This plan was scuppered when a foot, clad in an EVA suit, came down into the narrowing gap between the gun and my hand. Instinctively I grabbed the suited ankle and heard the sound of a different blaster pistol leaving its holster, directly above my head.
My gaze traveled up the EVA suit and arrived at the face of a young woman, with grease smeared on her face and her hair tied back. Her blaster was aimed smartly at the center of my forehead.
“Hiya!” she said, brightly. “Did you know that everybody wants to kill you?”
Chapter 16
Shortly afterward, I found myself in the mess hall of the newcomers’ ship, tied to a metal chair with loops of spare electrical cable. Warden and Jemima were tied to similar chairs on either side of me. Daniel was also there, but our captors had opted to put tape over his mouth after a short amount of time in his company.
The ship interior was quite junky, as they go, the walls covered in loose engineering panels and each corner piled with spare bits and pieces casually kicked aside. The floor was little more than a rattly gantry, providing an only slightly better walking surface than the layers of pipes and cables underneath.
I was right at home. This was a far cry from the Platinum God of Whale Sharks; this felt like a ship that people actually lived in. Very much like my own, although I had an obligation to keep it somewhat tidier for the tourists. And the Neverdie wasn’t plastered with Polaroid photographs, all virtually identical: a smiling young couple, their heads pressed together and one or both of them holding the camera.
The woman I had met in the umbilical was sitting on a fifth chair, turned around so that she could lean forward onto the backrest. She had stripped off the EVA suit to reveal a set of well-worn mechanic’s overalls and was vaguely aiming her gun in our general direction.
“We just got married a few weeks ago, actually,” said the woman, who had introduced herself as Pippa. No one had said anything about her marriage, or anything at all, but things had been silent for a while and she looked like she would scratch claw marks into her chair if she didn’t mention it. “Had the ceremony at Salvation Station, where we met. That’s it there.” She indicated one of the many completely identical photographs. “Aren’t many wedding dresses in the Black, obviously, but Peter said I should just show up and whatever I was wearing would be a wedding dress. He’s so smart. He’s the pilot, you know.”
“I think I gathered that,” I said. “Where did you say you got married?”
“Salvation Station. All the girls made a big layer cake for the reception by pressing a load of emergency rations together . . .”
“What’s Salvation Station?” I interrupted.
“It’s where we live,” she said testily, like I should have known that. “It’s where a lot of people live. Are you really Jacques McKeown?”
“Actually I’m not,” I said.
“Yes, he is,” said Warden, apparently on instinct.
“He isn’t really,” offered Jemima.
“Ymmph hmmph mph,” added Daniel.
At that point, the male half of the newlyweds returned from across the umbilical and appeared at the airlock door. Peter was a tall, thin man whose head protruded from the EVA suit like a tortoise’s from its shell, and he had short, stubbly hair and spectacles. He was holding a large cardboard box with both hands.
“Well, the ship’s mostly intact, but it’ll need to be towed back to the station for repairs,” he announced, dropping the heavy box to the side of the door. “Found a whole bunch of Jacques McKeown books, too. Rare editions and the like. I thought maybe we could sell them to that guy who’s building that hate cathedral.”
Pippa practically leapt across the room and draped her arms over his shoulders. “That is such a clever idea. You are such a clever man. Mwah.”
“It’s because I have you to inspire me,” said Peter, with the self-assured grin of a man who knows he’s the master of his domain.
“Oh you are so sweet, I just want to dine on your flesh, mwah mwah mwah.”
I coughed politely, and Peter seemed to acknowledge our presence for the first time since he’d entered the room. “So, what’s the story? Is he really McKeown?”
Pippa offered us an embarrassed smile, without disentangling from her husband. “Seems to be some confusion around that, actually.”
“You know what we should do? We should take him to Salvation. Rob’s got one of those hand-chip-scanner machines. We can look at his ID and that’ll settle it.”
