths as the patches of heat began to throb. They were now clearly focused between her legs, but she could also feel them on her thighs, back, and chest. She looked down at her wrist, convinced that something had just brushed past her, but there was nothing.

The heat grew more intense, and she put her palms on the ground for stability. It wasn’t the temperature that made it hard to deal with; it was the impression of movement. Feeling without seeing was unnerving. She had broken out in a heavy sweat, but she had to do the smart thing and wait this out. She tried to think of it as a weird massage, but that didn’t work.

It went on for well over a minute.

When it was gone, she was relieved. That hadn’t been nearly as brutal as what had come over her when she’d been running for the solarium.

She opened the box beside the hatch and tore free a few patches of magnetic adhesive, applying them to her palms and elbows. She was going to leave the station’s gravity field, and she’d have to go at least a short distance before she entered the refinery’s field. It was customary for these sorts of passages to have handholds, like a ladder that you could easily traverse in zero-g, but this one inexplicably had nothing but smooth walls. The adhesive would help her get purchase.

She got her breath and opened the hatch, crawling through. It took effort to pull it shut and get it sealed, but the primitive construction of the station no longer surprised her. There were no viewports of any kind. The plastic under her knees was warm but not hot through her fatigue trousers.

There was enough room for a grown man to walk in a crouch, but not nearly enough for her to stand. She wasn’t going to subject her back to the kind of posture it would take to scuttle through that way, so she just crawled on all fours.

“You okay?” Mabry asked in her ear. He must’ve heard her labored breathing over the comm.

“Fine,” she replied. “Watch the tram.” She wanted to talk to him; it felt good to talk to anyone at this point. That didn’t make it a good idea. They were in this together, but Mabry wasn’t her friend. He couldn’t be trusted.

Even knowing that, she was still drawn to him. He was, unlike most of Almayer Station’s crew, alive and lucid. And although she wasn’t proud of it, her body being in one of its moods probably also had something to do with it. All the same, getting friendly with Mabry would only get her into trouble; she still had enough presence of mind to know that.

It stood to reason that he
would be friendly. He needed her more than she needed him. She thought of snakes on Old Earth, and other cold-blooded organisms. In the distant past, when these creatures were pets, their human owners had inferred affection from them when they initiated close bodily contact. Those people had inferred wrongly. A snake just wanted warmth. There was no attachment, only pragmatism.

Mabry was no different.

A hundred meters wasn’t very far, but it was tedious at a crawl. She fought off a wave of claustrophobia as she neared the middle of the skywalk. It was a long way back, and an even longer way ahead. She crawled on.

A sudden impact to the wall jerked her free of the surface and threw her into the side of the tube. Her magnetic strips immediately pulled her to the nearest metal handhold, but pain flared through her back and she saw stars. She groaned, swearing at the Empress.

“What’s wrong?” Mabry asked.

She shook her head, and there was a dull ache where she’d hit it. She opened her mouth to answer, but the sky walk was struck a second time, this time harder, and from the other side. She crashed against the opposite wall of the tube, and new pain spread through her shoulder.

Deilani scrambled to brace herself against another impact.

“Did you see that?” she gasped, wincing at the pain in her arm.

“See what?”

“Something just hit me. It hit the skywalk,” she said, staring back down the tube. She was hearing something, something high-pitched, but faint. The tube groaned again.

“What?”

“Did something blow? Is it debris? What’s going on out there?” she demanded.

“I— I don’t see anything,” Mabry said. “Wait a minute.”

“What?”

“I think you’re bleeding.”

She stiffened, straining her ears.

“Empress,” she murmured.

“You’re compromised. Hey, if that thing cracks, are you protected?”

She wasn’t even wearing a chest supporter, much less a pressure suit.

She looked back in panic. “Is the break in front of me or behind me?”

“I don’t know where you are. It’s close to the middle,” Mabry said.

Then there wasn’t time to think. She plunged forward. She had to get out of the tube, and fast. It wasn’t the sturdiest, and the vacuum was going to break it wide open. Running out of air wasn’t the issue; she was about to be spaced.

Now the tug of vacuum had her. It wasn’t irresistible, but it was strong, and getting stronger. She was close to the actual breach. She put her knee against the side and pushed off hard. She almost got by, but her t-shirt snagged. Icy cold shot through her, and her cry of alarm was cut short because she couldn’t get air. She pulled free of the vacuum and pushed off the wall, but now she was working against the current.

The tube wailed. It wasn’t built to stand up to heavy impact.

Lightheadedness tried to slow her, but she clawed her way forward.

The hatch was sealed. She smashed the carbon over the emergency release and pulled it, seizing the handles and throwing her weight into them. The seal broke with a bang
of pressurized air, and the door leapt outward, nearly crushing her against the side of the tube. She fought her way past it, spilling to the deck on the other side.

That had been the easy part. She scrambled up and reached through for the handle. She got her fingers through and started to pull. The air rushed past, screaming in her ears.

Her injured shoulder flared and she fell back, hissing in pain. There was no autoseal. She had to do it herself, or give up the room. She doggedly climbed back and tried with her other arm. There was nothing to anchor her; if the tube gave way, she’d be sucked out like a fleck of dust, but this was an important airlock, and she wasn’t willing to lose it. If the depressurized zone was confined to the tube, there would be less damage than if the station itself became a part of this.

She managed to get the hatch away from the wall of the tube, reducing the drag. She jammed her foot against the side of the hatch and put all of her weight into it, forcing it shut. Gasping for breath, she wrenched the handle down, sealing it.

There was a horrible screech of tearing metal. The bulkhead shuddered, and there was a grinding noise.

She flopped onto her back. There wasn’t even enough breath in her lungs for a whimper of pain.

“There it goes,” Mabry said, sounding awed. “I hope you weren’t in there. Or planning to go back that way.”

She wasn’t listening to him.

She stared at the ceiling of the airlock, unable to process what had just happened. The anomaly was not a source of gravity; it attracted only subatomic particles. Anything larger would be kept away by Almayer Station’s repulsors; the collection arms were delicate, and they had
to be protected.

Rigby’s ship had exploded three days ago. There had been debris, but by now, anything that had been moving at high speed was long gone. Her mind raced, searching frantically for an explanation.

She had nothing.

Fourteen

Enough of Deilani’s training had been dedicated to vacuum-related injuries that she was intimately acquainted with the grisly details of what space would do to the unprotected human body.

It wasn’t as though she’d never had a close call before, but it wasn’t getting any easier with repetition. She picked herself up slowly. Dwelling on the damage to the skywalk wouldn’t help.

Dawkes was on this side, and so was Roth. The refinery was powered down, and she doubted that either of them would want to wander around in the dark. Only the administrative section had lights on, and that wasn’t a lot of space. The odds of running into someone would be much higher over here than on the station.

She took a deep breath. “Mabry, where’s the airlock for the techs over here?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I never worked here.”

“Take a guess,” she snapped.

“The supply room is under the viewing deck, but it wouldn’t be very efficient if you had to go down there, then take your stuff back up. It should be around there.”

“I remember now. There’s a dry room. Those skiff things are in there.” She took a light from the rack beside the tool bags.

“Be careful with those,” Mabry warned. “They don’t like the anomaly. That’s why nobody used them.”

“I’m not using one. I don’t even know how.”

“It’s not that hard.”

That was beside the point. She opened the hatch and left the airlock. She was in a short corridor with several hatches, a lift, and a ladder. She padded over to the ladder and knelt to look down. Below was an alcove just off the main administrative corridor. She was only about ten meters away from Mabry’s conference room. “Have you seen anyone?” she asked quietly.

“I’d tell you if I had.”

“Heard
anything?”

“Nothing.”

“If you had to guess
, where’s Dawkes now?”

“He didn’t come back this way, so he could be in the facility, the crawlspace, by the tram. Take your pick.”

“Great.”

“If he’s hungry like me, he could be in the canteen.”

She settled the database on her shoulder, hefted her light, and climbed down to go out onto the viewing deck. There was a light by the door and a few safety lights on in the refinery, but everything else was dark. The huge cooling towers that dominated the space were just shapes.

She listened for a moment, then turned on her own light and climbed down the ladder to the work floor. The supply room was directly underneath the viewing deck. There were tech suits, and more tools.

A pair of heavy doors stood in front of the shallow ramp leading down to the dry dock. Four skiffs waited down there that the techs could use to get around faster outside.

Dragging a tech suit behind her, she hurried into the dock and closed the hatch behind her. Now she could relax a little; no one could surprise her in here.

The anomaly was to her left outside the viewport, and the shadow of the one of the collection arms loomed above. This hangar wasn’t positioned with a view of the station: Almayer was somewhere off to the right.

She changed into another bright orange thermal bodysuit, then put on the tech suit and sealed her helmet.

She approached the hatch and started a soft vent. It took about a minute for the dock to equalize. She couldn’t just open the door; without power for the refinery, she didn’t know if everything in the dock was magnetically secure. If there were unsecured objects, a sudden depressurization could be suicide. She hadn’t kept it together this long to be taken out by a flying wrench.

The transition to zero-g was awkward, but that was normal. Even with Evagardian technology, it was never completely seamless.

Her suit’s AI seemed to be functioning, but she didn’t trust it. She checked the controls on her glove and engaged the magnetism in her boots, dialing it down to a level that would allow her to walk a little faster as she set out across the hull.

At least she didn’t have to worry about Dawkes out here.

It hadn’t been a real spacewalk when she’d dealt with that O2 leak; she’d been between the station and the refinery, where the two mammoth shapes boxed her in, shutting out the stars and the anomaly.

But out here nothing blocked her view. Space yawned above her, and the amorphous silhouette of the anomaly was front and center.

She turned and looked back at the distant station. The viewports were just tiny points of yellow. She turned her attention back to the anomaly, but the phantom colors bloomed behind her eyes, and the shape seemed to grow. It was hypnotic. She focused on the hull instead.

“Mabry,” she said into the comm.

“Yeah?”

“You said you were a mercenary.”

“I said I worked in private security.”

“But you’re not a fighter.”

“How can you tell?”

“By how unhelpful you were just now. I almost got spaced.”

“What did you want me to do?” he demanded, sounding defensive.

“See
what was hitting the skywalk. Use your eyes. See things. Pay attention,” Deilani shot back.

“I was looking
. There was nothing there.”

She just shook her head inside her helmet. “Forget it. You’re educated, aren’t you?”

“Physics.”

“So why were you stealing?”

“I’m blacklisted,” he said.

“From what?”

There was a hesitation; he was searching for the right words. “From respectable stuff,” he said finally. “Free Trade accredited stuff.”

“Why not affiliate with someone else?”

“It’s not that easy. This isn’t the Empire. And when Free Trade people won’t work with you, what does that say to everyone else?”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine.” She plodded on without a word. A few minutes ago, she’d decided not to chat with him, but she couldn’t help herself. It was too lonely out here with just the black and the stars.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What?”

“They don’t need military officers to do safety inspections,” Mabry said. “What’s your real job?”

“I’m a doctor.”

“Why’d they send you here?”

She hesitated. “I did something that made them suspicious of me. I let a guy go that I probably shouldn’t have.”

“Are you one of those New Unity people that hate the Empress?”

“No.”

“Too bad. What are you doing out there? Where are you going?”

“I’m going to find out what’s in these collectors,” she replied. “The ones that aren’t on the schematics.”

“You might be happier not knowing.”

“I think I already do, but I have to be sure.” She stopped short. It was time to make her way onto the arm. Under normal circumstances, a tech wouldn’t have to climb; they’d just use a skiff. They would also have the option of communicating with the control room to have the arm frozen in place while they were working on it.

The arm was stationary at the moment, but it wasn’t powered down like the refinery was. If the anomaly shifted enough to justify repositioning, this arm would move.

She had to be very careful. Mabry cleared his throat as she touched down in the trench.

“Um,” he said, although it came out as more of a croak. “I think I need help.”

“What’s the matter?” she glanced up at the refinery.

“I’m hallucinating.”

She frowned as she clambered onto the arm. “What do you mean?”

“I’m seeing things.”

“What are you seeing?”

“Roth.”

“Is he going for the tram?” She turned back to the station.

“No. He’s outside.”

“What?”

“He was on the lower strut thing, uh—Connector A, or whatever.”

That was the support opposite the one Deilani had visited to redirect the station’s O2 supply.

“What was he doing? Is he still there?”

“No, he’s not still there.” He cleared his throat again. “He wasn’t wearing a suit.”

Deilani was getting to her feet, but she froze.

“You saw Roth out here without a suit?”

A pause. “Yeah.”

“Where’d he go?”

“I looked away and he was gone, I was— I don’t know.” He sounded close to panic. Deilani didn’t blame him; it sounded like he’d gotten some radiation after all. “Um, I’m getting kind of hungry.”

“Stay calm,” she told him. “It’s not good, but it doesn’t mean you’re a dead man walking. I might be able to help you when I get back.”

“Okay.”

“Just keep an eye on that tram. It’s not much, but I like knowing which side Dawkes is on.”

“I don’t know how much good I am now.”

“I just told you to stay calm.”

He sighed. “I thought I was okay.”

“Just give me a couple minutes. I’ll help you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’m Evagardian, remember? The Empress never refuses aid.”

“Maybe I should’ve just become a subject.”

“Obviously,” Deilani said, her eyes on the collection pylon ahead. “No one ever regrets it.”

“How do you know?”

“Everyone knows,” she said. “I’m here. How do I get this thing open?”

“I didn’t even work with the legit stuff. How would I know about whatever they had going off the books?”

“You’re the one who brought it up!”

“Yeah, well. It was weird that you were just taking them at face value.”

She winced.

“Why do you want to open it?” Mabry pressed.

“Because I want to see what’s inside,” she snarled.

“Fine. Whatever it is, if it’s not getting sent to the refinery, it has to undergo some kind of sanitation right there. No one can handle it otherwise.”

He was saying there would be a system inside the pylon itself for decontamination, or at least containment. To find the finished product, Deilani had to find the end of that system.

She circled the pylon, running a gloved hand over it. There was a panel with handles. She removed it and peered at the machinery. Medical training wasn’t much use here. “I don’t know what any of this is.”

There was a handle with a tag on it near the very top of the compartment. It was the only component that appeared to be designed to be handled without tools. Inside, a sort of tray was locked into a device with no markings. She reached up and grabbed it, breaking the seal and jerking the tray free. A plastic shield covered the contents.

“Well? What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking down at the tray in her hands. “Obviously I’m not going to ID anything visually. But it’s black.”

“What?”

“I think it’s a liquid, but it’s hard to say in zero-g.” She watched the globules shift lazily under the lid.

“The samples from the refinery don’t come out as a liquid. They isolate them, then encase them in that carbon stuff that preserves them. They make these little blocks.”

“I know.” Suarez had shown Deilani that process during her inspection. “This is something else. Maybe it really is Harbinger.”

“Harbinger?”

“It’s a controlled substance. Dangerous. You can get into serious trouble just for having data on it in the Empire. Most people don’t even know it exists.”

“Sounds like the sort of thing Yagami would be into.”

Deilani shook her head. “We’ll go with that. It’s enough for me to bluff with if the wrong people get here before mine do.” She put the tray back and stepped away from the pylon as Mabry let out a startled curse. “What?”

“Something just went by me,” he said, sounding disbelieving. “Outside. Not in the hall, outside for real.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It was fast. Right past my viewport.”

She frowned. “Stay calm. If you know on an intellectual level that it’s not real, that’s a very good sign. You’re okay.”

For a moment he said nothing. “I’m not buying it. I’m not crazy. Or if I am, it’s coming on a little too fast. Lady, I don’t think you’re alone out there.”

There was no sound in vacuum; all Deilani could hear was Mabry, and her own breathing inside the primitive helmet. There was glare on her faceplate from the refinery’s emergency exterior lights.

“That’s your judgment,” she told him. “Judgment isn’t a constant. You’re all right. You’re still okay, Mabry. Just take it easy.”

“Listen to me! That stuff out there, those things, what’s on the other side of the anomaly—it’s real. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s here. It’s getting closer to us. We just can’t sense it.”

She paused, unsure what to say, as she stared over at the station. The things that were happening to her body, her reproductive system gone mad—those were real. That was tangible.

“Look, just be careful,” Mabry said. “Don’t come back here. I don’t know what that thing was, but you want to stay away from it. Just go back to the station.”

“You need medical attention.”

“You can’t help me if something happens to you. And what’s going to happen if you run into Dawkes while you’re wearing that suit? Can you protect yourself with all that on?”

She wondered if she could even protect herself without it.

Mabry meant what he was saying, and he sounded logical. Even if he was seeing things, he still seemed to be thinking clearly. That didn’t quite line up.

“What do you think I should do instead?”

“Go straight back to the station. We can figure out what to do from there. You’re not safe out there.”

Mabry was convinced, and his levelheadedness worried her. What if he wasn’t hallucinating?

Everyone was deaf in space, and the helmet severely limited her field of vision. She tried to look around, but the anomaly was overwhelming. The vastness of the cosmos was overwhelming. There wasn’t really anything else to see.

But she looked anyway. She was sweating; her skin began to prickle.

“All right,” she said, surprising herself. “I’ll go.”

Something

had hit the skywalk, after all.

“Hurry.”

She gazed across the gap at the station. It wasn’t a particularly dangerous thing to attempt; it was a straight shot, and her aim didn’t have to be precise.

She still didn’t like it: uncontrolled flight was always risky without precautions. There was nothing to affect her trajectory, but without a powered suit, a safety line, or any help to speak of, it was an intimidating proposition. It was too easy to imagine just floating off to run out of oxygen in the black of space. Or worse, in the anomaly.

But she knew physics, and knowledge had to overrule superstition. There was no reason for this to go wrong.

She switched off her magnetism and pushed off, beginning to float toward the station. She wanted to come in gently to minimize the danger of rebounding into space if she wasn’t quick enough to attach.

She was on course: the station was a nice, large target. Under different circumstances, it might’ve been an enjoyable little cruise. This was her first time on a real spacewalk. She’d trained extensively in a variety of zero-g scenarios, but that had all been in VR. Indistinguishable from reality, but without the risk.

Now there was risk. She wished she at least had some maneuvering wires; there had probably been some in the supply room, but she hadn’t expected to need them.

Mabry made a choking sound over the comm.

“What now?” she asked, watching the station grow larger with every passing moment, and focusing on her shadow on the hull. She would hit in a few seconds.

She heard him swallow. “You have to move,” he said. “As soon as you land. Do you understand?”

“What?”

“Just do it. It’s behind you.”

Her shadow ahead of her was suddenly enveloped by a much larger one. She struck the bulkhead, immediately pushing herself sideways. Something struck the station, and she slammed to the metal, cracking her faceplate. The back of her head hit her neck seating hard, and she saw stars.

Powering on her magnetics, she got a boot into place and looked around wildly.

A massive dent marred the panel where she’d landed, and pieces of the outer hull were spinning away into the black. Something had struck it hard enough to crack the plating. Her ears rang, but she could still hear Mabry telling her to get inside.

She struggled to obey, making for the nearest airlock with the best pace she could manage.

