Caro stirred and then stretched her chubby arms up over her head. “I’m hungry.”
Liam scooped her up. “Me, too.” He gave me a questioning look.
“I’m fine.”
They left, and I kept watch. Joseph and Kayleen slumbered side by side. From time to time one or the other of them moved. Sometimes he cried out. When he did, his dog crept up beside him and nuzzled him until he stopped, and afterward, Sasha lay down near his feet again. Kayleen moved less often, and when she did it was languid and soft.
They had slept a full twenty-four hours, and it looked like they were going for another twenty-four. Joseph had woken twice to take care of physical needs, but Kayleen’s body didn’t seem to need her.
It felt good to have everyone else in the room—even the dog—asleep and dreaming. The ship creaked and moaned all around me, like all starships do. Like a house does, only the inner sounds of a ship are electronic and metallic and cold.
I fretted. When we’d moved Kayleen here, she had been able to walk with Liam on one side and me on the other to support her, but had barely seemed to recognize us. Joseph would be fine, and Caro had looked as much like herself as possible given her mother had been—perhaps still was—in mortal danger. We were so much more fragile in this big world than we had been on Fremont. We’d lost Bryan. Marcus. We kept coming close to losing Kayleen.
It felt like being punched over and over.
That was my job. To lead. Me and Jenna and Liam. We needed to stay strong enough to survive. I took my succor from Mohami, lapping at the well of peace that he offered. He kept me strong. But that was also selfish. Me feeding me. I needed to feed the others.
We were going to have to convince Kayleen that she had to take a real break. To sleep. To stay away from data. To leave managing Caro to Joseph if he could handle it, or to me and Liam and Lou if he couldn’t. I walked over and took her hand, which felt slightly cold. Her fingers tightened around mine. I whispered to her. “It will be okay. Stay with us. Stay close.”
She let go of my fingers and turned away from me.
An involuntary moan escaped my lips. I sat down on the edge of her bed and stroked her shoulder and rubbed her neck. She felt like butter under my fingers.
Paloma came in and sat down in the chair I had been using. “Any change?”
“Not really. She hasn’t shown any sign of real consciousness. I’m worried. What if she left part of herself someplace we can never go?”
Captain Hill poked her head in the door. “Good morning.”
“How is your great-grandmother?” I asked her.
“She hasn’t woken up. The doctor and the medical robot are arguing about whether or not she’s in a coma.”
“I’m sorry,” Paloma said.
The captain shook her head. “It’s okay. The robot is right—she’s not in a coma. She’s responding to my voice from time to time.”
“I’m sorry.”
The captain swallowed. “She’s strong. She’ll be okay.”
I didn’t tell her she was protesting too much. This was a scary-smart woman. She knew.
“How about Joseph?” she asked. “Is he awake?”
“Yes,” he said from across the room, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“Good,” she said.
“Is it an emergency?” he mumbled.
She laughed. “Not quite that bad. But if you are awake, I’d like to debrief you on the most recent orders.”
Joseph pushed up from the bed with a soft grunt. “Let me eat something.”
The captain’s smile was so thin I wondered if she had slept. “Of course. I’ll meet you both in the war room in twenty minutes. You can bring Sasha.”
That didn’t seem long enough, but Joseph managed to use the time to down two glasses of water, eat a tube of vitamin paste and a real sandwich, and change into his old captain's coat from the New Making. I hadn’t even been sure he still had it. He looked so good I couldn’t help but tease him. “Don’t you need a Master’s Coat now?”
“Let’s just call this that, okay? Marcus gave it to me.”
“Testy?”
“Sorry. Distracted.”
I wondered if he was distracted by the captain, or by all of his worries, or by Kayleen.
Sasha refused to leave Kayleen’s side. Given that she was Joseph’s furry ghost, I took it as one more bad sign about Kayleen. Before we left, I kissed her and whispered, “I’ll be back.”
Joseph led me to a room that I’d never seen. I’d been in one like it, back in the cave on Lopali. Every wall was a visual of the fleets—our small group of ships converging on the larger fleet from Silver’s Home, the Islan Fleet coming toward us. Ship’s outlines ghosted across the walls, flying left to right, followed by statistics about crew and weaponry.
The captain and Joseph shared a somewhat intimate smile as they greeted each other. They weren’t lovers. I would have known that. But he was falling into her orbit and she was either attracted to him or felt protective of him or both. I could read him; I couldn’t read her.
Perhaps it was harmless; he needed to learn to be a Master and he’d just lost his mentor.
