Deep Black

by Miles Cameron

Genres: Alien Contact; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

Marca Nbaro had always dreamed of serving aboard the Greatships, with their vast cargo holds and a crew that could fill a city.

They are the lifeblood of human-occupied space, transporting an unimaginable volume - and value - of goods from City, the greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint at the other, to trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species.

And now, out in the darkness of space, something is targeting them.

Nbaro and her friends are close to locating their enemy, in this gripping sequel to the award-nominated Artifact Space, but they are running out of time - and their allies are running out of patience . . .

Written by one of the most exciting new voices in SF, this space thriller will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

 

Read more

Release date: August 1, 2024

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 510

Sample

1

‘Come in,’ Truekner said.

The commander was sitting on his rack, back against the screened bulkhead and padded with a piece of nano-fluff that had to have been salvaged from another acceleration couch. Truekner was old – right at the limit of what most people tolerated before they went to rejuv. He had creases where his jaw met his neck, crow’s feet around his eyes even when he wasn’t smiling, and most of his hair was grey. He wore a flightsuit and his feet were bare, which struck Marca Nbaro as faintly embarrassing, and intimate, which she knew was ridiculous.

She stepped over the knee-knocker of the hatch. Truekner’s stateroom was big enough that it had an airtight hatch and separate interior compartments. It was formidably neat; there wasn’t even an abandoned T-shirt. On the main screen, there was a picture of a dog – a big dog – frolicking in an endless loop.

Nbaro cleared her throat. ‘Personnel reports and commendations,’ she said.

Truekner gave her a thin smile. ‘Perfect.’ But then he shrugged off whatever remark he’d been ready to make and sat up. ‘Grab a seat, Nbaro. Give me a quick walk through, so I can sign ’em off fast.’

It was seven ship-days since the largest space battle in human history. It was twenty-two hours since humans had first managed to communicate directly with the Starfish, the aliens who controlled the xenoglas trade – the first real contact in two hundred years.

And the skipper had pulled Nbaro back to the ship and required her to stay and finish the paperwork, which Nbaro thought was a funny phrase because none of it was on paper. But the Directorate of Human Corporations, a four-hundred-year-old trading combine that maintained a loose control of about half of Human Space, maintained ‘the Service’, and the Service had traditions that went back to wet navies, sailing ships, and … paper. She’d spent her life learning them on sims, and a year trying to make them work for real, and still the age of it all daunted her.

Truekner gave her a slightly cynical smile. ‘Yes, Nbaro, through war and plague and alien contact, we still need to file our reports and nominate our people for medals. And while I have you, did you post that material readiness survey I gave you two weeks ago?’

She had to think about it. The material readiness survey had been completed before the battle, and thus seemed to have been done in a different age, so long ago she could scarcely remember the tedium. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said at last. ‘Filed and approved by Morosini.’ Morosini was the ship’s AI, which manifested as a courtly but difficult man in the scarlet clothes of a bygone era.

He nodded. ‘Nice. Good. I missed that. OK, let’s see the reports.’

She’d posted the ‘material readiness survey’ – which was really a report of cleanliness and stock in the squadron spaces – just before the battle; or rather, between the first big fight and the second …

It was hard to keep track.

Time had dilated for everyone on board DHCS Athens. Their voyage had been dogged by violence almost from the first; indeed, one of Nbaro’s first memories aboard was the full alert that the Doje, Eli Sagoyewatha, had ordered when the Greatship New York had been reported destroyed – the first of the DHC’s huge trading ships ever to be destroyed. That had happened while they were in initial refuelling and workup, before they’d loaded cargo and launched.

 What had followed was sometimes hard to sequence: an attempt to get a nuke aboard; a second attempt, that had succeeded in getting boarders and hackers aboard; a complex plot to take or destroy the ship while corroding the command AI, Morosini; a simultaneous fight with two apparent PTX Q-ships in dock at Sahel, and then what was, in effect, a single space battle that lasted, in ship-time, for months – seconds of combat conducted by computers, interspersed with trade missions and thousands of hours of watching space for enemy signals. All culminating in the Battle of Trade Point, as everyone called it: a three- or even four-sided fight that the Athens had won decisively.

So far.

She pointed her tab at the skipper’s screens and thumbed her first display.

‘Petty Officer Tresa Indra. Star of Honour posthumous.’

Truekner read the display, nodding along, and saying aloud, ‘In the highest traditions of the Service …’ He made a face. ‘Service has given out sixteen Stars of Honour in three hundred years,’ he said. ‘How many have you got in that pile?’

