“Does that question apply to me?” Tennal’s dry voice asked. Of course—the open comms channel.

“Yes, please,” Surit said. “How is the bridge?”

Tennal paused. “I’m in the fourth junior pilot’s chair. The officers are models of open communication.” Quieter, into his wristband, he said, “Everyone here’s an asshole. If they wanted me working on the bridge, why didn’t they train me here? They haven’t even told me to do the reader thing yet.”

That was odd. But then, the whole setup around Tennal had been odd from the start, and Surit would have to give more thought to figuring it out—but it would have to be later, when he wasn’t in the middle of an operation.

“They’ve found a solid mass on the scanners ahead,” Tennal said. “Could be an old space facility, I guess. They haven’t found any energy signatures that look like remnants. Ten minutes away.”

Surit swallowed. He’d never known his mother. He’d only seen vids. So he’d never know what was going through her head when she decided to take her fleet to that old space facility to seize its remnants or die in the attempt. And she’d managed one of those.

Basavi pinged from the shuttle to tell him the same thing: a dark, modular station was on their long-distance sensors. The flotilla headed toward it, the Note at its head.

Marit had never set foot in the damaged facility; she’d blown up in the attack. Her ship would have been sent on a different trajectory. Wreckage in chaotic space often stayed together even after destruction, like detritus endlessly bobbing in a whirlpool. The ship might even be recognizable.

“Look out,” Tennal commented. “Disturbance up ahead.”

Basavi sent a course-change report. There was a knot of chaos in front of the fleet, drifting across the clear path. The flotilla of shuttles split to avoid it.

Surit sank his hand into the cool filaments of the pod’s steering mesh beside him. He made the mistake of checking their position.

The flip side of Surit’s good memory was that it was hard to forget things even if he wanted to. He’d worked out an exact set of coordinates, back when he’d been a naive teenager and had thought finding Marit’s ship would solve everything. The numbers still blazed in his mind.

They were so close.

Surit kept his eyes on the screens and sensors as patches of chaos flashed past. He had lain awake at night dreaming of what finding her ship might look like. He’d simulated how a ship of Marit’s type might fracture, what the pieces would look like from every angle, how the refracted light of chaotic space would hit the metal. The glimpse he might get.