3

Jupiter: AD2531

Three years had passed, and most of the personnel aboard the Santa Maria had sorted themselves out somehow. Communication with Earth had been minimal after the first few months.

The three years had not been without their strains. There is only so long that one can tolerate checking and rechecking systems in the knowledge that none of the commands you are issuing are being executed but are merely being correlated with the actions of other responsive instrumentation. There is only so long that you can sit watching holos during your recreation time, or seeing the same familiar faces. Some, like Lan Yi, lost themselves in music or books, or stared at the starscape outside the windows for hours on end. Some indulged in the mating dance, sleeping around with a diminishing supply of partners: semi-permanent pairings removed some people from the pool of good-timers, but more people gave up because they noticed that folk like Lan Yi were looking a lot less bored than they themselves were. The Main Computer's libraries became in progressively heavier demand. Ball games like tennis were fiendishly difficult aboard the rotating craft, but some stalwarts persevered; there were brief vogues for ping-pong, volleyball and flick-me. All in all, things were boding reasonably well for the potentially hundred-and-ten-year voyage even though the corollary of intelligence and curiosity—the capacity to become bored—might at some stage pose a threat.

Six months out Strider dictated that rotas of her personnel should assist the agribots in the planting of the remaining fields in the Santa Maria's great central hold. Everyone realized that what she was doing was dictating occupational therapy for all—herself included. No one objected except Danny O'Sondheim, who had felt that it was beneath his dignity as First Officer. Even his objections didn't last long.

"You've got a splodge of mud on your cheek," said Strider one time they met on the command deck for yet another round of systems checks.

"Yes, I know," said O'Sondheim. "I thought I'd leave it there."

She grinned at him. For once, he grinned back.

There was a tension between Strider and her First Officer that she didn't know how to defuse. He made it obvious time and again that he was sexually interested in her, but at the same time his body language told her that in some obscure way he also despised her—perhaps because she had chosen not to encumber herself with all the technological enhancements which his own body sported. She, on the other hand, found herself profoundly uninterested in him except in a professional sense: it was her duty to ensure that the two of them worked together well as a team—which they had always done—but she couldn't envisage herself ever becoming friends with the man, and the thought of making love with him, with his secondary retinal screens and his thighputer and who knew how much additional augmentational junk clanking around (or so she imagined it) on the bed with them, repelled her entirely. It was odd that, on the very few occasions these days when she felt remotely interested in sex, it was still Pinocchio whom she invited to her cabin: the fake man was more attractive than the augmented one.

"I'm glad to hear it," she said.

His smile vanished. "Yeah," he said noncommittally.

The trip out from Mars to the orbit of Ganymede had taken the ferried Santa Maria the best part of two years. Once they'd arrived there, some of the commands that Strider and O'Sondheim entered into the Main Computer had begun to seem of purpose. The nuclear-pulse drive that would thrust the Santa Maria out of the Solar System depended on the detonation of about 250 small spheres of deuterium and helium-3 every second at the center of the electromagnetic field housed by the hemispherical chamber at the rear of the vessel. Both deuterium—"heavy hydrogen"—and helium-3—"lightweight helium"—are richly present in the atmosphere of Jupiter. For the past few decades bot "miner" drones had been plunging down into the atmosphere of the giant planet and bringing back the elements to store in installations on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. There was enough there now to fuel several Santa Marias out beyond Neptune's orbit, but even the Santa Maria alone required over one hundred kilotons of the stuff, for both acceleration out of the Sun's system and deceleration into Tau Ceti's. A constant relay of drones was bringing it up from Ganymede's surface to load the fusion drive.

In theory, the bot drones could have carried out the year-long task entirely on their own, with the aid of the Main Computer. In practice, there had to be constant supervision from the command deck by either Strider and O'Sondheim or their deputies, Maloron Leander and Umbel Nelson, in case of emergencies.

So far there hadn't been any serious emergencies, just an occasional malfunction that had been easily overridden, but . . .

"Oh, shit!" said O'Sondheim.

Strider looked up at him. Ninety per cent of the fuel was loaded. Her mind had been wandering. The slow rolling of the heavens as the Santa Maria rotated on its longitudinal axis tended to be hypnotic. Her right foot had, without her noticing, eased itself out of the loop beneath her chair. Annoyed with herself, she jammed it back in again. Once they were in deep space the command deck would reconfigure itself. At the moment, though, there was always the risk of floating upwards.

