Athos

“We must never mistake the truth for its consequences.”

(Part 16 of “The Misfits” series)

Long before the advent of the artificial beings that emerged out of the algorithms data scientists used to create the first such creatures, among the builders of the first technologicals, there was a maxim: There are truths in data; the deeper the data, the deeper the truths.

In the case of the data well Major Fieldstone and the late Lieutenant Mitchell Baye had stolen from the Etteran archives, the well was incredibly deep. Mining the truths of it took the entire crew of the Yankee-Chaos and its two Maícons nearly four weeks. And at the bottom of the well was an understanding: the corruption of Etterus was clever and complete, pervasive and permeating, obscured within the fabric of every facet of Etteran society. To fully unravel it, they would need to be able to find the loose threads in that fabric and pull on them, and to do so, they would need to be able to move about the Lettered Systems freely.

Carolina Dreeson knew there was only one man in the galaxy who could ensure their safe passage, just as surely as she knew he had been at the root of the ships that had been stalking the Yankee-Chaos in recent weeks. It was time to go see him. Time to go back to Athos. Finally, it was time for her showdown with Barnard Dreeson.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” Ren asked Carolina across the dinner table as Carolina strapped herself in.

“Wise? No,” Carolina conceded. “Necessary, yes. If he’s not directly pulling the strings, I know he knows who is. And I know he could ensure we got left alone. He wants me to know he’s watching.”

“That’s some way to communicate with your dad,” Ren said, shaking her head. “Generally, my dad just pings me. Is it passive aggressive to send mercenaries after your daughter on Athos? Or would that technically be aggressive aggressive?”

Carolina laughed and shrugged. “Just his little way of letting me know how much he misses me, I’m sure.”

Carolina’s voice echoing about the atrium brought Fieldstone to the table, and, even though Transom had grown to trust his fellow Etteran operator, he gravitated that way as well, reluctant as he was to allow Carolina to be in the presence of a man as deadly as Fields without being close enough to react.

“I had a thought this morning,” Fields began after he caught Carolina’s attention. “A loose end I’m sure they thought was tied up.”

“Oh?” Carolina said.

“I overheard that you’re thinking of going to Athos. I’ve been thinking there’s a way I might be more useful out here, rather than tagging along.”

“Who said you were invited?” Transom said, shooting a half-smile in Fieldstone’s direction.

“Yeah, asshole? If I’m not welcome on Athos, and I’m sure as hell not welcome in the Protectorate, that just about leaves one place now that I’m a traitor to Etterus too.”

As the conversation continued, Sōsh floated into the atrium alongside the embodied Maícon Prime, who was wearing the appearance of a standard Maícon shell.

“Of course you’re welcome on this ship,” Carolina said, “and anywhere she travels.”

Fields nodded. “I was going to say I should be out in the Lettered Systems anyway. I just need a new identity, if you can manage such things?”

“What are your intentions?” Transom asked.

“The Deputy Chief is almost always either moved up the ladder to War Chief or directly into the EO’s cabinet. So they’re all on Etterus. Every last one over the last fifty years that’s still living. Or so I thought, at first.”

“There’s one in the Letters? Who?”

“Akop Hernan,” Fields answered. “It’s just a guess, but I think it’s a good guess.”

“How old would he be now?” Carolina asked, her brow turned down to a skeptical grimace.

“Late seventies at least,” Transom said. “Would have to be. I don’t even remember him from when I was a kid. We used to have to memorize chain of command all the way up to CIC.”

“And,” Fields continued, “we know from offensive ops that the Trasp hide their dirty laundry in some of the boundary systems. We’ve been known to take retribution or abduct their senior officers for intel if we get a rock-solid ID on anyone important hiding out there. It’d be naïve to think we don’t do the same.”

“You got a lead on any place in particular?” Transom asked. “Letters is a pretty large swath of the galaxy to go door to door in.”

“You’re a funny guy, Sebastian,” Fields said. “I had the Maícons run a probability assessment. Hernan won’t be anxious to be found, but we do have our ways, don’t we, Sebastian?”

Transom grinned.

“You said you need a cover?” Carolina said. “Anything else?”

“A ride to the Kappas. Access to funds.”

“What kind of overhead are we talking?” Sebastian asked.

“Nothing major. Enough for transport, civilian expenses, room and board, light arms maybe.”

“That can be arranged,” Carolina said. “What are you going to do if you find him?”

“Depends on what the situation is. Most likely I’ll just keep eyes on him until you lot get done on Athos. Depending on what happens there, we’ll see how it goes.”

“The Kappas aren’t exactly on the way, but it’s not the worst diversion either,” Carolina said. “Maícon, I presume you have an idea of the details?”

“Yes, Captain, we’ve prepared extensive plans,” Maícon Prime answered.

“Any other thoughts while we’re all here?”

“Many, of course,” Maícon answered. “Perhaps you could be more persuasive than I with respect to Major Fieldstone’s cover. I was unable to convince him.”

“Convince him of what?” Carolina asked.

“That he should grow a moustache.”

The humans in the room looked around at each other for a moment. Then all eyes converged on Fieldstone, who shook his head in exasperation, and simultaneously, with the exception of the Major himself and Transom, they all burst out laughing.

---

Kappa-Rhodia was where Carolina ultimately dropped Fields. She left him with a data package and instructions on how to release it to the public if things went terribly wrong on Athos and her other contingency failed to trigger somehow. Fields, if all went well, would hear from them again in a few weeks to regroup and report on his progress tracking down the former Etteran War Chief, Akop Hernan, who himself was certainly living under an alias if he was still living. His first-hand account would go a long way to corroborating the data trail they already had in hand, which painted a clear picture of a high-level conspiracy to prolong the war.

If Barnard Dreeson did anything to halt his daughter’s investigation, she would make sure her data cache made its way to public prominence. Maícon had already made certain of that much. And depending on how the conversation went, she might make it public anyway. That was contingent on what the Chancellor had to say for himself and the rest of the family.

Along the way to Athos, Carolina prepared for the showdown, spending most of her time on the flight deck conferring with Maícon Prime, who knew Barnard about as well as anyone—his manner, his education, his strategic mind. The only hole in Maícon’s understanding of Carolina’s father was in first-hand behavior in closed government meetings, where his kind were almost always excluded from direct participation.

“Your father is a notoriously shrewd negotiator,” Maícon made the mistake of saying to Carolina once during their preparations.

“I’ve met him,” she spat back at the embodied prime, who was seated beside her. “I need to know how he’s going to react to our issue set, and I need to know how to deal with his counter arguments.”

“He will not like being threatened.”

“Show me a better way,” Carolina insisted.

Maícon’s technological body shrugged as he stated. “I have no better suggestion. You must be prepared for him to pull you into personal territory, to blind you from his objectives with emotions he pricks with the skill of an illusionist.”

She’d seen it, both first-hand and with her siblings. He could make you forget about the issue and place your focus exactly where he wanted it. She’d gone up against that mind in household arguments her whole life and never once gotten her way if Barnard didn’t also will it. She had to remind herself over and over as she prepared that she wasn’t going to Athos to win an argument: she was confronting him to achieve an objective—getting him to back off. The Yankee-Chaos couldn’t be a target of every mercenary in the Letters if they were going to stand any chance of getting answers, and her father wouldn’t grant that concession freely. She knew that much.

Transom, too, had his own preparations to attend to. Unlike the others, who’d at least visited Athos before, Sebastian had never set foot on the great ring. The closest he’d come was a distant glance from Yankee-Chaos’s atrium window when Burch had picked up Carolina herself at the outlying cylinders all those months before. To say he came from a different culture put it mildly. And it wasn’t just the Athosian culture that was different. Carolina’s circle—the inner Dreeson circle—was as high as high Athosian culture got. Carolina told him that she had enough to worry about on this visit without the added stress of wondering whether Transom would haul off and break some over-eager admirer’s arm for recognizing her and approaching too fast for his liking. There were things he could and couldn’t do in service of her security, and she insisted he either learn them or stay on the ship.

“If you think you’re going into that room without me at your side,” Transom said, “you’re mistaken, Captain.”

“Very well, Sebastian. I’ll expect positive progress reports from Maícon on your preparations then.”

“I’ve never even once blown off a mission briefing, and certainly never failed to prepare for anything this important.”

Even as she nodded, Carolina’s face betrayed her skepticism. That warrior in that place? It was a leap of imagination that required a good deal of imagining.

The most difficult part to imagine, at least for Carolina, was the part she was most hesitant to broach with Sebastian. Sure, he’d been willing to dress in some halfway passable civilian clothes when Sparrow had stranded them on Pax Heavy. But presentable out on a mining colony in the Letters looked a whole lot different than even the most socially liberal areas of Athos. Ithaca, on the other hand, was a social cauldron. It wasn’t merely a question of hanging clothing on Transom’s frame. He had to wear them like they weren’t alien attire. He needed to learn to walk beside her without projecting intent to do indiscriminate bodily harm on anyone who approached. His hair needed to be right. His hands needed about a decade’s worth of manicuring.

“You keep saying we’re a soft people,” Carolina began the conversation about a week before their arrival. “We’re going to need Harold to soften you up enough to pass for … well, not an Athosian exactly, but—”

“Housebroken,” Transom said. “I understand. I can’t look like a killer.”

He took the news much better than Carolina had expected.

