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alive with rumors about that nest of purebloods, ne’er-do-wells, and religious fanatics. They’ve been buying antimatter.”
    “Antimatter generators,” Michael countered. That was the rumor he’d heard. “Nobody used to know where they were, but recently they’ve been buying loads of stuff, and stuff has to be delivered.”
    He put down his tools and jumped up on the end of Petruzzelli’s desk. A 3D starmap hung above it, a holographic sphere the size of an exercise ball, with the sun in the middle. Not-to-scale planets and rocks swarmed in a fuzzy ring around the ecliptic. Michael walked around the desk’s U-curve until he stood in front of Captain Haddock, forcing the pirate to look up at him. His head was inside the bottom of the starmap. The projectors sparkled at the bottom of his field of vision. Haddock’s face looked navy blue.
    “The tramp hauler Now You See It left Ceres two days ago,” Michael said, “carrying a cargo for 99984 Ravilious. And I’m 99% sure Petruzzelli was on board.”
    He reached up into the sphere. The labels could not be read from this angle but Ceres was easy to find—the largest thing in the asteroid belt, 2.8 AUs from the sun. He dragged his index finger away from it, extending the red line of their current trajectory to a spot halfway around the Belt, 2.45 AUs out. His finger ended up in a region of space that looked empty at this scale. It was in the middle of Gap 2.5, one of the Kirkwood Gaps in the Belt, which had been cleared of asteroids by gravitational interactions with Jupiter.
    Of course, there remained a few asteroids wandering through all that emptiness. Spreading his arms, Michael zoomed the projection in until the whole sphere was dark blue, with a single low-albedo dot in the center. This dot did not represent any asteroid that existed in Kharbage, LLC’s databanks. It was Michael’s best guess, based on rumors and the Now You See It’s trajectory.
    “99984 Ravilious.” The asteroid’s label appeared at his command, blood-red. “All we have to do is tag along behind the Now You See It, and they’ll take us there.”
    Haddock reached between Michael’s legs. Michael skipped sideways. Haddock picked up his bottle of tequila and slurped. “You’re assuming we want to go.”
    “Well, don’t you? You’re short of money. And I bet they’re using those antimatter generators for something really cool. We could get in on the ground floor of the next technological revolution.” Michael deliberately appealed to the pirates’ desire to make an easy buck.
    But Haddock shook his head, and Kelp, in the corner, looked up from his book. “We’ve been there before.”
    “You have?”
    “Yeah.”
    Codfish explained, “For about three days. They didn’t even let us off the ship. We were quarantined. No comms. It was boring. And dangerous. I hate boring and dangerous.”
    Michael relaxed. “Well, it will be different this time, because Petruzzelli and Scuzzy will be there.”
    “Which is exactly the problem,” Haddock said, sounding less piratical than usual. “Scuzzy, as you call him—his real name is Kiyoshi Yonezawa—is bad news.”
    “He’s a pirate,” Coral said, without the slightest hint of self-awareness.
    “All other considerations aside, he said that if he ever saw us again, he’d scrag us.”
    “Frag us, Dad,” said Kelp. “He said he’d frag us. With extreme prejudice.”
    Anemone left the bridge, saying she was going to fix dinner.
    “I’m sorry, Michael,” Haddock said. “It’s just not a good idea.”
    Michael’s chest felt tight. They couldn’t be this wimpy! “It’ll only take four months,” he pleaded.
    “At least four and a half,” Codfish said. “And if we run out of reaction mass along the way …”
    “We won’t.” Michael’s confidence returned. “I’ve crunched the numbers. Our delta-V budget will get us there with propellant to spare. And if— if they won’t let us park, then we’ll just cruise