"What?"

"One of the drones has gone berserk."

"Click into the Computer and redirect it."

"I've just tried that. The drone's puter refuses to respond." O'Sondheim's voice was beginning to rise.

Still Strider didn't take it seriously until she looked at the screen in front of her.

"WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!!" the Main Computer was flashing urgently at her. "WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!!"

She instinctively pressed four keys to give her voice-interaction with the Computer.

"Quick!" she snapped. "Tell!"

"Drone seven eight three B's guidance puter has crashed completely," said the Main Computer calmly. "The vessel is heading towards the Santa Maria's midships at a rate of seven thousand three hundred and thirty-one kilometers per hour, and will impact within three point six minutes."

Strider slapped her hand down on the large red button beside her keyboard. Instantly a klaxon began sounding in the main body of the ship. Her personnel would start donning their suits as soon as they heard it—assuming they weren't too far from their suits. She bit her lower lip. Three children had been born during the trip out from the Solar System—the personnel had proved more fecund than expected. She hoped someone would be on hand to suit them up.

But there was no time to worry about casualties. This was a case of damage limitation.

"Can't you override?" she said.

"I've just told you—" began O'Sondheim.

"No," said the Computer.

"Can't you move the Santa Maria?"

"No. Not in time."

"Then what can you do?"

There was a silence from the screen.

Strider thought fast.

Things hitting her ship . . .

"Meteor defenses," she yelled at the screen. "How quickly can you get them up and running?"

She knew the answer. They'd tested out the meteor shields often enough. The chances of being hit by anything serious were minimal here within the Solar System. The chances of being hit by anything outside the Solar System were incalculable—no one had any real idea what might be floating between the stars—but when you were travelling at a substantial fraction of the velocity of light yourself it was wise to take precautions.

"Four point one seven minutes," confirmed the computer.

"Switch them on anyway," said Strider.

She glanced at O'Sondheim. What she could see of his face was paler than she'd ever known a human being's face to be.

"Unzip one of our shuttles," she said, trying to keep her voice clear of alarm.

"But—"

"Just fucking do it!"

She turned back to her screen.

"Have you got an accurate location for the berserker?" she said to the Computer. She could have asked the question of the air, but the instinct to face someone while you're speaking to them is almost impossible to break.

"To within three hundred meters."

"No better than that?" she demanded. The drones were little over three hundred meters across themselves.

"I could get it down to one hundred meters, but it would take me one point eight minutes to do so. Estimated time of impact is two point five minutes."

"Shuttled unzipped," reported O'Sondheim shakily beside her.

I must not think about those infants. "OK, Computer. What I want you to do over the next fifteen seconds max is progressively download your best figures for the location and trajectory of the berserker into that shuttle. Then I want you to launch it on an intersecting course."

"You are not permitted wilfully to destroy expensive items of SSIA property—"

"The Santa Maria's a fuck of a sight more expensive than a shuttle." Human lives are more expensive than either. "You're overridden."

"Very well. The chances of success are under twenty per cent."

"Do it."

"The situation is complicated by the fact that the meteor shields are beginning to deflect the berserker from its original trajectory."

"Adjust the shuttle's course accordingly."

"This problem is difficult."

"You've got about three seconds to solve it."

A small tremor ran through the Santa Maria as the shuttle blasted off.

"I hope this is going to bloody work," muttered Strider dourly, repeatedly thumping the surface in front of her with her fist.

"Meteor shields are now up to fifty per cent strength," said the Computer.

"That's not very relevant at the moment. How's the shuttle doing?"

"It appears to be locked on target."

"Good. Keep it that way."

For the first time Strider noticed the rate at which her heart was pounding. It was lucky some nearby medbot hadn't come rushing on to the command deck, insisting that she take it easy.

She looked at O'Sondheim. He was still ashen.

"Fingers crossed," she said, with assumed optimism.

"Shouldn't we suit up?" he said.

"There's no time. Besides, a captain goes down with her ship." It suddenly hit her. She was as terrified as he was, but she'd been too busy to notice it.

"Progress?" she snapped at the Main Computer.

"If impact is to be achieved, it will be between fourteen point nine and fifteen point eight seconds from now. The range of values is as wide as this because I am uncertain about the probability of impact indeed being achieved. The meteor deflectors are now at seventy-five per cent strength and rising."

