Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  I open my mouth.

  “No,” she says. “Not you. Him.” She points the cigret to Finch. “I want him to tell me how you got out.”

  I don’t say anything. Protest would make it worse. But we have to do this, or I won’t get the help I need. I don’t even look at Finch, because Petra is looking at Finch, and at me though not directly. Mr. Asian behind the long bar, facing our seats dead on, can see me too, and I don’t doubt that he might have ocular zoom implants. So I pull my own cigrets out of my pocket, cheap ones Lukacs gave me on the transport because I bitched for an hour straight. I light one and smoke, mingling the scent of our two different drugs.

  Finch holds his hands in his lap and says in his sweet accent, “We had help. The military might be stupid, but we still couldn’t just walk out of one of their prisons.”

  “True,” Petra says with a nod. “What help?”

  Finch shrugs and jerks his chin at me. “Not anyone I know. That’s his area.”

  I don’t look at him even though Petra still does. Maybe he did learn a thing or two inside. He at least learned how to keep a straight face.

  “Pirates,” I tell her. “Who else?”

  “How?” she says.

  “Killed me,” I answer. I roll up my sleeve so she can see the bruises on my arm. “Beat me to death, you know. I guess I deserved it.” Geisha can smile even in the face of that. If we don’t kill because of it first. So I smile at her, to keep it pleasant.

  She looks almost impressed. “You do deserve it. Which captain ordered it?”

  “They told me Cal, as they were tossing me into the morgue.” Because her and Cal never did get along, and the chances of her comming him are slim.

  “Cal and not Taja?” Her smile is mocking. She knows I despise Taja more than Cal. “You trust that?” One painted eyebrow goes up.

  “No.” I laugh. “But so far I’ll go along with it. I’m sitting here having a drink with you, after all.”

  Lies. Just all lies.

  “And I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to comm my ship.” That’s true.

  “Of course,” she says smoothly. “But you won’t at least relax in one of our dens?” Her eyes shift to Finch.

  “Sure we will. But you know my ship comes first.”

  “Ah, business with you, Yuri. Even when some business is a pleasure.”

  “It’s my upbringing.” Training sounds far too cold. And some people don’t want to be reminded that it’s a job for me.

  She grins now, and hauls herself off her seat. “I’ll tell Koto to link you. And give you some privacy. Afterward, you come see me.”

  “Of course.” This isn’t something we haven’t done before.

  She moves off toward the broader back rooms, hidden behind a long velvet curtain, and I don’t look at Finch. He doesn’t say anything. Koto from behind the bar comes over and plops down a commpad. “It’s secure,” he says, and walks off.

  “Go stand by the bar,” I tell Finch.

  “Why?”

  Now I look at him and tap my ashes in the silver tray on the table. Fatigue keeps kicking in my brain for attention. “Go stand by the bloody bar and make sure nobody’s loitering around the corner or by the doors.”

  “This place is probably bugged anyway.”

  “It’s not. Not that detailed, or do you think anyone would do business with her in these seats?” Drugs. Small weapons. Bodies. She trades in them all. “Just get over there.”

  He slides out and goes, but not without a tired glare. The hours since the prison weigh on him too.

  Deal with him later. I poke the pad to activate it and run my finger along the options. Won’t be a real-time talk, but text will do. Probably better. Less explanation.

  There’s a distress commcode that my ship will immediately recognize, and unless Taja somehow got into my primary command keys these won’t have changed, even if she implemented new ones. Mine just lie dormant until I send a signal, a kind of fail-safe in case the ship gets usurped. Which isn’t unheard of among pirates.

  So I send the activation set to the system and wait. Comm officer Chris will see the alert and answer back.

  And he does, in about ten minutes. The ship must not be in the Dragons for the signal to hop back so quickly, considering verification time. The message pops up on the pad.

  Identify.

  I tap in my old captain’s ID.

  Nothing.

  Then, Identify.

  I sink my burned-out cigret into the ashtray then input: It’s your captain. I need a pickup on Pax Terra, Red Square. Make it quick. And Chris? If Taja removed Dexter from my quarters, I’m going to kill her.

