Ziva lay back in her cocoon and closed her eyes. She’d lost track of how long she’d been up. Kept doing that. Odar wasn’t supposed to leave Delta Pavonis. And
that
gave her an excuse, and something unquestionably better to do.
She woke up again to find they were closing in on Alioth. She’d half-expected En to go for Wicca’s World and the Lost Gardens of Antipi-Hymbos but no, she’d gone to New California, the symbolic capital of Something New. Alioth had quite a history, but what most people knew about it was that this was where Mic Turner and Meredith Argent had turned a thousand years of history on their head by leading a revolt against both the Federation and the Empire at once and founding the Alliance. For the first time in a millennium, every world suddenly had a new choice. It had started here.
The
Dragon Queen
stopped its micro-jumps and locked in to one of the orbiting stations. Ziva didn’t know which one. She hadn’t been specific.
Take me to En
. That was about as much direction as she’d given the ship. Ziva floated, weightless, as the
Dragon Queen
drifted in. She tried going through her files on Khanguire once more; but she couldn’t focus and her thoughts kept slipping through each other like a knot of eels. She reminded herself that Khanguire didn’t matter, that she’d come here because she’d made that decision. She’d come here with Newman still sedated in her spare cabin because she’d chosen En and Aisha.
She looked at the files for a last time and then told the
Dragon Queen
to delete them, wipe them out, erase them utterly. Seconds after they were gone she was checking there was an archive after all, a backup, something the
Dragon Queen
could recover. There was. She wanted to kick herself. Maybe En would do that for her.
‘Prep Harris for transfer,’ she snapped. Alliance territory. She could off-load
him
, at least, and so she sent an avatar to start the claim for his bounty. The
Dragon Queen
had been complaining about the state of its jump drive after so many trips on skimmed fuel and so she booked a posse of Zorgon Peterson maintenance drones to come aboard as she docked. She’d need a temporary holding arrangement for Newman, too, while she had a proper self-contained prisoner-transport module fitted into the cargo bay again. The law said she had to hand Newman over to the station authorities and pay for him to be held in ‘proper and fitting conditions’ until she left. Hardly any bounty hunters ever actually did that when a jab of sedative served just as well, but it would be a relief to have him out of her ship for a while. That done, she took over the docking with the Golden Gate. It would be nice to spend a little time in a system like Alioth. The
Dragon Queen
could slumber in her station berth, safe and sound without any worries. Ziva could walk the corridors of the station’s rim in a full comfortable standard gravity and not be constantly on edge, wondering who was waiting for her around the next corner …
‘We appear to have been followed,’ said the
Dragon Queen
, and showed her the corvette that had scanned her from above Whit’s Station.
‘Send an avatar. Find out what they want.’ No one would bother her in a system like Alioth. It didn’t surprise her when the corvette didn’t reply, turned and powered away. One of Khanguire’s friends, Ziva supposed. So be it – let them watch her. It wasn’t like she was going to be hard to find.
She matched the rotation of the Golden Gate’s hub and drifted leisurely into its cavernous heart. The
Dragon Queen
had already negotiated a docking bay; Ziva guided the Fer-de-Lance in and settled on the landing pad. She felt the jolt as magnetic clamps engaged from both station and ship. The
Dragon Queen
’s reactor gradually dropped into hibernation. Ziva unstrapped and launched herself back to her cabin, bouncing in long smooth arcs in the micro-gravity made by the hub’s rotation; by the time she’d picked something to wear, the
Dragon Queen
was tucked safely away and the umbilicals from the Golden Gate were latched on. They’d bill her, of course, for the power and the fuel and the water and the air. No matter. She could afford it. She’d been able to afford it for years. Even without Newman she could have walked away from bounty hunting and kept the
Dragon Queen
to herself and taken En with her. She could have had the ship fitted out the way it had once been meant to be.
She looked at herself in the mirror, holding the dress up before her. There were reasons why she almost never wore a dress and micro-gravity was one of them. Blasted folds wandered all over the place doing their own thing and making you look like an idiot. She had no idea how she’d look up in the station’s rim, whether the dress would appear the way it was supposed to or whether she
would
just look like an idiot. Probably that. But En liked her in a dress. En liked her to look feminine now and then; En would tell her she was beautiful, which always made her laugh because she wasn’t, not in
that
way. En was the one with the classic elegance, with the curves and the arches and the long sensual fingers.
