The argument is short and I win. As we walk out of a room together the Aux stare, and Neen slicks the others a glance that says, Shut the fuck up. So they pick their jaws up off the floor and stare straight ahead.
Coming to attention, Neen orders a salute.
As I return his salute, I tell Trooper Emil to join the ranks. We might as well begin as I intend to go on.
On my collar are Vijay’s silver eagles. Captain Bonafonte’s braid falls from my left shoulder. An Obsidian Cross with crown and oak leaves hangs around my neck, because I’ve taken Vijay’s medal as well.
Meet Colonel Sven Tveskoeg, accompanied by Lieutenant Vijay Tezuka . . . Aptitude’s father won’t mind me stealing his family name. In fact, he’ll probably approve, assuming he ever gets to hear of it.
With us go the Aux, including the newly cropped, shaved and demoted Emil Bonafonte deMax Bonafonte, who has lost three of his names, as well as his commission and his jacket. Falling in, he ranges right and takes his position.
He’ll do.
‘We couldn’t find the Silver Fist,’ I say, ‘because they’re not on Hekati. They’re camped outside . . .’
Shock greets my words.
‘An Uplift vessel is locked to her outer rim. It has been for months. A parasite on this habitat.’ Vijay opens his mouth to say something and I hold up my hand. He shuts his mouth again, although his face tightens.
Time to reveal my secret. ‘Hekati told me.’
We have a choice of seven ships. Four are museum pieces. Semi AI at the most, all fins and curves. One even has portholes. The fifth is ours. Well, the U/Free hopper we arrived in. The sixth is a standard Z-class tug, squat and battered. The damn thing looks like a beetle/wasp hybrid, with a grapple harpoon and a couple of mechanical arms. You could probably shift a planet if you had enough of them. You’ll find the Z-class anywhere cargo needs dragging.
The seventh is like the sixth, but small and rougher. I choose that one, obviously.
‘Suicide,’ says the SIG. ‘With added rust.’
Yeah, worked that out for myself.
‘Sure I can’t interest you in a retro-special? Or a neat little hopper? We can make up our cover story later.’
‘No,’ I say.
The SIG sighs.
Our new ship has been berthed for so long that space grit has blasted one side back to metal. The door creaks as it opens, and rust flakes onto the scuzzy deck of its airlock. Everyone pretends not to notice. Emergency lights burn on a bulkhead, and a calendar advertising Bukiball Towropes shows a long-dead blonde.
Assuming she was ever real to begin with.
The crewpit is tiny, designed to hold three at most. Gravity carpet covers the floor, the kind that sticks to those tiny hooks on the heels of cheap space suits. An area behind the pit will do for the others.
Although it means they’ll be without seats.
A lash-up of wire and cheap memory crystal provides a navigation system. Semi AI at most, probably not even that. A diode on the console announces our ship’s beacon needs recharging; which is one thing we won’t be doing, since the fewer people who know we are leaving here the better.
Using simple words, my gun explains what will happen unless the ship agrees to release the security block on its engines. The ship agrees before the SIG’s halfway through; but the SIG’s on a roll. ‘And then,’ it says, ‘I’ll screw every-’
‘I’ve unlocked.’
‘Oh,’ says the SIG. ‘Yeah.’
Ajac and Iona are to remain in the hub, that’s my ruling. The air’s got enough oxygen to breathe, the radiation is no worse than on Hekati itself, and we will leave them rations. I would tell them to go home, but they don’t have one. Not any longer.
Iona frets that she is being abandoned. So does Neen on Iona’s behalf. I always come back; he should know that by now. So I decide to fold one problem into another, to come up with a solution.
The problem is my prosthetic arm.
Has General Tournier heard of me? Extremely unlikely, but my arm was made by Colonel Madeleine, and he will have heard of her. The arm’s black metal, swallows light and rings when tapped. No arm at all is less obvious, at least that is the way it seems to me. Although when I say this to Colonel Vijay, he smiles.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
He loses his smile soon enough.
