I flanked her with Dorr as the other jets cuffed the rest of the bridge crew. We headed back to the Charger. Up and down the corridors jets escorted restrained prisoners. Some were teenagers. Younger than teenagers.
My boots dragged on the deck.
* * *
XXVII.
We maintained a tight circle around the prisoners as we marched them to the brig. A quick head count came up at eighty-seven. There were about fifty casualties on their side, a dozen on ours, five fatal for the jets. We’d taken them by surprise. They seemed to have concentrated on grouping their people off-ship, probably because they knew once jets were aboard, Macedon wasn’t far behind. Five of their outriders had scattered with who knew how many more crew aboard. Scout ships that size could hold anywhere from thirty to fifty people, depending on how crammed they wanted to be. Nathan had shot two. Even if Mac pursued a couple, the others would get away. They either had a sinkhole or they’d eventually starve to death in the Dragons.
Lieutenant Stavros separated the children from the adults and ordered jets to take the kids to training deck, which had a few empty rooms since graduation. The rest of us corralled the Shiva crew into the brig cells. They were quiet after the first few rebels were beaten for mouthing off or fighting. None of our medics helped them. Bleeding, bruised, or otherwise in pain, they huddled in the cells and stared out at us as the gates slid shut and locked. Hatred was only one of the emotions in their eyes.
I pulled off my helmet and ran a hand through my damp hair. Kris caught my gaze and without a word we started for the exit.
“Jos!”
My nerves jumped. I stopped and turned. So did Kris. Dorr, Madi, and Hartman looked over while the other jets streamed by us, uninterested.
One of the Shiva crew fought his way to the cell gate. “Jos Musey!”
A feral face pressed to the bars. Slate-blue eyes searched for mine, then locked like a missile.
I couldn’t move.
“Who the hell’re you?” Dorr said, in my silence.
“Evan,” I said, from a long distance away. I stepped forward but Dorr grabbed my arm. I tugged at him violently.
“Stand down, Private Musey!” Hartman’s voice cut through the sudden dark caul that had fallen over my mind.
I went still. Kris moved up to my other side and held my armored shoulder.
“Who is this?” the sergeant asked me, without tolerance.
“Mukudori,” I said. All I could say.
“Get me outta here, Jos,” Evan pleaded. His voice rose, hysterical. “Get me out!”
“Shut up!” Dorr barked.
I shoved at the corporal and made for the cell. Kris and Dorr both hauled me back.
The prisoners started to yell. One of them grabbed Evan out of sight.
My rifle snapped up. “Let him go!”
“Musey!” Hartman knocked down the muzzle. She strode to the cell, weapon trained. “Bring the kid forward. Now!”
They shoved Evan against the bars. He winced. Bruises stained up and down both his arms.
“Let him out,” I said. “Sergeant, let him out.”
Hartman glared at me. “Shut the hell up, Musey!” Kris’s fingers dug into the inside of my elbow, between my armor. Hartman eyed Evan. “What’re you doin’ with this lot?”
“They b-bought me. After our ship—” His eyes trailed to me, wet, red, and panicked. “Tell her, Jos. Please—just get me out of here. Please.”
Dorr’s and Rilke’s hands held me fast. The ghost that was Evan didn’t take his eyes from me, or me from him. Hartman stared silent for half a minute, then fingered her wirecomm. Then she said, “Captain, we have a situation.” She explained it in terse terms, looking at me.
My stomach rolled over and clenched as she paused to listen.
“Yes, sir,” she said finally, and signed off. She motioned Madi forward. “Open the gate.” She stepped back, weapon up. “The rest of you get to the wall. Now!”
The crew edged away as Evan came up close to the gate. As soon as Madi yanked it back he moved out. Hartman turned him around roughly and cuffed his wrists behind his back. His breath expelled in frightened gasps. I pulled at Dorr’s grip.
“Give the corporal your weapons,” Hartman ordered. “Then you can approach. Carefully, or I’ll shoot you both.”
