by Moshe Ben-Or
He’d sent two line squadrons with that preening fag. And a carrier task group and extra scouts, and a light cruiser detachment. Now all that was left were three lousy, battered frigates!
“Surprise attack”, “previously unknown general solution...”
Worthless excuses!
That imbecile had gotten himself slaughtered by an inferior force, and his scouts had missed the Jews’ fleet!
The admiral’s claws scored the arm of his chair.
He’d ignored it all. The Jews’ counterattack. The force he’d left to control Haven’s space forced from orbit by massed surface to space fires. Ninth Army surrounded in Kiryas Yoel. A surprise assault launched in the middle of a howling snowstorm breaching Seventeenth Army’s defenses. Armored columns pushed forward through the gaping holes cutting two entire field armies to pieces in a massive battle of maneuver. The entirety of Theater Force Haven recoiling under the Havenite sledgehammer. Retreat quickly turning to rout as three hundred million troops shorn of the orbital support that had heretofore won their battles for them fled pell-mell toward the false safety of the planetary pole, pursued relentlessly by a vengeful avalanche of men and machines. Tens of millions dead. The enemy taking no prisoners. The whole surface campaign on Haven hanging by a thread.
None of it had mattered. The Jews’ fleet was going to Hadassah. All of it. One final, decisive battle. It didn’t matter what happened on the surface of Haven, or anywhere else.
He’d made a record transit. Twenty-four days from Haven to Hadassah. He’d stopped every major operation on every front of the Jihad. He’d amassed the largest single force the Ahmirrat had ever seen.
And now...
Surprised! Tricked! Evil, filthy monkeys! Sons of apes and pigs! While he’d been rushing to Hadassah, they’d snuck back to Haven, and massacred the force he’d left behind! Their whole damned navy was there right now! Almost every single ship his scouts had detected twenty-eight days ago, supposedly on its way to Hadassah, was now sitting in orbit of Haven, thumbing its nose at him!
He would tear out their throats! He would put out their eyes! He would rip off their balls as they begged for mercy, and stuff them down their throats! Allakh burn them all with eternal hellfire!!!
“The Fleet will set out for Haven at once!” commanded the admiral.
“But saydikh,” stuttered his executive officer, “The ships… The crews...”
“I DO NOT CARE FOR SHIPS AND CREWS!!!” roared the Zin Admiral of the Fleet, smashing his fist on the arm of his chair as he leapt to his feet in towering rage. “If the Jews are at Haven, then the Fleet will meet them at Haven! If the Jews go to Loki, then the Fleet will meet them at Loki! If the Jews go to the bottom Jahannam, then the Fleet will meet them at the bottom of Jahannam, do I make myself clear?!!!
“The Fleet will set course for Haven this instant! If I hear one more word from you or anyone else about broken widgets and tired crewmen, I will see their head on a spike!”
* * *
Patty Sleager paced back and forth across the cave floor. This rainy season was starting off with a bang, she thought, listening to the roll of thunder outside. All the leaves had gotten blown right off the trees up around here over the past couple-three days. It had been raining almost non-stop for a week. The forest floor was half swamp. The creeks had turned to raging torrents. All the roads out there were mud, the Yellow Rats were huddling in their garrisons, and even the Zin wouldn’t stick their noses outside their perimeter berms.
Operations were at a standstill, at least until the worst of the weather lifted. Truth be told, Yosi was already talking about winding things down for the winter, settling into a steady drumbeat of IED and rocket attacks while the Army reset and retrained for spring. She had nothing to do but think about the bind they were in.
She hated it, she thought. She’d hated it for years. Simply hated. All of it. The alien white skin. The foreign blond hair. The wrong-shaped, wrong-colored gray eyes. She hated her body. It was the thing that had always made her not fit here.
Skin too light, eyes too round, nose too straight, hair the wrong color, face the wrong shape. Alien. Putablanca. Liva. No business being in charge of anything on this world. No business being here, in the first place.
