by Zoe York
A soft knock sounded at the door.
Ying jerked around, wiping her eyes. Her hand dropped to her waist, to the spot where she usually wore a laser pistol, but of course all she wore now was that stupid robe.
She pulled the biggest knife out of the block and crept toward the door. It might be Marat. He ought to have had enough time to go to a ship and come back by now. But why would he knock? He had paid for the room; the door would open for him. She waved at a sensor, lowering the lights so shadows would hide her if someone charged inside.
The door slid aside, and she tensed, her hand tightening around the handle.
“Ying?” came Marat’s voice.
She waited to see if he was alone before responding. It was always possible someone had apprehended him and forced him to point the way back to her.
He leaned inside, his broad-shouldered form framed by the light of the hallway. “Ying?” he asked again, a note of concern—or maybe disappointment?—in his voice.
“Are you alone?” Ying asked.
Marat straightened. “Yes.” He held a bag aloft.
She blew out a relieved breath, though a weird jitter of emotions filled her gut at his reappearance. He hadn’t abandoned her. He had come back. With groceries!
She rolled her eyes at the excited burble from the back of her mind, annoyed that his presence, or lack thereof, had affected her that much. Her emotions were wobbling on a tightrope tonight.
“Well, quit loitering in the hallway where someone’s going to see you, and get in here,” she said, her voice sharper than she had intended.
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t sound chagrined at her reprimand.
After the door shut behind him, Ying waved to bring back up the lights.
Marat handed her the bag. “Let me know if you want help with anything. I couldn’t mix peanut butter and jelly and keep them from coming out horribly, but I’m fair with cutting things.” He fished a security sphere out of his pocket and headed for the table. “But let me get the camera activated first. I stuck it behind the potted fern—those are plastic plants, did you know? Not surprising, but why even bother if they can’t recycle CO2?”
“I noticed that, yes,” Ying said, oddly pleased that he had. With a name like Azarov, he wasn’t from Grenavine, not unless, like she, he had taken a different name after the world had been destroyed. But she supposed there were people on other planets in the system who cared about plants and their usefulness. “Thank you for...” coming back, she almost said. “The groceries,” she finished with instead.
He blinked at her, as if surprised by the gratitude. Just because she didn’t simper all over a man didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate favors.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“Are you hungry or did you eat aboard your ship because you weren’t sure I’d make something safe for you to consume?” Ying removed the vegetables from the bag, impressed that he had found some fresh ones instead of all freeze-dried versions in need of reconstitution.
“I am hungry. I didn’t eat there because I trusted you wouldn’t poison me—especially since you presumably haven’t been able to go out and shop at the apothecary, or wherever it is one purchases poison ingredients. I also was busy skulking around and trying not to be noticed, both on the station and on the ship.”
“Why on the ship? And, for your edification, I usually shop at laboratory supply stores. Or I use common ship’s items. I’m more of a chemist than an herbalist.”
“Edification?” Marat had been programming the security device, but he looked over at her now. “I had no idea pirates used such fancy words.” He grinned, probably to let her know he was teasing, nothing more. She caught herself staring back at him—at the grin. It brightened his face so much that she hadn’t realized his normal expression was on the somber side.
“I wasn’t always a pirate.” Ying wished she could come up with something clever or witty to say, to encourage that grin of his to stick around, but nobody had ever accused her of being a comedian. The closest she came to wit was when she was angry and insulting someone, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that endeared a woman to a man. Not that she wanted to endear herself to him.
“No? I got the impression your family ran a ship and that you’d grown up in the life.”
“I’ve been with—I had been with—my father for ten years, but before that, I lived with my mother and my sisters on Grenavine.”
Marat blinked a few times. “You’re from Grenavine? I wouldn’t have guessed from—well, I guess you admitted Ying wasn’t your real name.”
“That’s been my first name for... long enough.” Ying pulled out the vegetables and began chopping them. There were a couple of automated dicing machines, but she had always preferred the tactile experience of preparing food by hand. “My mother was enthusiastic about education, wanted me to go to a university and become a chemist or pharmacist. I was more into adventure. I left home when I was fourteen to find my father, my real father, not the one she married after realizing my father was never going to give up his pirating ways. I wanted to see the stars and everything in between, not sit in some boring lecture field. At the time, I had no idea... Well, my wanderlust was the only reason I didn’t die with the rest of the planet, my mother and sisters.” She stared down at the tomato beneath her blade, wondering why she was sharing all this with Marat. She didn’t share her background with anyone. Was she truly that lonely for company after a few months alone?
“Sorry, that must have been hard,” he said. “Huh, you’d actually fit in better on the ship than I do.”
Ying frowned over her shoulder at him. “What ship?”
“The Albatross. My ship. Well, Mandrake Company’s.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the captain is Grenavinian, and so is a lot of the crew, especially the inner core people that were there back when Mandrake formed the company.” Marat left the table and joined her at the kitchenette, picking up a knife and grabbing an onion. There wasn’t another chopping board, so he started cutting on the countertop. The knife probably couldn’t harm the puke-colored faux stone composite.
