Captain Kid

MORNING WATCH 04:37:12 Graveyard orbit circum Typhon

"Great uncle Lyle has a ship like this." Kay stepped out of the forward lock into a narrow tube lined with loose power cables and scraps of shiny insulation, showing that the ship was a work in progress. She wore an adult vacuum suit several sizes too big, cinched tight at chest, waist, and crotch, to keep her from tripping over it. Luckily, spin gravity was a relaxed .5 g. Seeing pressure was up, she undogged her helmet and lifted it off, shaking out straight blonde hair that fell to just past her small delicate jaw. Squared ends and razor bangs were edged in blue–matching her eyes. Filling her lungs with ship air, Kay found it musty, smelling of Chimps and solvent, way better than the stale stuff in her over-sized suit.

("Can you pilot her?") inquired a disembodied voice coming from the comlink clipped to her ear. Speed-of-light lag made the voice seem to hesitate, meaning that the signal came from a ways off. Hundreds of thousands of klicks at least.

"Sure, no sweat." At thirteen standard years, Kay already knew better than to show an angstrom of doubt, not when money hung on the deal. "Just let me look her over." Following the snaking power cables to the control deck, she brushed foam packing pretzels off the spanking new command couch, then climbed aboard, her small frame sinking deep into the crash webbing. "Centaurii Comet, right?"

("Serial number CC-8879442,") replied the voice in her ear.

If you say so. Finding the couch lead, she lifted the blue-fringed hair at the back of her neck and jacked in, running a swift systems-check. All green. Figures. Hardwired systems sit for centuries, waiting to spring to life–while the human parts wore down, or went to pieces. Lying back, she summoned up a virtual tour of the ship, a spherical pressure cabin married to a cylindrical antimatter drive, originally an insystem robo-freighter, presently being refitted by a SuperChimp crew, apparently for smuggling. She that noted the redone command cabin was a bit short, creating space behind the aft bulkhead. "So you need someone to make a shakedown run to Tartarus?"

("Yes, a pilot to check the work of the SuperChimps on the refit, then take the ship and SuperChimps to Tartarus.")

"Why take the Chimps?" She did not intend to lift ship until the refit was done–being desperate, but not clinically crazy. There were smarter ways of killing herself than taking a suspect ship deep into Typhon’s gravity well, headed for Tartarus, an airless volcanic moon, torn by tidal forces and drenched in hard radiation from Typhon’s Van Allen belts.

("These SuperChimps are needed on Tartarus.")

Poor Chimps. Poor her–she was headed for Tartarus too. Money can make you do ghastly things. Kay asked, "When will I be paid?"

("Payment in your name is waiting to be claimed on Tartarus, you need only go there.")

"Sounds great!" Actually, it sounded like a blazing lot of bullshit, but it did not pay to say so–in fact, the only way the excursion paid at all was to pilot this refitted museum piece safely to Tartarus. "Just let me go get my kit."

("Be back before 1600.")

"Absolutely!" Kay did not let a scintilla of doubt into her voice, grinning idiotically, sounding as perky as she could while lying at the controls of a derelict robo-freighter, a cosmic packing crate discarded ages before she was born–being told that she had to see the ship to Tartarus, for reasons so dangerous she dared not ask. "No trouble at all," she assured the invisible voice, checking the time in her head. It was 04:55:07. "I’ll be back by the first dogwatch."

Leaping up before the voice changed its mind, she waded through packing scraps to the airlock, clamping on her helmet, and returning to the stale stuffy air from Mom’s worn recycler. Cycling through the lock, she emerged from the despin system onto an open docking port on the ship’s main axis. Telling her boots to grip, she walked out to stand on the empty docking ring, surrounded by vacuum and starlight–all dressed up with nowhere to go. She just wanted to be out of the ship, before something screwed the deal. Silly, since the comlink was still in her ear, and the disembodied voice could call it off anytime, or demand she do it blindfolded. To which Kay would have to happily say, "Yes." But she herself would not prolong the process one nanosecond. What was there to negotiate? She was being offered more credit than she had ever seen to pilot a ship–something she had known how to do since she was two. Kay had to accept, resolutely refusing to consider the risks, consequences, or glaringly obvious dangers. It was not as if she had a choice.

Putting the comlink to use, she hit the net, scanning frequencies, scamming a ride, talking to anyone who would talk to her, hoping to get back to The Hub as painlessly as possible. Telling all who would listen that she was "deep in the Graveyard, needing a ride Home."

On the far side of her visor was one of the most awesome sights in Human Space, the Orion nebula from close up, great fingers of glowing gas tipped with stars in the making, seen through the young bright lights of Dawn Cluster, hundreds of suns crowded into a few score light-years, blazing at her out of the blackness. Starry nebula stretched from straight overhead almost to her feet, where it was abruptly cut off by the curved tawny-brown cloud tops of a ringed gas giant half a million klicks "below" her. This was Typhon, the huge Jovian world that everything hereabouts orbited, circled by immense silver rings taking up half the sky. By local convention, going deeper into Typhon’s steep gravity well was "down," and everywhere else in the universe was "up." Somewhere "down," there, between her and the rings, spun Tartarus, Typhon’s innermost moon, a sulfuric volcanic slag heap, freezing cold and lava hot, bathed in Typhon’s Van Allen radiation–that for some unknown reason urgently needed this ship and its Chimp crew. So urgently that they were willing to have her pilot it, a sign of practically suicidal desperation on someone’s part, or monumental stupidity. But who was Kay to question her luck?

