His jaw slowly hinged open as reality soaked his brain in parallel to the weak sunlight. The sheer cliffs were at least seven kilometers high, probably more, with a floor maybe five kilometers across. He’d been to the Grand Canyon a few years ago, done the whole tourist routine—some rafting, climbed an easy face of rock. This was an order of magnitude larger, which was ridiculous.

“Where the hell are we?” he blurted.

“You just called it, asshole,” Donbul mocked. “Hell. Otherwise known as Zagreus.”

“No,” Callum said. “No, no. That’s not possible.” He didn’t have to consult Apollo’s files for that; Zagreus was an exoplanet slightly larger than Earth, but with an atmosphere as thin as Mars and no surface water. It orbited three AUs out from Alpha Centauri A. When the Orion starship decelerated into the Centauri system, there had been quite a clamor to begin terraforming it. But it was so much cheaper to build a second wave of starships and send them farther out to stars with more suitable exoplanets.

“Still think you can get us out of here?” Foluwakemi sneered.

—

Yuri looked around the domestic disaster zone that was Callum’s flat and wrinkled his nose, partly from the sight, but there was also a weird smell coming from the galley kitchen.

“Don’t we pay him enough for a housekeeping service?” Kohei asked.

Yuri grunted. “Apparently not.”

Two technical officers came in and went over to the small white block in the corner of the room, which was the G3Turing house manager.

“I want a complete memory download,” Yuri told them. “Unlocked files available to my desk in two hours.”

“Yes, sir.”

He walked across the living area, frowning in disapproval at the large number of empty pizza boxes scattered around. “Plenty of people were here,” he said. “He knew he was planning a one-way trip, so what’s the point of clearing up?”

“You think they planned it here?” Kohei said.

“Probably. It doesn’t matter now.”

“So why are we here?”

Yuri pulled a face, unable to fully explain his sense that somehow they’d lost, that Callum was laughing at them. After so many years in the job you got a feel for things, for people in all their crazy glory. His old training back in Russia concentrated on individuals, where everyone was considered suspect, untruthful, corrupt. Now his corporate staff were all strictly procedure-focused, utilizing data trawls and analysis matrices. If they wanted someone, they didn’t go out of the office and hunt them, they just waited until facial recognition algorithms pulled them out of a public street camera. There were no real chases, only drones auto-tracking their targets. It was one of the reasons he enjoyed running the undercover ops division; intelligence gathering was as close as he got to old-school these days. Until Callum Hepburn had come along.