As their new linguist, he’d been hired to do all the talking and listening whenever the crew needed someone who was completely fluent in Rhodian or Gretian. Universal-translator AI was incredibly useful for everyday interactions between people from different cultures, but even with quantum-state computing, it couldn’t catch nuance, dialect, or inflection as well as a multilingual human could. And Zephyr sometimes moved in circles where people didn’t want to be easily understood by outsiders.
“What about you, Aden?” Captain Decker asked. “You want to keep the throttle open, or have a little more money in your ledger when we dock?”
“I get a vote, too?”
“Of course you do. You’re a member of the crew. Profits get split eight ways. The more fuel we burn, the smaller the payout once we get to Pallas. Might be nothing left over when Lady Mina pays up.”
“What’s the advantage of staying on the throttle if we’re going to win either way?” Aden asked.
“It’s good advertising,” Decker said. She pointed at the situational display projected above them. “Every ship in the neighborhood has us on their plots right now. And the telemetry data from our transponder is public record.”
“Everyone with a comtab can get on the Mnemosyne and see that this ship can do fifteen g sustained,” Henry added. “Reminds people where to look if they need to hire a fast courier.”
“Then let’s keep the throttle open,” Aden said. “That bet was bonus money anyway, right? Might as well invest it on advertising.”
Decker’s brief smile told Aden that she approved of his vote. He had gone out of his way to be agreeable as a new member of the crew, and he’d mostly gone with whatever he perceived to be the majority consensus. Fortunately, the other crew members were easy enough to get along with. Aden was glad he no longer had to mediate disputes or deal with the social dynamics of an entire company of troops that had been mostly in their teens and twenties when the war ended, and who had never known anything but top-down discipline.
“Tess?” Decker asked the last person on the maneuvering deck who hadn’t voiced an opinion yet.
“Keep going. And we have a bit more zip in reserve, if you want to open it up a little more,” Tess said from her gravity couch. She was scrolling through data readouts on her chair’s control tab, and there wasn’t a bit of strain in her voice from the added gravity of acceleration.
“We’re going plenty fast for a good show. No need to go all out and tip our hand,” Decker said. “Save the reserve for when we need it. All right, six votes for, none against. Steady as she goes, Maya.”
“That’s affirmative. T-minus six to turnaround,” Maya said. “Lady Mina is still on inbound burn, still chugging at nine point two g.”
“They can kiss that pot goodbye already,” Henry said with satisfaction in his voice. Except for him and Maya, the crew was Oceanian, so that was the language they usually spoke on the ship, and Henry’s Palladian-accented Oceanian sounded strangely musical to Aden, who wasn’t used to hearing that inflection. Henry Siboniso had a deep voice, and his low register combined with the Palladian habit of softening consonants made him sound almost mournful.
“I think we gave ourselves a fair handicap. And they accepted the terms. I can’t help it if we’re still the fastest kids in the neighborhood,” Decker said.
Aden had expected the turnaround burn transition to be unpleasant, but Maya handled the ship as if they were transporting a thousand crates of fresh eggs in the cargo hold. The gravity couches were on floor-mounted gimbals. The computer pivoted them to minimize acceleration forces as Maya flipped the ship end over end to commence the deceleration burn. Aden couldn’t tell if it was her manual skill on the throttle or merely sophisticated piloting software, but the acceleration faded out and returned so gradually that his couch didn’t have any work to do. There were a few moments of near weightlessness that made his stomach rise a little, and then the acceleration readout was climbing once more until Aden felt the weight of uncorrected gravity settling on his chest again.
“Turnaround complete. Estimated time to the inner marker is one hour, fifteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” Maya announced to the maneuvering deck.
“You want to get something from Rhodia to Pallas any faster, you have to strap it to a missile,” Tess said next to Aden. Every member of the crew wore overalls, but Tess was the only one who had hers slipped down to her waist, with the sleeves tied like a belt. Tess’s internal thermostat seemed to run about five degrees higher than everyone else’s. Much of the time, she wore just a sleeveless black compression shirt underneath her overalls that showed off the skin art on her well-toned arms, beautiful pictures of wolves and foxes done in color-changing ink. He hadn’t been around people with tattoos very much because body art was not allowed in the Gretian military, and it surprised him to realize that he found it attractive, at least on Tess. It matched her personality somehow.
“What if the gravmag array fails while we’re pulling this much acceleration?” Aden asked, and he regretted it right away when he found that he didn’t really want to hear the answer. Tess supplied it anyway.
“You’ll die of a cerebral hemorrhage in about ten seconds,” she said in a tone that sounded almost cheerful. “I’ll die in fifteen. Maya can probably hang on for twenty. Fifteen gravities will knock us all out before Maya can back off the burn. But don’t worry. Those arrays are super reliable.”
“Don’t let her freak you out. The fail-safe circuit runs on palladium pathways. It will cut the thrust in about ten nanoseconds,” Maya contributed from above. “We’ll all just have a bitch of a hangover. Maybe a nosebleed or two.”
“Good to know,” Aden said.
