The diagnostic sweep began at 0500 hours, cycle 1,847, and the Korinthian's distress beacon screamed into the void like something still alive after twenty years of silence.
Sevra Thorne sat in the pilot's cradle of the Scrapejack, her hands steady on the throttle while her console painted the derelict in spectral greens and warning reds. The colony transport hung against the star field in pieces, its port flank sheared open by a fracture that had taken two decades to finish becoming total. Hull plating drifted in lazy orbits around the carcass, catching starlight, flashing, fading. Her recycler hungers had dragged her halfway across the sector for less.
The beacon pulsed on a frequency Concord had abandoned, old and proud and begging.
Sevra narrowed her eyes. She had not heard that pattern since the day her crew had stopped answering.
"Lure," she said to the empty cockpit. "Or inheritance."
The Scrapejack answered with a tremor through its deck, a shudder of turbines cycling to sustain. She had bought the ship with the insurance payout that had followed three bodies home folded into transit pods, and she had kept it flying on salvage that nobody else wanted and nobody else would claim. The registry tattoo on her forearm itched under the pressure suit's cuff. Reclaimer. Scavenger. The word did not change no matter how she pronounced it.
A second signal joined the first. This one she recognized immediately, the automated handshake of a Cygnus port authority begging for transaction codes and salvage manifests and the small, clean bribe that turned a discovery into a right.
Cygnus-7 squatted on the rimward edge of Concord patrol space, a waystation for smugglers, refugees, and the kind of mining crews who did not ask what their contracts were funding. Its port authority, where any existed at all, answered to whoever was paying that quarter, and Sevra had paid them once before to walk away from a derelict she had not been cleared to enter.
The price then had been modest. The price now would not be.
She opened a channel and let the static settle into syllables.
"Cygnus-7 Authority, this is Reclaimer vessel Scrapejack requesting priority registration on a derelict contact, designation Korinthian class colony transport, twenty years cold. Salvage priority by first beacon contact. Transmitting handshake now."
Silence. A long, theatrical silence.
Then a voice, smooth and formal with the rounded vowels of a man who had learned to speak slowly because he had learned to be listened to.
"Reclaimer vessel Scrapejack, this is Port Magistrate Olin Vast speaking on behalf of the Cygnus Authority. We have received your transmission. However, the Korinthian falls within a complex jurisdictional band. Several parties have already lodged preliminary interest."
Sevra's mouth flattened. "Preliminary interest. From whom?"
"Concord reclamation office, of course. A private contractor by the name of Pell and Associates. And, as of this morning, an information broker who prefers to remain unnamed."
Jax Rendell. The name arrived in her chest before she could name him.
"I have beacon contact," Sevra said. "I have registration. I have a hold full of equipment capable of cutting into that wreck."
"Capability is not claim, Commander Thorne. You know the protocol. Salvage rights on a derelict of this class require port authority confirmation, an environmental impact waiver, and a Concord observer to certify the site is not, as we say, biologically active."
Biologically active. The euphemism made her teeth ache. Every port authority used it. None of them meant microbes. They meant the thing that had eaten her crew while the sensors had shown nothing, the thing that had left the Scrapejack's logbook stamped with three names and no cause.
"I am familiar with the protocol, Magistrate."
"Then you are familiar with the fees."
The number he quoted was not a fee. It was a ransom, calibrated to the precise weight of her need.
Sevra kept her voice level. "I cannot authorize that from a flight cradle."
"Then I suggest, Commander, that you dock at Cygnus-7 and discuss the matter in person. We have a magistrate's chamber that is quite comfortable. I will be pleased to walk you through the relevant filings."
She heard the smile in his vowels. She heard the teeth behind the smile.
"Transmit coordinates," Sevra said.
The channel closed. The Korinthian turned slowly in her viewport, its torn flank gaping, its ancient lights still answering to a current that should have died with its crew.
She set a course for Cygnus-7, and for a long moment she simply watched the derelict shrink behind her.
