Porti & ambiente — le notizie raccolte

JIAXING, China, June 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Shortly after 11:00 on May 28, YTO Airlines flight YG9007 took off from the runway, heading directly to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. This marked the inauguration of the first international cargo route at the YTO’s Jiaxing Global Aviation Logistics Hub – YTO SKYHUB, and the official activation of the hub’s international functions. It also signified a crucial step forward for YTO in its development goal of becoming an international integrated supply chain integrator. At the launch ceremony, Yu Huijiao, Chairman of YTO Express Group Co, stated that after more than a decade of meticulous planning and over three years of intensive construction, YTO SKYHUB had finally come to fruition. With the takeoff of the first cargo flight, a new “hub era” had been announced. YTO will remain committed to the principle: “Put market customer experience first, create value for customers; use our products and services to help customers achieve excellence and outstanding performance.” Following the guidelines of “full functionality, competitive costs, fast transit times, good service, strong technology, pleasant environment, and industry clustering,” YTO aims to transform YTO SKYHUB into a world-class aviation logistics hub and a new engine for high-quality regional economic development. The inaugural flight was operated by YTO Airlines' "Jiaxing" B767 freighter, with three flights scheduled per week. The flight will transport goods, mainly from the Yangtze River Delta industrial belt, such as garments, footwear and leather fabrics, computer and mobile phone accessories, auto parts, and cross-border e-commerce parcels, to South Asia, providing stable transport capacity for export goods from Yangtze River Delta enterprises to the South Asian market. The return trip of the subsequent shipping routes will bring back seasonal seafood from the Bay of Bengal, further enriching the domestic consumer market and achieving efficient two-way circulation. By the end of the year, YTO SKYHUB is expected to open more than ten international routes, connecting important cargo hubs in Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, the Americas and Europe, initially realizing a route layout that "radiating across Asia, reaching Europe and the Americas", and building a convenient air channel for regional foreign trade. As the core hub for this inaugural international cargo flight, the hub capacity of YTO SKYHUB is being rapidly released. This specialized air logistics hub embodies the national strategic positioning of "One Center—Jiaxing Air Transport Center, and Three Hubs—National Logistics Hub, Specialized Air Logistics Hub, and Global Postal Express Hub”. With a total investment of 12.2 billion yuan and covering an area of approximately 1,500 mu, the project encompasses seven major functional zones, including an air cargo terminal, smart warehousing, a comprehensive bonded zone, a multimodal transport center, and aircraft maintenance. By integrating air, rail, sea, and road transport into a multimodal system, it will establish a comprehensive international air logistics hub featuring full-spectrum coverage, end-to-end connectivity, and ecosystem integration. The opening and operation of YTO SKYHUB will further amplify Jiaxing’s locational advantages as a central hub in the Yangtze River Delta. The hub provides rapid connections to the Zha-Jia-Su Expressway and the Airport Cargo Corridor, among other highway and high-speed rail networks, and links to surrounding maritime and air hubs such as Pudong International Airport, Xiaoshan International Airport, and Zhapu Port. Through multimodal transport corridors, it establishes a 90-minute coverage zone for major cargo sources across the Yangtze River Delta and a 1.5-hour linkage zone for the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Suzhou-Ningbo metropolitan area, and a 3-hour air travel zone covering major industrial belts and population centers nationwide, thereby solidifying the foundation for industrial and supply chain distribution and logistics. Aligned with the national strategy of high-level opening-up, the “dual circulation” new development paradigm, and Strategy for integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, YTO SKYHUB will deeply integrate industrial and supply chains, using the port to drive industrial development. It will facilitate the establishment of hundred-billion-yuan-scale upstream and downstream industrial clusters in sectors such as biopharmaceuticals and semiconductors, thereby promoting the growth of the aerotropolis economy. In the future, YTO SKYHUB will be developed into a new hub, new corridor, new gateway, and new high ground for global commerce and logistics, serving both domestic and international dual circulation and driving the steady expansion of China’s industrial global outreach and openness. Company: YTO ExpressWebsite:https://www.yto.net.cn/Email: xujunjun@yto.net.cnCity: Beijing

There's a watery new way to travel between Chula Vista and downtown San Diego. The ferry boat Balboa began service Monday morning, its maiden voyage starting from the Chula Vista waterfront. Owned and operated byFlagship Cruises and Events, the 30-foot-long, diesel-powered Balboa will take up to 32 passengers per trip from the Chula Vista Marina to the Fifth Avenue landing behind the San Diego Convention Center. The ferry will be more than just a fun way to get downtown, Chula Vista Mayor John McCann said. "Economically, this is a game changer," he said. "This connection will bring more visitors to Chula Vista supporting our local businesses, restaurants, supporting small entrepreneurs. It will also make it easier for residents to access jobs, and opportunities throughout the region." Anne Moore, chair of the board for the Port of San Diego, said the ferry has been a long time coming. "That's why a future ferry terminal was included as part of theChula Vista master bayfront planfrom the very beginning," Moore said. She said new waterfront development doesn’t have to increase traffic. "That’s why we want to provide multiple options to get around," Moore said. "Like the bayfront shuttle as well as the expanded Sweetwater bike path. It’s about making it easier for people to enjoy our waterfront." The Balboa has a speed of 10 knots, or about 11 mph. A one-way trip will take around 45 minutes. But speed isn’t the point of this ride, McCann said. "Environmentally, this is a step forward," he said. "By offering an alternative to driving we’re helping to reduce traffic congestion on our roads, lowering emissions, and this is about building a more sustainable future while improving quality of life." A trip on the Balboa will cost $15 each way, and the ferry will make six round trips per day.

ByCHRISTIAN CALGIE, SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT-AT-LARGEandGETHIN HICKS, REPORTER Published:23:59 BST, 1 June 2026|Updated:02:18 BST, 2 June 2026 Angela Rayner was branded a 'destabilising' figure within the government in one of the few references made to the former Deputy Prime Minister in thePeter Mandelsonfiles. In May last year, Lord Mandelson claimed that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown 'has it in for Keir', adding that the ex-premier 'doesn't seriously believe that Angela is an alternative but she is an instrument of destabilisation.' Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden accused Ms Rayner of 'manoeuvring' against Sir Keir in the same text exchange, adding: 'Doesn't feel good for Keir.' Ms Rayner was also criticised by Mr McFadden for being 'notably silent' at an 'away day' designed to shore up SirKeir Starmer's position. The former Housing Secretary played a key role in pushing the government to publish the Mandelson files when theConservativesforced a vote in February. The more than 1,500 pages of material which were released on Monday offered a stark glimpse into the chaos which has ensued behind the scenes in Starmer's government. Mandelson and ministers were exposed as having discussed how things 'don't look good' for the PM, while staff at No10 were branded 'sub-optimal'. Wes Streeting - until recently the health secretary and now a leadership hopeful - was described by Mandelson as sending a 'wild long hysterical message' criticising Israel. Angela Rayner (pictured in May) was branded a 'destabilising' figure within the government in one of the few references made to the former Deputy Prime Minister in the Peter Mandelson files The release of the second tranche of files relating to Mandelson's appointment sparked chaos in the Labour government And the carnage within Labour was foreshadowed by a handwritten note from Mandelson to then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy at the end of 2024, saying Sir Keir would 'never regret' appointing him as US ambassador. Lammy however later apologised for his part in Mandelson's appointment and, in a letter sent to MP Emily Thornberry, revealed that he suggested Tory councillor George Osborne for the role. Lammy said: 'I suggested George Osbourne should be considered on any shortlist given his close links with senior Republican figures.' The Labour politician also suggested David Miliband, Dame Valerie Amos and Dame Cathy Ashton as possible candidates. The release of the second tranche of files was later branded an 'embarrassment' for Sir Keir, who kept a decidedly low profile yesterday before being pictured in the back of an Audi near Mandelson's Regent's Park home in the evening. Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater Joe Powell called on the government to learn its lessons after Andy Burnham launched a scathing criticism on X. In the wake of the files' release the Mayor of Manchester, who has been tipped to succeed Starmer, wrote: 'Today's revelations will further damage people's confidence in our political system. 'When I left Westminster 10 years ago, I did so in the belief that it needed fundamental culture change. I remain of that view and believe that change can't come soon enough. 'People have lost faith in a Westminster system which puts private vested interests above the wider public interest and concentrates too much power in too few hands. 'We urgently need a national politics which, rather than looking past places like Makerfield, properly works for them. We need a new political culture that is rooted in accountability and a genuine focus on the priorities of working people. 'If we are serious about restoring trust in politics, we must rebuild a system where public service is at the heart of decision-making.'

This 2021 Airstream Interstate 24GT was built on a 2020 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 3500 chassis, and it now has 7k miles. The van was acquired by the current owner in 2024, and it has been retrofitted with on-board WiFi and satellite connectivity. Finished in Iridium Silver Metallic over a Refined Brown-themed interior, the van is powered by a 3.0-liter turbodiesel V6 linked with a seven-speed automatic transmission. The walk-through floor plan includes a lounge area that converts to a sleeping surface, a flatscreen TV, a cooktop, a refrigerator, a shower, a generator, and interior storage. A dually rear axle and 16″ Alcoa aluminum wheels are also fitted along with a power-operated awning, an exterior shower, and Parktronic sensors. This Airstream Interstate 24GT is now offered by the seller on behalf of the owner with a brochure, owner’s manuals, spare parts, and a clean Arizona title in the owner’s name that lists the truck as a 2020 AITC EXT Grand. The extended-height van is finished in Iridium Silver Metallic and is equipped with a power-operated awning. Additional features include hookups for water and shore power as well as a ceiling vent, tinted windows, Parktronic sensors, fog lights, side steps, and a receiver hitch. The 16″ Alcoa aluminum wheels are mounted with 215/85 Continental VanContact A/S tires. The van rides on an air-adjustable suspension and a solid dually rear axle, and braking is handled by discs at all four corners. The chassis is equipped with an Electronic Stability Program (ESP). The brake fluid was flushed in July 2025. The heated and swiveling captain’s chairs are upholstered in Refined Brown leatherette, and interior appointments include all-weather front floor mats, Distronic cruise control, crosswind assist, automatic climate control, and MBUX infotainment with navigation. The leather-wrapped multifunction steering wheel sits ahead of a 130-mph speedometer, a 5k-rpm tachometer, a digital information display, and gauges for coolant temperature and fuel level. The digital odometer indicates 7k miles, approximately 5k of which were added under current ownership. The rear cabin is outfitted with a kitchenette with a refrigerator, cooktop, and microwave oven, as well as inward-facing seats, storage cabinets, a flatscreen TV, overhead lighting, and a power-folding rear sofa. A full-time on-board WiFi system has been added, along with satellite connectivity. The van also has a generator, two AGM batteries, a roof-mounted climate-control system, a toilet, a sink, and a shower. The bathroom sink was replaced in 2024. The 3.0-liter turbodiesel V6 was factory rated at 188 horsepower and 325 lb-ft of torque. The fuel pump module was replaced in 2020, and the seller notes that the oil has been changed annually under current ownership. The oil was most recently changed in July 2025. Power is routed to the rear wheels through a seven-speed automatic transmission. The Carfax report shows no accidents or other reported damage. We need to confirm your billing address in order to appropriately charge fees and taxes should you win an auction. Please provide your billing address below. Congratulations! You're the high bidder. Your bid has been posted in the comment flow on the listing, and you can see other bids there as they happen. Good luck! Please confirm if the following details are aligned with your current contact information. If not, pleaseupdate your profile. Bidding will advance immediately to $. The BaT Service Fee is 5% of the bid, with a minimum of $250 up to a maximum of $7,500.VAT on Service Fee is charged in USD If you win the auction, your card will be charged for the service fee and you pay the seller directly for the vehicle. If you don't win, your existing pre-authorization will be released. When you bid we pre-authorize your credit card for the service fee(this helps prevent fraud). If you win the auction, your card will be charged for the service fee and you pay the seller directly for the vehicle. If you don't win, the pre-authorization will be released. *Exchange Rates You are bidding for this item in USD. This means, if you have the winning bid, you will need to make your payment to the seller in USD. It is your responsibility to check the conversion rate, and you should also note that exchange rates may fluctuate between now and the due date of your payment after the end of the auction. Taxation If you are the highest bidder, you will also need to pay the seller any applicable taxes/VAT. Your bid may not be inclusive of these amounts. Relevant details are included in the listing, so please ensure you have read and understood this information before placing your bid. Note that, if you will need to import the vehicle to your country, you may be responsible for import-related taxes. For more info,read about our auctionsoremail uswith any questions. By clicking on “Place a Bid” below, I acknowledge that theright to cancelservice will not apply once the bid has been placed, as the service will be provided immediately and agree to Bring a Trailer’sTerms of Use. Your bid of $is $more that the current high bid of $. Are you sure you want to proceed? Bring a Trailer Verified Checkout Available

The rise of autonomous, long-running AI agents has introduced a new class of compute demand, namely tasks that maintain large context windows, spawn concurrent subagents, and iterate continuously without cloud dependency. Security and privacy concerns are also accelerating the shift toward local agents. Developers, by running autonomous agents on hardware they own withNVIDIA NemoClaworchestrating execution, can keep sensitive context on-device, retain direct control over what an agent can access and eliminate per-token costs. NVIDIA DGX Sparkis designed to build and run autonomous agents locally. At Computex 2026, NVIDIA is making it significantly easier to get there, introducing a streamlined path from unboxing to running AI agents in minutes (excluding initial model download, which depends on network speed). There are also model performance improvements with Qwen3.6 and a guided multi-node cluster setup for teams that need to scale beyond a single device. This post will cover what these updates mean for developers building agentic AI systems, including how to installNVIDIA NemoClaw, what it sets up, and how to build and run your first agent with OpenClaw on DGX Spark. Getting a local AI agent running has historically involved sourcing the right model, configuring an inference backend, installing a runtime, and wiring them together. That process could take the better part of a day even for experienced developers. The new streamlined NemoClaw installation path changes that. For new systems, the experience begins with unboxing and first-time setup of DGX Spark. The latest version of the DGX Spark system software,the June 2026 release, delivers the most streamlined out-of-box experience (OOBE) yet so users can reach local agents faster. With this release, over-the-air updates are no longer installed by default during initial setup, reducing setup time and getting users to the Ubuntu desktop sooner. NemoClawis an open source blueprint that packages three things into a single install: open models, an agent harness, like Hermes Agent or OpenClaw, and theNVIDIA OpenShell runtime. OpenShell is a secure, sandboxed execution environment designed for running autonomous agents more safely. It adds access controls, privacy protections, and operational guardrails to the agent loop. Combined with on-device inference, this gives developers a stronger default security and privacy posture for agentic workloads. Figure 1, below, shows the full path from OOBE completion to a running NemoClaw agent on DGX Spark. After completing OOBE, DGX Spark reboots and opensbuild.nvidia.com/sparkwith the NemoClaw playbook prominently displayed for a guided walkthrough. Run this single command to install Node.js (if needed), install OpenShell, clone the latest stable NemoClaw release, build the CLI, and run the onboard wizard to create a sandbox. The installation wizard walks you through setup: Learn more about how to install NemoClaw on your DGX Spark/GB10 system:Start with NemoClaw on DGX Spark → Once the install completes, you are ready to customize your agents. First, interact using WebUI: Then open the tokenized URL in a browser:http://127.0.0.1:18789/#token=<WEBUI_TOKEN>. Use 127.0.0.1 exactly — the gateway origin check requires it (notlocalhost). Send a quick test message —"hello” or “what can you do?” — to confirm the full stack is up. The local Ollama model is already selected; NemoClaw configures this automatically during onboarding. With your sandbox running, theNemoClaw Applications playbookoffers four ready-to-run agents to get started — each with policy setup, a starter prompt, and personalization guidance: With the sandbox running, the main levers for shaping agent behavior are: Developers can further customize by swapping in different models, adjusting OpenShell permissions, and connecting the agent to local workflows. To spin up a new sandbox with a different model, runnemoclaw onboard --fresh --gpuand select a different model during the wizard. Note that —freshdestroys and recreates the existing sandbox — use--name <new-name>to create an additional sandbox without affecting existing ones. The fullNemoClaw install instructionsand model catalog are available on NVIDIA NGC. Tip:Start narrow. Give the agent a single, well-scoped task on your first run, such as “summarize a file” or “answer a question” from a local document. Verify that the response and tool calls look right before expanding its permissions. A few commands worth keeping handy as you iterate: Developers can experience up to 2.6x faster inference with top agentic models like Qwen 3.6 35B on vLLM withNVIDIA’s NVFP4 quantized checkpointusing MTP optimizations. Additional improvements to vLLM CUDA Graph support for MTP with FlashInfer, BF16 autotuning across FlashInfer MoE kernels, TinyGEMM and cuBLAS BF16 paths. For developers who need more memory or throughput than a single DGX Spark can provide, the cluster assistant inNVIDIA Syncautomates the process of connecting two to four DGX Spark units into a high-bandwidth cluster. Clustering matters at the model level: two DGX Spark nodes provide 256 GB of unified memory (sufficient for ~400B-parameter models), and four nodes provide 512 GB. That’s enough to run large MoE models, multi-agent pipelines with multiple concurrent inference instances, or fine-tuning jobs that benefit from distributed memory. Setting up the cluster requires configuring the ConnectX-7 networking. Each DGX Spark has ConnectX-7 NICs that support 200 Gbps RoCE, but using them correctly requires configuring netplan, setting up node-to-node SSH trust, verifying bandwidth across each link, and knowing the right IP assignment scheme for the target topology. The cluster assistant simplifies the network configuration through a guided workflow inside Sync. Starting from devices already enrolled in Sync, the cluster assistant walks through: system readiness checks (OTA version, sudo access),CX-7 topology detection using a probe that runs on each node in parallel and combines LLDP/BPDU evidence with interface and IP checks, IP planning and deconfliction and netplan application, bandwidth and latency validation viaib_write_bw / ib_write_lat, and inter-node SSH setup using keys routed over the CX-7 fabric. Supported physical configurations are two-node direct connection (single QSFP cable, no switch), three-node ring (three QSFP cables, both CX-7 ports active per node), and two-to-four nodes via a QSFP switch with the minimum requirements shown here: For documentation on the NVIDIA Sync cluster assistant and supported topologies, see theNVIDIA Sync documentation. All three capabilities are available now: The DGX Spark updates at Computex 2026 reduce the two biggest blockers to building production-quality local agents: time to first agent and access to the compute needed to run large models.The streamlined NemoClaw install gets developers from unboxing to a running OpenClaw agent with Qwen3.6-35B as the default model and a built-in secure execution environment. For teams that need more, the cluster assistant in Sync removes the expertise barrier to spinning up a multi-node cluster with full ConnectX-7 performance. Start building on NVIDIA DGX Spark →

