<I itch.>

The translated words were a low growl in Bari’s ear. Crouched in the cramped airlock waiting for it to finish cycling, she barely had the elbow room to get her hand up to her headset and tap her suit mic over to her private channel. “Omi, tell Turquoise I’m working. There’s nothing I can do for him right now.” In another few seconds she would be back inside and not able to talk to him at all anymore.

[I’ve reminded him,] came Omi’s response in its comfortable, artificial cadence. [He tells me he’s going to be quiet now.]

“Thanks,” she said. The lock light turned from orange to a sickly green, and she had to go down on one knee to pull herself through the inner hatch into the cabin. Climbing wearily back up to her feet on the far side, she disengaged her suit’s environment controls and lifted her faceplate to take in lungfuls of stale warm air that smelled of people too long crammed together in a confined place.

“Oh great, she’s back.” Vikka looked up from her seat where, as near as Bari could tell, she hadn’t even moved in the hour-plus she’d been gone.

Cardin spun around in his chair. “You took your time,” he said. “You’re lucky you didn’t spook the herd, the way you were zipping around out there.” If he noticed the contradiction in those statements—you were too slow, you were too fast—he didn’t care. Beside him at the helm, Ceen didn’t even bother to turn around. Bari lifted the cumbersome maneuvering rig up over her head and settled it back in its alcove. Its oxygen tanks had only depleted by 20 percent, but she connected it back up to the recharger anyway. Good habits die hard, bad ones kill you.

Cardin put his hands together and flexed them outward, knuckles cracking, before he returned to peck at the patchwork system board he’d set on the console deck in front of him. “I saw activity out there a few moments ago, but I’m not up yet,” he said. “Did anyone get it?”

“She still has the hand-held,” Vikka said.

“Ms. Park?” Cardin asked.

“Oh,” she said, fumbling for the device her research advisor had spent half a lifetime designing, and checking the tiny display. “There was an 82 percent match with the pattern we associate with unhappiness.”

“Excellent!” Cardin shook a fist in the air in a gesture of triumph. “No one has ever come this close to understanding Rooan communication before. With my system, and the extended, close-up sampling we’ll be taking today, we are making history!” A royal “we,” Bari thought. His ambitions were transparent: King of his little corner of Haudernellian Academia. By his expression she could tell he was imagining the future speaking engagements, celebrity symposiums, and awards ceremonies that would be his natural due.

She knew she was only here because he needed someone expendable to do the spaceside work while he and his precious postdocs huddled around their tiny, blurred monitors congratulating themselves for their own manifest cleverness and superiority, safe and snug within the run-down, decommissioned Corallan shuttle that Cardin had dubbed Project One, but which, after his attempt to camouflage the exterior, would forever be the Space Turd in her mind.

The Sfazili independent who’d hauled them out here into the barrens had taken one look at their craft and declared as much himself; alas, neither Cardin nor anyone else on his team understood the tradesman’s argot, so her amusement had been a private one.

“Okay, people,” Cardin said. “We need to run calibration tests. Ms. Park, you arrayed our external sensors according to my exact specifications?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You double-checked?”

“Twice,” she said. Vikka rolled her eyes.

“So far we’ve been lucky and they haven’t noticed we’re here despite Ms. Park’s thrashing about out there. Ceen has gotten us into position along the outer edge of the herd, and we’ll maneuver our way a little further in as opportunity presents. As you know, the Rooan travel with their bioluminescent shell-walls all turned toward the center axis of the herd, so the further in we get, the more inter-animal communication we should capture. The herd is currently moving about point-oh-oh-oh-two Cee, so we’ve got about six and a half hours before they brush the edge of Auroran territory. We want to be well away by then with as much data as we can collect.

“Ms. Park, give Vikka the handheld unit,” he ordered. “Then go find yourself a place to sit in the back and stay out of our way.”

