Jaed recoiled, red-faced and surprised and, Thorsdottir suspected, hurt. It was no secret to anyone that he had, at one point, entertained feelings for Rory, which she had ignored gently and completely, and that he had, some six months into the nascent courtship, given up. There was no rancor between them, but he could be sensitive to Rory’s moods, even now.
Thorsdottir had intended a career putting herself between people (royalty, Rory) and harm (people with ’slingers or pointy things). Rory’s choices had necessitated a change in Thorsdottir’s profession, but the underlying principles remained. Put herself between someone about to do damage and someone who needed protecting.
“I agree with Jaed,” she said, more loudly than the narrow confines of the ship and the proximity of her targets would warrant. “If you’re going to leave Zhang here, then he should come with us. He’s got a greater familiarity with Tadeshi warships than we do. And,” she drilled her stare at Rory, trying to be one-eyed, mecha-eyed Grytt, “he’s at least as good with a ’slinger as you are.”
He was, in fact, better, Rory’s aim being somewhat unpredictable. Thorsdottir saw the sentiment reflected on Jaed’s face, along with a surprised and uncomfortable gratitude.
“Fine.” Rory’s face might’ve been the visor of her hardsuit, or one of the marble statues in the Thorne palace gardens. Serene, unblinking, utterly without pity.
Jaed, accustomed to sitting at comms when Zhang and Thorsdottir boarded vessels, was not as quick, or as practiced, getting into a hardsuit. Thorsdottir refrained from reaching over and helping him with the seals as he fumbled first one leg, and then the other, into the greaves and mag-lock boots. The transition from station-bred second son of a usurping traitor to spacer was a large step, perhaps even larger than the one from Royal Guard, at least when it came to handling the equipment.
Thorsdottir readied the ’slingers and stuck her head and shoulders back into the cockpit.
Zhang had lowered Vagabond’s forward blast-shields; this time, the view of G. Stein was real-time, live, on the other side of the transparent polysteel porthole. Now Thorsdottir could see for herself the scoring on the hull, blackened and still glowing with little white pockets of flame and unlike any damage she’d seen before.
High-velocity projectiles left holes in a hull, if they got past the shields. They didn’t set it on fire. Fire wasn’t even supposed to happen in void. There was no phlogiston. Fire didn’t, couldn’t, happen without phlogiston. Never mind that fire didn’t burn through metal, either.
And yet, clearly, some kind of fire did.
“Is that—what could’ve done that? Plasma? Some kind of battle-hex?”
“I don’t know,” Zhang said softly. “Neither does Rory. But she wants to find out.”
Thorsdottir pitched her voice low. “What’s this about a transmission?”
“She said she heard something and she wanted to investigate. You know everything I do, right there.” Zhang flicked a worried glance over her shoulder. “Rory’s told me to stay here. Please tell me you’re taking Jaed.”
“I am. If I can’t have you, I need someone else to hold a ’slinger.”
Zhang took a breath and swallowed. “He will watch your back effectively. I can’t predict his value if you meet resistance.”
“I can. A third target for an angry Tadeshi marine,” Thorsdottir muttered. She was sorry the moment she said it.
Zhang’s voice dropped somewhere between whisper and breathless. “I told Rory that I don’t think anyone should board that ship. Whoever did this, did that”—and she thrust her chin at the scorched ship outside the porthole—“may still be out there, and Vagabond is no match for a warship.”
Thorsdottir squinted past G. Stein, at the velvet void beyond. There were a lot of places a ship could conceal itself, beyond the reach of Vagabond’s instruments. It was wise, for some version of the word, for Zhang to remain on board. Thorsdottir still hated it.
“Be careful,” said Zhang.
“We will,” said Thorsdottir. “We’ll go quick as we can.”
That was certainly true. But Thorsdottir did not add, we’ll be back before you know it, or we’ll be fine. She and Zhang demanded honesty from each other, too.
CHAPTER THREE
Void-stations, Rupert reflected, were all very much alike. He supposed it was a convergence of necessity, in the beginning; there were only so many ways to construct void-proof, orbiting edifices in which one expected people to live and work. The older models had all relied on spin to produce gravity, and so had been versions of a spoked ring rotating around a central spindle. Even after gravity-hexes, the shapes of the stations had not changed overmuch, with down being feet toward the rim. Lanscot’s station was no different.
The beanstalk through which people traveled to and from the station stretched down to the planetside capital city like the tether to an orbiting ring-shaped balloon. From this vantage, the city below was a blur of light, and the beanstalk looked impossibly fragile.
Rupert traced his fingers along the bulkhead. The paint was pristine, new, of a shade meant to sooth an observer, blandly pastel and warmly organic. It was a valiant effort if, to Rupert’s eye, not especially successful. He had thought himself prepared for a return to void living, and in the first twenty-four hours of resuming it, he had been too occupied with meetings to pay much attention to his surroundings. But the past two days of relative inactivity had reminded him how very much he disliked bulkheads and deckplate and confined horizons.
People got into patterns of thought, of engineering, of politics. Seeing beyond those patterns was difficult. Breaking those patterns was almost impossible. Dame Maggie of Lanscot, former farmer, then local parliamentarian, then leader of a colonial rebellion that cracked the Free Worlds of Tadesh, was a woman capable of both identifying patterns and of shattering them when necessary. She had not disbelieved him when he had reported what the green fairy had said (though he had mentioned neither fairy nor Ivar as his sources). She had visibly weighed the likelihood of his information. (With her face concealed by the head-to-toe woolen wrap, this was mostly a shifting of eyes.) She had then invited him—and Grytt, who, true to her word, had accompanied him—to stay a few days on the station while she made inquiries about xeno contacts. The end of those few days was almost nigh, with a meeting scheduled this afternoon. During the endless several hours remaining, Rupert had elected to traverse one end of the station to the other.
Lanscot’s station, like Urse, had an arboretum. But unlike Urse, the arboretum here had a second tier and a dome of clear polysteel which rose out of the otherwise smooth profile of the station like a blister. A person possessed of sufficient desire and stamina could climb a rather daunting spiral of transparent steps from the arboretum’s second tier along the interior skin of the dome, until they reached a small platform, on which one might sit and observe the void, the planet, and passing ships from a single vista.