The console light bled red across Della Merrow's knuckles, a single pulse every three seconds, steady as a funeral drum.
She sat in the salvage locker of the Gilded Cessation , a ship whose name she had never bothered to learn properly, and watched the light count down. The locker's air recyclers hummed in a tone just below conversation, cycling the same eight cubic meters of filtered atmosphere over and over. Dust drifted through the beam of the console. The dust never settled. The recyclers were too efficient.
"Merrow." Rook Vance's voice came through the comm, flattened by distance and packet loss into something that sounded like gravel dragged over tin. "You seeing this feed?"
"I am seeing it." Della did not move her hands from the armrests. The console showed a long-range scan of the Ashfall, a debris field forty thousand kilometers wide and three centuries deep. "You're late."
"I'm exactly on time. You're early. It's a character flaw." A pause, the wet sound of someone drinking something that was not water. "The client's money cleared. All of it. Up front."
"Up front." Della tasted the words. They tasted like bad copper. "Rook."
"Yeah, I know. Nobody pays up front for a sealed pod off the Calliope. Nobody sane. I asked the broker why. He said the client doesn't like owing favors." Another pause. "I said, well, that's a hell of a reason to give me a reason not to take the job. He laughed. Then he stopped laughing. Then he transferred another ten percent."
Della's eyes moved to the secondary display. The scan resolved into a skeletal shape: the Calliope, broken across the spine, tumbling in a slow gyre that would take another eighty years to decay. A colony ship. First wave. The records said it carried eleven thousand souls. The records did not say what became of them. The records rarely did, out here on the fringe.
"How much is in the pod?" she asked.
"Client didn't say. Manifest says cryo-stabilized organics, sealed under quarantine seal. Could be embryos. Could be meat. Could be someone important who didn't want to die."
"Cael."
The cryptography specialist answered on the second beat. His voice came through the comm like oil over water, smooth and faintly amused. "I pulled the registry hashes. The pod's serial does not match any manifest I can find. It was bolted onto the Calliope after launch. After."
"After."
"After the colony ship was already spaceborne. Someone fixed a sealed container onto the hull of a generation ship and never told the mission authority." Cael Idris let that sit for half a second, which was, for him, an act of restraint. "Quarantine seal is genuine. Black-tier. I have only seen two of those in my career, and one of them was on a bioweapon cache the corps wanted very badly. The other is on this pod."
Della's hands finally left the armrests. She typed three commands without looking at the keys. The console obligingly divided into a quadrant: scan feed, comm traffic, manifest mirror, and a slim slice reserved for her own notes.
"Cael. Is the pod radioactive?"
"No. The seal is clean. The pod is, however, shielded. Whatever is inside does not want to be read."
"Rook. Who is the client?"
A longer pause this time. Della could hear the man breathing through his nose, a slow, deliberate sound. "I don't know, Merrow. That's the truth. I know three things. One: they have more money than most sovereignties. Two: they know your name. Three: they specifically asked for you. Not the unit. You."
The red light pulsed. The dust drifted. The recyclers kept their patient hum.
Della Merrow had learned, very early, that the universe was not kind to curiosity. Her father, Merrow Senior, had carved that lesson into her the way a sculptor carves a face into marble, by removing everything that was not essential. What remained, after his decade of instruction, was a woman who did not take jobs that asked for her by name. She did not take jobs that paid in advance. She did not take jobs that smelled like someone else's regret.
This job hit all three marks. It also offered a sum that would let her crew retire to a quiet station somewhere in the inner systems, buy apartments with windows, and stop flinching every time a comm chimed with an unfamiliar header.
"Cael," she said. "The Calliope. Give me the casualty profile."
"I can give you what the fleet recorded. Three hundred and twelve deaths in transit. Disease, accident, the usual attrition. The rest reached orbit, began colony operations, and then the records simply end. No final census. No shutdown timestamp. The colony authority filed a status update every forty days for nineteen years, and then it stopped. No distress call. No nothing. The system logged a single anomaly: an unscheduled jump signature at the end."
