My father called it regrouping.
Kirov had a lot of knowledge in his head—about pirates and all of their allies. Evan was right; Falcone had trained Kirov well in a lot of areas, not the least of which was intel gathering, but with it came a good deal of indoctrination. He wasn’t particularly cooperative, was extremely distrustful, but Musey said a few shifts in Macedon’s brig might change his mind.
I thought, The pirate wanted out for a reason. He wanted to help, he just didn’t know it yet.
If we built a strong case against Damiani’s ilk and sent it under the wire to Admiral Grandpa, it might eventually take the wanted sign off Macedon’s hull.
We real popular, Erret Dorr said. You never feel more alive than when somebody’s got a gun to your head.
They visited me. Musey, Evan, Erret. Even Lieutenant Hartman and Aki, who got me anything I wanted if I just asked her when she passed my room or checked on my chest bandage. I binged on chocolate for a week. Doc Mercurio told me this wasn’t what he’d meant by a physical exam, but if I got sick on candy he’d use that as an excuse. So I stopped.
Musey and Evan brought me music in a hand player, with earbuds, and Musey said there were a few tracks in there from Aaian-na, if I wanted to listen. They had a stringed instrument sort of like a guitar and he thought I might be curious. Courtesy of Nikolas S’tlian, he said, who had asked what I was interested in and wished me a swift recovery.
“It’s pretty good,” Evan summarized. “But it’s a bit quiet for my tastes.”
Quiet didn’t sound too bad to me.
Musey said, “I’m sorry we lost you on deck,” as if I were a hat that had fallen off their heads. His earnest concern made me smile.
“Well, at least you found me. If you talk to Otter let him know I’m grateful.”
Musey nodded, hovering at my right while Evan sampled some of the medbay food at my bedside, making faces but eating it anyway.
“So,” Musey said. “Get better. If you still want to learn more hand-to-hand.”
“Only if you teach me.”
“Who else?” he said. “I’m on orders.” One side of his mouth twitched and he patted the blanket by my leg, briefly, before turning and leaving the room without even a goodbye. Like a real symp.
Evan wiped his hands on his shirt and grinned at me.
“Better watch out, next thing you know he’ll be asking you on a date.”
That made me laugh and it hurt my wounded chest, but I didn’t care.
Two weeks of solid mending and I was ready to move. Stubborn Marines, jets, or captains had nothing on stubborn rich sons. I was out and walking about, albeit like an old man, using the bulkheads as a guide and prop in my blurried progress through the decks. They all volunteered themselves to watch over me in shifts, like I was some sort of favored pet too stupid to find the litter box on his own.
“Get out,” I said finally to Dorr, whose turn it was, as he followed me to the bathroom in my father’s quarters. “Enough. Get out.”
“Don’t you need help? Can you see to aim for the bowl?”
I was all ready to be mad before I realized he was joking. Punk jet.
“I may not be able to see well, but your fat head is a large enough target,” I said.
He laughed and tousled my hair. I didn’t care, since ultimately he left—after threatening me to keep my new tag-comm handy in case I needed anything.
Once I was alone I squinted at the ship’s map in my comp, memorized which levs went where, and went down the decks to the brig.
My father was going to kill me, but that would be later. For now I rode to the bottom of the ship, far away from even the loudest sounds of the drives. The brig was truly buried in the belly of Macedon, where crew and captain could forget about you if they didn’t like what you said or did. The jet at the monitoring station in the cold, steel-ridden room looked surprised to see me but I said, “Captain okayed.”
Sons hath their privileges. And it was fascinating what a smile, big eyes, and an appeal for pity toward the injured could do to a jet’s resolve.
“Just don’t go too near the cage,” she said.
I didn’t intend to. Despite the barrier between us, I kept a meter distance between me and Kirov, as he leaned on the gate.
“I heard you were alive,” he said. “Congrats.”
I stared through the bars at his flat blue, moisture-rimmed eyes. The light was bright in his cell and I saw him more clearly than I had in the underdeck, even with my damaged sight. He was bruised on his face and arms, his hair looked darker, matted and long, and he still wore the same clothes he had in the tunnels.
“Congrats to you,” I said, with as steady a voice as I could manage. Even with the barrier between us I half-expected him to jump through and grab me to finish his work. “You’re holding out here.”
“It ain’t so hard. I like jets.” His mouth pulled in a smile, half-hearted.
“Why don’t you just cooperate?”
“For what?” His gaze slipped to the side as if he was bored.
It wasn’t boredom. I saw it now in the way he chewed on the edge of his thumb, creases formed at the sides of his mouth as if he was trying to stop something distasteful from falling out. It was a despair so ingrained it occupied the slightest of his looks or movements. Even if my father came here personally and opened the gate, this pirate would doubt the intention.
