Vanguard

Chapter 2

A day and a half later, Rob waited with the rest of his optimistically named boarding party in one of the Wingnut’s main air locks. The air lock had already been cleared of atmosphere, but the outer hatch remained closed to prevent giving warning to the Bucket, which was now on final approach to its intercept of Wingnut’s orbit. The demands for protection money had been repeated twice, and each time the council had responded with references to space law and promises to report the incident to Old Earth. The crew of the Bucket hadn’t seemed the least bit impressed by either argument, instead repeating their own “concerns” that if the colony didn’t pay up “it would be unprotected against aggression.”

As always, Rob found waiting harder than actually doing something. The survival suit he was wearing felt too flimsy for a combat mission because it was. Strong enough to protect humans from the hazards of space and cheap enough to serve as a space equivalent of a life jacket at sea, the suit wouldn’t stop any weapon. He tugged at one armpit, the suit feeling even more one-size-fits-all than normal. The air being recycled through the suit was fine according to the readouts, so Rob concentrated on controlling his breathing and ignoring a persistent worry that it smelled off.

He looked at the men and women who would follow him aboard the enemy ship. They were gazing back at him, their expressions hard to see but their body postures tense. At least during his time in Alfar’s fleet he had learned how to give a pep talk before a difficult task. Keep it simple, keep it short. “The rest of the people in this colony are counting on us to stop these guys. We can do this. I have every confidence in all of you. The people on that warship won’t be expecting trouble, so they’re going to be very surprised when we give them more trouble than they imagined possible. Stay cool and stay sharp, and we’ll get the job done.”

“Lieutenant Geary.”

He switched to the comm channel for private communications. “Here.”

“This is Council Member Leigh Camagan. I wanted to inform you that under pressure the council has finally agreed on a name for this colony. It will have to be confirmed by a vote of all citizens of the colony, but I have no doubt of the outcome. Let those you are leading know that they are now defending the people of the Glenlyon Star System. Good luck.”

“Thank you.” Rob passed the news on to the rest of the boarding party, all of whom seemed happy to be defending newly named Glenlyon.

“How does it look, Ninja?” he asked over the coordination circuit.

“Smooth,” she replied, her voice confident and cheerful. “I’ve got control of every automated system on that ship, but I inserted a shell that makes it look to the crew like everything is normal. They’ll find out different in about one minute, but even then they’ll think the problem is confined to their maneuvering systems.”

“Sensors are hacked?”

“Absolutely! All they’ll see is the Wingnut looking like it was a couple of minutes ago, hatches sealed and nobody doing nothing.”

Rob gave the rest of the boarding party a thumbs-up. “We’ve got effective control of the Bucket’s systems. Ninja is about to order the Bucket to brake velocity and come to a stop relative to us. That will finally alert the crew of that ship that something is wrong, but their sensors have been hacked, so they won’t see this air lock hatch opening and their displays won’t tell them that their ship is dropping its shields. They’ll be focused on trying to figure out what happened to their ship’s maneuvering systems while we get aboard and get down to business.” I hope, he added to himself.

“Ninja accessed the crew files to confirm there are twenty-three of them aboard that Bucket,” Val Tanaka reminded the others. “There are twenty of us. But almost all of their crew will be in small groups at duty stations, so we can overwhelm them at each spot. Everybody double-check your shockers and make sure the safeties are engaged until we reach the other ship and you’re told to ready them.”

“Once we get control of the bridge and the power core, we’ve won,” Rob added as the air lock’s outer hatch swung open.

Buccaneer Class cutters were a lot smaller than the Wingnut, only about one hundred twenty meters from bow to stern, and the warship had been coming in fast for an intimidating firing run. It was still far enough off that Rob could only spot it because of the flare from the main propulsion unit, which was facing toward Wingnut as the warship braked velocity to engagement speed so the Bucket could threaten to fire on Wingnut or one of the colony shuttles, or put a precise shot into part of the Wingnut to encourage the colony to pay up before more damage was inflicted.

Any moment now, the crew of the Bucket would realize that something was wrong, as their main propulsion kept going past when it should have shut off, and the warship kept slowing until it came to a stop relative to the Wingnut.

“Their sensors are going to tell them that they’re stopped fifty kilometers away from the Wingnut,” Ninja reported gleefully.

“How close can you really get them to us?”

“You asked for one hundred meters, and you’re getting one hundred meters.”

“Have you maneuvered ships before, Ninja?”

“In simulators. I’m using the Bucket’s own maneuvering systems to do this, though. Don’t worry! I don’t want anything happening to you!”

