“That emotion helps imprint the message,” Kristiana added.

  “Carina bad, Terra good,” Byrne muttered. “I gotta get another drink. I have a foul taste in my mouth.” He walked away with short steps, his head down.

  I watched him go, my heart jumping about. “For propaganda to work, it has to be endless,” I said to Kristiana. “You said it yourself. They have to hear the message over and over and have nothing else to believe.”

  “We suspect that is exactly what is happening over there.”

  I looked at her directly. “They’re preparing for war.”

  She nodded.

  “I think I need another drink, too,” I muttered and went to find it.

  —9—

  IT TOOK ME ANOTHER HOUR to find Jai among the press of bodies, for everyone I knew who wasn’t family tried to talk to me. As the only way to avoid those conversations would have been to cut them off and turn my back on them, I gripped my empty glass instead and made myself smile and be pleasant.

  There was a bank of people standing around the edges of Lyssa’s screen tank, talking to her. She had adjusted her avatar and now appeared to be wearing a party dress, with her hair down. It was still orange, though.

  Ven caught my arm on the way through, then let go quickly when I glanced down at his fingers. He held up his glass, which looked as though it held scotch. “This is alcohol.”

  “Yes.”

  “I cannot drink alcohol.”

  “Fine.” I plucked the glass from his fingers and drained it. “Anything else?”

  Ven’s heavy brows came together. “What does ‘baller’ mean?”

  “Someone who lives on a planet, instead of a space structure.” I looked around. “Have you seen Colonel Van Veen?” The man was tall enough that I should be able to spot his head over the top of everyone here, but I couldn’t.

  Ven’s frown didn’t shift. “Sod-buster is the same thing?”

  “It’s a farmer on planet.” I added, my need to find Jai making me impatient. “It’s a subset.”

  Ven’s frown smoothed out. “Thank you. I see. And earth-eater means the same thing, yes?”

  I grew still. My impatience vanished. “Did someone say that?”

  Ven nodded.

  “To you?”

  He tilted his head. “From your expression, I think it does not mean the same thing at all.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It’s complicated, Ven. There’s all sorts of assumptions and ideas behind it, but it’s basically an epithet for Terrans.”

  “Epi…?”

  I sighed. How to even begin to explain why some Carinads looked down upon ballers, and that eating dirt was the act of the desperate, and ranked Terrans as the lowliest of ballers in existence? “Look, find Mace. Ask him to explain it to you. He might even be able to give you the ideograms for it.” I added, “It’s not a nice thing to call you, Ven. Whoever said it wasn’t being polite.”

  Ven considered that. “Then my impression of him was correct. He was an asshole.”

  I smothered my laugh. “And that’s not nice to say to someone’s face, either.”

  “You say it frequently, Captain.”

  “I’m not a nice person.”

  “That’s not true,” Ven said flatly.

  I stared at him. He was the second person tonight to attribute to me qualities I would never claim myself. I shrugged it off. A room full of people, some of them strangers, made my skin itch and my hand keep reaching for the shriver that had once lived on my hip. “Tonight, here, I am absolutely not a nice person,” I told Ven.

  He leaned a little closer. “You need fresh air, near running water. The positive ions will calm you.”

  I blinked. “I do not voluntarily step into air that moves by itself,” I assured him.

  Ven gestured over my shoulder with his chin. “The Colonel.”

  “Finally,” I breathed and moved around the clump of people behind me, looking for Jai.

  He was on the move. I followed him through the crowd, keeping my gaze on him and realized with a touch of dismay that he was heading for the wall of windows with their view of the lake far below.

  Triga’s pleasant yellow sun was behind the planet the station used as anchorage, so perhaps the night-darkened view wouldn’t be quite as distracting as the daytime one was.

  Van Veen moved up to where Marlow stood looking out into the night and rested his hand on Marlow’s shoulder, then handed him a drink he had been carrying. I moved right up to the two of them, privacy be damned.

