4

Mutually Assured Destruction

The heel of my hand hurts, but I don't really care. I bang on the hatch again, the door of what used to be Dad's cabin. Three more hard thumps. From somewhere inside, a high pitched voice yells something completely unintelligible, but I'm guessing it's a variation on the theme of “Go away.”

Well, I can do this all night, even if I have to switch hands once in a while.

It takes some time, and a good deal more banging, before the hatch finally scrapes open, a reluctant few centimeters, on one glaring purple eye.

“All right, all right, what?”

“Sedna?” I snarl at her. “Are you fucking serious?”

“Of course I'm—” she begins, then cuts off and yanks the door open. She's wearing some sort of giant fluffy green robe, probably hand-spun out of unicorn tears by Indonesian child laborers. And from the looks of her hair, it's either perfect all the time, or she stops to brush it when someone hammers on her door at midnight. A protection drone looms behind her. She stares at me, narrow-eyed. Suspicious.

“How did you know?”

“Never mind how I know. Are you just an idiot, or are you actually trying to get us killed?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You're going to the Tombs. You have to be. That's the only thing on Sedna that's of any interest at all.”

“You aren't supposed to know that yet. I told you, information is on a need-to-know basis, and until we get there, you don't need to know.”

She starts to shut the cabin door, and I shove my foot in it. My bare foot. And a jolt of pain shoots up my leg as she immediately slams the hatch anyway, what feels like as hard as she possibly can.

“Oww! What the fuck? Are you crazy?”

“I'm not the one hammering on people's doors in the dead of night and yelling incoherent insults at them. Go away. ”

She's still trying to close the hatch, yanking on it with both hands, apparently in the belief that if she pulls hard enough, she can magic my foot out of existence. I'm lucky she's small and not very strong. Still… it hurts. Rather a lot, in fact.

“Dammit, will you stop that? I am trying to tell you that your plan is suicide, okay? You don't simply fly over to Sedna. Not unless you wanna get killed. Look, I'm the pilot here, not you. What sense does it make to not listen—ow, fuck, stop that—to me about my own goddamned job?”

She gives up trying to slam my foot out of existence, lets go of the hatch handle and jabs one finger at me. The paint on her nail is fresh again, a coat of the same color, blue fading to purple, iridescent, like a butterfly wing. Who the hell still takes time to paint her nails when she's traveling on an industrial spacecraft?

“It's not your job right now. I didn't hire you to think. I hired to do what I tell you. And what I am telling you to do right now is shut up, stop snooping around, and wait for me to tell you what the next step in the plan is.”

“You didn't hire me at all. When you hire someone, you offer them a job, they say yes, and then you pay them. That's how it works. This isn't a job, Princess. I don't work for you.”

“Of course you do. Your pay is that I don't turn you in for piracy, and your ship doesn't get repossessed. Is that not valuable to you? Did you not agree to it? You're here, aren't you?”

My god, the mental gymnastics on this bitch. I'm too stunned to say a thing, so she just rambles on.

“That means we're going to execute my plan, and we're going to do it my way, because it's my discovery that we're going to—”

She stops, and starts again.

“Look, you're not in charge here, and that's your fault. It's the result of your own actions, and the sooner you realize that, the better things will go for you.”

“Wait a second,” I say, shoving the door open, despite her best efforts. “Your… discovery? You found something? At Sedna? At the Tombs?”

She stumbles backwards, looking disturbed, but doesn't answer, just ducks to one side. And is replaced by one of… them, its alarms and strobe lights blaring.

“YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO ENTER A RESTRICTED AREA. BACK AWAY AT ONCE. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN THE USE OF FORCE, INCLUDING HARMFUL OR LETHAL FORCE. THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING.”

I take my hands off the hatch, and attempt to back away slowly, but one foot, the one she slammed in the door, buckles under me and I stumble, catching myself against the opposite wall of the entryway. I don't see her push the hatch, but it slams shut with a very final-sounding clang.

