The lift moved too fast: up through Metal Reclamation and the Terraria level that served as the Hab’s living lungs, through the umbilicus ring where Fleet ships trailed on the ends of their leads, then layers and layers of living quarters. After a too-short minute’s frantic reacquaintance behind the closed lift doors, Casne and Triz were deposited at the top end of the Hab in the middle of an utterly unrecognizable Arcade. Gray and gold streamers spanned the space between the central lift column and the businesses that wrapped around the station perimeter. Some of them were proper custom-printed decorations, while others had been hastily assembled from paper scraps or mealcase wrappers. The decor closed in the wide-open Arcade, made it feel smaller, more enclosed, despite the windows all around that peered out into the open void of space.
Triz recoiled from the sight of all that empty black, chopped up into tiny pieces as it was by the myriad of windows lining the Arcade. In one corner of the window, over the main recycling chute, a small arc of the local star could be seen—a glimmer of gold against the darkness. All the orange dwarf’s planets were tidally locked and uninhabitable, so the Hab’s solar arrays had been built to take advantage of the otherwise-unused light and heat.
Triz appreciated the change in the Arcade’s atmosphere, but she paused a moment in the frame of the lift doors. That was a lot of people. A lot of noise, a lot of everything. Not many folks here had ever recoiled from her as if she still reeked of recycling engine—and she suspected Casne had sorted those out long ago. People here didn’t remember her as the guttergirl she’d grown up as back on Rydoine. Still. She couldn’t shake the sense she didn’t totally belong here, in this world of smiles and songs and light.
Casne smoothed Triz’s hair back from her forehead. “Come on, guttergirl,” Casne said, “you’re with me now,” and Triz took a deep breath as they careened out into the crowd.
They leaned into one another to stay together in the press of bodies, tripping over other people’s feet as well as the occasional empty moonshine bottle.
“Your dad must have given PubWel a break,” Triz shouted over the crowd. PubWel, the monitors of public welfare, must be politely looking the other way tonight. Or possibly they were at the bottom of another bottle themselves, instead of spending the celebratory night politely realigning the Hab to the norms of perfect eusocial behavior.
Casne’s laugh rolled warmly down Triz’s cheek. “Quelian just wishes he got to run public welfare like it’s part of his wrenchworks, but that’s not exactly how it goes, you know. He’s a civilian tribune, not the god of Justice.”
“I still don’t think he’ll be doing much to tamp down on tonight’s activities. Nothing like having your prodigal daughter return in star-studded glory to convince a man that maybe she’s done all right for herself after all.”
At that, Casne only grunted. Triz knew Quelian had been upset when Casne ran off to join the Fleet. But she couldn’t imagine how he could hang on to that old anger now, with all Casne had done. She let the subject slide and ducked her head into Casne’s shoulder to avoid the spray from a freshly popped bottle of fizzy-slosh. At Casne’s squawk of dismay, she cackled a laugh. In answer, Casne picked Triz up around the waist and wiped her wet, sticky face off on Triz’s already-mussed worksuit, ignoring Triz’s squalls of protest. Together they staggered, shrieking with laughter, into the minilift doors as they opened. Triz stepped on someone’s foot—not Casne’s.
Triz turned and looked up into Quelian’s dubious face.
“Baba!” Casne said to her father, reaching uncharacteristic heights of joviality before Triz could croak an apology. “We were just talking about you.”
“I got all the Swarmers inventoried,” Triz cut in, crushing a foot—Casne’s—on purpose this time. “Started drainage on the worst one and started two batches of algae cultures incubating, so they’ll be ready for you first thing in the morning.”
“Ready for me?” Quelian’s frown didn’t deepen, exactly, only shifted somehow. He was much fairer than Casne, whose looks took more after her mother, but there was a certain . . . stubbornness these two shared. When Casne and Triz were teens, he’d taken on a role as one of the habitation ring’s tribunes, expecting to transition away from the wrenchworks entirely once Casne came of age to take over. Then she’d gone and run off to be a Fleetie. Overworked and overtired as he was these days, he didn’t seem quite as eager, somehow, to hand off the ‘works to his daughter’s guttergirl-partner. “I assume you’ll be in somewhat later than first thing yourself?”
