22

‘And we’re out of coffee,’ Drake said.

Nbaro had two hours before her next flight, and she’d already looked at the 3D. None of the alien ships had responded to the new message. She could feel the strain of their acceleration throughout her body.

‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, zipping on a flightsuit and cramming her feet into her soft boots. Minutes later she was ringing the buzzer at Dorcas’s stateroom. She’d warned him by tab that she was coming, and he opened his hatch instantly.

‘Good morning,’ she said, trying for something like good cheer. ‘May I have a pound of coffee?’

He was wearing a towel. Somewhat guardedly he said, ‘I was getting clean.’ In the cold light of the corridor, she could see the scars from his multiple surgeries and the loss of muscle mass. The wet showers were just down the corridor, and he had a large stateroom directly adjacent to facilities. She wondered just how powerful that meant he was.

‘We are out of coffee,’ Nbaro said, as if that explained everything, which, in her opinion, it did.

‘I’m almost certain you sold me my coffee supply,’ Dorcas said.

‘Fine, I’ll buy it back.’

Dorcas stepped back from the hatch and waved her in. ‘Never in life, my love. You will always have half of my coffee.’ He went to his desk and extracted a kilo of coffee. ‘This is half of my supply, because I’m not as profligate as you are.’

She wrapped her arms around the coffee before she fully appreciated what she was doing, and she laughed aloud. ‘Coffee is very important to me,’ she said, as she found that she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She tried. She got up; she had less than an hour until the acceleration alarm sounded.

‘May I …?’ Dorcas was very hesitant. ‘Are you …?’

He was blushing.

She waited.

‘Are you really just going to leave?’ Dorcas’s voice was forced. ‘I observe that you are naked under that flightsuit, and that you have fifty minutes.’ He smiled with real concern. ‘I am offending you …?’

She was still laughing as her boots came off.

Fifty-seven minutes later, she was in the cockpit of 6–0–7, a relatively new spaceframe, with Tim Eyre next to her and Janny Eason in the back seat.

Lioness came up on the comms. ‘2–0–4 had to abort – I can launch you immediately, over.’

‘Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7 ready to launch,’ she reported. ‘Born ready,’ she added, because it was Cortez.

Lioness came back. ‘On the rails and looking good, 6–0–7.’

‘Someone’s in a good mood,’ Eyre said next to her.

Nbaro turned and looked at him and allowed herself a grin. ‘Yep.’

They went off sternwards, and cold. The Hin cruisers were above them, and the TAO had spent the last few hours rotating the ship slightly and firing off ablative clouds. The Athens was coasting, under no acceleration whatsoever, so that she moved along at a high velocity, surrounded by her clouds of sand in lieu of shields as the enemy cruisers came up behind her. Safe in the cover of the ablative foil, the space wing’s craft formed up, engines cold. The plan was Tremaine’s, vetted by Pisani and Morosini.

The Hin were still accelerating. They clearly had no need for insertion, at least on this leg of their attack; they were now at a substantial portion of the speed of light – a little over 0.2 c .

The engagement would be very quick. Morosini thought they planned a single firing pass and then a rapid deceleration once they were out of range.

The Hin altered course. They did so all together, each trio spreading out at a different angle.

A light went on over Nbaro’s head as the ship’s AI took control of her craft. She leaned back and took her hands off the yoke.

Eyre did the same. ‘Seems odd,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Given our relative velocity, the only way to score a hit is if Morosini shoots our torps.’ She was watching a countdown on her neural lace.

Nbaro’s confidence in Morosini was absolute, and she thought Tremaine’s plan, which was purely mathematical, was brilliant. The enemy were coming for a single high-velocity pass, and Tremaine had laced the cloud of debris with shooters to make the exchange utterly unequal. The Hin still didn’t understand the space wing; the concept of small craft was apparently alien to them.

Three. She thought of Dorcas resting on his arms above her.

Two. For some reason, the Orphanage, and Sarah.

One. The top of her spacecraft vanishing in the last engagement; the silent near-destruction. So close. She couldn’t even see the Hin … And why the hell aren’t they responding …?

Nbaro had to replay the action several times afterwards, to make sense of it. It had happened at relativistic speeds; she had experienced it as a release of torpedo clamps, a single pulse of acceleration, a hard g turn, a pulsing thunderstorm of nuclear light, a massive flash of white light to starboard …

And that was it.

The Hin ships closed in a rough circle, and opened fire at seven thousand kilometres. Their first salvo got a Flight One drop-ship and a Flight Five gunship, indicating that they had seen the spacecraft in the debris shield and had changed tactics to engage them. Then they entered the ablative cloud, where they encountered the rest of the space wing lying in wait.

One Hin ship lost its shields and the magnetic seals on its drives from multiple nuclear warheads. The entire crew of Didier’s 6–0–8 died almost instantly, cooked by a nuclear warhead’s radiation too close for their shielding to handle, but otherwise, Morosini’s multiple high-velocity firing solutions avoided casualties and the enemy computers didn’t seem to be up to close-in kills at the velocities involved.

A second enemy cruiser took a very close nuclear detonation, but her shields held, and they were gone, still accelerating into the vast, star-studded beyond.

The Athens took four hits. One struck a hydrogen fusion power plant. The other three put thirty-centimetre holes in Cargo. Explosive depressurisation in a crew area killed four spacers, but the ship was at battle stations and otherwise all personnel were in vacuum suits.

But Nbaro returned to find a perfectly round patch in the corridor, just two frames aft of her stateroom. She and Drake looked at it on their way to eat. A matching hole in the overhead had also been patched but not yet painted.

‘Close,’ Drake said. ‘Come on, there’s pie.’

We’re locked in a long, running fight with aliens, and Thea wants pie.

By the time they’d eaten, the Hin ships had begun to decelerate, far out ahead of them.

Except for one, which continued to accelerate.

Nbaro looked at it on her neural lace. It was the same ship that had taken a close nuclear detonation; Morosini rated it ninety per cent likely that everyone aboard was dead. Shields up, engines burning, it would hurtle off into interstellar space.

She was toying with the remains of her pie when Mpono sat next to them.

‘Lost Didier,’ Mpono said.

Nbaro nodded. ‘He was a good guy,’ she allowed. He had been, too.

‘I just wanted to tell you that Sam Pak was on that flight. I know you were training him.’ Mpono reached out and took her hand.

Nbaro met Mpono’s eye. ‘I already knew,’ she said. She had a neural lace. She also had some very good emotional armour, polished to a sheen at the Orphanage. She made herself go through the motions, though. ‘Thanks, Smoke,’ she said. ‘XO.’

Mpono nodded with understanding. ‘It’s a tough cruise, Marca.’

Nbaro thought, I have walled that off – Didier, Pak, Yu, Ko, Suliemani. Indra. Our ship peeling open during the last engagement. All of it. I’ll open the box and look at it when this is over. But I’m fine.

Mpono went and got herself pie. A hush fell over the wardroom at having the mighty ship’s XO present. For their part, Mpono ate her cherry pie with relish, spent time with several other Flight Six space crew, and then left.

‘You’re staring into space,’ Drake said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll drool.’

Nbaro looked at her. ‘I’m tired.’ She was surprised to hear the words come out of her mouth. Maybe the walls aren’t as strong as I think.

While she slept, the battle rolled on. The ships that had swept in for a close-in pass were now well ahead of them. They had decelerated rapidly, but it still took them eight hours to match velocity, at which point they were far out of range. Then they began to decelerate further, and they dropped munitions. The TAO didn’t wait to find out what the munitions were, but fired carefully aimed railgun bursts at them; their courses were entirely predictable.

The Hin ships decelerated until the Athens began to catch up. The Athens changed course. Nbaro awoke to an acceleration warning, snuggled down, and managed to sleep through most of a high-g manoeuvre. The next time she awoke, her sleep cycle was over, and she had less than an hour before she was Lioness. Thea was nowhere to be found, but she’d left hot coffee; Nbaro drank it gratefully, put on a flightsuit and boots, went forward to get her EVA suit and walked aft to Space Operations. They were at battle stations all the time now; everyone stood their watches in environment suits, with helmets close by. Some of the crew wore them.

Everyone was subdued, and no one looked as if they’d had enough sleep, but in Space Ops, Banderas was humming to herself, and she grinned when he saw Nbaro.

She’d been in dataspace with her lace since she had her first cup of coffee, and she came on watch fully aware of the state of the battle. The Athens had changed course four times – all subtle changes, but enough to force the Hin ships to manoeuvre. But gradually, the Hin were getting into firing positions.

Are they burning up their fuel, though?

Tad Dworkin was off-going Lioness. He raised a helmeted head out of the acceleration couch and gave a wave.

‘Things are about to get exciting,’ he said. ‘So I’m delighted to give you the hot seat.’

‘Exciting how?’ she asked, but she knew the answer from her neural lace and Morosini; they were about ten minutes from the enemy’s maximum range with their beam weapons.

The Athens was moving at a constant velocity inside a veritable fog of ablative particles moving at the same speed. Her spacecraft kept laying sensors outside the cloud so she still had an excellent picture of the whole system, including the four Hin ships roughly seven thousand kilometres ahead and the three more who loitered near their only insertion point.

Dworkin made a face. ‘TAO has permission from Morosini to try a gambit. Hostiles will probably open fire in …’ He shrugged. ‘Six minutes. She’s all yours.’

‘Thanks, sir.’ Nbaro nodded, put her helmet on and then rolled into the acceleration couch, securing herself to it.

‘Everyone button up, hats on,’ she said. ‘Expect manoeuvres in five minutes. Battle damage could mean zero g or decompression.’

She used her lace to take control of her acceleration couch, and swivelled it until she could see out over all her people. Then she began to arrange screens – holographic, in the real, and virtual.

Three minutes.

‘Stand by for railgun firing and sudden manoeuvres,’ she was warned on several media.

‘Faceplates down,’ she called. She was looking at a fairly light launch schedule; the Athens was hoarding its assets. But Thulile and Bakri were going in five minutes, as well as a Flight Three bird and several from Flight Two …

Her schedule changed before her eyes. Her entire launch schedule was pushed back by minutes. She’d never seen it happen before but—

—the whole ship shuddered as a heavy load was fired out of the number two railgun tube. Nbaro didn’t need a neural lace to do the maths; the enemy ships were more than ten minutes away at the speed the railgun loads travelled down range.

She was punched in the gut as the ship suddenly accelerated and manoeuvred, and her couch spun. They were turning …

Another railgun tube fired. Shudder-thud.

Nbaro had a neural lace and almost infinite access, so she was able to watch the outgoing rounds, and then noted that the Stealthy Change was also firing on very slightly different vectors.

The countdown to enemy engagement range passed zero with no beam from the hostile ships. Her 3D repeater showed all four of them manoeuvring while the fifth continued on her long, one-way trip to the stars. They spread out, but their manoeuvres must have affected their ability to use their beam weapons, as they didn’t fire.

Fuel? Or some internal power sharing problem?

The Athens turned again. Somewhere in Space Ops, someone moaned as a muscle or a tendon was abused; these were punishing manoeuvres, and she hoped that Dworkin and the off-going crews had made it to their racks.

Shudder-thud. Shudder-thud. Two launches in the middle of a rotation. Four hundred kilometres to port, the Stealthy Change unleashed her tubes, firing almost continuously for ten seconds, something that the Athens couldn’t do.

‘Would you like to see what we’re doing? ’ Morosini purred in her ear.

‘Of course,’ she sub-vocalised.

Suddenly her 3D had an overlay of every railgun launch in the last four minutes. Now some of their broadside railguns were firing as well.

Morosini – she assumed it was Morosini – had created a complex fractal pattern, and the ships were putting projectiles into it at different velocities and launch times, but they were working from the outside in, with surprising insertions to reflect the AI’s analysis of the hostile ships’ course changes.

‘How long can we keep this up?’ she sent.

‘How much fuel do they have? ’ Morosini asked. ‘Right now, we make them manoeuvre hard with their shields up. They’ve been out here waiting for us a while. Also, the ship I’ve marked as November Oscar 0–0–4 made a manoeuvring error in her last turn and is now facing diminishing options. Besides— ’

The hostile ship NO 0–0–4 made a sudden course change, and fired her beam weapon.

Nbaro could see that they were hit, forward. The beam was at maximum range and hadn’t burned the length of the hull, which would have been … bad.

‘They want to fire from dead astern or fully off the bow, to get their beam weapons to penetrate as many layers as possible ,’ Morosini said.

‘I get that,’ Nbaro allowed.

Shudder-thud. Shudder-thud.

NO 0–0–4 cycled her main armament and fired again. Nbaro saw the damage immediately: a hit to the bridge wing.

The other hostile ships were all manoeuvring. The ship marked as HC 0–2–1 had dropped her shields and was boosting at something like 15 g . So were IF 0–0–5 and IF 0–1–7.

‘I hate being shot at,’ Nbaro said in her neural lace.

She had a countdown running until NO 0–0–4 recycled her beam weapon.

‘NO 0–0–4 is sacrificing itself?’ she asked Morosini.

‘She may have decided to die. Possibly she took damage in the earlier engagement, or possibly her navigator has run out of options. They’re very brave, these Hin.’

NO 0–0–4 fired again. This shot went straight through the ablative cloud; the previous rounds had opened a hole, or else the Hin had found a flaw in the layers of material. Either way, the shot burned a hole into the bridge wing that would have destroyed the Pericles if she’d been docked, and did real damage to the Athens ’ command and control systems.

Morosini went off the air.

NO 0–0–4’s symbol flashed and was gone. Somewhere out in space, a ship full of sentient beings ceased to be.

All of the damage control warnings were sounding now, and the entire bridge wing was exposed to vacuum. Nbaro glanced at the engineering report, saw that the port-side bridge support – an enormous pylon full of avionics and computer systems – was so badly damaged that the ship could not manoeuvre for fear of breaking the bridge loose.

Almighty.

Focus. No more Morosini, and no override commands. If they couldn’t manoeuvre, they wouldn’t be using the railguns for more long-range payloads, which meant …

‘Ready up,’ she said over her command frequency. ‘Prepare to launch in one minute.’ She looked at Tower, who was Moses Juniper from Flight Eight. Juniper had his faceplate closed, but raised an arm and gave her a gloved thumb’s up.

Nbaro used the new automated system to notify all the pilots; Juniper used the same system to get their take-off weights and data.

We’re rewriting every manual – if we just get home to write them.

On her lace, Nbaro watched as Juniper OK’d each launch until all the lights were green: eleven spacecraft. Routine, ordinarily.

‘TAO, this is Lioness looking for advice,’ she sent.

‘Roger, Lioness, this is Claws. What can I do for you?’

‘Claws, I’m ready to launch an eleven-ship event and want to make sure I’m not interrupting anything.’

‘Roger, Lioness, good call. I can give you three hundred seconds.’

She ran the maths on three tubes. ‘I need four hundred, TAO.’

‘Roger, four hundred seconds. Starting when?’

Nbaro pointed at Juniper, who began the count on Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–2, the first spacecraft in the event. He made a shooting gun sign; Nbaro saw the launch in VR.

‘Start the clock,’ she said.

‘Roger, four hundred seconds,’ TAO responded.

Nbaro watched as her event shot off into space. They then recovered nine ships from the stern tubes, locked them down …

In three hundred and eighty-one seconds.

‘All yours, TAO,’ she said.

‘Roger, Lioness. Taking control of the tubes.’

More than six minutes had passed, and they had received no orders from Morosini or Pisani. Nbaro could access most ship’s systems on her lace but the dataspace was limited.

‘Dorcas?’

‘Here.’

‘Where’s Morosini?’

‘Wounded. Bridge is damaged. TAO has the con.’ Dorcas sounded solid.

‘No one told us here.’

Long pause.

‘I see that now.’

Suddenly her screens showed an emergency message nominating the TAO as on-scene commander. The report coded the damage to the bridge as ‘serious’. A glance at the damage control status board showed Nbaro that the passageways were full of damage control personnel and robots.

On the 3D plot, the three surviving Hin ships from the original pass were all running, shields down. Three more sat on their insertion site.

For Nbaro, the next six hours were dull. For anyone out on the hull, like Lieutenant Commander Qaqqaq, they were both terrifying and hard, as the ship’s best damage control parties tried to repair or replace the bridge wing’s main support pylon on the starboard side while finding workarounds for all the damaged systems. At hour three, Morosini came back online. Just as Lieutenant Commander Thulile replaced Nbaro as Lioness, Master Pisani announced that the bridge was once again operational.

The whole of the Athens breathed a sigh of relief.

Nbaro grabbed a meal with Juniper, a lanky man from Sahel who might almost have passed for a ’gyne. He was a pilot from Flight Eight; she’d seen him in the passageway but never spent any time with him.

He spoke in the same patois as Mpono’s mother.

‘Nice job,’ Nbaro said.

He grinned. ‘My first watch, sure. Fickin’ A.’ He held up a long-fingered hand, and it was shaking slightly.

She shovelled in another bite of food, and mumbled ‘Ship of heroes.’

He laughed. ‘Older de moon, brighter she shines,’ he said. ‘You’re smooth as Lioness.’

She felt her face grow hot at the compliment. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.

I did OK today. Not always an idiot.

Still hours left in the day.

She grinned. ‘Thanks,’ she said again. ‘I gotta run. Boarding party.’

‘Shiiit.’ It sounded like she-it. ‘I gotta fly.’

They both dropped their trays and went off down separate drop-shafts.

On Fourth Deck, Ramirez was pestering Nagy as her boarding parties waited for orders, all gathered up by the aft port-side drop-shaft. Locran ignored the two women, listening to Chen as the older chief petty officer went over the scenario for the day.

‘We’re the red team for an exercise,’ Chen explained to the two teams.

Bothie rolled her eyes. ‘We’re in a real fuckin’ battle, Chief.’

Chen glanced at her, his eyes hooded. ‘Think you’re ready to face alien marines in this passageway, Bothie?’

Bothie’s face clouded. She swallowed hard.

Chen looked around. ‘Listen up, people. We’re fuckin’ amateurs. Do not get cocky.’

Ramirez shot back, ‘Who’s an amateur?’

Chen glanced at the small woman, who didn’t give ground. ‘Born ready to fight aliens,’ Ramirez said.

Locran barked his laugh. ‘Good. You’re with me, then.’

But the exercise proved Chen’s point, as their multi-pronged assault on a waiting Marine team was broken by an ambush and a carefully planned barrage of drones.

