Chapter Eighteen

When Lanoe left the disk he’d gone straight to the cruiser. He’d updated Valk along the way, sent him all the video the Z.XIX had logged, all of its sensor data—everything except audio from his cockpit. He didn’t want the AI hearing what he’d said to Zhang, to his hallucination of Zhang. He didn’t want Valk thinking he was crazy.

When he arrived at the cruiser’s vehicle bay he’d gone straight to the brig. He’d thought he wanted to talk to Rain-on-Stones, get her impressions on what he’d seen in the Blue-Blue-White city. Talk with her about how he was going to win this war.

Maybe something else had drawn him there. Some intuition. No. Lanoe didn’t believe in anything so mystical as intuition. He’d just gotten lucky. He’d arrived just in time to stop his whole plan from going to hell.

“Ehta,” he said, very carefully, “put your gun away.”

The marine didn’t turn around. She didn’t so much as glance over her shoulder. Nor did she lower her weapon.

“You’re going to shoot me, Lanoe? Really? Over this alien piece of—”

“Yes,” Lanoe said.

“She’s no use to you,” Ehta said. “She can’t send us home. Come on, Lanoe! When did you start caring more about aliens than people? You’ve had Ginger stuck down here in your torture chamber this whole time for—for nothing! She’s just a kid, Lanoe. She’s a kid!”

“You’re wrong,” he told Ehta. “I still need Rain-on-Stones. I need her more than ever, and that means I need Ginger to talk to her.”

“She just told me the truth—Rain-on-Stones can’t open a wormhole for us. She can’t send us home!”

“I know.”

Ginger stirred in one corner of the room. Lanoe had only been barely aware that she was there, up until now. He saw her red hair drift around her face, like red clouds circling a pale planet.

“He’s always known,” Ginger said. “Take the shot, Ehta. Take the—ah!”

Ginger’s body convulsed and her eyes rolled up into her head. Rain-on-Stones must have figured out how much danger she was in. Ehta gasped and pushed her way over to the girl, grabbing Ginger up in her big arms. Her pistol was still in her hand but it wasn’t pointing at the chorister anymore.

“Is it true?” Ehta demanded. “You knew? You knew, Lanoe?”

“I did,” Lanoe admitted. “I let everyone believe she could open a way home because they needed to believe that. If they knew the truth—”

“They would have thrown you out an airlock the second we got here,” Ehta shouted. “They would have torn you to pieces!”

“Which is why I need you to keep this to yourself.” Lanoe kicked over to her. Grabbed the pistol out of her hand—she barely fought him—and shoved it in a pocket of his suit.

“You’re kidding me,” Ehta said. “You’re kidding—you bastard. You—”

Lanoe grabbed her by the ring collar and pulled her toward him until their faces were just centimeters apart.

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” he asked.

Ehta couldn’t seem to find a reply to that.

“You’ll keep this secret,” he told her. “That’s an order. Is that enough? Maybe not. Maybe you don’t respect my rank anymore. Maybe you need some more incentive.”

The look on her face might have killed him, in other circumstances. The mixture of betrayal and fear and confusion. Some part of him demanded that he release her, that he not say anything more. It’s Ehta! a voice in his head screamed. Your old squaddie from the 94th! Let her go!

He fought that voice. Pummeled it into submission.

“If you tell anyone about this,” he promised her, “I will blow your brains out.”

He let go of the collar ring. Pushed her away so she collided with the floor and he went gliding backward. Ehta stared at him with panicked eyes. Saliva leaked from one corner of her open mouth.

“And me?” Ginger asked. She was still in the middle of a seizure, her voice shaky but clear. “Will you kill me if I tell anyone?”

“I can’t kill you,” he told the girl. “I need you if I want to talk to Rain-on-Stones. But there are other ways to punish someone. You don’t want to hear details.”

