He hoped she wasn’t playing a prank. He turned around and headed aft, wherever that was, just kept walking in the opposite direction, through twists and turns, until he bumped into another lev. If they’d post signs this wouldn’t have been a problem. If he’d brought a map maybe that would’ve helped too.
Well, too late. He wasn’t sure he could find his way back, all the passageways looked the same, and the lev opened up promptly anyway, with a startling growl. He got in and told it, “Training deck.”
It agreed, and shot down with a bit of a jar. Definitely not Austro maintained.
It stopped and announced, “Maindeck.”
“Hey, I said—”
The doors grated open and a pile of crew pushed in. Some were sweaty men and women who had been working on repairs, it seemed. He backed up to the wall, couldn’t see over half the shoulders. Somebody said, “Get the next one, mano, we’re overcrowded.”
“Fattest ones oughtta take the stairs,” came the reply.
“There’s another lev down that way,” said a female voice.
The lev said, “Please clear the doors.”
“Yo, back on up, Bucher.”
“I’m late for my duty shift, mano, gimme a break.”
The lev said, “Please clear the doors.”
Ryan gritted his teeth and elbowed his way through the bodies. “I’m coming off, okay?” He got free in the corridor, after some shoves and nasty looks. “There. Now you should all fit.”
The doors shut. The jet standing outside—Sanchez’s buddy, Bucher—glared at him.
“Thanks, sprig.”
He didn’t answer; the guy was twice his width in muscle and must have remembered their first encounter. He moved past quickly down the corridor, thinking to find the other lev that the woman had mentioned. All he saw for a few minutes were the same bland corridors with their bland gray walls. Signs of battle peppered the way; bloodstains, blackened pipes, and gouged vents followed him around one corner and the next. Crew dug in at various locations applying maintenance with blowtorches or paint, or otherwise treating the wounds of the ship using tools he couldn’t identify.
He turned a corner into a cleaner, empty corridor just as a hatch up ahead opened and out from the room walked an unfamiliar soljet, then Musey and a strit.
He stepped back before he thought, with an instinct to run. In case of a station attack, please proceed to designated shelters… the biannual school announcement sped through his mind, dredged up from years of drills. Safe behind the corner, he peeked around and watched. Strits had never been to Austro, it was too far in the Rim. The only symps he’d seen (besides Musey) were quick glimpses of arrests when he and Sid happened to go past one of the polly precincts on station. Citizens would stand outside shouting insults. The symps there hadn’t looked stritified.
All the images in his head of tall, pointy-toothed white faces came from the Send and propaganda vids.
For a second it seemed like the strit was no more than a human in elaborate costume—it had the same human shape, two arms, two legs, though they were a bit lengthy, and even had hair, though it was silver-white and feathery-long. It wore clothes, just like in the vids, those coiled mummy-like strips—all white—except down the sides that were open and free for the iridescent wings to hang out. Wings under the arms, from wrist to waist, lined with what looked like creases but maybe they were veins.
So it seemed human, until it turned around and he saw its face—the completely black eyes that made it look as if it had no eyes at all, except they reflected the corridor lights in small shards. The intricate silver tattoos covering the area around its eyes and down the edges of its cheeks barely masked the bone structure, which was decidedly not human. It was too bold, too chiseled, created by the hands of an entirely different god.
If strits believed in gods. The Send said they didn’t.
White face and white clothing meant assassin. Or assassin-priest, as they called themselves. Kill someone then pray over them, he had no idea. Information wasn’t entirely reliable on this side of the DMZ. He heard its voice, words that seemed more of a song than speech, talking to Musey with the jet close by.
Musey was a small, dark body beside the unnatural lack of shading on the alien. They spoke briefly, Musey spouting back the same language, though it seemed much more labored coming from his mouth. Then a third figure— human—emerged from the room, accompanied by another jet.
