CHAPTER ONE
The first thing Topper said that morning was, "Wake up."
I opened one eye and found the little green robotic frog sitting on my chest with both front feet planted against my shirt. Artificial dawn had begun leaking through the blinds behind him, catching the scratch through the casing around his left eye and making the other one look brighter than usual. His damaged rear leg clicked when he shifted his weight. "You are aware," I told him, my voice buried somewhere between sleep and accusation, "that people invented alarms because climbing onto somebody's ribs was considered socially unacceptable." Topper stared at me. He had no expression in the ordinary sense, but after two years I knew exactly what that particular angle of his head meant. "You late." I reached blindly for the blanket and dragged it over my face. Topper climbed onto the new surface immediately. "I'm not late. I have twenty-eight minutes before I even need to leave." His feet began pressing into me. "Wake up." I groaned, threw the blanket aside, and nearly sent him tumbling toward the edge of the mattress. He caught himself on three legs while the fourth scraped uselessly through the sheets until its repaired actuator found the angle it liked. The joint gave its familiar double click. I could have replaced the entire leg months ago. The parts were cheap enough now, and I had already rebuilt everything around the damaged mount twice, but then it would have stopped making that sound, and the click had become too much a part of Topper for me to fix.
My room looked like somebody had tried to compress several incompatible versions of me into twelve square meters. My school jacket hung from the chair beside a gravball jersey that should have been in the laundry unit. Two controllers were buried under a history reader. A half-open bag of sour strips leaned against a particle-systems workbook beneath the desk. The shelf above it belonged almost entirely to Frames: a gray-and-blue Bastion with one shoulder missing because I had dropped it when I was nine, an old Ardent Thorn I had repainted twice and still disliked, a cheap civilian construction Frame whose manipulator arms I had replaced with oversized combat weapons when I was twelve, and three unopened kits I kept claiming I was saving for a weekend when I had nothing else to do. There had not been one of those weekends in nearly a year, mostly because whenever I had nothing else to do I found something else. Topper jumped from the bed and followed me toward the bathroom, his rear leg clicking every fourth step while Caelum manufactured another morning beyond the windows.
Morning in the colony was something engineers scheduled. The light outside warmed by degrees, first drawing gold along the towers opposite our apartment, then spreading across the suspended pedestrian bridges and park terraces while the artificial sky slowly became blue. Caelum curved upward beyond the residential district, so gradually that you could forget what you were looking at until the opposite neighborhoods began climbing into the distance. Apartment towers, offices, schools, hospitals, shopping districts, parks, restaurants, universities, transit lines and sports complexes covered the inner surface of the enormous cylinder until manufactured haze swallowed them. Somewhere above all of that, though "above" stopped meaning much once you thought about it too carefully, were the structural ribs and shielding that kept several million people from discovering vacuum personally. Most people born here stopped noticing the curve. I never had. I still sometimes stood beside the window too long and followed the city upward until my eyes hurt.
Topper climbed onto the closed toilet lid while I brushed my teeth. He watched me drag wet fingers through my hair, tilted his head, and said, "Hair bad."
I stopped brushing and looked at him through the mirror. My red curls had flattened on one side and risen on the other in a shape that suggested violence had occurred while I slept. Against my brown skin and half-awake face, it made me look like I had lost a fight with static electricity. "You were found beside a recycling chute."
Topper gave a pleased electronic chirp.
"That was not praise."
Another chirp followed while he continued staring at my hair.
"You are becoming extremely judgmental for something with one leg held together by parts from a kitchen cleaner."
The repaired leg clicked.
"Exactly."
By the time I showered, dressed, and entered the kitchen, the apartment had fully brightened around nobody. There was no note waiting for me. No message on the counter. Nothing blinking urgently on the wall display. The refrigerator was stocked because groceries arrived automatically every Thursday, and the school schedule had already synchronized with the apartment because everything synchronized with everything now whether anybody cared or not. I opened the refrigerator, stared at a shelf containing fruit, eggs, yogurt and several carefully labeled containers, then took the leftover noodles from behind them. Topper climbed onto the chair across from mine while I ate them cold.
Two framed photographs sat on the shelf beyond him. I had seen them so often that I usually stopped seeing them altogether. In one, Mom stood between Talia and me at a Caelum botanical park, one hand around each of us while Talia had apparently been in the middle of saying something rude enough to make me laugh. I had been ten. Mom looked younger mostly because I remembered how furious she had been about getting dirt on her shoes afterward. The second photograph had been taken somewhere else entirely. Dad stood beneath a real sky with Talia on one side and me on the other, all three of us squinting into sunlight during a trip I barely remembered. The frames were different. So were the years. There was no photograph on the shelf containing both of them.
Topper looked toward the first picture. "Talia away."
"Yeah."
He lowered himself onto the seat.
"She's fine."
Topper looked at me.
I twirled noodles around my fork. "Probably complaining about somebody right now. Statistically, that's what she does most of the day."
He chirped softly and rested his head between his front feet. The chair had been Talia's before she left for military training. Nobody had assigned it to her. She had simply always sat there, usually with one leg tucked beneath her and at least one thing stolen from my plate. Eight months after she left, nobody else used it. Mom almost never ate breakfast at home, and Dad had never lived in this apartment. When his weekends happened, I packed a bag and went across the colony. When they did not, I stayed here. The system had become ordinary enough that none of us talked about it much.
