4.0

So glad you could join us, Midshipman MacLeod.”

Commander Eugene Chen Lai, it had to be said, did not look particularly glad. He glared at Ravi from under bushy gray eyebrows, daring him to explain himself.

Ravi knew better than to try. He was late, and that was that. Besides, even if Chen Lai had been minded to listen to him, no one would believe what he had to say. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

“Apologies, Commander.” He tried to make it sound sincere. Not that Chen Lai would care. Punishment would come in due course, regardless.

He took his usual seat at the back of the briefing room. Ansimov flashed him a puzzled What happened to you? look but said nothing. Which was sensible, because Chen Lai was speaking again, and the engineer did not like to be interrupted. His voice had the dry crackle of an electrical short.

“After yester-sol’s checks, we can confirm that propulsion is nominal across the board, except for the L-three sequence control valves, which we’ll swap out as soon as we get the authorizations back.

“What that means is we’re good to go for any course correction the navigators decide to throw at us before Braking Day. Assuming we can fix the valves, of course.” A wintry smile of encouragement pulled briefly at his lips before melting away.

“We need to get on with our survey of the habitat wheels. Most of these compartments haven’t been rotated for thrust since Launch Day. Archie’s hooks, some of these compartments didn’t even exist back then. We need to make sure every single module can be turned through ninety degrees and that they can be secured and hooked up to the utility lines without any trouble.” His face took on a menacing cast. “I do not want my teams run ragged during final countdown because someone didn’t do the job right the first time. Am I clear?”

“Crystal!” the room shouted back.

Chen Lai nodded approvingly. Ravi felt a bunch of assignments hitting his implants.

“You have your schedules, people. Try not to break stuff.”

There was a general shuffling as the room started to stand up, eager to get on with the sol’s work.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Chen Lai announced, his voice slightly raised as it climbed over the background noise. “Midshipman MacLeod?”

Ravi tried to ignore the sinking sensation in his stomach.

“Yes, Commander?”

Chen Lai’s lips twitched into the fossilized outline of a smile.

“Once you’ve cleared your schedule, son, take a trip to Bermuda-four, deck twenty-five, Gunder’s Passage. The sewage lines need cleaning out.”

“Yes, Commander.”

The Gunder’s Passage sewage lines were every bit as bad as Ravi feared. A second-stage recycler had gummed up, jamming the lines from no less than a dozen compartments. Cleaning out the lines was a soul destroying, messy business, leaving both Ravi and his drones spattered with what was euphemistically known as black water. But no matter what he did, he couldn’t get the recycler itself to work right. Ravi fought to contain a rising sense of frustration. Beads of sweat on his forehead swelled to full-sized drips, winding darkly outlined paths across grimed skin.

“Keep doing it that way, Middy, and you’ll be here all night-cycle.”

Ravi had been so engrossed in his battle with the recycler, he hadn’t noticed Melati Petrides standing behind him. Archie alone knew how long the engineering lieutenant had been watching.

“Ma’am?”

Petrides was not Chen Lai. The smile on her round face was open and friendly. The lieutenant inserted herself into his code.

“The knack, MacLeod, is to work against the impeller. That way, you’ll build up enough pressure that when you open the c-valve like this, the gunk will vent itself. See?”

Sure enough, the stubborn jam Ravi had been struggling to remove was gone. A quick internal rinse and the whole mechanism was good as new—until the next time, anyway.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Oh, don’t thank me, Middy. I’m entirely self-interested. I need someone young and flexible, and the commander said I could have you—but only after you’d finished here.” Her smile turned wry. “He did mention you’d be covered from head to foot in muck.” She crooked a finger, indicating that he should follow. Ravi did as ordered, trailing the lieutenant into a maintenance stairwell and all the way down below deck thirty, Bermuda’s deepest. A little-used hatch opened into a netherworld of pipes, cabling, and tanks. The infrastructure of existence, unseen and unthought-of by the thousand or so souls on the decks above. Sensing their presence, a few dim lights shimmered to life, bathing the whole scene in gray twilight. Cold air clung clammy to Ravi’s skin, his breathing accompanied by streaming puffs of white. Overly strong gravity pulled at his knees.

