Hunted by James Alan Gardner Page B

ship because navy personnel acted non-sentient: all of Willow’s crew, and maybe the admiral who gave them their orders. That’s the sort of thing the High Council dearly wants to keep secret. Makes the whole fleet look bad.”
    “I can keep secrets,” I said.
    He patted my shoulder. “Yeah. Sure. But the Admiralty won’t take the chance. They only trust certain types of people—assholes who want to be admirals themselves and will do anything to get into the inner circle. Our beloved Captain Prope is like that, and a lot of other folks on our ship. High Admiral Vincence has stacked Jacaranda with scumbags who don’t mind taking orders that would disturb normal navy personnel.”
    “Orders like what?” I asked.
    “Like making you disappear, so you can’t spill the beans. Prope already has reassignment papers for you; I read them when I accidentally logged onto her computer and decrypted all her files. You’re headed for some godforsaken outpost in the back of beyond, where contact ships only show up once a decade. A one-man station. Jacaranda will take you straight there without a chance to talk to anyone, then they’ll fly away without looking back.” Tobit gritted his teeth. “You won’t be the first person our shite of a captain has marooned.”
    For a second I didn’t say anything. You can’t imagine what it’s like, to be going home after twenty years—twenty years on a moon with nothing but vacuum outside, like a prison except no one has the decency to call it that—and just when you think it’s all over, that you’ll soon see grass and sky and lakes again, someone decides you’re going to be dumped on some new lonely dung heap. And why? Because a boneheaded admiral wants to hide you away from everyone else, for fear you’ll make him look bad.
    The story of my life.
    “So what should I do?” I whispered to Tobit. Whispering because if I didn’t whisper, I’d scream. “I’m stuck out in space,” I said. “I can’t run away.”
    “Yes, you can,” Tobit answered, “but you have to make your move while you’re still acting captain of Willow. Hop into one of the evac modules and declare an immediate forced landing emergency. Use those exact words: immediate forced landing emergency. The ship-soul will launch all the escape pods straight toward Celestia, because it’s the optimal site for a forced landing right now: close by and habitable. You hit it lucky there, York—Celestia is a free planet, not part of the Technocracy. Once you touch down, the navy has no legal right to drag you back.”
    “But won’t Jacaranda stop me from getting away?”
    “They’ll try. But they can only catch one pod at a time. Even if they’re lucky, they’ll only grab four of the eight pods before you reach Celestia’s atmosphere. You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of making it to the ground.”
    “And a fifty-fifty chance of getting caught.”
    “So what?” Tobit asked. ‘The worst? they can do is banish you to some asswipe of a planet, and they plan on doing that anyway.” He gave me a yellow-toothed grin. “You have dick-all to lose, York. And Celestia is reportedly a cream-puff world: all tame and terraformed. If you lie low for a while, you can head back for the Technocracy eventually. Within six months, some new crisis will make the High Council forget all about you. Admirals have the attention span of lobotomized gnats.”
    Tobit obviously didn’t know who my father was…or he’d know Dad wouldn’t be so quick to forget. On the other hand, I figured my old man wouldn’t waste energy chasing me if I stayed out of his way—more than anything, he just wanted to pretend I didn’t exist.
    I asked Tobit, “Will you get in trouble for telling me this?”
    He shook his head. “Nah—they won’t have any evidence. I’m not transmitting back to Jacaranda, and you can erase Willow’s records of this conversation. You’re the captain; you have authority to wipe all the memory banks here if