That could've gone better.

I stare at the closed hatch, but it's not like it's going to scrape open again and disgorge a more reasonable version of Executive Spoiled Brat, who at least realizes she doesn't know the first thing about astrodynamics. Someone who might even listen when I tell her that flying straight up to a free-fire zone, while announcing your presence with a blazing fusion drive, is basically painting a target on your forehead and screaming “Here I am, please fire a very large nuclear warhead at me.”

And somehow, given all the secrecy, and her talk of “stealing something” for her, I have some idea that, just maybe, we are not invited guests. Hell, Starlight may start shooting the moment they see us. And on this course, blazing right in at one gravity all the way, they will see us.

But I can't tell her that. She won't listen for long enough. I'm going to have to do something.

I turn around and limp back towards my own cabin. Yeah, do something. Great. But do what? Is there any way to get through to this miniature nutcase?

Not likely. I may not know who she is, I'm starting to get a read on what she is. Spoiled rotten, and either stupid, or might as well be, because you can't tell her anything. Even smart people can be really, really good at talking themselves into stupid ideas.

I've seen incarnations of her before. Fashionably short and blonde, with perfect makeup, holding a red plastic cup at Flatlander high school parties on Venus where I grew up. Seven feet tall and willowy, with facial piercings and wild-colored hair, dancing to tuvo drum music, in Orbital nightclubs in the Belt.

Always surrounded by a halo of thirsty boys, who agree with every vacuous opinion, who laugh at every unfunny joke. Who know they are making fools of themselves, know that their eagerness will incite nothing in her but contempt, but they cannot help it. They are drawn in by the tug of primal male instincts, the call of beauty to testosterone.

The sort of girl who has never heard 'no' from the day she was six years old and discovered that daddy would give her a cookie when mommy wouldn't, if she just smiled. Who has never had to work, or to be disappointed. Who never buys her own drinks or carries her own luggage. Who knows, deep in her bones, that she is owed the best of everything because she is somehow, indefinably, special, not for anything she does, but just for being her.

Worse than that, this one's rich.

Judging by her obvious designer genetics, not just well-off, not just comfortable, not just 'daddy owns a successful law firm,' but super-wealthy. Imperial rich. Dynasty rich. Business empire rich. That's why she's so damn pretty. It's how they modify their kids. Health. Longevity. Looks.

When you own everything, you don't need to build your kids with more strength, or better vision, or quicker reflexes, because anything they need done, they're going to have people to do it for them. They don't need griping feet for zero-g, because your exclusive private orbital habitat ring spins at a steady point eight Earth gravities. And you're not going to try to make them any smarter, because you have experts and AI to do all the number-crunching, and, besides, all the first-generation brain-boosted 'twists went crazy, anyway.

All they need to do is manipulate others. So Rule One is “Make 'em look perfect.” Perfect enough to help people forget that Rule Two is “Raise them as ruthless, amoral sociopaths.”

I don't know why they gave her those eyes, those pointy fairy features. Why they made her so tiny. But her personality sure fits the pattern.

I'm jolted out of angry thoughts when I feel something familiar in my hand. I don't even need to look down to realize where my feet steered me to, what my hands unpacked. I'm standing in my cabin, in front of the open storage cabinet, last on the left.

And what I'm holding, what I took out without even noticing what I was doing, is the Sphinx SDP Ultima. Semi-automatic. Chambered in Hornady 7x25mm caseless. 21 rounds to a magazine. Heavy, black anodized steel and aluminum, its worn and familiar grip fitting the swell of my palm like a glove. Still in its hard kydex retention holster.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on just one fucking second, here. Yes, I don't like her. But… a pistol? Really? Is that where my brain just went?

It's not like I'd hesitate if someone were attacking me. I carry it when I go out on sketchier stations, selling jacked cargoes. But I've only ever had to draw it twice, and both times, pointing it was enough. I've never killed anyone.