"Unscheduled jump."
"A ship left the Verax system. Or something did. The signature does not match any vessel in the registry."
Della let the silence hold. Outside the locker, somewhere in the Gilded Cessation's lower decks, a pressure valve sang a high, thin note, then released. The air pressure in her suit, sealed and ready on the rack beside her, ticked down by a fraction and held.
"The Ashfall itself," she said. "What is the debris density at the Calliope?"
"Moderate. The wreck is at the dense edge of the field, but not in the core. You have a working corridor roughly nine hundred meters wide. Rotating debris is a problem. Three objects larger than a lifeboat in active tumble. None of them are on stable periods." Cael paused. "I can give you a drift model out to seventy-two hours. Confidence drops after that."
"I do not need seventy-two hours. I need four."
"Four is comfortable. Four is doable. Four is also what the client asked for. They want the pod off the wreck and inside your airlock before the next patrol cycle. The patrol cycles are six days apart, and the next one is in ninety-six hours."
Della stood. The locker's ceiling was low enough that she had to dip her head. Her reflection moved across the blank panel of the secondary display, a smear of pale hair and shadow. She was thirty-six, and she looked, on bad days, like the kind of person who had been thirty-six for a long time.
"Cael. The pod's mounting. Is it external or internal?"
"External. Bolted to the ventral hull, just aft of the engineering bay. Whoever attached it wanted it accessible from outside, but not from inside the ship. No internal access. No service corridor. Whoever put it there did not want the crew to know."
"Which means the crew did not know."
"Or the crew was removed before it was bolted on."
Della did not let that land on her face. She had trained, very young, not to let things land on her face. "Rook."
"Merrow."
"What is the failure scenario?"
A beat. Then, in the flat tone of a man who had brokered a thousand jobs and watched a hundred go sideways: "Best case, you are in and out in three hours. Moderate case, you lose time to debris, and you are out in six. Worst case, the Calliope decides to roll, or the pod is rigged, or the field shifts and seals your corridor. Worst case, you are the next thing the Ashfall eats."
"And the client's response to worst case?"
"The client asked me, very politely, whether I understood that the pod's contents were irreplaceable. I told them that, in my experience, everything in the Ashfall is irreplaceable. That's why people send people like you to fetch it."
"Rook."
"Yeah."
"Did they threaten you?"
"No. They didn't have to. They transferred twenty percent more to your operational account before we started this conversation. They also sent a token. A small thing, looks like a religious medal. I am not a religious man, Merrow, but I know what a reliquary looks like. It had a name on it."
Della's hands went still on the console. "Whose name?"
"Yours."
The red light pulsed. The dust drifted. The recyclers kept their patient hum, and somewhere in the walls of the Gilded Cessation , a pipe ticked with the slow expansion of a hull that had never quite learned to trust its own temperature.
"I am going to take the job," Della Merrow said, and the words sounded, even to her, like the lid of a box being closed.
She did not say because of the money . She did not say because of the name . She said, instead, the only thing that mattered to the two men listening on the other end of the comm.
"Suit me. Prep the cutter. Move us to the corridor in two hours. Cael, I want a fresh drift model every fifteen minutes once we enter the field. Rook, I want a live feed from the client side. If they so much as sneeze wrong, I want to know about it."
"Understood," Cael said, soft and precise.
"On it," Rook said, and signed off with a click that sounded like a bone snapping.
Della stood alone in the locker. The red light counted down. Somewhere, beyond the bulkhead, the Gilded Cessation began to groan as its pilot nudged the ship toward the Ashfall's edge, a forty-thousand-kilometer field of metal and memory that had swallowed a generation ship and whatever had bolted itself to that ship's belly in secret.
She did not think about the medal. She did not think about her name on a stranger's relic. She thought about the four hours she had been given, and the four hours she intended to take, and the exact sequence of handholds on the ventral hull of a wreck that had stopped answering its own logbook three centuries ago.
