30.0

Ravi slept through the night-cycle, uninterrupted by dreams. When he woke, the newsfeeds were atwitter about all of two things: BonVoys, and the next round of playoff games. There had been a number of arrests across the fleet. ShipSec on Chandrasekhar had raided some abandoned low-g compartments and recovered a bunch of explosives, some of which, they said, had been manufactured on Bohr. Lieutenant-Inspector Tir, the number two guy at Bohr ShipSec, and apparently their spokesperson for this sort of stuff, stood stiff in front of the monitors and said his people were looking into it. But it was apparent he didn’t believe a word of what was coming out of Chandra. Bohr, he said, was prioritizing other lines of inquiry.

The BonVoy menace, as the newsfeeds were now calling it, was not going to stop life aboard ship from proceeding as normal—or nearly normal—as possible. “We will not be terrorized,” Captain Strauss-Cohen announced firmly, staring straight to camera. “We will not live life as if there’s a BonVoy bomb in every gangway. Life goes on. The Mission goes on.” She allowed herself a studiedly carefree smile. “And, need it be said, freeball goes on. Chandrasekhar’s Spartans are already en route. We look forward to welcoming them aboard tomorrow evening . . . hopefully to crushing defeat.”

And with that, the newsfeeds shifted to sports coverage. The playoff picture remained complicated, and the pressure to win what might well be the last fleet freeball tournament ever was increasingly intense.

Ravi tuned it out. He slouched into class a mere forty seconds before he would have been late.

“Did you get lost in the hubs?” Ansimov asked. “I’m told the latest chipsets have navigation built in. Maybe you should learn to use it.”

“Har sarding har.” Ravi slouched into his usual seat, just in time to have his implants slammed with a particularly vicious data package. Warren was clearly not in the best of moods. With an inward sigh, Ravi settled down for another half-shift of education. He failed to see how six-letter DNA stranding was going to make him a better engineer. But if the navigators had to suck it up . . .

He nudged Ansimov in the elbow.

“What?” Ansimov’s mouth wasn’t moving, but even in code, he sounded irritated.

“Where’s Sofia?”

“No idea,” Ansimov muttered, biologically this time. He scanned the front of the class and frowned. “None of them are here.”

“None of who?”

“The navigators. Every sarding one of ’em is AWOL.”

Ravi scanned the empty chairs with a feeling of dismay.

“You think they’ve been arrested?” he asked.

“All of ’em? They’re navigators, for Archie’s sake! Are they inbred snobs who wouldn’t give you the time of sol if your life depended on it? Totally. But BonVoys? Come on!”

Ravi, thinking about Sofia and Jaden, wasn’t so sure. He got through his half-shift of education with half a mind, and his half-shift of work in much the same way. Prepping the last of the Fiji compartments for deceleration took him twice as long as it should have. Ansimov, who carried the extra load so they could finish on time, looked at him askance but said nothing.

Shift over, and showered with almost the last of his paycheck, he hurried over to Canada. To his immense relief, Sofia was waiting for him in the arboretum.

“I thought you’d been arrested!” he blurted out. “Where have you been all sol?”

“Hello to you, too! Working, if you must know.”

“Working?” Ravi didn’t bother to hide his surprise. “On what?”

“I’m not supposed to say. The whole department’s been sworn to secrecy.”

“You can tell me.” He smiled. “I’m a MacLeod. I know how to keep a secret.”

Sofia barely pretended to hesitate.

“Okay. But not a word to anyone. Got it?”

Ravi nodded.

“We’ve been taking bearings and crunching numbers all sol. I’m not meant to know why, because Uncle wouldn’t tell us. But I know the math, and only one thing makes sense.” She was staring at Ravi now, wide-eyed and a little scared. “They’ve detected something in near space, out past the Bohr somewhere. Something emitting in the S-band, so not natural.” Her voice was so low, Ravi could barely hear her. “It’s a ship, Ravi. An Archie-damned ship!”

Sofia, Ravi noticed, was trembling, her hand unsteady as she played with her hair. Ravi didn’t blame her in the least. He laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. He also dropped a quiet line of code into the hive. Unseen, unheard by anyone, it wormed its way to its destination.

Boz, it’s Ravi. We’re a go.

“Spartans, go home!”

“Dead Weights!”

“Stop wasting our air!”

The jeering was good-natured. The traditional Archimedes welcome for any off-ship freeball team—particularly when the Fleet Cup was at stake. A sizable crowd was floating around the boat elevators, waiting for Chandrasekhar’s Spartans to show their faces. The ribald shouting redoubled as the loud hiss of equalizing air pressure announced the arrival of an elevator. Thick doors cycled open, disgorging Chandra’s athletes into a cacophony of yells and off-color jokes and portable klaxons.

If the Spartans were fazed by any of it, they gave no sign. Escorted by a flight of ShipSec officers, they kicked off in the direction of Fiji, their kit bags floating alongside, attached to their wrists by brightly colored lanyards. The crowd spun and twisted out of their way—but only at the last possible minute, when collision seemed inevitable. The more-enthusiastic fans bent their knees against some solid surface and pushed off onto parallel trajectories, so as to give the visitors the benefit of their wisdom all the way to the spokes.

No one was really expecting someone to be traveling in the opposite direction, which caused Ravi some trouble as he tried to make his way to the elevator.

“Sorry,” he muttered. He’d bumped into some unsuspecting spectator, sending them both tumbling. “Sorry.” As he was wrapped in the massive bulk of a spacesuit and the spectator was not, his apologies didn’t get him very far. His stomach revolted at the sudden change in direction, but he managed not to throw up on his faceplate.

When he finally reached the elevator airlock, he was surprised to see it guarded by a ShipSec officer and a security drone.

