Tantamount

by Thomas J. Radford

  “Killed off, for the most part.”

  Scarlett raised one elegant eyebrow at that revelation. “An impressive statement for the upstart newcomers, assuming you believe in such things.”

  Nel shrugged. Other than the occasional oath she was happy to leave gods, particularly other people's gods, well enough alone and could only hope they did the same for her.

  Scarlett mused aloud. “So let me surmise, Quill follows one branch of the religion, the blockade captain and her crew the other.”

  The Guildswoman was quick, Nel had to admit. “Pretty much.”

  “Presumably such an association is perfectly obvious, if one knows what to look for.”

  Nel shrugged. “Probably is.”

  “Dangerous habit, worshipping dead gods,” Scarlett noted.

  “Way Quill tells it his lot were much more frightening.”

  “Dead all the same.”

  “Maybe so.” Nel shrugged again. “Wasn't there myself.”

  The ghost of a smile flickered across Scarlett's face. “Hopefully we'll hear no more about it. Thank you, Vaughn.”

  “My pleasure,” Nel said dryly.

  “We'll be heading for Rim now, correct?”

  “Once Quill stops seeing red, yes.”

  “I'd like you to signal the Mangonel Falling of our intentions.” Scarlett watched the dreadnought floating out against the backdrop. Even from a distance it blotted out much of the horizon. “Specifically that we intend to deliver our cargo to Rim. And be sure to state the nature of our cargo.”

  Across the ship's flank the Killing Loneliness was still pulling into formation with the Alliance ships.

  “That seems a little redundant,” Nel said, watching the manoeuvrings.

  Scarlett pressed her lips together. “I'd like it done anyway.”

  “You don't think the Killing Loneliness will pass on our intentions,” Nel said.

  Scarlett shrugged. “I'd prefer there were no misunderstandings in this matter.”

  “As you like,” Nel said slowly. “I can have Violet relay the message before we set sail.”

  “She's competent? With a signaller?”

  “Aye, she is,” Nel said, not willing to admit otherwise to the Guildswoman.

  “I'll talk to her then,” Scarlett said. The Guildswoman left Nel alone to consider the odd request. Again she found her attention drawn back to the privateer frigate. Sometimes the past just wouldn't stay away, no matter where one went.

  “Let me try,” Sharpe uncharacteristically volunteered after one look at Violet. The poor girl had ended up wearing most of the soup she'd taken to Quill. Nel had been moments from taking her wand to the Kelpie's backside but had ended up dabbing at Violet's face with a wet cloth instead. Fortunately for her and Quill, the girl had escaped any serious burns. It was only Quill's latest outburst since they passed through the blockade, but Nel was through letting him get away with it.

  “Why is every place like this called Rim?” Violet complained, looking out at the dreary staging outpost unhappily as Nel tended to her.

  Like Cauldron, it had an artificially created envelope, though by the simplest of means. A raft of ships that would likely never fly again, dry docks and planking nailed together to form a floating platform. Ships the size of the Tantamount could pull right up to the station without disrupting the envelope too much. Larger vessels, ships the size of the Mangonel Falling, of which there were none presently, had to ride out beyond the station's envelope and wait for the ferry craft to transfer their cargo. A tedious and inefficient exercise. In more peaceable times any larger ship would have made the journey further in to Grange itself. Rim would have been nothing more than a brief customs stopover, if that. Most planets had a Rim, an outer edge where the bare minimal amount of trading and such was carried out. Sometimes it was a moon, an asteroid, or a barren rock. Often settled by the dregs of planetary society, they made for a trash ridden landscape, like a city slums with inhabitants to match. Nel was hoping their visit would be a short one.

  “Tradition,” Sharpe told her helpfully when he returned from soothing a savage Kelpie navigator. “Saying you're a Rimworlder is like saying you're a peasant.”

  “In what way?” Violet twisted her face away from the washcloth. Nel grabbed her chin and held her, wiping firmly at the girl's grubby face.