Port Magistrate Olin Vast occupied an office that smelled of paper and power. The walls were lined with filing racks that reached the ceiling, each drawer labeled in a hand so meticulous it bordered on the reverent. A single viewport showed the traffic of Cygnus-7's central dock, lighters and tugs moving in their patient orbits, the slow commerce of a place that had survived everything by pretending nothing mattered.
Vast rose when she entered, a tall man with the soft hands of someone who had not turned a wrench in decades.
"Commander Thorne." He extended one. "I confess I have been following your work with some interest. The Harlow Drift recovery last season was very competently executed."
Sevra did not take the hand. She stood just inside the door, her pressure suit still sealed at the throat, her eyes moving across the room with the particular attention of someone cataloguing exits.
"You know why I am here."
"I know what you have asked for. The Korinthian is a difficult file. Concord's reclamation office maintains that any vessel lost within their patrol perimeter remains their responsibility, regardless of beacon status. They will challenge any claim that bypasses their observer process."
"And the broker?"
Vast settled back into his chair. "The broker will sell his interest to the highest bidder, and then he will sell the same interest again. It is what he does. The question, Commander, is what you are willing to pay to ensure he does not sell to them."
Sevra's jaw tightened. "Name the fee."
Vast steepled his fingers. "The standard salvage registration on a derelict of the Korinthian's class is fourteen hundred credits, plus a Concord observer bond, plus an environmental waiver, which in this sector runs an additional nine hundred due to the proximity of the Tideway Corridor. That brings the baseline to thirty-eight hundred credits."
"And the expedite fee."
Vast's smile did not reach his eyes. "I would not call it an expedite fee, Commander. I would call it a documentation surcharge, applied to filings that must be reviewed out of sequence due to the volume of competing interests. Three thousand credits."
Sevra's hands curled slowly at her sides.
"Six thousand eight hundred," she said. "For a wreck nobody has touched in twenty years."
"For a wreck that several parties believe is worth considerably more than a standard derelict, Commander. The Korinthian was carrying colonists, yes. But it was also carrying a Concord archive core. The exact nature of that archive has never been disclosed to this office. That is the source of the interest."
An archive core. Sevra felt the words land in her chest with the weight of something she had not expected.
"I was not briefed on an archive."
"No. You were not." Vast opened a drawer and removed a single sheet of paper, dense with small type. "This is the relevant passage of the Salvage Concordat, Article Nine, Clause Fourteen. A derelict carrying sealed Concord materials is subject to additional oversight, and any recovery requires the presence of a Concord-appointed custodian. The custodian must be vetted. The custodian's fee is separate from the port fee."
"You are describing a system designed to discourage independent reclaimers."
"I am describing a system designed to ensure that sensitive materials are not removed from jurisdiction without oversight." Vast set the paper down. "I am sympathetic to your position, Commander. Truly. But the law is the law."
Sevra was quiet for a long moment. The dock traffic drifted past the viewport, indifferent.
"And if I cannot pay the full documentation surcharge," she said at last, "what alternative does the law provide?"
Vast's expression did not change. "An alternative exists. A provisional registration, granted under emergency provision, which allows a Reclaimer to take preliminary custody of a derelict for a period not to exceed seventy-two standard hours. During that period, the Reclaimer is authorized to conduct limited external surveys and to secure atmospheric integrity. They are not authorized to breach sealed compartments. They are not authorized to recover sealed materials. They are not authorized to remove any object marked with Concord registry."
"And the fee for the provisional."
"Twelve hundred credits. Payable now."
Sevra exhaled slowly through her nose. Twelve hundred she had. Six thousand eight hundred she did not.
"Provisional it is," she said.
Vast produced a data slate and slid it across the desk. "Initial here. And here. And here. The magistrate's seal will appear once the transaction is processed."
She signed. The seal bloomed on the screen, a small, official flower of light.
"Commander," Vast said as she turned to leave. "A word of caution. The information broker who has expressed interest in the Korinthian has a reputation for acquiring interests through means that do not always respect the provisional status of a Reclaimer's claim. If you intend to return to the wreck, I would recommend you do so quickly, and I would recommend you do not dock at any port under his influence until your claim is fully registered."
