Sample of “Revelation in Vela (book two of The Incepti Cataclysm trilogy)”

1

They came in peace. Would the warships around the jump point believe them?

Anara Orden, along with the professor sitting next to her and tall, broad-shouldered Juston across the aisle, seemed to float on a bench in deep space. Her subcutaneous computer implanted under her skin near her shoulder, working through the transcranial magnetic stimulation gear in her beanie, fooled her sensory nerves into not seeing the ship’s chapel around her. The rigid pew she sat on faded out of view a few feet past the professor. The effect was similar on Juston’s side.

Against the backdrop of unfamiliar stars surrounding them slid bright points. Velan vessels of the jump point defense squadron here in the 39 Probitae system. From intelligence briefings on Velan military capabilities, she knew the warships would be mostly lancers and cruisers. Despite their apparent motion, the Velans held station. Her ship was the one in motion, with a speed over a quarter of lightspeed.

Even with the ship’s high velocity, blaster guns on the Velan cruisers would come to bear. The lancers—warships that were one giant blaster tube—would tweak their attitudes to target her ship.

Nausea curdled her stomach and sent fingers of acid up her throat. A physiological effect of jump drive, compounded with fear—

—and the siren blaring in a double echo, in virtual audio and in her ears.

“Pan-pan, pan-pan. Velan Fleet jump point squadron, this is Juston Rookson, commanding VFS Messenger of Truth.” He spoke slowly and enunciated each word. For the first time since Anara had met him, Juston spoke Velan. Though she only knew the words because her subcute murmured a translation into her ear, his calm tone astounded her. Seconds earlier, he’d been fired on by Democracy battle craft the same as her.

“We carry Carinese Democracy defectors with important intel. We took damage from Carinese flotilla on other side of jump point. Request heading to decelerate and conduct damage control.”

The word defectors sent a shiver down Anara’s back. Two standard months ago, she had been a loyal agent of the Democracy Intelligence Office. Seeking help from the Velans, the bitterest enemy of the Democracy and the supposed destroyers of Mu Incepti V, her parents’ homeworld? Unimaginable, then.

She glanced to her right. Radano Tissart, history professor, a widower with patches of gray in the brown hair at his temples. An Incepti like her, his clean-shaven chin narrow, his yellow eyes mixed with sadness and wisdom. An unlikely source of important intel.

Important? An understatement. Revelatory. Intel to rewrite the history of the past forty years.

Provided the gauntlet around the jump point let them pass. Anara’s gaze flicked across the virtual display from one to another of the Velan warships. Messenger’s sensors and computers, programmed decades prior, couldn’t identify the classes of modern Velan warships by silhouette and infrared emissions. At least it sorted them by size and shape. Twice as many cruisers as lancers, Anara judged. Had the Velan Fleet changed their jump point defense doctrine?

Their ship also reported distances and deltas to elements of the squadron, rounded to the nearest thousand kilometers. The deltas showed green for receding warships, red for ones growing closer. Their speed relative to the Velan vessels made the last digits of all the numbers blur.

Distances. Most of the Velan warships were multiple millions of kilometers away. Ten seconds or more before they could respond to Juston’s message.

Or their fire could intersect Messenger’s path.

Most warships, but not all. One bright spot barely moved, just outside the disc where Messenger’s front shield blocked direct visual contact and the ship’s computer filled in the virtual with the starfield and Messenger’s trajectory. Anara’s first fleeting thought guessed that bright spot was 39 Probitae, this system’s central star, but the computer labeled it as a ship. A blocky rectangle, a million klicks ahead. Growing closer at about eighty thousand klicks per second. Less than a hundred thousand klicks off their flight path.

The perfect angle to fire past the front shield at the ship’s exposed flanks.

Anara glanced at Messenger’s velocity and acceleration data, in front and to her right, at the height of her knees. The ship’s acceleration whipsawed from positive to negative. Linear evasion. At their speed and range, the enemy—

Enemy? Old thought habits, bubbling up under stress.

