[68839] FrederikSkardaFrederik watched curiously as a gull picked at the stringy white pseudo-flesh of an autonomous crab. Smashed open upon a blue-white sandstone rock face, pieces of its chitinous shell fell in little white chips onto the kelp-covered shoals below. A few body lengths above the gull and its prey, Frederik leaned his elbows against the stone guard rail and peered down. As if in a starving frenzy, the gull picked at the artificial decapod’s corpse, but there was no nutrition or sustenance from the auto’s pseudo-flesh.A cool, salty breeze wafted over the open waters of Lapis Lake. Frederik clasped his hands tightly and turned his attention away from the gull. As he closed his eyes, he imagined he was on the endless shores of Celosia—Ya Ke’s only habitable planet—instead of beneath the dome at the top level of Arco Lazuli. He could believe he was under a natural atmosphere, beneath the starry sky filled with twinkling stars.A gentle song played, carried by the breeze, announcing the imminent transition between the night and day cycles. Frederik tilted his head up, opened his eyes, and smiled. His heart ached at the beauty of this moment as the yellow-white starlight from Ya Ke crested over the horizon—a moment of natural warmth. Bathed in the stellar irradiance, his heart filled with joy. He took a deep breath, held onto that feeling, and sighed contentedly.Arco Lazuli was the largest of many sprawling mega celarium complexes drilled into the surface of Skarda, the fourth moon of the gas giant Jin. The tidal locking of Skarda around Jin produced long days of overwhelming starlight and long, frozen nights. Carved deep into the blue Skarda marbles, Arco Lazuli was safe from the extreme temperatures, along with the expected perils of space.At this top level of Arco Lazuli, where Lake Lapis was, the celarium had a high dome surface over ten stories from the ground. Artificial lights covered the domed surface, simulating natural, standard luminosity, daylight—not the overwhelming starlight from Ya Ke at Jin’s orbital distance, but something dimmer, like the more distant Celosia experienced. Between these lights were the etchings of a fine geometric tiling in a Martian-style trellis. With some regularity, certain panels in the geometric pattern were large spinel ceramic windows—a glassy, transparent material as hard as most metals. The spinel ceramic windows allowed some light through, but in the brutal Skardan daylight there was a single moment—at the balance point between long Skardan day and long Skardan night—where the light was completely unfiltered by the obsidian black protective polarizers.It was not through luck that Frederik caught this moment, but choice. Whenever his schedule allowed, he took the time to be here, on Arco Lazuli, to catch the glimmer of true starlight from Ya Ke, the eponymous star of the system.Frederik’s attention drifted away as the fleeting moment ended, and he looked back down to the gull right as it called out, then flew away. Frederik tracked its flight to a distant bluff overlooking the lake, noticed it had long strings of wires dangling from its beak, and watched as it dove into a nook. He wondered if the bird was not desperate for food at all. It would not find any sustenance in the artificial attendants that maintained Arco Lazuli. Instead, it seemed likely it had found a clever use of the metallic innards to construct a nest. Frederik looked back down at the innards of the eviscerated crab body left on the rock below. He watched curiously as fellow autonomous crabs pulled the last of the pieces away and crawled back to their hiding places among the gyrus-like rock faces.He took a deep breath and looked over the wide lake, wondering what he would do with the rest of his day. A mixture of natural birds and flight-capable autos filled the air above the gentle waters, while human activity and infrastructure turned the water into a marvel surrounded by public parks. Partially inspired by The Lattice, the mesh of wires and aquaculture on Celosia, Lapis Lake’s center, was a hive of habs, algaculture, pisciculture, and more.This was all part of the philosophy of Martian pseudo-planning. Procedurally generated microbiomes and physical space, designed to allow life to flourish in a barely controlled chaos, managed through the oversight of thousands of decentralized systems with redundancy and plenty of slack. Even the designers of Arco Lazuli did not know all that lay beneath the waves and