The Janitor of the Starbound Circus

• Chapter 1 Dust in the Rings
• Chapter 2 The Calliope's Lament
• Chapter 3 Sweeping Up Starlight
• Chapter 4 The Veteran's Broom
• Chapter 5 Echoes of the Armistice
• Chapter 6 Between the High Wires
• Chapter 7 A Glow Beneath the Bleachers
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Big Top
• Chapter 9 The Trapeze of Shadows
• Chapter 10 Smuggled Sparks
• Chapter 11 The Ringmaster's Debt
• Chapter 12 Ghost Fleets and Acrobats
• Chapter 13 The Sawdust Vault
• Chapter 14 Clowns and Conspirators
• Chapter 15 Gravity's Defectors
• Chapter 16 Ashes of the Frontline
• Chapter 17 The Menagerie's Secret
• Chapter 18 Midnight Behind the Curtains
• Chapter 19 Orbiting Sabotage
• Chapter 20 An Invisible Spark
• Chapter 21 The Grand Illusion Cracks
• Chapter 22 Shifting Loyalties
• Chapter 23 The Sweep of War
• Chapter 24 The Final Matinee
• Chapter 25 Center Ring Reckoning
• Chapter 26 Clearing the Floor

The hardest substance to clean out of an artificial gravity ring is not spilled synth-ale, dried blood, or grease from a fried pastry cart. It is sawdust.

Specifically, it is the blue-tinted, fire-retardant cedar flakes imported from the forest moons of Kaelus-4. When the antigrav emitters under the arena floor misbehave—which they did at least twice per matinee—the sawdust did not simply settle into neat little mounds. It drifted. It caught the thermal currents of thirty thousand breathing spectators, floated into the lighting rigs, clung to the velvet curtains, and found its way into the air filters of every suit in the quadrant.

Jonas Vance pushed his heavy-headed broom through the center ring, his rubber-soled boots making a dull thump-thump against the deck plating beneath the shavings. The show had been over for two hours. The crowd had shuffled out through the pressurized umbilical ramps back into the sterile, neon-drenched corridors of Port Aethelgard, leaving behind the usual mountain of debris.

Around him, the Big Top was dying its slow, nightly death. The massive canvas tent—woven from carbon-nanotube thread to withstand both atmospheric re-entry and high-energy spotlights—hung limp from the station’s overhead girders. The primary arcs were off, replaced by the dull amber glow of the night-shift emergency lamps. High above in the shadows, the trapeze rig swung gently on its magnetic gimbals, creaking like the timbers of an old wooden sailing ship floating in a vacuum.

Jonas leaned on the shaft of his broom and wiped his forehead with the back of a scarred hand. He was fifty-four, though the radiation burns along his jawline and the stiff servo-assisted brace on his left knee made him walk like a man twenty years older. He wore gray coveralls with the emblem of the Starbound Circus stitched over the left breast: a stylized starship trailing a tail of multi-colored ribbons. The stitching was frayed, and the ribbons had mostly turned gray from years of engine grease and sweepings.

"You missed a spot, old man," a voice called down from the gloom.

Jonas didn't look up immediately. He swept a pile of peanut shells and crushed fiber-cups into his long-handled dustpan before lifting his gaze to the high wire thirty feet above the arena floor.

A young woman was dangling upside down by one ankle from a balance bar, her silver-scaled leotard catching the dim amber light. Maya. She was nineteen, born on a troop transport during the final months of the Unification War, and had never known a world that didn't smell like recycled oxygen and cheap popcorn.

"If I clean it all up now, they won't have any reason to pay me tomorrow," Jonas said. His voice was gravelly, the product of a damaged vocal cord courtesy of a bad seal during the evacuation of the Orion Line. "Besides, you're supposed to be in the crew mess getting fed."

"Barnaby's cooking tonight," Maya said, swinging herself up with effortless core strength to sit astride the wire. "Synthetic protein stew with extra synthetic spice. I'd rather starve. Or eat the sawdust."

"The sawdust is toxic if ingested in large quantities," Jonas said plainly. "Caused a lung rot outbreak on the third moon of Ceti. Read the safety slick sometime."

