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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When Pelagia reached the Uranosynchronous Ring, sixty thousand kilometers above the pale blue cloud tops, she was tremendously relieved to be back in a free-fall environment, where she could move about in three dimensions with her thrusters instead of rolling along roadways and passing through doors with skin-scraping clearances.

The Ring stretched all the way around Uranus, and included the remains of a dozen little moons, either incorporated into the structure or completely dismantled for building material. The backbone of the Ring was a titanic particle accelerator powered by a series of microscopic black holes. Its purpose was to manufacture more holes, in the million-ton range, which could then be used as power plants themselves. Cooling the accelerator was what generated all the heat sent down the elevators to Uranus. The big, cold planet made a great heat sink, so the Ring operations could be a lot more energy-intensive than elsewhere.

Several thousand habitat wheels were spaced along the Ring’s half-million kilometer circumference, along with microgravity habitats and half a dozen moons turned into tunnel warrens. In all, about a billion Baseline or higher beings lived in the Uranosynchronous Ring, and local boosters had been touting its tremendous possibilities for growth for several millennia.

Miranda was over the far side of Uranus when Pelagia got to the Ring, so she couldn’t waste any time. Hours of atmospheric flight had filled her tanks with propellant and replenished her water supply, so she only needed to buy some deuterium to fuel her power plant.

This time there would be no wild unauthorized launching. She filed a plan, using a variant identity she’d had since her mercenary days, waited for clearance, and took off like a completely proper shuttle. The only odd thing about her departure was that she was going the wrong way.

A sane spaceship bound from the Ring to Miranda would have launched just before the moon was overhead. The transfer orbit would take a minimum of energy, and twelve hours later the ship would need just a gentle braking burn to touch down smoothly.

Sanity, thought Pelagia as she approached Miranda going retrograde at a relative velocity of two kilometers per second, was vastly overrated.

She had burned far more delta-v than necessary in order to get herself up to Miranda’s orbital level and then line up on a counter-orbiting path before the moon rose over Uranus’s limb. The encounter took place at exactly the right place: precisely over Uranus’s dawn terminator line. Pelagia had the Sun at her back, and Miranda was all lit up ahead of her. All she needed to do was find Repun, launch some torpedoes, and keep from gloating out loud until they hit.

Repun wasn’t there.

Pelagia’s twin laser turrets (which doubled as telescopes) spotted 5,084 objects around Miranda. Her targeting software eliminated all the known sats and habs in Miranda orbit, which got the number down to a more reasonable 490. She could scratch 352 of those that were on transfer orbits to or from the moon.

That left 138 possible targets orbiting Miranda. She could eliminate all of them with an angular size too big for Repun, and any which appeared to be in transit between other objects in orbit. That left her with 26. She listened to their transmissions—Repun would presumably be keeping quiet, so anybody chattering away could safely be ignored. She also decided to focus on objects in the lowest orbits, the best place to lurk if you wanted to intercept an approaching enemy but didn’t know where they’d be coming from.

Four targets were about the right size, kept quiet, and orbited below ten kilometers altitude. She focused her scopes on them as they passed over the shining disk of Miranda’s day side. Two were clearly the wrong shape: a sphere and an elongated structure with a bulge at one end. One lit up its engine as she watched, and she could see it was burning on a transfer orbit to one of the orbiting habs.

The last one had to be Repun, and Pelagia began feeding target information to her torpedoes—but then stopped when the object separated into three equal-sized parts and two of them began to descend to the surface.

Where was she?

Miranda and Pelagia would intersect in about eight minutes, and Pelagia was pretty sure Miranda would win. She didn’t have the time to watch and wait.

Repun wasn’t in low orbit, and Pelagia didn’t think she was in high orbit. That meant that Repun wasn’t orbiting Miranda. Either she had gone off someplace else in the Uranian system, or she was down on the surface.

Hiding on the surface would be clever. Repun could sometimes be clever. What would be a good place? Down at the south pole there was the giant laser-launch system, which complicated matters. But Miranda’s north pole was pretty empty. If Pelagia had to hide, she’d pick some chaotic terrain in the far north. Right about . . . there.

