why did you set me to looking for it?”
But she’d already turned away from him without answering, and was making a study of her command data.
* * * *
Chillicothe Xiang found him in the observation lounge an hour later. Uncharacteristically, Maduabuchi had retreated into alcohol. Metabolic poisons were not so effective on Howard Immortals, but if he hit something high enough proof, he could follow youthful memories of the buzz.
“That’s Patrice’s forty-year-old scotch you’re drinking,” she observed, standing over the smartgel bodpod that wrapped him like a warm, sticky uterus.
“Huh.” Patrice Tonwe, their engineering chief, was a hard son of a bitch. One of the leaders in that perpetual game of shake-and-break the rest of the crew spent their time on. Extremely political as well, even by Howard standards. Not someone to get on the wrong side of.
Shrugging off the thought and its implications, Maduabuchi looked at the little beaker he’d poured the stuff into. “Smelled strongest to me.”
Chillicothe laughed. “You are hopeless, Mad. Like the galaxy’s oldest adolescent.”
Once again he felt stung. “I’m one hundred forty-three years-subjective old. Born over two hundred years-objective ago.”
“So?” She nodded at his drink. “Look at that. And I’ll bet you never even changed genders once before you went Howard. The boy who never grew up.”
He settled further back and took a gulp from his beaker. His throat burned and itched, but Maduabuchi would be damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of choking. “What do you want?”
She knelt close. “I kind of like you, okay? Don’t get excited, you’re just an all right kid. That’s all I’m saying. And because I like you, I’m telling you, don’t ask.”
Maduabuchi was going to make her say it. “Don’t ask what?”
“Just don’t ask questions.” Chillicothe mimed a pistol with the fingers of her left hand. “Some answers are permanent fatal errors.”
He couldn’t help noting her right hand was on the butt of a real pistol. Flechette-throwing riot gun, capable of shredding skin, muscle and bone to pink fog without damaging hull integrity.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Where I grew up, green light means go.”
Chillicothe shook him, a disgusted sneer chasing across her lips. “It’s your life, kid. Do what you like.”
With that, she stalked out of the observation lounge.
Maduabuchi wondered why she’d cared enough to bother trying to warn him off. Maybe Chillicothe had told the simple truth for once. Maybe she liked him. No way for him to know.
Instead of trying to work that out, he stared at Tiede 1’s churning orange surface. “Who are you? What are you doing in there? What does it take to fake being an entire star?”
The silent light brought no answers, and neither did Patrice’s scotch. Still, he continued to ask the questions for a while.
* * * *
Eventually he woke up, stiff in the smartgel. The stuff had enclosed all of Maduabuchi except for his face, and it took several minutes of effort to extract himself. When he looked up at the sky, the stars had shifted.
They’d broken Tiede 1 orbit!
He scrambled for the hatch, but to his surprise, his hand on touchpad did not cause the door to open. A moment’s stabbing and squinting showed that the lock had been frozen on command override.
Captain Smith had trapped him in here.
“Not for long,” he muttered. There was a maintenance hatch at the aft end of the lounge, leading to the dorsal weapons turret. The power and materials chase in the spine of the hull was partially pressurized, well within his minimally Howard-enhanced environmental tolerances.
And as weapons officer, he had the command overrides to those systems. If Captain Smith hadn’t already locked him out.
To keep himself going, Maduabuchi gobbled some prote-nuts from the little service bar at the back of the lounge. Then, before he lost his nerve, he shifted wall hangings that obscured the maintenance hatch and hit that pad. The interlock system demanded his command code, which he provided with a swift haptic pass, then the wall section retracted with a faint squeak that spoke of neglected maintenance.
The passage beyond was ridiculously low-clearance. He nearly had to hold his breath to climb to the spinal chase. And cold, damned cold. Maduabuchi figured he could spend ten, fifteen minutes tops up there before he began experiencing serious physiological and psychological reactions.
Where to go?
The chase terminated aft above Engineering, with access to the firing points there, as well as egress to the Engineering bay. Forward it met a vertical chase just before of the bridge section, with an exterior hatch, access to the forward firing points, and a connection to the ventral chase.
No point in going outside. Not much point in going to Engineering, where like as not he’d meet Patrice or Paimei and wind up being sorry about it.
He couldn’t get onto the bridge directly, but he’d get close and try to find out.
* * * *
The chase wasn’t really intended for crew transit, but it had to be large enough to admit a human being for inspection and repairs, when the automated systems couldn’t handle something. It was a shitty, difficult crawl, but Inclined Plane was only about two hundred meters stem to stern anyway. He passed over several intermediate access hatches – no point in getting out – then simply climbed down and out in the passageway when he reached the bridge. Taking control of the exterior weapons systems from within the walls of the ship wasn’t going to do him any good. The interior systems concentrated on disaster suppression and anti-hijacking, and were not under his control anyway.
No one was visible when Maduabuchi slipped out from the walls. He wished he had a pistol, or even a good, long-handled wrench, but he couldn’t take down any of the rest of these Howards even if he tried. He settled for hitting the bridge touchpad and walking in when the hatch irised open.
Patrice sat in the captain’s chair. Chillicothe manned the navigation boards. They both glanced up at him, surprised.
“What are you doing here?” Chillicothe demanded.
“Not being locked in the lounge,” he answered, acutely conscious of his utter lack of any plan of action. “Where’s Captain Smith?”
“In her cabin,” said Patrice without looking up. His voice was growl, coming from a heavyworld body like a sack of bricks. “Where she’ll be staying.”
“Wh-why?”
“What did I tell you about questions?” Chillicothe asked softly.
Something cold rested against the hollow spot of skin just behind Maduabuchi’s right ear. Paimei’s voice whispered close. “Should have listened to the woman. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”
They will never expect it, he thought, and threw an elbow back, spinning to land a punch on Paimei. He never made the hit. Instead he found himself on the deck, her boot against the side of his head.
At least the pistol wasn’t in his ear any more.
Maduabuchi laughed at that thought. Such a pathetic rationalization. He opened his eyes to see Chillicothe leaning over.
“What do you think is happening here?” she asked.
He had to spit the words out. “You’ve taken over the sh-ship. L-locked Captain Smith in her cabin. L-locked me up to k-keep me out of the way.”
Chillicothe laughed, her voice harsh and bitter. Patrice growled some warning that Maduabuchi couldn’t hear, not with Paimei’s