7

Stripping out of her EVA suit in the cramped confines of the riggers’ shop on the station, Nbaro decided to find Dorcas immediately. It was her way: to attack things she feared.

Saves time.

For once, finding Dorcas was no harder than leaving the riggers’ shop. He was in the corridor, his very tall form slightly bent in the confined space, looking a little like an ungainly predator in a cage.

But he smiled.

She answered with a smile, and didn’t even have to think about it.

Thea Drake waved from behind Dorcas, and then dropped down a passageway towards the mess with no more communication than a broad wink.

Dorcas loomed. ‘Thea says …’ he began.

Nbaro popped up in the light gravity, kissed him, and then pulled him along.

He laughed, grabbed her in a gargantuan hug, and then pulled her the other way. ‘This way, now. Dukas has moved the crew quarters to make more room for the dockyard …’

His hug almost made her weep. Is this love? she asked herself.

They went up a deck and along a passageway that included a brief section of ice-cold plastic hardwrap and a construction crew installing the ubiquitous carbon-fibre panels. The smell of epoxy was everywhere.

She smiled at him again, her fondness overwhelming, her various anxieties and angers all suddenly unimportant. ‘They just … moved? The crew quarters?’

He smiled back. ‘You helped build the big swing-derrick for the dockyard,’ he said. ‘At some point, they cut the whole crew block free, swung it to here, and they’re still reinstalling it.’

‘You’re not the only one staying behind,’ she said. That trod very close to the dangerous territory, but it came out spontaneously.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Maybe,’ he added enigmatically.

The door to his crew compartment looked unfamiliar: new, black instead of the pale grey-green favoured in the first wave of construction. He tapped the palm plate with his hand and swung the door open, and she was shocked to see how much space he had.

‘This is bigger than the bridge of the Pericles .’ And then she realised that by saying that, she’d started them down the road to Armageddon.

Dorcas pulled his singlet off and looked at her with a set to his jaw that he often wore when he was solving a difficult problem. ‘Thea said we should make love first,’ he said, waving his singlet towards his rack. ‘I believe her view is sound.’

Nbaro laughed. It was a good laugh, and totally genuine, as she could imagine the exact tone in which Thea would make the suggestion, and the serious consideration Dorcas would give it.

‘Usually is,’ she admitted, and unzipped her flightsuit.

‘Now we have to face the music,’ Nbaro said over her elbow. She was holding herself against Dorcas’s rack, and he was embracing her; they were in microgravity, and sudden movement would fling them across the room. Artificial gravity would only be restored when the station’s reconstruction was complete.

Dorcas laughed. ‘I love you.’

She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at his matt-black carbon-fibre bulkhead, which seemed to glow in the soft, warm light of the LED strips.

‘I think I love you, too,’ she said. And then, trying for humour, ‘I certainly ought to love you.’

Dorcas shrugged, something she felt rather than saw.

‘How long have you known I was going to the Pericles ?’ she asked.

‘Since Morosini made the decision,’ he said. ‘It was supposed to be Han.’

That went through her like an electric shock. ‘What happened to Han?’

Dorcas pushed off, and in a very elegant movement, rolled over her, barely touching, and held himself on the other side, so that they were face to face. ‘Everything we discuss here is absolutely privileged and secret,’ he said.

‘I know that, you ninny,’ she said.

‘People have called me a ninny since I went to school, and yet in your mouth I almost like it.’ Dorcas flushed a little.

‘Pisani and Morosini are trying to avoid …’ he began, and stopped.

‘Mutiny?’ she asked.

‘God save us. I hope not. But disquiet and panic and rumour.’

‘There are plenty of rumours,’ she said, and then felt foolish, because there were surveillance devices everywhere on the Athens and on the station, and Morosini would know everything that was said.

Dorcas nodded. ‘There always are. Han was injured when an extremist faction attempted to seize the bridge of the Stealthy Change five days ago. He took several bullets in the arms and chest, and he’s not going to recover for weeks.’

‘Almighty!’ Nbaro spat. ‘PTX barbarians!’ She regretted her outburst as soon as she made it. Dorcas was patriotic but despised jingoism, and she saw his lip curl in distaste.

‘Barbarians they most certainly are not,’ he said pedantically. ‘Their physics is better than ours.’

‘Sorry,’ she agreed. ‘Han …’ I didn’t like him because he was too handsome and too charming, and then he turned out to be a shit-hot pilot and a hero, and now I don’t want him dead.

Like Ko and Suleimani and Indra and Aadavan and …

She made her face relax, forced herself to smile at her lover. The man she loved.

Loved. Stop fucking around, girlie.

‘Regardless,’ he said, banishing his look of distaste, ‘the Pericles was meant for Han. And now he’s wounded. It will still be his when he recovers, but until then, she’s probably yours. And while we’re on full disclosure, I volunteered to stay behind before Morosini told me he was selecting you to command the Pericles .’

‘Ahh,’ she said.

‘We will get home,’ he said. ‘But this is bigger than us. Marca …’ He rolled her. In the very low gravity, they sank a little, slowly, to sit-float together on the edge of the rack. ‘It’s the Starfish. Morosini and I think they wiped out the Circles, a hundred thousand years ago. There are other ways to read the evidence, but that’s the simplest explanation.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She had thought about it. She’d even considered the idea …

What a terrifying idea.

The Starfish are mass murderers.

‘Why trade with us?’ she asked.

‘No idea,’ he said. Words he seldom said. ‘None of it makes sense, and I’m already tired of hearing experts say we cannot predict how aliens think. That’s a cop-out – either they are rational beings, or not. Either way, what we lack is data, and the data is here, and out there.’

‘Yes.’

‘That little twist of fibre you found …’

‘Yes?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t told anyone.’

‘You weren’t the first to find some. One of the crews setting synthacrete found a few metres of the stuff, and we covered that up. But it matches. Now I have two samples with the … Remember the writing? The symbols along the woven edge?’

She looked at him fondly. ‘Do you think I’d forget?’

He sighed. ‘No one I’m working with is as intelligent as you, Nbaro. Except Qaqqaq, and I barely have her attention. Morosini is …’

Nbaro leaned towards him. ‘What?’

He looked away. ‘Sometimes I feel as if Morosini already suspected that the Starfish were behind the genocide,’ he said softly, as if whispering would hide his thoughts from the implant in his head. Or hers.

It was like the moment when they’d ripped Sarah from Nbaro’s arms and thrown her into the lift tube. Her world crashed. She wasn’t sure about anything for a moment.

‘Already knew?’ she asked. ‘Almighty, Dorcas—’

‘I have to stay and talk to the Starfish. If they stay. Feather Dancer is gone …’ He grabbed her hands, a curiously intimate gesture when they were both naked, and he kept her from floating away. ‘I think that the Starfish are getting ready to leave. In a hurry.’

‘What?’ she asked. It was too much, too fast.

‘We did something that spooked them. That, or they know something we don’t. And they have stopped singing where I can hear them – as if …’ He shook his head.

‘If they leave …?’

‘Then there’s no reason for me to stay.’ He nodded. ‘Feather Dancer was our best communicator.’

‘I know,’ she said, mostly so he’d know she had kept up.

‘I’m working on translating the long speech it made when the first PTX ship came in-system. Remember what you said?’

She used the straps to pull herself firmly back down onto the rack and relax her spine. ‘No,’ she admitted.

‘You made a dark jest that it wanted to defect.’ Dorcas looked at her, his eyes wide and bright and penetrating in the room’s warm light. ‘We have factions. Why wouldn’t they? And they’re very old, Marca. Smith’s friend in Science has been working on their DNA analogue. Of course it’s different, but it has many similarities, and one is that he thinks he can track the age of traits, or will be able to, in time. He thinks they’ve been sentient for … well, for aeons. Millions of years. Perhaps hundreds of millions.’

That didn’t rock her. ‘Sure,’ she said. I guessed that when we started looking at chemicals as communications agents.

‘And you brought us a Bubble,’ Dorcas went on.

‘Who’s us, now?’ Nbaro asked.

Dorcas wriggled – a low-gravity shrug. In the process he lost his place on the rack, and floated free, and had to grab Nbaro’s arm to pull himself back. ‘Mostly Morosini and me,’ he admitted. ‘There are others – Agam, Qaqqaq … you. Morosini has been … affected by recent events. He’s … cautious.’

‘Paranoid,’ Nbaro said.

‘Perhaps,’ Dorcas said. ‘Morosini is sufficiently self-aware to experience something like attachment disorder when he’s betrayed. I have reason to know that he hand selected Aadavan – and Aadavan must have been working against him from the beginning. Maybe even was planted.’

Dorcas’s hand, which had grabbed her arm, had begun to wander, apparently of its own accord. It was one of the most human and male reactions she’d ever seen in him. She smiled as he stroked her, casually, gracefully.

‘Hey,’ she said, taking control of his hand. ‘So you’re staying to talk to the Starfish, and to find out if we’re trading with a race of mass murderers.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘While you are going to jump off into the Deep Black.’

‘The Athens is,’ she said. But even as she said it, she knew that wasn’t what he meant.

‘I think that was Pisani’s original intent,’ Dorcas said. ‘But now I think Morosini means to send the Pericles. Or he did until the PTX ships came in-system. I’m not sure what he intends now.’

‘Almighty,’ she said. It was a little like being kicked in the gut.

He looked at her, eyes bright, penetrating, loving. All at once. ‘There’s more. Morosini is … uncharacteristically reticent about sharing this.’ He was nervous – not a normal state for Dorcas. But he went on. ‘The Bubble you took prisoner … She speaks Italian. And Anglatin, and Mandarin.’

Nbaro was reeling.

‘So her kind – the Hin, as they call themselves – have been in contact with the diaspora out to Anti-spinward.’

She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling, for the first time, naked. ‘In contact long enough to learn our languages.’ Then she said ‘Hin,’ testing the word, sounding it out. That’s what they call themselves. So we’re talking to them.

Dorcas put an arm around her. ‘The prisoner has asked for you. Morosini believes that in Hin society, you have some relationship, as you captured her.’

‘Almighty,’ she muttered, for the sixth or seventh time. An instructor at the Orphanage had once commented to her class that people who used the same swear words over and over were unoriginal and unintelligent. Or in a state of shock , she thought. She’d allowed herself to almost forget the eyes behind the faceplate. Had they been eyes? If so, there had been too many of them. Or was that her imagination?

‘If … you can make contact with the Hin …’ Dorcas said, and then went on with more confidence. ‘Assuming that you make contact with the Hin, you will be in a position to support or deny anything I have learned from the Starfish.’

Nbaro was breathing hard, as if she’d been in a fight. Her heart was racing.

‘Let me get this right,’ she said. ‘Morosini hasn’t told me this yet, but he’s sending me in an untried and experimental small craft to make contact with hostile aliens to corroborate our belief that the Starfish are genocidal.’

Dorcas raised an eyebrow. ‘Well put.’

The challenge of it lit her like a lamp, while the terror of it threatened her equilibrium. ‘Why doesn’t he tell me himself?’

‘I believe you are on “Full Privacy” in your neural net,’ Dorcas said carefully.

I’m an idiot , she admitted privately.

His hand was roaming again, and all the nervous tension, the elation of the whole idea, the terror …

‘And I’ll leave it that way a little while longer,’ she said, which was as close to seduction as she was ever likely to come.

Nbaro was still learning to enjoy sex; it was something she had to wrestle with, in that she found she looked forward to it, and yet had … issues with it. She didn’t like the way it controlled her. And, on the other hand, she’d never imagined that it was so much fun. At the Orphanage, it had mostly been a protest: forbidden, and thus required.

Horatio Dorcas, for all his bookish ways, seemed to know how to please her, and seemed to enjoy pleasing her, and had no inhibitions that she could find; a massive change from her partners at the Orphanage.

And she couldn’t stop her mind from whirling on its merry way, even when …

When …

Sabina pinged in her head.

‘Battle stations!’ Nbaro said, pushing Dorcas away. The gravity was almost non-existent, so he slammed into the overhead a little harder than she’d meant. But he was already moving for his black flightsuit, pushing off the overhead like a swimmer turning in a pool while she climbed down the acceleration couch.

Dorcas was not embarrassed by their nudity. He smiled at her, his bare feet tucked under a restraining strap as he wriggled into his underwear. ‘Some day,’ he said, ‘we’re going to make love with gravity and a bed.’ He didn’t seem worried by the alarm blaring from the loudspeaker. ‘And time.’

She fastened her nicest bra, deep in her neural lace, looking at the ladar/radar overlays on her system repeater.

‘The Behemoth is dropping her lines to the rock,’ she said. ‘Not sure why we’re at battle stations.’

Dorcas had his flightsuit zipped up and was forcing his feet into boots. ‘Someone’s being cautious.’

Then both of them were still, reaching out into the data field.

There was no sign of a new intruder entering the Trade Point system. The Stealthy Change was still decelerating, and had just received a fuel load scooped by a Flight Two heavy shuttle. Lieutenant Commander Han was listed as returning from the Stealthy Change on that shuttle. She noted that he was stable and improving.

Professional lust for the Pericles warred with her liking for Han and her desire to return to normal life with her Flight. Routine.

The battle stations alarm stopped, and the alert vanished from both of their neural laces.

She sighed. ‘We should go to work,’ she said.

The next three days flew by. Fitting out the Pericles occupied most of her work day, as she – and she alone – was cleared to install the tail that had been designed by Captain Dukas after she’d been allowed to examine the PTX technology.

But she also took part in several trading sessions; Morosini had ordained that she do so, without explanation. She stood several watches with the exchange team, and found she missed Feather Dancer’s frothy tendrils.

On the second day she was on with Dorcas and Commander Jha. He handled the direct aspects of the trade; he, too, was part of a consortium, and it was his turn. She was in the comms lab with Dorcas. Her little alarm went off and she spotted the damaged cerata of Bentnick.

‘Have we tried asking them where Feather Dancer went?’ she said.

Dorcas looked up from his console with something very like annoyance. ‘If I knew how to express such a complex situation as a past tense and a direction, I’d ask,’ he said. ‘But we don’t even know the being’s proper name.’

Nbaro took a deep breath, the scent of ammonia creeping into everything. She could smell the faint tang of ammonia even when she was in her spacecraft. Her throat was always sore.

‘Do we know the word for trade ? she asked.

Dorcas made a vague head-shaking motion. ‘Yesss … I’m fairly certain I know that chemical compound.’

‘When Jha is done, can we say A pleasure to trade with you to Bentnick?’

Dorcas played with some combinations while she loaded the airlock with a preset trade from one of the New London combines.

‘Pleasure …’ He shrugged. ‘That’s a difficult concept, even among human cultures. On the other hand, I’m almost certain that each creature that has been greeted by the robot starfish we built has answered with the same set-piece phrase in audible and chemical, which means something like my pleasure . I think so, because I believe I’ve isolated the my part … I wasn’t trained as a linguist, damn it!’

‘Do we have a linguist?’ she asked.

‘No. Major Darkstar is cross-trained as a cryptographer,’ Dorcas said. ‘As am I. We’ll get there. And this is worth trying – we’ll see from the response whether we have gibberish or a real phrase.’

‘Do you think that Major Darkstar is making headway with the—’ Nbaro was sometimes stunned by the speed with which Dorcas could move. One moment he was sitting at his console, and the next he was behind her, a hand over her mouth.

‘Imagine that the Starfish aren’t our friends,’ he said very quietly. ‘Imagine they have technology we absolutely do not understand, and that we don’t know when we’re bugged.’

She imagined it immediately. And further imagined that Morosini didn’t want the Starfish to know about the Hin.

I’m an idiot.

‘Ahh,’ she said. ‘Well,’ she went on, leaning her weight suddenly back into him. ‘Damn it.’ She paused, because below them at the edge of the trade lock, Commander Jha had just rapped his knuckles three times on the xenoglas panel that separated them from the Starfish. ‘Do we … always knock on the glass when we’re ready to trade?’

Dorcas froze.

Nbaro brought up the cameras on her neural lace and ran the main ‘trade’ camera back sixty seconds, and then asked the AI to find her other examples of this behaviour. She saw ten different episodes of people knocking on the glass, always to indicate that the airlock was set for exchange.

‘Damnation,’ Dorcas muttered in real space.

The next day, she ‘watched’ the Pericles get her first fuel load while she was floating inside the main avionics system cube, inserting leads into prepared, colour-coded plugs in the order laid out by Mpono, who was talking to her directly from the Athens with a brief time lag. The one-second delay in comms was somehow more frustrating than a longer delay might have been; every time Nbaro didn’t understand, she’d say ‘Wait!’ and that would clash with Mpono’s next direction.

She was about a third of the way through the job of attaching the tail to the main avionics components when Mpono said, ‘Wait one.’

Nbaro blinked, rubbed her lower back, and then Thea Drake tabbed her.

You will want to see this.

She followed Thea’s link.

The so-called Behemoth , the gigantic Starfish ship that dwarfed even their mighty greatship, was moving into an orbit over one of the moons of Beta Prime – the very moon that had emitted radio and micro-waves while the shuttles were scooping the gas giant.

Something came up out of the soup of the moon’s atmosphere.

Since Nbaro had a live link to Mpono, she said, ‘What are we watching here, Smoke?’

Mpono’s voice was excited. ‘Nothing we’ve seen before, according to Morosini.’

Morosini appeared on her neural link. ‘I am sensing precursor signals that, in the past, have indicated preparations for departure from station by the two smaller Starfish ships. ’

‘Is that on schedule?’ she asked.

‘We have a reasonable load of xenoglas ,’ Morosini answered. ‘In fact, a large load. Under ordinary circumstances, this would be a very profitable voyage. ’

For the rest of her working day, she peeked from time to time at the massive Starfish ship parked in orbit over the ammonia-ocean moon. Seven more objects rose out of the ammonia sea to rendezvous with the Behemoth . Ladar mensuration said that these objects, which were being called shuttles, were themselves several kilometres in diameter.

Nbaro continued to move through the very tight confines of the avionics cube, checking her wiring and then using her neural lace to watch new components bind into the avionics system. Everything worked except one black box that was supposed to allow for direct transfer of data from passive detectors to the targeting system. It would not integrate.

‘Fuck,’ Mpono said. ‘That’s one of mine. I hope it’s a code problem and not something I built in. Unplug it.’

Nbaro did. Then she ran diagnostics on everything from the ladar to the synthetic aperture radar, noting that each managed to display correctly both on screens in the cockpit and on her neural lace.

‘That silver worm inside your head is going to give you a massive advantage, Nbaro,’ Mpono said. ‘I worry, though. Scanning screens keeps you alive. How do you scan screens inside your head?’

