For Sarah Jane Watt, who takes her coffee black

Contents

‘Come in,’ Truekner said.

The commander was sitting on his rack, back against the screened bulkhead and padded with a piece of nano-fluff that had to have been salvaged from another acceleration couch. Truekner was old – right at the limit of what most people tolerated before they went to rejuv. He had creases where his jaw met his neck, crow’s feet around his eyes even when he wasn’t smiling, and most of his hair was grey. He wore a flightsuit and his feet were bare, which struck Marca Nbaro as faintly embarrassing, and intimate, which she knew was ridiculous.

She stepped over the knee-knocker of the hatch. Truekner’s stateroom was big enough that it had an airtight hatch and separate interior compartments. It was formidably neat; there wasn’t even an abandoned T-shirt. On the main screen, there was a picture of a dog – a big dog – frolicking in an endless loop.

Nbaro cleared her throat. ‘Personnel reports and commendations,’ she said.

Truekner gave her a thin smile. ‘Perfect.’ But then he shrugged off whatever remark he’d been ready to make and sat up. ‘Grab a seat, Nbaro. Give me a quick walk through, so I can sign ’em off fast.’

It was seven ship-days since the largest space battle in human history. It was twenty-two hours since humans had first managed to communicate directly with the Starfish, the aliens who controlled the xenoglas trade – the first real contact in two hundred years.

And the skipper had pulled Nbaro back to the ship and required her to stay and finish the paperwork, which Nbaro thought was a funny phrase because none of it was on paper. But the Directorate of Human Corporations, a four-hundred-year-old trading combine that maintained a loose control of about half of Human Space, maintained ‘the Service’, and the Service had traditions that went back to wet navies, sailing ships, and … paper. She’d spent her life learning them on sims, and a year trying to make them work for real, and still the age of it all daunted her.

Truekner gave her a slightly cynical smile. ‘Yes, Nbaro, through war and plague and alien contact, we still need to file our reports and nominate our people for medals. And while I have you, did you post that material readiness survey I gave you two weeks ago?’

She had to think about it. The material readiness survey had been completed before the battle, and thus seemed to have been done in a different age, so long ago she could scarcely remember the tedium. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said at last. ‘Filed and approved by Morosini.’ Morosini was the ship’s AI, which manifested as a courtly but difficult man in the scarlet clothes of a bygone era.

He nodded. ‘Nice. Good. I missed that. OK, let’s see the reports.’

She’d posted the ‘material readiness survey’ – which was really a report of cleanliness and stock in the squadron spaces – just before the battle; or rather, between the first big fight and the second …

It was hard to keep track.

Time had dilated for everyone on board DHCS Athens . Their voyage had been dogged by violence almost from the first; indeed, one of Nbaro’s first memories aboard was the full alert that the Doje, Eli Sagoyewatha, had ordered when the Greatship New York had been reported destroyed – the first of the DHC’s huge trading ships ever to be destroyed. That had happened while they were in initial refuelling and workup, before they’d loaded cargo and launched. What had followed was sometimes hard to sequence: an attempt to get a nuke aboard; a second attempt, that had succeeded in getting boarders and hackers aboard; a complex plot to take or destroy the ship while corroding the command AI, Morosini; a simultaneous fight with two apparent PTX Q-ships in dock at Sahel, and then what was, in effect, a single space battle that lasted, in ship-time, for months – seconds of combat conducted by computers, interspersed with trade missions and thousands of hours of watching space for enemy signals. All culminating in the Battle of Trade Point, as everyone called it: a three- or even four-sided fight that the Athens had won decisively.

So far.

She pointed her tab at the skipper’s screens and thumbed her first display.

‘Petty Officer Tresa Indra. Star of Honour posthumous.’

Truekner read the display, nodding along, and saying aloud, ‘In the highest traditions of the Service …’ He made a face. ‘Service has given out sixteen Stars of Honour in three hundred years,’ he said. ‘How many have you got in that pile?’

She frowned. ‘Just Indra and Zeynep Suliemani, sir. Indra spotted the alien ship under fire, located it, and notified the ship. Without her we’d all be dead. Suliemani gave her life ejecting her crew when the PTX tried to ambush us.’

‘And Lance Ko from Flight Five, and Naisha Qaqqaq from Engineering – she might even live to receive hers. And you, Lieutenant. Yours went off after the boarding action at Sahel. There might be more – not for nothing does the Master call this “the ship of heroes”. Five Stars of Honour from one ship.’

Nbaro nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

He gave an odd roll of his head that was like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ combined into a single motion. ‘Well, let’s run it up the flagpole. I’m happy to do anything I can for Indra’s family, and for Suleimani’s. Bits of ribbon are free.’ He smiled. ‘And of course, the Star comes with a promotion and a pay bonus that any family might want.’

‘Promotion?’ she asked.

Truekner smiled. ‘You hadn’t worked that out?’ He shrugged. ‘And in Indra’s case, she’ll get a patrician’s cargo allotment, which will be worth a kingdom after this trip.’ The smile transformed into a grin. ‘I mean, if we make it home alive. We’re on even money in the senior officers’ mess.’

‘Even money?’ Nbaro asked. ‘I mean, who pays off in a bet like that?’

Truekner sighed. ‘Oh, Nbaro, we old people have our little jokes, and we just hope you young folks will play along.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Nbaro said.

She thumbed the next display item: Lieutenant Suleimani’s Star of Honour.

‘Nicely worded. Ever read Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about war in the Age of Chaos, Nbaro?’

‘Can’t say that I have, sir.’ She was slightly chagrined, as Age of Chaos literature was one of the very few things the Orphanage had provided.

‘Eh.’ He leaned back, all his smiles gone. ‘I think about Suliemani’s courage – punching her crew out, knowing she’d die alone. In hard vacuum. Owen had it right, and I’m a little sick of heroism this shift. Tab me the rest and I’ll read ’em when I’m … ready.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Got the personnel reports?’

‘Yes, sir. Here’s Eyre’s. Sir, technically he should receive “not observed” because …’ Nbaro waved a hand ineffectively.

‘Because he was a petty officer for most of the reporting period,’ the skipper said, ‘and was only promoted midshipper a month before we got to Trade Point.’ He made that funny yes/no motion with his head again. ‘They can come and court-martial me. We’ll write him an officer report so that the battle goes on his permanent record as an officer.’ He looked up.

‘Do you realise that those of us who were here will probably get favourable promotion tracks for the rest of our careers?’ He looked unimpressed with himself and his career; his smile was as close to cynical as she’d ever seen on him.

‘ “We few, we happy few”?’ Nbaro asked. Truekner liked allusions to ancient literature, and she did know some.

‘We band of sisters, brothers and ’gynes,’ Truekner said. ‘Yep, like that.’

‘If we make it home at all,’ she said.

‘Touché,’ Truekner said. ‘Did you write your own?’

Nbaro hesitated. ‘No, sir.’

He shook his head. ‘Go and write it. Now. Tell me what a glow-in-the-dark wonder you are. Seriously. I’m up to my arse in crap right now. Do that, and you can go back to chatting with Starfish.’

She had been on the team that had broken the code of the Starfish language. In a way. And the team leader …

She clamped down on that thought. ‘Any idea what’s up next, skipper?’

Truekner was already sitting back into his neurofoam cushions. ‘You have a closer relationship with Pisani and Morosini than I do,’ he said. ‘And if they whisper in your ear, Lieutenant , I’d appreciate a heads-up.’

He opened his tab and put a hologram in the air. Then he put on music: a wailing male voice with a guitar. She heard the word ‘Strange’. The singer sounded insane.

‘The Doors,’ Truekner said.

‘I’ll close them,’ she said, and backed out. Skipper is definitely in a mood.

‘It’s a band,’ he insisted as the hatchway closed.

‘Does your boss make you write your own personnel report?’ Marca asked Thea Drake, her room-mate and best friend. Thea was also back from the Trade Point asteroid. She, too, was doing ‘paperwork’.

‘Captain Hughes has us all write our own,’ Thea said. She was tall and blonde and pale, and pretty much the physical antithesis of Nbaro. She leaned over, her arm around her friend. ‘It’s not a punishment, you barbarous orphan. It’s a reward.’

Nbaro made a sound like a growl. ‘Mostly I’m just afraid that I’ll never, ever get back to Trade Point.’

‘I hear that, sister,’ Drake said. ‘Every half-hour is like a spike in my dreams.’

They’d had to come back; they needed everything from hot showers to fresh EVA suits and more oxygen bottles. The battle had almost totally destroyed the human side of the Trade Point station; now it was barely habitable and there were only four pressurised spaces left. The Athens had taken heavy damage in her first fight, more damage in her second fight, and had been down two reactors and a number of other critical systems while she was coaxed through the Battle of Trade Point, and Nbaro was convinced that only her immense size had kept her from catastrophic damage. A 30 mm depleted uranium slug from a PTX cruiser had to work very hard to find something critical in a ten-kilometre hull. The new aliens and their energy weapons were something else again.

She had these moments all too often, where some idle thought would provoke an almost tangible memory of the battle – one of the battles – and she’d find herself standing in a passageway, looking blank.

Like now. Except she was looking at the display of space in front of the bow, as shown on her cabin in-screen. It was a live video feed of the repair work to the station, forty thousand kilometres away. Due to the lack of ‘right-side-up’ in three-dimensional space, the repair crews and sleds around the trade station looked upside down from her perspective. Half of Engineering was out there, including her friend Naisha Qaqqaq, who was second in command of the station repair effort while the rest of Engineering was working on the damage to Athens .

Out there, doing things …

‘We need to trade our gold,’ Drake continued.

Nbaro leaned against the locker that held her very meagre wardrobe and managed a smile. ‘I think we can trust Dorcas to trade for us,’ she said.

Drake gave her that look : a mix of frustration and resolve that said her will was indomitable. ‘I want to be there to trade my gold,’ she said.

Nbaro straightened up. ‘Hey, me too—’

‘I want to tell my grandchildren that I went eye to eye with the Starfish and negotiated …’

Nbaro, who knew more than most humans about the anatomy of the deep hydrogen-ocean dwelling aliens, couldn’t help but laugh.

‘Fine!’ Drake spat. ‘Eye to tentacle receptor!’

‘I’m sure if Dorcas was here he’d insist they be called rhinophores, unless you mean the cer—’ She didn’t get the word cerata out completely before both of them were laughing. Nbaro was in love with Dorcas, or thought that the lust-tinged constant desire to see him might be love, but she also enjoyed mocking him, both in person and with Thea Drake.

When their laughter subsided, Nbaro made herself sit down, conjure her holoscreen, and begin inputting her own evaluation. After fifteen minutes, Thea put her arm around Nbaro’s neck, leaned in close like a lover, and said, ‘You suck at self-praise. Go and lie down. I’ve got this.’

‘It’s all there,’ Nbaro said, but she left the stateroom’s one tiny seat and climbed into her acceleration couch.

‘Yeah,’ Drake said. ‘I especially like the bullet point, “Served during Trade Point conflict, securing station from enemy boarders.” Very evocative.’ Drake snorted so hard that she had to wipe her nose.

Drake sat down and spoke quietly to Morosini – everyone’s secretary and translator – and then went back over her work with a light pen.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Hero with a capital H . Your only shortcoming is that you didn’t die. If you were dead, I’d say they’d make you Doje.’

Marca dropped down off her rack and looked at the evaluation on Morosini’s gleaming holo-display. The words PROMOTE IMMEDIATELY in capitals caught her eye, and then farther down the screen, Under direct enemy fire, rescued … ‘Hey! “Captured and extracted an enemy alien while under hostile fire” isn’t even true. I captured it after the firefight.’

Drake grinned. ‘The battle was still going on, right? Ships were still shooting at each other?’

‘Thousands of kilometres away, maybe …’ Nbaro shot back.

‘Perfect. And what was their target?’

‘Thea, I think you are stretching—’

‘Sweetie, this is how we get to be captains. Modesty is for civilians.’ Thea Drake, the scion of a hundred generations of patrician officers, leaned in and toggled the ‘send’ button on the holo-display before Nbaro could stop her.

Nbaro made herself pause, be calm, and smile. The Nbaros had as many generations of officers as the Drakes – but her parents had died when she was a girl, and hadn’t passed on the ruthless self-confidence that seemed to cling to Thea Drake like the finest glas armour.

But she knew that the other woman was right: modesty didn’t lead to promotion.

‘Listen, love,’ Thea said. ‘I’m sure when you were eating rust and rotten rat soup at your barbarous Orphanage, they told you all to be modest and keep your head down, but this is an evaluation that will, in time, be read by every commanding officer you serve under, and every officer who sits on your review boards.’

Nbaro nodded. ‘Truekner said that those of us who fought at Trade Point could probably coast on it for the rest of our careers,’ she said.

Thea grinned. ‘My point exactly. You need to ensure they can never forget what you did. Never. Ever.’

Nbaro shrugged. ‘It seems like an odd way to spend our time after being heroes – writing about it.’

Drake met her shrug and raised the ante with her own. ‘No matter what happens,’ she said, ‘all the documentation needs to be filed.’

Fifteen minutes later the final copy, signed and sealed digitally by Truekner, entered her personnel record with four of Drake’s flamboyant lines of praise underlined and the words ‘ready for immediate promotion’ added a second time, at the bottom.

Appended was a note that said ‘Lt Nbaro is released for spaceflight operations.’ She had a message on her tab from Qaqqaq asking her to review a sim on weld inspection, and a long list of stores she was to bring back. Typical.

Marca punched the air and let out a whoop. But it turned out that she had seven hours before she was due to take a flight to dock with the Trade Point asteroid, so she walked down to the aft wardroom, ate a very quick meal, fetched a cherry pie to trade for a helmet bag of cookies, and, when the cookies were secured, flew a mission in the sim for a ship’s pinnace. Then she reviewed Qaqqaq’s sim on weld inspection and took a nap. Sleep was almost as valuable as food. On waking, she moved briskly about the ship, gathering Qaqqaq’s list of necessities, most of which were spare parts for things Nbaro didn’t understand at all.

It was her third flight on the command deck of the pinnace, the smallest spaceship by Service definition, because it carried an engine capable of navigating between stars. In fact, the pinnaces were mostly engine; they could be crewed by as few as three people, or even just one in a crisis, and almost everything was automated. She had a cargo payload of sixty thousand litres of fresh water, fifty tonnes of carbon-fibre sheets and bags of fibre-crete, a sort of nano-powered epoxy that substituted for concrete in deep space construction. She was ‘under instruction’ with a lieutenant commander from Flight One, Fuju Han, a tall, thin, handsome man who looked ridiculously young and boyish for his rank, and who looked vaguely familiar; perhaps they had shared a martial arts class somewhere out in the dark. The only dark wrinkle was that Doros McDonald, a red-headed lieutenant from Flight One, had apparently not been chosen for a place on the pinnace, and there had been some cold looks.

Which Nbaro thought of as normal. Orphanage normal.

Han favoured her with a small smile. ‘I’m writing evals,’ he said. ‘You take her.’

The pinnace didn’t launch from the launch tube rails. Instead, she docked against the upper hull, which created a completely different launch sequence, new undocking procedures, and a whole series of possible errors she had to avoid. She was very cautious in her launch, sneaking the pinnace out of the clamps with micro-thrusts until she was sure that she wasn’t going to hit any antennas in her ascent from the dock.

Han glanced up, smiled, scanned the screens and went back to whatever he was doing on his tab.

She took that for approval, however mild, and allowed the onboard sub-AI to feed more power to a more aggressive flight path. In seconds they were accelerating at a smooth 1 g away from the Athens and aiming at the shining white pinpoint that the HUD identified as Trade Point. She checked the whole course against the sub-AI’s course from habit, put a warning on her tab for five minutes before turnover and breaking burn, and slid her command seat back from the instruments.

Han looked up. ‘Looking good,’ he said, somewhat automatically.

She smiled, hoping to get him to talk.

He went back to his tab.

She sighed and went to hers. People were shy around her since her first brush with shipboard fame, and it was only getting worse, and no amount of coaching from the socially talented Thea was going to save her. And regardless, she still had plenty of work to do. She missed Suliemani, and Truekner had given her Suleimani’s personnel to handle: fifteen spaceflight techs and as many fitters and data systems techs. All of the squadron personnel were divided up among the officers, but until recently Nbaro had been too junior, and now she discovered that taking endless onboard classes was not the greatest timewaster in the service.

She was sure that she could hear the skipper’s voice telling her that ‘taking care of your people is never a waste of time ’, and she winced at her own thoughts, but what she wanted more than anything was …

Was …

What in a hundred hells do I want?

She stared at space. All she had ever wanted, through nine hellish years in the State Orphanage, was to be a spacer. Now she had her dream, and it was her everyday life. It didn’t lack for excitement or fulfilment, and yet …

And yet …

I put so much into getting here , she thought. Now where do I go?

