ONE afternoon the admirals sent Kari Wang, Helmo, and Wendell out to the barracks where her crew were quartered.

  “Not that they know they’re your crew yet,” Galenos said, “and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it until the security clearances come through, but we’re sure you’d like to meet them.”

  No one could replace the crew she’d had on the Kari Wang.

  The admirals didn’t say, but it seemed to be part of some bizarre bonding program. They’d told her the ships were linked, and that everywhere the Eleven went, Wendell and Helmo would follow, and vice versa. Along with the Gruen and the two media ships. Edie Song, captain of the Gruen, had been invited to join them, but she’d had other plans.

  Barracks 24, where the Eleven crew were stationed, was at the edge of the city, surrounded by golden paddocks. There were no other buildings close. Off to one side—but still four hundred meters from the barracks itself—was a stand of vegetation. Not quite trees, for the branches grew up from a central stalk. Each branch was studded with large, oval globules. As they exited the car, the stench of something rotting, but sweet, almost overwhelmed them.

  “Starfruit,” Helmo said. “I bet that’s a popular night trek.”

  Kari Wang bet it was.

  They found the crew exercising halfheartedly on the obstacle course outside the building.

  “Get your lazy asses into gear and do some work,” a trainer screamed at them as they jogged past. “If you want to play triball after this, you’d better work for it.”

  “I don’t think they’re even raising a sweat,” Wendell said. He frowned at one man in a New Viking uniform who was jostling a smaller man in Ruon uniform.

  The exercisers were running so slowly, Kari Wang could hear snatches of conversation as they passed. The odd couple of Tinatin and Mael jogged by. Tinatin was saying, “Lambert’s the worst ten ever, according to the woman who accompanied his cartel master here.”

  “So why have the cartels come to collect him then?” Mael asked.

  Kari Wang caught something about, “Line business,” but the rest of Tinatin’s answer was lost.

  “You’ve got some work ahead of you,” Helmo said.

  He was so right.

  Second time around the circuit, Kari Wang stepped in and snagged the New Viking out of the crush. A captain controlled her own crew, but she could see Helmo and Wendell both ready to step in. That was fine. She would have done the same.

  She looked at his shirt. “Spacer Mikaelsson,” she said. He had six bars below his name and team-leader pips on his shoulders. “We don’t tolerate bullies here. Consider this your first warning.”

  “It’s team leader,” he said.

  “That’s worse.”

  She became aware other spacers had stopped.

  “Will you look at that?” Mael said to Tinatin. “Captain Legless.”

  The trainer ran up. “Get your scummy selves back on the course.” She was the only one in the whole group who moved with any speed. “What in the lines is up with you all?”

  “Visitors, Group leader,” Tinatin said.

  “That doesn’t give you a reason to stop,” the trainer said. “Keep moving.”

  They kept moving, Tinatin looking behind her as they went. The result was inevitable. She ran into someone else, who knocked her over, but picked her up, too, and as they ran, Tinatin explained, with backward gestures, about their visitors. Or maybe about the legless captain.

  Kari Wang sighed. Normally, she liked a challenge, but she didn’t want to build another crew into a cohesive unit.

  She let go of Mikaelsson. Her arms and hands were strong, even if her legs weren’t. He’d have a bruise on his shoulder tomorrow where she had gripped him. “Remember this,” she said. “Go.” The man he’d been tormenting was halfway across the course now.

  “Visitors report to security,” the trainer said.

  “We did that,” Kari Wang said.

  The trainer checked her comms, saw they had, and scowled. “So what do you want?” She turned and bellowed at the trainees. “Come on, you useless lot. You’re on show here. Not to mention you have exactly”—she checked her comms—“forty-five seconds to get back to the line, or you’re out of this afternoon’s match.”

  Everyone picked up the pace.

  “What’s the match?” Kari Wang asked.

  “Triball,” the trainer said. “It’s the one thing I can bribe them with. There’s no motivation here.”

  Kari Wang’s own crew had just started a triball tournament when they’d been killed. She breathed deep and tried not to remember that.

  Helmo and Wendell noticed. Of course they would. They were both good captains.

  “Can we pick the teams today?” Wendell asked. She wasn’t sure if it was to give her time to recover or his way of helping her get over the bad memories by forcing her to relive them.

  The trainer looked at them doubtfully, looked at her comms again, looked at Kari Wang. “Why not?”

  Triball was a strategy game played by three teams. Each team had a token, and the aim was to place the token in the team goal. Three center players—one from each team—started with their team token and passed it on to other members of their team. It was a combination of speed, defense, and fooling the other sides as to who had the token.

  Team numbers varied, but it was usually played with between ten and thirty people per team. You could play it on planet or in space. Captains loved the game because it allowed them to gauge how fit their crew was, and how they cooperated with each other. The team that didn’t cooperate lost. Always. Even if they had the fastest movers on their team.

  Not only could you learn about how your team cooperated, you could learn a lot about the coaches by the way they played their team. If her ship was tied to the Lancastrian Princess and the Wendell, this would be a good way to see what the captains were like.

