“Then this is how you operate. You find out Gwendoline is Ainsley’s granddaughter and do your research. You create a flawless legend: Horatio and his whole family. Hell, maybe a dozen Horatios, to bump your chances. Then you drop him into place—a place where you know Gwendoline will meet him. And of course she falls for him big time, because they’ve matched him perfectly. He spends the next two years romancing her, and they marry. He tells her how she maybe should take a job with Connexion after all. She does, and works her way up the family ladder, which is a much shorter route to the executive level than anyone without Zangari blood. Zam-bam-thank-you-ma’am. It’s taken fifteen years, but you now have access to the highest level of Connexion—finance, strategy—and the power to influence same. That’s got to be a worthwhile investment for people like that.”

“All right, I’m playing. So why pull him away?”

He flinched. “I’m not sure yet.”

“Because he’s a tart with a heart, and really, really fell for her?”

Yuri hadn’t known that venomous level of sarcasm could carry across a solnet link. “No. I’ve come across something seriously wrong about this; I need to tell you about it in person.”

“Yuri, a G7Turing would have trouble hacking this encryption.”

“So color me paranoid.”

There was only a short pause, but with Poi Li that was significant. “Okay.”

“And in the meantime, run a full check on Horatio. Not just a G7Turing data mine; if he was put into place, his controllers will know we’d do that at some point. Go deeper. Maybe send someone you trust to physically interview his parents, get DNA samples and check them against residuals in his flat, talk to his school friends, his teachers, see if they have any memories of him as a boy. If he was planted, his controllers won’t be able to cover everything. I want to know if he’s real, Poi.”

“All right, Yuri. Leave it with me.”

“Thank you. I’m stepping into the Althaea hub now. I’ll call you as soon as I have something.”

—

The frontier town of Bronkal only warranted twenty-five Connexion hubs and a single commercial transport hub. It was a small town on the edge of the Estroth plains, a flatland plateau that extended for nearly two thousand kilometers before dropping sharply into the sea. It was that unbroken level ground that swung the decision to terraform in Althaea’s favor.

Pollux, as a K0 orange-giant star, wasn’t the obvious choice for a human world. But it did have a gas-supergiant planet, Thestias, which in turn had forty-eight moons. Four of the larger ones, Althaea, Pleuron, Iphicles, and Leda, were caught in a rosette orbit in the Lagrange-2 point, forever drifting around each other in Thestias’s umbra. In most cases, being caged within a supergiant planet’s shade would be a gloomy existence, but not when Thestias orbited a mere 1.6 AUs out from an orange giant. The reduced sunlight striking Althaea’s surface was as intense as midday on Earth’s tropics. Conjunctions with its L-2 co-moons provided a regular variable day-night cycle as it passed between their shadows.