The wall display changed from local traffic to the morning war report while I ate. A Federation cruiser group had withdrawn from the Halbrecht line after nine days of fighting. Ardent channels were calling it a rout. Federation command called it a controlled repositioning. The footage showed six cruisers. A casualty number moved beneath the report. I did not know how many ships had been there before six, and nobody on screen volunteered the answer. The next story showed Earth, where restoration crews had reopened another stretch of western coastline after decades of soil treatment. Children in white reconstruction uniforms planted rows of green beneath a bright sky while a minister talked about completing humanity's oldest obligation. The report ended with recruitment footage. Bastions dropped from a carrier bay into black space, gray-and-blue armor flashing beneath sunlight before their two blue-white eyes ignited. One rolled hard around incoming fire and disappeared through a curtain of particles.
I stopped with my fork halfway to my mouth.
Topper raised his head. "Frame cool."
"Very."
Another Bastion came into view carrying a long Particle Rifle almost as tall as it was.
"That one's better."
Topper stared at the screen.
"You have no idea what I mean."
"Frame cool."
"That is a defensible position."
The recruitment footage ended beneath the words ONE HUMANITY. ONE HOME, and the screen immediately changed to weather inside the colony, which was always funny because Caelum's weather department was essentially announcing what the environmental department had decided to do to us. I finished breakfast, put the bowl into the washer, grabbed my bag and made it halfway through the apartment before remembering my history reader under a game controller. Topper followed both trips. At the door he stopped just inside the threshold and looked up at me. I crouched, rubbed a thumb across the dent between his eyes, and said, "Try not to dismantle anything expensive while I'm gone."
"School now."
"Unfortunately."
"Come back."
There were phrases Topper used because somebody had taught him what they meant, and there were phrases he used because repetition had turned them into something else. I never remembered teaching him that one. "I will."
"Come back."
"I heard you."
He pressed his head once against my fingers before the door closed between us.
Caelum's residential core smelled like wet leaves in the morning because some planner decades ago had decided everyone wanted to imagine Earth forests. Real trees grew along the avenue outside our building, their roots disappearing beneath maintenance panels where city crews cut them away from pipes, power lines and transit controls every few months. A bakery had already opened beneath the pedestrian bridge. Across from it, a clothing store was replacing last month's display with Morrow Systems Week advertisements. Veyrault's logo occupied half the glass beside civilian construction Frames, medical equipment, transit systems, orbital power hardware, and a black silhouette labeled PROJECT TITAN — PUBLIC REVEAL, DAY FOUR. The silhouette had shoulders broad enough to be military.
I slowed.
Someone walking behind me nearly collided with my bag. "Move, Corven."
"Sorry."
"You always do that."
"I've never seen you before."
"That makes it worse."
I moved aside and kept staring long enough to decide the silhouette probably carried something behind its right shoulder. Then the hobby shop farther down the avenue gave me a much more immediate problem. A new limited-edition Bastion kit stood in the display window, correct shield proportions, proper articulated thruster housings, full rifle instead of the shortened version cheaper manufacturers used because children snapped long barrels and their parents complained. Forty-eight credits.
A boy waiting outside the unopened shop saw me stop. "They only got twelve."
"I have school."
"So do I."
"Then what are you doing here?"
He looked at the Bastion.
I looked at the Bastion.
"That is a reasonable answer."
I left before forty-eight credits became somebody else's responsibility.
The transit plaza had filled with students, office workers, technicians and a night-shift crowd that looked offended by daylight even though the daylight was fake. Two girls from my year shouted something at me from another platform. I waved without hearing what they said. The station display changed before they could cross over.
MILITARY TRAFFIC PRIORITY. EASTERN TRANSFER DELAY: THREE MINUTES.
The entire platform groaned.
Nobody asked what military traffic meant. Caelum sat close enough to Federation shipyards that delays happened all the time. Then the colony glass darkened against raw sunlight, and the reason drifted into view.
A destroyer moved past under tug control.
Conversation around me thinned.
Part of its forward hull was simply gone. Not dented or burned. Gone. Armor ended in torn black structure where several internal decks had been peeled open to space. Emergency coverings sealed what remained. One engine stayed dark while work craft crawled around the damage with lights flashing against scorched metal. The ship was close enough that I could make out temporary markings painted across one breached section.
Someone behind me said, very quietly, "Jesus."
A little boy pressed both hands against the glass. His mother tugged him backward and told him not to stare while she stared too.
My wrist display vibrated. Somebody on the school network had already identified the ship.
SFS HESPERA. HELIOS FRONT.
A second message appeared with an estimated casualty count. Somebody replied that they were guessing. Somebody else replied that their aunt served on Hespera and told everyone to shut the fuck up.
The destroyer disappeared behind Caelum's structural rim.
Our transit arrived.
Everybody boarded.
By the time the capsule reached the academy district, two people beside me were arguing about a mathematics test.
That was the part of war adults rarely explained when they showed us historical documentaries. Something could pass directly outside your window with half its body missing, and twenty minutes later you still had somewhere to be.
