Chapter Nine
The Sting
On the fourth evening, Brix cleared the middle of his bench.
That took longer than the plan.
The Stinger occupied one side of the shop, its two new tools fixed into their cradles. The scrambler was the smaller of them. The burner sat behind it, plain and heavy, with nothing about either one to suggest what it could do.
Neither could put a hole in anything.
Brix had said that often enough that the whole ship knew it by now.
Marek leaned over the bench. Nove had taken Brix’s stool, which Brix objected to from habit and allowed from tiredness. Rin stood opposite them with both hands resting on the cleared surface.
Between them lay a rough shape of the road, the weave and the guard that had driven them off it.
Brix tapped the scrambler.
“One breath.”
Then the burner.
“And that spends it.”
Marek studied the shape on the bench. “If it works.”
“It works.”
“You haven’t tried it.”
“It works here.”
Marek looked around the shop. “That was not the part I doubted.”
Brix gave him a tired look.
Rin moved the marker that stood for the Stinger toward the road.
“It threw at us twice because we came at it burning. So this time nothing burns.”
Nove stopped rocking the stool on its back legs.
“Nothing?”
“The Stinger goes cold before the weave.”
“As drift,” Marek said.
Rin nodded. “The guard sees nothing coming at it.”
“And if it sees you anyway?” Brix asked.
“Then the Stinger burns and comes out.”
Nove put the stool flat again. “That sounds less enjoyable.”
“It isn’t for enjoying.”
“Then why am I coming?”
“Because nobody else talks enough to keep the dark occupied.”
That won a short laugh from Marek.
Nove pointed at Rin. “Leading has made you cruel.”
“Sit properly.”
“Leading has made you Brix.”
Brix looked offended. “No one has earned that.”
Rin moved the other two markers in.
The Kettle.
Pod Twelve.
Three craft.
She looked at them together. No one awake had ever seen that many leave home at once. The markers barely filled the cleared part of the bench, but the sight of them made something catch under her ribs.
Marek put one finger behind the guard.
“Once the drives are gone?”
“It holds its heading,” Brix said. “Whatever way it’s facing when the burner takes it, that’s the way it goes.”
“The guns?”
“Live.”
Rin turned the guard marker so its bow pointed away from the three craft.
“Its guns ride a body that can’t turn.”
Her finger came to rest behind it.
“Dead astern.”
Brix nodded once. “That’s your door.”
They went over the cut after that.
The seam.
The line.
The splice and the com fitting, packed in a field kit made up at home. The brick stayed where it was. Brix said that twice and made Rin say it once back to him.
“Do not pull it.”
“I know.”
“Knowing’s not doing.”
“I won’t pull it.”
“If you pull it, you’ve brought me another corpse.”
“I won’t pull it.”
He considered her face, then let the matter go.
Outside the shop, the queue at Holl’s door had not moved. The same people waited there when Rin left as had been waiting when she came in, cups in hand, talking quietly beneath the cold light over the door.
She looked once.
Then she went to inspect Twelve.
The road was days out.
The three craft left together.
Rin saw the Kettle clear first, then the Stinger, its new tools riding dark along the frame. Pod Twelve came last.
Home fell away behind them.
Three voices settled onto the channel. Marek in the Kettle. Nove in the Stinger. Rin in Twelve.
For the first part of the ride, Nove talked.
She discussed Brix’s stool at length. She had decided it was hers now, chiefly because he had told her it was not. Marek suggested she wake in another century and see whether the argument had improved with age.
Rin listened without joining in.
The farther they went, the less Nove said.
By the time the road appeared on their glasses, she had stopped altogether.
The picker moved where it always moved.
The chain ran on.
The guard rode its weave, wide and even, turning through the same old shape that had carried it past them the first time.
Rin checked the road.
She was nearer the glass than the reading needed.
Nothing had changed.
The Stinger went cold far outside the weave.
Nove’s voice came down the channel, smaller than it had been on the ride out. “Stinger. Burn is out.”
Rin looked for the craft and nearly lost it.
Without its drive, it was only a dark piece moving among other dark pieces. Its heading carried it toward the road. Nothing corrected. Nothing flared. Nothing told the guard that a thing made by human hands was coming for it.
The Kettle and Twelve waited off the road with their drives low.
Rin could hear the soft working of her own pod.
Her breath.
The faint touch of her gloves on the controls.
Nothing else.
The Stinger drifted on.
The guard came around the far side of its weave.
Rin watched its body turn.
The same gun mounts.
The same hard shape.
The same machine that had come off the road and driven them away.
Her fingers tightened on the controls.
She let go.
Set them again.
The Stinger crossed into the weave.
The guard did not move toward it.
