“Stand down? Really?” her grandmother said. Porsche Kirkpatrick Saint George raised one mailed hand and lifted her visor, and Serendipity saw a distorted echo of her own face with purple curls tumbling down over an arched eyebrow. “Looks like you need some help.”
“No,” Serendipity said, realizing how silly that sounded with the four of them struggling there. She turned her glare to Toren. His eyes flickered between Serendipity’s grandmother, Serendipity—and Serendipity’s fist. “I think we have it just about sorted.”
They eased down gently, Serendipity slowly releasing her grip on Toren’s head, her fist still poised. Then they were both standing, almost eye to eye, Toren still towering over her, but hunched, Artemyst supporting him as Leonid backed Serendipity up.
Sirius stepped between them and pushed them all just a bit farther apart.
“Who’s that?” Leonid murmured. “Your younger sister?”
“No,” Serendipity said. “My grandmother.”
“So,” Toren said, glancing between Serendipity and her grandmother, “so she—”
“She’s not going to interfere,” Serendipity said. Keeping her eyes locked on Toren, Serendipity raised her hand towards her grandmother. “Stay back. This is between us.”
“As you wish,” Porsche said.
“Alright,” Toren said, locking his gaze back on her. “What do you want?”
“First I want all my stuff back,” Serendipity said.
Toren blinked, shrugged. “Alright.”
“Then I want you to stop treating the girls like slaves,” Serendipity said. “We’re—”
“You think this a war between the sexes? You think the boys are the bad guys?” Toren said. “The girls are the ones who turned on us. They tried to make us into farmers. All it would have taken is one girl to break ranks, but no. They stuck together and cost us our ship!”
“One girl?” Serendipity said. She reached out and seized the hand of a little slip of a girl, hiding behind one of the bigger ones with a raptor headdress. “Like this one? What is she, eight? How old was she when it happened, five? You’re blaming her for not taking on an Amazon with a machine gun and coming over to your side?”
Toren stared, blinked. “No.”
“And why’d you lump me with the girls when you met me?” Serendipity said.
“I didn’t treat you like a girl,” Toren said. “I treated you like what you are. An enemy—”
“An enemy? Offering aid and medicine?” Serendipity said. “Armed with little more than a self-defense stick, when all of you were packing? No. Besides—I overheard you. The other boys asked you ‘what to do with the new girl’—and that’s when you took me prisoner.”
Serendipity flicked an ear at him, and Toren looked away.
“I know your history, Toren. The girls treated you like half a person. Thrown to the boys, you blended in to survive. You had to keep up your performance, had to make the point that no girl remained free. But that played well with the boys, so you put yourself on top—”
“It was never about me,” Toren said. “It’s about the survival of our species!”
“Mankind is alive and well, flourishing elsewhere, everywhere,” Serendipity said.
“With four legs, quills, and rainbow hair?” Toren said. “You’re not human anymore.”
Serendipity glared, but Porsche laughed and turned away, inspecting a plaque on the wall of Independence’s cargo control chamber. Serendipity’s cheeks flushed. This boy had called her a monster, and her grandmother was actually mocking her.
“I’m human enough to want you all to survive,” Serendipity said.
“You mean you’re human enough to want to take charge,” Toren said. “Okay, I treated you like dirt, but we’d just crash-landed because of those stupid—no, those mutinous girls. Someone had to get everyone moving and that someone was me—”
“It was me,” Leonid said, “before you took over by force.”
“It was that or let you keep shooting first and thinking later,” Toren said.
“I’m the eldest,” Leonid said. “I should have been in charge—”
“I’m the daughter of the Captain,” Andromeda said. “I should have been in charge—”
“You are all idiots. I’m the only one who saw what needed to be done,” Sirius said. Serendipity saw Toren look at him sharply, calculatingly. Sirius didn’t flinch. “You all would have been dead if it weren’t for me. I should have been in charge—”
«This is my home,» the elf boy said petulantly. «I should be in charge—»
Everything dissolved into talking over each other. Then Serendipity raised her voice.
“It’s my world.” Her voice boomed. “All of you are just standing on it.”
Norylan looked at her in shock. «But I . . . my parents . . . »
«Your parents never finished paying the loan on that landing cradle,» Serendipity snapped, immediately regretting it when she saw the haunted look on his face. «The debt’s been outstanding for ten thousand years. I bought the debt. I’m sorry, Norylan.»
“You bought it?” her grandmother said.
“You bought this world?” Toren said.
“I bought it,” Serendipity said. “I spent my inheritance on it. It’s my world—”
“Seren,” Porsche began.
“It’s my world,” Serendipity repeated, “and you, Toren, docked without permission.”
Toren’s jaw clenched.
“Following the Protocols, now? Is that what you want?” he said, seizing Andromeda and shoving her towards Serendipity. “Then execute her. She took over our ship and forced us to crash it. She committed mutiny in violation of the Protocols. The sentence is death—”
“Is that what your Mission Commander decided?” Serendipity said, looking at Leonid. “I studied your Protocols—the Frontier is the space next door. Isn’t the Frontiersman rule that the Captain doesn’t have power of life or death? Only the Commander?”
