Entirely True

Avolier Girane paused at the gate to the DeGrace house, straightening his tie and smoothing a palm over his hair. Of course it was impossible to imagine Lorraine DeGrace, or Lorraine Roth as she is now, living anywhere other than the DeGrace's ancient house on the broad terraces above the river, but the restrictions on private vehicles in the old part of town did mean that guests were forced into a closer encounter with the public transport system than a councillor like Girane was used to.

Satisfied that he was at least presentable, Girane made his way up the path between the manicured shrubs. The door opened as he approached, and he recognised one of Lorraine's sons, the polite one, Michel or Marc I think, doing duty as a doorman, offering to take Girane's coat with a smile that made his resemblance to his father all the more marked.

And there was the father himself,  topping up another guest's glass with a wink and a laugh, Lorraine DeGrace's folly they used to say, until Jorion Roth, spacer, became Jorion Roth, capsuleer.

"Bon soir, Avol, you're well?" Jorion draped an arm around Girane's shoulders and drew him further into the room. "I'm glad you could make it tonight, I'd hate to get sent back upstairs without a chance to see you. Pesellian's well? He's not here tonight?"

Jorion's smile was, as always, infectiously warm. Pesellian always said it never reached the man's blue eyes, but Pese's always been jealous of every man better looking than he is, which is why he refused to come tonight and left me to make his excuses. Girane paused, vaguely aware that though the thought was entirely true, it didn't quite feel like the entire truth, and then realised Jorion was waiting for a reply. "I couldn't drag him away from the lab, I'm afraid."

"Ah, scientists, eh? My eldest, Cia, she's the same." Jorian gestured toward the back of the room, where a plump girl was moving among the guests with a tray of canapés. "Lorraine had to drag her down here by the ear, or close to it. She's been accepted to the Ecole de Physique, you know, we couldn't be more proud, but a girl her age needs more in her life than the books, non?"

Girane nodded agreement and took a glass from a tray offered to him by a younger girl, one with a far stronger resemblance to Lorraine. And there was Lorraine DeGrace Roth herself, her eyes and smile as bright as the gemstones around her neck, pausing to kiss her husband's cheek before extending one slender hand to Girane.

"Avol," she said fondly. "Such a pleasure.  Is that darling man of yours brewing up some sort of elixir of eternal youth in his laboratory? Because I swear you look younger every time I see you.  Therese has gotten you a drink?  And - Cia, don't stand there dreaming while Avol is hungry."

With a murmured apology, the older Roth daughter held out her tray, wearing an echo of her mother's bright smile. "M'ser Girane, how nice to see you again."

Girane contemplated the potential damage to his waistline in each pasty-wrapped parcel on her tray, but Lorraine's cook was famous in society circles, and rightly so, and he couldn't resist. The girl smiled again, and began to turn, and Girane hastily cast about for a topic of conversation that would delay her and the tray she carried.  "Jorion said you're studying to be a physicist?"

"Oui, M'ser," she said, politely but a little distantly. "Perhaps less useful than Dr Aurelim's work on tuber yields, but it interests me."

"Oh, you know Pese's latest?" Girane discreetly took another pastry.

"Great potential, perhaps not here but in places with more marginal conditions," Cia said, almost the exact words from Pese's Science Merit Citation, and entirely true, although with no mention of the military applications, not the entire truth. The girl gave him another bright, Lorraine-DeGrace-smile, and said,  "You must be very proud of him, M'ser. Please, do try the ones on the left. They're cheese, quite delicious."

"Oh, well, if you insist." She was right: they were quite delicious. He said so, and Cia's smile broadened, genuine warmth in her eyes for the first time, as if she'd been somewhere else until them and briefly stepped inside herself. Fortune, she's almost pretty, Girane thought with surprise, and then, "Did you make them?"

Cia nodded, flushing a little, and lowered her voice to say confidingly, "The secret is the - "


A loud curse behind her made them both turn. Doetre Tumame, past and most say future mayor, was hopping on one foot, swearing, the crumpled child's model of a sharp-edged space ship on the floor an eloquent explanation.

"You stupid cow!" a shrill voice declared. The owner of the voice, a small girl with startlingly ginger hair, glared up at Tumame. "You ruined it! Why don't you look where you're going, you - "

"Camille," Lorraine DeGrace said, and cast a laughing glance around the room. Children, the glance said, inviting complicity from all the parents there,  what can you do?

""Well, she should!" the girl said furiously. "That took me and Cia ages and - "

"Then you should have taken better care of it, cherie," Lorraine said. "Now pick it up and take it to your room."

"Not until she says sorry!"

Lorraine lost her smile. "Camille! That is not an appropriate tone to use. If you are looking to be -"

Whatever Lorraine thought Camille was looking to be was lost as the tray Cia had been holding hit the floor with a crash. She stared down at it and then looked up with a bright smile. "Fortune," she said. "I'm so sorry, everyone, I really am a butterfingers."


"Oh, Cia," Lorraine said with a disappointed sigh.

The girl flushed a dull red and bent to gather up the spilled food, murmuring apologies.

Jorian put a hand on his wife's shoulder and said genially, "Well, I think Cia has announced it's time to move into the dining room, everyone.  Mayor Tumame, let me offer you my arm, I trust Camille's Drake hasn't caused permanent injury? They are quite a sturdy little ship, we pilots call them flying bricks for a reason."

The tension in the room lifted as the guests followed Jorian and Tumame towards the dining room.  As the staff set out a first course of delicate white fish and lemon butter, even the former mayor forgot her injury.

