These Broken Stars(10)

Turns out she’s fast, shifting her weight nimbly as we circle each other. This is the sort of girl who suits me, quick and direct, none of that upper-decks intrigue. The way she moves reminds me of a line from one of my mother’s poems. Quicksilver light and motes of dust.

She smiles again, and for an instant I can see Lilac LaRoux’s smile, and those blue eyes.

But next thing I see is the metal grating across the roof of the deck. Corporal Adams has her bare foot on my throat, and it’s over. I lift my hands carefully, think about grabbing her ankle, and show her my palms instead. She got me. I should have had my mind on the job at hand.

She lifts her foot and leans down to offer me her hand. I grip it, she hauls, and I come up to my feet.

Now Miss LaRoux’s getting my ass kicked on the sparring mats as well. Is there any part of my life that girl can’t mess with?

I lace my hands together behind my head, arching my back until the stretch tugs at sore muscles, looking over at the sergeant. He directs the corporal to the next mat over, and closes the distance between us.

“Son, I don’t know what you’re working off there, but you might want to try the weapons range,” he begins.

I don’t want my gun. I want someone I can lay into, here in person. “Please, Sergeant, I—”

The ground bucks and heaves beneath me and we both stagger backward—for an instant I think someone’s tackled me from behind, and then I realize it’s the ship herself shaking beneath us.

I plant my feet wide apart, waiting to see if there’s going to be another tremor. The sparring hall is eerily silent as everyone turns their faces up, waiting for information from the loudspeakers. The Icarus hasn’t been anything but perfectly stable in the weeks I’ve been on her.

Nothing breaks the silence, and I exchange glances with the sergeant. Slowly he shakes his head, broad shoulders lifting in a quick shrug. Where’s the announcement?

There’ll be more information upstairs. For sure, someone will be telling the rich folks what’s going on. They’d expect nothing less. I toss off a quick salute, and stomp into my boots.

When I push through the doors of the silent sparring hall and out into the network of gangways beyond, it’s like entering another world. It’s all soft luxury upstairs, but down here they don’t waste an inch.

The gangways crisscross over and under each other like spiderwebs, populated by techheads in suits that pulse lights in time with the music around us, emigrants heading for new colonies, tourists taking the cheapest route to other planets, folks making the long haul for family visits. I hear a snatch of worried Spanish on my left, and an Irish curse nearby. A cluster of missionaries bent on bringing comfort and relief to the unenlightened rebels on the new planets stands watching the bustle of humanity like it’s their first time off-world. Amid all the sound and movement, there’s not a top hat or a corset in sight.

Footsteps clang on the metal gantries, voices echoing in a dozen variations on Standard, lesser languages woven in. Everybody’s wondering what’s going on, but nobody knows.

Brightly lit screens flicker nonstop advertisements at me—they line the walls and the ceiling, blaring words and songs and jingles. As I work through the crowd toward the first set of stairs, a 3-D holograph springs to life in front of me, a woman in a hot-pink catsuit throwing her arms wide open to invite me to a club at the aft end of the ship. I walk right through her.

My stomach lurches as though I’m in for a bout of spacesickness. I notice I’m not the only one looking uncomfortable—there are other faces in the crowd turning pale as well.

I can’t be spacesick. I’ve been shunted around the universe on ships so badly tuned you could barely hear yourself over the chugging, and all that time I kept my insides on the inside. I must have overdone it on the sparring mats.

I can feel the metal gangway beneath me vibrating to the hundreds of sets of footfalls banging down on it, but there’s something else under that—a tremor that doesn’t feel right. Abruptly the vid screens all around me freeze, the jingles and voice-overs cutting out so a woman’s voice can broadcast up and down the hallways, smooth and professional.

“Attention all passengers. In a few moments we will be cycling the ship’s hyperspace engines. This procedure forms a part of our routine maintenance of the Icarus. You may notice some minor vibrations. Thank you for your understanding as we carry out this routine maintenance.”

She sounds calm, but I wouldn’t use the words routine maintenance twice in one announcement myself unless I was trying to keep people from noticing it’s not. In two years of space travel, I only ever saw a ship cycle her drives once, about six months back near Avon. By the time we got that tub landed, she was more or less held together by spit and good luck.