19

This Is What I Do

Sedna hangs in the air over us, slightly translucent—a rusty, cratered sphere the size of a geckoball. Around it, a cloud of tiny bright stars, fusion drive flames, marked with distance and acceleration vectors, labels, traces of projected flight paths, countdown timers to firing range.

“It doesn't look that bad,” says Miranda, not strapping in, but looming through the display to peer at the pinprick indicating the White Cat. For a brief, disorienting second, the perspective fools me, and she is a star titan, a giantess hundreds of thousands of kilometers tall, with a slightly puzzled look on her gargantuan face.

“Isn't it just a matter of staying ahead of them? If we accelerate at the same rate they do, they can't close the distance, right? And we should be able to pull heavy gravities better than them. I'm small, and mostly made of upgraded parts, and you…”

She hesitates, looks me up and down. Well, up and across. And cracks a crooked little smile, like she's seen something that amuses her.

“… well, you look like a shaved gorilla.”

Figures. I must look pretty silly standing here in my sweatpants and nothing else. Not that it isn't a fair description, but I would have thought that saving her life would buy me a few days worth of common human decency before habit reasserted itself, and she started insulting me again.

Not that she looks all that stylish herself. I can see why she usually wears clothes that cling to her figure, because with her head peeking out of the dull green expanse of my double-extra-large t-shirt, she looks like a kid peeking out of a tent. With messy hair.

“It's not that fuckin' easy,” I say. “We'd have to accelerate directly away from all of them, and they're not all coming from the same direction. So the straighter and harder we run away from any one of them, the easier it is for the others to get close. Leela, how fast would we have to run to get away from them all, do you think?”

Leela flickers for a moment. I'm not sure it's intentional. “Uh… depends who exactly you're talking about,” she says. “There's about seven Starlight spacecraft in the area, including the three that are burning for intercept. But there's a lot more drive signatures turning towards us.”

“What? Who? How many?”

“Well, three supply ships, the Vesta Station, the Hard Luck, and the King Rat, then there's a fuel tanker—the Calypso—that just broke off two escort craft, I don't know their names, they're mostly engines and a railgun. Then there's the Blackhammer and the Hermione, and the—”

Dots light up on the display as she mentions each name, a loose scatter of drive signatures, in every direction.

“Leela, we don't have all day. How many?”

“It's not my fault you meat people listen slowly. How many close by, or how many total? Because it's a lot more if you—”

“How many total?”

“Thirty-seven.”

Shit. A constellation lights up all at once, a loose cloud, some of them light-minutes out, some ominously close.

“Starlight must have pulled a lot of strings,” says Miranda.

“No, they just offered a bounty. Probably for capture, or those three near us would be firing already. Leela, again, how fast to get free of all of them?”

“At their current pace, looks like about a steady seven point three gravities for twenty-two hours or so to pull out ahead. After that, they'd be clustered behind us, and we'd just need to match them. Except those four, here, here, and those over there.”

Several dots begin to flash slowly.

“Those are coming in ahead of us. They can't board us even if we let them, because they don't have a prayer of decelerating fast enough to match velocity, but they can get real close to us as they sail by. That's gonna happen pretty much no matter what we do. Close enough to rake us with fire if they want to play rough.”

Ouch. Seven point three gravities is bad. Twenty-two hours is worse.

“Yeah, see, I could maybe do that much heavy time,” I say, turning to Miranda, “in a crash couch with plenty of drugs. It would be close, but maybe I could do it and survive. Thing is, upgraded parts or not, I'm pretty sure it would squash you like a bug.”

“Oh,” she says, quietly.

“If we just needed to go fast, we could accelerate in spurts, give ourselves some rest breaks. Problem is, we don't just need to out-accelerate them on average. We have to stay ahead of them all the time, they only have to catch us once.”

“So what do we do?” Miranda asks, like this is the first time it's occurred to her.

“Wait, you're asking me? This is your plan. What did you plan to do if someone saw us?”

I know it's unfair. I know I'm being petty. I know it's absolutely impossible for her to have some magic waiting in the wings, or even backup on the way. But some part of me just can't resist a certain amount of I-told-you-so.

“The plan,” she explains, with careful enunciation, as if speaking to a young and rather slow-witted child, “was not to get caught.”

“Wait, you mean you not only came out here with no understanding of space flight, but with no backup plan at all? You have nothing?”

“My plan was to find myself a hotshot pilot. Somebody who outwitted a lot of very angry shipping companies with big guns. You keep telling me how good you are. So go ahead. Impress me.”

No, Princess. I'm not buying it. That monumental arrogance is just the mask you wear when you're terrified, and I know that because I've just seen it crack. You don't want this responsibility. You want to lay it on me. You're out of your depth.

