“Here we go, pet.” Porthos leaned over her controls with a fierce grin, guiding the dart down towards the moon as if it was nothing to her. The helm covered her shaven head neatly, with cables webbing out in all directions.
Dana longed to drag the helm off Porthos, and take the ship for herself. Being a passenger made her heart beat too fast.
As they fell into the final descent and the landing gear flicked out, Dana felt the moon’s gravity kick her hard in the spine. She knew it was mostly in her head – the actual gravity of the moon was going to have far less wear and tear on her body than the grav on any given space station.
And yet, this was dirtside. Dana could count on the fingers of one hand how often she had set foot on a moon or planet. There was a wrongness about solid ground that she could never get over.
Put me back in space where I belong.
Porthos let her breath out in a long, satisfied hiss as she completed the docking procedure, and the dart finally stilled. She plucked the various cables out of her head with a swish, and removed the helm. “Don’t worry, peanut. Once we’re under the dome, the air will be as fake as anything else you’re used to breathing.”
Dana scowled. “I’m fine.”
“You can let go of the seat now,” the older pilot smirked. “Don’t fret yourself. It’s only the Regence. She’s a doll. Most of the time.”
“Only the Regence!” Dana was wearing her best flight suit, but she felt shabby for such fancy company. “Do you think she’s going to arrest us?”
“It’s hard to tell with her Maj.” Porthos shrugged, stretching her arms and legs as she eased out of her own seat. “She pretends she doesn’t approve of our bad behaviour, but secretly she’s all over it. She’d be duelling herself if the protectors would let her out more often. Still, she’s unpredictable. It depends who has annoyed her more, recently: Treville, or the Cardinal.”
“Wonderful,” Dana groaned.
Lalla-Louise had been working all morning, appointment after meeting after public appearance, and she was worn thin. When she retired to her rooms for a late lunch, she did not eat a bite, but instead stretched out on the large perfumed bed, emptied an ampoule of nexus under her tongue, and plugged The Hunt directly into the port in the back of her neck.
The forest of Valour embraced her, dark and delicious, and she ran so fast she nearly flew. She could smell her prey nearby, a blend of fear and alien pheromones. Her bow flew into her hand as she tracked him, step by step, scent by scent.
Nothing could compare to this. Not her beautiful husband with his silk suits and muscles, not the thrill of politics, not food, not sex.
There was only this.
An hour later, the alarm wrenched her out of the game, sweating and shuddering at the return to reality. She used to let a servant awake her, but her reflexes were too violent when she was fresh from the Hunt, and it was so inconvenient to wash blood from her knuckles before going to her afternoon meetings.
She had not eaten, but that hardly signified.
If Lalla-Louise had only been able to stay inside another fifteen minutes, she was sure she would have destroyed the beast once and for all. It was infuriating.
On the other hand, she had already been running late for her appointment with Amiral Treville and the Musketeers when she first went under, so she wouldn’t be the only one who was frustrated.
Lalla-Louise rose and tidied her hair away again, beneath the rich blue star-scarf. Walking at an unhurried pace, she made her way along the long balcony that led to the Crown Gallery.
She could hear a slash and twang of metal against metal, and halted at the very edge of the balcony so she could observe without being seen.
They had given up on her. Other subjects might have stood to attention even into the second hour, but Treville and the Musketeers had a touch of irreverence about them, and this was not the first time their Regence had kept them waiting.
Athos and the others had dumped their formal jackets on the polished floor, and were giving their new friend a sword lesson.
Dana D’Artagnan, if this was she, was a lithe young woman with deep brown skin and a pilot’s buzz cut. She concentrated, frowning as Porthos demonstrated a move on Aramis. Athos leaned in and corrected Dana’s grip on the pilot’s slice, and then her stance.
Treville, watching them from the sidelines, glanced up and saw the Regence. Lalla-Louise pressed a silencing finger against her own lips, and Treville nodded reluctantly.