Vikka got up from her seat and sauntered over. As Bari extended the unit to her, Vikka leaned in closer. “Right before we launched I told Cardin that you were sleeping with Morus and giving away information about the project,” she confided in a low voice. “He was so furious at you that I thought he was going to bust something. Oh, I know! A lie, but what can I say? I just don’t like you Northies.” Smiling, she yanked the handheld out of Bari’s grasp and returned to her seat without a further look back.

Bari finished stowing her gear, her face burning. Morus was not only the top xenobiologist at rival Guratahan Sfazil Equatorial University, he was also studying the Rooan. The rival scientists hated each other with a white-hot passion that neared homicidal rage. It explained why Cardin had become more actively hostile in the last few days. She was lucky he hadn’t had time to replace her—if Vikka had gotten her kicked off the project out of sheer spite . . .

Don’t think about it, she told herself. I’m here. Gear properly stowed, she folded down the jumpseat near the airlock and buckled down her safety tether. And she waited.

From where she sat in the back, her view out the front was mostly obscured, but the light from Beserai’s sun shining on the black, rough backs of the Rooan made faint arcs of silhouette among the stars ahead. She counted a half dozen, though the herd strength was closer to thirty times that number; the very few, vulnerable young were tucked in the center, away from prying eyes. Not even Cardin, in all his arrogance, would risk trying to penetrate into the core of the herd.

As if reading her thoughts, Cardin spoke up. “We need to stay far enough on the periphery so that they don’t take too close a look at us. The Rooan are normally placid animals, but with the toll those pirates and thugs have been taking on the herd’s numbers, they’ll get more skittish the closer we get to Auroran space.”

 [Doesn’t everyone already know this? Why speak if not to say something useful, unless it’s just to hear his own voice?]

Bari allowed herself a small tic of a smile at Omi’s comment. Not that Cardin was wrong; the remote station and surrounding outposts that made up Aurora Enclave had earned their reputation for vicious and capricious violence. The Barrens had many such lawless enclaves, but Aurora was the biggest and meanest of all. Even Earth Alliance, if need drew them into the territories at all, skirted well around it. The Rooan could not. The herd’s migration loop between Beserai and Beenjai was dictated by gravity wells and the shortest of few, long paths between scarce resources. Along the way, the massive dwellers of the void inevitably attracted scientists, a handful of sightseers, and bored Auroran fighters looking for cheap and easy target practice.

Bari looked up as flashes of light caught her eye; one of the Rooan directly ahead was displaying a shifting pattern of bioluminescent greens and yellows, coruscating up and down the creature’s underside. An answering flash of red came from further ahead.

“Shush!” Cardin yelled, though no one was speaking, and even if they were, they could not drown out light with sound. He leaned in close, his whole frame tense. “Why isn’t the translator working?”

“It’s processing,” Vikka said, squinting at the handheld. “Um . . . the first one, it’s giving me ‘food near’ at 40 percent, and the response, um, ‘happiness’ at 75 percent correlation.”

“We’re nowhere near a nutrient source. Give me that,” Cardin said, and yanked the unit out of her hand. He stared at it, shook it, stared at it some more. “Food near,” he repeated, scowling.

“Could it be a statement of a more general anticipation?” Bari spoke up from the back. From the look Vikka shot her, it was an unwelcome interruption. Cardin’s gray eyebrows knit together, then he made a slight tsk sound. “A surprisingly good suggestion,” he said, turning to look one at a time at both Ceen and Vikka as if to reprimand them for not having been the ones to voice it. “Although the common understanding is that the Rooan aren’t sufficiently intelligent for such an indirect concept.”

Vikka had just started to flash a sneer at Bari when he added, “Of course, common understanding is often wrong. If I can prove the Rooan have a rudimentary grasp of abstract thinking, that would be an enormous coup.”

“And if you could prove Northies have a rudimentary grasp—”

“Bigotry doesn’t become you, Vikka.” Cardin cut her off. “Nor jealousy. You’re the professional—act like one.”

[Ha! Face stomp!] came over Bari’s link. [Turquoise asks how much longer you expect to be. I know you can’t answer, so I told him you take your job very seriously and he’ll just have to wait.]