No. I have. But not like this. Not in cold blood, up close and personal. On purpose. Am I willing to take a life? Her life? It's not like she's trying to kill us both…

For a moment, I imagine that perfect, adorable, scornful little pixie face vanishing under a welter of flying blood…

Violence is wasteful, Marc, but it isn't inherently evil. Sometimes you might have to fight, or even kill, to defend yourself. That's why I'm giving you this. Because you're old enough to understand that if you make that call, if you take someone's life, you can't ever take it back. I know you'll be smart about when not to pull a trigger.

Well, I guess I let you down, there, Dad. But… not this time. No. Nope. No way.

I'm holding the pistol for… I dunno, comfort, maybe? It feels better to be armed, like I'm less helpless, somehow. Except I am, aren't I? Because I'm not willing to do… that. I shake my head as I put it back.

Close the lid on it.

My heart is hammering so hard I can feel my pulse in my ears.

I'm not sure I'd get the opportunity even if I could make myself do it. Those drone things are fast, and they have me two to one. And even if I got incredibly lucky and managed to shoot both of them somewhere vital, what then? What about her? I can't just shoot her or shove her out an airlock. Well, not can't. Won't.

Even if I took out the drones somehow, it's not like I really have anywhere to lock her up. The hold, maybe? A shipping container? I've seen footage of the shipping containers packed with Terran refugees, thirty, maybe forty people each, discovered on Port Luna, or New Tokyo. They mostly survive the trip. Mostly.

I don't know if I wanna do that to her, either. But I have to stop her, before she gets us both killed. And I have to do that without any access to the ship's controls.

Okay. Think. Be systematic. Stop battering your head against locked doors. Think about what you need to do, and what you have. Solve the one with the other.

I need to stop us from accelerating at a steady nine point eight meters per second squared towards a spot square inside the reticles of a lot of nuclear missiles and mass-driver cannons.

I need to take those protection drones out of the picture, so she can't use them against me or set them on me.

I need to restore my access to the computers and get control of my ship back.

I need to somehow stop her from doing anything with those damning documents. I need control of my life back.

And I have to stop her. I don't have the choice to just bow my head and go along. That's not pride speaking. God knows I've had enough practice swallowing it lately. This time, I can't. I can't let her have her way.

Because she doesn't know what she's doing, and, in space, when you don't know what you're doing, you die. Space doesn't care how rich you are, or what size of a stock transfer you can make. It doesn't care what you own. It doesn't care how much other people respect you, or how special they think you are. It doesn't care how pretty you are, and how much other people desire or admire or envy you.

It will kill you.

And trouble has a splash zone out here. I refuse to be collateral damage when this spoiled little princess finds she can't buy her way out of the laws of physics, or bat her eyelashes at them.

I'm fighting for my life. And, ironically, hers as well.

Haven't got a lot going for me here. Without access to the instruments, and the helm, and, hell, everything but one cargo crane, my piloting skills are useless. Effectively I'm just some big lunk who can lift heavy stuff and maybe fix things here and there.

Pretty good at that, actually. I can fix most anything on the ship. I'm the one who built most of it.

Wait a second.

If I can fix something… I can break it.

I've wasted too much time beating my head against that computer lockout. I'm not a hacker. But I have physical access to the drive. I have physical access to the central network server boxes. I have physical access to all the actual hardware this stuff runs in. And I know where everything is.

That means I can stop us from flying… even if I don't have any helm control or computer access at all.

Time to throw a wrench in the works.

I'm climbing a ladder out of a deep well. Or that's what it feels like.

When I'm weightless, my brain tends to imagine the space as a round horizontal tunnel. But now, with the drive running, pushing us forward at one steady, earth-normal 9.8 meters per square second, the access shaft is vertical and deep. I take it slowly. A fall would be bad from this high. With each step up the ladder, the tool bag suspended from my belt bangs against my hip.

I'm technically alongside the drive already. The fusion containment shaft runs the length of the ship; Dad and I had to move the accessway about a meter and a half off center when we had it put in.