I unstrapped my webbing and dumped it to the deck, then shoved my rifle and sidearm at Dorr. Evan stood motionless, chin lowered, eyes darting up to me and around as I advanced. Then they steadied, two blue sparks from the pallor of his gaunt face. He looked older than his standard age, when he should’ve seemed younger. Shiva was a deep-space merchant.
I remembered those eyes watching the door of the hole Falcone had put us in. I remembered burrowing against his side and listening to his heartbeat in the dark, thinking he could protect us just because he was older. Now he looked at me for protection. His eyes begged. He said, “Get me out of here.”
* * *
XXVIII.
Sergeant Hartman, on Captain Azarcon’s orders, allowed Kris and me to take Evan to an empty q on training deck. I was sure Azarcon wanted this to play out to see what he could get from it—from either Evan or me. Someone from Shiva who might be willing to talk was an opportunity. Captains had to think that way.
Hartman told me to talk to Evan (she meant interrogate), then ordered a fresh jet to stand outside as guard. Kris left us alone and I stood awkwardly by one of the bunks while Evan folded his arms against his body and leaned against the bulkhead, as if he was afraid to sit. He shivered and wiped constantly at his hair, which had grown since the last time I’d seen him, like the rest of him—he must have been eighteen now. His hair hung in his eyes, dirty pale. His eyes never settled on anything for long, especially my face.
“You got cigs?” he asked, the first words since leaving brig.
“No, but… just a mike.” I stepped out of the quarters and asked the jet there for a stick. He fished one out, lit it for me, and I took it back and handed it to Evan.
Evan accepted it without a word and dragged deep.
“You can sit.”
He glanced at me and slid down the wall to his haunches, one arm against his stomach.
“I meant on the bunk.”
“I’m all right here.” He sucked on that cig like it was his last.
I crouched down across from him, then sat, resting my elbows on my knees. The narrow quarters only put us a couple meters apart. He looked at me briefly, wiped his hair back only to have it fall forward, then looked at me again. This time his gaze lingered in a kind of stunned disbelief.
“Shit, Jos. Shit.”
“Evan, what happened?”
He shook his head, glanced away, then back at my face. “Look at you. I can’t believe it.” His eyes filled.
Now I looked to the corner. “I know. I’m alive. You are too. Is anybody else? On Shiva?”
“No. No more on Shiva.”
“Nobody from Mukudori—”
“No.” He looked toward the hatch.
“Evan.”
“What’s gonna happen to me?”
I stared for a moment. I was in no position to make promises, and he’d been found on a ship that had shot at a carrier.
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t put me back there. You can’t—I’ll do anything, Jos, I’ll do anything.” He shifted forward until I could smell the smoke on his clothes and the sweat on his skin. He gripped my sleeve.
“I’ll try and help you, Evan, but—I’m new on this ship, I don’t really have a say in much.” His breath stank. Up close I saw the blood vessels in his eyes and tiny cuts along his collar and the backs of his hands. He stared into my face now without wavering.
“You’re older,” he said, flat-toned.
I shifted, trying not to shove him back but wishing he’d let me go. The desperation in his eyes made a hard block of ice form in my stomach.
“I’m almost fifteen,” I said, and put my hand on his
wrist to disengage his grip.
“Don’t trade me again, tell—tell your captain not to trade me.”
I got caught in the claws of his gaze. Everything about him was different from what I remembered. Somewhere in that older-than-eighteen face was a vague recollection of the twelve-year-old who had alternately terrorized and played with me. I had looked to him as a lifeline in Falcone’s ship.
“Let go, Evan.” The fear in his face put me ill at ease.
He released me finally and slid back against the bulkhead. The cigret burned down to a stub.
The hatch swung open without warning and Corporal Dorr stepped in. He looked a lot less fearsome out of battle armor but Evan still shrank back, staring at him guardedly.
Dorr glanced at Evan but otherwise ignored him. “Musey, let’s go.”
I stood. Evan tucked against himself tighter and barely looked up.
“I’ll come back,” I said, though I didn’t even know that.