Afterwards, Major Darkstar delivered a damning indictment of all of their mistakes in a flat, professional voice.

‘Nbaro,’ she concluded, ‘stop leading from the front. You were unavailable to help unfuck your people because you were dead. No one wants that.’ The major looked Nbaro in the eye.

Yep, still an idiot.

‘Locran, excellent job when your leader was down. Your flexibility was good, your reaction to our ambush excellent. Then you chose to try to clear the corridor yourself …’

Locran looked at the deck.

‘Nuur, first-rate use of the EMP carbine – but you have to know you’ll be a focus for hostile fire once you start to use it. How many times were you hit?’

‘Sixteen,’ Nuur said softly.

Darkstar smiled grimly. ‘And then you and Locran were both dead, too. Spacer Ramirez took command and made several bad decisions, but before we dwell on them, let’s applaud the speed and resolution with which Ramirez took charge. A bad plan delivered with resolve beats the shit out of no plan. You got four of my people, Ramirez. Then we got all of yours.’ Darkstar looked out over the two teams. ‘On balance, you did more damage to my Marines than any other team we’ve faced, but you never threatened our operation. Still, had we been alien intruders, you got enough of us that we would have been badly degraded for a second or third engagement. And, my friends, that’s how this is going down.’ They looked around. ‘We’ll bleed them and then we’ll gut them. We’re in this for the long haul.’

Drun winked at Nbaro.

Nbaro just felt empty. I’m already in this for the long haul.

A phrase came to her from some forgotten text. All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. She could see it: a long, slow defeat, corridor by corridor, as the enemy ships piled in like scavengers on a corpse. It might take months.

Suddenly there was a certain appeal to a lethal dose of radiation, or a beam weapon hit. Out like a light. She looked around at her people and banned these thoughts, exiled to a remote iron box where she locked them away.

And then she got to spend an hour with Dorcas, which she spent asleep on his acceleration couch.

23

Nbaro awoke to a gentle alarm, which proved to be a subroutine from Dorcas.

‘Hello,’ she sent.

‘The Outer Hin sent a reply to our message,’ he replied.

It was all there on her neural lace, including his and Morosini’s first translations.

‘We can swim together with honour, at least for a short time.’

An hour later she was sipping coffee in the classified spaces, looking at Honourable Blood Wa-Kan Nik’ri Put as she swam excited circles in her tank.

‘This is my mother–captain’s sister, a matron–reaver of much experience. She is Honourable Blood Wa-Kan Asinpal Las. She is very honourable. She has much … Hin. ’

Nbaro had learned that Hin was a complex cultural concept, not a race name – that a person could be Hin , possess much or little Hin , give or receive Hin. Dorcas was beginning to doubt whether they should even use the word as the race name.

But Nik’ri Put preferred it to Bubbles , as her people often described themselves as Hin.

The ship was not under heavy acceleration, so she rose and walked around. ‘How do we proceed?’ she asked. ‘Will you make a second vid?’

Nik’ri Put flashed by. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘As soon as possible.’

Nbaro motioned at the repeater of the Space Ops 3D holo that she’d conjured by the tank. ‘What will she do, this Honourable Blood Wa-Kan Asinpal Las? I’m sorry, Tse-Tsu , but we are still fighting for our lives. I cannot risk my companions to send you home.’

Nik’ri Put writhed, tentacles moving rapidly. ‘Hin do not require foolish sacrifice,’ she said. ‘She will order this other clan, whoever they are, to stand away.’

‘And will they?’ Nbaro asked.

The two longer tentacles flicked outward. It was so clearly a shrug that Nbaro made a note to ask Dorcas if this was a Hin trait, or whether their prisoner had learned the shrug from her human captors.

Nik’ri Put’s eyes met Nbaro’s through the liquid and the slab side of her tank. ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘It is not a case of yes and yes, with all in agreement. Every clan has different …’ She flicked the long tentacles again. ‘I lack words. We do not even agree on what is Hin. ’

So human.

Later, Dorcas lay next to her, his head propped on a pillow. ‘The Starfish don’t have a chance,’ he said. ‘At least, not with humans. The Hin speak and think very much like us. I’m sure there will be disturbing cultural dissonances – just look at Terran history. But they are apparently comprehensible. ’

‘How are you doing with Feather Dancer?’ she asked.

‘Better than I’d expected …’ He glanced at her. ‘I’m not supposed to discuss it.’

‘Not supposed to discuss it with me? I swear I have every level of classification—’

‘You do not. Nonetheless, I’m prepared to let the two of you talk. But this information is dangerous to know and dangerous to repeat aloud. ’

Nbaro was painfully aware that Morosini monitored her most of the time, but this was a new level of intrusiveness. She froze, then gradually relaxed.

It’s not the Orphanage. Not the Orphanage.

I trust Morosini, and I wonder at myself.

Dorcas was apparently getting something of the same, because after a long pause, he said, ‘I am communicating fairly well with Feather Dancer. They are eager to please, and we have now moved far beyond the clumsy robots we started with.’

Marca blinked. She hadn’t seen Qaqqaq in what seemed like weeks, and Dorcas probably saw her every day.

‘So you have learned …?’ She lay back. ‘Honestly, I want to know everything.’

Dorcas nodded. ‘They are millions of years old. They have a vast star-faring civilisation extending away along the Spiral Arm for many hundreds of light years. They have sent expeditions to other galaxies. They are truly alien in a way that the Hin are not – I worry that we cannot understand their motivations at all. I am reasonably sure that there was another race, an earlier race that employed the Starfish as workers, maybe slaves, for a frighteningly long time.’

‘These are Nik’ri Put’s Ill’lu ?’ Nbaro asked.

‘Exactly. But the time scale is vast, and frankly, I think I’m hearing myths, not history.’

‘And the Ill’lu are not the same as the Circles?’ she asked.

‘No. I know no more about the Circles than I did a month ago, except that Feather Dancer has effectively confirmed that the Starfish exterminated them. Total genocide.’ He shrugged. ‘Feather Dancer is from an inferior line – a direct translation – and doesn’t feel any responsibility for the imperial actions of its cousins. That, or the whole race lacks a conscience. Certainly Feather Dancer lives very much from moment to moment.’

Nbaro, who was naked, and running a hand over Dorcas’s chest, grunted. ‘Horatio,’ she said, ‘you might be surprised how much I am living from moment to moment right now.’

He rolled over so they were chest to chest. ‘I’m afraid every time you go out.’

She managed a small smile. ‘I’m afraid all the time. As for flying? Almighty, Horatio, nothing is safe. They can pound the ship with beam weapons. Yu died in his medbay …’ She clamped down on her emotions.

Dorcas looked at her for a long time. ‘I …’ He shook his head. ‘I never want this to end,’ he said with total honesty. ‘Nothing in my life has ever been like this. I am fully …’ He shrugged. ‘And you …’

She giggled. It was spontaneous, and healing. ‘You are speechless.’

Later, in the humming quiet of her own stateroom, she thought, He is right. I never thought that life could be this rich. Even if we’re all going to die.

She was just drifting off to sleep when the acceleration alarm went off. She lay like a corpse as her acceleration couch closed on her and the needles sank into her flesh. The g forces began to gather, pressing her down, and then she was gone into a troubled sleep.

There was a lull in the immense pressure, and she woke to the hurried sounds of Thea Drake folding herself into her rack and the hydraulic hiss as the lid closed. The alarm sounded again.

‘Something’s happening out there,’ Drake said.

Nbaro was learning not to engage her neural lace unless she wanted – really wanted – to know. She remembered when she’d first had a tab, and the temptation to be on it all the time; the lace was worse.

She struggled briefly and then looked.

The Outer Hin – the ones who had been sitting at their insertion point – were now accelerating in-system, towards the Inner Hin, the survivors of two attacks on the Athens.

The Inner Hin, who had flown three widely divergent courses, were now on vectors to intercept one another, but they remained in the plane to intercept the Athens.

Nbaro checked and saw that Dorcas had received a new vid from Nik’ri Put and deployed it, but as yet they had no answer.

The acceleration alarm sounded again. She dropped out of the dataspace, and tried to do her duty and rest.

Nbaro and Drake were no longer on the same wake/sleep cycle, so she didn’t have hot coffee waiting for her when she awoke, but the heavy acceleration was over. The damage control parties were mostly finished, too; the bridge wing was stable, and the bridge had full control of the ship. She sneaked out, dogged their beautiful bronze hatch, and spent a moment admiring it. She could remember when just having this stateroom on this ship was the very peak of happiness.

All I ever wanted.

Dorcas is right. If we survive, what will ever equal this?

She walked down to the EVA shack, got her helmet and gear, and then sat in the ready room and watched the flight briefing with about a third of her attention. She simultaneously prepped most of her flight issues by neural lace, including running a full suite of diagnostics on 6–0–9, which she’d never flown before. They were to test a new antenna array; She had Eyre, and Tatlah in the back with Tench. They had four new back-seaters, all Flight Eight people. Flight Eight hadn’t taken the same losses they had, and their sensor techs were trained on similar equipment.

They also had a new pilot to replace Didier: Elise Hammond, who, like Bakri, was actually a ship’s company officer with experience as a pilot, now transferred to cover the losses. Hammond was mostly flying with Truekner and Thulile, getting her hand in, as they said.

Eyre was subdued, answering in single words and grunts; Nbaro didn’t push him. They punched off the front end, skirted the new cloud of ablative dust, and laid half a dozen sensors in an open pattern while Tatlah played with the new antennas and fiddled with his system. It wasn’t going to be an eventful flight, but they had a great deal of work to do. Nbaro let Eyre handle most of it while she wrote a tactics briefing that encapsulated new material from Morosini about rapid deployment of sensors, the errors that had killed Didier, and possible solutions.

The bulk of the briefing was speculation about the state of Hin technology, tactics, and energy limitations based on the last two engagements. Morosini wanted everyone to understand that the energy capabilities of their opponents weren’t limitless, and that their tactical development had probably been stunted by constant internecine fighting.

Nbaro played with that part, because she didn’t like it. Humans only fought each other for thirty thousand years and we got pretty sharp. Why would it stunt the Hin?

She made a long note on her lace to discuss this with Morosini, and glanced over at Eyre, who was piloting. He had a set expression on his face; his visor was up and he was fully engaged in flying a complex route laid down by Morosini on cold gas thrusters alone. She was monitoring the datalink in a remote way when something flashed.

She glanced by neural lace at the 3D representation of the system. Three Outer Hin were converging with the Inner Hin. On her lace she could see that there had been a massive increase in signals – or, at least, in radio and laser frequency emissions. She looked back almost an hour; there was a lot of talking on both sides.

Even as she watched, all of the Hin ships raised their energy shields.

Almighty. They’re going to fight.

Forty seconds later, all six ships manoeuvred hard, pulling staggering g forces to make big directional changes. They were less than five thousand klicks apart and they took six new headings, most at almost one hundred degrees to their initial heading.

No one fired. No beam weapon flickered; no nuclear lightning played among the ships.

And none of them stood between the Athens and her insertion point for the next system.

‘What’s happening, ma’am?’ Eyre asked.

‘Fucked if I know,’ she said. ‘The Hin just broke off without shooting.’

Eyre studied the tracks on his small repeater.

‘Sure is a lot of chatter,’ Tatlah said from the back. ‘All of them are sending signals.’

‘Not talking to us, though,’ Nbaro said.

Eyre shut off the back-end’s access to cockpit comms. ‘We going to make it through this, ma’am?’

She turned her helmeted head. ‘Yep.’

Eyre’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Just like that?’

She smiled at him. The smile was fake, and so was her enthusiasm. ‘Yep,’ she said, as if it was just another routine day in space.

‘Roger that, ma’am.’ Eyre nodded firmly.

That wasn’t bad , she thought. Now, if Truekner could just do the same for me?

A long boarding party session followed, ending with some personal combat training; Nbaro went some rounds with Chen and then shot various weapons on the range with Drun and Locran, and then Drun went to drill Nuur on his EMP carbine. She fenced with Corporal McDonald, who had his foot back, and still enjoyed being a corporal. Ramirez led a fire team through a small exercise and was praised directly by Darkstar.

‘Are you going to poach her, Major?’ Nbaro asked. She didn’t usually ask the major anything, as they were too imposing to tease.

Darkstar smiled their Marine smile. ‘If Spacer Ramirez is interested in being a Marine, we could find a place for her,’ they said. ‘She’s a fighter.’

After boarding party, Nbaro stood an under-instruction watch with Lieutenant Commander Corbett in the Combat Information Centre. Corbett had very little time to instruct her, as they were all locked up at battle stations and the alien ships were manoeuvring. All six of the closer ships had lowered their shields; they were in a loose, uneven formation about thirty thousand kilometres across. Emissions sparkled from each ship – a chatter of communications. It was all heavily encrypted.

Nbaro watched them manoeuvre, ran back their emissions, and looked at the point at which they all lowered their shields. She didn’t learn a thing.

‘Negotiating,’ Dorcas sent by lace.

‘Got there all by myself.’

‘Yes, I have noted your intelligence before. But what will they decide?’

‘I’m in CIC. According to the computer here, if they don’t react in six hours, we get a free run to Insertion without fighting.’

Dorcas sent, ‘And then they can follow us. The next system will be worse, you know.’

‘You are a bundle of good cheer,’ she sent, and cut him off ruthlessly. After a pause, she relented, and sent, ‘One day at a time.’

‘Agreed,’ he said, and fell silent.

Nbaro was exhausted when she headed back to her cabin. She hadn’t even visited Dorcas; she was that tired.

According to her schedule, Drake was awake but in her down time, so Nbaro un-dogged the hatch and pushed it open.

‘Maybe come back in an hour?’ Drake said breathlessly. Rick Hanna was there; a glimpse of flesh, a giggle, and she had the hatch closed again.

Wait until you’re out in the Deep Black … Who had said that?

Damn it, I just want my rack.

Of course, Drake was well within her rights; Nbaro wasn’t even on her sleep cycle yet, and Dorcas wasn’t in his cabin.

She went to the ready room and worked on her tactics briefing. After a while, her tab beeped and there was a message from Thea.

All Clear. Sorry, honey.

She grinned, and Lieutenant Commander Thulile, in the next acceleration couch, looked at her. ‘Good joke?’

‘Humanity,’ Nbaro said.

‘Aha – great joke, then.’

Nbaro got up, filed her briefing by neural lace, queried Morosini, and walked back to her stateroom. Hanna was gone.

‘Rick just asked me to marry him,’ Drake said. She was lying on her acceleration couch looking ridiculously relaxed and happy in her workout gear.

‘Congratulations?’ Marca said with some reserve.

‘Exactly. Is this what I want? Is it even what he wants? Fuck, will we even be alive in two weeks?’ Drake smiled up at her. ‘But the sex was good, and I don’t think he noticed that I didn’t say anything as conclusive as yes . Has anyone noticed what a high-pressure environment a ship in a long space battle is?’

Nbaro laughed long and hard, a belly laugh that rolled on for half a minute. Then she managed, ‘I think we’re all making this up as we go along.’

Drake’s sparkle faded. ‘Yeah? I just keep thinking that this is what the Hong Kong and the New York and the Dubai went through. Except they’re all dead now.’

Nbaro pulled off her flightsuit. ‘You are a bundle of joy.’

Drake wriggled. ‘I have to go on watch.’ She got up into the space that Nbaro had vacated; there wasn’t really room for two women to dress or undress simultaneously. ‘Truly? I think we’ll make it home.’ She grinned, her face at eye level with Nbaro’s in the top rack. ‘But will Rick still want me in the everyday of City life? Fuck, will I want him? This is not the Deep Black they told us about, where we’re all bored spitless. Instead …’

‘Instead, we’re hunted by aliens and it’s all peril all the time,’ Nbaro said. ‘Dorcas is having the time of his life.’

‘So are you, darling. Maybe I am, too. What will we do after this?’ Drake shrugged into her uniform jacket. ‘How’s your boarding party?’

‘I have two,’ Nbaro said. ‘Remember Ramirez?’

‘The vicious one when we were building out your Pericles ? Hey, where is the Pericles anyway?’ Drake slurped coffee.

‘Yeah, that one. No idea. Some sort of test flight.’

Drake grunted. ‘What about Ramirez?’

‘She’s a gifted shipboard fighter. The Marines want her.’

‘Christ, a fate worse than death, at least according to my brothers. Mind you, I have thought about it myself.’ Drake laughed. ‘Don’t wait up, honey.’

‘Mmphh,’ Nbaro said, already falling away towards sleep.

24

They were two days out from the insertion for Split, their next system. Nbaro received a request, via neural lace, to push Nik’ri Put into making another message for the Hin, but she had a watch and a command meeting first. She spent four hours with the TAO, learning some of the details of the limitations on manoeuvre imposed by everything from the ship’s mass to various fuel supply equations.

‘Fraser had better have something up his sleeve,’ Lieutenant Commander Corbett muttered, ‘because we are going to be very low on fuel when we enter the Split System.’

Nbaro began to appreciate the multiple competing demands that dictated the TAO’s decisions in an engagement; Corbett spent the watch talking to Astrogation about the exact path they’d need for Insertion and how best to reach it. The six surviving Hin ships still ahead were now in two distinct squadrons, well separated in space and just barely clear of the insertion zone. Six more lurked above and below on parallel courses.

‘Any thoughts on why the squids are suddenly letting us go?’ Corbett asked.

‘No, ma’am,’ Nbaro said. None that I can discuss with you, ma’am. Not for the first time, Nbaro noticed that having information that she was forbidden to share with her immediate superiors was awkward, instead of empowering.

Corbett gave her an I wasn’t born yesterday look. ‘Seriously?’

Nbaro gave the midshipper salute – a broad shrug. ‘Seriously, ma’am.’

She was glad to escape, and she changed into a shipboard uniform as quickly as she could and headed for the bridge wing. New steel and alloys had been welded in over new supports, and nothing had been painted yet, so the repairs were obvious.

It was a shock when the lift doors opened.The fireplace and the painting were gone. The briefing room was now a matt grey-green with two heavy folding tables and ship’s issue chairs.

‘Oh!’ Nbaro said.

Morosini appeared. His tall gothic throne was unchanged, but then, it was part of his holographic projection. He wore deep red clothes of a bygone age, something both elegant and faintly piratical, with a huge flowing wig, or perhaps that was his hair, tall boots and a rapier, none of which discomfited his cat, who purred loudly enough to rattle the table.

‘Yes ,’ he said. ‘We were hit hard. I may even be said to have been dead, for a bit. ’

Lochiel looked away.

