The salvage arm locked around the black cylinder with a wet metallic clench, and Maren Vasik let out a breath she hadn't measured holding. Debris from the orbital platform spun lazy against the indigo curve of Veridian below, fragments catching thin sunlight and throwing it back in dull copper flashes. The Kestrel-7 hung in a drifting station-keeping pattern two hundred meters above the wreck, its patched hull humming with the particular frequency of a ship that had seen better decades.
"Got you," she murmured into her mask. The words tasted stale, recycled through the suit's scrubbers. "Come on, you stubborn little archive."
The black-box drone resisted the extraction claw's calibration. Maren cycled the grip wider, felt the servo whine through her glove, and coaxed the cylinder free from a lattice of twisted support struts. Something gave way inside the wreck, a slow groan that traveled up through the cable and into her harness. She froze, counting heartbeats until the debris settled into a new, quieter configuration.
Veridian spread beneath her, a city of gray basalt and collapsed transit spines. Maren had studied the pre-fall surveys of the place in her archaeology days, had traced the neat lines of its planned districts on flat-screens back at the Meridian Institute. Those lines no longer corresponded to anything on the surface. The streets had become shallow canyons, choked with dust the color of old bone. From orbit, you could still pick out the bones of the great civic arcology, a ringed structure the size of a small moon, now split down its eastern seam like a fruit left too long in the sun.
She had not come for the city. The city was where her brother had walked, before. The drone in her claw was where the answers might be hiding.
The cylinder seated itself into the cargo cradle with a satisfying thunk, and the Kestrel-7's winch hauled it up through the cargo bay's maw with a rattling protest that suggested the bearings needed replacement. Maren cycled the airlock, unsealed her helmet, and stripped one glove off with her free hand. The bay smelled of hydraulic oil and the stale sweetness of the emergency rations Captain Khoury insisted the crew live on. She had grown used to the smell. That was the saddest part of any long-haul run, she thought: the moment the unfamiliar became familiar.
She ran a gloved thumb along the drone's casing as the cradle settled. Matte black, no serial markings, no Meridian Institute stamp she could see at a glance. That was strange. Everything the Institute built carried the small silver asterisk of the archive corps somewhere on its housing. She turned the cylinder slowly, examining it under the bay's worklamp. The surface was pristine, almost obscenely clean against the battered hardware around it.
"Captain," she said, tapping her suit's external comm. "Cargo secured. Requesting permission to open the quarantine cradle and run a preliminary diagnostic."
The reply came after a delay, broken by the usual hiss of Khoury's ancient cockpit rig. "Permission granted. Try not to breathe anything that makes your teeth fall out, Vasik. We don't have a replacement dentist on the manifest."
"I'll add it to the requisition," she said.
Khoury's rough laugh crackled across the channel, then cut off. She heard the distant murmur of his voice on the bridge, speaking to someone in low, fast syllables. She did not try to listen in. Privacy was a currency on the Kestrel, and she had none to spend.
The quarantine cradle was a battered half-cylinder of brushed steel, scuffed from years of hauling artifacts the Institute did not want its salvage crews breathing near. Maren keyed it open, and the cradle's interior lamps came up soft amber. She positioned the drone on the central plinth and attached the diagnostic leads with the practiced motions of someone who had done this a hundred times in a previous life.
The drone's housing resisted the leads. She checked the port alignment, frowned, and tried the auxiliary feed. Nothing. The drone sat in the cradle like a held breath.
"All right," she said. "We'll do this the slow way."
She retrieved the manual probe from the kit and began working along the casing's seam. Her own breathing was the loudest sound in the bay, slow and deliberate, the way Gershom Doyle had taught her to breathe when the work demanded patience. Gershom, with his warm voice and his careful hands and his terrible habit of calling her Lass when he thought no one else could hear. She had not heard from him in eleven months. The Meridian Institute had stopped routing personal letters through the field channels, citing operational security. She suspected the truth was more mundane. She suspected they had simply forgotten her.
The seam parted under the probe with a faint click, and a row of micro-ports emerged along the drone's flank, hidden beneath a sliding shutter. Maren exhaled slowly and attached the leads one by one. The diagnostic suite on her wristpad pinged, then went silent for a long moment, then began populating with figures.
