Chapter 1 Callie had been dead for three months, and she was sick of it. She sat strapped into an ornate wooden chair decorated with carved comets and stars, glaring at a viewscreen, ostensibly browsing news feeds on the Tangle but mostly waiting for a message from an alien that might not even come today, or tomorrow, or next week. "Soon" was a word that contained a multitude of possibilities. She shifted around, trying to get comfortable. Having chairs in microgravity was stupid, but what was the point in owning the throne of a pirate queen if you didn''t sit in it sometimes? Besides, this kept her from pacing around the station, which was annoying everyone. Her engineer Ashok floated into the control room and crowed, "It''s Gravity Day! Soon you''ll be able to stomp around and glare with your feet on the ground!" "Unless you turn this ugly asteroid into a black hole by mistake." "I only spawn singularities on purpose, cap." Ashok spun himself with puffs of compressed air from his fingertips and twirled in a mid-air cartwheel.
"Gravity Day! You should make it a national holiday. You don''t make nearly enough imperial decrees." "To be an emperor, you have to rule multiple countries, Ashok. I''m in charge of exactly one asteroid in currently unincorporated space." She paused. "I do have two spaceships, though, so I could probably justify making you call me ''admiral''." "O admiral, my admiral." He clucked his tongue, one of the few unaugmented organs in his head.
"No, that doesn''t work at all." He glanced at her screens. "No message from Lantern yet?" Their friend Lantern was a Liar, the race of pathologically untruthful aliens who''d opened the stars to humans. and kept dark secrets from them, including the existence of an ancient, now dormant race of near-godlike aliens known as the Axiom. Lantern had been raised in the cult of truth-tellers - Liars who didn''t lie - but the cult itself secretly served the interests of the sleeping Axiom, hiding the existence of their ongoing, universe-altering projects from outsiders. Callie''s crew had stumbled upon an Axiom facility, and acquired forbidden Axiom technology, and as a result, the truth-tellers had tried to kill them. Fortunately, thanks to Lantern''s infiltration and double-agency, the cult believed it had succeeded. Lantern had taken over the local cell of the truth-tellers in the Sol system, and as far as the elders knew, she was still loyal to them.
She was checking their databases to make sure no record of their names, or the name of their ship, remained in the cult''s systems. Callie didn''t want to tangle with zealous assassins wielding unimaginable technology again. They''d only survived the first time by lucky accident. In the meantime, the crew was laying low. "No word," Callie confirmed. "I appreciate her caution and thoroughness and all those other admirable qualities, but I''d really like to come back to life already." "You talk like resurrection is inevitable, cap. If Lantern can''t purge us from the cult''s system without the big bad elders noticing, we might have to leave our old identities behind and start new lives in another system.
That could be neat. I could be a chef named Reginald who specializes in algae-based dishes. You could be a saucy bartender who beats up drunks with a pool cue." "I''m already that, except for the bartender part, and the saucy part, and they aren''t always drunks." "I was trying to hew closely to your essential nature. But cheer up. It''s Gravity Day! I''m gonna flip the switch in-" He consulted some chronometer in his heads-up display "-forty-six minutes and eight seconds." She glanced at the current local time on her viewscreen.
"At 7:07? Why then? Does the gravity generator need to warm up or something?" "No, but the gravitational constant is 6.674×10−11 m3 kg−1 s−2, so, you know." Callie sighed. "So you want to start it sixty-seven minutes and four seconds after six. I''m not sure that even qualifies as a joke, Ashok. Not even by engineering joke standards." "We''ve been stuck on a commandeered pirate base for three months pretending to be dead, cap. I''ve got to entertain myself somehow.
I''m just glad Lantern got her hands - or pseudopods, or whatever - on this alien gravity-manipulation tech and was willing to share. Having a project has kept me from losing my mind." Callie scowled. "You have so many lenses all over your face, I can''t tell if you''re giving me a pointed look or not. I haven''t lost my mind." Yet . "I just want to get off this rock and do something useful with my time." She considered sending Lantern another message through the encrypted channels that the ship - now station - AI, Shall, had set up through the Tangle, but the alien would have gotten in touch if she knew anything for sure yet.