It didn’t matter how much she tried to fit in. Her accent didn’t matter. Her education, her connections, even her money. None of it mattered. They would close their eyes and tolerate her, if they were feeling generous. If they were being civilized, and polite. But pour a little tequila into them, and the truth would out, every time: Go back where you came from, bitch!
She’d tried hiding it, in high school. It didn’t work. They didn’t need to look at her name. Artificially-colored hair didn’t look anything but artificial, to anyone with a decent pair of net glasses. Dyed skin didn’t look anything but dyed. A fake tan just looked fake. A real tan was worse. Try hard as she could, all she did was burn and peel. At best she’d get a shade darker, for a week or two, and then it would all go away and she’d be back to square one.
Even DNA treatments didn’t work. She’d bought the best ones. Her father could afford it. They would make her sick for a week, and still get her nowhere. Just sickly-looking dishwasher-brown hair, as if she hadn’t bothered to wash for a year, and a light brown tan that would go away in a couple-three months. That was the best her body could produce, even when spurred. She simply didn’t have the genes.
But there was another way to fit in, for the likes of her. She’d always known about it, as far back as she could remember.
By the time he’d struck paydirt beyond his wildest dreams, William Sleager hadn’t paid the least bit of attention to his daughter for years. The bottomless bottle of rotgut gin in the cargo net of his bunk had been far more interesting to that man than the little girl who’d once shared his cabin. But Captain Sleager’s daughter had long ago procured for herself a superior replacement. She got what she wanted, and so did the ship’s engineer. It had been a happy bargain.
For years Patty had wondered what exactly had gone on in the background, and in her father’s mind. How close had William Sleager come to the not-so-fine line between flophouse and homeless shelter? How did a man thrown off three ships in the space of six months suddenly manage to come up with a new navigator’s contract, and to what precisely, beyond the standard written provisions, had he agreed? What exactly had gone on between the morning when a grimy little girl looking for a drunk amid a mess of dockside saloons had bumped into a nine-year-old with narrow, ice-cold, grownup eyes and a grim, squarish man in a grease-stained, dark green overall, and the next evening, when that man had come to see an uncharacteristically sober and clean down-and-out loser in his pathetic cubicle at the aptly-named Last Chance Hotel?
Even at four months short of six, Patty Sleager had instantly understood the significance when the stranger’s offer of a free bowl of dandan soup had turned into a request to solve some puzzles, and then into a cheek swab. When she saw the same stranger coming through the stairwell door the next day, she’d run off at once to wash her face, and make tea.
The Lucky Lady’s AI had never permitted William Sleager free access to surveillance data from every area of the goldfish bowl that was a ship in space, not as captain and certainly not as navigator. But he had no need of it anyway. He’d known from the beginning what went on in the cabin Kang Jian shared with the two girls who introduced themselves to stationers as his daughters on the rare occasions when the Lucky Lady came in from the Fringe to touch the edge of the Core. Without doubt, William Sleager had known in advance what his own daughter would be expected to do in that cabin while he was up on the bridge, or drinking himself into a haze in his bunk, off-shift.
Patty Sleager had come to the engineer’s quarters, for the first time, about twelve hours after she’d boarded the ship. Her father had told her to wash well, dress nicely and do what she was told. Then he’d turned away, and gone up to the bridge.
He would never say anythi
ng more, or ever again. For years on end going forward, she would barely ever see him.
Did William Sleager really permit Kang Jian to run the autodoc when the time came to install her contraceptive implant because the engineer had done it for the second time only three months before? Or did he do it so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge knowing that, by the time his six-year-old daughter had laughingly clambered up onto that exam table without bothering with gowns, she hadn’t possessed an intact hymen for four months? Had asking been involved at all, or had William Sleager been told how things would go, from the very beginning?
The Fringe was a hard world, where life was cheap and jump fuel was expensive, where every semblance of law and order grew quite directly out of the barrel of a gun, where those who couldn’t pay for their oxygen swiftly stopped breathing, and where a man’s faculty of murder was at least equal in importance to his capacity for enterprise. An independent fringe runner was a self-contained universe unto itself, sovereign territory by customary law even when docked at a station.
