The best-kept secret in the solar system, a sheet of glass nine meters in diameter, was coasting at about twenty kilometers per second on an unpowered trajectory between Venus and Earth. The sheet of glass was unremarkable except that, despite being only a few centimeters thick, it was unusually flat. A thin layer of aluminum vacuum-coated onto the surface made it a nearly perfect mirror.
Domingo Bonaventura, in a small pod barely larger than a coffin, coasted along silently in the shadow of the mirror. He had been coasting for thirty days, periodically making small corrections in the angle of the mirror to insure that it shielded the pod from view from the Earth, and from the many stations and habitats in the cis-Earth space, and likewise that the mirror hid the pod from the view of a precisely calculated point in space. From the viewpoint of an observer anywhere in the Earth-moon system, if any such had happened to point a telescope in his direction, the mirror would reflect only an image of empty space. The infrared emission of the mirror was negligible, and only a phenomenally sensitive detector would show anything other than empty space. Radar, too—if anybody were probing space with radar—would be reflected into empty space.
He had his antennas out, listening for radar, and for radio emissions. There was some modest radio chatter originating from the point of space he was coasting toward: navigation beacons, primarily, and occasional data, most likely engineering-systems status updates. No voice, so far, and he was getting close enough that he would very likely be hearing spillover from a narrow-beam, if there were one. That was good.
Domingo made a tiny adjustment in the mirror angle, checked it, checked it again, and then checked it once more. A little over two hours to go. There was nothing to do, but Domingo had been living in space for two decades: he understood waiting. He folded his legs, placed his hands on his knees, palms up, and, floating freely, cleared his mind of all conscious thought.
For all practical purposes, Domingo Bonaventura was invisible. Which was precisely what he had intended all along.
* * *
Domingo Bonaventura was a tall man, lean, his eyes dark and intense. He was clean shaven, except for a small and neat mustache, but that was not unusual for people who lived and worked in space; any more facial hair would interfere with the seal of an emergency oxygen mask. His one extravagance was his long hair, which floated in tendrils around his head, waving slightly like the arms of an anemone in the faint currents from the air recirculator. The air itself was stale; he had been far too long in quarters far too small, and the entire living area, small as it was, smelled of him. But he was long past noticing, or caring. He floated silent except for his regular breathing, and waited as the laws of physics brought him to his destination.
Two hours later, Domingo opened his eyes. It was time. With slow, economical motions he checked the radio spectrum. No changes in radio signature from the quarry, and no radar pings. Good, and good. As far as he was able to determine, he was still invisible.
He risked a visual, periscoping a camera lens out from behind the shielding effects of the mirror. His target was a glistening white sphere, twenty-five meters in diameter. Zooming the view, he saw attached to it were much smaller aluminum spheres—fuel tanks—and below that, a habitation module.
The hab module was also spherical, with four portholes spaced evenly around the equator, and thermal radiators deployed outward like fins, one to either side. It was a design he was familiar with. There would be blind spots at either end of the module, and also where the radiators blocked the view.
It was the cargo, not the habitat module, that he was interested in. Ten thousand tons of cometary water being shipped to the Earth-orbital colonies using a Venus fly-by. The cargo ship itself had only a small engine, adequate when it was empty, but far too small to accelerate at more than milligees with the full load of load. It could not flee even if it had been warned. Except for fine trajectory correction; it was on a precisely aimed orbit that would take it to the Earth orbital whip, a hundred-kilometer-long rotating orbital station. The whip was little more than a smart rope, but one rotating fast enough that its end would match the speed of the incoming spacecraft, grab it, and swing it in a precisely defined arc that would end up with the cargo in a perfect Earth orbit, and the energy from the ship’s original speed banked into the whip’s orbital energy, where it would be used to toss the next cargo toward the outer belt. Ten thousand tons of water was a significant treasure. At its intended destination of the inner colonies, it would be used for luxuries and for life support, to grow plants in greenhouse modules and to be electrolyzed into fuel. In the out and out, even a fraction of that much water could be the difference between survival of a colony and starvation.
