Accord of Shadows: The Expansion Series, #3

By Caitlin Demaris McKenna

Sometimes to reach light we must brave shadows.

Shomoro's alliance has plucked Mose from the Project's grasp, but her work is just beginning. Now she must find a way to free him from the nano that keeps him chained—and keep him out of the hands of Council factions who want to experiment on him once they discover his true nature.

Mose wants nothing more than to help her. He sees the glimmer of a new life beyond the horizon of freedom. But even if Shomoro succeeds, the Project may pull him back in.

Because trouble is brewing in Diego Two: under Gau's command in all but name, the Djandjer-Pralsh faction is building toward their most ambitious strike at the heart of the Church. And what they uncover will send shockwaves through the Expansion and beyond.

Get the third book in the Expansion series, where the deals made in the dark will give shape to the light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caitlin Demaris McKenna
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201570958

Caitlin Demaris McKenna

Caitlin Demaris McKenna is a freelance editor and writes about future technologies and faraway worlds. She has visited three continents, and lived in Vancouver and New York. She grew up in the Minnesota woods, where on clear winter nights, she would look up at the stars and wonder.

Book preview

1

The room revealed when the opaque lid of Mose’s conveyance lifted did not look much like a prison cell or an interrogation room. It looked like an apartment. He tried to use this fact to slow the beating of his heart, taking slow, shallow breaths to prevent hyperventilation.

The oskven—Shomoro Lacharoksa—stepped toward him. Her white mane shone against the dark, wide window at the back of the room. Beyond it he could make out the dark skyline of what must be a city, or at least a very large complex of buildings. But dark, all dark. They must be kilometers underground.

He took all this in automatically, the way he noted how many people were in a room and where the exits were. The main part of his attention was on Shomoro. The sensitive nostrils under her long dark snout flared as she said, Do you know who I am?

The tension in his jaw made his words a hiss. Shomoro Lacharoksa. The avatar of his nano-induced dreams, whom he’d first seen as a mental projection from the Drevl Char who’d turned out to be her agent. The same Drevl Char who had held out the impossible hope of rescue, if only Mose trusted the two of them …

He’d followed that promise all the way to Teluk, a hidden undercurrent pulling him along even as his mission pushed him in the same direction. Now, not for the first time, he considered that that promise could have been a lie: a hook to lure him here and eliminate him at little to no risk to herself. He was the seph-hunter, after all. What seph wouldn’t kill him, given half the chance? And he’d given her that and more.

Are you going to kill me? he asked. Maybe she’d release him from the prison of spitstone the Veert had entombed him in first. Let him die on his feet.

But even as he pondered what reason Shomoro could have to show him even that small mercy, she laughed. Not at all. In fact, she added with a grin, if I’m right about you, I’m going to set you free.

Mose stared at her for long enough that he knew he was being rude. He blinked, swallowed. You … what? So Pri was telling the truth? Why would you help me?

Shomoro tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. I understand your caution, she said. Why would a seph help another seph sent on a mission to kill her?

Mose tried to dip his torso in a shrug, as if to say Precisely. But the spitstone constricting his body truncated the movement. Shomoro still seemed to understand.

She crouched down so he no longer had to crane his neck to look at her, resting long arms on her front set of knees. It has to do with a mission of my own, she said. Her gaze slid away from his for a moment, as though weighing what she should say next. When her eyes met his again, she went on. If you knew where to find me, then you must have seen my message.

Mose was puzzled; Shomoro’s agent Pri had contacted him directly, but he hadn’t learned where Shomoro was based until the Project briefed him.

His confusion must have registered, because she elaborated. The one I planted on Skraal-Teklan’s data net? Seeking other sephs of Za?

"That was you?" Mose blurted. Shomoro blinked, confusion curdling her scent. It wasn’t until it changed that he became aware of her default scent: smooth like moistened sand, with a very slight pungent spiciness. The same scent Pri had used to fool him on Greenwich Hub, but this time it was real. He pushed it to the back of his awareness, like a face already memorized.

Shomoro stood back up. It was, she said. In a lower tone she added, And I can guess how you encountered it.

A hot twist of guilt coiled Mose’s stomach, undiluted by the years. He’d tracked down Vorl Yureshenka by eavesdropping on that message. Vorl had recognized him, trusted him—and Mose had killed him.