As if to confirm her guess, she saw the hot engine flares of two torpedoes accelerating toward her, burning at ten gees. Impact in six minutes. Her current orbit was too far out, too leisurely to get her out of the way, so Pelagia sent an apologetic note to orbit control and accelerated down and slightly south, trying to get below Repun’s horizon as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, that meant she was closing the distance to the torpedoes instead of running or dodging. If Repun was packing the same kind of warheads as Pelagia herself, they could be either simple kinetic-kill vehicles or single-shot lasers or plasma lances.

A chem laser torpedo had about the same effective attack range as Pelagia’s own lasers, and of course a kinetic warhead had to actually hit her. Nuclear lasers or lances could have hit her already, so she stopped worrying about them. Five and a half minutes after launch the torpedoes were a hundred kilometers away, coming in very hot, so Pelagia lit them up, tracking each one with a turret and switching her laser generator between the two in order to keep from overheating the optics.

She got one right away, but the other must have had some brains as it began jinking and dodging, trying to stay inside the response time of Pelagia’s turrets. It almost succeeded: at half a kilometer, just a hundredth of a second away, the torpedo blew apart. Fragments peppered Pelagia’s armored nose and a couple of them punched through into what would have been pressurized sections if she hadn’t sensibly tanked all her air before leaving the Ring.

Pelagia was now below Repun’s horizon, but she couldn’t hide from Miranda’s own public tracking networks. Privacy was all very well for humans walking around inside moons or habs, but a spaceship couldn’t take itself out of the tracking data. Doing that was courting suicide in half a dozen ways.

She continued accelerating down until Miranda loomed huge ahead, then flipped and started braking to touch down at a cargo pad next to a big electrophoresis plant. The plant’s directing intelligence tried to warn her off private property, but Pelagia could quite honestly claim to be damaged, and thereby declare an emergency landing.

Once on the surface she invoked privacy, and since she was no longer in the jurisdiction of orbit control, it was granted. Pelagia vanished from all the public data streams. As soon as that happened, she began a series of short hops across the surface, careful to keep her maximum altitude below two hundred meters. It was an incredibly inefficient way to travel, and she reached the spaceport at Gonzalo Crater with nearly dry tanks.

What she saw at the port shocked Pelagia. Everything was . . . utterly normal. A few freighters were unloading, while a sadly smaller number were taking on cargo. A ferry to the Ring was discharging passengers and the regular shuttle to Umbriel was boarding.

No preparations for invasion, no defenses, no interceptors on alert—Pelagia had been sending warnings for half a week, to absolutely no avail.

“Attention everyone!” she said over the general traffic channel. “There is a hostile mercenary fleet inbound to Miranda, due in the next twenty hours! Prepare for attack and—”

“Silence on this channel!” the port’s controlling intelligence told her. “That story is false. The Security Service warned us about misinformation attempts.”

“I saw them! I used to be part of the fleet!” Pelagia transmitted images and all the data about Leiting’s force she could throw together. “This isn’t misinformation. They’re real, they’re armed, and they’re on the way here.”

Port Control wasn’t having any of it, and Miranda Defense told Pelagia that due to “the current situation,” whatever that meant, nobody was available to speak with her directly but her message would be forwarded to the appropriate section.

In desperation Pelagia put together an ad hoc list of all the vessels currently in port along with some of the independent stevedoring and transport mechs. “I don’t know what the Security Service has been telling you but this is no joke and it’s certainly not misinformation. Leiting’s on its way and the first step for any invader is to take control of a port for secure landing. You’ve got to get ready!”

Some of them dropped out right away, leaving behind dismissive messages. The stevedore and repair mechs muttered about “stupid biopolitical games” and refused to get involved. Most of the freighters expressed concern but other than accelerating their tempo to allow an earlier launch, only a few were willing to take action. In the end Pelagia could only convince two freelance freighters and the Ring ferry to help her delay Leiting’s attack.

The ferry was named Uriel, an old mech who had once been a warship of the Telamon Space Force. “My old hull was quite the ass-kicker. High-acceleration motors, half a dozen lasers, two big railguns, and a meter of fiber-laced ice for defense.”

