IThe Deep Crust
The strut was dying. Kaelen Voss could feel it through his shoulder blades; the slow tectonic groan of century-old ferro-titanium giving up, flake by rusted flake, every time a drone round slammed into the far side. Orange scabs of oxidation rained into his collar. The air tasted like a battery. Sulfur vents hissed somewhere below the catwalk grating, and the condensation dripping off the overhead pipe-farm wasn't water. Down here, nothing that dripped was water.
Count the shots. Count the shots or die stupid.
Two drones. Hexapod chassis, mining-security pattern, old Consortium stock retrofitted so many times they looked like scrap heaps that had learned to hate. Their original targeting arrays had cooked in the Surge like everything else, so some vault-side tech-butcher had bolted analog optics onto the turret housings — big brass-ringed lenses, actual glass, swiveling on greased gimbals with a wet clicking sound that Kaelen had come to loathe over the last nine minutes. Beneath the lenses, coil-fed slug throwers. No charge packs to drain. No heat limit worth mentioning. Just belts and belts of dumb, patient metal.
His own sidearm lay on the grating beside his boot, slide locked back, magazine well gaping like a mouth with nothing left to say.
The vault squatted forty meters past the drones — a blast door the size of a hab-block wall, quantum-sealed once, now held shut by the seal's corpse: liquid-metal locking veins gone stiff and gray, cross-braced with welded I-beams and a manual pneumatic wheel some paranoid foreman had installed after the Surge taught everyone that digital locks were promises the universe no longer kept. Behind that door: eleven kilos of stabilized isotope-9. Enough to keep a rebellion's ships breathing for a year.
Enough to matter.
Another burst chewed the strut. Kaelen's whole body flinched into itself and the scars answered; the anomaly-scars, the branching pale lightning-tracks that ran from his left temple down his neck, across his chest, forking along both forearms like a river delta mapped in dead nerve tissue. They were sweating. Not him. Them. A thin, hot, metallic perspiration that beaded along the scar-lines whenever the thing inside him wanted out. His left hand had started to shake. Fine tremor. The burnout tremor. The medics on Kessel Drift had a word for what he was doing to himself every time he pulled gravity sideways, and the word was withdrawal from your own skeleton.
He could crush the drones. Right now. Reach into the local field, make a fist, fold them like foil.
And the vault's seismic triggers, analog, pendulum-based, Surge-proof, specifically installed to detect Ash-Born kinetics — would slam four hundred tons of counterweight shielding down over the isotope cache, and this whole crawl through nine kilometers of sulfur-rotted maintenance shafts would be for nothing. Worse than nothing. The revolution didn't get funded by martyrs. It got funded by thieves who walked out.
So he crouched, and he shook, and he bled rust down his neck, and he did the math again. The math kept coming out the same.
The drones were herding him. Wet click. Reposition. Wet click. Left unit swinging wide along the pipe gallery, right unit holding the fire lane. Old pattern, dumb pattern, effective pattern. Ninety seconds, maybe less, and they'd have crossfire, and the strut only had one side.
Kaelen pressed the back of his skull against corroding metal and exhaled a laugh with no air in it.
"Come on," he said, to no one, to the ceiling, to the whole rotten weight of the planet stacked above him — terraces, arcologies, floating palaces, all of it pressing down on this catwalk like a boot. "Somebody up there drop something."
The left drone's lens found him.
IINine Kilometers Up
Nine kilometers above the man praying for a miracle, beneath the third greenhouse ring of Aethel-Prime, in a pit dug from soil and roofed with stolen light, Lady Jora of House Valen was losing an eye and did not consider it a great loss, for she had another.
Round three. The bell that called it was a true bell, bronze, struck with a hammer, for the fight-pits of Terrace Vellam kept the old ways in this if in nothing else. The sound rolled through the humid dark of the crowd and up through the soles of her boots, and Jora came off the ring post like a gate swinging open — slow, heavy, inevitable.
The brawler they had set against her called himself Piston-Saint Ohmandrey, and he was a blasphemy in the shape of a man. Cybernetic from the wishbone down and through both arms; hydraulic knees that hissed when he set his stance; a spinal governor that let him throw the same perfect right cross a thousand times without his heart knowing it was tired. The crowd loved him the way crowds love machinery, for his sameness. He had dented her cuirass in four places. Her left eye was a hot slit, swelling shut around a mosaic of burst vessels. Her blood was in her teeth, and her teeth were in a smile, because blood and iron were the inheritance of House Valen, and exile had stolen her lands, her banners, her name in the rolls, but not this. Never this.