It was a bit comforting to realize that Ninja really did like him and had extra motivation to get everything right as a result, but Rob felt his breathing speeding up and his heart racing as the start of the attack approached. He concentrated on controlling both despite the memories of that failed drill when he was an ensign filling his mind. He was facing an actual combat situation for the first time, something else that Val Tanaka had advised him not to share with the rest of the boarding party. Feeling fear of both failure and of personal injury or death, Rob hoped that he could power through the fear and make the right decisions at the right times.

Because these others were counting on him.

The Bucket came sliding in along a gentle arc, matching the orbit of Wingnut and coming to a stop relative to the other. Both spaceships were now actually orbiting the planet beneath them at about seven kilometers per second, fast on a planet but a snail’s pace in space, and since both were going exactly the same direction at the same speed they appeared to each other to be unmoving.

Ninja had done exactly as promised, directing the Bucket’s maneuvering systems to position the warship hanging in space about one hundred meters from where Rob waited. This close, the hull of the Bucket almost filled the view of space from the air lock hatch. Unlike the boxy shapes of large cargo ships, warships more closely resembled oceangoing predators. The chunky Buccaneers, though, looked less like sharks or barracudas than they did bloated trout, one of the reasons why they had been nicknamed Buckets.

“The Bucket’s door is open!” Ninja announced. “Mind the gap!”

Rob saw a patch of light appear on the Bucket’s hull as the outer hatch opened for the warship’s largest air lock amidships. “Follow me,” Rob told the others, trying to sound calm and authoritative, aiming for what even this close looked like a far-too-small target against the immensity of space. Knowing that any hesitation on his part would unnerve his boarding party, he took a deep breath and jumped off.

Despite his own experience, his inbred planetary instincts kept insisting that either he must be slowing down due to air resistance and gravity as he crossed the one-hundred-meter gap of emptiness, or increasing speed as if he were falling. The last thing his mind wanted to accept was that he was gliding along at an unvarying rate, the side of the Bucket growing steadily larger.

He felt an absurd sense of accomplishment as he reached the Bucket close enough to the air lock to grab onto the side of it as he hit the other ship with a bit more force than he had planned on.

Rob looked back, reaching out to grab other members of the boarding party as they came flying toward him. Some of the impacts when they slammed into him were hard enough to cause bruises, but everyone made it safely even though a few hit the side of the Bucket and had to stick, then crawl along to the air lock using the gecko gloves on their survival suits.

The Bucket’s air lock could only hold ten at a time. Rob sent Val Tanaka through with the first ten, hanging on to the side of the warship and hoping the crew wouldn’t figure out what was happening despite their sensors being hacked. “How’s it look, Ninja?”

“The guys on the bridge are seriously upset, but they’re still trying to fix what they think is a main-propulsion control problem,” she told him. “Do you want an audio feed? Their captain isn’t too good at swearing, but he makes up in volume for what he lacks in variety.”

“No, I’m good. Nobody suspects what we’re doing?”

“One of the other officers is trying to tell the captain that it’s really suspicious they came to a stop relative to us, but nobody is listening because it looks to them like they’re still fifty kilometers from us. Oh, hell, she’s trying to run a diagnostic on the other systems on the ship. I need to deal with that. Talk to you later.”

“Thanks. The air lock is cycling open. I’m going in.”

The air lock was a tight fit with ten of them inside. It ambled through its cycle at a sluggish pace, but Rob finally led the rest of the boarding party into the ship, into a nondescript passageway running fore and aft. Without consciously thinking about it, his eyes ran across the nearby piping, conduits, auto-sealing vents, fire suppression features, and other equipment, evaluating how well they had been maintained and kept clean. Not up to Alfar fleet standards but good enough as far as he could tell from the brief scan.

“Everyone arm your shockers and ensure the safeties are off. Make sure you don’t point them at anyone else in this boarding party! Like we planned,” he told Val. “Go.” She gestured to nine others, and that group headed aft for the power core control compartment. Neither she nor Rob had ever been on a Bucket before, but the standard deck plans for a Buccaneer Class cutter had been available in the colony’s vast database, and the route on such a small ship hadn’t been too hard to memorize.

Rob turned toward the bow, leading the remaining nine members of the boarding party still with him toward the bridge buried inside the ship farther forward.

They hadn’t gone more than five meters before reaching an airtight hatch sloppily left open during what should have been a combat readiness situation. At the same moment, two crew members of the Bucket arrived on the other side, coming aft. The crew members were actually jumping through the hatch before they realized Rob and the others were standing there, and barely had time to begin to stare in disbelief before a half dozen shockers went off, the impacts of the charges knocking the two flying before they hit the edges of the hatch and fell unconscious.

“Didn’t you tell us they’d be wearing survival suits, Lieutenant?” one of the men with Rob asked.