Sevra paused at the door. "And if I cannot fully register."
"Then," Vast said softly, "I will be very sorry to read about it in the incident reports."
She left the office without answering, and the door sealed behind her with the soft finality of a thing that had done exactly what it had been designed to do.
The corridor outside the magistrate's office was empty, lit by the long, blue-white strips of the port's commercial lighting, and Sevra Thorne walked through it without hurrying. She did not run. Running, on stations like this one, was a thing that got remembered.
The Korinthian's berth was three levels down. She took the cargo lift rather than the stairs, because she did not want her bootfalls announcing her to anyone listening. The lift smelled of hydraulic oil and recycled air, the same taste that had lived in the back of her throat for three standard years now, since the first time she had set foot off a planet and learned that space smelled like metal and wet cloth.
She pressed her palm to the reader outside the airlock. The mechanism recognized her, clicked, and the inner seal opened with a sound like a slow exhale.
"Kade," she said into the comm panel as she stepped through. "Status."
His voice came back after a delay, half a second longer than it should have, the lag of a man who had been sleeping. "Reclaimer. Good. You got the provisional."
"I got the provisional."
"And the broker."
"He hasn't found us yet."
"He's looking. I had the port's public channels open. There's chatter. A Sorrance-class was registered to dock two hours ago under a holding name. If that is him, he is here."
Sevra pulled her gloves off, finger by finger, and laid them on the console by the inner door. "Did Yuni get back to her station."
"Twenty minutes ago. She sent a one-word acknowledgment. I think the word was yes."
"And Jax."
A pause. "Jax is here."
She turned her head. Kade was standing at the bottom of the short companion ladder that led to the engine bay, his hands in the pockets of his coveralls, his face carrying the particular kind of tired that no amount of rest could fix. Behind him, in the narrow corridor that led to the crew quarters, Jax Rendell leaned against the bulkhead with the studied ease of a man who wanted it understood that he was comfortable.
"The provisional is registered," Sevra said.
"For what it is worth," Jax said, before she could continue, "congratulations. Twelve hundred credits is a small price for the privilege of owing the magistrate a favor."
"It is not a favor. It is a fee."
"It is a fee that is recorded. Recorded fees become favors when the recorder needs to call them in."
Kade did not move. He looked at Jax the way a man looks at a thing he has decided not to trust, then looked at Sevra. "Yuni sent a second message. After the yes."
"And."
"She says that the channel the Concord used to broadcast the Korinthian's last log is the same channel used to broadcast the navigational data you have on your slate."
The air in the corridor seemed to thicken. Sevra heard the soft hum of the Reclaimer's life support, the distant tick of the hull plating as it adjusted to the temperature change between levels, and her own breath, steady, even, too controlled.
"She didn't say that," Sevra said.
"She implied it. I read between her lines. She is good at implying things she cannot say."
Jax tilted his head. "May I ask which lines."
"No."
He smiled, a small, practiced movement of the mouth. "I will take that as a yes, as well."
Sevra walked past him toward the central compartment. She did not touch him as she passed, and the distance she kept was deliberate. At the central console she stood a moment, her fingers resting on the edge, and looked at the small holo display that showed the Korinthian's drifting position on the edge of the port's sensor range.
"What do we have on the manifest," she said.
Kade came forward, pulling a slate from his back pocket. "Preliminary, from the scan we did at range. Cargo bay one is empty. Cargo bay two has atmospheric breach, sealed remotely. Cargo bay three is intact. There are three crates marked Concord, sealed with military registry. There is one crate marked with a private holding symbol I do not recognize."
He turned the slate so she could see it. The private holding symbol was a simple geometric figure, a circle bisected by a single vertical line. Sevra recognized it.
"Yuni," she said.
"Yes."
"Get her on the channel. Eyes only."
Kade went to the comm. Sevra heard the soft chirp of the outgoing pulse, then the waiting tone of a system that had nothing to send back.
"She may not answer," Kade said after a moment.
"She will answer."