She thought about the silence a thing makes when it has been sealed too long.
Then she began to suit up.
The cutter hissed against the pod's hull, a thin blade of blue plasma tracing the seam where metal had fused to metal under three centuries of slow heat death. Della braced her boots against the ventral rail of the Gilded Cessation 's external frame, one hand steady on the cutter's housing, the other floating loose at her side inside the stiff fabric of her worksuit. The void pressed against her visor, a black so absolute it seemed to lean inward, as though it wanted to read what was written on her face.
"Thirty-seven seconds on the seal," Cael said in her ear. His voice arrived with the faintest delay, bounced twice through the relay chain before it reached her helmet. "You are getting clean separation. No pressure ghosts. The seal is behaving like it was never broken."
"That is not as reassuring as you think it is."
"I did not design it to reassure. I designed it to inform." A pause, barely long enough to count. "You are also talking to yourself again."
"I am confirming a hypothesis."
"About?"
"About whether you ever sleep."
"Sleep is a luxury reserved for people who trust their own internal clocks." Cael's tone carried the ghost of a smile, the kind a man offers when he has been awake for so long that exhaustion has become a kind of weather. "Rook says you are thirty seconds from the inner lining. I am watching his telemetry. He is watching yours. Between the three of us, something will notice if the pod decides to eat you."
"Comforting."
"That is also not the word I would have chosen."
Della did not smile. She rarely did, on a job, and especially not on a job like this one. The Ashfall Field glittered at the edge of her peripheral vision, forty thousand kilometers of wreckage that had once been a generation ship called the Carillon , and whatever had come with it, whatever had ridden its belly like a parasite or a promise. She did not look at it. She looked at the seam, and at the cutter, and at the place where her glove met the housing and where the housing met the metal that had been waiting, patient and sealed, since before her grandmother was born.
The cutter finished its arc. Della killed the plasma and let the blade retract with a soft click, like a bone settling back into its socket. She braced her boots again, wider this time, and pulled.
The hull came away in her hands. Not with a screech. Not with a groan. It came away with a sigh, the kind of sound a chest makes when it remembers how to breathe.
Inside the pod, the air was old. Not dead. Old. It moved across her visor in a faint bloom of dust, lit by the worklamp she had clipped to the housing, and the dust turned the light into something almost golden, almost soft, almost kind. Then the light fell on what was inside, and the kindness went out of it.
Not freight. Not contraband. Not a sealed crate of colonial seed stock or pre-Collapse medicine or any of the ordinary, terrible things people paid ordinary, terrible money to move through the Ashfall. A single cryo-casket, upright, bolted to the pod's spine with clamps that looked like they had been welded by hand. Around the casket, pressed into the metal like an afterthought, the outline of a habit, dark fabric gone silver with age, the rope belt still knotted at the waist. And in the casket's faceplate, lit from inside by a light that should not have been working, a man.
Not a body. A man. Eyes closed, lips faintly blue, frost on his lashes, but breathing. A thin fog formed and dissipated against the inside of the glass with every exhale, and Della found herself counting the breaths before she could stop.
"Della." Cael's voice had lost its smile. "Della, I am seeing a biosignature. Single. Viable. This is not a cargo pod. This is a lifeboat."
"I can see that."
"A lifeboat with a single occupant. Wearing the habit of a Void Saint. Della, that habit is not a costume. I am cross-referencing the weave pattern against the ecclesial registries I have on file. If I am right, and I usually am, that habit belongs to a monastery on Kerrigan's Reach, and the last abbot of that monastery filed a formal protest with the Coalition forty years before the Reach fell. The protest was about a missing novice. A novice who was supposed to have been removed from the rolls for doctrinal reasons." A pause. "The novice's name was Cael Idris."
Della's hand froze on the casket's housing. "You are looking at a relative of yours."
"I am looking at myself, Della. Or a man with my name, which, given the circumstances, amounts to the same confession."
