“Do you think it’s going to work?” Perez asked. “The mission, I mean.”
“I think if it doesn’t, you should probably spend all the money you’re going to make off this trip,” Durham said. “And spend it as quickly as you can.”
* * *
The first thought that came to Rafe Daquin as he bubbled up uneasily into consciousness was, I can’t feel my legs.
The second thought he had, after another moment, was, I can’t feel my anything.
Rafe sunk back into unconsciousness after that, falling through a blackness of indeterminate length and depth.
* * *
Rafe was dreaming and knew he was dreaming, because this was one of those dreams where he stood still and everything moved around him.
He started on the bridge of the Chandler, beginning his first day as an apprentice pilot, after six months at navigation and a year in the ranks of the engineers before that. The Chandler’s chief of pilots was not entirely pleased to find Rafe in her charge. Rafe had been dumped into her lap by Captain Walden, and he knew that Lieutenant Skidmore thought Walden had been bribed by Rafe’s family to accelerate him through the ranks. And, well, she had; Rafe’s father told him as much the last time the Chandler was at Phoenix Station. In Rafe’s dream he was experiencing Skidmore’s thinned lips and otherwise carefully neutral demeanor for the first time.
Rafe’s response in the dream was the same as it was in life: outward careful politeness and attentiveness, inward lack of concern because the fix was already in, and he was going to be a pilot whether Skidmore liked it or not. She hadn’t liked it. She left the Chandler not too long after. This occasioned Rafe’s promotion to assistant pilot, right on schedule, which was to say, ahead of schedule and ahead of others.
A blink-shift and he was in the headmaster’s office at Tangipahopa Hall, waiting for either his mother or father to arrive. This time it was for punching one of the sixth-form students in the head; other times it would have been for infiltrating the dining hall at 3 A.M., stealing one of the custodial carts for a joyride, or taking money to change grades for other students (and then not doing it, which prompted one of his unsatisfied customers to complain). Rafe was hoping it would be his father, who graded transgressions on a curve, as opposed to his mother, who emphatically did not. Rafe’s eventual graduation from Tangipahopa required his father agreeing to speak at the graduation ceremony, and his mother funding a science lab.
Another blink and it was the day after Rafe’s graduation from University of Metairie, with an ordinary degree in engineering, earned less by lack of ability than by overall lack of attendance and interest. His mother was telling him she wouldn’t sign off on the release of his trust fund, which customarily was given to the Daquin children on completion of their degree. Rafe pointed this out; his mother noted that “customary” was not the same as “obligatory,” and then stood there daring him to argue the point with her, she who regularly argued cases before the Phoenix High Court.
Rafe did not take the challenge. He instead looked to his father, whose face was carefully blank. He was not stupid enough to argue with Colette Daquin either. Nor could he do anything on his own; by the rules of the Daquin Family Corporation and Trust, both parents, if they were living, had to sign off on any trust disbursements prior to thirty-five years old (standard). Colette Daquin wanted her slacker child to get a job that would fill in the large and obvious blanks in his education, not with the family business. Jean-Michel Daquin suggested the Colonial merchant space fleet. An old supper club acquaintance would find an opening on one of his ships.
A final shift and Rafe was not standing anymore. He was running through the corridors of the Chandler, slower than he wanted, trying to avoid whoever it was who had taken the ship, and failing as two of the raiders stepped out of the T intersection ahead of him. Rafe skidded on his heels and turned, falling over his legs in the process. He righted himself and prepared to sprint away and was knocked off his feet for good by a shot to the back of the head.
In the dream as in real life Rafe could feel the shot strike his skin, impact against the bone of his skull, and begin to burrow through into his brain. In the dream as in real life Rafe felt the cold shock of certainty that this was the moment he was going to die, and the thought that rocketed through his brain before there was nothing else at all:
Unfair.
* * *