I didn’t want to go back to Evan yet. I sat at the limited-access comp Kris and I shared and tried to form coherent thoughts about Falcone. They refused to come.
Kris caught me at it, doing nothing, when he came to dump his training gear before lunch.
“Hey, I didn’t expect to find you in here.” He shrugged out of his webbing, which was splattered with mud from one of our maintenance sims—as Dorr called it. Maintaining your high level of fitness. Being dirty and still able to function was a requirement.
“Well, these’re my orders.”
He laughed. “To sit in q looking at a comp screen?”
I turned my seat around and watched him. “You seen those kids? The ones off Shiva?”
“Nah. Why?”
They’d be scared. I didn’t say anything.
Kris was used to my silences by now. “How’s your friends—Evan’s his name, right?”
“Messed up, thanks to pirates.”
Kris eyed me and I knew he waited for more. He sat on his bunk and worked off his dirty boots.
I said, “What’s the captain gonna do with those kids?”
He shrugged. “Take them to Chaos, probably. That’s the closest station out here.”
“Then what? Social Services?”
“Yeah. Or try to find their parents or some relative, if they’re alive. I guess what they did with you.”
“Evan’s eighteen. He’s adult. They’re gonna put him in some hospital ward he won’t ever stay in. But he’s…”
“What?”
I shifted. “He’s not—he’s not socialized for, you know, station life. He’s gonna just go the wrong way on a station. Gangs, drugs.” Worse, I thought.
“You should talk to Cap, then. Maybe he can work something.”
“What could he do?”
“I dunno, Jos, that’s why you oughtta talk to him. But I don’t think he’s the type to just dump somebody like Evan.”
I wasn’t so sure. Evan was more pirate than me, six years in their custody. I’d only been one and Azarcon looked at me sideways.
“I’m gonna shower, then grab some grub. Wanna join?” He laughed, seeing the look on my face, probably. “The grub, not the shower.”
“Maybe. I gotta talk to Evan.” I shut down the comp and headed for the hatch.
“Oh, hey. I got something.”
I turned back. Kris fished into one of his cargo pockets and tossed me a pack of cigrets and a finger lighter.
“I heard he’s been sapping the guards dry. Give those to him.”
Kris had to have made a special trip to supply for these and bought them out of his own creds. He didn’t smoke. I looked at him and “thanks” didn’t even make it past my teeth. He managed to blindside me at the oddest moments.
“Say it’s against what I owe you for all those poker games you keep winning.” His easy smile appeared.
“He’ll appreciate it,” I said, then just stood there.
Kris raised his eyebrows, amused. I knew he was laughing at me in some benign way that I didn’t quite understand.
* * *
XXXI.
Dumas looked at me with raised brows when I appeared again and handed over my gun. But he didn’t comment, just opened the hatch. Evan looked up at me but didn’t seem surprised either, even when I handed him the cigs. He just slipped the finger lighter over his thumb and forefinger, pulled a stick, and sparked it. He sat against the bulkhead at the corner of the bunk, in a riot of blankets, sheets, and pillows. He’d yanked the others off the opposite bunk for a reason I couldn’t fathom. He pulled his knee up and rested an arm against it, smoked and watched me. The wall of his detachment was high and solid. The gloss of Mukudori, our only real connection, had dulled.
I just said it, or else we would get nowhere. “Earlier, you know, forget about that.”
He’d retrieved the cup he used for an ashtray; it sat secure in an eddy of gray blanket.
“Sure,” he said. “So what’re you doing here?”
“Just to talk.”
He found this funny. “You’re still so fuckin’ innocent, aren’t you. A year with Falcone and you’re still this innocent? On a carrier full of jets and you’re still this innocent?”
“I’m not innocent.”
“How old’re you again?” He glanced at the ceiling, counting. “Fourteen?”
Somehow he’d turned things around, when I was the one supposed to ask him questions.
