She frowned, looked down, and then gave in to the impulse welling up in her.

“He’s right,” she said. “I’m in over my head with this job. I got it because of some political favors. I’m not qualified to do what I’m doing.”

He blinked rapidly. He shot a glance around her, checking to see if anyone had overheard them. She didn’t particularly care, but she thought it was sweet that he did.

“Not so bad, you,” he said. “I mean, little off here, little off there. But I’ve been under worse.”

“I need help,” she said. “To do all the work the way it should be done, I need help. I need someone I can trust. Someone I can count on.”

Ren nodded, but his forehead roughened. He blew out his breath and stepped off the treadmill.

“I want to get the work done right,” she said. “Not miss anything. And I want the team to respect me.”

“Okay, sure.”

“I know you should have had this job.”

Ren blew out another breath, his cheeks ballooning. It was more expressive than she’d ever seen him before. He leaned against the wall. When he met her gaze, it was like he was seeing her for the first time.

“Appreciate you saying it, chief, but we’re both of us outsiders here,” he said. “Stick together, bien?”

“Good,” she said, leaning against the wall next to him. “So. The brownout buffers? What did I get wrong?”

Ren sighed.

“The buffers are smart, but the design’s stupid,” he said. “They talk to each other, so they’re also a separate network, yah? Thing is, you put one in the wrong way? Works okay. But next time it resets, the signal down the line looks wrong. Triggers a diagnostic run in the next one down, and then the next one down. Whole network starts blinking like Christmas. Too many errors on the network and it fails closed, takes down the whole grid. And then you got us going through checking each one by hand. With flashlights and the supervisor chewing our nuts.”

“That’sc that can’t be right,” she said. “Seriously? It could have shut down the grid?”

“I know, right?” Ren said, smiling. “And all it would take is change the design so it don’t fit in if you got it wrong. But they never do. A lot of what we do is like that, boss. We try to catch the little ones before they get big. Some things, you get them wrong, it’s nothing. Some things, and it’s a big mess.”

The words felt like a church bell being struck. They resonated. She was that fault, that error. She didn’t know what she was doing, not really, and she’d get away with it. She’d pass. Until she didn’t, and then everything would fall apart. Her throat felt tighter. She almost wished she hadn’t said anything.

She was a brownout buffer pointed the wrong way. A flaw that was easy to overlook, with the potential to wreck everything.

“For the othersc don’t take them harsh. Blowing off steam, mostly. Not you so much as it’s anything. Fear-biting.”

“Fear?”

“Sure,” he said. “Everyone on this boat’s scared dry. Try not to show it, do the work, but we all getting nightmares. Natural, right?”

“What are they afraid of?” she asked.

Behind her the door cycled open and shut. A man said something in a language she didn’t know. Ren tilted his head, and she had the sick, sinking feeling that she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t acted normal, and she didn’t know what her misstep was.

“Ring,” he said at last. “It’s what killed Eros. Could have killed Mars. All that weird stuff it did on Venus, no one knows what it was. Deaded that slingshot kid who went through. Half everyone thinks we should be pitching nukes at it, other half thinks we’d only piss it off. We’re going out as deep as anyone ever has just so we can look in the devil’s eye, and Stanni and Solé and Bob? They’re all scared as shit of what we see in it. Me too.”

“Ah,” she said. “All right. I understand that.”

Ren tried on a smile.

“You? It don’t scare you?”

“It’s not something I think about.”

Chapter Eight: Anna

Nami and Nono left for Earth a week before Anna’s shuttle. Those last days living alone in those rooms, knowing that she would never be back—that they would never be back—was like a gentle presentiment of death: profoundly melancholy and, shamefully, a little exhilarating.

The shuttle from Europa was one of the last to join the flotilla, and it meant eighteen hours of hard burn. By the time she set foot on the deck of the UNN Thomas Prince, all she wanted was a bunk and twelve hours’ sleep. The young yeoman who’d been sent to greet and escort her had other plans, though, and the effort it would have taken to be rude about it was more than she could muster.

“The Princeis a Xerxes-class battleship, or what we sometimes refer to as a third-generation dreadnought,” he said, gesturing to the white ceramic-over-gel of the hangar’s interior walls. The shuttle she’d arrived on nestled in its bay looking small under the cathedral-huge arch. “We call it a third-generation battleship because it is the third redesign since the buildup during the first Earth-Mars conflict.”

Not that it had been much of a conflict, Anna thought. The Martians had made noises about independence, the UN had built a lot of ships, Mars had built a few. And then Solomon Epstein had gone from being a Martian yachting hobbyist to the inventor of the first fusion drive that solved the heat buildup and rapid fuel consumption problems of constant thrust. Suddenly Mars had a few ships that went really, really fast. They’d said, Hey, we’re about to go colonize the rest of the solar system. Want to stay mad at us, or want to come with?The UN had made the sensible choice, and most people would agree: Giving up Mars in exchange for half of the solar system had probably been a pretty good deal.

It didn’t mean that both sides hadn’t kept on designing new ways to kill each other. Just in case.

“. . . just over half a kilometer long, and two hundred meters wide at its broadest point,” the yeoman was saying.

“Impressive,” Anna replied, trying to bring her wandering attention back.

The yeoman pulled her luggage on a small rolling cart to a bank of elevator lifts.

“These elevators run the length of the ship,” he said as he punched a button on the control panel. “We call them the keel elevators—”

“Because they run along the belly of the ship?” Anna said.

“Yes! That’s what the bottom of seagoing vessels was called, and space-based navies have kept the nomenclature.”

Anna nodded. His enthusiasm was exhausting and charming at the same time. He wanted to impress her, so she resolved to be impressed. It was a small enough thing to give someone.

“Of course, the belly of the ship is largely an arbitrary distinction,” he continued as the elevator climbed. “Because we use thrust gravity, the deck is always in the direction thrust is coming from, the aft of the ship. Up is always away from the engines. There’s not really much to distinguish the other four directions from each other. Some smaller ships can land on planetary surfaces, and in those ships the belly of the ship contains landing gear and thrusters for liftoff.”

“I imagine the Princeis too large for that,” Anna said.

“By quite a lot, actually! But our shuttles and corvettes are capable of surface landings, though it doesn’t happen very often.”

The elevator doors opened with another ding, and the yeoman pushed her luggage out into the hall. “After we drop off your baggage at your stateroom, we can continue the tour.”

“Yeoman?” Anna said. “Is that the right way to address you?”

“Certainly. Or Mister Ichigawa. Or even Jin, since you’re a civilian.”

“Jin,” Anna continued. “Would it be all right if I just stayed in my room for a while? I’m very tired.”

He stopped pulling her baggage and blinked twice. “But the captain said all of the VIP guests should get a complete tour. Including the bridge, which is usually off-limits to non-duty personnel.”