The distance was closing rapidly. He made a few brief bursts of thruster firings, using cold-exhaust thrusters calculated to have almost no infrared signature. This adjusted his trajectory to bring his course closer to the target and also brought him in along a path where the bulk of the cargo would block any view of his pod from the habitat module.
And it was time. With a swift motion, Domingo hit the controls that blew the three struts that held the mirror to his pod, and fired a short blast on a braking thruster to separate them. The mirror coasted silently on, disappearing into space. Its trajectory was known precisely, and some time months later one of his people would chase it down and pick it up, so it could be used for another job. But for now it had done its work of keeping him invisible, and was unnecessary. He watched it disappear with no particular emotion.
He was committed.
With gentle taps on the pod’s braking thrusters, he slowed his course relative to his quarry until his relative motion was only a few centimeters per second. When he was done, the pod coasted to a bump against a cargo-support truss, and a final blast of the thruster brought it to a full stop. An external glue-gun extruded a bolus of vacuum-solidifying adhesive to tack the pod firmly to the strut; a quick shot of solvent would release it in an instant, if he needed it, but for the moment it would be docked firmly enough to stay in place even if the quarry made an unexpected attitude-adjustment burn.
Domingo suited up, working methodically but with swift practiced motions, checking each seal three times, and counting out the suit drill checklist aloud, even though there was no one to listen. He had already been breathing pure oxygen, so there was no decompression prebreathing time needed, and as soon as he checked his helmet seal, he punched for hatch opening. Pumps compressed the air from the cabin into tanks, saving it not so much for reuse (although reuse was reflexive where Domingo came from, as much a religion as a habit), but mostly to keep the hatch opening from releasing a cloud of oxygen that might signal to hypothetical telescopes that something was amiss. When the cabin pressure dropped to under a torr, he judged that the residual gas would be indistinguishable from normal outgassing of the quarry, and cracked the hatch. He took his tools and pushed off.
The white thermal blankets that kept the cargo cool were brilliant in the sunlight, and the LCD visor of his suit darkened to compensate. Towing his tools, he floated around the spacecraft.
He came around from the polar direction, away from view of the portholes, and aimed his infrared sensor at the closest of the fins to get a reading on how much waste heat was being rejected: 370 Kelvin.
Okay. As expected, the habitat module was live.
Somebody inside was about to have a very bad day.
He clipped his safety tether to a handhold just below the hatch to keep himself from floating away, and inspected it. The hatch was held in with six electromechanical dogs. Explosives would make short work of the hatch, but there was no point in destroying perfectly good hardware. Still staying out of the view of the portholes, and being careful not to make even the slightest jar against the habitat, he found the right spot and cut through the outer skin with a micro-torch, revealing color-coded wiring below. It was a standard design that he knew well. He shorted the two outermost wires, disabling the automated interlocks, and then clipped the next pair, bypassing the computer control.
There was no point in conserving oxygen at this point. He had to just hope no distant observers were looking in this precise direction at this precise instant. He checked his tether, and then selected two guns out of his tool pack. One he slung around his shoulders where it would be in easy reach, and the other, a glue-tipped harpoon gun, he held in his left hand. In his right hand he gripped a body-bag.
Domingo positioned himself out of the way, feet hooked against an edge of the thermal radiator. He counted silently down from five to calm his mind, and on zero he put forty volts across the two innermost wires: release.
The hatch blew.
The atmosphere expanded out in a silent spray, flashing instantly into ice crystals that glittered in the sun. Loose papers, hand tools, and some unidentifiable containers and other bits of debris flew by him, spinning into space. He ignored them, watching intently for a body entrained in the outrushing atmosphere.
Within a second, the outrush of atmosphere was complete. A few final bits of debris floated out of the hatch.
No body.
Time was critical. He pushed off from the habitat, hard, relying on the tether line to swing him around and then letting his momentum carry him through the open hatch without slowing. As he entered into the habitat his eyes searched left, right, upward, downward, seeking the body that had to be there, probably already unconscious from the shock of explosive depressurization.
No body.
In a single motion he flipped over and checked his motion, simultaneously releasing the body bag and unslinging the second gun. There were two suits racked in a niche to the side of the open hatch, one bright blue, one crimson. The suit to the right, the crimson one, was empty. On the blue suit to the left, however, although he could not see a face in the helmet, the indicator lights on the status display at the collar were green, green, green.