Girane would not even have remembered Jorion and Lorraine's youngest and least well-behaved child, except, leaving the house full of excellent food and better wine, he heard a child's voice from the shadows beneath the hedge at the front of the property.

"I don't care, Cia! I am running away and you can't stop me!"

The eldest daughter's voice sounded somehow softer and warmer in the darkness. "But I will be lonely when you've gone, cherie. And sad, without you."

"You're going away anyway, to college!" Camille said sullenly.

I am eavesdropping, Girane thought, with a faint, guilty thrill. Still, it's always useful to know what one can about a family like the DeGraces.  As a councillor, it's almost my duty to.

As  a justification, it had the benefit of being entirely true.  Girane stepped further into the shadows as Cia said gravely, "Only a little way away. And I have to, to get a good job so I can get a house of my own."

"Of your own?" Camille asked. "With just, like, you?"

"Mmm. There might be room for one more, cherie. If you wanted."

"We could be running away together!" the child said excitedly.

A faint rustle of clothing. "We could. If you weren't running away now, that is."

"Oh." A small foot scuffed gravel.  "Maybe I could wait, for you. If you didn't take very long."

There was a smile in Cia's voice as she said, "I promise I'll be as quick as I can, how about that?"

"Okay. I guess I can wait, if you're quick. Ow, don't squeeze, Cia!"


The girl laughed quietly. "I can't help it, you're too squeezable.  Hey, since you're not running away, do you want to help me fix your ship?"

"It's too smashed," Camille said sadly. "That stupid lady has big feet! She should watch where they go!"

"Yes, she should," Cia agreed. "But I bet it isn't too smashed. I bet we could fix it, with maybe some replacement bits."

Camille sighed. "Then it won't be the same, with new bits."

"No, it'll be like a real spaceship. They get fixed all the time, you know," Cia said. "And new parts get put on them when they're too broken."

"Really?" Camille asked.

"Uh-huh.  So your ship will be even more real, if it's been fixed up after a collision."

Camille said hotly, "Mama should have made the stupid lady 'pologise, not me, Cia! That wasn't fair! It was on the table and everything, she knocked it down with her big fat backside, I saw!"

Girane had to stifle a laugh, thinking Tumame is rather broad in the beam, as Cia said quietly, "Well, maybe Mama didn't see."


"She should have been on my side anyway! She's my mama!"

"Mama can't help being Mama, Cami. Don't be mean about her. And I'm on your side, hmm? How about that?"

"Okay. Cia?"

"Yes, cherie?"

"Can we go and fix my ship now?"

Girane stepped back out of sight hastily as feet scuffed and bodies moved in the shadows. "If you've finished running away."

"I have," Camille said, as the two sisters joined hands and started back to the house.

Then as they passed the shadows where Girane stood, she added thoughtfully, "Well.  For now, anyway."

Perhaps it was that carefully considered qualification that stuck like a grass seed on Dry Day to Avolier Girane's memory.  Certainly, when he heard that Jorion Roth had fallen victim to some sort of cloning accident, he wondered first, not about the man's beautiful now-widow but about the eldest and the youngest of his children.  When the Roth family left Debreth, suddenly and completely between one day and the next,  Girane found himself thinking For now without quite knowing why he did.

And when, some time after that, Ciarente Roth called upon the town council to explain that sometimes Air Traffic Control regulations were made to be broken, Mayor Avolier Girane surprised his fellow councillors almost as much as he surprised himself when he found himself agreeing with her.

She was a DeGrace, he explained to them later, even if this pilot fellow she wanted them to recognise as a hero was Caldari. There had always been DeGraces in Debreth, even back before the first of the nine bridges had been built.  Humouring her, especially now she was a capsuleer pilot and richer than Fortune's right hand, was an entirely prudent thing to do. 

Eventually he won their agreement.  Fines were cancelled, a statue commissioned, a public holiday gazetted.


After all, what he had said was entirely true.

And in the end, Girane thought to himself, standing on First Bridge on the first Debreth annual holiday to celebrate capsuleer pilots, watching Ciarente Roth watch Captain Night make a gracious speech thanking Debreth for the honour, in the end ...

No-one knows the entire truth, in the end, except perhaps Fortune.

Who keeps her own counsel. 

Even, he thought, joining in the general applause, even  from capsuleers.

Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty Three

People say starship pilots become their ships, when they're plugged in to the pod.

It's as true as any simple explanation of a vastly complex process affected by a thousand thousand variables can be, which is to say, not very.

Apart, the ship and the pilot exist, separate entities. When the intricacies of Jovian technology join them in a union more intimate than any imagined in the world of the flesh, one does not become the other.

The pilot is not the ship any more than the ship is the pilot.

But it is true enough that when the neural links slide home into the pod-jacks and the connection goes live a pilot is no longer themselves entirely, either, not the same self that walks on two feet through the corridors of the station, that sees only what can be revealed by limited human eyesight, the self contained entirely by a frame of flesh and bone.

A pilot in pod gains and loses with each transit of the barrier between metal and mind. Loses and gains with each journey back.

Capsuleers differ in the way they negotiate the constant demand of their profession to cross again and again from the self of the flesh to the self of the stars. Some reject the idea of unity between themselves and their ship as much as they can, and talk instead of controlling their ship as if pod technology is only a more efficient version of the Captain's bridge chair. Some regard their ships as if they were bodies to be put on and taken off, as casually as anyone with access to cloning technology puts on and takes off the body of their birth, declaring that their self is contained entirely in their intellect, whatever physical architecture it may be hooked up to at any given moment.