Maya laughed, a short, sharp sound that echoed off the empty bleachers. "You're a fountain of joy, Jonas. Truly. A walking encyclopedia of galactic misery."

"I read the warning labels. Someone has to." He pushed the broom forward another six feet, his eyes methodical, scanning the floor.

Cleaning a circus ring was a science. You started at the outer perimeter where the ground-crew ropes anchored into the deck, swept inward in concentric circles, and ended at the center pedestal where the ringmaster stood during the finale. If you missed a piece of scrap metal or a stray bolt, an acrobat could land on it and snap an ankle, or a levitating stage-platform could snag its field and send a dozen dancers plunging into the third row. In the postwar galaxy, life was cheap, but lawsuit settlements were expensive, and Barnaby ran the Starbound Circus on a margin so thin you could slice tomatoes with it.

"Did you watch the second act?" Maya asked, pulling her knees up to her chest on the wire.

"I was clearing a clog in the waste-reclamation unit under section four," Jonas replied. "Some kid dropped a souvenir light-baton down the hatch."

"I hit three spin-rotations off the high bar," she said, ignoring his grumbling. "Without the safety dampener. First time."

Jonas paused, his hands resting on the broom handle. He looked up at her, his face unreadable in the dim light. "Barnaby know?"

"He was looking at the box office receipts. He wouldn't have noticed if I'd sprouted wings and flown out the airlock." She paused, her smile fading slightly. "Was it good? From down there?"

"Didn't see it," Jonas said softly. "But you're still alive. That means it was good enough."

She snorted, though there was a hint of satisfaction in her eyes. She swung her legs down, unclipped her tether, and dropped into the safety net below with a soft whump. She rolled out of the netting with the fluid grace that made her the top-billed flyer in the outer rim, landed on her feet in the sawdust, and kicked a cloud of blue powder into the air.

"Don't do that," Jonas muttered, already sweeping over the spot she'd disturbed. "It takes twenty minutes for the dust to settle."

"You're a grumpy old ghost, Vance," she said, leaning in to punch his arm lightly. He didn't flinch. His arm was like iron beneath the canvas coveralls. She frowned slightly, her eyes flicking down to his wrists, where the faint white lines of dermal graft scars peeked out from his sleeves. She knew he had been in the war—everyone over thirty-five had been in the war—but Jonas never talked about which side he’d served on, or what fleet he’d sailed with. To the rest of the troupe, he was just the quiet guy who kept the gravity filters clear and made sure the lion-drakes didn't break out of their transport cages.

"Get some sleep, Maya," Jonas said, turning his back to her and resuming his rhythm. Push, lift, drag. Push, lift, drag.

"Yeah, yeah. Goodnight, sweeper."

Her boots clicked away down the dark performer's tunnel, leaving Jonas alone with the vast, quiet space of the tent.

The Starbound Circus was forty years old, a creaking, patched-together leviathan of canvas, steel, and antique grav-drives that hopped from system to system along the battered edges of civilized space. It was a place for people who didn't fit into the brave new galactic order—retired veterans, unregistered refugees, genetic freaks, and disgraced performers. As long as you could haul a cable, ride a unicycle, or smile for the kids in the third row, nobody asked for your identity chips or your military service record.

Which suited Jonas just fine.

He reached the edge of Ring Two, where the floor met the bottom row of plastic bleachers. The arena lights flickered, hummed a low B-flat tone, and dropped another ten percent in brightness as the station switched to cycle-night power.

Jonas bent down to pick up a discarded plastic mask depicting the face of High Admiral Vance—no relation, though the name made Jonas grimace every time he saw it stamped on cheap merchandise. He tossed it into the hopper on his push-cart.

Then his broom struck something heavy.

It didn't make the hollow clack of a plastic toy or the light ping of an aluminum drink bulb. It was a dull, dense thud, like lead striking lead.

Jonas stopped. He dragged the bristles of the broom backward, pulling a layer of blue sawdust with them.

Lying in the dirt, half-buried under a pile of discarded popcorn bags, was a dark gray cylinder about eight inches long and three inches thick. It looked like an engine coupling at first glance, but Jonas knew metal the way a jeweler knew diamonds.