The numbers did not make sense.
Power cells at full charge. Data cores reporting nominal. Inertial logs indicating a single, continuous operation spanning four years, two months, and seventeen days. No external transmission attempts logged in the entire interval. The drone had been awake, sitting in the guts of a destroyed orbital platform above a dead city, recording nothing, transmitting nothing, waiting for nothing.
Until today, when her salvage arm had bumped it.
She sat back on her heels and stared at the readings. Somewhere behind her, the cargo bay's atmospheric processor coughed and resumed its slow cycling. The sound reminded her of a throat clearing.
"Vasik." Khoury's voice, sharper now. "You still on the cradle?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Talk to me."
She hesitated, then keyed her wristpad to broadcast. The diagnostic summary populated on his display. She heard him inhale, a sound she had learned to interpret as genuine surprise rather than the performative kind he deployed when negotiating berth fees.
"That's not Institute hardware," he said.
"No."
"That's not anyone's hardware I recognize."
"No."
A longer silence. She could hear the faint tick of something in his cockpit, a loose rivet working itself free against the hull. The Kestrel-7 was held together with stubbornness and prayer, and the prayer was Khoury's.
"Leave it sealed for now," he said. "We're not broadcasting this until we know what we're carrying. Not until you've talked to your contact."
She nodded, then remembered he could not see her. "Understood."
"And Vasik."
"Captain."
"Whatever that thing is, it was sitting in a wreck above a city that doesn't exist anymore. So don't get attached to it."
The channel went quiet. Maren looked down at the cylinder, its matte black surface drinking the amber light without giving any back. She reached out, slowly, and rested two fingers against the casing. It was cool, denser than the housing should have been, and faintly warm in a way that did not correspond to the bay's ambient temperature.
She pulled her hand back.
In her quarters, a narrow bunk pressed against the hull's curve, she spread her equipment across the small fold-out desk and ran a more careful diagnostic. The bunk was never made. She had stopped making bunks around the third month of her time aboard the Kestrel-7, when the futility of the gesture had finally outweighed the discipline. Gershom would have been disappointed. She tried not to think about that.
The drone's data cores resisted her decryption suite. She cycled through the standard Meridian protocols, the legacy academic formats, the field-survey conventions she had used during her own digs. Nothing. The cores acknowledged her queries with a polite rejection that felt almost conversational. She tried a brute-force scan, expecting the cores to either yield or crash. They did neither. They sat, content in their opacity.
She leaned back and rubbed her eyes. The bunk creaked beneath her. Above her, through two layers of patched plating, she could hear the faint percussion of Khoury's boots on the bridge. He was pacing. She could tell by the rhythm. He paced when he was thinking, and he thought when he was worried, and he was rarely worried about cargo.
She opened a channel to Gershom Doyle, routed through the long-haul comms relay that the Institute maintained for field teams who had not yet been formally recalled. The relay had been installed in her quarters as a courtesy during her first tour. The courtesy had expired, technically, along with her contract. She kept using it anyway. Old habits.
The channel clicked and hissed. Static, the particular dry static of a relay that had not been serviced in too long. She waited.
"Doyle here." The voice came through warm, slightly blurred at the edges by the relay's compression. "Maren, lass. Is that you calling in?"
"It's me, Gershom."
"Ach. I was beginning to think you'd finally found a captain worth keeping."
"Captain Khoury has his moments."
"High praise, from you. What've you got?"
She hesitated, then described the drone. The casing without markings. The sealed ports. The four years of silent operation. She did not mention the weight of it in her hand, the way it had seemed to settle against her fingers rather than simply rest there. Some observations were not ready to be spoken.
Gershom was quiet for a long time. She heard him tap something against his desk, a habit she had never been able to identify the source of.
"That's not Institute," he said finally.
"I know."
"And not corporate, not military, not any of the syndicates I have files on."
"I know."
A longer pause. She could almost see him, leaning back in his battered chair, the old archive screens glowing around him in the Institute's undercroft, his lined face working through possibilities.
"Maren," he said, and his voice had dropped, taking on the particular weight he used when he was about to say something she would not like. "Where, exactly, did you pull this from?"
