9.0

I should have waited till payday, Ravi thought miserably. And bought myself a sarding shower.

Australia reeked of water. And all the things that water could buy. Like soap. And perfume. And clean clothes. They had hopped off the paternoster at Haiphong Circular, one of the wheel’s big ones, lined with boutiques, and nightclubs, and the Roxy, an honest-to-Archie replica of a Homeworld movie theater. Unlike most of the ship, which was preparing to go to sleep, this place was just waking up. It was full of people. And every one of them was staring at him like he’d leaked out of a sewer line.

It wasn’t just that he was unkempt and malodorous. He was wearing plain, standard-issue fatigues. Everyone else was dressed in something . . . not. Suits copied from twentieth-century archives, body-hugging ensembles from the twenty-first. Even Boz, with her so-called leather jacket and nonregulation boots, stuck out far less than he did.

Boz walked down the circular like she owned the place, smiling and nodding at everyone she met. Ravi, for his part, stuck his hands in his pockets, kept his eyes down, and lumbered after her like some reeking servant. He kept a wary implant on the hive, looking for any sign of a ShipSec scan or a surreptitious probe from a passerby. Nothing came up.

The walls and windows on one side of the circular suddenly disappeared, revealing a delicate skeleton of struts and piping. Not half-finished construction work, this, but infrastructure as art. A spidery catwalk, modeled after a Homeworld footbridge, arced gracefully through the ship’s innards toward a large, cylindrical structure at least three decks deep. Pipes erupted out of it like the legs of a crudely designed spider. Once used for water storage, it was now a decidedly upscale officers’ club called, appropriately enough, “The Tank.” An illuminated doorway punctured its curved wall.

Boz turned briskly onto the catwalk. Ravi followed, his steps slowing to a crawl.

“You really think they’ll let us in?” he asked, more conscious than ever of how bad he looked.

“They’ll let you in because you’re an officer in training. I get to tag along as your guest.” She looped her arm through his and dragged him toward the door.

The hive rippled to life as the portal scanned them, informed them they were attempting to enter an Officers’ Mess as defined by Ship’s Regulation 261-3d, and required proof of authorization. Ravi transmitted his ID and referenced Boz as his plus-one. A green light flashed inside his head, and they stepped inside.

The interior was a bewildering mix of levels and sublevels sweeping round a hollow core. There were multiple bars, a couple of dance floors, and plenty of dark booths. Pounding music blared from hidden speakers.

“Cool!” Boz yelled above the din.

Ravi imagined blood running from his ears. He picked a booth that might be marginally quieter than the others and led them toward it. Boz sat across from him, her face alive with excitement. Ravi could feel her probing the hive. But barely. And only because he was looking for it.

Boz glanced around, consuming everything there was to see with hungry eyes.

“This place is something else!” she coded. It was easier than shouting over the pounding bass. “Order something.”

Ravi’s stomach knotted in dismay.

“I’m out of water,” he confessed, miserably. Having to say it only made it worse.

Boz spared him a sympathetic smile.

“I thought you smelled a bit ripe! Don’t worry, cuz; I can afford one round. And if we don’t order, this whole plan’s out the airlock.” She dropped an order into the hive.

A wait-drone flew across to them on whooshing fans.

“Drink?” it asked. The pitch of its not-quite-human voice cut effortlessly through the noise. “Perhaps something to eat?”

“No food!” Boz yelled. “Two Pittsburgh lites!” She was leaning in to the drone, as if to make herself heard above the music. But a shrewder observer might have noticed she was only centimeters from the machine’s serial number. A really shrewd observer (or Ravi, who was looking for it) would have seen the mechanical glittering of her right pupil.

“Two Pittsburgh lites,” the drone repeated. It flitted away, deftly avoiding the flailing arms of an excited patron, and jetted toward the nearest bar.

“Did you get it?!” Ravi asked.

Boz’s pitying look was all the answer he needed. Her fingers rippled across the tabletop in time to the music. Her eyes wandered from one part of the bar to another, never lingering and mildly curious. She looked for all the world like a woman waiting for a drink. She did not look like someone committing a crime.

The wait-drone returned on a soft sigh of rotors. Boz reached out to grab the bottles, but the machine held on tight.

“Eight point two-five liters,” it insisted. “Please.”

“How much?” Boz seemed genuinely taken aback.

“Eight point two-five liters. Please.”

