Hegemony (50 page)

Now that the action was over, though, there was nothing for Zandy to do. The discomfort of being stuck in the acceleration pod was done with, at least. But on the other hand, no one was allowing her to plug into anything except a read-only data feed, and being stuck in her still-imperfectly comfortable replacement biosim avatar was getting boring.

It had been too many empty hours, and too many hours were left to wait before there would be anything more for her to do.

None of the crew seemed eager to talk. The cat-girl watched her with a focused look that could have been sexual desire or hostility, or both. Most of the other crew avoided her as much as they could, limiting their conversations to warning her to stay out of their way as they went about their duties. They did not seem overtly hostile, but neither did they make any move to be welcoming.

Except the captain. He looked at her with cold eyes that made her feel like a hostile targeting system was tracking her. Still, of all the pirates, the void-runners, he was the most interesting one. He was a handsome man, blue-eyed, well built, with the sort of unconscious confidence that went with his unquestioned personal lethality. She had seen enough of his moves, laser in hand, as they had left the atrium mall, to recognize the tell-tales of
telestraal
training. Unless she missed her guess, he was an adept, and maybe even a high-ranking one.

And he was a very good pilot; his maneuver against the SDF swift-ship had been brilliant. Abruptly, Zandy found herself wondering if he would have made a good interceptor pilot; she suspected he would have, had his circumstances been radically different. Maybe it was that thought that had led her to try to talk to the captain.

"Now is not a good time to bother me, daemon," Nas said. His tone suggested that there would never be a good time.

"You don't like daemons," Zandy said, less a question than a flat statement of fact.

"What gives you
that
idea?" Nas asked, with a hard smile.

"Right," Zandy smiled back, challenging. "Why?" she said. "I mean, is it something personal?"

"What makes you think I'd tell you, daemon?"

"Might as well. Nothing better to do."

"We're done talking, daemon."

There was more to this, Zandy thought. There was something in those cold blue eyes that was focused on Zandy, contradicting his words. She wouldn't get past the words by asking nicely, though.

"Fuck that, meat-brain," Zandy said. "All we've got to do is talk."

Nas' eyes narrowed. The woman facing him was pretty... better than pretty, not that it mattered with a daemon. She might have looked like anything at all, when she was still alive.

"I've killed people who've annoyed me this much before," Nas said, flatly.

"Well," Zandy said. "Sorry, but that's not going to stop me. I'm a 'ceptor pilot. Threatening my life isn't really raising the stakes for me."

"Hah," Nas almost snorted at that. It was hard not to take this girl at face value; the slight grin of challenge, the glint in the pretty artificial eyes... recklessness scabbed over a sadness which Nas could see clearly.

"So you're basically telling me you're a missile guidance unit with delusions of humanity," Nas said. Let her sputter at that.

"Basically. Yup," the woman said.

"Good that it doesn't bother you.

"No one made me do this. I chose it."

"So do suicides. They choose it. Stupid choice, though."

"Not to be insulting, but what do you know about it?" Zandy asked. "You speak Translang like a native, so you were born Hegemonic. That means you had your chance. It's one out of a million, literally, who get the chance. I'd like to see you get it, earn it, and then turn it down."

Nas' sudden laughter surprised Zandy. He laughed in a manner that was both arrogant and totally amused.

"Like to see it? Feast your eyes, then. I
was
chosen. I was
in
a Fleet Academy. You're a 'ceptor pilot, right. It was that or a hoplite... either you piloted a missile or a cannon-fodder combat android. Well, Hegemony girl, my scores at the Academy were so high that I was on the
command-navigation
track. I was
that
good; they didn't
want
me in 'ceptors or hoplites."

"I..."

"...Don't believe me, right," Nas said. The woman looked at him, her gray eyes looking right into his. She looked not at all afraid. That alone was novel.

"No... I believe you," she said. "Why didn't you, then? Do you think daemons are already dead?"

Nas was silent for a while. This girl, daemon, aristo, Hegemony officer... every definition of the enemy, she was. Except that she was on the same side, for this run, for this once. Damned if he wasn't thinking of telling this girl things he didn't see fit to share with his own crew, with his own Brotherhood.

She was a 'ceptor pilot; not a job for the fearful. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was the lack of fear in her. It had been hard enough, Nas thought, to earn fear from the Brotherhoods. It was odd how refreshing it was to meet someone who showed none.

"I was in. They kicked me out," he said.

"They?"

"Aristos. Daemons. There were three slots at the Academy for cadets in command-navigation track. Just three. Someone didn't like having a
demoi
-born meat-brain taking one of those slots. It was... made clear to me, that I should choose interceptors, should put in my time, before I was let into a command-nav posting. Not right out of the Academy. Not for a
demoi
like me."

"Fuck."

"Oh, they fucked me, alright, Hegemony girl. I was proud, you see. I was proud of my scores, proud of how well I'd done. I was... Well, a
demoi
shouldn't be too proud.

"They put a data worm into my files; set me up to fall
hard
. By the time they were done, I had to move fast just to keep out of the crosshairs of the Inspectorate."

"I was
demoi
myself," Zandy said.

"Guessed that," Nas said. "You don't act like an aristo born."

"Not all
aristokratai
would act like that," Zandy said. "Not all of them would do what was done to you. "

"So you say. Fuck, maybe you're even right. So what? Not all, but always enough. You... you weren't too proud. You were willing to fly their human-guided missiles. You don't stand out too much, so you can join the undead elite, if you live long enough to get out of 'ceptors."