Nove’s next breath caught in the channel. She covered it with words.
“Still drift.”
“Hold it,” Marek said.
“I’m holding nothing.”
“Then do that well.”
The guard continued through its turn.
Its bow passed across the Stinger.
Rin waited for the change.
There was none.
The picker went on picking.
The chain did not react.
The Stinger drifted closer.
Rin had known the plan at the bench. She had known it through the long ride and every check since. That knowledge had seemed clean enough.
Now there was only the guard and the dark space closing between it and Nove.
Rin’s mouth had gone dry.
“Range,” Marek said.
Nove gave it.
Her voice was flat now. All the talk had gone out of it.
The guard entered the last part of its weave.
“Scrambler ready.”
Rin watched its turn.
“Wait.”
The Stinger went on drifting.
“Wait.”
The guard’s guns crossed away.
“Now.”
Nothing flashed.
Nothing marked the Wasp’s hull.
For one breath, the guard lost the road.
Its turn broke. The body slipped sideways across its own weave, not far, but wrong. The guns held where they had been. The bow wandered.
The scrambler had bought its breath.
Nove spent it.
“Burner.”
The drive block cooked.
There was no hole.
No broken plate.
The Wasp simply stopped turning.
It held the heading it had been given and went on with it forever.
Its guns stayed live.
The first burst crossed the road ahead of the Stinger.
Rin pushed Twelve forward.
The Kettle came with her.
“Marek. Take the far side.”
“Kettle taking it.”
“Nove. Come out.”
The Stinger’s drive lit. It broke from its drift and pulled away as the Wasp’s guns cast another burst along the heading it could no longer leave.
Nove’s voice came back with its usual speed and none of its ease. “Stinger clear. Both tools spent. No mark on it.”
“Stay on the road,” Rin said. “Watch the chain.”
“The road’s clean.”
Rin drove Twelve toward the Wasp’s stern.
The machine kept firing.
Each burst went forward and out across the road. The guns could follow a little. The hull could not. Dead astern, their reach narrowed to nothing.
That was the door.
Rin brought Twelve into it.
The Kettle crossed behind the Wasp, carrying the tow bar toward the bow. Marek kept wide of the guns and said nothing that did not need saying.
The Wasp fired again.
From Twelve, Rin saw only the thrown pieces crossing the dark. They passed without light. Without sound.
One struck the pod.
The blow came through the seat and up her spine.
Twelve kicked sideways.
Rin’s hand missed the control.
Another strike ran along the outer plating, long and hard enough to shake her teeth together. The Wasp’s stern slipped out of the glass. The road swung across it.
Then Twelve was clear.
Not rolling.
Not fighting its own attitude.
Simply thrown away.
The gap opened in front of her.
It went on opening. Nothing she did changed it. Twelve carried the throw out and out along a line nobody had chosen, and the Wasp got small in the glass, and the road behind it got smaller.
The Wasp went on without her, firing.
Its bursts were nothing much from here. She could see the pieces leave the guns. She could not see where any of them went.
The Kettle moved along its far side.
It was a shape with a bar under it. The fire went out past it, and she had no way of telling by how much.
The Stinger crossed back toward the road.
All of it at the speed it had been going at when she was in it. None of it slower for her being outside.
Her plan continued in the dark as though it had never belonged to her.
Rin stared at the empty place where she should have been.
The channel went on beside her.
“Kettle’s along the flank,” Marek said. “Working up toward the bow.”
“Road’s clean,” Nove said. “Picker’s picking.”
Marek gave a count. Nove gave one back. Neither of them said her name.
The weave. The window. The burned block. The door dead astern. She had put all of it on Brix’s bench with three markers and one finger, and it was out there now, running at its own speed, and there was nothing left in it for her to do.
Her left hand had closed around the edge of the console. She opened it.
The fingers worked.
Her right hand answered when she asked it to.
She looked down at the seals.
Whole.
The pod answered the controls.
Whole.
Her face came back faintly in the dark glass, grey and whole, and the grey had no time in it.
At home somebody would have taken the pod off her and sat her down and put something hot in her hands, and she would have let them, and it would have taken the rest of the day.
There was no rest of the day.
There was the Wasp, firing. There was the Kettle coming up under its bow. There was Nove out on the road with both tools spent.
A voice reached her.
“Rin.” Marek’s voice stayed quiet. “Twelve.”
He did not tell her what to do.
Nobody did.
The Wasp fired again.
Rin watched the burst go out across the road, wide of everybody, into nothing.
Then she was leaning forward, and the working of the pod had changed under her, and she had not chosen either one.
Rin put her hands back on the controls.
“Going back in.”
She brought Twelve around.
There was no roll to catch. No stars to steady. The pod had already finished being thrown.
