“That’s too close,” I said. “You can’t—you have to turn away. The security drones, they’ll destroy the ship, you have to—”

“Shut him up,” the pilot said, without looking at me. There was no anger in her voice, no fear; my warnings might have been gibberish for all the concern she showed. Zahra’s gun was already pressed against the small of my back. “You ready?”

The question wasn’t for me. It was for the copilot. He was young for a SPEC pilot, maybe midtwenties, with curly brown hair and wary eyes. He grabbed my right wrist and pulled me forward, muttering a quiet apology as he wrenched my arm. He pressed my hand into what looked like a standard rapid-identification unit, the scan-and-verify sort used for basic security. There was a clear glass plate, cool to the touch, and beneath it the five trackers whirred and slid until they lined up under my fingertips, while sensors measured my pulse, my body temperature, the electrical conductivity of my body, confirming that it was a living flesh-and-blood person being identified. The unit pricked one finger with a needle, drawing a microscopic amount of blood.

“Come on,” the copilot muttered, looking over the report from the ID unit. “Come on.”

“Well?” the pilot said.

“It’s processing,” he answered, his voice lifting into a question.

That’s when I understood what they were trying to do.

“No,” I breathed. “It won’t work.”

The external security system had been developed when House of Wisdom was built, but it was kept secret until Dr. Lago’s attack forced SPEC to reveal its existence. The most cherished tenets of the Councils, and therefore SPEC, maintained that space was to be open to everybody, free of the warfare and militarism that had brought about the Collapse centuries before. That was written into the Reconstruction Charters four hundred years ago, when the survivors of the Collapse came together to reshape what remained of the world. An armed security system for a research vessel went against everything SPEC was supposed to stand for, even if they claimed it was only experimental, even if they claimed it had only ever been meant for protection.

In the aftermath of the massacre, nobody had even known the security net was active until the first rescue team was killed before their ship could get within a couple hundred kilometers of House of Wisdom. The system was made up of a network of fast, agile, high-powered, and well-armed drones that could disable a ship in seconds—and had, twice in the past ten years, before SPEC finally stopped trying to break through.