Morgan Gannis had been her best friend.

They had this ritual before they went into the deep sleep where they'd share a drink before wishing each other a good rest. For years, his was the last face she had seen before going down in the dreamless dark.

Only there was this one time when Morgan had this bag of prime Blue Morpho theece that he had scored in a game of Three Spin, he had the best and the worst luck at gambling, and so they vaped it all and sat in his quarters and stared at images of stars through their data lenses, and pretended that they could see outside the Kublai Khan, although it had no windows and even if it had, the drive field was up and all they could have seen outside was solid black. But then and there, floating on a wave of theece, that didn't matter.

"You know Suze, I think I used to look up at you, when I was a kid."

"You've always looked up to me shortpants, and you're still a kid to me."

"I don't know, I think I've caught up. Hell, I think I might even be a bit older than you now."

"It's all that time you spent working planetside that does it. Living your life all in one stretch like that, without any decent intervals of Sleep between. Sounds exhausting."

"Anyway, that's not what I mean. I mean, when I was a kid, growing up on Earth, this must have been Boston, you can't see the stars from under the Quito Beanstalk, my dad used to take us out in his boat to look at the night sky and point out which of the twinkling lights were space stations and which were stars. I was always fixed on the stars..."

"Of course."

"But I was thinking, you grew up in those habitats. You think I might have been looking up at you then, before I even met you? Maybe, in a way, I knew you before we moved up there."

"Nah, I grew up on Icarus, in geostationary orbit near the equator, wouldn't have been visible from your latitude. Still, it's a beautiful thought."

She had reached over and ruffled his unruly shock of red hair.

"Knew there was a reason I kept you around, Earth."

They had vaped and watched the stars in silence until it was time to enter their separate hibernation chambers before slipping away into temporary oblivion.

But now Morgan was gone, left behind her, in an even deeper sleep, maybe never to awaken.

And here she was, in the here and now, coming awake from the first Sleep in a long time where she hadn't seen Morgan's freckled face before going under.

As she came to, she listened, as she always did, to the sounds of the Kublai Khan. The low thrum of the drive engines through the deck plates and the exasperated wheeze of the environmental support systems as they choked back to life.

But this time, it didn't feel right. Her ship felt empty.

She was gripped by a sudden, desperate longing for company. She reached for the interior compartment of her hibernation pod where she kept her datalenses so she could call out.

And was stopped by the equally sudden realization that the only other soul on board was Raj, her first mate, and it would be him and not Morgan on the other end of that call. And it was Morgan she wanted to hear.

So, instead, she found her private stash of old-fashioned turnbooks, she never trusted her poetry to the Khan's 'eccentric' data systems, pulled out a battered copy of jatna Dunra Nitcys' Beyond and Between and began to read.

“Beyond the edge
We ease apace
Off in to the great in-between;
One star's bright face
Has turned away
It's years 'til the next shall be seen...”

2: Just One Spin

“Susan Ngn!”  Somebody shouted as soon as she came out of the airlock into the massive shuttle bay of the Cook's Folly, echoing down the narrow rows between the eight big cargo haulers strapped into their launch cradles.  Up in one corner of the bay, between two massive shuttles, somebody was slinging the Dark on instruments improvised from tools and bits of packing containers.  Mostly big, tattooed Capricornians from Opunui's crew, what with it being Opunui's ship they were on.  And a toothless old Aquarian, with a curling brass horn that he'd brought all the way from his homeworld.
     
The Captains were floating in the microgravity, clustered in a rough dome over a black circle on the deck, like they were in a high level strategy meeting, all taut faces and meaningful, furtive, looks.
    
“Late again, huh, Susan?” the same voice taunted as she drifted towards the Captains' circle.   It came from a big man and blond, not as tall as Susan, but half-again as broad.  Sterne's laugh was high-pitched for a man his size, and like everything about him, it always set Susan's teeth on edge.
    
“Whereas you, Turbulence Sterne, always come early as the memory serves.”
    
“Why you...!”  Sterne' pushed off from the wall and launched himself towards her, hand on the grip of the pulse laser jutting from his belt.  
    
A dark hand covered in tattoos reached out and grabbed Sterne's arm, stopping him in mid-flight.  The head attached to that hand shook 'No'.
    
“Don't.”  Now Opunui was one who looked like he sounded, a big thundering voice rolling out of a big, tattooed man.  He was Captain of the driver they were on and not a man to be messed with on anyone's ship.
    
“What is this?  You taking her side all of a sudden, Opunui?”
    
The bigger man pulled him back and shook his head again.
    
“That's Captain Opunui while you're on my driver, Sterne.  And I got no sides.  But while it's my air you're breathing, it's my word you'll be heeding.  And I say it's no blood you'll be getting on my decks.  Goes for all of you, la?”
    
He was addressing the group, but it was Susan that he was looking at.  She just shrugged and smiled sweetly to no effect.
    
Somebody passed around a drink-tube and suddenly Old Blind Captain Lin was calling for bids.
    
"Oh God, oh God, oh my Loving God, are we still spinning?" Captain Malki had woken up, popped a red pill into her mouth and stole a drink from the tube to wash it back.  Nafisa Malki had the permanently burnt cheeks and frayed khakis of the career soldier.  Looking across the circle, Susan could see that Malki's eyes were pink and bloodshot, a sure sign of Redline.  Susan's smile only widened.  Redline made you quick and sharp, but it didn't do anything for your patience.  Just what she liked to see across the Three Spin circle from her.
    
"All that rhodium down there, already mined, and calling out to be turned to money, and us still stuck up here in the far orbit around that gods-forsaken Outstation, spinning threes.  Cuss the luck."  Captain Sterne snatched the drinking tube from Malki's hand and squeezed out the last of the cheap etoh from it.
    
This set up a doleful chorus around the circle from the other Captains with similar complaints, all except Lin, who just serenely tallied the Bids and clicked her tongue sadly.
    
"What is, is."  She shrugged.
    
"What is?  What is for you, you dried-up old crone?  You barren old bat?"  Malki's voice twisted with a slurred snarl.  "You blind bitch.  You and your fancy friends and special papers and all that.  You can come and go as you damn well please.  Hells, you don't even have to be here now, do you?  Oh no!  No waiting in queues and begging for contracts for a Citizen of Mars, is that it?  I'd bite out both your eyes and spit them on your boots if you still had any!"
    
"What is earned is not given.  Twenty years I gave Mars for the privilege, girl.  And more besides."  Lin raised up the wrist that held the camera that she saw through on it and tapped her temple, next to the blackened sockets that had once held her eyes.  "It is your misfortune to have served in the wrong army this time.  Well, that's the 'Jaya."
    
"Wasn't the wrong damn army when I heard about the rhodium strikes." Malki crossed her arms and came across all sullen.  "When I set out from Teegarden's, Beta Hydri was still a free system."
    
"Well, it sure ain't now, is it?  Damned Martians beat us all to the punch."  Sterne spat and it just drifted, without gravity to pull it down, a freefloating sphere of spit and phlegm.
    
"Seal it up and give me the damn drink, Sterne."  Susan snatched at the drink tube to find it empty and tossed it aside, to float with the others in orbit around the circle.  
    
"Still, you can't blame them.  The Martians.  They were the first to hear about it and the first to act.  Any of us would have done the same, it was in our power."  The dark woman across the circle, taking hits from an old-fashioned wood-and-glass vaporizer that required the careful application of both hands, wasn't one that Susan could name.  She wore the furs and leathers of a property holder of Delta Pavonis, but Susan thought she recalled something about her ship flying Milo colors.  Not that it meant anything, along with Tau Ceti, MLO 4 was one of the most common Flags of Convenience out there.  Her own ship flew Tau Ceti colors, so who was she to judge?
    
“Alright, one of you spacers answer me this.”  Susan slid her own vape, sleek and modern, from her coat and took a long draw, savoring the dry, resinous flavor of the prime Horus Kush, then releasing the theece smoke in a thin, unbroken stream.  “The number of times this leakin' system has changed hands, how is it, and this is my question here, how is it that it seems to be the same old data-pushing, high-hat bureaucrats running things, no matter what color jacket they're wearing right now?  That's what gets me.  This a war they're having or a costume change?”
    
“Don't you hold back, moongirl.  You go on, you tell us how you really feel, la?”  Opunui laughed and reached out to slap her on the shoulder.
    
“But you were cleared through the security checks by the patrols, were you not?”  Old Blind Lin lowered the wrist that carried the camera to the deck and, with deliberate precision, plucked the tops from where they sat. 
    
“Ah...” It seemed for a slightly stoned moment that there were no words anywhere.  Then she remembered there were.  “Well, sure, but that's not the point, is it?  They were all up in my business almost before I'd brought down the leakin' drive field, right?”
    
“Martians searched you, already?  That's rich, that is.”  Sterne was laughing, rocking back on his haunches, a hand between his legs gripped the handhold that kept him on the deck.  
    
“Ain't that just like you, Susan Ngn?  Most of us can't even apply for a berthing permit until the Grand Army deigns to get around to us and here you are, bitching about it.  What makes you so special?  Your reputation must proceed you.”
    
She took another long pull from her vape while she put together an appropriate retort, but Old Blind Lin cut her off.
    
“Bids are closed.” Old Blind Lin announced and spun the tops hard enough to keep the magnets in them from pulling them to the deck, but not so hard that they flew off into their own orbits.   Susan held in a lungful of theece as they spun. 
    
“Slash!”  Malki cried out, striking the air with a fist as the first top wobbled and fell.
    
“Chop!  Ha! Yes!”  Opunui's eyes were bright as the second fell.
    
“Hit!  That's a Trice!  That's me!”  Sterne giggled and rubbed his hands together.
    
“Damn me deep!”  Opunui snarled and shook his massive head.
    
“I wake up for this?  This?  For God and all His Prophets to line up to take turns shitting in my breakfast?  This?”  Malki picked a direction to be 'up' and implored the imagined heavens she blamed for her problems.
    
“You see that, Susan?  Won it on a trice!  The luck is going my way tonight.  That's a share and a half you owe me.  At least this time you won't be able to fly off before I can collect, huh?”
    
She let out a cloud of theece vapor in Sterne's general direction.
    
“What?  I pay what I owe, I'm no welsher.”    
    
“Since when?”  Sterne snorted.
    
“You starting with me, Sterne?”
    
“Oh, yeah, so it's me that started this now?  That's a laugh.  Ngn, if we got trouble, it didn't start here and it didn't start with me.”
    
“Didn't realize it bugged you that much, boy.  But if you want to close accounts, the invite is always open.  Here, there or the next place.” 
    
Her hand rested casually on the butt of the pulse laser hanging from her belt.  She had already pushed him plenty, but it was damn fine theece she'd been smoking and she was feeling a little bit distant from both her actions and their consequences.
    
“An invitation, huh?  Well, back in Tau Ceti, we were raised to always oblige a lady...”  He pushed himself up off the floor, only to be dragged back down again by Opunui's hand.
    
“There was a warning, la?  No starting shit on my ship.  Get me, bruddah?”
    
“But my honor...”
    
“Ain't no concern of me and mine.”  
    
Opunui turned and pointed a meaty finger at Susan.  
    
“And you, Ngn.  I won't have his laser or your mouth spilling blood here.  Anybody gonna be taking your head on my ship, it gonna be me.”
    
Opunui picked up the tops and cradled them in his hand.  Susan took another hit of the theece in her vape and stared at them, unblinking.  Those little metal diamonds had done wrong by her, but she could ignore her losses for the present on the promise of the thrills of the spins to come.  And there was always another spin.  Always.
    
“So who's spin is it?  Sterne?  Opunui?”  It was so close to what Susan was thinking that she almost thought she actually had said it herself.  But, no, it turned out to be the dark Pavonian, her old-fashioned vape cradled in one hand and her eyes scanning across the faces in the hemisphere of Captains.
    
“Ah, what's the hurry, Rabiu?  We're all's of us stuck here the same, waiting for berths to open up at the Outstation, ain't we?”  Opunui popped open a wax-paper drinking tube with his teeth, spat out the wax stopper and swilled from it.  The stopper hit the exhaust port of a shuttle, bounced and continued its flight in another direction.
    
“You are, maybe.  But some of us got places to be, Opunui.”  Rabiu raised her voice so that everybody could hear.  Her lips were quirked up in self-satisfaction.  “Me?  I got a priority cargo in my cloud.  Military.  'Vital to the war effort' and all that.  Maybe I get called into port the next time a berthing opens up.  And maybe I got time to spin, but I sure don't have time to waste.”
    
Susan's eyes were fixed on the tops nestled in Opunui's massive hand, free in space and stuck in place, just like her.  It was all Susan could do not to reach out and set them into motion, just to see them move, see something move.  Even it was just to spin around for awhile and fall back down.  After all, wasn't that what they were all there for? 
    
“The luck you got, Rabiu.  How you manage that?”  Opunui passed the drink-tube over to Sterne.
    
“It's all damn pull.  Connections.  Must have some kind of pull with someone.”  Malki muttered under her breath and scraped a last red pill from a tin container engraved with the Aquarian Eagle and Bull.
    
“It's horseshit is what it is.  Just wind and talk.”  Sterne sneered and squeezed some more of the etoh down his throat.  “She just don't want to lose to me no more is all.  Want to know what I see?  I see the back of you as you run away is what I see.”
    
Susan snapped back into the conversation with a laugh her teeth couldn't hold back.
    
“Scared?  Of you?  One of these days, Turbulence Sterne, that big ego is going to outgrow your head and bust right out of your skull.  What do you have that you think she should be scared of, huh?  Even if the luck keeps going your way, she's playing for peanuts while we're playing for stakes.  What can she lose to you that's going to compare to the kind of contracts she can pull when she gets into port before the rest of us?  We're playing for the crumbs off her plate.  Now, Opunui, if you're not going to spin, pass those tops to someone who is!”
    
“That a fact?  Well if we're going to get the crumbs, than what can you look forward to?  Like you just said, first-come, first-served.  You'll be begging to get crumbs.  Oh, I do wish I could see your face when you finally get to dock to sell whatever sad shit you brought back from the Frontier, while I'm rolling in those sweet, sweet rhodium profits.”
    
Sterne had broken into that big grin that Susan wanted desperately to punch.
    
“I'll do alright.  I always do.”  She was grinding her teeth, but had brought up her vape to cover her expression.  Wouldn't do to give Sterne the satisfaction.  “Nothing fancy about food stuffs, but there's always a market.  Folks always got to eat.”
    
“Food?  Is that all?”  Sterne laughed at her and she could swear he'd gone up a half octave.  “You ain't got nothing like the food I got.  How are you going to shift your cargo after they've gotten a load of what I'm carrying?  Nothing but the finest, from good old Nuliajuk miltiar to Apples from Old Earth Herself.  Once again, Ngn, I take the best while you ship the rest, huh?”
    
“You best check yourself, boy.”  She could feel her chin rise and her lip curl in a defiant sneer.  “Because there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that you can do that I can't do twice as well for half the effort.  You name it, spinning, fighting, drinking, flying, selling, anything.”
    
She heard a low groan from somewhere around the circle, but ignored it.  The shuttle bay was starting to get pretty hot and she wiped the sweat from her brow.
    
“Big talk, that.  Always were the big talker, Susan.  But that's all you got, ain't it?  You've always been all talk and no follow through.  Just a Home System brat playing at the driver game.”
    
She had let go of her handhold and gripped her pulse laser, still in its holster.  His smirk deepened into a sneer and his mouth kept moving.
    
“You do like to come on like one of the People, but I know you, Susan Ngn and I know where you're from...”
    
“And you?  You can shut your filthy intake, you fish-eating son of a...”
    
She drew her pulse laser but Opunui grabbed her wrist and jerked her back down.  He put her down on the deck hard enough that she felt it from her tailbone to her collarbone.
    
“What I told Sterne about blood in my air goes for you too, Ngn.”  He twisted his head to glare at Sterne.  “And what I told Ngn about her mouth covers you, Sterne.  Swear before the shrines of my ancestors, any more beef from either of you and I'll have you out of my air.  You hearing me, la?”
    
Susan gave a curt nod of the head, eyes still fixed on Sterne.  Sterne mumbled something that caught him a warning look out of the side of Opunui's eyes.
    
“I don't hear nothing.  Now, I asking a question.  You hearing me?”
    
“Yeah, yeah, I heard you, I heard.”  Sterne rolled his eyes.
    
“Hey, it's your ship, Opunui.”  Susan pulled herself into a lotus stance, floating above the deck.
    
“Damned right it is.”
    
Malki snarled and snatched the tops from Opunui with one hand and popped the pill into her mouth with the other.
    
“Bids!  Bid, you infidel bastard spawn of donkeys!  Let's hear your damned bids!”  Her voice and hands were both shaking with barely suppressed energy.  She closed a tight fighting fist around the tops.
    
“That's the stuff.  There's someone with some breath!  I bid Slash Breaks!”  Rabiu grinned and pulled herself in tighter so that she was hovering right over the circle on the deck.  She refilled her vape from a leather pouch at her belt and Susan's eyes stung with the scent of the shake and the kief.
    
“Chop Splits.”  Opunui.
    
“Chops All.  Full Pot.  Let's see you put your credit where your mouth is, Ngn.”  Sterne snarled and a moment of silence followed.
    
“Hey, moongirl, just because Sterne gone all-in and bet the lot don't mean...” Opunui trailed off as he looked at Susan's face.  
    
She was smiling.
    
Sterne tossed the drink-tube to Lin in a slow, lazy arc but Susan reached out to snap it out of mid-air.
    
“Slash All.  Full Pot.”  Susan locked eyes with Sterne.  The etoh stung the back of Susan's throat.
    
“Well, well, didn't know you had it in you.  Following through isn't really your style, Ngn.”
    
“You'd be surprised what I'd do for the chance to seal up that mouth of yours, Sterne.”
    
“Last Bid!  As you love fucking, bid Lin.  You blind or deaf?”  Malki hissed obscenely through her clenched teeth.
    
Lin raised her wrist-camera to take a picture of Malki grinding her teeth and bouncing up and down impatiently.  A thin smile creased the corners of Lin's mouth.
    
“Full Split.”
    
“Finally!  And God piss on you all, there's any justice!”  Malki closed her eyes, took a drink from the tube going around and set the tops to spinning.
    
They spun long and they spun pretty.  Susan's head spun as the tops did, around and around.  She could hear Malki swearing and Sterne praying, but she wasn't really listening.  When the tops were in motion they were like quantum particles in the moment before they were observed.  Unbound potential.  This was the moment in which anything could happen.  
    
Then, as if her attention were enough to collapse the wave, they fell to the deck with definitive clicks and Malki called them out with glee and malice.
    
“Slash!”
    
“Fuck me!  Pass me that drink back!”  Sterne held his hand out and she tossed the tube back to him empty.  Drops of etoh floated like clear, gleaming pearls in the air in its wake.  Sterne made an archaic gesture with one finger that was still obscene back in his home system.
    
“Come on, come, there's still a chance, come on you bastard ancestors, come on...”  Opunui ran a finger along the tattoos spiraling his arm, eyes fixed on the remaining two spinning tops.
    
“Slash!”
    
“Fuck!  That's me out.”  Another drink-tube had appeared around the circle, nomadic and anonymous.  Opunui seized it and spat out the wax stopper, squeezing a stream of clear liquor down his throat.
    
“Yes, come to momma, come on...”  Susan held her hands protectively over the tops.
    
