Aggravation. I go to the hatch. Of course I can’t leave. “What the hell for?”
Now he sounds desperate as if he wants me to understand something. “For asking you. In the prison. I never should’ve asked you because the things you said after—”
“I never said anything after.”
“—in your sleep. When you walked. The things you said that had happened to you—”
I move away from the hatch, keep my back to the wall. “Get out, Finch. Go meet Angela in the library, make yourself useful.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know about Estienne, or Bo-Sheng, or what they trained you to do as a geisha—”
These names and words he says, as if he knows them. My blood feels white with rage. Or retreat.
“And now you’re back in this life,” he says, “and what it’ll do to you—”
I shout into his face, “I never left it!”
Except the fact he’s standing here says different in some unexpected way.
He takes a step as if he wants to come closer.
“Finch, I’m getting rid of people in a shift. You don’t want to fuck with me.”
And why does that sound more like a defense instead of a threat. I mean it as a threat.
He doesn’t hear it that way. He never seems to hear the way I say things, only what’s in my head. Because of that prison where we had nowhere to run, no corners or shelters, no barriers except our own words. And mine ran ahead of me like unsupervised children. These children that aren’t children at all; my sleeping words are old and clotted. That was what he heard, and now he’s here because I let him make me weak. But that won’t work on this ship. I have my plans, and now he’s screwing them up in my head because he keeps walking closer and these quarters are small.
“You only think you know me.” The words stop him, or maybe it’s my tone.
“I think I know…” His voice trails, but not out of uncertainty. His eyes search for the right words. They search me and only need to go so far. “You run a lot into yourself.”
This is how I’m bruised. My voice sounds level, but it feels torn in my throat. “I got you out, but I’ll kill you anyway, Finch. At some point I’ll kill you.”
“Like you’re going to kill Taja.”
“No.” He’s only a meter away, and now my arms start to fold before I stop myself and force them to stay loose at my sides. “No, I’ll kill you slower, and you’ll believe it’s because I care.”
The curiosity again. “Don’t you?”
“Not as much as you seem to think.”
“Don’t you.”
There isn’t another answer to give. Any questions he might ask now are only because he wants me to ask them too.
Except I don’t want the answers in my mind, much less said aloud.
I won’t stand with my back to the wall as if I’m cornered. I move to get by him, to the hatch, to bang on it and get outside in the corridor even if it means getting in an argument with the guard.
But as soon as our arms brush he turns, and his arms are around me. Not a straight-on embrace, he just catches me at what angle I’m at in passing and it’s both his arms around my body, pulling me in.
I will push him away, but then he says, “Don’t go back to it.”
I’m leaden, standing there. I’m leaden and lost.
I struggle from his hold, but in a snap he encircles me again, and for a second I think, No use. No use. And it’s strange to be held when you don’t want it. You don’t want it just because it feels so good. His body is warm and surrounding but not for geisha trade, not for prison protection, it’s just his arms, and they seem to crumble me in their grip.
“Stop.” I push at him.
Not hard enough. I think he’s scared, and maybe he’s not holding me so I can feel it, but for himself. He should be scared, he should remember why he avoided me before, when I taunted him. I can’t have his fear on me, polluting me against what I need to do. This ship will pollute him, but he’s muddying my thoughts.
I shove harder and cuff him across the head. “Stop it!”
He backs up, fast. I’m out of breath as if he had me running.
He leaves without a look, and the hatch slams in.
And I flinch.
He makes me pace. Before a major action, when I need to retake my ship, and he makes me pace. I try to sit on the bunk, but he was sitting on it, so I’m up again, and there’s nothing in my quarters to cut with. There’s nothing sharp here except my memory. My own fingers are too blunt, and what the hell is going on now?
I pace and claw at my arms.
What the hell is going on now.