Caelum Academy occupied fourteen levels around a central atrium beneath a reinforced transparent roof. Old recordings of Earth schools always looked ridiculous to me. Huge buildings spread sideways across enormous pieces of land as though nobody had ever thought to put another floor on top. Caelum stacked everything: classrooms above laboratories, gardens beside study halls, athletics beneath libraries, cafeterias overlooking transit lines. A mechanical model of the Solar System hung through the middle of the atrium. Earth and Luna moved near the lower levels, Mars rotated above them, and Jupiter occupied enough space that younger students spent their first month trying to touch it from the balconies. Security fields had been installed after somebody stole Mars during graduation six years ago.
My locker opened when I approached. The school had sent two notices. Talia had sent four messages.
CALL ME AFTER SCHOOL.
The next came seven minutes later.
THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY.
A third followed almost immediately.
THAT LOOKED LIKE AN EMERGENCY MESSAGE. IT ISN'T.
The last one read:
ANSWER BEFORE I DECIDE YOU'RE DEAD.
I smiled and typed, You are extraordinarily bad at reassurance for somebody trusted with military hardware.
Her response came before I closed the locker.
I HAVE NEVER CLAIMED TO BE REASSURING.
I wrote, That is probably in your personnel file.
Three dots appeared.
My personnel file is classified because of how impressive I am.
Or because of the motorcycle.
The dots vanished.
Then returned.
That motorcycle was never proven to exist.
I laughed under my breath.
A student passing behind me glanced over. "What?"
"Nothing."
"Then why are you smiling?"
"Private medical condition."
She nodded as if that explained everything and kept walking.
Political history came first.
Professor Aveden Roake had taught at Caelum Academy longer than some sections of the building had existed, and he carried himself with the particular exhaustion of a man who had spent twenty years watching teenagers rediscover the same bad arguments and announce them as revelations. He had put Earth on the classroom wall before we entered.
Not modern Earth.
Earth at the end of the Destiny War.
Nobody spoke for the first few seconds.
The planet looked sick. Burned regions crossed entire continents. Orbital debris formed bright scars above an atmosphere discolored by fires that had gone on long enough to become climate. Some coastal cities had vanished entirely. Others survived as lights around blackened zones where nothing lived.
Professor Roake stood beside the display with both hands in his pockets. "People like beginnings. Clean ones are especially popular because they let everyone decide who was right before anybody has actually done anything. The Solar Federation does not have a clean beginning. Earth was devastated, migration systems were failing, surviving governments could not independently coordinate food, medicine, transport or reconstruction, and three Seraphs had vanished after nearly destroying civilization. Central authority worked because something had to work."
A girl near the front raised her hand. "Then why did the colonies fight it later?"
"They did not all fight it."
"You know what I mean."
"I do, but history usually goes bad immediately after someone says that." Roake changed the display. Earth healed across decades. Reconstruction zones expanded. Orbital settlements multiplied. Mars brightened beneath grids of habitat cities. Giant colonies appeared as silver shapes along trade routes. "Emergency authority remained because the emergency remained. Earth needed water, metals, industrial capacity, labor and population. The early Federation position was that restoring humanity's birthplace was an obligation belonging to humanity as a whole."
A boy by the window leaned back in his chair. "It is."
The girl turned toward him. "My family has lived on Orison for four generations."
"So?"
"So none of us have ever lived on Earth."
"You still came from there."
"My great-great-grandparents came from there."
"That still counts."
"Why?"
He looked genuinely confused by the question. "Because it's Earth."
Professor Roake lifted one hand before they could escalate. "Excellent. Now add mandatory resource quotas, military obligations, local tax authority, labor law, residency restrictions, trade controls and several generations born under artificial skies being told that a planet they have never stood on is their inherited responsibility. You have reached approximately chapter four."
Someone laughed.
I was drawing a Bastion head in the margin of my notes.
"Corven."
I stopped.
Professor Roake looked at my tablet. I looked back at him.
He sighed. "Since the Federation military has apparently captured more of your attention than the Federation government, perhaps you can explain why the earliest sovereignty movements were not separatist."
"Most of them didn't want independence yet."
"What did they want?"
"Control over local policy the Federation considered strategic. Resource contracts, labor requirements, residency law, taxes, trade. Some military stuff."
"Some military stuff."
"I'm summarizing."
"You are avoiding the reading."
"That too."
A few students laughed. Roake continued looking at me. "Why did the Federation resist?"
"Because if every colony could decide whenever it wanted to stop supplying something, federal planning stopped meaning much."
"And was that concern legitimate?"
I thought about the Hespera sliding past Caelum with half its bow missing. "Probably."
Roake's eyebrows rose slightly. "A breathtaking commitment."
"I'm fourteen."
"Fourteen-year-olds possess opinions."
"Fourteen-year-olds have also made a lot of bad decisions historically."
"They have started wars."
"Then asking us political questions seems irresponsible."
That got a laugh from almost everyone, and this time even Roake's mouth twitched. "Write your essay, Corven. Preferably without drawing a rifle in the margins."
"It's a Particle Rifle."
"You are illustrating my point."
Advanced Systems came after that, which was the class adults mentioned whenever they wanted to describe me to somebody who had never met me. I liked systems. I happened to be good at them. That did not mean I spent every waking minute longing to become one with a containment equation. I also liked gravball, Frames, terrible action serials, games Mom would probably object to if she knew which ones I owned, spicy noodles, sleeping late, and winning arguments with Talia even when I had to redefine what winning meant afterward. Adults preferred the systems part because talent made them curious in ways personality usually did not.