Petrides led the way along a narrow catwalk, its grated deck plates hugging the broad curve of a water tank. The tank itself was at least a hundred meters long, bland and featureless, save for the occasional serial number stenciled on the side. But it was impossible to tell how deep it was. Both above and below, the tank’s vertical extent was hidden by pipes and cabling and gloom.

Petrides came to a halt. It was no coincidence, Ravi thought, that she was standing beside a ladder built into the tank wall. It stretched up through a painfully small kink in the piping and vanished from sight. Petrides reached into her pocket and pulled out a small spool, the thread it contained attached to a small, clearly visible weight. Petrides patted the nearest rung. A small blueprint appeared on the inside of his eyelids.

“Right, MacLeod. According to the specs, this ladder will eventually take you to the top of the tank. At the top of the tank, there is an inspection cap.” She tossed him the spool, the little weight digging into the palm of his hand. “Unscrew the cap, and unreel this plumb line through the opening until the weight hits the bottom of the tank, pull it back up and measure how much of the thread is damp—easy to do ’cause it’ll turn bright red. Got it?”

He knew he must be staring at her like she was several transistors short of a circuit. Was this the lieutenant’s idea of a joke? But then again, what if it wasn’t? What if Petrides was serious and this was just more punishment? Blood burned in his cheeks. In the end, all he could do was stand at attention and utter one plaintive word.

“Ma’am?”

Petrides burst out laughing.

“I know, Middy, I know. It sounds like some kind of prank. But let me assure you: it isn’t. We’ve read the sensors and run the diagnostics; we’ve had drone inspections and taken apart the drones. So . . . we’re doing this old-school. Like dawn-of-time old-school. Wriggle your way up there, MacLeod, drop in the plumb line, and read off the depth. The line will tell us the truth once and for all. Hopefully, this is some bizarre software issue—a bug in the hive. If not, we’ve got bigger problems.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Now get going. And stay flexible!”

Petrides wasn’t really kidding about the flexibility. The tank wasn’t a regular shape, and the ladder snaked and curved in cruel directions through ridiculously narrow gaps. By the time Ravi returned to the catwalk, his back, elbows, and knees had been scraped raw. He delivered the depth number to the nearest millimeter and tried not to wince with pain.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It was clear from Petrides’ expression that it wasn’t the number she’d been looking for.

“Okay, Middy. You’ve been on duty long enough. Dismissed.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“And Middy?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Don’t stint on the shower. That smell of yours is killing the filters.”

“It’s not funny,” Ravi insisted. He struggled to make himself heard above the raucous noise of the diner.

“It’s kinda funny,” Boz replied, grinning from ear to ear. She batted away a food-thieving hand from an older cousin and wrinkled her nose. “Also: you still smell.”

Ravi hoped to Archie she was joking. He’d burned forty liters of water, trying to wash away the aftermath of his battle with the sewage lines. Water he didn’t really have. And it was a long way to payday.

He and Boz were facing across a table in Diner Nine. Although no one called Diner Nine, where the MacLeods had gathered to shoot the breeze and do business, “Diner Nine.” They called it “Ansimov’s,” after the family that had owned it for at least two generations. Vladimir’s mother, Khadija, was keeping a careful eye on them, Ravi noticed, her face pinched into its usual expression of mild disapproval, her body pressed against one of the out-of-date ovens the family refused to upgrade because the new ones, according to Vlad, “cooked like crap. A human could do better.”

“The thing I can’t get my head around,” Ravi said at last, “is that she just disappeared.”

“People don’t just disappear,” Boz pointed out. “You must have lost track of her.”

“But I didn’t! There was nowhere for her to go! She was in the circular, plain as day-cycle.”

“And then she turned a corner. Easy enough to break into a run and give you the slip when you weren’t looking.” His cousin broke into a mischievous grin. “I’ve done it dozens of times. Turn a corner, sprint to the next one, turn into that, and ta-da! You’ve ‘disappeared.’ ” She curled her fingers into air quotes to emphasize the point. No mean feat, considering she was holding a cigarette. The tip reddened with movement, sending a curl of smoke toward the filters.

