In time, Paloma came out glaring, hands tucked under his armpits, cheeks shining with what Imbra allowed might be condensation, while Biggs laid out details for their trip to the space elevator. Imbra tried to feel nearly as much of a rush, a heat inside him like the kid had, and would continue to have, so long as he kept clear of the courts. But in his triumph, Imbra couldn’t even rely on a rush of oxytocin—too dangerous, the courts had decided, because of its role in defensive aggression between social groups— so Imbra settled for a nod to both and said nothing when Paloma answered with a gob of spit at his feet.
Imbra waited in the hovercraft while the kid visited his mother’s grave, one last time, before the pair was flung up to the stars.
2.
When the lava runs,
You run.
When the water runs,
You swim.
—Novuni Proverb
Imbra had tinnitus within a week in orbit, which helped tune out some of his new supervisor’s wilder conspiracy theories, but which also made keeping track of Paloma all the harder. The shipyards—an intricate, sprawling lattice of production modules dedicated to various stages of robotics and manual assembly, testing, and resource management—differed considerably from the large, open factories on Nov’s surface. As such, it had never occurred to Imbra that the decibel range in specific space modules, while tolerable to anyone with factory or garage experience, might still be wholly unsuited for long-term auditory health. His supervisor, Miha, liked to say that this was proof they were all being phased out in favor of the machines, but Miha also made no secret of his affiliation with the Path of the Vengeful Sun, so Imbra learned to take the burly man’s fatalism as lightly as possible.
“Way I hear General Asarus talking,” said Miha on Imbra’s second day, “Could be we’re all here as decoys, you know? The Allegiance sees that all our manpower’s up in orbit, so it ignores the satellites with almost no human presence. But that’s where the general gets crafty, see? She has the real weapons waiting on Hav or Isla or one of the other big moons, and she blasts Allegiance to smithereens while they’re doing the same to us up here.”
“Asarus wouldn’t use us like that,” another mechanic, Grott, hollered down-corridor. “She’s never left a man behind, and she’s not starting now. Don’t you listen to him, kitten.”
Kitten was a term from Nov’s subcontinent, where declaws had service roles waiting for them right out of the courts. The south was generally the cleaner, more urban hemisphere, where abuse still happened, but in nicer outfits and living quarters. Imbra hadn’t decided if Grott was making some sort of overture, in keeping with one of the major service roles for kittens down south, but the northerner kept his distance just in case. The beatings, at least, had ceased upon arrival, leaving only Paloma to watch for in the night.
Miha exhaled loudly at Grott’s retort.
“You think that’s leaving a man behind? To give everything in service to our people, our solar system—that’s why we’re here, y’damned southie.”
“Hell with that,” said Grott—a man of Her Loving Embrace, Imbra surmised from the tattoo on his arm when he floated a drill up-corridor. “I’m here to build things and to fix things. Don’t care who I’m building and fixing ’em for, so long as we’re all alive at the end of the day. Life’s what’s worth fighting for—mine, and yours, and even kitten’s too.”
“Go on, then,” said Miha. “Run and hide when Allegiance comes.”
“I will,” said Grott. “And you all should, too.”
Imbra saw more than heard Miha’s answering grunt. The ringing in his ears let him turn his thoughts elsewhere as a more heated argument ensued between coworkers: To the long line of bubble ships in need of supercooling assembly before central processors could be installed. To the heady stink of so many bodies in cramped, strangely sterile corridors. To the latest scuttlebutt about how the new kid, Paloma, was already hitting it off with one of the electrical technicians, Ren, a young woman of seventeen. Smart, vivacious, reckless. The kind of girl who’d listen to the kid’s sad story and maybe offer herself up as a partner in crime. A better ally for vengeance than Tripp and Hurley, to be sure.
So Imbra slept lightly, if at all—and always, after the first week, with one hand, then the other, cupped to an ear. Testing his hearing. Waiting for some sign of release. Accepting, in the meantime, the incessant hum of shipyard life. On Imbra’s recommendation to Biggs, Paloma had arrived at the shipyards with a ticket to “flight school,” an anachronism from when pilot training came first in a ship-officer’s education. Mostly, the kid learned how to handle weapons systems on a wide variety of fleet ships, and the ins and outs of basic in-flight maintenance. At first, Paloma was too young for guaranteed field placement and seemed more likely to end up with Ren on ground crew—safer than most for the remainder of the war, with an education and time to reconsider the whole of his young life before heading home.
But then the Allegiance’s next fleet arrived four weeks early, at the outskirts of the heliosphere, and took out General Asarus’s first line like a hot knife through butter.
Overnight, mechanics throughout the shipyards turned into seasoned strategists. Every spare bulkhead was filled with grids of the solar system, sketched and scratched out and sketched in again to show the strengths and weaknesses of possible attacks in
