by Jason Fry
Immanuel muttered his name as he nodded over Kate’s hand.
“Are you insane?” Yana asked, red dots chasing each other around her scarf. “She’s from Earth.”
“So?” Tycho replied. “He’s Saturnian and from belowdecks.”
Immanuel stepped forward, eyes cold.
“And what do you mean by that, then? If’n I didn’t know better, Master Hashoone, I’d think I was bein’ insulted.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Tycho muttered.
“Yes you did. So which is worse: Saturnian, or belowdecks?”
Tycho blinked at Immanuel for a moment, conscious of Kate’s eyes on him. Anger flared in him but almost immediately withered away into embarrassment.
“I’m not sure what I meant, Mr. Sier,” he said. “But I owe you an apology either way.”
Immanuel’s eyes narrowed, but then he nodded.
“All right then,” he said. “No harm done.”
“Come on,” Yana said to Immanuel, taking his hand and leading him back up the ramp. A last flurry of colors marked her departure.
Tycho exhaled, looking at his boots, then reluctantly raised his eyes to meet Kate’s.
“Well,” she said. “That was certainly exciting.”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Which part?” Kate asked, taking his hand again.
“Any of it,” he said disgustedly.
“The first part wasn’t your best moment,” she said, drawing him toward her. “But the apology was gracious. There are plenty of important men and women on Earth who can’t own up to a mistake. It’s part of the reason the solar system’s in the mess it is.”
“That’s true where I come from as well,” Tycho said.
“So that’s settled,” Kate said. “Now here we are surrounded by fake plants in a deserted corridor on a freezing asteroid—what could be more romantic? Come here, Master Hashoone.”
20
ELFRIEDA’S STORY
Tycho stared at the ceiling of his room, wishing sleep would come while knowing it wouldn’t. Finally he gave up, activating his mediapad and blinking unhappily at the sudden glare, then glowering at the numbers displayed there: 0549.
He padded into the kitchen and found his sister already there, face illuminated by her own mediapad. She glanced at him and grunted—Tycho wasn’t sure whether that was because of the early hour or their unexpected encounter the night before.
“I was thinking about bells,” Tycho said quietly, taking the seat next to her.
“That’s way too random a statement for me to deal with right now, Tyke.”
“I was thinking it’s hard to sleep without them.”
His sister sighed. “I thought I was the only one.”
They exchanged quick smiles. Then Yana looked back down at her mediapad.
“But that’s crazy,” Tycho said after a moment. “If you want people to sleep, the last thing you should do is ring a bell every half hour. Yet apparently that’s what I need.”
“Right.”
“How did I learn to sleep with them in the first place? It must have driven me crazy, when we started bunking belowdecks. But I don’t remember.”
Yana looked skeptical. “You don’t? Really?”
Tycho shook his head.
“It never bothered you,” Yana said. “I was so jealous. It took me most of our first cruise to get used to those stupid bells.”
Tycho tried to remember discussing that with his sister, back when they were apprentices, but if they’d spoken about it, he’d forgotten. He found that faintly disturbing—it hadn’t been that long ago.
“The bells aboard the Gracieux drive Kate crazy,” he said.
“That’s because she’s a civilian—they drive all civilians crazy. On the way here I’d find Mr. Vass in the cuddy at all hours, working because he couldn’t sleep.”
Tycho frowned, wondering if his sister had had her own conversations with the intelligence minister.
“So I guess you and Kate made up after your argument at the banquet,” Yana said.
“You could say that. How did you and . . . Immanuel get together?”
“Unarmed-combat drills. Dobbs made us partners.”
“That must have been awkward at first,” Tycho said, getting up.
“At first,” Yana replied, eyes back on her mediapad. “Then . . . well, not so much.”
Tycho paused, then looked at his sister. “What do you think Mom would say?”
“I’d rather not find out. What do you think she would she say about you and Captain Allamand’s daughter?”
“I feel the same way you do.”
“So that’s settled then.”