Both may be right. Or neither.

Cloning teaches us that the mind must be separate from the brain, that the self must be separate from the body it inhabits. If that is true, then the capsuleer makes the ship they wear themselves as thoroughly as anyone wearing a vat-grown body has made that biomass lattice their own even before the slow colonisation of their DNA.

But not everyone believes it is true. Some hold that something essential is lost with that first transliteration of memory and personality from flesh to flesh. Other say they believe no such thing, but hoard and protect their first body behind steel walls and security screens sufficient to keep even CONCORD out. The mind is the self, true, but the mind is the product of the brain, with all its intertwined and ceaselessly firing neurons responding to every twitch and tingle of the body that houses and shapes and changes it daily.

Except for capsuleers, who regularly, even eagerly, switch off the sensations of their flesh and switch on the carefully calibrated information flow from the thousand systems of their ship.

A pilot in pod does not become their ship, but perhaps in the intangible alchemy that technology provides, pilot and ship together become, temporarily, a single self, a mind created by the biological reactions of a human brain to mechanical stimuli fed directly into the cortex.

As complex as the technology of the pod is, the human mind is more complex still. For many pilots, their sense of control or habitation, of ownership or union, varies widely between one ship and the next. Different makes and models, different specifications and capabilities, all affect the comfort - or lack of it - of the pilot in the pod. And other intangible considerations, too: more than one pilot has been known to complain that this Vagabond, this Falcon, this Megathron, is just not as comfortable as the last.

Many a Chief Engineer has spent hours hunting for undetectable flaws and cursing their employer's eccentricities.

This pilot, though, had no such sense of nagging incongruity as he stretched his consciousness out through the kilometers of corridors and ducts of his Chimera-class carrier. This ship was not new, not unfamiliar. It was, in fact, home, in the pod or out of it, and the flood of information that poured through the pod implants was a background hum as reassuring and unnoticed as the beat of his own heart.

The ship had a heart, too, although the core life-support processors didn't beat, but hummed a steady whirr. Air hissed through vents and was drawn back again, washed through the scrubbers, pumped past the green leaves of the plants in the hydrobays and sent on its way again. Across the ship, machinery kept up its pace while redundant systems were in various stages of power-down or maintenance cycles.

The bipedal carbon-based components of the ship performed their tasks with the same reliable consistency, or moved through the rest and recreation stages necessary to peak efficiency. In one compartment, staff from engineering discussed improvements to the capacitor output mix over a game of cards; in another professions of undying love were offered and received; the muffled Rat-tat-tat. Rat. Tat of marines at pistol practice came from the range. A woman was singing as she switched out relay circuits in the cargo hold, a child was crying quietly in compartment 1583C, a med-tech sighing with relief as he looked at a test result ...

For the ship, all these sounds were of equal importance, or lack of it: non-operational background noise, of far less relevance than the hum of the capacitor or the whine of the shield buffer.

But the ship was not just a ship, when the human pilot was in pod, just as the human pilot was not only human when he was encased in the ship's embrace.

A child crying.

Responding to the pilot's interest the ship's systems sorted and ordered the flood of information with a new set of priorities. The sound was separated out from the quiet babble picked up by sensors all around the ship, identified, pin-pointed.

The neural links withdrew and the pod seal opened. The pilot slid through the decanting chamber and to the floor below, enduring the indignities of the process stoically. Jets of warm water sluiced away the pod-fluid before a blast of hot air dried the moisture from his skin. A uniform, immaculately pressed, was laid ready. Mere moments after that single anomalous sound had caught his attention, the captain stood before the door of compartment 1583C.

He pressed the call button by the door frame. "Camille? It's Silver. May I come in?"

At Camille's assent, muffled but intelligible, he keyed the door open.

The room, with its profusion of vegetative artwork, was of course familiar. The small red-headed girl sitting in the far left corner, hugging her knees to her chest, was less so.

"Camille, it's past twenty-three hundred. Shouldn't you be asleep?"

Camille sniffled without looking up. "Couldn't sleep," she said.

"I see." Silver paused. "Do you think you might be better able to sleep if you went to bed?"

The girl shook her head. "I feel better here," she said.

"I see," Silver said again, although in fact he did not, in more than the strictly literal sense, see. "Do you mind if I join you?"

"Yes," Camille said. "I mean, no. I don't mind." She shuffled herself sideways a bit, making room for him in the narrow wedge of space between Commander Invelen's desk and the wall.

Silver lowered himself down to sit beside her, his back to the ventilation duct, the faint hum of the life-support processors distantly audible under the gentle hiss of air, the constant whirr of the Utopian Ideal's heart, not, of course, a human heart that beat a steady rhythm but an artificial heart that hummed steadily without pause, much as -

I see.

He hesitated, and cleared his throat slightly. "I imagine you miss your sisters quite a bit. Cia. And Ami."

"I'm not crying," Camille said.

"I can see that," Silver assured her.

"And even if I was, sometime even marines cry." Camille sniffled again and wiped at one eye with her sleeve. "But I'm not."

Silver offered her his handkerchief. "Certainly not."

"Thanks." Camille took the handkerchief and blew her nose.

"You're welcome."

Camille blew her nose again. "I'm a bit worried about Ami," she admitted softly.

"Cia will take good care of her."