And in the corner, the Dark played on.  A tenor as clear as the void itself warbled some lonely old Pavonian chant in strange counterpoint to the heavy, driving beat the Capricorni were pounding out on improvised drums.  The last top spun until it didn't and then, a sudden click as the magnet hugged the deck showing its face to the universe.
    
“Chop!”
    
Rabiu's smile was a bright crescent moon in the dark sky of her face.  It was beautiful and Susan hated it.
    
Without being asked, Opunui passed Susan the drink-tube and she savored the sting on her tongue and the burn in her throat as the etoh went down.
    
“Well, Stranger's Luck was we'd say back on Dimangan.  Been a pleasure doing business, Captains.  I think I'll be cashing out now.  I've got a cargo to prep and I don't want to waste time when my call comes in.  So, if you'll just toss me your vouchers, I'll set liens to collect my winnings when you all come aboard the station.”
    
“Captain Malki, we'll discuss your payments later.  But for the rest of you, let's see, what is that?  That's three quarters you owe me, Captain Opunui, a half share from you, Captain Lin, a share and three-quarters from you, Captain Sterne and two and a quarter from you, Captain Ngn.”
    
“Two?  How you figure that?”
    
“Two and a quarter.  You went all-in, Captain.  Means you take on all the debts you wagered.  Apollo rules.”  Rabiu shrugged and smiled with all the calm and composure of someone who doesn't owe anyone anything.
    
“That stings.  Hard.”  Sterne floated back a bit from the circle and then pushed off from the bulkhead and right into Susan's personal space.
    
“Only thing makes it any softer is knowing that you got stung harder.  Anything I can do, you can do better huh?  Well, you're damn as near twice the loser I am, so maybe you got a point.”
    
“Get spaced, Sterne.”  She turned her line of sight away from him, but Sterne either didn't catch the hint or decided not to.  She was trying not to think about him.  Something like a plan was kicking around the inside of Susan's head.  
    
“You know what?  You should have never left the Legion, Susan.  You were just about alright with me to do the thinking.  You and me, we were a good team.”
    
“Sure.  What with me doing all the work and you taking the credit.”
    
“Oh yeah, sure.  And what with you doing so well on your own here, too.”
    
She lashed out with a punch that she turned into a shove at the last moment, sending him off into midair, making the medals on his coat jingle, where he had to flail around, trying to reach a handhold of some sort.
    
Without thinking she launched herself off the deck towards Rabiu and grabbed her sleeve as she flew by, arresting her movement.  When the words came out of her mouth, it was nearly as much of a surprise to her as to everyone else.
    
“One more go.”
    
“Give it up, moongirl. That's the way the spin lands, la?” Opunui put a restraining hand on her shoulder. She shrugged and he pulled it back.
    
“Don't you know how to listen, Captain? There's work wants doing. Tell you what.  We can play another round when you hit dock if we're still there.  Be best if you just took your medicine and paid up now, Captain.”   Rabiu let go of her hand hold and started to stretch out.
    
“Not another round. Just a spin. One more spin.”
    
“Even if you win one more, you're still going to owe me. So what's the point?”
    
“One spin.”  Susan could feel her head bobbing up and down and could see it taking the room with it.  “But for bigger stakes.  I win, we swap cargoes and I take your place in the docking order.  You win, you take it all, all my profits for this trip.  What have you got to lose?  You've got a cargo either way.”
    
Rabiu narrowed her eyes and considered Susan for what seemed like forever in a couple of seconds.
    
“You're some kind of crazy floater, you are!”  Opunui laughed.
    
“And I'd have to be crazy  to risk my sure thing on a spin.  What are you up to, Captain?  What is this?”
    
“Just business.”  Susan felt a big, crazy smile make her jaws ache.  “There's a rare metals boom going on here. And you and I and everyone here knows that the ones who get cargoes from this first wave are going to be able to charge the highest prices, before the mining operations kick it into high gear and flood the market.”
    
“And you want a shot at the brass ring.  Can't begrudge you for trying, I suppose.”  Rabiu pushed off from the floor and started floating in the general direction of the airlock.  “Nice try.  But I'm not like you, Captain.  I'm not crazy.  Better luck on the next turning.”
    
“You wanted a sure thing, you should have gone to work for the big transit lines.  Still, you don't feel like taking the big risk, that's fine, I understand.  Doesn't make you any less of a free driver.”
    
Susan took another pull from her vape and shrugged.
    
“Well, no less than any other dirt-walker.”
    
“Ah, don't mind her.  That's just Ngn being Ngn.  Just talking, is all.”  Opunui said.
    
Rabiu grabbed ahold of the shuttle wing that overhung the circle and spun herself around, launching back towards Susan.
    
“You got yourself a bet, floater trash.  But one thing.  Not my cargo against yours.  Not worth it with what I'm shipping.  My cargo against your ship.  Not just the driver but the shuttles and the cloud too.  Lock and stock.  That bet enough for you, spacer?”
    
Her ship!  The Kublai Khan.  She knew there was something about it that should bother her.  It sounded like a bluff, the way she said it.  Except that at the moment, in her current mood and state, it sounded perfectly reasonable.
    
“Sure.  Let's spin it, dirt-walker.”
    
“It's a bet.  And then we'll see who's the real free driver Captain when I'm selling off your cargo and mine!”
    
“Quarter share on the Pavonian.”  Sterne had drifted back down next to Opunui and they were sharing the last of the nomadic drink-tube.
    
“I'll see that bet, bruddah.  Nobody's got Ngn's fingerwork.”
    
“True enough.  But her luck is as bad as her fingers are good.”  When Sterne smiled, it drew up mean lines at the sides of his face.  
    
“Gonna enjoy watching you lose your stake, Susan.”
    
She heard, but she wasn't listening to him.  Her eyes were locked, unblinking, on Rabiu's.
    
“You've got a game, floater.  But I do the spinning this time.  Not that I don't trust you, Captain.”  Rabiu was still squinting at her, trying to size her up.
    
“Like the Void you spin.  My bet, my spin.  Not that I don't trust you, Captain.”  She did a passable imitation of Rabiu's tone, stretching out, one foot still hooked on the deck, so she could look down on Rabiu.  She reached down to select one of the three tops, fingers caressing the warm metal.
    
“No.  Not happening.”  Rabiu knocked her fingers aside with the back of her hand.
    
Suddenly both of their hands were on their lasers and the room went quiet.  Then giant hands reached out and covered the butts of their lasers, squeezing hard enough to hurt.
    
“What are you about, you mongrel son of a...”
    
“Me?  I was you, Captain Rabiu, I'd give it a good long think before I said something as regards  Mama Opunui, la?”
    
“The hand.  Make it gone.”
    
Rabiu flashed all of her teeth in a snarl, and locked eyes with him.  He let go and a warm rush of blood and pain returned to their hands.
    
“Sure, you get lucky this time.  So, you spin every other maybe?  You do Cho-Han for first spin?”  Opunui looked between them with veiled eyes.
    
“Works for me.”  Susan shrugged.
    
“I suppose.  And your cargo's already been inspected.  So at least I know that it's clean, right?  I take Cho.”
    
“I take Han. I'm always Odds.”
    
They both put out their hands and their fists came down on them. One, two, three.  She was holding out one finger, Rabiu was holding two.
    
“Three! That's Han. I spin first.”
    
“Bids,” said Opunui.
    
“Slash.” said Rabiu.
    
“Guess that makes me Chops, huh?” Susan knelt down and plucked a magnetic metal top from where it sat on the deck.  There was a thrill like electricity where she touched it.
    
She gave the first top a fast spin, too quick, too eager, almost clumsy.
    
“Chop!” Opunui called it.
    
Rabiu spun the second top fast and efficient.  It spun, it wobbled, it fell.
    
“Slash!” Malki this time.
    
“I like your spirit, Captain. This next spin, could be you, could be me. But you said yourself that you have more to lose than I do. Me, I make money either way. So I'm going to give you a chance to pull out before you blow this whole trip for yourself.”
    
“Really? You'd do that for me, let me bow out of this before the last spin?” Susan blinked and looked like she was thinking about it for a moment. With her other hand, she took her turn to spin.
    
“Not a chance!”
     
She swore as the top slipped out of her grasp.
    
“Void!”
    
“Damn sloppy.  Fingerwork, huh?  Fingerwork my ass!” Sterne chuckled and tossed the drink-tube aside.
    
“Should have taken me up on the chance I gave you, Captain.”
    
The top went wobbling, more crazily than the first time and after a couple half-hearted turns, it dropped.
    
"Slash."  Old Blind Lin announced it quiet but clear.
    
A moment of silence before everyone exploded.  Sterne was swearing and Opunui laughing and Malki asking the unfair heavens why it couldn't be her.  Susan herself was yelling.
    
Only Rabiu was quiet.

3: Raj and Home

The shuttle bay of the free driver Kublai Khan was cramped compared to the one on the Cook's Folly. Big enough in human terms, but barely able to fit the Khan's two tugships side-by-side. Susan barely brought the Xanadu into the bay without hitting the Samarkand, if only by millimeters.

Susan let out a triumphant whoop as the Xanadu shuddered into its launch cradle, buzzing with the thrill of the near miss. Pure luck, that. She was still on a streak. Rationally, the trained spacer in her knew that getting that close was bad, but that was drowned out by the pounding rush in her head. She came through the airlock and stuck her head out into the bay.

“Hello baby, mamma's home!” Her voice echoed pleasantly, filling the space between the two shuttles.

“Are you alright? That was a hell of a docking maneuver, Captain.”

Susan's first thought when the Khan answered her was how much it sounded like Raj. Which was funny, because she always thought the Khan would sound like that strange, androgynous, foreign voice from the ship's computer.

Then Raj emerged, a long dark figure in a creased gray uniform, from under the wing of the Samarkand, dark face still streaked with grease and Susan realized it actually was him.

Raj launched himself off the deck and swam through the microgravity towards Susan.

“Whew! The smell on you.” He made a face as he drifted close. “You didn't fly that thing back here yourself, in your state, did you?”

She shrugged.

“Sure. It was a short hop.”

“It was a short game. Usually when you take in one of Opunui's Three Spin games, you're not back for the rest of the shift, at least. What happened?”

He knitted his eyebrows together in a restrained scowl.

“How badly did you lose, Captain?”

“Lose? Lose? You shut your filthy mouth, crewie. Your Captain never loses!” Her face split into a thousand watt grin. “In point of fact, she has just made quite a haul. Won us a priority cargo. Military, even. Gets us past all the red tape of the Martians.”

She paused to snigger at her own pun.

Raj was not laughing.

“You won a cargo?”

“Better, I won a cargo swap, we get that prime military gear and, more importantly, their place in the queue, while they get to try and unload those hard grains we picked up up back at Innes' Star.”

She giggled again, for no apparent reason.

“The high and mighty Captain Rabiu needed to learn the golden rule of Three Spin. Never spin against the Ngn.”

“Uh-huh. So, and let me make sure I've got this straight, you got somebody to bet you their cargo against ours...”

“Nah. Not exactly. She needed collateral so I had to put up the Khan for security to lure her in, pretty cunning, huh?” She didn't have to tell him that, it would only upset him, but Raj had been with the ship for a long time and he deserved to know the truth.

And she deserved to see the look on his face.

“You what!?”

It was worth it. Completely. The way his eyes bulged out as his bushy eyebrows merged into an enraged unibrow was reason enough.

Raj closed his eyes, took a deep breath, counted softly to ten in Sanskrit and opened his eyes again. He spoke in a measured monotone when he spoke again.

“You risked our ship, you risked the Khan to... what? A turn of fortune? And with your luck?”

“Hey, don't knock luck.” She continued smiling and wrapped a companionable arm around Raj's shoulders and pulled him closer for a spot of slightly stoned Captain's wisdom.

“The thing about luck, my boy, the thing of it is that you have, absolutely have to, have the right kind of luck.”

“The right kind?” He grimaced, as if it was actually painful.

“The kind you make yourself.” There was nothing at all slow or clumsy about how she twirled her vape between the fingers of her free hand.

“You... cheated?” He pulled away from her and floated free, just out of arm's reach.

“With those stakes, how could I not? I suppose you would have preferred I'd have lost the Khan honestly, huh?”

“I would have preferred...” The spark left his eyes and he seemed to deflate a little as he floated slowly backwards.

“No, you know what, never mind. There's no point arguing with you when you're like this. Or at all, really.”

“That's what your beloved Captain likes to hear!” She pushed off from the Xanandu and did a couple of little pirouettes in mid-air. The zero-gravity ballet courses were literally the only things her grandmothers had made her do that she didn't resent.

“Just one thing though.” There was a lone note of triumph lurking passive-aggressively beneath the surface of his tone.

“Did you also win the authorizations to carry military cargo? In my experience, Captain, military contractors need special authorizations to carry military-grade cargo. Otherwise the authorities here would would be within rights, obliged to treat it as contraband and confiscate. But I'm sure you've already thought of that, haven't you, Captain?”

“I...” She opened her mouth with the realization that she hadn't. “Of course I have. Don't you worry yourself, Raj, I'm handling it.”

“Glad to hear it.” His tone rose, like a question, and like his one eyebrow, at the end. “However, if you want, I do have an idea or two about...”

“Said I was handling it!” She cut him off with a violent chop at the air. There was a hoarse growl in her voice that surprised her. “Now, how soon can you get the Samarkand spacebourne? We've got some work ahead of us. The clock is counting on this. I want that cargo over in our cloud by the time the call comes through for it from the Outstation. So get her spaceworthy and put some delta V on it, huh, Asthana?”

“Listen, Captain, I'm not even half way through the standard pre-flight check. And frankly, I wasn't able to do much more than a cursory once-over on Shuttle A before you took off. I'd like the chance to do a proper check.”

“What is taking you so long? We've been out of drive for...” She blinked on her datalenses and read the ship's internal chronometer as it flashed in front of her eyes in glowing, translucent letters. “...something like nine or ten kiloseconds. Post-drive checks never take this long.”

“And I've never had to do them alone. We always had more hands on board. And a proper engineer...”

“Don't you mention him!”

Since coming out of Sleep, she had been successfully suppressing the memory of their former engineer, before he had put a trio of laser pulses into the back of Morgan Gannis, depriving the ship of a tugship pilot and her of her best friend. Now she had a flash of his grinning face and her stomach turned a little.

“It's a job, not a man.” Raj's face tightened up. “And we should have one. We're both decent mechanics, but with our navigation and drive problems on the way here, I don't know how we're getting out of this system without a full professional work up. You'll remember that the last time we needed an engineer, Vikram just...”

“Yeah, well, hate to disappoint you, Raj, but Vik's not Captain anymore, I am. And did your Captain give you an order or not?”

“Captain! Aye, Captain!”

Glaring at her, Raj snapped off an exaggeratedly precise military salute. He floated with back and legs straight, like he was standing on a surface instead of drifting slightly to one side through the air, almost defiantly a planetsider.

The whole thing was a little ridiculous and Susan had to laugh. The effort of laughing made her realize how tired she was all of a sudden.

“Tell you what. Why don't you just finish those checks on the Samarkand and get her out there hauling cargo. I'll take care of the Xanadu in a bit.”

She pushed lazily off the Xanadu and started herself drifting slowly towards the hatch between the shuttle bay and the Khan's living quarters.

“Sure thing, Captain. You feeling alright?”

“Yeah.” She yawned. “Yeah, I just got some... you know.... Captain stuff to do.” She waved her hand vaguely in his direction.

“And you just finish up on that tug, huh?”

“Sure thing, Captain. I'll get the whole crew on it.” She didn't need to look to hear the scowl on his face. She braced her feet in the handholds and levered open the hatch with a grunt of effort.

“You are the whole crew. Now get on it.” She floated through the hatch.

Whatever he replied, it was lost when the hatch slammed close behind her. Her burning eyes were grateful to be free of the hard, white work lights of the shuttle bay. The dimmer, undulating bioluminescent glowtubes doppled the Khan's lone hallway with pools of uneven, golden light. Patches of darkness invited her to the corners and edges of the hallway. Was it the theece or were those dark spots bigger than the used to be?

Probably both. The Khan had been far from new when she and Vikram had...

No.

No point dwelling on that. No point at all. It was the past.

She launched herself off the bulkhead and down the hall, twisting slightly in the breeze from the air recyclers. It was not a long corridor and the trip to her quarters was short.

Once inside her own quarters, a spartan metal cube no different than any of the others on board, she brought the lights down entirely, strapped herself into her sleep-sack and closed her eyes.

But sleep would not come. When she closed her eyes, they still flickered with the beams of light that had pierced Morgan through, followed by the slow, sickly rise of the old-fashioned manual control panel as Morgan sunk to the ground. Susan had seen it all through his eyes. She had set his datalenses to record and and transmit back to her, for reasons that had seemed good then and she couldn't remember now, so she got to see her friend cut down through his own eyes.

Tired as she was, she could not sleep, not with that playing in front of her vision as surely as if she'd downloaded it into her lenses. She opened them again and took an old turnbook from its compartment in the wall next to her to calm her nerves. It was Nictys' Beyond and Between, and it opened to where she'd left off. When she was feeling alone in the Dark, the words of the old Captain-Poets always spoke to her.

No central orb

To guide my grief,

No rhythm of seasons to mourn;

My pangs adrift,

They aimless float;

E'en weightless they're much to be borne.

 

But she had trouble focusing on the familiar old words. Had trouble focusing on anything, really. Too tired to sleep, too tired to do anything but sleep. She unzipped a theece load from the storage pocket in the wall and loaded her vape. It had the rich, almost meaty, flavor of the Red Nightweed of Tlaloc.

Her mind wandered. Details came a went like dust in the wind. Hector's big, Centaurian, grin, like something he'd stolen from a toothpaste ad. The way Morgan's blue eyes twinkled when he was in real trouble, the scent of the really bad theece they'd vaped in here, and the good poems they'd read. The shrill, out of place, snigger of Turbulence Sterne.

Dark thoughts gathered in the darkness as the old theece paranoia whispered to her. Sterne's sneering face rose in her mind and the words 'just a Home System brat playing at the driver game' with it. Is that what she was doing? Playing? Perhaps. She had risked everything on the spin of a top, like a child. But she had won. That's what mattered. Forget the rest of it; she had won.

But what had she won? As much as she hated to admit it, Raj wasn't just being a downer. He was right. Without those permissions, all she had won was worthless.

The images came faster now, more recent. She could recall Sterne's sneer, Malki's ragged scar, Opunui's laugh, Rabiu's cold eyes, Lin's unchanging, unreadable expression...

Lin! The idea struck like lightning. Empty void one moment, brilliant and whole the next.

'Just playing' huh? Hurtling back down the corridor towards the shuttle bay, she kept hearing Sterne's aggressive whine, repeating the insult over and over, nails on the chalkboard of her mind. Hate focused her thoughts and pierced the physical lethargy she felt.

'Just playing'? She'd show him. She'd show him how they played back in the Home System.

“What is this? Are we running a driver or a pleasure ship here? Come on, let's get to it, spacer!” Susan exploded into the shuttle bay with a bark.

“Raj! Rajarshi Asthana!”

“Yes, Captain?” His voice echoed doubtfully from somewhere inside the Samakand's engine assembly. His head emerged from an open access panel, eyes narrowed with some concern.

“Just how stoned are you?”

“Enough, Raj-my-man, just enough to dance.” She was grinning now that her words, and her music, had returned.

“What do you mean? I don't...”

“Of course you don't. You don't dance. You've got to dance. There's a rhythm to these things and you've got to learn to move with the rhythm. The music of the spinning top and the main chance. They carry you along and you do what comes next. You see?”

“That is a complete load of shit. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I do. But as long as we're still moving forward, what's it matter?”