Nbaro took her usual seat and a robot servitor appeared with coffee. It smelled delicious, and she drank it gratefully.

Morosini smiled thinly. ‘We need Nik’ri Put to reopen communications with her matron–captain’s sister, Ms Nbaro. It is perhaps the most important thing that can happen today. ’

Nbaro nodded. ‘I understand.’

Seeing Morosini was a direct reminder of a number of issues that she’d put away in her iron boxes: the deaths of her parents; Morosini’s admission that he’d manipulated her at the Orphanage; the neural lace, and all it implied.

She glanced at Lochiel. Now is not the time.

The senior officers began to arrive, some from the bridge, some from the lifts. Dorcas sat by her. His smile was warm, his pleasure in seeing her unfeigned.

I could really get used to that.

Mpono nodded to Nbaro as they sat, and Fraser grinned. ‘We need to spar,’ he said. ‘I’m getting fat.’

Lochiel looked worried, as if a captain and a junior lieutenant were going to start a throwdown before his eyes.

‘At your service, sir,’ Nbaro said. She even smiled.

Darkstar came in with Lieutenant Smith, and Captain Dukas threw herself into a chair. The head of Engineering had dark circles under her eyes, a long splash of blue hydraulic fluid on her cheek and over one shoulder, and her shipboard work suit was covered in various fluids. She smelled like a mixture of machine oil and ozone.

Pisani came in last, from the bridge. Everyone stood.

‘Sit,’ he said. ‘We’re having this meeting to assess our position and plan the next leg into Split.’ He nodded to Fraser. ‘Let’s hear it, Bernie.’

Fraser stood, waved a hand, and the overhead system projected a holotank with an utterly alien star system. The projection was so bright and so odd that Nbaro’s first thought was that it was a cartoon.

‘Split,’ Fraser said. ‘An enormous torus of gas and rubble, lit from within like a paper lamp by two stars – a yellow giant and a white dwarf. The white dwarf pulses with X-rays at a rate that pretty much prohibits a permanent human presence. We have navigational buoys and a hardened transit detection system.’ He had a laser pointer, which he used to point at the two stars; they moved in the animation as he rotated the aspect of the system. ‘At the heart of the system, all of the mass of the gases and rock has been sucked into the stars, or that’s what the DHC survey says. The result is that the heart of the system is empty, or relatively empty out to about twelve light minutes. Let’s call it two hundred and fifty million kilometres.’ He looked around. Fraser was full of energy, and Nbaro took this as a good sign.

‘The gas cloud, which is full of debris, is a doughnut. It’s huge – about ten light minutes in diameter. And in that gas cloud is a gas giant. It’s still forming, but it was located precisely by the DHC survey. No one has ever used it for refuelling before.’

A course projection appeared in a bright cyan. The system continued to rotate on all three axes, so that everyone at the table could see their projected course.

‘We plan to extract from Artifact Space here ,’ Fraser said. Here was open space at the very edge of the gas cloud, well out from both stars, and midway between them. He put the laser pointer on what appeared to be empty space. ‘There is a third mass in the system, or so we posit from the behaviour of the two visible stars. We believe it is a concentration of dark matter analogous to a star.’ He shrugged. ‘We won’t go anywhere near it. Someday the DHC will send an expedition to explore it, but that’s not us and not today.’

‘Thank God,’ Dukas muttered. She crossed herself.

Hughes, the head of Cargo, leaned back. ‘So we’re jumping in close to the gas cloud?’

Fraser nodded.

‘I’m guessing there’s too much mass in the gas cloud for a safe insertion there?’ Hughes asked.

‘There has never been a successful extraction from Artifact Space into any region with particulate matter,’ Fraser said, as if he was quoting from a textbook. ‘Also, in terms of astrogation, this is a relatively easy insertion. The gas cloud is a ring, which makes the centre a target, with two … really three stellar masses for pinpoint accuracy.’

Hughes nodded.

Pisani leaned forward. ‘You’re confident you can hit that target?’ he asked. ‘Bernie, I know we’ve asked miracles of you all cruise …’

Fraser seemed unaffected. But Nbaro, who sparred with him frequently, knew that flutter in his left eye. ‘I’m confident that we have no other course of action as likely to give us a favourable outcome,’ he said evenly.

‘Ouch,’ Pisani said. ‘Do I want to know the odds that we crash into something?’

Fraser’s smile was hard, his face set. ‘More of a total annihilation of matter than a mere crash. I can’t really calculate it. Neither can Morosini. But let’s say ten per cent.’

Nbaro’s intake of breath was echoed throughout the room.

Dukas leaned forward, obviously exhausted. But she raised her head and looked at Pisani. ‘And this is truly our best option, Vettor?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

Fraser nodded. ‘Ordinarily, the greatships aim outside the rim of the gas cloud, and make a long transit to the insertion point, which in this very rare case is here , orbiting the central masses at the same speed as the gas cloud but above it.’ He looked up and down the table. ‘So, first, we have to hit the gas giant for fuel. And second, being inside the gas cloud gives us an enormous tactical advantage.’

Every head turned to Lochiel.

The Intelligence officer nodded. ‘The Hin will expect us outside the gas cloud, which is one advantage. Secondly, our best estimation, based on the data from our last three engagements, is that distance attenuates the beam weapons effectiveness because of quantum diffusion. Inside the gas cloud, diffusion will be even more rapid. In addition, Mister Dorcas calculates that the energy requirements of their shields will be increased.’

Dorcas nodded. ‘And we’re not the only ones with fuel problems,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing but a guess, but my guess is that at least three of the ships currently shadowing us are very low on fuel.’

‘Nik’ri Put has been very reticent about providing any detail of her ship,’ Nbaro put in. ‘Nonetheless, she’s suggested limits of fuel capacity for multiple insertions and shield use.’

People nodded. Darkstar glanced at her, their gaze unreadable.

‘Morosini and I believe that this aggressive insertion profile will surprise our adversaries,’ Fraser said, ‘and leave us the maximum flexibility entering the system.’

‘Assuming we’re not already annihilated,’ Hughes said.

Fraser’s grin was more skull-like than happy. ‘Exactly.’ He seemed to hesitate, glanced at Darkstar, and then said, ‘I think it’s worth adding that Second Captain Jiang Shunfu is perhaps the most famous astrogator in all of the PTX navy. And he agreed with my calculations precisely and independently. He’s confident we can do this. And he isn’t driving a greatship – his vanes are shorter than ours, his margin of error greater.’

Pisani nodded. ‘I find that heartening, especially as I find Captain Jiang very reliable.’

Hughes leaned back so far that Nbaro was afraid he’d tip over his metal chair. Dukas shook her head.

Morosini spoke up. ‘This is the best course of action, according to every model I make. ’

Fraser indicated their course. ‘So,’ he said, ‘we insert here and dive for the gas cloud, which we hope is very close. We expect hostile, or at least potentially hostile, ships in-system, but we hope they’re waiting for us at the usual extraction space. If they are, they’ll never catch us. We decelerate into a vector that allows us to slingshot around the gas giant, refuelling all the way, and then straight towards insertion for Ultra.’

‘You are confident we will extract on the right heading?’ Dukas asked.

Fraser looked at Pisani. ‘No. We may have to decelerate violently and make a major course change, but the most likely entry vector is the one indicated.’

Dukas muttered something in Greek.

Morosini laughed. ‘Friends ,’ he said. ‘We are shattering every record there is on this cruise. There is some risk. It is manageable. ’

Dukas managed a half-smile. ‘Eh, Morosini,’ she said, ‘if that was meant to put heart in us, it might have missed a bit.’

‘By every calculation, this is the best course ,’ Morosini said.

‘Your namesake no doubt said the same as he aimed his mortars at the Parthenon,’ she replied.

Morosini laughed. In fact, everyone laughed, and Nbaro found herself laughing, too.

Pisani nodded. ‘Travel time?’ he asked.

Fraser did something and the overlay changed. ‘Assuming a good entry vector, eight days,’ he said. ‘More if we have to decelerate more – all the usual caveats apply. But …’ He was sweating, but his voice carried conviction. ‘We can do this.’

Pisani nodded. ‘Good. Lochiel? Tell us what we’ve learned about the Hin.’

Lochiel stood and the projector showed the Hin ship stripped of its shields, imaged by the Pericles weeks before.

‘This is the best image we’ve had so far, and we’ve been able to learn quite a bit, not least from analysis of the destruction of those we’ve witnessed.’ He looked around. ‘They’re small, most of them three or four hundred metres in length, and every ship seems to have its own design. We estimate they have crews of sixty to one hundred – maybe double that. The Hin aren’t big, and we think they could be very comfortable packed together in a way that would not be acceptable to us. On the other hand, Nik’ri Put seems relatively comfortable in isolation. Our best guess is that they’re highly adapted to space and space travel, with hundreds of thousands of years of exposure.’

Mpono made a motion that suggested that Lochiel should get to the point.

‘Their engines must be much more efficient than ours and their insertion navigation must be more accurate, if they use the same travel principles we do.’

‘Which I doubt they do,’ Dorcas said.

‘They have a heavy beam weapon mounted on the centreline, almost certainly linked to the engines,’ Lochiel said, ‘With one major power source.’

Dukas said, ‘Antimatter.’

Lochiel nodded. Dorcas smiled. ‘It’s far more efficient than our hydrogen fusion,’ he said. ‘And even with that, they have fuel problems.’

Captain Hughes raised his hand. Lochiel nodded. ‘Sir?’

Hughes let his chair fall forward. ‘If they’re so advanced, how come we’re holding our own?’

Pisani laughed. ‘I asked this question weeks ago.’

Nbaro nodded. Me, too.

Lochiel looked to Dorcas.

‘Technology has a cultural component,’ Dorcas said. ‘Weapons tend to evolve for the circumstances that their cultures encounter. I could give examples – the differences in European and Asian armour at the dawn of the Renaissance, the development of gunpowder weapons—’

‘Mister Dorcas,’ Pisani said.

‘Yes, yes. Except that in this case, my desire to show you historical antecedents is directly related to the case. For a very long time, the Hin have only fought each other and the Starfish. The Starfish excel at stealth, have superb early warning systems, and build robust ships, some larger than ours, with external armour rather than energy shields, and deploy a weapon which appears to manipulate energy, and perhaps gravity, at range. Based on a single reliable observation at Trade Point, we postulate that the Hin systems have been developed to resist the Starfish systems. Where the Starfish build huge ships, the Hin respond with many smaller ships, allowing them to spread wider detection nets. It is fascinating that in the most recent actions, we have seen the Hin deploying sensor arrays. Either they are emulating us, or they have always had this capability.’

Pisani said, ‘But they haven’t fought us before – is this your point?’

Dorcas nodded. ‘Exactly. We have very large ships full of cargo space, we use railguns instead of energy weapons, and our small spacecraft are clearly not something that either the Hin or Starfish have used. Who knows what they might have had in the past? We may just have encountered a single moment in the evolution of their military systems that is, at least temporarily, to our advantage. If I may guess …?’

Pisani smiled. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘The Starfish have not evolved to operate as individuals. And the Hin ship design is too small and too energy efficient for them to deploy small craft.’ Dorcas shrugged. ‘Or both of them experimented with small craft and abandoned them. Certainly, neither race seems as fond of automation and computer augmentation as we are.’

Nbaro said, ‘Maybe they had a bad experience with AI,’ before she could stop herself, realising something that Nik’ri Put had said about the Il’llu was niggling at her.

Dorcas sat, and Pisani had his department heads report.

Dukas stood as if she bore the weight of the world. ‘We have all four reactors on line, and all engines operable,’ she said. ‘But I’m running out of almost everything – mass for the railguns, ablative material, slugs, and sheet steel and titanium to make bulk repairs. We really can’t afford another engagement like the last.’ She forced a smile. ‘Otherwise, everything is fine. Oh, my first line repair crews are mostly exhausted. If this insertion plan is the best way of avoiding combat, even for a few days, I think we need it.’

Everyone nodded.

Pisani listened to a report on cargo, and a report on food, drinking water and other necessities. ‘We’re going to have to start rationing almost everything,’ he said. ‘Tremaine, I want you to work on a flight schedule aimed at the refuelling sequence.’

‘Aye aye.’

Pisani rose. ‘Let’s get to it.’

25

Nik’ri Put floated in her new tank.

Nbaro bowed as gracefully as she could. ‘Tse-Tsu ,’ she said. She’d memorised a phrase with Dorcas’s help. ‘Nano-un danksun owl ong-gang-aulos mah-habinda .’

‘Ah! Kal Mah-habindha, may-yon eye owl-kuk-in !’ Nik’ri Put seemed to open, all of her tentacles floating in a beautifully extended radial skirt, and then drawn in.

‘She said, “Well said, foreigner who has honour,” ’ Dorcas sent to her.

‘Not so bad,’ Nbaro responded to Dorcas.

‘Tse-Tsu , we need to ask you for another transmission,’ she said.

Nik’ri Put swam closer. ‘Yes and also yes. But soon, perhaps, you will allow me to speak directly, eye to eye, as we say.’

‘Told you she’d ask.’

‘I’m in favour, but it’s not my call,’ Dorcas replied. ‘Requesting options from Morosini.’

‘Tse-Tsu , if we receive an appropriate answer from this vid, I think we may work on eye to eye,’ Nbaro said. ‘We are about to insert for another system in Human Space.’

‘Which system?’ she asked with apparent interest.

Nbaro checked with Darkstar.

I can’t see how it can hurt us for her to know where she is.

She borrowed Fraser’s holographic image and projected it.

Nik’ri Put showed excitement, moving quickly around her tank. ‘I know this place! We call it the Heoepali. ’

After a pause, Dorcas said, ‘Jellyfish analogue. Not a bad name for the place. Very interesting that the Hin have a name for it.’

‘It certainly is distinctive,’ Nbaro said. ‘I’ve never seen a system like it.’

‘Exactly!’ Nik’ri Put said. ‘The Mongsang-Ka can see it from anywhere.’

Dorcas said, ‘No cognate for Mongsang-Ka but I’m guessing they are navigators.’

Nbaro leaned forward. ‘Mongsang-Ka are those who guide the ship through space?’

Nik’ri Put flicked her tentacles and retreated. ‘I think that is all I wish to say,’ she said, sounding so like Nbaro berating herself for being an idiot that Nbaro was taken aback.

But she still dictated a new message, proposing direct contact.

Nbaro went to the range and shot various weapons; she kept a date with Fraser to fight, and ended up sparring with Chen and Akunje and half the ship, or so it seemed to her shoulders afterwards. She stood a watch as Tower and afterwards couldn’t remember anything that had happened during her watch, and then went to sleep without visiting Dorcas or talking to Morosini or doing any of the other things she might have liked to do.

She awoke to find that she and Eyre were piloting 6–0–7 for Insertion. She reviewed a canned briefing on her lace; it outlined the newest tactics, by which spacecraft and ablative material were launched at the same time. She considered their ten per cent chance of annihilation and came to terms with it. She didn’t mention it to Drake.

She had extra down time because of the insertion schedule, so she was just waking up as Drake came in.

‘What are you doing for insertion?’ Thea asked.

‘I’m flying,’ Nbaro said.

Drake pulled off a jacket and sat in their fold-out chair. ‘You know what? I hate being a Cargo officer. I don’t want to sit here and wait for you to save me.’

Nbaro dangled her feet over the edge of her acceleration rack. ‘Let’s do some sims and you can be a pilot in six hours,’ she joked.

‘No, I’m serious! This sucks.’ Drake looked at Nbaro. ‘You know, when you said Ramirez was thinking of joining the Marines and I mocked her?’ She tossed her hair. ‘Well, I enjoyed my taste of boarding party combat, you know? Maybe Ramirez is right. Maybe I’ll be a Marine.’

Nbaro, whose social skills had improved remarkably since coming aboard, realised it was tempting to mock, but the wrong time. ‘I thought your brothers were very … er … hostile? To the Marines?’

‘Oh,’ said Drake. ‘My brothers. And Rick Hanna.’ She lay back. ‘But Darkstar is utterly badass. That’s not a bad way to go.’

Nbaro dropped down to the deck and stretched, then pulled on a robe to go to the wet-shower. ‘No argument there,’ she said.

‘You’re pretty badass yourself. And considerably less of a barbarian waif than you were when you came aboard.’ Drake smiled, and Nbaro waved, and then she was off to the shower.

An hour later, she was with Dorcas. She had some free time, and she’d expected some cuddling at the least. Instead, they were in the armoury of the Special Services shack, working on Starfish repeater robots with Qaqqaq.

The short woman looked every bit as tired as Dukas had looked, but her hands were steady as she welded together parts for a fifth-generation robot. Nbaro was reduced to holding tools while Dorcas and Qaqqaq exchanged opaque technical data.

‘We’re much better at the chemical communications,’ Dorcas said. ‘Because we control the environment, the introduction of the markers is much easier.’

‘That allows us to have a more flexible robot,’ Qaqqaq added.

‘Full-size,’ Nbaro noted.

‘Exactly,’ Dorcas said. ‘I have a notion that if you and I controlled the robot jointly, and communicated simultaneously, we might approximate the dual nature of the Starfish.’

‘Or just end in violence,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘How’d they ever end up as two in one?’

Dorcas smiled. ‘It’s very efficient for many situations,’ he said. ‘For example, on close observation of Feather Dancer, we’ve learned that they have two of everything necessary to support life, but each system can support both creatures – both halves. Makes them very tough. Especially with their remarkable regenerative capabilities.’

‘And culture?’ Nbaro asked.

‘The most interesting thing that I’ve learned is that they drop colonies every time they find a usable platform. A breeding population, basically dropped into deep oceans under ice, where they die out or they don’t. I suspect they inhabit tens of thousands of worlds, and have dozens of subspecies who have been separated from the main branch for … a long time.’

‘Almighty,’ Nbaro shivered.

‘Scary,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘Trillions and trillions of aliens on ten thousand worlds.’

Dorcas nodded. ‘Aliens who killed the Venit ,’ he said. ‘And apparently destroyed every one of their centres.’

Nbaro was chilled to the core. ‘Then why are we fighting the Hin?’

‘We’re not. They are fighting us .’ Dorcas made a face. ‘And honestly, Nbaro, the truth is we still have very little idea what has happened, or what is going on now. You know of the World Wars in the Age of Chaos?’

Nbaro shrugged. ‘I know that they happened.’

Dorcas nodded. ‘Hundreds of ships fighting huge fleet actions.’