Evan nodded slightly as if he didn’t really believe me. I followed Dorr out to the corridor. He nodded to the jet who remained behind by the hatch, and headed toward jetdeck.
“Cap wants to see you.”
I went cold. Azarcon hadn’t seen or said a thing to me since before training.
“He’s a mess.” The corporal lit a cigret and smoked as we went to the lev and in. Obviously he didn’t mean the captain.
“He was on a ship that bought him.”
“From who?”
“Falcone. We were both on the Khan. Before.” I listened to the lev’s growling hydraulics as we ascended the decks. Black dirt had crusted in the corners. Scrub duty soon for some poor disobedient crewman.
“So what’d they do with him?” Dorr asked. “He bin there all that time with them pirates?”
I looked at the corporal. He was curious, not concerned. He had to know very well what pirates did to bought crew. Worked them to death or worse.
“Is Shiva really a pirate?” I said. “They port legal, don’t they?”
“They used to. Not no more they won’t.”
I remembered then that Falcone had docked legally too, at Chaos. False documentation, false sigs.
Dorr straightened from the gray lev wall as the doors grated open. I followed him out, down the same clean corridor I’d taken with Madi to the captain’s office. Not a tube of light flickered here. Dorr hid the cig behind his leg as the hatch opened. He sent me in.
“Thank you, Corporal.” Azarcon sat behind his desk, like the first time I’d met him. He gave Dorr two glances as the corporal stepped back to the corridor to wait. “And put out that cigret, you know there’s no smoking on open deck.”
“Yes, sir.” He didn’t sound the least bit contrite. In fact he grinned as the hatch shut.
I faced Azarcon. He leaned back in his chair and motioned briefly for me to take the seat opposite him. This was new. I sat.
“So how is he?” Azarcon said, the last thing I expected from his mouth.
“Scared, sir.”
“I don’t trust him and neither should you. Feel fortunate that I even let him out of the brig. Do you read me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Corporal Dorr said you did well on the mission.”
He jumped from topic to topic and it had to be purposeful. I hadn’t had time to think about the mission and I didn’t want to now. I just nodded, conscious of the fact I was still in my fatigues, though I’d ditched the armor, and I probably stank.
He looked at me carefully. “Private Musey, Shiva is a pirate ship. The fact nobody until now could really confirm it is because she reported directly—and only—to Genghis Khan.”
I blinked, feeling the weariness that had started to seep into me snap alert.
“She operated legally, as a front, while keeping one foot in bed with Falcone. She was Falcone’s second in command.”
I had nowhere to look but into his eyes, and I couldn’t read them.
“Why’re you telling me this, sir?”
“Did you know about her?”
“No, sir.” Dread started to shed its skin beneath my own.
“The Khan had never rendezvoused with her in the year you were there?”
“It might’ve, but I didn’t know it. He never took me off ship until Chaos and he never told me his operations.” I let my voice grow hard. “Sir.”
“How long has your friend been on Shiva?”
“Since Falcone sold him. He’s scared, sir. He’s in need of food and sleep and maybe a hot shower and I just didn’t get around to fully interrogating him yet, sir.”
I was tired and probably in slight shock, for a number of reasons. Azarcon put a hand on his desk in that casual way he had, though his eyes never left my face.
“You will interrogate him and you won’t forget that we don’t know what he did on that ship. He could be one of their operatives. I want you to find out what’s happened to him, what exactly he did after you two were separated—I want details.”
He didn’t reprimand me for my borderline insubordination. I said calmly, “Yes, sir.”
“I want to know everything he knows about Shiva’s operations. It might be he knows nothing. It might be he was the bedmate of a captain who talked in her sleep.”
“Yes, sir.” Ask the damn Shiva captain, then.
They probably were asking her and I just couldn’t hear her screams from jetdeck. If that woman we’d captured was even the captain. More likely the ship brass had fled on the outriders.
“Can I get him cleaned up, sir?” They were allowing the children that luxury.
“Yes, go ahead. Send me reports at the end of every duty shift.”