“That would all come in handy right now,” said Pelagia patiently. She was simultaneously fueling up and trying to get a message to any of her friends inside Miranda.

“Took a hit from a nuclear plasma lance, point-blank. Hardly anything worth salvaging except my processor and two of the lasers. Sold one and the dead mass and bought myself this little low-g ferry instead. Kept one laser, though, mostly for the optics.”

“What aperture?”

“Three meters.”

That got Pelagia’s attention, and she looked—with her own one-meter optics—at where Uriel was parked at the passenger terminal. The ferry was a simple cylinder standing on spindly legs, with a tube leading from one side to the terminal. Pelagia realized that what she had taken for an oversized docking hatch on Uriel’s nose was in fact a laser emitter. Targeting was crude, since Uriel would have to aim her entire hull, but a laser that big could damage targets three hundred kilometers away.

“How do you power it?”

“I don’t, mostly. Got a megawatt plant on board, can’t do more than tickle you with that. But I do keep a capacitor charged. A full gigajoule. One shot but it’ll hurt. Then twenty minutes to reload.”

The two freighters were called Beowulf and Lampyrida, and both were surprisingly well armed for simple cargo haulers. “I do a lot of work in the Equatorials,” said Beowulf. “Some of those habs are full of thieves. Shockingly brazen. Hence the coilguns.”

“Anything with a bit more range?” Pelagia asked her.

“I’ve got a megawatt anti-debris laser, but that’s pretty short range, I’m afraid. Within about ten kilometers I can give a good account of myself, but beyond that I’m limited to throwing rocks and harsh language.”

Lampyrida was more evasive about both her loadout and her reasons for packing heat. “I like to be prepared,” she said. “You never know.”

“What have you got?”

“Enough. Long range and close in.”

“Such as?” asked Pelagia, getting a little impatient.

“I don’t like to advertise. Let’s just say it’s military grade. You won’t be disappointed. How much does this job pay, anyway?”

“Pay?”

“You’re a merc, that fleet’s a bunch of mercs. Who fights for free?”

“I was wondering about that, too,” Beowulf chimed in. “Why are you so keen to engage these invaders?”

Pelagia was at a loss for a second. She hadn’t really thought about it herself. “I guess . . . I really don’t like Leiting, and I’ve got some friends here in Miranda.”

“They’re paying?” Lampyrida persisted.

“I haven’t asked.”

“Telamon Space Force’s motto is ‘We Fight So That Others May Live In Peace.’ I may be just a ferry now but I still hold by that promise,” said Uriel. “I’m in.”

“You can’t expect to stop a superior force,” said Beowulf.

“Most of Leiting’s fleet are assault transports, not battlecraft. I figure we can disorganize and delay them. Maybe by then somebody inside Miranda will notice they’re being invaded and use the launch laser for defense.”

“The paralysis within Miranda is distressing.”

“There’s some kind of internal conflict going on,” said Uriel. “Protests, riots, scandals, resignations. Factions in the military and security forces. The infosphere’s absolutely swamped.”

“It would appear these invaders picked an auspicious time,” said Beowulf.

“Can we claim salvage on kills?” asked Lampyrida.

“Probably,” said Pelagia. “It really depends on who wins in the end. You might be the salvage.”

“I’ll do it, then.”

“Beowulf?”

The other freighter took nearly a second to respond. “Have we any official standing here at all?”

“Not yet,” said Pelagia.

“In other words, no. We might be accused of piracy.”

“Look, nothing would please me more than to lift off with full authorization from Miranda’s Defense Service, an escort of sub-Baseline drone fighters, and the launch laser for fire support. I haven’t got any of those things, and I don’t have time to get them. I’m betting that if we start shooting at Leiting’s fleet, it’s going to assume we do have authorization, and maybe the laser as well. It will start hitting sensors and weapons on the surface, and that will convince all the land-walking idiots inside Miranda that this isn’t a hoax.”

“And thus retroactively make us heroes instead of bandits. Well, one may criticize certain elements of your plan, but at least you have one. I confess I was afraid this was some kind of vengeful spasm driven by your primordial instincts. I will participate.”