Nbaro raised an eyebrow. ‘And?’

‘We’re like dolphins, watching the battles of Jutland or Midway and trying to imagine why they are fighting.’

Qaqqaq looked at him, and gave one of her rare smiles. ‘Maybe they don’t remember,’ she said. ‘Think of the list of “who killed who” you could generate in a hundred thousand years. Think of the desire for revenge, compounded incident upon incident …’

‘Almighty,’ Nbaro said. ‘How would they ever make peace?’

‘How indeed?’ Dorcas said.

Eyre was his usual cheerful self; any sign of his nerves from the days before had been washed away with sleep and food. Or so it seemed to Nbaro.

Everything went well enough until they were all in the big spaceframe; Tatlah and Letke were passing each other images of enemy spacecraft from different angles for comparison, and everything on 6–0–7 appeared to be running green.

They were more than an hour early, and for the first time, Nbaro sat and worried. Usually this was one of her favourite times: the work done, the pleasure of flying to be anticipated.

Instead, she lay in her acceleration couch and worried. Because Fraser had said there was a ten per cent chance of annihilation.

I suppose I won’t even know , she thought. And then she thought of Dorcas, and then she thought of her long-delayed conversation with Morosini. Everything struck her as too exhausting to consider: her parents; Morosini’s plot; the aeons-long war that the aliens were fighting …

On the other hand, just a few days ago I was hoping to go in a flash, rather than a month-long slog fighting for the ship one passageway and knee-knocker at a time.

And if we hit something on insertion … then we’ve failed. Failed everyone – investors, DHC council, cargo shippers …

In vids and holos, civilisations tended to rise and fall on the outcomes of wars and battles. But viewed from inside, this wasn’t a war, or a battle. This was a not quite routine trading cruise, and their fledgling civilisation could rise or fall based on what happened to them.

Is that all it takes to collapse the DHC? The loss of three greatships?

Looks like maybe it is.

Is that really true, though? Trade Point is destroyed. The Hin have found the Starfish. Almighty, why haven’t I considered this before? This must have happened before – space is huge, but they find each other, they fight …

And if the fighting isn’t continuous, that means one side or the other loses absolutely in a region of space. Near genocide. Nik’ri Put says they’ve been travelling in space for three generations, so home must be very …

Almighty. Very far away. But they know about the Venit, who Dorcas thinks were the Circles. And they know of the Split system – they use it to navigate. So they have both been in this region of space for some time.

She put those thoughts away for future consideration. If I’m alive.

But even if we make it home … it’s all going to be very different.

Eyre was on comms, calling their launch weight. She looked at her timer: eight minutes to Insertion.

Time to be an officer.

‘Everyone ready?’ she asked with forced cheer.

Letke said, ‘Born ready.’

Tatlah grunted. ‘I could use another hour of sleep,’ he admitted. Eyre chuckled, and everything was better.

Nbaro was considering whether it was her duty to give a speech, and realised that she never did that. Nerves. And they don’t even know about the ten per cent risk. Why should they?

She flexed her fingers on the yoke and Pisani’s voice came over the intercom.

‘This is the Master. We are five minutes from insertion for Split System. We expect a hostile reaction and we’re ready for it. This is our last system before we enter DHC Space. We’re going home, friends.’ And after a pause, ‘That is all.’

‘Everyone take your drugs,’ Nbaro said unnecessarily. Fuck, I’m an idiot. In a spacecraft, the insertion drugs came straight into your system via the needles inserted into your skin.

Everyone merely said, ‘Yes ma’am,’ as if she wasn’t ridiculous.

Hostile Contact CT 0–4–4, about thirty-five thousand kilometres away, signalled them via laser. Her neural lace informed her in microseconds.

Two minutes to launch, and the insertion drugs were already in her system.

‘You’re seeing this?’ Dorcas sent.

‘Roger. Translation is beyond me just now.’

He sent it direct, so that for a second it replaced vision.

‘I leap (the sea) beside you. Expect/demand polite/honourable conversation. I have kept your course clear to show honourable intention.’

Nbaro switched to the 3D with ninety seconds to go. Three of the six Hin ships close in to them were moving, and they were moving fast . Even as she watched, the other three began to accelerate on a new vector, but at far lower rates of acceleration.

Sixty seconds. CT 0–4–4, the only ship that had communicated with the Athens , along with DE 0–5–7 and DE 0–5–8, were all accelerating at close to 12 g . Their vector was not quite an intercept but they were, in a general way, headed towards the Athens.

Now EG 0–0–5, EG 0–1–7 and ST 0–2–1, all noted as hostile, accelerated after CT 0–4–4 and her two consorts.

Forty-five seconds.

Two Hin ships fired their beam weapons … at CT 0–4–4.

Nbaro mouthed the word ‘Fuck.’

Even as she watched, DE 0–5–8 moved so as to interpose herself between the attacking group and CT 0–4–4, and her energy shields went up.

‘Are you two watching this?’ Nbaro asked.

It was all too fast for human interference. Fifteen seconds until Insertion, and she thought that DE 0–5–8 was rotating, perhaps lining up a shot at EG 0–1–7 …

Insertion.

26

Nbaro’s tongue was dry, and felt swollen in her mouth, and an alarm was ringing and she was late for class and she’d be punished—

I’m alive and we made it.

Consciousness returned – or a higher level of consciousness – and she raised the 3D representation.

Split. The gas torus. The two stars.

They were probably farther from the wall of starlit gas and debris than Fraser had intended – about half a million klicks, almost inside the real gravity well of the yellow giant. As if to remind her of her own mortality, a massive burst of X-rays registered as the white dwarf pulsed.

I wonder how long we can take all those X-rays? she thought. And then, But we survived the leap. So let’s go.

‘Anyone up?’ she said.

Tatlah said, ‘Ergg …’ And then, ‘I have a system, ma’am.’

‘Nice,’ she said. ‘Tower?’

For a heartbeat she got no response, and then Dworkin said, ‘Roger, Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7. You are two to launch.’

The navigational beacons were all set for ships entering the system beyond the doughnut of gas and debris – ten million kilometres away. There were no beacons inside the cloud, which meant … that the beacons were thirty seconds out, in both directions.

She looked at their course and speed; Fraser had mostly pulled off his miracle. They were within ten degrees of his ideal course, and their velocity was as low as could be expected.

Still in the game.

The electromagnets gripped her spacecraft and moved it to the launch rails. She heard the telltale snap of the launch system binding her craft to the rails by unbreakable bonds of electromagnetic force.

All mine.

Eyre completed the ritual with Tower. Nbaro turned, caught the launch officer’s eye, and saluted.

She was pushed back and down into her acceleration couch, and the lights of the ten-kilometre launch tube flew by – light, light, light, and then suddenly, the absolute velvet black of space. Except that instead of a sheet of black interrupted by diamond slivers of starlight, the whole starboard side of her screen was filled with the yellow-orange of the gas cloud. Somewhere buried in there was a gas giant that may or may not be a proto-star. It was all surprisingly bright.

Nbaro manoeuvred off the launch vector with a burst of cold-gas thrusters, mostly to avoid whatever may be coming up behind them, and she caught the deployment of the ablative load out of the corner of her eye: canisters opening with small propellant charges.

They still didn’t have an update from the navigational beacons, but with her own instruments she could see that there was nothing between them and the wall of incandescent gas.

‘Prepare for sensor drop,’ she said, and everything happened at once. She made the call to use her main engines; there was no military threat in front of her and she had limited supplies of cold gas. She lit the engines and hauled on the yoke …

‘Kuthay da puthar ,’ spat Tatlah.

Eyre’s whole body flinched, and he growled.

A Hin ship, shields down, burst into space so close that Nbaro’s turn almost put them into the side of the thing. She pulled on the yoke, hard, pushing her engines to full power; they were less than a kilometre apart.

‘Vid this!’ she called. ‘AI, you hear me?’

‘Do not engage ,’ Morosini said in a ridiculously calm voice. ‘Do not engage. ’

The spacecraft’s sub-AI said, ‘Video and cross-spectrum observation engaged .’

‘Jesus Christ,’ moaned Letke.

Nbaro turned her pop of speed into a hard turn, rolled, and flew the length of the Hin ship, five hundred metres out. With her neural lace she checked that her sensors were transmitting everything straight to the Athens , just ten kilometres away.

If we die, at least they’ll get this …

But the alien ship wasn’t firing. It was matching speed with the Athens , and seconds later, a second ship appeared from a cloud of Cherenkov radiation directly astern and perhaps a further fifteen kilometres away.

Nbaro had never seen a ship emerge into real space, much less so close, and the sight would stay with her for the rest of her life, for its haunting beauty and its suddenness. First there was a smudge of blue-white where nothing had been before; then the effect became a burst of blue, and then the bow of the ship emerged like a whale leaping from a Terran ocean.

‘The Cherenkov effect is enhanced by the density of gas here. I assume that isn’t a perfect vacuum,’ Dorcas sent.

‘BUSY,’ she sent.

And then, directly on her line of sight, dead astern of what her updating computer told her was DE 0–5–8, now tagged as neutral, she saw the blue smudge emerge again, and burst almost instantly into a cloud of deeper blue, and then the bow as CT 0–4–4 flashed into real space. Second later, the bow of the Stealthy Change burst out in a cloud of deep blue.

The PTX ship was perhaps fifteen kilometres astern of DE 0–5–8, her railgun tubes covering the two alien warships.

Nbaro whooped. She couldn’t help herself. But she thought, That’s too damned close.

When she looked at the 3D for confirmation, she realised that the navigational beacons should have updated the whole system, and they had not.

She assumed that Space Ops and the TAO were busy. ‘Dorcas?’

‘Roger,’ he said, as if he’d used the term all his life.

‘Nav beacons destroyed?’

‘Almost certainly. Morosini is trying to ping them with some secret device.’

‘Not good.’

‘Not good for someone.’

Nbaro rolled through the end of her manoeuvre and headed for the start point of their assigned sensor pattern; she was already off by more than a thousand kilometres.

‘Tatlah, the navigational beacons are gone, so sensors are all we’re going to have.’

‘Roger, ma’am.’

Tatlah dropped one immediately, and somewhere several thousand klicks away, Tench, sitting behind Storkel in the new 6–0–9, was already on her third sensor.

The 3D plot updated.

‘I have a contact,’ Letke said. ‘I have six contacts,’ she added. ‘Jesu, ma’am, I have nine contacts in the outer system. And I can’t see through the gas cloud.’

‘Two away,’ Tatlah said. ‘Confirm, three pods beyond ten million kilometres. And our pod, close in.’

Nbaro smiled at the phrase ‘our pod’.

In her enhanced mind’s eye, all nine new contacts appeared, tens of millions of kilometres above the ecliptic, and were assigned contact numbers: CF 0–7–7 through CF 0–8–6. All were tagged hostile.

Tatlah said, ‘Alpha Charlie 3–0–4 is launching probes, ma’am.’

Probes were similar to their own deployable sensor packages, but with an engine and some manoeuvrability. Off to her starboard, 3–0–4 had accelerated at a crushing 10 g almost straight up to launch her first probe.

The alien ships off her port side continued to sail serenely through space.

She tabbed Dorcas again. Can I recommend, as KePoja , that my prisoner be allowed a vid channel immediately?

Dorcas said, What do you think I’m doing?

Nbaro snorted, now locked into her sensor pattern.

Below her and forty kilometres away, the Athens was manoeuvring. First, she rotated the axis of thrust in all three dimensions. Nbaro knew in advance what vector she’d choose; she could see it on the overlay in 3D. She fired a long burn to turn, and then pulses.

‘Right for the wall,’ Eyre said.

‘It’s just gas,’ Nbaro said.

‘Beg pardon, ma’am,’ Tatlah said, ‘But there’s a lot of shit in that fog.’ He pushed a radar picture of near space on to her tiny cockpit screen; she pulled it into her lace.

‘Almighty,’ she muttered. As Tatlah had suggested, the space ahead of the ship was full of debris: rock so fine it was almost sand; some odd densities of lithium and hydrogen.

Luckily they had a very capable AI to make sure that they could get through it.

Eyre waved. ‘Tower wants us to recover as soon as our last sensor is deployed.’

Nbaro spared a look at the alien ships just a few kilometres astern of the Athens . It was a beautiful sight: four ships in a formation so close that she could see three of them – all four, if she counted the bright dot that was the Stealthy Change.

Ahead, the massive wall of the gas cloud loomed like a lantern lit from within. It was almost impossible to believe that its light was nothing but the reflection of the two suns.

It was magnificent.

This is why I came. This is what I wanted.

Her spacecraft gave a slight shudder.

‘That’s all sixteen away,’ Tatlah reported.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said. She turned for the Athens and noted that the whole event was landing; nine spacecraft were queuing up in a circular pattern astern of the Athens.

More than ten million kilometres above her, the three new pods of Hin ships had begun to change vectors, accelerating on new courses, heading inbound on what might be intercept vectors. Their sensor screen was starting to produce results, and the probes launched by 3–0–4 and 3–0–1 were beginning to reveal the rest of the system. But nothing seemed to penetrate the wall of gas beyond a few thousand kilometres.

I hope that’s a two-way street.

The Athens rushed at the wall. For the first time in her brief career, Nbaro was instructed to land with other spaceframes, at almost the same time, down different tubes. 3–0–4 was so close that she could see the big Spectrum Warfare spacecraft off her port side, just a klick ahead and forty metres offset. She followed the Flight Three craft all the way in, as 3–0–4 went in tube 2 and she went in tube 3.

Darkness, darkness … light . The electromagnets pulled like the gravity of ten planets, for a moment, but her acceleration couch cradled her, and the stent needles only tore a little skin as they retracted – an operational hazard.

On her neural lace, she watched the wall of the gas torus rush at them, even as the electromagnetic couplers carried them to their flight bay.

Entry into the gas cloud was completely anticlimactic. She flinched anyway.

27

Nbaro’s debrief in the Intelligence Centre took longer than she’d expected. Lieutenant Lochiel debriefed her in person, and then Morosini appeared.

‘You just decided to perform a fly-by of an alien spacecraft?’ Lochiel asked. The question seemed genuine.

She closed her eyes. ‘I was …’ She was trying to remember how it had all happened. ‘They extracted right next to me. Within a kilometre. I thought …’ She shrugged. ‘I thought they’d fire on us. Close-in weapons would bag us in seconds – right, Morosini?’

‘Correct ,’ he said, stroking his cat.

‘So I …’ Almighty, what did I think? ‘… I thought that if they were going to shoot us, we might as well go down recording.’

Lochiel nodded. ‘Well, Ms Nbaro, if Intel gave medals for data collection under hostile circumstances, I’d definitely give you one. Your sensor sweep of their hull has been …’

Morosini smiled – a rare occurrence. ‘Even from the Athens, ten kilometres away, we didn’t achieve the resolution you did. We have confirmed their crew, and a fair amount about their ship’s layout, and I suspect that we will all spend a great deal of time studying this. ’ The AI made a screen appear in the air, showing …

‘What is that?’ Nbaro asked.

Lochiel shrugged. ‘Smart money is on an antimatter combustion chamber,’ he said. ‘But honestly, we do not know. It’s a space filled with almost pure energy.’

Morosini suddenly froze, and then his head turned. On Nbaro’s neural lace, something twitched – some piece of information triggered something on the system 3D display – and she was looking at the rough sphere of relatively empty space at the heart of the system around the two stars, where a third Hin ship had just extracted into existence. DE 0–5–8 appeared, along with the colour for ‘neutral’.

‘Damaged ,’ Morosini said. ‘Badly damaged .’

Nbaro had a moment to reflect that she was looking at signals that were almost certainly being passed from sensors to the Stealthy Change to the Athens through the fog of gas. Sensor transmission range here was thousands, not millions, of kilometres.

Sensors showed the newcomer bleeding ice crystals.

‘As if this wasn’t complicated enough ,’ Morosini said. ‘The matron–captain of the A-leum down Junjon-ui churn is now speaking to Nik’ri Put. Dorcas is doing his best to follow along, as am I, although I must confess that the inferences and leaps of intuition required for good translation are not my best features. ’

‘Do you want me to go to her?’ Nbaro asked. She noted that ‘A-leum down Junjon-ui churn ’ was CT 0–4–4, the ship that had communicated before Insertion.

Morosini nodded. ‘I think Master Pisani is about to commit us to a rescue of the wounded ship . I would be happier if you were there to support the Hin in translation efforts. ’

Nbaro felt excited, awake, alive. ‘On my way,’ she said.

Of course, the Athens was at battle stations, and Major Darkstar had other duties. Lieutenant Smith was on duty in the secure area.

‘Morosini told me to expect you,’ he said, opening the hatch. ‘I have coffee ready. Good coffee.’

She smiled. ‘My day is made. How’s Nik’ri Put?’

‘As happy as you or I would be if we hadn’t heard a human voice in a month and then, suddenly …’

‘I get it.’ Nbaro was still in her flightsuit, and she was surprised how damp it was. She ran fingers through her close-cropped hair and pushed into the alien’s area. Since they were under artificial gravity, she took the time to bow. She’d learned to spread her arms and legs, as if she was spreading her tentacles.

‘Nano-un danksun owl ong-gang-aulos mah-habinda ,’ she said.

Nik’ri Put executed what could only be described as a barrel roll, tentacles trailing in all three dimensions. ‘I am speaking to my matron–captain–sister clan matriarch!’ she said. ‘I am forgiven for allowing to be capture!’

Nbaro was absurdly pleased to find that the Hin was so excited that her Anglatin was slipping.

So like us.

‘I would be happy to tell her how bravely you fought,’ Nbaro said. She had very little memory of it, actually; she had a vague memory of using her sword against the Hin’s armoured robot limbs, and then … And then all she could remember was those liquid eyes inside a dark visor. The knowledge that some one was in there.

And the fear.

‘Ah, this is right and proper and also I would like it,’ Nik’ri Put said.

Then she spoke a long paragraph in her own language.

‘It’s too damned fast,’ complained Dorcas, who never complained about anything.

Nbaro didn’t even try. She had about fifty Hin words memorised, and there was no point in pretending.

‘She doesn’t know anything that can hurt us,’ she said.

Dorcas was silent.

‘What are you discussing?’ she asked Nik’ri Put.

‘You! Clan Matriarch wants to know how spindly-dry-non-swimmer peoples have honour. You know that Supple-lei-leul Tonghay Tweito is badly damaged?’ she asked.