Bullam had moved her yacht close to the open end of the carrier’s flight deck. It meant nestling into a berth right in the most damaged part of the ship, and took some very careful maneuvering. When the duty officer asked her why she wanted to make such a time-consuming move, she’d simply told the man that she wanted to be able to see the stars. The move freed up some room deeper inside the flight deck, including three undamaged berths that could be used for cataphracts, so the request had been granted without further questions.

Perhaps someone suspected she had an ulterior motive in the move, but almost certainly they couldn’t guess why. They couldn’t know that Bullam’s pet neddies, led by Hollander, had rerouted a number of network cables into the berth, allowing Bullam to monitor the carrier’s communications and data flow. Once she was securely redocked, she had access to all of the ship’s sensors—and its most heavily encrypted file structures.

Maggs was deeply impressed. “So what’s first?” he asked, while gently rubbing her shoulders. “A denial of service attack on Valk, just to give him the fits? Or do we dim the lights in Candless’s bunk a little more each night to make her think she’s going blind?”

“I’m not above petty gaslighting if it serves a purpose,” Bullam told him, “but we have a situation here we need to handle.” She was crouched over one of her drones as if she were staring into a crystal ball. Not that far from it, as it were—instead of presenting a traditional holographic display, the drone was feeding her information by shining lasers directly onto her retinas. Information, therefore, that only she could see. It sparkled in her irises, as if tiny blue fires were burning within her eyes. “A lone fighter emerged from the disk a little while ago. It just made rendezvous with the cruiser.”

“Lanoe,” Maggs said. His hands stopped roaming across her neck muscles. Lanoe. Lanoe. It could be no one else. The bastard was alive.

Maggs was not, despite what some people might suspect, a betting man. He understood too much about the laws of probability for that. Yet the odds had suggested that Lanoe was dead. He hadn’t been seen since the disastrous retreat from the disk. He’d flown down into the very teeth of the enemy and with each mounting hour it had seemed more likely that the old fool had taken one too many chances. The law of averages and basic rationality suggested that a man in such a dangerous occupation couldn’t live forever.

Apparently, when it came to Aleister Lanoe, logic and common sense didn’t apply.

If he was back …

Buck up, Maggsy, his father’s voice said inside his head. You’ve still got your reprieve. For now.

Quite. Lanoe had no reason to suspect what Maggs and Bullam had been working at. It would probably take a while for him to come up to speed.

“This … changes a few things,” Maggs suggested. “We were counting on Candless being our biggest stumbling block. Now—”

Bullam nodded. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. But this doesn’t mean we need to make any major changes to our plan. We simply have to accelerate the timetable. You know what you need to do? What you need to say?”

“I have committed every line to memory. The greatest actors of stage and video would shrivel with jealousy could they see the performance I’m about to give.”

“Don’t lay it on too thick,” Bullam said.

He sketched a courtly bow. Not easy in the absence of gravity, but Maggs was nothing if not adaptable. He looked around for his suit and pulled it on with all the grace he could muster. As he headed for the canopy over the yacht’s deck, however, intending to blow her a kiss on his way out, he came up short because he’d heard a noise.

A rather quiet, rather sad little sound, if not entirely a dignified one. A grunt of pain.

He turned about and considered Bullam. She was still bent over her drone, her eyes full of light. Her mouth, perhaps, was a little twisted up. But that could signify concentration as much as it might indicate discomfort. If she looked a little pale, well, the lighting on the yacht’s deck wasn’t of the best.

“Anything the matter?” he inquired, trying to make it sound breezy.

“Fine. Get on with it,” she said.

And so he did. Maggs was a man of action before anything else. She didn’t look up as he left, so if he was frowning—the most subtle and noncommittal of frowns—she couldn’t possibly have seen it.

Lanoe kicked hard at the aft end of the axial corridor and shot through the cruiser’s decks, past the sick bay, the gun decks, the bunks. The place felt empty and haunted, hushed as if everyone were waiting for something to happen. Well, he was back now. Time to give them what they wanted.

