by Aimee Ogden
“It’s not true.” Triz’s fists balled in the soft fabric of her trousers. “Casne would never—she’d never. Someone’s doing this to, I don’t know, get back at her for Golros. Or something!”
Quelian shook his head. “Fleet service changes people. When you fire a Tactics array long enough, you start to forget what you’re firing at. Who you’re firing at.” His lips thinned and he looked away from Triz. “This quad builds and the Fleet destroys. We’ll be lucky if the whole family isn’t dragged down with that kind of reputation tagged to our name.”
“Your reputation?” Triz flung a pillow at him, but he raised a hand, and it bounced harmlessly to the floor. “That’s your daughter you’re talking about!”
Casne’s mother, Veling, peered out of the bedroom doorframe. Idha and Othine, Casne’s daddy and damu, were just behind her. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s this about Casne?”
Quelian stared at the ceiling just over his wife’s head. The vein in his forehead quivered as his jaw clenched. “Your daughter’s been arrested,” he said through his teeth. “War crimes, they’re saying, and by what I just saw, they’re not wrong.”
Othine gasped. Idha, forehead furrowed, put his hand on eir shoulder. They both looked to Veling to speak first, which was exactly what she did. “That’s absurd.” Veling resembled her daughter so strongly; the sudden tears tracing the lines of her face carved a fresh canyon of grief through Triz. “That’s Casne you’re talking about. No child of this quad would do such a thing, Quelian, you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking—”
“I came here to see what we were going to do about it.” Triz pushed to a stand and stumbled on the uneven footing of the shifting cushions. “I didn’t think you were going to . . . Quelian, you’re a Justice tribune. Can’t you talk to the Fleet? To Admiral Savelian or the—the Interior Watch?”
“He can’t pull strings for her now.” Veling’s word rasped sandpaper-rough over Triz’s skin. “Even if those strings were attached to something worth unraveling, and Triz, I don’t know that they are. The Admiralty doesn’t, and shouldn’t, come running when a tribune snaps their fingers. You know that. How would it look if her father tried to use his influence like that?”
“I know.” The words broke out of Triz, a surrender she wasn’t ready to signal. “Do you—?” The question died unasked in her mouth, and she swallowed it, fetid and whole.
Unasked, but not unanswered. “No. I don’t believe Casne could ever do such a thing.” Her eyes cut sideways at Quelian. “Of course, people change. But what you’re talking about is more than just change. My daughter didn’t suddenly abdicate her entire sense of self after five years in the Fleet.”
“. . . Okay.” Triz’s hands had balled into fists in the fabric of her worksuit. She pressed her fingers flat instead, smoothing over the deep lines she’d creased in. “I just want to do something. I need to do something. What do I do?”
“Go to work,” Quelian said. “There’s a pile of Skimmers waiting for us in the wrenchworks and a Parallax moored outside that’s not going to spontaneously regenerate its lateral atmospheric stabilizer.”
“Quelian.” Veling’s voice lanced into her quadspouse like a well-cracked whip. Quelian flinched and looked away. “You will not take this out on Triz.” Veling pushed past him to take Triz’s hands in her own and cast a frown over her shoulder, which Quelian ignored. Veling and Quelian had always been the most diagonal in this quad, both doting on their single quadborn child in their own ways. Veling had always been especially kind to the guttergirl stray who had fallen into the family’s orbit.
“We’re going to figure this out,” Othine said, putting on a smile—for Triz’s sake, she thought. “The people of Vivik know you and trust your judgment. And they know and trust Casne, too.”
Veling nodded, squeezing Triz’s fingers. Her strong hands ground Triz’s finger-bones together but Triz welcomed the pressure. “Hells if you’re picking up a wrench today, my heart. Quelian can work himself senseless down there if he needs to, but you don’t have to.”
Triz squeezed Veling’s hands back, if not as hard. She didn’t know whether she wanted the mindless release of work or not, but she did know she wanted more than just that. “I need to do something,” she repeated softly.
“They’ll let us visit her, if she’s in holding in the Hab.” Veling released her grip and straightened the silk wrap that smoothed her hair for the night. A tear dripped off the tip of her chin, and she ignored it. “We can take shifts, keep her company, bring her—I don’t know. Bring her whatever she needs.”
