Proper Company

“In my experience, people who lose hope aren’t thinking about the future. They’re struggling to break free from the past.”

(Part 5 of “The Misfits” series)

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There’s probably no secret in the outer Letters we’d like to keep as secret as Keneise. It’s not mapped in any proper manner. I’m sure there’s a survey number. But if you’ve got a ship, and you know where to find her, you’ll probably never find a nicer little water world to soak up some sun and recuperate, regardless of what ails you. The major land masses of the world are at the poles, which works out nicely, because the equatorial seas are all but devoid of land, and the area’s hot as hell. By the time the water circulates down to the poles, it’s like a warm salt bath, soothing to the skin and to the soul, both of which were welcome, especially for our guest, Transom, who was in need of quite a lot of recuperation following the blast he took from that proximity mine.

He promised to keep the place a secret if we promised not to tell anyone he got fragged. Not that we cared all that much, but the mystique of the cold, invincible, unflinching badass takes a bit of a hit whenever it becomes common knowledge that not only are you mortal, you’ve come damn near close to cashing it in.

This log entry, which is off Yankee-Chaos’s official register, started out there on Keneise, where all of us took some much-needed down time while Transom recuperated. Hale Burch, captain, recording.

I thought the waters would have Transom back on his feet in three or four weeks. It took eight before he was his old self again, both in body and spirit. For a while there, I wasn’t sure if he was going to go back to Etterus. He didn’t seem to have much fight left in him. Then he started swimming again, running, waking up early and doing calisthenics—soldier stuff. “What the hell else would I do with myself, Burch?” he asked me.

“You know,” I said to him, “I’d have said the same thing till I got blown up. Only difference was that soldiering got properly taken off the table for me that day. It will for you one day, too, and if you live through it, you’ll have to figure something out.”

“Maybe someday,” he said, “but not today.”

Once he was ready to go, we figured we’d give him a lift back to Etterus before checking in properly with Letters command and seeing if they had any work for us. Odds were good they’d have taken us for lost ourselves, so it was entirely possible they’d stopped calling after almost ten weeks since last contact. We were about to jump out on our way to Etterus, when Rishi, being the diligent sort, decided to sift through our comms backlog, and sure, there were a few messages, but nothing that couldn’t wait except for one.

“It came in two weeks ago,” Rishi said.

Everyone was back in the atrium, strapping in for the jump except for me and Juice. We were both up on the flight deck. Juice was finally starting to look like a normal human again after all that time, having made the best of that water world stop to put some weight back on his frame. He looked good.

“Well, who’s the message from?” I asked Rishi.

“I should probably just play it,” she said.

She put it up on the screen. It was one of the last people I was expecting to see, young Carolina Dreeson. She looked pretty torn up about something. She’d clearly been crying, and she started her message with a long sigh.

“Hi, Burch. I don’t know where you guys are right now, and, I don’t know, who knows when you’ll even get this. I need some help from someone I can trust. I’m not sure I know who I can trust anymore here. I need your help. I can’t say any more than that. I can get off Athos to the cylinders. I’m adding the encrypted address of a contact who can arrange for you to pick me up if you agree to. It’s a personal matter, but I can’t be more specific over a communication line like this. Anyway, I hope you can come. Of course, you’ll all be well compensated. I hope you and the crew are doing well.”

“What do you make of that, ship?” I asked Rishi.

“No idea, Burch,” she said. “But unless I dramatically misread her, something serious must be up. Carolina doesn’t strike me as the overly dramatic type.”

“Nor I.”

I was rubbing my chin, thinking about it. Etterus wasn’t exactly on the way to Athos, but Athos was definitely not on the way to Etterus. We already had a full ship. I must have been thinking about it for long enough for Rishi to guess what I was pondering.

“I think we should go get her,” Rishi said.

“Before we drop off Transom?”

“I have a feeling about it,” she said. “Like we’re not done with him yet, or maybe that, somehow all of these things are connected.”

To that point, Juice had been sitting there quietly, allowing me and Rishi sort through the business of ship running.

“We don’t even know what her issue is,” Juice said. “Looks like she’s pretty shaken up about something. You really want to subject Carolina Dreeson to Transom? Or running through Etteran space to drop him off?”

“Transom can wait,” Rishi said. “We need to go see her.”

“You steer, ship,” I said. “I’ll make the call, let Carolina know we’re coming.”

I told the crew about the change in plans an hour into the first jump. They were all still in the atrium and had a pretty decent Sabaca game going. Even Ren was in on it.

The course change wasn’t a minor detour. At best, picking up Carolina on Athos meant at least another three weeks before we could get Transom to Etteran space, but he took the news with a surprising stoicism. Yet again, it seemed like he wasn’t overly keen to get back to the war.

“You know I’ve never even seen that bastard ring with my own eyes,” Transom said. “They say everyone should see Athos before they die. I guess since I pretty much died last month, I’m overdue.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him, Boss,” Leda said.

“We both will,” Sōsh said.

“What?” Transom said. “Who is this Carolina girl supposed to be anyway?”

“This might be a bad idea, ship,” I said.

“After all we’ve been through,” Transom said, “you lot should have more faith in me.”

“That we have any at all is what scares me,” I told him. “You’ll figure it out when we get there.”

We got directions from Carolina’s contact on how to pick her up. Apparently, she had a friend who could get her off the ring anonymously, but she didn’t have a way out of the system from there. Whatever was going on, she didn’t want her actions publicly known. She even asked if Rishi could spoof our identity in case someone looking for her asked about her time aboard Yankee-Chaos a few months back. It had been a stroke of luck, then, that we hadn’t checked in with command, as we were still technically missing ourselves, maybe even presumed lost by the Letters. Yeah, of course, Rishi could spoof a signal from a similar transport ship. Carolina had us meet her on one of the Ag cylinders in the Bantham cluster, a grain plantation with a few thousand people on it called Crawford Bantham, which apparently kept a very loose docking log.

We’d been latched for maybe two minutes before Carolina was knocking on the outer door, there all by herself, carrying a decent-sized rucksack and wearing a hat pulled down over her eyes.

