Saveria looked at the decking. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Grace … did you make a sword for her?” The words tumbled out of the other woman in a rush, faster and faster until the end of the sentence was like a single word, makeaswordforher.
“Yes,” said Hope. “Her old one broke.”
“How did it break?” said Saveria.
“Saving the universe,” said Hope. “Too much stress on the metal, you know?”
“No,” said Saveria. “I don’t know about that … stuff.”
“Engineering?” said Hope.
“Anything,” said Saveria.
“Oh,” said Hope. “I don’t know much about anything either.”
“You’re an Engineer,” said Saveria.
“Engineers aren’t really good at anything,” said Hope. “We make things that break. Like Grace’s old sword. They didn’t call it Engineering back then, at least I don’t think so.”
“Tell me about it,” said Saveria. She sat on Reiko 2.0’s case.
“Her sword?”
“Her sword.”
“Okay,” said Hope. “You don’t want to know about folding metal, or fabs, right?” She frowned. What else was there to tell?
“What kind of person was it for?” said Saveria.
“I’m not good at people,” said Hope. “I don’t understand them well at all.”
“I get them fine,” said Saveria, casting a glance at the airlock. She tapped her head. “I can hear them.”
“Right,” said Hope.
“It doesn’t bother you?” said Saveria.
Hope figured she meant it doesn’t bother you I’m an esper. “One of my best friends in the whole universe is like you,” said Hope. “Let me tell you why I think the sword broke.”
“Okay,” said Saveria.
“Well,” said Hope. “It was made for a time before time. You know. They had horses, and never flew the stars. I think Grace’s old sword was made to save a world. Not all the worlds. So, it broke.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah, it broke.”
“No,” said Saveria. “Grace decided to save all the universe?”
“I don’t think so,” said Hope. “I think she was born to.” She scratched her head. “Want to help me with something?”
“What?” said Saveria.
“I need to get this crate up to Engineering,” said Hope. After a few seconds, she said, “It’s heavy.”
“I know,” said Saveria. “But there are heavier things.”
• • •
Reiko 2.0 was suspended from chains and tethers, cables connected from the Tyche’s systems into a port Hope had installed at the top of the robot’s spine. Saveria leaned close to the robot. “She looks so real. Like she’s asleep. Who is she?”
“Rei-Rei,” said Hope. “My Reiko.”
“She’s real?” Saveria’s startled glance hit Hope like a bright light. “Is she asleep?”
“She’s not alive yet,” said Hope. “I can’t fix the math.”
“Math is tricky,” said Saveria. “I’m okay at it, I guess.” She shrugged.
“I’m okay at it too,” said Hope. She lounged back onto her acceleration couch. “You know we need to fix it, right?”
“Fix what?” said Saveria.
Hope sighed. Saveria might be good at math, but this was some next-level stuff. The woman looked eighteen, maybe nineteen tops. And while Hope knew age wasn’t a marker of brilliance, exceptions were rare. Still. You were an exception, Hope Baedeker. She looked to where her old Shingle hung on the wall. No one had removed the gold El had given her. At the bottom, those words Hope lived her life by still gleamed.
DO GREAT THINGS.
Maybe great things weren’t just building new stuff. “Okay,” said Hope, turning to click buttons on her console. The holo sparkled to life. “Here we go.” The last few recorded minutes of the battle above Earth played out. “See?”
“They’re … dying,” said Saveria. “I remember it. I heard it.”
“Sure, right, sorry,” said Hope. “Not that part. Look here.” She zoomed the holo to one of the enemy polyhedral ships. She got the Tyche to overlay lines of G forces as it shifted in space.
“It moved fast,” said Saveria.
“Right,” said Hope. “It’s not possible.”
“How so?” said Saveria, leaning closer. Hope noticed that she smelled good, like a dessert. Vanilla? Something like that. Hope wasn’t a great cook, so she felt like she was in uncharted waters.
“Um,” said Hope. “Well, if you accelerate like that, you die. Also, there’s the small problem of instantaneous thrust.” She shook her head. Vanilla be damned, there was a math problem here.