“Where are you going?” the officer asked brusquely.

“Boat pylons,” Ravi replied. He removed his helmet and sent over his authorizations with the flicker of an eyelid. “Need to recalibrate the docking clamps.” The authorizations were genuine: non-urgent work that Ravi had volunteered to take on for extra credit—and a chance to access the lifeboats. He tried not to think of the two trojans nestled in his toolkit.

The officer’s eyes glazed over as she scanned the information.

“Looks good,” she said. Her gaze flitted across to the banged-up box floating next to him. “That your equipment? The drone can’t get a reading on it.”

Ravi nodded.

“It’s the lining,” he told her truthfully. “Keeps the tools from getting fried.”

“I see,” the officer responded, pursing her lips. “Open it up, please.”

“I’m sorry?” Ravi managed to keep his voice steady, but he could feel cold beads of sweat on his forehead. One look at the trojans and the whole game would be up.

The officer gave him the faintest grimace of an apology.

“It’s the BonVoys. After what those gullgropers did to Australia, we can’t take any chances. Everything going out on the spine has to be checked. Just in case.” She was staring expectantly at the toolkit, waiting for him to open it up.

Bluff it out, son. He could imagine his dad shrugging. Fuel line’s burst, anyway. What have you got to lose? The merest hint of a sneer. Or have you gone soft?

“Y . . . you’ll need to get suited up,” he stammered.

The officer’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“Why?”

“B . . . because it’s a pylon calibration,” Ravi lied. “The instruments are set for hard vacuum.” He gave what he hoped was a sorrowful shrug. “The whole box is sealed against atmosphere. If I open it, it’ll implode. Probably take my hand off. And it’ll certainly ruin the instruments.” His stomach was starting to heave, but the MacLeod in him managed to keep talking. “And if I do that, the Chief Engineer will have my ass. Still, if you can suit up and come with me to an airlock, I’ll evacuate the chamber and open it up for you, no problem.”

The officer favored him with a steady stare, trying to see if he was lying. Ravi stared back, his gaze as open and guileless as he could possibly make it. Boz and Uncle Torquil would have been proud.

“I guess it’s okay,” the officer said reluctantly. She floated to one side, giving him access to the doors. “Enjoy the ride.”

He threw up in the elevator. But the ride was fine after that. Grabbing a handhold to brace himself against the fake gravity of deceleration, he brought the machine to a halt about 2,500 meters aft of Hungary. He replaced his helmet, cycled the airlock, and stepped outside.

He was floating across the gap between the ship proper and ISV-1-LB-01 James Clerk Maxwell. A small cloud of ice crystals, mostly water vapor and unrecovered atmosphere, floated beside him, sparking like powdery diamonds in the light of the Destination Star. They drifted into the stark shadow of the lifeboat and vanished.

He brought himself down boots-first onto the massive bulk of a docking pylon. Mission accomplished, he tethered himself to an anchor point and walked along the pylon to its business end: the giant clamps that held the bulky lifeboat in place.

Summoning a drone from a nearby locker, Ravi opened up his toolkit and set about his assigned task: making sure the force exerted by the clamps matched the force the ship’s computers thought they were applying. It took him almost an hour to get everything squared away. Job done, it was time to summon an elevator and return to the hubs.

Except that he didn’t. Moving across the shadowed part of the lifeboat’s hull, Ravi found an auxiliary airlock and let himself in. He opened the suit visor to save his air supply and breathed in the cold, thin atmosphere of the dormant vessel instead, floating through dully lit compartments on his way to the hold. Despite the warmth of his spacesuit, his teeth chattered with the chill. Puffs of white breath streamed before him as he went.

Opening the last hatch, he drifted into the unlit chasm of the lifeboat’s hold. The weak standby lighting that squeezed in behind him withered in the darkness. All he could make out was the night shape of an occasional cargo net, vague and indistinct.

Not that it mattered. The trojans, he had no doubt, could see perfectly well.

He reached into his toolkit and pulled one of them out. It nestled harmlessly in his hand. With a flick of the wrist, he sent it spinning into the gloom.

“Good luck,” he whispered. As the little ball vanished from sight, he was struck by a sharp pang of remorse. He almost floated after it in an attempt to get it back. But it was too late. If he tried to retrieve it, he’d never be able to catch it. The trojan’s mission had begun. It wouldn’t allow itself to be caught again until everything was over. He took a long, shuddering breath and closed the hatch. The transistor was well and truly flipped. In about three hours’ time, the lifeboat’s flight crew would start prepping her for launch, thickening the atmosphere, taking away the chill, and filling her hold to the brim with surplus soy from the starship’s hydroponics. And about seven hours after that, the boat’s newly calibrated clamps would spring open, and the vessel would be on her way.

Headed to Bohr. With a small, round stowaway.

Leaving the lifeboat, Ravi pulled himself around to the far side of her hull, dust-scarred and stained pink by thirteen decades of exposure to the void. He turned to face aft. Ahead of him, beyond the bulge of the lifeboat’s engines, Archimedes’ ice-encrusted spine stretched for more than ten kilometers, a spidery trellis against a backdrop of stars.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to go that far. He only had to make it a kilometer or so to the next set of pylons and ISV-3-LB-03 The Princess Kaguya, newly docked from Chandrasekhar, with the Spartans freeball team as its most prominent passengers. She’d also brought in a delivery of high-tolerance thruster linings and would be flying back out with a boatload of cabbages in addition to the players. But no one cared about that.

Ravi, nestled by now between the giant nozzles of James Clerk Maxwell’s thrusters, focused his gaze on the distant nose of The Princess Kaguya.

And jumped.