  “Send them around once more,” Kari Wang said, without giving the trainer time to argue. “Then we’ll pick teams.”

  There was a chorus of protest when the trainer sent them around again. “You said we could play triball when we were done,” Mikaelsson said.

  “So I did, and these captains are going to pick teams. So work for a change.”

  They watched them go around, critically this time, looking for the strengths required for triball.

  This time when Tinatin ran past, she was explaining to the spacer who’d helped her up earlier. “Ransomed back the first time. Then the Alliance caught them again, so Wallacia said, ‘Enough, we’re not going to send good money after bad’, and refused to have them back. So the New Alliance is stuck with them.”

  Kari Wang wondered if the girl ever shut up.

  “So they’re enemies inside the New Alliance,” the spacer she was running with said.

  “Exactly,” as they jogged out of hearing again.

  Further, Kari Wang wondered if Tinatin always got her facts a little skewed.

  * * *

  JON joined them as they were choosing teams.

  She’d forgotten Jon came out here every afternoon to work with the crew. Fitch would be around somewhere, too.

  It seemed the captains looked for similar things in players, for most of the time Helmo and Wendell chose the same people Kari Wang would have. Except Wendell chose Tinatin for his third pick, which was unexpected. Kari Wang wondered if he did it out of sympathy.

  “Right,” she said to her team. “Any strategies?”

  Unfortunately, they had plenty. All of them contradictory. She held up a hand. “You, you, you, you.” The four who’d come in front on the final lap. “You’re our initial runners.”

  “If I’d known that, I would’ve run faster,” grumbled one who’d come in a long way back.

  Maybe it would teach him to try harder in the future.

  “One minute,” the trainer said.

  Kari Wang gave final instructions and stepped back to see how well they carried them out.

  “You haven’t seen these people work together,” Jon said, as the game started. “Some of them out-and-out hate each other. You’ll be putting quite a few of them into the brig when the interworld rivalry comes to a head.”

  Kari Wang looked at him. “There’ll be no interworld rivalry on the Eleven,” she said. She turned to look back at the field. It was obvious who had Helmo’s token. A tall, willowy woman whose skin had the green tinge of Nyan. It seemed half the field was after her.

  Tinatin was still talking. Tagging after one of Kari Wang’s own team, mouth and hands moving as she talked volumes. Eventually, Kari Wang’s team member turned and yelled at her to go away.

  Tinatin scampered.

  “No,” Kari Wang said, for she realized how close the two were to the Wendell goal. Everyone else was following Helmo’s latest runner. “Tell me he didn’t do that. The bastard.”

  Sure enough, the buzzer rang as soon as Tinatin reached the goal square.

  A trick like that should have only worked once, but Tinatin did it again just before the final bell.

  The game finished 6-3-3 in Wendell’s favor.

  The three captains shook on it. “We must try that again with our own crews,” Helmo said to Wendell, and Kari Wang agreed. When they did, her crew would be working together like a real team. And maybe as sneaky as Wendell’s.

  “That was fun,” Kari Wang overheard Tinatin say to Mael as they made their way back toward the barracks.

  “That’s because you scored two goals.”

  “I’ve never scored in triball before.”

  She was unlikely to score again for a while. This whole crew knew that particular trick by now. She’d end up the most marked woman on the field.

  They returned to the main barracks to meet a flurry of media drones.

  “Captain Kari Wang, is it true your crew consists solely of linesmen and failed linesmen?”

  “Captain Kari Wang, were you aware of this?”

  “Captains,” for some of the drones that couldn’t get to Kari Wang homed in on Wendell and Helmo. “Why do you think they chose failed linesmen to crew the Eleven?”

  Kari Wang ignored the drones, as did Helmo. Wendell, though, looked straight at the camera and said, “Why don’t you tell us? After all, doesn’t the media always know before we do?”

  Which silenced the drones long enough for all three captains to enter the building.

  * * *

  KARI Wang had half an hour left before dinner. She used it to exercise on the stairs. In truth, she’d have preferred to be on the bars.

  The building next door was up to six stories. They were using prefabricated Supacrete walls. Just slot and bolt, according to the ads Kari Wang forwarded past when she watched the news. All the infrastructure built in.

  One day to lay the floor, three days to set the walls. They hadn’t mentioned the day in between to move the cranes, and that you had to build it in two halves so the cranes had something to work with. Still, it was faster than anything Kari Wang had seen built on Nova Tahiti.

  When she had arrived on Haladea III, they’d been working on the third floor. Now they had completed the first half of the sixth floor, and had moved the cranes to the seventh floor—directly beneath her—ready to finish assembling the second half of the sixth.

  Kari Wang herself was on the ninth floor. She leaned against the bars of her prison to watch. It wouldn’t be long before her view was gone.

  She sighed and started down. Step after step after endless step. Except on the fifth step she tripped, and went tumbling down the stairwell.

  She grabbed at the railings, only to have them fall away as her weight crashed against them.

  There was no way she was going anywhere except over the edge. Kari Wang couldn’t stop herself in time, no matter what she tried, so she didn’t try. Instead, she used what little strength she had in her legs to springboard herself away from the stairwell to give her momentum a boost.

