Kira forced her thoughts elsewhere.
“Everything shipshape?” Falconi asked when Nielsen came floating through the doorway a few minutes later.
“Shipshape as can be,” said Nielsen. “We shouldn’t have any problems with inspectors.”
“Aside from Itari,” said Kira.
The first officer smiled with a dry expression. “Yes, well, at least they can’t blame us for breaking quarantine. There hasn’t been proper biocontainment with the Jellies since day one.” Then she went and sat in the crash chair on the other side of Vishal.
Sparrow made a disgusted noise and looked over at Nielsen. “You see what the Stellarists are up to?”
“Mmm. No worse than the Expansion or Conservation Parties. They’d do the same if they were in charge.”
Sparrow shook her head. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. The Premier is using this whole state of emergency thing to really clamp down on the colonies.”
“Ugh,” said Kira. Why was she not surprised? The Stellarists were always putting Sol first. Understandable to a point, but it didn’t mean she had to like it.
Nielsen assumed a pleasantly blank face. “That’s a rather extreme point of view, Sparrow.”
“Just you watch,” the short-haired woman said. “After this whole mess is over, if there even is an after, you won’t be able to so much as spit without getting permission from Earth Central. Guarantee it.”
“You’re overst—”
“What am I saying? You’re from Venus. Of course you’re going to back Earth, just like everyone else who grew up with their heads in the clouds.”
A frown settled on Nielsen’s face, and she started to answer when Falconi said, “Enough with the politics. Save it for when we’ve got enough drink to make it tolerable.”
“Yessir,” said Sparrow in a surly voice.
Kira returned her attention to her overlays. She never could keep track of the finer points of interstellar politics. Too many moving parts. But she did know she didn’t like the Stellarists (and most politicians, for that matter).
As she watched, Orsted swelled in size until it dominated the aft view. The station looked heavy and brutal, like a gothic gyroscope, dark of hue and sharp of edge. The stationary shield ring appeared undamaged, but the rotating hab-ring mated to it had several large rents along one quadrant, as if a monster had raked Orsted with its claws. Explosive decompression had peeled the hull back along the edges of the holes, turning the plating into lines of jagged petals. Between the petals, rooms were visible, white and glittery with a layer of frost.
The top face of Orsted’s central hub (where top meant pointing away from Ganymede) was a bristle of antennas, dishes, telescopes, and weapons, standing motionless on their frictionless bearings. Most of the equipment appeared broken or slagged. Fortunately, the attacks didn’t seem to have penetrated to the fusion reactor buried within the core of the hub.
The spindly, cross-braced truss that extended for several hundred meters from the bottom face of Orsted’s hub appeared intact, but many of the transparent radiators that fringed it had holes punched through them or had been shattered, reducing them to knifelike shards that dribbled molten metal from their severed veins. Dozens of service bots were flitting about the damaged radiators, working to stanch the loss of coolant.
The auxiliary communications and defense array mounted at the far end of the truss appeared scorched and mangled. Through some incredible stroke of luck, the containment chamber in the Markov generator (which powered the station’s FTL sensors) hadn’t been breached. The generator only held a minuscule amount of antimatter at any given time, but if it had lost containment, the whole array (and a good part of the truss) would have been annihilated.
Four UMC cruisers hung off the port side of the station, a visible demonstration of the League’s military power.
“Thule,” said Sparrow, taking a seat. “They really got the shit beaten out of them.”
“Ever been to Orsted before?” Kira asked.
Sparrow licked her lips. “Once. On leave. Wouldn’t care to repeat the experience.”
“Better strap in,” said Falconi from across Control.
“Yessir.”
They secured themselves, and then the burn ended. Kira made a face at the return to zero-g. The Wallfish performed one last skewflip (so it was flying nose-first toward the station), and Gregorovich said, “ETA, fourteen minutes.”
Kira tried to empty her mind.
Hwa-jung joined them soon after, pulling herself into Control with the grace of a ballet dancer. An expression of disgust marred her face, and she seemed more surly than usual.
“How are Runcible and Mr. Fuzzypants?” Falconi asked.
The machine boss grimaced. “That cat had another accident. Yuck. There was poop everywhere. If I ever buy a ship myself, I won’t have a cat. Pigs are okay. Not cats.”
“Thanks for cleaning up.”
“Mmh. I deserve hazard pay.”
For a time they were silent. Then Sparrow said, “You know, speaking of biocontainment, they really shouldn’t have been so angry with us on Ruslan.”
“Why’s that?” Nielsen asked.
“All those escaped animals were a great source of newtrition.”
Kira groaned along with everyone else, but it was a token protest. Most of them, she thought, were just sorry Trig wasn’t there to make his usual jokes.
“Thule be saving us from puns,” said Vishal.
“Could be worse,” said Falconi.
“Yeah? How?”
“She could be a mime.”
Sparrow threw a glove at him, and the captain laughed.
5.
Kira’s stomach tightened as the Wallfish slowed and, with a faint shudder, coupled with their assigned docking port in Orsted’s shield ring.
After a few seconds, the all-clear sounded.
“Alright, listen up,” said Falconi, pulling off his harness. “Captain Akawe arranged pardons for us—” He gave Kira a look from under his brow. “All us miscreants, that is. The League should have them on file, but that doesn’t mean you should go making fools of yourself. No one say nothing until we have representation and we’re clear on the situation. That goes double for you, Gregorovich.”
“As you say, Captain O my Captain,” the ship mind responded.
Falconi grunted. “And don’t go blabbing about the Jelly neither. Kira and I will take care of that.”
“Won’t Hawes and his men have already told the UMC?” Kira asked.
A grim little smile from Falconi. “I’m sure they would have if I’d given them comms access. But I haven’t.”
“Hawes is fighting mad about it too,” Nielsen said.
Falconi kicked his way over to the pressure door. “Doesn’t matter. We’re going to talk with the UMC straightaway, and it’s going to take them some time to debrief our friendly neighborhood Marines.”
“Do we all have to go?” said Hwa-jung. “The Wallfish still needs maintenance after that jump.”
Falconi gestured toward the door. “You’ll have plenty of time to deal with the ship later, Hwa-jung. I promise. And yes, we all have to go.” Sparrow groaned, and Vishal rolled his eyes. “The liaison officer on Orsted specifically asked for everyone on the ship. I think they’re not sure what to make of us yet. They mentioned having to check for orders with Earth Central. Besides, we’re not letting Kira walk in there alone.”