by Jason Fry
Sanford turned pale. “You wouldn’t.”
“Tycho, check your sister’s seals. Carlo, do the same for Mr. Dobbs.”
“Aye-aye,” Tycho said, unstrapping himself and waiting next to Yana’s station as she zipped up her suit.
“Captain, I must protest this barbarism!” Sanford stammered.
Diocletia ignored him.
Yana rotated her helmet in the groove of her suit’s collar, locking the two together, then cinched her gloves closed.
“Your seals are green,” Tycho said.
“Green over here,” Carlo said.
“Stand by to evacuate the atmosphere,” Diocletia said.
“Wait!” Sanford said. “I’ll unlock the controls!”
Diocletia nodded to Dobbs, who cut the zip ties on Sanford’s wrists and marched him over to Carlo’s station. The Earth crewer began hurriedly typing out commands.
“I am called Pathfinder,” said the deep, calm male voice of the Leviathan’s AI. “How may I assist?”
“By giving me the sticks,” Carlo said.
“Acknowledged,” Pathfinder said.
“Earth ships are closing,” Tycho said. “Twenty thousand klicks.”
“Take these men below, Mr. Dobbs,” Diocletia said. “Mavry, cast off. We’ll be right behind you.”
Carlo yanked his helmet and gloves off as the Leviathan’s control yoke rose from beneath his station. He gripped it and exhaled, peering at the view from the rear cameras half a kilometer behind him.
“We’re detached and heading out,” Mavry said over the comm.
The Leviathan’s bells clanged out eight times—it was midnight.
“Here goes nothing,” Carlo muttered.
The deck shuddered beneath their feet, but nothing else seemed to happen. Tycho looked questioningly at his brother. But then he realized the dromond was moving slowly but steadily backward.
“This is like pushing a boulder with your nose,” Carlo said through gritted teeth, sweat running down his forehead, and Tycho thought with a scowl that he felt that way when he was flying the Comet—a nimble ship barely a tenth the length of the dromond.
“We’re clear of the asteroid, Leviathan,” Mavry said in their ears. “But company’s coming.”
Carlo’s eyes jumped between the viewports and his monitors.
“Gotta cut to starboard,” he said to himself, pushing at the control yoke. “Come on, baby, move.”
The rock wall ahead of them was more distant now, with a lattice of struts and girders stretching from the end of the hollow asteroid past their vantage point.
“Little more to port, I think,” Diocletia said.
“I know!”
“Proximity alert,” Pathfinder said.
Carlo shoved at the control yoke and the Leviathan shivered, a vibration passing through the hull.
“Ugh, too far,” Carlo muttered.
“Impact,” Pathfinder said, sounding disappointed. “Assessing damage.”
“You just scraped her fenders, kid—that’s what they’re for,” Mavry said reassuringly. “Keep coming!”
Tycho and Yana looked at each other anxiously.
“I’ve got it now,” Carlo said. “She takes a long time to respond is all—makes it hard not to overcompensate. Let me line her up. Almost, almost . . . there. Okay, hang on!”
The Leviathan gained speed, the rock wall retreating rapidly in front of them. Tycho imagined he could feel the enormous weight of the huge ship now—her mass and her growing momentum.
The lattice inside 124996 became a blur on either side of them. Then they saw the entrance to the hidden hangar and the black expanse of space—the Leviathan had emerged from the asteroid. Carlo gasped, his head dipping forward momentarily, and Yana gave a cheer.
“Silence on the bridge,” Diocletia said.
Carlo flipped switches and shoved the Leviathan’s control yoke hard to the right, sending the massive dromond’s bow swinging to starboard.
“I have three Earth ships and several pinnaces at five thousand klicks—and six Jovian craft between us and them, in defensive formation,” Yana said.
“That will be our friend Captain Allamand, I expect,” Diocletia said.
“Patching the Jovian ships through to a shared channel,” Tycho said. “And plotting a course back to Cybele.”
“Pathfinder, display colors,” Diocletia said with a smile. “Jovian, if you please.”
Cheers erupted over the shared channel as the Nestor Leviathan began broadcasting her reclaimed identity.