Drops of her blood floated in her helmet, and the crack in her faceplate lengthened slightly. She felt the air pressure change. A warning light started to flash.

Movement caught her eye and she looked over in panic, but there was nothing to see. Had a shadow just flitted over the hull? Or had she hit her head harder than she thought?

Mabry was saying something, but his words sounded so far away that she couldn’t make them out.

She reached the airlock, started the cycle, and didn’t turn around. She didn’t look up. She just stared at the readout as the chamber beyond depressurized. The doors opened, and she pulled herself through, transitioning to gravity and collapsing to the deck on her side; she hadn’t re-oriented herself to what the station considered up and down.

The hatch closed behind her and air began to flood into the room.

She didn’t wait to unseal her helmet and yank it off for a rush of icy cold air and an intense smell of ozone and decontamination mist. She took deep breaths, dropping the helmet and feeling at the back of her head. Her fingers came away wet with blood. Idiotic galactic helmet design. She picked herself up, closing her eyes and trying to think about concussion symptoms, but something punched into the airlock doors hard enough to deform the metal and knock her off her feet.

Fifteen

She crashed against the inner hatch and saw stars. Emergency lights flashed, and the klaxon was quiet next to the blood in her ears.

Eyes wide, she stared at the pressure doors. Seconds went by. She reached blindly for the keypad, and the hatch slid open, letting her spill onto the deck in the corridor. She scrambled away to the nearest bulkhead.

Sweat dripped from her, but her mouth was dry. She reached for her ear, but the earpiece was gone.

The massive dent in the hatch seemed to stare back at her.

There really was something out there. It had crashed into the skywalk when she’d been inside, and now this.

For several minutes, she sat, not moving, not even thinking. Her head ached, and blood was drying on her neck and back. She had to think about the wound. Head wounds liked to bleed, and losing blood wouldn’t help her right now.

The suit was suddenly suffocating. She got to her feet and struggled out of it, staggering away and hitting the keypad to kill the screaming klaxon. She could see
the dent, but the airlock had obviously held, because this level still had integrity.

Her earpiece was lying just in front of the bent pressure doors.

She darted in and grabbed it, then fled down the corridor, fixing it to her ear and sealing the section behind her.

“Mabry?”

There was an explosive breath. “You’re still alive,” he said.

She realized what it must’ve sounded like to him: a loud crash, then nothing.

Her voice was a croak. She cleared her throat. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see it clearly. It’s dark. But it’s big. It was right behind you, going right at you. Is the station okay?”

Deilani looked over her shoulder at the airlock. “The hull’s not breached. That airlock’s out of commission, though.”

“I’m not crazy.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

It wasn’t. “What are we talking about here?” she demanded, not knowing the answer herself. “A hostile xeno?” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to think.

A hostile xeno that could exist in a zero-g vacuum was one thing. Something that could be so mobile
in a zero-g vacuum was something else; she simply didn’t understand.

“Empress help me.” She started to walk, trying to get her breath.

“Roth,” Mabry said.

“What about him?”

“I really saw him out there on the connector.”

She considered it. “What’s happening?
You want to tell me all of this came from the anomaly?”

“It’s getting worse. It physically interacted with the same parts of reality that we’re
physically interacting with. That’s not supposed to be possible. We shouldn’t be aligned enough for that to happen. It’s got to be Rigby’s resonance.”

“Rigby’s doing this? He’s gone. His ship is gone. Where’s his signal coming from?”

“I don’t know.”

“So this thing is here with us. Really here. Outside the station.”

“I don’t know for how long. I don’t see it now. When it hit the outer door, it looked like it just went through. I don’t know what happened. Maybe the signals slipped out of resonance.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the signal fades or changes, it could lose compatibility with us.” He made a familiar noise of disgust. “I mean, that’s how he explained it.”

“It would go back to being harmless?”

“Like a ghost that we can’t see or hear.”

“But can it see or hear us?”

“I don’t know
,” Mabry snapped. Deilani scowled. She climbed onto a ladder and descended to the second deck, making for the infirmary.

“I hit my head,” she told him. “I have to treat it. Then I think I have to rest. I’m not feeling well.”

“You need to hear me when I tell you this is getting worse. I think we’re shifting closer to full resonance. Rigby was afraid of this.”

“Of something from the anomaly coming through?”

“That’s if we’re lucky.”

She stopped in front of the infirmary doors. “What?”

“I keep trying to explain this. It’s not another
place. It’s this
place. It’s everything
. Two things can’t occupy the same space. Not even Rigby knew what would happen if the resonance caused a merge. If some life forms from over there are all we have to worry about, then maybe we have a chance. But it’s not just them. It’s all
of it.”

“Then where is it now?”

“I told you. Rigby said the signal reacted to living tissue.”

Deilani was bleeding; she couldn’t process this right now. She reached the infirmary and went straight for the painkillers, then held a scanner over her eye. No concussion.

The cut on the back of her head wasn’t bad, but there was a lot of blood. She cleaned it and applied sealant, then tried to consider Mabry’s words.

“It came out of nowhere,” he said. He had to mean whatever had tried to smash her against the station.

“What do you mean?”

“One second, you were by yourself, and then it was there behind you. Then it was gone again.”

“Empress,” she repeated, leaving the infirmary, but she caught herself. She wasn’t alone on the station. Dawkes was still on the refinery side, at least presumably, but there was no telling where Roth was, or Suarez. She couldn’t just walk around like she owned the place.

She had to focus.

“We’re going to figure this out,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

It was pathetic, but it had come on suddenly, the graininess in her eyes, the loss of clarity. She couldn’t cheat a sleep debt forever. Especially not when getting knocked around like this. The adrenaline should’ve been keeping some of the fatigue back, but it wasn’t.

She closed her eyes and thanked the Empress for Mabry. His warning had probably saved her life out there.

Had he done it out of decency? Or reptilian self-interest? Had he earned an early release? It wouldn’t hurt to have a second pair of hands in this.

She looked down sharply. That wasn’t her mind talking; that was her body. And speaking of her body, Suarez’s bite on her chest was throbbing despite the painkillers.

Mabry could stay where he was. He was being helpful enough already.

She made her way down to the lodging deck. It was tempting to go up to Yagami’s suite and sleep in that bed, but it was too close to Suarez’s quarters. With no door locks, that seemed like a foolish risk.

Likewise, her own quarters weren’t a good idea.

Deilani chose Barry’s room at random. She slipped inside, finding the cramped cabin neat and orderly. It smelled nice. There were some clothes on the floor, but everything else was in its place.

She felt no guilt sitting on the clean bunk in her sweaty, dirty bodysuit. She was well past the point of caring about manners and hygiene.

When she was busy, it was easy to forget that she had taken quite a battering over the past few days. Plenty of bruises and cuts from her efforts to restore power, Suarez’s bite, her tender arm, Dawkes’ blow to her back—it was adding up.

Gingerly, she stretched out on the cool sheets. Just this much felt decadent.

She couldn’t be sure because there had been a lot going on at the time, but she thought that at the moment of impact out there, there might’ve been another flare of phantom heat. But she’d been focusing on moving, not on reading every nuance from her loins.

She turned onto her back and stared at the gray plastic above. There wasn’t much clearance over these bunks; the space was used for storage cabinets. It was clean and calming.

Her bad situation was only getting worse, but right now, that didn’t matter. For the moment, everything was all right because it had to be. She was surprised that her little nap had kept her going for as long as it had. She had nothing left; if something came her way demanding her best, it just wasn’t meant to be.

She needed to sleep, although she’d settle for passing out. And not dreaming.

Sixteen

Her lungs filled with fluid.

She choked, taking in more of the thick, foul stuff, but it didn’t drown her. No matter how much of it she breathed, she clung stubbornly to consciousness, although the pain and sense of suffocation didn’t lessen. It just continued to intensify.

She was in the dark, like the absolute black of space, and there was pressure from all sides, crushing her. Cold and hot mingled, and everything was wet and slick, enveloping her. Flashes of pink and yellow flooded her brain, behind her eyes, but there was no light.

There was no time or room for rational thought. She fought her way out of it, feeling membranes tear and oily, burning substances released into the fluid she was drowning in.

She clawed her way free of the stuff that was squeezing her, finding herself in a tight, narrow space.

The walls, ceiling, and floor were soft and ridged, with patterns that she could feel. It had too much give to be rock or metal. There was
light. It was feeble, but it came from patches of something pale and white that dotted the surfaces, like a phosphorescent fungus. Tiny white tendrils waved in the dark, milky fluid.

She pulled herself forward, bumping against the wall. The tendrils touched her skin, immediately stiffening and clinging to her, burning. She tore free and rushed ahead, dragging herself hand over hand. She didn’t know which way was up, but it didn’t matter.

There was a crevice. She squeezed through it, emerging into another horribly cramped space, this one without light. She felt blindly, her hands finding smooth, bulbous protrusions on the walls.

There was something solid beneath her feet, but nothing above. She didn’t know if that was really up, but she had to try. Her chest was still being crushed, and with nothing to breathe but more of the foul liquid, there was nothing to cleanse its awful taste of decay from her mouth. She couldn’t even scream with her lungs full of it.

She tried to get purchase, grasping one of the protrusions, but it promptly collapsed in her hand, expelling something scalding hot as it did so. She recoiled, hitting the protrusions behind her, and setting them off as well.

The fluid was getting hotter by the second, heated by these boiling releases. She made her way up regardless, climbing into the first sizable cavity she reached. Hands in front of her, she moved forward, trying to feel her way over the smooth, soft surface.

There were heavy, slimy folds of something ahead, but she pushed them aside, shoving her way through.

Something abruptly clamped down on her thigh, and she struck it away in panic. Another found her shoulder, and she pushed that one off as well. She squirmed on more recklessly, more of that hot substance bleeding into her bath.

Then she was free, but up against another wall, this one covered in more of the soft, rounded ridges. She felt up and down as something else brushed past her legs. She clawed her way in the opposite direction, swimming blindly into a mass of roiling, thrashing flesh that wrapped itself around her in an instant, thick limbs probing and squeezing.

She wrenched herself free and swam for the wall, finding handholds and struggling upward, kicking off tendrils that wound around her ankles from below. Every second she thought she was going to pass out from the constriction, or to just burst, to combust from sheer horror, but nothing could stop it. She was already surrounded by black, so she couldn’t close her eyes. She couldn’t even hold her breath, because she had no breath.

She hit her head on another ribbed ceiling and flinched, feeling desperately. The tendrils tried to stop her from taking refuge in another alcove, but she slipped away. The surfaces around her were soft and porous, and they tried to cling to her skin. There was movement: a tickling, as though there were thousands of small things, very alive, pulsing against her.

She didn’t stop.

The pressure on her body became more intense, and the appendages probing at her became more insistent. Stubbornly, her brain refused to quit. No matter how much she wanted it, the blackout wouldn’t come. There was no respite. Although she was immersed and suffocating, she couldn’t suffocate. She wanted
to, but it wouldn’t end.

She struggled harder to get away, but they responded in kind, beginning to pull her back to bind her.

Her hand found a ledge, and she pulled with everything she had, coming free with an immense feeling of suction. Fatigue began to make itself felt in her limbs. It took immense bursts, all of her energy to keep moving, and her strength was fading.

Suddenly she was in the open, and sinking.

She flailed her arms and legs, finding that she could swim, but she didn’t know where to go. Normally sinking would be down and the opposite would be up, but she wasn’t thinking, only feeling.

The squeezing and stifling was still there, and she still couldn’t breathe. She could move her arms and legs freely, but for all she knew the walls were just out of reach—or perhaps she was in an ocean.

She spread her arms, drifting gently.

No. She couldn’t be idle. She had to move, to swim.

A faint light appeared beneath her. She looked down as it grew slowly brighter.

And larger.

She began to swim toward it. A shape began to materialize, something massive.

She couldn’t tell if she was moving toward it, or if it was coming toward her.

A split appeared, a line in the dark. It grew, widening beneath her.

Monolithic jaws were opening, and the movement was no longer gradual. The thing surged toward her, the light illuminating thousands of teeth, each a hundred times longer than Deilani was tall.

She came awake very suddenly, and for the briefest, most horrible moment imaginable, she couldn’t move.

Her entire body boiled. She was soaked with sweat, and there was a powerful odor of urine. She fell off the bunk, struggling to tear off the sodden bodysuit even as she crashed to the deck. The floor was wet too. She slipped, but her nausea was the least of her worries as she peeled off the sticky fabric.

She flung the suit aside, fumbling in the dark for the door to Barry’s bathroom. She fell through and lunged for the shower, but she tripped over something unexpected as the lights came on.

Suarez was in the shower, and it was his feet that had tripped her. She fell in with him, seeing the blood that was everywhere, and now all over her.

That was what the fluid on the floor had been.

She didn’t have the breath to make a sound, and her body wouldn’t obey. She was crumpled in the tiny shower with the corpse, her legs numb, body quaking as the phantom sensations flooded through her. She retched, pushing Suarez’s body away, but there was nowhere for it to go. Conscious thought wasn’t even a memory. With the same panicked determination that she’d had to get into the shower, now she had to get out of it, out of the room.

She couldn’t stand. Her legs were useless; they couldn’t do anything more than quiver and twitch. She dragged herself out of the shower, black spots in her eyes threatening to blind her.

As she crawled across the floor, slipping in Suarez’s blood and choking on her own bile, it was hardly different from the dream. She was suffocating, like there was pressure behind her eyes that threatened to shut down her consciousness, cancel her out. Her head was bursting, her chest had collapsed, and her lower half was on fire.

Her limbs wouldn’t obey, and she couldn’t even stop shaking. Her fingers couldn’t get any purchase on the smooth floor because of the blood. The mixture of bodily fluids in the air made a sickening miasma.

She reached the hatch and hit the release, slumping through into the corridor.

The change was instantaneous and profound. The air was dry and cool. It was fresh. It had been through recyclers a thousand times, but it was clean. The only blood on this deck was what came off her body.

She didn’t stop until she reached the opposite bulkhead, where she sat with her bare back against the cold plastic, gulping air.

Now she had the breath to make a noise, but she didn’t.

She just stared, waiting. Adrenaline surged through her. The way her heart was pounding, blood battering her ears, the smells overwhelming her senses: her body was primed to overreact and overextend thanks to the bizarre cocktail of stims and chemicals still in her system. It would be a coronary if she was lucky. A stroke if she wasn’t. This terrifying head rush was almost a reprieve.

Seconds went by.

The door to Barry’s quarters closed with a whisper.

Her eyes slid down to the streaks of blood on the deck and the smears covering her own skin.

It was starting to fade. The nausea came again, but she just put her head back and ground her teeth through it, gagging. It passed.

She still felt the pressure, the probing, the touch of the dream. That one had been briefer, milder than the first, but no better. These weren’t real sensations; they didn’t have that inescapable, tangible quality of the phantom heat that assaulted her, but they still wouldn’t go away.

She wanted to ram her skull against the bulkhead, just smash herself into unconsciousness—except then she might be back in the dark with those things.

She had never even contemplated suicide before. Now it wasn’t just an option; it seemed like the smart
option. She would die if she went too long without sleep, but sleeping was worse than death.

When she had walked across the surface of Nidaros, going on nothing more than the vague hope that there might be a chance ahead, she had thought about her decision to enter the Service. About the situations she had imagined she might find herself in.

The war had been inevitable when she had gone up for officer aptitudes. She had attended preparatory school and worked hard. In the ancient past, certain things were required in militaries to become an officer: certain levels of birth, education, even money. There had been a time when a commission could be purchased.

In the Imperium, officer hopefuls had only to prove themselves worthy, but they had only one chance. You could only test for officer candidacy once. If you didn’t qualify, you could never try again.

Deilani remembered. She remembered how much she’d wanted it. Her desperation. There were one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week. She had spent well over a hundred of them preparing, and the rest sleeping.

If she’d failed, she’d have been willing to enlist. The status wasn’t the same, but it was still something; less than one percent of people who tried to qualify for the Service were accepted. The percentage for officers was even lower.

Just serving, even enlisted, would have given her what she needed. And she’d known
she could make that cutoff. That had never been in question. Whether she got her commission or not, she had been destined for the Service.

Would she find herself in battle? It seemed likely; if Evagard went to war with the Ganraen Commonwealth, no one would escape combat. They’d all known that wouldn’t be a short or easy campaign.

She had been prepared for that. She had pictured herself in all manner of situations, things she’d seen in dramas, things she’d read about.

Fighting with a rifle in her hands. Piloting a drop shuttle. Running command from an airship for the ground forces, serving on a station, being a tech.

But she’d ended up in Bio, a physician, and the ceasefire had come at the same time that her training ended. As she’d accepted her commission, she’d known that she would not be going into battle after all.

She would work in an infirmary. Mostly likely aboard a ship, but not necessarily. Perhaps she would be assigned to a consulate at a galactic station full of exotic people and opportunities.

As she’d walked across Nidaros with a man that she was convinced was her enemy, she had reflected that this was no way to begin her career.

Now she was covered bodily fluids, steeped in chemicals, sleep-deprived, and sitting naked in a corridor of a mining station that was actually a front for a criminal enterprise.

For a second time she had hostile xenos in her life, and her only ally was a man she couldn’t even begin to trust. Even her own body was no longer on her side, but inappropriate libido had become the least of her worries.

She caught herself. Thinking about suicide was one thing, but just then she’d been seriously wondering how
she was going to do it. The doctor in her bristled at that. It was a red flag. It wasn’t that
uncommon for suicide to cross a normal human’s mind in times of extreme emotional and psychological pressure, but crossing the line to logistics meant there was a problem. It was actionable, at least in the eyes of the Service. One could be forgiven for having ideation, but if it ever got as far as a plan, that was usually a career-ender.

Deilani was now formally obligated to seek out her supervisor and report herself as unfit.

She didn’t let herself laugh.

Seventeen

Her skin prickled, and she was getting cold. Slowly, reluctantly, her synapses began to fire.

There had been a cutter clutched in Suarez’s pale, dead fingers. That made it easy to guess how his throat had gotten open that way.

Had he killed himself because of the dreams? Because of the radiation poisoning?

He couldn’t have already been in there when she came into the room to lie down; the blood hadn’t been on the floor when she went to sleep. So—what? He’d just wandered in and decided to kill himself in the shower?

She shook her head, which was still pounding from when she’d hit it when she tripped. She was probably bleeding again, but how could she tell when she was already covered in Suarez’s blood?

The stress on her body alone could kill her easily. So could Dawkes. So could that thing outside.

She knew that she wasn’t going to sleep again on this station.

Suarez had it right. That was
better than going back to that place.

Giving up was becoming more than just a temptation. And before Nidaros, maybe she’d have seriously entertained that notion.

But all she could think about was the pitying look that the Admiral would give her if he could see her like this. That was what annoyed her. She wondered if all of this would even faze him.

That would make this the second time the Admiral had screwed up her life. Nidaros had been his fault. And it was his fault she’d lost her berth aboard the Julian
. Deilani wanted to get off Almayer Station alive just so she could find him and strangle him.

No, that wasn’t true. She’d lost her berth because of her own decision: the decision to confront him on Payne Station. She’d wanted the last word.

