The grass made Dana’s feet itch through her boots. She was certain she would not enjoy Valour at all, if was anything like this faux-medieval cartoon. Her eyes longed for the plain flat grey walls that were everywhere, back home. Gascons didn’t need to pretend that grass was growing underfoot – they got on with living their lives in practical, everyday environments.
It wasn’t just the meadow. Paris Satellite was trying too hard to impress her, and Dana was over it.
Her would-be murderer, the first of three, lounged against a tall grey stone. Athos the Musketeer looked less like a pilot and more like a retro burlesque performer with those long, luxuriant blond locks and matching beard.
This was so much worse than the Moth pilot from Meung. How was that hair not a major safety hazard, with all the cables and plug-ins required for basic flight conditions? Dana glared at him as she approached.
“Ah, the girl from Gascon,” Athos said with a vague wave, not bothering to stir himself. “Forgive me for not rising to the occasion, but my latest medipatch still needs two minutes to complete its clever work. It’s not quite the hour, in any case, and I’m waiting for my seconds to arrive.”
There was an open bottle on the grass beside him. Was she expected to duel a drunk? Then again, perhaps it might give him an unfair advantage, if he were anaesthetised against the sharp flashburns caused by Duel. The medipatch was a worry. Much though Dana wanted to survive this encounter, she also didn’t want to end up with a dead Musketeer on her hands.
Dana drew close to him. “If your wound still troubles you, we can postpone…” she suggested.
“None of that, I have my honour to think of!” Athos sat up slightly, grimaced, and lay down again. “That wasn’t two minutes yet, was it?”
“Not even slightly,” she said, not wanting to smile, not at all. God help her if she started to like this fool.
“I hate waiting for things,” he grumbled.
His comment about seconds only just sank in. Dana glanced around. “You invited others, did you say?”
More people to witness her shame and potentially steal her identity studs if she lost consciousness. Marvellous.
“Of course. You need a second to duel. I always invite two, because my friends are terribly unreliable, and apt to get distracted.” Athos gave Dana a sharp look from beneath his lidded eyes. “You didn’t bring a second?”
“I don’t know anyone on Paris Satellite,” she confessed.
“No one at all?”
“I just got here. I met Amiral Treville…”
A look of mild alarm shot across Athos’ face. “Yes, well, don’t invite her. It’s illegal, you know, for us to have these little exchanges.”
“I’m new, not an idiot,” Dana snapped.
The medipatch made a chiming sound, and Athos leaped to his feet, making a few experimental lunges. “Excellent, all better now!” he exclaimed, then doubled over in a fit of pain. “Fuck it.”
“Sit down,” Dana ordered him, pushing him back down on to the Artifice grass. She flicked open his shirt and peered at the medipatch. “Where did you get this thing? Not from the official medibay.”
“I may have found it lying around somewhere.” Athos reached for the bottle, but Dana lifted it up quickly and moved it out of his reach. He made a low growling noise in the back of his throat.
“It’s dodgy, however you got it.” She tapped a few experimental codes into the flat patch. “If I put in the code for anti-inflammatory, it reads as a lung purge. There must be a crossed circuit.”
“Are you a medical professional, girl from Gascon?” Athos asked her, his face uncomfortably close as she fiddled further with the medipatch.
“No, but I’m good at rewiring bad tech to make it work,” Dana said, biting on her lip as she concentrated. “We have to be, out on the rim. Supply ships don’t come that often, and printing anything costs – four times as much – THERE.”
The medipatch chimed sweetly. “Skin and blood vessel repair continuing, complete in three minutes, twenty eight seconds,” it announced in a babyish voice.
“Three minutes,” groaned Athos, swooning again. “I might as well be dead.”
“You’re welcome,” said Dana, moving away from him so he could do up his own damned shirt. He had a tattoo of a sunflower there, not far from his wound, and she didn’t want to be caught staring at it.
His eyes brightened as he looked past her. “There are my seconds now. You’ll like them. Everyone likes them.”