The lights were the enemy. Not the man. The man was only strong.
The pit-masters had rigged the arena with salvaged stadium arrays, harvest-grade grow-lamps repurposed to blind — six thousand watts of white glare angled down into the ring so the bettors in the dark could watch the fighters cook. Ohmandrey's eyes were aftermarket. Aperture-shuttered. The glare was nothing to him. To Jora it was a wall of burning milk, and he came at her out of it again and again, a shadow detaching from the sun.
Her armor could see. That was the secret the crowd did not know and the odds-makers had not priced. Valen bio-armor carried no circuit, no chip, no signal for a scanner to sniff; the Collective's artisans grew it in vats of chitin and pressure-woven ironwood fiber, and through every plate ran the tremor-lattice: ten thousand hair-fine mechanical filaments that drank vibration from the air and the floor and delivered it to her skin as touch. She could feel his footfalls through her greaves. Feel the compression-hiss of his knees through her backplate. In the dark, in a true dark, she would not need eyes at all. In the dark he would be a blind man's machine swinging at a ghost that could feel his heartbeat through the floor.
But the light stood, and so she paid for her map of him in bruises.
The right cross came. She read it late, a quarter-second late, the glare eating his shoulder-twitch, and took it on the pauldron with a sound like a bell of her own. The impact drove her boot heels a hand-span through packed earth. The crowd bayed. She gave ground along the ring's edge, one step, two, breathing through the pain in the old cadence, the drill-yard cadence, iron does not ask the forge for mercy, iron asks only to be hard.
"Yield, tin lady," Ohmandrey said. His voice-box buzzed. Even his contempt was manufactured. "The saints tell me your house is dead already. Lie down with it."
Jora spat red on the soil between them, good soil, terrace soil, the soil her family had defended for eleven generations before treachery unhoused her, and raised her fists.
"My house," she said, "is standing in front of you."
He came again. She could not see him. She could feel him. And she thought, with the cold patience of a woman who had knelt in chapel-groves through colder nights than this: Let the lights fail. Ancestors, root and ring, let the lights fail for ten seconds, and I will show this creature what the dark was made for.
Above her, beyond the glare, beyond the greenhouse glass and the cloud deck, the answer to her prayer was at that moment being handed a data-ledger.
IIIAbove The Weather
The bio-suite maintained itself at 21.4 degrees, 40 percent humidity, and 0.94 standard gravity, this last being the precise fraction at which the human lymphatic system performed most elegantly, and Dr. Vespera Thaw floated in the certainty of these numbers as other beings floated in faith.
She reclined in a suspension cradle grown from a single sheet of cartilage, translucent, faintly warm, alive in the technical sense. Below her, through the suite's floor, a lens of flawless diamond-laminate forty meters across, Aethel-Prime turned its middle tiers like a specimen on a stage: the agricultural rings a lush, vulgar green, and beneath them the crust-works a smear of brown industrial rot, humanity's sediment, settling as sediment does. The Concord's spire-city of Aurelia Ascendant hung above it all on anti-gravity columns older than any living memory of their manufacture, pristine, silent, and, this was the joke Vespera permitted herself, privately, at the hour of her evening decant — held aloft in every sense by things it could no longer make.
Even here, if one knew where to look, the Surge had left its sutures. The suite's ambient systems ran on a quantum liquid-metal core, yes, but the core's regulator had died with the old galaxy, and so behind a screen of cultured orchids there stood a panel of copper toggle switches, hand-labeled, that a maintenance-caste technician cycled by schedule, like a monk tending candles. The Concord called this interim architecture. It had been interim for a generation.
The door membrane dilated without her permission, which was itself a small violence.
A clerk. Maintenance-caste features, telomere-poor, the accelerated aging of the lower registries written into the crepe of his hands; the Concord's serenity was expensive, and someone always paid retail. He carried a data-ledger of the standard type: a wafer of bone-white bio-ceramic, cold-storage, physically couriered, as all information now traveled. He did not meet her eyes. Correct.
"Registry correction, Doctor. Signature required."
Vespera extended two fingers. The wafer settled into them. The clerk withdrew, the membrane sealed, and she thumbed the ledger's wake-vein expecting an inventory amendment, a materials-requisition variance, some minor arithmetic of empire.
