Bellona studied him as Zeni wound herself up into a fury over the Abilio crew’s rebellious ways and their latest infractions—this time, a refusal to attend the minimum daily training Zeni orchestrated in the cargo hold each morning.
Amilcare didn’t seem to be listening to Zeni. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention to anything. He was an independent man—all the Abilio people were. Bellona had learned to give them parameters and goals and let them get on with achieving them in their own way. He only appeared to be not paying attention right now. In his own way, he was absorbing everything, she was sure.
When Zeni fell silent at last, Amilcare lifted his square chin and looked at Bellona, perhaps challenging her to do something about it.
Only direct action would serve. Rhetoric did not move Amilcare and his teams.
Bellona launched herself at Amilcare, getting her hands around his neck and squeezing, before he could react.
No one else moved. Sang watched with interest and Khalil smiled. Zeni smothered a little shriek of shock and shuffled out of the way.
Amilcare struggled to fight Bellona off. She wound her leg around his and disrupted his balance, so his bodyweight was falling against her. To defend himself he would first have to shift his weight back to his own feet, which was impossible as long as she had a grip around his neck.
She squeezed.
Amilcare’s eyes seemed to protrude even more, growing wider. A whisper of breath wheezed out of him as he scrabbled weakly at her hands.
As soon as she could see his consciousness was fading, Bellona released him. She let him slide to the floor, lowering his weight so he landed softly, then propped him against the back of the navigation station.
His breath rasped, his head hanging, the thick black, waving locks shot with gray hanging limply.
Zeni cleared her throat. “You don’t intend to kill him, then?”
“Of course not,” Bellona replied. She crouched down in front of Amilcare. “Can you hear me?”
He nodded. He didn’t lift his head.
“I don’t have to guess what that felt like,” she said. “I’ve been exactly where you were a moment ago. Helpless, useless and defeated. It is not a good feeling, to know that someone else has complete control over you and your life.”
Amilcare breathed in, his shoulders and chest lifting, then out. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Watch me,” she told him and got to her feet again. “Look at me, Amilcare.”
He raised his chin. His eyes were bloodshot, a result of the strangling. Anger made the lines running down his cheeks deeper.
Bellona nodded. Without telegraphing her intentions, she turned and rammed into Sang, taking him off his feet. She grabbed his neck and squeezed, in the same way she had held Amilcare.
Sang reacted automatically, the actions ingrained in him. He slumped, letting his full weight sag in her hands. It was the unexpected thing to do but took a degree of discipline to overcome the normal human response to fight back and go limp, instead. The sudden, heavy weight dragged her hands down and loosened her grip on his neck.
It also pulled her down to the floor. She landed heavily on one hip, with a sharp exhalation as pain exploded there.
Sang’s hands landed flat on the floor next to her. He pushed off with them, thrusting up onto his feet, breaking her hold. His boot landed on her chest, just below her chin, pinning her down. He grew still, breathing hard.
Amilcare’s eyes had widened even more. Zeni’s, too.
Sang took away his foot and held out his hand. “I apologize,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”
“You acted exactly as you should,” Bellona said, using his hand to help get herself back onto her feet. Her hip throbbed. She looked down at Amilcare. “That is why I insist you train with Zeni every day. You will know, in your bones, that no one can control you the way I just did.”
Amilcare swallowed, then winced at the movement. “Karassians and Eriumans…they don’t fight. Not like that. They hang in space and kill us from there. Fancy stuff like that can’t stop a city killer.”
Khalil crossed his arms. “Listen to yourself, Amilcare. You just said the magic words.”
Amilcare blinked, frowning.
“You said ‘Karassians and Eriumans don’t fight like that’,” Khalil added.
Amilcare stared at him.
“They can’t fight like that because they don’t know how,” Khalil said. “You do…or you will, if you keep up the training.”
Amilcare’s frown increased, making the lines on his face shift.
“Learn to defend yourself,” Bellona told him. “It will serve you well, even if it is not proof against city killers. While you learn, I am working on neutralizing the city killers.”
“How?” Amilcare demanded.
She looked at Sang.
“Four minutes,” Sang replied.
“In four minutes, I will show you,” Bellona told Amilcare. “Stay on the bridge until then.”
Amilcare nodded.
Bellona went back to the oversized, overstuff Captain’s chair and sank into it.
Khalil followed her over. “You’re hurt,” he said softly, so no one could hear. He reached out to touch her hip.
She pushed his hand away. “I’m fine,” she said shortly.
Khalil let his hand drop.
Bellona rubbed her hip. “Why does it feel as if I’ve done that before?” she demanded.
“Done what?”
“Disciplined. Instructed. Given orders. Every time I do that, it feels like an echo of something I’ve done before. I can’t remember doing it. Yet it’s familiar.”
Khalil didn’t try to touch her again. “If the records we’re digging up from the Karassian databases are accurate—and there’s no reason to think they are not—then you have done it all before.”
“Xenia did that?” She was startled. “I thought she tore down civilizations and beat up helpless free-staters.”