The sword lesson continued. The three of them made surprisingly good tutors, and the young newcomer had grit. Every mistake only made her more determined to work harder.
Lalla-Louise had never understood what it was that drove people to be pilots. The thought of flying through the cold of space, bound to your ship with implants and cables, had nothing like the appeal of taking game drugs in her own bedchamber.
But this – the clash of metal on metal, the elegance of duelling your way past another person with a sword. The Regence understood why her pilots never stopped fighting each other.
She cleared her throat to alert them to her presence, and descended the stairs. By the time she reached the polished floor below, they had all scuttled back into their formal jackets, and were standing at attention with the blades nowhere in sight.
“Your Royal Majesty,” said Treville, clearing her own throat. “May I introduce you to…”
Lalla-Louise was already standing in front of the new recruit. “D’Artagnan,” she said in her most musical, seductive voice. “I’m always glad to meet young people who are eager to serve the Crown.”
D’Artagnan met her gaze with a wary deference that Lalla-Louise was used to seeing in the faces of her subjects. “Your Royal Majesty,” she said. “There is nothing I want more.”
“Good.” Lalla-Louise smiled, and clapped her hands. “Commandant Essart, I think, is looking for new blood in the mecha squad. It will be an excellent training ground for you. And perhaps one day…”
She let the words trail off, pretending not to enjoy the look of crushing disappointment on D’Artagnan’s face. The child needed to learn that dreams did not simply fall into your lap.
“Perhaps one day, the Musketeers,” the Regence said finally. “But not yet.”
8
The Nesting Habits of Musketeers
It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone with piloting experience can easily get to grips with a mecha suit within a few hours.
Dana was pretty sure that anyone who made that claim was full of enough shit to fill the mecha suit in question.
This was her life now. She was a Pigeon.
Not just any Pigeon. She was the newest recruit of Commandant Essart’s Elite Mecha Squad, charged with protecting and serving the inhabitants of the Luna Palais and surrounding city, within a giant plexiglass dome on the moon.
Dirtside guard duty.
She pretty much wanted to kill herself.
“Stop complaining,” said Aramis, who had (along with Athos and Porthos) sacrificed a rec shift to come and laugh at Dana’s attempts to put her new mecha suit through its paces in the Mecha Training Centre, in the outer city of Luna Palais. “At least it’s a job.”
“This is not flying,” Dana said between gritted teeth. “This is the very opposite of flying.”
She had worked in a mecha suit when she was fifteen, and saving every penny for flight hours. That had been quite fun. But that was space-going mecha, for a few hours at a time, performing basic repair work in zero-g on the outside of Gascon Station.
This was hell – she could barely walk, she couldn’t wrap her brain around what all the buttons were for, and once she got the hang of it, her main duties were going to be breaking up duels and drunken brawls between civilians and pilots on leave. Oh, with a side order of providing an extra layer of wall between the disgruntled masses and the royal family in the event of assassination attempts.
It was not flying.
“It’s a start,” s
aid Porthos, who had brought a laden picnic basket for them all to share while they amused themselves at Dana’s expense. “Not every baby pilot gets a private audience with the Regence before being rewarded with a plum position.”
“Guarding her Majesty’s moon is an honour,” agreed Athos, who had found the bottle of wine in the basket and wasn’t sharing it with anyone. “You impressed her.”
“If you’ve all quite finished making fun of me,” Dana snarled. “I only have the rest of this shift to master the controls before I go on duty. If you want to make sure I don’t accidentally set fire to Luna Palais or your precious Regence, a little help here, please?”
The mecha was a lot like flying a dart. It was plugged into her synapses, the helm of the metal body connected intimately to her brain. But while it was second nature to Dana to be ‘at one’ with her ship, gliding effortlessly through the depths of space for days and weeks at a time, it was remarkably difficult to deal with limbs. These large, throbbing metal appendages stuck out from her giant tin can of a mecha suit, and had a tendency to lash out in any direction if Dana let a stray thought distract her.