Kang Jian was a dangerous man, and a fifty-five-percent partner in the ship. He’d been born into the world of the Fringe, not thrust into it, like William Sleager, by the accumulation of misfortune. By the time William Sleager had signed on as navigator in a clanless crew of outcasts, the engineer had been with the Lucky Lady for almost thirty-five years.
Kang Jian never drank anything stronger than tea. He neither gambled nor used drugs. He saved every centicredit he made. In his seventy-two years, he’d killed at least two dozen times, just with his own hand.
Kang Jian slept with a gun under his pillow, he barely ever left the ship and he never went anywhere unarmed, or without a spider secbot at his back. Even when he was in the shower, he had his weapons close at hand, and the well-armed secbot would stand guard inside the cabin, carefully out of any probable lines of fire for anyone who somehow managed to breach the armored door.
For that matter, for all her tender age and delicate appearance, Kang Ling had been no worse a shot already, than that secbot. She never left Kang Jian’s side, waking or sleeping. She guarded his control pod alongside the robot when he was on shift. She trusted not a single living soul. Her heart contained nary a smidgen of mercy. No fox was ever as vicious. No dog was ever as loyal. And her laser, too, was always close at hand.
The Lucky Lady’s engineer never raised his voice at his girls, and he almost never hit them. Should William Sleager have stopped a kilojoule pulse train in some barf-spattered dive, his daughter wouldn’t have ended up sitting in a shelter cage like a stray dog, waiting for a date with a needle and a waste processor unless someone picked her up within fourteen standard days.
Because the likes of William Sleager had no kin and clan, and went hopping from ship to ship and station to outpost without ever discarding their Core Worlds notions, the raven-maned, almond-eyed girl William Sleager knew as Ling and the red-haired, porcelain-skinned one he knew as Ai had once ended up in such cages. But his own daughter never would. Not as long as she spent most of her time in the engineer’s cabin, with the man who’d come along, and caused Ling and Ai to live.
The high-end Imperial-made birth control implant in Patty’s womb screened out pathogens and eliminated cancer cells while it went about its primary job. In her entire life she’d never had a yeast or urinary tract infection, much less a venereal disease. She never would, as long as that implant stayed inside her. If she’d possessed the access codes to it, she would have no need to ever remove it at all. Unlike the cheap ones, it could switch modes. With the correct credentials, she would need no separate medical exam to determine if she could safely deliver a baby. She would require no prenatal care. She would never develop an ectopic pregnancy or placenta previa. She would be in no danger of a breech birth. The little machine would even prevent premature labor.
But the age-dependent recording and alerting functions the thing was originally built with had been burned right out of the firmware. Her sister Ling had once told Patty that when the Lucky Lady’s new navigator gave the implant to the engineer to install, those firmware modifications had already been made.
William Sleager had said nothing. He had acknowledged nothing. Ling had been the one to help morph his daughter’s ship suit into the pretty red silk dress on the morning when she’d simply packed up and moved. But, just the evening before, her father had given her the garnet hair clips Ling would use to do her hair that morning. A birthday present.
He knew what the carbuncle paired fish on those golden clips stood for, what kind of dress they went with, and why they were the customary birthday gift for girls aged five to seven. He’d lived out on the Fringe long enough.
William Sleager had permitted a thing to happen, thought Patty, but he had neither accepted its existence nor understood its nature. William Sleager had remained a creature of the Core. But his daughter had been born a creature of the Fringe.
By the time she’d climbed up onto that autodoc table, the fleshy tunnel the AI would use to access her womb had already been shaped to fit the man behind the control console, as perfectly and snugly as a custom-made glove. The off-beige walls of that man’s cabin had already come to mean Home and Safety and Love. The sensations and the little rituals that came with the regular filling of her tunnel from entrance to cervix, the taste and smell and feel of the man who filled it, had become as comforting and warming as the spicy algae stews he made for lunch. She had already come to long for it and seek it. It had already become her chief source of pride, her ever-flowing fountain of joy; the most important thing she shared with her sisters.
