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didn’t have the clout she might have had if the support bases had been run by the navy.
    “I’m going to be begging again,” she said to her executive officer, Salvatore Francisco. “I’ve got to find somebody in the Pentagon who can squeeze Arnie Young.”
    Brigadier General Arnie Young was the commander of the support bases.
    “Talk to Admiral Clayton. He’s a sneaky prick,” Francisco said.
    “That’s a thought. The problem is, he always wants some payback. I don’t want to become one of his
girls
.”
    They’d make another round of calls in the morning, they decided, and gave it up for the day.
    Fang-Castro headed home, carrying her briefcase. She was quiet, serious, short, and slight; the first impression she conveyed was that of the quintessential forty-something Chinese woman, despite being fourth-generation American. Her parents had brought her up with a traditional, antiquated propriety.
    She was nowhere near as frightening as the name “Captain Fang” led some to believe, before meeting her . . . as long as you weren’t standing between her and her objective, as long as you didn’t ignore one of her suggestions.
    The captain’s “suggestions” were not optional. Very few made the mistake of thinking so, a second time. The space station was a comfortable and safe environment, entirely surrounded by near-instant death. Nobody had yet died under her command, and everyone agreed that as unpleasant as her wrath could be, it beat the alternative.
    Fang-Castro’s home was in Habitat 1, Deck 1 of USSS3, known as the Resort. The Resort had simulated gravity, equivalent to a tenth of Earth’s, created by the rotation of the habitats, and real private quarters instead of dorms and sleep-cubbyholes. A select few of the quarters even had two rooms. One even had a window.
    Fang-Castro loved her window. After a long command shift, she’d sit in her easy chair, raise the vid screen and the stainless steel shade behind it, dim the room lights, and let her mind drift with the stars, and sometimes the dime-sized sun, and at other times the massive soft expanse of the earth, as they all slowly swept past the window once a minute, the markings of a cosmic clock.
    It was a near-daily ritual, and she joked that that window was her one addiction.
    Her fiancée didn’t like it. The window made Llorena Tomaselli queasy. She’d logged seven months in space as a computer maintenance tech, and she was fine in confined spaces like cable tunnels, but having the whole universe rotate about her, like she was some lesser goddess, gave her mild vertigo. Fang-Castro knew that while she was at work and Tomaselli was home, the shade stayed tightly closed and projected a pleasant Earth scene, someplace in Italy’s Campania. When Fang-Castro was home alone, the stars were always there. When they were both home, they negotiated.
    Tomaselli was cooking. As Fang-Castro entered the suite, she smelled stir-fry for dinner—sprouts, jerked mock duck, ginger, hot peppers, and platanos—with rice and red beans on the side. Her stomach rumbled impatiently. She wasn’t an obligate vegetarian, and vegetarianism wasn’t obligatory in space, especially not if you were the station commander. Meat was hard enough to come by, though, that it was easier just to put it out of one’s mind.
    “Tough day?” Tomaselli asked, when Fang-Castro dumped her briefcase.
    “Too long, too messy. It was a nibbled-to-death-by-ducks day.” She yawned, stretched, and said, “Smells terrific.”
    “It is terrific,” Tomaselli said. “Want a drink?”
    “I’ll get it—maybe a margarita. You want one?”
    “Sure, but take it easy on the salt. The last time—”
    The security phone in the bedroom pinged; that almost always meant trouble. “Ah, really . . . ?”
    “Go get it, I’ve got some work to do here yet,” Tomaselli said. “Won’t be ready for ten minutes, anyway.”
    “I’m sorry, dear, I’ll make it quick.”
    “What if the