The fighter flew low and fast through the artificial canyons that made up Imperial Seat. There were glowing lights bathing us all around. The only light that ever reached these depths in the artificial canyons was from all the neon and other bright screens that turned the lower levels of the city into something that would be a cyberpunk enthusiast's wildest fantasy.

I only kept an eye on the threat board, though. The lights and the boards were pretty and all, and they made me want to go down there and have street level adventures sure.

But there was a different kind of adventure happening right now. The cyberpunk playground would have to wait until I was done playing the hotshot loose cannon pilot.

"There's nothing on the board yet," Varis said.

"You sure about that?" I asked.

"As sure as I'm going to be," she said.

I looked up to the threat board. Trust but verify. That was always one of my things when I was running something.

I'd always been an inherently lazy commander. Sometimes I thought that was the best sort of leadership. I gave people enough rope to do their job, and all I had to do was check in on them from time to time to make sure they weren't hanging themselves with it. Ideally the only work I had to do was when I needed to correct somebody who wasn't doing it to my satisfaction.

I never understood the kind of micromanaging prick who had to be so far up everybody's ass that they might as well have their subordinate officers working as puppets rather than independent people who could think for themselves.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"Looking at the threat board?" I asked.

"Thinking and getting distracted from what's in front of us."

"Yeah, sorry," I said.

We moved in low. Supposedly there was an entrance over in this direction. We'd run a couple of drone scans on the area, but there was always a possibility those drone scans might be picked up by somebody we didn't want picking up on those drone scans. Which might result in a welcoming committee meeting us out here.

I wanted to avoid a welcoming committee if it was at all possible. The last time we had a welcoming committee, I ended up getting involved in one of the numerous aerial dogfights that happened over Imperial Seat on the regular.

Flying those drones through the city under the city had been a lot of fun, though.

"I almost hope the empress does send someone after us," Varis said.

"You're asking for trouble," I said. "Like I know. You livisk have an almost Klingon level of desire to get into a fight, but a fight is the last thing we need right now."

"I think we're going to get into a fight regardless of what you want. The people at the reclamation mine might not be happy about the idea of coming under new management."

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," I muttered.

"Something like that," she said with a smile.

"Arvie, how are we doing with the troop transport behind us?"

"Things seem to be going well enough there," he said. "They've maintained their maskirovka and are keeping station behind us at a safe enough distance that nobody should connect them to us."

"I almost think it might be a little too ostentatious to be flying around in a fighter like this," I said.

"It serves two purposes," Varis said.

"Yes, yes, the two purposes. I've heard all of this."

I knew that wasn't going to stop her from telling me the two purposes. That was fine. Going over a plan was how she dealt with her nervous energy.

"The first is that it's going to distract anybody who sees us making our way through Imperial Seat. Nobody is going to be looking for a troop transport if they focus on a fighter making its way through the concrete canyons. I rather like that turn of phrase, by the way."

"Glad you like it," I said, keeping my attention on the readouts in front of me.

I didn't exactly have a white-knuckle grip on the stick in front of me, but I had an attentive grip on it. The kind of grip that would allow me to make a minute change in an instant if, say, we suddenly got a notification that there were missiles coming at us. Which wasn't entirely outside the realm of possibility considering where we were and what we were doing.

"Having a fighter craft will also be invaluable if the empress does realize what we're doing, or if another one of the noble houses whose territory we're flying through suddenly realizes there's a fighter moving through their territory and they decide to make a thing out of it."

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"I thought you said they'd see that we were running unmarked and decide we were more trouble than it was worth."

"They might still cause trouble," she said.

"Wonderful," I muttered, scanning the threat board again.

Still clear.

"Anyway, I almost wish the empress would come after us just because she would be breaking the Grand Gathering peace."

"Is that really such a big deal?" I asked.

"Yes and no," she said with a shrug. "People break a Grand Gathering peace all the time. It's a matter of whether or not you're powerful enough when you're doing it, and if you do it in a clever enough way that you don't have to worry about getting discovered."

"I see," I said.

I thought about some of my own plans. Plans that involved breaking the Grand Gathering peace as well, though I wasn't sure if a plan to blow somebody up when they were leaving the Grand Gathering was necessarily breaking the Grand Gathering peace considering it was after the Grand Gathering was over.

It was a bunch of rules lawyering, but there was nothing the livisk loved more than rules lawyering when it came to honor or finding a way to cleverly kill people.

"Coming up on the hole now," I said.

"Things you can say in a fighter and with me last night," she said.

I turned and looked at her. Amusement spiked through the link.

"That was half clever," I said.

"Half clever?" she said, sounding insulted.