“Baba.” Casne’s perfectly cheerful tone sheathed steel. “Has Triz ever slacked off a day in her life?” She pursed her lips. “Where are Daddy and Damu and Mama?”
“I queued up to handle the tab while the others took your mother home.” Now a touch of humor tugged at his mouth. “She drank enough brandy tonight to drop a Tolvian martyr.”
A flicker of guilt over missing time with Casne’s family made Triz’s shoulderblades jump. They got to see Triz plenty, more than they wanted, probably; better to let them have their one-on-one time with Cas.
“In fact, it’s probably just as well you excused yourself when you did,” Quelian went on. “All three of them send their regards, Triz. Veling said to remind you that you’re invited to dinner tomorrow night.”
These “family” dinners hadn’t stopped, as Triz had half-expected, when the quadfamily’s only daughter had gone off to war. Having grown up a guttergirl in another Hab’s recycling engines, Triz found any meal she didn’t have to fight for to be a gift; she was embarrassed and pleased to still be included when she was outside of Casne’s shadow.
They wanted her to be a part of their extended family, so why was Triz so hesitant?
Quelian looked between Triz and Casne once more and sighed, looking not a little martyr-ish himself. “Enjoy yourselves, then. I’m sure you will.” He shouldered his way out into the Arcade crowds as others finally nudged Triz and Casne forward and into the minilift.
“Gods,” said Casne, and sighed. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. You know how he is.”
Triz did know. After Casne had first invited Triz to join her and her wife Nantha in their marriage, Triz had tried calling Quelian ‘baba’ too. Once. The look he’d given her could’ve slagged plastiglass. “Didn’t your parents want to see you tonight?” she asked, now that Quelian’s dour mood had kindled a trashfire of guilt in her belly.
“Trying to get rid of me already?” Casne’s elbow dug into Triz’s ribs as the minilift spat them out on the second level of the Arcade, where most of the eateries and, more importantly, drinkeries were located. “They were waiting for me as soon as I offloaded. We had dinner while you were slumming it in the wrenchworks. Which, by the way . . . why were you doing that exactly? Mama told me she couldn’t dislodge you out of there with a crowbar and a bottle of brandy. Wasn’t the same without all six of us together. We even had Nantha on the ‘port.”
A flush crept up Triz’s neck, and she let a little space come between her body and Casne’s. It was always nice when Casne talked about her like she was really one of them, and still awkward too, because she wasn’t. “I wish Nan could’ve been here too. To celebrate all together.”
“Nan said the same thing.” Casne arched an eyebrow. “But I bet if Fleet Admiralty tried to unplug her from her calculation matrices right now, she’d claw her way right back into them. With those three inbound deployments, the navigators are up to their necks in math about now and she lives for that stuff.”
“Says the Tactics number-jockey.” They both laughed, and Triz ducked her head in embarrassment. “Anyway, your parents deserved to have you to themselves.”
“Well, you’re basically part of the family. More than basically, if you ever get around to formalizing it, which by the way, Nantha and I are still waiting for you to say yes to.” A snort. “Besides, if you’d been there, maybe Mama wouldn’t have done so much damage to the brandy on her own. Oh!” Casne let her hand slide down Triz’s arm until they only clasped fingers so they could slide one after the other through a flock of Fleet engineers and their admirers. “Speaking of the wrenchworks. That must have been Kalo’s Swarmer on the blocks down there? Did the Hero of Hedgehome tell you about how he took out an entire Ceebee orbital installation on one good engine?” She laughed, and the sweet sound drew Triz in close again. “I guess not, seeing as you’re not still down there getting your ear bent.”
Not this again. Triz grimaced. “Kalo and I don’t have a lot to say to each other these days. Shitting stars, Cas, you know that.” It had been Casne who introduced her to Kalo. Triz knew just how much Casne wanted them to hit it off, wanted them to have a gon.
“Well, yeah. But Nantha and I always thought . . .” Casne pulled Triz into the shuttered doorway of the bakery. “He hasn’t told me what happened between you two yet, either.”
Triz raised her eyebrows into Casne’s expectant silence. “Okay? You know I don’t care if you keep sleeping with him. I don’t even care if you want to bring him into your gon instead of me.”
“Triz.” Casne grimaced at the magnitude of that lie. “You know you don’t have to wait till you find a fourth, right? We love you and we want you to be part of our gon. I know you like the idea of a quad but a triad is a good start. Or finish, for that matter. Now, later. Whenever.”