She frowned. ‘Just Indra and Zeynep Suliemani, sir. Indra spotted the alien ship under fire, located it, and notified the ship. Without her we’d all be dead. Suliemani gave her life ejecting her crew when the PTX tried to ambush us.’

‘And Lance Ko from Flight Five, and Naisha Qaqqaq from Engineering – she might even live to receive hers. And you, Lieutenant. Yours went off after the boarding action at Sahel. There might be more – not for nothing does the Master call this “the ship of heroes”. Five Stars of Honour from one ship.’

Nbaro nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

He gave an odd roll of his head that was like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ combined into a single motion. ‘Well, let’s run it up the flagpole. I’m happy to do anything I can for Indra’s family, and for Suleimani’s. Bits of ribbon are free.’ He smiled. ‘And of course, the Star comes with a promotion and a pay bonus that any family might want.’

‘Promotion?’ she asked.

Truekner smiled. ‘You hadn’t worked that out?’ He shrugged. ‘And in Indra’s case, she’ll get a patrician’s cargo allotment, which will be worth a kingdom after this trip.’ The smile transformed into a grin. ‘I mean, if we make it home alive. We’re on even money in the senior officers’ mess.’

‘Even money?’ Nbaro asked. ‘I mean, who pays off in a bet like that?’

Truekner sighed. ‘Oh, Nbaro, we old people have our little jokes, and we just hope you young folks will play along.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Nbaro said.

She thumbed the next

display item: Lieutenant Suleimani’s Star of Honour.

‘Nicely worded. Ever read Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about war in the Age of Chaos, Nbaro?’

‘Can’t say that I have, sir.’ She was slightly chagrined, as Age of Chaos literature was one of the very few things the Orphanage had provided.

‘Eh.’ He leaned back, all his smiles gone. ‘I think about Suliemani’s courage – punching her crew out, knowing she’d die alone. In hard vacuum. Owen had it right, and I’m a little sick of heroism this shift. Tab me the rest and I’ll read ’em when I’m … ready.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Got the personnel reports?’

‘Yes, sir. Here’s Eyre’s. Sir, technically he should receive “not observed” because …’ Nbaro waved a hand ineffectively.

‘Because he was a petty officer for most of the reporting period,’ the skipper said, ‘and was only promoted midshipper a month before we got to Trade Point.’ He made that funny yes/no motion with his head again. ‘They can come and court-martial me. We’ll write him an officer report so that the battle goes on his permanent record as an officer.’ He looked up.

‘Do you realise that those of us who were here will probably get favourable promotion tracks for the rest of our careers?’ He looked unimpressed with himself and his career; his smile was as close to cynical as she’d ever seen on him.

‘ “We few, we happy few”?’ Nbaro asked. Truekner liked allusions to ancient literature, and she did know some.

‘We band of sisters, brothers and ’gynes,’ Truekner said. ‘Yep, like that.’

‘If we make it home at all,’ she said.

‘Touché,’ Truekner said. ‘Did you write your own?’

Nbaro hesitated. ‘No, sir.’

He shook his head. ‘Go and write it. Now. Tell me what a glow-in-the-dark wonder you are. Seriously. I’m up to my arse in crap right now. Do that, and you can go back to chatting with Starfish.’

She had been on the team that had broken the code of the Starfish language. In a way. And the team leader …

She clamped down on that thought. ‘Any idea what’s up next, skipper?’

Truekner was already sitting back into his neurofoam cushions. ‘You have a closer relationship with Pisani and Morosini than I do,’ he said. ‘And if they whisper in your ear, Lieutenant, I’d appreciate a heads-up.’

He opened his tab and put a hologram in the air. Then he put on music: a wailing male voice with a guitar. She heard the word ‘Strange’. The singer sounded insane.

‘The Doors,’ Truekner said.

‘I’ll close them,’ she said, and backed out. Skipper is definitely in a mood.

‘It’s a band,’ he insisted as the hatchway closed.

‘Does your boss make you write your own personnel report?’ Marca asked Thea Drake, her room-mate and best friend. Thea was also back from the Trade Point asteroid. She, too, was doing ‘paperwork’.

‘Captain Hughes has us all write our own,’ Thea said. She was tall and blonde and pale, and pretty much the physical antithesis of Nbaro. She leaned over, her arm around her friend. ‘It’s not a punishment, you barbarous orphan. It’s a reward.’