Nbaro thought that was a good question. She wished that she had had some formal training on her neural lace, the way Dorcas obviously had. And she had questions about her lace – lots of questions.

Why do I have one? Why was I not told?

She didn’t want to revert to the Marca Nbaro of Orphanage days, but she had lots of questions that tended towards paranoia.

And Dorcas thought that Morosini already suspected the Starfish of committing a genocide.

Nbaro could think while she ran diagnostics; it was very routine work. And her thoughts were dark. She thought about a vast conspiracy across the DHC and PTX that involved hundreds, if not thousands of people, working to …

What? What do they want?

And what does Morosini want?

And Dorcas thought that the Starfish could just turn off the xenoglas. Again, she saw the bubble over San Marco exploding out with decompression, heard the vanishing screams, the shattering glass …

‘Hey, Nbaro?’ Mpono asked. ‘Your breathing is getting pretty rapid. You OK?’

Nbaro drove the image away. ‘Yes, tir.’

‘You have the cabin pressure indicator?’

Nbaro took a deep breath. ‘Green and good.’

‘I’m going to need you to look at the engineering panel. We’ve automated some things that are usually handled by a flight engineer. Ready?’

Nbaro fell back into the routine, and compartmented her thoughts away from paranoia.

‘They’re evacuating,’ Dorcas said. He and Nbaro were both fully dressed because the Athens had ordered a heightened state of alert. Nbaro was aware that every human asset was running silent throughout the system now, but no one – including Dorcas – was telling her why.

‘The Starfish?’ she asked. She’d been asleep until fifteen minutes earlier and the first bulb of coffee wasn’t having its usual effect yet.

‘The Behemoth is evacuating the whole population of the system,’ Dorcas said. ‘She’s on her third moon.’

‘That’s not good,’ Nbaro said. They were in the galley. The station had morphed again, making the human habitable area larger and flatter. The galley now included the seating that had once been a sort of lounge. And the crew of the station was down to just twenty-four, as the shipyard was complete and so was the Pericles . The two railgun turrets had never been installed. Nbaro noted that with some interest.

‘Are we still trading?’ she asked.

‘Until the Starfish leave, we’re still trading,’ Dorcas said.

She didn’t want to ask, but she did anyway. ‘And you’re still staying?’

Dorcas got up and fetched each of them another bulb of coffee. ‘I don’t know.’ He was seldom bitter, but today, he made a face as if he’d drunk something bad. ‘I just don’t know. And not knowing seems worse. If they’re leaving, what the hell am I staying for?’

She smiled and they touched hands.

Two hours later, she still couldn’t get the black box from the passive detection systems to mate with her weapons, but she had managed to trip a hydraulics pump and squirt about a litre of something bright blue and sticky across her clean new avionics bay. The clean-up was like a living demonstration of the power of entropy. And she was covered in blue goo.

‘Starfish Tango Sierra 0–1–9 and X-ray Alpha 0–2–4 are preparing to undock,’ said a voice in her neural lace. It wasn’t Morosini; it was Dorcas. He sounded rattled.

‘That’s not unexpected, right?’ she returned.

‘They put a 130-kilo load of xenoglas into the airlock and left without trading,’ Dorcas reported.

‘Where are you?’

‘In the Starfish language centre.’

She hadn’t meant to snap at him, but she did. ‘So someone got some free xenoglas? Look, I’m fucking covered in oily blue crap and I’m way behind.’

‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘It is an anomaly.’

‘I don’t like hydraulic fluid,’ she snapped, and cut the link.

A minute later she felt guilty, and five minutes later, when she’d isolated the almost impossible sequence that had allowed her to sever a very small hydraulics line, she relented.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We have a situation,’ he sent back.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Feather Dancer is in the ammonia lock,’ he said.

‘What?’ she asked, but she understood immediately. ‘Fuck, that’s not good.’

‘I’m trying to get the robot …’

She flicked over to her Space Ops repeater, and then clicked to encrypted direct comms. She still found one-on-one comms via the lace very tiring.

‘Horatio?’ she asked. She felt a heavy thump , and then a second thump , right through her little ship.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Both Starfish ships have detached. You feel that? They’re breaking away.’

‘Damnation,’ he said. ‘They left Feather Dancer behind.’

She was flooded with suspicions at once, almost overwhelming her ability to use the lace, as well as a heavy burst of adrenaline.

‘No,’ she said.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Feather Dancer is defecting.’

There was a pause. She was already moving to the cockpit.

‘We need to get off this station,’ Dorcas said. ‘But damn it, how do we get Feather Dancer off? And where do we put it?’

It was rare to hear Dorcas flustered. Or to be ahead of him. Maybe because she’d lain awake thinking about the Starfish …

‘Put Feather Dancer in the ammonia clearing tank,’ she said. ‘It’ll hold a Starfish for several hours.’

Morosini appeared. ‘We are evacuating the station ,’ he said.

The Battle Stations alert came on. Nbaro threw herself into her acceleration couch, blue goo and all, and began a preflight check.

‘I can take Feather Dancer and the whole ammonia tank,’ she said. She tried to visualise it in her neural lace. This was the part at which she lacked skill, but she managed a rough sketch showing the ammonia overflow tank clipped into her cargo area. ‘Morosini, the xenoglas panels can hold the pressure while I’m in hard vacuum. Temperature is a problem, so I won’t have much time. If I punch it, I can get to the Athens in …’ She let the lace do the work. ‘… forty minutes at three gees.’

‘That’s a lot of time for a Starfish to be in a four-by-four metre ammonia tank. In hard vacuum.’ Dorcas sounded apologetic. ‘I’m not sure …’

‘We will move the Athens closer ,’ Morosini said. ‘Do it. ’

Nbaro tabbed Qaqqaq and tabbed, Are you following this?

Qaqqaq replied by grunting on an encrypted channel that opened like magic. ‘I’m supposed to reinforce the ammonia holding tank for immediate lifting while simultaneously evacuating the station,’ she snapped.

Nbaro was on the Space Ops display.

‘Lioness, this is Pericles , do you copy?’ she said.

Cortez came back, slightly nasal, and excited. ‘Roger, Pericles . I have a clean signal. Over.’

‘Lioness, this is Pericles . I have room for …’ She looked back into the crew compartment. ‘… four in acceleration couches. I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to do this trip without a couch, over.’

‘Pericles , I have you for four. Wait one.’

She knew that Cortez was very busy. Everyone was busy except her. She was already aboard her craft, and she only wished that she had her bag, which was packed by the door of her tiny cubicle.

And my flight jacket.

She could just imagine explaining to Morosini that she’d gone back for her flight jacket. Instead, she tabbed Akunje. Wilson, I need a favour.

A little busy right now, ma’am. He shut her out.

She sighed and began to pull on her EVA suit. But she stopped, stripped off the hydraulics-soaked flightsuit, and then put her EVA suit on. That felt much better.

Her tab beeped and her sub-AI Sabina said, ‘Bogey inbound .’

Her tiny window looked out on a real space, like a cockpit window, and there was a sudden flash. Nbaro was very happy she wasn’t looking at the source. She reached up, got her helmet from the overhead, pulled it on, toggled the cheek plates closed with a hiss and slapped her visor down, all while trying to read various sensory inputs.

She lay back, let her suit mate with the seat, and dropped into the data stream.

The raw data was instantly interpreted and provided to her with an overlay from the familiar but vastly oversimplified Space Ops screens that had once been her sole information access point. Now she could scroll through the second-by-second returns from the thousands of radar and ladar emitters and passive detection arrays throughout the system, reading their distance/time lag and factoring the vector of the returns.

‘Almighty,’ she spat in real time.

Weeks of practice had allowed her to create a virtual environment that helped her process the data. In her datasphere, she stood at the centre of a hemispheric shape that encompassed her whole arc of vision. Of course, it was itself a model, but that was how she’d chosen to display her data. She had a variable number of data bubbles, some imitating holographs, some imitating flat screens. Trial and error had taught her that thirty independent data streams were the most that she could handle, and that was when she was well fed and rested and at the top of her game. Most of the time, nine or ten was the most she could handle. When she was tired, she looked at the refined feeds of various repeater systems; when she was fresh, she read the data directly.

Here, cocooned in the neural lace and the computer systems of the Pericles , she concentrated on the space around the station and the system-wide situation as reported by the Athens . She had the Space Ops repeater in front of her virtual face, but she also had the live feeds from dozens, if not hundreds, of sensors scattered like seeds by an ancient farmer – tossed out by every spaceship that had flown during the last two weeks. Qaqqaq’s brilliant inventions, giving them a massive advantage in information flow.

And her virtual data flow showed her …

… that one hundred and seventy seconds ago, the great Starfish ship they called the Behemoth had fired its main engines and risen smoothly out of its most recent orbit. The vast ship had dropped one of the huge spheres it had been loading, casting away an object the size of an asteroid as if it was junk. Umbilicals had broken free as the Behemoth pulled away from the spherical shuttle, and she had vented gas or liquid that refraction instantly revealed as ammonia. This action had provoked the Athens Tactical Action Officer to punch his Battle Stations button.

In seconds the Behemoth was driving for the asteroid belt, her rate of acceleration somewhere between incredible and absurd, especially considering that the DHC’s intel estimated she massed half again what the Athens massed.

As the enormous Starfish ship bolted, about one hundred seconds earlier, the two smaller ships had broken free of the station. They had done so with so much force that Nbaro had felt it in real time, through her hips. On replay, she watched as they imparted a slight wobble to the asteroid’s steady rotation. Both of them had fired their engines before breaking away.

It was an insane manoeuvre. The station was venting a plume of ammonia from the Starfish side … all that had happened a minute earlier.

Three Hin ships had dropped into reality ten seconds later, just above the system’s ecliptic and moving fast. They didn’t arrive out by the comet belt, as Pisani had predicted, and they didn’t prowl; they came in like a cavalry charge.

But Morosini – or perhaps Pisani , Nbaro thought – was playing a canny game. The only energy passing through space was informational: comms and bursts of radar and ladar from remote sensors. The Hin ships had energy shields, and Nbaro had the leisure to see what a giveaway they were, glowing like miniature suns as they shot after the fleeing Behemoth .

One of the Hin ships fired a lance of fire at an asteroid. One of the dozen or so stationary emitters acting as the Athens went off the air.

Then a fourth Hin ship had appeared: it had either been bolder or more foolish, and had emerged into real space and vanished in a flash of blue-white light that suggested the near perfect transfer of matter to energy.

Hit an asteroid? Nbaro guessed, but stayed with the action as the lead Hin opened fire, the plasma carrier-beam of her main armament striking the Behemoth . A system full of sensors helped her estimate the range; the particle beam was travelling across an incredible nine thousand kilometres of space, a lot farther than their theoretical estimate.

The two smaller Starfish ships emitted massive pulses of energy. It was like watching the flash of a mirror on a cloudless day, but neither Nbaro nor the overlay from the AI could tell her what weapon the Starfish warships had used.

A wall of clutter began to emerge from the asteroid belt – like a three-dimensional line of blindness. Nbaro had seldom been outside the clutter-field looking in, and it was remarkably effective. She read it at a glance; the Athens hadn’t just studded the asteroid belt with sensors, but also with chaff dispensers and sand casters. It formed a smokescreen on a godlike scale, covering a deep band of sky and almost a third of the horizon. The Starfish ships accelerated towards what looked like a wall of nothingness – the end of the universe, a vast and threatening cloud. It was like dark magic.

The Hin thought so, too. The three ships, each separated by about three thousand kilometres, turned as one at about 11 g . They powered off on a new vector, almost straight up above the ecliptic. All three reached out with their plasma beams, which Nbaro saw as pale green lines in a darkness.

All three fired at separate targets. One hit the station, striking the asteroid somewhere in the Starfish side. The other two were shooting at targets that she couldn’t identify and could only hope were decoys. Then all three fired on the Behemoth .

None of the DHC armaments had loosed a shot. None of the Athens spaceframes had revealed themselves; no torpedoes had been launched. But the clutter-field was threatening in its immensity and the relative mystery of its appearance, and the Hin ran from it.

The Behemoth ship went through the wall of chaff and vanished, but it had taken damage and was trailing gas and debris like a comet. Its escorts unleashed whatever hellish energy weapon they carried for a second time, and followed.

It all happened in front of her augmented senses.

Morosini said, ‘Do not engage! ’

Command, the rarely used frequency that overrode all other comms, spoke. It was Pisani.

‘Do not engage. Repeat, do not engage.’

Nbaro was intrigued to see that even the radio message went out from a dozen in-system repeaters, not from the Athens .

The three Hin ships were vectoring straight up from Nbaro’s perspective, and she guessed they were trying to get a look around the clutter-field. Beyond it, the Starfish ships were lost to her instruments.

Why aren’t we shooting back?

Another particle beam struck the rock, this one less than a kilometre away. The asteroid was venting ammonia in three places: two from particle beam hits, and one where a Starfish ship had apparently left their airlock open on purpose.

To kill Feather Dancer?

The result was that the rock began to tumble in space. It wasn’t moving fast … but the venting ammonia was acting like a rocket engine. Three rocket engines.

‘Morosini, did the Starfish intend to blow Trade Point?’

‘I fear that it looks that way. ’

The venting ammonia would tip the rock enough to cause it to fall in towards one of the stars, or so it appeared to Nbaro.

Qaqqaq’s voice crackled in her earpiece. ‘OK, Nbaro. The walls on the ammonia container are double-thickness already. I think it’ll hold up to hard vacuum and I think that the insulating property will keep our guest warm for … two hours? Maybe?’

Dorcas came on the same encrypted channel. ‘We don’t know how long Feather Dancer can tolerate extreme cold.’

‘Doesn’t ammonia freeze?’ Nbaro asked.

‘At minus seventy-seven degrees Celsius,’ Qaqqaq said.

‘What if we ran pipes around the outside?’ Nbaro asked. ‘Warm pipes?’

‘We’re not coming back here, right?’ Qaqqaq asked.

Dorcas sounded sad. ‘Maybe not ever.’

Qaqqaq’s voice was confident. ‘Then I’ve got a plan, though I can’t promise the ammonia won’t go sour, or whatever, from Feather Dancer breathing it. I don’t have an oxygenator that will work in ammonia.’

‘Someone better get to work on that over in the Athens ,’ Dorcas said. ‘Damnation! What do they eat?’

‘I have two Flight Two shuttles inbound,’ Nbaro said. ‘Commander Jha is on the line with Space Operations, planning the load-out of our xenoglas and everyone’s kit. What’s my timeline, Naisha?’

‘I need forty minutes,’ the engineer said.

Nbaro was watching the three Hin ships. They were thousands of kilometres away, and her simulation said that they would see the fleeing Starfish again …

All three Hin ships fired their beam weapons, and there was a flash, like the death of a distant sun, and then one of them was gone – an expanding radioactive cloud on instruments. Simultaneously, something cataclysmic happened beyond the clutter-field: a pulse that showed right through the cracks in the expanding sensory wall.

Forty minutes was a long time in a space battle, and Nbaro was doing nothing. It wasn’t helped by the fact that no one else she knew was doing anything, except the crew of the station, who were all packing, and the pilots of the Flight Two shuttles. They’d dropped away from the Athens with a strong electromagnetic push, and didn’t light their engines until they’d given their mother ship plausible deniability.

On the other hand, she had forty minutes.

‘Morosini, I have forty minutes until Qaqqaq clears me to lift the Starfish,’ she sent. ‘I’m going to get my kit.’

Morosini didn’t deign to answer. Nbaro was out of her cockpit and out of her ship in seconds, moving in zero g to the hatch, cycling the airlock …

Inside the station, everyone was deceptively calm. It was likely that, lacking neural laces, they didn’t even know they’d been under fire from beam weapons. There was no artificial gravity, and Nbaro left her helmet on, bouncing down one passageway and up the next, past the new galley, and into the corridor of her own space. People were moving with efficiency; no one seemed to be panicking.

She got her hatch open and got her carbine, her precious sword and armour, and her kitbag. She passed Gunny Drun in the corridor heading out; he was in a power-assisted suit, the servos whining as he walked.

‘Ms Nbaro!’ he said. ‘I’m on your ship.’

‘You’ll need a pressure suit,’ she said.

‘Roger that.’

As it turned out, she had Qaqqaq, Drun, Dorcas and Akunje. They were to be the last people off the station.

She dropped into her hatch and filed her flight plan from her acceleration couch. Then she watched Qaqqaq on her VR as she and two engineering techs turned the ammonia overflow tank into a sealed, airtight box with a space heater run from a generator that fitted in a four-by-four metre shipping container. It was a lesson in tool use and efficiency, and Nbaro didn’t interrupt.

Sometimes she’d watch Dorcas as he packed the robots into their cases, and his lab equipment and the chemical sniffer, the various computers …

… on to pallets.

‘Ready for the forklift,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘We’re going to move the Starfish last, so we can get everything and everyone else out first, and so it’s not freezing in vacuum any longer than it needs. I have no idea if that little space heater is going to help at all. This isn’t engineering! This is guesswork.’

The first Flight Two bird came in hot, thrusters firing all the way to docking, a so-called ‘shit-hot’ manoeuvre. The techs and spacers from the station had the whole bird loaded in ten minutes – incredibly fast work for the participants, agonisingly slow to the observers.

Ten thousand klicks above their heads, the two surviving Hin ships had changed vector to pursue the Starfish, both firing their beam weapons and receiving fire. The Athens and her complement continued to sit tight.

Seconds after the Flight Two shuttle burned its way in, a beam weapon struck the asteroid. It missed the cargo shuttle by perhaps two hundred metres. The only immediately visible result was the rock splitting and boiling away under the power of the beam, so that wisps of what looked like smoke, and were probably powdered asteroid, rose to mark the location of the impact.

Nbaro was watching.

‘Heads up, folks,’ she said. ‘We’re under fire from the Bubbles.’

Then she was on with the Tactical Action Officer on board the Athens , explaining that the local instruments had seen the carrier beam and she’d located the impact. There was a three-second delay as her messages bounced around the system to the Athens .

A little less than a minute later, one of the Hin ships rolled end for end, and fired.

The whole asteroid shook.

‘What the hell was that?’ Qaqqaq asked.

Nbaro was chewing her lip with impatience and frustration. ‘A weapon,’ she said. ‘Something coaxial.’ Nbaro was sure Dorcas had told her that the beam weapons had a maximum range of five thousand kilometres, based on the laws of quantum physics. She was more than a little disappointed in him.

‘Very helpful.’ Qaqqaq was dismissive.

The cargo bird announced its departure on the Space Ops frequency, fired her thrusters, and banked away as if fired from a gauss gun. Immediately the second ship came in from where she’d lurked over the asteroid’s horizon. Her pilot knew her business, and got her into the docking bay with considerably less display.

