by Jessie Kwak
“Boss?”
It’s time, but his hand isn’t reaching for the gun.
“How long is the mayor’s speech slated to be?” he murmurs.
Toshiyo’s relief is evident in her voice. “Thirty minutes. They’ll be leaving out the Commerce Street entrance.”
Coeur offers her arm to the ambassador, and they both walk up the stairs.
Willem Jaantzen melts back into the crowd.
“What in sweet damnation does Yang want?”
JAANTZEN FINDS a corner table in a cafe he trusts and Toshiyo patches the call through to his earpiece. Julieta Yang won’t answer a video call, only voice. She’s convinced video calls are easier to track, no matter what anyone else tells her. One of the mister drones has followed him from the plaza; it dips its wings twice, Toshiyo’s signal.
Willem Jaantzen doesn’t relax.
“Madame Yang,” Jaantzen says, waving away the waiter, the owner’s son. The boy hovers, watchful yet discreet and visibly nervous. He’s not used to being alone around Jaantzen. “How may I help you today?”
Julieta Yang’s voice is cool and aloof, gone papery around the edges with age in the years since they first met. He’d been a fool child just getting started in the game, and she’d come herself to deal with him for poaching on her territory. All these years later, and she can still make him feel like a fool child with the right tone.
“My people have intercepted troubling news about mutual friends of ours,” she says. Never for the small talk, Julieta goes straight to the point — “Life’s too short to pretend to care how someone is doing,” she’d told him once.
Jaantzen doesn’t ask; waits for her to tell him. He’s sweating more than usual — he can smell himself through the expensive suit and the nice cologne: the sharp bite of adrenaline. His body had prepared itself for the inevitable hail of bullets and is having trouble adjusting to the fact he’s still alive.
“The Alliance attacked Silk Station three days ago,” Julieta says. “By all accounts, they destroyed it.”
An echoey silence in Jaantzen’s head; the restaurant seems hushed. There but for the grace of God go we all, one fiery explosion away from having no family, one volley of torpedoes away from having one’s entire organization, everyone one cares for and protects, completely destroyed. He signals to the owner’s son for a glass of wine.
“Any survivors?” he asks once he’s sure the horror won’t color his voice.
“Yes,” she says. “There was enough warning for some of the family to flee before the Alliance began firing. Reports are still coming in.”
“Raj and Lasadi?”
“The Nanshe was apparently mobile when the Alliance attacked. It was boarded and prisoners were taken. We haven’t been able to learn whether Raj and Lasadi were among them.” A pause. “I was hoping you could do that. It’s more your expertise.”
“I can connect you with Toshiyo — ”
“I don’t need your surveillance team,” Julieta snaps. “My surveillance is the best. I need your political connections.”
Jaantzen checks the time on his comm, takes a sip of the wine. He has ten minutes to get back in place by his count; as if on cue, Toshiyo sends an update: SHE’S WRAPPING UP. 10MIN TO EXIT. YOU GOOD BOSS?
Jaantzen’s not good.
Raj and Lasadi Dusai have taken care of themselves and their family for decades. If the Alliance got them this time, it’s because they stretched past their limits, picked the wrong pocket, slit the wrong throat.
They’d nearly done it seventeen years ago when they tried to turn over a ship containing one Willem Jaantzen. Fortunately, the result of that encounter had been lifelong friendship.
Julieta Yang’s business would be taking a dip with the loss of the Dusais and their steady supply of pirated goods, but he knew that wasn’t the only reason she was upset. Raj and Lasadi Dusai, once you’d met them, were infectious. Their business partners often found themselves unexpectedly becoming friends.
If Raj and Lasadi planned right, their family — their daughter; he thinks of her with a pang and moves on — will be taken care of. Like Jaantzen’s people will be.
Jaantzen has taken care of everything. His legitimate businesses are all shielded from backlash through layers of red tape, his illegitimate ones dissolved and the assets put into a fund to be distributed by Manu Juric, who will ensure that everyone is comfortable during the transition.