"The Veridian platform wreck. Upper orbital ring, near the original civic arcology approach corridor."
"Were there other drones?"
"No. Just the one. Just this one, sitting in the wreck like it had been placed there."
Silence. Then a sound that might have been a sigh, might have been something else.
"Lass, listen to me carefully. Do not connect that drone to anything with an open network. Do not transmit any data from its cores. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to wake its broadcast capability."
She stared at the matte black cylinder on her desk, half-illuminated by her bunk's dim reading lamp.
"Gershom. What is it?"
"I don't know," he said. "And that is what frightens me."
The communications panel on her bunk cycled to standby, casting a pale green wash over the matte cylinder. Senna sat motionless for several seconds, watching the light from the panel play across its surface. The casing had not changed. The faint warmth where her hand had rested had not changed. She reached out and touched it again, and the warmth was there, patient as a held breath.
"Diagnostic suite," she said quietly. "Is it safe to run a non-invasive scan of this object? No network connection. Local only."
The Oathkeeper's voice came through the bunk's speaker, a carefully modulated tone that Senna had come to associate with the AI choosing its words with more deliberation than usual. "The object is inert. A passive scan will not wake any broadcast capability that may be present. However, I would recommend that you do not attempt to open the casing, and that you keep it shielded from external signals until I have completed a more thorough analysis of its emissions profile."
"You think it's transmitting?"
"I think it was transmitting until shortly before you recovered it. The residual emissions are consistent with a device that had been in active operation and was shut down abruptly. Whether it can be restarted by an external signal, I cannot determine without more information."
Senna considered this. "Run the scan."
A low hum filled the bunk as the diagnostic suite cycled up. The Oathkeeper did not speak again. Senna watched the diagnostic indicators flicker through their patterns, green and amber and occasionally a deep red that pulsed and faded. The cylinder sat on her bunk like a small black moon, indifferent to the instruments being aimed at it.
Twenty minutes passed. The diagnostic suite finished its initial sweep and began a deeper analysis. Senna forced herself to remain in the bunk rather than pace the ship, though her hands found the edges of her jacket and worried the seams. Eventually, the Oathkeeper spoke again.
"The scan is complete. The object is not a weapon in any conventional sense. It contains a power cell that has been depleted to approximately twelve percent of its original capacity, a memory core of unusual design, and what appears to be a short-range broadcast array. The casing is not standard military or civilian manufacture. I have no record of its alloy composition in my databases."
Senna's hands stilled. "What kind of memory core?"
"The architecture is not one I recognize. It is not human-standard, not Coalition, not any of the corporate formats I have on file. It is also heavily encrypted. Without the proper decryption key, extracting data from it would be extremely difficult."
"Could Maren Vasik do it?"
There was a pause, longer than the Oathkeeper usually allowed. "Possibly. She is one of the few people I know of with the skill set and the clearance to attempt it. However, contacting her carries its own risks. She is being watched."
"By who?"
"The same people, I suspect, who shut down that broadcast."
Senna looked at the cylinder again. In the diagnostic light it seemed less like a piece of salvage and more like something that had been waiting. She picked it up again, feeling its weight, feeling the faint hum of the depleted cell through the casing.
"Get her a message," she said. "Eyes only. Tell her I have something she needs to see, and that I need her help to see it. Tell her not to bring anyone."
"That will take time to route through the relays without being flagged."
"I know. Do it anyway."
She set the cylinder down carefully on the narrow shelf beside her bunk, positioning it so that it would not roll if the vessel shifted attitude. She did not want to let it out of her sight, but she could not sit in the bunk and stare at it for however many hours the routing would take. She needed to move, to think, to do something useful with the time.
She went forward to the cockpit, where the long view of the asteroid field glittered against the deeper black. Iko was not there. The cockpit was empty, the displays showing the usual quiet dance of debris and distant rocks. Senna took the pilot's seat and let the view fill her vision. The Oathkeeper had adjusted the forward optics to filter out the worst of the glare from the nearby sun, but there was still enough light to throw long shadows across the asteroid surfaces. Some of them were pitted and scarred. Some were smooth as glass.
She thought about the Veridian platform wreck. She thought about the way the drone had been sitting in the ruined corridor, too neatly placed, too intact in a place where nothing should have been intact. She thought about the sound it had made when she picked it up, that faint almost-hum.