Dexter is quiet, and I’m on the bunk, on my back, arm over my face. Listening for activity, some indication that I’ve won. That this thing could get going again—my ship, this plan, my life. Help Lukacs, whatever his agenda, but stay ahead of the game. It isn’t an old notion, it’s inbred at this point.
The hatch rattles briefly, then yawns open. I lean up on my hand—Taja? Come in to threaten me?
But it’s Finch again, holding bird food in a clear plastic bag. He glances behind him as the hatch shuts and holds out the bag to me.
“Rika sent this. Taja won’t let her in.”
“Did she say anything to you?” I slide up and take the bag, open it. Dexter hops and screams at me, recognizing a meal.
“Rika or Taja?” He sounds surprisingly normal considering the shit he pulled.
“Both.” I stick my hand in the bag, feeling the colorful pellets roll between my fingers.
“Rika just gave me the food.” Not mentioning Taja.
I look up. His face, forced impassivity. But his collar’s a bit torn, and my hand shoots out, grabs it and pulls it aside so I can see the red marks on the side of his neck. Fingers and teeth.
He shoves my hand away.
“The hell, Finch?” I forget the bag, look at the hatch.
“Forget it, Yuri.” He steps into my sight line. “Look, she can have her thrills, and I’m not telling her anything.”
But my thought wasn’t on information. Faced with it in bruises I thought only of what’s mine. What Taja has no right to touch. This instinctual leap that’s got me into trouble since prison.
“I can handle it,” he says, and I look at him. He has a geisha face, the kind of features that would show stark under paint. I can almost see my color on his skin. I don’t know what he sees, but he stares kind of concerned. “What?”
This heaviness in my chest. It’s not even what I touch; everything I look at is somehow tainted by my eyes. But I still look at him and how he’s handling it. Giving in because there’s no way out. This is how it starts.
“Rika didn’t give me anything but this food.” He gestures to it to draw my attention.
So I look down. It frees him to break expression if he wants. “Not just the food.” I feel around some more and pull out a tightly wrapped scroll of paper, bound by an elastic, and a small card of cigrets. My spacer brand. Rika, you beautiful bitch. “Here, drop some of this in his feed cone.” I hand the bag to Finch.
He takes it but stares at the paper in my hand.
Rare paper. But Rika’s a geisha and likes fine things. I slip the elastic around my wrist and read her calligraphic handwriting.
Talked to Chris. He passed private messages to the ones I know are on our side. Piotr’ll block off Engineering with his people down below. Angela’ll take your boy and a team to the biosystems for the sabotage. Ville’s got the Hanamachi on command crew deck, flight, and the armory—our bedbugs will help—and Buckell, Chance, and Rickert are going to move on the bridge. Chris is there too. Will pump smoke through the environmental controls, seal off forward deck sections C to F, knock them all on their asses, sort them later. Bridge needs to be barricaded and Taja taken down. Then the rest won’t put up a fight. Fence-sitters will capitulate. Then she added, Brig’s going to be crowded.
But only by the fence-sitters. The ones around Taj
a as her personal squad will be vented. Anyone who puts up too much of a fight will be killed. But Rika knows that. And my saliva tastes sour at the thought.
These quarters seem too small. Worse when I read the smaller print beneath the brief. Where do you want your boy after?
I look across at him. He’s on the deck poking his finger at Dexter, trying to get him to bite it. Not afraid anymore, but then it’s just a bird, and they’re both inside something larger. Maybe he feels my silence. He looks over his shoulder at me.
“After you help Angela I want you to go to your quarters,” I tell him. “And stay there.”
He doesn’t say anything, but it’s plain in his eyes. No. He doesn’t want to hide, he wants to help, like he thinks he’s helping by bedding Taja or whatever it is she’s got him doing, and the thought of it scrapes me again. I should be yelling at her, but I yell at him.
“I said you’ll go to your quarters and not move your ass!” Now, until you’re needed. After, or you’ll regret it.
He doesn’t attempt to convince me otherwise. But when he leaves I have nothin but the echo of my anger.