Issue 237 – June 2026 17960 words, novella byRebecca Campbell CHAPTER ONE Captain Ignatius Faber’s eyes were full of halos, and each scratch in thePhiloctetes’ viewscreens caught the light, bleeding across his retina like stars. His vision had weakened since the artificial gravity failed two years before, though he had followed Company protocol for extended micro-G exposure, stubbornly chewing through hundreds of tablets in their foil packages. The tablets were twenty years out of date by the time he found them, but he was a Company Man, and the guidelines were clear. Far below him, Gliz passed from the shadow of GLZ7E, its parent gas giant, and was again bathed in the glorious day of GLZ7, the system’s golden star. Ignatius rarely missed the daily miracle, as dawn illuminated steppe and mine. A hundred kilometers across, the open pit followed a rich, shallow seam of rare earth metals, surrounded by tailings that sank into marshlands. The planet and the mine were indifferently called “Gliz” because the alpha-numeric designation was awkward for daily use, and the place had not yet been given a real name. The singular human settlement below him was just called Town, his only fellow creatures within ten parsecs. They were mostly old men and women, much older than Company miners ought to be, bodies worn by six five-year contracts served consecutively. Gliz’s high gravity destroying their joints, while thirty years of Company scrip collected in Earthbound accounts. Some of them exchanged it—at a significant loss—for civil cash, and bought real estate at home, beaches and hillsides they’d never visit, though they saw them in long-awaited photographs taken by husbands and wives they were no longer really married to, and grown children who could not remember their touch. Ignatius alone could not identify the tiny smudge of human endeavor, but on clear nights, when he used thePhiloctetes’ surviving sensors and squinted at the viewscreen, he could locate individual dwellings. Though he glanced over the whole human population, a particular roof always drew his eye, on the edge of Town, facing away from the mine and surrounded by five fields, walled in by salvage from the dump, where hundreds of miners and factors had left their detritus to rot in the soil. That was the house where Charis and Sim and Aurelius lived. Charis and her five fields were Gliz’s best hope to eat something other than out-of-date protein biscuits. He had never set foot in the gardens, but he had watched their growth from orbit, had nightly listened to her ambitions and disappointments as she single-handedly led Gliz’s agricultural revolution. Only Charis would be there this morning. Aurelius was out in the newest field, preparing it for apple saplings, and Sim had left Town a few days before, walking steadily and undetectably through that huge emptiness, toward the foothills she had been mapping for years. Charis would get anxious soon, he guessed, and he would do his best to find the spark of Sim’s campfire and report back that she was safe. “She’s fine,” Ignatius told Charis the last time Sim left for the hills. “She’s your daughter, tough as boots. Just like the other kids.” “But they aren’t. Not like they think they are. She doesn’t even have a raincoat. She’s got that poncho she made out of strapping—” Charis stopped for a long moment, then said, “It’s awful. I just wish she had a sleeping bag.” “I’ll look for her,” he said. “And she’ll be fine. Promise. She always is.” He didn’t tell her that thePhiloctetes’ sensors were failing, as his vision was. She was a doctor, though, so she knew about the effects of microgravity on the human eye, even if they didn’t talk about it. When Ignatius was twenty-one, his family spent most of their collective savings to acquire his commission as a junior officer of the Company of Adventurers. He had been lucky, appointed to a new ship, thePhiloctetes,designed for exploration beyond the edge of the Company’s territory. He’d been twenty-two when thePhiloctetesdeparted Earth, and twenty-three when they arrived at Gliz. They had reprovisioned the mine, delivered twenty miners and their equipment. They were preparing to take on those servants at the end of their contract, then travel beyond the edge of cultivation, when they received a communiqué: the Company of Adventurers had allied with Earth in a war against the Martian Company, its colonies, and subsidiaries. Hold position. ThePhilocteteswas too precious to risk passage through what was now unfriendly territory. For the next twenty-eight years, the fleets chased each other through the dark: flecks and flames and the sudden, violent deaths of off-world campaigns. Ceasefires had failed, and the War had seemed permanent until last year’s armistice. After that, an interminable peace conference between the companies, mediated by civil diplomats. He had watched it from the far edge of civilized space, followed the talk and champagne, glorious blue of Company dress uniforms against the red Martian tunics and the dull khaki of Earth; the parties, the summer excursions to mountains and beaches; the speeches and interminable debates. Since then, the Company’s communiqués had been brief: remain in position, negotiations are underway. But today, after dawn broke over Gliz, Ignatius received a message that changed his strange, suspended life:Negotiations concluded. He was past fifty now, and perhaps his first voyage was nearing its end. This is the new world, as far as Ignatius can tell. Two months ago, on a day that hadn’t seemed remarkable, Gliz had ceased being an Adventurer’s outpost and become this new thing: a Dominion of the Company of the New Stars, held by a board shared between Martian and Adventurer members, and supervised by civil representatives of Earth and various colonies. According to the communiqué, this corporate marriage would ensure lasting peace, cosigned by Earth and the other solar colonies. For years, distant strangers had drawn maps that tinted Gliz first blue then red while it remained utterly itself, and nothing disturbed the sky, except thePhiloctetes. Many lightyears away, people had sat around huge, glossy tables negotiating the peace, while millions stood down, tumbling in orbit around lonely moons and teeming stations, waiting for news. For Mars, this station. For Earth, this system. For the Company of the New Stars? All the rest. Now theColossus, under the command of young Captain Alexander Salmerón, would arrive in six weeks. He would deliver a new, expanded engineering team with their habitats and collect the Company’s surviving faithful for their long-promised voyage home. And—more importantly, in the chaos of the last decades—he would try those deserters who had abandoned their duties on thePhiloctetes. The list of faithful included Ignatius, the chief Factor of the mine, Persephone, thirty-nine aging miners who remained of the original fifty, and the half-dozen Martians who were now servants of the New Stars. The list did not include deserters, nor those subcontractors who had been abandoned by their companies. Captain Salmerón proposed a brief local court martial for thePhiloctetesdeserters who lived on Gliz, then removal for hard labor at the Company’s pleasure. There was no mention of the stateless (and contractless) children who had been born on Gliz since the war began after Company-mandated birth control began to fail. Good Lord, Salmerón couldn’t be more than twenty-eight, which meant he hadn’t yet been born when thePhilocteteswas outfitted. His whole life had unfolded while Ignatius orbited Gliz. Persephone would finally depart, leaving behind her two-room home of dirty concrete. She’d spent decades counting the outgoing shipments that hadn’t departed in ships that hadn’t arrived, Factor of a small, dusty computer and a view of the pit. Now Persephone would need to find her blue dress coat for the handover ceremony and comb her hair and make the long voyage home to a world that had changed absolutely, and she, a ghost. TheColossuswould arrive in six weeks. In six weeks, he would have fresh food and substrate for the derelict printers. In six weeks, he could arrange a sleeping bag for Sim and a shovel for Aurelius; he could get painkillers and antibiotics for the old people on the surface; vitamins for the children. Tenders to carry it all down. No. Dream larger than that. A new razor. Chocolate. Beer. Oh god, he could exchange Company scrip for civil cash and buy a condo in Paris, and he could swim in the ocean, he could, he could— —Something crunched in his chest, and his heartbeat pulsed, his eyes and ears, blinding him further. He’d throw up. He’d laugh. Around him, thePhiloctetesdroned, that irritating metallic buzz he’d learned to ignore. Now he could mend the ducts. No. He would slip through the airlock and leave the failing ship behind forever. The New Stars would fund painful therapies to correct the damage done by isolation and microgravity. He would walk in a crowd of strangers, and he’d never be alone again. He’d visit the apple trees with Charis. Was he crying? What was the exchange rate for Company scrip? It might have risen with the merger. He’d write to his lawyer. His sister would have already seen the news weeks ago, and he’d hear from her soon, maybe a day behind the communiqué. Old friends would send their congratulations because he had held the line—he hadheld—as his contract required in the long list of duties and rights. But still, these were tears blinding him, with no gravity to draw them down his cheeks, so the bridge of thePhiloctetesseemed underwater, becoming an ancient, earthly shipwreck. When he wiped away his un-falling tears, they clung to his cheeks and his hands, and for a long time, nothing would make them stop. Settle his uniform. Dry his face. His first duty was to call Persephone. She answered, but the way she stared down and to the left meant she was probably playing solitaire. Behind her hung a faded Company flag. “Persephone?” he said. “Persephone? Can you—” She looked up sharply, “—What?” “Did you get the Encyclical?” That was what they called big directives. “What? No. I’m slammed right now, Ignatius.” “You should have it by now. You’re the senior ranking Company servant.” “No. They’ve changed the guidelines—ships over shacks. At least—was there a memorandum? Senior ranking Company officer in the Dominion is—Commodore someone or other of theBellerophon, last I checked. But locally that’s you.” “But listen, Persephone. Negotiations are concluded.” “Concluded,” she said. “Concluded.” Persephone often told him that she could have pursued a civil career on Earth, but the money was far better out here, and she’d made the familiar gamble. Often, she talked about the day she decided, telling him that by now she could have had some emeritus desk job with easy afternoons spent enjoying the great-grandchildren. They’d all be grown now. You learned not to ask about them. “Perhaps we should tell Peele,” Ignatius prompted, but Persephone remained silent. Peele represented Town’s Martians: five old men and seven women surviving of the twenty-three who had arrived on theDSX23-Bsix months after the declaration, the ship too damaged to limp home. “Persephone, listen. We should talk to Peele.” “Oh,Peele,” Persephone said. “What’ll he do? Capture my office in a last stand for the Martians? He’ll find out when they tell him. Not our circus.” Technically, Persephone and Ignatius had been at war with Peele for decades, though the negotiations of the last year had suspended direct combat. By necessity, the Martians had integrated with the other stragglers—civil, Adventurer—that formed Town. Besides, Martian scrip stopped arriving in their accounts shortly after they reached Gliz, with a message indicating that, since they were now prisoners of war, they could no longer be paid by the Martian Company (review 375.45.4 of your contract). Peele still flew a tiny flag from the roof of his hut, but when his swollen, old-man’s belly outgrew his uniform, he attached its tattered ribbons to another shirt, leaving his red coat to make clothes for Gliz’s children. “What about the kids?” Ignatius asked. “I registered the ones born under contract. If they filed the forms.” “But the deserters’ kids. How many are there now?” Persephone shrugged, then said, “I lost count. Talk to Charis. She’s probably already got a plan.” “Deserters aren’t—” “—when they tell me what to do, I’ll do it.” “You could join us—” “—I really don’t have time, Ignatius.” Her eyes skated away from the camera, and then she was gone. He forwarded the Encyclical to Charis, then called. She answered from the orchard, her voice breezy, “We’re a full seven degrees up across the same day a decade ago, but we really need a word for these dual weather cycles. Ambivernus? Intervernus? Some of the blossoms are definitely pollinated, too. But don’t tell Aurelius I’m reviewing his work.” Then she must have seen the file. He expected tears. Hers would fall as tears should, though faster than they would on Earth. As soon as she saw the title, she began to laugh. He was surprised at his own disapproval. “Charis! It isn’t funny!” “I’m just—Ignatius—it’s so fucking stupid. Thirty years for a merger?” “But the kids,” he said. One more chuckle and then silence, until she said, “I still don’t know what to do.” “Six weeks until Salmerón arrives. And there’s precedent. Isn’t there? Gliz can’t be the only place where this has happened. Persephone should be able to find out what’s happened elsewhere?” “Will she, though. We’ll have to figure something out.” “They won’t let you stay, even if they don’t arrest you for desertion. It’s all New Stars, now. The mine. Your house. The shipping containers. The launchpad.” Her eyes flicked down the text, and he knew she was already planning. “I do actually know that, Ignatius,” she said without glancing up from the text. He wasn’t sure she did, though, that there were dozens of extra-contractual and unsigned children on Gliz, belonging to no Company, and recognized by no civil government. No place on Earth that would allow them, no Company contracted to take care of them. Even those with parents were—legally—orphans. “They’ll be moving onto the graphite deposits now, I suppose.” Probably they were, but that didn’t matter just now. “He’s coming here for you, Charis, and everyone else who deserted thePhiloctetes.” Her face was so still he thought the connection between them had failed, but then she nodded. A hundred years before the War, the first engineering team had arrived on the empty steppe and printed an ugly cluster of buildings that they now called Town: the Factor’s house; several connected bunkhouses with a kitchen and infirmary, extensive warehouses, and landing pads. Nearer the mine, there was a smelter and the machine shops, abandoned because the mine’s fuel had been spent decades before. One gravel track ran from the landing site to the dump; another ran from the mine to the village. Around them, desire paths cut corners, leaped ditches, and collected at a kind of square in the middle of things, where a century of footsteps had exposed purplish gravel. Beyond the original, Company-built houses stood the shacks assembled from salvage to accommodate Gliz’s growing population, both the original exiles trapped at the edge of known space and the children born in the decades of their exile. The first time Ignatius descended, he was a very young man, and the War had not yet reached them. On the surface, GLZG’s high gravity dragged painfully at every bone in his body. He and a little crowd of thePhiloctetescrew—all eager for fresh air and an open sky—followed Captain Bastian’s slow walk from the landing pad to the Factor’s house. There was nothing but the steppe, the mine, the ugly Company prefabs grown uglier after a century of neglect. “Two years in a tin box and you forget what it’s like,” Simram said, breathing heavily, slower than the others. “You love thePhiloctetes!” Charis said, falling back to join him, Ignatius drifting alongside. “I do, but one can love horses and not want to spend one’s life in a stable. That light, my dear. A sky as high as one can dream! I had heard it was an ugly, empty place.” “It reminds me of the country north of Yellowknife,” Charis said. “The way it is in spring.” “Where’s Yellowknife?” Ignatius asked and tripped on the rough, purple stone. Despite what Simram said, he’d decided itwasan ugly, empty place. Charis didn’t seem to hear him. She asked Simram, “Why haven’t they given it a name?” Simram had spent his life under contract as an engineer, and he answered from a wealth of experience on many tiny outports. “No one stays longer than five years. Perhaps seven, if there are delays. In a century, the seam will be stripped, and all this will be abandoned. I find it hard to believe that a single child will grow up here. You need children born and people buried to make a place home. And the dead are all shipped back to Earth. It’s in their contracts. Why name a place that’s no one’s home?” Charis shook her head. “It still deserves a name.” GLZ7E drifted above them, much larger than the distant, yellow sun. Outside the Factor’s residence, Ignatius pulled out his monocular and examined the storm patterns of the upper atmosphere. He wondered what kind of gods you’d find under that sky. But perhaps five years wasn’t enough to find a god. Persephone met them at the door. “You’re late,” she said. “We are, yes,” Captain Bastian said, smiling. “They get angry when they’ve been kept waiting this long. It’s another job to keep them calm, and I haven’t had an assistant for years now. We’re going to run out of liquor—” “—such a challenge,” Captain Bastian agreed. “So many delays, but we’ll be on our way shortly.” “They’re all brutes, and Gliz makes them worse. I was supposed to be away from here three months ago. I’ll miss my granddaughter’s twenty-first.” And that was the last day of peace they’d known in nearly thirty years. They found out when they returned to thePhiloctetesthat evening, though it had already been done and dusted for weeks by the time news reached them: Titan’s brushfire war over a dubiously legal ocean station escalated, dragging in both companies, their subsidiaries, and the two civil governments of Earth and Mars, as well as half a dozen other colonies. That evening, he and Charis stared dully at the screen in the junior officer’s mess, watching the news roll out. Ignatius told himself that this was no different than any of the other delays he’d experienced since his departure, and wars could end as quickly as they began. The six-day war, he remembered. The nine-hour war. But such reminders could not dispel anyone’s gloom because who knew what had already happened at home, what disasters had befallen people they loved. Like everyone in the Company, he had friends and family serving far away, on worlds he knew only by number in thePhiloctetes’ star charts. Every Company ship could have fallen to the other party, and he wouldn’t know for weeks. It could have happened when he’d stared into thePhiloctetes’ screens, searching the stars for their destination. The last, tenuous link with Earth flickered, then failed, the last neutral ship blinking into the dark between stars. There are questions that preoccupy everyone left behind on Gliz, though they do not bear thinking about for too long, lest you become Persephone and disappear into your anger and silence. What if the delays following that first ceasefire had been shorter? What if the War had ended at Jove? What if it had just been one year or two? Just a decade? Ignatius was haunted, yes, but wary of indulging those thoughts, having lost years to imagining the other lives he might have lived. He regretted signing on with the Company for a very junior commission on thePhiloctetes, which had cost his family so much. He regretted his exile. But there’s one thing he regrets more than the others: Charis. Charis had departed Earth as thePhiloctetes’junior medical officer, second to Doctor Nahanee. Then, Doctor Nahanee won the lottery for a seat on the emergency shuttle that escaped in the first month of their tenure over Gliz. They had become lovers shortly after that, after a year of circling one another in the junior officers’ mess. Ignatius remembered an afternoon in her tiny cabin, lying together as she flicked through images of Gliz on her tablet. The steppe. The slag heaps. “Why bother? We’ll be out soon enough.” Charis continued her contemplation: the strip mine; the smelter; a huge purple horizon over which rose the silvery gas giant. “Do you think so?” He snorted at her naiveté. “It’s far too expensive to carry on for much longer. It’ll take months for trade routes to spin up again as it is. The mines on C90q have been delayed again. The markets will collapse, and they’ll negotiate. They always do.” Charis said nothing, so he continued. “There hasn’t been open combat since Titan. It’s winding down already.” “Maybe. But if it isn’t, I wonder if I wouldn’t rather wait on the surface.” Ignatius sat up sharply. “You can’t possibly be serious. You’ll be stuck down there for months after we ship, waiting for a court-martial.” “Maybe.” “Hard labor somewhere irradiated.” Charis said nothing. “Well, I’m not going with you. I don’t believe in marriage. I told you that.” “You’ve said that a few times. It’s good I’m not interested in marrying you, or we might have a problem.” “You just want to play homesteading—don’t be stupid.” “There are the crews of theChicagoand theThames. Twice as many people as there were three months ago. They need a doctor.” “They have a doctor.” “They have a medic. They need a doctor.” “The lanes are going to open up again, and we’ll be back on Earth skiing and drinking champagne.” That was Ignatius’ little fantasy, the dreamiest, most expensive thing he could imagine: champagne and skiing. Charis had told him about her family’s place in the Rocky Mountains, traveling by helicopter through the cold to this beacon of warmth above the tree line, where you could drop a full kilometer on a snowboard, then call a drone to haul you back up to the top. Neither of them particularly liked champagne, and Ignatius had never been skiing, but it meant the kind of firesides he had seen in films. It meant the scent of winter and breakneck acceleration downhill and Charis naked in the sunshine of a window high in the mountains. “Maybe,” she said again and flicked through other images: tailing ponds; slag heaps; a tiny human observing vast and hungry machinery. “Well, you’d do that. You’re rich. You can throw away your career for a bunch of contractors.” The words kept coming out of his mouth, all the irritation and frustration of the previous months, trapped shipboard, waiting, imagining sunshine and cold air. “It’s theirjob. It’s in their contracts. But I suppose your family will clean up whatever mess you make. Not like some of us.” Later, he would accept that he had been afraid, but that day—the last with her—he only knew this blistering resentment of Charis, who was beautiful and rich and brave. Who could casually desert a commission that had cost so much that Ignatius feared he would never repay the debt to his family. Charis was the first of thePhiloctetescrew to desert. He had been on communications duty the day Captain Bastian sent the letter of desertion and regretted it in the long years since. After Charis, he regretted Ahmad and Llewellyn and Dixie, who left for the surface next. Had he not sent those letters, their families could have taken their pensions when they died, their scrip turned over to their next of kin. Two years after the declaration, the blockade at XH7b had locked the War into an unwinnable stalemate. Captain Bastian died. The last of his old crewmates left for the surface, until only he and Simram remained on thePhiloctetes. He wrote and signed and sent each letter of desertion because he was a Company Man. He held the line. When the War finally ended, he had spent more of his life above Gliz than anywhere else and had risen from sublieutenant to captain. In these years of exile, he had heard of his sister’s marriage and the arrival of her four children, their various victories and calamities, their weddings, and the birth of grandchildren. His youngest nephew was born and enlisted, never knowing Ignatius, though he had purchased the boy’s commission with Company scrip and celebrated his appointment as a junior officer on theHydra. Ignatius wept for the boy he’d never known when news came that Martian fire had breached theHydra’s hull, and what was left of Steven and his shipmates still orbited that distant world forever. Even after all the others left, Ignatius and Simram stayed with thePhiloctetes. In the twenty-five years they spent together, Simram taught Ignatius what he could about the ship and its management. “You aren’t a talented engineer,” he said, “but you’ll do in a pinch. And what is this if not a pinch? The pinchiest of pinches.” Ignatius took the compliment. “I suppose it’ll just be you, one day,” Simram said when he fell ill the last time. “Have you thought of what you’ll do?” “The work will be much the same,” he said. Simram, always wiser than Ignatius, hadn’t corrected him. Simram died before the armistice. He’d been an old man when they left Earth and remained with thePhilocteteswhile the enlisted crew and even the Company secretary settled on the planet below, accepting their exile. During a brief ceasefire in the tenth year of the War, theHalicarnassushad passed the system. Ignatius and Charis had arranged a lottery for twelve spots, and Ignatius had offered Simram a guaranteed place, but he declined. ThePhiloctetesneeded him more than ever, he said. And, of course, theHalicarnassusnever reached Earth. The Martian armada destroyed it two months after it departed Gliz. “I would have liked to have been buried in Charis’ orchard,” Simram said near the end. “Under those little trees she’s always fussing over. It would be good to know I’m contributing to the children’s future. And I’d be near my namesake and give her guidance from beyond the grave. I would enjoy haunting her.” “We could send you down in the lifeboat,” Ignatius said and made a move toward the hatch. “Right now.” “Oh dear no. You must save those for a really dire moment. It may yet come. And this is a far more appropriate destiny for an engineer.” CHAPTER TWO On thePhiloctetes, Captain Ignatius Faber wrestled alone with the Company’s encyclical. Far, far below him, on the surface of Gliz, Sim woke in her foothills camp, lying on the tarp her mother, Charis, had scavenged for her in the dump. In four days from Town, Sim had covered more than 120 kilometers with the slow, heavy gait of a body not evolved for Gliz’s high gravity. She’d been walking this route for more than a decade, since she was fifteen. Each trek took her a little farther, until she reached the foothills and began mapping Gliz in earnest, using glitchy surveyor’s scanners she found in the storage sheds. Sometimes when she walked, she imagined the future, when other people might join her, her nearly invisible trail worn to a path, then a road from Town to the mountains, gardens around it expanding into farms, clustering near other villages, in the wake of the cairns she built and the water holes she bored. She was proud of her solo expeditions, inspired by the stories Charis had told her about space exploration: Amani on Mars five hundred years ago, and the early civil explorers, shot out through the asteroids and the inner planets in fragile, antique crafts. She might travel on foot, but she was part of the same clan: Amani and Li and l’Esperance were her celestial models, illuminating her path from Town to the mountains, and beyond them to something else she could not yet name, for which she searched. Or perhaps it was someone else. Like the creatures that accompanied her sometimes, who crept up to her camp at night and left their footprints in the creek bed. Back in Town, Sim’s various jobs were boring, which was why she spent so much time exploring the foothills. She cleaned her mother’s clinic. She worked for her younger brother, Aurelius, in the gardens and orchard. She taught the younger children what she knew of Gliz: geography, biology, and history, showing them the early surveys, her own maps, and drawings of plants and animals. There were no flowers on Gliz save the ones they brought from Earth, but there were the tiny, jeweled carapaces of bugs, if you crouched and waited quietly for them to creep across the stones. The kids liked hearing about bugs. Last week, she had been explaining the seasons, whose cycles were far longer than a human year, and maybe even a human life, when Auntie Clara’s boy asked, “Is it like this back on Earth?” “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been to Earth.” “But you’re a grown-up!” Peele’s granddaughter said, scandalized. “Mom’s from São Paulo,” Aunty Clara’s boy explained. “Have you been to São Paulo? She says there are mountains and a city. And she says you can get chocolate all the time. And chocolate is the best thing ever.” “I’ve never had chocolate.” Peele’s granddaughter piped up again, “Mom says the War will be over really soon, and we’ll go back to Earth, and we’ll go to a real school, and when we go to Earth, she says we’ll go swimming!” Others added: the ponies on Earth run free; there is candy that looks like sunrises and sunsets and tastes a hundred times better than the sweetened protein biscuits they kept for special occasions or the apples Charis had coaxed out of the orchard. “But you can swim on Gliz,” Sim said. “There’s a whole ocean to swim in, past the mountains.” “Dad says the apples are bigger than his fist!” Around them, oohs and ahhs of shock. Apples so large were impossible, like the iced cupcakes or popcorn you saw in movies. “You know, there’s a lake in the mountains near here that’s deeper than anything on Earth. Deeper than Baikal. And I’m going to find it. And maybe someday you’ll help me.” Said like a lure, a treat. But why, Peele’s granddaughter seemed to say with her squished and doubtful expression, would she hunt for mountain lakes when she’d be home on Earth soon, where there were wonders and glories unimaginable? Sim recognized the look and knew she’d never get the class back, so she gave up and dismissed them. When she left a few minutes later, the kids were playing Earth, which meant pretending to ride a pony and naming all the beautiful and delicious things they would have when they got “home.” As the oldest child of Gliz, Sim had seen the game many times and played it often. Next year on Earth, an eight year old might say, I’ll swim in my grandma’s pool. Next year on Earth, we’ll go to a mall so big we can’t see the end of it. Whatever a mall was. But you couldn’t play forever. When you got old enough, you began to grasp just how far away Earth was, and how long the War had been going on. You were twelve, and you’d fall silent about the ponies and jungle gyms, looking up at the pale blue-green sky, beginning to see that no matter what grown-ups said about the War ending, you were already home, maybe forever. By the time you were thirteen, you had to figure out what you’d do with yourself, or you’d end up like Persephone, looking up at the stars, waiting for one of those lights to descend and take you home. Not this one, maybe, but the one after that. Next year, on Earth, she said, and wait. Charis wasn’t like that, of course, but as a child, Sim hadn’t appreciated her mother’s realism. “Mom says at home I would have a pony,” some little girl would shout, then, “Dad says I’m a princess on Earth.” That day, Sim left the game, frustrated, and went looking for her mother in the clinic, where she was taking inventory, her face cramped and tight-jawed as she surveyed the empty shelves. “On Earth am I a princess?” Sim asked. “No,” Charis said. “Put this box on the second shelf and hand me the next one.” “Oh,” Sim said. “Okay.” And held the box. “Would I have a pony on Earth?” “No. And if you’re going to ask questions, you have to help.” She helped. That evening, they sat outside together after Aurelius had gone to bed. Charis pointed to a faded light on the low horizon and said, “That’s where I came from. I think. In the dark on the other side of that light.” “Do you miss it?” Sim asked, thinking of the kids playing Earth: its teeming cities, its vast sugar plantations, and libraries. The Eiffel Tower. An immodest variety of food and entertainment. “Yes. But if I hadn’t come all that way, I wouldn’t have you or Aurelius.” “Is Aurelius really worth not having swimming pools and hot cocoa? Is he worth awhole planet?” “He’s worthtwo,you little monster!” Then they’d cuddled together and made-up names for the constellations. “The house. The little kid,” Sim said. “The waterfall. The mountain,” Charis answered. By the time she was fifteen, Sim understood those conversations better and had replaced games of Earth with more important enterprises, like walking from Town to the foothills, recording what she found there in drawings and glitchy maps. She was no princess: She was the first daughter of Gliz, shorter than she would have been on Earth, with higher blood pressure than Charis liked. She was stooped and heavily muscled, unsuited to shopping malls and swimming pools. Suited best to walk slowly into the wild, following Amani and Li and l’Esperance. In addition to mapping the tiny area around Town and observing the planet’s plants and animals, Sim kept the human history of Gliz. She wrote some of it down and sent copies toPhiloctetes, but the tablets in Town are failing, and there’s no paper for hard copies, so she kept it safe in her memory, too. This is how Gliz came to be. In the first eighteen months of the War, theChicago, theThames, theTilikum, and theDSX23-Bcollected around Gliz. TheChicagoand theThameswere elderly private freighters contracted to the Earth’s navy, abandoned by its contracting Company on the day of the declaration. No orders. No pay. No rescue. TheDSXwas a small Martian Company exploratory vessel, assigned to illegally survey Adventurer territory, and now limping home. It was, technically, a fair target, but a certain gentlemanliness in thePhiloctetes’character forbade them from opening fire on an obviously damaged ship they outgunned. Sim’s and Aurelius’ father had beenDSX. So was Peele. TheTilikumhad arrived last, a civil exploration vessel, studying star formation. TheDSXdonated its tenders to ferry the crews of all three ships to the surface, where they’d wait out the War. Those two tenders still lay—derelict but useful—outside Town, having been stripped for parts. Sim and all the other children had learned to read in the storage bay of one of those tenders. When Sim was old enough to understand the nature of her existence on Gliz, she began to ask questions of the other grown-ups: Persephone, Peele, Gord, who worked in the clinic. She pieced together the terrifying and chaotic truth of an interstellar war. Once Charis found her crying at bedtime and coaxed it out of her. “The War, Mommy. Is Peele going to kill us?” “Who’s been talking about the War? Did Peele say something?” Sim shrugged. It had been Peele, but she wasn’t going to tattle. “Honey, if the Company falls, it won’t matter much out here.” “How do youknow?” “Because the only thing anyone wants is the mine. Someone very far away will make a decision about it, and we won’t know until they tell us. If the Martians win, Peele might take over Persephone’s house. But nothing else would change.” “He doesn’t have any ammunition left. He used to practice at the dump, on the old packing cases.” A crack in Charis’ motherly calm. She said only, “Peele is not a serious man. But.” And here, she relaxed again. “It would only mean a different-colored flag, and we’d all go about our business. Besides, you and Aurelius are half Martian and half Company, so you should be fine no matter who wins.” There were richer worlds closer to Earth, Charis told her, where the War was really happening. Worlds with waterfalls that dropped a thousand meters into pale green oceans. Worlds with ten moons and a sky full of doves. Companies had more worlds than they had servants. Sim considered doves. She only knew the white linnet, a tiny, birdlike creature entered into no taxonomy, with no name but that given by a homesick miner a hundred years ago. An accidental name, earned because that miner had looked up and heard a faint, sweet piping, then saw the tiny creature flit from branch to branch in the scrub. White linnet, he had called it, a homesick name. When Sim was thirteen, she asked her mother if the bugs on Gliz had any other name, like linnet or orca or scarab, which she read about in books. Mom stopped what she was doing—that was unusual for a woman who never stopped working—and said, “No one’s named them.” Here she sat down at their table in the kitchen full of dried herbs and protein rations, three precious apples from her young orchard. “None of it has a name, not really.” “It’s Gliz,” Sim told her. “That’s just a nickname. It’s never had a proper name. It’s a temporary place, until they’ve dug up all the rare earths and the graphite on the other side, then no one will ever come back.” “But the Company of Adventurers,” Sim began, “is dedicated to the exploration of new worlds, as well as freeing resources from the silent wastes of space.” “That’s definitely what the charter says,” Charis said grimly, then went about her work. “Captain Faber says it, too.” “Yes, Saint Ignatius believes it. He who dwells bodily in heaven and intercedes on our behalf.” “He hates it when you call him that,” Sim said. “Oh, I know, darling.” Sim could hardly remember her father. He was very large in her mind, and his hands around her rib cage were like iron when he lifted her up toward the sky, and she laughed and laughed, and then he’d hang her upside down, and she’d laugh even more. When she was twelve, she asked Charis, tentative because it was hard to talk about Dad, did he lift me up a lot? “That was his big parenting move for you. When you got upset, he’d lift you up as high as he could. If you were really upset, he’d turn you upside down. It worked, too. Not so much for Aurelius, but he was just a baby when your dad died.” CHAPTER THREE As Gliz’s first historian and explorer, Sim collected stories from her many aunts and uncles, then set them down. There was one she knew well but didn’t understand, so she often turned it over in her mind. The Battle of Gliz—as it was locally known—took place in the first year of the War, when the Martian Company retook some system Sim couldn’t name. News reached them weeks after the tiny victory. The Martians celebrated with what remained of their liquor, singing songs in the muddy square, until one of them pissed on Persephone’s doorstep. An equally drunk gang from the Company found him midstream and spewed threats, but the Martian Company man only zipped up and laughed. Doorstop piss was just the opening sally. Later that night, someone tore the Company flag from the pole outside Persephone’s house. Persephone said she slept through it, but Charis told Sim she was probably too frightened to open her eyes. Who could blame her. Peele told Sim the air itself was angry that night, with a storm brewing over the mountains, maddening the blood. Charis said everyone had been tired and scared for months, and it just boiled over because Martian liquor means nightmarish hangovers. Persephone said they were all a lot of assholes who deserved what they got. When, at fifteen, Sim asked them for their accounts, none of them was sure of the order of events. The Battle was already underway when someone found Charis in the clinic. She arrived on the square. Persephone was already there watching two young men batter one another, while the Martian Company servants shouted slogans that meant less and less with each repetition.Rise Up Mars and Defy the Tyrant’s Yoke. That sort of thing. Charis tried to get between them. Peele pulled her back. “Let them,” he said. “If you stop them, they’ll only go harder when you’re not watching.” “They’ll kill each other—” “—Maybe. Could be a good lesson to the others.” “Go home, Doc,” someone said from the darkness on the edge of the lighted square. Others took up the command. Go home. Go home. “We can’t afford to kill each other,” Charis said, but maybe not loud enough to be heard. Charis told Sim, I knew he was right, but I still hated it. She made herself watch; it lasted another five or six minutes. One of them fell to his knees, then his hands, and dribbled blood onto Gliz’s purplish soil. The other one got him in the side of the head with a knee. He didn’t get back up. Peele finally loosened his grip. Charis knelt beside the boy. He was still breathing. Beside her, one of the miners started in on how Gliz was Company land, and the Martian had violated— “It’s not anything,” Charis said, loud now, grinding the words out of her clenched teeth as she examined the boy. “It’s a lump of rock, and we’re forty lightyears from anyone who cares. The Company doesn’t give a fuck about you. Neither does Mars.” That time, she was loud enough to hear. A Martian medic and two of theChicago’s crew helped Charis get the boy back to the clinic. “It was our first date,” Charis said of the Martian medic. Six months later, she was pregnant with Sim. The boy lived another two days. Charis sat up with him, listening to every word he muttered, wondering who he was asking for: a mother, a girlfriend, a husband. She, sleepless, scrolling through her old textbooks for treatments that didn’t require medicine or computer-guided microsurgery. Trepanning, she considered, bleeding. Later, she would heal others with those ancient tools. But that night, she was new to Gliz and the kind of medicine it demanded. The boy lapsed into silence, with a slow, rattling breath she would soon learn to recognize. The victor died a day later. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he had not realized that an intergalactic war would require him to murder another kid with his bare hands. They were buried in the same plot, not for any sentimental reason, but because Gliz’s topsoil was stony, and there was much other work to do. Charis did not yet know it, but in a year, she would build scrap metal walls around the grave, and it would become the human heart of an apple orchard, with Earth’s alien trees rooted in their bodies. The Battle of Gliz cost the Martian Company and the Company of Adventurers each one servant. Their deaths purchased no territory beyond the six-foot space of their shared grave. They’d been teenagers when they signed on to their respective companies for twenty-year indentures, and then here they were, consigned to Gliz. Nineteen is a bad age to find oneself trapped on a tiny moon, with no end to exile or one’s labor. After the ships collected, the strangers met, and the Battle of Gliz resolved in a necessary truce, the facts of the Company War leaked out from home in a series of unofficial messages. It would not be over by Christmas, neither this nor next. That was when most of thePhiloctetes’crew deserted. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, those two young men changed into something new, neither quite Gliz nor quite Earth. By the time Sim was old enough to understand, her own father was dead and buried beside the Glorious Fallen of the Battle of Gliz, and she could pick a small, red apple from the tree rooted in her father’s body. “What kind of apple is it called?” she asked when she was seven, the first year the tree bore fruit, and she looked in wonder at its warm, red skin, a color you never saw on Gliz, which was purple and gray and dusty green. “I don’t know,” Charis told her. “It comes from a Red Prince apple back on Earth, but that will be something new. Do you want to name it?” Sim thought of her father, a huge and hazy memory that blotted out the sun, a silhouette named Adam, who picked her up and made her laugh. Examining the little fruit, which exactly fit her hand, she said, “Adam’s Apples.” Charis laughed, then cried, then squeezed Sim in a hard, tight hug and chokedI love yousinto her hair. Charis had been responsible for so many firsts on Gliz: the first pregnancy and the first widow, the first garden, walled in with sheeting she’d found in the dump. The first house built from scrap torn out of theDSX’s tender because they were spilling out of the old bunkhouses and fights broke out over beds. Peele told Sim the story, laughing, how Charis had woken up on the floor of the mess hall, walked straight over to the tender, and started taking it apart. Peele had tried to stop her, but she was six months pregnant, and Sim’s father, Adam, had got between them, then there were a dozen of them pulling the tender’s interior to pieces with screwdrivers and sledgehammers and fashioning those parts into the houses and streets they now called Town. Sim returned to Town one evening a week later. Charis said, “I need to talk to you,” before she could open the door. After more than a week under the sky, home was cramped and stuffy. There were pink-petalled geraniums on the windowsill, descended from plants Gliz’s first Factor had brought out a century before. She’d been a gardener, the story went, though no one could remember her name. She was the one who’d brought the Scotch broom and the Himalayan blackberries, the dandelions and poppies. All those bright, jarring flowers that grew in the corners of buildings and between the paths and gravel roads. “Why do you still have those?” Sim asked. Charis looked around confusedly until she saw that Sim meant the geraniums. “I like them,” she said, and touched one lurid flower. “There are these tiny gray-green vines that grow in the rock faces of the foothills. They turn purplish when they’re out in the sun. I could bring you some to cover the garden walls.” Charis stared at her. “I just don’t get geraniums,” Sim said, like that would explain something. “I think I’ll sleep outside tonight.” “Sure. Okay. Sim, you have to listen. The War’s over. And we need to talk about what’s going to happen now.” Sim caught a sweet, resinous draft from the door. A relief after the house, which smelled so much of people. She sat down and asked, “But what does that mean?” “As of last month, sometime, we are under new management.” “Oh. Okay.” She tried to understand what Charis was saying. “Who won?” “It’s a merger. Adventurers and Martians are now the Company of the New Stars.” “Jesus Christ.” Charis relaxed. “Yeah, that’s what I said.” “Is this—good?” “Well. Your mother’s a deserter, and you’re a squatter. So I don’t know.” Iron in her voice, rare and sharp. Sim had heard it when Madeleine got lost at the edge of the mine and none of the older kids could remember when they’d last seen her. When Peele had stolen apples to make a bitterly alcoholic cider. When Eric broke Shin’s jaw during that fight at a bonfire party the year before. “Things are going to change, love. In ways you can’t imagine.” Condescending. “But you can?” she asked. “Yes, actually. I have literally been places you can’t imagine.” Maybe. But Charis had never been to the foothills and felt the presence of something, of Gliz, nearby and just out of sight. “Do you have a plan?” Sim asked. “I do. It’s going to be tough. But I do have a plan.” “Are you going to tell me what it is?” “No.” They were both staring at the table between them. Once, Charis had sewn up Zayne’s shoulder on this table, after he’d fallen down the edge of a slag heap. Sim had witnessed some of it from the doorway: Zayne’s father bracing his shoulders and neck while Charis picked gravel from the wound with a pair of tweezers. He’d passed out when she stitched it, but it had healed cleanly. Five years later, they had lost their virginities together, beside a campfire just outside of Town, he fifteen to her seventeen. “Okay, I guess,” Sim said and stood up from the table. The look on Charis’ face kept her from saying more. That night, Sim slept outside, staring up at the dark that was now, somehow, alive with change. Inside, Charis left the light on: a wasteful luxury she reserved for childbirth and other emergencies. That meant she was up working, Sim supposed. Around them, Town settled into silence. Sim knew every single person on Gliz by name. But Gliz as she knew it would be over soon, and everything she had found in the foothills would come to nothing or collapse into the ever-widening mine, until the Company’s machines had stripped the whole planet down to rock. CHAPTER FOUR The day before theColossusarrived, Ignatius dug his dress uniform out of a vacuum pack. The blouse had fit him well once, but after two years of microgravity, his spine had elongated, and it was far too short, exposing a few centimeters of his remaining good undershirt, which he wore backward to hide a large hole from the front view. The trousers were even worse. He received Captain Alexander Salmerón and company at thePhiloctetes’only functional airlock. It was difficult to keep himself properly at attention, and he drifted toward the ceiling while he played the boatswain’s call to mark their arrival. In person, the captain was even handsomer than he’d appeared on screen, blue-eyed and blessed with abundantly curly black hair and tanned skin, as though he had just come in from a day on the water. Ignatius finished the call, coughed twice, then spoke to another living human in person for the first time since Simram’s death. “Captain Salmerón,” he began, his voice catching on his very dry tongue, “Welcome to thePhiloctetes.” “Captain Faber, thank you.” “Well,” Ignatius said as the speech he’d rehearsed fled his mind. “Well. Well. Hold the line.” Salmerón’s eyes flicked past Ignatius’ shoulder to the darkened corridor, then down to Ignatius’ boots, which he’d mended with electrical tape that morning, requisitioned from some wiring in the junior officers’ quarters. Ignatius remembered the boots he’d ordered before he left, which were still in their box in his bedroom closet in his parents’ house. He should have given them to Sarah’s boy when he received his commission on theHydra. Why hadn’t he? “Captain Faber. Where’s—” Salmerón looked past him through the hatch. Ignatius started, then turned to follow his eyes and realized what he was looking for. “Oh. There’s just me,” he said. “Everyone else is gone. It’s just me now.” Salmerón nodded, as though he had known, “Their names will be lauded when we count the dead.” Ignatius couldn’t place it but thought the line came from the Company’s funeral ceremony. You were supposed to recite it over a dead crewmate, but he had forgotten it when Simram died. “Captain Faber? Are we waiting for something?” “Right. Yes,” Ignatius said. “Come along.” He led the officers to the bridge, bouncing gently along the ceiling. In the low remaining lights, Ignatius explained thePhiloctetes’ peculiarities. He was proud of what he had done, given that he was not a clever engineer, with his only education from Simram and the operating manuals. He was enthusiastically describing his solutions to such-and-such a problem when Salmerón asked, “Would you like to board theColossus? You’ll find it quite comfortable. The air circulation is excellent, and Doctor Cook has prepared the low-gravity bunk we mentioned in our last communications.” “Oh. I suppose. But perhaps not yet? There are still a few things to do.” “We’ll have the decommissioning ceremony this week, then scuttle her into GLZ7. First, though, we must dispatch the deserters.” Charis. Charis. “Oh,” Ignatius hesitated. His own shipmates, and he had written the letters because he was a Company Man, and it was his duty. He lied, “I’m not sure. I haven’t kept an eye on the deserters. You’ll want to talk to Persephone—” “Civil or Company?” “Factor. “Of course,” Salmerón said, conciliatory. “We’ll collect them on descent. Then a quick trial. An hour or two.” “There are others to consider, not Company—the survivors of theThames, theTilikum, theChicago.” “TheChicago? I don’t remember anything about aChicago.” He reached for a tablet held by one of his silent attendants. “The vessel was contracted to Earth before the hostilities. There are children and grandchildren, too, from theChicago’s crew as well as the others. More than forty now.” “More than forty children!” Salmerón said, scandalized, then giggled. “I suppose there’s nothing else to do on GLZ7G? Well, if it were a civil craft, that’s for Earth to resolve.” “The Company dissolved, I understand. The survivors of theChicagohave no recourse. They haven’t even been paid.” “So many unreliable companies. But as Servants of the New Stars, we are not here to make up for the shortcomings of other organizations. They might sign on, if they like. And I’ve heard the Company is offering a generous discount on passage to Earth. Ten percent, last I heard.” Ignatius groped for words a young man like Salmerón would understand, “But what will the children do?” “The Company will sign them on with a simplified application—no exams or certifications required. Of course, it will be at a reduced salary, given they have no training.” “Sim de Crèvecoeur surveyed—” “—I’m sure they’re all very clever,” Salmerón said. “Can they write their names? So many illiterates at the edge of the Dominion. I imagine most of them will sign, and if they don’t, the Company isn’t in the habit of supporting those unwilling to work. I suppose they could wait for a civil ship, but since they’re neither Earth nor Martian, it would be a long wait. So they sign on and leave, or they refuse and stay here as squatters, without the benefit of legal status.” Salmerón said with a pompous kind of finality. “Mr. Douglass will contact the Factor for a census and generate the contracts.” Ignatius tried again, a new tactic. “Do you know anything about her family? Charis’ grandfather is Aurelius de Crèvecoeur.” “Hold the line—that’s been our motto for three hundred years. Half the Company’s servants would have liked to give up and settle somewhere quiet, but they didn’t abandon their oaths.” “Her son is even named after the old man. He takes an interest in his namesake’s education and opportunities, even out here. I think Charis was his favorite.” Salmerón twitched, “We’ll try her tomorrow. And then we can move on to more interesting things.” Salmerón did move on, easily and at length. He talked about acquaintances on exploration vessels already dispatched for the new stars. Ignatius’ treatment, and his eventual return to Earth. He told stories about his War, the final action of FH67l, where he had been at the armistice. How theColossusand a Martian vessel had both stood down, the two of them so close he could have signaled with a flashlight. How strange it had been, the two ships observing one another in silence, waiting for peace or the reinstatement of hostilities. Anything would have been better than the waiting. How they’d watch the Martian ship collide with an orbital mine and blow up six weeks into the armistice, leaving theColossusalone. The irony made him laugh. But Salmerón had forgotten: there was the defender’s medal for those who had served out the whole War. They even had the specialized substrate—dusted with real platinum—and could print it shipboard. Ignatius would have it in his hands tomorrow. Then it was time to go, and he insisted Ignatius join them on the far pleasanterColossus. Ignatius declined. Salmerón pressed once more before he conceded and left with his attendants. Ignatius messaged Charis, using an old channel he hoped theColossuswouldn’t monitor.They’ll be trying you as a deserter tomorrow. Perhaps she received it or perhaps not. She didn’t answer. He should have gotten through to the young man. Reminded him that rules changed this far from Earth. But Salmerón must already know that. He’d known at FH67L, when theColossusand the Martian ship circled one another, in a kind of union that could only exist in the cold. Salmerón had known it when the Martians struck one of the Company’s orbital mines and disintegrated. Anyone who crewed a ship had felt the cold pressing against the thin hull and had turned inward, to the little group at hand, to whom one owed one’s duty, no matter what the Company mandated. It was why there were ghostships where whole crews abandoned their mission together. And why they might build this fragile peace on a rock so far from home it seemed like a different universe. One changed when one spent these long years held tight to the surface by unearthly gravity or floating freely above an alien world. Persephone received the new contract from Douglass on theColossuswith orders to distribute it to interested parties, including those awkward, unauthorized children. Charis read it, pausing only to highlight something or make a note and punctuate the shack’s silence with outraged snorts. Sim and Aurelius were familiar with the sound of her vitriol; they left her alone. Outside, the new orchard was still just a wonky five-sided field from which most of the rocks had been removed, but Aurelius was ready to start amending the soil. “Looks good,” Sim said. He shrugged and got to work. Privately, Sim wondered if there was any point, especially after Aurelius led her to last year’s privy—now compost—and they began hauling its contents to the new field. After two silent trips, she couldn’t restrain her questions. “Do you want to go back to Earth?” Aurelius lowered his shovel and squinted. “We can’t go back if we’ve never been there.” She made a face like, don’t be so goddamn pedantic. He answered her look: “Yeah. I don’t know.” “If you don’t know, why are we shoveling out the privy?” “It’s all properly broken down. You can’t even smell it anymore.” But then he looked up at the sky and down at the shovel. It was one of the very old ones left behind by the first survey mission, predating even the mine. Aurelius, having taken over Gliz’s agricultural revolution, had the luxury of a real shovel. Like the kids who worked for him, Sim used a shovel they’d hammered out of sheet metal from the dump. “If Gliz isn’t the middle of nowhere anymore, maybe we could get more shovels,” Aurelius said. Sim relaxed at that. “Or tents. I’d like some tents. How many shovels do we need?” “As many as we can get,” he said and went back to work. That night, after Sim had washed away some of the mud in pond water, she and Charis went for a walk. They stopped where they always did, outside of Town, searching the sky for thePhiloctetes. “This is your choice, as far as I can see,” Charis said as they watched the speck. “You can sign on with the Company and leave for Earth—and after you’ve served the first ten years, you could buy out your contract. Or, you can stay on Gliz, and we claim squatter’s rights back on Earth. That’s all we’ve got.” “If I sign on, can I come back?” “Maybe. Eventually.” “I don’t want—” “—Don’t answer so quickly.” “Mom—” “—What’s keeping you here, Sim?” Sim turned to face the foothills and felt the whole planet unrolling around her, which included the presence of the others she sensed, whoever they were. When Mom spoke again, it seemed to be to herself. “There’s so much on Earth. There are schools and strangers and museums. You could have a life there, a really nice life. And ten years isn’t that long.” Ten years ago, she had been in love with Zayne. Ten years ago, she’d started her slow walks toward the foothills. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s going to be a fight. They own everything. Gliz will be flooded with strangers who hold the Company line. They won’t make it easy.” “But it won’t just be me.” “People need time to think.” “Peele?” Charis laughed. “He’s a loyal servant of the New Stars now.” “So I bet Lisa will go, too, and Jeff.” “They’re not wrong to leave.” “I didn’t say that?” “You could challenge the surveyor’s exam and probably skip the first two rungs on the ladder. And you have the money for a commission if you want it. You’ve already gone farther than most human beings. But you could go farther than that, now. And if you hate it—it’s only ten years.” Vast crowds of humanity. Restaurants and strangers and mountains and perfume and grandparents and great-grandparents. After that, the deep black of space beyond the edge of cultivation, as the Company called it, into worlds unknown. In a few weeks, the universe had grown unimaginably huge. “I could get a tent, probably.” “Or you could get a tent. But is that all you want?” “And a sleeping bag. And if we have to leave Town to hide from a bunch of Company assholes, maybe I’ll finally get you out to the foothills,” Sim added, suddenly hopeful. “And there’s at least one river you can properly swim in.” “Okay,” Charis said. “The foothills.” CHAPTER FIVE The last night Charis, Aurelius, and Sim were together, they sat around the wobbly table in their shack and drank a bitter tea that Aurelius had grown from the ragged mint plants in the Factor’s garden. The ritual was so familiar, it was hard to believe that Gliz, as they had known it, was about to end. Mom said, “Okay. Salmerón of theColossushas orders to try thePhiloctetesdeserters tomorrow.” Aurelius spoke first, “There are what, elevenPhiloctetescrew?” “Can we hide them?” Sim asked. “Probably not. Or not all of them. Not yet. So they’re going to arrest me.” Charis pushed the tablet toward them. “This is the appeal. My lawyers drafted it months ago. You’ll hand it over to Salmerón once I’m arrested, and the lawyers will submit it to the Company when they receive word that I’m in custody. My contract includes the right to a trial at home and to representation, which I won’t get out here.” “What is that going to do about—” “—Delay. Draw attention to Gliz. There are unsigned and extra-contractual children in a lot of places. Maybe if enough people know about you, we can hope for some kind of civil intervention. Colony status, maybe.” Aurelius shifted in his chair, his hands in fists on the table. “Jesus Christ, Mom, why do you trust them? Why do you think you’re going to survive the arrest in the first place?” “Of course I don’t trust them. But what else are we going to do? We stay calm, and we do what we can with what we have.” Aurelius left, closing the door silently behind him. At dawn the day theColossuscrew was to arrive, the elderly survivors of theThames, theDSX, theTilikum, and theChicagogathered near the landing pads, their silence vibrating with hope: something will descend, please, let something descend. Sometimes the little kids joined the old people on their way to or from playgrounds among the slag heaps, but they never stayed long. Around midmorning, a star flared in the blue-green sky, and the old people squinted at it until they had to look away. Sim was digging in the new orchard with Aurelius, but she looked up to watch that light resolve into a white capsule trailing fire, the air beneath it rippling with invisible heat as it settled on the landing pad, blowing dust into everyone’s eyes. That was when Sim and the other children of Gliz joined the crowd, their arms crossed and their faces grim. Later, when the heat died and the noise stilled, some invisible signal dragged Persephone to her feet, her uniform hanging loosely from her bony shoulders. (She’d held onto that uniform long after all the others had been worn to rags and those rags stitched back into clothes. She’d kept the Company flag, too, limp and whole in her office. Charis hated that flag. “Do you know how many diapers we could make out of it?” she said to Sim at each new birth.) The first strangers Sim had ever seen arrived in fire like gods in an old story. First, the marines in olive, conspicuously armed, then four officers in blue, with brilliantly polished boots and elaborate sidearms, then the tall, slender man who must be Salmerón. These beautiful aliens moved awkwardly, so light they might snap. An officer stumbled, then three of the marines hit the ground and struggled up again. “Captain Salmerón!” Persephone shouted, her voice cracking. “You have Gliz.” Captain Salmerón bowed. Misty—just sixteen—shoved in beside Sim, craned her neck and squeaked, “He’s handsome! I’msorelieved he’s handsome.” Then added, “That marine isn’t bad, either. The girls aresopretty, though.” Sim stared at the blue moiré coat one of the lieutenants wore and wondered at her iridescence. Her hair shimmered from purple to blue, like those tiny, brilliant creatures that lived in the foothills, the ones Sim often watched creep across the rocks. How fascinating. Misty couldn’t tear her eyes away, and why should she, when all around her were stooped, exhausted men, and boys she’d known her whole life, with their missing teeth and their scars, and every one of them wearing clothes that had been worn by the dead. And now a heavenly body descended, and he wasn’t just iridescent, he was properlyhandsome. Like,moviehandsome. Misty and all the other girls should be careful, nevertheless Sim expected a baby boom in nine-and-a-half months. But after her initial delight, Misty seemed to wilt. She was wearing this skirt she’d patched together out of fabric she’d begged from every family in Town because she’d wanted something full enough to twirl when she danced. She’d worked vines and flowers around the hem, in threads also harvested from those old clothes. Faced with elegant strangers whose boots had never touched mud, Misty stepped back, gathering her skirt into one hand, hiding its precious stitches from those alien eyes. Persephone led them to the Factor’s house, the crowd following and Sim squeezing Misty’s hand, like it could help her sudden, terrible self-consciousness. Some of the little kids fell silent in wonder, and others pestered the marines with questions, even when grown-ups tried to yank them back.My mom is from Singapore, are you from Singapore? Do you know my grandma? She lives on Earth. Do you have chocolate? Do you have a pony?Old men said that styles had certainly changed. It was all orange velveteen when they were young. At the back, one of the elderly miners—blind—shouted about Earth as he had left it. The softness of the grass there. The beauty of the girls. When they reached Persephone’s house, Salmerón wouldn’t go in, just stood outside and said something Sim couldn’t hear. Then he raised his voice—you had to, with Persephone—and apparently repeated himself, “Captain Faber’s records were deplorable.” Sim crept closer as Persephone hesitated and said, “I’m not sure myself, Captain Salmerón.” “Your duty as chief Factor is to keep track of these things. Some of that crowd must bePhiloctetes.” “Well. There’s theThames, theDSX, theChicago, I think. Oh, and—” Here Persephone paused and turned to Peele, “that civil crew studying stars.” “Right.” Peele seemed to think. “TheTilikum.” “Was it theTilikum? I think Laurence was on it. Where’s Laurence?” “Of course not!” Peele said, “He came in on theChicagoright after theDSX. Did you want to talk to Laurence, Captain Salmerón—” “—Thank you both,” Salmerón said. “Where is Charis de Crèvecoeur? Junior medical officer on thePhiloctetes. Deserter.” “Oh. Yes,” Persephone said, then turned to the crowd, searching until she met Sim’s eyes. “Sim? Where’s your mother?” “I think she’s in the orchard,” Sim said. Persephone didn’t seem to understand, so she shouted, “Orchard!” She wasn’t, but for a desperate moment, Sim couldn’t help but lie and keep her hidden a little longer, even if that wasn’t the plan. Moira hustled her father, Gethin, away from the crowd. He’d been a kid on thePhiloctetes, a junior technician. Last night, when Charis sent out the instruction to hide, he’d said, plaintively, “I just want to see them one time.” Salmerón gave someone a look, and a dozen marines filtered through the crowd, their guns easy on their hips. Children saw the game and ran about, searching, until one shrill voice sounded, “I saw Charis!” and led a marine to the clinic, where Charis stood in the doorway, drying her hands. “Well,” she said, her voice raised to carry, “I suppose I’ve got a trial.” Sim had observed this before: How Charis could expand to meet a confrontation, suddenly taller, emphatic. It reminded Sim of the time Mom found her with Zayne out behind the sheds near the smelter, the way she’d told Zayne to pull up his pants and go home. Zayne’s mom had been on thePhiloctetes. Salmerón said something to the corporal beside him. Marines surrounded Charis, pulling her roughly toward the square, Sim wondering why it took four of them to manage a stooped, gray-haired woman. One stumbled, dragging Charis to her knees. Now the crowd murmured dissent. Persephone saying, “There’s no need for that, there’s no need.” But the marines ignored even that charge, continued staggering to the square. Then Salmerón tripped and fell heavily to the ground, struggled to his feet with mud on his uniform. Someone giggled. Someone asked, “You alright, Charis?” “Fine, fine,” she shouted. “Nothing to worry about.” One young woman paced the crowd’s edge, and Sim was distracted by her fragile, perfect skin and the curl of dark hair on her forehead beneath her dull green helmet. She’d have been born on distant and glorious Earth, where the ponies and the rollercoasters were. But then the Earthling tripped, like Gliz itself was pulling her down into the simmering chaos of the crowd. Someone laughed like it was slapstick, but Sim looked from marine to marine and could only think of those hands, dozens of them, each slung across a gun, the fingers resting easily on triggers, and she knew every single safety was off. The young woman struggled to her knees, hard-faced, shouting, “Who was that? Who the fuck did that?” Other marines helped her up, scanning the crowd for the culprit. So easy for them to squeeze a trigger, and there’s Gliz gone forever, all of them laid out because a stranger panicked in high gravity. That was when Sim understood Charis’ unnatural compliance, the way she kept her hands open, her gaze on the ground. In front of Persephone’s house. Salmerón made his proclamation, the words came to him easily, and Sim wondered how many times he’d recited them, on how many worlds and stations, since the War ended: “The Company of the New Stars will forgive the speed with which we undertake this trial, but the crime is clear to all present: Doctor Charis de Crèvecoeur, you forswore your oath to the Company, to your comrades, and to thePhiloctetes. You will pay the price of the deserter. Hard labor at the Company’s pleasure.” Outraged murmurs. Peele shushing the crowd, like he could stop it. Someone nearby Sim said, “It’s been hard labor for the last thirty years.” “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Charis said. “There’s nothing here to worry about.” But the crowd pressed tighter around Sim, drifting into a circle enclosing the marines and Salmerón. Don’t surround them. Don’t get too close, please, don’t, because in a second one of them would shoulder into a marine with an easy finger on that trigger. “Back,” Salmerón shouted, but the crowd only thickened until he raised his sidearm and fired half a dozen rounds overhead. Sim dropped to the ground and dragged Misty with her. Some little kids started crying. The reaction seemed to please Salmerón. He shouted, “Where is the crew of thePhiloctetes?” “I don’t believe there’s anyone anymore,” Persephone said and struggled to her feet. “Charis, are there any?” “They’re all dead,” Charis said, and she seemed about to say more when the marine to her right shoved her. Marcus was near Sim in the crowd. He’d been a mechanic on thePhiloctetes, seventeen when he left Earth, Mom had told her, and he’d stuck it out as long as he could, honoring his contract until there was no one left but Simram and Ignatius, and they sent him down to the surface in the last tender, with as much gear as they could spare. “Don’t,” Sim said to him. “You aren’t even supposed to be here. Can we get the kids away?” Because now fire repeated overhead, this time from the marines. Sim dropped to her knees, then her hands. That was when Peele said, “Listen, I remember now. Charis is right. They’re all dead. A weak bunch, thePhiloctetescrew.” Captain Salmerón briefly searched the crowd. He turned to Persephone, accusing. “You told me there were at least a dozen survivors of thePhiloctetes.” Persephone started. “Oh, did I? I must have meant theChicago. There are at least a dozen. Aren’t there, Peele?” “Eleven, since poor Khadijah.” “But see, Captain, there’s no one,” Persephone said, plaintively. “Peele’s right. They’re all dead. All of them, except Charis.” None of theColossusgang was listening. Salmerón gave inaudible orders, and two young officers led the marines to the old bunkhouse that bordered the square. Then Salmerón walked clumsily toward the pads, accompanied by marines who dragged Charis along the rough ground. “But you still need to sign—” Persephone said. Salmerón did not look back. Two officers and a marine trailed behind, their steps heavy and stumbling. He fell twice more on his way to the tender. And then it launched, and Charis was gone. For years after Charis left, Sim would revisit their final conversation, writing it down, rereading it, comparing it to Aurelius’ account. She set that text beside the Battle of Gliz, a piece of history she knew intimately but never quite understood. That last night, Sim fell silent in the face of her mother’s plan, which was the best they had, but felt close to nothing. “Why can’t you just run, if Gethin and all the others are going?” “Because there is nowhere. There is no part of this planet they won’t be able to see. And someone needs to go back to Earth for trial.” Sim knew she was probably right. TheColossushad begun launching its satellite swarm, and there’d be new stars every evening, even more unseen on the far side of the planet, above the graphite deposits. In a year or two, they wouldn’t need boots on the ground because every inch of Gliz would be under the Company’s eye, everything that crept or flew or crawled, every mark in the ground rendered naked. But not quite yet. “How long will you be gone?” Charis made a face, the one she made when someone was too stupid to see what must be done. Then she said, “I don’t know. But, Sim, you need to leave town. Don’t stay just to see what happens.” “I know. We’ve talked about it. But you were supposed to come—” That look again. “Don’t underestimate them. It’ll be a lot harder than you think.” “What could possibly be harder than this?” she asked. The memories ran roughly through her mind: the girls who died of eclampsia and infection; old people worn down by high gravity, joints swollen to immobility. “What could possibly be harder?” she repeated, and she heard the shock in her own voice, that her mother could have missed the truth of life on Gliz, how short it was, and how wild. “Maybe not,” Charis conceded. “They won’t want you to succeed. You’re squatters. I wish I could be here to help—” (Much later, Sim would think, you did help. Because we watched you handle Peele and the various calamities of a small town in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but your wits and salvage and goodwill.) “The foothills,” Sim said, again. “There’s water, and we’ll be hard to find.” One of the valleys she’d found between the rising hills, with a rivulet at the bottom. They’d have to think about privies downstream. They should take the shovels and the plastic sheeting, the protein biscuits. But the Company owned Gliz: every shovel and biscuit, every slag heap and privy and wall and tarp. “We’ll be like thieves,” she said. “Youarethieves. But just now, they don’t have the manpower to take you all in. And by the time another shipload of Company militia gets here, the lawyers will have done their jobs. And I’ll be shouting to high heaven about you.” Then they were down to business: passwords for the tablets, little Diya’s cough, and Charis’ case notes. Finally, she concluded, “I might be able to send you a tent and a sleeping bag. It’ll be a while, though, because we can’t go through theColossus. It’ll come from Ignatius because I’m obviously a criminal, but thePhiloctetes’ printers still work, if we can get the substrate.” “Yes,” Sim said, “Sure. What about Ignatius?” Charis looked away. “He’ll have to stay. ThePhiloctetesis the only way you’ll have any communications. And it would be nice to get you some antibiotics. Maybe a shovel.” “Two, if you can afford it.” Sim tried to say it lightly. What outrageous wealth to have two new shovels. She’d never had anything new in her whole life. Charis’ smile died, and her eyes brimmed. She hugged Sim tight, her thin arms like wire binding them close. “Yes. Shovels. Aurelius will need a few.” “We’re going to be okay,” Sim said. “You will. You will be okay. And next time I see you, I’ll bring you apples from the orchards at home. They’re keepers. They’ll last at least a year on shipboard.” “We’ll be okay, and you’ll come back with apples,” Sim said, like repetition could make it true. “And you’ll look after Aurelius.” Her voice cracked on his name. “He thinks he can do everything. He’ll destroy his back before he’s thirty if he doesn’t rest. Make him rest sometimes.” That was too much, somehow. Sim told the truth for the first time, her voice slight and childish, “You could be dead, too, like the rest of them.” She sounded like she was five again and crying,Where is Daddy, where is Daddy, where is Daddy. When Ignatius left thePhiloctetesfor theColossus, he felt—for the first time in two years—the weight of his own body. Even sedated for transit through the ship to his low-gravity bunk, the weakness was intolerable, and with it a spinning nausea that made it impossible to eat, even with all the delicious things the ship offered. “That’s your cochlea,” Doctor Cook said cheerfully. “Your vestibular system will take some time recovering, and you’ll need implants. But they can do wonderful things back on Earth.” Ignatius wasn’t sure a year of nausea and ship’s gravity was worth whatever would happen on Earth, but he was too tired to speak. That evening, Salmerón blew through the door, stepping gracefully into the air near Ignatius’ bunk. He didn’t bother with a greeting. “Thirty years on that rock has turned them all into a bunch of filthy little barbarians. The chief Factor’s a fool. We’ve got Crèvecoeur at least.” “Is she here?” Ignatius asked. But Salmerón didn’t hear him. He went on as though he could not stop himself: the ugliness of GLZ7G, its uncivilized gravity, its brutish population, who felt not one iota of gratitude to the Company; the depths to which servants fall on the far side of the Dominion. Its mud, which clung so insistently to his boots, he considered tossing them and printing new ones with a more fashionable heel. When Salmerón had exhausted his irritation, Ignatius spoke mildly, “You’ll send down the miners tomorrow, then, if you’ve got de Crèvecoeur, and be away.” “We’ll send down the miners, yes, to knock down the houses. Your deserters will turn up soon enough.” The savages Salmerón excoriated were Charis and Sim and Aurelius. Persephone and Marcus and Gethin and Lin. How to explain to such a young man, so spiky, so preoccupied with the state of his boots, that Gliz was their home and they were no longer the Earthlings they had been when they arrived. “Wait, Alexander,” he finally said. “Please.” Just now, Salmerón was listening, but soon the moment would pass, and the young man would drive thePhiloctetescrew out of their homes, and if anyone stood in their way, there was Gliz gone, the deserters rounded up, the children forced to sign on, and anyone else dead. He could feel the disaster close beside them, only drawing closer if Salmerón was afraid, if he felt slighted or embarrassed. The Battle of Gliz and all the other spats of the last thirty years would be nothing to the Company’s sudden and obliterating violence. “Spit it out, Faber.” “When you were at FH67L after the armistice, you watched the Martian ship collide with one of our mines.” Salmerón’s face was still. “Did you take any of them onto theColossus?” He hesitated, and when he spoke it was confidential and low, as though they might be overheard. “They didn’t tell me to stand down the mines. I would have done it if they’d said. We had all the codes. But the orders didn’t come.” “The orders don’t come, not when you need them. We’re far on the edge of things here. So far out, the Company’s laws don’t mean what they do on Earth. Not quite.” Salmerón bristled. One must be gentle with them, these prickly children of War. Ignatius was bitterly tired, but he went on, his voice gentle, “The remaining crew is dead, but I have been remiss in registering those deaths. It would be easier, I think, if I wrote the official letters. Persephone will give me the names, and I will send them. Then you’re clear of the whole business. And it’s not all disaster, either. You’re returning Aurelius de Crèvecoeur’s granddaughter to Earth. His favorite. Take care of her, and you’ll be in his good graces. And you could grant a little latitude to his unsigned grandchildren and their friends. It’s the kind of thing a man like that remembers.” Salmerón smiled a little. He was imagining himself: a handsome young officer with dramatically curly hair, bowing low to the old man and relating, bashfully, that he honored Charis and her children, despite the charges. It was his natural aristocracy, gracious to one’s enemies in defeat. What gifts he could expect! What patronage for such a favorite! “They’re all dead,” Ignatius said, “all my old crewmates.” “That’s what the Factor said.” “Yes, and now you’ve taken the lone survivor into custody. You’ve done your duty to the Company. You’ve held the line.” The people of Gliz held their line, too. They decided, daily, to persist, eating protein biscuits and drinking water, keeping company with strangers on the edge of known space. After Simram died, Ignatius had tried to stop all this ridiculous exercise, thePhiloctetes, and exile, and protein biscuits, but the inertia of custom kept him what he was: a man of Gliz. He was no longer the Company Man who had sent the letters of desertion home. How sad and strange that he had only discovered that now, as they came to bring him home. Salmerón hesitated. He’d been raised inside this long, meandering war. Ignatius wondered if he’d ever been alone, had ever struggled to understand who he was with no one around. “They’ll want to know. They’ll want it documented.” That was an opening. It was difficult to think under the pressure of even this reduced gravity. He wondered how he had stood the weight of it, for those first decades on Earth, before he became St. Ignatius, who dwells bodily in heaven. How noisy one’s mind must be on Earth. How heavy one’s thoughts. How much freer one was, far from the reach of the Company, alone. One could become a different sort of person at the edge of things. They’d scuttle her after the restock, when she’s got tenders and lifeboats. He imagined the catalog of things Sim would need to make a new village in the foothills: bunks and sleeping bags and protein biscuits ten years past their disposal date; the store of uniforms he had kept back, remade into clothes for children, or baskets, or tents. She’d build roofs of metal decking, and Aurelius would construct garden walls against the side of a noon-facing slope. She’d find clear springs of water and circle them with rocks. She’d dig wells. She’d walk farther into the mountains, know their secret valleys and passes while the Company filled the sky with satellites and the ships departed with loads of palladium and iridium and graphite. Aurelius would carry his apple seedlings from Town, and some would survive to bear their strange, gnarled fruit. “Yes, Company men. And they don’t like their orders ignored,” Salmerón said. Perhaps Salmerón’s parents were also in debt for his commission, paying the heavy maintenance in civil cash. “The orders wouldn’t be ignored, just delayed a little. She will be scuttled, but perhaps not this minute. And there’s latitude on the edge of things.” “Not the edge of anything anymore,” he snapped. “There are rules.” “You have a certain freedom as the ranking officer of the New Stars. And a War hero, I understand. You have the authority to leave it all to me, and I’ll carry it out according to the Company’s rules. I swear. ThePhilocteteswill be scuttled.” Ignatius watched the struggle between ego and obedience in the young man’s face and was surprised at how much affection he felt, despite all the irritating pomp of Salmerón’s authority. He had been born at war. Perhaps he, too, wondered what he would be in this new world and what he might have been in a different, peaceful history. “You’ve arrived at the old edge of Dominion. You’ve found an old man going mad in his ship, and perhaps you felt a little compassion for him in his madness. ThePhilocteteshas been his home for most of his life.” “You’d have to stay—” “—I’ll serve with pleasure,” Ignatius said quickly, before either of them could change their minds. The young man relaxed, as though some matter had been resolved. The crew of thePhilocteteswas dead. Ignatius would send the letters and scuttle the ship. He would hold the line for Gliz. Sim should name something after him, a stream she had yet to discover. Some tiny, gray-green plant she might find in the mountains. On the surface, they had time—just a little more. Sim should name something after Salmerón, maybe a stream she had yet to discover, or some tiny, gray-green plant she might find in the mountains. Salmerón’s stonecrop. CHAPTER SIX Late that afternoon, Sim stood in the middle of Town and could not remember what she was meant to do next, though her mother’s instructions ran through her mind. Food. Any plastic sheeting they could find. Shovels. Peele was louder than ever now, talking up his status as the senior surviving Martian of the region, and now a loyal servant of the New Stars. He’d requisitioned a flag and a uniform from the marines, now permanently camped outside of Town. Sim had heard they didn’t want to hand them over until he got pretty loud about it, and some NCO gave in. All that, despite the gunfire overhead, and the kids dropping to the dirt, and Charis gone. Peele must be a forgiving soul. “Come on,” he said when he spotted her. “Come say goodbye properly.” She wasn’t going to, but he was her uncle, so she followed him. She wished she hadn’t when he said, “Jesus. You’re really staying on this rock?” She just looked at him. “So you’re New Stars now, huh?” Peele shrugged, then gestured with a swollen hand toward the new tent, “They’re all good kids,” he said. “We just have to go along to get along.” Sim was turning away when Peele laughed. “Stop, stop, you’re as crazy as your mother. Just wait a sec.” He dug a small rectangle out of his pocket. And—this shocked her—his eyes were wet when he offered it to her. She stared dumbly at the smooth, gray glass, cool in her hand. It was a screen without a single scratch, finer and cleaner than anything she had ever seen. She didn’t know what to say until he explained, “Your dad would have liked you to have one. It’ll be good for all that exploring.” Here, he waved at the foothills. “He would have been proud of you—but he also would have said get the hell off this rock and sign on while you still can.” That last bit trailed off into a sniffle. Then he added, “I did a little work on it, so it’s synced to thePhiloctetes, not theColossus. I remembered St. Ignatius’ old frequencies. But maybe don’t tell the Company that just yet.” It took her a minute to understand what he had given her and how important it would be. She said, “Thank you, Mr. Peele.” He looked like he was going to hug her, but then Lisa emerged from the house with the baby on her hip and talked about all the things they were giving away because theColossuscould print anything they needed on credit. In six months, they’d be at some new station, with the whole universe ahead of them. Lisa offered the clothes they wore, the very walls of the house, and their share of the biscuits. “All of it,” she said, laughing. “Take it all. We’re rich now!” The children of Gliz left before dawn the next morning, melting into the long twilight by ones and twos. There were two marines on watch, drowsing in front of their tents through the short night, but they ignored the exodus. Perhaps by order of Salmerón. By midnight, thirty-seven people had collected a kilometer from Town, including the eleven surviving deserters of thePhiloctetes, now officially dead, six children too little to walk, and twenty others who had chosen to throw their lot in with Gliz, whatever that meant. Sim had to be careful not to outpace them, dawdling sometimes at the end of the column and counting heads. Thirty-seven, and all under her care. Thirty-seven whose lives might depend on the place she’d chosen. At their third or fourth stop, Patricia—usually so calm—insisted that this path Sim said they were following was no different from the steppe. “Do you even know where you’re going?” she asked, fussy and doubtful. She had wanted to sign on, but her mother wasPhiloctetes, and there was Lizzie the baby to think about. “I’ve been doing this for years, Patsy.” “You keep saying that, but I have no idea where we’re going. And I hate it when you call me Patsy.” She bounced Lizzie on her hip and looked away before Sim could be sure those were tears glittering in her eyes. Patricia had never wandered far, and now Town was gone, and there was nothing in front of her but the steppe, and Sim’s word that the foothills would be safe for a while. That first night, they camped at one of the water holes Sim had hollowed and watched shuttles rising from the distant pads, a rumble and a cloud of dark red collecting on the horizon, and then a star shooting into the night sky. Sim named the people who might be on them, though she could not say which soul rode which star: Peele and Lisa and Shin, Persephone, Charis. Misty. Sim said, “Goodbye, Mom,” to every one of them. They stopped before the foothills, when the ground rose, so they could see Town for the last time. The air was clear enough to see the outline of tall sheds where the Company’s mining equipment rotted. “There,” she said to Alex, just six, who had been walking beside her. She’d carried him on her back for a few kilometers that afternoon, since his dad had bales of plastic sheeting. “That smudge over there is Town.” “Are we on Earth now?” Alex asked. “No, this is all Gliz.” “But we’ve walked farther than anyone has ever walked ever! I thought we walked all the way to Earth!” Sim remembered that muddled feeling from childhood, so she explained it carefully. “Gliz is much bigger than just Town. It’s bigger than Earth, even. We could walk for our whole lives and not see it all, but right now we’re going to a place I know, a nice place where we can build houses. We’ll be closer to the mountains, too, and there’s a lake I want to find, and rivers where you can learn to swim.” Alex considered her words, then nodded seriously. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. This is Gliz, too, and there are rivers.” “And you know,” she said, the moment finally right, “I can tell you a secret about it.” He grew still, listening hard. Secrets are always good to hear when you’re little. “Sometimes when I’m out here alone, I think there are other people, too. I don’t know what they look like or where they are, but they know much more about Gliz than we do. And maybe if we find them, we can talk to them, and they’ll tell us all sorts of things.” “Are theyaliens?” the boy asked, incredulous. It took Sim a moment to answer the question. “No,” she said, finally. “They’re from here. They probably think we’re aliens, though.” “We’re from here, too, though,” Alex said meditatively, then added, “Maybe we could ask them where the lake is. Maybe they know.” Maybe they did. It was good to know that Gliz had a real name, even if she’d never hear it. But she still might find them, if she went farther, listened harder. A new village meant a new base, and a month’s journey from there would take her well into the mountains. She’d find their Gliz, wherever that was, and if she was brave and lucky, she might hear what name it held. Ignatius heard the hatch slide open but could not turn his head to look. A figure stepped lightly into his peripheral vision, out of focus until she drifted before him, then tilted her head, slight and imperious, revealing Charis. She was stooped now, too, having also grown old in the previous decades, though in his dreams she remained as she had been the last night they spent together in her quarters. “Ignatius,” she said. “Ignatius.” Repeating his name like she knew how wonderful it sounded in her mouth. Her hands slid to his shoulders, and he could have wept for the touch of another human being he loved. Resisting the oppressive gravity of the ship, he raised his hands enough to rest them on her arms. In their year together on thePhiloctetes, she had smelled expensive. Now she smelled sharply resinous and clean, like open air. That’s the scent of Gliz on her shoulder, where he buried his head. Her clothes must have hung on those low, scrubby bushes that grew near Town, the ones Sim had not yet named. He had never known the wind that crossed the scrub, but he felt its ghost on Charis’ skin. “You know,” she said, as though continuing a conversation only briefly interrupted. “I feel so light here. I feel like a ballerina. Ship gravity is heaven. But.” She looked at him critically. Doctor’s eye. “How do you feel?” “I’m going blind, and I can’t move,” he said. “So, you can guess.” She nodded. He’d kissed her twenty-eight years ago, a perfunctory goodbye because he still didn’t believe she would really desert. She took the tender to the surface with everything she owned and a significant portion of the medical bay. “Thief,” he’d said, only half in jest. “If we want to survive, we need everything we can get,” she had answered. Then he’d gone and sent the letter of desertion home. He’d refused to speak to her, and now all that time was lost, regretted as he regretted the letters of desertion. Nevertheless, he’d made Simram tell him everything happening on the surface. He’d heard about the Battle of Gliz and that she and a Martian medic had expanded the clinic as more ships limped into orbit. He’d relented and spoken to her again only when she’d had Sim because Sim meant it was all real, and he must accept it. “How did you get in?” “Salmerón is surprisingly understanding.” “De Crèvecoeur,” he said. “How much did it cost?” She sighed, “Grandfather has spent a lot of money on this. But it won’t be enough. We can’t rely on one man behaving reasonably well because of my family. There are 150 strangers on the surface now, and they’re loyal servants of the Company. And they’re armed.” It pained him that all he’d done—persuading Salmerón, committing the rest of his life to Gliz, and promising to scuttle thePhiloctetes—had cost everything and accomplished so little. “At least bribery works,” he said. “What will you do now?” “Not much. I’ll spend most of my time in the brig. You know it’s only a year back? Miraculous. War’s good for tech, I suppose. They’ll have to agree to the trial on Earth, and then maybe we’ll have a shot. And Sim will hide them, in the meantime.” She stumbled on Sim’s name. “Will you come back?” “It depends on how good the lawyers are.” “Perhaps I’ll see you, then.” She ignored the obvious lie. “What will you do?” “I’ll stay with thePhiloctetesas long as I can. Then we must scuttle her.” “Ignatius, the gravity on Gliz—” “—I know. But I promised Salmerón, and my orders stand. I do have some ideas for how I’ll scuttle her. She could be useful, down on the surface.” “But not just yet.” “No. Not yet. They’ll still need communications.” Charis’ mouth was small and tight, and she did not meet his eyes until she said, “I have something for you.” From one of her pockets, she produced a small, misshapen apple, red-cheeked and streaked delicately green. Ignatius took it from her clumsily. “Adam’s apple,” he said. And then he wished he hadn’t, because Charis laugh-cried as she curled his fingers around its cool, smooth skin. He had forgotten how apples smelled, how sweet they were. How warm Charis could be when she curled beside him in the narrow bunk. Doctor Cook helped him to the airlock, where he crept from theColossusto thePhiloctetesand felt gravity leave him, replaced by this sudden, directionless buoyancy. Home. And himself again. Two days later, thePhilocteteshad been reprovisioned, and he wore a new uniform. He watched theColossusdepart, taking Charis with it, and a terrible regret flashed through his heart as the ship’s emptiness settled around him. But the grief he felt came to be bearable. He supposed it was because he had become a different sort of creature, belonging neither to Earth nor the Company, but to thePhiloctetesas she kept time with Gliz. How painful it would be to return to Earth and be trapped under the millstone of its gravity. A long time ago, Simram had told him he should descend and live a human life on Gliz, instead of remaining in the firmament, watching over people he loved but could never touch. Simram—and Charis and all the other deserters—had been right, of course, but he hadn’t understood until it was far too late. And anyway, they needed thePhiloctetesnow. He would descend when the work was done, but not yet. Not everything was lost. Much remained to him. The bridge was fuzzy and haloed, the world drawing closer to him as his eyes failed, but thePhiloctetes’ new sensors replaced them, and he could overlook the whole of Gliz now. He preserved the tenuous thread that linked him to Sim and linked Sim to the rest of the universe. They would need the link if Charis’ plan was to work. Somewhere near him, a chime. He felt for the screen. “Sim,” he said, his eyes closed but his ears alert. “You reading me?” “Reading you, St. Ignatius. Better than ever. Is that the new gear?” “Probably. It’s good to hear your voice. The orchards are fine.” “It’s the graves. They know better than to disturb the dead.” Far away, Sim seemed to hesitate, and he knew what was coming next: “Any word from Mom?” It hurt to tell her the truth, but he did. “Nothing from her or theColossus.” “What about the lawyers?” “Not the lawyers, either, but she’ll send us word when she can.” He waited for her to respond, but she said nothing, so he added, “She’s so proud of you. Wherever she is, she’s proud of you.” Hold the line, he supposed, but not for the Company anymore. Aurelius stayed back long enough to watch Town fall to pieces and to stand in front of the garden walls, reminding everyone who approached that there were graves inside as well as apple trees. He told Sim it took less than an hour to knock down the shacks they’d built, their insides turned out, and treasures people had guarded with pride now just junk. Like that prism they’d both loved as kids, hanging in the window of the miner’s bunkhouse and casting rainbows on the walls. He’d pulled it out of the rubble. “There’s nothing to go back to,” he said when he caught up with them in the foothills, apple seedlings on his back, having followed the path they’d trampled. “I guess that’s the point.” “But not the orchards? Ignatius said they’ve left them alone.” “No. Not the orchards.” They shared a moment of silence for the graves, then Aurelius went on, “I saw some of the new mining equipment. It’s huge. It’ll chew through the surface in seconds. There won’t be much left of anything in a few years.” The new camp was a full kilometer from what had been Town. When they returned, the orchards would be all that was left of their home, and this new camp would be full of strangers, who called it by some other name. A hundred and fifty-two people, the printers running day and night to make new buildings, a laboratory, meeting rooms, a canteen. Aurelius said some of them would be two stories. “They’ll have stairs,” he’d said. “It’ll be like a city.” Meanwhile, the children of Gliz were slow to make their new home, and for the first days of their exile, Sim walked from one end of camp to another, supervising and counting heads and taking inventory. She tried not to think about what came next. Above them, the trade routes would reopen, and ships full of substrate and fabricators and building equipment and meds would arrive. Gliz would be a way station to farther ports, and the sky at night would be brightened by passing ships, flotillas of strangers in such crowds she shivered and wondered how she’d remember their names. If Mom was right, and Ignatius was clever, she’d get new boots and a tent and a ground sheet, maybe even the kind Company explorers used. In the future, she might reach the planet’s oceans, where archipelagoes raised their stony headlands over the sea. Maybe she’d find them, if they let her: their footprints on the ground, their marks on the walls of valleys she had not yet seen, leading her farther into Gliz. Eventually, their foothills camp would become permanent. They’d build something very much like Town, but perhaps better arranged. It would be in the shadow of the mountains, where Aurelius thought the soil was volcanic and rich. The water was fresher, and she had seen fish in the deep pools. Or no, she corrected herself. Something like a fish, but not a fish—something that belonged wholly to this place. She tried out names for this new place. Gliz. New Town. None of them felt right, but they would find it. Some day in the future, a child would call out to her friends and say,I’m going home now, and the name she used would come naturally to her. The right name, familiar in her mouth, that meant she was where she was supposed to be. Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird stories and climate change fiction. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She won the Sunburst Award for short fiction in 2020 for “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest,” the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for “An Important Failure,” and in 2023 she won the Ursula Le Guin Prize for her Stelliform Press novella,Arboreality. NeWest Press published her first novel,The Paradise Engine, in 2013 and Undertow Publications published her novellaThe Talositein 2022. Her most recent publication isThe Other Shore: Stories(Stelliform Press 2025) which collects the short stories she’s written about the Pacific Northwest. She mostly uses her PhD in Canadian Literature to make up sad stories about the future. Browse By Fiction Audio Fiction Articles Interviews Editorials Awards & Recognition Authors & Artists Random Story Random Podcast Follow Us On SUBSCRIBE AT B&N Nook Newsstand Patreon ClarkesworldCitizens Weightless Books ISSN 1937-7843 · Clarkesworld Magazine © 2006-2026 Wyrm Publishing. Robot illustration by Serj Iulian.