“Captain, I just think that...”

“Enough! Listen, Asthana. You just get that tug out there and concentrate on getting those cargoes swapped. If your Captain isn't worried about the permissions, you shouldn't be, either.”

“You're not worried?”

“Don't worry, your Captain,” she announced with a graceful pirouette in mid-flight. “Has a plan!”

“Ah.” He took in a breath between clenched teeth. “Good.”

4: The Web of Lin

The Xanadu's proximity detectors didn't squeal out their tinny warning until the little tugship was already passing through one of the half-kilometer wide loops in the net that surrounded the Goddess Ma-Tsu. The Goddess was one of the newer, war-era models that came with a mesh of flexible spidercarbon to hold the container ships in its cloud in place. The net was in full extension, nearly out to the maximum radius of its drive field.

Susan shut down the alarm. Without thinking, her fingers danced across the controls and the tugship jolted a little as the maneuvering thrusters fired once to straighten its course. She was deep in thought about how she was going to approach Captain Lin. Plotting a course through half-kilometer wide spaces between millimeter-thick cables took up very little of her attention.

The tugship crossed into the net and the universe shrank. The sensors scaled down from megameters to kilometers. Mass icons glittered in the sensor display along lines that traced the cables, indicating where the bulky, unmanned container ships hung like fat flies caught in a web, with the main driver of the Goddess Ma-Tsu squatting in the center, the spider that wove it.

A light flashed in the corner of her vision, the signal for an incoming communications hail in her datalenses. It opened up into a standard request from the Goddess' flight computers to take control of the Xanadu and guide her in.

She reached out by reflex to reject it but stopped herself. Wouldn't want to be rude, would she? Not when she was on her way to beg a favor from Captain Lin.

Still, it wrenched her gut as her controls grayed to 'read only' and the Goddess' flight computers took control from her. Her hand patted the jacket pocket where she kept her vape, but she didn't take out.

She was a bit surprised as the maneuvering thrusters sputtered back to life for a moment and turned the Xanadu's course off center, away from the main driver engine. She did a quick eyeball estimate and traced the new course to a small, oddly low-mass capsule that was threaded on the spidercarbon like a bead on a necklace. The flight computers could have just told her that, but it was an old habit she had picked up during her time among the People. You relied on your machines when you had to, double-checked them when you could. Vital with the ancient systems of the People and a good idea anywhere.

The tugship glided closer on the momentum of the now-silent thrusters. Susan brought up the rarely used exterior cameras on the Xanadu to get a visual on their destination. To a planetsider it would looked a bit like a tin can on a string, but to Susan's space-born eyes it was obvious what it was. A habitation module, spinning rapidly to simulate gravity.

An old fashioned Captain's Lodge, like the drivers used to have in the grand old high age of the Competitions. Its old-fashioned elegance looked out of place among the starkly modern webbing.

The scene tilted as the thrusters came back online and the tugship started to match the module's spin, and closed to dock with it. She could feel the centrifugal force began to draw her down into the inadequate padding of the pilot's seat as the tugship matched the Lodge's motion.

Coming out of the airlock was like stepping into the center of a rose, all swirling red silk and incense. The silk parted and Susan found herself in what appeared to be a room on Mars. Austere sitting mats woven into intricate mandalas lay across the deck, held in place by a simulated gravity of 0.3g , like that of Mars. Susan had visited Mars a couple of times as a child, before the war, and the gravity was just the same as she remembered, a minor annoyance but not as crushing as that of Old Earth. The air was filled with perfumed incense and the sound of unseen flutes and drums. And everything was draped in red silk embroidered in patriotic patterns. The only thing that broke the illusion was the room's shape.

The room was the inside of a smooth cylinder and the spin mimicked gravity equally along its whole surface, no floor, ceiling or walls. 'Down' was wherever you were standing, 'up' was where you were not.

Susan started as something scurried up her leg. She brushed it off with a quick swipe of her arm and jumped back towards the airlock. It clattered to the floor and Captain Lin's camera eye gazed up at her from an independent, spider-like, chassis.

A roar of laughter erupted from a fat trio of florid groundsiders sitting on mats halfway up the curve from Susan. One of them pointed a bejeweled finger at her and barked something incomprehensible in a language Susan didn't understand, setting off another wave of laughs, too loud and drunk for the enclosed space. Susan's jaw and hands tightened and she curled her gun hand into a fist.

The little camera eye scurried 'up' the curve, scrambling with almost animal agility over obstacles to reach the planetsiders.

A new voice, calm and level, entered into the conversation, speaking what sounded like the same language. The planetsiders' gazes turned 'up' towards the center of the room and Susan followed them to look at Captain Lin Moniang.

She sat, cross-legged, floating in the air in the exact center of the room, held in place by the equal pull of the centrifugal force from all directions.

She was wearing long, formal robes folded carefully around her, like an origami flower, tastefully understated with only one small clasp, bearing the fire seal of the Grand Army of Mars, on it, for decoration. Serene and unmoved, she was like one of those woodcuts of the Citizen-Bodhissatvas from the Third Century of Mars, the height of the Republican Era, that Susan had seen once in the Citizen's museum in Xin Kun Lun. It was all picture perfect. Too perfect. Native-born Martians, especially from the Citizen Families, never flaunted their Martianness like this. They didn't have to. It marked her as a colonial, likely from the Martian colony on Guan Yin, as clearly as if she'd been holding a sign.

She said something else to the planetsiders in their own language, and they rose unsteadily to their feet. One of them, the largest and most florid of them, sloshed a clear liquid from an actual glass bottle into gilt goblets. They lifted the goblets, shouted out a boisterous toast and shot their drinks in one go. Lin made what sounded like a courteous reply and the planetsiders started to stagger towards the airlock at the other end of the cylinder, their long, elaborate robes swaying with them. One of them turned as they left, muttered something slurred and guttural to Susan and gave her a wink so broad and clumsy as to border on the comic.

To her credit, Susan didn't laugh until the last of them had entered the airlock.

“That's some floor show you've got there, Captain Lin. They play every shift or do you only trot them out for special occasions?”

The little camera eye spun around and skittered back in Susan's direction.

“Ah, yes, thank you for your patience, Captain Ngn. You were most gracious to wait.”

Lin sighed theatrically and shrugged.

“I must again offer my most abject apologies for the unpardonable delay. Alas, it was unavoidable. I must only pray that you, as a driver Captain yourself, might understand. Certainly you are aware that each kind of cargo brings with it certain challenges, yes? And passengers are perhaps the most challenging, no? Although no excuse for neglecting such a notable guest as yourself.” Captain Lin's head bowed with practiced formality.

“Xing Hui, Captain Lin. You do me too much honor. I would not want to presume upon your hospitality.” She used the formal Mandarin greeting and mimicked Lin's bow.

Captain Lin gripped one of the thin, nearly-invisible, guide-lines strung from one side of the cylinder to the other and used it to pull herself off-center. The centrifugal force did the rest and she slid easily to the deck. Her fall was padded by the thick Cimmerian carpet layering the deck. The camera eye scrambled to meet up with her, climbed her robes and wrapped its mechanical legs around her wrist.

“Would you do me the honor of accepting a cup of my unworthy tea, Captain Ngn?” She went over to a low cabinet, almost hidden under its covering of red silk, opened it and began to remove a small tea set. She dropped a packet of leaves into the pot, which began to hum as it heated.

She lowered herself into a lotus position, settling her robes around her. She carefully placed the trey on the deck in front of her.

Susan took the hint and went to Captain Lin, arranging herself opposite her.

“I am humbled by the invitation.” She bowed her head respectfully and waited for Captain Lin, as host, to begin.

Captain Lin poured them both cups of steaming tea. Susan waited for Lin to take a sip before she tried her own.

The tea wasn't Martian, not quite, but it was close enough to fool anyone who had never had the real thing. In fact, Susan, who'd had the real thing, liked this a little better, it had a peppery bite that made it interesting.

“At the very least,” there was a little whir from Lin's wrist as the camera eye stayed pointed at Susan's face even as the wrist lifted the steaming cup to Lin's lips.

“You must admit that there are few cargoes as actively demanding as the living. And certainly none as inconsistent in their needs.”

“Of course, I defer to your greater expertise in such things, Captain Lin. But in my own experience, I find passengers to be little different from any other frozen cargo while they're in hibernation.” She kept her eyes riveted to Lin's immobile face. It was the host's prerogative to drag the guest through small talk before getting down to business. Captain Lin, of course, knew damn well why Susan was there. Susan had lensed her on the way over to the Goddess. And she would get to it in her own time, not Susan's.

“It is indeed fortunate when they are so obliging.” Lin nodded in agreement. “But when they are of sufficient status to wake when they wish, it is not conducive to the harmony of the ship. Most, shall we say, turbulent, is it not?”

Susan wasn't sure she didn't imagine the little laugh when Lin chose the word 'turbulent'. She started wracking her brain for something, anything, to talk about to forestall any possibility of discussing Turbulence Sterne.

“Important planetsiders, huh? Don't see how it matters how important they are at the bottom of the gravity well. It's your air they're breathing, all the same.”

“Ah, you still have the romantic notions of youth. We are but business people. No more. No less. And it may be my air, but it's their credit paying for it, and for whatever else they desire.”

A heavy sigh and a shake of the head.

“Must be some passengers, huh?”

“High Church officials from Groombridge 34, come from their home system to press their rights to a portion of this system's trade now that rhodium has been discovered. And they awoke craving fine white baijiu and shirako miltiar. Fortunately, I always carry my own personal supply of baijiu, at the least.”

Susan whistled low in sympathy.

“A thousand apologies, Captain Ngn. I am sure you did not come all this way to listen to an old lady's problems.”

“Please, Captain, think nothing of it. It is my honor. I am both humbled and shamed by your hospitality. Especially in light of how reckless and disrespectful my behavior was the last time we met.” Susan swallowed her pride with her tea. The thick incense that filled the room stung her eyes, but she kept them wide open, as if nothing was wrong. The incense wafted in clouds around the beatific figure of Captain Lin.

“It is of no matter. Please, do not concern yourself with it. It is a rare enough thing that we can receive company here. Anything you shall require, you have but to ask.” She sighed softly. “Would that we could could show such hospitality to all our guests.”

“I am grateful that you have chosen to receive me on such short notice, Captain Lin. I would hate to think that I was keeping you from things you needed to deal with.”

“Nothing more important than seeing to my duties as a host, I assure you. It is my own trouble, not yours, and I would not so cloud your visit with it.”

“Captain, please, do. Are not all spacers kin? If if would ease your burden to speak of it, it would be the least I could do to listen.”

“Ah, but you are not here as a spacer, but as a guest. An equal might so burden an equal, but a host would be most inexcusably remiss to do so with an honored guest.”

“Does a sun cease to be a star simply because it is also a system primary? I sit here, breathing your air, drinking your tea, complete and whole, in all my offices at once. I am not any less your fellow Captain because I am your guest than you are any less from Guan Yin because you are now a citizen of Mars.”

Lin lifted her wrist to let the camera eye glare unblinking at Susan. Lin's equivalent to a hard look? Good. Susan would have hated to be the only one uncomfortable here.

“No, it is too minor to even mention. Think no more or it, I beg of you.”

That the was the third refusal. Susan had to stop herself from smiling. Now the negotiations could truly begin.

“Though, perhaps you are correct. I would grateful for the chance to share my trouble. No matter how inconsequential it must seem to a brave young spacer like yourself. May I press you to a dan juan?”

She held up a shallow ceramic bowl filled with light pastry rolls. A traditional Martian appetizer. With great care and formality Susan took one.

“I am honored to accept this food that you offer me, my gracious host.” Susan was aware that her limited Mandarin was stilted and formal, but it should serve for moments like this. The deal was all but sealed now, but for haggling over the details. Accepting food was as good a handshake in Martian manners.

“My fortune in passengers is my misfortune as well. As you are no doubt aware, my well-traveled young guest, in the Zvyozdny Rodina in the Groombridge 34 system, the Church handles all business dealings with the outside universe. Something to do with their greater trustworthiness, I believe, although to my aging senses they are distinguished from other traders only in the amount they drink and the insistence they have with getting their own way.”

Lin took a biscuit roll herself and shook her head again.

“Their talks with the Grand Army do not go well. They continue to petition for preferential treatment in acquiring rhodium for their Czar despite being denied twice already by the military governor. They cannot seem to understand that there is a difference between hearing them and agreeing with them and this only compounds their already considerable impatience. So they continue to send petitions and impose on my hospitality, having brought none themselves for they expect that I shall provide. Like all the Groombridge kind, their appetites for liquor and imported miltiar are seemingly bottomless. It is fortunate for me that I have always kept a great store of finest baijiu on hand, for myself and my guests. But as to the other...”

She spread her hands and shrugged.

“The money which made them so attractive to begin with begins more and more to appear the bars of a cage. The more poorly their business goes, the more demanding they become in their living arrangements. And their cries for miltiar grow louder and more, shall we say 'insistent'?”

“That is indeed a misfortune, Captain Lin.” Susan was nodding her head in agreement. She was putting the clues Lin was laying down together into an idea. “And if someone was to make you a gift of miltiar as, let us say, gratitude to a gracious host? Might I so assume that it would be appreciated?”

“Indeed it would. Most appreciated. For the gift of silence from my honored passengers, it would be only just to consider anyone who would bring such a gift a full partner in this voyage.”

Susan leaned forward, scenting a deal in the offing.

“This partner, they would, of course, praise their good fortune for the opportunity to share in the good name, and legal protections, of my honored host, Captain Lin?”

“Indeed. I believe we understand each other better now, do we not, Captain Ngn? I'm sure you must be going and I would not wish to keep you from your duties. Do not let me detain you.”

“You are clarity itself.” Susan's mouth was making all the right noises but her mind was rushing ahead with a combination of excitement and dread. She had Lin's price, she just needed to find some high grade miltiar. And...

Her heart sank with a sudden realization.

Sterne had miltiar.

Lin knew Sterne had miltiar.

Susan looked up and saw Lin smiling.

5: Raj in Transit

“Damn me to the Cold Place, Kublai Khan, could you not manage to pick up even one single fucking barge that had its own guidance system on this last run of yours? I swear on the deep and frozen bones of Our Mother, if we have to haul all of these back ourselves...” The high lilting voice on the other of the comm channel trailed off into what Raj could only assume was profound obscenities in a language that didn't understand.

Raj allowed allowed himself a little smile as he played his fingers through the lit controls that floated in his vision that indicated the small fleet of self-propelled barges that were following his tugship back from the cargo cloud of the Rabiu Paiza.

“As opposed to the nice, automated cargo ships you've given me use of? Much thanks, by the way.”

Another curse he didn't recognize crackled across the comm channel.

“Hey, count yourself lucky we've got standard-gage cargo ships at all, Rabiu Paiza. The clients had to take out a loan from their neighbors just to get what you see here.”

“Sweet Saints and Ministers of fucking Grace, where did you pick this antique rubbish up at? The back end of Far Astarte?”

“Pretty close. One of the moons of Itzamna, out around Innes' Star.”

“Should've known. Bleeding Frontier. Bunch of savages out there. Kind of surprised they be letting a fancy crew of Home Systemers like you trade out so far as the Frontier Systems.”

“Hey, our crew might be Home System, but we're flying Tau Ceti colors.”

“Damn near as bad!” The other pilot had a laugh like glass breaking. They cut communications as the two tugships passed each other, Raj's headed back in the direction of the Khan, the other towards its own driver.

Even with the comm channel closed, that laugh rang in his ears. While he couldn't quite place the language the pilot had sworn in, her accent struck him as familiar. It brought up the images of crowded spaceports and bustling outstations. Something common among spacers. One of the Milo dialects, maybe? It was hard to keep them all straight.

On a whim, and because he was yet a fair distance from the Khan's location, he tuned into the identifying beacon of the Rabiu Paiza. A respectable enough Pavonian name with, from what Susan had said, a respectable enough Pavonian captain.

The beacon decrypted and showed him that it was flying the colors of 'Caer Wyddno', one of the innumerable tiny governments of the MLO 4 system willing to sell use of their flag for a little easy credit. On instinct he sneered at the cheap dodge, but then fought down the contempt rising in his throat. After all, both him and Captain Ngn were both from perfectly respectable worlds in the Home System but flew under the colors of the mercenary of the Tau Ceti Legion.

And, he mused as his mood darkened, he was certainly in no position to cast aspersions on anyone else's reasons for flying under the horizon and far from home.

He brought up the navigational plot of 'local' space in his datalenses, covering the area between the Kublai Khan and the Rabiu Paiza, each driver on one edge of the display. It rotated slowly so that he could see in all three dimensions.

With the Captain away, the tug he was flying was the only one of the Khan's icons on the plot. He looked closely and saw that his own bearing had gone slightly off during his conversation. He corrected course with a gentle nudge from the maneuver jets and was gratified to see the icons of the automated barges behind him change course to mimic his. It felt good to benefit from having the superior equipment for once. It was something he missed.

At this scale, the icons of the Paiza's four tugs seemed to swarm around Raj's tug. Two, including the one he had been talking to, were headed back towards the Rabiu Paiza, each trailing a single icon to represent one of the container ships from the Khan's cargo cloud, in their tractors. The other two were headed in towards the Khan to rendez-vous with more of the dim icons still floating in the Khan's cloud.

No, the other three, Raj corrected himself. A third icon had broken out of the Paiza's cloud and was hurtling towards the Khan at a spectacular rate of acceleration. He switched over to thermal sensors and waited several slow seconds for the scanners to gather info from across several light seconds. The scan confirmed his suspicions. The new icon was running way too hot to be a tugship. Almost up to the acceleration rating of a military torchship. A special launch? The Captain's personal gig?

Raj chuckled to himself. This Captain Rabiu must really want that cargo loaded if she was breaking out her own custom boat. And, sure enough, the tugs that already had loads were dropping them at the outer edge of the Paiza's cargo cloud and were headed back towards the Khan at full burn.

Out of curiosity and old habit, he plotted the courses of the incoming ships. A good astrogator always knows where his course lays, while a living astrogator knows everybody else's as his old Academy instructors had always said.

The Captain's ship plotted out past the drifting cargo and towards the main driver of the Kublai Khan herself. Did Captain Rabiu perhaps think that Susan was still around?

He brought up the comm channel, hailed her and sat back in his pilot's couch to wait for the reply.

One second passed.

Two seconds.

To kill time, he continued plotting the courses of the tugs, making a game of trying to guess beforehand which containers they were headed towards. The two tugs that were incoming ahead of the Captain's gig also plotted out for an intercept with the Khan, deftly avoiding all the containers. Turning a suspicious eye to the two already in the Khan's cloud, he found them also headed inward towards the main driver, at their top acceleration, passing by any container ships.

Thirty seconds now, no response.

He broadcast again, this time on the universal emergency frequency. By common agreement, their comm systems had to automatically play any signal received on this frequency. There was a part of him that long training had conditioned to feel a twinge of guilt about misusing the frequency when it wasn't an emergency. The rest of him just hoped that he was wrong.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Twenty.

More than enough time to reply.

With one hand, he cut the link to the automated barges, altered his course slightly to meet the Khan, and put all power to the thrusters.

With the other hand, he drew the pulse laser from under his seat and checked its power levels.

6: Encountering Turbulence

The great ship didn't actually appear out of nothing in a burst of Hawking radiation like a newborn universe, no matter what the sensors on the Xanadu were trying to tell Susan. It seemed that way only because when the drive field fell, letting the pocket of time and space inside it rejoin the universe and discharging the built up radiation, that it stopped moving faster than any eye, natural or artificial, could follow. Now that the field was down, the Xanadu's sensors could make out the mass shadows of a small cluster of ships and cargo containers.