I sat on the stripped, opposite bunk. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I don’t feel like talking to you, Jos. I might offend you.” The bitterness could have seared flesh.
“You don’t offend me.”
“I don’t feel like telling you anything about Shiva.”
“That’s okay.”
“Fuck you, okay?”
I sat on my hands, watching him. “There’s nobody but us, Evan. I looked for anybody that survived Mukudori but there’re no traceable files.”
“I don’t give a shit about Mukudori.”
“I don’t believe that. Haven’t you ever wondered what it could’ve been like?” I forced myself to keep looking at him, even through the memories. Him and Shane. His parents. My parents. I needed to get through to him. He couldn’t just be this stranger. “Don’t you miss them?”
He shot out a breath of smoke and glared at me, burning eyes. “You naïve little shit. Come in here and give me shit about ships and wantin’ me to remember. I got no memories. I shit ’em out where they belong.”
“Even Shane?”
“I drank and pissed his memory a long time ago. You oughtta try it, maybe then you wouldn’t be so hung up. You had one damn year with Falcone and you sit there caught up in it. Yeah, think I can’t see it? Can’t stand to have someone touch you? Why? What’d he do, Jos?”
My hands were going numb. “You misread me.”
“Yeah, sure. Probably you liked it more than you wanna admit now.”
“Fuck you, Evan.”
“Can you?”
I kept sitting on my hands, otherwise I would’ve gone over there and strangled him to death.
“Austro, was it? Funny ’bout that, Jos, but I’d heard you were plucked off Chaos by a bunch of strits.”
I stared, cold.
“Falcone was real pissed about that. Shot at by jets ’cause he was shootin’ at you and in the confusion he looks up and his ladybug’s gone. None of the jets got you. So Shiva’s crew got sent to look for you, oh some kid named Jos Musey, dark hair, blue eyes, ask around. You know him on sight. But no Jos. Strits pulled out of the system and no Jos Musey found on the entire station. So how’d you get from Chaos to Austro? That’s a big leap for a kid with no creds.”
I wasn’t aware of breath. His eyes were bloodshot but behind them sat hard clarity.
My voice broke. “They trained you good, Evan.”
His hand shook when he took a drag. So I knew I’d hit my mark.
“Was that what the charade in brig was about, Evan? Make like the helpless prisoner, get me to get you out so you can sit in luxury with regular meals and cigs? Or do you give a damn at all? You wanna leash me along, is that it?”
His face lost some of its nastiness. But I didn’t know if I could trust it.
“I’m a jet on this ship. I can kill you now and claim you came after me. You wanna play that game?”
“You won’t kill me,” he said, steady. “I’m your last memory of our ship.”
“Maybe I prefer the one where you’re twelve.”
He stubbed out the cig and tucked his arms against his body, watching me. “You think I’ll tell?”
I didn’t blink. “Tell what?”
“About you bein’ taken by strits.”
“I wasn’t taken by strits. I got in good with a lady who took pity on me and she bought my passage to Austro. I was nine and I looked cute.”
“That’s not what Shiva said. Or Falcone.”
“How do you know?�
��
“I got ears.”
“And other things, apparently.” It was low. I saw it cut deep, despite his attempt to mask it. He knew what he’d become and he knew what I hadn’t.
He lit another cigret. “So I guess that means it’s back to the brig for me.”
“Not necessarily.” Some time ago my heart had formed a shell around itself. I looked him in the eyes. “Why don’t you tell me all about how you heard things from Shiva and Falcone?”
He smiled slightly, but like his other emotions it was steeped in a detached kind of cynicism. “Sure. And then I’ll just tap that jet outside the hatch and tell him about you and aliens.”
“What you know is shit.”
“Yeah? Maybe so. Maybe they’d even believe you over me. But there’s always that little bit of doubt. Military ships’re paranoid places, ’specially in times of war. You sure this quarters ain’t bugged?”
“How do you live?” But my stomach clenched.
He shrugged. “Ask yourself.”
“You don’t wanna leash me, Evan.”