The wait was longer than she expected. Then the screen lit, and Yuni's face appeared, small in the corner of the holo, the background behind her the familiar gray of a Concord listening post. Her hair was pulled back, her eyes too bright, and her voice when she spoke was the voice of a young woman trying very hard to sound calm.
"Reclaimer. I have to be quick. The channel is monitored."
"Yuni. The symbol on the manifest."
"I see it."
"What is it."
Yuni looked away from the camera, toward a part of her console that Sevra could not see. "It is a holding symbol. Not Concord. Private. Registered to a research concern that has been administratively dissolved for fourteen years."
"What research concern."
There was a pause. Yuni's fingers moved, just slightly, off camera, the way a person's hands move when they are about to say something they have been told not to say.
"I cannot tell you over this channel."
"Can you tell me in person."
Another pause, longer this time. "I cannot leave the post. I am on a rotation. I have two days before I am off shift. I cannot give you two days."
Jax had moved closer. Sevra could feel him at the edge of her sight, the way you can feel a heat source before you look at it.
"Yuni," Sevra said. "The sealed compartments. There are three. Military registry. Are they consistent with what you have seen on the navigational data."
Yuni's mouth pressed into a thin line. "I am not supposed to have seen the navigational data."
"I am asking."
Silence. Then Yuni's, barely above a whisper: "Yes."
"Thank you. Disconnect. Clean the channel."
The screen went dark. Kade stared at it for a moment, then at Sevra, then at Jax.
Jax was smiling his small smile. "Well," he said. "That was almost informative."
Sevra turned to face him. "You have not yet told me why you are on my ship."
"I am here because Olin Vast told me to be here."
"Olin Vast does not give orders on my ship."
"He gives suggestions. The distinction is administrative." Jax pushed himself off the bulkhead, and the movement had the careful grace of a man who knew he was being watched and wanted the watching to be enjoyable. "I suggest that you hear what I have to say before you decide that I am an obstacle rather than a resource."
"Speak."
"There is a buyer. For the contents of the Korinthian. The buyer has been in negotiation with a Sorrance-class that is now docked at the port. The buyer's interest is not in the ship's hull, which is what the port will give you salvage rights to. The buyer's interest is in what is inside the hull, which is what the port is not going to give you salvage rights to."
"How do you know this."
"Because I am the broker."
The words landed in the small space between them like a coin dropped on metal. Sevra did not move. Kade did not move. The Reclaimer hummed around them, indifferent.
"You," Sevra said, "are the broker who has expressed interest in the Korinthian."
"I am. And now that interest is professional rather than acquisitive. The distinction is, I assure you, considerable."
"Explain."
"The buyer wants what is in the sealed compartments. The buyer is willing to pay well. The buyer is not Concord, and the buyer is not registered in any jurisdiction that I can find, which means the buyer is operating through intermediaries. The buyer is, in short, a person who is accustomed to operating outside of record, which is a person who is accustomed to operating outside of law."
"And you," Sevra said, "are the intermediary."
"I am the broker. I do not work for the buyer. I work for whoever is paying me. At present, no one is paying me, which is why I am having this conversation with you rather than with the buyer."
Kade stepped forward, just slightly, his weight shifting. His voice, when it came, was low and very even. "Jax. When did you arrive at this port."
"This morning."
"On the Sorrance."
"I prefer not to discuss my means of arrival."
"You prefer not to discuss because you arrived on the buyer's ship. You are here because the buyer sent you here to make the acquisition, and the buyer is going to pay you whether you acquire the contents from the wreck or from me."
Jax turned his head slowly toward Kade. The smile did not change. The eyes did. "Kade. You have survived three disasters."
"Four."
"You have survived four disasters, and you trust systems more than people. So let me speak to you in a system you understand. The buyer's interest in the Korinthian is not the hull. The buyer's interest is in something that has been sealed in a military bioweapon vault for nineteen years."
The word landed in the room like a dropped tool. Sevra felt the cold of it in her chest before she let it reach her face.
"Bioweapon," Kade said.