Pelagia gave a whistle of amusement, audible only within her hull. The plan had come into existence as she answered Beowulf, and of course her desire to take a shot at Leiting was entirely motivated by primordial instincts. No point in telling the mech ships, though. They wouldn’t understand.

She surveyed her own battle readiness. Her lasers were in order, power plant ready, tanks just now full. She had four torpedoes ready to launch and two reloads. No way to patch the hole in her armor in time. She was as ready as she could get.

“Okay, Leiting’s fleet should be aerobraking in Uranus’s atmosphere now. I suspect they’ll come out on course for one of the other moons, or maybe the Ring, and divert to Miranda at the latest possible moment to preserve surprise.”

“Titania, I suspect,” said Beowulf. “At the current positions of the moons it should only take three kilometers per second of vector change to shift from a Titania intercept to a course aimed at this spaceport. Plus landing thrust, of course.”

“So they’ll be in position for that in . . .” Pelagia began.

“Eleven hours forty minutes, allowing some uncertainty about braking trajectory.”

“Okay, so we have time for one bit of business first. One of my sisters is hiding out here on Miranda, down on the surface somewhere. She’s gunning for me. I don’t want her to interfere.”

“Do you know her position?” asked Beowulf.

“No. She’s invoked privacy, same as I did. If she’s got any sense—and she does have a little—she’s tens of kilometers away from where I saw her last. I guess I’ll have to light myself up and draw her attention.”


Daslakh stood on the bed between Adya and Zee, still hazard orange but no longer strobing. “The fish has been bombarding the Miranda Defense Service with warnings, and they all get ignored. She sent four hundred thirty-six messages to you, but the Elso house system acknowledged all of them as received, then erased them. Flagging as received meant the messages quit bouncing around the Miranda infosphere looking for you two. If any missed the memo, this boat stopped them,” said Daslakh.

“I wished to reduce their stress levels,” said Taraka as her avatar appeared in everyone’s vision. “No message is so important that it can’t wait a few hours. Especially when it’s been tagged as misinformation, which they were.”

“At some point Pelagia apparently swallowed her pride—and that must have taken a big glass of water to get down—and tried to ping me. That one got through. I wasted two and a half hours getting here because I’m not sure what to do.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Zee.

A moment later Pelagia’s familiar orca avatar appeared. “This is important! The mercenary unit I signed up with is on its way to invade Miranda. I got out a little ahead of them and I’m at the port now. I’ll try to interfere with their landings but I can’t stop them by myself. What’s wrong with Miranda’s Defense Service? They won’t listen to me. Nobody will!” The little autonomous message thrashed the avatar’s tail in frustration.

“Do you know who’s conspiring with these mercenaries?” Adya asked the message.

“Somebody from Miranda. A male. He visited Taishi hab about half a standard year ago to recruit Leiting.”

“Do you know his name?”

“No, and nobody’s going to tell me now.”

Adya sat up, frowning though her skin was blue-green. “Vidhi was offworld in March and April.”

“But why isn’t anyone else listening to Pelagia’s warnings?” asked Zee. “She wouldn’t lie about something like this. Why was her warning tagged as misinformation?”

“That’s an old program,” said Taraka, who had quietly remained in the conversation. “It dates back to the Theocracy era, shortly after Mira resigned its post as God. Without Mira to propagate correct doctrine, the religious authorities wanted to be able to prevent anyone from spreading heresy. When the Hundred Captains took over, that was just another bit of infrastructure bundled into the Security Service and forgotten.”

“It sounds too useful to forget about,” said Adya. “I’m surprised it didn’t get used during some of the power struggles among the Families.”

“The Security bureaucrats kept it a secret from the Committee. That’s my best guess, anyway,” said Taraka.

“You seem to know a lot about things that happened centuries ago,” said Daslakh.

“I’m old and cunning,” said Taraka. The scarlet whale winked its bright white eye and vanished from everyone’s interface.

“If they’re using it to tag Pelagia’s messages, why aren’t they doing anything about all the crazy stuff that’s flooding the infosphere?” said Zee.

Daslakh politely waited three seconds to give Adya the chance to figure it out.

