“We don’t know that.”
“It’s a good bet. Something at True Center has been a fixation of mechs for a long time—Quath says so.”
“You believe everything that big collection of pants says?”
“Sure do.” Toby shot back. “At least Quath doesn’t try to cheer me up.”
Besen frowned prettily. “Ummm. You are down in the mouth.”
“I’m not celebrating, is all.” Toby sipped his lotus juice and picked up a grain cube. He rapped it against the table and a small white weevil came squirming out. “Only way to get these bugs out, far as anybody knows,” he said with disgust, sweeping it away.
“It was that Erica, she let them get free.”
“Easy mistake to make when you can’t read the directions.”
“She could’ve asked her Aspects!”
Erica had mistakenly let the self-warming vial of frozen soil-tenders escape years ago, but their daily irritations reminded everybody and brought her name up like a curse.
Toby was sympathetic. Who could have known that the ugly squirmers would pop out of their container, all ready to start eating?—which was, after all, their job. They startled poor Erica into dropping the vial. Who could guess that then they’d get into all the grain crops? The worms belonged among the vegetables and apple trees, just as the inscription said, in some dead language. Just Erica’s bad luck—and theirs—that she was in the grain dome when she opened the cylinder. He shrugged. “She’d been working hard seeding.”
“I think the Cap’n should’ve whipped her for it.”
“He doesn’t like whipping.”
“What a Cap’n likes and doesn’t like, that doesn’t matter,” Besen said stiffly. “What’s good for the Family, that comes first.”
“Sure. And a smart Cap’n gets his crew all fired up about what he wants.”
Besen blinked. “Oh, so you’re saying Cap’n’s got us dancing his dance, only we’re hearing different music?”
“Could be.”
“And you don’t want to say anything in public? Out of loyalty?”
“I don’t like to go against him.”
“Well, you’d sure be unpopular.”
“Yeasay—and I got to admit, everybody’s spirits are running pretty high.” He gestured around at the cafeteria, jammed with animated faces. There was an electric smell of skittering excitement. People so long on the run greeted a hard pursuit with elation; the thrill of familiar danger.
Besen’s lips pursed with concern. “You really don’t think this is just a way of getting away from the mechs, do you?”
“I don’t know what it’s really about.” Toby rapped his grain cube angrily. Another weevil fell out onto the table. With relish he squashed it with his thumb. “Pays to be careful, is all.”
Besen smiled. “Look twice for weevils?”
“Weevils can be anywhere.”
Besen gathered herself visibly and tried to shift their mood. “Let’s go up to observation, see if we can spot any.”
“Great.” He tossed aside the grain cube, then thought again, rapped it a third time—no more weevils—and bit in. “Umm, not bad—when you’re starving.”
“You’re always starving. And since the sail-snake and the rest, we have plenty to eat.”
“Let’s go.” Toby was grateful to her for giving him an exit from an uncomfortable conversation. He didn’t like his brooding to color the mood of the ship, not when his father had pulled everybody together so well, had them putting in long hours of grunt labor and smiling about it.
They made their way up the broad helical ramp at Argo’s core. All crew were working harder now, dealing with the agro domes. The level of radiation from outside was climbing by the hour. Smoldering infrareds, sharp ultraviolets, unseen spectra biting at the crops. They had polarized the domes to the max, but stinging energies still got through. So it was a relief to forget all that, to slump into the netting of an observation chamber and watch the stunning brilliance outside.
In the cool, dim core of the ship the observation room was crowded and Toby could not get a good clear view. The field of glowing stars was confusing, crisscrossed by eerie splashes of radiating gas. Then the Bridge switched to a Doppler-shifted frequency, and details leaped out. Going to blue-rich frequencies picked out things moving toward Argo and dimmed everything else.
And there they were: brilliant pinpoints of blue, eight of them evenly spaced around a circle.
“Impossible to miss,” Toby murmured.
“The mechs must not care whether we notice,” Besen said.
“Or else they really want us to.”
“Why would they? More effective to sneak up, I’d think.”
“Maybe they want to spook us.”
“Into doing what?”
“Maybe just what we’re doing,” Toby said grimly.
“Hey, we’re gettin’ away from them!” a big, hawk-nosed woman protested on Toby’s left, gouging him with a sharp elbow. She was an Ace, from the wastelands of Trump. Trained to follow her Family leader.