Nbaro made a sound like a growl. ‘Mostly I’m just afraid that I’ll never, ever get back to Trade Point.’

‘I hear that, sister,’ Drake said. ‘Every half-hour is like a spike in my dreams.’

They’d had to come back; they needed everything from hot showers to fresh EVA suits and more oxygen bottles. The battle had almost totally destroyed the human side of the Trade Point station; now it was barely habitable and there were only four pressurised spaces left. The Athens had taken heavy damage in her first fight, more damage in her second fight, and had been down two reactors and a number of other critical systems while she was coaxed through the Battle of Trade Point, and Nbaro was convinced that only her immense size had kept her from catastrophic damage. A 30 mm depleted uranium slug from a PTX cruiser had to work very hard to find something critical in a ten-kilometre hull. The new aliens and their energy weapons were something else again.

She had these moments all too often, where some idle thought would provoke an almost tangible memory of the battle – one of the battles – and she’d find herself standing in a passageway, looking blank.

Like now. Except she was looking at the display of space in front of the bow, as shown on her cabin in-screen. It was a live video feed of the repair work to the station, forty thousand kilometres away. Due to the lack of ‘right-side-up’ in three-dimensional space, the repair crews and sleds around the trade station looked upside down from her perspective. Half of Engineering was out there, including her friend Naisha Qaqqaq, who was second in command of the station repair effort while the rest of Engineering was working on the damage to Athens.

Out there, doing things …

‘We need to trade our gold,’ Drake continued.

Nbaro leaned against the locker that held her very meagre wardrobe and managed a smile. ‘I think we can trust Dorcas to trade for us,’ she said.

Drake gave her that look: a mix of frustration and resolve that said her will was indomitable. ‘I want to be there to trade my gold,’ she said.

Nbaro straightened up. ‘Hey, me too—’

‘I want to tell my grandchildren that I went eye to eye with the Starfish and

negotiated …’

Nbaro, who knew more than most humans about the anatomy of the deep hydrogen-ocean dwelling aliens, couldn’t help but laugh.

‘Fine!’ Drake spat. ‘Eye to tentacle receptor!’

‘I’m sure if Dorcas was here he’d insist they be called rhinophores, unless you mean the cer—’ She didn’t get the word cerata out completely before both of them were laughing. Nbaro was in love with Dorcas, or thought that the lust-tinged constant desire to see him might be love, but she also enjoyed mocking him, both in person and with Thea Drake.

When their laughter subsided, Nbaro made herself sit down, conjure her holoscreen, and begin inputting her own evaluation. After fifteen minutes, Thea put her arm around Nbaro’s neck, leaned in close like a lover, and said, ‘You suck at self-praise. Go and lie down. I’ve got this.’

‘It’s all there,’ Nbaro said, but she left the stateroom’s one tiny seat and climbed into her acceleration couch.

‘Yeah,’ Drake said. ‘I especially like the bullet point, “Served during Trade Point conflict, securing station from enemy boarders.” Very evocative.’ Drake snorted so hard that she had to wipe her nose.

Drake sat down and spoke quietly to Morosini – everyone’s secretary and translator – and then went back over her work with a light pen.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Hero with a capital H. Your only shortcoming is that you didn’t die. If you were dead, I’d say they’d make you Doje.’

Marca dropped down off her rack and looked at the evaluation on Morosini’s gleaming holo-display. The words PROMOTE IMMEDIATELY in capitals caught her eye, and then farther down the screen, Under direct enemy fire, rescued … ‘Hey! “Captured and extracted an enemy alien while under hostile fire” isn’t even true. I captured it after the firefight.’

Drake grinned. ‘The battle was still going on, right? Ships were still shooting at each other?’

‘Thousands of kilometres away, maybe …’ Nbaro shot back.

‘Perfect. And what was their target?’

‘Thea, I think you are stretching—’

‘Sweetie, this is how we get to be captains. Modesty is for civilians.’ Thea Drake, the scion of a hundred generations of patrician officers, leaned in and toggled the ‘send’ button on the holo-display before Nbaro could stop her.

Nbaro made herself pause, be calm, and smile. The Nbaros had as many generations of officers as the Drakes – but her parents had died when she was a girl, and hadn’t passed on the ruthless self-confidence that

 seemed to cling to Thea Drake like the finest glas armour.

But she knew that the other woman was right: modesty didn’t lead to promotion.