“I know that.” Triz rested her forehead against Casne’s strong shoulder. It felt good, and she didn’t have to meet Cas’ eyes. She knew Casne and Nantha both cared for her, that whatever triad or quad or pent they ended up with would be a beautiful thing. And she also knew Casne and Nantha had been together for about a million turns, and as a triad, they would be Casne and Nantha (and Triz), not Casne and Nantha and Triz, and she wanted a partner of her own to bring to that table. Both so she wouldn’t feel that tiny bit of extra distance, and so Casne and Nantha wouldn’t realize it was there and feel guilty about it. They would always have their own history from before Triz, their private, personal language of Academy stresses and first Fleet assignments that Triz had learned to understand but never to speak. Some people were suns, some were moons, and some were just rocks who soaked up others’ light and warmth. Triz was not a sun.
“All right. As long as you know.” Casne rocked a bit from side to side, making Triz dance with her. “So do you want me to throw someone at you? Not another Fleetie then, but—”
Triz’s face scrunched up; she pulled back a bit to frown up at Casne. “Why would I care if it’s someone from the Fleet?”
“I thought that’s why you and Kalo—never mind.”
She hated how well Casne knew her, and she loved it too.
“Well, do you want me and Nan to ruminate on that one?”
“No! I mean, maybe. I don’t . . .” Triz sighed and rolled her face to the side. Her forehead found the damp heat of Casne’s neck. “I just need time to—to figure things out. All right?”
“Sure. Yes. Sorry.” Casne rolled them side-by-side back into the cheerful fracas of the Arcade; her arm lingered around Triz’s neck. “Let’s just have fun tonight. You remember my friends Lanniq and Saabe, right?”
“Of course!” Triz liked getting to spend time with Casne’s Fleet friends. A little glimpse of life out there in the black, without the unpleasant necessity of actually having to put a Hab behind her. At fifteen, she’d been rescued (though broadly speaking, proper rescues surely involved less screaming and biting on behalf of the rescued) from the bottom of Rydoine Hab, crammed into a spaceship, and pitched out into the void. No more dark familiar recycling caves, only the endless black, swallowing her alive. In her panic to get back, she’d managed to scratch a plastiglass viewport on the ship the Tolvian mendicants had chartered across the Galactic Web from Rydoine to Vivik. Even the other gutterkids had been a little scared of her, then.
“Great!” Casne pulled her around the bend of the Arcade. “They’re at Edillo’s. Come on!”
“Edillo’s,” Triz echoed.
Hopefully, she’d changed enough since her guttergirl days not to embarrass Casne and her Fleetie friends in an upclass joint like that. “Okay. I’ll buy the first round.”
The steward at Edillo’s had given up on his usual hospitality rituals; he couldn’t even contrive to pour drinks himself for the crowd of Fleet uniforms invading the normally quiet lounge. Instead, he sold Triz two bottles of spicewine at a severe markup while he hunched over the opening of his stock cubby. “Glasses?” she shouted over the background din, but he had already turned away to a pair of ensigns who were trying to open the taps drilled into the gnarled moonshine tree that formed the centerpiece of the establishment. When the steward cornered the ensigns and launched into a tirade about the history of the tree and the great-grandmothers who had planted it, Triz gave up. She retreated through the crush of bodies to the pile of cushions in the back corner where Casne’s friends had staked out space.
Casne’s fellow captain, Lanniq Erron-2 Kett, was the most beautiful man Triz had ever met. His skin was a few shades lighter than Casne’s, and like her, he wore his hair shaved down close. His shoulders and waist formed very nearly a perfect triangle, and Triz found herself staring more than once while he recounted heroics from the battle at Golros. Too bad he was already firmly ensconced in a stable triad of his own, or Triz might’ve made a play for him. When he leaned in to take the spicewine out of Triz’s hand, his fingers were warm against hers, and he flashed her a lopsided smile. Maybe she’d make a play for him anyway, especially if Casne was too tired to come back to Triz’s place tonight. One small catch: he was a Light Attack pilot. But one night wasn’t a gon and after all, Triz told herself, no one was perfect.
