Part of the reason I didn’t like it was because I had a good idea of who it might be. Even if I didn’t have direct evidence, I had some strong hints. I think I could get almost anyone I knew to the answer just by asking, “Of everyone in Grand Lake, who would be the worst person to have a useful amount of Artificer or Ghost DNA?”

I’d have answered, “Jody” with barely a thought. As long as I’d known him, he’d hated me and seemed to enjoy petty cruelty. Lately, he hadn’t seemed so bad and even appeared to be taking founding the new version of Justice Fist seriously, but a couple of small events during the big fight with mushroom zombies made me almost certain he was working with Magnus willingly.

During one of those events, he’d slipped out of my control and I wasn’t sure how. It didn’t seem too weird on the face of it. We’d been fighting and it wasn’t hard to miss a detail like that with a speedster.

If his abilities were related to Rachel’s though, phasing out would work even if it were only partially phasing out. Beyond that, I’d only found my Artificer-related abilities useful when Artificer/Abominator artifacts were in play.

In the fight, I’d used them against Jody, making him the only human other than Magnus that I could use my abilities against.

As of this moment, we had to promote the question, “What are we going to do about Jody,” to the top of the list if we were going to collaborate with Sean and Dayton.

The three of them had been friends since childhood and they wouldn’t give up on him easily.

As I tried to think of how to bring up the subject, I felt the main engine turn off and realized we were descending via anti-gravity. That meant we were home.

Rachel let go of my hand, thinking, “We’re here,” at me.

I opened my eyes as Cassie flew the jet into Grand Lake and the base’s underwater entrance. Moments later we were traveling through the tunnel and into the base itself.

We sat there, waiting for the water to be pumped out of the airlock, not saying much of anything. That was fine because I felt tired, the deep tired from a long run, the kind of run where you wonder if you’ll be able to walk afterward.

I closed my eyes again, feeling outward with Artificer senses, and discovered nothing unexpected. I didn’t sense Magnus searching for us. I did notice energy coming from the artifacts we’d grabbed, but not much. I didn’t at all notice energy from the storage rooms Grandpa made for Abominator devices.

It gave me reason to hope he’d gotten some help from Lee or was simply as brilliant an inventor as I’d always imagined. Either way, I knew where we’d be stashing the new stuff.

I let the vision go, feeling more tired than normal from something so simple. I had a feeling that all I’d be doing after I got back was eating some real food, sleeping until tomorrow, and hoping that nothing world-ending happened while I was unconscious.

Despite what I might have assumed, given the additional hit of lethargy, barely any time had passed. We were still waiting for the water to be drained, though the level was now lower than the jet.

Resigned to waiting, I found that my implant had thrown up a notification in my brain. A message had come through the ansible near the Xiniti base. It was from Kals.

A little surprised that I hadn’t received it when the message came from Xiniti High Command, I checked the timestamp, finding that it had only arrived at the station’s ansible less than ten minutes ago and been sent less than an hour ago.

Unless this was a “send in the event of my death” message, Kals was alive. I opened it. Given that she was in the middle of leading a revolution, a posthumous message was more likely than I’d like to think.

It wasn’t a posthumous message.

She sat behind a desk in a room that, even if my implant hadn’t been calling out the various expensive bits, I would have recognized as representing an unachievable level of wealth for most people in our civilization or hers. If I were prone to purple prose, the words sumptuous, gilded, and maybe even glorious might have appeared in my description.

I lean toward simplicity, so here’s what you get: it was big.

When I say big, I mean as large as the main floor of my Grandpa’s bungalow. Red curtains inlaid with gold on the edges separated the room into sections. Pictures on the walls varied, some showing stern people in uniforms or formal robes. Another series of pictures showed people in different stages of undress. I didn’t need the implant’s help to figure out they were meant to be erotic.

The bed behind her appeared large enough for at least three people. Across the room from the bed was a pool large enough to swim laps. Decorative, possibly living, plants surrounded it, including small trees.

Kals grinned at the camera, dark hair hitting her shoulders. Still dressed in her silver, Xiniti-made protective suit, she’d configured it into a more comfortable mode—no helmet or hanging weapons.

Her first words were, “Ha! We won—not everything, but the first push. The military says we’ll be fighting for years, but we took the Minott subsector and its capital Seven Rings. Look out the window.”

I followed where she was pointing—an arched window wide enough to drive a compact car through. Three rings glowed gold in the dark, star-filled sky.

Kals turned the camera back to herself after a few seconds. “It’s amazing. I’ve never been here before, but I’ve seen pictures all of my life. I know you can only see three rings, but trust me, there are four more.

“You can check your implant for why, but it’s significant in many different ways. The most important for us is that it controls access to a gate and practically this entire sector. There are a lot of Alliance and Xiniti ships here to make sure it stays in our hands.

“Plus, as the movement’s figurehead, they’re placing me in the governor’s mansion. This is his room. It’s nice, but I’m going to change the sheets. Someone will know where new sheets are.”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure if I’ve slept since I last saw you. I think it’s been a day, maybe two? I went straight to the invasion fleet and into combat. Oh… You know how you were worried your killbots’ tech would already be dated and gave me a software update? I didn’t get back in time to pass it on, but you know what? The old version worked—very well. We assassinated thousands of Ascendancy motivators at once on hundreds of different worlds. I’m sure they’ll counter the first version, but we’ve still got your update ready for phase two.”

Pausing, she gave a half-smile.

“Well, I should go. I miss all of you. Tell everyone I said hi. Katuk’s great, but he’s here to keep me alive. And you know him, he doesn’t talk just to talk. It would be nice to talk to someone about something other than security arrangements and how to run a planetary economy and a war. If any of you want to immigrate to the Ascendancy, let me know. We’re remaking our whole civilization. It might be fun. Oh, and message me back, okay?”

She winked and the message ended.