I thought it was Gau, he said. All this time I thought it was Gau Shesharrim.

The pale horizontal pupils of her eyes widened in surprise at the name. Of course she recognized it: Gau Shesharrim was the most well-known of the sephs who fought for Za. He’d been a hero by the war’s end, and then—

You’ve been looking for Gau, haven’t you? Shomoro asked softly.

For fifteen years. The answer was instant. It was one thing he knew, the thing that had kept him alive as everything else dropped away. A thought occurred to him. Pri must have told you why. She was your agent, right under Gau’s snout. A bitter laugh trickled out of him. He’d had a healthy respect for the Project’s intelligence division, and they hadn’t been able to get him close to Gau until he was on the verge of committing a major crime on Terran soil. It seemed Shomoro’s intelligence network put the Project’s to shame. She’d been able to implant a shadow agent in the midst of Gau’s team without him suspecting a thing.

She told me what she overheard, Shomoro said, but I want to hear it from you.

Mose breathed against the constricting spitstone, trying to steady himself. He had no way to make her believe him; all he had was the truth.

Gau betrayed Za. He knew of the nanovirus attack beforehand—intelligence he chose not to share with the colony’s government. The words spilled out almost faster than he could enunciate, leaving no room for an interruption. Gau was the reason we lost the war.

Mose waited for Shomoro to say that he was wrong, that he had to be wrong. That it couldn’t be Gau, the hero of Za, who’d left the city to its doom.

His stomach sank as her silence lengthened. But then she broke it.

I know. Her snout shifted away, averted from looking at him head-on in chagrin. Pri discovered as much when I set her on Gau’s trail. She crossed her arms over her chest, scratching absently at the blade sheath under one arm. I’d meant to recruit him, too, she added in a near whisper.

And then you learned the truth, Mose said. A loosening went through his aching muscles; belatedly he realized it was relief. Until this moment, he hadn’t fully believed that she wasn’t working for Gau. "I have obeyed the orders of the Terrans’ Project, become their seph-killer, because it was the only way I could see Gau punished for his crime."

She pinned him with a hard stare again. Moment of chagrin over. Why? Why help the Project hunt us down? The us stabbed like a blade between his ribs. Mose wondered if she meant to include him with the sephs who had been his prey, or if the us only applied to the rest of them.

Shame tightened his chest, and he had to force the next words out. I had no choice.

She crouched again. Curiosity enlivened her scent with saline notes. What do they have on you? Eagerness he wondered at colored her voice.

"It’s what they have in me." He tried to raise a hand to his chest to indicate the Terran-controlled nanites that swarmed there, but his spitstone sheath ended that impulse.

"What they have in you?" she repeated.

I was there the day Za was destroyed, Mose said. My bio-implants were broken down like the others. I was suffocating in Olios 3’s oxygen atmosphere when the Project found me. They used a nanoswarm to save me—a nanoswarm they control.

Her eyes widened in comprehension and, quick on its tail, apprehension. Is the Project listening to us right now?

No … Mose said. The internal structures the nanites had built inside him weren’t that complex—mostly medical monitors and programming terminals by which Terran technicians could give them new instructions. At least, that was what Vernsky had told him. I don’t know. He shrugged helplessly against the spitstone. But they know approximately where I am right now. There are internal monitors, plus more in the armor.

Even this far underground? she asked.

RD transmitters, he said. Regular radio transmissions could be blocked by bedrock, but there was nothing that could block Relativity Defiant hyperwave, as far as he knew.

Shomoro sprang to her feet and spoke to a point over his head—to the Veert who’d brought him to this hideaway. He’d almost forgotten they were there.

Lab, she said. Now.

Shomoro had chosen the vault’s modified guest suite as neutral ground on which to meet Mose for the first time. As neutral as could be secured, she amended, when he was trapped inside a delivery cart by a layer of Veerten spitstone. That one of the labs was only four floors down had not been a consideration, but now she was glad of its proximity.

She stood in the ring-shaped observation gallery behind mirrored glass and watched three Veert in the amphitheater below spray a dissolving mist onto the spitstone that entombed Mose’s torso and limbs. As the pale beige material sloughed off, black articulated armor plating became visible underneath.