"Bioweapon. The seal on the crates you scanned is a Concord seal, but the contents are not Concord inventory. The contents belong to a project called Harrow. The project was administratively dissolved. The contents were not. The contents were sealed and put aboard a freighter that was supposed to take them to a disposal site, and the freighter, as far as the official record is concerned, was lost with all hands in a navigational accident."
"And unofficially."
"Unofficially, the freighter is the Korinthian, and the Korinthian has been drifting, sealed and intact, for nineteen years, until something in the navigational data on Commander Thorne's slate brought it back into range of a port that recognizes salvage claims."
Jax paused. He looked at Sevra, and the look was, for the first time since she had met him, almost respectful.
"You did not know," he said. "What was on your slate."
"I knew it was navigational data. I knew it was classified. I did not know it was a beacon."
"It is not a beacon. It is a routing key. The data identifies the location of vessels that have been administratively lost. The data is what allowed your slate to find the Korinthian in the first place. The data is what is going to bring the buyer to your airlock within the next twelve hours, regardless of what Olin Vast has or has not registered in his office."
Sevra heard Kade breathe out, a single, controlled exhalation. She did not speak. She let the silence hold the shape of the thing that had just been said, and she watched Jax Rendell's face, and she looked for the seam, the place where the performance ended and the person began.
"I am offering," Jax said, after the silence had lasted long enough, "to be the broker for the sale. The contents of the vault, sold to a buyer who can afford to pay, in a transaction that is recorded and legal and that gives the magistrate his fee and gives you enough credit to walk away from this station and never look back."
"And the buyer."
"The buyer remains anonymous. The buyer pays. You do not ask questions."
Sevra turned away from him. She walked to the console where the Korinthian's drifting image still hung in the air, and she stood there a moment, her back to both men.
"You are asking me," she said, "to sell a military bioweapon to a person I cannot identify, for a price that will let me disappear."
"I am asking you to accept the reality that the contents of that vault will be sold, whether by you or by someone else, and that you have the rare opportunity to choose who that someone is."
"And the alternative."
"The alternative is that the buyer takes the contents by means that do not respect the provisional status of your claim, and that you are left with nothing, including the navigational data on your slate, which the buyer will also want, because the buyer does not want anyone else finding more wrecks."
Kade's voice came from behind her, very low. "Sevra."
She turned. Kade was standing where he had been, his hands at his sides, his face unreadable.
"I trust systems," he said. "I trust what I can see and what I can hold. There is something on this ship that I cannot see and cannot hold, and it has been drifting for nineteen years, and it has just been found by a person whose slate was given to her by a navigator who is now dead, and the only people who know what is on that slate are the people in this room and a junior analyst on a Concord listening post who cannot leave her post for two days."
"Yes," Sevra said.
"And the only person who has offered me a number is a man I do not trust."
"Yes."
Kade looked at Jax. Jax looked back at him. The small smile was gone.
"I have survived four disasters," Kade said. "The fourth was the Korinthian. I am not going to survive a fifth by trusting a man who sells to the highest bidder."
"Then," Jax said quietly, "perhaps you should consider trusting the woman who carried the navigational data that brought us here."
Sevra turned back to the holo. The Korinthian hung in the air, dark, silent, drifting. Behind her, Kade was waiting. Behind Kade, Jax was waiting. On a Concord listening post two sectors away, a young woman with too-bright eyes was sitting at a console she was not supposed to be sitting at, looking at a symbol she was not supposed to recognize.
"Prepare the shuttle," Sevra said, without turning around. "We are going back to the wreck."
"Now," Kade said.
"Now. Before the buyer makes contact. Before the provisional expires. Before anyone else decides what the contents of that vault are worth."
Jax did not move for a moment. Then he straightened, and the smile returned, but it was smaller now, and there was something in it that had not been there before.
"I will come with you," he said.
"No."
"I have information about the vault that you do not have."
"Then give it to me here."
"It is not information that can be given. It is information that can only be retrieved from inside the vault."
Sevra turned. She looked at him for a long moment, measuring the distance between what he was offering and what he was asking, and then she turned to Kade.
"If he tries anything," she said, "you put him in the airlock and you cycle it."
