49.0

A gentle musical chiming floated through the brig, accompanied by a short message on the inside of Ravi’s eye.

The wheels were shutting down. The motors that drove their ceaseless rotations had been put into quiet slumber. Ravi found himself testing his weight against the deck, but everything felt exactly the same as before. The wheels didn’t—couldn’t—stop on a button. They would take some hours to come to a halt. And it would be several minutes before all but the most sensitive noticed anything at all. But whether you could feel it or not, physics and friction were doing their work. Every rotation of the wheel was taking fractionally longer than the one which preceded it. Eventually, they would stop turning altogether. The Captain would activate the drive. Or try to.

His cell door sprang open. A ShipSec officer stood on the other side of the threshold.

“Visitor,” he announced.

Sofia Ibori was already there when he arrived, her face composed and friendly, her uniform immaculate, her braided hair gleaming in the light. His escort retreated through the door, leaving the two of them alone.

He tried to ignore the sudden pitter-patter in his chest.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come see me.”

A small frown crossed Sofia’s features.

“Your friend, Vladimir, was extremely insistent. He rather gave the impression that you were, er, thinking of killing yourself. Said you were writing a note, on paper. And it might look bad if I didn’t at least try and see you.”

Ravi fought to keep his expression neutral. Vlad knew perfectly well that he couldn’t write on paper to save his life. Same way he knew that Ravi wouldn’t thank him for suggesting that Ravinder MacLeod was cracking under the strain.

He couldn’t decide whether to kill Ansimov or laugh out loud. Maybe both. Sofia was here, after all.

“What’s in the note, Ravi?” Sofia was still smiling, except it was no longer reaching her eyes. “What does it say about me?”

“What do you want it to say?”

“Nothing. That would be safest for all concerned.”

“For you, maybe.”

“You don’t have the family name to think about. It’s bad enough to be seen in this, this . . . place, never mind featuring in some sort of suicide note.”

“So, you don’t care if I commit suicide? So long as your name is kept out of it?”

“Of course I care. I just don’t want things to be even worse; that’s all. Let’s face it, if you die—which I hope you won’t—the rest of us have to go on living.”

“How very Second Gen of you. Super pragmatic.” Ravi was surprised at the bitterness in his voice.

“You’re not being fair, Rav. I’m asking you for a favor. I can’t believe you’d want to hurt me by writing some stupid note. That’s not who you are.”

“There is no note, Sofe. Vlad knew I wanted to see you, so I guess he just said whatever he thought would make you come.”

Sofia didn’t bother to hide her irritation.

“Do you have any idea how much hassle I’m going to get when the family finds out I’ve been here? What Jaden will say?”

Something twisted in his guts.

“Jaden will get over it,” he said tightly. “I’m glad you came.”

With a small sigh, Sofia leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table.

“Did you have anything in particular you wanted to talk about, or are we just hanging out? I don’t have a lot of time.”

His heart was thumping very fast now.

“There is something I’d like to talk about, actually.”

“Which is?”

“The bombs you and your BonVoy friends have planted in the engine rooms.”

Sofia just laughed. An explosive bark of disbelief.

“I was inside a dragon—a LOKI weapons system—when Bohr’s drive went down. The LOKIs saw everything. Even figured out that it must have been caused by a failure in a Q-series sub-coil.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“There’s only one sub-coil that could cause a failure like that. The one I told you about in the engine rooms.”

“Really?” Sofia continued to look mildly amused.

“There’s no point denying it, Sofe. There’s no guard here. No drone. No one can hear us.” The bitterness crept back into his voice. “Do you know how great it was to have you want something from me? The lengths I went to to get you a tour of the engine rooms? How good it felt to spend time with you?”

He had no idea how much he’d hate this. The look on her face was answer enough.

“I’ve been such a sarding idiot,” he said. “Of course you did. You knew exactly how I felt about you. You knew I’d do pretty much anything you asked. Archie’s hooks, Boz knew I’d do pretty much anything you asked. ‘Wrapped around your finger,’ she said. And when you pressed that finger against the warm vent in the engine rooms, you weren’t feeling the power of the drive, or its . . . its awesomeness, or the sheer beauty of it. All you heard was me telling you that if you blew out the sub-coil, the drive would be shut down for months.

“The BonVoys planted bombs in all three vents, triggered to go off when the drives shift to full power. That’s what happened to the Bohr, wasn’t it, when they panicked and tried to get away from the dragons.”

The face staring back at him was eerily calm.

“There are no bombs,” she said. “If there were, Eugene would have found them by now.”

Ravi could feel himself blinking furiously.

“But there’s something, isn’t there? The moment I told you about the sub-coil, you knew you’d found a way to keep us off of Destination World. So, what did you do?”

