28.0

There were klaxons going off in his head. Or were they coming out of the walls? His arm was throbbing. And it was so dark . . . .

“Ravi? Are you okay? Ravi!” Boz was frantic. Her voice was coming from somewhere above him, which made no sense.

Except, suddenly, it did. The explosion. The jerking pipe. The fall. He was lying on his back against some curved, uneven surface. He tried to sit up. The throbbing in his arm became jerking, stabbing agony.

“Ow!”

“Ravi?”

“Down here.” A statement of the sarding obvious. He quietly cursed himself for his stupidity. The klaxons were real: he’d had to raise his voice to shout over the top of them. The air was acrid with smoke. Somewhere close by he could hear the whining of a pump.

“Are you okay?”

“No. I think I’ve broken my arm.” Just saying it out loud made it hurt. He stifled a whimper.

Boz’s voice had retreated from the edge of panic. It was more businesslike now.

“Are you bleeding out? Can you tell?”

“I don’t think so.” He reached out into the hive, dragging up the blueprints for Australia-12, figuring out where he had to be. He found the Tank, followed the piping into the wall. Dropped down to . . . here. A curving mezzanine bulkhead a deck and a half below Haiphong Circular. There were a couple of power conduits to his left and a wastewater ballast tank to his right, which explained where the pump sound was coming from. The tank was either filling up or emptying, shifting mass from one part of the wheel to another to keep everything balanced out.

Ravi grimaced to himself. The mechanics of wheel balancing were the least of his worries.

“Boz?”

“Yeah?”

“Get out of here. You don’t need the attention right now.”

“What about you?” It was clear from her voice that she was reluctant to leave.

“I’ll be fine. I’m an engineer. I saw a gap in the wall, stuck my head in to investigate, and fell off.” Trainee officer or not, he was still a MacLeod. He could sell a story if he had to. “Get lost!” he said gently. “No one needs you!”

“Sard you, too!” He could hear her scrambling back along the pipe. Ravi gave her a few minutes to get clear and then, wincing at all the trouble he was about to cause, launched an SOS into the hive.

It took ShipSec an hour to dig him out. With kind words and painkillers, they put him on a medical drone and wheeled him back onto Haiphong Circular. Drugged up as he was, it took him a minute or two to understand what he was looking at.

A number of shopfronts had been blown out. Black scorch marks blotched the ceiling. Foamy fire suppressant coated the decks. The few lights that hadn’t been smashed were shining bright as day in the middle of the night-cycle.

“What’s going on?” he asked. The drugs made everything come out in a mumble.

“BonVoys,” someone replied bitterly. “They bombed the circular. People are dead.”

Ravi’s mind spun back in time. He was dropping a primitive piece of string into a water tank, standing with Petrides in front of a cache of stolen water; listening to the Menendez kid talking about “devices.” Ravi had thought the kid was talking about fancy holograms, BonVoy propaganda. But this . . . this was far worse.

In the end, he couldn’t tell if it was the drugs or the killing that had set his wheel to spinning. He passed out.

He was lying in his bunk, on a lawn of scalene triangles beneath a bright blue sky. The girl was at his side, leaning over him.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“I am?” He didn’t feel hurt. But he didn’t feel surprised, either. “Is it bad?”

The girl shook her head.

“I don’t think so.” Her forehead creased in the smallest of frowns, as if she was thinking. “Your brain patterns are slightly off, like you’ve been drugged. But they’re not off-the-charts bad. You’re not at death’s door.”

The sky on top of his dream had turned to night. Unwinking stars peppered the firmament. The girl, however, glowed, as if illuminated by some invisible spotlight. He stared at her a moment, trying to make sense of what was going on.

“Why are you here?” It seemed like a good question.

The girl smiled. Crooked, and a little sad.

“Same as always. To ask for your help.” She leaned forward, her gaze intense. His bed gave a sudden lurch, swaying from side to side. Except it wasn’t a bed anymore; it was a sailboat, its long mast vanishing into the distance above him, its hull bobbing on mirror-smooth black water.

The boat was moving now, heading toward the Newton. Still tiny and far away, but getting closer with every rise and fall of the sailboat’s bow. The girl was seated across from him, her back propped against the front of the boat, knees drawn up under her chin. The starship hovered over her shoulder.

“Will you help us?” she asked. “With the transponders and the weapons?”

The question made him anxious, but he didn’t know why. Had she asked him before? Had he agreed to help? Was there a reason not to?

And then he remembered. What she’d asked, and how often; the conversations with Boz; the BonVoy bombing; his arm.

“Maybe,” he hedged. “You were right, though. There are definitely weapons. A torpedo and a mass driver. The torpedo might be nuclear.”

Newton loomed ever larger over the girl’s shoulder. She looked solemn but unsurprised.

“The mass driver isn’t a problem. It’s for close-in work, defending the ship against torpedo attack. The torpedo, on the other hand . . .” She leaned forward, staring into his dream-eyes. “Can you disable the torpedo?”

Ravi nodded.

“And the transponders?”

The anxiety ratcheted up again.

“There are three,” he said, speaking far too fast, as if to get it over with. “One on each ship. There are old-style physical interlocks that can only be overridden in Main Navigation by a real person and we’re only on this ship and not the others and I don’t see how—”

The girl cut him off, laughing. Behind her, the boat seemed to be rising up to meet the Newton. There were shadows flying around the ship, he noticed. He watched them with a vague sense of foreboding.

