police system wasn’t that different. Now he pointed out something Jorgun would have missed. “It’s not another colonist. The signal is wrong—it doesn’t plug into our comm protocols.”
She resented his automatic suspicion. That was her role. “Maybe they jury-rigged a system.”
“No,” he said, contradicting her without hesitation. “It’s too regular. I can’t decode it, but it’s repeating. It has to be a distress beacon. It has to be one of theirs. The enemy.”
Jorgun offered his best to the conversation. “If they’re in distress, we should help them. It’s the right thing to do.”
“They might not want our help, Jorgun.” Kyle was surprisingly gentle with him. She hadn’t expected that from a man wearing a League armband. “But I agree with you anyway. We should help them into the brig.”
“Are you kidding?” said Prudence. “My ship is unarmed.” All they had were rifles and handguns.
And the hidden pod of missiles, but Prudence was not about to reveal those. The miswired laser had been a regulations violation. The unregistered missiles were a crime.
“I’m not kidding.” His voice was hoarse. He’d spent hours talking, bullying, persuading. “These are the people that did this. They need to be held to account.”
“Letting them freeze isn’t good enough for you?”
Gray with fatigue, he stared at her.
“No. It’s not good enough.”
His eyes were like flames behind smoke: hot and black. She recognized the look of stubbornness, the spirit that would not back down. It was like looking into a mirror.
Casually, disguising the action as merely flipping the intercom switch to contact Melvin in his gunnery pod, she began the arming sequence for the missiles. Outside, the hatch panels would slide open; the electronic brains of the missiles would come awake, sniffing for a target, eager to be released on the hunt.
The sound of grating metal was washed away by the windstorm.
“Melvin. Direct us to the new signal.”
Melvin argued with her. “Why? Because the tin-horn sheriff says so? Screw that! Screw him.”
She was too tired for insubordination, too tired to stroke her crew into doing their jobs. “If you don’t, I’ll send him up there to take your place.”
“Whatever. See if I care.” Even while he dismissed her threat, he caved in to it. “Go right, five degrees. And down.”
Visual was worthless. The cameras, so finely tuned for empty space, were blinded by whirling flecks of white. They hovered a hundred meters above what the radar claimed was ground, and crawled slowly forward.
“Can we even see it this far up?” Kyle was obsessed.
“They’ll see us long before we see them.” Prudence kept trying to change his mind, mostly out of habit. She knew she would fail. “What if they shoot us down? It’s not just us that dies. That arctic team won’t last the night.”
“Land a kilometer away and we’ll walk in, if you’re worried about getting shot at.”
It was tempting: the walk would surely kill him, and that would be the end of her problems. But then she almost certainly wouldn’t get paid.
“Stop, Pru! You’ve passed it.” Melvin had become conscripted to the cause by sheer curiosity. “Radar says metal, but not ship-sized … it’s a boat or something.”
She sent the ship down, drifting through the white sky. If the enemy hadn’t fired yet, they weren’t going to.
“How do we know it’s not a mine, waiting to explode when some fool comes out to investigate?” she asked. It was the sort of thing a paranoid person would do. Like herself, for instance.
“Nobody would put a trap out here. They would have left it where it would matter.” Kyle was looking around, searching for something. “Where’s your suit locker?”
“Next to the air lock,” she said, trying not to sound too exasperated with his ignorance.
“I’m going out there. If I lose radio contact, take off immediately.”
A thrum, deep and distant, sounded in the far recesses of her mind. Her suspicious nature, flaring up despite the exhaustion.
“I’m going with you.”
He stared at her, shocked. “Don’t be foolish. Send one of your men, if you want. But you can’t leave the bridge.”
“Can I go, Pru? I want to see it.” Jorgun was grinning with simple excitement at seeing something new. How easy it would be for Kyle to pull one over on him, set up whatever trick he’d come all the way out here to prepare.
“We’ll all go, Jor. Suit up.”
This had to be what Kyle was here for. This had to be what all of this was about.
“What if something happens to you?” Kyle stood in her way, adamant as a wall. “Who else can fly the ship? We’ll all freeze out there.”
“Then you better not let anything happen to me.” She would not let him get away with it. Thousands had died on Kassa, and she was going to find out why.
“You can’t tell Pru what to do,” Jorgun explained patiently. “She’s the captain. She tells us what to do.”
“You’re being stupid.” The anger in Kyle’s voice was leaking out.
He wasn’t in real danger. In a few weeks, Altair Fleet would be all over this planet. He would be safe on the ship until then—its life support could sustain people in deep space, it could certainly protect them from a blizzard. His Fleet would come and get him. He didn’t really need her.
She decided not to point that out.
“If you get off this ship without me,” she promised, “you won’t get back on it. I’ll leave you out there. Take us all, or stay here. Your choice.”
He surprised her. Even though she could feel the heat of his anger, he surrendered.
“Fine. Have it your way.”
Kyle fit into Garcia’s suit, albeit badly. Both men were thick, but in entirely different ways.
Melvin was complaining bitterly, but Prudence ignored him. She wanted as many eyes and guns as she could get around Kyle. She even gave a rifle to Jorgun, although she made sure it was unloaded. He would be useless if Kyle turned on them; but Kyle might not have figured that out yet.
Kyle had brought over two mag rifles from the
She accepted, gracefully. When his back was turned, she swapped them, taking the one he had set out for himself.
Her last precaution was to remove the medallion she wore around her neck. It was small, three centimeters across and a millimeter thick, but it was the most valuable thing she owned. Worth more than even the
It was the only link she had with her mother. A trinket, passed from mother to daughter, but the one tangible thing that had come from her hand to Prudence’s, from her exotic world to the cramped apartment Prudence grew up in.
Reflexively, she squeezed the medallion. It had taken her years to learn the trick, just the right pressures in just the right places. As a child she had struggled for hours a day to master this skill, to be worthy of her mother’s gift. Her father could only manage it one try out of ten.
The medallion unfolded in her hand, stretching out into a handle, and the blade sprung free. Ten centimeters long and as light as a feather, it was the sharpest edge Prudence had ever seen, heard of, or read about. Her father had claimed it was a single molecule thick. It would cut through hardened steel as easily as through water.
A ridiculously dangerous object to give to a child. But her father had trusted her, had known she would treat it with the respect it deserved.
Letting it collapse into a disk again, she dropped it into a pocket of the suit, where she could reach it in a hurry.