He raised both guns. In his earphones, he could hear the almost inaudible sounds of electronic handshaking as the microprocessor in his suit negotiated frequency. And then, very slowly, the arms of the blue spacesuit raised above its head. In his earphones, a soft voice: “Don’t shoot. I surrender.”
A girl’s voice.
He brought the gun to bear, and fired two short bursts, one into the faceplate of the helmet, the second into the suit. It was the right gun, the glue harpoon, and he had it set in the glue-only mode. The streamer of glue congealed almost instantly in vacuum, obscuring the faceplate and restricting the figure’s freedom of movement. Domingo tapped his receiver off before he could hear any protests from the captive. Two more short bursts tacked down the captive’s hands, just in case there was a weapon within reach.
According to the timer in his display, elapsed time from the moment he had blown the exterior hatch was just under four seconds.
The tangle of glue held the space-suited figure blind and immobile, the suit arms spread-eagled awkwardly and glued to the bulkhead. Domingo kept a small portion of his attention on the captive as he reset the hatch electronics, closed the hatch and reset the interlocks, and brought the habitat back up to full atmosphere. It took five minutes before his gauges all showed green, and in that time he did a quick check of the systems, verifying that everything was nominal, and that no messages had been received suggesting that anybody outside had seen something unusual. He paused for a moment, considering, and then removed his helmet and pulled off his gloves. It felt good to be breathing unconfined air again. The cabin air had the cold and dry tank-air feel of recent repressurization, with almost a metallic smell.
With the cabin back to pressure, it was time for him to deal with his captive. He examined the suit. The glue held it firmly immobile, and a large spatter of dark gray glue covered the visor of the helmet. A neatly block-lettered label, written in dark marker on the suit’s hardshell carapace, said “May.” His captive’s name, presumably. First or last?
He had already put the glue harpoon down. He kept the other gun in his left hand, a little railgun that shot a tiny loop of wire at hypersonic velocity. It had almost no recoil—an important feature for a gun used in microgravity—and while the wireloop projectile would easily shred flesh, it wouldn’t penetrate pressure walls.
He found the solvent spray in his tool pack, brought it out, and sprayed it over the glob of glue covering over his captive’s helmet. He popped the quick-release flanges and gave it a quarter twist, still one-handed, and pulled the helmet away.
“Thanks,” she said. She shook her head, dirty blonde hair swinging left and right, and then sneezed once.
This was the first look he’d gotten at her face. Buddha. How old was she, eighteen? Certainly no more than twenty, at the maximum.
She looked down at the gun he still held in his left hand, and then up again at his face. Was she actually smiling? “You don’t need that,” she said. “I already told you; I surrender. I’m ready to do whatever you tell me to. I won’t go back on my word.”
She wasn’t about to do anything just then; both her hands and her torso were still
glued to the walls. He looked at her, and then lowered the gun, not letting it go, but at least aiming away to the side.
“So you said,” he said. “But should I trust you?”
She looked at him. Her gaze was disconcertingly direct. “I don’t know,” she said. “Should you?”
He laughed, without actual humor. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I should.”
He paused, and then said, “You were suited up when I blew the hatch. Why?”
“I felt a jar in the spacecraft,” she said. “Indicators didn’t show anything, but I thought some of the cargo might be venting, thought I’d take a look.” She paused, and said, “That must have been you docking, I take it.”
Domingo considered. That was plausible, although she must have been extremely sensitive to notice the tiny bump as he docked against the much larger cargo ship, since large spacecraft sometimes shudder erratically from thermal expansion waves created when parts move into or out of sunlight. It was hard to believe that a girl as young as she was could have enough experience in space to be able to tell the slight bump of his docking from normal quivering of the ship. And she was fast—it had been less than five minutes from his docking to blowing the hatch. On the other hand, the Venus to Earth transfer was long and boring, and she very likely had been hoping for something, anything, to do, to break the monotony.
“And what about you?” she said. “You blew the hatch, just like that? Not ever worrying about who might be inside? No warning at all? I know that pirates aren’t supposed to be very nice, but killing people without warning is a little extreme.”