Right now, Jaantzen should be thinking about Tae and his children. Preparing to see them, should that be his option in the ever-mysterious afterlife.
He doesn’t need to be thinking about the Dusais.
“I’m in the middle of something right now,” he says. He’s not telling Julieta what. He doesn’t need her blessing — or her chiding.
A sharp breath on the other end of the call. “Ah, yes. I heard what you’ve planned for today, and I think it idiotic.”
He doesn’t ask how she knows, and in seven minutes it won’t matter. He drains the glass of wine and authorizes a hundred-mark transfer to more than cover the bill. He stands, nods to the owner’s boy. “I thought you’d appreciate the chance to soak up some of my territory,” he tells Yang.
“Those idiots in the Sendera Dathúil would get there before me, you know that, Willem. Things are good in Bulari now. Balanced. Don’t toss the lot of us into the churn.”
“That’s not my concern, Julieta. I’m taking care of my people. You can take care of yourself, Raj and Lasadi can take care of themselves, and the Sendera can go to hell. I’m paying my own debts today.”
The mister is trailing behind him, veering from hanging plant basket to hanging plant basket like a working drone would. His comm buzzes: Toshiyo. 5MIN BOSS. Ahead, he can hear the noise of the crowd; he starts to slip into the outskirts, blending in.
Julieta Yang is still in his ear, but he’s already gone, scanning the plaza to check the guards, check the misters. He’s working his way to the front of the crowd.
“We have learned one thing,” Julieta says, and his attention snaps back to the conversation, caught by her tone. She’s been holding back a card, and she’s ready to play. He tenses. “We know they’ve captured the daughter.”
Jaantzen doesn’t answer, but he’s doing the math. How old is the girl now? He hasn’t seen her since she was just starting to walk, when Raj and Lasadi brought her with them on one of their many trips planetside. She’d been about the same age as his daughter Sora had been when —
Now she’d be fourteen — no, fifteen.
Now the Alliance has the girl, will they treat her as a child, or as an adult, a traitor?
“Raj and Lasadi made you godfather, didn’t they?” Julieta asks, but it isn’t a question, and again he doesn’t bother wondering how she knows. Julieta Yang’s specialty is expensive luxury goods and even more expensive information — both of dubious origin.
“She’s being held in Redrock Prison,” Julieta says, like she’s telling him tomorrow’s weather forecast. “Here. On-planet,” like there might be other Redrock Prisons. He can almost hear her examining her cuticles with feigned disinterest.
Two minutes.
“You know people who could help, don’t you,” says Julieta, and for a moment he thinks he hears worry in her voice. “There’s nothing I’ll be able to do about it.”
The last time he saw the girl, she was all gangly limbs and graceless toddler exuberance, that same glorious joy and innocence as his Sora and Mikal, yet so different in her fierce desire to break free from her parents’ orbit.
There’s a flurry of activity in the guards by the door; the moment is here. He hasn’t seen Starla in years, but he’s seen Raj, he’s gotten updates on his goddaughter, he’s made renewed promises over business dinners to take care of her if anything ever happened to Raj and Lasadi.
Ahead of him, Coeur is walking out, flashing that smile and a palm-out wave to the crowds below her. Her gaze dances over him, and the pistol in its holster burns hot and fierce.
He buttons his coat.
“Dammit, Julieta,” he says.
“Let me know what you find out,” she says. “I’ll help where I can.”
Chapter 3
Starla’s back in her cell, door slammed and lights flicked off to pitch black — even the dim lights that had glowed through the other nights. A spike of fear in her chest. Starla wonders if lights-out is punishment for not telling Hali and Mahr what they wanted to hear. Sensory deprivation to make her afraid.
1, 4, 9, 16 . . . She counts her squares like Deyva always told her to do, whenever she was angry at a mechanical problem whose solution was eluding her. She gets as high as 17 times 17 before she feels the panic subsiding.