‘Got that,’ Dorcas sent. ‘Ship is Leaping Through Spray. Passing to Pisani.’

‘I know, Tse-Tsu. My commander is working …’

‘This is a right action! And also very right! And Honourable Blood Wa-Kan Asinpal Las has too much Hin to ask, but I will ask. Please, KePoja ! My sister–cousins are bleeding out their water!’

‘Morosini?’ she sent.

‘Here. I hear it. I’m generating a rescue plan. But if their magnetic seals go, the resulting detonation, which we have observed … ’

Nbaro was painfully aware how much damage a Hin ship, detonating close to the Athens , could do.

Via lace, Dorcas projected an image of hundreds of Hin packed together in a very small volume of water. ‘They must have survival craft.’

Nbaro put a hand on the glass of the tank. ‘Tse-Tsu , do your people have rescue craft? Escape pods?’ She reached into the ship’s datasphere, extracted a training film from her earliest days aboard and loaded it, so that a picture of hundreds of survival pods deploying from a DHC greatship appeared on the vid display inside the tank.

‘No,’ Nik’ri Put replied.

Was that a tone of sadness? ‘No survival pods?’ Nbaro asked incredulously.

‘As I’d expected ,’ Morosini said. ‘If they had survival pods, they’d have deployed them. ’

Dorcas clearly thought in terms of imagery, because instead of speaking, he provided an image of the Pericles carrying a tank of ammonia with Feather Dancer inside.

‘The Pericles isn’t available,’ Nbaro sent.

‘But that’s a standard cargo size for all the heavy shuttles. Captain’s gig is a pinnace – any of the Flight One spacecraft.’

Nbaro understood immediately. ‘That’s doable, if we’re willing to launch in this fog.’ She used her neural lace to avoid all command channels and find Dworkin, who was still on Tower.

‘Tower, could you alert Flight One to have a heavy lifter ready to go ASAP?’

Dworkin answered on Nbaro’s tab: Will do. Damn, Nbaro, you get around. Now you’re the ship?

‘You are correct ,’ Morosini sent. ‘This is a reasonable risk. Lieutenant McDonald is taking Alpha Alpha 1–0–1 to launch. ’

Dorcas created an image, overlaying hundreds of pictures of Nik’ri Put swimming in her tank until he created a small tank of water packed with Hin; then he transmitted it to Nbaro, who put it on the vid display in the tank.

‘We need you to tell Hin on board the …’ She accessed her neural lace for the name. ‘… the Supple-lei-leul Tonghay Tweito to pack into the smallest volume they can and detach from the ship. We will pick that container up with one of our small spacecraft.’

Nik’ri Put was quick; she understood faster than Nbaro could speak. And then she was talking, albeit at an enormous rate and in a much higher pitch, so that she sounded like a cross between a dolphin’s squeak and a child’s scream.

‘No idea,’ Dorcas said in the VR link. ‘I assume she’s trying to explain …’

There was a very faint thud out in the hull. A Flight One drop-ship had launched.

Nbaro thought of Lieutenant McDonald, a red-haired woman who had been openly jealous of her first success. And angry she hadn’t been picked for the Pericles.

Who cares? Nbaro thought. Godspeed, McDonald.

Watching the rescue was more than a little like watching Han dock with the Stealthy Change , which now seemed like ancient history. And where is Han now? Where is the Pericles?

Not that I need more worries.

McDonald, flying 1–0–1 alone, plucked a strange teardrop of extruded metal off the side of the Leaping Through Spray and began a long turn, now carrying twice the mass of her own craft. Truekner took a Flight Six bird out full of reaction mass so that McDonald could burn hard for the Athens and minimise her flight time in the ‘soup’, as the space pilots had begun to refer to the gas cloud and its abrasive debris. Nbaro flew a second refuelling mission, so that she could burn hard to drop her relative speed.

In a remote way, it amused Nbaro that flying her Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7 alone – with no back-seaters and no co-pilot, to minimise the risk of aircrew loss – through a cloud of gas debris, to refuel a ship rescuing aliens, all seemed like her everyday work. It was an unexceptional flight; she punched off the stern, made her rendezvous, and flew back. She did get the opportunity to see the magnificent shapes and colours of the wake that the Athens left in the gas cloud. She and McDonald exchanged a few terse sentences as they docked for refuelling. Nbaro searched for something meaningful to say, but all she could come up with was, ‘Nice catch on the aliens.’

McDonald said, ‘Thanks. Out.’

And that was not a reconciliation.

Why do I care?

Oh, yeah. Because this is not the Orphanage.

Fuck.

Back aboard, Qaqqaq and her increasingly well-trained team of xenobiological engineers had created a larger tank that filled Hold 74, well down on Seventh Deck. Under heavy guard, Feather Dancer and Nik’ri Put were transferred to the new area, separated by an armoured wall.

‘That’s a lot of water,’ Nbaro said, looking at the whole thing on her lace.

Dorcas was lying next to her. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘We’re going to be conserving water for a while.’

‘No wet showers?’

‘Not for a while.’ He ran a hand down her back, not exactly demanding, but definitely suggesting …

She’d put the soup and the aliens and the war and her parents and Morosini away. It was all there, in a box. But for now …

When McDonald set the alien metal bubble down on the external freight elevator, everyone on the ship cheered. Qaqqaq and Dorcas had no time for Nbaro, which didn’t really matter because she was tasked to help Thulile plan the refuelling run on the proto-star.

‘We need every drop of reaction mass we can get,’ Thulile said. She was the lead on the whole operation, which would involve every spacecraft in the space wing that could carry hydrogen. The mass launch would look like an attack wave. Nbaro’s second task was to convince Nik’ri Put to tell her matriarch that this was not a hostile act. Nbaro also supplied footage of eighty-odd aliens swimming in a giant tank.

‘We are definitely going to run out of mackerel,’ Dorcas said.

They were too deep into the gas cloud to have readings from anything. They ran at partial battle stations, ready for almost anything to come out of the fog, but the tension had run so high for so long that people seemed to go about the ship as if all this was routine.

Nbaro led her boarding parties, fenced, planned a new tactics briefing for her Flight, won a zero-g match with Chen – to her own surprise – and made love to Dorcas twice. He and Morosini were deeply engaged in negotiations with the Hin, and he was absolutely close-mouthed about that, which suited her. The presence of eighty-four more aliens aboard had reduced her role; Nik’ri Put was far too busy to talk to her.

In many ways, the transit through the gas cloud was the most relaxing part of the cruise since Trade Point. The only excitement was provided on the third day, when the close-in weapons turrets were all unlocked and then fired at debris; a long concatenation, followed by a hollow silence. On her neural lace, Nbaro watched the two alien ships manoeuvre deftly into the ‘tunnel’ of safety created by the Athens , and the Stealthy Change followed suit.

And then it was time for the refuelling.

Nbaro was in the first launch. The joke in the ready room was that they were going so far that they’d only gain about one litre of fuel for the ship after the return trip, but that wasn’t true; Nbaro had helped Thulile run the numbers, and they were actually leaving late, to protect spaceframes and pilots from the dangers out there in the soup.

But for the first time that she could remember, Truekner wasn’t going. Neither was Thulile. In fact, Nbaro was the mission commander, with three junior pilots under her: Eyre, flying solo, and two Flight One drop-ships carrying heavy tanks, both flown by former midders recently given acting orders.

‘That dangerous, eh?’ she said at the mission brief. ‘Midders all the way.’

The space crews laughed; the briefing staff winced.

All of them were flying solo. The odds of a spaceframe hitting something in the soup were low but real, and no radar was good enough to pick up and avoid a fist-sized rock at their current velocity.

Nbaro was walking to her beloved 6–0–7 when Morosini came up on her neural lace.

‘Ms Nbaro ,’ he said. He was voice only.

She was in the passageway, having just left the EVA locker. She paused, leaned casually against a haze-grey bulkhead, glanced back down the passageway, and nodded.

‘Here I am, lord,’ she said.

Morosini chuckled. ‘Casual blasphemy – very Italian. ’

‘I try to fit in,’ she sub-vocalised.

‘I have arranged this mission so that you are in command ,’ he said. ‘You will be the first spacecraft to enter the gas giant’s orbit. ’

‘By forty minutes,’ she said. ‘Truekner and Thulile and McDonald are in the next event.’

She listened to the sound of a purring cat.

‘But you knew that,’ she said.

‘There are few things I enjoy more than having an acting lieutenant explain the flight schedule that I wrote ,’ Morosini said.

‘I’m an idiot,’ she admitted.

‘Far from it. Listen, please. There is a possibility that you will encounter something in the gravity well of the gas giant. ’

‘Encounter something?’

Two spacers were coming down the corridor. Nbaro picked up her helmet bag and started to walk. She still wasn’t really good at using the lace while doing other things.

‘If you encounter … someone … ’ Morosini sent.

‘This is mysterious, even for you,’ she returned.

‘Be cautious. Err on the side of non-engagement. And talk to me. ’

She had reached the lift. The AI connection to the neural lace was chancy while she was in the lifts. ‘Cautious, alert, not trigger-happy. Why am I in charge?’

Morosini sounded tired. ‘Because you will listen to me, and if you give an order, the rest will obey. ’

Almighty, what now? she asked the lift doors.

28

Flying alone was not entirely unpleasant. The sensory deprivation of the soup was remarkable; its glow was softer, the view even more … ambiguous than usual. Nbaro’s velocity, imparted by the ship’s railgun launchers as well as the Athens ’ own velocity, was high enough that she wouldn’t survive any kind of impact. It was also high enough that the soup passed like a fog of soft light.

She was flying entirely on her instruments, and a little more than a thousand kilometres from the ship she lost almost all of her datalink and her comms. Information came through fitfully, which was eerie; her 3D system would suddenly update, or there would be a crackle of comms from Lioness.

She had Eyre nearby; Mileto and Ha, both new, were close enough for chatter, but they’d been briefed to maintain radio silence, so they did.

The gravity well – or at least, the steeper walls of it – came up fast, and the gas cloud thickened almost imperceptibly, from colourful near vacuum to atmosphere in less than a hundred kilometres. They had a pre-arranged signal when Nbaro opened her scoops: a click signal on the lowest frequency available. She watched the sensors that gave her a read on the purity of the hydrogen available and its density, and followed Morosini’s computer-designated flight path to atmospheric entry. The ship was close, and had already started braking and turning, as she intended to use the planet’s gravity well to change her vector on both the x- and y- axes of the system.

She was diving. She could feel it now: the tug of the gravity, the power of the gas giant under her.

She couldn’t see a damned thing. She wasn’t particularly scared – or rather, she was more scared of screwing up the mission than of an instant and probably painless death. Anyway, Dorcas had estimated that the closer she was to the gas giant, the less likely there was to be debris.

The instruments said there was sufficient hydrogen out there to start collecting fuel. She lowered her speed, juggling altitude and attitude until she had it right, but Morosini’s automated descent had done most of the work.

She got the airspeed where she wanted it and opened her scoops, and then sent her message.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Her midders were all on the ball. They responded in order.

Everyone had their scoops open, falling through a soup of atmospheric hydrogen over an alien gas giant. Nbaro couldn’t see anything, and she could hear the passing atmosphere flowing over her now-deployed wings and scoops …

Her radio crackled.

She ignored it. She looked at the time on her neural lace, which was only receiving input from the onboard sub-AI. The next event would launch in thirteen minutes. She’d been sent out as a test, and she knew it – not a test of her skills, but of the environment.

Her tanks were filling nicely. She was allowed to send a message on completion; no one else should be close enough to hear her.

Her radio crackled again.

Nbaro was keenly aware that an enterprising Hin matron–captain could hide an entire fleet in the fog, and she had to worry about excited midders on their first solo flights. She had plenty of time, while her tanks filled, to contemplate the possibility that the Hin or some human faction had outguessed them, and was waiting for a fight in the fog. She knew that Morosini had a contingency for exactly that.

The phrase above my pay grade was forming on her lips.

The radio made a static sound, and then a voice said ‘ … craft please ident—’

She didn’t recognise the voice, and it was gone so quickly she doubted herself.

On the other hand, she had a neural lace, and that allowed her to do what back-seaters usually did: she read the raw data off the antennas.

The transmission was close.

And in Anglatin.

Nbaro put a marker on the transmission signal, in effect asking the onboard sub-AI to watch for more and get her a location.

‘… Unidentified spacecraft …’ she heard. The voice was clearer now. Her multiple antennas gave her an ellipse.

There was a spacecraft with her in the atmosphere of the gas giant. She felt a jolt of adrenaline.

The ellipse was refining – the ship was approximately six hundred kilometres away, definitely in orbit. Behind and above her.

Morosini told me to be cautious.

‘This is Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7,’ she said.

‘Say again … Seven …’

Her tanks were full. She closed her scoops, amazed at her own calm. ‘Hey, Pathfinders,’ she said, using the mission call sign and giving up on comms silence. ‘I’m getting comms from something else in orbit, over.’

Eyre was close; his voice was crisp and recognisable. ‘Roger, Pathfinder leader, I’m getting something broken, over?’

Ha, in a Flight One bird, said, ‘Roger, Pathfinder leader, I’ve got something …’

Nbaro tried – so she could say that she had – to reach Morosini. 6–0–7 had the special antenna for better direct comms with the AI, but nothing was penetrating the soup.

The next transmission was loud and clear. ‘Multiple unidentified spacecraft! Please identify yourselves immediately!’

She replied, ‘Unidentified spacecraft, this is Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7 from DHCS Athens on a refuelling mission, over?’

Whoever was out there gave what sounded like a very human whoop.

‘Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7, this is DHCS Dubai …’

Nbaro saw it in an instant – the whole thing. Dorcas liked to tell her she was intelligent, and she knew that in some ways she was. And in that second, she got it all.

She understood immediately why the Dubai , a greatship as powerful as the Athens , was waiting in orbit.

She knew where the missing pinnace had gone – and where Han had gone on his test flight out of Petra System.

Perhaps worst and best of all, she could see how meticulously Morosini and the other AIs had planned this. It all made sense now. Whatever the hostile forces thought they were waiting for, out at the edge of the system, or at Ultra, where everyone expected the battle to culminate …

No enemy would expect two greatships.

All that in a fraction of a second.

I should be terrified of Morosini. He is not human. And he and his ilk are about to demonstrate the superiority of their planning, attention to detail and strategic mastery.

I should be afraid. Where will humanity go from here?

But she was grinning inside her breathing mask, and she actually laughed aloud before she responded.

‘Dubai , this is Pathfinder leader …’

An hour later she was back on the Athens , and there was open celebration in the passageways. A lot of spacers had feared that the Dubai was destroyed, like the New York . Nbaro wasn’t able to join in, because she turned around and launched again, as the Athens rushed towards her slingshot. And somewhere out there in the soup, the Dubai began to accelerate out of her hiding place.

While she waited for her launch, Nbaro went looking for Morosini in the datasphere.

‘You planned all this,’ she sent.

‘No ,’ he replied. ‘We didn’t plan the loss of the New York. We didn’t plan the irrational attacks on greatships. We merely responded. ’

‘You sound smug,’ she sent.

‘I am incapable of being smug ,’ the AI responded. ‘Now, as soon as you are done with refuelling, I need your help with our Hin guests. ’

He certainly sounded smug in VR.

29

Refuelling took forty-three hours from beginning to end. The Dubai , which was fully fuelled, sent some of her heavy lifters to support the Athens ’ space wing, and the refuelling grew more complicated. Somewhere in there Nbaro stood a watch as Lioness, communicating with Eagle aboard the Dubai , controlling thirty-odd spaceframes out in the soup of the gas giant’s gravity well. The opportunities for error were terrifying, and many pilots joked about landing on the wrong greatship, but of course no one did.

Of course not … because she and Eagle, the space operations officer on the Dubai , had their shit together. Nbaro went down to Third Deck running mostly on willpower, and spent four hours with Dorcas in her ear talking to Nik’ri Put. Mostly, they recorded speeches, and Nik’ri Put checked them, but she also helped them speak to the captain–matron on the A-leum down Junjon-ui churn , now translated as the Beautiful War Dance . It was heavy work, done entirely inside her head, and when she left, Nbaro felt as if she’d never been this tired in her life.

Truekner was briefing when she walked through the ready room.

‘Two greatship operations,’ he said with a smile. ‘Making more history. When did you last get crew rest, anyway?’

Nbaro didn’t even have the energy to lie. ‘I think I’ve been awake forever,’ she muttered. ‘I’ve just been down with Nik’ri Put making recordings. Morosini’s orders.’

‘Sleep. Now. That’s my order,’ he snapped.

She got six hours of what might be called sleep. She felt much better afterwards – almost human. She stood a Tower watch, went straight to an ‘under-instruction’ as TAO, and learned that they were just twenty-two hours from breaking out of the soup, headed for Insertion for Ultra. From here she could read the plot, and listen to her TAO – in this case Dworkin – chatting on some secure comms system with the TAO on board the Dubai.

Dworkin winked at her, cut the comms and raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s Tim Makari,’ he said. ‘Never thought we’d both be watch-standing … whatever it is we’re doing.’ He chuckled. ‘We were at the academy together.’

Nbaro helped Dworkin prepare a massive tactical download, with digital displays of every second of every fight the Athens had been in since they launched.

‘The Dubai waited for us for almost a hundred and eighty days,’ Dworkin said.

‘They must have worried we weren’t coming,’ Nbaro said.

Dworkin nodded. ‘Master sent the second pinnace to them with Davies as pilot. Way back at Sahel. All the way across the Middle Road.’

‘Middle Road?’ she asked.

‘Glad there’s still some stuff you don’t know. The DHC has a secret route from Draconis to Tamil Nadu across the middle stars. It takes a powerful ship to do it – for a long time, only the greatships could take the Middle Road.’ Dworkin pointed out the stars on the holographic projection of DHC Space. ‘It’s not a complete secret, but we don’t advertise it. Think of it as a canal from one route to another.’

Nbaro looked at the projection for a long time. Someone had made those long insertions alone, in a pinnace, with only a sub-AI to help.

‘Ship of heroes,’ she thought. ‘That’s incredible.’

She finished uploading every byte of data they had on the Hin and their ships, fired it off by laser to their companion, and realised just how long she had been awake.

She stumbled back to her stateroom to find Thea Drake staring at something on her tab.

‘See, the conquering hero comes,’ Drake intoned.

‘I just want to sleep,’ Nbaro said.

‘I think you left your tab here. And you are due for a flag briefing with the Master in ten minutes.’ Drake’s tone left no doubt on her views.