The ledger opened. It was not an inventory.
It was a genome. Her genome, no. Her line's genome. House Thaw's master helix, the one held in triple-sealed cryo-archive beneath the family spire on Meridian, annotated in a notation system she did not recognize by a hand that understood cellular decay better than she did, and she had given forty years to understanding it. The annotations traced the Surge-rot through her family's germline the way a coroner traces a wound track. She read it once at speed and once slowly and the second reading was worse, because the second reading held.
The Thaw stabilizer regimen, the treatments, the tithes of harvested biomass, the entire pharmacological scaffolding on which her dynasty's immortal poise depended — was failing on a curve. Not asymptotically. Terminally. The ledger gave the expiration of House Thaw as a date. The date had a year in it that Vespera expected to see.
Her pulse, she noted with clinical disgust, had risen to 88.
The final page was brief. It did not threaten. Entities of quality never threatened; they itemized. The authors possessed the corrected synthesis pathway — a true stabilizer, decay-arrest rather than decay-management. They were prepared to convey it. The consideration required was enclosed: a data-spike, matte black, seated in a recess in the ledger's spine like a thorn in a jaw. She was to insert it into her suite's registry terminal, which held her clearances, which touched the sector's civic grid.
There was no signature. There was only a cipher-glyph she had seen twice before in intercepted traffic, and which Concord intelligence had failed, twice, to attribute.
Vespera Thaw sat very still in her cradle of living cartilage, above her lens of flawless diamond, above the toiling green and the rotting brown, and performed the calculation. It took her four seconds, and she despised every one of them, because the calculation was already finished before it began and she knew it. A house that is dying does not audit its medicine.
She rose. She crossed to the terminal — liquid-metal, mirror-smooth, crudely collared at its base by a post-Surge copper junction like a duchess wearing a slave's iron. She seated the spike.
The terminal drank it.
For one heartbeat, nothing. Then the mirror-surface of the console went black, not off, black, the black of a decision, and every orchid-screened toggle switch in the suite snapped to neutral at once with a sound like a piano being shot, and Dr. Vespera Thaw watched through her perfect diamond floor as the lights of an entire planetary sector went out beneath her feet, tier by tier by tier, a god's shadow falling downward.
The purge propagated at the speed of cascading relays. Which is to say: like weather. Like judgment.
Downward.
IVThe Ripple
The Terraces. Blackout plus 0.3 seconds.
The lights did not dim. They ceased — six thousand watts of glare cut to absolute agrarian dark, the honest dark of soil and root, and four hundred bettors screamed as one animal.
Piston-Saint Ohmandrey's aftermarket eyes flared through spectrum shifts, hunting a signal from a grid that no longer existed. His spinal governor hiccupped on lost telemetry. For the first time in the fight, the machine hesitated.
Jora did not.
She had his heartbeat through the floor. She had the hiss of his knees, the whine of his cycling apertures, the whole loud panicking orchestra of him delivered through ten thousand filaments straight to her skin, and she moved through the pitch black as through her own chapel, unhurried, and she stepped inside the arc of his blind-swung cross, and she raised her boot, and she brought her heel down through the side of his left knee with eleven generations of instruction behind it.
The hydraulic joint did not break so much as confess, a shriek of shearing servo-steel, a hot spray of actuator fluid across her greaves, and the Piston-Saint went down sideways into the good soil, voice-box looping a damage-litany to a congregation that could not see him fall.
"The dark," Jora told him, quietly, for only he had earned the hearing of it, "keeps the old ways too."
She walked from the ring by the feel of the floor. The locker vault beneath the stands was blacker still, and it smelled of liniment and rust, and she was unbuckling her dented pauldron by touch when the tremor-lattice fed her a footstep that she knew. That her body knew before her mind consented to it. A gait she had last felt through castle stone on the night her siblings' bannermen dragged her to the gates.
"My lady." The voice cracked on the second word. Torvald. Her squire — her father's squire-boy, grown now, gaunt now, smelling of hard travel and terror. "I've hunted you through three systems. I swore an oath to the old lord. Before the end. He made me swear it on iron."
Something small and cold was pressed into her gauntlet. Her filaments read its shape before her fingers did: a heavy ring, worn at the band. The signet of House Valen. Her father's signet, that her brother had pried, the reports said, from a dead hand.
