CHAPTER ELEVEN  Walls of Glass and Steel

“Midflight checks complete,” Norla announced. “All systems normal, and we are on course.”

“Very good,” Koffield replied, his voice coming through the intercom. And his voice made it clear he was not paying much attention.

Second Officer Norla Chandray spun around in her command chair and looked through the glass wall of the pilot’s station. Koffield was reading, seated in the lounge area on the other side of the ops deck of the lighter Cruzeiro do Sul. With the pilot station’s access hatch open, they didn’t really need the intercom. They could have shouted to each other, or even just raised their voices a bit.

The Cruzeiro was essentially a fat cylinder, fifteen meters high and twenty in diameter. Topside was the docking system, and the flat upper deck, open to space so that the Cruzeiro do Sul could carry bulky cargo, that would not fit inside the ship, strapped down to her upper deck. The main deck, the ops deck, was little more than one big open compartment that could be rigged as any combination of cargo space or passenger facilities. Below was the systems deck, and below that, at the aft end, the main ship engines.

This trip out, they had rigged the ops deck with two small private cabins, one each for Norla and Koffield, and a large open area that served as a combined lounge and wardroom.

The pilot’s station was built up against the hull between the only other two permanent structures on the deck—the gangway leading down to the systems deck to the pilot’s left, and the main airlock to the right. The airlock was an oversize job, to allow for trips when the Cruzeiro carried bulky cargo in the main deck. For this trip, however, the central deck space was wide-open, the gunmetal-grey deck plates a broad and cold expanse between Norla Chandray and Anton Koffield.

The lighter had four portholes set into the hull at equally spaced intervals. These gave the pilot’s station, the lounge, and each cabin a view out.

So far as flying the ship was concerned, the pilot’s porthole wasn’t of much use, because it looked out the side of the ship. For most operations, the ship’s pilot relied on external cameras, radar, and other sensor systems that put information on the displays. But even if the porthole wasn’t much use for piloting per se, there was good psychology in giving a ship’s pilot a way to see out.

In the two days they had been aboard, neither had ventured near the other’s cabin, let alone knocked on the hatch or gone in. They had their meals together, but there had not been much in the way of real conversation. Norla was starting to think she might as well carry the transparent walls of the pilot’s station around the cabin with her, for all the contact she had made with Koffield so far.

The arrangement felt strange, uncomfortable, as if they had carved up the ship’s interior into sections of private turf and neutral territory. Which was not to say that Koffield had behaved badly. Far from it. He was always gracious and polite, but still reserved and distant.

Well, never mind. She had work to do. She spun back around in her chair and started resetting the controls from diagnostic to operational.

The pilot’s station consisted of two command chairs and control equipment inside a transparent cubical box. At the moment, the pilot’s station was retracted into the hull. But merely by sealing the hatches on the transparent exterior shell and the transparent interior bulkhead, and pressing a button or two, the pilot’s station could be sealed tight and raised up and airlocked out of the hull to the topside face of the cylinder. When the pilot’s station was extended, Norla had an unobstructed view in every direction but straight down. The command chairs could be rotated to any orientation, pointing her straight at whatever she needed to see.

It would be nice if she could get a clear view of Koffield just by sealing a hatch and pressing a button. As she finished reconfiguring the controls, she found that, once again, her thoughts were turning back toward the mystery man she traveled with. Despite her best efforts, she could not keep her mind from the puzzle that was Koffield.

Norla Chandray finished the reconfig, flipped the master to standby, stood up, and stepped out of the pilot’s station. She stood at the station entrance for a moment and considered Koffield as he sat in the lounge-area sofa, reading. A strange and haunting song, sung in no language she had ever heard, played over the wardroom speakers.

He had not done any of the things she had expected of him on this voyage. The nonsense about his not being rated for this type of spacecraft was just that—nonsense. After ten minutes of familiarization, it was clear that he could fly the ship as well as she could, or better. She had expected him to act on that, to plant himself in the copilot’s seat of the Cruzeiro do Sul and stay there, watching her like a hawk—or, more accurately, like a flight instructor. It would not have surprised her overmuch if he had simply ordered her out of the pilot’s station for the duration of the trip and done all the flying himself.

Instead he hadn’t set foot in the station, once he had confirmed that he could handle the controls in an emergency. Beyond that, he had barely paid Norla a moment’s attention since they had boarded the lighter.

