Musketeer Space Read online

  Here she was, in a room above a seedy bar, with the metallic taste of the psychic drug still sharp in her mouth.

  Drug-duels were illegal, which was why the bartender had kept his offer quiet. Still, they had gathered quite an audience. The Mendaki card-sharks were exchanging bets, and pilots and engies alike were happy to scan their credit studs again in such a splendid cause.

  Dana sat on a straight-backed chair, with the woman from the Moth opposite her. Between them glowed the static of the game.

  Her enemy looked older in this light. Ro. No last name. She had to have more than a decade on Dana, though she held herself like a younger woman. Like she knew how hot she was. And oh, the bitch would not stop smiling.

  “Red,” said Ro. “Have you duelled before, Buttercup?”

  My name is D’Artagnan, Dana wanted to shout, but the last thing she should do was give this crowd her name. “Blue,” she said. Anything but yellow.

  She didn’t care what history her parents had with that bloody buttercup-coloured ship, she was selling it the second she got to Paris Satellite. The fleet would provide her with a new dart when she was accepted into their ranks. Musket-class, all the way, state of the art. She would never have to hear the word ‘buttercup’ ever again.

  The static dissipated, leaving a holographic starscape hanging in the air between the two players. Two tiny spaceships sparked into life: a blue sabre-class dart, and a red Moth fighter.

  The bartender, who had set them up for this and taken a fee from each of the players because the bribe-hungry officials here on Meung Station would demand a cut of tonight’s illicit proceeds, now darkened the room so all that could be seen were the two ships and the faces of their players.

  Dana had taken pilot drugs before. They were a necessary part of training, placing you inside the navigational computer of your ship, helping you to build the necessary reflexes to fly as fast and as sharp as you needed to. Blending the synapses of your actual brain with new software programmed into your head through a series of implants. When you flew, your hands and head were both directly plugged into the helm.

  Eventually, you learned to fly with the implants but no drugs to connect you. Dana preferred that, the streamlined flight. As soon as she was able, she had stopped using pilot drugs altogether. Sure, it they were supposed to make you a more ‘perfect’ pilot, but there was something creepy and mechanical about the process. She loved the helm at her hands, and the stars inside her head. She hated the sensation of not being able to tell where one began and the other ended.

  It had been a surprise to no one when the tools of the pilot trade were turned into illegal gambling drugs. In Mama and Papa’s day it hadn’t even been illegal, not until the first back alley deaths rolled in and Something Had To Be Done.

  “You might as well stick each other with metal blades,” her Mama had muttered, when she first told Dana about friends she had served with in her youth, Musketeers who spent too much down-time on Duel until there was nothing left of their brains but mush. The warning was clear. Only idiots let pride and honour get in the way of actual brain functions.

  Dana inhaled now, and the blue dart in the scape quivered. There it was. Almost like a real ship, she could feel its controls and its computer, blossoming inside her thoughts. She could direct it, up and down, back and forth.

  If that ship was damaged or destroyed, it was going to hurt like hell.

  “Game on,” said the bartender.

  Thirty seconds into the duel, it became evident that Dana had been very, very wrong about the woman from the Moth. Long hair be damned, she was a pilot. An exceptional one.

  It was fun at first, like any other game. Dana and the Moth dodged and swooped around each other, shooting laser cannons through the false starscape, hiding and refuelling behind asteroids and occasionally (quite by accident) blowing up whole planets.

  The first time that the Moth caught a glancing strike across Dana’s bow, she felt a flashburn in the back of her skull, and almost couldn’t see for a few precious seconds. That part was true, then.

  The reason that pilot drugs were used in training and long haul interstellar voyages but never in combat was because any damage to the ship rebounded to the pilot. It wasn’t always fatal, but it was no lover’s kiss.

  The Moth closed in, chasing Dana’s dart from asteroid to asteroid. Ro was good, and she was practiced, and more than that, she knew exactly how to shoot Dana’s avatar so as to hurt her, to send just enough flashburn or sharp electric shocks through her brain. Enough to hurt, to sting, to shock, but never quite enough to finish the game.