"It's the kind of corny joke I'd say."

"I've learned from the best, my darling," she said, reaching a hand over to put it on my arm.

Only for a moment. We both knew that was the kind of distraction neither one of us needed when I was in the middle of a flight through very hostile territory while we were trying to escort a troop transport made to look like a regular cargo transport ship.

It wasn't a perfect camouflage. A troop transport was loaded down with armor, and anybody who gave it more than a cursory scan would realize what we were trying to do. There was entirely too much armor and mass on a troop transport, even if it was disguised as a heavy ore transport.

The hope was nobody would give it a second look because people weren't prone to looking for something more when they saw what they expected.

That was something that held true with humans and livisk alike. I just hoped that a little bit of deception would work here.

"Coming up on it," I said. "Hold onto your butts."

"Why would I hold onto my butt?"

"It's just a turn of phrase from Earth," I said.

We broke out over an odd scene. There was a massive dark hole in the ground and what looked like the remains of a large building that had fallen partially into that massive hole. I could see the occasional light from drones and other ships down in the hole, but there wasn't a lot of activity.

At some point this might become a reclamation mine. It wasn't nearly as large as the gaping hole in the city my crew was currently being held in, but it was pretty damn big. Big enough that it'd swallowed one of the massive towers pierced the sky in Imperial Seat in the architectural dick-measuring contest the nobility had with one another.

"Damn," I muttered. "So how much do we have to worry about something like that happening with your tower?"

"Not much," Varis said. "The tower I'm in goes down to the very bedrock under the city, and there are all sorts of reinforcements and inspections happening on the regular."

"So what in the name of Palpatine's lightning-shriveled balls is going on with this one?" I asked.

"Palpatine's… lightning-shriveled balls?" she said, frowning. "Like, I can tell that's a curse, but I haven't heard that one before."

"It comes from Star Wars."

"That's the one that doesn't have Captain Kirk."

"Right. Han Solo, not Captain Kirk or Captain Picard. Or the Sisko if you're feeling really badass."

"Got it," she said. "So anyway, there are some who gamble because it's less expensive to simply build on some of the upper layers of the Undercity. It's less expensive to simply have an antigrav unit or a single column that goes down to the ground level rather than building directly into the bedrock."

"I see," I said. "So you're saying somebody cheaped out on the construction and the instant a large sinkhole opened up under them, they were screwed?"

"Exactly," she said. "They paid the price for not wanting to pay the price."

"I guess the phrase 'you get what you pay for' is eternal," I muttered.

"Exactly," she said. "It's also entirely possible that somebody went down into the area under the building and deliberately undermined the structural integrity of the building. That's not entirely unheard of. It's one of the reasons why there are troops deployed in the parts of the Undercity that aren't covered in rubble leading up to my building."

"Wait, we could've just gone out of the bottom of your building?" I said.

"Theoretically, yes," she said. "But the area under my building is full of a lot of debris. We deliberately haven't cleared it out to make it more difficult for anybody who would try and move in on us from the Undercity. You'll note that in all the times the empress attacked us, she never went that route. Too time consuming to dig through and likely to fail because we would've had plenty of warning."

"Got it," I said.

"Not to mention the areas in the Undercity between my building and the reclamation mine we're targeting aren't mapped out nearly as well as the path we're taking now because of all the debris. It would take far longer for us to try and figure out a path from my tower to the reclamation mine, not to mention we'd probably have to do some drilling and blasting which would risk tipping off people living on the surface, than it would to simply go to a hole that is closer to the reclamation mine and move in from there."

"And it would be too obvious to just fly into the damn thing from up top," I muttered.

"It would certainly be a decision, and it would earn us that fight with the empress I wouldn't mind having. But yes, that would be very obvious and would probably have us accused of breaking the Grand Gathering peace."

"But we're not fighting the empress."

"Technically, the empress licenses out the rights to use any of the reclamation mines. Anything in there is considered her property."

"Since her ancestors are the ones who blew the shit up?"

"Not necessarily her ancestors, but her predecessors. So either way, there's a legalistic way it could be interpreted as an attack on the empress if we attacked a reclamation mine directly rather than resorting to subterfuge."

"Wonderful," I muttered, moving down into the big black hole after doing scans on multiple bands to make sure there weren't any surprises waiting for us.

"Hold on," I muttered. "This is about to get really interesting."

As I said that, a beam attached to the skeleton of a former building that had collapsed in some damned war the livisk had with each other over the millennia loomed out of the darkness in front of us, and I deftly moved around it.

"I'm Bill Stewart. I fly the ship!"

I grinned. This was the kind of flying that was borderline suicidal, but that was when flying got the most fun.

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