Toren shifted. “Yes . . . but . . . we don’t have a Commander.”
“Then pick one—but until then, an execution isn’t going to happen,” Serendipity said, pulling Andromeda back and angling her body to shield her. “I’m granting Andromeda asylum—and as for the rest of you, you’re under my rule as refugees without transport.”
“So it’s a monarchy now?” Toren said, lip curling.
“No, but this place became my responsibility when I bought that mortgage,” she said. “You’re holding unauthorized prisoners in Dresanian territory, and until we have a government here, I am the Dresan-Murran Alliance. I order you: release the girls from captivity!”
Toren straightened. “No. If you want to claim authority, then you owe us. We were a ship in distress. You had a Beacon. You owe ships access to a working landing cradle. We followed your Beacon, found no place to land—and now our ship is wrecked!”
Now Serendipity’s jaw clenched. He was right. He was right . . . and it was possible.
“Right enough,” she said. “But I’ve surveyed this ship. It will fly again. I promise you.”
Toren laughed.
“Don’t mock me,” she said. “It may take years, but we can do it.”
“With what equipment?” Toren said. “You don’t have a spacedock—”
“I will,” Serendipity said. “I didn’t come here on a lark. I came here to start a port. We’ll have to shutter it when the black sun rises, but this will be a great port. The first thing we do is flush the landing cradle. Then I charge every ship that comes here a tax—”
Toren laughed again, shaking his head.
“What?” Serendipity said. “It’s my world, and I’m in charge—”
“Tell that to the indigenous population,” her grandmother said.
“What indigenous population?” Serendipity said.
“The spores,” Porsche said. “Surely you saw the biosphere wake after the tensor shock?”
Serendipity felt her face flush with heat. “Oh . . . shit.”
“The spores,” Sirius said. “Not the gasbags themselves, but their spores? What?”
“That’s why this world was left fallow,” Porsche said. “Right now you’re seeing the first flowers of the summer of the black sun, but once the thundermounts are fully grown, this world will be swarming with intelligent spores, all competing with each other—”
“It wasn’t in any of the assessments,” Serendipity said. “There’s no indication—”
“A couple of days of research should have picked up that—oh, dashpat. Because of the war a lot of that was classified,” her grandmother said. “Still, you should have sent a probe or a survey team. What, did you rely on the prospectus of the investors that sold you the debt?”
Serendipity’s face flushed. “But . . . it was from Gretgramama Clarice—”
“My mother?” Porsche said, with a bitter laugh. “And you believed her?”
“I did do my own research,” Serendipity said, voice sounding unpleasantly petulant in her own ears. “And anything else, it-it was her duty to disclose!”
“A disclosure play?” Porsche said. “Oh, good luck collecting on that with my mother—”
“So,” Sirius said, “I take it you’re from what they call a dysfunctional family?”
“Oh, shattap!” Serendipity said, her voice cracking, embarrassingly, into the clan’s English Enclave accent.
“Never mind,” Leonid said. “What about your deal? Did you squander your inheritance?”
“No,” Serendipity said firmly. “Even a patch of a world can hold a port. Right enough, Gramama, you’ve informed me of a possible indigenous claim, thanks, I’ll have to do a Contact assessment before we do extensive development. You can be my First Contact Engineer—”
“I can’t do it,” her grandmother said. “And we can’t stay either—we’ve got to evacuate now. Tensor pressure is worsening the deeper the black hole plunges into the system. We have to teleport back within the hour, or we’ll be completely cut off for months—”
“The hell with that,” Toren said decisively. “We spent centuries fleeing the Alliance and we’re not going crawling back to them now with no ship, no money, no status—”
“What?” Serendipity said. “You—you can’t just stay—”
“Spacers, scatter,” Toren ordered, and half the children bolted, just like that. “Back to camp. Tell them to break it down and prepare to move to the new site—”
“Wait,” Serendipity said, seizing his arm. “You can’t just go—”
Toren glared at her. “I thought you wanted to treat us like equals,” he said, nodding at her hand on his arm. She let go, and he shifted. “We’re your new indigenous population now. We’ll make our way here. We may not have a ship, but no spores or centaur will stop us—”
“This ship will fly again,” Serendipity said. “I swear it.”
Toren stared at her like she was crazy, then laughed and walked out of the control room.
—————
There were eight of them now: Serendipity, Leonid and Sirius; Andromeda and Dijo, Beetle and the elf-monkey Norylan—and the elephant in the room, Serendipity’s scythe-wielding, heavily armored grandmother, staring at her grumpily with folded arms.
“That . . . went well,” Serendipity said.
“You humiliated him, Seren,” her grandmother said. “What did you expect—”
“Dashpat, can’t you let me have this?” Serendipity said. “We need to go get him—”
“No,” Porsche said, oddly hurried and agitated, counting the crew. “Six, seven. Wait, where’s Tianyu—oh, Seren, I’m so sorry. At least we have his memories on file. Right enough; seven. I think I can manage seven on the return jump, though it will be difficult—”
“Seven?” Serendipity said. “There are . . . how many crew on Independence?”
“Fifty-four,” Leonid said. Then his face fell. “Fifty-three.”
