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  When they got into a mover, I used the interior security system to watch Terry Charmayne. That seems callous to me now; I wanted to see his reaction to losing his mother. I wouldn’t know how that felt until I lost my own.

  Terry was so young, not nearly so skilled at schooling his expression as his mother had counseled him to be. He sat between two older men of his clan, and they weren’t entirely unsympathetic to the fourteen-year-old boy who tried so hard not to cry or to look frightened.

  But those kinsmen deferred to the Iron Fist, and her expression was cool-bordering-on-smug. She ignored the boy and delivered clipped directives to the men who would foster him from that point forward. I became wrapped up in the effort to decipher her meaning. “As to his education,” she said, “you know what I expect.”

  Maybe they did, but I didn’t. My attention kept shifting back to Terry. If he had been sitting among my friends and me, we would have herded around him, pretending to be engrossed in our studies while we shielded him so no one could see that he was crying. We would have been close enough so our bodies touched, comforting him with our nearness, but not so close that observers would notice he was distressed in the first place. We would have stayed with him as long as we could, and we would have sought him out for as many days afterward as he needed us, talking with him only when he wanted it, speaking personally only if we were few instead of many. That’s how I felt then, and when he and I would eventually have our most dangerous encounter, years later, I would remember how he looked sitting between those two kinsmen.

  But in a way, those two men were doing the same thing for him we would have done. It’s just that it was hard for them to focus on comfort when Lady Sheba was breathing down their necks. “This move is beneficial,” she said. “Olympia is fertile ground.” And I saw something odd in the faces of the men in the mover: hope.

  What are they hoping? I wondered.

  Now I know that every man who was in that mover with Sheba immigrated to Olympia. They survived Titania’s destruction. Maybe this was the moment they realized they wouldn’t have to take one for the team. Or maybe they were simply glad to be that much farther away from Sheba.

  At that point, it was still a mystery, and it made me wonder even more about Lady Sheba’s use of words and what she really meant. I searched for old communications from her. If you went by what could be accessed by worms like me, only official announcements could be found. But my secret implants gave me access to far more than that. I searched through subdirectories that Sheba herself may not have known, though they were part of the general directory if one had the patience to dig long enough.

  And I found her history—but the database of those communications was so huge, I didn’t try to read any of it yet. I just copied it, thinking I would go over it later, when I had time.

  I’m still going over it, years after that incident. I have yet to decipher everything. At the time, it wasn’t all those directives Sheba fired at her kinsmen and her underlings that snagged my attention. It was the pattern of communication that I noticed first. Sheba was talking to many people who weren’t talking to each other—ever. She shared information with certain recipients that she didn’t share with others, including her eldest son, Baylor. I realized I was looking at the pattern of a master manipulator, and I felt duly impressed.

  But I wasn’t nearly so impressed with what I discovered in the secret library hiding at the end of one of those communication links. Amazingly, the recipient was labeled SEWER SYSTEMS. I’m not sure what that says about Lady Sheba, because she was hiding a diary there.

  I sat up straighter as I recognized the nature of those writings. A ripple of movement went through my friends as they readjusted themselves around me, but no one glanced at me, even if they were curious.

  The history tutorial on my monitor had shifted gears into a brief and overly simplified outline of operations on Titania and Olympia, beginning with the principles behind our simulated gravity. “The gravity experienced depends on the position on the spin arm,” said the narrator. “The gravity experienced at the end of the arm feels one-point-one times heavier than the gravity on the Homeworld. But at the very center of the spin, gravity is zero, and technicians who work there experience weightless conditions.”

  My eyes were pointed at the images of weightless workers using hand- and toeholds to propel themselves along an access tunnel between the giant pressure seals separating Fore and Central Sectors. In my head, I superimposed Lady Sheba’s diary entries over those images, thinking I was about to see the good stuff. But I was wrong.

  Breakfast at 06:27: two meal cakes (126.796 grams) and 1 Tbsp margarine

  Toileted 57 minutes later (113.493 grams)

  Lady Sheba used her journal to list what she ate during the day and to record her bowel movements. Seriously. Which explained why she had named that file SEWER SYSTEMS. I felt nauseated as this became clear to me; it seemed as if she had managed to take a virtual dump on my head. I entertained the possibility that Lady Sheba had left this ugly market list of bodily functions to prank anyone who dared to invade her privacy.

  But there was something about the painstaking details in those lists that argued otherwise. She was so specific about times and amounts, as if every measurement was critical. And I finally concluded that the diary was the product of a mind predisposed to mania—a curiosity, but not useful. I almost withdrew without copying it.

  However, I have my own manias, and copying information is one of them. The diary was such an oddity, I decided to keep it. I’m glad I did. Because many years later, I would learn that there was something hidden in Lady Sheba’s diary.

  Terry Charmayne and his kinsmen bade Lady Sheba farewell, and she went back to her estate in Titania’s Habitat Sector. Terry and company got on a shuttle and went directly to Olympia. He had stopped crying by then, but his tears would start up again when he was alone in his sleeping cubby. He had gotten up at the beginning of that cycle with a mother who was alive; he would suffer through a sleepless cycle knowing she was gone forever.