  She dived toward the cranes she had been watching earlier.

  Two floors onto Supacrete might not kill her, but it would be close, and even if it didn’t, she’d be left so crippled she’d take years to rehabilitate. Unless Fitch and Arnoud could come up with another miracle cure.

  If she could slow herself enough to catch onto the builder’s scaffolding at the bottom, it might not be so bad.

  She calculated velocities and fall rates as she fell, and twisted her body halfway down to turn. In space, a miss was as good as forever. She was going to catch the links on that crane, or she didn’t deserve to be in space.

  The crane approached fast. Distances on world were tiny compared to those in space, and gravity was a major factor you had to calculate for. She grabbed at the chain, so small from the stairwell, each chain link as thick as her arm up close. If her upper-body strength had been standard, she wouldn’t have held on.

  The chain spun crazily. Down below, the workers scattered. She slid partway down the chain, let go before the slide burned her, and grabbed again farther down.

  She used her momentum to push herself away, aiming for the railings that surrounded the drop between the sixth and seventh floors and swung in a dizzying loop of acrobatics to slow down even more.

  The scaffolding gave way, but she’d slowed enough by then to jump away and land on her feet.

  Where her treacherous legs immediately gave way under her.

  Footsteps pounded up the temporary metal stairway between the sixth and seventh floors. Someone in workman’s boots stopped in front of her.

  “You crazy bitch. You could have gotten yourself killed.”

  Kari Wang stretched her legs to see if they were broken. “The aim was to not get killed.” She couldn’t feel anything, which might or might not have been a result of the adrenaline still pounding through her body.

  She stood up carefully. “Apologies for this.” The shaking was definitely due to adrenaline. At least, she hoped it was. She looked up at the blank space in the stair guard opposite them. “The railing broke. I fell.”

  He looked up, too, made an “oh” at the hole. “Lady, you lead a charmed life.”

  She thought so, too, and her legs wouldn’t hold her up much longer. Stupid, inconvenient things they were. Why hadn’t they gone with an old-fashioned pair of neo-alloy legs? They’d have been crushed right now, but they could withstand the pressure of a two-story fall.

  “Sit down,” the man said, and she was glad to. “You need something for shock.”

  His name was Sten, and he was the building foreman. He gave her hot tea and called the site doctor. “We need to see if anything is broken. And I’ll have to fill out an incident form.”

  Kari Wang blew on her tea to cool it. All planet-bound people drank their tea too hot. Worse, this particular batch was like tar. Sweet tar.

  Her biggest hope was that their elevator was working. The thought of walking down seven flights of stairs was daunting.

  She looked around for her comms. She should call Fitch. He’d want to make sure she hadn’t broken his precious legs. Better yet, call Grieve. He could sort things out.

  Her comms was gone.

  Sten brought it up to her before the doctor arrived. “One of the men found this down on the sixth. Is it yours?”

  It had shattered. Her second since she’d arrived on Haladea III.

  “Thank you.”

  The site doctor pronounced her lucky and with no permanent damage. “You’ll be sore tomorrow. And very stiff.”

  She rather expected that herself.

  “And if you’re going to do any form of gambling tonight, don’t. You’ve used up all your luck for the next ten years.”

  There was luck and there was preparedness. Although, it took two coincidences—her to trip, and the railing to fail—for the bad luck she’d had today. She had tripped before, often. This time it felt as if she’d fallen over something on the stair.

  “You should call someone,” the site doctor said. “I’d prefer if you didn’t go home alone.”

  Home was next door, but she dutifully borrowed Sten’s comms and called Grieve to come and get her.

  “From where?” Grieve asked.

  “The building site next door.”

  “And why aren’t you calling on your own comms?”

  “I dropped it.”

  “Again?”

  She didn’t want to explain it over the comms. “Why don’t you come collect me, and I’ll explain.”

  Grieve brought the chair because, naturally, what else would he think except that her legs had given out? Kari Wang was glad Sten and the doctor escorted her down to the ground floor rather than have him come up to the seventh.

  Sten was apologetic about that. “Regulations,” he said. “No one allowed on the site without clearance.”

  “It’s fine.” She signed a waiver to say she didn’t hold the building company responsible, and signed the incident report as well.

  “Thank you again.”

  Sten nodded, and said to Grieve, “Now you’re a smart man.” He helped Kari Wang into the chair. “She’s one very lucky lady.”

  Kari Wang settled into it without protest.

  “You should make sure she sees her own doctor,” the site doctor said. “And no matter what she says, she’ll be in shock.”

  Everyone on the building site came to wave her off.

  “I’m not even going to ask,” Grieve said. “Not until we get inside.”

  “Thank you.” Kari Wang sat back and let him push the chair. “Didn’t they give you a motorized chair?”

  “Motors take room, they’re heavy, and you’re stubborn.” He pushed over a rough piece of path. She felt it all the way to her nerve ends. “I’m not carrying around extra weight I don’t need if you refuse to use the chair. What happened?”

  “You weren’t going to ask until we got inside.”

  “Look at your hands. They’re scraped raw.”