  “I have a question or two to ask you, Jai.” I tried to keep my tone civil. I glanced through the steel glass and my gaze was caught by the lights of houses on the other side of the valley, spilling over the edge of the cliff and climbing down very nearly to the level of the water. And there were boats on the lake, too, spreading auras of gold and red upon the water.

  I put my back to the window and crossed my arms and glared at the pair of them. “Why didn’t you drop the bomb on the conference, Jai?”

  The bomb was the reason we’d come here. It was the one victory we’d managed to snatch out of the whole Tracia disaster. No one knew about it but a small handful of us, and we were all in this room.

  Marlow glanced at Jai. “Uh-oh. You didn’t announce it?”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said. “It would have shut up everyone, if he had, but he placated, instead…and why weren’t you there, Marlow? You could have kept him to the script.”

  Marlow grinned. “If you think I have even a jot of influence on Jai, then you vastly overestimate me.”

  I snorted.

  “But holding back the announcement was never considered, that I remember,” Marlow added and raised a brow at Jai.

  “I…changed the plan,” Jai said. He stirred. “I saw you speaking to Eliot Byrne, a few minutes ago, Danny. Did he show you the footage they captured while they were over there?”

  “You knew he was jumping into Terran space?” I studied Jai. “Or did you ask him to go?”

  “He would have gone there without my asking, but I did make a suggestion or two about what he might do while he was there.”

  “Such us?”

  “No engagement,” Jai said shortly. “No heroics. If he finds a settled world, he backs out silently, slinks away and heads back here immediately to report, so we can do something intelligent with the information.”

  I felt somewhat mollified by that. “I should think so,” I told Jai. “I didn’t go to all that effort to haul Byrne out of the mothership just to have him hand himself and another crew over to the Terrans.”

  “Byrne is not the type to sit about waiting for them to come to us, either,” Jai said, his tone wise.

  True. “You didn’t tell him what Lyth did?”

  “I have told very few people,” Jai said.

  Marlow laughed. “Try ‘no one’.”

  “I wanted to think it through.” Jai didn’t sound defensive.

  “Is that why you didn’t announce it at the conference?” I asked.

  “Something like that.” Jai scrubbed at his hair. “In truth, I didn’t want to give the information to Keskemeti and others who run with him.”

  “You don’t trust him,” I said, trying to sound shocked.

  Marlow grinned.

  “There were many people in the room today I did not trust, but that was not the only reason I didn’t mention the matter,” Jai said with stiff formality. I’d wounded his dignity.

  I didn’t let it bother me too much. Jai was tougher than extruded plasteel. He’d get over it. “What was the other reason?”

  “It was something Gratia Rosalie said,” Jai replied. “About morale.”

  “That suicides and depression have increased on Zillah’s World?” I clarified. “They’re a hospice facility, remember. Most of the population on Zillah’s World is vulnerable one way or another.”

  “Which makes them a lead indicator for the collective mental state of other Carinad worlds,” Jai replied. He stirred and looked over his shoulder. “Let me just call over a couple of people…” He beckoned.

  “He’s made up his mind,” Marlow said softly to me.

  I nodded. “Is that scotch?” I asked Marlow, pointed at the full glass in his hands.

  He sniffed. “Yes.”

  I crooked my fingers. “Gimme.”

  “I see you are as cavalier with your drinks as you are with your data pads.” He handed over the glass.

  I took a big mouthful and handed it back. “That will tide me over, thanks. I get the feeling I’m going to need a clear head for a bit.”

  Dalton came up to me, holding two glasses. He glanced at my empty hands. “I was right.” He handed me one of them. “Jai?”

  “A moment,” Jai murmured.

  Lyth stepped up to the growing group. “Colonel?” He was speaking to Jai, not me. I was always ‘captain’ to Lyth.

  A few seconds later, Kristiana squeezed between a wall of people and moved over to where we stood in the dimmer light by the windows. She looked at all of us. “You do look grim,” she declared lightly. “Hatching plans?”