“We have to leave them,” her grandmother said. “I can’t track them all down—”
“What?” Serendipity said. “Of course you can! I know what you’re capable of! And we can’t just leave them. You saw Toren! He’s more baggage than you travel with, and he’s going to build his own little dictatorship here, with boy warriors and an army of girls as slaves—”
“We can worry about that later, Seren,” Porsche said. “The tensor pressure is increasing. That black hole’s like a giant thumb pressed down on spacetime. In a matter of hours, any jump will be impossible, for at least fifteen to sixteen months. We have to go, right now—”
“Can’t you send a ship?” Serendipity said. “A rescue pod—”
“Seren, I’m here now to rescue you,” Porsche said. “And it can’t wait—”
“Why?” Serendipity said. “I almost had him. Why can’t you come back when—”
“I’m pregnant,” her grandmother said, extending her hand back to her barrel—and Serendipity’s jaw dropped. Now she could see extra armor, on top of the usual, and a bulge. “This is my last long jump for a while. I shouldn’t even have come—”
“Why . . .” Serendipity began. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Your grandfather and I are planning to raise David on Harmony,” Porsche said. “It’s better to raise a child in one gravity well. The whole Project is moving. Site Omega’s being shut down. I’ve been so busy, and we’ve been having so much fun, I just didn’t have the heart—”
But at “fun,” Serendipity flinched—and her grandmother caught it.
“Or at least, I thought we were having fun,” Porsche said. She stared up into the vault of cargo control. “I thought I was worried about you being left alone, but really I was worried about me, leaving. Dashpat, I’ve gone and done it again, made everything about me—”
“You think?” Serendipity said, unable to hide the bitterness.
Porsche winced. “Sistine and Amin have to be gone so much, I thought I’d fill in—”
“You’re not my parents,” Serendipity said. “They’re supposed to be there for me—”
“What if they were dead? Should I abandon you because ‘they’ were supposed to deal with you?” her grandmother said. “No. Don’t waste a second of your life hurting yourself just because someone else ‘should’ do something. Accept the situation and make the best of it—”
“So I’ve a summer to myself before college, and you try to smother me?”
“Smother you?” Porsche said, shocked. “I just wanted you to succeed—”
“By besting me at everything I ever tried to do?” Serendipity said, hating the petulance in her voice. “You have no idea how impossibly good you are at everything. Or, maybe, you do, at least physically. I’ve heard you: ‘ninety-ninth percentile on all axes,’ isn’t that the phrase? I—”
But her grandmother raised her hand.
“I’m sorry, Seren. I have been smothering you. I just hated to leave you alone.”
Serendipity felt a sudden pang. What if her grandmother had just left her alone?
“You didn’t have to make it either-or,” she said. “I—I could have gone with you—”
“But when you just heard I was going, you secretly felt relieved, didn’t you?” Porsche said. “You ran halfway across the galaxy, Seren. You don’t want to follow me to Harmony.”
“No . . . no I don’t,” Serendipity said. “I’m . . . I’m sorry, Gramama.”
“It’s right enough,” her grandmother said, biting her lip the moment she said it. “You’re not the first daughter I’ve had who needed space to grow up.”
&nb
sp; Serendipity twitched. Then she stepped toward her grandmother, arms out, but paused at the razor edges of her bladed armor. Porsche tilted her head, and the armadillo blades flattened, leaving the surface of her armor a battered mirror when Serendipity stepped into her hug.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated lamely. “Forget what he said, Gramama. We’re not a dysfunctional family. We’re just . . . different.”
“It’s just me and my mom and my dad that had the falling out,” Porsche said. “All my brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren . . . I couldn’t be more proud of you.”
Then she shifted. “Still . . . it’s time for us to go.”
—————
Serendipity stared at her. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I can’t just leave them—”
“And we won’t go,” Leonid said. “We can’t abandon Independence!”
“It doesn’t seem to be much of a ship anymore,” Porsche said.
“We . . . we can rebuild it,” Leonid said, looking to Serendipity for reassurance. “She even said we could. And—and even if we can’t, I won’t abandon our crew.”
“We can’t take them all,” Porsche said. “In fifteen months, we can send a ship—”
“And leave Toren in charge?” Serendipity said. “You didn’t hear him earlier. The way he was talking . . . we’d be sentencing the girls to fifteen months of gang rape.”
“She’s right,” Leonid said. “I won’t go. I won’t leave the girls back at camp to Toren.”
“Thank you,” Andromeda said, and Leonid squeezed her hand.
“You shouldn’t leave the boys to Toren either,” Serendipity said, looking away from that touch. “They’re right at the age that they’re most vulnerable to indoctrination into soldiering. He’ll lure them on with the promise of power and booty, and they won’t want to turn back.”
“I won’t let that happen,” Leonid said.
“It may not be that easy,” Serendipity said. “Militia structures can develop quickly—”
“You really think only you can save us?” Sirius said, stepping to stand with Leonid and Andromeda. He folded his arms. “You have a home to go to, and a way to get there. Take it while you can. We’ve got a lot of challenges, but we can take care of ourselves.”
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