Then again . . . his smile had dropped off his face, even before he had the spicewine open. Triz remembered Casne had told her not to bring up his family tonight—something about his nephew falling in with the Ceebees, with no word from him since the battle at Hedgehome. That sounded like the kind of thing that would severely overshadow even a ringing victory like the one the Fleet just enjoyed.
“We were just getting to the good part,” Lanniq said, by way of greeting. He got the sealer off the wine and drank a mouthful. No one asked about the missing cups. “But I don’t tell it as well as Kalo. Where is he?”
“You don’t tell it as well as Kalo because you don’t do the sound effects. You gotta do the sound effects.” Saabe, a lanky lieutenant from the low-grav colony on Andeus, leaned in to reach for the wine bottle. E took a deep swig and gargled it violently, miming with eir arms a starfighter in flight. Casne elbowed em hard, making the bottle jump in eir hand; Lanniq rescued it and Saabe sat back, chagrined. “Anyway, old Pokey is probably spilling his heroic saga to the poor greasemark stuck with him in the wrenchworks. Maybe making time with them, too, if he’s lucky. He’s been churning heavy atmo since before Hedgehome, poor guy.”
Triz stiffened. “Looked to me like the only thing spilling in the works was the entire flight assembly of ‘Pokey’s’ Skimmer. Do you cockpit jockeys know you don’t win a fight by collecting the most shrapnel with your fuselage?”
“Lieutenant,” Casne said, a little louder than was necessary to cut through the background chatter. Saabe’s spine straightened as if by instinct. “Do you remember my partner Triz, who works? For my father? In the Vivik wrenchworks?”
“Oh! Shitting stars.” Saabe scrambled to make room on the cushions for Triz to slide in between em and Casne. “I didn’t recognize you without your, I mean, when you’re not—you and Kalo were, uh.” E jumped when Casne cuffed em amicably on the back of the head. “Sorry.”
“It’s nothing. Just pass the wine.”
She’d just raised the bottle to her lips when a four-note fanfare played over the bar’s speakers. The strangely upbeat tone covered the lowkey rhythm of the music beating a moment before, and the lights flashed on and off to match the beat. She didn’t recognize it as one of the Hab’s alarm codes. She took a big gulp before noticing the three Fleet officers around her had gone stiff. “What does that mean? What’s going on?”
“It’s him,” said Casne, standing. She waited just long enough for Triz to catch up before shoving through the throng of patrons who now crowded toward the door out onto the Arcade.
Thanks to Casne’s imposing figure, they made their way up to the railing that looked down into the lower levels. A moment later, both Saabe and Lanniq butted up against them. Triz wanted to ask again exactly what was going on, and whether they were likely to lose their prime seats in Edillo’s by the time all this was over, but clamped her mouth shut when the main lift doors below opened. The quiet swarms of revelers pushed back from the doors as a quartet of Fleet officers emerged. They must have boarded the Hab several levels down, at the umbilicus band. The Hab lights glared on their helmets’ visors, lending an eerie sheen of sameness to the group; on each shoulder, they bore the insignia of their home whaleship. From here, Triz couldn’t make out which it was; she didn’t think it was Casne’s home ship, the Dailos. When she turned to ask Casne, the hard look on her face stopped her short.
More movement drew her eye back down. Another figure emerged from the lift, and behind him, four more guards. Only the man in the middle had his helmet off, and Triz gasped when she recognized him. “That’s him,” she said. “That’s Rocan Melviq.”
“The one and only Lord Commander,” said Lanniq, as Saabe muttered, “He’s just a figurehead.”
More theories came jumbling out of the two of them. “My cousin whose ex-partner works for Fleet Intelligence says the Ceebees still have another secret terraforming project underway,” Saabe said.
“No.” Lanniq’s hands tightened on the railing in front of him. “They’re done for after Hedgehome and Chimon. The tide of this war has turned. I believe that.” He said it like a man who needed to believe it. Triz wondered again about the nephew who’d disappeared. Would he come slinking home now that the Ceebees had been routed, or was he on his way home already in a Fleet prison cell?
Saabe clucked and shook eir head. “That’s what they want us to think. But I’ll bet you a month’s sugar rations that they still have reserves hidden out there. Maybe somewhere webward of Golros . . .”