A dignified gentleman with a genial smile, twinkling eyes, and a snowy-white thatch of hair,@trusted_onebegan our ride by pointing out that he was wearing his car show shirt, expressing how funny it was to discover when he pulled it out of the closet after all these years that it had shrunk so much! I laughed at the joke as he humbly confided he was suffering from “imposter syndrome,” finding himself the subject of the latestRiding Shotgunseries. Told me he couln’t hold a flame to most of the guys on the site. But I wasn’t concerned that I had an imposter on my hands. Not one bit. Knew right off the bat I had the Real Deal. You’re known throughout the Bring a Trailer community for having managed the sale of literally hundreds if not thousands of cars for charity. Clearly you’re interested in them. Ahem. How’d you get hooked? Well, my dad was an Oldsmobile Man, just like yours. Every two years he’d get a new Oldsmobile. All different types. Starfires and Delta 88s. But he worked for the Forest Service and we moved a lot, and I think when I really got the bug was when we moved to Pocatello, Idaho. The first person I met there was someone you might call a geek or a nerd these days. He had bright red hair and freckles and was a little pudgy and wore glasses and had invited me over to his house. Turned out his dad was an oral surgeon and they were a really rich family. I remember he had anAvantisitting in his garage—probably the only one in Pocatello if not in all of Idaho! I thought that thing looked so cool. Anyway, my friend invited me to sleep over and the next morning his dad asked if I wanted to go for a drive in hisnewcar, a silver split-window Corvette! There was no back seat of course but I just crawled back there anyway and I remember looking up through that split window when he dropped the clutch. It just rumbled then screamed and I thought “Wow!” I’d never felt anything like that! The next day I went out and bought the Monogram or Revell model for a ’63 Corvette and spray painted it silver just like his was so that was probably the start of my car thing. Did you get into scale modeling then? Yeah, I learned a lot through models. I liked the strange stuff. Big Daddy Roth’sBeatnik BanditandMysterionand George Barris’Drag-u-la. I remember for Christmas I got a model kit that was called theBig T. It was larger scale, about two feet long, and was a bucket-T and had all the parts—Pitman arms and tie-rods and headers—so I really saw how a car was put together. Then for my birthday I got aVisible V8that taught me how engines worked. I learned about pistons and camshafts and crankshafts. You could hook up a battery to it and watch it work. It was pretty cool! First car story, please. When I was fifteen I got my permit and my dad said he could buy a cheap car for me and I could pay the insurance and maintenance on it. Alternately, I could buy the car and he’d put me on his policy and maintain it. I took the first option, but told him I’d like it to fit a certain criteria—something ’55 to ’57 and two doors. The next day he came back with a butt-ugly two-door ’56 Dodge Coronet, pink over white. Huge Dolly Parton bumpers. I told him I wouldn’t even sit in it. Handed him the title back and he said okay. And then kept it. I hustled out and mowed lawns and delivered newspapers and did plenty of babysitting and picked pounds of green beans to raise the money to buy my own car. Really wanted a ’55 to ’57 Chevy, but you couldn’t touch those. Noticed the ’58s weren’t very popular so they were more affordable and I got a Biscayne two-door. Still a pretty cool car, maybe not what every guy wanted but was pretty nice. I re-did the interior myself in black naugahyde, not as good as the tuck-and-roll stuff that was coming up from Mexico, but I learned a lot doing it. Every penny I got I put into that car, but I soon learned that girls didn’t really care about chrome dipsticks and chrome valve covers and chrome air cleaners! Oh, I don’t know—I’ve known a few that did. But now I want to hear a good second car story. Mine was a ’65 Impala. A 283 with three-on-the-tree and overdrive. Bought it because at the time I had this big Slingerland drum set that would fit in the trunk. I was afraid people were going to race me and knew I wouldn’t do very well, so I ordered some “427/435 HP” stickers from JC Whitney and some exhaust cutouts that mounted on the headers. You activated them from under the dash and they’d open up into straight pipes. I switched around two plug wires too to make the engine kind of lope like I had this big racing cam. With that and the stickers no one ever tried to race me. Me and my fake SuperSport. Kept it all through high school. Then something interesting happened. My grandparents in Pierre, South Dakota, won a Pontiac convertible in a Rexall Drug sweepstakes. It was red with a black top and really nice but when they picked it up they didn’t think it was their type of car. They held onto it for a while but then called me and asked if I’d like to have it. Sure! At the time I was a sophomore at West Point, so during spring break my roommate and I flew into Pierre on a twin-prop to pick it up. Had a three day break so we visited for a day then started the drive back. Running a little late, we were going through Pennsylvania on the turnpike and I was speeding. Probably 85 with the limit at 70. Got pulled over by a trooper. He walked up to the car. Asked for license, registration, insurance. Looked at it all and said none of it matches. The car’s plates were from South Dakota but its insurance was from California and my license was from Utah while my address was in New York. Paused for a minute and said he wasn’t going to take the time to figure it all out. That if I was a cadet the only thing he had left to say to me was one thing: Beat Navy! Cool to be young and single and rolling in a red Poncho convertible. Yes, but there was a problem. You’ weren’t allowed to have a car at West Point until your senior year so I had to hide it for the time being at a colonel’s house. He taught English at The Point and I’d taught his kids how to ski and they’d kind of adopted me and he let me keep it in an extra garage he had! If I’d’ve gotten caught it would’ve been two months of confinement to my room and about 100 hours walking with my rifle on a Punishment Tour. But I didn’t! What ride came next? Well, I’ve always liked sports cars, but I’m not into Ferraris or Lamborghinis. I’m an engineer and a practical guy—not really a wrencher. I like Saabs and Volvos and Mercedes, and during senior year at The Point when you can finally have a car they have “Car Day” where all the dealers come and have their cars in the parking lot of the football stadium so you can drive them. I drove a Mercedes 350SL that day and loved it. Rode great and handled really nice in tight corners and when you closed the door it was like a bank vault. My dad had made another deal with me that if I made it through West Point he’d go half with me on a car, but the cadet price for the Mercedes was $14,000, so when I called him and told him what his half for my car was he screamed, “what are you getting?!” I told him and he said, “No, you’re going to be a second lieutenant when you graduate. You need something more practical.” So I test-drove a Z. Thought it was a pretty fun car and ordered one, but when the time came for delivery the dealer told us that all of them were stuck at the port in Elizabeth, New Jersey, because they didn’t meet emissions requirements. We could cancel our order if we wanted or wait for it. At the time I was dating a girl who lived in Queens and was visiting her and there was a Lincoln dealership that had an orange Z. I went in and told them the story about my ordered Z and asked if theirs was for sale and they said that it was. They explained to me that a guy had won the lottery and had told himself that if that ever happened he was going to buy a brand new Lincoln Continental, so he’d come in with the Z he’d just bought a couple weeks earlier, traded on the Lincoln and paid cash for the rest. I asked what he’d sell it for and he said to make an offer. I said “how about $3,800?” and he said he didn’t know what it was worth but since I was a cadet…Sold. Beat Navy, Go Army, again. And at last I had my Z. A great car. It really was. I drove it across the country with my roommate who had a Z, too. We called it the “sow your oats tour”—two young guys coming from an all-male school with sports cars and freedom and two months off before we reported to infantry training. Drove day and night all the way across country to California because we were both from the Bay Area, using NoDoz and drinking lots of Coke to keep awake. Drove side-by-side on the freeway at night and if one of us started to weave because we were falling asleep the other would honk his horn to wake him up. Some guardian angels were definitely looking out for us! Back to your military service? Why Army? First of all, I want to say that while I served, I’m not a hero. Not necessarily a military man. I wanted to be a rock star. I had music scholarships to several colleges. Was planning to be a musician and make a fortune. But during my junior year in high school my dad said I should try and get an appointment to the Air Force Academy because everything was paid for—tuition and room and meals and uniforms and books—everything. Well, the only way you could get an appointment was with a congressional appointment or a Presidential appointment so I wrote a letter to the senator in Utah, and out of the 88 guys who applied for the single appointment, he ended up narrowing it down to two of us. He said we both were leaders in our schools and captains of sports teams with 4.0 GPAs, but the thing that set me apart was that I held a job while doing all that stuff. He said that was tough to do and made me a good candidate for the Academy. Then, a problem: two weeks before I was supposed to report, they notified me that somehow I’d forgotten to take my color-blindness test and my depth-perception exam. So I took them but failed miserably and they said they couldn’t take me. So much for being a jet-jockey. But my mother had a cousin who was a big shot at West Point and she called him and he told her they didn’t have a color-blind limitation. In fact, they preferred soldiers who were color-blind because they can see better at night. He also said he had a guy there who wanted to go to the Air Force and thought he’d switch with me and that’s exactly what happened. That’s how I ended up at West Point. This was around the time of the Vietnam War, right? Yep. We were all scared to death. I knew I’d be ranked in the infantry because I was at the bottom of my class, so I was worried about that, but I think it was my senior year where they said they weren’t going to send any more troops over from West Point. Missed it by just a few weeks. Lucky me. I never had any thoughts of making the Army a career. I appreciated the education—they say it’s a quarter-million dollar education and I believe that—and honestly my five-year commitment went by pretty quick, although in your early twenties that feels like forever. Then what? When you get out of the Army you have to be in the Reserves for a year, so when I moved to Pennsylvania I went to the unit that was closest to my house. It was a medical unit and I went in and asked if they had any positions for non-medical personnel and they said they needed a personnel officer. They liked I was a member of the infantry and signed me up! It was great. Medical people are intelligent and there were lots of doctors and nurses. Our first mobilization was to Nicaragua during the time of the Contras and the Sandinistas, and I was sort of back in battle what with the Sandinistas firing shots at our perimeter and I remember thinking I might as well have stayed in the infantry! But you just kind of flip a switch and become a different person. Your training kicks in and you do what you’ve got to do, protect the people you need to protect. My last thing with the medical unit was during Desert Shield at a two-star general’s headquarters. I was in charge of of mobilizing the medical units. Had twenty years in by then and had to fly to Minot, North Dakota which was about five degrees below zero when I got in. There was this whole hospital unit there and I had to stand in front of them and thank them for their service and tell them that the President didn’t need them anymore and that he was disbanding the unit. These were people who’d given their lives to the service of their country and now they were being treated like they were disposable. Now we need you, now we don’t. I had to do that to two different hospital units and that’s when I said, that’s it. Couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t right. And that was the end of my military career. Had to be a difficult passage to travel. Ironically, the experience was similar to how I ended up with the car charity auction gig. The company I was running back then employed six hundred people and I had to downsize it. I knew all my employees individually and they all thought we were going to continue to grow and their job was secure, but when the market turned I had to lay off three hundred of them. That hurt me personally. It was a lot of pressure and stress and I had a massive stroke. I had to do extensive occupational and physical therapy to learn how to shave and brush my teeth and write, and when I started typing on the computer it was all gibberish. Clearly I couldn’t do my old job anymore and had no idea what I was going to do. I was in my fifties—too young to retire. So what did you do? Well, that was around the time I’d been getting fed up with California and their emissions laws. I’d had three cars that failed the test including a Scarab Z that I’d brought into the state. They just laughed at me. Said they couldn’t give me a certificate unless I put back in the original engine. That I couldn’t leave the 327 and that the headers weren’t legal and the exhaust wasn’t legal and I didn’t have a smog pump and I’d be better off taking it back to the state where I bought it and selling it and that’s exactly what I did! Then I remembered that diesels were exempt from being smogged so I went on eBay. Found a [Mercedes] 240D with 300k miles on it. It was a good looking car with a four-speed, so I bid on it and won. Got it for $1,200. It was being sold by a charity where the money went to the Boys and Girls Clubs. The charity was being run by two guys, and when we were talking they said it seemed like I knew a lot about cars then asked if I wanted to help them out. I told them it was probably a good time because I’d just suffered the stroke and was trying to get back on my feet, and maybe I could handle cars. They asked if I had any place I could park stuff and I told them the company I’d been with was a defense contractor that had closed down and moved back east and left me with the building to try and help the real-estate people get it sold. I told them it was a strange building with no windows, but it did have parking for 600 cars, and that was that. They started bringing cars up, and it was great. I found that even if I had 100 or more cars I could remember every one of them—the mileage and the KBB price and the history of the car and how it ran. It was something I could do. People would just call me up and ask about whatever car and I’d always tell them the truth about it, living by the Honor Code I had at West Point. That’s how I got my screen name “Trusted One.” I ended up doing it for twenty years! Loved cars and loved people and it brought those two things together. Worst car to pass through your hands? The first Porsche I ever had! Ha! Gotta hear about that! Honestly, I never liked Porsches a whole lot. Had never ridden in one or driven one and always thought they were just glorified Volkswagens, but I saw one listed on Craigslist for five or six grand. A 912 soft-window. I called the guy and told him I was on my way. Got there and was the first one, but while I was there three other cars pulled up. He said those were other people coming to look at it and if I wanted it I’d better take it so I said I’d take it. He’d said it was a good car and I like to trust people so I gave him the money and got in the car and drove off. Took it to my shop the next day to look it over and they put it on the lift and as soon as it started to raise it literally buckled in half. All the longitudinals had rusted out. The guy had sprayed it with some thick black crap to make it look good and when my mechanic dropped it down he told me that I didn’t want that car. We couldn’t even hardly get the door closed anymore because the car had bent so bad. I put it back on Craigslist and was honest about the rust but even so some guy came and said he loved soft-windows and wanted to buy it. Said he was a welder and could fix anything. Paid me what I had into it and took it away and I thought I maybe never wanted another Porsche! Okay, now the story of the one you’d like back. It was a ’59 190 SL. Ever since Dad wouldn’t go in with me on the 350 I had wanted an SL, and when I lived in Fort Hood, Texas, there was a guy who lived next door who was a salesman for a Mazda-Mercedes dealership. I told him if he ever ran across a good deal on a nice SL to let me know and one day he knocked on my door. Told me to come out and take a look at a barn-find. Original gray paint, white top, red interior. Said a lady’s husband had it and when he’d passed away she’d parked it in the barn. Started it every week and drove it around the property then parked it again. Came to the dealership wanting another Mercedes and got to talking to him about it and he asked if he could see it. Went out and saw it and immediately asked what she wanted for it and she said how about three thousand dollars. Sold! He got into it and drove it back to the dealership. Only 33,600 miles on the odometer. He asked me if I was interested and told me I could pay him what he’d paid for it. Score! It was a nice car and I drove it back and forth to work for about a year, but every time I drove it I was always worried that someone was going to hit me. Then my second child came along and it didn’t have a backseat and really wasn’t practical for me to keep so I decided to sell it. But I’d like to have that one back. What’s on the horizon for trusted_one? Any mountains left to climb? Well, after two head-on car crashes and a plane crash and a helicopter crash, a stroke at forty thousand feet, and a downhill ski racing accident, I’m just trying to preserve myself and make the world a better place wherever I can. I don’t know what God has in store for me, why he’s gotten me through these nine lives. Maybe it’s just to teach people and interact with people and be myself and sit back and enjoy the grandkids. Maybe it is, my friend. Maybe it is. Thanks for the ride.