The colonel’s never seen me without an arm before. If he thinks that looks bad, he should see the stump before Colonel Madeleine remade it.
‘Look after this for me,’ I tell Iona.
She buckles under its weight, then straightens and shoots Neen a smile. We’ll be back, she believes that now. No way will I leave this behind. Sliding my shoulder into Emil’s jacket, I have Rachel fold the sleeve across my front and tack it into place.
‘Hey, looking good,’ my gun says.
‘Officer on deck . . .’ As I step through the hatch, Neen has the Aux salute. Vijay walks a few paces behind me. Returning the salute, I send them to their places.
My place is in the pilot’s seat. Haze sits one side of me. Vijay sits the other, looking bemused. He’s wearing my rank badges on either side of his collar. Even as a lieutenant, he looks absurdly young.
The first thing I do on sitting is charge the power packs for my gun. The one usually slung behind the trigger is almost out. The other, the one that wasn’t left behind, is long since empty.
‘Thank fuck,’ says the SIG.
‘Make them last,’ I reply, and then tell the gun what I expect.
SIG-37s are fluent in fifty languages, or so it claims. For all I know it’s telling the truth. Because there are words in there I don’t begin to recognize. And I can order a whore or a beer in more languages than anyone I know.
‘You can do it?’
Torn between saying it’s impossible, and wanting to boast that of course it can do it, the gun decides to boast.
‘Good,’ I say. ‘Then start us up.’
Diodes ripple along the SIG’s chassis, and it does the whirring thing it does every time I demand that it do something difficult. The familiarity is vaguely comforting. Although I don’t let the gun know that.
As I wait, the deck beneath my feet begins to hum and the lights go low in the crewpit. So Haze, Vijay and I buckle ourselves in. The others are already tied to a rail. It is the best we can do.
‘Sir,’ says Haze. ‘You sure you want me to do this?’
Yes, I’m sure.
Wiping the ship’s memory with a single pulse obviously hurts his head, because he vomits into a bag he grabs. We’re still running low gravity, thank God.
‘Do that in freefall,’ I say, ‘and I’ll dump you outside myself.’
He manages to smile.
Read-outs promise clear space between the asteroid belt and us. Well, hydrogen, helium, assorted trace elements, not to mention your basic interstellar radiation field. Also three dead satellites, a rotting cargo container and half a dozen coffins in loose orbit around the habitat. Nothing, however, that looks like it wants to shoot us. In fact, nothing that looks like it is paying any attention to us at all.
Suits me fine.
‘OK,’ I say to the gun. ‘Take us out.’
Pipes hiss as couplings break free, grapples clang and the crewpit shudders. I would ask the SIG how long this tug’s been in dock but I don’t want to know. It’s not as if we have much choice.
‘So,’ asks the SIG. ‘You want this quick or careful?’
‘Careful,’ I say.
‘Good answer.’
I leave the SIG to work out Hekati’s spin. We need to keep her bulk between us and the Silver Fist ship on her side. This matters, because we are about to arrive on Hekati for the first time. At least that’s what we’ll be telling General Tournier.
As the SIG runs our tug along one spoke, then slides it over Hekati’s outer rim to hug the far side, it mutters endless numbers. ‘Point one nine two four six,’ it says, adding a string of numbers to the end of this.
‘Angular velocity?’ asks Haze.
‘Check,’ it says. It’s a tricky manoeuvre; at least I assume it is, because eventually it reduces my gun to silence.
At some point, we pass beyond the abandoned cargo container, the satellites and all the coffins and match Hekati’s spin, right out to the rocks. The asteroid belt is an M-type, which gives us a hundred thousand bloody great clumps of metal in slow orbit about the star Hekati uses for light.
No one is going to spot us in here. So we peel off and hide ourselves in its edge.