‘Loading the last kit now,’ Drun reported to her on the Marine frequency. ‘Akunje is on his way down to our passenger. I’m ready to come aboard.’

‘Come on down, Gunny,’ she said.

She heard the airlock cycle, and then she heard the servos on Drun’s armour.

‘Never thought I’d use combat armour as a wheelchair,’ he said.

In armour, he could just lie on an acceleration couch and plug in. And he did.

The Hin ships had split up, and the closest ship was now headed for them.

Again, the rock trembled.

‘I really don’t like waiting,’ Nbaro said.

Drun laughed – not a happy laugh, just a sort of ‘life is like this’ laugh. ‘Ma’am, I’ve been under mortar fire and I’ve been shot at with drones. No matter who the fuck does it, sitting on your ass being shot at sucks.’

‘Roger that, Gunny.’ She was trying to get Dorcas to answer her. And worrying.

Another hit.

‘Shootin’ from ten thousand klicks,’ Drun said. ‘So a hundredth of a degree or so there, just the distortion of an optical lens, means a difference of hundreds of metres down here.’ He grunted. ‘They ain’t that good.’

‘Yeah, Gunny,’ Nbaro said. ‘I think about this stuff, too. Like, why aren’t they better? They’ve had hundreds of thousands of years …’

Drun snorted. ‘Not enough Marines, ma’am.’

She laughed. It was a completely genuine laugh. And she thought, If I survive this, by God, that’s how I’ll tell the story. About Drun. Not about being scared and afraid for my lover. But about Marines .

She tabbed Dorcas again .

He didn’t answer.

‘Lioness to Alpha Bravo 2–0–3, I have you good for lift-off from station,’ came Cortez’s voice.

‘I have thirteen aboard, plus equipment. I’ll give you a landing weight en route.’

‘Roger, 2–0–3.’

Nbaro watched the thrusters fire.

‘Just us now, Gunny,’ she said. She tabbed Qaqqaq. Let’s get out of here.

‘… at …’ spat the comms.

Akunje came up. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘I think we have a problem.’

Nbaro’s blood chilled.

‘Tell me.’

‘That last incoming round baked the passageway to the trade area. I’m standing in hard vac looking at a smoking crater. On the other side, I can see light, and Qaqqaq waving.’

Nbaro began to link to cameras on her neural lace, even as her stomach sank away from her ribs. ‘Akunje, do you see Dorcas?’

There was a long delay. ‘No, ma’am. Just Qaqqaq.’

‘Pericles , I need you to get your ass out of there,’ the TAO broke in. ‘We’re manoeuvring towards you, but that second ship can see us now.’

‘We have personnel missing,’ she said. ‘Mr Dorcas is not accounted for, over?’

Pisani came on over Command. ‘Ms Nbaro, I am sorry, but I must order you to leave the station as soon as you can. The ship depends on it.’

‘Aye aye, Master,’ she said. Dorcas! she screamed inside.

‘Akunje, can you get to Qaqqaq?’

‘That’s a negative, ma’am. It’s a deep, smoking crater. Sides are glass smooth.’ He sounded scared.

‘Can you get back to me?’ she asked.

‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘On my way.’

She was scanning cameras. Finally, she wrestled control of the camera that was watching the Starfish away from the computer system and panned it.

There was Qaqqaq. And there, on the floor, was Dorcas. He wasn’t moving.

Nbaro tried everything over the next sixty seconds while she waited for Akunje to come to the airlock: prayer, memory, even a little meditation. And watching the alien ship on her neural lace. None of it distracted her. Dorcas lay on the deck of the trade area like … a corpse. Sprawled in his vac suit. And the area under him reflected light like liquid.

It was a long sixty seconds.

Qaqqaq heard the camera moving behind her and turned to look.

Nbaro ran the camera back and forth, up and down.

Qaqqaq waved.

Nbaro said, ‘Morosini, if we have any microphones working in the trade spaces, I need access.’

‘None. I am sorry, Marca. ’

Qaqqaq was pointing at Dorcas. Nbaro made herself see that as hopeful.

She heard Akunje at the airlock, and cycled it for him.

‘Wilson,’ she said as soon as he was in, ‘listen up. I’m going to fly us over the pit. You are going to drop down and communicate with Qaqqaq. If you can, get Dorcas. He’s unconscious – maybe dead. Qaqqaq needs to make it possible for me to lift the tank straight out of there. Blow the roof – whatever it takes. Understand me?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Akunje was enthusiastic, and she loved him for it.

‘Qaqqaq will need something to open that roof,’ she said.

‘Ma’am, I have four shaped charges.’

She managed a smile. ‘Best news I’ve heard all day.’

She took Akunje through it twice, and then she fired her thrusters and attitude jets, running the ship by wire through her neural inputs, scarcely bothering to watch what the computer did; it was her trusted crew, and she had other problems. The computer lifted her beautiful ship out of the cradle for the first time. She flew it while looking at the claws on the underside of her ship: the clamps that could accept a four-by-four metre crate, or a number of weapons or electronic warfare suites. There were four clamps; she could open and close them, and she tested them now, in flight.

The little ship was already over the crater from the beam strike. There was a

FLASH

and her external cameras were blind. By nothing but good luck, her eyes had been on the Space Ops screen and she wasn’t blind. Her ship was buffeted, as if a giant hand had picked her up and moved her through space.

Her neural lace saved them. She had so many inputs – so many ways of watching her environment – and she was getting used to using them, so that her perception of the universe around her never faltered, and the bright flash was reduced, in a millisecond, to data.

Which was good, because almost all of her port-side sensors were gone.

So was most of the human-constructed portion of the station. All their work destroyed …

‘Another hit,’ she said.

Pisani said, ‘Nbaro, I really can’t afford to lose that ship.’

Nbaro turned her ship until she had starboard-side cameras on the rump of the station. There was the original crater, the one that Akunje couldn’t get around. And there was the still-lit window of the airtight hatch into the trade area.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I have a shot at this, and it’s for our new guest, and Qaqqaq, and Dorcas. I think it’s worth the risk.’

She had a good long look. ‘Wilson? You got this?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Gunny showed me a rig. I’m going to descend on a wire from the airlock. Got that?’

‘Sounds … great. Gunny, you buttoned up?’

‘Roger that, ma’am.’

She got the attitude she wanted: slightly nose down, so she could see out of her cockpit window. It wouldn’t have been possible without a computer; the whole rock was tumbling, in all three dimensions, but with a little modelling help from the onboard AI she managed to keep them steady over Akunje’s drop zone.

She double-checked Drun was in his helmet and buttoned up, and then vented the cockpit atmosphere into storage bottles so they could get out of there as fast as possible.

She couldn’t see Akunje descend; it seemed to take a long time.

‘I hate waiting,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ Drun said. ‘I fucking hate not being out there.’

She agreed. Maybe I should have become a Marine.

Then she saw movement, and in five seconds, Akunje was at the hatch into the trade area, moving carefully around the pit where part of the human hab had been. Inside they had atmosphere but no airlock, and Akunje didn’t have a portable. Or any time. She saw him put his helmet against the hatch, and then she heard him speaking to Qaqqaq.

‘I’m coming in. The air’s going to vent hard. Hold on to something.’

There was a long pause. She had time to query the Athens net via her neural lace, learn that the enemy beam weapon seemed to have a reliable recycle rate. She started a timer.

‘Here we go,’ Akunje said.

Then: ‘I’ve blown the hatch. I have Mr Dorcas secured.’

Nbaro found that she was biting her lower lip, and she stopped herself.

‘I’m waiting for Lieutenant Qaqqaq, and then we’re all coming up together. She’s opening the roof.’

‘I’ve got the winch,’ Drun said.

There was an interminable wait.

Finally, Pisani said, ‘Nbaro. You have to move. No matter who we lose.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said cheerfully.

‘Damn it, Nbaro!’ Pisani said. ‘Don’t make me do this.’

‘Sixty seconds, sir.’ She was proud of her voice: assertive, cheerful. She was pretending that she was Wilson Akunje, a man who never seemed to be anything but cheerful. Her timer said the beam weapon was about thirty seconds from firing.

Drun said ‘I have a tug. I’m running it.’ After a pause, he said, ‘At least I’m doing something.’

She couldn’t hear the winch run, but the vibration could be felt throughout the cockpit.

Drun was now in the airlock, looking down. ‘We have all three of them,’ he said. ‘I have Qaqqaq aboard. I have Akunje … I have Dorcas. Outer hatch closed …’

Nbaro was already manoeuvring. Qaqqaq dived into the co-pilot’s seat. Nbaro, full of specialised knowledge from having built this little ship herself, reached out, took a comms plug from the overhead, and pulled it down to physically link Qaqqaq to the ship.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘Charges will fire in ten seconds.’ Her helmeted head turned. ‘And if you see any ammonia boil up, well, then we cooked our Starfish.’

Nbaro watched the countdown on her neural lace, but she was already putting the cargo claws over the room even as the digits said 2, 1 … The other countdown – the one that showed the alien beam weapon’s recycle rate – was at 7, 6 …

There was nothing in hard vacuum to convey the force of an explosion, or the heat or sound. The four charges and some explosive cord provided a flash of light, and then the entire roof of the trade area blasted away, struck her ship’s unretracted landing gear a glancing blow and spun off into space.

Nbaro didn’t have a functioning belly camera. But she did have a neural lace, and she did have the functioning camera that hung on the human side of the xenoglas partition. She panned it up to look at her cargo claws, and she slaved her ship to it. Then, based on the crisp image of her one camera, and a very powerful computer, her ship dipped like a dancer, and the four retractable claws snapped on to the four sides of the metal crate the engineers had built around the ammonia tank.

All four claws had sensors; all four showed a good lock.

The beam weapon recycle read 3, 2 …

She lifted. ‘Acceleration couches now!’ she said. ‘Gunny, get Dorcas strapped down.’

‘Roger,’ he said.

She used the manoeuvring thrusters only, powering directly away from the rock, on a vector at ninety degrees from the last three beam weapon strikes. Then she turned the ship, pointing the nose to the Athens .

‘Incoming! Eyes closed!’

FLASH.

Nbaro had had her eyes closed. But the flash had been behind them, and she was accelerating hard to get above any spalling from erupting shrapnel. No red lights came on. They were alive.

‘Lioness, this is Pericles inbound with one casualty, one special guest, over?’

‘Roger, Pericles .’ Cortez was still on. ‘You’ll be landing topside. Please acknowledge topside, over.’

‘Roger, topside,’ she said.

‘What’s your status, Pericles ?’

‘Something cooked all my port-side antennas and I can’t retract my landing gear,’ she said. ‘Which isn’t all bad, considering I have no atmosphere.’ I’m babbling. Better get it together, spacer.

‘Roger, Pericles , I have a crash crew standing by, also medical, also …’ Cortez, despite everything, managed a chuckle. ‘… guest services ready!’

She noted many things from inside the cocoon of her piloting. The Athens was underway, at almost 3 g acceleration. She wasn’t far away – just fifteen thousand kilometres. They weren’t moving on opposite courses, either.

She let the Pericles do the maths, OK’d the indicated course, and said, ‘Stand by for acceleration.’

She told the computer to put on the juice slowly. She was worried about Dorcas, and worried about Qaqqaq’s welds on the box holding her special guest … if Feather Dancer was still alive.

She looked at the beam weapon recycle rate. Forty seconds until the next shot.

Almighty. Imagine defecting to aliens. How bad must it be, that you’d rather jump off into the unknown than face another day …?

Everything was holding. At the forty-second mark, the enemy beam weapon vaporised more of the Trade Point rock, well behind her. She barely blinked.

‘I fucking hate being shot at when I can’t shoot back,’ Drun said.

‘Roger that, Gunny,’ she muttered. The fact was, there wasn’t enough to do now to keep her mind off Dorcas, and the tension wouldn’t let up until she’d put her ship into its docking cradle, having matched accelerations with the Athens and found the docking signal. It was all automated – easier, in every way, than landing an XC-3C.

The cradle locked to her ship with a clank.

‘Open the main hatch!’ someone ordered. Nbaro had already hit the cycle button, and the hatch opened. She’d long since replaced their atmosphere.

Four suited figures entered, cut Dorcas out of the acceleration couch with nano-cutters, and were gone. Outside, a dozen Marines and some techs were moving the cargo container to an elevator. Even as she watched, Major Darkstar, identifiable by their height and the rank painted on their helmet, gave a wave, and the elevator literally fell away.

‘Well,’ Drun said, ‘I guess we’re chopped liver.’

8

The Athens was driving for Insertion. The surviving Hin ship inserted at a point no one had predicted, well above the ecliptic and far closer to the Beta Star than any human astrogator would have recommended. Both of the survivor’s consorts had been destroyed by Starfish fire, and radioactive clouds that they could detect beyond the clutter-field suggested that both of the Behemoth ’s consorts had also been destroyed. The Behemoth was gone; Intel was already predicting that the Starfish could insert and extract with far more accuracy than even the best human systems, and so could the Hin.

Nbaro was not, at first, very interested in a space battle between two apparently hostile alien races, because she was following Dorcas down into the depths of the ship: first to the infirmary, and then into surgery. Steven Yu appeared, gowned and masked.

‘It’s pretty bad,’ Yu said. ‘Don’t wait. He’s got crushed ribs and a lot of internal trauma.’ He turned away brusquely.

Nbaro wandered the infirmary for a little while. Gunny Drun was being moved in; despite being ambulatory in a mech rig, he was supposed to be on bed rest, and another tech threatened him with clamshelling if he didn’t calm down.

She went and sat by Drun. ‘You were great back there,’ she said.

‘Great for someone who couldn’t actually participate,’ he said bitterly.

‘Yeah, it’s true, you’re a total slacker.’ She found that working on Drun’s feelings helped her wall off her own. She’d done the same at the Orphanage: in her darker moments, she’d wondered if her impulse to help people had only been a desire to avoid her own pain.

But Drun grinned. ‘Thanks, ma’am.’ And after a little while, he added, ‘He’ll make it, ma’am. I seen guys with worse. And Dorcas is tough, in his weird, nerdy way.’

She realised that she was fighting tears, and her throat burned.

Drun cleared his throat. ‘You’re still in your EVA suit, ma’am,’ he muttered. ‘And your face is covered in … er … blue goo.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Definitely time to shower.’

Thirty minutes later she found she was leaning her forehead against the wall of the shower cubicle nearest her stateroom, the warm water pouring down her back. She wondered how long she’d been there, just standing under the shower.

Weeping.

Fuck this.

She dressed, carefully stowed her gear, and brought up the flight and Space Ops schedule. She was Tower in four hours. Thea Drake, who might have helped out, was on watch.

She knew she should sleep, but instead she wandered down to the ready room.

Fatima Bakri, a mid-grade lieutenant who’d been watch-standing on the bridge, waved. They’d never flown together, but Nbaro knew her. Didier was deep in conversation with Midshipper Eyre, and Midshipper Pak was sitting at one of the terminals at the back, reading something.

Skipper Truekner was sitting with a small dark-skinned woman at the front of the ready room. The skipper was wearing a flightsuit that he’d clearly sweated through; his face was deeply creased from his helmet. Nbaro didn’t know his companion immediately; she’d seen her before …

‘Nbaro! It’s always nice of you to join us in between bouts of saving the universe!’ Truekner stood. He put a hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry about Dorcas,’ he said in a lower voice. ‘I know the ship is doing everything it can for him.’

‘Thanks, skipper,’ she said. Almighty, I sound brittle.

‘This is Lieutenant Commander Thulile, formerly of Flight One. She’s going to take Mpono’s place as operations officer for a little while, and then, if we all still like one another, she’ll be XO.’ He smiled.

Thulile didn’t smile. Instead, she said, ‘I don’t think we need to like one another.’ She shrugged. ‘We just have to work together.’

Truekner grinned as if Thulile had made a joke, but Nbaro didn’t think she was joking at all.

‘You’re the acting lieutenant who just disobeyed the Master?’ she asked Nbaro.

Nbaro met her level gaze. ‘Yeah.’

‘Care to share why you felt you could disobey his direct order?’ Thulile asked.

Nbaro shrugged. ‘Ma’am, I was there and he was not. I knew we could get those people.’

Thulile’s gaze didn’t waver. ‘The Master has asked to see you, Ms Nbaro. I think you made the right call. But you might want to take a different tone when you talk to him.’ She smiled. It wasn’t the warmest smile in the world, but it wasn’t fake either.

Nbaro nodded. She wanted to smile back and make a nice response; Thulile was clearly not a monster, and the small woman was smiling up at her, trying to take the sting out of her words.

Only Nbaro didn’t have a smile in her. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she managed. ‘Shall I go to the bridge?’

‘Master’s briefing room,’ Truekner said. ‘I’m sure you know the way.’ But he followed her out into the passageway. ‘Hey, Nbaro.’

She stopped, turned, and looked at him.

‘We’re running out of medals. Please stop being a hero for a few weeks.’

Nbaro felt as if she was looking at the skipper from the wrong end of a telescope. ‘Why didn’t we shoot the fucking Bubbles?’ she asked. ‘We just sat there getting pounded.’

Tears were close. So was rage.

What’s wrong with me?

Truekner put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I just sat out there for seven hours in a cold spaceframe, waiting for the order to shoot.’ He shrugged. ‘It never came.’

There was the rage again.

‘Every time their particle beam fired, I knew something would get hit.’ Nbaro hadn’t even realised that the words were coming out. And then it came. ‘Someone ,’ she sobbed.

Truekner gripped her arm. ‘You need to rest before you see the Master? I can arrange it.’

She shook herself. ‘No, sir.’ She was in charge again, the crack repaired.

‘Need a hug?’ he asked.

Yes?

‘No, sir,’ she said.

He released her arm, and she walked stiffly away towards the lifts.

On the way up, she realised that this was the very lift where she’d met Dorcas. Or at least, first spoken to him.

Is he still alive? Will anyone tell me? She could probably use her lace to go straight into his medical files …

Nope. Not doing that.

The lift opened on the O-7 level. She stepped out into the small foyer, palmed the reader, and the hatch opened into the Master’s briefing room, which looked more like a dining room from early in the Age of Chaos, with paintings on the wall and a fire in the fireplace. The walls were panelled in wood, and the table was the size of a small house. An android servitor motioned to a chair.

‘The Master and I will be with you shortly,’ Morosini’s voice said out of the android’s mouth.

‘Can I get you anything?’ the servitor asked, still in Morosini’s voice.

‘How much trouble am I in?’ she asked.

Morosini’s voice said, ‘None that I know of. Can we get you something?’