And part of that was about seeing Horatio Dorcas. Who wanted to marry her. Maybe.

And I definitely want him. But what happens then? Babies? A home? A life in politics? Dorcas won’t ship out again, so …

A life apart? With me out for five years a cruise, and him at home …?

And I’m just borrowing trouble, as Thea would no doubt tell me. We’re at least two years from home in the middle of a long shoot-out. Why worry now?

Because we’ve been apart three days and I fear he might have moved on? Really?

Because I’m an idiot.

And she was resolutely trying not to think of the neural lace she’d discovered she had. With all of the consequent doubts and paranoia of her Orphanage upbringing.

Morosini put that thing in me as soon as I came on board, damn it all. What does that mean? It means they never trusted me. It means they always knew I was a fake …

God, if Morosini knew all along … what the hell does that make me?

She slowed the racing spaceplane of her thoughts, lowered her eyes to her tab, and went to work on Spacer Patel and his poor exam scores. Exemplary performance reviews, excellent under pressure, bad test results.

Yeah, I think I know you. OK, make time to chat with Patel.

‘What was the alien like?’ Han asked.

She looked up. ‘Huh?’ she asked, or something equally un-intelligible. Then she managed a smile, her best new reaction that was almost natural. She knew she’d done some backsliding since the space battle. Do not snarl at your superiors, there’s a dear.

‘The Starfish …’

Han managed a smile of his own, which only served to make him seem younger. ‘I meant the other aliens. The bugs.’

‘Bugs?’ she asked. She hadn’t heard them called bugs.

‘Did it have … eyes?’ Han asked.

She thought back to her brief glance inside its faceplate – if the term ‘faceplate’ could be applied.

‘It had something,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I felt … something.’

‘I hear we’re going to interrogate it?’ Han said.

‘Above my pay grade, sir.’ She put a smile at the end, a carefully chosen reaction to show that, in this case, she was aware that it was above both of their pay grades. Another of Thea’s little tactics.

‘I hope they stick it to that thing.’ He nodded at her. ‘Pretty impressive, Lieutenant, got to say. I was … happy you were assigned to me this flight.’

She nodded. ‘I’m sure anyone would have done the same,’ she said, aware how banal and lame the comment sounded.

‘No way.’ He frowned. ‘I’d like to think I might have rescued the Marine, but damn, I’d just have shot the bug.’ He glanced at her. ‘My best friend was sent off into the Deep Black …’ He paused. ‘You know about the second pinnace?’

‘I know we used to have two,’ Nbaro said carefully. This was a matter of ship-wide speculation, which Han had to know.

‘Davies took number one, way back, right after Sahel.’ Han made a face. ‘I thought she’d be back in a week or two. Now I’m afraid the Bubbles got her.’ He looked at Nbaro. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about it.’

Nbaro hoped she did a better job of keeping a secret than Han. She murmured something diplomatic and went back to her tab.

‘What do you think the Master will do now?’ Han asked. Rather pointedly, he said, ‘Everyone says you have his ear.’

She wasn’t sure why this comment bothered her, as it was occasionally true. ‘I really don’t know, sir.’

‘Call me Fuju,’ Han said.

She smiled. ‘Call me Marca. I had very limited access to the Master. It’s just scuttlebutt that I know what’s going on.’

Han smiled, as if he knew a secret. ‘Sure,’ he said. But his smile seemed genuine, and he let her get back to work.

About forty minutes out from Trade Point, he cleared his throat. ‘I know you are an excellent pilot,’ he said, ‘but do you mind if I take the docking?’

‘Sir?’ she asked.

‘The dock is a shambles and there’s all kinds of stuff to hit, and the automated systems don’t have it all logged yet.’

‘Sure,’ she said.

‘You sit in the co-pilot’s seat and watch. There’s a trick to it.’

There definitely was a trick to it: a combination of a well-located automated camera that could be locked on to a docking target, and the understanding of how to guide that camera into the docking ring. It had been in the sim, but Han didn’t use the school solution, and her appreciation of him went up several notches. In effect, instead of ‘landing’, he backed in, never changing the ship’s orientation in order to keep the main engines on a deceleration burn. It was fancy and elegant and simple.

‘Nice,’ she said. And she meant it. His good piloting cut straight through her foul mood.

Han beamed.

People like to be complimented. Remember that when you talk to Patel.

The trade station had changed so much that she didn’t even know where to find the crew quarters. Changed wasn’t really fair; completely rebuilt was closer, and there were derricks and frames extending in three dimensions from the asteroid that was the basis for the station, and every EVA-qualified spacer who wasn’t repairing the Athens was here, working as fast as safety, fatigue and materials allowed.

Nbaro was staying; she moved her bag off the pinnace, waved farewell to the handsome Han and heard multiple dings as her tab accepted a dozen messages and comm requests. She wanted to open the PERSONAL from Dorcas, but the WORK SCHED said she had a fifteen-minute walk to an EVA, working on structural integrity with Qaqqaq.

‘Ma’am?’ someone commed.

She was standing in the airlock, frozen by the weight of message traffic. But she knew his voice immediately: Marine Wilson Akunje.

She turned, touched helmets. ‘Mister Akunje,’ she said with real pleasure.

‘Gunny thought that you, being an officer, would get lost. Sent me ta take you to your quarters, like. Ma’am.’ He smiled.

She grinned. ‘Gunny has me pegged. How’s he doing?’

‘Still clamshelled.’ Clamshell was an ancient term for a sailor bound for the brig, but the new medical units actually looked like giant clams and the term had migrated. Wilson smiled. ‘But the clamshell is here, aboard the station, and he’s givin’ orders like he ain’t got nothin’ else to think about, like.’ Akunje pushed a button on a lift – a brand-new, matt-black carbon-fibre lift.

‘Nothin’ outside is pressurised yet,’ he said. ‘Saves time.’

The lift slid to a stop and its double doors opened on another airlock. This one was active, and once the elevator was locked out, atmosphere began to push in. Her helmet read amber, then green, and Akunje winked at her.

‘You can pop your helmet, ma’am,’ he said.

‘But Gunny has you lot in full kit all duty, right?’

‘Yes’m.’ Akunje’s shrug could be read right through his EVA suit and battle armour.

She nodded. ‘Well, I’m just a squid,’ she said, and popped her visor. The air was good: cool, fresh, the sign of clean filters and brand-new components.

There was carpeting on the ‘floor’, and artificial gravity.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I love what you’ve done with the place.’ Last time she’d been aboard, there had been no carpeting and, in many places, no walls. The precise railgun holes in the passageway were gone, but the space still conjured a moment of terror; she’d stood helpless, right here, while an alien starship targeted this corridor. Only luck had kept her alive.

But she kept walking. In some strange way, it helped steady her. After all, she was genuinely the hero of the station fight. She really had been an effective officer. Whatever Morosini thought of her when she came aboard, she was clear about that.

Right? Truekner isn’t a game-player. He wouldn’t blow smoke …

They clomped down the passageway, passed through a common messing area where a dozen off-duty spacers and officers looked up, and people she knew waved and greeted her warmly; then they were in a berthing corridor that ran at what would have been, planet-side, a ridiculous angle, but artificial gravity made it possible to turn and walk ‘up’ as as easily as turning a corner.

‘B1601,’ Akunje said. ‘Enjoy, ma’am. Welcome back.’

She grinned. ‘Good to be back. I have an EVA in ten minutes.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, we’re understaffed. To say the least. I gotta run. Ciao !’

She tossed her bags into the tiny stateroom – it was basically a rack and a locker, more like a cylinder than a room – and dogged the hatch closed.

‘Wait up!’ she called. ‘I’m with Qaqqaq on structural integrity,’ she added.

‘I can get you there.’ Akunje consulted his tab, mounted on his left wrist. ‘Hakuna matata .’

She followed him back through messing, and into the same airlock and elevator, re-sealing her helmet as they moved along. This time, they went past the dock and up into the unfinished rigging above the docks – the mess of girders and cables she’d watched Han avoid in his landing.

There were at least ten spacers working here, and their speed was incredible; carbon-fibre panels were assembled so fast that she could watch an arm of the station grow as if it was some Earth-side plant in a speeded-up video.

Akunje’s voice spoke in her helmet, even as he turned back into the lift.

‘See you around, ma’am!’

Almost simultaneously, Nbaro heard Qaqqaq say, ‘See, the conquering hero comes!’ The shortest of the suited figures released a girder, flipped, and dived towards her with the grace of a porpoise or a seal. Qaqqaq’s landing was so perfect, so poised, that the two ended up helmet to helmet, almost in an embrace.

They touched helmets.

‘Now, if I say to go inside …’ Qaqqaq said, not entirely joking.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Nbaro agreed.

‘You’re on weld-inspection for a bit,’ Qaqqaq said, as if this was small talk. ‘I’ll check you out on construction later. I hear you’re staying around?’

‘A week at least,’ she said.

Qaqqaq kept her helmet touching Nbaro’s. ‘I know you have other stuff to do,’ she said. ‘But any waking minute you have spare, you’re a lowly construction tech. I’m desperate for bodies with EVA quals.’

‘You make it sound so appealing,’ Nbaro said, but in truth, she was delighted to be ‘outside’. It always got her: the reality of the universe around her. Days, even weeks could go by when she was in the ship and didn’t even think about …

… the expanse. Out here, far from the two stars, and on a station arm projecting into the void from an asteroid, she could look at infinity in every direction – up, down, everywhere. It just went on and on, being infinite everywhere .

Here in the Trade Point system, it was stranger than most: the lone asteroid that had clearly been moved to the balance point between two distant stars; the two asteroid belts – or rather, moon belts – around the stars in a complex and balanced chain of orbits.

It looked artificial. In fact, it looked more artificial to the naked eye than it did on the various charts and 3D representations.

And then beyond the bright points of the two stars, there was …

Space. The deep black absence of light was beautiful, and so was the vast brilliance of the infinite pinpoints of light created by all the stars. The moon belts gave the scene depth, and mystery, but the starfield gave it majesty, and the Horsehead Nebula on her Spinward horizon gave it awe.

‘Are you space-sick?’ Qaqqaq asked.

‘No, Naisha,’ Nbaro said. ‘I’m in awe of the universe.’

‘Fair,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘But functionally similar. Myself, I try not to look up.’

‘Wherever up is,’ Nbaro quipped. ‘Take me to my welds.’

There followed a brief refresher course in weld inspection. As Nbaro had just watched the vid, it felt mildly patronising, but she was experienced enough in space operations to know this was a vital job and needed her full attention, and that there was all too often a gap between vid instruction and ground reality.

The next six hours passed in a blur of welds and QR codes. Each weld she inspected received a code burned into the girder by her inspection laser, listing the date and time of inspection, and with her name.

She was very careful. But the welds were all good despite being done in haste; this was a veteran crew. She was floating, tethered, by a six-way junction weld when her tab chimed.

‘Shift’s done, Marca. You can come in now.’ Qaqqaq sounded amused.

Nbaro finished her inspection of the sixth weld, stamped it, tabbed the result into the ship’s memory, pulled herself back to the assembly and then jumped for a handhold and again for the lift platform, proud of her hard-won zero-g skills. When she’d first come to the Athens , even a jump up a lift-well had been a risk.

Qaqqaq and two other spacers held the lift for her and they filled it, the four of them pressed against one another for the ride down.

‘Airlock,’ the lift said into their helmets. They packed into the lock, and it cycled. Nbaro was surprised to see the others pop their visors as soon as the lights showed amber, and suspected familiarity bred contempt, even for hard vacuum.

‘When do we get to the gun turrets?’ a spacer asked. She was young, shaved nearly bald, and almost as short as Qaqqaq.

The engineering officer smiled. ‘Rosta, our protection is the Athens . If the Bubbles come back, we’re not going to fight them off with a couple of small railguns.’

The male spacer looked sour. ‘Understood, ma’am, but I’d feel better if we had guns.’

‘Nine more days at this rate and we’ll put in a railgun turret,’ Qaqqaq said. But she sounded … doubtful. As if she knew something.

When the two spacers turned into their berthing area, Nbaro glanced at Qaqqaq. ‘So we’re here at least nine more days?’

Qaqqaq shrugged. ‘I thought you’d tell me?’ she said. ‘I stink. I’d kill for a fewkin’ shower.’

Nbaro knew that the station had water reserve issues. Part of her cargo in the pinnace had been sixty thousand litres of fresh water. ‘Sonic?’

‘Sure, honey, but sonic never makes me feel clean.’ Qaqqaq stopped at a hatchway. ‘This is me.’

‘Good to be back.’

‘Good to have you. Get some sleep.’ It was a slightly pointed remark, and the Terran-born woman smirked as she waved.

Nbaro couldn’t see what all that was aimed at. But she gave Qaqqaq a wave and clomped up the corridor, through messing, and then up to her own tiny cylinder, where there was just room to get off her armour and her splendid, high-tech EVA suit, which was technically both the property of the Special Services and a piece of evidence in the web they were building on the conspiracy to take or destroy the ship. She was honest enough with herself to admit that she never planned to give it back.

She loved her EVA suit and her armour enough to spend fifteen minutes cleaning them; the suit had a self-renewing inner surface that claimed to be self-cleaning, but she’d noticed that in high perspiration areas it needed a little help. And the xenoglas armour was virtually indestructible, but she liked to wipe it until it shone.

She was sitting on her tiny rack, cleaning her gauntlets and thinking about food, when her tab chimed and so did her hatch

‘Nbaro, are you hiding?’ came a voice.

It was Dorcas.

Nbaro was naked; Dorcas was her fiancé; he was also her commanding officer on the away team for diplomatic interaction with the Starfish: all that went through her mind in a quarter of a second, and she simultaneously blushed deeply and put a palm firmly against the hatch.

‘I’ll be out in five minutes,’ she said.

‘I’ll be in the mess,’ Dorcas said. One of the best things about him was his essential straightforwardness; he didn’t get angry over little things. He wouldn’t mind being kept waiting; he’d just download some esoteric journal.

She pulled on a flightsuit and zipped it up, found soft boots and pulled them on, ran her fingers through her hair and opened her hatch. He wasn’t leaning there waiting for her; he was, as he’d said, sitting in the mess with his tab set to holo-project.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked.

‘ “Heating Freezes Electrons in Twisted Bilayer Graphene”,’ Dorcas answered.

‘Graphene?’ she asked, despite knowing that she didn’t need to understand anything he was reading.

‘Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms in which the atoms form a hexagonal lattice.’ He smiled.

‘Do they? Is that stuff real?’

‘Your carbon-fibre construction sheets are layers of graphenes with electron bonds that—’

She leaned over the table and kissed him.

He paused for a moment. ‘I believe you are trying to tell me that’s enough about graphenes.’

‘For the moment,’ she admitted. ‘Although the concept is interesting … Damn it! I haven’t seen you in days.’

Dorcas smiled. ‘As you see, I have not changed. Nor have you.’

‘How are the Starfish?’ she asked.

He made a face, licking the inside of his cheek with his tongue so that his cheek bulged out. She’d seen him do it before, and she still didn’t know exactly what it meant.

‘How are the Starfish?’ he asked her back. ‘If only I knew. I can only translate things that I essentially already understand. Then we search a three-dimensional logic grid for the chemical response, take a day to work it out, fail, succeed, and then we can work on the next component, only to arrive at “it’s cold”.’

‘But there’s a world of meaning in “it’s cold”,’ she said.

‘If only “it’s cold” was the meaning we’d picked up. I was making an example … You’re so literal.’

‘This from you?’ she asked.

He smiled in self-knowledge. ‘One of the great patrician families feared this contact so much that they were willing to engage in piracy and assassination to prevent it, and look – we’re not learning anything.’

She’d never heard him sounding bitter. It wasn’t in his approach.

‘You expected immediate success?’ she asked.

He shrugged.

‘Wow, I’m not the only one who’s an idiot,’ she said.

He looked up, then sat back, considering her. He nodded as if he’d come to a decision. ‘It’s good to have you back.’

She managed to say, ‘I missed you,’ and he grinned his natural, full-pleasure grin.

People like to be complimented and missed. Got it.

As if they’d mutually agreed that this ended round one, they both rose and went to the food dispensers. Everything was pre-packaged for free-fall eating, in bulbs: curries with rice, orzo pasta with ground meat, a spicy dish with eggplant for vegetarians. Marca took a bulb of each and extra rice, and made delighted sounds as she chewed through the curry.

‘It is the highest testament to the depraved quality of the food at your Orphanage that you vacuum up our zero-g fare with such enjoyment,’ he said.

She shrugged, because her mouth was full.

Naisha Qaqqaq appeared, her hair wrapped in a towel, grabbed food bulbs and sat with them, and then they were joined by several of her shipmates from her last tour at the station. Nbaro opened her helmet bag and shared the cookies, to everyone’s delight.

Nbaro’s eyes kept meeting Dorcas’s, and then they’d both look away, and finally Qaqqaq leaned over and murmured ‘get a room.’