Smiling into her helmet cam, she pictured the people she talked to–Mom’s transceiver chip in the back of her skull let her see images projected directly into her optical lobes, so she could read faces. Someone had to burn mass and come out of their way to pick her up. Someone human. Chimps lacked the authority, and few cyborgs would give her the time of day–narrowing her choices alarmingly. CC-8879442 orbited deep in the Graveyard, a parking orbit for cargoless ships and airless hulks at the edge of Typhon’s Van Allen belts. Scavengers, salvage crews, refit parties, ring-runners, and antique dealers all visited the Graveyard–if only sporadically. So that’s who she appealed to, pleading patiently while the worn recycler on Mom’s old v-suit labored in the background.

Finally, she found a guy who felt right, who had not only a ship but a job, a fat, friendly tug operator doing orbital maintenance, promising to fit her into his schedule as long as she paid for her mass. Since she massed next to nothing, it was a deal–though she still wished he were a woman.

Settling in to wait, Kay stood weightless in her mother’s oversized v-suit, listening to the laboring recycler. Being on the axis of rotation made the whole ship seem to spin around her, but left her stable relative to the stars, pointed smack at Betelgeuse. But Typhon was the big attraction, blazing in half-phase with its giant rings, so huge that she couldn’t see it all. She searched for Tartarus, but the tiny moon was too close in, blotted out by the bright rings. She was going to really be a ring rat now, close enough to file her nails on them.

It was 05:37:42. Waiting began to wear. Space travel had way too much dead time, even for little hops like here to The Hub. Nor did she like how Mom’s recycler sounded–if it gave out, she had just a small reserve before the suit died.

Retreating to the net, she scanned for free feelie casts, finding a 3V ad for a resort and retirement aerostat in Typhon’s upper atmosphere. Floating like a huge transparent bubble several klicks across, the aerostat hung from a giant balloon of heated hydrogen, suspended amid brown clouds of ammonium hydrosulfide hundreds of klicks above a grey-white sea of water ice clouds. Within the aerostat’s protective bubble was a free-form world, where beautiful people flitted between aerial hamlets on gossamer wings and skycycles. Fairyland to a child raised in cubicles and corridors, breathtakingly wonderful no matter how often she felt it. She blended with the ad, riding a skycycle with wind streaming in a cool rush of feeling over her face, weirdly refreshing. She pedaled along, dodging skyships, pleasure barges, and colorful homes floating like open flowers, complete with hanging gardens and rooftop landing pads. Aerostat technology had been used by the first settlers to terraform Oceania and the inner worlds, then introduced to Typhon to provide living space in the outer system. Ice-mining and terraforming left colonies scattered about Typhon living off local resources and gravity advantage–not everyone could pick up and move to the wonderful new inner worlds. Kay was having her troubles just getting to The Hub.

Shooting through waterfall rainbows, she skimmed the surface of the warm ballast lake at the bottom of the bubble, feeling the splash of spray on her feet, all without fear of crashing–this was just a commercial. To prove it, she pulled back on the skycycle and did a perfect inside loop right into the lake.

Soon as she hit the water, she was swimming, no longer aboard a skycycle, but nude, wearing only swim fins, goggles, and a rebreather. Warm oxygenated water turned her into an aquatic creature, gliding at will over sunlit sand through schools of tiny silver fish, swimming effortlessly despite never having been in water deeper than a sponge bath–all thanks to the power of advertising.

Suddenly, she was back standing in her oversized suit, warm limbs still twitching from the swim. Suit alarms wailed as a tug came in to dock at the port she was standing on. Her ride was here. Clearing the docking ring, she waited until the locks matched, then entered the tug, finding it spotless compared to what she was leaving–usually a good sign. "Welcome aboard," the tug operator called out from his command couch. "Crack your hat and have a seat."

She had the usual split-second to decide about the man, while the lock cycled closed behind her and ships prepared to part. Was this guy going to hurt her? Should she go back? Risk the next ride instead? Half a dozen times, she had turned right about and been out the lock before her surprised ride said hello. And so far, she had always guessed right, since in hundreds of rides, nothing bad had ever happened. Not real bad anyway–not yet. This guy had a comfortable slovenly appearance that did not match the clean cabin, giving him a sympathetic complexity, beefy and easy going, totally adapted to zero-g, yet not afraid to be neat. She relaxed a bit as the lock clicked shut behind her–for better or worse, she was aboard the tug. "Thanks," she replied cheerfully, pulling off her helmet, "shan’t mind if I do."

His air tasted as neat as his cabin, not clean and free like on an aerostat, but well-preserved. Kay parked herself in the co-pilot’s couch, snapping her belt to the crash webbing, as he asked her, "Where you from?"

Unsealing a glove, she pushed back her big suit sleeve, showing him her tattoo: K-9251949. He nodded at her crèche number, "So you got no family?"

"Just Mom’s uncle Lyle." Who didn’t know she existed until she’d looked him up. "He has a ship of his own–but it’s not as nice as yours."

"Wish she were mine." The big man smiled ruefully.

"Well, you keep it real nice." She laid on the compliments thick as she could. "Granduncle Lyle’s is some mess."

His jowly smile widened. "What was that ship I picked you up from?"

She shrugged, "Just there looking for a job." She had never even asked the ship’s name. "Didn’t get it."

"What kind of job?" Captain Inquisitive cocked an eyebrow.

She had not asked what she would carry to Tartarus, knowing it must be heinously criminal–otherwise, they would be idiots to hire her. Unlicensed pilots could cost you your ship; hiring a thirteen-year-old without formal training showed utter contempt for the law, meaning a cargo so despicable only a desperate teenager would haul it "no questions asked." It hardly helped her to know how criminal, since bland ignorance was the best way to beat a brain-scan. She shrugged again, "Told you, I didn’t get it. How hard is it to gun a rig like this?"

