Honor Among Thieves

by Ann Aguirre

  Normal. Sure. Or maybe this wasn’t normal at all. I could feel Nadim’s moods. Maybe that closeness was bringing down defenses I’d spent years building, brick by brick. Got to fight to keep your distance, Z. If you let him in any more, you’ll have no defense at all. Because why would I trust an alien? A ship who could get in my head, mess with my moods? One who could, if he got really angry, blow me out into space? I depended on him for air and water and food. That was one hell of a lot of trust to ask me to give.

  So I made it a mission to ignore Nadim for the day. Completely. I threw myself into the data console like it was a game I was determined to win. I was crap at 3D math, but I was good at visualization, at least. It took me four hours to develop the ability to see the course in 3D space, and then another two to figure out how to enter all the coordinates.

  Then levels of difficulty started up. First, varying gravitational influences from close-in stars. Then a hidden black hole. Then fuel warnings; Nadim wasn’t infinitely powered, he needed regular infusions of starlight to be able to keep moving. He had to keep his courses close enough to star systems to angle his solar sails and catch the energy, or he’d go dark, like he’d shown me in the video. So plotting courses wasn’t as simple as getting from one spot to another. It was more like tacking with the wind on an ocean, judging just how far your food and water would take you.

  The last level of simulations put us through a meteor field, and I couldn’t keep the images out of my head of the Russian girl on the bridge, of the fog, the choking coughs, the blood. The whispering, silky rope of air fraying away into space, and Nadim waking up somewhere injured and alone with his dead.

  I couldn’t get the sim right. I tried and tried, pushed myself until it was clear I wasn’t going to get it right, and then I shoved back from the console and let out a frustrated yell. I wanted to punch a wall, not Nadim. So I hit the metal side of the console, which hurt me a lot more.

  After a long, panting silence, Nadim said, quietly, “Your heart rate is quite elevated, Zara. Do you need help? Shall I get Beatriz?”

  “No,” I snapped. “Leave me alone.”

  I grabbed the H2 and checked to see what was next. One level I hadn’t conquered wouldn’t matter much, I hoped. I was scheduled for a tour of the medical facilities, which were mostly automated and featured a doc bot that could be activated for emergencies. When I went in, Beatriz was coming out, wearing a mischievous grin. I didn’t ask what that was about, just worked my way through the entire rotation, making sure I knew where every drug was kept, every medical instrument. I didn’t activate the doc bot. I remembered how they worked from med clinics in Paradise, and my hand wasn’t that bad. I was used to punching things.

  I joined Beatriz for dinner, and she first proposed we watch a holo. Afterward, we played a combat sim game. Once I’d soundly beaten her two out of three rounds in the sim, I said I was tired and went to my quarters.

  I’d just opened the door when Nadim said, “What am I doing wrong, Zara?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Look. Just let me be, okay?”

  The pain I caused him wasn’t something he intended to share. I could tell, because it was just a brush, a whisper, quickly gone. But it was breathtaking.

  I stopped on my way into the room. I didn’t apologize, because I couldn’t; I just put my hand slowly out and touched the wall. “Nadim . . . I feel like you—this—is changing me,” I told him. “Making me forget to be who I am.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’m not friendly. I’m not trusting. I don’t like people.”

  “But you like me. And Beatriz.”

  “That’s my point!”

  “You think I’m doing something to you,” he said. I didn’t deny it, and I felt that hurt again, distant and almost hidden. “I’m not. But still, you don’t trust me.”

  “I don’t trust anybody.” Not true. I trusted Derry, once. But look where that got me.

  “Then how can you live, so alone?”

  The question hurt, because it sounded so bewildered. It made me want to fire back an angry justification, but I swallowed that and said, “Safe. I live safe.”

  “But alone.”

  “I thought Leviathan traveled alone most of their lives. So what?”

  “We’re never isolated. Not completely. The stars sing. Even planets sing. And we sing to one another, across the long reaches, for comfort.” He fell silent for a few seconds, and then said, “If you want me to stay away from you, then I will. It’s difficult, because you are so—”

  “Bright?” I said, a little bitterly.

