Chapter One

Logos was ugly, but even the most dreadful planet could be striking and majestic from orbit. Someone who spent a lifetime living and working in space would get used to views like this, but Tessa’s brief military career hadn’t shown her as much of the galaxy as she’d hoped.

The atmosphere was silvery and opaque, streaked with black and white storm systems. A vast, white sun created a harsh corona, even with the viewport darkening to compensate. Tessa had seen enough warships and other staggeringly large things up close that she had some grasp of scale. Walking across the surface of Nidaros among its towering spires came to mind, and looking down at this place brought those memories back in a way that wasn’t entirely pleasant.

Logos was still considerably more attractive than the Waypoint that Tessa was currently aboard. It was difficult to imagine anything ghastlier than Baykara City, but she’d never been the most imaginative person.

Every surface in the pitiful atrium was covered in bright, moving adverts. Any bit of floor that wasn’t meant to be walked upon produced headache-inducing holograms. If she took the noise-canceling buds out of her ears, the noise would have been intolerable.

It wasn’t like this on an Evagardian station. It wasn’t even like this on a station that reasonably expected the patronage of anyone civilized. It was even worse than the Bazaar in Free Trade space, which was a considerable accomplishment.

It was best to think as little as possible about what it meant to be in properly unregulated space. What guidelines were in place for the filters that were inside the recyclers on this station? Who had certified this viewport against explosive decompression? What were the biohazard containment protocols and decontamination procedures? What sort of medical care could one expect if one fell ill here? Would there be care? Even if there were, there were no regulatory bodies to ensure that it would be appropriate.

Tessa shuddered and went back to gazing at the planet. Drexler appeared beside her, and she used her holo to dial down her dampening so that she could hear him. Rather than try to speak over the chaos, he indicated his right with his thumb.

Tessa followed him to a lift, which they shared with no fewer than eight other riders and a stench that made her stomach churn. As Tessa ground her teeth, eyes watering, Drexler looked amused.

“What is that smell?” she asked once they were safely in the corridor.

“I guess Imperials don’t have all the finer things,” he replied.

In another state of mind, Tessa might have bristled at that. Drexler’s clothes and grooming were expensive and refined, but the rest of him was another story. As her mother would’ve said, he had no breeding.

Their destination was a cramped, dingy room with two dozen hard plastic seats bolted to the walls, which swam with even more dizzying adverts. The noise level, at least, was reasonable.

Two men were already waiting, sitting at opposite ends of the space, as far as they could possibly be from each other. Drexler took that in, then sat as far as he could get from them. Taking her place beside him, Tessa considered the other travelers.

The man to their right didn’t look much older than Tessa. He was staggeringly beautiful, and his clothes boldly advertised that he came from the Golden Worlds. The formal suit was appallingly fine, and the gold stitching was hardly subtle. His black hair was glossy and long enough to reach his waist, worn in an elegant ponytail that Tessa had no choice but to envy. It had only been a matter of weeks ago that she’d been forced to leave all her hair severed on the bloodstained deck of a cargo bay aboard the Julian. Two things could be true at once: she could be comfortable with her almost boyish new haircut, even though it didn’t suit her, and she could miss what had once been.

The other passenger was considerably less gaudy than the Golden. His gray traveler’s suit was tasteful and understated. He had the sort of square jaw that Tessa could admire, although the way that he sprawled in his seat was hardly attractive. He reminded Tessa of Drexler. Drexler could easily present himself so much better; he just needed to do away with his asinine rich person costume and start giving more than a second’s thought to what came out of his mouth. Neither of those things seemed particularly likely, but he did have a lot of money. That was worth something.

Both travelers spared a cursory look for the two of them, but that was all.

Drexler wrinkled his nose, although there weren’t any problematic odors here.

“What’s the matter?” Tessa asked him. She had to be careful what she said. She wasn’t sure about the one in gray, but the Golden troubled her. A little noise from the adverts would cover audio, but even if that man couldn’t read lips, he could easily record her with his holo and use AI to get her words. Maybe it was paranoia, but Tessa was ready to put the odds at exactly zero percent that the Golden wasn’t a spy. He’d be posing as a businessman or something, but that hardly mattered. Prosperous, Golden businessmen did not travel alone in places like this.

His eyes flicked toward her. Then he went back to his holo.

Tessa swallowed.

“I don’t like flying commercial,” Drexler said tiredly. He folded his arms and crossed his legs, shifting in the uncomfortable seat. “I’d rather take my own ship.”

“That’s wasteful.”

“Why?”

Tessa blinked and looked up at him. Was he being funny? No. She shrugged. “Allocation of resources.”

“Do you people not have privately owned vehicles?”

“Only those with good reason. Or the terribly shameless,” Tessa added.

“Where’s the shame in being able to get around?”

“You don’t need your own vehicle to go places. For the Empress’s sake, Mark. A functioning society is not one in which everyone’s got a vehicle. It’s one in which nobody needs one. Civilized transport isn’t like this,” she said, glancing upward to indicate the Waypoint.

