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I dock Glory in bay ninety-four at the outer Oort station and ping my contact. I know it won’t take him long to get to me, but also I’ve had nothing but recycler worms for the entire journey away from the Roundabout wreckage, so I hop out. Stations always have a variety of food and people selling them, and this one is pretty big, with lots of cruiser transfers. I grab some skewers of something brown and crunchy as an appetizer—surprisingly sweet—and then get closer to the center, where the good stuff is.

My contact finds me bent over a cart, picking a flavor of a protein drink. “There you are,” he says, his voice low and gruff. “Why did you leave the bay?”

“I’ll take a purple one, with some of those cold cubes,” I tell the vendor, pointing. “And he’s paying.”

The vendor bends into her cart, scooping out the squishy cubes into the reusable cup I hand her.

“No, I’m not,” my contact says. I don’t know his name. He told me once before, but eh. I ping him with the code word, and he shows up; that’s all this ever needs to be.

“You are paying,” I say, my voice betraying a bit of an edge. “Because I have your stuff. Want anything?” I grin at the vendor as I take the cup back.

Grudgingly, my contact taps his cuff against the vendor’s scanner. “Come on,” he growls, leading me back to Glory. When we’re far enough away from others, he says in a low voice, “You got all three items we need?”

I slurp the purple drink. “Yup.”

He frowns and looks like he wants to say more, but a group of people walks close by. I motion for him to follow me into the docking bay and on board the ship.

He looks around at my little Glory as if she wasn’t the best ship in the entire galaxy, which says a lot about how bad his taste is. Even with a hole in her side that I have to seal off behind the bulkhead doors, Glory ’s lovely.

“You have comms down, right?” he asks.

“Obviously,” I snap. Everyone knows that all communication runs through the portal network, and the portal network is run by the government using the same system base. The law-abiding types tend to point out that comms are on private relays, but it doesn’t take much figuring to guess that “private relays” are only private as long as no one wants to listen.

And there are a lot of people who want to listen to what my contact has to say.

“Speaking of security, you do know that the code word Jane Irwin is, er, how shall I put this? Too well fucking known.” I head toward the bridge, the contact on my heels.

“We know,” he says.

I shoot him an exasperated look over my shoulder as I lean down to the bridge box and get out the data recorder that has all the information from the cryptex drive on it.

“It’s a base code at best, and a way to recognize who may be working undercover. We let the law think they know the right code so they don’t dig deeper, and we weed out some low-levels by using it.” He looks down at the box as I hand it to him. “This is useless without the key and the prototype.”

“Sure is. Just like you’re useless until I see the payment in my account.” I pointedly look at the data band on my wrist, already glowing with my financial info.

The contact heaves a sigh. “Some people would help us because it’s the right thing to do,” he says. “I am not getting paid. Knowing that I could save billions of people is payment enough, and—”

I clear my throat and tap my band.

His jaw works while he pulls out a data pad, punches a code on the screen, waits, taps a few more times. In moments, the sum we agreed upon flashes in my account.

“Wonderful!” I say brightly. I reach into my pocket for the small box that contains the cryptex key and the nanobot prototype and toss it to him.

He fumbles, dropping his data pad to catch the box. “Hey, this is sensitive material!”

“It’s fine, ” I say. “If that little nanobot is supposed to figure out a way to clean up the pollution on Earth, then it’s going to have to take a bigger beating than just being tossed a few meters.”

He stares down at the box as if it holds the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

Maybe it does.

No, who am I kidding. It just holds a key and bot.

“Any trouble?” he asks.

“Some,” I say. I was already in place when Roundabout came into view. I watched as the crew inside evacuated and got picked up by another ship in my contact’s network. I suppose there’s some sort of cover for the crew. They were all Earthers; I know that much. Anyway, after the crew left, they set a crash course for Roundabout onto the terran protoplanet.

“You were supposed to crash the ship neater,” I point out. The plan had been to wreck the Roundabout , then let me loot the goods the operation needed and be gone before anyone else showed up. It was the best plan to keep the crew alive and still get the data, and with the crash, there was an excellent chance it would be weeks before the government even knew the material was missing. With a freighter like that, any pause to open up a cofferdam or allow outside boarding would have sent immediate alarms through the system, and probably the United Galactic Systems Navy would show up, guns blazing. But by crashing the ship, communication was just cut off. No one would know about the evac crew until they saw the crash site. And the government agencies monitoring the Roundabout would believe they’d have to gather up a salvage crew, wasting valuable time.

Time that I could have spent getting the goods and getting out.

Had the ship’s crash site not been quite so bad.

“We did what we could,” the contact says. “And it can’t have been too difficult. You got the stuff.”

The crew of the Roundabout knew the drive was in the bridge box, and they suspected the key was in one of the cargo crates—but all the cargo crates had been linked to the security system, so they couldn’t locate it before the wreck.

“It was a hassle, is what it was,” I grumble. “I deserve a bonus. I have to pay for repairs that I incurred running your job. Which was also in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“You knew that going in.”

I did. The Roundabout’s course was set on an unusual path that was supposed to be off the charts. But it was heading to a nanobot factory on one of the little unnamed worlds with no atmosphere. Safer to produce something directly designed to interfere with water cycles on a world without water. If it malfunctions, you just scrap the design without risking ruining the whole freaking planet.

Bots are wild. I don’t really mess with them, because I don’t like the idea of someone programming something invisible to the naked eye that can mess you up. People used to use them for everything, including biological and medical issues, but some regs came out limiting their use. Thing is, bots work like a virus—they can replicate, and they can infect other bots with bad coding. No one volunteers these days to infect themselves with nanobots that a coder could bust into and hack your own body . But for things like the environment? I guess the government cleared that.