He reached out and caught a handhold on the wall, stopping himself just as he reached the wardroom. Valk was at the ship’s controls, lying motionless in his seat with his arms floating in front of him. At least he had his helmet up and looked approximately human.

“Welcome back,” the AI said.

“Thanks,” Lanoe said. “I need an update. Tell me about the dreadnoughts that are looking for us. Are they moving?”

He reached across Valk and tapped at a virtual key. Displays sprang up all around him, showing him telescope views of the surrounding volume of space, tactical assessments, the status of the cruiser’s systems.

“All three dreadnoughts changed course when you left the disk,” Valk said. “They saw your engines burning, definitely. Two of them are headed for the disk, probably investigating where you came from. The third one is headed for us, but it’s still twelve hours out. Then—there’s this.”

One of the displays moved to the front, right where Lanoe was looking. It showed a telescope view of a portion of the disk, an endlessly swirling cauldron of red storm clouds. Scattered across one cloud bank were dozens of dark specks. Before Lanoe could ask, the view magnified, and then magnified again, and again, losing definition each time. The final view was pixilated and hard to read, but Lanoe got the point.

“Are those airfighters?” he asked. They had the same spherical glass hulls as the drone ships they’d fought inside the disk’s atmosphere.

“Same principle, similar design, but look, there’s something missing,” Valk said. “Wings. They don’t have wings.”

“You think those are spacecraft,” Lanoe said cautiously.

“I don’t need to think it. They left the atmosphere shortly after we received this image. They’re headed our way.”

“How many?”

“That’s the closest thing we have to good news. There were hundreds—thousands—of airfighters in their fleet, but it looks like the Blue-Blue-White are only sending forty-five of these things after us. Spacecraft are more expensive to build than aircraft, and maybe they didn’t expect to ever have to fight off an invasion from space—”

Lanoe held up a hand to stop the AI talking. “Interceptors. Probably drones. But interceptors. How soon will they be here?”

“They move a lot faster than the dreadnoughts, but they’re coming from farther away. Twelve hours, give or take a few minutes.”

Lanoe swore under his breath. “They’ll arrive at the same time as the dreadnought. They’re smarter than I thought they were. These,” he said, stabbing one finger through the display, “are reinforcements for the dreadnought. And they make our lives a lot more complicated.” When they were just fighting one big ship, the advantage was on the Navy’s side. The cruiser’s guns had a far longer effective range than the dreadnought’s plasma ball cannons. But if the Blue-Blue-White could field interceptors as well, this wasn’t going to be a showdown. It was going to be a pitched battle.

“We’ll fight them. On their terms, if we have to,” Lanoe said. “There’s no backing down. Tell me about Candless and the others. How’s their morale? You think they’re ready for a battle?”

“They’ve been busy, mostly focused on hiding. I think they’re scared, Lanoe. But if it comes to it, they’ll fight—if only to defend themselves.”

“I guess that’s good enough for now,” Lanoe said.

“They kept telling me you were dead. But I had a feeling that couldn’t be true.”

Lanoe snorted. “You had a feeling, huh? You’re telling me an AI believes in intuition?”

“Not intuition. Just logic, really. If you had died, I wouldn’t still be here.”

“What are you talking about?” Lanoe asked.

“The data bomb I gave you. You would have triggered it if you knew you were going to die. You would have erased me.”

Lanoe frowned. He’d promised to let Valk go when the time came, when the AI was no longer necessary to the mission. He’d never considered the possibility he might die first. “I might not have had time,” he said. “You know as well as I do that when you’re a pilot you can’t always know when your time is up.”

The AI had no comment on that.

Lanoe sighed and looked into the black dome of Valk’s helmet. It was blank, as always. He’d thought he knew the mind in there once. He’d understood Tannis Valk. Ever since it turned out that the Blue Devil was just a fiction, a false memory programmed into a machine, he’d seen Valk drifting away from him. Getting less and less human—less understandable—with every passing day.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Okay.”