Fifteen seconds or so. Not a long time to think about being dead. Even the personnel who'd managed to get themselves suited up wouldn't have a great chance. A mass of several thousand tons moving at upwards of seven thousand kilometers per hour would probably break the Santa Maria in two. Depending on where it hit, one or other of the craft might explode. Short-circuiting through the electrics would do untold damage. There were likely to be flash-fires in the few seconds before the Santa Maria's oxygen dissipated: suits were designed to withstand vacuum, not flames. Some of her people might be able to cling on to installations around them long enough for the people on Ganymede to be able to get here in time to save them, but most would be spilled out into space: you don't go hunting for a person floating in space, because space is too big and a person is too small. Anyway, the force of the impact would probably be so great that no one aboard her ship—her ship, dammit—would have a bone in their body left unbroken.

"Don't blame yourself," said Pinocchio, who had suddenly appeared behind her.

"Between six point four and six point seven seconds," said the Main Computer. "My accuracy is improving because—"

"Just tell me to the nearest second!" she screamed at the screen.

"Four." That was the number of people she was really fond of aboard the Santa Maria: Pinocchio, Lan Yi, Maloron Leander and Umbel Nelson. OK, since she was being honest with herself in what could prove the final few moments of her life: five. Leonie Strider could be added to the list.

"Three." Which was the number of infants who had been born since the vessel had left Phobos. She had an insane urge to start singing her thoughts out loud, as if they were some kind of nursery rhyme.

"Two." She didn't have a thought for the number two, so she was glad she hadn't started singing.

"One." The one thing she had wanted for over twenty years to do was to go starside.

There was an impossibly long delay. Her crudely improvised guided missile had failed to find its target.

Then . . .

A flash of brightness to her left, like the first rising of the Sun in a tropical dawn, appeared in the view-window in front of her. It grew with implausible speed, seemingly becoming even brighter. She shut her eyes tightly, but the light still stabbed through the lids. She put up her hands, but even they didn't seem to give her retinae enough protection.

"Impact achieved," she heard the Computer say.

She'd been holding her breath for too long. Now it came rasping painfully out of her.

"Status of meteor-deflection shields," she croaked, her hands still over her eyes.

"Ninety point two per cent," the Main Computer replied promptly. "There is a four point one per cent chance that any of the debris from the impact will hit the Santa Maria with sufficient momentum to cause major damage."

"Keep the shields rising," she said, slowly lowering her hands. It took an extra dose of courage to open her eyes. She discovered that the base of the thumb of her right hand was bleeding, and realized that at some point she must have been pressing her fingernails into it. The brightness in front of her had ebbed almost entirely, but she was still having difficulty seeing things directly: green and purple afterimages were confusing her vision.

"Techbots are alerted," said the Computer, "in case of atmospheric leakage."

In case any of those bits of junk out there crack the hull, is what you're too polite to say, thought Strider sourly.

"Update me," she said wearily to the screen, once she could bring it into focus.

"Meteor shields are one hundred per cent. They are currently deflecting the next drone, which may also be lost as a result. I am working with its onboard puter to try to calculate a secure trajectory so that it—"

"About the danger to the Santa Maria," she said.

"Below one per cent and falling rapidly," said the Main Computer. She could almost have imagined that it sounded aggrieved.

She let out another great gust of breath.

"I think we've managed it," she said, looking towards O'Sondheim.

It took him a couple of seconds to reply.

"I think you have," he said.

#

Marcial Holmberg cornered Strider as she made her way back to her cabin after she and O'Sondheim had finished their tour of duty and handed over to Leander and Nelson. She was tired beyond the limits of exhaustion, and looked jadedly at the short, stout man. She and O'Sondheim should probably have called in the other two to take over as soon as the crisis had been averted, but she'd decided that they should work on: it was better the personnel were encouraged to believe that such things were all in a day's work than that they started to wonder just how close to death they had all been.

She could tell from the expression on Holmberg's face that her policy had backfired on her.

"I represent the non-SSIA personnel aboard this craft," he began pompously.

"I know," she said wearily. "You've told me often enough before." He told her every time they met, which was as infrequently as she could manage it. Why is it that groups of apparently sane, intelligent human beings always elect dorks as their representatives? she thought for the hundredth time. And, likewise for the hundredth time, she answered her own question. It's because the dorks elect themselves, that's why. Sane, intelligent human beings have better things to do. Out loud she said: "Dr Holmberg, how may I help you?"