A vast object stirred in the center of the cargo cloud. It emerged with glacial slowness from between the massive container ships, building up momentum from a full stop. A ship in drive didn't move, it stood still in a discrete bubble of space that did, accelerated faster than light, held apart in the field by the powerful forces generated by the drive engine.

The sight, even the virtual sight, more so the idea, of a ship coming out of drive held Susan transfixed, if only for a moment.

“Still it stands that fastest flies/our secret key to endless skies.” The words she whispered to herself were no less true for having being written centuries ago by a nameless spacer of the early Reclamation. A bit of doggerel left in the data banks of one of the first starships.

The ship emerging from the cloud was bigger than any mere driver. It was easily as large as a Homeship of the People and heat signatures erupted from it as it launched parasite ships. From old habit Susan calculated their trajectories in her head. Their courses converged on the same point as the Xanadu's. The free driver Bonhomme Richard.

Susan made a note of their estimated time of arrival and hit the thrusters. The thrusters kicked on and the little tugship rattled with their force.

She had to hit the retro rockets the moment the thrusters kicked off, and the power gauges glowed hot as the retros fought the momentum she had just bought herself, a wasteful way to do it, but Susan had the idea that with the arrival of this new ship, the clock was counting.

Big as life and twice as blond, Turbulence Sterne was waiting for her when she emerged from the airlock into the shuttle bay of the Bonhomme Richard, with his whole crew behind him. They all wore their lasers openly, the bay's work lights gleaming off of metal lovingly chromed and yellow ivory handles. Little lucky coins trailed from their tooled leather holsters on twisted cords in the Tau Ceti fashion. The only one who wasn't packing light was the broad-shouldered, bearded man in the turban who stood to Sterne's right, who had a gleaming curved sword hanging from his wide sash of a belt.

The lights shone off of the big white teeth in Sterne's smile.

“Susan Ngn, as I live and breathe. All that big talk around the three spin circle and here you are, on my doorstep, looking for a piece of ol' Turbulence Sterne.”

“I'd tell you not to flatter yourself, Turbo, but who else would? Get it straight, I'm doing you a favor by bringing this to you first. Don't go making me regret that.”

She turned to the turbaned man and gave him a smile and a nod.

“Heya Singh, you still taking the Tau Ceti penny, huh? How's business?”

He shrugged, arms still crossed.

“A favor! You hear that, crew? After a lifetime of taking what belonged rightful to her betters, Susan Ngn her own bad self has deigned to come over to the Richard just to do us a favor, out of the goodness of her heart. That it, Suzie-girl?”

There was a round of rough laughter following Sterne's own.

“Well of course I have.” She smiled wide and sweet, pushed off of the airlock and started to drift languidly towards Sterne.

“Just like I always did. You never had anything that I didn't give you first.”

“Why, you don't talk like that to the...” A russet-haired giant launched herself off of one of the sinister-looking patchwork tugs in the Richard's bay and rocketed towards Susan. Sterne slapped her shoulder with the back of his hand and sent her drifting backwards.

“Ah, she don't mean nothing by it, Larimore. It's just talk. You know our Susan, and our Susan's all talk. Ain't you, Suzie-girl?”

Her smile stretched tight and Susan could hear her own teeth grinding together behind it.

“You mouthing off about being all talk? Now that is irony. Especially when there's credit to be had from that talk. Or maybe you've lost your taste for credit. Which would explain your performance around the circle, I will say.”

“Credit, huh? Well, shit, girl, why didn't you lead off with that? You know me, I always got me some time for credit. What's the scam, Suzie?”

Her grimace went back to being a real smile. Yes, she did know him. Knew him for the greedy, short-sighted thug he was.

“Already told you. Lensed it from the tug. But listening never was your strong suit, was it Turbo? Still, not going to hold that against you. What's it that you always say? 'Credit don't know no grudge'?”

“Surely do. Always said you was a fast learner.”

He craned his head back to address his crew.

“Taught her everything she knows!”

Susan bit back the obvious rejoinder about what precisely Turbulence Sterne actually knew, but only because she wanted to do business here.

“What's all this talk of the old days lately? You feeling nostalgic, Turbo? Figured you more for a forward-looking type. Got an opportunity here for you to move some of that fancy cargo of yours before you ever see port. Credit in hand. How does that sound to you?”

“Ah, you always did have a way with words, Suzie-girl. Keep talking money to me, honey.”

“Well, here's the deal. I've got a buyer on the line, desperate, which is just the way you like them if I recall correctly, willing to pay full credit for as much of that Nuliajuk miltiar you were bragging about as you can...”

Sterne whooped out a laugh.

“Well if that don't beat all! All that trash you been talking about me since you left the Legion, and here you are, after all this time, trying to get your hands on some of my....”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down there, Turbo. I'm looking for fish milt, not yours. This is a whole different thing.” She couldn't help but add. “I do have standards these days, you know.”

His face curled into a petulant scowl.

“And what makes you think I don't? The abuse I take from you, credit involved had best be some kind of spectacular.”

“Oh, believe me, Turbo, it is.”

“Full share?”

“That's kind of high. My credit value just went up with my new cargo.”

“Yeah, I know. That's why I asked.” One corner of his mouth twisted upwards in an unpleasant smirk.

“In the name of the Void, Sterne, it's just some fried fish spunk.” She rolled her eyes.

“It ain't just that, it's the whole of the male genitalia of the fish, both meat and fluid, but then you never did have much patience for anything grew up on a planet, did you? And some of the very best people there are would give their left nut to get a bite of what our fish have got in theirs. Hell's own! Even with Rabiu's cargo in your cloud, a full share is letting you off cheap, you being an old friend and all.”

“Leakin' dirtwalkers.” Susan pursed her lips and shook her head with disgust. “Fine. I suppose I shouldn't be ungrateful. A full share it is.”

She had drifted up to arm's reach of Sterne and stuck out a hand in the old Tau Ceti manner, palm open. Sterne looked down at it with a raised eyebrow, like he'd never seen one before.

The eyebrow stayed cocked as he raised his eyes to look into Susan's.

“No.”

“What?”

“Now who ain't the strong listener? Said 'no'.”

“'No' to what? 'No', you won't honor the price? If it's a bigger share you're after, you leakin' pirate...”

“Nope. Just ain't going to sell. Not at any price. Not to you, nohow.”

The grin had dropped from his face and he leaned forward with an animal snarl deep in his throat.

“Susan Ngn just gives in and pays full price without more than a squeak for protest? Not even haggling? Nope, I ain't buying it, sister. You want it too bad. And that's why you ain't gonna get it.”

“So what if I do? What does it matter to you what I want? Don't turn this into something personal, this is business. Are you looking for more of a share? Is that what this is? Listen, if that's your game, I'm not going to go a fraction higher than...”

“No.” Sterne shook his head in a slow negation. “You got it all backwards-like. Business is personal, always has been. And you're lying to yourself if you think it ain't. You thought you could just bad mouth me in front of them other Captains and all across Human Space and not pay a price. Like hell! You hurt me, you snotty Home System bitch, I hurt you. That's my just right.”

“Wait, that's why you're shutting me down here? Really? You're refusing to do business with me because I made fun of you?”

She looked into his wide, unblinking eyes and choked back a laugh.

“You're telling me, seriously, that you're going to turn down good credit in the here and now for some nothing thing like this?”

“Nothing! This is my pride! You calling my pride 'nothing', Home System?”

A tide of low growls rolled out from the Cetani crewmen. Singh, who'd been still and silent this whole time, calmly and smoothly drew the curved sword from his belt, although his face was still as impassive as stone.

“Oh, come off it, Turbo, I wasn't talking about your pride specifically, I was...”

The crew had taken up a chant, beating their hands slowly against the sides of the tugships or their own weapons, with voiceless grunts accompanying each beat. Susan felt her hand coil around the grip of her pulse laser. It was an act of will to pry each finger from the grip. This was his ship, his turf. There were too many of his people present. This was no place to make a move.

“You are one of the universe's original fools, Turbulence Sterne. But you aren't my crew and I'm not your mother, so it's not my place to keep you from making your own bad decisions. It will make my shift to leave you and this sorry bucket of yours behind me. Plenty of other places I can spend my credit. Suck vacuum, Sterne.”

She spun around and launched herself back towards the airlock. As she flew, she blinked her lenses on to check the Xanadu's sensors. The first of the parasite vessels had crossed into the Bonhomme Richard's cargo cloud. The Richard's proximity alerts should be going off right about now.

“Oh, and on my way out, is there anything you want me to tell that big, beautiful mothership I saw coming out of drive on the way in?”

There was a long pause followed by 'You bitch'.

Susan did a little zero-gravity pirouette to face Sterne again, wearing her most insulting smile.

“How much you know, Ngn?”

“Enough to do business and more than you think.” Her smile got wider and more insulting. “Three-quarter share.”

“Devil's own, Suzie-girl, we had a deal...”

“That you turned down. Come on, clock's counting, Sterne.”

“I need that share, damn it! Hell, from what I heard, you're running light this trip anyway. I ain't seen Gannis or Rukh and they ain't the sorts to skip a game of three spin, so I'm figuring they ain't going to be needing their shares anytime... soon...”

His voice trailed off and the room went dead silent, but for the harsh buzz of the lights and the sigh of the life support.

Susan didn't remember actually drawing her laser, but it was in her hand and the red aiming dot was coloring the center of his forehead. His eyes were white and he held himself absolutely still. The crew was tensed up behind him. Singh pointed the tip of his blade at Susan and shook his head in the negative.

“What do you think you're doing, Ngn?” Sterne broke the silence, talking fast, as if he was afraid he wouldn't get more than the one breath. “Come on, you got to know that there's no way past this. You put light through me, my crew will take you down.”

“Sure. Let them. Way I have it figured, I can take down three of them before they get to me, starting with you. Now they've got to ask 'do I want to be one of the first three?' How loyal is your crew, Sterne?”

“Enough.” Singh's voice, heard for the first time, was smooth and almost musical, with a rhythm that the nasal Cetani lacked. He swung the sword in a slow, precise figure eight.

She closed her eyes, forced herself to take one, two, three deep, even breathes. While her eyes were closed she took the opportunity to check her sensors on her datalenses. The mothership was now crossing into the cargo cloud of the Bonhomme Richard.

She opened them again and arranged her face into a passable smile. She spun the laser around her finger a couple of times and slid it back into its holster.

“Half-share.”

“The Hell you say! You were talking Three Quarters just...”

“You don't get to say their names, Turbo, either of them. No matter what's been done, they're still crew and I'll thank you to mind your own business. So it's a Half share now. Take it and be grateful. I take any more grief off of you, it'll be a Quarter. You're the one who said that business is always personal, aren't you?”

“Ngn, you cold-blooded, pirate, floater...”

“Yeah. And?” She laughed and Sterne winced as if she had physically struck him. “If I was you, I'd decide quick. If my guess is right, and it usually is, you've got about until your friends out there get here to conclude this transaction. Now you can get some funds in hand before that happens or I can fly away and you get nothing. Go ahead, if I'm wrong, prove it. But do it quick. The clock is counting.”

Sterne's people looked to him and he glared at Susan.

“Well?”

“Fine. Take the miltiar, that's what you want. I'll take the Half-share. But you got to pay up in the here and now, no liens, no promises. Cash on the barrelhead.”

Susan checked her sensors again, watching Sterne fidget through the translucent images projected on her vision. The incoming ship was bigger than she had initially thought.

“Works for me. What do you want that in? Standards? Units? Voucher Marks?”

“Nope. Amulet.” He crossed his arms.

“You want the funds Amulet-encrypted? Ah, what's the matter, Turbo, don't you trust me anymore? That's sad, that's what that is. Ah, well, I suppose that's the 'Jaya for you, huh?”

Long seconds crept by as her lenses relayed commands back to the Kublai Khan's computers via the Xanadu, then back to the Richard's systems, taking time to transmit the quantum encryption bit by bit.

“See, that wasn't so painful, was it? And my miltiar?”

Sterne tapped his temple, next to an eye that glimmered with active an datalens.

“Just released the codes to the container ship to you. Now get the hell off of my boat.”

“Gladly” She did a little bow in mid-air. “Besides, I wouldn't want to keep you. I think you're about to be pretty busy.”

His silence as she entered the airlock was all the reply she needed.

She kept an eye on the new ship as she flew out of the Richard's cargo cloud on course towards the Goddess Ma-Tsu, dragging the small container ship she'd just bought behind in her tractor. The mothership was closing with the main driver of the Richard now, as some of the smaller parasite ships began to dock. She checked the mothership's beacon. It came back as the Aiendes Zdama'e. Her gut instinct had been right, a Homeship of the People. She didn't know what could bring a Homeship this far into the colonies or what business it could have with the likes of Turbulence Sterne, and truthfully, she didn't really care.

A communications hail from the Bonhomme Richard flashed in the corner of her datalenses. She reached out and to where the comm icon appeared to be in her field of vision and refused the hail.

She was already gone.

7: Dangerous Cargo

“Aye there now, Kublai Khan-b, what's about you then?” Raj had finally gotten a response from the tugs of the Rabiu Paiza that were headed towards the Kublai Khan's main driver. And all it had taken was setting the Kublai Khan-b (or Samarkand as the Captain insisted upon still calling it) on a course to intercept them at the driver. The Milo accent of the speaker, and he could definitely tell it was a Milo accent at this point, was a great deal thicker than the one of the tug pilot he had spoken to earlier.

“That was my question, Rabiu Paiza. I see that you're headed to our main driver. Is there anything I might assist you with?” He was communicating through audio only, but his voice was filled with the 'customer service' smile that he never truly lost, no matter how far in time and space he got from the jobs he'd held in college.

“No, no, not bein' no problem now, just a bit of palaver with your captain now, none of it to worry the likes of you.”

Raj opened his mouth challenge them with the fact that the Captain was absent at the moment, but some instinct delayed him. A warning light flashed in his datalenses and he expanded the navigation display to fill his vision. It showed the largest of the incoming shuttles, the overpowered cutter he thought might be the Captain's Gig, changing course to intercept his own. His scans revealed power signatures from points along the hull that matched up to weapons profiles. Quickly, he zoomed out the plot and started scanning it for other destinations. They had started paying attention to him when he'd started paying attention to them. Now he needed something, anything really, other to do to avoid those attentions.

“No worry.” He forced the smile back into his voice. “Well, if you don't need any help from me, I've got some work to out here. You know, orbital adjustments, that sort of thing.” Still scanning the navigation display, he spotted where one of the Khan's big grain carriers had drifted alongside a newly-delivered barge from the Rabiu, and was getting dangerously close to crossing its path. It was a bad placement for the barge and Raj took a moment to wince at the sloppy work in establishing a parking orbit for it. He could blame it on being rushed, doing a whole crew's worth of work while the Captain was off doing... whatever it was she was doing. He could, but it wouldn't change the results and like he'd been taught as a child on Callisto, results were all that mattered.

“You be about that then. Ach, now, you be careful with our barges won't you then? Or we'll know the reason why, eh boyo?” There was an ugly snort of a laugh for punctuation.

He hit the maneuvering thrusters hard and the little tugship started to veer sharply towards an intercept with the two container ships. And well out of the Gig's intercept orbit.

He was relieved by the lack of response from the crew of the Rabiu Paiza.

The navigation plot scaled down repeatedly as he pulled in close, firing the retros to bleed off momentum. By the time he matched velocity with the two container ships, his display was very nearly to scale, the tugship a tiny dot dwarfed by the kilometer-long container ships. Once again, Raj was struck by the scale of interstellar commerce, the volumes necessary to make it profitable.

He easily placed the tugship in the relatively narrow space between the two cargo ships and activated the tractor array. He put the tractors on repulse and turned it on the unpowered grain barge, adjusting the spin until it was nudged into a safer orbit. Now he turned his attention to the self-guided barge. It had been a while since he had the luxury of a fully automated vessel and he had to pull up the procedures from the tug's computers to refresh his memory. Maybe the nameless Milo pilot had been right, maybe they had been out in the Frontier too long.

Of course, given the rather haphazard nature of the databases on the Khan's network, it took him a couple of tries before he came across the proper procedures. He had to wade through a recipe for Eridani curry for automated kitchens, a half-finished essay on sculpture by a previous captain, and an energy budget spreadsheet from a long-ago trip to Fomalhaut before he came to the refresher document on instructing automated barges. He pitied anyone who ever tried to hack the Khan's network. Almost as much as he pitied the crew that had to use it now.

Submit code to gain navigation access? Check.

Synchronize barge's navigation plot with the Khan's central computer to get most recently updated information? Check.

Take mass reading to determine inertia? Check.

Double-check manifest to confirm mass reading? Check.

Raj ran his eyes over the readings, his mind already skipping ahead to the next step, expecting, as always, for the numbers to be different, but within a range of tolerance. Only his nearly-forgotten military training impelled him to scan over the numbers one last time to make sure. Let's see, margin of error was... he stopped and his eyes widened a bit at the size of the number. There was always a difference between the actual mass and the cargo manifest's idealized version of reality, but even among civilian shippers it wasn't supposed to be that much.

It was odd, almost as odd as all the tugs converging on the main driver like that. Raj tried to tell himself that they were probably just as uneasy about this irregular deal as Raj was and looking to protect their interests. Probably. But Raj was too well trained to not consider other explanations. For one thing, with the demand for drive engines being what it was, drive-jacking was not uncommon, especially in battlefield systems like Beta Hydri.

Also, he didn't like the way that the last Milo he'd spoken to had talked about 'our' cargo, with that nasty laugh. What were they shipping, anyway? He could almost hear the Captain's voice telling him to 'not worry and just go with it'. But that wasn't him. Details mattered and in space, details were often all that stood between you and the Void.

He was careful to change his status from 'in transit' to 'maintenance', in case any of the Paiza's crew was watching his comm channel and pulled the tug in to dock with the Paiza's barge. On the plot it looked like a fly landing on the side of a building compared to the kilometer-long behemoth.

The tug shuddered slightly as it docked its airlock with the maintenance hatch on the outside of the barge. It didn't surprise him that much when he transmitted the access codes to the maintenance hatch and they came back to him denied.

He got into the tugship's worn vaccsuit, filled with the smell of sweat and moldy air filters. Raj mentally added a full cleaning and maintenance of the vaccsuits to his growing list of things that needed doing in the increasingly distant 'later'. He'd been out of hibernation for barely a full work shift but he'd already done at least two shifts of work and anticipated some sleepless shifts to come. All the systems seemed to be within tolerance, if only barely. When he loaded the tool harness, he made sure his pulse laser was one of the tools hanging from it.

He cycled through the airlock and floated in the tug's docking tunnel, facing the blank metal slab of the access hatch, considering it with narrowed, hostile eyes. The surface was pitted and scarred from numberless micro-impacts in the past and that told Raj that it was too thick to just cut through, at least with the bare-bones tool kit aboard the tugship. But it was still, supposedly, a legitimate cargo vessel and according to safety regulations, all maintenance hatches aboard automated ships were supposed to be equipped with manual overrides in case something happened to their control systems. He felt around the edges in the clumsy suit gloves until he found it, a notch in the seam between the hatch and the hull. He gave it a hard pull and it folded out to reveal an old-fashioned manual keypad, with the standard Sanskrit numerals on its keys.