Lanoe strapped himself into a chair in the wardroom. Leaned forward so he could keep his voice low. Nobody was around, but this felt like a conversation that should be carried out in whispers. “How are you doing?” he asked. “I mean, really. Are you … I don’t know. Functioning optimally?”

“I’m fine. I run diagnostics on myself all the time, and I haven’t seen any problems.”

Lanoe rubbed at his face. “Because I kind of have. Seen problems.”

Valk couldn’t raise an eyebrow, or frown, or even turn his head to look at Lanoe. He did tilt over a little in his chair, and Lanoe figured that had to mean he was confused. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.

“It started when we first got here. I asked where exactly we were in the galaxy, and you couldn’t tell me.”

“I explained that at the time,” Valk said. “I couldn’t find any of the standard candles.” The landmarks of space, in other words—the most reliable stars and nebulae that could be used to fix a vehicle’s position relative to the rest of the galaxy. “The stellar population here is so dense it blocks traditional methods of orientation, and the effect of gravitational lensing can’t be ruled out because—”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “But then what about when I asked you to talk to the Blue-Blue-White for me? Because you were supposed to know their language.”

“I have a small vocabulary that I got from a drone ten thousand light-years from here,” Valk pointed out. “It’s true I can’t understand what they said in response to our message. But there could be lots of reasons for that. Maybe the locals use an idiomatic form of the language, or maybe the Blue-Blue-White have more than one language, just like humans do. If you went to a planet where they speak English, and broadcast a message in Mandarin, you would get the same response.”

Lanoe nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Those all sound like very logical reasons. Reasons for why you can’t do the things I need you to do.”

“Lanoe,” Valk said, “if you have doubts about my functionality, then by all means. Switch me off. Delete me now. But I’m telling you, I’m fine.”

Lanoe unstrapped himself. He pushed over to Valk’s chair and patted the AI on the arm. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. But I’m going to relieve you from duty for a while. At least until we can get Paniet to come over here and take a good long look at you. You okay with that?”

“What the hell do you think? No, I’m not okay with that.”

Lanoe reared back a little. He’d never seen Valk get angry before—not even back when he still thought he was a human being. He’d come to count on the AI being unflappable.

“I’m fine, damn you,” the AI said. Valk’s voice roughened into a distorted growl. “You don’t know the first damned thing about computers, about artificial intelligence. How dare you come in here and start insulting me, start suggesting I’m—I’m—”

Valk fell silent for a moment. Lanoe, surprised by the sudden outburst, could only wait until he spoke again.

“Lanoe. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me just then. I mean, I shouldn’t have yelled.”

“Why not? It’s what a human would have done.”

“Okay, but listen. You can’t take me off of duty. I don’t have anything else! I’m so deeply interconnected with this ship right now, giving it up would be like … like losing myself. Again. Please, Lanoe. Please don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry,” Lanoe said, pushing away from Valk’s chair. “I just can’t trust you right now. There’s too much at stake.”

“You’re telling me that Candless actually shot you? In the leg? Just because you refused to listen to her defeatist rhetoric? Surely that was a hair-raising moment. I would have been terrified.”

“I’ve fought my share of duels in my time. A man who’s afraid of being shot at is a man who is afraid to fully live,” Shulkin said, and slapped the leg of his suit.

Maggs laughed and raised his flask. “To a true hero,” he said, and drank. Shulkin waved away the compliment, but his eyes were still bright. Almost human.

He had learned the trick of getting anything out of Shulkin. The old captain was dead inside for the most part, scoured clean by the Navy’s best brain surgeons. They’d taken perhaps too much and left him with very little in the way of an inner life. They had, however, left him the ability to fight—and to talk about fighting. Luckily Maggs had some experience in dealing with old warriors of Shulkin’s stripe, who were fueled in their dotage by nothing but the warmth of memories of slaughter.

I’d almost take that thought personally, if I didn’t know better, Maggs’s father’s voice said inside his head.

