Federations

So—still groggy after frogsleep—I wasn’t exactly wetting myself with excitement, not even when Mouser started spiking the thick with combat-readiness psychogens. Even when we went to Attack-Con-One, all I did was pause the neurodisney I was tripping (Hellcats of Solar War Three, since you asked), slough my hammock, and swim languidly up to the bridge.

“Junk,” I said, looking over Yarrow’s shoulder at the readout. “War debris or another of those piss-poor chondrites. Betcha.”

“Sorry, kid. Everything checks out.”

“Hostiles?”

“Nope. Positive on the exhaust; dead ringer for the stolen ship.” She traced a webbed hand across the swathe of decorations that already curled around her neck. “Want your stripes now or when we get back?”

“You actually think this’ll net us a pair of tigers?”

“Damn right it will.”

I nodded, and thought: She isn’t necessarily wrong. No defector, no stolen military secrets reaching the Royalists. Ought to be worth a medal, maybe even a promotion.

So why did I feel something wasn’t right?

“All right,” I said, hoping to drown qualms in routine. “How soon?”

“Missiles are already away, but she’s five light-minutes from us, so the quacks won’t reach her for six hours. Longer if she makes a run for cover.”

“Run for cover? That’s a joke.”

“Yeah, hilarious.” Yarrow swelled one of the holographic displays until it hovered between us.

It was a map of the Swirl, tinted to show zones controlled by us or the Royalists. An enormous, slowly rotating disk of primordial material, 800 AU edge to edge; wide enough that light took more than four days to traverse it.

Most of the action was near the middle, in the light-hour of space around the central star Fomalhaut. Immediately around the sun was a material-free void that we called the Inner Clearing Zone, but beyond that began the Swirl proper: metal-rich lanes of dust condensing slowly into rocky planets. Both sides wanted absolute control of those planet-forming Feeding Zones—prime real estate for the day when one side beat the other and could recommence mining operations—so that was where our vast armies of wasps mainly slugged things out. We humans—Royalist and Standardist both—kept much further out, where the Swirl thinned to metal-depleted icy rubble. Even hunting the defector hadn’t taken us within ten light-hours of the Feeding Zones, and we’d become used to having a lot of empty space to ourselves. Apart from the defector, there shouldn’t have been anything else out here to offer cover.

But there was. Big, too, not much more than a half light-minute from the rat.

“Practically pissing distance,” Yarrow observed.

“Too close for coincidence. What is it?”

“Splinter. Icy planetesimal, you want to get technical.”

“Not this early in the day.” But I remembered how one of our tutors back at the academy put it: Splinters are icy slag, spat out of the Swirl. In a few hundred thousand years there’ll be a baby solar system around Fomalhaut, but there’ll also be shitloads of junk surrounding it, leftovers on million-year orbits.

“Worthless to us,” Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair that ran all the way from her brow to fluke. “But evidently not too ratty.”

“What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl.”

Yarrow gave me her best withering look.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Not my smartest ever suggestion.”

Yarrow nodded sagely. “Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours is to fire and forget.”

• • •

Six hours after the quackheads had been launched from Mouser, Yarrow floated in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath her. She resembled an inverted question mark, and if I’d been superstitious I’d have said that wasn’t necessarily the best of omens.

“You kill me,” she said.

An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren—first to swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin, which let us tolerate cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the billions of molecule-sized demons that coursed through our bodies, or the combat-specific psycho-modifications. But swapping your legs for a tail touched off too many queasy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve, though.

“What?” I said.

“That neurodisney shit. Isn’t a real space war good enough for you?”

“Yeah, except I don’t think this is it. When was the last time one of us actually looked a Royalist in the eye?”

She shrugged. “Something like four hundred years.”