Chapter 36

9 January 01 A.A.

Bryce polished a glass and hung it in a rack. It was his last afternoon in the R2 Desert Pub and he wouldn’t miss the place. All the trappings that were lacking in his own pub were here. A real wood bar down one entire side of the long room. A staffed kitchen just in case someone wanted a midday snack. Delicate tables that barely supported a couple liters of beer and wouldn’t make it through even the mildest bar brawl. Delicate flutes for champagne, rounded stem glasses for the reds, and narrower for the chilled whites. He served many times more glasses of wine than beer here.

There was no real life here. He actually missed the energy of his bar. Here everything was tempered, the fights were civil debates and the roars of joy were a calm smile. Though the party down at the far end was shifting over to pitchers and that showed some promise.

The view from Desert Pub had thrilled him at first, but after seeing the jungle sunset last week, he was spoiled. The pub sat thirty meters up the Desert biome wall and was built out on a deck. Small shade trees and a wide red-and-white striped awning kept the patrons cool, but the desert made them thirsty. A nearly invisible sheet of plas isolated the biome from accidental contamination.

He brought another pitcher over to the table along with some fresh glasses as the roar of their laughter rattled decently about the gentle conversation of the other patrons. A red-tailed hawk was spooked from his perch just outside the floor-to-ceiling window that separated the bar from the Desert biome. The arid valley floor lay three levels below and appeared to stretch beyond the far horizon. Low chaparral and sage offered refuge for the small rodents seeking safety from the lofty predators perched ever so high on the food chain.

A broad-shouldered spacer with a great, broad grin waved his thanks for the beer and tossed a twenty-cred disk his way. At the pub’s inflated prices that didn’t quite pay for the beer.

The spacer waved a hand indicating it was a tip while he told a story to the too perky blond across the table. A tip. He’d never gotten one at R4U and even in R2 it was exceptional. He dropped it into the till for Daver. Let him take the tip as a gift to get him off to a good start after his week-long break.

“C’mon, Turner. What happened then?” the blond chimed in.

Turner held his hands palm up indicating some imaginary person before him.

“There she was. First mate Devra Conrad. She’d spent twenty years working her way up from cargo handler. What did I know? I was a hot-shot pilot with officer’s school ten days behind me. The Loonie run was growing faster than they could train us, so they just gave me a ship. My first ever post and I was in command.”

He took a slug of wine and gargled it briefly for his audience’s amusement. He suddenly put on a very serious expression.

“Now I’m telling you. I know for damn sure that I was the best bloody pilot this side of Neil Armstrong.”

“Who’s that, Turner?”

He leaned forward and stared down the table. “Give me a break, Rolovsky. First dude on the moon. Ring any bells?”

“No, that was a Ukrainian. He…”

“Aww. Pipe down, Rol. I’m telling a story here.” He swung his gaze back and forth until he was sure of his audience.

Bryce stayed close enough to hear, which didn’t have to be too close with the expressive volume of the storyteller’s voice.

“Devra must have gotten sick of me by the end of that first run. She had the con on approach while I was doing my Captainly duties. We were way past the turn point before I realized that our nose was still pointing toward the moon. She was powering straight in until we were only three hundred meters off the Lunar dust. I nearly wet myself when she did a high-gee flip and set the old shuttle on her pads as sweet as could be, after a fourteen-gee burn. I’d have blacked out if I hadn’t been so scared. Fuel consumption was within a few hundred kilos of a standard approach. Never mess with Devra Conrad.”

There was a round of laughter, but Bryce could see he was leaning back holding onto the punch line. He wiped at the counter and waited. As the laughter died Turner leaned back in.

“Of course the high burn totally wrecked the landing pad. The first ever landing in my official record contains a major penalty for the damage as well as hazardous and unwarranted action…in my name. Never, ever mess with Devra Conrad.”

Everyone roared.

On his return to the bar, Bryce noticed a new arrival. Alone. Back in a dark corner, just inside the east entrance, half-hidden by a misplanted holly bush. Holly in the Desert Pub. Didn’t quite work.

He headed for the table when a hand shifted forward into the light and mimed drinking a beer. He pulled a draft of the porter, dark beer for a dark corner.

On his way to the table, a laugh rang out that ripped through his memory like a lightning bolt. Celia, his memories screamed. Emilia now, he reminded himself. He had wondered where she’d gotten to, she hadn’t come to R4U since he’d warned her off. He must be daydreaming to have missed when she had joined that party.

She leaned on the shoulder of the spacer with too many teeth, laughing as if he was the god of standup comedy. The red-tailed hawk flew up to the clear plas window and braked sharply with a great spread of wings. This time the predator latched onto his perch staring into the pub rather than out at the desert floor below.

Bryce restarted his feet, delivered the beer to the corner table, and gained his first clear view of its occupant. She was small in a day and age of progressive breeding and nutrition that had consistently added height and weight to the human race. Her straight, jet-black hair, hung down past her shoulders.

It was her eyes that stopped him.

The narrow slits, so dark that no hint of iris color peeked forth, regarded him steadily. She was everything that most of the women on board weren’t: petite, trim, and, he’d bet Daver’s twenty-cred piece, tough as nails.

She nodded her thanks and, after gazing at him longer than he was used to being noticed by a customer, her eyes drifted down and narrowed further as they aimed at the boisterous group.

“You are probably welcome to join them,” Bryce offered in his best bartender-host-R2 Desert Pub fashion. “They didn’t all come in together.”

“And why would I want to do that?” Her gaze had returned to study his face with no humor, no smile, no frown, just impassive regard. He was wrong, nails had just found their match in the toughness contest.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just. You were watching. Them.” Smooth, Bryce. And where did you learn to build coherent sentences?

Emilia’s laugh ripped through him again leaving him breathless for a moment.

“Perhaps you should be the one who joins them?”

Somehow Emilia had worked her way into the spacer’s lap and was making a show of distorting his wide mouth into foolish expressions.

