Cygnet had paid the bills, put up with the endless delays without a murmur. Because he knew that someday, Centrocor was going to need a machine like this. He’d had the vision to keep the project going long after another executive might have decided the short-term costs outweighed any future return on investment.
“What do you think, Captain?” Bullam said, craning her head back to see as the yacht passed inside, as true darkness swept across the wooden deck. “You have to admit, we’re giving you the best tools for the job.”
She could barely see Shulkin in the dark. Only the light of a drone’s display touched his face, painting his gaunt cheeks with a bluish shadow. She was surprised to find him sneering in disdain.
“All wrong,” he said. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Bullam’s face fell. “What do you mean? You—you haven’t given it a proper look-over. I assure you, it’s fully repaired. It’s ready for—”
“Do you play chess?” he asked. In exactly the same tone as when he’d asked her if she had a lover.
She shook her head. “I never have. I’ve heard of it, but I rarely have time for games.”
“A battle in space is like a game of chess,” he told her. “The pieces matter. You don’t send a carrier against a cruiser. It’s wrong!”
He pounded on the dome with one fist. For the first time, even in the dark, she saw light come into his eyes. It was like he’d been hibernating this whole time and now he’d woken up, a hungry bear.
“I don’t understand,” she said, taking a step backward. “This one’s bigger than Lanoe’s cruiser. It’s bigger! So … it must be better.”
“It’s wrong,” he said again. But then he shook his head and turned away from the dome. “It’ll have to do. But it’s all wrong.”
The yacht found a space along the inside wall of the carrier and docked automatically, with barely a lurch. A flexible hoselike gangway was extended to make contact with the yacht’s side and part of the dome flowed away to let them disembark. Together, in the minuscule gravity of the asteroid, they headed into the carrier’s warren of crisscrossing companionways. An honor guard of marines was waiting for them, lined up in spotless heavy suits, all wearing the hexagon on their pauldrons. One of them moved forward and cleared his throat, clearly intending to welcome them onboard.
“Major Yael,” he said, placing a hand on his chest near his cryptab. “I take it you’re Captain Shulkin and M. Bullam. We’ve been instructed to see to all your needs. If you’ll just follow me, I’ll—”
But Shulkin ignored him completely. The captain hurried past, deeper into the carrier. Yael looked more scared than surprised. He gave Bullam an apologetic smile, then rushed after Shulkin.
“Sir,” the marine said, “if you’ll just allow me—this vehicle can be a confusing place, if you don’t—”
“I know where I’m going,” Shulkin told him, not even looking back. “I’ve spent more time in carriers like this than you’ve spent breathing, Major.”
“I’m supposed to show you your cabin, and then—”
Shulkin stopped in mid-stride and wheeled around to glare at the marine. Yael had to grab a handhold on the wall to keep from colliding with him. “You have new orders,” Shulkin said.
“I … I do?”
“Yes. Find the flight crew and tell them to head out immediately. Our quarry has a head start on us—we need to make up time. Tell them that if we aren’t moving in ten minutes, they’ll be removed from duty and replaced. Understood?”
“I—I—yes. Yes, sir,” Yael said.
Shulkin looked the marine up and down, as if he were only now actually noticing his existence. He stuck out his jaw and then turned and walked away.
Yael looked over at Bullam, who had barely taken five steps into the carrier.
“Better do as he said,” Bullam told the marine. “He is in charge.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Yael said, and departed in a hurry. The rest of the marines were left standing there at attention, with no orders.
She had no way to tell them apart—their helmets were all up and silvered, and because she wasn’t wearing a military suit, she was unable to ping their cryptabs. In the end, she just picked the tallest one. “You,” she said.
“Ma’am,” he replied, his body language signaling he was relieved to have some supervision.
“Take me to the most comfortable cabin onboard. And call ahead to make sure there’s some tea waiting for me when I get there.”
Ginger knew she should sleep. She very much wanted to sleep.
It wasn’t going to happen.
