“And you mean to tell me there’s a goddammed C-suit ringing in your brain right now?”
“Yeah,” Nesbit nodded emphatically. “And you really need to take this call.”
Susan rubbed the bridge of her nose, simultaneously hoping and failing to cut off the budding stress headache. She’d had weird days in service of the CCDF. She’d had weird days as a civilian. But this, this one took the blue ribbon by a light-year.
“Okay, what the hell? Mattu, if you’ll release permissions to Mr. Nesbit to access the main display so he can put his important call through?”
“Permissions granted, mum.”
All eyes, of both species, turned to face the … face that appeared in the tactical plot. A fit man with a square jaw and blue eyes that looked just south of gene-spliced and a shock of straight hair losing the battle against graying. Susan guessed he was within a handful of years of her own age. Which direction, she couldn’t say.
“This is Captain Susan Kamala, commanding officer of the CCDF cruiser Ansari and acting … spokeswoman of the combined Human/Xre task group Christmas Truce.” They hadn’t actually agreed to the name. She’d just pulled it from memory and decided it had some emotional gravity to it. “Whom am I addressing?”
“Well, now that is the picture of a motley crew if I’ve ever seen one,” the unidentified silver fox said as he surveyed everyone present in the CIC in turn. “You all seem to be getting along famously.”
“State your name and business in the Grendel system, sir,” Susan clapped back in irritation. “Or we’ll have to assume your intentions are hostile and respond accordingly.”
“The Grendel system is my business, Captain Kamala. Both literally and figuratively. My name is Tyson Abington, CEO of Ageless Corporation, majority stakeholder in the planet we mutually orbit, and one-twelfth of the bosses who hold your contract.”
A corner of Susan’s mouth curled up into a vicious sneer. The universe had handed her a gift. The once-in-a-lifetime chance to properly shove one of these empty sport-jackets into their proper station.
“Grendel has recently undergone an abrupt change of ownership, Mr. Abington. You may hold the legal papers, but I currently hold all the nuclear missiles, and you’re transmitting from what my drone integration officer tells me is a ship that’s broken medical quarantine, giving me complete authority under the CCDF Charter to reduce you to your constituent atoms if I feel like it. So, let’s start over. Why are you here, and what, if anything, can you do for me?”
Tyson, if he was indeed who he claimed to be, had the cheek to smirk and lean back while he considered the threat to his life she’d just laid down. He crossed his fingers over his flat stomach, then brightened. “I apologize, Captain Kamala. You’ve obviously had a busy time out here and don’t need some company bigwig barging in. I came on too strong; it’s a personal failing.”
“I’ve no doubt of that.”
Tyson held up a hand—not to silence her, but a request for a pause. “We are not a plague ship. In reality, we’re the Nexus-flagged Taipei. We traded IDs with the Preakness to escape Lazarus undetected. I assure you, there is none of the Teegarden contagion onboard this ship. And even if there was, I’m sitting next to the woman who’s going to cure it.”
Susan tugged at an earlobe. “You had to escape your own planet, Mr. Abington? I find that strains my suspension of disbelief.”
“It’s been a strange couple of months. The fact you’re sitting there with Xre on your bridge who are not shackled or otherwise under guard tells me you’ve come to some sort of realization, yes?”
“That would be an understatement.”
“And the absence of the task group the fleet sent out here to avenge your ‘death’ means the real story is quite a bit more complicated, right?”
“Actually, we absorbed part of that task group,” Susan said, brimming with pride at the improbable feat. “The part we didn’t eradicate.”
“Fascinating.”
“That doesn’t alarm you, Mr. Abington? Because a normal person would be spooling up their rings to get the ever-loving fuck out of here by now.”
Tyson actually snorted in amusement. “They would indeed. That’s why they’re normal. But we aren’t, are we, Captain? Or your, our, new friends. I think not.” The man in the perfectly tailored suit, with the perfectly coifed hair, let out a sigh that he’d been holding in for a week.
“As implausible as it seems, Captains, we three have a common enemy. I believe they set you on a collision course as part of a campaign to see my transtellar fall. And I need your help unmasking them so they can be brought to justice.”
“And I suppose you have a plan to bring that about that our forces are somehow critical to.”
“Well, now that you mention it, I very much need to get to Ceres to ask some questions of a citizen there.”
Susan’s head shook involuntarily as if she’d been physically struck. “I’m sorry, did you just say you wanted our help to invade the Sol system?”
Tyson held out his hands and smiled in a gesture that was equal parts accommodating and placating. “‘Invade’ is such a loaded word. ‘Infiltrate’ may better fit the circumstances. But yes, Captain Kamala. I’m going to Earth, and you’re coming with me.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s customary at this point in writing a novel to spend a page or so acknowledging all the people other than oneself whose time and talents went into helping bring it into the world. People like agents, editors, cover artists, beta readers, significant others, and other authors whose own words were the foundation on which a new story was built.
And just as in my five previous books, all of these people deserve credit and appreciation. But I’ve banged on about them five times already and they know who they are.
Instead, I want to use this space to acknowledge all the people who have inspired me in the years since this book was written. You see, the first draft
