Since Esther’s death, she’s only been special to one person. One who saw her more deeply than even Esther ever did.
One nobody else on Genesis would admit is a person at all.
The captain’s tone turns gentler, more thoughtful. “Some Second Catholics meditate, I know. Do you?”
“I’ve tried. I’m not very good at it.”
“That’s the secret about meditation—nobody’s good at it.” A quick smile flashes across Baz’s face. “You need to find center, Vidal. You need to refocus. If you do that, I think the people around you will sense it.”
“Maybe so,” Noemi replies politely. She gives this about a zero percent chance of success.
Either Baz doesn’t pick up on Noemi’s skepticism or she doesn’t care. “The next time you meditate, I want you to ask yourself two questions. What are you fighting, Noemi Vidal? And what are you fighting for?”
The questions resonate more deeply for Noemi than she would’ve thought. Disconcerted, she stares at the floor as she nods.
“You’re free to go,” Captain Baz says. At least she won’t push the meditation thing any further. “Try not to step on any toes on your way out?”
“Yes, Captain. But—I wanted to ask about the stars. Have the scientists figured out what they are yet? What they were supposed to do?”
Baz shrugs. “So far nobody has a clue. Nothing obvious has shown up. Nothing not so obvious either. Maybe it wasn’t official, or serious. Maybe some Earther with more money than sense decided to make harassing us his new hobby.”
“Maybe,” Noemi says. But she can’t bring herself to believe it. Those projectiles from Earth could only have been intended to do them harm.
If they failed, that means others will be coming. This time, she won’t have a chance to shoot them down.
2
HALF A GALAXY AWAY, ON A LUSH RESORT ISLAND OFF the coast of China, Abel is crashing a party.
“Thank you,” he says to the George model who hands back his identibadge, the one Abel personally programmed with false data. George mechs are only equipped with enough intelligence for uninteresting bureaucratic tasks, and this one performed only routine checks, all of which Abel had taken into account. It would take a far deeper inquiry to discover any issues. Even a human would’ve been unlikely to determine that the man walking into the party is not actually named Kevin Lambert, is not a lifelong resident of Great Britain, and is not a potential investor in Mansfield Cybernetics.
The party fills a large, oval, translucent bubble suspended not far above the ocean, surrounded by a few smoky side rooms and corridors that wind around it like the precious-metal setting around a jewel. So far, attendees number approximately two hundred and seventeen; he’ll finalize this count once he’s certain he’s accounted for people who might be in bathrooms or hallways. There’s at least one service mech for every three partygoers, a mixture of Dogs and Yokes handing around food on trays, a couple of scantily clad Fox and Peter models no doubt provided for after-party entertainment, and three Oboes in the corner, playing music just loud enough to ensure people can still converse.
Abel’s information about popular music aged badly during the thirty years of his confinement. He’s still catching up. After nearly a century of slower, gentler, neoclassical music, up-tempo tunes have returned to popularity. This song, with a hundred and forty beats per minute, is clearly meant to echo a human heartbeat in a state of excitement, thus stimulating listeners on both conscious and subconscious levels….
Then he stops analyzing the music and simply asks himself, Do you like it?
Yes. He does.
A slight smile on his face, Abel walks into the heart of the gathering. He’s surrounded on all sides by the rich and beautiful—slim bodies garbed in richly patterned kimonos, jackets and trousers cut to emphasize attractiveness, and silk dresses that do little to conceal every curve and plane of the bodies within.
Only 3.16 meters beneath the transparent flooring, the dark water ripples past, waves forming under their feet to break on the distant shore. Soft bands of light sweep downward repeatedly as if the illumination were flowing along the walls into the sea.
The dataread tucked into Abel’s black silk jacket pulses once. Rather than pull it out, he simply taps his chest pocket and localizes the range of his hearing. The crowd’s murmuring instantly becomes muted.
“How’s it going down there?” asks Harriet Dixon, who works as the pilot of Abel’s ship, the Persephone. She’s generally full of bubbly optimism, but she gets nervous when she can tell Abel isn’t telling her the full story. “Finished trading the ‘big and sparkly’ yet?”
He snags a glass of champagne from a nearby Yoke’s tray to complete his image as a partygoer. “Not yet.”
This is untrue. He sold the diamond they mined from a meteor near Saturn as soon as they made landfall on Earth. His other tasks do not concern Harriet and her partner, Zayan Thakur. Involving them would only put them at risk. Abel has begun calculating the morality of lying in more complex ways, of late.
“As long as you’re not losing it at a casino,” Harriet says. “That stone’s going to fetch us enough to live on for months! If you manage it right.”
“I will,” Abel says. In fact the price he got could probably pay for a full year’s operating costs. He will cut Harriet and Zayan in for equal shares of the haul, but he has chosen to distribute larger windfalls in smaller, scheduled installments. When he met his crew members six months ago, they were very near the point of starvation. The natural psychological result of such privation is the impulse to spend any funds as quickly as they come in, sometimes on pure extravagance. This isn’t unique to Harriet and Zayan; most Vagabonds are so used to living on scarce resources that they’re often unsure how to handle prosperity. Such luxuries don’t tempt Abel.
His one temptation lurks at the far edge of the Earth system, monitored by security satellites—the