The emergency access codes, of course, were classified information, generally only available to the shipping company, the military and emergency services. Raj still had his from his time in the service, but that had been a long time ago. Before the war, they would have been useless, with regular updates by port authorities transmitted to all military and emergency services. But the wars had meant the end of cooperation and a general breakdown of communications between systems, so merchants had grown lax about regular updates, especially independent operators. So it was worth a try.

His first code stored in his datalenses was worthless. The second code was not. The hatch seemed to slide open silently in the airless environment. And before him, framed by the open hatchway, was the gaping cavern inside the container ship. It was a plain hatch, no point in having an airlock on this end. Except with live cargo, which was expensive, there was no point in raising overhead with life support.

He pushed off the hatch and drifted out slowly in the cavernous container ship, into the darkness deeper than deep space. Alone in a void. Only the twin narrow shafts of light from his helmet lamps, one flickering brighter than the other, struggled feebly against this darkness. Their beams were divided by a regular, symmetrical forest of metal framework that ran in all directions, beyond the range of his light. He didn't have the illumination to see the edges of the void.

The Captain would have probably found some bit of obscure old poetry for this but all Raj could think of was that it was damn dark.

The skeletal framework was fleshed out with vast, unmarked cylinders, easily as big as a man, filling the endless racks out as far as the light would reach. He recognized them at a glance. No one who had ever served could have mistaken them for anything but 'gun engines', the massive supercapacitors that were used to power ship-class and artillery energy weapons. Priority military cargo indeed! To be sure, they had non-military uses as well, but this far out in the colonies? And a recent warzone, even one undergoing a mining boom? No, these were headed for weapons emplacements.

He nudged a control in the glove of his suit and a short burst from one of the maneuvering jets on his belt and then another sent him spinning around in a perfect circle, the light from the head lamps wheeling through the darkness. In every direction, and as far as his lights would reach, it was the same, regular rows filled with the military grade capacitors.

So why, he asked himself, didn't the mass sensors give the proper reading for a standard-gauge cargo barge filled with standard issue gun engines? He fired selected jets a few more times as he stabilized his own movements and then set himself rocketing in the direction of the nearest rack.

He reached out and stopped himself against the scaffolding and begin to inspect the capacitor, going through the old shipboard drills for this that they had taught him in the Fleet.

Sanskrit characters trailed down the side. Sanskrit meant that they were Jovian made, or by a Jovian ally. Not that it told him much. Most of the best supercapacitors came out of the great factories on Europa in the home system. He followed the characters down to where the serial numbers would be. There the metal was blank, rubbed until it shone, unlike the metal around it. Bootleg. Again, not unusual, with system-level powers switching sides as often as they did, a great deal of the military aid the great powers gave them ended up on the open market.

He did a swift check of the locking seal on the casing. Only the end user should be have the code to open the lock, turning the red light to green. He was less than surprised at this point to see it was off. The locking mechanism was deactivated. He took a prybar from the tools hanging from his suit's harness and wedged it into the thin seam that ran down the long side. He turned on the magnets in the other glove and his boots and anchored himself to the framework to get leverage. There was nothing graceful in zero-gravity manual labor, no matter how skilled you were at it. Raj had been working in space for years and it was still a struggle to do something as routine as pry open a cylinder.

But he did. And when he did, he saw suddenly why these gun engines didn't fit the mass profiles of supercapacitors. Because that's not what was inside the protective casing. His lights shone weakly though closely-clustered dirty glass tubes, running the length of the casing, caked with frost and some kind of translucent white sediment, or maybe it was a mold or moss of some sort. And sitting in the middle of tube, suspended in what looked like dirty ice, were long, dark strands. It looked like a vine or weed of some kind.

For a long moment, Raj just stared, trying to process what he was seeing. He wished, not for the first time, that Morgan was still on the crew. Not just because he would have appreciated the company but because Morgan had been an encyclopedia on flora and fauna. On the streets of his native Callisto, the only flora and fauna he'd ever run into were already processed into meals.

He closed his eyes and said a little prayer for Morgan's soul. And then opened them and looked at the vines in ice. And slowly, a dark shadow of suspicion began to fall over his thoughts. He did know what it might be. The black weed that the drug 'corpselight' was made from. He thought he even recalled that it came from one of the planets in the MLO 4 system. Milos. He began to do the calculations in his head, even in its unprocessed state, if all the container ships, or even a significant fraction of them, had canisters like this, it would be enough, more than enough, to supply a planet for a year, maybe more. The amount of money involved would almost be beyond calculating.

He had to tell the Captain! He tried to raise her on the comm system. All he heard in response was the strange, incomprehensible voice of the Khan's computer and a symbol flashed in his datalenses. His permissions on the Kublai Khan's network had been denied. He fought down the panic growing in his gut. Something was definitely wrong here. He had to get word to the Captain. Signal the authorities. Do something.

He squeezed his glove control and two of the maneuvering jets on his suit spun him around.

And saw the two suited figures climbing out of the open maintenance hatch, bulky, double-barreled pulse lasers gripped in their mitts.

Raj's hand drifted down to where his pulse laser was on his harness. Whatever was about to happen here, it was going to happen very quickly.

8: Captain Interrupted

Susan Ngn was riding high. She was burning fuel building up velocity towards the Goddess Ma-Tsu, with the Bonhomme Richard shrinking to insignificance behind her. She was dragging a small-gauge container vessel, an expensive model with environmental systems to keep the miltiar fresh, in a tractor behind the Xanadu. Sterne was in trouble and she had got what she wanted. Everything was coming up Susan.

Grinning, she took her vape from her jacket pocket, snapped a theece cartridge smartly into it and commanded her lenses to call up Raj. He had thought this was a bad idea and she was feeling in the mood to dish out some 'told you so'.

The signal came back denied. Clenching the unactivated vape between her teeth, she boosted the signal strength as far as it would go and tried again.

Denied again. 'Target system not available'.

Not available?

“The Void you say!” she hissed the obscenity through clenched teeth. Was this some kind of fault in the Khan's systems? She had taken a look at the comms before Opunui's three spin game and they'd seemed fine then. Well, no glitchier than usual anyway.

She punched through another hail from the Xanadu's node on the network to the central computers back on the Kublai Khan to get a system status, using her priority administrator's access.

Denied.

'Target system not available'.

Now Susan began to worry. The only reason that the systems would fail to respond to a Captain's credentials was if they were down. Granted, the Khan's network had always been a bit 'eccentric', but it'd never crashed before, even that one time that Hector had ended up downloading all that porn from...

Her heart seemed to stop for a moment. Hector.

The Khan's former engineer had been their resident computer genius. It would have been well within his skills to set a virus or some hostile commands in the system. She wouldn't have figured him for the type to do that to the Khan, but then she also wouldn't have figured him for the type to shoot a crewmate in the back either, and that's what he was currently doing time in a Frontier penal colony for.

So, had he set some kind of virus or planned a shutdown in the Khan's computers before they'd left the Innes' Star system? She had never been easy with the thought of leaving either him or Morgan behind there. A Captain should be able to both exercise justice on and take care of her own crew, but the circumstances had allowed neither. She could hear in her mind the voice of old Captain Klaras, back during her time with the Aberles-lanzu, lecturing her in monotone Lojban about how the ship was both world and womb for her crew, and how the ship would pay back the Captain that mistreated her children with the wrath of an angry mother. She could only imagine what kind of a vicious, half-mad, snaggle-toothed old bitch the Kublai Khan would...

She shook herself out of it. She respected the People, the first starfarers, and their culture, but even during her time among them she had never embraced their animistic faith. She had never truly believed the long, dark tales of damned captains and vengeful ships that filled the long, dark journeys through the Cold Mother Void. Well, not literally, anyway, although the symbolism about a Captain's dependence on her ship and duty to her crew were always plain enough.

She pulled the scale of her navigation plot out by an order of magnitude and adjusted her course so that it only passed near the edge of the Goddess' cargo cloud and then arced back around towards the Khan. She planned to launch the miltiar towards Lin and head straight back home. She might not literally believe she was being punished by the soul of an angry ship, but the lesson here about abandoning her crew was all too clear.

She kept her eye on the plot. As the new orbit reached its nearest point to the Goddess she cut the tractor beam. Thrusters fired and the little tugship began to turn, while the container ship continued on its own momentum, cruising towards the Goddess' cargo cloud.

An orange alert flashed in the corner of her vision, an incoming hail. Orange? That meant a direct hail to the Xanadu itself, not channeled through the main servers aboard the Khan. She accepted. The static, fuzzing, translucent image of Captain Lin filled her lenses.

“Captain Ngn, to what do we owe the honor of your return, so soon?” The image smiled beatifically and inclined her head with mock humility, like a stock character from some old Tharsis opera, Mama Laodan. The only thing that kept Susan from whistling Mama Laodan's opening song from the first act of 'A Coward of Cydonia' was that she was pretty sure Lin would recognize it.

“Might I be so forward as to hope that the cargo container you have just launched towards me contains that which will be buy me the peace which I so crave?”

It wasn't really a question, just another stage of the ongoing ritual of business.

“Nuliajuk white leviathan milt. Enough to sate even the most voracious guests, and to leave you a surplus with which to do business, if your guests wish to save face by not returning home to their masters with empty hands. A sign of my great esteem for my most gracious host, freely given. I would be honored if the storied Captain Lin would take me under the protection of her clearances, for it would far more than this unworthy one deserves.”

The ritual words came easily to her, but her mind was already past the Goddess Ma-Tsu and dwelling on her own Kublai Khan. A lump was growing in her stomach at the thought of losing Raj. He was the last of her crew left. Her heart began to speed up.

“No, it is the least I can do for the generosity that shames me with its bounty.” There was something arch and sing-song in Lin's delivery that only strengthened the air of old Martian opera about her. She bowed her head low in a classical sign of deep gratitude.

“And indeed, so confident was I in the virtue of my most honored guest that I tried to transmit the clearance codes as soon as her ship began its approach. But I am most ashamed to report that I found myself unable to do so. The main systems of her driver would not respond to my own. I have had my systems engineer working on diagnosing the problem.”

Void! Susan snapped back to the problem at hand.

“Dishonor no more attaches itself to my gracious host than water to the back of a duck. The fault lies on my head. A system failure aboard my own vessel, nothing that deserves your notice, Captain Lin.”

“My guest and benefactor no doubt knows that the shipping clearances I possess were given as a sacred trust for my service to the Martian Free State. Surely she knows that I could not bestow such codes on a recipient that is insecure. This shames me greatly, but my business is dependent on the goodwill I have built up with the Grand Army, I do hope you understand.”

She spread her hands in a classical stage gesture of submission to fate. That bitch! There was no way to catch up to the unmanned container ship now. In her concern about her ship she'd forgotten the most basic rule of business, never give up the cargo until you've got cash in hand. And it would cost her.

Still looking for all the universe like a carving of a Martian Bodhissatva, Captain Lin smiled sadly and spread her hands a little wider.

Susan stewed over her response. The smug old crone knew she had her over a barrel. She probably had been monitoring the situation the whole time. Void, sitting there in the center of her web, she had a better view of it than...

Susan's thoughts stopped in their tracks.

“Captain Lin. I understand, of course, that such a valuable set of code could never be entrusted where the system was not secure. Of course. You need not apologize. Only, if you would grant me one small request, I am limited to the sensor suite aboard my tugship right now. Might I have access to your driver's sensors for a moment?”

The mask broke for only a fraction of second and a pursing of the lips registered Lin's doubtfulness. Then she was back to full, smiling, Mama Laodan. She might not like it, but this was the rules of the game she had started them playing.

Streams of angry red Mandarin characters flickered across Susan's lenses, too fast to read, before resolving into a long-range sensor display with much higher resolution and much more detail than the bare bones equivalent aboard the Xanadu.

She was not surprised it was already fixed on the Kublai Khan. The Khan was like a miniature solar system, with the Khan's main driver as its primary star, the vast container ships orbiting it like planets and the tugships zipping back and forth, crossing orbits like comets and rogue objects. Or they would be if they were out working. Which they weren't.

The tugships were clustered around the main driver, all but one that was towing a small icon that the Goddess' sensors were pleased to ID as the Kublai Khan-b, her Samarkand, back towards the driver.

A closer glance at the data on the ship doing the towing revealed that it was no ordinary tug, it was too large and spat too much waste heat from its engines. And those protrusions there? And there? Susan would have know them for weapons mounts even if the Goddess' computers hadn't helpfully marked them as such. All in all it looked like some sort of converted raider. The kind minor planetary governments used for orbital patrols or pirates for boarding missions.

The formation of the the other tugs at the Khan's main driver looked familiar. They had attached themselves to all the emergency and maintenance access points except for the docking bay, which was presumably the raider's post.

And that's when she realized where she'd seen it before. Out towards Fomalhaut, during her time traveling with the Aberles. A classic drive-jacker's formation.

The puzzle was why they were still here. A good drive-jacker's greatest friend was speed. Speed in the capture and speed in the get-away. Drive engines took time to get up to full power, and the sooner you started, the sooner you were gone with your prize. She pulled the scale of the plot back to take a look at surrounding space to see if she could find a reason.

She could. The big Martian torchship that was doing the inspections of the incoming drivers. An oversized power plant with engines on one side and weapons on the other. The fastest thing in sub-light. A label sat next to it announcing the rather grand name of the GAV Price of Freedom. It was engaged with a driver which was on an orbit that passed near (in spaceflight terms) to the Khan's own. Her guess was that they didn't want to attract its attention and take the risk of the Martians blowing them out of space. A very real threat. After all, you weren't faster than a laser until after the drive field was up all the way. As a point of fact, Susan also would have preferred they didn't get her ship blown out of space either. She wasn't much surprised to see a comm icon next to the torchship indicating it was in contact with the Goddess.

However, the authorities were present and she supposed she should give them a call, as much it went against her nature. After all, wasn't this what they were supposed to be for?

She minimized the navigation plot to a corner of her vision and brought up the comm menu to have Lin connect her to the Martian warship.

A flashing red comm icon greeted her when she brought up the menu. Red? Red marked it as coming through the Khan's own network. Was her system back up? Susan's heart rose with excitement as she accepted the hail.

And sunk again as the crystal clear picture of Captain Rabiu's smug face filled her screen. Rabiu's mouth was twisted into something that was both smirk and sneer, and she was idly toying with the fine gold chains that dripped from her fur cloak. The resolution was clear enough to show the texture of the fur and the unpleasant tightening in her brow.

“What in the Void are you...?”

Rabiu silenced her with a single upraised finger.

“Don't talk, no matter how much you want to, Ngn, just listen. There's some things you should know. Just be nice and fly yourself back to your driver quietly and we can have us a nice, calm, productive chat between business women. Get down to brass tacks, if you will.”

She paused as if she meant to log off. Susan opened her mouth to frame a response, but Rabiu cut her off with another raised finger.

“Oh, and Captain Ngn? Let's just keep this between ourselves, shall we? We wouldn't enjoy it if the Redcaps broke up our little parlay, would we? And neither would your handsome exec. Understand me?”

She disconnected before Susan could answer, apparently confident that she did.

Understand? Susan was still processing all the information she had just absorbed.

Rabiu was in control of her network.

Rabiu was in control of her ship.

Rabiu had Raj.

Rabiu had called Raj 'handsome'? Really? It wasn't that was bad-looking, exactly, because he wasn't. But he was a little old. And he was a bit broad across the shoulders for Susan's taste. Such a planetsider. But then, so was Rabiu, so that figured.

'Parlay'? 'Redcaps'? That was an awful lot of Milo downport slang for a supposedly respectable Pavonian merchant princess.

She couldn't call in the Martians now. Not without risking Raj. The thought of sacrificing him caused her insides to pull into a thick knot. No. She was his Captain and he was her crew. Her only crew.

And not telling the Martians meant not telling Lin, of that she was sure.

But she would feed the deep, insatiable Void before she would fly into whatever trap this Rabiu had already caught Raj in.

It was HER ship.

It was HER crew.

And she was going to take it back from Rabiu, but her way. And for that, she'd need help. Rabiu had crew enough to man four tugships and that raider, to boot. Susan knew she'd need back up to meet that. Fighters. No, mercenaries. Someone who could be bought and stay bought. Someone like the Tau Ceti Legion.

Her heart sank a little lower and settled in her already twisting guts.

That meant Sterne.

9: The Flight of Blades

They burned through the void, their heat signatures tracing a path in the darkness between the Xanadu and the Aiendes Homeship. The waste heat from their engines glowed like bonfires on her sensors.

Susan could see them in her mind's eye, ugly, blocky things, never meant to fight an atmosphere. She had a pang of nostalgia from her wild days traveling with another clan, the Aberles, flying and racing the custom-built fast runners, what the People called balryma'e, all engine and power plant, nearly as fast as a military raider, if more lightly armed. She could almost feel the rumble of those powerful thrusters shuddering through the hull and into her bones, and contrasted it against the almost undetectable thrust of the Xanadu's underpowered little engines, efficient and slow.

Beyond the balryma'e on her display, she could see the massive, lop-sided outline of the Aiendes Homeship, deformed by the much smaller main driver of the Bonhomme Richard, hanging off of it like a vestigial limb.

The balryma'e were showing no sign of losing speed, still building up velocity in what looked like an attack run. Even though she knew better, it was an act of will for Susan to not pull the Xanadu into a hard, evasive turn out of their path, to head for the cover of the container ships that her eyes had already found. She crossed her arms and gritted her teeth and waited for the incoming hail.

When it came, it was audio only, nearly lost in the pop and hiss of the balryma'e's ancient comm net.

“Coi ninpre. e'inai.” The voice barked out the challenge in Lojban with a flat, harsh monotone that was like a burst of static itself.

<Aclis, daughter of Seiras by Endrus, of the Clan Aiendes, Ralju in command of the patrols.> A Ralju! A section-head, second only to the clan's Captain. If a Ralju was commanding the patrols, that meant that there must be a Captain commanding aboard the Homeship.

<Coi. spusku. Suzyn, daughter of and by Howard and Stewart, of the Ngn, officer-by-law of the clan Aberles. Ship-leader Kublai Khan.> Without fully meaning to, she naturally mimicked the flat, aggressive tone of the Ralju as she responded. Technically she was a captain in her own right, but the Lojban word for Captain, Jatna, meant so much more among the People than just command of a ship, so she used the more general term of bedma'e or 'ship-leader' instead.

<What is your business with the Aiendes, bedma'e Suzyn of Aberles?>

<My business is with the Bonhomme Richard, not the Aiendes.>

<Your business with the Bonhomme Richard is your business with the Aiendes. Our Jatna stands aboard her.> There was no stronger statement of ownership. The fuzzing in and out of the comms failed to cover the hostile growl in the Ralju's throat.

<I am corrected. I have business with your Jatna after all, its seems. Ship's business.>

<And what shall I tell my Jatna of your business, bedma'e Suzyn?>

<That it is ship's business. Ship to ship.> She hesitated before pulling rank on the Ralju. She didn't want to alienate someone who likely would have the Jatna's ear, but she also didn't want to seem weak in their first impression. Especially with that many guns coming at her at that speed.

<As you say.> She couldn't be sure if the hiss she heard was more static from the pick-up aboard the balryma'e, or the Ralju making an obscene noise and she couldn't afford to care. After a moment, no doubt conferring with the Homeship, the Ralju continued.

<The Jatna will meet you. She is aboard the diver, dealing with the other derdzu. She will receive you there.>

Susan bristled at the insult of derdzu or 'dirtwalker', but held her tongue. There would be time for the Ralju Aclis after her business with the Aiendes was done.