She thought about Maren.
They had met eight years ago, on a dig in the outer territories. Senna had been running cargo, mostly legal, occasionally not, and Maren had been part of a Meridian Institute expedition cataloguing some pre-Collapse ruins on a moon that had no name in any of the charts she used. Senna had taken a contract to supply the expedition, and she had ended up spending three weeks on the surface while her ship underwent repairs in orbit. Maren had been the one who invited her to the dig. Maren had been the one who had shown her how to read the strata, how to listen to the ground, how to be patient with things that took a long time to reveal themselves.
Maren had not been like anyone Senna had ever known. She was careful in a way that most people Senna dealt with were not. She measured her words. She thought before she acted. She had a way of looking at Senna that made Senna feel seen in a way that was both comforting and slightly alarming.
They had kept in touch, in the irregular way that people who move around the edges of civilization do. Occasional messages through relays that might or might not be monitored. The occasional meeting on a station or a moon when their paths crossed. Maren had never told Senna exactly what she was working on for the Institute in the years since that dig, and Senna had never asked. There were things that were better not known.
Then, two years ago, Maren's brother had disappeared.
His name was Tamir. He had been a field tech for one of the Institute's exploration teams, working in a region that the official charts described as "unstable" and that everyone else described with more colorful language. He had gone quiet. The Institute had sent a recovery team. The team had found his camp, abandoned, and no sign of him. Maren had gone to find out what had happened. She had come back with questions and no answers and a face that Senna had never seen on her before, a face that had learned something it could not unlearn.
After that, Maren had been different. More careful. More guarded. She still corresponded with Senna, but the messages were shorter, the intervals longer. When Senna asked her what had changed, Maren had said only that the world was larger and darker than she had thought, and that some of the things in it were best left undisturbed.
Now Senna was about to ask her to disturb one of those things.
The cockpit displays chimed softly. A new contact had appeared on the long-range sensors, coming in from the direction of the planet's primary station. The Oathkeeper's voice came through the cockpit speakers.
"Captain, I am detecting a ship approaching. Single pilot, small craft, transponder identifies it as a Meridian Institute shuttle. It is requesting permission to dock."
Senna straightened in the pilot's seat. "Maren?"
"I am unable to confirm the identity of the pilot from the transponder alone. However, the flight path is consistent with someone who has been vectored in from the primary station, and the Institute registration is genuine."
"She got here fast."
"She did. Perhaps she was already in the system."
Senna considered this. Maren had been careful for two years. Maren did not move quickly unless she had reason to. If she had gotten to this system within hours of receiving a routed message, she had either been much closer than Senna had realized, or she had been looking for a reason to move and this had provided one.
"Grant docking permission. And tell Iko we're about to have a visitor."
"Understood."
Senna stood, stretched, and headed back toward the airlock. The cylinder was still sitting on the shelf beside her bunk. She paused, looked at it for a moment, then picked it up and carried it with her. If Maren was going to look at it, she might as well look at it properly.
Iko appeared from the engine compartment as Senna reached the cargo bay, wiping his hands on a rag. "We got company?"
"We do. Maren Vasik."
Iko's eyebrows went up. "That's quick. I thought the relays would take half a day at least."
"They did. She was already in the system."
"That sounds like her."
A soft thud ran through the hull as the shuttle docked. The airlock cycled, and a moment later Maren stepped through into the cargo bay.
She looked the same as she had the last time Senna had seen her, which was nearly a year ago. Same dark hair pulled back from a face that was composed and watchful. Same practical coat, same steady eyes. But there was something in the way she held herself now, a kind of coiled readiness that had not been there before. She had aged in ways that had nothing to do with time.
"Senna," she said. Her voice was even, but there was a warmth underneath it that Senna recognized.
"Maren." Senna held up the cylinder. "I found this in the Veridian wreck. The diagnostic suite says the memory core is encrypted in an architecture it doesn't recognize. I was hoping you could take a look."
Maren's eyes went to the cylinder immediately. The readiness in her posture sharpened into something else, something focused. She crossed the cargo bay in a few steps and held out her hand. Senna placed the cylinder in her palm.