“Organics,” said Saveria. She pulled her cap down over her face a little more, and Hope wondered if she was shy, or thought she was ugly, or just didn’t want to be seen. “Organics would have that problem. Not constructs.”
“Um,” said Hope. She looked at her stim pile. How long had it been since she’d slept? Hope should have thought of that herself. “I guess?”
“What you want is a harpoon,” said Saveria. She leaned back, miming firing something from the hip, then did the winching motion as she no doubt pulled in her imaginary whale. “You want a big harpoon to tether ‘em in place.”
“A harpoon,” said Hope.
“I know, it’s stupid,” said Saveria, slouching again.
“It’s brilliant,” said Hope. Math, math, math. Okay. Math. “So, well, um. There’s a problem. There’s a few. There’s several, okay?”
“I know. It was a dumb idea.”
“No,” said Hope. “I said problem. Problems are fun, Saveria.”
“They are?”
“They are,” said Hope. “We’ll need more stims.”
“Hold up,” said Saveria. “Stims? No. They cloud your mind. Short term. I’m fine. Coffee? I can get coffee.”
“Not for this kind of math,” said Hope. “See, what I think we want is a gravity weapon.”
“A what?” said Saveria.
“It’ll be awesome,” said Hope.
• • •
Hope clicked the comm, licking her lips at the same time. She’d had coffee. Hope and Saveria had done a couple stims, too. Now it was time to get shopping. “Cap?”
There was a pause. “Hope? Hope, I’m kinda in the middle of a thing here.”
“Do you want to kill all the things?” said Hope.
There was a pause, then the sound of a door sliding shut. “You have my attention.”
“Okay,” said Hope. “Saveria had this idea—”
“Saveria?” Nate sounded bewildered, surprised, like this conversation should happen elsewhere, to someone else.
“Yes,” said Hope. “We were talking about a gravity weapon—”
“Saveria’s the young woman. Ball cap. Slouches a lot?”
“Yes, yes,” said Hope. “She’s—”
“Same Saveria that’s on my ship?”
“Yes,” said Hope, looking at Saveria. “Although if you keep talking, she might leave. And I think she should stay.” Hope didn’t say, not just because she smells of vanilla. All of Engineering smelled of vanilla. It was better than degreaser by a long shot.
“A gravity weapon?” said Nate. “You’re making a gravity weapon?”
“That’s what I said,” said Hope.
“Is that possible?” said Nate.
“Of course not,” said Hope. “Don’t be silly.”
The sound of Nate’s sigh came over the comm, nice and clear. At least the Tyche’s ship-to-crew network was working fine. “It’s been a long day, Hope. I’m tired. I know you’re tired too, but we’re up to our eyeballs in roaches. We’ve got an Empire on fire. Everyone we know who we didn’t bring with us is dead.”
Hope nodded. “Sorry. Look, I’ll keep this simple.”
“Simple is good,” said Nate. “Just, so’s we’re clear. I’m no Engineer.”
Hope la
ughed a short ha hah sound. “I know,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway. The problem we’re faced with is Endless fields. Do you know how they work?”
“Hope,” said Nate.
“Sorry,” said Hope, and bit her lip. “Okay. Negative space field. Positive space field. With me?”
“No,” said Nate.
“It’s quite simple,” said Hope. “You make a bow wave at the front of the ship. Negative space sucks you through the stars.”
“Hope,” said Saveria, putting a hand on Hope’s elbow. “Tell him about the tether.”
“There’s a tether?” said Nate. “I thought this was an Endless Drive.”
“You were paying attention,” said Hope. “Great. Where was I?”
“The tether,” said Saveria, and Nate from the comm at the same time.
“Right, right,” said Hope. What we want is to generate a positive space energy field near one of the enemy ships. A gravity well, if you like.”
“You said gravity weapons weren’t possible,” said Nate.
“It’s because they’re not,” said Hope. “Haven’t you been listening?” Nothing came from the comm. “Hello?”
“I’m still here,” said Nate. “I’m not sure why, but I am. Lord above, save us all, but I’m still here.”