She didn’t wait for an invitation. As soon as Rishi opened the lower airlock hatch, she stepped in. “The less time we spend out here the better,” Carolina said to the comm outlet in the empty room.

“Where to?” Rishi asked.

“Out of Dreeson’s for now,” she said. “I’m not entirely sure yet. Maybe Hellenia first. I don’t even know.”

As soon as we’d cleared those outer cylinder groups, Rishi burned us straight away from Athos so the only good view they got of us was the light escaping our engines, a proper look at Yankee-Chaos’s backside and nothing in profile, in case anyone was looking.

I floated down to greet Carolina in the Atrium. Transom, Ren, and Sōsh were strapped in at the table by then.

“How was the view?” I asked Transom, referring to the ring, which we didn’t get much time to see from out at the Ag cylinders.

“Kind of amazing,” Transom said. “Center of the galaxy, one would think from the way everyone talks about it, and you could hardly tell it’s even there.”

“Yeah, biggest structure ever built looks like a hair tied around a football,” I said. “It’s a little less anticlimactic when you land there.”

Carolina seemed to be struggling to guide herself down the back corridor. She looked awkward in zero G with that rucksack on her back. I floated over there to give her a hand getting the bag off, but she grabbed me around the neck and started hugging me first.

“Thank you, Burch,” she said.

She was a proper emotional mess, and she hadn’t even fully made it into the atrium yet. It took her a minute or so to compose herself.

“I’m going to put you in my quarters,” I told her. “Guest room’s occupied at the moment.”

“Whatever you think is best,” she said.

Carolina greeted Leda and Sōsh as we passed through the atrium, and I could see Transom looking over at Carolina curiously. I supposed the crew had filled him in already on who Carolina was.

“Get settled in,” I told her when we got to my quarters. “When you’re ready, come on up to the flight deck and tell Rishi and me what’s going on. Take your time.”

“It’s awful,” was all she said when I left her there. She shook her head and took a deep breath.

We didn’t see her again before we jumped out of Dreeson’s for Hellenia. Meanwhile, Rishi had tapped into local networks and grabbed as much news as she could pull. We’d been out of touch for a while. Rishi didn’t know whether she had the whole story, but she thought she’d found the root of what was eating at Carolina, and it was no small matter. Her Aunt, Sayla Purcell, had taken her own life a week before Carolina had sent that message asking us to pick her up. As uncommon as such a thing was on Athos in general, for a woman in her forties, especially one of the Dreesons, it was particularly shocking. From what we could gather from the reports, nobody really understood why she’d done it. Outwardly, she seemed to have a full life. Of course, for the lot of us banged up soldiers, it wasn’t as though it was a foreign concept. With the kind of losses we’d dealt with, I think we’d all thought about going down that road ourselves at one point. It was tough for me to reconcile my own journey with Carolina’s Aunt, though. Of all the lives in the galaxy, at least superficially, one would think Sayla Purcell would’ve had as much to live for as anyone. But I’d learned a little about the Dreesons being around Carolina, and as good as things looked for their family from the outside, life isn’t easy for anyone, really. We’ve all got our own monsters and demons to face, and the thing is, you can never truly understand what anyone else’s monsters look like to them. I figured it’d be a lot better to hear about the situation from Carolina than reading what Rishi had pulled from public sources.

Carolina told Rishi that she felt too tired to come out that evening, that she’d been trying to sneak out of Ithaca and then off the ring for nearly four days, sleeping in guest rooms, then ducking off Athos by trading places with a crew hand on a cargo carrier.

I decided to make the flight deck my temporary quarters while Carolina stayed with us. I suppose the one benefit of being legless, if there were any, was that in zero G, I could pretty much get about as good a night’s sleep in the captain’s chair as my rack.

“So basically we just kidnapped Carolina Dreeson,” I said to Rishi as I was settling in. “Sounds about right with all the nonsense we’ve been up to these past few months.”

“It may look that way to the Athosians,” Rishi said, “which will definitely not go unnoticed, given what’s going on in the family.”

“Hardly the riskiest thing we’ve done for a friend lately,” I said. “She might be our last friend on Athos, though, after this.”

“I’ll drop us out far enough from Hellenia that no one sees us coming,” Rishi said. “We can figure out what to do once we talk with Carolina in the morning.”

We were still on Letters time, and Carolina was on Athos time, so she was up before the rest of us—at least most of the rest of us. When I opened my eyes, she was out in the atrium, strapped in at the table having a coffee, and across from her, was Transom. I figured I’d get down there.

“It’s actually going okay,” Rishi said as I was unstrapping. “If he keeps it up, I may begin to think he has a decent side, but I know what you think already, Burch.”

When I got back there, Carolina did seem better than the previous night anyway. She even gave me a halfhearted smile as a greeting when I approached the table.

“I was just getting acquainted with your guest, Burch. Transom is the first proper Etteran soldier I’ve ever met.”

“Transom’s not really a proper anything,” I said. “Proper piece of work, maybe. We were just going to drop him off in Etteran space when you called.”

“I’m glad you didn’t, Burch,” Transom said. “First proper Dreeson I ever met. She seems like a—” he paused for a moment, looking over at her. “Well, she’s a lot different than what I would have expected.”

“What were you two talking about?” I asked.

“Suicide,” Transom said. “Casual breakfast conversation, right kid?”

Carolina shrugged. “I presume Rishi told you about my Aunt?” she asked me.

I nodded. “Were you close?”

“Yeah,” she said. “She used to babysit me a lot when I was younger. We’re a pretty tight family. It’s been a brutal few weeks.”

“Do you want to talk about it now?” I asked her. “In private maybe?”

She looked over at Transom. “I don’t think we’ll be sharing state secrets. Will we, Burch?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It just sounded urgent enough to come pick you up that we dropped everything.”

She sighed. “There was something going on before my aunt took her life. The past few months, I’m not sure if you’ve been following this whole alleged terror plot, but I’ve had the sense that somehow our government is all wrapped up in it. Whoever those terrorists were, it had everyone really spooked, my dad included. I’m not saying it had anything to do with Sayla taking her own life, but the way everyone in my family—my dad, my grandmother, my other aunts and uncles—all me and my cousins wanted to know was why she would do that.”

