obscured by interstellar dust, from this “height.” But the nearest arm, lying right across a third of the visible sky, shone fierce and clear — not the tender, delicate light you got from the rest of the Milky Way as seen from Earth on a clear night, but bright, definite, and immense. Best of all, though, you could hear its stars shining, a multifarious and splendid harmony across the terrible distance, and all around, silent, you could feel empty space listening.
“It is beautiful,” Laurent said very softly behind Maj.
“You got that in one,” Maj said. It was the sound, though, that had done it for her the first time — the game designer’s idea that, if you could hear explosions in space, well, what was the shining of a star but a very large, controlled, prolonged explosion? It had given her the shivers then, and it did so now. But there was no time to waste. The others would be meeting on the bigger moon, Jorkas, in a matter of minutes.
“I wish my father could see this….” Laurent said, very quietly.
“He will,” Maj said. “I’ll make sure of it.” It was all she could find to say immediately that wouldn’t sound soppy or artificial. That image of a man, alone, in a little, harshly lighted room with no windows, while someone with a gun and a nasty expression stood over him, had recurred to her a few times since she’d spoken to her father. It was probably born of seeing too many old movies. But Maj knew that, though the details of that kind of intimidation might have changed over the years, the mind-set had not. There were still plenty of people who didn’t mind hurting other people to get what they wanted. The thought of Laurent’s
“Could I — is there any chance I could fly this?” Laurent said, in a very small voice.
Maj grinned at that, understanding the instant attraction. “Not tonight, Laurent. We’ve got business to take care of. For tonight, just sit still and enjoy the ride. But I have a sim built into my work space to practice on. Tomorrow you can fly all day, if you want, and get the feel of it. Who knows? We might need a new pilot one of these days, and I can’t see why the squadron would refuse a talented one….”
She kicked in the Morgenroths at full and made her way around the other side of Dolorosa. Just the far side of the gas giant’s terminator Maj found Jorkas sailing along toward them, seeming leisurely as always in this system where its less massive brothers and sisters mostly tore around their primary as if their tails were on fire. Maj made for the pole, where even at this distance she could see the big streetlight circle-and-7 that marked the Group’s base here.
Five minutes later they were settling into the “parking bay,” a circular force-fielded area that was otherwise open to space and the spectacular views of Dolorosa and the Cluster. Eight other Arbalests were there, the syncrete under them glowing softly in token that their engines were live and on standby; and their pilots stood in a small cluster, talking, occasionally waving an arm or two. A large spherical hologram hovered glowing over the ’crete to one side, mostly being ignored. One of the pilots was pacing back and forth, back and forth, with metronomic regularity.
“Shih Chin,” Maj said as she popped the canopy. “She always does that. She gets tense.”
“Will they mind that I’m here?” Laurent said.
Maj opened her mouth to say “no,” and then started to say “yes,” and then said, “I don’t care if they do. But I doubt they will, once they understand you’re just along for the ride. Just be friendly, and leave them to me.”
They walked across the syncrete toward the others. Heads turned as they came, and Kelly said, “Maj, who’s your copilot?”
“God,” Maj said, laughing, “if anybody. This is a passenger…he’s a cousin of mine, just in from Hungary. Niko, this is the Group of Seven.”
He did not make the response a lot of them would have expected, which Maj suspected pleased them. The name “Group of Seven” was as much of a joke about its members’ wildly conflicting schedules as about anything else. If you could get as many as seven of them together in one place, it was an event, even when there were eleven of them total. Niko, though, just smiled at them. “Hello,” he said.
“This is Kelly,” Maj said, indicating the tall freckly red-head. “Shih Chin—” She stopped pacing just long enough to smile. “Sander—” Dark-haired Sander waved. “Chel, and Mairead—” Mairead shook her blazing red curls out of her eyes, grinned a little at Laurent. Chel, looking taller and broader than usual in the space suit, waved. “Bob—” He nodded to Laurent with a preoccupied look.
“And Robin and Del.”
“Hi,” Robin said, and Del bowed a little, idiosyncratically formal as always. Maj waggled her eyebrows at them, grinned, but didn’t say anything else, for she saw them a little more frequently than the others in the Group…since Robin and Del were also Net Force Explorers. Big, blocky Del was attached to the New York area, where his dad and mom both worked at a large law firm, and little slender Robin with her retropunk blue Mohawk was somewhere in one of the LA suburbs, living with a dad who worked for Rocketdyne. They had never met physically, but then lots of the Net Force Explorers hadn’t, their online meetings, by and large, being considered to be real enough to get by with. In any case, their status with Net Force wasn’t something that they went into a lot with the other members of the Group of Seven. Partly this was because having made it into the Net Force Explorers when so many people wanted to get in was something of a plum…and partly because it struck them all that bragging about it was not only unnecessary, but possibly unwise. Occasionally Net Force Explorers found themselves working together on projects which were not precisely public knowledge, and which were probably better staying that way. They preferred to keep the profile of that part of their involvement with the Explorers low. However, there was no rule that said they couldn’t have fun together “off duty”—if there was any such thing for three young people so thoroughly committed to the jobs they intended to have some day, and if there was any justice.
“Glad you could make it,” Bob said. “We’ve been going over strat-tac again…”
“And we are
“We are not,” said Kelly. “Will you
There was a brief silence. “Nerves,” said Kelly, with some embarrassment.
“Yeah. Look, forget it.”
A mutter of agreement went round the group. “How long now?” Mairead said.
“Ten minutes to the positions filed with the master tactics computer.”
“Oh, I hate this part,” Del muttered. “Once we get up there and start shooting things, everything will be fine.”
“Assuming we last that long,” Kelly said.
“Hungarian, huh?” said Chel. “Well, Goulash, you’re in for a real show today…assuming we survive the first ten minutes.”
Maj opened her mouth to say something cutting to Chel, but Laurent grinned and said, “Goulash? I like goulash. And if you make it right, with the really hot paprika, it’s got a bite.” He bounced a little in the light gravity, still smiling. “Separates the men from the boys.”
“Paprika?” said Bob. “That’s right, it’s a kind of chile, isn’t it? My dad grows chiles, and he—”
“You can talk about your male macho chile-eating stuff later, for pity’s sake,” Maj said. “Niko, better have a look at the diagram, you’ll see what’s cooking….”
They went over to it, the others following by ones and twos. The hologram was mostly filled with the planet Didion, where the Arbalests would be fighting down and dirty in the atmosphere with many, many others.
“It’s a ‘built’ planet,” Maj said as Laurent walked around the hologram, peering at it. “It may look green…but everything about Didion is artificial. It’s constructed, from the core out…there are thousands of levels. It was the library for all this part of space once, until the Archon moved in and took things over. Now it’s been reamed out and stuffed full of weapons, killerbots, crawling code…you name it. Nasty place, and the nerve center for all the Archon’s operations in this part of space. But there’s a way down inside, and if we can once fight our way down to the surface and get in there—”
“And there, of course, is the problem,” Bob said. The “surface” of the planet on the hologram disappeared to reveal the way into the core — a complex and twisting path of conduits and tunnels.
“It’s a body, with a brain,” Maj said. “What it needs…is a lobotomy.”
“Icepicks R Us,” said Bob. The others groaned.
“Bob,” Shih Chin said with good-natured disgust, “you are so
“A lot of other groups are going to be trying to beat us to it,” Mairead said. “We intend to be first…or at least real close behind first.”