  She was toying with Dana, and that made Dana angry. She was good at being angry. Nine times out of ten, being angry made her better at whatever she was doing.

  She saw how to do it now, and next time the Moth flitted between two safe spots, Dana slipped in from an unexpected side. This time it was her laser cannon blasting hard across the Moth’s wing.

  Ro rocked back, gritting her teeth against the pain. Dana did exactly what the Moth had not been doing, closing in for the kill.

  But no, the Moth was fast, too damned fast, and his pilot knew the layout of this game far better than Dana. They spiralled together out of the asteroid belt and into blank, empty space. Dana whirled her dart around to fire, but the Moth was there first, facing her dead on, and the laser cannons flashed bright.

  Her vision was red, all red, and she could not feel the dart in her brain any more. Dana coughed and choked on her own spit, not knowing why until someone turned her roughly over and she realised, floor, I’m lying on the floor again, fuck, I never even made it to Paris.

  Everything hurt, and she could not see.

  Then it stopped hurting.

  2

  Paris, At Last

  Dana awoke, and wished she had not. Every stubbled hair on her scalp felt like a needle pressing directly into her skull.

  She coughed, and tasted blood, then vomit, and finally an odd metallic tang. Duel.

  If her mother was right, and all pilots were crazy, Dana had just proved… something. She was not sure what, except that next time she saw that woman from the Moth, she was going to break her nose.

  She could tell even without opening her eyes that she was lying in her old bunk on the musket-class dart that her parents had been so proud of providing for her to make her way in the world. There was a comfortable hum in her head that she only felt when she and the ship were this close to each other.

  Buttercup.

  “He’s a good ship,” Mama had told her. “A lucky ship. Not as new as some, but he served me well and he will serve my daughter well.”

  “The only one she never crashed,” Papa laughed in reply.

  “Name him yourself,” Mama said firmly. “When you’ve flown together a little way. Never mind what he was called before – he’s your ship now.”

  For one horrible, weak moment, Dana wanted to be back with them, to have never tried to leave Gascon Station.

  It could be worse. At least the bastards who had set her up for that duel had been civic-minded enough to dump her back on her ship in safety. Dana struggled off the bunk and into the sonic shower, peeling off her clothes as she went. The jacket, at least, was undamaged. She’d need that in Paris.

  The sonic wave stung her neck, and she shut it off quickly, leaning in to check herself in the mirror.

  Three small, red holes marked the place on her neck where her credit stud, identity stud and finally her application to the Space Agency had all been ripped off her skin. All three had been stolen while she was unconscious.

  Anger poured through her, and she swore every foul name she could think of about that bitch, the arsehole from the perfect brand-new Moth. Alone in the shower, Dana punched and kicked the walls until her knuckles hurt worse than her head. She couldn’t swear anymore, couldn’t even think the words she wanted or needed.

  There were backups, of course there were backups. That was how the galaxy worked: everything was
data, and everything could be printed anew. The information on her credit studs was backed up here, in the ship she would always now think of as the Buttercup. Her money, her identity files and pilot records, even her application, they were all backed up.

  Except, of course, that someone had brought her home.

  Slowly, Dana stepped out of the sonic shower and made her way along the narrow ship to the flight deck. She sat naked at the computer, ignoring the voice in her head as the helm tried to coax her into flight.

  Let’s go, space space, come and fly, come and fly.

  Sometimes, having a spaceship in your head was a lot like having a large, nagging pet who couldn’t think beyond the next walkie.

  Dana called up her information quickly. She wasn’t angry anymore, had no rage left in her veins. But oh, her credit account had been hacked, of course it had. No number left but zeroes.

  An odd numbness spread across the back of her skull. Hopefully this was shock rather than actual Duel-induced brain damage. Dana printed new studs for herself, one for her ID and another for her Paris application. A third for her empty credit account. A fourth, to clone and back up every iota of personal information in the ship’s archives.