“Nice flying, son,” Mavry said, and even Tycho had to smile at the relief on Carlo’s face. Then an alert on his console chased his joy away.
“It’s the Gracieux—she’s hailing all craft,” he said.
“Captain Hashoone, I presume?” said Allamand. “It seems I must congratulate you on an elegant rescue—as well as a remarkable display of piloting. Let me assure you that the prize is yours, with no need for further hostilities. Your crewers will find the cargo untouched—our intention was to restore the Leviathan to her proper owners once the current regrettable situation was behind us. Which it soon will be, I’m pleased to report.”
“What do you mean?” Captain Andrade demanded. “I don’t know of any parley.”
“Things are happening back on Cybele,” Allamand said. “I’m informed that our envoys are negotiating steps to defuse this current confrontation. Captain Hashoone, may I ask after my prize crew?”
“We have five fatalities,” Diocletia said. “I’m sorry for it. The remaining crewers will be freed at Cybele, of course.”
“Thank you. One more bit of business, if you’ll allow me. Might I address Master Tycho Hashoone?”
Tycho looked up in mingled surprise and dread, conscious of his siblings’ eyes on him. Diocletia frowned, but nodded at Tycho, who hurriedly searched for the setting that would broadcast his voice across the open channels.
“I’m here, Captain,” he said, trying to keep the quaver out of his voice.
“My AI informs me you’ve been a guest aboard my ship, Master Hashoone—along with your mediapad. Which explains why we are meeting at this particular location.”
Tycho tried to force his vocal cords to work. “That’s correct.”
It was very hard not to call the man on the other side of the transmission “sir.”
“My daughter . . . ,” Allamand began, then paused. “My daughter is innocent in ways you and I can no longer claim to be. You have conducted yourself rather badly, Master Hashoone. All victories have a cost, but I suspect you will come to regret the price you’ve paid for this one.”
I already do, Tycho thought, staring at his hands in his lap.
“That will do, Captain Allamand,” Diocletia said.
“All in all, captains, it’s been an honor to match wits with you,” Allamand said. “I believe we’ve put on a splendid show—one I hope has satisfied our leaders back home, so that cooler heads may now prevail.”
“They’re moving off,” Yana said. “Heading back toward Cybele.”
“Time for us to do the same, then,” Diocletia said. She freed her black hair from its ponytail, shaking it out, and closed her eyes for a moment.
The bridge was silent as the Leviathan churned steadily toward distant Cybele. Then Diocletia spoke again.
“Tycho, duty compels us to take actions we’d rather avoid. Things done for family, for country, or for both. And often that duty comes with regret.”
She offered him a small smile, but he shook his head, determined to deflect the praise he’d so often sought.
“I didn’t do the right thing,” he said. “If I could do it over again, I’d make a different choice. An honorable choice.”
Diocletia’s smile vanished. “Then the Jovian Union would be worse off. And so would your family.”
Tycho nodded numbly, pierced by the realization that he’d never again see Kate smile at him, never see warmth in her dark eyes. He’d never get to lo
se his fingers in the tangles of her black curls, or watch her hurry to cross the distance between them more quickly. He had thrown all that away—not by accident or through inaction, but deliberately.
“Would you really have done it, Mom?” Yana asked. “Opened the ship to vacuum?”
Diocletia’s eyes searched the stars spilled across the void beyond the viewports. “We had a mission. I would have completed it.”
24
BROTHERS
It was an hour into the middle watch when the Jovian and Earth craft returned to 65 Cybele, holding their positions as various captains insisted—with the exaggerated politeness of recent enemies—that the other be first to dock or land.
The arrival of the Leviathan sent Cybelean traffic control into a frenzy, with a harried administrator first claiming that the dromond would have to wait until morning to dock. Diocletia’s suggestion that she could park the Leviathan in the middle of the traffic-control tower probably didn’t help, but it did frighten the Jovian consulate into waking up higher-ranking Cybelean officials, and they were able to coax the bureaucratic wheels into creaky motion.
Since docking was clearly going to take a while, Tycho got permission from Diocletia to leave the bridge, descending the ladderwell and wandering for a while until he found the officers’ cuddy. He found Yana huddled in the corner with a jump-pop and her mediapad. Her eyes were red and watering.