soil of the celarium. A controlled unpredictability acting as the boundary conditions for a thin, though complex, ecosystem constrained to exist within a defined superstructure, where the outermost wall of the celarium was the only ultimate constraint. The mixture of biological and artificial autonomous systems gave Arco Lazuli a vibrance and life to it, even when there were no people, like Frederik, around to see it.In a few hours, people would stream out of the cramped confines of the largest Skardan cosmodrome, which was connected to Arco Lazuli, and visit the mega celarium. These guests and visitors would easily double the population in the megastructure. Soon, it would get quite crowded.There was a tickle on his left wrist from his seal bracelet, and he ignored it until it became a steady buzz of haptic feedback. Reluctantly, he tapped on the dark gray surface of the bracelet. Text appeared to be anchored on the surface of the bracelet. As he moved his wrist, the text on the seal bracelet followed. Illusory text posed a question:[Activate Extraocular Augmented Reality system?]His fingertips tingled as he pushed his hand through the text and waved to reactivate the rest of his EAR system. There was a gentle glow in his peripheral vision as implants on his optic nerves gently formed the illusion of his personal EAR interface. In the default heads-up-display mode, he was able to effortlessly find information like the local time, his rough location in Arco Lazuli, what part of the local work cycles were active, and the ambient temperature in his section of the celarium.An icon of a radio dish jumped for attention near the left edge of his field of view. Each hop coincided with a buzz on his wrist. He pinched this eager icon with his left hand and pulled it open in front of his nose. A translucent frame covered his view of the lake of Arco Lazuli, then filled with logograms, symbols, and colored triangles. The arrangement of these shapes secured and encrypted information. It was a seal code waiting to be unsealed by the biometrically locked quantum encryption key stored on his wrist. Each of the corners of the seal code contained an Arte myawn logogram embedded in a small red maze, guiding the unsealing algorithm by defining a seal code’s border and providing a mnemonic check for the final output when the intended recipient got the seal—though hardly anyone asked for a mnemonic verification anymore. For now, he kept the rectangular seal snugly stored in his bracelet, so he pressed its edges. There was a gentle prick at his wrist from the blood sampling and then watched as decrypted headers emerged from the dissolving seal code.[Seal Status] Good[Signer] [1]“Betty Blue” [349-11-0101-011-407715][Co-Signer][2] “Absolute Horizons” [345-00-0001-000007635958558]“Domot Get Grond Dey (Han Oblast)” [263-02-0299-000000006405194][Signed] [1]68839-22:59 CelosiaLT[Verified][3]68839-23:00 CelosiaLT68839-23:20 CelosiaLT68839-23:29 CelosiaLTAn autonomous contract, authorized for negotiations. Unusually formal, Frederik thought, and looked skeptically at the sender. No name, only the seal hash and a pseudonym. Absolute Horizons. He recognized the corporate entity making the request.Frederik hesitated. As a bonded and sealed member of the Domot Get Grond Dey cluster, he could simply ignore the message and let someone else deal with it, but someone—or some autonomous system—in Domot Get Grond Dey had already accepted the terms offered by Absolute Horizons and co-signed the contract. So, someone from the arroyo—the network of resource transporters that spread throughout Ya Ke like roots of a tree—would have to complete the contract or risk the quality of the cluster’s status on IBIS for future work. It was terrible timing. He had just settled his daughter, Diya, back into a stable life on Skarda, and he had planned on at least twenty more days before they had to take their next job. But it would either be him on this job, or someone else he probably knew. He grimaced at the thought, but he knew that the faster he completed jobs, the faster he would get a permanent home for Diya. A little more pain now, for a lot less pain later.He opened the contract, then activated the provided autonomous negotiator.It was a generic Absolute Horizons generated portrait of someone who would be nondescript in Frederik’s local environment, but did not seem memorable enough to be anyone he had seen recently. The avatar bowed their head politely and spoke a dual-gender, stereo voice typical of a United Planets autonomous personality. Frederik found the effect of two different voices speaking in unison quite strange, but the Uppers sure seemed fond of the choice. As the auto spoke, Frederik’s EAR translated and transcribed any words unique to the United Planets trade language—Upblanda—beneath the auto’s portrait.