Instead he had idled over his meals, by all appearances doing his best to savor what there was to savor in flavor and texture of shipboard food. He had brought along a large number of downloaded books from the DP-IVs library. From what Norla could see from looking at the titles, his choices were either eclectic in the extreme, or else had been made totally at random. And if there was anything beyond random selection in the music he played, Norla was unable to divine it. She recognized hardly any of it. Some of it was, to her, heart-stoppingly beautiful, but just as much of it was indistinguishable from noise.

There was something disturbing behind his calm, his detachment. Something that also whispered of the condemned man’s last meal, a man bidding a last fond farewell to all the things that made life worth living. But that was not quite it. There was something in what Koffield did that told her he was familiar with the patterns of the things he was doing, that he had done these things before, and in the same way. The meals, the books, the musical pieces were part of some ritual he had performed many times.

Norla was finally coming to understand what was going on. Koffield was preparing himself for battle, enjoying one last time the things of civilization, the things that made battles worth winning.

Anton Koffield was doing what he did when he knew it might be the last time. He was saying good-bye, bidding a ritual farewell to all the things he loved. Anton Koffield was savoring, one last time, not merely the things of life, but the things of peace. Whether or not he came back from whatever fight he expected, he would start the struggle with the fresh and clear memory of the things that made fighting worthwhile.

But if Koffield was going into battle, then she was too. And if he felt the need to be prepared, then so did she. She needed to know things. And there was only one way she could see that she was going to find them out. She crossed the deck and sat down in the chair opposite him, regarded him closely. It took a moment for him to look up from his book and notice her. “What is it, Officer Chandray?” he asked.

“That was what I was about to ask you,” she said. “What’s going to happen? What is it you’re getting ready to face? Is there going to be a fight? A battle? If there is going to be, I should know about it, so I can get ready too— and get the ship ready.”

“This ship was not built to fight,” he said.

“No, sir. She’s not armed. But even if it meant standing on the hull with a hand weapon, I’d rather go down fighting—if we are going to fight. When I see a man going through his prebattle ritual, I like to know what it’s about. Are we going to have to fight—and if so who, and over what, and where, and when?”

Koffield glanced down at his book, then closed it and set it down on the sofa next to him. “ ‘Prebattle ritual,’ “ he said. “I’ve never thought of it in quite those terms, but I suppose that’s what it is.” He pulled a pocket controller out of his breast pocket and pressed a button. The music stopped. “I have every expectation that I will be in a fight,” he said. “But it will not involve you. It will not be fought with guns or bombs or laser cannon, but with words—at least at first. I doubt I will be killed, or even injured, even if it goes badly—but I could very well be arrested and thrown in some sort of jail or concentration camp—or mental institution.”

Norla thought back to the scuttlebutt she had heard aboard the DP-IV: third- and fourth-hand stuff about what one crew member had heard about what another crew member had said about what the captain had said in an unguarded moment. “The story going around is that as soon as you were revived, before you knew what had gone wrong, you were expecting to be arrested—for warning the Solacians that their climate had gone wrong.”

“Yes. I expected to be arrested for predicting disaster.”

“Are you still expecting that?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Even though what you predicted has already come true.”

“Partially. Not all of my predictions have come true— yet. According to my studies and researches, the worst is yet to come.”

“You don’t think the planetary ecostructure will recover,” she said, careful not to make it sound like a question. “But I don’t see why that should be such shocking news that you’d be thrown in jail for saying it. If things are as bad down there as you say they are, surely someone has thought of that—and said it—already.”

“Quite true,” Koffield said, his face revealing nothing.

“But if that was all there was to it,” Norla went on, “you wouldn’t have pushed so hard to go in-system. Why risk being thrown in jail for the rest of your life, just to tell them what they already know?”

“You are quite right once again.”

“So what is all this? You know more than you’re saying.”

Koffield shook his head no, back and forth one time, as if to deny that he knew more—but then stopped, and let out a weary sigh. “And why I do keep hiding it all? That’s the logical next question. And the best answer I can offer is force of habit. Fear of spreading panic, of getting rumors started without any way of stopping them if—or rather when—the story goes out of control. Maybe there’s some part of me that still believes in magic, that thinks that if I don’t say it out loud, it won’t come true. But you’re right. I know a lot of things. And I haven’t even told them to Marquez. He thinks he knows it all—and what he knows is bad enough. But he doesn’t have the whole story.” Koffield paused a moment, and considered. “That was a mistake, probably. If something happens to me, there will be no one left in a position to press on. I should have taken the time, convinced him. Too late now.”