“I don’t think you’re in much of a position to ask questions,” he said.
She shrugged, or did as much of a shrug as her limited range of motion allowed. “So, if you’re planning to shoot me, you would have done it already.”
He laughed, this time with real amusement. “Point,” he said. He jerked his head at the body-bag, an emergency-orange sack now floating unattended near the pilot’s console. “If there was somebody, I was ready to bag and repressurize them.”
The body bags were standard pieces of emergency equipment, human-sized airtight fabric bags with a small cylinder of compressed oxygen. In the case of an explosive depressurization, an unsuited crewman could, in principle, crawl into one, seal it, pull the quick-tab to inflate it, and wait for rescue. Or a vacuum-suited comrade could snag non-suited personnel and jam them into a bag. They were last-gasp desperation equipment for serious emergencies—something that might save your life, not something you’d ever want to try out.
She looked at him. “You really think you could find somebody, stuff them into a bag, and get them repressurized inside of sixty seconds?”
He nodded. “Yep. In drills, I’m under fifteen seconds.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“We practice,” he said. “We drill. A lot.”
“Yeah, but with real, living people, not dummies? I don’t think so.”
He looked at her steadily. “We practice with real people.”
She shuddered. “God. You guys really are crazy.”
Domingo looked at her. It was a tough universe out there. How could they not practice? “Maybe in the cozy, rich worlds you live in,” he said, speaking slowly and contemptuously, “maybe you didn’t practice decompression drills. Maybe you’re rich enough that you never have blowouts. I suppose everything’s triple-redundant in the habitats you live in. You don’t know what it’s like. I guess you’ve never seen a blowout, never seen metal walls rip like potato chips under the pressure of escaping atmosphere, never seen your friends and family exposed to vacuum and known that anybody that you can’t chase down and cram into a bag in sixty seconds or less is somebody you’ll never again see alive.”
He was getting angry now. “Well, girl, I’m not you. I don’t live in that world. I live in the out and out, where things don’t always work, where blowouts can happen any day, any night, and there’s nobody else to rely on. Damn right we practice. Damn right we practice with real people.
“You say you can’t get somebody into a bag inside of ten seconds flat, seal the bag, and be looking for the next one in fifteen? Girl, I wouldn’t even want you in the out and out. You’d die in a week, and I’d call it lucky if you didn’t take somebody with you when you go.”
“Oh,” she said, in a very small voice. “Okay. I believe you.”
His burst of rage had passed now, and he felt empty. And thinking about seeing his friends die—because, one time, there were too many to save—he had little inclination to add another body to the universe’s death toll. The universe was harsh enough. It might be acceptable if somebody died in the course of an operation; that was something you had to accept, but it was another thing to kill somebody in cold blood. “No, I probably shouldn’t trust you,” he said. “But I will.”
“Thank you,” she said, still in a small soft voice.
He raised the solvent to release the glue holding her, but she shook her head, and said, “It’s okay, I got it.”
She squirmed a little, and the tips of the fingers of one hand came poking out of her suit, under her chin. She must have silently worked the arm loose from the glove and sleeve, and pulled it into the torso of the suit while he was checking the ship, leaving the suit arm that he’d glued to the bulkhead only an empty shell. The suit was slightly large for her, and the neck flange had just enough extra room that she could twist around and snake her arm out through the neck. Once she had her arm out to the shoulder, she reached down and carefully unsnapped the side latches on the hardshell chest segment, popped it free, and wriggled out into the cabin.
Under the suit, she was wearing underwear and nothing else. He made his face rigid to hide a smile. She really had suited up in a hurry, he realized, skipping the suit liner and the entire thermal control subsystem fittings. No wonder she’d gotten the suit on so quickly.
She reached out one hand. “Solvent,” she said, apparently paying no attention to the fact that she was nearly naked, while he was bundled in a full vacuum suit, carrying a gun in one hand and a spray solvent can in the other.