  “Loud,” he clarified, which made me smile a moment. I deserved that. “I’m not changing you, Zara. You were a seed, surrounded by hard shell and stony ground. Now you can grow any direction you wish. I will leave you alone until you see that.”

  Alone suddenly didn’t have as much appeal. I imagined walking through this space and not feeling Nadim around me, not talking to him or having him talk to me. I wondered how Chao-Xing did that for a whole year. It would break me.

  “I don’t want that either,” I said. “And I don’t know why.”

  “I think there’s something in you like me,” Nadim said. His voice was quiet, and I felt he was looking at me. Seeing me. “Like tuned strings, we vibrate to the same frequency.”

  Music, again. And it felt right to hear him say that. “Yeah, well, probably the biotech patch they put in my head when I was a kid. Right?”

  “That’s possible.”

  “It’s just that I need to stay myself. Make sure what I’m feeling is really me. You get that?”

  “Yes, Zara. I do. I—” He hesitated, and I felt the uncertainty again. “I don’t know how much communication with you is too much. Is this?”

  “No.” It felt a little too good, a light, gentle flicker of emotion, like light against my skin. I imagined him turning down a dimmer switch on his broadcast. “That’s okay. But when I say back off—”

  “Then I will,” he said, and instantly, he left, and I was drowning in cold silence. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d gotten to the sense of his presence. His absence was . . . shocking.

  I pressed my hand on the wall. “Nadim? Come back?” He did, and it felt like some anxious knot in my chest eased. I didn’t invite him into my room again—it seemed wrong—so I went outside and sank down against the wall and sat there, legs out blocking the corridor. “How did your people ever learn to get along with us? Did they teach you in school?”

  He sighed. Actually sighed. “Zara, we are not like you. We don’t have a homeworld. We don’t have buildings where we learn. This is my school. Here. With you. I learn by making mistakes. Don’t you?”

  “So many,” I said, and leaned my head back against the wall. “And I’m going to make a hell of a lot more.”

  “As am I,” he said. “But perhaps we can learn from them together.”

  “When do we get a day off?” I asked on Day-I’d-Lost-Count of work. Working sucked. I’d discovered that in the Lower Eight, where I occasionally turned my hand to honest labor. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that I’d rather lift a purse or a wallet than scrub toilets. Up here, though, there were no shortcuts.

  There was, on this day, a seemingly endless list of repairs to make to the equipment of the human-built section of the ship.

  “Days off are a human concept,” he said. “Careful of that part, please. It’s delicate.”

  Putting the thin, breakable data module down, I cursed under my breath, and he asked me what the words meant. I told him. Somehow, it wasn’t as satisfying when you had to explain the mechanics of it, and all Nadim said about my definition was that it seemed strange. I guessed it would, to a being without sexual organs as humans understood them.

  I was on my back inside a console, checking circuits to make sure everything was working properly, since Nadim had reported a glitch in the interface. Well, what he’d actually said was that one part of the console
had gone deaf. But I interpreted that to mean something had burned out. It took me an hour of patient testing to find it, which was ratshit nonsense; diagnostics hadn’t caught it at all and should have. I was still cursing when I crawled out from the dark, cramped space and braced myself against the wall to stand up.

  “You did that on purpose!” I didn’t think about the accusation—well, I hardly ever did—but more than that, I didn’t know why I said it. Just that it was true. “What was that, a test? Did you screw the diagnostics too?” Without thinking, I sent the question out like a wave, trying to find out.

  I got a shock back. It felt like a thin electric zap, nothing to damage, only to surprise. I snatched my hand away from contact with the wall—with his skin—and Nadim said, “That was just a reminder that you wanted more distance between us.” He could hold a grudge. Interesting. “And I didn’t do anything to the diagnostics. Why would you think I had?”

  “Such a jerk.”