“Brilliant idea, mwah. How do you keep doing it? Mwah.”
“Oh, stop. It was your brilliant idea to answer the distress call, mwah.”
I heard an abrasive sound next to my ear and noticed that Warden was grinding her teeth. She was also sitting in a cringe with her knees and elbows drawn in tightly, as if trying to extrude as little of her body as possible into the ship’s dingy atmosphere.
Peter laboriously detached himself from his wife. “What I don’t get is what Jacques McKeown would be doing in the middle of the Black getting shot at by a Zoob.”
I was about to say “Yes, let’s all discuss how little sense that makes,” but the last word of his sentence changed the words forming in my throat. “Zoob?”
“Yeah, you know, the little green—”
“I know what a Zoob is. Are you saying that thing that attacked us was a Zoob?”
Thinking back, it made sense on certain levels. The Zoobs were a race of just barely sentient small blob-like green creatures with one large, adorable eyeball and a mouth just about equipped to speak in simple, broken English. They were native to some oceanic world where another, equally barely sentient species had begun preying on them aggressively, and after their plight was revealed by a popular documentary, a lot of them were “rescued” from the planet.
There had been a period—some time before Quantunneling came about—when it had been fashionable for star pilots to adopt Zoobs as a sort of onboard pet, as they were very clearly aliens, but were also friendly, adorable, and just intelligent enough to put saucepans on their heads and run around asking who turned out the lights.
I’d never kept one on the Neverdie. A couple of my colleagues had them, and I’d seen them while visiting for poker nights, that kind of thing. From those encounters, I’d realized I wasn’t a Zoob person. They were cute, yes, but so are talking teddy bears, and talking teddy bears can be turned off. Some pilots found it endlessly amusing to teach their Zoob how to play 52 Pickup, but I hadn’t seen the appeal.
I relayed all of this to Warden and Jemima. “Most of the pilots I know put their Zoobs up for adoption after Quantunneling,” I concluded. “They were too expensive to feed and the spaceport didn’t allow them.”
“Mm, yes,” said Pippa, sitting on her chair again. Peter had disappeared into the cockpit to fly us to whatever this Salvation Station place was. “A lot of the guys who’ve crossed the Black brought Zoobs with them. That’s what caused the whole problem here.”
“What problem?” asked Jemima.
“Wasn’t any easier to feed Zoobs out here in the Black after Quantunneling hit. Impossible to make them understand why they weren’t being fed on time, either. Turns out Zoobs are only willing to do the cute-mascot thing as long as their needs are being met.”
“Oh, trac,” I breathed.
“Didn’t understand why everyone had to go hungry when there was nice fresh meat all around the place. Not sophisticated minds, you see. Well. Sophisticated enough to wait until the crew are sleeping or looking the other way before they start biting throats out. Then they take over the ship and fly it until it falls apart. It still happens now and then, even now we know all this. People get attached to their Zoobs, convince themselves that theirs must be the exception.”
I tried not to think about the handful of Zoob-owning friends of mine who’d crossed the Black, and who I never seemed to hear much from these days.
“Anyway,” said Pippa brightly, slapping her thighs as she stood up. “Not going t
o dwell on nasty things like that. I’m on honeymoon! I’m gonna check on my Pookie Bear.”
She left us, presumably so that she and her husband could continue being completely insufferable with each other, and we were unsupervised in the mess hall.
“If we can get out of these ropes,” I muttered, leaning into our little semicircle, “then I think we can make a move.”
Warden immediately untensed and glared at me witheringly. “And what kind of move would that be, McKeown? A move out into the vacuum of space? Or a move to hijack a ship from two armed pirates, without weapons?”
With superhuman willpower I kept my tone polite. “You are welcome to make your own suggestions for escape plans if mine are so full of flaws.”“The main flaw in your escape plan is that we don’t need to escape. These people are taking us where we wanted to go all along, to what seems to be the center of the pirate presence in the Black. Frankly, now that I know that there are women there, I am considerably reassured.”