The siren still blared. With a thought, she tried to block the sound from passing from her ears to her brain, but her subcute wouldn’t let her. Serious damage. At least the shot from the Democracy flotilla had spared Messenger’s artificial gravity system. Otherwise, the linear evasion would’ve squashed Anara and the others into bloody paste on the bulkheads.

A voice, calmly menacing, crackled with radio static. Anara’s subcutaneous computer translated directly into Carinese. “Unidentified vessel, this is VFS Blue Carpenter Hornet. The ship you claim to be was lost with all hands at the end of the Democracy War.”

“Blue Carpenter Hornet, this is VFS Messenger of Truth,” said Juston. “Ship hidden in 94 Veneratorum system on orders local commander Velan Fleet prior to evacuation at end of war. Authentication code kilo bravo zero niner eight lima seven.”

The formula for the warship’s name, a color and an animal species engineered sometime in the thousands of years of humankind’s expansion from Earth, dislodged tech specs from somewhere in Anara’s mind. This class of Velan cruiser had fourteen guns per side, top, and bottom. Enough to pepper Messenger’s trajectory with blaster fire.

Anara squeezed shut her eyes and hunched her shoulders. Foolish instincts. No matter how small she made her body, nothing she could do could protect her if the Velan cruiser opened fire.

The siren stopped. Their ship had sealed off the compartments vented to space, she guessed. Damage control beeps and bloops sounded. She silenced the virtual noises with a thought.

The Velan warship lurked less than half a million klicks away. About a second and a half at the speed of light. Or radio. How long had it been? If they were going to reply instead of fire—

“Messenger, Hornet. Proceed to Velan Fleet base this system. Decelerate at 94 g. Side shields off. Your ship will be impounded and all personnel on board taken into custody. Deviation from flight plan will be considered hostile act. If you are loyal to the One God, He will be loyal to you. Hornet out.”

A wave of relief filled the chapel, in sighed breaths and eased shoulders.

“Confirmed,” Juston said, voice even more confident. “Will follow instructions. Messenger out.”

2

They did as they were told. The Velans still didn’t trust them.

About an hour into their journey to the Velan base, two hundred million klicks from the jump point, they passed another layer of the Velan defenses. Here, lancers and cruisers circled the jump point at speeds approaching 0.3 g. A cruiser, identifying itself as Ochre Daliphant, peeled away from its circular trajectory. Three hours more and Daliphant matched course, speed, and deceleration. It came even with Messenger, a thousand klicks off the port side, and stayed there.

Even after Anara’s subcute turned off the immersive virtual, revealing to her senses Messenger’s cramped interior and signage painted in Velan script, her subcute always ghosted the bulkhead to port, to show the cruiser shadowing them. If her gaze lingered on it, her subcute tried to be helpful, magnifying it and popping up tooltips, marking each blaster turret with line-of-sight to their ship.

None of the cruiser’s visible guns aimed directly at Messenger. Instead, they covered the volume of space Messenger would have to pass through if it deviated from its trajectory.

Professor Tissart ignored the Velan ship matching course and speed. He studied the Velan religious symbolism and texts visible throughout Messenger. The professor of religious history reveled in the opportunity. “Ah, that barbed cross was painted in the style of 63 Doctrinae e, but decades after the Velan Inquisition suppressed the henotheistic schismatics…”

Totally unimportant. Anara opened her mouth to say that, then thought better. Abstract knowledge was a luxury, but what harm in indulging it for a few hours?

During their waking shifts, Juston sent a status report to Daliphant every ten minutes. Holding bearing and deceleration. The cruiser hadn’t asked for updates—its computers could pick up that information before Juston could relay it by voice—but its comms crew didn’t tell him to stop.

Maybe he wanted to practice his Velan. His pronunciation sounded right to her, lots of ks and bs. Like the speech of villains in virtual movies, preparing to torture the captured Democracy agent.

Those stories were propaganda, she knew now.

How much pull did her former boss, Kentatu Donnall, have over the Democracy’s entertainment industry? Teach everyone in the Democracy to hate and fear Velans, and few citizens would even think for a moment that the Theocracy had clean hands in the Incepti Cataclysm.