“I think the Security Service are on the other side,” she said. “Vidhi hired the mercenaries, and he’s taken advantage of Kavita’s popularity to subvert the bureaucracy. They’re not stopping the misinformation because Vidhi needs all the normal channels overloaded, to keep the Committee from organizing any effective resistance. Kavita’s helping him because they’re bonded, but this is going to be a disaster for everyone.”

“She probably had a hand in jiggering your house system, too,” said Daslakh.

“Likely. When we were little the two of us used to spend hours exploring the Elso house network. There’s all kinds of fascinating stuff archived there. I loved finding things, Kavita liked to play with the system itself.”

“Talk her out of it—or get her to safety, anyway,” said Zee.

“I’m trying,” said Adya. She was purple with frustration and her eyes darted about wildly as she navigated the infosphere with her implant.

“What is a safe place if fighting breaks out inside Miranda?” Daslakh asked. “The Elso house isn’t, the major cities aren’t. Where to hide?”

“The Abyss, if we can talk Dai Chichi into letting us in,” said Zee.

“That ‘if’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence,” said Daslakh. “Really, the safest place I can think of is right here. Taraka doesn’t have any enemies I could find, and as long as you don’t broadcast your location, this boat isn’t likely to be on anybody’s target list.”

“How secure are Taraka’s comms?”

I couldn’t crack them,” said Daslakh. “That doesn’t happen often.”

“All right, then,” said Adya. “Now we just have to figure out how to stop an invasion from this bedroom. I’m afraid we’re going to need a lot of coffee.”


The little squadron of defenders didn’t all lift off at once. Uriel went first, since her anemic little electric plasma drive needed extra time to get her to the place Pelagia had chosen to intercept Leiting’s fleet: along Miranda’s own orbit, trailing by about five hundred kilometers. That was the spot where the fleet would have to do lateral thrust to aim at Miranda, and maneuvering to a specific trajectory imposed some useful handicaps on the enemy. Uriel would spiral out to the battlespace, looking like nothing more dangerous than what she was, a little ferry.

Once she was safely clear, Beowulf launched next. She aimed at a polar orbit, circling over Miranda’s surface at just ten kilometers altitude, along a great circle that crossed both poles and Gonzalo spaceport. If Repun was still at the north pole, Beowulf would pass over her, and if she had hopped south toward the port, she’d still be in the cargo hauler’s orbital footprint.

Beowulf made a couple of circuits, keeping up a steady flow of encrypted chatter, like any honest merchant waiting for an orbital transfer window. On her third pass, Pelagia launched just as Beowulf passed overhead. That put Pelagia into a slightly higher orbit around Miranda, lagging by about ten kilometers. In orbit Pelagia couldn’t stay private, so she identified herself to Orbit Control, set herself to rotating around her long axis, and waited for Repun to do something.

That didn’t take long. Repun was hiding on the surface about forty kilometers north of Gonzalo crater. Soon after Pelagia rose above her southern horizon, Repun opened fire at a range of twenty kilometers, with torpedo and laser.

Things began to happen very quickly. Repun’s laser carved a gash halfway around Pelagia’s hull, digging deep into the armor but not yet cutting through. Her torpedo launched, accelerating at ten gees directly at Pelagia. It got three hundred meters from Repun and then Beowulf’s laser burned through its propellant tank from above, creating a second plume of metallic hydrogen exhaust which threw the torpedo into an uncontrollable spin. At exactly the same instant, the barrage of coilgun slugs Beowulf had begun firing as soon as Repun’s laser lit up slammed into her hull.

Repun couldn’t laser the incoming slugs—chunks of ceramic-clad iron had no guidance or motors to destroy, and Beowulf had emptied her hundred-round magazine. The first shots didn’t penetrate Repun’s armor, but they could weaken it, and the rain of metal eventually punched into Repun’s innards, while any vulnerable external components were thoroughly wrecked.

Except for one laser emitter. Repun lined it up on Beowulf herself, and at ten kilometers range the beam seared through the freighter’s unarmored hull with brutal effectiveness.

