Caligtiera. So I bypass the guard without a glance and go to the library, which is just down a deck, where I’ll have comm access.
The room is dark and empty of life. Knowledge here is clogged inside comps and probably not accessed much since I left. I doubt Taja encouraged my crew—or hers—to read, explore, or experiment. I used to. The information might be screened, but a crew ignorant of basic slate-learning can’t serve you well. Difference in my captaincy and Taja’s. Stop thinking of Taja. When I sit at one of the center consoles I can feel the cold coming off the black equipment, the table, the chair. There’s a fine layer of dust on the smooth surfaces.
It’s habit to let my expression fall to blankness as I comm Rika to link us. Cal’s face appears on the display, bland and lined. He says, “Are you up and running?”
“Yeah. To get from A to B and even fire a few shots.”
“Comm your contact and get him out here. Not to Hades. We’ll meet at Ghenseti. I’ll let you know where specifically on station—later. But first I want you to come aboard.”
I tell him, “No. Whatever you want to say to me, you say it now.”
“What I want to say won’t go over comm. Come aboard, or the deal’s off.”
He shuts down.
So now he’s testing me. Maybe his interest in Lukacs is a lie, and all he wants is to get me back on the Cross so he can kill me and take my ship, too easy in its half-staffed stage.
But you don’t figure a man like Caligtiera by keeping a distance. And this time I’ll go to him armed.
Rika accompanies me, and two men I vaguely recognize that she assures me are good. The same woman in the gray suit escorts all four of us to the conference room, with three of her own guards. I tell Rika to wait outside with the guards, which she isn’t happy about. But she doesn’t argue in front of them. Me and the woman go into the room where Caligtiera waits, sitting with a slate in front of him. The woman sits on his right side and I mirror them on the opposite end of the table.
“Did you comm your Ops contact?” he says.
“I want to know what you have to say to me first that can’t be said over a secure comm.”
“Well for some things I need to see the face up close.” He slides the slate across the table, and I stop it with a slap of my hand before it goes off the edge.
Clearly he wants me to read it, so I do.
They’re schematics of the EarthHub carrier Archangel. With patrol schedules. Deep-space carriers have six to eight thousand crew.
I look at him. And he’s actually sort of smiling as he smokes his toxic brown cigret. He says, “This will send a message to the Hub. And Ops. If they even think to fuck with us.”
It’ll send a message to the other pirates too.
Macedon’s sister ship.
And sitting here my gut tightens and begins to twist. I force myself not to swallow, show anything except that dead gaze Falcone used to say made me look like I was one step from committing an atrocity.
And look, here I am.
I set the slate back on the table. “When?”
“Haven’t figured that out yet.” He might be lying. I almost bet he is. “But since you went to all that trouble to retake your ship, I expect you to be my bloodmate in this, and if this flies, then I think we’ll do all right with Ops.”
I nod. “Why’re you risking it to tell me?”
“I honestly didn’t think you had the balls anymore to do Taja,” he says. If he could see my hand beneath this table. My nails dig into my palm. “Since you managed not to do Azarcon’s kid. But this has restored my faith in you. And from now until this deal goes down with Ops, you’re not leaving my portside space. Understood?”
“Yeah.” Of course.
I may have my own ship, but I still don’t have my freedom.
On the flight back to the Khan, Rika asks what happened so I tell her the bare minimum. Kill Archangel. She grins. “Cal has balls, man. You think he can do it?”
“Yeah.” I pretend to check my sidearm. But I’m not seeing the gun.
“Take down a carrier.” She is impressed. “Especially that one.” There’s no talking to her about the black dosage in my veins from this, she’s still a junkie wanting a fix, and I’m still feeling withdrawal pains. “Only Falcone did that,” she says.
“Falcone knew carriers.” State the obvious.
“Cal must have someone inside.” She admires him. “To get those schems.”
But of course he would. Everyone’s dirty.