<Co'o, bedma'e Suzyn.>

<Co'o, Ralju Aclis.>

A packet of raw data accompanied the Ralju's sign off, directing her to dock at an ancillary maintenance airlock at the other end of the Richard's habitation module. As she drew closer, she began to see why. The main airlock to the shuttle bay, where she'd docked last time, was occupied by the primary boarding tube of the Aiendes Homeship. She flipped on the exterior cameras to get a better view of it.

Even in the unflattereing external lights of the Xanadu, it was an impressive sight, vast and irregular, like an alien landscape scrolling past with its own mountains and valleys, it was hard to get the precise contours because of the swirling fractal pattern that covered every millimeter of the hull, making it into a single optical illusion, the clan fractal of the Aiendes, their identifying equation, extrapolated out as far as there was hull space to do it.

She docked and was met on the other side of the airlock by a single, taciturn, spacer, a blade dangling from her hand, wearing an armband embroidered with a small section of the Aiendes fractal. The spacer spun in midair and started to propel herself down the hall with, small efficient pushes off the handholds built into the deck. Susan followed suit.

The habitation section of the Bonhomme Richard was of a fairly standard configuration, a pair of crossed hallways with a common room in the center. It was larger than the Khan's single hall and a bit newer, but put together from the same basic pre-fab. Even so, she could tell the difference immediately. It seemed like Sterne was trying to lay the old Tau Ceti Legion barracks over it, complete with patriotic posters in Tau Ceti's red, white and black, faded to pink, beige and gray, pictures of the extreme environments of the various planets of the Tau Ceti system, doors festooned with small trophies and stenciled marks of honor, all in the archaic, pre-Reclamation, Panglish that was the common tongue of Tau Ceti. Even down to the metallic tang of weapon polish and the sour undertones of stale Cetani lager.

The only thing missing was the Cetani themselves. All the signs of life were there but she and the Aiendes crew-woman were the only living things present. Floating down the hallway, not talking, silent ghosts just passing through a haunted place. No, not haunted, empty even of spirits, a once-living space preserved in time, a mausoleum.

“Here's endless space...” she found herself quoting under her breath.

<To ceaseless pine/to glut with a yammered lament.> She was surprised as the crew-woman continued with the next lines of Nitcys' Beyond and Between. In the original Lojban at that. Susan was caught, as she always was, with the the power of a kutsa'a in the frank, unadorned Lojban.

She chided herself for being surprised. After all, like all the great Captain-Poets, Dunra Nitcys had been, first and foremost a Jatna of the People. Of course she would be known among her own folk. The crew-woman had turned to look at her now, every millimeter a member of the People, the human form stretched too far, long and lean even compared to the station-born Susan, a faint chocolate tone over the pallor of skin that had never seen a sun, dark and grown pale both as no planetsider could ever be.

They faced each other in the darkened hallway, breathing in shallow time.

The crew-woman spun again and led her down the hallway to the hatch to the shuttle bay. The hatch hissed open and the illusion of lifelessness was broken.

Motion roared in the corner of Susan's eye and caught her full attention. A red-haired giant of a woman launched herself out from behind a tugship with a wild, whooping, battle cry, flying through the air like a screaming rocket. The Aiendes she was hurtling towards pivoted in the air and she missed by millimeters. The Aiendes lashed out and winged the woman, diverting her headlong trajectory straight into another tugship. She hit with a clang and rebounded off, drifting backwards, shaking her head like a wounded animal. In her moment of confusion, they pounced on her, three straight-flying Aiendes crew-women, all armed with long knives of dull metal, who pinned her against the side of the tug, points to her throat and vitals. It was over in a matter of seconds. On a planetary surface the frail-looking People could have never done what they'd done to the big-boned heavy-gravity native, but in microgravity it was leverage, not strength, that mattered. Watching the People fight in microgravity was like watching a ballet. A ballet with knives, Susan was quick to remind herself.

And they were everywhere, the knives. A score or more of the spacers, in much-patched, threadbare jumpsuits embroidered with the clan fractal were scattered around the room, restraining the members of Sterne's crew with the points and edges of their blades, two or three to every one of the Cetani.

The big woman lashed out and tossed an Aiendes out into the middle of the room, before the other two got their blades to her vital blood vessels, neck and thigh, restraining her.

“Tell her to stop as she values your life, boy.” Susan's attention was drawn to the source of the heavily-accented Panglish, a tall, even for the People, scarred woman of indeterminately middle years, who had herself anchored with one arm and one leg to a tugship and had her other leg up and pinning Turbulence Sterne himself to the deck with her boot on his chest. And a long, gleaming blade to his throat.

“Larimore, ol' buddy, why don't you just calm it down there, that's a good soldier, huh, huh?”

The big ginger woman settled sullenly back against the tugship, followed by the points of the knives of her captors.

<Jatna. Bedma'e Suzyn of the Aberles.>

The crew-woman announced Susan and then turned to present the Jatna.

<Olevias, daughter of Sinti'a by Daniyl, by works and acclaim Jatna Aiendes.>

<Coi, honored Jatna. I enter by your leave.>

<Coi, bedma'e Suzyn. You had my leave or you would never have been allowed to dock in the first leaking place. Skip the rest of the formalities, as you can see, we're still busy here. Assume my air is yours to breathe and all the rest.>

“Suze!” Sterne croaked from under the Jatna's boot. “You speak the lingo, you can...” He grunted as the Jatna drew back her boot and kicked him hard in the sternum.

<Speak without leave, that breathes my air/And find that your tongue isn't there!> It wasn't exactly one of the kuta'a of Dunra Nitcys but it elicited a round of throaty, close-mouthed laughs from her crew.

<So, bedma'e. Our Aclis says you breathed the air of the Aberles. That true?> Her tone was pleasant, nearly warm, almost as if she wasn't tapping the flat of her blade against Sterne's temple, close enough to his eye to make him wince with each tap.

<Confirm.> She was careful to keep her eyes on the woman and not the blade. And to keep her hand clear of the empty holster at her side.

<So, old Klaras is yet the Jatna Aberles?>

<She was when last I left her, by the grace of her vessel.>

<And her son, young Lukas, is it? What is his state?> The Jatna was appraising her out of the corner of her eye.

<Last I knew, in trouble with his mother.> Susan responded with a careful smile.

A single laugh burst out from the Jatna.

<When is he not? 'A handsome boy is always trouble aboard a ship', as they say. You know, a couple of my nieces have known him once upon a clan-meet. Said he was... sufficient.> There was an ugly leer in her voice and dismissal in the slight shrug of her shoulders.

It was Susan's turn to laugh.

<With all due respect, Jatna, did I not think you were testing me, I think I'd call you out for a liar in front your crew. Lukas was a friend to me when I was among the Aberles. And you know as well as I that your nieces, nor no women, have ever had Lukas. It's his mother's despair but she'll have neither hand nor word raised against him.>

<So, you do know the Aberles! She does spoil that boy something shameful. Such a handsome one, too. Leaking waste of good man-flesh. He just needs a real woman to straighten him out.>

Susan didn't respond. She was afraid that if she did she might actually call out the Jatna. Lukas really had been a friend to her among the Aberles.

<So, it is good that you've come here, bedma'e. Saves me the trouble of finding you myself.>

<Indeed?>

<Confirmed. You have that which belongs to the Aiendes.>

<If I do, I do not know of it.>

<If you knew, I'd be much surprised. This dirt-crawling worm lies as soon as it breathes.> She placed the tip of her blade between Sterne's eyes and smiled or at least twisted her scars into some morbid approximation of a smile.

<Both habits I intend to break it of.>

“Hey, now, ladies, ladies, I never...”

“No more words from you. You should be silent. And in your silence grateful. In my grandmother's day, they would have castrated a man and set him down among the derdzu unarmed for less then you've done. I am more merciful.”

She ran the tip down across his nose, lips and chin to rest, dangerously, against his throat.

“But not much more.”

<And what has he done, mighty Jatna?> There wasn't much she would put past Turbulence Sterne, but if there was a taint on his cargo, which she hardly doubted, then she'd be sharing in it for her part of the miltiar.

<There is no reason you should not know. After all, this concerns you, too, bedma'e. It has taken cargo that was Aiendes cargo. But it has not made us the proper payment. Therefore it is Aiendes cargo still. Therefore it is a thief.>

She raised her gaze to catch Susan in it.

<And also you should know that it was quick to reveal, when pressed, that you, bedma'e Suzyn, had already paid for that which it has no right to sell, one of the choice lots at that. I did not then know you as one of us and a woman of honor. I assume you've come to return what is Aiendes to the Aiendes, have you not?>

“Now listen, I know you can savvy plain Panglish, lady, but I told you already that I was going to...” The tip pressed deeper, dimpling the soft flesh of his neck.

“Speak again.” Her smile resembled an actual smile less and less as she lifted the blade and placed the edge to his lips. “Please do.”

He did not.

<I have heard much of its excuses. I have tired of them.>

<Who has not?> Susan forced her lips up into a very People-like smirk.

<Do not add your own. I ask plainly now. Where is our cargo?>

<It is no longer with me.>

The Jatna's eyes narrowed.

<I found it necessary for a business dealing of my own. I would be more than willing to grant the rightful owners the payment I offered this one here. I assure you, you should find it more than sufficient.>

<These would be the funds that they hold, Amulet-encoded, in their computers, yes? That will be ours as well. Soon.>

She threw a gleefully malicious look towards Susan.

<As soon as this worm unlocks it for us. Which it will. It's not that strong, even for a man. Those funds will go towards the operating costs we incurred tracking this worm down. And anyone who studied under tight-fisted old Jatna Klaras would have easily found a way to pay this worm far, far less than what the cargo was worth.>

Susan could feel a knot beginning to form between her eyes.

<And what would the Jatna find to be a reasonable price for that particular part of the cargo?>

<There is no price. There is no purchase. The cargo was not available for sale. A client along the Aquarian Run had already contracted for it. 'Who steals our cargo steals not just things...'>

<'...but our honor and all that upon it rests'> Susan grimaced as she finished the line from an Aiendes Captain long dead, perhaps even the bloodthirsty grandmother the Jatna had mentioned.

The Jatna nodded.

<You do understand. Good. Then you realize that we must have that cargo back. Not just for the money, but for what the money represents. More than the sinma, but the whole of the vamji of the Aiendes. You are not without sinma yourself. And by that honor, you know you must reclaim and return what was unlawfully sold to you. Not just for the Aiendes. It stains you to deal in such cargo.>

Susan tensed up, suddenly hyper-alert as the Jatna mentioned their vamji. The People had two words that were commonly translated into Panglish as 'honor', sinma or 'face', the personal respect an individual holds, and much more serious, the vamji, the value of the ship, a combination of reputation and financial worth.

<We speak of my sinma, but at the cost of my own ship's vamji? I have already taken payment for it myself. I also had a contract.>

The Jatna's face lost its pretense at a smile, collapsing into a maze of scars and lines.

<Understand this, Aberles pretender, we are the Aiendes, come in force to have what's ours. Our mothers tore tribute from the derdzu from the Eridani Reach to the Aquarian Run. We will have what you have taken, however unwittingly. Because you will have given it, as an honorable woman would, or because we have taken it, as we would from a derdzu. Like we will take it from this derdzu thief here.>

In a single lightning move, she flipped the knife in her grip, so that the point was against Sterne's throat again.

A dozen good arguments, a hundred decent bluffs, all crowded for space in Susan's mind. She could argue that she did not know, threaten her with the Martian patrols, any number of things. But as she opened her mouth to say one of them a light suddenly dawned in her mind, like when the darkness of a drive field went down to reveal the glare of a nearby star. She saw, with sudden and crystal clarity, how she could get everything she wanted here, her cargo and her mercenaries both and depending how she played it, some service from a powerful lanzu of the People as well.

<e'inai.>

Besides, she didn't like how she'd talked about Lukas.

<What was that, girl?>

<e'inai, Jatna Aiendes.> She repeated the challenge, pushing off the airlock to drift into the center of the bay.

<You dare?>

<I dare. As the senior-most representative of my clan here, I have every right to appeal this to the Court of Blades. You have insulted my honor and threatened my value. I claim satisfaction.>

<If you can take it.> The Jatna nodded one of her crew over to hold Sterne in place while she turned to face Susan head on.

<I don't see your blade, ninpre.>

Susan's hand went to her belt and she realized that the Jatna was right. This was supposed to be just business before it turned the other way.

<The bedma'e can use mine.> The crew-woman who had guided Susan in floated up next to her and handed her the handle of a blade. Plain, straight and unadorned, its use-smoothed grip fit comfortably in her hand.

<And the stakes, bedma'e?> The Jatna's teeth and blade both flashed in the lights.

“Suze, what're you...?” Sterne's voice was pitched into a high whine.

“Seal those intakes, Turbo, before you make me regret this.”

<I fight for the cargo I paid for. And for the lives of the thieves I bought it from.>

<You know the law. I take your cargo and your life with victory. Your life for theirs? Seems too dear a price for derdzu trash.>

<Only if I lose.>

She felt both sides of her mouth curl up at the corners in a broad, feral and entirely un-People like smile. Her foot was tapping in mid-air. The tune had changed but she was still dancing.

The Jatna pushed off from the nearest tug and drifted serenely towards Susan, arms outstretched like a martyr except for the long, filigreed blade gleaming in her hand. All eyes followed her.

<You claim to know the Way, do you ninpre? Well, we'll do this right and formal. A challenge? Accepted. The volba'e. This is my choice.>

<Freely accepted, Jatna. > Susan swallowed down the frog in her throat.

Crew-women appeared to accompany her and their Jatna back to support columns at opposite ends of a narrow space between shuttles. The pillars had no structural function, but they provided convenient handholds for crew who had to move fast through open space in microgravity. Or to fight in microgravity.

Instinctively both of the space-born, one ship and one station, gripped their poles and braced their feet against it.

Between them was the old crew-woman who's blade Susan held. Her hands held out towards both of them, intoning some solemn words invoking honored ancestors and spirits of ships and voids as gidva, a 'guide' of the klaji, the faith of the People.

Susan found that interesting. Usually the Jatna was also the gidva as well. But there was no time to think about that now. The old crew-woman was addressing them, the Jatna first and then her.

<...agree to abide by the outcome of this contest without prejudice or restraint, on your sinma and the vamji of your clan? And do you swear that you nor your clan will seek revenge or vendetta for the outcome of this challenge, freely accepted, so sworn by the Invisible Eyes that See All?>

<Yes, yes, of course I do, Seiras. This isn't my first challenge, you know that better than most. Get on with it, will you, you old fool?>

If 'Seiras' took offense she didn't show it. She spun in mid-air to face Susan.

<And you, bedma'e Suzyn, Ngn-of-Aberles, do you agree to abide by the outcome of this contest without prejudice or restraint, on your sinma and the vamji of your clan? And do you swear that you nor your clan will seek revenge or vendetta for the outcome of this challenge, freely accepted, so sworn by the Invisible Eyes that See All?>

Susan nodded in the affirmative.

<'Blood and honor, ship and steel/Know that nothing else is real'.> It was the only other bit of Aiendes poetry she could remember, typically bloodthirsty doggerel from a clan more noted as warriors than poets. But it earned her a round of approving murmurs from the crew and a doubtful snort from the Jatna.

<Very pretty, I'm sure. But can it fight?>

Susan switched grips on her blade so it was held outward for thrusting.

Seiras said some more words, but Susan could not hear them for the blood thrumming in her ears.

A dual! The volba'e, the Flight of Blades. She took a deep breath and steadied her hands. She had seen one, but only the one, a quarrel over salvage rights between Meir, Jatna Klaras' eldest granddaughter, and some hot-headed young Binoc who's name she couldn't recall.

But to be in one herself, she was was excited. Her racing heart beat out a staccato rhythm to the fierce music she was feeling in through her trembling limbs, nerves stretched taut, vibrating like the strings of an instrument.

Seiras floated backwards, affording her a clear view of the Jatna. The Jatna was not trembling. She clung easily to her support, blade held loose and ready in her hand. Her eyes swept over Susan in frank appraisal.

Seiras must have given a signal, even if Susan didn't remember seeing it, because suddenly she and the Jatna's tensed up leg muscles had released and they were hurtling towards each other, blades held out in front of them.

The Jatna was aimed squarely at Susan, arm held out straight like a lance with the knife as its tip. Susan was surprised at her, leaving herself vulnerable, trusting to her aim and momentum to make the hit. Why leave yourself open like that? The only way it could work was against...

The only way it could work.

The Jatna Aiendes didn't think Susan had any training in how to fight in microgravity. Susan swallowed back the feral grin building in her jaw muscles. She loved being underestimated.

She spun on her axis as they drew close, just to one side of the Jatna's trajectory. The blade glinted hungrily as it drove towards her. He reached out, gripped the arm and their two opposing momentums set them spinning around violently. Susan let go and went flying off towards her own support again as did the Jatna..

“Backla!” Seiras announced the end of the first pass somewhere beyond Susan's sight.

The support swelled in her vision as she sped towards it. She reached out a hand, grabbed it and used it to swing back around, flying back into the fight.

As she spun around, she saw the wide, surprised eyes of the Jatna, still at her support, taking a short pause to catch her breath. Seeing Susan speeding towards her, she launched herself, this time watching Susan's eyes, knife arm crooked and drawn back, ready to strike. Susan knew she couldn't count on the Jatna underestimating her again.

Like a pair of missiles, they streaked towards each other, death in their hands. But she had the advantage of launching first, more time and space to maneuver in. She jinked to the right to take her out of the Jatna's trajectory, if only just. As she passed the Jatna's side, she lashed out to put her knife in it, but it met only steel as the Jatna parried. And then they were past and the other support was filling her vision.

“Backla!”

She reached out with her free hand and stopped her forward motion on the support. It slammed into her palm like a club. Later, when the adrenaline faded, there would be a bruise, but now she didn't even feel it.

Clinging to their supports, they locked eyes across the narrow lists between shuttles.

Then, as one, they pushed off from their stays and cut through the empty air between them. The shuttle bay blurred past and the only thing she saw clearly was the oncoming Jatna.

They drew close and Susan saw her opening, a gap where the older woman was holding the knife too far out from her body. They passed and Susan jabbed for her ribs. The Jatna snapped her arm, wiry and surprisingly muscular, in to trap Susan's knife hand against her side and too late Susan realized she had been lured in.

Carried again by their warring inertia, they began to tumble. The Jatna threw her weight against Susan and they tumbled with their accumulated momentum against the hull of a Cetani shuttle. Susan's vision went red as the back of her head struck the tug. The Jatna struck her once, twice, three times with her forearm.

“Backla!”

Lights swam before her eyes. They began to clear and she saw the Jatna, one forearm pinning her against the shuttle, the other holding her custom blade against Susan's throat.

She was, she realized with uncommon detachment, going to die. Strangely, she found that it bothered her more that she had lost. She savored a last moment of caring about what people watching would think of her before Mother Void claimed her and she cared for nothing at all.

The tip of the knife began to dig into the flesh of her throat and the Jatna pulled her scars back up into a grim smile.

<No.> She shook her head.

<Not this shift, little Aberles. You do not die this shift. Maybe the next. You showed spirit if not judgment. I would have use for one like you. Look grateful, little Aberles. You may have lost, but in fighting, you showed that you are truly one of us.>

As they manacled her to her own support, she wasn't sure what shocked her more: that she lost or that she lived.

10: The Khan in Descent

They awoke Raj with a blow to the face and a laugh like broken glass.

Raj was surprised to be waking up at all.

