Conner was on his feet, already dressing, and God knew how because I couldn’t have seen a damned thing a second before—the compartment didn’t have so much as a chemical ghostlight, not a single ray of illumination.
“We got about thirty seconds until the gravity cuts out,” he warned, like I’d never been on a damned starship before.
Lucky for me I’d slept in my clothes, mostly because I didn’t trust the provenance of the bedding, so all I had to do was pull on my boots. I’d barely strapped the second one on when reality twisted and turned and took me with it into another universe. And because we still hadn’t figured out the mysteries of the universe the way the Predecessors had hundreds of thousands of years ago, once we dropped out of Transition Space, the ship’s gravity faded to nothing.
The boots were made for it, though I hadn’t needed them since we left the Orion behind, and a tap of one heel against the other activated the electromagnets built into them. Metal clicked on metal, anchoring me to the deck, but there was nothing they could do for my stomach. Not that I wasn’t used to free fall, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
But it wouldn’t last long. The next siren warned us in plenty of time to prepare for what came next, the rumble of the fusion drives resonating through the superstructure of the freighter, the press of acceleration substituting for gravity nicely, settling my vertebrae and my stomach back into their rightful places. I sighed with relief and deactivated the magnets.
“One gravity,” Deke judged, and I nodded. “Don’t know how long that’ll last, but enjoy it while you can.”
“I wonder if they’ll leave us in here until we reach orbit around…” I shrugged. “… wherever the hell we are.”
“Oh, I’d bet on it. After all, the more of this system we see, the easier it’d be for us to find it again.” He pulled a deck of cards out of his jacket pocket and tossed them on his bunk. “Interested in a game?”
“You had those this whole time?” I asked, goggling at him. “We’ve been sitting in this damned room for days, twiddling our thumbs, and you had a deck of cards the whole time? Why didn’t you break them out before?”
“Oh, I didn’t want to fleece you too bad before we got here,” Deke explained, grinning. “I mean, after all, your back pay isn’t actually worth anything now, with the economy in the shitter, so I figure all you got to bet with is what you’ve earned since we commissioned you. That’s in chits, you understand, exchangeable for time on the fabricators, and measured in units. Every unit is about a half hour on the fabs, and I figure you have maybe a couple hundred at this point?” He pulled the cards out and shuffled them with dexterity I’d rarely seen, even among the card sharps on troop ships during the war. “That ought to last you about an hour, so I didn’t want to drain your account completely. After all, you might need to get yourself some new clothes.”
“Oh, vato,” I said, shaking my head, slipping into the slang of my youth from the surge of righteous indignation, “it’s on. I spent the better part of eight years playing poker with some of the baddest motherfuckers who ever shuffled a deck when there was not a damned thing else to do, and I left the Marines with an account stuffed full of their money.”
“Well, brother,” Deke said, dealing onto the bed, “the thing about Omega Group that made us so special wasn’t that we could slip onto Tahni outposts and kill every single one of those assholes, then slip out and never even be recorded. And it wasn’t that we basically took Canaan all by ourselves before you Marines even landed. No, the really special thing about us, about the Glory Boys, was that we were the best-trained and most highly skilled poker players in the entire human Commonwealth.”
“Yeah, well that sounds like a bunch of bullshit,” I told him, sitting on the edge of the bunk, picking up my hand. I meant the part about poker. The rest I could believe.
It was all I could do to keep a straight face when I saw the hand. Three kings. Maybe I’d have the fabricator crew make me a groundcar…
The hatch slammed open and Vagabond stood silhouetted by the lights in the passage.
“Come with me. It’s time.”
“Oh, hell,” I sighed, throwing down the hand. “That figures.”
Deke grinned and tossed his own on the bed beside mine. Four aces. Four fucking aces. I followed Vagabond out the door.
[ 15 ]
“Gas giant,” Deke murmured, staring at the small viewscreen in the passenger compartment of the lander.