‘OK,’ I tell the others. ‘This is how it’s going to work.’
I talk, they listen. And then they look at me, look at one another, and do what they’re told. Because the look on my face tells them what will happen if they don’t. Only the gun vocalizes – and it has the sense to whisper.
‘You nuts?’
‘Probably.’
It snorts. ‘I mean,’ it says, ‘it’s not like it makes a difference to me. But sabotaging your own ship . . .’ Lights flicker as it scans the crewpit. ‘Given it was pretty fucked to start with.’
‘Going to be worse now.’
‘Tell me about it,’ says the gun.
Most of the asteroids are no bigger than us. But we manage to find one fifty times our size and I have the gun scrape us alongside. You can’t hear in space, so everyone insists, but I hear every screech, so maybe the air in here makes a difference. Not that that’s going to be around much longer.
‘Sven,’ says a voice.
‘Trooper?’ Something in my tone makes Emil’s chin come up.
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘Is this necessary?’ Colonel Vijay asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I ask. ‘What do you think?’
He bites his lip. Not his fault, I remind myself. Sending an eighteen-year-old staff officer to assassinate a Death Head’s general always was stupid. Except that thought is treason. So I decide it is actually a brilliant idea, in a way still to be revealed to the rest of us.
‘You done?’
‘Almost,’ says the SIG.
A radiation tag on the shoulder of my pressure suit is orange, going on black. Looks like it’s useless. Mind you, it was orange going on black when I first looked, and that was before we even left the mirror hub.
So maybe everything is fine.
‘We stole this ship,’ I tell the others. ‘OK?’
They nod.
‘Took it from a launch yard in Ilseville.’
‘But-’ says Neen.
‘Yeah, OK. There isn’t a launch yard in Ilseville. General Tournier won’t know that . . .’
Clicking my helmet shut starts an oxygen feed. So I reduce the mix, because we have to make the air last. And then, tapping a dial, I hold up two fingers and twist my hand. Everyone turns their mix down. I’d tell them, but the audio on most of our suits is out.
‘On my count,’ I tell the gun.
As we hit zero, the SIG scrapes us down the rock one final time. We lose our only escape pod, a jagged outcrop rips our shell and every wall light dies. A second later, two emergency lights come on. It’s true what they say about noise in a vacuum. Sirens scream, and then fade as our air is sucked away through the punctured hull.
‘Fuck,’ says Vijay, whose comms system still works. Dark eyes stare from behind the faceplate in his helmet. So I give him a thumbs up.
After a second, he nods.
Extreme cold withdraws blood from your fingers and toes, hands and feet, arms and legs, in that order. I’ve seen it happen. The emergency routine on our ship follows the same principle. It kills the lights, slams doors, seals any rips it can, and stops supplying heat to non-essential areas and then essential ones.
We feel the chill, all of us.
‘Shutting down,’ says a voice.
The ship sends its warning direct to my helmet.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know.’ To the SIG, I say, ‘Run that broadcast.’
The gun does.
‘Mayday, SOS, Mayday . . . This is the cargo ship Teller3, coordinates . . .‘ The SIG blasts out a string of numbers that puts us near the asteroid belt, on a heading that has the ship almost crashing into Hekati.
‘This is the cargo ship Teller3, coordinates . . .’
The coordinates are shifting slightly and so are we.
Everything depends on the next few hours. If we can’t go to the Silver Fist, then they must come to us. And the bait has to be convincing. My mouth tastes sour, and it’s not just the kyp feeding off the panic around me. It is not fear, either.
Expectation, maybe. And a tightness that comes from wanting to know that I have this right. I will kill General Tournier. If it can be done, then I will do it, whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes, that’s what we’ll do.
The Aux motto.
‘Sven,’ says Vijay. ‘You’re smiling.’ Not sure how he can see in the dull glow from the few bits of console still working.
‘It’s sir,’ I say. ‘And we’re observing radio silence.’