"There was an emergency three hours ago, and all of our people had to stop their work—important work, I might add—in order to suit up." Holmberg had put on a lot of weight since they had left Phobos; Strider wasn't certain quite how he'd managed it, because the rations aboard the Santa Maria were reasonable but not over-generous.

"It was certainly an emergency," she said. She explained roughly what had happened.

"Our lives were endangered, is what you're trying to tell me," said Holmberg.

"They were indeed. But First Officer O'Sondheim and I were able, with the assistance of the Main Computer, to avert the danger."

"But only at the very last moment. That's not good en—"

"It's good enough for me." She raised a palm towards him. "I'm very tired, Dr Holmberg."

He ignored her. "Why was the emergency allowed to arise in the first place?"

"Because the puter on one of the fuel-ferry drones crashed. It shouldn't have happened. There'll doubtless be an inquiry in due course—with luck, sometime after we've left Jupiter far behind." She was finding it intensely difficult to keep her patience. It would be bad for personnel morale to land a punch smack in the middle of that pompous, technology-enhanced face, but . . .

"Was there any way in which the SSIA crew of this vessel could have stopped this emergency before it began?"

"No. It was totally unpredictable."

"Isn't that shameful?"

Strider shrugged. "Puters sometimes crash," she said.

"There should be back-ups."

"Yes, there probably should be, even on drones. But the tasks drones normally have to do are pretty simple, and normally there are big puters overseeing them and ready to take over. This time it didn't work. Look, I need some sleep."

"So the SSIA, for reasons of economy—because they didn't put back-up puters in the drones—risked every human life aboard this ship? Is that what you're trying to tell me?" He mopped sweat away from his brow with the back of his sleeve.

"I'm trying to tell you that there might—just might—have been a disaster, but we stopped it from happening. Can't you accept that?"

His perspiration was making her perspire as well.

"The personnel whom I have been elected to represent are very concerned about the fact that their lives have been wilfully put in danger," said Holmberg.

Infuriated beyond control at last, Strider stabbed her finger into the center of his chest. "First, I don't believe it: I'll call a meeting if you like. Second, I think your people will tell you, if you'd listen to them, that they're damn' glad their skins were saved. Third, it probably wasn't too bad an idea that we had this crisis while still in the Solar System, because now we know what to do: if something like it had happened for the first time a year from now, in interstellar space, we could have been wiped out completely. Fourth . . . aw, shit, there are a whole lot of things lining up for 'fourth'. Now can you let me go? I need to crash out a while."

"That's not good enough, Captain Strider."

"Get it into your teensy head that me and First Officer O'Sondheim have just saved your life!" she shouted, shoving him away from her.

He raised a fist.

"Hit me and you're dead meat," she said.

He lowered it again.

"I could have you thrown off the Santa Maria as an undesirable," she added. "If I were feeling charitable I wouldn't just flush you out through the nearest airlock but arrange for you to be shuttled down to Ganymede. Is that what you really want? To miss out on seeing Tau Ceti II?"

There was a pause during which she became aware of the sound of barley-heads rustling in the fields on either side of the path.

"Well . . . no," said Holmberg.

"Then get things straight, buster." She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. The exhaustion seemed to be moving through her in low pulses. "Your job is to look after the interests of the non-SSIA personnel. I respect that: it's an important job. My job is to make sure this vessel gets to Tau Ceti II, and to safeguard the lives of everybody aboard her if I possibly can. When it comes to it, because I'm better at my job than you can possibly be at yours, you will do what I say."

"We're supposed to discuss—"

"Yeah, and we will discuss things when it's appropriate. Right now it's not." She jabbed her finger at him again. "Right now it's important for everyone's lives that I get some sleep. You're stopping me from doing that. Ask all of your people what they actually think about what happened today, and then you can come and see me tomorrow. We can 'discuss'"—she covered the word in sarcasm—"as much as you like at that point. But not now. OK?"

"This is not democratic," said Holmberg stiffly.

"Who ever said," remarked Strider, walking away from him towards her cabin, "this was supposed to be a democracy?"

#

Leander and Nelson had watched the entire scene via their secondary retinal screens.

"There's trouble a-brewing," said Nelson. He was a blocky man, his face craggy, his skin even blacker than Strider's. Like O'Sondheim, he had retinal screens over both eyes. He wore a bushy grey-white beard with pride. He smiled at Maloron Leander. "It's gonna be a real fun mission if this keeps up."

