“There’s five other lanes!”
“Nobody wants to interrupt your ‘anger swims.’”
“You wimps.” Susan splashed his trousers. “Fine, I’m done. But if I catch anyone fucking in the sauna again, it’s getting ripped out.”
“Yes, mum.”
“Honestly, we put privacy walls in the showers, for Christ’s sake. Use them.”
“I understand.”
Susan grimaced as she pulled herself out of the water. Her rotator cup complaint couldn’t be linked to any war story or heroic deed, unless one counted the battle against Father Time as an act of heroism. It had just appeared a few years earlier of its own accord, unannounced and uninvited, but it had doggedly settled in for the long haul regardless. Regular exercise, especially in the pool, helped to keep it in check, but it was the first to let her know when she’d overexerted herself.
Miguel held the towel open for her, which she took with thanks.
“Anything new stumble into our web?” she asked as she wrapped herself in the genuine cotton towel and tucked a corner of it by her armpit.
“Nothing.” Miguel shook his head.
Susan sighed hard, on the verge of a growl. Since the incursion, they’d redeployed back to low orbit around Grendel and linked up with the system’s spaceborne antimatter factory to top off their tanks. Once UnRep was complete, they’d deployed the rest of their complement of recon platforms and pushed them all the way out to their maximum effective range, hoping to catch a glimpse of their ghost.
With their drone constellation pushed all the way out to the twelve-AU border, the platforms’ observational spheres had virtually no overlap. Each drone was effectively on its own and couldn’t rely on any of its siblings to double-check and confirm their observations. There were periodic gaps in coverage that had to be covered through a preset search pattern. Further, the light-speed delay so far out was more than an hour and a half.
It was far from ideal, but with any luck, Mattu’s little sleight of hand would have the enemy believing their web was a lot tighter than the threadbare, moth-eaten lacework it actually presented.
“Has that skip courier come back from fleet HQ yet?” Susan said as she slipped her feet into sandals and pointed herself toward the showers.
“Just did,” Miguel replied. “Packers won the Super Bowl. Again.”
Susan shrugged. “No surprise there. The Dervishes were good, but no expansion team has any business being in the big game their first year in the league. Anything else?”
“No change in our orders. We’re to remain on station and monitor the system for a follow-up incursion.”
“And our reinforcements?”
Miguel shook his head. “No such luck.”
“God dammit. Admiralty House couldn’t shake a frigate loose—really?”
“They’re tightening defense and increasing patrols of the core systems. Grendel is too underdeveloped to be a priority.”
“Well, the Xre consider it enough of a priority to actually come here. Did anyone consider that?”
“I’m sure it came up.”
“Uh-huh. Do you have any good news for me, or did you just come down here to ruin my endorphin-enhanced mood?”
“They strapped a couple of replacement recon drones and a decoy onto the courier to cover our losses. It’s matching orbit with us right now. Another hour and we can start the transfer.”
“I’ll take it,” Susan said. “Maybe we can even plug a couple of holes in our web once we get them through engineering inspection and worked up.”
“Frankly, mum, I’d feel better if we kept them in the barn to give us some reserve capacity.”
Susan pursed her lips. “Yeah, okay. Get them onboard and integrated with our network, but leave them in the tubes.”
“Yes’m.”
The chime for the 1MC sounded from the ceiling. “Captain Kamala, please call the bridge.”
Susan looked up. “The hell? They know I have a com implant, too, right?”
“You were in the pool, mum,” Miguel chided with a smirk.
Susan slapped her forehead with the heel of her palm. “Right, excuse me.” She padded over to the nearest bulkhead and grabbed a hardline handset from behind a small panel. “Go for Ansari Actual.”
“Captain,” a hurried voice said through the handset. One of the com officers that usually worked an opposite shift from her whose name she could never remember. “The Governor of Grendel is demanding a meeting.”
“She’s calling herself ‘Governor’ now? That’s adorable. Tell her we’re preparing for a material transfer. She’ll have to call back.”
“That’s just it, mum. Her shuttle is already inbound.”
Susan’s eyes rolled so fast and hard, for a bright moment she thought she could see the future. “You’re kidding.”
“Sorry, mum.”
“How long?”
“They’re already out of the gravity well and burning for our altitude. It’ll take three orbits to match our velocity.”
Two hours, Susan thought. “Understood. Thanks for the heads-up, Com.”
“Yes’m.”
“Oh, and Com—find Mr. Nesbit. He’ll want to sit in on this.”
“Understood.”
“Actual out.” Susan hung up the handset and closed the panel.
“XO,” she called over to Miguel. “How long to cut those drones loose from the courier and secure them once it gets here?”
“An hour after it matches velocity, ninety minutes, tops.”
“Put a rush order on it. Tell the boat bay we’re expecting company in two hours. We’ll need something to eat. And tell the galley to break out the good china.”
Her hair still damp under its top cover, Susan watched through the boat bay’s observation gallery windows as the small civilian shuttle maneuvered through the opening in the Ansari’s hull. There was space for it among a small fleet of auxiliary vehicles, maintenance and inspection drones, and marine assault shuttles, but only just.
The approach hadn’t been without drama. Susan’s boat bay supervisor had insisted the governor’s shuttle slave its controls over to the Ansari’s traffic control computers, as was standard procedure for any small craft operating within a warship’s gooey zone. The governor’s pilot had refused, insisting that he “… learned to parallel park a shuttle on Proxima Centauri, you [redacted].”
This led immediately to a dick-measuring contest between the two of them that only ended when Susan herself stepped in and reminded everyone involved that indeed, she