He didn't touch it immediately. He stood straight up, his eyes darting toward the empty bleachers, then up into the catwalks, then toward the dark mouths of the exit tunnels. The arena was empty. The only sound was the distant, rhythmic hum of Port Aethelgard's life-support turbines echoing through the hull plates.

Jonas knelt, his bad knee popping softly in the quiet. He reached out with a gloved hand and brushed the rest of the cedar flakes away from the object.

It was made of Aegis-grade stealth alloy—non-reflective, cold to the touch, and far too dense for commercial transit. There were no serial numbers stamped on its casing, no manufacturer logos, no bright warning labels. But along its spine were four recessed contact points, shaped like teardrops, coated in conductive palladium.

Jonas’s chest tightened. His breath caught in his throat, smelling of dust and old cold coffee.

He knew what this was. He hadn't seen one in twelve years, not since the surrender at the Siege of Tauri-Prime, but a man doesn't forget the core component of an orbital targeting array. This wasn't a circus prop. It wasn't garbage dropped by a spectator from the upper decks.

This was military hardware. The kind used by special operations units to paint targets through three miles of solid planetary crust.

And it was still warm.

Jonas reached out and touched the side of the cylinder with his thumb. A tiny green diode buried deep within the palladium recessed points pulsed once—a slow, rhythmic blink that meant it was actively searching for a signal.

He sat back on his heels, the heavy grav-broom lying forgotten in the sawdust beside him.

The circus was currently docked at Port Aethelgard, a deep-space refueling hub floating on the edge of the neutral zone between the remnant Coalition forces and the newly formed Regional Authority. It was a crossroads for smugglers, war criminals, deserting soldiers, and honest traders just trying to keep their ships from falling apart.

A piece of gear like this didn't just fall out of someone's pocket during a matinee. It was meant to be dropped. It was meant to be collected. Or worse, it was meant to be left behind to broadcast.

Jonas looked up at the ceiling of the Big Top, past the high wire, past the light trusses, to the thick black fabric of the roof. Beyond that fabric lay two inches of hull plate, and beyond that lay the freezing, endless void of space—and whatever ships were currently hovering in the dark, waiting for a signal.

From the dark mouth of the central tunnel, the heavy, drunken footfalls of Barnaby, the ringmaster, echoed into the ring.

"Jonas!" Barnaby bellowed, his voice carrying the theatrical boom he used to announce the lion-drakes, though it was somewhat ruined by a wet cough. "You done with the floor yet? The port authority inspector is coming aboard at zero-six-hundred, and if he finds one piece of popcorn on the deck, he’s going to fine us another fifty credits!"

Jonas didn't answer right away. His fingers closed around the cold, heavy cylinder of Aegis alloy. It slipped easily into the deep side pocket of his work coveralls.

He picked up his broom and swept a fresh layer of blue sawdust over the spot where the cylinder had been lying.

"Almost done, Boss," Jonas called back, his voice flat and steady, the voice of an invisible man who didn't want to be noticed. "Just clearing the last ring."

The maintenance bay of the Starbound Circus smelled of warm ozone, fried hydraulic fluid, and the faint, sweet decay of old fruit from the menagerie cages down the hall. It sat directly beneath the center ring, tucked into the narrow gap between the primary atmospheric scrubbers and the sub-deck gravity plates. To anyone else on the ship, it was a noisy, cramped utility closet full of spare parts and discarded rigging. To Jonas, it was the only place in the galaxy where nobody asked him what he had been doing fifteen years ago.

He bolted the hatch behind him, turning the heavy iron wheel until the rubber seals groaned.

The room was lit by a single bare phosphorescent tube hung over a workbench cluttered with wire strippers, solder tins, and half-disassembled grav-couplings. Jonas set his broom against the wall, reached into his coverall pocket, and pulled out the gray cylinder.

Up close, under the harsh white light, the object looked even more out of place. The finish wasn't just painted; it was covered in an anti-reflective radar-absorbent coating that swallowed the room's glare. Jonas set it down on a dirty rag. The cold metal gave off a faint metallic ping as it expanded slightly in the ambient heat of the workshop.

He reached into a drawer beneath his bench and brought out a handheld diagnostic wand—an ancient piece of military surplus with a cracked liquid-crystal screen. He clicked it on, swept the sensor over the cylinder, and waited.