“Nantha.” That single word sucked the air out of the room faster than a hull breach. Triz struggled for the air to say it again. Guilt filled her lungs instead. Why hadn’t she thought of that sooner? Visions exploded in front of her: a stone-faced Fleet clerical worker breaking the news through a brief port connection, or worse yet, a terse text missive delivered straight to Nantha’s fob. “I’ll call her,” Triz said. “Tell her what’s happening.”
“Thank you.” Veling folded her arms. With her chin lifted high, she looked more like Casne than ever. The space in the room shifted, Othine and Idha drawing closer together, standing behind Veling. Their positions made Quelian’s lone outpost by the far wall all the more conspicuous. “Now, we have some quad business to discuss amongst ourselves before Quelian goes anywhere. If you’ll excuse us, Triz.”
Nantha answered the call after the first ring. On the wallport in the wrenchworks, her face was porcelain-pale with dark smears under the eyes. “Triz?” Nantha asked, “Do you have any news?”
Triz stared up at Nantha’s bigger-than-life features on the oversized wallport surrounded by tools and parts hung on the walls. Veling told her not to go to work today, but a retreat to her own empty rooms was unthinkable. At least here the hulks of sleeping starfighters kept her company, and the dull throb of vacuums and cleaner modules filled the silence.
“Hi, Nantha,” Triz said. “Someone . . . already told you.” If only she could wish away the millions of miles between them and wrap Nantha up in her arms. If only she’d been the one to call Nan first—she shied away from that guilty thought. “Are you all right?”
“Not particularly.” Nantha looked away. Her dark hair was mussed, and so was her usually pristine uniform. By Fleet Standard Time, it was midmorning on Hask, the substation just outside Centerpoint where Nantha was billeted, but Triz suspected she’d woken Nan up. “I don’t think I’ll be all right until this all gets straightened out. Or I at least get to talk to her.” Nan folded over at the waist. Triz’s stomach churned as she watched Nan’s fingers twist through her close-cropped hair. When she spoke again, her voice was muffled by her knees. “They have footage, Triz! How can it be real?”
“I don’t know,” Triz said. She felt so useless. “I don’t know anything. I’m so sorry, Nan.” Triz gnawed the inside of her cheek. In the cozy picture she carried in her mind, Nantha was always laughing, always in the middle of some dreadful but cheery punchline. She found it hard to reconcile the woman in front of her with that image. But it wasn’t as hard as reconciling her conception of Casne with the woman hauled away in restraints the night before. “Did they call you last night after they brought her in?”
Nantha pushed out of her forward fold into a boneless slouch. “Kalo called,” Nan answered, her teeth digging into her chapped lower lip. “He wanted me to hear it from him before I got the Fleet’s official notice. Or saw it on the port. Have you been watching?”
“I’ve been trying not to. You shouldn’t, either.” Better not to pour pollution into her remaining reserves of strength. “They’ll tell us what we need to know.” Triz didn’t even know who they were. The Fleet? Justice?
“I hope so, because she didn’t. Even if it was an accident, a miscalculated firing sequence—why didn’t she just tell us?” Nantha’s voice broke and the edges were sharp. “Did she tell you?”
“No!” Triz pressed her hand
to the wallport. It was faintly warm to the touch, and after a moment, Nantha mirrored the gesture. “Nan, did they take you off active duty?”
A rough laugh. “Of course. I can’t be plugged into Nav calculations right now. I’d probably accidentally point half the Fleet into the Cluster and chart a few courses straight through the heart of a neutron star.” Her voice steadied. “I know she couldn’t have told you anything, because there’s nothing to tell. I know Casne. It’s just all happening so fast and so far away—”
“I know.” Triz let her hand fall back into her lap. Nantha’s hand stayed on the port screen, a ghostly white afterimage left behind by Triz’s fingers. “I feel like I’m in shock, and I’m right here.” And whatever else might be between them, Triz wasn’t Casne’s wife. “I can’t imagine what it’s like, Nantha.”