“Awnyawngha shimka to our esteemed partners in the Spanning Worlds Independence. In this contract document you will find—” “Please show me the contract summary.”As the avatar bowed their head, a new window appeared with an orbital map of Jin. A simple spherical region extended around the gas giant, just past the orbit of the third moon of Vas, representing the exclusion zone. Skarda was close to the zone, but never inside, while Vas was at the edge, but its orbit would occasionally, but regularly, bring it inside the exclusion zone.Every star and every planet had a similar exclusion zone, or EZ, though it scaled with mass and was irrelevant around a smaller moon like Skarda. Neither politics nor regulation defined this zone. Rather, the limits of physics and engineering inherent in the ubiquitous ERR–AL drive—the gidizip in Di Lingua—defined it. Powerful linear accelerators built along the spines of some spacecraft produced exotic matter in nested bubbles of warped spacetime to enable superluminal travel. Within the exclusion zones, gravitational forces disrupted this delicate warp of spacetime. At the limits of precision of manufacturing, operating, and calculating trajectories for an ERR–AL drive, these exclusion zones were more-or-less fixed based on known empirical formulas. A fortunate reality for Frederik, as there was a need for a purely Newtonian spacecraft, like SSV Ergo Infinitum.Of course, every Solar year, some meesee ill binu from Celosia—and they were almost always from Celosia—would declare they had defeated the limits of engineering precision and broken past the limits of the exclusion zone. Each attempt yielded nothing but another rescue mission to save the poorly constructed prototypes stranded deep in the well of Jin without enough rocket propellant, or supplies, to make it back out of the EZ alive.The auto highlighted Skarda, the fourth moon of Jin, disrupting Frederik’s thoughts.“In accordance with local orbital regulations, SSV Ergo Infinitum, operating on behalf of Domot Get Grond Dey (Han Oblast), will rendezvous with an Absolute Horizons low orbital station in the Ya Ke star system, serial number Juliette Sierra zero-two—”“Skip to the final contract summary, please.”“Passenger transport for five guests. Less than one ton of cargo. Three stops: Near Skardan Orbit to onboard passengers, a recycling repository at the edge of the Jin exclusion zone to pick up a single cargo container, and finally completing the delivery contract at SSV Fengshen in a high polar Jin orbit. If agreed upon, an Absolute Horizons representative currently on Skarda will accompany SSV Ergo Infinitum crew from the surface to Near Skardan Orbit and the rest of the passengers will join at the orbital rendezvous.”On his EAR, the orbital map updated as the auto spoke. Frederik was familiar with SSV Fengshen. It was a spacecraft-turned-station in a polar orbit around Jin, almost perpendicular to the orbital plane of Skarda, Vas, and the other moons of Jin. It was an independent space weather monitor for the Jin orbital jurisdiction. Frederik scanned the range of dates for the contract and the proposed compensation.He frowned. “Are these contract completion dates correct?”“Of course, ohlowyeh.”“These are tight timings. We’ll have to burn a lot more delta-vee than usual to make it on time, and it’s going to mean we can’t take up our regular restocking contract with SSV Fengshen in nearly three weeks.”“Of course, ohlowyeh,” the avatar seemed frozen in place.Frederik frowned. “I am worried it will reduce the IBIS reputation of my crew if we—”“Negotiation terms accepted, ohlowyeh!” “Terms?” there was a small jolt of anxiety, and he wondered if he had made a mistake. “What terms do you mean?”“Under the current proposed contract, and pursuant to timely delivery of passengers to SSV Fengshen, the conflicted future contract to restock Fengshen will be sealed as satisfied—including appropriate payment.”“Hmm,” Frederik scratched at his beard. “Are you saying we will get paid as if we restocked Fengshen, in addition to the payment for this current job proposal?”“Yes, ohlowyeh.”