She knew how to do this. The theory was the same as flying a ship. And yet… ships didn’t have arms.
“I can’t,” she moaned. The mecha lowered its pigeon-grey head, and the large metal shoulders slumped. “It’s not too late to volunteer for a civilian transfer.”
Athos leaned towards her, rapping lightly on the visor of the mecha. “Kid,” he said in a stern voice. “That’s not how this works. The Regence likes you. She gave you this job as a dainty treat – as a reward for nearly stabbing Captain Jussac to death which I have to say is a box I have ticked at least three times in my life and never once been rewarded for… what was I saying?”
Aramis reached out and took the neck of the wine bottle off Athos. “He’s saying, Dana darling, that you can’t turn down her Majesty’s reward. It’s rare enough to be a favourite of hers. Believe us, you don’t want to make yourself her enemy. There wouldn’t be anything left of you but a pile of skin and sequins.”
“I always wondered what it would be like to pilot a mecha,” Porthos said thoughtfully, peering up at Dana. “Isn’t it even a little bit awesome?”
Dana flexed her fingers, and one of her power arms shot a sudden burst of flame at the surface of the training room, making all three Musketeers jump nearly out of their skins. The floor melted into a pile of slag, then patiently began to rebuild itself. “I suppose there are compensations,” Dana admitted.
Whenever she lay down to try to sleep in the tiny bunk allotted to her in the Squad barracks, Dana found herself thinking of the Regence, and the look on her face as she presented Dana with her “reward”.
“And perhaps, someday, the Musketeers,” she had purred.
The Regence was the most beautiful woman that Dana had ever seen. She was a sylph of a creature, all soft lines like a watercolour sketch of a weeping willow. Her lips had been painted gold to match her clinging gown and elaborate hair brooches.
Dana had previously considered Aramis to be the pinnacle of feminine grace and beauty, but Lalla-Louise Renard Royal, Regence of the Solar System, left Aramis in her perfumed dust.
Perhaps, someday, the Musketeers.
Hope could keep you going longer than anything else. Hope would have made this whole Mecha Pigeon nightmare almost tolerable, if it wasn’t for the fact that Dana could not sleep on the moon. She did not understand how anyone could.
Dear Mama,
It could be worse. I think if you say something often enough, you come to believe it. I didn’t come to Paris to waddle around inside a robot body, but as the weeks have passed… well, I’m almost glad of this strange reward that the Regence bestowed upon me.
After all, we had been caught duelling (the fisticuffs kind, as Athos would say, not the fuck-your-brain-up kind), and I might well have been turfed into a cell for a month or two, or given my marching orders from this sector of space.
Yes, I’m billeted on Luna Palais on a permanent basis, and if I think too hard about that word ‘permanent,’ I would scream at the walls. Dirtside is not where I want to be. But there is work for Pigeons up on Paris Satellite, and once the first probationary month passed, I started getting as many shifts Up There as Down Here.
Things that are good about living on the moon:
1. Leaving the moon on a regular basis.
2. Attending Zero-G TeamJoust matches at the Andromeda Bowl, especially with Porthos, who knows more about the game than any sane human being should, and has colour coded wigs to match the three different teams that she supports depending on which stream you’re following… you know what, I’m not even going to try to explain.
3. Earning credit, which means I can pay for my own meals instead of sponging off my friends – and they can sponge off me when they’re out of pocket (which seems to happen a lot, it’s amazing how easy it is to spend money on having a good time in Paris).
4. Commander Essart is way less scary than Amiral Treville, and even cracks a joke sometimes.
5. It’s not forever.
I don’t love my mecha suit the way I’m supposed to. It’s nothing like the relationship I’ve formed with even the most basic of practice ships. But it’s getting better. I didn’t accidentally set fire to anyone this week, which reduces the risk that I might do so to the Regence or the Prince Consort.