“You know,” Maggs said, ignoring his ghostly paterfamilias, “speaking with you really takes me back. I was born and raised at the Admiralty—”

“Bah,” Shulkin said, sneering as if he’d smelled something unpleasant. “Bunch of bureaucrats, bean counters, and staff officers there.”

“Quite,” Maggs said. “A lad like me, who dreamed of high adventure and glory—why, I was in constant danger of having the spirit stamped out of me. So I sought out men and women like you, Captain, and like my father, the admiral. Those who had lived. Those who could still teach me something.”

As I recall, you spent most of your formatives chasing nubile young women and robbing my liquor cabinet.

I put in enough hours sitting at your knee to pick up a few tricks, Maggs told his father. “It was a magical time, hearing the old stories. I don’t suppose you have a few you might share. For old times’ sake.”

Shulkin smiled. At least his microscopically thin lips creased at the corners and his eyes sparkled like faulty circuits. He leaned back in his chair, his arms lifting in front of him in the classic pose of one sleeping in microgravity. Maggs made himself comfortable, assuming he was in for a good solid hour of dusty tales of murder and mayhem in the wild and wooly days of the Brushfire. At least he had his flask to help him sit through it.

Yet something unexpected happened then, something he hadn’t planned on. The old captain’s mouth closed, his teeth coming together with a click. His smile faded and his eyes visibly focused. Maggs could almost hear the neurons firing in the mass of scar tissue that was what remained of Shulkin’s brain.

“Flattery,” he said. “Flattery.”

“I beg your pardon?” Maggs asked.

“Flattery will … get you … nowhere.”

What had Maggs said? How had he triggered this change? Instantly, Shulkin had lost his air of bloodthirsty bonhomie and instead taken on the distracted air and hesitant speech of a sleepwalker. Some switch had been flipped, some logic gate had closed. It was downright spooky. And decidedly inconvenient.

“I do beg your pardon, Captain,” Maggs said. “I didn’t mean any offense—”

“You want … something,” Shulkin said.

“Only good company, I assure you! A friendly chat to help pass the time of my captivity, nothing more.”

“Lying … bastard. Just ask for it. Whatever … it is.”

Maggs set his jaw. He had been sent over to listen to Shulkin’s stories and plant a seed or two of sedition. Working closely with Bullam he’d planned out everything he would say to Shulkin, every subtle suggestion, every nuanced turn of phrase. Suddenly they had gone off script.

Well, Maggs was an excellent improviser, when it came to that.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve seen through me. You’ve got me.”

Shulkin didn’t even nod. He just stared. He was, Maggs had to credit it, very, very good at nasty stares.

“I’m not here for chitchat. I do want something from you. Or rather—I would say I want something for you.”

Stony silence ensued.

“I want to give you back your ship,” Maggs told him. “This ship.”

“Centrocor,” Shulkin said. Drawing out the word until it sounded like a draft of air leaking from a tomb. “You’re working for … Centrocor. Working for Cygnet. Cygnet was … a fool. It was a mistake to throw my lot in with him and his …monopoly.”

Dariau Cygnet was one of the directors of Centrocor—one of the most powerful people in all of human space. Bullam had told Maggs about him, how he had personally sent her on her original mission, to find and capture Lanoe. Cygnet had hired Shulkin to assist her toward that end. They had come a long way since then.

“Centrocor,” Maggs said, “is a dead issue. We’re ten thousand light-years from the nearest Centrocor field office. What happens here, what happens now, has nothing whatsoever to do with Big Hexagon.”

At least that got Shulkin nodding. Well, Maggs thought it was a nod. It might have been some kind of neural tic.

“I’ll admit it,” Maggs said. “Yes, I’m working—in a clandestine sort of way—for M. Bullam. She sent me here. You see, Captain? I can tell the truth. I’m working against the Navy by coming here today.”