“Day-cycle robbery. Shoot me a key.”

With eyes closed, Ravi watched the drone transmit his cousin a line of code. Which his cousin promptly used to deposit 8.25 liters into the Tank’s account.

Unfortunately for the drone, the 8.25 liters was accompanied by several lines of programming that shouldn’t have been there. Having entered the bar’s systems, they rapidly metastasized, breaking out of bookkeeping and forcing their way into drone management. An indicator light on the wait-drone’s scuffed exterior cycled from green to red. Boz barely had time to snatch the beers before the machine headed off to a docking station for diagnosis. The moment it docked, the diagnostics kicked in and were immediately hijacked by ones and zeroes of rogue code. The rogue code rampaged through the entire docking station, and then through the hardwire network to which the docking station was connected. The Officer Country network.

The Tank, however informally, was an Officers’ Mess. Technically, however informally, it was Officer Country. And it was connected to the rest of Officer Country—barely—by a handful of unimportant systems. For Boz, though, it was enough.

The hijacked drone, its indicator light still shining a lurid red, reached out to Boz across the general network, loaded with information . . .

“I want to do it,” Ravi was insisting.

“I absolutely forbid it,” Mother said, powerful arms folded across his chest. “They’ll turn you into a monster.”

Ravi’s chin jutted forward in defiance.

“It’s too late. I already signed the release . . .”

Boz thumped the table with excitement.

“We’re in!” She dropped a key—a long, complicated one—into Ravi’s head. “Come on over. Door’s open.”

What the sard? Ravi came to with a jerk. Still trying to recover from . . . whatever that was, he took the key Boz had given him, turned it in the lock, and linked implants with his cousin.

The bar faded away to dull background. In front of him was a large, virtual oak table piled high with equally virtual paper files that Boz must have copied from a nineteenth- or twentieth-century movie. Dreamlike, he could feel Boz at his shoulder, but he couldn’t see her.

“This is every file of every person on the ship,” Boz said. “All eight thousand nine hundred and fifty-two.” She wasn’t really speaking, of course; it was just a chipset simulation, deeper and huskier than the voice Ravi was used to hearing. This was Boz’s voice as she heard it. “We’re looking for a woman, so we can ignore anyone who identifies with your lot,” she continued. The mountain of files almost halved. “And we’re looking for a young woman, so let’s toss everyone younger than fifteen and older than thirty.”

“Thirty-five. Just to be safe.”

“Thirty-five, then. That leaves us with . . . nine hundred and twelve candidates.” Still a lot, but just about manageable. Boz heaved a sigh of satisfaction. “Over to you, cuz.”

Ravi took a deep breath—real, not virtual—and went to work. Linking the pattern-recognition software built into his implants with purely biological memory was never easy. This time, it was even more difficult than usual. It was as if his memory of the girl was stored in the wrong part of his brain. His head throbbed with the effort.

Slowly at first, but more and more quickly, he cycled through the files, looking for someone, anyone, who bore the slightest resemblance to the girl on the wrong side of the airlock. Nine hundred and twelve times.

Zip. Nothing. Nada.

“No dice,” he began. It was as far as he got.

“Get out!” Boz hissed. She cut the link. Ravi was back in his own head. Dance music pounded in his ears.

“Move!” Boz said, aloud this time. She was shoving him out of the booth.

Ravi stumbled to his feet.

“What’s going on?”

“Trouble.” His cousin’s eyes were fixed over his shoulder. Ravi looked behind him.

ShipSec. Two officers were at the entrance, dropping scans into the hive just as fast as they could generate them. The bits and bytes of Boz’s hack had scattered to stardust, but the scans were hunting them down, trying to reassemble them, to trace them back to their creator.

“Nice and easy,” Boz instructed, one hand on his elbow. “Let’s lift from the sarding launch pad.”

She led the way toward a back exit.

And a third ShipSec officer, one with a considerable amount of silver on his collar. He was leaning against the curve of the Tank’s outer wall, beside the patched-over remains of an old pipe. Commander-Inspector Vasconcelos. Ravi’s heart beat a drumroll on his chest.

“Good evening, Crewman MacLeod,” Vasconcelos said amiably, looking at Boz. “What a pleasant surprise.” His gaze traveled to Ravi.

“Who’s the accomplice?”

Ravi jumped as a hand landed on his shoulder.