Carol puffed air, her breath steaming in the chilly compartment, and glanced up at the holoscreen readouts. She ran a hand over her Belter crest, a stiff strip of short black hair across her skull from front to back, wiping the clean sweat onto her already stained pant leg. The hairstyle, rare outside Sol's asteroid belt, suited her exotic dark features. She leaned close to Bruno for a moment, her lips brushing his high cheekbones lightly. She scratched herself delicately; upkeep of the Sun-Tzu required a great deal of manual labor, and she and Bruno were not yet due for their weekly showers.
No automation was perfect, after all. There was no substitute for a brush and elbow grease, even in the high-tech twenty-fourth century. And, Bruno reflected, Captain Faulk was not at all shy about demanding the use of such ancient technologies. Tradition, she called it. Character building. Bruno believed that there were other, more appropriate, words.
Belters were pathologically neat.
“Sorry that it took me so long to get here, Tacky,” she said in her husky contralto, between her slowing deep breaths. “Just not used to your groundhog gravs.”
She had spent most of her life traveling from asteroid to asteroid in the Belt; short boosts from a fusion drive followed by long ballistic periods of zero gee.
He kept his tone even. “I've got some bogeys.”
“Again. First, got some water?” she asked with studied nonchalance. “Then you can give me the bad news, which I sincerely hope is yet another false alarm.” Her face became too obviously neutral, the Captain persona wiping away her smartass facade.
It did not surprise Bruno that Carol remained calm. In the Belt, very few things happened quickly, due to celestial mechanics and the realities of changes in delta-v. It was a difficult habit to break. But the Kzin War would destroy that attitude forever, Bruno reflected grimly. And Carol had fought the ratcats herself, ship to ship. She had learned the hard way to keep herself in control.
He tossed a waterbulb at Carol, who reached too high, her reflexes more accustomed to microgravity environments than were Bruno's Flatlander muscles. She recovered the bulb neatly as it bounced off the hull wall, twisted the cap, and drained the water in one thirsty swallow. They had selected lemon-lime flavoring for the water this week, to cover the inevitable earthy traces of the recyclers. Carol winced visibly — the lime was rather biting, Bruno thought, maybe a software malf — and flipped the empty bulb into the recycler slot.
She leaned over Bruno to see the holoscreen windows more clearly, rubbing his neck and shoulders with both hands, the way he liked it. Her hands were magical, strong and intuitively knowledgeable with the years they had spent together driving the Sun-Tzu toward Wunderland.
Carol's hands moved progressively around his neck. They studiously avoided the hard plastic of his Linker plug assembly.
“What do you have?” she asked after a moment, attacking the knots of tension in his neck. The tone of command edged its way back into her voice.
Bruno would normally have enjoyed Carol's massage, sweat and all. Familiarity on long space voyages did not breed contempt in his particular case. But desire drained from him this time. The fresh graphic on the holoscreen window, and what it implied, kept his glands turned down. Fight-or-flight hormones coursed frantically through his bloodstream, but there was nowhere to run.
And few weapons with which to fight.
Bruno took a deep breath. “During the last watch, Skipper,” he said, “the long-range array picked up a set of graviton wiggles above the background hash. I keep the subsystems looking for things in or near our flightpath in real time.” He leaned back into Carol's strong hands. “You can imagine what a bit of gravel would do to us at point seven lights relative. Let alone a microsingularity. At our velocity, we don't have much reaction time.”
Carol stopped massaging his neck, and tapped him lightly on the shoulder with her left hand. “Get to the point,” she murmured patiently. She had been with Bruno long enough to know how to balance her dual roles as captain and lover-friend.
He made a face. “The signals come and go over time, but I kept recording and finally nailed down some decent data.”
Bruno murmured to the computer and flexed his fingers deftly within the dataglove. The main holoscreen window split into three sections: raw data on the lower left side, the idealized graphic on the lower right, and the Doppler-shifted stars dead ahead of the Sun-Tzu looming above the two of them in midair. “Asymmetrically polarized gravity waves, possible multiple sources. No mistake about that. What precisely is making the waves, of course, is another matter.”
Carol held absolutely still in thought, another odd Belter trait that Bruno had noticed long ago. In zero gee, a drifting arm or elbow could unintentionally activate an important keypad — like the fusion drive, or an airlock. Carol, like all long-term Belters, only moved when she intended to move. Bruno still found Carol's statuelike posture disturbing, even after all their time together.
She whistled tunelessly through her teeth for a moment. “Good chance it's those damned kzin reactionless drives?”
“I'd say so.”
Carol rubbed her Belter crest against Bruno's face. “Not another false alarm again?”
“I don't think so,” he replied, his tone flat.
“Ratcats. Just like that dinosaur, Early, predicted, right?” She arched a jet black eyebrow at him, making a face.
Bruno nodded and ignored Carol's not-so-hidden dig. She hadn't spent as much time with Early as Bruno had in both Luna and Geneva, so she couldn't know that beneath the bluster and atavistic cigar smoke, the colonel was a decent man. He had been like a father to Bruno. And he seemed to know everything about two hundred years' worth of proscribed technology in the ARM restricted databases. Humans would need every bit of even remotely militaristic technology to fight the kzin; the engine that drove the Sun-Tzu towards Wunderland was but one example. Early had helped make that possible, as head of UN Special Projects.
Bruno and Early had spent years together, studying the records in Luna's most restricted ARM database, the Black Vault. It held things much more dangerous than mere antimatter spacedrives — such as the tiny cryovial Sun-Tzu carried as cargo. The cryovial with the ancient virus, older than humankind.
The source of his Dream. But — perhaps — a weapon against which the kzin could not stand.
He smiled slightly at Carol, shrugged with his eyebrows. “The waveform pattern resembles what we've seen from damaged kzinti warships insystem, trying to run stealthed. Not a perfect match, I have to remind you.”
“But close enough to worry you,” prodded Carol. Her implicit trust in Bruno's judgment, even after two false alarms, warmed him.
Bruno nodded again. “The kzinti drives don't leak neutrinos, like our fusion units; some of the ratcat ships seem to leak aphasic gravitons.” He shrugged again, and pointed at one of the graphical icons on the holoscreen. “Now you know as much as I do. Summary analyses under the usual menus.”
Carol quickly sank into the second crash couch, next to Bruno. She strapped in with care, in typical Belter caution, and pulled on a dataglove. Bruno knew his captain. He waited patiently for Carol to think it all through for herself, as she mulled over the data marching across the holoscreen windows. She called up a few analytical subroutines of her own; again typical for any Belter singleship pilot. Bruno wasn't offended; a Belter could never stand to let someone else, even a long-term lover, make a decision involving shipboard matters.