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governor. Hoping I can get the price down. No-questions-asked is harder to do these days.”
    Greene and Huntington didn’t bother to respond. And in that moment, not for the first time, Harry wondered just who was working for whom.
    He left the little office and headed out into the cool Afghan afternoon. He didn’t really care how it played out now, he reminded himself.
    It only mattered who was in charge at the end.
    He was distracted by a text, which conveniently popped up on the inside of his sunglasses. It came via an unlisted account on a black corporate network—one that even government stooges couldn’t hack.
    The message read simply: “I know what you’re up to. You can do better than Kabul. I can help. I want in.”
    Harry raised an eyebrow as he got into his car, which dutifully transferred the message onto the windshield. These sorts of messages, while not an everyday thing, were part and parcel of modern corporate life. Some people made a living being anonymous angel investors for questionable yet potentially profitable enterprises. Heck, Harry had dabbled himself, back in the day.
    Now he was on the other end. And he was getting pretty damn tired of uncertainty.
    But…
    “Send reply as follows,” he told the car as he drove off. “I’m interested. Set up a secure link and we’ll talk.”

CHAPTER 2
    March 27, 1809
    C apt. Patrick O’Brian, commander of HMS Thunderer , looked at his young officers and midshipmen with a practiced eye as they filed into the great cabin of his 74-gun ship. So young. How could I have ever looked this young?
    Yet they were the best England could provide—or, rather, the best the North of England could provide, along with Scotland, half of Ireland and a bit of Wales. Perhaps that’s why the frigate captains looked like green lieutenants, the lieutenants appeared to be naught but midshipmen, and the mids…dear God in Heaven, the mids looked barely weaned from their mothers’ bosoms.
    They were the newest addition to the fleet protecting Elizabeth Mercuris, the floating outpost above the blasted cinder that was the planet Mercury. They would have to do, for the outpost was critical to keeping the French from taking control of the Void itself.
    O’Brian looked out his aft windows at the outpost. It had grown immensely in the thirty years since he first laid eyes upon it. It had started as a commercial trading post for the miners who worked in the caves and caverns of Mercury below, then blossomed—if such a term might be used for such an unsavory place—into a major Sunward Trading Company port. Through alchemy, plenty of sails and no small amount of genius born of desperation, the floating outpost consisted of old ships and hulks lashed together with rope, joined by wooden walkways and bridges, weighed by alchemical lodestones designed to keep gravity and air in place. It was tucked directly behind Mercury so as to keep the heat and light of the Sun from becoming too intense.
    And today, it was England’s last hope.
    There was a rapping upon O’Brian’s door. “Come,” he said over the low murmur of his wardroom officers.
    When the admiral walked in, O’Brian smiled as he stood. Only Thomas Weatherby would knock before entering a subordinate’s cabin .
    The officers and mids scrambled to their feet, eyes wide with shock as they saluted Admiral Lord Weatherby, and O’Brian registered a slight shock of his own. It had been nearly six years since he last saw his old commander and friend—the man’s wedding day, in actuality—and the years seemed to weigh upon Weatherby like an old cloak.
    Weatherby, it seemed, saw something similar in O’Brian as he came across the room and clenched the captain in a warm embrace. “For God’s sake, Paddy, why the hell aren’t you eating?” Weatherby said quietly, his concern broken with a warm smile that, for a moment, banished the lines of worry upon his face and lifted the air of palpable gloom around him.
    “Likely the