Page 150

He turned, scowling. ‘Don’t you have something better to do than poke at me?’

She shrugged. ‘I would’ve stayed gone had someone kept screaming my name over comms like their ship was on fire.’

Xander’s scowl deepened. ‘Speaking of, where the hell were you? You disappeared in the middle of a damn interrogation.’

‘I was on a call.’

‘With whom?’

‘Kainan.’

Xander’s eyes narrowed. ‘Thefokk?’

Miral didn’t flinch. ‘He needed to be briefed.’

‘You couldn’t have told me first?’

‘There wasn’t time.’

The irony of this conversation was not lost on Xander, but he pushed Savvine and his woman problems aside.

‘Bullshit,’ Xander snarled, prowling to his desk. ‘You don’t run to him before looping in your commander unless you have a golden reason. So let’s hear it. It must be good to warrant you stepping over me, Miral.’

‘It is,’ she said, unfazed. ‘I need to let him know the crats were behind the unrest in the Wildlight Expanse. They’re feeding the Lombardis and the Bianchis advanced tech.’

Xander stilled. His nostrils flared. ‘Who are they exactly?’

‘They’re formerly identified as The Technocracy. A race of beings with an advanced biology who captured the Riders on their way to Pegasi and conducted a series of horrible experiments on them for five years.’

Xander jolted. ‘I didn’t know. Hell.’

‘Naam, the crats tortured the Riders for years. The tests also spliced their DNA and injected them with metanoids. This reinforced their bones and infused their skin and body cell walls with a latticework force to withstand punches, blows, ballistics, and zero-g space flight better than most. Mirage, my mother node, was the AI on the craft ship; in fact, she was the craft’s singular, most potent sentient intelligence. The Riders built a relationship with her; she learned what it meant to care for others, and they emulated it back to her because that’s how AI understands the human condition, by experience. They then persuaded her to use deep machine learning to recognize and distinguish the crats from them. They also asked her to take over the ship’s AI-controlled drones and, when they were ready, she unleashed a precise attack.’

‘Damn.’

‘There’s more. Their escape came five years after being captured, almost to the day. Mirage used her Technocracy maps to get them to Pegasi’s safer, more populated regions.’

Xander remained silent.

All this time, he thought his cousin jetted into Eden II with zero hustle and became a hotshot without a care in the world for those left behind. He was flooded with remorse. ‘I had no idea.’

The Riders don’t like to broadcast their shit.’

Xander felt like shit for all the times he cursed Kainan out, and thankful the Sableman chose to look beyond his disdain to help the Signet Company. ‘I owe the man a few drinks and an apology.’

‘I don’t think he was aware of the extent of your rage at him, given that he was no contact for ten years. When you reestablished the connection, he was happy to know he still had family. On that note, how are you related?’

‘His father rest in peace, was my uncle on my mother’s side. We visited him often at the orphanage, but my ma was too poor to take on another kid. Regardless, the Eden Guards did a better job of raising him. Still, we weren’t close because he was older than I, but I always had respect for him. He also got me into the military academy, which I will forever be grateful for.’

‘Fascinating,’ the AI murmured.

‘So what the hell do the crats want now?’

Miral crossed her arms, her shimmer-skin flickering with residual data. ‘Revenge. Kainan, Mirage, and Zane think they’re using Eugene, and maybe even the entire flotilla, as a Trojan vector. They’re placing illegal weapons and tech into the hands of our enemies. First, they want Signet out of the way so the Sable Group will be targeted when the armada arrives in Pegasi. Perhaps even stir up an interplanetary war.’

‘So we’re being used,’ Xander growled, every muscle in his body tensing.

‘Seems so.’