  Sharpe shrugged. “It's all anybody will ever see you for, or want to.” He turned around in a slow circle. “I haven't been here in years. Doesn't look like anything's changed.”

  “You used to live here?” Violet made a face at Sharpe. “It smells terrible!”

  Sharpe gave her a pained look. “We can't all grow up in fairy tale castles, little princess. Some of us have to start at the bottom.”

  Violet's head came up with wide, curious eyes. “What was that like? Did you ever join a Lane gang? How did you get out? Did you stowaway on a ship like I did?”

  Sharpe gave Nel a helpless look.

  “You got her started,” she told him unsympathetically, bundling the cloth into a ball and pitching it down the length of the deck. “That's as clean as this one will get. You deal with her now.”

  “I didn't actually say I was one of those people,” Sharpe told Violet. “Just that some people are. A lot of them in fact, but I'm not one of them.”

  “One of the seething, stinking masses,” Quill called derisively, having come forward to squint at the layout of their destination.

  “Exactly,” Sharpe called back. He'd learnt to be quick when Quill started baiting him. The comradeship was wearing thin as Quill's usual nature took over. The Kelpie had been short with all of the crew since the run-in with his kin, Violet just the latest victim. Even the captain had been on the receiving end of his forked tongue lashing. That hadn't gone down well.

  “Just a regular human, that's me,” Sharpe agreed.

  “Close enough,” Quill spat. “Cursed humans. Filthy vermin, all of you.”

  “Quill!” Violet objected. The earlier lesson was apparently lost on her, despite the soup still matting her hair. “Watch your mouth! Or that's the last soup you're getting from any of us.”

  “It will be a pleasure not having to find fur in my soup, runt,” the navigator told her. “You are no better than the rest of this crew. A human with a tail, more or less.”

  “More, rather,” Sharpe commented. “Two tails in fact, if we're counting.”

  Nel glanced at Violet's backside. It was hard to tell she still had two tails. The bushy extensions poked through a flap in her breeches but wrapped around each other in an interlocking corkscrew.

  “We are not,” Quill retorted.

  “No, we're picking another fight,” Nel interrupted. “And we are likely to be assigned to clean up the galley slops if we don't get our scaly mouth muzzled and minding its own business. Consider yourself relieved. Go find your bed, navigator. You're not helping yourself today.”

  “Helping,” Quill muttered as he stomped past them all on his way below deck. “I miss Cauldron already. At least the vermin there gave us excuses to exterminate them. Here we are supposed to . . . help.”

  “And we all know how much you love to help your fellows, Quill,” Nel told him not so quietly as he passed. The comment cut deeper than any barb she could have thought of. Quill's look had daggers in it and the obscenities grew more colourful as he made himself scarce.

  “It comes back to haunt you sometimes,” Sharpe said.

  “What does?”

  “Your style of command, Skipper. Whatever happened to all that Alliance discipline instilled in you? Floggings, kissing the gunner's daughter, that sort?”

  “Captain doesn't approve,” Nel said.

  “Captain doesn't run the ship.” Sharpe folded his arms. “Humour me. You let this crew get away with things that would see them whipped bloody on other ships. Why?”

  Nel hesitated. Her encounter with her former captain was still fresh in her mind. “You sailed on the Falchions?”

 
“Aye, saw the bosun raise his cat more than once, too.”

  “And the whole crew watched and said nothing.”

  “Of course they did. That's part of what discipline is.”

  “That's the part I don't like,” Nel said. “I don't want my crew to have to stand there. If they think I'm wrong I want them to tell me.”

  “Quill thought you were wrong.”

  “His argument wasn't good enough.”

  “You're a complicated woman, Skipper.”

  “Are we going to look around, Skipper?” Violet asked, fidgeting at the rails. “It's been a long time aboard.”

  Nel had almost forgotten the girl was there. “The last time I took you off-ship you got yourself kidnapped.”

  “I didn't get myself kidnapped,” Violet objected.

  “That's true, she had help,” Sharpe agreed.

  “And Sharpe's been teaching me some stuff since,” Violet said.

