Ekatya looked from one to the other. “What are you saying? That you want it to be this way?”

  “We’re enjoying the opportunity to do it differently this time,” Lhyn said.

  “In private,” Salomen added. “With no pressure whatsoever.”

  “Actually, a kind of reverse pressure. A set of parameters that keeps us focused on everything else. All the things that build a relationship, excluding joining and a two-way Sharing.”

  “Like transplanting a sapling. You hardly see growth in the first cycle because it’s all happening underground. The tree is repairing and expanding its roots, preparing them for the next growing season.”

  “What happens in the next growing season?” Lhyn asked.

  “It doubles in size. It bursts into life because the roots can support it.”

  “Oh, I like that.” Her fingers twitched, as if she were looking for her pad to record the thought.

  “You and your plant analogies,” Ekatya said.

  “But you understand it?”

  She nodded, then remembered that Salomen couldn’t see her. “Yes, I think so.”

  Lhyn retrieved her glass from the railing. “Stop fretting about holding us back.”

  “I don’t fret.”

  “You have an opportunity to do it differently, too,” Salomen said.

  Ekatya froze.

  For four years, she and Andira had skirted the edges of what they could have, acknowledging the draw while reinforcing each other’s resistance to it. When those edges vanished, she was distressed by the loss of her guiding boundaries.

  Not once had she considered that she could still have a boundary while giving in.

  “What is she doing?” Salomen whispered.

  “Looking like you hit her in the chest with a posthead,” Lhyn whispered back.

  Ekatya leaned back and laughed, a joyous release that loosened her shoulders and made the first stars of the night dance in her vision. When she faced forward again, Salomen was listening with closed eyes and a delighted smile that matched Lhyn’s.

  “I’m going to leave you to it. Thank you. You have no idea how much you helped.”

  “Got a date to plan?” Lhyn asked knowingly.

  “I have a flight to arrange, weather permitting.” She thought for a moment, then gave a satisfied nod. “And it’s just the right season for it.”

  20

  Lead from the front

  “Hey, Red.” Candini looked at her through the quantum com, her spiky hair more rumpled than usual. “I have a question for y—holy fucking fuck, what happened to your hair?”

  Rahel stretched out her legs, comfortable in her off-duty clothing, and focused on the wall display across her living area. “Well met to you, too. I see my lessons on Alsean courtesy aren’t sinking in.”

  “Never mind that, when did this happen? It looks fantastic, by the way.” Grinning, she pointed at her own head. “Though you’re missing the spikes.”

  “Yesterday after you dropped me off, and there will be no spikes. Reynard says my face isn’t the right shape for them.”

  “Reynard? Seeders, I’d know he was a hairdresser just from the name. He did good work,” she said grudgingly. “Despite having no sense of creativity. Let me come up there with some gel and show you how it would look.”

  “No.”

  “Come on—”

  “No.”

  “You’re a wet branch on the fire.”

  “Good usage of an Alsean idiom, but the answer is still no.”

  “Fine.” She swiped a finger horizontally through the air. “Given the wide view, you must have me up on the massive display of yours. Is my head about two meters wide?”

  “Yes. Life size.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said dryly.

  Rahel laughed. “You set yourself up for that. Don’t blame me for accepting the gift. I tried to show you my new cut last night, by the way. Where were you? I thought you’d have called back long before now.”

  “Er . . .” Candini rubbed her earlobe. “I was visiting an old friend.”

  “All night and most of the next day? Fahla’s farts, it’s true what they say about pilots.”

  “That’s a stereotype. Anyway, it’s not related to my question.” She was suddenly serious. “The captains and the Alsean war council finished their analysis. I just got my orders from Colonel Alportel. I’m supposed to pick out six Serrado flight teams and train them to grapple the space elevator if it gets severed during a battle. To keep the lower part from falling back to Alsea long enough to get a repair team up there.”

  “Seems like a sound strategy.” Though she couldn’t sense Candini over the quantum com, she had come to know her well enough to recognize this expression. “What’s bothering you about it?”

  “Do you realize what that means? Sending fighters to hold that thing up in the middle of a battle? They won’t be able to maneuver, their defensive options will be minimal, and they’ll be a target. It’s a suicide mission.” She scrubbed a hand through her hair, rumpling it further. “How do I choose?”

  “You choose the ones with the best skills at grappling. This isn’t a job for the pilots, it’s a job for the gunners.”

  “Did you hear what I said? It’s a suicide mission.”

  Ah, now she understood. “You’ve never had to send someone to die before.”

  “No! It’s not usually an issue when you’re fighting pirates, and that’s all I’ve done since leaving the Caphenon. Before that, I was the ship’s pilot. The last time I sent someone to die was in a theoretical exam.”

  “It might not be an issue now,” Rahel pointed out. “These are just war games.”

  Candini scowled. “You know as well as I do that’s not true. They’re not saying it, but this is preparation.”

  She did know. It had been eye-opening to see the sheer volume of weaponry fired during that war game. Even without weapons-grade explosives, that amount of hardware could not be cheap. Someone in Fleet had signed off on an expensive line item, and Rahel knew from her service to Prime Warrior Shantu that such things did not happen without a compelling reason.