The screen flickered, spat out two lines of static, and then displayed a string of red hexadecimal code.

Jonas closed his eyes for a second, letting out a long, slow breath through his nose. He knew that code format. It wasn't Coalition standard, nor was it used by the Regional Authority's border patrols. It belonged to the 7th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing of the Vanguard Arm—a unit that had officially been disbanded, disarmed, and scattered to the solar winds following the armistice at the Orion Line.

The cylinder wasn't just a passive marker. It was an active transponder, designed to pulse on a tightly compressed hyper-frequency band. Every seven seconds, the palladium contact points glowed green, sending out a signal so brief and low-powered that standard station scanners would mistake it for background cosmic radiation.

"Targeting repeater," Jonas muttered to himself, his scarred fingers resting lightly beside the alloy casing. "Positioned inside a civilian habitat ring. You clever, rotten bastards."

If a strike fleet was warming its long-range plasma batteries out in the dark beyond Port Aethelgard, this little tube was designed to tell them precisely where to burn a hole through the station's hull.

Before Jonas could reach for a ceramic-shielded container to block the signal, a deep, shuddering vibration shook the floorboards beneath his boots. The metal walls of the maintenance bay hummed in resonance, followed immediately by a screeching, warbling blast of sound that rattled the tools on his rack.

It sounded like a brass band being dragged through an industrial turbine.

Jonas grimaced and rubbed his temple. The Calliope had started up again.

The Starbound Calliope wasn't an ordinary musical instrument. It was a fifteen-ton monstrosity of brass pipes, copper steam-tubes, and ancient vacuum-tube amplifiers mounted to the rear chassis of the circus’s primary transport hull. Originally designed as a shipboard interior signaling system during the early days of deep-space colonization, it had been modified fifty years ago by a mad dwarf accordionist who had turned it into the loudest musical instrument in the Sector. When the Calliope played, it didn't just fill the Big Top with sound; it rattled the teeth in your skull and shook loose the soot in the station's exhaust flues.

Right now, however, it wasn't playing the cheerful, jaunty march that usually opened the matinee. It was screaming.

A series of disjointed, mournful tones echoed down through the deck plating—a low, descending minor chord followed by a screeching whistle that sounded alarmingly like a wounded animal.

Jonas grabbed a pair of insulated work gloves, shoved the stealth cylinder into a heavy lead-lined tool box on his bench, locked the latch, and picked up a heavy wrench. He tossed his broom back onto its rack, unlocked the bay hatch, and stepped out into the damp, echoing corridor.

The noise grew louder as he climbed the iron rung ladder leading to the aft stage-rigging platform. The air was thick with the smell of scalding water and burnt oil. High above the ring floor, perched on a iron gantry suspended between two structural bulkheads, sat the Calliope.

Standing on the operating bench in front of the massive bronze keyboard was Oona, a four-armed Phalian technician whose skin was the color of bruised plums. She was furiously pounding at the stuck keys with two hands while using her other two hands to throw pressure-relief valves on the main steam manifold. Clouds of white vapor billowed around her goggles, making her look like a phantom trapped in a cloud of boiling fog.

"Shut it down, Oona!" Jonas yelled over the din, climbing onto the gantry platform.

"I can't!" she shrieked back, her four ears flattened tight against her skull. "The automated sequencer is locked up! Something is feeding a dirty signal directly into the logic board! It’s driving the steam valves crazy!"

The Calliope gave another agonized wail—a long, descending howl that sounded like a ship’s hull tearing open in deep vacuum. Down in the dark arena below, the lion-drakes in their sub-level transport pens began to roar in response, their heavy iron cages rattling as they slammed their scaled bodies against the bars.

Jonas scrambled across the grease-slicked catwalk to the rear of the instrument. The central processing unit for the Calliope was an ancient, grease-stained brass housing packed with glass vacuum tubes and thick bundles of cloth-wrapped copper wire.

He unlatched the maintenance panel and peered inside.

Three of the glass tubes were glowing with an intense, unnatural purple light rather than their normal soft amber. They were vibrating so violently in their sockets that small specks of blue sparks were jumping between the leads.