“Sure.” Drexler scowled at the advert playing directly across from them. It was something to do with lip augmentation. “Did they teach you that before or after they made you recite your little oath to your Empress every morning in school?”

“What are you on about?”

“Don’t Imperial children have to say some kind of pledge at school every morning?”

She stared at him in disgust. “Why would anyone do that?”

He frowned. “Oh. I heard that somewhere.”

“It’s absurd.”

Moments passed, but the silence didn’t last. Tessa had learned that Galactics did not share the Evagardian appreciation of quiet. Drexler leaned close.

“What the hell else are they keeping down there that’s so important that they won’t let us just come down?” It wasn’t the silliest question he’d ever asked. “Is your friend really worth that much?”

“Depends who’s buying,” Tessa murmured, glancing at the Golden.

“Is it wrong for me to ask how much I’m going to be paying here?” Drexler asked.

It wasn’t wrong, but neither was it tasteful. Before Tessa could decide whether she ought to humor that with a reply, the light over the door at the far end of the room went from amber to green. The door slid open, revealing a woman in a tidy, gray flight suit. She was twice Tessa’s age, trim, and there was an air of professionalism in her bearing. Her eyes swept the room. She did something with her holo, then beckoned.

“Surface bound. All aboard.”

Tessa, Drexler, and the two men rose.

The Golden politely stepped aside and gestured for Tessa to go ahead. The man in gray was already ducking through the hatch, and Tessa didn’t like how hard he seemed to be working to avoid looking at her.

Drexler followed her onto the entry shuttle, which was a step up from the Waypoint, although that bar was low. The interior was clean, and the seats still had padding. All the straps and emergency equipment looked functional.

“Anywhere is fine,” the woman in the flight suit said, standing aside and grasping a handhold on the bulkhead. The man in gray took the nearest seat, and the Golden went a few rows back. Tessa sat beside Drexler on the other side of the aisle. “Strap in,” the woman warned.

Tessa helped Drexler with his buckles, then fastened her own. The function of this craft was to breach the atmosphere and handle suborbital flight safely and economically. There were no viewports.

Tessa had learned a lot about the galaxy since emerging from her sleeper on the surface of Nidaros. But she couldn’t pretend to understand all of it, especially the legal intricacies that went with places like this.

Who were the people holding Lieutenant Nina Deilani? Tessa could guess, but even with Drexler’s resources, it was difficult to be sure. Deilani had been KIA and her body was recovered by Blue Label. Blue Label was part of a network of private security companies that had been jointly owned by Commonwealth and Free Trade interests. After the war, from what Tessa understood, the Commonwealth shareholders had divested, leaving the mercenaries freelance.

It seemed probable that one of two things had happened next: Blue Label had sold Deilani promptly to someone willing to take on the potential risk of ransoming her, or they were doing it themselves. These people on Logos could be some deniable component of Blue Label, or someone else entirely.

Whoever they were, they were careful. They had never fully acknowledged that they had Deilani in any communications with Tessa and Drexler. They strictly controlled every step of this process. What they were doing was not, strictly speaking, illegal. They were in possession of what they could reasonably claim to be a Jane Doe. Furthermore, they weren’t operating in Evagardian space or space bound by any of the usual accords with provisions for human rights.

Normally, this would’ve been addressed by the Evagardian Navy, Evagardian Intelligence, Imperial Security, or above all, Galactic Rescue, whose purpose was to recover Evagardians in situations exactly like this. None of those entities were interested in the law. They would’ve gone in and taken Deilani back with no regard for good manners.

But these were not normal times. As far as the galaxy knew, only a few short months ago a rogue Evagardian had destroyed a city and killed twenty million noncombatants. This had led to something unprecedented: Evagard walking on eggshells. The galaxy had been convinced, at some cost, that the Empress was not responsible for that monstrous crime. To solidify that narrative, the Imperium had to think twice about the sorts of operations that they’d have mounted in the past as a matter of course. At least publicly.

The fear probably wasn’t that recovering a missing member of the Empress’ Service would be unpopular. It was more likely that Imperial Security was worried about a setup. Perhaps the Commonwealth or their allies were hoping to catch the Imperium with its hand in the cookie jar to press the only advantage they had at the moment: public opinion.

According to Agent Hopper of Imperial Security, Evagard had judged that recovering one junior officer was not worth the risk at this juncture. Hopper, of course, had been lying. Evagard suddenly acting with a shred of decorum was not an abdication of its most basic cultural tenets. The decision not to officially rescue Deilani or to ransom her back had to have been made with another reason in mind.

There was nothing official about what Tessa and Drexler were doing, although Tessa was under no illusions. Hopper had told her about Deilani knowing perfectly well that Tessa would come at once. Evagard did not want to leave Deilani where she was. Neither were they inclined to pay a ransom, which might inadvertently reveal Deilani’s true value. The odds were virtually nil that Tessa’s unofficial expedition hadn’t been engineered by Imperial Security leadership. As far as IS was concerned, if Tessa could use Drexler’s money to return Deilani safely to Evagardian space, that would be the tidiest resolution for everyone.

Chapter Two