He laughed, "Not hard. Lookin’ for my job?"

"Sure thing!" She started asking dumb kid questions about orbital mechanics, getting him to talk tug operations, salvage hassles, ring-runner gossip, rumors of slavers insystem, family problems; he showed her happy waving holos of his three wives and seven kids. When conversation lapsed, she let her mind drift, hopping aboard a feelie ad for an starliner headed outsystem, hiding her absence behind blue-trimmed bangs and a spacey blonde smile.

Starliner Artemis was built to pamper interstellar travelers with bars, casinos, lounges, and recreation decks, and a hollow core where garden balconies formed near-vertical cliff faces, seemingly klicks apart, enclosing a virtual space filled with winding trails and cascading waterfalls. Passengers could step from their stateroom terraces into hologram landscapes that were changed weekly–so that just finding your way to a favorite bistro became an adventure. Anything to fight boredom during the months of shiptime it took to see the stars. She sampled wind-surfing on the pool deck and the virtual world of Q-deck, popping back now and again to see if her ride was saying anything important. Each time she left the feelie, Orion Lines eagerly reminded her that Artemis was nearing Typhon orbit, her last stop insystem–with SPACE AVAILABLE for outbound passengers! She wished that she could go, but she didn’t have the credit to get to the Graveyard and back.

Abruptly, her ride was over–the tug pilot was telling her that they were at The Hub. Hurriedly unstrapping, she apologized for daydreaming. Several ships were docked in the torus station, making The Hub look like a rimless wheel with most of the spokes missing. Home sweet home. And time to pay up. Her ride calculated her mass cost, handing her the keypad so she could check his figures. They checked–it would cost all her credit, leaving her nothing for the trip back with her kit. Her bare thumb hovered nervously over PAY.

"Hey, kid," the guy asked softly. "Want to save yourself the credit?"

"Sure," she replied slowly, relaxing her fingers, letting the keypad float away from her hand. Somehow, she had to hustle the credit for a ride back to the Graveyard. Turn this guy down, and the next one might not be nearly so nice. "So long as I do not have to take off my suit."

"You really like that v-suit?" He sounded disappointed at not seeing her naked.

She started to say how little she had to show under the bulky suit, then stopped, fearing it might queer the whole deal. Forced by circumstances to be a connoisseur of child molesters, Kay guessed that this guy was not the sort who got off on seeing girls suffer. He just thought of her as "young stuff" and wanted to get his a little early, making him more lazy than mean. Hell, she could tell that he liked her, though his way of expressing it was to take criminal advantage of her, showing a need for serious psych reprogramming. Pronto. But that was his problem. She just told him, "It belonged to my Mom."

"Your Mom was a vacuum hand?" He sounded impressed, and a bit embarrassed at propositioning someone’s baby girl.

"She was a pilot, and shipped out across half the galaxy." Kay gave the tug captain her warmest, most dazzling smile. "Mom was born in Alpha C, right next to Old Earth–and this was her v-suit." She did not mention that Mom had died in it–something Kay thought about every time she put it on.

"So you just can’t stand to take it off?"

Kay smiled even wider, stubbornly determined to stay in the suit. "It was all she left me." Not strictly true; the transceiver chip in her skull had been left for her too, along with enough credit to have it put into her as a toddler. It had originally been in her mother’s head.

"So your Mom’s dead? What about your dad?"

"Sperm donor," she replied cheerfully. "MSS-789439-X18."

"Guess that means you’re on your own?"

"You bet," she said it like she would not have it any other way.

"And how old are you?"

"Sixteen," she lied to make him feel better, since it didn’t matter to her.

"Earth years?" He looked suspicious.

She nodded eagerly. He gave in and let her keep the suit on. Adept at disconnecting parts of her brain, Kay put herself on automatic, sending her conscious mind on another visit to starship Artemis–no wind-surfing or virtual-adventuring this time, just leaning on a terrace rail in the liner’s hanging gardens, listening to night music and smelling jasmine in the dark air, while hologram fireflies blinked ancient come-ons to each other. Her ride ended up tipping her.

As soon as she was off the tug, Kay rinsed her mouth with chemical-tasting wash water, careful not to swallow, wishing she could afford bottled water from the bulkhead dispenser. Corridor taps were clearly marked NOT FOR INTERNAL USE.

To take her mind off her thirst–and her impromptu audition for wife #4–Kay tried guesstimating her chances. To be brutally truthful, she had signed on with hardened criminals who hoped to profit off her trip to Tartarus. Fortunately, payment seemed foolproof, since Tartarus confirmed the credit was hers, merely needing to be claimed. That payment was her lifeline, her chance to go somewhere for real, instead of hitching 3V rides on starliner ads. Best of all, no matter how she turned it over in her head, she couldn’t see any real profit, in killing her. If they were blowing up the ship for insurance, why make it murder as well? And what idiot would insure an illegal ring-runner with a teenage pilot? They wanted the ship and Chimps on Tartarus for a reason, a seriously criminal reason–so they got a cheap pilot, who knew nothing and could not testify against them, whoever they were. Disposable but not doomed, that was her ticket. Just because her employers were hardened criminals, didn’t mean they had to be completely heartless.

Squeezing past tired looking families camped in the passageways, she got to her storage locker, and found an aging shaven-headed vacuum hand sprawled in front of it, thin and gaunt, and reeking of potable coolant. Kneeling down, she shook him, "Hey, old-timer, wake up, I need to get to my stuff."

His good eye flicked open, and he stared up at her, his questioning look turning into a lopsided grin. "Kay! I prayed you would come back."

She smiled wearily. "And here I am."

"Where did you go?" His questioning look returned. "No one knew where you went, like you had vanished from The Hub."

