26.0

Dragons?” Boz asked quizzically. He could tell by her expression that she was looking them up in the hive libraries. “Odd thing to dream about, isn’t it? Even for you.” She’d almost finished breakfast. The last of the fruit and tofu hid vainly in the corners of her plate. All around them, Ansimov’s echoed to the click-clack of cutlery, the low hum of early morning conversation.

“It wasn’t my dream,” Ravi said. “It was hers—and she was really, really scared of ’em. Don’t ask me why.” Ravi knew why. He just didn’t want to explain. Even in the waking world, the memory of it made him tremble.

“I mean they’re not even real, are they?”

Ravi shrugged his shoulders. The libraries were strangely ambivalent on the subject. On the other hand, he knew for a fact the old-time movies were full of them. In the movies, at least, no one seemed to question their existence. Not if they wanted to live, anyway.

“Do you want that?” Boz asked, reaching across for his plate.

“Yes!” he snapped, batting her hand away. “Not everyone eats like a recycler.”

“Judgy much? Did the girl explain what the dragons meant?”

“No. She was too busy getting burned alive.” He remembered the way their skin had blistered and crackled and caught fire. The searing explosions of pain. The sudden appearance of bones.

Boz was undeterred.

“Well, next time the two of you share a romantic dream, be sure to ask her before then, eh?” The glint in his cousin’s eye was wicked. Ravi, suddenly embarrassed, stared down at his plate. Even when he’d recovered, he took care to make sure no one else was listening before he spoke again.

“Can we do what she wants? Is it possible?”

“The better question is: should we do what she wants?” Boz let loose a low whistle. “This is sarded up, Middy. Totally sarded up.” She leaned across the table, switching over to code. “Assuming they exist and we can find them, turning on the transponders will broadcast the fleet’s exact position to the Newton. If she decides to shoot us up, she won’t miss. And if we disarm these weapons your girlfriend seems to think we have, we won’t be able to shoot back, either.”

“She’ll do the same on Newton,” Ravi coded back. “I think the plan is to make sure everyone can get killed so no one is.” He gave an apologetic little shrug. “She didn’t exactly descend to the particulars.”

“And what if she doesn’t follow through? Are you going to risk thirty thousand lives on the back of a dream?”

“I think she will, though.” Ravi leaned across the table. “I realized something else last night. When she tramples through my head, she leaves stuff behind. Memories. She made a kid eat cake, once. With her mind. More importantly, she’s fallen in with some kind of peace group. Her memories are real, Boz. So real, I can feel them like my own. I think we can trust her.”

“Let me get this in the airlock. You’re willing to trust this girl because of ‘memories’ this same girl has planted in your head? Sard me, Rav. If she can make you see things when you’re awake, and talk to you in your dreams, what makes you think she can’t gin up a couple of fake memories about cake and honorable intentions?”

Ravi’s mouth was suddenly dry. In the cold light of day-cycle, the whole thing sounded stupid.

Not stupid, he told himself. Insane.

“Let’s not cross those hubs until we get to them,” he suggested. “We can worry about what to do once we find the transponders and the weapons. If they don’t exist, we’re done. If they do . . .”

His electronic voice trailed off, helpless.

“Make like you’re busy,” Ansimov insisted, the words echoing in Ravi’s helmet. “Chen Lai’s coming.”

“I am busy. I don’t need to pretend.” Nonetheless, he made sure his drones put on a good show as Chen Lai appeared from behind the round dishes of a sensor array. Speeding along the ship’s spine, he was clearly a man in a hurry. Encased by the thronelike confines of an EMU, the Chief Engineer bore a startling resemblance to an old-style monarch. At least, if the monarch were wearing a spacesuit and jetting along at several meters per second.

Ravi chewed on his lip. Outside of the safe confines of a maintenance bay, EMUs made him nervous—and Chen Lai was really flying. Untethered to any part of the ship, it was all too easy to go shooting off into space with no way to get back. Despite the best efforts of the lifeboats, people had been lost that way.

Chen Lai seemed to have no such concerns. With a hard puff of reverse thrust, he brought himself to a halt about fifty meters away from their position. A few more puffs from the thrusters, and the blank mirror of his faceplate turned slowly in their direction. Ravi, imagining cold eyes behind the cold glass, felt his heart thud in response.