"I know," Camille said with a sigh. "Cia's good when you're sad. It's nice she's good for something." She held out the handkerchief to him. "Thanks."

"Ah, you should keep that. In case you need it again," Silver said quickly.

"Okay." Camille tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve.

"When you can't sleep, at home, what do you do?" Silver asked.

"Cia usually makes me hot chocolate," Camille said.

"And that helps?"

Camille nodded. "Yeah."

"I'm sure the officers' mess could send up some hot chocolate, if you wanted," Silver said.

"It's okay," Camille said sadly. "It wouldn't be the same. I think I'm just going to sit here for a bit."

Silver nodded. "Do you mind if I sit with you?"

"No," Camille said. "That'd be okay."

"Good."

Camille sighed again, and shuffled herself a little closer to Silver. "Silver?"

"Yes, Camille?"

"Cia said you're not very used to little kids."

"I suppose that's true," Silver said.

Camille leaned her head against his shoulder. "It's okay, though. You don't need to worry about it. I'm nearly nearly-ten, and when I'm ten I'll be nearly big enough to start training to be a marine, and that's practically almost grown up. So don't worry. I won't be a kid much longer."

"I will," Silver reassured her, "do my best not to worry about it."

"Good," Camille said, and fell silent again.

A thought brought up the interface for Silver's internal neocom, another created a memo for the Facilities and Maintenance division. Work order: Commander Invelen's quarters, compartment 1583C. Temporary relocation of bed to far left corner of compartment, adjacent to ventilation duct. Work to be completed next main-day shift.

He let the interface fade from his vision and glanced down at the top of Camille's head, her ginger hair a vivid contrast to the dark blue of his uniform. The slow regularity of her breathing and her limp weight indicated that she had fallen asleep.

Given the lateness of the hour, that was not unexpected.

What Silver had not expected was his own discovery that he did not, altogether, mind.

Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty Two

Isala Haya had, in twenty-five years of service, seen it all.

He'd waited on Captain Katamara as a junior steward on the Blue Star the night the Captain had dined with Ruunuken Vulli and Tsilo Ralttilo, and never breathed a word of what he'd overheard.  He'd poured wine for Mens Reppola without spilling a drop, pulled out chairs for C.E.O.s and pirate lords and podders with equanimity, and even, in the recent years of his employment as Captain Night's chief steward, Sansha. 

But spirits and ancestors, there are some things nothing can prepare one to see at the Captain's table.

It wasn't Captain Night's guest's spectacular black eye - there had been plenty of occasions when Commander Invelen had eaten her dinner with an icepack handy for whatever bruises she'd acquired that day.

It wasn't the less-than-impeccable table manners, either - customs differed throughout the Cluster and no Chief Steward worth the salt in the Captain's silver salt-shaker would turn a hair even if a dinner guest picked up the finger bowl and drank it.

But of all the things Chief Haya had seen in his long and varied career, a small child at Captain Night's table had to be the most unlikely of them all.

Unlikelier still, the girl seemed quite at home, black eye and all. Haya himself had never exchanged more words with Captain Night than the minimum required for food and wine to be ordered and delivered, and if the ancestors love me they'll keep it that way, but Miss Camille Roth chattered away at the Captain as if he were, well, a normal person.

In three years of waiting on the Captain's table, Haya had observed many things about his employer: that he had impeccable manners; that he not only ordered, but also appreciated, wine of exquisite quality and breathtaking expense; that no reason short of a hull breach would see him appear in the officer's mess wearing informal attire.

And if Captain Night treated the crew with slightly distant formality, if he sometimes went days at a time without leaving his capsule, if he had the unsettling habit of occasionally looking through his Chief Steward as if the presence of another human being was a momentary distraction from the contemplation of warp vectors and jump points, well, what else could be expected?

The Captain was a capsuleer. He was immortal, impossibly powerful.

He was most definitely not normal. 

The little girl's apparent blithe disregard for that simple fact unsettled the foundations of Haya's universe, but what rocked them to their core was the fact that Captain Night didn't seem to mind.

None of his internal turmoil showing on his face, Chief Haya inclined his head in acknowledgment of the Captain's order of seafood for himself and a cheeseburger for the child and took himself back to the galley to recover his composure a little.

"... say sister," one of the junior stewards was telling another as they washed the fine china dishes that no cleaner drone could be trusted with, "But do the math, right? No-one knows where she - "

"Mister Makkura," Haya said frostily. "There will be no gossip in my kitchen while the Captain's at table."

"No, chief!" Makkura said quickly.

"Kaalioka Trefin, quickly now. And a cheeseburger."

Haya watched closely as the food was prepared, but as usual, could find nothing that fell short of his exacting standards. At the head of a small procession of junior stewards, he returned to the officer's mess.

"You know what is very important, when you fly fighters?" Captain Night was saying to the little girl as they entered.

"What?" she asked.

"Picking your fights very carefully," Captain Night said.

Haya decided that he had clearly either inadvertently eaten something with hallucinatory side-effects or the Sansha invaders' rumored wormholes led, in fact, to an alternate reality, because the only other possibility he could think of was that Captain Night was, in fact, imparting avuncular advice to Commander Invelen's eight year old adopted sister, and that clearly wasn't happening.


The comforting conviction that he had simply lost touch with a reality that nevertheless retained its accustomed shape and was waiting for him to rejoin it, let Haya view with equanimity Captain Night agreeing with Miss Roth that indeed, biting was an option when one was losing a fight, although more general strategies were also useful to have. It carried him through half-heard snatches of conversation about gardening and it withstood Miss Roth asking the Captain Did you always know who you were going to be? Like, when you were my age? and the Captain actually answering. It wavered a little at Captain Night reassuring Miss Roth that in his opinion, she didn't need to be afraid of growing up to be an accountant.