It had been sheer vanity.

And she had severely underestimated the consequences.

Whatever the reason, whatever he’d been thinking, Suarez was dead. Deilani was too far gone to feel guilty; she was glad. The wound from the bite he’d given her was a painful reminder that Suarez had been a threat. There had been so many bodies since everything went to hell that it no longer bothered her, although she had a feeling she wasn’t going to get around to dragging Suarez to the freezer to join the others. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have to worry about him anymore.

Now there was only Dawkes. And Roth.

And Mabry. She couldn’t give him a free pass just because he hadn’t tried anything yet.

The blood was drying and getting sticky. Soon it would become a disgusting crust on her skin. She needed to get clean and dressed.

Then, as always, there was work to do. It was clear that a timely rescue wasn’t something she could gamble on. If she couldn’t find a way off the station or eliminate the threat, she was as good as dead. This time, she didn’t have the luxury of letting the Admiral decide her next move for her.

She was responsible for whatever would come next. No one was going to do this for her, and if she let it, time would run out.

Her body was unnaturally sore as she picked herself up, just as it had been after the first time she’d experienced that black world. Muscle strain? Seizures in her sleep? She held her hands away from her sides so she wouldn’t have to touch the blood any more than necessary and shuffled to the next door in the line. She didn’t even know whose room it was. She palmed the release, leaving an ugly smear on the reader.

The hatch opened, and the lights came on as she entered. At a glance, she couldn’t tell who had occupied these quarters, but it was obviously a woman. Maybe that blonde that had worked under Suarez: Miller.

The shower was long overdue. She was scalding herself, but she didn’t reduce the heat. She could burn it away, or she could scrub herself raw. None of this would help, but nothing could stop her from doing it.

She found a pair of the orange thermal bodysuits in the closet. So this wasn’t
the blonde’s room; it belonged to that older woman, the tech. Rinsing off and putting on clothes wasn’t as calming as she’d hoped. Her reproductive system was a reactor melting down, but her brain stubbornly hung onto a sliver of focus. That was the best she could hope for.

She made her way to the upper deck, finding that her sore arm didn’t like ladders very much anymore.

Suarez’s holo was still on the bar in the executive lounge. She picked it up, finding it locked. She’d expected that. There was no avoiding it; she had to go back into Barry’s quarters. She had to get her earpiece so she could get back into contact with Mabry.

She made her way back down to lodging, turning into the corridor with the crew quarters.

The blood on the deck stood out clearly under the bright lights. She was still barefoot. She carefully made her way to Barry’s door and hit the release, taking care not to step in the blood as she let herself in.

The room was still fragrant, still a mess. The bloodstains on the floor might’ve told her something about the state that Suarez was in when he entered the room, but she’d completely ruined any clues they might have held when she’d been crawling around.

She held her breath and edged around the streaks and smears to the bathroom door. Suarez’s corpse was still there. He was wearing his Almayer Station jacket with Team Lead
sewn on the breast. His eyes were open.

She threw a towel over his head and knelt with the holo to key it on. It came to life, sluggish but functional. It was upsetting that her own more sophisticated holo hadn’t survived the radiation, but this humble one had.

She used Suarez’s thumb to unlock the holo and got out of the bathroom, grabbing her earpiece from the floor and wiping it off. She eyed the bunk with distaste. She didn’t like it that this thing, this situation could reduce her to such a humiliating state. Still, if she had to admit to all these less-than-dignified details in a report, that would mean that she’d gotten off Almayer Station alive. She’d have to take the bad with the good.

Strapping Suarez’s holo to her wrist, she left Barry’s room, but halted in the corridor. She wasn’t sure where to go next, so she attached the earpiece.

“Mabry?”

“You get your nap?” He sounded tired.

Deilani swallowed and checked the time on the holo. Two hours. Pitiful. It wouldn’t be long before her fatigue came back with a vengeance. There was no changing the amount of time she had; all she could do was try to use it wisely.

“When did you sleep last?” she asked Mabry.

“I don’t know.”

“How many times have you slept since the power went off?”

“Twice.”

“Next time I’m over there, I’ll bring you some stims.”

“Okay.”

She checked the corridor in either direction. She was alone, and the station was quiet.

“Are you hungry?”

“No, but I’m out of food again.”

“I want to check up on something. Is Dawkes still over there?”

“The tram hasn’t moved.”

Dawkes would have to take the tram, which Mabry would see, or put on a suit, which he probably didn’t have the presence of mind to do. The sky walk was depressurized.

“And he hasn’t come past me,” Mabry told her.

“Okay. Stay alert.”

“Yeah.”

He didn’t sound good.

She headed for the bridge. There, she looked out the viewport at the expansive view of the refinery and the collection arms.

There was no more doubt left in her mind. Rigby’s world was real, and so were Mabry’s theories about it. There was no money in skepticism at this point. She was ready to take it all at face value.

But she couldn’t see
it. She looked down at the tram, locked in place on the station side.

In theory, she had the station to herself. She sank into Suarez’s chair and looked at the holo on her wrist.

Yagami had never spoken to her after their initial conversation when she arrived. It had always been Suarez. Suarez, the team lead. He was her guy, the unlucky one who had to deal with the Imperial inspector. Maybe Yagami hadn’t given Deilani any face time because she felt it was beneath her. Maybe she didn’t want to get to know someone that she might eventually have killed.

It was hard to picture Yagami spending a lot of time with Rigby. A woman like that would see him as an asset or a possession, not as a peer or an ally. She’d bought him, after all.

Suarez would be the middleman for her dealings with him. He had to be.

So there would be communications on this holo. Suarez was just a guy. He wasn’t the mastermind type, like Yagami. He wouldn’t have a collection of readers and holos.

His thumbprint had already unlocked the device; Deilani began to look through his files.

There were plenty of communications with Yagami, some of them concerning Deilani herself. She wasn’t interested in those. She wanted to know more about Rigby, and what he’d been doing.

She tried Suarez’s private communications, where she was startled to find several explicit images of Barry. The context was obvious, but Deilani hadn’t even suspected a relationship between the two. Maybe this had something to do with his decision to commit suicide in Barry’s shower. Deilani would never know, and it was none of her business.

As expected, there were messages from Yagami.

YAGAMI: We’re taking his word for this? No one can verify these graphs and readings, no one has a frame of reference for them.

SUAREZ: He says it’s the best he can do.

YAGAMI: Not good enough. Tell him he has a week.

This seemed promising. Deilani paused, going back up to that conversation. She looked at the dates associated with each message. There were no letterheads here, no ID. There were lots of candid conversations like this logged in the holo, but this was the first one that might point to Rigby.

SUAREZ: He says he can come up with a way to show you. He wants a month.

YAGAMI: Two weeks.

YAGAMI: This isn’t a charity.

YAGAMI: He better be serious.

SUAREZ: He’s building a prototype, something that can let you see what he’s picking up.

YAGAMI: If it’s that easy, why didn’t he do it sooner? Don’t let him lie to you. He’s up to something.

SUAREZ: I talked to him. He says his prototype doesn’t actually ‘see’ this thing, but it recreates it from the data that it takes in.

YAGAMI: VR?

SUAREZ: I don’t know. That’s what he said.

YAGAMI: How do we know it’s legit? He could show us anything.

SUAREZ: He says they’ll convince you.

SUAREZ: He’s excited. He’s not faking it.

YAGAMI: Keep me posted.

The cache afterward had been cleared. Deilani chewed her thumbnail. This could be her meal ticket: the last of these messages was dated a week before she arrived on Almayer Station. Rigby’s prototype must have done its job, because the scientist had been comfortable in his VIP status when she met him. He must have given Yagami what she wanted, something that could convince her that Rigby’s work was worth whatever she was paying for it.

A device that could let the user see
Rigby’s world? If it was real and it worked, Deilani wanted it.

“Roth’s over there.”

She blinked, startled from her thoughts. “What?”

“He’s over there,” Mabry repeated. “And he didn’t take the tram.”

She tried to process that. “How?” How was he doing this?

“He’s right under you. Just went past the lounge.”

She thought for about three seconds, then ran for the hatch. She sprinted into the corridor and leapt onto the ladder, sliding down and taking off around the curve.

Running wasn’t a good idea. Her body didn’t need sudden movements, it didn’t need more impacts—and it certainly didn’t need a confrontation with the man who had been the last person to see Barry alive.

Her body wasn’t at its best, and neither was her judgment. She didn’t care.

The corridor ahead was deserted.

“Where’d he go?” she demanded.

“I can’t see past where you’re at. I can only see the other side.”

Groaning in frustration, she took off again. She reached the junction and halted, heart racing as she turned a full circle, watching every corridor. “You got eyes on him?”

“No. You sure you want to be going after him?”

“Yes,” she replied, starting to jog forward. She sped up, glancing into the fitness center as she passed. Deserted.

She stopped and listened, suddenly queasy. There was nothing to hear. The recyclers went on and off. The Isakan drink dispenser in the canteen began to play its jingle, and the melody echoed softly through the corridor.

“He wasn’t running, was he?”

“No. Just walking.”

She sighed. There was no way he could’ve stayed ahead of her at a walking pace. Either she’d gambled on the wrong direction, or he’d pulled off another vanishing act. It wasn’t too late to rush back and try to search the rest of the deck, but she wasn’t going to do it. Confronting Roth wasn’t a good idea—not until she found out what had happened to Barry.

“He must’ve suited up and crossed over,” Mabry said. If he hadn’t taken the tram, that was the only explanation. Unless she wanted to believe that Mabry really had seen Roth outside without
a suit. And why not?

Deilani turned to the viewport. Mabry’s conference room was just a point of light against the black of the refinery.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for clues on Rigby’s work.”

“He was in the ship when it went up, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then have you tried Yagami? She probably had the data.”

“On her person?”

“She was a Free Trader. You never know.”

He had a point. Yagami hadn’t been big on trust. Caution was necessary when dealing with any galactics, but Free Traders were particularly predatory.

Would she keep some kind of physical data storage close? Why not?

It was thin. Thin enough that if she hadn’t been so close to the galley, Deilani probably wouldn’t have bothered. But she changed course, passing the irritatingly cheerful drinks machine.

She hit the release. The hatch to the freezer hissed open, and she screamed.

Eighteen

It wasn’t much of a scream. Less than a cry, but more than a gasp.

The freezer was empty.

She stepped inside without thinking, eyes wide. The bodies were gone, every last one of them. She put a hand against the cold wall to steady herself.

It wasn’t just the bodies: there hadn’t been a lot of blood because these people had been killed by radiation, not physical trauma—but there had
been some.

Now there was none. No blood, no bodies, just some torn fabric.

The floor of the freezer was clean. Not just clean: sterile.

She just stood there, mouth open, breathing more and more rapidly.

“You all right?” Mabry asked. “Something wrong?”

“Someone moved the bodies.”

“What?”

“Had to be Dawkes,” Deilani told him, looking over her shoulder.

“Why? Where’d he take them? Wouldn’t that be a big job?” he added.

“I don’t know!” She caught herself and lowered her voice. “How
would I know?” she snarled. “He had two hours. I was sleeping.”

“He’s supposed to be over here, though.”

“Shit.”

“And he couldn’t do that without me seeing something,” Mabry added.

Something was wrong, though. Something about what she was looking at was off.

She looked around, trying to pin it down, and then she saw it: the colors. The walls of the freezer had built-in shelves of drawers in clear plastic. They housed foodstuffs, real food that could be prepared, not combiner gel.

The drawers on the back wall were empty. Not all of them, and some were just half-full. But they’d all
been full when she’d brought the bodies here. And they’d still been full when she’d come here looking for Roth’s body the first time.

“I don’t…” She trailed off. “I don’t get it.”

“What would he do with the bodies?” Mabry was asking.

“He couldn’t
. It’s not possible.” It didn’t add up. The list of things that made this impossible was too long for her to even think it through.

Dawkes was in no condition to undertake a job like this, and it was difficult to imagine him staying focused long enough to see it through.

She put her face in her hands and tried to calm her breathing. The impossible was hard to shrug off.

And that was what this was.

She opened her eyes and looked a second time, really looked.

The freezer was still empty and clean, but there was something on the floor. She knelt and picked it up, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Part of it was like fabric, and part was like plastic. It crumbled in her hand, turning to a fine dust.

After a long moment, she lifted her fingers to her nose and sniffed. She was nearly sick right there. It was the smell of the dream.

Lightheaded, she brushed off her hands and backed up to the hatch. Her confusion was overwhelming her desire to get out of there; she couldn’t get past the rear wall. It didn’t look as though someone had simply removed the food from the drawers; it was more like they had erased it.

She gazed at what was in front of her and imagined something passing through the wall, taking only the food and leaving plastic and metal behind. The outline was round, but lumpy and misshapen. If it even was
an outline. She didn’t know. She was afraid she was losing her mind.

“You still there?”

It was Mabry. She cleared her throat and went into the corridor, going to the viewport.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what’s going on over there, but you want Rigby’s data, right?”

“The ship’s gone.” It was sad that she needed him to bring her back on task.

“Yeah, but Yagami made him send it all to her. She couldn’t understand any of it, but that didn’t matter. She was archiving it somehow. Probably through Suarez. Look for a physical backup.”

“I checked his holo. I didn’t see anything like that. We’re talking about raw data, right?”

“Code from the signal,” Mabry said. “I told you. We converted it to ones and zeros.”

“It’s worth something, isn’t it?”

“A lot.”

How much, though? Had the mining operation been cover for Rigby, or had Rigby been cover for the Harbinger? Or were they connected? One of them had to be Deilani’s trump card, but which?

“And you think Suarez had it?” she asked.

“Had to be him or Yagami.”

She swallowed. “Give me a minute.”

How had the Admiral put it?

She tried to remember as she made her way through the station, but couldn’t. He’d said something about this, though. Something about times when one way or another, it would be over soon. Times when you went all in, where there was no going back, and your only chance was to try to make it to the other side.

The empty freezer didn’t matter. The dreams were enough. Deilani didn’t need to be convinced that reality was falling apart, and Almayer Station wasn’t doing much better.

Her limbs were heavier than ever, but she climbed down the ladder to the next deck. It was too soon to risk resorting to stims. She set her jaw and tried to press on, but had to stop as soon as she got to her feet. A throb of nausea and warmth came and went.

The phantom sensations were returning. They were no longer moving around; there was only one part of her body they were interested in.

She had to ignore them. Her eyes fell on the hallway outside Barry’s quarters.

Blood had been all over her when she scrambled into the corridor after finding Suarez in the shower. It had gotten everywhere.

But the deck was clean, as though a custodial android had just come through.

She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t even confused. Just angry.

She hit the release hard enough to crack the reader. The hatch hissed open, and she knew what to expect.

The lights came on in Barry’s room, revealing twisted, shredded sheets and Deilani’s own cast-off bodysuit.

She knelt, touching the orange fabric. Dry. She picked it up and sniffed. The odor was there, but it was faint. It wasn’t just sweat, urine, or bodily fluids. She got up and went to the bunk, putting her hand on the sheets. They’d been savagely torn, and at her touch, they started to crumble. She stared at the bunk for a long time before turning to bathroom.

The shower was empty. Suarez’s body was gone, and so was the blood. His tattered clothes remained, but they were barely recognizable.

The cutter was still there: clean, but damaged. It had deformed, somehow.

She went out into the corridor and pressed her forehead against the viewport. The carbon had a force shield reinforcing it, which made it warm to the touch. It was a little comforting.

She couldn’t search Suarez’s body now, although anything he’d been carrying would have been left in his clothes. It didn’t matter. Rigby’s raw data wouldn’t do her any good; there was no trump card there. Maybe it could be used to bargain, but at this rate, she’d be dead long before Yagami’s people showed up.

But Rigby could still help her. Or rather, Yagami could.

She remembered the prototype that Yagami and Suarez had discussed in their messages. Dawkes wasn’t the one making these bodies disappear. She wasn’t alone; there was something outside the station, and something inside it as well.

And

Roth.

Whatever it was, it was erasing organic material and damaging the inorganic materials that were left behind. That was bad news for the station.

She made her way up to the executive floor, going straight to Yagami’s suite.

This time, she looked on the decadent luxury with new eyes. She went to the android in the chair and knelt in front of it, pulling the towel from its head. The eyes were closed. Deilani snapped her fingers a few times in front of it.

“Wake up,” she said. That was usually the activation key phrase with these things.

No response.

Could there be anything interesting stored on the android itself? Could it be Yagami’s secret archive? Anything was possible, but she didn’t want data, just the prototype.

She got to her feet, looking at the secretary in annoyance. It was just an assistant model, but even if Yagami had a comfort android, it wouldn’t do Deilani any good unless it worked. And very few things worked. She shook her head; these were the thoughts she couldn’t get rid of.

There was nothing useful in the desk. There was a little bar, but no bartending arm; Yagami controlled her systems from her own holo and mixed her own drinks. Or made her android do it. How quaint.

The wardrobe contained expensive but appropriate clothing. Yagami had been small in stature, but fierce. She’d had a lot of presence. She wore business clothes in dark colors with red accessories.

Clothing. Shoes. A reasonable quantity of personal effects and accessories. Yagami wouldn’t store important business-related valuables here.

Deilani kept looking. If she hadn’t watched so many Old Earth dramas, she never would’ve found Yagami’s vault. It was behind a feed on the wall that was set to a soothing loop of wild grass swaying in the wind. She tore the display off the bulkhead and threw it aside.

The vault was half a meter wide but only thirty centimeters tall. It had a biometric scanner, but it was high-end. It wouldn’t be fooled by a thumb attached to a corpse, and Yagami’s body was missing anyway.

But there was no need to be stealthy, no need for discretion. There was more than one way to get into a vault, and Almayer Station had plenty of tools.

Deilani wasn’t a tech, but after what she’d gone through to restore power to the station, she felt like one. She would cut her way into the vault. There was no guarantee that there was anything useful in there, but it seemed like a reasonable place to check.

But why was
there a vault? It was silly.

Yagami owned this station. She had built it, and these people worked for her. Without her, they had nothing. Who would steal from her?

Mabry would. Not so silly after all.

She left the suite to get her bag of tools, padding barefoot through silent corridors. The phantom sensations were back in force, but she was determined to stay focused. In only minutes, she was back in Yagami’s bedroom.

She didn’t need her database for this. Donning protective gloves and goggles, she switched the cutter on. Better to use a dangerous tool like this now, before her fatigue could drag her down even more.

It would only be necessary to sever the hinges and the lock. After that, she would drill a hole to break the pressure seal, and she could attach a magnetized handle to pull the door off.

She decided where she would cut and got started, but it was immediately clear that it wasn’t working. This cutter should’ve sliced through metal like it was nothing, but that wasn’t happening. The metal was heating up, but it had to be reinforced with something pretty sophisticated for the molecules to hold together under this level of heat.

“They should build ships out of this stuff,” Deilani muttered.

“What?” Mabry asked.

“Nothing.” She pulled the cutter back and switched it off, frowning. It stood to reason that a vault did not want to be broken into. With enough work, she was confident she could get in, even with these tools, but it would take time. And by then she’d have heated the metal to extremely dangerous levels, which would damage whatever was inside.