But the spacer wasn’t watching the squirming load of thinly clad flesh in his arms. Instead his gaze was watching their dark little corner.

Bryce turned for the lady’s reaction but the table was vacant. The foam atop her beer was unbroken. A five-cred piece rested beside it. He moved to check the corridor, but she was already out of sight.

He cleared the beer, wiped the immaculate table for form, and pocketed the five-creds.

# # #

“You’re a hard person to catch up with. I ask and no one sees you go by.”

Ri twisted and peered around the trunk of the cherry tree. The buds showing just a hint of the pink that would be bursting forth in the weeks to come. A few meters away, Captain Jackson Turner stood rooted to the ground. His feet planted firmly on the green grass, his fists rested on his hips with his elbows out. His torso tapered up toward the pale-blue sky. His smile was broad and inviting and she didn’t trust it anymore than she had before…no matter what warmth prickled across her chilled arms.

He moved about her like some sort of giant before levering his huge frame down to human-size by sprawling on the verdant green an arm’s-length away.

“Your Captain was right. You don’t talk much do you?”

“When there’s a need.” She didn’t like one bit that the Captain had said that, or that it was so true. That redhead squirming in his arms clearly had no problem with chatting away. It was the same one she’d seen on the balcony a few nights before. The woman had been at ease and in control then as well. Ri searched for those easy words, but they didn’t bubble forth in a way that hooked a man’s interest.

“That’s not why I came looking for you.” It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.

“What are you talking about?” He raised a single eyebrow in her direction.

No wonder she didn’t chat with men, her thought had been so clear, that she’d finished it aloud without noting that the first half had been inside her head.

“Where is Emilia, anyway?”

“Is that her name?”

Ri could feel her jaw drop.

His smile slid easily into a leer. “Hadn’t gotten around to finding that out yet.”

This was the man she was going to ask for help? The one she was going to help out? Why couldn’t he be more like his over-serious, battered brother? She’d been unable to find out anything from the databanks beyond the fact of their relationship. The data sorters at Hanoi Launch had clearly decided that the past of these two men was of no interest to Stellar One and her voyage to new worlds.

“Why can’t you…” she couldn’t ask the question.

“Be more like my brother?” His smile disappeared like a blossom on its final journey to the orchard floor.

She could only nod, disconcerted that her thoughts were so clear on her face.

“I saw that question coming the moment I spotted you.” He turned his gaze from her and faced out across the forest and lake biome. A small stream rushed cheerfully by their feet, slicing its narrow path across the orchard meadow.

More fruit trees were packed into the agricultural bays, but here the entire biological process had been captured. Robins hunted the bugs that hadn’t earlier fed the trout fingerlings. Rabbits cheerfully burrowed in the rolling hills, still trying to avoid, as they had for millennia, the marauding barn owls. The forest swept across one long side of the biome, oaks, beeches, maples all roaring skyward under the lesser gravity of the rings.

But his gaze was somewhere much farther away.

“Mother cancelled his dad’s contract when Olias was eight. About a year later, her new man had done his job and I was ready to come forth and wander the world. The flitter failed on the way to the birthing center. Mom was killed. She could have survived the crash or the birth, but not both. Olias never forgave my dad. Never forgave me. Wears his scars to this day refusing all cosmetic surgery, as a reminder to us of our mother.”

“But you called him ‘little brother’?”

His attention slowly returned from the far trees and he looked at her with those hazel eyes, sad with the past. Apparently he did have emotions deeper than leering smiles.

“Clearly you didn’t grow up with boys in the house.”

She shook her head. She grown up fearing and fighting boys for survival or a scrap of food, but her cadre had been all female.

“Another thing he never forgave me was growing taller than him by the time I was sixteen. My reaching command first would have hurt our relationship if we’d had one left to damage. That we both ended up in space was chance as far as I can tell. Perhaps both trying to give the other room to breathe. And now we’re sitting here on the same ship.” His gaze wandered away again and the tentative smile slid once more off his lips.

At rest he was a handsome man. There was normally no way to tell beyond his dazzling smile, but he was.

“I have a problem and was wondering if you might help me out.”

He turned his lost eyes upon her and for just a moment he looked like one of the lost ones her cadre had sometimes brought in off the streets. Young girls, starving, raped, wrapped in rags, separated from their own cadres, if their companions even still lived. Or the solos. The ones who appeared occasionally with no past and no power to speak of it. Jackson had lost mother, father, home, and brother. And now planet and career gone as well. Perhaps he did need what she had to offer.

“The ship’s security. I can’t keep up with it, and the few on the crew who might have time, have no skills, no training, no aptitude.” She’d practiced a dozen ways to dress it up, to cajole, to make her case, but the words had failed her as usual.

“You want me to work next to my brother, who can’t stand my existence, much less my presence? Thanks. Thanks a lot.” He rose to go but stopped when she rested her hand on his arm. His forearm muscles rippled beneath her fingers as he clenched his fist. He was spacer strong, workout strong.

“I’ve watched your crew.” It was like she’d kicked him in the balls. The life drained out of him, only the white of his knuckles gave away how deeply he felt.

“They need a task. They need a goal.” The words spilled forth. “I need a team. You can work from the Icarus. There’s no need for Olias to know. Perhaps better if he didn’t. No need for anyone to know. Reporting to me only. I need solutions, not people in the corridors. I need…” The words ran out.

“I need help.” Ri pulled back and hung her head exhausted by the effort. Problems were coming. She could feel it in the spring breezes that were teasing forth the new leaves. Feel it in the bite of cold that was coming off the stream which had been cooled to snowpack-fed temperatures. Trouble was ahead and there was no way she dared handle it alone. If she did, who knew where her death-curse might land.

“So do I.” Jackson’s voice was barely louder than the birdsong of a lone chickadee testing different branches of a huckleberry bush as a boundary for its territory.

# # #

Jackson had insisted that she make her full proposal to the whole crew at once rather than testing it out on him first. When they’d arrived aboard the Icarus to comm everybody, the entire crew was already there. It was hard to tell if the main lounge had been built for them or they were built for it.