  “Teaching?” Nel growled. She glared at Sharpe. “What have you been teaching her?”

  “Nothing,” he protested. “Well, all right, not nothing. But nothing you need to worry yourself about.”

  “Don't tell me what I worry about.”

  “Just things to look for, Skipper,” Violet assured her. “What to watch for, who to watch for, same as you do.”

  “Same as you do.” Sharpe couldn't keep the smirk off his face. “See?

  “Don't compare yourself to me,” Nel said. “And Violet, don't you be getting confused about whose lessons you ought to be following.”

  “Aye, Skipper,” Violet said, trying to sound serious.

  “Aye, Skipper,” Sharpe echoed, waving a mock salute.

  Nel looked at them both critically. “Fine, we're going in. The three of us.”

  “The three of us?” Sharpe repeated. “Including me? Wait, why? You never want me to come along.”

  “This is your backyard,” Nel reminded him. “Maybe you'll be useful.”

  Sharpe nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “And maybe I can find someone to take you off my hands.”

  “Ah,” Sharpe sighed. “Your ulterior motive. I'm crushed.”

  Violet nudged him in the ribs. “Don't be giving the skipper any ideas, Sharpe.”

  Sharpe stared. “Good point, little princess,” he conceded. “Good point.”

  “You told me you'd been practicing.” The skipper had that disappointed sound in her voice again. Violet sighed.

  “I have,” she insisted. “Piper's been teaching me.”

  “Still not enough, it seems.”

  “Not his fault, Skipper,” Violet defended her friend and tutor. “That message Scarlett had me send was hells hard.”

  “Shouldn't have been.”

  “There were seven breaks to it, Skipper. Seven.”

  “Seven?” the skipper repeated. “Seven breaks or it took you seven attempts? All you had to do was tell them where we were docking. How do you use up seven breaks saying that?”

  Violet was about to repeat the litany of coloured flashes Scarlett had dictated to her when she caught sight of where they were. She stopped in her tracks.

  “People live like this?” Violet whispered.

  Sharpe stopped too. “Amazing, isn't it.” His voice sounded ragged and he coughed into his hand. “Rim actually boasts a bad part of town.”

  “Sharpe, don't,” the skipper's voice came from behind. Violet felt her hand on a shoulder.

  “Don't what?” Sharpe asked her. “Look around you, Vaughn. I don't have to say anything, this is how the other half live.”

  They were in the slums, on the far side of Rim. Docklands warehousing where what Sharpe had bitterly called the “subsistent” population made their homes. There was no weather to speak of in places like Rim—it lacked even the basic thermal activity of Cauldron. Some of the buildings Violet had seen didn't even have roofs, others had walls that were in the midst of falling down.

  Every now and then on the journey over they had come across bridges of ships. Old mothballed vessels that had become part of the town, wrapped up in reused planking and gantries until it was hard to tell where the ships ended and other buildings began. Near the edges of Rim the ships were more recognisable as former sailing vessels. Still clinging to their identity, as if they might breakaway at any moment for one last voyage.

  This was no way for a ship to go out, the skipper had said, so quietly Violet didn't think she meant herself to be heard. Violet agreed, but it was the people she noticed more than the ships. The people who'd cannibalised those ships for planks and sails to scrounge together a home. Tarps and tent-like structures made up those dwellings, crammed with people who stared at the well-dressed, well-fed trio strolling through their community.

  Up until then Violet had never thought of herself that way. But here she was uncomfortably aware that she was insulting these people just by parading around in their world. She didn't belong and everyone knew it.

  “This isn't living,” Violet said quietly. “Even home was better than this.”

  The skipper frowned at her words. But the skipper didn't know there were reasons Violet and those her age left home—to stay was to be forced to compete with those above her. Better to return when you had levelled that field. But here . . .

  “No, you're wrong, Violet,” Sharpe corrected her. “Bad as this is, this is still living. It gets worse than this. When you see carts hauling the dead and the not-quite dead away, then you'll understand what . . .”