It buckled completely when Captain Night gave his dessert order.

Chief Steward Isala Haya was a seasoned officer. He inclined his head in acknowledgement, turned precisely on his heel and strode into the galley to relay the order. He stared down the junior stewards with a glare that said the first person in my galley to comment will be scrubbing pots until the end of time. He supervised the preparation of the dessert the Captain had chosen and its delivery to the table.  When the Captain and his guest had finished their meal, shaken hands with all the formality any Deteis could desire, and gone their separate ways, Haya oversaw the clearing of the table and the careful cleaning of the irreplaceable cutlery and crockery.

Then he dismissed his juniors, and locked the door behind them.

In twenty five years of service Chief Steward Isala Haya had never once taken even the smallest liberty with the ship's stores or the Captain's property.

There is, he thought, as he took down a bottle of the Captain's least expensive hak'len and poured himself a precise single measure, a first time for everything.

For drinking the Captain's liquor. 

For eight year olds at the Captain's table.

He tossed the hak'len back, shuddering a little at the alcohol and a little at the memory.

For two chocolate milkshakes.

With, spirits help me ...

With extra chocolate.

Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty One

The girl was eight years old but she had a black-eye worthy of a heavy-weight prize fighter and a scowl that wouldn't have been out of place on the face of a Civire bouncer.  An air of don't-want-to-be-here radiated off her like heat shimmer from warp-core housing, and had been since Inola Toras had dragged her off a Brutor boy a year older and twice her weight and marched her into the empty classroom.

The boy was on his way to medical.  By the time the sixth sense for trouble that Inola had developed over twenty years of teaching had sent her down the hall to the lunch-room at a run,  Commander Invelen's sister's excellent impression of a small, red-headed whirling dervish had done considerable damage.

Not the first fight Irt Kalur has been in, Inola thought, but quite possibly the first he's lost.

"Miss Roth?" Inola asked the small bundle of resentment sitting in front of her.  "I asked you a question."

Camille Roth folded her arms and sighed. "I know."

Inola folded her own arms. "Are you going to answer it?"

"No."

Inola's sigh was internal, twenty years of teaching having given her more than a little self-restraint when it came to dealing with miniature miscreants.  "Miss Roth, that's not an acceptable response. Why were you fighting?"

Camille shook her head. "That's not any of your business."

"Children fighting in my classroom most certainly is my business, Miss Roth."

"We weren't in your classroom."

Strictly speaking, true. "You were in the lunchroom after you were in my classroom, and that's not an excuse. And I know you've only been here a few days, but that's not an excuse either. What would Commander Invelen say if she heard you'd been fighting?"

"She'd ask if I won," Camille said.

Quite possibly true, Inola thought, given some of the rumors about the Commander. "I think she'd be unhappy you got in trouble. We don't allow fighting here, Miss Roth."

The little girl stuck out her chin and said stolidly, "Then I guess you better punish me."

"I need to know what happened to know who deserves punishment, and how much. Did Mr Kalur start it?"

"I'm not saying."

"Miss Roth. Camille. I know that when you come to a new place, it can be hard to fit in. Sometimes the other kids want to make sure you know who the boss is, yes? Is that what happened?"

Camille's expression didn't change. "I'm not saying."

"If you don't tell me what happened, I'll have to punish you both."

"Good," Camille said.

"You want me to punish you?" Inola asked.

Camille rolled her eyes. "If you don't, the other kids will think it's because of whose sister I am."

Ah ha, Inola thought. "Is that what happened? Mr Kalur thought you were getting preferential treatment because you're Commander Invelen's sister?"

"No. And I'm not saying."

"If the other kids are teasing you, I can make them stop, if you tell me."

"Ms Toras," Camille said patiently, "If I tell you, then I'll be a tattletale. And they will stop, now. I proved he was wrong."

"Mr Kalur? Proved he was wrong about what?"

"About Ami. I proved he was wrong on his body."

Inola blinked. "On his body?"

Camille sighed again and gave Inola a pitying look. "He's Yushkal clan," she said, clearly thinking that explained everything.

It took Inola a moment to dredge up what she knew about Irt Kalur's clan background, and then Camille's words made sense. Yushkal clan, one of the Brutor clans with a long tradition of trial by combat. "He said something about Commander Invelen and you challenged him to prove the truth of it with a fight?"

"I'm not saying," Camille said, but her expression gave her away. "And it wasn't true, anyway!"

"What wasn't true?" Inola asked gently.

"She's not a Sansha!" Camille burst out, glaring at Inola. "Ishukone made her arms, not the Sansha! And she hasn't let the crew down, either, that's not fair! It's not her fault! She's the best XO ever and it's not because she's Silver's girlfriend!"

Oh.

Inola pulled out the chair from the desk nearest to Camille's and sat down, used to compressing herself into a piece of furniture made for eight-year-olds.  "Honey, no-one thinks  that about your sister."

Camille blinked hard, tears trembling on her eyelashes. "They say it."

"This is the first time you've lived in a crew, isn't it?" Inola asked.

"Cia has crew!"

"Your other sister, Captain Roth? She has crew, but do the two of you live with them, do you go to school with their kids, like you do here?"

"No," Camille admitted.