She needed a better solution.

And she had one. It was in her very own safety report: the nanocutter, a tool that used nanomachines to cut instead of heat. The technology was similar to that used in the nanoblades carried by Imperial acolytes, the Empress’ most elite guards. The nanoblade was supposed to be purely ceremonial, but in all the exciting Evagardian dramas, people tended to end up using them in duels and such.

Deilani had never liked those dramas.

The nanocutter was a dangerous piece of machinery, but the mining crew’s safety procedures had been satisfactory.

That would get her into the vault.

But it was over in the refinery, locked up securely in the mining supply depot. But that
was a lockup she could break into with the plasma cutter she had.

It was starting to come together.

The only thing standing in her way was Dawkes, who was presumably still over there.

She caught herself and shook her head. It was time to stop letting Dawkes bottleneck her plans. There was no choice; she had to take him down. With him out of the picture, she would only have Roth to worry about. That was worth the risk. If she was going to find a way out of this, she couldn’t be planning every move around a man she might or might not run into.

She returned her tools to her bag and dropped it on Yagami’s bed, then climbed on and crawled over to the nightstand. The drawer opened at her touch.

The gun was still there. It wasn’t the fancy sort of weapon that you saw in the hands of wealthy villains in dramas, just a compact pistol from an Evagardian maker.

Galactics weren’t supposed to be able to get Evagardian weapons, but this was one of Yagami’s lesser sins.

Deilani checked to make sure it was loaded, then picked up her bag and database. This was getting to be a lot to carry.

It was still better than carrying bodies.

Better than dragging two people across the hull of a colony ship under a rainstorm of rock and live xenos with only seconds to spare.

With that memory to put things in perspective, she shouldered her things and got moving.

Nineteen

The anomaly was no longer beautiful and hypnotic.

The clouds of black and grey looked the same as they had when she’d first reached Almayer Station, yet somehow they were more threatening.

There was something in there, and if it was what Mabry thought it was, then it was something that no one understood.

She looked through the tram’s viewport at the refinery as it drew closer. Apprehension wanted to swell up in her chest, but she didn’t have much patience for it.
She forced it down and stepped back from the hatch.

She shrugged her shoulders to settle her assorted straps and put both hands on the pistol.

As a Health and Wellness Inspector, she was still active duty Service, but she was filling a role intended for a civilian. That meant that even though she wore her uniform for these inspections, she wasn’t authorized to carry a sidearm. It was an odd rule; she was required
to carry one just to go on liberty in uniform aboard a friendly galactic station. But out here, alone—no weapons allowed.

Normally, that was all well and good for an inspector. A doctor with a gun probably wouldn’t send the right message anyway.

The tram locked into place, and the hatch opened. She raised the pistol and stepped through, pausing in the welcome center. She waited, listening.

A feed announced the tram’s arrival, and the words, delivered in a mild Luna accent, echoed through the empty corridors.

“Arrival,” the broadcast stated pleasantly. “Arrival.”

This was the announcement that Deilani had been afraid of earlier: it would tip off Dawkes that someone was close. Now she didn’t mind. In fact, she was counting on him hearing it.

She stood ready. There was one hatch and two corridors. She watched all three. It was hard to forget the way he’d slammed against the doors earlier—how suddenly he’d appeared, and how quickly he’d closed the distance. The radiation sickness wasn’t slowing him down.

She wouldn’t shoot to kill. She would hurt him badly enough to stop him, then stabilize him, give him enough chems to keep him unconscious until this was over, and find a way to lock him up. No matter how bad things got, she was still a doctor. She’d never killed anyone before, and she preferred not to start now.

She jumped as a safety reminder came over the broadcast.

“All team members, please remember to manually log your holo when entering the refinery proper,”

the voice said. These loops weren’t running back on the station; she’d gotten used to the quiet.

She glared at the feed for a moment, then went back to keeping watch.

“Are you okay?” Mabry asked.

“I’m fine. Why?”

“Because I saw you come over, but you’re not here yet.”

“I’m waiting for Dawkes. I thought he might show up if he heard the tram come in.”

“Don’t hold your breath. If he’s in the refinery somewhere, he’s not going to hear anything.”

“And he could be dead,” she mused.

“Radiation?”

“Or suicide. He can’t like these dreams any more than we do.” She chewed her lip. “Or what happened to Barry. I can’t stand here all day. Dawkes,
” she said sharply, trying to project. Her voice would carry down the administrative corridors, at least.

She went up to the welcome desk and rapped on it sharply with the handle of Yagami’s pistol. The sound wasn’t very loud. She looked around for something better.

“I don’t care,” she said, to no one in particular. She raised the gun, pointing it down the corridor on the left. There was no one down there.

The shot was especially loud in the confined space; she flinched despite herself.

“Whoa,” Mabry said. “What the hell?”

“Maybe he heard that.”

“Are you insane? What if you put a hole in the hull?”

“This thing couldn’t put a hole in a viewport.”

“Be careful
.”

“I’m done being careful.”

Minutes passed. Dawkes didn’t appear.

She glanced at the feed over the desk, noting the time. Fine; she’d have to sort out Dawkes later. She went to Mabry’s conference room and again considered letting him out.

She thought she wanted to, but did
she? Did she really? Or was this her libido again, pretending to be her brain? She swallowed.

“You know what to do,” she said.

He went to the other side of the room and put his hands on the wall. Deilani put the gun in her tool bag and got the door open. She went in and dropped one of her bags on the table, then backed out and sealed the hatch.

The lock clanked into place, and she wasn’t alone.

Dawkes was at the end of the corridor, looking even more ragged than when she’d last seen him. His uniform was rumpled and stained. His hair was disheveled, and his skin was gray. He was breathing hard. She’d seen that look on his face once before.

She froze, but only for a moment.

“Mr. Dawkes,” she said, facing him. “How do you feel?”

He started forward. He didn’t have his cutter, but he still had fifty kilograms on her.

She snatched the pistol out of her bag and brought it up. Dawkes didn’t make a sound; he just saw the gun and bolted, running back toward the refinery.

For a moment she just stared. She took aim but didn’t fire. He turned the corner and was gone. His footsteps faded.

She started to swear. Mabry was at the conference room door.

“What is it?”

She just shook her head, groaning. “Empress damn
him. He could be anywhere now.”

And he knew she was in the refinery. He knew she was armed.

“Never liked that guy,” Mabry said with his mouth full. He’d already started on the food she’d brought.

Her groan was long and heartfelt. She’d let her guard down for one second, and in that second, he’d appeared. She had to be more careful. She rubbed at her eyes, then looked at Mabry through the viewport.

“There’s a kit in there. Test your blood. If you’re reading above the danger level for radiation, take the painkiller,” she said.

“Will it help?”

“You’ll feel better.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I don’t think you’re poisoned. I think what you’re seeing is real.”

“You sure you want to go in there?”

“I have to.” Deilani looked at the door to the viewing deck.

“He’s in
there.”

“I can handle him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t offer me help,” she warned.

“You don’t have to trust me. I know an Imperial’s never going to. But take a look around.”

Deilani hesitated. “Shut up,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Just shut up.”

He looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

She wasn’t going to explain it to him. And she needed to stop looking at him. It wasn’t just the lust goggles; he really did look good, even though that stubble would probably feel pretty rough. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought about those feelings. She turned her back on the door.

“I’ve been wrong about people like you before,” she said. “Let’s hope I am again.”

“It’s my funeral too,” he said, annoyed.

“Deal with it,” Deilani shot back.

He rolled his eyes.

She rubbed her face again, then set down the maintenance database by Mabry’s door. She had to keep her tools; she would need them to get at the nanocutter. Adjusting the strap on her shoulder, she addressed Mabry again without looking.

“Do you know where the nanocutter would be?”

“No. But I think only two of them were certified to use it.”

“Miller and Mogambi.”

“Sounds right.”

“So if I can find their workstations, the cutter would probably be close by.”

“You’d think so.”

“Where did they work?”

“Probably the same place as everyone else. Down under the filters.”

Where the arms joined the refinery and the big conduits fed into the particle decontamination system. Most of the workstations were over there, but they hadn’t gotten much use. The refinery didn’t need a lot of people to operate.

She groaned. Still, that area was all the way at the other end of the facility.

“Stay quiet in there. He’s dangerous,” she warned Mabry, and didn’t wait for an answer.

As she approached the hatch, she fished the light from her bag and switched it on. The emergency lights in the refinery wouldn’t be much help. It was going to be dark.

The hatch opened, and she went through without hesitation. If she stopped, or started to think about where Dawkes might be, what he might have in mind—she couldn’t let herself get mired in fear disguised as caution.

She wasn’t kidding herself; she didn’t want to run around the pitch-black refinery any more than she wanted to deal with Dawkes, but the allure of Rigby’s prototype was too much to walk away from. Just the possibility of being able to see what she was up against was enough to push her forward.

The floors in the refinery were mostly metal grates over crawlspaces, and it was all loose, held in place by magnets in case of gravity loss. It rattled underfoot no matter how lightly she tried to walk, and it wasn’t comfortable with bare feet.

All too quickly, the reassuring glow of the viewing deck was gone, and she was among the cooling towers, making her way through the labyrinth of walkways and chambers that made up the refinery itself. With full power and everything running, it was loud enough that the walkways needed dampeners to protect the crew. Now, there were only the recyclers and emergency coolant lines to hear, and those were just whispers in the dark.

She could shine her light up and see nothing but black. She knew how high the ceiling was, and that the beam wasn’t getting anywhere near it. Likewise, there were places where she could shine it down without being able to see the bottom. It was only about twenty meters down to the lowest point, but it looked infinite in the dark.

At least there were plenty of handrails and safety bars; she never would’ve given the refinery a pass otherwise. Yagami must’ve had a feeling about that. Some of these safety features had the look of having been installed recently.

The workstations were positioned along the walkway so that they could all be visited with a single circuit around the refinery. There were a few more in a sort of pocket in the middle, and Miller’s was one of those. Deilani remembered finding all of this unspeakably dull when she’d been inspecting, but now she wished she’d paid more attention.

She found the right catwalk and followed it, massive compressors looming on either side, with a deep trench underfoot. At the bottom of this one was machinery covered in the most disgusting coolant gel that she had ever encountered. The coolant was only about three centimeters deep, but it was ferociously corrosive to skin, and impossible to get off. Worse, the machinery it was covering was capable of generating enough heat to melt the human body. Handrails weren’t good enough; her report made it clear that this section needed gravity tethers.

To be installed within two hundred hours of Deilani’s departure. Suarez had looked pained by the expense, but he’d reluctantly agreed. As though his agreement mattered. The Empress’s safety regulations were absolute, but people liked to cling to the illusion of choice.

The grating underfoot rattled, but now she didn’t mind that. She was light, and if she was making noise, that meant Dawkes would too if he tried anything in the dark. She’d hear him coming, but he wasn’t the real threat in here. The danger was getting lost, or wasting too much time. She had to move, but it wasn’t easy. It went against her instincts to rush toward all this dark when she didn’t know what was waiting in it.

After all, something that could make a freezer full of bodies and half a wall of food disappear without a trace probably wouldn’t have much difficulty dealing with one Evagardian junior officer.

The beam of her light fell on Miller’s station, where everything appeared to be in order. There hadn’t been anyone working in the refinery when Deilani inspected the facility. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t known
the crew was hiding something. Foolishly, she’d been taking advantage of the refinery’s brief time offline to see if she could find out what. Her curiosity had probably saved her life.

Her plasma cutter made short work of the lock on Miller’s storage cabinet, and she opened the doors to reveal the gear inside.

The nanocutter was folded up with its deployable stand. The device was intended to be locked in place when used, but it was detachable from the tripod. That had almost become a serious issue during the inspection, but a nanocutter wasn’t much
more dangerous than a plasma cutter, and no one was ever going to require plasma cutters to be stationary.

She had cited Suarez for unsatisfactory written safety protocols for the system, and he hadn’t been able to produce any documentation that his people had been formally trained on it. They were listed as certified but hadn’t been able to provide any of the materials to prove that they’d received the training. Deilani had nailed him for that too.

She shook her head; her focus was drifting again, heading in the wrong direction. She thought of Mabry, then Suarez. Images flashed in her mind, including those of Barry that she’d found on Suarez’s holo. In the state she was in, it was hard not to feel a bit jealous. It looked as though Barry and Suarez had been having a nice time when they took those.

“Stop
,” she said. “Just stop.”

“What?” Mabry asked in her ear, puzzled.

Deilani froze; she’d forgotten about him. She cleared her throat. She wasn’t going to explain to him that she was standing in the dark, alone, telling off her rampaging sex drive and its stubborn accomplice, her imagination.

“Nothing. Shut up.”

She unlatched the case for the nanocutter and lifted out the device. It was heavy, but not as heavy as she’d feared. It was a little larger than a carbine, and more or less the same shape. She shifted to get it positioned correctly, then keyed it on. She flicked off both safeties and charged it up.

She could see it come to life, but it was whisper-quiet. That was another safety issue—one she hadn’t noticed the first time around. Probably because when the refinery was actually functioning, it was loud even with the dampeners.

She had what she’d come for.
She switched it off and put it over her shoulder, hoping she could remember the way back. She just had to make a right, then follow the exterior walkway. The refinery looked like a maze, but it wasn’t very complex. It was just big, and the sheer quantity of places to go was intimidating.

Dawkes could be in any of them. In the state he was in, he could easily get turned around, or fall over a railing. In fact, the odds of him surviving any length of time alone in the refinery—without power, without a light, without the full use of his brain—had to be slim.

Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the chems she’d taken. Maybe it was something else, but she didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him.

“Roth?”

The voice stopped her in her tracks. She was in the middle of a catwalk spanning one of the trenches. Disbelief had frozen her, but there was a sudden surge of heat in her body, and the phantom sensations began to creep over her again.

She ignored them. That had been Barry’s voice.

She kept still and listened. It sounded like it had come from below. She went to the railing and leaned over to look down. Even with her light at maximum power, she couldn’t see anything down there. She cleared her throat, but stopped herself there.

She didn’t want
to run into Dawkes in here; she didn’t want to raise her voice, but there was no alternative.

“Barry?” she called out hesitantly.

There was no reply.

Barry was dead. She’d seen those readouts on Suarez’s holo, where he’d tracked the vitals of the crewmembers. Barry had died shortly after Deilani had spotted her in the solarium. The reason for her death wasn’t clear, but a flat line didn’t leave a lot of uncertainty.

She was gripping the handrail so hard that it hurt.

But that had only been a reading, and that wasn’t the same as seeing a body. Trackers could be fooled; Barry could still be alive. Deilani stepped back, looking in either direction. She had to get down there.

“Roth?” The voice floated up from below.

She lunged back to the railing.

“Barry—Pilot Officer Barry, is that you? Can you hear me? Where are you?” The acoustics were playing hell with the sounds. The voice sounded
like it was coming from the dark below, but Deilani wasn’t convinced. “Please, please
—can you hear me? This is Lieutenant Deilani. I can help you.”

She waited. And waited, knowing she was going to hyperventilate if this went on.

“If you need help, just say something,” she cried out, desperate. “I can help you. I want
to help you. Just tell me where you are.”

The metal of the hull groaned faintly as the collection arms repositioned. That was the only sound.

“Roth?”

Deilani felt a chill. Something was off, and it had been that way each time Barry spoke. The thought hid underneath her hope, underneath her panic, in the corner of her brain.

The words were the same.

Roth. Roth?

The volume, the speed, the intonation. Every syllable was identical. This wasn’t a woman with radiation poisoning caught in a loop of thought, confused, lost, repeating herself. It was too uniform.

It was like listening to a recording.

Roth had followed Barry into the solarium, and she was never seen again. Roth was supposed to be dead.

Roth?

Those might have been the first words out of Barry’s mouth when she saw him. Deilani didn’t know. How could she know?

Barry was dead. Whoever was down there—well, it wasn’t her.

Twenty

Mabry stared at her.

Deilani gazed back down the corridor, moving the straps on her shoulder for the hundredth time. The nanocutter wasn’t meant to be carried this way; it was starting to hurt, but that was the least of her troubles.

“You okay?”

It seemed like he asked her that a lot, but he did have a vested interest in her wellbeing. She was his literal meal ticket.

“You even awake?” Mabry pressed.

She turned to return his gaze through the viewport, focusing.

“I don’t think you’re safe over here,” she said, looking back toward the refinery. “I want to move you to the station. You shouldn’t be alone here.”

His brows rose. “I’m not complaining, but did you find Dawkes?”

She shook her head, waving him back. “Get on the floor. Face down.”

With an exaggerated look of patience, he got down flat and offered his hands.

She had made sure she was prepared to move him if she needed to; she had an industrial binder from maintenance supply in her bag. Dawkes, as security officer, probably had some control cuffs. She doubted he would lend them to her.

A small towel was all she had to cushion his wrists. The metal binder she was using was meant for patching high-pressure pipes, but it would work well enough to keep a man’s hands immobilized. It wouldn’t be very comfortable.

“Christ Jesus,” Mabry gasped as she tightened the clasp.

Deilani helped him up. With his hands behind his back, he wasn’t going to try anything.

“You smell pretty good for a guy who’s been locked up,” she said.

“They weren’t going to mistreat me until they found out who I was working for.”

“Who were
you working for?”

“What if I told you it was your people?”

“I might believe you.”

“But I won’t tell you that. I’m not telling you anything.”

Up close, he was a little broader than she’d realized. “Fine,” she snapped. “You can help me carry some of this.” He snorted. She draped the database and tool bag over his shoulders.

On the way back to the foyer, she saw the way he was looking around. He was glad to be out of that room.

“Don’t get excited. You’re not free, you’re just changing cells.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“What did you see in there?” he asked as she pushed him into the tram and joined him, keying the cycle.

“No, you tell me what you’re
afraid of.”

“I think what’s happening right now is just the beginning,” Mabry said, looking serious. “Like if their world is bleeding into ours, this is just the first couple of drops.”

“When’s the rest coming?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t want to be here when it does. We need to leave.” He meant it.

“I don’t trust the ECs after what’s happened to the systems. Barry’s shuttle was damaged, and I couldn’t pilot it anyway. Could you?”

He shook his head. “Yagami’s people have to be on their way. They’ll kill us both for sure. What about your
people?”

“If we could contact them, they’d be here right away. But I won’t be overdue for a while, the systems don’t work, and I’m not a tech. I can’t build a communications system.”

Mabry watched the anomaly as they glided back toward the station. “I said that thing was creepy the first time I saw it, and I was right.”

“I thought it was pretty.”

“Those clouds are corrosive. It’s nasty in there.”

Deilani wasn’t watching the anomaly. She was searching the black of space, hoping for a glimpse of whatever had attacked her when she was outside, the thing that Mabry had seen. From the way he was fidgeting, it seemed he hadn’t forgotten about it.

“You have a theory?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Something got through. The signal resonated at the right moment, and it was here, physically. I don’t know what it was, but it went straight for you.”

“Living tissue, organic material.” She chewed her lip. “Maybe it was hungry.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Too bad we aren’t full artificial.”