"Hah," the girl said. "Make up your mind."

Nas frowned.

"Am I undead," Zandy said, "or do I have to worry about living long enough to make it? If I'm already dead, I don't have to worry about shit. If I'm still alive, then daemons are alive... You sound like a Coaly when you say that."

"Fuck. I
have
killed people for saying less than that to me."

"Sure. I believe it. You're a hard man. You'd have to be, to captain a Brotherhood ship... Maybe I am already dead, so I don't care," Zandy said. Then softly, "If I'm not, everyone else is."

"Right..." Nas said. There was that pain he had seen, raw now, in the lovely artificial eyes. "You lost your ship," he said. "Lost everyone, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Don't give them the satisfaction."

"Huh?"

"The fuckers who killed your ship, your friends. Your
people.
They killed them. You lived. Don't give the fuckers the satisfaction of you just dying. Don't do their work for them. Don't quit."

"Does it matter?"

"Yes. Those aristo shits that backstabbed me, they expected me to quit. They fucked me and expected me to take it, just fold up. Fuck that. Never quit. Live, and make them sorry for it. Die, and they win all the way."

Nas paused for a moment, then spoke again. "You hate them, right?"

"Yes," the girl said, softly, but with enough intensity to make Nas narrow his eyes. There was a ferocity to this one, he saw. He wouldn't, he realized, have wanted her guiding an inceptor missile burning for his ship.

"Well, then," he said, "if you just die, they win again. Even if they don't know. Don't know you're alive, don't know if you die... if you just die, they have a
reason
to be that much happier, even if they don't know it. Fuck giving the bastards who killed your friends a reason to be happy."

The girl was silent, the gray eyes hard as glass, and cold.

"I got one of them," she said. "My Wave. We killed one of their ships. I found out, from Freya... Demi-Captain Tralk."

"OK, then. One more to go, right?"

"Yes," she said, and Nas smiled at her, suddenly
liking
this little blonde android package of focused ferocity.

"You're not so bad, for a Void-Runner murdering scum, you know," she said.

Nas laughed again. "Fair enough. I was just thinking you're not so bad, for an undead missile-guidance unit with delusions of humanity."

"Contact," called out one of the crew. He probably sent the information via data link as well, but aboard the
Whisperknife
, a crewmember was as likely to speak aloud as not. Zandy found it odd, even quaint, but somehow interesting as well.

"What've you got?" the captain answered.

"Radar and LIDAR return off the probable the
Ice Knife
cued us on to. Definitely not just local micro-asteroid junk. Solid return, and the vector is just right to be debris from the battle."

"OK," said the captain. "Get me more details. We can't match vectors with every bit of debris. Is it a sensor drone?"

"Negative, Captain," said the sensors operator. "It looks... kinda like a really big warhead."

"Can I get in on the sensors feed?" Zandy asked.

"Not n--" said the sensors crewman, annoyed.

"Sure," said the captain, "let her in."

"Thanks," Zandy said, and uncoiled a data cable from the console she was sitting next to. The interface was standard, thank God, she thought as she plugged in.

"It's another interceptor," she sent, vocalizing into the data link. Then with a slightly odd feeling, she repeated the words aloud.

The
Ice Knife
had already found one of the
Conquering Sun's
empty interceptors, drifting far and fast from the battle, but that one had been so damaged that no contact had been possible with its computers. Captain Tralk had maneuvered her ship in for a closer look and the detailed data
Ice Knife
had sent over had threatened to take Zandy's breath away; the burned, ruined interceptor had been hers. Seeing the transmitted image of the ruined 'ceptor had been a bit like looking at her own dead and mangled body.

Now the
Whisperknife
had tracked down another faint, cooling thermal signature, and found another interceptor.

"It's a Hegemonic 'ceptor," Zandy went on. "Look at the way the reflectors are mounted. A Coaly 'ceptor would have three axial struts, instead of one central one."

"OK, then," said Captain Killick, "that makes it worth picking up. Strap in for maneuver."

Zandy let her fingers run along the glossy carbon black of the interceptor. The tiny ship fit inside the
Whisperknife
's cluttered main cargo bay, though the crew had had to clear the space. The interceptor looked pristine... was pristine, except for the expended sensor drones and decoys, and the empty warhead racks.

A quick uplink with the 'ceptor's computers gave its identity; CS-1-2, an interceptor from the
Conquering Sun
, First Wave. Her wave... Interceptor Pilot Wimms' interceptor. There was no damage to the 'ceptor... no disruption to the on-board neural net. And no daemon inside.

Somehow, Wimms had made it unharmed though the attack, and then...

"He must have linked back to the
'Sun
," Zandy said. "He made it through the attack with no damage at all, and then..."

"And then he beamed himself back to your assault-ship, right before it blew up," Nas said. "Well, that's bitter irony, if you like. Were you close to him?"

"No... not really. But... that ship was my family. "

"I know," Nas said, and closed his eyes. "This ship is all the family I have, too. I'm sorry."

---

Oversight Officer Segan leaned back in his command pod with a frown. The high priority coded signal that had just come in was cued to his own personal security cipher. No one else aboard the
Swift Liberty
could have read it, and only the most senior officers could have even known of its existence.

Segan didn't understand the details of the covert operations that had been active in Hegemony space. He had no need to know. In fact he had a substantial need
not
to know. But whatever
was
going on, it had gone very wrong indeed.