“So, is that double the usual 5,000 Tonn amount to Domot Get Grond Dey, or do you mean double our crew fee?”“Regular crew and organizational fees will be paid upfront, ohlowyeh, while the remaining payment will be sealed upon arrival at SSV Fengshen, for a total amount shown on your EAR.”[279,287.97 S₩ [247,227.71 Ŧ]]“Nawa oh!”[25][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑ he gasped.Nearly two hundred and eighty thousand swawn. Triple the usual restock and resupply contract, with all the costs paid upfront. And even with a fast burn and tripling the crew’s share, it would not triple the costs of a haul. In the end, it amounted to an almost tenfold increase in the share Ergo set aside for the expansions to the Domot Get Grond Dey—a year’s worth of set-aside for Frederik and Diya’s permanent home. And if Frederik gave up most of his share to the cause, it would amount to nearly fourteen months’ worth of accumulation toward that goal in a single job. They’d have a permanent home this year, not next.“Is that correct?” he frowned at the concessions the auto was able to make. “That’s quite a large payout to get a few passengers to a weather station, isn’t it?”“I’m sorry, ohlowyeh, I do not understand the question.”Fredrik laughed nervously. “Hah…when do we have to make a final decision?”“You have until 68840-07:00 SolUT to seal and respond to initial signing and co-signing parties,” the auto answered.Fredrik nodded. “Oke. You are aware of Ergo’s sealing procedure, ye?”“Of course, ohlowyeh.” Frederik pressed the button on his seal bracelet, placing his sealed co-sign on the contract. “Oke, forward my sealed contract to the others on the crew manifest.”With a deep polite bow, including the formal hand laid flatly over their stomach, the auto acknowledged his seal. “Of course, ohlowyeh. We look forward to a quick sealing, and as always, thank you for choosing Absolute Horizons!”Frederik cleared his EAR with a wave, and let his thoughts idle in the growing murmurs of the day-shift crowds swelling around him in Arco Lazuli. He took a deep breath, feeling the air entering his nose and tickling the hairs of his well-groomed beard. He hoped to regain the calm he had in that moment of Ya Ke’s starrise.Eyes closed, he failed. There was something resting over his shoulder. Pressure from a stranger leaning against him. He opened his eyes, irritated, and saw the former sole of empty boot, carved out and removed with a cut knife, dangling by laces wrapped around fingers with short, but elaborately painted, fingernails. This empty boot sole was bent into an uncomfortable and unnatural shape, replete with a series of barely effective straps and unwieldy cylinders attached underneath where the heel would go, if it was still the sole of a boot and not some jury-rigged fashion item. A spacer’s high heel. Frederik was about to shout out in anger at whoever had trespassed into his personal space when he caught a familiar scent.“Cutting our leave short by twenty days, old man?” a familiar voice quipped with the singsong of a Chironian accent and a click of the tongue.Frederik let out half a sigh before he rolled his eyes. “You could always refuse to seal the contract, Io.”He pivoted under Io’s arm to face her, but moved so her shoe stayed over his shoulder. Io was barefoot and in basically nothing but her pata with a purple and green jacket tucked under her armpit. Despite being covered in a thick layer of glitter, sweat, dust, and night-life detritus, her tattoos were still plainly visible.Io’s tattoos covered most of her back, both of her shoulders, her right thigh, and her left forearm. Many of Io’s tattoos were Arte myawn or in an Earther style, but a few refused to conform to this trend. Her left forearm tattoo mimicked the traditional monochromatic and heavily geometric Martian style, but her right shoulder was a Chironian tattoo made with older Arte steh methods that used a kind of pneumatic needle gun. Located right above the knob of her shoulder blade, this intricate Chironian tattoo’s colors ranged from dark black to an unsaturated cobalt, and the few pockets of negative space contained colorful portraits of the worlds Io had visited.Io’s smile was infectious. His frown and skepticism melted before her. Whenever they shared calm moments like this, he sometimes felt like he did not need a fixed location, so long as his daughter and Io were there. Frederik considered that feeling—that gravitational pull Io still had on his heart—while looking at his own