“That’s a misnomer,” Mabry said. “You’re never full artificial. You’ve still got your real brain in there. Only androids are full artificial. Except for those Eden ones, or whatever. That was a Ganraen thing.”

“The what?”

“The ones that think they’re real people.”

“That’s a drama. This hot guy hunts them down on Old Earth. Or was he the android? I don’t remember. I’ve seen it, though.” She stifled a yawn.

“Pretty sure that’s where they got the idea. It’s half myth at this point.” He shrugged. “They did it, though.”

“Machines that don’t know they’re machines.” She snorted.

“It’s not a new concept—don’t you read?”

“What’s the point of it, though?”

“Don’t try to get into the heads of these virtuoso genius types,” Mabry told her frankly. “It never ends well. Look at Rigby.”

For the first time in a while, she felt almost at ease. As a physician, she appreciated the power of the mind over the body, and the therapeutic value of positive human interaction. She knew all that, but she’d never felt
it so profoundly before.

The carriage docked, and they boarded the station.

She had to do something with Mabry. She wasn’t about to drag him along with her while she followed up on her leads. Trust was still an issue, and perhaps more importantly, she didn’t trust herself not to get distracted. She had to leave him somewhere. Somewhere safe and secure, but where would that be?

She’d brought along the lock from the conference room, so in theory, she could put him anywhere. This wasn’t the time to overthink it. He could stay in her quarters until she figured something out; at least that way he wouldn’t have to climb any ladders with his hands tied.

She took him to lodging and opened her door.

“Sit,” she said, pointing at the floor.

Mabry raised an eyebrow, but obeyed. She pulled up his hands and hooked them on the handle of the closet slider.

“This is not comfortable,” he said, giving her a hopeful look.

She released one of his hands and tightened the binder down on the remaining one, attaching him to the closet. It wasn’t a luxurious arrangement, but it was more or less humane. She sat on the bunk and began to rummage through her bag. She got her blood scanner and took a sample from her arm. Her hormones were insane, but her radiation levels were still okay.

“What’s your plan?” Mabry asked, watching her.

“I want Rigby’s prototype. I don’t know what it is or what it does, but I want it.” She rubbed her face and looked at him. “Yagami pressured him to deliver. That’s why he accelerated whatever he was doing. That’s why he did things that weren’t safe. That’s
what got us here.”

Mabry nodded. “Sounds right.”

“Can it be reversed?”

“I don’t know.”

“I need
you to know.”

He gave her a look. “Rigby strengthened the signal by broadcasting his own signal that resonates with it, and that had the effect of amplifying it.” He was looking curiously around the room. Deilani noticed her filthy cast-off clothes from hours ago on the floor and kicked them under the bunk and out of sight.

“You think the signal from our end could still be active?” she asked.

“It’s possible, if Rigby wasn’t
broadcasting from his ship. Whatever his setup was, he put it together before I got here. He did suit up and go outside sometimes.”

“Where did he go?”

“I never asked. When he was out, that my chance to try to get his data. If you want to know more about it, check the holo under the bunk in Rene’s quarters, if it’s still there. Everything I lifted should be on it. The pass key is 58705.”

Deilani put her blood sampler aside and leaned back. It felt good to sit down. 58705.

“If the signal’s still here, that might be worth thinking about,” Mabry added.

“Will things go back to normal if I turn it off?”

“I don’t know. I guess we have to hope so.”

“Shutting down the signal doesn’t actually save us. We still have Yagami’s people to deal with.”

“Might buy us time, though.”

Deilani chewed her lip. She had an idea, but Mabry was reaching for her bunk. He picked up her collar from where it was lying on the sheets.

“Help yourself,” she told him dryly. “You don’t want to use that.”

“It still turns on. It’s not completely fried.”

“It interfaces directly with your brain and nervous system,” she told him tiredly. “Using a damaged one is a good way to end up in a coma.”

“I know. I just wanted to see what you had loaded.” He squinted at the readout. “I used to mess around with this stuff, trying to teach myself to starsail. I don’t know how much money I’ve blown in VR parlors. That’s right,” he said, glancing up at her. “Out here you have to go somewhere and pay money for this. You people can do it from your beds.” He shook his head. “Five Husbands
? What’s this supposed to be? Is it an Imperial thing?”

She grabbed for the collar, but he avoided her, still reading.

“Oh, it’s full sensory. One of those
games.” He put on a very mild look.

Deilani cleared her throat. “It’s an iconic franchise,” she said. “It’s considered culturally significant in the Imperium.”

“It’s a series? What’s the next one? Six Husbands
?”

“Do you know anything
about our culture?”

“Not really. But I thought hooking up with artificial people was supposed to be beneath Evagardians. It’s why you people don’t like androids or whatever, right?”

“It’s a social science training tool,” Deilani snapped.

“How? What’s it do?” He sounded genuinely curious.

She looked at him suspiciously. “Each one’s in a different city, and there are five potential husbands. It’s all about how you win them over.”

“Win them over? Are you joking? The whole point of using VR is that you don’t
have to do all the work. Does this have to do with your weird Evagardian gender stuff? How do you win them over?”

She twitched. “You buy them gifts, take them places they want to go, style your look to suit what they like, impress them with your bloodline prospects,” Deilani said, counting on her fingers. “Usually they have some sort of problem or baggage in their life that you can help them sort out. Each one has its own story. Some of it’s pretty dramatic. I had to fight a duel once,” she said proudly.

“Did you win?”

“Took me a couple tries.”

“So it’s a strategy game. You have to do dumb Evagardian stuff to make these dumb virtual Evagardian guys fall in love with you.”

Deilani narrowed her eyes. “It’s harder than it sounds.”

“Then you get laid.”

She opened her mouth, then just sighed. “Yes.”

“Well, us normal people have these games too. They’re called dating sims, and they’re for sad, lonely people.”

She groaned. “All
Evagardian girls play it. It’s expected of you. It prepares you for life.”

“So real Evagardian girls leave their actual Evagardian lives to go into VR and work
to build a fake Evagardian life. Beautiful. So do Evagardian guys get to play Five Wives?
”

She balked. “What? That’s ridiculous.”

He was fiddling with the collar again. “I forgot you guys can marry more than one person. Five, though? Sounds crowded.”

“I’ve never gotten more than three,” she admitted, rubbing her injured arm. The truth was, she wasn’t all that good at it.

He raised an eyebrow. “How many of these have you played?”

“What do you care?”

“Hey, I think it’s good to have a hobby. Do you actually want
five husbands?”

Deilani shook her head.

“How many Imperial women are actually married to five guys?” he pressed.

“Almost none. They’re usually big aristocrats. I met a girl from one of those families once.” She was going to go on, but she stiffened.

“You okay?” he asked.

She wasn’t.

There was another episode coming on. Her skin was heating up, and she was starting to sweat. She squeezed her legs together and breathed deeply.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

He nodded.

“The signal must be strong right now.”

“Yeah— Wait, you’re hungry too?”

She shook her head, then put her face in her hands. “No. I have a different problem,” she told him, her voice muffled by her palms.

“What problem? What do you need?” he asked.

She snorted. Then she looked up.

Mabry sensed the change in her and tensed. He cocked his head.

“What?”

She stared at him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” A pause. “No. No—you’re kidding
,” he said, looking like he wanted to laugh, but his stomach growled, and there was probably some discomfort associated with that. If his hunger was even half as intense as what Deilani was feeling, he had to be in pain.

But she wasn’t thinking about his discomfort; she wasn’t thinking at all. In fact, she’d gotten to her feet without realizing it.

He looked up at her, disbelieving.

“You can’t be serious,” he said.

She didn’t reply to that. She started to peel off the orange bodysuit.

Mabry tried to back away, but there was nowhere for him to go. He looked up at his bound hand. “I get that you can’t take me to dinner, but aren’t you even going to ask?
” he demanded, sounding panicked. “Or at least find me a snack first?”

“Sure. In a minute,” she replied, pushing down the suit and kicking it aside. Now he was the one staring, and his look of incredulity became one of concern.

“Are you even up for this?” he asked.

Deilani looked down. She wasn’t especially confident about her body even when it wasn’t covered in cuts, scrapes, and large, blackening bruises—but that was when she had control of her brain.

“I’m good,” she said, and it was true. She could have a gunshot wound at this moment, and she would still rather have him than a medic.

“Do we have time for this?” he asked, his voice cracking.

“No,” she replied, advancing on him.

“I don’t have a choice here?”

“Not unless you have a really
incredible mastery of your circulatory system,” she said, kneeling down to straddle him. She sank her weight into his lap and leaned in.

“If I’d known this was how Imperial girls got when they were away from VR for a few days,” Mabry said, still looking stricken, but Deilani wasn’t interested in jokes. She shut him up with a kiss and pressed against him in a way that a few days ago she probably wouldn’t have been able to imagine herself doing.

It was immediately evident that Mabry did not have the circulatory mastery to resist, but he did have a hand free, and he used it to push her back.

She gave him a threatening look.

“Okay,” he gasped. “You talked me into it.” He rattled the binder and gave it a meaningful look. Deilani gazed at him for a moment, then freed him. Seeing the state she was in, he wanted to be gentle, but she had no time for that. She needed him to forget his discomfort, get assertive, and do his part.

Fortunately, he’d picked up on that, and just the first touch of his fingers was enough to send her into a euphoric state that put chemical stimulants to shame.

She’d taken enough of a beating that she should have been in tears, but now she welcomed everything. She knew that judgment was the first to go at times like these, and appropriately, she didn’t care. There was only so much blood in her body, and right now none of it was in her brain.

She had never been this impatient in her life, or this vocal. Or this good at multitasking. Kissing Mabry ferociously, her thighs clamping down on his hand like she was trying to break it, blindly getting his trousers open—she did it all at once.

There was a sudden hotness on her stomach, and she opened her eyes, indignant—but the glistening drops on her belly were crimson.

Dawkes swept the nanocutter in an arc, and she was doused with an ocean of blood.

What was left of Mabry’s body splattered onto her, pinning her to the deck.

Dawkes threw the nanocutter aside and moved in, his lurching figure reflected on the shining red walls. She kicked his feet from under him, sending him crashing into the spreading pool of blood. She scrambled onto his back and locked an arm around his throat, squeezing desperately. Eight seconds on the carotid was all she needed, but her body was too slippery to get any purchase, not with her arm on his neck, or her bare feet on the slick floor.

To Dawkes, she might as well have been weightless. He was trying to get up, grabbing for her. She couldn’t choke him out before he found a way to fight back, and there wasn’t time to think of some other, better way.

She twisted her torso to get leverage, then pushed off the ground with everything she had, using all of her weight and every muscle in her body to wrench Dawkes’ head in the opposite direction.

His spine snapped with a noise like a gunshot. Suddenly limp, his body collapsed, and she spilled to the ground with it.

Twenty-One

There was a part of her that didn’t want to move.

There was also a part of her that knew that even though her eyes were closed, she was lying in blood, not a warm bath. That part knew that this blood was going to cool down, then congeal all over her body and in her hair. It would even crust her eyes shut if she let it.

That

part of her knew better than to give into the indulgent desire to disconnect and shut down, refusing to deal with what was happening. Even the best therapists could never really treat themselves, but her training still counted for something. The rational corner of her mind knew that by doing what she knew to be least harmful, she could mitigate the damage.

She was already doing it, already withdrawing into test-taking mode, that tunnel vision that she’d mastered as a student. It wasn’t a good sign; it was regression. That was the wrong kind of coping skill.

But if that was what it took, fine. If that would get her through the next few minutes, or even the next ten seconds, fine.

She picked herself up from the floor, careful not to slip and fall. Slowly, with an eerie impression of calm that didn’t involve looking down, she walked into her bathroom and switched on the shower.

This felt familiar. Especially the part about her brain thinking, even when she didn’t want it to.

With Mabry off the refinery, no one was keeping watch on the tram. Dawkes had been free to just come on over. And of course, the door locks weren’t working.

She had already known that he was fixated on her and her quarters. She knew
that Dawkes was afflicted with the same thing she was.

But he hadn’t seemed as much of a threat. She’d no longer been alone, and she’d been armed. And she hadn’t been thinking. No, that wasn’t true. She’d been thinking; thinking about Mabry, and how perfect, how convenient it was that not only had she removed her contraceptive implant, but that she also happened to be ovulating.

Mating had been her only thought. Dawkes hadn’t even existed in her mind.

She leaned against the wall of the stall, watching pink water swirl in the drain. The worst part was that the feelings were still there. Her mistakes had gotten Mabry killed, and all she was thinking about was that she still hadn’t gotten what she needed.

She wished she was back on Nidaros. There, she’d struggled with hopeless odds, but she’d take that over this
.

Mabry hadn’t known what hit him. The instant the nanocutter pierced him, the contents of his torso had become liquid. It was as close to an instantaneous death as you could ask for.

That didn’t make it better.

She was close to being sick again, but that feeling wasn’t alone.

The sensations were so forceful that she was physically aching. Her need was drowning out the abuse her body had suffered like a sadistic painkiller. It would pass, or at least go down a little, if she waited. She’d been through it enough times now to know that.

Her fingernails dug into her palms, and she unclenched her fists, putting her hands against the wall.

She didn’t leave the shower until she reached her water limit and it cut off automatically. She opened the hatch. The room was still a scene from a horror drama. She swallowed weakly, pulling towels from the rack. She threw them on the floor to walk across, although the blood immediately soaked through them.

She took her EV suit from the case under the bunk. Nothing that had been on the floor was wearable. The EV’s AI wouldn’t function, but it still fit her, and she needed something to wear.

Did she? There was no one else left alive aboard Almayer Station.

What about Roth? He was dead
.

Still walking around, though.

Clothes were probably optional at this point. What might’ve been a laugh turned into a choke, and she caught it before it could become a sob. She focused, grinding her teeth and pulling on the EV. At least this way she wasn’t barefoot anymore.

She gathered what she needed from her quarters and threw it all into the corridor, then picked up the nanocutter and set off, leaving red footprints behind.

“…here at Almayer Station, we value…”

The promotional audio was back, and she was grateful for it. Because she wasn’t going to hear Mabry’s voice again, and before he’d been reduced to scraps, she hadn’t appreciated how much it helped to hear a human voice.

She paused in the junction, turning to look to her right. Roth was there, walking away from her. Perhaps thirty meters separated them. He disappeared around the corner.

For a moment she considered following, but decided against it. Chasing Roth hadn’t gotten her anywhere so far.

“It’s not him.”

That was what Dawkes had been trying to say when she saw him outside her quarters. She didn’t know that he was talking about Roth, but Mabry had expressed the same suspicion.

Roth was dead, just like Barry. Barry’s voice in the dark, Roth walking the corridors of the station.

It wasn’t him. It looked like him, but it wasn’t him. It was something else.

It was whatever had made Barry disappear. It was probably responsible for the missing bodies and food, too. Mabry had seen Roth walking outside the station without a suit.

No, she wouldn’t chase him. In fact, running into Roth was the last thing she wanted to do.

It was awkward to climb ladders with the cutter, but she was no longer paying attention to fatigue or weakness. Time was up.

She dragged herself up to the executive deck and entered Yagami’s suite.

The nanocutter made four simple slices in the door of the vault. They weren’t perfectly straight, but she wasn’t trying to impress anyone. She put the cutter aside and fixed her magnet and cord to the door. There hadn’t been a portable winch small enough to bring along, so she had to do this part herself.

She turned around, put the cord over her shoulder, and pulled. There was some movement, but not much. The dense armor of the vault was staggeringly heavy. On its powered hinges, the door would swing open effortlessly. Severed from those hinges, she had to contend with both gravity and friction.

She put her back into it, wishing she had an EVX suit for times like this, but even an EVX couldn’t augment her strength if its systems were destroyed by radiation.

The door ground out of place and thudded to the thickly carpeted deck, sending vibrations through her feet. She was shaking from the exertion, and hot. EVs were supposed to be temperature-controlled; she’d never worn one unpowered before. It wasn’t as comfortable as she’d hoped.

She went to the vault and peered inside, mindful of the sharp edges left by the cutter. It was neat work, and she hadn’t damaged the contents. There were several physical data cards and crystals, and another pistol. There were some physical currency bonds, a flat case, and a device that could only be Rigby’s prototype.

Her heart leapt in triumph. Mabry had died for this device. She’d only gone into the refinery for a way to break into the vault. If she hadn’t gone in there, she wouldn’t have heard the voice. Without the voice, she wouldn’t have brought Mabry to the station. He’d probably still be alive.

She swallowed, gently lifting the device from its shelf. It was a blocky sort of headset that would completely cover the eyes, obviously put together by hand. It was heavy, and there was only a pair of straps to secure it to the user’s head.

She looked back into the vault, hoping for something else—instructions, perhaps—but there was nothing. Rigby must have explained the headset’s use to Yagami or Suarez personally.

She’d have to figure it out for herself.

There was quite a bit of money in the vault, although for Yagami, it was probably just emergency cash. Deilani glanced at the door, then sat on Yagami’s bed, considering the headset.

The vault should have afforded some protection from the radiation, so there was a chance that it was still operational.

The main component appeared to be an ordinary holo connected to the feed inside the headset. She swiped her thumb over it, and the display came to life.

CALIBRTING

The word flashed on a white background, and it was misspelled. Rigby really had thrown this together in a hurry.

Lines of code began to scroll, and she held back the padded flap so she could see better. She’d never seen a piece of equipment load so slowly.

The white vanished, and an image of the suite appeared. She got to her feet, pointing the headset at the vault. The feed quality wasn’t very good, and there was a noticeable delay when she moved it, the image taking a few milliseconds to catch up to where the headset was actually pointed.

Carefully, she pulled it over her head and tightened the straps.

She was still looking at the suite, but it was a little less distinct. Maybe it could only pick up the anomalous readings when the signal was strong. She could only feel the phantom sensations faintly at the moment.

Maybe it wasn’t switched on. Maybe it didn’t even work. She looked around, disappointment rising in her chest and throat. Had Rigby conned Yagami? He could’ve programmed the headset to show something at his command, something that would convince the wearer that they were seeing something interesting. Now that he wasn’t around to trigger that effect, this thing was just junk.

But Rigby hadn’t been a fake. His work was real. If it wasn’t, then what was going on?

She wandered around the suite, wishing that she knew what she was looking for.

There was a way out of this. There was
a way to win, but she needed this device to work.

Her foot bumped the ruined vault door, and she glanced down.

Deilani screamed like she had never screamed before in her life, but it was cut short as she recoiled, slamming into the bar. The goggles were knocked askew, and bottles fell to the tiles and shattered. She slid down to the floor, tearing off the prototype and putting her hand over her abdomen, then between her legs.

There was nothing there. She took shallow, gasping breaths, clutching at her stomach. She looked down at the goggles, still in her hand. Her throat was tight with dread. A terrible nausea began to well up in her as she felt the squirming on her skin.

The feelings had been focused more or less on the same places for a while now; she’d been trying
not to think about it.

Sweat stung her eyes, and it was pouring off her. With shaking hands, she pulled the headset back on. She looked down, and nearly blacked out.

