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Kontos nodded. “Run checks. Full diagnostics on everything. I don’t see how this could be anything but the result of a glitch, but let’s check it carefully.”

“Incoming call from HTTU 458,” the comm specialist reported.

The image of HTTU 458’s commanding officer appeared before Kontos. “What was that?” she asked. “That ship that appeared on the edge of the star system?”

Kontos paused before answering. “Your ship saw it, too? Was it over the link with Pele?”

“No. My ship’s sensors reported a detection independent of that from Pele. They identified what they called an enigma warship in the same location that Pele reported seeing one, then reported that the warship had vanished as if it had entered jump space.” The transport’s commanding officer shook her head. “But Iwa doesn’t have a jump point there.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Kontos said. “Or, rather, it’s not supposed to have a jump point there. And we cannot see a jump point in that location.”

“I know very little about the aliens, the enigmas. Can they do that?”

It was Kontos’s turn to shake his head. “I don’t know. Black Jack’s people didn’t tell us the enigmas could jump to places where we cannot see jump points, but they admitted they were able to learn little about the enigmas.”

“Alliance,” the transport’s captain said, her tone filled with disgust and anger. “They wouldn’t tell us the truth.” A century of war with the Alliance, a war the Syndicate had finally lost not too long ago, had left a vast reservoir of hatred which might never fully drain.

“It was Black Jack’s workers,” Kontos repeated. “Black Jack” Geary, the legendary hero of the Alliance, who had impossibly returned from the dead to save the Alliance and bring an end to the war that seemed as if it would never end. He had been the one to finally defeat the Syndicate. And yet he had also stopped practices such as the bombarding of civilian populations on planets and the execution of prisoners, which during that century of war had become commonplace. He had broken the Syndicate’s power and given places like Midway their chances at freedom. “Black Jack is… for the people.”

The transport’s captain grimaced. “The universe seems to be full of impossible things these days. Could the enigmas have used something other than jump space?”

Kontos paused before answering, upset that the possibility had not occurred to him. “We know of only two ways to travel between stars in less than decades. That doesn’t mean another one could not exist. But what we saw of this enigma ship matched the behavior of something using jump space.”

“How could a jump point be there? Jump points are created because the gravity wells of stars are huge enough to stretch space itself far enough to create thin spots which we can use to enter or leave jump space. Jump points stay in the same spots relative to the stars that created them. They don’t come and go.”

“Perhaps the enigma ship used a different kind of jump point,” Kontos speculated. “Or perhaps the enigmas have discovered a new way to mess with our sensors, and there was no ship there.”

“What should we do?”

“We’ll investigate both possibilities as well as we can, though neither your ship nor mine has exotic scientific instruments that might be able to see something we cannot already see. Let’s get this off-load done as quickly as possible once we reach the planet so we can return to Midway. I want to report this.”

He didn’t know what the inexplicable appearance of the enigma warship at Iwa meant, but it could not mean anything good. Neither would the chance that the enigmas had discovered a new way to fool the sensors of human ships. The enigmas had refused to negotiate or even openly disclose their existence for decades, remaining invisible to Syndicate sensors as they seized human-occupied star systems and destroyed human spacecraft without warning. The secret of their invisibility had been solved by Black Jack, but the enigmas had nonetheless continued their attacks. If they could now directly jump to human-occupied star systems other than Midway, it would present a serious threat.

President Iceni had to be told. She would know what to do.

* * *

The largest city on the planet known as Midway in the star system that humanity had named Midway had been built to Syndicate standards. Curves were inefficient, so straight lines marked the street grid, and straight lines characterized the buildings that lined those streets. Those designs also meant straight lines of sight in all directions, which helped out another standard feature of Syndicate cities: surveillance systems intended to provide continuous coverage of every square centimeter. Even though the Syndicate Internal Security Service agents (nicknamed “snakes” by the citizens) had been eliminated during the rebellion by President Iceni and General Drakon, the surveillance systems remained, though other watchers now made use of them.

But other standard aspects of the Syndicate were corruption, shoddy work wherever undermotivated workers could get away with it, and shoddy construction wherever corporations could get away with it. Between bribes, badly placed surveillance devices, and poor quality in much of the surveillance gear, the system intended to see everything in fact had cracks in its picture of the city. And in those cracks, crime could still operate, vice could find its outlets, and those who did not want to be seen could remain invisible. The president and the general might be slowly changing how things had been done under the Syndicate, but the nature of the underbelly of human cities had not changed in thousands of years and would not change here anytime soon.

Colonel Bran Malin cautiously eased his way down a short alley, placing each step carefully to avoid noise. A security light intended to illuminate the alley had never worked, but the low-light “cat’s-eye” contact lenses Malin was using provided a decent view of the cluttered alley despite the gloom of the night. The suit he wore, similar to that of an average low-level executive, appeared innocent but actually contained a wide variety of weapons and defenses. He thought of it as a hunting outfit, because it had been designed to stalk and eliminate prey.

Human prey, because Malin was determined that anyone who might threaten either Drakon or Iceni would be taken out before they could harm either leader. It sometimes bothered him that he felt no qualms about killing anyone he suspected of being a threat. Perhaps that was because of how important his goals were. Or perhaps he had inherited that lack of conscience from his mother. That thought bothered him as well.

Malin froze in position as one of the screens on his palm pad revealed another flicker of motion as someone slipped from one crack on the surveillance system to another. He had been following that someone for over an hour, a slow-motion game of cat and mouse. This was no ordinary criminal but a highly skilled operative, using the sort of techniques that only someone trained by the Syndicate snakes would know to employ. Malin, who had acquired that same training by means that would have meant his death if the snakes had ever discovered it, had been sorely pressed to maintain contact with his prey.

Was this a surviving snake, operating under deep cover? Or someone like Malin, who was serving other masters?

And where was he or she going? His quarry had at first seemed focused on places and things related to General Drakon and Colonel Morgan, leading Malin to initially believe that this chase might be related to the hiding place of General Drakon’s infant daughter. Drakon wanted to find that girl, to rescue her from whatever planned upbringing Morgan had arranged. Malin always thought of the baby girl as Drakon’s, and not as Malin’s own half sister. Contemplating the girl’s relationship to him too easily brought up emotions that could distract and anger him when focus and cold calm were necessary.