Of course, so am I. But at least I know how to swim.

“Okay, fine, Princess. Strap in. We gotta go.”

She looks at me, and there's some hope in those big purple-indigo-violet eyes. Looks like a stray scrap of wishful thinking.

“You have an idea?” she asks.

“Nope. Not a clue. Can't fight them all. So if you can't fight, you run. So we run. Maybe we get lucky. Now move.”

The Grand Champion of the All-Solar-System-Pushy-Bitch Competition is suddenly as obedient as a well-trained pet. She not only moves, she scurries. What a difference a brush with death makes. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

I'm not far behind her, settling into the pilot's couch, strapping my oxygen mask on, stripping off my coverall to apply a g-stim patch to the inside of each thigh, and I'm climbing into my vacsuit double fast. Doesn't take me long, I've been doing this for years.

“You're only supposed to use one of those,” Miranda says.

“I mass 112 kilos,” I shoot back.

“Still pushing it,” she says. “You could stroke out, or go into hypotension and faint.” She sounds worried, for once, not snarky.

“Been doing this a long time, Doctor Fussbudget. Still breathin'. You set up?”

“Go,” she says, and I do, taking the drive from our current half gravity to one, then two, then three. A giant invisible hand crushes me into the smartfoam, and I push my legs out, hard, against the footplates, tightening my entire body. Actually feels good to work some muscle, but it won't feel that way for long.

Behind me, Miranda moans softly, more discomfort than pain. Things haven't gotten bad. Not yet.

My fingers dance over the nav interface, trying to pick a course that will get me the most distance from the greatest number of pursuers. One thing I love about virtual reality gesture consoles is that the controls can be anywhere, and over the years I've set mine up so I don't have to lift my arms from the rests to do pretty much anything. And right now those arms weigh about thirty kilos each, so that's important.

“You okay back there, Princess?”

“Yes, but… can you please just not?”

“Oh, right. Sorry. Force of habit. You shoulda told me your name right off. But I'll try to remind myself to stop.”

“Oh,” she says, sounding surprised. “Uh, thanks.”

“Still doesn't mean I forgive you.”

She sighs. “Yes. I know.” I expect her to say more, for a moment, but she doesn't. It's pretty hard to breathe.

I just focus on the trajectory projections behind my closed eyes, swarming around the image of Sedna, smaller now, shrinking as we pull away. After a moment or two, I see it. There's a gap in the spiderweb of trace lines, about fifteen degrees off the plane of the ecliptic, small and narrow, but there. I calculate furiously, fingers flying now.

“Okay, Prin— Miranda. We're going to have about seventeen seconds drive cut to come around to a new heading, then we're gonna accelerate hard. You still good?

Nothing but an affirmative grunt now. This has to be hitting her a lot harder than it is me. But I'm going to have to push her harder still. I need to make as much distance as I can, before they stop trying the radio, and start shooting.

Three, two, one… and we gasp in unison as the pressure vanishes and air rushes into our straining lungs, weightless for only a moment, then yanked to the side as orientation jets kick in, burning hydrogen metal and liquid oxygen, swinging us around.

“Miranda? Get your biomonitor data turned on. I'm going to have to push us hard, and I'm setting up some trip thresholds to throttle back the drive if one of us is in trouble.”

“Yeah, I see them, but… those blood pressure numbers are all wrong, Marcus, and don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, I—”

“Yes, yes, graduated top of your class from med school, I know. It's not about being comfortable or healthy or even conscious. We just have to stay alive. You with me?”

“No, I mean they're just thresholds, you're not looking at ejection fractions, I…”

And just then the engine cuts in, ramping up towards five gravities, but somehow she continues, barely above a whisper.

“I… can… do… this… better…”

She probably can. I don't even know what “ejection fraction” is. I give another instruction to the Cat, granting her the predefined role of ship's physician.

“You have access,” I tell her, straining against the anvil on my chest. “Set whatever. Go.”

She's still working when we hit four gravities, but even then she's still hanging in there, and so am I. I think she's adjusted our oxygen mix somehow, because I barely need to move my lungs to get enough air.

“Got some stuff set up,” she whispers in my ear. No, not my ear, she's reactivated the neural link. Sounds like her head is on my shoulder when she speaks.

“I'll try to keep an eye on you, but I may pass out. I told the engines not to throttle back unless you pass out, or either one of us is in real danger. That's all I can do. I hope you're as good as you say you are.”

Five gravities now. I've abandoned the physical controls, my arms are too heavy. I twitch my right index finger slightly on a virtual flightstick, vectoring the fusion thrust around a few degrees. My left hand lays in navpoint markers in the void of space.

“As good as I say I am?” I whisper to her in the dark, behind my shut eyes. “You know that maneuver I scooped you up with?”