“What’s wrong?” Tycho asked.
Yana swiped irritably at her cheeks with the back of her hand, looking away.
“It’s nothing.”
“Come on. You don’t need to act tough with me.”
“I guess you already know anyway,” she said, shoving her mediapad over to Tycho. “This message arrived as soon as we reached Cybelean local space.”
YANA,
BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS I WILL BE GONE. I AM NOT TAKEN BY CRIMPS OR STRAGGLING THO THAT WUD BE EASY TO LET EVERY ONE BELEVE. YANA I AM A SON OF SATURN AND I CAN NO LONGER DENY THAT. THE JOVIAN UNION HAS NOT GIVEN US OUR RITES AND THEY WILL NOT GIVE US OUR RITES THAT IS CLEAR TO ME NOW COS THEY CAN NOT EVEN TREAT YOU AND YOUR FAMILY RITE AND YOU ARE THER CONTRYMAN YANA. SO HOW CAN I EXPECT RITE TREATMENT FOR ME A SATURNEAN. I MUST DO WAT I BELEVE YANA AND THAT IS TO FITE FOR MY PEPLE SO THEY HAVE THE SAME RITES YOU ENJOY AND THAT PEPLE ENJOY ON EARTH. I AM SORRY TO HURT YOU YOU HAVE BEEN GOOD TO ME. YOU WILL BE A GRATE CAPTAIN ONE DAY YANA AND I MISS YOU ALREDY. REMEMBER ME.
IMMANUEL
“I’m sorry, sis,” Tycho said.
“Your girlfriend’s an Earth noble and my boyfriend’s an Ice Wolf,” Yana said with a small smile. “What’s next, Carlo taking up with a Martian separatist?”
“What’s that?” Carlo asked from the doorway. Tycho and Yana looked up, startled.
“Nothing,” Yana said, her face turning hard. Stone-faced, she scooped up her mediapad and pushed past Carlo.
“Wait, I didn’t mean . . . ,” Carlo said to his sister’s departing back. He turned back to Tycho, looking crestfallen.
“Just forget it,” Tycho said. “It has nothing to do with you.”
“Okay,” Carlo said, perching uncertainly on the cuddy’s padded bench, as far as he could get from his brother.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” Carlo said after a moment.
“I think it’s safe to say she isn’t my girlfriend now.”
Carlo nodded. “I heard what you said about doing the honorable thing. Mom didn’t seem to agree.”
“I don’t care what Mom thinks about it. Or anybody else, for that matter.”
Carlo retreated into silence. Tycho glanced up and found him studying his hands on the tabletop, his teeth working at his lower lip.
“What would you have done?” Tycho asked. He wasn’t sure if he was trying to bait his brother or if he was genuinely curious.
Carlo opened his mouth, closed it, and then shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”
They sat there for a while, listening to the thrum of the Leviathan’s air scrubbers.
“Do you think Mom really would have opened the Leviathan to space?” Carlo asked.
“Yeah.”
“Would you have done it?”
“No,” Tycho said. “I couldn’t have. Would you?”
“No. I couldn’t have either.”
Morning came all too quickly, and along with it orders for the Hashoones to return to the Jovian consulate. They found themselves in the familiar conference room overlooking the Well, with the other privateer crews filing in slowly. By the fragile, haunted expressions on their faces, Tycho guessed there’d been a fairly legendary shindy to mark the end of active hostilities with Earth.
“Why are we here again?” Yana leaned over to ask Mavry.
Mavry yawned. “Maybe it’s important to the future of the Jovian Union that we learn to fold napkins properly.”
Huff was snoring contentedly in the chair next to Tycho when Vass and an aide entered the conference room and took seats by the door. Two Gibraltar Artisans cyborgs followed them in and stood at attention, studying the privateers.
“By now you’ve heard the rumors about negotiations between our envoy and Earth’s,” Vass told the bleary-eyed spacers. “I’m pleased to announce that the rumors are true. We’ve reached an agreement to cease hostilities here at Cybele.”
Tycho elbowed Huff, who woke up with a snort, his living eye roving around the room.
