Much like the corridors, one of the walls in Cell’s room was a floor-to-ceiling window to wide-open fields and distant mountains. In this case Ashla felt sure this was literally a window, but that it would become a viewscreen if the scene outside became less happy and serene. Ashla had the sudden vision of some apocalyptic event going on outside, with fire and brimstone falling out of the sky, but inside this room it would still look like a bright, sunny day.
Cel lay in the room’s only bed, asleep. Her uniform and smartskin were gone, replaced by a simple gown and an ID bracelet. Her weapons were nowhere to be found. Ashla smiled, imagining the conniption Cel likely had when she woke up and found them missing. She was covered in an off-white blanket. Her face had a lot more of the color back in it. Her hair fell about her in long, swooping curls.
The wall behind the bed displayed all kinds of data too obtuse for Ashla to parse outside of the usual vitals.
Ashla had originally hoped Cel would be awake when she arrived, which would give Ashla the opportunity to thank her. Now she wasn’t so sure what she would say. The temptation to set the cake on the side table and leave was almost overpowering. Ashla didn’t know if it was the sense of propriety that came with training or a genuine sincerity, but Ashla wouldn’t leave until she could talk to Cel.
“Cel?”
Cel’s eyelids fluttered. Her sleepy eyes wandered a moment, seeing nothing. Then they focused on Ashla.
“Hi,” Ashla said.
“Hi,” Cel replied. She continued to blink for a minute. Then she pressed a button on the side of the bed and rose to a sitting position. “What are you doing here?”
“I, um, I wanted to see you. I wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“Well,” Cel said, lifting a hand and frowning at the fist she was making at it, “the doctors say I’ll be okay.”
“That’s good.”
“They say I’ll be out in a few weeks after some physical therapy, but I’ll be back on duty, mm, day after tomorrow.”
“I think...I think you should rest and listen to the doctors. We were really worried about you.” Why was she so nervous all of a sudden? She had traded ugly remarks with this woman since almost the day she met her. What was wrong with her?
“I’ve had worse.”
“You’re kidding?”
Cel shook her head.
Ashla’s link chimed. She picked it up and read the message, letting her know her scheduled lunch with Father was in thirty minutes. Ashla stuck her link back in her pocket and looked at Cel. She was still blinking, trying to hold off sleep.
“I’ve got to go.”
“Okay. Thanks for coming.”
“No.”
“No?”
Ashla swallowed, something broke and the words came. They sounded angry at first, but they were spurred out by threatening tears. “No. I thank you, not the other way around.”
“What?” The shock of Ashla’s sudden outburst must have woken her up. Her eyes were wide now.
“You nearly died, just to save my life. You shielded me from a bomb. You killed people. You killed with your sword men armed with guns. And you faced down a Shaumri assassin!”
Ashla had to stop, not wanting to lose her dignity entirely. Cel took it as an opportunity.
“Ashla, that’s my job.”
“Well, it’s a stupid job!” Ashla couldn’t keep it in any longer. Cel became blurry behind fresh tears. “Ever since I met you, I’ve been nothing but trouble. Rude. Disrespectful. Unappreciative. You probably hate me. I bet anyone else in your position would have loved to see me blown into bits by that bomb.”
Ashla put a hand to her face to hide her crying. Before yesterday, she hadn’t cried in years. Now it seemed she was making up for lost time.
“Listen,” Cel said. “No one who accepts a job like this does so ignorant. I knew what I was getting into.”
“Then why did you?”
Cel sighed. “Well, first because it’s what I’m good at, second because your dad and I have a history and he asked me and...well, yeah, you’re a pain in my crack when you want to be, but I don’t hate you.”
“Okay,” Ashla said, her momentary outburst draining her of the emotional energy needed to further make a scene. “I wanted to say thank you. And I’m sorry. And I brought you some cake.”
Cel chuckled. “Well nothing makes up for hospital food like cake.”