It had all happened so fast. The two figures had faced him across the dark expanse of space inside the container ship, with him floating between them and the fake supercapacitors holding the corpse-light. Without communications there was no negotiation. Everybody's hands had gone to their lasers. The first figure had been faster but Raj had been more accurate, sending the figure scurrying back towards the airlock, a whitish geyser of air hissing from the holes in its suit. But the second figure's aim had been more sure and Raj had ended up with holes in his suit and his shoulder. The second figure had got in close enough to take his laser from him and cut off his air.

The frozen ruby gems of droplets of his own blood drifting between the faceplates of their suits were the last things he saw before his vision went red and then faded to black.

He had formed a silent, airless prayer with his lips before the darkness claimed him.

He had not thought to awaken.

But here he was and the pain from where they had struck his cheek and the wound in his shoulder were all too real and once again he reminded himself that the illusion of his life in the universe was too persistent for him to shake.

“Awake? Good. Because we have some questions to ask you, Mister Asthana.”

A dark face filled his vision. The hand belonging to the face grabbed his collar and pulled him closer. A fist from another slammed into his kidneys and he cried out in surprise more than pain.

There would be time to hurt when his brain caught up. It took a moment, and then he grunted and curled up into a ball. In gravity, he would have fallen to his knees, but here he just floated.

“Nothing to say, Mister Asthana?”

“You,” he grunted out the words. “Haven't asked anything yet.”

“Very good.” The laugh seemed genuine. “And if I should ask you, will you answer?”

“Depends on the question.”

“Hmm, not a good response.” She nodded to one side and the fist slammed into his side again. Harder this time. It drove him against the deck and knocked the wind out of him.

“Now, let's start again, you and I. Do you know who I am?”

“Captain Rabiu, I assume?” He wheezed out the words, using each breath as he regained it.

“See, that wasn't so hard, was it? So you do know. Smart. Smart and good looking. It would be a shame to hurt you any more.”

He pulled himself straight and in response his shoulder, which didn't seem to be bleeding anymore, his side and his back all complained. He was flanked by a pair of short, thick-set types, typical heavy-gravity natives in swathes of brightly colored cloth. They were both grinning ugly. Fists were clenched and their eyes moved up and down him like they picking the spots they would hit him next. Milos. Specifically, the short, pale types you saw in the worst parts of space ports.

“We got off to a bad start, so let's begin again. I am Chuluun Rabiu, captain of the Rabiu Paiza, part of the Ortogh of the Rabiu oboq, under the Banner of Askia and the ship's records say that you are Rajarshi Asthana, first officer to Captain Ngn and the only crew she has left.”

She bobbed her head in a ghost of a bow.

“And as you seem to be a smart enough sort, I'm sure you see that the situation has changed aboard this driver.”

He bit his lip to keep from from saying precisely what he thought of the situation. Or pirates and piracy in general.

“And what do you what?” he said instead.

“There we go. That's what I want to hear. You'd be surprised how painless this can be if you'd just let it.” She smiled and adjusted a fine gold chain fetchingly against her fur collar. She had some charm, he had to admit. Her speech was smooth and without accent, with an almost Jovian, business-school polish and she wore the flamboyant furs and gold of the Pavonian property holders as if she were a boardroom exec showing off the latest fashion, gained at great expense and discarded tomorrow.

It was only the two growling heavies floating to either side that ruined the effect, with their garish homespun and the medieval weapons tucked in their wide sashes of the same, hatchet-like knives and long thin spikes with worn coral handles.

“What I want is for you to give me the codes for the power, navigation and drive systems. Trust me, it's in your best interests.”

Raj failed to keep in a chuckle.

“Something funny?” The civility in her voice was starting to strain.

“So, you haven't located the Captain yet, have you? That's why I'm still alive isn't it? I was wondering about that.”

“I would have put it more diplomatically myself, but you're not wrong.” She shrugged. “I can see you're a straight talker. Good. I like that. But you've skipped a step here, straight talker. You never did answer my initial question. Not smart. I'm a bit disappointed in you, honestly.”

She nodded to the side and one of the Milos laughed again as she grabbed his collar and slammed the back of his skull against the deck.

His vision was filled with stars but Rabiu's voice continued to speak.

“See, you really to want to give me direct answers to my questions. And not just because I like the sound of that Home System accent of yours. What is that? Jovian?”

“Yes.”

“Legend has it that the Jovians are supposed to be reasonable people. Business people. I hope so, for your sake. You see, what I ask you a question, you are going to answer. The only choice you have is who you answer answer to. You can answer me.”

Her smile was all but sincere.

“Or you can answer them.” She jerked her chin towards the Milos. One still had his collar in her fist. The other was fitting what looked like a chain-mail glove on his hand.

“Just wanted to make sure you knew your choices here.”

“Choices. Sure.” He could see his choices gleaming in the Milos' belts. The icepick or the chainmail glove.

“Now that we understand each other, the codes for the drive, navigation and power systems, if you would please.”

“Not to seem ungrateful, but why do you need my help with that? You cut off the comm systems. Seems to me, you've already got a pretty good grasp on the systems.”

“Three mistakes, straight talker.” She stopped smiling and held up three beringed fingers.

“One, you still didn't tell me what I wanted to know, and we've already discussed that.” The Milo holding his collar drove her massive fist into his kidney. He cried out because he couldn't see a reason not to.

“Two, you answered a question with a question. And that's against the rules. I ask the questions.” The other Milo backhanded him across the face with his mailed fist. He could feel the stinging in the cuts he left behind on his cheek, a stinging he knew would only get worse. His mouth filled with the harsh, coppery taste of his own blood.

“And three, and this one I take personally.” She floated up to him and grabbed his crotch, hard.

“You tried to play me for a fool by playing stupid.” She squeezed hard enough to that tears began to well up in his eyes and his teeth ground together in a silent scream.

“You crew this scow. You know her systems as well as anyone. Better than that brat Ngn, I'd wager. And I know that you know that it doesn't have a 'system' as much as a series of mismatched machines so incompatible that it's a wonder they don't cancel each other out. Not only do they not speak the same language, some don't even speak a language that my systems recognize. You're alive, Home System, because I'd rather have your help then have my data-slave go to the trouble of tearing them apart bit by fucking bit. Feel me, Home System?”

She let go and a whimper welled up from his throat as the blood rushed back to his bruised genitals.

He spat out a thin stream of blood that formed a stream of spherical droplets and murmured 'Yes'.

“That's better. Now, tell me what I want to know.”

“Can't, have to...”

“Can't?” She toyed meaningfully with a ring bearing a sharp pyramid of diamond.

“Have to show you. It's...” He took a deep gulp of air. “It's a process. I'll need my lenses.”

The male Milo drew back his mailed hand but Rabiu stopped him with the shake of her head.

“Sure. Gomi's been at it nearly all shift, but he's gotten nowhere, even with a liberal taste of the prod. Let him try it.”

She was smiling again, but Raj had seen a glimpse of what was behind it and it sent a shudder through him.

“But not alone. No, now that we know we can't trust Home System here. Gwylan, you'll shadow him on your own lenses. Gull here is our astrogator. Anything you do, she'll understand and if you try anything clever or brave...”

The smile grew wider. And 'Gull' laughed. It still sounded like glass breaking.

“But I'd wager you're not feeling so clever or so brave now, are you?”

He shook his head 'no'.

“Good. Gull, keep me updated. Dafyd, you're with me, we still have a cargo to shift, you know!”

Rabiu turned and propelled herself towards the door. 'Dafyd' grunted and followed. She turned as she reached the hatch.

“Now you two, behave. I can still monitor your channel.” She took out a soft leather pouch and tossed it towards Raj. He eyed it cautiously as it floated near him.

Gull snatched it out of midair, opened it and shoved a pair of datalenses into his hand.

“Now, boyo, you'll do what the Cap'n has said or I'll know the reason why.” She bared her yellowed teeth and rested her hand on the butt of the pulse laser that was stuck in her sash right next to the icepick.

His hands were still shaking and the lenses slipped from his fingers twice. They drifted off away from his eyes and he had to push them back in.

It took a couple of seconds for him to load up all the relevant systems on the Khan. He languished as, one by one, the symbols of two operating systems that had become unsupported when he was young and one that he never had identified loaded up.

He risked a glance over at the Milo, 'Gull'. She was glaring at him with dark, hooded eyes. Her gaze held steady, never wavering. Her eyes did not twitch and flicker like a person browsing the local mesh.

“Well, you know the old Dbus proverb...” He continued with a proverb in the ancient, if obscure, language about 'locking the door from the outside and leaving the thief within'.

Gull grunted her incomprehension.

And while she was glaring at him, and not the data on her lenses, he quickly switched the display options over to 'Dbus'.

“Wait, what's all this gibberish now? Are those even letters?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. These old systems have some odd quirks, and every so often, they get stuck on another language. Since we don't have the time for a hard reboot we'll just have to wait for it to work itself out, it usually does. Don't worry, I've picked up enough Dbus to function, I'll set up a translation for you.”

He opened up a text document in one lens and started transmitting some bits of code from the most recent astrogation log with the time stamps altered to Gull's lenses. Meanwhile, in the other lens, he started taking apart the tenuous links between the systems and replacing them with secured, password-encoded portals, copies of something Hector had kept on the engineering systems. It wasn't much, and wouldn't stop anyone who knew what they were doing, not really, but it would slow them down.

Accessing the navigation plot, he made a quick note of all the ships in nearby orbits. Nothing spectacular. Other drivers mostly. Except for...

The Martian frigate. It was broadcasting an ID beacon that give its bona fides, but the Khan's systems weren't cleared for any more specific information. Fortunately, he didn't need any more. The navigation plot told him everything he needed to know. The big frigate was on a course that brought it near the Kublai Khan's orbit.

The comm systems, already under Rabiu's control, were closed to him, but there had to be a way to contact the frigate.

Surreptitiously, he maximized the big, full-color nav plot of local space, in hopes that it would distract the Milo and opened up a submenu at the bottom of the page. Just hit that blaring red icon there and it would override the comm systems and send out an automated call for help. By interstellar law, the frigate would have to respond.

He hit the emergency icon.

Nothing. He felt his heart beat once. Twice.

Then suddenly, the navigation system went down and his vision filled with the scowling face of Captain Chuluun Rabiu.

“You know, Home System, I don't think it's that you aren't that smart. It's that, like most people from the Home System, you just don't think that anyone else can be smart. First thing you do when taking control of a ship is disconnect the emergency beacon. I'm a little insulted, honestly, that you didn't think we'd think of that.”

She smiled, although it only went as far as he eyes.

“And to teach you the error of your ways, I'm going to have Gull torture you for a bit. Gull, be a dear and hurt him, won't you? Then we'll see what his attitude is like.”

Raj started moving before she had stopped talking and pulled the pulse laser out of Gull's sash before her hand reached the grip.

He pressed the lens of it against her eye.

“This weapon, what is this? An Omniarms 55-MU, right? With the police-model stun pulse attachment?”

“Aye.”

“Good. For you.” Without taking his eyes from her, he flipped the selector from laser to plasma pulse.

He drove his foot into her midsection and drove them both back against opposite walls of the room.

“Gull? What's going on there? Damn it, Home System, you're only alive...” Rabiu's face still filled his lenses.

“Until I gave you what you wanted. You want straight talk, Rabiu? Fine, I was dead anyway, we both know it. Just like we're both aware I've got nothing to lose.” He blinked off the lenses before she could respond.

As they struck their respective walls, he pulled the trigger and an invisible laser ionized the air between them in a shockwave of plasma that slammed into Gull in a flash of exploding light. She screamed, convulsed and then went silent.

He swung out of the hatch and closed it behind him before she could void herself. The Captain was not going to be happy to find that in her quarters, but he couldn't worry about that now.

He propelled himself one-handed down the hall, using his free hand to push himself along, laser held forward. He was speeding along the single hallway of the Khan's habitation module, headed towards the shuttle bays. It was his one chance. He had to get away. Get to help.

Get to the Captain.

The comm systems were off-limits but not Hector's precious engineering feeds, heavily-encrypted and running on saMlaapa 26, the only OS on the whole ship that wasn't expired. Hector had been so proud of it when he'd upgraded the system. Raj used his First Officer's privileges to open up the feeds and access the cameras installed in the repair equipment for close examination of the ships. Fortunately, the rush of preparing the tugs for flight hadn't allowed him much in the way of time to clean up the bay, or all he would have gotten was a view of the inside of toolboxes.

As it was, the view he did get was incomplete, limited to the angles the tools were laying at. Corners of tugships, movements at the edge of the narrow displays. Was that two? Or was that three different Milo crewmen in the bay? Three, he decided. Two more of the squat, pale types and one tall and dark, but dressed in the same flamboyant colors and rough fabric as the others.

He paused on the other side of the hatch, estimated their positions as best as he could, threw it open and threw himself in.

Thunder cracked in staccato in the wake of a series of laser pulses. The rubber seal on the hatch hissed as the pulses struck it. Without realizing it, his old training kicked in, fear melted away and the pain mattered less. He turned away from the noise and towards the opposite. The old reflexes stretched like muscles he'd almost forgot he had. With two smooth plasma bursts two figures slammed back against the sides of the unfamiliar tugs parked like cuckoo eggs in the Khan's hold. It was so easy, he didn't need to think, he just did.

A figure flew out of the path of a third burst of ionized plasma exploded off the engine casing of a tug. The remaining Milo, short and thick like Gull, fired wild. The light flashed through the air to either side of Raj. Without thinking, Raj took aim and leading the Milo's position, fired. The pulse hit perfect and the screaming Milo went tumbling back away from him.

He paused to check the progress of the Martian frigate. Almost on top of them. There was an irony to the forces of Mars being his only hope, an irony he tucked away in his mind to appreciate later.

He kicked off the deck and propelled himself towards the cockpit of one of the shuttles. He found the hatch unlocked. It opened and he found himself staring into a the gleaming lens of a pulse laser.

“So close. So almost clever, Home System. Do you not think the engineering feeds were the first thing we cracked after we failed to get into the drive systems directly? There was only ever one place you could go. And here we are, waiting for you.” It was only when she spoke that Raj realized it was Rabiu's face behind the laser.

The flick of a thumb switched the pulse laser in his hand from 'stun' to 'kill' and he brought it up into that face.

“Don't be more of a fool than you have to be, Home System. Pull that trigger and you're dead. You know that, right?”

Something cold and sharp slid softly across the skin on his neck and he heard heavy breathing from behind him as a Milo he'd somehow missed put a blade to his throat.

He just smiled as his finger tightened around the activation trigger.

“Already was. What else you got?”

“Clever. Not smart, but clever. And brave. It's too bad, Mister Asthana, you could have been quite useful. But you've become more trouble than it's worth to keep you alive. Good by, Home...” She paused as a light flashed in her eye. On her lenses.

The comm channels on all their lenses suddenly came to life, flashing emergency-channel hails. Raj reopened his lenses' link to the comm system.

A black and red symbol filled the display, followed by an image of a harsh, high-boned face over a high, stiff, red collar.

“This is sub-Colonel Shang Shu of the patrol ship Price of Freedom, Unending Vigilance battlegroup, 19th Support Squadron of the Third Star Army of the Grand Army of Mars! To all aboard the free driver Kublai Khan. We have received information that you may be shipping contraband materials in your cloud and have reason to suspect other activities injurious to peace and order. To all now aboard her, we command you, in the name of the People and Planet of Mars, under whose protection this system rests, to power down all weapons and propulsion systems, unlock all hatches and databanks and prepare to be boarded! Under current Operational Doctrine, any resistance, or failure to comply, will be considered the act of enemy combatants and we will respond accordingly. Shang out! Mars Abides!”

He gave a quick salute and disappeared from the channel, although the Grand Army's symbol remained, as did their communications lock.

Raj could have laughed. He had failed to come to Mars, so Mars had come to him.

 

11: Three Captains

They had shackled Susan to the same post as Turbulence Sterne and she wished they hadn't.

“Damn you, Ngn, I knew you was gonna get us in trouble. Damn well knew it!”

“What? You're going to blame this one on me? Really?”

“Why wouldn't I? That's the way it always goes. Every damn time. Everything's going along just swell and then, boom! You come along and it all just sinks straight to the bottom.”

“Oh, come off it, how could I... Correlation isn't causation. Even you know that.”

“The cold, deep Hell I do!” With his free hand, he reached over and rubbed the lucky coin attached by a ribbon to his empty holster.

“You do Ngn a great disservice. She showed great courage in fighting for us like she did.” Singh's deep, melodic voice came from the support post across from them. Singh himself did not stir as he spoke.

“Yeah, but she lost, didn't she?” Sterne snapped.

“I said she showed great courage, not great judgment.”

“Gee, thanks.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. Even floating, tied to a post, in microgravity, she felt a weight begin to settle on her as she started to crash from the adrenaline high of her duel with the clan Captain.

“Shouldn't have done knives, Ngn. Always was better with lasers.” A short man, tethered to the same post as Singh, wearing black leather that matched his slicked-back black hair.

“Well, thank you for the information, Johnny, I did not know that. Here I'd been sitting thinking I'd won the duel.” She sniped at Johnny Eel. She knew him, knew all of them from the early days of her Captaincy of the Kublai Khan, when they flew under contract to the Tau Ceti Legion.

“Also, might I add that you stuck to lasers, didn't you? How did that work out for you, huh?”

“Just saying, is all.” Johnny's shackles jingled slightly as he shrugged.

“Hey, guys, keep it down, huh? Don't you never seal it up, Ngn?” The young woman with the short-cut military hair was androgynously thin but without the height of a spacer.

“You're bothered by too much talk, Scape, and yet you still work for this one here?”

She nodded her head towards Sterne.

“Hey! You shut your fancy, floater mouth!”

“You first, Turbo!”

“Seal it up, both of you! I'm working here.” Scape hissed through clenched teeth and jerked her chin down towards skinny wrists working back and forth in their manacles.

“Corporal Goethe, are you...?”

“Sure, go ahead, Skip,” Scape Goethe snarled softly. “Say it a little louder, I'm sure the space witches will be more than happy to give me a hand with my escape after they've taken both of mine, that is. Officers,” she breathed with a shake of the head and resumed working on her shackles.

“See what I got to put up with, Ngn? Don't know why I stand it, honestly.”

“Well, if I had to guess I'd say it was because Scape's the best damn engineer you ever had and you know it.” Susan smirked and shrugged. “Now, why she, or any of them, stay with your sorry ass, that's a mystery of the universe.”

“They're all old Legion. The 14th Commando. 'The 14th Never Forgets'.” He shrugged the shoulder that bore the unit patch that bore that legend.

“You tell 'er, Skip!” The giant, red-headed woman, Larimore, rattled the shackles that chained her to one of the tugs.

“Me and mine been through the storms together and back again. Hell, you know. You was there. You and the Khan. You and me.”

Susan scowled at him but he kept talking.

“Cold Hell, Suze, what happened to us?”

“Thought that would have been obvious, Turbo. I left.”

“And yet here you are, back again. How about that?” Sterne had on his biggest, most shit-eating of grins.

“And don't I regret it? Don't be more of a fool than you absolutely have to be, Turbo. I guess we had some fun, but you always tried to make it out to be more than it was. Don't know why you dirt-siders always have to make everything so damn personal.”

She finished the sentence with surprising venom, even to herself.

Sterne twisted his face up into something silent and sullen.

“Well that and the two of you would have killed each other and well you know it.” A stocky, dusky-skinned man with a Belter's tattoos but the collar of a priest.

“Rev's right, Turbo. We would have.”

“Might yet, Suze, we ever get out of this,” Sterne growled deep in his throat.

