Jai wasn’t exaggerating. It was possible we might have to use their home world as leverage to extort them into a peace they didn’t want, but without knowing where they lived, that wasn’t a possibility at all. They could pop into real space without warning, with the same dire results as the first time, when they had abducted a whole ship’s crew.
Lyth’s plan was to build a virus protocol to scrape all communications in the last year. As a benign virus, it could self-replicate across the entire galactic communications grid, spreading faster than anyone could manually distribute it. Then it would get to work looking for any mention of aggressive non-humans.
We had spent the rest of that first evening brainstorming terms and keywords to prime the virus to look for, including ‘blue men’, ‘slavers’—which had been Fiori’s idea—’visitors’, ‘strangers’, ‘non-crescent ship’ and other offshoots and weird associations. We tried to channel the minds of the average, unaware human and guess what terms they might use to describe what they had seen if they encountered the aliens.
Then Lyth locked himself in the map room with Lyssa and coded the virus, then set it loose upon the galaxy. The rest of the three days, he spent examining the reports that came back. There were a lot of false positives, and each needed to be manually checked.
“If I’d had more time, I might have narrowed down the parameters,” Lyth said. “It’s out there now, though. I can’t change it even if I wanted to, but I don’t think we should, even if we could.” He rubbed at his face, pushing away sleep.
Jai, who had been keeping him company, was sprawled in the armchair Lyssa had built for him, in the far corner, snoring softly.
“Wouldn’t tighter parameters cut down on all this work?” I asked, handing Lyth the coffee I’d made him.
He grinned as he took the cup, for it was the cup he used to hold while waiting for me to come aboard, when he had still been the shipmind. Then his grin faded, and he shook his head as he raised the cup to drink. “If anything pops up at all, it will be because of some freak association none of us thought of.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do know,” he said firmly. “If there had been a common, ordinary association, if the item spoke directly about aliens, we would have heard about it by now. Certainly, a basic search, even an advanced one that you might have put together, would have pulled it up.”
Anderson Marlow stepped into the room, the bright light from the passage on the other side of the door making us wince. “There he is,” he said, sounding vexed as he glanced at Jai. “How’s it going?”
“Lyth is explaining to me that we haven’t heard about the aliens before because we’re not thinking strangely enough.”
Lyth rolled his eyes.
Marlow rubbed his chin. “Sure,” he said, his tone one of agreement. “If anyone has come across them before, they might not have recognized what they were dealing with.”
“But even so, these blue guys are so…so noticeably different, why didn’t those people come dashing back to the comms network and babble about their amazing run-in with them?”
“Because they didn’t survive,” Lyth said simply.
My jaw dropped open.
Marlow sighed. “You’re looking for missing ship reports, then?”
“I’m looking at every single missing ship report,” Lyth said grimly. “Even then, I might miss the vital one.”
I shoved my fingers through my hair. “Why?” I demanded. “A missing ship is a missing ship.”
“Because no one reported the ship as missing,” Marlow said softly, studying Lyth.
Lyth nodded.
“But that’s…of course, they would report it!”
“To who?” Lyth said.
I felt my jaw drop. I couldn’t think of a single logical answer.
Marlow gave a laugh that held no amusement. “Lack of a central authority, or even a sectional authority, is working against us, for once.”
Horror leapt, making my gut twist. “That’s not a reason to create one,” I said swiftly. “We just got away from that shit.” Well, it was thirty years ago, but it still felt like yesterday to me.
“Danny’s right,” Jai said from the depth of the armchair. He stirred, got to his feet and stretched. “The closest to a central author is the Shipping Guild, but even they don’t track the movement of ships. They only keep a register of ships who care to join the Guild. Which is as it should be,” he added, resting his hand on Marlow’s shoulder. “Come on, both of you. Leave Lyth to his work. I’ll buy you a drink.”
My mind gnawed over the possibilities that Lyth kept suggesting. Lack of reporting, lack of central authority. Whole ships going missing and no one seemed to notice. We had thought it was a good thing the Empire had collapsed. And I still felt that way, I told myself firmly.
Once Lyth had scraped all comms for the last year, he went back to the year after that. “We don’t know how long ago they found our section of the galaxy and came across humans,” he pointed out. “They could have been watching us for years.”
Dalton had laughed bitterly at that idea. “You wait. Lyth will figure out they have been watching since humans nearly clawed each other to death because of the Shutdown—and they decided the only way to deal with such a miserable, aggressive species was to come in with all guns blazing.”
It turned out that Lyth was right. They had been watching us for years.
—19—
“At least, I presume they have been watching us,” Lyth explained.
“While also abducting who they wanted and pirating their guts out,” Dalton added, his voice drier than the toast on my plate.
I pushed my plate aside. “They’ve really been watching us for three years?”
“As far as I can tell, yes.” Lyth added quickly, “The objective of this was not to figure out
