“A sniper isn’t much good inside a ship,” Caldswell said.
“But excellent for protecting the ship on planet,” I countered. “And he has three other guns.”
The captain folded his arms over his chest. “Fine,” he said at last. “Call him back up and tell him we’ll hire him on a provisional basis. Two months, same terms as you and Cotter.”
“Yes sir,” I said, grinning.
Caldswell just shook his head and headed for the door. “I’m going to check to see if they’re finished with the bridge. Make sure he fills out all his paperwork, Miss Head of Security.”
I grinned wider still. “Yes sir!”
Rashid must have known he’d get the job, because when I went out to get him he was waiting with his duffel, ammo cart, and gun case ready to go. I gave him the same spiel about pay and duties Caldswell had given me. He listened attentively until I was done before asking a few pointed questions about rotations and the cargo checklists that hadn’t even occurred to me when I’d signed up.
By the time I’d given him the tour of the ship, which took me less than half the time it had taken Basil back on Paradox, I was more certain than ever we’d made the right choice. Rashid was unfailingly polite and surprisingly knowledgeable about antibreach tactics in older ships. We were talking about how he would have handled the xith’cal raid Cotter and I had held off during our first month on the Fool when we walked back into the lounge to see that the cook and Ren had returned to their customary places.
I averted my eyes immediately, letting Rashid introduce himself. Our new security officer greeted the cook politely, but when we got to the captain’s daughter, his face lit up in a smile that made all his others look brittle. “Hello,” he said softly. “And who are you?”
Since Ren wasn’t going to answer, I spoke for her. “This is Ren Caldswell. The captain’s daughter.”
“Hello, Miss Caldswell,” Rashid said, leaning over to catch Ren’s eyes. It didn’t work. Ren just kept playing her chess game, moving the little plastic pieces with mechanical precision without so much as a glance in our direction.
“Don’t mind her,” I whispered to Rashid. “She’s like that to everyone.”
My new partner ignored me and dropped into a squat so that he was peering up at Ren from across the table. “Can you tell me about your game?” he asked sweetly.
Ren’s hands didn’t slow, and she didn’t reply. Rashid asked again, his voice even gentler, but the result was the same. He might as well have been talking to the wall. Eventually, he gave up, giving Ren a final smile before standing with a sigh.
“Sorry,” I said awkwardly as we walked out the lounge door.
“For what?” Rashid asked. “She is absorbed in her game. Girls that age are ever too busy. I have a daughter myself.”
“Really?” I said. “What’s her name?”
“Yasmina,” he answered proudly.
I smiled. “That’s a pretty name.”
“She is a pretty girl,” he said. “And very smart.”
“Is she here on Wuxia?” I asked as we walked down the hall.
Rashid gave me a smooth smile I couldn’t help but think of as fake after seeing how he’d smiled at Ren. “Perhaps.”
His strange answer threw me for a second, but then we ran into Nova and Basil and I forgot all about it as we went up to see the newly redone bridge.
Getting blown up might have been the best thing that could have happened to the Fool. Caldswell had replaced the entire command deck, and except for the salvaged captain’s chair, which was still the same worn, dirty old leather lounger from before, the bridge now looked almost modern. Basil was beside himself with joy. He spent nearly thirty minutes showing us how his maps could now be projected across the whole bridge, filling the room with neatly labeled stars.
When we finally managed to escape the impromptu navigation lesson, I showed Rashid to Cotter’s old room so he could start settling in. The captain had shipped all of Cotter’s possessions and what was left of his armor back to his family on Paradox when we’d first landed on Wuxia, but with the door closed, I’d still thought of the room as his. Now that Rashid was here, though, Cotter’s presence was gone from the ship entirely, and that brought me down a lot more than I’d expected.
I’d lived among strangers ever since I joined the army at eighteen, but I’d always been around Paradoxians. Cotter had annoyed me, true, but he’d been a familiar annoyance. Now that all trace of him was gone, I was starting to realize that I was alone. Truly alone among aliens and off-worlders for the first time in my life.
That realization killed the good mood I’d managed from hiring Rashid. Between the attack on Falcon 34, my missing memories, losing Cotter, and the bullshit with the cook last night, this was shaping up to be a bad month for me. I needed something to get my spirits up. A xith’cal raid maybe, or pirates, something straightforward I could stomp into the ground. But as I entered my room, I realized I was wrong. There was something that could cheer me up even more than a good fight, and it was sitting on my bunk.
Perched on my pillow was a rectangular package wrapped in plastic and stamped all over with caution warnings. I sprang on it like a tiger, ripping it open with my suit’s strength. The plastic shell was just a covering for another case, a metal one, and inside that was the blade I’d ordered two days ago.
To say it was a thing of beauty would be an insult. My new blade was breathtaking. At eleven inches, it was a little smaller than Phoebe’s cutting edge had been, but unlike my old blades, which had to be replaced when they burned out, this one had a replenishable thermite edge set into a tungsten steel core. This meant I could actually parry with it, something I’d never been able to do with Phoebe. Also, where Phoebe had been little more than a thermite cutting edge screwed into a handle, my new blade was meant to be integrated into armor, which meant so long as I kept my arm, I’d keep my weapon.