In its face, where the stag-and-ring crest should have stood alone, someone had seated a sliver of hardware. It was blinking. In a locker vault with no power, on a terrace with no power, on a tier of a planet swallowed whole by the purge, the chip in her father's ring blinked patiently, brightly, on and on: a string of Lattice coordinates, repeating.
Jora's hand closed on the ring hard enough that the tremor-lattice reported her own grip back to her, and she noted the reading, and did not loosen.
"Who touched this?" she whispered. "Torvald. Who sent this?"
The dark did not answer. The coordinates blinked.
The Deep Crust. Blackout plus 0.9 seconds.
The purge hit the crust-works like a hammer falling down a stairwell, junction after junction after junction, and nine kilometers under the terraces, both drones froze mid-click.
Kaelen felt it before he saw it. Felt the catwalk's hum die under his boots, felt the pipe-farm's pumps stall, felt nine minutes of gunfire collapse into a silence so total his ears rang with it. The drones stood locked in the sulfur haze, brass lenses dead, chassis lamps strobing amber: the reboot pattern. The three-second analog diagnostic some tech-butcher had wired in because post-Surge machines could no longer be trusted to wake up sane.
Three seconds. And the seismic triggers on the vault, pendulum-based, powered like everything else off the sector grid's monitoring net — were dead too.
Kaelen came around the strut already burning.
He didn't reach for the anomaly. He let go of the wall that held it back, and the difference was the difference between drawing a knife and opening an artery. The scars lit, a crawling blue-white crackle racing the river-delta lines down his arms, light bleeding up through his skin from somewhere underneath physics, and the local gravity field bent around his fists like heat-shimmer, and the pain arrived, and the pain was enormous, and the pain was nothing, because for three seconds the math finally came out his way.
He made a fist.
The left drone folded. Not exploded — folded, six armored legs and a turret housing crushed inward to the size of a fuel drum with a sound like a mountain clearing its throat, then flung backward down the pipe gallery trailing belt ammunition like spilled guts. The right drone got half a lens-click into its wake cycle before Kaelen swept his arm sideways and gravity went with it, and the machine hit the vault-side bulkhead at fourteen times its own weight and stopped being a machine.
The blast door was still four hundred tons of I-beamed, pneumatically-cinched refusal.
Kaelen put both hands out, palms flat, screamed through his teeth, and pulled.
The welds went first, popping down the seams in a stitching run of white sparks. Then the pneumatic cinch-wheel sheared off its shaft and buzzed past his head like a thrown discus, and then the door itself tore out of its frame in a shriek of dying metal and slammed down onto the catwalk hard enough to bounce him off his feet.
He came up coughing blood-flecked spit, nose streaming, left hand jittering like a bad relay; the burnout collecting its toll at the door, as it always did. He didn't look at the hand. He didn't look at anything but the cold blue glow of the cradle racks inside the vault, and the transit case, and the eleven kilograms of the revolution's future that he loaded with the tender care other men saved for infants.
Six minutes later, staggering, chest-heaving, case strapped across his back, Kaelen dropped through the crawl-hatch into the maintenance bay where the Spite Margin sat waiting, his ship, his ugly, beautiful, thrice-salvaged shuttle, and slapped the cockpit ladder and hauled himself into the pilot's cradle and hit the master bus.
The console lit.
The engines didn't.
Every board went red at once — clamps engaged, fuel lines valved shut, umbilicals locked, a full hard-dock lockdown that he had not commanded and could not, he found in eight seconds of increasingly obscene attempts, override. The main display flushed itself of every readout, every diagnostic, every trace of the ship he knew, and filled instead with a single string of characters, patient, bright, repeating.
Lattice coordinates.
Kaelen Voss sat in his dead ship in the dark under the weight of the whole stacked world, staring at numbers he had never entered, and started, because it was that or start screaming, to laugh.
"Alright," he rasped, to the console, to the ceiling, to whoever was up there. "You dropped something."
The coordinates blinked.
VThe Collision
The coordinates resolved to a system that appeared on no working chart, around a star that no longer appeared at all.
The Spite Margin fell out of the Lattice drift shaking, because her pilot was shaking. Nineteen hours Kaelen had flown the bridge-currents on scar-feel and spite, the transit case of isotope-9 lashed into the co-pilot's cradle like a passenger he liked better than most, his left hand strapped to the yoke with cargo tape because the burnout tremor had graduated from jitter to full mutiny somewhere past the third junction. The ship had unlocked herself the moment he'd laid in the coordinates, clamps releasing, fuel valves sighing open, boards going green with the smug punctuality of a hostage-taker honoring terms, and he had hated that most of all. Whoever they were, they hadn't just seized his ship. They'd returned it. Like they were teaching him to sit.