But I can't commit any sabotage from here. Cut through that wall, through layer upon layer of compressed hydrogen boride and water-extended polymer, break into the exotic field channels, coolant lines, and the superconducting induction grids, and I'd breach the vacuum of the drive tunnel. Wear a vacsuit to survive decompression, and I'd still be irradiated to the point of glowing in the dark for the rest of my life. All three minutes of it.

No, I need access to the control mechanisms. The fuel lines, coolant pumps, field emitters. So I climb.

Top of the ladder. The hatch door above me is marked “Cargo Access Airlock” in faded red epoxy paint. I reach for the crank wheel carefully, one hand still on the ladder.

There's no need to cycle the lock once I clamber in. The indicator lights on the far wall show me that whoever my unwelcome guest is, she didn't know enough about cargo operations to activate the pumps and evacuate the hold once in-atmosphere loading was done.

That's okay. Saves me the trouble of getting into a suit.

Still, I close the inner door before opening the outer one. It's a fifty meter fall down to the observation deck at the other end of the hab cylinder. Then I clamber up into the hold, and there it is, looming in the semidarkness above me, centered between the four massive steel beams that run along the spine of the ship—the ten meter spindle of a Starlight 512C Nuclear Fusion Induction Impulse Drive.

The whole mass of coiled tubes, radiator fins, cable conduits, and exotic field hardware revolves around the central vacuum shaft in a slow procession, sending out a deep throbbing hum that I don't just hear but feel as well, at infrasonic frequencies that vibrate my diaphragm, the walls of my chest, my skull. I've never seen the spin rate vary, nor the pitch of the sound, no matter how soft or hard I've burned the drive.

Around the central core, empty shipping container racks line the hold's vast cylinder, stretching from floor to ceiling. A few paces away, where the spine of the ship meets the floor, the next ladder stretches upwards.

I climb into the gloom.

Up in the scaffolding around the spindle, I unpack my tools… a zero-gravity shop vac with mounting clamps. Safety goggles. A filter mask. An oscillating saw, cased in yellow and black plastic. An opened package of blades, held together with faded duct tape. A worklight.

Okay. Gotta think about this.

No one knows exactly how these things work, except a few cloistered Starlight scientists and engineers, and even they are copying their homework off an impossibly advanced alien species. If you don't know your physics, nothing about it makes sense, and if you do know your physics, everything about it makes even less sense than if you didn't.

It fuses hydrogen into helium, like the core of the sun, but forty-two percent of the energy the reaction should generate just… isn't there. Like it goes somewhere else we can't see. It doesn't push against a shock plate like a standard drive, but exerts force along the length of the tunnel with some sort of magnetic induction. It's not a reactionless drive, but the reaction mass exhaust it throws out is a tiny fraction of what it should be.

Scientists all agree that the physics doesn't work. The drive, however, just does.

So it's in the absence of any great sense of enlightenment that I stare at the complex tapestry of the spindle rotating slowly past me, held within a series of massive collars packed with fullerene bearings and lithium grease.

What exactly can I do to this thing?

Hmmm.

Can't break the field emitters. No one outside of Starlight knows how to fix them. Coolant lines? No, spectacularly bad idea. My plans for today do not include being part of a nuclear fireball. Same for the charge distribution net.

How about the fuel feed lines?

Yes. No matter how proprietary and secret and complex this thing gets at the injection end, at a certain point, a PMH line is just a PMH line. And nothing runs without fuel.

Okay, so… primary and secondary injection manifolds there and there, injection collar here, static lines running into the walls of the primary vacuum shaft… better cut further back from the source. There. Running into the manifolds on the upper and lower collar bushing. Primary and secondary lines, zero through seven.