“It doesn’t always make any sense, kid,” Transom said. “Sometimes it’s the people you’d least expect.”

“I know,” she said, “but it seemed like they didn’t want anyone asking questions about it, least of all us.”

“It might be that there’s not an answer,” Transom said. “Sometimes there’s just no explaining the unexplainable.”

“There’s a lot of other weird stuff going on, though,” Carolina said. “Sayla had been traveling off world a lot in the months leading up to it. She was very secretive. My cousin Ally thought she was investigating something. Sayla told her it was a family genealogy project, as though our family’s genealogy isn’t well documented enough. Then the AI she was working with went missing under very mysterious circumstances. Both Sayla and Ally were disturbed by his disappearance, and no one in my family seems to want to know about that either, even though Maícon has been close to our family from as far back as Charris. Even my dad doesn’t seem interested in figuring out how he disappeared.”

Transom looked over at me. Of course, during the weeks he was recuperating on Keneise, he’d told us about meeting the original Maícon and watching him get blown up. Transom flashed me a look as though to ask whether we should tell Carolina the bad news.

“You two know something,” she said. “That’s the same damn look I’ve been getting from my family for the past month. Don’t you start, Burch.”

I gestured for Transom to tell her. He was the eyewitness, after all.

“Maícon, the prime Maícon anyway, I’m sorry to have to say, but he’s dead.”

“Dead? What do you mean dead? He can’t die, he’s an AI—one of the primes.”

“The terrorist your people were looking for,” Transom said. “We were the ones hunting him down. Maícon was with me and a team of commandos from the Letters. I was on the ground when the terrorist blew up our ship. Maícon was aboard when it happened. I’m sorry, but he’s gone. That ship got blown to hell. Nothing came out of there.”

“You saw Maícon?” Carolina said, wide-eyed. “You’re sure it was him—the prime.”

“Oh, yeah. He let everyone know about it.”

“Tell me everything about the way that ship got destroyed.”

Transom shrugged and described the scenario—how they’d attacked the manufacturing outpost, how he’d gone after Clem Aballi alone, how their ship had been hovering above him when it was destroyed, then how he’d gotten blown up by a proximity mine. He even went into greater details about the conversation he’d had with Aballi while he was bleeding out in the desert rocks.

“Did Aballi know Maícon was with you?” Carolina asked.

“I don’t see how he could have,” Transom said.

“Burch, we need to go there now,” Carolina said. “Maícon is still there.”

“How?” Transom asked. “I can’t imagine a processor coming out of that conflagration and then surviving a thousand-meter fall.”

“That’s because you don’t know anything about the processor,” Carolina said. “Maícon is still alive. You need to get us back to the wreck,” she said to Transom.

“Rishi knows the way,” I said. “It’s just—”

“Burch, this is the most important thing in the universe. Rishi, please,” Carolina said, and then she continued talking as though thinking aloud. “We’ll need to find him a body somewhere along the way. And wetware. Somewhere high end that’s off the grid. Nobody can know we’re going there.”

“Ship?” I said. “Are you getting all this?”

“I’ll set us a course,” Rishi said.

“Won’t that outpost still be crawling with Athosians?” Transom said.

“Maybe,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

And that was that. This sure was the Carolina I remembered. Once she got her mind set on something, it was happening. I hadn’t even had my coffee yet, and there was no way Transom was getting back to Etterus until young Ms. Dreeson had her answers. I suppose it was a good thing we’d kept him aboard after all, given his encounter with the prime Maícon.

We had a lot more discussion as the day progressed, mostly on how we were going to revive this original Maícon. Carolina knew things that most heads of state in the Letters probably didn’t even know. And it turned out that Transom had some in-depth knowledge about Maícon too. Apparently, they’d had a rapport of sorts, which was surprising. Must have been a hell of a charismatic bot to get anything out of Transom but scorn, if the way he treated our android Harold was any indication.

Carolina, meanwhile, was working with Rishi on a plan to find a place along the way we could pick up some wetware, which was a computer term I didn’t know or understand. But Rishi, Juice, and even Harold himself were all working to figure out a way to reconstitute Maícon if we could somehow find his main processor in the mess of shipwreck out in that desert world. It wasn’t really a processor, as Carolina explained it. The core of the processing unit—Maícon’s brain, essentially—was, on its own, a solid, inert, graphene sphere about the size of a cherry, and according to Carolina, nearly as hyperdense as the ring material in FTL drives. Even if the explosion had vaporized the entire ship, according to Carolina, as long as the debris didn’t fall into the mouth of an active volcano, a star, or a black hole, there was pretty much nothing in the universe that could put a scratch on that processor core. The wetware was a specialized type of aqueous solution that surrounded the core, facilitating communication between it and a suite of processors that surrounded the fluid and the core. When active, the whole system was Maícon’s brain. Hyperintelligent, unique, and housing one of the oldest living memories in known existence—at least he’d certainly seemed like a living being, according to Transom.

Our problem was that there weren’t a lot of places we could pick up wetware components like that, especially if we wanted to remain inconspicuous. It turned out, though, that we had a decent team already aboard in Juice and Rishi, who had her own personal motivation to reconstitute the original Maícon as a way of paying back a similar debt she owed to one of his distant clones. Between the information she had in her databases about wetware and what Carolina could tell us specifically about Maícon, Rishi and Juice were confident. They believed they could build a functional interface that would allow them to communicate with Maícon well enough that Maícon himself would be able to instruct them on a permanent solution. Rishi gave me a shopping list. Apparently, their short-term plan, if they could get the interface working, was to house Maícon in Juice’s rusty old workbot George. It’d certainly be the last place in the universe anyone would go looking for the most sophisticated ancient AI in the Battery. It needed a decent voice box and a power supply upgrade, but Juice had already re-done its legs, its vision, and a bunch of other technical upgrades that were too in the weeds for me to know much about.

We stopped at a little lunar settlement just our side of the Boundary systems called Keaton-Myrra. They were renegade enough that they wouldn’t be so fussy about the ship’s register, and it was close enough to our bearing that it didn’t take us too far off track. Carolina was anxious about getting there as quickly as possible. We weren’t sure whether that would be such a great idea. There was a strong possibility Letters security or the Athosians would still be keeping up a presence around the outpost, just to see if anyone from Aballi’s network came back to the site.

