“For the others… don’t take them harsh. Blowing off steam, mostly. Not you so much as it’s anything. Fear-biting.”
“Fear?”
“Sure,” he said. “Everyone on this boat’s scared dry. Try not to show it, do the work, but we all getting nightmares. Natural, right?”
“What are they afraid of?” she asked.
Behind her the door cycled open and shut. A man said something in a language she didn’t know. Ren tilted his head, and she had the sick, sinking feeling that she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t acted normal, and she didn’t know what her misstep was.
“Ring,” he said at last. “It’s what killed Eros. Could have killed Mars. All that weird stuff it did on Venus, no one knows what it was. Deaded that slingshot kid who went through. Half everyone thinks we should be pitching nukes at it, other half thinks we’d only piss it off. We’re going out as deep as anyone ever has just so we can look in the devil’s eye, and Stanni and Sole and Bob? They’re all scared as shit of what we see in it. Me too.”
“Ah,” she said. “All right. I understand that.”
Ren tried on a smile.
“You? It don’t scare you?”
“It’s not something I think about.”
Chapter Eight: Anna
N
ami and Nono left for Earth a week before Anna’s shuttle. Those last days living alone in those rooms, knowing that she would never be back—that they would never be back—was like a gentle presentiment of death: profoundly melancholy and, shamefully, a little exhilarating.
The shuttle from Europa was one of the last to join the flotilla, and it meant eighteen hours of hard burn. By the time she set foot on the deck of the UNN Thomas Prince, all she wanted was a bunk and twelve hours’ sleep. The young yeoman who’d been sent to greet and escort her had other plans, though, and the effort it would have taken to be rude about it was more than she could muster.
“The Prince is a Xerxes-class battleship, or what we sometimes refer to as a third-generation dreadnought,” he said, gesturing to the white ceramic-over-gel of the hangar’s interior walls. The shuttle she’d arrived on nestled in its bay looking small under the cathedral-huge arch. “We call it a third-generation battleship because it is the third redesign since the buildup during the first Earth-Mars conflict.”
Not that it had been much of a conflict, Anna thought. The Martians had made noises about independence, the UN had built a lot of ships, Mars had built a few. And then Solomon Epstein had gone from being a Martian yachting hobbyist to the inventor of the first fusion drive that solved the heat buildup and rapid fuel consumption problems of constant thrust. Suddenly Mars had a few ships that went really, really fast. They’d said, Hey, we’re about to go colonize the rest of the solar system. Want to stay mad at us, or want to come with? The UN had made the sensible choice, and most people would agree: Giving up Mars in exchange for half of the solar system had probably been a pretty good deal.
It didn’t mean that both sides hadn’t kept on designing new ways to kill each other. Just in case.
“. . . just over half a kilometer long, and two hundred meters wide at its broadest point,” the yeoman was saying.
“Impressive,” Anna replied, trying to bring her wandering attention back.
The yeoman pulled her luggage on a small rolling cart to a bank of elevator lifts.
“These elevators run the length of the ship,” he said as he punched a button on the control panel. “We call them the keel elevators—”
“Because they run along the belly of the ship?” Anna said.
“Yes! That’s what the bottom of seagoing vessels was called, and space-based navies have kept the nomenclature.”
Anna nodded. His enthusiasm was exhausting and charming at the same time. He wanted to impress her, so she resolved to be impressed. It was a small enough thing to give someone.
“Of course, the belly of the ship is largely an arbitrary distinction,” he continued as the elevator climbed. “Because we use thrust gravity, the deck is always in the direction thrust is coming from, the aft of the ship. Up is always away from the engines. There’s not really much to distinguish the other four directions from each other. Some smaller ships can land on planetary surfaces, and in those ships the belly of the ship contains landing gear and thrusters for liftoff.”
“I imagine the Prince is too large for that,” Anna said.
“By quite a lot, actually! But our shuttles and corvettes are capable of surface landings, though it doesn’t happen very often.”
The elevator doors opened with another ding, and the yeoman pushed her luggage out into the hall. “After we drop off your baggage at your stateroom, we can continue the tour.”
“Yeoman?” Anna said. “Is that the right way to address you?”
“Certainly. Or Mister Ichigawa. Or even Jin, since you’re a civilian.”
“Jin,” Anna continued. “Would it be all right if I just stayed in my room for a while? I’m very tired.”
He stopped pulling her baggage and blinked twice. “But the captain said all of the VIP guests should get a complete tour. Including the bridge, which is usually off-limits to non-duty personnel.”
Anna put a hand on the boy’s arm. “I understand that’s quite a privilege, but I’d rather see it when I can keep my eyes open. You understand, don’t you?” She gave his arm a squeeze and smiled her best smile at him.
“Certainly,” he said, smiling back. “Come this way, ma’am.”
Looking around her, Anna wasn’t sure if she actually wanted to see the rest of the ship. Every corridor looked the same: Slick gray material with something spongy underneath covered most walls. Anna supposed it was some sort of protective surface, to keep sailors from injury if they banged into it during maneuvers. And anything that wasn’t gray fabric was gray metal. The things that would be impressive to most people about the ship would be its various mechanisms for killing other ships. Those were the parts of the ship she was least interested in.
“Is that okay?” Ichigawa said after a moment. Anna had no idea what he was talking about. “Calling you ma’am, I mean. Some of the VIPs have titles. Pastor, or Reverend, or Minister. I don’t want to offend.”
“Well, if I didn’t like you I’d ask you to call me Reverend Doctor, but I do like you very much, so please don’t,” she said.