Mask and goggles first. Okay, now clamp the shop vac to the pipe, just after the Tesla conduit section, and before the tertiary injectors. Angle the head and power on with a whir. Breeze begins to pull past my face…

There. That should catch most of the residual fuel in the lines. PMH. Particle Metallic Hydrogen. Hydrogen gas, compressed to its metallic form by unbelievable pressure from exotic field technology, then rendered into a fine dust, each particle precisely the same mass. I peel back the tape, extract a blade from the package, check it carefully to make sure it's the type I expect. Yes, “CL/Diamond Enhanced Sparkless.” Fit it to the saw.

Hopefully, between the sparkless blade and the shopvac to suck up the leakage, I should be okay. Because with the hold pressurized, there's plenty of oxygen in here, and I can't run the pumps to drain it.

PMH fuel plus oxygen plus a spark equals a big fucking fireball. Oh, well, at least if it goes wrong, I probably won't even have time to notice.

Okay, let's get ready for this, visualize the game plan. Time to find out if I remembered just what the reactor safety systems are designed to do. If I'm right, cutting feed lines should trigger a reactor trip shutdown.

Necessary? Not really. Even with a fuel feed imbalance slewing the beam, I'd theoretically be fine. The grid should channel any hot plasma away from the shaft wall. And there's still several redundant layers of BH-WEP shielding between me and enough neutron radiation to scramble every cell in my body. But I'm hoping the systems engineers were paranoid, because the safety shutdown is what I really want.

I fire up the saw, careful to keep my fingers back. The blade, vibrating back and forth at twenty thousand cycles per second, bites right into the fuel line with a howl. The external copper shell and insulating jacket shred immediately, then I feel the blade halt as it bites into the vanadium steel core, shedding a halo of steel dust to flow into the shopvac in a visible stream of glitter.

Press hard and wait. It's loud this close, damn loud. Hope she can't hear it through the distance and the steel bulkheads. If she does, with all this noise, I wouldn't be able to hear those drones coming. Just have to hurry and hope.

After a brief fucking eternity, the saw jolts, and a loud sucking hiss cuts through the howl of the saw. There. Vacuum breached. There's air in the line. No way that one will work now.

“Alert. Alert. Alert. Feed vacuum breach detected. Core engine trip in progress. Emergency shutdown in ten seconds. All personnel brace for core ejection.”

Yes! Thank you, calculating overcautious left-brained pencil pushers of the engineering worlds. Without you, we'd all be dead of radiation sickness or sucking hard vacuum.

But you did just let my unwelcome guest know exactly what I'm up to. That warning just came through every intercom speaker on the White Cat. So even if she couldn't hear the saw… well, she sure as hell knows what I'm up to now.

“Alert. Alert. Alert. Feed vacuum breach detected. Core engine trip in progress. Emergency shutdown in five seconds. All personnel brace for core ejection.”

I lock an elbow around the ladder cage, and grab my own wrist, holding tight… It's about to get loud in here. And rough.

“Four. Three. Two. One. Ejecting fusion core.”

And a titanic blow, like Nyberg's Hammer up close and personal, hits the Cat—somewhere. I can't see anything from here, of course, and for a moment, as the steel superstructure rings like a colossal gong, I can't hear anything, either, but I know what's happened.

A living, breathing fusion reaction, a shaft of plasma as thick as a pencil and over seventy meters long, has been freed from its primary containment field, to explode out violently backwards under inertial containment, expanding and cooling fast, but still burning. Still as hot as the core of the sun. Turbulent and chaotic as it slams against the secondary grid field all along the length to the Cat, buffeting her sideways this way and that.

She lurches forward, shuddering and groaning in protest, for a single moment. And then gravity is gone, and I am floating free.

PMH glitter jets out around me, swirling in zero gravity, and I cut the saw power off fast, teeth clenched and palms clammy, but the shopvac seems to be drawing most of it in, there's no huge fireball, and I'm not dead.

Now I just have to not-die fifteen more times.

I affix the shopvac to the next line, and start to cut. Sweating now. The drive may be shut down now, but I know there's some redundancy here… the reactor doesn't actually need all these feed lines in order to work. But cut enough of them, though, and the computer will flat refuse to start it up again, even in rescue mode. I bend my head to the task.