  Nobody but shipmates know about my pet bird. And nobody but intimate crew knows that I threatened Taja more than once about how she treated Dexter when I had to be off ship for one reason or another.

  I wait for the reply.

  Yuri? Holy shit.

  Come get me. I palm off and motion Finch over. “We’re set. Stay here while I go see Petra. Don’t drink anything.”

  “What’re you going to tell her?”

  “Nothing. We’re not gonna speak.”

  “Meaning what?” His voice is sharp.

  I don’t look at him. He doesn’t know anything about me, certainly not enough to judge.

  “Figure it out.”

  I leave him there to sit.

  Petra asks for perks, so I give her a half hour of body barter and she makes sympathetic faces at the bruises and bandages. I let her do most of the work but still I ache afterward and I want to sleep and just not have to move. But to show that would insult her, so I keep it all to myself. While I’m pulling up my pants she lights a cigret, lying there on the couch in her office with her naked legs crossed and her long hair draped over her breasts like a mermaid.

  “They coming?” she says.

  “Yeah. Got a room for me and my mate for a few shifts?”

  “Sure. Just don’t wear yourself out on him, I want more of this.” I hear the smirk in her words. “It’s nice to see prison didn’t ruin you, Captain.”

  I let my hair hide my expression as I look down to seam up the pants, because now I’d like to kill her. “You never have to worry about that.”

  She motions to the door with her chin, licking her bottom lip briefly. “Take the Argenta room.”

  I nod and leave. I meet Finch, who hasn’t moved from his seat or touched the glass as ordered, and ignore his stare.

  Koto unlocks the room for us from the master controls behind the bar, then leads us down a narrow hall. The den area of the club is a ten-room curtained-off section just past the VIP lounge. The room she lends us is midnight purple and silver, draped with a canopy. At least it’s not red, but it’s gaudy, really, with its main feature being the single middle-sized bed with an ostentatious peacock headboard.

  Finch says, “I think we need two rooms.”

  I unload my pockets on the side table. “Get over it. She’s not going to waste an extra room when she already thinks we’re shagging.”

  “We’re not shagging.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” I collapse onto the plush covers, on my back, and shut my eyes. I hear him walk around the room and poke into corners, opening the bathroom door, investigating things like some curious animal. Eventually he must have gotten tired because the end of the bed sinks down under his weight, then hesitation, and finally I feel him stretch out beside me. He doesn’t move at all.

  I roll my back to him, and I feel him do the same.

  I wake up halfway through the shift with my back to the peacock headboard and the lights up at a low glow. And Finch is sitting at the foot of the bed with one of the pillows in his lap, staring at me.

  I pull my knees up, rest my elbows against them, and rub my eyes. Again. What did I say? I don’t want to ask.

  “Yuri,” he says.

  “Don’t.” Don’t tell me, don’t look at me, I don’t want to know.

  This started when yo
u screwed me, his eyes say. With guilt? But he’s wrong. My active body and deadened consciousness didn’t need him to trigger it.

  “Go back to sleep,” I tell him. So you won’t hear me.

  But he doesn’t move. “Who’s Estienne?”

  I can’t tell if he knows already and just wants me to say it awake. I look at the bathroom door and miss the switchblade in my pocket.

  “Bo-Sheng?” he says.

  So I slide up and go inside the bathroom and lock the door. I sit on the tiles with my eyes open.

  For the next week the routine is simple. We lie low in Petra’s flash house, drinking and eating there, and I have sex with her every other night to pay the rent and feed us without having to spend all our cred. That’s what I’ve come to and me and Finch don’t talk about it, even though every time he sees Petra his face goes solid blank. He doesn’t quite look at me that way. Mostly I think he’s disgusted. I would be too since doing this for rent seems to degrade the years of geisha training in the Hanamachi on Falcone’s ship, whatever that means now, except I can’t have that much pride and work for Ops at the same time. There’s no pride involved here, any more than there is emotion.