He tossed her the solvent, momentarily wondering if she could possibly be daring enough to try to spray him in the eyes and hope to grab his gun, but she turned to spray at the glue holding her suit in small, neat squirts, the minimum amount of spray needed to peel away the glue. Her back to him, she did a quick inspection of the seals, carefully making sure that no errant glue blobs might interfere with any of the fit, and then put the suit in its place on the rack behind it and plugged the electrical cables and air line into it to recharge it for the next use.
He nodded to himself approvingly. With instincts like that, she might have some chance of survival in the out and out after all.
While she had her back turned, he took the opportunity to do a visual inspection. The little she was wearing made it pretty easy to see that she had no place to hide a weapon.
She turned back to him, catching him looking her over. “Now what?” she said, holding his gaze directly with hers.
He averted his eyes slightly away from her body. “Now, what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You have the upper hand; I expect that I’m going to do whatever you say I should do.”
“In that case, I’d say that right now you might want to put on some more clothes.”
Her eyebrows raised a tiny fraction of a millimeter, but she nodded and said, “Okay.”
Buddha, all this time had she been thinking he was planning to rape her? What kind of a barbarian did she think he was? His Anteros crew weren’t pirates because they liked to pillage and rape; they were pirates because they had no choice. Could she not know that?
She pushed off to coast across the cabin. The main cabin was partitioned off, with six niches spaced evenly around the circumference. Other than the one that held the spacesuits, two of these were apparently storage, and two others served as a small galley and a head. The one opposite, to which she was heading, was apparently fitted out as a sleeping cubby. He pushed off behind her, and she looked back and down at him. “You’re following me?” she said.
Buddha! Was she still thinking he was about to rape her? She caught herself on the wall rail outside the cubby’s door and stopped her motion; an instant later he braked himself to a spot next to her against the same rail.
“One moment, please,” he said, and slid past her. He looked back. “If you don’t mind, stay where I can see you.”
He kept one eye on her attuned to any unexpected motion, but the only movement she made was to occasionally touch a fingertip to the wall rail to keep herself from drifting. Domingo searched the sleeping cubby quickly but efficiently. It had a zippered mesh hammock tethered against the inner wall, and a number of cabinets, each of which he checked out. They were full of various pieces of loose-fitting one-piece ship’s wear, a little more colorful than what he’d been used to, a lot of it decorated with whimsical horses and other animals. The cubby and the clothing both had a distinct scent of girl, not an unpleasant odor, but rather something that reminded him of other times, other places. He checked through it all, moving from the neatly folded clothing to the dirty laundry and then to towels and bathroom supplies. He caught her slight grin when he found her supply of tampons, but he kept searching, trying to keep his inspection pointedly disinterested. Clearly she wasn’t using the drugs to suppress menarche, but her medical regimen was no business of his, and he was not so young as to be either shocked or titillated by indications of feminine biology. Here with her personal things would be a good place to hide a gun, if she had one, and he took extra care to make sure that he searched it thoroughly, without any loss of focus. After he finished, he floated out, saying “Okay. You can go in now.”
She gave him a look of disgust, and pulled herself in. He expected that she would have flounced, if there’d been any way to do so in microgravity. “You sure made a mess,” she said.
“No problem,” he said, and then, as she started to peel off her underwear, said, “you can go ahead and close the door if you like.”
“Thanks,” she said, and did so. He took the time to do a quick search through the other compartments of the ship.
Through the door, she said, “Are you bringing the rest of your crew in? Or will they just wait in your ship?”
Ah—she thought he had a whole ship, and that he was just making excuses to be alone with her. “Oh, my ship,” he said. “No, they’re already gone. They, ah, dropped me off, and went on to the next target already.”
“Oh.” She paused. “I don’t understand. You’re not here to take the cargo?”
“Well, something like that, yes.” He was, in fact, intending to ride with the cargo, at least as far as the orbital whip. Once he got to the whip, though, he had other plans.
“So,” her voice came out to him, chatting just as lightly as if he were nothing more than another shipmate, “how did you manage to make your ship invisible, anyway?”
“Trade secret,” he said. “Sorry.”
He finished his quick search of the cabin. It was still possible that a weapon might be hidden deeper in the systems, under panels or inside electronics enclosures, but he judged it unlikely. If she had been tipped off about piracy, despite all his precautions, a weapon would have been out for ready use, not buried away deep. And if she hadn’t been tipped off, there would be no weapons at all; space ships were not normally armed.