“Roberta MacLeod!” Khadija yelled at her. “Put that thing out before it shows up on the sensors! You want ShipSec in here?” Various MacLeods piled on, adding roars of mock disapproval to the general hubbub.

Boz waved good-naturedly and smothered the glowing embers between thumb and forefinger. Ravi had no idea how she did it without burning herself.

“The only one running was me,” Ravi explained. “And I’m not slow. She didn’t have time to reach another corner.” He could feel his face forming into a frown. “I’m telling you, Boz. She just vanished.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

“Hmmm,” Boz murmured, stroking her chin. “There might be another explanation, you know.”

“Which is what?”

“That you’re sarding crazy! No one just ‘disappears’ into thin air. It’s not physically possible. You’re the engineer, cuz. You know this.”

Before Ravi could respond, their uncle Torquil slid into a seat beside him. He was accompanied by the tart aroma of hydroponics and a wide smile.

“How’s it going?” he asked Ravi. “Still doing the officer-training thing?”

Ravi nodded.

Torquil gave him a skeptical look. At least he hadn’t spat on the deck, Ravi thought. In MacLeod lingo, any sentence with the word officer in it almost required the excessive use of saliva. It was like a rule of grammar.

“You gonna be looking down on us after you graduate? Turn us in to ShipSec?”

“Don’t be daft, Uncle Torq. I’m an engineer. The only thing I’ll be looking down on is jammed valves and worn-out bearings. I’m still family.”

Torquil stared at him a moment or two longer and then decided to let it go.

“Braking Day’s coming,” he said, as if Ravi was the only person in the fleet who didn’t know. “This whole beast of a ship is going to turn around, point its ass at the Destination Star, and . . . Boom! The drive goes off for a whole sarding year!” His eyes glowed at the thought. A powerful, heavily tattooed arm wrapped itself around Ravi’s shoulder, like some gigantic Homeworld snake. “We slow down. We drop into orbit around Destination World, and we land. Mission accomplished!” The arm began to crush him with merciless glee. “And you know what happens then?”

“No, Uncle.” Ravi rolled his eyes. “I’m sure I haven’t got a clue.”

“No more officers!” Torquil roared, banging the table and laughing. “No more officers!” Others nearby took up the chant, banging tables in unison. “No more officers! No more officers!” Only when Khadija Ansimov made to move from the ovens did the chanting fade away to good-natured laughter. Torquil leaned back in his chair, chuckling quietly.

“I’m sorry to break it to you, Uncle,” Ravi said, “but you’re going to have officers up your ass for an eternity after Braking Day. Reconnaissance, surveys, preliminary expeditions . . . It’ll be years—years—before anyone gets to go down.” He poked a sharp elbow into his uncle’s ribs. “You’ll be an old man. I mean an even older man, obviously. . . . And all that time, you’ll have to call me sir.” He shook his head in mock sympathy.

“You’re killing me, Ravi.” Torquil loosened his grip on Ravi’s shoulder. Turned to look him in the eye. “You really sure you want to be one of those stuck-up, inbred bastards? They treating you okay?”

“Yes,” Ravi said. “And yes.” He wanted very much to believe the second yes was as true as the first.

His uncle didn’t look entirely convinced. For a moment, it looked like he was going to pursue it some more. Until, that is, his face broke into a sudden, mischievous grin.

“MacLeod’s World,” he said.

“What?”

“MacLeod’s World. That’s what we should call Destina—”

“Uncle, shut up!” Ravi hissed, scandalized.

“Why?” Torquil’s grin grew wider. “It doesn’t flow so well, I admit. How about New—”

“Not another sarding word from you!” Boz said, even more sharply than her cousin. “You know it’s bad luck. We haven’t gotten there yet. Don’t sard it up for the rest of us.”

“Okay, okay! Archie’s hooks, you two: I’m kidding. Kid. Ing. It doesn’t count if you don’t mean it.”

“Yeah, well, let’s not take the risk, eh?” Ravi said. He allowed himself to smile. “If something goes wrong now, Vasconcelos will be all over you.”