This one had to be the Warboy. The Send had never captured an image but there was no mistaking the deep indigo tattoo on the right side of his face—a pattern almost as complicated as the strit’s—or the serious, almost-strit hardness of his human expression. The white coiled clothing around his lithe form was partially covered by a long black robe. Ample place to hide weapons, though Ryan was sure the jets would’ve checked him. The Warboy stayed by Musey’s shoulder, taller than the strit (who was in fact not much taller than Musey), with long black hair and, surprisingly, an olive-tan, human skin tone. The Send said the homeworld symps had altered pigmentation like the strits, but apparently not the Warboy.
The backs of his hands were covered in similar tattoos. He laid one on Musey’s shoulder and muttered something that seemed to make one of the strit’s wings flutter in response. The two jets hovered just out of arm reach. They were both visibly armed and notably expressionless.
Then the captain and the admiral stepped out of the room, with a couple aides and a nervous-looking Minister Stellan Taylor of Alien Affairs in tow. The entire group of them started down the corridor toward Ryan’s position.
He backed up quickly and walked, looking for an open hatch, trying every other one, but all were locked.
“Dammit.”
A corridor junction sat ahead on his right. He jogged to it, glanced over his shoulder.
The group had turned the corner. His father saw him, but didn’t say anything.
He took that junction and walked faster still. Deep breath.
Strit on the deck. It was guarded, of course, and it was all for peace talks, yeah, but—
His skin crawled. He bit his thumbnail as he walked.
It wasn’t an actor in makeup, wasn’t a holo image. Of course it wasn’t human, that was the point, but it wasn’t like looking at a wild animal in the zoo or a pet dog on a leash. Wild animals were still from Earth and pet dogs still ate from your hand, he’d played with one that Sid had grown up with, when they’d visited Texas, and he’d looked into its little dog eyes and knew it recognized him in some instinctual way. He was human, and humans had a long relationship with domesticated dogs. The dog had wagged its tail and licked his face. His ancestors had played with dogs just like Sid’s, and there had been a mutual understanding, passed down through genetic memory.
Strits weren’t from Earth. You looked in their eyes and they were all black and they had little pointed teeth. They weren’t friendly animals, they didn’t think like animals, they had an unpronounceable language, and wings, and they didn’t take prisoners of war, everybody said, they just killed you outright if you didn’t serve a purpose.
They blew stations and gutted them of valuables, even people, then skipped back behind the DMZ, out of reach. And symps who grew up on their planet were practically alien, they somehow leaped over the human species and landed elsewhere, somewhere without humantype thought, where assassins could be priests and little alien kids were taught how to kill people before puberty.
If aliens even had puberty.
Had Musey grown up like that? How the hell had he fooled anybody on this ship, being a symp acting human?
Because symps were human.
Right.
He stopped and leaned against the bulkhead, looked around to figure out where he was going and if he ought to just find a lev and go back to quarters.
Find a lev and find Sid, maybe. Tell him, damn, he’d seen a strit up close.
That was enough to last him a lifetime.
He couldn’t fathom having one of
them touch him. Or even having a symp like the Warboy touch him, like Musey had allowed. How did you stand so close to killers like that and not want to go the other way?
Of course Sid had killed people in his line of work, plenty of people in the numerous theaters of war he’d been in since he was seventeen on Earth. The captain had killed people too, though maybe from a distance on a ship or a hunter-killer. And something about Admiral Grandpa’s smiles always seemed more like a friendly maître d’ than a brass-tacked commanding officer. Besides, he’d seen Grandpa in pajamas when he’d stayed over at their house in Virginia one week in Spring Break.
None of them looked—like killers.
Well, what did killers look like? The baddies in a Tyler Coe vid?
Wake up, Ryan.
This was his father’s world.
The ship had small echoes in these corridors for such a large vessel. He found himself near a metal stairwell, in a pocket of inactivity, no footsteps or opening hatches or voices from crew on duty. Maybe they’d all vacated this deck because of who else was on it, or maybe he was just in an unvisited part of the ship.