She did take it seriously—seriously enough to have hiked thirty-seven miles of barren no-man’s-land to the isthmus border between North and South nations on Haudernelle, everything she owned on her back and a verichip with a personal recommendation from the Northern Institute’s Director of Xenobiologic Field Studies tucked in a pocket against her breast like a ticket home. Even that had only been enough to get her five minutes of Cardin’s time. If she hadn’t had the experience with zero-grav and the full set of untethered spacewalk certifications, that would have been as far as she’d gotten. He’d told her as much when she signed on, and told her if she didn’t appreciate that he’d given her a job at all she could “go back to the woods and scratch in the dirt for food like the rest of your people,” or something like that; the exact words had fastened less in her memory than the tone of them.

As it turned out, she’d displaced another of Cardin’s students who didn’t have the certs, and Vikka had been trying to drive her out ever since. Bari suspected that they’d been lovers, but didn’t care enough to find out.

Cardin stood up. “On the off chance that Ms. Park is on to something, I should be able to get the system to give us a double translation simultaneously, one of explicit meaning, and one of running extrapolation. But I need to access the primary console to make programming changes. Ceen, keep us steady relative to the herd.”

The professor threw the floor hatch and disappeared down into the tiny hold where the mishmash of tech he’d spent decades putting together nestled like a canker in the ship’s belly. As soon as the hatch closed behind him, Vikka whirled on Bari. “You fucking bitch,” she said. “Are you trying to make me look stupid? Haven’t I warned you to keep your damn Northie mouth shut?”

“You have,” Bari said. She checked her tether, got out of her seat, then popped open her locker and began sorting out her personal gear.

Ahead of them the gigantic shapes of the Rooan flashed light back and forth, yellows and blues, reds and purples, a lone beacon of blue. “Will you two shut up?” Ceen snarled. “It’s bad enough trying to fly this piece of shit as it is, and Cardin will kill us all if we miss anything important out there or spook the herd.”

Ah, my jacket, Bari thought, unfolding the garment and shaking it out.

“Oh, very nice,” Vikka said, reaching a new high pitch. “Did your mommy sew that for you back home? What do you Northies call home, anyway? Palm-fern huts in the woods? Dirt burrows?”

Bari slipped into the jacket. She flexed her arms, shrugged her shoulders, pleased again that even after all these years the fit didn’t impair her physical movement. The jacket was comfortable, almost too much so. She walked forward toward Vikka, the weight of her mag boots on the metal decking and the faint tension of her safety tether a reassurance. “Would you like to see?”

“Why the hell would I want to be anywhere near anything of yours?” Vikka said, as Bari extended one hand, palm up, to show off the workmanship of the embroidered sleeve. As the woman opened her mouth to say more, Bari reached around with her other hand and slammed Vikka’s head into the console in front of her.

“What the fuck!?” Ceen shouted, half-rising out of his seat, as Bari reached over and punched the emergency off for the ship’s gravity field. Untethered, Ceen’s motion propelled him into the back of his seat and into a bulkhead. He managed to get a grip on the seat foam and was trying to swing himself within reach of the end of his free tether when Bari kicked him just hard enough to send him careening around the cabin. Then she bent down and snapped tight the lock on the hatch Cardin had just gone through.

Vikka was struggling up in her seat, one side of her face a brutal red and already beginning to swell, her eyes tearing up with hatred. Bari put a hand on the back of her neck and forced her face back down against the console. “Vikka,” she said. “Please understand. First of all, you make yourself look stupid all on your own. Second, my mother is dead, so I’m not really inclined to listen to you talk about her. Third, while I came to Haudernelle Academy from the North, I wasn’t born there. Still, during my time in the North, nearly everyone I met was intelligent, hard-working, and generous, entirely unlike you. It’s something you might consider if you find yourself face to face with a real ‘Northie.’”

“I am so going to kick your ass,” Vikka hissed. “Cardin will—”

“Cardin can’t do anything, and neither can you.” Bari took the small dermal patch she’d palmed while sorting through her stuff and slapped it—harder than necessary, she had to admit—onto Vikka’s forehead. Almost immediately the woman’s eyes rolled up into the back of her head and she went limp. “Nighty night.”