“When she wasn’t doing that, she was a leader and strategist,” Khalil said. “It looks as though she planned most of the campaigns she led. She didn’t just follow orders. That’s why it may feel familiar to you, even though you don’t remember the details. It’s like muscle memory. Habit.”
Bellona shuddered. “I planned the defeat of Alkeides, then? It was all laid out in the file. A full military campaign, with strengths and weaknesses of the opposition and how to overcome them…I wrote that?”
Khalil’s gaze softened. “Xenia did that.”
“Am I ever going to remember doing it?”
He shook his head. “Those memories aren’t buried, Bella. They’re gone. Completely. You will never have to remember doing the things that Xenia did.”
“Except my body remembers for me,” she said, digging her fingers into her aching hip.
Khalil bent to look at her hip, his hands at his sides. “Sang did not spare you,” he said softly. “Perhaps the medical bay—”
“No,” she said firmly. “I was cruel, with Amilcare. I had to be, to make the point. I’ll accept the consequences, thank you.”
He straightened and his gaze met hers once more. “We should talk—”
The normal space alert chimed, echoing around the bridge. The same loud blare of notes would be repeated across the ship, ensuring everyone was braced for the emergence from null space into possibly hostile space.
The ship shuddered delicately as the null drive made the translation.
The permanent screens on the walls immediately came alive. Everyone turned to look at them, even Khalil, because Bellona was the only one who knew where they were and what was out there.
Hayes and Thecla, Fontana and the other Ledanians ran onto the bridge, too, looking around anxiously, trying to determine if there was a threat. Emergence from null space was always a high risk moment.
“Ship ahead!” Fontana cried, bending over the tactical table to study the dashboard. “Big ship!”
“Scanning and ide
ntifying!” Retha called out.
Bellona called up the scans and matched them to historical data. “Relax,” she told everyone. “The thing is harmless. Get a lens on it and you’ll see what I mean. Thecla?”
Thecla nodded and stepped behind the communications console and swiped at the controls.
The big center screen switched views from the default dead ahead view to an angle that encompassed the ship.
“What is that sound?” Vang said, looking up at the roof. “It sounds like rain.”
“Something hitting us,” Fontana said, frowning down at the scans. “I can’t see anything, though.”
“It’s debris,” Bellona told them. “Too small to hurt the ship. It’s inert and too small to register on the scans as a threat. Look.” She nodded toward the central screen again.
The ship on the screen looked quite small and was sitting in space, dead still. It was an elongated shape, with superstructures and outer attachments and weapons married to the original sleek shape.
“White ship. Karassian?” Hero said. “Where are we, anyway?”
Amilcare hauled himself to his feet, moving slowly, watching the screen.
Fontana looked at Bellona. “Do you want to save me from a directory search and just tell us who that is out there?”
“The ‘who’ is nobody,” she said. “That is the Karassian Homogeny Ship Aarens.”
“The cruiser?” Thecla said, startled.
“Shit,” Fontana breathed, staring at it. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”
Aideen stood by the corner of the console he was working on, looking up at the screen. “The Aarens was a casualty of the battle against the Republic, who opposed the possession of the Alkeides system,” she said, with the flat voice that said she was recalling and reciting data from records she had read elsewhere. “The space engines were destroyed, forcing the Aarens to abandon, all hands evacuated to other Homogeny ships.”
“Hayes, take manual control of the helm,” Bellona told the giant. “Pass us slowly by the carrier, so everyone can take a look.”
Hayes ambled over to the helm. He peered down at the controls, then ran his hand over them. The Alyard swung around. The lens focused on the Aarens tracked with the movement, keeping the ghost ship on the center of the screen. The Alyard moved forward slowly.
“We’re over Alkeides?” Retha asked.
“It’s a short hop behind us,” Bellona told him. “The Republic and the Homogeny fought here, before the Karassians went on to claim Alkeides.”
“Felis,” Aideen added. “That’s its name now.”
“Felis,” Bellona said in agreement.
“More of your bedtime reading?” Khalil asked quietly.
“Yes.” She studied the ship growing larger on the screen. The scorch marks and jagged fuselage surrounding the massive normal space engines were the only visible damage to the ship.
“It looks completely whole and untouched,” Vang said.
“If it is, then what debris is raining on us?” Fontana demanded.
“What is left of the Quattrocchi,” Bellona told them.
“The Republic destroyer,” Aideen added. “Xenia ordered the Aarens to play dead. When the destroyer came up from behind, they fired the engines at full throttle and did not engage the thrusters. The reactors on the Quattrocchi were incinerated by the exhaust and containment was breached. The explosion set off a chain reaction inside the ship, as heat-sensitive objects reacted to the sudden temperature spike. The Republic withdrew after that.”
“It melted,” Vang said, fascinated.
“From the inside,” Retha added.
“It exploded,” Thecla corrected them. “Nothing could contain the interior of a whole destroyer going critical.”
Khalil was studying Bellona with close attention.
“What?” she demanded.
“Why bring us here?” he asked. “Why dig up old memories like this?”
“Because something good can come out of Xenia’s doings.” She got to her feet and moved closer to the screen. Hayes was drifting the Alyard over the top of the cruiser.