The next day, Ashla was in her coveralls, standing on Luna’s nose, and hosing the cockpit down. What looked like water leaving the hose, was actually a stream of sweeper nanite colonies. They sprayed out of the hose at the large, dark bloodstains and other signs of battle, collected the molecules of blood, and then found their way down into the ship’s waste removal system, which was now pumping into a waste sorting unit, which then pumped everything through a wide tube into a recycler outlet in the wall of Luna’s berth.
Ashla didn’t just spray the stains, though, she hosed everything down. She could remember the coppery smell of blood mixed with the sour stench of smoke permeating her nose during her flight from the station, and she wanted it all gone. Despite it all, it didn’t terrify her like it had before. Maybe this was because she knew Cel was okay, maybe it was due to the simple passage of time. Ashla didn’t know, but she was happy that looking at Luna no longer had negative connotations for her.
As she worked, Officer Tarquin stood aside, changing the direction of her glance from the doors, to the open bay, to Ashla, and around and around. Per her promise, Officer Tarquin hadn’t attempted to push Ashla to talk, nor had she immolated her with unwanted advice. Ashla couldn’t help but like her. She wasn’t anything like Cel: battle-hardened, bristling with weapons and prickly as a pufferfish. Officer Tarquin was serene and easy going, more like a yoga instructor than a bodyguard.
“Do you want to know what happened to the men who attacked you on Vares Station?” Lita asked.
Ashla trembled, struck by a vision of an invisible Shaumri blade slashing her neck out, but only for a second.
“Have they taken over the station?”
“No,” Lita said, chuckling.
“Are they on their way here?”
“Also no.”
“Then, no,” Ashla said. “I don’t.”
Lita nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to bring up any bad memories.”
“It’s okay,” Ashla said.
Once done flushing the cockpit, Ashla dropped into her seat and installed the updated software she’d scripted for Luna’s maintenance and damage control systems. In so doing, she remembered a minor data-reception glitch in Luna’s system.
“Luna.”
“Yes, Ashla.”
“Please add the following to my maintenance list: investigate data storage glitch in Luna’s system, which might require replacing her primary storage drives, or just flushing them and reinstalling.”
“Acknowledged. I’ve added it to your list.”
“Thanks, Luna.”
While she waited for the software to update, she dropped back out of the cockpit and looked through her list for a few quick fixes she could make before dinner. She tightened the coupling on her forward stabilizer. Then she replaced the fuse that kept shorting out one of her landing lights. She replaced a line of power cabling. It was all easy work and Ashla fell into it.
“Ashla,” Luna said. “You’re to have dinner with your father in thirty minutes.”
Ashla shook her head and double checked the time on her link, then nodded. An hour had passed without her noticing. She went over her list, smiled at the knowledge that it was shrinking, and then thrust the link back into her pocket.
“I’m going to take a quick shower, Lita.” she said to Officer Tarquin.
The officer smiled and nodded. “Okay.”
After a shower and a change of clothes, Ashla led her shadow into the corridor behind the berths. They took a cart to the lifts, cued one and, when the doors to the lift car opened, got in.
/> “I don’t think I got to tell you before, but Luna’s a really impressive ship,” Lita said.
“Thanks,” Ashla said.
“Is she entirely your design?” Lita didn’t call Luna ‘she’ because that was the age-old tradition, she did it because Ashla thought of Luna as a ‘she,’ and had determined to give her a female voice. Ashla didn’t know if that was a sincere attempt at friendship, or the manipulative workings of a psychologist, but at this point she didn’t care. Lita had been true to her word of being unobtrusive, and Ashla figured she deserved at least to think she was doing a good job.
“Yep, well, her N-slip engine was engineered and installed by someone else.”
“Lunar Seed has N-slip capability?”
“Yep,” Ashla said, nodding.
“Have you done a maneuver in her yet?”
“Not yet,” Ashla said, “but she’s ready to go if needs be.”
“Wow.”
The lift car shuddered.
Ashla looked at Lita, and she looked back. “That was odd.”
Then the car banged and rattled. It ceased for a moment so suddenly Ashla felt like her feet had left the floor. The lights blinked on and off, on and off. Then they blinked off, plunging the car into darkness. Ashla gasped. Then a set of red emergency lights lit the car.