It wasn’t clear if she was looking at one organism or a mass of them—no, she could feel
them. There were several bulbous, pulsating things the size of her fist, and the goggles rendered them as a grainy, gray and white shifting pattern, like a silhouette.

At least a dozen were attached to her.

That wasn’t all: through the goggles, her belly was distended, stretched. There was something in that same gray and white filter there, throbbing.

She stared. Her fingers had closed around broken glass from the bottles. It was cutting her, but she just clenched her fists, unable to take her eyes from what was in front of her.

She touched where one of them was locked on tenaciously. She felt nothing but her EV and her own thigh. There was nothing there, but she could still feel it.

And through the prototype, she could see it.

Again she put her hand over her abdomen. It was normal. Her belly was flat. She was normal.

But through the goggles she looked about five months pregnant, and the black, twisted shape at the heart of the image didn’t look like any fetus she had ever seen before.

She couldn’t look any longer. She ripped off the goggles, and her eyes caught on an ornamental mirror.

There were massive, dark circles beneath her eyes. Her skin was flushed and gleaming with sweat. She trembled all over.

She tried to breathe, watching her chest heave. The sensations were getting stronger again, and now that she knew what they were coming from, it was difficult to keep from gagging.

The suite was quiet. Everything was all right. She could still feel the things, but she’d muscled her way through these episodes before, and she would again.

These things were real, but they were separate from her. They were clinging to her, but not really
. She was safe.

She knew she was safe because she had to be. She didn’t know what the alternative was.

Drawing her knees to her chest and closing her eyes wouldn’t help, but she did it anyway.

This would pass. All she had to do was breathe, wait, and not let herself panic. That was all. It was that simple. If she could keep her head, everything would be all right.

Her heart began to slow down. She was starting to get some oxygen. Not enough, but more. The queasiness in her throat faded. This was a bad situation, but she’d been in bad situations before.

The key was to stay calm.

The thing in her belly squirmed.

Twenty-Two

“…so if this works, no one’s ever going to have to see this. I think that’s all I have.” Deilani rubbed her eyes. “I’m losing focus. I don’t have much time left.”

She shut off the recorder and leaned back in the command chair. The bridge hummed quietly around her. The clouds of the anomaly roiled silently beyond the viewport.

It wasn’t her imagination: the maelstrom out there had gotten more feverish. Despite the anesthetic that she’d injected into her thigh, she could tell that her passengers were getting twitchy as well.

There was still so much to do. It seemed like too much.

But she had to get started.

An alert flashed on the main readout, startling her. Power levels were dropping. She keyed up the error and looked at the malfunction codes, quickly propping up her maintenance database on the console and waking it up.

She couldn’t afford to let the station lose power again. The first time, it had been shocked into an emergency mode, then prevented from coming back on. Now she was looking at a similar reset. There was no damage, but the station drew on the refinery’s reactor to power the collection arms, because that was considered an essential function.

Right now, the arms had only station power, the power that she had restored—and that wasn’t sustainable. There was no danger; nothing was broken, and nothing seemed likely to break on its own, but if the system became sufficiently drained, it would reset, and there was no guarantee that it would come back.

She plunged into the technical orders, desperate for a solution. Without power, her plan was dead in the water. She had to take enough strain off the grid to keep the arms going, but the arms were accounting for almost half the station’s power use. She could cut off everything
else
and it would still overload.

Would the arms still function on emergency power? She checked the database, then tried the informational prompts in the computer, but got no answer. It was such a basic, fundamental question. The arms didn’t just position themselves; they also positioned the station to keep it safe from the anomaly. Surely that was a safety protocol that would remain active at all times.

No—No
. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need the arms to move; she just needed emergency functions, and those would be active even with the system stripped down to its most basic modes.

Only if it shut off completely, as it had after the explosion, would she be in serious trouble.

She swiped through the menus, praying to the Empress that corrupted data wouldn’t block her from what she needed. The process to go to emergency power was surprisingly complex, but there was an absurd workaround: she could initiate a drill. And she could set the duration of the drill to hundreds of hours, vastly more time than she would need.

And she didn’t even need administrator approval to do it.

Non-Evagardian systems were ridiculous.

She didn’t hesitate; she started the sequence and sat back as code flew across the readout much too fast for her to keep up with.

Systems began to power down.

The light adjustment in the viewports vanished, slightly increasing the ambient light coming in from outside. The command chair stopped gliding and locked into place.

Feeds went black.

The lights went out.

For several seconds, she sat in the dark, gripping the arms of the command chair. It hadn’t occurred to her that the drill might not execute correctly, but that should’ve been her first thought.

There was a harsh tone from the console in front of her, and the feed snapped to life: green text on a black background. Manual emergency control. The menus were the same, just not as pretty. The function was identical, but slower. She couldn’t swipe; she had to navigate the system with the console’s manual controls by entering data with her fingers.

She checked the power. There was no longer a deficit. The station could sustain emergency power for weeks.

She got up from the chair and raised her arms in triumph, thanking the Empress that she’d been there to see that alert. A full reset at the wrong moment could’ve been very costly.

She was still in it.

And in the dark again. The dim emergency lights had come on, but they were an extreme departure from the bright white light that was supposed to bathe Almayer Station’s interior.

She grabbed the database and headed for the hatch. In the corridor, the lighting was even worse. She needed a hand light, and her bag of tools was still sitting in Yagami’s suite.

So quickly she’d gotten used to the normal sounds of a station with power, but now the silence unnerved her. It was familiar; she had experienced this before, but the associations weren’t positive. Even the slightest sound carried. Her EV boots were far from heavy, but the slight tapping of her footsteps seemed to ricochet from the walls like projectiles.

She spotted movement and paused at a viewport. There was someone walking in the other wing, on the same deck—it had to be Roth. He wasn’t moving quickly, but he was coming her way.

She backed away and jogged to the ladder, climbing up to the executive level. She ran to Yagami’s room and grabbed her tools, then sprinted back to descend again. She had no cling from the unpowered suit, only friction to slide down the two levels to the crew deck. She jogged a few steps away from the ladder and looked up at the ceiling, as though she might see through the deck, touching the prototype hanging around her neck.

Where was Roth now? She backed away, thinking fast. After a moment’s deliberation, she headed through the fitness center, emerging into lodging.

To her surprise, her bloody footprints were still there. If Roth was the one making these things disappear, then he hadn’t been here yet.

Mabry and Dawkes were still in Deilani’s room, along with an appalling amount of organic material. Maybe that was what Roth wanted.

Stiff, awkward footsteps were approaching behind her. She had to get away from here, but now Roth was between her and the junction. She hadn’t been thinking; she’d cut herself off.

She took off in the other direction, panning her light over the names on the doors and ignoring the twinges from her arm and the intensifying pressure in other parts of her.

Rene’s room.

Deilani turned off her light and listened, moving into the shadows and pressing her back against the bulkhead.

It was quiet. She started to breathe again, relieved. She reached out, feeling along the wall for the release. She found it and slipped into Rene’s room, closing the door behind her.

At least she was out of sight. The room was bare and the bunk was made. If Roth had some way of finding her, there wasn’t much she could do about it, but if he was just wandering at random, she could wait until he moved on. She put her bag and the database on the bunk, making sure Yagami’s pistol was where she could get at it quickly.

In silence, she got down on the floor and rolled beneath the bunk. There wasn’t room for her light; she felt blindly until she found the holo that Mabry had mentioned. It was tucked into an indentation in the plastic near the bulkhead. Why it was in this
room, she didn’t know. Maybe there had been something between Mabry and Rene.

She peeled it free and powered it up, dialing down the brightness of the holographic display.

There was a lot of code, a lot of programming. A lot of graphs and numbers. This was the real raw data that Mabry had been siphoning from Rigby. There weren’t many communications, but there were a few discussing things like data reliability and validity, resonance levels, and Rigby’s requests to Suarez for help from station techs with his equipment. In these cases, he was probably talking about his own signal emitter, which was somewhere on the outside of the station, causing the resonance with the anomaly.

This is life by every definition. There is no question.

That was a message sent directly to Yagami. It wasn’t signed, but it had to have come from Rigby.

She swiped onward as Yagami gave her blessing for Rigby to continue, ordering him to focus his attention on this organism he claimed to have identified.

It exists with the others in the soup of what I presume to be life in which matter in this

place

interacts. Larger in size and presence than its peers, I have named it the Devourer. Using what I can only call mechanisms that I do not fully understand, smaller presences seem attracted to this creature; it draws them in and appears to consume them. Sometimes in enormous quantity. Assuming that the dynamics of life in this place parallel our own, then this creature is what we would regard as a predator—one whose oblivious victims blithely flock to it in numbers. I’m not a xenobiologist, but I feel that we must, if you will, consider potential ‘cultural’ differences between ourselves and our neighbors.

Though my data suggests absorption, assimilation, consumption—that detail in itself is not verifiable with my current level of access. In terms of presence and signal strength, the Devourer gains no mass from these conquests. I will call it mass because there is no better term at present.

This can be interpreted several ways. We see being eaten as a negative, as death—but beings whose existence is so different from ours might think, or more accurately, instinctively believe differently. It may be that the goal for these smaller, still unidentified organisms is nothing more than to be consumed by this larger one. That may be their role, their function.

Moreover, while what I see paints for me a picture of predator and prey, of food and eating, I may well be looking at something different. I’m prejudiced in a sense; I’m stuck in the way of thinking of a human being that exists in four dimensions, our four dimensions.

What if Devourer is the wrong name for it? Its victims are not digested, at least not in any way that we understand—they are simply gone. Eliminated. Perhaps the Devourer is but a gateway to yet another place beyond our understanding, and these other beings flock to it to gain admittance.

However we choose to interpret this early data, one thing is clear to me: we are not looking at a resource. This is not a particle field that gives unusual readings, it’s not an undiscovered element that has drawn our attention, though something to that effect might well come of it. It is home to what we must define as life.

Deilani had been hoping for insight on the things that Rigby had described in an earlier communication as being intent on reproduction, but once she started reading about his Devourer, it became difficult to stop. That had
to be what was making organic material disappear from the station.

Rigby went on to explain that in the case of genuine predatory intent, the strategy of luring one’s prey was hardly an unfamiliar one. There were countless Old Earth examples of organisms using these techniques to find food, from insects in trees to coldblooded animals that lived thousands of meters beneath Old Earth’s vast oceans.

He seemed sure of himself, but he was also trying to cover his ass by emphasizing that they couldn’t be sure of anything before they found a way to take a clearer look at the data.

It made sense. The images she saw through the goggles were far from distinct, and Rigby hadn’t even had that to work with back when he wrote this.

The hatch hissed open.

Deilani went stiff under the bunk. The room was dark. Her light was on the deck, set aside, the yellow beam pointed at the far wall.

The hatch was behind her; She couldn’t see it, and there wouldn’t have been anything to see in the dark anyway. She held her breath as seconds passed.

The hatch closed. She still didn’t move. She hadn’t heard anything to indicate that Roth had entered the room, but the blood was pounding so loud in her ears that she might have missed a shuttle taking off.

Her chest was getting tight, but she had to breathe.

Painstakingly, she eased onto her side, looking out from under the bunk. She was alone.

She worked her way out and got to her feet, stealing up to the door and pressing her ear to the metal. She listened. After a moment she stepped back, wondering how long she should wait.

Wandering at random?

She didn’t buy it. Roth was looking for her.

Twenty-Three

Adrenaline couldn’t prop her up forever.

She gathered her things, picked up the pistol, and opened the door. In the corridor, she swept her light around, but Roth wasn’t there.

She started forward but immediately paused, her light pointed at the deck.

The bloody footprints were gone. Roth wasn’t tidying up for his health. Rigby had called it a Devourer and theorized that it was some kind of doorway. Those things on Nidaros had been both strange and awful, but at least they’d basically been animals.

Telkin. Telkin had been the systems guy for Almayer Station.

She’d barely had time to meet him before it had gone to hell, but he was the one she needed.

His quarters were at the end of the line, next door to Barry’s. Deilani let herself in and began to search. Telkin’s workstation was on the bridge, but his bag of equipment with the various connectors and accessories that he used for his system maintenance duties hadn’t been there.

He didn’t have a locker, like the techs did. Where else might he keep his gear? He’d never gone anywhere without his Martian leather bag, but it hadn’t been with him when he died. She had noticed that when she dumped him in the freezer.

She looked under his bunk, in the storage space above it, and in his closet. Normally, she would expect something like this to be on the desk, or on the deck near the door, but there was no sign of it.

Frustrated, she massaged her temples, trying to think. There wasn’t enough time to be doing this. With Roth on the prowl, every move she made was a gamble, and staying in one place wasn’t in her best interests. Worse, the pressure in her abdomen was growing, although without the goggles, everything still looked normal.

Where could it be? She tried to put herself in Telkin’s shoes. He was essentially a tech, just a different kind of tech. They dragged him all over the station to check and repair system issues; that was why he needed portable equipment. Sometimes he even had to fit into small spaces to connect his consoles to things that should’ve
been accessible from the bridge. Deilani had cited him for some of the things he’d done to that effect, ignoring safety precautions in favor of getting repairs done more quickly.

If he wasn’t out repairing something, he’d be on the bridge. That was where he’d been when Rigby’s ship blew up. What had he been up to? There had to be a way to find out—and there was. It was obvious: the work order log.

Deilani fished Yagami’s holo out of her bag and went through the work orders that Suarez had forwarded to her. Most of them were cursory. Suarez knew that Yagami wasn’t reading each one, and she certainly wasn’t interested in details. Still, there had to be records of everything that was done. Everything had to be accounted for; this was a business.

According to the log, Suarez had loaned out Telkin to Rigby shortly before the explosion. Deilani was surprised he’d put that on the books, but it was just labeled as routine maintenance.

More likely, Telkin had helped Rigby do whatever he had done that had led to this. Yagami had gotten exactly what she’d asked for: living proof of Rigby’s sincerity. She just hadn’t survived the experience.

For Telkin to do work for Rigby, he’d have to go to Rigby’s ship. He wasn’t the right kind of tech to throw on a suit and go spacewalking, and he didn’t seem like the type to jump on a skiff, either.

Memory clicked into place.

Barry excusing herself, claiming she had to go play chauffeur.

Deilani remembered
. And she was willing to bet that Telkin had been Barry’s fare.

She left lodging at a run.

The shuttle bay’s personnel entrance was standing open, locked that way by emergency power. It would take special clearance to open the bay doors with the station in this state.

In the gloom, she could only vaguely see the debris that had punched through the bay doors. These were pieces of Doctor Rigby’s ship; several had pierced the station, causing violent depressurization.

Automatic emergency response protocols had dutifully launched sealant that preserved atmosphere, but the result wasn’t pretty. This was a situation that needed to be promptly addressed by a team of competent techs, not left alone for days on end.

The sealant had begun as an extremely hardy—not to mention carcinogenic—foam, but once in place, it degraded to an adhesive sludge, eventually hardening into a seal almost as sturdy as the structure itself. It had to be removed before repairs could be made to the superstructure.

That wasn’t going to happen. The viewport was cracked. Shrapnel and debris were everywhere, and so was the hardened sealant. The bay was a mess, and it looked even worse in the dark.

Deilani pointed her light up at the bizarre forest of punctures, all coated. There was a coating on the carbon shielding as well, halting the cracks there from spreading. Not attractive, but safe.

Barry’s shuttle had been knocked out of place by the impacts. One of its landing struts had broken, plunging the craft down on its shoulder so that it rested at an angle. The cockpit had been partially crushed by the crane that had fallen on it. Even with a pilot, the shuttle wasn’t going anywhere.

Lugging her bag and her maintenance database, Deilani made straight for it.

She had removed the shuttle’s power cells for safety. She didn’t think
any of the damage to the shuttle could cause it to explode, but she’d seen a shuttle go up once before, back on Nidaros. That time, she’d been lucky; it had been in a bay so vast that there was room for explosions.

Here, something like that would blow the station wide open.

Without power, she had to open the hatch manually, which took all the muscle she had. She was lucky it hadn’t been damaged or deformed, or she’d have had to try to climb in through the mangled cockpit.

The seal broke and the frame thudded out of place. She hauled the hatch open and heaved herself up to lean in with her light, shining it around the passenger cabin. Things were out of place; nothing had been secure when the shuttle was damaged, and equipment and supplies had scattered when it tilted.

She squirmed up and in, grabbing a padded handhold as a wave of sensation washed through her. She hoped she was imagining the spasms from her abdomen. Rigby’s goggles were still around her neck, and it wasn’t hard to resist the urge to turn them on and look at herself again. She knew she’d regret it.

There was no sign of the bag, but there was a small locker for sensitive electronics during transit. Unfortunately, it was at the front of the cabin, and had taken some damage when the massive shards of metal had come crashing into the bay. Most shuttles had something like this, but it was rare for anyone to use them.

She tried to open the locker, but the door was jammed. Looking worriedly at the hatch and the dark bay outside, she took the plasma cutter from her bag and fired it up. Wishing the device wasn’t quite so noisy, she cut her way into the locker.

Telkin’s bag was actually there. She could hardly believe her eyes. Why hadn’t he taken this with him when he disembarked? Had he been in a hurry?

Had he known something was wrong?

She grabbed the bag and knelt to open it, careful to keep her balance on the sharply-angled deck. This was the equipment that Telkin had used to interface with every system on Almayer Station.

Setting up her light, she placed her database beside the bag and checked the ports on the side, feeling them for shape and type. The bag contained a plastic case filled with cords and adaptors for a variety of purposes. Did that include one old-fashioned enough to connect to a piece of equipment this outdated? There had to be; he had set this device up for her, and he had to have put the files on it somehow.

She tried different connectors with shaking fingers. It was all riding on this. She was confident one of these would work; if she couldn’t connect the database to other systems, that would stop her cold.

She didn’t need Telkin’s fancier gadgets, and she didn’t need his advanced knowledge as a programmer—and in all likelihood, a breaker as well. All she needed was the ability to connect and write executable files. It was hardly an unreasonable request in an age when every facet of life was more or less governed by systems.

She found a connecter and plugged it into the database, running the cord to Telkin’s admin terminal. It was locked, and she wasn’t naïve enough to think she could break into a code expert’s personal unit, but it was enough to confirm that she could establish a connection. Proof of concept.

Back on Nidaros, the Admiral had never hesitated to take off running on hunches and theories. Deilani didn’t like that; it wasn’t her style. But now she thought she understood where the Admiral had been coming from. He
didn’t like it either. The reality was that it didn’t matter what anyone liked; when all the options were bad ones, all you could do was aim and pull the trigger.

The Admiral had just done it all so cavalierly—that
was what had gotten under Deilani’s skin. But no matter how much he’d pretended not to care, he’d probably been just as scared as she had.

She broke the connection and shouldered the bag. With the database and her pistol, she climbed out of the shuttle and dropped to the deck.

A shadow passed one of the viewports overlooking the bay, two levels up. It had to Roth; there was nothing to indicate that he knew she was there, but she had a bad feeling about this. If he was coming this way, he’d come through the main door.