After my second month in the Mecha Squad, I was able to request shifts flying shuttles back and forth between Luna Palais and Paris Satellite to transport equipment and some of my fellow Pigeons. The shuttles are bulky and ugly just like the mecha suits, and I always want to throw up when I make moonfall, but flying a ship is better than anything else. Always and forever.
It’s not planetside, at least. The shifting green-brown, gold and blue orb that is the over-heated planet Honour looks pretty from up here, but I’m happy to keep my distance from the wretched place. Bad enough that I’m supposed to sleep on the moon. It’s been months and I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to adapt.
I used to manage an hour or two in barracks, when I was exhausted, but it wasn’t enough, and I was starting to worry it might get me seriously hurt, or worse. I don’t know if it was my stupid brain or my stupider body or some gravity shit that I was never going to figure out, but sleeping on the moon was just impossible.
Aramis noticed it first. “You look like shit,” she told me when we met for a drink not long after my first shuttle job to Paris. “Have another drink,” she added.
At that point, I was facing a black spiral inside my own head. “I don’t think I can,” I told her. Drink wasn’t going to help. Nothing helped.
“Sleep, then,” she urged me.
“If only.”
Then – I think I collapsed in the corner of the booth in the Abbey of St Germain some time later. Athos and Porthos had joined us by the time I woke up – the three of them ordered wine on my credit stud for hours, the bastards!
After that, one or other of them always insisted I crash in their Paris digs when my shift ended. And after Porthos had a word with one of her boyfriends who apparently works in Scheduling and Admin (sooo convenient I can’t even tell you), suddenly I get all these double shifts which happen to end on Paris Satellite instead of Luna Palais.
I have friends, crash space, and my credit is increasing at a slow but positive crawl. Life could be worse.
Thanks for not telling Papa about the Buttercup – and for being so understanding. I hated not telling you both from the start, but I most of all didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I know you’re steel-coated, like me. D’Artagnan women can handle anything.
Love, Dana.
Dear Mama,
What, really? You want to know more about these Musketeers I’m hanging out with? I thought I talked about them too much already!
Let’s start with Athos, the one I know least about. Aramis says he has a tragic past, but she never provided details – all three of th
em are loyal to the point of sheer stupidity, so that doesn’t surprise me.
Athos lives in two rooms beside a grimy bar on 4th Level, the only drinking hole in Paris that he refuses to patronise. I think that means it’s pretty bad.
He shares digs with his engie, Grimaud, who is much older than I expected, and the perfect roommate because she’s constantly plugged into headphones, and never talks.
“She doesn’t laugh at my jokes,” Athos said the first time I unfurled my trusty bedroll on his floor. “She also doesn’t chatter through my hangovers, or suggest I call my mother more than once a year. Love you, Grimaud!” he yelled in the direction of the tiny kitchenette.
She gave him the finger, which I took to mean she loves him too, but won’t put up with his bullshit.
Grimaud wears a star-scarf all the time but I don’t think she’s especially religious – I suspect the scarf was there for the same reason as the headphones – blocking out the universe. Or maybe blocking out Athos.
“The Sabres keep trying to steal her,” Athos told me once. “Best engie in Paris. But she likes my ship too much to let me go. There’s no artistry involved in keeping a fucking Sabre in the sky: they replace each part the second it fails.”
Grimaud’s children are convinced that Athos is secretly married to their mother, and they always send him brandy at New Year. I suggested this might be an elaborate assassination plot on their part, as everyone knows Athos is the Musketeer most likely to drink himself to death. There may be a formal betting pool on that one. Athos rejected the idea on the grounds that it wasn’t especially good brandy. I’m not convinced…
Apart from his cheap habits, his silent engie, his perverse sense of humour and his formerly ridiculous beard, Athos the New Aristocrat remains a mystery. I’ve learned not to try to match him drink for drink, not to talk to him at all when he gets a certain maudlin look on his face, and never to tease him about lovers, not even when Porthos does (she teases everyone about everything, and gets away with it somehow).
Musketeer Space Page 7