by Marko Kloos
“Agreed,” Solveig said quickly. “On all points.”
Falk laughed again, flashing his perfect teeth.
“See? We didn’t have to save this for tonight after all. I hope you’re still planning to come home on time, though. We could have dinner and look at rental properties together.”
Solveig felt as if she’d had several strong drinks in the canteen with Berg that were just now starting to take effect. There had to be calculation and intent behind her father’s sudden and profound change in attitude, but for all her knowledge of his personality, she couldn’t begin to figure out his motivation right now.
“Of course. I’ll be home at six,” she said. “Dinner sounds good.”
“See you then. Love you,” Falk said.
“I love you, too,” she replied, and he terminated the link.
Solveig stared at the blank screen for a few moments.
One careful step at a time, she thought. But I’ll be damned if I know what the hells just happened.
CHAPTER 17
ADEN
Zephyr wasn’t a large ship, but with only the four of them on board, it felt unnaturally empty.
The feeling was enhanced by the way they were spread out after they had undocked and set a course for the transfer lane to Rhodia. Maya was in the pilot station at the very top of the maneuvering deck. Tess was all the way at the bottom of the ship in her engineering shop, and Decker split her time between the command couch on the maneuvering deck and the airlock deck whenever she wasn’t in her berth. With Henry still in stasis at the medical center on Adrasteia, that left only Aden. Normally, he’d spend much of his time down on the galley deck, keeping Tristan company and learning how to set up a mise en place in a starship galley where things could go to zero g unexpectedly. But Tristan was gone, and the galley deck was cold and silent now, bereft of the smell of chopped herbs or the sound of Tristan’s idle humming as he was turning packaged meals into something that didn’t offend his culinary sensibilities. That left the medical and sanitary deck, and Aden spent some time there to clear his mind while taking inventory of medpacks and dry soap. Tristan had been the ship’s medic as well, but he had never spent much time on the medical deck, so the surroundings didn’t remind Aden of his friend everywhere he turned. The grief that had abated just a little when they had seen Tristan off to his resting place together seemed to be amplified again by being back on Zephyr without him.
He was in the middle of refilling a dispenser in the shower capsule when the ship intercom hummed.
“Everyone, can I see you in the galley?” Decker’s voice said.
Aden finished his task of topping off the sanitation dispenser and stowed the refill bladder in its place in the storage locker next to the shower capsule. After a few months, double-checking locks and latches had become almost second nature, and he was pleased that his muscle memory now had him perform the motions without conscious input from his brain. He wasn’t a spacer yet, but he was slowly turning into one, and much of his progress was due to Tristan’s tutelage.
He went over to the ladderwell and climbed the two decks to the galley. Decker and Maya were already sitting at the crew table. There was a green away bag in the middle of the table, and Aden’s stomach did a little lurch when he recognized it as Tristan’s. He walked over to the table and took his usual chair. After a few moments, Tess came up from below as well and joined them.
“I sent the message to that Rhody captain,” Decker said. Her blonde hair was tied back in a tight, precise braid that looked like she had spent a lot of time getting just right. “I asked him to meet with us to lead him to the people who gave us that nuke. But I want to let you all have your final say on this before we get the reply.”
“Four votes,” Maya said. “What if we deadlock? Henry can’t vote from his stasis chamber.”
“We all have an equal share in this now. But if you vote to risk the ship, you’re not just voting to risk your part of it. So we’ll have to remain unanimous on this. And hope that Henry forgives us for going over his head when he wakes up.”
“If we’re still around at that point,” Tess said.
“If we’re not, then Henry gets the consortium money by default. Even without his share of the ship in the mix, he won’t have to look for a new crew for a long time,” Decker said.
“If we go through with this, we will be at the mercy of the Rhodies. If they decide to not follow along with our plan, we won’t be able to do anything about it. They can detain us and impound the ship.”
“We can outrun anything in their navy,” Maya said. “If we meet up with them and they start talking about handcuffs, we can just throttle up and get the hells out.”
Decker nodded.
“We could get away in the short term, no doubt. But right now the Rhodies are still giving us the benefit of the doubt because we volunteered that nuke. If they want to arrest us and we go evasive, we’ll never be able to cross into Rhodian space again. And they’ll probably put us on an Alliance-wide arrest bulletin. There’ll be nowhere left to go, no place where we can just fill up and lay low.”
“They won’t,” Tess said. “There’s no risk in this for them. We’re going to offer ourselves as bait. All they have to do is come and collect. They’re still trying to find whoever dropped that nuke on their planet. If they figure the odds on this are higher than zero, they’ll jump on it. I say we go.”
“I agree,” Aden said. He wasn’t wild about the idea of depending on the goodwill of the Rhodian military again, hoping that the bigger stakes would be enough to outweigh his parole violation and legal status if the Rhodies made an issue of them. But staying on Oceana meant that he’d have to talk to the police about Tristan’s death eventually, and he was certain the attendant background check would result in his arrest and deportation.
“So do I. Three yes votes, then,” Decker said. She looked at Maya. “What about you?”