All that remained was the distance back.
Nove’s voice came fast. “Scar on your flank. Big one.”
“Depth?”
“Can’t read it.”
“Twelve holds pressure.”
“Then come straight. You’re outside the door.”
Rin saw it.
The Wasp’s stern sat ahead of her, narrow behind the fixed body. The guns worked on either side, casting their fire into every place except the one she needed.
She lined Twelve with the dead space.
The Wasp fired.
A thrown piece passed above the pod.
Another crossed below.
Rin did not follow either one with her eyes.
Dead astern.
The door.
She drove into it.
The collar met the Wasp’s rear seam hard enough that the contact came through her boots. The pod held.
Rin checked the seal.
Checked it again.
The second time, she noticed.
She left it sealed anyway and took the field kit.
Outside Twelve, there was only her breathing and the small noises her own body made inside the suit.
The Wasp moved beneath her hands.
Every burst from its guns came through the hull as a short run of hard vibration. The machine was still fighting. It was not facing her. It did not need to be facing her for her body to know what the guns were doing.
She worked along the stern.
The seam lay where Brix had said it would.
Her glove found it.
The next burst ran through both arms.
She held on.
“Twelve,” Marek said over the channel. “Kettle is at the bow.”
“Set the bar.”
“Setting.”
Rin opened the field kit.
The cutter sat first. Then the splice. Then the com fitting, each held in the order Brix had packed them. Nothing loose. Nothing clever.
The Wasp fired.
She set the cutter.
The vibration came through the hull again.
Her hand slipped a finger’s width.
She put it back.
The seam opened.
Inside, the runs lay close to the body. Thick first. Thin behind them. The line to the brick sat where it had sat in the dead Mite on Brix’s bench.
Do not pull it.
Rin did not.
She found the line Brix had marked in the kit drawing. She checked it against the fitting. Checked the path back to the brick.
The Wasp fired.
The hull struck against her palms.
She put the cutter around the line.
For half a breath she could not close her hand.
Then she did.
The cut stopped everything mid-burst.
The vibration vanished.
One moment the Wasp was firing.
The next it was a lamp, waiting to be wanted.
Rin stayed over the open seam.
Her hand was still closed around the cutter.
She waited for another burst.
None came.
Her own breathing filled the suit.
“Twelve?” Nove’s voice had dropped almost to nothing.
“Cut.”
Nobody answered at first.
Then Marek let out one breath over the channel.
“Do the splice.”
Rin set the cutter back in its place.
The brick stayed in.
She worked the splice onto the cut line. Her fingers shook once. She braced her wrist against the hull and kept going.
First side.
Second side.
The fitting went on last.
Made at home.
Fitted here.
She pressed the final contact into place and checked it with her thumb.
The Wasp remained still beneath her.
Not dead.
Waiting.
Rin closed the seam as far as the fitting allowed and went back along the hull toward Twelve.
At the collar, she stopped.
The Kettle had put the tow bar across the Wasp’s bow. It floated there within reach of an arm folded so closely against the body that Rin had always taken it for part of the mount.
She had stripped dead guards.
She had seen that shape before.
She had never seen it open.
Rin went inside Twelve and sealed the collar.
Her hands were still unsteady. She set them on the console until they were not.
“Marek. Bar ready?”
“Kettle. Ready.”
“Nove?”
“Road reads as it did. Picker’s still picking. Nothing coming off the chain.”
Rin opened the channel to the new fitting.
For one second she heard only the quiet of Twelve.
Then a small call appeared on the channel.
The Wasp asking.
Rin looked at the folded shape beside the bow.
“Wasp. The bar at your bow. Take hold, and hold.”
The asking stopped.
Nothing came after it. Rin sat with her hands off the controls and watched the folded shape.
A grip nobody had known was a grip opened from the Wasp’s body.
It came apart along seams she had never seen open, unhurried, spreading exactly as wide as it needed to be. She had crawled over that mount when it was dead. She had put her weight on it. She had never once thought there was a hand in there.
It reached.
Closed around the bar.
Held.
For a moment nobody said anything.
Nove laughed once. The sound broke halfway through and came back as breath.
Marek said nothing.
The channel stayed open with his breathing in it and nothing else. He had a word for most things. He did not put one on this.
Rin watched the grip.
It held square.
Nothing about it was working hard. It had taken the bar the way a person takes a rail, because it had been told to and because that was where the bar was.
She put one hand flat against Twelve’s console. Her palm would not stay still against it.
She left it there and watched.
The Wasp had taken the work.
“It’s holding,” Nove said, and there was nothing in her voice but the two words.
Nobody answered her.
The Kettle began the tow.
The grip held.