Her fondest ambition. She sighed and sat down beside him, "I went to see about a ship."

"What ship?" He started to panic. "You can’t ship out. You’re my angel, the only beautiful thing I see every day! If you leave, there will be nothing." He waved at the blank passageway bulkhead to prove his point.

Pretty bleak, but that was why she was leaving. "Look," she whispered, "there is good news, but you must keep it secret."

"What good news?" He still sounded wary.

"Promise to keep this secret," she insisted. "I’m signing on as captain."

"Shit, girl, that’s absolutely crazy!"

"Ain’t it?" She nodded cheerfully. "And criminal, too. With an antimatter drive and a SuperChimp crew. My crew, pretty scary, huh? And I want you to go too, as my supercargo. Whadya say, will you come with me?"

He gave her a grateful, bewildered look. "You are an angel. My golden angel!"

She laughed outright for the first time in what felt like forever. "Then move over, old-timer. This is Captain Angel speaking."

"Aye, aye." With difficulty, he slid away from her door. "Where are we shipping to?"

She arched a blonde eyebrow. "Does it matter?"

He laughed, shaking his shaved head sorrowfully, "Long as it’s not here."

"There could be danger," Kay confessed. "I mean, you know, any lift can be dangerous. . . ." This one more than most.

"Dangerous?" He looked astonished. "Signing unto an unknown ship, sight unseen, for an illegal trip with an unlicensed underage pilot? Where’s the risk to that?"

She laughed again. "When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound nearly so bad. Be ready by the first dogwatch."

He raised a crooked finger, reminding her. "Better to die in space than live in a box!"

"You wish." She thumbed the lock, and her storage box sprang open. He just slept in passageways–she was the one who lived in a box. Crawling into her three-meter storage locker, she closed the door, shedding her mother’s suit like a chrysalis in the darkness, followed by her sweat-soaked pants and tee, exposing her bare thin body to the safety of the dark locker. Finding her cooler by touch, she got out a packet of water, broke the foil seal and drank. By the next dog watch, she would be living on ship’s rations, eating and drinking her fill for the first time ever.

Now she just felt drained. Lying curled in darkness, she let herself go, crying lightly at being alone, an ache so old that it seemed to always be with her. She thought about her dead Mom, and her dad, Male Sperm Sample-789439-X18. The X18 meant his name could not be released until she was 18. He only wanted to meet her as an adult. Five more years. How the fuck was she supposed to survive until then? Sometimes, she tried chatting with kids on Typhon or Oceania, real kids, on real worlds, with real lives, but speed-of-light lag made her look so hick and stupid, taking forever to answer simple questions. Too slow even for virtual sex, except for the crudest sort of show-and-tell–which she did not much like anyway. She wanted someone to hold her and touch her, and tell her she was not alone.

Her one ticket out of here was the chip put in her skull as a toddler; with it, she could pilot any conventional spacecraft. Mom’s files were extensive and continually updated themselves, making for a weird upbringing. How many three-year-old girls had an "invisible friend" who was a gravity drive cyber-friendly, Centuarii Starcruiser? Being born in space, she could not afford to look back. Tartarus could hardly be worse than this, and on Tartarus, credit waited to take her somewhere else. Or so she hoped. Her employers were saving a fortune over the cost of a real pilot; would they kill her to save the little she cost? Unlikely. Or to shut her up? Possibly.

Better to die in space than live in a box. Setting her head for 0800, she closed her eyes, returning to starship Artemis, to dance through a low-g lounge with handsome hologram officers in snappy Orion Lines uniforms. Movement and music soon lulled her to sleep. One more hitch to the Graveyard, then she would have her own ship–then look out, universe!

MissBehavin

Second DOG WATCH 18:54:33 In constant-g transit to Typhon

Hardwired to her work station by superconducting cable, Heidi Van der Graf stared into virtual space, watching two lopsided moonlets tumble toward each other. Connecting her biocircuitry directly to the onboard systems, the cable plugged into a microsocket at the back of her head that was hidden by naturally pink hair. The two tumbling satellites were guardian moons–Aetna I and Aetna II–pockmarked cinders a hundred klicks across, on concentric orbits forty klicks from the outer edge of Typhon’s A-ring. With an orbital separation well within their mean diameters, they seemed determined to collide, and Heidi aimed to put Artemis’ passengers at the upcoming point of impact.

("Ship bearing ZERO-FOUR-FOUR plus TWENTY, looks to be a ring-runner.") Heidi thought heinous thoughts about her boss, having seen the ship already, a Centaurii Comet skirting the rings, making for Tartarus–too old and slow to be trouble. Heidi’s whole job was seeing things before they happened; now she felt like her section head was sitting at her shoulder, willing her to screw up, and for no good reason. Sure, she was newly signed on, never serving on a posh starliner before. Worse yet, she had shocking pink hair, green eyes, and dimples when she grinned. So what? None of that made her an idiot; in fact, she could already tweak unrivaled virtual effects out of Artemis’ humdrum circuitry.

Gasps came over the comnet as Heidi zoomed in on the moonlets. Pick-ups on Aetna II let her plunge straight to the surface, then shoot upward. Passengers packed into lounges and staterooms tuned to 3V found themselves staring up from the airless surface of Aetna II. An astounding scene. Typhon’s silvery A-ring rose right out of the short, pitted horizon, standing edgewise in space, neatly bisecting the great neon blotch of the Orion nebula. Six moons were up. Oceania, Typhon’s largest satellite, hung like a powder-blue pearl amid the hot young stars of Dawn Cluster. All backed by synthesized accompaniment–Aretha Chou’s Pleiades Symphony. Not bad for the new girl! Her Orion Lines contract read Signalsmate, Second Class, but Heidi rated herself a virtual artist, with the cosmos for her palette and music for a brush.