I let Dexter out of his cage so he can hop or flit around, then I lie on the bunk again with a lit cigret and look at the ceiling. Waiting. Smoking to calm myself, to distract myself, but it doesn’t really work because I listen too closely to the environment. Finch doesn’t come back even though he’s stubborn and he can. And that’s for the best. It’d be best if he wasn’t on the ship at all. But everything’s gone too far for that.
Taja knew from the moment I set foot again on this deck that it was going to come to this, but maybe, despite the Ops deal, she knew already that she had to show her hand in a big way. To the Khan, to the rest of the pirates. She needs to have it out with me—instead of winning the ship by default—or she’s never going to get anywhere in the organization or with our clients. And certainly not with Caligtiera.
No captain retires on a pirate ship. There’s only one way you lose your seat. And if you want to be a pirate captain, and you serve aboard a ship already, there’s only one way you can get it. Unless you’re a protégé.
Caligtiera is a patient man, and he had genuine respect for Falcone. But like any snake in the grass, he waited to strike. His ship has no Hanamachi. That’s one part of Falcone’s vision that he never did agree with and will never perpetuate. For whatever reason.
Protégés perpetuate protégés, that’s the theory, but I was the first to get my own ship. No other ship turned out a geisha protégé. That was Falcone’s gift, and his failure.
Except now.
I’m still alive, and there will be more deaths. I smoke to settle nerves and cloud my sight. I smoke and blow the tendrils to the lights. The lines perform ballet in the air with an accompaniment of distant violence. When the shots grow closer outside my hatch Dexter launches himself across the quarters in a flurry of bright green, a dart of color in the gray.
Eventually the hatch opens again, bringing in a strong acidic wave. When I smelled that from the air vents I knew things were well under way. Now Rika stands here with a rifle slung on her shoulder and blood smudges on her cheek. The guard’s dead at her feet. She tosses me an LP-150.
“Bridge?” I check the ammo read on the side of the weapon’s pulse pack. Still well over 70 percent.
“Waiting for you, Captain.” She grins.
“Taja?”
“Also waiting. With your boy.”
“What? I told him to go back to quarters!”
Rika frowns. “He didn’t tell me.”
This isn’t prison. He better learn it.
I lock Dexter back in his cage. He screams at the commotion, the smell, and the sound of the hatch shutting behind me.
Bodies guide my path all the way to the command deck and the bridge. Some of them I recognize, most of them I don’t. Cleanup’s going to be tedious, and there’s nothing to do but shut down a good part of your brain and your senses. Push them to the shadows so your world is just white.
“How much did we lose?” I ask Rika, as she walks along beside me, her wrist casually resting along the muzzle of her weapon.
“From reports?” She wears a pickup in her ear, hands me one so I can link to the comm chatter. “Forty percent of the crew, maybe. Maybe more. Ville and his team’s got the brig covered.”
“We’re running almost skeletal.”
“We have bridge and Engineering.”
And that’s what counts. The hatch stands open. I step in, see three of the six bridge personnel facedown on the deck. One of them with her hands behind her head: Taja. The three replacements for my bridge, plus Chris, stand off to the side with guns trained, and amid them is Finch. Someone gave him a gun at least.
No time for questions. He disobeyed me. He looks at me, and he feels it. He’s going to feel it.
I push my slung rifle to my back and walk up to him. His eyes narrow. Maybe he thinks I’m going to hit him, but I take the gun from his hand, check it. He put it on safety, and I thumb it back to kill.
“Kirov,” Taja says. “Listen to me.” Her voice muffled in the deck.
“Shut up,” I tell her. “Dead woman.”
Faced with it in an enclosed space, I see him pull in a rough breath. But he just gets a mouthful of dissipating smoke. The vents are shut, but it still creeps in. His eyes say, Don’t. But not for her sake or mine, for yours.