“What was that?” Ashla said.
Lita shook her head. “I don’t know.” Then to someone else she said, “Palace control, this is Officer Tarquin. We are stuck in...hello? Palace control? Are you reading?”
“They’re not answering?”
Lita shook her head.
“What do we do?”
“Well, we’re not going to stay here.”
Lita knelt by the lift car’s control panel and pulled a red handle marked “EMERGENCY.” This opened a panel, which she dropped to the floor and then pulled from the new compartment a heavy tote bag.
“What’s that?”
“Emergency Lift Car Kit. It’s going to get us out of here.”
Lita unzipped the bag and snapped the two sides open, revealing a packed mess of metal parts. Lita spent the next few seconds assembling some kind of device. It had a large round disk and two sturdy metal arms. This she slotted onto the lift doors at her eye level, centered right where the two doors met. Lita pulled a heavy battery from the tote and snapped it into a slot on the big disk, then hit the ‘On’ button.
The device groaned and pulled the heavy lift doors apart. While the machine did its work, Lita then linked a series of thick metal bars together. Once the machine opened the doors, she slid the big bar across the floor between the two doors to hold them open.
Ashla could see two different floors of the palace, the floor one one separated from the ceiling of the other by half a meter of concrete. The lower floor she could see was the big foyer leading out to the garden, the way Cel had taken her after her failed attempt at breaking blue. The upper floor, was a veranda overlooking a big window from which Ashla could see, dotting the late afternoon sky, tinged with crimson, aerosol fighters flying, firing and exploding.
“This can’t be,” Lita said, her otherwise serene face coated in sweat and shock. “The palace is under attack!”
Chapter Sixteen:
Men of Bloodshed
“You can’t be serious, Sal!” Sabella’s voice was turning shrill. Salazar could only remember two other times where his generally unflappable first mate had gone shrill. One of those involved her catching him with another woman.
Salazar Kol sat at the table in Sabella’s room at the Hotel Ekidra. The city outside the floor to ceiling windows was covered in dark clouds. Every few minutes lights would flicker up beyond the cloud cover, lightning cracking in the far distance. Not bright, furious whip lashes, accompanied by ear-popping screams of thunder, but rather distant, near-hidden glimmers followed by impotent murmurs. Rain fell on the city of Angora. But again, it wasn’t violent, windblown torrents but rather a pitiful drizzle.
The weather felt like an extension of himself. He wanted to bring fire and fury to Renzo’s house, watch him cower in fear at his wrath, smell him wetting himself in terror. Instead he was sitting in Sabella’s hotel room feeling sad, pathetic, impotent.
A glass of fine paracle sat before him. He picked it up, observed its golden color. Paracle was a local spirit made from aged wine. Most paracle was artificially colored and flavored to imitate the wood-barrel aging process of the higher end stuff. Salazar didn’t need to taste it to know this was the real thing.
“Maybe I am serious,” Sal said after knocking the glass back. Maybe the alcohol could rekindle the rage he felt after leaving his meeting with Renzo. “We’ve got plenty of hardware. I’m sure at least some of the crew would be willing to help and we wouldn’t need many just to break into his place and put a hole in his head.”
“Sal,” Sabella said. She walked in front of him. Her form, covered only in a silk robe, didn’t do much to block the scene of the city under its petulant storm. She crossed her arms and shook her head. “This is insane.”
“Is it?” Sal boomed at her. “That scuff-eating slime took part in getting Lekem murdered.”
“It wasn’t—”
“Yes, Sabella, it was murder. Maybe not when the local kank gunned him down. That was some kid drunk on his system’s propaganda. But when Renzo set me up to bring that hardware to Lekem, that was murder!”
Sabella turned and drew close to him. “No, Sal.” And when Sal waved her off she repeated, “No. That was a greasy bottom-feeder making himself rich on someone else’s war.”