Obviously unimpressed, her supervisor broke into the music of the spheres, rattling off irrelevant info on the ring-runner. ("Ship is MissBehavin, anti-matter drive robo-freighter inbound for Tartarus.") Heidi swore silently at her immediate superior, Chief Signalsmate Marten DeRuyter, a pompous twit, breaking the flow of her act with authoritative announcements, blowing the mood she created. Shut up and enjoy the show! She desperately needed to shine–to go totally nova, showing Orion Lines what they were getting.

Slowly, Aetna I rose up over the stone’s-throw horizon. Bigger and more menacing as it came on, the moonlet plunged straight at the smaller satellite, gathering speed. Tumbling toward the viewpoint, its cratered surface grew to fill the entire sky. Millions of tons of misguided rock and ice hurtled right at Aetna II. An unnerving sight, even in 3V. Virtual effects put anyone who’d tuned in smack at the point of collision. Pulses quickened. Music swelled to a crescendo, as passengers braced themselves, hugging loved ones, and hunkering deeper into body-couches. Heidi could hear sharp intakes of breath on the comnet. Heart-attack time. Catastrophic impact rushed at them, scary and awesome, threatening to send unstable personalities caroming about their staterooms.

At the last second, the cosmos flinched. Aetna I and Aetna II somersaulted in space. One instant, they were close enough together to see house-sized boulders on Aetna I’s surface. A moment later, Aetna II swung completely around, switching orbits with Aetna I–a dance that the two guardian moons had been doing down through the ages as they swept the outer rim of Typhon’s A-ring.

Instead of facing a shattering collision, passengers found themselves staring at Typhon’s vast multicolored cloud tops, while Aetna I whirled off into space, a dwindling hunk of rock and ice. Great brown and yellow bands of ammonium hydrosulfides streamed across the face of the gas giant, whipped by white storm eddies bigger than planets, whirling one into another across a colossal disk spanned by silver rings, incredibly immense and breathtakingly unexpected. Stunned silence turned to cheers, showering Heidi in comnet applause. Chief Steward Taylor called to congratulate her. So did the First Officer. That ought to get DeRuyter off her back.

No such luck. Chief Signalsmate DeRuyter curtly took control, telling her via private back-channel. ("Daddy will do the encore.")

("Why?") Heidi hated men who called themselves "daddy"–especially to subordinates–one more warning that her boss was wired pretty weird. She wanted to keep going, straight down through the cloud tops to the aerostats floating in Typhon’s upper atmosphere–contrasting the empty infinity of space with the endless cloud plain of the great ringed planet.

("You’ll see, just lay back and learn.")

You wish! Giving up control, Heidi cursed DeRuyter for treating her like a trainee. Sure she was new, but she had given an orgasmic performance, on top of a résumé that read like she’d made it up herself. Her boss would be hard put to do better. She saw Typhon vanish, replaced by blank starscape. The image tightened. At the center of the starfield sat the Centaurii Comet, centuries old and hopelessly obsolete, with her round pressure cabin and stubby antimatter drive, MissBehavin bound for Tartarus, the ring-runner. So? Heidi saw the virtual audience ratings slip as staterooms went off-line. Sensors picked up random conversation in the L-deck lounge. Heidi smirked. We can’t all be a hit. People drifted toward new pleasures, ignoring DeRuyter’s virtual offering. Boredom was the bane of space travel. High-g drives and relativistic velocities had failed to erase the gulf between the stars, but people still wanted to "go there"–even if it took months of shiptime. Designed to meet that challenge, Artemis had every stateroom wired for 3V. Plus a pool deck and lounge deck. Another deck devoted to kids. Non-stop virtual shows. Hologram acts and gambling arcades. On-line orgies that would make Caligula blush. Anything to make light-years fly by.

Heidi unplugged. Her internal transceiver let her follow things without being wired into the work station; she used the ship to supply images and boost her signals, but the chip in her skull turned thoughts into actions. Her hand groped for a dopestick. Nasty habit, but she needed to even out the strain, mixing some yin in her yang, making life a little less like work. She inhaled sharply and the stick lit itself, filling her lungs with narcotic smoke.

Too bad she had to light up in a church. Her stateroom was set on bright summer day, showing a 3V interior of La Mezquita, the great mosque built by the Caliphs of Cordoba, converted after the Reconquest into a Christian cathedral. Colorful columns and arches plundered from Roman temples disappeared into virtual distance. Beyond an ornate inscribed archway–patterned on the Mihrab, a prayer niche built by Hakam II–perfumed water splashed on the sunlit marble of the Alhambra’s Court of Lions. She wore silk harem pants under her ship’s kimono to match the decor, her slippered feet resting on flagstones worn smooth by the knees of pilgrims. Not exactly the Sistine Chapel, but she called it home.

Staring into illusionary space, Heidi took a pull on the dopestick, reveling in her new job security. Orion Lines ought to be ecstatic. She was smashing–hitting MEMORY, she replayed the applause in her head. No matter how much DeRuyter sneered at her, she had sealed her cozy berth on a pleasure ship headed outsystem, going to see the universe in style. And she hadn’t had to drop her harem pants to do it. Always a plus.

Alarm bells jerked her out of her euphoria. Snubbing out the dopestick, she returned to realtime. MissBehavin was broadcasting a MAYDAY–a persistent, repeated plea for help.

