by Linda Nagata
“We just came from Quennet,” said the rre navigator from inside thon’s metamaterial suit. “Twenty shifts out.”
“And we will return,” said the Captain.
“We barely escaped last time,” said Mr. Arun Sliver, the human expert in negotiations and (when those failed) munitions. “We had to hide in the hold and pretend to be Terequale Bitty’s slaves.”
“I will not leave a man behind,” said the Captain. “Or in this case, leave a woman’s body unprotected by the rites of her native religion.”
“Cap, c’mon,” said Yip-Goru. “We’ve got a hold full of Terran food and quenny caviar. Half full, after the accident. We go back to Quennet without unloading, we’re bankrupt.”
The Captain pulled up a 3-map showing Sour Candy’s current location, and drew her finger between the ship and a rest-stop icon. “Patrolwoman Elaine Bliskop Memorial Space Station,” she said. “Six shifts away. We unload the cargo, hire a temporary sysadmin, back to Quennet.”
“It won’t be worth much, so close to quenny space,” said Mr. Arun Sliver.
“Damn it!” said the Captain, plunging a fist harmlessly through the 3-map. “Have you already forgotten how many times Terequale Bitty saved the lives of this entire crew?”
“Three or four, I guess,” said Yip-Goru. “Who’s counting? Why should we risk our vocalizers for a dead body?”
“I have a sacred obligation,” the Captain snarled, “to respect the religious beliefs of every member of my crew.”
“Well, my religious beliefs—” said Mr. Arun Sliver, but Kol cut him off with a gesture.
“Ma’am, a word?” he whispered to the Captain. They walked a fraction of a metre to Terequale Bitty’s abandoned 2-station, and Yip-Goru and Mr. Arun Sliver pretended not to hear what they were saying.
“Captain, I think the crew are just confused,” he said. “I never thought of Terequale Bitty as being especially religious. Why respect her traditions more than she did?”
“She was a Cametrean,” the Captain whispered. “Quite devout. She never gave you those . . . pamphlets? The fake travel brochures?”
“Oh, well, she wouldn’t have, ma’am,” said Kol. “Cametreans recruit from the top down.”
Captain Mene, of needing-you-now-more-then-ever fame, fancied himself a student of Galactic religions, and held a deep respect for each of the thousands of ways in which the cosmos came to know itself. Growing up, Kol had understood this as the harmless eccentricity of a fictional character, but the dubs the Captain had seen treated his attitude as some kind of virtue. And so.
“We don’t have a choice in this,” said Captain. “Returning the body is the right thing to do.”
“Yes’m.” Argument was useless. Kol walked back into the center of the bridge and bowed his scaly head, as he always did when synthesizing his Captain’s ideals with his own hard-won pragmatism.
“The Captain’s orders,” he said. “Yip-Goru, set the course. The station, then Quennet, where in accordance with the beautiful Cametrean funerary rites. . . . ” He looked at the Captain, clueless.
“The family of the deceased will ceremonially eat the preserved corpse.”
Silence held the cramped bridge. Finally Yip-Goru spoke up.
“Preserved,” thon said, “in what?”
“The crate of lemon pickle should do nicely,” said Kol.
“Well, there goes the bloody lemon pickle,” said Mr. Arun Sliver.
The second kind of cargo is junk.
Junk is physical stuff, but the business model is totally different. Kol had learned the hard way that nobody wants junk; else it wouldn’t be junk. The client with junk pays you to take it off his hands. Junk comes with specific disposal instructions; if you could just drop it into a star, the client would have done that himself.
A single shipping operation doesn’t normally handle both goods and junk. Unless that operation is Sour Candy Shipping Ltd., with its batshit-insane captain and its hunk-of-junk dead sysadmin. Packed in salt and citric acid, on her way back home.
Oh, there was also the war. Yes, wars are important to smugglers, but background, local colour, yeah? Nobody takes up water-yachting because they’re super interested in the weather. A sudden re-emergence of hostilities between the Extension and the Fist of Joy is the same type of problem as the sudden death of your sysadmin. Just another impersonal glob of spit in your face, the universe showing what it thinks of you.