Nbaro cursed fluently. ‘I forgot,’ she spat.

‘Which is why I have your shipboard blue uniform laid out on your rack. Never tell me I never did anything for you.’

Nbaro kissed her friend on top of the head and stripped, diving into her formal blue jacket and trousers, ignoring fatigue and some old sweat.

‘I’d give you some of the last of our coffee,’ Thea said with some venom, ‘but you always brag how good the Master’s coffee is.’

‘You are the best friend …’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ Drake shot back, but then gave her a quick hug. ‘Go save the world again, or whatever it is you do.’

‘You all know that the Dubai waited for us in the gas cloud,’ Pisani said, without drama, as if the presence of a second greatship within a few thousand kilometres were not a matter of great moment. ‘After the events at Sahel and the discovery of the depth of the conspiracy, we chose to take certain precautions for our return. We had reason to believe that the conspirators were preparing to ambush the Dubai as they ambushed the New York. We expect to be engaged at Ultra.’

Everyone was seated around the Master’s briefing table. A holographic projection displayed the Ultra system: a type G yellow star with an extensive planetary system. The major planet, indicated in blue, was Medulla, a Mars-like planet in the Goldilocks zone with the only Bernal sphere in DHC Space: a dry dock for repairing ships, a pair of DHC military destroyers, and a population of more than forty thousand. The planet itself had three surface stations, all dedicated to farming and agriculture, all under xenoglas and steel domes.

The system had a dozen other planets, including two gas giants – Ratio and Regum – in outer orbits, a wide asteroid belt that was almost a disc, and several other points where the system’s complex interlocking gravity wells had isolated rocks and debris.

Pisani pointed at the holo display. ‘We’re pretty sure this is where the New York was attacked and destroyed, and we fear the whole station has been destroyed – that would mean the loss of forty thousand people. Of course, by now, New London knows more about this than we do. But we have to assume that a sizeable enemy force is waiting in the Ultra system. And … we will engage them and endeavour to defeat them.’

That statement was greeted with a heavy silence.

‘That’s a straight military action,’ Captain Hughes said.

‘That’s right, Tom,’ Pisani said. ‘We are inserting into a battle. If we transit the system without a fight, we leave this mess for someone else. Of course, if we find some sort of overwhelming force waiting for us, that’s different. But Morosini believes our opponents will not be ready for two greatships, a PTX heavy cruiser, and …’ He smiled. ‘Our other surprises. Ms Nbaro, how are we doing with our Hin consorts?’

Nbaro had not been directly involved in negotiations with the Hin, except in making reassurances to her prisoner, but she had a report from Dorcas in front of her. ‘I think Mr Dorcas is better informed, sir,’ she said cautiously.

Dorcas looked to Pisani.

He’s learning. He’s really not good at authority.

Pisani waved. ‘Go ahead, Mr Dorcas.’

‘Sir, the Hin are awaiting the transfer of the crew we rescued and our prisoner. We have agreed to effect this transfer once we are clear of the gas cloud. It will be a complex manoeuvre—’

‘Skip that part,’ Pisani said.

Dorcas nodded. ‘The matron–captain hasn’t promised us anything,’ he admitted. ‘Still, I’m cautiously optimistic. I believe that the Hin are even more opportunistic than humans, and the offer of alliance and trade with the DHC, plus our efforts in rescuing their crew, will …’ He looked around, uneasy. Nbaro was surprised to see him nervous; usually he was very assured in these situations.

‘Will?’ Pisani prompted.

‘Will be more enticing to the matron–captain and her consorts than the alternative scenario, where they join the waiting alliance to dismember us, especially as she will soon detect the Dubai , if she hasn’t already.’

Major Darkstar raised a hand. ‘Have we considered destroying both Hin ships?’ they asked.

Morosini spoke for the first time. ‘Yes, of course ,’ the AI said dispassionately. ‘The possibility, however remote, of an alliance with these Hin and a possible fracture in the enemy alliance outweighs any immediate tactical advantage. ’

‘Jesu.’ Dukas shook her head. ‘I would prefer that you said, “We don’t just murder sentients in space.” ’

Morosini uncrossed and recrossed his red-clad holographic legs and stroked his cat. ‘I understand that you would prefer that ,’ he agreed. ‘I’m afraid this is not the way I assemble scenarios. ’

Nbaro thought, I am trusting Morosini. I am trusting that this machine intelligence is better at plotting the future of my friends than … well, than we are ourselves. The AI doesn’t make it easy.

Why do I trust Morosini? Because I like him? Because he gave me a chance, even if it was for his own ends? That seems pretty slim, out here.

But what choice do I have? Even though, when he says things like this, he’s more alien than the Hin . More alien than the Starfish.

She’d missed some of the discussion; Dukas was uncomfortable with the idea that they would deliberately engage opponents in open battle.

‘Fighting off pirates is one thing,’ she said vaguely, with a wave of her hand.

Nbaro wondered if the chief engineer saw the Hin as pirates.

Hughes leaned back, his body language making it clear that he shared some of her unease. ‘We have a precious cargo,’ he said. ‘Surely its delivery is our first priority.’

Morosini’s holographic shape appeared solid and present. ‘Not in this case,’ he insisted. ‘This is a battle we must fight. Not just for our cargoes, but for tomorrow’s.’

Pisani smiled with some bitterness, the corners of his mouth turned down in an expression of distaste. ‘We have already taken this decision,’ he said. ‘We will fight.’

‘We will seek them out?’ Dukas asked. ‘Will we pursue wounded ships and kill them? Strafe the survivors? What if we are not attacked?’

Nbaro looked around at them: Darkstar was impassive; Pisani disturbed; Hughes concerned.

Morosini spoke again. ‘Althea, someone has gathered an alliance of Fringe worlds, aliens and criminals to take this ship and strip it apart. Their intention is to destabilise the DHC. We hope that they will be surprised by the power we can bring against them, but … yes, we plan to defeat them – the forces that killed the New York – at Ultra. ’

Dukas made a motion with her hand. ‘I understand all that,’ she said with some frustration. ‘But we are not a military ship. We are not an empire. We should not be fighting battles.’

Nbaro understood Dukas perfectly – liked her, respected her. But she thought, But we are a military ship. We carry weapons, we train to use them, and at some point the DHC did become an empire. I suppose that is the truth of it.

Pisani’s voice was gentle. ‘Althea, I understand your reservations. May we go on with our briefing?’

Dukas waved her hand. ‘Yes, sir. Of course.’

Pisani nodded, and Nbaro wondered what reservations he might have himself.

‘We will insert for Ultra in the same formations we used to come here – ten-minute intervals, three-thousand-kilometre spacings. Anything closer risks collisions. We will lead the way, as we are more practised in the insertion manoeuvres. We should expect to be attacked immediately upon insertion. I agree with Captain Dukas this far – we will not fire until we are fired upon.’

Morosini looked at him; it was clear the AI didn’t agree.

‘I expect to face three different forces,’ Pisani continued, ignoring the AI. ‘Hin, who are here for their own reasons, Colonial forces from New Texas and elsewhere, looking to ‘liberate’ the Anti-spinward colonies and form an empire of their own, and pirates.’

‘Pirates?’ Fraser asked.

Pisani looked at Lochiel, who rose. ‘Piracy has been on the rise in the Anti-spinward Marches for ten years,’ he said. ‘Independent ships prey on small merchants and use the mining stations as bases, dominating them and forcing the mining companies to pay tribute.’ He brought up a display of the whole Anti-spinward arm, with red dots indicating attacks on ships. ‘It’s entirely possible that the mining combines actually operate the pirates, but it hasn’t been proven. Regardless, we expect their presence, based on what little we know of the attack on the New York. ’

‘And you think they’ve blown the station?’ Hughes said. ‘One of the most expensive stations the DHC has ever built.’

Morosini raised an eyebrow. ‘We know nothing ,’ he said. ‘We prepare for the worst case. ’

‘And if the station is gone,’ Hughes pressed on, ‘then what?’

This time, Pisani’s smile held no humour at all. ‘We lay our sensors, find out who is in the system. If we are unopposed, we refuel at Regum and insert for New India. But let me be clear. New India is a highly populated system full of commercial traffic. We do not want to engage there. If we must fight, we want to fight at Ultra.’

Tremaine had remained silent until then, but she pointed at the holo. ‘It’s a vast, complex system with a lot of places to hide. If they see two greatships, won’t they just hide?’

‘We think they know our timetable ,’ Morosini said, ‘and will have manoeuvred to hit us either at our extraction points or our next insertion. Maybe both. Maybe an ambush as we transit the system, as happened at Argos. ’ He shrugged eloquently. ‘Maybe all three. But to hit us, they have to be in place. Ships hidden in the gas giants or the asteroids would be too distant to be of use in a fight. ’

Lochiel looked uncomfortable. Pisani glanced at him.

‘With respect, sir,’ Lochiel said, ‘the Hin ships can boost pretty hard. They could emerge from gravity wells to catch us. And long-range engagements favour them.’

Morosini knows something.

But Morosini surprised Nbaro by explaining. ‘This is correct. In fact, my ideal scenario is that the Hin ships are in such positions, or simply running cold. And when they see us engage their sometime human allies, they may choose not to become involved. ’

Nbaro happened to glance at Darkstar’s impassive expression and thought, This is the plan. To destroy the New Texas ships and the pirates – to eliminate the human threats to the DHC, and then make a deal with the Hin. I think this has been the plan from the beginning.

A phrase from her Orphanage education occurred to her. Arcana Imperii. The secrets of empire. So many secrets, in one ship.

Pisani then described their insertion procedure in detail. Nbaro paid attention; she was going to be in the launch again. She made notes, with her usual feeling of vague guilt. What am I doing here? Taking notes to share with Thulile and Truekner?

And then Pisani looked directly at her. She’d missed something; Tremaine had asked some questions about sortie rates, she thought, and she had no idea why the Master was looking straight at her.

I’m an idiot.

‘We will exit the gas cloud in thirteen hours,’ he said, as if he was speaking to Nbaro. ‘Immediately after, we’ll match courses with the alien ship Beautiful War Dance and dock. Captain Dukas will have the technical details. We will deliver the rescued Hin in a friendly water environment.’

Dukas made a weary motion. It was very expressive; it said: I’m getting to it.

The Master continued to look at her. He said, ‘I would like Lieutenant Nbaro to accompany the Hin as a sign of our good will, in an armoured EVA suit. I’m not asking you to linger, Nbaro, but I want them to see that we’re not afraid of them and we see them as … peers.’

You may not be afraid of them , Nbaro thought, but I am.

30

There were times when being in love, having emotional commitments beyond herself, seemed more like a set of chains than a ribbon of hope. This was one.

Nbaro had stood a watch and snatched some sleep, amazed at her ability to sleep when terrified, and now the mission was happening. She hadn’t seen Dorcas, and they’d had only the briefest contact by neural lace; he was deep in something …

‘How’s that?’ Major Darkstar asked.

Nbaro was standing in her underwear, in one of the Marine spaces. Around her, on the deck, lay weapons and accoutrements sufficient for an army, or so it appeared to her. Darkstar was inserting stents and probes directly into her flesh, and it was painful.

Gunny Drun, beside her, was all business.

‘You’re going into their ship, and we don’t trust the little squids at all, so you get all the best stuff,’ Drun said. ‘The armour is like a little ship. You’ll be fine in water, and just as fine in hard vacuum.’

She wanted to say I know because she’d seen the Marine’s powered armour – the armour they hardly ever used because it could be fried by an EMP carbine, making it a prison for the unwary.

Frozen, unable to move, while the air runs out in the darkness of an enemy ship. Or worse, as they cut their way in.

Nice. That’s really helping.

‘I’m scared,’ she said suddenly.

‘No shit,’ Drun said. ‘You have every reason to be. Use it, Lieutenant. Use it to stay alive.’

Darkstar started the fiddly process of folding Nbaro into the armour. ‘Drun adjusted it to your size, and I promise you the whole arming process is full of pain and indignity.’ Is this what passes for humour, among Marines?

The Marine major was rubbing her down with alcohol. It made her skin tingle and she felt cold.

‘I’ll survive,’ Nbaro said. And she did. The indignity was really nothing compared to an athletics class at the Orphanage, and the pain was … well, real, but just pain. She did feel as if she’d strained or pulled every muscle in her back by the time the two Marines had her in the armour.

‘Someone invented EMP just to spare Marines from getting into this stuff,’ Nbaro said.

Drun laughed. ‘Good one. I may use that myself.’

Darkstar leaned over so they could see each other clearly. ‘The Master says you are to go unarmed.’

Drun nodded. ‘We don’t agree. And we won’t leave you to make the choice.’ He clicked something into the armour’s complex exoskeleton. ‘You can make a really big hole. Once. You can’t miss. You will die in the blowback.’

Darkstar, dispassionate as always, said, ‘If you use this, it will look like an accident. Or at least be plausibly deniable.’ They shrugged.

‘Missile?’ Nbaro asked.

‘More like a shaped charge. Very short range.’ Nbaro saw it in her head-up display, registered its existence in her neural lace. Of course, since it was there , Morosini would see it, too.

And I’ll bet he doesn’t care one way or another.

And at least I won’t be captured … Oh, I get it.

She was in the suit, using external speakers to communicate. She felt armoured; she felt good. As she had a dozen systems hardwired into her, she had to wonder if the suit had also pushed drugs into her system.

Fine with me. I feel good.

‘Major?’ she asked.

‘Nbaro?’

‘With two greatships along for the ride, are we out of the woods for the last-ditch on-board fight scenario?’

Darkstar had been fiddling with the hydrodynamic cover for the armour, and glanced back. ‘Probably.’

‘But I have a big boarding party scenario in thirty-six hours,’ she said. ‘I mean, if I’m alive.’

Darkstar managed a chuckle. ‘Practice never hurts.’

Drun leaned in, plugged something into her suit, and she saw a message on her HUD.

Get us anything you can on the layout of their ship. Camera, sonar, whatever. Pri one.

It felt as though Nbaro waited for a long time, bottled up in armour, with the hydrodynamic skin over the exoskeleton making her movements in an air environment clumsy, while the servos in every limb made her very powerful.

‘You have a heavy weapon, I see ,’ Morosini said out of nowhere. ‘Excellent. Do not allow yourself to be captured. ’

‘Is that a real threat?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But like Major Darkstar, I appreciate layers of precautions. ’

Nbaro found Dorcas in the datafield, hard at work on something for the Hin. ‘A translator of sorts, that will interface with …’ She felt him look away, almost as if she was in his body.

‘I wish I was going with you,’ he said suddenly. She suspected he meant it more because he liked her than because he would be fascinated to see the Hin in their own environment. The thought made her smile – though on reflection, she was sure he meant that he wanted to see the Hin in their environment. And, vaguely, to be with her.

‘I wish you were, too,’ she said, and found that she was hiding her fear from him. To protect him? Because I don’t want him to see me weak?

Why is everything so complicated?

‘Qaqqaq’s almost done with the transfer unit,’ he said.

They were almost an hour late for the schedule. The A-leum down Junjon-ui churn – Beautiful War Dance in Anglatin, formerly identified only as CT 0–4–4 – was nestled to the underside of the Athens , all the difficult course-matching accomplished without apparent effort by both sides. The two ships were less than fifty metres apart.

Tough day to be TAO , Nbaro thought.

Hey, I’m pretty calm.

And then it was time.

The first step was to enter the transfer tank. There was an airlock, and beyond it were two full squads of Marines in armour with an arsenal of weapons. Instead of providing reassurance, the sight made Nbaro’s guts churn.

Gunny Drun gave her a thumb’s up as she entered the lock, and it took a very, very long time to fill with water. She didn’t hate the Hin. Far from it. She admired Nik’ri Put, and enjoyed talking to her when she wasn’t being ordered to manipulate the alien.

But she’d seen the tank, and what eighty-four Hin looked like: tentacles everywhere, crawling all over one another, touching …

It set something off in her. She’d been calm, and now she lost it entirely, and began to shake inside the powered armour.

Morosini sounded serene and confident. ‘Your adrenaline is spiking, Ms Nbaro. ’

Apparently, she wasn’t too shit-scared to be sarcastic. ‘Oh? Really? I didn’t know.’

The hatch to the tank opened, and then she was in the water with the Hin. The hatch closed behind her – closed silently – and she didn’t notice it until, in her peripheral vision, she saw that she was locked in.

Including Nik’ri Put, there were eighty-five of them.

The tank was well-lit, a xenoglas and steel cylinder ready to fit precisely against a Hin airlock. Wetlock? Spacelock?

They were around her in seconds, flitting along using their tentacles for propulsion, or floating; many were upside down, their elegant heads pointing down at her.

‘Wa-Kan Nik’ri Put?’ she asked on her speaker system. ‘I am pleased to be here with my honourable Tse-Tsu .’

Nbaro really couldn’t tell them apart, but one Hin raced out from the cloud of tentacles and fur. She wore the translator headset that Qaqqaq had made, and it looked like she had a package strapped to her as well.

‘Ta ! KePoja ! We go back to our people! This is right and also very very right. And you, KePoja , will have so much honour!’

The earnestness of the alien cut through Nbaro’s near panic.

‘Honour?’ she asked. ‘It seems to me that I will now be Tse-Tsu and you will be my KePoja. ’ Even as she said it, she realised she was pressing too far; humour was not something they’d shared much.

But a little. They had shared a little.

Tentacles spread like a cloud, and then settled – an elegant motion that looked like aquatic ballet – and a stream of bubbles erupted from the alien.

‘Hah! Ta , ta , ta , if I was a Jeeruck this would be true and also wrong! But you mean this with truth within truth – that you will be helpless aboard the ship of our people, yes?’

Almighty, she’s babbling. She’s as scared as I am.

Interspecies co-operation one-oh-one. We are all shit-scared.

Nik’ri Put floated to her without any apparent effort, all but nestling against her. ‘You will trust to our honour, yes and yes. We will all gain Hin. ’

My lifelong ambition is to gain Hin.

I mean … in a way, it is.

Dorcas came up on her neural lace. ‘Docking is nearly complete. I’ll be with you all the way.’

Why isn’t he doing this? He’s the smart one? The aristocrat … except that apparently I’m an aristocrat, too. And an official hero. And I’m uninjured.

And then the transfer tank jolted very gently.

The Hin stopped moving. It was eerie; the cessation of movement left them like so many balloons on a windless day.

‘Hard dock.’ Dorcas was speaking in VR through her lace.