  I tired of watching his progress and returned to my general perusal of communication patterns, feeling reassured by the presence of my friends, whose names and faces I still remember. All of them died when the gravity bombs destroyed Titania. They would have been part of my daily routines if things had continued normally. We would not necessarily have worked together, but we would have found ways to spend time together, to network with each other, to pursue romances and have children.

  But even if Titania had not been destroyed, I would have lost most of my social connections simply by moving to Olympia.

  “They called Titania Shantytown,” Nuruddin said to me once. “But I was old enough to remember it well, when I immigrated. It was identical to Olympia.”

  “Identical,” I agreed.

  He said nothing more about it. That made him the closest thing to a friend I had on Olympia.

  Terry Charmayne was fourteen when he immigrated here. That gave him a little time to build social ties he could rely on later. But I didn’t keep track of that, because Lady Sheba didn’t. After that day, she considered the matter closed. I didn’t reconsider Terry until he warned me not to get curious at that dinner party.

  But Lady Sheba was another matter. I thought about her all the time. Back then, I studied her in the hopes of anticipating what she might do. Years later, I would change my focus. I would think about what I might do with her vast library of communications, and even with her diary—not the real log she had written, but one I might compose with her voice.

  The day before she died on Titania along with everyone I had known and loved, Lady Sheba sat in her place of honor at Baylor’s table, slicing into the textured protein on her plate that was so artfully blended with vegetables, grains, legumes, and nuts, enjoying Pachelbel’s Canon in D and believing that those transcendent strains were all about her. She thought it was her grace the music exemplified, her beauty and promise. She never looked directly at t
he Servants who filled her wineglass. She never realized the music was really about us.

  The day after Lady Sheba died on Titania, she showed up as a ghost in my machine. And I had reason to wonder if the music was about her, after all.

  6

  Medusa

  You cannot kill in a void (though on Olympia, you can sometimes use the void to kill). When you’re a killer, everyone around you is at risk, if not from your direct actions, then from the consequences of your actions. This is not a fact that most killers consider. But I do. I even considered it the first time, though I didn’t set out to kill a target then. Instead, I was someone else’s target.

  I was already feeling paranoid because of what had just happened with Nuruddin and the boys who tried to carve him up. Prior to that event, my playbook consisted of feeding misinformation to people in order to influence events. Rescuing Nuruddin with the decompression alarm was a classic example of that. It’s still my main tactic, but shortly after that incident, things took a turn for the violent. And as unplanned violence often does, it started out very normally. I simply went to work.

  I dressed in my Servant mantle and rode a lift in toward a Habitat access tunnel. I was alone, which struck me as odd but not impossible. It was rare for Servants to report individually; we were called in groups, but sometimes you get called because you’re filling in for someone who’s sick. So I felt fine about it until the lift stopped, then reversed and took me out to the maintenance level. I hadn’t punched that coordinate. The door opened, and Glen Tedd stood there.

  Glen Tedd, who had made the snide remarks to Baylor Charmayne about Lady Sheba’s untimely demise.

  “You,” he snapped. “Follow me.”

  “Yes, sir.” I was dismayed to discover that he had selected the Penitent voice for my responses. That alarm grew as I followed him into an access corridor for the series-100 air locks—the locks used most often for executions.

  My mind raced. I scanned communication records for any indication of what he might be planning, and found nothing that jumped out at me. I had never served Glen Tedd alone, but he had a reputation for being furious one moment and weeping the next. He had never apologized to any of my fellow Servants when he got into the weepy state; in fact, that was the time when he expected Servants to apologize to him.

  That’s why he’s crying, Nuruddin told me once. Out of frustration, like a small child.

  Based on Glen Tedd’s reputation, he could get worked up about something minor, so an abject apology might be all he expected of me. But our journey into the realm of air locks kept me on high alert. No one used those locks except for Maintenance workers and Executives who wanted to kill someone—and neither of us was a Maintenance worker.

  He stopped short in front of Lock 113 and turned to face me. “Stand here.” He pointed at the floor, as if I were the most dense person he had ever met. I obeyed him, since we were still outside the air lock. But then he opened the inner door. “Get in.”

  I didn’t move.

  His mood had not been good to start with. When I ignored his order, it got a lot worse. “You heard me! Get in!”

  I plan everything before I act. I knew I had to kill him then. But I didn’t know if I could do it with my bare hands, and I wasn’t sure I could scrub the event from the security monitors in time to prevent consequences if I just tossed him into the air lock.

  He snorted in disgust and marched into the lock, leaving me even more flummoxed. After wrenching open a suit locker, he pointed inside. “Look at this!”

  He couldn’t very well blow me out if he was in there. So I stepped through and joined him at the locker. I saw what he was trying to show me. All air tanks on the suits in the lockers are supposed to be near 100 percent. The indicators on the suits I could see were just below 30 percent.

  “Explain this!” he demanded.

