“Anton,” the voice said, lower and as intimate as a friend. Trejo turned around in his chair to face the room. Winston Duarte stood near the foot of his bed, hands behind his back. He wore a loose casual shirt and black trousers. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. His hair was mussed, as if he’d only recently woken up. He looked like he was actually there.
“Security alert,” Trejo said. “This room. Full sweep.”
Duarte looked pained. “Anton,” he said again.
In milliseconds, the ship had swept every inch of his cabin looking for anyone or anything that wasn’t supposed to be there. His screen reported to him that the room was free of listening devices, dangerous chemicals, unauthorized technology. He was also the only person in it. The ship asked if he wanted armed security personnel to respond.
“Am I having a stroke?” he asked the apparition.
“No,” Duarte said. “Though you should probably be getting more sleep.” The ghost in his room shrugged its shoulders, almost apologetically. “Look. Anton. You’ve done everything that could have been asked of you to hold the empire together. I’ve seen the reports. I know how difficult this job has been.”
“You’re not here,” Trejo said, asserting the only possible reality against the lies his senses were telling him.
“What here means has become strangely flexible for me,” Duarte agreed. “As much as I appreciate your work, you can stand down now.”
“No. It’s not over. I’m still fighting to hold the empire together.”
“And I appreciate that. I do. But we’ve been running down the wrong road. I need a little quiet to think this through, but I see things better now. It’s going to be all right.”
The need to hear those words—to believe them—rushed through Trejo like a flood. The first time a lover had kissed him, it had been less overwhelming than this.
Duarte shook an amused and melancholy smile. “We built an empire that spanned the galaxy, you and I. Who’d have imagined we were thinking too small?”
The image, illusion, projection, whatever it was, vanished so suddenly it was like a skipped frame in a film.
“Fuck me,” Trejo said to no one. The security alert was still flashing on the screen over his desk. He slapped the comm link with one hand.
“Sir,” the duty officer said. “We’ve got an active alert from your quarters. Do you want—”
“You have five minutes to prep for a max burn to the ring.”
“Sir?”
“Sound the alarm,” Trejo said. “And get everyone in their couches. We have to get back to Laconia. Now.”
Chapter One: Jim
It pinged us,” Alex said. His voice was a light almost singsong that meant he thought they were screwed.
Jim, sitting on the ops deck with a tactical map of Kronos system on the screen and his heart going double time, tried to disagree. “Just because he’s knocking doesn’t mean he knows who’s home. Let’s keep acting like what we’re acting like.”
The Rocinante was acting like a small-haul freighter, a class of ship thick on the ground in Kronos system. Naomi had tuned the Epstein to run just dirty enough to change their drive signature without generating too much extra waste heat. A set of extra plating welded to their hull at an underground shipyard in Harris system had altered their silhouette. A slow dribble of liquid hydrogen was pumping out across the top of the ship and changing their thermal profile. When Naomi had gone over the plan to layer on camouflage, it had seemed comprehensive. It was only the threat of violence that made Jim feel exposed.
The enemy frigate was called the Black Kite. Smaller than the Storm-class destroyers, it was still well armed and had the self-healing outer hull that made Laconian ships hard to kill. It was part of a hunting group scouring all the inhabited systems for Teresa Duarte, runaway daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, heir apparent to his empire, and, for the time being, apprentice mechanic on the Rocinante.
This wasn’t the first time they’d seen it.
“Any follow-up?” Jim asked.
“Just the ladar ping,” Alex said. “Think I should warm up the peashooter, just in case?”
Yeah, let’s do that was on the edge of Jim’s mind when Naomi’s voice answered instead. “No. There’s some evidence that their next-generation sensor arrays can recognize rail-gun capacitors.”
“That feels unfair,” Jim said. “What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.”