She was keyed up, her blood thrumming with the excitement of her first time flying the cruiser. She hung there floating in her tiny bunk, occasionally bouncing off the walls, and every time she closed her eyes they just opened again of their own accord.
Eventually she sighed in frustration and zipped herself out of her sleepsac. She rubbed at her face—she was tired, her body was definitely tired. Her brain didn’t care. She slapped the release key on the bunk’s hatch and slithered out into the corridor beyond, which was well enough lit to dazzle her eyes.
She pressed her face up against a ventilation duct in the wall and let the ship cool her down for a bit. When that started to get to be too much, she pushed away again, thinking she might get something to eat. Not the flavorless paste they had in the pilots’ wardroom, though. She couldn’t handle that again. She wandered until she found the marines’ section—she’d heard they had an actual cook. At the end of the corridor of bunks was a wardroom, bigger than the one the pilots got. She could hear voices coming from down there, the rough cadences of marines joking around, laughing, insulting each other. She kicked down the hall toward the wardroom and stopped herself at the open hatch, poking her head in to take a look.
A half-dozen marines were in there, including Lieutenant Ehta, their leader. They were playing freepool, a game Ginger had heard of but never actually seen played before. On the orbital where she’d grown up, around Metnal, it was considered a sport of the lower orders. Certainly no one at Ginger’s boarding school had ever played it.
The marines were all pressed up against the walls of the wardroom, creating an open space in their midst. Six metal balls hung in the air between them, each of them spinning but mostly staying in place. As Ginger watched, one of the marines carefully lined up a shot, studying the angles with one closed eye, sticking his tongue out to get a sense of the airflow in the room. When he was ready he made a fist and smacked one of the balls into motion, sending it hurtling at medium speed toward another ball.
Spots of paint on the wardroom’s walls marked targets, their various colors indicating different point values. The idea was to hit one of the targets, but not with the ball you set into motion—that was a foul. Instead you had to hit a second ball in such a way that it would fly off toward the target.
The marine’s ball just kissed the second ball, which flew off at an angle, air resistance slowing it as it moved. Marines dodged out of its way, climbing over each other in a flurry of punches and rude jokes. The secondary ball moved slower and slower, inexorably approaching a red spot on one wall, curving just a hair as the weird currents of the room’s ventilation pushed at it. “Yeah,” the player said, “yeah, come on—yeah, yeah, yeah!”
Others shouted encouragement or derision. One marine playfully stuck his hand up into the ball’s path, but he was quickly dragged back and given a half-serious punch in the gut for being an ass. The ball had slowed to a crawl in the air but the marines just got louder and louder, and when it struck the wall just a centimeter outside the paint, they screamed and roared and groaned and whooped, even as the player grabbed both moving balls out of the air and carefully put them back in their starting places. Others slapped the player on the back or mocked his ability, and the wardroom was a riot of noise until Ginger pushed her way inside and a marine saw her. He slapped the arm of the marine next to him, and soon every eye in the wardroom was on Ginger.
Silence fell over the room, a quick hush that startled her.
She wanted very much to blush, to shove away down the hall. To get away from all that attention. She knew, though, that if she just disappeared now the marines would talk about her when she was gone, about how weird she was. They might think she was afraid of them.
She couldn’t very well have that.
“Can I play?” she asked.
The marines glanced at each other. Ehta, their commander, kicked over to the hatch to hang next to Ginger. “Officer on deck,” she said.
The marines all came to attention, moving quickly to take up positions against the walls as if they were lined up and ready for inspection.
Ginger frowned. “No need for that, guys,” she said. “I’m just an ensign, I—”
Ehta cleared her throat. “The officer seems to have forgotten that these are enlisted troops,” she said. She gave Ginger a questioning glance.