He hadn’t expected anything, actually, but now that he had verified that nothing was in easy reach, he relaxed very slightly. The ship was still full of weapons, of course—in space, a thousand things ranging from oxygen cylinders to power lines would be deadly, if used right—but he knew what to watch for.
When she emerged from the sleep cubby, she was wearing a one-piece ship-suit, a thin jumper in an innocent light blue, tight enough to keep from having loose cloth snag on protrusions, but loose enough to hide most of her curves. He’d already seen her, though, and could easily enough visualize what was underneath.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you would be so good as to tell me your name.”
“May,” she said, and then, after a pause, “May Hamilton.”
“May,” he repeated. “You work for Hayes Minerals, I take it.”
“Of course,” she said. “And may I also ask who you are? Or is that a secret?”
“I am Domingo Bonaventura,” he said. “Of Anteros colony.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “Oh,” she said. It was likely that she’d already heard of his name. Lies, probably—stories got around, and were usually distorted and exaggerated in the telling—but he hoped that, at least, the stories she’d heard hadn’t made him seem too cruel.
Her eyes drifted down to the gun, which he’d stuck with Velcro to his thigh. It was still in easy reach, although no longer in his hand. He raised his eyebrows slightly.
“A projectile gun?” she said. “I don’t think you’d use it. Not inside a pressurized cabin.”
He smiled. “Think not? Think again. We’re not amateurs, you know. The weapon is carefully designed. It won’t penetrate a cabin. Shred flesh, yes indeed; you can bet that I would make a mess of anybody I shoot. But it won’t depressurize the cabin. Better not count on me hesitating. If I need to use it, I won’t.”
“Oh.”
Was she disappointed? He couldn’t say. For all he could tell, she was just making conversation.
“But I’ll offer you a deal,” he said. “You will promise not to try to hurt me, or try to escape or call for rescue or make any kind of secret signal. If I ask you to do something, you’ll do it. Fair?”
“A deal?” she said. “So, what’s your half of the deal? That you won’t kill me?”
“My half of the deal,” he said, “is that I will trust you.”
“You’ll trust me?” she said.
“To a limited extent. When I say I’ll trust you, that means I won’t tie you up with electrical cables, cover the whole bundle with glue until you can’t move a centimeter, and stuff you into a cargo hold until we reach a spot where I can put you and a locator beacon into a body bag and eject you in the general direction of somebody who might be able to pick you up. Which is what I will do if I decide I can’t trust you. Fair?”
“Sounds fair to me,” she said. “And when we get to the whip?”
“You’ll be free to go.”
“You’re going to subvert the whip,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Domingo smiled. He was really beginning to like her.
“You’re not planning to brake into Earth orbit,” she said. “Of course not, why would you? You’re going to ride the whip, but you’re going to use it to grab the cargo and toss it into another orbit, somewhere in the outer belt. You have a trajectory all planned, I bet you do. Your destination is the out and out. That’s why your ship didn’t stay; you don’t need a ship. You’re not just pirating a little bit of water, you’re taking the whole cargo.”
“You seem to be telling me my plan,” Domingo said. “Since you seem to know it all, please, go on.”
“So you’re not stopping at Earth orbit at all, are you? And what about me? You say you’ll let me go? So what do you mean by that?”
“I have a pod.”
“A pod. You’re going to drop me in a pod?”
“Crude,” Domingo said, “But I personally guarantee that it’s functional. Are you objecting to the deal?”
“No,” she said. “I understand. If a pod is what you’ve got, I’ll take it.” She paused for a moment, and then added, “Thanks.”
“In that case, if you’re done asking questions?” Domingo said. “As long as you ask me before you go near the communications console, please feel free to go about your life.”
“Thank you.”
He tilted his head ironically.
“No, really, I mean it,” she said. “The cargo’s insured. You could have—” she paused. “You could have been a lot worse.”
“So,” Domingo said. “You’re welcome.”