Kade nodded. Once.
Jax inclined his head. "Commander," he said. "I appreciate the directness."
Sevra did not answer. She was already at the comm panel, opening the channel to Yuni, knowing that Yuni would not answer, knowing that she had to try.
The Korinthian hung in the dark, waiting.
Yuni's console lit up before the first tone finished. She did not even pretend to hesitate. Her fingers found the accept key, and her mouth opened, and for the first time since the anomaly had begun to take shape in her department's instruments, she spoke to the person she had been forbidden to speak to.
"Channel open," she said, and her voice did not shake, which surprised her. "Sevra. I am here. I should not be here. I am here."
A pause. The hiss of static between sectors. Then Sevra's voice, low, stripped of everything but intent.
"Yuni. Listen to me. The Korinthian is holding a navigational dataset of unknown origin. It is not Concord standard. It is not registered in any public index. It is the most dangerous thing I have ever seen, and I have been paid to find dangerous things for nine years."
"I know what it is," Yuni said.
A longer pause.
"How."
"I have been watching the signature for seven months. I flagged it the first time it crossed my console. I filed a standard anomaly report. The report was routed to Senior Analyst Drayne. Drayne marked it routine. I refiled it. Drayne marked it routine again. I refiled it six more times. After the sixth, Drayne called me into his office and told me, very calmly, that some anomalies are best left to people with more rank, and that I should focus on my assigned sector, and that if I continued to agitate I would find my clearance level reduced to the point where I could no longer agitate about anything."
"Kade," Sevra said, off the line, in the cold shuttle bay. "Get us moving."
"The engines are already cycling," Kade said. "Strap in. Both of you. Especially you, Rendell. I am not fishing you out of the void."
Jax was already strapped in. The smile was gone. He looked like a man who had stopped performing and started calculating.
"Sevra," Yuni said, and now her voice was faster, the words tumbling, "the signature is not random. It repeats. On a cycle. I do not have enough data to map the cycle, but I know there is one. Sevra, it is not noise. It is a signal."
Sevra did not answer for three seconds. In the shuttle, Kade's hands moved across the helm, and the deck vibrated as the maneuvering thrusters fired, and the station began to fall away behind them.
"Define signal," Sevra said.
"Structured. Repeating. Self-similar at multiple scales. It has the mathematical fingerprint of something that was built to be recognized. Sevra, I think someone put that dataset where it could be found. I think someone wanted it to be found. I think the Korinthian was a delivery mechanism."
Jax, in the shuttle, leaned forward against his restraints.
"Ask her about the cycle length," he said.
Sevra's head turned a fraction.
"Why."
"Because if I am right about what is in that vault, the cycle length tells us how long we have before it does what it is designed to do."
She keyed the channel.
"Yuni. The cycle. How long."
"I do not have enough data. Seven months of passive observation. The cycle is longer than seven months. It could be a year. It could be longer. Sevra, I cannot give you a number."
"Then give me a direction. Is the cycle accelerating. Decelerating. Stable."
A pause that felt like a held breath.
"Stable," Yuni said. "Unchanging. As if it is waiting for something."
The shuttle cleared the port's outer markers. The Korinthian resolved on the forward display, a dark shape against darker dark, her running lights long dead, her hull scarred by micro- collisions and the slow patient work of vacuum.
"Sevra," Yuni said. "Where are you."
"En route to the wreck."
"No. Sevra. Listen to me. Drayne is not the only one who saw my reports. The flag pattern matched a priority threshold that I did not set. Someone above Drayne set it. Someone above Drayne has been watching this file move through the system, and they have been letting it move, which means they have been watching me, which means they are watching this channel. Sevra, I have been on an open line for forty seconds. You have to go dark."
Sevra looked at Kade. Kade looked at the comm panel. Kade looked back at Sevra.
"Do it," Sevra said.
Kade killed the channel. The cabin went quiet. The only sound was the low thrum of the shuttle's drive and the soft tick of the hull cooling as they crossed from the port's shadow into open dark.
"She was right," Jax said, from the seat behind them. "About being watched. About the priority flag. About Drayne being a waypoint, not a wall."