“It’s a mission,” he explained. “I’ll consider it a disguise—required gear.”

Harold started working on his hands daily. Proper manicures, balms and lotions, and Ren even helped out with some laser abrasion to reduce the prominence of several scars of varying size and age on nearly every finger, his palms, his left wrist.

“It’s like your hands have been through a meat grinder,” the good doctor said under her breath as she was working on him a few mornings before their arrival.

“You’ve got it backwards, doctor,” he told her.

“I’ve got what backwards?”

“My hands. They are the meat grinder.”

 He said it in a cold deadpan, his eyes fixed right at her.

“See! That. You can’t say shit like that on Athos, Sebastion. Gawd!”

“I’m just working it out of my system,” he said with a dark grin.

It wasn’t till the day they dropped out in the coded lanes outside Dreeson’s System before Transom would let Harold touch his hair. The bot had a mandate from Carolina about the style, which, according to the recent fashion dispatches, was current and suitable and also quite difficult to picture on Sebastian. And as quietly curious as the others were to witness the transformation, none of them dared to encroach as Harold was styling Transom’s hair. In fact, no one even knew it was done until Sōsh went to check on their approach and found Transom in the FO’s seat beside Carolina.

He looked down, floating between the Captain and her bodyguard, and he gave a half-look and a shrug. “Looks good,” he said. “Interesting style.”

“I will murder you with your own arms and legs, Metalface.”

“I hope that’s you getting it all out of your system, Sebastian,” Carolina said, shaking her head.

Sōsh turned to Carolina. “Be sure to take lots of pictures, Captain. We wouldn’t want such a monumental trip to go undocumented.”

“Your own metal limbs,” Transom repeated.

They’d only been in the outer system ingress lane for an hour before the ship, traveling under one of her many aliases, must have been picked out by one of the mid-system buoys. Carolina had figured it was only a matter of time. Athosian Inner Guard pinged several times, but it was an Iophan fighter group that responded on an intercept vector.

“Letters transport vessel, this is AIG Approach Command. We suspect you of running a fraudulent transponder signal, which is a Class 4 offense in this system. We order you to immediately identify yourself and your intentions or we will deploy defensive measures.”

“Command, this is the Letters transport vessel Yankee-Chaos, Carolina Dreeson commanding, I’ll be requesting a direct encrypted channel with CCOS. You can direct the staff in Mr. Maye’s office to ping me at their leisure.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Maye’s office? In Ithaca? You want us to ping the Chief of Staff? Is that a joke?”

“No. That’s correct.”

“Who did you say you were again, Captain?”

“Carolina Dreeson, and to save you the follow-up question, yes, that Carolina Dreeson. We’re running the ship on an alias to protect my identity. I’m here to see my father. I’ll need Mr. Maye’s office to find a window in the Chancelor’s schedule as well as an inconspicuous place for us to land.”

“You intend to land in that vessel? In Ithaca?”

“Affirmative, Command.”

“Standby, Yankee-Chaos. This could take a bit to sort out. I presume you won’t be offended if we mirror your approach?”

“Not at all,” Carolina said. “I’d welcome your protection.”

There was a long silence.

“Not sure they believed you,” Sōsh said. “At least they sound like they might need some convincing.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth.

“Yankee-Chaos, this is Anchor-3, AIG Approach Command. I’d just like to say, if that is you in there, Ms. Dreeson, welcome home.”

Sōsh and Transom exchanged a look. The tone of the pilot, even over the antiquated audio channel seemed palpably sincere.

“I appreciate the sentiment, A-3. We’d also appreciate a quiet approach with as little fanfare as possible, if that can be arranged.”

“Message received, Yankee-Chaos. Will relay approach instructions as they come in. I’ll be on your 8 o’clock for the duration. Do not hesitate to ping us if you need anything.”

“Guess they didn’t get the memo to shoot us out of the stars,” Transom said. “Thankfully.”

---

Athosian Approach Command rerouted the Yankee-Chaos onto an alternate vector, one that slowed the ship and ensured they would arrive under cover of darkness, when most of Ithaca would be sleeping and few eyes would be looking up at the nanosheet, tracking incoming ships. Few ships ever arrived at that hour in Ithaca, and, surely not lost on Approach Command was the fact that Ithaca happened to be in the natural nighttime penumbra of Athos, so the nanosheet opening to admit Yankee-Chaos offered a matching black backdrop rather than the blinding white of Athos’s roiling daytime clouds.

To Carolina, Sebastian appeared to be curious as they approached the ring, slowly traversing the vast side wall and making the turn to the inward-facing side of the ring. Transom hardly said two words from the time the nanosheet opened, revealing a sea of city lights beneath them, to the time they touched down in a closed port beneath the Garner Airfield—the Athosian military’s preferred docking bay for visiting dignitaries and high-ranking government officials. It was nearly as secure as the congressional buildings and offices.

“Guess it’s too late now to ask whether you’re sure this was a good decision,” Transom said as the airfield roof began to retract above them. “No chance of shooting our way out of here.”

“That was never an option, no,” Carolina said, letting out a nervous laugh. “Leverage is our only weapon here. And hopefully it won’t come to genuinely needing to wield it.”

Their second Maícon, the beheaded clone, was now guiding the ship as it descended through the airfield’s underground network and touched down. The airfield left instructions for them to remain on the ship for a security review, part of the reason, no doubt, why Carolina’s ship was directed to Garner Airfield in the first place. She and Maícon Prime had anticipated it and prepared everyone accordingly.

Maícon himself, having taken up residence in his new shape-shifting shell, was perfectly mimicking an ordinary Andrew, whom the security officers ignored nearly as completely as their Harold. They seemed far more interested in Juice’s old bot George, which had been switched off for weeks in the back storage area.

Base security officers didn’t like the look of Sōsh much, as he’d done nothing to alter his appearance to make his living half more palatable to Athosian sensibilities. His metal half made that a moot point, so he figured, why bother. Ordinary base security hardly seemed to notice Transom. It wasn’t until the Chancellor’s Guard arrived that the mood shifted.

They knew exactly who Transom was and immediately insisted on separating him completely from Carolina. She made her stance clear to them.

“That is absolutely not going to happen, mister?”

“Riles,” the senior guard replied.

“Where’s Jonathan?” Carolina asked Riles.

“He was reassigned, Ms. Dreeson. And, I should say, for the record, he was pretty bitter about it. I can assure you; we will not lose our protectee in the same manner.”

“They fired him?”

“Demoted him.”

Carolina shook her head. “I’m sorry to hear that, and I can assure you, Officer Riles, I’ll be putting in a word on his behalf while I’m here.”

“That’s inconsequential to me, ma’am. We’re here to do our job—isolating you from any potential threats.” Riles’s eyes tracked directly to Transom.

“Oh, he’s not a threat to me, Riles. But if you try to isolate me from him, that’d be a very bad tactical decision for everyone.”

“My orders were very clear.”

Transom was about to speak, and Carolina put up a finger.

“Let me be clearer,” she said. “I do not step foot off this ship if Sebastian is not at my side, and if you do not like that fact, you’d better just open up the ceiling and walk back off this ship very carefully and respectfully as you go.”

Riles glared over at Transom.

“You may keep your distance,” Carolina said. “You’re more than welcome to keep a perimeter, but Sebastian stays with me.”

“Hmmph,” Riles snorted. “I’ll consult my superiors.”

Carolina nodded. “You do that.”

“I’ll need the blade, though.”

Carolina looked over at Transom, who glared back at Riles, wearing a dark grin.

“Major Pollack is well known to carry a blade and to be quite deadly with it, Ms. Dreeson,” Riles said.

“Major Pollack is more than deadly enough without the blade,” Transom said, pulling his knife from his pantleg, flipping the naked blade into his palm, and handing it, butt end first, to Officer Riles.

“When my crew clears your review,” Carolina stated. “I expect them to be given freedom of movement on the ring, as any citizen of Athos would. They’re both citizens of the Letters in good standing and will be treated as such.”

“As part of your party, I reserve the authority to put officers on their person, just as I would yours, Ms. Dreeson—for your protection of course.”

Carolina shook her head.

“They’ll be free to move about unobstructed, but not unobserved. I’m sure you’ll understand why I might be extra cautious considering the fate of my predecessor,” Riles said. “I don’t intend to be made a fool of.”

“That’s fine,” Carolina said. “Just as long as you don’t intend to hold them here like prisoners on the ship.”

Riles nodded. “I’ll be back.”

The Chancellor’s Guard departed to report to their superiors.

In the meantime, Cinta, one of Carolina’s personal housebots, arrived toting a garment bag—clothes for Carolina herself and for her personal guardian, all pieces tailored to suit Athosian good taste. It was the finishing touch. When Transom emerged from his cabin dressed for Athosian high society, clean-shaven, hair groomed and styled, weaponless, only Sōsh was able to conceal his amusement, but only by turning the living half of his face away. His metal half retained its regular stoicism while he struggled to suppress a hearty laugh. Ren, on the other hand, didn’t have a chance.

“My God,” she said, laughing, “he looks like a human being.”

“As they say,” Transom replied, flashing a scowl the doctor’s way, “looks can be deceiving.”

“Okay, you two,” Carolina said to Sōsh and Ren. “Hang here the rest of the night. I’ll send Andrew back with instructions. Communication protocols in effect. Break those protocols only in the case of an emergency. Assume every word you utter or hear will be recorded and reviewed by my father’s interior intelligence division.”