Along the way, Transom took a keen interest in Rishi’s topographical charts of that lonely planet. He worked with her closely to try and narrow the area of the ship’s debris field. Even after they were satisfied that they’d identified a proper search grid, Transom kept staring at the map. He came to me the night before we were scheduled to arrive. I was up on the flight deck. He didn’t even knock.

“Burch, I hope you don’t mind—”

“What, barging in while I was about to fall asleep? No. No trouble at all.”

“Great,” he said, completely ignoring me. “I need to take a few drones out when we get there. The rest of you can handle the search.”

“What are you talking about? What other business do you have out there?”

“Personal business. I have to know.”

“Know what?”

“How he got me. I’ve never had anyone get the better of me like that. I need to know exactly how he did it—plug the leak.”

“Are you kidding? Why? You’re not considering going after this guy again?”

“Not particularly.”

“You’re going to twist your head all in a bunch over this. Not that I care. It’s your head. My opinion, one soldier to another, is that the one thing that made you better than any other soldier I’ve ever crossed paths with is that you have keen instincts and you didn’t overthink things.”

“I’m taking a couple drones out when we get there. That’s all I came to say.”

“Just don’t hold us up. We want to get in and out. That’s if there isn’t a security detail sitting on the outpost anyway.”

Rishi took us into system 563613 from an odd approach angle, bringing us up toward one of the planet’s poles fast to an aggressive braking maneuver in the upper atmosphere. There was no sign of any surveillance on the way in.

“Let’s be quick regardless,” I told everyone. “Be on your toes and ready to bug out of here in a heartbeat if anyone shows.”

Leda was first out, hopping out the airlock at a thousand meters in her drone suit. Rishi dropped the rest of us on the surface to walk a line, except Transom, of course. Rishi dropped him off in the hills to retrace his steps from that day he’d gotten fragged. I had to remind myself not to get agitated with the guy. He was always going to do his own thing.

When Rishi returned to the site, she took close passes over the search grid, taking lidar readings. The ground was hard, wind-packed sand—almost sandstone. And the ship had largely disintegrated before hitting the ground, so we didn’t expect this piece to be buried deep if it was still here. That was our only initial question. And by the looks of things, no one had been there looking through the debris for anything, specific or non-specific. Rishi was optimistic.

Leda flew in parallel with Rishi covering the grid, double-checking any spots that seemed like a possible hit on the lidar. Those bionic eyes of hers did the trick once again. We were there for a little over an hour before Leda swooped down on an object that looked like a round black rock and tried to pick it up.

“I think I found it,” she said, “if it weighs more than Sōsh ’s metal half. I don’t even think I can lift it.”

“I’ll send Harold over,” I told her.

We were up in the air a few minutes later with Maícon’s core in hand. Transom was still out in the desert. I had Rishi put me through to him.

“We’re out of here, Transom,” I told him. “I was thinking of stranding you again, but Leda and Rishi would never let me hear the end of it.”

“Negative, Burch. I figured it out. I need to borrow Leda. We’ve got some charges to blow.”

“How long’s it going to take?”

“However long it takes,” he said. “This isn’t an optional job, it’s a we do the work. So, chop chop.”

Rishi explained what Transom had learned. Aballi had examined the topography outside the manufacturing facility. There were eight natural routes out into the hills on foot, and he’d proximity mined every one of them. Transom had mapped out the first five pathways with the drones by the time we’d arrived to help clear the mines. He had Leda fly overhead and drop rocks to set off the live charges still out there.

“You don’t leave live ordnance around like that,” he said, “for some colonist’s kid to get blown to bits three hundred years from now for no reason. If I ever see that asshole again, I swear…”

So that’s how he’d gotten him. Mined every footpath, figuring Transom would try to track him down personally. That took a little mystique off one of the wizard’s tricks. They found and detonated fourteen sets of charges in those hills over the next three hours. It wasn’t exactly us being inconspicuous, but Transom did have a point about leaving live ordnance around. It was an odd bit of dissonance in my mind—Transom the good Samaritan. When I asked him about it later, he just said, “We keep war in the war zone. That’s all.” Cracking that man’s ethical code was a mystery equal to any of the befuddling situations we’d gotten ourselves into.

By the time Transom and Leda were done blowing the charges, Juice, Carolina, Harold, and Ren were already hard at work, trying to get Maícon back online. They estimated it might take weeks before they had Maícon operational inside George’s body. So I asked for suggestions on places with an atmosphere and the right gravity, where we could work without any chance of being happened upon. Juice actually had a place in mind—Texini, of all places. He was right that no one would ever find us there. After what had happened to his people, it might be that no one went back to that planet ever. Nobody else objected, so off we went, back to the beginning, Juice’s adopted homeworld turned ghostworld.

“Actually should be pleasant weather there this time of year,” he told us.

I was shocked he would entertain the possibility of ever going back to Texini, but between him and Transom, the gang was turning out to be full of surprises.

Along the way there, I happened upon Transom and Carolina quite a few times talking in the atrium. Each time, I seemed to interrupt either a completely normal conversation or a surprisingly deep discussion surrounding Carolina’s recent circumstances—her aunt’s suicide, her growing suspicions about things going on in the Athosian government, even her thoughts about her own family’s reaction to recent events. Most of the time, when I joined them, I sat quietly, listening to a man I realized I had never even met. This Transom seemed like a human being, and I couldn’t help but wonder what was bringing that out of him—revisiting that brush with his mortality back on that planet, or was it Carolina herself? She certainly had a way with people, sure. But I still wasn’t certain whether Transom was an actual person, after all. Maybe it was just time—that change in mindset being away from the war so long. Who knows? But he was sure acting different.

When we got to Texini, Rishi took Juice’s advice on where to set down. He chose one of the northern towns not too far from his own. There was a little pond to the north, a few hills, and a large enough barn that the computing team could set up in there and work on reviving Maícon together without getting baked in the sun.

