by Yoon Ha Lee
Jedao said to her, “You’re going to instruct your underlings to get the hell out of our way and open the airlock so we can leave.”
“And why would I do that?” the priest said.
He reached up and snatched out half her hairpins. Too bad he didn’t have a third hand; his grip on the gun was precarious enough as it was. She growled, which he interpreted as Fuck you and all your little foxes. “I could get creative,” Jedao said.
“I was warned that the heptarchate was full of barbarians,” the priest said.
At least the incomprehensible Gwa-an fixation on hairstyles meant that he didn’t have to resort to more disagreeable threats, like shooting her subordinates in front of her. Given her reaction when he had knocked out the sentinel, he wasn’t convinced that would faze her anyway. He adjusted his grip on her and forced her to the floor.
“Give the order,” he said. “If you don’t play any tricks, you’ll even get the hairpins back without my shoving them through your eardrums.” They were very nice hairpins, despite the creepiness of the elongated humanoid figures, and he bet they were real gold.
Since he had her facing the floor, the priest couldn’t glare at him. The frustration in her voice was unmistakable, however. “As you require.” She started speaking in Tlen Gwa.
The workers in the area hurried to comply. Jedao had familiarized himself with the control systems of the airlock and was satisfied they weren’t doing anything underhanded. “Thank you,” he said, to which the priest hissed something venomous. He flung the hairpins away and let her go. She cried out at the sound of their clattering and scrambled after them with a devotion he reserved for weapons. Perhaps, to a Gwa-an priest, they were equivalent.
One of the workers, braver or more foolish than the others, reached for her own gun. Jedao shot her in the hand on the way up the hatch to the Moonsweet Blossom. It bought him enough time to get the rest of the way up the ramp and slam the hatch shut after him. Surely Meng couldn’t accuse him of showing off if they hadn’t seen the feat of marksmanship; and he hoped the worker would appreciate that he could just as easily have put a hole in her head.
The telltale rumble of the Blossom’s maneuver drive assured him that Meng, at least, was following directions. This boded well for Meng’s health. Jedao hurried forward, wondering how many more rounds the Gwa-an handgun contained, and started webbing himself into the gunner’s seat.
“You wouldn’t consider putting that thing away, would you?” Meng said. “It’s hard for me to think when I’m ready to piss myself.”
“If you think I’m the scariest person in your future, Meng, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“One, I don’t think you know yourself very well, and two, I liked you much better when we were on the same side.”
“I’m going to let you meditate on that second bit some other time. In the meantime, let’s get out of here.”
Meng swallowed. “They’ll shoot us down the moment we get clear of the doors, you know.”
“Just go, Meng. I’ve got friends. Or did you think I teleported onto this station?”
“At this point I wouldn’t put anything past you. Okay, you’re webbed in, I’m webbed in, here goes nothing.”
The maneuver drive grumbled as the Moonsweet Blossom blasted its way out of the bay. No one attempted to close the first set of doors on them. Jedao wondered if the priest was still scrabbling after her hairpins, or if it had to do with the more pragmatic desire to avoid costly repairs to the station.
The Moonsweet Blossom had few armaments, mostly intended for dealing with high-velocity debris, which was more of a danger than pirates if one kept to the better-policed trade routes. They wouldn’t do any good against Du Station’s defenses. As signals, on the other hand—
Using the lasers, Jedao flashed HERE WE COME in the merchanter signal code. With any luck, Haval was paying attention.
* * *
At this point, several things happened.
Haval kicked Teshet in the shin to get him to stop watching a mildly pornographic and not-very-well-acted drama about a famous courtesan from 192 years ago. (“It’s historical so it’s educational!” he protested. “One, we’ve got our signal, and two, I wish you would take care of your urgent needs in your own quarters,” Haval said.)
Carp 1 through Carp 4 and 7 through 10 launched all their shuttles. Said shuttles were, as Jedao had instructed, full of variable-coefficient lubricant programmed to its liquid form. The shuttles flew toward Du Station, then opened their holds and burned their retro thrusters for all they were worth. The lubricant, carried forward by momentum, continued toward Du Station’s turret levels.
Du Station recognized an attack when it saw one. However, its defenses consisted of a combination of high-powered lasers, which could only vaporize small portions of the lubricant and were useless for altering the momentum of quantities of the stuff, and railguns, whose projectiles punched through the mass without much effect. Once the lubricant had clogged up the defensive emplacements, Carp 1 transmitted an encrypted radio signal with the command that caused the lubricant to harden in place.
The Moonsweet Blossom linked up with Haval’s merchant troop. At this point, the Blossom only contained two people, trivial compared to the amount of mass it had been designed to haul. The merchant troop, of course, had just divested itself of its cargo. The nine heptarchate vessels proceeded to hightail it out of there at highly non-freighter accelerations.
* * *
Jedao and Meng swept the Moonsweet Blossom for bugs and other unwelcome devices, an exhausting but necessary task. Then, at what Jedao judged to be a safe distance from Du Station, he ordered Meng to slave it to Carp 1.
The Carp 1 and Moonsweet Blossom matched velocities, and Jedao and Meng made the crossing to the former. There was a bad moment when Jedao thought Meng was going to unhook their tether and drift off into the smothering dark rather than face their fate. But whatever temptations were running through their head, Meng resisted them.
