Despite the bold suggestion of her youngest advisor to confront the captain, Atlanta was hesitant. She found the captain intimidating. The older woman had the same kind of presence the Empress held, an unthinking assumption of command that might have been galling if it were not so well deserved. Atlanta had watched the captain cheer and console crew members over the days, doing so unobtrusively and in a way that each time left the recipient of her attention standing straighter, renewed hope in their eyes. Atlanta kept scrutinizing the captain, trying to figure out how she projected that aura, but she had yet to capture it.

Instead she stood there in silence until Niko finally, after a good ten minutes, turned and said, “All right, you’ve outlasted me. What is it that you want to ask?”

“What’s the plan?” Atlanta said meekly.

Niko rubbed the underside of her chin, squinting into the air. “That is a reasonable question.”

“Your lack of answer might be read as a lack of a plan,” Atlanta said less meekly.

Niko gave her full attention to Atlanta, hand falling back to her side. The window light sifted her dark skin with a grayish cast and lightened her hair to ivory and textured shadows. “The kitten has some bite! I tell you what, I will give you all that I have learned, and you will tell me what you think I might do and what the consequences are.”

“What research could you do?” Atlanta asked. “We are cut off from public or shared V-spaces.”

“This ship has an extensive library, stretching even to some contemporary novels bound old-style. Follow me.”

Intrigued, Atlanta followed Niko to a room she had not encountered before.

“What is this?” she asked, looking around at the tiny room. Shelves looked like they carried actual books, but when she tugged on one, she found them all of a piece.

“It is someone’s idea of what a personal library looks like,” Niko said. She crossed to the massive mahogany desk in the very center of the room. “Here we go. It happens to have a copy of a very popular book, so popular I’ve even got a copy in my own luggage. So popular you mentioned it yourself. You can have this copy, if you want it.”

She held up a book bound in bright scarlet with a golden skull and crossbones on the cover. “Skullduggery and Sacred Space Vessels: A Life Among Space Pirates. Its release enraged the IAPH, and the author was tortured to death. Apparently Arpat Takraven was a sucker for the latest trash; this topped the Nonfiction Based on Real Life on a Nonplanet bestseller list for almost a year when it was released.”

“How can you trust anything that book says? They could make up everything!”