“Line five,” he said to Vega, and he and lines one and eight sang line five down. The big screen Helmo used to communicate with other ships—the only thing that was still lit at present—went black.

  Vega glanced his way sharply, then glanced down at her comms, which was also black.

  Wendell called them up. “Lancastrian Princess, we have lost communication. Please answer.”

  Naturally, the Lancastrian Princess didn’t hear the message. Maybe Ean or Helmo should have explained it to every ship in the Eleven’s fleet

  “No problem,” Ean sang, but Wendell persisted.

  “Lancastrian Princess, please answer.”

  Ean sang the line up. “I don’t think he’s going to stop,” he said to Helmo. Wendell was unpredictable, and when he did things, he was fast. If Wendell thought something was wrong, the crew of the Wendell would be setting out to board the Lancastrian Princess. In fact, right now Wendell was choosing a team.

  “Let me talk to him,” Helmo said.

  Ean sang a line open.

  “Everything’s fine here, Piers,” Helmo said. “We’re doing a line-twelve exercise. Seeing how far we can go.”

  Wendell looked past Helmo. What could he see? Everything dimmed by emergency lights. He chewed his bottom lip. “You don’t know where line twelve will stop.” The Wendell lines flooded with anxiety. “How long will this exercise last?”

  “Another two, three minutes.”

  It felt like an hour already.

  Wendell clicked off.

  Ean sang line five down again. “Line three.” It was getting harder. He sang the full ten lines in to pull it down.

  He didn’t see much change—everything was in emergency mode already—but Vega did, for she clicked her boots off and pushed herself over to the door. She studied the door, then looked back at Ean.

  Ean took a deep breath. “Line six,” he said, and started to sing line six down. The whole ten lines again, concentrating on using them to lower line six.

  As the line quietened, line one grew agitated. It came in waves. From Helmo, from everyone on the bridge. Even Vega. Rolling off them, even though they all stood quietly, watching him.

  He stopped. “I’m not going to do this.”

  A wave of giddy relief—from everyone—deafened him. Followed by determination from the ship lines—from Ship.

  “You have to, Ean,” Helmo said. “Otherwise, this whole exercise is pointless. You have to show you have total control.”

  “He’s made his point, Captain,” Vega said. “And if it’s all right with you, I’d rather not leave us helpless in space while we waste ten hours and a payload of fuel turning the Bose engines back on. Just so he proves he can turn them off.”

  Ean didn’t wait for Helmo’s approval. “Back on,” he sang to the lines. “Back at full strength. All of you.”

  Returning power was deafening; returning light was blinding. Returning gravity crashed him to the floor. He wasn’t expecting it. Naturally, he fell. He picked himself up, wincing at the pain in his knees. “Thank you,” he sang to the lines as he stood. “Thank you.”

  At the boards, crew did status checks. It was the same all over the ship.

  Helmo finally gave the all clear.

  Ean climbed out of his suit. He was drenched with sweat, shaking like he’d run a marathon. Only then did he look across at Vega. Her face was bloodless.

  “And any high-level linesman can do this once they’re taught?”

  “No,” Captain Helmo said. “Other linesmen can work with single lines at a time. Rossi, for example, would be able to break line six. But to take the whole ship off-line like that, the lines have to work together. It seems to be a function of line twelve.”

  “You see, Commodore,” Michelle said. “It’s not about the alien ships because we can’t separate them, and as soon as Gate Union realizes that, they’ll attack us.”

  Vega moistened her lips and tried to speak. Couldn’t. Ean wished she would sit down. She looked as if she would faint.

  “It’s about what we can learn from Ean to protect us. Or to attack, if required. We can’t hand that to Gate Union.”

  Vega finally sat down. “I concede he’s a powerful weapon, but he’s a menace to any ship you put him on. He’s a monster. We need him off here right now.”

  Ship line one surged, and the other lines with it. Ean hurriedly put a hand on Michelle’s arm. Her muscles were bunched. It took all his strength to hold her. “It’s all right,” and he sang to calm line one as much as he did to calm Michelle.