I took that as dismissal and stood.
“And, Private…”
“Sir?”
“Write me everything you can remember about Falcone. Everything.”
I stared at him, frozen. He would’ve had a report from Social Services on Austro, a brisk account from the memory of a nine-year-old. Niko had arranged it. And then my own psych form, from training.
“Is there a problem, Private Musey?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you’re dismissed.”
I saluted and left.
* * *
XXIX.
Dorr walked me back to jetdeck without asking what the captain had wanted; he probably knew.
“I guess the crew’s going to be interrogated,” I said. He knew which crew I meant.
“Yah. ‘Specially ’bout why they were meetin’ a strit ship out in the wide dark yonder. Man, if the strits an’ pirates are hookin’ up, we’ll be in sinking shit.”
I had to send another report to Niko. I had to write a detailed report about Falcone almost six years after the fact. And I had to dig at the only other person who remembered Mukudori as more than a name on a slate. Everything I did was dirty.
But I wanted to talk to Niko, more now than anytime since I’d been on this ship. My feet moved but I wasn’t quite aware of where we were going until Dorr stopped me outside my quarters.
“Ain’t I gallant?” He grinned. “Now go sleep. That’s an order.”
“Evan—”
“Ain’t goin’ nowhere and you’re dead on your peds. I’ll have the jet check on him.”
“Captain Azarcon said he can clean up.”
“Then I’ll get somebody to hose him down.”
I stared at Dorr. He laughed.
“Crikey, Muse, learn to smile. Ahright? Now get lost, I’m sure Rilke is pacin’ the deck waitin’ for you.” The grin and dimples appeared again.
I longed to hit him. Instead I went inside the q. Kris wasn’t pacing, but sitting on his bunk doing nothing. He rose to his feet when I came in.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.” I went to my bunk and grabbed my pouch of toiletries from the footlocker. The quarters was a double bunk only, our racks against one wall across from each other, with lockers, upright tiny closet space, and a narrow comp
desk. It was cleaner than how we’d left it before the mission. Kris must have tidied it up in my absence. I headed back out.
“Musey, wait—what d’you mean nothing happened? What’s with that guy—”
“I’m going to take a shower.” I said it more to interrupt him than really tell him what I was doing.
“Are you all right?”
He was going to follow me. To the shower. I turned and pushed him back, not gently.
“I’m fine. Just—leave me alone.” I glanced into his eyes, not sure of what I saw there, and left. He didn’t follow.
The shower was on a timer. After five minutes it shut off and the body dryer cycled. I cut it and cycled the water again and just stood there, letting it come down on my head and steam my vision. Soap scent replaced some of the things that had clung to my skin during and after that mission. But I still smelled Shiva lingering through the clean. Images lingered. No amount of water and soap got rid of those.
When I approached my quarters, Kris and Aki were at the opposite end of the corridor, walking away together, their backs to me. She had her hand on his shoulder. I couldn’t hear them. They didn’t look behind them or see me when they turned the comer. I went inside quarters and shut the hatch before the sound of their bootsteps faded away.
I collapsed on my bunk, put a boot on the mattress and the other on the floor, and stared up at the ceiling. Rows of lights and cold pipes. The ever-present hum of the drives seemed too loud. It grated on my nerves. I rolled over and found myself staring at Kris’s bunk. I memorized the wrinkles on his blanket from where he’d sat. Anything to get my mind away from reports and interrogations.
I was still staring when he returned, a couple hours later. I tossed onto my back and he paused in surprise.
“I thought you’d be asleep by now.”
“No.” I put an arm behind my head and didn’t look at him. He fell into his rack.
We lay in silence for a while.
“Jos, what happened to your friend? Who is he?”
Kris came from a station culture. He hadn’t grown up with talk or threat of pirate ships and Slavepoint. Sympathizers once upon a time bombed Austro dock and his bad luck put his father on that dockside. But he had the station to take care of him. Pirates killed ships and confiscated crew, then ransomed them or sold them. And the rumors were not as bad as the reality.
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