Closing her eyes, she shut out the Romanesque mosque-cum-cathedral, triggering her transceiver, staring into cyberspace. Traffic control showed a new ship: a sleek gravity-drive starship, swinging out from behind Typhon at high acceleration. Data banks tagged the newcomer as the Hiryu, out of Azha system, Eta Eridani. The high-g drive, the silent rush to match velocities, along with Eridani registry–all shouted "Slaver." Heidi heard the viewing lounge fall silent, recognizing the same expectant hush heard on a game park tour when someone spots a leopard or a sabretooth.

Pulling pink hair aside, she hurriedly plugged back in. Horrible things were about to happen. Happily, they would happen to someone else. Artemis had nothing to fear from Hiryu, or any outback predator. The starliner’s energy shielding stood up to the storm of radiation at near light speed. Nukes could not even scratch the paintwork, and in centuries of operation Orion Lines had never lost a starliner. Which would not help MissBehavin. Artemis was decelerating toward Typhon at 1-g, headed for an orbit inside the Roche Limit, planning a pass between the planet and rings, skimming the cloud tops. Hiryu and its prey were farther out, headed for Tartarus–the high-g slaver would be finished with the robo-freighter long before Artemis arrived. Any other help was even farther off.

Horrified, Heidi watched a winged gravity-drive gig separate from Hiryu, matching velocities with the fleeing freighter. As the gig attached to MissBehavin’s main airlock, DeRuyter fed the MAYDAY into the comnet, letting passengers see aboard the doomed ship. Meant to be crewed by SuperChimps and computers, MissBehavin turned out to have humans aboard. Her MAYDAY came from a gaunt ring rat, hands trembling, his aged face a mask of fear, begging Artemis for help. "Signal to starliner, please render assistance. We are being boarded. . . ."

Not your normal holoshow. This real-time drama had Heidi sitting paralyzed at her station, aghast at the expanding spectacle. Tapping into MissBehavin’s onboard cams, DeRuyter broadcast the nightmare scene at the airlock. Alarms wailed hysterically. The narrow corridor filled with dancing sparks as an anaerobic torch cut its way into the ship. Suddenly, the lock burst open. Tripod-legged cyborgs with steel tentacle arms and twin gun-turret heads emerged from the shower of sparks, firing as they came. Crazed SuperChimps ran hooting in terror, unarmed and helpless. Appeals for assistance turned frantic. Heidi hardly believed what she was seeing.

And it got worse. Detecting more images tightcast to private staterooms, she tapped in, seeing the same ghastly scene from the cyborg’s point of view–DeRuyter was reading the slaver control channels, a neat trick. Gun-cams tracked terrified Chimps banging off bulkheads frantic to escape the hail of fire. One by one, they were blown to bloody rags.

Wondering who got off on this live-action shooting gallery, Heidi backtracked one of the tightcasts to an A-deck holo-suite. By now, she knew all first-class passengers by name, face, and predilection. This one she had tagged as trouble, an insolent jerk-off who practically lived on the ship’s S&M channel. Sitting cross-legged on his zero-g bed in a virtual stupor, he had a headset on, leaning and twisting with the action, mouth agape, sweat gleaming at his temples. Every so often, his fingers twitched. His teenage hired girlfriend lay beside him on the bed, wearing nothing but dead black lipstick and matching nails, looking almighty bored.

Heidi hit security override, blanking the signal to the stateroom. Swearing like a bosun, the punk tore off his headset, feverishly checking his connections, then jacked back in. His hired girlfriend smirked at his troubles. Heidi quit tormenting the little sadist, who was, after all, a paying passenger. Let him have his twisted fun. No sick jerk-off was worth a complaint in her file.

Returning to the tightcast, she saw something new. Mixed in with the signals from the cyborg’s guncams was another set from a slaver wired for sensurround. Heidi could not see the slaver’s face, just his hands and body, since she was seeing through his eyes, hearing through his ears. Uncanny, but thoroughly familiar to her.

Stepping lightly through the carnage left by the cyborgs, he looked happily about, carefully avoiding the gore and Chimp shit. Heidi could tell he was happy by the spring in his walk, and by the way he glanced around him carelessly, attentive and curious–not the least downcast or wary. His right hand held a recoilless pistol nonchalantly at his side. Making his self-satisfied way straight to the command deck, the slaver shut off the ship’s MAYDAY. The old man was splattered across a bulkhead, blasted at close range by some uncaring cyborg. As the slaver knelt to examine the gory remains, Heidi shifted away.

Switching to control deck cams, she got a look at the slaver himself, a cheerful hoodlum with dark tousled hair and a keen, confident air, going casually through his victim’s clothing. Clearly a bright, alert boy who enjoyed his work, and did not care who it hurt. Homo galactus, born in space, most likely raised a slaver. His uniform blouse was open to the navel, showing off a garish dragon tattoo that twined across his naked chest–Hiryu meant "Flying Dragon" in a dead language. Tattooed skulls bracleted his wrist, marking him as a veteran killer.

Done robbing the dead, the slaver straightened up, looking away from the human mess at his feet. His eyes swept the room. To see what he was looking for, Heidi switched back to sensurround, at the same time calling up the deck plan for a Centaurii Comet. He stared hard at the aft bulkhead, which looked to be half a meter closer than the deck plan warranted.

Walking to the back of the cabin, he ran expert fingers over the bulkhead. Heidi sensed the hands of a master smuggler-cum-slaver feeling for flaws in the smooth plasti-metal. His hand stopped. There it was. Jacking up the sensurround, Heidi felt an invisible vertical ridge, right under the slaver’s fingers. Together they followed the ridge down to the deck, where the pressure seam felt wider than it should. Curiouser and curiouser. It was weird to be at one with this murderous felon, melding her senses with his. He called for a cyborg.

