“All these stars. On the world where I was born the clouds are so thick we never see the night sky. As a child I read about stars, of course, but I could only imagine them. The first time I went above the atmosphere—when I was at school—I stayed awake the night before, wondering what space would be like.”
“Was it everything you’d dreamed of?”
“Hardly,” Bullam told him. “I was deeply disappointed. From the shuttle’s windows we couldn’t see any but the brightest stars. Their light was overwhelmed by the light from our sun. The paltry handful I could see just looked like pinpricks in a sheet of black paper. This,” she said, and gestured at the view, “is what I imagined.”
Maggs spared the universe a glance. It was, he had to admit, arrayed in gaudy splendor. Wherever they were now, wherever the wormhole had brought them, there was no shortage of bright, colorful stars. “This must be quite the sentimental moment for you, then.”
Bullam turned and faced him with narrowed eyes. “It might. If I wasn’t so frightened of what they mean. Lanoe ran a very long way. And it wasn’t just to escape us, was it? I think we both know why we’re here.”
Maggs knew because he had fought alongside Lanoe at the battle of Niraya—the first world the Blue-Blue-White had tried to sterilize of human life. He had, of course, been instrumental in driving the aliens back, not that Lanoe would ever admit he’d needed Maggs’s help.
“Lanoe brought us here because this is where he thinks he can get his revenge,” Maggs said. He wished he could stroke his mustache in a pensive manner, but of course that was impossible with his helmet up. “The Blue-Blue-White killed his lover, Bettina Zhang.”
“And Shulkin brought us here because there is nothing left of him except the burning need to kill Lanoe,” Bullam said. “The two of them are madmen. Obsessed.” Her mouth twisted up for a moment, then relaxed. “I imagine you share Shulkin’s desire. You’d like to see Lanoe killed.”
“I don’t care for the man, no. Not one whit. Killed? Well. I suppose it would be expedient.” Maggs knew for a fact that if he was ever in the same room with Lanoe again, the Navy commander would not hesitate to strangle him with his bare hands. If Lanoe were dead, he could sleep easier. Still. “I wouldn’t go out of my way to do it, though.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear—that you’re still capable of thinking rationally. That’s a rare enough quality here. I need logical people on my side.”
“You may trust me implicitly,” Maggs assured her, and sketched a bow.
“Hardly. Oh, don’t look like that, Auster. I don’t trust anyone. I’m too good a businesswoman to believe in loyalty or even courtesy. People act in their own self-interest ninety-nine percent of the time. The only way to secure someone’s loyalty is to make sure their goals align with yours. And I believe we—you and I—have the same priority right now.”
“To go home,” Maggs said, without hesitation.
Bullam’s eyes sparkled. “It’s always a pleasure to see that you’ve sized someone up correctly. Yes.”
She looked up through the windows of the cupola. “There are no wormholes in this system. If Shulkin kills Lanoe, we’ll be stranded here forever.”
“The fact has not escaped me.”
She sighed and leaned back on the bench until she was lying prone, looking up at the bright sky. “Lanoe must know some way to get back. He’s no fool. But I can guarantee you that Shulkin hasn’t given it a moment’s thought. Clearly we’re at odds with him. He’ll kill Lanoe the very next chance he gets, even if that means sacrificing our only way home.”
Maggs clasped his hands behind his back and walked over to the wall of carbonglas. He studied the welter of light in front of them. The carrier was in motion but because of parallax even the closest stars seemed fixed to the sky, jewels encrusting a black glass dome.
“We can’t let that happen,” Bullam said. “We need Lanoe alive.”
“You’re suggesting insurrection.”
“Am I? This isn’t a Navy ship. It belongs to Centrocor. I’m an executive of Centrocor. In the corporate hierarchy I outrank Shulkin by a considerable margin.”
“Hmm,” Maggs said, and gave her one of his best smiles.
