The Killing of Worlds by Scott Westerfeld Page A

among themselves, out of Hobbes’s hearing. The executive officer instinctively made the control gesture that should have fed their voices to her, but of course second hearing was gone as well. Hobbes knew why they were frustrated, however; for their calculations, the pilots were using a shielded darkmode computer hidden behind the sickbay armor. The machine had about as much processor power as a robotic pet.
    At this range the Rix sensors were very sensitive. Only the most primitive electronics could be used.
    Hobbes turned her mind to Frick’s engineering team. They should have the impromptu armor plating in position by now. She rotated an unwieldy select dial at her station, trying to find the team. The usual wash of sound from below decks had been reduced to a smattering of voices; the only dialogue that reached Hobbes came through the hardwired compoints at key control points on the ship. The low-wattage handheld communicators they’d broken out were to be used only on the captain’s orders. At this range, Rix sensors could detect the emissions of a self-microwaving food pack boiling noodles. Even medical endoframes had to be shut down. Captain Zai’s prosthetics were frozen; he couldn’t budge from the shipmaster’s chair. Only one of his arms was moving; the other was locked in a position that seemed painfully posed.
    “How are they doing, Hobbes?” the captain asked. His voice seemed so soft, so human now, absent the usual amplification of the captain’s direct channel.
    “I …” Hobbes continued to scroll through the various compoints on the ship. The primitive interface was maddening. Ten awful seconds later, she was forced to admit, “I don’t know.
    sir.” Hobbes wondered if she had ever said those words to her captain before.
    “Don’t worry, Hobbes,” he said, smiling at her. “They’re probably between compoints. Just let me know when they call.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Despite losing his legs and one arm, the captain seemed hardly bothered by the blindness of darkmode. Zai was actually working with a stylus—on paper, Hobbes realized.
    He noticed her gaze upon the ancient apparatus.
    “We may need to use runners before this is over, Hobbes,” he explained. “Just thought I’d practice my penmanship.”
    “I’m not sure I know that last word, sir,” she admitted.
    He smiled again.
    “On Vada, you couldn’t graduate from upper school without good handwriting, Hobbes. The ancient arts always come back eventually.”
    She nodded, recognizing the ancient root-word. Pen-man-ship. It made sense now. As always, the Vadan emphasis was on the male gender.
    “But perhaps old ways aren’t a priority on Utopian worlds, eh, Hobbes?”
    “I suppose not, sir,” she said, feeling a bit odd that the captain was conversing with her only moments before the
Lynx
would come under fire. In darkmode, of course, there was not much they could do other than chat.
    “But in lower school I did learn how to use a sextant.”
    “An excellent skill!” the captain said. He wasn’t kidding.
    “Though it was hardly a requirement for graduation, sir.”
    “I just hope you remember how, Hobbes. If the Rix hit our processor core again, we may need you at the hard viewports.”
    “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, sir.”
    “Twenty seconds,” announced a young ensign, raising her voice to be heard across the bridge. Her eyes were fixed on a mechanical chronometer someone had dug up from stores. Captain Zai had also produced an ancient Vadan wristwatch from among his family heirlooms. He had examined the two timepieces, determined that they ran on springs—making them undetectable to the Rix—and synchronized one to the other with a twist of a minuscule knob.
    As the ensign counted down to the point when the Rix could begin firing, Captain Zai handed Hobbes the writing instrument and paper.
    “Care to have a go?”
    She held the stylus like a knife, but that didn’t seem right. She tried it like a