‘I need coffee,’ she said. She was annoyed with herself for feeling relief that she wasn’t in trouble, because in the lift she’d worked up some excellent righteous indignation that she was in trouble at all. Now she had to stare herself in the face and realise that it had all been internal posturing.

Still an idiot.

Pisani came in from the bridge, still speaking into the old-fashioned headset he wore.

‘As soon as you can, right, Sasha?’ He looked up, saw Nbaro, and managed a thin-lipped smile. He really was very old .

He tapped something on his wrist and tipped the headset off.

‘Coffee,’ he said, and sat almost next to her, pulling out his chair so he faced her.

‘Ms Nbaro,’ he said.

Morosini appeared in another chair, with his cat on his lap. He was dressed in red: the clothes of another century, another world. Powdered wig, lace collar, red boots.

Nbaro had stood at attention as soon as the Master entered the room. Now he nodded. ‘At ease, Ms Nbaro,’ he said.

She sat stiffly.

‘Mr Dorcas is still with us,’ Pisani said, ‘and will probably weary me again with his patronising repetition.’

Morosini winced. ‘What my esteemed commander wishes to convey ,’ he said, ‘is that Mr Dorcas is an essential part of this team, and your rescue of him was— ’

‘Impertinent and personally driven, but nonetheless the correct action.’ Pisani raised an eyebrow. ‘I doubt you saved him because he’s vital to our plans. But you did. And the Starfish is alive – needs a little thawing out, but alive. In fact, we didn’t lose anyone.’

His eyes met hers, and she realised how very important that had been to him: that they hadn’t lost anyone.

‘I’m not reaming you out, Ms Nbaro. I’m not even scolding you. But I do want you to consider where I’d have been if one of those beam strikes had taken you out. I’d have lost your ship, you, Gunny Drun, Dorcas, Qaqqaq and Akunje, not to mention the cargo and the Starfish. From where I sat, the risk was growing too great.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

‘If the Bubbles had hit you, I might have had to fire on their remaining ship,’ he said.

She didn’t know what to say to that.

‘So,’ Pisani said, and then coffee arrived, and the servitor gave Nbaro a cup. If it had been watery mud she might have liked it; as it was, it was superb coffee.

‘So,’ Pisani said again. ‘I can’t reprimand you for success, but you gave me a really bad five minutes.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I had a really bad few minutes myself.’

He nodded. ‘I bet you did.’ He sounded human. Fatherly.

‘Sir, why didn’t we shoot at them?’

Pisani looked at Morosini. ‘I know it’s not what you want to hear, but the answer is – that’s the course Morosini and I decided on, barring certain events.’

She looked at him. ‘You decided in advance not to shoot?’

Morosini nodded. ‘Yes ,’ he said. ‘I do not mind sharing this with you, Ms Nbaro. There were several reasons, all embracing one another. First, we hid in plain sight, by filling the system with proxies of ourselves. I believe that at the height of the action there were nine Athens clones as well as the original, all either tight to asteroids or manoeuvring. ’

She nodded.

‘The moment we fired our main armament, the Hin and the Starfish would have known which one of us was real. The Starfish, at least, knew we had only one ship in-system. The Hin, on the other hand, only know that they lost four ships here very recently. ’

‘And two more today,’ Pisani said.

Morosini nodded. ‘As we are very likely headed into a major battle, I would like to provide the Hin with as little information possible. I want them to imagine that we are ten feet tall and have fangs. And many ships. ’

Nbaro felt foolish. ‘Ah, she said. ‘I’m sorry, Morosini. I’m dumb.’

Morosini shook his head. ‘No, Ms Nbaro, I must insist that in this case it is I who was foolish, and you might be said to have “saved my bacon”. If Dorcas had died, or we’d lost the Starfish … ’

‘Feather Dancer?’ she asked.

Morosini smiled. ‘I hope that soon enough we will know its name ,’ he said. ‘You see, the other reason we did not fire is … moral. Or at least ethical. We have one of the Hin prisoner – you know this. She can speak, much more fluently than a Starfish, and has a little Anglatin and a little Old Italian, some Hindi and some Mandarin. ’

Nbaro would have said she was too tired for surprise or a jolt of adrenaline, but she was wrong. She sat up. She’d forgotten, or compartmented, this vital information.

Always more idiocy available.

‘I heard?’ she managed. And then looked ruefully at the Master.

Pisani nodded. ‘She – or her people – have been in contact with humans. Probably over on the Anti-spinward fringe.’

‘New Texas, Delhi, New Shenzen ,’ Morosini said. ‘Based on languages. ’

Nbaro blinked. I know , she thought, but then settled in to hear it straight from Pisani.

‘She hasn’t really told us anything,’ Pisani said. ‘Which is why you are here, in addition to being congratulated for saving yet more of this mission.’

Nbaro looked between them.

‘Until Dorcas is functional, I’m putting you back on my council,’ Pisani said. ‘I always liked having you there – you’re lucky, and I’m a sailor. But there’s a more practical reason. If we understand correctly, the Hin has a special relationship with her captor. And that’s you.’

Morosini nodded. ‘Major Darkstar will brief you ,’ the AI said. ‘But in short, it’s almost medieval. You captured her, so you are responsible for her. ’

‘Dorcas told me some of this.’

‘Not so odd in a warrior culture ,’ Morosini said. ‘And, on a positive note, she accepts being captured as a normal consequence of conflict. Regardless, the issue is an ethical one. We have reason to believe that the Starfish … ’

‘… committed genocide,’ Nbaro said. ‘Dorcas didn’t have to tell me. I got there all by myself, as soon as I found the carbon fibres in the asteroid rubble.’

Morosini nodded. ‘Well, then. And are you familiar with Dorcas’s theory that they can turn the xenoglas off? ’ He stroked his cat.

‘Yes,’ she admitted.

Morosini shrugged. ‘So, you know everything. ’

‘The end of the fucking universe,’ Pisani said.

Morosini shrugged. ‘No ,’ he said. ‘Probably the end of the DHC. Certainly, there will now be great changes. But honestly, Vettor … the changes had already begun. ’

Pisani wiped a hand down his face. Nbaro had never seen him display so much emotion. ‘I can’t be expected to like it,’ he said. ‘The end of everything I know.’

Morosini smiled, and the smile was very human, and intensely cynical. ‘We will be lucky if we make it to the end of everything ,’ he said. ‘Right now, we will have to take it one star system at a time. ’ He looked at Nbaro. ‘But I will offer some words of hope. We have aboard, by a twist of fate, representatives of both alien races. The Hin – I think we must stop calling them Bubbles. The Hin must imagine that we are pretty strong, and that their human allies have misled them. And none of those allies could have imagined that the Stealthy Change would be so bold as to change sides and insert with us, but that’s what’s going to happen. And Vettor and I have a surprise ready – several, in fact. So, let us see how we go forward, one star system at a time. ’

Pisani looked better. But Nbaro was still sick at heart. And she couldn’t stop herself.

‘You knew some of this before we ever came out here.’ Her tone was full of accusation.

Pisani nodded. ‘I think that’s a little above your pay grade, even as a miracle worker, Nbaro.’

Her chin quivered, and she hated how her voice shook: indignation? Fear?

‘You knew the Starfish committed genocide,’ she said.

Morosini kept patting his cat, who purred. ‘I knew more than that ,’ he said sadly. ‘And I came, myself, anyway. Please consider that, and how narrowly I have escaped destruction, Ms Nbaro, before you indulge in a fit of human emotion at my expense. ’

She gulped. She’d heard the term, but it had never happened to her before.

A great deal more than that.

Oh, Dorcas, heal fast. Do not dare die. I can’t do this by myself.

Nbaro stood her watch, almost wooden in her responses, and then fell into her rack to lie for more than an hour staring at the overhead, wondering how Dorcas was, and wondering what the AI meant by a great deal more than that.

But seven hours later, she woke to find Thea Drake going quietly about her morning routine, and as soon as she rolled down off her rack, Drake caught her in an embrace.

‘You OK?’ Drake asked. ‘Stupid question. You’re not OK. You’re walking in thirty minutes, so I’ll go and visit Dorcas.’

‘He’s still alive?’ Nbaro asked softly.

‘Honey, I know you’re a fucking barbarian, and I know I have to teach you everything, but really there are these things called tabs?’ She held hers up, clicked something, and there was a status display of every patient in the infirmary. Sabina pinged.

Nbaro noticed that Han was listed as ‘Critical’, and so was Dorcas.

‘Critical means … definitely not dead,’ Drake said. ‘Come on, get dressed. And what the hell did you get on this bra?’

‘Hydraulic fluid,’ Nbaro said.

Drake shrugged. ‘Bras are hard to come by out here,’ she said. ‘My mother is like a goddess when it comes to stain removal. Let’s see what can be done.’

Nbaro nodded, looked again at Drake’s tab to make sure that Dorcas was still alive, and then got dressed, steadied as always by Drake’s sense of the normal.

I need some normal.

‘Sabina,’ she said aloud.

‘Yes, ma’am? ’

‘Please alert me to any change in the medical status of Horatio Dorcas?’

Her sub-AI said, ‘Yes, ma’am. ’

Nbaro had a mission. She took a deep breath and walked to the ready room, to find Lieutenant Commander Thulile sitting with the skipper, talking. She looked at the maintenance boards, found her crew consisted of Pak and two spacers she didn’t know, and went to the riggers for her kit.

Spacer Chu grinned at her. ‘Nice to have you back, ma’am,’ she said. ‘See anything new?’

Nbaro glanced at her.

‘And what the flock did you do to your pretty EVA suit? Ma’am?’ Chu asked. ‘There was hydraulic fluid inside it.’

‘It’s a long story,’ Nbaro admitted. ‘I did something stupid with a rigging knife, and cut the wrong wire, which proved to be an internal hydraulics feed …’

Chu was laughing. ‘Oh, shit, ma’am. I don’t see you as someone who does that sort of crap!’

Nbaro had to laugh because Chu was laughing. ‘Oh, I do,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I’m an idiot.’

Chu shrugged.

‘You’re a petty officer!’ Nbaro said. It was three beats too late, but she finally spotted the new pips on Chu’s coverall.

‘I am, too! Passed the maths, passed everything.’ Chu grinned. ‘Thanks for the help, ma’am.’

‘Nice,’ Nbaro said, with more warmth than she’d felt for a whole day.

When did I start liking people?

Oh, yes. When I came on board the Athens.

9

Her new back-seaters had both been working in less glamorous jobs. Spacer Hardeep Singh Tatlah had been in laundry; spacer Janny Eason had been in Astrogation, working as cleaning staff. Nbaro knew she was wooden and not putting them at ease; she struggled to appear cheerful and mostly failed, sounding a little too much like a tyrant. Like Guille.

Guille is dead.

Tim Eyre wasn’t much help. He was still struggling to understand all his new responsibilities, and Nbaro started a cascade of bad feeling when she corrected him, snapping an instruction at him when he failed to understand her during the preflight checklist. He passed her annoyance straight on, when Tatlah misunderstood that they were operating on passive systems only and toggled the big radar as soon as they launched.

‘Passive ,’ Eyre spat. ‘That means you don’t radiate. Are you stupid?’

There was a heavy silence.

Eyre waited a moment, and then said, ‘The whole point of this mission was to fly dark and silent. We got shot off the rails with a big boost so we can stay out front of the mother ship, ready to shoot, basically invisible.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Tatlah sounded utterly miserable. His misery cut through the cloud around Nbaro, and she toggled front end only on her comms.

‘Tim,’ she said. ‘Stow it.’

She could feel his sullen anger radiating through his EVA suit.

‘Tim,’ she said, ‘they don’t understand. How long did it take you to understand all these new tactics and silent running?’

‘Mr Didier explained it all to me right away,’ he said.

‘Right, Tim. So …’ She paused, modified what she was going to say to share the blame. ‘So, which one of us has explained tactics to our back-seaters, who are – pardon me as a jumped-up midder – so wet behind the ears that we could wash with them?’

Eyre turned his head. He was still angry, but the sullenness was gone, and he nodded, eye to eye. ‘Roger that, ma’am.’

‘Marca,’ she said. ‘You’re an acting midder. I’m a midder acting as a lieutenant. We’re on a first-name basis.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Marca,’ he added, very quietly.

‘It’s hard,’ she said. ‘It took me … a while … to call Mpono Smoke and not tir .’

She heard Eyre take a breath, and then he was on the cockpit comms.

‘I shouldn’t bite your head off, Tatlah. And the aliens probably won’t come and eat us this time. So let’s use this flight to get familiar with the whole idea of running dark.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Tatlah managed.

‘Yo, Tatlah. I’m apologising. That one was on me.’

Eason said, ‘I tried to tell him. I said we were running silent. I understood.’

Nbaro didn’t like her tone at all, but this wasn’t the moment to jump on it.

The rest of the flight was dull routine – cold and dark. They were out for seven hours, and then landed with a minimum of thrusters, and just as Nbaro entered the ship’s datasphere, within which she had a direct neural exchange with the ship’s systems, her tab pinged and Sabina said, ‘Dorcas’s status has improved to stable. ’

She had an hour to eat before going on watch as Tower. She found a message from Steven Yu on her tab.

Dorcas is stable. I expect he’ll be awake when you come off watch.

She wanted to hug Yu. She felt as if a weight had been lifted off her chest.

Instead, she went to Space Ops. It felt as if she’d been gone a year, when in fact she’d been gone a little more than a week. Tower wasn’t very challenging, because they were accelerating towards Insertion. Astrogation clearly didn’t want them going too fast, so they were moving at a sedate 1 g , and space operations were being kept to a minimum.

Commander Tremaine of Flight Eight was Lioness. Nbaro couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen someone as senior as Tremaine in the chair. She was a decorated hero, beloved throughout the ship, and also easy to work with.

‘Master is afraid we’ve got bogeys in-system,’ Tremaine said. ‘Maybe out at the edge, hiding in the comets. There’s a tactical briefing you should see.’ She leaned over the edge of her acceleration couch and waved her tab, and Nbaro’s tab pinged.

Two minutes later, Nbaro swore. ‘How did I miss this?’

Tremaine shrugged. ‘We’ve all been busy.’

The tactical briefing outlined their doctrine until Insertion. Nbaro looked through her tab entries and found that it had come in while she was flying the Pericles.

She tabbed her own sub-AI: Sabina! I need you to watch for this stuff.

‘Right ,’ Sabina replied. ‘How will I know what makes “this stuff” different from the bulletin on material readiness in your stateroom that you deleted without reading? ’

Nbaro took a deep breath. ‘This was from the Master,’ she said. ‘Anything from the Master gets a warning.’

‘I understand ,’ Sabina replied cheerfully.

Tremaine leaned over. ‘Have you seen this exercise we’re running?’

Nbaro blinked both eyes. ‘No, ma’am.’

She was looking at a full mass launch plan, the kind they’d used entering systems before. It had some new wrinkles, mostly having to do with the deployment of EW assets and emitters.

‘We’re doing it live, and timed,’ Tremaine said.

Nbaro read through it. She wasn’t on watch; she was assigned to the Pericles. With an Electronic Warfare package.

The mass launch was twenty-seven hours away.

In the whole of her Tower watch, Nbaro launched a handful of fighters and torpedo-carriers, and then retrieved them, and a Flight Eight spaceframe testing an engine. She had plenty of time to catch up on her paperwork; Skipper Truekner had sent a few of her evals back for minor rewrites.

She had a priority message from Truekner, too. It said: ‘Patel.’

Nbaro winced. Patel was in Maintenance, and she didn’t spend much time there. But that was no excuse, and she’d walked through that very morning.

Gorshokov came on watch. He was replacing her as Tower.

She managed to dredge up some cheerfulness for him. ‘You qualified?’ she said.

‘Midshippers forever,’ he said with a comic salute. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’m standing Tower while training for Lioness, just like you.’

Just like me. She found Gorshokov’s hero worship a bit much, but she punched him in the shoulder nonetheless. ‘Well done, Andrei. And you’d better call me Marca.’

He grinned. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Marca ma’am.’

She was still smiling when she left Space Ops, but she paused at the hatch and it was all still there … muted, but there: layers of reality, as if spacetime was all at once, not moment by moment. She was there, and the enemy boarders were trying to break in to Space Ops; she was firing the drones at them; she was running down the corridor …

I’ve got this bad.

And Dorcas …

Nbaro bounded down the corridor as if fleeing the past, dropped through the shaft to Third Deck, and tried not to run along the main starboard passageway to the infirmary.

Yu was going off duty, but he’d clearly waited for her.

‘Nbaro, he’s in a bad way. I want you to prepare yourself, because ordinarily we wouldn’t let him have a visitor. But he’s very insistent.’ He paused. ‘He should not speak. He’s very badly injured. Let’s not disturb him.’

He took her in past a row of men, women and ’gynes in clamshells or in other machines, all casualties from the space battle four weeks earlier.

‘Horatio?’ Yu asked. ‘You have a visitor.’

Nbaro entered a small cubicle separated from the rest by a curtain. Everything in the infirmary had to be able to be nailed down for acceleration, and privacy was not a requirement for spacers. The curtains were a courtesy.

Nbaro had to stop and get a hold of herself, because Dorcas was a shock. He was almost deathly white; his eyes were sunken, and he looked terrible. Almost like a monster. She could read in his face what he’d look like when he was very old. Also, his chest was horrifyingly the wrong shape.

‘Plastic ribs,’ Dorcas signalled.

‘Don’t talk,’ Yu said. ‘At the very least, use your neural lace.’

‘That’s like asking him not to breathe,’ Nbaro said, trying very hard to sound normal, and maybe even funny, channelling Thea Drake.

‘Do not, on any account, make him laugh,’ Yu said. ‘His ribs were crushed. He should be dead, but Morosini used his neural lace to force his heart to function. He lost a lot of blood and—’

‘And they’re not sure …’ Dorcas said via the lace.

No, he didn’t mutter.

He’s in my head.

Dorcas twitched. It was … not a good twitch.

‘What aren’t you sure about?’ Nbaro asked.

Yu looked at Dorcas. ‘I’m not sure this is the time …’ he began.

Dorcas twitched again.

Nbaro looked at Yu.

‘What’s wrong?’ She didn’t like the sound of her own voice.

Yu set his jaw. ‘Quite a bit. So how about being a model visitor and not a problem?’

‘I may never recover from this, Marca,’ Dorcas said inside her head.

Nbaro had to struggle with her neural lace. Emotion wasn’t the best way to approach the datafield.

‘You will recover,’ she said.

‘Morosini thinks I have brain damage,’ Dorcas sent.

‘You sound fine to me,’ Nbaro replied.

‘Are you two communicating somehow?’ Yu asked. ‘Because …’

‘I’m not upsetting him,’ Nbaro said.

‘So far I can’t feel any part of my body,’ Dorcas said.