  “What’s he doing now?”

  There was a frozen standoff, then Helmo laughed. “So that didn’t prove what we wanted it to.”

  “No,” said Ean, for neither Vega nor Michelle looked ready to answer.

  Helmo rubbed his chin and looked at the two women, then at the time display comfortingly back at the bottom of the screen. Three minutes. That’s all it had been. “Dinner is in half an hour,” he said. “Join me at my table.” He looked at Ean. “All of you.”

  * * *

  AFTERWARD, Ean went to the fresher, but he couldn’t clean Vega’s “monster” accusation from his memory.

  He eavesdropped unashamedly on the lines.

  Vega called Helmo and said she couldn’t make dinner. Helmo fixed her with a stare Abram would have been proud of, and said, “Captain’s orders.”

  “I outrank you.”

  “On my ship, I outrank everyone unless it’s to do with the welfare of Crown Princess Michelle. I will see you at dinner, Commodore.”

  Afterward, he listened in on Helmo, in Michelle and Abram’s workroom—where Ean would normally have gone but he didn’t feel it was appropriate right now. Helmo sat on Ean’s couch. No one sat on Abram’s couch.

  Michelle was fresh from a shower, too. Ean could see it in the way the hair curled damply around her face.

  “Vega is right when she says you are personally involved. She thinks that is coloring your judgment.”

  Ean had never heard Helmo speak so bluntly to Michelle.

  “Do you think it is?” Michelle asked.

  “Not in how important Lambert is. Just in the way you deal with it. He scares people. He scares me sometimes, and after today’s demonstration, he scares me more than he used to.”

  Helmo had suggested Ean use life support. Had he simply not realized the effect it would have.

  “He doesn’t scare me,” Michelle said.

  “He should.”

  “But—”

  Helmo spoke over the top of her. “Recognize that other people feel differently. You have succeeded today in showing Vega why she should protect Lambert. Or destroy him. Now that you have shown her he’s a ticking bomb, tonight you have to convince her that he’s your bomb, and you control what sets him off.” Helmo stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve a dinner party to prepare for.”

  Ean waited until Helmo had gone before he entered the workroom.

  Michelle looked up and smiled wryly. Her dimple showed. “My bomb,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  “Lines are lines, Ean. That’s what they do.”

  Some lines should learn human manners. It wasn’t polite to eavesdrop.

  “Besides, I’d only have to explain it to you if you hadn’t.” Michelle crossed her arms across her chest, almost defensively. “Eventually all level-five linesmen will be able to listen in, I suppose.”

  Listening in to the ship was more an overall thing, much like what he’d had to do earlier to take down the lines. “Line five can only listen on comms.” He thought about what he could do with a comms. “I think a level-five linesman can move comms from one channel to another. Divert it, multiply it, or even make their own connections. But they still need something to get the messages, something for it to come out on.”

  “That’s a relief,” Michelle said. “One of you is enough for the moment.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry I put you through that. Especially since it didn’t have the desired result.”

  “It’s fine. I’ve a thick skin.” After learning what the other high-level linesmen thought about him, Ean should be inured to people thinking he was a freak. Vega wasn’t much different. He leaned over and gave Michelle an awkward hug. “A bomb is better than a monster, though.”

  Michelle’s dimple showed, full and deep. “Thank you.” She sighed and stood up. “And I’d better get dressed for dinner.”

  * * *

  BOTH Captain Helmo and Commodore Vega wore formal uniform, while Michelle dressed in a long midnight blue sheath dress that showed off a lot of leg. She wore a choker of Girraween opals and a bracelet of the same that went halfway up her arm. Ean was glad she wasn’t around the Lancian slums. She wouldn’t last two minutes wearing jewelry like that.

  Or maybe she would, if she had a team of Lancastrian Princess guards with her.

  Dinner was in a small room off Helmo’s office. He had two spacers waiting on the table.