  “It is,” she agreed.

  “So how do I choose? How did you?”

  “It’s not the same thi—”

  “You were a leader,” Candini interrupted. “Of criminals most of the time, sure, but you still led them. You sent people to do dangerous things. And you told me you liked some of those people, so it wasn’t as if you were only choosing the dokkers and the assheads. How did you decide?”

  She wasn’t asking for advice, Rahel realized. Candini was a trained warrior; she knew what was expected. What she was asking for, in a roundabout way, was absolution.

  “I chose the ones whose skills were best suited to the need,” she said. “Which is what you will do. The first team you’ll put on that list is you and me.”

  “I’m commanding the orbital fighter fleet,” Candini objected. “We can’t tie ourselves to the elevator in the middle of a battle!”

  “Stop thinking like a Fleeter and think like an Alsean. Warriors respect commanders who lead from the front. Show them that you’re willing to do what you’re asking them to do. They’ll follow you gladly.” She swung her legs off the couch and leaned forward, forearms resting on her thighs. “Listen, Nightwing. We don’t have to be the ones who do it. But we should be able to do it if no one else can. We should train with them.”

  “Red . . .”

  “If we don’t, you’ll lose their respect,” she warned. “They know who scored the highest in the grappling competition.”

  Candini scrunched her face and scrubbed her hair as if she were trying to pull it out. “To think I was proud when you did that. Now I’m wishing you were all thumbs.”

  “It’s easier to risk your own life than someone else’s, isn’t it?”

  She nodded miserably. “Especially a friend’s.”

  “When I became a warrior, I swore an oath to protect Alsea. If I go to my Return keeping that elevator from crashing all over Pallea, I’ll go happily. That would be a truly honorable death.”

  She waited through a long silence.

  “It’s not just words to you, is it?” Candini said at last. “You really mean that.”

  “On my honor.”

  She sighed. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

  “All right, eyes front,” Candini said loudly, cutting through the conversation. Five pilots and six gunners fell silent, giving her their full attention.

  “Thank you. This is Chief Kameha, an old friend of mine. You may know him as the beard behind the space elevator.”

  “Hey, I’m more than just my beard,” Kameha retorted, setting off a wave of chuckles.

  Rahel laughed with the others, having seen her share of interviews and images of the famous Chief of Advanced Technology. He was the only Caphenon crew member to remain on Alsea after the crash, and had spent the intervening cycles working with the Prime Builder to restore the ship and its fighters, design the space elevator, and help create the sleek new Alsean shuttles. Initially, his face had appeared normal, or at least as normal as a Gaian could be. Then he began growing his facial hair, commenting in interviews that he enjoyed having the only beard on the planet. The increasing numbers of Phoenix crew taking shore leave on Alsea had made facial hair slightly less shocking, but Kameha still set the standard with the eye-popping shrubbery draped to his chest.

  He turned to the semicircle of Alseans facing him and spread his short arms, indicating the cavernous space and its bustling hordes of builders. “Welcome to my domain. This is where things get built that need a lot of room. We built the space elevator spool booster here.”

  Rahel craned her neck to view the curved ceiling far above. Candini had flown their fighter straight through the doors with plenty of room to spare.

  “Now, I’ve read the analysis from the war council. I’ll be shekking furious if the Voloth manage to break my beautiful elevator. But I’ll be devastated if it falls back to Alsea. Does anyone know what that would do?”

  “Set us back a couple of cycles,” one pilot offered. “And a shipload of cinteks.”

  “Destroy the port platform,” said a gunner.

  “Cause a giant wave when it hits the water?” another pilot guessed.

  “Yes, yes, and probably not.” Kameha pointed to each in turn.

  “Rain debris across northern Pallea,” Rahel said.

  Kameha tilted his head with an approving waggle of his beard. “Because . . . ?”

  “It won’t fall in one piece. The very bottom part will, and that will be enough to smash our port platform to splinters and kill everyone on it. But there will be a lot of forces acting on the rest. Natural coiling,” she began, counting off on her fingers. “Atmospheric drag. Turbulence from high winds in our upper troposphere. The magtran rails aren’t as flexible as the cable, so they’ll break off in pieces and become projectiles.”

  “Whoa,” said a pilot. “Nasty.”

  Kameha gave her a pleased nod, encouraging her to continue.

  “Some of the debris will burn up on reentry, but not enough. The rest will rain down on the equatorial zone, because while the cable is falling, Alsea is still rotating beneath it, west to east. And it won’t all fall at once. Depending on where it’s cut, there could be twenty, thirty thousand lengths of cable coming down. That takes time. Whitemoon would probably be hit hard.”

  “Did Captain Serrado tell you all of that?” Kameha asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ve been fascinated with orbital space since I was seventeen. My tutor gave me a math problem where I had to calculate the amount of fuel I’d need to launch a satellite into low orbit. It took me several hanticks because I started researching the variables and couldn’t stop.” She shrugged, self-conscious under the expectant stare of Alsea’s most celebrated engineer. “I’ve read everything I could about our space elevator.”