Infect a whole planet, see what happens.

My contact tilts his head back, looking down his nose at me as if he has me all figured out. “You’re not in it just for the money.”

“I am,” I snap back immediately. “Also, did you not notice the hole in my hull? It’s kind of big deal. And it’s gonna cost a lot.”

He starts shaking his head, this little smirk on his face really tempting me to just punch him. “Nah, you say it’s about cash, but really? You care.”

“Of course I care, ” I snarl. It was why I was willing to risk Glory to get the work done. “But if the Halifax had offered me more than you guys did, I would have taken it. Those people weren’t even willing to give me seconds at mealtime.”

“You interacted directly with the government salvage?” My contact is surprised.

“Mm,” I say, looking at my data band to find a repair at the station.

“How much interaction did you—”

“I was on the Halifax for a few nights,” I say. “And I would charge you overtime, but they fed me well. Except for being stingy with the portions.” I take a moment and think about that chicken. That peach . I wonder how much luxury food costs on Rigel-Earth. Probably as much as this repair is going to cost.

“Did you—”

“I didn’t learn anything you don’t already know,” I say, sighing as I look up at him. “Probably only the government operative on board knew the full picture of what they were salvaging.”

“Who—”

“Rian White.”

He leans back. “Oh.”

A tone like that? My body goes still. “What’s that oh mean?”

“We’ve run into White a few times. He’s...observant.”

Damn right he is.

“Won’t take a bribe,” he continues.

Not surprising.

My contact weighs the box in his hand. “He’s an operative, not a decision-maker, but he’s someone who influences those who do make the calls. But...White doesn’t know coding.”

And there’s the rub. See, Rian wants to help Earth. But he believes there are proper channels for that, official ways to help. That the government arcs slowly but eventually bends toward goodwill. So, he probably headed a commission for solutions, and he probably listened to all sorts of private investors who came up with action plans, and then he probably helped pick the final companies to manufacture these nanobots that are supposed to clean up Earth.

Except he doesn’t know code.

And these guys, my contact and his lot? They do. And they know that the company ultimately hired for the job isn’t like Rian. They don’t care about anything but profits.

Guess we have that in common.

“So, you made contact with White,” my contact muses. “How did that go?”

I shrug. My eyes are on my data band. There’s only one repair shop that can see me without a wait, but they’re pricy as hell.

“Listen, all cards on the table,” he continues, his voice beseeching me to look up. I don’t. “We know that this data can be replicated by the government. At most, we’ve delayed their plans, not stopped them. And maybe we’re wrong! Maybe when our people inspect the coding, we’ll see nothing but what the government has said it’s making—climate cleaners that are going to help fix Earth. Maybe it’s all going to be fine.”

He’s wrong. I’ve already looked at the coding. It’s designed to go bad. But he’ll figure that out on his own, and I don’t want him to know how much I know.

He sighs, making a show of running a hand through his shoulder length hair. “But,” he continues, somehow even more serious, “maybe when we look at this code, maybe we find that there’s some malware or something on these bots.” Yup. “We’re working on a time limit. Once these nanobots release, if they are designed to spy or hack or exploit the system...we’re all fucked. All of Earth. A whole planet fucked. Microscopic bots programmed to alter the environment can’t exactly be put back in the bottle once they’re released, and if they have any type of malicious programming hidden inside their coding—”

I go ahead and book the expensive guy for the repairs. Glory can fly with that hole in her side, but it’d be better to patch her up. “You should be paying for this,” I grumble.

“We will.”

My head whips up.

“If,” he adds, “you join the cause. Use bravado if you need to save face, but we hired you for a reason.”

“Because I get the job done.”

“Because you care.”

By all the fucking stars out in the black, he’s smiling now. My fingers curl into fists.

“You care about Earth; you care about the people of Earth,” he continues as if he’s not spouting bullshit. “And you knew what this mission was for, and that’s why you went as far as you did to get what we needed.”

“Look, I have a competitive streak that is perhaps not healthy, I will give you that,” I say, my voice pitched low enough to make him raise his eyebrows in surprise. “But do not try to entangle me in with your little schemes and subterfuge. I did the job. You paid me for the job. We’re done.”

“But if you have an in with White, and if this coding proves our theory that the bots are corrupt—”

“Then you can maybe hire me for another job,” I say. “But my rates are going up. If I have to listen to you preach at me about causes , then I’m going to charge you an hourly.”

He huffs a little, but I cross my arms and stare him down.

“Fine,” he says finally, and he stomps out.

· · ·

One Month Later

I’m wrapping up a different job—no need for details; it involved explosives but ended up quite boring overall—when I get a ping from the contact.

Suspicions confirmed. Code bad. Let’s talk.

They’re limiting what info they send, knowing comms are never truly secure. I send back a number with a lot of zeroes at the end as my price.

They don’t reply.

· · ·

One Month After That

I’m kicking my heels up on the Zoozve base when I get another ping.

We need you.

I send back the same number.

We don’t have those kinds of funds.

I send back a number higher than that.

It’s a different mission. Undercover.

I tack on another ten thousand.

They counter with a much, much lower number—although a better one than they started with—and attach it to a message that reads: This is all the funds we have for the job.

I hesitate. I mean, sure, okay, there was a little bravado in how I spoke to the contact. I don’t actually want Earth swarming with malicious nanobots just because the government’s too inept to inspect the coding of the bots they buy. And it’s been made patently obvious that none of the colo nized worlds care about the old homestead, not enough to actually do anything.

I get another ping. We need you to talk to Rian White.

I stare at the glowing letters on my dash.

Fuck it.

I’m in.