The Nature of a Pirate

by A. M. Dellamonica

  IT WOULD BE TRICKY—WHAT ISN’T TRICKY HERE? WE’D NEED SOMEONE WITH EXPERTISE WHO WANTED TO DIG THEM, NOT TO MENTION PERMISSION, BUT IT’S THE BEST IDEA I’VE HAD SO FAR.

  Figuring out whether Stormwrack was simply the future was important, because whatever had wiped out or submerged most of the Earth’s continental landmass had obviously been devastating. Was their home staring down the barrel of a bunch of massive comet strikes? The chances of those hypothetical strikes happening within their own lifetimes was vanishingly small—she and Bram estimated a ten-thousand-year window for such an event—but neither of them could let go of the possibility.

  HOW ARE MOM AND DAD DOING? DID YOU GIVE THEM MY LETTER? YOU HAVEN’T SAID—

  “Kir Sophie?”

  She looked up from the letter she was writing into the impassive, big-eyed face of a government functionary from the nation of Verdanii. “Hi, Bettona.”

  “Convenor Gracechild will see you now.”

  Annela Gracechild was part of the government of the Fleet of Nations, a congress of two hundred and fifty sovereign countries, island nations clinging to the archipelagos of land that remained within the enormous seas that covered most of the world.

  Sophie hadn’t set out to abandon ordinary life in San Francisco, to forge a path, alone, on a strange world. But six weeks earlier she’d been given a choice: stay, now, and make a place for herself … or never come back.

  Stormwrack’s very existence was a whopper of a scientific discovery. And given the lingering chance that it was Earth’s future, that a disaster was on the horizon … Despite the risks, she’d stayed.

  Her brother had returned to San Francisco to follow up their research into the connection between Earth and Stormwrack and—just as important—to ensure their parents didn’t report them both missing.

  As for Sophie’s half sister, Verena, and the crew of the sailing vessel Nightjar: Annela had sent them off on an unofficial diplomatic mission.

  Sophie had been working to endear herself to Annela, who clearly had veto power over Sophie getting the Stormwrack equivalent of a green card. Agreeing to poke into the serial attacks on the Fleet’s civilian ships had seemed, at the time, like a good way to make her case.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that she might fail.

  Now she got up, exchanged bobs with the assistant—she was getting better at the Fleet bow—and followed her belowdecks to a cabin that looked, to Sophie, like an autumn-colored bordello. Orange silks hung from the walls, hiding the boards. Dark-brown cushions, embroidered with fallen leaves, covered most of the surfaces.

  Annela Gracechild lay at the center of the nest. She was in her sixties, tall and curvy, with copper skin and so much self-confidence it barely left room in the cabin for air.

  “Welcome,” Annela said, declining to rise. Bettona set out a tray—tall cylindrical cups of thrown pottery, a steaming pot of anise-scented tea, and a plate of fresh-baked apricot biscuits and salted walnut sticks that reminded Sophie of pretzels. One of Bettona’s cuffs was dusted with flour, hinting she had done the baking herself.

  “Sit, girl.”

  Sophie said, “Are you sick?”

  Annela gave her a flat look that might have meant anything from Thanks a lot for saying I look like crap to Not in front of the servants, dear.

  “Fasting,” she said. “Now, what of Kitesharp?”

  Sophie filled her in on the morning’s events, holding out the camera so Annela could see the wooden fright with its mossy green eyes. “I’m not sure how much I can offer—it’s obviously magic at work.”

  “Reminds me of the salt creatures you fought on that bandit ship, Incannis,” Annela said. “Short lived, somewhat mindless, used for mischief—”

  “This one can’t cross the deck of the ship without rooting into the wood,” Sophie said. The tea wasn’t the usual, she noted—the anise flavor was strong. “If a thing like this has an intended habitat, I’m guessing this isn’t it.”

  Annela nodded. “Yet tearing apart the ships’ hulls and sinking them seems to be the point.”