  While Finch goes out on forays for first aid, food, clothes, and smokes—easier for him to show his face on the decks than me—I scroll the Send for info on the comp in our room. In the heart of Hubcentral, there isn’t much on the popular links but Centralist propaganda. President Judy Damiani seems to be basking in the glory of diminishing strit attacks on ships and military bases in the Dragons. Her politics makes no mention of Captain Cairo Azarcon or his adoptive father EarthHub Joint Chief Admiral Ashrafi and their attempts to make peace with the strits and their human sympathizers, nor is there much mention, of course, of her subtle Fundamental Centralist opinions and ties to antialien terrorist groups like the Family of Humanity—which I know for a fact.

  She and her followers play it up as if the strits are quiet because of better work by the deep-space carriers, but anybody who’s skated deep space—wasn’t that long ago I was in Azarcon’s brig—knows that pulling back has more to do with Azarcon’s voluntary exile to the strit side and his communication with the sympathizer Warboy. But Damiani hates Azarcon, and the thing she wants to do least of all is keep his name in the collective consciousness of the Hub, where he can do damage.

  Like his son Ryan seems to be doing damage. A bit of a burndiver, that one, intelligent and inherently rebellious—like his father, whose ship he’s on right now thanks to Family action that resulted in his mother’s death on Austro Station. Not my family, not pirates. Family of Humanity. The boy can be vengeful, encouraged by his father, I don’t know. Bit of a meedee darling thanks to good looks and a sharp tongue. I scroll a few marginalized reports apparently transmitted from across the Demilitarized Zone, origins no doubt heavily coded with deep-space military technology. And maybe some strit protocols too, I wouldn’t be surprised. That’d make them pretty much impossible to trace. Ryan Azarcon, drumming up suspicion about Damiani’s real motives in the EarthHub presidency. He’s immune just like his father, who Damiani already branded a traitor when he refused to be recalled. Her mistake, forcing his hand. To prosecute the son for slander or conspiracy or treason they’d have to find him, and there isn’t a carrier in the Hub that would go up against Cairo Azarcon and the Warboy, at least not without plenty of persuasion.

  From the moment Falcone died, the persecution of pirates by those same carriers stepped up, and it’s not a far stretch to believe they’re too busy chasing pirates to be that engaged with a fallen brother like Azarcon. Deep spacers tend to stick together, and they all hated us.

  Not a lot of mention about pirates on the Send, but then we never seem to make the main news cycles this far insystem. Deep-space links make passing mention, but it’s not advantageous to harp on pirate attacks when you want merchant ships to take quicker routes to deliver goods instead of the long way around in order to avoid interception.

  We prefer it that way. Lack of meedee attention means people are more ignorant of our existence, or at least in a healthy denial, and criminals do work better in the dark.

  Reading all of this, hearing the reports, there is nothing more sure in the Hub right now than constant jockeying for political power. No matter the faction. Within the Hub government, out in deep space, and especially among the pirates. I don’t need to find reports to remember how I left it. Why I left it. Why I regretted leaving it, stuck in Azarcon’s brig with a man too angry over a wife’s death and a son’s blindness.

  Push and pull of attention, desire, and agenda. Now I’m here with this warlord woman so she doesn’t give me up to badder elements, and that’s all politics is, really—this give-and-take on your back in someone else’s bed.

  I suppose I must please Petra a lot because she gives me a gun, nothing fancy, but it works and it’s small. Finch and I sequester ourselves in the room in late blueshifts when the music and voices of the club penetrate into the dens, loud and teeming. The less people see me here the better. He bought a deck of cards, cheapest entertainment, and we play that on the bed, sitting amid little avalanches of sheets, blankets, and pillows. He doesn’t talk much. Once or twice I catch him smiling when he beats me at a game, but then he seems to remember the situation, and it all fades.

  On the seventh full shift, at 1200 hours, when the club is in full swing and we’re holed up in here, he finally asks: “When are your people going to get here?”