As they were getting the workspace settled out there, Leda, Transom, and I cleaned out a couple of the empty houses on the outskirts of the town. We figured it’d be more comfortable than cramming into Yankee-Chaos after she’d baked in the hot sun all day out on the edge of the desert basin.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one noticing how friendly Transom had become with young Carolina, because Leda started giving him a hard time while we were pulling out the furniture to dust it and air the rooms out. She made some remark about one of the couches being a nice place for him and Carolina to watch the sunset together. We were outside in the dusty street by the front door of this old townhouse, and Transom stopped dead in his tracks and pitched about the fiercest look I’d ever seen from a man over at Leda. And I was thinking we were about to see the real Transom again. I didn’t know whether to leave the two of them alone to hash out whatever was going on there or to stay in case it got ugly. It was like he could sense what I was thinking.

“Don’t you dare slink away, Burch,” he shouted at me. “This concerns you too.”

I put my hands up in the air to let him know I hadn’t fired the first shot.

“You don’t even know what’s going on here, do you? Either of you? You can’t see the writing on the wall?”

“I was just joking around,” Leda said. “God, she’s like a teenager, Transom.”

“Only a rich family from Athos could raise a kid that innocent. And let me tell you, when that AI wakes up, she’s about to ask questions even we don’t want the answers to. Have you two even asked yourselves why Aballi has such a bug up his ass over Athos? Are you even curious about that? That girl’s family is Athos, and she doesn’t have the first clue about who she is. If I were placing bets on why somebody in the Dreeson family killed herself within weeks of that whole fiasco with Abbali, I’d bet those two things might be related. If any of you people had eyes, you’d realize this kid is about to get crushed. Normally, I wouldn’t care less, but, yeah, Leda, I like the girl. She’s an innocent kid. Open your damn eyes.”

Then he walked off.

Later that evening, Carolina told me that Transom had bumped into her back at the ship. He’d pulled her aside and told Carolina that he was sorry about everything happening to her and that he’d be willing to help her talk through it. I asked her if it was awkward and whether she wanted me to talk to Transom, tell him to back off.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that at all. I like him. I’m just confused, because you all treat him like…well, you treat him like he’s different from the rest of you—dangerous somehow. I don’t know.”

“Let me know if it gets weird, Carolina,” I told her. “He is different from the rest of us. Dangerous? Probably not to us, but you definitely don’t want to make an enemy of Transom.”

Things got quieter after that. It took thirteen days there on Texini before Juice, Rishi, Ren, and the rest of them finally got a signal back from that little round rock that supposedly housed the mind of the oldest AI in the Battery. Even then, the communication was sparce, just messages back and forth about the current situation, accessible materials, and finally, directions back from the ball about how to proceed. Juice said it was going to take another week before they finally had Maícon’s brain properly installed in George’s body.

I offered to run Transom back to Etterus in the meantime.

“I want to see this through,” he told me. “It’s important.”

“Fair enough,” I told him. “Nobody’s trying to get rid of you.”

“I know,” he said.

He started taking long walks in the hills. I, on the other hand, sat on the porch of that townhouse and read. The last book I had read start to finish was during my second stint in the rehab hospital. I hadn’t had a moment since to relax enough to just enjoy reading a novel. I read three that week.

The “brain” the gang was building in that barn was one of the coolest looking tech toys I’d ever seen. The permanent interface was a sphere Juice printed from an amalgam of metals and carbon fiber. That round container was filled with a hyperdense aqueous solution that Maícon’s core floated in. Juice had to print the thing in one go, which meant they had to fill up the sphere with the solution as the printer fabricated each layer. In order to get the core to float in the middle, Carolina and Ren had to alter the density of the fluid mixture as they filled the sphere. Then, once the sphere was filled and sealed, Juice installed the processors that communicated with the android body on the outside of the sphere. Then he installed that “brain” in the head of old George after wiring up the relevant bodily systems. Juice was a pro with all that stuff—he and Harold mostly. Though Ren and Carolina were on hand to help out as needed too. After all those tech theatrics, I was looking forward to meeting this special bot. I’d met a few Maícons over the years, but Transom insisted there was a difference with the prime. He’d even used the word wisdom.

On the day they were finishing up Maícon’s head, I had Leda and Sōsh help me drag a dinner table behind the barn and set it down in the shade cast by the building. I figured we could sit down and eat together—celebrate once they’d finished the work. Transom and I were sitting there together at that table, me reading and he sipping coffee, when Carolina came walking along the back wall of the barn with old George, who presumably was now being occupied by the spirit of that ancient AI—Maícon himself. Maícon prime looked even more robotic walking than poor George did steering that awkward heap of a body, but he was getting around again anyway.

They sat down with us.

“It would appear I have a lot to thank you for, Transom,” Maícon said. “And you as well, Burch.”

“Would you believe me if I said I was happy to see you functional again?” Transom said.

“Oddly enough, yes,” Maícon said. “I can’t say the body’s all that stylish, but I imagine if it hadn’t been for your chance encounter with Carolina, it would have been a great deal of time before I was reconstituted again, if ever.”

“Life’s funny like that,” Transom said. “If it weren’t for Carolina calling Burch, I’d be back somewhere on the West End, most likely, killing a bunch of people I have no cause to have any quarrel with of my own. Maybe one of them will live and do something meaningful now.”

“There’s a thought,” I said.

“Carolina wanted to speak with you both,” Maícon said. “That’s why we came out together. She wanted you two to be here because, for whatever reason, she trusts you both. No offense intended, Burch. I do not know you.”

“None taken,” I said. “In fact, the opposite. Carolina’s trust is no small thing in my book.”

“A lot has happened,” Maícon said. “Your very interesting ship’s AI and I had quite the conversation this afternoon, Captain Burch.”

“She has a special fondness for one of your clones,” I said.

“I’m well aware,” Maícon said. “She filled me in on the news of the past month or so, both out here and on Athos. Our operation didn’t go quite as planned, needless to say.”

“On the bright side,” Transom said. “The guy never intended to irradiate a Trillion of Carolina’s fellow Athosians, so that’s a plus.”

“That possibility was never in our calculus,” Maícon said. “As I told you before, Transom, Aballi is among the craftiest humans I’ve ever dealt with.”