"How do you know about the flag," Kade said, without turning around.
"Because I sold the priority flag pattern to a Concord contractor six years ago. It is a very specific design. It is meant to look routine to anyone below a certain clearance, and it is meant to be unmistakable to anyone above it. It is a leash, Mr. Marrow. A very polite leash. And whoever put it on that anomaly file has been holding the other end for a long time."
Sevra unbuckled from her seat. She moved to the cargo rack, where the salvage kit was stowed, and she began to pull components with the efficiency of someone who had done this a hundred times and did not need to think about the order.
"We are not here for the dataset," she said, and her voice was flat, and final, and Kade recognized it as the voice she used when she had already made a decision that could not be unmade. "We are here to confirm what is in the vault. We are going to look. We are going to know. Then we are going to decide what knowing costs."
"And if the cost is high," Jax said.
"Then we pay it. Or we do not. But we do not pay it blind."
Kade brought the shuttle in along the Korinthian's ventral line, matching her dead rotation, letting the hull drift into contact with the soft magnetic clamps of an airlock that had been waiting, open, patient, for someone to return.
"Inside," Sevra said. "Quiet. Lights only as needed. Rendell, you stay behind Marrow. Marrow, you stay behind me. If we separate, we do not search. We return to the shuttle. We do not become people who got lost in a dead ship."
The airlock cycled. The Korinthian breathed out a thin sigh of stale, recycled, ancient air, and the three of them stepped into a corridor that had not seen a living footfall in years.
The dark was not empty. It hummed.
The manifest had said the navigational data was stored in the captain's safe, third deck aft. The captain's safe was not where the manifest said it was. Sevra knew the Korinthian's class. She knew the variations. She knew the places a captain might choose if the captain did not trust the manifest, and did not trust the owners, and wanted the one thing that mattered kept somewhere that could only be reached by someone who understood the ship.
"The galley," Kade said, reading her mind. "Under the false panel. Behind the water recycler."
"Yes."
They moved. Sevra first, cutter in hand, the narrow beam painting the bulkheads in slow arcs. Kade behind her, pack on his back, eyes on the ceilings and the corners, the places a drone carrier would nest if a drone carrier was still on patrol. Jax behind Kade, silent now, the performance stripped away, leaving only the focus of a man who understood that the next ten minutes would define whether the rest of his life was a story he told or a debt he paid.
The galley was small. The water recycler was older than either of them. The false panel resisted Sevra's cutter for three seconds, then gave, and behind it was a space the size of a breadbox, and inside the space was a case the size of a fist, and inside the case was a data core the size of a thumbnail.
Sevra did not touch it. She looked at it for a long moment.
"Marrow," she said. "Do not let Rendell near this."
"I hear you," Kade said, and he shifted his weight so that his body was between Jax and the open panel.
Jax raised both hands, palms out, the universal gesture of a man who understood that his value was information, and that information required him to remain alive and uninjured to be redeemed.
"It is not the core that matters," Jax said. "It is the case. The core is inert. It is the case that carries the signature."
Sevra looked at the case. It was old. It was Concord manufacture. There was nothing unusual about it. There was nothing unusual about anything.
Then Sevra saw it.
A hairline seam. Running the circumference of the case. Invisible to the naked eye, visible only when the cutter's beam caught it at exactly the right angle. A seam that should not have been there, because the case was a solid unit, factory sealed, designed to be opened only by authorized maintenance crews with authorized tools.
"Kade," she said. "Look at this."
Kade looked. His breath stopped for half a second.
"That is not Concord," he said. "That is a fabrication technique I have seen exactly once. It was in a report I was not supposed to read, about a listening post that detected something that should not have been detectable. The report said the source was unknown. The report said the technology was not in any database. The report was sealed, and the analyst who wrote it was transferred to a station so remote it does not have a name."
"Yuni," Sevra said.
"Yuni," Kade confirmed.
Jax, behind them, exhaled slowly.
"So," he said. "It is real."
"What is real," Sevra said.