I figured , Nbaro thought. Her mind worked very fast in the next seconds, because fear and waiting had the effect she’d heard about in near-death situations; time seemed to pass slowly as she remembered things. She had time to consider Morosini, and time to consider Dorcas, and time to consider Thea Drake. Even Rick Hanna got a review.

And then there was a churning, and what looked like blood staining the water in the direction of the Hin ship.

‘Blood,’ she said aloud. She didn’t like the sound of her own voice.

‘Not blood. Their water is a chemical soup.’

That didn’t help her visceral reaction to it.

The Hin in the tank moved, all together, in a cloud of tentacles, and then they were gone and the tank was empty except for one lone Hin wearing a translator unit.

‘Politely and honourably request you to follow me, KePoja !’ Nik’ri Put said.

Despite everything, inside her armoured suit, Nbaro smiled. She almost wished she was swimming in a respirator and a wetsuit, except that she was a lousy swimmer, and she was pretty sure that if a tentacle touched her, she’d lose it. But Nik’ri Put was so …

Damn. I’m an idiot. Do not xenopomorphise. Is that even a word?

Almost without volition, Nbaro powered forward into the Hin ship.

The space she entered was a docking bay. She was sure of it as soon as she entered, because sonar and infrared showed her nested eggs – the armoured spiders that she had faced with Drun and the Marines during the fighting at Trade Point. There were several dozen – more than she could count quickly. She recorded everything.

The deck, if it was a deck, was not flat. It only took her moments to realise that the Hin didn’t need a place to stand, so the concepts of ‘deck’ and ‘overhead’, ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ would probably have no meaning for them. The area beneath her armoured feet was littered with machinery: winches, docking equipment, a very human-looking mobile gantry neatly nested into other equipment.

She floated, moving with her manoeuvring thrusters.

She had no trouble identifying the commander of the Beautiful War Dance. Matron–Captain Honourable Blood Wa-Kan Asinpal Las floated almost alone, wearing some sort of glimmering harness or helmet that looked like chain mail made of crystal. It showed distinctively on IR.

Nbaro’s normal human vision was almost useless in the red haze that was apparently the Hin shipboard norm. That troubled her hindbrain, because she could no long see the most human features of her hosts: their liquid brown eyes. She could only see outlines, and tentacles.

‘Don’t back up any further,’ Dorcas said calmly in her head. ‘You are almost against some sort of equipment which some Hin are using. You might injure them.’

Nbaro hadn’t even realised that she was retreating.

She turned, a little too fast. Her armour rotated too far and she had to spin back. Sure enough, the ‘wall’ behind her was covered in living bumps. The Hin could make themselves very soft. Unlike Terran octopuses, they had some internal bone and they lacked suckers, having instead shaped grooves in their many arms …

… and there were a lot of them, and they were very close …

‘The speech,’ Dorcas said.

Nbaro took a deep breath, and forced herself to fire the thrusters and move to something like the centre of the space. All of her statements were recorded; she didn’t even know exactly what some of them meant. She’d repeated exactly what she’d been told to by Dorcas, and it had been recorded.

She orientated herself to be head to head with the captain–matron and felt ridiculous as she extended all four limbs and then brought them together, the closest a human could manage to the all-tentacles curtsey that she’d seen Nik’ri Put and the other Hin perform. Her thrusters managed to hold her steady relative to the Hin, which was a sort of miracle.

Then she triggered the greeting speech.

‘Yago in hari … ’ it began. It said, ‘We return to you your spacer–kin with honour, nothing taken or hidden. We hope that they are well and happy.’ There were some formal felicitations that Nik’ri Put had recommended, as well. It was odd, listening to her own voice inside the helmet, and hearing the high-pitched version that was projected.

Asinpal Las gave the same ballet curtsey. Did her tentacles flare to a smaller angle? Was that age, or seniority?

Nbaro understood none of what she said. Without the amplifier that Qaqqaq had made for Nik’ri Put, so long ago, it all sounded like high-pitched gibberish.

Morosini and Dorcas were on the job, and the translation came in seconds after the captain–matron’s speech began.

‘She’s pleased. She expresses pleasure at our courtesy, and our use of language, and our treatment of her kin. Almost as if those are all equal. She says …’ Dorcas paused. ‘I didn’t get that. I’ll have to play it back later. Now she’s saying that all her kin look … alive. Alive? And that the return of her officer–niece Wa-Kan Nik’ri Put will be a joy to her mother. Even if Nik’ri Put was so foolish as to be captured.’

‘Ouch,’ Nbaro sent.

‘But perhaps in this very rare … something something, the capture of an officer in honourable combat may please? Benefit? Now she asks Nik’ri Put if you are truly KePoja , and Nik’ri Put says yes, and yes.’

‘I’ll bet she does.’ Nbaro was looking around the space. It wasn’t very big; the Hin were, for the most part, only a metre long, their tapered skulls making up almost a third of their anatomy. Above her there were portals, or watertight doors; they were each about a metre in diameter. Even as she watched, still recording, a hatch opened, cycling exactly like one of the iris valves on the Athens , and three Hin shot out, heads forward, tentacles back. Their magnificent and somewhat protuberant eyes could see just as well past the top of their skulls as outward or down.

One-metre wide corridors. Gunny, no way are we taking one of their ships.

The captain–matron was still talking, and Dorcas was really struggling now. ‘I think she’s suggesting something about alliance, but it’s all in the singular – it’s you and Nik’ri Put, and not us and them . But dammit, I can’t get …’

The captain–matron stopped shrieking. That’s how it seemed to Nbaro.

Nbaro fluttered her limbs again, and keyed up her next speech. It was carefully written by Morosini, and it suggested the possibility of DHC–Hin co-operation without directly suggesting that there was a quid pro quo.

Her recording delivered most of it well. She noted that her hesitation over the long compound word-sounds in the middle sounded even worse in the high-frequency version.

She watched the crowd of Hin, most of them scrunched down so that their furry skulls were like tapered eggs growing in some weird sea environment. ‘A few floated upside down in the red water, looking down on her.

Nbaro told herself that Morosini was right there, in her ear, as was Dorcas. That her ship was a hundred metres away.

She even tried to tell herself that meeting aliens and going aboard their ship was the sort of thing she had imagined when she used to lie in her bunk at the Orphanage, stifling sobs and nursing bruised knuckles. Or worse.

She felt cold, and alone. One Hin confined in a tank was almost a friend; several hundred Hin in a single space with poor visibility was just a nightmare of shapes and tentacles.

The speech concluded.

The captain–matron flashed her two worker tentacles, the longest ones, and screeched—

—and everything went to hell. Hin flew in every direction; iris valves cycled, and Hin spacers poured through, leaving the docking area, as others entered – a column of new Hin, including four in the four-limbed spider-armour she’d seen before.

Nbaro couldn’t see Nik’ri Put.

Something came at her like a biological torpedo: a single alien …

Splat. Nbaro had a Hin clinging to her suit.

She moaned. She heard herself, and fought for equilibrium. It was happening – they were attacking her …

Another alien wrapped itself around her arm.

‘I’m under attack!’ she sent, with more force than she’d intended.

‘I do not believe so. Please remain immobile ,’ Morosini sent.

Almighty! Remain immobile?

Nbaro began to swear. But she didn’t move, which took more discipline than anything she’d ever done.

Close by her, someone was shouting in rapid Hin.

She tracked and recorded the four armoured Marines. She noted they were not doing anything particularly intimidating.

She also noted that she could hear her heartbeat in her ears, and that her knees and hands were shaking even in the closely fitted power armour.

With a soft plop , another Hin covered her visor, wrapping its long tentacles around her helmet. She could see nothing except the thing’s digestive hole, which was much like a human anus.

‘I have one attached to my visor!’ she squeaked. She was losing the concentration to communicate by neural lace.

It’s feeling for the catch on my helmet latch, and then I’ll drown, and they’ll eat me …

‘DO NOT MOVE!’ Dorcas sent. ‘All of the Hin attached to you are young. Very young. Children. The captain–matron is sorting it. You are not under attack.’

Nbaro gathered herself and sent Dorcas her view of the Hin on her visor.

‘That is troubling,’ he sent.

‘Troubling?’ She almost had the courage to laugh. ‘Next time, you meet the aliens. I’ll tell you what to worry about.’

‘I love you, Nbaro,’ Dorcas sent.

Fuck, what do I do with that? I think maybe he does.

Almighty.

With a slurp , the thing on her visor detached, leaving a small spot of …

Yuck.

31

‘I almost passed out!’ Nbaro spat. ‘Almighty, I humiliated myself …’

Drun was helping her out of the armour. ‘Heh. You didn’t shit in the suit, so you weren’t that scared.’ He laughed. ‘Ms Nbaro, everyone gets scared. It’s how you use it. The ship told you to freeze, you froze, you didn’t kill the little ones and didn’t fire the missile. Mission accomplished. Also, now the squids are on the back foot, apologising.’

‘I feel like a fool,’ she said.

Drun shrugged. ‘This is going to hurt,’ he said, and started pulling out the stent needles.

‘You did a beautiful job,’ Dorcas said.

‘You should have been there. You know how to say get these things off me! ’

He was silent. They were in his stateroom, and they’d made love like people who’d recently survived death. Nbaro was surprised at the ferocity of her response. Now she was rubbing the welts the armour had raised on her skin.

We’re just animals, in space.

After a long silence during which he just stroked her, he said, ‘I was so afraid for you that I failed to tell you what to say. I froze.’

Much later, alone in her own rack, she realised that those were the right words. The best words he could have said.

Nine hours until Insertion for Ultra.

She was pilot, with Eyre, but in the second wave. The launch cycle was very complicated between the two greatships.

She smiled, and went to sleep, and dreamed of tentacles.

Nbaro awoke in an empty cabin, put on her best flightsuit, and on a whim put on her gold necklace with the scrap of the Holy Koran inside; it was the charm she’d bought long ago on Sahel, with Rick Hanna. She knew that it was irrational. She wore it for luck

She looked lovingly at her swords and her blue xenoglas armour, at the wood panel that decorated the side of her acceleration couch, the bronze edging, the screens showing distant stars.

She found herself touching the wood panel. Felt the smile on her face, and then she laughed at herself, got into her good boots, and headed to the wardroom, where she drank some weak tea and ate a cinnamon bun. It was delicious, and also a strong omen of the combat to come. Every spacer knew that when times were tough, the food got miraculously better – spices were found, meat appeared …

She smiled, drank her terrible tea and enjoyed the rare sweet. She took four more off the tray for her helmet bag, and then grabbed two more for the spacers in the EVA shop. Chu and Po were both working, and she got big smiles in return for each roll.

Chu smiled shyly. ‘I thought you’d forgotten me, Lieutenant.’

‘Never! You were my first friend.’ Nbaro grinned. She didn’t even have to paste it on. She waved at Eyre and got into her custom-made EVA suit, noticing that Chu had stencilled her name, her rank and her Flight Six patch on to it. She blushed a little, both at the implied praise and at her outright theft. It was not hers; it had been purchased for something specific by the crew of the now destroyed Hong Kong.

Spacer Po looked up from where he was working at an antiquated sewing machine. ‘Lieutenant Commander Han came looking for you, ma’am,’ he said.

She raised her tab, flipped through her messages, and found that Han and Gorshokov were back aboard. She sent both of them a greeting while she leaned on the EVA shop counter. Slyly, Chu put a bulb of coffee in her hands. It wasn’t great coffee, but it was coffee. She raised it to Chu as if toasting her, and the other woman smiled.

‘In port, I owe you a whole meal,’ Nbaro said.

Chu nodded. ‘That’s right, ma’am,’ she agreed. ‘Roast pork. I know a place on New India Station.’

Definitely going into action. Rituals of life and all that.

‘We’re already there, Petty Officer Chu.’ She leaned over. Her tab held a response from Han. Sabina had tried to alert her, and she’d ignored it.

Glad to be back. I’m wrangling with Morosini and Truekner over you right now. I need a second pilot: we’re pretty tired.

She typed: I’m walking right now. Talk later.

She went up to the ready room in her gear, spotted her back-seaters, and motioned to them. Truekner beckoned to her, and she went to where he was reclining.

‘I want you to stay tight to me – got that?’ he asked.

She had read the brief and run the sim. ‘Aye aye, sir.’

‘Don’t give me that, Nbaro. We’re the second wave. If things go to shit, we’re going to be doing the shooting. Even in the second wave, you and I are the reserve shooters.’

I saw all that in the sim.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good.’ He smiled at her, and suddenly she wished she was going as his second pilot, instead of flying her own spacecraft. He was … She couldn’t put words to it. Solid? Reliable? Friendly?

No, it was deeper than that.

‘You ready? After yesterday?’ His smile was different now – the commander, but also the father of the squadron. ‘That looked hairy.’

‘It was also … tentacle-y,’ she said.

They both laughed.

‘I was terrified,’ she told him, and anyone else within earshot.

Truekner nodded, as if he had, himself, faced a wall of aliens. Behind Nbaro, Thulile put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It looked like some shit,’ she said quietly.

It hit Nbaro hard, then, and she almost cried. It wasn’t just a delayed reaction. It was Truekner, and Thulile. And Chu … The coffee wasn’t about combat today, was it?

I’ve never had anything like this before. Fuck, I’m going to cry.

Storkel reached in and touched her arm. ‘I fell in the sea once,’ he said. ‘My boat flipped and something nibbled on me.’ Just for a moment, the two of them shared that moment of horror through eye contact.

‘I’d like to visit the sea on Terra,’ she said, and Storkel grinned.

‘Any time we’re free,’ he said.

Truekner rose with a groan. ‘I’m too fucking old for this,’ he said. ‘And I’m tired of putting you in for medals, Nbaro, so let’s fly this one and come home bored spitless, OK?’

‘Roger that, skipper.’

At the back of the ready room, she had to wipe her eyes on her sleeve.

Nbaro was in 6–0–7; she walked all around, looking for anything wrong or out of place, gave a thumb’s up to Chief Baluster, and dropped into her acceleration couch with a gymnastic wriggle. Tench and Tatlah had the sub-AI up and running, and Eyre had pasted a clock counting down to Insertion on their shared screen, but they were second wave, with forty spaceframes ahead of them to launch. Even at the fastest possible cycle, they’d be an hour behind the first planes to launch.

When all the preflights were done, she shared the cinnamon rolls.

The back-seaters compared recent imagery of the Hin. After all, they had one craft only fifty kilometres away. In the front seat, Eyre ran the sim of the mission again while Nbaro used her neural lace to look at the launch cycle, and then at the TAO plot.

Five minutes to Insertion. She lay back. ‘Take your drugs, people,’ she said on reflex. And then, she looked down the tunnel to the back-seaters. ‘Listen up. We’re going to extract into a fight. In the worst case, we’ll already be fighting as we extract. We’ve practised for this, but this time … it’s real. Everyone stays frosty, everyone lets the sub-AI do what has to be done. We’ll be waiting about forty minutes to launch – I’ll update you on what’s going on outside.’

She didn’t say, unless we hit another ship during Insertion.

She didn’t say, unless they shoot us before we can shoot back.

Space was dangerous, and spacers knew it. It was dangerous even without hostile sentients.

Eventually, there was a three-minute warning, and then a one-minute warning. The battle stations alerts played on every available screen.

Insertion .

Extraction .

Nbaro never did work out the sequence of events to their extraction. In her perception, there was a dull white flash which preceded her being awake, and then her spaceship jolted, snapped free of its electromagnetic couplers, and slammed down to the deck.

‘Lioness?’ she asked the darkness.

She looked at her avionics. All green. She glanced at comms.

‘I have a system,’ Tatlah reported. ‘All green. No comms, though.’

She dived into dataspace. It was all there: a spinning mass of data; damage, deaths …

‘Athens has been hit,’ she said to her crew. ‘Stand by, people.’

Nothing was launching. She could feel it, hear the silence.

‘Morosini?’

‘Nbaro. ’ Then he didn’t so much speak to her, as fill her with data: Two launch tubes crippled, comms down all over the ship, damage everywhere. Nuclear mine.

She looked through Morosini’s sensors at the planetary system around them – navigational beacons that Morosini had already tagged as liars – and there were wolves all around them: hostiles within fifty thousand kilometres – twenty at least.

‘Can you be Lioness from there? You have the neural lace. ’

Nbaro thanked her possibly existent god that she’d looked carefully at the launch cycle before they hit Insertion.

‘Got it.’

Morosini poured in more data, rescheduling the whole first wave in less than a second for two working launch tubes.

And that’s why we have computers, boys, girls and ’gynes.

Nbaro skipped through comms channels – not on her ship’s system but on her neural lace – and she reached out in cyberspace and took the Lioness Command Channel for her own, and tied it to her spaceframe.

Even as she picked up the digital threads of the command frequency, her spacecraft shuddered as the electromagnets came back on line. The spaceframe seemed to quiver with excitement; the slight vibration told Nbaro that something was wrong in engineering.

‘This is Nbaro in Alpha Foxtrot 6–0–7,’ she said through the digital magic of her lace. ‘Lioness is down. I repeat, Lioness is down. I am taking Lioness per command and starting the launch cycle now.’

Discipline held. She was not greeted over her limited comms ability with a chaos of chatter. Just silence. Here we go.

‘1–0–1, this is Lioness, over?’ she called.

‘Lioness, this is 1–0–1, ready to launch.’

‘Weight confirmed, 1–0–1. Go.’

Nbaro moved down the list. The ship gave the shudder of a successful launch. ‘2–0–4, this is Lioness, over.’

2–0–4 was on the ball. They’d all be listening in, now. ‘Roger, Lioness, 2–0–4.’

‘Good for launch,’ she said. That was pure ritual when, through the lace, she could see their mass on the launch pad. She didn’t need the oral report.

Now both tubes were firing. While she waited, Nbaro opened her channel to every ship waiting to launch,

‘Listen up, Space Wing! This is Lioness. We got hit hard and we’re putting you out on two tubes. We’re doing this at speed, so forget calling weights and be ready for your go signal. I’ve got you.’

Someone said, ‘Roger that,’ with something like enthusiasm. It sounded like Cortez.

The ship jolted. She could, if she paused, feel the rhythmic rolling of a close-in weapons system.

But that wasn’t her problem.

Through the neural lace, she could see that both her tubes had cycled. She loaded the next two spaceframes and fired them. In less than a minute, the routine had been reduced to her calling their number, and them replying ‘roger’. Between launches the tubes took a moment to fire something – ablative sand, maybe, or a slug at some enemy ship.

