He caught Miral’s eye. The older man nodded, and—Filip thought with a sigh—shifted to open a little room beside him. Filip didn’t run there like a little boy, but he went quickly, worried that the gap might close again before he reached it.
Karal was sitting across from Miral, and all of them sandwiched by unfamiliar bodies. A woman with dark skin and a scar across her upper lip. A thin man with a tattoo on his neck. An older woman—white, close-cropped hair and a crooked, unfriendly smile. Karal was the only one of them to acknowledge Filip, and that only with a grunt and a nod.
When the older woman spoke, it seemed like she was picking up the thread of a conversation that had been going on before Filip had taken his seat, but with a studied casualness of someone with an agenda. “Con mis coyo on the Shinsakuto, the Ceres fleet’s there forever. Earth away from Earth.”
“Forever’s a long time,” Miral said, considering the table like he was reading it. “Can think we know what a year, two years, three years down looks like, aber that’s only shit and guessing.”
“Can’t see the future,” the woman said. “Can see what’s there now, though, que no?”
Filip took a mouthful of too-salty noodles. He’d waited too long to start eating, and they were more than halfway to paste. The older woman grinned like she’d won a point, leaned in, put her elbows on the table so the split-circle tattoo of the OPA on her wrist showed. Almost like she was displaying it.
“All I’m saying is maybe time we start winning something, yeah? Ceres. Enceladus. Seems like las sola cocks we kick anymore are Michio Pa’s, and not so much hers even.”
“We beat Earth,” Filip said. He’d meant it to seem like an offhand comment. Something thrown into the conversation almost at random. Instead, he sounded shrill and defensive, even to himself. The words lay there on the table like something broken past fixing. The older woman’s smile was thin and nasty. Or maybe he only thought it was. One way or the other, she leaned back, took her elbows off the table. When she stood, when she walked away, it was with the air of having made her point, whatever it had been.
Karal coughed, shook his head. “No te preoccupes, Filipito,” he said.
“Why would I worry?” Filip asked around another bite of the noodles.
Karal made a circling motion with his hand. All this and everyone. “After a fight it’s the story about the fight, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Filip said. “Bist bien. I understand.”
Miral and Karal glanced at each other, and he pretended not to notice. The other crew from the Koto kept their silences to themselves. “Hoy, coyo,” Miral said, touching Filip’s shoulder. “Finish that and come help me with some repair work, yeah? Still tracking down some ganga between the hulls.”
Filip pushed the bowl away with his fingertips. “This is done already,” he said. “Let’s go, us.”
The strike that had crippled the Pella hadn’t been one thing, but a tight cluster of PDC rounds. If they’d hit straight on, it would have been better. The top of the ship above the cockpit and command deck was angled and reinforced against exactly that kind of impact. Maybe it would have peeled back a section of the hull and made a hell of a bang, but kept the guts of the ship safe. The way it had happened—the rounds raking down the side of the ship in a stream—was worse. The housings of the Pella’s maneuvering thrusters and PDC cannons, sensor arrays and external antennas had suffered. It was like someone had taken a scraper along all the exposed parts of the ship and taken off whatever could be removed. The damage had left a blind spot in their PDC coverage, but the torpedo that came through it had malfunctioned. If it had detonated, it could have cracked the ship in two, and the old bitch from the galley would have had to hope for the mercy of the inners to keep her leathery ass from drowning in her own waste air.
The torpedo had still hit hard enough to breach the outer hull, though. And the long, tedious work of finding each bit of scrap shaken loose needed to happen. Leaving a handful of metal and ceramic shards to rattle around between decks whenever they fired the maneuvering thrusters was begging for death. So Filip and Miral suited up, checked each other’s seals and bottles and rebreathers, and crawled into the space between the hulls. The Martian designs were elegant and well ordered, everything labeled along with inspection and change-out dates. In the white flare of light from his lamp, Filip considered the bent plate of the outer hull, the jagged gash where the stars showed through. The galactic plane glowed white and gold and rose against the black. It was hard not to stop and stare.
It was different looking at the stars as stars and not dots on a screen. He’d spent his whole life in ships and stations. Seeing the billions of unblinking lights with just his own eyes only happened when he went outside on a repair or an operation. It was always beautiful, sometimes alarming. This time, it seemed almost like a promise. The endless abyss opened around them, a whisper that the universe was larger than his ship. Larger than all the ships put together. Humanity could put its flag on thirteen hundred of those dots and not be a percent of a percent of a percent. That was the empire the inners were fighting and dying to control. A hundred more planets a dozen times over, and less than a rounding error of what was out there staring back at them.
“Hoy, Filipito,” Miral said on the suit’s private channel. “Come around. Think I’ve got something.”
“Commé. Moment.”
Miral was crouched down beside the power conduit for the sensor array. His light was playing over a bit of inner hull. A short, bright line showed where something had scratched it. Miral ran his glove over it, and it smeared. Ceramic, then.
“Okay, you little shit,” Filip said, playing his lamp down the conduit. “Where’d you go?”
“Follow on,” Miral said, scrambling down the handholds.
When they reached Pallas, the crews could do a more complete inspection. There were tools to blast nitrogen and argon into every crease and curve of the ship and blow out anything stuck there. Better, though, to have as much done before they arrived. And, Filip thought, there weren’t any other people out between the hulls. As jobs went, it was the most isolated one that the Pella had to offer. All alone, that was reason enough to work it.
Miral’s little gasp of victory caught Filip’s attention and brought him down close to where the other man was hunched. Miral took a pair of pliers from his belt, applied himself to a section of conduit where the weld had left a gap, then sat back with a grin Filip could see through the suit’s helmet mask. The chip was the size of a thumbnail, jagged along one side, smooth on the other.
Filip whistled appreciatively. “Big one.”
“Si no?” Miral said. “Leave esá bastard la bouncing around like shooting a gun in here, yeah?”
“One less,” Filip said. “Let’s see how many more we find.”
Miral made a fist and agreed, then tucked the shard into a pocket. “You know, when I was about your age? Drinker back then, me. Spent my time with this coyo always talked about fights he’d been in. Got in them a lot. Liked them, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Filip said, lowering himself farther down, playing his light across the housing of a maneuvering thruster. He didn’t know where Miral was going with this.
“This coyo, he said mostly when things spun up, it was from the other bastard getting embarrassed, sa sa? Maybe didn’t want to throw knuckles, but couldn’t find a way to push off without his crew seeing him weak.”
Filip scowled behind his faceplate. Maybe Miral was talking about what had happened on Ceres? It still bothered Filip sometimes. Not the violence itself, but little flashes of the humiliation left over from realizing the girl he’d been with at the Ceres bar had gone. It wasn’t something he wanted to spend more time with. “Que sa, es,” he said, hoping that would be enough.
But Miral went on. “Only saying, a man who’s feeling like he lost face, yeah? He’ll say things he doesn’t mean because of it. Do things he doesn’t mean.”