“Why are they running?” Teresa asked. “They don’t think they’re going to get away, do they? Because that would be stupid.”
“They aren’t trying to save the ship,” Amos said. He had the same patient, almost philosophical tone as when he was walking her through how to do a good weld in microgravity or checking the seal on a pipe. It was the voice of a teacher walking his student through a lesson in how the world worked. “Whatever they had on that ship that Laconia was going to get pissed about, they can’t hide it. Not in a system as thin as this one. And there’s no way they’re slipping off and swapping transponders, so their ship’s fucked. The trade station’s big enough they can maybe get the crew off and sneak onto other ships or pretend they were on the station all along.”
“Running to where the hiding places are,” Teresa said.
“And the more lead time they have, the better the chances they can find a good spot,” Amos said.
That could be us, Jim thought. If the Black Kite had decided that we looked a little sketchier than the Perishable Harvest, we would be sacrificing the Roci and hoping we could get small enough to overlook. Only it wasn’t true. There was no hiding place in Kronos or anywhere small enough that Laconia wouldn’t look there. Plain sight was their best hope, because their plan B was violence.
He didn’t think he’d said anything aloud or made any kind of noise that would show his distress, but maybe he had, because Teresa looked at him with something between annoyance and sympathy. “You know I won’t let them hurt you.”
“I know that you’ll try,” Jim said.
“I’m still the daughter of the high consul,” she said. “I’ve gotten you out of trouble before.”
“I’m not leaning on that trick,” Jim said, more harshly than he’d intended. Muskrat shifted, hauled herself up to standing, and looked from Jim to Teresa and back in distress. Teresa’s eyes hardened.
“I think what the captain’s saying,” Amos said, “is that using you as a meat shield isn’t something he’s a hundred percent comfortable with. It’s not that you wouldn’t do it, since you already did. But the people on the other end of that gun? We don’t know them, they may not be the most reliable, and the less we have to count on them, the better.”
Teresa scowled, but less.
“Yes,” Jim said. “That was much more eloquent.”
“Sometimes I’m good that way,” Amos said, and it might have been a joke or it might not. “You want us to get the ship ready to rabbit? We’ve got enough reaction mass for a decent burn.”
“I thought we needed fuel pellets.”
“We do, but we can spend ’em getting out of Kronos, put water on the grocery list, and call it good. Recyclers are really going to be our limiting factor.”
The pull of the thought was stronger than gravity. Light the drive, put nose toward the ring gate, and get the hell out before the enemy could get hold of them. Jim intentionally loosened his grip on the bulbs. “Naomi. What do you think?”
A moment of silence, then, “Sorry. I wasn’t listening. What was the question?”
“Should we prep the Roci for a mad dash out of here? As soon as the Black Kite’s fully committed to its burn, we could make a break.”
“No,” she said, the way he had known she would. “They haven’t identified us. If we go too soon, it’ll only make them suspicious. Better if we look like bystanders. Alex? Plot an intercept with the Whiteoak. It’s the big ice hauler at the second gas giant.”
“Got her,” Alex said.
Amos shifted on his bench. “Captain?”
“I’m fine.”
“If we need to run,” Naomi said, “we’ll run.”
We’ll always need to run. We’ll never get to rest, Jim thought. There didn’t seem like any point in saying it.
Chapter Two: Tanaka
Aliana pressed the button on her vaporizer and inhaled deeply. The mist tasted like vanilla and hit her lungs like a soft warm cloud. Nicotine and tetrahydrocannabinol mixed with just a touch of something more exotic. Something that tempered the THC sleepiness with a vivid hyperawareness. The shades in her room were drawn, but the hint of light at the edges shifted the dust into a rainbow of sparks. She moved one leg, and the silk sheet caressed it like a thousand tiny lovers.
Tristan was asleep next to her, his small muscular butt pressed up against her thigh. He snored gently as he slept, punctuated by the occasional twitch and sigh. Aliana knew that she found the noise charming and sweet because she was high and postcoital. The minute his snoring became annoying, Tristan would have overstayed his welcome.
There were, in her experience, two ways to thrive in a rigid, authoritarian regime. The first—the one most people reached for—was to be what power wanted you to be. Mars had wanted loyal soldiers, and they had produced them like they were printing machine parts. She knew, because she was old enough that she’d been one of them. She’d seen her cohort try to strangle or excise from their collective souls anything that wasn’t sufficiently Martian, and sometimes they’d managed.
The other mode of survival was to enjoy having secrets. Enjoy the power of seeming to be one thing while being another. And then be good at it. Even when it didn’t involve fucking her junior officers, it was a kind of sexual perversion. The thrill of knowing that a wrong word or an unexpected slip could put a bullet in the back of her head was more important to her than the actual sex.
A permissive, open society where she could have done all the same things without fear of consequences would have driven her crazy. She’d loved being part of the Laconian experiment from the beginning because Duarte’s vision—first as a capital offense against Mars and then as a permanent engine of danger—fed her kinks. She felt no shame about that. She knew what she was.
“Wake up,” she said, pushing her fingers into the young man’s back.
“Sleeping,” Tristan slurred at her.
“I know. Now wake up.” She jabbed him again. She spent ten hours a week boxing and wrestling. When she stiffened her fingers, they were like iron bars.
“God dammit,” Tristan said, then rolled over. He gave her a sleepy grin. His tousled blond hair and clean-shaven face with its deep dimples made him look like a cherub in a classical painting. One of Raphael’s putti.
Aliana took another hit off the vaporizer and offered it to him. He shook his head. “Why’d you wake me?”
Aliana stretched luxuriously under the soft sheets, her long frame barely contained by the oversized bed. “I’m high. I want to fuck.”
Tristan flopped onto his back with an exaggerated sigh. “Allie, I barely have any fluid left in my body.”
“Then go get a glass of water, take a salt pill, and get your ass back into my bed.”
“Aye, aye, Colonel,” Tristan said, laughing.
The laugh ended in a sharp oof when she rolled over on top of him and slammed down onto his belly, locking his thighs to the bed with her ankles and feet, and gripping his wrists in her hands. He looked up at her with surprise, then thinking it was sex play, started to struggle. His arms and chest were well formed but soft, more like a healthy teenager’s than a man in his twenties. Her arms were thin and ropy, the muscles of a long-distance runner, burned down to their essence through constant hard use, and strong as steel springs. When he tried to move, she easily shoved him back down, squeezing her hands until his wrists popped and he squealed.