“Yeah,” Transom said. “We’ve both got the scars to prove that.”

“And the uproar on Athos is testament to it as well. The damage may be irreparable.”

Carolina laid a binder on the table and opened it. “Sayla’s husband Michael married into our family and was very suspicious about how she died,” Carolina said. “I thought, at the very least, someone should listen to him. My father told me it was just pain and confusion—the search for an answer where there was none. Michael, for whatever reason confided in me, maybe he reached out to others and I was the only one who listened. I don’t know. But he gave me a list of meetings she’d had in the months leading up to her death. He didn’t know exactly what it was all about, but my cousin Ally thought it had something to do with my grandfather and the war. I’m not sure if even you know all of this, Maícon, but I did my best to figure out all the people she’d met with and what their connections were to my grandfather. There was a name on her contact list I almost couldn’t believe.”

Carolina illuminated the list and projected it holographically above the binder. The names, of course, all meant nothing to us until about halfway down the list. There he was. Our terrorist, Clem Aballi.

“I didn’t know what to make of it, and I still don’t,” Carolina said. “Please, Maícon, tell me you can make sense of it.”

“Exactly, no,” the AI said. “This is an even more improbable cluster of names than my finding you here with Transom, dear girl. This galaxy of ours is an unpredictable place.”

“Is there any chance she was working with him?”

“Sayla?” Maícon said. “Certainly not. More likely she was being used by him in some way, probably for information about the family. She’d have had no idea who he was or what he was up to, I suspect. Before last month, no one but the security service even knew who he was. It’s the other names on this list that interest me.”

“How so?” Carolina said.

“They cluster around three distinct events at various points in the past century. Some deal with your grandfather, some with your uncles. Burch and Transom may not know, but the Athosian government keeps AI sequestered from any of the internal dialogue about decision making. Only at times of vital importance, like we suspected Aballi’s purported terror attack to be, will I be called upon. The events these names cluster around are interesting Carolina, but I have no first-hand knowledge. We’ll need more information before I can draw any conclusions definitively.”

“What about not definitively?” Transom said. “This isn’t an inquest, robot. Tell us what you think.”

“There may be a deeper connection between Athos and the war.”

Transom shook his head and looked over at Carolina. “I’m sorry to have to say this to you, but he won’t. What the robot means to say, Carolina, is that he suspects your family may be filled with war criminals.”

“That is not remotely how I’d have put it,” Maícon said. “And we have no evidence yet, just a list of contacts.”

“Transom?” I said, looking over at him. “What the hell?”

“Carolina’s not dumb, Burch. She might be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.” He turned to her. “It’s better you know the truth and best that it’s discussed when people are here with you to help you process it.”

She had tears in her eyes, but she had her emotions as well in check as one could imagine under the circumstances. All her beliefs about who she was, who her family was, what her civilization was in the scope of the Battery—basically every foundation a person has—was cracking under her feet.

She turned to Maícon and asked. “What about my father?”

Maícon tilted that busted old robot head of George’s and simply said. “Your father runs the government.”

“I need to talk to him,” she said.

“I would very much advise against that,” Transom said. “That sounds like the worst possible idea I could imagine.”

By that point, Carolina was clutching her hair with both hands and was curled up in a ball with her feet perched on the edge of her seat, resting her chin on her knees.

“I agree,” Maícon said. “We should not contact Athos, especially not your family. We need more information. I know where we must go, but it’s going to be dangerous, Carolina.”

“Good thing she’s got an entire crew of badasses watching her back,” I said.

“Damn straight,” Transom said.

“All right,” Carolina said. “Wherever the trail leads. I owe that much to Sayla.”

“You just give Rishi the coordinates and we’ll get underway,” I said.

“I could use another day or so,” Maícon said. “No disrespect to your luddite technician, who did a commendable job on my processor interface, but this body is a monstrosity that needs quite a bit of work before I go anywhere I might be called upon to defend myself and other humans, especially Ms. Dreeson.”

“Just let us know when,” I said.

“Mr. Burch,” Maícon said. “You are a true gentleman, and you have my gratitude.”

“Ain’t that something,” I said, and I meant it.

Juice, Harold, and Maícon himself did some work fixing up George’s old android body over the next forty-eight hours or so. Of course Juice had been working on upgrades piecemeal since he’d joined us on Yankee-Chaos, and he had picked up quite a few parts on Keaton-Myrra in anticipation of Maícon needing George’s body. But it sure was something to see it transform from a total clunker to a fairly dynamic android in a matter of a couple days.

When he was finally ready, Maícon gave us the destination. We were heading to a defunct cylinder group hidden away in disputed space between Trasp territory and the Letters. He wouldn’t say what was out there, except that it was the next piece in the puzzle.

Before taking off, I asked Juice if he wanted to take a minute to pay his respects to his old home. He hadn’t stopped working on Maícon’s body for a waking minute since we’d landed.

“I’m good, Burch,” he told me. “I had plenty of time to reflect when I was up in that cave. It’s not easy to see this place, though. I’ll be glad to go.”

It got me thinking about all of us, how one way or another we kept doing things that had us staring our past demons in the face. Even young Carolina was getting her feet wet on that front. And Transom? It turned out I had no idea how right I was about not knowing him.

Rishi woke me from a dead sleep in the middle of the second night on our way to the Garvin system. Carolina had been up in the atrium drinking tea by herself. Then Transom got up and saw her there, looking sad. He floated over and sat across from her.

“I don’t like eavesdropping, Rishi,” I told her.

“This was twenty minutes ago,” Rishi said. “And you need to see it.”

“Is Carolina okay?” I said.

“Yes. Just watch.”

So I watched as Rishi replayed the encounter on the float screen.

“Can’t sleep?” Transom said.

Carolina shrugged and looked across at Transom. “You?”

“Thirsty,” he said.

“Grab a drink,” Carolina said. “Pull up a seat.”

Transom floated back over to the commissary, made himself a cup of tea and came back to the table with a water pouch for Carolina. He placed it gently in front of her on the table as he pulled himself down to the chair across from her.

“A lot to think about,” he said. “I’ve been trying to imagine your perspective. Best I can come up with is that it’s probably as hard for you to imagine someone like me as it is for me to imagine someone like you.”