Nbaro made a little moue of feigned surprise. And tried not to look at Dorcas. And that set the tone for the next days, because the two of them followed rules, and the rules said they couldn’t be together until he was no longer her commanding officer. Qaqqaq thought they were crazy, and said so. But Nbaro put her head down and worked, because that was how she dealt with most problems. And because her experiences at the Orphanage made her …

… hesitant.

It was remarkable, and a little sad, how quickly her tours of duty beyond the air/ammonia lock into the Starfish half of the station went from heart-pounding alien encounters to dull routine visits. It had been extensively rebuilt since the battle, with xenoglas partitions and a huge drain tank that allowed the human side to flush the ammonia out of the lock faster, and then refill it. The result was to make her feel a little as if she was in an aquarium, with the ammonia holding tank behind her, so that all four walls of the observation deck were xenoglas and it was always cold. She didn’t mind.

She’d sit watching the monitors, and a little tool that was meant to measure vibration in water for fishermen on Sahel. She’d epoxied it to the xenoglas partition that effortlessly restrained the high-pressure liquid ammonia atmosphere in which the Starfish lived, and it gave her a few seconds’ warning when a Starfish was coming to visit. For this innovation, she received the plaudits of the rest of the language team, but all it really served to do was to take the edge off each encounter. The little tool would flash its tiny red LED, and she’d look up to see the ammonia swirl with some sort of sediment that showed in the low lighting, and then, like the monsters they were, the Starfish would appear – usually just one, but sometimes two. They were star-shaped, like two Terran starfish joined at the centre, back-to-back, with five radial arms on each half. The arms were covered in short tentacles called ‘cerata’ by Dorcas, and various other names by the rest of the team. They waved and flowed in a very non-mammalian manner that left most observers queasy, and the ten arms could tie themselves in what appeared to be knots, so that two or three of them looked … very frightening. One of the Starfish had cerata that were much more elaborate – almost feathery – and they had dubbed it Feather Dancer . Dorcas thought it might be the most advanced in age, but they had no evidence one way or another. It never seemed to be alone.

Regardless, each watch, she’d sit waiting for a Starfish to appear, and if one did, she’d trigger preset greeting routines in their model starfish robot, and a greeting would be exchanged. And then the Starfish would have one of their robot sleds move a cargo into their trade airlock. On the advice of a Cargo officer, usually Don Jha from Large Cargo, she’d stack gold ingots in the DHC trade lock. Both airlocks had transparent hatches made of xenoglas, so that all parties could watch the exchange. The DHC representative would pile gold bars – sometimes refined aluminum or steel or copper, but mostly gold – until the operator felt the exchange was fair, and the lock door would be closed with some formality. Then the Starfish representative would either open their side and take the metal, or remove some of the xenoglas panels.

What was perhaps most surprising was that the exact amounts traded seemed to vary from day to day, and even from trade to trade, as if the apparent value of the glas fluctuated. Nbaro wanted to talk to Thea about it, and what that suggested about the Starfish as economists, but she was working too hard; two four-hour shifts at the trade locks, and then at least one four-hour shift on a construction team rebuilding the Trade Point station. Whole days passed when she only saw Dorcas for a moment; they never seemed to have a watch together, which she assumed was deliberate.

She ran all the language tests that she dared. Dorcas would send her word lists, each with a chemical compound as a modifier; the great breakthrough of the last four weeks had been the realisation that the Starfish communicated both by chemical pheromone analogue and by sound. Dorcas had a lab in the secure section of the station and he was always tinkering …

The language structure matched nothing human, but that didn’t surprise them. Dorcas was searching for verbs, for actions, and found a key word in move/swim . Progress was glacial, because the Starfish rarely wanted to talk. Don Jha was the first to get Feather Dancer to participate in a point and name session and got the all-important ‘I’ and ‘You’ described, and then something that they hoped was ‘here’ and ‘there’, but which might have been ‘airlock’ and ‘ammonia’.

‘We’d need fifty years,’ Nbaro said to Jha.

The Cargo officer smiled. ‘You know, this isn’t my job, but I love it. I never expected to do anything this … fun. It’s like a giant puzzle.’

Nbaro was glad someone enjoyed it. She was too impatient, and the Starfish all too often swam away as soon as the robot went beyond a simple greeting.

She did begin a notebook cataloguing any individual traits she could detect – size, colour, and so forth – only to have them proved unreliable when she saw one of the larger Starfish both shrink and change colour as another arrived.

But Jha liked the idea, and had others of his own. He spotted the damaged cerata on the Starfish they’d christened Bentnick and the frayed arm ends on another, as if it was old and worn. That one became Granny . Nbaro thought that she could tell the difference between younger and elder, and she suspected that the young were required to shrink in the presence of the old – but these were guesses.

Jha worked on correlations between prices paid and the Starfish who were present. It was not immediately fruitful, but it was part of the game, and the xenoglas continued to move across the airlock barrier and into the holds of the Athens .

In her other shifts, Nbaro learned to do a little welding, and how to build structures on the steel girders with epoxied carbon-fibre panels. It was fun to watch the station grow, and the evening of day four was punctuated by widespread celebrations as the new habitat area was opened to the crew, including a vast water recycler and forty showerheads.

‘Fuck, there’s going to be an orgy,’ Qaqqaq said, but in fact what happened was more like a warm water fight, followed by a meal.

Nbaro’s day five began well, as Gunny Drun was released from his medical shell and moved to a powered chair. He was groggy, but his sense of humour was still there, and he gave Nbaro a thumbs up as he rolled by.

She took a shower, because she could, and then went on to her duty at the trade locks.

Dorcas was there.

‘Hello,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘Hi,’ she said, suddenly a little shy.

He took both her hands and kissed her, and she responded …

‘Let’s not make love in a glass box,’ she said.

Dorcas was flushed and breathing hard, and she laughed because he was usually so controlled. She reached out, planning to at least kiss him again, when Feather Dancer’s elaborate fronds stirred the sediment under the lights and she realised that her little vibration monitor was flashing.

‘Damn,’ she said.

Dorcas snorted a laugh, and began to manipulate the robot starfish on the other side of the hatch.

‘Don’t we have a Cargo officer today?’ she asked.

Dorcas shook his head. ‘Today we trade for our own little cartel,’ he said. ‘I arranged it.’

‘Of course you did.’ Horatio Dorcas, in addition to having a neural lace and an incredibly high security clearance, was also from one of the richest patrician families in the whole of the Directorate of Human Corporations. He had access to power that Nbaro couldn’t even imagine. So he’d arranged that they could make private trades with the Starfish. It was absolutely legal; the DHC service was a commercial organisation, not a navy, and every spacer was allowed to trade. At least technically.

‘That’s our gold?’ she asked, looking at the grav sled with its cargo of dull yellow ingots.

‘And some copper,’ he said. ‘And with a little help from Thea, I have added a few dozen kilos of phosphor and silicon bronze, an alloy that I suspect will prove durable in liquid ammonia.’

‘Neat,’ Nbaro said. ‘No one’s tried that before?’

‘Everyone is incredibly secretive about trade here,’ he said. ‘I have access to most records, and even I know virtually nothing about what has been tried with the Starfish.’

‘Well, at least we have Feather Dancer,’ she said.

‘If it’s actually senior. For all I know, it’s thought to be from a lesser race and has no power to trade. I’m sure you’ve noted that it is never alone?’

‘You are full of good cheer,’ she quipped.

Feather Dancer was interacting with Dorcas’s robot while a larger Starfish observed from the shadows of their side of the air/ammonia lock, invisible except for the occasional flash of a tentacle in the murk of their gigantic bay. Nbaro flashed on a memory of being in that huge area with Dorcas, and the endless darkness that ate light.

Feather Dancer drifted forward towards the robot, and they exchanged greetings, and then Dorcas tried his new pheromone/audio phrase.

The Starfish answered. Nbaro saw the spike on the receptors as they took in the response’s chemical component, and then she saw the audio input register as a set of green waves on the monitor.

It was a mixture of ammonia perfumes and whale song. Dorcas glowed with satisfaction.

‘What’s it mean?’ she asked. Feather Dancer had been joined by the second Starfish, and their cargo robot rolled into their side of the lock and began to unload stacks of xenoglas plate.

‘Are you and Jha still keeping a descriptions book?’ Dorcas asked.

She nodded over her shoulder, watching the stack of xenoglas plates grow.

‘Can you make a note of the second Starfish, please? I mean, if you feel that …’

‘I think what I’m feeling right now is greed.’ Nbaro tore her eyes away from the stack of xenoglas.

‘Hmmm,’ Dorcas said.

‘Easy for you, rich boy,’ she snapped.

‘Hmmm?’ Dorcas was still studying the readouts on the monitor from the language bot they’d planted on the other side. ‘I think I’ve isolated “move/swim”,’ he said, breathless with excitement.

He hasn’t heard a word. Right.

Nbaro hadn’t done this before without someone directing her. But she had her own notions, and she watched the alien robot-forklift, which looked remarkably like a slightly rounder, duller-finished version of their own forklift, as it manoeuvred a stack of plates and placed them on the deck of the trade lock. A precise scale, installed hundreds of years before, measured the weight of the plates. Her tab deducted the weight of the light material the Starfish used between the plates.

A big parcel: about 160 kilos. Not by any means the largest offer, but the biggest in their five days of trading so far.

She looked at yesterday’s offers, both accepted and rejected, and deliberately lowballed the lowest accepted offer, putting down nine gold bars, and putting in four copper bars and one of the phosphor bronze bars as well.

‘That’s not enough,’ Dorcas said. ‘Put in at least another gold bar. What if they’re offended?’

She looked at him. ‘Can they be offended? Isn’t that a human concept?’

‘Touché, my young entrepreneur. Are you willing to risk it?’ he asked.

She added one of their hard-earned gold bars, and left the trade lock.

Now the Starfish pressed up against their glas wall, its suckers and cerata clutching at the smooth glas in a manner that was almost obscene. But it gave Nbaro a great view of the larger Starfish’s arm-ends: young; smooth. And its cerata were undamaged, but on one arm it had a remarkable double cerata – two arms on one trunk.

She noted this, took a photo, and labelled it Double .

While Nbaro was busy with her observations, the Starfish triggered the trade lock without releasing their own.

Nbaro looked at Dorcas.

‘It happens,’ he said. ‘I assume they want to examine the bronze.’

Sure enough Double swam into the trade lock, picked up the bronze bar in one of its manipulator cerata, and swam away with a curious undulation that only a creature with five sides could manage.

Suddenly there was a burst of audible whale song.

Dorcas was head-down over the language-bot monitor. ‘Feather Dancer is communicating with the robot,’ he said.

‘It’s as if they’ve just realised we can talk,’ she said. ‘It’s been a week!’

Dorcas nodded, intent on his monitor. He tapped something, and she knew him well enough to know that he was using his neural lace to interface directly.

But after a long minute, he looked up. ‘Imagine that every time you went to talk to a deaf friend, a light went on next to her head. How long would it take you to realise she was trying to use the light to communicate?’

‘About thirty seconds,’ Nbaro said.

Dorcas sighed. ‘It’s a hypothesis,’ he admitted. ‘Two minutes forty seconds and it is still communicating. Gods above, I have so many chemicals coming in, I can’t even trace their delivery order. This is the longest transmission ever recorded, in hundreds of years.’

‘Or in five days, depending on how you look at it,’ she said. ‘Where’s that thing gone with our bronze? Eh?’

‘Probably a lab,’ Dorcas said.

‘Right.’

‘Three minutes twenty and still singing,’ Dorcas said.

‘No doubt complaining about the temperature,’ Nbaro said.

Dorcas looked at her. ‘What?’

She shrugged. ‘I was really just talking shite.’ She pointed at the murky liquid ammonia. ‘But Feather Dancer is all in a tizzy. Look at the way its fronds are moving. Surely some of that 3D posturing is part of their language.’

‘Shit.’ Dorcas rarely swore, and when he did, it was effective. ‘Shit,’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t consider that placing the robot here would keep the speaker closer to us. We need to get a camera on that.’

Nbaro had a neural lace of her own; she just didn’t really know how to use it. But she did have a friend …

She accessed Morosini. The ship’s almost all-powerful AI had twinned part of himself into the station.

‘You called? ’

‘Can you get a camera on the Starfish? Without making it obvious?’

Morosini chuckled. ‘Yes. ’

‘Give me the feed?’

In real time, her inserts allowed her to overlay the camera images – almost 3D – and an additional instrument was clearly watching Feather Dancer in another spectrum. Infrared? she wondered.

‘Pass to Dorcas.’

‘You really need to learn to do this for yourself. ’

‘But you’re so good at it,’ she said, and Morosini was gone.

I didn’t ask for your neural lace, either , she thought. The neural lace made her uneasy every time she used it; it made her think dark thoughts about surveillance and the Orphanage.

Dorcas shook his head in obvious frustration. ‘I’m standing under a waterfall of fascinating data and I don’t understand anything ,’ he said.

Feather Dancer’s gesticulations were calming, and its song lowered in intensity.

‘What’s the propagation of sound in liquid ammonia like?’ Nbaro asked.

‘About sixteen hundred metres per second at this temperature and pressure,’ he said. ‘Why? Oh, right. Feather Dancer isn’t being private. It’s communicating to their whole station.’

‘And us.’

‘Morosini?’

‘How may I help you? ’

‘Is there anything happening in real space that might prompt … alarm? From the Starfish?’

‘No. ’

Nbaro had time to sigh and then Morosini said, ‘Yes. ’

The red lights flashed, and outside the trade lock, the scream of alarm sirens could be heard.

‘Battle stations,’ Nbaro said. Then she contacted Morosini. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Unknown spaceship has dropped into the system. It is moving very fast. The Athens has gone to full alert. ’

Nbaro looked at the readout that Morosini helpfully provided her. It was almost exactly like seeing a screen in Space Operations, her usual post when she wasn’t flying. The object’s velocity was terrible: above 0.6 c .

She read the tag on the UnID object twice before that registered.

Dorcas shook his head. ‘I can read most data,’ he said. ‘What am I seeing here?’

‘Are you looking at the main Space Ops board on your neural lace?’ Nbaro asked.

‘For all the good it’s doing me, yes,’ Dorcas said.

Nbaro nodded. Unless you made regular use of the 3D displays, they were very difficult to read, packed with information in the form of notes and colours and a vast array of symbols.

‘Every object that appears on the sensors and is tracked, every object that is known or presumed to be a ship or even an important object, is classified in two ways. Once by colour—’ She interrupted herself. ‘Look for the newest contact.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘If you were better at using your neural lace …’ He paused. ‘Whatever it may be, it is moving very fast indeed.’

She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, with something in the pit of her stomach rolling over. She started to speak and then hesitated.

Dorcas glanced at her. ‘Don’t stop now,’ he said. ‘Tell me how all this works. It can’t be more complicated than Greek or Hebrew.’

It was so rare for her to know more than Dorcas that she was tempted to lecture. She held herself back. ‘See the different colours? Red means hostile, green is neutral, and blue is friendly. This object is orange-brown, the colour for “unidentified”.’

‘It has a number.’

‘Sure.’ She was looking directly at the 3D board herself, marvelling at the direct interface with her neural lace. She wondered, idly, if she could share with Dorcas.

‘Anyway, every object has an alphanumeric tag,’ she said, and then, somewhat pedantically, ‘The format is usually letter, letter, number, number, number.’

‘Like your Flight Six shuttles. Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7.’

‘Exactly,’ she said, and then, relishing the moment, ‘You are really quite intelligent.’

Dorcas grunted.

‘Some objects get a special symbol,’ she said. ‘Look, the fast-mover just got tagged as a ship …’ She paused.The ID went red somewhere in her optic nerve and the UnID transformed into ‘PTX/Hostile’ with a ship symbol and a number. DD 3–9–7.

Heavy Cruiser, Juniper Class. We tangled with her and her escorts.

‘Hells,’ she said. ‘They’re already dead.’

The ship was going so fast that it couldn’t possibly have the fuel to slow down.

Dorcas grunted again, and then said, ‘普天下 Pǔ Tiān Xià. They tried to follow us.’ PTX – or, as it was actually known to its trillions of citizens, 普天下 Pǔ Tiān Xià – was from the other Human sphere, stretching away from Old Terra in its own direction, with its own traditions of space flight – and of government. Relations between the Directorate of Human Corporations and 普天下 Pǔ Tiān Xià had never devolved into open conflict, although it had come close several times, and in the last six months the Athens had had repeated clashes with a trio of PTX heavy cruisers. But the evidence of the PTX officer they’d caught and interrogated seemed to indicate that they were not facing the whole empire by any means, but rather a faction – much like the DHC faction that had been trying to plant a nuke on the ship.

‘Poor bastards,’ Dorcas said. ‘Dee Dee 3–9–7 is moving at almost 0.7 c . Then he said, ‘And accelerating.’