  “Sharpe!” the skipper snapped, stepping up until she was right in his face. The man chewed on the ends of his words, obviously wanting to keep spouting.

  It was the most upset he'd ever acted around Violet. During his rescue, during her rescue, he'd been an ocean of calm. Here something was getting to him. From the time he'd come onto the ship he hadn't seemed to take anything seriously, buying into the rough house camaraderie aboard the Tantamount. Now he exchanged heated words with the skipper, words Violet couldn't hear as they were in hoarse, strangled whispers. Sharpe gestured around them expansively and the skipper put her hand on his chest, grabbing a handful of shirt. A warning, a threat, the skipper being the skipper.

  “There are so many of them. Why are there so many?” Violet gestured around them. She saw families but there was something wrong with most of them. There were people missing from the basic units. Too many children and not enough adults.

  “Refugees.” Sharpe stepped away from the skipper, his shoulders slumped. “Fleeing the war. But this is as far as they can get. A pathetic little station on the backside of nowhere. Past here they run straight into that blockade, and no one here has the kind of coin to buy passage past that.”

  The more Sharpe talked the deeper the lines on the skipper's face got. Violet saw the woman take a long look around them.

  “Skipper.” Violet tugged at her hand. “Is there anything we can do for them?”

  “We brought the medicine, Violet,” the skipper reminded her. “That's a lot by itself. We are helping.”

  “You really don't care about anyone outside of your ship, do you?” Sharpe said.

  The skipper's eyes narrowed to slits. “Stay here,” she said to Violet, grabbing Sharpe's arm and pulling him away again. Violet turned away but strained her ears to catch what was said this time.

  “Whatever your problem is, stow it.”

  “Doesn't it bother you, Skipper?” Sharpe's voice was bitter, resigned. “Look at all the misery around you. Can't you feel it?”

  “It's not my problem. I've got my own issues, this isn't one of them!”

  “I figured you for better than that.”

  “Then you figured wrong.”

  “Your old captain was right, Vaughn.”

  “Right about what?” The skipper's voice rose. “Hells, Sharpe, you weren't even on deck when she was. I saw you run and hide when they came aboard.”

  Violet heard a scuffle behind her and risked a look. Sharpe had pulled the skipper clos
e, her face inches away from his. He wasn't bothering to keep his voice down either. “She was right. That medicine we brought, that you brought, you think the likes of these will ever see a drop of it? Think it won't go straight to the war effort, never mind the people who might actually need it?”

  “I didn't start this war.” The skipper pulled away. “Don't expect me to try and solve it.”

  Sharpe grabbed her shoulder. “The ship's bursting at the seams. No one would miss a single box, even several.”

  “Keep your voice down,” the skipper hissed, pulling him close again, enough that their faces were practically touching. “The last thing I need is you . . .” She whispered the rest, half looking to see if Violet was looking. Violet tried to look like she wasn't.

  “I get that you're angry,” Violet heard her say, “but this isn't something we can fix. Coming out here was a mistake, we're heading back to the ship. I'm getting Scarlett, her golem, and this hells-damned cargo off my ship and then I'm turning her back to Cauldron. Now. Violet!” she called loudly. Violet jumped.

  “Back to the ship,” the skipper told her. “Stay close, no running off.”

  “Yes, Skipper,” Violet said. She turned around and started the long walk back towards the docked Tantamount.

  “This is just Rim,” Sharpe said as he walked past her. “Can you imagine what it's like on Thatch and Grange?”

  “Ignore him, Violet,” the skipper said, catching up. “He's just bitter.”

  He has reason to be, Violet thought.

  “Castor!”

  The man who ran up to Sharpe was as ragged as everyone else they'd seen. Even in a place made of recycled ships and wooden planking there seemed to be an excess of dirt, much of it on his face, and an absence of clean water with which to wash it off.

  The man staggered to a stop, hands on his knees, hair falling over his face. His shoulders heaved up and down but he didn't seem to be breathing hard. “You're back.”

  Sharpe stiffened, a spasm that ran down his back and he glanced at Nel and Violet before facing the man.