“Captain Falling. Thank you for your assistance earlier.” Captain Stanton clapped his hands to his side and performed a half-bow. The gesture was entirely unnecessary, but mildly romantic.
“I’m glad we could help.” Stanton was not really her type. Fleet guys never were. But she could certainly appreciate him as a fellow spacer.
“May I introduce the commander, Lieutenant Kyle Daspar.”
She was amazed at how much seething hatred Stanton could inject into such a simple sentence.
“A pleasure to meet you, sir.” Formality seemed to be the appropriate tack. A spacer might appreciate her for her merits, but a civilian, promoted to authority on political strings, would expect to be deferred to and flattered.
“Please. Just call me Kyle.” He seemed flustered, uncertain. In his face Prudence recognized a familiar suspicion. Authority never trusted the tramp freighter, never understood why someone would hop from system to system unless they were running away from something. The idea that someone might be running
She sighed, resigning herself to the coming interrogation. Curiously, his eyes flickered, and for a moment she thought he was disappointed. Perhaps she was seeing things. After all, she was tired, and there was enough disaster here to throw anyone off their game.
“Captain Falling, I have a few questions I need to ask.”
He was beefy, in a compact way, like ten kilos of steak packed into a five-kilo bag. His jaw was set in perpetual defiance, expecting hostility even while his stubborn eyebrows projected innocence. But he wasn’t as hard as a soldier. His curly black hair was short and neat, but not severely so. She could, with a generous stretch of creativity, imagine his lips pouting in a cute, boyish way, a depth of feeling that most spacers and soldiers had beaten out of them long before they became old enough to interest her.
As much as she detested the uniform, she could still admire the physical package. Languidly she let her eyes communicate this ambiguity. He responded with more contradiction: instead of swelling under her unspoken compliment, or following up its implied half-invitation, he seemed to be struggling not to blush.
But Captain Stanton had no patience for their emotional fencing match. “Perhaps the commander would like to start with the formalities. We have a narrow window if we wish to capture one of those mines.”
Daspar was unhappy with being rushed. His face flashed a grimace, which she assumed indicated violent outrage, given how tightly he had a lock on his emotions. She could feel his repression, like you could feel the energy of a tight spring just by looking at it. It was a state she was all too familiar with.
Just to provoke him, she played into Stanton’s hands. “You’re going after a mine?”
Stanton nodded. “Thanks to you, we disabled all seven. Once blind, they went on null trajectories. Capturing one and dissecting it constitutes a level-one military goal. We need to know who did this, how they did it, and what else they can do.”
Noticeably missing from his list was “why” someone would do it. But she couldn’t really hold it against him. He was Fleet. “Why” wasn’t part of his domain.
“You need to get some rescue operations here, too,” she reminded him.
“Yes,” he agreed, “but that constitutes a level-two humanitarian goal. We don’t even have a mutual defense treaty with Kassa.”
She ventured a tiny piece of bait. “After this, you might get one.”
Reassuringly, he didn’t take it. Looking at her with a slight narrowing of eyes, he said, “I don’t think that is particularly relevant, Captain Falling. I’m just pointing out that it’s not a level-one problem. The populace here is not in immediate danger. My military goal will delay humanitarian aid by no more than a few hours.”
“Thank you, Captain Stanton.” She let her real gratitude inflect her tone.
He responded with a ghost of a smile. Probably the closest a Fleet officer was allowed by regulations. “I’m offloading what medical supplies we have. I can also offer you two armed guards. You’re the only operational vessel on the planet right now, which puts you at an undue risk. Especially while you’re flying relief missions for strangers.”
No doubt he thought he was being generous. But she didn’t want a couple of goons hanging around. “That’s not necessary, Captain Stanton. We’re known to these people, and we trust them.”
“As you wish, Captain. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He stood there, waiting to be excused.
“Captain Falling,” Daspar said. “My directives do not overlap with Captain Stanton’s. I understand your ship is legally registered out of Altair?”
Daspar was reaching into his jacket for papers, terrible papers that would place her ship under Altair’s orders, while Stanton waited eagerly. All of Prudence’s sympathy for the captain of the
“I’ve busted my ass helping these people,” she snapped, “for sixteen hours and no pay. I’ve dumped a cargo to help them. You are not going to commandeer my ship
“I have the authority to do so.” Daspar tried to hand her the papers. In disgust she knocked them out of his hand, and they fluttered to the ground.
“No,” she said, fighting back tears. It felt too much like being trapped, too much like being chained. Too much like losing everything. What the League took, it might never give up again. That was its way.
“Captain, I must insist,” Daspar said, and his tone was not what she had expected. Hard, yes, but underneath, something else. Something striving to reach out to her, make her understand. “At least this way you can get paid for your efforts. I can make sure Altair reimburses you, for time lost, for fuel, for expenditures.”
Casting about for a way to control her emotional reaction, she thought of what Garcia would say. That mercenary bastard would never let emotion get in the way of money. “For our cargo?”
Daspar paused, thinking. With a little surprise, she realized he was not considering whether or not it was worth it, but whether or not he could pull it off. Not whether she deserved the promise, but whether he had the authority to make it.
“Yes. For your cargo, if it’s unrecoverable.”
It was a good deal. It was a deal she had to take, both by the law of Altair and by the law of economics. But it still made her insides clench in terror to say the words. “Accepted, Commander.”
“Please,” he said, “call me Kyle.”
They flew hops for another sixteen hours. Kyle used his authority on the refugees, cutting through the sea of complaints to find the ones that needed help now, the ones dying or without water, instead of the merely injured and without food. He browbeat those who had plenty into sharing with those who had nothing, threatened the aggressive and comforted the meek, appointed officers and managers, and assured everyone that Altair Fleet was on its way. With no more than his voice and his badge, he brought order out of chaos.
Prudence would have been impressed, if she had been able to think about anything other than how tired she was.
Standing on the bridge, he watched her fly. The scrutiny made her nervous, vaguely, but the blanket of exhaustion muffled everything.
This was the last trip they would make tonight. An arctic research station had gotten a radio working and called for help. Bombed out of their installation, they would freeze to death soon. They’d already burned what was left of their building for warmth.
Garcia had stayed at the refugee camp, organizing the distribution of supplies. Prudence had cajoled the rest of her crew into one more flight.
“Melvin,” she said over the intercom, “give me a heading.” They were using the targeting system to home in on the radio signal. Without GPS, it was like finding a snowflake in a blizzard. But GPS depended on global satellites, and those had been the first things destroyed by the attack.
“Left three degrees … Wait. There’s another one. There’s some kind of radio source out there, to starboard. And it’s close!” Melvin was exhausted, too. He slipped into panic without any resistance.
“Is it moving, Mel?”
A pause. “No … I don’t think so.”
Kyle was helping Jorgun with his console, working the communications system like an old pro. He’d said the