‘Listen, love,’ Thea said. ‘I’m sure when you were eating rust and rotten rat soup at your barbarous Orphanage, they told you all to be modest and keep your head down, but this is an evaluation that will, in time, be read by every commanding officer you serve under, and every officer who sits on your review boards.’

Nbaro nodded. ‘Truekner said that those of us who fought at Trade Point could probably coast on it for the rest of our careers,’ she said.

Thea grinned. ‘My point exactly. You need to ensure they can never forget what you did. Never. Ever.’

Nbaro shrugged. ‘It seems like an odd way to spend our time after being heroes – writing about it.’

Drake met her shrug and raised the ante with her own. ‘No matter what happens,’ she said, ‘all the documentation needs to be filed.’

Fifteen minutes later the final copy, signed and sealed digitally by Truekner, entered her personnel record with four of Drake’s flamboyant lines of praise underlined and the words ‘ready for immediate promotion’ added a second time, at the bottom.

Appended was a note that said ‘Lt Nbaro is released for spaceflight operations.’ She had a message on her tab from Qaqqaq asking her to review a sim on weld inspection, and a long list of stores she was to bring back. Typical.

Marca punched the air and let out a whoop. But it turned out that she had seven hours before she was due to take a flight to dock with the Trade Point asteroid, so she walked down to the aft wardroom, ate a very quick meal, fetched a cherry pie to trade for a helmet bag of cookies, and, when the cookies were secured, flew a mission in the sim for a ship’s pinnace. Then she reviewed Qaqqaq’s sim on weld inspection and took a nap. Sleep was almost as valuable as food. On waking, she moved briskly about the ship, gathering Qaqqaq’s list of necessities, most of which were spare parts for things Nbaro didn’t understand at all.

It was her third flight on the command deck of the pinnace, the smallest spaceship by Service definition, because it carried an engine capable of navigating between stars. In fact, the pinnaces were mostly engine; they could be crewed by as few as three people, or even just one in a crisis, and almost everything was automated. She had a cargo payload of sixty thousand litres of fresh water, fifty tonnes of carbon-fibre sheets and bags of fibre-crete, a sort of nano-powered epoxy that substituted for concrete in deep space construction. She was ‘under instruction’ with a lieutenant commander from

Flight One, Fuju Han, a tall, thin, handsome man who looked ridiculously young and boyish for his rank, and who looked vaguely familiar; perhaps they had shared a martial arts class somewhere out in the dark. The only dark wrinkle was that Doros McDonald, a red-headed lieutenant from Flight One, had apparently not been chosen for a place on the pinnace, and there had been some cold looks.

Which Nbaro thought of as normal. Orphanage normal.

Han favoured her with a small smile. ‘I’m writing evals,’ he said. ‘You take her.’

The pinnace didn’t launch from the launch tube rails. Instead, she docked against the upper hull, which created a completely different launch sequence, new undocking procedures, and a whole series of possible errors she had to avoid. She was very cautious in her launch, sneaking the pinnace out of the clamps with micro-thrusts until she was sure that she wasn’t going to hit any antennas in her ascent from the dock.

Han glanced up, smiled, scanned the screens and went back to whatever he was doing on his tab.

She took that for approval, however mild, and allowed the onboard sub-AI to feed more power to a more aggressive flight path. In seconds they were accelerating at a smooth 1 g away from the Athens and aiming at the shining white pinpoint that the HUD identified as Trade Point. She checked the whole course against the sub-AI’s course from habit, put a warning on her tab for five minutes before turnover and breaking burn, and slid her command seat back from the instruments.

Han looked up. ‘Looking good,’ he said, somewhat automatically.

She smiled, hoping to get him to talk.

He went back to his tab.

She sighed and went to hers. People were shy around her since her first brush with shipboard fame, and it was only getting worse, and no amount of coaching from the socially talented Thea was going to save her. And regardless, she still had plenty of work to do. She missed Suliemani, and Truekner had given her Suleimani’s personnel to handle: fifteen spaceflight techs and as many fitters and data systems techs. All of the squadron personnel were divided up among the officers, but until recently Nbaro had been too junior, and now she discovered that taking endless onboard classes was not the greatest timewaster in the service.

She was sure that she could hear the skipper’s voice telling her that ‘taking care of your people is never a waste of time’, and she winced at her own thoughts, but what she wanted more than anything was …

Was …

What in a hundred hells do I want?

She stared at space. All she had ever wanted, through nine hellish years in the State Orphanage, was to be a spacer. Now she had her dream, and it was her everyday life. It didn’t lack for excitement or fulfilment, and yet …

And yet …

I put so much into getting here, she thought. Now where do I go?