Dana braced herself before she turned, only to discover that the sinking feeling in her gut was justified. Two female pilots – one tall and slender, one short and round, strolled along the grass towards them, with the bright white shape of the Luxembourg Church looming behind.
“Excellent,” said Athos. He waved cheerfully at his friends from where he remained lying on the grass. “Good news, chaps! We can get started as soon as I stop bleeding internally!”
Aramis and Porthos gave odd looks to Athos and then to Dana herself.
“A little early aren’t we?” Porthos drawled.
“Quite a lot early,” Aramis corrected.
“Unless -”
“You don’t mean to say -”
Athos jumped in now. “Why are you two behaving like a Love and Asteroids double act?”
Porthos broke first, laughing uproariously.
Aramis was more reserved. “Don’t tell me this is the same girl who crashed into you, Athos? And the clod who damaged your new belt, Pol? My, baby doll, three challenges in one day. You have been busy.” She eyed Dana up and down.
Dana bristled at that. “I challenged no one, Captain Aramis. I simply accepted…”
“You don’t mean you’re fighting all three of us?” Athos broke in.
“Not all at once,” Dana said impatiently. “I wasn’t expecting Captain Porthos for another hour, and Captain Aramis for two. It’s not my fault no one can keep to a schedule.”
“My feelings are hurt,” said Athos after a long moment. “Didn’t you think I’d give you a good enough challenge on my own?” His beard twitched.
Dana scowled, hating how they flustered her with their teasing. “Shall we get started? Or haven’t you finished cooking yet?”
Athos tapped his medipatch. “Almost done. Fighting three of us, without a second. Aramis my love, you might as well put your feet up, it’s hardly likely you’ll get your turn.”
“I can think of somewhere to put my feet,” Aramis said, nudging him with her boot. “Are you getting up, or is the kid going to have to fight you from there?” She frowned down at him. “You are mended, aren’t you?”
The medipatch beeped its approval.
“Up I come!” Athos whooped, leaping to his feet with a smoothness that belied his previous damage. He gave Aramis a smacking kiss on the mouth, then looked past her to Dana. “Good patch up, sweetness. I can see you’d be useful to have around if I weren’t honour bound to give you a pasting.”
“Such a gentleman,” said Porthos, arranging herself against one of the stone monoliths as if it were the most comfortable of armchairs. She reached around for Athos’ abandoned bottle, and took a swig. “What’s your name, little one?”
Dana was sick of being talked to like she was a child. “My name is Dana Amelie Alix D’Artagnan of Gascon Station,” she said between gritted teeth. “Can we get on with this?” She looked from one Musketeer to another, wondering which of them had brought the equipment with them. “Well? This is a duel isn’t it?”
“So it is,” said Athos in a low purr that reminded her he was more than the lazy buffoon he had pretended to be. He had to be more than that, to fly musket-class here in the centre of the solar system, even if his parents had bought him a posh accent. “En garde then, little one. Let’s see what you’re made of.”
His hand flicked against his belt, catching up the baton that swung there, and to Dana’s horror it flickered into life, revealing a long, silver streak of metal where empty air h
ad previously been.
A sword. A genuine sword. These crazy bastards didn’t take pilot drugs and throw imaginary spaceships at each other. They fought their duels with edged weapons. Which explained, of course, where Athos got that wound of his, and why Treville was so pissed off about it.
She was going to die here today, with a long stabby weapon impaled in her body.
It was impossible to guess what Paris Satellite was trying to tell her now.
6
The Wrong Sort of Duel
Dana stood in the Artifice meadow, staring down the tip of the Musketeer’s sword. Athos stared implacably back at her, waiting for… for what? For her to draw a sword of her own?
That was only one of the many things wrong with this scenario. “You duel with swords,” Dana said slowly. “That’s – why do you even have a sword?”