She sat down close to him, filling his nose with the smell of her expensive bodywash. She took his hand into hers. Sabella hadn’t lived a minute of swag until she’d met him. She’d worked hard all her life on transports, some legitimate, some not, until she joined him on the Jessamine. Her hands weren’t soft. They were the rugged hands of a hard worker. But they were gentle. Sal could feel the contact seeping fire from his chest.
“I know Chief Lekem was a friend of yours. And I know a large part of your anger is at yourself, feeling you were somehow responsible for his death. But you weren’t.”
Salazar seethed and shook his head.
“You weren’t responsible,” Sabelle reiterated. “Now if you go find Renzo with your crew and you kill him...” She shook her head. “Not only will you never do business in this system again, but you’ll never be able to come back home.” As she said this, she waved her hand at the window.
Sal followed the gesture, looked out into the city he was born in, the city he left at the age of fifteen to join his first independent hauler. Was it really home, though? He kept coming back but that was as much to get another job from Renzo as anything else.
Salazar stood up, poured himself another glass of Sabella’s expensive paracle. He carried the glass to the window with him. Sabella’s room had a perfect view of Calasat Tower. Even now he could see ships landing and taking off from the tower’s lower berths, the ones that hung below the low-hanging cloud cover. The tower itself was a black silhouette against a dark gray sky, lights flashed up and down its length, illuminating nothing.
Salazar drank from the glass all in one swift gulp. His thoughts came together, cohesive for the first time in hours, and he enunciated them as they did.
“This place isn’t my home, Bel.” He could feel Sabella’s anxiety grow at that, but he went on. “If it ever was, it isn’t anymore. But I’m not going to give it up to get revenge on Renzo. Like you said, he’s a bottom feeder, a barnacle on the system. Getting revenge on him would be like taking it out on the gun that shot Lekem.”
Sal heard Sabella sigh. He turned towards her. She nodded at him, agreeing. But she didn’t know what she was agreeing to.
“But I would to find out who was behind his death.”
Two hours later, Salazar stood in the Jessamine’s galley, the only room large enough to seat the whole crew. It was a few hours past midnight, and the crew of any long-rage ship
was often quick to adopt local time, but everyone had responded to his message and everyone was here.
The Kid sat closest to where Sal stood. Sabella the furthest, and closest to galley’s port door. Maybe she was distancing herself from him, maybe she wanted a quick exit.
Everyone but he and her were talking, chatting over cups of coffee. Besser was telling Tally and Olo how he lost half his cut from the latest job at the card table. Fish was trying to tell a joke when Nat came in, slapped him up the back of his head and said, “Shut up, Fish!”
It was all laden with anxiety. As his crew talked and laughed, they shot their captain side eye when they thought he wasn’t looking. He was. They all knew he was a little unhinged from the last job.
“Alright, listen up,” Sal said, and the room fell silent. Sal sighed. “You all know a friend of mine was laxed on the last job. You all know I’m still pretty mad about it.”
His mouth was dry. His courage seemed to fail him. His plan had seemed foolproof back at Sabella’s room but now he wondered if he could make some excuse to call the meeting off. Nothing came to him, so he soldiered on.
“It has come to my attention that Renzo set us up with the job, so we could lure my friend and his faction out of hiding so the local forces could deal with him in the open.”
A suspicious murmur rumbled through the room, an impersonation of the thunder he’d heard while considering it all. People looked at each other, then back at him.
“Not only did this result in the death of an old friend, but it put the lives of my crew at risk, which is something I will not let go without some payback.”
“I first considered getting back at Renzo, knowing he was in on the trick, but I then realized that he’s just a charge in the gun, and I’d rather find out who pulled the trigger.”
The crew remained silent, anticipating what he was about to ask them.
“So I want to propose we do a little wet work.”
Two hours before dawn Sal stood in a maintenance closet about ten meter’s from the door to Renzo’s apartment. The closet was packed, standing room only. Yuki stood right next to him, filling Sal’s nostrils with the brutal combination of sweat and the overpriced cologne he had put on for his night on the town. Besser and Olo were there too, waiting.
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