“If I can get you into Main Navigation—on any ship—can you turn them on?”

“Sure. But—”

“And can you keep them on?”

Ravi frowned.

“I could fry the controls,” he suggested, after a moment’s hesitation. “The system is designed to ‘fail safe,’ so the transponders will turn on and stay on until they can fix the interface or destroy the transponder.” He smiled mischievously. “Thing is, the transponder itself is buried inside the main shield. That thing is tough. It’d take them weeks to dig it out. It’ll be easier to fix the interface—and if we make enough of a mess, that’ll take forever too. Old-style controls are real difficult to work with. It’s basically Steel Age tech.”

The sailboat, tilted subtly to one side, was almost at the Newton now, aiming for the spine as if intending to dock. The ship was escorted by dragons. Nine of them, circling the starship in an elaborate aerial dance.

How can they breathe? he wondered.

It was as if one of them had heard him. It reared above the boat’s high mast, looking down at them.

“I can get you to the controls,” the girl said. “All of them.

“And don’t worry. This always happens.”

The girl closed her eyes. A pillar of fire erupted from the dragon’s mouth.

“How’s it feel?” Fairley MacLeod asked. The wrinkles around his mom’s eyes were deepened by worry, and she’d clearly been crying. Her hair, though, was pulled back in a tidy braid and she was wearing her best set of fatigues. A little necklace from Homeworld glittered on her neck. She reached out to play with his hair, hesitating halfway there, at about the point where he’d usually start backing away. But he didn’t. He let her fingers flutter across his scalp, delicate and deft, bringing back his childhood with each gossamer-light tug. Boz was standing a little way behind her, a relieved smile on her face.

“I feel good,” he told them, slightly surprised to be saying it. He’d snapped his right arm in two places and broken his collarbone. The medics had kept him unconscious for the best part of three sols while they fixed him up. Now, apart from a bit of stiffness, he felt as good as new. His discharge papers glowed comfortingly on the inside of his eyelids. There was a spring in his step as Boz led the way out of the Main Infirmary. His mother clung to his arm as if scared to let him go. Reaching the lobby, Ravi looked around curiously.

“Seems real crowded.”

“It is,” Boz said, glancing at him over her shoulder. “The sarding BonVoys hurt a lot of people—and not just here: they hit Bohr and Chandra as well.”

“What?” The news bought Ravi to a halt. Boz, however, kept going. His mother had to haul on his arm to get him moving again. Boz was still talking, firing words over her shoulder as she walked.

“Same time, same targets. High-end stores selling ‘planetary goods.’ ”

“Planetary what, now?”

“Planetary goods,” Boz repeated. She stepped out of the infirmary and onto Denmark’s Bristol Circular. Consistent with good medical practice, they were only deep enough in the wheel for 0.7 g, so Boz’s strides covered a lot of deck. “Destination World ‘fashion’ for folks with more water than sense: sunglasses, baseball caps, raincoats, that kind of stuff. Everything the well-to-do planetary explorer could possibly need. Like they have a sarding clue.”

“But why?” Ravi was still trying to get his head around what the BonVoys had done.

Boz shrugged her shoulders.

“Who knows? BonVoys are crazy. They don’t want us landing on Destination World, so I guess anything that celebrates doing exactly that is fair game.”

“Do you think they meant to kill anybody?” his mother asked anxiously. “I mean, blowing something up is, well, not good, obviously; I’m not saying that. But, I mean, to kill somebody . . . That’s a really big deal. Maybe it was an accident.”

Ravi looked across at his mother, at the anxious look in her eyes. There was a painful twisting in his gut. His mother always wanted things—wanted people—to be better than they were. It’s why she’d stuck by Dad to the bitter end.

“I don’t think it matters,” Boz said. “They made bombs on a spaceship and set them off. Think about that. Think what would have happened if they’d cracked open the hull.”

“Yes, sure . . . sure, but the hull was a long way away and it was night-cycle,” Ravi’s mother protested. “The shops were closed.”

“But the circular was wide open,” Boz reminded her. “There’s clubs, and a movie theater, and restaurants for the rich folks. Any bomb was bound to hurt somebody.”

They’d reached the Denmark-9 spoke. Boz headed straight to the paternoster and jumped on, leaping the gap effortlessly. Ravi was about to suggest that his mother take the elevator, but she followed suit without breaking stride. Ravi fought down his surprise. He always thought of his mother as delicate, like crystal. But that was her mind. Her body, honed by years of hard physical labor, was lean and athletic. He jumped across after her, by far the clumsiest of the three of them. He winced as his still-stiff arm hit the rungs too hard. The rungs rattled in protest.

“You okay?” his mother asked.

“I’m fine. I just want to get home.”

They made their way to Ecuador in near silence. The hubs were deserted. The leafed spheres of the zero trees had the place to themselves. Ravi gave one of them a near pass, taking in a breath or two of heady eucalyptus as he went. The scent helped calm his stomach, which had been on the verge of rebelling.

“Well, here we are,” Ravi said, standing outside the door to his quarters. “Come on in.” He flashed a key at the lock and the door slid open.

The girl was already inside, her petite body and crooked smile leaning against the bulkhead.

“What took you so long?”