Dan Wright sat at one end of the couch. Donnie was leaning back against him as they watched a vid on the wall screen. Her feet rested against Rolovsky who was browsing through an actual paperbound cookbook. Hank Christianson was in deep intense communion with a computer terminal, a complex three-dee model of some orbital mechanics puzzle twisting above as he studied it from various angles. Sicily Jacobs leaned over his shoulder offering comments that he grumbled about but incorporated even as he did so. Jill Emers and Jane Keller were playing a lazy game of chess that neither seemed to be winning.

A single armchair broke the tableau until Jackson collapsed into it and completed the scene. Icarus Crew at Home would be the title of this particular piece of performance art. The eight crewmembers fit together as neatly as her eight hunters ever had. An aching void opened in her heart, its name was Tancho Cadre.

She forced herself to turn and face them, these eight strangers’ faces all waiting patiently for whatever she had to say. She tried to shrug off the hollow feeling. She was just hungry. That was it. A skipped breakfast and a missed lunch chasing around after Captain Turner.

She glanced at Jackson, but he raised his eyebrows and waved a hand indicating she had the floor. Everyone turned their attention to her with no further signal, except Donnie who didn’t surface from her vid until Wright poked her sharply in the ribs. Ri was left to stand near a worktable covered with a large jumbled model nearly a meter across. An array of small tools and bits of plas were scattered over the surface. It took a moment to recognize that it was a nearly complete copy of “The Wanderer.” They had worked on a model of the Earth’s destroyer even as they were flying back to Stellar One. The hammer that had destroyed their world was now captured in miniature aboard the last ship of humankind.

She stayed on her feet, it was where she always did her best thinking. Ri pushed off from the wall she’d been leaning against and strode to the only place that she could see everyone easily at the same time. The Wanderer was thankfully behind her.

“I wish to make a proposal to you, the crew of the Icarus. Your Captain has let me speak to you without hearing it himself first.” However much she would have wished otherwise.

“The Captain, my Captain, our…” Most of them were grinning at her confusion. “Captain Conrad has placed me in the position of both Security Officer and Biologics Liaison. I am also her chief spy.”

It raised a few eyebrows where she’d been expecting a laugh.

“Okay. Not really. But Captain Conrad wants me to make an ongoing assessment of what is happening to our crew and what we need to do to fix the situations. I’m at a loss. When I initially accepted the added role of Biologics Liaison, my security tasks were very light. Of late, the latter has been escalating and frankly I can’t keep up. This is supposed to stay very low profile, per the Captain’s request.” She ran out of words and rather than continue, just shut her mouth. It had made sense when she’d first thought of approaching Jackson and his crew, but now it sounded so dumb she just wanted to leave.

Hank clapped his hands together with a loud smack. He learned forward in the settee. “Right to the point. I like that. No mincing words. Complete waste of time. Can’t stand the people who do. What’s the problem?”

“Mankind cannot survive being human.” It was not at all what she intended to say. She wished she’d chosen to sit.

“Yup. Life will be the death of us all. But what can we do about that? Immortality seems to be out of our reach. At least to date.” Hank overflowed with bonhomie despite his dour look. His dark eyes studied Ri intently from beneath broad gray eyebrows and thinning hair.

“That is not what I meant.”

“Well, then,” the eyebrows pulled together, “get to the point.”

“Hank.” Sicily cut him off. “Give the girl a chance.” Ri could have kissed the elderly woman seated beside him.

Hank harrumphed and, leaning back, crossed his arms over his chest. Now his overeager face had shifted into a deep scowl. No one else paid him any attention so she did her best to copy their example. A deep breath did nothing to recall any of the neat phrases she’d rehearsed to use on Captain Turner.

“People are unhappy. Dangerously unhappy. The chief of fabrication won’t even speak to me. I hear rumors of fights all the time. The autodocs have patched more broken bones in the month since Captain Conrad declared the crisis over than during the entire construction phase combined with the six weeks of when we were struggling just to survive. There are suicides every day.

“Devra Conrad wants, needs answers about how we can stop these problems, or catch those responsible. These are answers I can’t give her.”

Rolovsky leaned forward and gestured broadly with his large hands. “You are saying…what? That we need to understand people’s minds and motivations and figure out how to fix that?”

“I guess so. No, I hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s more… Yet, if we could fix why people are doing things, then we’d be much better off. Wouldn’t we?” It had been such a simple request when she’d thought it up on her own. She shook her head.

“What I really meant to ask for was an elite security team. We need a shorter-term solution. Your other idea gets complicated far too fast.”

Hank rejoined the conversation like a clap of thunder. “So you wish us to discard a fascinating possibility in exchange for being turned into an advanced brute squad. And what specific plans do you have for the ‘Icarus Squad’?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“What?” Hank burst to his feet forcing Ri to give way in the small space and sit on a stool by the Wanderer model. “You come to us with a wild notion of understanding the human psychological motivations, something that no one other than the world leader, Premier Stevens, has ever dared attempt, and you toss that lightly aside. Then you ask us to assist in arming the ship against her own inhabitants and you offer no suggestions?”

“Nope. Not a one.” It wasn’t the right moment for a smile, but Ri couldn’t help herself. She covered her mouth with one hand and was only rescued by Sicily slapping his butt affectionately and bursting into laughter herself.

“Well, I certainly haven’t a clue. I’m an astrophysicist,” Hank grumbled still pacing. Then he pointed a finger at Sicily. “And don’t you get any ideas, girl. You aren’t young enough to learn a new trade either.”

Sicily pulled him back to the couch and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you too, Henry.”

“Need some damn psychologists and an armed brute squad.” He looked only slightly pacified.

Ri nodded her head. “Sounds fine, but all I have is you guys.”

“We have a command center. That’s a start,” Jill Emers, the ship’s pilot and second-in-command, pointed a long-fingered hand at the decking. She pushed her shoulder-length hair back behind her ears.

Donnie sat up, accidentally planting an elbow in Wright’s belly. He let out a whoosh and a groan which she ignored.