You were with him when he acquired the armor? Shomoro asked Stone. The Veert beside her coiled their head tendrils toward their brown-stippled stalk in what she’d learned was an affirmative, equivalent to an Osk snout jab.

He retrieved it from some sort of machine, Stone said. Their hesitancy came through the monotone of the translator box they wore.

Retrieved how?

He said it was a spacecraft, an individual conveyance of some kind. But like none I’d ever seen. Shomoro listened as Stone described a machine that wove itself together from black tendrils in the alleyway canal, in response to a drop of blood Mose laid on the water.

It covered him, and when it withdrew he was wearing a set of armor, Stone said. It looked almost alive … but it must have been a machine. Another coil of tendrils indicated a shrug.

It can be hard to tell the difference with Terran tech, she said. Indeed, at the nanotech level, the line between machine and organism became irrelevant in her mind. Continue.

Stone resumed their report. The plan to trap Mose in the palanquin had gone off without a hitch. Nearly.

How is the Veert he injured doing? She glanced toward the theater where the Veert were removing the spitstone from Mose. They nearly had the top part of his torso and arms free.

Their injuries were attended to in the infirmary, Stone said. They have not yet reached their ninth regeneration; they will be able to regrow the head tendril.

Thank you, Stone. Dismissed.

The Veert bowed their head and shuffled out a door along the curve of the ring. They would be making the same report to their Veerten councilor, likely immediately.

A frown turned down the corners of her mouth. She wondered if Basalt would receive that report with as good humor. Stone’s team would have equally willingly delivered Mose to a vault black site—only Daikar’s change of heart had saved Mose from that fate. Basalt had been one of the councilors in favor of his indefinite imprisonment. They were not likely to give up just because he had eluded them. This was only the first round of the long, bitter negotiation she could see stretching ahead.

She turned at the soft hiss of the door. A scaly blue head emerged, followed by a ropy mass of locomotor tentacles at the base of a cone-shaped body. The dark blue sash draped across the Baskar’s shoulder allowed Shomoro to identify him. She bowed.

Whalg-General.

He inclined his head at a shallower angle. I came to check on how your little project is doing.

Her mouth tightened, and she turned away to hide it. But Whalg-General had not risen to the rank of high councilor by being unperceptive. Did I say something, ah, offensive?

She started to cut the air in a negative and turned it into a wave toward the chamber instead. It’s what the Terrans call him. A project. Something to be developed, improved upon, controlled. She thought of the nanoswarm he claimed was spread throughout his body, keeping him alive on their terms. Mose told me how the Project has been controlling him.

I was there. Whalg-General gestured at the air. In a manner of speaking. The whole Council watched remotely through the team’s audiovisual pickups.

Of course they did. Judging the success of stage one of the operation. Shomoro had known from the moment she’d proposed recruiting Mose that the whole operation would be closely monitored by the Council, but Whalg-General’s casual remark was a weight settling onto her skin. This was a test for her as much as Mose; the Council might be investing resources in the project, but the risk was hers.

The project. She winced again, though this time the motion was no more than a clench of the jaw.

Do you believe his story? Whalg-General sounded merely curious—as though the answer was something he was mildly interested in and not something that could seriously affect his influence on the Council he’d devoted his career to guiding.

It doesn’t matter if I believe it, Shomoro said. We’ll know soon enough whether he’s swimming with nanotech as he claims.

She went to a comm panel in the low wall of the observation gallery and pushed the buzzer. Inside the decontamination chamber, one of the Veert peeled off and answered her page.

Stop treatment for now, she said into the comm. I want to take some samples first.

Whalg-General followed her to the prep room, watching in uncharacteristic silence as Shomoro washed her hands, drew on sterile gloves, and fitted several ampules with hollow needles.

At last he said, That isn’t what I meant.

She turned on her heel. Irritation fluttered in her chest. Then what is? With respect, Councilor, she added, remembering to whom she was speaking.

Whalg-General looked at her, arms folded behind his back. Mose Attarrish has lived among Terrans a long time was all he said.

Before Shomoro could pursue that statement, the door to the observation ring buzzed. Without thinking, she called, Come in, then felt a stab of trepidation. What if it was Water Dancer come to protest?