  Helmo served black liqueur in thumb-sized glasses. “This is from one of the rim worlds. Onanganang. They call it black fire.”

  Ean thought of Mael, one of the single-level linesmen being recruited for the Eleven, smacking his lips over black fire.

  “It’s potent, so beware.” Helmo downed his drink in one swallow. He smiled, and his tongue and the edges of his teeth were black. “Don’t worry. It’s not a permanent stain. It’s actually good for your teeth.”

  Vega and Michelle threw their drinks back the same way.

  Ean looked at his own drink doubtfully. How long did a nonpermanent stain stay around? He hoped Helmo didn’t plan this as part of some bizarre bonding ritual, where the four of them spent the next month going around with black teeth to show that they were all friends.

  Still, if the others had done it, so could he. He downed it the same way they had.

  Fire was a good way to describe it. It burned all the way down and settled in his stomach in a ball of hot flame that spread out and warmed him through, and kept burning for a minute afterward.

  “That’s quite a drink,” Vega said eventually.

  Helmo grinned, and Ean could have sworn his teeth were blacker than they had been. “It’s traditional to serve a dish called keep-the-fire-burning afterward, only we don’t have the ingredients on ship, so we’re serving the poor man’s version—battebrot.”

  Battebrot turned out to be a thick bread with green, purple, and red chunks through it. The purple chunks were tart, maybe a berry. The red junks were rubbery and chewy and tasted like dried flam fruit. The green chunks melted in your mouth. The trick, Ean found, was to chew them all together and the taste changed again as the ingredients reacted with the saliva in his mouth. In his stomach, the heat from the black fire flared up momentarily after he swallowed.

  “I thought I knew more weird food than the rest of you combined,” Michelle said. “But this is the weirdest I’ve come across in a while.”

  “Battebrot is quite tame,” Helmo said. “Compared to some of the food from Wossworld, for example.”

  “Wossen spores,” Vega said, with the heartfelt hatred of someone who knew them well.

  Ean wanted to ask when she’d come across them but figured it was better if Vega forgot he was at the table.

  “They get into the air-conditioning and reproduce, and before you know it, the spores have coated everyone’s lungs, and they can’t take oxygen in. Worse, take some into your lungs, then next time you climb into a suit, you’ve contaminated the suit.”

  “So how do you get rid of them?” Then Ean remembered he was trying to be seen and not heard.

  Vega looked at him. The drink might have relaxed her, or otherwise she was trying as hard as Michelle was to be civil. “Water. Plain and simple. Flush the air-conditioning system out with water. Better yet, replace it altogether—after you’ve flushed it. Destroy the suits. And hope to the lines you got to the personnel in time to flush out their lungs, because otherwise you have to replace them. If you realize what the problem is before they suffocate to death.”

  Vega had definitely seen Wossen spores firsthand. Ean shuddered.

  “Exactly.” Vega bit off a piece of battebrot and chewed it. “If I had to kill a whole ship,” she said reflectively, “that’s a good way to do it. Particularly if the ship can’t get a jump.”

  Everyone shuddered this time, Vega included.

  “Although,” and Vega took a breath, as if debating whether to say the next, “if I had access to a line twelve, I might rethink it.”

  Ean hoped she didn’t plan on using him like that. He wouldn’t do it. He was glad Helmo laughed.

  “Despite what we were trying to prove earlier, Ean doesn’t destroy ships as a rule. He’s far more likely to use the Eleven to link your enemy ship to the Eleven’s fleet instead. That’s what you have to watch. He’s a true line in that respect,” and he patted the wall beside him. The emotion that came out through line one was tangy affection. “They don’t necessarily take sides.”

  It wasn’t that bad. A ship knew its ship people’s enemies. But only through its humans’ emotions, Ean supposed.

  “Speaking of killing people,” Michelle said. “That’s an impressive collection of ancient weapons you have on your wall. I’m told that’s only a quarter of it.”