I let the throttle further out, and gasp as I run out of air. My fingers fly, and the White Cat groans and shudders as we skew this way and that.

“It's called a cartwheel, or a bay door catch.”

Gasp.

“It's supposed to be for snaring loose cargo pods.”

Gasp.

“But it's not in the textbooks. It's too risky.”

Gasp.

“Too irresponsible. It's not a serious thing.”

Gasp.

“It's just something pilots use to show off.”

Gasp.

“And no one's ever tried it to catch a live person and… had… them… sur… vive.”

Gasp.

“Until now. You're the first person… in history… to live through that.

Gasp.

“And I'm the first one to pull it off.”

Gasp.

“You told me you picked me because I was…. a… loser.”

Gasp.

“But you are a very lucky girl, because you were… dead wrong.”

Gasp.

“I may have made a whole series of shit decisions, and fucked my life pretty bad…

Gasp.

“… but this is what I do.”

And in that moment, I am telling the truth, as I wield the two thousand ton White Cat like a saber, slicing through the web of trajectory lines that try to tangle us, to hem us in. Kilometer by tiny kilometer, I begin to fight us free.

“That was beautiful, Marcus.”

The voice in my ear is calm, unlabored, without a trace of strain. For a moment I don't know why, because my head's a little fuzzy, and it takes me a moment to recognize the voice—Leela.

Leela, who doesn't need to breathe at all. Who can't be crushed by a mere six gravities of acceleration, because she's actually several hundred kilos of heavy solid-state circuits without a single moving part. Leela, who can do this all day, every day, and any day.

“It was really nice. And I'm glad you're feeling good about this. But I'm afraid your audience has passed out again,” she says.

I'd smile at the irony, but my face hurts. Everything hurts.

It's okay. My real audience was me.

Telling myself I can do this. Hope I was right.

The swarm closes in on me from all directions, and I duck and weave like a prizefighter, slewing this way and that, slamming us about in our acceleration couches as I struggle to win free. If I can get out of the cloud of incoming craft, and turn this into a stern chase, I can outdistance the lot of them, string the pack out in a line behind me.

If, that is, I can get free without coming into range of anyone's railgun. No one's actually fired yet, but the swarm is tightening and condensing, fast approaching ranges where they can score clean hits if they do. I don't know how long this tacit and fragile treaty will last. The Cat's software is far from sentient, but it almost seems nervous anyway—it keeps pinging me with firing solutions. I doubt it's just the Cat. There's a lot of itchy fingers on light triggers out there. Better get as much space as I can before the shooting starts.

Dogfighting at fusion-drive accelerations is like boxing and playing chess at the same time, with a side order of heavy barbell deadlifts. But that's why I train like I do.

And for the next few hours, I am everything I said I was, and more. In the pilot's chair, I am Hendrix with a guitar, Elvis with a microphone, Shakespeare with a quill pen. I fight for distance, playing every trick I know and a few I make up on the spot, picking up a thousand kilometers here, another few thousand there, sacrificing a little to jumble a small pack together, forcing them to turn their attention on each other.

From the couch behind me I occasionally hear Miranda whimper. Like a pet or small child. I'm worried—she's been beat up enough already. But she hasn't asked me to stop or throttle back, and the computer says her vitals are stable.

I try to slip in a few seconds of zero-g here and there, when I can. I need them, too. Humans can take high acceleration in spurts, but this has been hours, and for that you need training, conditioning, and most of all, big slabs of thick muscle.

Even so, I'm a hurtin' unit right now. It's like having a concrete slab sit on your chest for hours, while you sip air instead of gasping. If you let your lungs deflate all the way, it's hard to fill them again.

If it's bad for me, Miranda must be in hell.

Couple weeks ago, I'd have said, serves you right. It's your fault we're in this mess in the first place.

But not now. I'm not even mad. Because, perversely, despite immanent capture, or just straight-up death, I'm filled with… joy.

I have a purpose again, and my enemy is in front of me, someone and something I can actually fight. Not powerful oligarchic abstractions, but flesh-and-blood opponents who are here with me, in my arena, where I can oppose them with the skill that defines me, the thing I was purpose-built in the womb for, if not by expensive doctors, then at least by fate.

Marcus Warnoc was born to fly.

So I fly.

I don't count the minutes and hours, only the positions of the oncoming swarm, and the receding speck of Sedna behind us. I'm aimed at a high angle now, way above the plane of the ecliptic, headed for the Oort cloud and interstellar space, but that's okay, I've found an opening there in the web of inbound tracks, and I'm punching toward it, flat out and hard, burning enough hydrogen to light a small station, and I'm so close I can smell it.

Almost free.