And part of that was about seeing Horatio Dorcas. Who wanted to marry her. Maybe.

And I definitely want him. But what happens then? Babies? A home? A life in politics? Dorcas won’t ship out again, so …

A life apart? With me out for five years a cruise, and him at home …?

And I’m just borrowing trouble, as Thea would no doubt tell me. We’re at least two years from home in the middle of a long shoot-out. Why worry now?

Because we’ve been apart three days and I fear he might have moved on? Really?

Because I’m an idiot.

And she was resolutely trying not to think of the neural lace she’d discovered she had. With all of the consequent doubts and paranoia of her Orphanage upbringing.

Morosini put that thing in me as soon as I came on board, damn it all. What does that mean? It means they never trusted me. It means they always knew I was a fake …

God, if Morosini knew all along … what the hell does that make me?

She slowed the racing spaceplane of her thoughts, lowered her eyes to her tab, and went to work on Spacer Patel and his poor exam scores. Exemplary performance reviews, excellent under pressure, bad test results.

Yeah, I think I know you. OK, make time to chat with Patel.

‘What was the alien like?’ Han asked.

She looked up. ‘Huh?’ she asked, or something equally un-intelligible. Then she managed a smile, her best new reaction that was almost natural. She knew she’d done some backsliding since the space battle. Do not snarl at your superiors, there’s a dear.

‘The Starfish …’

Han managed a smile of his own, which only served to make him seem younger. ‘I meant the other aliens. The bugs.’

‘Bugs?’ she asked. She hadn’t heard them called bugs.

‘Did it have … eyes?’ Han asked.

She thought back to her brief glance inside its faceplate – if the term ‘faceplate’ could be applied.

‘It had something,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I felt … something.’

‘I hear we’re going to interrogate it?’ Han said.

‘Above my pay grade, sir.’ She put a smile at the end, a carefully chosen reaction to show that, in this case, she was aware that it was above both of their pay grades. Another of Thea’s little tactics.

‘I hope they stick it to that thing.’ He nodded at her. ‘Pretty impressive, Lieutenant, got to say. I was … happy you were assigned to me this flight.’

She nodded. ‘I’m sure anyone would have done the same,’ she said, aware how banal and lame the comment sounded.

‘No way.’ He frowned. ‘I’d like to think I might have rescued the Marine, but damn, I’d just have shot the bug.’ He glanced at her. ‘My best friend was sent off into the Deep Black …’ He paused. ‘You know about the second pinnace?’

‘I know we used to have two,’ Nbaro said carefully. This was a matter of ship-wide speculation, which Han had to know.

‘Davies took number one, way back, right after Sahel.’ Han made a face. ‘I thought she’d be back in a week or two. Now I’m afraid the Bubbles got her.’ He looked at Nbaro. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about it.’

Nbaro hoped she did a better job of keeping a secret than Han. She murmured something diplomatic and went back to her tab.

‘What do you think the Master will do now?’ Han asked. Rather pointedly, he said, ‘Everyone says you have his ear.’

She wasn’t sure why this comment bothered her, as it was occasionally true. ‘I really don’t know, sir.’

‘Call me Fuju,’ Han said.

She smiled. ‘Call me Marca. I had very limited access to the Master. It’s just scuttlebutt that I know what’s going on.’

Han smiled, as if he knew a secret. ‘Sure,’ he said. But his smile seemed genuine, and he let her get back to work.

About forty minutes out from Trade Point, he cleared his throat. ‘I know you are an excellent pilot,’ he said, ‘but do you mind if I take the docking?’

‘Sir?’ she asked.

‘The dock is a shambles and there’s all kinds of stuff to hit, and the automated systems don’t have it all logged yet.’

‘Sure,’ she said.

‘You sit in the co-pilot’s seat and watch. There’s a trick to it.’

There definitely was a trick to it: a combination of a well-located automated camera that could be locked on to a docking target, and the understanding of how to guide that camera into the docking ring. It had been in the sim, but Han didn’t use the school solution, and her appreciation of him went up several notches. In effect, instead of ‘landing’, he backed in, never changing the ship’s orientation in order to keep the main engines on a deceleration burn. It was fancy and elegant and simple.

‘Nice,’ she said. And she meant it. His good piloting cut straight through her foul mood.

Han beamed.

People like to be complimented. Remember that when you talk to Patel.