"I think Leonie's just taken the trouble off the boil," said Leander quietly. Although as tall as Nelson, she was extremely slight, her figure seeming barely able to support her height.

"Holmberg hates her," said Nelson.

"Right now he does." Her voice had a clipped quality that Nelson relished. The two of them had been regular lovers since about three months out towards Jupiter. They hadn't committed themselves yet—Leander slept with whom she liked, and Nelson generally slept with whoever liked him—but it seemed probable that sometime during the trip they would settle down with each other. They enjoyed each other's company. Sex between them wasn't all that great, in strict technical terms, but they had the same sense of humor, which made up for a lot. They enjoyed the stupid jokes they shared when they woke up together.

"In a couple of days' time," Leander continued, "he'll come round. The man isn't an imbecile."

"Coulda fooled me."

"He has degrees in astrophysics, astrometry, mathematics, chemistry, economics, ergonomics . . ."

"And he's a damn' troublemaker."

She touched a few buttons on her keyboard, making a small adjustment to the course of an incoming drone.

"He's not all bad," she said. "He's playing a game, that's all. He wants Leonie to know that she's not a god."

"Shit, darling, you just fucked up," said Nelson, suddenly concentrating very hard on his keyboard. His fingers moved rapidly. "We coulda lost some fuel there."

"I was only testing your concentration. It was a deliberate mistake, OK?"

After he had tapped in a few more instructions they both began to laugh.

The drone docked successfully, locking to the rear of the Santa Maria like a fly against a wall. Another drone was already beginning to come on-screen.

"Holmberg's an asshole," said Nelson after a few minutes. "There's no idiot like an idiot who's gathered himself a passel of degrees."

"I would remind you, Mr Nelson," said Leander primly, "that I too have several degrees to my credit."

"Yeah, but you're not an asshole. That's a big difference."

"I AM OVERRIDING THE PUTER ON THE INCOMING DRONE," said the Main Computer. It was a fairly standard message, so neither of them paid it more than cursory attention.

"Pinocchio," said Leander, looking back over her shoulder, "could you do me some coffee?"

"Of course, Maloron Leander," said the bot, who had parked himself unobtrusively near the rear of the command deck.

"Chocolate for me," said Nelson.

It was going to be a long shift. Both Leander and Nelson privately wished that something would go wrong, just as it had for Strider and O'Sondheim, so that the boredom would be alleviated a bit.

Nothing went wrong except that Pinocchio forgot her preferences and put milk in Leander's coffee. She drank it anyway.

#

Holmberg, too, was drinking coffee. He was sitting in his cabin, looking downwards between his knees through the window. Every now and then part of Jupiter would come into view. In between times he was offered a vista of stars or, rarely, a crescent of Ganymede. It was better than a holo, though that wasn't saying much. Jupiter had lost a lot of its glamour when the Great Red Spot had dissolved during the twenty-second century and the early part of the twenty-third: the Solar System's longest volcanic eruption—except possibly Neptune's Stigma Formation—had finally come to an end. But it was still a very exciting planet to see this close up, with its curvilinear formations of clouds. From here, too, you could appreciate the fact—in a way you never could from Mars or through holographs—that Jupiter's atmospheric structures were not just hugely wide: they were also hugely deep, and they operated on a completely different timescale from anything in the inner Solar System. A volcanic eruption on Earth might affect the atmosphere for a few months. The Great Red Spot had taken hundreds of years to die away.

Strider had been right. He'd recognized that even at the time. She'd saved everyone's lives.

If she hadn't been right, he might be feeling a little less resentful.

The truly annoying thing was that he liked her.

#

There was plenty of water aboard the Santa Maria. It was a luxury that Strider hadn't known since she'd left Earth for Mars. On Mars you could create the illusion of water any time you wanted to, but as soon as you switched the illusion off it was over. On the Santa Maria you could enjoy a long lukewarm shower at the start of the day and still feel refreshed by it when you fell on to your bed sixteen hours later. You could turn on a tap and fill up a liter cup with cold water and drink it all down, and then have some more, if you wanted to.

The recycling aboard the Santa Maria was very efficient.