Lostalleres de empleovuelven a cobrar protagonismo en la comarca de Barbanza con la puesta en marcha de cuatro programas de formación dual que permitirán mejorar la cualificación profesional de 80 personas desempleadas. La Xunta destina cerca de dos millones de euros a estas iniciativas, que se desarrollarán en diferentes municipios; las últimas anunciadas, enRibeira, Noia, Porto do Son, Lousame y Outesdurante los próximos nueve meses y que combinan formación teórica y práctica con experiencia laboral remunerada. Uno de los proyectos presentados este lunes fue la undécima edición del obradoiro dual de empleoTahume, promovido conjuntamente por los concellos de Ribeira y Porto do Son. El programa contará con 20 alumnos, diez en cada municipio, que recibirán formación en actividades forestales y en producción en carpintería y fabricación de muebles; con una aportación autonómica total de546.552 euros. Los participantes también recibirán formación en competencias digitales, orientación laboral, igualdad, medio ambiente y autoempleo, así como preparación para la obtención de la ESO en aquellos casos en los que sea necesario. Colaboración entre concellos Durante el acto de presentación en la casa da cultura de Xuño, la alcaldesa de Ribeira,María Sampedro, destacó que«o obradoiro de emprego Tahume eríxese como unha valiosa ferramenta para mellorar as opcións de inserción no mundo laboral», a la vez que recordó el éxito alcanzado por las diez ediciones anteriores. La regidora puso en valor la colaboración entre ambos municipios para mantener una iniciativa que, según señaló, beneficia tanto al alumnado como al conjunto de los ciudadanos a través de los trabajos que se ejecutan en espacios y equipamientos públicos. En la misma línea, la teniente de alcaldesa de Porto do Son,María Maroñas, incidió en la«importancia de continuar levando a cabo este tipo de iniciativas que contribúen en gran medida ao desenvolvemento económico e que ofrecen oportunidades de emprego real na nosa contorna». Inserción laboral La jornada también sirvió para inaugurar el obradoiro dual compartido por Noia, Outes y Lousame, que permitirá formar aotras 20 personassin trabajo en actividades auxiliares de conservación y mejora de montes y en aprovechamientos forestales. Este programa cuenta con una inversión de522.500 eurosy contempla la realización de actuaciones de acondicionamiento ambiental, limpieza y recuperación de espacios públicos y forestales en los tres concellos. Durante la presentación, la delegada de la Xunta en A Coruña, Belén do Campo, destacó que en la comarca se han aprobado cuatro obradoiros de empleo dentro de la convocatoria 2026-2027, con una inversión próxima a los dos millones de euros. Do Campo subrayó que estas iniciativas tienen como principal objetivo mejorar las oportunidades de inserción laboral de 80 personas desempleadas. Además, también habrá unos incentivos de 3.000 euros por cada persona contratada para las empresas y 1.500 para los concellos.