There was genuine disappointment in her voice as she said, “You didn’t bring Sasha.”
“She wouldn’t leave Kayleen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So is something different in our orders?” he asked her.
“No. I’ll review them with you later today. I needed to get you both in here, where we have extra layers of shielding. I don’t want anyone but you two to hear this. Yet.”
She and Joseph shared a glance, communicating at a level I couldn’t hear.
The walls began to dance with pictures, to zoom in and out, to simulate one type of ship in combat with another and then a different pair.
They could see this without me—read the raw data. They were both Wind Readers. Joseph was one of the most powerful ever seen on Silver’s Home, but Captain Hill must have formidable skills for Marcus to have left her in charge of the Thorn. So the visual display was all for me.
Apparently, they were waiting for me to say something.
“How certain are you that the fleets will actually engage?”
“Do you remember Lukas?” Joseph asked. “He was here. Tried to arrest me for fighting back on Fremont.”
I shivered. He had tried to buy Joseph from Jenna once. He had tried to stop Joseph from saving us on Fremont. “But he didn’t?”
“He’s sure the fleets will engage.”
“Lukas is on the Opportunity?”
Joseph nodded.
The captain said, “Even if Marcus had lived, the chances of the fleets getting into real combat were good. Now they’re better. You two are both trying to stop it, and so are others. Maybe we can gather enough allies to slow it down. Maybe we can’t even do that.”
I had been thinking about this for a long time. “We’re trying to make a third idea. That’s what the Doctrine is about. Aren’t we making a third fleet?”
“That’s treason,” the captain snapped.
“And who would lead it?” Joseph asked.
“Okay. Don’t think of it as a third fleet. Think of it as a third force. Think of it as a counterforce if you will.”
The captain had folded her arms across her chest. Her look told me she hated the idea. On the wall behind her, images of huge ships flew by one by one, sometimes two at a time. The Islan ships looked more uniform than ours, much more martial. There was no doubt they were built to fight. Hearts and minds and dreams of glory drove those ships as much as the propellent matter of stars. “We can protect ourselves from our own—I could stop Opportunity from boarding us. I can protect us from Islans. But I cannot attack our own. And I cannot disobey a direct order during a battle. I have sworn those things.” She looked at Joseph. “You swore those things, too.”
“I know. We can’t disobey, but if we can change the orders they want to give us? If we can change the fleet’s consensus? If we can help them to think differently?”
Bless him. I spoke up. “Right now, fear is driving every one of those ships on the wall behind you.”
She shook her head. “No, Chelo. Not fear. Power. They want to tell us what to do.”
I thought of Mohami’s map of beliefs and values. “Are you saying we want power over them?”
“We don’t,” she said. “We want them to leave us alone. They’re the ones starting this war. We just have to stop them.”
“We’re afraid of them.”
“Aren’t we always afraid of our enemies?”
I took a step toward her, made sure Joseph was watching me too. “Is it possible they’re coming for us because they’re afraid of us?”
She turned around and stared at the images of the Islan ships. They weren’t real time, of course. But they were modeled on the real ships; they were what we would face soon.
“And why are they afraid?” I thought of Mohami’s exercise. “Because we value different things?”
She shook her head. “I value my skin. But even more, I want the world to be better. I want the fliers to be free. I want a sense of right to come back into what we create. I want us to have integrity. We had that once, and it’s all turned to power and credits. To games of politics.”
The more time I spent with Captain Hill, the more I liked her. She was wrong … it did matter that the Islans—and us—were driven by fear. It meant we could use Mohami’s ideas about values to change things. But Joseph didn’t trust Mohami as I did. He had not been with us in Oshai, and he hadn’t seen the morning flights.
He had really only seen the betrayals.
I let it go. As Marcus often said, there weren’t really just two sides. “We’ll join the larger fleet soon.”
“I’ve been dreaming of fighting,” Joseph said. “I’ve dreamed of being on the Thorn in battle, but I’ve also dreamed of me flying some of these other ships. Even a lot of these other ships. The dreams feel so real they almost have to happen. I knew this all the way back on Islas, and the closer we get to the war, the more realistic they seem even in my waking hours.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t want these dreams to be real, but I think they must be.”
Captain Hill gave him a long, measured look. “That’s part of why I brought you here.” She glanced at me. “And your sister.”
“Because of my dreams?” he asked.
“Because you own more ships than the Thorn. And have an interest in even more.”
I swallowed. Everything about this week was getting worse. Like a slide down a mountain with a cliff at the edge, and almost nothing left to grab onto but prayers and thorny redberry bushes.
