“Thank you.” Michelle turned back to Abram. “You have to accept this promotion.”
Abram had just raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll miss this,” Michelle said.
Abram had sighed again. “So will I.”
• • •
DINNER over, the three admirals left to do whatever admirals did in the lead-up to creating a new political union. Ean got himself another glass of tea and sat in relative peace, listening to the music of the lines. One hundred twenty-eight ships had come out of the void with the new eleven. With so many, he could only pick out the bad notes, but he took time to give special attention to his own eleven’s fleet. All lines, including the now-mended media ships, were fine. They made a symphony in his head of life, work, and the stars.
On the wall, separate screens showed reporters Coral Zabi and Sean Watanabe covering the event. Déjà vu. It wasn’t that long ago they’d done the same thing at the signing of the peace treaty.
The second meal shift arrived, mingling with the first, who stayed to watch the ratification ceremony.
Captain Wendell stopped at Ean’s table, hesitated when he realized who was sitting there, and almost walked away. Then he shrugged and sat down.
Wendell’s crew had fared the worst of anyone. They were from the Wallacian worlds, which had stayed with Gate Union. The union had put a bounty on their heads. If they were ever caught in Gate Union territory again, they’d be killed.
Yaolin and Lancia had both offered them citizenship. As yet they still hadn’t chosen one over the other although, according to Fergus—and Ean had no idea where he got his gossip from—at Michelle’s request Emperor Yu was already moving to decree they become honorary citizens of Lancia, whether they wanted it or not.
Ean nodded at Wendell, who nodded back.
“You’re different from what I expected,” Ean said, when the silence became too long and stilted.
Wendell could have learned his steak-eating techniques from Orsaya. He probably had. He swallowed his mouthful and raised an eyebrow but didn’t speak.
“Through the lines, you’re a cross between a—” Ean stopped. He had the command of Abram and some of the flair of Michelle. “Yet in real life, you’re—”
“Human,” Wendell suggested. “Ordinary.”
“Not ordinary.” Never that. “Different to the line view.”
Wendell took a long mouthful of tea. “I expect the lines take on the characteristics of the whole ship, not just one person. And I have a very good crew. Or I did have until you started killing them.”
Ouch. Ean was almost glad to see Fergus and Rossi making their way across. Not that he wanted to see Rossi ever again, but the New Alliance insisted all their linesmen be trained, and somehow Ean had become de facto line trainer, along with everything else. Sometimes he thought he’d be crushed under the weight of all he had to do now, but he wouldn’t change it. He wouldn’t change the lines.
All the lines surged with that thought.
Rossi staggered and collected himself. “Bastard,” he greeted Ean, and Ean wasn’t sure if he meant it for the inadvertent line surge or just meant it generally.
“This is it,” someone from another table said, and everyone fell silent as the screens focused on the representatives from the seventy worlds.
It was longer than the last ceremony because this time a representative from each world stepped up to press their palm against the treaty as signature.
Lancia was represented by Emperor Yu. Michelle was among the watching dignitaries, and the camera focused on her a lot. Tall and beautiful, flanked by two equally beautiful but millimeters shorter women who could only be her sisters and two handsome but centimeters taller men who had to be her brothers. Michelle looked tired, and Ean could see by the body language of the other four that they didn’t have a lot to do with each other or with their older sibling.
They watched the ceremony in silence.
Finally, the signatories stood together for the obligatory video at the end. Someone gave them glasses of sparkling wine. They raised their glasses.
Everyone in the dining hall raised their glasses, too. Ean raised his own empty tea glass.
“To the New Alliance,” Emperor Yu said.
Every voice in the dining room echoed it. “To the New Alliance.”
• • •
EAN was kept busy. Visiting ships, voice lessons, line training. Plus he had to do enough schmoozing of his own with the military who swarmed around him wanting to know about the ships.
It would have helped if Rigel’s lessons had been more about how to deal with the military rather than about working with civilians.
The three linesmen spent a lot of time together.
He was grateful for Fergus, who knew everything and everyone, or if he didn’t, made it seem like he did. Sometimes he was even grateful for the brooding presence of Jordan Rossi, who occasionally got exasperated enough to deflect some of their questions. Rossi was master of the barbed put-down.
Sometimes, too, Ean snooped too much through the lines—lines didn’t have boundaries like humans did—and it helped to have Rossi’s snarling, “Get out of my lines, bastard,” to pull him back to civil behavior.
Every evening at 19:00 hours he, Fergus, Rossi, Engineer Tai, the medic, and Captain Helmo met with the three admirals—Abram, Katida, and Orsaya—for a private speculation about the lines.
On the third night, they discussed the likelihood of two elevens being found in the same region of space.
“Coincidences like that don’t happen,” Abram said. “They came together, or one came looking for the other.”