“Ah, hells.” Maya leaned back and shoved her hands into the pockets of her shipboard overalls. “We’ve taken it this far. No sense in sitting around and waiting for other people to make things happen.”
“Can we run everything with four people?” Aden asked.
“We’re short our first officer. And we don’t have a medic anymore. But we have a pilot. We have our engineer. And we have a comms specialist,” Decker replied.
They sat in silence for a few heartbeats.
“Well,” Tess said. “If we’re going to run off to do dumb things again, I should make sure that the Point Defense System works the way it should.”
“What about that?” Maya asked and nodded at the bag on the table.
Decker let out a slow breath.
“Those are the things Tristan had with him when he went planetside. The police released them to me. He didn’t have any next of kin. And I didn’t want to throw it away. Or put it in some storage locker that nobody’s ever going to claim. It’s all that’s left of him.”
Aden stood up and reached for the bag. He pulled it across the table toward him and unzipped it. Inside, there were a few pieces of clothing, the lightweight linen shirts Tristan liked to wear when he was on leave. A jacket was rolled up and tucked into the space next to the shirts. Aden touched it with his fingertips and found that it was made of soft suede. There were a few little containers of various cooking ingredients—herbs and spices, all neatly labeled. Underneath the spice bottles, Aden saw something familiar. He reached into the bag and pulled out a few of the spices to get at the object, then pulled it out of the bag. It was Tristan’s knife roll, his beloved cooking knives that he had taken everywhere even if he hadn’t planned on using them. The others looked at the knife roll in his hands in utter silence.
Aden gathered the spice and herb containers and walked over to the galley counter. He put the containers down one by one until they were lined up in a tidy row. Then he put the knife roll down, opened it, and spread it out on the counter. All of Tristan’s knives were there, from the large
all-purpose blade to the little paring knife. The water stone Tristan had used to keep them sharp was in its little pouch in one corner of the knife roll.
“He said it took him twenty years to get his cooking knives exactly how he wanted them,” Aden said. He looked over at the table to see that the others were all watching him.
It felt wrong to see the knife roll out on the counter without smelling any cooking preparations. Aden opened one of the herb containers and shook out a little bit of basil. The scent of the herb made him smile despite the sadness he felt.
He’ll never use these again, he thought.
“I think these should stay in the galley,” he said. “It feels like they belong here.”
“He kind of made you his understudy, didn’t he?” Decker said. “I think you were in the galley with him most of the time when there was cooking going on.”
“He showed me how to do a few things,” Aden said. “He said there were ten things everyone should know how to cook. I think we got up to number seven on that list.”
Decker nodded at the knife roll.
“You’re their custodian now. Nobody else knows how to sharpen them anyway. And if you can cook seven things, that’s six or seven more than the rest of us know.”
Aden picked up the basil leaves and stuffed them back into their container. Their smell remained faintly in the air in the galley.
“All right,” he said. “Just don’t expect me to be up to Tristan’s level in six months, please.”
Maya shook her head and smiled dryly.
“If we’re still around in six months, I’ll gladly put up with an over-seasoned dinner here and there, Aden.”
Decker’s comtab beeped, and she waved her hand to make a screen and read the incoming message. She sat up straight, and all the levity disappeared from her face. They watched silently as she read the text on her screen.
“There’s our response from the Rhody commander,” she said finally. “They’re giving us rendezvous coordinates to meet up and consider our request for assistance.”
“That’s not a yes,” Tess said.
“But it isn’t a no either,” Decker replied. “They want to see just how willing we are to prove that we’re the good guys.”
She looked at what was left of her crew at the moment.
“We’re sticking our necks out here. But we’re doing it to bring the hurt down on the people who did this to Tristan and Henry. If any of you have second thoughts, now’s the time to mention those.”
“Not me,” Tess said.
Aden ran his fingertips over the handles of Tristan’s knives. He looked at Decker and shook his head.
“Well, let’s go and burn some fuel, then,” Maya said.
“I want to get there before the Rhodians so we can see what’s coming our way. They are trying to gauge how sincere we are. They can’t blame us for doing the same,” Decker said. “Lay in a course and let’s all strap in for a fifteen-g burn.”
“That’s burning some fuel, all right,” Maya chuckled.
The rendezvous point the Rhodian commander had transmitted to them was nowhere near any current transfer lane. It was out in deep space between Rhodia and Oceana, many hours away from any commercial traffic. Three hours into their speed run, they reached the halfway point of their plotted trajectory, and Maya flipped the ship around for the deceleration burn.
“If we really don’t like what we see, there’s no way they can stop us from leaving,” Tess said a little while after they flipped. The maneuvering deck had been mostly silent for the journey, with everyone lost in their own thoughts or engaging in busywork for distraction. The absence of Tristan and Henry in their usual couches to Aden’s left and right seemed to suppress any levity or casual conversation. To Aden, it was as if the mood on the ship had been calibrated for the six people who had been on board when they docked at Oceana, and now the ship was running out of balance, like a turbine that had shed several blades, still functioning but operating well below its normal efficiency level.