Professor Vessa Quill had already arranged training modules across the laboratory when we arrived. She was a narrow woman somewhere in her forties with silver rings through one ear, black hair tied carelessly behind her head, and the habit of drinking coffee from a cup printed with the words THIS MEETING COULD HAVE BEEN A MESSAGE. She stood in front of nine low-output particle chambers and waited until everybody stopped talking. "Your job is to maintain circulation while I change the load. The safety system stays active. Anyone who bypasses it because they believe catastrophic stupidity will make them interesting will spend the next month analyzing municipal wastewater controls."
Nessa Coil leaned toward me. "She means you."
"I haven't done anything."
"You always say that before doing something."
Professor Quill looked directly at us.
Nessa straightened.
I smiled politely.
Quill took a slow drink of coffee. "Corven, whatever you are currently planning, I resent it already."
"I'm planning to follow instructions."
"That is exactly the sort of statement that causes paperwork."
The exercise began.
My loop held through the first load change. The second made the field ripple but recover. The third pushed thermal load toward the outer circulation section. The fourth collapsed everything into the emergency reservoir with a sharp blue flash.
Nessa leaned back from her chamber and grinned at me. "Outstanding."
"Your own system is about to fail."
Her grin vanished. She looked over, swore, and caught the control two seconds before the field destabilized.
"I accept apologies."
"You distracted me."
"That sounds difficult to prove."
Professor Quill passed behind us. "If either of you destroys federal equipment before lunch, I am billing your families personally."
Nessa pointed at me. "His family first."
"Traitor."
I reset the loop.
The failure had not been interesting. The load changed, instability began, the controller reacted after the fact and lost. I moved the response point earlier and started again.
The field stabilized.
Quill stopped beside me.
"What did you change?"
"The system was waiting too long."
"For what?"
"For the problem to exist."
Her eyes moved from me to the telemetry. "That is not the approved solution."
"It works."
"That phrase should require licensing."
She increased the load without warning.
The loop shuddered hard enough to throw amber warnings across my tablet, recovered, then settled.
Quill increased it again.
I changed the response curve while the system was still moving.
The field held.
Nessa stopped pretending not to watch.
Quill folded one arm beneath the other. "Again."
I ran it again.
It held longer.
The third run was cleaner.
Quill took my tablet, scrolled through the telemetry, then handed it back. "You overcorrected thermal response here."
"I know."
"You knew before I said it?"
"I saw it on the third pass."
"Then why didn't you fix it?"
"I wanted to know whether it mattered."
Her stare became very still.
Nessa whispered, "This is where she kills you."
Quill ignored her. "And?"
"It matters."
"That discovery has cost civilizations considerably more than this school module." She tapped the relevant line on my display. "Fix it before you decide curiosity constitutes methodology."
I did.
The final run was less efficient and much more stable.
I liked it better.
When the period ended, everyone else left for lunch. I had almost reached the door when Quill said, "Corven, stay."
Nessa turned around in the hallway and mouthed, wastewater.
I raised two fingers at her.
Quill did not look up from the equipment case she was sealing. "I can still see you."
"I was saying goodbye."
"You have a fascinating interpretation of courtesy."
Nessa disappeared laughing.
Quill finished locking the modules, walked to her desk, and removed a thin black envelope.
Paper.
Actual paper.
My mood changed immediately.
"My grades are good."
"That being your first concern tells me you know exactly how often you test the boundaries of institutional patience."
"What did I do?"
"Open it."
My name had been printed across the front beneath the silver seal of the Solar Federation Directorate of Advanced Systems. The first page contained enough federal language to make me regret literacy, so I skipped until the heading.
FEDERAL YOUTH SYSTEMS RESIDENCY.
Five students selected from Caelum.
Six weeks.
Temporary residence aboard an active Federation strategic carrier undergoing final commissioning.
Technical observation, supervised systems work, shipboard instruction, medical clearance, restricted military access.
My eyes moved lower.
HOST PLATFORM: SFCV-01 BLACK STAR.
I read the line twice.
Then once more.
"You're joking."
Professor Quill leaned against the front of her desk. "I generally put more effort into jokes."
"Black Star?"
"Yes."
"The Black Star?"
"I am unaware of a second six-hundred-meter Federation carrier currently attached to Caelum's outer yards, but perhaps you have discovered one while avoiding my assignments."
I went back to the packet. Strategic command support. Deep-range independent deployment. Medical facilities. Fabrication. Refinement. Particle storage. Frame maintenance.
Carrier capacity: thirty-six.
I looked up.
Quill immediately said, "Do not."
"Thirty-six Frame berths."
"I can read."
"Are they all occupied?"
"I don't know."
"You know more than that."
"I genuinely do not."
"Mostly Bastions?"
"Corven."
"Any prototypes?"
"Corven."
"Do students get access to the hangar?"
"Ilyan."
I stopped.
Quill almost never used my first name.
Her expression had softened by a degree. "You are being given six weeks aboard an active military vessel because your work earned somebody's attention. Try to experience that before converting the entire opportunity into a scavenger hunt for things with guns."
"I can do both."
"That is exactly what concerns me."
I looked down again.
Guardian authorization had already been completed.
Seleana Corven.
Darius Corven.
Different signatures.
Different timestamps.