“They should be,” Rob said. “But they’re so confident that they’re ignoring basic precautions. That’s good for us.”

Their route had been planned to go past the local control station for the Bucket’s pulse particle cannon. Rob led the group in a rush to the hatch giving access, finding it, too, hanging open and four crew members lounging around the powered-up weapon consoles as they traded jokes. Their survival suits lay draped across the backs of their seats.

Rob didn’t give them a chance to give up. Too much depended on speed and silence. He and the rest of his team fired, and the four weapons crew members jerked and fell as multiple shocker charges hit each of them.

“That’s going to hurt,” one of the boarding party commented.

“Maybe it’ll hurt enough that they’ll realize they need to wear their survival suits in a potential combat situation next time,” Rob replied. He waited impatiently for the few seconds required for those of his party who were members of the colony police force to expertly and swiftly bind the hands and legs of the unconscious crew. “Elliot and Singh, you two stay here and make sure no one else from the crew shows up and tries to use that cannon. Seal the hatch and use the panel here to see anyone who tries to open it.”

“Got it,” both Elliot and Singh replied.

Rob led the remaining members of his group back out into the passageway, heading forward, then almost immediately inward toward the bridge. Worry nagged at him, that he had taken a wrong turn or misread something, but then he spotted a ready response compartment just where it should be if he was on the right route.

Six more crew members were lying around the ready response compartment, supposedly prepared to rush out and reinforce or fix any place or anything that needed either. But the six were all engrossed in whatever was on their individual handhelds, none of them noticing the arrival of Rob and his team until shock charges knocked them out and fried their handhelds.

As these six had their hands and legs bound, Rob looked around the compartment and saw something with familiar markings that had probably been standardized on Old Earth centuries before. “That’s an arms locker. One of these guys might have a key to it.” It would take time to search for that key, if any of these crew members had been entrusted with one. Time they couldn’t spare. But if the locker contained anything useful… Rob hesitated, trying to decide.

“They might have some good hand weapons in there,” one of Rob’s team suggested.

“We don’t know that,” Rob said, making up his mind, “and even if they do, and even if we can find a key fast, that locker door might be alarmed so the bridge would know if we opened it. Our best weapon is still surprise.”

He paused again, not happy at the idea of further diminishing the size of his force but knowing he couldn’t leave these crew members and an arms locker unguarded. “Safwat and Watson, you two stay here,” he ordered. “That arms locker has to be watched. Don’t hesitate to use your shockers again on any other crew members who come by, or any of these six who wake up and cause any trouble.”

Rob gripped his shocker tightly as he ran the final stretch to the bridge through empty passageways, followed closely by the five other boarding party members left with him. There was the hatch to the bridge, helpfully identified by absurdly ornate letters spelling BRIDGE that had been painted above it. He nodded to the five with him, then tugged at the hatch, cursing as he discovered that it was locked. Finally, someone on this ship had done something right, and just where it was least needed.

“Ninja?” he called over the coordination circuit. His signal shouldn’t be able to transmit through the warship’s hull, but if Ninja had control of the Bucket’s internal comm system she might be able to—

“Whatcha need?” Ninja called back. “Oh, got a locked hatch?”

Spotting the tiny red light that marked the active surveillance camera by the bridge hatch, Rob nodded toward it, knowing that Ninja must be remotely controlling that system as well. “What are things like on the bridge? Can you see there?”

“Yeah. The captain is still screaming at everybody, and everybody is looking at him because if they look away, he screams at them personally. He’s wearing a sidearm. I don’t think it’s a shocker, so don’t take any chances with him.”

“Understood. Thanks. Can you pop the lock on this hatch?”

“Stand by. Three, two, one, go.”

Rob tugged again, and the hatch swung open.

He led his team onto the bridge. As Ninja had reported, everyone on the bridge was standing at attention and facing inward toward the captain, who was so busy yelling at them all that he didn’t even notice Rob’s arrival.

Rob aimed and fired his shocker.

The captain’s latest angry shout changed to a strangled garble as the charge hit and knocked him senseless into the nearest other member of the bridge crew.

A woman officer spun to look, one hand reaching for where her sidearm would have been holstered. But she broke off the motion as if realizing she didn’t have a weapon and raised her open hands in surrender. The others on the bridge also raised their hands, staring at Rob in disbelief.

“Are you the second-in-command?” Rob asked the female officer, using his survival suit’s external speaker.

She shook her head. “The captain sent him back to engineering to yell at the techs there.”

“Ninja? Can you tell how Val Tanaka is doing?” Rob asked.

“She’s got the power core,” Ninja confirmed. “They just knocked out some officer who came charging in as if he were being chased by rabid dogs. Here. I’ll link you through the ship’s internal comms.”

