Ishant brushed back his shock of white hair, which had a habit of flopping across his forehead. He took a deep breath and hoped that the stims he took wouldn’t wear off soon. He hated working alone as much as he liked, even needed, to work alone. He wondered if he should have had Amachi stay. She proved to be more capable than he’d first assessed her to be. She had calm and poise, not easily ruffled when encountering the unknown. All useful skills in his work.

Nguni guards became alert as he rounded the corner from the nook. Ishant’s palms moistened with anticipation. They eyed him with casual suspicion, as an out-of-place alien among them. In the way. A nuisance. Impure. But he needed to get to the docking bay.

“This is a restricted area.” A guard stood at the rear entrance of the bay. “Ident sigil.”

“Here.”

“A diplomat? Of Muungano?” The guard looked him up and down as if he were small. Or nearly unwanted. “Is this what the Ijo have come to?”

Ishant’s extensive training kept him from rolling his eyes. Or from having anything sarcastic or offended registering on his face. “May I proceed?”

The guard allowed him to pass. With a measured nonchalance, Ishant walked along the raised corridor. The mining gangplanks gave him a great view of the bay. Scanning the scene, a crowd of Muungano members milled about the area. Day cycle must have neared. Or dusk. He’d lost all sense of time, always a risk with the way he threw himself into his work, reminded once again of time’s artificial arbitrariness. All he knew was that he was tired, that he probably hadn’t slept for untold cycles because that wasn’t his way. Once he’d been given a job that needed to be done, he’d see it straight through to completion. Only Jaha had the presence to remind him to do the little things, like sleep.

There, he thought, thumbing through the generated data stamps. A member passed a checkpoint and soon afterward, their metadata on the transit logs disappeared. He withdrew a Black Caesar, a device used to pirate link streams. He tagged the ghost’s metadata with a marker and programmed the Black Caesar to alert him to any disappearing data logs. Ishant scrambled along the passageway. The data tag wouldn’t last long. Like any good stream worm, it wasn’t designed to last long since ones with longer half-lives were more easily detected. Ishant hurried toward the lower hall, hoping the agent wouldn’t lose him in all of the splitting passageways of the mine.

The hallway split into a service corridor, like the isocrawl corridors on a research ship, which ran parallel to many of the shafts. Ishant hesitated. There was no reason for anyone to take them except for service workers. Unless the agent knew they were being tracked.