Nothing interrupts me. Even after five minutes, ten, no nightmare metallic spiders rush out of the access lock to drag me from my work. Finally, the last line is cut.

There, Miss Corporate Documents. Miss Expensive Shoes. Miss Trust Fund Baby. Go ahead and cut out the damaged segments. Cut and prep fresh conduit pipes. Bend them to fit. TIG weld them into place. Check tolerances. Flush and evacuate the lines. Then run a full set of manual reactor pre-start checks.

Good luck with all that, sweetie. Hope they taught welding in finishing school. Don't break a nail.

I leave my repacked toolbag velcro-strapped to a coolant feed line, and head back down into the access lock, flying along the ladder in zero gravity. Now it looks horizontal to me again. She'll be up there somewhere up ahead, with those heavily armed spiders to guard her, to prevent me from laying one finger on her. Too bad for her that she wasn't the only vulnerable thing on this ship.

I'm not looking forward to this next part, where I deal with whatever reaction her madness has cooked up, but I can't just stay up here forever.

Might as well get it over with.

But I don't encounter her on the way down the access ladder at all. Not in the tunnel, not on the engineering levels, not on the bridge, not in the galley. I don't see her at all until I reach the cabin level, and then I understand why she hasn't come after me at all, not one step.

She's drifting in the door of her cabin, surrounded by a massive sphere of glossy black hair that stretches out in every direction, waving gently in the current from the vent fans. Motionless. Curled into a ball. Around her orbits a cloud of makeup bottles, partially unfolded clothing, a hairbrush, the detritus of a bag packed for travel. And woven through all of it, a swarm of tiny red oblong shapes. Pills.

Is she some sort of… addict?

It takes me a moment to spot her constant metal shadows, the drones, where they cling to the junction of wall and ceiling, scanning back and forth with sensor clusters. They don't appear distressed at all. But are they programmed for medical?

She stirs a bit, whimpers, and reaches out for the hatch opening, turning herself to look blearily in my direction. Hmm, she doesn't look high. She looks slightly… green.

Oh. Freefall. Right. Expensive little custom genetwist girl isn't perfect after all.

“What,” she groans, “did you do?”

I savor the moment. “We regret that your hijacked spacecraft is experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by. If you require further assistance, we recommend you go fuck yourself.”

“What did you do?”

“Drive's out of action, Princess. Now do you wanna talk about your stupid-ass flight plan without slamming a door in my face, or do you need to go to the head and throw up first?”

“Be fine… in a few… minutes. Got. Pills. For it.”

“Yeah, I noticed. You better clean those up before they get everywhere. But we need to talk first. We're not going to fucking Sedna.”

“I heard you. The first time. We had this. Conversation. Already. And yes we are. What did you do to the drive?”

“Knocked off a couple bits you won't fix in a hurry. That way you have to listen to me this time.”

“Well, maybe if you didn't. Hammer on my door. In the middle of the night. Besides, we talked about this. You've been stealing cargoes for years out here. Stealth flying is supposed to be your thing. So your job, since you keep asking. Is to make sure we don't get noticed.”

She's straightened up a bit, looking a little less distressed already.

“Oh, for fuck's sake, this isn't just about you wanting to go there, which is insane enough. It's about how. You laid in a course straight there. Thirteen days accelerating at one gravity, thirteen days decelerating at one gravity, then insertion into low orbit. Right in the middle of the no-fly zone.”

“Yeah, so what? It was easy. You just tell the nav plotter thing where you want to go.”

I groan, lay one hand on my forehead, and run it back over the short stubble of my hair. Where to begin?

“Are you for real? Look, Princess, the Starlight Coalition Exclusion Zone is not a joke, okay? The Tombs, and the artifacts they took from them, are the basis of their whole empire, and they do not mean to share. No interlopers. No visitors. No student exchange programs. No outside access at all. The hundred thousand kilometer radius around Sedna is the most intensely scrutinized slice of sky in the known universe.

