Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  He held his hand up in a warning gesture. “There will be soldiers in the corridors—and they may be looking for you with you orders to take you into protective custody.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “I think I can misdirect them. I’ll come with you.”

  Time was running out. She had to take him at his word or not, trust him now or never. This wasn’t Rik Gole the bloodless auditor. He was Darik-Arn, the tiger—son of a syndexec in the Quinvirate. If his father was like this—hotblooded yet cool-thinking, decisive and charismatic—no wonder that man had risen to head a syndicate and then the world. “All right. Come with me.”

  She quickly pulled up a Station schematic on the room’s central console. “Station personnel are the blue dots. The yellow dots are unknown personnel. You’re right. They’re in. They’re clustered in the dock but moving. These two blue dots in the midst of the unknowns—Station personnel who’ve been surprised and detained, or else in collusion with the troopers.” She memorized those names. “Come on!”

  “Do you mean to stay out of the vators?”

  “They probably have a means of commandeering vators.”

  “Right. They do.”

  The station was laced with ladderways and stairs. They went up using ones in out of the way places.

  Comm stations blared. “Attention personnel. This facility is now under the protection of the Faxen Interstellar Military Authority.”

  “Protection means protecting a place from the rightful inhabitants,” Rik said behind her.

  “All personnel should report to their work assignments. Administrative personnel should report to their area of responsibility immediately.”

  As they approached the Main level, Daya said, “Up there you go left. Toward the Cargo sector.”

  Behind her, Rik said, “About that third question.”

  She stopped to stare at him. “Now?!”

  “Would you take a stateless auditor into your bed?”

  Desire and anger flashed in her mind like lightning and illuminated things that were there, truths she hadn’t noticed. Several such truths. She seized him and gave him a brief, fierce kiss. “Yes, and I want you to give them something better than misdirection, and I want you to survive it. Listen carefully!”

  Strange, Rik thought, that it was like putting on a long-unused, but carefully stored, suit of clothes—only needing to be shaken out to fit perfectly—for him to assume the mannerisms of his father. Mattiz, with his Wendisan University education, would have called it the implicit privilege of the ruling class, or something like that. Rik heard the heavy tread of the soldiers coming this way. He went to meet them, walking with unhurried confidence, a kind of stroll.

  The soldiers recognized it. They might either round up or ignore Station personnel. but that wasn’t their reaction to him. He identified the commanding officer of this small unit. With his best top-of-Strata accent, he told her, “I need to see your—” here he put in a slight but significant pause “—special civilian advisor.”

  She knew what he meant. And that meant his guess was right. These troops had a SECINTAG operative advising them. In a few minutes Rik stood in front of a man with unremarkable looks, an unremarkable name—Major Rand—and cold eyes.

  Rik knew he was wagering his freedom or even his life on the odds that his resignation from FINFINA was not yet known to Rand. And that someone in SECINTAG’s recondite chain of command knew who Rik’s father was and assumed Rik to be his father’s special tool, and that the briefing that Rand had received would include that as a fact. In the dirty fog of a secret war, such was a very likely mistake to make.

  “Welcome to Star Corner Station, Major,” Rik said. “The Station Manager is hiding from you. She’s in an old passenger ring with some armed supporters who have an unfortunate degree of loyalty to her. I happen to have her handprint to open the place. Here.” He held up Daya’s security disk

  The Colonel had a cold smile, like his eyes.

  Though his heart was pounding harder than it had in the wargame, Rik felt a sudden certainty, like what he’d often seen in his father, that he could bend the universe to his will. It made his words persuasive. “Perhaps you know of the report I’ve made? Good. As you settle the Station’s affairs, I believe I can help you convince her to cooperate fully.”

  Rik found himself escorted to Daya’s office. A single lightly armed soldier was there guarding a strained-looking Mattiz. Of course—there would be some hardened shock troops in this operation, but the rest of the military personnel were ordinary and relatively newly recruited soldiers who could herd civilians without inciting them. The guard had a communicator on his wrist. There were audible updates from the soldiers fanning out through the station and from the heavily armed detachment heading for the old passenger ring.