Nbaro bore down on her mind, isolating her fear and panic. ‘Good thing we have nerve regrowth technologies.’

Dorcas grunted in the real.

‘Why didn’t you contact me this way before?’

‘I don’t want to interrupt you,’ he said. ‘Also, I wasn’t sure it would work.’

‘Ah, right. You’re an interruption of my life.’ She found it hard to get to the right tone in the data field. ‘I am always available to you.’

‘When you’re flying? During Space Ops?’

‘Fine. I’ll just come find you, then.’

In the real, he smiled a little. Some saliva crept out of his mouth.

‘You smiled,’ she said.

‘So noted.’

‘OK, that’s enough,’ Yu said. ‘Sorry, folks. That was five minutes.’

Nbaro nodded. ‘I’ll be back.’

‘I’ll be right here,’ Dorcas managed.

Nbaro grinned at him, and then let herself be led through the curtains.

‘Can I see Han?’ she asked Yu.

He nodded. ‘Absolutely,’

They walked down the row of clamshells, to where Lieutenant Commander Han was resting. Yu read something off the dataport and nodded. ‘He’s not asleep. He’s in VR playing a game.’

‘Fuju?’ she said gently.

Inside the clear surface of the clamshell, Han’s eyes opened. And widened.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hey,’ she responded. ‘I hear you’re a hero?’

Han’s smile widened. ‘I got us there,’ he said with visible pride. ‘And then some stupid èr bǎi wǔ shot me!’

Yu raised a cautioning hand.

Han’s face moved behind the glass. ‘Thanks for coming,’ the voicebox said. ‘Please come again. I promise not to raise my heartbeat.’

‘How’s he doing?’ she asked Yu.

Yu waited until they were outside the infirmary. ‘He’s doing very well.’ He crossed his arms. ‘His problem – and ours – is that he thinks he’s ready to resume duties, and I want him in that regrowth tank for another two weeks. Maybe three.’

By then, they were out in the empty passageway, heading forward to the lift shafts.

‘Can I ask you a sensitive question?’

‘If it’s about Dorcas,’ Yu began, ‘I can’t—’

‘It’s about me,’ Nbaro said. ‘When did you put the neural lace into my head?’

Yu stopped and looked at her. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘You need to ask Morosini.’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘And I’m declining to answer,’ Yu said.

‘We’re friends!’ Nbaro didn’t like the pleading tone in her voice. Walls were coming up, armour was being donned. She needed to keep some things out.

Yu held her gaze. ‘We are friends. That question goes beyond friendship. Ask Morosini.’

She nodded. ‘I see,’ she said frostily.

Yu shrugged in frustration. ‘Fine,’ he said. And walked off. She didn’t follow until she saw him vanish into the lift shaft.

I don’t need friends like that.

Marca, you are being unfair.

Fuck that. He could have answered me. Clearly I cannot trust him.

By the time she got back to her stateroom, she didn’t remember what she’d said to Yu. Instead, she wriggled out of a hug from Drake.

‘No escape,’ Drake said, forcing her into the hug, and Nbaro burst into tears, and cried, and cried.

Later, Nbaro told Thea everything, and she just listened.

‘Well, that sucks,’ Thea said. ‘But Yu’s dead right. If he’s been told it’s confidential—’

‘But don’t you see, Thea? I was set up! They put that thing in me to watch me!’

Thea sat back. ‘Yeah,’ she admitted.

‘It makes me feel dirty.’

Drake raised an eyebrow. And then tilted her head to one side, the way she did sometimes. ‘You can’t have had it when you came aboard,’ she said.

‘True,’ Nbaro said.

‘And you never went to the infirmary before we left on cruise.’

‘That’s true,’ she admitted. ‘After we left City Orbital.’

Thea wrinkled her forehead. ‘So if they put the neural lace in then,’ she said, ‘it must have been as much to protect you as to keep tabs on you.’

Nbaro shook her head in denial, but she had to admit that she liked Thea’s timeline. And the idea that the ship wanted to look after her.

I should talk to Morosini , she thought.

She ate alone: a mysterious curry that reminded her of how long they’d been in space without a port, but the rice was still delicious, and it was still better than any meal at the Orphanage. She wolfed down several helpings and then ran to get changed for her boarding party training. She was now a team leader, and as the drafts of young spacers came up from early cruise jobs in various labour-intensive roles, she knew that eventually she’d be an instructor, which made her feel like an impostor.

Captain Fraser caught her as soon as she entered the chain locker.

‘Ms Nbaro,’ he said, with a formality that worried her.

‘Sir?’

‘I’m glad you made it. Listen, can you train teams six and seven?’

‘Me?’ she squeaked. She had absolutely known that this moment was coming, and then she’d left the ship for two weeks, and here it was.

‘I can give you Locran and maybe …’ He looked around. ‘Chief Chen?’

Chen was the best zero-g martial artist on the ship, and Locran had been her first friend on board and her companion in a deadly, real fight.

Her appreciation for their skills easily overwhelmed her impostor syndrome. ‘Absolutely!’ she said.

Until then, boarding party drills had been fun – almost mindless exercise routines. That is, she’d often been a team leader, by rank if not skill, but they had all been assigned teams. Now she was getting a team of her own.

Two teams.

She waited for Chen to finish a brief refresher on zero-g infighting with two young spacers, and Locran found her, pushing through the crowd of lower deck newbies who looked too young to be aboard.

‘Gentlemen,’ she said, putting an arm on each shoulder.

Almost in unison, they proclaimed that they worked for a living.

She smiled. ‘We – and I mean we – are now the proud leaders of those unwashed spacers behind us.’

Locran winced.

Chen made a thoughtful face and pinched his nose, a lightning-fast motion that she’d come to see as his twitch.

‘Chief, you get team six, and Locran, you get team seven.’

Both men nodded.

‘Now, I assume you’ve both trained teams before?’ she asked.

They both shook their heads. Chen pointed aft, towards the infirmary. ‘Chief Turney was the trainer.’ After a pause, he said, ‘Engineering. Bad radiation dose. Won’ be back this cruise.’

Locran nodded.

Nbaro realised that there were more missing faces than she’d observed two weeks ago.

Chen raised his hand. ‘I … I have an idea,’ he said.

She nodded with what she hoped was encouragement.

Look, I’m pretending to be an officer.

‘I always thought we did this wrong. We start by teaching them all this combat stuff, which, to be fair, you and I, ma’am, we like all that, right?’ Chen shrugged.

Locran joined in the shrug. ‘Just give me a shotgun.’

‘Sure,’ Chen said, ‘but I think we should start by walking them around the ship and talking about what it’s going to be like – fighting, I mean. Choke points, ECM gunners, drones, close combat.’

‘So that the training makes sense,’ she said.

Locran nodded. ‘I’m in, Chief. I did this stuff for two cruises before I understood why we learned a bunch of the techniques.’

Nbaro took a deep breath. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know anything—’

Chen barked a laugh. ‘Ma’am, how many intruders have you put down?’

Locran pretended to cough.

She wanted to roll her eyes. ‘Fine. Let’s take them on a tour.’

Her intention had been to hang back and watch her professionals teach the newbies, and she did think it was a little unfair that they had two eight-person teams of completely untrained personnel. However, her resolve to stay quiet didn’t last through the first space. Chief Chen got them all quiet, put them in two sticks, and with a nod to Captain Fraser, they all went out into the port-side passageways and started aft.

Chen stopped at the first knee-knocker.

‘So,’ he barked. ‘You all know how lucky you are?’

The young men, women, and ’gynes all stood at attention.

‘You are all assigned to Lieutenant Nbaro, here, who’s killed more people than the plague.’ He smiled at them. ‘And she hasn’t lost anyone, either.’

Too much praise. ‘I keep getting wounded, though,’ Nbaro said aloud.

A couple of the braver souls managed a titter. She noticed little Ramirez; she’d been a good worker when they were assembling the Pericles , and she sent the woman a smile, which was returned.

Chen spoke up. ‘So we’re going on a little tour of the ship for two hours, which is easy duty. The problem is – we really need you to listen to us. So I’m going to test you at the end. Those who fail will get extra duty.’

‘Those who succeed will get pie,’ Nbaro said. She believed in both the carrot and the stick. Locran gave her an approving look.

Chen looked at each one of them. And nodded at Locran.

Locran stepped forward. He had a real boarding shotgun on his shoulder, which gave him a certain authority and had to be against the rules. Nbaro wasn’t minded to stop him, though.

‘How many of you have been in a fight?’ he asked. ‘Any fight. Bloody nose, cracked knuckles, a kick in the gut?’

Two women, two men, and a tall ’gyne all raised their hands very tentatively. Ramirez was one of them, which didn’t surprise Nbaro at all.

Locran looked at them. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk.’

Chen had a whole philosophy of shipboard combat. He’d divided the ship into terrain types in his head, and he introduced his students to his thoughts, one type at a time.

He began with the choke points: passageways and corridors, hatches and doors.

‘So here we are in the port-side passageway,’ he said. ‘Imagine you need to retake this passageway from an aggressor. How do you do it?’

One of the women who said she’d been in a fight raised a very tentative hand. ‘Ah …’ She realised that no one else was even trying to answer. ‘Ah … big push? Everyone at once, maybe?’ she asked more than answered.

Chen looked at Nbaro. ‘How did you clear the passageway?’ he asked. ‘Ms Nbaro fought down this very passageway, not six months ago, our time.’

Nbaro thought the chief might be going there. She took a breath. ‘Everyone look up. See the little nodules, like eggs, over the knee-knocker? In the overhead? Look.’

Some of them weren’t looking.

She took the boarding shotgun from Locran and used it to point out the nodules. That got their attention.

‘What are they?’ she asked.

A small, heavily freckled man who looked more like a boy said, ‘Drones, ma’am!’

She nodded. ‘Right. Drones. What’s your name?’

‘Nuur, ma’am.’

‘Right. I had the AI use the drones on the borders in the corridor, and then we swept it.’ She smiled at the woman who’d spoken up. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Gallash,’ the woman said. ‘Spacer Gallash, ma’am.’

‘So – you are right, Gallash. After we fired the drones, we all went in together. Two of my petty officers were hit. Both of them had armour on and neither had anything worse than bruises.’ She nodded back at Chen, who was smiling.

Chen waved. ‘Drones, body armour, choke points,’ he said. ‘Everyone got that part?’

Locran added, ‘Boarding shotgun. One round will hit every part of the passageway beyond the knee-knocker. You won’t always have drones, but you’ll always have a boarding shotgun. With slugs, it’ll knock an armoured enemy unconscious, or even dead, right through their armour. With flechettes, it’ll clear a whole corridor of unarmoured hostiles.’

Chen nodded. ‘We’ll eventually talk about grenades, smoke and close combat. For now, think about this – there’s places on the ship where it’s challenging to pass another shipmate quickly, right? So imagine what it’s like when that’s a fucking hostile trying to put you down. Those are the choke points.’

Then he walked them to Cargo Operations, which was virtually uncrewed because the cargo load was done. He tabbed open the space.

‘Here’s a different kind of problem – an objective space. Could be Space Operations, could be the bridge, could be the auxiliary helm or a reactor compartment. Right?’

People nodded. Some were getting into it, Nbaro could tell.

Chen never left the O-3 level, but he took them through his four types of terrain: choke points, objective spaces, open battlefields, and what he called ‘3D spaces’ where multiple access was possible in all three dimensions. At each, he and Locran and Nbaro would talk about the tactical problems posed by the space.

They ended back at the chain locker.

Chen pointed at the freckled boy with no warning. ‘Tell me three things you learned,’ he said.

Nuur grinned. ‘The four types of terrain are choke points, objective spaces, open battlefields and 3D spaces,’ he began.

‘Good,’ Chen said.

Locran pointed at another spacer. ‘When we point at you, say your name,’ he said. ‘That’s an order until further notice.’ He looked at them all. ‘Anyone already have armour?’

Both of the ’gynes and one big man all raised their hands.

He pointed at the taller ’gyne. ‘What’s this for,’ he asked, holding out his boarding shotgun.

‘Spacer Grunhild. That’s a boarding shotgun, and it can fuck a body up through his armour or, I dunno, cover the whole passageway in … fleshers.’ They flushed, clearly not used to the word flechette. In broad New London patois, they said, ‘Sounds narsty, any road.’

People laughed, and Nbaro realised Chen had managed to get them all interested – even Photino, the shorter ’gyne, who seemed very hesitant about … everything.

It was clearly Nbaro’s turn. She pointed at a dark-haired, very pale spacer who’d remained quiet the whole time. ‘What are those?’ she asked, pointing at a row of plastic eggs over the hatch to the chain locker.

‘Bothie, ma’am,’ the spacer replied. She had a nice crisp voice. Nbaro thought it was probably more of a liability than an asset that she was remarkably pretty, so she made herself smile.

Bothie took courage from the smile and smiled back. ‘Drones, ma’am. Or at least, I guess they’re the casings for the drones.’ She looked up at the drones as if hoping for some divine revelation, and then looked back. ‘I guess you used ’em to clear a passageway, but due respect, ma’am, I didn’t catch how they worked.’

A few people laughed. The loudest laugh was from the biggest man, whose pocket flash said ‘Kent’.

Nbaro pointed at him. ‘So how do they work?’

Kent didn’t wilt under her glare. ‘They flies,’ he said. ‘And then they blows up.’

More laughter. But Nbaro felt that the man had the right of it. ‘Not bad. I think the two of you managed to get the gist.’

She turned away while Chen and Locran asked a dozen more questions, until every spacer had answered something correctly. She got on her tab to the forward Dirtyshirt mess, where she used her status as a hero to beg two cherry pies.

She looked at Chen. ‘Any fails?’ she asked.

‘Nope.’ Chen smiled at their people. ‘I think maybe we got a good bunch.’

Nbaro nodded. ‘Two cherry pies will be delivered to the aft mess hall at ship’s time 2000. You get one slice each. You’ll need to show ID.’

‘Shit-hot,’ Spacer Nuur said aloud, and then they turned to hear a few words from Captain Fraser for all the trainees.

‘We’re two weeks out from Insertion for Corfu System.’ Fraser had the absolute attention of every spacer. It wasn’t often that they were engaged in anything that looked beyond the next watch. ‘It’s no secret that we could be jumping straight into another fight,’ he said. ‘So whether you are here, or on a damage control party, or both, you need to be ready.’

There were a lot of sombre faces as they all filed through the hatches back to their routine duties.

Nbaro caught Chen. ‘That was excellent,’ she said.

Chen nodded. ‘I always wanted to give this approach a go.’

‘Can we get together in the next two days to plan some classes?’

Locran raised his tab and the three of them shared schedules, then Nbaro waved a hand.

‘Wait one,’ she said. ‘Sabina, find the best time in the next twenty-four hours for the three of us to meet.’

‘Got it ,’ Sabina said. ‘Besides right now, you mean? ’

Locran smiled with half his face – a sort of grimace. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘right now is good.’

Chen agreed, and the three of them went to Nbaro’s ready room and drafted a training syllabus. Lieutenant Commander Thulile joined them, probably lured by the voices, and Nbaro introduced Chen and Locran.

Thulile listened for a while and then drifted away, but when they were done and Nbaro was collating the results into a document on her tab, she returned.

‘Spoken to Patel yet?’ she asked.

Nbaro froze. She had forgotten again.

Thulile nodded. ‘How about right now?’ Her voice was even: not demanding, not accusing. ‘He’s working on 6–0–3.’

Nbaro stood up. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

Thulile looked frustrated. ‘It’s not an order,’ she said. ‘It’s a suggestion. You seem very uneasy about talking to Patel.’

‘I keep forgetting,’ Nbaro said.

Thulile raised an eyebrow.

Nbaro took a deep breath. And then shook her head.

I’m an idiot.

‘Now is a good time,’ she admitted.

Thulile’s gaze was mild, but their eyes locked. ‘Do you have a problem with Patel?’ she asked quietly.

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Do you have a problem with telling someone else about their mistakes?’ Thulile asked.

Nbaro grunted without thought, as if she’d been punched.

Got me pegged.

Thulile wasn’t a warm person. She didn’t come closer, or put a hand on Nbaro’s shoulder; in fact, she kept her distance like an Orphanage grad. Nor did she smile. Her gaze remained level. ‘This comes with the job,’ she said. Her smile was so slight that Nbaro would have missed it if she hadn’t been fixed on the other woman’s face, but it spoke of something … some inner knowledge.

‘I’ll go right now,’ she said.

Thulile said nothing in return.

Nbaro found Patel working on 6–0–3, just as promised. He was as absurdly young as Nuur, perhaps six whole months younger than Nbaro herself.

Nbaro found Chief Baluster out on the deck, watching three different work parties.

‘Chief, I need a word with Patel,’ she said.

Baluster nodded. He seemed distant; she wondered if he held a grudge. He’d been reprimanded for the hydraulics leak in her spaceframe back on Madagascar, but it hadn’t gone in his record …

Then he turned, and the coldness was gone. ‘Going to fry him for his test scores, I hope,’ Baluster said.

She nodded. ‘Something like that.’

‘Well, pretty smart letting him stew the last few weeks. He knew this was coming. He’s probably stopped eating.’ Baluster grinned.

Nbaro felt a hollow in her gut.

I didn’t think about it that way …

I’m an idiot. As usual.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘Patel! ’ Baluster roared over the sounds of the Hangar Deck. His voice was louder than two high-speed drills and a powered wrench.

Rohan Patel was a man of middling height, and he was almost exactly the same shade of brown as Nbaro herself; they might have been brother and sister. He wore a small beard and a moustache, and his smile didn’t hide his nerves. He crossed the deck like a man walking bravely to his execution.

‘Chief,’ he said. And then, ‘Ma’am.’

She nodded. ‘Let’s take a walk,’ she said, playing Truekner in her mind.

Patel looked back at Baluster.

Baluster smiled. ‘Oh, no, Rohan. Now you get it, and I’m not holding your hand.’

The Hangar Deck was full of activity. It was a vast area, more than a kilometre long, filling the third and fourth deck levels towards the stern of the ship; in slow times, there were mounts for ball courts to be installed.

Not now. Now, there were a dozen spacecraft under construction as the Athens threw off all constraints and converted herself to a war footing. Flight Six, which had been a pool of reserve pilots to support merchant operations, suddenly received their military spaceframes, as did Flight Two, which was getting small, close-in interceptors that could be piloted remotely or live. There were rows of spacecraft in every stage of completion.

Despite which, it wasn’t hard to find privacy. Nbaro walked Patel into the space between two parked gantries, and they might have been on the surface of a moon.

‘So …’ she said.

‘Ma’am, I’m really sorry …’ He was charming, and he was probably also funny. And he was prepared to trot both of these qualities out.