“You are there, though.” Nantha’s fingers spasmed and she leaned closer to the wallport. “Be my eyes and ears. Keep an eye on her. And Triz, if you can get to the bottom of this—!” Her hand dropped away and she bent over her wrist fob. “I’m shooting you the names of some of the officers on the Dailos. People Casne knows, who know her. Maybe one of them can help you work through this.”
That sounded more like the Nantha Triz knew, but the sudden steel in her made Triz wilt. “If anyone’s going to get this straightened out, it’s whoever Justice assigns her as an Advocate. Not me. I’m just a wrenchworks jockey.”
“Advocates are Fleet officers.” Nantha’s blue eyes snapped down to the wallport inputs, then back up to Triz. “Can you promise me it’s not someone in the Fleet pinning this on Casne for some reason?”
“No, but . . . ” Triz hadn’t considered that possibility, and she didn’t like considering it now. But the Fleet was made up of people, and people could do ugly things. Turn an uncaring eye to the gutterkids scurrying beneath the decks of Rydoine Hab, for example. Or slice through their own flesh to turn themselves into Ceebees. “I’ll help however I can, Nan, but—”
“I know you will.” Nantha half-smiled and Triz’s doubt sublimated into ever-expanding resolve. “Go see her first. She’ll need a friendly face. Even more than I did.”
“Her parents were going to see her . . . ” Triz hesitated. Some of her parents were, at least.
Nantha read into that silence. “She’ll need all the strength they can lend her and all of yours too. Give her my love, Triz. Please.”
“I will.”
“And take care of yourself. You know we love you.” Nan managed an echo of a smile. Her hand finally fell away from the wallport screen as its light flickered out. Around her, the low hum of the machinery was a distant comfort. The ships, ringed around the airlock at the ‘works center, stood on their pedestals like statues of old friends. Triz put one hand on the ventral hatch of a DX-3 Nebula and leaned into it, taking strength from its vast weight. When her arm dropped back to her side, she was ready to lose herself in the monotony of work again.
When Quelian arrived in the wrenchworks, late in the morning, Triz was up to her shoulders in a Swarmer’s innards. She knew her way around a ship, at least, and she couldn’t make the damage any worse—which was a lot more than she could say about trying to solve Casne’s case. What did a stupid guttergirl know about the inner workings of Justice, or the Fleet? “Glad to see you’re keeping yourself together,” Quelian said, pressing his lips together.
Triz realized, with a flinch, that he was . . . proud of her? “Sure,” she said, not trusting her voice to go uncracked on more than one syllable.
“I’ve got some screenwork to catch up on before I join you out here.” There was a closed-down look to him today. There was always a closed-down look to Quelian, really, but now it was as if he’d added a rotary combination and a maglock into the mix. “I’ll be in the offices for now.”
Triz flashed him a sounds-good gesture and focused back on the ship in front of her. When the office door banged shut behind her, she let out a planetquake of a breath. While the repair job she was currently working on did require her to rip open this panel and get intimate with the ship’s computer systems, it did not require her to try to download those systems’ logs to her personal datablocks.
This was the third Swarmer she’d tried—surely one of them had captured vid that would prove Casne innocent—but every single one had been doubly locked down beneath Fleet access codes and Justice inquest screeners. Triz considered asking Lanniq or Saabe to log in under their own officer-level access codes (a wrenchworks account only got you so far, and she wasn’t exactly running diagnostics here). But you had to rank somewhere just shy of the Seventh God of Issam to merit access to this data. Triz wasn’t on speaking terms with any of the admiralty and/or Godhead.
What was she even doing here? She knew functionally nothing at all about Justice or Fleet actions or, really, anything beyond getting the engine of XR-2 to stop knocking under maximum thrust. Stupid to think she could do something useful. In the end, she was really just a hopped-up guttergirl with a little good socialization.
She could hear Casne’s weary retort to that. If you call yourself stupid again, Triz . . .
Fine. Not stupid, then. But very, very frustrated. Triz fobbed into the magistrate’s scheduling system to check on the appointment she’d requested with Casne. It had been bumped an hour later in the afternoon, but still lit up green—request accepted.
Another hour to kill.