This time, Torquil didn’t hold back from spitting on the deck.

“That bastard. Should have killed him when I had the chance.”

“Like you’d ever kill anyone,” Boz teased.

“For him, I’d make an exception. You turn out like him, Ravinder MacLeod, and I’ll tan your hide from one end of Haiphong Circular to the other.”

“It’s a circular, Uncle. It doesn’t have an end.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yessir, Uncle sir. If I have to be an officer, don’t be a bastard one.” He replaced his grin with something more serious. “I won’t be, Uncle Torq. Promise.”

“Deal. And hey, if the officer thing doesn’t work out, come see me.” He favored Ravi with a crafty smile. “Engineers get to know all the nuts and bolts, don’t they? I bet there isn’t a compartment in this ship you couldn’t get into if you put your mind to it.” The smile became positively wicked. “I’m sure we could find a use for someone with your particular set of . . . talents, eh?”

“Mom would kill me.”

“Yeah, well. What your mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” He turned to his niece. “On the subject of which, Boz, my darling, let’s get down to business and talk chocolate.” He leaned toward her across the table, propped up by powerful forearms. “I can get you forty liters a quarter bar.”

Boz’s response was an incredulous laugh. “Seventy-five or nothing, Uncle Torq. I gotta keep the vacuum out of the airlock; know what I’m saying?”

Torquil grunted, entirely unsurprised by the response. Cheerfully calculating eyes scanned Boz’s guileless expression for some kind of tell.

“Sixty?” he offered, at last. “And some lightly used inductors?”

“Done.” They shook hands. Some sixth sense made Torquil look over his shoulder. He blessed them both with an impish grin and left, avoiding Ravi’s mother by seconds.

“What did he want?” Fairley MacLeod asked. She was staring anxiously at Torquil’s back, her slim hands clasped too tightly together.

His mother was, as ever, a pencil-thin bundle of nerves. She was still pretty, Ravi thought, but the cheerful woman of his childhood was long gone. He liked to think that losing his father to the recycler had dimmed the light in her, but truth was, Dad’s constant clashes with ShipSec, his always-broken promises to fly right, had ground her down long before the ship had finally had enough. She turned from Torquil to Ravi, her expression freighted with worry.

“He didn’t want much of anything,” Boz assured her smoothly. “He lost a bet on the playoff game, is all. We were just settling up.”

She might as well have said nothing for all the effect it had. Fairley MacLeod continued to stare at her son, willing him to speak.

“What she said,” he mumbled at last. His stomach hopscotched into knots, the way it always did when he lied to his mother. He managed a weak smile. “Nothing to do with me,” he added. That, at least, had the virtue of being true.

His mother relaxed a little.

“Good. You’ve come a long way, Ravinder. A long way. You’re one semester from becoming an honest-to-Archie officer.” Her eyes shone with pride as she said the word, followed by a troubled glance around the room. “Don’t let anyone drag you off the circular, Ravi. Not now.”

“No, Mom.” Ravi couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye.

“All right, then.” She reached out to adjust his hair, but Ravi swung out of the way, embarrassed. He got to his feet.

“I need to get going,” he said, more abruptly than he’d intended. He gave her a brief hug, and a smile to make up for it. “Got to study if I’m going to be an officer and all.” He let her go, kissed her lightly on the forehead, and headed toward the exit.

Boz caught up with him in the corridor.

“Not so fast, Middy.” She gestured at Ravi to follow her. Curious, he fell in step alongside.

“Where are we going?”

“To the scene of the crime. I’ve been thinking about your, er, sighting, and one of two things is going to happen. Either we figure out how your mysterious girl did it; or you’re making an appointment with the shrink.”

“I’m not going to the shrink.”

“I will be the judge of that.”

Boz headed for the habitat wheel’s nearest spoke. Her progress was rapid, and Ravi struggled to keep up. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that Boz walked quickly because she was always expecting trouble. And like most MacLeods, trouble stuck to Boz like a rash. How could it be otherwise when half of what she was involved in was sketchy—and the other half was worse? Unlike Ravi, both her parents had been sent to the recycler. Ravi worried every single sol that she would be next.