Joseph was not as single-minded in his opinions. When he was a child and all we had was a silver ship that had sat on the plains for so long that it looked derelict, he had drawn it and made stick figures to represent it and hoped and dreamed. And of course, he had eventually flown it.
The captain said, “Let’s start with the pieces. There are a hundred and twenty ships aligned with Silver’s Home. Seventy of them are owned or completely controlled by the Port Authority. Piloted by Port Authority pilots. There are thirty-one ships that are wholly owned by various powerful space-going affinity groups or—in five rare cases—by individuals. The Thorn is one of those five. So is the Unicorn.”
“Who are the other individual owners?” I asked.
“I’ll get to that in a moment.” She furrowed her brow. “That leaves fourteen ships that are owned in common by people who share our feelings. The fourteen and the five are all spreading the basic message that you folks further refined as the Doctrine of New Making. It’s slightly different on each of the ships, with the same main message. We have been led to believe there is an Islan version as well.”
Joseph watched the wall as Captain Hill brought up fourteen ships, all looking slightly different from one another, and over half clearly adapted for war rather than meant for it. No matter what the captain thought, as I looked the fourteen ships, I saw the beginnings of a third fleet.
We stared in silence for a moment, and I kept turning over the implications of a three-way split in power.
“Who owns those?” Joseph asked.
“A coalition. I even have a piece of them. But so do you, now. Marcus passed his part of the ownership to you. Twenty-one percent.”
So much? “Out of how many owners?”
“Ten.”
I kept drilling her. “Does anyone else own more?”
“No.”
I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. Joseph was the majority owner of fourteen ships and of the one we sat inside right now. “How much do you own?”
“One percent. It was a gift from Marcus, too.”
“Just now? A bequest?”
“No.” She smiled sadly. “It came through my mother. She and Marcus worked together years ago.”
Marcus who knew everyone. “There’s more you have to tell us, too.” I could feel that in her, that she wasn’t done with basic reveal.
“Marcus had ownership—entire—of two other ships. You are the Master of those ships as well, as soon as you say the words for them. They are the Peacemaker and the Sun’s Orbit. They’re part of the fleet we’ll be catching up to soon.” She nodded toward the far wall, where the images of two ships shimmered in silver and gold, brighter than anything else we’d been looking at. They were both bigger than the Thorn. The Sun’s Orbit was a fat ship designed to carry cargo. There were no obvious weapons, but Captain Hill said, “Inside, the Orbit is carrying a whole fleet of small ships that have formidable weaponry. Enough for a small Navy.”
“Was she built for that?” I asked.
“No. For flying close to stars and collecting data on planets in close-in orbits, such as mining data. She hasn’t been used much lately—we’ve learned to make almost any material out of its raw parts. So Marcus picked her up for a little over the cost of salvage about twenty years ago. He used her to carry cargo between space stations. She’s got excellent shielding. Very few of the Islan weapons can penetrate her hull easily.”
“And the Peacemaker?” Joseph asked, his gaze already directed toward the bigger of the two ships, and the most beautiful of all three. The Thorn was a dagger, the Orbit a bucket, and the Peacemaker a full-scale war machine. She was long and thin, and riddled with what looked like guns and shields and instruments. Perhaps that was a trick of the wall, or the way the captain was showing her off, but I swear she glowed. Everything about her whispered trouble to me, although you’d have thought Joseph was admiring a naked girl.
“How did Marcus end up with that?” he asked.
Good question. We’d always known Marcus had money and power, but this wasn’t a casual starship. If there even was such a thing.
The captain laughed. “Someone gave it to him.”
“What?” I asked.
“He had … supporters. The Master of the Peacemaker died twenty years ago. She willed the ship to Marcus. It wasn’t even finished then. But it’s all her design.”
Marcus had always had a way with people, and particularly with women. Even so, this was hard to take in.
Didn’t anyone give away nice little planets, with skies and the heat of the summer sun? That, of course, isn’t what I asked. “Didn’t Marcus have other heirs?”
“Not that he gave spaceships to.” She looked directly at me, and spoke slowly and clearly, as if she thought it would be hard for me to understand. “If anything happens to Joseph, by law, all of this goes to you as long as you are his next of kin.”
I had always loved Marcus, always would love Marcus. But this was too much for us, too much for Joseph. If he would have ever been ready for so much, it wouldn’t have been now. I was suddenly furious with Marcus for dying.
When I looked over at my brother, tears ran down his face.