I wished them the best of luck, in the privacy of my own head.
Of the other parties to the battle, there was no news. The chapel fell ever farther astern, blatting obsolescent viruses and trojans at the sky with ever-increasing desperation. They were nothing more than a nuisance, but the various planetary traffic-control agencies were clearly becoming annoyed, going by the increasingly strident injunctions against spamming on the emergency channels: If they kept it up for much longer, they were going to find themselves blacklisted by port authorities and unable to dock anywhere. And there was a complete news clampdown from Nova Ploetsk in particular and the Kingdom of Argos in generaclass="underline" Someone was clearly keeping something quiet.
I spent much of the time working and studying. As per the terms of our agreement, Rudi was required to issue me with an officer’s assignment of shares in the Branch Office Five Zero; at a later time, we would formally vest these as shares in the parent institution, but right now I was merely to be an equity-holding first lieutenant and officer of the audit, not to mention a major deposit-account customer. The learning curve was steep: I had many operational manuals to study, and much of the business of a proactive assurance agency was new to me. However, nothing concentrates the mind like starting a new management job in the middle of a space battle: Getting it right first time was a matter of life or death. And so I threw myself into my new routine with gusto and a degree of enthusiasm that I will admit came as a surprise to me.
As a new-minted officer of the corporation, I spent most of my time in the financial services suite, learning the ebb and flow of bonds and loans and other financial instruments from the experienced clerical officers. I didn’t have much contact with the executive arm of the Branch Office, so I was somewhat taken aback one evening shift when a semifamiliar muzzle stuck her nose over my shoulder and announced its presence. “Graah! Skipper sends ’is compliments and be asking after ye’er presence the noo! Ye be coming along smartly, heh?”
I blinked mildly, refusing to recoil. “Li, isn’t it?” The piratical boarding specialist who had dragged me aboard the Five Zero in the first place, over a year ago, looked back unblinking. “Rudi wants me? Where?”
“The combat information center on boarding deck two. You be following now?”
“Show me,” I commanded, locking my retina and swimming into the middle of the room to follow her. I had become much better at identifying bats by their gender over the past month. I had also found time in my schedule for an appointment with the ship’s surgeon, and had functional legs again—albeit with webbed feet and prehensile toes. But I’d kept the embarrassing big-eyed face, and the gills, and many of the other modifications for now, and hadn’t made up my mind about asking for wings and fur and a pointy muzzle yet, the better to fit in: Major surgery and bodily fluids work better under gravity or centrifugal spin, and there just wasn’t time to fix everything all at once.
Pirate Li led me toward the central service core of the vehicle, down past the habitat and life-support spheres, then into a cramped world of gray passages lined with automatic pressure hatches and racks of equipment, from reels of patch tape to radiation detectors. The grim guts of the enterprise, the tools of last resort when negotiation and contract law gave way to the rule of force.
The CIC was buried within a rodent-friendly maze of these passages and ducts, behind surprisingly sturdy walls. Within its spherical confines was a surprisingly small capsule, barely bigger than a Soyuz crypt, rotating freely on gimbaled mounts. Li waved me toward it; I swam toward the open hatch and poked my head in.
“Come in! Come in!” Rudi flapped at me, clearly jittery. “Shut the hatch, jolly good.”
“What is this—” I lowered myself into one of the unoccupied couches.
“The bunker. From which some lucky officer has to manage the branch when all the accounts are in the red.” Rudi glanced at me. “This is your final chance to back out, you know.”
It took me a long time to frame my reply. The quiet—broken only by the hum of the ventilator fans and the gurgle of acceleration gel in the tank beneath our seats—seemed to stretch out.
“You set this up with Ana, didn’t you?” I finally asked. “All of it. My abduction, this confrontation, the sucker punch the People are lining up to deliver.”
Rudi nodded. “Are you angry with me?”
I sighed. “I would have said as much already. How long have you been working with my sister?”
“For longer than I care to recall. We first met in the Trailing Pretties, shortly after the Five Zero arrived in Dojima—I was looking for an expert on certain aspects of local trade law.”
“And that’s when she told you about the Atlantis Carnet . . . ?”
“Not immediately.” Rudi’s smile was slow to emerge. “There was a small matter of mutual trust. But she had already resolved to make a clean break from your lineage before she arrived here. Discovering more reasons to hate your mother was . . . well, it served as glue for our mutual trust and respect.”
“For your . . .” I stopped. Something about his tone sounded wistful. “What is it?”
Rudi drew a wing membrane across his face. “She is joining the People. I suppose it was inevitable that we would drift apart: The passion of such a relationship can only last a handful of years, a decade or two at the most. But we agreed, long ago, that when this was over, we would combine our lineages and spawn infants.” He peered at me bashfully over his arm. “She gave you a soul chip, did she not? With a message—and an up-to-date backup.”
I stared at him. “You’re a bat, Rudi! She’s a mermaid. What were you thinking?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said drily. “I know that Sondra minimized your libido function when she spawned your sib-hood. That was another of the things that angered Ana. She, too, was uninterested in concupiscence when she first arrived in Dojima.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Your belief is entirely optional, I assure you, my dear. But in any case, I didn’t call you here to tell you that you are going to become an, ah, aunt. I called you here because your mother’s vehicle just changed course.”
“She’s—” My head spun. “Wait. What’s she doing? Where are we in the time line?”
“Attend.” Rudi focused suddenly, snapping wing-fingers at the retina that formed an arc around our seats. “This is our current vector. Here, behind us, are the drifting capsules from the, ahem, ‘interceptor missiles.’ We’ve now slowed sufficiently that they’re closing again. And here is Sondra’s current vector. It’s a log-log scale, by the way.”
I boggled. The arrow representing Sondra’s vector was huge. And it was changing direction visibly.
“Until half an hour ago, she was indeed decelerating toward the intersection point we agreed on. But then she executed this maneuver.” The screen depicted an intricate spiral, the magnitude of her acceleration fluctuating. “We are not painting her with active radar at this point—she is still many hundreds of thousands of kilometers distant—but that maneuver was consistent with pointing her flank at us and dropping something overboard. Something that will reach us shortly before she does.”
“Mines. Or missiles?”
“Possibly both. If she continues on her present course, her bombs will reach us a couple of hundred kilometers before she makes her closest approach. I fear your challenge may have unhinged her completely. Most annoying. We may have to switch to Plan B.”
“You’re actually planning on shooting her?”