Nbaro couldn’t stop herself. ‘Delta Delta 3–9–7, please,’ she said.

‘Right,’ Dorcas said. ‘Alphanumeric, like the spaceframes.’

DD 3–9–7 was moving so fast that Nbaro could watch it move relative to the whole system. DD 3–9–7’s vector was a function of a missed jump, or a jump taken with too much mass or velocity already accrued, or perhaps just of damage. It was every spacer’s nightmare. A missed jump, and then a relativistic eternity.

‘Almost 0.7 c ,’ Dorcas added. ‘I’d fly my ship into a star. Much faster than starving. And think of what you might observe before you burned up …’

Nbaro found that her face was set and she had tears in her eyes, despite the fact that this was almost certainly the PTX faction who’d tried to kill their ship and had killed one of their stations.

After a long pause, Dorcas glanced at her. ‘You think Feather Dancer was alarmed by the PTX ship?’

She nodded.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Feather Dancer started communicating over three minutes before the PTX ship dropped in system and hit our detection limit,’ he said. ‘It might be coincidence.’

‘Or the Starfish might be able to detect incoming ships earlier than we can,’ she said.

Dorcas raised an eyebrow. ‘My professional reply would be that no one can detect an insertion before it occurs.’

‘True. No one can make xenoglas, either,’ Nbaro said in Thea’s most sarcastic tone.

An hour passed, as the hyper-velocity ship streaked across the system. It travelled from its insertion point to somewhere above the Trade Point station in the high ecliptic – roughly the distance from Old Terra to the gas giant Jupiter – in seventy-four minutes. It didn’t release anything: not torpedoes, nor beam weapons, nor escape pods.

Nbaro wanted to distract herself from the horrible human drama racing across the system; her mind kept throwing up rescue scenarios, and she was sure that every pilot was doing the same, but a speed of 0.6 c meant no one was able to catch them. They were already in a different time frame of reference.

‘If any of them are alive,’ Dorcas said. ‘We don’t even have a blue-shift transmission. Nothing. You’d think …’

Nbaro was staring at the trade lock, and the stacks of xenoglas plates. Thinking about the PTX ship and its doom. Her stomach felt heavy; her joy at trading with the Starfish was firmly quashed. ‘We’re fighting for that,’ she said. ‘For the glas.’

Dorcas smiled. ‘A gross oversimplification.’ He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps not.’

‘And we don’t know how they make it!’ she said.

He sat back, his full concentration on her. ‘Marca, we’re emerging from a scientific dark age. We barely struggled through, and no one has done serious science—’

‘Serious science? We have computers and AIs and spaceships …’

‘The technology of the twenty-third century! Nbaro, the article I was reading on graphenes was written in 2020! Listen to me. In the late twenty-first century, physics was on the edge of unifying all the forces, all the particles—’

‘We have the Tanaka drive, don’t we?’ she asked.

‘And we don’t really know why it works. In fact, it’s not too much less alien than xenoglas. That’s why the graphenes—’

‘You and your graphenes,’ she said.

‘There’s a very interesting ’gyne at New Beijing Orbital who thinks that xenoglas is a stack of silicon molecular sheets analogous to graphene, held in place by …’ He smiled. ‘By magic. Nothing should allow silicon to line up like that.’ He sent her tab an article; it pinged as it arrived. ‘Doctor Ho is probably the leading expert on glas in Human space.’

Nbaro read the abstract while following the PTX ship on her inserts. At one level, she hated the neural lace and what it did to her belief in herself and her friend Morosini. But at another level, the thing was … like a magic spell. For learning, for piloting …

They’re incredibly expensive. Why did Morosini put one in me?

‘Feather Dancer’s friend is coming back,’ Dorcas said. He went back to the trance that indicated he was using his neural lace, and Nbaro wandered up behind him and put a hand on his neck.

‘Battle stations alert is cancelled,’ she said softly.

The smaller Starfish swam into view, placed the bronze ingot precisely where it had been lifted from and then swam to one side. It extended some sort of applicator, and made a mark.

‘That has absolutely never happened before,’ Dorcas said.

In fact, the mark was very precise: five parallel lines.

And a line, pointing to the bronze ingot.

‘You’re a genius,’ Marca said.

‘I know,’ Dorcas said, modestly. ‘And look, we’re communicating.’

Nbaro felt inspired. It was the moment, the miracle of it all: the tension, the release; Dorcas, the aliens …

Nbaro opened one of the medical fridges they used to store the pheromonal analogue compounds, and took out the greeting chemical. When she opened her side of the trade lock, after the automated system emptied out the ammonia and flushed the system, she carried in five more bronze ingots and sprayed them lightly with the pheromonal analogue that went with the audible signal for ‘Greeting’, their first word.

‘Oh, my,’ Dorcas said. ‘You really are very bright.’

‘I’m told it’s my best feature.’ Nbaro dogged the trade lock closed and watched as it filled with cloudy, ice-cold liquid ammonia. She remained pressed to the glas as the larger Starfish swam in and appeared, after a pause, to embrace the ingots. The glas was cool under her fingers – cool and smooth. It should have been icy cold; in fact, her breath should have frozen to it.

‘More whale song,’ Dorcas reported unnecessarily. Pressed against the trade lock glas, she could feel it, even hear it. The larger one sang, a good twenty seconds, and Feather Dancer responded.

The hatch to the xenoglas unlocked; the trade was accepted.

Nbaro couldn’t stop herself from giving a soft whoop , and then their robots were emptying the trade lock on their side, and it was their turn. Nbaro put in fifteen gold bars, the rest of their reserve, as well as four copper ingots and five more of Dorcas’s bronze. She dusted the whole offering with the greeting pheromone analogue and shut the hatch, starting the trade process. ‘So Doctor Ho, at New Beijing, thinks xenoglas is a silicon version of graphene with the atoms connected by forces we don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Concise and accurate,’ Dorcas said. They were both watching the smaller Starfish as it swam-walked around the ingots. The Trade Point tradition was that each species took a turn to initiate, putting out items for trade, waiting for an offer.

‘Our consortium now owns one hundred and sixty kilos of xenoglas,’ she said.

‘Which may have almost any ascribed value by the time we get it home,’ Dorcas said. ‘Probably very high.’

‘Unless we’re killed,’ Marca said.

‘Right. But then we won’t care, will we?’

‘Excellent point.’

Dorcas began to kiss her where her shoulder met her neck. It was very pleasant and promised even better, and she was genuinely regretful when the dull metal forklift rolled into the alien side of the lock and began to place trays of glas.

‘Are we being filmed?’ she asked, suddenly pushing him away.

‘Absolutely not.’ Dorcas sounded offended. And then he stiffened. ‘Ah. Yes, we are.’ He looked at her. ‘Ah. Morosini turned them all back on when you asked.’

He really was easy to like. And then the Starfish caught her attention.

‘Damn,’ she said. ‘That looks like lots.’

‘We’re at about 240 kilos,’ Dorcas said.

‘And there’s more coming …’

‘Three hundred and forty-some kilos. It’s not quite record-breaking, but it’s a very good deal. Especially considering the relative value of the copper and bronze.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you want to send them back for more?’

She made a face. ‘I think … No.’ She raised a hand. ‘Here’s my logic. We engaged them emotionally, assuming we know they have emotions, by including the pheromone. But if we then ask for more, we look greedy and we forfeit the delicate compliment of the use of the greeting pheromone.’

‘A human might think that way,’ Dorcas said. ‘I admit I might think that way – a pleasant perfume to go with something I already want, and then a feeling of mortification when it’s clear I’m being gouged. But who knows?’ He spread his hands.

‘Worst case, it’s an excellent deal,’ she said.

‘Absolutely true,’ he agreed.

She released the lock on the far side to conclude the deal, and Feather Dancer waved all ten arms and seemed to gyrate.

‘Was that a whoop?’

‘Ask me in fifty years,’ Dorcas said. ‘And two long items of song, and the matching chem emissions. A red-letter day.’

‘Except for the PTX ship,’ Nbaro said.

They were both silent for a while.

‘Now what?’ she asked. ‘We’ve done our trades. We aren’t allowed to trade for other consortiums …’

‘We can trade for the ship, but that’s usually a Cargo officer’s job.’ Dorcas had his hands at her waist.

‘If you lick my ear again, there will be trouble.’

‘I am feeling amorous,’ he said. ‘I’m a simple creature. Success makes me amorous.’

‘Nothing about you is simple, mister. And nothing makes me feel less amorous, as you put it, than the opportunity to be a zoo exhibit for two aliens.’

Dorcas looked up. ‘I wasn’t proposing …’ he began, and blushed. He opened his mouth, but whatever he was going to say remained unsaid, because suddenly Feather Dancer was singing.

Dorcas froze.

‘I’m recording it,’ Nbaro said. ‘Morosini is, rather.’

Dorcas had the immobility that came over him when he was interacting via his neural lace.

Instead of asking him, she tried finding him in the digital soup of the interactive dataworld. It wasn’t hard; he glowed like a lamp.

He reached out and handed her a string of data: a comparison of the digital audio signal from the alien’s first song and this song – nearly identical for a given value.

Morosini accepted the data comparison and issued a red-alert warning.

In the dataworld, where everything happened with ridiculous speed, she understood without words that Dorcas and Morosini were assuming the Starfish did indeed have some early warning of ships dropping into real space, and as the song was the same …

‘RUN SILENT,’ came the command from the Master. ‘RED ALERT.’

On her Space Ops feed, Marca watched every human ship in the system run for cover: shuttles and ferries ran to dock or hide in the shadow of asteroids; the remaining frigate powered down; the two Gunslinger heavy fighters turned off their engines and active radar and ladar and went dark. Her squadron mate, Thor Storkel, did the same; Storkel even turned off his internals of 7–0–4, relying on suit air for his crew.

The whole human expedition went silent and cold in perhaps five seconds, the fruit of a long voyage under threat and repeated drills.

The station turned off virtually everything that could be turned off. Turbines went down; the constant whisper of the air conditioners stopped, and the silence was chilling. She could see information in the dataworld, and beyond it, another layer – the real. But she couldn’t hear anything but her own breathing, and Dorcas’s, and the beat of her heart in her ears, and beyond, the terrible, eerie counterpoint of the Starfish’s song.

Her heart was beating fast.

‘What’s happening?’ she said aloud, and it was ridiculously loud.

‘Crash-couch,’ Dorcas said, rolling into one. There were four, and Nbaro allowed herself to fall back on another. They were inside the rock of the asteroid – one of the best armoured places on the station, or in the whole system, for that matter.

Dorcas had rigged a countdown in their shared dataworld display; it was based on the lag between the first whale song and the first appearance of the runaway PTX ship. She watched the numerals tick down.

The restraints of her crash-couch settled automatically over her, bending or straightening her limbs and neck to optimal positions, and then tightening down. The datasphere was thinning; she guessed that the Athens was no longer transmitting, and thus Morosini wasn’t providing data updates. By comparison, his cousin, the station sub-AI, lacked both power and speed. She couldn’t refresh her Space Ops feed for ten real-time seconds, and then it refreshed sluggishly and without any new data from most of the outlying repeaters.

The station just didn’t have the command-and-control bandwidth. She wondered what the Starfish were doing. Feather Dancer and the smaller Starfish were gone.

Her mind was racing, and she had no data to feed it and the neural lace made her feel more ignorant. Not to mention the basic invasion of privacy. She hadn’t even thought that part through …

The counter was down to 10, 9 …

What the hell do I think is about to happen?

Dorcas said, ‘I love you.’

So he’s nervous, too.

She couldn’t turn her head and …

The counter went to zero. She breathed, wondering if the circumstances required her to tell Dorcas that she loved him, and her damn Space Ops frame still wouldn’t reset or refresh. It wasn’t a good day to have a neural lace.

She put together the words ‘I love you’ with a little vid of the Starfish experiencing the pheromones she’d sprayed on the bronze, and pushed it at him in the datasphere.

He laughed aloud. Very satisfying, really.

And then her Space Ops frame refreshed, apparently off a deployed beacon.

BOGEY.

Another ship, this one at almost 0.4 c , the fastest it could go and probably decelerate in-system. It was broadcasting a wavefront of messages, and its insertion point showed a glowing starburst of Cherenkov radiation.

‘Well, well,’ Dorcas said. ‘The Starfish have a way to see the ships as they come in, ahead of their light-speed wavefront. That’s not possible. But it’s obviously true.’

It was moving very fast, and Nbaro’s information was badly lagged; it came in high above the ecliptic and well out from the station, so there was a delay between the sensors detecting it and their own antennas. Dorcas entered into her own calculation and inserted an answer – about eight minutes.

She ran the calculations. ‘The Starfish knew eleven minutes before we did,’ she said. ‘Three minutes before our outermost sensor did. At least.’

Dorcas was glowing with calculations. ‘If I didn’t know it was impossible,’ he said, ‘I’d guess they had a form of FTL communication with an invisible sensor net three light minutes out from our own sensors and …’ He shrugged. ‘I think it’s a good time to say “I have no idea”.’

Nbaro had switched to a prediction plot on the bogey. It could be almost anything; if it was chasing the doomed PTX ship, it could even be one of theirs, except that their long-jump battlecruisers weren’t intended to come to Trade Point.

‘The new watch will be here in thirty minutes,’ Dorcas said. ‘Anything we should be cleaning up?’

Nbaro laughed. ‘Shall I mop the trade lock, sir?’ she asked sweetly.

The icon on her neural-laced digital model of a Space Ops repeater station turned bright red.

‘PTX heavy cruiser, Juniper class,’ she said. ‘Another one.’ Someone in Intel had a sensor picture and she saw it, fuzzy and dark, but it still had its long tail deployed from jump, and that confirmed its identity.

‘Unencrypted SOS,’ she said unnecessarily, reading the info off the same data that Dorcas could access. ‘She’s surrendering.’

‘She’s jumping into this system of her own free will and surrendering,’ Dorcas said. ‘That wasn’t anyone’s expected outcome.’

Suddenly, her data field was flooded with information. Morosini was back; the Athens was broadcasting again. All through the asteroid ring, ships moved; out in the open space nearer the station, shuttles and fighters lit their drives.

‘This is all on an eight-minute delay,’ she said. ‘Space Ops believes they’re seeing the cruiser taking in her tail. They’re predicting she’s going to flip and start decelerating.’

Dorcas was drawing lines in the air with his hands, as if he was some wizard from a holodrama.

‘Same insertion point, give or take a few thousand kilometres,’ he said. ‘Same point of origin – ninety per cent chance. Did they have a spat, our friends from the Eternal Empire?’

Nbaro was full of useless energy, her veins coursing with adrenaline she couldn’t use, her heart pumping more blood than she needed, her lungs drawing extra air to fight no battle.

‘You are agitated,’ Dorcas said.

‘My squadron is deploying and I’m sitting here.’

‘You can’t do everything. A moment before, you were making everyone in our little cartel a fortune. How much adventure do you require in a day, Ms Nbaro?’ Dorcas asked. ‘What if I can’t keep up?’

Marca grunted. Thea’s instructions would have her make a snappy remark, but Dorcas was Dorcas – her friend, and probably her lover. ‘I’m not good at sitting by and watching,’ she admitted.

‘I’d suggest that you avoid politics,’ Dorcas said. ‘Let’s start shutting down.’

‘The cruiser—’

‘The Athens is not really going to be threatened by a single PTX ship, no matter how well captained,’ Dorcas said. ‘In fact, I suspect that even now, some Flight One shuttles full of Marines are preparing to launch, and the Athens will no doubt stay hidden. It’s not a crisis.’

‘We’re two years away from home in an alien system, and we’re seven days from the biggest space battle in human history and … you think this isn’t a crisis?’

‘No,’ Dorcas said. Despite the pulsing red light of the general quarters alert, he began the process of leaving his acceleration couch. She considered the accuracy of his usual analysis and grunted again.

And then the little red light flashed, and she turned in time to see Feather Dancer re-emerge, alone, from the murk of the sea of ammonia in which the Starfish lived.

Feather Dancer went straight to the robot starfish and began what could only be described as a dance, along with a chemical fusillade.

But no sound.

‘What the …?’ she said, and told the couch to let her off. She did not enjoy the feeling of the flexible fibre needles withdrawing from her flesh any more than she enjoyed the insertion, but it happened, and experience had taught her that wriggling only made it worse, and eventually raised a rash.

‘Damnation!’ Dorcas said. ‘No audible component! Unprecedented!’

All ten Starfish arms waved, first in unison, and then in an incredible ten-beat rhythmic pattern.

‘Please tell me we are filming this,’ Nbaro asked Morosini.

‘Top priority ,’ Morosini responded.

She stood behind Dorcas, and she could see the symbols for the chemicals he was detecting.

‘If you have any insight, I’d be happy to hear it,’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ Nbaro said.

Finally, Feather Dancer stopped. It was still for a long moment, and then gave a five-armed shrug. It was so like a human shrug that Nbaro gasped.