Melbourne, VICTORIA, June 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --Fantastic Cleaners Australia, responding to startling peer-reviewed Australian medical research showing that children in Melbourne's inner-west face disproportionate rates of asthma-related emergency department visits, today released a new study on tackling indoor asthma triggers ahead of the Melbourne winter season. This study examines the household areas where dust, mould, and airborne irritants commonly accumulate as homes become increasingly sealed during colder months. Fantastic Cleaners Australia specialists completing a pre-winter deep clean. Medical research, published in May, found that asthma-related emergency department visit rates for children in Hobsons Bay and other parts of Melbourne's inner west area are 53% higher than the Victorian average, a pattern maintained across a 12-year dataset, with Brimbank recording similarly elevated figures. Notably, the elevated rates are not explained by socioeconomic disadvantage; as areas analysed rank above the national average on the socioeconomic index. The researchers point instead to air pollution from industrial and freight activity in the area, combined with indoor triggers, limited GP access during flare-ups, and parental anxiety as likely drivers. The research also found that 44% of parents went straight to emergency during a flare-up, even when a GP was available. Fantastic Cleaners Australia, a professional cleaning company providing comprehensive deep home cleaning services in Melbourne, works room by room through a property to remove the accumulated allergens that routine domestic cleaning typically leaves behind. The company's technicians — each selected, trained at the Fantastic Academy, and fully insured — address every surface and room: from bathroom tiles and kitchen surfaces to air vents, skirting boards, window seals, and mattresses.Rune Sovndahl, CEO of Fantastic Cleaners Australia, said: “You cannot control what pollution comes off the freight routes near Port of Melbourne. But you can control what’s inside your home before you shut the windows for the winter months. Dust mites in mattresses and bedding, mould built up in bathrooms and around window seals, dust collected in vents during months of disuse. A professional deep clean before winter removes those triggers in a way that a weekly domestic clean simply does not reach, and for a family already living in a pollution hotspot, removing the indoor allergy and asthma triggers is just common sense.” When a home seals up for winter, whatever has built up through the warmer months, circulates indoors rather than dispersing. Health guidance from asthma organisations recommends completing a thorough clean while conditions are still mild enough to air rooms well during and after cleaning. For households where a member has asthma or allergies, the advice is clear: have someone else do the cleaning where possible, as even routine cleaning disturbs allergens and the room should remain unoccupied for at least 20 minutes after cleaning finishes. A standard clean addresses visible surfaces. Professional deep cleaning services, delivered by trained cleaners with the right equipment, cover the areas that accumulate allergens year-round but rarely receive attention: inside and above cupboards, behind appliances, around window seals, inside air vents and ducted heating grilles. For mattresses where dust mite concentrations are highest, Fantastic Cleaners Australia’s advanced mattress cleaning service removes dust mites, dead skin cells, allergens, and stubborn stains at a level that standard vacuuming does not reach. For households managing asthma or allergies, the products used during cleaning matter as much as the cleaning itself. Harsh chemical agents can act as respiratory irritants in their own right. Fantastic Cleaners Australia uses eco-friendly detergents and methods across all its cleaning services in Melbourne, ensuring a comprehensive clean that minimise the risk of introducing new triggers to the indoor environment. The research found nearly one in four primary school-aged children across six inner-west schools has asthma. With the Victorian winter beginning and households closing up, the window to reduce indoor triggers before the heating season begins is right now. For Melbourne families, particularly those in the inner west, and neighbouring areas like Yarraville ,Williamstone,Flemington and Ascot Vale a professional deep clean before winter may be the most directly useful asthma trigger taming action available. Melbourne households wanting to reduce indoor asthma triggers before cool weather makes airing rooms impractical can book professional cleaning services at:https://fantasticcleaners.com.au/melbourne/before the season changes. 6 Areas to Deep Clean in Your Melbourne Home Before Winter A whole-home deep clean before winter addresses specific areas where allergens accumulate and concentrate once a home becomes increasingly sealed up for the colder months. Frequently Asked Questions: Deep Cleaning and Asthma Triggers Can professional cleaning help reduce asthma triggers in my home? A professional deep clean removes the indoor allergens most closely associated with asthma flare-ups; dust mites in mattresses and bedding, mould in bathrooms, dust in air vents and ducted heating systems, and residue on hard surfaces throughout the home. While it cannot address outdoor air quality, professional cleaning by trained cleaners in Melbourne eliminates the indoor variables that compound existing triggers. Health guidance from asthma organisations recommends having someone else carry out cleaning for households where a member has asthma or allergies, as cleaning itself temporarily disturbs allergens. When is the best time to deep clean my home before winter? The best time to deep clean a Melbourne home ahead of winter is in May, before cold weather makes it impractical to air rooms during and after cleaning. Health guidance recommends cleaning while conditions are still mild enough to open windows and ventilate rooms properly both to disperse temporarily disturbed allergens and to allow surfaces to dry, reducing the damp conditions in which mould develops and persists. What does a professional deep clean include that a standard clean doesn’t? Professional deep cleaning services cover areas that routine domestic cleaning typically misses: inside and above cupboards, behind large appliances, inside air vents and ducted heating grilles, grout and tile surfaces in bathrooms, window seals and tracks, skirting boards, and mattresses. Cleaning companies offering deep clean services use professional-grade equipment, operated by trained technicians, not commonly available for domestic use. Is it safe to have my home professionally cleaned if someone in the family has asthma? Professional cleaning using eco-friendly detergents and methods is well-suited to households managing asthma and allergies. Health guidance recommends that people with asthma or allergies stay out of freshly cleaned rooms for at least 20 minutes after cleaning to allow disturbed allergens to settle. How do I book a professional deep clean? Fantastic Cleaners Australia offers a streamlined online booking system for professional cleaning services across Melbourne. Bookings are available directly through the website, with options for fixed-price and hourly quotes depending on the property and scope of the clean. Every job is carried out by a trained, fully insured technician. Does Fantastic Cleaners Australia provide NDIS cleaning services in Melbourne? Yes. Fantastic Cleaners Australia is a registered provider of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), delivering cleaning and support services to NDIS participants in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Brisbane. The service is designed to ensure participants can access professional cleaning that supports independence and a safe, healthy home environment. About Fantastic Cleaners Australia Fantastic Cleaners Australia is a professional cleaning company providing specialist services to homes, apartments, offices, and commercial properties across Melbourne and major Australian cities. Services include regular domestic cleaning, end of lease cleaning, professional deep cleaning, advanced mattress, carpet and upholstery cleaning, oven cleans, and commercial cleans — each delivered by trained specialists using professional equipment, eco-friendly detergents, and proven cleaning methods. Every technician is carefully selected, trained at the Fantastic Academy, and fully insured. Experts from Fantastic Cleaners Australia removing dust and allergens. Press Inquiries Allan Edwardsallan [at] binarypr.co.uk+44(0)7956583080https://fantasticcleaners.com.au/

Patricia Abet Galicia La noticia del desembarco del gigante asiático Saic Motor en tierras gallegas activó este lunes la reacción de los grupos que, con mayor o menor entusiasmo, aplaudieron la llegada de la factoría a Galicia. Para la portavoz de Industria del PSdeG, Patricia Iglesias, es reseñable...que se propongan «dos ubicaciones», el puerto exterior enFerrol y As Pontes, para las auxiliares de la firma china. Una elección a celebrar en la que la socialista no dudó en apuntar la mano del presidente del Gobierno, Pedro Sánchez, en su último viaje institucional al país. Ante el anuncio, Iglesias se apresuró en poner el foco en la «coincidencia» del viaje a China de Sánchez, donde estableció, dijo, «relaciones institucionales y comerciales», por lo que la socialista gallega concluyó que fue el responsable estatal quien «pilotó esa alianza estratégica comercial». En otro plano muy alejado, la viceportavoz del BNG Olalla Rodil explicó que los nacionalistas son «prudentes» hasta ver «los términos exactos» del proyecto. «Estamos a favor de que se incremente elpeso de la industriaen nuestro país, pero también quiero ser prudente y ver los términos exactos en que se materializa esa propuesta porque sabemos cómo las juega el PP», receló la frentista. Al margen de las reacciones políticas, en un comunicado hecho público pocos minutos después del anuncio de la Xunta, la marca MG, de la que es dueña el gigante chino, destacó como «un hito histórico» su futura fábrica de coches eléctricos en Galicia, la primera en la Europa continental. Para la marca, la llegada a este rincón atlántico acelera la estrategia de la marca, insisten, «en Europa, para Europa». «Traerá a Europatecnologías líderesa nivel mundial mediante la fabricación localizada y la I+D, apoyando la transición hacia un futuro de movilidad más sostenible en línea con los objetivos de cero emisiones de la UE para 2035», agregaron desde la compañía asiática. Y añadieron, sobre la apertura en la Comunidad: «Llega en un momento decisivo para la industria automovilística europea, cuyos objetivos de cero emisiones de la Unión Europea para 2035 continúan impulsando la transición hacia la movilidad electrificada».