Even so, Anara wished Juston would speak Carinese and let his subcute translate his transmission.

He did speak Carinese with her early in the journey, when they inspected the damage taken by Messenger from the Democracy flotilla on the 94 Veneratorum side of the jump point. Twenty meters past the central bulge of the jump drive, a blaster beam had slashed the radiation shielding all the way to the stern. Near the midpoint of the blaster’s gouge, the beam had found a thin spot and punctured a hydrogen tank.

One of the ship’s dog-shaped bots, its body waist-high to a man, worked on the hull. While they stayed comfortable in the pews of Messenger’s chapel—comfortable being relative on the rigid pews of synthesized wood—Anara and Juston borrowed the feed from the cameras studding the bot’s body and entered a virtual.

Even though the Velans weren’t her enemies, Anara still let out a breath when the barbed cross behind the altar winked out.

The bot’s four magnetic feet clamped onto the alloy hull while its four arms worked. It had no head and with all its cameras could move and work forward and backward with equal ease. It squirted a viscous green line of temporary sealant into the gouge. The solvent boiled off in vacuum, leaving the line to harden and darken. Her subcute induced the odor and taste of vinegar in her nose and mouth.

“If the bot hadn’t sealed the punctured tank, why did the siren stop?” Anara asked.

“There was enough capacity in the other tanks for the ship to pump hydrogen out of this one,” Juston replied in fluent, though accented, Carinese. The Democracy’s official language was his native tongue, he should stick with it when he transmitted and let Theocracy comms computers translate his words to Velan.

Anara turned her head toward another part of the virtual. The jump drive bulge circled the ship’s midsection. How close had the Democracy fire come to crippling their jump drive and trapping them in the 94 Ven system? A microsecond?

She shuddered. A cold clammy feeling ran down her back and into her limbs. She hugged herself to keep warm. “I thought I’d bluffed them into letting us go.”

“Don’t dwell on it. You bought us time while they debated the truth of your transmission. A minute longer for them to decide, and we would’ve made it through the jump point unscathed.”

Another shudder rocked Anara, but this time with sympathetic dread. “The Melnes. They wouldn’t give us away intentionally. The Democracy forces used truth serum? Or—” She broke off with a gasp.

There were ways to extract intel from the brains of the freshly dead. She’d learned them when training for the Democracy Intelligence Office, when Kentatu Donnall, intel chief and as Incepti as her and Professor Tissart, had taken her under his wing. She’d helped the Office use those ways, by poisoning Velan agents. Before she learned the truth from the professor.

But the Melnes and their followers… Her heart ached. “They’re pacifists.”

“Who opposed the machinations of an evil man, a worshipper of the most false god of all.”

Anara bristled. “Kentatu Donnall might have fallen away from the Divine and the Infinite—”

“I don’t mean the gods of you Incepti.” His tone brought Anara up short. “Or the all-pervasive Pantheus, Pandeus? The one the Melnes believed in. Your gods are not the One God, but they show you are aware of truths greater than yourself, that existed before your birth and will exist after you die. But Donnall, and that other Incepti the professor told us of, the senator—”

“Vidarno Arensel.”

He peered at her. “Isn’t it obvious? Apparently not. I know the false god Donnall and Arensel worship. It is unbounded ambition.”

Anara looked up at his clear brown eyes. Longing sparked inside her. Perhaps the gap between his beliefs and hers could be bridged.

No, no, not now. She had to devote her energies to helping Professor Tissart share his testimony, share the true story of the Incepti Cataclysm. Besides, when all this was over, if she took Juston home, her mother would see his eyes weren’t yellow and his chin was too wide.

Juston turned away from the virtual projection of the gash down the ship’s flank, toward the dense field of stars, dominated by the bright yellow point of 39 Probitae off the starboard quarter. “Fortunately, no one is as depraved as Donnall and the Senator, here in the Worlds Unified by Faith.”