“Not that Striker, I hope.”
Marat grunted. “I don’t think so. I mean, I know he’s been there a long time, but I don’t think he’s Grenavinian. I’m not sure he knows the difference between a plant, a rock, and his own brain.”
“Are you sure there is a difference?”
“Not entirely, no. I’m just hoping he didn’t tell the captain about...” He glanced at her and didn’t finish.
“Me?”
“Not so much you as my leading an attack on a pirate captain’s personal android bodyguards. I’m not one of those core people that the captain thinks kindly toward. I mean, I don’t think he thinks unkindly toward me after Midway 5, but we had a rough start.”
“What does that mean?” Maybe this was her chance to find out why he had become a mercenary.
“The circumstances of my joining the company weren’t exactly—well, there was no résumé process, that’s for sure.”
When he fell silent, she made an encouraging noise, hoping he would continue.
Marat pushed aside the chopped onion and started in on the basil. “I got in a fight with three of his men in a bar. I was thrown into a holding cell, and he—the captain—came down personally to see me, to decide if he wanted to press charges. This was on a fairly respectable station, the one orbiting my own planet as it were, and they have laws about beating people up.” His lips flattened, and he gave the wall of the kitchenette a distasteful look, one perhaps meant to encompass this station, one where a person would have to commit murder before the law stepped in. Even then, with enough money, the charge could be made to go away. “Anyway, I messed up one of the men and left a few dents in the others.” He gave her a quick glance—a nervous glance? Worried she would judge him? “That’s not something I usually do, getting into senseless fights, but...” He was chopping the basi
l much more finely than the recipe required—than any recipe would have required.
Ying reached out, resting a hand on the back of his wrist, mostly to stop him from pulverizing the leaves, but a part of her wouldn’t mind if he found the touch encouraging, or maybe comforting, and continued the story.
“Mandrake offered me the option of sitting in jail for the next year, or whatever the judges and lawyers decided on, or he would drop the charges if I joined his outfit for two years.”
That wasn’t quite the information she had wanted—she was wondering what had prompted him to get into the skirmish in the first place. She believed his statement that getting into fights wasn’t usual for him. He didn’t seem like someone who would back down from a confrontation, but he didn’t seem like someone who would hunt out trouble recklessly, either. Except perhaps when defending the honor of naked women in an auction house.
“I doubt he would have bothered with most people,” Marat went on, “but I had a military background and knew how to put out fires. He didn’t have anyone else in his company with that specialty.”
“Put out fires? Real fires?” Ying wriggled her fingers to mimic the dancing of flames.
“Yes. First wildfires back home, then on space stations and ships. I was a firefighter when I was in the Fleet.”
So, he had been a soldier before becoming a mercenary. That wouldn’t have been her guess, even if he looked like someone who could take care of himself in a brawl.
Ying dumped the ingredients in the pressure cooker and started water for the noodles.
“I didn’t start out in the military,” Marat said, as if reading her thoughts. “I was going to the university on Novvy Moscow, studying to be an astrophysicist, if you can believe it.” The way his mouth quirked suggested he couldn’t. “But I always loved the outdoors. Did a lot of camping and star-gazing as a kid, and when we had a few drought years and there were a lot of fires breaking out in the wilderness, I signed on to help fight them in the summers. An army recruiter came to the university one day, talked some of us into joining up with promises of seeing the entire system. I was always a restless kid, and it appealed. My parents weren’t happy. I was one semester shy of finishing my degree. Always said I’d go back. They’re still waiting.” He found exactly two plates, dented and scratched and stained, in the cupboard. He set them on the table along with equally battered forks, spoons, and chopsticks.
“Do you get along with them?” Ying tried not to envy him for still having his parents.
He didn’t answer right away. He was paying particularly close attention to setting the table, making sure the forks and spoons were aligned just so. “We get along, but I’ve been avoiding them lately, especially Mama. It’s easier that way. Sometimes family means well, but they smother you with their concern, you know?”
“I would give anything to have family around to smother me again.”
He winced. “Sorry, that was a thoughtless comment.”
Ying waved away his words, though it irritated her that he didn’t know how lucky he was to have his parents alive still. She was fairly certain he was older than she, but he hadn’t yet learned the lesson of appreciating something before it was gone.
She finished preparing the meal in silence, and Marat returned to checking the camera. It couldn’t be that time-consuming of a task, but he probably felt he had offended her.
“Hm,” he said, leaning close to the display.
Ying brought over the noodles in the pan, since the kitchenette had a dearth of bowls. “Something?”
“An android just walked through the lobby.”
An uneasy lurch twisted her stomach. What would she do if they were found? Go along with Marat’s idea? Claim that he had stolen her and that she’d had no choice? What would Wolf’s men do to Marat if they believed that story? What would they do to him, regardless of any stories? Even if there hadn’t been any footage to identify Marat or Striker, Wolf could guess who had stolen her based on Marat’s interest at the auction.