Maren did not pick it up the way Senna had. She held it in both hands, carefully, as though it were a small and fragile thing. She turned it over slowly, feeling the weight, the casing. Her thumb traced the seam where the two halves met.
"This is not Institute," she said quietly.
"I know."
"And not corporate, not military, not any of the syndicates I have files on."
"I know."
She looked up at Senna. Her eyes were very dark, and very steady.
"Where, exactly, did you pull this from?"
"The Veridian platform wreck. Upper orbital ring, near the original civic arcology approach corridor."
"Were there other drones?"
"No. Just the one. Just this one, sitting in the wreck like it had been placed there."
Maren was quiet for a long moment. She looked down at the cylinder again, then back at Senna.
"Senna," she said, and her voice had dropped, taking on a weight that Senna recognized from years of hearing it used before difficult truths. "Do not connect that drone to anything with an open network. Do not transmit any data from its cores. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to wake its broadcast capability."
Senna stared at her. "Maren. What is it?"
"I don't know," Maren said. "And that is what frightens me."
The silence stretched between them, broken only by the drone's faint thermal tick and the soft rhythm of the cargo bay's pressure stabilizers. Senna's hand hovered near her console, the impulse to reach for the diagnostic suite almost physical, and Maren's fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the casing.
"Walk me through it," Maren said at last. Her voice had gone very even, the archaeologist's clinical detachment settling over her like a familiar coat. "Everything. From the moment the intercept alarm sounded."
Senna did. She described the faint ping against her passive sensors, the slow approach, the way the drone had oriented on them as though it already knew they were there. She described the Veridian wreck's shadow falling across the cargo bay, and the strange, sourceless smell of it, old plastic and something else underneath, something older. She described the moment the cylinder had arrived in the retrieval net and how the drone had simply fallen away.
Maren listened without interrupting. Her eyes had drifted half-closed, the better to hear, and Senna had the sense that she was not just listening to the words but weighing them, testing each one for what it carried underneath. When Senna finished, Maren was quiet for another long moment, her thumb still resting against the cylinder's seam.
"The casing is magnetic shielded," Maren said softly, almost to herself. "Triple-layered, with a noise-dampening weave in the interior. This is not standard for any manufacturer I have ever seen. It feels almost hand-finished." She lifted it closer to the overhead light, tilting it so the subtle tooling marks caught the glow. "Look here. Someone worked on this. Carefully. Recently."
She turned the cylinder over and ran her fingertip along a small cluster of marks near the base. Senna could barely see them in the dim light, tiny notches pressed into the alloy with a precision that looked almost surgical.
"Sequence markers," Maren murmured. "Or a serial code, of some kind." She looked up at Senna, and there was a flicker of something in her expression that Senna could not quite read. "Bring up the auxiliary screen. Quietly. Local only, no network handshake. I want to photograph those marks before we do anything else."
Senna did so without comment. The auxiliary screen was an old flat panel set into the far wall of the cargo bay, hardwired to a self-contained camera and image-processing unit, no wireless link, no broadcast pathway. She positioned it on a small folding stand and adjusted the angle while Maren held the cylinder steady.
The image that resolved on the screen was crisp, almost too crisp, as though the cylinder's own surface had been polished to a mirror sheen. The sequence of tiny marks resolved clearly: nine characters in a pattern Senna did not recognize, but Maren, after a long moment, did.
Maren had gone very still.
"What is it?" Senna asked.
"Read the first three," Maren said. Her voice was very steady, very quiet. "Read them aloud."
Senna leaned closer to the screen. The first three characters were not letters in any alphabet she knew, but Maren had spoken them aloud once before, long ago, on the deck of a different ship, in a different system. They were a shipyard stamp. They were a class designation. They were the marking burned into the hull plating of every warship built in the orbital yards above Meridian Prime during the Border Wars.
IRV.
Senna felt the cold move through her before she understood what it meant. "IRV," she said. "Independent Republic Vessel."
"Yes."
Maren's eyes were on the screen, but Senna had the sense that she was looking at something far away and long ago. Her fingers had begun to tap, very lightly, against her thigh, a rhythm Senna had seen only once before, the night Maren had finally spoken about what she had seen on Veridian.