“Val?”

“Here. We’re in full control, but I’d recommend getting that Torres character aboard so he can fix up the controls on the power core. One of the guys with me, Snee, has a little experience with gear like this, and what he can see of their control setup has him scared. Yeah, I see, Snee. Duct tape. Who the hell fixes a power core backup control link with duct tape?” she asked Rob.

“I’ve seen stranger uses of duct tape,” Rob said. “But I agree with Snee. We’ll bring the Bucket in closer to Wingnut and get some reinforcements aboard.”

The female officer was gazing at Rob with a wondering expression. “How the hell did you jump fifty kilometers?”

“We hacked your sensors,” Rob said. “You’re actually only a hundred meters from our ship.”

“Oh. I thought the problem was a lot bigger than it looked, but Cap’n Pete was too busy yelling at us to fix things to listen to what we thought might be broken.” She sighed. “If you have the power core and the bridge, we’ve lost. What do you intend doing with the crew?”

Rob shook his head. “That’s up to the colony council, but I assume we’ll put you all aboard the Wingate and let her carry you back to her next destination. I don’t know what they’ll do with you there, but as long as you never come back here, I don’t care.”

“All right. Let me use the general announcing system, and I’ll tell everyone aboard to surrender. There’s no sense anyone else’s getting hurt.”

One of Rob’s group had removed the captain’s sidearm. “Look at this, Lieutenant. Ground forces issue. Anybody he hit with this would have been badly wounded or killed. These guys weren’t playing around.”

Rob gave the woman officer a hard look. “How many colonies have you guys shaken down for protection money?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “This is my first run with them. I got recruited out of Earth Fleet by a bunch of assurances that turned out to be as worthless as a Red’s promise.”

“Earth Fleet?” Rob asked, startled and looking at her with new eyes.

“Yeah, I’m former Ensign Danielle Martel of Earth Fleet, now a former lieutenant in Scatha’s fleet because you just gave me a chance to get out of a bad contract.” She shook her head at him. “You should know that Scatha isn’t going to be happy about this.”

“Too bad,” Rob said. “We’ve got this ship, and we’ll use it if they try anything else.”

“Do you really think this is over? Scatha has two other warships, both better than this one, and its leaders are not nice people. Ever since I got to Scatha, I’ve been hearing pronouncements from those leaders about how Scatha is going to be a new Earth but with teeth. They want what they call order and safety, and to do that they intend to be the big dog in this region of space, whether the neighboring star systems want it or not. You’d better be planning on how to handle whatever they try next.”

Rob gave Danielle Martel a grim look, the glow of victory fading within him. This had just been the first skirmish in what looked to be a war rather than an isolated raid.

“Can’t Old Earth do something?” Ninja asked over the comm circuit.

“Not out here,” Rob replied. “Not anymore. We’re on our own.”

Many light years away from the star now named Glenlyon, Carmen Ochoa stood glaring out a window at an ancient landscape that countless other human eyes had looked upon. “Earth was the center of the universe. Now, we’re irrelevant.”

Her boss favored Carmen with a weary look. “What is it now?”

She kept her gaze on the scene outside. An impact crater from the First Solar War still marked the site of the original spaceport outside of Albuquerque, the new port spreading out to the south. Clusters of trees and closely trimmed grass designed to reclaim battered land provided welcome carpets of color. The remnants of the old city, and the newer structures built to look like early structures and so strangely seeming older than the original buildings, filled the valley beyond the port and the crater. Beyond them, rough mountains and hills rose toward a daytime sky that had looked down uncaring on human activities for thousands of years.

Make the low-lying sun a lot smaller, make the mountains and hills a little redder, and it would look very much like the sort of landscapes that Carmen had grown up seeing on Mars. The buildings, though… not like here at all. Put up in a rush, on foundations of idealism that proved to be as sturdy as shifting sand, sagging under the burdens of age, makeshift repairs, and the voracious dust of Mars. Unbidden, Carmen’s mind summoned up memories from when she was little, huddled into one corner of a small room hiding from gang battles outside, or from the searching eyes of gang recruiters.

Promising herself that someday she would keep other places from ending up like Mars had. Doing whatever she had to in order to make it off Mars and to the one place that had the power to make a difference.

As if to mock that old vow, from here a large piece of public art was visible, globes shining reddish golden in the sunlight fixed to swooping, silvery metal shafts. In the center hung the globe representing Sol, the sun of Earth. Spreading outward in an irregular sphere were the other globes, each marking a star where humanity had planted colonies.