She liked him instantly, which made this much harder.

Who am I, the fake officer, to tell this kid how to live his life?

When did I start liking everyone, anyway?

‘Stow it,’ she said, overcoming her urge to be cheerful.

He froze.

She had her tab, and she held it up in front of her face as if she was reading it. ‘Any idea how many spacers fail their first petty officer exam?’ she asked.

Patel gave up on charm, probably too early, and turned surly. ‘A bunch, I bet.’

She used his tone to clamp down. ‘Want to guess how many spacers who’ve already been put in charge of a work party fail?’ she asked. Patel was a valuable man, who had a real facility for spaceframe repair and maintenance. He’d been in charge of repairs for three months already.

‘I suck at tests. Ma’am.’

She nodded. ‘So noted. But your score is so low, it’s as if you have some test-taking anxiety.’

He made a face and mumbled something.

‘So how about we sign you up for some therapy in that direction?’

‘Do we have to?’ he asked. ‘Gods, ma’am, I signed up for Service so I could … I dunno. Not do this shit.’

Well, here’s the part that Truekner told me about.

She put her tab under her arm. ‘Yeah. You know, I kinda get that.’ She didn’t let herself smile. ‘The thing is, Patel, you said Service. Service means we serve. You know me, right? You know I came from the Orphanage.’

Patel nodded. ‘I know you, ma’am. Everyone asks about you.’ He shrugged. ‘When this is over, if I’m still alive, everyone will want to hear—’

He was back to funny and charming.

She cut him off brusquely. ‘So I used to think that Service was all military and orders. But then I got to the Athens and I found that I’m serving. And so, here I am, on the Hangar Deck during my sleep time, serving your needs by telling you to get your ass in gear and pass the fucking test. Because the ship needs you, and Flight Six needs you to be a petty officer and carry out orders. Given what Baluster and every other Leading Petty Officer in this maintenance section says about you, you should already be studying for your next promotion board. It’s not all about you, Patel. We need you to get promoted.’

Patel looked confused.

She leaned closer. ‘Skipper Truekner sent me, the barbarous Orphanage grad hero, to tell you to get it together. You, the only person in my division to fail a test.’ She shrugged. ‘I fail shit all the time. So what? Get it together, pass the next one. I’m scheduling it for you in four weeks. Got that? So, therapy? Or just wing it?’

‘What happens if I fail again?’ he asked.

She held the muscles of her face immobile and just looked at him until he broke eye contact.

I didn’t know I could do that. Wow.

‘I’ll take the therapy. But people will fuck with me about it.’ He was looking at the deck.

‘Oh, really? I could use some new sparring partners in boarding party drills,’ she said cheerfully. I like that tone. Nasty. Barbarous. ‘Next time we talk, I want to be shaking your hand and pinning your rank on.’

‘I hear you, ma’am.’

‘Excellent. Don’t forget to tell all your shipmates how nice I am.’

Patel looked at her then, and cracked a smile.

You are a bold one. Do you see through me?

But then he looked away.

She walked him back to Baluster.

‘Spacer Patel is going to go to therapy with Science Tech Yu to address test-taking anxiety,’ she said.

Baluster nodded.

‘Chief … so my views are clear,’ she said, ‘I know a shitload about hazing. If I hear that Patel took any grief about this therapy, I will be mean-spirited about it.’

Baluster’s mouth twitched. ‘Point taken,’ he said. ‘I might be mean-spirited myself, ma’am. I need this grinning bastard to get promoted so he can take some work off my shoulders.’

Patel shut his eyes.

She nodded. ‘Good,’ she said briskly. ‘Patel, if you need anything to make this work, you tell me. Hold up your tab.’

He raised it.

She pressed the button that exchanged comms data. ‘Now you have my personal contact.’ She made her smile feral. ‘And I have yours. I expect you to attend every therapy session on time, and that you will study for this exam.’

God, now I sound like the instructors at the Orphanage. Yuck.

10

Nbaro was sucked back into the world of shipboard life. She might be deeply worried that her lover was critically wounded; she might have deep concerns about the presence of a neural lace in her head and its implications; she might share the same host of concerns facing every spacer aboard – aliens, distance, the daily dangers of life in space. All of those things were there, every minute of every waking hour, and all too often in her sleep.

And yet, the warm embrace of shipboard routine was also there.

Incidents stood out. The mass-launch drill was fascinating, as the Athens experimented with creating windows in its clutter-field, and selected band jamming, and new, more subtle deceptions: emitters mounted on torpedo hulls, for example, capable of moving at high speeds in bursts; refitted spacecraft with more powerful emitters and sub-AIs capable of very deceptive flight paths; and Flight One cargo shuttles launched cold to drop responsive clutter patterns to cover the flank of the Athens. It wasn’t all new, but laying it all on together was a major exercise, and the ship and the space wing rose to the challenge.

Nbaro flew the Pericles with a robust electronic warfare package clamped on, and with Andrei Gorshokov as her co-pilot. Gorshokov was a Flight Five pilot, another former midder.

‘I guess we were supposed to be learning from Han,’ Nbaro said as they ran preflight checks.

‘I’ve done about fifty hours on the sims,’ Gorshokov said.

Nbaro nodded. ‘It’s Frankenstein’s monster, Andrei. It’s too big to fly like a spaceframe, and too small to really be a ship. It’s clunky, and it can’t lift-off from the railguns, so no cold boost.’ She shrugged inside her EVA suit.

Both of them were in full EVA gear, as were the two Flight Three EW techs who had turned the crew space aft of the cockpit into a snake’s nest of wires and cables connected to myriad boxes, consoles and screens.

‘I wonder if we really need EVA suits,’ Gorshokov said. ‘If we’re targeted …’

‘I agree. It’s overkill. I’ll mention it to …’ She paused. ‘To Han.’ He was the commanding officer of record of the little hybrid ship.

The drill exposed errors; the roll-out of spaceframes off the catapults was slower than anyone had anticipated, and the deployment of chaff from the Flight One drop-ships was ineffective due to an engineering fault. Nbaro got to watch it all from a front row seat, hovering ten thousand kilometres above the Athens and slightly behind her.

Nbaro’s verdict on the whole thing, including flying the Pericles , was one word to Drake.

‘Boring.’

‘Honey, you have the command of your own small ship while, technically, you’re still a midder. I think that’s something.’ Drake smiled.

Nbaro smiled back. ‘Sometimes I’m amazed I’m here at all,’ she admitted. ‘But I want back in my own spaceframe, I guess I’m an XC-3C girl.’

They were eight days from Insertion, and then seven, and then six. She trained boarders, flew routine Flight Six missions training her midders, stood watches, and in between, worked out, practised her close combat skills, and stopped by Maintenance twice to see Patel. She’d just smile at him and move on.

I hope that’s not creepy.

Five days from Insertion, and the schedules were published. She was Lioness. That thrilled her, but it also told her how thin the crew was; the mass launch was stripping the ship of senior pilots. The sudden construction of light fighters for Flight Two and heavy fighters for Flight Six meant that many pilots whose primary work had been on the ship or ‘helping out’ on cargo flights and in Space Ops were now dedicated military pilots with missions to fly.

In fact, Nbaro noted, looking down the schedule, that the moment she came off the Space Ops watch from Insertion, she would be in a spaceframe as co-pilot with Truekner.

Four days from Insertion. She forced herself to find time to visit Dorcas.

Yu wasn’t on watch, but another med tech took her to Dorcas’s clamshell. He no longer had privacy curtains, probably because he was now fully immersed in the gel that combined healing properties with acceleration protection.

‘Hey,’ she said.

There was a long pause. It scared her.

Suddenly, his eyes popped open. ‘Nbaro!’ he sent, as if this was a total surprise.

‘Remember me?’

‘Always,’ Dorcas replied. ‘I have found something we can do together, to our mutual profit.’

He sounded very much like himself – or, at least, the self he projected into data space.

‘I’m in. What are we doing?’

‘I’m going to train you to use your neural lace. To really use it, the way I use it. In fact, this injury may prove to be beneficial. Morosini has been showing me many things I had not understood before.’

‘Is that even possible?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes. There are many things I don’t understand. I thought you of all people knew that.’

‘That was sarcasm.’

‘Ah.’ Pause. ‘Ah, of course.’

‘Your brain seems unimpaired.’

‘Yes. We’ve done extensive tests, and it appears the impairment was mostly concussion.’

Nbaro’s anger flared up, and for a moment she lost her neural link altogether.

‘And when were you going to tell me that?’ she asked.

Dorcas’s eyes, just visible through the gel and a transparent window, were wide.

‘I should have told you.’

‘Yes,’ she sent, and tried to put emphasis on the neural projection, like a pitcher putting spin on a ball. ‘Yes. In fact, I’m very angry with you. And happy.’

They looked at each other through the gel.

‘I am very badly injured,’ he sent. ‘A tragic figure, really.’

‘You have a fine brain and a neural lace. You could have dropped me a message at any point, say, “Brain unimpaired. Having deep thoughts. Dorcas.” ’

Dorcas blinked. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Yes, that sounds like something I really should have done.’

‘But you didn’t,’ she sent back.

Just for a moment, Dorcas sent Nbaro a glimpse of an incredible landscape.

No – a three-dimensional figure. A geometry … no. More than three dimensions …

Then it was gone. ‘That’s where I’ve been,’ he said. ‘Six-dimensional space, as realised by Calabi and proven by Yau. So we call this a Calabi–Yau manifold.’

She was at a loss for words, not least because it was beautiful, and also because she realised that Morosini had thrown Dorcas into this mathematical wonderland for benign reasons, and so, naturally, Dorcas had pretty much forgotten her existence.

She settled into a chair. ‘Tell me about it. What is a Calabi–Yau manifold?’

‘Well,’ he said, and she could imagine his tone if this was in the real: his slight breathlessness, his excitement, his passion. ‘The motivational definition originally given by Shing-Tung Yau is of a compact Kähler manifold with a vanishing first Chern class, that is also Ricci flat.’

Nbaro smiled. ‘Pretend I don’t know what a Chern class is.’

‘Oh, the characteristic classes associated with complex vector bundles. Right?’

Eventually, Dorcas took her inside, in data space.

Forty minutes later, Nbaro was no closer to understanding multi-dimensional geometry than she ever had been, but she was aware that Calabi–Yau manifolds were widely believed to be the six-dimensional structures at the smallest ‘frames’ of the universe. She was also aware that her beloved was going to recover, if slowly, and that he was both happy and fully entertained. And the possibility of her becoming fluent in the use of her neural lace seemed …

Healing. Mostly. And a little scary.

She left Dorcas to his data space, and stopped by Han. He now had a private space created by sheets of black plastic, because he was only partially clamshelled and his head and left shoulder were clear. He was in a sort of medical acceleration couch, and Nbaro realised that they were all being prepped for Insertion … and whatever came after.

‘Ms Nbaro,’ he said as soon as she pushed through the curtain. She’d exchanged messages with him to make sure he was awake and receptive.

‘Afternoon, sir.’

‘You don’t have to call me “sir”.’ He grinned.

‘I don’t. But this is sort of a business visit.’

‘Great.’ He actually sounded eager. ‘How’s the Pericles ?’

‘She’s fine. But Gorshokov and I were wondering whether we really needed to wear full EVA suits on board.’ She made a face.

‘Nah. I almost never wear EVA gear on board the pinnace. Anything that gets you while you’re in it is probably going to kill you.’ Han’s smile was odd, as if his face was stiff, and she realised that it probably was – that a person coming out of a long period in clamshell hadn’t done much smiling. She thought of Lieutenant Smith.

‘That’s sort of what I thought. Well, I’m keeping your seat warm for you. So is Cortez from Flight Five – he’ll be taking her for the insertion.’ She smiled. ‘And then you’ll be back, or that’s what a little bird told us.’

‘Three weeks, tops. But, oh, man, the physio I’m about to endure.’ Han shrugged his one exposed shoulder. ‘How’s Mr Dorcas?’

‘Healing!’ she said, with enough brightness that she surprised herself. ‘Sorry. We were worried he had brain damage, but apparently not. On the other hand, his ribs are all broken and there’s damage to his pelvis and neck, so …’

So, sex is off the table for a while, I guess. Weird. A month ago I’d have thought I could just skip sex for the rest of my life.

Han nodded. ‘Well, this place works miracles.’

The med tech came in. Nbaro was embarrassed because she’d sat with them at dinner a couple of times: one of Yu’s friends with an old Americano name she had forgotten.

The woman smiled at Nbaro. ‘Ma’am, I have to move you along. This handsome devil needs his meds, and then he gets to start his nice rehab!’ She said the last words in a tone that made it clear she knew there was nothing nice about rehab.

‘I bet you say that to all the boys,’ Han managed.

The med tech smiled. She had bright eyes and a wicked grin. ‘Boys, girls and ’gynes.’

Wayne. Lisa Wayne.

‘Work him hard, Lisa,’ Nbaro said, in Thea Drake tones. ‘We need him back.’

‘Ooh,’ Wayne said. ‘Permission to work the subject hard.’

Han drew his left hand theatrically across his face. ‘No, Nbaro, don’t leave me.’

Wayne rolled her eyes. ‘He’s going to stretch his left arm. Maybe ten times. And do some grip strength stuff. Don’t believe a word he says about the whole torture thing.’ She winked.

Nbaro left, knowing Han was in good hands, and two hours later he sent her a tab message thanking her for her visit and authorising flightsuits only on the Pericles. She re-sent it to all the acting crew members, including the EW techs.

And then, happier than she’d been in a week, she went to zero-g combat, and then to her rack.

11

Nbaro didn’t have to physically visit Dorcas to exercise her neural lace with him, but she preferred it, so she visited him, and Han, too. The exercises varied from the utterly mundane, as he showed her ways to memorise data entry points, like index cards, which definitely sped up her use of the extensive system, to the exploration of worlds of wonder, like the six-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifolds.

‘Still doesn’t make sense to me,’ she admitted in the steady VR environment the two of them could now share. ‘Can you really hold six dimensions in your head?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But in the data space I can approach understanding them, both mathematically and … intuitively.’

She wanted to say something like ‘That’s nice for you,’ but she didn’t.

Two days from Insertion, the station at Trade Point was a distant memory – the last hours of bombardment by the beam weapons just a trace in Nbaro’s nightmares – and she was looking at her usual table in the wardroom: seated around it were Steven Yu, Thea Drake, Rick Hanna, Jesus Cortez, Captain Bernie Fraser and acting Captain Jan Mpono, now the ship’s executive officer.

‘Just like the old days,’ Nbaro said, as she approached the table with a tray piled high with food.

‘Marca’s storing food for winter,’ Thea Drake quipped.

Cortez, who worked out constantly to fight his tendency towards muscular overweightness, snorted. ‘Where the hell does she put it all?’

Hanna had already finished eating, and he leaned back. ‘You know that our universe has eleven dimensions, right?’ he asked. ‘One of them is just for Nbaro’s food, and my socks.’

‘I love you all,’ Nbaro said as she sat.

Acting Captain Mpono smiled at her, their narrow face alight. ‘It’s good to see you, Marca.’

‘You too, tir – Smoke .’ She laughed. ‘Damn it. I laugh at Gorshokov when he does it, and I still do it to you.’

Smoke laughed back. ‘And as for the “old days”,’ she said, ‘I’ve been eating at this table for four cruises, and your “old days” are only three or four months old.’

‘If Dorcas was here—’ Drake stopped herself. ‘Marca, how is he?’

‘Great!’ Nbaro said. ‘Er … by which I mean he’s got no brain damage, and the ship has him occupied with higher dimensional space to pass the time.’

‘That sounds right,’ Hanna said.

‘Otherwise … broken ribs, broken collarbones, broken pelvis.’

‘So a long time until you have sex again,’ Thea said, and Nbaro tossed a bread roll at her.

Fraser laughed. ‘We’ll all have to watch ourselves at sword drills,’ he said ruefully.

‘Ah,’ Mpono said. ‘We must be in the Deep Black. The part of the cruise where everyone’s been away from home a little too long.’

There was a little silence. Then they said, ‘Well, it won’t be secret in two hours. We’re inserting for Corfu, ahead of schedule.’

Nbaro knew that must be good news, as everyone brightened except Fraser – who, as commander of Astrogation, had to already know their destination.

‘Corfu!’ Drake said.

Nbaro raised an eyebrow. But she had a neural lace, and she was getting much better at accessing information. So she did.

In milliseconds, she had ‘learned that Corfu had previously been a system called Gliese 1187, and had a bright G series star and no planets in the habitable zone, but two gas giants well out. An extensive double asteroid belt featured a quiet zone running down the middle, and held a number of mining stations, most of them run from distant New India. Corfu had one large station: a hollowed-out asteroid with a substantial population in the outer belt.

The DHC had made the decision two hundred years ago to limit human expansion into this sector – called the ‘Anti-coreward Fringe’ in some articles – to avoid potential infringement on Starfish space, but their attempts to limit the frontier had not only failed utterly, but had been a cause of increasing friction with the frontier worlds. Ultra and its Medulla Station, with a DHC base and a major trade depot, had been intended as the absolute human frontier in this direction, but colonists and refugees had other ideas.

‘It’s the longest insertion on our route,’ Captain Fraser said. ‘In fact, it’s the very limit of our capabilities, although with a little help from our new PTX friends, we may have a better time of it.’

‘Astrogation always sweats blood over this leg,’ Mpono said with a slight smile.

‘Yes, we do,’ Fraser admitted.

‘But when I update the plot in a couple of hours,’ Mpono said, ‘you’ll see that we’re going to get a little R and R on Corfu Station.’

‘If …’ Thea Drake said. ‘If the Bubbles don’t jump us coming in-system.’

‘If ,’ Cortez added, ‘the Bubbles haven’t already killed everyone in-system.’

‘You’re a cheerful lot,’ Yu said. ‘I’m going back to work, where we try to do some science in between patching up the survivors of your escapades.’

‘Ouch,’ Nbaro said. ‘I prefer to think that you’re patching us up because we helped you survive.’

‘Ooh,’ Drake said, and made a ‘score’ mark in the air. ‘Amazing you can be so witty and still pack away all that food.’

‘I’m getting out of here before you two target me,’ Fraser said. He looked at his partner, Mpono, who smiled back.

‘These children wouldn’t dare target me with their humour,’ Mpono said. ‘I have all the powers of the XO.’

‘That’s us told,’ Drake said. ‘Come to think of it, I’ll have another dessert. It works for Marca.’

Nbaro left the table feeling better – so much better that she realised, as she slipped into her rack, that she’d gone a full day without feeling like an idiot.