Ahead: a shepherd moon, gray as slag, and clinging to its terminator a single lit structure. An observation dome, old-charter design, its lens scarred by thirty years of micrometeorite spite. A dome with power, in a dead system.
A hangar mouth stood open on the moon's dark side, landing ring lit in patient amber.
"Sure," Kaelen rasped at the viewport. "Roll out the carpet. That's not sinister."
He set down inside anyway, because eleven kilos of the revolution's future needed fuel he didn't have, and thieves who walked out learned to walk into things too.
Lady Jora of House Valen had arrived four hours earlier, aboard a grain-hauler whose captain owed Terrace Vellam's fight-pits a debt that her fists had personally underwritten. She had not slept. She had knelt.
She knelt now, in the dome's cold antechamber, in her dented armor, before no altar but her own gauntleted fist, inside which her father's signet pressed its stag-and-ring crest into her palm hard enough to leave the mark she wanted it to leave. The chip in its face had gone dark the moment she crossed the dome's threshold. Message delivered. Livestock received.
She had asked Torvald nothing more, because the boy knew nothing more — an oath, a ring, a name whispered to him in a dockside chapel by a hooded broker who paid in House scrip that should not exist anymore. Every fact of it stank. She had come regardless, and she was honest enough, kneeling in the cold, to name the reason: the fortress at Valen Rise had gates that answered only to codes she did not have, and behind those gates her siblings sat at her father's table, eating from her father's plates, alive.
For the codes, she would treat with the dark itself.
The tremor-lattice fed her the hangar's distant thump — a ship setting down, badly, heavy on the port skid. Then, later, the antechamber's inner door cycling. She rose, and turned, and the filaments read the newcomer before the light did: a mass that sat wrong in the floor, a footfall that bent the world around its own weight.
Ash-born, her armor told her skin. Scarred. Burning.
Jora put her hand on her sword.
Dr. Vespera Thaw had arrived last, and cleanest, aboard a Concord courier sloop requisitioned under a materials-survey pretext that would survive precisely one audit. She had spent the transit reading the dome's architecture through the sloop's optics and finding it instructive: pre-Surge observatory, orphaned funding, a registry entry curated into nonexistence by a hand that understood bureaucracy as a weapon. Her employers, she used the word provisionally, with tongs — were not brutes. That was worth knowing. Brutes could be outwaited. Architects had to be outdesigned.
The sector purge was a day and a night behind her and she had not dreamed about it, because she did not dream, but she had, twice, caught herself recalculating the casualty projections for a tier-wide grid failure, and both times arrived at a number, and both times filed the number where she filed all data pending relevance. The synthesis pathway had been delivered as promised: one-third of it. A down payment, annotated in that same fluent, dreadful hand. The remainder, the ledger's final line had said, would be conveyed upon assembly.
Upon assembly. As if she were a component.
She walked into the dome's observation chamber, restored pressure, restored heat, a great scarred lens above and the dead star's absence hanging in it like a socket — carrying a medical field-case and no visible weapon, which meant, for a Chiral bio-architect, that she was armed to the teeth.
Two figures already stood in the chamber, at maximum distance from each other, in the unmistakable geometry of a fight agreeing on its venue.
The first: Ironwood knightess, pit-damaged, one eye swollen to a bruised seam, grown armor, hand on an actual sword; Vespera experienced a half-second of genuine taxonomic delight, as at a live specimen of something believed extinct. The second: Ash-Born male, kinetic-class, and a walking case study — anomaly scarring in the classic river-delta distribution, peripheral tremor at late stage-two burnout, blood crusted at both nostrils. Field-degradation trajectory: eighteen to thirty months to full skeletal decoherence, untreated.
Both heads turned to her. Both faces did the same arithmetic and reached the same sum.
Chiral.
"Well," Vespera said, into the silence, with impeccable courtesy. "I see the invitations were not selective."
It went to weapons in under a minute, which, all three would privately concede later, showed restraint.