  Rik positioned himself behind Mattiz to watch the Station monitor on the wall. Primitive technology compared to the monitor in the Control Room, this monitor just showed a sticklike schematic of the Station with either green lights for no problems or red lights for problems of some kind. There were no dots for personnel. What Star Corner Station could afford and keep in good repair had been in short supply for a long time. Daya had stretched her limited resources in amazing ways.

  Daya had said yes. He let himself touch that memory for only a moment before putting it away again.

  The comm station out in the corridor blared the same announcement as before.

  Rik noticed a long, edged metal shape under Mattiz’ desk. So that was where he kept his wargame sword. With false heartiness, Rik put a hand on Mattiz’ shoulder and said, “You can be glad the house will be cleaned up.” One of Rik’s fingers unobtrusively pointed to the sword. The soldier didn’t notice. Mattiz did. He swallowed hard. He let the pressure of Rik’s hand move him to one side, so his feet weren’t in front of the sword.

  Between the blaring words of the all-station announcement came a loud blur of static. Rik made out panic-stricken words. “Booby-trap!” He felt a shiver in the floor as though an explosion had rocked part of the Station. “Explosion—casualties—”

  On the monitor, the first finger of the Station’s hand where the ring was broke in two.

  Rik snatched up the sword and leaped at the soldier, landing a stunning broadside blow to the soldier’s bare head. He snatched the soldier’s beam gun and tossed Mattiz the sword. “Show me the best back way to the ore plant!”

  If the Station was a hand, the Main level crossed it below the fingers, where the fortune-tellers on the Steppe located the lifeline on a human hand. Daya wondered what fortune it told for her. Was it where the line of her life would be broken?

  She found tape lettered with the words PROHIBITED DO NOT ENTER stretched across the level. Daya recognized tangletape—try to move it aside and it entangled you. She didn’t mean to take the main entrance to the ore plant, which was what the tangletape barred from both sides—but she had to get past it to the sideway up to the part of the plant she needed to reach.

  The sharp edge of her dagger sliced through the tape, first on the near side of the ore plant entrance then on the other side. The tape shriveled. She continued along the Main level. The curve of it blocked her view of the next intersection until too late. She saw the four uniformed soldiers there just as they saw her.

  “Halt!”

  Daya doubled back to a side-stairway, not the one she wanted because it went up to the Ports too close to the Cargo sector. She ran up the stair. The soldiers followed and gained on her. She barely registered a green blur as she raced past it. Then there was a commotion behind her.

  The hugwort had stretched itself across the stairway, hung on, and tangled the soldiers’ feet. They came crashing down.

  Wincing at how that must have hurt the hugwort, Daya reached the Port level and turned left, found no soldiers in her way and ran to the Port 42A receiving area.

  The door opened to her touch. She let out the breath she’d been holding when she saw not soldier
s but familiar faces, and a recognizable bulging container in the catapult.

  “The door stuck but Veda fixed it,” Jax told her. Veda had smudges on her face. “It’s ready now, except the override command.”

  This time she felt no reluctance to do it. Not with soldiers trying to take over her station, soldiers’ boots trampling the hugwort as it tripped them to save her from them. Daya touched the plate.

  “Initiated.” Jax bent over the catapult control console. “Where is that damn ship?”

  “At the Cargo docks. It has such a low albedo it’s hard to see,” Daya told him.

  “Oh so.” His hand made a slight, decisive movement. With a thrust, felt even this close only as a quiver in the walls and floor, the catapult launched its load. “It’s not moving fast,” Jax whispered. “The catapult isn’t meant to hurl anything.”

  Over his shoulder she watched the image on the monitor. “The better for it not to be seen until too late,” she whispered back.

  “Too late will be very late indeed, since starship hulls are not made of metal.”