Old Earth, it was called now, and those colony worlds were increasingly known as the Old Colonies as new worlds were settled after the explosion of humanity into space as the new jump drives made interstellar travel much faster and easier. The sculpture was obsolete, a relic of the past. Like her job. “I am thinking,” Carmen said, “that I just wasted more of my time and effort for nothing.”

Her boss shrugged. “You got the cease-and-desist order approved and sent.”

“Yeah. You know what’s funny? When ships tried to push light speed and spent years getting to one of the Old Colonies or back to Earth, they listened to Earth. They respected Earth. But now that ships can use jump space to make the same journey within weeks, the Old Colonies pay less and less attention to Earth.”

Another shrug. “Nothing funny about it,” her boss said. “Familiarity breeds contempt. When we were the incredibly distant home that took years to reach, we were wrapped in myth and memory. But when anybody can get from there to here in a few weeks? Then we’re just another planet, one with dozens and dozens of independent governments ruling independent states that often refuse to cooperate. A planet that has seen a lot more mistakes and stupidity than any of the Old Colonies have gotten around to yet.”

Carmen shook her head. “Everyone is talking about how much smaller the galaxy is with jump drives. But it took four months for that request for a cease-and-desist to reach us, on ships jumping from star to star, then four more months for me to work it through the bureaucracy and get the order approved, and it will take another four months for that order to get back to the star Derribar, where a colony has now existed for eight months. And what will happen when the colony at Derribar presents that cease-and-desist order to the nearly-as-new colony at Cathal? Nothing. Because Cathal knows they can ignore it. Assuming that in the year since the request was first made by Derribar that it hasn’t already been overtaken by events.”

“What do you want, Ochoa?” her boss asked. “For Earth to build a fleet big enough to force colonies in a sphere hundreds of light years across to do what we want?”

“I know that’s impossible, even if enough of the governments in the solar system agreed on something like that.” Carmen gritted her teeth. “You know that I grew up on Mars. I saw firsthand how ugly things can get when there is no such thing as effective government or respect for law.”

“And, for a Red, you’re a really decent person. But most of the Reds seem to like it that ugly, at least until their terraformed ecology begins to collapse again due to neglect and they beg the organized governments on Earth to step in and fix it.” Her boss sighed. “Humanitarian crises shouldn’t be so predictable.”

“You’re a really decent person… for a Red.” Even her boss on Earth couldn’t forget where she had come from. “I didn’t like it that ugly. So I left to try to make things better. And instead, it’s happening all over again! Just like when Mars was colonized, only this time it’s happening on countless worlds. The sheep are scattering in pursuit of places with no shepherds, and the wolves are sharpening their knives.” Carmen shook her head, turning away from the window. “I can’t make any difference here. I’m resigning. Heading out. Maybe out there I can do something that matters.”

“I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving,” her boss said, sounding almost sincere but also too tired and worn-out to care. Like most of Earth, he had seen too many wars and too many half-failed efforts to save people who stubbornly refused to cooperate in their own deliverance. “You’re not going to try heading up the spiral arm, are you? The colonies in that direction are still refusing to let any new people move in.”

“I wouldn’t go up even if they’d take me,” Carmen scoffed. “Them and their Original Blood of Terra nonsense. No, I’m going down the spiral arm, where the colonies are expanding as fast as ships can jump to new stars. There’s a ship leaving for one of those new colonies next week.”

“Which colony?” her boss asked, not even trying to sound as if he were actually interested.

“Kosatka.”

“Never heard of it.”

“You will.” Carmen had been preparing for this moment for a long time, not knowing when she would finally make the leap but knowing it would happen. She powered down her system, logged out for the last time, swept the few personal items allowed on her desk into her backpack, and nodded good-bye to her boss. “Farewell.”

Her boss rubbed his face with one hand, nodding back, his own attention already shifting back to processing the next interstellar court order that would very likely be ignored by every party involved. “Good luck, Carmen. You’ll need it.”

Many light years down the spiral arm of the galaxy that contained Earth, Lochan Nakamura helped one of the other survivors off the lifeboat, then stood gazing around at the plain metal walls and overhead of the enclosed surface docking station. Having gotten this far, he wasn’t sure where to go next.

The star humans had named Vestri was a red dwarf, about a third the size of Earth’s sun, putting out a fraction of the light and heat of brighter stars, puttering along as it had for billions of years and would continue doing so for much longer. Vestri had no worlds worthy of the name orbiting it, just several airless asteroids that were not quite large enough to be labeled planets and countless smaller rocks that had mostly formed into two impressive belts about the star. Fortunately for Lochan and the others who had been passengers aboard the merchant freighter Brian Smith, one of those large asteroids held a way station and had been within range of the lifeboat from the ship.