“Lanoe let me fight,” Shulkin said. “He knows how to fight.” Spoken with a level of reverence bordering on the tone that religious zealots used when acclaiming their redeemers.

Ah. It seems there’s been a shift of loyalties, his father said. This one’s signed on with the other side, Maggsy. Tread lightly …

Maggs nodded, though whether it was in response to Shulkin’s spoken words or his father’s spectral voice he wasn’t sure. “Yes. Lanoe let you fight.” He took a deep breath.

All in, he thought. All in.

“Candless shot you when you refused to retreat,” he said.

Shulkin’s eyes darkened and his mouth pursed, as if he’d bitten into a lemon. That deathly and deadly stare of his drooped, just a hair, until it was no longer focused like a particle beam on Maggs’s face.

It was always so encouraging when you saw the hooks go in. When you knew you had your mark.

Lanoe strapped himself into the cruiser’s control station and brought up a tactical board. The alien dreadnought was still closing in, burning hard to intercept them, but it was ten hours away. The interceptors were still trailing behind it, but they were catching up fast.

Candless had done an excellent job of using tricky maneuvering to hide her ships from the Blue-Blue-White searchers—honestly, Lanoe was impressed by what she’d accomplished—but he had no intention of following the same strategy.

He intended to stand and fight. He had other things to get done first, however, before they engaged.

First up was to call Candless and let her know that he was back in charge. She’d refused to give him her position, back when he was still down in the disk. She had to be reminded that she worked for him.

He sent the call and as expected she answered immediately. Maybe she knew what she was in for, but she was a teacher and she would know there was no point shirking discipline.

“Give me a report,” he said as soon as her face came up on his display.

“Of course, sir,” she said. She fed data to his system and new displays popped up all around him. “As you can see here, two of the dreadnoughts have moved toward the disk, away from us—”

“I’ve got the tactical situation covered. Valk filled me in about the interceptors.”

“I … see,” she said.

Something bothered Lanoe, something missing. When he realized what it was he frowned. “Where’s Shulkin?”

Her brow furrowed. “Sir?”

“I asked you a question, Captain. I can see his seat over your shoulder, and he’s not in it. Why is he not on the bridge of his own ship?”

She took a breath. “He’s resting. We’ve all been taking very long shifts here—I haven’t had a break in over twenty-four hours and even with caff tabs I’m in desperate need of some sleep myself.”

“Hmm,” Lanoe said. “I thought you might have relieved him of duty and claimed the carrier for your own. It seems you’re under the impression you’re in charge around here. I’m calling to ask you to formally relinquish command of the fleet, but maybe you’d like to fight me for it.”

“Of course not, sir. I’m glad to have you back. I understand that you may not see it that way, but I assure you—”

“It doesn’t matter why you failed to obey my order. I’m not particularly interested in excuses.”

She lifted her chin a fraction of a degree. “Sir,” she said.

He’d known her for a very long time. He’d fought beside her, lived in quarters with her. Anyone else might have missed it, but he could see the tension in her neck muscles, in the set of her shoulders. He’d wounded her deeply. She was a woman who very much valued Naval protocol and the chain of command. He’d struck her to the core.

Lanoe forced himself to soften his tone. He still needed Candless. He’d made his point and he didn’t want to antagonize her any further. “All right,” he said. “You did what you did to protect your crew. I suppose in this particular case I can forgive your insubordination. But, Candless, I need you on my team. I need to know I can count on you to carry out my decisions. We’re in the middle of a war, for the devil’s sake.”

“A … war, sir.”

“Yes, that’s right. Why do you look confused right now?”

“It’s just that I was under the impression that we … well. I suppose it doesn’t matter what I thought.”

“Go ahead,” he told her. “I want to hear your analysis.”

She nodded. “We had our noses pretty well bloodied back there,” she told him. “Our engagement with the Blue-Blue-White was an unmitigated disaster.”

“You see it that way? We shot down one of their dreadnoughts and dozens of their airfighters. We even took out their laser emplacement.”