  Sophie braced herself for a reprimand for having hastened the ship’s demise. When none came, she went on. “The drawn outline of the hand is off—there’s something wrong with the little finger. I suggested Septer Xianlu have a glance at all the Kitesharp crew.”

  “In case someone’s missing a digit?”

  “And walks funny. The fright had a limp.”

  Annela looked at Bettona, who made a note.

  “I also have a sample of the waxy stuff. It might be testable.”

  “Your brother can send you instructions for performing an alchemical knowing, can he not?” Annela asked.

  “Chemical identification,” Sophie corrected. “Maybe. If the supplies exist here. There’s also this.” She held up the plastic container containing the bit of bloody tissue, preserved in denatured alcohol. “It’s gross, but I wonder if this might not be uterine tissue.”

  Annela looked it over. “Looks like it. I suppose there’s no way to be sure.”

  “There might be,” Sophie said. There’s no way to be sure was rapidly becoming her least favorite phrase. “I’ll need to talk to a doctor.”

  “An outland doctor?”

  “You must have obstetricians here,” Sophie said. “The whole thing had an icky birth vibe to it. The blood trail, the way the fright pushed its way up through the ship—”

  “The Fleet decries frightmaking; there was an international effort to stamp out the known inscriptions, perhaps fifty years ago. There’d been an incident, on Tug Island, I believe. Thousands of them, running riot.” Annela handed back the sample. “I seem to recall the spells require a subject, someone to provide a…” Her hands moved, shaping a figure.

  “A template?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anyone who’d know?”

  “You could ask that last bandit from Incannis, the one who attacked you. He’s aboard Docket, awaiting trial,” Annela said. “Request a visitor’s pass from the judiciary.”

  Sophie nodded without enthusiasm. Her birth father had captured the sailor in question, while slaughtering all of his crewmates. She could do without any hard reminders of that particular bloodbath. “Yeah. Or … is there a listing or index of spells? Something that would talk about frightmaking?”

  “Perhaps some trial minutes persist, from the cases related to the effort to eliminate the practice. You want your pet memorician to look at them?” Annela said.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “As far as I can tell, you can find a reason to want access to every piece of information, true or false, ever recorded.”

  “It’s not my fault everyone here thinks curiosity’s some kind of personality defect,” Sophie said.

  “Cultural flaw, rather,” Annela corrected.

  “So I’m not broken, I’m just—”

  “Savage. Just so.”

  “Thanks a lot, Annela.”

  “To get back to your wood fright: I mentioned the bandit ship and the salt frights because of the effort to stamp out such spellwriting. There can’t be that many active frightmakers.”

  Based on what evidence? “You really believe that whoever made that ship with the salt zombies might be the same person who attacked Kitesharp?”

  “It’s the same behavior, isn’t it? Sinking ships and attacking their crews?”

  Sophie nodded. “How to prove it, though, that’s the thing.”

  Annela gave a little shoulder twitch, the common gesture that seemed to mean Don’t know, don’t care. “Seems probable enough.”

  “It’s probable enough and we’ll never know that are gumming up your court system,” Sophie said. “The point of using me is supposed to be about bringing a little definitely and for sure into the mix. Not to mention case closed.”

  Annela tsked. “How much progress have you made? This Forensic Institute of yours promised great things to the peoples of the Fleet, but what you’ve accomplished is little
more than a well-trained agent of the Watch might have managed.”

  “And yet didn’t.” Sophie didn’t quite hide her sense of insult. It was Annela’s way, she knew, to look at a horse-size success and complain because it wasn’t an elephant. “Anyway, since you ask, I have a proposal.”

  “Do you indeed?”

  Snagging an apricot biscuit, Sophie pulled out a wad of two-page briefs—a tiny fraction of the Fleet’s ongoing bureaucratic logjams.

  “What are these?”

  Sophie passed them to Bettona, who started leafing through the pages.

  “Five or six times a year, someone disappears from Fleet,” Sophie said. “They desert, or fall overboard, or whatever. And about every three months, bodies turn up in the ocean. Sometimes they’re identifiable, sometimes not.”