A doubt lodged in Anara’s gut. Her training had included techniques for recruiting informants. The classic quartet: money, ideology, compromise, and ego, though she’d struggled for full understanding till she realized compromise was an archaic word for blackmail. Multiple lectures had focused on how to apply those levers to Velans, with ample case studies.

Theocrats could love Mammon more than the One God, or indulge in secret sins that would destroy them if revealed. Anara opened her mouth to say that.

Expression rapt, Juston studied the virtual projection of stars. His gaze hunted for something. Anara’s intuition instantly told her what. 21 Hamaticrucis, the system holding the twinned seats of Velan religious and political authority.

Juston saw this voyage not simply as a blow against the Democracy’s occupation of his homeworld, 94 Veneratorum Bc. For him, this voyage was a pilgrimage.

Ghosted through the hull beneath their feet, a virtual within a virtual, Daliphant remained on station. To her, it shadowed them. To him, it guided them to the next holy site.

Anara stayed silent. If the Divine were willing, he might be right about the moral fiber of the Theocracy’s leaders.

And if he were wrong, they would find out soon enough.

3

The Velan Fleet’s main base in the 39 Probitae system was an asteroid two hundred klicks in diameter, large enough its own mass had pulled it into a sphere. The base was home to dozens of ships, thousands of personnel, plus the mining and nanofab operations to support them all. But no signs of human activity intruded on the pocked gray surface. Even a mere 50,000 klicks out, with the visible spectrum cameras on full magnification and their virtual output filling her view, Anara saw nothing.

They sat in the chapel, Juston at the edge of his pew. He pumped his left knee up and down, nervous energy like electricity seeking ground as they crept closer to the asteroid. His hair was damp from a shower and he gave off a strong clean scent of soap.

“VFS Messenger of Truth, this is VFB 39 Prob traffic control.” A woman’s voice, clean and high, sounded through the chapel. She spoke the harsh Velan language with clipped tones. “Prepare to cut deceleration in ten seconds.”

The knee stopped. He stumbled over his reply in Velan though he’d spoken it often enough in his comms to Ochre Daliphant. “Understood.”

“On my mark,” the woman said. “3. 2. 1. Mark.”

The asteroid welled up twenty kilometers away. The rocky bulk, pocked with craters and rubble, covered half the virtual sky. Even this close, the asteroid looked unoccupied.

Their deceleration stopped with Messenger over a wide crater, two klicks across. The crater was so deep that thousands of stars and their ship’s running lights could not plumb the bottom. Only when Anara’s subcute added a false color infrared overlay did she see the evidence. Heat poured out of darkness.

Not a crater. A tunnel entrance.

The woman from traffic control said, “Turn off your front shield. Proceed into the asteroid. Accelerate at 10 g to speed one thousand klicks per hour. Continue until you receive further instructions.”

“Understood.” Juston sloughed out a breath when the woman’s voice cut out.

Messenger pitched and rolled to point its bow towards the entrance. Three seconds to get up to speed. A minute to cross the distance. After the prodigious speeds they’d reached in their escape from the Democracy’s clutches, a thousand kilometers an hour seemed a crawl. Adding to the unreality, Anara’s virtual view of the asteroid turned slightly transparent, showing the altar and Velan religious symbols that were the chapel’s only decoration.

Anara glanced behind them. The ghost of Ochre Daliphant grew larger and larger through the back wall of the chapel. The Velan cruiser would follow them in, and closely.

No surprise. The Velans still didn’t trust them.

She looked left across the aisle at Juston. He stared at the barbed cross on the front wall and slowly shook his head.

Her gut curdled a bit. Did he trust them?

“How can a woman serve in the Velan Fleet?” Juston muttered.

Anara arched an eyebrow and cleared her throat. “We of the fairer sex are too delicate to fight?”

He turned to her and squinted as if he found the words absurd. “I’ve seen you draw and shoot as fast as any man could. But how many women have the capability and the motivation to train as much as you in acts of violence? One in a thousand?”

She shrugged and quirked her mouth.

Juston went on. “The Worlds Unified recognized that fact and for that reason never enlisted women. That’s what my grandfather said. What could make it change that policy?”