Mom had approved it sometime yesterday afternoon. Dad had done it six hours later.
Neither had mentioned it.
I stared at the names longer than I meant to.
Quill noticed. She did not ask.
That made me like her more.
"You can decline," she said instead.
"No."
The answer came quickly enough that she laughed.
"You should probably read the rest before surrendering your life to the Federation."
"I'm not surrendering anything. I'm borrowing their ship."
"That distinction should definitely reassure the federation."
"When do I leave?"
"Next week."
"Exactly when?"
"It is written three lines below the section you have now skipped twice."
I found it.
"Can I watch Frame launches?"
"Keep reading."
"What about carrier operations?"
"Keep reading."
"Can I—"
Professor Quill lifted her coffee. "If you ask another question already answered in the packet, I will personally recommend they house you beside the sewage processors."
I grinned.
She pointed toward the door. "Go eat lunch."
"I had breakfast."
"Lunch generally occurs after breakfast."
"Technically."
"Leave."
I left.
By athletics, half the people I knew had heard.
I never discovered how.
"Black Star?" Ziven Holt asked while changing beside me.
"For six weeks."
He stopped pulling on his training shirt. "You're actually living aboard?"
"That is what temporary residence means."
"Do you think it'll deploy?"
"I hope not."
"You hope not?"
"I'll be aboard."
"Yeah, but imagine seeing a battle from a carrier."
I looked at him.
He understood a second later.
"Right. Bad phrasing."
"Very."
Ziven tugged the shirt down. "Still, thirty-six Frame berths."
I stared at him.
"What?"
"How did you know that?"
"It's public."
"You looked it up?"
"You're not the only person who likes Frames, Corven."
That offended me more than it should have.
Gravball fixed it.
The chamber occupied three athletic levels, a wide cylinder lined with shifting goal assemblies, anchor rails, padded walls and variable-gravity systems. People from planets imagined gravball as floating randomly until someone accidentally reached the goal. Those people were idiots. Gravity changed according to programmed sequences. Sometimes there was a clear floor. Sometimes the floor became the wall. Sometimes the field weakened until momentum mattered more than anything else, and then every bad decision stayed with you until something gave you another direction.
I liked those sections best.
Coach Drenek looked at the clock when I came through the entrance. "Twelve minutes late."
"Professor Quill kept me."
"You have legs."
"I used them."
"Poorly."
"I arrived."
"You are fourteen. Arrival is not yet an accomplishment."
I hooked one foot beneath the starting rail. "Are you always this encouraging?"
"Only with students I expect to survive adolescence."
The entry signal sounded before I could answer.
Our team was already losing.
Ziven had ended up opposite me and came off the first reset carrying the ball against his ribs. He was taller, stronger and exactly confident enough to believe the first opening he saw belonged to him. He pushed from the rail as the gravity warning changed.
I saw where he was going.
I moved somewhere else.
There was no equation. No explanation arrived in my head. The angle felt open before it looked open. I caught an upper bar, swung below his approach, released as the field shifted, and hit the ball from the side before his body finished rotating.
He swore.
The ball spun free.
I caught it with both hands.
For a moment the goal was above me.
Then gravity rolled twenty degrees and the word above became less useful.
I threw before my shoulder hit the wall.
The ball passed through.
Coach Drenek blew his whistle hard enough to hurt. "Corven, you had two open passes."
"It went in."
"That is not the point."
"It seems closely related."
"You think everything is related when you score."
Ziven pushed himself toward the reset rail. "He thinks everything is related when he's awake."
"That is slander."
"You used the word technically three times today."
"That proves education works."
Drenek pointed toward both of us. "Reset before I make gravity educational."
We moved.
For the next forty minutes I forgot Black Star almost completely. I missed two shots, scored four, got hit in the mouth hard enough to taste blood, argued about a foul I definitely committed, lost an argument about one I probably had not, and laughed so hard when Ziven mistimed a gravity change that he promised to break my nose after class.
We won by three.
He did not break my nose.
In the locker room he stood in front of the mirror trying to fix his hair and said, "Friday."
I looked up from my bag. "What happens Friday?"
Ziven turned slowly. "You cannot be serious."
It took me another second.
"The party."
"My party."
"Right."
"You trained with me yesterday."
"I knew your face."
"That is almost more insulting."
"I know your name now."
"Because Coach shouted it at you eight times."
"That still counts as learning."
Ziven threw his towel over one shoulder. "You're coming."
"I might."
"You always say that."
"Because sometimes I do."
"You came to one thing last term and disappeared before we ordered food."
"I was there longer than that."
"You were there thirty-seven minutes."
"You timed me, should I feel honored ?"
"I noticed because you said you were getting air and then apparently traveled three transit districts to find some."
"I like quality air."
"Caelum recycles all of it."
"That sounds like something the government tells you."
Ziven stared at me, then started laughing. "You are absolutely going to get arrested on Black Star."
"I am going to be an exemplary guest."
"That sentence makes me more confident."
Someone at the far end of the room threw a sock at him. Ziven ducked. The sock hit another student in the face. The argument immediately became louder than ours.
I left before anybody involved remembered me.