She did not answer. She pulled the diagnostic wand from her belt and ran it across the casket's faceplate, watching the numbers climb in faint amber across her HUD. Heartbeat. Respiration. Core temperature holding at four degrees above what should have been a corpse. Three centuries in the dark, sealed in a metal egg, and the man inside was still trying to live. She had seen stranger things in the field, but she had rarely seen them breathe.
"He is not Void Saint." Rook's voice arrived on a separate channel, blunt as a slap. "I have been on the client side for the last six minutes. I have been watching their feeds. They did not send you for a casket. They sent you for the slate."
"What slate."
"Under the casket. Bolted to the spine. They want the slate. The man is, at best, a complication. At worst, he is a witness, and the client does not pay for witnesses."
Della looked. Beneath the casket, half-hidden by the clamps and the dust, a slate. Not a modern slate. A pre-Collapse archive tablet, the kind that used crystalline substrate and held its data for a thousand years if the vacuum held. It was fused to the pod's spine with the same hand-welded care as the casket above it, and it had the look of something that had been placed there deliberately, by someone who had known they would not be coming back to move it.
"Cael."
"I see it. I am locking onto its beacon. Della, the beacon is not passive. It is broadcasting. It has been broadcasting since the moment you cut the seal. The client is not the only one who is going to be interested in that slate within the hour."
"Then we move fast."
"We move smart. There is a man in that casket."
"There is a man in that casket, and there is a client on the other end of a contract that says we deliver the slate intact, and there is a forty-thousand-kilometer field of wreckage that is going to start noticing us the moment we light a torch anywhere near that spine. So we move smart, and we move now, and we do not pretend that this is anything other than what it is."
"Della."
"Cael."
"He has my name."
"He has a name that happens to match yours. There is a difference."
"There is a legal difference. There is no moral difference." Cael's voice was very quiet now, the way it got when he was no longer talking to her but to the version of himself he kept filed under the things he did not discuss. "I was recruited out of graduate school. I have never worked outside classified operations. I do not have family. I do not have a file in any registry. I was told, when I was told anything at all, that I had been a foundling. That I had been delivered to the monastery as an infant. That the monastery had raised me until I was useful to someone else. If that man is wearing my name, then either I am the man in that casket, and I am some kind of very elaborate copy, or he is the original, and I am the copy. Either way, the client does not get to decide which one of us gets to walk away from this."
Della closed her eyes behind her visor. She did not close them for long. She opened them, and the casket was still there, and the man was still breathing, and the slate was still broadcasting its quiet, insistent pulse into the dark.
"Rook."
"Yeah."
"Can we take both."
"The casket is heavy. The casket is going to slow us down. The casket is going to make us a target for the next forty minutes."
"Can we take both."
A long pause. She could hear him breathing on the other end, the faint static of a man weighing a number against a conscience. "Yeah. We can take both. But if we take both, we do not run. We fight. And if we fight, I want a clear corridor out of this field before the first shot is fired. That means I need Cael to give me a route that does not cross the spine, that does not pass within a hundred klicks of any active debris cluster, and that does not require us to light a torch for more than ninety seconds at a time. I also need you to stop talking to yourself and start cutting that casket loose. We have a window. The window is closing."
Della looked once more at the face in the glass. Younger than she had expected. Older than he should have been, given the math. The lines around his mouth were not the lines of a man at peace. They were the lines of a man who had spent a long time deciding what to believe, and had not yet finished.
She set the cutter to the first clamp.
"Cael. The slate. What is on it."
"I do not know yet. The encryption is pre-Collapse ecclesiastical. It will take me time. But I can tell you one thing without breaking it. The header. The header is a location tag. A coordinate, locked to a specific point in the Ashfall, and tagged with a name I have never seen in any registry I have access to."
"What name."
"Ninth Station."
Della's hand paused. The cutter hung in the dark, a thin blue line waiting to be aimed. Ninth Station. She had heard the phrase once before, in a briefing she was not supposed to have been in, delivered by a man who had since been buried under a name that was not his own. The briefing had lasted four minutes. It had been enough.
