“Son, yes. I’m in a bit of a rush. Could you grab my server so I can settle the bill?”
“Sure, mister. Who was waiting on you?”
“Cassidy.”
The youth wrinkled his brow in consideration. “Like, a boy, or…”
“A girl. Early twenties, shoulder-length brown hair. Caucasian features. Henna tattoo on her left hand.”
“Mmm, sorry mister, but we don’t have a Cassidy working here.”
A chill spread down Tyson’s back. They’d been under observation. But by whom? One of the other transtellars? An Earthgov? Sokovol herself, or one of her enemies? Who?
Tyson held up his wrist to speak into the audio pickup built into his cufflink. “Paris,” he whispered.
“Yes, sir?” his AI assistant answered.
“I’m sending you a section of video capture from my retinal implant. I need you to ID the waitress and flag her for surveillance.”
“Tyson Abington?” Paris scoffed. “Afraid to ask a Chili’s waitress for her link avatar? How far the mighty have fallen.”
“Not exactly, dear. You’re not playing matchmaker this time. She’s a spy.”
“For whom?”
“That’s an excellent question.”
“Understood. I have it. I’m feeding her face into our recognition matrix. If she shows up on a surveillance camera or a mobile device, we’ll know.”
“Thank you, Paris. I’ll see you at the office in twenty.”
“Is something wrong, mister?” the young man asked with a tone that made it clear he was only asking to avoid blame.
Tyson stood up and wiped his mouth before dropping his napkin onto the table. “There’s always something wrong.”
SEVEN
Susan’s hand cut a slash through the cool water, propelling her forward another half meter as her other arm broke the surface and shot out ahead. The far wall approached quickly. Susan anticipated it, tucked her chin to her chest and spun in place. The soles of her feet slapped onto the rough-textured surface of the wall exactly where she’d anticipated it would be. She pushed off, hard, and let her body glide through the water for several meters without moving a muscle before breaking the surface again to take a breath and fall back into the rhythm of her strokes.
She’d lost count at fiftyish laps, which in the twenty-five-meter pool put her well over two kilometers already, but her body could go further. And so she would.
The “pool” was actually a freshwater cistern, part of the Ansari’s water reclamation and purification system. It was a holding tank where water waited between steps in the filtration process. It wasn’t yet safe to drink in any quantity, but the chemicals were benign enough that it posed no danger to swim in, provided you didn’t swallow more than about a liter.
A couple of ship classes ago, some bright spark in Naval Development decided to throw a retractable, watertight, rolling lid onto the cistern to let it pull double-duty as a recreation pool for the crew in calm times, an innovation for which Susan and thousands of other sailors were eternally grateful. It gave her a space to work out, to meditate, and to think.
It had been almost three weeks since their encounter with the unknown Xre warship. Three weeks since the first incursion of an enemy vessel into a human-owned system in three generations, and the first time the CCDF had fired on an alien ship in just as long.
Three weeks since they’d been ghosted by that same damned ship. On her watch.
She’d replayed the engagement a hundred times since, in her quarters, in the pool, as she slept, each time turning over every aspect of the encounter, trying to spot anything she might have missed. Any clue she overlooked that could’ve allowed her to anticipate the Xre commander’s feint that had let them escape in such spectacular fashion.
But she kept coming up empty. The simple truth was she’d never faced a Xre before, not really. Like all CCDF commanders, she’d studied their tactics from the Intersection War exhaustively at Academy. Every battle and skirmish, from large-scale fleet engagements, to commerce raids, to orbital insertions and attacks on infrastructure, right down to stray ship ambushes. They’d poured over them all, interpreting patterns, extrapolating doctrine, and even burrowing into the psychology of their foe in an effort to gain understanding and advantage in any future conflict.
Of course, the Xre had been doing the exact same thing for just as long, adapting their own tactics to compensate for what they’d learned about their human adversaries. Guessing how humans would adapt to those changes. Shadowboxing. After seventy years of such second-guessing and head-fakes, who was to say that anyone’s assumptions, on either side, held water at all?
Susan shook the thought loose. She’d just been outplayed, simple as that. But, she took some small measure of satisfaction knowing she’d managed to catch them completely by surprise and force them into such a reckless gambit in the first place.
She completed five more laps before her right shoulder started to complain too much and she had to stop. As she hung off the far wall catching her breath, someone tapped her on the crown of her head.
Susan looked up into Miguel’s waiting green eyes. He stood next to one of the diving platforms, holding a towel. She pulled out her earplugs and lifted her swimming goggles. “Yes?”
“I was just wondering if you were finished or if you were bent on becoming the first person to drown in outer space.”
“I couldn’t be the first. Surely someone’s managed it by now.”
Miguel shook his head. “I looked it up. Couple of close calls, but you would get the honor.”
Susan swung her shoulder around a couple of times trying to work the knot out. “I might have a few more laps in me.”
“Not to be