Late last year, I reviewed theAnalogue 3D, a 4K reimagining of the Nintendo 64 that offered a way to revisit my entire N64 collection on modern hardware, without (much) hassle. The system was an excellent buy for starry-eyed 30-somethings who grew up on Nintendo's 64-bit console, but it's no longer the only N64 replica on the market. The ModRetro 64 ($229, or $199 with early bird pricing) is the latest retro console that brings the beloved Nintendo console back to the living room. Like the Analogue 3D, it emulates the original hardware to accurately play N64 cartridges at higher resolutions, along with many cool screen filters to clean up the image or capture that classic CRT feel. Based on time with a pre-production model, I can say that the ModRetro 64's an excellent system that's on par with the Analogue 3D in many ways, while stumbling in others. Ultimately, your purchasing decision might come down to the frequency of its system updates and whether you dig that translucent, 1990s aesthetic that screamsextreme. The ModRetro 64 caters to a very specific audience. From the bright yellow box press kit I received to the translucent green console, the ModRetro 64 is made for people who remember the sights and smells of their local Blockbuster. My system arrived in a green-and-yellow colorway, but it's also available in purple, white, and red. In terms of size, the ModRetro 64 is much more compact than the original Nintendo 64, as well as the Analogue 3D. It measures approximately 8.5 inches wide by 6.5 inches deep (I reached out to ModRetro for official measurements). It's almost toy-like in appearance. In terms of ports, four controller ports line the front of the system, while a microSD card slot (the ModRetro 64 includes a 16GB microSD card), two USB-C ports, and an HDMI port line the back. In contrast, the Analogue 3D has two USB-A ports and a normal-sized SD card slot. The ModRetro has one large button that handles power and reset functions. Interestingly, it also has a dial for navigating the system's operating system. The console has some interesting quirks, too, including an eject button that works almost too well—it sent my cartridges flying into the air. There's also an LED lighting strip in front of the cartridge port to illuminate and highlight whatever game you’re playing. Most of these features are just for fun and add to the system's toy-like quality. Like the Analogue 3D, the ModRetro 64 doesn't rely on software emulation; instead, the system emulates the Nintendo 64's original hardware using an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) circuit. The benefit of hardware emulation is that it sidesteps the incompatibilities common to software emulation, such as graphical and audio glitches, input lag, and frame rate issues. ModRetro 64 touts a "deep partnership" with AMD and uses the AMD Artix UltraScale+ FPGA with a 16nm process node to power the system. Retro gaming enthusiasts will be happy to learn of ModRetro's other partnership, one with Robert Peip, aka FPGAzumSpass. Peip is best known for successfully developing the Nintendo 64 core for the MiSTer FPGA, which, in short, enables the ModRetro 64 (and Analogue 3D) to accurately emulate the original N64 hardware. ModRetro promises that the ModRetro 64's FPGA core will be open-source at launch. While Analogue is determined to emulate the warmth of original hardware, ModRetro feels more like it's resurrecting the original hardware for a new audience. That feeling comes from ModRetro also acting as an independent game publishing studio that re-releases classics and works with homebrew developers. In fact, on July 28, the company plans to release four cartridges: Buck Bumble, Extreme-G Turbo Fusion, Xeno Crisis, and Xibalba 64. ModRetro is building an ecosystem around this idea. One example of this is that the ModRetro 64 offers developers specific video filter defaults. The system can detect a ModRetro game and give the user the option to either experience it with the system’s 4K upscaling for the cleanest visual experience or utilize the filters that best represent the developers' intended vision. In that way, the ModRetro is far more creator-focused than I expected. While similar, the ModRetro 64 has a few tricks up its sleeve that differentiate it from the Analogue 3D right out of the box. For starters, the ModRetro 64 has its Wi-Fi enabled, which means that the system can update wirelessly like other modern consoles. This is a feature that was promised by Analogue, but itstillhasn't arrived months after the system's release. Maybe that's for the best. In my time with the ModRetro 64, I had numerous issues updating the system over Wi-Fi. In fact, I resorted to updating the system via microSD card. It's hard to tell whether the issue is just pre-release bugs or if this will be a problem upon release. Other updates set to arrive post-release include in-game notifications, enhanced video processing, effects and filters, in-menu sound effects, and lag-free AV adapter accessories. ModRetro also promises to release a "pro" Nintendo 64 controller, the aptly named ModRetro 64 Pro Controller, with a swappable control stick, wireless and Bluetooth options, and compatibility with the original Nintendo 64. It'll retail for $89.99 and release the same day as the system. For this review, I used Hyperkin's Nintendo 64 Premium Captain Controllers, provided by ModRetro. What will be available at launch is compatibility with EverDrive-64 X5, EverDrive-64 X7, and Summercart 64, popular flash carts that allow you to develop and play games on the Nintendo 64. Overclocking is also promised at launch, but wasn't available during the pre-release period. It may prove invaluable, because many Nintendo 64 games didn't perform particularly well on original hardware. Perfect Dark, for example, plays like a slideshow. That performance was acceptable in 2000, but it would be considered nearly unplayable in 2026. By overclocking, games will hit their target frame rates (usually 30fps) and become noticeably more responsive. To test the ModRetro, I broke out my collection of Nintendo 64 games. Upon powering on the system, the ModRetro64 took me to a menu screen with the Clean, CRT, and Scanline display profiles, along with a custom setting. Integer+ scaling, a rendering technique that upscales low-resolution images to higher-resolution displays, was another option, along with 720p, 1080p, and 4K graphics resolutions. In testing, I found the ModRetro's CRT and Scanline modes a little jarring at first, at least by default. I felt the lines were too thick and a bit distracting. If you're like me, you'll want to customize the picture settings. I was able to adjust scanline size, aperture grille, sharpness, and horizontal bloom, among other options. There's also an advanced section with deeper options, including different scalers. The default picture on the Analogue was more pleasing, especially the Broadcast Video Monitor (BVM) and Professional Video Monitor (PVM) settings. In action, however, the system does what it claims: play Nintendo 64 games in 4K. I tested the system with real cartridges that have been sitting around for more than 20 years. They included classics, such as Goemon's Great Adventure, Goldeneye 007, Mario Tennis, Super Mario 64, and Perfect Dark. I also booted up a few Japanese games, including a Japanese copy of Super Smash Bros, and A Bug's Life, which ModRetro graciously supplied. The titles performed as well as they did on original N64 hardware, which means that some games, like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, perform with noticeable frame rate drops. As of this writing,ModRetro confirmedthat 246 of the N64's North American releases play without issue, 23 have minor issues such as frame rate drops, and another 23 have major issues, such as not starting up at all. However, when the overclock option becomes available, I hope it will iron out most frame rate issues. 240p games stretched to 10 times their resolutions are rarely a pretty sight, which made the aforementioned display settings that much more important. The scanlines hid those chunky pixel edges and cleaned up the image quite nicely. I also didn't experience any input lag, something plaguing the N64 titles available onNintendo Switch Online. I did not like the system’s UI. I get that it also leans into the 1990s aesthetic, but it looked more like something from a Saturday morning cartoon than the OS on a modern, bespoke emulation machine. Likewise, the ModRetro simply starts the game upon load, whereas the Analogue 3D's clean, library-like menu lets you customize individual game settings and save them before starting the game. The system has flaws that go beyond a few minor quirks. For example, the controller shortcut that opens the system menu interrupts gameplay, so it's safer to just navigate the system menu from the console's dial, which means walking over to the console. Another gripe: If a game doesn't read right away on the ModRetro, it just sits on a black screen, which isn't a good look. The Analogue 3D, on the other hand, notes that in its menu. Yes, the ModRetro 64 is built on promises, much like the Analogue 3D. Problems aside, the ModRetro 64 is a great way to play classics. I love that I can resume save files from 20 years ago and revisit the classics in my library. I'm also especially excited to explore its indie releases and homebrew projects. Your decision to buy the ModRetro 64 will likely come down to how quickly these promised updates arrive (or if they arrive at all). For me, the Analogue 3D was just easier to play right out of the box, with settings tuned exactly to my liking. However, the ModRetro is an impressive console and a solid alternative to the $269.99 Analogue 3D if you want to save money and prefer your retro consoles with a healthy dose of rad aesthetics. The ModRetro 64 officially launches on July 28.

A new model for airport growth: check in, drop bags, and clear security 20 miles from the runway, on SITA's common-use platform. BOSTON,June 1, 2026/PRNewswire/ -- Boston Logan passengers on select Delta Air Lines and JetBlue flights can check in, drop their bags, and clear TSA security in Framingham, Massachusetts, before they ever reach the airport. The Logan Airport Remote Terminal at Framingham, launched today by the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), is the first off-airport security checkpoint in North America.SITA'scommon-use check-in technology is the platform that makes it work. Massport faced a challenge familiar to major hub airports across the country. U.S. airports welcomed one billion passengers in 2025, with annual throughput expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2040. Building more terminal capacity at Logan was not a realistic answer. Massport needed a smarter one: bring the airport experience closer to where passengers live, and reduce pressure on roads, curbs, and security lines in the process. SITA gave Massport the technology to do it. By deploying its common-use check-in platform at the Framingham site, Massport was able to stand up a fully functional terminal processing environment outside the airport campus. Passengers check in, print bag tags, and receive their boarding passes at Framingham. By the time they board the dedicated secure bus to Logan, check-in is complete. Standing up a credible, passenger-ready terminal in a non-traditional space was its own design challenge. Through its CCM business, SITA delivered both the physical design of the check-in counters and the technology running inside them, giving Massport a single partner for the full check-in environment rather than having to coordinate across multiple vendors. "For decades the industry has measured airport capacity in gates and runways, but the real bottleneck at most major hubs lives before you ever see a plane. The check-ins, the bag drops, and the security line are where we see most passenger anxiety. What Massport has done in Framingham is move those friction points twenty miles upstream, reducing the pressure on the airport facilities and passengers' anxiety levels. Once you can do that, the airport itself gets meaningfully bigger without adding a single square foot," said Shawn Gregor, President, SITA Americas. The program is built on a multi-partner model with Massport at its center. Landline powers and operates the dedicated secure bus between Framingham and Logan. TSA provides security screening at the remote site to the same federal standard as Logan's main checkpoints. SITA's platform connects the check-in process across airlines and the facility, ensuring every passenger is airline-ready before they board the bus. The Framingham pilot builds on the Logan Express network, which carried more than 2.7 million passengers in 2025, with Framingham its busiest location. The pilot will run through the summer, with Massport planning to extend access to additional airlines over time. SITA's platform is built to scale with that growth, able to onboard new airlines and new locations without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure. Reservations for the Logan Airport Remote Terminal at Framingham are open now atmassport.com/logan-airport/getting-here/remote-terminal. About SITA SITA is the air transport industry's tech engine, making travel safer, easier, and more sustainable for everyone. From the earliest days of commercial aviation to today's digital frontiers, SITA has been there, connecting the industry and helping it evolve through every leap forward. With around 2,500 customers, SITA technology supports over 1,000 airports and more than 19,600 aircraft worldwide. It also helps over 70 governments strike the balance between secure borders and seamless journeys. Behind the scenes, SITA bridges 45–50% of the industry's data exchange, enabling a highly complex global network to operate smoothly and reliably, every step of the way. SITA is transforming fast. From advanced self-service and operations control to airport design and digital borders, we're shaping the next generation of travel through key acquisitions like Materna IPS, ASISTIM, and CCM. We're also expanding beyond aviation with initiatives such as SmartSea, bringing our trusted technologies to cruise, rail, and urban air mobility. This transformation is about more than new products. We're investing in the right skills, tools, and partnerships to help the industry move with greater intelligence and agility, bringing together smart systems, seamless data, and sustainable innovation. Because as global travel surges, flow is everything. As part of our bold climate strategy, SITA is cutting emissions by 4.2% each year and targeting net zero by 2050. Our science-based targets are validated by the SBTi, and our growing portfolio is helping customers reduce their own carbon footprints too. Owned by the industry and driven by its needs, SITA operates in more than 200 countries and territories. Find out more atwww.sita.aero. About MassportThe Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) is an independent public authority responsible for the operation of Boston Logan International Airport and other aviation, maritime, and transportation assets across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. To learn more vistMassport.com. Media ContactSITALauren Shankman[email protected] SOURCE SITA

Given its plan to bring to life two approved oil and gas developments in the Sergipe Alagoas Basin off the coast of Brazil, the country’s state-owned energy giant Petrobras has signed off on deals for two floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) units with Dutch giant SBM Offshore, laying the groundwork for a new oil and gas production frontier in the South American nation. With total investments exceedingR$ 60 billion (around $12 billion), Petrobrasconfirmedthe two projects would produce more than 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe) while disclosing a final investment decision (FID) for theSEAP Iproject in the Sergipe-Alagoas Basin almost four months afterannouncingthe FID for theSEAP IImodule in December 2025, consolidating the development ofSergipe Deepwater (SEAP). The Brazilian giant has now signed contracts with SBM Offshore for the construction of two FPSO‑type oil and gas production units for the SEAP project under the build, operate, and transfer (BOT) model. While Petrobras will be the owner of the units, the Dutch giant will be responsible for the design, construction, and assembly, as well as the operation and maintenance of the two FPSOs for an initial period of 6.5 years. TheFPSO P‑87for SEAP‑II will have an installed production capacity of 120,000 barrels of oil per day and process 12 million cubic meters of natural gas per day. The start of oil production is scheduled for 2030, with gas export beginning in 2031. This project comprises reservoirs of light, high‑quality oil and non-associated gas with low contaminant content, located about 80 kilometers offshore, in the BM‑SEAL‑4, BM‑SEAL‑4A, and BM‑SEAL‑10 concessions. Petrobras is the operator of the BM‑SEAL‑4 concession, with a 75% stake, in partnership with ONGC Campos Limitada (25%), and operates the BM‑SEAL‑4A and BM‑SEAL‑10 concessions, in which it holds a 100% stake. This content is available after accepting the cookies. Petrobras bringing $12-billion oil & gas project pair to life with SBM Offshore on FPSO duty for both On the other hand, theFPSO P‑81for SEAP‑I will have an installed capacity to produce 120,000 barrels of oil per day and process 10 million cubic meters of natural gas per day. The start of production is scheduled for 2031. The SEAP I project comprises reservoirs of light, high‑quality oil and non-associated gas with low contaminant content, situated about 100 kilometers offshore in the BM‑SEAL‑11 and BM‑SEAL‑10 concessions. Petrobras is the operator of the BM‑SEAL‑11 concession, with a 60% stake, in partnership with IBV Brasil Petróleo (40%), and holds a 100% stake in the BM‑SEAL‑10 concession. The two FPSOs will be connected to a production offloading gas pipeline approximately 134 kilometers in length, with 111 kilometers offshore and 23 kilometers onshore, to help expand the availability of natural gas in Brazil and strengthen energy security. These two projects are said to represent a significant economic return for the Brazilian player, making a relevant contribution to increasing national oil and gas production and developing a new hydrocarbon production frontier in Brazil’s Northeast region. Take the spotlight and anchor your brand in the heart of the offshore world! Join us for a bigger impact and amplify your presence at the core hub of the offshore energy community!