The trade station had changed so much that she didn’t even know where to find the

crew quarters. Changed wasn’t really fair; completely rebuilt was closer, and there were derricks and frames extending in three dimensions from the asteroid that was the basis for the station, and every EVA-qualified spacer who wasn’t repairing the Athens was here, working as fast as safety, fatigue and materials allowed.

Nbaro was staying; she moved her bag off the pinnace, waved farewell to the handsome Han and heard multiple dings as her tab accepted a dozen messages and comm requests. She wanted to open the PERSONAL from Dorcas, but the WORK SCHED said she had a fifteen-minute walk to an EVA, working on structural integrity with Qaqqaq.

‘Ma’am?’ someone commed.

She was standing in the airlock, frozen by the weight of message traffic. But she knew his voice immediately: Marine Wilson Akunje.

She turned, touched helmets. ‘Mister Akunje,’ she said with real pleasure.

‘Gunny thought that you, being an officer, would get lost. Sent me ta take you to your quarters, like. Ma’am.’ He smiled.

She grinned. ‘Gunny has me pegged. How’s he doing?’

‘Still clamshelled.’ Clamshell was an ancient term for a sailor bound for the brig, but the new medical units actually looked like giant clams and the term had migrated. Wilson smiled. ‘But the clamshell is here, aboard the station, and he’s givin’ orders like he ain’t got nothin’ else to think about, like.’ Akunje pushed a button on a lift – a brand-new, matt-black carbon-fibre lift.

‘Nothin’ outside is pressurised yet,’ he said. ‘Saves time.’

The lift slid to a stop and its double doors opened on another airlock. This one was active, and once the elevator was locked out, atmosphere began to push in. Her helmet read amber, then green, and Akunje winked at her.

‘You can pop your helmet, ma’am,’ he said.

‘But Gunny has you lot in full kit all duty, right?’

‘Yes’m.’ Akunje’s shrug could be read right through his EVA suit and battle armour.

She nodded. ‘Well, I’m just a squid,’ she said, and popped her visor. The air was good: cool, fresh, the sign of clean filters and brand-new components.

There was carpeting on the ‘floor’, and artificial gravity.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I love what you’ve done with the place.’ Last time she’d been aboard, there had been no carpeting and, in many places, no walls. The precise railgun holes in the passageway were gone, but the space still conjured a moment of terror; she’d stood helpless, right here, while an alien starship targeted this corridor. Only luck had kept her alive.

But she kept walking. In some strange way, it helped steady her. After all, she was 

genuinely the hero of the station fight. She really had been an effective officer. Whatever Morosini thought of her when she came aboard, she was clear about that.

Right? Truekner isn’t a game-player. He wouldn’t blow smoke …

They clomped down the passageway, passed through a common messing area where a dozen off-duty spacers and officers looked up, and people she knew waved and greeted her warmly; then they were in a berthing corridor that ran at what would have been, planet-side, a ridiculous angle, but artificial gravity made it possible to turn and walk ‘up’ as as easily as turning a corner.

‘B1601,’ Akunje said. ‘Enjoy, ma’am. Welcome back.’

She grinned. ‘Good to be back. I have an EVA in ten minutes.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, we’re understaffed. To say the least. I gotta run. Ciao!’

She tossed her bags into the tiny stateroom – it was basically a rack and a locker, more like a cylinder than a room – and dogged the hatch closed.

‘Wait up!’ she called. ‘I’m with Qaqqaq on structural integrity,’ she added.

‘I can get you there.’ Akunje consulted his tab, mounted on his left wrist. ‘Hakuna matata.’

She followed him back through messing, and into the same airlock and elevator, re-sealing her helmet as they moved along. This time, they went past the dock and up into the unfinished rigging above the docks – the mess of girders and cables she’d watched Han avoid in his landing.

There were at least ten spacers working here, and their speed was incredible; carbon-fibre panels were assembled so fast that she could watch an arm of the station grow as if it was some Earth-side plant in a speeded-up video.

Akunje’s voice spoke in her helmet, even as he turned back into the lift.

‘See you around, ma’am!’

Almost simultaneously, Nbaro heard Qaqqaq say, ‘See, the conquering hero comes!’ The shortest of the suited figures released a girder, flipped, and dived towards her with the grace of a porpoise or a seal. Qaqqaq’s landing was so perfect, so poised, that the two ended up helmet to helmet, almost in an embrace.

They touched helmets.

‘Now, if I say to go inside …’ Qaqqaq said, not entirely joking.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Nbaro agreed.