From Anara’s other side, Professor Tissart spoke with a tone practiced in a thousand lectures. “All religions struggle with tensions between truths they believe are timeless and the changing needs of daily life.”

“You think I believe enlisting women in the Velan military is a sin against the One God?” Juston scowled, then looked chastened. A familiar look, from when his father had been alive, and Juston had taken the older man’s words more harshly than intended. “I haven’t shared enough of my faith with you.”

The professor raised one hand in conciliation. “Or you shared a meaning we didn’t grasp.”

“The One God tells us each one of us is a unique individual. By His will, that uniqueness is flavored by sex, by age, by nation, but those aspects of us manifest in tendencies, not absolutes.” Juston bobbed his head. “Hearing a woman’s voice took me by surprise, is all. All I have are my grandfather’s stories, from how things were in the Worlds Unified more than forty years ago. I don’t know how it is today.”

They entered the tunnel. It was as wide as the crater rim and ran straight toward the asteroid’s center. The faint reflection of Messenger’s running lights off the tunnel’s laser-carved walls showed blaster guns in recessed alcoves tracked their flight. Ochre Daliphant lay a klick behind the stern, front shield down, ready for its bow guns to fire.

No turning back now.

Ahead, to the left and below the plane of the chapel floor, pulsed an ellipse of light. Soon it resolved into a pattern of concentric flashing rings surrounding a dark circle in the tunnel wall.

“Enter landing pit eight foxtrot,” came the woman’s voice from traffic control. “Security personnel are waiting for you.”

4

Messenger entered a narrow passage that soon flared out into a cavern. Spotlights blazed in the cavern’s domed roof. The ship deployed its landing spars with a mechanical groan. In a dizzying moment, the ship yawed and rolled to align itself for touchdown. The virtual display of the landing pit spun through Anara’s senses while the ship’s internal gravity made it seem they didn’t move. The professor squeezed shut his eyes and sucked in tight breaths.

Her queasiness eased and he opened his eyes when a vibration made clear the landing spars touched the smooth, flat floor. Green flecks of olivine glimmered in the polished asteroidal rock.

Around the perimeter of the circular pit, doors flipped open. Bots scurried out on spidery legs and climbed invisible ramps sculpted from artificial gravity to inspect Messenger.

With the bots, from a receptacle crept out an access tube. It raised its snout like a cresting worm for the ship’s passenger hatch. A clunk sounded, and the virtual display popped up a message from Velan docking ops. Access tube pressurized. Prepare to debark. Remove transcranial interface headgear. Leave all weapons on board. Bring your personal effects. You cannot expect to return to your ship.

Anara rose and stretched arms and legs tight from two days of journeying. Personal effects? They’d fled 94 Ven with the clothes on their backs and the data in their subcutes and brains. And the blaster given to her by Juston and his late father.

Hide it? The blaster was small and her customized jacket had a built-in low-profile holster… which Velan counterintel’s scanners would detect in a moment. She sighed and slipped the blaster from its pocket, then laid it on the pew next to her.

A worry gripped her. “Juston, if I leave my blaster here, would I be offending our hosts?”

He glanced over, then gave his head a mild shake. “It doesn’t bother me.” Then he squinted. “But I don’t know if the Fleet personnel who’ll come on board will see it as sacrilege. We’ll leave our weapons at a storage locker on our way out.”

In the virtual projection, spotlights shone overhead and a bot clung on gecko-pad feet to the ship’s invisible hull, exposing its black nanotube alloy underbelly to them.

“Before we go, enough of virtuals,” Juston said. “Time for reality.” He swept his left arm through the air. The virtual disintegrated in an effect like shards of broken glass.

The altar and the Velan cross dominated the view in front of them. Juston took a step that way, then kneeled and bowed his head. He murmured some Velan words Anara could not make out and her subcute could not translate.

Her bare forearms suddenly felt cool. She slid them together for warmth. Through her subcute, she opened a private voice line to Professor Tissart standing next to her. «Do you know what he’s praying?»

