Daks is silent for a moment. “I wouldn’t care to guess,” he grumbles. I shiver. Daks’s disposition is normally sunny and open; this reticence is quite unlike him. So I tag along behind, trying to work out what might be the worst news to come.

We leave the opaque tunnel behind and enter one with an outside wall, transparent in the most widely used visible wavelengths. Below Stairs — our little eyrie headquarters — hangs from Bifrost perhaps a hundred kilometers below Deimos. I think it is visible in the service timetables, listed as a maintenance wayport. Most traffic zips past at several hundred kilometers per hour, too fast to see. (And in any case there are many such maintenance wayports. Ours differs only in the matter of what it maintains.) The view from here is vertiginous and amazing. We’re nearing the zenith right now, and Mars bares his ruddy face to us, a seared disk that swells to cover half the sky. A glance in the opposite direction takes in the silvery sword blade of Bifrost, an irregular lumpish rock speared on its tip. The rock glitters as if gem-stones are embedded in it. A bright point of harsh violet light moves slowly along the blade, heading toward the rock — the early morning express service decelerating on its column of laser power. I pause for a few seconds. It’s at moments like this that I have a numinous, mystical sense of what we are sworn to defend.

It’s just the way I was designed, of course.

The boss is in the command module, assimilating his newsfeeds and brooding. Surrounded by blinking displays, he sits in twilight, ignoring the planetscape outside his porthole. Daks and I pause on the threshold. “Boss?” I call.

“Juliette.” He looks up — the entrance to the conical den is right above his head, and I’m hovering headfirst in it — and manages a smile. “And Daks. One sees you found her. Come in.”

I let go of Daks and swarm down an instrument-encrusted panel toward the antique gee couch beside him. It’s something of an affectation, this use of an antique exploration ship’s command deck as a personal office, but I guess the boss is entitled: He bought it, after all. Scuttlebutt suggests that the CRV-M is flightworthy, in extremis, its reentry shield carefully restored and its autopilot primed with the coordinates of a secret crater hideout. (Scuttlebutt is, in my opinion, cute but naive.) “What’s the story, Boss?”

“Valentina opines that you are recovering well,” he says, speculatively. One bushy eyebrow rises a millimeter as he examines me.

“She’s not wrong,” I agree, grinning. The combination of techné-directed repair and an upgrade to my Marrow has been great; the damage from the assassin’s gun is completely gone, as if it never happened. “I’m ready to go back out whenever you’ve got a job for me.”

“Yes, well.” He pauses, then sighs. “I’m afraid I do.”

I catch the dissonant note. “It’s a bad one.”

Daks butts in. “What kind of bad?” (Yes, I’d been wondering, too, but I wasn’t going to approach it so bluntly…)

“It came out of what you found on the surface,” Jeeves says reluctantly. “Come in and shut the door. Juliette, tie yourself down. I’m going to undock.”

It’s one of this particular Jeeves’s little security foibles. He doesn’t like to give sensitive briefings Below Stairs. So I strap myself into the Mars Excursion Supervisor’s station while Daks burrows into the empty life-support supply locker as Jeeves runs through the undocking checklist, his fingers flashing across the timeworn instrument panel with long practice. Latches click shut and readouts glow green as the CRV-M prepares to undock. A final button tap sends cold nitrogen gas pulsing through attitude thrusters, and we begin to drift away from the station. Finally, he switches on the noisemaker and draws a fine wire-mesh blind across the inside of the commander’s porthole. We’re completely cut off in here. “There are no bugs,” he assures us. “I’ve been thorough.”

If it was anyone but the boss telling me that, I’d be nervous. “So. What’s up?”

He glances at me, then at Daks, then back at me. “We’ve been compromised, ” he says. “Definitively.”

Those four words send a chill down my spine and make my vision blur. “Someone’s gotten in — who? An aristo cabal? The Dark — who, damn it?”

Daks is making an odd whirring noise. After a moment I realize he’s snarling quietly.

“One is unsure.” Jeeves closes his eyes. “Whoever it is, they’re very good. However, what we are aware of is that at least one consortium of spooks successfully obtained samples from the mummies, and they made an end run around our, ahem, allies. They ran a blind auction down-well which we didn’t win, couldn’t even draw any firm conclusions about the vendor — and the samples are already off-planet. But we know who the purchaser is — a proxy, a representative of certain outer-system interests. There are signs that they’re based in Jupiter system, with connections from there to the Dark. One fears we are going to have to send you away.”

Daks stops his almost inaudible growling. His anterior stabilization spine begins to vibrate, from the tip down, sweeping back and forth. “Really?” he asks hopefully.

“Unfortunately, you won’t be going with her,” say Jeeves.

“What—” we begin simultaneously, then shut up. I look at the boss. “Huh?”

“We’re overstretched,” Jeeves says patiently. “We had the inner system under control, but there’s that small matter of a penetration attempt. And, one would like to repeat, we’re overstretched. Daks, we want you to head for Mercury, where you can do some legwork for us. There’s something funny going on there, and you are best suited to look into it.”

“Aw, Boss.” Daks doesn’t sound happy.

“Don’t aw, Boss me. There aren’t enough of us to go around, especially out beyond Jupiter. You’re too well-known out there, Daks, so I’m holding you down-well, where you can still sniff around.” Eerie how he’s echoing my earlier thoughts. “Meanwhile, we need an agent who can pass to follow the trail all the way out and do whatever is necessary to derail the purchasing consortium’s plans. A review of the disposition of our agents and associates, and a quick check of the available transport options suggests that the current positioning of the major planets favors a dash from Mars. Most of our agents are otherwise committed, so you are my first choice for the task. There’s a nuclear-electric coldsleep liner readying to depart next month — you can be there in less than three years.”

“But — why me?” I ask, hating myself for the near whine in my voice. Daks and I have been together for so long, it’s almost impossible to imagine working solo again, without his comforting presence.

Jeeves fixes me with a fishy gaze. “Because you’re here, and you’re clear, so far — you’re not under suspicion,” he says, close-lipped. Then the other shoe drops: “Please give me your soul chip, Juliette. I need it… for another mission.”

Shit. I stare at him, aghast. This is awful. “Must I?”

“Yes. Now.”

“But I—”

“We need you to be in two places at once.” Realization dawns, along with a shaky sense that maybe he hasn’t seen through me after all, maybe he doesn’t know about the other thing. “Well?”

I reach up under my hairline and feel for the chip.