“Gotten through to the who?” asked Jack.
“The Lassateirra faction,” Eddie repeated.
“That the bad guys?”
The pilots laughed. Carter laughed. Porter didn’t laugh. Eddie’s mouth turned into a hard straight line, and he tried to stare down Jack Hawker but failed.
At the front of the room, Ted was balling his hands into fists, then releasing them, balling them up again. “Get to the point, Eddie,” he said.
“In good time, Commander,” Eddie replied. “There are important details here. Recently, the company has been in communication with sources on the ground here on Iaxo—”
“I thought we were under blackout,” Billy said.
“We are,” said Ted. “Eddie?”
“We are,” said Eddie. “Corporate is not. These were back-channel conversations, mostly, so don’t go getting any ideas.”
“Well, what sources then?”
“Other mercenary organizations,” Eddie continued. “Some well-placed friends of ours in various foreign aid groups and noncolonial charities. That’s in addition to their contacts in several of the large shipping conglomerates and guild spacers. And for some time, the company has been very concerned about other groups moving supplies through the blockades. With this recent turn of events—”
“Eddie…,” said Ted, warningly.
“Not to mention their substantial investment in material resources here and the usual risk of legal sanction involved in such an operation, there has been some discussion—”
“Eddie!” snapped Ted.
Behind his podium, Eddie Lucas turned on his thousand-watt smile, passed it over the assembled pilots like a searchlight. He could tell them everything. That was in his power. He could crash this entire mission with a word or two. But that wasn’t the surprise he had. He looked at Ted and saw him leaning forward, waiting, maybe, to tackle him. To hit him. Eddie loved this. He really, really did.
“It’s bad news,” Eddie said.
“Fucking out with it already!” someone shouted, and Carter was surprised to discover that it’d been him.
“Stow that shit, Captain,” Ted barked.
“I spoke with a couple friends of mine in the legal department back home just a couple of hours ago, and they informed me that…” He paused briefly and then Eddie came back, quoting from his notes. “A motion to provide humanitarian aid for Carpenter 7 Epsilon, also known as Iaxo, was presented four days ago before the Colonial Council, currently in session at Tranquility. The request was vague. No specific cause was presented before the officials, and there was no specific or implied mention of ours or anyone else’s presence here. But it’s there now. It’s in the hands of the council, which means that Iaxo is now a real place. It’s on the map, so to speak. And while the company feels it likely that the motion will be dismissed without a formal hearing, the operations department feels that it is only a matter of time now before someone comes and pokes their noses into our business here.”
Carter was drifting. Repeated shocks, his hangover, the nausea of relived death—it was all numbing him. He’d had some very specific reasons for taking this job when he did. One of them had been that he would never again have to sit in a little room, in an uncomfortable chair, and listen to someone lie to him about how concerned his bosses were for his health and well-being. Another was that he would never have to talk (or hear, or even think) about politics, corporate or otherwise. He’d had enough of that in his other life—the one that’d come before this. Before Flyboy. So sitting there, he decided that Ted and Eddie could talk at him all they liked. It didn’t mean he had to listen. He closed his eyes and put his chin on his chest. He was going to sleep. No one could make him care against his will.
“But after the events of the past two days,” Eddie continued, “it has become obvious that this filing was only part of a larger strategy. Off-world supply has been coming in to the Lassateirra for some time now.” He paused again to look at his notes and shuffle through the pages. “No one seems sure exactly how long. But there is equipment in theater, and potentially quite a bit of it. Most deliveries have been coming in far up-country…” He looked at his papers, running a finger down a page. “Arkhis Mountains,” he muttered. “And the coast.”
Carter told himself to sleep. He ordered himself to sleep. He thought he knew what was coming—could imagine the worst thing, suddenly, as a real thing. And just like Ted talking Morris’s plane onward toward death and Carter’s wish that he could’ve just stopped, just changed the path of the past with a word, so, too, did he want to not be here when Eddie said what he thought he was going to say. He wanted to not hear it, to go forth in ignorance, unworried. Part of him cheered Eddie on, begging for the worst. Another part dove for the deep, dumb blackness of sleep. If he didn’t hear it, things wouldn’t have to change, get worse. To hear the words, that would make it real.