The captain of the Derecho was a gaunt man named Botton. The ship shuddered under them, and the high-g burn made her a little light-headed. But she wasn’t getting in a crash couch yet, and so neither was he.
“If we are not sincerely trying to catch the enemy. . .” Botton said, and then lost his train of thought. Not enough blood to the brain.
She waited to reply until he came back to himself. “We won’t catch them before they transit the ring. We won’t catch them before they transit out of the ring space either. We are setting their expectations as to our speed of pursuit to maximize the time they feel comfortable staying in the ring space. Once they’ve gone through the Freehold gate, we’ll accelerate to an even higher burn. Near the maximum the ship can handle. Our aim is to reach the ring space before their drive plume has fully dissipated. That’s how we’ll determine which gate they escaped through.”
“If we could . . . slow our present approach . . .”
“It would mean a harder burn later.”
Botton started to nod, but thought better of it. Standing free in a hard burn meant keeping the spine very carefully stacked. Tanaka suppressed a smile.
“My concern, Colonel,” Botton said, “is that the supply of high-g drugs may not me . . . may not be sufficient.”
She pulled up the allocation chart that showed the reservoirs of juice for the crew. While Botton watched, she dropped her own to zero. The pull of thrust gravity made his distress look like a sorrowful dog’s.
“I wouldn’t ask anyone to take a risk I won’t take myself,” she said. It wasn’t true, but it made her point. She was stronger than him, better than him, and tired of hearing him whine.
“Yes, Colonel,” he said. He braced, turned, and walked out of the office that had been his, careful to place his weight so that it wouldn’t blow out his knees. Tanaka waited until he was gone before she let herself ease back into her crash couch. Or her throne of skulls.
The Forgiveness began its life as a colony ship built at Pallas-Tycho in the years when the Transport Union had ruled the ring gates. With almost two billion square meters of cargo space, and living quarters that were the same size as an in-system shuttle, the Forgiveness was about freight, not passengers. Ekko had signed on when he was fifteen, and apart from a year he’d stayed behind on Firdaws to work on his command certification, he’d pretty much been there ever since. His stint as captain had outlived the union that had certified him. It had outlasted the traffic control authority on Medina Station. It had outlasted the iron fist of the Laconian Empire, more or less.
The major shareholder in the Forgiveness, on the other hand, seemed like she’d be plaguing Ekko until the day he died. Mallia Currán had financed the ship’s overhaul with a private loan backed by the governing council, and while she didn’t have a greater than 50 percent stake in the ship, she could get a coalition that did by making two calls and a coffee date. And she was Komi Tuan’s niece, so anything semilegal she did was played down by the magistrates. Like the old gods of Earth, most of the time she ignored Ekko and the Forgiveness, and the days she didn’t were almost always bad ones. She’d asked for a status report five hours before, and he’d been thinking about how to answer ever since.
He arranged himself in his office, checked his image on the screen, and started recording.
“Always good to hear from you, Magistra Currán. Everything’s five by five with the ship. We have a full load of ore and samples for Bara Gaon, and I’ve had assurance that the return cargo is going to be ready when we get there. We’re just waiting on the passage protocol before we make transit.” He tried an insouciant smile, but it came off forced. “You know how it is with taking large cargoes through. Want to make sure we’re doing it by the book and all. I will check back as soon as we have confirmation.”
He saved the message and sent it before he could second-guess himself. Four hours back to Firdaws, and maybe it would reach her while she was sleeping. That would give him a few more hours before she worked herself up into an excoriating mood. Which she would.
He already knew the arguments she’d make: The underground’s protocols were guidelines, not law; the infrastructure to support them was only partly in place; what the fuck was he going to do if the okay didn’t come through? Just sit there on the float waiting for consensus flight permissions while someone else bribed the supply officers in Bara Gaon for the soil and fuel pellets and fabrication printers that Firdaws needed?