Jonas didn't need a diagnostic manual to figure out what was happening. The Calliope’s unshielded vacuum tubes were acting as an antenna. They were picking up the hyper-frequency pulses from the stealth cylinder sitting in his toolbox downstairs, amplifying the signal through the instrument’s high-voltage power coils, and feeding it straight into the mechanical steam actuators.

Every time the targeting transponder pulsed its silent message into space, the Calliope screamed.

"Get back," Jonas told Oona, reaching for the heavy main breaker lever on the side of the housing.

"Don't pull that!" Oona yelled, waving two wrench-wielding hands at him frantically. "If you drop the main grid instantly without venting the pressure, the boiler manifold will burst! We'll all be boiled like cave-crabs!"

"Then hold this," Jonas grunted. He jammed his heavy wrench into the primary steam bypass gate, using his body weight to force the stubborn valve lever downward against the pressurized steam.

"More pressure!" Oona shouted, leaning her upper two arms against his shoulders to add her weight to the bar.

Together, they shoved the lever down. A massive jet of superheated steam hissed out of the top relief vent, filling the upper reaches of the Big Top with a dense white cloud. The high-pitched whistle died down to a sputtering, rhythmic hiss.

Jonas took advantage of the brief drop in line pressure to reach around the back of the logic housing with his free hand. Ignoring the blistering heat radiating off the glass, he grabbed the middle vacuum tube, twisted it hard, and ripped it out of its socket.

The circuit broke. The purple glow snapped out instantly.

The Calliope gave one final, miserable hiccup—a faint plink from a stuck middle-C whistle—and went dead silent.

The sudden quiet in the vast, empty arena was deafening. The only sounds left were the slow, rhythmic drip-drip-drip of condensed steam falling from the steel girders onto the blue sawdust thirty feet below, and the harsh breathing of the two mechanics leaning against the gantry rail.

Oona pushed her goggles up onto her forehead, wiping a streak of black grease across her violet nose. She glared at the glowing glass tube in Jonas's gloved hand.

"That wasn't a mechanical failure," she said, her four eyes narrowing as she looked at him. "That tube was driven off-frequency by an external pulse. What in the seven hells was that, Vance?"

Jonas didn't look at her. He dropped the hot vacuum tube into his coverall pocket alongside his rag.

"Old equipment," Jonas said evenly, his voice returning to its normal flat, unhurried tone. "Station power grid must have spiked when they switched Port Aethelgard over to the night cycle. The ground wires in these old ships are full of corrosion."

Oona snorted, wiping her hands on a greasy rag. "A power spike doesn't tune a vacuum tube to a military-grade sub-harmonic band, old man. I know what radio feedback sounds like. Something was talking to this ship."

"Then go tell Barnaby," Jonas said, stepping back onto the ladder rungs. "He loves hearing about expensive problems he can't afford to fix."

"You're a miserable liar, Vance," she called down after him as he began his descent. "One of these days, I'm going to look up your service record in the old navy registries."

"Save your credits," Jonas said without looking up. "The archives burned during the retreat from System Six. There’s nothing left to read."

He climbed down off the gantry, his bad knee throbbing with a dull, familiar ache as his boots hit the deck plate.

As he walked back through the darkened staging tunnel toward the main promenade, he could hear the faint, muffled sounds of Port Aethelgard through the ship's outer hull. The station was a massive, rotating wheel of steel and glass, housing fifty thousand souls who were all trying to forget the war that had ended five years ago. But war, Jonas knew better than most, wasn't something that simply vanished when a piece of paper was signed in a neutral capital. It just broke down into smaller, meaner pieces. It hid in the corners, under the bleachers, and inside the blue cedar dust.

He made his way toward the circus's main entry hatch, where the pressurized gangway connected the Starbound Circus to the station’s commercial concourse.

Standing near the perimeter security gate, lit by the flickering pink neon sign of a cheap noodle bar across the corridor, was Barnaby. The ringmaster had discarded his bright red velvet tailcoat for a worn leather jacket that stretched dangerously tight over his massive belly. He was gesturing wildly with an unlit synthetic cigar at a man standing on the other side of the turnstile.

The man facing Barnaby wasn't a station dockworker or a local patron looking for matinee tickets.