12

Nbaro used her neural lace ruthlessly to prep for her mass launch in Corfu System. Used to its fullest extent, the neural lace allowed her to – at least virtually – be in several places at once. She managed to get every one of forty-four spacecraft to register their take-off weights in advance through various virtual personas, while she tinkered with the routines, slightly changed flight schedules, and received a plea from Engineering to give them thirty more minutes to get the new chaff dispensers affixed to the Flight One drop-ships, which the Master agreed to.

Nbaro imagined she could hear them grinding their teeth in Astrogation.

Alpha Alpha 1–0–4 made it on to the rails with seven minutes to go for Insertion. Nbaro locked it down, translated its new weight and made sure Tower had it all for launch.

Then she raised her hand. ‘Take your drugs, friends,’ she said.

All through the black, bronze, gold and underlit red-orange elegance of the remodelled Space Operations Centre, her crews took their insertion drugs and then raised their hands to indicate compliance.

Brian Evans, a Flight Six officer just starting his Space Ops qualifications, was sitting at the Tactical Operations repeater. ‘Ma’am,’ he said.

Nbaro didn’t have to look down, or around. She just cycled her TAO screen to the forefront of her busy retinal projections.

TAO had identified three fast-moving ships. They weren’t close, but two of them were obviously Hin. The third was just UnID.

‘Not changing anything right now, Brian,’ Nbaro said. ‘Good heads-up, though. Now take your nice drugs.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, although, like everyone else of lieutenant status or above, he outranked Nbaro in day-to-day matters.

So the aliens had made their move, about seven hours earlier. They were far behind, in the Athens ’ frame of time-reference.

‘Two minutes to Insertion,’ she said. Her pulse was starting to race.

On the TAO plot, the Stealthy Change was about a light-second astern of the Athens , her tail fully deployed. Nbaro wished her astrogator luck. Ship’s gossip said that the Stealthy Change ’s captain was also the astrogator, after a complex mutiny and then the counter-mutiny that had wounded Fuju Han.

These are not profitable thoughts just now.

Life with a neural lace forced a certain mental discipline that didn’t come naturally to Nbaro. But she was one minute from a potential space battle, and she needed everything to run perfectly.

Pisani’s voice came over the ship’s system.

‘Shipmates,’ he said. ‘Once again, we’re going into what may be a hostile system. You all know the drill, and I mean that literally. So I ask that you watch your own backs and your shipmates’, and together we’ll help the Athens get us home. That is all.’

Fifteen seconds.

Ten seconds.

Five seconds.

Insertion.

Nbaro came to feeling so good that she wondered for a moment if something had gone wrong. It was almost a religious experience; she felt as if she was at one with the universe as her consciousness became aware.

Automation was lagging behind human reaction. She’d heard about it happening, but never experienced it before.

Maybe an artifact of how long this insertion was?

Still no sign of Morosini, or of anything on her neural lace.

And that’s why I have my whole launch sequence hand-written on a knee-board.

‘Listen up!’ she called, echoing the way Mpono had done it back at Sahel. ‘Full launch! Ready?’

Hands went up raggedly, because people recovered consciousness as slowly as machines. But as soon as Nbaro had Tower and her catapults, she said, ‘Go.’

A rattle of voices. She didn’t need to do it all herself, any more. Dworkin, on Tower, said, ‘Alpha Alpha 1–0–3, I have you good for launch.’

‘Roger, Tower. Good for launch.’

Nbaro’s acceleration couch vibrated very slightly as the enormous bulk of a drop-ship carrying tonnes of metal foil chaff and other tricks hurtled down the electromagnetic rails and into the void.

‘One away,’ said Evans, her understudy.

They had five craft out into space before Morosini suddenly came online. There was a burst of white noise on her neural lace and she lost several seconds, and then her ‘extra senses’, as she thought of them, began to register.

I need to talk to Morosini about this , she thought. That was a long lag.

Nbaro went straight to TAO. The Flight Six spaceframes were just coming off the front end; the TAO plot showed an empty system, but in their frame of reference, in-system for less than two minutes, they were sailing through the transmissions of past time.

The plot updated.

‘Yikes,’ someone muttered.

They were way out in the comet belt, and they were going very fast. At 0.4 c , give or take, relative to the star, they were right up against the constraints of slowing down.

Nbaro toggled back and forth in her mind, looking at sensors. The system was very much alive, or had been recently. There was in-system traffic: small local craft flitting from asteroid to asteroid, and a larger ship, possibly an ore freighter, forty hours out from Corfu Station. A traffic control beacon updated their in-system data using the standard DHC-wide format: x- , y- and z- axes, with the plane of the ecliptic defined as the x -axis, and a t tag on every location or ellipse to represent the time of last location. They were light minutes out from Corfu Station, so updates were slow.

But they were there.

She began to breathe more easily.

The Flight Six XC-3C spacecraft began to deploy their sensors, and suddenly the system began to register in higher definition. It was eerie to watch the information update; on the scale of a whole star system, the speed of light was a tactical reality.

Her launch rolled on. She wasn’t the Tactical Action Officer – she didn’t have to worry about the immediate reactions, just about launching her craft – and she rolled along, checking her AI-driven implant against the piece of paper clutched in her hand all the way to the end of the launch. It took just over eleven minutes and used all four railgun tubes.

‘Forty-four away,’ Evans said.

A few seconds ticked by, and Nbaro had just begun to frame some words of congratulations when the Command net came to life.

‘Nice launch, Lioness,’ the Master said. ‘The XO says they couldn’t have done better.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘We have a great crew down here in Ops.’ She grinned, because she was speaking out loud and everyone could hear her. ‘And lots of shiny new equipment.’

Just this once, I am not an idiot.

She stood up when Pisani was gone. ‘Beautiful job, everyone,’ she said. ‘I believe we just set an Athens record for the timing and scale of launch.’

‘Maybe a Service record,’ Evans said.

‘That’d be fun,’ she admitted. ‘Anyway, folks, thanks to each and every one of you. Now look sharp – we could still be in hostile space.’

She sat down again, and Evans came and stood by her. She didn’t really know him, but he seemed decent enough; he was a long-servicer who’d started as an enlisted spacer and made his way into the officer ranks. A true veteran.

‘We’re going really fast,’ he said very quietly.

Nbaro was going to make a snappy remark, but he really did outrank her by years, and anyway, she knew he was right.

‘Dorcas?’ she asked. She didn’t do this often.

There was no delay. ‘Good launch?’ he sent.

She glowed. ‘Everything worked,’ she replied. ‘You know how it can be.’

‘I’m sure you had nothing to do with it. I imagine, as you are in near-combat conditions and quite busy, that this isn’t a social call?’

‘Can you tell if our velocity and acceleration are a problem?’

‘Wait one,’ he said.

She blinked. ‘I would imagine …’ she began, looking up at Evans, and Dorcas was back.

‘No problem.’ He tossed her a three-dimensional plot showing the Athens passing a gas giant, with the tendrils of hundreds of sorties of refuelling spacecraft diving into the planet’s atmosphere like fingers reaching into a cloud, and then making a elliptical path down and around the star to return via a single pass at the second gas giant.

‘Wow,’ she sent.

‘Yes. Beautiful, isn’t it? Morosini plotted it.’

She returned to the real. ‘As I was saying, I would imagine we’ll refuel from the gas giants as we fly by. Morosini is plotting the course.’

Evans narrowed his eyes. ‘You know that already?’

She shrugged. ‘I have a neural lace.’

He didn’t look pleased. ‘Hardly fair to the rest of us,’ he muttered. And then, ‘Sorry. Nothing personal, Nbaro. But I hear rumours of cockpits designed for laced pilots, and so on. It doesn’t seem … fair, to us old-fashioned humans.’

I didn’t ask for this thing.

She nodded, rising off her acceleration couch. ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ she said. ‘I think that, in my case, desperate times called for desperate measures …’ She looked at him. ‘But I take your point. My squadron skipper has mentioned it a few times.’

Evans seemed taken aback by her agreement. ‘Yeah …’ But then he said, ‘Well, at least it’s good to know that we’re not going Dutchman at 0.4 c .’

Soon enough, they had a cycle of recovering the earliest launches and then another launch event. The Athens was on full alert, and wasn’t changing that status until they had a much fuller picture of the system.

A little less than an hour later, the Stealthy Change arrived almost exactly at their extraction point. The PTX ship’s own extraction was visible from all angles on the new passive systems deployed by various spacecraft, and she arrived almost exactly on predicted time and course. She was also a little above 0.4 c .

Two hours later, Nbaro was in the co-pilot’s seat of 6–0–7, going through routine checklists as if she was still a normal midder and nothing had ever changed.

When they’d run the preflights, Truekner smiled at her. ‘Well, Ms Nbaro, I must say it’s nice to have you back.’

‘Good to be back, skipper,’ she said.

‘You spoke to Patel?’ he asked, as they were cranked into the railway and manoeuvred into their launch position.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. And then, after a moment, ‘Sir.’

Truekner laughed. ‘You are so salty, now, Nbaro!’

‘Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7, I have you as go for launch,’ said a voice in her ear. It was a little redundant; on her neural lace, she could see her spacecraft’s exact position on the rails, as well as her status in the launch cycle, and if she wanted, data on everything from fuel flow to hydraulic pressure. She didn’t need Tower or Lioness …

Which, of course, was exactly what Evans was annoyed about.

‘Earth to Nbaro. Are you there?’ Truekner asked.

‘Sorry, sir. Thinking about something from my last watch.’

‘Something bad? Tell me about it.’

She toggled her mic. ‘Tower, this is 6–0–7, we are go for launch.’

Truekner raised an eyebrow; Nbaro could see the twitch of his bushy, old-man eyebrows right through his golden mirror-visor.

But he turned, looked at the catapult operator, and saluted.

A few seconds later they burst out of the light and into the wonders of the void. She could hear the two sensor operators in the back end, comparing notes as they began to wrestle with the complexities of the pattern of detectors, and the world of spacetime according to their position in it.

All of which she could do with a glance, an eye-twitch and a sub-vocalisation.

Truekner surprised her by using thrusters to roll them right off the catapult, a fairly sudden acceleration out of the plane of their forward motion.

‘We have a target area for six sensors,’ he said.

Nbaro saw, ruefully, that she hadn’t taken in the whole of the mission.

‘Anyway, tell me your troubles, Lieutenant.’

She picked up the sensor drops, and passed them to the back end.

‘It’s about having a neural lace,’ she said. ‘It really is unfair.’

‘Yep,’ the skipper said. ‘It really is.’

Ouch.

‘You know I didn’t choose to have it, right?’ she said, more defensively than she’d meant.

Truekner chuckled. ‘Honestly, Nbaro, one of the many mysteries surrounding you is how a penniless orphan got a neural lace.’ He shrugged. ‘But hey, no one needs to tell me anything.’

Then there was a busy twenty minutes as they laid new sensors into the pattern. Nbaro didn’t need a neural lace to realise that they were laying a pattern to catch someone coming behind them, and not the Stealthy Change.

‘Anyway, I was on watch with Lieutenant Evans, and he was … annoyed … that I could just communicate with Dorcas and learn … stuff.’

‘Like?’

‘Like our plot for the next six weeks.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if you shared that with me, young lady.’ Truekner sounded just a little sarcastic.

Nbaro pasted the 3D file into a message and tabbed it – or rather, she sent it to his tab from her head, via the ship, which caused a few seconds of lag.

‘I imagine that eventually, every pilot will have a neural lace,’ the skipper said. ‘And ships will be very different. In fact, to be honest, I can imagine a world where there are very few humans on a ship at all.’ He glanced at her. ‘Which will suck, because it’ll be lonely. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned. But eight thousand people on a ship is a good-sized small town. It’s pleasant. It keeps the absolute zero of the void at a psychological arm’s length.’

‘I hear that,’ she agreed. ‘I love it here.’

‘I wonder if we can sell the DHC on the idea that ships need to be big and well populated to function,’ he said. ‘But, yeah, it’s all about to change. The PTX tails, the change with the Starfish, the new aliens, the neural lace … there’s other new technologies coming up. Hell, we’re inventing new stuff on this cruise.’

‘The only constant is change,’ Nbaro said, quoting from a manual.

‘Exactly. Anyway, if people give you shit, be considerate to them, but tell me.’

I am considerate, and I never wanted this thing in my head.

When did I learn to be considerate, though?

The idea made her laugh a little.

‘This is gold,’ Truekner said.

‘The plot?’ she asked, meaning the astrogation plot that showed course and deceleration around the star.

‘Forewarning of the plot. We’re going to fly missions like there’s no tomorrow. Almighty, Nbaro, I see three hundred sorties in forty hours here. Mostly for us.’

‘Roger that, skipper.’

‘You take her. I’m going to start writing the flight schedule.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Eight hours later, the Tactical Action Officer declared the system safe, for a given value of safety. The navigation buoys were intact and transmitting, and the Master broadcast the greeting of Corfu Station over the whole ship.

‘Welcome, Athens ! A sight for sore eyes! Do you have cargo for us?’

And the Master’s response: ‘We have cargo for you, Corfu Station. And we plan a week alongside.’

‘Well, that’ll be teleia ! Ta leme !’

‘What language is that?’ she asked Dorcas.

‘Greek,’ he answered. ‘Corfu is mostly Old Greek and Southern Indian.’

13

Forty per cent of the speed of light was a hefty burden of speed and acceleration to shed before they could come alongside the station at Corfu, and everything about their cruise to date sufficed to keep them in a high state of readiness as they fell in-system, decelerating all the way. As the medbay was full of wounded, the Master and Morosini elected to decelerate only at rates consistent with their anti-gravity capabilities, making the process even slower. Morosini’s projected route was an exercise in applied orbital mechanics that looked a little like a showy billiards shot. They would drop in-system, passing the sun well out from its gravity well, and then slingshot around the gas giant under heavy deceleration in controlled bursts until they were heading back in-system, making a second full rotation using the star’s gravitational well. Finally they would slip into an orbit that would allow them to come alongside the station, which was a hollowed-out asteroid in the outer of the two asteroid belts.

‘How many systems have two asteroid belts?’ Nbaro asked via her lace.

‘Do you imagine that I’m so bored that I can just look things up for you?’ Dorcas sent back.

‘And here I thought I was making small talk.’

‘What you are making is busy-work.’ He sent that with a neural-connected list of every system known by exploration or astronomy to have dual asteroid belts. There weren’t many, but they still added up to more than a hundred.

‘Why do you ask?’ Dorcas sent.

Nbaro sent back an image of the decayed xenoglas she’d found at Trade Point. Dorcas was a smart boy. He’d understand what she was driving at. If the Hin and the Starfish were fighting a war, or had fought, or had annihilated a third race, or whatever the current theory was, then there’d be more evidence.

He sent her back a set of transmissions from the Corfu Station Society for the Furtherance of Science, which proved to be an amateur association of miners and engineers who had made a hobby of scientific exploration in their system, or perhaps had merely reported things that seemed unusual.

‘Almighty,’ Nbaro murmured as she read them.

‘Makes you want to go look at it for yourself, does it not?’ Dorcas sent.

She was reading an article that included a nicely shot vid and several good still photos of … alien wreckage.

It was on the outer asteroid belt – virtually the other side of the system from Corfu Station.

There was a long, narrow acceleration couch, with a miner in a deep-space exploration suit posing next to it.

‘That’s an acceleration couch,’ she sent.

‘Or just a bed,’ he sent back.

The ruins were not extensive. What had appeared to be a small asteroid was a piece of … of something. A building? A huge building? A ship?

There were no bodies, and very little metal. Just the rubble of something built by sapient beings, and this couch, and four metal boxes, all manufactured, and all looking remarkably like boxes manufactured anywhere for use in space: airtight, with locking handles. Two of the four had markings on them. Language? Brand names? A logo?

‘Astroarchaeology must be having a field day back in New London,’ Nbaro said aloud. If Dorcas bothered, he could hear her. And she was alone in her stateroom, lying on her acceleration couch.

‘If they even know yet,’ Dorcas sent. ‘You think real scientists read journals written by miners?’

‘I think that the couch wouldn’t fit a Starfish or a Bubble.’

‘Intended for a being approximately two point five metres tall,’ he replied.

‘They were giants.’

14

They were still two weeks out from the nearer gas giant, decelerating as they ran through the system. With a stream of data pouring into the ship and hundreds of sensor packages littering the system, they’d achieved something like confidence that there was no ambush waiting, but they continued to fly a perimeter defence and a combat space patrol even as they ramped up their refuelling-capable shuttle capacity by refitting drop-ships. Nbaro stood her watches and flew, mostly short hops with her midshippers as co-pilots, training runs that also accomplished small tasks for the Maintenance shop. She also had multiple flights on the Pericles , which felt different; instead of flying a spaceframe, she was commanding a small ship. And she had boarding party drills, tactics classes, a special short course in material readiness – which was mostly about container stowage. She even managed to attend two of Yu’s dance classes, as well as earning exciting new bruises in free-fall martial arts.

The evening that Han was released from medbay, Nbaro arranged for him to eat with her friends in the wardroom. Rick Hanna sat with Thea; Yu was leaning back, savouring a good cup of his own tea while chatting with Rudyard Singh Agam; they worked together, and Agam was there as a guest of Lieutenant Smith, who made a rare appearance from his hole on Sixth Deck. He was even seen to laugh. Qaqqaq was lecturing midshipper Gorshokov on something, and Cortez sat with an officer from the data processing centre.

‘Introduce us?’ Drake said, leaning over Hanna.

Cortez smiled. ‘Lieutenant Tereza Klipac,’ he said, and then couldn’t resist adding, ‘Not in my chain of command.’

Tereza Klipac was a strong-faced woman with dark hair and square shoulders. ‘Hmf,’ she said, glancing at Cortez with something like disapproval. ‘You are the famous midder,’ she said to Nbaro.

‘Hey, I’m also a famous midder,’ Drake said.

Gorshokov muttered something about staying unnoticed.

‘Klipac,’ Cortez said, ‘is a ship’s system analyst.’

Nbaro smiled. It really was a good way to approach people. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

Klipac nodded, as if this was a sensible question. ‘We keep the computers going, and we make sure that the data processing systems are intact.’ She smiled at Nbaro. ‘Morosini talks to you, and it shows up on my desk sometimes.’

Nbaro flushed. ‘You mean …?’

Klipac’s eyes widened a trifle, and Nbaro wondered if she’d looked very threatening.

‘No, no, I can’t see what you discuss.’ Klipac laughed nervously. ‘Only the data usage. When you were trapped on the Trade Point station, Morosini was using a tonne of wattage on you.’

Cortez glanced at her. ‘So you already know Nbaro?’

Klipac glanced at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just an IP and a name.’