  Annela nodded. “That’s life asea.”

  “These files are petitions by families,” Bettona said. “Requests for death benefits for Fleet recruits who’ve gone missing but are not proved dead.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve learned that the Fleet takes handprints from its new cadets,” Sophie said. “You’ve even used them a couple times to confirm someone’s identity. But it’s basically been a matter of getting lucky. Some random officer compares the corpse’s prints with the ten most likely missing people. If it happens to look like a match, then hurrah. If not, you’re all ‘Alas, we can’t figure it out.’ Eventually, you get one of these lawsuits.”

  “Petitions,” Bettona corrected.

  “You can do better, Sophie?”

  “Fingerprint identification is an established forensic practice, back home. What if I got the Fleet fingerprint files on the missing people, took the prints of the ‘found sailors,’ as you call them—”

  “The bodies, you mean.”

  “Yeah. And trained some Watch people so they could create the beginning of a fingerprint bureau?”

  “What’s to keep you from falsifying matches?”

  “Excellent question,” she said, managing to hang on to her smile. “The answer is, the Fleet gives us the prints of all the missing individuals but mixes them into a number of other handprint samples. Say five hundred or a thousand. They don’t tell us who’s who.”

  “You believe you can pick the missing individuals out of the larger pool?”

  “Totally.”

  “Without magic?”

  “Say the Watch gives me a few people and I train them in dactyloscopy. If each of us comes up with the same matches, independently, and if the personnel files they match correspond to missing individuals instead of Joe Random Sailor—”

  “That would be convincing,” Annela conceded.

  “Convincing?” Sophie said. “Get excited, Annela! It’d be impressive!”

  Annela couldn’t quite hide a smile. “This is something you know how to do?”

  “Ah. There’s the catch.” She laid out how far they had gotten to date. Bram had assembled information on the procedures. They were both pretty sure Sophie could pick it up. “When the technique originally propagated on Erstwhile, a lot of cops managed to work it out by using textbooks and writing to each other.”

  Annela glowered at the apricot biscuits. “Then this is a ploy to get a transit visa to your home nation.”

  “It’s not a ploy,” Sophie said. “I don’t ploy. You already know I want to go home.”

  “And come back. And go again.”

  “I’m happy to bring forensics to Stormwrack, but it’s not all up here.” She tapped her head. “You can’t ask me for help, cut me off at the knees, and then carp about lack of results.”

  “Is that what I do?”

  “If I can teach the Watch to identify fingerprints, it’ll have tons of other uses. At home, prints are used to solve crimes, not just identify bodies.”

  “How?”

  Sophie picked up one of the cookies. It was warm, moist, just a bit oily. Then she rolled her thumb over the teacup, leaving a visible print. “You can find prints like this everywhere. The natural oils in our skin make them. This one’s visible, but the Watch can learn to pick up prints that can’t be seen.”

  “To what end?”

  “A print match can prove where someone’s been, or whether they touched a … say, a weapon. It can place someone at a crime scene after they’ve sworn they were never there.”

  “Impossible!” Bettona said.

  “Seriously. It’s a whole thing, back home. Very reliable.” Reading the doubt on their faces, she scooped up a carefully polished letter opener, made of lacquered wood, with a visible—if smudged—partial print on it. “This is probably yours, Bettona. Want me to see if I can prove it?”

  “No parlor tricks. Not now.” Annela rubbed her temples. A clock ticked loudly, somewhere close, and the seconds clunking by made it seem as though the older woman was taking forever. To hide her impatience, Sophie ate another of the cookies.

  Finally, Annela said, “It seems a more comprehensible procedure than the identity coding you tried to explain.”

  “There’s no way you can do DNA analysis here. Anyway, about the sailors’ bodies. Wouldn’t that be good PR? If you start paying out pensions to the families, instead of wrangling over it while they suffer?”

  “Mm-m-m,” Annela said.