Heidi shifted to the cyborg. Sensors turned the invisible ridge into a hairline crease, pressure-proof, but real. Anything could be on the far side. Extending a pair of grapples, the cyborg grabbed onto the bulkhead, then pulled sideways. The hairline crease widened into a crack.

She shifted back to the slaver. Pistol leveled at the crack, he signaled the cyborg to pull harder. Staring over the pistol sights, she saw the bulkhead creep sideways, widening the crack. She could feel the slaver’s finger tighten on the firing stud. His first sign of nervousness.

As the crack widened, a couple of centimeters of girl’s face appeared. Heidi could see a blue eye, sharp-cut blonde bangs with a blue trim, a tear-stained cheek, and the corner of a mouth. "Out," the slaver ordered. The visible tip of the girl’s lip trembled, but she did not speak. He jammed the pistol barrel into the crack. The girl shrank back–wedging herself deeper into the half meter slot behind the bulkhead. "Out, or I shoot."

He would shoot. Heidi could feel it in his gunhand–the readiness to kill if he didn’t get his way. She tried desperately to will his finger off the firing stud, but sensurround didn’t work that way. Instead, she felt the finger press harder on the stud. Another milligram of pressure and the pistol would spray explosive shells into the tiny space, ripping the girl to shreds.

Slowly, the panel slid back. Terrified and hollow-eyed, the girl stayed pressed tightly into the tiny space; she was twelve or thirteen at best, wearing a woman’s v-suit several sizes too large, with the helmet tipped back off her head. Giving a satisfied grunt, the slaver reached in and grabbed her. As his hand closed on the girl’s suit, Heidi unplugged, not wanting to feel his fingers seize the frightened child.

Sensesurround vanished. Signals still came in, beamed straight to the transceiver in her skull, but not with the same intensity. Plugging in was not a necessity–most folks lived fine lives without it–but having the plug in her head gave Heidi her professional edge. Superconducting connections sharpened sensurround and shaved off precious nanoseconds essential for 3V programming.

By now, most of the ship had tuned in. Way more people were on-line than had seen her cosmic tumbling act. Taking a peek at that A-deck asshole, she saw him still wearing his headset, with his girlfriend in his lap, her eyes shut, dead black lips pursed, head resting listlessly on her employer. He reached down between her legs. Heidi cut the signal to the stateroom. Let them put it in her file; she would not let the sadistic little scumbag get off on that girl’s fear.

("What are you doing?") DeRuyter demanded.

Heidi did not answer. Screw DeRuyter. Picking up the dopestick, she breathed it back to life, thinking about the girl, trying to imagine what she could do–knowing that the answer was nothing. That girl was gone. Soon she would be headed outsystem in the hold of a slaver, never to come back. The Cosmos could be horribly cruel to the unlucky.

("Consider yourself on report.")

Consider yourself an asshole, she thought, but did not say it–noting that the signal to A-deck had been restored. Good to see someone getting something out of this fiasco. Snubbing out the dopestick, she shut off her cerebral transceiver, stood up, and stalked through the Mihrab gateway into the Court of Lions. Green Cypress tops poked up over the colonnade surrounding the fountain, a shallow basin supported by a dozen sculpted lions. Andalusian sunlight poured out of a hot blue hologram sky. She sat down on one of the lions, letting the water pour over her, soaking her harem pants and ship’s kimono. Water and fountain were semi-real even if the sunshine was not.

Damn, what a disaster! DeRuyter had upstaged her, rubbing her face in what the paying public really wanted. Who needs art when you can have live-action horror? She stared at the slender marble columns surrounding the fountain: a hologram façade, like the hot blue sky above, 3V fakes hiding ship’s bulkheads, giving depth and solidity to her compressed world. Reality was different. Reality was a terrified child turned into live passenger entertainment.

Was she wound way too tight? Probably–but with reason. Heidi could not walk away from her problems, no more than that girl could. Not aboard ship. She could not even walk away from her station. Only her resolution to stay shut down gave her a semblance of privacy. Calls were piling up. So what? Let them scold, let them scream. Home is where your head is, and right now, Heidi’s head was not accepting callers.

With her head chip off, she was a normal, unaugmented woman, and she meant to make the most of it. Tossing away wet slippers, she struggled out of her pants and kimono, letting sunlit water cascade over her, cool and cleansing, mixing with her tears, then disappearing down concealed drains in the deck. When she gave in and checked her calls, she found herself summoned to a face-to-face with the Chief Steward–the surest sign of authority in a 3V society is the power to demand an appearance in person. Heidi ordered up a crisp starched Orion Lines uniform, figuring that if she couldn’t really be a happy slave, she could at least look the part.

Her cabin door dilated ahead of her, and the painted archways of La Mezquita merged into K-deck corridors tuned to high summer in a cathedral pine forest. Giant gnarled sequoias rose up around her, lit by shafts of late afternoon sunlight pouring down through greenery from infinite space overhead. Birds flitted back and forth among the boughs, and animals moved between the trees. Trails connected cabins and staterooms. Stepping into a drop shaft in the forest floor, she told it to take her down to S-Deck. People in the shaft greeted her with broad smiles and shouts of, "What a show!"

Which she found humiliating, but she still smiled back–this was her public. Young and approachable, with her pink hair and ready smile, she had gotten tagged as "the new girl in the crew." Nearly everyone outranked her, and anyone could accost her under the guise of "getting to know you." She had enjoyed the pseudo-popularity–making her feel welcome–but now, it just felt stale, though that did not stop her from smiling. Her job was dedicated to the impossible supposition that everything could be fun! Even mind-numbing months in transit, locked in a metal ship so far from anywhere it took starlight years to reach them. Someone had to keep the passengers content, or at least catatonic, and she would shuck and hustle with the best; she just drew the line at kidnapping and murder. Heaven knows why.