  “Hmph. Of course Serrado would find an Alsean with her head already in the stars.” Fondness wrapped around him. “She always did have a built-in detector for things like that. Sayana is right,” he added in a sharper tone. “The cable would break up and fall in pieces all over northern Pallea. It would be impossible to predict the impact coordinates of every piece. Impossible to evacuate people. Impossible to prevent property damage and deaths, unless we prevent it from falling in the first place. That’s why you’re in my workshop. Now, everyone follow me. I’m going to show you a piece of the elevator cable and why your grapplers won’t work on it.”

  Rahel was riveted by the rest of Kameha’s presentation and thrilled when they gathered around a segment of cable to touch it. Despite knowing the dimensions since construction began, she couldn’t believe how thin it was. It should have been called a ribbon.

  The need for constant tension along its length meant a gradual increase in width from port platform to geosync station, and this segment represented the cable at its widest. Even so, they could have parked their fighter on it and covered most of the width. Kameha was correct, seeing and feeling for oneself was different than reading about it.

  As soon as he held the jointed hooks of a fighter’s grappler next to the cable with its attached magtran rails, she understood the problem. Their grapplers were designed to close around tow loops built into fighter hulls, enabling a functional fighter to tow a damaged one back to a ship—or soon, the space elevator dock—for repairs or rescue. Tow loops were tiny compared to magtran rails; their grapplers weren’t nearly large enough to clamp around them.

  The builders were already manufacturing new grapplers for the six fighters now parked in the workshop. Kameha demonstrated a prototype, with its longer hooks and stronger joints, then opened the belly of the nearest fighter to show them the attachment point and where it would need to be reinforced to handle the load.

  Rahel was still peering into the guts of the fighter, fascinated by details she had never considered, when Candini clapped her hands together.

  “Right, now that you all know what Kameha and his miracle workers will be doing today and tonight, it’s time for us to get busy. Tomorrow we’ll practice in orbit with the real thing, but today we’re hitting the simulators.”

  Kameha held up his prototype. “You may think this won’t make much difference in handling, but believe me, it will. You’re going to miss the first few times you try.”

  “I won’t,” one gunner boasted, prompting laughter and good-natured bets as they followed Candini out.

  Another gunner sidled up to Rahel. His call sign was Archer, after the constellation every Alsean learned as a child, and he had scored second in the grappling competition.

  “Bet I get it before you,” he said.

  “Oh? What will you bet?”

  “How about one of those sparkly drinks you’re always bragging about?”

  “I don’t brag,” she scoffed. “And even if you won, which you won’t, by the time I got a Synobian Sparkler down here, it wouldn’t be sparkling.”

  “If I win, which I will, you can take me up there. You always get to go back and I’ve never even seen the inside. We’ve all practiced flying into the Caphenon’s bays, but it’s not the same as being on a ship in orbit.”

  He was trying for nonchalance, but Rahel read the hope in his expression. In a flash of understanding, she saw herself through his eyes: the privileged one, coming and going at will from a magical place the others could not enter.

  A plan unrolled in her mind. She followed the options to their possible ends, nodded in approval, and held out her forearm. “If I win, you buy my rajaltas for our next five trainings.”

  He clasped it gleefully. “Done! This will be fun.”

  They all missed the first three attempts, bearing out Kameha’s prediction. Rahel clamped her grappler around a magtran rail on the fourth try and smiled at the quiet curse from the simulator pod to her left. Archer had lost his bet.

  He succeeded on the fifth attempt, and the other gunners began catching up. When all of them could successfully operate the new grapplers, Candini upped the difficulty level. The previously static elevator cable was now dropping away from them, bringing the pilots into greater play. When the six teams mastered that, she increased the speed. The step after that added unpredictable motion.

  By the end of the training, they were sweaty, tired, and exuberant at their success. Tomorrow, Candini informed them, Kameha would take a segment of cable into orbit and shove it out the back of a shuttle. Attached drones would propel it at different speeds and in different directions, giving them a real-life approximation of the difficulty in catching a falling cable.

  “Double or nothing,” Archer said.

  Rahel had expected no less. “You’ll lose that one, too.”

  “If you believe that, you’ll have no trouble betting.”

  “Done.”

  When Candini returned her to the Phoenix, she wasted no time tracking down Commander Zeppy.

  He listened to her request and eventually nodded. “But I’m not the final approval,” he cautioned. “The bay doors stay closed without an order from Captain Serrado.”

  She thanked him and went straight to the captain’s office.

  “Why do you want to do this?” Serrado asked.

  Rahel’s spine was so straight that it did not touch the back of her chair. “We’re asking them to risk their lives. Shouldn’t that be worth something?”

  “We’re asking every fighter crew, both Fleet and Alsean, to risk their lives. They’re by far the most vulnerable component of our battle plan. Why should these get special consideration?”

  It was a test, she realized. Serrado liked the idea but wanted a better reason.

  “Candini has been drilling her pilots on entering and exiting the Caphenon’s bays,” she offered, noting Serrado’s twinge of melancholy at the mention of her old ship. “But it’s not the same as in orbit. This could be a training opportunity. There might be a time when we need Alsean fighters to come into our bays.”