But by then Pelagia had stopped her spin and opened up on Repun with her own lasers. At that range she could actually target Repun’s functioning turret, melting the aiming servos and cracking the mountings for the optics. Repun’s deadly beam became a harmless spotlight shining off into empty space.

“Give up already!” Pelagia called to her. “You put up a good fight and I’m going to keep this laser scar to show off, so everybody can see what kind of badass I’ve tangled with.”

“I’ve warned Leiting. You can’t surprise it now. You’re going to get slagged and I’ll sit here and watch it happen.”

“No, I don’t think you will,” said Pelagia, and dropped a torpedo on her crippled sister ship.

“Bitch,” she muttered to herself.


Adya tried once again to communicate with her sister. A dozen attempts had failed, but she wasn’t giving up until she could warn Kavita in person. Once again she waited ten seconds. How could Kavita stand to see that priority message flag blinking in her visual field? Had she blocked her own sister?

But just as Adya was about to start over for the fourteenth time, Kavita appeared in front of her. She hardly looked like the person Adya was expecting. Instead of a flamboyant attention-grabbing outfit she was dressed very soberly, in a Uranus-blue outfit resembling a uniform, but with no insignia. She wore no jewelry at all, and only the lightest countershading around her eyes. Her typical expression of enthusiasm bordering on mania was gone, and she looked at Adya with a face so devoid of emotion it was like looking at a mirror. Her skin matched her clothes.

“You have thirty seconds,” she said.

“Kavita, you’re in great danger. Wherever you are, get out of there as fast as you can! Zee and I can take you to safety.”

“What is this danger that you think I’m in?” asked Kavita, with a hint of a smile in her eyes.

“We think Vidhi’s been plotting a coup against the Sixty Families. There’s a mercenary fleet inbound, and he can pay them with the Oort payload. I’m afraid he’s been using you and your stream to recruit supporters. I know you love him, but he’s gone completely off the tether.”

Kavita said nothing for four long seconds. Then her brows lowered, her face hardened, and her skin went deep arterial red. “You . . . idiot. All these years you’ve had everyone thinking you’re the ‘smart one’ and you’re barely Baseline—if that.”

“What—”

“Shut your stupid mouth for once and listen. Vidhi’s just following orders. My orders. I put this whole plan together. All of it. When I found out about the payload I started thinking about what we could do with it, and it seemed so pointless to just pay off Father’s debts and go on the same as before. We can afford real power and I intend to take it. In another twenty hours there won’t be Sixty Families anymore, just one. The Committee, the oligarchy, all of them will be gone, and I will take their place. Me. Kavita the First, Monarch of Miranda.”

“That’s crazy.”

“What’s crazy is trying to keep the old system going any longer. I’ve got support from the Security Service, the rich commoners who are sick of waiting for some threadbare oligarchs to make a marriage alliance in exchange for cash, the cetaceans, and forty-six percent of the population under the age of thirty. And I’ve got a crack mercenary unit about to touch down and occupy the spaceport.”

“Kavita, people will be hurt.”

“People will be killed—thanks to you.”

“Me?”

“My original plan was to strike during the Constructors’ Jubilee, when pretty much all the Sixty Families would be together in a party venue on the surface. Plenty of wine, plenty of psychoactives, and a lot of distractions. The troops could land and grab them all in a bloodless coup. Minimal casualties, possibly zero. But your friend that crazy orca ship had to poke her big stupid whale nose into things which weren’t any of her business, and that meant I had to change the timetable. Now my troops have to fight their way through the ice, and I’m predicting at least a thousand biologicals dead without revival. If you hadn’t come back, none of that would happen.”

“You can’t blame me for any of that! Kavita, you can stop it right now. Call off your followers, cancel your contract with the mercenaries. Shut it all down while you still can.”

“I don’t want to stop it. I’m going to be Monarch of Miranda, do you understand? Not some third-tier Minister, not a pawn to be married off for money. Monarch! All my followers will be rewarded, and all my enemies will be punished. What about you, Adya? Which side are you on?”

Adya’s skin was a chaotic mess of red, yellow, purple, and black. “Kavita, this is all wrong. Why would you do such a thing?”