Yet the door did not slide open to reveal an angry Rul. Instead, Daikar sidled into the room. He was running one hand through the straggly brown hairs of his mane. As he met her gaze, she noticed the fading blue flush of fear draining from the dark gray skin of his snout. He avoided looking into the theater below the gallery, at Mose being tended by the Veert.

I came to make sure you were all right, he said. Belatedly seeing Whalg-General, Daikar executed the shaky afterthought of a bow. Councilor.

I’m fine, Shomoro said. The words sounded stilted even to her. She lowered shoulders that had tented up when Daikar had entered the room. She had a feeling it would be a while before she could completely relax around him—before she felt she could trust him again.

But he’d earned more than she’d just given him. He’d proven himself part of her alliance in the end and delivered Mose to her. Thank you, she said. For trusting in me.

Daikar looked away—in chagrin, she thought, until she realized he was looking into the decontamination chamber. He stared at Mose in silence for a breath or two, then spoke low. Can he see us?

No, Whalg-General interjected. He rolled over to the window on his bed of tentacles and rapped the glass lightly with the hooked black claws of one hand. One-way mirror.

Shomoro snapped shut the case containing the ampules. I should get those samples.

Daikar looked between her and the door into the chamber, frowning. She waited for him to ask to accompany her; she half suspected that was what Daikar had come to do in the first place. To face his fear of seeing Mose again head-on, with all they knew of his deeds in the Project’s service.

But watching his agony of indecision, Shomoro knew this wasn’t the right moment for that. It was too soon for Daikar to face this. And she didn’t need him there in such a state when she had work to do.

Have you debriefed Stone and their team yet? she asked gently.

Daikar seemed to shake himself; focus came back into his eyes. Not yet. I’ll page them now. He found her gaze. I can’t stay. She suspected he was trying to sound apologetic, but the words just sounded relieved.

She turned to Whalg-General. The security team has been briefed, Councilor? They can assist me?

The smallest widening of his nostrils indicated Whalg-General understood what she was doing. He played his part, saying, They’ll enter before you and make sure Attarrish is secure before you take any samples. That is protocol.

With the sterile gloves in place, Shomoro couldn’t squeeze Daikar’s shoulder. She tried to project reassurance in her tone instead. I’ll be done soon.

She walked past him to the door and down the stairs to the glassed-in chamber. It had originally been an operating room, part of the infirmary complex the Council had installed in the vault to oversee the health needs of a populace estimated in the potential thousands. They had intended to be able to administer the needs of an entire city in this underground vault. As far as Shomoro knew, the operating rooms had never been used for their intended purpose. The research team she and Water Dancer had headed together had converted several of them into test nano-containment chambers for their experiments.

The three Baskar members of her security team were already in the room. Their silver sashes marked their rank as Teluk Intelligence operatives. They had trailed Shomoro every time she left her apartments or labs while Mose was still at large. In the end, they hadn’t been needed—yet. The potential for danger wasn’t ended just because Mose was in their custody. In some ways it had increased with his proximity. She knew almost nothing about him and had only his word that what he had told her was true.

Well. She tugged down the hems of her gloves, ensuring they were secure. That’s about to change.

She nodded to the Baskar at the head of the three. Operative Jureshsillim. Is your team ready?

Jureshsillim inclined her wedge-shaped head. Tiny flickers of gold winked from the triangular markings on her ear wedges. From a pouch above the metallic skirt she wore, the Baskar removed a pair of specially machined cuffs. We will precede you, Scientist Shomoro.

Shomoro jabbed an acknowledgment. It was standard practice among Baskar to append a title based on someone’s rank or occupation to make up for the loss of honor when brevity demanded they clip the person’s full name. Considering Baskar names could take as long as a minute to recite, pragmatism often demanded it. Shomoro had no such long name, but the title Jureshsillim had used was a useful reminder of what she was doing here: she was a scientist and agent of the Teluk High Council, trying to recruit another potential agent.

She drew breath from her diaphragm, quelling the doubts. Proceed, operative.

Jureshsillim flowed out the sliding door, her two seconds fanning out on either side as they surrounded the workstation. The cart with Mose inside it had been propped on the adjustable table at a forty-five degree angle while the Veert removed the spitstone. Jureshsillim’s seconds gave a command to the Veert, and they backed away as Jureshsillim approached Mose. The other two Baskar had tasers trained on him from angles of the room where they could fire freely without hitting their commander.