I blinked. “Of course there are women there. Why wouldn’t there be women there? You think women can’t be pirates?”
Warden took on that very specific tense posture unique to upper-middle-class white people being called out on saying something politically incorrect. “Of course not.”
“Anyway, my point was, yes, we were planning to meet with pirates, but not pirates who, thanks to you, now think that I’m Jacques Mc-plying-Keown.”
Warden straightened her back, sniffing. “That seems to be solely your problem.”
“But . . . isn’t that enough?” asked Jemima.
Warden and I both looked at her as if we’d been having a row in the kitchen and the dishwasher had suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak.
“Sorry,” added Jemima hurriedly. “I know I’m just, you know, the hostage. But it seems to me like he’s brought you all this way, and if he’s going to be in danger, don’t you think you, you know, owe him something?”
Warden didn’t reply straightaway. Her mouth had taken on a very curious shape. It was like taking a freeze frame of the moment when a contemptuous sneer is halfway to turning into a look of slack-jawed surprise.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have interrupted,” said Jemima, dropping her gaze.
I coughed. “Aren’t you going to answer the young lady’s question, Ms. Warden? I think it’s a pretty good one.”
She scowled impotently, and I think at that moment I was more cheerful than I’d been in years. But Jemima, having suddenly drawn attention to herself, brought a lingering question to the forefront of my mind.
I turned to her, straining against my bonds. “Hey, is it true that your mum’s the president of the UR?”
Jemima and Warden both started at the question. Jemima colored and looked at the floor, while Warden seemed to freeze again, eyes glazing over. She sucked on her suddenly dry lips. “I see.”
I swung my head back and forth a few times, to take in both ends of the spectrum of embarrassed looks. “Wait, you didn’t know? The galaxy’s most organized psychotic?”
“Many things required my attention!” she protested. “I was hired to single-mindedly look after the interests of the Henderson family and corporation! All I knew was that Daniel . . . How did you know Jemima’s the president’s daughter?”
“Henderson—” I was going to add told me, but my better instincts kicked my mouth shut an instant too late. Her sudden question had caught me off guard.
Warden’s eyes narrowed. “When did Henderson tell you? Did you call Henderson and offer him a deal?”
“No!” I said truthfully. “I didn’t call him. I seem to be the only one who doesn’t think calling Henderson will solve all my problems—”
“So he called you, then.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
It was hopeless. She must have seen enough of my barefaced-lying face to be able to identify it on sight. “This is why I am not indulging your escape plans, McKeown. This, Jemima, is why I don’t owe him anything. He will sell us out the first chance he gets.”
I wasn’t letting that lie. “Not us. You. I will happily sell you out the first chance I get because you are going to get us all killed. And I think that’s as obvious to Jemima as it is to me.”
“Do you know what I think, McKeown?” said Warden archly. “I think you’re trying to score points with her now that you know she has influence.”
I almost choked on my own snort of rage. “Oh! You know, until this moment I didn’t think ‘projection’ was actually a thing. You only started throwing words like us around since I told you who her mum was. The only one trying to score points here is—”
Jemima hopped in her chair, slamming all four legs on the grating floor with a violent clang. “Could you please stop talking about me like I’m the—like I’m the prize money?!” she yelled.
Warden and I were both frozen in midrecoil, staring at Jemima in shock. Her face was red and her mouth was quivering.
“Now, maybe you can’t trust Mr. Captain Not Jacques McKeown but he’s the only person here you, you know, know anything about and you shouldn’t just assume you’ll be able to, to make friends with the pirates,” continued Jemima. Her voice was quavering, and her eyes glistened. “And you, maybe you can’t trust Ms. Warden either but you probably can’t trust Dan’s dad either and Dan’s dad isn’t here and she is. So I think you should both just maybe remember that we’ve all been tied to the same chairs and that tying people to chairs never leads to good things. Okay?”