She let herself into the maintenance corridor, jumping in surprise as a pipe loudly vented steam. Normal. Normal procedures on emergency power. Swallowing with a parched throat, she made sure all of her bags and belongings were secure and mounted the ladder, starting to climb. The way up was hard with all the extra weight; she was probably carrying fifteen kilograms of gear.

She stopped a rung short of the opening, hesitating. She listened, arms burning, sweat stinging her eyes. Slowly, she levered herself up, peeking over the edge.

Roth wasn’t there. It had worked: she’d gotten behind him.

He was showing up a little too often for her liking, but she wasn’t sure how he was tracking her. Almayer Station wasn’t huge, but it was big enough that their paths wouldn’t cross this much by chance. Organic matter, living tissue in particular—that was what he wanted, right? He was cleaning up anything he found along the way, but maybe blood and bodies weren’t what he was really after.

Deilani was willing to bet that her bags of combiner gel were gone. So were the bodies in her quarters. The freezer was probably completely empty now.

Maybe she was the only item left on the menu. The thing hadn’t come after her before because back then, it had other options, options that weren’t moving around so much.

She hauled herself up and hurried off. She needed time, and that meant she had to put some distance between herself and Roth.

To her right was the same viewport she’d seen Roth move past just a few moments ago. She turned and looked down at the shuttle bay.

He was already down there, standing in shadow. They had traded places. She hadn’t fled a moment too soon. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he was staring right at her.

She stared back. Nothing moved.

Without taking her eyes away from him, she felt for the headset hanging around her neck. Licking dry lips, she thumbed it on. The white loading screen appeared. She waited, still staring. She could hear the innards of the handmade device struggling.

It beeped, and she pulled the headset over her eyes to look at Roth, suddenly very cold.

She’d been so wrong.

It was
him. But he wasn’t alone.

The thing behind him was big, much larger than Roth himself. It looked as if it was made up almost entirely of a gaping mouth, lined with teeth like jagged needles. There were two enormous orb-like eyes, dead, flat, and milky white. The grainy visuals provided by the prototype denied her any real detail, but she could see the sticky strands that led from the thing’s tiny malformed limbs to Roth’s body, like the strings of a marionette.

Twenty-Four

She was in trouble.

Not because the thing walking Roth’s corpse around had fazed her, because it hadn’t. She
was the problem. The pitifully inadequate rest she’d been getting was being crushed under the deluge, and her mind wasn’t handling it any better than her body was.

She was losing her edge, and nothing could get it back for her but sleep, but sleeping would be like serving herself up to Rigby’s Devourer. Those eyes looked blind, so maybe it wasn’t looking
at her, but its attention was on her. She wasn’t wrong about that.

There was very little time. She had to make the most of it.

Where could she go? Where was safe?

Back in Rene’s room, Roth had opened the door—or rather the creature had used Roth to open it. That had some disturbing implications, along with the fact that it was walking in corridors and using doors when she was pretty sure it had passed through walls at some point. That could be attributed to the inconsistent intensity of the signal, or maybe there was something else
here, but at the very least, the thing was clever enough to use a human as a lure and operate hatches—but also clueless enough to think that Roth would make good bait.

Except that he had
made good bait. Deilani had gone after him more than once, completely oblivious to the danger. It was only her good luck that the Devourer always seemed to have some other meal on its mind.

That wasn’t the case anymore.

Running wasn’t easy with so much to carry. Her bags, straps, and equipment weighed her down, bumping around distractingly and threatening to overbalance her. She didn’t care; she sped up.

No number of walls or doors could protect her from this thing; the state of the freezer was proof of that. The creature hadn’t touched those drawers containing the food, but the food was still gone. Just because the thing chose to open hatches didn’t mean it had
to. She wasn’t sure if she had to worry about it just barreling out of the bulkhead, but she couldn’t ignore the possibility. She couldn’t ignore anything.

She headed for the bridge. There was no tactical advantage there, but it felt safe. The big viewports in there let in a little light, which she needed.

A sudden impact threw her off her feet, slamming her into the bulkhead. She fell to the deck, blinking stars from her eyes to see the corridor’s outer viewport covered in white cracks. Something had just crashed into the hull.

She lunged for the breach handle. She could see the pane beginning to deform from the pressure. If it broke away, she could be spaced before the emergency sealant knew to deploy.

She grabbed the plastic ring and jerked hard. Pink foam spurted from tiny openings around the viewport, spreading across the carbon and halting the damage.

A second crash followed before she could even take a breath. The viewport, now opaque with sealant, bowed visibly inward.

She ran, skidding into the junction and making the turn to go deeper into the station, away from the outer passages.

Gasping for breath, muscles aching, she stumbled onto the bridge.

She dumped her bags on the console and went to the viewport to look out. Everything looked normal. Even the anomaly appeared to have gone back to a low boil. The throbbing between her legs was faint, and she felt only a light flutter in her belly.

The signal was weak. She had to take advantage of that. What she needed to do demanded concentration.

She set down her light and laid out the database along with Telkin’s equipment, then grabbed the prototype around her neck and switched it on. She had a pretty good view from here: three of the four collection arms were clearly visible.

Praying to the Empress, she pulled the goggles over her eyes.

The anomaly was painful to look at. It was the flashing mass of the white and gray that she was now familiar with, but there was something else, a line shooting from the third arm, plunging into the heart of the storm.

The origin of that line would be Rigby’s signal emitter, the device he used to create the resonance that was causing all of this. Now she knew where it was: out there, among the collection panels.

She took off the goggles and connected Telkin’s system reader to her maintenance database, going straight to work. This would be as delicate as it would be arrogant.

Essential functions were still active, and that included control of the collection arms. She tapped into their controls and linked them to her database. The older device wasn’t made for this, but it was all just ones and zeroes.

Telkin’s admin terminal made it easier because he had full access to the station. Deilani didn’t have to worry about credentials.

Minutes went by as she toiled, squinting at the feeds, which were unnaturally bright under the emergency lights. With every move she made, she expected the hatch would open and Roth would appear, or the signal would surge back, paralyzing her with another sudden flood of sensation.

Perhaps the signal would grow so strong that she wouldn’t need the goggles to see. After all, that had happened at least once before, when Mabry spotted the thing outside when it was going after her.

When she first came to Almayer Station, she’d been a little impressed. It wasn’t an Imperial operation; it was a product of Free Trade: people governed by money, not loyal to anything but their bottom line.

But the station was relatively new, and it had been clean. The people, even if they weren’t Imperials, had seemed normal enough. Not perfectly professional, not perfectly friendly, but hardly the subhuman slime that her prejudices had led her to expect.

Yagami had been running the show, but at its heart, this operation was all about like-minded people working together to get wealthy. That, at least, was not un-Evagardian.

It was a bold endeavor: alone at the edge of space, trying bravely to cadge some profit out of something new.

A little impressed. Not enchanted. Not smitten with the romance of the Free Trade life. A little impressed. That was all she’d felt.

Deilani had not been thrilled with her new job as a Health and Wellness Inspector, but she hadn’t expected to get killed doing it. She’d expected to be bored. To be annoyed. She’d expected tedious hours spent touring facilities that she had little or no interest in, hours spent examining people who didn’t want to be examined, hours spent writing reports that she wasn’t certain anyone was going to read. Hours spent issuing citations and fines that would be paid and then forgotten.

She had expected her time on Almayer Station to be more or less wasted. Just as she’d expected the trip from her academy graduation to Payne Station to be quick.

It wasn’t fair.

And it wasn’t lost on her that she’d spent too much time in one place. That thing didn’t seem to be moving very quickly, but there was no doubt that it was following her. It might not have sensed her when it had been outside Mabry’s room, but she had a feeling it had her scent now. She had to get out of there before it showed up.

Her work was finished.

Anything she didn’t need wasn’t coming. She grabbed the database and slung it over her shoulder, then reached for the prototype. She picked it up, hesitated, then put it around her neck.

Moving fast, she hit the release and went out into the corridor.

Roth was right there, just meters away. Skin pale, face slack.

Close up, it was painfully obvious that Roth was a corpse.

Deilani sprinted away, clutching the database to her chest. She looked back desperately, but it wasn’t running after her.

It was still just walking. Maybe the thing knew that she didn’t really have anywhere to go.

Another ten seconds and it would’ve been on the bridge with her, and she’d have had no way out. It was moving faster than she’d thought.

She leapt onto the ladder and slid down, scrambling onto the second deck and taking off along the curving outer passage as fast as she could. This wouldn’t work for long; she didn’t know the station well enough to keep herself safe, to always make the right decisions when she chose where to go. Even if this thing couldn’t be bothered to move more quickly, it would corner her eventually, or just get her through a bulkhead.

She had to act now, and that meant going back up. She found the nearest ladder and began to climb.

A tech suit was no good. It would be too big, too bulky, too limiting. Those massive padded gloves wouldn’t allow her fingers the dexterity they were going to need out there. What she needed was a working EV, but that wasn’t going to happen.

That only left one option that she knew of: an emergency pressure suit. There would be some in the shuttle bay, some in the shuttle, and probably some over by the refinery.

But there was also one in the airlock that led to the sky walk. Well—it had once
led to the skywalk. Now it just led outside. The hits the skywalk had taken had damaged it enough that the violent depressurization had pulled the whole thing free of the station.

That was convenient.

She didn’t want to go out there, not with the thing that Mabry had seen, the thing that kept ramming the station whenever it spotted her—but things weren’t exactly great inside
the station.

In the airlock, she took the prototype from around her neck, held it up for a moment, then smashed it to the deck, breaking it into pieces. She stepped down hard on the central board, crushing it. No one would be pulling any data from it now.

She tore the pressure suit off the rack and pulled it on, checking the seals and switching on the oxygen supply. At least she knew it was prepped and maintained; she’d checked it out herself during her inspection. This suit didn’t even have a computer that could be destroyed by the radiation; it was the simplest, most stripped-down design imaginable. Its only function was to preserve life in a depressurization scenario.

She pulled the helmet into place and sealed it, the hum of the station’s recyclers becoming muffled. The emergency lights only created a little glare on the polished bubble that was her faceplate.

She sealed the gloves, flexing her hands, moving her fingers. This was doable.

She grabbed the database and turned to face the airlock, then looked back toward the corridor.

After a moment’s hesitation, she awkwardly went to the hatch and leaned out.

It was dark, and he was a long way off, nearly at the end—but the thing was there, and it was coming.

She pulled the hatch shut and went to the outer door, starting the cycle. She looked down at the O2 readout on her wrist. It was fully charged.

She felt for the database. It was heavy on its strap, still a reassuring weight. Blocky, primitive, and designed with offensively inefficient and un-Evagardian sensibilities.

It was the only thing on this station that hadn’t let her down yet.

All the air had drained from the room. She applied a generous amount of magnetic adhesive to her boots and put a few extra strips on her arms. She rolled up a piece and sealed it to her chest, then pressed Yagami’s pistol against it, sticking it in place.

She made sure the connector hanging from the database was wrapped securely around the rubber coating. Her belly squirmed.

The creature was probably right outside the door.

She reached for the hatch and broke the seal.

Twenty-Five

Space was bright compared to the dimly lit halls and corridors of the station on emergency power. Deilani got clear of the hatch and knelt on the bulkhead to watch it close. She got to her feet, closing her eyes, knowing that when she opened them, up and down would be shifted ninety degrees.

The refinery was now above her, and the station below.

This time, she didn’t hesitate. She had already done this once, and waiting around wouldn’t make it any safer or less terrifying. She jumped, flying toward the refinery, which was about to become the ground for her.

She didn’t look around as she flew. She wanted to close her eyes; somewhere out here was something that did not like her—or perhaps it liked her too
much. But she was at the mercy of her momentum. There was nothing to use to alter her trajectory: no tools, no thrusters, no wires. If it wanted to come after her now, there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

Seeing it coming wouldn’t help.

There was a peculiar calm as she sailed toward the refinery. Out here, the phantom sensations couldn’t do much to her. They were still distracting, but they wouldn’t trip her up. She couldn’t fall without gravity. At the moment, they were just in-flight entertainment.

She had always hoped to be assigned to the ground forces, or placed in garrison somewhere. Better yet, a military hospital on a foreign station—something like that.

She hadn’t asked for ship duty. A lot of people wanted it.

But she had never actually liked space very much.

She flipped over, touching down on the refinery and looking up. There was no sign of anything coming after her, although she wasn’t sure she’d be able to see it even if there was.

She got moving, grateful that the pressure suit had no AI or heads-up display. A properly working tech suit had several cameras whose feeds could be viewed from the faceplate.

She didn’t want to know what was behind her; she just put one foot in front of the other, watching the curved hull of the refinery seem to slip away into the bright halo of ambient light from the anomaly. Pink and yellow flashed in the corner of her eye, but when she looked, there was nothing but dark. More of the clouds came into view. Everything seemed to move so slowly out here.

The closer she got, the stronger it grew, more potent, more immediate. Like her presence was directly influencing the anomaly’s state of mind. Mind? She didn’t know where that idea had come from.

The storm ahead grew more fierce, pink and yellow flares and arcs of energy splashing around in the clouds in total silence, a cosmic lightshow on a godlike scale for an audience of one.

Everything was more intense on her side as well. There was a pulse inside her, building with every step, swelling and straining.

As she came into full view of the anomaly, the radiation alert light began to flash on her wrist. Deilani hugged the database to her body, praying that it would hold up, and that her body would as well. This exposure would come with a cost, but there was no turning back.

The anomaly appeared to expand in front of her eyes, as though it knew what was coming.

And who was to say it didn’t?

Rigby had tried. He had tried his hardest to leave his bias, his prejudices, his preconceptions—his worldview, his universeview—his reality
view—at the door when he’d taken this thing on.

And he’d still missed it. He’d tried to tackle the anomaly with an open mind, but it seemed his mind hadn’t been quite open enough.

He had assumed that the signal was coming from a place
. There was nothing to prove him wrong, but Deilani suspected something else. The place on the other side, the place that was home to these things
trying to claw their way into her reality, wasn’t a place at all. Or rather, the concept of a place was more fluid than most people gave it credit for. It was an abstract.

Every human’s body was filled with bacteria and trillions of organisms, some of which behaved no differently than Rigby’s Breeders and Devourers. He’d been half-right.

In a way, he’d been correct when he’d said that he’d discovered a form of life. But Deilani didn’t think the new reality that he’d been peeking into was a petri dish full of organisms.

It was
an organism. A big one. That was, if size as she understood it had any meaning in this.

She reached the collection arm. There was no time to climb. Wrenching pain shot through her gut, and a sudden slackness in her chest followed by a momentary black blur around her eyes told her that she’d started to bleed internally.

She hadn’t been certain that just exposing herself to the anomaly would strengthen its connection to her, but the moment she had seen the thing in her belly through the goggles, she’d known this wasn’t survivable.

Rigby’s resonant signal was accelerating the anomaly’s incursion—no, that wording was wrong. The anomaly was already here. Rigby’s signal boost was just letting it make itself felt.

She reached the collection arm.

There was no gravity to keep her down, but the phantom sensations were interfering, and they were no longer vague. They weren’t phantoms anymore. She could feel the things clinging to her, and their every move was like an extension of her own body.

She was so far past sickened that the nausea was barely even noticeable. There was blood in her mouth, but she kept walking.

When she first came out onto the collection arm to check out the Harbinger collection devices, she hadn’t actually gone past the edge of the structure, which had been at the corner of the long, flat rectangle that was nearest to the spindle.

Now she was walking out into the field of collection filters.

Each filter was a square with about three meters to a side. They were silvery, but luminous and vaguely translucent: a porous shield held in place by a force tether kept the absorbent molecules in the shape of a sheet.

The surface of the panels seemed to ripple, like waves on a body of water. The molecules were being sucked out through the ports, their contents channeled down the arm, to the refinery, or in the case of Harbinger, to the filtration pylons.

Three meters to a panel. The arm was eight panels wide and forty panels long.

The magnetized walkways were only half a meter wide, but without gravity, it was impossible to overbalance and fall.

She had never been out among the panels before. It was like walking on water. They were reflective, so the anomaly seemed to churn above and beneath her.

Rigby’s emitter was at the very end of the arm. It was so small that to Deilani, it was only the faintest shape in the distance. If she were wearing the prototype, she’d have been able to see the burning white line that was shooting into the heart of the storm over her.

The walk across Nidaros had been countless kilometers. This felt longer.

Space had never looked as big as it had when she’d been on the surface of that misty black planet. Until now.

She missed Cohengard. She missed the wide streets and the big, white, rectangular mass sustenance housing units. She missed the constant music in the air, and the monuments on nearly every corner, all heaped with flowers, plush toys, and physical images of people lost in the revolt. She even missed the New Unity rallies that she’d worked so hard to stay away from. She hadn’t even wanted to risk being seen
near one.

And then she’d been seen with the Admiral. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.

She looked back.

It did not surprise her in the slightest to see the thing following her. It was closer than she expected: only about twenty meters back.

True to Mabry’s word, it wore no suit. It didn’t need one. Roth was just a body, a puppet on strings.

Something behind the walking corpse seemed to shimmer, but Deilani couldn’t see the creature with her own eyes. That was for the best; throwing up in her helmet wouldn’t help her odds.

She turned around and started to backpedal, keeping her eyes on Roth as she fumbled with the database. She powered it on with clumsy gloved fingers. Fighting down the pain flooding her body from her tortured abdomen, she activated the uplink and called up her remote control of emergency functions.

They were two-thirds of the way down the arm. Was that row twenty-five? Or fifteen? How was the grid laid out? She didn’t know; there hadn’t been time for her to figure it out. She tried to calculate, tried to do the math, but her brain was sluggish.

She executed the command on her best guess.

There was a jet of coolant, and a panel several meters behind Roth began to float up from the arm, spinning slowly.

Deilani recalculated and hit it again. More panels around Roth began to rise.

Perfect.

She planted her feet and pulled the pistol from her chest, holding it out at arm’s length. She didn’t level it at Roth, but at the panel nearest to him. She pulled the trigger.

In total silence, the panel exploded into billions of fragments of highly unstable molecules. They would react to nearly anything. The arm’s superstructure had been designed not
to set them off, but Roth was a different story.

Deilani swept the pistol in an arc, firing rapidly into the crowd of lazily spinning panels.

Roth disappeared in a haze of silent streaks of light. A stray fragment tore past Deilani, opening a tear in the arm of her suit. She pulled a piece of adhesive from her arm and sealed it without taking her eyes off the cloud.

The pressure in her stomach was getting worse, but she kept the pistol up, refusing to blink.

The thing materialized out of the cloud. Its skin and clothes were torn to shreds, but apparently that didn’t matter. As the Devourer walked Roth’s body forward, the wounds began to regenerate in front of her eyes. So the creature could style its puppet to suit its needs—that was why Roth’s flesh didn’t freeze in the vacuum.

It hadn’t worked. Not her attempt to stop Roth, and not the creature’s attempt to fool her with a convincing puppet.

Trying not to groan in pain, Deilani stepped off the walkway, onto the nearest panel.

She began to back up, but now she was moving diagonally.

The thing obligingly followed, stepping on the panel immediately to its right.

Deilani jettisoned that panel, bringing up the pistol again and firing rapidly at Roth. Every shot sent recoil down her arm to punch through her body, jarring her and squeezing the pain in her belly.