“I’m perfectly sure I didn’t do anything. And if you were half as sure as you pretend to be, it’d be me sitting in a cell instead of you.”

“Right, because every time a MacLeod points the finger at an officer, it’s the MacLeod who gets believed. Get real, Sofe. If I’d said anything like that to Vasconcelos, I’d be in even more trouble than I am already.”

“Poor thing.” Sofia threw him a sly smile. “Even if I admit everything to your face, no one will ever believe you.”

“No,” Ravi agreed. The truth of it gnawed at him: had gnawed at him for as long as he could remember. “And I guess you’re going to sit on your hands and let me get mulched.”

“It’s not what I want, Rav.”

“But you’re not going to stop it.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

Sofia said nothing, not quite meeting his eye. Maybe for the first time, the extent of his stupidity, the full, mind-blowing enormity of it, hit him like a meteoroid. Even if she’d never felt for him what he felt for her, he’d always comforted himself that she felt something. That he was something. That she cared about him at least a little.

And now that sorry, pathetic excuse of an illusion was slipping away; a loose torque wrench spinning into the black, glinting in the starlight for a few brief moments before vanishing.

He was a convenience, nothing more. A naïve, no-name boy from an unfashionable wheel with an idiotic crush on someone who’d been laughing at him the whole time. How ridiculous he must have looked to her, he realized, shambling about in his scuffed fatigues, without even enough water to keep himself clean. A MacLeod so stupid, he thought he could become an officer.

He was nothing more than a means to an end. Someone she could use. And if, while being used, he got used up, too bad. It’s not like he was anyone who mattered.

He gritted his teeth. Tried to hang on to some small scrap of dignity.

“If I’m going to get mulched, at least do me the respect of admitting what you and your BonVoy friends have done.”

Sofia leaned back in her seat, head cocked to one side. Ravi held his breath.

“Well, hypothetically of course, you know BonVoys: Destination World has to be saved from ruination and genocide, yadda yadda yadda. Demonstrations had failed. Politics had failed. This was the only way.”

“You need to tell me what they did.”

“Don’t be silly.” Sofia’s laughter danced across the room. “If the drives fail, the fleet’s not braking. Why would I get in the way of that?”

“Because the fleet is braking. Some of it, anyway. There are no BonVoys on Newton, Sofia. And trust me on this: there’s no way those guys are letting someone from the Bohr, never mind a BonVoy, anywhere near their engines.” He shook his head with conviction. “Regardless of what you do, ten thousand crewmen from Newton and seven thousand survivors of the Bohr are going to land on Destination World—maybe more if Newton takes on more people. Everything you don’t want to happen is going to happen anyway. Stopping Archie and Chandra from braking isn’t going to make an atom’s worth of difference.”

“It makes all the difference in the wheel,” Sofia said. Her eyes glinted with a barely suppressed passion.

Ravi tried to keep the puzzlement off his face. For a BonVoy, Destination World was doomed regardless of what happened to Archie and Chandra. So, why didn’t she give a cracked thruster about it?

“I know you believe in what you’re doing,” he persisted. “I can even respect it, sort of. But if those drives fail, you’ll be killing more than twenty thousand people for no good reason. And that’s not saving the planet. That’s just plain old murder.”

“Go sard yourself, Ravi.” The words were flat and without malice.

He sat back a moment, forced there by the strength of her feelings, the utter conviction that she was right. He could hear his father’s oft-repeated complaint ringing in his ears.

Sarding officers. Think the ship owes them a living.

“You’re not a BonVoy,” he said, suddenly sure.

Sofia shrugged her shoulders, the movement elegant as only she could make it.

“No, I’m not. I keep telling you that, and it never seems to get through to you, does it? I get where they’re coming from, and I couldn’t have done any of this without their help. Without Jaden’s help, to be precise. Jaden is a BonVoy to the core. But I was never a member. They bombed Haiphong Circular for starters, and I wanted no part of that.” A wry smile. “Too bad they found you where they did, Ravi, banged up at the bottom of some shaft, wheels away from home. What in Archie’s name were you doing there? There’s no way they’d have pinned it on you otherwise. ShipSec are so convinced you’re their guy, I don’t think they’re even looking for the real culprits.”

Ravi shrugged.

“It’s always easier to blame a MacLeod,” he said stolidly. “But now I’m guessing there’s more to your differences with the BonVoys than a disagreement over tactics.”

“BonVoys want to save Destination World. I want to save us: this new civilization we’ve built, up here, away from stars and planets and all the things that will tear us to pieces if we ever go back down.”

“And a civilization where you get to stay an officer.” Ravi’s voice was dangerously quiet. “Where being a navigator still means something.”