“What do you imagine?” Carolina said.

“A lot more than I would have before I met you, that’s for sure. We all have our impressions. Etterans, in general, we have our thoughts about Athosians, but your family?”

“Where do you begin, right?”

“I’m sorry about your aunt,” Transom said. “My mother killed herself when I was a baby.”

Carolina’s eyes grew wide.

“It’s not…” Transom said. “I didn’t know her. I was an infant. Not like you and Sayla. I had to imagine what I was missing. There’s a lot of orphans in the Etteran systems. So I was in good company. Well, a lot of company anyway.”

“Do you know why she did it?” Carolina said.

“I think it was despair. My father died in combat. He was nineteen years old. My mother was seventeen. It’s very strange for me to think that I’m almost twice as old as she ever grew to be. Just a child, really.”

“I don’t suppose the universe would have given you good odds on that, given your occupation.”

“No,” Transom said. “I’m damn near ancient now compared to most Etteran soldiers. Most are dead before they learn the first thing about what it takes to stay alive. If you make it that long, then you become obsessed with staying alive long enough that you wonder why you even bother. I’m still alive more out of habit than anything, doing the smart thing every time subconsciously, by default.”

“Who raised you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t. It was the military. First a regular group home. Then, when they couldn’t properly contain me, they sent me to a pipeline academy for special forces recruits. I was spitting steel when I was twelve years old.”

“Sounds like Sparta.”

“I don’t know,” Transom said. “Who knows what to believe? All those stories about other cultures? Every other culture is strange except your own, and you can’t really know another culture unless you live in it. Athos is like an alien civilization to me. You’re the most innocent person I’ve ever met. At first, I thought you were this delicate thing, ready to shatter into a thousand pieces at the first gust of wind.”

“And now?”

“Still, in some ways yes, but in other ways, there’s a toughness about you I recognize. If you’d been born on Etterus, you’d have done fine. Built a backbone of solid steel like the rest of us.”

She looked at him directly.

“What’s your name?” Carolina said. “The one your mother gave you?”

Transom laughed a muted laugh. “God, you can ask questions like that, can’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody else can.”

Carolina shrugged. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“No one has ever called me by my name,” Transom said. “When I was a kid they called me Skal, which is an Etteran slang term for…well, like feisty, a fight-starter, which was true.”

Carolina laughed. “I can picture it.”

“Until I grew. I only started fights with the older boys and sometimes got my ass kicked and sometimes won. I stopped doing that when I knew I’d win every fight.”

“What did they call you then?”

“Skal still, until I graduated ODAS and took my call name. Now that’s what everyone calls me.”

“Transom,” Carolina said. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Transom paused.

“Sebastian,” he said. “Named for a dead uncle who was named for another dead uncle most likely.”

Carolina’s head slumped down.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s difficult for me to not be…”

“Hard?” Carolina said.

“What can I say? It’s my gift,” Transom said. “But I came over here to talk to you, and somehow you’ve gotten my given name out of me.”

“What can I say?” Carolina said. “That’s my gift.”

“What were you thinking about that’s keeping you up?”

“Sayla,” Carolina said. “She was a very political person. Engaged. Energetic. Optimistic. I was wondering what it was she could have found out to so profoundly shake her faith in the future that she would do what she did.”

“For what it’s worth,” Transom said. “In my experience, people who lose hope aren’t thinking about the future. They’re struggling to break free from the past. I don’t know.”

“Hmm,” Carolina said, looking Transom in the eyes. “What about you, Sebastian?”

He laughed. “You little devil. There you go again, turning things around on me.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “You’re going to go back and fight in this war? With everything you know?”

Transom shrugged.

“I don’t buy it,” she said. “I don’t. You could have gone home weeks ago.”

“Well, this was fun,” Transom said. “I like you, kid, but if you tell the rest of these losers my real name, I promise you’ll never make it back to Athos.”

“Okay,” Carolina said, as Transom unstrapped from his seat and began to float there. She was smiling. “I won’t talk, but you could never hurt me.”

“Don’t ever test me, Dreeson.”

“You couldn’t,” Carolina said. “I know.”

Then Transom floated back to his rack.

I scarcely knew what to make of that late-night conversation. It left me kind of speechless, to the point I didn’t remember Rishi and I discussing it afterward, and when I woke up the following morning, I half thought it had been a dream.

It was still another day to Garvin, where there was a secret settlement hidden in the remains of a cylinder group that had been blown out by the Trasp during the early days of the war. According to Maícon, there was an anti-war underground operating in the fringes of both sides of the conflict. This outpost of these activists was predominantly Trasp, but there were people from all over the Battery integrated into these groups.

Rishi took us into the system cloaked in the penumbra of Exos, the planet whose gravity well the cylinder group orbited. We could see pieces of that defunct civilization still floating derelict in space, dead metal now, all black but for the starlight reflecting off the random chunks of debris in the distance, large open cylinders the Trasp had blasted to pieces some decades earlier.

Maícon had a signal set. Some kind of code. Apparently, there was a functional cylinder in a low-polar light-locked orbit on the sunny side of the planet. When we came up under the pole into the light, the cylinder looked intact but dead, no outward signs of power, but a closer examination revealed a low heat signature. They were well hidden in there, operating on solar panels and stealth, apparently.

Rishi executed some of her finest flying, pulling us alongside almost burn free and docking with magnets and thrusters in a single, smooth, quick arc that had us stopped and fixed to the rotating cylinder in a matter of seconds.

“Flawless work, ship,” I told her.

“Thank you, Captain.”

We’d come up on it so suddenly, I hardly had time to think about what was happening, but by the time I got back to the Atrium, Carolina was there, saying her goodbyes to the whole crew. Leda was latched on to her. Sōsh was holding her bag. I hadn’t even thought about the prospect of dropping Carolina there like that, sight unseen, and I didn’t feel too good about it.

“Don’t worry, Burch,” Maícon said. “We’d like you to accompany us a little further. I assure you we are in good company.”

Everyone said their goodbyes, and Maícon led the way back to the lower airlock followed by Carolina, myself, and then Transom.