Space stations are neutral territory by treaty, but in real life, Elaine Bliskop was swarming with humans and their Extension lackeys. On his way to the engineers’ bar, Kol got a lot of hostile glances and was hassled more than once for his commercial papers. Probably should have delegated Mr. Arun Sliver to make the hiring decision. Only there was no decision, because every stray engineer on the station had been drafted into the Extension navy except one: a human named Mrs. James Chen, an old drunk broad who was obviously an Extension spy. This was very bad, but coming back with no new crew would also be very bad.
“Seventy-two, too old to fight, bad leg besides!” Mrs. James Chen said cheerfully, like it was a new war slogan. “But I’ll get your engines running at one-thirty of rating!”
“Our engines already run at one-thirty rating,” said Kol. “I learned that trick when I was an apprentice. I need someone who’ll do the preventive maintenance so we can run at one-thirty without blowing a coolant pipe.”
Mrs. James Chen looked ostentatiously down the length of the empty bar, cradling her beer mug in both hands. “Well,” she said, “ya got me.”
“You’re hired,” said Kol. Spies read from a script, same as the Captain. Kol would use Mrs. James Chen to deal with the Terequale Bitty situation, and the next time Sour Candy ran the wrong kind of contraband into Fist of Joy territory, then would come the betrayal. Mrs. James Chen would tip her hand, try something stupid, and Kol would help her out an airlock. Or whatever, no need to be all dramatic about it.
“Quennet,” said the Captain, walking around a detailed 3-map. “Planet of mystery!”
“Planet we were just at,” muttered Yip-Goru.
“Planet of fucking mystery!” said Kol.
“Yessir.”
“The military buildup complicates things,” said the Captain. “Quennet is right on the border. The quenny get pushed around a lot. First by the Fist of Joy, then by the Extension. Every time someone pushes, there’s a backlash and the Cametreans consolidate power. Quennet withdraws, becomes more isolationist. It gets harder to do business.”
“Why did Terequale Bitty leave Quennet?” called out Mr. Arun Sliver.
“Hey!” said Kol.
“Let him speak,” said the Captain, as she always said, every single time. This one came from Wat and the Warriors. Always with the letting people speak.
“The Cametreans are isolationists,” said Mr. Arun Sliver. “Space travel is a sin. So why did Terequale Bitty leave home? Sounds a bit of a cafeteria Cametrean. Someone who doesn’t much care about the forms and the rituals.”
“Who’s Terequale Bitty?” said Mrs. James Chen, slouched uncomfortably in Terequale Bitty’s quenny-shaped chair, still drunk or pretending to be.
“Trading partner,” Kol lied. He was pretty sure Mrs. James Chen knew exactly who she was replacing, but there was no point in volunteering information. “A real rough customer.”
The Captain was happy to let Mr. Arun Sliver speak but she felt no need to respond to his question. She made a sweeping gesture and thousands of holographic drones and battleships, red and green, swarmed above the 3-map of Quennet.
“This will be a delicate operation,” she said. “Both the Extension and the Fist of Joy have blockaded the planet. We take up a spiral orbit and get lost in the noise. If the Fist does notice us, you three go down in the hold, and Kol and I will pretend to be incompetent civilian volunteers. If the Extension spots us, Kol and I go into the hold, and Mr. Arun Sliver does his Bertie Wooster routine.”
“Dreadful sorry, separated fro
m our package tour, brave lads, keep up the fight,” said Mr. Arun Sliver. “That sort of wheeze, yeah?”
“Precisely. In this way we’ll drop through the blockade. I’ll contact our distributor planetside; Mr. Arun Sliver will act as backup. We’ll deliver the merchandise and split.”
“What’s the ‘merchandise’?” said Mrs. James Chen.
“Hard drugs,” said Kol.
“Thank you, Kol,” said the Captain, who disliked having to lie.
The third kind of cargo is information. Do not carry this. Information couriers look glamorous because they don’t live long enough for their clothes to go out of style. Something will go wrong. The sender will suspect you of keeping secret copies for resale. The recipient will accuse you of modifying the message in transit. The authorities will show up, and you won’t be able to prove you don’t have whatever world-cracking secrets they’re looking for.
Worst of all, information leaks.
