Sisi, Co, and Jasper joined Natalya on the bridge, relief clear on their faces as they saw the opalescents engaged and the ship fleeing Prosper space.

“Did you get me anything?” Augustus asked, smiling and puffing on his vaporizer.

“Yeah. A yellow transmitter,” Natalya answered.

“That’s no fun. How about chocolates? It’s been ages since I’ve had a Prosper-origin chocolate.”

“Maybe next time. Sisi, get that transmitter set up. Auggie, what’s our course?”

“The chocolate mines of Kava.”

“There is no such place!” Sisi said.

“Good. Make sure to stop by planet Chianti on your way,” Natalya replied.

“We’re plotted to the Gaixia System,” Jasper noted. The planet Gaixia was still in the process of Prosper-forming. A somewhat cold world with a red sun, it was at the outer edges of Prosper control, and the closest semi-habited planet to Farbind.

“Wonderful,” Natalya said, and exited the bridge, taking the stairs two at a time.

Jasper followed. “Natalya, I know what you’re going to do.”

The Prophet caught up with Natalya and put a hand on her shoulder. She whirled to face him and snarled, “What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to punch Ptolemy.”

“No, I thought I’d kick him. Or shove that transmitter up his backside, I’m still weighing my options,” Natalya said.

“I don’t think it would fit,” Sisi noted as she descended the steps with the transmitter.

“I’m sick of being manipulated, Jasper.”

“That’s why I want to be there when you punch him, in case he needs healing,” Jasper said, and nodded at the captain.

Natalya wasn’t sure what to say. She turned away from the Prophet before a smile cracked her lips, and strode toward Ptolemy’s quarters.

The door wasn’t locked. Natalya found Ptolemy once more standing in front of a holographic display. Prosper orbited green and blue in front of her, the black fleet and Shihuangdi commanding Ptolemy’s interest.

“We aren’t being followed, if that’s what you want to know,” Ptolemy said.

“Destroy a planet?” Natalya asked, standing in the middle of the hologram.

“I have no intention of doing that, Captain.”

“You built a space station that can destroy a planet!”

“It was built to found a planet, not destroy one.”

“But it can be used that way. All you have to do is switch it in reverse, right?”

Sisi poked her head in the door behind Jasper. She held the transmitter like a shield, curiosity overcoming her caution.

“Sisi, you helped design the thing. Can it destroy a planet?” Natalya asked.

“Theoretically,” Sisi answered with a shrug.

“Qin found out what was happening after the platinum mine was discovered,” Ptolemy said.

An explosion came from the speakers in Ptolemy’s walls. Sisi shuddered, but Natalya knew the sound was artificial. The lights in the holographic projector flashed and flickered, forcing Natalya to squint and step away.

She saw a hologram of a white-metal lab. Plastic tanks full of plants and animals were spaced throughout the room, along with myriad data consoles and a gargantuan laser emitter in the center. Ptolemy had made his holographic projectors play a video recording.

The video showed a fire in the far side of the laboratory, with scientists taking off their coats to put it out while others ran about the room trying to barricade a metal door on the far side. The square lab had four doors, one with barricades, two collapsed and made inaccessible by smoking debris.

“This is Sisi’s video log,” Ptolemy explained. “It shows the facility I built to develop the necessary equipment for my station.”

“What’s going on?” Sisi’s voice sounded over the speakers.

“I don’t really want to watch this,” Sisi said from the other side of the room.

“Qin took hold of my researchers. I had to do my best to keep them working on my project, keep him from figuring out what they were really working on, but Qin had other plans for a secret lab full of biological experts,” Ptolemy explained.

The hologram moved closer to the lab’s sunken center. The experiments in this dungeon-like hole were no longer about plants and animals, atmosphere and water retention. A ring of robotic arms encircled a glass dome. Tables full of wires, blinking power emitters, and crystalline discs sat ready to be torn apart. The lab was clean and sterile, but the floor around the dome, and the devices surrounding it, were covered in blood.

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Sisi’s voice in the video log gasped with shock as she looked inside the glass dome. Surrounded by broken equipment, the round walls singed from bursts of electricity, were four white tables. Each had a human being on it, one with dead pieces of machinery protruding from her chest, one with his arm a messy stump and his stomach burst open beneath a stained sheet, and a third covered in black pieces of tech, one eye a flashing orb of light, the other wide open, staring at nothing.

Pul sat on the fourth table, unconscious, his face grimaced in pain. Natalya recognized the pieces of machinery attached to him as the shield emitters he’d used while fighting her. It did not look like the application of these devices had been a pleasant experience. Or a voluntary one.

“The scientists were volunteers. They had vision, a desire for better worlds, and a will to create them,” Ptolemy explained. “They didn’t appreciate having their minds used for other purposes.”

The video log only showed Pul for a moment, as Sisi stepped quickly away from the glass dome. She looked around the lab at the scientists who were assembling near the door with makeshift weapons, some of them laser-emitters, some of them jury-rigged flamethrowers made from laboratory equipment.

A woman who’d used her lab coat to douse a fire from a wrecked console ran toward Sisi, pushing a cart with a metal box on it. Natalya recognized the box. It was the Key Core.

“Help me with this!” the scientist demanded, pushing the cart against Sisi’s side.

“What is it?” Sisi asked, helping the woman push.

“It’s the only thing that matters. This is what we were working for, not him.”