“Have you found any fractures?” he asked brusquely. “Any at all?” The voice in Ravi’s helmet sounded no more irritable than usual, so he relaxed a little.

“No, sir,” he replied. He pointed a bulky, gloved hand at the crisscrossing struts of the spine he and Ansimov had been inspecting. “Everything’s normal.” He hesitated before adding, “Temperature’s slightly up. It’s almost thirty Kelvin. Not enough to shift the stress gauges, though.”

“Good.” Ravi could tell from the flow of code that the engineer was downloading raw data from the drones. “And good catch on the temperature. The Destination Star must be starting to warm us up. In a few months, it’ll be warmer out here than any time since First Crew. Last thing we need is stuff cracking with the heat. We’ll keep an eye on it.”

And with that he was off, climbing toward the habitat wheels and the front of the ship at breakneck speed.

“Suck-up,” Ansimov muttered when Chen Lai was safely out of range.

“I just call ’em like I see ’em,” Ravi replied, smiling. He was about to needle Ansimov some more when he noticed that Chen Lai had stopped again. He had maneuvered himself close to the spine, just shy of where it merged with the outer hull of the hubs, and maybe five hundred meters “above” Ravi, Ansimov, and their attendant drones.

Thing was, there was no reason for Chen Lai to stop there. There were no teams at work and nothing scheduled. Chen Lai hovered in place for more than a minute and headed forward again, disappearing from view behind one of Hungary’s long-dead spokes. Curious, Ravi cranked up the suit’s augmented vision, hoping to see what had caught the engineer’s attention. All he could see, though, were struts and pipes and cables. Nothing unusual.

Except for the dark, shrouded mass lying flush with the main gantry.

“Where are you going?” Ansimov asked, his voice ringing accusingly over the radio. “You’re not even halfway done.”

“I’ll be back in a minute. I just want to check something out.”

Lacking Chen Lai’s EMU, it took Ravi a good deal longer than a minute to hook his tether to a suitable safety cable and make his way, hand over hand, to the object of Chen Lai’s attention. If Chen Lai hadn’t stopped, he’d never have noticed it. Even up close, it didn’t look like much. Just some long, flat mechanism covered by a shroud to keep off the dust.

Or shield it from prying eyes. Careful not to get tangled in his tether, he spun slowly around to make sure no one was close by. Then, wedging himself in the angle between a couple of struts, he untied part of the shroud. And then some more, until the entire mechanism was exposed.

“What the hungary do you think you’re doing?”

Ravi started with fright, the motion hurling him end over end, away from the gantry. Ansimov’s laughter rang in his ears.

“Not funny,” Ravi snarled, throwing out arms and legs to kill his rotation. He yanked angrily on his tether to pull himself back in. “You could have told me you were close by.”

“And you could have been doing your job. It won’t get done on its own, you know.” In Ravi’s frame of reference, Ansimov was standing upside-down on the gantry, several meters “above” Ravi’s head. As ever, it was impossible to read his expression. The white glare of the Destination Star burned out of the mirrored surface of his faceplate. Ravi flipped to land on the gantry feet-first, within touching distance of his partner.

Ansimov was bent down, looking at the mechanism. Even through the suit radio, Ravi could hear a sharp sucking-in of breath.

“Do you know what this is?” Ansimov asked. His voice was flat, without inflection.

“Maybe,” Ravi replied carefully. “What do you think it is?” If he was right, Ansimov knew stuff like this backward. If he was wrong, he’d rather not make a fool of himself.

Ansimov’s spacesuit straightened up and turned toward him. There was no glare in the faceplate now. Instead, all Ravi could see was his own suited reflection. And, beyond that, the trelliswork of the ship’s spine, stretching out behind him toward the stars.

“It’s a Kasimov-fifty mass driver,” the suit said, its voice shaking.

Hearing it from Ansimov suddenly made it real. The blood drained from his face, leaving him lightheaded.

Someone had gone back to the LOKI wars and copied the design for a space gun.