"The thing the buyer wants. The thing the buyer has been waiting to acquire. The thing that made the Korinthian worth killing a crew to keep secret. Commander, the dataset in that core is not a navigation chart. It is a coordinate. A single coordinate. The location of something that was placed in our space a very long time ago by someone who wanted it to be found, eventually, by someone who would understand what it was."
Sevra stared at the case. The seam. The hairline fracture in a fabrication that should not have existed.
"And the cycle," she said. "The cycle Yuni detected."
"Is the length of time the coordinate remains valid," Jax said. "After which the thing at the coordinate will no longer be where it is. Or will no longer be findable. Or will no longer be what it was."
A sound. Faint. Distant. The click of a relay closing in a corridor that should have been dead.
All three of them went still.
"Did you hear that," Kade said.
"Yes," Sevra said.
"It is the drone carrier," Jax said. "It is still on patrol. The Korinthian was not abandoned. It was set. It is a stage. And we have just walked onto it."
The relay clicked again. Closer. The hum of a charging capacitor. The soft whine of a targeting system waking from a sleep it had been waiting, patiently, to be woken from.
"Marrow," Sevra said. "The data core. Get it. Do not touch the case."
"I am not touching the case," Kade said, and his hands were steady, and he reached into the panel with the precision of a man who had pulled components from living reactors without shutting them down, and he lifted the core free, and the core sat in his palm like a seed, and the case sat in the darkness behind it, and the seam in the case caught the cutter light one more time, and then the lights went out.
The Korinthian came alive.
The drone carrier was not one unit. It was six. They dropped from maintenance cradles in the overhead, their running lights dark, their weapons already tracking, and the first plasma bolt seared the air six inches from Sevra's shoulder and turned the water recycler into a spray of vaporized metal.
Sevra did not think. She thought later, in the shuttle, when there was time to think, and what she thought then was that she had not thought, that her body had simply moved, that her hands had found Kade's collar and Jax's collar and that she had shoved them both out of the galley door and into the corridor and that her own feet had followed and that the second bolt had hit the doorframe where her head had been and that the third had hit the panel she had just closed behind her.
"Run," she said.
They ran.
The corridor was a throat. The bolts came in stuttering bursts, each one a white flash that left an afterimage burned into the dark. Kade was ahead. Sevra was behind him. Jax was behind her, and Jax was not making a sound, and the absence of sound from a man who had filled every silence with performance was louder than the weapons fire.
The airlock. The shuttle. The clamps. The void.
Sevra hit the cycle. The inner door sealed. The outer door opened. The clamps released with a shudder that ran through the deck and into her teeth. Kade was at the helm before she was in her seat. The shuttle kicked away from the Korinthian's hull with a thrust that slammed them all back against their restraints, and the Korinthian fell behind them, dark, silent again, as if the violence had been a dream, as if the drones had never woken.
Jax, in his seat, was breathing in short shallow gasps.
"The core," Sevra said.
Kade held up his hand. The core sat in his palm, unmarked, unharmed, waiting.
"The case," Sevra said.
Jax shook his head. Slowly. Once.
"Left behind," he said.
"Yes."
"It was the more valuable artifact."
"Yes."
"Commander, you chose the crew over the cargo."
"I chose the living over the dead," Sevra said. "The dead can wait. The dead have waited a long time. They can wait a little longer."
Kade brought the shuttle about on a wide arc, and the Korinthian shrank to a point, and the point became a star among stars, and the stars became a field, and the field became the dark.
Sevra keyed the comm panel. She opened the channel to Yuni. She did not know if Yuni would answer. She did not know if Yuni was still at her console. She did not know if Yuni was still free.
The channel hissed.
Then, faint, across two sectors and a silence that should not have been crossable:
"Sevra."
Yuni's voice. Steady now. No longer breathless. The voice of someone who had decided to be where she was.
"I am here," Yuni said. "I have been waiting. Tell me you have it."
"I have the core," Sevra said. "Yuni, listen to me. The case was a fake. The seam was not Concord. The case was the artifact. The core is inert. We left the artifact behind."
A pause.