  “Yes,” Jai said.

  “Oh.” Her humor vanished. “Is here the place to do that?”

  “Pulling us all together anywhere else would draw attention to the meeting,” Jai said.

  “Those sorts of plans. Very well. I’m listening.”

  “Danny’s official report on the Tracia incident wasn’t completely frank,” Jai told her.

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Kristiana murmured. She looked at me.

  “It’s something Lyth did, actually,” I told her. “Right at the end, when the two shuttles busted through the dome. There was a reason we hovered for a bit.”

  Kristiana looked at Lyth with an enquiring expression.

  Lyth said, “Danny was transporting a load of the new miniature data beacons we’ve been developing.”

  “Why miniature?”

  “They’re cheaper to produce, so they can be scattered to drift in long reaches of space and act as relays for very-long-distance data transmissions. And they’re small enough that a ship’s shields will repel them, instead of being holed by them.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “While Danny was sitting on top of the shuttle, I rigged together one of the miniature beacons with one of the snakeheads Yoan built and—”

  “Snake heads?” Kristiana interjected.

  “Yoan has been trying to reproduce the snakehead lariats the Terrans use. He thinks they would be useful for freight work,” I told her. “Whip them around a freight container and it will follow you wherever you go. The snakehead is a grappling hook that will attach to any surface.”

  “Any surface?”

  “Any,” Lyth repeated firmly.

  Kristiana tapped her pointed chin. “A positive use for a hideous device.” She looked at Lyth expectantly.

  “I put a miniature beacon and a snakehead together, without the lariat, and used a grenade launcher to fire it at the second shuttle as it moved through the dome. It attached itself to the back end of the shuttle.”

  Kristiana’s lips parted. She was an engineer, when she wasn’t being a politician. She didn’t need the rest pointed out to her. “Tell me you’ve picked up data from the beacon?” Her tone was one of pleading.

  “We have,” Lyth said.

  “We know where the mothership went to,” Jai said, his voice dropping even lower.

  Kristiana glared, her hands on her hips. “And you didn’t think it worth mentioning this today?”

  Jai scrubbed at his hair once more. “I wasn’t comfortable handing over that information in that particular room, no.”

  Kristiana considered that and her hands dropped. “You’re right,” she said softly. “It’s just that…the boost such news would give everyone!”

  “Exactly,” Jai said. “Consider, though, how much better the morale boost would be if we not only announced we knew where the Terrans had taken our people, but that we had gone there and taken them back?”

  My heart actually leapt at the idea. Screw that it was only six people. It would be a major black eye to the Terrans.

  Kristiana was the first to recover from her surprise. “You want Eliot Byrne and his little crew to raid a Terran world?” She seemed underwhelmed at the idea.

  I gripped my glass hard. I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea, either. Byrne looked like a good stiff breeze would knock him over. Six-year-olds had more muscle mass. Yeah, he was an ex-Ranger, but he’d been through hell. His crew of wildcatters would have less discipline than the same six-year-olds, too.

  Jai shook his head. “A raid into hostile territory is a military operation and there’s only one colonel I know with the guts and the ability to pull it off, and she has the perfect ship for it, too.”

  Everyone swiveled their heads to look at me. So I gave the only sane response I could. I finished my drink.

  —10—

  THE ANCIENT, CYLINDRICAL STAR CITY of Wynchester became my default base camp and HQ. It had been my home since we’d recovered the crew of the Ige Ibas, a home which suited both Dalton and me. I got to live in my space-located structure where the air moved only when I wanted it to, while he got to live with his feet on dirt and weeds.

  It didn’t come as a great surprise to me when, a month after our resident permits were issued, Dalton told me over dinner that he’d bought a farm in the Arterberry area, which was about halfway along the cylinder. What did surprise me was when Sauli turned up with a building crew and blueprints. Dalton had hired him to build us a house on that farm.