He wore a tailored dark gray trench coat made of dense, slate-colored fabric that showed no seams or buttons—the standard attire of a Regional Authority trade inspector, or at least that was what the official badge pinned to his lapel claimed. But Jonas took one look at the man’s stance—feet set shoulder-width apart, weight balanced precisely on the balls of his heels, right hand resting casually near his left ribs where a shoulder holster would sit—and knew instantly what he was looking at.

That man had never inspected a cargo manifest in his life. He was a hunter.

"I told you, Inspector," Barnaby was saying, his booming voice tinged with the slick, practiced charm he used on angry creditors. "We’re fully compliant with all local sanitary and safety codes! The lion-drakes are double-caged, the gravity rings are calibrated every forty-eight hours, and my sweepers keep the floor cleaner than an admiral's mess deck!"

"I'm not here about the sawdust, Mr. Barnaby," the inspector said. His voice was smooth, quiet, and completely devoid of emotion. He had sharp, pale eyes that swept across the interior of the circus ship like a pair of searchlights, taking in every rigging line, every camera, and every doorway. "We picked up an anomalous signal pulse originating from this sector of the station roughly twenty minutes ago. High-density, short-burst broadcast."

"Signal?" Barnaby chuckled nervously, tapping his cigar against the iron turnstile. "My dear man, we run a circus! We have electric lights, levitation fields, music synthesizers, and sixty performers running around with wireless comm-beads. The air in here is practically made of signals! It’s probably just our Calliope acting up again—the damn thing just blew a valve five minutes ago!"

The inspector's eyes shifted past Barnaby's shoulder, locking onto Jonas as he walked slowly up the aisle with his broom rested over his shoulder.

Jonas didn't slow down, and he didn't speed up. He kept his head down, his shoulders slightly hunched, adopting the dull, weary posture of an old laborer who had just finished a twelve-hour shift sweeping up trash.

"You there," the inspector called out, stepping closer to the turnstile. "Janitor."

Jonas stopped, blinking slowly as if it took him a moment to process that he was being addressed. He leaned on the shaft of his broom and looked up with an expression of dull, gape-mouthed confusion.

"Yeah?" Jonas grunted.

"Did you notice anything unusual while you were cleaning the main ring tonight?" the inspector asked. His pale eyes flicked down to Jonas's hands, inspecting the scarred knuckles and the gray grime beneath his fingernails. "Any discarded equipment? Electronics? Small metallic components?"

Jonas shifted his weight, letting his bad knee buckle slightly so he appeared shorter than he was. He pulled the oily rag out of his pocket—the one he had used to handle the hot vacuum tube—and wiped his nose with it.

"Found three broken souvenir light-sticks, four empty beer bulbs, and half a fried dough-nut under section six," Jonas said, keeping his voice thick and slow. "Kid dropped a plastic toy in the waste hatch earlier, but I cleared it out. You want the light-sticks? They’re in the hopper."

The inspector looked at Jonas for three long seconds. Jonas suffered the glare without blinking, letting his gaze wander vaguely toward the neon signs of the noodle bar across the concourse.

Finally, the inspector sneered slightly—a subtle curling of his upper lip that signaled the contempt of a polished agent looking at a broken piece of human trash—and turned back to Barnaby.

"If your crew finds any unaccounted-for hardware in the arena, Barnaby, you are required under Section Four of the Emergency Powers Act to surrender it immediately to the Port Authority," the inspector said softly. "Failure to comply carries a penalty of ship impoundment and immediate detention of all personnel."

"Of course, of course!" Barnaby smiled broadly, though the sweat glinting on his forehead under the neon light suggested he understood the threat perfectly. "We are loyal citizens of the Authority, Inspector. Always have been!"

"See that you remain so," the man said. He turned on his heel and walked away down the crowded concourse, his gray coat snapping around his boots with military precision.

Barnaby watched him go until the man vanished into the crowd of spacers and station dwellers. As soon as the inspector was out of sight, the ringmaster let out a long breath, pulled a silver flask from his coat pocket, and took a deep swig.

"Smug little bureaucrat," Barnaby muttered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He turned to look at Jonas, his brow furrowed. "What was all that noise up on the gantry a minute ago? Oona looked like she was about to blow a gasket."