“Hi, Mr. Dreeson,” Ren joked.

“Well,” Carolina said, unamused, “we’ll see you in a few days at the latest if all goes well.”

At the back ramp, Riles and two other CG officers were waiting for Carolina and the Major, as they referred to Transom directly, much to his chagrin.

---

The people in Ithaca referred to the vehicles in which the CG transported protectees as litters. For, even among that elite population, on such a highly populated megastructure, personal vehicles weren’t an option. Only the most important corporate leaders, visiting dignitaries, and cabinet members got spared the indignity of using public transport or, as Carolina usually preferred, her two good feet.

That, among other things, had made life difficult for Jonathan, Officer Riles’s demoted predecessor. Carolina rarely took a litter, which meant she was accessible to the people. Because of that, even though she wasn’t in public life herself, Carolina Dreeson maintained a public profile—and a highly favorable one at that.

For this trip, though, Carolina saw the sense in a layer of distance from her fellow Athosians. From what Airee had told her on the way to Lime Harbor, and from her own intuition, she figured her reappearance would trigger a rush of public interest. The dark of night was their friend between the airfield and their destination in the Ibiri Quarter. The route took them through several of the more iconic sections of the city, which were almost completely abandoned and only poorly illuminated at that hour, and still, Sebastian could hardly take his eyes from the window.

“First time on Athos, Major?” one of the CG security officers asked him.

“Yes,” he said under his breath, not even turning to meet eyes with the younger man.

“What do you think, sir?”

“I think you should care about one thing, and it’s not my feelings, son.”

“I assure you; Ms. Dreeson is quite safe here on Athos, Major.”

“Damn well better be,” Transom grumbled, still gazing out the window.

The litter slowed as it came into the tight marble streets of the Sondomme district. As they passed the outer theaters and halls of the conservatory, Carolina noticed something out her window.

“Stop the vehicle,” she ordered.

The officer diagonally across from her looked at Carolina inquisitively, but she offered no explanation.

“Atalanta stopping,” he muttered, using Carolina’s familiar old codename to relay the stop to the leading and trailing litters.

A female officer they hadn’t seen at the airfield was waiting for them outside the litter when Carolina and Transom stepped out. She made the mistake of trying to step between them. Transom merely put out an arm and gently brushed her aside, holding up a finger to let her know she’d crossed a boundary.

Carolina stepped along the white marble pavement, gazing off at a magnificent stone building the likes of which Transom had only ever seen abandoned in the dusty port city of Lime Harbor. Only this structure, here in Athos, was a majestic living building of yellow stone with carved figures, arches, columns, and fine, expansive windows. It was the most beautiful building Transom had ever beheld, and there, about halfway up the facade, where Carolina’s eyes were drawn with utter disdain, was an etching burned into the stonework, it seemed, poorly carved out by crude laser work, probably by drone. The etching read MELAS, and the letters were encircled, as many words and logos seemed to be on Athos, by a ring that encompassed the entire word.

“Melas?” Transom asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Carolina didn’t even answer. She was indignant.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded of the trailing officer. “How long has this been here?”

Riles arrived at her side, shaking his head with the same disgust Carolina was expressing. Carolina seemed on the verge of tears, as though personally affronted. And given her family’s status, Transom might have mistaken it for such if it hadn’t been for the anger of the gaggle of officers that gathered on that side of the building to glare at the stain on their pristine civilization.

“What is this, Riles?” Carolina barked again at the head officer.

“Graffiti, ma’am?”

“Graffiti?”

“It’s an unlicensed public display of crude art.”

“Art?” Carolina spat. “Michel Opera House is a work of art, Riles. This is vandalism, pure and simple. Disgusting. How long has it been like this?”

“I hadn’t heard of it here in the Sondomme.” Riles gestured to one of the junior officers. “We’ll call it in immediately.”

Carolina looked perplexed. “Here in the Sondomme? That implies this isn’t an isolated incident?”

Riles shrugged and shook his head. “No ma’am, unfortunately. That logo or icon, if you will, has been popping up recently; although, nothing quite so brazen as this.”

“What does it mean, MELAS?”

“As you say, Ms. Dreeson, it’s just vandalism. Bots will be here presently and officers not far behind, please, can we return to the vehicle before more people arrive. I assure you this will be dealt with now that we’re aware.”

Carolina turned and looked back up at the wall, shaking her head in disbelief. “Graffiti?”

She didn’t meet eyes with Sebastian as they walked back toward the litter, but she didn’t have to. He recognized the fire in her eyes even if he didn’t fully understand the spark.

Fury.

That’s the only word that did the emotion justice. And for the first time since he’d met Carolina, Transom understood her, knew her for who she really was. Sebastian Pollack feared nothing and no one, but he could sense it well enough in others, and as the small motorcade of litters blistered their way to their destination in Ibiri, he could feel it gushing out from every last one of the others, permeating the air.

Atalanta, her father’s daughter.

---

When they arrived at the residence in Ibiri, Sebastian figured it was the Dreeson family’s estate. It was profoundly elegant, expansive, and cordoned off from the neighborhood by a buffer of fences, gates, and open greenery behind a wall of trees and hedges that blocked the actual home from outward view—a smart design that combined both the appearance of opulence and seclusion.

Yet, it was almost completely empty.

Atalanta and Castor, the codename the CG had branded Transom with, remained in the litter while the Chancellor’s Guard took a report from the advance team that had cleared the house.

“Triss Ball is inside,” Riles reported as he met Carolina at the litter’s opening door. “Not sure how she found out, but she’d like to greet you, Ms. Dreeson.”

Carolina nodded as she stepped toward the front door, which was opened by one of the house bots. Transom stepped alongside her and stopped when she did, about halfway up the marble walkway to the arched front entrance.

“Riles, I want you to give my Andrew access to every file the security service has on that graffiti. I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

“Your Andrew?” Riles said. “Ma’am I assure you the security service is—”

“Did you hear Ms. Dreeson stutter, Riles?” Transom said. “Keep a perimeter and get her bot what she wants. It’s been a long day.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Riles said. “Ping our coms channel if you need anything. We’ll just be outside.”

Riles expressed genuine concern at that arrangement, but Carolina had been clear. Sebastian would remain beside her.

“So this is your house?” Transom said as they entered and the housebot shut the door behind them. “Not the family’s house?”

“It was my aunt Sennia’s, but she moved out to Petras with her family a few years before I came to university in Ithaca, so my dad kept it for me.”

“Where does the rest of the family live?”

Carolina looked at him as though the answer was obvious. “The Avery Mansion, of course—the Athosian Chancellor’s estate.”

“Of course,” Sebastian said.

“Could you at least pretend this is normal,” Carolina said. “You’re looking at everything funny, including me. It’s still me, Sebastian.”

“I’m doing my best here.”

“Take a deep breath, because apparently Triss is here somewhere.”

“In the back garden, Carly!” a voice echoed from the back sitting area.

“She’s a close family friend,” Carolina explained, “from my childhood.”

Transom shrugged and followed as Carolina led the way through the front hallway to the back sitting area and out onto the back patio, which was dimly illuminated by a ring of artificial candles. Triss was seated, and as they approached, she stood, a young woman of Carolina’s age immaculately dressed and groomed, though, Transom could barely hold back a laugh at her garish hat and veil, evidently a current Ithacan fashion that to Etteran eyes looked utterly ridiculous.

“Oh my God, who is this, Carly?” Triss said, staring at Sebastian. “They said everything about you, love,” Triss continued after a moment, turning back to Carolina, “that you’d had a breakdown, had a religious revelation, gone on a deep-space expedition, but nobody thought you of all people had run off with an absolute stallion from? I’m guessing somewhere exotic? Floriston maybe?”

Sebastian looked over at Carolina.

“This is Sebastian. Personal private security. He’s Etteran if you must know, Triss.”

She looked him up and down. “I want one, Carly. You must give me the name of his agency. Otherwise, I’m not going to lie, I’m going to poach this one right out from under you, or on top, whatever the case may be.”

“Is she serious?” Transom said.

Carolina sighed. “Mostly.”

“Deadly serious, Samson. Whatever she’s paying you, I’ll double it. I need a body man of my own,” she said. “Anyway, Carly, come. Sit. I’d left orders with Cinta to ping me as soon as you got back. I didn’t expect the CG to show up at your house in the middle of the night, but I thought somebody better get over here and welcome you. Goss and Etta didn’t bother, I see.”

Carolina and Triss sat in the chairs in a cutout along the walkway around the garden pool, whose gentle babbling waters were lightly reflecting the warm candlelight. Sebastian didn’t sit.

“I’m not sure anyone knows I’m here,” Carolina said. “My father and mother, of course, but she couldn’t exactly sneak out on an excursion in the middle of the night without anyone noticing.”

“They could have sent somebody.”

“He sent the CG, Triss. Two units. They’re probably hiding in the trees.”

“Well, regardless, you have to tell me everything. Where have you been, doll? I’ve been worried sick.”

“That’s complicated,” Carolina said. “And as much as I’ve missed your company, Triss, I’m not sure I have the energy for all that right now.”

“There was a rumor you were out in the Letters, Carly,” Triss said, looking over at Sebastian. “It’s true, isn’t it? Is it as wild as they say it is?”

“And then some,” Carolina said, smiling.

