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AUBERON

The old ue over his teeth, then lit a fresh cigar His left arrafted deep into the bones of his shoulder, but his natural right ar: scarred and pocked by decades of violence and abuse His hair was a fluffy white fringe that cupped the back of his skull, and he wore a thin mustache like it was a joke he was in on

“All right So we’ll get a new governor who answers to a different boss,” he said “It happens Everyone’s playing by the rules, and then soet scraures the new rules out”

His second went by Agnete because it wasn’t her naetting poetic, especially when he was thinking soers of hisin on itself the way the real one had, back in the day

The office wasn’t really an office at all At the old man’s level, business could be done anywhere, and he liked the little bar on the Zilver Straat plaza with its wide-bladed ceiling fan and the s off the bay He clairown up in, back on Earth Soo out and sit with people in other parts of the city Soet one Sos, pornography or off-book sex workers, untraceable security teams or zero-day code exploits, then sooner or later they came to the old man

“The thing is,” he said, “you only have so long to figure out the new rules That’s what kills you You’ve got to look at the situation like you’re just coot the same street and the same people That doesn’t ranted about hoorks are up for grabs again, and—”

“Permission?”

He scowled, but he nodded her on

“Boss,” she said, “we didn’t just get a new governor We got conquered”

The old nete nodded toward the wallscreen behind the bar The newsfeed froeneral of Earth, the speaker for the Martian parliament, and the president of the Transport Union—theall the scattered huht to heel by the new order like the burghers of some half-razed medieval town The combined fleet was in tatters The void cities broken or occupied Pallas Station was reduced to pebbles and hot gas Medina, at the heart of the gate network, taken over by the half-alien ships that had boiled out of Laconia system The whole huh Consul Winston Duarte had nah people to alaxy

“This time is different,” she said

The old ain

The gate network had opened more than thirteen hundred solar systems to humanity, almost all of them with one or two or three planets in the Goldilocks zone Under hundreds of suns, evolution had i question, What is life? With carbon and nitrogen, hydrogen and sunlight and time, the possibilities weren’t li The DNA and asyanic life on Earth and its Sol system colonies turned out to be idiosyncratic in a wide and creative universe Even animals shaped by the sarass trees of Bara Gaon, the hueons of Nova Brasil, the skinfish of New Eden—only needed a glimpse under a microscope to show they were as different from their Terran counterparts as a bull from a bicycle