Dedication

For Amanda

Chapter One

Callie floated, feet hooked over a handrail in the observation deck, and looked through the viewport at the broken ship beyond. The wreck hung motionless, a dark irregular shape – a bit of human debris where no such debris should be. Was this a crisis, or an opportunity? Every unexpected event could be one or the other, and sometimes they were both.

The dead ship was long and bullet-shaped, pointlessly aerodynamic, apart from a bizarre eruption of flanges, fins, and spikes at one end that looked like the embellishments of a mad welder. The wrecked craft was far smaller than Callie’s own ship, the White Raven, a fast cruiser just big enough for her crew of five people (or four, or maybe six, depending on how you defined “people”) to live comfortably along with whatever freight or prisoners they had to transport. If the White Raven was a family home, the wreck was more like a studio apartment.

Ashok floated into the compartment, orienting himself with tiny puffs of air that burst from his fingertips and heels – showy and unnecessary, but he had a gift for turning simple things into engineering problems he could solve in complicated ways. He hovered with his head near hers, sharing her view – though it probably looked a lot different to him. “Oh captain, my captain.”

She glanced at his complex profile and grunted. “You got new eyes?”

He shook his head. “These are wearables, not integrated. I’m giving them a test run before I implant them.”

“That’s almost cautious, by your standards.”

He grinned, insofar as he was physically able. One of the lenses on the array attached to his face rotated and lengthened toward the viewport. “So do we get to crack the mystery ship open and see what’s inside?”

She went hmm, pretending she hadn’t already decided. “Last time I let you clamber into a wreck, you lost an arm.”

Ashok held up his current prosthetic. The translucent diamond housing revealed glimpses of the mechanical motion within as he flexed his hand, which was really more like a nest of tiny, versatile manipulator arms. “That was just an opportunity for an upgrade, cap. I say we fly over with torches and cut a hole and poke our heads in and look around.” No surprise there. Ashok believed in radical self-improvement, and every mystery was a potential upgrade in waiting.

“I like the enthusiasm, Ashok, but we’re still factfinding. This doesn’t look like any human ship I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t look like a Liar vessel, either, despite all that weird shit on the stern. Didn’t the Jovian Imperative try to solve its toxic waste problem by launching tubes full of poison randomly into space? What if this is one of those?”