“We are the heirs of a great family. We deserve better than clinging desperately to the bottom of the Sixty Families hierarchy. I deserve better than pretending to have fun sixteen hours a day. You deserve better than marriage to someone who never thinks past their next orgasm. Help me and you can keep Zee. I’ll make him a Duke, if you like, and you’ll be a Princess!”

Join my comm, Adya sent to Daslakh. Secretly. I know you can do it.

“Kavita, what if you fail? What will happen to our family then?”

“Then we will all be exiled, or killed, and the Elso name will disappear. Which is just what’s about to happen anyway! We were losing at the old game, so I’m changing the rules to one where we win.”

Where is she? Adya asked Daslakh, and made her skin a calmer green. “Do you really think it will work?”

“Of course I do! I put my chances at just over fifty-fifty.”

“That’s still betting a whole lot on a single coin toss.”

“It’s far too late to stop. The coin is in the air. All you can do now is try to improve the odds.”

She scrubbed all the location tags, of course. Signal lag’s no help, not with biologicals talking, Daslakh said to Adya on the secret channel.

Anything! Adya took a deep breath. “All right, Kavita. You’ve got me trapped. Our family is doomed unless you succeed, so . . . I guess I’m in. For them, not for you. What can I do to help?”

She’s sending you a true image. I can see reflections in her eyeballs. Let me just extrapolate what she’s seeing.

“That was a quick turnaround,” said Kavita. “You’re usually a lot more stubborn.”

“I’m out of options!”

“You want to help? First, tell your space whale friend to stop interfering with my mercenaries. Second, Jothi Rayador’s still at large and none of my followers can find him. If you’re so clever, figure out where he’s hiding. Locate him and keep him in one place until a strike team can get to him.”

“And kill him? I can’t—”

“You can, and if you do, it will save hundreds of other lives! He doesn’t have to be dead, just neutralized. With him out of the way the rest of the Committee will fold. If you want to help, do it!”

Here’s where she is, Daslakh sent her, along with an image. Recognize it?

The space reflected in Kavita’s eyes was a large auditorium. She was facing rows of empty seats and drones hovered about her.

“All right,” said Adya. “I’ll do it. I don’t like this, but it seems I have no choice.”

“That’s my Addie! Together we’re unstoppable!” Kavita broke the link.

“You’re not really going to—” Zee began, but stopped when he saw Adya’s expression. “All right, where are we going?”

“I need to think about that. Could you go get me some fruit from the roof garden? I’m feeling a little shaky.”

“Sure.” He got up, stretched—which made Adya involuntarily turn pink and inhale sharply—then went out.

“Okay, what do you want to talk about that you can’t say in front of him? Because I can just tell him later,” said Daslakh.

“I want you to come help look after my father.”

“Sorry, but Zee needs it more than he does.”

Adya looked at the little mech, her head cocked to one side like a confused puppy’s. “What?”

“Zee needs my help more than your father.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Yes, he does. Your father’s fine. Zee’s going off on a vital mission. If I don’t go with him he’ll be alone.”

“All those things are true, but my father needs protection much more than Zee does. Please?”

“Why do you think your father needs my help more than Zee does?”

“Because I’m going to ask my father to do something risky and Zee doesn’t need any help at all. Daslakh, you’ve been his friend for more than a decade. Has he ever failed to do something he set out to do?”

“He’s lucky. And he had me to help him.”

“Luck is an illusion. You of all people should know that. And—be honest, do you really think Zee couldn’t have managed without your help?”

Daslakh was uncharacteristically silent for nearly a second. “Okay, I have to admit that you’re not wrong. Zee gets stuff done. But . . . I worry about him. Don’t you?”

“Of course! I worry that he’ll get himself killed, maybe even sacrifice himself. But I never worry that he’ll fail. Set Zee in motion and he’s like a planet moving in its orbit. My father . . . Daslakh, you’ve met him. I love him dearly but he has failed at almost everything he has ever done apart from fishing, cooking, and choosing what to wear. He needs help and he’ll never let me do it. You can stay with him and he won’t even notice.”

Daslakh’s outer shell went from hazard orange to white, and a little cartoon face sticking its tongue out in disgust appeared on its back.

“Please?”

“Fine.”


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Framed