“Service lines are connected. Collar is pressurizing. Annnnnnnd . . . we have atmo. Green lights on the starboard airlock. Hard dock confirmed. You can all get up and stretch your legs until we get security clearance to come across.”
“About time,” Tess said next to Aden. She raised her gravity couch into the seated configuration and unbuckled her harness with one well-practiced move. “Because I really, really have to get rid of some internal ballast.”
“After you, then,” Aden said.
Down in the airlock deck, Captain Decker activated the screen projection of her wrist comtab. Aden watched as she cycled through a few data fields.
“Lady Mina just paid up,” she declared. “They’ll whine about this for a while.”
“Let them demand a rematch,” Maya said.
Aden had no idea what Maya had done before joining Zephyr, but judging by the experience level of the rest of the crew, he guessed it was an interesting story if she managed to get the pilot job at her age. She was twenty-seven, the youngest member of the crew by half a decade. She was also the shortest, with the slight build of an Acheroni, and she wore her dark hair shaved close to her skull. In his three months on the ship, he hadn’t had many conversations with her, and he had only stopped wanting to take it personally when he had noticed that she didn’t chat much with the rest of the crew either.
“They’re not going to do us that favor,” Decker replied. “The ’Syne data says they only barely broke ten g, and I bet they were giving it all they had.”
She flicked her finger across the projected screen in front of her comtab to shuffle some data around and turned her wrist to make the projection disappear again.
“I subtracted the refueling cost for what we burned on that sprint and split up what’s left between all of us. Let’s go drink it away, because it’s not enough to do much else with it.”
“No, this is good.” Henry had retrieved a jacket from one of the lockers in the airlock deck and was putting it on over his flight suit with care. “We get to replace the fuel and get a little drunk, no more. It was a perfect amount for a wager. Not enough to cause hard feelings.”
Aden noticed that Henry hadn’t bothered to take off the kukri he usually wore in a locking sheath on his left side. None of the stations Aden had ever set foot into allowed weapons, but he figured that the ship’s first officer knew the regulations, and that he had a reason for what he was doing.
The last one to arrive at the airlock deck was Tess, who climbed up the ladderway from the engineering deck. She had put on the top of her flight suit properly again, though it looked like it was a fresh suit from the locker in her berthing compartment.
“Reactor is on standby. Temps are back down to normal. I want to inspect the heat sinks visually from the outside before we head out again—make sure nothing fell off. Took a while longer to bleed off the residual than I would have liked.”
“Your baby,” Decker said. “But be absolutely sure if we need to dip into the maintenance budget right before the three-year overhaul.”
It felt odd to walk through a docking collar instead of floating through it. Pallas One’s gravmag rotors generated one g everywhere on the station, right out to all the ships that had physical contact with it. Rumor had it that the Palladians were on the verge of introducing gravity-based atmospheric containment fields, and the next generation of space stations wouldn’t need docking clamps and collars anymore. Technology had marched on again at a brisk pace after the stasis imposed by the war, when every economy in the system had been churning out weapons and war material to shovel into the furnace of conflict.
At the end of the Alpha docking section, they had to pass through a security checkpoint before they could enter the main part of the station. Aden watched as Tristan stepped through the scanner array, then Decker, then Maya. When it was Henry’s turn, the flooring underneath his feet lit up in red, but the Palladian security officer merely saluted and let him pass despite the curved thirty-centimeter blade hanging from Henry’s belt in a magnetic sheath.
“Veteran perk,” Tess explained when Aden looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
“How so?”
“Pallas Brigade. You know the thing with their knives, right?”
“Sort of. I know it’s a traditional thing.”
“They get a kukri when they make it through training. The sheath is coded to the owner. The kukri won’t come out for anyone else. You see someone with a kukri and a sheath like that, he’s brigade or used to be. And they are exempt from weapons laws. On Pallas anyway.”
Aden took his turn through the scanner. The floor under his feet remained green. He waited on the other side for Tess to take her turn.
“Well,” Aden said when she had rejoined him. “The knife thing is a little strict. I mean, I get that a gun can poke a hole into a pressure hull. But how much damage can you do to station infrastructure with a knife?”
Tess chuckled.
“Those kukris have monomolecular blades. The sheath keeps them that way. I’ve seen Henry stick that thing right through the primary locking clamp on an escape pod hatch. They are trusting their veterans an awful lot, letting them keep those things everywhere they go.”
Tristan had been walking a few steps ahead of them. Now he slowed his step a little so they could catch up.
“The knife ban isn’t for people like Henry,” he said. “It’s for morons like us. Spacers from somewhere else. So we don’t stab each other at the bar after we get fucked up on