Bullam’s face was set, expressionless. “As far as I’m concerned, I gave Shulkin a direct order back … wherever that was, in that bubble of space, and he disobeyed it. By entering the wormhole that brought us here, he committed a gross act of insubordination. I intend to discipline him, as I would any unruly employee. This isn’t a mutiny I’m proposing. I’m going to fire him, not usurp him.”
“And you want my help with that. Even though I have no official position in your org chart.”
“That’s what makes you useful. The crew of this ship is afraid of Shulkin. With good enough reason, I suppose. You, on the other hand, are outside of his command, and I doubt there’s anyone you’re afraid of. If you were willing to betray Aleister Lanoe, I imagine you’ll have no trouble turning on Shulkin. Furthermore, once our psychopathic captain is gone I’m going to need someone to replace him. Someone to take charge of this vessel.”
That’s how you make your bones, Maggsy. By proving your indispensability, his father’s voice told him.
She was offering him command of the ship. How delightful.
“Consider me your obedient servant, M. Bullam,” Maggs said.
“Forget that. As of now, you’re my personal assistant.” One of her drones lifted from the floor and came over to him. A biometric panel on its face lit up. “Let it scan your retinas and we’ll have a contract. Just a formality, of course, but I like to be protected.”
Maggs leaned over and peered into the panel. The drone swept a laser across the backs of his eyes, recording the unique pattern of the veins in his retinas, more unique than any fingerprint or signature. It only took a moment.
“Congratulations,” Bullam said. “You’re now an official Centrocor employee. When we get back to civilization, we can discuss your compensation and benefits package.”
Then the die is cast, Maggs senior said. You’ve picked a side, for good or ill.
A side? Maggs thought—in his own voice. Why, yes. My own.
All of the cruiser’s officers had been gathered together in the makeshift bridge as they approached final maneuvers. Candless was just glad there was finally something to see. The iceball they’d dubbed Caina filled half of the big display, a blindingly white mass that flooded the wardroom with light. Candless studied the planetoid’s surface with pursed lips, mostly out of nervous habit. If one was about to get into a pitched battle, it behooved one to know the lay of the land, she supposed.
Caina was a protocomet—an icy mass that never got close enough to its star to actually grow a tail. Spectroscope and mass density scans showed it was a vaguely spherical agglomeration of frozen water, frozen nitrogen, and dust, barely held together by its own gravity. Its surface was a glossy white except where it had been punctured by craters full of shadow. To Candless those deep pits looked like the mouths of animal warrens. She would not have been surprised if some massive space beast stuck its head out of one of the holes and snapped at the cruiser with its toothy maw. Ejecta from the craters spread outward in long triangular rays, the roughest terrain visible on the surface. Between the craters were broad plains of perfectly flat ground, so devoid of features they glistened in the light of the distant sun.
“What makes it so smooth?” she asked.
“My best model suggests resurfacing,” Valk told her. “The surface is solid ice, but only for the first ten or twenty meters down. Below that it’s a sort of half-liquid slush right to the core. When a meteoroid or something hits Caina it punches straight through the crust. Heat from the impact liquefies the slush below and sends it geysering out into space. The liquid falls back to the ground and freezes almost instantly, burying any surface features. Eventually that process even fills in the craters. That’s why you see so few of them on an object this old.”
&n
bsp; “How can you tell how old it is?” Ehta, the head of the marines, asked.
“You look for traces of radioactive decay,” Valk explained to her. “Stuff like radium and uranium breaks down over time, turning into lead. The younger an object is, the more radioactive it’ll be.”
“How much radiation is this thing putting out?”
“None,” Valk told the marine. “Not so much as a blip on the scintillator. This place could be older than Earth’s solar system, maybe a lot older. It doesn’t look like it’s ever been touched by intelligent hands. We could be the first living things to even see it.”
Candless glanced over at Lanoe, though she did so discreetly. He was still under the impression that this system was the home of the Blue-Blue-White, despite its lack of any planets. Caina’s uncharted nature didn’t prove him wrong, but it certainly wasn’t evidence to back up his claim.
“I’m ready to use the maneuvering jets to put us in close orbit,” Valk said. “Just say the word, Lanoe.”