“If they see us go in there, they will shoot us right the fuck out of space. And if we somehow dodge that, we'll have to get away again, with them chasing us, not to mention a bounty on us so enormous that every single cargo carrier, mining ship, courier, and fucking research vessel within a few light minutes is going to join the chase, okay? Not that we would live long enough for anyone else to collect it with a pack of Coalition warships on our ass.”

She arches one eyebrow at me. “You've been listening to far too many stories,” she says. “And you know nothing about corporations. No one has any warships. Not even Starlight. You know who used to have warships? Governments, that's who. Not corporations.

“You know why? Because governments have subjects, who they can just take money from whether they like it or not. Corporations have customers, who expect something for their money, and stockholders who expect to be paid. They can't just buy a bunch of superfluous junk that doesn't turn a profit, or their stockholders will vote everyone off the board. Warships aren't a good investment. They aren't profitable.”

“Lotta companies sure as hell had warships in the Artifact War.”

“It was profitable to fight over alien artifacts back then. When that was over, they were nothing but an expense. They've been decommissioned and sold, pretty much everywhere. The United Nations might have a few hidden in Earth orbit somewhere, but even they wouldn't dare use them, or even show them, because if they did, another Nyberg would just drop another asteroid on them.”

She's warmed up to her subject, and is looking slightly less green already. Her eyes have this little sparkle to them when she gets passionate about something, and there's this cute little dusting of freckles across her nose that I just know the designers put there on purpose.

God, I hate myself sometimes.

“Warships,” she continues, “are obsolete. So what they'll have there will be a few lightly armed security patrol craft, at most. And you can handle those, right?”

“Handle them how? Just what the hell are you imaging I'm going to do?”

She stares at me down her pert little upturned nose like I'm an idiot, an effect that's slightly spoiled by a drifting pill bouncing off it.

“Do what you've been doing. Fly us in without being noticed and get us away clean. You stole 47 full-mass cargoes, in the middle of empty space, and no one ever caught you. You know what they were calling you in the press?”

“Yes, and I'll thank you not to repeat it. It's not that fucking easy. First of all—”

She gives me a smug look.

“You'll figure it out. Besides, it's my call to make. Now get us under way again.”

“No.”

“Are you that stupid? You can knock out the drive, but I still have the radio. I can still turn it on, call up Arachne Station, and…”

“And do what? Call for rescue? Turn me in?”

She opens her mouth to answer, but I don't wait for whatever piece of crazy is gonna pop out.

“And what will you tell them when they arrive? That I'm a pirate, and you just happen to be drifting around with me in a crippled ship, twenty million kilometers out in space? That you neglected to mention it to them when we left? And where will you tell them we were going? Will your story agree with what's in the nav plotter's memory? Will it agree with what I tell them when they ask? Maybe we could all just sit around and have a nice chat. Imagine the things we could discuss, them and I.”

“You're bluffing,” she scoffs, with that sort of fish-mouthed expression she makes, a combination of anger and disgust. “You'd be in a lot more trouble than I would.”

“So what? I'm fucked already. And what you're doing is so legitimate and above-board that you hired a pilot, and a crew, by advertising on the internet, right? 'Charter ship needed for potentially dangerous, highly profitable mission to the Sedna Exclusion Zone. Hazard pay and profit-sharing bonuses available. Top talent and highly experienced only.'

“Oh, wait, no, you didn't do that at all, did you? You blackmailed me, instead. Well, now I have no incentive not to say things that Starlight would be very interested in hearing. Face it, Princess. The days when you could turn me in without consequences were over the moment I figured out where you wanted to go. I may not know exactly what your plan was, or who your backers are, but I know enough to sink you. Mutually assured destruction.”

She glares at me. “And if I just call those backers and have them come sort you out? You'd never have a chance to talk to anyone.”

“I know you can't do that, because if you could, we wouldn't be here alone. If they had people to send, people they could trust, those people would be here with us already. And if they had a ship to send, you'd be on it right now instead of here.