  She could go to the station’s militia and report this theft. As long as she didn’t mind sharing the story of the illegal Duel racket they had going on here on Meung.

  Or she could cut her losses, and find out what price the Buttercup (damn it) would make at one of the vendors here. She could get a seat on a commercial venturer or the solarcrawler and still make it to Paris. That was the sensible thing to do. Mama and Papa might not even learn she’d done it, not until later when she had a job and a new ship to crow about.

  There were many benefits to this plan, up to and including never again having to wince with embarrassment when someone made up a cute pet name for her bright yellow spaceship. At least now she wouldn’t have to brazen it out when everyone assumed the paint job was her idea.

  Still, when Dana entered the commands to detach her consciousness from the Buttercup’s controls, she felt like a traitor. Right up until the end, she heard a tiny litany inside her head: Don’t leave, let’s go flying, space space space, let’s see the stars!

  Ro, that was the pilot’s name. Dana memorised it along with her dark eyes, her scarred cheek and her long sweep of hair. She would recognise her again, if she saw her, and she would get her revenge.

  It wasn’t until Dana was in her seat on the venturer Sun Wukong bound for Honour, Luna Palais and Paris Satellite, that she realised she had lost something else. The photo silk of her mother’s youthful adventures was no longer tucked safely inside her jacket pocket.

  Had her thief taken that too, or had she somehow left it behind on the Buttercup? Dana did not know, but it was enough to make her angry at the Moth pilot all over again.

  So much for softening Amiral Treville’s hard edges with a spot of family nostalgia.

  Paris Satellite was the biggest space station that Dana had ever seen. There was none of the grimy elbows-in mentality she knew from Gascon Station, where she had grown up. Even the orbiting cities around Truth, the furthest she had previously travelled across the solar system, had a tendency towards economy of materials and space.

  Paris was all gleaming steel, plexi-glass, and wide-open spaces. As Dana disembarked from the venturer with the rest of the passengers, shaking off the headache she got every time she flew as a passenger, she spotted genuine trees growing up out of paving stones in the main avenue, for all the sky as if this was a dirtside city.

  This was where her parents had lived, worked, fallen in love. Paris, the satellite of dreams, in orbit around Luna Palais, Honour’s only moon.

  You could practically smell the red dirt of Honour on the boots of the locals. Not that Dana had any interest in planets, or moons for that matter. She only had eyes for the pilots who hurried this way and that, their flight suits a rainbow of colours that told you exactly who they flew for. Pigeon grey for the satellite’s general service pilots, red and gold for the Cardinal’s Sabres, and blue and white for the Musketeers. The occasional black flight suit marked out a Raven, members of the independent Courier Corps.

  Button pushers, as Mama always referred to them with a sneer. In a galaxy where most communications were instant, and anyone (with enough credit points) could send the data for an item of choice to be printed on any planet they chose, the Ravens represented an antique profession.

  It had been Dana’s private dread that they would be the only ones who offered her employment. Boring ships, boring trade routes, boring co-workers. Everything that the Musketeers were not.

  Dana fingered her collar studs nervously. Plain black plastic, instead of the platinum she had set out with. Nothing to strut about. Perhaps she was an idiot for thinking such things mattered. But oh, she could do with an injection of confidence right now.

  The important thing was that the commander of the Musketeers had been born on Gascon Station too, and knew what it was like to try to forge a career from the provinces. Surely the name D’Artagnan coupled with Dana’s excellent training record would be enough to impress Amiral Treville.

  The photo silk niggled at her, though. It would have been a nice touch: something to make this meeting personal, and to show that Dana was more than just another recruit.

  Possibly it would have also been helpful to make an appointment.

  Amiral Treville was a mountainous figure, with dark slab-like arms and a barrel body, enveloped in the bright blue and white uniform of the Musketeers. Her black hair was buzzed pilot-short. She showed no sign of having anything but hard edges, and every inch of her presence made it clear she still thought of herself as a pilot first, an administrator second.