“Yes, sir. And all it cost us was half of our fleet.” Candless pursed her lips and he knew she was wondering just how candidly she was allowed to speak. He could tell by the way her nostrils flared that she had decided to just say it. “We lost the battle. Lost it miserably. We are not capable of fighting the Blue-Blue-White—not here, not on their own ground. Our only sane option at this point is to retreat. Have Rain-on-Stones open a wormhole and head home to lick our wounds.”

Lanoe nodded. “I see. You don’t feel that what we’re doing here is worth the sacrifice.”

Candless shook her head. “I didn’t say that. However, you asked for my analysis, and it’s this: we can’t win here.”

“I think we can. And it’s what I think that matters.”

“Then you intend to continue to engage the enemy? There will be more battles.”

“That’s right,” Lanoe said. “Starting in a little less than ten hours. We’re going to clear the skies so that we have unrestricted access to the disk. And then we are going to rain hell down upon the Blue-Blue-White.”

The blood ran out of Candless’s face. She was afraid. Well, this was no time for cowards.

Lanoe cut the connection before either of them could say anything more.

Maggs made his way through the carrier with only moderate discretion. He was permitted in most areas of the ship, as long as he didn’t make a nuisance of himself. At one point he caught sight of young Bury, heading somewhere with a nasty look on his face—if the child was capable of some other expression, Maggs had never seen it—and he hung back in a hatchway rather than let the Hellion see him. A confrontation now, as delightful as it might be, would only slow him down.

He stopped off at a few bunks in the quartering decks, knocking on hatches and speaking a few words of encouragement to those Centrocor employees Bullam had identified as being the most loyal. He said nothing of any substance, of course, just reminded them that they had not been forgotten. Some of the people on his list looked downright terrified to see him, so he soothed their jangled nerves. Others struck him as impatient. These he offered reassurances that the time was coming, and soon.

They had to accelerate the timetable, Bullam had said. Move things along. Not the easiest of tasks when everything had to be handled so damned delicately, but Maggs understood how to wield subtlety as a weapon. How lucky Bullam was to have him as an assistant, he thought. Not for the first time he admired her intellect—had she allowed Lanoe to kill him back at Caina, she might have avoided some unpleasantness, but then she would have lost her very best asset.

He was rather proud of himself, honestly. He was a talented fellow, and a great help in such a time.

He kept telling himself that. He needed to puff himself up. The final visit he needed to make was going to be the hardest.

He headed for the quartermaster’s little office. The same little cubby of hell where he’d gone through such a trial getting his old suit—and his ceremonial dirk—back. He was not one bit surprised to find that when he arrived the same woman was on duty, lost in her endless spreadsheet displays. He’d almost forgotten the scar that crossed her nose and left her with but a single eyebrow, but he managed not to let his revulsion cross his features.

“Remember me?” he asked.

The sour look she gave him failed to surprise. She swiped away her displays and folded her arms across her chest. “It’s the big fancy Centrocor executive, then,” she said. “The one who threatened to get me fired.”

“Ah, now, I don’t remember saying anything of the kind,” he told her. “I asked how much you enjoyed your position. Just a friendly little inquiry as to your morale.”

She made a rude noise.

He’d run across her type before. Too beaten down by life to believe you when you flattered them. Too battered by time and history to believe in the universe’s grand possibilities—so you couldn’t appeal to their greed. Tough nuts to crack, it had to be said. But everyone, in Maggs’s experience, had an in. Something they wanted, something they were afraid of. Some hidden button you could push.

“Back then, you could bully me pretty easy. You were a big wheel with Centrocor so you could make my life hell if I didn’t play along. Funny thing, though. Centrocor’s gone. Now I’m Navy again. And you—you’re just a civilian.”

“I’ll point out I haven’t actually asked you for anything yet,” Maggs said. “For all you know I came down here to shoot the breeze. To try, perhaps, to make amends for my previous hubris.”