He’s being weird. “A lot of people think Endless fields manipulate gravity, but they don’t. They make energy fields. Positive and negative. Think of it as positive and negative mass.”
“Mass makes gravity,” said Nate. She could imagine his jaw clenched, that stubborn look in his eyes when he was getting ready to dig in.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have started with the gravity weapon part,” said Saveria.
“You think?” said Nate.
“How it works is like this,” said Saveria. “We create positive energy near one of their ships. It acts like mass, and they can’t accelerate so well.”
“Amazing,” said Nate. “Why has no one done this before? Seems a neat trick the Navy might fancy.”
“Oh,” said Hope. “It’s because it’s impossible.” There was a sound, as if the comm was being muffled, but Hope swore she could hear Nate saying something that sounded a lot like fucking fuck’s fucking sake. “Anyway,” she continued. “We fixed the bit that was impossible. The math for extending Endless fields beyond the mass profile of the originating object—”
“Hope!” Nate sounded anguished. “English!”
“The further away you get from the physical object generating the Endless field, well, the field decays,” said Saveria. “But it’s a math problem. Vectors, not planars.”
Silence from the comm.
“There’s still a problem,” said Hope. “It’s not an Engineering problem.”
“Hah,” said Nate.
“No, really,” said Hope. “It’s a … shopping problem. We might need more energy than exists in the universe, and we also need a really big Endless Drive. But I have a solution.” She looked at Saveria, who nodded back. “First, we need to get the Cantor’s Endless Drives back online. They’re at the bottom of the ship. Station. Ship? Whatever.” She rubbed pink hair out of her face. “The network says they’re offline. I think that’s an easy fix, so maybe send Kohl for that one. Just plug ‘em in and go.”
“What’s the hard problem?” said Nate.
“Controls to fire ‘em up are on the bridge. Command center. Is it still a bridge if it’s a station?” said Hope. “We need to calibrate them.”
“Bridge is fine,” said Nate, exhaustion in his voice. Hope wondered if he’d been looking after himself. He didn’t have her youth. He needed his sleep. “Let’s call it the Bridge.”
“What we’ll do is this,” said Hope. “Someone, the least clever person you’ve got, will go down to Engineering and turn the Endless Drives back on. Someone else, a cleverer person, but someone good with a blaster, should go to the Bridge and clear out the bugs.” Hope frowned. “Did you know the Ezeroc controlled the bridge?”
“Yes,” said Nate. “We were just talking about that.”
“Good,” said Hope. “Once that’s done, we’ll need to move the station close to the enemy ships.”
“You what now?”
“It’ll be fine,” said Hope. “It’s a ship. It’s supposed to fly! Oh, that’s also why we need the Bridge back. That’s where all the Helm controls are. They don’t put them in Engineering. Hah! I don’t know why they don’t trust Engineers with that stuff.”
“I do,” said Nate, perhaps more mysteriously than Hope felt was warranted in this situation.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IN EL’S MIND, ‘bar’ was a place with low lighting. Back in the day? It was maybe a couple folks studded on leather stools around a deep, rich slab of mahogany. Expensive crystal mingling with ordinary glass, as much a marker of the drinker as the drink. Snacks, if that was your thing, but El preferred her calories in fluid form.
Since getting off a crust and into space, few details changed. The humans were the same, whether basking in the native radiation from a star or under artificial lighting. The drinks and the glasses were the same. Less mahogany, more ceramic, but still in dark tones.
This bar? A lot of things were different. It had the black ceramic bar surface, but where it should have a rich gleam, this was dusty, and then marked with the passing of a hundred different fingers. There were waste wrappers of ration packs stacked in piles. Precious little drinking was going on. If El was being honest with herself, this would be the first time she’d been in a place that looked like a war zone bar. She had the remains of Baggs smeared on her side, and was covered in dust and ash. Compared to the people here, she felt like a holo star. Every face held desperation, a kind of sick team jersey they all wore. There were fifty people, easy, in little clumps or singles around the space. Some sat in booths. Others sat on the floor, or stood, waiting for whatever would happen next. A couple of pinball tables, holo stages dark, had been shoved against a wall. As far as bars went, it wasn’t what she expected. But maybe it was what she deserved.