"Well," Inola said. "A crew is bigger than a family, but it's not like a station, either. People know lots of other people, especially someone like Commander Invelen. She's in charge of everybody, right, after Captain Night?"

Camille nodded, and unfolded her arms long enough to swipe surreptitiously at one damp cheek.

"And sometimes grown-ups, they say things they don't mean. And they don't think that kids overhear them, or they think their kids know they aren't serious, but the kids don't always know. Right?'

Camille nodded again.

"So you don't need to take it to heart, something like that. It doesn't mean anything.  You just ignore it next time."

"There won't be a next time," Camille said, with a certainty that could easily have belonged to her sister.

"There won't be a next time for fighting, either. Will there, Camille?"

Camille heaved a sigh. "I'll try," she said. "I do try, you know, Ms Toras. But it's a lot of work, sometimes."

Inola let herself smile. "I know, honey. It's a lot of work for everyone, sometimes."

Camille nodded.

"You tell a teacher next time someone says something mean, okay?"

"Oh, it'll be okay," Camille said. "Irt is the leader. That's why I picked him."

Kalur is the leader, Inola thought, studying the girl. Headed for a good career as an NCO, if he can learn to control his temper rather than letting it control him. "Do you want to be the leader, Camille? Is that why you fought him?"

Camille rolled her eyes again. "I am the leader, Ms Toras. They just don't know it yet.  How are you going to punish me?"

"I think this time we'll say that a warning is enough, Camille, since you're new."

"No!" Camille said indignantly. "You have to punish me! If you don't, it won't work!"

"I see," Inola said, and she did. The formal curriculum for the children of Captain Night's crew focused aptitudes and trained skills, but there was an informal curriculum that the teachers kept an equally close eye on. Who leads, who follows. Which ones make peace, which ones get their friends working together, which ones can't suffer fools ... 


The ever-shifting relationships in a class of five-year-olds settled and hardened as time passed, under the teachers' watchful eye. By the time they graduated, their files would have reports on the intangible complexities of personality as well as their academic achievements, making sure they were slotted in to the right place in the massive human machinery of the crew.

And in that process, the ideas of settling things yourself versus tattling to the teacher, of being the defiant martyr as opposed to the teacher's pet, those ideas carried a certain weight.

"All right, Miss Roth," Inola said. "Report here at zero seven hundred tomorrow morning for cleaning duty. You'll be making this classroom shine every morning before the other students arrive, and you'll clean up after them when they leave at the end of the day."

Camille nodded. "Okay!" she said. "Can I go?"

"Yes. Go on to medical and get your eye looked at before dinner."

"I will!" Camille stood up. "Thanks, Ms Toras! I'm sorry I caused you trouble, but you know. Sometimes you just have to."

Inola turned in the under-sized chair to watch the girl leave. For a moment longer, she sat looking at the door.

I am the leader. 


They just don't know it yet. 


Inola shook her head, and unfolded herself slowly. They might not know it yet, she thought.

But they will.  

Conversations on the Fortune's Firefly: Nineteen

"Camille," Sella Rammiode said. "Should you be doing that?"

The little girl's feet in their bright green boots - the only part of her not hidden by the control console of the simulator - wiggled. "Yes!" she said. "I should!"

Sella crouched down and peered under the console. "And what exactly is the that that you're doing?"

"Fixing the inertial compensators!"

"I didn't know they were broken," Sella said.

"They aren't broken!" Camille said. "They're just not sensitive enough!"

"Uh-huh," Sella said. She lowered herself onto her back and pulled herself under the console to lie side-by-side with Camille. "How sensitive should they be?"

Camille turned her head and grinned. "So your stomach goes whoosh!"

Sella couldn't help smiling. "Most pilots don't want their stomachs to go whoosh, Cami."

"Most pilots don't know how to have fun with a ship!" Camille said.

"Mmmhmm," Sella said, studying the wiring Camille was working on. "You know, we did talk about how you weren't going to make any changes to the hardware without talking to me about it first."

"Um," Camille said, studying the wiring intently.

"Camille," Sella said. "Didn't we talk about that? It was one of Pilot's rules, wasn't it? For you having this sim set up here in the hangar in the first place."

"Well," Camille said. "This doesn't count. It's not really hardware."

Sella had to turn her head to hide her smile. "I think it maybe is really hardware, Camille."

"Oh."  The little girl stared at the wiring, biting her lip. "You don't have to tell Cia, do you?"

"Mmnm.  Well," Sella said. "How about if I check over what you've done and we make a deal that next time you really will remember to talk to me first. I mean, I'm your engineer, right? Real pilots would never make systems changes without telling their engineers about it."

"Oh," Camille said thoughtfully.

"You sister wouldn't,"  Sella said, pressing her advantage. "And Captain Night certainly wouldn't. If you ask him, I bet that's what he'd tell you."

Camille narrowed her eyes. "I will ask him, you know."

Sella smiled. "You do that, Cami. And now, let's have a look at what you've done here."

Drones, I expected, Sella thought as she studied the wiring. Warp cores, afterburners, juggling grids ... all part of the chief engineer's job. 


But void take me and spit me out, I never expected to be making a simulator more 'whooshy' for an eight year old kid.


"Hold that for me, Cami, will you?" Cross-link that and maybe ... "There we go. That should work."

"Thanks, Sella!"

Sella wriggled out from under the console. "No problem, sweetness.  I don't mind giving you a hand, so long as you ask first, okay?"