  “I’ve made you angry,” he said. “You burn so . . . warm.” There was something about the way he said that word that made my breath hitch. It was something I noticed about him . . . the tone in his voice, the heat of the walls within him. You’re reading into it, I told myself. But I remembered the dream that had so unsettled me—Nadim’s nightmare of being sealed alone in the cold, a lonely and desolate scream in the night.

  No wonder he longed for warmth. No wonder I did too. All those long nights out in the Zone, running from my own nightmares and believing I was free. Weird, to come all the way out here into the black and find someone who understood me so well. Who wasn’t even human.

  Without even thinking about it, I blurted the next thing that occurred to me. “You did mess with the console.”

  There it was, an unmistakable pulse of surprise. And guilt. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s not my fault you’re thinking so hard you’re leaking into my head!”

  “Zara, I wasn’t thinking about it at all,” he said. “That’s the problem. You are . . . difficult to keep out. And I’m trying.”

  My mouth went dry, suddenly, and I rubbed my palm against the nu-silk of my uniform. “But—”

  “It’s difficult for me to keep things from you. I don’t know why. I’ve never had this problem before.”

  “So I’m a problem.”

  “It’s not the same thing, Zara.”

  Sure. Like I hadn’t heard that one a million times.

  I put the handheld tester back into the toolbox and had the satisfaction of slamming the lid shut. Not very many things around here I could slam. The sound echoed through the chamber, and I kicked the metal housing of the data console for good measure.

  His voice flattened. “If you’re finished with the repairs, there are other tasks on your list.”

  “I’m ahead of schedule,” I pointed out.

  I’d learned something from this exchange, at least. Nadim could lie. And I could tell when he did. Since I was good and pissed about that reveal, I headed to the VR room to burn some anger. I scrolled through a lot of the standard game stuff, quests, and puzzles, and stopped on the combat sims.

  I tapped that, fast, and got a dizzying array of options, from standard martial arts to cage fighting to guns and knives and half a dozen more weapons. I hadn’t looked at all the choices before. Damn. Somebody knew how to party. I suspected it was Chao-Xing. I started out on the midlevel, just to get warmed up, on the cage match, and ended up in a startlingly realistic VR sim that gave me convincing biofeedback on punches, chokes, and throws. No bruises or broken bones, and Nadim’s spongy floor came in handy for a fall mat.

  It felt madly great. I dialed up the level to expert and went at it. Then, when I’d won two and lost the third, I swapped for an opponent with a knife. Then one with a gun in a realistic street setting. The bullets, I learned, hurt. But I didn’t get killed. Not once.

  Sim was just what I needed to clear the cobwebs and confusion, get me back in my own skin again.

  Nadim didn’t tell me to get to work; I showered and returned to task myself. While I was kicking ass and taking names, more orders had appeared on my H2, sending me back to the same workroom where I’d assembled the shock device. Without a word, I went there and checked until I found the project number. Another huge rolling bin, and it was subnumbered.

  Since Nadim can’t work with components like this, humans brought this tech on board at some point. Maybe Marko or Chao-Xing?

  I stepped back and looked at the rows of enormous bins. This one was number ten of a series that stretched all the way to fifteen. When I pulled the tabs, the sides fell away to reveal another enormous, mysterious device—larger than the last, towering over me by a good two meters at its highest point. It reminded me of something I’d seen before, at a distance, but completely outsized. Is it an engine? No, that wasn’t right, though it had some aerodynamic sweep to it.

  Took me a few moments to figure out it was a weapon. Laser cannon, missile delivery, I didn’t know, but whatever it was, it was militant. And from the size of this thing—it wasn’t meant for any drone.

  There are weapons here, and they’re having us assemble them. No. They were having me assemble them. Beatriz hadn’t set foot in here at all. Maybe this was the kind of shit that Gregory Valenzuela couldn’t adapt to, and I wasn’t down with it either. In the Zone, I had been great at crafting new gear out of parts I scavenged, so a picture of why they needed me was starting to form.

