With luck, the town of Northfield would long remember the lesson it had learned this day: that if you wanted to live, you refrained from fucking with ships from the House of Reclamation, and especially from fucking with Carnivore-class heavy cruisers.

To be honest, the townspeople were lucky to have escaped with the relatively small number of casualties they had sustained. If Mulch or his cronies had killed me, I had no doubt the Trouble Dog would have killed those responsible. The ship might be almost incapable of mourning individual crewmembers, but she had the loyalty of an Alsatian, and I was certain that if things had gone differently, she would therefore have done her best to avenge my death.

And there was a certain comfort in that.

* * *

Once clear of the atmosphere, the Trouble Dog began to oscillate like a flying fish skipping between waves. With each bounce, her hull sank further through the membrane separating our universe from the whistling hurricane of the hyperspatial realms. And as she sank, she began to pick up transmissions echoing across the intervening light years like voices carried on the wind. Some of these broadcasts were incomplete, corrupt fragments of ancient message shells; some were idle chatter or routine communications between ships and stations; but one stood out sharply against the background noise. It was addressed to the Dog herself, but had been sent anonymously. All the usual header data had been stripped from the signal, leaving only its point of origin—which appeared to have been on the fringes of our target system—and the stark warning comprising the body of its message: Stay away.

Twenty-Five: Trouble Dog

TWENTY-FIVE

TROUBLE DOG

Later, when the lights in the human quarters had been dimmed, the rest of the crew and passengers were settled and the captain had retreated to the inflatable life raft in the hold, she asked me to tell her a story.

“Tell me about my great-great-grandmother,” she said. “Tell me about Sofia Nikitas.”

She knew I had the data in my files. It was a story known to every member of the House of Reclamation, and one I had told her many times before. It was our origin story, our creation myth. As members of the House, it was an integral chapter in our shared history, and it went like this:

* * *