“I could hack into Stellar’s data banks. You’d be amazed what you can learn from a little statistical analysis of things.”

“Like what, you young pup?” Hank leapt back to the attack.

Ri knew from the records that she and Donnie were both in their early twenties. Donnie might pass for sixteen with her close-cut dark hair and round face, but she gave back as good as she got. Far better than Ri would.

“Like is it always the same folks landing in the autodocs? Might that be interesting, you old windbag? Like what group’s having the worst sickness records and what do the suiciders have in common? Maybe we’ll even find serial killers and death games and secret—”

“Kindly put your overactive imagination on hold and save that for your vids.”

Jane, the chief mechanic, didn’t move at all from her slouch in a chair. “We can review the schematics of the ship and see what might be useful for crowd control if things grew a little too rowdy.”

Ri watched as they brainstormed the problem. She understood now why Jackson let them go rather than attempt to control them. The Icarus crew had to be small, so every person had to be excellent in their own field, as well as adaptable to whatever was needed for the next task. They proposed and solved problems she’d never considered. She knew about the ship’s present security systems and some of the computer’s data structures, but they were rapidly making the idea their own.

Donnie didn’t even bother to ask her for any codes. She swung a terminal into place and dove in. By the time Ri could dodge past Hank Christianson’s flailing arms as he wafted one idea into extinction while giving birth to another, Donnie had already hacked into the system. Within moments she was code-deep in places Ri had never seen.

Jackson drew up his legs and shifted until he was sitting upright in his chair. Everyone fell silent, even Hank, despite being in the midst of explaining to anyone who would listen the proper structure to manage a team of eight, scientific or not.

Captain Turner slowly looked around the room receiving a nod from each of the other seven members of the crew. Finally he faced Ri. The entire crew kept their eyes on him and she realized that if he said no, that would be it. No anger. Perhaps debate, but the final decision was his no matter how casual he was about it. He commanded this crew because he had their respect.

Ri had led her hunters because she was the best. It suddenly struck her that no matter how he made it appear, Jackson Turner was the best at what he did as well.

His face was calm for a long moment as he looked at her. There wasn’t even a breath to be heard, everyone must be holding theirs just as she was. Then a smile burst forth and lit his whole face.

“You have your team, Security Chief Jeffers.”

She couldn’t speak. She stood and offered a deep bow of thanks. The Icarus team would make a fine group, as good in many ways as her hunters. And she’d never lost a one. Her breath caught…until she’d lost them all.

# # #

Hank and Rolovsky rapidly became involved in an intense argument over the relevance of certain types of psychological profiling systems. Sicily called up an ancient novel that Ri didn’t recognize. She wondered if “wuthering” was a typo or if the word had dropped out of the language. Sicily leaned her back on her husband’s shoulder, rested the palm screen on her knees and didn’t seem to mind at all when he gesticulated grandly in his argument.

She might be reading, but the comments she dropped into his tirades gave them coherence and direction. Her guidance as essential to his process as his own thoughts.

Donnie and Wright disappeared into a haze of holos of system architecture of Stellar One. Occasionally a hand would appear, dragging one section aside and replacing it with another.

The Wanderer’s model was shoved, with no ceremony and little care, into a locker below one of the viewers. Jane and Jill were hunched close together over a tabletop display staring down at various ship’s schematics and making careful notes.

Jackson had stretched out his legs and closed his eyes. He was asleep almost instantly despite Rolovsky pounding the chair’s arm and accusing the Icarus’ chief scientist of being dumber than a native-born Loonie. There was a smile on Jackson’s slumbering face, all this must seem like home to him.

No one paid attention when Ri stood and headed from the lounge. A short corridor led past a galley, then two emergency air lockers that looked like they could turn into airsuits if one crawled into the narrow space. Next was the airlock they’d entered by and the Captain’s and pilot’s quarters. Two hatches opened through the floor; perfectly normal in zero gee, but it gave her a moment of vertigo. She stepped across quickly onto the solid deck and entered the control room.

Levan had taught her to fly flitters and the like, but this was something else again. Controls and displays ranged around the two forward seats. A wide variety of readouts were embedded in the ceiling. There was a clear plas port above and below, probably as some navigation aid.

Space was tight, not an open bit of wall or ceiling. All the controls and system’s readouts covering the many stations on the command deck of Stellar One were crammed into a space smaller than her security console. She turned around and saw she’d entered through six other stations stacked two high behind the pilots’ chairs. Short ladders led up and down into the spaces for when they weren’t at zero-gee.

Ri didn’t need to know what each station was to figure out who occupied it. Sicily’s was neat and had some sort of multi-colored, hand-sewn cloth hanging along one side that contrasted nicely with the soft blue walls. It took a moment to realize it was several images, all of brightly-colored chickens.

Her husband’s neighboring station had clearly been attacked by a whirlwind. Journals, notes, three commpads, including one of Sicily’s, none in their interface cradles, were scattered across the work surface. A large lump of rock was strapped into one corner. That had to be a piece of the Wanderer that he’d collected during the Icarus’ rendezvous before it splashed into the sun. Ri dragged her gaze away from the last remaining piece of the planet killer.

Donnie’s screen was the one covered with small plas toys that must be aliens from some of her favorite vids. Wright’s nav console directly above displayed several pictures of Donnie clowning it up. There wasn’t a single shot of her at rest. The other two upper stations were relatively neat. Rolovsky apparently did have an interest beyond cooking, a picture of a bound man hanging upside down in a glass tank was pinned to the wall. Paraphernalia from magic tricks lay scattered about. Jane had several ship’s components torn apart on her workbench, each meticulously labeled, and a small painting of a cat.

The two command seats were impersonal, but there was little room for any trimmings. In addition to the main forward viewers, there were a dozen smaller displays at each station as well as keypads in each chair arm.