Starla lies back on her cot with knees bent.
It’s just darkness. It’s not a punishment, it’s just a reminder of the deep black, of that inky, starry night she’s been plucked from. She belongs among the stars, not here.
She realizes her eyes are still open, and closes them.
She remembers.
STARLA’S HANDS were clumsy in the EVA suit she’d stolen from her mother, but she’d been practicing making her gestures bigger so that Mona could read her signs even through the unsubtle suit. Of course, they wouldn’t always have visual communication, so Starla had reprogrammed the heads-up display on her mother’s helmet to show her what Mona was typing. She had programmed a glove to recognize what she was fingerspelling and transmit that to Mona.
Starla carefully removed the right glove from her mother’s suit, replacing it with the one she had modded herself. She stared at the lower left corner of her screen, waiting for the glove to patch into the system.
GLOVE_TEST_3 DETECTED, blinked the screen. Starla suppressed her delight. It was working.
She glanced over at Mona, who looked nervous. No backup system, Mona signed. Starla nodded. She knew. But this was a trial run, just to make sure she could communicate. Eventually, they would get a backup system in place. She certainly wouldn’t be comfortable relying only on her modded glove to pass messages back, not if she ever got to go out on the skin of the Nanshe.
Starla slowly began to fingerspell the alphabet, watching as each letter appeared in the lower corner of her screen. A – B – C . . . She glanced over at Mona, who was staring at her comm. Mona nodded, signing the letters she saw back to Starla.
Starla felt a thrill of excitement.
Should work like a charm.
Ready, signed Starla, and Mona grimaced nervously.
Her scaredy-cat cousin was as ready as she’d ever be.
Starla’s mother’s suit was snug, but Starla had been nervous about stealing a suit from a taller cousin. Her mother’s would just have to do.
Mona glanced up at the ceiling in that gesture Starla had learned to recognize: an announcement was coming over the intercom. For some reason she couldn’t fathom, everyone looked to the direction the sound was coming from like it helped them hear it better.
As expected, Starla felt her comm buzzing in her pocket — three short jabs. She couldn’t reach it, not geared up as she was, and she hadn’t had time to patch her incoming messages into her mother’s helmet where she could read them.
Starla waved to get Mona’s attention. What is it? Comm in pocket, she signed.
Shuttle docking in the bay right next door, Mona signed back. Maybe we should wait until tomorrow.
No.
No way was she getting this close without testing the glove outside. After years of waiting, Starla’s parents had finally agreed to let her join one of their training runs with the new recruits. She would show them that she was ready, that she was resourceful. That she should join their crew permanently.
Starla punched the button for the airlock, and the door slowly began to open.
She felt a tap on her shoulder — the sensation muffled through the suit — and turned to see Mona shaking her head. We know the glove works, she signed. Try tomorrow?
Starla shook her head again. Mom’s already going to yell at me, Starla signed. Might as well earn it.
Mona looked resigned. I’ll get yelled at, too.
Tell them I made you do it.
That doesn’t work anymore.
Despite her nerves, Starla grinned. They had been getting into trouble for years together, and Mona had almost always been able to talk herself out of trouble by saying she was just watching out for Starla. It never bothered Starla — even on the times Mona had come along willingly, Starla had always been the instigator.
They were as opposite as could be. Mona was curious about books and history, spending hours on her own with TUTOR learning about the harsh early days of settlement on Indira, about life on the Ark Matsya, about old Earth. Starla had put in the required hours with TUTOR, trying to get the AI to teach her what she was really curious about: electronics, programming, mechanics, weaponry. She soon found that TUTOR’s curriculum was annoyingly theoretical, and although she continued to work her way through the calculus and physics courses just so the AI wouldn’t ping her mother that she was skipping lessons, Starla began spending more time down in the mechanics bay learning about the daily operation of the station and getting her hands dirty in its wired guts.
I’m going, she signed. Mona’s shoulders slumped. Now.