  This time, I didn’t ask Nadim about what I found. I just sealed up the device, rolled it back into place, and checked the task off on my list. I’d find out what this was about. Nadim wasn’t the one with the answers. I wasn’t sure who was; maybe I was going to have to beat it out of Marko or Chao-Xing. But someone, somewhere was going to tell the truth.

  Because I wasn’t going to put thing A into slot B until someone told me why Nadim needed to be armed.

  As I finished up, a loud, shrieking signal rang through the whole ship. It reminded me of the lockdown warning that pealed through the Zone when the cops stormed in to arrest someone really dangerous. Shit. Maybe by refusing that job, I’d set off something.

  “Nadim! What’s happening?” I ran out of the assembly room, only to pause in the hallway because there were no guiding lights to tell me where to go. “Nadim?”

  “The Elder approaches.” Nadim’s tone came across oddly flat, devoid of nuance. He cleared the ship’s wall and showed me the dizzying expanse of space. I might never get used to the wonder of having the solar system appear in an instant, floating right before my eyes. Rather than the impressive view, however, Nadim meant for me to focus on a rapidly closing Leviathan.

  “Typhon,” he said.

  Beatriz burst out of another room, busy dragging her thick hair back and securing it with an elastic tie to keep it out of her face. She swore in Portuguese when she realized she was heading straight for the now-transparent wall. When she grabbed at me for balance, I let her.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  The alarm died away, leaving a heavy silence.

  I pointed. Typhon was already a pale spot like a very bright star, and he got closer every second. Beatriz’s fingers tightened on my arm as the Leviathan swept in, growing in immensity with every breath until it filled the view and slowed to a drift. Elder Typhon. The other ship had pale, broad scars like the rake of giant fingernails, all down the side that faced us. I saw other, deeper scars, too—blackened spots. Gouges. Typhon was old.

  He had to be twice Nadim’s size. And he had . . . plating, bolted over what I assumed were vulnerable spots. Dark metallic flexible plates that covered parts of his body. Armor? You saw the holo of Nadim getting hit by meteorites. Probably meant to guard against that. I wondered when Nadim would get those upgrades. Clearly, those were manufactured.

  We were supposed to rendezvous near Earth after the first week, but—

  Beatriz beat me to the punch. “They’ve come for us early. What does that mean?”r />
  Nadim hesitated a fraction too long. “Nothing good.”

  Interlude: Nadim

  He blocks the stars so I can no longer hear their song and casts me in cold shadow. His mind is vast, infinitely colder than the lack of suns, and I try to twist away, find the light again.

  He is faster. Stop, he tells me, in booming shuddering waves that I know my Honors can feel but not understand. It hurts, these frequencies. He intends it to hurt. This is the last of your chances. You understand this.

  I gather strength, though it is difficult, and reply, I understand.

  Fail, as you have failed before, and you go into the wild. Alone.

  Fear washes through me in a gray wave. Alone. I dread emptiness, running cold and desperate in the silences. Never hearing my name again in a song. Failure means exile, means a life of crippled solitary travel in the wastes. Others will avoid me. No Honors. No future. No great Journey. I will hear the songs, but they will never hear mine.

  I will be cast out, and I feel the hard icy satisfaction in Typhon at the thought. Weak, he flings at me. You are disorderly. Prove yourself.

  Prove yourself now.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Breaking Ranks

  TYPHON DIDN’T SPEAK. At least, he didn’t speak to us, though what he said to Nadim could have been private; a strange cold rumbled through our Leviathan that left me badly unsettled. Nadim seemed very still and quiet, none of the joy and enthusiasm I’d felt when we first came aboard. It reminded me of standing at attention at the wilderness camp, not daring to show weakness because weakness just meant vulnerability. Predators liked that. They smelled it.

  That’s your experience, I told myself. Not Nadim’s.

  But it felt the same.

  Nadim finally said, “A shuttle is coming. Typhon’s Honors will inspect your progress.”

  Beatriz and I looked at each other. She raised her fine, perfect eyebrows. I raised my pierced one in response.

  “Nobody said there’d be a final exam,” I said. “I hate tests.”