‘Fire off the greeting,’ she said.

‘Without sound,’ Dorcas agreed. He looked blank; he wasn’t using the keyboard, but was accessing the robot via his lace, and she watched him in dataspace.

‘Why no sound?’ she asked.

‘I think Feather Dancer just told us something it doesn’t want the other Starfish to hear,’ Dorcas replied.

The robot starfish waved its arms, a poor parody of a real Starfish. And then the chemicals were released.

Feather Dancer turned, locked the suction cups of five arms on the xenoglas wall, and knocked with one lower arm.

Knock knock knock.

Nbaro felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

And then Feather Dancer turned and swam away.

‘What the fuck did we just see?’ she asked. ‘Is it trying to defect?’

The next three days passed in a wave of complex drudgery. The squadron’s command sub-AI demanded Nbaro’s personnel reports via niggling little messages that went right through her filters and into her neural lace at inopportune times; the work on the station was back-breaking and constant, and she didn’t draw another cargo watch with Dorcas. Every time she had a chance, she asked about Feather Dancer. But no one had seen the distinctive Starfish since their trade at the airlock.

The third day was enlivened by the arrival of a Flight Two shuttle – one of the senior officers’ ‘barges’ reconfigured as a cargo pallet with engines, incapable of atmospheric flight. It brought them pallets of new material to construct – so much material that it filled the new pressurised warehouse space that they’d just finished building.

Good planning there, Morosini.

The cargo included Thea Drake, who shot out of the command module as if she intended to conquer the station, not just work there. She touched her helmet to Nbaro’s and said, ‘Anything fun? How’s the sex?’

‘I did our trade,’ Nbaro said. ‘I got—’

‘You tabbed me about the trade. I mean Dorcas.’

‘No,’ Nbaro said.

‘Do you need lessons or something?’ Drake replied, and leapt away to land on the station’s airlock platform.

Boredom and grinding work with Thea around were much better than boredom and grinding work without her. Thea was standing endless cargo watches to learn the trade with the Starfish, and she ended up spending more time with Dorcas than Nbaro had, but watch rotation had them all on the same shifts, and they developed a routine that was almost … fun. With Naisha Qaqqaq, they had four for meals and occasional games, although Qaqqaq usually did a quick workout and went straight to bed. At Thea’s urging, Nbaro began to work out with Dorcas in the tiny fitness space, which was so intimate that …

There was some blushing. But Nbaro and Dorcas held to some sort of line, despite the constant teasing of their social peers that suggested that no one, from Qaqqaq to Gunny Drun, thought that they were celibate.

Nbaro found it all frustrating, and her answer to that frustration was to work harder. When she started to think too much about Dorcas, or certain aspects of Dorcas, she volunteered for yet more work, cataloguing and moving cargo coming from the Athens .

The cargo pallets contained some fascinating mechanisms, and four days after Thea’s arrival, Nbaro raised Qaqqaq on her private comms.

‘Are we building a shipyard?’ she asked. The new portion of the station seemed to have huge beams, heavy derricks and a big metal-forming shop, and Nbaro knew the look of the 3D printers that she’d just bolted down to a spin-capable outer hull. In fact, they were building a whole spin-ring to generate gravity. It was also quite big. For the first time, she was involved in sinking bolts into the asteroid itself, and building what could only be described as foundations for further construction.

Qaqqaq made a clicking sound with her tongue. But after a moment, she said, ‘Yes. I’m just guessing here, but I think the Master plans to build a new frigate.’

Every greatship carried two frigates. They weren’t really warships; they were more like giant Electromagnetic Counter-Measures (ECM) drones with heavy-duty engines, designed to mimic the Athens in combat. Both of theirs had been destroyed.

‘We carry a spare frigate?’ Nbaro asked.

Qaqqaq jumped over, clicked home against the metal girder where Nbaro was standing, and touched her helmet to Nbaro’s. ‘I’m pretty sure,’ she said in the utmost privacy. ‘And I know they’re breaking a bunch of new stuff out on the Hangar Deck of the Athens , so there’s no room over there.’ She smiled through their visors, and winked. ‘But this isn’t something to discuss. Do you know there’s a big argument on the Athens ?’

Nbaro leaned in slightly to keep their domed helmets together. ‘No,’ she said.

Qaqqaq’s eyes were bright under her visor. This close, the gold tint barely hid her.

‘Some of the command team want to run for home,’ she said. ‘Especially now we know where two of the PTX ships are.’

Nbaro initially thought, That’s what Aadavan wanted , followed almost immediately by the realisation that it made some sense.

‘Astrogation wants to continue on our course,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘My boss, Captain Dukas, also wants to. She says it’s our duty.’

Which also makes sense.

‘But the scuttlebutt is that Pisani wants to …’ Qaqqaq’s dark eyes locked on Nbaro’s. ‘Do you know anything? Pisani talks to you.’

‘Not lately,’ Nbaro said, slightly miffed. ‘Ask Dorcas. He knows everything.’

Qaqqaq’s eyes shifted briefly. She was actually showing fear.

‘What?’ Nbaro asked. ‘What’s the gossip?’

‘The cargo pilot says that Pisani wants to follow the aliens who jumped out. The bugs. The Bubbles, depending on who you are talking to.’

‘What?’ Nbaro asked.

Qaqqaq backed away and shook her head.

A sleep cycle and another work cycle later, and Nbaro was working against resistance bands while Dorcas, at her feet in the artificial gravity, was doing push-ups. He was literally between her legs …

She’d already used her growing neural-lace abilities to sweep for surveillance devices. The success of her sweep was not guaranteed, and she was all but certain that Morosini could overhear anything she heard or saw, which should have piqued her Orphanage paranoia but, so far, had not.

Because I trust the AI? Or because if he wants to watch me mate, he gets what he deserves?

Not the way to answer that one.

‘There’s a rumour that Pisani plans to follow the aliens,’ she said.

Dorcas’s body went up and down. ‘Really?’ he said. And then, ‘Yes, I’m fairly certain he does.’

‘Follow the aliens into unknown space?’ she asked. ‘With the only cargo of glas in four years? For what? Didn’t someone tell me that we just barely won the fight here?’

‘We won handily, after a tipping point was reached—’

‘Spare me,’ Nbaro snapped.

Sweat flowed. Her arms ached.

He rolled over and she shuffled back against the bulkhead to make room. She looked away.

‘The Master has every right to decide on the course his ship takes, advised by Morosini and his officers,’ Dorcas said.

‘Thanks, dear, I had that lesson in DHC Law,’ she said with bite.

Dorcas was a head taller than her, standing. His presence was almost overpowering, and she was watching him devour her with his eyes.

‘We’re funny,’ she said.

‘I agree,’ Dorcas said.

‘Everyone on this station assumes we’re shagging the moment we come in here.’

Dorcas licked his lips. ‘I am painfully aware of this fact,’ he said.

Fuck it , she thought, and leaned forward.

His lips locked on hers, and one of his hands found a breast. It was a very, very good kiss, and it went on longer than she’d expected.

He broke off and smiled ruefully.

‘I think we could just limit ourselves to that …’ she said.

He half turned away, hiding his body’s reaction, and he giggled, a sound he seldom made. ‘I’m sweaty, I smell bad, it’s hot in here and the air stinks, and this is not what I want for our … consummation.’

‘Good God,’ she said. ‘Consummation? I will marry you just for your words, good sir.’ Very deliberately, she leaned forward, brushed her lips hard against his, ran her tongue along his upper lip, and then turned and popped the hatch before anything else could happen.

Dorcas laughed. ‘I cannot wait for my next workout.’ As the hatch was open, most of the tiny habitable portion of the station heard him.

‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘About Pisani?’

He looked away. ‘Tell you tomorrow,’ he said.

Their attempts at secrecy were wasted, because by the time they were pulling bulbs of curry the next day after their working shifts, everyone on their rotation was talking about the three possible paths.

‘It’s obvious that we need to get home in the fastest possible way,’ Commander Jha said. He was – at least technically – Drake’s boss, and he was well thought of in Cargo. He had advanced degrees in economics, and he spent most of the meal laying out the cost of delaying their shipment of xenoglas to New London, in both financial and political terms.

Dorcas sat back and listened, and Nbaro suspected that his stillness bespoke disagreement.

‘We can’t afford risk at this point,’ Jha said.

The mess was egalitarian; by custom, people who dined together could, up to a point, ignore rank. So Wilson Akunje waited until the commander was finished and shook his head.

‘With respect, sir,’ he said. ‘Seems like bad tactics, going back the way we came.

Jha glanced over at him. ‘Why bad tactics?’

‘Closer to PTX space. Right past places where we know they have agents in place. If we’re pursued, we’ll go right into the teeth of our pursuers. Just saying … we’re trained to never go back on the same trail we go out.’ Akunje smiled broadly. ‘Maybe that’s just Marine thinking.’

Qaqqaq moved her head as if she meant to speak, but then looked over at her engineering personnel and shook her head.

Jha nodded slowly, eyes slightly narrowed. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way,’ he admitted, and Nbaro liked him better for that. ‘But I’m not sure that those factors can ever be balanced – the unknown versus the unknown.’

Akunje smiled his big smile again.

‘I’m not a Marine, but I’ve done some hunting,’ Jha said. ‘Surely our ongoing course is the most predictable route? Why would they expect us to turn back?’

Akunje nodded, acknowledging his point.

A junior spacer from Engineering, Ramirez, shook her head. ‘I hear the Master wants to jump off into the Deep Black,’ she said. ‘And that’s just crazy.’

Jha glanced at her and smiled. ‘I think that’s just a rumour,’ he said with smooth confidence.

Dorcas wriggled.

‘Our cargo is too precious to risk,’ Jha said, and that closed the conversation.

Out in the system, the second PTX starship struggled to decelerate, her drives showing real signs of damage: frequency variations that spoke of desperate patches and too much power for too long.

She noted that days had been added to her rota on the station; the extended assignment showed up on her tab with a note from Truekner that said simply ‘not pleased’. That made her stomach churn. But she was very busy indeed.

From the station, in between watches and work shifts, Nbaro watched the dark green arrowhead on the Space Ops repeater, and watched the long, apparently slow curves as two big cargo shuttles and the pinnace reached out towards the distant ship and struggled to match velocities. Aside from station bridge watch-standers, she and Dorcas – with their neural laces and access to Morosini – were probably the only people aboard who could see the progress of the chase, and see how very close the outcome would be. She could only guess at the level of drama and the risk involved.

She was doing push-ups against the floor in a little over 1 g , and Dorcas was finished, wiping himself off with his T-shirt.

‘We’re cutting water rations tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It’ll get even worse in here.’

‘That’s because most of our heavy lifters are chasing the PTX ship,’ she said. ‘I guess we’ll have to wait for a big shipment.’

‘We’re going to cut food, too. Not hard, but people are going to notice it. Tomorrow’s shipments are cargo for trade and a lot of building material.’ Dorcas made a face. ‘Morosini feels that we can manage for a few more days while he gets his little shipyard built.’

She rolled over. ‘Why does Morosini like you better than me?’

He wasn’t looking at her. ‘I was asking some related questions,’ he said, a little distantly. ‘Are you planning on making a dozen more desirable postures first, or do I get to kiss you now?’

She rolled to her feet. ‘You know, you’re not really my commanding officer here,’ she said.

‘I really am.’ He wasn’t meeting her eye, and suddenly she realised that he was very serious.

She stopped. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that there’s a lot happening,’ he said. ‘And ultimately …’

‘Ultimately?’ she asked. She didn’t have seductive in her. She wasn’t trying to vamp him. She just leaned against the other bulkhead and crossed her arms.

‘Ultimately I’m in command here,’ he said.

She swallowed. ‘But Commander Jha …’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Commander Jha, as a Cargo officer, can command this station, but ultimately—’

‘You keep using that word, and I know you, and words. Does Jha know he’s not in command?’

Dorcas gave a slightly bitter, fairly hesitant smile. She hadn’t seen him like this in a while. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Aha,’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I think this is exactly why I’m not supposed to be in love with someone to whom I may have to give orders.’

‘Aha,’ she said again. ‘But you are, and here we are, and I’m not exactly a blabbermouth. So give.’

He still hesitated.

She considered drama but, like seduction, it wasn’t her way. So she went for analysis instead. ‘Pisani has taken a big risk with the pinnace and the cargo boats, and if the PTX drives keep fucking up, we’re going to lose them all,’ she guessed.

‘You are so very intelligent,’ he said.

‘If this is supposed to be a secret, someone should keep it off the Space Ops repeater boards.’

‘I don’t think most people bother with the maths,’ Dorcas replied. ‘But every time those drives fluctuate, the PTX ship accelerates briefly. And our ships need to make that rendezvous or no one out there gets home. We’ve got the repair kits. And the fuel.’

‘I guessed that,’ she said.

‘But the point of no return …’

She nodded. ‘Is close?’

‘Nine hours ago. The Master ordered them to keep going. It’s done. Nbaro, he’s determined to pull this off. It’s part of his strategy …’

‘They’re past the point of no return?’ she asked.

‘If they don’t catch the PTX ship, they’re lost.’ Dorcas sounded strained. But his head was still turned away.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why take that risk?’ But in her heart, she knew the answer, because she still looked from time to time at the other ship: the Flying Dutchman that was headed out into the universe at 0.7 c . Because there were probably hundreds, even a thousand spacers aboard that ship, and whatever disagreement the DHC and PTX were having, out here, at the very edge of known space, humanity seemed a very strong bond indeed.

‘What’s she called?’ Nbaro asked.

Dorcas turned. ‘She’s called 偷天換日 Tou Tian Huan Ri ,’ he said in his apparently excellent Mandarin. ‘The Stealthy Change .’

‘That’s … quite a name.’

‘Bit of a giveaway, if you ask me.’ Dorcas looked at her, and smiled. ‘A lot of people are deeply angry at Pisani over this, and I thought you might be one of them.’

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘No one should die out here.’

‘Even after we shot each other up?’ he asked.

‘Which side are you on?’ She wasn’t used to him being so reticent. Or rather, he was always reticent, but she’d grown used to something more from him and this was like a relapse into an older and more correct, more withdrawn Dorcas.

She was tempted to press up against him and kiss him to break him loose of whatever he was worrying about, but …

Not seduction. Not even for that.

But something was definitely wrong, and it was more than Pisani’s risk to save the Stealthy Change . Based on her very limited experience of relationships, it was something between them.

They left the workout box without so much as a kiss, and Nbaro buried herself in her fitness evaluations. And after that she had a four-hour rotation outside, working on what every spacer now openly called the dockyard.

Her officer’s rank was of no value out there because she had so few work party qualifications, and she wasn’t an engineer, so mostly she welded or inspected welds, and sometimes she joined the very junior spacers in just … pushing things. Moving mass. Otherwise, she was learning avionics at Qaqqaq’s command, but today’s work merely required her to guide a remarkably low-tech electric drill as it bored into the nickel- and iron-rich rock of the asteroid, pausing from time to time to cool the friction-heated bit and oil it. It was dull, repetitive, and demanded very little of her attention, leaving her far too much time to think about Dorcas, about Morosini; about the doomed PTX ship flying on at 0.7 c and the one that she hoped Pisani was going to rescue. She wondered how many of her squadron mates were strung out across the system as refuelling birds, trying to get the heavy shuttles all the way out …

And she thought about Sarah. Sarah, who had joined her in revolt, back at the Orphanage. Sarah, who’d paid the price, sold to a brothel. Sarah, who had found her a hacker to alter her record and get her aboard. I wouldn’t be here without Sarah. And I flew off and left her to it.

Not very noble.

She usually locked all these thoughts away from herself, compartmented them so that she could … live. She wondered if allowing herself to … love … Dorcas was letting the demons free.

Somewhere in there, her attention slipped, and suddenly she realised that the drill had stopped. She worked it free …

I’m an idiot.

The bit was very hot, and vacuum wasn’t a good place to cool it. And to her eye, it looked very slightly deformed.

An idiot.

However, she did the right thing: found the spares and popped the hot bit out of the drill. But it really was hot; the palm sensor in her hand-armour reacted, and the big tungsten bit shot away in near zero g , struck the shoulder of her EVA suit and bounced away into the rubble-strewn surface of the asteroid. By good luck, it stuck in the dust and didn’t bounce back into space.

Very carefully, she put the new bit into the drill, remounted it, and put it back to drilling in its laser-registered hole. Then, after checking her tether, she released herself from the asteroid and moved cautiously along the surface on all fours. She could see the bit gleaming against the charcoal-grey dust, and she got a hand on it as she grabbed at a larger rock for support.

The rock moved. Dust rose, disturbed in the micro-gravity. She wondered idly how long it would take to settle again. A century?

There was something under the rock – an organic shape that had no business being in space. A snake . She flinched and immediately felt foolish.

