The girl’s fingers seemed so thick, so solid compared to what they had once been. She was growing up. Not their little baby anymore. There had been so many plans for her university and traveling together. All of them gone now. The world they’d thought they were raising her in had vanished. She felt a twinge of guilt about that, as if there were something that she could have done to stop all this from happening. As if it were somehow her fault.
In the deepening darkness, there were voices, though not so many as there had been. Before, there had been some nightlife in the quarter. Pubs and street performers and the hard, rattling music recently come into fashion that clattered out into the street like someone spilling bricks. Now people slept when the darkness came and rose with the light. She caught the smell of something cooking. Strange how even boiled oats could come to mean comfort. She hoped that Old Gino had gone to the van, or that one of Anna’s parishioners had gone for him. Otherwise Anna would insist that he take part of their supplies, and Namono would let her.
But it hadn’t happened yet. No need to call for trouble before it came. There was enough on the road already. When they reached the turn to Old Gino’s street, the last of the sunlight was gone. The only sign that Zuma Rock was even there was a deeper darkness rising up thousands of meters above the city. The land itself raising a defiant fist to the sky.
“Oh,” Nami said. Not even a word so much as the intake of breath. “Did you see it?”
“See what?” Namono asked.
“Shooting star. There’s another one. Look!”
And yes, there among the fixed if flickering stars, a brief streak of light. And then another. While they stood there, hand in hand, a half dozen more. It was all she could do not to turn back, not to push her daughter into the shelter of a doorway and try to cover her. There had been an alert, but the remnants of the UN Navy had caught this one. These smears of fire across the upper atmosphere might not even be the debris from it. Or they might.
Either way, shooting stars had been something beautiful once. Something innocent. They would not be again. Not for her. Not for anyone on Earth. Every bright smear was a whisper of death. The hiss of a bullet. A reminder as clear as a voice. All of this can end, and you cannot stop it.
Another streak, bright as a torch, that bloomed out into a silent fireball as wide as her thumbnail.
“That was a big one,” Nami said.
No, Namono thought. No it wasn’t.
Chapter One: Pa
You have no fucking right to this!” the owner of the Hornblower shouted, not for the first time. “We worked for what we have. It’s ours.”
“We’ve been over this, sir,” Michio Pa, captain of the Connaught, said. “Your ship and its cargo are under conscript order of the Free Navy.”
“Your relief effort bullshit? Belters need supplies, let them buy some. Mine is mine.”
“It’s needed. If you’d cooperated with the order—”
“You shot us! You broke our drive cone!”
“You tried to evade us. Your passengers and crew—”
“Free Navy, my fucking ass! You’re thieves. You’re pirates.”
At her left, Evans—her XO and the most recent addition to her family—grunted like he’d been hit. Michio glanced at him, and his blue eyes were there to meet her. He grinned: white teeth and a too-handsome face. He was pretty, and he knew it. Michio muted her microphone, letting the stream of invective pour from the Hornblower without her, and nodded him on. What is it?
Evans pointed a thumb toward the console. “So angry,” he said. “Like to hurt a poor coyo’s feelings, he goes on like that.”
“Be serious,” Michio said, but through a smile.
“Am serious. Fragé bist.”
“Fragile. You?”
“In my heart,” Evans said, pressing a palm to his sculpted chest. “Little boy, me.”
On the speaker, the owner of the Hornblower had worked himself into a deeper froth. To hear him tell it, Pa was a thief and a whore and the kind of person who didn’t care whose babies died so long as she got her payday. If he was her father, he’d kill her instead of letting her dishonor her family. Evans snickered.
Despite herself, Michio laughed too. “Did you know your accent gets thicker when you flirt?”
“Yeah,” Evans said. “I’m just a complex tissue of affectation and vice. Took your mind off him, though. You were starting to lose your temper.”
“Not done losing it yet,” she said, and turned the mic back to live. “Sir. Sir! Can we at least agree that I’m the pirate who’s offering to lock you in your cabin for the trip to Callisto instead of throwing you into space? Would that be all right?”
There was a moment of stunned silence on the radio, then a roar of incoherent rage that resolved into phrases like drink your fucking Belter blood and kill you if you try. Michio lifted three fingers. Across the command deck, Oksana Busch waved her own hand in acknowledgment and tapped the weapons controls.
The Connaught wasn’t a Belter ship. Not originally. She’d been built by the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, and she’d come equipped with a wide variety of military and technical expert systems. They’d been on it for the better part of a year now, training in secret at first. And then when the day came, leading her into the fray. Now Michio watched her own monitor as the Connaught identified and targeted six places on the floating cargo ship where a stream of PDC fire or a well-placed missile would peel open the hull. The targeting lasers came on, painting the Hornblower. Michio waited. Evans’ smile was a little less certain than it had been. Slaughtering civilians wasn’t his first choice. In fairness, it wasn’t what Michio would have picked either, but the Hornblower wasn’t going to make its journey through the gates and out to whatever alien planet they’d thought to colonize. The negotiation now was only what the terms of that failure would be.
“Want to fire, bossmang?” Busch asked.
“Not yet,” Michio said. “Watch that drive. If they try to burn out of here? Then.”
“They try to burn on that busted cone, we can save the ammunition,” Busch said, derision in her voice.
“There’s people counting on that cargo.”
“Savvy me,” Busch said. Then, a moment later, “They’re still cold.”
The radio clicked, spat. On the other ship, someone was shouting, but not at her. Then there was another voice, then several, each trying to cut above the others. The report of a gun rang out, the sound of the attack pressed thin and nonthreatening by the radio.
A new voice came.
“Connaught? You there?”
“Still here,” Michio said. “To whom am I speaking, please?”
“Name’s Sergio Plant,” the voice said. “Acting captain of the Hornblower. I’m offering up our surrender. Just no one gets hurt, okay?”
Evans grinned their triumph and relief.
“Besse to hear from you, Captain Plant,” Michio said. “I accept your terms. Please prepare for boarding.”
She killed the connection.
History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect. And what was true of nations and planets and vast corporate-state complexes also applied to the smaller fates of men and women. As above, so below. As the OPA and Earth and the Martian Congressional Republic, so with Oksana Busch and Evans Garner-Choi and Michio Pa. For that matter, so with all the other souls who lived and worked on the Connaught and her sister ships. It was only because she sat where she did, commanded as she did, and carried the weight of keeping the men and women of her crew safe and well and on the right side of history that the smaller personal histories of the Connaught’s crew seemed to have more significance.