‘You’re on weld-inspection for a bit,’ Qaqqaq said, as if this was small talk. ‘I’ll check

 you out on construction later. I hear you’re staying around?’

‘A week at least,’ she said.

Qaqqaq kept her helmet touching Nbaro’s. ‘I know you have other stuff to do,’ she said. ‘But any waking minute you have spare, you’re a lowly construction tech. I’m desperate for bodies with EVA quals.’

‘You make it sound so appealing,’ Nbaro said, but in truth, she was delighted to be ‘outside’. It always got her: the reality of the universe around her. Days, even weeks could go by when she was in the ship and didn’t even think about …

… the expanse. Out here, far from the two stars, and on a station arm projecting into the void from an asteroid, she could look at infinity in every direction – up, down, everywhere. It just went on and on, being infinite everywhere.

Here in the Trade Point system, it was stranger than most: the lone asteroid that had clearly been moved to the balance point between two distant stars; the two asteroid belts – or rather, moon belts – around the stars in a complex and balanced chain of orbits.

It looked artificial. In fact, it looked more artificial to the naked eye than it did on the various charts and 3D representations.

And then beyond the bright points of the two stars, there was …

Space. The deep black absence of light was beautiful, and so was the vast brilliance of the infinite pinpoints of light created by all the stars. The moon belts gave the scene depth, and mystery, but the starfield gave it majesty, and the Horsehead Nebula on her Spinward horizon gave it awe.

‘Are you space-sick?’ Qaqqaq asked.

‘No, Naisha,’ Nbaro said. ‘I’m in awe of the universe.’

‘Fair,’ Qaqqaq said. ‘But functionally similar. Myself, I try not to look up.’

‘Wherever up is,’ Nbaro quipped. ‘Take me to my welds.’

There followed a brief refresher course in weld inspection. As Nbaro had just watched the vid, it felt mildly patronising, but she was experienced enough in space operations to know this was a vital job and needed her full attention, and that there was all too often a gap between vid instruction and ground reality.

The next six hours passed in a blur of welds and QR codes. Each weld she inspected received a code burned into the girder by her inspection laser, listing the date and time of inspection, and with her name.

She was very careful. But the welds were all good despite being done in haste; this was a veteran crew. She was floating, tethered, by a six-way junction weld when her tab chimed.

‘Shift’s done, Marca

You can come in now.’ Qaqqaq sounded amused.

Nbaro finished her inspection of the sixth weld, stamped it, tabbed the result into the ship’s memory, pulled herself back to the assembly and then jumped for a handhold and again for the lift platform, proud of her hard-won zero-g skills. When she’d first come to the Athens, even a jump up a lift-well had been a risk.

Qaqqaq and two other spacers held the lift for her and they filled it, the four of them pressed against one another for the ride down.

‘Airlock,’ the lift said into their helmets. They packed into the lock, and it cycled. Nbaro was surprised to see the others pop their visors as soon as the lights showed amber, and suspected familiarity bred contempt, even for hard vacuum.

‘When do we get to the gun turrets?’ a spacer asked. She was young, shaved nearly bald, and almost as short as Qaqqaq.

The engineering officer smiled. ‘Rosta, our protection is the Athens. If the Bubbles come back, we’re not going to fight them off with a couple of small railguns.’

The male spacer looked sour. ‘Understood, ma’am, but I’d feel better if we had guns.’

‘Nine more days at this rate and we’ll put in a railgun turret,’ Qaqqaq said. But she sounded … doubtful. As if she knew something.

When the two spacers turned into their berthing area, Nbaro glanced at Qaqqaq. ‘So we’re here at least nine more days?’

Qaqqaq shrugged. ‘I thought you’d tell me?’ she said. ‘I stink. I’d kill for a fewkin’ shower.’

Nbaro knew that the station had water reserve issues. Part of her cargo in the pinnace had been sixty thousand litres of fresh water. ‘Sonic?’

‘Sure, honey, but sonic never makes me feel clean.’ Qaqqaq stopped at a hatchway. ‘This is me.’

‘Good to be back.’

‘Good to have you. Get some sleep.’ It was a slightly pointed remark, and the Terran-born woman smirked as she waved.

Nbaro couldn’t see what all that was aimed at. But she gave Qaqqaq a wave and clomped up the corridor, through messing, and then up to her own tiny cylinder, where there was just room to get off her armour and her splendid, high-tech EVA suit, which was technically both the property of the Special Services and a piece of evidence in the web they were building on the conspiracy to take or destroy the ship. She was honest enough with herself to admit that she never planned to give it back.