One of the way station employees, wearing coveralls and a smile, stuck a pad in front of Lochan. “Thumbprint, bio-scan, and signature,” she requested.

“For what?” Lochan asked, still bemused from his escape.

“Agreement to pay for rescue services, lodging, provisions, and life support until someone picks you up,” the local said cheerfully. “You’ve still got your universal wallet, right? Great. You’ll need to compensate the station for everything you receive.”

Wondering at her attitude in the wake of the hijacking of the freighter, Lochan scrolled through the document he was being asked to sign. “These rates are ridiculously high.”

Her smile widened. “You’re welcome to get your food, water, heat, and air from another place, sir.”

“And you’re the only source for those things in this star system, aren’t you?” Lochan asked, finally understanding why the woman was so happy.

“That’s right. And we’ve got bills to pay.”

Having left the Old Colony at Franklin in part because he was tired of paying taxes for government services he didn’t think he needed, Lochan took a moment to savor the irony of his situation. In Franklin’s star system, this station would have been run by the government and provide rescue and aid without charge. “Are you going to report that pirate who took the freighter and dumped us here?” he asked as he pressed a thumb to the pad.

“Of course,” she said absentmindedly as she checked to make sure everything had been done right.

As the local went off to put the screws to another castaway, a young woman paused beside Lochan. He had seen her on the freighter but hadn’t spoken with her before. Even if her bearing and attitude hadn’t proclaimed her a veteran, the small brass sword-and-shield clipped to one earlobe would have given her away as having once been part of Franklin’s tiny force of Marines.

“She didn’t seem too upset about that pirate,” Lochan commented.

The woman smiled. “I’ll bet you that pirate hits ships passing through Vestri all the time and shares profits with this station. Why do you think the pirates let us all keep our wallets?”

“That’s why they let us go so easily?” Lochan shook his head. “Nice scam.”

“Who’s going to stop them?” The woman nodded to him. “I’m Mele Darcy.”

“Lochan Nakamura. What’s a Marine doing out here?”

“Former Marine,” Mele said, her eyes studying the crowd. “Force reductions to save money, so I decided to give the new colonies a try.”

“What do you think so far?”

“It sucks.” She grinned. “Where are you headed?”

“Down and out. I haven’t decided exactly where, yet. What about you?”

“Same. Figured I’d go until I found a place worth staying.” Mele looked around. “I can already tell that Vestri ain’t that place.”

“You got that.” Lochan and Mele followed the rest of the group as they were led down stairs toward the station’s accommodations beneath the surface.

“You know what I am. What are you?” Mele asked as they trudged along bare-walled corridors mined from the rock of the asteroid.

“Me?” Lochan shrugged. “Failed business owner, failed politician, failed husband.”

“Oh? What are you planning on doing down and out?”

“Find something else to fail at, I guess.”

Mele laughed. “I think you can do better than that. Stick with me. We’ll watch each other’s backs until we get off this rock.”

Lochan had been wondering why the Marine had attached herself to him. He knew he wasn’t the sort of man that younger women gravitated toward. But self-interest. He could understand that.

The room the former passengers were brought to proved to be a single large space lined with bunks. The only privacy was offered by a bathroom. Several vid screens were on the walls, but as Lochan suspected, the first involuntary guests who tried them discovered that they had a per-minute viewing charge. “This is what a cash cow looks like,” Lochan said to Mele.

A nearby way station employee looked offended. “We’re providing a service. Where would you be if this station hadn’t been here?”

“Probably still on the Brian Smith, approaching the jump point for the next star,” Lochan said.

The employee glared at Lochan. “You’d better be careful what you—” He paused in the act of raising a fist, looking to the side where Mele stood with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on him, then lowered his hand and walked away.

Lochan nodded to Mele. “Thanks. I’ve got a big mouth.”

“You did say you’d been a politician.” Mele gestured toward the rest of those from the freighter, who were milling about in various states of despair and distress. “How about using those skills to organize these people? The vultures running this station will pick them clean if we don’t all look out for each other.”

Startled, Lochan looked over the group. “Are you going to help?”

“That depends on how you work. I’m feeling a need to stay in the background, and I’ve learned to listen to my instincts. But show me a good leader, and I’ll follow.”

Lochan nodded once more. He couldn’t explain why, but he didn’t want to let Mele Darcy down. Maybe it had just been too long since anyone, himself included, had thought he could do anything right. Or maybe he was already tired of trying to run away from past failures. Sooner or later, he would have to stop running and start trying again. “I’ll give it a shot.”

She gazed at him, then abruptly pulled him close in a tight hug, burying her face next to his ear and whispering so low he could barely hear. “They’ve probably got these rooms bugged. If we need to pass on serious warnings to each other, use this old code.” One finger tapped the back of his neck three times quickly, three times with a slight pause between each, then three times quickly again.