Triz gave up on following the argument and returned to Casne’s side. When her hand brushing Casne’s arm didn’t dislodge her viselike grip on the railing, she prized Casne’s fingers up and clasped them herself instead. Casne squeezed once, then relaxed. “Look at him, Triz. He’s enjoying it.”
Casne was right. As the anonymous Fleet officers marched Rocan forward, hissed curses and whispered disgust followed them. The Ceebee Commander wore a small, calm smile. “They’re taking him to Justice?” Triz asked, as his escorts directed him into the minilift. A bottle smashed against the doors just as they closed; a Hab security guard with his uniform jacket hanging open half-heartedly pushed his way through the crowd while a trio of cleanerbots zipped between legs to take care of the broken glass. “Why march him through the Arcade in the middle of the party? They should have at least left his helmet on.”
“Civilians love a show,” said Casne grimly. Her expression thawed slightly. “Sorry.”
Triz wondered if they’d sentence him to cryo until the hearings started. Practically a death sentence for a man who, rumor said, had bioengineered away his need for sleep. She shifted from foot to foot. “As long as this is the beginning of the end for the Ceebees.” She craned her neck as though she could see through the Arcade’s ceiling into Justice. “There’s something wrong with them. I mean, they think they’re entitled to wipe entire worlds and terraform them for their own use . . . Something about what they do to themselves must mess them up in the head. I can’t understand why anyone would want to mod their perfectly good body that way.”
When Triz turned to the others, Lanniq was grimacing down at his own boots. Casne’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, then opened for a splash of the spicewine she’d had stashed under her arm. When she spoke, the wine roughened her voice. “Triz, you had your eyes done three years ago to fix your myopia. And what about Nantha's reassignment?”
“That’s not the same thing at all!” Triz protested. “Ceebees are more machine than human.”
“Are you saying you think that anyone with mods—” Casne closed her eyes for a moment, then shook her head. “No. Let’s not. We’re here to celebrate, not fight.”
Lanniq cleared his throat. The crowds had begun to flow back in the directions of the eateries and bars and tea rooms. “I’m going to go save our table. You all coming?”
“I definitely am,” Saabe sighed. “The artigrav on this Hab is too shitting high, I need to sit down again.”
Triz peeled off from the group as they squeezed through the doorway of the bar. “I’ll get another bottle,” she said. Obviously, she’d ruffled feathers, but maybe she could smooth them down again if she poured enough spicewine on.
“You sure?” Casne plucked at her sleeve. “Is Quelian paying you so much you can afford to keep three Fleeties in booze all night?”
“I said another bottle, not all night.” Triz laughed, and Casne let her break free with a lopsided grin. She looked around; the steward was nowhere to be seen, but a small crowd packed in around the door to Edillo’s storage rooms. Triz edged forward and wedged herself in between a pair of bodies. “Excuse me,” she mumbled, as the Fleet officer she’d bumped turned to face her.
It was Kalo, because of course it was Kalo. He was embedded in among a knot of Fleet folk, with a few civilian hangers-on mixed into the mess. When he saw her squeezed in next to him, his face folded into an embarrassed smirk, and he raised a glass of something smoky-green. Shitting stars. Not for the first time, she wished he wasn’t so easy to look at. Wavy black hair, sleepy dark eyes, and crooked front teeth, just so he didn’t look quite too pretty to be real. “Make yourself at home. What’re you drinking?”
“Poison, with any luck.”
His gaze flicked to Casne and her other Fleet friends in the corner, then back to Triz. “To your health, then.” He slugged the smoky-green drink and turned into the crowd of Fleeties and civilians packed around him.
Triz managed to flag down the steward and swapped a fob-scan for a bottle of Simek green wine: decidedly a lesser vintage than the first round. The steward got an earful of Triz’s disapproval, mostly because she was annoyed Kalo had somehow scored actual drinking glasses while she was stuck drinking from the bottle like a slob. She slouched back toward the cushioned corner with her second-rate prize tucked inside her elbow.
If the reduction in beverage quality disappointed anyone, they didn’t mention it. Whatever awkwardness Triz had woken on the Arcade washed away under a sticky-sweet green tide. By the time the bottle had run dry, Triz was laughing herself sick over Saabe’s story about how e had tried to smuggle Roian leather out of a planetary Arcology only to discover e had bought a living, oozing, two-foot-long Roian hideslug.