forearms. Her tattoos reflected her essence and Frederik’s reflected his own.Underneath the rolled sleeve of his tunic, Frederik had extensive Grond steh tattoos. Although each Grond steh tattoo was unique to the person wearing them, they were always geometric and predominantly monochromatic, and Frederick’s looked like a tiling of triangles that formed a dissolving gradient. Near his wrist geometry of his ink was a mere outline, suggestive of volume and form in a triangular lattice. Moving up his arm, the lattice filled out, iteratively and continuously, a slow inversion, creating a negative space triangular grid around solid color. From beneath his cool sable skin, the geometric shapes of this ink were the color of the red rock faces of Elysium Planitia on a stormy day.Superficially, there were commonalities between Io and Frederik’s ink work, though Frederik had more extensive tattooing, yet there was an extra layer of meaning in his own ink. He was a descendent of Grond myawn. He was born and raised in Skarda’s Martian-like gravity, a moon inhabited and built and designed by Martians who had left Sol behind. These lines in his arm were his cultural heritage, not simple decoration, or self-expression.Skarda was a Neuvo Mars, a planet with thin or no atmosphere and Mars-like gravity, making it perfect for Grond steh. Unlike the stellah steh who had assimilated to near-standard gravities, those who came to live on Neuvo Marses designed all their habitats to work at Mars-standard gravity, not Earth-standard. Like any upstanding community member of the Domot Get Grond Dey, his body needed to thrive in higher acceleration than he had been born into, and so his body contained extensive musculoskeletal implants and enhancements. To him, his tattoos stood for the hard-won legacy of generations of Mars’s descendants pushing forward, one hab at a time, to make the universe livable for future generations. While Io’s seemed to reflect a preference for chaos and novelty. Hers were highly individualistic, and mercurial, like her own heart. He was working to secure a stable future in Domot Get Grond Dey, and she was working as the end-to-itself. She was a nomad, and he was a farmer. That was why he had pulled away from her. Pulled back from what they could have been together.Io gently touched Frederik’s forearm, bringing his attention back to her, away from his sullen musings. She shifted her weight and smiled slyly as she tussled her warm, light-red-blond shoulder-length hair.“I suppose I could cash out from Ergo and catch a ride to Celosia instead,” she said.Sometimes, it was like Io had read his mood and thoughts as though they had popped up on her EAR. However, sometimes he also had a deep understanding of her inner life. He glimpsed a flickering frown at the corner of her mouth. He turned, leaning his back and elbows against the railing, and faced her. They were both saddened by the thought of Io leaving Ergo Infinitum, for good, though Io would only admit that under duress.“You’d get bored on Celosia within a month.”“Oh, yeah?” Io gave him a performative frown that did not touch her gray eyes. “You don’t think I could get up to trouble in the sprawling metropolis of Tiantang, Eff? I am the wild spirit of my home planet Chiron set free in the Spanning Worlds!”“Exactly, Io. You would burn hot, but fast. You might even get bored with life on Celosia in just a week.”“What is the alternative?”“You’re already part of my arroyo, Io. You have been ever since you came to work on Ergo,” he pressed.Io laughed. “Ye ye, I know I know.”“Ye, and you also know with all those years of work you helped us gather the resources we will wind up using to build the superstructure for the sa-sheb deul hive.”“Really? You think space farmers will keep me interested longer than Celosia?”Frederik shrugged his hands, wanted to say so many things, but let the opportunity slide past.Io took a step closer to him and balanced herself with one hand on his shoulder as she put the heeled boots back on. Frederik had to flex to keep them both balanced. Io made a gentle push motion aimed at each of her heels with her fingertips, and they responded by cinching and conforming to the shape of her foot. Fabric pulled itself up well past her knee, half-way up her thigh, as it stretched. Fredrick assumed there was some EAR interface.“Neat, eh?” Io asked as she changed the subject. “Just hacked the haptic feedback—sends a slight electrostatic charge and activates the piezoelectrics. It’s like a biosuit with the counter-pressure straps, or gecko grip,” she wiggled her fingers like insects in front of his face.