“It’s called a pilot’s slice,” Porthos contributed from where she was very comfortably seated on the artificial stone. She tossed her own baton from hand to hand. “Official issue – smartsteel. It shapes itself into any blade length or width that we require. Essential in emergencies. Designed to be our final option if we’re trapped in wreckage or need to hack our ship into a rudimentary shelter.”
“So of course you figured out a way to use it as a casual weapon against each other for kicks,” Dana said with heavy sarcasm.
“A hundred and one uses,” said Aramis with a warm smile of her own. She sat on the grass beside Porthos, unpinning her dark hair so that it fell loosely down her back. None of them were taking Dana remotely seriously.
She was a joke to them.
“I thought you meant Duel,” Dana exploded, looking back at Athos. He did not lower the sword pointing directly at her.
Athos glared at her along the thin line of metal. “You mean with pilot drugs and computers and seedy betting circles? Of course not. We couldn’t fly straight if we were doing that to ourselves every other day.” He paused, and reflected. “Well, these two couldn’t. They’re lightweights.”
“Whereas fighting each other with metal spikes, perfectly sane!” Dana snapped back. She shook her head at him, stepping back out of range. “I don’t understand you. Any of you. You have the best fucking job in the world, and you act like bored teenagers in a pantomime. Metal swords, and honour duels and – that beard!”
Athos looked almost hurt, and did lower the sword this time. “What’s wrong with my beard?”
“IT’S RIDICULOUS!” Dana howled. “Long hair worn out is against every military regulation there is – you can’t possibly say it’s not a flight hazard. But that beard of yours is taking the piss. It’s like a mad concoction of all the other beards that male pilots shave off every morning. It makes no sense at all. You make no sense at all!”
Athos tilted his head at her with an odd sort of smile. The other two weren’t nearly so restrained – Porthos laughed so hard she was nearly sick, and Aramis leaped up to smack Athos between the shoulders. “Some of us have been telling him that all year,” she declared, tugging at his locks. “But only when drunk. He never believes us.”
Athos stroked his long beard, frowning. “I grew it for a bet. Ten months I’ve had it, waiting for Amiral Treville to order me to shave it off. Someone spoiled the surprise ahead of time – thank you, Porthos…”
“Not guilty!” protested Porthos.
“…And so Treville refuses to acknowledge it, pretends she’s never even noticed I have a beard.” Athos sighed deeply, as if this was a deep tragedy to him. “I suppose she assumed I’d get bored of it soon enough, or that I’d have strangled myself with the ship cables by now.”
Dana frowned at him. “So you lost the bet?” She still wasn’t ruling out the possibility that these three were making fun of her.
“Of course not!” Athos said, completely serious. “I bet she wouldn’t crack. Let that be a lesson to you here in Paris. Never bet against Amiral Treville.” He looked Dana over, from her own regulation shaved head down to her sturdy and serviceable boots. “You don’t actually have a sword, do you,” he said finally. It was not a question.
Dana shook her head slowly. “That’s how you were wounded,” she muttered. “You let some rival stick a blade into you?”
“I tried to stop him,” he said as if that made it reasonable. “I’m not completely irresponsible. And I can’t help it if dangerous men with questionable politics flock to me. It’s a curse.”
“You could stop actively encourage them to murder you,” Porthos suggested.
Athos rolled his eyes at her. “The weight of past evidence suggests otherwise.”
“You’re all crazy,” Dana interrupted. “How do you even have time to do your jobs? I haven’t got a blade. I haven’t got a ship. I – washed out of the Musketeers. If this is your idea of honour, put down the swords and I’ll take you on with my bare hands.” She held herself in boxing stance, determined that she wasn’t going to leave this meadow without hitting at least one of them very hard in the face.
There was a brief pause in which the expressions of all three Musketeers barely changed. Athos raised his blade for a moment in something like a salute, and then flicked it back into the shape of a baton.
“Well then, D’Artagnan,” he said reasonably. “We’d better get you fixed up with a job, a blade and a ship before we try to kill you. It’s only sporting.”