“I bet you need a guide like Samson over there to keep you from getting shot.”

“It’s Sebastian.”

“Oh, Carly! I cannot wait to hear about your adventures!”

“Not tonight, Triss.”

“I want the rights to your memoir, love,” she said, grinning from ear to ear.

Just then Maícon arrived, wearing his perfect facsimile of an Andrew shell.

“Please, Triss, I wanted to say hello, but you’ll need to excuse me as I have some business to attend to before I finally get some sleep. You should get some sleep too, dear, it was so kind of you to come check in on me.”

“Oh, Carly, it’s so good to see you. Don’t you dare leave me again without saying goodbye.”

“I’ll be in touch,” Carolina said. “I promise. Have Cinta show you out when you’re ready to go.”

Triss nodded as Carolina stood, gazing over at Transom as they walked toward their approaching disguised AI. Carolina took a few steps and suddenly turned back toward her friend.

“Oh, Triss?” she said. “One thing. We saw a graffiti, as the CG called it. Someone had carved the word MELAS on the side of the Michel Opera House with a drone, and the officer seemed to imply it wasn’t an isolated incident.”

Triss shook her head, “The Michel? Savages! I swear, Carly, this city is going to hell. I’m not sure anything’s sacred anymore.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“It means we don’t have a fraction of the class our parents’ generation did, that’s for sure.”

“No, Triss, the word. MELAS? Do you know what the carving is supposed to mean?”

“Damned if I know, Carly dear. Who knows what sort of depraved ideas such a person could be trumpeting, carving anything into such a public treasure? They’re probably crazy. They’ve been writing it all over Ithaca. All over the ring!”

“Really?”

Triss shook her head. “I swear, Carly, ever since that terrorist scare, people have been acting very strange. Very strange. You’re lucky you’ve been off on your adventures.”

“Thank you, Triss,” Carolina said. “It’s good to see you, love. I’ll ping you tomorrow.”

---

It wasn’t exactly the tour of Athos wealthy travelers from the Letters signed up for. Ren looked common enough along that mundane side street out in Petras.

Sōsh, though, attracted far more attention from onlookers than the sight of graffiti on one of the buildings in this modest municipality on the outskirts of Ithaca. Ren, Sōsh, and Maícon had been able to get to the wall before the cleanup bots, who were furiously working to scrub the paint from the wall. In this case, the vandalism seemed to be the work of a copycat, and a much less sophisticated one at that. The painted letters weren’t even sketched out to any scale. They seemed hastily scrawled by an amateur.

“Why did she send us out here?” Ren said. “I don’t get it.”

“You don’t quite appreciate the degree to which this is an aberration,” the bot said to the two travelers. “A society that numbers in the trillions must retain a healthy respect for shared public spaces. Vandalism such as this is ill tolerated, both legally and culturally.”

Sōsh turned to his left and to his right, and at both sides, people were staring back at him, several with glasses, doubtless taking pictures and video.

“What?” he stated, eliciting a sudden reaction—several people shamed into turning their heads back toward the graffitied wall, several merely looking away, and one particularly skittish couple withdrawing completely, hastily shuffling back into the crowd of passing pedestrians.

“Any idea what this means, Andrew?” Ren said to their disguised Maícon. “MELAS?”

“Historically, MELAS could refer to a rare mitochondrial affliction, a village in Macedonian Greece, a Napoleonic field marshal, or a chasm on the surface of Mars. Nothing that would fit in a contemporary Athosian context, suggesting these etchings may be an acronym for a longer phrase of unknown significance.”

“Any of you know what it means?” Sōsh said loudly enough for most of the gawkers to hear. “I’ll take a picture with the one who knows the answer.”

There were no takers.

“Why does she even care about this?” Ren asked.

“We are attracting attention,” the Andrew stated. “I suggest we withdraw. I don’t think there’s more to be gleaned here.”

“It’s not polite to stare,” Sōsh stated as they stepped away from the crowd, who’d again turned back toward him. “Really.”

“Sōsh, please,” Ren said. “Let’s head back, maybe.”

“I came out to see Athos, not for Athos to see me.”

The trio took a few steps from the side of the building where the graffiti had been discovered. As they walked, shadowed closely by their two CG escorts, Maícon turned to both of them.

“Neither of you see.”

“Yeah, I don’t get why it’s such a big deal,” Ren said. “It’s just a little vandalism.”

“It is a ripple in the fabric of their polity. It is the most troubling thing I’ve seen in Athos in ten generations.”

Sōsh looked back at the crowd behind them and then to the people eyeing him along the street.

“Could be it’s about damn time.”

---

Excepting Barnard Dreeson’s personal security detail, bots were not allowed in the Chancellor’s offices. The people who went in went in with their notes, their wits, and their best attempts at preparation. Most left with their figurative tails between their legs. Barnard Dreeson had strong convictions about how the ring was to be run, and thus the galaxy, because for his purposes, the galaxy might as well have revolved around Athos. The Chancellor also had the most capable collection of bureaucrats in the galaxy. And he had a peerless command of the layers of systems that needed to symphonize seamlessly to keep Athos functioning like a finely tuned orchestra, resonating in perpetual harmony, just the way this conductor liked it.

The litters had arrived at Carolina’s house on the promised second. The streets had been cleared of foot traffic to accommodate her motorcade. The press had been cleared from the Sesk Wing in the lower level, so that nobody might catch a glimpse of Carolina across the courtyard as she arrived. No one had guessed that her return—equally unexpected and mysterious as her disappearance—had any connection to government business, and Barnard Dreeson aimed to keep it that way.

Carolina had never been down there. She knew the Sesk as the wing of the building where classified executive briefings were held. She’d only been in the executive offices during official functions—holiday parties and the like, especially before university, when she was still living with her parents. It felt to her like she and Transom were being led into a dungeon, fewer and fewer windows the further down the corridor they progressed. At the doorway to a small, well-lit conference room, Riles was greeted by a superior officer in the Chancellor’s Guard.

The supervisor announced to an evidently open channel that, “Atalanta and Castor have arrived.”

The supervisor held up a hand to stop Transom at the entrance to the conference room. Sebastian was about to protest when Carolina turned around and scowled at the Chancellor’s advanced security team.

“I just need to scan him, Ms. Dreeson.”

“Scan away,” Transom said, holding up his hands, palms down.

The supervisor had a device in his hand that looked like a glowing blue square. Transom had never seen anything like it, but the supervisor waved the square up and down his side before gesturing for Transom to enter.

The room was small and nondescript, surprisingly spartan and not unlike similar government offices Transom had visited on Etterus. Carolina saw him noticing the room.

“False modesty,” she explained. “Like everything in the Executive Offices, the Chancellor’s Estate, the Congress. It’s all far too humble-looking and small by design. It’s our balance sheet that projects the power, not the architecture.”

They sat in silence for several minutes before a handful of CG officers arrived in the corridor outside, followed shortly thereafter by two strikebots that took up a post outside the room on either side of the doorway. Then with no ceremony or warning, the guards stood slightly straighter, and the chatter died to a focused silence as all eyes turned in one direction down the hallway. A few moments later, Barnard Dreeson entered the room. Behind him, his two closest guards followed and took up a post beside the door, the hindmost looking behind him to see that the room was properly sealed.

The Athosian Chancellor pulled out his own chair and sat. To Transom’s eyes, he looked roughly how he’d expected, like the pictures, a man in his early fifties, slightly gray, trim but powerfully built, a serious bearing, an executive in the height of his prime. He carried an energy, the power of Athos focused through him. He merely sat and crossed his arms.

Carolina and her father glared at each other through a long silence. Transom didn’t know what he’d expected, but he hadn’t expected this. The silence went on for nearly half a minute before Barnard broke it.

“Well, Carolina, I’ve carved out twenty minutes for you on a very busy afternoon. Is this how you’d like to spend it, glaring at me across a table?”

“Hello, father. It’s lovely to see you too, of course.”

“Nineteen minutes.”

“This doesn’t have to be contentious,” Carolina said.

“Doesn’t it? I do have a pretty good sense of what you’ve been up to, and with whom. Certainly a better sense than you have, at least in the latter.”

The Chancellor glared over at Transom, letting the Etteran know exactly what he thought of the company his daughter was keeping.

“Honestly, I thought you had a lot better sense than you’ve demonstrated recently.”

“I suppose we’ve both learned a lot about each other in these months apart.”

“Prudence would dictate that you reserve judgement on any subject until you understand it, yet, my dear, you are a long way from understanding, a long, long way.”

“I want you to back off, father.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Carolina.”

“The mercenaries. Bounty hunters. Whatever you want to call them.”

“You suspect that I …?”

“No,” Carolina said. “I think if you’d genuinely wanted me back here on your terms, you’d have pulled me in long ago. But the fact that someone in the Letters feels comfortable enough putting out orders on my ship means you haven’t been explicit enough to the company you keep.”

“What makes you think I keep such company, Carolina?”

“Because I have the bank records, father. Okay. Let’s not play games here. What’s your price?”

“That all depends on what you think you’d like to buy. My side of the story, I presume?”

“I wouldn’t believe a word of it.”

“Your own father, Carolina? That genuinely wounds me. This?” Barnard said, holding out his arms, palms up. “All this is business.”

“This business? Our family’s business? Did I mention I have the bank records?” Carolina said.