“Just before they’d finished their work on my station, they realized Qin was making them turn it into a weapon,” Ptolemy explained. “So they rebelled, refused to continue their work and refused to give it to Qin. I had been trying to placate Qin, keep him from stopping their work, keep him from finding where we’d hidden the station. But Qin decided to take what they’d made, whether the scientists gave it up willingly or not.”

Sisi and the scientist pushed the cart toward the lab’s only remaining door, struggling with the weight. “We have to get it out of here before—” the scientist said as the barred door on the other side of the lab exploded inward.

Hoppers streamed inside, blasting at the scientists. The men and women in lab coats fired lasers and flames at the black hoppers, cutting off the robots’ legs and pushing them back. But there were too many, and the scientists were gunned down as they tried to destroy equipment before it could be taken.

“Quickly!” the scientist helping Sisi shouted as she pushed the cart. They reached the door and Sisi screamed as the scientist was shot in the back. She shoved the cart one last time, getting it clear of the door.

The video log showed a sterile, circular corridor leading to small labs full of broken experiments. The hologram showed Sisi turn back at the sound of shattering glass. The massive laser emitter had collapsed, falling onto the glass dome. As the sound of screaming, dying scientists rang out, Pul leapt through the flames. He turned toward Sisi, saw the scientist gaping at him, and sneered with hatred covering his bloodstained face.

“Go!” the scientist who’d been helping Sisi said, and shut the door, sealing it. The sounds of blasts, flames, and screams continued to erupt on the other side of the door.

Ptolemy paused the hologram at the moment it showed Sisi begin pushing the cart away from the lab.

“She escaped in a shuttle. The other scientists died trying to keep Qin from acquiring the technology they’d created,” Ptolemy explained.

“I didn’t want to fight,” Sisi said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I just wanted to create. I got my welpro and ran.”

Natalya put an arm of comfort around the woman. Sisi accepted it, eyes wet against Natalya’s shoulder.

“She was the only one with the wisdom to flee. Or the only one to succeed in doing so. There is no record either way,” Ptolemy said.

Ptolemy removed the memory stick from his console and the hologram winked out, the simple lights of the man’s quarters giving the room a sterility that was chillingly similar to the lab they’d just watched burn. He held the stick out for Natalya to take.

“I’m sorry for entering your quarters to get it, but it had to be shared,” Ptolemy apologized. “Study it yourself if you think I tried to deceive you, Captain.”

Natalya took the memory stick, furious, intending to do just that.

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” Natalya asked.

“You should feel sorry for Sisi,” Ptolemy noted.

Natalya felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She embraced the woman with a greater respect, and turned back to Ptolemy.

“That doesn’t excuse you manipulating me into thinking this was just some humanitarian mission,” said Natalya.

“If you thought altruism was a motivation, Captain, that was a deception you brought upon yourself,” Ptolemy corrected. “I have always made my intentions known. I want my own planet. I want to get out of Prosper control, out of this galaxy. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I don’t want to help anyone other than myself. And there are powerful others who want to use my work in a way it wasn’t intended.”

“You could have told me this station we’re hunting can be used to destroy planets.”

“I could tell you every discovery, technology and resource can be used for evil. Would that change your desire to acquire it?”

“Qin is after your station.”

“Qin has hunted us both since Farbind. He may know the station is in the Farbind system, but he will not find it, that you can be sure of. If you think I withheld information, then I apologize. But make no mistake, Captain. We’ve both used each other. I used you to acquire what I needed. You used me to get your chance at redemption. Don’t let a little thing like pride get in the way of that — we have all we need to get to Farbind and be done with this galaxy. Qin, Prosper, the colonies, all of it. The universe is open to us. And I’m inviting you to join me.”

“No more tricks then?” Natalya asked. “No more errands?”

“I shall endeavor to be honest from now on.”

Natalya took a breath, held it as she considered what to do. Spiting Qin, salvaging something worthwhile from Farbind, was that worth accepting Ptolemy moving her around like a chess piece? The man’s eyes held nothing but greed, want, desire for more as he stared into the empty space where the hologram of Farbind’s secret lab used to be.

Then Ptolemy looked at Sisi, and Natalya saw something in his eyes she didn’t expect. It looked like sympathy, the weight of a man who’d made tough decisions, and had been forced to take actions that hurt others. That glimmer of care was what made Natalya exhale and say, “Okay.”

“You sure you don’t want to punch him?” Jasper asked.

Natalya laughed. “I’m sure.”

“Good. You’re a good man, Ptolemy Pdenner, despite the appearances.” Jasper extended a hand toward Ptolemy.

“Don’t let the word spread too far,” Ptolemy said, and shook hands with the Prophet. “Now, Sisi, I think we need to get that transmitter set up.”

“On it!” Sisi said, glad to leave the room.

“Jasper, you seem to have a grasp of communications. Why don’t you assist Sisi?”

Jasper glanced at Natalya.

“I need to keep an eye on things from the bridge, in case Ptolemy’s wrong and we’re followed,” she said.

Jasper nodded.

“A fair precaution,” Ptolemy noted as Jasper followed Sisi.

Natalya put the memory stick in her pocket and said, “Let me know if you hear any chatter,” to Ptolemy before leaving his quarters.

As she walked toward the steps leading to the bridge, Natalya heard footsteps behind her. Ptolemy was following.

“You need to go to the bridge too?” Natalya asked.

“No. We’re going to your quarters,” Ptolemy answered, and stopped by her door.

“Why would we do that?”

“Because you want me to be honest about everything. But I’d rather certain others not know about it.”