"Cael. Whatever is on that slate, we are not delivering it to the client."
"Della."
"We are not delivering it. We are taking both. We are taking the casket and the slate, and we are going to Ninth Station, and we are going to find out what a man in a Void Saint habit thought was worth dying for three hundred years ago."
"And the client."
"Tell the client we were intercepted. Tell them the field ate us. Tell them whatever you like. Tell them the truth, if you think they can hear it. But we are not handing that slate to anyone who sent us into a graveyard to do their shopping."
A long silence on the channel. Then Cael, very softly, said, "Copy. Routing now. Della. Thank you."
"Do not thank me yet. Save it for when we are alive."
She set the cutter to the clamp, and the blue light flared, and the metal began to part.
The line of blue light drew steady across the clamp housing, bright enough to throw Della's shadow long across the open freight bay of the Spite-Hound. The cutter hissed as it moved, a sound like wind over broken glass, and where it passed the metal of the casket peeled back in curling ribbons that smoked faintly as they cooled.
Della Merrow did not hurry. She had learned, in the long years since her father had first set her on the deck of a salvage scow and told her that haste was the one indulgence he would not forgive, that the body that worked fastest was the body that died first. She had also learned that she could not afford the indulgence of being seen.
The freight bay was a converted cargo hold, stripped of its original fittings and lined with dampening mesh that made the air feel slightly dead, slightly muffled, as though sound had been wrapped in cloth. A single work lamp hung from the overhead track, its beam tight and white, throwing the rest of the bay into a gloom that smelled of engine grease and recycled coolant and the faint mineral tang of the Ashfall that still clung to her boots. Somewhere behind the bulkhead, the drive units cycled in their low, arrhythmic pulse. The ship was old. It had been older when she bought it. It would probably outlive her, which was one of the qualities she had been looking for.
"Spark," she said, without turning her head.
A thin line of text appeared on the inside of her left lens, scrolled from Cael's terminal three decks up.
LORNE. Vessel under Imperial escort, bearing 112 mark 4. Confluence pennant. Coming up fast. ETA to intercept nine minutes. Recommend we move.
She watched the cutter for another breath, watched the clamp finish its slow separation, watched the lid of the casket lift a centimetre on its hinge and reveal, beneath, the dull gleam of something that had not seen light in centuries. Then she killed the cutter and set it on the deck plate and pulled a worn leather wrap over the casket and cinched it tight.
"Moving," she said. "Bring the bird up."
Already on it.
She hauled the casket onto the flatbed dolly with both hands, felt the weight settle through her arms and into her hips and lower back, and pushed the dolly toward the aft ramp. The ramp itself was a recent modification, a hinged plate that lowered with a grinding complaint from the rear of the hold, and the hydraulic seal that should have eased its descent had long since been cannibalised for parts she could not even remember. It dropped the last half metre with a clang that rang through the hold and set the work lamp swinging on its hook.
Outside, the Ashfall stretched on every side. From the ramp she could see a hundred kilometres of it in any direction, a floor of pale compacted ash broken only by the occasional rise of a half-buried transit pylon or the dark scar of an old impact crater. The sky above was the colour of tarnished pewter. There was no horizon. There was only the slow curve of the dust shell against the black, and the faint bright smear of the Eye of Keris hanging low in the west like a wound that had never closed.
The Spite-Hound sat a hundred metres from the freighter's wreck, her long, blunt hull resting on its extended skids, her running lights dimmed to amber. Behind her, already rising on its lift fans with a rising howl of displaced air, the boarding bird Cael had named the Penitent lifted off the deck and came around toward the ramp, its open hold yawning.
Della pushed the dolly up the ramp into the bird and lashed it to the deck with two cross straps and a ratchet that had a hairline crack in its housing she had not yet had time to replace. Then she stepped out onto the ramp again and stood for a moment with one hand on the frame and the Ashfall at her back.