“I want someplace safe. I don’t wanna get dumped in some damned hospital and shuffled through some station shit’s files. Is this a fair ship?”
“Hell no.”
“I like it here. I can stay in this room a long time.”
“You’re a pirate. Azarcon won’t see it any other way.”
“And what’re you? What you wanna know? I’ll tell you, but you gotta do something for me. Yeah, they trained me okay. They taught me you don’t get somethin’ for nothin’. So I’ll put out, I’ll bend right over for you, Jos. But you get me on this ship.”
“That’s not gonna happen. And I got no damn incentive. Your lies’re no damn incentive.”
“Fine. Good-bye.” He leaned back and smoked and watched me with the trained eyes of a baiting, backden whore.
It crossed my mind to kill him. Ash-dan would have done it, even Niko. My position here could be compromised. What he knew could probably be wrangled somehow out of one of the prisoners in brig. Azarcon wouldn’t miss him, though he might question my killing a former shipmate, even if I claimed self-defense. The murder would be a whole other mother lode of problems and questions.
And if the q was bugged, no argument of mine would wash.
Looking at him, at his wasted features and suspicious eyes, I just couldn’t. He was desperate and didn’t trust. So I had to make him trust. And I had to shut him up. He was right; suspicion alone, word from somebody who knew about Chaos, would land me in the interrogation chair.
“Evan, I don’t want it to go this way. I know you say you don’t give shit about Mukudori but I know you do. I know you do. I know you still remember Shane. And your parents. Don’t lose that between us. I brought you out of that brig for only one reason. I don’t care if you can’t recognize it.”
His eyes no longer dodged me like they had earlier. I saw well enough the pirate influence in him.
“I hated it there, Jos. Don’t think I liked it.”
“I don’t think that.”
“So help me. I just want a good place. No tricks if you just work that out.”
“I want to help. I said that. But you have to give back. I’m not the captain here. I just do what I’m told.” Reason. Once you’d calmed them, propose reasonable requests. “So I’ll be up front with you. Azarcon wants all that you know about Shiva’s operations and her connection to Falcone and the strits—meeting points, munitions depots, other legal ships that’re on Falcone’s good list. You don’t owe them anything, so help us. Captain Azarcon will be more inclined to offer you a position here if you give him those things.”
“That crew’s still out there. Their outriders escaped.” The fear in him was thick enough to see.
“They can’t get to you on this ship, Evan.”
He was silent, thinking. “And you’ll talk to Azarcon for me? I swear you do your end or I’ll bring that jet in here.”
Eventually he would compromise me. I knew it then. He was far too nervous and desperate.
“I’ll talk to Azarcon,” I said. “But first you talk to me.”
* * *
XXXII.
Being with Evan was like being sucked down, forcing my thoughts through the tiny window he allowed. Aaian-na never felt so distant as when I sat with Evan listening to his life since Mukudori. And all the things he knew about pirates.
I wanted a shower. I wanted to lie down and never wake up.
I wanted to forget what was in my head.
The shift change beeped when I finally left his q and went a little ways down the corridor, out of sight of Private Dumas. I sat on a stairwell and watched the dust and scuff marks on the deck, forcing my gut to settle. Azarcon expected his reports. Both of them. On Evan and Falcone. Eventually I went back to quarters, ignoring everyone who passed, and commed Kris. I asked him if he could just stay out of q while I wrote my report. He agreed. Maybe he heard something in my voice. Or heard what wasn’t in my voice.
I sat at the comp, stared at it a second, then flipped it up. Activated it.
Sat there.
The words came, eventually, like the dragging footsteps of something bleeding.
* * *
XXXIII.
I’d just sent the reports to the captain’s comp when Kris came in from his off-shift fun in rec. It was late in our shift and one-third of the ship was bedding down for sleep. My eyes stung from staring so hard at the screen. For a long time I sat there, unable to move, fingering the image disk of my parents that Niko had given me. Kris flopped back on his bunk, arms behind his head.