Tycho opened the wall cooler. “Do you want a jump-pop?”
“We’re out. Mr. Speirdyke should be here before long to start making breakfast. I’m hoping he bought some.”
“Not likely,” Tycho said, sitting back down. “But hey, there’ll be burned coffee.”
Yana made a face.
“What are you reading so avidly over there, anyway? Love notes from Mr. Sier?”
“Belay that, Tyke. There’s a big scandal on Titan. Jovian Union investigators discovered someone’s been diverting funds from refining operations to secret accounts for the last two or three years.”
“Diverting funds? Like for a concubine or something?”
“Not with this many livres. Unless whoever did it was supporting a whole moon full of concubines.”
“Right,” Tycho said. He was too tired to worry about some scandal on distant Titan, yet he knew he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep—and he hated the idea of sitting around waiting for the rest of their family to get up.
“You know, Grandmother has jump-pop,” he said.
Yana looked up, considering the thought. “Is her place even open now?”
“If Grandmother can earn a livre, she’s open. Our recall order isn’t till 1000, right?”
“That’s right,” Yana said. “Fine, I’ll go—someone has to keep the crimps off your back. Another day of searching for ships that don’t exist. I can’t wait.”
Tycho couldn’t see what had alarmed Bazaar’s merchants and early-morning shoppers, but he heard the familiar rattle and bang of shutters coming down and saw anyone young and fit enough to catch a crimp’s eye hurrying to make themselves scarce.
He and Yana turned toward the brilliant sign adorning the Last Chance, where clerks had brought half the shutters down while Elfrieda’s goons stepped forward, ready to swing their heavy iron bars like clubs.
“Come on,” Tycho said, hurrying toward the depot.
One of the guards stepped into their path.
“Get lost,” he growled.
“But we know Elfrieda,” Tycho protested, catching sight of her at the center of the depot. “Grandmother!”
She turned at the sound of his voice, frowning. “Let those two in, Bix.”
The goon stepped aside, and a minute later Tycho and Yana were inside the shuttered depot with the rest of Elfrieda’s customers. The spacers and shoppers trapped inside peered wearily at monitors hanging from the ceiling that showed the nearly deserted dome outside. They sighed and muttered about lawlessness and what they were going to say if they were late.
Tycho craned his head to see past the shoulder of one of the guards. A woman in threadbare robes was alone in the dome, possessions bundled in a blanket, looking frantically from shuttered stall to shuttered stall.
“Hey!” Tycho said, shaking the guard’s shoulder. “We need to let her in!”
“No we don’t. Shove off, kid.”
“Elfrieda!” Tycho said, getting his grandmother’s attention.
Elfrieda shook her head. “Don’t know her.”
“Forget it,” Yana said when Tycho started to object. “She doesn’t care.”
Tycho stared anxiously at the feed from the security camera until the woman moved out of range.
“Whoever she was, she’s fine,�
�� Yana said. “Probably scooted into the next tunnel.”
Yana elbowed her way to the counter. After a moment, Tycho followed her.
“Two jump-pops, please,” she said. “An orange and a lime.”
Yana handed over a few coins and Elfrieda counted them, then placed the bottles on the counter. Tycho stood beside his sister, peering up at the monitors.
“So how’s the buried-treasure business, Tycho?” Elfrieda asked.
“What? Oh. So far it’s not working out. Um, how was your nip with Grandfather?”
“Oh, we had a good time,” she said, her eyes turning to Yana. “I do adore that old pirate. He’s always been trouble. But then trouble’s part of the fun, isn’t it?”
Yana smiled thinly and extracted her mediapad from her jacket. Elfrieda’s gaze lingered on her granddaughter for a moment, then returned to the monitors overhead, where a group of men in jumpsuits was looking around Bazaar with puzzled faces.
“Those are mine inspectors, not crimps,” she scoffed. “Everybody around here’s acting like a bunch of old biddies recently. Bix! Open up!”
As the shutters rose, Yana nudged Tycho. “I’m going back to the fondaco. Are you coming?”