The 2026 college basketballtransfer portalis all but picked clean, the stay-or-goNBA Draftdecisions have been made and now one question remains: Who is going to be good? On paper, the Big Ten seems on the precipice of taking a slight step down after taking the mantle as the best league in college basketball last season.Michigan'sentire fearsome frontcourt is off to theNBA, but the number of excellent guards that are also exiting stage left is mind-boggling.Purdue'sBraden Smith,UCLA'sDonovan Dent,Illinois'Keaton Wagler,Wisconsin'sNick BoydandJohn Blackwell,Iowa'sBennett Stirtz, etc. are all gone, either to the NBA or other leagues. It's a big-boy list. The path is clear for new faces, new stars and a heated race. Consider this a first glimpse at strengths, weaknesses and the personnel for every team in the Big Ten. Before we know it, players will be back on campus, and summer workouts will be starting. These conference tiers provide a preferable way of contextualizing the outlook of each team. Let's dive in. 2025-26 record: 28-9, 15-5 in Big Ten play. Postseason: Lost in the Final Four toUConn. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: FJake Davis, CZvonimir Ivisic, G Lucas Morillo, GEthan Brown, F Zavier Zens, FJason Jakstys The scoop: Illinois has one of the highest floors in the Big Ten because its strengths travel every night. The Illini will be one of the biggest teams in the Big Ten, featuring a top-eight rotation that is littered with seven guys who are 6-foot-6 or taller. It will be the best-shooting frontcourt in the Big Ten, which pulls shot-blockers away from the paint. It will also be one of the elite rebounding squads. Size, shooting and rebounding give you a chance to win every night, and there's beauty in balance. Illinois' entire starting 5 is capable of getting 15-to-18 points, based on the matchup. Illinois may not have a lottery pick guard on the roster like Keaton Wagler, but it still has arguably the best personnel in the league. High-feel forward David Mirkovic is primed to dominate after a Big Ten Freshman of the Year-worthy campaign that was overshadowed by Wagler's excellence. The 6-foot-9 polar bear is a quote machine, and his game backs it all up as a big playmaker who can shoot, drive, rebound and pass. Andrej Stojakovic is back to find the weakest defender and put 'em in a blender again. Sharpshooting wing Jake Davis and the center platoon of Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivisic stuck around, too.Xavier'sJovan Milicevicwas the only high-major center to make more 3s than Tomi Ivisic last year (50). The guard play will determine whether Illinois is just a good team or agreatteam again. Providence transfer Stefan Vaaks is going to be the Money Man. The 6-foot-7 guard was one of the best offensive players in the portal, combining expert pull-up shooting with shrewd feel as a playmaker. Some of the shot selection was iffy, and the defense was an abomination at times, but Illinois can clean up those fixable things. If Vaaks can play clean basketball, Illinois will be in a position to win this league, and five-star freshman guard Quentin Coleman should be an overqualified fourth or fifth option from the jump. There's a chance Illinois isn't quite as good as last year on either end, but the floor is just so ridiculously high because of the rebounding and the balance. It will just have nights where Keaton Wagler's knack for basically depositing every single shot will be missed. 2025-26 record: 37-3, 19-1 in Big Ten play Postseason: No. 1 seed; National Champions (as if you could forget) Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: F Quinn Costello, FJalen Reed(recovering from torn Achilles), FOscar Goodman, G Joseph Hartman, GLJ Cason(recovering from torn ACL, redshirt candidate), Wing Lincoln Cosby (recovering from torn ACL, redshirt candidate), GRicky Liburd, GMalachi Brown The scoop: Dusty May's new starting 5 can go toe-to-toe with anybody. Point guard Elliot Cadeau is back to set the table with wizardly dimes and an infectious snarl. The Trey McKenney breakout train has left the station. The big-bodied sophomore guard is a safe bet to lead this club in scoring. Five-star freshman Brandon McCoy will bring the clamps defensively from the jump, and Michigan's new-look front-line has some serious potential. 6-foot-11 forward JP Estrella is skilled, tough and plays so hard. Cincinnati transfer Moustapha Thiam is all of 7-foot-2 with the coveted intersection of 3s and shot-swatting. That stuff is cool, but Thiam can be a pro if the processing ticks up and he simplifies his game. Cadeua-McKneney-McCoy-Estrella-Thiam should be one of the best lineups in the Big Ten, and May has more skilled size waiting to check in off the bench in Quinn Costello (6-foot-10 shooter) and Reed (a 6-foot-10 forward who can punish mismatches when his body doesn't betray him as it has in each of the past two seasons). Michigan has three legitimately nasty point-of-attack defenders and real rim protection in Thiam, so the defense should be very good. I think you'll see this group continue to play in transition as much as it can, but this roster is clearly not quite as vicious on paper as a year ago. There's no game-wrecker likeYaxel LendeborgorAday Mara, who can bend the floor and create leverage. Plus, there are real questions about the guard depth while spark-plug sixth man LJ Cason heals up from a February ACL tear. This cutting-edge coaching staff deserves the benefit of the doubt that it will squeeze every ounce out of this group. That's why Michigan is a deserved Tier 1 inclusion, but losingJuke Harristo Tennessee and Morez Johnson to the NBA Draft lowers the confidence level a smidge. That said, if you pick Michigan to win this league even after losing three potential lottery picks, nobody will argue with you. 2025-26 record: 27-8, 15-5 in Big Ten play Postseason: No. 3 seed; lost in the Sweet 16 Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: GKur Teng, FKaleb Glenn, G Jasiah Jervis, G Carlos Medlock Jr., C Ethan Taylor, FJesse McCulloch, G/F Julius Avent The scoop: Michigan State could very well have the best backcourt in the Big Ten. Jeremy Fears Jr.? Dog. Jordan Scott? Dog. Freshman Carlos Medlock Jr. will put defenders in a blender, and you can add top-35 freshman Jasiah Jervis next to 38% 3-point shooter Kur Teng, high-flyer Coen Carr, high-energy forward Cam Ward and now-healthy, 3-and-D wing Kaleb Glenn to give Tom Izzo a potpourri of off-ball options who do something a little bit different. Fears is the skeleton key to all of it. The potential preseason Big Ten Player of the Year could lead the nation in assists again, although finding his new go-to pick-and-roll partner may be the biggest X-Factor for the Spartans. Michigan State will walk into summer practices with at least 11 players who have a legit chance for minutes, but all eyes are on the frontcourt remodel. MSU will really missJaxon KohlerandCarson Cooper, who were cogs of the Spartans' top-15 defense and knew the scheme front and back after four years in the system. CanCharlottetransfer Anton Bonke get up to speed? He won't be as good as Cooper defensively or Kohler offensively, but he has to be serviceable. The 7-foot-2, 260-pound senior is a load on the glass as you'd expect, but there will be some iffy moments. For a 7-2 monster, Bonke sure gets blocked a lot when he's not Hulk-smashing dunks. His heavy feet can make him rickety defensively, but he's enormous, and big people move little people in hoops. If that doesn't work, Michigan State may have to give highly-rated freshman big man Ethan Taylor a bit more burn. His tools are obvious but the production is still very much a work in progress. Bonke has to be solid, so Taylor can develop in peace. A brand-new center platoon could lead to some volatility for the Spartans. This defense may not be quite as stout as it was a year ago, but there's optimism this offense could be a little better now that Fears isn't the only guard who can dribble (I wish I was joking). MSU will rebound. It will tear it up in transition, per usual. It has more shooting this year. It has real depth to withstand injuries. It has more creators, which should help the turnover rate tick down. Izzo's bet on internal development will work, but getting outbid on some of the more high-upside, transfer bigs it chased could be what holds MSU back from reaching the peak of its powers. 2025-26 record: 18-14, 7-13 in Big Ten play Postseason: None. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: F Christian Collins, C Adonis Ratliff, GJalen Cox, C Darius Ratliff, GJadis Jones, GAaron Hunkin-Claytor, FJoshua Hughes The scoop: It's time forUSCto make a jump. From a pure talent standpoint, this is one of the best rosters in the Big Ten. Eric Musselman wants to find the mismatch and destroy it. Rodney Rice and former five-star scorer Alijah Arenas can do that, butRice'srecovery from a painful shoulder injury will be critical to monitor. He's All-Big Ten good if he's back to being Rodney Rice again. Pass, dribble, shoot, cut and defend forward Jacob Cofie is also back after a dalliance with the NBA, and USC signed the No. 7-rated recruiting class, headlined by five-star forward Christian Collins and the Ratliff twins (Adonis and Darius). USC also filled critical holes in the portal. Georgetown transfer KJ Lewis will add transition punch, creation and ravenous defense.Colgatetransfer Jalen Cox is a heck of a backup point guard, who can shift Rice into a scoring 2-guard, if needed. UConn transfer Eric Reibe has a ton of potential as a 7-footer who can score inside and step out for a pick-and-pop trey. A little portal, a little retention and a little high school recruiting is the recipe to win big, and USC hit all three notes. You can see the vision in this Trojan group, which overwhelms opponents with size, depth and raw talent. It just needs to simmer. I'd be stunned if USC doesn't easily make the NCAA Tournament, assuming it stays mostly healthy. And once you get into do-or-die games, USC has the size and guard play to be vicious. 2025-26 record: 18-14, 9-11 in Big Ten play Postseason: None Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: GDarren Harris, FTrent Sisley, F Trevor Manhertz, G/F Vaughn Karvala, G Prince-Alexander Moody The scoop: Darian DeVries was clearly sick and tired of being undersized and out-talented,so Indianawent into the portal and did something about it. The Hoosiers are primed to trot out a double-big lineup of 6-foot-10 Alabama transfer Aiden Sherrell and 7-foot-2 SMU transfer Samet Yigitoglu. Your bigs control your floor in the Big Ten, and IU has two good ones. At minimum,Indianawill have one big fella patrolling the paint for all 40 minutes. But the entire IU calculus comes down to two guys: Markus Burton and Sherrell. If Burton and Sherrell can transform into one of the Big Ten's best inside-out duos, Indiana can be a major factor because it has a little bit of everything else with this supporting cast. There's shooting here with Bryce Lindsay, Darren Harris and all three of Indiana's top-100 freshmen. There's offensive rebounding and rim deterrence from Yigitoglu, who is a mountain of a man. There's an athletic wing defender who can slash in Jaeden Mustaf. All of that is fine, but it doesn't matter all that much unless Burton and Sherrell aredudes. Burton, while undersized, is a stone-cold killer. DeVries can build this offense around him. Burton is a crafty, paint-touch machine who could get his shot blocked three times in a row and come right back looking to destroy on the next possession. Fearless is an understatement. Sherrell is a key X-Factor, though. He's shown flashes of being everything you want in a big fella. Sherrell hit 27 treys last year at a 34% clip, and that pick-and-pop game will be vital. He's helpful on the offensive glass, in the short-roll game and as a rim protector. But can he be tough and repeatedly impose his will? Ultimately, an awesome lead guard, multiple serviceable bigs and numerous role players who can shoot should be more than enough to vault Indiana into the top half of the Big Ten with room for more if everything pops. 2025-26 record: 28-7, 15-5 in Big Ten play. Postseason: Lost in the Sweet 16. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: GConnor Essegian, GCale Jacobsen, GTaj DeGourville, FDamon Wilkinson, FLeo Curtis, G Colin Rice, G Jacob Lanier The scoop: Size and shooting. That's the Fred Hoiberg special.Nebraska'snew-look starting lineup features five guys with positional size and good to great shooting for their positions. It's hard to ask flamethrower Pryce Sandfort for anything more offensively after he shot 41% from downtown on 8.8 attempts per game on his way to All-Big Ten honors, but there's plenty more meat on the bone in Braden Frager's arsenal. With extended minutes coming his way, Frager could sniff 15 points per game in 2026-27. Frager and Sandfort should be the 1A and 1B of this club, especially with an unselfish point guard like Utah Valley transfer Trevan Leonhardt entering the fold trying to get them shots. Plus, keep an eye out on Belmont transfer Sam Orme. The 6-foot-9 stretch 4 shot 40% from downtown last year with passing and post-up chops. He will play right away. But this defense will be significantly worse. Nebraska's best two defenders (Sam HoibergandBerke Buyuktuncel) departed. Nebraska's no-middle scheme made a living forcing a ton of contested, late-clock 3s because it scrambled and rotated like hyenas. I don't think this group has quite the same athletic pop on that end.San Diego Statetransfer Taj DeGourville should pick up this defensive scheme quickly, but a healthy step back should be expected on that side of the court. Good thing Sandfort is immune to missing shots. 2025-26 record: 24-13, 10-10 in Big Ten play Postseason: No. 9 seed; lost in Elite Eight Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: FCam Manyawu, GIsaia Howard, FTrey Thompson, FTrevin Jirak, F Ethan Harris, G Jaidyn Coon The scoop: Ben McCollum has earned real cache, but one magical postseason run guarantees nothing a year later, especially without every-down workhorse Bennett Stirtz. The player-development incubator is one of McCollum's superpowers, and it has to be running at max capacity for Iowa to reach its ceiling. Pass-dribble-shoot wing Tate Sage looks like a future pro; can he start showing more than just glimpses in Year 2? Big, rangy shooter Cooper Koch looks like he can be an impactful Big Ten starter for years to come, but is there more on-ball stuff in his repertoire? This Iowa frontcourt could be sneaky deep if intriguing, skilled young bigs like Trey Thompson and Trevin Jirak can make a surge after a full year in the system. Iowa's seven returners can be stabilizers, but Iowa needs to go 2-for-2 in the portal if it wants to be a top-25 team. Iowa will be so much bigger with 7-foot-3 Saint Mary's transfer big man Andrew McKeever. It was too small last year and too vulnerable on the glass some nights. McKeever can shore up the trench-work on the glass immediately, and if he can ace this mentally exhausting system, he can really help Iowa as an interior finisher, secondary playmaker and rim deterrent. Twitchy Illinois State transfer guard Ty'Reek Coleman is another huge swing piece. Coleman was one of the best freshmen in the Missouri Valley, but it was on limited usage and he didn't get a ton of on-ball reps. He has a chance to be really, really good, but there will be some low lows and plenty of learning moments in a tougher league with more on-ball work. Iowa didn't break the bank to get Coleman, but if he can outplay his contract, the Hawkeyes could be a top-25 club. 2025-26 record: 21-13, 12-8 in Big Ten play Postseason: No. 8 seed; lost in the Round of 64 Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: WingJimmie Williams, FAndrija Jelavic, GCurtis Givens III, CIvan Njegovan The scoop:Bruce Thorntonis irreplaceable, butOhio Statelooks primed to be just fine. Jake Diebler's ability to retain both sharpshooter Juni Mobley and burly forward A'mare Bynum is the initial pitch here. OSU could certainly get 25-to-30 points a night from that duo, and Mobley will be in the mix to lead the Big Ten in triples. Then you toss in five-star freshman wing Anthony Thompson, who is a shot-making, 6-foot-8 southpaw? And a quartet of playable transfers who hail from top-10 leagues? There's something here. Ohio State finally has real depth with nine Big Ten-caliber rotation players. Cal transfer Justin Pippen provides a playmaking point guard who can defend, shoot enough (51 3s at a 33% clip) and shift Mobley to an off-ball, score-first role.Duquesnetransfer wing Jimmie Williams is all of 6-foot-5 and can pass, dribble and shoot.Memphistransfer guard Curtis Givens III projects to be a bucket-getter for the second unit.Kentuckytransfer forward Andrija Jelavic is a connective piece who can play the 4 or a small-ball 5 and bring shooting, ball movement and offensive rebounding. Ohio State got basically no second-chance points last year (9.9 per game, 29th percentile), but that should tick up if ex-Baylor big fella Josh Ojianwuna (2.7 offensive rebounds per game in 2024-25) can get healthy and knock the rust off after missing all of last year with a leg injury. Six of Ohio State's top-eight players are newcomers, which raises the risk profile if they don't mesh, but the shooting, five-star talent and influx of depth should keep OSU afloat. 2025-26 record: 30-9, 13-7 in Big Ten play Postseason: No. 2 seed; lost in the Elite Eight Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: F Caden Pierce, G Luke Ertel, G Antiione West Jr., FRaleigh Burgess, G/F Jacob Webber, C Sinan Huan The scoop: Purdue has been a top-12 offense for five straight seasons. If that happens again in 2026-27, just hand Matt Painter the Big Ten Coach of the Year trophy now and be done with it. But you can talk yourself into theideaof the Boilermakers. Omer Mayer seizes Braden Smith's usage and balls out. 7-foot-4 center Daniel Jacobsen finally surges. TheAntione West Jr. prophecies are fulfilled. CJ Cox shows he has more in his bag than just pull-up jumpers and rugged on-ball defense. Freshman Luke Ertel cannonballs into the league with his feathery jumper and winning intangibles. Your choice. The options are endless. It's all about role allocation for this group. Purdue coach Matt Painter is asking numerous guys to step into bigger roles than they've had during their times in West Lafayette. It's intoxicating to think about the potential range of outcomes, but there's certainly going to be some growing pains with the hierarchy adjustment. On paper, Purdue has plenty of depth in the backcourt with five guards who can hoop. While it's fair to worry about the rim-pressure, creation and offensive rebounding, the 3-point shooting shouldn't be an issue for this roster. Defensively, Cox is a pest, and Purdue will be a little bigger on the perimeter to go along with some rim protection from Jacobsen. That's good enough to be serviceable under this coaching staff. There's just a lot ofwhat-ifsfor this group. 2025-26 record: 24-12, 13-7 in Big Ten play Postseason: No. 7 seed; lost to UConn in the Round of 32. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup GTrent Perry GJaylen Petty(Texas Techtransfer) FEric Dailey Jr. FFilip Jovic(Auburntransfer) FXavier Booker Top bench options: G Stink Robinson, GEric Freeny, FBrandon Williams, F Joe Philon, FSergej Macura The scoop: You like your chances to win a street fight when you have warriors like Trent Perry and Jaylen Petty on your side. Perry and Petty give UCLA a potent backcourt duo that should be the lifeblood of this Bruins squad. Perry is that 6-foot-4 big guard who can score, defend and create a smidge. Petty is the fearless, pogo-stick leaper who is a little undersized and yet, just gives you buckets every single day of the week and twice on Sundays. Inside-out forward Eric Dailey Jr. is back, and he'll get a bigger piece of the pie withTyler Bilodeauoff to the NBA. Xavier Booker got a whole lot better in Westwood, and the Year 2 transfer jump should help him immensely. Petty is the star of this portal class, but Filip Jovic should buff up UCLA's meh offensive rebounding, and Azavier 'Stink' Robinson is a Mick Cronin guard if I've ever seen one. He'll be licking his chops to pressure the basketball from baseline to baseline. UCLA has good pieces, but it feels like a piece away from being a Tier 2 club in this league. Losing prizedBaylortransferTounde YessoufoutoSt. John'sat the final hour is going to sting for a minute. 2025-26 record: 12-21, 4-16 in Big Ten play Postseason: None Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: GBishop Boswell, GMichael McNair, F Robert Jennings, FRakease Passmore, FGeorge Turkson Jr., G Kaden House, FMaban Jabriel The scoop:Marylandis going to be better in Buzz Williams' second stanza. By how much, though? That's the million-dollar question. Double-double machine Pharrel Payne is still waiting for the decision on his injury waiver for an extra year of eligibility. If Payne gets the thumbs up, Maryland will have one of the most vicious frontcourts in the Big Ten. New Mexico transfer Tomislav Buljan ranked fifth in America in offensive rebound rate, and he will turn 24 years old before the season-opener in November. Having two grizzled, offensive-rebounding mavens in Payne and Buljan has to tempt Buzz into ripping the tarp off for a flex. The Terps' offensive rebounding has to be a deodorant for an offense that may struggle to generate good shots and space the floor. Rising sophomore Andre Mills had to create so much for himself last year, so playing next to a set-the-table point guard like Arkansas transfer DJ Wagner should help. Incoming five-star freshman Baba Oladotun is more of a prospect than a Day One difference-maker, but the 6-foot-10 freshman wing should give Maryland some ginormous lineups — although his passive approach on the glass will, uh, not be tolerated. Being this big should help Maryland's defense sniff top-30 levels nationally, especially when Tennessee transfer guard Bishop Boswell checks in. He will be one of the Big Ten's top point-of-attack defenders from the jump. Williams has accrued enough depth to play big or small, especially if rangy shooter Michael McNair can earn the trust of the staff. Maryland could have up to a dozen solid high-major rotation pieces, and there are a lot of legit athletes on this squad. That's not nothing. But who is the force multiplier? Who makes this thing hum? CanWagnerfinally fulfill the five-star prophecies? Defense, offensive rebounding, athleticism and depth should get the Terps back into the Big Dance, but all of Maryland's top guards have posted far too high turnover rates in pick-and-rolls whenever they've been asked to be the man. That could be the Achilles heel that keeps Maryland from being anything more than just solid. 2025-26 record: 24-11, 14-6 in Big Ten play Postseason: No. 5 seed; lost in the Round of 64 Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: GJack Janicki, CVictory Onuetu, WingHayden Jones, GZach Kinziger, CWill Garlock The scoop: Wisconsin is losing 505 of its 548 pick-and-roll possessions after star John Blackwell transferred toDuke, and Nick Boyd,Andrew RohdeandBraeden Carringtongraduated. But the Badgers, like usual, have back-filled as smartly as they could. Australian point guard Owen Foxwell will turn 23 before the season, and the lefty averaged 11 points, 4.5 assists and 3.0 rebounds in the NBL, hooping against the likes of ex-Michigan State bucket-getter Tyson Walker and ex-UCLA floor general TygerCampbell. Foxwell is not as good as Boyd, but the 6-foot-1 veteran is primed to be a useful ball-screen manipulator (get ready for a million one-foot floaters) for a Wisconsin club that has so much shooting at all five positions. Autry and Elmer are both knockdown catch-and-shoot assassins, and Elmer was also one of the best do-it-all defenders at the mid-major ranks. There's 3-and-D vibrations here at minimum, but Wisconsin believes Elmer has more in the tank as an on-ball threat. I'm open to that theory because the paint will be open due to the floor spacing that Austin Rapp and Nolan Winter present. For all the talk about this new-look backcourt, it's Winter who will be the Badgers' best player. The 7-foot senior is a fantastic cutter and pick-and-roll or pick-and-pop threat while running the floor like a deer. Mark me down for a 16-and-9 season from Winter. But this Wisconsin profile has some understandable red flags. This defense isn't going to be very good. Structurally, Greg Gard's scheme leads to high-floor outcomes because Wisconsin coaxes analytically friendly shots and corrals every defensive rebound, but the personnel on this end is limited. On the nights when Wisconsin's 3s are dropping, the Badgers are going to be so dangerous, but can they score in enough other ways? This backcourt is clearly a notch below the Boyd-Blackwell, two-headed, fire-breathing dragon. Plus, the inexplicable, frustrating loss of promising big manAleksas Bieliauskas— he made a questionable decision to transfer toSouth Carolinaafter starting 28 games — takes one more big body who fit the scheme so well out of the equation. I was all-in on Wisconsin a year ago at this time, but a slight step back seems in the cards. 2025-26 record: 15-18 overall, 8-12 in Big Ten play Postseason: Lost to Baylor in The Crown. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: GMalachi Palmer, GWinters Grady, FGrayson Grove, GNolan Groves, GKai Shinholster, F Nolen Anderson The scoop: The arrow is pointing up forMinnesotaas long as Niko Medved is at the helm, and he's leaning on retention to spark a Year 2 surge. Minnesota was able to re-sign point guard Isaac Asuma, jumbo shooter Bobby Durkin and do-everything forward Jaylen Crocker-Johnson. That nucleus is bolstered by a five-man portal haul, featuring only high-major transfers. That's notable after Medved was forced to add a ton of mid-major transfers a year ago. Minnesota isn't teeming in NIL money, but Medved was able to check off some boxes in roster-building, most notably pure, raw size. We'll see if 7-foot-2 Michigan transfer Malick Kordel is good, but it's understandable why he didn't play much last year behind Aday Mara. Malachi Palmer looks like another rock-solid addition. The Villanova transfer guard is all of 6-foot-6 and should fill Minnesota's 3-and-D void. The notable one is Kyan Evans, though. Evans was really good under Medved atColorado Statebefore transferring to UNC and, predictably, struggling in a new offense. Now, he's back in the Princeton-adjacent scheme where his cutting and off-ball movement should be maximized. If Evans can rediscover himself in the Twin Cities, similar toCade Tyson, and the injuries don't pile up again, Minnesota will sniff the bubble. Medved's that good. 2025-26 record: 16-17 overall, 7-13 in Big Ten play Postseason: None. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: F Wini Braga, FSteele Venters, GParker Friedrichsen, CMady Traore, G Tristan Devers, GJasir Rencher The scoop:Washington's buying power looks to have decreased this offseason compared to last spring when it threw big bags around at some high-priced free agents. Quite a different story this time around. With star big manHannes Steinbachoff to the NBA and five rotation players dipping via the portal, UW has to reinvent itself. Danny Sprinkle needs Wesley Yates to look like Wesley Yates again after an injury-plagued sophomore season. He's going to take a million shots next year. San Francisco transfer Ryan Beasley is a tiny turbo lead guard who can fill it up off the bounce and plays clean basketball, but he could be in hot water on defense in the Big Ten. Can LeJuan Watts be a post-hype sleeper? His value to UW skyrocketed even more afterBryson Tuckermade the bizarre decision to stay in the 2026 NBA Draft. Watts was not quite tough enough to stick for Final Four contender Texas Tech, but his high-feel bootyball should be a staple of this Washington halfcourt attack. Injuries played a part, but Sprinkle couldn't find enough answers for a talented roster last year. Can he elevate a so-so squad this year? 2025-26 record: 12-20, 5-15 in Big Ten play Postseason: None Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: GJasper Johnson, FTaylor Bol Bowen, GJerry Easter II, FPharaoh Compton, F Tajh Ariza The scoop:Oregonhas gone from zero two-way wings on the roster last year to like five this season. Buffing up the perimeter size and defensive versatility was clearly a major point of emphasis for Dana Altman. When it's right, Altman weaponizes depth as well as anybody. With nine or 10 guys slated to play real minutes, Oregon should come at teams in waves with all these big wings offering the ability to junk it up defensively with fullcourt pressure, switching man-to-man or some hybrid zones. That's all well and good, but who is the catalyst? Who breathes life into all these ancillary pieces and gets them easy shots? Boston College transfer Fred Payne may need to be that guy. He put up 15.8 points and 2.7 assists for a BC offense that rated … 278th nationally. Can it be ex-Kentucky guard Jasper Johnson? I'm not so sure. That Kentucky tape was brutal, but maybe Eugene is the life-raft Johnson's career needed. Oregon feels like one good guard away from actually being very good. If Payne or Johnson pops, everything else starts to make sense. Tyrone Riley IV can slash and kick. Arizona transfer Dwayne Aristode is an enormous shooter with physical tools that jump off the tape. Andrew Meadow is a terrific secondary option who shot 39% from downtown last year for Boise State and drives long closeouts. Taylor Bol Bowen, Pharaoh Compton and Sean Stewart can all be useful bigs if they have someone creating that advantage for them to go to work. This roster hinges on Payne and Johnson, or it will be destined to hope the defense can create enough buckets and the athletes can get enough back on the offensive glass to stay alive. 2025-26 record: 14-20, 6-14 in Big Ten play. Postseason: Lost in the first round of The Crown. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup GLino Mark GTariq Francis GRasheed Jones(Coastal Carolinatransfer) FDarren Buchanan Jr. CChristian Gurdak(Virginia Techtransfer) Top bench options: GKaden Powers, FDarin Smith Jr., GJamichael Davis, FWill Sydnor, CDorin Buca, G Lewis Duarte The scoop: Don't be caught off guard ifRutgersis a little better than you might think. Tariq Francis was one of the top isolation scorers in the Big Ten last year, and Rutgers was able to keep him away from portal hounds. It also kept guys like Lino Mark, Kaden Powers. And Darren Buchanan Jr., who all look like Big Ten-caliber contributors. This portal class is also just rock-solid. There's shooting with Rasheed Jones and Darin Smith Jr. There's interior heft with Christian Gurdak and Dorin Buca, who hail from high-major programs like Virginia Tech andKansas State, respectively. It'd be a shocker if Rutgers was in the at-large conversation, but it won't be a pushover like it was a season ago. 2025-26 record: 12-20, 3-17 in Big Ten play. Postseason: None. Projected 2026-27 starting lineup GJay Rodgers(Central Connecticut transfer) GRoberts Blums(Davidsontransfer) FBrant Byers(Miami Ohio transfer) F Roko Prkacin CIvan Juric Top bench options: FTim Oboh, G/F Francois Wibaut, F Jamison White, F Thomas Allard The scoop: Mike Rhoades is leaning offense this offseason. Jay Rodgers was one of the top pick-and-roll navigators at the mid-major ranks. Now he gets a shot at the Big Ten.Penn Statesurrounded him with two dead-eye shooters in Roberts Blums and Brant Byers to go along with Croatian forward Roko Prkacin and returning 7-footer Ivan Juric. Get ready for a hefty amount of Rodgers-Juric pick-and-rolls with Blums and Byers spacing the floor and Prkacin trying to drive long closeouts. The depth and the defense is not anything to write home about, uh, to put it kindly. 2025-26 record: 15-19 overall, 5-15 in Big Ten play. Postseason: None Projected 2026-27 starting lineup Top bench options: FColin Smith, GAleksej Kostic, F Jayden Hodge, CLuke McEldon, FRyan Soulis, GPhoenix Gill The scoop: When you have resources like Northwestern's, your roster looks a bit like a mid-major All-Star team. It's a tough pill to swallow for Chris Collins, who lost 23-points-per-game scorerNick Martinellito graduation and his in-the-lab, fill-in (Tre Singleton) toIowa State. Sophomore point guard Jake West is a TikTok sensation, but don't be fooled, this PG1 canreallyplay. He has to be one of the breakout stars in 2026-27 ifNorthwesternwants to compete. Bellarmine transferJack Karasinskishould be West's top running-mate. The 6-foot-7 forward can shoot it and drive it, giving him enough in the toolbox to find answers in the jump to the Big Ten. Northwestern won't be small, especially when chiseled 6-foot-6 wing Angelo Ciaravino is on the floor. The Cats' presumed rotation should feature at least seven guys who are 6-foot-5 or taller. That should help with the aggressive post-trap gameplan that Collins and defensive coordinator Chris Lowery have in store. Collins has only finished outside the top-100 on KenPom once in the past decade. He's significantly raised the bar at Northwestern, but the raw talent on this roster does not pass the Big Ten sniff test.