She got a new handhold, and checked her tether automatically, and scooped the drill bit into a pouch at her waist.

The snake wasn’t moving. That perception had been an artifact of her own weight shifting the rock. It was just a twist of something half-buried in the dust and rock …

She blinked. ‘Morosini? Please record.’

‘Recording. You are aware that there are automated functions and control keys and breathing patterns … ’

She reached down and, with all the delicacy she could muster with her armoured hand, plucked the twist of material from the dust.

She completed her work, handed the drill over to another spacer, and found that almost everyone in the mess was glued to vid or holo as the Athens vehicles raced to catch the slower of the two fast-moving PTX ships.

She tabbed and marked the damaged bit and tottered off to her rack, painfully aware that Dorcas was on another watch, the little twist of material forgotten.

She was in the middle of her sleep cycle when Qaqqaq woke her via her tab. ‘You’ll want to see this,’ she said.

After a glance at her comlog, she brought up her Space Ops repeater and watched it on the back of her eyelids through the neural lace. There was a seven-hour delay now on anything coming from the Stealthy Change , which gave her an odd feeling she’d had back aboard the Athens , when she watched events that she knew had already played out. It was like watching a sporting event when the game was already decided.

Somewhere out in space, millions of kilometres away, the master of the Stealthy Change and the trio of craft from the Athens trying to catch her had thrown the dice. They were close: all in comms, probably near real-time.

She lay in her crash-couch and watched the pinnace go to its maximum acceleration, and then exceed it. That would be Fuju Han, out there, going for it, risking his engines and his life.

I hate watching. I want to be there.

Han was an excellent pilot; she felt a strange resentment because she hadn’t really liked him, and he’d impressed the crap out of her with his docking manoeuvre, and she’d felt a little …

The Space Ops repeater showed the Stealthy Change making a successful deceleration.

The two trailing shuttles were losing ground to the pinnace, and the PTX ship was still pulling away. Not by much.

The Stealthy Change ’s drive vibrated. It was bad enough that the variation could be detected at a hundred million kilometres.

She wanted to turn it off, or close her eyes.

‘Are you watching this?’ Dorcas asked on the datalink.

‘You know it,’ she replied.

‘I wish I could hold your hand,’ Dorcas added.

It felt selfish to think it, but that one comment made her feel better.

On the repeater, the Stealthy Change seemed to wobble and flicker.

The pinnace …

… gained. It gained. She mentally ordered the screen to expand, and she ran a probably inaccurate mensuration and guessed at the distance between them and the probable run time.

The two ships were close, and the PTX ship was decelerating. It was also wobbling. Even at this incredible range, the sensors tracking it were showing some fluctuation, as if it was no longer moving in a straight line.

‘It’s going to explode,’ she said aloud to her silent cabin.

Nbaro opened her eyes, blinking away tears and the awful reality, and thinking of Han and all the spacers …

‘ALLLLLLLL RIGHT,’ Dorcas sent through the datalink, with an image of a crowd applauding.

She blinked back into the Space Ops board.

The two dots had merged.

‘He’s going to try and dock,’ Dorcas said.

‘Morosini? Can I have the comms?’

Immediately she had a buzzing in her ears, and a low drone.

‘Roger, Tou Tian Huan Ri , I am matching flight path and I have your automated landing sequence. Stand by for docking.’ It was Han, and he sounded glacial.

Someone – their equivalent of Lioness? – spoke in Mandarin.

Han’s comms beeped and he responded – in Mandarin.

‘They’ve cut their engines,’ Dorcas said hopefully.

Time passed like a spoon passing through jelly. There was no change on the repeaters, and nothing but silence on the comms …

Han’s breaking thrusters at close range. The sound came through the comms link as a rapid pulsing, like machine gunfire.

RAT tatatatatatat.

Brak.

Brak ratatat.

BAM!

‘Docked. Green and green.’

Nbaro could hear the cheers throughout the hab module, and she could feel them through the walls.

She was breathing hard, soaked in sweat, and the showers were turned off.

She was grinning from ear to ear.

Way to go, Han.

Argonauts. A ship of heroes.

Nbaro’s alarm woke her from a deep sleep, and she clawed her way into a dirty flightsuit and her EVA rig on automatic before she realised that it was just an alarm, not a crisis. After a bulb of coffee and a tube of sweet sticky rice, she was ready to face another day assembling the new docking arm. Dorcas managed to pass her in the cargo bay access tube. He grabbed her hand and brushed her lips with his, and she felt immediately better about every aspect of life, which she found funny and faintly ridiculous.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Later,’ he apologised, and moved away.

‘I have something to show you,’ she said to his back.

Qaqqaq held a morning briefing for all the assembly crews in the pressurised hangar bay. Water was being rationed again; everyone smelled strongly of human being, and the acrid scent of bad coffee lay over all of them, along with the smell of drying epoxy and the artificial lubricant scent of spacecraft.

‘… probably our last day on the docking arm,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘You folks have done first-rate work, and I appreciate it and so does the Athens . I’m sure everyone saw our pinnace rendezvous with the PTX ship last night. This morning, about 0400, both of the shuttles docked and started pumping them fuel, and my boss, Captain Dukas, went aboard with every spare part we could think to send.’

Nbaro thought that PTX engineering was renowned for its quality and inventiveness and wasn’t sure what Dukas had to offer, nor could she imagine any parts from the Athens working on PTX engines, but … she kept her mouth shut.

‘The shuttles will start back in two days. They’re going to scoop one of the gas giants on the way, but in a week max, we’ll have water and more food and all the things that make life worth living.’ She smiled to indicate that that had been intended as a joke.

Most of the spacers managed a smile.

‘OK, team, suit up. Today, I’ll be leaving acting Ensign Hauser in charge of the docking arm, and I’ll be taking all the team Charlie and Delta folks to start work assembling the frigate.’

Nbaro grinned at Hauser’s faceplate. She didn’t know them well, but the long-limbed ’gyne from one of the New London Orbitals had helped her with her two midshipper promotees in what seemed like the ancient days off Far Point, and Nbaro reckoned them a friend.

The young ’gyne managed to look both confused and humble even in a vac suit, but the midshippers were all rising to various challenges, and more than twenty of them had been promoted to ensign in the aftermath of the Battle of Trade Point.

But while she smiled at Hauser, Nbaro realised that Qaqqaq meant her to lead the team assembling the frigate. That meant she had a lot of responsibility in departments in which she had no training whatsoever, and after she got back into her EVA suit, she followed a dozen other spacers of every conceivable rank down a second access tube and along the docking arm that was, itself, still under construction. It was cramped, and there was the smell of burnt metal and welding, and it was very cold. Only two layers of specially treated plastics stood between them and the airless void, and she already knew better than to allow any part of her to rest against the plastic wall.

Qaqqaq was crouched in the very narrow space at the end. Above her, upside down in zero g , two spacers were gliding a carbon-fibre panel into a pocket of girders that was shiny-wet with epoxy.

She looked back at the two work parties.

‘So,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘We’re going to build a starship right here, and what’s even more fucked up, we’re going to start building it while Alpha and Bravo teams build the docking cradle around us and Hauser completes the docking arm over our heads. Morosini estimates that by the time we’re dealing with serious mass issues, the docking arm and part of the cradle will be complete. We still need to get another leg bolted down to the rock.’

While she spoke, she illustrated the whole plan in seven day/night phases on a hologram projected in front of her face, and it repeated into everyone’s systems for review.

‘Lieutenant Nbaro, as she’s a pilot, will take the avionics and bridge section. Marca, I am downloading you the specs and the connection diagrams. You get team Charlie.’

The other spacers smiled at her. Ramirez, who was a tiny, dark-complexioned woman, gave her a thumb’s up. Luroy, a petty officer, also from Engineering, gave her a nod. He was big and fierce-looking, but she’d been gluing panels and pushing cargo with him for a week and she knew he was both funny and strong – and careful. And her friend Thea Drake just looked resigned.

Nbaro gathered her crew with a wave even as she used her new neural lace skills to review the various documents and the holographic production schedule.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not in any way an engineer.’

Luroy grinned. It robbed his face of its habitual expression of dangerous rage, which she’d rapidly learned was just … how he looked. ‘Well, ma’am, we’re all from Engineering, so we probably have that covered.’

Drake laughed. ‘I’m from Cargo. I can only guarantee what comes out of the containers.’

Nbaro nodded. ‘Yeah. Anyway … this looks like a three-dimensional puzzle, or maybe one of those model-building competitions they pushed on us at the Orphanage …’

Ramirez nodded. ‘Yes’m. It’s all coded shit. Ms Drake can check the codes, we can rattle it together and then you can test it. Not exactly rocket science.’

Luroy looked at her. ‘It is, in fact, rocket science,’ he said.

Ramirez made an obscene gesture, and Luroy scowled.

Nbaro had a moment of wondering if that obscene gesture constituted something of which she should take notice, but the moment passed and she took no action.

‘Well, that’s a plan made, then. I agree with Ramirez. Thea, you’re going to watch the unload and check every crate and its assembly code, and coach the assembly teams. I’ll test the components as they come on-line.’ She smiled at Ramirez and the little woman beamed.

Everyone likes to be listened to. It was, in fact, exactly what Nbaro had intended to do, but it didn’t hurt to share with Ramirez, who was the most junior, and wavered between enthusiasm and cynical fatigue.

She put a hand on Drake’s arm as they both put their helmets on. She leaned in.

‘Should I have said something to Ramirez?’ she asked. ‘She told Luroy to fuck himself. Not exactly …’

Drake winked, visible even through the reflective gold foil coating on her visor. ‘They’re shagging,’ she said. ‘Ramirez is a tough bird, she can take care of herself, and Luroy isn’t delicate.’

‘Oh,’ Nbaro said. ‘But he’s her boss.’

Drake winked. ‘It’s the Deep Black,’ she said. ‘It’s got its own rules. And anyway, honey, you ain’t in a position to talk, are you?’

Drake kicked off and flew to the airlock hatch as if she had been born in zero g .

Nbaro sighed inwardly at the unfairness of it all – a familiar feeling from her Orphanage days – and made sure the magnets in her boots were activated before joining Drake in the tiny airlock.

A day passed. Nbaro glanced at the Space Ops repeater too often and noted that the Stealthy Change hadn’t made any attempt to decelerate further since docking with the pinnace.

When it was time for her workout, she fetched the twist of material from her EVA suit external pocket; parts of it fell to a greasy black dust in her hand, but she managed to get the surviving third to the workout room.

Dorcas tried to kiss her, and she shouldered him away in the low gravity. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said.

Dorcas looked abashed.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’m a mess of hormones, just like you. Only I want you to look at this.’

Dorcas obediently took the little twist from her and sat back against the tiny compartment’s bulkhead, a look of puzzlement on his face.

‘This is carbon fibre,’ he said. ‘Very old carbon fibre.’ He shook his head. ‘So you kept some, after telling me it was immoral for me to keep some?’

She sighed, her hunch confirmed. ‘I found it here.’

Dorcas became very still.

‘You can access Morosini and watch me harvest it from the surface,’ she said, and related the circumstance.

He looked at her, and finally blinked. Then he leaned forward, brushed her lips with his own, and stood. ‘No workout today,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘I’m sorry. This is … is …’

He was rarely without words. He looked at her, clearly deeply troubled, and then shook his head. ‘I need to get this in a vacuum bag as soon as possible. And then go out and see if there’s more.’

And he was gone.

And Nbaro thought dark thoughts – because she could connect the dots as fast as he could. The aliens they called the Circles had been on Haqq and Far Point, at least. A hundred thousand years ago. And they’d had something very like xenoglas.

And they’d all died, or disappeared.

And now, it looked as if they’d been at Trade Point, too.

After she showered, Nbaro checked again and saw that one of the shuttles was breaking away and had taken a long, low-fuel path towards one of the outer gas giants beyond the asteroid belt.

‘Get lots of readings,’ she told the distant shuttle pilot. Whoever she was, she was bound inwards for a long, lonely flight in a cockpit with limited sanitation facilities. Nbaro’s maths in her augmented head said that the shuttle was a week, at least, from refuelling in the atmosphere of the gas giant, and then would have a faster trip home after some fancy flying to avoid the strange debris ring and the plethora of moons.

The pace of the construction seemed to increase. Truekner, her skipper, came in person with two Flight Six spacecraft packed with cargo modules, including four matt-black packages that went into her avionics and astrogation schedule, but had no registered build codes.

She was happy to see Truekner, and the flight was long enough that he and his crews – her flight mates – stayed for a bulb of noodles and a cup of tea.

‘I’m going to need you back soon,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a list of cargo for this station as long as my arm, and until the big lifters get back, we’re transporting it, in hundreds of sorties. I’ve seen the sched. Are you required here?’ He gave her one of his skipper looks: an apparently soft, understanding glance that hid a direct order.

‘No, sir,’ she said reluctantly, although she really, really wanted to make things … right? Better? … with Dorcas.

‘When I send 6–0–2 over tomorrow, I want you to come back as co-pilot and leave Midder Eyre in your place to get some station time. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

She hugged Guille and Storkel, gulped the rest of her too-sweet tea and went back to work. She tabbed Qaqqaq to inform her that she’d have to be replaced as a team leader, with a note that Luroy was doing some effective team leadership anyway.

The progress was incredible. Not only were the bridge and avionics systems mostly assembled, but the hull was assembling around the computers, so that it had already begun to look like a starship. Nbaro knew, as did everyone else on the crew, that it was a new design – something that Dukas and Morosini had created out of the parts available: part electronic warfare frigate and part pinnace, with actual deep-space engines and a massive computer, and a curious set of fittings that Nbaro knew had been machined out of printed titanium parts on the Athens . The ship also had a pair of massive clamps, and a hollow profile amidships, where she could see the new ship could take on various packages: an EW suite, a detection package, or just cargo. In fact, it could pick up a full-sized four-by-four metre packing container in those clamps.

Nbaro had already guessed what the increasing number of black boxes coming off the fabricators back on the Athens had to hold. As the spine of the little spaceship grew, she was unsurprised to see that they received installation codes for the stern nacelles.

That evening was her last aboard the station, and she wished for a shower she couldn’t take and went to the workout cubicle. Dorcas was already there.

‘You know I’m leaving,’ she said. It came out very differently from the way she’d meant to say it. It sounded accusatory, and not wistful.

Dorcas was using the resistance bands. ‘I know.’ He sounded … miserable.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I like you, and everything.’

He smiled broadly at that.

She started to do push-ups.

Staring at the matt-black rubber of the floor, she said, ‘You can tell me what’s on your mind. I won’t tell.’

She wasn’t watching him; the only part she could see was his bare feet. He didn’t smell bad, which was remarkable.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said simply.

She pushed off with her hands and stood. ‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Losing you,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘Won’t happen.’ She was going to end the discussion altogether, but he turned his head away.

‘I’ve volunteered to stay,’ he said.

She was going to ignore that, except that something … ‘Stay?’ she asked.

‘Here. On the station. Working with the Starfish, at least until the next ship comes.’ Now he looked at her.

The workout cubicle was a box slightly more than two metres on a side. There was no place to run or hide. Everything in it was black, and the light came from three powerful sunlamps set into the ceiling – or at least, the wall that was ‘above’ when the station wheel was under spin, as it was now.

‘You’re going to stay,’ she repeated.

‘Yes,’ he said miserably.

‘Alone, in deep space, on this station.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is my duty as I perceive it.’

She nodded.

‘I know it appears that I prefer the Starfish to you—’ he began.

‘Spare me,’ she said.

‘I knew you’d be angry.’

‘Shut up and stop patronising me,’ she said. ‘I’m not angry. If I’d thought it through, I’d have known this was coming.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Am I so transparent?’

She shrugged. ‘Truekner asked me to go back to the ship and I accepted that instantly. I was afraid you’d be mad, but my flight needs me. And you do not have to tell me, of all people, how important your work with the Starfish is.’

He flushed. As he was wearing short trunks and a barely existent tank top, the flush was visible over most of him. ‘Oh, God, you do understand.’

Nbaro knew, without feeling around inside her head, that she wasn’t actually all right with it: that some part of her had expected this and saw it as rejection; that another part had never believed that he loved her; a third part – a deeply injured part – had never expected any other outcome.

She felt all of that, but she also knew her man. And she knew how incredibly important actual communication with the aliens might be.

She knew she sounded calm to him, but the internal turmoil was real, and it wasn’t going to go away. Some men will do anything to avoid a relationship , a bitter Nbaro thought, while another Nbaro believed that Dorcas was making a sacrifice, and a real one, and felt it.

‘You won’t be home until …’ she began. ‘Jesus, you’re here until another greatship calls.’ That was brave. He was brave.

He also enjoyed being by himself. With his friend Morosini, who would no doubt clone himself to stay.

All that, in two or three seconds of thought. And then, for another terrible second, she teetered on the edge.

Show my anger?

Or show my love?

She had both people in her.

