Not a sad survivor who might have gotten lost long before he opened a door into a forbidden place.
Still, she has paid me and she has given me free rein.
I sit at the built-in desk and move the money to all of my accounts. I’m going to have to create some new ones before I leave so that my holdings are diversified. Before I do that, I pay for this berth for the next five years.
I warned Riya that the recovery could take a long time. She wants it done right. After I heard her tales of the previous attempts, I knew that part of the problem was that she hired thieves and ruffians and risk takers who specialized in cross-system possession recovery.
She hired disposable people who usually committed snatch-and-grabs. People who didn’t care much for her mission or their own lives.
People who wouldn’t be missed.
In that, they were a lot like me.
Riya and I finished the negotiations as I drank my coffee. She showed me the device her people had used to get out of the Room. I examined it. It looked unusual enough.
But she wouldn’t give me its specs until I was ready to go to the Room.
I was fine with that. It gave both of us an illusion of controclass="underline" me, the ability to say I was done before I went into the Room; and her, the belief that I had no idea how to use what she had shown me.
We made a verbal record of our negotiations. Both of our attorneys would work together to make a formal agreement that we would sign within the month.
She seemed nervous and uncertain, while I was nervous and happy. If someone had asked me before we started the negotiations who would feel what, I would have said that I’d be the uncertain one while she would be happy with all that we’d done.
I fully expected her to terminate before I arrived in my berth.
Instead she paid me.
I finish transferring the money. I contact and pay my attorney, notifying her of her obligations in drafting this agreement.
Then I lean back in my chair.
For the first time since I’ve come to Longbow Station, balancing my chair on two legs does not satisfy me. The berth—with its built-in desk, view of the grow pods, and slide-out soft bed—no longer feels like home.
I need to move. I need to get out of here.
I need to spend the night on my ship.
By modern standards, Nobody’s Business is a small ship, but by mine, it’s huge. The Business can fly with a single pilot, but it’s designed for twenty to fifty people.
When I was wreck diving, I’d fly with ten or fewer, and to me, that felt crowded. I’d close off the lower levels and lock up the cargo bays.
Sometimes I forget all the space I’m not using. The main level has the bridge and auxiliary controls. It also has the lounge, where I’ve put most of my viewing technology so that I can review dives. There are six cabins on this level as well, including mine.
The captain’s cabin is two levels up. I never use it. My cabin is the same size as all the others. It looks the same, as well, except for the hardwired terminal that I use when I don’t want anyone hacking into my work.
Most (but not all) of the other systems on the Business are networked, and I’m up-front with any crew that I hire that I watch the systems diligently. If they put something on the system, from a virus to a piece of information, it’s mine. I’ve learned a lot that way.
The Business is docked in the permanent section of the station. I pay extra to keep her systems disconnected from the station’s systems. I also bribe the officials to keep an eye on her, to make sure no one enters illegally.
Even so, I still run several security programs—all of them redundant. No one, not even the best hacker, can shut off all of them and still have time to case my ship.
As I enter the Business, I stand in the airlock and check the first layer of security, seeing who—if anyone—has crossed this threshold since I last went through.
According to the programs, no one has.
I let myself in, breathing the stale air. I keep the environmental systems on low when I’m station bound—no sense wasting the energy. I power up, check more redundant security systems, and run a full diagnostic that I network to my own internal computer.
Long ago, I set up the Business and my single ship to communicate with me—mostly to make sure I remain awake and alert when I’m piloting either ship. But I also use the links to communicate with the Business about internal matters, mostly so that I’m not tied to the bridge.
The air has become cool as the environmental systems kick in. My cabin still smells faintly of incense from an abortive and mistaken attempt at relaxation on the last trip full of tourists. I make a mental note to have this room cleaned top to bottom, and then I sit at the hardwired terminal.
It’s covered with a faint layer of dust. I haven’t touched it in more than a year. I’m not even sure it’ll power up.
But it does. Then it runs its own diagnostics and shows me all the security video from the cabin itself. I let the video play in a corner of the touch screen while I access my financials.
I move 90 percent of the money that Riya paid me from my public accounts to my private ones. In a day or so, I’d create some new accounts, and divide the money up even more.
Then I settle into my chair and order lunch from my personal store.
I’m going to be here for a while. I have a lot of research to do, and I don’t want it traced.
I start with the Colonnade Wars.
I learned long ago to research everything, especially something you’re certain of, because the memory plays tricks. And something you’re certain of is most likely to be the thing you’ll get wrong.
The Colonnade Wars lasted nearly one hundred years. The wars began as a series of skirmishes on the far end of this sector. Then actual war broke out toward the other end, on a small planet that had been colonized for so long that some believed the humans on that planet actually evolved there.
Other battles with different participants—started throughout the sector. At first, the weapons brokers and the mercenaries seemed to be the only ones who knew about the various skirmishes, but then it became clear that powerbrokers from several nation-states were financing their favorites in each conflict. And sometimes those powerbrokers backed both factions at the same time.
The battle turned away from the petty internal squabbles—over land, over entitlements, over religious shrines—and turned against those who funded the fights.
Suddenly the powerful found themselves fighting on several fronts. Their massive armies and huge weapon systems were no match to the smaller, more creative warfare of their enemies.
And it looked, for a long time, as if the massive armies would break.
Enter Commander Ewing Trekov and his cohorts. All of them had been injured on one front or another. Most of them had come within a heartbeat of dying.
They ended up at the same treatment facility in the very center of the sector, and there they realized they had the same philosophy about the wars.
First, they believed that the Colonnade Wars were not wars at all, but a single war—a large, scattered battlefield that spread across several systems. These men and women, brilliant all, realized that fighting each front as if it were a separate war was what was destroying the army. A military could have no coherent strategy when it believed it was fighting a dozen wars at once.
So these people, as they healed, began studying the history of warfare— not just in this sector, but throughout human history, as far back as they could go. They discussed superweapons and super troops. They discussed a unified front and a robotized military. They explored remote fighting versus hands-on.