  “More like a tenth,” and Vega launched into a description of the weapons room at her home on Lancia.

  Judging from the impressed hum of line one, it was an impressive collection. One whole wall was for weapons with artificial intelligence. “I’ve even got an early Brimstone missile from Earth,” Vega said. “It’s primitive, but fascinating to see how far we have come.” She looked sideways at Ean, and said, “I don’t have any functioning, reasoning weapons, though.”

  Jordan Rossi would have said, “Functioning, yes. Some of the time anyway. Reasoning. That’s questionable.” Ean was glad Rossi wasn’t there.

  “It would be interesting to test his limits.”

  The trouble with functioning, reasoning people was they didn’t like to be used, not when they had plans of their own that didn’t include being a living weapon.

  “This one’s for my wall,” Michelle said.

  Ean wiped his palms down his sides and knew that some of his relief seeped through line one. Helmo would have registered the reaction even if Michelle didn’t.

  Vega nodded, and changed the subject to talk about the exercise regime on the Lancastrian Princess.

  They finished up at 02:00, on a lot friendlier terms than they had started, and Vega even said good night to Ean as well as to Michelle and Helmo.

  He walked with Michelle back to their rooms on the fifth floor.

  “That ended better than I expected,” Michelle said. “I made a mistake earlier, thinking that showing her how you could be a weapon would get her on our side.”

  “It could have been worse. She could have found out by accident.”

  Only time would tell if it had made things worse for Ean, but for the moment they seemed to have a temporary truce. And Vega couldn’t—now—say she didn’t know Ean was dangerous. Even better, something had changed between Vega and Michelle. The beginnings of acceptance? Which was probably what Helmo had been aiming for.

  “Captain Helmo’s quite sneaky, I think.”

  Michelle laughed as she moved off toward her own rooms. “You only think.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  SELMA KARI WANG

  THERE WAS NO sign of her usual clinging escort when Kari Wang left the admiral’s office. She reveled in the chance to be alone and relaxed for the first time since they’d installed her legs. Or had they grown them? She wasn’t sure.

  There was no sign of any transport, either.

  Kari Wang looked out across the building site that made up most of the current headquarters. There were temporary paths among the mayhem, and people on them. Fleet tarmac that would become parade grounds once the offices were built.

  She thought about calling a car, looked at the people walking, and decided to walk herself.

  After fifteen minutes, she regretted her decision. She—who could have navigated her way out of an unknown sector of space with a star chart and some starting coordinates—was hopelessly lost. Worse, the temporary paths were gravel, making every step she took an effort. Her legs ached, and she was losing her sense of balance.

  She paused, holding on to one of the temporary fences that separated the works area from the path she was on, and considered asking a passerby for help.

  Maybe there was a public cart close by. She pulled out her comms, and pulled up carts, public.

  Someone shouted. She looked up as two figures crashed into her and pushed her down. Her comms went flying. The fence she was leaning against fell flat. An aircar swooshed over the fallen fence, so low it pushed the fallen fence aside, nearly tipping itself over as it went. The heavy concrete support of the temporary fence base slammed into her side.

  “Sheesh, lady,” said one of the people who’d knocked her down. “Don’t you pay attention?”

  The aircar righted itself and hopped across the construction grounds, eventually plowing into an earthmover in its way. It settled with a crash and screech of folding metal.

  “Stay there.” Her rescuers sprinted across to the crash site.

  Kari Wang pulled herself up. She picked up her comms, which was crushed. She wouldn’t be able to call for help on that. Her legs were shaky.

  Her two rescuers came back, the older one—the man who’d chastised her for not paying attention—shaking his head. “Nobody in it. It’s on auto. I got the registration, but I doubt it will help.”

  He called it in.

  “Are you okay?” his companion asked Kari Wang. She was a young girl, hardly old enough to wear the generic coverall favored by off-duty soldiers. Hardly large enough either. She would fit easily under the bulkheads on the Eleven.