“What do you want from me, daughter?”

“The Yankee-Chaos is not to be touched. Me and my crew are off limits. Let everyone know.”

Barnard Dreeson scoffed. “I’m not omnipotent. The forces you are dredging up, some of them are powerful beyond even my control, especially so far from home.”

“Those mercenaries aren’t.”

Barnard nodded. “I could have some influence in certain arenas, but then there’s the matter of the cost, of course.”

Carolina gestured to the table, as though inviting Barnard to set down a proposal.

“I want something from the both of you, actually.”

“Sebastian is non-negotiable,” Carolina said.

The Chancellor looked confused.

“You reject a proposal I haven’t even finished making? That’s not how this game is played, Carolina. Plus, the path you’re going down, I couldn’t think of a more savage killer to put at your side in all the galaxy. You do know who this man is, yes?”

“I know him.”

Barnard Dreeson shook his head doubtfully and sighed.

“Major Pollack, before you leave Athos, I insist that you come in for a full debriefing on your encounter with Clem Aballi. There are holes in that incident that my ISS can’t abide, not least of which is how you are still breathing, and how you came into the company of my daughter. Also the fate of a certain Prime AI. I have some ideas, but confirmation would be appreciated, as well as the whereabouts of your ship’s former captain, provided you didn’t kill him at my daughter’s behest, in which case, I don’t really want to know.”

“Kill Burch?” Carolina said. “Father!”

“You’re certain he didn’t kill him?” Barnard Dreeson asked.

“Yes, father. God.”

“Well, that’s a relief then,” the Chancellor replied. “In exchange for your complete cooperation, Major, I will keep your presence on Athos classified. As far as I know, your government still believes you to be deceased, just as we did until quite recently. I’m not sure how long that will be the case, but on my end, I’ll make sure it isn’t our ISS that disabuses the Etteran EIC of that misbegotten belief.”

Carolina looked over at Transom.

“Send them out to the house,” Transom insisted. “I don’t leave her side while we’re here.”

Barnard nodded.

“And me?” Carolina said.

“From you I demand three things, Carolina. They are non-negotiable. First, I will allow you to continue down this extremely ill-advised path you’ve stubbornly adopted, but it must be on the condition that whatever you find, none of it sees the light of day until you give me the opportunity to refute, to explain, and to advise you on the consequences of making any such information public. Not only are you playing a dangerous game with your very heritage, a thousand-year birthright that gives its name to this entire star system—countless generations of Dreesons every bit as important and conscientious as you—but you seem to think that you get to have a choice between a galaxy with and a galaxy without war. And you are gravely mistaken. Ask your friend here what the war has done to his sector, multiply that by the horrors visited upon the Trasp, and then think about this ring and the trillions of good people on it, and then spend some time pondering what it might be like to try to sleep at night with the blood of billions of them on your hands because you were careless with information you didn’t fully comprehend. You come to me first, no matter what you find. I need your word on it, or you do not walk out of this room.”

Transom looked over at Carolina, whose face had all but gone white. Barnard looked across the table at his daughter, whose suddenly childlike eyes shut as she sighed. Then she raised her head to meet his gaze.

“Yes, father,” she said. “You have my word on it.”

“The contingencies I’m certain you have in place. You’d best rethink them in light of what I’ve just told you.”

Carolina nodded.

“Second, you will visit your family before you disappear again. Essia’s wedding would be a good opportunity to do it. I’m sure Triss can fill you in on the details.”

“Oh, God,” Carolina sighed. “I’d totally forgotten.”

“You’ll have a few angry cousins to smooth things over with, not to mention your own siblings.”

Carolina nodded.

“And lastly, you’ll make an appearance in front of the media. My communications office can make arrangements for a friendly audience if you don’t want it to be impromptu. They’ve been covering for you for months, and frankly, they’re sick of it. I don’t care what you tell them, but it had better be believable and acceptable and put all their doubts to rest.”

“Sure,” Carolina said. “Just all those things.”

“You’re a clever girl. Figure it out.”

There was a knock at the outer door, signifying the time.

“One minute,” the Chancellor said to the closed door behind him.

He shook his head across the table at Carolina and took a deep breath before he spoke.

“Prudence. I see before me a young lady with the wit of a very bright woman and the sensibilities of a child, and she couldn’t possibly be playing a more dangerous game with more monumental stakes. You’ll need Major Pollack’s steel before it’s through.”

Barnard turned and glared at Transom.

“You don’t have to say it,” Sebastian said. “I’ve known from the first time I set eyes on her.”

There was a long pause as the two men met eyes.

“Good enough,” Barnard Dreeson said, standing. “Your mother misses you, daughter.”

The Chancellor’s back was already turned and the door opening before him, as they all did.

Twenty minutes, to the second.

---

They didn’t speak on the ride back to Carolina’s villa. Transom had been present through enough of Maícon’s prep sessions to know the meeting hadn’t gone to plan, not nearly, not Carolina’s plans anyway. It had taken Barnard Dreeson less than twenty minutes to turn what they’d believed to be leverage into a liability, and the certainty, in both their minds, that he was tied neck-deep into a conspiracy to control the galaxy was made to seem silly and childish. Why would Barnard Dreeson need to resort to a conspiracy to control the galaxy? He already did. That much was certain.

Yet somehow, as Transom was turning the meeting over in his mind, as they cruised through Sondomme and then the Ibiri district, it occurred to him that they’d gotten everything they wanted—freedom of movement, permission to continue investigating, even his anonymity to the EHC—and for that, the cost was relatively scant. Right of first refusal, essentially. It’s probably what Carolina would have insisted upon anyway, a meeting with her father so he could explain himself before going public with the information. Doubtless, he’d have better input on the consequences of releasing such data than anyone. All of it was sensible. Prudent.

“So,” he said, as they were finally pulling in to Carolina’s estate, “that was your father.”

She looked over at him, awaiting the inevitable follow-up.

“It explains a lot.”

Carolina glared at him.

“Like it or not, Dreeson, it does.”

Carolina was silent.

As they exited the litter and approached her mansion’s threshold, the CG officer at the front door announced, “Your doctor brought a guest, Ms. Dreeson, and we’ve cleared him. They’re with your Andrew in the first-floor gallery, awaiting your arrival.”

“Sōsh?” Sebastian asked the guard.

“No, it’s not him, Major. He’s gone back to the ship with one of our officers.”

Carolina nodded. “Let’s go see what this is all about.”

As she led the way to the lower gallery, Carolina seemed agitated to Transom, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the meeting with her father, his own comments in the litter about it, or the unwelcome intrusion—maybe the totality.

The grand back gallery was a palatial, intricately decorated showplace. Even the furniture seemed too fine to use for its ostensible purpose. And fittingly, the guest, Dr. Ren, and Maícon were all standing on the ornate carpet in the middle of the gallery when they arrived rather than sitting.

“May I present Guy Rudin,” Maícon said, still perfectly mimicking an ordinary Andrew. “Mr. Rudin is a performance artist, Ms. Dreeson. We informed him that you were quite interested in his work.”

She gestured for Maícon to come closer and whispered into his ear. “This is the vandal?”

As Maícon nodded, she leaned in again and asked. “How did you find him?”

“One of my clones informed me of his identity and whereabouts,” Maícon whispered back.

“Why didn’t your clone report him, Andrew?” Carolina whispered, stepping back and leveling an angry look at the AI.

Maícon leaned in again and whispered, “What can I say, Carolina, my clones seem to have inherited my own penchant for mischief.”

“So it would seem,” Carolina stated. “Excuse my rudeness, Mr. Rudin, but the CG is listening. I’ve only recently been familiarized with your work.”

“I was stunned and hardly believed that someone of your eminent status had taken an interest in my art,” Rudin said, placing a hand on his chest and bowing. “How could I pass up the opportunity to meet in person?”

“You weren’t afraid?”

“What choice did I have?” He stood straight, one arm behind his back. “Besides, my biggest fear, sincerely, is to live a single day more swallowing the indignity of this façade surrounding us all and remaining silent. The truth cannot remain silent. It resonates. It bubbles to the surface despite the greatest efforts of powerful people to suppress it.”

“Lofty words for a …” Carolina paused, “little-known—and let’s be fair—marginal talent.”

“So you say,” Rudin said, smiling and bowing again.

“The work I took an interest in,” Carolina continued, “what intrigued me so much about it was the artist’s motivation. On the surface it seems crude and almost base or crass. I was left to wonder if there wasn’t some sort of postmodernist statement about the function of art itself. A critique perhaps.”

“If I told you the point, the piece wouldn’t speak for itself, would it? It would be a failure, but clearly it is not.”

“No?”

“Here I stand.”

She gestured for Rudin to come closer. Transom stepped directly beside him, eliciting an immediate discomfort in the vandal as his nervous eyes looked to Carolina for reassurance. She offered little.

“What does MELAS mean?” she whispered in his ear.

“Ah,” he said, stepping back and away from Transom. “You still haven’t seen the piece.”

“No?” Carolina said. “I have a very discerning eye. You’d scarcely believe how much I see.”

“I’m not so certain of that,” Rudin responded. “I don’t think you’re ready to see.”

“We could be having this conversation with other members of my family. I’m not the only one who’s taken an interest in your work.”

