Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,21

play temporarily.

None of this made any sense. I needed to find the rest of the crew from the Persephone and see if they had any clue what in the hell was going on. And if there was one place in the system they were likely to be, it was here on Daedalus.

My agent had had time to connect with the station and get updated information on our approach. Sarah, any communications from Chan, Miller, or Harper?

No messages have been received, my agent replied.

Damn. That didn’t mean they weren’t here. Communications could be monitored so they might simply be lying low. After all, I hadn’t exactly been broadcasting messages out into the deep. Having had one assassin come after me already, I wasn’t inclined to make it even easier for another.

Keep looking, Sarah, I instructed. And see if you can find any trace of them, here or anywhere else.

While my agent undertook that task, I made my way through the docks, moving steadily coreward. Crowds filled the corridors of Daedalus just as much as they had on Prospect, though here the mood among them was brusquer. Those who lived on the station kept to themselves and presented a gruff exterior, at least outside of their friends and family. Outside of the markets, that lent the station a sense of quiet discretion. Still, there was scarcely a station in the system that wasn’t packed to the gills with humanity, and Daedalus, holding on to the remnants of its founders’ stoicism, wasn’t any different. When the promise of immortality became an effective reality, no one really thought about the impact on population. The birth rate had dropped off significantly, as more people realized that they had plenty of time for kids and took advantage of technology to help control when conception happened, but the death rate—the true, total death rate—was nearly zero. To complicate the issue further, regardless of the coil into which you were born, if you were re-coiled into a biological female, you were capable of bearing children. Which meant that every human under the sun was likely to have the capacity to give birth at some point in their lives. The biological process had been streamlined as well; you certainly could carry a child to term if you so chose, but most opted to have the fetus bottled and grown at a med facility. Regardless, the hopes of an endless universe of planets to colonize outside our own system still languished under our inability to prove Einstein wrong and travel faster than light.

And so, the exploding population of humanity had to be content with domed cities on hostile planets, moons, and asteroids, or free-floating space habitats. The impressive feats of engineering had pushed humanity’s sphere of influence all the way to the moons of Neptune… but they were still unable to keep up with our constant need for procreation and expansion. As I shouldered my way through the press of people—much easier in my new coil—I longed to be back on board the Persephone. The vessel had been small, and every bit as cramped with four souls as Daedalus was with its teeming thousands, but at least I knew and trusted the crew. We had worked together for years, and even if we all seemed to spend our off-ship time as far away from one another as possible—a needed escape when you were packed in tight quarters with the same people for so long—I counted them as friends. Now, as I pushed through the crowd, I imagined a knife in every hand and a garroting wire in every pocket. I moved a little faster, suddenly anxious to get to the relative safety of my berth and away from the crowds that could be concealing any numbers of assassins.

My implant pinged, and a window opened in the top right of my vision.

I didn’t recognize the face displayed in that window, and by the look of confusion on his face, he didn’t recognize me, either. Before I could trigger a disconnect, Sarah’s voice resonated in my head: Shay Chan, Langston.

Shit. “Shay?” I asked softly.

“Carter?” The voice was a smooth baritone that seemed somehow fitting to the leonine features and wavy blonde hair of the face in my augmented reality view. But there was a hesitancy in it, a note of fear or pain. The coil, from what I could see, was a fine specimen: chiseled features, piercing eyes, tanned skin glowing with health, lean, and almost aggressively handsome. It was also unmistakably