I can string them out behind us. Then I can take as long as I need to get ahead, then punch back “down,” towards the solar system spread out beneath me, anyplace I need to go. Find somewhere to hide while we figure out what we're gonna do with this thing. Sell it. Hell, even have a fucking moment to take a look at it. I don't know what. That's Miranda's department. I just fly.

Oh, they fight back. They claw at me like a swarm of clutching crows. They cling to my trail like limpets. They jink around the sky trying to cut me off. They fan out and try to plug every hole in their lines. Still, there's no shooting, no railgun pulses, but everyone's trying to get close, and I know what that means. That's okay. I don't plan to let them do it. I'll slip through their nets and I'll laugh at them.

And I do.

I run rings around them. I juggle them with a twitch of my fingers, lead them about by the nose, and all but run them into each other, impossible as that would actually be in the vastness of interplanetary space. I toy with them and insert that extra little twist and s-curve into my flightpath that only another pilot could read.

“Bow before the throne,” it says, 'for I am your king.'

Go on, catch a fly with tweezers. I am too fast for you. I am too smart for you. I am too quick for you. I am too strong for you. I am Marcus Warnoc, space pirate, the thief so cunning that you've all heard of my deeds, but never knew my name. And you shouldn't have let me get in my zone, because now you are no match for me. Watch and learn. Watch and despair, anonymous corporate lackeys and sleazy bounty hunters, because you will never, never, not ever, not if you live a two hundred years and practice every day, be half the pilot I am.

I know Miranda can't understand what is going on, can't understand what she sees on the display, can only feel that she is being shaken like dice in a cup, and it hurts. But over the VR audio link I hear a low impressed whistle in a high girl voice, and it's the only noise she needs to make to get her point across. Leela, who can model this all in three dimensions and in real time, can play it back and forth and from a thousand different angles, is telling me that she sees me, sees my art, and she gets it.

If we live through this, she'll make a fine pilot one day, I think.

When I fly, I am a feather on the breath of God. Watch me soar.

And that's when it happens.

In the middle of my magnum opus, my symphony of fusion fire, in mid-stride of all my self-absorbed glee, inventing poetic bullshit in my head about how cool I am… that's when old Murphy steps in to kick my ass.

That, in other words, is when the damn engine cuts out.

At first I don't even register that this is a bad thing. I'm in the zone, thinking I'm invincible, thinking I'm god, so full of myself I'd be laughing out loud if only the crushing weight on my chest would let me, and then, suddenly, that crushing weight is just… gone.

And I do laugh out loud, for just a moment. Until I realize that the throttle isn't responding and the lack of weight is a very, very bad thing, and the error log screen, which has enthusiastically popped itself to the forefront of my display, is spitting out “Command Error” entries so fast I can't read them as they scroll.

I trigger control icons on my neural lace, clicking three menus deep and cursing some interface designer's name. Purge engine command queue. The errors keep coming. Lock out engine command.

Confirm engine command lockout?

Confirm, goddamn it, you idiot machine. Confirm already.

Miranda starts making confused noises, awakening to the fact that the loss of gravity is not a thruster turn or one of the rest breaks I've been doling out with a miserly hand.

Commands are locked out, the reactor's in idle, but the error messages are still coming in, the engines angrily objecting to phantom commands that my console can't possibly be sending. What the hell is going on?

“Leela, are you seeing this?”

Leela appears, six inches tall on the arm of my acceleration couch, staring down at me with her hands on her hips.

“Uh, seeing what? And why have we stopped burning mass?”

An inquisitive noise from Miranda's couch informs me that she, too, is waiting for me to explain myself.

“I didn't stop. We had an engine trip, and now it's just scrolling error message spew. Even after I shut down the console. So either I'm crazy, or those bad commands are coming from somewhere else—Fuck!”

On the proximity display, traces are turning from green to yellow. Incoming hostiles, matching trajectories, and making up distance, fast. At this rate, the work of hours will be undone in minutes. And I have no idea what the hell is going on. If those commands aren't coming from the console, then what the hell is sending them?

“Marcus,” says Leela, “I have direct control of my network interfaces. I'm grabbing signal packets off the wire. We'll see if they match the error messages.”

“Good idea. I'll run console diagnostics.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Miranda asks.

“I don't know,” I snap at her, in a wave of frustration, “is there anything you can do?”

Silence. She knows full well that right now, in this fight, I'm the captain, Leela is my first mate, and she's nothing but cargo. Working to retrieve the artifact, we were a team, and for a brief, golden interval, we stopped snapping at each other. But that's gone now, because she wasn't trained for this, and all she can do is watch the display and ask me what's going on.

I don't have time. The self-test routines are telling me nothing useful at all. The system's not doing anything it shouldn't. That flood of engine commands is definitely coming from somewhere else. Which shouldn't be possible.

It doesn't make any sense.

Then things get worse.