Ginger was very good at social situations, normally. This one was a little more complicated than she was used to. Ehta outranked Ginger by a significant margin. Her lieutenancy, though, was even more brand-new than Ginger’s ensignry. Before she came onboard, Ehta had been only a sergeant, an enlisted rank. She’d served with all of these marines—as one of their own. Then there was the fact that the Marines and the Navy were technically two completely different worlds. Even if everyone in the room had been an ensign, they would have been marine ensigns. A totally different thing.
“I beg your pardon,” Ginger said. Maybe slinking away with her tail between her legs was the best option now. She reached for the hatch, intending to leave them be.
“Marine Binah,” Ehta said. “The officer would like to play.”
“No, no, please,” Ginger said, but it was already decided, apparently. One of the marines peeled off the wall and moved quickly, steadying the balls in the air and then twisting them to make them spin with a deft motion of his wrist. When it was done he moved back to his place, nestling in among his squadmates.
The whole time, everyone kept staring right at Ginger.
“May I suggest the blue target?” Ehta said. “It’s worth six points.”
Ginger pressed her lips tightly together. She kicked off the wall, then grabbed for another wall to stop her motion. She considered the various shots she might take for a moment. Thinking she should try to make a good show of this, even if it was her first time playing. Then suddenly it was like her eyes had shifted focus. Like she saw the balls in the air for the first time.
And she realized that the game was the easiest thing in the world.
Compared to flying in a fighter and keeping the positions and velocities of your squad, your enemies, and your objectives all in your head at one time, lining up a single deflection shot was child’s play. The windage from the ventilation ducts made the angles a little soft but it would be easy enough to compensate for that with a little extra force. In fact, if she really wanted to get fancy—
“Anytime you’re ready, ma’am,” Ehta said.
There. Ginger could see an almost perfect shot. If she hit her ball into that ball, it would strike a third ball and she could land balls on both the blue spot and a red one as well. She studied the state of play a little more—maybe she could even get three spots, if she struck the first ball just right, with just a little backspin.
“It’s trickier than it looks,” Ehta said. With just a trace of warning in her voice.
Ginger glanced around at the marines on the walls. They watched her with various expressions, none of which she liked. Some were glaring in open contempt. Others looked, as hard as it was to believe, afraid of her.
“Ah,” Ginger said. And took her shot.
Her ball spun through the air and caught a second ball just off center. Both of them went bouncing away, one of them toward the open hatch, the other flying straight back toward Ginger’s face.
Lieutenant Ehta snatched it out of the air before it could smack Ginger across the nose.
One of the marines coughed. Another tried desperately but couldn’t quite manage to keep a grin off his face. A third kicked through the hatch, chasing after the wayward ball before it could get into something important.
“That’s a foul,” one of them said. “Ma’am.”
Lieutenant Ehta gave her a meaningful nod. Apparently, Ginger had made the right choice. She forced herself to smile and lifted her hands in resignation. “Thank you,” she said, not looking at any one marine specifically, “for letting me play. Very kind. I won’t detain you any longer.”
She kicked out through the hatch, nearly colliding with the marine who’d chased after the lost ball. She gritted her teeth as she tried not to blush. She could escape with a little dignity, she thought, if she got out of there quickly enough. She couldn’t help hearing them laugh at her after she was gone, though.
The carrier was a secret weapon, perhaps the most closely guarded asset that Centrocor possessed. It could not risk appearing in the skies around Tuonela—a system swarming with Navy vessels. There would at the very least be uncomfortable questions to answer. At worst they would be boarded and the carrier would be confiscated. They could hardly let that happen.
So the carrier’s pilot—an ex-Navy flyer Centrocor had scooped up just as they had acquired Captain Shulkin—brought the carrier to a dead stop inside the wormhole, still an hour’s travel from Tuonela. Bullam took her yacht through the wormhole throat, her flight plan logged with local traffic control. As far as anyone local was concerned, she was there as an official spy. It was not illegal for an uninvolved poly to send an observer to a war zone, someone to keep tabs on whether the Navy or ThiessGruppe was winning the war down on the planet. As long as she stayed well clear of the theater of combat, no one would question her presence.
