Should he stay where he was, he wondered, or go on? If matters were as bad as he feared, there was no point in cowering in his office. When they—whoever “they” were—found him, he would most likely be dead anyway. And if he was going to be dead, he might as well die doing his duty.

He opened the door to the next level, which held the berthing spaces for the oil rig’s crew as well as individual quarters for staff and management. This time, the red light of his flash showed bodies, several of them.

Multiple casualties, he thought. That meant he had to do some serious triage. He was the only medic on #47, and help was hours away if it ever came at all. If he hoped to do any good, he would have to begin his work with the grim task of sorting the casualties into those who could wait for attention, those who could be helped if they were tended immediately, and those who were going to die whether they were helped immediately or not.

He had no idea what was going on, except that it was bad. All he could think of to do was what he had been trained to do, in the way he’d been trained to do it.

He took a deep breath. “Anybody who’s not hurt,” he called out, “come over here.”

There was no response. No walking wounded, then, at least not within sound of his voice. He moved on forward, and knelt by the first body. Entrance wounds from a firearm of some sort had chewed a bloody line across the torso. He gave the man two rescue breaths. No result. He attached a black tag from the supply of them in the side pocket of his jump bag, and moved on.

The second body had half its skull fried away by what might have been a laser rifle. The body had a cooked smell, but was still breathing. A red tag, this time—marking the victim for immediate medical attention when help arrived. If help arrived. He put that thought out of his head, and moved on.

The third body lay in a spreading puddle of blood. One arm, still wearing the sterile bandage he’d put on it earlier that day, twitched feebly. He reached out to check the carotid artery for a pulse, then froze at the sound of footsteps, and looked up—past a pair of high-top boots, past shapely legs in dark trousers, up to a hand grasping a heavy slug-pistol.

The hand raised the slug-pistol and fired a single shot. The survivor Murchison had begun tending was a survivor no longer, and the medic realized that unless he was very lucky, he was himself already a dead man. He found the knowledge oddly calming. He sat back on his heels and looked all the way up.

He saw a woman dressed in tight trousers and a snug leather jacket, her long dark hair pulled tightly back. She was looking down at him and smiling, and her body and face together were seductive enough to have fulfilled all the most lurid fantasies of his younger self… if she hadn’t just shot Glynis Barton in the head.

But she hadn’t shot Ian Murchison, not yet. He took one breath, then another, the better to control his voice, and asked, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“I am Anastasia Kerensky,” she said. “I own this platform now. And because it would be wasteful to kill a medic who has proved that he can carry out his duties even under the most trying circumstances—I also own you.”

2

Tourist-Class Passenger Lounge

DropShip Pegasus

en route from Addicks to Northwind

November 3133

On most nights after dinner, the tourist-class passenger lounge on the Monarch–class DropShip Pegasus was a lively place, in spite of the fact that after the collapse of the HPG network there was no more interstellar tourism to speak of. These days, anybody traveling from one star system to another was likely to have more important reasons than mere desire for an exotic holiday, but there remained plenty of people in The Republic of the Sphere who needed to get someplace and needed do it on a budget.

The tourist-class lounge had a bar—but only one bartender, and passengers had to fetch their own drinks rather than have subservient waitstaff shuttling back and forth. The lighting in tourist class was bright and matter-of-fact, instead of being kept atmospheric and privacy-dim. The tables, upholstery and flooring were a touch on the shabby side, their repair and replacement cycle stretched a little bit too long in favor of polishing up first class one more time.

The food in the tourist lounge, though, came out of the same galley as the food in first class. The cutlery here was stainless steel and not silver, and the napkins were plain paper rather than linen folded into the shapes of swans and starbursts, but the meals were every bit as good.

After long months spent fighting on Addicks, Captain Tara Bishop wasn’t in the mood to care about silverware and fine linen. Good food served hot instead of field rations, and drinks mixed sufficiently cold and strong, were enough to keep her satisfied. The Northwind Regiments had called her home, and they wanted her there badly enough to pay for her ticket… but only tourist class. Northwind, after all, wasn’t made of money. Captain Bishop could have paid to upgrade the ticket—she had most of her unspent back pay from Addicks burning a hole in her pocket—but she didn’t care enough to bother.

Besides, first class was too quiet and well behaved. Tourist was a lot more fun. She could play poker every night until the bartender closed down the lounge to clean the tables and wash the glasses. Captain Bishop liked poker, and was good enough at it to win a respectable amount of the time. There hadn’t been that much else to do on Addicks, in between clashes with the forces of Katana Tormark’s Dragon’s Fury—and, later, with Kev Rosse’s Spirit Cats—except hone her natural talent for bluff to a keener edge.

Her meals and bed on board Pegasus were covered by her ticket, and she had a new post waiting for her on Northwind. She could gamble using all of her back pay and not worry if she lost. For Captain Bishop, in any case, the pleasure of the game lay in the exercise of skill. She got no gambler’s buzz from the prospect of winning big or losing it all.

Two of the other three players tonight were the same as she. Captain Bishop had seen them in action for the first time last night; she’d quit the game while she was a few stones ahead, but she’d been more or less sober at the time and some of the others at the table weren’t. On the other hand, the man with the eye patch and the woman with the knife up her sleeve—she probably thought it was concealed, but Captain Bishop had experience in spotting such things—had kept on nursing the same drinks all evening long.

Captain Bishop had become curious. Moved by that curiosity, she had stayed up late that night, accessing the ship’s passenger records from her cabin’s data console. She shouldn’t have been able to do that, but life in the Northwind Regiments had taught Captain Bishop any number of useful skills, and computerized breaking and entering came high on the list.

The man with the eye patch and the woman with the knife—Farrell and Jones, names so bland and ordinary they had to be assumed—had come aboard separately, with paper trails pointing back to different planets. There was no reason that they should be viewed as confederates, working the crowd together. But her gut said they were, and for the same reason that she played poker herself on shipboard—sheer, complete boredom.

Captain Bishop had resolved at that moment to spend the next night having fun.

Now the players at the poker table were Bishop, the man and the woman, and the weedy-looking young gentleman whom the man and the woman appeared to be in the process of cleaning out. Bishop and the two card sharps were sober; the evening’s destined victim, unsurprisingly, was not.