“Are you mad?” Ceen shouted from where he drifted mid-cabin. “You’re jeopardizing the entire project!”

At least he cares about the science, if nothing else, Bari thought. She peeled the backing off another patch. He watched her do it, flailing his arms hopelessly trying to reach something to grab onto. “If it’s any consolation, Ceen, the project was already failing,” she said. “The herd is going to turn early toward Aurora space, coming dangerously close to their outpost in this sector. You’d only have had another thirty minutes, possibly less, to try to accumulate the material needed to demonstrate the validity of Cardin’s translation program. We both know that’s not nearly enough time. And after this, the herd is going to slingshot off Beserai and head back into deep space for the centuries-long trip to Beenjai. They’ll go dormant and silent, leaving you with nothing left to study.”

“How can you know this?”

Bari sighed. “The Rooan use gravity wells to modulate their velocity, right? If you simply look at the alignment of the planets in this system and their current heading, their trajectory is obvious—and gives them no more options in-system. This has to be the last pass.”

Ceen was silent a moment. “I suggested that to Cardin six months ago and he said I was wrong. He said I was an idiot.”

“Well, when you get out of here, be sure to remind him.”

“Am I going to get out of here?” he asked.

“You might,” she said, and slapped the patch on his arm.

“What is it you want?” he asked, his voice already fading as the sedative grabbed a hold on him. He was out before she could answer, but she did anyway.

“To sleep at night,” she said. Pulling him across the cabin by one arm like a strange balloon, she stuffed him into the chair beside Vikka. She buckled them both in and down, pulling the straps tight to keep the two of them in place.

There was banging on the floor hatch, muffled and indistinct. She ignored it for the moment, and tapped open her mic. “Okay, Omi, the ship is mine,” she said.

[Right on time. I’ll let Turquoise know.]

Bari slipped into the seat Ceen had vacated so abruptly, swapping tethers once she was fully seated and strapped in. Pulling open one of the access panels on the helm console, a small blade took care of long-range communications. Then she reached over and turned off all of Cardin’s external sensors. Sorry, Professor, but I don’t need any recordings of this.

“I’m taking the ship further into the herd,” she said.

[Turquoise says you’re clear, and the front of the herd appears to have begun to turn.]

The intercom on the helm began blinking. She pressed a button, and a moment later Cardin’s voice rang out tinnily in the main cabin. “What the hell is going on up there, Ceen?”

“I’m sorry, but Ceen is unavailable.”

“Ms. Park. Put Vikka on.”

“Vikka is also unavailable.”

“Did we have an accident? A malfunction?”

“No accident,” she replied, as she logged into the helm console with Vikka’s password and changed all the passcodes. “Ship systems are all green.”

“We’ve lost gravity and the hatch above me is stuck fast. What do you call that?”

“I call that one small switch and a medium-sized lock, Dr. Cardin.”

The pause was longer this time. “Ms. Park, explain. Now.”

“I decline,” she said. “If I were you, I’d get a hold of something shortly, because I’m about to start shutting systems down and I assure you, sharp things multiply in the dark.”

“Morus put you up to this. How much did he pay you to infiltrate my team and sabotage my project?”

“A poor guess. I’ve never even met Professor Morus,” she said. “Please rest assured that my real client has no interest in the success or failure of your project; you are merely a convenience.”

“What is it you want?”

Everyone keeps asking me that, Bari thought with some annoyance. For Cardin, she had a more practical and immediate answer. “I want your ship.” And then, because she didn’t really want to talk to him again, she turned the intercom speaker back off.

[You’re just about in position,] Omi said over her private link. [Turquoise is going to help spot for you, so I’m patching him back in. A fair warning: he’s still complaining about being itchy.]

<It does itch!>

“I’m certain it must, but it’s not for very much longer,” Bari replied, trusting Omi to translate. “How am I looking?”