“Me and Iratxe and Aki went to the flight lounge,” he said. “And we whipped the wings real good in the star target sim. The Jellybean had no face left.” He laughed.
I went to my rack and lay stomach down.
“Muse?”
Thorough reports. For Evan’s, anyway, I’d been precise. For the one about Falcone I only wrote what I had told Niko those years ago. And in the writing of it, I remembered a bit more. But I didn’t write the more. Azarcon didn’t have to know everything. He wouldn’t know the difference.
“Jos?” I heard Kris shift up on the bunk. “Hey, did you get that report done?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’d Evan say—about the strits and his ship? About the pirates?”
I touched a slight dent in the bulkhead and scraped it with the edge of my fingernail. “As far as he knows, some of the ships in Falcone’s fleet have been meeting with symps or something. Like regularly for a few years now. He gave dates for future rendezvous.”
“Ah, shit! Are they organizing? Allies?”
“Trading partners, he said.”
“What’re they trading?”
I wished he would shut up. I dug harder at the bulkhead steel, its unforgiving surface. The paint gouged a bit under my thumbnail, but only the surface layer. Underneath lay the same gray.
“Muse, what’re they trading?”
“Children and guns.”
“What?”
I just wanted to sleep. “The pirates’re giving the symps and the strits weapons and tech—and the pirates get to stash their… commodities… behind the DMZ. Where Earth-Hub can’t touch.”
“The fuck!”
Strits stole kids. I knew that firsthand. Now they were allowing the other thieves to stash their hostages in territory military carriers were hard-pressed to encroach upon. Very hard-pressed. The Warboy, after all, patrolled there with his ships.
And Niko had said he suspected pirates were pushing into strit space. He knew.
I hauled myself off the bunk and out the quarters. Fast. Straight to the head where I threw up what food I’d had that shift. Footsteps padded up behind me.
“You need a medic?”
I coughed, waved on the water in the sink, and splashed my mouth and face.
“Jos, you okay?”
And I’d sent a report telling Ash and Niko that we’d captured Sh
iva and were interrogating the crew.
Evan had to be lying. Or something. Niko wouldn’t
A hand rested on my shoulder. I jerked and stepped back, casting water droplets all around.
“Easy.” Kris stared at me, concerned.
“Slavepoint’s real.”
His brow furrowed. “Slavepoint?”
“This—this place. This place we knew about, merchant kids. Where pirates took their hostages and other pirates gathered and they bid on them. They bid on the kids and the crew that they don’t ransom back to the Merchants Protection Commission.”
“Is that what he said?”
“He said strits help them stash us behind the DMZ!”
I heard the “us” echo in the wide, tiled room. I started for the corridor.
“Jos—” He followed. “Jos, they won’t be getting away with it anymore now that we know. We’ll take down the strits and the pirates.”
The idealism of a jet who just got his blacks. Idealism even after blowing people up. Even after seeing Corporal Dorr shoot that pirate in cold blood.
What was the difference? Niko was an assassin too.
I’d shot a pirate in cold blood. Twice. More than twice.
I sat on my bunk and wiped the wet from my face. The taste of bile still clawed the back of my throat.
“We’ll get them, Jos. The pirates, we’ll get ’em.”
The pirates were only half of it. Sometime Evan was going to expose me. Whether he knew the truth or just insinuation, that wouldn’t matter here. Azarcon already paid attention to me because of my link to Falcone. Adding a possible link to the strits would just compound things.
Niko was nowhere that I could ask him, that I could confront him about these claims.
Kris sat beside me and put his hand on my shoulder.
I shoved it off and moved away.
“Jos.”
I didn’t answer.
His voice got hard. “Get yourself together, mano.”
I glared. “You grew up on a safe station, don’t give me that.”
I remembered I was supposed to have grown up on a safe station.
Everywhere on this ship was too close. All I could think about now were the tall mountains of Aaian-na and the wide sea.
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