“Ooh! I think I’ve guessed your plan,” Paniet said, surprising her. “Tell me if I’m right, will you?”
Lanoe nodded absentmindedly.
“You’re going to be clever,” the engineer said. “You had us fire up the engines just for a few seconds, knowing perfectly well that Centrocor would see it. They’ll come investigate, of course—they’ll head right for the last place they saw us. Meanwhile you’ll be waiting for them behind Caina, ready to pop out and hit them with all our guns blazing at once. That’s it, yes? You asked for that burn so we could lure them in?”
“That’s an old Navy trick, sure,” Lanoe said. “Standard stratagem for use in a situation like this, where you’re outnumbered.” He leaned close to the display until its white light blazed in his eyes. “Which is exactly why we’re not going to do it.”
“Wait—what?” Paniet asked.
“Whoever they’ve got commanding the carrier, he or she is ex-Navy,” Lanoe explained. “A campaign veteran, definitely—I could tell the last time we fought them. Don’t ask me what somebody like that is doing working for a poly, but I’m sure of it. And that means they learned the same tricks I did back in flight school. So they’ll be expecting an ambush like that. They’ll already have thought of how to counter it, too. So, no, we’re going to do something else. Something unexpected. Valk, I’ve got a new bearing for you.” He tapped a few virtual keys on his wrist display. Valk stirred as if he was surprised by his new orders.
Next Lanoe turned to Candless. “I need you in the vehicle bay. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes. Ehta, you, too.”
“Me?” Ehta asked. Candless knew the marine had been a pilot once, but that she’d lost her nerve and could no longer fly. “You want me there?”
“Yes,” Lanoe said. “Now. Let’s go.”
Maggs had no illusions about what Bullam had in mind for Captain Shulkin. She hadn’t said it outright, but it was clear that “firing” the old fool wasn’t going to be as easy as sending him a message to clear out his bunk.
What she really wanted was … somewhat distasteful. It was also the one thing standing between Maggs and command of a Hipparchus-class carrier. When he left the cupola, he headed directly for the aft section of the carrier where stores were kept. The ship’s quartermaster had a small workstation amidst the low-ceilinged cargo compartments that served both as a general dispensary and as the arsenal for the carrier’s marines.
Maggs had been aboard carriers like this before—he’d lived on one for several months back during the Establishment Crisis. He knew perfectly well what obstacles he was about to face. Nothing for it, sadly.
A fleet travels on its belly, his father said inside the dark chambers of his skull. Can’t remember who said that first, but it’s true. Proper accounting of supplies is vital to any military operation.
Is that why it’s always so bloody difficult to get a replacement every time you lose a toothbrush? Maggs asked his father.
Maggs was given to sarcasm almost habitually, and he often asked such pointed questions of the memory of his father that lived in his head. The old man very rarely answered.
The quartermaster turned out to be a woman with a scar across her face that made rather a ruin of her nose. The collar ring of her suit was engraved with a pattern of interlocking gears, which meant she’d been a neddy once—an officer of the Naval Engineering Division. The hexagons painted on her shoulders marked her as currently belonging to Centrocor. She was neck-deep in a dozen displays when he arrived, and she failed to look up even when he’d cleared his throat several times.
“I truly do beg your pardon,” he told her, “but I have a need only you can fill.”
One of the quartermaster’s eyebrows lifted in suspicion. The other one, Maggs noticed, had been neatly erased from her head by her scar. Lovely.
“My name,” he said, “is Auster Maggs, and I—”
“I know who you are,” she said, and looked back down at her displays. “The traitor.”
Maggs refused to let her get under his skin. “That’s as may be. We’re on the same side now, though, and perhaps you could see your way clear to—”
“You want something? Maybe you can switch sides again, and maybe they’ll give it to you over there. I’ve got clear orders concerning you, and they basically boil down to one word.”
“I hope it’s a nice one,” Maggs said.
“The word is ‘no.’”
“No?”