“I have never been so embarrassed,” said the Captain, who probably hadn’t. “Blockade runs are supposed to be easy. It’s like they knew exactly where we were!” She looked frantically around her office as though the culprit were some piece of decor.
“We’re fine,” said Kol, settling into the Captain’s pleather desk chair. “They didn’t find anything. But they did know where we were, because Mrs. James Chen is an Extension spy.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“Nothing about her story holds up. Like, her name. ‘Mrs. James Chen.’ Female honorific, male name. She says it’s her late husband’s name. Her real name is ‘Roberta,’ but she doesn’t use it. Her husband dies, so she steals his name? Who is she fooling? Did she not know there was another human on this crew? God, they always think they’re smarter than you!”
The Captain leaned into the porthole above her desk and took in the green planet Quennet and the space above it, twinkling with the massed military might of the galaxy’s two great powers.
“I never heard of a female James,” said the Captain, “so I asked Mr. Arun Sliver about this. He says the husband thing is archaic, but it does happen. It’s very slim evidence. I think we should give her another chance.” Suspected spies always got another chance on Nightside; of course they’d get one on Sour Candy.
“I don’t get why she’s playing for such small stakes,” said Kol. “I hired her on the implicit understanding that she’d save the spy shit for Fist of Joy space. What’s so important about this blockade?”
“Let me run this idea by you,” said the Captain. “Mrs. James Chen would like to acquire the corpse of a member of a notoriously isolationist species, which we’re keeping in a crate of lemon pickle. Dissect it. Bioweapons research or something.”
“Which would be an opportunity for us,” said Kol. “We wouldn’t need to deliver the body at all. We could sell it to the Extension and get on their good side for once.”
“Absolutely not,” said the Captain.
“Or, here’s another idea. We can eat Terequale Bitty ourselves.”
The Captain gagged. “Which of these is the ridiculous alternative you put in to make the other one look good by comparison?” she said. “Because that’s the single most inappropriate thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“No, you’re putting on a show for me, like you do for the crew. Showing off your sense of honour. I don’t question that sense of honour, because against all the rules of the universe I’m aware of, it’s kept us alive and solvent for eight kiloshifts. But I do question the results we’ll get out of this operation.”
The Captain turned away from the porthole. “You think we’ll fail.”
“I’ll never take that bet,” said Kol. “You’ve beaten the odds a hundred times, and you’ll do it again. Somehow we’ll run this blockade despite having a spy on board, and without any quenny crew to help us, we’ll locate the xenophobic relatives of a dead woman whose real name we don’t know.
“But what happens when we succeed? Terequale Bitty was a heretic! She disowned herself when she left Quennet. You think her folks will want to eat her now? They’ll think she deserves the Cametrean rites? Is this still worth it to you?”
“We have to try.”
“I agree, but here’s a different way of trying. We don’t need to locate Terequale Bitty’s family, because we are her family. We took her in after her birth family cut her off. We didn’t ask questions about religion or politics. We accepted her, ma’am, and we were all she had. All she has. I know you can find Terequale Bitty’s parents, but if anyone’s actually going to eat her, it’s us.”
“This is your official recommendation?”
“On the record.”
“So, we eat Terequale Bitty, and then we die of toxic shock.”
“These cannibal rites always have an out,” said Kol, “like, if the body is poisoned or radioactive. The general rule is that you eat what you can. For us, that means the roe. God knows we’ve exported enough quenny roe as caviar. And we can eat the brain, as long as we cook it.”
“Really? The brain?”
“I’ve eaten animal brains, from Bex, and Earth. A brain is a brain.” Kol was cheating a little here—one of Captain Mene’s popular lines was “A man is a man.”
“Brain and roe,” said the Captain. “We’re the family. Let’s do it.”
Except. When Terequale Bitty’s four colleagues gathered in the hold and ceremonially cut open her skull, they found a crystal sheath encasing her brain and upper nervous system. The end point for hundreds of threadlike wires embedded in Terequale Bitty’s sensory centers. A recorder.
“Oh, shit,” said Mr. Arun Sliver. He dropped the bottle of oil he was going to fry the brain in, and it bounced and rolled around the hold. “How long has that been there?”