  She’s going to say yes. Sophie was elated. “There are things I have to go home and learn. Plus, I can’t just vanish on my family.”

  “What will you bring to Erstwhile, while you’re landing there to acquire esoteric knowledge on uterine tissue and corpse fingers?”

  Sophie fought to keep her mouth shut. She could protest that she’d keep Stormwrack’s existence a secret, but Annela would just come back with the inconvenient truth: Sophie had told her brother, the first chance she got. Besides, she was hoping to talk the government here into loosening up on the secrecy. Sooner or later, she and Bram had to get more experts from Earth in on researching this world.

  First things first. This was the first step, and she sensed, at long last, some give in Annela.

  “You’ve shown this new branch of study has its uses,” Annela conceded. “The Watch has a few lamentably curious work pairs who are excited by your results. If they like this proposal of yours, they’ll recommend it to the court. You would work with the adjudication branch, continuing as you have been, investigating stalled cases that might be resolved by…”

  “Evidence? Proof?”

  “You would have increased accountability and a higher degree of support. Salaries for you, your memorician, these apprentice fingerprint investigators you ask for, perhaps a clerk or two.”

  “What about a role for Bram?” She wasn’t eager to expose her brother to Stormwrack and its dangers, but it wasn’t her call, and she’d promised to ask.

  “Depending on the cases in question. You would also be permitted to make periodic visits to Erstwhile.”

  “Awesome!” A flood of relief—she almost teared up. Remaining in Fleet had been a gamble, but she’d been afraid to go home until she had official permission to travel between the worlds.

  There had always been a chance Annela would never let her go home.

  “Before you get too excited, you should know you would have to take the Oath of Service to the Fleet of Nations.”

  Wrackers and their oaths and agreements. “Which promises what?”

  Annela nodded at Bettona, who said, “You would be, in essence, an agent of the court. You would report to the judiciary, act in their interest, enforce the law, maintain government confidences—”

  “Doesn’t sound too major.”

  “The consequences, when you break oath, will be severe,” Annela said. “You couldn’t recover from them as you have from your other blunders.”

  Blunders. Telling Bram about Stormwrack and magic. Returning when she’d been told to stay away. Getting into a big fight with her birth father over his stupid country of origin and its evil laws—

  “What makes you think I’d break oath?”r />
  “You broke your contract with your father within weeks of leaving for Sylvanna,” Annela said.

  “Yeah, because you didn’t tell me he was taking me to the Old South slave plantation from hell!”

  “Hell…?”

  Sophie sighed. Thanks to magic, she was perfectly fluent in the language of the Fleet, but on occasion she spat out an English euphemism that confused people. Hell, here, was the capital city of another island nation.

  Parrish’s island nation.

  “Forget it,” she said, unsure if she was responding to Annela or to the inner voice that brought up Garland at every opportunity.

  “One can only fight nature for so long, Sophie,” Annela said. “You’ve freely shared your opinion that the Fleet’s values are antiquated and ridiculous. You are bound at some point to prefer your judgment over our rules—”

  “How can you say that? I lived just fine in the outlands, as you call them, without ever once going on a crime spree. I barely even break the speed limit when I drive!”

  “What will you do when one of your experiments benefits your enemies?”

  “I don’t have enemies.”

  “No? There are the men who kidnapped and tortured your brother.”

  “I—” It was a slap. “Science doesn’t lie. Innocent’s innocent. Guilty’s—”

  “I’m not trying to be unkind, Sophie. You’ve said yourself you have no talent for discretion.”

  “I said I’m a bad liar. That’s different.”

  “Is it? I believe you will always put how you feel before the facts and rule of law. I fear, deep down, you are contemptuous of our system.”

  I’m not gonna cry. Sophie toyed with another of the apricot biscuits. “Then why let me go forward?”

  “I cannot punish you for oathbreaking until you do it.”

  “That’s how it is? ‘Here’s a rope. Let’s see how long it takes you to hang yourself.’”

  “We’d say, ‘Here’s a rope. Go loop a sinking anchor.’ But yes.”