  “They have to send someone in from the Rim. They weren’t in the Dragons I don’t think, but it’s still not a short haul. Anyway, don’t be so eager. They might just decide to kill us.” I lay down a card. We’ve resorted to playing Go Fish. We’ve played every other game ever invented for a deck.

  After a minute of concentration that doesn’t seem needed for a child’s game, he says, “How’re your injuries?”

  “Better.” And I know I’m baiting. “Concerned?”

  He blinks, his only reaction. His voice is wry. “Since my well-being is directly tied to yours, thanks to—him—then yeah.”

  The devil must’ve heard that tangential invocation because the very next shift, when I’m in the bathroom taking a piss, Finch bangs on the door.

  “Yuri, come out.”

  I sent him to buy cigs. After washing my hands I open the door, and he says, “Lukacs. Out there. Told me he wants to see you.”

  “Where’re my cigs?”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  I hold out my hand. “Of course I did, you’re yelling it in my face. Petra probably even heard, and now she’s going to ask questions, thanks, now gimme my cigs.”

  He pulls them from his pocket and takes out a stick before handing me the pack. “I wasn’t yelling,” he whispers.

  No, he wasn’t. “If talking to that man makes you so freaky, then maybe you should just let me kill you and be done.”

  This is what passes for humor between us. He doesn’t answer it, just lights his cig. My expensive spacer brand. I inhale his smoke before lighting my own, then I head to the door. “Put on your game face.”

  Finch leads me to the shadowed back booth of an off-ramp Irish pub, a little away from the main strip of higher-end clubs and dens on the primary concourse. It’s still part of the regularly patronized shops and restaurants that fuel the resident population, tourists, and stopover travelers heading outsystem, so there’s enough of a crowd to obscure us in a rear booth. Andreas Lukacs sits with his back to the wall and a beer in his hand, sips it casually as we slide into our seats—one on each side of him. Finch takes the cue from my eyes.

  But our benign outflanking maneuver is counteracted by the other agent who disengages himself from the bar and pulls up a chair to sit across from Lukacs, back facing out but with clear lines of sight to both of us. He leans back with his fingers laced across his belly, watching us. Less of a bodyguard pose and more of a partner. They must be partners, and yet that odd warning before liftoff from Earth. W
atch him. I try to see behind the shadows cutting his face from the dim lights, but there’s no getting through that. His expression is the same hard evaluation and despite the relaxed pose I can feel he’s hair-triggered.

  Lukacs is casual and undisturbed at being fenced in. He eyes my new dark sweater and cargo jacket and pants. “You’re looking better.”

  “You mean better-looking,” I reply.

  “Your boy here let me know that you’re waiting for someone from your ship to pick you up.”

  I don’t say anything, just poke the table menu with my order. White Russian. And I plan on leaving him with the tab.

  “Once you’re aboard, I expect you to get in their good graces in a reasonable amount of time and get to work setting up my cover.” He slides over a small chipsheet and a reader. “My contact information. Memorize it now.”

  I stick the sheet on the interface and peruse the codes. Trained memory, and he gives me the silence. Five minutes, then he holds his hand out and I pass it all back.

  And what will you be doing in the meantime while I arrange all of this? My eyes drift to the blond man. And you? But I don’t bother to ask because they won’t give any answers.

  We don’t speak as the waitress comes by to set down a small square napkin and my White Russian. She leaves, and I sip, and then I say, “You’re paying.”

  “Then why don’t you order?” Lukacs glances at Finch. The question somehow sounds like a challenge.

  I don’t want Lukacs to focus on Finch but Finch says, evenly enough, “No thanks.”

  “Trained him well,” the blond man says.

  I look at him, razor-cut direct. And that means what?

  “Not to take favors from strangers,” the man continues, with a thin smile, as if he heard my thoughts.

  “But you’re not strangers now. We’re all practically kissing cousins.” I can smile too if just for the entertainment of it.

  “I’d advise you not to get too attached,” Lukacs says, talking to me but looking at Finch. “But I think my words come a bit too late.”