The Captain put her bloodstained laser cutter down on the crate of lemon pickle, and wiped her eyes. “Kol,” she said, “I would very much like to know why you keep hiring spies as system administrators.”
“Ma’am, I—I had absolutely no idea.” Kol took an anxious swig from his water bottle.
“And now we know why a Cametrean would leave her home planet,” said Mr. Arun Sliver.
“She’s not a spy!” said Kol. “Who was she spying on? Why would they give a spy this elaborate rig? This is for building VR environments. Why monitor everything she sees and tastes?”
“It’s a repressive theocracy,” said Yip-Goru. “That’s kind of their thing.”
There was a coughing sound. The kind of sound a human would make. Kol pivoted from Terequale Bitty’s corpse towards Mr. Arun Sliver, but he hadn’t made the sound. He was pointing his microwave pistol at the other human in the hold. The other human.
“Oh, hi,” said the Captain.
Mrs. James Chen stepped off the ladder and made the coughing sound again.
“I think it’s time we stopped keeping secrets from each other,” she said.
Good news was, this wasn’t the betrayal; it was the recruitment turn.
“As you know,” said Mrs. James Chen, “my predecessor in this job made detailed recordings of you, starting from her first shift.” The entire crew was crowded onto the bridge. “Terequale Bitty compressed these recordings and streamed them back to Quennet using a second transmitter, which, as your system administrator, she was ideally positioned to conceal from you.
“As a representative of the Navy of the Terran Extension, I’d like to show you what happened to all that footage. With the Captain’s permission?”
The Captain nodded.
Every 2-station showed a flat projection: the stabilized subjective view from Terequale Bitty’s eyes as she climbed the ladder up to the bridge deck. She cracked open the hatch. Everyone turned to face the rear of the bridge, as if expecting Terequale Bitty, or her ghost, to climb out the hatch.
“What’s the scratchy noise?” said Yip-Goru.
“Music,” said the Captain, her face taut and stern.
“She had music running in her head the whole
time?”
“It’s incidental music.”
The footage had been dubbed into Mirret, Terequale Bitty’s native language. Mrs. James Chen provided subtitles in Trade Standard D:
THE CAPTAIN
Ten-Minute, if you can take your mouth off that bottle long enough to program a course to the rendezvous point, there might be a little left for Admiral Golelli when we get there.
KOL [TEN-MINUTE??]
Fuck Admiral Golelli and fuck your mother. And fuck you.
[THE CAPTAIN notices TEREQUALE BITTY, or WHATEVER SHE’S CALLED IN THIS THING.]
THE CAPTAIN
Hey, Super-Squishy, how’s the firing context on the forward weapons array?
SUPER-SQUISHY, APPARENTLY
Fixed it with a number six ratchet.
[What the hell, a FIRING CONTEXT is software, you can’t set it with a RATCHET.]
THE CAPTAIN
Then strap your ass down and we’ll go to lightspeed.
Mrs. James Chen paused the recording. “‘Super-squishy’ is a quenny insult,” she said. “Kind of insult that starts fights.”
“We know,” said Mr. Arun Sliver. “So what in Santa Claus is this?”
“A quenny broadcast 3-program,” said the Captain through tight lips. “Extension Navy. A workplace comedy. As the name implies, the five of us are . . . were . . . officers in the Extension navy. I carry the dubious distinction of ‘kookiest captain in the fleet. ’”
“Heh, we’re military?” said Mr. Arun Sliver. “Gosh.”
“Hey, Cap,” said Yip-Goru, “where’s our nice red uniforms?”
“Gentlemen, shut up,” said the Captain. “I’m declaring an outrage.” She paused for effect. “This is an outrage.”
“The Cametreans have been using your pissant smuggling operation as cheap raw material for anti-Extension propaganda,” said Mrs. James Chen. “To blunt the population’s interest in offworld affairs. Make us a laughingstock. Keep the quenny at risk of Fist-of-Joy domination.
“Terequale Bitty was worth a lot to us, but we couldn’t get to her, and now she’s dead. I’m here to see if you want something good to come out of her death.”
“Cap, is this shit for real?” said Yip-Goru. “All we have is some foreign gibberish and this young lady’s subtitles.”