And strangely enough, Sella found she didn't mind, much as she'd thought she would when Pilot installed the simulator and told her that its safety was the chief engineer's personal responsibility.

The Cluster, Sella thought, it's a funny old place.


Not a bad one.


Just ... unexpected. 

Conversations on the Fortune’s Fist: Thirteen

"Well, you be captured by the Angels, then, and I'll rescue you!"

Camille Roth's voice sure does have a carrying power, Luisa thought to herself as she closed the door to the secure container holding Pilot's hab-unit behind her. Just as well, if she ends up being a marine like she's got her heart set on.

Ain't no-one going to mishear an order  she gives, for sure.

"In the holos, it's usually the  girl who gets rescued." The second voice belonged to Jamie, and it still gave Luisa a start, a little lift of the heart, even all these weeks after Pilot had come to her and suggested, in that soft, diffident way Pilot had about her, that maybe Gwen and Jamie might stay a little while here at Lustrevik, given how far away they all were from State space these days, given how important family was. 

Luisa had told Pilot stiffly that it wasn't necessary, thank you very much, she was well used to not seeing them above once or twice a year, thinking  And I'm not going to be any rich podder's charity case, even one as stupidly sweet-natured as you.

Pilot had nodded, and said  Mmhmm, and talked for a little while about how much she worried that Camille wasn't seeing other children except at school because of all the security issues, and how nice it would be if there were other children living inside the perimeter, and how she wished awfully that some of the crew had families here on station, and somehow Luisa had found herself turned around and offering to ask Gwen if she and Jamie could stay a little while, and Pilot nodded and smiled and said how kind it would be of Luisa to do that, and how much she'd appreciate the favor, and it wasn't until she was out the door that Luisa had realized just how thoroughly she'd been conned. 

Vague and wishy-washy as Pilot was, Luisa reflected as she made her way up the path towards the pretend-Gallente house in its pretend-countryside setting, there were times when talking to her was like what Luisa had once overheard a couple of pilots say about trying to catch and kill a Helios.  Fragile as a cobweb one had said. Get one good hit in and you just know it'll go to pieces. But every time you think you're closing in, the damn thing disappears and pops up on the other side of you.

"Only in the  stupid holos," Camille said firmly from the other side of the garden. "In the good holos the girl rescues herself!And everyone else!"

"Can't I rescue myself too?" Jamie asked.  

As Camille said reluctantly "O- kaaaaay", Luisa spotted Pilot sitting under one of the pretend-trees in pretend-shade from the pretend-sun, a stack of hard-copy next to her, studying one of the pages with her bare feet stretched out in front of her. Luisa noted with a mental snort that Pilot had found time to paint her toenails all the colors of the rainbow. Typical Gallente foolishness.

Pilot caught her gaze and wiggled her toes with a smile. "Camille felt creative," she said. "Better my toes than the walls of the house, eh?"  
Luisa had to admit, if only to herself, that yes, it probably was. "I've got my recommendations on those roster changes for you, Pilot," she said. 

"Oh, good, thank you." Pilot rose to her feet with, Luisa noted, the ease and grace of someone too young to know arthritis as more than a word. "Come inside, let me get you a cold drink and we'll talk about it."

"I'm fine, Pilot," Luisa said.

"Well,  I'm thirsty," Pilot said. About to turn toward the house, she paused, and looked across the pretend-garden, shading her eyes against the pretend-sun. "I do hope Camille isn't pushing Jamie around too much. She can be very, uh, decisive."

"If she is, it'll toughen him up, is all," Luisa said. 

"But he's so sweet! Why would you want him toughened up?"  

Luisa blinked. Pilot's eyes were wide and blue and genuinely puzzled. "Let him know what life's going to be," she said shortly. "While he's still young enough to learn from the lesson."

"Oh," Pilot said, and Luisa could tell this particular  oh was what she herself classified as number seven. Oh, I don't understand what you mean but it would be rude to say so. It was close, but not identical, to number thirteen, Oh, I think you're completely wrong, but it would be rude to say so. "Well, come and have some lemonade, and tell me about the rosters."

Luisa followed Pilot into the house, the thick stone walls shutting out the pretend-summer outside. She waited, hands clasped behind her back and shoulders square, as Pilot opened the refrigerator and took out a tall jug of something, poured two glasses and carried them to the battered table.  

"Please, come and sit down, have some lemonade," Pilot said, taking a chair herself, legs curled up under her like a kid. Luisa's own rules about dealing with a Captain who made requests rather than issuing orders meant she had to treat that invitation like a direct instruction, and so she took a chair opposite Pilot and picked up the glass. The lemonade was tart and sweet at the same time, and Luisa could recognize the tang of real fruit and the smoothness of sugar from a ...  Wonder where real sugar does come from, now I think about it?

Where-ever it came from, a tree or a flower or some animal, it was a luxury,  although not to podders, I guess. 

Luisa gave herself a few seconds to savor it as Pilot tasted her own drink and smiled with satisfaction.  

Those three seconds of self-indulgence past, Luisa swallowed and spoke. "Master Gunnery Sergeant Jadat thinks you should promote Private Alpassi."  

"Helmi? Why? And to what?"

"His report says she's got real natural talent at close personal protection. And she's hard-working, and dedicated. Plus she's about the right age, and the right gender, to work close-in, in civvies. She'd look like a friend, to anyone else, you see?"

"A friend?"

"You go shopping, she goes with you, two girls off on an outing. Anyone looking to try anything, they'll clock your detail, have a plan for them. Alpassi would be the nasty surprise they didn't plan on."

