“Are you willing to stay on as my XO, even though we don’t have any authority or legal standing to shoot at anybody anymore? We’re not quite going rogue, but only because there’s not really a government left for us to go rogue from.”

“You want to poke around in parts of the universe where you shouldn’t, don’t you? Just to see what you’ll find.”

“Sometimes you find gold. Sometimes you find spiders. Sometimes you find golden spiders.”

“You should have called this ship the Golden Spider instead of the White Raven.”

“You’re right. That’s also pretty good. So. Are you in?”

“I’m too young to retire and too old to learn another trade, so yes, if you can find me a place to lay my weary head and take my wonderful drugs, I will continue to put the broken people you bring me back together.”

“Great. How do you feel about becoming a pirate?”

“Not… good? Not good at all. Bad. Yes. Definitely bad.”

“Yeah. Me too. But you’ll have to trust me.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Callie was in her room, running through the mental script she’d created, that she’d doubtless have to abandon as soon as reality didn’t match her hopes and expectations. The ship was burning toward what was once the liminal space between the Jovian Imperative and Trans-Neptunian Space, and was now just the edge of the inhabited solar system instead.

She’d caught up on the news on the Tangle, and there was plenty of coverage about Meditreme Station, but the prevailing narrative was that the station had been destroyed by accident. The Trans-Neptunian Authority was always experimenting with new weapons, or so the inner planets and the Imperative assumed. Rumors had spread of the mass Liar exodus just before the disaster, which led to obvious speculation. Either the aliens had sold the TNA some kind of unstable weapon system, or they’d discovered some deadly flaw in an existing system and hadn’t bothered to tell any of the humans about it before saving themselves; which one you believed depended on how xenophobic you were feeling.

Several Liars from Meditreme had been tracked down and interviewed, though My Cousin Paolo wasn’t among them. They gave the predictably bizarre range of explanations for why they’d fled: one said it left for a family reunion in colony system seventeen. Another said the ghost of Miranda Tanzer had appeared and given it a vision of a new propulsion system, and it had immediately flown off to a research lab to sell the idea. A third explained that the mass exodus was part of a game the Liars played, a sort of wild chaotic race across the system. A fourth insisted that Meditreme Station hadn’t blown up at all but had merely phased into a slightly alternate dimension.