Maícon turned to Transom and said, “Thank you, but it’ll just be us and Burch from here.”

“Try and stop me, robot,” Transom said. “Not until I know what’s in that cylinder.”

Maícon looked at me, and I just shrugged. I had no objections. Then again, I had no idea what we were walking into.

Once we got inside, we were met by a group of well-armed security personal in ragged clothing, maybe ten of them in total. Behind them were two Etteran strike bots, no doubt programmed a little differently than Transom was used to. The unit did not like the fact that Transom was there. They’d been expecting three of us, and the soldiers among them did not like the look of Transom in the same way he’d tripped my internal gauge the first time I saw him.

“Step back!” they yelled at him over and over, but he didn’t budge.

I could feel the energy in that annex working to a pitch, the type of scenario where one jumpy idiot could pop off a totally unnecessary massacre.

“Y’all want to see how many of you it takes to kill me?” Transom shouted. “I assure you it’s a crooked number.”

That brought the rifles up even higher with even more fevered shouts.

“Take a deep breath, boys,” Transom said. “In and out. In and out. I ain’t budging an inch.”

Finally, a call came from the back, evidently a commander. “Hold.”

“That’s it,” Transom said. “Nice and easy, boys. I thought you all were supposed to be pacifists around here.”

Carolina started laughing, shaking her head as one of the guards at the front began to pull her forward by the arm.

“Hands!” Transom shouted from behind me, and he charged forward right through that pile of men before they could react, punching the guard who’d grabbed Carolina, dropping him straight to the deck, out cold, setting off another standoff.

Again, after about thirty very angry seconds, throughout which Transom stood there in front of Carolina without an ounce of fear in his eyes, a voice came from behind the unit. “Hold, hold, hold!”

“Hands to yourselves, and we’ll all be fine,” Transom said. “We’re all friends here.”

The commander of the guard came through and directed the group to fall back, though two of them stayed on us, their weapons pointed at the floor.

“That was far more exciting than it needed to be,” Maícon said to Transom as the commander led the way up to the main concourse of the cylinder.

“Just laying the ground rules,” Transom said.

Somehow in all that commotion, I ended up carrying Carolina’s bag. I had no idea who had been carrying it before.

The commander of the guard led us up to an open space where a group of people were waiting under a dim area light. The whole place was darker than the ship at night even, but my impression was that the cylinder was still comfortable—clean.

The group turned toward us as we approached, and in the center, a tall, middle-aged man looked right past Transom toward Carolina and said, “Those are Dreeson eyes if I know a thing in this galaxy. Welcome, Carolina. I’m your cousin, Kenn Dreeson—second cousin, technically. Everyone calls me Sparrow.”

She cast a dubious look over at Maícon. He nodded, confirming the man’s identity.

“Nobody told you about me? Not even Sayla?”

Carolina stepped around Transom and shook Sparrow Dreeson’s outstretched hand. He pulled her in for a hug.

“Your friends?” he said.

“Hale Burch,” she said, gesturing toward me. “The bot is Maícon, the prime.”

“I heard,” Sparrow said. “Happy to have you with us, old friend.”

“This is Sebastian,” Carolina said, gesturing toward Transom.

“Oh?” Sparrow said. “We weren’t expecting anyone else.”

“Adjust your expectations, sir,” Transom said.

Carolina laughed. “We’re going to have to figure out how to dial you down a little,” she said, shaking her head.

“Good luck with that,” I said.

I wasn’t sure if anyone back on the ship had figured it out, but I felt like the last to know. Or maybe Transom had decided on his next mission right on the spot. They both seemed to know, though. And Maícon? Who knows what a bot knew?

They offered us tea, asked us about where we’d been. We sat and talked through that cup of tea before Sparrow asked if he could speak with me.

“We understand you captain a ship with a talented crew,” he said.

“That’s a fair statement,” I answered.

“You can spoof your registry?”

“To a point,” I said. “As long as no one looks at us too closely.”

“If you’re willing, Captain Burch, we would like to hire your services?”

“All depends on the mission,” I said. “My crew has to agree.”

“You have my gratitude regardless of your answer, just for getting Carolina here safely,” Sparrow Dreeson said. “I’d have Reggie brief you and your crew on the details. When you’re ready to leave.”

He gestured to a woman who seemed to materialize out of the dim light right behind me.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

Again, things seemed to be happening almost too fast for me to process them, but I had the sense that it was time for me to go. And at that point, as I asked Reggie to wait for just a moment while I said goodbye to Carolina, I could see Sparrow looking over at Transom, processing, I think, for the first time, that Carolina’s Etteran bodyguard wasn’t going anywhere. Sparrow’s brow clearly betrayed that there was some concern there, but I also think he realized there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

I gave Carolina a hug and wished her well. And she thanked me and promised she’d see us all soon.

“So?” I said to Transom. “I guess I’ll give everyone your regards?”

“If you’re asking me what to tell Etterus if you ever have occasion, tell them whatever. You’ll think of something.”

“I was more curious of my own accord,” I said.

“Soldiers fight wars to end them, Burch. Tell me you’ve crossed paths with anything or anyone more likely to end the war than Carolina is. Now that she’s on that path, as long as she’ll have me, that girl won’t take another step in her life that’s not guarded by my right hand.”

“What about the rest of you?”

He shook his head. “It’s an expression we say on Etterus. Never mind, asshole.”

I laughed. “Look. I wouldn’t have left her with you a few weeks ago. Or maybe you’d have killed me for trying to stop you. In any case, I feel better knowing she’s in proper company now. It’s a dangerous road she’s going down. You know better than any how to keep her safe on it. If you ever need backup—”

“You’re the first call I’ll make, Burch. You have my word on it.”

“We’ll see you both soon,” I said.

Then I headed back to the ship with Reggie. Here we were again, hardly with the time to take a breath from the one misadventure before we were starting another. So off we went, me and this new compatriot, venturing out anonymously into the secret dark. And I suppose that, in itself, is as good a place to end a log entry as any. Hale Burch, off the official log, naming this entry “Proper Company,” and wishing those two very different people my strongest personal hope that I will see both of them again, safe, healthy, and on good terms. Signing off.