Haval and Teshet greeted them on the Carp 1. After Jedao and Meng had shed the suits and checked them for needed repairs, Haval ushered them all into the business office. “I didn’t expect you to spring the trademoth as well as our Shuos friend,” Haval said.
Meng wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“What about the rest of the crew?” Teshet said.
“They didn’t make it,” Jedao said, and sneezed. He explained about Meng’s extracurricular activities over the past thirteen years. Then he sneezed again.
Haval grumbled under her breath. “Whatever the hell you did on Du, Sren, did it involve duels?”
“‘Sren’?” Meng said.
“You don’t think I came into the Gwa Reality under my own”—sneeze—“name, did you?” Jedao said. “Anyway, there might have been an incident…”
Meng groaned. “Just how good is your Tlen Gwa?”
“Sort of not, apparently,” Jedao said. “I really need to have a word with whoever wrote the Tlen Gwa course. I thought I was all right with languages at the basic phrase level, but was the proofreader asleep the day they approved it?”
Meng had the grace to look embarrassed. “I may have hacked it.”
“You what?”
“If I’d realized you’d be using it, I wouldn’t have bothered. Botching the language doesn’t seem to have slowed you down any.”
Wordlessly, Teshet handed Jedao a handkerchief. Jedao promptly sneezed into it. Maybe he’d be able to give his mother a gift of a petri dish with a lovely culture of Gwa-an germs, after all. He’d have to ask the medic about it later.
Teshet then produced a set of restraints from his pockets and gestured at Meng. Meng sighed deeply and submitted to being trussed up.
“Don’t look so disappointed,” Teshet said into Jedao’s ear. “I’ve another set just for you.” Then he and Meng marched off to the brig.
Haval cleared her throat. “Off to the medic with you,” she said to Jedao. “We’d better figure
out why your vaccinations aren’t working and if everyone’s going to need to be quarantined.”
“Not arguing,” Jedao said meekly.
* * *
Some days later, Jedao was rewatching one of Teshet’s pornography dramas while in bed. At least, he thought it was pornography. The costuming made it difficult to tell, and the dialogue had made more sense when he was still running a fever.
The medic had kept him in isolation until they declared him no longer contagious. Whether due to this precaution or pure luck, no one else came down with the duel disease. They’d given him a clean bill of health this morning, but Haval had insisted that he rest a little longer.
The door opened. Jedao looked up in surprise.
Teshet entered with a fresh supply of handkerchiefs. “Well, Jedao, we’ll reenter heptarchate space in two days, high calendar. Any particular orders you want me to relay to Haval?” He obligingly handed over a slate so Jedao could look over Haval’s painstaking, not to say excruciatingly detailed, reports on their current status.
“Haval’s doing a fine job,” Jedao said, glad that his voice no longer came out as a croak. “I won’t get in her way.” He returned the slate to Teshet.
“Sounds good.” Teshet turned his back and departed. Jedao admired the view, wishing in spite of himself that the other man would linger.
Teshet returned half an hour later with two clear vials full of unidentified substances. “First or second?” he said, holding them up to the light one by one.
“I’m sorry,” Jedao said, “first or second what?”
“You look like you need cheering up,” Teshet said hopefully. “You want on top? You want me on top? I’m flexible.”
Jedao blinked, trying to parse this. “On top of wh—” Oh. “What’s in those vials?”
“You have your choice of variable-coefficient lubricant or goose fat,” Teshet said. “Assuming you were telling the truth when you said it was goose fat. And don’t yell at Haval for letting me into your refrigerator; I did it all on my own. I admit, I can’t tell the difference. As Haval will attest, I’m a dreadful cook, so I didn’t want to fry up some scallion pancakes just to taste the goose fat.”
Jedao’s mouth went dry, which had less to do with Teshet’s eccentric choice of lubricants than the fact that he had sat down on the edge of Jedao’s bed. “You don’t have anything more, ah, conventional?” He realized that was a mistake as soon as the words left his mouth; he’d essentially accepted Teshet’s proposition.
For the first time, Jedao glimpsed uncertainty in Teshet’s eyes. “We don’t have a lot of time before we’re back in heptarchate space and you have to go back to being a commander and I have to go back to being responsible,” he said softly. “Or as responsible as I ever get, anyway. Want to make the most of it? Because I get the impression that you don’t allow yourself much of a personal life.”
“Use the goose fat,” Jedao said, because as much as he liked Teshet, he did not relish the thought of being cemented to Teshet: It would distract Teshet from continuing to analyze his psyche, and, yes, the man was damnably attractive. What the hell, with any luck his mother was never, ever, ever hearing of this. (He could imagine the conversation now: “Garach Jedao Shkan, are you meaning to tell me you finally found a nice young man and you’re still not planning on settling down and providing me extra grandchildren?” And then she would send him more goose fat.)
Teshet brightened. “You won’t regret this,” he purred, and proceeded to help Jedao undress.
About the Author
Yoon Ha Lee is an American science fiction writer born on January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas. Her first published story, “The Hundredth Question,” appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1999; since then, over two dozen further stories have appeared. She lives in Pasadena, California. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Yoon Ha Lee
Art copyright © 2017 by Micah Epstein