Walter Stroud was waiting at the Lodge when we got back from Akila.
I'd seen him around — between board meetings and funding conversations he is always at the Lodge. He caught me before I'd made it to the common room and invited me to join him on a trip to Neon. He was planning a soiree, he said. A gathering. A social occasion among friends, with perhaps some light conversation about a certain item of mutual interest.
He said it with the absolute straightfaced ease of a man who has been conducting transactions by other names his entire career and has gotten very good at it. I told him I'd come. I was curious about the man more than the soiree.
We docked at Neon and I bought a ship before we'd even left the starport.
The Razorleaf had been fine. The Razorleaf had been more than fine — she'd gotten us out of situations that should have ended differently, and I'm not ungrateful for that. But we were six people now, counting Cora, and six people on a ship built for two is a specific kind of misery that compounds daily. I'd been squirreling away credits for a while, more than I'd realized, and the Naginata was sitting at the dock like she'd been waiting.
Large. Serious. Built for a real operation rather than a pair of people and their luggage. I paid for her without quite deciding to and then decided to afterward. The Razorleaf would find a dock somewhere. The Naginata was ours now.
Then I walked into Neon proper and understood why Walter had chosen it.
The city is built on a platform above a toxic ocean, which tells you something about the founding philosophy. Ryujin Industries built it and runs most of it — corporate law, corporate security, corporate interests threading through everything. But Ryujin isn't the only power. Administrator Benjamin Bayou runs the rest, in the way that certain figures run things in places where the law is too corrupt to stop them and too useful to remove. Between the two of them, Neon is less a city than an arrangement — every corridor, every smile from every person who works here is a line in somebody's ledger.
It is not safe. The lights make it easy to mistake. The lights are very good. But people disappear in Neon, and Neon Security looks the other direction because that's part of the job description, and the ocean below is toxic, and the city knows all of this and keeps the lights on anyway. That's the pitch: come spend your money somewhere nobody asks where it came from.
Walter moved through it like a man who had done the math on every room before entering. He took us to the Stroud-Eklund corporate offices — his company, co-owned with his wife — and that was where I first understood the two of them.
Issa Eklund already knew.
Walter hadn't told her about the meetup. That was clear from the shape of the conversation — the way he approached the subject of the company's discretionary fund was, well... discrete. The way she received it was as though she were already six steps ahead of the introduction. She knew about the artifact. She knew about the seller. She'd probably worked out the location before he'd finished the sentence.
They are adversarial in the way of two people who are very much in love and have found that keeping each other sharp is the best use of the energy. She hadn't heard about the meeting from Walter — she'd hacked his accounts. The calendar, the correspondence, the location. All of it, likely before we'd even left the Lodge in New Atlantis. This is not a secret between them. Walter knows she does it. She knows he knows. They've been doing this to each other for years, and I got the impression that for them it amounts to the same thing as affection.
I introduced myself properly when we arrived. She had a genuine smile on as she received the introduction, going so far as to ask Walter where he'd met his delightful new friend. It was clear that part of her success in business was in her information gathering, and the other part was in making people around her feel at ease. She was a formidable woman indeed. She approved the funds without drama, and by the end of the conversation she was looking at me with something that I'd almost call warmth — which caught me off guard, given the context. Issa Eklund is a genuinely pleasant woman. Almost unnervingly so, for someone who'd just admitted to reverse-engineering her husband's private correspondence.
I don't know why that was the moment it hit me. Maybe the intimacy of it — two people who know each other well enough to weaponize that knowledge and choose to anyway, because being known is the point. I stood there watching them and thought about my wife with the particular sharpness that only comes when you've been not thinking about someone for too long. What she'd make of Neon. What she'd make of all of it. What she'd make of me, standing in a corporate office on a platform above a toxic ocean eight light years from anywhere she'd ever heard of, trying to recover an alien artifact for a faction of explorers while wearing a dead vigilante's reputation.
Andreja was beside me. I was more aware of it than I wanted to be.
I left it where it was. I've been doing that a lot.
While Walter finished with Issa, The pair sent me back into Neon to work.
The seller's name didn't take long to find. He'd been let go from Slayton Industries recently — laid off, with the kind of abruptness that leaves a person with grievances and access they probably should have lost sooner. He'd walked out with an artifact his former employer didn't know they had, which meant he'd known exactly what it was worth and exactly how little time he'd have before someone came looking.
Desperate people are often easier to deal with when you have the upper hand in strength, But far less predictable overall.
The Astral Lounge was the other item on the list. It's the kind of venue that sells experiences as its primary product — they have a drug, Aurora, that is illegal to produce anywhere but Neon, and illegal to purchase anywhere but the Astral Lounge. I found the right person and made the right impression and walked away with VIP access at a number that suggested they'd wanted to say yes anyway. The meeting room Walter had in mind was accessible, sightlines manageable, exits where I'd want them. I scouted the whole thing in the time it would have taken most people to find the entrance.
When I got back, Walter and Issa were finishing a conversation I hadn't heard the start of. Issa looked at me once and then at Walter.
"I'll be following this little operation," she said, "just in case."
It wasn't a threat. But it wasn't entirely reassuring either. She said it like someone who had already identified three ways the evening could go wrong and wanted us to know she'd identified them.
We went to the Lounge.