The Stinger took the far side. Twelve rode behind the Wasp’s stern, close enough that Rin could watch the cut fitting answer through the whole turn away from the road.
Nothing followed.
The chain did not change.
The picker went on picking.
The Wasp asked again, two on the count.
The small call appeared on their channel and waited.
Nove answered it first. “There it is.”
Marek’s voice settled over the channel. “It’ll ask till it’s given work. Let it ask.”
The call ended.
Two later, it came again.
It asked all the way home.
At first Rin watched for it. By the end of the first long watch she knew when it would come without looking at the count.
Ask.
Wait.
Ask again.
It rode among their own voices.
Suda called from home before the long ports came into sight.
Her voice arrived level and clean. “I have the road record. Give me the day.”
Rin looked at the Wasp on the tow.
The dead drives held cold.
The grip held the bar.
She gave Suda the weave, the window, the burned block, the boarding and the cut. She gave her the brick left in and the work taken from their wire.
Then she said, “Nobody marked, on either side of it, and nothing destroyed anywhere on the day.”
“Filed,” Suda said.
Nove came onto the channel before the quiet had settled. “Thrown that hard and not a mark on anybody. That’s luck, that is. And that scar is Marek.”
Rin looked toward the Stinger.
“No.”
“Already named.”
“No.”
“Big, old, and full of character.”
Marek’s answer took a moment. “I object to the order.”
Nove laughed. “You can object to the scar when we get home.”
Rin looked at the image Nove sent across.
The new line ran along Twelve’s flank for the length of her arm. Deep enough to catch the light from the pod’s own glass. The little finger-width score from the first time sat low on the quarter, hardly anything beside it.
“Marek is not the scar’s name.”
Nove moved on as if Rin had agreed.
Suda’s voice returned. “Give me the final line.”
Rin watched the Wasp ask again.
She said, “the Wasp takes its work from us now.”
“Filed.”
The road dropped behind them.
Nothing came after.
Half the ship stood at the long ports when they came home.
No one cheered.
The ship did not.
People crowded the glass in quiet rows, children pressed between adults, hands lifted to point and then lowered again. The Kettle came in first on the tow. The Wasp rode off the doors behind it, its grip closed around the bar.
The Stinger came beside it.
Twelve followed.
Rin saw faces turn with the captured hull. The guns moved past the ports, whole and still.
The first gun the ship had ever owned.
The Wasp asked on the channel.
The call went unanswered.
Its drives would be somebody’s bench work for another season. That did not matter to the tow. The grip held, and the Kettle brought it home.
At the doors, Brix stood nearest the glass.
He did not wave.
He looked at the Wasp the way he had looked at the Stinger on its first morning, with both hands hanging at his sides and no place ready for them.
Nove put the Stinger down and came onto the channel at once.
“Marek made it home.”
Rin looked at the scar on Twelve’s flank.
“No.”
“Ask anybody.”
Things the ship failed at twice got named.
That was how the guard had become the Wasp after driving them off the road. Nobody had planned the custom. The second failure simply needed somewhere to live, and a name was where the ship put it.
The doors closed behind them.
The Wasp asked again.
Marek found Rin beside Twelve after the checks were done.
She had one hand on the new scar. The metal beneath it was cool. The line ran out to the end of her reach, rough beneath her palm.
He stopped beside her and looked along it.
“Full of character,” he said.
“Don’t encourage her.”
“Too late for that by several centuries.”
Rin moved her hand over the scar again.
Marek looked past Twelve toward the Wasp, where Brix had already begun walking around the dead drive block without touching it.
“Next year’s telling,” he said quietly. “I had thought I knew it.”
Rin looked at him.
He watched the captured guard.
“The old part stays old,” he said. “It has earned that.”
“And the sting?”
His mouth moved by half a smile.
“The sting is going in.”
“For the children?”
“For everybody.”
Across the bay, the Wasp asked on the channel.
Marek listened to the call.
“Some part of it will be new,” he said. “First time in living memory.”
Then he went to help Brix by standing near him and refusing to leave.
Rin stayed with Twelve.
The little score lay beneath her hand first.
Then Marek.
The name had stuck.
She opened the logbook that night.
The usual form waited.
Date.
Craft.
Take.
Condition.
Crew.
Rin filled each line.
She wrote the road and the Wasp and the burn. She wrote the scar against Twelve’s condition and paused over the name before putting it down.
Marek.
The earlier breaks sat elsewhere in the book.
Tam found one.
Took it whole.
Lines that did not belong to the form and had stayed anyway.
Her hand rested above the empty space beneath the day’s entry.
The Wasp asked through the ship’s channel.
Two later, it asked again.
Rin put the pen down.
Then she picked it up and wrote:
Took it alive.