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.She remembered how he had fumed and threatened as the last Ganymedean cargoship had unloaded, having brought nothing but her new shipment of hunters, their supplies, weapons and fuel.“There would be no Neptunekaisha without my Sotoi Guntai forces!” she had shouted at Shen-lin and his 3VRD minions; no one faced her intheflesh except Shen-lin.She had no lovers: Don’t need them, she often told herself.“You are not here to earn profits,” she had lectured the politician.“Profits are meager.They won’t pay off the initial costs of Neptunekaisha for a generation, what with maintenance and salaries.NKK would never have built the stations except to enforce NKK military dominance over the Outer Solar System.So go to hell!”Shen-lin hadn’t reacted, except to stand in her way at every opportunity.He had even changed the access codes to Station Kiken’s countless mini servers: To those of this, her, station! But she had held back the blood-hate, knowing a time would come to repay him.It seemed to have arrived.Clarisse’s smile widened, her eyelids drooped, and her thoughts sailed into the future.She flicked back on her headfeed and switched to her first hunter’s pov.The wall and doorway before her seemed to split open as the 3VRD splice pushed aside most of her physical pov.I’ll get Neptunekaisha Protection a fleet yet, she thought, watching the EarthCo craft grow steadily larger and thinking of her pitiful fleet of armed personal craft.With magnification at its greatest, her hunter pov showed the adversary’s glossy hull the size of a mylar balloon held at arm’s length.She noticed that a long tube extended straight toward her, its black mouth swallowing the distance between them.Otherwise, she could discern no details, no ports, no visible antennae, only a few blackened spots that told of the battle it had fought against her fellow Sotoi Guntai—NKK’s top soldiers—near Mars.No doubt: This tiger would be her liberation.Without warning, the ship’s mouth blazed orange, then white, faster than her headcard’s dampers could compensate.The craft was decelerating.A dull throb began at the back of her skull.This was the danger of splicing full-sensory in to machine povs.Her nerve-ends fizzled.She felt her fists ball and unball.The familiar old rage welled up within her.Threat.She directed the hatred at the faceless sphere riding a plume of white hydrogen toward her.She sensed no contradiction in hating that which gave her strength.The hate fed her, empowered her even more than Shen-lin’s obeisance.Clarisse gloried in the hot flush of this hate, at last finding a legitimate focus for it.She would prove her value to little Neptunekaisha, to NKK, and to the Sotoi Guntai brass, guaranteeing her future.The stations would look to her for safety and leadership, and soon Uranikaisha and Saturnkaisha would follow.She would lead the Outer Planets.But she would have to keep herself from reacting purely out of hate.She had to be rational.Pure hate, without reason, had cost her more than once, and she would never let that happen again.“I’m ready, EarthCo Bounty,” she said, her claws extended from the hunter.EarthCo Bounty 1: Pehr JacksonLess than a hundred thousand kilometers from Neptune and closing fast, EarthCo’s fighter/bomber Bounty flung through black space.The ship was mace-shaped, a glistening metallic sphere eight meters in diameter with a handle four times that long, housing hydrogen fuel and tipped with an atomic rocket.At the moment, all was relatively calm.The stars pricked the blackness in silence, muted by light-years; even their furious roars couldn’t be heard across the vast distances.Neptune, too, looked serene from this distance, a blue and white marble slightly squashed at the poles.Its moons glared much brighter than stars at this range, spinning lazy circuits around their captor—the greatest light source so far from Sol—like lonely moths.Inside the ship, a computer program cycled through to a critical point; messages flicked from the main server, a mid-sized artificial intelligence incapable of making its own decisions; contacts closed.A warning-whistle pierced the stagnant air.Pehr Jackson, ship’s Captain, straightened in his zero-g netting.His face grew animated, as if he had just come alive.He was pleased to shut off the emotionless 3VRD letter from his wife that he’d been watching.Pehr pocketed the child’s bandanna he had been absently toying with, dreaming of some day having a miniature version of himself accompany him on long interplanetary missions.For now, the boy he had glimpsed years ago in the cloth was still his only true partner.He automatically pushed his bare toes against the walls to align the netting parallel with the floor.Enough fantasizing about another life, he told himself, about children he would never have, about a fabric child.Sorry, boy.This is life.The fight, the show.“Showtime,” he told the cramped, windowless cabin.Just beyond his feet, he noticed dust gathered in the white corners, carpeting the room’s staticky ventilation intakes.It clung in zero-g, smooth tenuous slopes rising from the floor, descending from the ceiling.Old cells clinging to the only available energy.A pair of discarded pants, upset by his sudden movements, disturbed one of the slopes, scattering it in slow motion.Details leaped out at him now, things he hadn’t noticed a few seconds prior: the stowage locker door hanging open, the empty green bottle hovering precariously at the cabinet’s lip, the stench of close humanity, the dull glow of fiber-routed sunlight so distant from native Earth, the itch of stubble beneath his chin rubbing against an oily leather vest.“Three, two, one.” he counted down, not needing to access Feedcontrol’s script; he knew the routine.The sudden pressure of 0.3g acceleration swallowed him into the mesh a moment after a muffled roar tunneled through the steel walls.The hovering bottle fell and smashed against plastic floorplates
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