Accsoon’sCineView SE 4Kwireless video transmission system joins the existingCineView SEin the lineup, and it features UHD transmission, camera control, and expanded monitoring options. Wi-Fi-based systems have continued to get better and better over the last few years, and they are popular because they are significantly more affordable than uncompressed zero-delay options. The CineView SE 4K is capable of up to 4K 30p transmission, and it has a claimed latency of under < 50 ms when using 1080 60p. Now, just to clarify, 4K means UHD, not 4K DCI. It also utilizes Dual-band (2.4 & 5 GHz) transmission. On paper, the CineView SE 4K looks like a good option if you are after an affordable wireless video transmission system that offers both HDMI and SDI capabilities. The Accsoon SE 4K Wireless Video Transmission System consists of a TX unit and an RX unit. Both are the same size and similar weight. The system offers both HDMI and SDI input and output, with the transmitter outputting video via USB-C and the receiver providing simultaneous HDMI, SDI, and USB-C video outputs, supporting a wide range of on-set monitoring and distribution workflows. From my testing of Wi-Fi-based wireless video transmission systems, the real-world latency is always a lot higher than what is quoted by manufacturers. It is important to note that the claimed < 50 ms latency is when doing 1080 60fps video using the low bitrate setting. When transmitting 4K/30fps video, the claimed latency is < 100 ms when using the low bitrate setting. This figure also excludes any camera latency. Hollyland’s MARS 4Kwas the first affordable 5GHz wireless video system, at least to my knowledge, that was capable of sending a UHD signal over HDMI. We have seen a ton of affordable wireless video systems come to market over the last 4-5 years, and a lot of them have very similar feature sets and capabilities. This increased competition has been good news for the end consumer, as prices have continued to come down, and more features have been added. With a large array of ‘affordable’ wireless video transmission systems now on the market, it is harder than ever to make your product stand out. Accsoon has made good quality systems that have continued to improve over the years, so they didn’t want to stray too far off the path when making the CineView SE 4K. Having a system with both HDMI and SDI capabilities makes a lot of sense as it allows it to be used on a wide array of different cameras. With MFi video, the CineView SE 4K uses Accsoon’s SeeMo technology to access professional monitoring and streaming via cable from the transmitter (TX) unit. Importantly, this also opens up camera-to-cloud connectivity withFrame.io. This allows you to quickly share and distribute 4K video while you shoot, or record footage to quickly review. The CineView SE 4K uses Accsoon’s RTMS 4.0 proprietary protocol for its transmission, which is claimed to be more robust and better optimized than older systems. The CineView SE 4K operates on the 2.4 and 5 GHz frequencies. With 20 available channels, it is claimed to offer higher speeds with less interference. It doesn’t utilize Tri-Band frequencies (2.4, 5, & 6 GHz) like the more expensive CineView Master 4K. I have reviewed a lot of wireless video systems over the years, and the build quality of even the most budget-friendly options has continued to improve. The physical design of the CineView SE 4K replicates that of its predecessor, the CineView SE. The CineView SE 4K has a form factor that is very similar to products like the Hollyland Pyro S. It features a different form factor from Accsoon’s flagship CineView Master 4K. The exterior casing of both the TX and RX feels robust and well-made. It certainly doesn’t feel like a product that is likely to break, even if you did accidentally drop it. The HDMI connectors are slightly recessed, although I would like to see more companies make lockable HDMI connectors because it is very easy to break or snap an HDMI cable, especially if they are sticking straight out at an angle. The SDI ports are also slightly recessed, and they do offer a little bit of protection. The On/Off switch is reasonably solid and tactile. Both the TX and RX feature a series of buttons for navigating the menu and making changes. Overall, I think most people will be happy with the build quality of the CineView SE 4K. It is well-made and constructed for a product at this price point. The CineView SE 4K RX and TX are the same weight. They both weigh 8.6 oz / 245g without the antennas. They both have physical dimensions of 4.3 x 2.9 x 1.3″ / 110 x 74 x 32.7 mm (Excluding Antennas). As a comparison, the Hollyland Pyro S RX and TX weigh 7.30 oz / 207 g without the antennas. The TX and RX are a very similar size to other comparable wireless SDI/HDMI Wi-Fi-based systems. At least in my opinion, this weight and size do make it more suitable for use with small-sized mirrorless hybrids. In saying that, all of the currently available wireless video transmission systems will take up a lot of real estate and add substantial weight to smaller-sized cameras, especially when you are powering them with a Sony NP-F battery. I think the next big evaluation in this space needs to be making wireless video systems smaller and more compact. There is a big market out there for people who want to use affordable Wi-Fi-based wireless video systems on smaller-sized cameras, but they are hesitant to do so because of their size and weight. The Accsoon CineView SE 4K SDI/HDMI Wireless Video Transmission System comes with the following items: The transmitter has HD-SDI and 4K HDMI 2.0 inputs, plus a USB-C camera output and a USB-C Video Out. The receiver has both 4K HDMI 2.0 and HD-SDI outputs and a USB-C Video Output. The USB-C video output provides users with wired monitoring on mobile devices. This type of connection enables close to zero-latency monitoring, while also supporting mobile device charging via USB-C or Lightning. There are also DC inputs (6.0 to 16.8 VDC) on the TX and RX units. Both the TX and the RX units feature a reasonably large color screen with a user-friendly UI design that enables quick configurations and status checks. As I mentioned earlier, there is a series of buttons that you use to access the menu and make changes. I would have preferred to have seen some type of scroll dial, rather than just buttons. The CineView SE 4K uses Accsoon’s RTMS 4.0 protocol, which integrates 2.4 and 5 GHz frequencies. It allows for intelligent dynamic adjustment of audio and video data across both bands for claimed faster connection times, lower latency, and easy management of multiple connections. It is claimed to have a stable transmission range of up to 1312.3′ / 400 m (Line-of-Sight). Now, this is only possible when the setting is in 1080 60p, where there are no obstacles or interference. The claimed range of the Accsoon is the same as the Hollyland Pyro S, which has a range of 1,300ft / 400m. The DJI SDR Transmission Combo has a claimed range of 1.9 miles / 3.05km, but that can only transmit Full HD at up to 60p. As with other CineView models, a single TX can transmit wirelessly to up to 4 units or devices at the same time – whether that be CineView Master 4K RX units, iOS or Android devices, or a combination. An additional iPhone or iPad can be cabled to the TX to create a 5th attached device. Number of simultaneous connections: 4 Receivers and mobile devices can be mixed and matched for use: Below you can see what resolutions and frame rates the system can transmit and receive: HDMIUHD 4K: 30/25/241080p: 60/50/30/25/241080i: 60/59.94/50SDI1080p: 60/50/30/25/241080i: 60/59.94/50 Using the same technology as Accsoon’s popular SeeMo line of iOS adapters, the CineView Master 4K integrates the functions of both a SeeMo and 4K 30P wireless system into a single transmitter unit. It features a wired MFi-certified connection that transforms a connected iPad or iPhone into a professional camera-top monitor. 4K 30P video can be viewed, recorded, or streamed on iPads and iPhones. The resolution of the MFi output can be set to either 4K or HD, similar to the way each RX unit can be set at a different resolution. For example, the MFi output can be set to 4K, while a 1080P signal is sent wirelessly at the same time to RX units or wirelessly connected iOS devices. When cabled, the CineView SE 4K, the data rate of the MFi connection is up to 32Mbps. The CineView SE 4K can encode and transmit three different video streams at the same time: Stream 1 (4K)– Resolution up to 4K30, for wireless and wired USB transmission. Highest resolution with the best image quality at a closer range. Stream 2 (1080p Wireless)– Resolution up to 1080p60, for wireless transmission. This is for a good balance of resolution, latency, and transmission range. Stream 3 (1080p Wired)– Resolution up to 1080p60, for wired USB transmission. This allows you to monitor, stream, and record 1080p videos with a good bitrate. INPUT VIDEO 4K INPUT VIDEO 1080p The CineView SE 4K receiver wirelessly receives video and audio signals from supported transmitters and outputs them via HDMI, SDI, or USB to monitors and mobile devices. Compatible Transmitters: CineView SE 4K transmitter, CineView Master 4K transmitter, CineView Master 4K Lite receiver, CineView M7 Pro (TX Mode), and CineView M7H Pro (TX Mode). The CineView SE 4K transmitter is capable of wirelessly transmitting video and audio signals to compatible Accsoon receivers, as well as to mobile devices via Wi-Fi. Compatible Receivers:CineView SE 4K receiver, CineView Master 4K receiver, CineView Master 4K Lite receiver, CineView M7 Pro, CineView M7H Pro, Android phone/tablet, iPhone/iPad, MacBook (M1/M2/M3 Chip) Both the CineView SE 4K’s transmitter and receiver include a USB-C video output port capable of transmitting both video and audio signals to mobile devices while simultaneously powering the connected device (5V/2.4A) via cable connection. This works well, but there is still quite a bit of latency if you are using HDMI. With SDI, it is very minimal. As you still need to utilize the CineView SE 4K and a smartphone, it takes up considerable real estate, and I wouldn’t recommend doing this with mirrorless hybrids or small-sized digital hybrids. While not everyone is going to want to utilize this feature, it is nice to have the option. You may have preferred to have seen this connection on the RX unit as well, so that you could attach a phone or tablet and have a very affordable director’s monitor, especially when using the system over larger distances. Supported iOS Devices:iPhone 12 or later; iPad Pro 12.9-inch Gen 4 or later; iPad Pro 11-inch Gen 3 or later; iPad Gen 9 or later; iPad Air Gen 4 or later; iPad mini Gen 6 or later. Supported Android Devices: Please check the latest supported device list on the Accsoon official website before use. A major new addition to the CineView SE 4K is camera control. Users can remotely adjust key camera parameters, including ISO, aperture, shutter speed, and white balance. The system also supports touch autofocus control. Users can adjust focus by tapping or dragging on the monitoring screen, as well as activate bi-directional record triggering between the camera and monitoring devices. Supported camera models include: I tested out the camera control with a Sony FX3. Above you can see how it works. The camera control functionality works really well, and there is minimal latency. Accsoon has plans to expand compatibility with additional camera models in future updates. The CineView SE 4K utilizes four antennas on both the TX and RX. The antennas are removable, but they don’t bend or move, so you need to be mindful of where you are mounting the TX and RX on equipment. These antennas do increase the footprint, especially on smaller-sized cameras. Accsoon has included a single 1/4 20″ mounting hole on both the TX and RX units. These are located at the bottom of both units. Accsoon does include two mounts that allow you to attach the TX or RX to a cold shoe mount. These are very basic and don’t allow for any adjustments. I would have preferred to have seen adjustable, swivel mounts, as you get with the CineView Master 4K. I would like to see companies such as Tilta or SmallRig design quick-release cages or attachments for mounting specific wireless video TX and RX units. Both the TX and RX can be powered using NP-F type batteries or via a DC barrel connector. The battery plate is reasonably well-made. You can’t power the TX via USB-C. Having in-built batteries would have kept the size down, but most professionals don’t want devices with built-in batteries unless they are able to power a unit for a considerable amount of time. Using the CineView SE 4K with a Sony NP battery on a small to mid-sized digital camera is going to add some weight; however, I personally prefer to power wireless video systems directly from my camera, but that’s just the way I do it. What is nice is that you hot-swap power sources if you happen to have two connected at once. For instance, if I have the battery on and I then want to suddenly swap to a DC power source, I can simply take off the battery without the devices shutting down. I would have liked to have seen Accsoon include a DC to D-tap power cable in the kit for this very reason. The CineView SE 4K transmitter supports bitrate changes for both wired USB transmissions and wireless transmissions. Wireless Bitrate Setting:Use the buttons to navigate to the “AV INFO” page → Press to selectRate, → then change the bitrate → Press the enter button to confirm → Setting completes. Click theReturnbutton to go back to the home page. The bitrate setting can be changed between 1-12. Codec Setting:Enter the “AV INFO” page → then selectURate. Press the knob again, enter “Codec Type” page → here you can choose from H.264 or H.265 → Press the Enter button to confirm → Setting completes, press the Return button to go back to the home page. VBR/CBR Setting:Navigate to the “AV INFO” page → then enter “VBR/CBR Setting” page → you can then select VBR or CBR → Press the Enter button to confirm → Setting completes, press the Return button to go back to the home page. This setting will take effect on all three video streams. USB Mode:Navigate to the “AV INFO” page → then enter “Apple/Andriod Setting” page → you can then select Apple or Android device→ Press the Enter button to confirm → Setting completes, press the Return button to go back to the home page. To be honest, I didn’t notice any major difference in the quality when changing the bitrate settings. The issue I have with these settings is that Accsoon doesn’t state anywhere, not even in an operating manual, what the bitrate is for these various modes. You can livestream using the Accsoon Go app, but you can only do this via the app. In theRecord/Streamsection ofControl Center, you can choose the vertical liveview rotation and also choose to record/stream with a LUT burnt in if you are sending the app a Log image. In thePush Streamsection, you can enter the stream code for various popular social media platforms and then start streaming. You also have the ability to utilize Frame.io Camera to Cloud, but this can only be done when you have the CineView SE 4K hard-wired via USB-C to an iPhone/iPad. The device’s region code is pre-set based on your purchase location. Accsoon states in their manual that you should not change the region code. If changes are necessary, ensure the region code complies with the RF regulations of your current location. Accsoon also states clearly that it is not liable for any legal issues arising from incorrect region settings that violate local laws and regulations. For questions about changing the region code or any related inquiries, you can email[email protected]. As I say in every wireless video system review, a good solution should be easy and fast to set up and get running. In all honesty, this shouldn’t be a difficult task, and if it is, then, in my opinion, the product has already failed. Like most wireless systems, the CineView SE 4K was designed to essentially be a plug-and-play system. You just power up the TX unit, input a video source, and then power up the RX and hook it up to a monitor, etc. All you need to do is make sure that the TX and RX units are on the same channel; however, the system will automatically select the same channel on both the TX and RX for you. Once everything was powered on, it took 45 seconds for a picture to appear on a connected monitor to the RX unit. This is very slow, and as a comparison, the competing Hollyland Pyro S took 20 seconds. Unlike the competing Holyland Pyro S, you can’t do a manual channel scan to see what the best available channels are to use. If you do decide to change the channel on the CineView SE 4K, the TX needs to reboot. This is something you need to be aware of. So, what about if you start pulling cables out or turning the TX and RX on and off gain? These are real-world things that happen, and you need to test how the system works by seeing how quickly it can re-establish connections. If I pulled the SDI cable out of the TX unit, it took roughly 10 seconds for the image to re-establish, which was reasonably slow. If I suddenly changed the frame rate on the camera, it took around 13 seconds for the RX to re-establish the connection. Ok, what about if I turn the RX unit off and turn it back on again? It took roughly 22 seconds for an image to reappear on the connected monitor. If I turned the TX off and then back on again, it took about 36 seconds for the image to appear on the connected monitor with the RX. Now, if you are using the Accsoon SEE app and you turn the TX off and back on again, you won’t get a picture because it kicks you off the Wi-Fi network. I needed to go back into my phone’s settings and select the Accsoon Wi-Fi again and then open the app. The CineView SE 4K was a little slow for my liking when booting it up, but this may or may not matter to you depending on what your requirements are. The Accsoon SEE app works on both wired and wirelessly connected iPads and iPhones, plus wirelessly connected Android devices. It offers features like live streaming, recording, focus peaking, pinch-to-magnify, image-flip, waveforms, audio level meters, false color, and more, all via touch control. The app features some reasonably nice functionality, and it is reasonably easy to use. You can also update the firmware of the CineView SE 4K by attaching your phone or tablet directly to the TX unit using the USB-C cable. You need to select the Accsoon CineView Master SE Wi-Fi network (in my case, it was Accsoon_1BB9) before you open the app. This can be a little confusing, as two Accsoon networks appear. I also found that it takes a long time (approx. 1 minute and 12 seconds) from the time you turn on the TX unit until the correct Wi-Fi network appears on your phone. This is very slow. The default password is 123456789. My issue is that on the device itself, you can’t see what the WiFi password is. To change the Wi-Fi name and password, you have to use the Accsoon SEE App. Once you hit connect, you will be taken to the main screen. You can simply tap on the screen to remove the overlays. The UI layout is reasonably straightforward and easy to understand, and you can also use it in a vertical orientation if you prefer, which is handy if you are shooting for social media content. There is a good array of monitoring assist tools, and I think most people will be reasonably happy with the tools and features that are available. You can do pinch-to-zoom magnification, and Accsoon also gives you a small indicator showing %, so you know you are looking at a zoomed-in image. You can also you can move the focus magnification around in the image. There is false color and an IRE value scale for it; however, it isn’t mapped to any particular camera. With the waveform, histogram, and vectorscope, you can move them around to any position you like on the screen, and you can change their size and transparency. You can have multiple scopes up at the same time. There are also peaking and zebras, and you can change the intensity and color of the peaking. There are a few default LUTs available in the app, but not many. You can also load up your own LUTs if you want. I like that you can actually record the video or take still images directly within the app. While this isn’t great quality, it does allow you to view back clips and also upload something to social media if need be. Clips get recorded in HEVC MP4. Now, if I actually looked at the clip in my photo reel on my phone, it was telling me that the frame rate was 29.98p, which was correct. You can do image zoom and access the monitoring tools while you are recording, which is handy. Zero (or close to) image delay is one of the big reasons you pay more money for a higher-end system. Most high-end wireless video systems have basically zero latency, while a lot of the budget systems can have quite a lot of latency, especially those systems using HDMI. 2.4/ 5 GHz wireless video systems use a WiFi or ‘packet-based’ approach in which video is first compressed and then transmitted over a local-only WiFi network. Compressing video into packets before transmission introduces delay, typically 2-4 frames, and lowers the image quality. This is because most decoders will store multiple packets, or decoded frames, in a buffer to smooth out the video before outputting, which creates a less robust signal and latency unsuitable for the rigorous demands of film production. Now, depending on what you are doing and what your requirements are, having some latency isn’t going to be a big deal. If you just need to monitor an image or you are not doing highly complex remote focus pulling, then you arguably may not need a zero-delay system. Speaking of zero delay, technically, zero-delay wireless video isn’t possible. If you’re shooting 23.98, 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second, then a wireless video delay of less than a millisecond (0.001 seconds) ensures that the frame you see on your monitor’s screen is in perfect sync with the camera’s sensor. Zero frames are out of sync. 0.001 seconds of latency is effectively true zero-delay on any set. As I previously mentioned earlier in the review, from my testing of Wi-Fi-based wireless video transmission systems, the real-world latency is always a lot higher than what is quoted by manufacturers. It is important to note that the claimed < 50 ms latency is when doing 1080 60fps video using the low bitrate setting. When transmitting 4K/30fps video, the claimed bitrate is < 100 ms when using the low bitrate setting. This figure also excludes any camera latency. What do these figures actually mean? Well, anything below 100ms is considered to be low, because most humans don’t perceive a delay that small. Once you get over 100ms, we perceive a noticeable delay. I wish companies were more transparent with their marketing material when it comes to latency figures. You shouldn’t have to go to an operating manual to find out what the latency is and what conditions those tests were done under. Latency figures should be listed for regular frame rates and at the higher bitrate options. This isn’t a dig at Accsoon, because all of the companies selling Wi-Fi-based wireless video transmission systems do the exact same thing. In Accsoon’s defense, at least they do list the latency figures and under what conditions those measurements were made in their manual; most companies don’t even do that. There also isn’t much point in listing latency figures without factoring in the camera chain because a wireless system without an image is just an expensive doorstop. Sure, HDMI outputs on camera systems have varying levels of latency, but with SDI, that shouldn’t be the case. So let’s find out what the latency actually is. I previously used to provide figures for latency, but in the real world, these don’t mean much to anyone, so I will show real-world examples showing you the whole image chain. Ok, so let’s try transmitting HD 60p first at a low bitrate (setting 1), as in theory this should give us the lowest possible latency. Viewing images on a monitor connected to the RX against a monitor directly connected to the Kinefinity MAVO EDGE 6K. As you can see, the actual real-world latency is fairly low. So, what about if you use the Accsoon See App? Above, you can see what that looks like when transmitting HD 60p at a low bitrate. As a reference, above you can see that there is zero latency when using an expensive Teradek system (well, as close to zero as you can get. No wireless system is really zero in the scientific sense). This is a prime example of why you pay more money for a high-end wireless video system. You can also transmit uncompressed high-quality images with no quality loss. So, now let’s see what the delay is when sending HD 23.98p with the bitrate set at 12 (the highest setting). As you can see, as soon as you try to send regular frame rates like 23.98p, 24p, 25p, etc., the latency increases quite a lot. Whether image latency is a big deal for you will depend on your personal requirements for a wireless video transmission system. Ok, so let’s try transmitting UHD 30p at a low bitrate (setting 1), as in theory this should give us the lowest possible latency when using 4K. We can compare the RX signal being fed into a monitor against the LCD screen on a Nikon R9. As you can see, the delay is a lot higher when transmitting UHD 30p over HDMI than when transmitting HD 60p over SDI. I also tried transmitting 4K 23.98p at the lowest bitrate (setting 1) to see how the latency compares when viewing images from the RX connected to a monitor against the LCD screen on a Nikon ZR. As you can see, the latency is pretty high when doing this, and the delay is a lot higher when transmitting 4K 23.98p over HDMI than when transmitting HD 23.98p over SDI. I also tried transmitting 1080 60p over HDMI at the lowest bitrate (setting 1) when viewing images on a monitor connected to the RX against the LCD screen on a Nikon ZR. As you can see, the delay is a lot higher when transmitting UHD 60p over HDMI than when transmitting HD 60p over SDI. As I previously mentioned, HDMI latency varies greatly from camera to camera. This is exactly why I prefer using SDI when dealing with wireless video, because it doesn’t matter how low the latency is of your wireless system if the camera’s HDMI latency is bad. I also tried transmitting UHD 23.98p at the highest bitrate (setting 12) to see how the latency compares when viewing images on the Accsoon See app and the LCD screen on a Nikon ZR. As you can see, the delay is a lot less when using the See App than it is when transmitting UHD 23.98p over HDMI to an RX unit. I also tried transmitting HD 60p at the lowest bitrate (setting 1) to see how the latency compares when viewing images on the Accsoon See app and the LCD screen on a Nikon ZR. As you can see, the delay is a lot less when using the See App than it is when transmitting UHD 60p over HDMI to an RX unit. I also tried transmitting HD 60p at the highest bitrate (setting 12) to see how the latency compares when viewing images on the Accsoon See app and the LCD screen on a Nikon ZR. As you can see, the delay is a lot less when using the See App than it is when transmitting UHD 23.98p over HDMI to an RX unit. When using SDI, the image delay was fairly minimal using the Accsoon, but not quite as good as the more expensive CineView Master 4K. As soon as you switch to UHD over HDMI, the latency does increase quite a bit; however, HDMI latency changes from camera to camera. You are not going to get the same sort of results as you will with an uncompressed, zero-latency system, but some of these new compressed systems are getting pretty good and are getting to the point where latency is becoming a lot more acceptable for more applications. At the end of the day, there needs to be an acceptable limit that you are willing to tolerate. If you are using dedicated TX and RX units, then latency really needs to be below 100ms. When I say below 100ms, that is for ‘affordable’ budget systems. For high-end systems, it should be almost zero. Some cameras have the ability to send 50p or 60p signals over SDI while still recording 23.98, 25p, etc. This certainly helps with latency. The latency of the Accsoon when sending a signal to the TX unit and then viewing it on the Accsoon See App was very good. Could you use it to pull focus remotely? Yes, you could. Latency figures can be a bit like dynamic range figures in that manufacturers like to quote numbers that are sometimes not explained or quantified. Pulling out connectors, changing settings, and turning receivers and transmitters on and off is one thing, but how does it actually perform in the real world? How about the operating range? I decided to test the range and performance of the system. To test the range of the system, I remained in line of sight of the CineView Master 4K TX and started walking away with the RX unit attached to a monitor. I could get 400m / 1312′ before I ran out of road. Now, the signal did keep dropping in and out over that distance if objects or cars got in between the TX and RX units. The biggest issue I faced was that once the Wi-Fi signal got so weak that it dropped out, it wouldn’t just connect up by itself. I needed to re-choose the Accsoon network for the signal to come back. Now, Accsoon claims a UHD 4K60 maximum operating range of up to 1.6 Miles (line of sight), but this is usually only going to be achievable on flat, open terrain where there is little wireless interference. I did this test in the middle of Tokyo, which is one of the most heavily congested RF and WiFi traffic areas on the planet. When I tested the CineView Master 4K TX, sending a signal to my iPhone running the Accsoon SEE app, I could only get a maximum distance of around 160m / 525′ before I started having issues. *I ran out of straight road, and this is as far as I could test. Above, you can see how this compares to some of the other similar wireless video systems I have reviewed in the past. Whenever I review wireless video transmitters, I do the test in the exact same place under the same operating conditions. This way, I get a good idea of how various competing systems compare. What you need to remember is that maximum distances are often a good marketing line, but most people don’t need to operate over large distances, and usually, you won’t find yourself in too many places where there is zero interference and open flat terrain. At least in my opinion, the majority of people want a system that works well through obstacles and walls over shorter distances, as that is the most common real-world use. So how does the Accsoon perform when doing that? The system works well if you are moving around in different rooms or even when going out of houses, etc., through doors and downstairs. As I said before, most people don’t need long-distance range, and for most applications, I think people will be happy with how the Accsoon performs. With every compressed Wi-Fi-based system I have reviewed, I have found that the image quality isn’t nearly as good as when using an expensive uncompressed system. Even with the bitrate at its highest setting on the Accsoon, there was a lot of macro blocking when there were scenes with a lot of movement going on, which can stress codecs. This occurs even with a camera that can output 10-bit 422. This didn’t matter if I was using the Accsoon SEE app or outputting to a monitor attached to the RX. Now, when I tried the competing Hollyland Pyro S, it was exactly the same. This is a legitimate question because, depending on what equipment you are using and what your needs are, the answer could be yes or no. If you have a UHD monitor attached to the RX unit, then, yes, it probably does make sense to receive a UHD image. If you are not using a UHD monitor and only looking at material on a 7″ HD screen, then transmitting a UHD signal from your camera may at first seem like a complete waste of time. However, if you send a UHD signal and then view it on an HD monitor, do you get a cleaner-looking image if you are using image zoom? Well, let’s find out. Is this enough to notice any difference between UHD and HD? Yes, it is. I did some testing, sending both UHD and HD signals from a Nikon Z9 to the CineView Master 4K RX, which was hooked up to a SmallHD Cine 13, to see if I could see any big differences. When zooming in, there is quite a substantial difference when looking at the UHD image as opposed to the HD image. It might be a little hard to see in photos from a screen, but I could see a fairly substantial difference. If you are not zoomed in, there is still a difference, but it isn’t as big. If you are checking critical focus, then the UHD image is far sharper. Ok, but what about if we don’t have a UHD monitor and we are sending a UHD signal to an HD monitor? Well, if you are zooming in on your image, then yes, you can see a difference between the UHD and HD signals. If you are not zoomed in, then the difference is less apparent. The Accsoon CineView SE 4K SDI/HDMI Wireless Video Transmission System is available for$499 USD. As a comparison, the competing Hollyland Pyro S costs$449 USD. Although the Pyro S can transmit and receive 4K 60p, it can’t do things like camera control and wired Apple/Andriod smartphone connection. Direct competition comes in the form of the Hollyland Pyro S. TheHollyland Pyro S 4K HDMI/SDI Wireless Video Transmission System can currently be purchased for $449 USD. A wireless video transmission system needs to have rock-solid reliability. It also has to not get in your way and be easy to set up and use. Nobody wants to be messing around trying to fix wireless video transmission issues on set, especially if you are working in small teams or by yourself. The Accsoon SE 4K is solidly built, and having a system that features both SDI and HDMI and the ability to wirelessly transmit UHD or HD images makes it a versatile product. The added benefit of Apple/Android wired smartphone monitoring and camera control is a great additional feature. The image quality is so-so, and even with the bitrate at its highest setting, there was a lot of macro blocking when there were scenes with a lot of movement going on, which can stress codecs. If you are using this system to show a client an image on a reasonably large screen, then I wouldn’t recommend using this product, as nobody wants to see a highly compressed image that has image artifacts or macro blocking. The system also doesn’t support 4K DCI, which could be a problem for some potential users. The latency is the best I have seen from any Wi-Fi-based compressed video transmission system, and depending on what you are transmitting, you certainly could use it to pull critical focus for some applications (as long as you are using SDI 1080 50/60p). What you clearly need to be aware of is that any system that isn’t sending uncompressed video is going to have some latency, and this is why certain systems cost more than others. In saying that, the low latency of the Accsoon system certainly makes it a far more compelling choice than other competing systems. The operating range of the system is good; however, in built-up congested areas, you will get image dropouts and interference if you don’t have a completely clear line of sight. As soon as you go out of range and then come back into range, it re-establishes a connection as long as the Wi-Fi network doesn’t drop. The Accsoon SEE app isn’t as stable over the same distances, but it does work reasonably well up to around 160m / 525′. The UI is pretty easy and straightforward to navigate, but the boot-up time is pretty slow. The Accsoon SEE app has certainly been improved, and it offers a good array of video assist features. It was also stable and reliable to use. The only issue I had was that it was slow to establish its Wi-Fi network, and if you turned the system off and then back on again, you needed to re-choose the Wi-Fi network. You don’t want to buy a product, regardless of how much it costs or who it is aimed at, and then find out it doesn’t perform in the way you were expecting. With wireless video systems, you need to look at the overall performance in real-world scenarios so that you are aware of what you should expect and what the limitations are. Some quick overview without any real-world testing tells you nothing about a product. Latency, image quality, mounting options, app, and real-world operating distance are all things you need to consider before making a purchase. Wireless video transmission systems have come down in price dramatically in recent years, and you can now obtain a pretty good system without having to spend too much money. In the past, you needed to spend a lot more money if you were after close to latency-free performance. However, in saying that, a lot of the budget systems have continued to improve, and the Accsoon CineView Master 4K has the lowest latency I have seen so far. The Accsoon CineView SE 4K is a solid product, and for $499 USD, it offers a lot of features and functionality. It is arguably one of the most well-rounded and feature-rich, affordably priced compressed systems currently on the market, but the image quality and latency could be better. Matthew Allard is a multi-award-winning, ACS accredited freelance Director of Photography with over 35 years' of experience working in more than 50 countries around the world.He is the Editor of Newsshooter.com and has been writing on the site since 2010.Matthew has won 51 ACS Awards, including six prestigious Golden Tripods. In 2016 he won the Award for Best Cinematography at the 21st Asian Television Awards.Matthew is available to hire as a DP in Japan or for work anywhere else in the world.