"The rest of it," Maren said, after a pause. "The rest of the sequence."
Senna read it: HEL-7-04A.
"Helios," Maren said. The word came out flat, almost without inflection, but Senna could hear the strain underneath. "The IRV Helios."
The name meant nothing to Senna. She had never heard of the Helios, had never seen the designation in any registry file. But she could read the silence in Maren's face, the way her shoulders had drawn in slightly, and she knew that whatever the Helios was, it was not good.
"I do not understand," Senna said carefully. "Who were they?"
"The Helios was a Meridian-class light carrier," Maren said. "Third Border War. She was part of a task force that operated out of Veridian, hunting raiders in the orbital corridor above the planet. She was reported lost with all hands in the last weeks of the conflict. Sunk, officially. No survivors. No recoverable hull." She paused. "The wreck you pulled this drone from, Senna. That is where the Helios went down."
Senna stared at her. "A wreck from the Border Wars. And you are telling me this drone was sitting in it."
"Yes."
"For how long?"
Maren did not answer immediately. She was still looking at the cylinder, but her gaze had gone distant again, and Senna had the strange sense that she was not seeing the cargo bay at all, but something else, some other place and time that pressed against her from the inside.
"That wreck has been dead space for over a decade," Maren said at last. "Cold. Dark. Nothing functional in it for years. Anything that survived from the original wreck would be inert by now. Decayed beyond salvage. There is no reason for anything to still be running there, and certainly no reason for anything to still be transmitting."
"And yet."
"And yet."
Senna let that sit for a moment. Somewhere in the deeper parts of the cargo bay, the diagnostic suite made a small, soft noise, as though the ship itself were clearing its throat. The Oathkeeper's presence stirred faintly at the edge of her awareness, a low pulse of attention that she had learned to trust.
"Maren," she said slowly. "You told me not to wake the broadcast. You told me not to connect it to anything. Was that because of the Helios?"
Maren looked at her then, and for the first time since the cylinder had been placed in her hands, something in her expression cracked open. Not fear, exactly, though there was fear underneath. Something older. Something closer to grief.
"Because of what the Helios was carrying," Maren said. "And because of what happened to the people who tried to find it."
She lifted the cylinder slightly, as though weighing it again. The overhead light caught the tiny notches of the serial code one more time, glinting faintly.
"There were stories, after the war. About the Helios. About a payload she was carrying that was never logged in any official manifest. Something the Institute had a hand in placing aboard. Something that was not supposed to survive the wreck." She paused, and her thumb brushed the seam again. "My brother was part of the team that went looking for it."
The cargo bay was very quiet.
"He never came back," Maren said. "Officially, he is listed as missing, presumed dead. Unofficially, the Institute has told anyone who will listen that there is nothing to find. That the wreck was scoured, that nothing survived. That the whole business is closed."
She set the cylinder down on the nearest flat surface, gently, as though it were something that might break, or might wake.
"And now this."
Senna looked at the cylinder. She looked at Maren. She thought about the strange, sourceless smell of the Veridian wreck, old plastic and something else underneath, something older.
"What do we do?" she asked.
Before Maren could answer, the cargo bay's main intercom chimed. A moment later, Captain Vael Khoury's voice filled the bay, rough and unhurried, with the faint grain of someone who had smoked too much and slept too little and was not particularly sorry about any of it.
"Roe. Vasik. If the two of you have finished cooing over your mystery egg, I would like a word on the bridge. There is something on the broadcast bands you are going to want to see."
There was a pause, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost its sardonic edge.
"Now, ladies. If you please."
The bridge of the Dust Larkspur smelled faintly of old leather and engine grease. Captain Vael Khoury stood at the central console with his arms folded and his back to the door, watching the holo display flicker with the soft, colorless light of a public news feed. He did not turn when they entered.
He was a lean man, weathered in the way of someone who had spent too many years under too many suns, with close-cropped gray hair and a face that looked like it had been carved out of the same kind of stone they used to build orbital docks. His uniform jacket hung over the back of his command chair, and the sleeves of his undershirt were rolled to the elbow, revealing old burn scars along his forearms. He moved with the economy of someone who had learned long ago that wasted motion was a luxury, and he spoke with the blunt precision of someone who had stopped caring what anyone thought of him.