<Do you see the big female ahead? Pull up beside her.>

Bari leaned forward and peered out the window. She’d closed the distance between her and the herd, and again she was struck by how singularly massive all the Rooan were. And how much, if they’d been green instead of gray-black, and hadn’t had shifting fluorescent colors along their underbellies, they’d look like gigantic space pickles. “How do I tell which ones are female?” she asked. Or “big”?

There was a pause, then Omi answered instead of Turquoise. [I’m not translating that.]

Banging started up again on the hatch, easily ignored. Bari picked one of the several looming shapes in front of the ship and sidled up between it and another. “Is this good enough?” she asked.

<It will do.>

[The herd is on a straight trajectory now, and will cross into Auroran territory shortly,] Omi said. [You should lower the ship’s energy output to avoid detection.]

“On it,” she said, and she already was, shutting down all non-essential systems and the Turd’s primary engines. Unless something went terribly wrong, she wouldn’t need anything more than minimal thrusters to keep her position amidst the Rooan. Just before hitting the lights, she glanced around the cabin and spotted a small silver ball hovering, idle, near the ceiling at the back of the ship. She snapped her fingers. “Bob,” she called. The bob lit up, glided near. “Light,” she ordered. “Thirty lumens.”

The bob switched on, casting a light bright enough for Bari to make out the controls but not much brighter. She turned off all ship interior and exterior running lights. There was a brief flurry of sound from the hatch that sounded faintly like someone scrabbling for purchase, then nothing. I did warn him.

With the faint light from the bob sufficient for what she needed, she killed all remaining main and auxiliary power feeds to the ship. A faint hum she’d long ago stopped hearing became noticeable by its sudden absence, and reflexively she took a deep breath. Ceen and Vikka, unconscious, breathed shallow and slow, and she resented only one of them what air they used. Cardin’s supply was his own. Bari would use only a little herself, and if they didn’t all die at Auroran hands she’d have plenty of time to turn the air generators back on before anyone felt any ill effects.

Leaving the helm controls on auto, she stripped out of her coveralls and pulled on the suit that she’d taken from her locker, a tight-fitting, matte-black, alien-made biosuit much less cumbersome than the Turd’s, and worth far more than all Cardin’s grants and endowments combined. She slipped her jacket back on over that and buttoned it up. The jacket was fine black linen, a double-row of magnetic buttons up the front placket, and a small semi-circular starburst of silver thread embroidered where mandarin collar met left shoulder, where sleeve met arm. She ran her fingers lightly over the old thread and thought of long-forgotten things.

[I’m picking up incoming from the outpost. Four ships, probably showing up for some more target practice on the Rooan. They don’t appear to be in a hurry, but they’re definitely coming here.]

“Got it,” she said, pulling her suit hood up over her short-cropped hair and sealing the face-plate. Next she put on a vest, quickly checking each pocket to make sure it was still sealed and its contents secure. Ignoring Cardin’s maneuvering rig, she pulled a much lighter-weight, thin-profile pack out of her locker and slipped it over her shoulders, fastening straps across her chest, abdomen, and crotch. A small plug connected it into the suit. Then she took out the last item she’d need, sliding it into the narrow sheath just over her shoulder.

She flexed the muscles in her hand in sequence, powering on the suit’s systems. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

[Loud and clear,] Omi answered.

<Are you coming out to play?> Turquoise added.

“I am,” Bari said, and she cycled herself out the airlock into space.

As part of its camouflage, the outside of the Space Turd had been given a rough, uneven surface. It had made adding covert handholds to it trivially easy, and Bari used these to move up and on top of the ship. Around her the Rooan shifted ever so slightly, giving her an unnerving vertigo. She wondered where among them her friends were hiding—nowhere easy to find, certainly.

No one who had not been explicitly invited there came intentionally within reach of Aurora. This inactivity made the pilots who flew along the border outposts bored, and bored pilots found any entertainment they could. On their last two passes a third of the Rooan herd had been lost; much more and they wouldn’t have the numbers they needed to survive.

The gigantic animals must have become aware of the approaching ships, because the flashing on their undersides became more intense. [The ships are on direct approach,] Omi said. [They should be in range in three point six minutes. The herd is getting nervous.]

