I sat back slowly in my fancy chair. The secret of eternal life, and who knew what else. The sum of humanity’s best and brightest knowledge, of all that humans could be. Knowledge that had been lost for a thousand years. I finally understood why Quint’s boss wanted this done quickly and discreetly.

And yet, this whole situation still reeked of a trap.

“I get that you don’t want to draw attention to the ship,” I said. “If the Ministers notice it, they’ll finish the job and destroy it and you won’t get your data. But if this trip were legal, your boss would be sending Republican commandos, not three criminals. This is a set-up.”

I pushed the last gear into place on the clock, found the dial, and wound it up. The gears twitched, then, as smoothly as if it had never stopped, the clock resumed ticking.

“I will be travelling with you, if that puts your mind at rest,” Quint said. “I’m willing to put my life and future on the line for my boss—in all my dealings with him so far, he has treated me fairly and well.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not exactly a criminal about to get shipped off to jail forever,” I said.

Quint was silent. Meaningfully so.

“Quint,” I said, delighted.

“I used to work for my boss in a different capacity,” she said. “Moving money around. Some of the money I moved slipped through the cracks and into my own account. A very large sum, in fact. Enough that it would have put me in the same legal situation you’re in right now. My boss made me an offer, and I accepted it. Since then I’ve done a number of smaller jobs for him, and he has treated me fairly for each one—and paid me very well. You can trust him.”

She had her hands clasped on the desk before her, fingers tightly entwined. I felt a sudden surge of pity for her. “Not how you thought your life would go, huh?”

“If money and freedom and scientific discovery isn’t enough for you, then think of this,” Quint said. “The invention of faster-than-light engines allowed us to finally throw off the yoke of Ministerial oppression in the Terra Nova system, allowed the Republic to be born. Imagine what the technology of the Philosopher Stone can do for humanity.”

Freedom, greed, curiosity, moral rectitude. They really weren’t leaving a stone unturned on this, were they?

“We can finally be secure in our resistance to the Ministers,” Quint said. “What happened to Kystrom ten years ago will never happen again. The Republic will be safe.”

Ah, she was charming. And so very Republican. Did she really think the security of her country was going to motivate a Kystrene like me? “The answer is still no,” I told her.

She sat back hard in her chair, her earnest expression washing off her face like the tide off stones. Did she hate me? I wondered, when I saw what that tide revealed, but no: she looked at me like you might look at a dog barking indoors, a little dislike, overall indifference.