Mele stepped back, looking sheepish for the benefit of onlookers. “Sorry. I get physical sometimes.”

“No problem,” Lochan said, wishing she had held the hug a little longer and wondering if she would be interested in something more later.

But she smiled again and shook her head slightly at him, answering that unspoken question before Lochan could build up any false hopes.

He turned to the others and raised his voice to command attention. “Hey, everybody! I’ve got a couple of suggestions.”

Carmen Ochoa hadn’t been in space since leaving Mars for Earth, but the experience hadn’t changed all that much in a decade. Take the regular shuttle up to the orbital station, then transfer to the ship, in this case a large, newly built craft whose boxy lines contained enough room for hundreds of passengers in conditions ranging from luxurious to cramped, as well as plenty of freight compartments holding goods that would be snapped up by the growing colonies on the edges of human expansion.

Her walk through the orbital station was hindered by the presence of a lot of Earth Fleet sailors. Men and women in uniform were seemingly everywhere, some of them lined up to get into crowded bars but most standing around in somber groups. Whatever was happening didn’t seem to be a celebration.

“What’s going on?” Carmen asked one small gathering of sailors.

An older man with several service stripes on the sleeve of his uniform gestured toward space beyond the station. “The fleet just decommissioned the last three Founders Class destroyers.”

A woman about the same age nodded morosely. “The George Washington, the Simon Bolivar, and the Joan of Arc. The ceremonies ended about an hour ago. I spent three years on the Bolivar. Now the only people aboard her are contractors shutting down all the systems before the ships get hauled to join the ghost fleet at Lagrange 5.”

“Are you going to other ships?” Carmen asked.

“There aren’t enough other ships left in the active fleet. Most of us are being let go,” the older man said. “Early retirement or just kicked out as surplus.”

“They’re talking about demilitarizing the solar system,” the woman sailor said, sounding both bewildered and angry. “Getting rid of the fleet completely. Who’s going to defend Earth? Who’s going to help the Old Colonies if they need it?”

An officer passing by stopped to partially answer the question. “The Old Colonies up and out have cut themselves off from us already. The colonies down and out will have to help themselves. There are rumors that Earth gov is trying to set up an arrangement for the Old Colonies to protect us,” he finished.

“Maybe we can get positions in their fleets,” the woman sailor said.

“You can try,” the officer agreed. “But the Old Colonies don’t have much because they’ve depended on our forces if things got really bad.”

Carmen spoke up. “There are all the new colonies. They’re going to need something.”

The sailors looked at her with various degrees of curiosity and skepticism. “Where are the new colonies going to get ships?” the older sailor asked. “It takes a while to develop shipyards.”

“They can probably get our old ships cheap,” the officer remarked. He fixed a tired, cynical gaze on Carmen. “Are you going down and out? Let them know Earth has a lot of warships with plenty of light hours of sailing time left on them just drifting in the ghost fleet.”

“They can recruit crews when they buy the ships, too,” the woman sailor said. “There will be plenty of us sitting around wishing we had a deck under our feet again. I’d rather be part of something growing than wait until I’m the person who turns out the last light and locks the last hatch for good in the Earth Fleet.”

“I’ll remember that,” Carmen said. “I’m sorry I can’t do more.”

“You’re just being smart, getting out of a game with worn-out players and nothing left to score. There’s not much left to do here except remember when we made history instead of being history.” The officer squinted at the nearest wall panel showing an image of space outside. “I may go down and out, too. Why not? Hey,” he told the sailors. “Come on. I’ll buy you all a last round before the final crew of the Bolivar breaks up for good.”

The sailors went off toward one of the bars while Carmen boarded her shuttle. She shifted the view on the entertainment panel in front of her seat until she spotted the long, lean shapes of three destroyers near the transfer station. Compared to the big, stout merchant ships around the station, the destroyers looked like the predators they were, three barracudas drifting amid schools of fat, slow fish.

When she tapped the images on her panel, the information that popped up identified all three as “inactive—surplus.” No names left to them, nothing to mark what they had done in the service of Earth or the crews who had served on them. Just “inactive—surplus.” In some ways, that felt like a metaphor for what Earth was becoming. Still there, but passive and no longer heeded by the children she had sent out to seed the stars.

Boarding the new ship Mononoke was a welcome relief from thoughts of decline and decay.

She dumped her luggage on the bunk of a stateroom barely large enough to hold her and the three other women who would share it with Carmen. The medium-sized carryall and her backpack didn’t hold much, but Carmen had learned in the dog-eat-dog shantytowns of Mars that clinging to material possessions was foolish.