She stepped gingerly over the unbreakable port filled with whirling stars that was the space between the two chairs and slid into the left-hand seat. Unlike the floor portal, the main viewer was compensating for the fact that the ship was docked at the outer edge of Ring One. The image of the stars was steady. The constellation Hercules was off the bow. As they swung around Earth orbit, the constellations slowly drifted past and mighty Hercules gave way to Cygnus the swan and then Lyra. Katakana, Hakuchou, Koto. Old friends of long nights.

“It’s good to have them back together.”

Ri turned to see a wide awake Captain Turner slide down in the other command seat.

“Haven’t sat on this side in quite some time. Reminds me of when I was first bouncing out of Hanoi.”

“I’m sorry. Would you like your—” He gestured for her to stay put. The chair that she hadn’t noticed a moment before seemed to wrap around her. How many hours had the lanky Captain Turner sprawled in it? She shifted a number of times but her intense awareness of the contours of the cushions did not dissipate.

“I haven’t ridden the pilot seat since my first command with ‘your’ Captain Conrad sitting over here. Three weeks as pilot, then I turned Captain. I had the answers to everything back then.”

Ri looked at him, but he watched the stars.

“Simpler times, though they seemed pretty exciting to us. We were supplying colonies on two worlds. Devra and I hauled the first ever run of Loonie manufacturing back to Earth. The Juno Jumper was coming into shape in high-Earth orbit and needed materials without having to fight them up the gravity well. I captained the first couple runs of that and Devra jumped from Loonie Shuttle pilot to Captain of the Martian Hopper when Sedgewick ate some stray space junk in low orbit.

“Devra and I developed the Station Slider over the comm during long hauls for servicing the LaGrange Point colonies. While I was out at Io, they offered Devra Stellar One. Then I grabbed the Icarus for a change of pace. We were supposed to do a Mercury survey on the way home. The whole solar system was just waiting for us to take it, but she always wanted to reach for the stars. They seem awfully far away now, don’t they?”

Ri could only nod, but he didn’t turn to see. Captain Turner too had dreams. And had lost them. Again, another layer to disabuse his chosen persona of disaffection.

“Aw, shit.” He slapped a control and the viewers blanked to the same soft blue as the walls.

“Didn’t mean to go and get all nostalgic on you.” Now that his bright eyes and wide smile were focused on her, she felt pinned to the chair.

“It’s okay.” Her mouth was dry. She hadn’t eaten today, not even a sip of beer at the Desert Pub. “I really should…”

“One question they haven’t hit yet.” He dialed up two beers and handed one to her. “Here, this might loosen you up a bit.” His easy manner made it difficult to be offended even if she wasn’t tight-wound. She simply observed before acting.

She considered dumping it over his head anyway, but her throat was dry and the first sip did taste good going down. She set it in the holder dangling from the under edge of the left-hand keypad.

“What question?”

“What happens if things get ugly out there? What level of force will be necessary?”

“The ship’s article’s—”

“Are meaningless. My guess is it will get much worse before it gets better. Ring One is all nice and pretty. In R2 I saw a couple of black eyes. I haven’t made it to the other rings yet, but I’d guess it gets rougher the farther you go from command.”

“It does. Now that you mention it, though I hadn’t noticed it before. We’ve got to do something. I just don’t know what.”

He slid down in the pilot’s seat and took another swallow of his beer.

“They’ll figure it out. They always do. Sure is good to have the team together again. You’ve set them up right nice. I owe you, pretty lady. I owe you big time.”

# # #

Ri opened her eyes. 0130 hours. 0130 and there was a man snoring in her bed. Snoring loudly. As her eyes adjusted to the dim glow cast by the readout, she saw the ceiling sloping down toward her feet. Not her bed. Instead of a door, an airlock sealed the room. A narrow desk and chair completed the luxury of the Captain’s suite.

Ri closed her eyes. Her low blood sugar mixed with a pint of beer had aberrated her judgment sufficiently that she’d been swept off her feet by Captain Jackson Turner’s laser-blast smile and hard body. The silken sheets whispered over her skin revealing that her feet were not the only thing swept aside.

Her feet landed in a wadded up pile of shipsuits and it took several tries before she disentangled hers. It was only when the closure didn’t work normally that she discovered the suit had been turned inside out, for reasons she didn’t want to remember. Sealing the closure anyway and jamming on shoes, she slid out the door and left the sleeping commander about his business.

The lounge was silent. Rolovsky’s massive frame snoozed on the couch, someone had draped a blanket over him. He slept quietly, unlike his commander. The table display was covered in electronic notes nearly hiding the schematics of Stellar One beneath, Jill and Jane had clearly spent hours dissecting the ship’s systems. The cycling of the main airlock didn’t cause Rolovsky to twitch in the slightest.

0130. Two-and-a-half hours until her watch. Not enough time to sleep, she knew that all she’d do is berate herself for giving in to Captain Jackson Turner’s dubious charms. Obvious charms, dubious chance of any meaning behind them. A good run would at least purge the last of the beer from her system, but she certainly didn’t want to run in her usual R1 maintenance level, passing beside the sleeping Captain every three kilometers.

R2L0, when she finally arrived there, was all torn up. The mess from the explosive decompression accident still hadn’t been cleaned up. It looked little different from her inspection shortly after the patch had been put in place. Shoring girders turned the corridor into a tangled maze.

The peephole in the emergency airlock revealed nothing at first. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see stars up and to the right where the L1 blowout had occurred and taken over a hundred people with it. They would never know the cause. The engineers swore it wasn’t their fault which left few other options, some drunken idiot taking a moly torch to a portal is about the only thing that could cause such a breach.

Of course Ri could attest to how stupid beer could make someone. She was now a conquest of Captain Conrad’s friend. She started her journey over to R3, she’d never run there before.

Where would his charm be next directed? The dashing redhead? Would he even miss a beat because Ri wasn’t there when he woke up?

And there went her chance of working well with the Icarus crew, she’d just slept with their beloved Captain and then snuck off like a thief in the night. Maybe they were used to that, but she wouldn’t be able to face them. She needed their skills. She needed the enthusiasm and energy they’d shown last night. Time for a new plan, Ri, you certainly botched the last one.