Tissart’s yellow eyes studied the front wall. His voice sounded in her mind as if it came from where he stood. «Hmm? His prayer? Perhaps the statement of faith or the give-us-this-day.» Tissart angled his head toward Juston. «The give-us-this-day. I wonder how much of it he grasps. Ritual prayers commonly get fossilized in the language of a religion’s founders. It becomes a challenge to keep their meaning alive for later believers speaking other tongues.»

Juston fell quiet. Anara read his body language. From the hunch in his broad shoulders, he prayed silently about his father.

Tissart kept eyeing the altar and the Velan religious symbols. “A monograph,” he mumbled absently. “Changes in Velan religious imagery since the War…” He gave Anara a sudden, embarrassed look. “I’m playing professor again.”

She smiled. “We’ll get back to normal, eventually. You’ll go back to the college on Conatus Prime…”

The professor’s face betrayed a crossing thought, and enough tact not to voice it. He didn’t need to.

Anara had no normal to go back to. Even if Kentatu Donnall and Senator Arensel were stripped of power and their minds rebuilt like common criminals, the Office felt closed off to her. Its personnel, especially the disproportionate percentage of Inceptis raised up by Kentatu Donnall, would shun her as a pariah. She’d chosen truth over loyalty, and few of her former colleagues would forgive her.

What would she do with the rest of her life?

She shook her head to clear away the question. The need to answer lay months, perhaps years, away. First, she had to help Professor Tissart share his message with every citizen of Theocracy and the Democracy alike.

Juston rose from his knees. He stood tall, from wide shoulders to trim waist. Nervous excitement danced in his brown eyes. Unlike Anara and the professor, for whom Velan space was a temporary refuge, on some level he had come home. Even if he returned to the Democracy, his place was on 94 Veneratorum Bc, with the community of Velan loyalists who’d survived four decades of Democracy rule.

She had no future with him, no matter how much she might dream of one. No matter his lingering clean smell of soap drifting to her nose. Don’t be a fool, then stifled the thought for fear he’d read it in her face.

If he did, he showed no sign. The excitement in his face was directed outward, through the ship, out the hatch, to the first Velan citizens he would ever meet. “It’s time.”

5

The access tube snaked from the unpressurized space of the landing pit, through ten meters of rock. The narrow tube allowed them to traverse it only single-file. Juston took point. Anara followed him. She paid attention to the muscles in her legs for any sensation of climbing or descending. None. Just a steady walk always aligned with the base’s artificial gravity. Less than the 1 g as normal as the 24-hour clock on the Democracy’s artificial habitats, homage to legendary Earth.

She shuddered. She wasn’t in the Democracy any more.

Sheets of weak luminescence on the access tube’s ceiling gave pools of dim light. Equipment embedded in the rock walls hummed and status lights showed as smears through the access tube’s translucent material. The Velans scanned them. Leaving their blasters on Messenger had been a wise choice.

The access tube opened up on a chamber. Looking past Juston’s broad shoulders where he stood at the mouth of the tube, Anara glimpsed rocky walls and multiple figures wearing the black uniforms of a thousand movies, a hundred nightmares. Velan Fleet and Marines.

“Turbek. Stop.” A man’s voice, high pitched, trilling the r. Anara couldn’t see him, but he didn’t sound like a stereotypical Velan thug. He spoke his next words in Velan, then repeated them in Carinese. “My name is Lt. Carteret, Velan Fleet. You are?”

“Juston Rookson.”

“Are you the person who identified himself as captain of VFS Messenger of Truth?”

“Ish.” Yes.

Carteret switched to Velan only for the next questions. Without her TMS interface to her subcute, Anara couldn’t translate the words. Juston replied in the same language. Slowly and with enough of a Carinese accent that Anara picked out Veneratorum. Where they were from? No, that was obvious. Where he was born?

The questioning soon ended with a brusque command from Lt. Carteret. Juston stepped forward, slowly, arms down and hands open to the lieutenant and other figures in black. He moved to the side.

“Piwi kesheb. Next.”