Macedon had recently been through a battle. People had died. Macedon was older than his father’s command, he knew that much. It’d had one other captain who’d taken her out of the shipyard brand-new over three decades ago. The ship had probably endured many battles, numerous retrofits, upgrades, patches, and polishes.
He wondered where the dead went.
His damn imagination. He didn’t need to be thinking of that, with an image of a strit’s demon-white face and black eyes already in his head. Childhood fears belched up anew, now that he was alone, surrounded by steel and cool, caressing air. As if real life weren’t disturbing enough.
He walked, annoyed at himself and his runaway melodrama. He was nineteen years old, for crying out loud, and he didn’t need to sleep with a light on. Strits were flesh and blood, jets killed them all the time, and whatever nightmares he might get, aliens didn’t play into them.
Bodies and blood.
He blinked, looked around, stuck his hands under opposite armpits against the ventilated chill, and considered tapping his tags for Sid, just to ask for directions.
He should’ve loaded up that damn map into his slate.
Or taken the stairs. Dammit.
His Austro-trained tendencies never looked at stairs as a route of travel. Levs existed for that purpose. But this wasn’t Austro; a station had signs.
So he turned around and went back the way he’d come, instead of heading in directions he had no points for, and actually rediscovered the stairwell. Barely lit, dusty thing. He started down the perforated steps. Training deck was below maindeck. Right.
Threads of gray smoke floated up past his feet.
He stopped and squinted.
A pair of eyes looked up at him from below the steps.
He moved back up, holding the rail, heading for the corridor again. Almost turned and ran before a voice said, “Hey. You lost?”
It was a human voice, young and male, and the smoke smelled—now that his heart slowed to a normal beat and he paid attention—like cheap cigrets.
He peered down through the holes in the steel.
“Come round,” the voice said. “Just down a flight.”
He walked, unintentionally clanking his way with heavy steps, and met up with a young guy who sat across a single stair, legs slightly bent to accommodate his height in the small width. The bottom of his right boot was propped against the rail post. One arm rested across that knee with a cig between his fingers. He took a drag on it and looked up at Ryan with bruise-blue eyes in a pale narrow face. His hair was jagged long around his cheeks, unkempt, light blond. He wore black fatigues and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up, no telltale jet unit patches anywhere.
“You lost, sprig?” he said.
Ryan leaned against the rail a couple steps above him. “No. And don’t call me that. Why’re you just sitting here?”
“Havin’ a smoke. You want?” The boy drew out a pack from his leg pocket and offered it up. His gaze went up and down and back up and he tossed his head a little to clear his eyes.
Ryan felt the stare. He almost accepted the pack but then thought of the hell he’d get later if Sid smelled it on him.
“No, it’s all right. I was just going down.”
The boy grinned. “Be my guest.” He didn’t move. And he still held out the cigret pack.
Ryan found his eyes sliding from the Macedon tattoo on the boy’s right wrist and up to another, darker tat just below the inside of his elbow.
The boy said, “Like it?”
It snapped his attention up to the unblinking eyes. “I don’t know. What’s it of?”
The boy pocketed the cigs with a little shrug. “My old ship emblem. Shiva.”
“The Hindu god of creation and destraction.” The tat’s image had the three-eyed face and weaponry and even a vaguely phallic shape behind it all, in red. Odd symbol for a ship.
The boy looked surprised and his gaze seemed clearer as he stared up at Ryan.
“That’s right. You heard of it?”
“Just the name, from school, not the ship. Why would you name a ship that? Shiva’s a god, isn’t he?”
“Of creation and destruction. Good and evil. You know, contrasts.” He sounded like he was reciting something. “It fit, anyway. What’s your name?”
“Ryan.”
“Evan,” the boy said. “Siddown before you give my neck a cramp. You sure you don’t wanna cig? You look like you need one.”
No cig, but he could talk to the kid. Evan seemed normal at least. Ryan sat on the step, arms on his knees, and shook his head. “I just saw a strit.”
