"So, what exactly are you planning on doing with your people down here, anyway?" Varis asked.

We were on a small skiff that was going deeper and deeper inside the reclamation mine. There were plumes of smoke that rose up from the middle and got wider and obscured everything as we got closer to the top, but they seemed to get thinner down near the bottom.

I turned and looked at her. I gave her a smile as I also gave her an up and down. What can I say? She wore a flight suit that clung to her in all the right places. Not at all like the baggy flight suits that were still popular amongst flyers in Terran space. Even if they were flying through space in a fighter rather than flying through the air.

It left nothing to the imagination. I even caught a couple of the other guys on the skiff with us turning and giving her looks.

One of them was the pilot for the reclamation mine. Like the dude who guided the skiff. Not the guy actually flying the thing, which was a confusing mixture of terms.

Apparently the mines were so treacherous and full of a constantly changing environment where a building could fall over one day and knock over a good chunk of the place, just to give one example of the hazards that waited for people working down here, that they had pilots. The same as there would be tug drivers and harbor pilots in a spaceport, or in an open-water port on any planet where there was enough water to make that sort of thing worthwhile.

"You know, I suppose I could try and hide this from you," I said.

"But you've learned your lesson and know there's no point in trying to hide anything from me because of the mental link?" she asked.

"Yeah, you could say that," I said, grinning as I stared at her.

"So you have no idea what you're planning on doing even if you free your people?" she asked.

I blinked. I was used to having the mental link to give her an idea of how I felt. I was even getting used to the idea of the mental link allowing both of us to synchronize our movements when we were in the middle of a fight.

It seemed that being able to fight more effectively was one of the reasons this whole battle link thing had developed in the parts of the livisk brain that were responsible for the kind of stuff that was referred to as ESP back on ancient Earth. Back when they didn't quite understand that there was actually a little bit of scientific and anatomical basis for telepathic communication.

But the livisk had taken that latent ability from the Ancients, and they'd cranked it up to eleven.

"You're wondering how I read your mind, aren't you?" she asked.

"Just a little bit," I said.

"I know you wanted to come here. That you wanted to save your crew. I know you've been wanting to do that for some time now."

"Well, yeah," I said.

"And I figured I'd let you have this one."

"But aren't we risking pissing off the empress? I thought you were reluctant to do anything that would piss her off."

"Yeah, well, I have to let you have some wins, don't I? Besides, the idea of letting your crew rot in the middle of a reclamation mine, especially one controlled by the empress where they might decide to liquidate your crew at any moment, isn't something I want hanging over our relationship."

"Well, I'm glad we're in agreement on that point," I said.

"So you really do have no idea what you want to do with the reclamation mine now that you've taken it over?"

"I mean, I have some ideas, sure," I said with a shrug. "It's just that they're kind of half-formed ideas."

"Like the kind of half-formed ideas you've been going over with Arvie in your man cave?" she asked.

I shook my head at that. I'd referred to the luxury holding cell that'd been my quarters the first couple of nights when I was in Varis's tower as my man cave a few times, and the term stuck.

I kind of liked it on the one hand. It brought to mind Bruce Wayne sitting deep beneath Wayne Manor plotting out all the ways he was going to take care of the criminal element in Gotham City.

Though I planned on doing way more than beating the shit out of low-level criminals in this city.

But at the same time, it was also a touch ridiculous. A man cave was still mostly just a place where a husband was allowed a small corner of a house he could decorate in a way he saw fit. Even a thousand years after the idea of a man cave first started to take hold in pop culture consciousness.

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"Something like that," I said, not wanting to go into whatever I was working on with Arvie in the man cave any more than I absolutely had to.

"Well, you keep working on whatever you're working on," she said.

"Yeah, keep working on whatever I'm going to work on," I muttered.

I stared down and ahead. We were getting closer to the moment of truth. I hadn't seen anybody in my crew since that fateful day on Early Warning 72. Te day that massive explosion ripped through the doors because one of Varis's sappers had gotten a little overeager and hadn't realized she was linked to one of the humans who was trapped inside that bridge.

The guy who did it was dead in his own explosion and wasn't going to be able to make any more mistakes like that, at the very least. Varis had complained long and loud when I asked her about it, saying she would've preferred it if she could deal out her own brand of justice that involved a lot of torture.