Anara came forward. She stopped at the end of the access tube, a step away from the polished, green-flecked rock floor. The harsh light of ceiling panels made her narrow her eyes. The brightness would reveal her features to everyone in the chamber.

Lt. Carteret had wavy black hair under his service cap, and a skinny torso and soft hazel eyes that fit with his voice. The belt holster holding his sidearm seemed too loose, sagged on his hip. His tanned face was the most vigorous part of his appearance. Behind him, blocking the exit from the chamber, waited a half-squad of six Velan Fleet Marines. Blaster rifles on shoulder straps dangled in front of their chests. All eyes locked on her and went wide. The men didn’t even glance at her figure, which meant they had to be transfixed by her facial features. Even the two bots in the chamber, their torsos covered with cameras and scanners, immediately grew still.

One of the marines recovered first. He muttered something in Velan. Anara couldn’t understand much of his words, except for Myooinsseptee and one word, from those same thousand movies, from old Incepti survivors’ tales of the Velan occupation, from her intel service training on the Democracy’s only enemy. Stibnok. Kill.

I thought we killed them all on Mu Incepti V? Anara’s yellow-eyed gaze snapped to the marine. A sullen mixture, half abashed, half contemptuous, flickered across his stoic face. He gave her a cold, flat look.

Yes, that’s exactly what he’d said. A lopsided grin came to her face. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help it when her laughter echoed off the walls.

More marines grumbled. Hands tightened on the grips of their blasters.

Anara managed to get control of her laugh. Two days of running past the muzzles of ship’s guns—microseconds away from getting trapped in the 94 Ven system—she knew her laughter came from nervous energy trying to leak out.

The Velan marines did not.

Lt. Carteret spoke, with more authority than she expected from his high-pitched voice. “Steady, men.” He gave Anara a closer look. Though he hadn’t reacted physically, the jaundiced look she got from under a raised eyebrow made her think he wished he could throw her out the nearest airlock.

If you’re trying to win them over, you’re doing a horrible job. “Lieutenant, my apologies,” and it wouldn’t help her case that she could only speak Carinese. “It’s not like that at all. It’s—”

“Turbek.” Carteret then switched to Carinese. “You will be debriefed later, by those servants of the One God chosen to do so. Your name?”

“Anara Orden.”

“Place of birth?”

“Epsilon Tutelum II.” A forgettable, high-gravity world that gave her little more than a stocky figure and the deep feeling that her narrow chin and yellow eyes meant she wasn’t really from there.

“Your position in the Democracy?”

“Former agent, Democracy intelligence.”

The eyebrow rose again. “Former?”

“I never formally resigned, but after they tried to kill me I don’t think they’ll take me back.”

Lt. Carteret weighed her words for a moment, then pointed to Juston standing with his back against the side wall. “Wait there. Next.”

Anara went over. Juston gave her a polite smile, though his mind seemed elsewhere.

She stopped, but not too close. His hair had fully dried from his earlier shower and the scent of soap had faded from him. He would want to look like a proper Velan in front of these men, which meant not getting too friendly with enemy women. No harm in helping him get what he wanted.

Professor Tissart came forward. He moved a little stiffly. Three days since his last morning walk. A fresh wave of grumbles erupted among the marines.

“Order,” Carteret said. The marines fell silent.

Blinking, the professor came up short. His head jittered at the lieutenant and the marines. He wouldn’t have seen so many Velan military personnel in one place for decades, since the ship orbiting Mu Incepti V rescued him from the Cataclysm.

He drew a deep breath. He moved more calmly, cupping his left hand around his right fist and bowing. He spoke Incepti, words Anara did not understand from her limited grasp of her parents’ native tongue. He repeated in Carinese. “The Divine knows I have wronged you and I wish to make amends. My apologies, I don’t speak any Velan.”

Lt. Carteret raised his hand for silence. “Your name?”

“Radano Tissart.”

“Place of birth?”

“Mu Incepti V.”

A rustle of creaking equipment came from the marines. Shifting their weight at the name of the world where their name and cause had been stained. The lieutenant went on, unmoved. “Occupation?”