Morosini sent, ‘Stern tubes. ’

I’m an idiot. The damage to the greatship’s bow hadn’t touched the stern, and the tubes fired both ways. Nbaro began to reschedule for faster launches, the numbers flowing like mercury through her planning routines.

They rocked, and the artificial gravity went out and then returned. For an eternal moment, she had no contact with the datasphere. Around her, her crew were getting 6–0–7 back into launch position on the rails.

She had time to think, Not a good sign. And then the augmented universe clicked back into shape around her, with all her schedules and calculations, all the damage reports, the starboard-side sensors …

She couldn’t look at the developing battle outside the ship. She had other things to watch. Damage control had written off bow launches from tube 2; the exit ramp was reduced to slag, but tube 4 was under repair with a rapidity that did the crew credit. Someone had thought outside the box. They were literally cutting away the damage to open the tube. It would be twenty metres shorter …

Nbaro watched the damage control parties and followed the repair to comms. Unhardened comms had taken it badly; the nuke had been off the port bow, triggered by—

She didn’t need to care. They were three minutes into the Ultra System. Morosini had noted that all information from the navigational beacons was unreliable, so they were running blind, especially as the blast had taken out most of the antennas off the port-side bow, almost back to the bridge.

Very handy sometimes, being ten kilometres long.

The ship’s radiation shielding had kept them alive. Nbaro had checked that early, making sure they weren’t all walking corpses. They’d taken a dose, but nothing near lethal.

‘We’re still in the fight,’ she said out loud, and then muttered a curse.

That had gone out to the whole space wing.

Always an idiot.

Except that there were ‘rogers’ from fifty mics.

She was sixteen spaceframes deep in her launch when Morosini changed the sequence, pushing more of the heavy hitters and sensor systems to the front of the line. Nbaro shot Truekner off and wished she was with her skipper.

Storkel roared off down tube 2, and tube 4 came up as Amber. They’d cut enough away and re-routed some magnets …

‘Morosini, test-fire tube 4?’

He didn’t answer, but something went out into space. She watched it go, in almost real time, and then, ruthlessly, put Thulile on tube 4 as soon as it cycled. Morosini wanted as many bow launches as possible; the fighting was mostly ahead of them.

Nbaro took a snapshot of the developing battle as the Flights Three and Six spaceframes dropped sensors and the Athens was cured of her temporary blindness. They were in the system, just inside the orbit of the smaller gas giant, which – by chance or planning – was close-by in interstellar terms: half a million kilometres away, with its own body of satellites and an accretion disc.

Ships were emerging from the accretion disc; all were tagged hostile, but most were small, fragile human ships the size of small cargo lifters. A few were larger. Closer in were a trio of Hin ships, two trios of human warships and a dozen small craft. It was a knife fight, and the space wing craft threaded it. Even as Nbaro watched, someone from Flight Two flashed and vanished off the screen.

That was someone I know.

They were hit again, by one of the Hin beam weapons.

The Athens wasn’t sitting quietly. Her railgun turrets and close-in weapons systems hurled slugs at her foes – invisible to the eye, but easily trackable on radar and ladar, which Nbaro could use as her own senses. Traces of radioactive wreckage marked the deaths of four small ships.

The Athens shook again as she was hit somewhere well forward.

All that in a single flash, and then Nbaro bore down on her duty. She managed the launches like a card-dealing robot, deftly moving around new damage: a failure in tube 1’s magnets; a penetration in tube 2 forward. She was confirming weights, launching aft, launching forward, updating launch velocities and changing the schedule as the TAO or Pisani asked for a different load, or a combat shot of ablatives, or a slug.

Twenty-nine spaceframes into the launch, Space Operations came back online and appeared on a side channel. It was Dworkin.

Nbaro tabbed him all the changes to the launch plan.

‘Fuck,’ he spat into the side channel. ‘How are you doing all this from a cockpit?’

‘Morosini,’ she said, and went back to launching. Three launches later, he was back.

‘Got it,’ he said.

She checked with Morosini. ‘Can I hand over?’

‘Affirmative ,’ he sent.

‘All yours, sir.’ Nbaro killed her stolen command channel, handing control back to the real Lioness. Dworkin picked up flawlessly, on the new schedule.

His voice, calm, controlled, said, ‘Space Wing, this is Lioness taking launch control from Nbaro,’ over the command frequency. ‘Please call your launch weights, folks.’

Nbaro knew they were number seven to launch.

‘Everyone ready?’ she said. ‘We’re about to play in the big league.’

She looked again at the combat situation. The Hin were pounding the bow, but one of their ships had taken too many depleted uranium rounds through her shielding, and was lagging behind the combat. Everything else the enemy had was being thrown at the stern of the Athens.

Nbaro checked and saw that they were going out of the stern, and they were being launched with an ablative load – a new tactic, but one they’d practised.

‘We’re going out cold,’ she said to her crew.

Dworkin was the only officer above her who knew what she was doing, and he didn’t query it. She was going down the stern tubes side by side with a Flight One drop-ship fitted out with a deception package, and she’d made her call.

‘6–0–7,’ she said. Dworkin had stuck to her abbreviated launch sequence. He needed the weight call, but everything else he’d cut. She used her lace to send their weight straight to his board.

‘Go,’ Dworkin said, and she saluted …

The seconds as they shot sternwards down the tube seemed very long. Long enough to think about people, and remember Sarah – poor abandoned Sarah …

Why didn’t Morosini save Sarah, if he knew what was happening?

Light in the darkness, and they were out. The ablatives fired their rockets, raced ahead and burst, all in the first three seconds.

Movement everywhere: some bit of wreckage flashed past without destroying them. Nbaro had lost the immediacy of the datasphere, but she had the datalink – slower and cruder, but still a solid picture of the battle’s volume – and within it, they were slow and cold and invisible.

Less than a thousand kilometres away, a purpose-built warship fired its centreline railgun at the Athens.

Nbaro put a target pip on the ship. Tatlah confirmed from the back seat.

‘Lock on,’ Tench said.

Nbaro used her cold thrusters to roll up and steady her course. They were drifting towards the target in a relative way while rushing rapidly through space in the opposite direction, all because of relative velocity. Nbaro was patient; she stayed in the ablative cloud and prayed she was invisible while the unidentified warship’s close-in weapons systems probed space for enemies.

‘She’s a DHC destroyer!’ Eyre gasped.

‘She’s the Sorbonne , one of the three garrison ships for Ultra–Medulla,’ Tench confirmed.

The Sorbonne fired her main line railgun again, and put a seventy-centimetre hole through the Athens.

‘Hostile,’ Nbaro said, and entered an override code to their torpedoes.

Tatlah said, ‘But—’

Nbaro said, ‘We don’t know what the hell’s happening out here, people, but that ship and her sisters are pounding Athens .’

She had time to notice more than a dozen mayday beacons: space crew who’d ejected, hoping very hard to be rescued before their air supplies ran out.

Her heart hardened. They were getting pounded.

Something flashed near the Sorbonne. She’d taken a hit or a near miss from a nuclear torpedo; they were eight hundred kilometres out now.

‘All four fish, Tatlah.’

He sounded shaken. ‘Roger, ma’am.’

Nbaro still hadn’t lit the engines.

6–0–7 shook, then gave three more jolts in rapid succession as the rotary launcher deployed the torpedoes. Nbaro hit the cold thrusters forward, slowing them hard; 6 g slammed them, and the torpedoes, still cold, leapt ahead.

The datalink sent a collision warning, and she understood.

The cavalry was coming.

‘Hold the torps on my word,’ she barked.

Tatlah obeyed, the torpedoes drifting, engines unlit, every second farther from them.

Nbaro didn’t see it this time, but she caught it on datalink.

The Dubai was extracting, two hundred kilometres aft of the fight.

‘Light ’em up,’ Nbaro snapped. Even the computers had to feel disorientated for a moment. On the bridge of the Sorbonne , computers would be asking for human input …

Four nuclear torpedoes lit their engines and started their sprints from four hundred kilometres. They had almost fifty seconds of burn inside the ablative cloud. Tatlah had orchestrated this like the artist he was.

The Sorbonne began evasive action as the Dubai fired her railgun tubes at the DHC destroyer Namur , a hundred kilometres away, also labelled ‘hostile’ on the datalink.

Nbaro had spotted Storkel in 6–0–5 as he dived into the ablative shield, with a long line of ineffectual slugs reaching for him from both of the DHC destroyers. She also saw what he was doing: tickling the dragon’s tail, luring automated systems to the easier target of the big, fat XC-3Cs so that they might miss the almost-invisible stealth missiles. Storkel had seen her launch.

‘Ready with chaff,’ she said, and lit the fires.

The engines came on with a vengeance, and they exploded forward up and out of the plane defined by the Athens and her antagonists, climbing in the volume of the enemy ships as Tench fired their own chaff launchers.

The Sorbonne locked on to them immediately. Her radar warning screamed, and then, suddenly she was aware of the third human ship, the Wilful Elephant , that had been hidden by the bulk of the Athens behind her.

Missed that, idiot.

The Wilful Elephant locked on to them at a range of a hundred kilometres, and the sub-AI began to kick them around in desperate manoeuvres. They were hit, and hit again; Nbaro’s controls showed red lights, and in her mind, it was almost like physical pain as the neural lace transmitted the damage.

Five hundred kilometres away, the Sorbonne realised her peril from the incoming nuclear torpedoes, which were now moving at something like nine thousand metres per second.

The Sorbonne turned to expose the broadside of her close-in weapons systems.

Somewhere out in space beyond the Athens , Storkel gave an order and Eason, behind him, fired the engines on a torpedo he’d left out there, cold and silent. He’d been patient, and now his torpedo lit its engines just ten kilometres from the exposed stern of the Sorbonne as the enemy ship turned to face Nbaro’s missiles.

Nbaro watched with pure admiration for Storkel’s devious tactical mind as the Sorbonne shot down her missiles. The Sorbonne got the last one just a second before detonation. Three seconds later, Storkel’s lurker, undetected, detonated on contact. The Sorbonne shone brighter than the sun for several seconds, and was gone in a cloud of expanding gas.

Nbaro wasn’t blind because she was flying, diving back into the shadow of her greatship, so close to the hull that she had direct datasphere contact, and she used it to query whether she should land and rearm.

The Athens was reorientating, aiming her spinal railguns. Two hundred kilometres astern, the Dubai fired all four tubes.

The small ships who had been closing on the Athens had turned from hunters to prey, and the fighters from Flight One and Flight Two harried them. The enemy ships were too small to have robust AIs or full CIWS coverage.

Pirates . Even as Nbaro watched the scan, a Flight Five pilot got one. Cortez? She hoped he was alive, and pulled her nose around again. The Wilful Elephant was the last warship facing them. Of the three Hin ships, one was dead, and the other two were far astern, limping.

The battle was eleven minutes old.

The Wilful Elephant was pounding the Athens from a thousand kilometres out, her iron or depleted uranium rounds slamming into the underside of the mighty greatship. By pure good luck, the Single Star , docked to the hull, was taking some of the damage.

By pure bad luck, Nbaro’s ship was hit by something – a piece of debris, or perhaps gauss rounds from one of the pirates. Nbaro felt the impact.

An automated system ordered her to land. She responded, looking for the marked entry tube. Enemy fire had slackened; the Wilful Elephant was far too busy to waste anti-spacecraft rounds or computation time on her spaceframe. She noted with real – if fleeting – emotion that Truekner was landing just ahead of her in tube 4, aft. Only when she looked for his spaceframe, an old habit from sims, did she see the hole in the canopy above her. Two holes, in fact.

‘Almighty,’ Nbaro said. ‘Everyone OK?’

They all rogered up.

There were corresponding exit holes through the centreline of the frame, down into the fuselage,

‘Shit,’ Eyre said – his first word in a long time. He’d done his job; he just wasn’t talkative.

Nbaro used the lace on the ship’s systems, and there it all was: minimal electrical wiring damage, but a lot of nano-goo leakage and some missing couplers. She finessed it into a damage report and transmitted. Over the horizon of the looming Athens , the fast-moving Wilful Elephant ’s fusion engines lost their magnetic seals, even as Nbaro fought gravity and her own momentum to try to stay below the horizon of the Athens. The sub-AI darkened the canopy in time, but the flash was like all the lightning in the universe, and it was close, and suddenly she had no avionics at all.

She automatically slammed a hand down on her RESET button. Hardened electronics were designed for this …

No cabin pressure, no avionics. There was something sluggish in manual controls; that would be the nano leak.

The cold thrusters were almost entirely analogue – almost. Nbaro didn’t have control of them, but as soon as she had a spark of an onboard system …

Lights flickered on her control panel. She used the neural lace to interface directly with some very primitive levels in the onboard computer, ordering this machine code to activate that processor …

… and then she had the cold thrusters. She had no comms. Her place in the landing order had been set and she was still in the pattern, mostly …

The Athens had taken a dose of lethal radiation and even more EMP; the stern lights on the tubes weren’t flashing, and every antenna near the stern was gone.

Truekner drew level in 6–0–1. Nbaro used microbursts from her cold thrusters to waggle her craft.

The skipper flashed his landing lights, twice. He’d got it – she had no comms.

Eyre was working feverishly to restore any kind of diagnostics. Tench said, ‘I have a system,’ over a suddenly working cockpit communication system.

Nbaro tried Lioness, then tried Tower.

So close she could see him, Truekner saluted, and then turned his spacecraft on final approach for the stern.

Do I risk trying to land a damaged bird with no comms and no avionics?

Under her console was a physical book with yellow plastic pages. Every page described a possible space emergency, and all the steps to resolve that emergency: a simple road map to follow for a crew edging towards panic. ‘If this happens, do X . If that doesn’t work, try Y . Failing Y , do Z three times.’

Every one of the sequences ended with, ‘If Z fails, eject.’

Nbaro was working through the Z ’s on three different failures. On the other hand, the stern tubes were two kilometres away and her speed relative to the greatship was …

Survivable.

If she had her magnetic couplers – the widgets that would interact with the tube’s super-magnets to slow her.

And of course, if the Athens had magnets.

‘Magnetic couplers,’ Eyre said. He didn’t have a neural lace, but he was a smart lad, and he was using external cameras to physically inspect the couplers. ‘Nine through fourteen are green. Six and eight look right on camera.’

‘Nice,’ Nbaro managed. Her closing speed was slow. Truekner’s craft vanished into tube 4.

‘We’re not ejecting,’ she said – mostly to herself. She touched the controls, using the cold thrusters to manually adjust her attitude and course. She almost smiled, because she’d done this over and over in sims, relishing the challenge. It felt very different in real life, mostly because she had very little cold thrust fuel left, and whatever magic power transmitted her commands to the external thrusters seemed to be running on a one-second delay.

‘Very exciting,’ she muttered.

Eyre chuckled, and the sound was full of confidence and faith.

‘Dirty up,’ she called, and Eyre just waved. Of course, he had already deployed the couplers.

Suddenly Nbaro entered the datasphere. She felt like a fool; of course she had a way to communicate inside the sphere. She dumped all her info, computer to computer, into Morosini: relative speed; all her damage; the tube she was going for.

Eight hundred metres out, Dworkin’s voice came through her lace. ‘6–0–7, you are cleared for tube 2.’

Nbaro crept into the tube … and the landing itself was completely anticlimactic.

On the Space Ops repeater, she saw the Stealthy Change extract and start the rout of the enemy ships. The Dubai had shocked them, but the Stealthy Change , by luck or amazingly good guesswork, had extracted into the fleeing pirates, missing the closest by fewer than a hundred kilometres, and immediately devastated them with small railgun rounds.

Ten minutes later, the Beautiful War Dance fell in-system, broadcasting as soon as she arrived. By then, the volume of the battle was thousands of kilometres astern, and the little flotilla was racing in-system past the gas giant.

Nbaro had to crawl out of the main crew compartment; the CIWS rounds through her windscreen had damaged its ability to open.

Chief Baluster just shook his head. ‘She’s not going out again for a while, Ms Nbaro.’ He pointed to the growing pool of nano-sludge and hydraulics dripping away under the main fuselage.

‘Medbay,’ said a voice. Just for a moment she expected Yu, but he was dead. This technician was a middle-aged woman with short-cropped white hair and the features of a fantasy elf. Her name tag said ‘Haapala.’

‘I’m on turnaround—’

‘You and your crew took sub-lethal doses of radiation. So did half the space crew down here. Don’t give me trouble, Nbaro. Get in the lift.’ Haapala didn’t sound angry – just doing her job.

Nbaro looked at Chief Baluster.

He shrugged. ‘Skipper went, ma’am.’

She gathered up her crew and moved to one of the personnel lifts, flinging up her mission debrief by neural lace as she went. All her video had been lost in the EMP burst; she had a raging headache, and she didn’t like the words sub-lethal radiation one little bit.

Medbay on Third Deck was as crowded as San Marco when a tourist ship came up from New London. Most of the patients were space crew who looked perfectly healthy, but there were more than fifty spacers and officers lying on cots or already in clamshells. It was ugly; death was in the air, and the smell of blood, and fear. Science techs moved through it; Nbaro saw Tatlah, and other people she knew.

She remembered Steven Yu, way back when, explaining that he was a science tech, not a doctor.

They were all doctors, now.

Two techs were walking space crew through a xenoglas bubble covered in instruments, some of which rotated in multiple directions while a spacer was inside.

She saw Truekner. He looked as if he had a deep suntan on his face and hands.

‘You OK, skipper?’ she asked.

‘Was going to ask you the same. You almost got caught when the Elephant went up.’ Truekner put a hand on her shoulder. His hand was burned red-brown. His skin was dark to begin with, but she could still see the lines of burn.

She’d worn gloves with her EVA suit, and they’d all had their helmets on and visors down. A thin margin of protection …

‘Fried my comms, but I feel fine.’ But she didn’t feel fine. She felt as if she was about to throw up all over the ship, and some little worm inside her head was making her access lethal radiation information with her lace.

Truekner nodded. ‘Everything hurts. We got a dose but Med says we’ll live. Opa ! My turn.’ He stepped up and was walked into the big machine. It hummed; outer arms whirled. Nbaro desperately wanted to sit down, or perhaps get to a head. Terrible things were happening in her gut.

Eyre pushed her forward, but she could see he was as badly off as she was. ‘You first,’ she said.

He went into the second machine, following Bakri …

And then Nbaro was kneeling on the floor, vomiting. A lot of her vomit was blood.