They got drunk instead. Fiercely, companionably drunk. Somehow, Dana had ended up classified as a mate rather than an upstart, simply for her willingness to shout at Athos.
Surely making friends wasn’t this easy? It had never been so easy for her before. She might be more suspicious if she wasn’t far too drunk.
The bar was called the Abbey of St Germain, which meant the staff wore medieval monk costumes, a source of great amusement to all three Musketeers because of some joke lost in the mists of time.
Dana could not understand half of what they said to each other, but she liked that they never bothered to explain. It felt as if she was already one of them.
They had convinced Athos that the beard had to go. He resisted, until Dana pointed out that the joke had gone on so long, Treville would be more disturbed by its absence than its presence. Aramis seized upon this premise, and Porthos plied Athos with wine until he agreed to it.
“I’m sure this is an android’s job,” he said dourly, sitting lengthwise on the bench. Aramis sat astride the bench behind him, running the sonar clipper slowly and thoughtfully across the back of his head until only a thin layer of stubble remained.
“You don’t trust androids,” said Aramis, concentrating. A nearby bar android hovered, sucking up the hair that had fallen in snippets all over the polished floor.
“I don’t trust you,” Athos said.
“Liar,” said Aramis, turning his head so as to tidy up above his ears. Dana watched Aramis’ hands, gentle and competent as she played barber for her friend.
Athos’ eyes fixed thoughtfully upon Dana. “So what did you do, baby pilot?” he asked, not slurring nearly enough for a man on his third round of a golden elixir called Valorous Grain. “To earn three duels in one day.”
“It just sort of happened,” Dana admitted. She had given up trying to moderate her own drinking on the grounds that being sober would make it even harder to communicate with these reprobates. “Didn’t it?” she applied to Porthos and Aramis, who laughed at her.
“You offended my chest,” Athos said sternly. “My poor, wounded chest.”
“Your pride,” Dana corrected.
“And yours.”
She shrugged, slightly ashamed of herself. “Granted.”
“But my two lady friends here…”
“He only calls us ladies when he’s drunk,” Aramis put in.
“It’s the only time he remembers,” Porthos added.
Aramis elbowed Athos to make him turn around again, so she could start on his beard.
“These ladies are the pinnacle of grace and excellence and forgiveness,”
Athos said grandly. “How did you make enemies of them?”
Dana looked over at Porthos, who busily poured herself herself more wine. “I don’t need a reason,” Porthos said, looking as embarrassed as Dana felt. “I fight to fight.”
“We argued about fashion, I think?” said Dana cautiously. This at least was a joke she could share with Porthos, rather than watching as the Musketeers lobbed them over her head.
“Fashion, that was it.” Porthos winked at Dana. “Don’t tell him, pet. He’ll only make fun of us.”
Athos had moved on from them already. “But Aramis,” he said. “No one has ever quarrelled with Aramis… she is perfectly amiable in all ways.”
“You dickhead, you quarrel with me constantly,” said Aramis, buzzing away at the line of his chin.
“You have the patience of a saint,” Athos told her. “And yet…”
Aramis sighed. “And yet.” She gave Dana a wary look before returning to her task. “Our new young friend and I argued over a matter of theology,” she said. “You know me.”
“Too much religion,” said Athos fondly. “It always gets you into trouble.”
“If you lived a more devout life, your soul would thank you for it,” replied Aramis, kissing him on the top of his head.
A dark expression fell over Athos’ newly-shorn face for a moment. “The very opposite, I think,” he muttered.
An attractive “monk” cleared the empty bottle from the table and opened a fresh one for them. She tipped Aramis a wink as she did so, and managed to flash some leg despite the large brown robes.
“Oh,” said Athos, cheering up. “That sort of theology. Makes more sense.”
“I resent your implication,” said Aramis, but she was laughing.
“Can we stop talking about this?” begged Dana. She was still kicking herself about the photosilk.
Musketeer Space Page 5