The seller arrived with the posture of a man who had decided, somewhere between accepting the meeting and walking through the door, that he was in a stronger position than he'd originally thought. He opened by asking for double.
I'd scouted the room. I'd learned his situation. I knew exactly what kind of double he was trying to get and exactly how much ground he was standing on when he asked for it.
We didn't move. Walter was calm. I was calm. The seller looked at us looking at him and gradually recalibrated. We left with the artifact at the original price and his grudging acknowledgment that he'd played it wrong.
On the way out, an armed man stepped into our path and explained, with the confidence of someone who hadn't done his homework on who he was stopping, that Slayton Industries would like their property back. The Astral Lounge's security materialized behind us with the timing of people who take their VIP obligations seriously. The armed man did his own recalibrating and left.
We were almost to the exit when Issa appeared.
She'd been following, as promised. She had news: Slayton had put a bounty on us and gotten the Naginata impounded. He'd moved fast, which told Issa and Walter that he had to be close. Physically. their Headquarters was in the same Tower as the Astral Lounge...
Slayton's headquarters were the kind of corporate space designed to make visitors feel small — high ceilings, hard surfaces, a drop dead gorgeous receptionist positioned to maximize the impression that you were not expected and possibly in the wrong building. I talked my way past her. Walter and I took the elevator to head up to have a little chat. Then it stopped.
Slayton, from somewhere above us, had decided we'd gone far enough.
Issa had anticipated this too. She'd been working a different angle — one of Slayton's own security staff had a price, and she'd found it. While we were standing in a stopped elevator, she was taking over the security from the inside. A moment later the PA system crackled on and Issa's voice came through, warm and pleasant, as though she were directing guests at a dinner party. Turn left at the end of the hall. The third door on your right should be unlocked now. Mind the camera at the stairwell.
That was when I understood what I'd been missing. The warmth isn't a veneer. It isn't a tactic. It's just how she is — which simultaneously endeared me more to her, and made her considerably more unsettling than someone who at least looks like what they are.
It was a long path, but with Isse's guidance and a few long pauses at hallway corneres, we made it to Slayton without raising a hand.
Walter handled the conversation. This wasn't a conversation I had any place in anyway. It was a conversation between businessmen, with wealth and lawyers. By the end of it Slayton had agreed to settle — terms to be determined later.
Then Slayton did the thing that told me everything I needed to know about him.
The seller — the desperate man who'd stolen the artifact to get out from under a company that had already thrown him away — was in Slayton's hands, and from the looks of it with a bullet lodged in his lower abdomen. A non-fatal wound, most likely, but a brutal one regardless. And Slayton wanted us to decide what happened to him. Not because he needed our input. Because making us part of the decision was its own kind of message.
Walter wanted a bit of Leniency for the man, and I could understand it. It was the kind of attitude that men at the top of the world had the luxury of having. I said let Neon Security deal with it. That's what they're for. I'm not Slayton's instrument and I'm not the man's judge.
Andreja seemed very pleased with this answer. She was rigid in her beliefs of punishment for criminals. Normally I would agree wholeheartedly, but it's hard not to feel greasy when saying that on Neon.
The Naginata was back when we made it to the starport. The city was still lit up behind us, selling itself to everyone who hadn't been inside it yet.
We were barely clear of Neon's gravity well when the ship came out of nowhere.
Advanced. Quiet on approach in a way that shouldn't be possible. The pilot Identified themselves as "Starborn" and spoke in the tone of someone delivering terms rather than making a request. Surrender the artifact. Or don't, and see what happens next.
I didn't.
We fought our way clear. The Emissary's ship was better than it had any right to be — better than anything in the settled systems, better than anything with an obvious manufacturer...
Or at least that's what I would have thought shortly before the Razorleaf blew up. But we weren't on the Razorleaf. We were on the Naginata, a ship that cost me a whopping 200,000 credits. And this baby had POWER. I managed to push the Starborn Vessel to it's limit, and it jumped away before being destroyed.
Back at the Lodge, we had Noel run some scans of my ships computer so we could share what we encountered with everyone.
Nobody knew much beyond the name "Starborn" and the ship nobody could identify and the fact that they wanted what we had. I sat with that for a while. The artifact. The power in my chest. And now this — beings who move between stars in ships that shouldn't exist, demanding things from us at gunpoint.
Human or human-adjacent. That's my working theory. I don't know why I'm so certain of it. But something about the way the Emissary spoke — the cadence of it, the shape of the threat — didn't feel alien.
It felt like someone who had been where I am now, and hadn't liked how it ended.
I also made a decision somewhere in all of that: I hung up the Mantis.
The suit is still aboard. The Razorleaf is still the Razorleaf. But the title — the identity, the performance — I set it down in Neon. I'm not playing a role anymore. I'm finding artifacts for Constellation, and that's what I am now, and that's enough.
The Naginata carries Sam and Cora, Muira, VASCO, Andreja, and me. A proper crew. The largest thing I've ever called mine.
There's room for Cora to be eight years old somewhere that isn't directly underfoot, which I consider a significant design feature. She spent the first hour out of Neon cataloguing what she thought could be improved about my storage organization, and I found myself listening to about sixty percent of it and thinking she wasn't wrong. Sam caught me doing that and said nothing. He just looked like a man who had been in this situation before and was glad it was someone else's turn.