The word trailed off into emptiness, cut down by a sharp glare from Nox, but Sanda didn’t press. Their voice rasped and they’d gone deathly pale. “Against every person in the known universe?” “Bero, can you run a gait analysis?” she asked. But she’d learned a long time ago that wanting something to be true badly enough to lie to yourself only led to more pain. She wanted that figure to be Rainier, too. “Doesn’t disguise gait,” Sanda countered. Sanda suspected those buttons were little more than placebos, but she hadn’t had the heart to ask Bero outright.

They often fiddled with the controls, trying to figure out the inner workings of The Light. This ship didn’t need a crew to fly, but Bero had gone ahead and given them all seats with consoles they could work, if they so desired.

Only one other known impostor wore that armor. The movements were too forced, too stilted, to be hers. Sanda leaned toward the screen, frowning.

From that canister, a wave of self-replicating nanites had spread the ascension-agent throughout the city’s ventilation system. Needling her might give the magma within a path to eruption, and not a soul on board The Light had time for her to melt down.Ī guardcore appeared in the footage, slipping through the thin cracks in Prime’s protocols to secure an unwelcome canister to the additive tank of Atrux’s atmo mix. Below the major’s bars on her chest and the sleek confines of her Prime-issued jumpsuit, Sanda boiled with molten rage. Her irritation was only scraping the surface. She almost rolled her eyes, but that’d only encourage him. Bero, showing his annoyance by inserting a glitch. The video flickered onto the forward viewscreen, though The Light was perfectly capable of displaying video without the tiniest hiccup. Warning hackles raised along the back of her neck. “Watching it won’t change anything,” Bero said. “Tell me Anford’s finally recovered footage of the contamination moment,” Sanda asked Bero. She wasn’t sure anything could be enough. There wasn’t a weapon in the universe big enough to stop what had happened to Atrux. Sanda clutched her blaster like a shield, though the weapon could do her no good. And in their confusion and pain, they rioted across the city, not understanding their own strength, until guardcore-vetted, safe-showed up to capture them or put them down. The rest, that 3 percent, had been converted by the ascension-agent. That was the only number she could cling to, because the actual amount of dead and comatose was too high to comprehend. Sanda Greeve stood on the deck of the biggest weapon humanity had ever known, and watched live footage of the city of Atrux tearing itself apart. CHAPTER 1 PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543 HELLO, SPY

How Far I'll Go by Arden O'Keefe