“We can’t steal the Aarens, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Khalil said. “If the space engines could have been recovered, the Karassians would have reclaimed the ship long ago.”
“Exactly,” Bellona told him.
On the screen, the shadow of the Alyard fell across the cruiser’s hull. It was a tiny dark mark.
“Big ship,” Hayes said softly.
“Fucking huge,” Vang added. “I hadn’t realized how big they were.”
The Alyard’s shadow tracked along the length of the cruiser for long minutes as everyone stared at the dead vessel.
Khalil stirred. “What do you intend to do with it, then?” he asked.
“Claim it,” Bellona replied. “You’re all looking at that massive structure out there as a ship. Something that moves through space to get somewhere else. What I see, when I look at it, is a place to call home.”
Silence. All eyes were on the screen.
Sang smiled. “It will need a name,” he pointed out. “Aarens is a ship name. A Homogeny name.”
“Nothing Eriuman, either,” Hero said sharply.
“What do you call a place that used to be a ship, that is a new free state?” Khalil asked of everyone.
“Demosthenes,” Bellona told them.
No one looked away from the screen.
“Terran antiquity,” Aideen said. “It means ‘The strength of the people’.”
“Demos,” Fontana said, trying it out. “Demos, demon, demonic. Demosthenes.” He nodded, satisfied. “Sounds about right.”
Chapter Seven
Karassian Homogeny Ship Aarens, Alkeides System
It was chaotic in the ship that would become Demosthenes. The emergency evacuation had left clutter and abandoned objects everywhere. In the massive carrier hold, Connie was barely able to find room to land, among the hundreds of personal fighters and other junk littering the deck.
Thecla patted the side of the nearest fighter, which was only a little taller than Hayes, overjoyed. “A whole fleet of fighters just for us,” she breathed.
“Fighters with a tendency to blow up if you push the steering column the wrong way,” Fontana pointed out.
“I can fix that,” Thecla said, with complete assurance.
“Later,” Bellona told her. “There’s a lot of work ahead of us to make this place livable, first.”
For over a week, they stayed aboard the Alyard, even after coupling it up to the side of Demosthenes and generating a particle tunnel between the two ships. The Alyard was too big to land on the carrier deck, although Connie had made herself comfortable in a corner she claimed as her own.
During that week, they shuttled and then walked over to Demosthenes to work on clearing up the areas they needed the most. The first priority was restarting the fusion cores, to generate the energy they would need. Fontana was a competent jackleg engineer and power was restored within twelve hours.
After that, the priorities were less clear. “There are four kitchens and seven dining rooms,” Hero pointed out. “One of them just for the captain. Where do we start?”
“One dining room and one kitchen. Living quarters for everyone—assigned, to start,” Bellona told them. “Later, if someone finds different quarters more to their taste, they can clean them up for themselves. We clear out the bridge, the medbay and as much of the landing deck as we can.”
“You’re not going to dismantle the bridge?” Khalil asked.
“Not yet,” Bellona told him and everyone who was listening. “We might still want to move, one day. Thecla says the null generators could be made functional again.”
“The space engines are completely fried, though,” Thecla added.
“You have to be moving for the null engines to work,” Khalil pointed out.
“A meter a second is all that is needed,” Sang said.
“Positional thrusters will overcom
e inertia enough for that,” Thecla said. “Just,” she added. “And it might take a few minutes to get going, so it’s not something we can use for an emergency.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Bellona assured her.
The interior of Demosthenes rang with industry as the priority areas were cleared out and returned to a functioning state. Useful objects and abandoned possessions rounded up from these areas were added to a growing pile in one corner of the landing deck. Crew members—that Bellona insisted be called residents—could take from the pile anything they needed, or raid the unused areas of Demosthenes for more.
Bellona put Hero in charge of environmental ambience and told her to get rid of the stark white walls wherever possible. Hero immersed herself in color technology, converting the static walls to blush expressive and experimenting with colors and patterns. She also found a wide-mouthed assembler in the deeper bowels of Demosthenes and with Sang’s help, adjusted the programming so it would extrude textiles.
Bellona was made aware of the new capabilities of the assembler when she found drapes over a generated screen at one end of the dining room they were using. The screen showed a view of mountains and a window frame.
“It should be a lagoon,” Hayes complained, when he saw the view. “I like lagoons.”
No one pointed out to him that he liked lagoons only because his Ledan conditioning had taught him to like them.
After six days of hard but gratifying work, Bellona was satisfied enough to allow everyone to move over to Demosthenes from their cramped quarters on the Alyard. She found the expansive captain’s suite located behind the bridge almost uncomfortably roomy. She also heard comments about elbow room and breathing space and knew everyone else was enjoying the scale.
When Demosthenes was functioning at a basic level, she turned to the real priorities, leaving others to take care of the details of life in Demos.
She called Sang to her new quarters first. “I can’t ignore that this was a Karassian ship, originally,” she told him, as she punched at the controls on the big desk, trying to dismiss the screen that had spontaneously generated when Sang walked into the room. “We’re getting all their feeds—so many of them, it’s overwhelming. I can’t figure out how to turn them off so they don’t spring to life some time later.”
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