“Doesn’t cover much.”“Ye, but when you wear these, you wear it to look kacha bul. It’s not supposed to be a practical outfit.”He had a hearty laugh and shook his head. “I don’t know about all that, Io—looks like some juan juyey heywell steh tsow olodo dey.”[26][Di Lingua]: Loudmouth, planet born, horny fucker. ↑She smiled as she rolled her eyes. “Ye ye. Looking like some wonda mo fresh from Celosia with no sense of space looking for something you can only find down here in Jin’s gravity well is the point, old man.”He raised his eyebrow skeptically. “But can you walk in them?”“Byanjeng bin dey![27][Di Lingua]: Of course! ↑ There is gecko grip on the bottom.”“Is that the default, or another Io modification?”She held her hands up, again mimicking a saintly pose with her gaze up to the top of Arco Lazuli’s dome. “Ah! What do you think? I am a master of adaptation,” Io yawned. “Let’s get back to the hab—and tell me about this new contract. Why should I seal it and not cash out?”“Oke. Comot.”Io grabbed Frederik’s arm, pulled herself close, and the pair walked through the gardens to the outer edge of the massive dome on the top level of Arco Lazuli. “They’ve offered a generous contract for shuttling some weather station crew to Fengshen.”“Hmm, two hundred and eighty k-swawn to shuttle a few folks to a weather station?”“Ye.”“Over generous, hmm,” she looked up at the Arco Lazuli dome as they walked toward the edge of the celarium. “What are you thinking?”Frederik shook his head. “A gah mot sabi.”[28][Di Lingua]: I don’t know. ↑“A bit strange, ye?”“To say the least. Upfront pay is enough to cover the entire trip, but Absolute Horizons throws around a lot of resources for inscrutable reasons,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a lot of risk. Why not seal it and do the job?”“Eff!” Io tugged at his arm. He couldn’t help but chuckle—even with the added height from her strange shoes she was a quarter of a meter shorter than him. He smiled down at her.“Wetin dey?”[29][Di Lingua]: What? ↑“You really think this is a low-risk job? At triple pay?”“Domot Get Grond Dey already sealed,” he said. “Almost no cargo on the way out. Already got them to agree for increased pay because of the time constraints, but the orbital timing is on our side so we can use a lot less propellant, we might even manage a propellant shuffle from Fengshen to Horizon’s Edge and increase our final payout by another forty thousand swawn. It’s a good enough deal that Domot Get Grond Dey might even look to hire replacement crew for anyone who refuses to seal from Ergo—three hundred Tonn per day for a freelancer is easily worth it—so might as well be me and you and Ergo, ye?”Io shrugged. “Oiya![30][Spanning Words]: Yikes! ↑ People who aren’t from your damned hives don’t pay people extra unless there’s some serious risk, Eff.”“They do if they’re in a hurry. Maybe they’re just on a time crunch?”“A time crunch to get where? To get to a weather station? Why? Perhaps if it was a secret dance club, I would understand,” she flashed him a crooked smile before she got serious again. “But even if they’re in some rush to see a wildly exciting once-in-a-lifetime scientific event—that we’ve never heard of and didn’t hit the streams yet—who has the interest and the resources to afford that?”“Fine, oke. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’re the smart one—what do you think?”Her smile was gone. “Spy shit,” she said.“Prastitey?”[31][Di Lingua]: Excuse me? ↑he nervously laughed. “What do you think is going on?”Io nodded and let go of his arm. “There are a lot of Cooperative Defense facilities on low orbit over Jin, right?”“Shey,ye.[32][Di Lingua]: Right, yeah. ↑ Cooperative Defense—CADSS—has a lot of defense systems in Jin’s exclusion zone, why?”“Oke, well…it’s a weather station? They’ve hauled cargo with us, and the passengers are a rounding error in the cost when they do that, but we rarely haul over more than one or two of them—”“Ye, so what?” “—maybe three—so, what? We’re always hauling at least fifty tons of supplies, and usually closer to one hundred to make it worth the propellant cost. Well, Eff, they’re offering us triple that usual rate to get a few scientists there but not having us lug any cargo? They’re spying on the CADSS.”