  I felt mystified. I’m not a Maintenance worker, so I’m not in charge of keeping the suits up to snuff—at least, so far as anyone knows. In fact, I have poked around quite a lot in the air locks, and I always check the air levels in the suits first thing, out of sheer paranoia. It’s a safety rule my father taught me. But Glen Tedd should not have known that. Had I been exposed?

  “Maintenance didn’t fill the tanks properly,” I offered.

  “That’s right!” He grinned like a shark. “And you’re my Servant. So what are you going to do about it?”

  For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom why Glen Tedd had a bug up his butt about the air tank pressure levels on the suits in this particular locker, or why it gave him satisfaction to address the problem in such a circuitous fashion.

  “You know who told me about this?” he asked, as if reading my mind. “You know who just had to rub my face in the shoddy way this sector, which is under my jurisdiction, is being run?”

  “Ryan Charmayne?”

  That was a tactical error. I was right about who it was, but his question had been rhetorical; he hadn’t expected me to know the answer. I had just revealed to this nasty little man that a Servant was paying attention to politics at the parties of Executives. But that wasn’t the biggest problem, because I had just realized something else. Glen Tedd had mortally insulted the Charmayne family at the last Executive party, and Ryan Charmayne’s favorite method of murdering rivals was to—

  “The lock!” The Penitent voice made my cry sound downright mournful. But the warning came too late. The inner lock spun shut.

  “Hey!” Glen threw himself at the inner lock. “Open that door! Do you know who I am?”

  I didn’t waste my time calling him an idiot. I tore off my Servant’s mantle, and at the same moment, all my sensory feeds went dead. I wasn’t surprised by that development—after all, we were in full disaster mode, with everything that could go wrong absolutely doing so, and things were about to get a lot worse. I used the surveillance feed in the lock to find a pressure suit. I knew I had less than a minute.

  Back in the infancy of space travel, space suits had taken up to four hours to put on. We had one of those on display in our history museum, along with a checklist of the protocols that had to be observed before Ground Control would let an astronaut out for a space walk. Our suits were vastly more streamlined, and began the pressurization process as soon as you sealed them. Maintenance workers usually got them on in five minutes.

  Paranoia had ruled my life for as long as I could remember, and that’s what saved me, because I had practiced getting the suits on quickly. My best time so far had been just under a minute. But this time, my hands shook. I fumbled things I had done smoothly during practice.

  The suit’s automatic systems signaled green when I sealed it. I hooked my safety cable to a ring next to the outer door. I let go of the clip and was reaching for the rung that would prevent me from being blown out of the lock along with the atmosphere when the outer door spun open—just as I was about to grab the rung, I exploded out of there. As I reached the end of the cable fastened above my navel, I flipped around to face the ship, and Glen Tedd collided with my right shoulder. I had only half a second to see his contorted face with my helmet cam, but I could tell he was sorry he hadn’t done what I had done. He was suitless and cableless as he drifted away from the ship, going from 1 atm of pressure to 0 atm with unhappy consequences.

  But I had no time to watch his last struggles. Olympia was spinning the door out of alignment with me. Tedd’s collision had pushed me in an arc at the end of my tether, toward the massive hull. I could still see the tether stretching through the opening, and I very much wanted to switch on the motor that would reel me back in. But I was afraid it would fray as it rubbed against the edges of the lock. My fears were probably irrational, but I congratulate myself for trying to think at all under the circumstances.

  Olympia’s hull is not a smooth terrain. It bristles with ladders, safety rungs, valves, and other equipment, especially around the maintenance locks. As I sailed toward those protrusions, I stretched my hands out, eager to connect. The
seconds flashed by. I struck the side of a ladder and held on for dear life.

  The other end of my cable sailed past me, its end cut cleanly.

  I looked for the air lock, but couldn’t see it with my suit’s helmet cam. I felt light-headed, and realized I was breathing too fast.

  Little sips, warned a calm voice from the back of my mind.

  Little sips, my ass! I screamed back at it.

  But I tried to calm down. When I had managed to slow my breathing, I realized my senses had all come back. It was as if the program that had controlled them had already been deleted. As if I had been as much a target of this murder as Glen Tedd. And that presented me with a real conundrum. I had planned to wait a half hour or so, and then open the outer lock and go back inside. I figured whoever had killed Glen would be gone by then.

  What if they were waiting for me? I checked my air supply. These suits were designed for short-term use, which translated to eight hours of air with a full tank. But this unit was down to 27 percent capacity. So I had about two hours, which might be plenty if I wanted to get into one of the locks in this sector. But if I needed to get to another sector, I might not have time.

  Out of curiosity, I opened a link and looked at the operating systems for the series-100 locks.

  OFF-LINE was the status. ESTIMATED DURATION OF DENIAL OF SERVICE, 24 HOURS.

  Someone wasn’t taking any chances.

  I thought about going around the order and getting one of the locks to open manually, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that on the 100-series locks without creating an alert. If I could get to the 200-series sector, I might be able to get one open, for the simple reason that those locks weren’t used regularly, and no one paid any attention to them. They were too big for executions. But I’d have to get there, and it was five kilometers away. For the first time in my life, I felt so intimidated by my surroundings, I didn’t know what to do.