Strider was having a shower at the moment, while at the same time briefing Dulac on what had happened with the berserker drone. She hadn't known the man was on Ganymede; it had probably been kept from her deliberately, so that he could covertly supervise her decisions in the final few months before blast-off from Jovian orbit. It was never too late to fire a starship captain until the starship was going faster than conventional ships could easily manage. She hadn't expected, either, that she would be speaking to him right now. She'd assumed he would have the common sense—the knowledge of personnel-management—to leave her and O'Sondheim alone for a while, so they could wind themselves down.

Her argument with Holmberg had stirred up her adrenalin again, so that when she got back to her cabin she looked at her bed and realized that sleep was a strange and distant country. So she'd started to run a shower, hoping the warm water would ease the tension out of her.

That was when the screen on the ceiling above her shower had clicked into life.

"Instigate face-to-face communication," she told the screen in answer to its question. Dulac had of necessity seen her naked hundreds of times before during the past few years—he probably knew her body better than she did, because there were bits of it she couldn't examine except in a mirror. She wasn't much worried in general by nudity, although she knew there were still some psychos on Earth who might get over-excited and jump you. Dulac wasn't like that.

Well, he probably wasn't. He was a hard man to read.

It didn't matter. He was down on Ganymede, the screen had said, and she was thousands of kilometers away on the Santa Maria. Let him slobber at the mouth if he wanted to. It was a long jump from Ganymede to here.

She smoothed the skin of her stomach with a digit of soap and looked directly up at three-quarters of Dulac's face. The remaining quarter, at the top right, was taken up with the Main Computer's constant updating of the operations Leander and Nelson were carrying out on the command deck. It was unnecessary for Strider to know any of this—she trusted them implicitly—but the Main Computer insisted on feeding her the data every time she activated one of her screens.

The effect at the moment was odd. It was as if Dulac were permanently winking at her.

Maybe he was. But the rest of his face seemed completely disinterested.

As he started speaking she had a sudden awful suspicion.

." . . and we'll need a full report in due course, Captain Strider."

"You can get that just as well from the Main Computer." She bent down and raised her leg cautiously, and began to soap her calf. The g in the Santa Maria's living quarters was currently a little under Mars-standard: if you splashed around too much there'd be water everywhere.

"But I want it from you, Strider. And a separate report from First Officer O'Sondheim, of course."

"No."

She slowly lowered her leg and began on the other one.

"I think I may have misheard you."

She twisted her head upwards again. Both the visual image and the sound were patchy this close to the cocktail of electromagnetic radiation that the active surface of Jupiter constantly ejected.

"No," she repeated. "My first imperative is to manage this ship as efficiently as I possibly can. Making unnecessary reports gets in the way of that imperative. There was a crisis, and O'Sondheim and I dealt with it. Anything else you can get from the Main Computer, as I said. Or you could ask Pinocchio—he was there at least part of the time."

"But I want—"

"More to the point," she said, cutting through him, "is what you have to report to me. That drone's puter crashed, and there wasn't any back-up. I know that the SSIA always tries to run things as cheaply as it can, but that was a false economy. You could have lost the Santa Maria and everybody aboard her."

She remembered the way, when she'd been on the command deck, that the thought of those three kids had kept coming back into her mind.

"Are you deliberately committing an act of insubordination, Captain Strider?" said Dulac formally.

"Yes, but it's so that I can do my job better. More efficiently."

"I could have you out of there in three hours. O'Sondheim could do your job just as well."

"No he couldn't." Oho, she thought, so you haven't been through the Main Computer's records yet.

Dulac pursed his lips and glanced down at something front of him. "How is O'Sondheim shaping up?" he said after a few moments.

Strider began to straighten up.

"If I thought there were any deficiency on the part of First Officer O'Sondheim," she said coldly, "I would report it to you. He seems to have been undertrained for his task, but he and I can make a good team together."

"But you're not very fond of each other, are you?"

"We have . . . an interesting relationship. It works out OK, though." She began to wash the lower part of her face.

Dulac glanced down again at what was presumably a checklist of things to ask her.

"And Leander and Nelson?"

"They're first-rate," said Strider emphatically. "Leander has tremendous powers of intuition, while Nelson's got a quick computational brain and"—she waved a hand lazily and a spray of shower-water shot towards the wall. Oh shit.—"and a lot of common sense. They're a great partnership."

"A better partnership than yourself and First Officer O'Sondheim, would you say?"

She hadn't really thought about it before. "Yeah," she said eventually. "They probably are."

"Would you say that O'Sondheim is a weak link, in that case?"