By the time she’d climbed up onto that table, William Sleager’s daughter had already loved Kang Jian and Ling and Ai with all the power of her heart. And she’d already had nothing but contempt in that heart for the man who called himself her father.
By the time of the Lucky Lady’s final expedition, Kang Ai had maintained the cargo chutes and docking bay all on her own, and run them when needed. Her sister had managed the fuel and shield matter connectors, worked on the shield generator and helped out with the drives. When things got rough, Ling would run the damage control bots and boarding defenses. Ai would man the starboard gun, and Captain Sleager’s daughter would man the port. A good year before, Ling had finally stopped introducing herself on Core stations as Kang Jian’s daughter. On her last Core station visitors’ pass she had added four years to her thirteen, but that pass had called her what Fringe station passes had called her ever since the day when the engineer had pulled her out of the cage at the homeless shelter, almost seven years before – Kang-furen Ling. Six months after they found the Golden Age outpost, on the way back to Civilization, Ling would give birth to her husband’s first son. She would spend the rest of the trip beaming with pride at her achievement.
Captain Sleager’s daughter had all but forgotten the name “Patricia” by then. For four years, she’d lived in the engineer’s cabin. For four years, Fringe station visitor’s passes had called her “Kang-furen Bo.” Her old name was not a thing she’d wanted to remember. There had never been a Clan Sleager, and there never would be. But Clan Kang was ancient and proud. Through her womb and through the wombs of her sisters, that which had once been laid low would rise once again. By the mercy of the Goddess and through her Sacred Labor, her family would grow numerous, and strong.
Kang Bo had already learned the fundamentals of helmsmanship. She could pilot a pinnace. She was a decent shot with a laser. The arts of astral and subspace navigation were beginning to reveal their secrets to her. Her gunnery skills had already helped to send one would-be pirate slinking off to lick his wounds, and turn another into floating wreckage. She’d helped Ling to pick a name for her coming baby, and she’d spent half the voyage picking names for the next, and for Ai’s and for her own. Every third night it was her turn to fall asleep in her beloved’s arms, and she’d eagerly looked forward to it every evening. It was the last time in her life she remembered being happy.
<
br /> Kang Jian bought a brand-new ship, free and clear, when they’d all struck it rich. A Spartan-built Argo-class general purpose freighter with hundred-kilo guns and rocket-capable cargo chutes. A warship, as far as the Fringe was concerned.
Every fringe runner’s dream. Almost as good as a Haven Clipper in a fight. Same guns. Same shells and rockets, if you could afford them. A good bit slower, but with heavier armor and better shields. Lots shorter legs but a bit more cargo space, an engine a lot less efficient but utterly undiscriminating about fuel quality, and every system 100% compatible with generic, commonly available parts and supplies.
As long as you didn’t run out of jump fuel, you could go anywhere in an Argo. With the right set of fabricators and an in-situ resource utilization kit aboard, the crew could produce up to seventy percent of everything the ship needed simply by co-orbiting with a convenient space rock for a while. It might take a few weeks, or a month or two, but if your engineer had a working brain and your crew wasn’t all thumbs, you could repair pretty much anything that could conceivably break, or get broken in a fight that didn’t outright wreck the ship and kill everyone in the first place. Every vital system could be kept running almost indefinitely without ever putting into port. The necessary provisions would eat about a quarter of your cargo space, but almost everyone on the Fringe went for them regardless. Her husband had certainly been no exception.
Nothing but a clipper was hotter than an Argo, but who could honestly afford to run a clipper out on the Fringe? Just the high-end fuel alone would eat your profits right up, never mind all the fancy custom parts and supplies. And in-situ resources with a clipper? Don’t even think about that!
Underneath the modular armor layer, an Argo was mostly stainless steel, basic ceramics, simple polymers, a bit of titanium and a whole lot of plain old buckytube fiber. With a clipper, you needed special alloy precursors just so your fancy-schmancy onboard self-healing systems could fix a little hole in the hull. An Argo could see one off anyway, if it came to a one-on-one. Argos were tough. The League’s assault transports were customized Argos.