At the apex of the ship, perched on the nose, she unclipped the large energy-cannon she’d tucked there just before the Turd left Glaszerstrom Station to intercept the Rooan. “I need a window,” she said.

[Working on it. These things are hard to nudge.]

The Rooan to Bari’s left began drifting upward, and Bari could make out four small pinpoints of light moving toward them. In the distance was the faint blue glow of Outpost One. Deep in space behind that was the heart of Aurora itself, with its implacable, invincible warlord, who took everything he could see, and owned everything he could touch. She gritted her teeth, raised the cannon, and took aim at the closest of the incoming ships.

The first one will be the easiest, she told herself, and fired. The pinpoint of light flared for an instant and went out, as immediately the other three veered away. Now the hunt would begin; they’d be scanning the area, but the Turd, powered almost fully down, would be virtually invisible. Her Dzenni suit, far more sophisticated than anything found in human space, was a total insulator: she would not radiate heat, she would not absorb it. She would not be easy to find.

One of the remaining ships moved nearer, slowly edging up on the herd as if scanning for something on the far side of it. She checked the cannon’s heat load—still only 12 percent, still cool enough—and then shouldered it again.

The second ship flashed and disintegrated.

“I don’t see the other ships. Omi?”

[One is circling around the Rooan. I don’t see the other.]

All of a sudden, around them, the Rooan began to shift and scatter, their light-patterns now oscillating wildly. <I believe he’s trying to use the herd for cover while he looks for the source of the fire,> Turquoise said.

“That works for me,” Bari said. She turned around, then threw herself backward in a panic, flat onto the surface of the ship as a Rooan barreled overhead, nearly knocking her off the ship. Big mistake, Bari, she told herself. No matter how big they are, they aren’t going to make any sound when they move. Pay more attention.

The passage of the creature had left a small gap, and she could just see the edges of the third ship behind them. She got the cannon up, took the shot, and missed. Swearing, she checked the heat load again—a little over 40 percent now, starting to get warm. The ship banked, disappeared behind a cluster of Rooan, and briefly reappeared farther up than she had expected. Ship’s moving in an evasive pattern. “Can you see him?” she asked.

[No . . . yes. He’s banked low again, circling around.]

“Thanks,” Bari said. She lined up the sights on a gap ahead, and smiled when the ship appeared. Another flash, and then there was just one.

Don’t run home yet, she thought at it, I need you.

She ejected the power cartridge from the cannon and let go of both pieces, where they drifted along with the herd. The cartridge would cool off quickly in open space. Unencumbered, she looked around the herd to get a sense of their positions, stood up straight, and launched herself up and forward toward the bright yellow-orange underside of the ancient Rooan who had nearly knocked her down moments ago. A quick squeeze of one hand sent enough thrust from her pack to carry her forward, and she reached the big creature and got a grip on its craggy, pitted underside, oscillating from yellow to orange and back again under her gloves. Two more jumps brought her forward.

“Where’s my last fighter, Omi?”

[I still can’t see it. Turquoise?]

<It’s directly ahead. The herd is moving around it. You’ve almost caught up to him.>

If only Cardin knew how thoroughly his Rooan-camouflage would be tested, she thought. The problem was, Cardin had only designed it to stand up to the scrutiny of dumb animals; as aggressive as Aurora’s fighters were, “dumb” they were not.

She moved hand over hand along the side of her Rooan until she was up near the pointed front, then flipped her faceshield to infrared. Even then the enemy fighter wasn’t immediately obvious. It was only as one of the Rooan directly ahead of her swung slightly out of line to avoid something that she spotted it. He’s playing the same trick I am, shedding his heat load to avoid detection while looking for his enemy. If she wasn’t wearing her Dzenni suit, she was sure she’d be lit up like a nova on his screens.

She had maybe a minute before he was close enough to the Turd to spot it for the fake it was. She smiled and reached into her pack. Not a problem.

Copyright © 2011 by Suzanne Palmer