Either way, it didn’t endear itself to her at first blush.
Still. Any decent Helm of the big starships didn’t stand in the doorway, mouth slack, eyes wide. She’d rock on inside, seat herself at the bar, and get a drink. Didn’t matter about the dust and ash. Hell, after the wholesale destruction of Earth, what mattered was a little liquor. Some artificial fire in El’s belly would settle things aways, put her keel down, protect her from the capsizing she felt was en route.
El’s boots made muted clumping sounds as she walked into the bar. No one stood behind the dusty ceramic, but that wasn’t the kind of detail she let get in the way. El slid behind the bar, and because she was a Helm and not a pirate, pulled a fistful of coins out of her ship suit, letting them clink onto the counter. Enough coins dropped from her shaking hands to buy every drink this place could sell, and then some, but she wasn’t worried about the money. El was worried about how much her hands shook. She wasn’t holding the sticks of a starship. El was adrift, just more loose refugee flotsam in a sea of hard black. The feeling was too familiar for her liking. Last time this happened, she’d been flying for the Empire, before it fell, only to rise again. El had her boots under the Helm console of the Nostradamus, a destroyer that hunted between the stars.
She found a glass, cleaner than some, and wiped the inside of it with a discarded cloth. El held it up for inspection under the bad lighting. No smears. Good enough. Her hand found the neck of a bottle of good Europan whiskey like it was the most natural thing in the world. Liquor spilled from the bottle to the glass. El slammed the drink back, wincing at the harshness. It wasn’t right to abuse a liquor this good, not this way, but she needed settling before the real drinking began.
El poured herself another glass. No ice? No problem.
She noticed wide eyes watching her from the lip of the bar. Round, blue, just above two hands holding on. A kid. El nodded to the child. “Hey.” Anoth
er blast of whiskey, another refill, and she leaned forward. “How you doin’?” The eyes blinked, but there were no words. In El’s experience, this wasn’t unusual. Kids could be shy. And they didn’t have the advantage of a good social lubricant like Europan whiskey. El shrugged. “You want a drink or something?”
The kid raised his head above the bar, shaking it. “No, thank you.”
“It speaks,” she said. She leaned back, taking her glass with her. “I’m El.”
“Like the letter? I’m learning letters,” said the boy.
“Just like the letter,” said El. She took another sip. “I figure it’s easier to remember that way.”
“Why not call yourself Q? That’s easy to remember,” said the boy.
“My name doesn’t start with Q,” said El. “Good idea, though.” They stood looking at each other for a little while. “Why you here, kid?”
“They told me to come here,” he said. “But it’s boring.”
She laughed. “Guess it is, at that. Not much to do here but sit and drink, and you’re not drinking.”
“No,” he agreed. “I’m waiting.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding at him. “Bars are good for that too. Wait until something changes. The flow of the stars, or the sea of the hard black below. Currents of solar wind shift all the time. And when your ship comes in, you ride it to the next port.”
The boy blinked. “What?”
“Or, you just wait,” said El. “You got a name, kid?”
“Will,” he replied.
“Short for Wilson or William?”
“Wilson,” said Will.
Of course, thought El. Kid’s got sociopaths for parents. William would be easier. Bill. Billy. Will. Wilson sounds like the star of a bad holo. “Good enough,” she said. “You sure you don’t want a drink, Will?”
“I don’t think I should drink,” said Will.
“I’m not a lunatic, Will,” said El. “I’m not going to pour you hard liquor. I was thinking a soda or something.”
“Sure, okay,” said Will, clambering up onto a stool. He crossed his arms on the bar top, not looking entirely comfortable on account of the stretch needed to land the pose. El rummaged around the bar until she found a low-slung refrigerator with a collection of non-alcoholic drinks in it. She cracked the seal on a soda, the self-effervescing container charging the liquid with bubbles. El poured it, a smooth motion with no vapor locking, the fluid not fizzing at all. She finished by dropping a straw into the glass. Will’s eyes were wide as she put the drink in front of him. “How did you do that?”
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