“Perhaps so, sir. But you still haven’t told me anything.”

Koffield. laughed, and there was even something careful and reserved about the way he laughed. “You don’t miss much, you know how to put the pieces together, and you’re damned persistent. Those are good traits to have, Officer Chandray. They’ll serve you well.”

“Well, sir, I’d like it if that started happening right now. Talk to me. What’s going on? What is the big picture? What is this all about?”

Koffield sank back on the couch, rubbed his face with his hands, and let out a sigh. When his hands came down from his face, it seemed almost as if he had peeled away a mask. Suddenly the weariness showed, and the worry, and the anxiety. He was letting her see. “What’s it about?” he asked, echoing her words. “Disaster. Long-range, fullblown disaster for our entire civilization—and our species as well, for that matter.”

Her eyes widened, and she stared at him. His tone of voice, his expression, made it impossible not to believe Koffield. He wasn’t spouting hyperbole that made him feel big and important. He was speaking the truth. That it had taken so much effort to drag it out of him only made him seem more convincing. He meant what he said.

“Tell me,” she said.

Koffield stared at her for a moment, and then, at last, nodded. “All right,” he said. “All right.” He stood up and paced back and forth a time or two across the wardroom-lounge area. “It’s hard to know where to start,” he said. He paused and looked out the wardroom porthole. “After not speaking for so long, it’s hard to start at all,” he admitted.

He stared out at the cold stars for a long time, his thoughts seemingly as. far from Nor la as the stars themselves. Suddenly he turned toward her and spoke. “I suppose the best way to explain it to you is to explain how I got involved,” he said. “I expect you know—-you know what happened—what I did—at the Circum Central Wormhole Farm?

“In general terms,” she said. I don’t know every detail.” I know they curse your name at Glister, and the mere fact that the Chronologic Patrol approved your actions was enough that, before the collapse came, Glister’s government ordered all Patrol facilities in the system closed, and ejected the entire Patrol contingent, she thought. They’ll never trust the Patrol, or any outsiders, again. But was that true? Never was a long time—and the incident was now a century and more in the past. What was Koffield to Glister now, today? A name that rated a footnote in the history books, or still a monster whose name would echo down the ages? “I—I suppose I know as much as I need to know.”

“Hmmmph. You might—or might not—need to know a great deal more about it in future. But that’s to one side. Circum Central is not what I want to talk about now.”

Or ever, Norla added silently. If that blood were on her hands, she would not want to talk about it. “Go on, sir,” she said.

Koffield sighed, turned his back on the porthole, leaned up against the outside bulkhead, and folded his arms wearily.  “The Circum Central Incident. That’s what it ended up being called, for the most part. I will tell you it in brief. Some of what I’ll tell you I knew at the time, and some of it I knew later. I’ll tell it as short and clean as I can. There was a standard defense arrangement on the time-shaft wormhole. One ship, the Standfast, on the past, or downtime, side of the singularity. Another ship, mine, the Upholder, that had transited from the downtime side, to the future, or uptime, side of the wormhole. The Standfast was jumped by thirty-two uncrewed intruder ships that seemed to come out of nowhere, and maneuvered and accelerated at very high rates. Sixteen of the intruders were decoys, meant to occupy the Standfast while the others got through the wormhole. The Standfast was destroyed while killing most of the sixteen intruders that were trying for the wormhole. Six of the sixteen got through—how, no one knows. The codes and control systems were supposed to be completely unbreakable.

“My ship, the Upholder, killed three of those six intruders, and was severely damaged in the process. I—we—lost six of our crew. The other three intruders escaped, and seemed—I emphasize that word—seemed—to accelerate to and past light-speed as they did so.

“Two relief ships—the Guardian and the Watchkeeper— arrived at the downtime end of the wormhole, and sent an extremely minimal signal to my ship, the Upholder, to report their arrival. I mistakenly assumed that only one relief ship would come from downtime, while the other would arrive from the uptime end. Once I destroyed the wormhole, of course, there was no point in sending any sort of relief craft, from past or future, to the uptime end of Circum Central. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

“The original plan had been to send the Watchkeeper through the wormhole to the uptime side while the Guardian remained on the downtime end. However, before the Guardian could rig for duty stations or the Watchkeeper could revive her crew and make the wormhole run, a new crisis erupted.