“Pick it up, Middy!” Boz ordered over her shoulder as Ravi started to breathe heavily. “All that extra sewage slowing you down?” She threw him an infuriating grin and started to move even faster. Ravi would have sworn at her, but he didn’t have the oxygen.

At the spoke, Boz, impatient as ever, chose the hubward paternoster rather than the elevator. The endlessly moving ladder—this one rattling “up” toward the hubs—moved more slowly than the elevator, but there was never a need to wait. Boz jumped across without breaking stride and hung on nonchalantly, using only one arm and a leg. Ravi was having none of that. He stuck himself to the worn rungs with every limb he had.

They rode the paternoster in silence. As they climbed through the remaining, night-dark decks and the weight of his body against the rungs lessened to nothing, Ravi patted his leg pocket. It was a nervous habit. He had plenty of sick bags, and he knew it. Besides, he wasn’t going to be weightless long enough to need one.

The paternoster was coming to an end, bringing them out of the spoke and into the weightless center of the wheel—of all the wheels. “Above” him, Boz bent her knees and pushed off. Ravi pulled down a gridded navigation screen over the inside of his eyelids. Arcing green lines of possible trajectories flickered across his vision. He picked one and jumped, launching himself into the cavernous expanse of the hubs.

Queasy stomach or not, it was a sight Ravi never got tired of. The hubs: the long, hollow tube around which the ship’s enormous habitat wheels made their turns. The wheels had to spin in order to make gravity. And the hub of each wheel was here, spinning in contrarotation to its neighbor, each one pierced by round spoke holes with their elevators and paternosters, the means by which the crew traveled from the wheel’s habitable decks “up” to the hub and vice versa.

To call the hubs a “tube,” of course, failed to do it justice, seeing as it was over two hundred meters across and more than five kilometers long. It was the largest open space on the ship, bar none—and the only way to get from one wheel to another that didn’t involve a spacesuit. Because the top of each spoke opened onto the inside of the hubs, crew routinely floated from the hub of one wheel to the hub of another. Unlike the wheel rims, the hubs spun too slowly to make gravity. Unless people were manhandling a load or were otherwise incapacitated, they simply bent their legs and jumped from hub to hub, hurtling across the voluminous expanse like unguided missiles.

There were eight wheels in all, named alphabetically from stem to stern with Australia at the front/top and Hungary at the back/bottom. In front of Australia, there was only the round disc of the shield, and behind Hungary, a mess of loading bays, and airlocks, and vacuum-rated elevators leading out to the ship’s spine and, ultimately, the flared bulk of the drive. But those were strange, foreign places, exposed to space and accessible only to a few. All life, the whole point of the ship’s existence, was in the wheels. He still remembered the chants in kindergarten as he’d learned their names for the first time. First is Australia, second is Bermuda, third is Canada, fourth is Denmark, fifth is Ecuador, sixth is Fiji, seventh is Ghana, and eighth but not least is Hun -ga-ree! Though in truth, Hungary was very much the least and had been for generations.

Over time, the hubs had evolved from an engineering necessity into a three-dimensional recreation area: a park, of sorts, at the center of the ship. The volume was dotted with the spherical outline of zero trees, and caged-off spaces for freeball, and dancing, and any number of null-g pastimes. And even though everything around him was night-cycle dark, it was easy to see the broad rings of the hubs, each of them rotating in ponderous, eerie silence, moving opposite to one another on near-frictionless bearings. Sunk into each hub were four large, softly lit circles, each one a slightly different color, each one marking the entrance to a spoke. They moved in quiet, precise circuits, creating slow-moving patterns of round light. A giant’s kaleidoscope.

Heart pumping with excitement, Ravi soared weightlessly into the volume. Now that he’d kicked off, the nav screen flashed up the corkscrew curl of his actual flight path. It was a glorious green, matching his intended course almost perfectly. His jump had been better timed than Boz’s. He was headed directly to the Denmark Wheel. She was going to miss by at least a couple of hundred meters. She knew it, too. He could see her grimacing as she drifted off to his left.