She saw he was about to protest and rolled her eyes. “If you must know, Immanuel messaged me.”
Tycho glanced at his grandmother, then back at his sister. “I’ll see you at the ship, okay?”
“Gotcha. Watch out for mine inspectors.” And with a smirk, Yana was off.
Elfrieda watched her go, then turned and found Tycho looking at her. “I suppose that’s another member of the family who doesn’t much like me,” she said.
“I think she thinks you want to be left alone.”
“That hasn’t run you off,” Elfrieda muttered, and anger swelled in Tycho. But then he saw that his grandmother’s eyes were sad and felt his anger drain away, replaced by pity.
“Word of advice, kid—don’t listen to grouchy old battle-axes,” she grumbled. “Especially first thing in the morning.”
He supposed that was an apology, or the closest thing to one that he would get. Elfrieda was watching his sister stride off toward the Westwell.
“It’s amazing how much she looks Carina. Or like Carina did, before it happened.”
Some mean little part of Tycho wanted to ask Elfrieda how she remembered what Carina looked like, considering she hadn’t seen her in years. But he held his tongue.
“And your brother?” Elfrieda asked.
“He’s fine. Got a tip yesterday that led to us capturing a prize, in fact.”
“You make that sound like bad news.”
When Tycho just shrugged, his grandmother nodded.
“Oh, of course—the battle for the captain’s chair. The competition that’s been tearing Hashoone families apart for centuries.”
“It’s—it’s not like that.”
“It isn’t? Then why are you unhappy about a prize?”
“I’m not unhappy about the prize . . . ,” Tycho said, groping for words and finding them all inadequate.
For a moment he was tempted to tell her everything. Perhaps if his grandmother knew what he had done, how he had conspired with the Securitat, she’d be able to advise him how to react to Carlo having made the same mistake.
But that was crazy. Elfrieda was his grandmother, but he barely knew her.
“I’m . . . it’s complicated,” he said.
“It always has been. And now it’s come between you and your brother.”
Tycho shook his head emphatically. “No. That isn’t true. I . . . I love my brother, of course. But we’ve never been close.”
“And why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know. We’re just different, I guess. And maybe because I barely knew him, before the Comet. He left Darklands when Yana and I were little kids.”
Elfrieda nodded. “I remember. As long as you’ve known your brother, you’ve been competitors. What if he becomes captain and you don’t? I’ve seen what that leads to, you know. I saw it rip apart Huff and my daughters. By now you know your grandfather was going to name your aunt as the next captain, right?”
“Yes. And I know my mom and dad weren’t going to accept that. I know they planned to join Cassius Gibraltar’s crew.”
“That’s right. Which made Huff angrier than I’d ever seen him. He ranted that he’d been betrayed, that Carina had dishonored the family and now Dio would destroy it. And that was on his good days. On his bad ones he told me it was all a plot of Cass Gibraltar’s, a plan to eliminate the family starship and then the family name. Carina marrying Sims, Dio and Mavry joining the Ghostlight—he saw Cass as behind all of it and swore he’d stop it somehow.”
“By doing what?” Tycho asked.
“Oh, it wound up not mattering. Sims and Cass died. Huff nearly did too. Carina . . . well, you’ve seen what happened to her. And so Dio became captain while knowing she wasn’t his choice. Just like your grandfather always knew she’d planned to defy him and walk away from it all. They’ve spent every day since then living in the shadow of that.”
“I know what Mom and Dad’s plan was,” Tycho said. “But since she became captain, Mom’s followed the old tradition. She’s done everything she can to teach that tradition to us and to make it work.”
“I know she has. And of all the bad decisions your mother has made in her life, that’s the one I find hardest to forgive.”
“But it wasn’t the wrong decision!” Tycho said. “Yana and Carlo and I have talked about this. We have our differences, but we know the stakes—and we’ve never let the competition get in the way of our shared goals as a family.”