Domingo went to the control console and made a show of checking out systems, ostentatiously pretending to be paying no particular attention to her. He really did need to check out the ship and familiarize himself with its controls; when they got to the whip, he would need to do some rapid manual maneuvering. He had three days to become completely familiar with the control systems, and there would be no margin for error on maneuvers that would have to be done with perfect timing and no computer control. When he was done, he made sure that the ship was set to answer routine traffic control queries with an automatic “systems nominal” response.
She, for her part, kept well clear of him, drifting over to a spot near her sleep-cubby to read a book. He wondered if she was really reading, or if she were pretending just as much as he was.
He did trust her, to a limited extent, but he nevertheless remained wary. He wasn’t trusting enough to allow himself to fall asleep with her free in the cabin. He knew how to sleep in a spaceman’s cat nap, with part of his attention always aware, still listening for anomalies and ready to break into full consciousness in an instant, but he wasn’t quite willing to trust to his reflexes. He inspected the door to the sleep cubby, but it was little more than painted paper; there was no real way to lock anybody inside. After some thinking, when the evening came according to ship’s time, he had her get in her suit again, and he carefully glued it immobile. He left her visor up, so she could breathe ship’s air.
She seemed remarkably patient about the process, watching him with a slight grin on her face.
He finished up by gluing the helmet down to the hardshell carapace to make sure she wouldn’t be able to do her trick of sliding an arm out. Sleeping in the suit would be comfortable enough; he’d done it many times. In free-fall, she would be floating loose inside, and sleeping inside the suit would be no different than inside a mesh hammock.
“Everything okay?” he said. “Nothing binding?”
“No complaints,” she said.
“Sorry for the indignity,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t trust you.”
“—but you don’t trust me,” she said. “I understand. No problem. Good night.”
And she closed her eyes.
After he had awakened in the morning and used the small head and then gone into the small freefall shower facility to clean up, she was still asleep. Domingo watched her face for a little while, soft and unlined, with wisps of hair straying out from the helmet, and then went to the galley, which was quite well appointed for its compact size. He was pleasantly surprised to see that it had a pressure-percolator to brew up coffee, something that was an expensive luxury in the belt. Hayes apparently thought a lot of their employees. Then he went back to her. He left the suit glued to the bulkhead, but unsealed the chest and the helmet, pulling them away as a single piece. Her eyes opened sleepily just as soon as he started unfastening the dogs.
“Good morning,” he said. “Arise, arise, a new day dawns.”
She tried to suppress a yawn. “So soon? What time is it?”
“Soon?” he said. “It’s been five hours. How long did you plan to sleep?”
“Longer than that,” she complained. “God. I’m going to need a nap.”
“As you like. There’s coffee, if you want some.”
“God yes,” she said.
Domingo had two cups squirted out of the brewer and waiting for her by the time she’d finished with the head. The cups were designed for use in either freefall or gravity, with a mesh latticework of ceramic that held the liquid in place by surface tension and yet allowed the coffee to be sipped slowly. He raised his cup to the small Buddha statue he’d installed on the bulkhead opposite, lowered his eyes for a moment, and then drank. Symbolically, raising the cup counted as making an offering to the Buddha. If the Buddha actually wanted to drink, he was free to come over and have a fresh cup squirted out for him; there was no point in actually wasting real coffee on symbolism.
May followed his eyes and noticed the Buddha statue. “God,” she said. “Or, I mean, Gods. You don’t actually believe in that stuff, do you?”
Domingo sipped his coffee and considered. “No, not exactly. The rituals instill a certain amount of discipline that I like to encourage my people to follow, and I observe the forms, so as to not give them any temptation to slack off. But if you mean, do I believe a three-thousand-year-old dead Indian guy is watching over us from the great beyond, I’ll reserve judgment on that until I see him.”
“Your people?” she said. “You mean, you have followers who believe whatever you tell them to?”
“We’re a pretty anarchic group,” he said, “but, yes, to some extent, my people tend to look at what I’m doing.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “So, pirates are Buddhist? I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“We don’t like to be called pirates, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“Really? So what do you call coming on board a cargo ship with a gun and hijacking the cargo to god-knows-where?”
“I would,” he said, “call it survival.”
