The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)
John Scalzi
To Meg Frank and Jesi Lipp
PROLOGUE
Years later Lenson Ornill would reflect on the irony that his time as a religious man would be bracketed by a single and particular word.
“Well, fuck,” Gonre Ornill said, to her husband, Tans, on the bridge of their spaceship, the We Never Agreed to This.
Tans looked up from his own workstation, where he had been instructing their son, Lenson, age eleven, on some of the finer points of shipwide energy management. “What is it?” he said.
“You know that imperial ship that wasn’t following us?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s following us now.”
Lenson watched his father frown, wipe the energy management screen from his own workstation and call up the navigation screen. On the screen was a representation of all the ship traffic between the outpost of Kumasi and the Flow shoal that would take the Agreed to Yogyakarta, their next destination, after five weeks of travel. Most of the ships were commercial and trade concerns, like the Agreed. Two of them were Imperial Navy ships. One of those, the Oliveer Bransid, had just plotted a course that would intercept the Agreed in roughly six hours, right before it hit the shoal.
“I thought we were paid up,” Tans said to his wife.
“We are paid up,” Gonre said.
Tans motioned to his workscreen, as if to say, Well, obviously not.
Gonre shook her head. “We’re paid up,” she repeated.
“There’s a new naval commander,” Genaro Partridge, comms officer, said. She was part of the bridge crew of the Agreed. “I heard Samhir talking about it in mess. He says he was warned about him when we were loading in the cargo.”
“You’re telling us about this now?” Tans said to Partridge.
“Sorry. We were talking at mess. I thought Samhir told you.”
“I meant to tell you,” Samhir Ghan, the ship’s purser, said three minutes later, when he appeared on the bridge, in a hurry. Lenson, looking at Ghan’s slightly breathless form, knew his father had a reputation for being a genial captain, until he wasn’t. Ghan was in danger of making his father not genial. “Sorry. We got busy in cargo.”
“Tell me now,” Tans said.
“The new naval commander is named Witt. A real grasping prick by all indications. Was transferred out of a job at Hub because he slept with the wrong person’s spouse and is trying to get back there by ‘cleaning house’ here. Which means he’s messing with established practices to look like he’s being effective.”
Tans frowned at this. Lenson, at eleven, didn’t know the particulars of his parents’ business, but he knew enough to know that much of it was predicated on “good relations” with the various local and imperial law enforcement people of the systems the Agreed traveled to. This entailed “established practices,” which Lenson had only recently discovered meant giv ing certain people money and other desirable things in ways that were understood to be not entirely legal.
Lenson was neutral on all of this—he was young enough to believe that everything his parents did was by definition correct, and also to be bored with the fiddly details of their line of work—but it did seem like a long way to go around things.
“Who told you this?” Gonre asked Ghan.
“Cybel Takkat,” Ghan said. “My opposite on the Phenom.” Lenson knew Ghan was referring to the ship That’s a Phenomenal View, with whom they had shared a cargo hold at the Kumasi mercantile station. Smaller ships like the Agreed and the Phenom would frequently co-rent cargo space on the station to save money. Occasionally during the load in and load out things would get rushed and certain bits of inventory that started off on one ship would accidentally end up on another. Now that Lenson thought of it, he suspected this required some “established practices” as well. “She mentioned that one of her payments got waved off by one of her usuals in the navy here. He said he was being watched too closely by Witt’s people now.”
“We could have used this information sooner,” Gonre said.
“Sorry,” Ghan repeated. “I meant to tell you. I thought Cybel was just talking about how graft was being cracked down on, and we’d have to be less obvious about it from here on out. I didn’t think she was saying that the navy was going to be chasing us to the Flow shoal.”
Tans looked over to Partridge. “Any word from that naval ship?”
“They’re not hailing us, no,” Partridge said. “They’re just moving to intercept.”
“We’re not at full power,” Gonre said to her husband. “We could run for it.”
Tans shook his head. “Not yet.” He tapped his workscreen to signify the Bransid. “That’s a big ship. Lots of mass. It’s slower to accelerate but faster under speed than we are. If we break and run now they’ll catch up to us before we make it to the shoal.”
“If they catch us with this particular cargo, we’re all fucked,” Ghan said, then remembered to whom he was asserting this fact. “Uh, sir.”
Tans nodded absentmindedly at this and danced his fingers across his workstation keyboard. Lenson looked and saw his father was making calculations for the Agreed and for the Bransid. He couldn’t follow the details but Tans made a small grunt of satisfaction, and then looked up at him. “Do you know what I’m doing?” he asked Lenson.