Mose shot two quick glances at the weapons pointed at him. The graphite skin of his snout darkened in fear. Shomoro remembered Stone’s report, how they’d had to use a taser to subdue him, and her skin puckered with chills of sympathy. The electric weapons were designed to subdue by flooding the nerve endings with overwhelming pain. That was one type of pain she hadn’t experienced firsthand, and she briefly wondered why a taser had never featured in the White Arrows’ torture sessions.

Too impersonal, the part of her mind she’d named Shomoro of the White whispered. They wanted to cause the kind of pain that could build. The anticipation of it was as much a tool as the pain itself.

Shomoro shook her head clear of the voice. She didn’t need that distraction right now. The Veert hadn’t been torturing Mose when they carried out her orders. They were trying to help him.

Whether it was fear of the tasers or a desire to be cooperative, Mose didn’t balk when Jureshsillim told him to present his hands. He held them out in front of himself, and the Baskar snapped on the cuffs. A flange of metal was fastened to each circlet, a bit like the caps at the end of the stalls used for dulling blades during training. Especially for novice bladefighters, such stalls ensured the fighters didn’t inflict serious injury on each other or themselves. Only full sephs or soldiers sparred with blades undulled, and even then never without armor to protect them.

Affixing the caps to handcuffs had been Shomoro’s idea, in one of the planning sessions her alliance had held with Whalg-General and Yurll. Coming up with effective ways to restrain Mose once they had him had been priority number one. And what better way to control a seph, she thought, than by taking away their blades?

Mose didn’t flinch as the cuffs went on. He didn’t test their strength or fiddle with the caps that blocked his blade sheaths. He accepted the restraints. He’s used to it.

She wasn’t sure whether that thought had come from herself or her sub-personality. The burst of shame that came with it, though—that was hers alone. Even if it was a safety precaution, even if he was a stranger to her, and possibly hostile—she admitted that possibility even now—she never thought she would be party to imprisoning another Osk. Even though their prisoner had clearly been one for a long time.

Schooling her face to stillness, Shomoro grasped the case of ampules and opened the door into the operating theater.

At the sound of the sliding door, Mose dared to look away from the Baskar guard in front of him. He did so by moving only his eyes, keeping his head still lest the two Baskar pointing tasers at him misinterpret the movement. His skin still tingled with aftershocks from the jolt Stone had given him.

The door framed Shomoro, dressed now in a gray lab coat and gloves, holding a slim black case at one front hip. A tiny tension went out of his spine at seeing her again. Hers was a slightly more familiar face, by a half hour or so.

Shomoro waved the Baskar guard who had restrained him aside.

I’m going to take some tissue samples from you now, she said in a soft tone, as though speaking to an easily frightened animal. She opened the case and held it out so he could see the ampules nestled in gray fabric compartments within. Are you allergic to any synthetic polymers or adjuvants?

No, Mose said. He knew his medical history without having to think about it. Vernksy had always said Mose was an easy patient: no allergies, no sensitivities, almost no complications when he healed. Though that might have been part of how the nanites had changed him as they colonized his body.

Raise your arms, Shomoro said. He lifted his cuffed arms out in front of him. He had a second to wonder how she could take a blood sample while he was wearing armor before Shomoro grasped his biceps and twisted it outward, firmly but not painfully hard, to expose the softer seam between two articulated plates. She inserted the needle into the vein running down his upper arm, and he felt the slightest pinch before the ampule began to fill with blood—dark but unmistakably red blood, rather than the teal it had been before his nano altered it.

The hand holding his biceps twitched as Shomoro stared at the fluid filling the ampule. She muttered something lower than he could hear.

What? Mose asked.

They really changed you, didn’t they? she said. The Project.

He mulled the double meaning of the question. It could mean They changed you a lot or They actually changed you after all— in which case, maybe she hadn’t believed he was telling the truth until now.

Mose mentally shrugged. He wouldn’t have believed him either, without evidence. They had to, to save me. My bio-implants were gone, I couldn’t breathe oxygen. So their nanites … made it so I could.