“I’m wiped,” said Casne in Triz’s ear, once she could breathe normally instead of whooping for air. “I’m ready to head back to your place. How much longer do you want to stay?”
Triz leaned into Casne, turning a private word into a kiss on the back of her neck. “My place? Oh, are you not heading back to the quadhome?” That got her a rude noise in response, and she hid a smile against her sleeve. “Then let’s get out of here.”
They bid goodnight to Lanniq, and Saabe, who wore a knowing grin of eir own, and stumbled out of the still-packed bar and onto the Arcade. Triz still had a half-bottle of green wine in one hand, but no one waited at the door to scold her for breaking flammable liquid regulations tonight. The air out here was cooler and fresher, and Triz gulped down a welcome breath in the hope it would sober her up a bit. She wanted to remember this tomorrow and the next day—and the next and the next. Casne slung an arm around her neck, and her brandy-scented sigh roll hot and wet down the side of Triz’s cheek, and Triz thought sobriety might not be all it was cracked up to be.
“Captain Casne Vivik Veling?”
Heads cracked together, Triz’s temple to Casne’s chin, as they turned to take in whatever sycophant wanted a photosnap or an autograph. A pair of uniforms stood side-by-side under the Arcade’s bright lights. “Some other time,” Triz said, but when she went to tug on Casne’s arm, it had gone stiff inside her sleeve.
“Officers.” Casne sounded cool and formal in a way she never did with Lanniq and Saabe, who were officers too, after all. Triz looked at these two again and noticed their uniforms, though cut to Fleet standard, were a pale brown color rather than the casual gray Casne wore. “How can I help you?”
The taller of the two, with a female-denotation epaulet on one shoulder and a commander’s on the other, stepped forward. Triz’s gaze ratcheted downward from the officer’s epaulets to the sidearm holstered at her left hip. “Captain, I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”
“Of course,” Casne said flatly. “I’m happy to assist the Interior Watch any way I can.”
“Interior Watch?” Triz’s belly lurched, and not from all the drink she’d downed. The Interior Watch served as the Fleet’s military police. Like PubWel, but with shocksticks. “Casne, what’s going on?”
“Lieutenant,” the female officer said, and her junior stepped up with a pair of restraints.
“Hey—no. No!” Triz grabbed the restraints and tossed them over the side of the Arcade. Below, a few surprised voices yelped before the noise of the celebrations swallowed up any dismay. The junior officer took a few steps toward her, then stopped and glanced at his superior. Triz took advantage of the pause to jab a finger into his shoulder. Inside her own chest, her heart hammered out of kilter like a TR-39 with a misaligned nozzle. “You can’t arrest her! Don’t you know who she is? What she’s done for the Fleet? This is all a misunderstanding, Casne is a common enough name—”
“Triz.” Casne’s voice was still eerily level, but the ice in it thawed around Triz’s name. “I need you to tell my parents where I am in case this isn’t all straightened out by the time they wake up tomorrow. I need you to keep a cool head and ask the right questions. Can you do that for me? Triz?”
Triz swallowed hard. Casne’s brown eyes, usually so warm and soft, were now diamond drill bits boring into her. Instead of pounding, her heart slowed enough to fit a lifetime between each beat. “I—I can. Shitting stars. Yes, of course.”
A crooked smile cracked the hard lines of Casne’s face. She bent over to press a kiss between Triz’s knitted eyebrows. And then the Watch officer was locking her wrists into the closed cylinders of a second pair of restraints and guiding her forward through a crowd that parted before them. The noisy banter and clatter of bottles receded, falling away into shoes scuffing on the plastic floor and uncomfortable muttering.
Casne would never have done anything to merit this kind of treatment. If she’d ever broken a rule in her life, it was the stupid kind of rule, the ones that needed breaking.
People didn’t get hustled up to Justice because they spilled spicewine on the sleeve of their dress uniform. Triz felt very small and entirely useless watching Casne march along that human hallway. She didn’t realize she’d dropped the bottle of green wine until it bounced off her toe.
“Nine arms of Swalen, what’s going on?” And then there was Kalo, intercepting the Watch officers before they could hustle Casne out along the Arcade for the rest of the Hab to gawk at. He grabbed the senior officer by the arm hard enough to spin her around. “Is this your idea of a bad joke?”
