Page 16 of Cloverleaf Station

“Good.” He took over the helm control, turning them back toward Cloverleaf Station in silence, and Kieron was too afraid of what it might mean to risk breaking it.

Chapter seven

Naively, Kieron had expected that to be the extent of their collaboration. He would release the probes, they would go out together to gather data and push their AI search algorithms as far as they could, without getting themselves smashed into pieces, and then they’d come back and analyze the data they collected. Preferably alone.

Elenus might be the king of the castle now, but he had his own room, his own place in the medical clinic, his own fancy ship. He had places he could be by himself while Kieron could hole up in the command room and process data—and the interminable paperwork that came with running Cloverleaf Station—in solitude.

He hadn’t counted on Elenus being so godsdamned chatty.

“Why did you use the Smith theorem on those outlying clusters?”

“When was the last time you tried a different blend of ferroconcrete and alloys behind the water wall?”

“Are there any pizzas in the food storage locker? I would absolutely kill for a decent pizza right now.”

Kieron did his best to answer as succinctly as possible in an effort to dissuade Elenus from pushing any further. They were better off when they spent as little time together as possible—it made it harder for Elenus to push Kieron to the breaking point, which in turn made it easier for Kieron to resist killing him.

“Because,” “Never,” and, “No,” were the answers for those particular questions, and variations on those worked for over a dozen others across the next few days before Elenus finally pushed in a way that Kieron couldn’t ignore.

“How did you get out of Hadrian’s Colony, anyway?”

Kieron didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He knew the stiffening of his body was answer enough. Please, please, don’t let him press. But there were no gods, and even if there had been, they wouldn’t have listened to Kieron.

“You must have been young,” Elenus went on, swiveling his chair in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc as he mused out loud. “ Hadrian’s Colony was only established forty years ago, and it did business with a very limited number of outsiders. Your parents must have been merchants or pilots, right?”

Kieron focused very hard on the screen in front of him, ingraining the numbers that scrolled across it in his brain. Traces of radium … xethalnum …

“The only other survivor I ever met got out as a small child. She told me there were three functioning ships on planet when the colony’s commanding general decided to blow the place up to keep the Alliance from figuring out about the private army he’d been breeding. Two of the ships belonged to off-worlders, one to the general himself. She and seven other kids were spirited onto one of them, and a few young families made it onto the other.” Elenus twirled in his chair, fingers steepled under his chin, deliberately not looking at Kieron while he “mused out loud,” the bastard, but not stopping either. “You could have been on one of those. It’s even probable, given what happened to the other ship.”

Kieron didn’t say anything. Frigium … there’s some traces of gold, too, huh …

“This next part is all hearsay, but it’s so interesting. From what I understand, the general’s daughter fought her way through an entire squad of her father’s followers to make it to his ship, along with her young son, right before the general pulled the trigger on blowing everyone else up. She managed to take off, but she couldn’t quite make it to space before the destruction began. The planet gets massive storms that make it hard to monitor, but it’s said the general blew a bomb he’d placed along a fault line in the core of the planet, causing an entire continent to collapse.”

He shook his head. “Nobody had thought the Hadrians were serious when they said they would sooner die than accept Alliance oversight. They certainly proved the galaxy wrong, didn’t they?”

Kieron didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He stopped being able to read the numbers on the screen, dedicating all his energy to controlling the trembling that tried to spread through his limbs and send him spiraling down into a well of darkness that he thought he’d put behind him two decades before.

“The ship was damaged, so the woman did the only thing she could think of—she put her son into the escape pod and used the rest of her fuel reserve to blast it through the atmosphere, hoping that one of the other ships would pick it up,” Elenus went on quietly. “And one did. Eventually … or so I’ve heard.”

Or so he’d heard? So he’d heard?

Kieron whirled around in his chair, holding onto the arms so tightly they creaked in his grip. “I guess someone like you can buy any information he likes,” he said quietly, with the same deadly focus he’d learned in his youth. “Someone rich and bored and looking for a thrill. What did you like best about that story? The sacrifice of the mother for her child, fighting to save him against all odds? What if it didn’t happen that way?” His throat hurt like he was holding back a laugh or more likely a scream. “Your story is bullshit. Whoever told you all of that is a fucking liar.”

Elenus held up his hands. “Peace, Sparky, peace. I swear I’m not trying to rile you on purpose. I just can’t let a question go once it’s gotten into my brain. It’s a character flaw.”

“You’re a character flaw.”

“My ex-partner would agree with you.”

Kieron stopped his teeth from grinding. “Tell me about him,” he said, forcing himself to sit back and at least appear relaxed. “Since you’re so interested in talking about the past. What did you do to make him steal your ship and go on the run?”

Elenus raised one eyebrow. “You assume I did something?”

“I have met you, haven’t I?”

Elenus laughed. “Fair enough. I’m sorry to disappoint you, though, but all Ganians are quirky. It’s part of our charm.” He gestured down at his elongated body. “We’re the physical oddballs of greater humanity, and the weirdness doesn’t stop at our height. Curiosity is bred into us. It’s what’s made Gania the creative and scientific heart of the Central System planets. I could have done more, I’m sure, to make my partner happy, but I assure you, Deysan left of his own accord after fucking his life over.

“On Gania, it’s common for university students to acquire patrons to help support their art and inventions,” Elenus continued. “Especially those of us who didn’t come from money. Deysan was my patron. He was an established presence as a shipwright, and he loved the idea of an entirely new life-form.” Elenus shook his head. “What he really loved was the idea of playing god. I was lucky I’d hired a good attorney before signing any paperwork because he’d have had me sign over every invention I came up with for the rest of his life otherwise.”