Evan gave an unimpressed sniff. “Yeah, they’re on the ship now, aren’t they.”
“You’ve seen one before?” If he was a jet, then it was possible.
“A couple times. I been over on the Warboy’s ship.”
He stared. “And you lived?”
Evan smiled, but it didn’t seem to be because of the comment, which Ryan had meant seriously. “Cap can charm a snake, they say. So what’re you doing?”
“Doing?”
“On this ship. You don’t look like a jet.”
“I’m not, I—” Could tell the truth. “I’m here because of my father. The captain.”
He waited for the inevitable reaction—kiss-ass or tease.
“Oh.” Evan stared at him for a second, letting the cig burn, then he put it to his lips with a kind of slow distraction. “Poor you,” he said, around the stick.
Ryan laughed. That was new.
“No offense or nothin’,” Evan continued, blowing out a fast stream of smoke.
“Don’t worry, none taken. So what do you do on this boat besides smoke in stairwells?”
“Keep people happy,” he said. “Same as I did on Shiva.” He laughed.
“Why’s that funny?”
“‘Cause it is. You wanna go to q?”
“Quarters?”
Evan reached up and behind him, grasped the rail, and hauled himself to his feet. He dropped the butt end of the cig and squashed it with his boot, then jerked his head toward the stairs leading down. “Yah. Wanna?”
“Um, actually I was on my way to the library.”
“For what?”
“Just to look around. My father wants me to acquaint myself with the school or something.”
“Do it later. I’ll even take you, I know all that library shit, I had to run progs on the system. C’mon, mano, I’m bored and you’re the next best thing on this ship.”
Hell, he was halfway bored himself, and Evan, like Shiri, didn’t seem to care who he was.
And it was better than going to school.
Ryan stood and walked down until they were side by side. “Next best thing to what?”
Evan grinned at him. “To screwin’ the captain.”
He almost stumbled on the last step. “What?”
/>
Evan laughed. “Don’t you know the hierarchy of power on ships? The divine right of kingpins?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Alliances. Figure the captain, but if the captain don’t want you, figure the favored son.”
He stopped walking. Evan went on ahead a few strides before turning around with a question on his face.
“You think you’re going to win my father somehow by winning me?”
Evan stared at him as if he’d spoken a different language, then laughed again. “Hell no. Everybody knows you and your daddy are on the outs. Besides, I ain’t serious. Mac ain’t no pirate. I’m just proddin’ you.”
“Of course Mac isn’t a pirate.”
“That’s what I said. Now smooth your feathers and c’mon.”
It might not have been a good idea but he went anyway. Evan took him through jetdeck, where his father had expressly said not to go, but he’d been here already with Sid, and anyway, Evan seemed to know quite a few people—personally. He stopped at one girl and backed her to the bulkhead, talking fast and quiet, and Ryan thought he caught more than their mouths communicating. In a few seconds Evan walked off, motioning Ryan forward with a tilt of his chin.
Ryan glanced behind him at the cornered girl, who stared after them with bright eyes. He looked at Evan. “What was that?”
“Just business.”
“What kind of business?”
Evan snorted and dug in his pocket and lit another cigret with a finger-band lighter. “What’re you, a polly?”
“No, just curious. I have to tell my bodyguard something about where I’ve been.” He smiled to show it was a joke.
“Oh, I seen your bodyguard. He’s real cute an’ Mariney. He just guard your body and all?”
“I’m not even going to answer that.”
Evan laughed. “What a waste.”
“Really, what do you do on this ship?”
Evan stopped by a hatch and lifted one of his tags from inside his shirt. “Crew Recreation and Morale. In its broadest sense, sometimes.” His eyebrows lowered and his smile went up.
Ryan couldn’t believe he was so bold about it. “Doesn’t my father, like, forbid that?”
“What, sleeping around? He ain’t that much of a dictator. Besides, it gives me protection.” He slid his tag through the lock and shouldered open the hatch.
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