“Are you sure about that?” Aden asked. “What if we get there and they have four or five ships converging on us from different directions?”
“They don’t have a ship in their fleet that can match our acceleration,” she said, her voice laced with mild contempt. “They can’t catch and board us.”
“They have guns and missiles,” Aden reminded her. “They can just go ‘Halt or I’ll shoot.’ What’s the acceleration on a ship-to-ship missile?”
“A hundred, a hundred and twenty g,” Maya supplied from the flight station above their heads. “Some of the new shit may be able to pull two hundred or more.”
Aden looked at Tess and shrugged. She just shook her head and rolled her eyes slightly.
“If they threaten to shoot us, and if they’re not bluffing, then they have to get one of their missiles past our PDS. While we’re hauling ass at fifteen g plus. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But they’d have to be damn close, get damn lucky, or put a fuck ton of missiles into space in a really short amount of time.”
“And if they manage all of those at once, it’s just not meant to be our fucking day,” Maya said.
Maya had calculated the deceleration burn to end a few thousand kilometers early so they could flip the ship around and point the bow sensors at the rendezvous area ahead of their arrival. When they turned around and cut the drive to coast the rest of the way without a thermal plume to mark their position on infrared, everyone on the maneuvering deck tensed while the passive sensors looked at the space in front of them.
“No visual contacts. Nothing on thermal. Nothing on infrared. No radio chatter,” Tess declared. “Looks like we beat them by a lot.”
“That works for me,” Decker said. “Get us right into the center of the coordinate and hold station with cold thrusters. Let’s see what comes our way. Passive gear only.”
“You got it,” Maya said.
“Tess, make sure that we can go from zero to haul ass in a second if we have to.”
“Affirmative,” Tess replied. “Reactor is on standby for full output. I’ve got my fingers on the power slider. Just give the word, and we are going to launch like a missile.”
“Let’s hope I didn’t misjudge that commander,” Decker said. “He seemed like a level-headed man. If he wanted to lock us up, he had plenty of opportunity when we were on his ship and their marines were on ours. But we are here now. We’ll have to dance to whatever tune he is bringing.”
Aden hadn’t been nervous about this meeting when they had made the decision. He’d only been mildly anxious when they had arrived at the coordinates the Rhodian commander had sent. But as the hours ticked by while they were floating in the darkness, his mind spent the idle time going through all the ways in which this plan could end badly, and the tightness he had started to feel around his chest seemed to clamp down just a little harder with every passing minute. He knew his crewmates well enough by now to tell that they were getting increasingly tense as well the longer they were waiting out here with their station lights blinking and their ID transponder broadcasting their presence into the void.
“It’s been seven hours,” Tess said at some point and started to unbuckle her harness. “Still nothing on passive. Even if they show up at the edge of our detection range in the next few minutes, it’ll be a few more hours before they get here. If nobody minds, I’m going to get a meal and a shower. And maybe half an hour of bunk time.”
“Go ahead,” Decker said. “If there are surprises, I’ll sound the alarm.”
The comms console next to Aden came to life with the two-tone trill of an incoming transmission. The unexpected sound made him jerk upright in his chair.
“Incoming tight-beam comms,” he said in disbelief. “Someone’s hitting our comms array with a low-power tight-beam.”
Tess fastened the buckles of her harness again and looked at her screens.
“There’s nobody out there in tight-beam range. I don’t see how that can
be right.”
“Answer the request,” Decker said. “Put it on the overhead.”
Aden accepted the connection.
“OMV Zephyr, this is RNS Hecate. We are coming up on your starboard bow. Keep your drive cold and maintain your current aspect, please.”
Aden exchanged looks with Decker and Tess.
“Hecate, Zephyr. Confirm hold current aspect and momentum.”
“Coming up on our starboard bow?” Tess said. “What the fuck. There isn’t anything off our starboard bow.”
“You heard them, Maya,” Decker said. “Let’s not get jumpy and give them a reason to dislike us.”
“Keeping station,” Maya confirmed. “No sudden moves. So much for seeing them coming, huh?”
“Hecate, we don’t have you on our sensors. What is your distance and bearing?” Aden asked. And why the fuck aren’t you showing on our gear?
He got the answer to his question a few moments later. Out in the dark void off their bow and slightly above their current inclination, a set of position lights started blinking in the distance. An alert chirped on Aden’s screen, and he looked at the source.
“They just swept us with fire-control radar.”
“They’re inside of a hundred kilometers,” Maya said. “Well inside.”
“Fifty-five and closing,” Tess confirmed. “How the hells did they get so close to us without getting picked up?”
She focused one of the optical arrays on the position lights in the distance and magnified the image.
“That’s not the frigate that took on the nuke,” Aden said.
“Looks like our Rhody commander got himself an upgrade.” Tess enhanced the image, but even at this short range, the hull of the Rhodian warship remained indistinct. It seemed as if the hull swallowed the flash from the position lights as soon as they left their emitters.
