Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  The Coreyal sped beneath them, silver from their light, away into lucid dark and the upcurve of distance. The ache in her hip and shoulder, and one on her hand from hitting Dayva, all throbbed dully. She needed food and was starting to shudder with that need; the Rage used carbs like air.

  “You a clone, Virtue?”

  She blinked at Dayva. “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.” She frowned, her voice going stiff. “I’m quite sure.”

  Dayva chewed her lip. “Maybe that kid knows he’s a clone, Virtue, maybe not. And even if he does—”

  “Right, he didn’t know about the tracer,” she said, finally thinking it through. “If Horatio meant me to kill him, he wouldn’t have told him much. James is a smart set. He’d have tracked this whole encounter differently if he’d known. He’d have run the second he was off Piranesi.”

  She picked up the shiral, turned it once in her fingers; it had gone cloudy opal again. She heaved it overhand with a grunt, didn’t listen for the splash. Maybe a brakfish would eat it.

  They went back for him the next day.

  It was full day. The light and heat bouncing back and forth between the water and station sky made it brutal hot at mid-cycle. You couldn’t drink Coreyal water: the first and most frequent warning a tourist got.

  His skin was burned, lips swollen slightly; he sat in the bottom of the skiff, knees up, arms loosely clasping them, head down, shirt off, wet and draped over him. He looked up only slowly when Virtue caught the skiff with a hook. She tossed him a water flask and leaned above him on the Artace’s deck. Dayva was over by comp, listening.

  “You think of a better answer yet?” She watched him remember what she meant, and the words echoed in her own head.

  “And you don’t know why he might have chosen you—someone I don’t know?”

  “Horatio just said—I might do . . . It was free passage off Piranesi,” he said. “I’d never have afforded it on my own.”

  “When I get back,” she said, “I want a better reason than that . . . ”

  Now he drank some of the water, squinting up at her through swollen lids. He said slowly, “I knew. About you and my . . . predecessor. Not that Horatio ever told me. Remember Famke?”

  Virtue nodded.

  “Well,” he coughed, drank another sip of water, wiped his face with trembling fingers. “She told me, some of it. So, I knew. And I knew your brother wasn’t sending me for any reason that would make you happy. But . . . I never let on . . . how much I just wanted to escape. I was a very obedient clone.” The bitterness sounded almost mild.

  “You could have just run, not brought me his message at all.”

  He cast another look up at her. “I was curious. About you. The story Famke told me . . . ”

  “You didn’t know about the tracer?”

  He shook his head, swallowed. “No. Void—I’d never have . . . No.”

  Virtue flicked her fingers against the hull. “How long have you been, Tao-Jin James?”

  “Ten years.”

  “What’s your cell age?”

  He touched a blister on his lower lip, gave her an opaque look. “Twenty-five.”

  “Does my brother have a hold on you?”

  “Besides money, power, and registry title?”

  “Title’s not good off Piranesi.”

  “Then, no.” He blinked, then grinned with cracked lips. “Not that I know of, anyway.”

  Virtue nodded and reached a hand down to him. “Come aboard, then. And welcome.”

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s story is set in her Diving Universe. Tory Sabin, captain of the Geneva, is a professional warrior who serves the Fleet. The Fleet has been around for thousands of years—always moving forward, never looking (or going) back.

  The Application of Hope

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  1.

  “Requesting support. The Ivoire, just outside of Ukhanda’s orbit. Need warships.”

  The calmness in the request caught Captain Tory Sabin’s ear before the name of the ship registered. She had stopped on the bridge just briefly, on her way to a dinner she had sponsored for her support staff. She wasn’t dressed like a captain. She had decided to stay out of her uniform and wear an actual dress for a change.

  At least she had on practical shoes.

  But she felt odd as she hurried across the nearly-empty bridge, covered in perfume, her black hair curled on the top of her head, her grandmother’s antique rivets-and-washers bracelet jingling on her left wrist. She grabbed the arm of the captain’s chair, but didn’t sit down.

  Only three people stood on the bridge—the skeleton crew, all good folks, all gazing upwards as if the voice of Jonathon “Coop” Cooper, captain of the Ivoire, were speaking from the ceiling.

  Then Lieutenant Perry Graham, a man whose reddish-blond hair and complexion made him look continually embarrassed, leaned forward. He tapped the console in front of him, so that he could bring up the Ivoire’s location.

  It came up in a two-D image, partly because of the distance, and partly because Graham—the consummate professional—knew that Sabin preferred her long-distance views flat rather than in three dimensions. The best members of any bridge crew learned how to accommodate their captain’s quirks as well as her strengths.

  She moved closer to the wall screen displaying the image. The ship, marked in shining gold (the default setting for the entire Fleet), showed up in small relief, traveling quickly. Like Coop had said, the Ivoire wasn’t too far from the planet Ukhanda. Whatever was causing the crisis wasn’t readily apparent from this distant view, but Sabin could tell just from Coop’s voice that he had been under attack.

  Coop was one of those men, one of those captains, who didn’t ask for help if he could avoid it. Much as she teased him about this, she knew she fell in that category as well.