“An android that looks familiar?” she asked.
“One that looks a lot like the one Striker blew up.”
“It’s a common model.” Ying sat down beside him, waving for him to replay the video. Despite her words, her stomach sank further as she watched it walk out of the elevator and past the potted fern. The camera had swiveled to follow it. The fronds occasionally blotted out the display, but it showed enough. The android had walked to the display of the map where Marat had paid for the room. It was standing in front of it.
Marat skimmed forward to real time. The android was still standing in front of the holodisplay, now talking to someone.
“...security override required to obtain occupant names,” it was saying.
The response, coming out of the android’s comm unit, was too soft to hear. It sounded like a male voice though. Wolf’s?
“I am not certain, sir,” the android said. “The information on her last-known whereabouts was given to me by an untested informant. As you suggested, I paid him ten aurums, but I cannot be certain if this amount purchases accurate data from an unknown human being.”
“Her,” Ying whispered.
“Yes, sir,” the android responded to the comm. “Shall I wait here?”
“No,” Ying said.
Apparently, the android received a different response, because it turned its back to the wall and took up a guard position between the fern and the holodisplay. Ying hoped it wouldn’t notice the camera.
“What do you want to do?” Marat asked.
“I don’t suppose you have any more grenades?”
Marat dipped a hand into a trouser pocket and pulled out a gray, bullet-shaped Mig-37, one of the more powerful hand-thrown grenades on the market, one definitely not approved for on-station or on-ship combat. “I thought it would be best to come back prepared for trouble.”
Ying snorted softly and looked toward his trousers. “Oh, yeah? What else do you have in there?” As soon as the words came out, she realized she had set herself up for a dirty joke.
Marat’s eyebrows did twitch upward. “I’m not sure we’ve reached the stage in our relationship where a man is supposed to reveal all of his armament.”
She squinted thoughtfully at him.
“You don’t agree?” he asked.
“No, I agree. I was just trying to decide if that was dirty or not. I’m used to blunter men. Is that how astrophysicists make penis jokes?”
His eyebrows did more than twitch this time. “No, astrophysicist jokes show a preoccupation with rockets and missiles. That was artillery humor. That’s the section I work in on the ship when I’m not putting out fires.”
“So you blow things up, ensuring they catch fire, then you trot over and put out the flames?”
“More or less. It’s a combination of positions that ensures job security.”
Ying found herself wishing he would grin again. Or at least smile. Oh, his eyes were crinkling slightly at the silly conversation, but that earlier grin had apparently been a rare expression. Too bad. He had been quite handsome when it had been on display. Not that he wasn’t attractive otherwise, something she could well judge, since she was only sitting a foot or two away from him. There were a few flecks of gold in his light brown eyes, something she hadn’t noticed earlier, an interesting contrast to the solid, dark brown of her own eyes and those of the men from the Death Knot.
Her father and most of the ship’s crew had been descended from one of the few Chinese colonies that hadn’t intermingled with the rest of the system, and everyone had spoken Ancient Mandarin as well as the American-Russian amalgamation that had become the standard after GalCon unified most of the system. Ying, having grown up on the commingled Grenavine, hadn’t learned to speak Mandarin until after joining her father. She had tried hard to fit in, but somehow, she had never felt as Chinese as the rest of the crew, something that had been driven home after her father’s death.
“Is there something in my e
ye?” Marat asked.
Ying shifted and looked back at the display. Fortunately, while she had been gawking at him, the android hadn’t moved. “No, sorry. I was thinking of—” home, she almost said. “It’s only been three months since my father’s death. A lot of things still make me think of him.”
“Sorry. I know what it’s like. Losing someone close.” He winced, and she wondered if she had assumed too much earlier when she was thinking he didn’t value his parents enough or hadn’t lost anyone important. “And it’s probably not a promising sign when a girl looks into your eyes and thinks of her da.” Marat’s lips twisted ruefully. He pushed his chair back, standing up.
“It’s nothing like that.” Ying regretted that she had made him leave. Why had she said anything?
“I’m teasing.” Marat grabbed the silverware, jammed it into his pocket, and headed for the kitchenette. “Let me see if there’s a container. We should go, but I’m not leaving dinner for Wolf’s team of androids.”
“Does that mean you think we should run instead of blowing that one up?”
“Well, if we’re not here when the pirate’s men bust down the door, then we could still try our story in the morning. Just because they didn’t find us, doesn’t mean we hadn’t found another spot where you could bash me over the head with lamps.” Marat gazed toward the bed. “Maybe we should even break a lamp before we leave. A cheap one. I don’t want a big damage fee to be subtracted from my account.”
“Just a box theft fee?” Ying pointed to the container he had found and was pouring spaghetti sauce and noodles into.
“Exactly.”
“Perhaps if we left the lamp on the floor, unbroken, that would be sufficient.” Ying didn’t know how much it would matter, if the android was the one to inspect the room. It would doubtlessly remember stray lamps on the floor, but it might not start thinking of reasons they might be there.