“So spare me your attempts at bluffing and look at your options. Call for help and tank your whole plan, or give me back control of my ship. Or, we can just sit here until you change your mind. Maybe watch the stars a bit. Play some chess. Catch up on your knitting or whatever it is you do when you're not fucking with random strangers' lives.”

It feels so good to say it, to be back in charge… or, at least, it does until the moment I notice that she's not angry anymore, she's grinning, a little crooked smile I don't like the look of.

“There's one more option,” she says.

And then she kicks out both legs, pushes off the doorframe, and takes a flying leap at me.

What the hell?

She comes in at head level, swinging an arm in a big slow haymaker, those fancy nails extended to claw my face or something. It's the most pathetic attack I've ever seen, and I'm so prepared that I'm actually waiting for her, for just a split second, before I bat her away with one open hand. Doesn't take much effort when she's weightless, and only masses about as much as a kid to begin with.

She flies across the room, tumbling end-over-end in the air, and I have one moment, just a moment, of smug self-satisfaction with my complete and obvious physical superiority.

Wait, she's… still grinning?

Then the drone slams into me, flashing strobes and screaming klaxon fury, and that's the moment I realize she's outsmarted me, taken advantage of my training and reflexes. The drone doesn't care about abstract concepts like “self-defense.” All it sees is an attack—which was the point all along.

For a moment, I hold it off, grabbing at flailing segmented limbs, using my mass and reach against it, then every muscle in my arms and chest locks up, and pulses of white heat run through me, a wave of angry hornets, buzzing, stinging, burning. Taser. My cybernetic eye blurs over with static at each pulse.

I can't move, can't fight back, my arms won't obey me. Not that I could make a dent in the damn thing anyway. I can't see where the girl is, can't hear her; the worlds are a confused blur of fractured images, strobing light, and the incessant, deafening howl of whatever brain-melting frequency some sound engineer picked for this metallic bastard.

But I can feel it. It's dragging me off in some direction, one grabber limb clamped around my shoulder, pushing off walls with metal claws. The taser must be a probe instead of wired darts, because it doesn't have to reset, it keeps shocking me every time I start to regain control, and I'm covered in something wet and sticky… blood?

Pepper spray?

No. Marker dye. Purple. Dumb machine thinks I'm a would-be assassin who might flee into a crowd. Artificial stupidity. No understanding of context. That fucking dye's gonna get every fucking where in zero g.

I wonder, though… where is the other drone?

But I'm too busy being hit to find out.

The thing about pain is that it makes the worlds small. Shrinks your focus.

My world has shrunk to the size of the few square inches of deck plate next to my face. The cheap gray epoxy paint, chaos of tiny scratches. Somehow I can see, or at least imagine, all the countless random impacts and scuffs needed to create that surface.

I don't think I want to move right now; something in my back is still twitching in hard, random spasms that send a hot needle of pain shooting up and down my left side. Not to mention that I don't have any idea what those drones might interpret as a resumption of the “threat.”

From somewhere beyond my drifting sphere of aches, the prod of a dainty, slippered foot interrupts my thoughts.

“You awake?” she asks, sounding… satisfied. “I can see it was foolish to expect you to see reason. I didn't like doing that, but you put your hands on me, and that's not allowed. Hopefully, you've learned your lesson. I suppose you'll need to rest after that business. Fine. But tomorrow morning, go down to the drive and do whatever it is you need to do to get us sailing again. For now, go to your cabin and stay there. I have things to do, and I don't need you looking over my shoulder.”

She pushes off a wall, and I don't watch her go.

No, Princess. It's ain't that fucking easy. You may think you've won, but all you've done is show me how soft and unprepared you are. You think a single ass-kicking is going to change my mind?

Well, maybe violence is unthinkable to you, in your soft luxurious world of full-gravity habitats, brunch, and non-functional scarves, but I've had my ass kicked harder, by scarier people, and gotten back up to repay the loan with interest.

We'll see how you take it when it's your turn.