The displays on the walls, one by each bunk, were all showing the path the Mononoke would take down and out. Out beyond the previous bounds of human settlement, and down this spiral arm of the galaxy in the direction of the center of the Milky Way. Carmen zoomed in the display to see the details of the crooked path the ship would take as it jumped from star to star.

Another woman came in and claimed the other bottom bunk. “How far are you going?” she asked Carmen.

“All the way.”

“Seriously? I’m just going back to Brahma.” She stretched out on the bunk. “Old Colony is fine with me. Have you ever been in jump space?”

“No,” Carmen admitted. “Is it as bad as they say?”

“Not at first. It gets worse with each day. It will only take six days to reach Brahma, which will just leave us feeling uncomfortable. The longest jump you’re going to face after that is, um, about two weeks. Your skin will feel like it belongs to someone else by the time you end that jump.”

Carmen sat down on her bunk, gazing at the route ahead. She knew why the ship had to jump from star to star, not skipping any. Partly it was because the jump drives didn’t have enough range to go farther than the closest stars to whichever star they were jumping from. And partly it was because, as her new roommate said, jump space made people feel more and more uncomfortable the longer they were in it. There were already a lot of frightening rumors about what had happened to the people on ships that had spent too long in jump space. “Have you heard anything about piracy beyond the Old Colonies?”

“It’s happening,” her new roommate said. “That’s about all I know. The more isolated the star, the worse your odds are. I’ve heard ships are getting waylaid more frequently the farther out you go. Enough ships that people are starting to talk about doing something. But it’s all just talk. I doubt anything will actually be done.”

“Aren’t the Old Colonies worried that it might spread their way?”

“We’ve always been safe enough. It’s not our responsibility to bail out a bunch of malcontents who headed down and out and ran into trouble.”

That didn’t leave much room for discussion, so Carmen changed the subject. “It’ll take two weeks to get to the first jump point?”

“Yeah,” her slightly-more-experienced-as-a-space-traveler roommate replied. “The Mononoke is faster than the average freighter, but not nearly as fast as a warship, so it’ll be, uh, thirteen and a half standard days from Earth orbit for us to reach the jump point for Brahma. You know how the jump drives work, right?”

“Space gets stretched by the mass of stars,” Carmen said. “That creates thin spots in the fabric of the universe that ships can use to enter and leave jump space. Jump points are the thin spots that give access to thin spots at other stars.”

“Uh-huh. We can’t just jump from anywhere.”

“I’ve heard jump space is gray.”

“Ha!” Her roommate’s laugh startled Carmen. “It’s the gray to end all grays, a gray so gray that you can’t even imagine any color in it. It’s the most boring kind of space imaginable. Except for the lights, whatever they are. Have you heard about them? They show up sometimes, then go away.”

“What are the lights?” Carmen asked. “What causes them?”

“Um… no one knows what they are yet, but they’ll find out soon, I’m sure,” her roommate predicted confidently. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

“No,” Carmen said.

“Sorry! Are you a physicist?”

“Me? No. My job’s a lot more difficult than physics,” Carmen said. “Conflict resolution.”

“Conflict resolution? At least you’ll have job security down and out,” the woman from Brahma observed. “You’re originally from Earth?”

No way was she going to admit the truth to this woman. “Yes.”

“And you’re going to the end of the line? That’s… Kosatka?”

“Right,” Carmen said.

“What’s so special about Kosatka?”

“I’ll find out when I get there.”

“What’s the problem?” Lochan Nakamura demanded.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” The young and hard-looking man who wore a doctor’s patch on one shoulder pointed Lochan to a seat in the small infirmary that served the asteroid way station. “Shut the door, sit down, and shut up.”

Lochan, his temper and patience both worn after a couple of weeks at the station, considered walking out. But he had learned to pick his fights, and there would be time later to turn this encounter into a face-off if he felt like it. He sat down on the indicated platform under a wall-mounted universal-scan.

The doctor paused to touch a couple of commands on his comm pad, then fixed Lochan with a flat stare. “I’ve got nothing against taking sheep like you for all the money you’ve got. But there are lines I don’t cross.”

“Which line is this?” Lochan asked, speaking calmly.

“Human trafficking.” The doctor checked his pad again. “I’ve got a routine running that is spoofing the surveillance gear in here, but I don’t want to run it any longer than I have to, so keep quiet and let me talk. In three more days, a freighter is going to show up, saying it’s from Varaha. They’ll agree to take you on to there.”

“Why is that a problem?”

“I told you to keep quiet. That freighter will actually be from Apulu, where they need warm bodies to do unpleasant jobs. They’ll take you to Apulu whether you like it or not, and all of you will vanish as far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned.”