R3 had a composting unit disassembled for maintenance. The parts were scattered across the corridor completely blocking her efforts to wear out her body. This was really getting ridiculous.

What degree of stubbornness dragged her back up to the core and down to R4L0 was hard to determine, but if she kept going at this rate, she just might end up running out in the vacuum of the unfinished wreckage of R5. And it wasn’t even spinning, no rotationally induced gravity there.

She trotted along for the first lap of Ring Four, beneath the green of the ag bays, white piping of the Arctic, and the green of the next ag bays. Another quarter rotation and she’d have found a clear route to run, far from the madness of Ring One. Far from her command duties. Far from the gravity well of Captain Jackson Turner.

Ri leaned into the ever-upward slope as she headed beneath the green-brown of the jungle’s support systems. Full circuit. No obstacles. She kicked into a hard run, her body screaming at first, but by the end of the second lap she’d settled into the long, loping run that had once been so natural to her. Natural as breathing, natural as running through Nara. Here she didn’t even have to worry about attacks by predatory cadres. No one to keep safe.

She flew down the corridor. By lap three, kilometer nine, the oxygen deprivation had set her legs to tingling until she lost awareness of when they were in contact with the decking and when they weren’t. The echoing slap of her footsteps became a mesmerizing song, a symphony of flowing air and blood, a concert of silence. No one to need her. No one to find her. Perfectly invisible within a ship of thousands.

The soft echoes of her own feet, could be the Cadre. She had built the most feared hunters Nara had seen in a long time. Perhaps the most dangerous in the entire history since the Crash and Smash that had destroyed her race, her country. The economic Crash and the engineered earthquake Smash, the end of Japan and the creation of her world. She could feel Ninka off her right shoulder and Koukou close behind. She narrowed her eyes to the merest slits against the wind and sailed down the passage with her memories wrapped close about her.

A great blackness slammed down in front of Ri.

No chance to scream before she crashed into it.

The obstruction grunted as she spun sideways, slammed to the deck, and careened into a tool locker.

Ri swung to her knees to face her attacker, but collapsed to the deck as her damaged knees came in contact with the hard decking.

Her assailant was also knocked from his feet. He crawled over until he was looking down at her, upside down.

His dark eyes were shadowed by the long hair that flowed downward on either side of his face in great soft waves. She could see his lips move, but her ears were still full of the winds of Nara.

“Are you okay?” the lips repeated.

She nodded until she made the mistake of moving one of her legs. The shot of pain roared up her body and she jerked upright to inspect the damage. Their heads struck sharply and the man cursed as he disappeared from her vision and she lay once again upon the decking with both hands on her now damaged forehead.

“What did I ever do to you? Shit, that hurts.”

She couldn’t agree more. When she could bear to move her hands aside from the knot she was sure was already forming, she arched her neck to look behind her. A long-limbed man held his nose tentatively between his fingertips, wiggling it slightly. His eyes were slightly crossed as he tried to sight down its length.

Her lungs still dragged for air and her heart rate had done nothing about settling. Making sure the way was clear, she sat up and inspected her knees. The left one was just a bit sore. The right was another matter. The shipsuit was shredded by the non-skid decking surface and her knee looked little better, with blood oozing out of a hatchwork of cuts and scrapes.

She struggled to her feet, and suddenly a large pair of strong hands were lifting her until she was upright. A steadying hand remained on her upper arm to make sure the breeze from the ventilators didn’t return her to the deck. The hand didn’t just support her arm, it encased it. It was large without being massive. She followed it up a long arm, past his shoulder to a concerned look far above her. Her head barely reached his shoulder.

An initial shrug didn’t dislodge his grasp but the second succeeded.

“What were you doing?”

“Running.”

He tossed his hair aside with a casual twist of his neck. The corridor lights revealed his strong face in sharp angles. It was somehow familiar, but she was unable to place it. By now everyone aboard had a fair chance of looking familiar, Stellar One wasn’t all that big a community.

“What about you?”

“Climbing down a ladder. I never believed that old saw about the last step being a doozy. I know better now.” He rubbed a long finger beside his nose. No smile flashed across his face as it would have Captain Turner’s. Just a slight twist at the corners of his eyes. One point in his favor. A glance over his shoulder revealed the ladder in question, a dozen paces back along the side of the corridor.

“Is there an autodoc up that ladder? My knee is a bit banged up.”

The man glanced down and any hint of amusement disappeared. “Shit. Did I do that? I’m sorry.” He bent down with a look of genuine concern wrinkling his broad brow.

“No. I did that. When I slammed into a walking brick wall at a dead run. My apologies.” Ri tried to bow, and nearly fell on her face in the process. Catching herself on her bad leg was a major tactical error. Her stumble and hiss of pain brought his hand back to her arm. She’d had enough of men for the moment and shrugged him off once again.

She hobbled toward the ladder. He watched her for a frozen moment and then leapt ahead as if she were going to steal his ladder. He shot up the rungs, opened the hatch, and moved into the room above. For a second she thought he was going to lock her down in the maintenance level and she’d have to stumble to the next hatch several hundred meters along. Then his face looked down clearly waiting for her to follow.

Did men exist who still opened doors like they had in the old books? Not likely, just some weirdo, R4 denizen. Ri considered continuing to the next hatch, but the first step put any thought of that out of her mind. It took all her willpower to reach the ladder without showing the razors of pain scorching up her leg.

Thankfully her arms were strong enough that she was able to move up the ladder without bending the right leg. He reached out to help her once her shoulders were clear of the hatch, but he backed away after a single glare. He moved off, disappearing into the darkness. She stepped clear of the hatch and it slid shut plunging the room into complete darkness.

What had she just let herself in for? She stumbled backward and ran into a large plas tank. But it was too warm, it was nearly body temperature. A flail of her arm contacted some kind of ropes or hoses. Nothing loose for a weapon. Before she could scream for her Cadre of hunters, a hatch opened in the wall to her right and she shot out, bad knee or no. Best strategy in a fight, don’t be there.