“No. You come in here asking for equipment, for supplies, I’m supposed to say no. You aren’t cleared for so much as a roll of razor paper. Captain Shulkin doesn’t trust you.”
“Are you so sure of that?” Maggs asked. “Perhaps we should call him up and—”
“He sent me a personal message when you came aboard. I’m going to paraphrase, but the message essentially said, ‘I do not trust this man. If he asks for any item or supply, the answer is no. Especially no weapons.’”
“Ah. Well,” Maggs said, “then perhaps—”
“No.”
Maggs nodded. “The thing of it is—”
“No.”
“—I’m not actually asking for anything.”
The single eyebrow went marching up the woman’s face again.
“Nothing that doesn’t belong to me, at any rate. It happens that when I came aboard, I was thoroughly searched and everything in my possession was confiscated. Before you tell me that that’s standard operating procedure, please don’t, because I know that. Even my suit was taken from me, perhaps in the thought it might contain some tracking device or other instrument of sabotage. All perfectly normal and understandable. Centrocor was even kind enough to furnish me with a replacement suit. The one I am currently wearing.”
“Did you come down here to thank me for that piece of junk? It’s at least twenty years old. The last guy who wore that suit died in it. He was shot to death. I can see the patch where they covered over the puncture.”
Maggs looked down and saw the brighter spot of fabric in the middle of the suit’s chest. He ran an idle finger around the seam of the patch.
“Do you know the provenance of every piece of gear in your charge so well?”
“The suits, yeah,” the quartermaster replied. “That way when somebody comes down here asking for one, I can decide which one they get based on how much I like them.” She gave him a rather ghastly smile. There were teeth missing from it. “I picked that suit out for you personally.”
“How kind. But I can see I’ve taken up enough of your time. If you’ll simply return my old suit and my personal effects, I’ll be on my way, and—”
“No.”
“Back to this, then,” Maggs said. He even permitted himself a tiny sigh. He’d really hoped his next gambit would have been unncessary. Partly because he wasn’t sure if it was going to work. If it didn’t, he was out of ideas. “I suppose I’ll just have to pull rank.”
“I’m a major. You’re a lieutenant. A major in the Neddies beat
s a lieutenant in the Navy.”
“You’re ex-Neddy,” Maggs said. He knew that the vast majority of the carrier’s crew had originally served in the NEF, the PBM, or the NED—in other words, for Earth. Either they’d been discharged from duty, wounded and invalided out, or they had quit the service for their own reasons, only to discover they had no skills that would allow them to thrive in the civilian job market. Centrocor had been hiring such people for years, as a way of building up their own armed forces. “I also once served the triple-headed eagle. But those days are gone. Now we’re both Centrocor. Are you an executive-level employee?”
The eyebrow lowered itself to half-mast. Clearly the woman was confused.
“As of half an hour ago, I am,” Maggs said.
“You can’t—that’s not—”
“Check my Centrocor employee number. While we wait, perhaps you’d like to consider how much you enjoy working for our mutual employer. We’re all in this together, you know.”
A great silence fell between them, as the quartermaster checked the veracity of his claim. For a bad moment he thought perhaps she would still refuse him on principle. Yet finally she grumbled out something that might sound, to a charitable ear, like an apology.
His plan had worked.
A few minutes later he was handed his personal gear, which had been neatly folded and sealed in a rapidly degradable bag. He carried it back to his bunk and pulled the thin quickplastic away from the suit and his few personal possessions. The quickplastic, released from its stable configuration, dissolved into twists of vapor all around him as he shook out the suit and laid it carefully across his bed to get the wrinkles out.
It would be pleasant, he thought, to get out of the ill-fitting loaner suit he’d been issued and back into his perfectly tailored and quite expensive Naval-issue heavy pilot suit. That measure of comfort had not, however, been the main point of this laborious exercise. He hadn’t gone to such trouble to secure the entire suit. Just one of its accessories.
Mounted on the hip of the heavy suit was a long thin pouch with a quick-release catch. Maggs flipped it open and drew forth its contents: one dirk, twenty-centimeter blade, ceremonial.
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