Finch is still in my quarters. He sits in front of the cage watching Dexter but gets to his feet when I step inside. I dismiss the guard and shut the hatch. Maybe I should dismiss him too. The cold I felt from the docking bay to these quarters doesn’t seem to dissipate. It just settles in my chest and in the room like a broad net, pulling us down.
He doesn’t say anything. And it’s all right because now I have to speak. Now I feel sick. Nobody else will listen, and if I keep it in my head, it’s going to mangle me in some way, or infect me until I have no choice but to give in.
We stand apart, and I tell him, “They plan on blowing up Archangel.”
A flicker in his gaze. “Is that a ship?”
My quarters. Its forest green walls in some vague semblance of nature, the polar opposite of this ship’s angled gray interior. The bed’s unmade. Taja’s sheets. But I sit on it anyway to alleviate the growing nausea.
“A carrier,” I tell him. “Macedon’s sister ship. You know Macedon?”
He nods. Who doesn’t know Macedon.
“They’re going to blow it up. Archangel. Six thousand souls.”
Not so long ago they would’ve been six thousand enemy. But somewhere along the line I lost the flavor of the word.
“Can’t you tell them? Comm them?”
I rub a hand through my hair and pull at the roots a little. “No…no, I don’t know their link code, they change them every week, and even if I did, if they’re warned, he’ll know who did it and kill us instead.”
Finch moves over to me, leaning back on his heels on the floor beside where I sit. Just watches me, thinking of Taja. I can see him thinking it because it’s there on the surface of his eyes.
“I had to do it.” Like I have to explain myself to him for some reason. As if I hadn’t yelled and hit him just a few hours ago. But one death against thousands can bring argument to a halt.
“What about this carrier?” he says.
This is different. The other wasn’t completely right, and this would be completely wrong. I try not to make it form too solid in my head though.
“I tried to leave before,” I tell him. “It didn’t work. You don’t just walk away.” Maybe I’ll have to go through with this. And it’s making me sick.
“So,” he says, still mild, still watching. “You just keep going? ’Til someone kills you or you kill yourself?”
But that’s the pattern of this life.
Hands on opposite arms. I dig.
“Yuri.”
“I’ve done worse.” What do you call pulling children into this? Recruiting from a station and sinking them to a planet to rot until some dark ship takes them up and drowns them in its blood.
“So you’ll do it again?” Not so much judgment in his tone as a complete confusion. Maybe my mind really is this alien to him.
My words feel like another language. “Which is worse, killing a child or killing a ship? What is it, just numbers?”
“They’re equally wrong.”
“But say that’s your only choice.”
He’s silent for a long minute, and I don’t interrupt it. “Then whatever makes it your only choice is wrong. And the choice itself is a child of that wrong.” He answers it, but he’s questioning me. Why are you asking these things?
“Then what does that do, absolve you when you actually do choose one or the other? When you’re forced to?” Was I forced? Maybe not. Like I’m not in this. Maybe if it means your life or taking lives, you’re expe
cted to self-sacrifice.
He rests his hand on the mattress. “People do shit for complicated reasons. Absolution isn’t something we get for ourselves. It’s given.”
I look him in the eyes. “But maybe it’s all a lie. Who gives it, anyway. Who is so fucking pure that they can give absolution? The law? The government? Religion?” Distant concepts, like the stars, and when you’re just a kid you look to more immediate influences. Estienne, telling me it was all right that he did things with me because my mouth said I wanted it but my mind was in the palm of his hand. So people like me take the children because nobody’s truly innocent, everybody’s the same. Everybody has to be the same or how can people pick and choose what they care about. Maybe kids are only important when they’re yours; otherwise, people don’t make the effort. At least not the right people. I can taste my own bitterness, years removed from that bloody Camp. I’m not even so involved that I can’t see exactly the track of my own thoughts. They leave deep imprints in the black snow of my memory. Cold thoughts with geisha detachment.
Maybe this is what I tell myself to justify the thing I will be doing and all the things I’ve done. My gaze drifts to the deck.
“Yuri,” Finch says now. With a certain firmness. “What does all of this have to do with that carrier? It’s obviously wrong.”
