“Don’t move,” Boone answered, reaching over roughly and pulling Sagara’s gun out of his hands. Then he pulled the security officer’s other weapons from his belt: the energy-blade, another holster. “If you even think about trying anything, not only will I put fifty megajoules of kinetic fuck-you through your head, but Natalya will put a bolt in Park’s neck. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

Sagara said nothing, so Park said: “Why are you doing this?”

She stared into Natalya’s eyes as she said it. She saw nothing in them except flat indifference—a look that implied violence without emotion, action without thought. Boone glanced over at the surveyor and said, “You got her?”

“Yes,” Natalya answered quietly, stepping over so that she was within arm’s reach of Park. “She will not get away from me again.”

“So you’re the one who’s controlling the ship now,” Sagara said to Boone. He sounded very calm, as if he had sharply suppressed his anger and his shock: it was a defensive response, Park thought. A coping mechanism he’d developed for times of crisis. “Natalya distracted us with the fight so you could try the first time, but that didn’t work—the ship locked you out. Caused the blackout, shut down to protect itself from your attempts. I assume you tried to force Wick to give command over to you next? And he refused, so you killed him?” He glanced at Park, as if to say, And concocted that cockamamie story about the man to cover his tracks.

The man was real, she wanted to tell him, or at least the echo of him through spacetime was—but Boone was saying, almost carelessly, “Yeah, that’s about right.”

“We thought command of the ship would default to him, in the event of the commander’s death,” Natalya drawled, lynx-eyed. “It turns out we were wrong.”

Sagara almost smiled, thinly. “Yes. It defaulted to me. Wick and I agreed to that from the start.”

“But why?” Boone asked angrily. “You’re not conscripted. I am. ISF should have trusted me more.”

“They were right not to,” Sagara answered, casting a glance at Boone’s gun. Boone’s shoulders tensed a little, but Park wanted to shout, Don’t provoke him, for God’s sake!

To distract everyone she said, “Why are you doing this? Why would you want to kill Wick, take control of the ship?”

“And who helped you override METIS the second time?” Sagara added.

Natalya turned to Boone. “We don’t need both of them,” she said. “Get rid of Park. She asks too many questions—and ISF doesn’t give a shit about her.”