"Dirty power tube," Jonas said, nodding back toward the ship's interior. "Replaced it. The Calliope's fine now."

"Good," Barnaby sighed, rubbing his face. "Because if that infernal machine dies completely, we don't have the cash to replace it. We’re already running on a shoestring, Jonas. The station docking fees just went up another twenty percent, and if we don't sell out the weekend matinees, I'm going to have to start selling off the spare parts."

He looked at Jonas for a second, his expression softening just a fraction. Barnaby had bought the Starbound Circus ten years ago at an auction for bankrupted civilian transports, and he knew as well as anyone that half the people working under his canvas roof were running from something. But Barnaby was a showman, not an investigator. As long as the show started on time and the floor was clean, he didn't care what names his crew had used during the war.

"Go get some food, Jonas," Barnaby said softly. "You look like hell. Leave the rest of the bleachers for the morning shift."

"Floor's already swept, Boss," Jonas said, turning back toward the dark interior of the ship. "Just need to lock up my tools."

He walked back down the quiet tunnel, his footsteps soft against the deck plates.

The encounter with the inspector confirmed what Jonas had feared the moment his broom had struck the gray cylinder in the blue sawdust. The transponder hadn't been dropped by accident, and it hadn't been left behind by a careless spectator.

Port Aethelgard was a strategic choke-point for the entire sector—a massive hub connecting three major trade routes and two military sectors. If someone was planting targeting repeaters inside a civilian circus ship docked at the central hub, it meant the war wasn't over. It was just changing shape.

Jonas reached his workshop, unbolted the door, and stepped inside.

He didn't turn on the overhead light this time. He sat down in the dark on his wooden stool, pulled the lead-lined toolbox onto his lap, and flicked the latch open.

Inside, the four palladium contact points on the stealth cylinder pulsed again—green, steady, and indifferent.

Jonas pulled off his work glove and ran his fingertips over the scarred skin along his left jawline. Beneath his sleeve, the old nerve-damage in his knee throbbed in time with the transponder's pulse.

Twelve years ago, he had been Commander Jonas Vance of the Third Fleet's Forward Engineering Corps. He had spent four years building defense grids and three years tearing them down again when the lines collapsed. When the final surrender came, he had walked away from the wreckage of his ship, tossed his dog tags into a re-recycling chute, and taken a job sweeping up popcorn and cedar shavings for a traveling circus.

He had spent a decade making himself invisible. He was the old man with the broom. The guy who cleared out the waste drains and fixed the stuck valves. The man nobody looked at twice.

Jonas reached down, picked up his heavy iron wrench from the bench, and held it over the targeting transponder.

One hard strike against the palladium contacts would shatter the delicate crystal logic board inside, deadening the signal forever. Barnaby would pack up the circus in three days, they would drop their docking clamps, and they would jump to the next system on their tour, leaving Port Aethelgard and its shadow war behind.

Jonas raised the wrench.

Then he stopped.

Through the thin steel wall of his workshop, he heard the faint, echoing sound of footsteps on the upper catwalks. It was Maya, practicing her footwork on the high wire in the dark, her light boots tapping out a quiet rhythm against the steel cables. Down the hall, one of the lion-drakes let out a soft, rumbling huff in its sleep, followed by the quiet chatter of the Phalian technicians fixing the steam lines.

If he smashed the transponder now, whoever planted it would know the signal had been compromised. They would send another agent—or worse, a recovery squad—to find out what happened to it. And they wouldn't start by asking polite questions in the promenade. They would search the ship from the bilges to the Big Top canvas.

Jonas lowered the wrench slowly, setting it back on the bench with a soft clink.

He closed the lid of the lead-lined box, slid the heavy iron deadbolt into place, and buried the box deep beneath a pile of spare grav-dampener coils in the corner of his workshop.

The Starbound Circus was a ship of ghosts, run by fools, dreamers, and dropouts who had nowhere else left to go in a broken galaxy. But it was his ship.

Jonas pulled his old cap down over his eyes, leaned back against the bulkhead, and listened to the slow, steady rhythm of the station's life-support pumps echoing through the iron hull.

Outside, in the dark between the stars, the fleet was waiting. But inside the ring, the sawdust was clean.