Just walk out and quietly close the hatch. It’s done.

Dorcas projected a data image of a man slipping away, a hand waving goodbye, and she reached out a digital hand and grasped his ghostly one.

She grabbed his shoulders as she had back on the orbital, so long ago it seemed like a lifetime – really, only a couple of months. She was smaller than he, and shorter, but she was a much better infighter, and she pushed his shoulders back against the bulkhead’s matting, and put her mouth over his.

He put a hand on her bare waist, and then on her breast, and then under her workout shirt.

He broke away. ‘There’s cameras,’ he said.

She had a flash of the chapel at the Orphanage, and then she looked straight into his eyes. ‘If Morosini wants to watch …’ she said, and she laughed into his mouth.

Dorcas grinned, and then he was fierce and she was fierce, and then …

… they were naked, and they’d overstayed their time in the cubicle.

‘We are idiots,’ Dorcas said.

‘Hey, that’s my line,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I’ll grow more like you,’ he said, fumbling with his shorts.

‘So many reasons,’ she murmured, not really ready to go back to non-sexual reality. She held him a moment longer, and his arms wrapped around her.

‘I won’t leave you out here,’ she said. ‘If I have to, I’ll come get you myself.’

He kissed her.

Someone was pounding on the hatch, and they both flushed at the comments awaiting them from the next pair.

‘I love you,’ Dorcas said.

‘Good,’ Nbaro said. ‘I needed to hear that.’

But as soon as she was alone, she felt her full reaction: the anger, the sense of betrayal, however unfair, and she thought, I won’t see him again. Not for a while . Alongside another feeling – an alien feeling – of longing, and desire, and loss.

Seven hours later, Nbaro was in the pilot’s seat of 6–0–2, landing in the well-lit stern of the Athens , and her world was both shaken, and searingly routine. Every time she took a bird to the station, she saw him; a week passed, as she carried black fabrication boxes and distilled water and food out, and sometimes people back. Flight Six flew round the clock, as if they were in combat; sometimes she’d hotseat a bird, taking the round trip, watching them refuel her from inside her cockpit and then tracking back to the railgun to be launched again. When she wasn’t flying, she was working on her personnel reports, filing material readiness reports, and reviewing and updating her tactical briefings based on the ten thousand new things that had happened since Far Point. Some of her early slides on space tactics – the ones from her first lecture with Suleimani – made her wince; they’d come so far in those weeks. They now drilled to rapid launches and expected to go out behind a cloud of ablative dust – the use of Qaqqaq’s passive sensors had changed the way tactical officers thought about detection – and when she had the time, which was effectively never, she took notes on what she’d observed with the Starfish. Clearly they had a detection system that was another degree of magnitude superior.

Nbaro had the whole stateroom to herself, because Drake remained on the station, and she spent long hours there working on her various projects with a combination of direct digital interaction and neural lace. She might have limited her world to her stateroom and her cockpit, except that Captain Fraser from Astrogation was insistent that she return to her boarding party routine, and physical exercise seemed to help her sleep.

Dorcas loved her, but he was staying with his Starfish. Intellectually, she understood that he’d made the best choice for the human race and the DHC, but somewhere in her injured psyche she didn’t like it at all, and she was …

Depressed. That’s what she was. And it was easy to be depressed on board ship – easy to avoid others, easy to stay isolated – since she didn’t have Drake dragging her to social occasions and making her eat with others.

Except that this is the person you decided not to be.

It definitely didn’t help that she had to endure the hostile stares of Lieutenant McDonald and her friends from Flight One. Her second meal aboard, McDonald glared at her, and she reacted like an Orphanage survivor and not a service officer.

‘See something you like?’ she drawled. She was craving a fight.

McDonald’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘You get whatever you want,’ she hissed. ‘And if I’d been picked, I’d at least be out there. Han’s flying almost alone!’

‘Whatever I want?’ Nbaro spat. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

Suddenly there was a hand on her arm. She flung it off, whirled, ready to fight.

It was Cortez. He was short and solid, and he stepped right past her, so that he physically stood between her and McDonald.

To Nbaro, he said, ‘Let it go.’

Nbaro screwed up her face in an effort to make herself … be the person who walked away from this fight.

I’m an idiot.

McDonald snorted in contempt. ‘Fucking patrician.’

Curiously, that didn’t sting, at least in part because Nbaro had never seen herself as a patrician.

Cortez took her arm and dragged her through the hatch and into the passageway.

‘You need to cool off,’ he said. ‘Jesu, sister. People think I’m a hothead.’

She was due to go to a boarding party training session, so she raised her hands in mock surrender. Cortez let her go, and she changed into her armour and sparred with people she knew, wrestled in zero g , and fought a couple of long bouts in the drop-shafts with Fraser and Locran and a big Marine she didn’t know well.

Captain Fraser was having a bad evening; he was clearly very tired. She knew the look; a few days before jumps, he always looked frazzled. After she hit him for the third time in a row with a simple attack, she stepped back and opened her visor.

‘Are we getting ready to jump?’ she asked. Her own bluntness surprised her, but there it was. He had circles under his eyes. ‘Sir?’ she added, belatedly.

He glanced around, but they were effectively alone.

‘It’s more complicated than that’ he said. ‘I expect that you know more about it than me.’ He managed an enigmatic smile.

Her puzzlement must have shown in her face. He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Nbaro. I’m sure it will be clear in time.’ He pulled his visor down and they both saluted. She gave it a little thought, and then was swept away in her work. Any spare moment was spent on managing her neural lace. The flood of data made her frustrated, and frustration fed anger and depression. Twice she tabbed Morosini for support and both times he answered laconically, directing her to vids and embedded instruction systems, without any of the more human interaction she loved in him.

That hurt, too.

She had nightmares of rejection; they came back to her like old friends.

Almighty, am I this weak?

Every trip to eat seemed like a return to the Orphanage: the hostile stares of the Flight One crew, and some others … so familiar. And Dorcas …

A week into Nbaro’s self-isolation, Truekner ruined it by putting her back on the Space Ops watch standing rotation. She stood a watch with Musashi and found herself sharing her misadventures in construction on the station, to the amusement of everyone in Space Ops. Like a popular person.

It was ridiculous. The Space Ops crew enveloped her like a big embrace of teasing, joking, cynical, overworked … family .

Family.

That evening, she ate something pretending to be barbecued pork with Musashi in the more formal officer’s mess when they went off watch, and then sparred with him for a while.

He is much, much better than I am , she thought, and then reveled in it, exploring his excellence, the apparent laziness of his crosses and parries, the stillness of his waiting guards, which offered her no real information as to his next movement, the precision of his cuts and thrusts, the depth of his deceptions.

‘You are brilliant,’ she said, when he left her blade deep in a counter and struck almost slowly across her wrists.

He smiled. ‘When your name is Musashi, you have to work very hard,’ he said. ‘The expectations are terrifying.’

She laughed at that, and felt better. Why?

It wasn’t all better, but three straight days with watches in Space Ops, one as Lioness, did something to crack her depression. It didn’t just wash away, but the routine of the watch, and the pleasure she still took in a well-executed launch and recovery, and the routine excitement of handling the first of the big Flight One shuttles to return aboard, went a long way to restoring her equilibrium.

It occurred to her that McDonald might be on edge because she wasn’t out there with the rest of her Flight. It occurred to her to meet with McDonald and talk about their common ground, but she didn’t.

She schemed a little, and arranged her part of the flight schedule so that she had her pilot rest layover at the station. As she flew in towards the rendezvous with the docking arm, she was not really shocked, but definitely amazed, to see how advanced the frigate-pinnace was. The whole hull looked to be closed and pressure-tight, and the starboard engine nacelle held a completed engine assembly.

She hugged Drake and tabbed Dorcas. Where are you?

She knew perfectly well he was on rest. She’d laid her snares carefully.

In my bunk, he replied.

Unlock your hatch and make room.

Two hours later her crew rest hadn’t really been particularly restful, but she felt much better.

‘How much longer do we have?’ she asked him.

He smiled sheepishly. ‘Three weeks? The Stealthy Change is making a grav-assist turn around the Beta Star and she’ll start decelerating next week. If she decelerates at all.’ He shrugged. ‘Morosini seems confident.’

‘He’s sure not talking to me,’ she said.

Dorcas shrugged. ‘When the Stealthy Change is back and repaired, and the Pericles , our new pinnace, is spaceworthy, I believe the Master will feel he’s as ready as he’s ever going to be.’ He rolled in the artificial gravity and looked at her. ‘There’s a great deal going on, Nbaro, and for once, you aren’t at the centre of it. Morosini is running near his maximum capability – he doesn’t have a lot of spare processing power for acting lieutenants.’ He smiled to take the sting out. ‘Remember – none of us, including me, is supposed to talk to him unless directed to do so. It’s in your beloved ship’s regs.’

She lay back, looking at his carbon-fibre overhead and thinking, a person can get really tired of carbon fibre .

‘I got used to … having him around.’

Dorcas looked conflicted.

Nbaro licked the tip of his nose. She had never known another person so intimately. Dorcas concealed many of his reactions, and yet, increasingly, she could read him. At the moment, he was naked.

But she didn’t use seduction, and she knew from comments Truekner had made that learning to be a lieutenant instead of what Truekner called a ‘special child’ was part of her career path.

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ she purred.

‘It’s a very …’ he began.

Nbaro’s mind ran very fast, comparing the hesitancy of his reaction, the enigmatic smile of Captain Fraser, and all the other slight clues of the last week: newly minted Ensign Gorshokov looking as hollow-eyed as Fraser; Qaqqaq’s rush to complete the frigate-pinnace.

She felt more enlivened by lovemaking, not less. The whole experience of sex was neither what she’d expected, nor remembered. She was alert and full of energy, and her brain ran along as if it was on rails. ‘The Master isn’t just waiting for the aliens to come back, is he?’ she asked.

Dorcas eyed her steadily.

‘I mean, you can tell that we’re jumping out of here, and soon, from the behaviour of our astrogators,’ she said. ‘And since there’s a rumour that the Master wants to follow the aliens, I’m going to guess that Astrogation is working round the clock on what we know of the Bubble entry vectors and what star systems lie beyond. Right? But even with my limited grasp of astro, I can’t see that working. Can you? Seems to me we’d need to follow one, and follow pretty closely.’

Dorcas lay back. He was still naked, lying in the rack while she sat on the edge, getting dressed. ‘Well,’ he said, making a face. ‘If you already know that, why are you asking me?’

‘Because you are so poor at hiding your reactions,’ she said. ‘So, like I already asked, mister patrician, sir. How long do we have?’

Dorcas put a hand on her waist and pulled her, unresisting, back into an embrace. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘But since you are so very intelligent, I’ll bet you can guess.’

She chose to break away. ‘So …’ she said with real regret. ‘So if they don’t come back, we’re leaving in three weeks, on plot and on time. But … the Master, and Morosini, and you, all think the Bubbles will come back. And then we jump out right behind them. How’s that?’

‘How often can you fly over like this?’ Dorcas asked.

‘As often as I can,’ she said. ‘I’m writing the flight schedule this week.’ She leaned over, kissed him, and allowed herself to feel it: that precious thing.

Then she nibbled his lip, avoided his hands, and slipped away. ‘Did you EVA and look at my carbon fibre?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘Classified,’ he said.

‘I found it! You can tell me.’

‘We know you did,’ he said.

‘We?’

‘Let it go,’ he replied.

And to her amazement, she did.

The Stealthy Change flew her slingshot with perfect accuracy, as one would expect from a professional military ship, and then, when she was inbound at slightly over 0.3 c , she rolled over and fired her engines, and there was no wobble. The Space Ops holotank, updating based on transmitted data eleven hours old, showed the PTX heavy cruiser decelerating smoothly from the first moments of her burn. Everyone in Space Ops cheered, so loudly Nbaro could hear them from the corridors and passageways.

Even though we were shooting at each other , she thought. But the fate of the other ship, now well out of the Trade Point system and deep in interstellar space, remained on the minds of every spacer. Bygones were not entirely bygones: every turret on the ship was manned; the ship itself remained on low power and snuggled up to an asteroid deep in the belt. No one trusted the PTX ship. But everyone was glad the Stealthy Change was alive and not dead, or running at relativistic speeds to the end of time.

Nbaro could run her own calculations through her lace: assuming current profile and no mechanical problems, the Stealthy Change was nine days out. The other ship was already gone; everyone called her the Dutchman , leaving the system for interstellar space at 0.7 c . They’d never communicated in any way; Nbaro and everyone she knew assumed they were already dead. It was just one of the many mysteries confronting them.

The Pericles , the new frigate-pinnace, was seven to ten days from completion.

She wondered about the aliens, the Starfish, and the conspiracy that probably still existed to destroy the Athens , and watched the time of her happiness tick away towards zero.

The Athens was beginning to move towards something like normal operations. Every spacer was keenly aware that they were very far from home, with alien ships around them and the threat of enemy action close. At the same time, every hole was patched; all four reactors were online, and all four of the Tanaka drives were reported to be green and ready to go. And there were other developments. Down in the giant maw of the Hangar Deck, eight new spacecraft had been assembled, much smaller than the Flight Five birds – close-in defence fighters that could be crewed, or piloted by computer or flown remotely.

And now Nbaro could see why they’d had to build the Pericles on the rock: there were also replacement birds for losses in Flight Five and Six under construction. The Hangar Deck, usually an empty space where the crew could play sports, was a hive of activity, and there were so many crates of parts that it was difficult to thread a path between them. And the maintenance crews looked as tired as Nbaro felt.

She flew three consecutive sorties to the rock without seeing Thea or Dorcas, and then she had a shower and went to Space Ops without eating.

It was her second time in the Lioness chair in just a few days, and despite her fatigue she enjoyed it thoroughly – all the more because there was almost no in-system clutter, no flights that weren’t her own, except the four Starfish vessels. She watched her scans and toggled her comms and was, in all ways, the Lord of Creation of her systems.

‘One of the Starfish is showing a vector,’ Banderas said from her console. ‘Energy pulse. She’s hot.’

Nbaro told her neural lace to show her, and there it was, complete with a 3D image inside her head in real time. Every time she did this, she wondered about the future of avionics: there was really no need for a bridge, or repeaters, or consoles, or screens, if everyone was laced. No one would even have to sit together. The crew could be almost anywhere and instantly …

She blinked it all away and concentrated on the Starfish ship. Not the Behemoth , which was their name for the huge Starfish ship that was a third longer than the Athens and much broader, but one of the smaller ships, each one of which was larger than the Stealthy Change .

She passed her note via lace to the Master and contacted Morosini.

‘I’m here ,’ he said.

‘I thought you weren’t speaking to me,’ she blurted.

Morosini raised a sculpted eyebrow and stroked his big cat. ‘Not so . Or perhaps, not precisely so. You are Lioness – you have access. Regardless, we’re all watching. ’

‘Starfish Bravo Bravo 1–0–3 is leaving us,’ Banderas predicted in real space.

Nbaro used her neural lace to contact Captain Fraser.

‘Astrogation,’ he said.

‘Sir, are you seeing Starfish Bravo Bravo 1–0–3 on what appears to be a departure vector?’

‘Innnteresssting,’ Fraser said. ‘Thanks, Marca. I’ve got it marked.’

Nbaro watched the outbound ship accelerate. A great many thoughts jumbled together in her head, and she had to fight to get the important one into the neural lace.

‘Morosini, you know Dorcas hasn’t seen Feather Dancer in two days,’ she said. It seemed like a non sequitur, but her growing awareness of the speed at which the AI operated led her to hope Morosini understood the connection.

She was aware that, as an inexpert lace user, she was mouthing or even physically pronouncing the words. Banderas must have been wondering to whom Nbaro was speaking, and about what, but she was in the virtual environment with Morosini and, suddenly, with Pisani.

Morosini was reviewing a vid when Pisani interrupted.

‘Nbaro,’ he said politely, in virtual.

The three of them watched the Starfish ship, an experience which was less like watching and more like participating. Nbaro was actually one with the instruments of observation, and she realised, as a new user, that in time she wouldn’t need the abstract representations of a 3D holographic map on her retinas, because she’d be able to read the raw sensor data for herself – or, at least, with a little boost from the AI. Her idea of the future bridge grew even less focused.

The Starfish ship continued to accelerate. It had a smooth and very rapid acceleration, the virtual opposite of the PTX ship’s vibrating main engine nacelle and stuttering deceleration.

‘Is that on purpose?’ she thought, and her thought was transmitted to the other two.

‘Interesting thought,’ Pisani said. ‘I assume we’re recording everything?’

Morosini indicated they were.

‘We haven’t seen more than two Starfish ships at a time in this system in eighty years,’ Pisani said. ‘When the Esperance first found them, there was in-system traffic – a lot of little ships. Not any more. In fact, I’ve never seen one.’

‘I have recordings from the early days ,’ Morosini said. ‘There was traffic everywhere, especially by the Beta Star. ’

‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’ Nbaro asked.