“Sometime after the first intruder assault, a convoy of five ships filled with relief supplies and bound for Glister came in on a standard approach toward the uptime end of the wormhole. Just as they were commencing final approach, six of the vehicles that came to be called Intruders with a capital T entered the system as well. Three tried to ram the Upholder and so destroyed themselves. We destroyed two Intruders before they could reach the wormhole. The third was destroyed inside the wormhole as the wormhole nexus shut down with the ship inside.

“Once the wormhole was destroyed, and it was clear that no relief would be coming, I decided to head for home. The Upholder traveled back to the Solar System, using other timeshafts so as to arrive without getting thrown farther out of our own time. The ship was not in good condition even before we started the trip. Suffice it to say it was not a pleasant journey.”

Koffield stopped talking and stared, unseeing, out across the compartment, at some dark and quiet place beyond. Norla had read enough about the Circum Central Incident to know that the return voyage of the Upholder was a saga in and of itself. She did not speak and waited for Koffield to start again. At last he did, but said no more about the Upholder’s return.

“One ship of the convoy, the Herakles IX, got through the wormhole. Three were torn apart by the singularity as they attempted to abort their approach. The fifth and last of the convoy ships, the Stardrifter Gamma, aborted successfully and left—or perhaps, or more accurately, escaped— Circum Central immediately, to be marooned on the uptime side of the wormhole. Merchanter’s law puts priority on reporting an incident over delivering cargo eighty years late. The Stardrifter Gamma limped to Trior’s Realm Wormhole Farm and reported what she had seen.

“However, Merchanter’s law and Chronologic Patrol rules place defending chronology above anything else. That meant that the ship that made it through the wormhole could not report on the events she had seen until the events had in fact happened. As is and was standard procedure, only the captain of the Herakles IX had been revived for the pass through the wormhole. The rest of the crew had slept through the whole affair. But the captain, and the ship’s data-recording instruments, had seen a great deal in the future. The Chronologic Patrol had to do two things. First, the Patrol had to prevent any description of the incident from getting out before the time in the future when it had happened. No one, not even the Patrol, could be allowed to learn more about Circum Central, before the incident took place. Second, the Patrol had to secure that information and get it to Patrol Headquarters as soon as possible after that moment had passed.

“Because the wormhole had been destroyed, the Watch-keeper could no longer transit through it to relieve my ship. She was, therefore, sent in pursuit of the Herakles IX in order to accomplish those goals. As is normally the case with a timeshaft ship’s flight plan, it had been arranged so that the ship would arrive at her destination some month or two after her original departure. Thus, she was a month or two out from Glister when she reached her original departure date, and about forty years downtime, in the past, of the Circum Central Incident.

“A prize crew from the Watch keeper boarded the H-IX before the captain came out of temporal confinement, took him into custody, and did a full data download of everything in the ship’s computer and Artlnt system. Then the prize crew wiped the snip’s memories clean of everything that had happened after her arrival at Circum Central. They put the data and the captain in a temporal-containment unit and sealed them in. Once everything was impounded and erased, they revived the first officer, informed him that the captain and the data had been unintentionally involved in a ‘time-displacement incident,’ and left the first officer to bring her ship in to Glister as best she could. For what it’s worth, the H-IX arrived safely, though without a captain, and with her operational logs blanked out.”

“Almost sounds like what happened to us,” said Norla.

Koffield frowned in surprise. “So it does. I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of it.”

“Is that what happened, do you think? Did the Dom Pedro IV accidentally witness something? Did her instruments record something that forced the Chronologic Patrol to board her, blank her memories, and target her toward Solace without a timeshaft transition?”

Koffield shook his head. “It’s possible, I suppose. I’ll have to think about that one—but somehow, it doesn’t quite feel right. It’s not the way the Patrol does business. They don’t like creating any more mystery than necessary. They leave a message, or make a statement, when they intervene. They made it clear to the H-JX’s first officer that the ship and the captain had broken no law, committed no crime, but were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They do that to keep people from speculating and inventing conspiracies. If they hadn’t said something to the first officer, then everyone in Settled Space would have spent the next forty years dragging the captain’s name through the mud.”

The way they’ve dragged yours, Norla thought. But best not to explore that area, just at the moment. “So what happened next?” she asked. “To the captain and the data.”