That much was obvious, but this wasn’t the typical gas giant like the hundreds I’d seen in my career. Generally, they all were much of a muchness, as the Skipper used to say. Light-colored atmosphere with darker bands, usually swirling into semi-permanent storms in oranges and yellows. Not this one. This one was a light blue with deep purple clouds in spirals running off of each other like cells differentiating in a Petri dish. Beautiful, mesmerizing, unique.
Would it be enough for us to find this place again?
There are a half a dozen systems in the astrogational files with similar colors and patterns, Jim informed me. I didn’t bother telling him not to answer questions I hadn’t directly asked, because this time his answer was useful.
How many within the Transition time reference? We’d been in T-space less than a week, which limited the distance we’d traveled.
Three.
All with habitables? I pressed, hoping that would narrow the field even more.
Unfortunately.
Damn.
The gas giant caught my attention, but it wasn’t our destination. That was one of its moons, and there was nothing unique about this world. Every habitable moon of a gas giant I’d seen had the same look. Thick ice sheets encroaching from both poles, held off in narrow stretches by thermal features, the habitable zones left as a gift by the Predecessors.
For the Tahni. That was a secret I wasn’t planning on sharing with Pol-Kai. The Tahni had started both wars with Earth because of their fervent belief that the living worlds of the Cluster were their birthright, left for them by the Predecessors. As it turned out, they were dead right about that. Maybe that should have made me feel guilty that we’d encroached on the worlds that had been the inheritance of the Tahni, but it didn’t. Mostly because I’d found out the Predecessors were such douchebags.
In some ways, moons like this were just evidence of how full of themselves they were, their assumption that the Cluster would be so teeming with life that even the narrow habitable bands on these little worlds would be needed. A place like this couldn’t have held more than a few hundred million, and that would have been with the population crammed into every nook and cranny, half of them underground.
They weren’t intended for habitation, Jim informed me.
Stop snooping on my thoughts, I snapped, scowling. But curiosity got the best of me. Then what were they intended for?
They were experiments. Small-scale tests before they moved on to terrestrial worlds. Losing a moon this size meant losing, as you noted, a home for a few hundred million at most. Losing a terrestrial world would mean losing a living space that could house billions. Not to mention the ecosystem to fill it. But you’re correct about the Predecessors being douchebags, of course.
The ordinary moon shut out its extraordinary parent world, filling the small screen and engulfing the lander in the rust red of its atmosphere. A shudder rocked the little ship as we passed through a layer of storms, the convection from the heat of the thermal springs mixing with the colder air off the ice sheets to spawn dark, rotating swathes of thunder and hail. My fingers tightened around the armrests of my acceleration couch and my jaw ached from clenching my teeth. I tried to relax, sucking in a deep breath, earning a lopsided smile from Deke.
“Don’t like flying through storms, Alvarez?”
“I don’t usually mind it,” I told him, “when I trust the pilot.”
The pilot in this case was an Evolutionist, though not Vagabond. The cyborg in charge sat two rows ahead of us, bolt upright and unmoving, a statue being transported to a museum. The pilot wasn’t much more lifelike, not even his hands moving, resting at his sides instead of on the controls, which would have worried me if it hadn’t been for the interface cables plugged into jacks at his temples. I’d seen Attack Command pilots jacked in that way, but they still had to manually operate the controls.
Not this guy. On an intellectual level, I knew he had to be using some kind of remote system that allowed him to use a headcomp like mine to fly the ship, but it felt like he’d just taken his hands away and decided to let Jesus take the wheel. I badly wanted to run up to the cockpit, push him out of the seat, and take over the controls myself, but seeing as how he was likely three times as strong as me, I clutched at the armrests and prayed.
Finally, we dropped out of the clouds and the constant shuddering and bucking smoothed out into a normal landing and I was able to catch a brief glimpse of our LZ. Such as it was. Steam roiled up from bubbling springs, holes in the pustules of snow patching the surface of the valley, belching trails of smoke into the perpetual twilight of a sky dominated by the gas giant. No sun to warm this harsh and unforgiving hellscape, the glow of the star blocked off by the body of the planet, and I wondered if this side of the world ever received direct sunlight.