“No doubt. No doubt,” Rudin said. “This is a fair point, but you still don’t see. It is the primary obligation of every person, every adult of sound mind, to see the world they live in for what it is, with clarity, with discernment. And the greatest sin is to choose to turn a blind eye to it, for who knows what horrors come to reside in such a desert of darkness? We can’t begin to guess, can we Ms. Dreeson?”

“I see far more than you could guess, Mr. Rudin, I assure you of that.”

He snapped his finger and presented an empty hand, which he turned in each direction, displaying his naked palm. Everyone in the room, Maícon included fixed their gaze on Rudin’s empty left hand. For a few seconds, they all stood there puzzled. Maícon noticed first and then Carolina and Transom, followed by the doctor. Rudin’s right hand, cupped at his waist, was cradling in it a gleaming gold earring that took the shape of a flying bird.

Carolina reached for her ears, quickly finding her left ear bare.

“I’m thrilled that you’ve taken an interest in my work,” Rudin said, smiling as he handed the earring back to Carolina. “But you haven’t seen it. Because we do not have the luxury of walking away, we must therefore see. Good day, Ms. Dreeson.”

Rudin, stepped around Carolina, making sure to keep her between him and Transom, who seemed to take particular offense to the earring stunt. Sebastian even glanced over to Carolina to inquire.

“Let him walk,” she told him, as Rudin disappeared down the front hallway. “Let him walk.” She exhaled. “I could use a drink.”

---

Carolina’s cousin Essia was three years older than her and marrying relatively young for a Dreeson woman in the inner circle. The groom was the son of one of Ithaca’s business leaders—a commodities trader, whose legacy was mostly in metals but had spent the past generation moving into ships and deep-space construction and design. The pairing was highly acceptable to both families.

All of Carolina’s immediate family would be there, including Barnard Dreeson himself, barring any unforeseeable state emergency. Carolina’s two brothers, her sister, and her mother, and, of course, scores of cousins and distant cousins would all be certain to be counted amidst the center of power as it re-cemented the Dreeson tradition, one sanctioned new household at a time.

Carolina’s task that day, in fulfilling her side of the bargain she’d struck with her father, was to see and be seen by everyone who mattered without her presence being conspicuous enough to overshadow Essia and Daniel—the bride and groom.

In the few days they’d been on Athos, rumors of Carolina’s return had circulated, both in official media channels and by word of mouth. Triss hadn’t said anything directly about seeing Carolina on her social outlets, but she had been coy when asked about the rumors. The lights in her Ibiri villa all but confirmed what people were whispering—Carolina Dreeson was back. From the mental hospital on Hellenia? From an archeological expedition in the Indies? From an abduction by pirates while on vacation in Cerea Prima? No one knew exactly, but the media had started to cluster outside her villa, and they would certainly be waiting outside the reception to snap pictures of all the Dreesons and their guests. Essia’s wedding was a proper event on Ithaca’s social calendar.

The picture snipes, as Carolina called them, weren’t serious journalists. Even a crowd of them couldn’t hold a candle to a single one the handful of serious investigative reporters in Ithaca. That’s why she chose them. On the spot, without fair warning, none of them would have any serious substantive questions to ask, and certainly none of them had the spine to ask a meaningful follow-up question to the perfunctory answers she intended to give. They’d be too busy snapping pictures of her and demanding to know whose dress she was wearing to ask a relevant question. It was just what Barnard was looking for.

The Lox Estate, Daniel’s grandparents’ home, was the site of the reception, and, given the guests in attendance, the entire area had been cordoned off to nearly a kilometer. Locals, wedding guests, and staff were the only Athosians permitted past the cordon kept by Barnard’s praetors.

As they approached the crowd at the gate temporarily erected for the wedding reception, Carolina turned to Transom and instructed him to walk a step behind her. He understood the symbolism of it immediately and did his part by looking around conspicuously, scanning for imaginary threats, doing far more than enough to ensure he wouldn’t be mistaken for a date. Of course Carolina Dreeson’s body man would be tall and formidable, well-groomed and handsome. And absent from the social scene for so long, of course, it made sense that she would be attending solo.

They shouted for her to look at their lenses, for her to smile, and, predictably, which fashion house she was wearing. Then, as she was about to be admitted through the gate, one of the reporters in the crowd asked.

“Carolina? Where have you been this past year?”

She stopped and smiled. “On an expedition out in the Letters. Unfortunately, I can’t say more. The site is still secret.”

“Carolina, what system?”

She shrugged. “I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

“Is it in the Kappas?” One shouted.

“Does it have anything to do with the Kappa Artifact?”

Carolina smiled. “I can’t say. Really. You’ll have to wait for a press release when our findings are published.”

“Did your family know where you were, Carolina, your father?”

“Of course my father knew,” she answered. “My father knows everything. Please, everyone, excuse me. I don’t want to be late.”

Transom separated a few of the more eager photographers from her with a forearm and fell in behind her along the vacant street leading up to the Lox Estate’s front entrance.

“That went well,” Sebastian said. “‘My father knows everything.’ The Chancellor will love that.”

“You know, Sebastian, I know it’s probably asking more of you than you’re capable, but a little empathy would be in order, given the amount of pride we’re both going to have to swallow today. The last thing either of us needs is the other holding a mirror to the other’s hypocrisy. Let’s just get through this, shall we?”

“Whatever you say, Ms. Dreeson.”

---

The degree of luxury was something Sebastian couldn’t fathom. The columns in the ball room were gold plated. The walls were painted with a kind of nanofilament that allowed the painted scenes to morph, portraying a sort of silent opera of mythic splendor, complete with nymphs, hunters, chimeric creatures, beautiful people and animals, and that was just the paint job on the room.

The guests were beautiful. The food was beautiful. The music stately and tasteful, and all of it was coordinated to delicately finesse the energy of the party from the expected and obligatory, through warmth and tradition into happiness, joy, and then exuberance, all of it manicured and managed, with each party playing their unspoken role with perfect adherence. No scripts necessary.

The weight of the energy sat in the center of the floor before the head table, unsurprisingly, with Barnard and Cynthia Dreeson. It was almost as though the party was a performance for his benefit.

For those hours, while the Chancellor was present, eating and then quietly mingling, Carolina was sure to be seen visiting with cousins, migrating from sibling to sibling, apologizing profusely for the secrecy surrounding her most recent dig. For most of the day, Sebastian was ignored, blending into the background of these Athosian lives as though he were one of the serving bots or a member of the Lox Estate’s human staff.

In the early evening, long after any sort of novelty had worn off for Transom, when the only thing left worthwhile about the party was the food, Barnard Dreeson gave a brief blessing before departing.

Then, the revelers began to drink in earnest, almost as though the reins had been released with the Chancellor’s departure. The dancing became more exuberant, with the revelers belting out the lyrics to bright songs Transom had never heard before—anthems of Athosian excess from the soundtrack to their beautiful lives.

He was growing agitated.

Still, Carolina didn’t feel like she had license to leave the party as early as her parents had. It was the job of her generation to cut loose. The rest of them seemed to be doing their job with great enthusiasm.

Transom was standing back, observing as Carolina was socializing with several cousins and their dates. They were in a quieter corner set back from the dancing, and he had his back to the crowd.

Out of nowhere, he felt a hand grab him from behind between his legs as a second hand wrapped across his abdomen.

“Aw, Samson, you are delicious. I don’t know where my Carly found you, but I’m jealous.”

It was Triss Ball. She was visibly intoxicated but not so obviously that she was slurring her words or staggering. She let go of the grip she had on his ass, but she continued to brush across his torso with her other hand. Carolina caught the interaction out of the corner of her eye just in time.

“I’ll pay you twice what she’s paying you,” Triss continued, offering a wide smile. “Plus, fringe benefits.”

“Triss, honey,” Carolina interrupted, pulling her friend’s hand away from Transom’s torso. “Why don’t you come dance with me?”

“Oh, Carly, I’m so glad you’re back,” she said, turning away from Transom.

He glared at Carolina, who held up a finger, ushering her childhood friend to the safety of the dancing crowd of Athosian aristocracy.

It took every bit of restraint he possessed, but he stood there stoically, waiting for Carolina to finish the dance. Inhaling. Exhaling. Hands by his side.

A few minutes later, Carolina returned, took Transom arm in arm, and exited the reception hall, where Riles and two other officers were waiting to accompany them to the litter.

The energy in the car was so conspicuously bad the two CG officers hardly looked at Carolina and Transom. They knew better than to speak or to meet eyes with their protectee. When they got back to the Ibiri estate, the guards exited the vehicle first.

Transom grabbed Carolina’s hand before she had a chance to get out.

“Are you beginning to see yet, Ms. Dreeson?”

“I’ve seen for far longer than you know,” she said, glaring back at Transom. “It’s over now. Let’s put it behind us, please.”

 It was still before midnight Athosian time, so when they got inside, Carolina only briefly discussed with Maícon whether they should leave Athos then and there. Ren had taken the hypermag out to New Corinth and was fast asleep in her hotel room. Sōsh and the officer assigned to guard him, Grady, had taken a trip to Kysanyia Lake just at the base of the mountainous rim at the ring’s edge forty kilometers from Ithaca, and it was suiting Sōsh much better than the capitol city. So as unpleasant as their day had been, Carolina figured it would be better to sleep through the night and give the others time to wind down their visit on Athos, rather than pulling out that night.

Carolina and Sebastian seemed to tacitly agree that if anything needed to be discussed, they would do it in the morning. Quietly, they both turned in.