I stared at the thing for a good minute before I grabbed the package and my armor case and ran to the lounge to start installing it.
Two hours later, the lounge table was covered in tools and my new blade was in place. The manufacturer’s suggestion had been to embed the blade on top of the arm, but I’d attached mine to the outer side of my right wrist, which allowed me to hold my gun even while the blade was out. The included installation kit was designed for Terran armor, and I’d tossed it without opening the box. Instead, I used the nano-repair in my armor’s case to integrate the blade’s tiny computer into the Lady’s closed gap system so I could control it directly via my neuronet.
Modding a custom suit like my Lady Gray was always a tricky proposition, especially with non-Paradoxian equipment, but the blade I’d picked was high quality, and after a few tweaks, everything snapped into place. When it wasn’t in use, my new blade rested in a sheath on the outer side of my right forearm, but with a single thought I could shoot it out like a spike. Another thought would fire the thermite. Even better, now that my blade was hooked directly into my computer, I could set the temperature I wanted the thermite to fire at, lowering the base slightly to extend the burn time by up to five seconds.
“I know each moment contains eternity, Deviana,” Nova said when I caught her in the hallway to show her my new lovely. “But five seconds doesn’t sound like much time to me.”
“It’s not,” I admitted, retracting the blade and then shooting it out again just for the joy of hearing the razor sharp edge whistle through the air. “But when you’ve been stuck at eighty seconds forever, five more can be a game changer. Plus, with the tungsten core, the spike will still be useful even after the edge burns out. No more brittle blades. And since it’s attached to my suit rather than held in my hands, I can put a lot more power into each swing.”
I planted my feet and punched to prove my point, shooting my new blade out as my fist extended while Nova made appropriately impressed noises.
“What are you going to name it?” she asked.
I’d been thinking about that ever since I’d first seen the blade gleaming in its case. I’d considered calling it Phoebe just to keep things simple, but that seemed like a dishonor to the real Phoebe’s memory. In the end, I’d gone with an old favorite.
“Elsie,” I said proudly. “After Elsievale of Ambermarle. She founded the king’s Hidden Guard almost five hundred years ago, and she was the first woman ever to receive a royal knighthood. I wrote a paper about her in school. They used to call her ‘the sword you never see.’ A perfect namesake for a blade that retracts.”
Nova’s pale eyebrows shot up. “Are all your weapons named after famous Paradoxians?”
I pulled Elsie back with a laugh. “I wish. I was never that good at history. Mia’s called Mia because I liked the sound of it, and Sasha was my grandmother’s name.”
Nova bit her lip. “You named your gun after your grandmother?”
“Yep,” I said, checking Elsie’s sheath to make sure my new baby had gone in snugly, which she had. “She was so proud when I told her that she bought me a whole crate of ammo blessed by the king’s monks.” I still had a clip left, actually, stowed in my armor case along with the pictures my mother had sent of my sister and her family. You can guess which one I looked at more.
“Come on,” I said to Nova, flipping down my visor. “We’ve got an hour before takeoff. Let’s go get a drink and scare some Terrans.”
“But I don’t drink,” Nova protested as I pushed her along. “And I’m Terran.”
“You can spectate then,” I said. “Come on, this will be fun.” And if we were quick, we’d be off-planet before the Wuxian cops could give me a ticket for wearing my suit.
Nova didn’t look convinced, but I was already escorting her through the lounge to the cargo bay steps. The cook was sitting at the table prepping a pile of vegetables for dinner. Nova said hello to him, but I kept my mouth shut and my eyes down, using my suit to track him just to be sure he was keeping his promise not to stare. It wasn’t perfect, but as far as I could tell he kept his eyes on the leaves he was mincing like he was trying to turn them into powder, and that was good enough.
We left Wuxia with minimal fanfare. As usual for the Fool, the cargo bay was empty, but if Rashid was worried by the lack of actual trading aboard Captain Caldswell’s trade ship, he didn’t comment. He didn’t comment on anything, actually. He was unfailingly polite, but he kept to himself, though not to his room. He followed me on patrol while we were waiting our turn to use the Wuxia gate, but the moment we entered hyperspace, he’d taken off his armor and installed himself on the opposite side of the lounge couch from the captain’s daughter with Mabel’s fat cat snoring on the cushion between them.
This didn’t seem to bother Ren at all, but though I still wasn’t looking at the cook directly, I could tell it bothered him. He was glaring at Rashid so hard I could feel it through my suit, but Rashid paid him no mind. He just sat there reading on his handset, never bothering the captain’s daughter, never crowding her, and never speaking unless spoken to. He stayed that way all through the jump, and while I thought it was a little odd, he wasn’t doing any harm, so I quickly moved on to other, more important things, like seeing just how much metal my new blade could slice through.
By the time I’d pinned it down to six inches of industrial steel, exactly as the brochure promised, Basil was announcing our exit from hyperspace. That surprised me. Last I’d heard we were headed for the Aeon Sevalis, which was a lot farther away than the hour and a half we’d spent in hyperspace. I couldn’t see a thing from down in the empty cargo bay where I’d been doing my cutting, though, so I pulled my new baby back into her sheath and trotted up the stairs to see what I was in for.