Triz headed to the next workbay over and crawled underneath the imbalanced rear engine suite of a Gyrax 33. She finished repairs on the Gyrax, and one of the Skimmers that was only a cracked plastiglass panel the worse for the wear. Quelian would take them out for a spin later to make sure they were spaceworthy before handing them back to their usual pilots.
Triz hadn’t been out in the black since the trip over from Rydoine and didn’t plan on another such jaunt anytime soon.
Or any time.
The work absorbed her, filled her mind with joint seals and line reroutes. Triz felt like a different person when she worked, and sometimes she thought she liked this person better than the one she saw in the mirror every morning and night.
A few minutes before her scheduled slot uphab, Triz went to wash up in the wrenchworks sink. But as she splashed water on her stained hands, her wrist fob chirped. Her appointment had been bumped back another two hours. She gnawed her lip and went to find something leftover to eat in the ‘works coldcase. She indulged in a pair of dumplings from a tin marked with the name QUELIAN in bold hand on the lid—it had been there four days now, and if he wasn’t going to eat Casne’s daddy’s cooking, then he couldn’t complain if Triz cut his losses—then she started the necessary disassembly of Kalo’s fighter. When she hit a good stopping place, she stashed her tools. Quelian still hadn’t emerged from the office. That could be either good or bad. He didn’t like screenwork for screenwork’s sake, but if he had moved on from invoices and supply ordering to using the resources of Justice to help Casne out . . .
Wishful thinking. Triz washed up and hit the lift. Two floors up and her fob chirped again.
Another delay. Another four hours.
The lift wall kissed Triz’s forehead coldly where she rested it. Going back down to the wrenchworks now would be a retreat. Casne would never retreat—well, no, that was stupid, with Casne’s head for strategy she’d definitely retreat if she had to. But if Nantha were in trouble, or even Triz?
No way.
Triz queried the quadparents’ fobs too for schedule updates: only Veling had time marked off for an official visit time with Casne, and while Triz was looking, that too leaped half a day into the future. This time, Triz ordered her fob not to reschedule. Standing up, she crossed her arms and tried to look like someone who could stroll into Justice and demand access to one of its prisoners.
The stern set of her face didn’t last for long. Triz scanned her fob at the entrance to Justice and ducked through the open door. She froze. The queues in front of the long semicircular counter were jam-pack
ed with petitioners who needed fines disputed, fobs registered and recycled, and any other manner of bureaucratic nonsense. All the color of the Arcade just below Triz’s feet bled away up here, leaving nothing but clean, functional lines and serious gray and beige. But the noise was still the same.
One of the lane operators popped out at her: Belas Vivik Fithe, a Justice clerk who lived down the hall from Casne’s quadhome. Triz queued up in the line under his number and tried not to fidget like a child with her jacket or her fob.
Belas greeted her warmly despite the circumstances and nodded when Triz showed him the two appointment delays on her fob. When she asked if she could see Casne anyway, as long as she was uphab, he squinted at the screen of his deskport.
“You know I shouldn’t do that.” He glanced at the clerks on either side of him and leaned in. “I shouldn’t tell you the Fleet is trying to isolate her while they press her to confess. Fleet hero, ugly business. They don’t want a messy, noisy trial to detract from parading around all the Cyberbionautics brass they’ve brought in.” He fiddled with his fob, and his lane number flickered in the air, then vanished. The queue behind Triz groaned. “I also shouldn’t ask you to come with me while I go on my break.” Belas stood. “So. I won’t ask. Follow me.”
Triz met him at a gap in the long, semicircular counter. He ushered her to the central ring room at the top of the Hab, where Justice made its home. The only thing farther uphab was the room where Justice held hearings, and she would just as soon not think about that place right now. “I happen to know Fleet Counsel is taking their lunch,” he murmured. “I’ll pop you in to see Casne for a few minutes.”
Triz followed. She wanted to embrace the plan wholeheartedly, but she knew Justice kept eyes on the whole station, and on itself most of all. Concern overwrote desire, and she grabbed Belas’ sleeve. “But won’t you get in trouble? Belas, I don’t want you to lose your job.”