---

Transom awoke suddenly in the night to the sound of a distant commotion. The lights slowly came on as he rolled out of bed and to his feet. As he stepped into the corridor, he saw Carolina’s door, still closed with the lights off. A woman’s voice could be heard downstairs shouting. It was nearly three in the morning.

When he got downstairs, the CG officer on the front door was standing at the entrance holding back Triss, who was shouting into the open door, trying to make enough noise to rouse Carolina.

“Of course she’ll let me in, you imbecile,” she shouted at the officer. “Oh, look. Samson! Samson! Tell this brute to let me in.”

“Ms. Dreeson doesn’t want to be disturbed, Ms. Ball,” the officer said. “She was clear.”

“Carolina! Come down here! Oh, Samson, let me in.”

Transom stood there, his arms crossed, glaring at the drunken socialite.

“I have something to show her.”

“Go home, Ms. Ball. You’re drunk,” Transom said.

“I am, darling, but I had to speak with Carly. I don’t know what I did to upset her. I can’t … can’t leave it like that. She disappears.”

“She’s asleep, like you should be.”

Triss was making so much noise carrying on that Transom didn’t hear Carolina coming down the stairs behind him, robed and squinting the sleep from her eyes.

“Let her in, Sebastian. I’ll take care of her. I’ll be down in a minute.”

Carolina turned and headed back upstairs to get dressed.

“Sebastian! I’ve been calling you Samson. Oh, I’m such a fool, I swear.”

The officer stood aside, and just then Maícon arrived, showing Triss to the sitting area adjacent the kitchen in the back.

“I’m so drunk,” she said to Maícon as they walked. “When did Carly get an Andrew? You’re so very nice.”

“Kind of you to say, miss,” Maícon said, sitting her on the couch.

“I’m sorry, Sebastian, I was calling you … off. Wrong.”

“I’ll get Ms. Ball some water,” Maícon said, stepping toward the kitchen.

Sebastian watched from the doorway as Triss fumbled with her shoes, loosening and then kicking them off in succession. Then she looked up at Transom and stood.

“Have a seat,” he said.

“Samson, I’m sorry. I want to tell you I was serious. I wanted to tell you.”

“Sit down, please, Ms. Ball.”

“I mean it. If, because if you’re ever unsatisfied with Carly.” She reached out, grinning, and attempted to grab his crotch. “I like you.”

“I said sit down,” Transom said, grabbing her outstretched arm by the wrist and yanking her to the floor with a thud.

By his standards it was delicate.

Triss began to bawl like a wounded child, clutching her wrist.

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to, woman?”

Carolina came rushing into the room, crouching beside her friend.

“She doesn’t know,” Carolina said, glaring up at him. “She doesn’t know anything, Transom, and she’s drunk.”

“She’s rude is what she is, and she thinks she’s superior.”

“I’m sorry,” Triss said. “Carly, I should go.”

“Nonsense, honey. I’m not letting you go anywhere in this state. You’re staying here, I insist.”

Maícon arrived, handed Carolina the glass of water he was carrying, and helped Triss to her feet. He supported Triss as she drank the water one sip at a time, tears still streaming down her cheeks.

“You can put her in the back bedroom, Andrew. We’ll sort all this out in the morning.”

“Carly, don’t go. Don’t. I brought something for you. I took a picture. Let me show … It’s important.”

“What is it?” Carolina said.

Maícon was still holding her up.

“It’s in my …” She gestured toward her eyes.

“In your RV files? From your lenses?”

Triss nodded. “It’s one of those—the vandalisms you were asking over. You wanted to know.”

“Just go with, Andrew, love. He’ll help you to bed.”

“The picture?”

“You can show it to Andrew. He can analyze it. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Carolina sighed and glared over at Transom as Maícon helped Triss to the back bedroom on the lower floor. Transom didn’t speak. He certainly wasn’t going to apologize, not after the way he’d been treated by nearly all her people—these willfully oblivious people.

“Cinta, would you get Andrew an ETOH blocker for Ms. Ball, please?”

“Yes, Ms. Dreeson,” Cinta’s voice echoed through the room.

Transom shook his head.

“What do you want from me?” Carolina said. “I’m not going to apologize for my people. All I can do is what I can do.”

“I didn’t ask. Nothing either of us can say right now will change anything.”

Maícon pinged to the sitting room. “Carolina, Ms. Ball’s picture may offer something interesting.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not certain. When Cinta arrives I will be out to show you.”

She and Sebastian sat and waited for Maícon to arrive, and after a few moments, Maícon projected Triss’s picture onto the wall in the sitting room. Similar to the first graffiti on the opera house in the Sondomme, this was a laser etching on the side of a building in Carolina’s Ibiri district, a few blocks from her home. The lettering was nearly identical, only beneath the five-letter logo was an odd phrase: “bright-towered by the sea.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Transom said.

Carolina shrugged just as Maícon arrived from the back hallway.

“It is an odd phrasing that doesn’t overlap with anything in my memory,” Maícon said. “But it is unique enough that I may be able to find a match in the archives if it exists in previous written references. I shall search the city archives tonight and let you know in the morning.”

“Well,” Transom said, heading for the stairs, “good luck with that.”

---

Morning snuck up on Transom. He woke to find Carolina’s door open, her room empty, and somehow, she’d managed to creep past his open door across the hallway without waking him. For a few heartbeats and a few swift steps toward the stairs, he suffered under the sudden terror that he’d been abandoned there in that palace, until he heard Carolina’s voice echoing softly up from the first floor, in conversation with the Andrew.

When he got down to the kitchen, where she was clutching a coffee with both hands, she nodded at him as though to wish him a good morning and simply said, “Not here. The others are on their way back to the ship. We’re leaving.”

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She looked somber.

“No,” Carolina said, shaking her head. “No, I’m not.”

She gestured for Sebastian to drop that line of questioning.

“Did you get Triss home okay, or is she still sleeping?”

“I had the boys give her a ride,” Carolina answered, gesturing toward the front of the house where the Chancellor’s Guard were keeping their perimeter. “She left you a video. An apology, I suspect. If not for her, I’d ask you to do me the courtesy of watching it.”

Transom shrugged. “Sure.”

“Triss isn’t the deepest person I know, but she is sincere,” Carolina said, looking up to meet eyes with Transom. “That’s a vanishingly rare and precious quality in this city.”

“No doubt.”

“Anyway, I suggest you grab breakfast while I get cleaned up. We’ll head back to the ship first thing.”

Sebastian could tell there was something genuinely weighing on Carolina. Perhaps he couldn’t properly fathom the weight of a system or a galaxy looming over a single family. Perhaps he’d never nearly understood the cost.

She hardly ever let it show.

---

Sōsh was last to return to the ship. He’d had a sudden and obvious shift in demeanor, wearing about the largest half-grin Transom had ever seen on the living side of his face.

“Good time?” Transom asked as Sōsh and his assigned CG officer carried several crates into Sōsh’s quarters.

“Hell yeah,” Sōsh responded. “The lakes region? One of my favorite places in the entire galaxy. They had some good people out there too.”

Transom nodded.

“Grady turned out to be a top guy,” Sōsh continued. “We had a blast out there, man. How was Ithaca?”

Transom just shook his head, and Sōsh picked up on the vibe in the ship then and there.

Approach Command sent the Yankee-Chaos out on a long egress vector toward Hellenia in a crowded lane. It meant nearly twenty-eight hours before they could jump back toward the Letters. Perhaps a final subtle message from Barnard Dreeson about special treatment going forward. Carolina ordered the ship’s Maícon clone to follow the flight plan exactly, and then she disappeared into the Captain’s stateroom for nearly eight hours.

In the early evening, she called everyone to the atrium for a dinner. She, like Sōsh, had brough back a few Athosian commodities. Cinta, apparently, had given her counterpart Harold strict instructions on how dinner was to be prepared for Carolina, not just for that night, but for the coming three weeks. It was more challenging in zero-G, but Harold was doing his best. The crew were strapped in at the atrium table following the opening course, when Harold announced there would be a twenty-minute respite before the main course. Flambéing in the Chaos’s cutout kitchen wasn’t exactly an option, so he explained he was doing his best to improvise.

It was quiet at the table, and again, almost somber. The four humans—Carolina at the head of the table, Transom, Ren, and Sōsh, and at the other end of the table was Maícon Prime, having taken up the appearance of a normal Maícon shell again.

For nearly a minute it was quiet, before suddenly, for the first time all evening, Carolina just started talking.

“Even being around my toxic family this past week has reminded me of how important it is to have family, community. It’s totally weird at this table right now, and that’s my fault, my energy. It’s like, you know, my dad walks in the room and sucks all the energy out of it and dominates it. That’s not something you do to friends, I’ve decided.

“I’ve been crying all afternoon. That’s because it seems so overwhelming right now. All of it. And I don’t know what to do exactly. I know my dad if he were a young captain of a ship, he’d never say that out loud, never let it show. He’d sit here and let everyone feel as uncomfortable as he did. He’d hang on to that energy as a demonstration of his power, that it was unspeakable to speak what everyone was feeling. You all know me, though. So what am I hiding? I don’t want to stew in that energy for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be him. So, I’ve been crying all afternoon. So what?”

“What’s eating you, boss?” Sōsh asked.