“Or maybe they were simply routed, and this was the only place they could escape to,” Katida said.
They were, as Ahmed Gann had once said, a battered and bedamned group of ships.
“However they got here,” Abram said, “they came from somewhere. And they were fighting someone. We have to expect that one day, their own people will come looking for them. Or their enemies will.”
Orsaya blew out her breath. “I’m not sure I want to meet a force that can rout ships like that so effectively.”
Neither did Ean.
The initial Agreement of Worlds charter the member worlds had signed had made the ships the common property of a combined New Alliance fleet headed by Admirals Galenos, Orsaya, and Katida. Part of that, or so Katida had told Ean, was that no one wanted Lancia in charge, so they’d provided the equivalent of a committee to keep Abram in check.
Ean didn’t ask why they thought Abram would be there. There was never any question of that.
“And the other part?”
“There are obviously aliens at war out there. We’re your three best admirals to have in such a situation.” Katida had never boasted about her abilities, but she was sure of them. “A war like that could even turn Gate Union and the New Alliance into allies in the future.”
Or Markan could try to make a deal with some of the aliens.
What would the aliens think, when they finally did arrive, to realize that humans had collected their ships and refurbished them to suit themselves? Ean hoped they’d listen to reason.
The ships wanted humans. They’d told him so. They were looking for people to communicate with. Ean suspected a line’s definition of “people” was different from that of a human’s.
After that, Tai tried to describe line eleven. “It’s huge and it’s . . . You can feel it, and—”
“Hmm,” Abram said. “Now describe Ean.”
“Ean. He’s not—”
“When he sings. What does he sound like?”
“Oh, that.” Tai’s voice hushed. “He sounds like space, and people, and— Have you heard him?”
The one thing he seemed to have in common with the other lines was that no one could describe them. Ean sup
posed that was because no one had the words to describe what lines felt like. But it was embarrassing, all the same.
Katida cut in. “There’s a degree of ecstasy in both. One can only surmise both touch the same centers of the brain. Probably the nucleus accumbens.”
Her voice was clinical. She sounded as if she had thought about it a lot. Or talked to some brain specialists about it.
The medic nodded slowly. “Maybe.”
“Wonderful,” said Rossi. “Now we have crazy Ean Lambert with direct access to our brain,” but he didn’t deny it. Ean wished he had.
Abram nodded, as if what they were saying wasn’t unexpected. “So does Ean sound or feel like line eleven?”
Tai shook his head doubtfully.
“No,” Katida said.
“No,” Rossi said, a lot more explosively, as if it was sacrilege to even suggest it.
“So a different line then,” Abram said. “Line twelve?”
That joke was beyond repeating. Abram should have known better.
“Or a ten so badly damaged it feels like a different line,” Rossi said.
Ean wasn’t damaged. He was a certified ten, no matter what Rossi said, and he could mend the lines as well as Rossi did, even if he did it differently.
“Or the only ten who hasn’t been damaged by current line training,” Katida countered.
Captain Helmo, who hadn’t said a word until then, said, “I don’t think there is any doubt. He communicates with line eleven rather than just reacting to it the way the others do. The ship treats him like a different line.” He paused, and Rossi opened his mouth to argue with him. “My linesmen treat him like a different line.”
Rossi closed his mouth.
• • •
MICHELLE arrived back on ship at midnight.
Ean was in the central workroom, telling Abram about Fergus’s training. It was going well.
“So, officially a twelve,” Michelle said.
She hadn’t even been at the meeting. “Not you, too.”
Michelle looked exhausted. The skin under her eyes looked blue and bruised. She carried a black-and-gray uniform shirt over her arm. Ean stood up. Michelle and Abram would want to talk. Abram left in three weeks. His replacement would be here in four days, and they hadn’t seen much of each other since Abram had become an admiral.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Wait.” Michelle smiled, so that her dimples showed, and held up the shirt, then shook it out so that it was displayed for Abram and Ean. She’d added two extra bars on the pocket, below his name.
Ean buried his face in his hands.
“Try it on.” She tossed it over.
Ean caught the shirt automatically, then didn’t know what to do with it. A dignified exit was the best he could think of. “Good night.”
He took the shirt with him, for what else could he do with it?
Through the lines, he saw Michelle settle back on the couch with a sigh while Abram got them both tea.
He looked at the shirt clutched in his hands. He belonged here. Whether they mistakenly believed he was a twelve or whether he really was one, surely this shirt meant he’d made a place for himself here. With the lines.
The two fleets made a chorus in his head. Of course he belonged. He was of their line. He belonged with them. Why would he think otherwise?
Yes. He belonged with them. He dropped the shirt on the end of his bed and settled back to talk with his fellow lines. It was time he found out more about them.
“So,” he sang to line seven. “What exactly is it that you do?”
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