  Five

  “Uh-oh,” said Mattiz.

  They’d used an out-of-the-way ladder tube to get up to the ore plant. It was an escape ladder, Mattiz said, for plant personnel to escape any conflagration or massive airloss there. Every rung was coated with more and more tailings dust, making bruising slips easy. Maybe personnel escaping an actual disaster could have just slid down the ladder, Rik had thought, nursing a painful elbow. Finally Mattiz had opened a hatch only to find the ore plant catwalk already occupied by tense, silent shapes.

  The nearest shape put a finger to her lips. Mattiz and Rik climbed out onto the catwalk and quietly closed the hatch behind them. Now Rik recognized these people. They were Keepers and Trovers, some armed with wargame weapons, others with whatever long and hard they seemed to have found at short notice. Every third or fourth person had a roll-ladder hooked to the railing of the catwalk in front of them. A few had large buckets balanced on the railing.

  That was when he heard the soldiers on the Port Level. It was a squad of them, pausing in front of each port door. Rik recognized what they were doing—it was a clearing maneuver. The soldiers had a life detector. They would break in to any port where it detected someone inside. The life detector only worked where it was pointed. None of the soldiers thought to point it up. They probably had orders to clear the Port level of Stationers and that was what they were intent on.

  One of the dark shapes on the catwalk gave a low whistle.

  The wargamers laddered over the edge onto the Port level below.

  Buckets full of tailings dropped onto the soldiers, injuring any soldier they fell on and dumping rolling rocks and slippery powder underfoot.

  “Ban zay!” the Stationers yelled.

  It turned into a war down there.

  Rik gripped Mattiz’ wrist. “I told her I’d meet her. Where’s 42A?” Mattiz pointed. Rik helped himself to a roll-ladder away from the fray. Mattiz followed him down.

  Rik paused at a narrow window. As he craned his neck to see it better, something about the transport ship looked wrong. There was an unseemly dent, a crack in the hull, and a cloud of outgassed air and material.

  Mattiz was at Rik’s back, watching the fight. “Some of us and some of them are down but we’re pushing them back.”

  From the far end of the transport, space-suited figures streamed out. They jetted toward the cables that crisscrossed the hollow palm of the Station’s hand. They probably meant to mount an attack on Port 42A. In a line, with good discipline, they formed up along one of the cables.

  Rik saw something else, something coming toward the spacesuited soldiers lined up at the cable. It looked like a spider making its way toward a fly in its web.

  He knocked two times twice on the door marked 42A. Friend. It opened to let them in. “I see you gave them what they wanted,” Rik said.

  “You’re alive!” He got a fast, fierce kiss from Daya and from Romeo Ito an approving glance.

  She said, “Rik, this is a port that has secure communications channels and a catapult that can be tilted further than most of them, with the right override. It can catapult at the Station. It was built that way in case anything ever attacked the Station. The Starcross Nebula is a perilous place.”

  He wanted more of her fierce kisses. There was a chance he’d have them. Not a certainty. His father’s confidence in bending the universe to his will had no place in the Starcross Nebula. To emberalm with it.

  Part of Rik’s attention registered but disregarded comm stations repeating the tiresome invasion announcement. Daya was able to cut it off. “Attention, invaders in Star Station. Your transport ship is damaged and your comrades on the ship may be hurt.”

  Rik told her, “Some of them exited the ship to attack us but the ore-yard dogs look interested.”

  Daya translated, “Some of your comrades are prepared to attack this Station across the ore-yard, but an unpleasant surprise awaits them.”

  “And you were right. The ring was booby-trapped. It took out some shock troops and the special advisor.”

  Daya’s voice took on an ominous tone. “Some of your shock troops and your special advisor are casualties.”

  By now Mattiz with his sword and Romeo with Rik’s beam gun had the door to the plant ajar, warily peering out. Romeo said, “Manager, your words are disconcerting them. We’re winning.”

  “You had better surrender. If you do, you’ll be humanely treated and repatriated to your home soon,” Daya finished.