"Is that dangerous?" Pilot asked.  

Luisa paused. "Alpassi isn't the one I'd pick, all in all," she said carefully. "Taking everything into consideration. But Jadat doesn't know, and  Alpassi doesn't know, what you and I do."

Pilot looked puzzled for a moment, and then shook her head. "Oh. No, I mean, is that dangerous  for her. Is it a dangerous job, being ... that person?"

"Yes," Luisa said baldly. "I expect she'd be wearing some kind of light armor, nothing visible, you can talk to Jadat yourself about the details, but there would have to be limits, I'd expect, if she's passing herself off as an ordinary civilian."

"Oh," Pilot said, and Luisa recognized it as  'Oh' number nine, Oh, you've just told me something I'd have preferred not to know. "And what does Helmi think about it?"

"It's not her job to have opinions about the best way she can serve her Captain, her ship and her crew," Luisa said.  

"Oh," Pilot said,  number thirteen. "Well, I'd like to know, all the same. I'd rather have someone volunteer, especially if it's dangerous. And we should promote her?"

"You should, yes." Luisa eyed her glass of lemonade, then allowed herself another swallow. "I've given you Jadat's report on restructuring security, separating out your security, and hanger security. Those marines will need different training, a different roster, different reflexes and priorities, to say, boarding parties. Jadat says, and I agree, they're specialists. Either way you go with Alpassi, Jadat says she ought to be on security duty, not general. It'll take a restructure, and that'll mean some promotions anyway."

Pilot nodded. "All right. If you think that's the best way to go about it, and Demen does, then ... " She shrugged.  

"It's whether  you think it's the best way to go about it, Pilot."

Pilot scratched at the table with her thumbnail. "Well, it's not like I know anything about security," she said. "That's why Ami sent Demen, after all."

"He's a gunny from another ship, you're the captain of this one. Take his advice, if you like, but the decision's down to you, Pilot."

Pilot pulled a face, and for an instant Luisa was reminded so strongly of Gwen, a few years younger than Pilot was now, faced with mathematics homework, that she could almost  see the cramped kitchen in their tiny flat on the Ishukone Logistics station in Haajinen, smell the greens simmering on the stove, hear the front door open and close and a dear and familiar voice callI'm home, finally! - 

She shut the door on memory, hard and tight. Pilot wasn't a teenage girl struggling with algebra, Pilot was a captain and a podder and wealthy beyond imagining, Pilot held thousands of lives in her hands every time she undocked, Luisa's among them, Pilot  took tens of thousands of lives as a matter of course in her chosen profession. 

Pilot needs to act like a Spirits damned grown-up, from time to time.

Not pull faces like a spoiled teenager asked to clean her room.

Pilot looked up from the table. The opalescent light cast through the fake windows by the pretend sun blurred and softened her features, and despite herself Luisa was forced to acknowledge  She is barely more than a kid, after all. 

Not so very much older than the girl running around in the garden outside.  

Just a little bit older than I was, when I got my papers cut for the  Sapphire Star.

Hard to remember, that girl,  Lulu Kamajeck, hard to see past five long years in the dark. Kid when I carried my duffel up the companionway.

No kid when I walked back down, that's for Spirits- damn sure.

Luisa looked at Pilot biting her lip and scratching at the end of the table and wondered what five years in the dark would do to her. 

Wondered if they'd both live long enough to see.  

Maybe. If she starts paying decent notice to her own security, for the Ancestors' long-suffering sake.

"Pilot," she prompted, gentler than she might have.  

"Oh," Pilot said, and Luisa recognized and welcomed  'Oh' number three, the one than meant Oh, now I have to do something I don't want to, but there's no getting out of it. "Yes. I'll read Demen's report, Luisa, before I make any decisions. And I want to talk to Fisk, too."

"Over comms?"

Pilot shook her head. "Face to face. I know it's harder for him. But I want to see his face when I tell him Helmi might be going to spend her working life standing next to me with a gun."

Luisa nodded. "Thank you, Pilot," she said formally, and got to her feet.  

Pilot smiled. "Thank  you, Luisa," she said. "Won't you finish your lemonade?"

Politeness gave Luisa the excuse to pick up the glass, then, and take the last few swallows of liquid, sour and sweet and tasting of seasons she'd never seen for herself on worlds she'd never go to.

Outside, she could hear Camille and Jamie still running and shouting in the garden, playing one of their drawn-out games with arcane rules that they changed according to whim. Pretend battles in a pretend garden under a pretend sun.

That was all right for kids, she supposed.  But one day you have to learn that rules don't change because you want 'em to.

When the pretend sun goes out, in the dark behind the stars.

She set the glass down carefully. "I'll let Hurun know you want to see him."

Pilot nodded absently, gaze on the thin line she'd scored into the tabletop with her thumbnail. Luisa waited a few seconds to see if she'd say anything else.  

But it seemed Pilot had nothing more to say, not even an  Oh, and so Luisa left her there, in the middle of that carefully-built illusion, expensively constructed to give the impression that nothing had really changed, that Pilot's world was just as it always had been, with drinks made out of fruit that had ripened beneath an open sky, and sunlight that might even feel real if you were careful to not notice the faint shimmer of the joins in the holo-screens against the container walls. 

All right for kids, Luisa thought again as she made her way to the doors that would let her out in the hanger, into the familiar world of deckplating and canned air and the smell of machine oil. 

But I'm no kid.

And neither is she, know it or not.  

And none of this is a game.