The hubs, for Ravi at least, were a lot more fun in night-cycle. Darkness was easier on his stomach. Less to see. Less to upset his sense of balance. It was why, despite his initial fears, he’d never been sick outside of the ship. Soaring over Ecuador, he could hear the pulse of freefall dance music from a nearby cage. He wondered distractedly if Sofia was there, flying in and out of the arms of the man he’d seen her with at the intersection. Farther off, a knot of bright lights and voices indicated a freeball game in progress. Remembering it was the Archimedes’ playoff game, Ravi twisted his head ever so gently to see who was winning. The cage, however, was too far away to make anything out. A round, free-floating zero tree drifted across his line of sight, blocking the view and filling his nostrils with the scent of eucalyptus.

Some minutes after leaving Fiji, he twisted himself around to land feetfirst on the Denmark hub. It was another two minutes before Boz caught up with him, looking distinctly cross.

“Show-off.”

“It’s not my fault you’re getting old and your eyesight’s shot,” Ravi needled. He took a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

They rode a paternoster all the way down. Like everything else on the ship, it had seen better sols. The rungs of the endlessly moving ladder were worn and cracked under his palms. Its chain drive wheezed and rattled with the grinding resentment of 132 years of thankless use. Ravi stole a quick glance “down” toward the wheel rim. The paternoster’s narrow shaft, running arrow-straight through the inside of the spoke, plunged dizzyingly into the distance, its twilight gloom interrupted by splashes of light that marked openings onto the various decks. At the very bottom, somewhere below deck thirty and farther than he could see from this far up, the rungs would loop around a hidden mechanism of gears and cogs and start moving “up” on a separate but parallel shaft back toward the hubs. The whole arrangement had a Rube Goldberg feel to it, but it worked. So long as a person was sound of limb, halfway coordinated, and lacking the patience to wait for an elevator, they could step through an entrance that was little more than a hole in the side of the shaft, hop across a meter or so of open space, and grab on.

Of course, if they were not sound of limb, or just plain clumsy, things might not go so well. High up in the wheel, where gravity was minimal, missing a rung was embarrassing but no big deal: there was plenty of time to grab the next one. Closer to the rim, though, as gravity climbed toward a full g, slipping off a rung was much more serious. If the unfortunate crewman lacked the presence of mind to brace themselves against the shaft wall, they would drop like the proverbial Homeworld stone. Every year or so, someone died or got badly injured on a paternoster, and the senior officers would agonize about shutting them down. But it never happened. They were far too convenient.

The officers might have reached a different conclusion, however, if they had taken the time to ride the paternoster taking Boz and Ravi into Denmark. The deeper they got, the more the battered rungs bucked and whipsawed, as if desperate to throw them off. By the time the two of them had descended to a full g, Ravi was clinging on for dear life. Even Boz’s grip had strengthened from carefree to slightly cautious.

Ravi hopped off the paternoster and onto solid deck just as quickly as he could.

“This way.”

The intersection, as they approached it, was deserted. Phoenix Circular, which had been so full of people earlier in the sol, stretched ahead of them into the nighted gloom. A couple of cleaning bots, under the supervision of a bored-looking janitor, moved slowly past in the opposite direction. Neither the bots nor the janitor paid them the slightest attention.

“The girl came down this way,” Ravi said, reaching the intersection. The walls here were covered in murals: modern, Sixth Gen stuff for the most part. Edgy, and mildly subversive. But it was just possible to make out the faded name of the cross corridor stenciled underneath the artwork: manchester passage. “And then she turned here,” he explained, pointing. “There’s no . . .”

He came up short.

Chen Lai was in the cross corridor, running a worried hand through close-cropped, gray hair. And he wasn’t alone. Standing next to him was Commander-Inspector Vasconcelos, head of ShipSec; and standing next to him was Qadira Strauss-Cohen, fourth of her name, Chief Pilot, and adjunct professor of post-LOKI history.

Ravi took a deep breath. No one called Strauss-Cohen any of those things.

They called her Captain.