  As I was still in debt up to my eyebrows, I left Sauli and the architect to argue over the final site and asked Dalton to help me with wrangling customers looking for passage to Tracia. Dalton agreed to come along for he trusted that Sauli would out-stubborn the architect and build the house the way Dalton wanted.

  When Lyth, who also lived in Wynchester, heard we were heading for Tracia he asked if there was room in the freight bay for a container of his new miniature beacons, which he wanted to show to a consortium on Inner Elbow station. So he had come along, too.

  We’d found ourselves waylaid ever since, with Terran strikes and strategy conferences and now this—a military raid into Terran space.

  I had been out of the Rangers for near seventy years, Dalton for longer than that. But I tapped him to be my 2IC before we’d left Jai’s party, and we made plans all the way home.

  The fallow fields on Dalton’s farm became the basecamp. I’d had to ask Dalton what fallow meant, too. The temporary buildings Dalton grew also hosted a boot camp for everyone I selected for the job. My recruits were ex-Rangers and had been out of the war business for at least thirty years, or they’d never been in the Rangers, but had talents or expertise I thought I might need. Either way, they needed basic training, or needed to repeat it. I put myself through the same training, for the same reason.

  Getting everyone fit and ready gave me time to reconnoiter and draw up a plan for getting our people back.

  I didn’t ask Eliot Byrne to join the team, even though he would jump at the chance to sock it to the Terrans. He wasn’t physically strong enough. I did not yet know for sure how the raid would go, but sneaking into any enemy territory usually involved maximum physical effort. In other words, humping yourself and lots of weighty gear from a remote drop point, through countryside filled with unfriendlies to the target location, where you were absolutely guaranteed to meet hostiles with weapons.

  And, as I learned the day after the party, Eliot Byrne needed a new body. He wasn’t just weak, he was dying. It was yet another of the consequences of his Terran captivity. Not even replacement organs would save him. He was taking whatever high-paying insanity-filled assignments Jai would give him, to build up funds for a new clone.

  So I whispered in Jai’s ear, and Jai sent Byrne into Terran space to scout out the world where our Carinad prisoners were being held, while I got on with turning the swiftly growing team into soldiers.

  Both Lyth and Juliyana volunteered, and I flatly refused to take both of them. “I need Lyth for his linguistics, Juliyana.”

  “You’ve got Mace for that.”

  “Lyth can talk to computers. Mace reads ideograms.”

  “And I’ve got years as a Ranger under my belt,” Juliyana pointed out.

  I studied them both. “Okay, I’ll say this once. You’re parents now. And this is a military mission. Whichever one of you goes with me leaves a codified last directive behind. Get it?”

  Lyth nodded. “We know that.”

  “Then you have a decision to make. Until your kids reach their majority, the two of you have to split the risk at all times.”

  They looked at me blankly.

  “One of you gets to stay home, in case the other one doesn’t come back,” I said flatly.

  “You need both of us, Danny,” Lyth said. “And don’t tell me Juliyana is rusty. You’re even more out of practice than she is. And yes, I can help with computers you come across and I can work with Mace for the translations. And no offense, but this body I’m wearing has Y chromosomes. I can pack on muscle faster than either of you, and I will. We will both pull our weight.”

  I shook my head. “When I raised Juliyana’s father—” I couldn’t bring myself to call him by his given name. The sentient array had appropriated both the name and Noam’s image, and even his body for a while. Now the name was tainted, for me. “I stayed put for twenty-five years. I took a leave of absence from the Rangers, and I did everything to support his development. You’re lucky. You have two of you and can spell each other off. So I’m giving an order. You go home and you decide which one of you comes with me and which one of you stays with the kids.”

  “Do generals always interfere in family decisions?” Lyth asked, sounding amused.

  “No, they don’t,” Juliyana said. “It’s against military protocol to make recruiting decisions based upon a soldier’s private life.”

 

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