The hallway outside athletics was full of people I knew just enough. Someone from chemistry asked for the homework. A second-year waved from the stairs. Two girls from my history class tried to convince me to come somewhere Saturday, then spent thirty seconds arguing with each other about whether I would still be on Caelum Saturday. One of the gravball reserves slapped my shoulder as he passed. Professor Roake called me Talia by accident, frowned, and muttered that the resemblance was becoming inconvenient.
People knew me.
I knew a lot of them.
There was usually somebody to sit beside at lunch, somebody who wanted me at a party, somebody who knew which team I played for or which class I was taking or that my sister had joined the military.
I did not know what most of them were afraid of.
They probably did not know what I was afraid of either.
That seemed normal.
I opened Black Star's public records before the transit capsule had even cleared the academy district.
The technical documents were mostly useless, so I abandoned them for images. The official Federation rendering made Black Star look cleaner than the actual ship: six hundred twenty meters of dark armored hull arranged around a long central spine, carrier bays buried along the body, engine clusters gathered at the stern, white identification markings running near the bow. The real Black Star hanging beyond Caelum still had scaffolding across one side, temporary service lines along the carrier section, mismatched armor where newer sections had been installed against older hullwork, and entire areas covered by construction lights.
It looked better that way.
Less like a brochure.
More like something somebody had actually built.
I enlarged an image of the Frame deck.
Thirty-six maintenance berths.
A public commissioning photograph showed two Bastions in the background behind a row of officers shaking hands. I enlarged the Frames until the image turned ugly.
Standard Federation units.
Still excellent.
I searched assigned pilot rosters.
Restricted.
I searched special test units.
Restricted.
I searched Black Star prototype Frame.
The public network immediately became stupid.
One forum claimed Black Star carried a recovered Seraph.
Another claimed it carried twelve.
Someone insisted the Federation had built a Frame capable of destroying a moon.
A fourth thread claimed senior officers drank processed fetal tissue to survive acceleration.
I closed everything.
Humanity had survived Destiny only to invent public forums.
The transit passed through Caelum's commercial district. Systems Week advertisements covered an entire plaza below. Families moved between restaurants and stores. A cinema was showing the fourth installment of a series that should have died after the second. Children played around a fountain beneath artificial sunlight. A group of university students carried a huge cardboard Titan silhouette through the crowd while security tried to stop them from blocking pedestrian traffic.
Then Black Star crossed the windows.
Conversation inside the capsule shifted.
The carrier hung beyond Caelum's shell beneath construction lights. Two military patrol ships kept the station farther away. A shuttle approached Black Star's port-side bay, rotated, matched velocity and disappeared inside so completely that it made the carrier look even larger.
A little boy across from me pressed his face against the glass. "That ship is ugly."
I looked at him. "You're ugly."
His mother looked over.
The boy grinned.
I turned back to the window before she decided to become involved.
The apartment was empty when I got home.
Topper came clicking toward the entrance before the door had finished opening. He stopped against my shoes, raised his head, and said, "Ilyan home."
"Apparently."
I picked him up. His legs folded against my wrist.
"I have news."
Topper stared at me.
"I'm going to live on Black Star for six weeks."
His brighter eye flickered.
"Big ship."
"Very big."
"Frame ship."
"Thirty-six berths."
Topper remained still for a few seconds, processing the information with far more seriousness than necessary.
"Frame cool."
"You understand the important part."
I carried him into the kitchen.
Nothing had changed since morning except the angle of the artificial light.
The two photographs remained on the shelf.
Mom's bedroom door was closed.
There was no reason for it to be open.
I had not actually seen her since the previous morning.
That realization came and went without becoming an emotion I wanted to examine.
I put Topper on the counter, ordered dinner with the household account, and ate fried food while reading the residency packet properly for the first time. Medical screening. Security orientation. Personal belongings restrictions. Controlled network access. Students would be housed in a separate residential section under civilian educational supervision. Nobody under any circumstances was permitted to access launch control, weapons systems, engineering restricted zones, command facilities, classified laboratories, or active Frame deployment areas without explicit authorization.
That was an impressively specific list.
I read the Frame line again.
Topper leaned toward the tablet.
"No touching."
He looked at me.
"That was directed at both of us."
He sat back.
Talia called halfway through dinner.
Her image opened above the kitchen table with her body floating sideways relative to the camera. She had one boot hooked beneath a rail and one hand wrapped around another, loose strands of short red-brown hair lifting around her forehead. The passage behind her was narrow, lined with secured equipment and handholds. A crew member came through the hatch behind her headfirst, rotated using one wrist, and disappeared toward whatever counted as down somewhere else.
Talia studied my face.
"You got it."
"Apparently everybody knew except me."
"That isn't true. I only knew yesterday."
"That does not help."
"It helps me." Her mouth twitched. "You've got that stupid expression."
"What expression?"
"The one you make when you've decided something is exciting enough that consequences have become theoretical."
"I have no idea what you mean."
"You climbed into a ventilation duct when you were eleven because a fan sounded wrong."
"The bearing was failing."
"Mom spent nearly an hour looking for you."
"And when she found me, what did we learn?"
"That you fit inside ventilation ducts."
"That the bearing was failing."
Talia closed her eyes for a moment. "This is exactly what I'm talking about."
Topper climbed onto the table and walked directly through the lower edge of the projection.
Talia's expression changed. "There he is."
"Topper."
"Frog."
Topper looked toward her image. "Talia there."
She grinned. "You see that? Respect."