  “Is repatriated the right word?” Jax asked.

  “I don’t know, but it sounds good.”

  Daya’s announcement worked. The soldiers on the Port level started throwing down their beam rifles. Rik wondered if their hearts had been in this travesty of invading Star Corner Station. The shock troops were hardened military killers; the ordinary recruits were not.

  Some of the rigid tension seeped out of Daya’s shoulders.

  “The war is over,” he told her.

  Her hand found his, and held it tightly. She whispered, “But we don’t know yet who and what we’ve lost.”

  The surrendering soldiers were treated with civility, relieved of their weapons, and locked into safe and relatively warm places. If there was one thing Star Corner Station had, it was space to store prisoners. Dr. Anahita Lee attended to the soldiers’ injuries immediately after assessing the Stationer injured. Fortunately everyone who belonged to the Station would live.

  The Faxen shock troops were not so lucky. Six of them were very dead along with the SECINTAG advisor, blown up in an obliterating explosion triggered when the door of the anteroom opened, according to the eyewitness account of the surviving member of the detachment, who’d been behind everyone else.

  It was visible through the window—the skeletal finger broken off where the passenger ring had been. Whatever the Angels had been doing in that ring, they’d made sure no one would know, Daya thought.

  The Faxens had injuries from their ruined ship, too. After a quick rescue operation, these people were in Dr. Lee’s care. She was busy and so was her sick bay, but at least twenty people—Faxens and Stationers—were alive who in any barbarous pre-interstellar war would have been beyond medical help.

  The Station’s Control Room became the nerve center it was always meant to be. Daya took the command chair, surrounded by her chief staff as they assessed the damages to the Station, made sure no soldiers were still at large, and tried to decide how to clean up a considerable mess. Daya was tired and edgy but she gritted her teeth and kept making decisions.

  Mattiz ran into the Station Control Room with a Wendisan bubble in his hand. Its petals were spread, the capsule open. The message was nonsecured and readable by anyone who opened the capsule, but written in Wendisan.

  Romeo Ito read the message. His eyes widened. “It wasn’t pirates. Starway was attacked by the Faxen Telal Cartel!”

  Rik gave Daya a thoughtful look.r />
  “Starway may have been described to Telal as easy pickings—and it was not. With help from militant friends of Wendis, the attack was foiled.” A cheer went up. “Wendis considers it to have been an act of war.”

  Mattiz waved his hand excitedly. “Manager, the contract that describes the Station’s ownership is voided in case of war involving the owning entities.”

  “Then who gets ownership of the Station?” she asked him, hearing a sharp edge on her voice.

  “We argued it in that law class. The conclusion we reached was—no one.”

  There was a long silence as everyone digested that.

  Romeo said, “The interstellar situation is unsettled, to say the least, with a lot going on to distract Faxe and Wendis from pressing their rights of ownership to the Station.”

  “Goya?” Rik asked. It was, as usual, an apt question.

  “Goya lacks expertise,” Daya said. “Goyan authorities partner with other interstellar interests, but rarely or never do they own interstellar efforts this far away.”

  With a slow smile, Romeo said, “May I suggest the Republic of Trove?”

  Daya felt the foundation of her life drop out from under her like a high-speed vator. “Is that even conceivable? If it it’s conceivable, is it doable? If it’s doable, is it a good idea?!”

  “Of course it is.” Rik was Darik when he said that, convincing and compelling. The nearest Stationers started nodding or waving agreement. Daya saw the idea spread across the Control Room, her people reacting to it, startled, yes, but suddenly eager.

  Mattiz pointed to Rik. “Finance Ministry!”

  Rik raised an eyebrow then smiled a Darik smile.

  Suggestions started coming from all directions. “Romeo for Interior Minister!” “Brina for Minister of Mining!”

  Daya knew an avalanche when she saw one. No point standing in its way. She waved toward Veda Mender. “Ministry of Maintenance!”