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believe they’d risk losing the Hope by breaching it. Keep monitoring them, Yehoshua.” Lily studied the screen on her console arm. “Do we have a vector yet?”
    “Two hours to the closest window,” hissed the Mule, “but Station Omega is refusing us coordinates.”
    The bridge door swept aside and Bach floated in, singing a three-note query.
    “Can you make do with Bach?”
    The Mule glanced at her. Its crest raised, just enough that she thought it found the challenge amusing. “I can guarantee nothing.”
    “ I can guarantee that Comrade Vanov is not a man we want to surrender to.” Lily whistled a quick command to Bach, and the robot sped over to plug into the navigation console.
    “Without Forsaken Station’s coordinates, the risk to vector is great. Surrender is sometimes preferable to death.”
    “In this case,” replied Lily, grim, “for most of us, I suspect surrender is death. I’ll take the vector.”
    “Ah.” The exclamation slipped smoothly from the Mule. It turned back to the console and began to calculate, Bach singing softly next to it.
    Gregori had found a corner in Engineering where Blue would not stumble across him. Paisley knew he was there, of course, but Paisley understood him. And the technician who had stayed on after the mutiny was a quiet and dutiful worker, not one to question the movements of the ranking mercenary Commander’s only son.
    So the boy watched them at the great consoles that controlled the Hope ’s engines. He didn’t like Blue much, but he respected Blue’s ability to understand engines. It seemed to him little short of miraculous, considering Blue was so young and so ill-tempered and touchy. He especially disliked the way Blue treated Paisley: with a contempt tempered only by the fact that he had no one with which to replace her. Outside of Engineering, of course, Blue merely ignored her, being smart enough to realize that more public derision would not be well received by the captain. As far as Gregori knew, Paisley had never complained. Her ability to brush off Blue’s scorn he found more miraculous than Blue’s genius for engines.
    “What are you doing here?” Blue’s harsh voice startled the boy out of his reverie. “We’ve got an emergency. Now get out !”
    Gregori got. Paisley cast him a brief, taut smile as he scuttled past her toward the door, but it was all she had time for before Blue appeared, scolding her as well.
    The door sighed shut behind Gregori, cutting off Blue’s words, and left him in the hush of iron deck corridors. It was especially silent down here, because virtually no one except the Engineering techs, and the occasional mercenary patrolling the shuttle bays, ever came down this far. Even the ghosts, who seemed to Gregori to haunt the ship’s corridors, were scarce here, finding more to occupy, and recall, higher up.
    When he saw a figure slip hurriedly past a far intersection of corridor, he thought at first it might be one of the ghosts. After all, Hawk knew about them as well, so it could not be entirely his imagination. They were like faint presences, not seen so much as felt, and a few of the stronger ones he had given names to: Happy, who lived mostly in Medical; Fearful, whose path disappeared frequently into the Green Room, where Gregori was not inclined to follow; and Grumpy, who Gregori quite liked because he seemed to leave a trail of laughter behind him.
    But he had never actually seen one before, so he padded quietly after it, careful to stay unobtrusive.
    It led him to the bay left empty by the forced departure of Machiko and crew on one of the shuttles. It wasn’t until the figure paused outside the door to the control overlook, looking almost comically furtive before it opened the door and vanished inside, that Gregori realized who he was following.
    Under any other circumstances, he would have been more cautious, but he simply walked boldly in behind her.
    “Lia,” he asked as he came through the door,