Pisani shook his head. ‘Nbaro, everything about the Starfish is odd. They should never have lost a ship-to-ship duel with us. They should never have built Trade Point. They should be far more interested in communications, and now they send four ships, including this gigantic thing …?’

Nbaro tried to imagine what it would be like to be the Master, right then – with two species of aliens and hostile humans and a plot on his own ship, trade to conduct … responsibility after responsibility.

All that in a flash, while she watched the Starfish ship accelerate cleanly through 6 g and head for seven.

‘Up to their usual seventeen gees?’ she asked. ‘Dorcas says he thinks it’s their home world norm – the equivalent of one gee to us.’

Morosini gave off a mathematical amusement, ‘I have some very interesting data from the shuttles that refuelled in the gas giants .’

Nbaro saw the data: energy spikes, neutrino emissions, infrared.

‘So they do have colonies in-system.’

‘Colonies they make every attempt to hide from us,’ Pisani said. ‘Those transmissions were all on the dark side of the moons for our sensors out here.’

‘But some of them correlate with the Esperance’s observations, over two hundred years ago ,’ Morosini said.

Pisani grunted audibly. ‘Figures,’ he said. ‘They run dark as soon as we come in-system.’

Morosini said, ‘I am coming to believe that they run dark all the time. And have done so for eighty years. Maybe … Maybe they always have. ’

He seemed to leave her in virtual space with that statement.

Nbaro remained in virtual space for the rest of her watch, cycling in and out to chat with Banderas at her screen or Musashi on Tower, and then merging with the ship’s systems to watch the space around her, playing with the figures from the shuttle fly-by, looking at the construction work on the base and on the frigate-pinnace. It became more and more immersive. She was easily overwhelmed, and she snapped at Banderas like an arsehat and had to apologise later. That was a real problem; the information overload was real, and eventually she had to leave virtual space entirely to focus on what she was doing in the real.

By the end of the watch, she realised that sense of being overwhelmed wasn’t going away any time soon. But she handed over to Lieutenant Commander Dworkin from Avionics and stretched.

‘How’s our pet frigate coming?’ Dworkin asked.

Nbaro smiled. ‘I haven’t been over in a couple of ship-days, but she’s coming together nicely.’

‘You assembled the avionics package?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘Four very competent people from Engineering assembled it, and someone smart built it all here …’ She paused. ‘That was you, wasn’t it, sir?’

Dworkin’s grin was very broad. ‘Damn, a lowly lieutenant just called me smart,’ he said. ‘I may just replay that from time to time. Yeah, I designed the avionics, with a heavy load of help from our AI. That ship is …’ He paused. ‘You know all about it. But it was complicated, and I don’t envy the eventual pilot-commander.’

She nodded. ‘All the systems pasted together …’

‘Morosini rewrote all the software, so it should be good, but the frigates have a bridge and the pinnace is fly-by-wire. You flew it, right?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘And Morosini has me doing more sims.’ Which I should be doing right now.

Dworkin’s eyebrows went up a fraction. ‘Uh-huh. Well, Lieutenant, eat something sweet for me when you get to the mess. Doc just put me on a diet.’ He looked at something on his tab. ‘We had better train up some more watch-standers.’

She looked over his shoulder.

The space wing was spread very thin across the system. There weren’t enough people to go around, and with Mpono now the ship’s executive officer, they were at the edge of being seriously short-handed.

‘I wondered why I had two watches in two days,’ she said.

Musashi joined them as Cortez replaced him in Tower. ‘At this rate, I expect to be Tower and Lioness at the same time,’ he said. He inclined his head politely and headed forward.

Cortez gave her a long look. ‘You OK?’ he asked.

She was suddenly aware of how much Cortez liked her. Actually liked her, not just wanted to get her flightsuit off. ‘I had some bad days,’ she admitted quietly. ‘Better now.’

‘Good,’ Cortez said with a crisp nod. ‘Shit happens.’

She grinned at him. ‘Sure does.’

He answered her grin with one of his own, and then wiped it away and fell into the command couch.

She gave a sketchy wave-salute and headed for the mess, exactly as Dworkin had suggested. While she ate, Sabina, her sub-AI, whispered in her neural lace and her tab clicked with a message to see Commander Truekner, so she finished her pie and took an elevator forward to the squadron’s space.

Truekner was in the tiny administration office with two of the squadron’s admin spacers, signing the evaluations that they’d all spent two weeks writing. He signed with a physical pen, and with a flourish. He was wearing physical glasses; the whole scene was shockingly old-fashioned.

He looked up. ‘Ah, Lieutenant Nbaro,’ he said, with more relish than perhaps the situation warranted.

Uh-oh.

She automatically went to attention.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Morosini and I just had a spat about you.’

She winced. ‘Sorry?’

He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. ‘Morosini wants you to complete the little ship over there on the station. I want you here flying missions and in Space Ops. We all want you standing watches under instruction with the TAO. And while Morosini doesn’t have the power to overrule me, he was very persuasive.’

She stood even straighter.

‘What is it about this little monster ship, that only you can complete it?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘Sir, with due respect to Morosini, I was the least important member of my own assembly team.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he agreed. ‘I’m all for getting you a little avionics experience for later in your career, but I need you flying right now.’ He looked at the pile of evaluations. ‘But you have all your reports filed, and I have to admit that the Orphanage served you well in one respect – you can write a report. When I read yours, I usually don’t want to rip my veins open or breathe vacuum.’

He looked up over his curious antique glasses. ‘Is this about Dorcas?’ he asked.

‘Dorcas?’ she asked, and she knew that, despite her deep brown skin, she was visibly blushing.

‘Ahem,’ the skipper said, and waved to the two admin spacers, who rose from their acceleration couches and retreated beyond the partition, making small talk about coffee.

‘Am I in trouble?’ she asked.

Truekner took his glasses off and folded them, which she took as a bad sign. ‘It depends. Did you ask Morosini to get you reassigned back to the station?’ he asked.

She shook her head a little too hard. ‘No, sir!’

He smiled warmly, and she realised how close to anger he’d been. ‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘That’s that.’

He put his glasses back on and knocked hard on the partition, and the two admin spacers reappeared as if by magic.

Truekner gave her a mild look. ‘In some ways, Nbaro, you are as innocent as a lamb, and I’d like to keep you that way.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Nbaro, do you even know what a lamb is?’

‘An edible Earth ruminant,’ she said promptly.

‘Was that you or the neural lace?’ he asked.

She thought about it. ‘Pretty sure that was the lace, sir. I don’t think I’d heard of a lamb before a moment ago. But now I know what they look, smell and taste like, as well as the history of the phrase and the quasi-religious background to why lambs might be thought of as innocent …’

Truekner smiled. ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘You definitely needed to have the whole library of human knowledge at your beck and call. And please, do not tell me where the phrase beck and call originates.’

‘No, sir.’ But I could, you know.

‘Seriously, Nbaro – here’s the problem. Your lace gives you a power none of your peers has – and a direct line to the AI and the Master. People are starting to talk. You are the only lieutenant on the ship with a lace, and you’re really just an acting midder.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m sure you’ll have my job someday, but I’d prefer it not be before the end of this cruise. What I mean is, I can’t have you using your connection to Morosini to fix your love life.’ He nodded. ‘And to be perfectly frank, Nbaro, what you need is a long stretch of gut-wrenching normalcy, routine, and practice being a cog in the machine. I know that sounds terrible. But you need to work on …’ He smiled. ‘On not being a hero all the time.’ He nodded again. ‘I apologise for thinking you would go over my head to your friend the AI.’

Now she was definitely blushing. ‘I would never—’

He nodded. ‘Keep it that way. I’m sending you to Trade Point with a cargo of stuff for the Pericles tomorrow, and you’ll stay and send Eyre back. Morosini wants you there until the damned little ship is completed.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He nodded. ‘I need you here, Nbaro. I’ve lost three veteran pilots and replaced two of them with half-trained midders. Build this weird space boat and get yourself back here.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

‘Also, the Master has posted the awards ceremony for eleven days from now. You’ll want to be there.’ He winked. ‘Of course, everyone on board is receiving something, so it’ll take about four weeks to pin ’em all on. Oh, and I read your eval on Patel. You’ll need to talk to him. We need him. You need him.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘May I offer you some advice about Patel?’ Truekner asked.

She finally smiled, in relief. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Rohan Patel is a smart young man who has got along pretty well with a minimum of work here in the Service. And he has some form of test-taking anxiety which he avoids by avoiding tests. Now, suddenly, we need him to make petty officer, and he needs to work up the energy and enthusiasm to overcome his anxiety. Right?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. That was pretty much what she’d seen herself.

‘And how are you going to do that, Ms Nbaro?’

‘No idea, sir.’

Truekner pulled his glasses down on his nose, for all the world like a professor in an old vid. ‘Ms Nbaro. You are, or shortly will be, the most heavily decorated midder in the history of the Service. You are physically attractive, fit, and a verified hero. I would think that you might lead and inspire young Patel with a few choice words and some solid encouragement.’

She swallowed, hard. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Nbaro, while I want you to have about twenty-four months of mind-numbing boredom and routine operations during which a material readiness review is something to be looked forward to, I also believe that you are allowed to think of yourself as an inspiring hero. Got that?’

She laughed aloud.

‘Good response, Nbaro. On your way.’

‘Yes, sir.’

She was deeply happy to be going back to the station: happy to be able to talk to Dorcas, happy to …

It was all about Dorcas. And that was foolish. Very foolish. And bad for her career.

Got to talk to Patel first.

She went to her stateroom and picked up her combat gear, and then went forward to an exciting evening of boarding party drills, did her sims, slept, and walked to her spacecraft. She had a full load of cargo, including a small blue box that a spacer from Fabrication handed her in person, to transport in her helmet bag.

‘For Mister Dorcas, deliver in person,’ the spacer said.

‘I’ll probably see him,’ she said with a smile. Part of her was pretending that she didn’t particularly care; her best bra mocked her attempts at dissimulation.

I’m an idiot.

Nbaro docked 6–0–8, the new Flight Six spacecraft, against the small craft dock that was part of the new dockyard facility on the station. There was no sim for it, so she had to fly the whole landing. In fact, it was dead easy, with dedicated smart systems that functioned perfectly, but she managed to work up a good level of adrenaline over it, and she was pleased to hear the chime that signalled a good seal and air on the other side of the crew hatch.

She picked up her duffel in near zero g and wriggled out of the cockpit without using her hands, passing down the tube and rotating smoothly to grab the sides of the crew hatch. She checked the external lock alarm one more time: green. She opened the hatch, and there was a slight hiss and the smooth functioning of hydraulics, and she was station-side, with Thea Drake looking thinner and almost frail, and Dorcas …

Dorcas had come to meet her.

She had no trouble managing a smile.

Qaqqaq gave her perhaps twenty seconds to hug her friends, and then she was holding up her tab. Nbaro shot her the bill of lading, and Qaqqaq nodded.

‘You brought all the secret stuff,’ she said. ‘And now you’re going to install it.’

She mouthed later at Dorcas, kissed Thea Drake, and followed Qaqqaq to a dockside elevator that hadn’t been there a week before.

‘You know what you have aboard?’ Qaqqaq asked.

Nbaro was having the very strange experience of having Morosini download that information via the neural lace, so that even as Qaqqaq spoke, her understanding awoke and then deepened. In a way, she had guessed as soon as she’d seen the black box components towards the frigate’s stern. But there it was, all laid out: the latest in PTX technology. A jump-tail, complete with Relic-Particle Sensors (which she already had pegged as RPS units) and the quantum web that allowed a material computation of an immaterial problem, reading the Higgs Field …

‘Did the PTX just hand us all this?’

Morosini sent her a cat’s smile. ‘We traded . We are, after all, traders. ’

‘For saving their ship?’

‘You do ask all the hard questions. But no. In exchange for their officer who was a prisoner aboard our ship. As Major Darkstar had surmised from interrogation, he was important, if antithetical to the faction now in control, which, I will tell you for nothing, I fervently hope represents the actual government of the Empire. But this is a problem for another day. ’

In real time, she gulped.

‘And of course ,’ Morosini went on casually, ‘someone may have pointed out that we could simply take their ship .’

Do not ever make an enemy of the AI , she noted, not for the first time.

And all this conveyed in an eyeblink. With blueprints, installation guides, plug-and-play instructions, software manuals, and a navigation sim.

A navigation sim.

‘You are putting me on this ship?’ she asked.

‘I thought that was obvious ,’ Morosini said.

Shit. Truekner will have a cow, and I don’t blame him.

‘Only occasionally. You will be Truekner’s most of the time. ’

In real space, Qaqqaq was looking at her in the way that Nbaro herself looked at Dorcas when his face went slack.

‘Yes,’ she said to Qaqqaq. ‘Yes, I know what I have aboard. I know how to install it and I know what to do when it’s installed.’

Qaqqaq looked relieved. ‘I’m putting in the power plants tomorrow, and then you can install …’ She grinned. ‘The secret shit.’ She waved her arms. ‘The other secret shit. This thing has more stealth technology than anything except the new battlecruisers we came out with.’

Nbaro nodded. She was overwhelmed. ‘I guess I’ll start moving the palettes of secret shit down to construction bay four,’ she said with forced cheer.

Qaqqaq shook her head, and put her helmet on. ‘I want you to see her first. I’m guessing you’re taking her out. I can’t see any other reason why Morosini ordered you in. And I’m guessing I’m going to be your engineer.’

‘Almighty,’ Nbaro muttered. But she couldn’t disagree.

The next hour was like walking through a dream of technology. The Pericles was seventy metres longer than the pinnace; a quick reference via neural lace showed her that this was the maximum size that could dock against the hull of the Athens in the cradle built for the pinnaces, and Nbaro suspected that even now, that cradle was being altered.

The ship lay against the asteroid, supported on the slim towers that Nbaro had helped plant, with umbilicals into the dockyard area and a tube that suggested that the crew compartment was under pressure, and a tent of hard plastic aft, where a work crew was welding in atmosphere. She was matt black, with no markings, the whole exterior a waffle weave of complex carbon-fibre shapes.

‘Not capable of atmosphere,’ Nbaro said.

‘Eh.’ Qaqqaq put her helmet against Nbaro’s for ultimate privacy. ‘Oh, she is. She’s deceptive. Also long-jump capable, and almost invisible to radar, and good against ladar too.’

‘With a tail,’ Nbaro said.

The Pericles was two engines and a bridge. There really wasn’t much more to it. Four bubbles set radially amidships held sensor packages and close-in weapons turrets, and Nbaro already knew that she had a light railgun running co-axially, but everything else aboard was either power, thrust, or computer. There were clamps in recessed positions between the two centreline stations, where she could take a standard cargo cube; even the ultimate in DHC design still had to take cargo. She smiled.

After touring the outer hull, Qaqqaq took her aboard.

‘Almighty, my cockpit is bigger,’ Nbaro said. It wasn’t literally true, but for a ship that was almost two hundred metres long, the cockpit was tiny and the living spaces consisted of four staterooms, each of which was a two-metre cylinder with independent life-support and a storage locker. Each rack doubled as the emergency escape system.

‘Lifeboats,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘Keep us alive for ten days.’

‘Almighty.’ Nbaro’s too-fertile imagination pictured being trapped in the coffin for ten days, waiting, waiting …

She concentrated on the here and now, her stomach queasy from her vision of a long slow death.

Better a ball of fire , she thought.

The galley had four seats, a fold-down table, and a food unit.

‘They’re only sending us because we’re the smallest officers aboard,’ Nbaro said, hoping that humour would banish the nightmare.

Qaqqaq, whose Inuit heritage had kept her stocky and short, nodded. ‘I said the same.’

It was all gleaming and new. The poly-fibre on the galley seats was unworn, untouched. Everything smelled faintly of construction epoxy and titanium welding.

Nbaro wanted to love it, but she was still overwhelmed at every level: overwhelmed by the information flow rate from the neural lace; overwhelmed to think that she would be responsible for this ship; overwhelmed because she didn’t know how to say to Dorcas … to say …

Dorcas probably already knew that she was going to be on the Pericles .

Dorcas … who had volunteered to stay behind …

She blinked.

Then she did the mental equivalent of toggling off the neural lace. It was never fully off, but she could limit the input. Then she opened her faceplate. So did Qaqqaq.

She went forward into the cockpit and put a hand on the back of her acceleration couch. It was her own tiny bridge, and it reminded her of Space Ops after the reconstruction, and she was delighted to see that every instrument casing and every screen was edged in etched bronze; the acanthus leaves scrolled across it like an outburst of the Ancient World across the fertile ground of technology.

‘It’s beautiful.’ Nbaro slithered into the command seat. ‘Beautiful.’

‘We have a week or less to get her to launch,’ Qaqqaq said.

Nbaro smiled. ‘Surely a craft named the Pericles should be a him ?’