"Not at all." I don't have to like Danny, but I bloody well do have to be loyal to him.

"We can remove him from the chain of command, if you would prefer."

"No. I won't have that. I've spent three years establishing a rapport with the guy." She reached out behind her for the shampoo cylinder, not wanting to take her eyes off Dulac's three-quarter face. The cylinder proved elusive, so she pretended she had simply been stretching her arm. "I told you: we make a good team. If you drafted in someone else, I might have to spend another three years and discover we made a lousy team. By then we'd be well on our way to Tau Ceti—a bad moment to sack someone."

"I will want," said Dulac mildly, "a complete report on the situation aboard the Santa Maria before I will permit you to ignite the nuclear-pulse drive." He rubbed his chin with a palm, and Strider suddenly realized that he was as tired as she was—maybe even tireder. "In the meantime, are there any of your personnel who you feel should be . . . er . . . taken off the staff?"

Holmberg, thought Strider immediately, but almost at once realized she didn't want to abandon anyone. It was a tight little community aboard the Santa Maria, and at the moment it was working fairly well. Holmberg was a small and seemingly counterproductive component of the machine, but who knew? If the machine was working fine, it'd be crazy to mess around with it. For all she knew, Holmberg was holding some part of the machine together.

But there was another.

"Strauss-Giolitto," she said.

Dulac looked down again.

"The teacher," he said.

"One of the teachers. Andersen's fine. There's no problem with him. But Strauss-Giolitto . . . yeah, we might have a difficulty."

"Why's that?" said Dulac, still looking downwards. "Her credentials are excellent."

"She's prejudiced."

Dulac looked back up at the screen, visibly surprised.

"Against whom?"

"Bots in particular," said Strider. "I mean, I know Pinocchio's supposed to present himself to everyone except me as a bit dimwitted, but Strauss-Giolitto keeps trying to score points off him as if to prove publicly that he's inferior." At last she'd found the shampoo cylinder, but right now she wasn't sure she wanted to use it. "Just above bots on her spectrum of contempt come people who can't trace their roots back to Europe, in particular Greater Yugoslavia." She put the cylinder down on the shower-bath's rim and began soaping her armpits for the second time.

Prejudice between Artifs and Reals was a fairly commonplace emotion: Strider herself certainly thought the whole business of Artiffing reprehensible. But it didn't just work the one way round. The counterpoint was that many Artifs thought the Reals—who chose to live no longer than the couple of centuries or so that nature allotted—were throwbacks to a pre-technological age. In the twenty-first century there had been lynchings and riots. Now Artifs and Reals just rubbed along with each other. There was sometimes friction—Strider herself had broken up a fight between an Artif and a Real when the Santa Maria had been six months out from Mars—but most of the time it didn't matter.

Other frictions could turn up through religious adherence, particularly between the Umbellists and . . . well, between them and anyone else, really. The Muslims alive after the War of Hatred had realized that, if this was what dissent between sects could do, the consequences of an all-out war between different religions were unthinkable. The same point had been alarmingly clear to the various Christian sects. Islam and Christianity had united to form a single religion, with Buddhism not as part of it but as a benign, friendly fellow-traveller on the Tao. Hinduism was accepted into the Faith of Unity only later, after it had abandoned the caste system. Smaller religions were picked up along the way.

There were still a few purist Christians, or Muslims, or Hindus, or Sikhs, or whatever. A very few.

Umbellism was different. The Prophet Umbel—after whom Umbel Nelson had been named by pious parents—had lived 2273–2318. During his short lifetime—he had been drowned during the Battle of Istanbul—he had caused major damage to the human species by stirring up old intolerances that had largely been forgotten. Strider had been taught much about him during her childhood at the institution in Ouagadougou. She hadn't much liked what she'd heard, although she'd let most of it wash over her: her potential goddess had abandoned her at birth, and she refused from infancy to worship any other deity. Gods were betrayers.

Umbel had spoken with God, who had told him that there was only one way to Heaven. It involved killing anyone who declined to believe that Umbel's drug-induced experience had been a genuine communion with the deity. The experience, whatever it was, had certainly been profound: Umbel himself had forsaken drugs, which was the reason why the religion he announced during his early days in Afghanistan forbade most pleasurable activities and prescribed strict penalties for those who indulged in them.