The panel floated up obediently, taking Roth with it into space, however slowly.

Deilani didn’t know if that would actually get rid of the thing, and there was no point watching. If it didn’t work, she didn’t have another play to make. She couldn’t see the Devourer itself in any case. Roth’s body was floating away, but the creature was still coming straight at her.

She turned away and hurried on toward the emitter, wondering what it was going to feel like to go wherever Barry had gone.

The Devourer seemed to choose when it wanted to interact with matter. Could it protect itself from something dangerous from this side? It could erase the food from the freezer without touching the drawers. How could Deilani hope to hurt it?

She reached the emitter and got down on her knees, searching for an interface. She found a folding shield, which she pulled up, revealing a readout and ports.

She connected the database to Rigby’s emitter and punched in her code.

That was it. She let out her breath. It was that simple.

She turned to look behind her. There was no sign of Roth. She looked up, but there was only the silvery cloud of debris from the panels she’d shattered.

That was one thing she hadn’t thought about: even if her plan to use the collection panels against Roth worked, how could she go back through that cloud? It would tear her suit apart.

She reflected that this was what happened when you made plans when you weren’t properly rested.

She turned back to the emitter, then crawled away from it. It was the best she could do. Even without gravity, she couldn’t move enough to reach a standing position. The agony in her abdomen was too much. There was a profound wrongness, a tearing that brought with it a sense of finality that felt long overdue.

Maybe her plan would work, maybe not. She wasn’t going to live long enough to find out.

With the last of her strength, she flung away the database, then brought up the pistol and fired her last bullets, blowing it to pieces without a sound.

The database had always been there for her. As the magnetic strips on her suit drew her gently to the nearest panel, she reflected that it didn’t feel good to destroy her only friend, but there was no helping it. It would understand why it had to go.

Her eyes blurred and cleared, then blurred again. She could see her reflection in the panel, and she didn’t look anything like herself. No surprise there.

There was movement: an indistinct shape behind her, growing larger, getting closer. Deilani couldn’t have moved even if she wanted to. She’d been wondering where that thing was, the one that liked to ram itself into the station so much. Maybe it had just now noticed that its target was outside, or maybe it had been watching to see how things would play out with the Devourer. Maybe it had been napping. Maybe it was
the Devourer.

She could see it clearly it reflected in the panel; she wondered if she’d be able to see it if she turned around.

It was moving fast, and accelerating, all titanic size and teeth. To her, it was moving through a vacuum without a visible source of propulsion. But she’d had the dreams; she’d seen the other place.

It wasn’t really swimming in space; it just looked like it was. It was swimming through that black stuff that had tried to drown Deilani in the dream.

She pulled herself forward, pushing away from the arm, but she was too slow, too weak, and too late.

The impact of the thing bulling into the collection arm sent shockwaves through her body, throwing her freely into open space and spinning away toward the anomaly.

There was no panic. It had been possible
that she would come out here, that the signal would be weak enough that the thing inside her would not manifest, that the thing would not follow—or that if it did, she’d be able to stop it. It had been possible that the other thing might not notice her, or that it might sportingly allow her to go about her business.

The possibilities had been endless.

But she knew better than to expect things to go her way. When she left the station, she hadn’t been planning on going back.

She was glad she didn’t have the strength to look down, because it felt like her belly was about to burst, and maybe it was.

As she flipped over and over, painstakingly slowly, she saw Almayer Station and the anomaly in turn, one after the other, again and again. Perhaps at one time it would’ve made her dizzy.

But she had forgotten what that was.

Epilogue

The face on the screen was haggard and pale. Shining sweat highlighted the terribly black circles beneath the girl’s eyes. Her hair was matted, and the EV suit she wore was grimy and smudged. A drop of blood was beaded at her right nostril, and her left eye was totally bloodshot.

She seemed to be struggling to focus.

“...it’s not— It’s not impossible
to reverse the signal. The numbers are all there, so inverting them is easy. If I can use Rigby’s emitter to broadcast the new signal, I can do more than just disrupt the resonance. I might be able to reduce what’s coming through the anomaly. Maybe even cancel it out. The problem’s going to be making it happen.”

She paused to wipe sweat out of her eyes, wincing at some pain whose source wasn’t readily apparent.

“The radiation’s so strong that it actually got through the station’s armor when the ship went up, so anything I take out there probably won’t make it. That just leaves this.” She held up a crude-looking black device, sheathed in protective rubber. “If anything can do it, it’s this. But I have to find a way to make it so that I can use it. It’s not meant for programming.”

She shook her head.

“That’s my
problem. If you’re watching this, you don’t have to worry about that. I will make it work. Okay. I’ve told you what happened here. I’ve told you what I’m going to do about it. I think that’s it.” She wavered slightly, then focused. “So if this works, no one’s ever going to have to see this. I think that’s all I have. I’m losing focus. I don’t have much time left.”

The recording ended and the conference room’s lights came back on.

Commodore Kellerman turned to Major Wilson, who in turn looked to Colonel Hall.

“Impressively succinct, given the circumstances,” Wilson remarked after a moment, rubbing her chin. “It’s consistent with the investigation.”

“Veracity isn’t really the issue here,” Hall cut in. “There’s no sign of this anomaly. And conveniently—” he gave her an arch look “—no remaining evidence of the codecs we’d need to duplicate or synthesize this mysterious signal.”

“As you just saw,” Kellerman said, pointing at the feed. “She stated that her intention was to remove the anomaly from the playing field. She thought it was too dangerous to be permitted to remain. Perhaps she feared that someone else would repeat Rigby’s mistake. Given how it played out, that seems like a valid concern.”

“That’s not the point,” Hall said. “This resource is now gone. And it’s not clear that we can get it back.”

“Alternately, we’ve been spared a critical threat.” Wilson cleared her throat. “I think we should focus on that angle. If you’d read the full report, I think you have to agree. And you understand why there could be no physical evidence.”

“The threat—I’m not disputing that she did what she thought was right when she eliminated the threat, if that’s what we choose to call it. Gone. All gone, every trace of very nearly everything she described in her report, all because this signal
was the thing allowing it to interact with our reality—that’s a direct quote, mind you. Is that what you did, Lieutenant?”

“The threat is in one place, Sir. We are here. I disabled the—the bridge between us. That is, I think, the simplest way to put it. Sir,” she said, mouth dry.

Hall scowled. “And then you deliberately destroyed the records
. Anything we could’ve used to verify any of this.”

“She didn’t trust us,” Wilson said. “Plain and simple. Why might that be?” She arched an eyebrow at Kellerman.

“Don’t give me that,” he shot back. “What Imperial Security does with people on their watch list is up to them, not me. That’s an IS problem. And you don’t know that she didn’t trust us
. She might’ve thought the first people to show up would be these Free Trade gangsters. Maybe if she’d known we’d be the first ones there, she’d have left us something. Maybe she didn’t deprive us— Maybe she protected us by depriving the enemy.”

Wilson nodded approvingly. “I like that take on it.”

“Well?” Hall said, turning to look at Deilani. “Lieutenant? Was that your thinking?”

Deilani didn’t let herself shift uncomfortably, although every part of her wanted to.

“Sir, I don’t completely trust my recollection, under the circumstances,” she replied.

“Hm.”

Deilani winced but kept her mouth shut, continuing to stand at attention.

“Lieutenant, step out,” Kellerman ordered.

Deilani obeyed, pausing only briefly when the hatch slid shut behind her to breathe. She tapped her mask nervously against her thigh for a moment, checked her whites, then went down the hallway to the small alcove at the corner. She perched on one of the sofas, leaning forward and trying to stifle her nausea through sheer force of will.

She had never set foot in a command wing before, not even after Nidaros. It wasn’t as impressive or as frightening as she expected. Just a lot of offices and conference rooms. She had never visited Burton Station either, but it was an Evagardian station in Evagardian space. It was hard to imagine anywhere safer, but she wasn’t sure when she’d be able to feel safe again.

A man in whites emerged from an office and crossed the hall at a brisk walk, there and gone so quickly that she barely got a look at him. Everyone who worked in this section wore whites every day.

She noticed that she was chewing her thumbnail, and stopped.

A figure appeared at the end of the passage, hurrying toward her.

Deilani frowned, wondering if her eyes might be playing tricks on her. This person wasn’t wearing whites; she wasn’t even in uniform. And she didn’t belong here.

Private Tessa Salmagard came straight to her, pulling her into a tight embrace—but then drew back almost immediately to gaze at her with concern. That was for the best; any display of physical affection between them was technically fraternization. Context didn’t mean much to the fleet; Deilani understood that intimately now.

She just stared. Salmagard was the last person she’d expected to see here.

The private looked nice on her worst day. Here and now, she had obviously gone to considerable lengths to look her best, and the result was heartachingly lovely.

Her waist-length hair was done up in an elaborate style that Deilani had only seen in aristocratic dramas, and the private wore an odd sort of Isakan dress that showed no skin to speak of yet still managed to be intensely alluring.

“What happened?” Salmagard demanded. “I just saw that you’ve been in medical? What’s going on? Why are you here?”

Deilani swallowed, shaking her head. “Nothing I can talk about,” she replied. It was understandable that Salmagard was puzzled; Deilani had informed her that she was being reassigned to Demenis Affairs. That should’ve been a commitment of two or three years.

It hadn’t even been two weeks.

But what was Salmagard doing here?

“What about you? Is the Julian
docked here?” Deilani asked. Of course it wasn’t; she’d know if it had been. Everyone would know, and the people in this particular part of the station would be a lot less relaxed.

“I’m on leave. I’m on my way to Imperial Pointe. They called me in for an interview, then cancelled on me just now.”

“Oh,” Deilani said, beginning to understand.

Salmagard just stared, her concern obvious. Deilani appreciated that, but it was also a little uncomfortable. She hadn’t told Salmagard in detail about how she’d lost her berth aboard the Julian
, but the private could read between the lines. She’d known Deilani was being punished for something.

“Were you ill?”

“Yes,” Deilani said. Whatever happened next, Almayer Station would remain a closed file. She couldn’t talk about it. “But I’m all right now.”

“But why are you up here?
” The private meant on the executive deck.

“I’m in trouble again.”

That seemed to take Salmagard aback, but Deilani didn’t want to let it get awkward.

“Meeting someone?” she asked, looking the private up and own. She was obviously dressing to impress.

“Fatima picked it out,” Salmagard said, smoothing the dress self-consciously.

The few times Deilani had seen Salmagard in civilian clothes, the private’s choice of attire had always been rather masculine. This was very different, and in Deilani’s opinion, a considerable improvement.

“Anyone I know?” she asked, unable to help herself.

Salmagard gave a slow, hesitant shrug, not breaking eye contact.

Deilani’s eyes widened. Salmagard was going to meet the Admiral.

Her heart sank, but she caught herself and took a deep breath. There was no sense trying to talk the private out of this. It was a bad idea, but telling her so wouldn’t stop her from going through with it. She could say something, but what would it sound like? She’d been in trouble before, and now she was in trouble again.
Was she really someone who could give advice?

Yes. About this, she could. She’d already been burned by it, so there was no one better.

She wasn’t going to kill the mood, though. It wasn’t her place to do that, and Salmagard had to make her own decisions. She was her own person.

“Well,” she said. “Good luck. Just be careful out there. Really careful. Being seen with the wrong person can actually be a big deal. Believe me,” she added. “I know.”

Salmagard took that in. She smiled.

“Thanks. You too. Don’t— Don’t take it the wrong way,” the private said quickly. “But I have to be on this shuttle. I’m glad you’re safe. I was worried.”

She meant it. Salmagard was that kind of person. It didn’t matter who you were or what you’d done; she liked you. She liked everyone. Deilani had been horrible to her on Nidaros, but Salmagard had understood.

She was just so damned nice. How had someone like that ended up in this line of work? Evagard had spent centuries honing its ways of evaluating aptitudes, yet things like this still happened.

“I’m fine,” Deilani assured her, finding a smile. She thought Salmagard might hug her again, but instead, the private put out her hand. Deilani shook it. Her holo chirped. “I have to go,” she said.

“Me too.”

Wistfully, she watched Salmagard hurry away.

Kellerman, Wilson, and Hall were all still in their seats when she returned to the conference room. Their chairs were all turned in her direction this time.

Deilani took her place in front of them and went to attention.

A second went by and no one put her at ease. Her heart sank.

“Third Lieutenant Nina Deilani, attention to orders. This isn’t an interview anymore. This is your hearing,” Wilson said, voice deadpan.

Deilani saluted.

Kellerman leaned forward. “Lieutenant, do you know why you were reassigned to Demenis Affairs? Don’t answer that. You can’t possibly answer it without incriminating yourself or compromising your integrity, and I won’t ask you to do either. You were reassigned when it came to light that you had contact with an individual who is a person of interest to Imperial Security. You probably thought it was a punishment. It wasn’t. It was a test. Your case handler thought you’d accepted a bribe, so he decided to put you in another situation where you were likely to be offered one. In case you were wondering. Perhaps that eases your mind.”

“Not a great strategy,” Wilson said. “Given that he apparently wasn’t watching you closely enough to see that Almayer Station had gone dark. So supposing you had
taken a bribe, it’s not clear to us what IS would’ve done about it.”

“But that’s not what we’re here to deal with,” Hall said, waving a hand.

“No. We’re here to talk about what happened on Almayer Station, not what led to it. But it’s very important, Lieutenant, that you understand how you look right now. You were suspected of having sentiments that could be viewed as disloyal to the Empress. We don’t have to tell you how serious that is. It’s the most serious crime that we have laws for. That was then. Now you have deliberately eliminated a unique and significant resource. Knowingly. Not only knowingly,” Kellerman said, gesturing at the dark feed. “But on the record.”

“No one can know the contents of your mind but you,” Wilson said, tenting her fingers. “We’re not going to bring an empath in here and question you. We’re not going to put you in the jacket.” Deilani winced at just the mention of it; the jacket was the worst torture the Service had to offer.

“All of that or more would potentially be justified,” Kellerman cut in. “You need to understand that. Because we are not
going to those lengths, there are things that we can’t be sure about. You may have had the best of intentions. Or perhaps you really are one of these New Unity radicals who just wants to undermine the Empress. A picture can take a new form if viewed through a different lens.”

It was Colonel Hall’s turn. “Lieutenant Deilani, you are hereby cautioned to give more attention to the image you project to your peers and the officers appointed over you. Your thoughtlessness and your inconsiderate actions are either leading to a quick end to your career or to great expenditure on the part of the Empress for nothing more than a trifling misunderstanding.”

“Lieutenant Deilani,” Kellerman said, pushing aside the reader in front of him, “Though your image might seem like an intangible thing, it can have very tangible effects on your life and your career. If you doubt that, I’d be happy to put you in touch with this detachment’s Public Affairs officer, who will explain to you just how profound is the role that interpretation plays in our lives as servants of the Empress. It is fortunate for you that I do not believe that perception to be reality. But I’ve also been heard to say that there cannot be smoke without fire. Do you understand what we’re trying to tell you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lieutenant Deilani, you are hereby relieved of duty. Do you have anything to say?” Major Wilson asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Good,” Major Wilson said.

“Considering the extreme nature of the circumstances on Almayer Station following the thus far unexplained explosion of one ship belonging to a Doctor H.R. Rigby, this tribunal finds your conduct on Almayer Station adequate, including your willful destruction of a potentially significant resource. You will not
be commended,” Admiral Kellerman added.

“And you will not be reprimanded,” Major Wilson added. “Or brought up under the UCEJ.”

With those words, the atmosphere in the room eased noticeably. Deilani started to breathe again.

“Lieutenant, you have proven yourself woefully incompetent,” Colonel Hall told her, “in the task of ensuring the safety and welfare of individuals engaged in commercial operations in Evagardian space. Under your watchful eye, the state of affairs on Almayer Station went to a place that could be interpreted as… supremely unsafe. You’ve already been relieved. Now that you’re inactive, we recommend your removal from the Department of Demenis Affairs. I’m going to provisionally bring you back under fleet command, pending the approval of your supervising physician.”

“Lieutenant Deilani,” Major Wilson said, pointing a finger at her. “It was elegant, the way you were able to utilize Doctor Rigby’s emitter device as a broadcasting unit, using it not only to eliminate the threat but also to send out your SOS. However, to do so, by your own admission, you had to generate your own executable code. Nothing complex, nothing world-changing. Nothing sophisticated—and yet not something you were trained to do by the Service. In our day and age, there are only two kinds of people who know how to write their own code, Lieutenant. Programmers and breakers. Which are you?”

Deilani hesitated.

“I’m a doctor, ma’am.” She swallowed. “But I grew up in Cohengard.”

“Yes,” Commodore Kellerman said, sighing. “A detail that has not escaped anyone’s attention, Lieutenant. Please be cognizant of the fact that this information does not
contribute to your sterling reputation. Coming from the city of the revolt only makes you a likelier suspect for people who might try to paint you as someone whose loyalty is to be doubted.”

“Indeed,” Major Wilson agreed. “A better answer to that question would have been that you learned the value of doing things the old-fashioned way when that very skill helped your unit escape Nidaros alive. I hope you’re taking notes, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Anyone who’s read your file will know you’re clever, Deilani. But it’s not enough just to be clever.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s also not enough just to be lucky,” added Colonel Hall. “According to the security detail that found you, you had drifted into a cloud of corrosive material. Another hour and your suit would’ve been compromised. Choose your battles, Lieutenant. From your report and the outcome of the investigation, no one’s disputing that you’ve come through a challenging situation, but I hope you aren’t expecting anyone to be impressed. This is the Service. You’ve displayed competence, but competence is expected. We would expect the same from any of our people if they’d been in your shoes, and the fact that you’re an officer just means it should’ve been that much easier, because you should be that much better than the rest. If you’re hoping for a medal, keep hoping. This isn’t some galactic navy of children who join up because they don’t have anywhere else to go. We don’t just give decorations out for showing up.”

Kellerman gave Hall a look, then turned to Deilani. “In the event that you are cleared for active duty, I see no reason that you should not be permitted to return to the Julian
.”

“I agree.” Major Wilson drummed her fingers on the table. “Your position as supervisor in the atmospheric sampling lab appears to have been filled, but the Julian
does have a vacancy in the infirmary. And since you’ve already had the training unique to the Julian
, that makes you a practical choice. Provided none of this has rattled you. Has it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Ship’s doctor,” Colonel Hall said. “Big job. Hardest job in the fleet, some people say. You don’t typically see junior officers in that role.”

“It’s a position typically held by a major,” Kellerman mused, tapping through menus on his reader. “Although that’s not a technical requirement. It’s one of seasoning. We’re willing to consider recommending you for this position if you can convince us you have what it takes. Judgment. The ability to act strategically under pressure. Characteristics that emerge in some but not others over the course of long, eventful careers. The difference between people who retire and people who make admiral. Fortitude in the face of adversity, Lieutenant Deilani. Tell me what you think you know about that.”

The Author

Sean Danker conscientiously objects to author bios.

Can you believe he used to be in the military?

He doesn’t seem like the type.

@silverbaytimes

www.seandanker.com