  Sabin didn’t have to tell Graham to zoom in. He did, more than once, until the Ivoire looked huge. Around it were at least a dozen other ships, so small and feathery that they almost seemed like errors in the image.

  “What the hell?” said Second Lieutenant Megan Phan. She was tiny and thin, her angular face creased with a frown. She probably hadn’t even realized that she had spoken out loud.

  Sabin doubted the other two had realized it either. Phan’s words probably echoed their thoughts. In all her years in the Fleet, Sabin had never seen ships like that.

  On screen, they looked too small to do any damage. If they were firing on the Ivoire, it wasn’t obvious. But their position suggested an attack, and a rather vicious one.

  “Let Captain Cooper know we’re on the way,” Sabin said to Graham.

  “Yes, sir,” Graham said, and sent the word.

  The Geneva’s current rotation put it in the front line of defense for the Fleet, but the Fleet was in a respite period, which was why Sabin only had a skeleton crew on board. The Fleet had rendezvoused near an unoccupied moon. Six hundred of the Fleet’s ships were engaged in maintenance, meetings, and vacations, all on a rotating schedule.

  She’d been in dozens of respite periods like this one, and she’d never needed more than a few officers on the bridge.

  Until now.

  “Captain Cooper sends his thanks,” Graham said, even though everyone on the bridge knew that Coop had done no such thing. Someone on his staff had. If Coop had done so, he would have spoken on all channels, just like he had a moment ago.

  “We need other front line check-in,” Sabin said. Technically, she wasn’t the senior captain for all the front line ships on this shift, but no one took front line seriously during a respite period. Everyone had dinners and relaxation scheduled. Most bridges, even in the front line ships, were minimally staffed.

  The only difference between a minimal staff in a front line ship and the other ships during a respite period was that the front line ships had top-notch crews manning the bridge, in case something did go wrong.

  “Already done, sir,” Graham said. “The
captains are reporting to their bridges.”

  “What about our crew?” she asked. She felt almost embarrassed to ask. Graham was one of her most efficient crew members and she knew he had most likely pinged the bridge crew.

  But she had to make sure—even in this respite period—that the crew was following protocol.

  “Notified, and on the way,” Graham said.

  “Good, thank you.” She sat in the captain’s chair, and winced as the bow on the dress’ back dug into her spine. A bow. What had she been thinking?

  She knew what. The dress’ tasteful blue fabric and demur front had caught her eye. But she had loved that bow for its suggestion of girlishness, something she wasn’t now and would never be.

  “Let’s hear the check-in,” she said.

  Graham put the captains’ responses overhead. In addition to the arrivals—all twenty of them—the captains seemed to believe it important to engage in a discussion of Coop’s motives. A request for support was the lowest level request a captain could issue. Normally, a captain in distress asked for a battalion of a particular type, not a general support request of warships.

  So it was curious, but it spoke more to Coop’s conservatism than to the situation at hand. Besides, no one seemed to acknowledge that the Ivoire had gone to Ukhanda at the request of one of its nineteen cultures. The Fleet had agreed to broker a peace deal between the Xenth and the Quurzod, but didn’t know enough about either to do a creditable job.

  The Ivoire, which had the best linguists in the Fleet, had gone into Quurzod territory to learn more about that culture in advance of the actual peace conference three months away. The Alta, the Fleet’s flagship, apparently believed that the Fleet knew enough about the Xenth to do more limited preparation.

  It had only been a month since the Ivoire had sent a team to the Quurzod. Apparently things had not gone well.

  She shifted, the dress’ shiny fabric squeaking against the chair’s seat. She wasn’t sure she had ever sat in her chair without wearing regulation clothing—at least, since she had become captain. As a little girl, she used to sit in her father’s captain’s chair on the Sikkerhet. This dress made her feel that young and that out of place.

  Stupid chatter from the other captains surrounded her. They were still speculating on what Coop wanted and whether or not this was a legitimate request. They hadn’t made the transition from respite to action. And there was another issue. Coop’s message was low-key.

  Only people who knew him well understood that he was worried.

  “Open a channel,” she said, unable to take the chatter any longer.

  Graham nodded. Then he signaled her.

  “Coop’s asked for support,” Sabin said in her most commanding voice. “Stop arguing about why, and haul your asses out there.”

  The chatter stopped immediately. She had a hunch she knew how the other captains had reacted: a straightening of the shoulders, a nod, a deep breath as they all gathered themselves, a momentary flush of embarrassment as they realized they had conducted themselves like people on vacation instead of captains on a mission.

  She didn’t like respite periods, so she didn’t understand the vacation mindset. But a lot of these captains believed in relaxation, and believed the crap that the civilians on the various ships peddled, that a rested crew was a healthy crew.

  She believed a practiced crew was an efficient crew.

  She followed regulations, gave her staff the proper amount of time off, and no more.

  Because this respite period was so long—months, really, as the Fleet prepared for the work around Ukhanda—she had her first officer, Charlie Wilmot, continually run drills. Each department had to run drills as well.