Fear, delicious and electric, thrilled through her as she stepped through the airlock door. Starla took a deep breath. She could feel the pressure change as the door slid shut, and she deliberately turned away from the window separating her from Mona.
Behind her were the familiar corridors of Silk Station. Behind her were generations of a tangled family tree and many friendly transplants — all too quick to step in and help out whenever she had trouble with something.
In front of her was the black, glittering with stars. She took a step forward, tentative, though the outer airlock wasn’t even open — the thick glass still seemed too thin — and startled when the broad, scarred side of a shuttle lumbered across her view. The shuttle that was docking in the bay next door. Right. She took another deep breath.
A message from Mona popped up on her screen. YOU OK?
Starla almost turned around to give her a thumbs-up, but she had to break herself from relying on visual communication. She made a fist and signed yes, instead, and to her delight the glove captured the movement. Y-E-S. Starla beamed.
She had never been outside the station in an EVA suit, but she’d done the drills, and she’d read about it. She’d watched TUTOR’s instructional videos and gotten one of her older cousins, Amit, to talk her through it one day when he was in the middle of a passionate anti-Alliance diatribe and too distracted to wonder why she was asking.
She waited until the shuttle was past the window before starting the sequence Amit had given her. Next time she would have to figure out how to patch her comm into the helmet — she felt naked without her connection to the rest of the station — but that wouldn’t be hard.
O-P-N-N-I-N-G-N-O-W, she fingerspelled, and the glove translated each letter. One typo. Not bad, but still some fine-tuning to do.
CHECK BELT CLIP, Mona typed back.
Starla sighed and checked her tether, then she did turn back to give her cousin a thumbs-up and a grin. Mona looked terrified.
Starla hit the button.
She could feel it, the sensation of the vacuum a subtle thing yet phenomenally alien. Starla self-consciously checked the belt clip again, feeling the reassuring tension of it tethering her to the station. She wouldn’t be going anywhere. She would be fine.
Starla stood at the edge of the airlock, gripping the handrail on the left side as she stared out into the expanse. Blackness, washed with stars and studded by the ever-shifting vista of the asteroids that made up Durga’s Belt.
It was the same view she’d seen every day of her life, but today there was no glass between her and the void.
She realized the lower left corner of her screen was blinking, annoyed. O-O-O-O-O
She let go of the handrail and the
Os stopped.
There was a bug she would have to fix.
WHATS WRONG, came Mona’s response, predictably.
N-O-T-H-I-N-G-S-T-U-P-I-D-G-L-O-V-N
Starla frowned at the glove, annoyed.
She could still feel the thrumming of the station around her, the minute vibrations and shifts, the way it shivered from time to time like a living creature. It was more intense at the core, but here, out at the edge? Silk Station felt like a distant memory.
Starla fought the wild urge to let herself float free towards the heavens.
She could feel the gravity of the station still, feel its life and energy through her feet. The place she’d known her whole life, the energy she’d experienced for fifteen years. The same old people with their same old stories and complaints and dramas.
The black expanse beckoned her with its tantalizing unknowns, and damned if Starla was going to stand on the edge of it and not taste it.
GOOD TEST RUN. COME BACK IN?
N-O-T-Y-E-T
Starla hadn’t gotten this far just to open up an airlock and stand at the threshold.
Starla stepped out.
IT’S STILL dark in her cell, but Starla is smiling, the memory of floating soothing the ache in her bones, the memory of Mona soothing the pain in her heart.
And the scent that had lingered on her suit when she’d reentered Silk Station, that faint, metallic scent like the fumes from a welder, or the antifreeze Deyva used to flush the systems. The smell of space.
Starla can still remember it, if she tries.
She’ll fly again.
Alliance be damned.
Chapter 4
Jaantzen steeples his fingers in the glow of the screens, trying to ignore the rat’s nest of tangled cables and gadgets and drifts of unlabeled data sticks littered over the tables, keeping his attention on the data streaming across the central monitor.