For a moment she thought of Khanguire again and quickly shook her away. If she looked like an idiot to everyone else, so what? This was for Enaya. She bagged the dress and put on a disposable jumpsuit.
The things we do for love …
She left the
Dragon Queen
behind and took an elevator out from the hub, feeling the false gravity sink into her as she rose towards the rim. They had public changing rooms by the exits, discreet cubicles you could rent for ten cents every fifteen minutes, places where spacers from the hub turned into the elegant citizens of the rim and later turned back again. She stripped out of the jumpsuit and into the dress. Now that the folds and skirts and cuffs hung the way they were meant to, she supposed she looked good enough. Nothing special. A little awkward, perhaps, but not too bad. She tried putting on some make-up – another thing she hadn’t done for almost a year – and discovered that yes, she still didn’t really know how all that worked. Never had, probably never would. No matter – the cubicle had a bot which could do it for her and the only hard part after she’d scrubbed herself clean again was choosing from the hundreds of styles it had to offer. The new Independent look was tempting, but En wouldn’t thank her and so she went for simple subtle classic Imperial. She let the bots do her hair as well. When they were finished, she hardly recognised herself. The scrawny sharp-edged bounty hunter Ziva was gone. She looked like what En would call a ‘normal person’.
She tapped her earlobe, opening a link to the
Dragon Queen
. ‘Where is she?’
‘Go outside.’
Ziva opened the cubicle. En was standing right there, waiting for her.
‘Ziv.’ She was smiling. Ziva opened her mouth and then closed it again when no words came. There was a lump in her throat she hadn’t been ready for and a wetness at the corner of her eyes.
‘En,’ she managed. ‘En.’
‘You’re beautiful, Ziv.’
‘You always say that.’ Ziva laughed then. A relief. ‘But not next to you I’m not.’ She held out her hands and Enaya took them and squeezed them and then came closer still and wrapped Ziva in her arms.
‘I’m so glad you came.’
There were things Ziva wanted to say. How she was going to come home, at least for a while. For a few months. Maybe as much as a year. See how it went. Get Aisha back on her feet. Forget the likes of Newman and Khanguire, that sort of thing, but they were all suddenly too big to fit her mouth. Her tongue felt awkward as though it belonged to someone else.
‘I thought you’d prefer Wicca’s World,’ she said at last. Laughed. ‘You and your retro Dreamwave shit.’
En laughed back. ‘Oh come on! My “Dreamwave shit” is infinitely better than this month’s k-cast sensation created especially in a sonic laboratory somewhere on Mars. Three songs, sell-out tours for a month or two and then they burn out and no one ever hears of them again? Do you remember that warbling pair of teenage boys who called themselves Jesus and Allah?’
‘Barely.’
‘Quite. A year ago they were everywhere. Where are they now? Gone, thank goodness. Iron Sky? Heroic Trio? Band of Brothers? Myq-L and the Bumblefunks?’
Ziva shrugged. ‘The cult of celebrity. That’s all anyone in the Federation cares about any more.’
‘I only know them because I see the posters change in Ay’s room.’ Enaya leaned in to Ziva and lowered her voice. ‘I think it’s all the same three or four bands. They have a secret base on Mars and recycle them. They give them a whole body makeover, re-engineer them for the latest market trends and put them back out with a different name. That’s why they all sound the same.’
Ziva wasn’t really listening, distracted. ‘I keep remembering the first time I saw you. Coming out of that club, the Quantum Tunnel. I was supposed to be watching out for this guy … shit, I can’t even remember his name now. He was going to tell me where …’ She shook her head. ‘And so there I was, watching, and then you came out in your stupid sleeveless T-shirt and all that hair loose practically down to your fucking ankles and … Christ. I couldn’t stop looking at you.’
‘You stalked me.’ En raised an eyebrow.
‘I asked you where you were going next.’
‘I said I didn’t know.’
‘You said you were going home! … You were so fucking tall!’
‘An hour later you were trying to rent a room for us.’