A half-dozen steps later she stumbled to a halt. Stools, a scattering of small tables, chairs. Lines of light and dark, more dark, slashed across the space, revealing and hiding at the same time. She was in a café or bar. Bar. To her left a long sweep of plas counter sported two small clusters of taps: one lit, one shaded. Racks of mugs were arrayed neatly beneath the bar.

Ri turned to face her companion. He moved behind the bar and came to a rest with his large hands resting lightly on the pale surface. He took root there as if he were a painting and had never been anywhere else. Darkness hid his face. A hand raised through a shadow and into a patch of light as he pointed a finger down the corridor.

“A few dozen paces on the right.” The hand settled back through shadow to rest on the bar.

She limped off and slid into the narrow booth below the red cross high on the wall. She got off easy. A general analgesic eased the bulk of the pain quickly. A myriad of microfractures in her patella meant her knee would be sore for several more weeks, though the temporary skin graft should slough off just fine in about a week.

She cut off the lecture about blood sugar and eating properly, her last meal was yesterday’s breakfast. Or perhaps the day before’s dinner. She damn well knew about her blood sugar.

The report of the cancelled session would be sent to the medical office, but she didn’t care. She knew they were too busy with broken bones and a backlog of fight injuries to care either.

Ri stood in the corridor, dimmed down for nighttime, and considered her options. She could head toward the lifts and return to R1. Just let the stranger drift back into his anonymity. He could have long since continued his journey homeward. But no one needed L0 to get to their apartment. No one except service crew were ever supposed to be down there.

Without conscious decision, she hobbled back toward the bar, away from the lifts leading to the core. A single bright light revealed a sweeping parrot wing making the letter from which it sprang leap upward. R4U. Too many possibilities to guess about a meaning. Even with the apparently obvious allusion to Ring Four.

She continued back into shadow where scatterings of the dim corridor lights revealed that the man had not moved from his post. As Ri drew closer she saw that this assessment was inaccurate. Two mugs of beer rested on the otherwise clean bar. One beside his hand, a few sips missing. The other, before the central bar stool and was still foamy to the brim.

After the Icarus and Jackson Turner and smashing her knee, a beer looked awfully good. It was cold and sweaty to the touch when she raised it and knocked back a large swallow. It slid down her dry throat and all her muscles, still torqued from the collision, eased off at once. With her muscles gone liquid, she more melted than settled to the barstool as the man continued to regard her.

“Thanks.”

He nodded and returned to his standard state of silence. Not much of a conversationalist.

“You the bartender?”

Another nod, this time with that humored crinkling about the eyes. Right. Man serving beer from behind a bar at three in the morning to a partially crippled officer. Of course he’s a bartender.

She took another sip.

His hands. One wrapped around his mug. The other clutching a bar towel.

“I know you from somewhere.”

The sense of play dropped from him like a stone into deep water.

“Your hands. I recognize your hands.” Nice, strong hands. Ones that had been used for work without becoming heavy and coarse. Just strong. Then she had it.

“The Desert Pub. You were the bartender there as well. Unless you have a twin brother.”

“Just me,” he offered with a whisper that barely managed the passage through the shadows between them.

The bartender that afternoon. Yesterday afternoon. Jackson Turner had occurred since yesterday afternoon. Damn.

She slammed back another swallow of beer and smacked the mug against the plas. The man across from her still didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Barely breathed. Why did she always run into the strange ones? She slid off the barstool, but her turn was a little too quick and her knee gave. She caught herself on a chair, he was half around the bar by the time she had control again. He halted in the deep shadow by the door to what must be his brewery and the hatch to down below.

The silence stretched out until it had a palpable texture. It flowed between them like a barrier. He was the opposite of Jackson Turner who seemed to always have a way of putting her at her ease. This man brought out her anger, or was it her fear, this afternoon at the pub. Her fear. Pinpointed and tacked down.

She feared she wouldn’t be welcome in the bounds of the lively, charmed circle which flowed along in Captain Jackson Turner’s wake. The fear that had surged up like a blown airlock and shot her out the Desert Pub’s door only to get lost in the vortex of Turner himself. The fear of never again having a cadre. A place to be welcome. A place to be at rest.

The fear that threatened to wash her out of this Ring Four Unlit bar which she conquered consciously by pure stubbornness.

“Do you have a name?”

This brought a nod. It was too dark to see if any part of the smile had returned. He gave her enough time to consider coming over into his shadows to physically wrestle speech from the man before continuing.

“Bryce.”

“Hi, I’m Ri. Biologics Liaison.”

This time it was he who was startled from his dark corner into a crossing slash of light.

“The voice. I know your voice. Officer of the Watch. Ri…hold on… Officer Ri Jefferson.”

“Jeffers. When—”

“Day of The End. I woke up in transit quarters to the sound of your voice telling us about the end of the world.”

He took a step forward. His speech was slow, yet with untapped power, like the first evening breeze from the unseen ocean beyond Nara. Wandering around corners, hugging buildings, slipping through shattered windows, but enough to give everyone pause.

“I woke alone. I shouldn’t have. Wasn’t meant to wake at all, I guess. Would have been okay.” His voice wavered out of focus as did most people’s on the rare occasions they mentioned The End. As if he were surprised that some woman left his bed because he overslept on the worst morning in history.

Ri had learned to avoid the subject for the sake of others, The End lacked much charge for her. Her world had died months earlier with the death of the last of Tancho Cadre on the shattered streets of Nara, Japan. She pushed even that glancing blow deep down where even she couldn’t feel it. She wished.

“I remember wondering about your voice. In the midst of it all. You were strong. Remote.” A smile struggled past his lips and played with his eyes.

“I wondered if you were human. So calm in the storm.”

“And?” It was hard not to return his reluctant smile.

“Jury’s still out.” He wrapped the bar towel around his hand and wrapped the ends into a fist. “Still out on a lot of things.”

Ri’s leg was aching. She either needed to sit down or go.