"He calls Frames cool."
"He has excellent judgment."
"You called a Bastion ugly when you were fifteen."
"I was trying to annoy Dad."
"You succeeded."
"I usually did."
Something behind her shifted. Talia tightened her grip around the rail automatically as a faint acceleration moved her body several centimeters before stopping. "You excited?"
"Black Star has thirty-six Frame berths."
She stared at me.
"What?"
"I asked if you were excited."
"I answered."
"No, you counted military hardware at me."
"That is my answer."
Talia let her forehead rest briefly against the back of her hand. "Right. Of course it is. I don't know why I expected anything else."
"You fly one."
"That does not mean I start every conversation by announcing how many can fit inside a room."
"You absolutely would if the number were thirty-six."
"I would not."
"You would call me specifically."
"I would call you to tell you something important and then casually mention thirty-six Frames because I am a considerate sister."
"Exactly."
She smiled despite herself. "Fine. You're excited."
"Very."
"Good."
The word came warmer than everything around it.
Then her face changed slightly.
"Listen, though. Black Star is still an active military vessel. It isn't a school with worse windows. If somebody tells you a compartment is restricted, you stay out of it."
"I know."
"Ilyan."
"I do."
"You know rules exist. That is not the same thing as believing they apply to you."
"That feels unfair."
"It is based on fourteen years of evidence."
"I haven't been alive fourteen years worth of trouble."
"You were trouble before you could walk. You used to pull open every cabinet in the apartment just to see what was inside."
"I was a baby."
"You are still fundamentally motivated by the same thing."
I leaned back in the chair. "I'm going to be supervised."
"That makes me feel much better."
"It should."
"It doesn't." She watched me for a moment, and her voice lost the teasing edge. "I mean it. Military spaces aren't built around the assumption that some kid might wander through the wrong hatch. There are things aboard ships that can kill you because somebody forgot to secure a tool before a burn. There are compartments where you do not get a second warning because the first warning is the hatch refusing to open. If somebody says no, take the no."
"I will."
She continued looking at me.
"What?"
"I'm deciding whether I believe you."
"Do you?"
"Not completely."
"That sounds like your problem."
"There he is."
I smiled.
A metal tool drifted into view behind her shoulder.
Talia's eyes moved past the camera.
The tool continued slowly down the passage.
Her expression flattened.
"Whose driver is that?"
A man somewhere offscreen replied, "Not mine."
"It has your name on the handle."
"That doesn't prove ownership."
"That is literally why names go on things."
"Someone could have borrowed it."
"Then whoever borrowed it has incredible commitment to framing you."
Talia caught the tool one-handed as it drifted past and pushed it sharply out of frame. A curse came from somewhere beyond the hatch.
She looked back at me. "Professional military."
"I feel safe already."
"You shouldn't."
Topper watched her.
"Talia tired."
Her eyes shifted toward him.
For a second she did not say anything.
Then she looked back at me. "Your frog is rude."
"He is observant."
"I'm fine."
"I didn't ask."
"That was very elegant. Did you practice it?"
"No."
Talia adjusted her grip on the rail. "How's home?"
"Still attached to the colony."
"I meant you."
"I'm also still attached."
"Ilyan."
I picked at the edge of the food carton.
She waited.
Talia was good at that.
Mom filled silence with practical questions when she remembered she had left one open. Dad usually filled it with explanations. Talia could leave silence sitting between us until I either used it or refused.
I refused.
"So when do you get leave?"
Her mouth shifted slightly.
"I don't know."
"You said maybe this month."
"I said I was trying."
"That sounds like no."
"It sounds like I don't know. We've had schedule changes."
"What kind?"
"The military kind."
"That answers nothing."
"It answers exactly as much as I'm allowed to tell you."
I leaned back farther. "You've become incredibly boring."
"You're going to tell me that when I come home and beat you at gravball?"
"You've never beaten me."
"I taught you."
"You taught me when I was nine."
"And then I left before your ego became clinically dangerous."
"You left because I started winning."
Talia laughed, and for a few seconds she looked like she had before she joined the service, before the short hair and the uniform and the shadows under her eyes. "God, you're awful."
"You miss me."
"Unfortunately I do."
A voice called her surname from farther down the passage.
She turned her head. "Give me a minute."
The camera shifted with her.
A hangar opened beyond the hatch.
I sat forward so quickly my knee hit the table.
"Talia."
"No."
A Federation Bastion hung in a maintenance cradle behind her, gray, blue and black armor opened along the left shoulder. Its two eyes were dark. Technicians moved around it in microgravity, one tethered near the chest while another worked from a service frame beside the leg. A Particle Rifle had been secured against the wall behind it.
"Turn the camera."
"No."
"Is that yours?"
"No."
"Whose is it?"
"Someone's."
"That is terrible operational security."
"That is excellent operational security."
"Move your hand."
"I am ending this call."
Then another frame became visible behind the first one.
A Bastion with a Particle Axe secured beside the cradle.
The armor around one forearm had been scraped down through paint. A maintenance marking sat near the hip.
I recognized the small personal emblem beneath the cockpit immediately.
"That one is yours."
Talia's face gave her away before her voice did. "Maybe."
"You scratched it."
"The other frame scratched it."
"So you got hit."
"That is generally how scratches happen."
"What happened?"
"Training."
I looked at the armor again.