Somewhere in the west, on a bearing of 112 mark 4, an Imperial escort was coming up out of the dust. She could not see it. She would not see it until it was close enough to see her, and that would be too late.
"Lorne. Status."
The reply came on the private channel, half a second faster than usual.
"Two corvettes, flank speed. Lead vessel is hailing us on the Confluence administrative band. They want a response."
"Do not respond. Lorne, take us up. Steer 280 mark 7, put us in the lee of the basalt rise at grid fourteen. Go cold on all emissions. Let them overfly."
"You want to let them overfly."
"I want them to think we are still on the wreck. I want them to land, and walk the hold, and find nothing. By the time they have walked the hold we will be at grid fourteen, and we will be moving on the surface, and they will be looking at an empty ship."
A pause. Then, on the channel, a sound that might have been a laugh, or might have been a cough.
"Copy. Bringing her up. Della. There is a complication."
"Tell me."
"The hail on the admin band. It is not a routine hail. It has a flag embedded in the carrier. A black-flag."
Della went still.
A black-flag hail was not a hail. It was a declaration. It meant that the vessel being hailed had been entered into the Imperial register of condemned craft, and that any ship, station, or installation that offered her shelter or succour was, by the terms of the same flag, liable to summary execution under the Heresy Accords. It meant that Della had been right about the cargo, and that someone higher than the client had decided that the cargo was worth more than the lives of every soul who might touch it.
"Who is the hailing vessel," she said, very evenly.
"The Confluence vessel is named the Throne of Ash. Captain of record is one Rook Vance."
"Rook."
She said the name into the empty air of the ramp, and the air did not give it back.
She had known Rook Vance for eleven years. He had been the man who had first approached her father about the alliance between the covert recovery unit and a network of shadow factions operating along the Veil. He had been the man who had signed off on her recruitment into the unit when she was twenty-three and green and still believed, in the way the young believe, that the work she was doing served a cause larger than the men who paid for it. He had been the man who had stood beside her at her father's funeral and not said a word, and who had, an hour later, handed her a sealed chip and walked away.
She had not heard his voice in six years.
"Patch him through," she said. "Audio only. Lorne, take us up."
She stepped off the ramp onto the deck of the hold and watched the Penitent settle back onto the Spite-Hound's deck and watched, through the open ramp, the ash plain tilt away beneath her as the ship came up off its skids. The basalt rise at grid fourteen was a low, dark swell on the horizon, barely distinguishable from the rest of the dust, and Lorne put the ship down behind it with a touch so light that Della felt the landing only as a faint shudder through the soles of her boots.
The channel opened.
A man's voice came onto the line, rough at the edges, Midwestern in its vowels, with the clipped cadence of someone who had once given orders and had since learned to give them more quietly.
"Della."
"Rook."
"You're hard to find these days."
"I'm meant to be. You black-flagged my ship."
A short pause. Then, very dry: "I didn't black-flag your ship. I black-flagged the Calliope. Your ship is just the one that came out of the wreck with its teeth in the cargo. Della, listen to me. You need to jettison what you took, and you need to do it now."
"The Calliope was a salvage contract. We were contracted. The cargo was listed as recovered ecclesiastical material. Nothing on the manifest was flagged."
"The manifest was a cover. The cargo is not what it was listed as. I cannot tell you what it is over an open channel, but I can tell you that the client who contracted you has been dead for forty years. The contract you took was a forgery, Della. It was bait. And the people who laid the bait are not people you want to know about."
The hold was silent around her. The dampening mesh drank the echo of the drive cycle. In the leather wrap on the dolly, something that had slept for three centuries sat under its straps and waited.
"The Heresy Accords," Della said. "Rook, you are invoking the Heresy Accords over a piece of salvaged church furniture."
"I am invoking the Heresy Accords over an item that has been moved, under cover, through seven sectors in the last ten years. Every ship that has carried it has been lost. Every crew that has touched it has been killed, or disappeared, or converted. The last captain who refused to hand it over was Lorne Travers, and his body is on a slab in the Confluence morgue with a flag pinned to his chest that I am not allowed to describe to you. Della. Please. Don't make me do this."