“You thought he could help you,” I said. “He still might. If you help us.”
Kirov snorted and didn’t answer. He turned and went to the single cot in the cell and dropped down on it, feet up on the mattress, knees bent.
“The only reason you’re alive,” he said, “is ’cause some stroke of luck made them find you in time. You don’t think your papa realizes this? I killed you for all intents and purposes. I meant to. Now go away, Dead Man.”
He was young, or at least he looked it. Evan’s age. Maybe my age. He had the snarky attitude of someone too used to associating at arm’s length.
“Where are you from, Yuri?” I asked.
A moon colony like my father?
“Do you have a family?” I asked.
Like my father’s brothers?
He tilted his head on the pillow and stared at me. Even from a distance, and with my blurry sight, I felt his sudden sharp attention.
He didn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe I’d hit some spot in him that nobody had yet aimed for, or maybe I’d missed completely.
It didn’t matter. He was going to be on this ship for a while, and I was going to come back.
I was in my room playing my guitar because I could shut my eyes and do it, just feel the strings and hear the music, when Sid visited. He sat on the other side of the bed and leaned on one hand, and I opened my eyes and saw him up close with a little less blur and grayness than a week ago. He looked like he’d lost weight in those weeks since Austro and some permanent lines had appeared around his eyes that weren’t from laughter.
But he still smiled for me. “When’re you going to grace the ship with a live concert?”
“Ha ha. Never.”
“Ah, c’mon, when you feel comfortable we can put you out on station and you can earn some extra cred busking on the deck.”
I laughed, but then we both remembered that the only station we could dock at lately would be one deep inside striviirc-na territory. Sid looked down at the bedsheet and sighed.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a thought.”
“Sid.” I watched his face, dreading what I might see there. “You know… you’re not really caught up in this. I’m sure my father would let you go to one of Mac’s sister ships and they could take you back to Earth. To your family. Your mom.”
He looked at me, surprised. “I’m not really in this? You’ve been my family for seven years—and counting, Ryan.”
“I mean… you’re an EarthHub Marine. And you were ordered to accompany me. They couldn’t hold that against you.”
“Rya
n…”
“Maybe it’d be good for you to be away from the Azarcons for a while. We tend to draw fire.” I tried to make it light.
He wouldn’t be, not now. “But it’s my duty to be here, Ryan, and I’ll always be here if you ask.”
It wasn’t just duty. I saw it in the way he looked right into my eyes. Like he always had, unperturbed by anything I might throw at him.
“What about you?” he said. “You can always go back to Earth and stay with your grandparents. If you didn’t want to be on ship. I’d go with you.”
It was an option. But he’d have to go as my guard again, because Earth wasn’t safe. Especially now. And going to school, camping, riding horses, and tanning on roofs seemed more than a world away. I thought about being away from my father. Or my odd mix of friends that I had somehow made on this ship.
I couldn’t do it.
I think he knew my answer, but he wanted me to hear the question.
I said, “Joanne Martin commed me. She said Mom left her estate entirely to me.”
He nodded; it wasn’t anything that surprised him, but any mention of my mother always made him quiet.
“I want you to help me.”
“Of course,” he said, without hesitation, without even asking for details.
That was Sid.
My grandparents on Earth crowded in front of their coded and secured comm so they were both in the frame, and both of them could tell me they loved me and I was going to be all right, and even if Grandpa himself had to send an assassin after Damiani he was going to see my father and me in person sometime in the near future.
“Take care of your father,” Dr. Grandma said, which I thought was odd until I thought about it, and she continued, “He needs more than the Hub’s support right now.”
“I know…” One day, I figured, I was going to sit down with my grandparents and ask them what it had been like, to live and put through school an eighteen-year-old Cairo Azarcon. I had the feeling they would talk to me now, that my father wouldn’t mind the additional stories to whatever he might tell me himself. What had he looked like when Grandpa took him off Falcone’s ship, and how had Grandpa ever convinced him to toe the line long enough to graduate from the Academy?
Had he thrown him into it and ordered the education, like the captain had done with me?
When had they started to love him as their own son?
It must have been something extraordinary for my grandparents, who’d had two daughters through their own blood, to take on a headstrong pirate orphan.
Maybe they didn’t see it as so special, though. Maybe it was just something they couldn’t ignore, that my grandfather couldn’t deny when he was on a battleship in deep space, seeing the ramifications of the war on families across the Hub. Maybe he even felt a little responsible.
Maybe my father did, and thus his crew. Filled by Dorrs and Hartmans, and Museys and Evans.
“I’m glad you two at least are together,” Grandpa said.
Especially because Mom was gone.
The distance between our comms seemed too far, when I remembered those sun-drenched breakfasts in their home in the summers.
My room in my father’s quarters seemed cold by comparison.