Talia watched me.
"Was it?"
A little of the warmth disappeared from her face.
"It was a complicated exercise."
"That isn't what you said."
"Because you're fourteen and I don't feel like conducting a tactical debrief over dinner."
"You brought it up."
"You asked."
"You showed me the hangar."
"I absolutely did not show you the hangar. You stared through a doorway like a starving animal."
"That forearm is nearly through the outer armor."
"Ilyan."
"What happened?"
The voice called her again, harder this time.
Talia closed her eyes, then looked back at me. "I'm fine. The Frame is fine. The armor is replaceable. That is the entire story you're getting tonight."
"That sounds like there's more story."
"There is always more story. That does not mean you get all of it."
I disliked that answer.
She knew.
Neither of us said so.
Talia softened first. "Hey. I'll try to get leave before you board Black Star."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
The answer made me look at her.
She held my eyes.
Unlike our parents, Talia rarely promised anything she could not control.
"I'll try," she repeated.
"Okay."
"And call me before you go."
"I will."
"When you're aboard too, whenever they let you."
"Yeah."
"And if something feels wrong, you leave before deciding you need to understand why."
I stared at her.
"That sounded weird."
"It sounded like advice."
"It sounded like very specific advice."
"You are very specifically difficult."
"Talia."
She glanced toward the hatch.
"I'm tired, Ilyan. That's all."
Topper shifted on the table.
"Talia is tired."
She pointed toward him. "I am turning that frog off next time I come home."
"You don't know how."
"I will learn."
"He bites."
"He does not have teeth."
"He'll adapt."
Talia laughed again, quieter this time. "Love you."
"Love you too."
Her expression stayed there for half a second after the words.
Then the connection vanished.
Topper stared at the empty air.
"Talia gone."
"Yeah."
"Come back."
I looked down at him.
"She will."
Topper settled beside the food carton and said nothing else.
Nobody came home before I went to bed.
That was not unusual enough to deserve a thought.
I played games for an hour, lost badly, blamed the connection, checked whether Ziven had sent the party details, ignored them when I discovered he had, then reopened the Black Star residency packet instead. I made it through the medical requirements before getting distracted by the public carrier schematics again.
The apartment remained quiet around me.
From my room I could see the two photographs on the far shelf whenever the door stood open. Mom with us in one. Dad with us in the other. Talia in both.
I had never really noticed that before.
Or maybe I had noticed it so many times that noticing had stopped being an event.
At eleven eighteen, I gave up on sleep.
Topper came with me to Caelum's observation deck.
The lift carried us toward the colony's central axis, where the artificial gravity weakened enough that my stomach noticed before my feet did. Topper gripped the front of my jacket during the last section. The public observation deck sat beneath a broad transparent section of armored glass overlooking Earthward space. Families crowded it during the day. At night there were only a few couples, an old man reading beside the window, and a tired father trying to convince two small children that Earth would still exist tomorrow if they went to sleep.
Earth filled part of the darkness beyond Caelum.
Blue and white.
Whole from here.
You could not see poisoned ground or reconstruction borders. You could not see abandoned cities waiting beneath new ones, orbital graveyards left from Destiny, or the millions of arguments people had spent a century having over what Earth deserved from everyone born somewhere else. You could not see the Horizon War at all.
Just Earth.
Black Star hung below it.
The carrier looked enormous from the observation deck. Construction lights traced the hull while service craft moved along its sides. A military shuttle approached one bay, rolled into alignment, and vanished completely inside. Farther out, patrol ships crossed against the stars.
Topper pressed both front feet against the window.
"Big ship."
"Very."
"Frame ship."
"Yes."
"Frame cool."
I laughed softly. "You've made your position clear."
We stayed there.
I tried to imagine what six weeks aboard Black Star would actually be like. I imagined the Frame deck first because I was fourteen and there was no reason to pretend otherwise. I imagined seeing a Bastion launch from close enough that the carrier structure shuddered through my feet. I wondered whether maintenance crews cared when students watched them work or whether they would throw us out. I wondered whether military food was really as bad as Talia claimed, whether shipboard bunks were uncomfortable, whether the crew noticed when thrust stopped and down vanished or whether they kept working without thinking about it.
I wondered what Black Star sounded like from the inside.
That thought stayed with me longer than the systems did.
Ships always sounded alive in recordings. Pumps through the walls. Ventilation. Cooling. Distant impacts from maintenance. The faint structural changes of acceleration. People moving through compartments where every loose object had somewhere it had to be secured. Caelum was enormous enough that silence could almost feel natural. A ship carried its machinery everywhere with it.
Six weeks inside that sounded incredible.
Six weeks somewhere people would know if I came home because there was only one home to come back to.
I did not follow that thought very far.
Topper tightened his little claws in my jacket.
"Come back."
I looked down at him. "It's only six weeks."
His head tilted.
"I'll come back."
He stayed pressed against me.
Across the dark, Black Star continued turning slowly beneath its construction lights.
Somewhere inside were thirty-six Frame berths, hundreds of crew, sealed compartments, restricted systems, military officers, engineers, cooks, pilots, technicians and thousands of things I had never seen except through screens. Next week I would walk through one of those airlocks.
That was what Black Star meant to me then.
A ship.
A chance to see Frames up close.
Six weeks somewhere new.
I had no idea that somebo