  This did not in any way prevent her from giving the pilots under her command one hell of a hard time.

  As the morning dragged on, Dana waited in a plexi-glass walled corridor, above the maze of docks and airlocks that housed the ships of the Royal Space Fleet. She sat there, invisible in the crowd. Behind and around her, pilots sprawled across tables in their cafeteria, sharing food and conversation. There were more women than men, which matched the numbers she remembered from training – the Royal Fleet was at about 75% women which was lower than her mother’s day when it had been closer to 90% thanks to the previous Regence’s belief that women made the best pilots.

  Dana’s belated attempt at an appointment had been met with rolled eyes from the assistant at the front desk, but she was given a number in today’s queue, with no guarantee that Treville would find time for her.

  The number was 78.

  So, Dana waited. There were view screens all around, running curated feeds –plenty of gossip, expensive shopping options and occasional injections of local politics, along with hourly five minute episodes of Love and Asteroids, the latest hit soap.

  Without fail after every episode of Love and Asteroids (which was packed with scandalous tales of adultery, swordfights, military coups and bar brawls), some sort of morality vid would play, to balance things out. As one shift ended and another began, Dana saw the Regence’s famous inauguration speech about the sanctity of marriage contracts three times, and the Cardinal’s equally famous ‘all gods followed us to the stars’ soundbyte eight times, if you didn’t count the parody version which was used to sell cola shots.

  On the whole, the interior of Amiral Treville’s office was far more interesting than anything the holo-channels had to offer.

  From where she sat, Dana’s eyes kept being drawn back to Treville as she strode back and forth in her office, usually barking at the comm channels or tapping at a panel on her standing work station. Every pilot that docked their ship had to cross this corridor to reach the rest of Paris Satellite including their sleeping quarters.

  The Amiral missed nothing.

  Several times, Treville lunged forward to fill her doorway, bellowing out into the corridor, usually at a pilot who was attempting to sneak past her without
reporting in. The unfortunate in question would be dragged into her office and berated behind the soundproof plexi-glass.

  No wonder this was a popular cafeteria for all the pilots, not just those wearing the blue and white of the Musketeers. The food printers were standard enough, but they came with the entertainment option of watching your peers being publicly roasted.

  Amiral Treville, Dana decided, was terrifying.

  When Dana’s number was finally called, her mother’s former colleague managed something like a welcoming smile. It looked more like a tired grimace, but Dana appreciated the effort.

  They sat opposite each other at a low desk on the far side of the office, perhaps the first time Dana had seen the Amiral off her feet all day.

  “Dana D’Artagnan,” said Treville, rolling the name thoughtfully around in her mouth. “Your father was one of the best engies in Paris back in the day. And your mother…” For a moment, the smile did not seem forced. “No one flew like Alix D’Artagnan.”

  “She’s still the best,” Dana admitted.

  Treville shrugged. “Can’t imagine there’s much skilled work flying to be done out on Gascon Station these days. I grew up there myself, you know. Apart from the Mendaki invasion three generations ago, nothing has ever happened there.”

  It was true. In the most recent intergalactic war, which had ended eight years ago, the shape-changing aliens known as the Sun-kissed had famously invaded every planet in the solar system except Freedom. Even if Dana hadn’t always known that her station orbited a world at the arse-end of the solar system, every chancer who ever blew through Gascon Station made sure to let her know just how far from “civilisation” they were.

  Amiral Treville tapped the plastic application stud that Dana placed on her desk between them. A screen flickered up, displaying Dana’s training transcript. “We don’t get many applicants from remote training, but you’ve acquitted yourself well here. With these kinds of marks and hours logged, I’m surprised you didn’t take this stud two levels up, directly to the Cardinal’s Own. Most new-qualified pilots try there first. The salary is almost twice what we have to offer.”