The Watch officer jerked her arm out of his grasp. “This is none of your concern, Lieutenant.” Casne stressed his rank as she straightened the black stripes on her shoulder: a hint even Triz could read.
But taking hints had never been Kalo’s strong suit. “You’re not going anywhere with her.” He brandished his wrist fob in the junior officer’s direction, making him step back. “I’m calling Commander Escoth. And Admiral Savelian. Whoever I have to get down here to get this straightened out.”
“It was Admiral Savelian who issued the order.” The junior Watch officer’s lips stretched over his teeth: not really a smile, not really a sneer. “Stand down, Lieutenant.”
Kalo surveyed the bigger officer for just a moment. Then he hauled back and punched him square in the mouth.
Triz lurched forward with every intention of throwing herself into Kalo’s fight. Even if the enemy of her enemy was also her enemy, he had the right idea.
“Kalo.” Casne’s voice cracked out like a lancet gun, killing Triz’s resolve.
Triz guiltily dropped her hands.
The officer’s arm locked around Kalo’s neck, as the flyboy strained to break free, but Casne’s voice pulled him up short. Kalo’s arms fell limp and the Watch officer let him slide to the floor.
Lanniq stood just behind the officers, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Behind him, Saabe leaned around for a better view. Casne shook her head at them, an almost imperceptible movement.
Saabe skirted the Interior Watch officers to put a tentative hand on Triz’s shoulder. She wanted to shrug off the touch, and she wanted it to stay, too. Casne was the one who deserved comfort now. But she stared straight ahead, stone-faced and straight-backed, without catching Triz’s eye to offer a wink or head-shake or some kind of shitting reassurance this was going to be all right. Triz’s head spun with shock and alcohol alike, but Casne’s face was steely and sober.
“Are you at least going to tell us what all this is about?” Kalo asked, still on the floor at the junior officer’s feet, one arm wrapped protectively around his belly. Triz didn’t think she’d seen a blow come from the junior officer, but her mind was reeling. Her finger bones groaned under the strain of her fists. Kalo spat a thick wad of blood but missed the officer’s boot. “I know the Watch likes to keep its secrets. But if the Admiral sent you—”
The Watch commander’s chin jutted out. “Check the channels in the morning and read all about it with the rest of the Hab.”
So Triz would have to wait to find out alongside Casne’s family.
“It’s all right.” Casne’s voice pulled Triz’s eyes up to her. The steadiness of her gaze put the gravity back in Triz’s world, took all the upside-down and set it back on the ground—albeit in a jumble. She unpeeled her stiff fingers one at a time from her clenched fists. It hurt, but that helped steady Triz too. The Watch officer nudged Casne’s shoulder and hustled her forward, but she craned her neck to look back. “Triz. We’ll get this figured out.”
Triz nodded. She found herself sandwiched between Lanniq’s broad shoulders and Saabe’s narrower ones while the Watch officers checked Casne’s restraints and marched her away into the Arcade. Into the minilift, and up. To Justice. When she disappeared from sight, Triz’s breath hitched, and she doubled over. Saabe said, hesitantly, “Do you . . . do you want company for the walk home?”
Saabe’s hand froze her arm where Casne’s would have warmed it, but she appreciated eir presence anyway. E pulled Triz gently toward the lift. She stopped, unable to believe what had just happened, how they had just left the safety and warmth of Edillo’s. She realized Lanniq had left her side. He was standing outside the bar, head bent, listening to another Fleet officer with captain’s stripes. Triz didn’t recognize the captain’s face, but she knew all too well the look of doubt and dismay on Lanniq’s. When the captain turned and walked away, Lanniq looked around, then followed. That was odd. Why did they need him specifically, but not Saabe, who served directly alongside Casne? Maybe Triz could track him down later to find out. Maybe he’d even tell her, Fleet secrets be damned; he was Casne’s friend, too.
As for Kalo, he leaned up against the doorway of the bar—divested of admirers, he kept company with one of Edillo’s rags pressed to his nose.
“Thanks,” Triz said, and very nearly meant it. But the noise of the Arcade swallowed up the quiet word.
Only Saabe heard, and gave her elbow a reassuring squeeze. “Hey, no problem. How far downhab do you live?” Triz let em lead her to the lifts and tried to focus on the spicewine spinning in her head. Maybe this was all just a lousy bottle-dream.