“We’ve restocked Fengshen a few times now…was it always a spy outpost? Think we’d have noticed after all these years. Also, if they’re spying why wouldn’t they bring more equipment?” “I dunno, but we never exactly got a tour of their facilities, have we? Ever take a close look at any of their equipment or the crew? Who’s to say your friends in Han Oblast didn’t know it was a spy outpost when they sent us that first resupply job years ago?”Frederik angrily shook his head. “Our arroyos don’t work with militaries. Out of all the oblasts in Domot Get Grond Dey, Han Oblast is the least likely to break that rule. And no one from Han Oblast would lie to the crew about a job. That’s an unforgivable line to cross. The arroyo would dry up real fast if word ever got out.”“Maybe they just look the other way—a lot of people do that when they have a lot to gain. Hell, in my experience most people refuse to see the plain truth if they have anything at all to gain and the only thing needed from them is ignore what they can plainly see,” Io poked Frederik’s shoulder. “With as much swawn they are offering, the Obialos are years closer to having your own hive, right? You know, that one you keep hoping I will live in?”Frederik raised an eyebrow. “Ye, this job would accelerate the plans for the next hive, but that doesn’t shift my judgement when it comes to risks of the job.” She sighed. “I dunno, Eff…maybe they want to launch some corporate espionage op when there’s bad space weather? Fengshen is deep enough into the EZ, and close to the low orbit stations that skim Jin’s clouds…they can probably get a team to one of the military stations and back out if a coronal ejection ever got dicey enough. Or maybe they’re not Upper spies at all…might be some internal Cooperative Defense intrigue.”Frederik laughed. “Juan juyey![33][Di Lingua]: Bullshit. ↑ So factions within factions and constant power struggles?”She nodded. “Ye, why not?”“The Spanning Worlds doesn’t have intrigue like that.”“You did once,” she said with a nod to the colors of her jacket. “We all did, at least once.”“The war was a long time ago, Io.”“Hostilities don’t die that easily, and it wasn’t even that long ago,” she shook her head. “We’re getting off target here. The risks aren’t just getting wrapped up in some questionable run, Eff, the risks here are what they’re asking us to do is going to get us killed or wrapped up in some military or corpo shit. Absolute Horizons is an Earther corp. They’ve been fine to us so long as all we did was bring them doshiraks and fresh gear, but whatever is really going on Fengshen is not just monitoring proton flux or whatever the fuck a space weather station does.”“How? How do we know that? Arte steh are just strange people, Io. Maybe they really are just monitoring space weather because it impacts the price of helium. You know how they’re always desperate for any little extra slice of information to feed into their large autonomous models so they can predict what will happen here despite the gidizip time-lag. Anything to gain that extra fraction of a percent better information to win their wagers. Plus, they can leave Earth, but they can never return. Banished by their own people to live out here with the stellah steh and well steh and grond steh and—”“I know SSV Fengshen isn’t what it pretends to be because of the price they’re willing to pay for the contract, Eff. Please, trust me on this,” she said with a pleading look up at him. “I grew up around this kind of nonsense.”“I appreciate the concern, Io,” Frederik said. “But you know I already sealed the contract, and you know how much Diya needs this. How much I need this? I just want a stable place for us before she gets too old and—”A notification appeared on Frederik’s EAR. An update to the contract. Someone from Ergo’s crew had sealed and signed.[New][Co-Signer][3] “Juhasz, Io Park” [340-13-0109-011-907348]“Io…you sealed it?” he asked, bewildered. “Thank you.”“I will not let your naivete and pacifism get you killed.”“Hmm, I take my thanks back.”“Ha! Too late! I’ll be there the whole time to keep an EAR spun up on our guests—and watch your backside, too,” she said with a wink and a smile that did not touch her sad, watery eyes.“Great,” Frederik groaned. “Don’t cause too much trouble, oke? We’re not even amateur spy hunters.”She laughed, and then patted his chest as she yawned. “Ahh! Of course not. Now, comot, let’s get back to the hab—I need to crash before we lift-off.”“You think the others will seal the contract?”“They’d follow us to Tartarus if we went first, Eff,” Io hummed to herself.