Shig slid his forearms onto the bar, fingers laced. “First, Turalon reached Solar System. And then Ashanti. Nothing like the wealth they carried has been seen since the treasure fleets in the sixteenth century as they pillaged the New World. And with them comes news of the Supervisor giving us title to Port Authority. Additionally, The Corporation hears about the missing ships, not to mention the tragedy of Freelander. When Ashanti arrives, they learn about Vixen’s unexpected arrival after it’s been missing for fifty years. A series of shock waves running through a system that was built specifically to function without surprises.”

“The Board must have been stunned to its roots.”

“And the families that have dominated the Board for the last century would have been the most stunned and threatened of all. They control The Corporation, all of its assets, mining, manufacturing, distribution of resources, information, and management. The algorithms might run The Corporation, but the families oversee them. Nothing, not even old Calypso Radcek’s attempted coup, has been as potentially destabilizing.”

“So, you think it’s a bunch of Boardmembers?” Talina shook her head. “No, those candy-assed bastards would never take the risk.”

Talina gave Inga a nod as the woman came hustling down the bar to place Talina’s mug of stout on the chabacho wood. Then she set Shig’s customary glass of wine—only half full—in front of him. She took a swipe at the bar with the damp towel she had slung over her shoulder before hurrying back down to where Fenn Bogarten and Rude Marsdome had bellied up with empty glasses.

“They’d send someone,” she told Shig. “Someone with power. My bet? It might be another operator like Tam Benteen.”

“Hope not,” Shig told her. “We’d have to cut the door off the AC up in Freelander before we could toss the new guy in with Benteen. It might be getting crowded in there with all the ghosts.”

He frowned and added, “From my experience on Freelander, a great number of ghosts can fill a very limited volume. I suspect it’s an existentialist argument without a solution. Are the number of ghosts limited to the number of dimensions intersecting at a given point in Hilbert space?”

“Until Freelander, that was a question without any bearing on reality.” Talina lifted her glass of stout and sucked a mouthful of foam off the top. Squinting, she said, “My bet? Given my security training? The Corporation will respond with caution this time. Surely Kalico had filed reports aboard Turalon. And they’ll have Abibi’s records and commentary and everything from the crew debriefing. And, of course, they’ve got the returning contractees: Marston, Shankrah, Mollie, and the rest. They’ll know that Kalico gave us title to Port Authority, and after Ashanti popped back inside, they’ll have an update that the colony is surviving.”