“And what’s wrong with that? The Iboris, the Strauss-Cohens, the Chen Lais—all of us—we have built something . . . incredible. A stable, safe society with no wars and no famines and no misery. Why would anyone want to give that up? You want to go down there with those . . . those throwback freaks on the Newton? You think that’s going to end well? Their grandchildren will give their motherboards for the chance to have come with us.”

“That’s not the Mission, and you know it. You love being an officer? Great. You love that your family is a big deal? Even better. For you. My ancestors didn’t sign up for this. We’re not going to be lorded over by a bunch of officers with rights and privileges and the best berths and the best opportunities, just so you can fly the ship until it breaks.”

“You still don’t get it, do you? The MacLeods are crew. You’re crew. And when thrust comes to full burn, crew always does what it’s told. Crew understands that it’s discipline that keeps everyone alive, discipline that keeps the ship on track. Discipline has kept us going for a hundred and thirty-two years, and it’ll keep us going forevermore. Officers order, crew obeys. If we overshoot the system and tell them the Mission has changed, the crew will accept it. Because that’s what crew does. That’s how it is, because that’s how it needs to be, and you wanting it to be different isn’t going to change a thing.”

“I wonder what your great-uncle would say about that. Or Vasconcelos.”

Sofia’s expression darkened.

“You won’t be telling them anything. They won’t believe a word you say.”

“And what have I got to lose? If I’m going to be mulched anyway, I might as well tell the truth. It may be too late when they do, but they’ll believe me in the end.”

“You think? Even if they do, they’ll never prove it, will they?” She leaned in to him then, her voice suddenly fierce. “And I could make life very difficult for your mother. I’m bound to know someone who knows her shift commander. Maybe suddenly, her work isn’t so good. Maybe she gets a demotion and can’t afford her quarters. Maybe . . . maybe she gets disciplined. Is that what you want?”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Try me.”

She sat there in a scuffed polymer chair that might as well have been a throne, radiating confidence. True officer confidence. The result of six generations of breeding. Steely and unbreakable.

Almost unbreakable.

Everyone, even an officer, has weaknesses. His family had traded on that simple fact for generations. A need for hard-to-get equipment, restricted information, even chocolate. That his own weakness was Sofia, he had already learned to his cost. But bitter though it was to face up to, he also knew hers.

“Is this what Jaden wants? You and he, flying together through the dark? Chief Navigator and Captain-to-be? Queen and king of the fleet?”

“Jaden’s got nothing to do with this,” she said stiffly. But she was lying. He could see the riptides of emotion roiling in her eyes. The need, the insecurity, jealousy.

“Sofe?” He said it so quietly, he could barely hear it himself. “Before you throw everyone’s life away for nothing, there’s something I need to show you.”

He transferred his video recording of Jaden Strauss-Cohen and Ksenia Graham at the movie theater. Sofia’s eyes burned as she saw the two of them intertwined, as she heard Jaden describe her as “clingy.” When it was over, she took a deep, stertorous breath.

“He’s not worth it,” Ravi said, as gently as he could. “He doesn’t love you. Never did, never will. This future you’ve planned for yourself? It’s not going to happen. You’ll be flying through the dark alone—or with a guy who’s two-timing you at every turn of the wheel.”

Sofia took another breath, even deeper than before. Tears streamed down her face. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

“Think about it, Sofia. He’s a BonVoy. He may not care about you, but he loves that planet. If people go down there, he’ll want to save as much of it as he can. If you went to Jaden right now and said, ‘Let’s go to the Bohr. She’s already adrift. We’ll round up everyone who agrees with us and head on over there. A civilization with no stars, no planets, bon-voyaging forever.’ Do you really think he’d go with you? Do you really think he’d actually, like, go?”

The silence stretched for an eternity. The tears in her eyes burned like suns.

“It’s not a bomb.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “They printed a new sub-coil. It looks exactly like the real thing on the scanners, but it’ll fail almost as soon as the drive reaches full power.”

“Thanks, Sofe.” He touched her lightly on the wrist, headed for the door that would take him back to his cell. The slowing wheel was having an effect. He was definitely lighter.

She managed a tight little smile.

“You know, when you tell Eugene this, I’ll deny it all. Everyone will think you planted that sub-coil yourself. They’ll mulch you anyway.”

There wasn’t the slightest hint of compassion, of regret, in her tone of voice. Sofia’s heart might be breaking over Jaden, but there’d never been room in it for anyone else, least of all him.

He couldn’t stop himself from lashing out.

“I think you’re forgetting something.”

“Am I?”

Ravi tapped his right eye, wallowed in a petty sense of triumph.

“I’m an engineer, Sofia. I come equipped with a recording function.”