This isn’t a job for Minecorp security. They are here to guard the Illibrium and manage the safety of the transfers of the Illibrium off planet. For all I know, there might be a mole planted within their ranks. I’m still searching to discover if they have been compromised. This is why I do this alone, outside of security.
I sit and pull up the grid schematic, the way I have most nights for the last two moon cycles, since the attack. Since three House operatives walked onto Timbur trained well enough that I didn’t catch them until they were already aiming at Rook’s chest. And the power grid chose that exact moment to cascade and fail, dropping the whole med wing into the dark while my youngest brother bled.
That wasn’t bad luck. Power grids don’t fail on cue.
I’ve been over it a hundred times. The grid’s failed before, there was a cascade years back, during a scheduled upgrade, that blacked out the whole outpost. Bad wiring, they called it then. I didn’t like that silly explanation then either. I don’t like coincidences. I especially don’t like the same impossible thing happening twice, years apart, the second time with a blast aimed at my brother.
House Vaszneth.
We have the name now. Hallie brought it off Chronos with her along with the proof of all of it, the plan to phase the Margol out of the mines, to take the Illibrium for the Royal Pigment and leave my species with nothing. We know someone, or a group of Xylan, within that house killed our parents. We know why. What we don’t know is how to reach these killers and bring them to justice. They sit on Chronos behind their old money and ancient House, untouchable, a whole world away, and laugh at the eight of us stuck on the one planet they can break from a distance.
I open my box of food, turn on another screen and continue to work through lunch.
The knock comes mid-afternoon.
“Come in,” I shout.
It’s Gruten, from Xylan Resources, with a tablet. “Grid contractors,” he lets me know. “Coming in on the noon transport. Two of them.”
I don’t look up. “Minecorp’s bringing in outside help now?”
“After the cascade? Admin wants the whole network hardened before storm season. None of our crews do systems work like that. We mine, we don’t engineer the wires.” He shrugs. “They’re human. A male and a female.”
That gets my attention. “Why humans?”
“I was told these two are the best in the Four Sectors at exactly the type of energy audit we need.”
I shrug. “They cleared intake?”
“Both attuned. Tested clean.” He says it like it’s a marvel, and it is, humans almost never attune, and two off the same transport are amazing odds. “Admin signed off this morning.”
I take the tablet and see two names. A. Wilson. M. Wilson. “Are they related or are they mates?”
“Related. They are siblings. We think that’s why they are both attuned.”
I nod in agreement.
Then I open the door and step out. At the end of the hall I can see down onto the transport station, where the noon arrivals are exiting. Two of them stand apart from the rest. Both of them are colorless humans. The male says something and the female laughs and shoves his shoulder, and he shoves her back, the easy unthinking way of two beings who’ve known each other a long time.
“Security has already cleared them. But do you want their backgrounds run again?” he questions.
I almost say yes. My thumb is already moving toward the tablet and then something catches. My crystal shifts in mypocket, a flicker I feel more than see. “No. They’re here to fix the grid and leave. I’ve got bigger problems than two random humans.”
Chapter Two
Mara
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about relocating to an alien mining colony—the recruitment packet lies.
Lies, lies and more lies.
The packet had a very tasteful rendering of a glowing blue crystal and the phrasecompetitive hardship compensationin a font designed to make you feel brave. It did not mention that every single being on this planet is roughly the size of a vending machine, that the air smells like hot rock and lightning, or that I would step off the transport disk feeling like I was about to throw up.
“Breathe, Mar.” My brother, Andrew, slings an arm around my shoulders and steers me off the transporter disk toward the intake line. “You did it, you made it across the Four Sectors in one piece.”
“Thank gods,” I breathe, then look down at myself and around the room. It’s true, the nausea is quickly receding, probably only arriving from my nervousness. For the first timein my life I took a transporter disk to get somewhere super-fast and I’m a little bit giddy with relief. I’ve never traveled this way before because the cost is astronomical, therefore I’ve always taken a commercial ship to the next job or location, but for this one, Minecorp paid to send us via fancy transporter disk. I’ve been disassembled from the disk on Singapore, New Earth scattered in a million atoms and reassembled, lightning-fast, here, on another disk on Timbur. It all happened in the blink of an eye, perfectly painless. I’m still holding my suitcase, which seems to have reassembled too.
I’m traveling like a rich celebrity and it’s exhilarating.