He still did not turn.
"There," he said, and nodded at the display.
Senna stepped closer. The holo was a standard public feed, one of the cheap, ubiquitous news channels that piped its way into every corner of inhabited space, the kind that paid for itself by carrying corporate advertising and state-approved nothingness. A news anchor was speaking, her face arranged in the careful, neutral expression that the channels all used when they were about to tell you something that was supposed to sound reasonable.
Senna read the crawl along the bottom of the display.
TERROR ATTACK AT VERIDIAN. SOLE SURVIVOR IN CUSTODY. INVESTIGATION ONGOING.
A second later, the anchor spoke, her voice smooth and unhurried.
"Authorities on Veridian have confirmed that an incident at a remote orbital platform yesterday evening has been contained. One suspect is in custody, and no further threats to public safety are anticipated. Initial reports describing the event as an act of sabotage have been revised; officials now characterize the incident as a tragic sanitation accident involving improperly secured waste materials. The matter is considered closed."
Senna stared at the display.
She had been there. She had stood in the cargo bay of her own ship and watched Maren walk out onto that platform, unarmed, unprotected, in the middle of a ring of soldiers who had been ordered to kill her on sight. She had watched the shuttle lift her away from Veridian's surface while the sky behind them lit up with fire and the planet's orbital traffic control screamed at them to turn back. She had watched the news feeds the next day and seen Veridian's governor stand in front of a podium and call Maren Vasik a terrorist and a murderer and a traitor.
And now this.
"A sanitation accident," Maren said softly.
"Yes."
"They have rewritten the whole story."
"Yes."
"And the people who did the rewriting."
Captain Vael turned at last, and his face, in the colorless light of the holo display, looked older than it had a moment ago. He looked, Senna thought, like a man who had just been handed a problem he had not expected to have.
"There is more," he said. "The feed is cycling through, but there is a segment scheduled for the next quarter-hour that you are not going to like. Someone has been feeding tidbits to the channels about the Veridian platform. Specifically, about what was actually there. Specifically, about what was found in the wreckage after the fire."
Senna felt the cold move through her again.
"What was found?"
Vael's jaw tightened. "The channels are not saying yet. They are teasing it. Holding it back for the next broadcast cycle, like bait on a hook." He looked at Maren. "But whatever it is, they are already blaming you."
"I know," Maren said. Her voice was very even. "I know what they found."
Vael's eyes narrowed slightly. "Do you, now."
"The Oathsworth manifest. The original freight declaration. The one that proves the Institute sold weapons to the raiders in the first place. The one that has been buried for a decade." She paused. "The one my brother died trying to find."
The bridge was very quiet. Outside, through the bridge's narrow observation port, the stars of the Veridian system turned slowly past, cold and indifferent.
Vael watched her for a long moment. Then he turned to the holo display, where the news anchor was still speaking, her voice smooth, her face neutral, her words perfectly shaped.
"So," he said. "What do you want to do with your little egg, Vasik?"
Maren looked at the display. She looked at the stars. She looked, for a moment, at nothing at all, and Senna had the sense that she was listening to something far away, something older than any of them, something that had been waiting a very long time to be heard.
"I want to get it off this ship," Maren said quietly. "I want to get it off this ship, and I want to drop it into the sun."
Senna stared at her. "Maren. No."
"Yes."
"You cannot just throw it away. You cannot just, what, delete it? That is what they want. That is exactly what they want."
"Yes."
"Then why."
Maren turned to her, and her eyes were very dark, and very steady, and very tired.
"Because," she said softly, "if it stays on this ship, it kills us. All of us. And everyone we have ever spoken to. And everyone they have ever spoken to. That is what the Helios was carrying, Senna. That is what my brother died finding. And that is what we are going to put into the sun."
The holo display flickered. The news anchor smiled her careful smile. The crawl kept moving along the bottom of the screen, telling its careful lies to everyone who would listen.
Captain Vael watched Maren for a long moment. Then he turned to his helm console and began entering a course, his fingers moving with the steady, unhurried precision of a man who had already made his decision.
"Roe," he said, without looking up. "Plot us an intercept with the primary. We have a delivery to make."