“Thanks.” He worried at the towel, as if straightening out the wrinkles of it were the most urgent task he had.

“For what?” Watch started in under an hour. If she sat, she probably wouldn’t be getting there any time soon.

“For noticing. I used to like the fact that bartenders blend into the background, but sometimes it’s nice not to.”

Sitting won, she pulled a chair off a table and dropped into it.

“What happens when you blend in? What’s that like?” Ri had never belonged anywhere since the Angel-lady had rescued her from Nara. The sole Japanese person walking the planet. The instant signal of danger to any who had lived through the Crash and Smash fifty years before.

Bryce took a step back and faded into shadow. “This. I disappear. People come here to drink. To drink hard. Even more since the Captain’s speech.”

Ri was disoriented for a moment. What speech had Jackson Turner made that she’d missed? Then she knew he meant Captain Conrad’s New Year’s address.

“Ad Astra.”

“Right.” He waved toward the long, empty counter, only his arms in the light, painting a picture with no man to control them. “They come to drink down that lost dream. To blow off the steam that has no outlet, but builds within these plas corridors. No winds to carry it away. Sometimes it is so thick in here that the people blur and I can’t see them any more than they see me. All the same. All without hope. All without a home.”

“This is their home.” Ri jabbed her finger down toward the deck.

“This is the colonist’s home. But these are space fabrication workers. The elite of the construction industry. Now they’re mucking about in the soil of the ag-bays. Crawling like the rest of us ants among the precious food crops of our survival. Ad Astra. Shit lady, open your eyes. They come here to pretend there is something beyond themselves, some sort of hope.”

Ri fought against the tightness in her chest and finally managed to gasp in some air.

The man was staring down at his precisely arranged bar towel, all layered in neat folds across the back of his hand, as if exhausted by producing so many words in a row. “But it’s only temporary. An illusion that we cannot much longer accept. The facade is wearing thin.”

Ri rose to her feet, no longer feeling the pain of her mangled kneecap.

“I choose to look with different eyes.”

She turned, more carefully this time, and left the half-finished beer, the bar, and the glum man behind in his own shadowed cloud. She staggered to the hallway fighting her way through the chairs. Too many had died. In her first hour, Donnie had uncovered at least a hundred unreported deaths over the last four weeks. There must be hope. Carla was wrong to give up and freeze alone in her dead Arctic night.

Ri managed to move along the corridor until the bright ceiling lights washed down on her and she could breathe in the corridors the color of sunlight. She took a lift up to L3 simply to get away from the bartender. She was almost to the wall of the jungle biome when she found a lift to the core. She hooked her feet and zoomed upward, the gravity dropping away from her as she rose.

She drew deep bouts of air into her lungs to fight the nausea. She shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach.

And it was not an illusion. The future was full of possibilities.

It had to be.

# # #

The corridor was dead quiet by the time Jaron finished the plant respiration analysis. Something was out of balance in his biome. He strode from the jungle toward his quarters and passed by the bar. He noticed the bright emblem on the wall had become a little scuffed and faded over the last few weeks.

The place was so empty and quiet that Jaron didn’t notice Bryce until he called out.

“Have a beer on me, Jaron.” He was already drawing a half-liter.

Jaron accepted the cool glass. It felt good to rub it across his brow. There were two mugs on the counter, one empty, one barely half gone. Bryce poured out the latter and wiped up the spill around it as Jaron sat.

“This brew’s a new flavor, made up a batch using the leftover papaya coming out of your biome. It’s actually been quite popular.”

Jaron sipped the pale liquid. It did have a strong hint of papaya, but it was more in the smell than the flavor. It was sweet and ripe and full of life. It was almost like being in the jungle breathing deeply of the ripening fruit somewhere in the distance.

He set the glass on the bar and nodded. “That’s a good one, Bryce. You’ve written it down?”

Bryce tapped his forehead. “Safe as can be.”

Jaron nodded and then took another sip.

“What are you doing out at 4 a.m.?”

He hadn’t realized it was so late. “CO2 analysis of the diurnal cycle. Something riding down hard on the CO2 level, but I’m having a hard time finding it.”

“Anything toxic?” Bryce poured himself a mug and offered to refill Jaron’s.

He shook his head. “No. Nothing that significant, but it is almost three-tenths of a percent lower than my model. I don’t like not knowing why.”

Bryce smiled. “Need to dump more yeast onto your fruit. Makes great gobs of CO2 then. You’re drinking it.”

He stopped with his glass half-raised. “But the fungi check out. They’re healthy…though their population is… I don’t know. Do you have a commpad?”

The bartender reached under his counter and pulled out a stack of them. “People are always leaving them.”

“One is enough.” Jaron took one off the top, thumbed in, and called up the stats on fungi biomass over the last year. They were nowhere near extinction, so he hadn’t noticed their decline.

“But why are they declining?”

Bryce tapped his beer mug with one finger. “We’re an efficient culture. No longer any fruit lying around to sugar up the soil.”

A wave of relief ran through him. “That’s it! No planned wastage, just the cutoff from the trail clearing. In the wild, there is no need to plan it, but we humans have interrupted the natural decomposition process. I saw the cutoff and paid no further attention.” He held out his hand to Bryce. His shake was solid, like a man who worked with his hands rather than tending a bar.

“Thanks. That’s been bothering me for days. It’s easy to compensate now that I know the cause. Any time you want to switch to my crew, you let me know.”

Bryce held up his hands in a stopping motion. “No, thanks. Like it just fine right where I am.”

Jaron couldn’t see why this would be a natural niche for such a man.

“You can do me a favor though.” The bartender wiped at the already meticulous counter.

“As long as it doesn’t remove an even higher percentage of fruit from my biosystem.”

Bryce laughed and Jaron found it easy to join in for a moment. It was a nice sensation. He sipped from his beer.

The bartender raised his dark eyes to stare straight at him. “I ran into someone earlier, or rather she ran into me. What can you tell me about Officer Ri Jeffers?”