“Man, I don't even know what you're bitching at me for. This is your mess and you got me into it, not the other way.”

“And the prosecution rests! Amen, hallelujah!” Rev sang and the rest of the Cetani snickered.

“Devil take you all! Keep it down, will you?” Scape had her arms twisted around, almost dislocating one shoulder, and pulling up the sleeve until her brands, and Susan had never been sure which were religious and which decorative, were visible.

“So what were you thinking, Turbo? No, wrong question, were you even thinking when you decided to just steal a cargo off of the whole Aiendes-leaking-lanzu?”

“Ah, come off it, Suze.” There is was, his signature whine. “You would have done the same. We had a contract to haul this stuff for the Aiendes out of Tau Ceti to some rich clients in Groombridge 34 when the word came through of the mining strikes at Beta Hydri. Already had the cargo in our cloud, so I just bribed a bursar at the port authority on Aurora to fake a problem with the funds transfer to the Aiendes and while they were arguing with the outstation, we just lifted our skirts and fucked on out of there, cargo and all.”

He turned his eyes, half pleading and half defiant, on her and she had a sudden twinge of emotion, stirring memories of why she had left him and why she had been with him all in one.

“You know how it is, Suze. Saw our chance and took it.”

“Void!” She laughed and earned herself an angry glare from Scape Goethe.

“And you didn't think that the whole of the clan under arms would come hunting you 'across the cross of stars, the black and void'?”

“You and your damn poems. Satan's blue balls,” Sterne muttered under his breath.

“You really aren't smart enough to be out, are you, Turbo? Should have stayed on the ground where it's safe.” Her tone was acid and cutting, except for the catch in her throat at the end.

Now where had that come from?

“Hey, you can't talk to the Skipper like that, you floater bitch!” There was a sharp clang of chains as Larimore strained against her bonds and a sharp intake of breath from Scape as a trio of Aiendes, knives drawn, floated over the top of one of the tugs. The lead figure was a a long, rangy figure with short dark hair and a long, custom knife in one hand, of a darker metal than the Jatna's.

The leader nodded towards Larimore and the other two launched off the tug towards her. The almost serpentine figure of the leader did a twist around a projecting antenna on the first tug and let her remaining momentum carry her in Susan's direction.

[Enough trouble from that oversized derdzu. It struggles, cut it.] The harsh, uninflected delivery was familiar to Susan.

[Coi, again. Ralju Aclis, daughter of Seiras, I presume?] Susan nodded her head in due respect.

The blow to the side of her face from the pommel of Aclis' blade was all the confirmation she needed.

[Coi, bedma'e Suzyn of Aberles.] There was nothing friendly in the smile that twisted her lips.

[You're still alive.]

[Surprised?] Susan raised her eyes to meet Aclis'.

[No. You owe her money.] Aclis laughed and nodded across the bay to where the Jatna was conferring with a group of the older Aiendes officers. She placed the edge of the blade to Sterne's throat while she unlocked Susan's shackles.

[So, in what station will I be facing the Jatna? What am I to the Aiendes now?] It was something that had been bothering Susan. She had dueled to the death, lost and not died. She had no idea what the zdafla, the law, said about this.

[Whatever our honored Jatna says you are.] Aclis' voice was a flat growl. Lojban did not communicate sarcasm well, but Susan thought she could detect a sneer in Aclis' snarl.

She filed that away for later use.

[Now, go, meat!] She gestured Susan towards the Jatna. Susan rubbed her wrists and pushed off the post with her feet. Aclis swam through the air behind her. As they glided in towards the Jatna, the Jatna made a quick gesture and the Ralju surrounding her scattered in all directions like a flock of birds. All but old Seiras, who waited for Aclis to shoot ahead of Susan and do her ritual obeisance.

The Jatna cleared her throat and Aclis spun to face her.

[Coi, honored Jatna.] Aclis raised her eyes and the Jatna averted hers, just to make clear where everyone stood.

[Coi, Aclis.]

Susan noted that, Aclis did honor to her gidva automatically and had to be prompted to acknowledge her Captain. Another interesting tidbit. Could be nothing, especially if this 'Seiras' was her mother, or it might be deliberate. Small gestures mattered in the claustrophobic society of the People.

Seiras drifted forward to inspect Susan's face and Susan, in turn, inspected hers. A thin, pale scar puckered the skin along her jawline and a tiny quirk at the corner of the mouth suggested a smile.

[You have done no shame to your lanzu, bedma'e Suzyn Ngn-of-Aberles. The Jatna Aiendes is an accomplished fighter. Many fine fighters have fallen before her blade.]

[Like you?] Susan guessed, focusing again on the pale scar along Seiras' face.

The other side of Seiras' mouth joined the first in the whisper of a smile, as much sad as joyous, and she drifted away.

[Why are you alive?] The Jatna's voice boomed and all eyes snapped to her.

[Because the mighty Jatna of the Aiendes so willed it.] Susan replied smoothly, keeping her eyes fixed respectfully on the Jatna's, while the Jatna made it a point to dismissively avoid meeting Susan's gaze, as if paying attention to something else, something, it was implied, far more important than her, to demonstrate their relative status.

[Don't feed me feces and tell me it's protein, bedma'e, you're smarter than to think you could pull that on me, aren't you? Of course it's because I will it. Now, tell me, why in the cold, sucking Void would I have done that, do you think?]

[Because I owe you... that is, I owe the Aiendes money, mighty Jatna.] The answer came out smooth and easy, with something of Aclis' edge to her tone. [And in your wisdom, you've placed your clan's vamji over your own sinma.]

Another laugh, this one a little more forced. More an angry cough than an actual laugh.

[You've been talking with our Aclis, is that it? Sounds like her. I wouldn't get too cozy with my ralnu'a, if I were you. She advised me to have you killed.]

She smiled and nodded towards Aclis, who just raised a hand in agreement.

[She hates it when I keep people alive.] Another of those coughing half-laughs. [It is an honest Aiendes trait. This thoroughness. It makes her a good Chief of Security. I should know, I was ralnu'a before her.]

[And you would have killed me then?] It wasn't really a question. Her eyes were on the drawn blade in Aclis' hand and the sheathed one at the Jatna's belt.

[I was ralnu'a then, now I am Jatna.] It was all the answer she was going get and all Susan needed.

[And a Jatna has need of a wider perspective than a Ralju. This is about more than money, young Aberles. Oh, it's also about the money, and you will retrieve it for us, yes. But not because we need you for that.]

[No?]

[No. The Aiendes do not need an Aberles to take what is ours. You will retrieve it because your sinma will demand it. And because our vamji will be your vamji.]

Susan opened her mouth to reply before the implications of what the Jatna said sunk in, closed it and opened it again.

[Are you...? Did you just offer me...? Am I to have a stake in the Aiendes-lanzu?]

[Of course. Why else would you be alive? In the old days, the Aiendes left no survivors.] She licked her dry lips and looked past Susan towards the Cetani bound there.

[But if you don't mind me saying so, mighty Jatna, the old days are long gone. They disappeared with the Reclamation, the coming of the warships of the...]

[...same derdzu that have been busy slaughtering each other out here for one of their short, planet-bound generations. You've started to measure time like them. Time doesn't exist between the stars. This 'Reclamation' of theirs? It's a phase. The natural state of things is returning. And in the old ways, a Jatna can use as many loyal blades as she can gather. There is plunder and adventure in the Aiendes. And with the Home System ninpre fighting among themselves, there is plenty of opportunity for both.]

[I am one of those Home System ninpre, you know.] She kept her gaze respectfully distant from the Jatna, on Aclis' blade.

[In blood alone.] The Jatna dismissed it with a shrug. [Even the Aberles saw something of our ckagi in you to take you into their lanzu. You showed it again when you demonstrated the courage to face my blade in the volba'e. You're one of us, don't doubt it. The only question is, do you stand with those cowardly old crones in the Aberles, little better than men, or with the Aiendes?]

In a gesture of uncommon solemnity she held out her hand, palm up to Susan, not demanding but asking, a rare moment. With full awareness of the insult and consequence of refusing the Jatna, Susan raised her head and stared humbly at the Jatna's averted gaze, reached out and took her hand.

[Adventure. Reward. And glory.] For a moment, she wasn't lying. There was something to the thought of riding the Long Dark between stars with the Aiendes, raiding and fighting with a clan again that made her heart jump. And then she remembered her own Kublai Khan and realized the same values that she'd be embracing would forbid a bedma'e from abandoning her ship. Besides, she always forgot that she had an authority problem.

It felt good to be lying again.

[I knew you were a proper Person! You're reckless but you've got ckagi. And that will take you far among the Aiendes. Who knows, maybe even to the rank of Ralju.] She glanced meaningfully over at Aclis, who did not acknowledge the glance.

[I am honored, mighty Jatna.]

[Of leakin' course you are!] This laugh sounded genuine. [We'll get old Seiras to do the formalities later. Meanwhile, Aclis will find you a section. You're a fighter, she should be able to find you something.]

She turned her face away from Susan entirely and the interview was done.

Aclis floated up to her and took her arm in the hand that wasn't holding the blade.

[Come on, you heard the Jatna.]

Aclis went. Susan followed.

12: On the Edge of a Blade

Thin and muscular, Aclis cut through the air like the knife she resembled. Long, loosely-hung limbs snaked out and pushed off the sides of the close-parked tugs, adjusting her course with the fine and thoughtless control of one born to it. She swam through the air like an eel and Susan wondered briefly if that's what she looked like to the planetsiders, like Turbulence and Morgan.

 

<Aclis, daughter of Seiras. A 'Seiras' presided as gidva over my duel with the Jatna. I fought with her blade in my hand. Are they the same?>

 

<Yes.>

 

<Curious. In my experience the Jatna is usually also gidva of her lanzu.>

 

<Usually,> she grunted.

 

Susan waited until she was sure there was no reply coming.

 

<So, where are we headed?> She peered around Aclis to see a gathering of Aiendes crew, men and women both this time, prepping one of the tugs and talking in short, flat bursts of Lojban.

 

Another silence answered her. Aclis turned her head and glared at her then fixed her eyes back on her course.

 

Two women, separated by at least a generation but much the same for all that, the same narrow, shifting eyes and hard, knowing smirks, drifted up from the tug. The elder's jacket was covered entirely in a beaded version of the Aiendes fractal, with a long string of keys that would not have embarrassed a Jatna strung on a wire that drifted from the sleeve of her coat. Marks of station and status. An impression that was verified when she waited for Aclis to greet her. All Ralju were technically equal. Some, as an old pre-Collapse writer had once observed, were just more equal than others.

 

<Coi, Ralju Ezabelas, daughter of Djeseka.> Aclis grabbed one of the support poles and arrested her momentum. Susan did as she did, eyes respectfully on the newcomers.

 

<Coi, Ralju Aclis, daughter of Seiras.> Ezabelas nodded graciously and then nodded to the younger woman with her.

 

<Coi, Ralju Aclis, daughter of Seiras.> There was something stiffly formal in the younger woman's greeting, respect spoken but not felt.

 

<Coi, catni Emelis, daughter of Ezabelas.> Aclis put an emphasis on her lesser rank and the smirk died a bit on Emelis' face.

 

<And what is this? The latest of our Jatna's small mercies?> Susan tensed and clenched her fists, eyes still fixed on the Ralju Ezabelas, but sizing her up now instead of showing respect. Lojban was a very precise language, and the 'it' she used was the impersonal state used for inanimate objects instead of people. It was an insult and Susan was considering answering it. Ezabelas was old woman, getting frail and thin, even for the attenuated People. Her movements were still graceful but her best days were obviously behind her. But her daughter, the very picture of her a generation before, was a single long muscle, rippling under her jumpsuit. Her, and it would surely be her that would answer for her mother, Susan was almost certain she couldn't take.

 

So she kept her mouth shut, and her jaw muscles hurt with the effort of it.

 

<The Jatna has a use for her.> Aclis snorted and gave Susan a derisive glance out of the corner of her eye. A sign of disrespect for a person who's status is undetermined.

 

<The Jatna has a use for us all, it seems.> Ezabelas' smirk had gotten deeper and nodded back in the general direction of the Jatna.

 

<She is keenly aware of our duties to her and purposes we may be put to. For her grand design, of course, as is her right as Jatna,> Emelis muttered and the two Ralju looked back at her, Aclis with a glare and her mother with approval.

 

<Suzyn, Ngn-of-Aberles, is to be made bende. A part of the Aiendes-lanzu.> Another of those sideways glances. <Perhaps even make Ralju if the Jatna favors her.>

 

Ezabelas gave a dry snort that was almost a laugh. She addressed Susan, glancing over her shoulder so as not to make eye contact. She reached out and almost patted Susan's arm, her fingers less than a millimeter from touching Susan.

 

<I would not give too much cargo space to such ambitions, ninpre, if I were you. The Jatna is careful in promotion. Even among her closest allies. Before she unseated Seiras as Jatna, Olevias promised my daughter Emelis a position as Ralju. And yet she is still a catni.>

 

She allowed herself a brief glance at Susan's face and her smirk thinned into something almost like a smile.

 

<Of course, if I were you,> she pulled her hand away from Susan's arm. <I suppose I would already be dead.>

 

Their conversation had the practiced, almost scripted quality of a great deal of the official business between officers of the People, with a rhythm like a sort of poetry. Almost like music. If Susan listened closely, maybe she could make out a beat she could dance to.

 

<Which section would you have Emelis Ralju of, Ezabelas? Security, perhaps?> There was a dangerous syllabant quality to Aclis' voice, close to the obscene hiss. She let go of her blade for a moment. It floated in the air in front of her and she set it spinning, gripping the handle when it came around to a fighting grip.

 

<Of course not, sister colleague. You have proved yourself to the other Ralju time and time again. If the Jatna was to ask my advice in the matter...>

 

Aclis made a snort of derision and shook her head. Ezabelas' smile grew a little wider and she continued as if she hadn't heard.

 

<...I might suggest to her a section that needs, shall we say, more fitting leadership? Cargo for example? Could you see Emelis as the next raljdima?>

 

Susan saw their eyes flicker over to a dark-skinned, blond-haired officer wearing a broad sash embroidered with the clan fractal, who was barking quick, abbreviated orders to the Aiendes pilots commandeering the tugs.

 

<Well, we will discuss this more anon. Co'o Ralju Aclis.>

 

<Co'o Ralju Ezabelas.> Aclis met her eyes in respect and sheathed her blade. <Co'o Emelis, daughter of Ezabelas.>

 

<Co'o Ralju Aclis.> Emelis averted her eyes in respect. Ezabelas pushed off the nearest tug and flew off, Emelis right behind her.

 

Without looking back at Susan, Aclis coiled her legs, launched off the pole and resumed her course towards the tugs. Susan rushed to follow her.

 

<Follow me, meat.>

 

<So, the Jatna, she must be pretty secure in her position.>

 

Aclis grunted in response.

 

<I mean, to keep so many of her enemies alive and in the clan. I'm not the only one she's kept alive. Your mother as well. A former Jatna! That is a bold move. There are those who would think that foolishness, but I think it shows a great strength.>

 

Another grunt.

 

<Of course, I suppose she can afford it, if she really is that strong. I fought her. She's a great fighter.>

 

<Defeating old women and ninpre does not make you a great warrior.> Aclis muttered with a shake of her head.

 

<As you say, Ralju. I defer to your greater expertise.> Susan grabbed a passing support pole and used it to build up more momentum, gaining rapidly on Aclis. As she passed the Ralju she whispered in her ear.

 

<Who knows who else she plans on leaving alive?> She passed Aclis and their eyes met. Susan directed her gaze with a nod of the head towards the poles where the Cetani crew were chained like overripe fruit hanging from steel trees.

 

With a flash of movement too fast for Susan's eyes to follow, Aclis grabbed a pole with one hand and Susan's collar with the other and swung them around so that Susan was pinned against the hull of the nearest tugship.

 

<By the Cold Mother Void! Don't you ever seal it up?>

 

<Sorry, Ralju.> She put up her hands to show she was carrying no blade. <I was just making conversation.>

 

<Like the Void you were, you lying ninpre trash! What are you playing at? I am a loyal Ralju and I will not tolerate this sort of sneaky backtalk about the Jatna.>

 

<Of course you are, of course! I'm sorry I said anything. I have no doubt of your loyalty. If the ralnu'a is not loyal, what Jatna can stay in power? But then, I don't have to tell you that, do I? You've seen it happen, haven't you? Another apology.> Susan babbled, keeping her eyes on Aclis', wary as well as respectful.

 

Aclis opened her lips as if to speak but not her teeth and hissed in obscenity, the sound of a leaking seal.

 

<Consign you to the Void, ninpre! What are you playing at? Why keep harping on the derdzu? You were chained to them a moment ago. Their fate was yours. Why so concerned now that they pay? You are implicated in their crime as well.>

 

<What is my own self-interest when compared to the vamji of my new lanzu? And if the derdzu are allowed to... ugh!>

 

Aclis, using her leverage on the pole, pulled Susan forward and slammed the back of the head again the tugship. Susan squeaked and shook her head to clear it.

 

<Fine, fine. I have a history with this crew of derdzu. I have scores of my own to settle with them. You satisfied, Ralju?>

 

Aclis grunted, and kept her pinned to the hull.

 

<But just because I have my own reasons for wanting them dead doesn't make what I said any less correct.>

 

Aclis' eyes narrowed in warning and her grip tightened on Susan's shirt.

 

<No, wait, listen, just listen to me for a moment, alright. If she keeps thieves alive, if it is known that you can steal from the Aiendes and live, it lessens the vamji of the lanzu in the eyes of the rest of the People. Sure, sure, it might not be my first reason, granted, but it's no less true for that, you know this, right?>

 

Susan could count the seconds tick by as Aclis considered her.

 

<And I'm not the first one to say it, am I?> She glanced over Aclis' shoulder, to where Ezabelas and Emelis floated, conferring with an old, and heavy-set for the People, officer who also had a string of Ralju's keys floating from her belt. Aclis craned her head around to look at them and then back at Susan. As she did, Susan continued.

 

<The Ralju aren't happy about this either, are they? And the Jatna can't act over the objection of her Ralju, can she?>

 

Aclis's lips twisted in a silent snarl.

 

<Unless none of them can challenge her. She is a very good fighter.>

 

Aclis let go of the pole and drew her knife, placing the tip under her chin.

 

<What's the old poet say? 'Captaincy balanced on the edge of a blade '.> She muttered through clenched teeth, to keep her jaw from being pierced by the point of the knife.

 

<She can be beaten. She is just a person. And a person can bleed.> With a flicker of her hand, Aclis spun the knife around, but did not sheathe it. Not yet.

 

<Defeating her in challenge wouldn't be enough. It would take the support of...> Susan trailed off, a very People-like hint of a smile on her lips. She nodded again to where Ezabelas and the other Ralju were now looking at Aclis.

 

<The Ralju,> Aclis finished for her softly. Quickly, her head moved from one side to another, taking in Ezabelas and her companion and then over to the blond Cargo chief, still loading. Susan could actually see her doing the arithmetic in her head, counting up how many would back her if she made her play. Susan didn't say anything. The seed was planted.

 

With a grunt, Aclis let go of her shirt.

 

<Go on. Report to the raljdima, Teiler, daughter of Ilezabet, she will have work for you.> She gave Susan a push and started her drifting towards the blond-haired Ralju.

 

<But remember. Your interests, like the Jatna's rule, rides on the edge of my blade.> She braced her legs against the side of the tug and launched herself off towards Ezabelas.