“I’m still the daughter of the high consul,” she said. “I’ve gotten you out of trouble before.”
“I’m not leaning on that trick,” Jim said, more harshly than he’d intended. Muskrat shifted, hauled herself up to standing, and looked from Jim to Teresa and back in distress. Teresa’s eyes hardened.
“I think what the captain’s saying,” Amos said, “is that using you as a meat shield isn’t something he’s a hundred percent comfortable with. It’s not that you wouldn’t do it, since you already did. But the people on the other end of that gun? We don’t know them, they may not be the most reliable, and the less we have to count on them, the better.”
Teresa scowled, but less.
“Yes,” Jim said. “That was much more eloquent.”
“Sometimes I’m good that way,” Amos said, and it might have been a joke or it might not. “You want us to get the ship ready to rabbit? We’ve got enough reaction mass for a decent burn.”
“I thought we needed fuel pellets.”
“We do, but we can spend ’em getting out of Kronos, put water on the grocery list, and call it good. Recyclers are really going to be our limiting factor.”
The pull of the thought was stronger than gravity. Light the drive, put nose toward the ring gate, and get the hell out before the enemy could get hold of them. Jim intentionally loosened his grip on the bulbs. “Naomi. What do you think?”
A moment of silence, then, “Sorry. I wasn’t listening. What was the question?”
“Should we prep the Roci for a mad dash out of here? As soon as the Black Kite’s fully committed to its burn, we could make a break.”
“No,” she said, the way he had known she would. “They haven’t identified us. If we go too soon, it’ll only make them suspicious. Better if we look like bystanders. Alex? Plot an intercept with the Whiteoak. It’s the big ice hauler at the second gas giant.”
“Got her,” Alex said.
Amos shifted on his bench. “Captain?”
“I’m fine.”
“If we need to run,” Naomi said, “we’ll run.”
We’ll always need to run. We’ll never get to rest, Jim thought. There didn’t seem like any point in saying it.
Chapter Two: Tanaka
Aliana pressed the button on her vaporizer and inhaled deeply. The mist tasted like vanilla and hit her lungs like a soft warm cloud. Nicotine and tetrahydrocannabinol mixed with just a touch of something more exotic. Something that tempered the THC sleepiness with a vivid hyperawareness. The shades in her room were drawn, but the hint of light at the edges shifted the dust into a rainbow of sparks. She moved one leg, and the silk sheet caressed it like a thousand tiny lovers.
Tristan was asleep next to her, his small muscular butt pressed up against her thigh. He snored gently as he slept, punctuated by the occasional twitch and sigh. Aliana knew that she found the noise charming and sweet because she was high and postcoital. The minute his snoring became annoying, Tristan would have overstayed his welcome.
There were, in her experience, two ways to thrive in a rigid, authoritarian regime. The first—the one most people reached for—was to be what power wanted you to be. Mars had wanted loyal soldiers, and they had produced them like they were printing machine parts. She knew, because she was old enough that she’d been one of them. She’d seen her cohort try to strangle or excise from their collective souls anything that wasn’t sufficiently Martian, and sometimes they’d managed.
The other mode of survival was to enjoy having secrets. Enjoy the power of seeming to be one thing while being another. And then be good at it. Even when it didn’t involve fucking her junior officers, it was a kind of sexual perversion. The thrill of knowing that a wrong word or an unexpected slip could put a bullet in the back of her head was more important to her than the actual sex.
A permissive, open society where she could have done all the same things without fear of consequences would have driven her crazy. She’d loved being part of the Laconian experiment from the beginning because Duarte’s vision—first as a capital offense against Mars and then as a permanent engine of danger—fed her kinks. She felt no shame about that. She knew what she was.
“Wake up,” she said, pushing her fingers into the young man’s back.
“Sleeping,” Tristan slurred at her.
“I know. Now wake up.” She jabbed him again. She spent ten hours a week boxing and wrestling. When she stiffened her fingers, they were like iron bars.