Nbaro was amused, because she was watching Cortez fail to be a good boyfriend. The ship’s systems analyst didn’t like being introduced as a sexual partner; who would? And the woman’s reaction actually warmed Nbaro to her.

‘Well,’ she said confidingly, ‘you know me now. This is the hero of the hour, though – Lieutenant Commander Han.’

‘Fuju,’ Han said, introducing himself. He grinned at Klipac and Cortez bristled.

Uh-oh. Nbaro really didn’t need the evening to be spoiled by male posturing. She exchanged a glance with Drake, and Drake smiled and tried to avert it.

‘Does Cortez ever stop talking about himself?’ she asked.

Klipac laughed. ‘These are your friends?’

Cortez had the good grace to grin back. ‘I think they’re my friends.’

Han began to lean forward to talk to Klipac, and Nbaro elbowed him.

‘Ow,’ he growled. He looked at her for a moment and she raised an eyebrow. I hope I know you well enough …

Han made a face as if he’d smelled something bad and sat back. ‘Oh,’ he said softly. ‘I’m being a dick.’

‘Just possibly,’ Drake said. ‘Sir.’

Han chuckled. ‘Too long in the clamshell.’

Nbaro got him a slice of cake.

‘Why are we getting liberty on Corfu?’ Qaqqaq asked Hanna. ‘I mean, last we heard, Pisani and Morosini were in a hell-fired hurry …’

Hanna shrugged. As an astrogator, he tended to know more about the ship’s plot than anyone. Nbaro knew things through her lace and Dorcas, but she felt obliged to keep them to herself, even though she suspected that her skipper had shared her data with all the other squadron commanders.

The word liberty had an almost magical effect, as everyone at the big table fell silent. They’d been in space for more than eighty days, fought a battle, lost people. Everyone wanted a few hours ashore.

Hanna spread his hands as if to protest ignorance, then looked around and conceded a little. ‘Look,’ he said, in a conspiratorial tone, ‘I don’t know much. But I’m guessing we have more than three days’ cargo to unload, and that’s if Pisani allows us to go alongside and hook up. And we really need some stuff, right?’ He looked at Drake.

Drake shrugged back. ‘I’m in Cargo, not Logistics,’ she said. ‘Still …’ She waggled her head. ‘Still, I hear things. I hear we’re so low on meat that we’re getting tofu next week, and I know that I’m very close to running out of coffee to trade, which is bad. And good.’ She smiled.

‘Med supplies are low,’ Yu said.

‘I don’t think Corfu Station is a place to get reliable med supplies,’ Agam put in.

Hanna spread his hands again. ‘My point is – we’re getting some R and R because the ship needs three or four days alongside, not because Pisani or Morosini can spare the time.’

Cortez flexed his arms and cracked his knuckles. ‘Lot of refuelling flights between here and there,’ he said. ‘All of us in Flight Five are getting refresher training on drop-ships. We’re going to fly round the clock refuelling runs, just like you, Nbaro.’

‘I’m trying to get my midders ready to fill spots in the flight schedule,’ she said. ‘Skipper says it’s going to be wild.’

Thea looked at her. ‘Well, my turn is coming,’ she said. ‘While you all drink your faces off, or whatever you do on shore leave, I’ll be worked to the bone. We have a lot of cargo for the station, and most of it seems to be my problem.’

Hanna frowned. ‘You’ll get a day, surely?’

‘I hate it when you call me Shirley,’ Thea answered.

Nbaro choked on her after-dinner coffee. Even Klipac, who seemed a bit of a cold fish, laughed.

Hanna looked hurt. He could be a delicate flower, sometimes.

Thea relented. ‘I might get a day off,’ she said, ‘but I’m trying not to count on it, and neither should you.’

‘I’ve got to go and hit people with swords,’ Nbaro said.

‘Hey.’ Han put a hand on her arm. ‘We’re taking the Pericles out tomorrow. My first time in command.’

Nbaro tried very hard not to react to the hand or the words. The Pericles was his, after all. She’d only been keeping the command seat warm.

I’m being an idiot.

She slipped away.

The flight with Han and Gorshokov, and two engineering techs working on their engines, was mostly uneventful. Han was already very good at the controls.

‘You don’t need me at all,’ Nbaro said.

Han shot her a glance. ‘All I had to do for three weeks was fly the simulator,’ he said. ‘I am a little puzzled about the vehicle log, though.’

She frowned. ‘What?’

‘You and Gorshokov have had her out six times and you’ve never signed her in or out.’

Nbaro smiled. ‘Oh, I just put my signals straight through the neural lace, sir,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to use this level of functionality.’

Han hesitated for a moment. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Um …’ Long pause. ‘Except, since I’m the commander, and I need to be able to see the records, I kinda need you to do the paperwork.’

She took that in, considered a snappy reply about how much digital paperwork she already had to do, and then settled for the correct answer. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Shit, Nbaro, you don’t have to call me “sir”.’ He shrugged. ‘But I need to be able to file things …’

‘Totally get it, sir,’ she said. ‘Fuju,’ she added lamely.

He glanced over at her. ‘Don’t take it so fucking seriously, Nbaro. No biggie. The neural lace is probably a great thing. It’s just that we poor mortals need to be able to see your work, so to speak.’

‘Got it.’

He sighed.

‘Can you use it to look at things like fuel flow?’ he asked.

She decided to give him a full reply. ‘I can use it to look into almost anything at sensor level. I can read the performance of the attitude thrusters at a very fine-grained level. I can make adjustments to fuel flow, I can change the lighting …’

Han laughed. ‘What am I here for? It’s me you don’t need at all.’

She smiled. ‘Command? Experience?’

Got that one right. The look on Han’s face suggested that she’d hit the right tone.

They’d put the Pericles back in its dock; Han stayed aboard, talking to the engineering techs about weapons systems they may or may not ever receive, and Gorshokov went to the Intel shack to debrief. Nbaro had two hours before she was due to report to be Tower and planned to visit Dorcas …

Her tab flashed, and her sub-AI, said, ‘The Master requests your presence in his briefing room in one hour.’

‘Almighty,’ she spat, and began to hurdle over the knee-knockers to get to her quarters. Shower? Number one uniform?

Thea was sitting at their desk, her head buried in columns of figures on the screen of her tab.

‘I have to change,’ Nbaro breathed.

‘Whatever,’ Drake said helpfully.

Nbaro chose her number one uniform, which was clean and pressed. She slipped down the passageway, showered and dashed back to her stateroom in a towel.

She then changed into her best shipboard uniform, and Thea never looked up or commented.

‘I’m going to have sex with Petty Officer Locran,’ Nbaro said.

‘Sure,’ Thea said.

‘And then the Master.’

‘Sure,’ Thea said again.

Nbaro leaned over her friend and looked at the columns of figures without comprehension.

Thea looked up, probably because Nbaro’s freshly showered warmth was getting through to her. ‘We have to trade,’ she said. ‘Greatships don’t usually stop here and we don’t want empty holds, so we should be trading for something.’

Nbaro hadn’t considered that aspect of trading. ‘So? Metals?’

‘Maybe,’ Drake said. ‘But what metals? And how much?’ She frowned. ‘Not much in high-value metals here anyway. Surprisingly little …’

‘What are they mining here, then?’

‘Cobalt, feldspar that they refine to potassium, lithium. There’s traces of iron and copper, but never enough to mine.’ Thea looked up. ‘You’re in your number ones.’

‘Nothing gets past you, does it?’ Nbaro smiled and relented. ‘I have a meeting with the Master.’

Thea shrugged. ‘Of course you do,’ she said, and went back to work.

Nbaro had moved so fast that she was fifteen minutes early. But an automated servitor let her into the Master’s briefing room. There was, as usual, a fire in the fireplace.

‘I’ll inform the Master that you are here,’ said a disembodied voice.

She reached through her neural lace for Dorcas, and found …

Nothing.

She started, sitting up.

Morosini had appeared in a chair, with a cat in his lap. He wore a long scarlet coat, with a scarlet waistcoat, scarlet breeches with ribbons, scarlet stockings and small scarlet shoes. His face looked lined, and he was clearly wearing a full wig that fell in curls past his shoulders.

‘Ms Nbaro ,’ he said. ‘May we offer you wine? This will be a wine-drinking sort of meeting. ’

‘Why can’t I access …?’ she paused. Don’t panic. ‘Anything?’

‘Ah. I have shut off your neural lace for a little while. Just for the duration of this meeting. I accept that you may tell Dorcas everything we say, but I’m not prepared for him to overhear it directly. ’ Morosini smiled without pleasure or mirth.

How long does it take to build an AI that can render a smile of bitter self-knowledge? Nbaro asked herself.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Red wine, please.’

‘Excellent. ’ Morosini didn’t do anything overt, like snap his fingers, but the servitor appeared with a tray and a glass of wine.

She took it.

‘You are not on duty ,’ Morosini said. ‘This is not a test. ’

Nbaro drank. It was delicious.

‘May I ask why I am here?’ she asked.

Morosini smiled. ‘I think we should wait for Vettor. He is coming. ’

‘Thank you for entertaining Horatio. He is—’

‘He is very impatient to leave the confines of his medical restraints ,’ Morosini said. ‘I have come to suspect that even the pleasures of entering n-dimensional space fail to compare to the promise of your charms, Ms Nbaro. ’

She blushed, and grew angry at the same time. ‘I’m not—’

Morosini raised a hand. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Nbaro. I have created myself as a creature of a bygone age, and occasionally it leaks out. Although perhaps I might add that as the two of you are so obviously besotted with each other, it seems curious that one is not allowed to discuss it. Ah, here is Vettor. ’

Morosini rose to his holographic feet without disturbing his holographic cat. He was so well realised that Nbaro would have taken him for a real person in a real chair with a real cat.

Perhaps that was the reason for the outlandish clothes?

She stood at attention.

Vettor Pisani entered and smiled. ‘At ease,’ he said.

Morosini bowed and sat.

Nbaro nodded and sat.

Pisani made a motion and the servitor brought a glass of wine.

‘Has Morosini told you why you are here?’

Morosini sounded hurt. ‘I waited for you, Vettor. ’

‘You mean, you want me to do the heavy lifting.’

‘Is Dorcas …?’ she blurted out.

They both looked surprised, and Pisani recovered first. ‘Ah. Damn. Mr Dorcas is not at issue. He’s doing well enough, although there’s plenty left to worry about. We’re not here to tell you about Mr Dorcas.’

Morosini twitched. ‘He is improving ,’ he said cautiously.

There was a pause. If Nbaro hadn’t known that Morosini was an emotionless set of algorithms, she might have said it was a nervous pause.

‘We’re here because our Hin – our Bubbles – prisoner has asked for you to … ’ Morosini made a face, which was rare. ‘To be her advocate. I think that is the clearest way to express it. ’

Nbaro looked at the Master, and then back at the hologram of Morosini. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You took the prisoner in single combat ,’ Morosini said. ‘She has been clear that among her kind, this makes you, to some extent, responsible for her. ’

Nbaro thought about this for a moment and found that it made a strange sort of sense.

‘And what have we learned from our prisoner of war?’ she asked pointedly.

Morosini looked up, and the image really seemed as solid as another person. ‘Too much and too little. The language is simple – that is, it is complex and nuanced, and our subject tells us that different factors change it every hour, but it is child’s play compared to the Starfish language. But the Hin … ’ The AI seemed to look out into space. ‘The Hin are not a unity, or a polity. I think they are a species, but I cannot rule out that they are several species. I have translated the name of our captive as Honourable Blood Wa-Kan Nik’ri Put, but while the Wa-Kan is accurate, the title is … ’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps a romantic attempt to anthropomorphise an enemy. ’

Nbaro wondered if an AI could be said to anthropomorphise anyone and decided that if anyone could, it was Morosini.

Morosini seemed to brush lint off his coat. ‘The title is borrowed from medieval Korea, and denotes a certain relation to the royal family – close, but not too close. ’ He shrugged again. ‘The Hin, as they call themselves, seem to have royalty but no nations. They appear to have no polity greater than a sort of extended clan with family, dependents and slaves. Nik’ri Put is a successfully bred matron–warleader, if I understand her claims. She tells me she built her power armour herself, with her own tools. ’

‘She speaks our language?’ Nbaro asked. ‘I mean, speaks it well?’

‘Some Mandarin, some Anglatin, some Old Italian, some Old Standard English. ’ Morosini’s eyes narrowed. ‘Lately we have heard some Hindi. We can guess the Hin’s contacts through the languages our prisoner seems to know. ’

Pisani steepled his hands. ‘She doesn’t know them very well …’

‘But she’s learning every day, even as Dorcas is learning her language – which, as I say, is child’s play compared to the Starfish’s. ’

‘Dorcas …?’ Nbaro said, feeling foolish, and also perhaps angry.

Pisani looked at Morosini. ‘Dorcas is sworn to absolute secrecy, Ms Nbaro. And he has begged that you be read in on these projects because he dislikes misinforming you. So I’ll ride to his rescue and tell you that, while he may have whiled away a few hours visiting Morosini’s jungle of n -dimensional shapes in VR, he’s mostly absorbed in the Starfish and Hin languages, and has been for weeks.’

‘Of course he has.’ Nbaro wasn’t quite sure how she felt about this.

We can talk to the Bubbles? How’s it going, having a Starfish – a living, breathing one – all to yourself? What’s it like, being the lone ammonia-breather trapped on an oxygen-breather ship, light years from your own kind? How did that even happen?

Pisani leaned forward. ‘Lieutenant Nbaro, let me be plain. I miss having you on my Command Council. I think you are lucky, and to be honest, I suspect you are destined to hold a chair like mine. You and Mr Dorcas have developed a perfectly legitimate relationship that biases him in favour of your participation in certain high-level programmes. And now our prisoner has asked for you.’ He leaned back. ‘So, I am asking you to accept some extra duties and a fair amount of security briefing in exchange for working directly with Morosini and Dorcas.’

Morosini turned to Nbaro and raised a hand, a clear sign for caution. ‘Ms Nbaro, I am not entirely in favour of this step, at least in part because it has been represented to me that at this point in your career, you need to become fully proficient with the routine tasks of being a junior officer. This particular programme will interfere with everything that is routine in your life, and we may have to hold you back from combat missions because— ’

‘Because once you are fully briefed,’ Pisani broke in, ‘we cannot let you fall into the hands of any of our rivals.’

Honestly, I’m tired. I’m twenty years old, and I’m not sure I can handle this decision on my own. Why the hell don’t you two just give me an order?

Nbaro drank off her wine. ‘I’m not sure that …’ She took a deep breath. ‘That knowing that my prisoner wants me, and knowing that she can speak and be spoken to, that I could just go about my duties,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a routine cruise, is it, sir?’

Pisani smiled grimly. ‘It most certainly is not,’ he allowed.

‘As to getting captured …’ She looked at Morosini. ‘It really doesn’t seem very likely, does it?’

Morosini flexed his eyebrows. ‘It is a very, very small possibility. ’

Nbaro shrugged. ‘I’m prepared to accept,’ she said. ‘I don’t need much sleep.’ And then, as her brain began to engage with the information she’d just received, ‘Hindi and Old Standard English means Anti-spinward.’

‘New India, New Bengal and New Texas ,’ Morosini said. ‘Particularly New Texas. ’

‘That’s only fifteen insertions from home,’ Nbaro said. ‘It takes time to learn languages.’

‘And that makes it seem likely that this has been going on a long time ,’ Morosini said, ‘and that, as accused, the Anti-spinward colonies have gone their own way with their own aliens . The Hin, to be precise. ’

‘And you’re not surprised.’ Again, it just came out of her. Nbaro was aware that she couldn’t read an AI. Any visual cues it gave were a performance, not a reality. But there was something there: Morosini wasn’t surprised.

The AI steeped his long – almost skeletal – fingers, his elbows resting on the arms of his gothic chair, forming a cage around the big cat. ‘Very astute .’ He actually seemed uncomfortable.

Pisani glanced at his AI. And then at Nbaro. ‘What do you mean, Lieutenant?’

She frowned. ‘I’m not sure, except that Morosini seems almost comfortable with the idea that the Hin are in contact with the Anti-spinward colonies.’

Pisani raised an eyebrow.

Morosini smiled at her. ‘Eventually, you and I will have a lengthy conversation on a number of topics. I am aware that you remain uncomfortable with the neural lace I forced upon you. I realise that we have some issues to discuss. I am asking you to let all that go during the current emergency. ’

Pisani said, ‘Morosini, did you know about the Hin before we left New London?’ His voice held the snap of authority that it seldom did when he spoke to the AI.

Morosini patted his cat and looked up. ‘No ,’ he said. ‘I and others of my kind were increasingly aware of the sabre-rattling of the Fringe states, especially New Texas. And we were aware that someone had probably made contact with aliens. Some suspected a new contact with the Starfish, only no new source of xenoglas appeared. ’ He shrugged. ‘So, yes, I was, and remain, unsurprised by this development. But I am surprised by the reach and power of these new aliens. ’ He looked at Nbaro. ‘We live in interesting times. ’

Her voice so low it sounded like a growl, Nbaro said, ‘And you don’t want to tell me why I have a neural lace?’ Just asking the question frightened her.

Morosini met her eyes. It was easy for him; he was a machine. ‘Not just yet ,’ he said.

‘Begging your pardon,’ Nbaro said to the Master, ‘but what if I just demanded to know?’

Pisani nodded to her. It was encouraging, she thought, and it helped fight a tide of old feelings that threatened to drown her in distrust. I’m here, at this table. They trust me. Get over it, girl.

Morosini’s expression didn’t change. ‘If you insist, I will tell you right now ,’ he said. ‘Without prevarication. ’

Nbaro was thinking about that. The Master was silent.

Her tab flashed and she jumped. ‘I’m Tower in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Sir.’

Morosini shook his head. ‘I need more than ten minutes to discuss the matter with you .’

How convenient.

‘Very well,’ she said, perfectly aware that she wanted to hide from whatever he was going to tell her, probably as much as he didn’t want to tell her.

‘But you agree to this additional duty?’ Pisani said.

‘Yes, sir,’ she answered.

They all stood.

Pisani shook her hand. ‘You’re a good one, Nbaro, and when you are master of a greatship, I pray you tell people about this cruise with pride.’ His smile was warm.

Nbaro’s neural lace came back up.

Morosini said, ‘Please visit Lieutenant Smith in the Special Services office to be read in to the necessary programmes, and please make time to visit the prisoner as soon as possible thereafter. ’

She nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

Morosini smiled. ‘I think you have four minutes to get to the Space Operations Centre. ’

‘Oh,’ Pisani said. ‘I have listed you to start training as a Tactical Action Officer.’

For some reason, both of them found that amusing as she fled.