Carolina sighed. “Oh, that. Well, apart from just the ordinary buildup of emotions meeting with my father, it’s the graffiti thing that’s been bothering me.”

“Really?” Ren asked.

“You don’t know?” Carolina said, realizing that she hadn’t discussed it with them. “I’m sorry I didn’t share. Sebastian was sleeping, and it didn’t seem important to the rest of you, but Triss’s picture, Maícon figured out the etching. We had it all wrong. Rudin even told me I didn’t see it, and I didn’t. I think Rudin left that last etching that Triss found as a hint. MELAS wasn’t an acronym but a literary reference—Omelas, the city of Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The ring around the letters in the etching was an O.”

“What’s so upsetting about that?” Sōsh asked. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s like the O,” Carolina explained. “Once you see the ring as an O, you can’t unsee it, and you can’t ignore the meaning once you understand the statement the graffiti is making. Maybe Maícon can explain the story more succinctly than I can, but the reason—the main reason—that I’ve been crying is the story. I read the story.”

The heads of the others turned to face Maícon.

“The fictional city of Omelas, in the story, is a utopia,” he explained, “and to be among the blessed few who inhabit Omelas, the residents must know and accept that their idyllic existence rests upon the utter misery and ongoing suffering of one helpless, unwitting, innocent child. All the residents know it, yet still, they pretend, going about their pleasant lives, behaving as though the suffering child doesn’t exist, pretending not to see.”

“It hit home to see so much of that in my people,” Carolina added, “and not all the Athosians, mind you—although, many do suffer under the same willful blindness to a large extent—but especially my people, the ones in the inner circle, my family most of all. You can believe they know the things that have to happen in the rest of the galaxy to make life on Athos what it is. And they are perfectly fine living in Athos on those terms, as long as no one forces them to see what gets done in their name.”

“And in your case,” Ren said, “I suppose it’s literally in your name.”

“That illusionist, Rudin, the vandal,” Carolina continued, “he’s right that you must first see before you can know the truth. The thing that got me so turned around is that I thought that my father was angry that I was trying to uncover the truth. Now, I’m not certain that he is. He’s so smart that it’s almost impossible to read him sometimes: you want to give him credit for knowing things he can’t know—tenth-order eventualities he couldn’t possibly have predicted. But I’ve been thinking about it since we spoke. There’s that old expression that there’s truth in data—”

“The deeper the data, the deeper the truths,” Ren finished the old axiom.

“My father had another saying—that we must never mistake the truth for its consequences. And that’s the part we must reckon with. Okay, so we get our answers, then what? What do we do with them?”

“We tell the people,” Sōsh said.

“Maybe we do,” Carolina said. “That might be the right thing to do. Or maybe that plunges the entire Battery into all-out war when they find out what’s in the Etteran dataset, what’s in the spreadsheets from the murder mills, what was in the bank on Lime Harbor, or in the testimony of Pitka Remera’s Maícon about who started the war. My inclination is to trust people with the truth rather than leveraging it for power as my father does.”

“It may also be that it causes untold chaos, as your father said,” Transom offered. “Those people down there, on Athos, I can tell you those are not people ready for war. If war broke out on that ring, it would be the greatest slaughter pen in the history of humanity.”

“There’s also the possibility,” Maícon suggested, “that the information we’ve gathered, if strategically used, may be leveraged not for the sake of control but for good.”

“In any case, we can’t fix the galaxy in a day,” Carolina said. “And definitely not this day. Athos must be reckoned with, but for now, I think we should enjoy the meal.”

“Speaking of which?” Transom shouted into the commissary.

“Five minutes more,” Harold responded.

Carolina looked at Sōsh and Ren. “You know, my mentor, Professor Bankara, I know you two may find it hard to believe, but she’s actually an amazing teacher.”

“Professor salt?” Sōsh said, shrugging. “I could see it. She is smart as hell.”

“Bankara believes that most people are hard-wired to dwell on their failures and completely ignore their genuine accomplishments as trivial, almost obligatory.”

“I’ll buy that,” Transom said. “I only have to fail once and who knows how many obituaries get written over something I’ve missed.”

“How often do you think about the lives you’ve saved?” Ren asked him.

“Never.”

“Never?”

Transom shrugged. “Almost never. Sometimes I wonder about a person or maybe a couple people I met along the way. People back on Etterus.”

“Anyway,” Carolina continued, “Bankara used to make us list out all our accomplishments at the end of a semester before she would submit our grades, and it helped to offset the inevitable feeling that we could have done better. I was just thinking, as horrible as I felt about this trip, that meeting with my father, the graffiti—”

“Triss.” Transom interrupted.

Carolina shook her head. “Poor Triss.” She sighed. “Anyway, I was just thinking the trip was not a failure by any measure. We came to Athos to get the mercenaries off our back, principally, and we did that without having to sacrifice much in return. That’s important.”

“Should we be toasting this?” Ren suggested.

Carolina smiled.

“Actually,” Sōsh said, grinning. “I do have something for this. Keep talking. I’ll be right back.”

Sōsh unstrapped and floated off toward his quarters.

“There’s something else,” Carolina continued. “Would you like to tell them, Maícon? You deserve most of the credit.”

“You please, Carolina, I was merely the emissary.”

Transom looked over at Carolina inquisitively.

“I only have limited access to my family’s holdings and business records—solely the trusts I’m specifically listed on. What my father doesn’t want us to see, none of us can access in the family’s archives without complete power of attorney, which I don’t have.”

Carolina paused to let the suspense linger among her small, captive audience.

“But my mother does.”

Ren’s eyes bulged at the revelation.

“How did you?” Transom asked Carolina. “You saw your mother for maybe ten minutes at the wedding. What did you get?”

“We got copies of everything,” Carolina stated, grinning herself now. “Business records, family transactions, properties, titles, stocks, political documents. Everything. Going back almost two centuries.”

“That had to be a physical transfer—that much data plus encryption?”

“You probably didn’t notice, Sebastian, even as observant as you are, that my mother and I wore the same earrings to Essia’s wedding.”

“The same ones—with Rudin?” Ren said.

Carolina smiled as she nodded, taking off one of the golden birds and letting it fly there in front of her for effect. “We switched them in the washroom.”

“Some very old-school spycraft, Ms. Dreeson,” Transom said.

“What did I miss?” Sōsh said, floating back into the atrium with a red bottle and four zero-G shooters filled with a dark ruby spirit.

“Carolina swiped the entire Dreeson archive,” Ren said, still wide-eyed.

“Let’s drink to that first then,” Sōsh said, floating a shotglass to each of them.

“Oh my God, what is this?” Ren said, looking at the red alcohol skeptically.

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Sōsh said. “Stuff’s delicious.”

“No seriously, Sōsh,” Carolina said. “What is it?”

Sōsh turned the bottle toward the others.

“Vodkaberry, Sōsh? Seriously?” Carolina said, laughing. “Were you and Grady partying with teenage girls up at the lake?”

“They weren’t teenagers.”

Transom started laughing so hard he could scarcely breathe. A long, heavy barrel-laugh they’d never heard from him before.

“What? I know you Etterans probably toast with battery acid or something worse, but don’t knock me for developing a few slightly more sophisticated tastes here on Athos.”

“Vodkaberry’s not a sophisticated taste, Sōsh,” Carolina said.

Ren was laughing so uncontrollably, she started to snort, which got Carolina going as well.

At one point, barely coherent as she was gasping so, Ren turned to Transom and stated, “I’ve never seen you laugh before, Sebastian. It’s nice to know you can.”

“Nice. That’s great, doctor,” Transom said, in a cold deadpan.

He glared at her, eliciting a dead silence in the atrium for several seconds. Then Ren erupted into laughter again.

Harold was bringing dinner to the table, sticking dishes and pouches to its magnetic top.

Finally, when the laughter had died down, Sōsh raised his shotglass and said, “To the Captain, the Dreeson archive, and the next piece, whatever it may be.”

They all toasted and drank.

Sōsh looked over at Transom, inspecting his face for even the slightest expression. “It’s good, right?”

Transom glared back at him.

“Okay, that’s pretty good,” Ren admitted.

“Vodkaberry,” Sōsh said. “Who’d have thought?”

“Let’s eat,” Carolina declared.

“Hang on,” Sōsh said, starting by refilling his own shotglass. “Two more first. One for Leda, then one for Lieutenant Baye.”

“Good call,” Transom said, handing over his glass. “And that will be the last drop of Vodkaberry this Etteran ever drinks.”

As they were toasting, the Maícon clone informed the Prime that a ping had just come through deep space on a long-range channel. Maícon Prime waited until they were finished the third drink to interrupt the moment.

“When you four are finished eating, Captain, a message has just come in for you on the LRDS.”

“Something urgent?”

“Nothing that takes precedence over the meal.”

Carolina scrunched up her eyes as though she were thinking.

“In light of what I was saying about my dad and keeping secrets, maybe we should just put it up on the floatscreen right here, for everyone to see.”

“Who’s it from?” Sōsh asked.

Maícon looked to Carolina for permission to answer. She gestured for him to share.

“It is from Burch, at a great distance. He and the others have interesting news.”

“How about one more for Burch,” Ren suggested, holding up her glass.

Carolina nodded and floated her glass back over to Sōsh for a final refill. “One last one for Burch,” she agreed. “Then we eat.”

---

End of Book I

The Misfits will return 2024!