She loved her EVA suit and her armour enough to spend fifteen minutes cleaning them; the suit had a self-renewing inner surface that claimed to be self-cleaning, but she’d noticed that in high perspiration areas it needed a little help. And the xenoglas armour was virtually indestructible, but she liked to wipe it until it shone.

She was sitting on her

 tiny rack, cleaning her gauntlets and thinking about food, when her tab chimed and so did her hatch

‘Nbaro, are you hiding?’ came a voice.

It was Dorcas.

Nbaro was naked; Dorcas was her fiancé; he was also her commanding officer on the away team for diplomatic interaction with the Starfish: all that went through her mind in a quarter of a second, and she simultaneously blushed deeply and put a palm firmly against the hatch.

‘I’ll be out in five minutes,’ she said.

‘I’ll be in the mess,’ Dorcas said. One of the best things about him was his essential straightforwardness; he didn’t get angry over little things. He wouldn’t mind being kept waiting; he’d just download some esoteric journal.

She pulled on a flightsuit and zipped it up, found soft boots and pulled them on, ran her fingers through her hair and opened her hatch. He wasn’t leaning there waiting for her; he was, as he’d said, sitting in the mess with his tab set to holo-project.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked.

‘ “Heating Freezes Electrons in Twisted Bilayer Graphene”,’ Dorcas answered.

‘Graphene?’ she asked, despite knowing that she didn’t need to understand anything he was reading.

‘Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms in which the atoms form a hexagonal lattice.’ He smiled.

‘Do they? Is that stuff real?’

‘Your carbon-fibre construction sheets are layers of graphenes with electron bonds that—’

She leaned over the table and kissed him.

He paused for a moment. ‘I believe you are trying to tell me that’s enough about graphenes.’

‘For the moment,’ she admitted. ‘Although the concept is interesting … Damn it! I haven’t seen you in days.’

Dorcas smiled. ‘As you see, I have not changed. Nor have you.’

‘How are the Starfish?’ she asked.

He made a face, licking the inside of his cheek with his tongue so that his cheek bulged out. She’d seen him do it before, and she still didn’t know exactly what it meant.

‘How are the Starfish?’ he asked her back. ‘If only I knew. I can only translate things that I essentially already understand. Then we search a three-dimensional logic grid for the chemical response, take a day to work it out, fail, succeed, and then we can work on the next component, only to arrive at “it’s cold”.’

‘But there’s a world of meaning in “it’s cold”,’ she said.

‘If only “it’s cold” was the meaning we’d picked up. I was making an example … You’re so literal.’

‘This from you?’ she asked.

He smiled in self-knowledge. ‘One of the great patrician families feared this contact so much that they were willing to engage in piracy and assassination to prevent it, and look – we’re not learning anything.'

She’d never heard him sounding bitter. It wasn’t in his approach.

‘You expected immediate success?’ she asked.

He shrugged.

‘Wow, I’m not the only one who’s an idiot,’ she said.

He looked up, then sat back, considering her. He nodded as if he’d come to a decision. ‘It’s good to have you back.’

She managed to say, ‘I missed you,’ and he grinned his natural, full-pleasure grin.

People like to be complimented and missed. Got it.

As if they’d mutually agreed that this ended round one, they both rose and went to the food dispensers. Everything was pre-packaged for free-fall eating, in bulbs: curries with rice, orzo pasta with ground meat, a spicy dish with eggplant for vegetarians. Marca took a bulb of each and extra rice, and made delighted sounds as she chewed through the curry.

‘It is the highest testament to the depraved quality of the food at your Orphanage that you vacuum up our zero-g fare with such enjoyment,’ he said.

She shrugged, because her mouth was full.

Naisha Qaqqaq appeared, her hair wrapped in a towel, grabbed food bulbs and sat with them, and then they were joined by several of her shipmates from her last tour at the station. Nbaro opened her helmet bag and shared the cookies, to everyone’s delight.

Nbaro’s eyes kept meeting Dorcas’s, and then they’d both look away, and finally Qaqqaq leaned over and murmured ‘get a room.’

Nbaro made a little moue of feigned surprise. And tried not to look at Dorcas. And that set the tone for the next days, because the two of them followed rules, and the rules said they couldn’t be together until he was no longer her commanding officer. Qaqqaq thought they were crazy, and said so. But Nbaro put her head down and worked, because that was how she dealt with most problems. And because her experiences at the Orphanage made her …

… hesitant.