Their nano reengineered your metabolism to an oxygen basis? She pulled out the needle and slapped a circular bandage on the spot. Capped the vial and discarded the needle in a sharps bin beside the table. Curious. I’d have started by trying to reestablish an ammonia-based metabolic pathway. In a more hospitable atmosphere of course. She turned back as though remembering her audience. It will be an interesting challenge to unravel the changes they’ve made.

You sound confident. Mose tried to make it a statement rather than a judgment, but his voice betrayed him. Anxiety had roiled in his gut too long, ever since … well, he wasn’t sure when it had started. Maybe all the way back to his awakening in the tank after Za’s fall, jolting to consciousness when he should have been dead. Maybe it had never really stopped, had only receded when depression numbed it enough. And now this Osk held out the possibility of escape and called it an interesting challenge.

She blinked hard several times, and he caught from her a scent halfway between salty and sour. Embarrassment.

I—That was insensitive, she said. This is all new to you, and I haven’t taken time to explain how I’m going to help you. She bit the inside of her cheek. I’m a scientist, not a doctor. But that’s no excuse.

Mose didn’t know what to say to that, so he shrugged.

I have extensive experience programming nanite swarms, she said. Terran and non-Terran. She touched her chest, indicating the nanite swarm he knew from Pri’s messages that she carried within her. In a memory, he’d watched her breathe methane without a mask, an ability she’d attributed to the swarm. I’m going to analyze yours and see if I can reprogram its permissions to lock out the Project’s control.

A prickle swept across the skin of his back and arms, wholly different from the familiar swirl of anxiety. It took Mose a moment to realize it was excitement. Hope. How long will it take? he asked. We may not have much time. If the Project realizes something’s wrong, they’ll look for me.

She jabbed her snout. Which is why our first order of business is to get their eyes off you.

She reached for another ampule. This one was full of thick, dull silver liquid. A trickle of associative nausea returned at the familiar sight.

A nanite swarm? he asked, trying to keep the revulsion out of his voice. But I thought you needed to analyze mine first.

Shomoro tapped the bottom of the ampule. Not for what I have in mind.

What will it do? he asked.

It’s likely the Project’s technicians haven’t entrusted everything to your nanites, she said. They’ll have used the nanoswarm to construct other structures in your body that they can more directly interface with. Medical monitors and internal telemetry, for example.

She waited until Mose confirmed this with a jab. The Project’s techs had often made small calibrations to his nanoswarm by issuing commands to the medical terminals inside him.

Brandishing the ampule, she said, This swarm will detect and map those larger structures. Based on the images it returns, I’ll program it to preserve the medical terminals in your body and target the RD telemeters.

Target how? Mose asked.

When the nanites flow past the telemeters, they will accrete and interfere with the telemeters’ functions.

It was an elegantly simple plan. But Mose could see a snag. The telemeters operate using hyperwave frequencies, he said. How will these nanites block those?

A small smile tugged at Shomoro’s lips. You saw what happened to the RD device in Pri’s memories when it was tampered with.

Mose remembered the Relativity Defiant transceiver the Terran scientists had been working on, and how it had dissolved into dust when they tried to cut into it. He imagined tiny transmitters scattered through his body crumbling as the nanoparticles clung to them, the dust dispersing in his bloodstream. Is this process safe? he asked.

This is the same formula I’ve tested on my own nanoswarm, she said. I can give you another injection to flush out the nanites along with any residue from the transmitters. It’s as safe as our tests can make it.

Mose knew any medical procedure carried risk. His continued life was the product of an extremely risky experimental procedure. The technicians trying to save him then would have probably given even odds that he wouldn’t make it. So he heard the meaning under Shomoro’s words, the implication that he would be safer submitting to the treatment than he was right now. His safety relied on blinding the Project to his location for as long as they could, and hoping it was as long as they needed.

But there was something else. One more question he needed the answer to sooner rather than later, before the courtesy she’d shown him thus far lulled him into dangerous assumptions.

Do you require my consent before proceeding?

Her mouth twisted into a small frown. Of course I do. But her gaze flickered to the mirror in one wall, a one-way mirror he was sure.

At least until you receive a different order from your superiors?

Her frown grew edged, almost a snarl. In a biting whisper she said, I will never perform a medical procedure on you without your consent, Attarrish. Don’t think that of me.

All right, he said evenly. Then what will you do if I say no?