Maybe if my crew weren’t standing around. Maybe if I didn’t have this deal with Lukacs and Caligtiera waiting off my starboard side. Maybe if I wasn’t bred for it. Blooded for it.
Maybe if she’d kept her hands off him. Maybe if he’d just stayed in q like he was supposed to he’d never have to see me quite like this.
“You don’t have to,” he says. Wrongly.
I feel my crew shift. I feel Rika tilt her rifle, just a bit.
“You have your ship,” Taja says. Keeps saying. She knows the routine, but like any of us, maybe, her convictions don’t stick this close to death. “Yuri, you have the Khan!”
“I know,” I tell her, and look away from Finch. I aim the gun and shoot.
“No!” Finch says, a beat too late.
Rika says, “Finally.”
Rika takes Finch back to my quarters. The captain’s. I go to the comm station and tell it Caligtiera’s private link, but not for an open call. I want to leave him to think and contact me. With my rifle scope I freeze a shot of Taja on the deck and transload it straight into the message to him. With two words:
Your move.
I’m alone on the bridge with the rifle in my lap, in the captain’s seat, watching the console waver in standby, helio images morphing and twisting in the air just above the hardplate. I can lean over and finger a coil or a command nebula and the ship will power up or fire its cannons and I can go anywhere with it. I can take it to Lukacs and blow him to the strits. Or I can deal him to Cal, and together we figure out this operation once and for all. It sounds so plausible in my mind, but I know better. Reality is never that rosy.
We’re motionless in space, anchored to the stars, and Taja sprawls dead behind me on the deck.
The bridge hatch beeps and opens, and I swivel the chair to look. Rika. She steps in and around the body, then drops down in the conn seat in front of me. She’s ditched her rifle, and now all she’s got is a sidearm, which she places on the console beside her elbow.
“Yuri,” she says, “what are you doing with that boy?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That Finch.”
“I’m doing nothing with him. In any sense, in case you wanted to know that too.” Warning. I look at her.
She leans forward on her knees. Her cheek still has blood on it, like geisha paint. But flakier. Darker. She says as if I don’t know it already, “You can’t let him question you like that in front of the crew. For your sake and for his.” She plows ahead. “He’s weak. Any idiot can see she had to be shot.”
Because this ship is a pirat
e.
“He won’t do it again. I made my point. He saw it.”
I saw it. I’m still seeing it.
“You made your point because he’s in love with you, and you want to hurt him,” she says.
I stare. “What have you been drinking?”
She answers like she didn’t hear me. “Because you’re in love with him but he’s your protégé. That’s not how it works, Yuri.”
“I’m not in love with him and he sure as hell isn’t my protégé.”
“It’d be good if he was, so people know you’re on board for it. You never showed interest in getting one.”
I have no answer for that. Because it’s true and I’m tired and there’s a body that’s my fault lying bleeding on my bridge.
No I don’t want a protégé.
Her eyes say I better want one. The right one. “You’re going to severely mess things up if you take him on and you can’t separate. I don’t know what went on with you on Earth—or Austro for that matter—but it’d be best if you dump him on Hades right now.”
I still don’t say anything. I just look at her.
She says, “You know I’m right.”
“I know that just because you’re the Elder Sister of my Hanamachi, you can’t assume you can talk to me this way. Especially with wild ridiculous theories. You think I don’t know what I’m doing with him? You want this fucking seat?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t want the seat. But I just helped you get it.”
We stare at each other. This captaincy comes with conditions. Of course it does.
How did I forget?
She picks up her gun again. “I’ll stay on bridge and get someone to remove the body. You better go…do what you have to do.”
“Is the ship secure?” I ask dully.
She says, “It’s secure.” Without the “sir.”
So I get up from the chair and leave it behind.
Rika put a guard outside the captain’s quarters where I told her to hold Finch. I’m almost at the hatch when the intercom sounds overhead.
“Captain Kirov, comm one.” Rika’s voice.
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