Chief Steward Taylor held court in a tree, having an illusionary glass tree house at the top of a kilometer-high forest canopy–a favorite setting of claustrophobics. Immensity of distance hit Heidi as the corridor door vanished behind her; air and space stretching in every direction, filled with birds and blue day moths fluttering amid the sunbeams. Monkeys swung past, hooting and scampering along the branches. How Chief Steward Taylor passed the psych tests was anyone’s guess, since the woman was a mass of nerves and denial who kept her 3V set at wide angle. Taylor loved Heidi’s deep-space gymnastics. Instead of aging gracefully, Taylor had gone for the biosculpted look–relying on flame-red hair and slick glossy wrinkleless skin–something Heidi prayed that she had the sense to avoid when she was old and rich. Why would a borderline claustrophobic choose a starship career in the first place? To punish herself? Looking sharp was the least of this woman’s worries.

DeRuyter was there as well, ungodly handsome in his better biosculpt job, a cool solid contrast to the Chief Steward’s fragile authority. Taylor asked frostily, "Is it true that you cut service to an A-deck stateroom?"

Heidi admitted as much. "She’s new," DeRuyter explained, eagerly apologizing for her, putting her in the wrong under the pretense of protection. "She’s fresh up from the inner system, and doesn’t know we mean to show our passengers the real Outback–warts and all." He offered her an out; admit her mistake, promise to be good, and Orion Lines would forgive. Chief Steward Taylor would be equally happy to see the situation go away.

Surprisingly, Heidi found herself standing up to her section head, in front of the Chief Steward no less, insanely demanding a full-blown inquiry. "Outback conditions are one thing–being accomplices to hijacking, kidnapping, and murder is another."

"Accomplices?" DeRuyter looked taken aback. "You can’t mean that."

Again, the chance to back down–but she would not take it, charging straight ahead. "I do mean it! You knew that slaver was coming. You gave the freighter no warning. . . ."

DeRuyter looked to Chief Steward Taylor, who seemed to want to crawl into a hole–except for her deathly fear of confined spaces. Normally, Heidi was relentlessly upbeat in font of Taylor, not for fear of reprimand, but because she could not bring herself to add to the worries making this woman a nervous wreck. What was the point? Now wild accusations tumbled out of her. "That is abetting in a highjacking, and murder. . . ."

DeRuyter sighed. "No. It’s just good operating sense."

"Good operating sense?" It was her turn to be taken aback.

He glanced at Taylor. "Of course we knew that the slaver was coming. It’s our business to track their movements. Orion Lines has to know what the slavers are up to."

"But a warning . . ."

"Would have done the freighter no good," DeRuyter assured her. "And it would have let the slavers know that we had cracked their command and control codes–endangering our passengers."

Taylor hurried to back him, seeing the line to hide behind. "This is a rough corner of the universe, and we cannot afford to put our passengers at risk."

"There are no innocents out here," DeRuyter added. "Class-C robo-freighters do not carry passengers; those were smugglers, ring rats–all aboard were breaking the law."

Even the Chimps? "But you didn’t have to broadcast it, turning terror and hijacking into a sideshow!"

"We’re just reporting events as they happen," DeRuyter replied, making it sound like a public service, "nothing illegal in that." It’s never a good sign when superiors insist that your job doesn’t technically break the law. "Our passengers pay to see the universe up close. Edit out the bad parts, and they might as well stay at home."

"We cannot sugarcoat the cosmos," Taylor added staunchly. Strong sentiments from a woman who turned her cabin into a treehouse. "Our broadcast will be evidence, to be used against the slavers when they are brought to justice."

Fat chance of that! Heidi stared at them. There was more to it than this. Way more. What was a slaver doing hijacking some two-bit ring-runner? Right when Artemis happened to be there? That could hardly be coincidence. But it was pointless to tell that to Chief Steward Taylor, who feared the forest, only wanting to see the tops of the trees. She and DeRuyter were dismissed.

Outside, Taylor’s treetops vanished, replaced by S-deck’s simulation of starry night in the Street of Dreams on Bliss. Happy holos gyrated atop glass and neon fun-palaces, dancing to low pulsing music that made you yearn to move with it. Laughter and squeals of delight came from the pleasure arcades–some of them real. DeRuyter seized her arm in his light authoritative grip. He was not just her superior, but was also bigger and stronger, looking down on her figuratively as well as literally–but she could not help being small, or having pink hair. "Listen," he told her, "no one likes what happened to that robo-freighter."

Heidi glared up at him. Really? She could see that he secretly loved it, feeling the excitement in his grip. Just talking about it turned him on. Her job was knowing people’s pleasures, and DeRuyter was an easy read. Somehow he was in with the slavers–most likely paying the Hiryu to put on a show. Perhaps helping to set up the target. Why else would a high-g slaver snatch up some random ring-runner? Hijacking and kidnapping were capital offenses, not done for nothing. Nor was it bad advertising–contrasting Orion Lines, immunity to the pitiful fate of the ring-runner. Taylor was clearly out of the loop, lacking the nerve for illegal deals with psychotic criminals.

"Technically, you are tops," her boss told her, his fingers feeling her flesh beneath the fabric. "But you lack the killer instinct to make it big. Luckily for you, I could teach you." His hand pulled her closer to him. "You and I could take some downtime together, making your job a whole lot easier."

Instead of trying to shake off his hand, Heidi gave him her sweetest smile, asking, "Why don’t I just sue you and Orion Lines for harassment? Then I wouldn’t need a job."

Fingers froze, and his hand dropped. "Consider yourself relieved of duty–until we get a replacement from Typhon."