She took a deep, slow inhale in which he read frustration. But she answered him calmly. Find another way. I’m a scientist. Solving hard problems is what I do.

The offense she appeared to have taken seemed genuine—though he wondered if and how her stance would change with enough pressure from the Council—and so did her answer.

It was enough for now.

Let’s do it, he said. Let’s blind the Project’s eyes.

2

At 7:53 A.M. Greenwich Hub Mean Time, Jan Shanazkowitz blinked the bleariness from his eyes and looked down into the hushed activity of the control hub with a grim sense of pride. Faced with the loss of its primary asset, it would have been reasonable to expect panic on the part of Project: ShadowStalker’s employees. Yet when the morning shift had come on and seen the anomalous telemetry reports logged by the automated systems, they fell to troubleshooting the problem as though they’d been prepared for this contingency since signing their contracts.

Which probably they had. Jan didn’t have to remind himself that the intelligence analysts and RD techs down there in what Wythe called the crucible, spot-checking lines of code, hadn't been his employees for long. Jan was an interloper. He’d assumed the helm of the Project only a few months ago. He was, strangely, the most junior of them all, despite being in command. The people down there surrounded by banks of computers owed their deepest loyalty not to him, but to his first lieutenants.

Sharon Wu, the director of Project Intelligence, was currently down in the pit with the rest of them, coaching the techs’ efforts to reestablish a lock on Mose’s suit telemetry. Hoping humans could succeed where automated systems had failed.

Ethan Wythe, the ops manager, was locked in a terse call with requisitions for additional RD transceivers. Wu had suggested boosting the hyperwave signal on their end by linking several transceivers. Jan left them to it; the complexities of RD networks made his head swim.

Jan didn’t know where Alex Vernsky, the head of the Project’s medical division, was. An image came to him of Vernsky slumped at his desk with a tumbler of vodka in one hand. Jan grimaced and banished it from his mind. They were nowhere near the time for real worry; in all likelihood, the vanished suit telemetry was an odd glitch. Failures in RD transmission were rare but not unheard of.

And the important monitoring systems were still functioning. Mose’s internal telemeters were still reporting his vital signs and location. Although from what the medtechs had said, they were getting some damn strange GPS readings.

Jan saw Vernsky enter the crucible in the midst of a huddle of medtechs bearing lightpads. The screens’ bluish glow lit his pale skin a ghostly tone, but otherwise the man looked more rested than he had any right to be. His beard was neatly trimmed and there were no bags under his eyes. His pants and shirt appeared washed and pressed. Jan inferred Vernsky had worked a reasonable shift the day before and gone home to a full night’s sleep.

Jan felt suddenly guilty. Not for noticing this morning’s change, but for being oblivious—willfully?—to the doctor’s exhaustion up to the mission’s launch. Vernsky had been pushing himself so hard, and instead of recognizing that and giving him time for R&R, or at least the promise of it after the launch, Jan had asked him to push himself even harder. And now this had happened …

Jan descended a set of stairs into the crucible, moving toward Vernsky. He couldn’t change his inattentiveness in the weeks leading up to the mission, but at least he could try and make up for it now.

Vernsky looked up and gave him a small wave. At a nod from Jan, the medtechs surrounding Vernsky made room for him.

How are you holding up, Alex? Jan asked.

Vernsky shrugged. I’m all right. I think it’s a little early to be worried. He reached out without looking for a lightpad, and one of the medtechs handed him hers. Vernsky waved Jan over to his side. But we’re getting some strange data. Look at this.

Projected an inch above the screen was a color-coded topographical map of Anmerresh. The colors denoted elevation, with green being sea level, shading into yellows, oranges, and reds as the map climbed into the jagged bowl of the extinct caldera the city nestled within. Jan was puzzled to see a second spectrum of colors extending below the green baseline, this time shading into blues and purples. A red dot blinked almost dead-center in the dark purple band. But below sea level meant …

He’s underground? Jan asked. Did he go back to the Veerten safe house?

Vernsky was shaking his head before Jan finished. This reading puts him deeper underground than that, sir. A lot deeper. He tapped the blinking red dot that indicated Mose Attarrish.

A number in meters appeared next to the dot. Jan peered at it, leaning forward as though closer proximity would make the numbers say something else. They stayed stubbornly the same.

"Four