He heard someone say, “That’s him,” and he tensed.

The murmur had come from a group of young officers with pilot stripes. Tennal, who had been inspecting the faces around the room with sharp interest, glanced over at them and smirked in return. Surit realized the comment hadn’t been about Marit Yeni at all, but directed at Tennal—the only reader in the fleet.

Smirking as a response had never even occurred to Surit. The blank, baffled reaction it got from the elite young officers was strangely gratifying. Surit filed that away to consider.

The chief of staff snapped a command, and the chattering assembly quieted. Surit slipped into a chair at the side next to some other junior officers. He saw Tennal glance around at the handful of other rankers who’d been allowed in to assist officers and then, without turning a hair, take up a standing position behind Surit’s left shoulder. He linked his hands behind his back in a reasonable approximation of an at-ease stance.

Commander Vinys took the front of the hall. He turned the wall behind him into a display screen, tuned to a view of the nearest opening in chaotic space. Clouds of color broke like slow-motion waves across the blackness of the void.

“Soldiers,” he began, “wherever you’ve just arrived from, welcome to the next stage of the mission. Welcome to the gateway to chaotic space.”

Surit gratefully focused all his attention on the briefing. He had worked with disturbed space before, even if not this kind—the mother lode, the chaotic space around the link itself—and retrieval missions into it held no moral ambiguity at all. You went in, you picked up any useful hardware or debris, and you came out. He and Tennal could fake their sync all the way through that.

“Some of you’ve got experience in salvage retrieval,” Commander Vinys said. “Some of you’ve been yanked from other jobs and are probably wondering why you’re here. Let me answer your question.”

Behind him, the display changed. A smooth, quartz-like object rotated in midair. It was impossible to tell its scale from the projection, and even in the recording, it glowed with a light that was slightly off in some way.

The commander waved a hand at it. “Remnants,” he said. There was a murmur of interest around the room. “The lost technology of something that was alive before we were even plankton in the sea. Those of you with neuromodifications, this is what made you who you are—or, for the kiddies here, your parents. This is what we’re looking for.”

Surit frowned, taken aback. That might explain the secrecy around the mission.