Then I heard the hatch open from the outside room and my father’s voice called out, coming closer, “Ryan? Are you in here? Let’s go to dinner. The cook’s outdone himself for you.”
And that was familiar. That was the warmth that picked me up and set me exactly where I belonged.
I told the captain at one of our recent dinners, “I want to do something about these war relief agencies that aren’t properly helping people. Maybe with all the cred Mom left me. Maybe I can set up some sort of fund, I don’t know. I’m still working out the logistics. But people need to know… you should tell people…”
“Tell people what?” my father said.
I rubbed my sore eyes. They were healing, but slowly, and they still ached if I didn’t shut them every few hours. I took a deep breath to test the healing there and the tightness in my chest was a little less than it had been.
“How it is out here,” I said. “The truth. When Kirov talks… you have to help him so he wants to talk… we could let the Hub know for sure what Damiani did. What the Family of Humanity are into and their connection to her.”
“Intel is often slow in coming,” he said, “and slower still to be compiled and transmitted, especially now that we’re cut off from official channels.”
“Official channels never bothered you before.”
He smiled. “True.”
“And if you transcast or drop news, if Musey sets it up or something so you can burndive, they won’t be able to stop you, or charge you, or anything. I mean… you’re already rogue, what’re they going to do?”
He watched me. “I’m not sure mine is the best face to put on things right now. Maybe once things settle down.”
Oh.
I pushed my food around on the plate. “Maybe.”
“I haven’t given up,” he said.
“I know.”
“Many of my comrades are still on board with the peace, and we’re going to make it work in the Dragons. Eventually, hopefully, once the truth comes out… we’ll be able to return to Austro. And Earth.” His tone tread lighter. “You won’t be stuck on this ship forever.”
“Dad,” I said, “that’s not an issue for me.”
He took a sip of his water. “Oh?”
“I mean, sure, I’ll want to go back to Austro at some point. Or Mars. Or Earth. Anywhere. But…” Hiding out on planet or in an executive tower wasn’t going to help me anymore. Or help anybody.
“But?”
I set the fork down and rested my hand on the table by my plate. “Yuri went into piracy because Falcone recruited from a relocation camp. He told me. Evan’s been showing me stats of pirate attacks on camps and merchants, dating right back to when you—at Meridia.”
He tilted his chin at a slight angle, interested but cautious. “What are you thinking?”
“There’s got to be some way to help these people. And the kids. The government’s not doing it properly. Jos told me about NGOs. And… Mom left me a lot of assets. And cred. We can transcast. We can make it known… what it’s really like in those places. Like where you come from.”
I didn’t know what was in my words, particularly, that made his stare so wide and his eyes so curiously bright, despite their dark color.
But I told him what I wanted to do, and how, from what I’d hashed out with Sid and Joanne Martin, across comms, and how in some way I planned on never forgetting that I’d had blood-related uncles and grandparents with the same last name, and maybe the captain could fill in those blanks. And maybe there were things he didn’t know that we could find out. Had he asked Admiral Grandpa about any of those files?
“No,” my father said. “I actually never had. At the time… I’d just wanted to forget. Maybe that sounds odd, but—”
I told him it didn’t. At all.
And then I told him about Earth, and why if we ever went back I’d want him to go with me.
To Hong Kong. And to London.
To that hotel where Sid had found me.
It was my first time saying it aloud, and I had to admit that maybe it hadn’t been unintentional, maybe I’d just been weak and selfish and too weighted. But I looked that memory in the face like I looked at him. One started to fade, like some pains do, and the other stayed fixed, like love or decision.
I commed Shiri a week later and I admit I took some pleasure in her shock.
“All this time you were on Macedon and you didn’t tell me. Are you okay?”
“That seems to be all you’ve been asking lately.” I tried a smile on her and touched the edges of my eyes, habit now when they pained me.
“You have to stop getting into trouble and then I’ll stop.” She stared at me as if she could gauge my health through the comp screen. “I’m so sorry about your moth
er, Ryan.”
I nodded. I wasn’t going to get into that in private or in public. Not for a while. Or ever. “I’m comming because… if you still want to impress Paulita Valencia and land that story, I can set it up.”
She stared. I looked back and wondered what she saw now. Maybe it was my altered vision, but Shiri seemed closer than a comm’s usual perspective, her eyes darker and more intense.
She said, as if she thought I was teasing her, “Your father’s going to talk to me? Really?”
It would make her career.
“Not yet,” I said, taking a deep breath. It settled my heart and sharpened my words. “But I will.”
About The Author
Karin Lowachee was born in Guyana, South America, and grew up in Ontario, Canada. She holds a creative writing and English degree from York University in Toronto and taught adult education for nine months in Canada’s tundra community of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. Visit her on the web at www.karinlowachee.com.
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