Honestly, considering the reaction and what had happened as a result of that asshole setting off a charge that was way too explosive for that small space, I wished I could turn back in time to torture the bastard just a little myself. Or maybe go to one of those livisk mystics Varis kept talking about when she said she was going to have me resurrected so she could torture me all over again if I was stupid enough to get myself killed.

The skiff moved around a couple of large plumes of smoke. I looked down over the edge, trying to see down into the bottom of the reclamation mine. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to be seen all the way down there.

"So what are they doing down there anyway?" I asked. "What's with the plumes of smoke?"

"Mostly taking materials found in the depths of the mine and tossing them into incinerators to either be used to make energy or to melt something down so they can get at some precious metal or another."

"So is that going to hurt us being so close to those smoke plumes and breathing in everything?" I asked.

I thought about some of the planets in outlying parts of human territory. Places where poverty was the rule rather than the exception. Though there was still plenty of poverty to go around even in the central systems.

One of the drawbacks of deciding to organize society along what basically amounted to a corporatocracy was the people who were sitting on the top in all the CEO positions didn't seem to give a damn if there were people living in squalor and poverty. Not as long as they got the next target on their corporate bottom line.

There were times when I suspected they didn't fix things like poverty despite the vast resources traveling to the stars had brought humanity because it was no fun being fabulously wealthy if you didn't have someone to lord it over. The bastards. Not that I'd ever given voice to those thoughts.

That was the kind of opinion that could get you a bad performance review, after all. Not that I gave a shit about that anymore.

"There's nothing in there we wouldn't be able to take care of with a quick scrub in a medbay," she said with a shrug. "If you're really worried about it we could grab a respirator for you, but I don't think it's necessary."

"I'll take your word for it," I said, staring out for another long moment and shaking my head.

"You really aren't looking forward to seeing your crew, are you?" she asked.

She surprised me by reaching out and putting a hand on my own. Though honestly, I don't know why I was surprised. It's not like she'd been hesitant to show a public display of affection in the past, after all.

But we were in the middle of a reclamation mine. We were in the middle of what was very much enemy territory here, and I wondered that she was doing this in front of people who were still technically our enemies.

Sure they'd agreed to work for us, but I was well aware after all the trouble I had trying to get a rescue operation mounted that there was a big difference between somebody saying they worked for you and somebody actually being willing to follow orders you gave them.

"It's going to be okay," she said.

"Is it?" I asked.

"It's not like what happened out there was your fault."

I chuckled and shook my head. The skiff moved through one of those massive plumes of smoke. I thought I almost saw a little bit of purple sparkling dust going up through that same plume. I shivered, wondering at what was in that dust that it was shimmering like that.

Then we were through, and I realized the shimmering was actually from a shield bubble that had gone up around us as soon as we went through the plume. Which was probably a good thing that kept us from getting overwhelmed by the smoke surrounding us.

"I'm the one who was stupid enough to get bonded to a livisk," I said.

"Do you regret that?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Come on, Varis," I said, shaking my head. "You can feel how I feel about you in the link. I don't regret for a moment that it happened. But that doesn't make it any less my fault that it was part of the reason why my crew is down here in this reclamation mine."

I looked out across the massive reclamation mine. I knew it was a giant hole in the ground that went down through multiple layers of Imperial Seat that had been destroyed and then built over in numerous livisk civil wars.

But I wasn't prepared for the scale of everything. Like when I looked up, I could see the glow of massive antigrav plates that were constantly running to keep parts of the city up where they were supposed to be.

"Wouldn't it be simpler to just rebuild on the ground level?" I said, shaking my head as I looked at the skyscraper-sized gaps in between the lower levels of the city and the top level.

"You would think so," she said with a shrug. "But in a lot of cases, it's much easier to just set up a massive antigrav plate and have the new level be higher than the old level. Especially if there's a skyscraper, or a group of skyscrapers, that were knocked over and they don't want to tear it down."

"I guess if you make war often enough that you're destroying your city on the regular, that's a semi-sensible way to do it," I muttered. Even as, on the inside, I thought it was utter insanity.

"You know I can tell you're lying, right?"

"I know," I said. "Force of habit."

I wasn't really paying attention to our conversation any longer, though, because I could see that the skiff was coming in for a landing. We weren't quite at the very bottom of the reclamation mine, but we were getting there.

And I could see a familiar face waiting for me on the landing platform we were approaching.

Rachel.

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