“Horatio is right,” Rhea agreed. “I couldn’t have done it without my friends. Nor you.”
Targon beamed at that. “So I have your permission to stream all of this when I get back? I’d like to add live commentary.”
“Of course,” Rhea said.
“Can I also get the footage you recorded of your fight on Ganymede?” Targon asked.
She hesitated, and glanced at Horatio, then Will.
“Don’t look at us,” Will said. “Has to be up to you.”
She considered a moment longer, then: “Considering all the trouble we’ve put you through, yes. You can have the footage.”
“Excellent!” Targon said. “Then you’ll agree to sign this contract…”
Rhea received the share request and accepted the document. She read it through. It seemed a standard boilerplate agreement, allowing Targon to use any and all footage he recorded while her and her companions were aboard. It also gave him nonexclusive rights to rebroadcast any video she shared with him.
She signed it.
“Thank ye kindly,” Targon said.
“You were pretending to be far more outraged a few moments ago than you really were, because you thought it would help you convince her to sign the contract, didn’t you?” Will said.
“Maybe,” Targon admitted. “Hey. Anyone up for a game of Robot Wars with yours truly? I’d like to get a few more segments recorded.”
“Of you beating the Warden…” Will said drily.
“That’s right!” Targon admitted.
Rhea chuckled softly. “We’ll play you, Merchant.”
Targon beamed. “I’ll set up the lobby.”
12
Time passed slowly in the transport.
On the second day, Rhea found herself growing impatient—she was eager to try the Ban’Shar, and she refused to wait until they reached Earth before doing so. And so she woke up early that morning and fetched the weapon from the crate that harbored it. Will and Horatio grudgingly helped clear a space for her to practice.
“This is a bad idea,” Will said. “And remember, you’re giving Targon free hidden camera footage. Plus, I doubt he’ll be happy when he finds out. There’s a rule: never shoot a weapon aboard a starship. I think that applies to your disk generator thingies. Even more so.”
She shrugged, secured her boots to the deck via a strap, then activated the Ban’Shar. The plasma disks erupted from the metal knuckles, painting the nearby bulkheads and crates blue. She instinctively ran through different defensive postures with the disks, being careful not to bring them too close to the deck, bulkheads, or overhead.
She discovered it had a remote interface she could access, which allowed her to loosen the buckle that held them to her hands. She wasn’t sure how useful that would be in a fight, but it did make them easier to remove.
When she originally tried to transform those disks into blades, as she had done in one of her flashbacks, she was uncertain at first what to do. But after some trial and error, she realized that instead of making a complete fist, she had to leave certain fingers extended, while the remainder closed. It was easy: extend the index finger, and the disks transformed into plasma blades. Join the two hands together, and the blades became a single, longer unit, whose reach surprised her—it bit into the bulkhead, cutting a sizable hole before she could deactivate it.
Will regarded the black gash dubiously. “Told you this was a bad idea.”
“Guess I probably don’t need to practice for the duration of the trip,” she said. “Quick, help me shove the crates back into place before Targon finds out.”
“He’ll find out when he wakes up and reviews the footage anyway,” Will said, but he shoved off to begin moving back the crates.
She removed the knuckles, freed her feet from the straps, and returned the weapon to the crate she’d taken it from. She had only just begun rearranging the remaining crates to cover the gash when Targon came jetting inside.
He wore a big smile on his face, but when he saw the damage to his bulkhead, he was beside himself. “Me precious wall! Do ye know how much it’s going to cost to fix this? And ye could have killed yourself and your friends!”
When she explained how relatively shallow the gash was compared to the hull thickness and promised to devote her every waking hour to playing Robot Wars with him, he forgave her.
“All right,” Targon said. “But don’t let it happen again.”
“I won’t,” she promised.
True to her word, she didn’t touch the Ban’Shar for the remainder of the journey. She also played Robot Wars with Targon each and every day, though she didn’t devote all her waking hours to the game: sometimes, she just needed some Rhea time.
She often sat alone in virtual reality, seated cross-legged on the pier before a Ganymedean lake, the stars shining through the translucent panes of a geodesic dome on the horizon, and the city lights of a quaint settlement beckoning behind her. She sat there, dreaming of a world she could not remember. A world she would never see.
One such time, Will materialized next to her.
“How’s it hanging, Dude?” he quipped. He took a seat next to her on the pier, letting his feet dangle over the edge.
She gave him a forced smile and returned her gaze to the stars reflecting off the lake. Jupiter hung low in the sky. The red spot seemed bigger today, as if the constituent storm was spinning so fast that it threatened to break itself apart.
Too bad it wasn’t real.
“Why do things always turn out differently than we expect?” she said. “I thought I’d be happy on Ganymede. I thought I’d be home. Instead I found a dead world, colonized by people I didn’t recognize, and a government that threatened to imprison me unless I agreed never to return.”
“It’s life,” Will said. “We can’t control the randomness of it.”
“I suppose not,” she said. “I just wish… I’d found what I was looking for.”
“And what was that?” he asked.
“A sense of belonging,” she replied.
He studied her for a moment. “You had that on Earth, didn’t you?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “While the people