"How are things going with Elena?" Ashok asked. Callie relaxed a little. "Good. She''s the only thing that makes being here tolerable." "Ouch," Ashok said cheerfully. She ignored him. "This Sebastien thing is wearing on her, though." She glanced at one of the tattle-screens, and it showed a peaceful sine-wave of their prisoner-patient''s sleeping brain.
"She was hoping we''d see better results by now." "I''m impressed every day you don''t put him out an airlock." She was always tempted. "Uzoma and Stephen are doing their best to fix his broken brain." "Oh, I didn''t think you''d put him out an airlock because he went psycho and tried to take over the universe and kill us all," Ashok said. "I know you wouldn''t hold that against him. I meant because your girlfriend had a big crush on him and everything." "I don''t push my romantic rivals into space, Ashok.
I just out-amazing them. Anyway, I think Elena''s crush started to wane when Sebastien kidnapped her and tried to feed her to alien robot brain-spiders." "I can see how that might have a chilling effect." He spun again, and waved. "I''m going to go tell everyone else that Gravity Day is upon us." "You could just have Shall make a general announcement." "Then I''d miss the opportunity to receive everyone''s applause individually and in person." He paused.
"I can''t help but notice you didn''t applaud. The thing you''d be applauding is my technological genius." "I''ll clap after you fail to turn us into a black hole, and when my feet are firmly on the ground." "I love your optimism." He floated out of the control room and down one of the twisting corridors, cut long ago into the stony asteroid by miners and long since repurposed into living quarters by the pirates Callie had stolen the station from. She sat and brooded for a moment longer, then got bored. Maybe she should take the White Raven out on a little run, not anywhere near inhabited space where they might be identified, just to make sure the ship was still in good working order. She wasn''t built for this level of inaction.
Even being on Meditreme Station between jobs for a couple of weeks at a time had made her antsy, and Meditreme Station had been the size of a city and home to fifty thousand souls, instead of the size of a city block and home to fewer than a dozen. At least Meditreme had bars, before it got blown up. She was rapidly working her way through the late pirate queen''s stash of stolen liquors. "Callie?" Shall spoke into the implant just behind her ear on their private channel. "I''ve got weird news and other weird news." "Did we hear from Lantern?" "I just received a voice message from her, yes, but it''s not the all-clear you were hoping for. She has a line on some potential Axiom activity." Callie grunted.
If she couldn''t come back from the dead, killing genocidal space monsters could be a nice compensation. "Let me hear it." Lantern''s voice, euphonious from her artificial voicebox, spoke into Callie''s ear: "I have been in touch with the elders of my sect, who report a troubling development in the Taliesen system. Our cell of truth-tellers there has gone silent, missing numerous scheduled check-ins, and the central authority has grown concerned. As you know, the elders value their secrecy, but they admit there is a major Axiom facility of some kind on the outskirts of that system, and that our cell has been monitoring it closely for millennia. I don''t know for sure if they have gone silent because of Axiom activity. but it is certainly a possibility. I am investigating further, and will be in touch with any discoveries.
" She paused. "As concerns the other matter, I expect to have an answer soon - I have scrubbed details about your ship and crew from every database I can access, and only have a few last precautions to take and investigations to make before I know if you''re safe or not. I hope to see all of you soon." "Huh," Callie said. Taliesen had been a backwater for a long time, but now it was booming as a colony system - as of about a year ago, its innermost planet Owain had an Earthlike atmosphere, after almost a century of terraforming with Liar tech. Colonists were flocking to the planet now, hoping to grab their own little slice of paradise, and it had a certain wild frontier atmosphere. The settlers who''d moved in earlier, during the terraforming process, were a quirky lot, too. If the Axiom was waking up there, a lot of people could be in danger.
"Michael''s company was heavily invested in that system, right? Wasn''t it his horrible uncle''s pet project?" "The company contributed heavily to the terraforming project in exchange for resource-exploitation rights in the future, yes," Shall said. "Uncle Reynauld runs the operation there, last I heard." She sighed. "If I wasn''t dead, I could investigate this from the human side - call up Michael and ask if he''s heard about a.