  Her crew was going to remain the most disciplined crew in the Fleet. If a member of the crew complained, that crew member got transferred. Often, she’d trade that crew member for someone else on a different ship. She’d stolen more good officers from other ships than any other captain. The good officers, she believed, were the ones who wanted to work, not party at every opportunity.

  Wilmot had just arrived on the bridge. His uniform looked crisp and sharp. He glanced at her dress and his lips turned upward just enough to register as a smile to anyone who knew him. Fortunately, no one else on the bridge watched him.

  “The Ivoire’s in trouble,” she said to him. “Graham will catch you up.”

  Wilmot nodded, then walked to his station not too far from hers. As he did, he looked up at the screen, frowned, and glanced at her again. But he didn’t ask anything, because she had already told him to figure out what was happening from Graham.

  As if Graham knew. No one on the bridge did, and it was clear that no one on the other front line ships did either.

  She tapped the right arm of her chair, bringing up the captain’s holographic console. She’d designed this so she didn’t have to move to another part of the bridge to get information.

  Before she’d followed the captain’s training route, she’d started in engineering. While she loved design, she hated the lack of control the engineering department had. Plus, she was a captain’s daughter, and she had Ideas from the start on the way a well-run ship worked.

  Most of the ships she had served on were not well run. So she had gone back to school, and had risen through the ranks until she got the Geneva. That was fifteen years ago. Even though she occasionally designed upgrades for her baby—upgrades that other engineers eventually brought to their ships—she hadn’t really looked back.

  She preferred being in charge.

  Which was why, as the five other members of her team took their places on the bridge, she looked up those small, feather-shaped ships herself.

  The ships weren’t in the database, no matter how she searched for them. She searched by the ships’ image, the design, and the area’s history. She also searched through the images of Ukhandan ships, not that there were uniform ships on a planet that housed so many different cultures. Not all nineteen cultures were space-faring, but five of them were, according to the database, and those five had no ships like this.

  Small, efficient, and capable of swarming.

  She wanted to contact Coop, but she would wait. He would let her—and the other front line ships—know if something had changed.

  She almost closed the console, when something caught her eye. She had images of the ships for five cultures, but the information before her contradicted itself. Five cultures had ships, but six cultures had been gone into the space around Ukhanda.

  The sixth culture, the Quurzod, were the ones that the Ivoire had gone to Ukhanda to study before the peace talks.

  Her stomach clenched.

  Clearly, something had gone very, very wrong.

  “How far out are we?” Sabin asked Lieutenant Ernestine Alvarez, who was running navigation.

  “Even at top speed, we’re half a day away,” Alvarez said.

  Too close to use the anacapa drive with any accuracy. The anacapa was the thing that enabled the Fleet to negotiate long distances. It put a ship in foldspace, and then the ship would reappear at set coordinates. The problem was that the ship would reappear blind, and in a battle situation, that wasn’t optimum.

  Plus, time worked differently in foldspace, and while the best crews could predict the time differences down to the second, sometimes even the work of the best crews went haywire. Engineers claimed the problem was with sections of foldspace itself; scientists believed the problem was with certain anacapa drives.

  Even with centuries of study and upgrades, neither group could come to a complete agreement. In Sabin’s opinion, the Fleet had forever messed with something it did not understand when it started using the anacapa drive.

  She wasn’t going to use it on something like this. Nor was she going to order the rest of the front line to do so—not unless Coop sent out a major distress signal, which he had not yet done.

  She wasn’t going to explain herself to her crew, but if she had to, she would tell them what
she always told them—that portion of the truth that they needed to know. It was the same truth every time they considered using the anacapa drive. The anacapa put a strain on the ship and on the crew that Sabin couldn’t quite quantify. She hated using it for that very reason, just like most of the captains did.

  Which was probably why Coop hadn’t used his drive yet. The anacapa also worked as a shield. The ship would jump to foldspace for a moment, and then return to its original coordinates. Depending on how the anacapa was programmed, the return could happen seconds later or days later, without much time passing on the ship at all.

  “Another twenty-five ships have just left Ukhanda’s orbit,” Alvarez said.

  “That settles where the ships are from, at least,” Graham said.

  “It was pretty obvious that the ships were from Ukhanda,” Phan said. “The question is which culture controls them.”

  That was the question. It would have an impact on everything: how the front line ships would proceed, how they would fight back, if they would do more than simply rescue the Ivoire. If they needed to rescue the Ivoire. Coop might get away on his own.

  Sabin hoped Coop would get away on his own.

  She asked Graham, “Have you sent a message to the Alta, asking if they know which culture owns these ships? Because we need to get some diplomats on the mission here, to ensure we don’t make things worse.”

  The Alta was twice as large as all of the other ships in the Fleet, including the warships, and it housed the Fleet’s government when that government was in session.

  “I notified them as soon as we got Captain Cooper’s message,” Graham said. “I trust that they’re monitoring the Ivoire as well.”

  Sabin was about to remind Graham that one should never “trust” someone else to do anything important, when Wilmot snapped, “Don’t make assumptions, Lieutenant.”

  He sounded a bit harsh, even for him. Sabin glanced at him. That small smile had disappeared, and she saw, for the first time, how tired he looked. She wondered what he’d been doing during respite, besides running drills.