“Sure. And maybe you’re into women with scars, and you came down here to ask if I wanted to have dinner with you sometime.”

Maggs checked that particular line of approach off of his mental list of gambits to try out. So. He could not proceed by flattery, or greed, or seduction, or intimidation. Well, that left only a very few arrows in his quiver, and none that he liked to use very often. Perhaps … perhaps he might try to play to her pity. Sell her a story of woe and tragedy, and eke some sympathy out of her human heart.

He nodded sadly and dropped his chin. “I see. I’ve underestimated you. I beg your pardon, then. I seem to have wasted your time. I’ll go. Too bad. You were my last hope—you see, I’m in a spot of trouble with my employer, M. Bullam, and … never mind. You don’t want to hear this.”

“You’ve got that right.”

Maggs was too committed to his ploy to let her get under his skin. “Yes, really, my troubles have nothing to do with you. If I lose my job, well, I guess it was my own damned fault. I thought maybe she would be more understanding when I told her about my tragic upbringing, and how it made me … made me vulnerable to … I say. Stop that at once. That’s quite unseemly.”

The quartermaster was laughing at him. Chuckling without so much as bothering to cover her mouth with her hand. It was quite rude, given the gravity of the—admittedly completely untrue—story he’d been working up to.

“Relax,” she said. Her eyes still burned with hatred, but she let her arms fall to her sides. “I already know why you’re here. M. Bullam sent me a private message while you were on your way over.”

“I—I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

Maggs struggled to keep his face from turning red. “You were expecting me.”

“Yes.”

“You knew why I’d come. And you let me talk all that bosh anyway.”

The quartermaster shrugged. “I owed you for last time. You should see the look on your face right now. It’s priceless.”

“Damn you, let’s get to business, then. I have no interest in being raked further over the coals of indignity.”

“Yeah, okay. Come with me.” She unstrapped herself from her desk and pushed herself along the wall, deep into the low-ceilinged storerooms that held the carrier’s supplies. “Your boss is pretty generous,” she said. “She set up a nice schedule of payments, and even gave me some advice on how we’re going to do this. Basically you want to send your people down here one at a time, no more than a couple of them in any given day. I’ve changed the numbers on some requisition forms—they should ask for allergy medication. That’s how I’ll know you sent them.”

“Allergy medication,” Maggs said. “Aboard a ship with Navy standard-issue air filters that catch anything bigger than a micron. Do you even carry any such drugs?”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is to make sure nobody looks twice at the tracking numbers.” The quartermaster ran one finger along a line of shelves, then stopped when she reached one that Maggs could not tell from any of the other multitude of shelves around him. “Your people come down here and ask for the pills, and this is what they’ll get instead.” She pulled a box from the shelf and opened the lid.

“Ah,” Maggs said in appreciation.

The box was full of weapons. Mostly sidearms, though there were a few neural stunners, combat knives, and smoke grenades in there as well. Near the top he thought he saw an actual pair of brass knuckles.

“This is all the stuff that got seized when the Navy took control of the carrier. All the personal effects their marines dug out of our bunks. I haven’t even had a chance to log it into the system yet, so the powers that be don’t have an inventory on it. Even if somebody from Commander Lanoe’s crew does come down here and wants to inspect this box, there’s no manifest for them to check its contents against. No way to know what should be here.”

“You haven’t logged these in,” Maggs repeated. “Surely that would have been one of your first duties when these came in.”

“Oh, sure,” the quartermaster told him. “That was a total brain failure on my part. I totally should have thought of that.” She gave him a look so cynical it made him squirm. “Of course, if I had, I would have missed out on a pretty hefty bribe. I guess we all just got lucky.”

“Ma’am,” Maggs said, bowing just a little, “it is rare in this life that I meet someone who understands the game as well as I. One as devious and underhanded, one as skilled in the criminal arts—”

“Are you working up to asking me out for dinner after all?” she asked. “Because I’m still not interested.”