‘And they were all too expensive and so we ended up in Brotherhood Park. I think I spent the whole night kissing you.’ Ziva’s smile faded. She looked Enaya in the eye. ‘I grew up believing in the Federation. In my culture, its values, in its potency. Now look at me.’ She brushed her fingers down her sides. ‘Forty years old and I look at the Empire and wonder, despite their slavery, if they had a point. I look at the Alliance and Turner and Argent and I don’t wonder why they did it any more. It’s the superficiality. The impermanence. How fucking shallow are we all? I don’t want to be like that. I want something that lasts.’
‘You look at the wrong things, Ziv.’ Enaya stared back at her. ‘You know what I look at? I look at you and I look at Ay. Just at the two of you.’ She took Ziva’s hand. ‘Come on! I know what you’re like. You’ve been sitting in that ship of yours for Allah knows how long, living off reconstituted nutrient soups of some sort. I’m sure your
Dragon Queen
looks after you very well in its own way, but now you’re with me and I have a reservation for us at a very nice restaurant.’
‘Aisha …?’
En put a finger to her lips and very slightly shook her head. ‘Not tonight, Ziv. She’s a grown girl. I can’t stop her going wherever she wants. I can’t …’ She blinked a few times and looked away. ‘I can’t tell her what to do any more.’
As Ziva and En walked together hand in hand, the
Dragon Queen
flashed a message to say that Newman was secure in the Golden Gate cells and that Harris had been handed over. He’d be on the k-cast news soon. He’d be asked for interviews, his life story. He’d have his five minutes of fame. He’d bubble back one more time when they sentenced him and then he’d vanish. If you had any sense, Ziva thought, you took your flash of glory and rode it for what you could and then quietly sank, content to have your obscurity back and pleased to have ridden the dragon, if only for a moment. There was nothing more pathetic than a low-talent loser who’d had their moment of lucky fortune, their flash of notoriety, and couldn’t let it go. So many did that.
‘You know,’ said Enaya, who’d obviously caught her train of thought, ‘there are rehab clinics on Wicca’s World for those fifteen-minute wonders. Places to help you adjust to being normal again, to being not very interesting, to being not noticed. Special clinics for letting go. Next to them, they have clinics for people who haven’t ever had their flash of fame but who can’t let the idea of it go. They have speakers in those clinics who come from the first clinics, former fleeting k-cast faces telling suicidally attention-hungry wannabes what it was like to make it for a moment and then be forgotten again and how they were better off where they were; and yet in those talks they all get their fix of what they so desperately need. It’s attention, that’s all.’ There was a bite behind the words.
Ziva tugged on Enaya’s hand, spinning her round. ‘Stop.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I just want to look at you. I could never stop looking at you.’ Enaya stood still and Ziva drank her in. En was nearly a foot taller than Ziva, her long dark face framed by luscious black hair that shone all the way down to her waist. She had a perfect nose and huge dark brown eyes and a smile, when she let it out, that broke sorrow with hope. She wore a high-collared dress tonight, in embroidered white silk that flowed all the way down her to the ground and with a cream Roman chasuble over the top. There were designs woven in to the fabric of the chasuble, characters in old Arabic that Ziva couldn’t read. She took the chasuble in her hands. ‘This one’s new. What do the words say?’
‘Family. Honour. Loyalty. Friendship.’ En was blushing now.
‘You’ve always been too damn tall to kiss properly.’ Ziva had something in her eye again. She blinked it away. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.
Enaya led her on to a quiet place on the edge of the rim – the Sungrazer, a name which made Ziva groan because it was obviously named after the quadruple platinum Jjagged Bbanner recording – now hundred-year-old background muzak that everyone and his dog across the Federation must surely be sick of hearing by now; but En took her hand and pulled her in anyway. She tugged Ziva through a sprawl of discreet tables, each tucked away in its own nook. Plants and shrubs broke up the space, providing the illusion of a pleasant evening garden on the surface of some balmy world. The outside wall of the rim was transparent and through it Ziva could see out into space, to the stars, to the vast curve of New California a few hundred miles below. The sun was somewhere on the other side of the station and most of the planet below was in daylight. Now and then bright lights flared as ships moved in and out of lower orbits.