“Professor, religious history, Conatus Prime University.”

A frown creased Carteret’s tanned face. His gaze darted to Anara and Juston. Obviously curious how the three of them had come together. How a college professor could provide any intel worth defecting for.

Then he raised his narrow shoulders. In Carinese, he said, “The three of you will now come with me.”

6

The exit from the chamber opened onto a wide concourse. Anara expected a grim space, with walls of laser-cut rock adorned solely by the encircled barbed cross of the Theocracy, symbolic of the tentacles of the One God reaching in all directions for the limits of the galaxy.

Instead, she glimpsed a high ceiling and white surfaces. A central esplanade of planter boxes held sycamores and cypresses, pruned to look proportional in the space, branches extended to overhead panels of sunny light. On the walls, a tall horizontal stripe of a video display. An orchard of steakfruit trees on a bright planetside morning.

From her training with Democracy intel, she took all this in in one glance. The marines formed a gauntlet between the chamber exit and a windowless wheeled vehicle, a small bus waiting directly in front of them. The bus had plain sides, not even showing the barbed cross. Two smaller, open-topped vehicles stood empty, at the head and tail of a short column with the bus in the middle.

The vehicle’s door opened. Two marines went in and clomped up steps to the unseen cabin.

Lt. Carteret gestured with one hand. “Kor bowek. Enter.”

Juston led the way past the remaining marines. Anara took the rear. One last glance from the corner of her eye, past the callous Velan faces, showed the esplanade of planter boxes stretched for kilometers. If people were about, they were too far away to be seen.

Not a coincidence. If she took in people claiming to be defectors, she’d minimize their exposure to her people too, until she confirmed the defectors were sincere and not double agents.

The bus held three rows of bench seats. Juston took the middle row, left side of the aisle. Anara and the professor sat across the aisle. Same arrangement as on Messenger. Known each other a few weeks and already set in habits like an old married couple. The seats were padded but didn’t conform to her body. Even more uncomfortable were the flat gaze of a marine standing at the front of the bus and the sounds of jostled equipment and heavy boots shifting from the marine behind her.

Carteret took the front row right in front of Anara and the professor. He sat sideways, back against the wall, and watched them from the corner of his eye. From his breath, he’d eaten sauteed garlic or onions with his most recent meal.

The door slid shut. The bus started off. Behind the lieutenant’s back, the wall lit up with video. The scene wrapped fully around the bus interior. To the right, orchards, branches heavy with lumpy brown steakfruit. Wheat fields on Juston’s side, rippled by a soft breeze.

Juston’s eyes shone and his mouth gaped. He slid a few inches over on the bench seat. His neck craned. To get a better look at something.

Ahead, partially blocked by the marine, the video wall showed a bruise-purple ribbon of living asphalt running over a gently rolling plain. In the distance, half lost in morning haze, rose a city of domes. Not the pressurized kind of some marginal world, but decorative ones. Eight, ten, difficult to count. Near the city’s center a rotating spire surmounted the largest dome.

Anara clamped her lips together as the spire gave her a full-on view. A Velan cross gleamed as white as bleached bone or the lifeless ice cap of some frozen world. To be seen from this distance, the barbed cross had to be hundreds of meters across.

They drove through a projection from the surface of 21 Hamaticrucis c, toward Revelation City, capital city of the Velan Theocracy.

A bucolic scene, if true. Far away from the torture chambers of the Inquisition.

And Juston looked at the domed city as if he approached the fulfillment of all his dreams.

She squeezed shut her eyes. A faint shake of her head. Maybe those torture chambers were a lie—so much else she’d been brought up to believe about the Velans had been false—but his faith was foreign to her and real to him. It would always stand between them. There could be nothing between her and Juston and why couldn’t her heart understand?

In the video wall, a bright blue sign marked an upcoming intersection. The bus slowed and turned left. Somewhere deeper in the asteroid.

Forget about the Velan Inquisition and its probably mythical torture chambers. The real inquisition would begin in minutes.