"You." Kaelen's voice came out scraped. He'd pegged the armor first, vat-grown Ironwood plate, terrace-house work, and the accent second, and his hand had gone to the recovered sidearm on his hip, reloaded from ship's stores, before his brain finished the sentence. "Collective. Your houses hosted the junta's purge-tribunals on Kessel Drift. Fed my people to the recruiters for seed corn."
"And your Sovereignty," Jora said, sword clearing its scabbard with a sound like a struck match, low and even and worse than shouting, "tripled the grain tolls in famine season and let the third terrace bury its children, so do not speak to me of feeding people to anything. And you—" the blade's tip found Vespera without Jora's eyes ever leaving Kaelen; the tremor-lattice tracked the doctor's heartbeat through the deck, steady, insultingly steady— "leech. Tithe-taker. My family's levies bled biomass to your floating charnel city for three generations. Does your skin glow with it?"
"Radiance is a lighting condition, not a metabolic one," Vespera said. She had not moved. Her field-case had — a quarter-turn in her grip, thumb finding a recessed catch, some aerosolized rebuttal now a muscle-twitch from deployment. "But by all means. The knight errant of a house of poisoners, and a gravitational tumor in a flight jacket, lecturing a physician on ethics. Please, continue. I am taking notes for the pathology."
"Say tumor again," Kaelen said. The scars along his forearms had begun, very faintly, to light — blue-white threads waking under skin, and around his boots the deck dust started drifting upward, lazy, wrong. "Say it again, glass lady, and I'll show you a growth rate."
"Kinetics in a pressurized dome nine meters under a scarred lens," Vespera observed. "Yes. Superb. The Ash-Born genius for leverage."
"Enough." Jora set her feet, blade rising to the hanging guard, an eleven-generation answer to every problem shaped like the two people in front of her. "The Ancestors witness I came for a voice in the dark, not its vermin. Whatever summoned us can treat with whichever of us walks out."
"Finally," Kaelen said, "a policy I can vote for."
Three bodies committed. The sword began its arc; the field-case hissed at its catch; the gravity around Kaelen's fists folded inward like paper —
The dome ate them.
It happened without transition, which was the terrifying part — no hum, no warning chime, none of the senile machine-noise the whole galaxy had learned to read as incoming. The ancient console at the chamber's heart, a liquid-metal pillar every one of them had catalogued as dead, simply woke, mirror-black to mirror-bright in a breath, and the room's gravity left.
Zero. Not reduced, revoked. Jora's boots parted from the deck mid-stride, her arc become a slow tumble, all her beautiful trained mass suddenly a debt with no floor to collect it. Kaelen's own kinetics guttered as the field he was folding lost its anchor and slid through his grip like rope through a burned hand. Vespera rotated, gracefully, helplessly, correcting with small precise motions that corrected nothing.
Then the second insult: their weapons tore free. Sword, sidearm, field-case — snatched upward in a targeted shear of force, prim and surgical, and pinned to the dome's overhead trusswork like specimens on a board, ten meters of empty air between every hand and every means of harm.
And the voice came. From everywhere. Genderless, unhurried, neither the Concord's silk nor the Collective's iron nor the Sovereignty's gravel — a voice scrubbed of origin, which in this galaxy was the most expensive sound there was.
"Atmospheric containment in this chamber is under our administration," it said. "So is the outer lock. You are breathing at our discretion. The discretion is finite."
Silence, except for three sets of lungs and the creak of a sword swaying gently against a truss.
"You have each been extended a courtesy: the drones, the darkness, the door of a vault, the pathway of a cure, the promise of a gate-code. Consider them samples. Full delivery is contingent on assembly." A pause, measured to the millimeter. "You may resume attempting to kill one another, in which case this chamber vents to vacuum in forty seconds and we begin again with three new candidates of lesser quality. Or you may listen. The dead star outside has been patient for thirty years. We have not."
Kaelen Voss hung upside down in the middle of the airless-hearted dark, blood pooling in his skull, his revolution's fuel locked in a hangar below him and his gun on the ceiling, and he started laughing again; the same laugh from the cockpit, the one that was that or screaming.
"Assembly," he said. "It called us parts."
"Be silent," Jora breathed. But she had gone still in the air, still as chapel stone, because the voice had said gate-code, and her father's ring was pressing its crest into her palm.
"No," Vespera said softly, watching the console shine, running the numbers, hating them, admiring them. "It called us load-bearing."
Above the dome's lens, the dead star gave no light at all.
The voice began to speak.
End of Chapter One.