“Well, they were in the temporal-confinement unit aboard the Watchkeeper. Think it through, and you’ll see that, by chasing the Herakles IX, the Watchkeeper had marooned herself forty years into her own future. She couldn’t go back. But her captain didn’t want to go any farther forward either. Not if he could help it. He plotted a standard timeshaft transit flight plan back to the Solar System. They did a standard cryosleep flight through the Sirius Power Cluster Farm, and got to the Solar System about a month or so objective time after departing Glister. They turned the captain and the data over to Chronologic Patrol Headquarters and went on to other duties. CP HQ kept the captain of the Herakles IX and the data recordings in time containment until the objective-time year, day, minute, and second of the ship’s uptime-end entrance into the Circum Central Wormhole.

“At about the same time, my ship, the Upholder, zx-rived back at the Solar System, and the Stardrifter Gamma arrived at Thor’s Realm. For getting on eighty years, the only information on the Circum Central Incident had been the bare-bones account my ship had been allowed to send downtime—nothing more than a playback of what the Standfast had sent uptime. And that information, I can assure you, was kept very tightly under wraps. The only other information anyone had was that four out of five ships in that Glister convoy had vanished, along with the Upholder. By the time we returned to base, the story, and the mystery, had more or less died of old age—except on Glister, I suppose.

“Then the Stardrifter Gamma, the Upholder, and the information from the Herakles IX all popped up into view, one after another. Rumors started to float around. Crew from the ships circulated and started to talk. The messages relayed from Thor’s Realm to the Solar System and back leaked here and there—and of course the data on the Intruders floored everyone. The whole tale came back to life. Everyone and everything sprang into action, trying to solve the mystery of the Intruders. Patrol Intelligence interrogated the captain of the Herakles IX for three days straight, just for starters, and went over every bit and byte of the Herakles data. Then the Patrol got their hands on the Stardrifter, and on the Upholder—and me.

“The interrogations, the debriefings, the analyses went on forever. They studied everything, and then studied it again. They even examined the piece of shrapnel, assumed to be part of one Intruder that blew up, that sliced into my bridge and buried itself in my detection officer’s brain. But the sample was too contaminated by explosion and impact and all the ricochets it had taken bouncing around the bridge. It told them nothing. Nothing told them anything. The mystery came alive after eighty years of waiting, but it died again.

“Except on Glister. Glister had been in bad shape when I killed the convoy ships. Eighty years on, it was teetering on the ragged edge of final collapse. And suddenly, with the more complete story of Circum Central coming out, they had someone to blame. All of their bad decisions and budget cuts and bad luck didn’t matter anymore. I did it. Because of me, four ships out of five in a convoy eighty years before never arrived. And because of that, because of all the magically potent and powerful cargo that was supposed to be on the other four ships, everything had gone wrong. I had killed their planet. Complete nonsense, of course. They were not utterly cut off. There were other routes—albeit more difficult and expensive routes—to and from Glister. Supplies and people could get through.”

“But not easily,” said Norla.

Koffield paused a moment. “No,” he said at last. “Not easily. Circum Central was in the optimal location for transport to Glister. With Circum Central operational, it was an eighty-year objective-time trip to Earth. Without it, the next shortest routing turned it into a hundred-and-forty-year trip. That nearly doubled the wear and tear on the ships, made cryosleep far more dangerous, and made it massively more difficult to transport the biological material that Glister needed. Fewer ships were willing to make the run to Glister, and there were more casualties among those that did. That, I’m sure, did make things far more difficult for Glister. For that, I suppose, I could be blamed.

“But the ironic thing, from my point of view, is that the Intruders, whatever or whoever they were, or are, were never blamed. I did it. Not the ships that attacked me. To Glisterns, the Intruders were incidental to the whole story. Maybe I would have destroyed the wormhole even if they hadn’t existed, out of sheer spite. Maybe the Intruders didn’t exist. Maybe I had faked them, somehow, to provide an exculpatory motive for my crime against the good people of Glister.

“Aside from the Glisterns, most people were at least somewhat more interested in the Intruders than in what I had done. The moment the Circum Central story came out, there were any number of false sightings of Intruders coming in and out of every wormhole in space, circling every planet that experienced bad luck. Anything from a patch of bad weather to a currency collapse could be blamed on the Intruders. There were endless guessing games as to what they were. Alien beings, the nonhuman intelligences we’ve never found. A covert operations team sent by the Chronologic Patrol, or by nearly any other organization you can think of, to perform some mysterious and complex mission. They were a bizarre natural phenomenon, and their seemingly intelligent behavior was all explained away by invoking some little-known—and nonexistent—physics and mathematics.

