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Prologue: Maneo

Maneo Jung-Espinoza—Neo to his friends back on Ceres Station—huddled in the cockpit of the little ship he’d christened the Y Que After almost three months, there were maybe fifty hours left before he made history The food had run out two days before The only water that was left to drink was half a liter of recycled piss that had already gone through hi he could turn off, he’d turned off The reactor was shut down He still had passive ht in the cockpit came from the backsplash of the display terminals The blanket he’d wrapped himself in, corners tucked into his restraints so it wouldn’t float aasn’t even powered His broadcast and tightbeaed the transponder even before he’d painted the name on her hull He hadn’t flown this far just to have some kind of accidental blip alert the flotillas that he was co he had to do was not be seen And not run into anything, but that part was in las manos de Dios

His cousin Evita had been the one who introduced hishots That was three years ago, just before his fifteenth birthday He’d been hanging at his faone to work at the water treatrid roup that he oversaw, and Neo had stayed ho school for the fourth ti at the door, he’d figured it was school security busting hi truant Instead, Evita was there

She o years older, and his , thin bodies, but she was fro for Evita since the first time he saw her He’d had dreams about what she’d look like with her clothes off What it would feel like to kiss her Now here she was, and the place to hi three times standard before he opened the door

“Esá, unokabátya,” she said, s to act cool and calrown up in the massive city in space that was Ceres Station just the way she had, but his father had the low, squat fraht to the cos of the Belt as she had, but it sounded natural on her When he said it, it was like he was putting on so down portside Silvestari Campos back,” she said, her hip cocked, her“Mit?”

“Que no?” he’d said “Got nothing better”

He’d figured out afterward that she’d brought hier than hiht it was funny to watch the ugly inner girl padding around after the half-breed, but by then he didn’t care He’d

Went like this: Soe Maybe it was fabbed Probably at least some of it was stolen Didn’t need to be h air and water to get the job done Then it was all about plotting the trajectory Without an Epstein, torch drive burned pellets too fast to get anyone anywhere At least not without help The trick was to plot it so that the burn—and the best only ever used one burn—would put the ship through a gravity assist, suck up the velocity of a planet or moon, and head out as deep as the push would take the dead Whole thing got tracked by a double-encrypted black net as hard to break as anything that the Loca Greiga or Golden Bough had on offer Maybe they ran it It was illegal as hell, and soerous, which was the point And then when you got back, everyone kneho you were You could lounge around in the warehouse party and drink whatever you wanted and talk however you wanted and drape your hand on Evita Jung’s right tit and she wouldn’t even move it off

And just like that, Neo, who hadn’t ever cared about anything verypeople have to reical,” the Martian woman said Neo had spent a lot of ti, and so far he liked her the best Pretty face Nice accent She wasn’t as thick as an Earther, but she didn’t belong to the Belt either Like him “We don’t understand it yet, and we iven us sohs in y since the wheel Within the next ten or fifteen years, we’re going to start seeing the applications of e’ve learned fro the protomolecule, and it will—”

“Fruit Of A poisoned Tree,” the old, leathery-looking coyo beside her said “We cannot allow ourselves to forget that this was built froen and Mao-Kwik released this weapon on a population of innocents That slaughter began all of this, and profiting from it makes us all complicit”

The feed cut to the moderator, who smiled and shook his head at the leathery one

“Rabbi Kimble,” the moderator said, “we’ve had contact with an undisputed alien artifact that took over Eros Station, spent a little over a year preparing itself in the vicious pressure cooker of Venus, then launched a massive complex of structures just outside the orbit of Uranus and built a thousand-kilo that we are nore those facts”

“Himmler’s hypother his finger in the air, but noas the pretty Martian’s turn to interrupt

“Can wein a way that said, I’ about space Nazis here This is the single en’s role in it was terrible, and they’ve been punished for it But noe have to—”

“Not space Nazis!” the old coyo yelled “The Nazis aren’t fro us They are the beasts of our worst nature By profiting froitimize the path by which we came to them”

The pretty one rolled her eyes and looked at the ed at her, which only rier