She had no intention of getting anywhere near the planet. She had a rendezvous to make, but it was far from Tuonela. In the dark end of the system a chunk of useless rock orbited the local star in a wildly eccentric orbit, an old comet that had burned off all of its ice. It took three hours just to match velocity with the rock, and another thirty minutes to make a slow descent.
The ship she’d come to meet was already there. It had set down next to an old research station that hadn’t been used since Tuonela was terraformed. The ancient docking facilities were useless, the gantries corroded away to piles of scrap, the mating seals rotted away by years of exposure to hard vacuum.
“Are you coming?” she asked Shulkin, as she pulled on a thinsuit—a civilian model designed for light use. “I can handle this on my own, if you prefer.”
He didn’t answer. Instead he just reached up to his throat and pressed the recessed key under his collar ring that raised his helmet. It flowed up around his scowling features and immediately polarized to a shiny black.
She matched the gesture, polarizing her own helmet to a deep red that matched the crimson and gold brocade pattern of her thinsuit. Then she retracted the dome that covered the yacht’s deck, and all the air inside froze and fell around them like snow.
A cloud of drones lifted off the deck and trailed after Bullam as she jumped down from the deck, floating down with her to the rough surface. They seemed to fall forever in the planetoid’s tiny gravity. Taking ten-meter-long strides, she made her way to the hatch of the research station. Inside, a weather field had been erected to create a tiny space of air and warmth. Condensation slicked the rusted walls and as she stepped into the field a scurf of torn carbon fibers blew across her boots.
Across the room, three people waited for her. Two were irregular troops wearing armored suits with the green Maltese cross of ThiessGruppe painted on their chests like knights from some ancient crusade. Their faces were obscured by balaclavas under their helmets. The third kneeled on the floor, her hands tied. A bag thrown over her head.
Bullam felt her heart thudding in her chest. Not a pleasant sensation for someone with a vascular disease. “It’s her?” she asked.
“All
according to our arrangement,” one of the armored men said. “TG honors its contracts.”
The polys all owed each other countless unspoken-of favors, a quiet economy of whispered requests and subtle reminders that was, of course, scrupulously accounted for. Getting this meeting set up had meant calling in a very old marker between Centrocor and ThiessGruppe. Dariau Cygnet seemed to think it was worth it.
The other TG man stepped forward. “I don’t mind saying it took some work. Kidnapping a Naval officer from one of their firebases.” He shook his head. “Big Hexagon doesn’t ask for much, does it?”
“We’re all in this together,” Bullam said, distractedly. “Could you … I need to verify you brought us the right person.”
The TG man nodded and bent down to pull the bag off the captive’s head. Bullam didn’t even bother looking at the woman’s face—she had mostly just wanted the TG man to keep his hands where she could see them.
“This was part of the arrangement, too,” she said. Then she pulled a tiny pistol out of a pocket of her suit and shot him through the crown of his head.
Before he’d even fallen to the floor in the low gravity, she spun around to shoot the other one—only to find she’d made a mistake.
She’d miscalculated how quickly he could move. He was already on her, the fingers of one gloved hand digging into her wrist until she gasped in pain and dropped the gun. He brought his other hand back to punch her in the face. He was almost on top of her, and she could look him in the eyes. What she saw there left no doubt in her mind—he was going to kill her, as quickly as he could.
His fist collided with her nose—why in the hell had she dropped her helmet?—and she felt blood splatter across her lips and splash across her collar ring. The pain was incredible—because her disease kept her body from producing collagen normally, the cartilage in her nose shattered instead of bending like it should. For a second her vision went black and she could hear herself screaming, but it was like the sound came from somewhere outside her body. She struggled to get her arms up, to grab at the TG man, but he punched her again, this time in the cheek, his knuckles bouncing off her skull. She tried to suck in a deep breath, to get some oxygen, but instead she just aspirated her own blood and started to choke, her body racked by spasms of agony. In a second the TG man would think to strangle her, or maybe he had some hidden weapon—
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