I looked down at the cables binding me to my chair, as if I had briefly forgotten their existence. “All right,” I muttered. “Let’s just stop bickering and figure something out.”
At that moment, the cockpit intercom burst into life, firstly with static, then with male and female giggling, before the male voice managed to pull itself together. “Hey, uh, sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Stop it, Pippa, you’re terrible. Salvation’s in visual range. Have a look.”
The set of vertical shutters opposite our little semicircle of chairs turned sideways, permitting a view of the space outside. Salvation Station was presumably the large space station whose open airlock the ship was curving gently toward.
The last pirate hangout I’d been to was Old Freeport, way back before Quantunneling pulled the rug out from under the star piloting game. It had been little more than a collection of old decommissioned or shot-down vessels welded together with permanent umbilicals. The docking bay had basically just been a large cargo container with one side sawn off. It had a certain surviving-against-the-odds charm, but it was the kind of place where the ramshackle bar wouldn’t sell you a beer if you didn’t have a gun visible on your hip. And even then it was considered poor etiquette to drink all of it, rather than throw it in the face of the person next to you and start a fight.
I’d been expecting Salvation Station to be something along the same rickety lines, but to my surprise, it was an actual space station. With a donut-shaped residential promenade built around a power facility and administrative center in the core, the kind of design modeled after a giant chariot wheel with prominent hub spikes.
To my further surprise, it appeared to be relatively new and extremely professionally constructed. The hull shimmered with metal plates that hadn’t yet built up the layer of dust and grime that gave hulls actual character.
But it was built to last. The plating was thick and reinforced, steeply curved to efficiently disperse explosive damage. There were mounted turrets all around the top and bottom of the ring, covering every possible angle of approach. The nearest ones turned and watched us suspiciously, waiting for a false move. In the distance I could just about see a perimeter defense consisting of towed-in asteroids with more mounted turrets, which Peter and Pippa must have already moved us through.
All in all, as much as one would expect from an outpost designed to be placed smack in the middle of pirate territory. Except there were pirate ships everywhere, and whoever was operating those turrets seemed co
mpletely tolerant of them. The smaller ships were much more in keeping with what I expected of pirates, being mostly well used and heavily decorated rust buckets repurposed out of old ship-to-surfacers. They hung around the station the way a group of toughs might congregate around the outside of a swanky nightclub.
“Pretty swanky,” I commented, summarizing all of the above.
“Did they build that?” asked Jemima.
“Of course not,” said Warden. “Pirates don’t build space stations.”
“Oh, what, so they stole it?” I sniped. “How do you picture that working? Cut the bicycle lock and pull it here on a tow cable?”
“Well, I don’t know! As I have said before, McKeown, you are ostensibly the expert on pirates here.”
“Yeah, I know. And speaking as such, that thing was definitely built here. If it was patched together from hijacked ships it would look like a rusty mirror ball, and if they’d dragged it here it’d have brought half the region’s interstellar dust with it. They must have been secretly shipping in materials for years.”
“But I thought pirates were all really poor and stuff,” said Jemima. “’Cos teleporting means no one has to fly through the Black anymore except pilots and they’re poor as well.”
“You’ve certainly picked up on the salient points,” I said, eyes not leaving Salvation Station as it grew bigger and bigger in our view. “I don’t know what to tell you. This is all new to me.”
The station went out of view as the ship turned in order to dock, and the next thing we saw was the interior of the bay. It was not dissimilar to the one we had briefly occupied back at Cloud Castle, in terms of layout and cleanliness, but that had been the cleanliness of an old construction that was very rarely used. This was a new construction absolutely teeming with life.
Almost every docking space was occupied by a pirate ship, and almost all of them were unloading. Pirates of every shape, size, and species, helping each other carry crates, sacks, and sheets of building material into the space station proper.
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