“Nonetheless, we must respect the possibility, however remote. My department has developed scenarios we don’t ever reveal to the public,” I confided. “Some of them are…disturbing.”

“I bet they are. But at the end, it’s all human paranoia.”

“Maybe. However, the non-exposure protocol must be enacted if the contact species turns out to be hostile. Will you accept that responsibility? I need to know I can rely on you if I’m incapacitated.”

“Incapacitated!” She took a moment, breathing in deeply as she finally realized what I was asking.

Getting her assigned to the mission on that basis—that thanks to her quirks she was genuinely dedicated and fearless enough to initiate the self-destruct sequence—had been an easy sell to Yuri. He had never questioned my choice.

“All right,” she said. “If it comes to that, I’m prepared to press the big red button.”

“Thank you. Oh, and the other three, they might not appreciate—”

“Yeah. We’ll keep that part to ourselves.”

“Good. Let’s go meet them, then.”

Exosolar Security occupied seven adjacent floors. The departmental conference room was on the seventy-sixth floor. I took Kandara down the big spiral stairwell in the middle of the tower.

Naturally, the conference room occupied a corner of the tower, giving it two glass walls. The oval teak table stretching along the middle of the floor probably cost more than my salary. It had fifteen chairs spaced around it. More chairs lined the non-glass walls for flunkies to sit in. Pure psychology, emphasizing the importance of those invited to sit at the table with the grown-ups.

There were seven people waiting, and none of them using a wall chair. As far as I was concerned, only three of them were relevant, the representatives of true power: Yuri Alster, Callum Hepburn, and Alik Monday.

Yuri was sitting at the far end, with his executive assistant and tech advisor Loi next to him. He’s one of the real old-timers, born back in St. Petersburg in 2030; all broody and sullen like only Russians who emigrate from the Motherland can be. Couple that with his age, and I doubt his mouth was even capable of smiling anymore. He’d got his first telomere extension therapy about a century ago, and then progressed to gene-up to keep himself alive. If you called that living; most people call all the myriad extension therapies the undying, stretching out their existence at any price. I’ve seen people who never got rich until their eighties then go for treatments. It’s not pretty.

All those treatments and procedures had left Yuri’s appearance suspended in his late fifties, with his round face slightly bloated and his thin sandy hair shading lighter as it was infiltrated by gray strands that’d resisted the gene-up. Hooded gray-green eyes completed the image of a man who was suspicious about the whole universe.