"Rook."
"I have an armed escort on your bearing. I have two corvettes with broadside coils and a full complement. I have orders that I did not write and cannot refuse. I have, on this channel, the only voice that might talk you out of what is going to happen if you do not jettison that cargo in the next ninety seconds."
The bird was still on the deck. The straps were still tight. Somewhere in the dust above the basalt rise, two corvettes were swinging around to take up a firing position, and she could not see them, and they could not yet see her, but the geometry of the next two minutes was already closing like a door.
"Rook," she said. "Who is the client."
A longer pause. She heard him breathe out, a single long breath, the breath of a man setting something down.
"The client is Ninth Station."
The name settled into the hold like a stone into still water.
She had heard it from the briefing she was not supposed to have been in. She had heard it from the man who had been buried under a name that was not his own. She had heard it from the slate that sat on the dolly in front of her, sealed in pre-Collapse ecclesiastical encryption, tagged with a coordinate in the Ashfall and a name no registry recognised.
"Ninth Station," she said.
"Yes."
"Who are they."
"I don't know. Nobody knows. What I know is that they have been moving this cargo, piece by piece, for forty years, and that anyone who has stood in their way is gone. Della, I am telling you as a friend. Jettison the cargo. Fly the other way. Let this pass. You have done good work. You have a ship, and a crew, and a name that is not yet on any list. Don't put your name on a list."
She looked at the casket. She looked at the straps. She looked, past the dolly, at the open ramp, and at the ash plain beyond, and at the pewter sky where the corvettes were swinging into their run.
"Rook."
"Della."
"If Ninth Station is the client, then the cargo was always meant for Ninth Station. The manifest was a forgery because the real manifest was never meant to be read. The contract was bait because the contract was never meant to be completed. We were not hired to deliver the cargo. We were hired to carry it to the edge of the Ashfall and be visible. We were the mules. And the people who laid us out as mules are not people who care whether the mules live."
A pause. Then, very quietly, "Yes."
"Then jettisoning the cargo does not save us. Jettisoning the cargo only tells Ninth Station where we are and what we are willing to give up. The moment we drop that casket onto the ash, we are dead. The only way out of this is forward."
"Della. Forward is Ninth Station. Forward is the thing you cannot fight."
"Then we go to Ninth Station. We find out what is on the slate. We find out what they want. And we find out why a man in a Void Saint habit thought it was worth dying for, three hundred years ago, in a freighter that was not his own."
A long silence on the channel. She heard him breathe in. She heard him breathe out.
"Della," he said. "I can't help you."
"I know."
"I'm going to have to fire on you."
"I know."
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
The channel did not close. She could hear him, breathing, on the other side of the line. Then, very softly, in a voice she had not heard from him in six years:
"Good luck, Merrow."
The line went dead.
She stood in the hold for one more breath. Then she keyed the intercom to the bridge.
"Cael. Lorne."
"Here," said Cael.
"Here," said Lorne.
"The client is Ninth Station. The cargo is theirs. Rook Vance is on our stern with two corvettes and orders he cannot refuse. We have one chance. We make for the coordinate on the slate. Ninth Station. Whatever is there, we find it before Rook finds us."
A pause. Then Cael, very calmly:
"Rerouting. Della, are you sure?"
"No."
"Then I'm in."
A pause. Then Lorne, on the bridge, with the faintest edge of something that might have been a grin in her voice:
"Helm is yours. Take us in."
The Spite-Hound lifted off the basalt rise on a column of blue-white thrust, swung her blunt nose toward the southwest, and went down into the Ashfall at a speed the old hull had not seen in years. Behind her, the corvettes came up over the rise in formation, and the first ranging shot fell half a kilometre astern, throwing a plume of pale dust into the pewter sky.
Ahead, somewhere in the dust, the coordinate on the slate was waiting.
Della stood at the hold rail and watched the plume rise and settle behind them, and did not look back again.