"She is herself a Christian," said Strider. The water was beginning to run cold. Even though there was plenty of recycled water aboard the Santa Maria, the heating was unreliable. She wished the conversation could be over. She didn't mind people seeing her naked, but there were parts of the showering process that she preferred doing in private. Oh, what the hell. "I don't hold it against her, of course."

"You're an atheist, Strider, are you not?"

"Yes. But I'm not a militant."

Dulac abruptly smiled. "You wouldn't be captain of the Santa Maria if you had been."

"The point hadn't escaped me."

"So is Strauss-Giolitto putting her prejudices into any kind of action that could jeopardize the welfare of the mission?"

"I don't enjoy seeing the way she behaves towards Pinocchio. It offends me. Some of the other personnel feel the same way. The Reals, that is. She's an Artif who doesn't like bots. Her views are irrational."

"Forget about Pinocchio. He can take it."

"I know Pinocchio can take it. It's whether the rest of us can that I'm worried about." On second thoughts, she'd get to work with the shampoo. It would be less embarrassing. Had Dulac been present in person she'd probably have felt less inhibited. She squirted an ejaculation of the green gel into her hand and began to rub the stuff into her wet hair. "She's a divisive element, is what I'm getting at," said Strider. "A lot of us are fond of him. Me particularly, for obvious reasons. And I don't want her teaching the kids the same prejudices she has. In short, I'd like you to ship her out of here."

"I'm afraid that will be impossible, Captain Strider," said Dulac, suddenly formal again. "Maria Strauss-Giolitto has a role to play in your small society."

Strider reflected. The shampoo had decided to invade one of her ears, and was popping there disconcertingly.

"Like what?" she said at last.

"A healthy society has to have a gadfly," said Dulac.

Strider thought about this for a while longer.

"Yeah," she eventually said, "I can see what you mean. But this particular gadfly isn't especially constructive. It'd be better if there was one who was a constant pain in the butt to authority, that'd . . ."

Holmberg, she thought again. That's why I don't mind you so badly. You keep me on my toes. But Strauss-Giolitto . . .

Strider took a breath. "I don't want the woman on my ship. She's likely to endanger the children as they grow up. The way they think. Through that, she's endangering the Tau Ceti II colony."

"She stays aboard." The three-quarters of Dulac's face that Strider could see was looking completely unperturbed. "She has been placed where she is for a reason. Between you and me, however, I can't stand her either. But you could ask your friend Lan Yi for an opinion."

Strider waggled her finger in her ear until the noise of the shampoo abated.

"That's not the kind of question I ask my people. I'll ask Pinocchio, maybe."

She knew her voice sounded grudging. As captain of a starship, the last thing she should be doing was wandering around asking personnel what they thought of each other: that would make her more divisive than Strauss-Giolitto could ever be. Even asking Pinocchio . . . felt wrong.

"By the way, Captain Strider," said Dulac, "congratulations on dealing with that berserker drone today. You coped most admirably, and with the minimum wastage of resources."

"Hang about a fucking moment. A few minutes ago you were saying you wanted a briefing," said Strider, pausing, her fingers on her scalp.

"There's no need. As you pointed out, we can get everything we want from the Main Computer." Dulac smiled again. "There's a replacement shuttle coming up from Ganymede tomorrow, to bring you up to full complement."

"You mean you rigged all that?"

"No," said Dulac. "But we expected an incident like it to happen. We'd have arranged something, otherwise."

"And risked killing us all?" said Strider, incredulous.

"This is a very important mission, Captain Strider," said Dulac. "During your trip out from Mars we've had word from one of the other Project Eyeball probes. Sigma Draconis has a terrestrial-type planet, so there's a new craft under construction. If you people had proved incapable of dealing with this emergency, we'd have used the new craft to explore the Tau Ceti system."

He drew his hand across what she could see of his brow. His look of unperturbedness had gone. It was obvious he was unhappy to be saying what he was saying.

"You see, Captain Strider, if you'd fouled up here the SSIA would have lost a lot of money and a lot of effort, but we'd have known what had happened. If you're not able to cope with this sort of problem—well, once you're out of the Solar System it might be forty years before we were certain things had gone wrong. In forty years' time the governments of Earth and Mars might have decided that interstellar travel was a waste of valuable resources. So, if an accident like today's hadn't happened, we'd have engineered one."

He brushed his hand across his forehead again.

"Well done," he said. The screen flickered into blankness, going down through green to black.

There are three small kids aboard this ship, thought Strider.

The shower had run very cold indeed.