The Seventh Gen children were running through the arboretum, the simulated light of a setting Home Star irradiating their heads. Not that they cared. They raced across fields and between the trees in a cavalcade of screams and giggles, their Fifth and Sixth Gen chaperones watching carefully from the shade. Ravi wished he had the nerve to run after them—or at least to walk under the blazing ball of fire with his head held high. But he just couldn’t do it. He stood safely in the shade of a giant tree and looked on helplessly. Like all the Sixth Gen kids, he’d only come to the arboretum after dark. He’d liked the quiet light of the Homeworld moon, the feel of the night-silvered grass against his feet. The searing heat of the Home Star was just too much. For the Seventh Generation, though, deliberately exposed to it from birth, it was just another sol. A literal walk in the park.

Feeling inadequate, he distracted himself by watching Sofia crossing the meadow toward him. She was wearing a blue baseball cap, carefully chosen to match the blue of her fatigues, and—what had she called them?—sunglasses. Apparently, they were all the rage in Bermuda and Australia now—if a person had the water. Ravi had no idea how much they cost, but they allowed her to walk under the Home Star without hunching over in panic. She looked as elegant as ever. More so, really. The trees, and the grass, and the wildflowers beneath her feet made her look . . . stunning. His stomach knotted with longing.

“You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”

It was the girl, crooked smile broad and slightly mocking, stretched out on the ground next to him, back against the tree trunk.

“What are you doing here?” Ravi asked, his voice strained high with surprise. “This is not a good time.” His eyes skidded from the girl to Sofia and back to the girl again.

The girl’s smile got wider.

“You know she can’t see me, right?”

“Yeah, but I can. And you’re . . . distracting.”

The girl laughed at that: sweet, musical notes that spiraled past his ears and into the leaves above. She reached over and patted him on the ankle.

“Have it your way,” she said lightly, and was gone.

“Who are you talking to?” Sofia asked curiously.

“No one,” Ravi assured her, far too quickly. Sofia’s forehead crinkled with suspicion.

“Vlad,” he lied, referring to Ansimov. “He’s lost the manual interface to one of his drones and he’s freaking out about telling Chen Lai.”

“I’m sure he’ll figure it out.” She fixed him with a radiant smile. “Let’s figure out what Warren was trying to teach us this morning, instead. Do you think she makes this stuff difficult on purpose?”

For some reason, Sofia’s smile didn’t quite hit the mark. It was the girl, Ravi supposed. Just because he couldn’t see her didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Or did it? He found himself staring at his feet, remembering her hand on his ankle.

“Hey!” Sofia cried, irritated. “What am I? Suit rations? You could at least pay me some attention!”

“Sorry,” he said contritely. But the memory of the girl—and what she wanted—still lingered. “Sofe?” he asked. “Do you know anything about transponders?”

“Transponders?”

“Yeah,” he said, bending the truth. “There’s some First Crew records that seem to reference ’em, but I can’t find anything to show they ever existed. No blueprints, no nothing.”

“Transponders are, like, Navigation one oh one,” Sofia told him impatiently. “They broadcast a ship’s location and vector so as to avoid collision with other ships.”

“I know what a transponder is, Sofe. I’m just asking if we have one. If we ever had one.”

“Sure,” Sofia said, clearly surprised that he didn’t know. “The controls are in Main Navigation.” She flashed over a schematic in her slightly clumsy fashion. It was from a Navigator training manual, something he’d never have thought to access on his own. “Old-style, hands only, to prevent hacking. The Home Star system was full of spacecraft, so sabotaging a transponder was a big deal, particularly during the LOKI wars.” She shrugged. “Out here, having it on was kind of pointless. It’s been switched off since forever, but it still works.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “I guess we’ll need it when we get to Destination World. There’ll be three ISVs, plus the lifeboats, plus however many probes and satellites we put out there, all flying this way and that in close orbit. We wouldn’t want to go crashing into each other by accident.”

“Makes sense.”

“Enough transponder talk,” Sofia said, smiling. “Time to study.”

“Sure.” But he was thinking about other things. About the girl. And about the fact that if he wanted to activate the fleet’s transponders, he would have to break into Main Navigation on three separate ships.