“That’s because you haven’t lost yet. You all still think you’re going to win. But two of you will be wrong.”
“I know. We all know. But . . . the tradition is bigger than any of us. We have an expression, ‘The family is the captain—’”
“Don’t you dare say that horrible old proverb in here!” Elfrieda said, loud enough to make heads to turn in her direction. “Huff was whispering that bilge to my children before they could even sit up. It’s cherished by the winners and despised by everyone else. You think Ulric Hashoone still recites it at his home? Or Josiah? Or Philemon? Do you?”
Tycho remembered the resentment on the faces of his great-uncle and his cousins—the ones who’d been passed over for the captain’s chair and consigned to a life spent dirtside.
“Probably not,” he admitted.
“Believe me, they don’t,” Elfrieda said. “I know because I was rotting away at Darklands when Ulric and Josiah were left dirtside—and I was still rotting there when Philemon quit. They felt abandoned. They were abandoned. Just like I was.”
Elfrieda picked up a box of carbine batteries and began to sort through them, separating the different models and slapping them down on the counter one by one. Tycho stood silently as his grandmother’s voice rose.
“Oh, it was all such fun at first,” she said, shoving a mislaid battery into the proper pile. “Huff would sweep in with silks and jewels, flinging livres around and regaling everyone with his latest adventures. When Johannes gave the crew leave, we’d be off to Ganymede—or Huff would send tickets for a liner and tell me to meet him on Vesta, or even Mars. But the waiting? That wasn’t so much fun. Saying something and waiting for your husband to hear the words and react? Or sending a message into the void and fearing there would never be a reply? No, that wasn’t fun at all.”
Slap slap slap went Elfrieda’s hands on the counter. She flung the empty box aside, heaved another one onto the counter, and smacked its magnetic release.
“Huff wasn’t there when your aunt was born, did you know that?” she asked. “Or your mother. It was me and a pack of flea-brained nurses and governesses—all of whom thought I was the luckiest woman in the solar system to be wed to a dashing pirate. The luckiest woman in the solar system, sitting in a hole on Callisto.”
She stopped and looked down at the
batteries scattered across the counter, her anger momentarily spent.
“Is that why you left?” Tycho asked hesitantly.
Elfrieda looked up and Tycho wondered if she’d forgotten he was there. Then she laughed, a curt bark without a trace of humor.
“Oh, I left a few times. But yes, you could say that was why. Do you know the worst part? In a terrible way, I was glad when your grandfather came home after 624 Hektor.”
She stopped for a moment, drumming her fingers on the counter, then shook her head and continued.
“He was so badly injured that the doctors on Ganymede said he might not live unless they turned him into a brain in a tank—some experimental procedure the scientists had in mind. I told them no. I knew he’d rather die than become like that. I prayed for him to live, and he did. And I thought at least I had half a husband back, after all these years of not having one at all.”
Elfrieda looked down at her hands, the box of carbine batteries forgotten.
“He lived—and then he went back into space,” she said. “Not to be captain, not to be anything. Just to be on that ship of his.”
Her eyes scanned the little kingdom of her depot.
“Your brother packed his gear a month before his birthday, do you remember that?” she asked, smiling faintly. “He was that excited—told everybody he was sure he’d get to fly the ship on his first day. And I saw what the rest of my life would be like. I’d sit in that hole with a shattered daughter and two more grandchildren who’d grow up counting the days until they could go into space themselves. And then I’d wait for two of them to come home bitter and broken, if they came home at all.”
Tycho just stood there, stomach churning and cheeks hot. He’d been too young to remember Elfrieda at Darklands, but he did remember many childhood afternoons he’d spent asking adults about the day he’d get to leave, or telling them the amazing adventures he’d have once he did. Then he had left, and his family’s ancient homestead had become a place to endure, an interruption of life aboard the Comet. And he’d rarely if ever thought of those for whom the fractured plains of Callisto represented normal life.
Elfrieda shook her head. “I couldn’t do it, Tycho. Not even for another day.”