“But there were no answers, and so, after a while, most of the questions and theories and sightings faded away, though there was still a sort of background-noise level of theory-spinning and lunatic-fringe research, the way there always is when something big and inexplicable happens.

“But they still had me. I was someone—something— they could point their fingers at. I learned very quickly that there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do, that would make it go away. I gave up trying. Silence seemed to make more sense.”

“But what about the Chronologic Patrol?” Norla asked. “You followed their orders, did what they asked. Didn’t they support you?”

Koffield was silent for half a minute. “The Patrol,” he said at last. “They were part of my silence. They certainly sent plenty of signals to the effect that I should keep quiet. I’m sure they hoped that I would vanish altogether.”

“But they promoted you. Decorated you. Told everyone you were a hero.”

Koffield nodded. “There are times in any organization where the higher-ups will support a subordinate, back him to the hilt in public—but treat him very differently in private.”

“They punished you?”

“My superiors backed me up in private just as much as they had in public. And, frankly, so they should have. What I did at Glister was absolutely, one hundred percent, totally in line with Patrol policy. The whole purpose of the Patrol is to see to it that what could have happened at Circum Central, what nearly did happen, never does happen. What took place—what I did—was terrible. The alternative would have been infinitely worse—and my superiors knew it. The core reason for having a Patrol at all is so what I did could be done.”

“I heard the arguments on both sides of that point after—after the incident,” said Norla. “Everyone did.” And which side of it did you come down on? she asked herself. She had never been sure of her own answer to that one.

“Inside the Patrol, there was no argument, could be no argument,” Koffield said, his voice still quiet. “There was only Patrol doctrine—and I followed it, and the Patrol backed me up, in public and private.”

Koffield went silent for a moment, and Norla knew that she would have to urge him on before he could say whatever it was that came next. “But?” she asked. “There’s a ‘but’ in there, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Koffield said. “They backed me up, in public and private. But.” He turned back toward the porthole, and once again looked out at the stars. “But. There is such a thing as realism. And there are such things as whispers, and pointed fingers, and stories that get more overblown with every telling. And for a senior officer there are such things as official receptions, visiting delegations, courtesy calls on other commands, public occasions of all sorts.

“My superiors knew, and I knew, that, after Circum Central, I could no longer hold a command. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever. Because sooner or later someone important and official would throw a drink in my face. Or some Glistern with thoughts of revenge would make a try for me with a pistol or a knife and get himself killed by my security detachment—or try it with a suicide bomb attack and get a few hundred innocent bystanders killed. Or maybe there would be something as trivial as a crude, loud, abusive drunk cursing me at a party. Even something as minor as that could develop into a very bad situation if it happened in the wrong time and place.

“Wherever I went, whatever I did, whatever orders I was given, Circum Central and the collapse of Glister would be there, getting between me and whatever job I was supposed to do.”

“So what did they do?”

“So they gave me a medal and made speeches they seemed to be embarrassed to be making, at a public ceremony that was kept very quiet and held where no one could get to it. And then they took me off the operational-assignment list and set to work finding a job for me that would keep me busy, and keep me quiet, until the worst of it blew over.”

Koffield shrugged. “They put me on a shelf. And I stayed there until Oskar DeSilvo reached up and took me down from it.”

Norla was duly impressed. “You met Oskar DeSilvo?”

Koffield laughed, with more bitterness than humor. “Yes,” he said. “Oskar DeSilvo. The great man himself.” He walked to the wardroom porthole and looked out. The planet Solace was visible, a tiny blue, green, and brown ball hanging in the darkness. “The man who built Solace. Who made it what it is. Made it all that it is, for better or worse.”

Anton Koffield turned from the porthole and looked at Norla. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said. “There’s something I want to get. Something I’d like to show you.”

With that, he walked into his cabin and shut the door behind him. Norla shrugged. Even when he was explaining things, the man didn’t give much away. Patience was quite a valuable virtue when dealing with Anton Koffield.

She stood up to look out the porthole. There was Solace, drawing closer. With a little luck, they’d be docked at Solace Central Orbital Station in another day or so. Or was SCO Station there anymore? It almost didn’t matter. There would be some sort of station, and they’d dock with it, and arrange for passage down to the surface. Norla would get to see her first terraformed world.

Though, judging by the way Koffield spoke, she didn’t get the sense it was going to be much worth looking at.