“His Majesty has withdrawn the letters of marque issued to all Earth privateers,” Vass said. “And talks about a closer relationship between Earth and Cybele have adjourned and are not expected to resume.”
“So it’s a draw, then?” demanded Canaan Bickerstaff. “What good is that?”
“Against the power of Earth, a draw is a great victory,” Vass said with a smile. “His Majesty was embarrassed to see the return of the Nestor Leviathan hailed as a Jovian triumph, and furious to learn the Cybeleans used their neutrality to build a battleship for the Ice Wolves. His conclusion is that Earth has overextended its forces, and a pullback from the Cybeles would be a gesture of good faith in seeking a more lasting peace.”
“Arrrr, I’ll believe that one when I see it,” Huff muttered.
“I share your skepticism, Captain Hashoone,” Vass said. “But by stopping the rise of Earth in this region of the solar system, we have eliminated a considerable threat to the security of the Jovian Union. Ladies and gentlemen, your country owes all of you a debt.”
“How big a debt?” asked Dmitra Barnacus, to laughter from the privateers.
“That will be established by the Defense Force upon review of your contributions here at Cybele. But all of you will be compensated. And those ships that responded to Captain Andrade’s call for assistance will share in the reward for the rescue of the Leviathan. A rescue for which we have Captain Hashoone and her crew to thank—particularly Master Tycho Hashoone.”
Tycho managed a pallid smile. He’d had only a couple of hours of sleep at their temporary quarters, during which he’d woken up repeatedly after dreaming Kate had sent a furious message to his mediapad. Each time he checked, he found his message queue empty, and by dawn he’d realized that no message would be coming—not today, not tomorrow, and not ever.
And that was so much worse.
“And what about the Ice Wolves?” asked Garibalda Marta Andrade. “There’s a pretty big battleship out there somewhere, Minister.”
“We are analyzing instrument readings and communications logs from the encounter. We will find the ship, and eliminate it as a threat. And we are actively investigating the Titan affair that apparently funded its construction.”
“In other words, we ain’t tellin’ you lot nothin’,” Huff growled to Tycho.
“Now then,” Vass said over the hubbub. “With His Majesty canceling privateering operations, President Goddard has decided on peace overtures of her own. Therefore, the letters of marque issued for this campaign are being withdrawn effective immedia
tely.”
“What?” demanded Baltazar Widderich.
“I assure you that all condemnations taken to date shall be honored if approved by an admiralty court,” Vass said, pitching his voice to be heard above the privateers’ angry voices. “Expenses incurred as you return to your home ports shall be paid, of course. And previous letters of marque remain valid. President Goddard thanks you for your service, captains—as do I. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I have more meetings today than you can imagine.”
The diminutive minister levered himself out of his seat and strode from the room, his aide hurrying along in his wake. The cyborg soldiers pivoted on their heels and exited as well, leaving the privateers all talking at once, fists and stumps pounding on the table.
“What was it they called us at Saturn?” Tycho asked Yana. “Irregulars?”
“I ain’t standin’ for this,” Baltazar Widderich said, his yellow teeth bared. “They can’t give me a commission and then yank it away again without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“It ain’t right,” Karst Widderich snarled.
“You heard the minister—you will be compensated for prizes and expenses,” Andrade said, fixing the Widderiches with a steady gaze.
“Easy for you to say, Garibalda,” Canaan Bickerstaff growled. “You three captains still have your fancy letters of marque. The rest of us have nothin’—if we do the same thing today we did yesterday, we won’t be cheered as patriots but hanged as pirates.”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with bein’ a pirate,” Dmitra Barnacus said. “’Cept maybe our saintly president not approvin’ of it no more now that it ain’t useful to her.”
“There is also the prospect of being hanged,” Zhi Ning said. “I dislike the idea.”
“Eh, they can only hang you once,” Dmitra said, looking around the table with a wolfish gleam in her eye. “Listen, you lot. When the excitement started, some of us set up camp at 588 Achilles—we’ve dry docks and lodgings and even a depot. And a grog shop or two, naturally. You’re all invited to make it a new port of operations—unless you’d rather get back to haulin’ freight and payin’ taxes.”
Huff leaned forward, his living eye bright and his forearm cannon quivering madly.