It’s obvious but not easy. Like leaving a life. Or a necessary killing. “I don’t know what else to do.” That’s a lie. I know what should be done. I just keep weighing my options, hoping the scales will tip better in my favor.
Finch doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to, and he knows it.
“You should go.” I say it without any heat. Not like before. “None of this is your decision.” Or your life. “I’ll drop you off at the nearest port once it’s all over.” If we’re still alive.
He asks as if he didn’t hear anything that I said, “What exactly do those Ops want you to do? Don’t you think you should tell me now?”
Yeah, there’s that. If it’s not Caligtiera’s agenda, it’s Andreas Lukacs’s. And maybe it makes perfect sense that the only person I can possibly trust is the one I brought out of prison. But there’s Taja… I look at Finch and remember Taja isn’t an issue now.
“Yuri, tell me.”
Has he ever said that to my sleeping self? Is that how he knows?
This alliance of one can’t hold. So I pull my hands through my hair, just hold them there with my elbows on my knees. “Ops wants me to set them up with Caligtiera—that’s the captain of the other ship—” These words to him bleed out of me like a transfusion, he’s pulling them out, and I feel less steady with each syllable. “I don’t know if those agents really want to infiltrate the operation or if they just told that to me to protect their own ass. They might actually be looking for a real alliance. Either way, Cal wants that carrier dead to give everyone a signal. And now I know and now I have to go through with it or he’ll kill this ship, Finch. He won’t hesitate, and we’re running on low crew as it is. There’s not enough here to fight with. Taja was just the beginning.” For me. This ship. My blood tied to this ship, and I don’t know where else to be and what else would keep me contained. “This is my ship.” I shot Taja because this ship can only be my refuge when I’m in control of it.
But I’m not really in control of it. It’s all illusion.
“You can get out of it, Yuri.” His hand makes a fist in the sheets.
“I told you I tried. You don’t get out.”
He twitches as if he wants to touch me, but stops. “Didn’t they say—didn’t they say on the Send long ago that Azarcon had? Isn’t that why all the politicos hate him?”
“I’m not Azarcon. I don’t have an admiral in my corner.”
“Then approach him.”
I shake my head. “I tried already. I almost killed his son. He sent me to Earth to be put in prison. He would never listen to me.”
“You have information he would want. He’d be more inclined to listen than any other captain.”
There are red lines on my arms from my fingernails. Finch grabs my wrist, stops my clawing.
“Yuri.”
“He’ll kill me, Finch. He’ll kill me and likely all of you.”
“Tell him what you know.”
What I know.
That I’m a protégé too? I’m Falcone’s protégé in blood.
I’m what he left behind.
WRECKED
5.19.2186 EHSD—Protégé
I was ten years old when Marcus took me into my first command crew meeting, which was once a week. None of the ten department commanders, plus Caligtiera, found it odd that I was there, which made it easier. So easy that I was bored. Even though Bo-Sheng had said this ship was a pirate, and Estienne confirmed it, it seemed to run just like any other ship. Not that I knew firsthand. But Marcus went over procedures and costs, cargo and schedules and flagged crew files with meticulous discussion. They also talked about their allies, like Shiva, who was their bloodmate, and others in the network spanning all the way to Hubcentral. He made me take notes in my slate, which I had to send to his comp so he could review.
It only got interesting when they talked about punishing people for breaking ship rules—like people who stole from each other or the ship, or witheld profit that they’d made on one mission or another. Sometimes the punishment was brig time, other times it was a thrashing.
Once or twice Marcus just put people in the airlock and vented them. At the end of my first month of meetings they talked about this one girl who used to steal drugs from medical. She was a junkie and lied twice about getting on recovery. Marcus said he didn’t abide drug use on his ship because it made people stupid and desperate and dependent on something other than their Blood (which is what he called the ship). So out she went. And I took notes.
You couldn’t just let people go on stations if you wanted them off your ship, Marcus said. Because they knew the operations of the ship and the network, and he wouldn’t risk them getting caught and blabbing to Hub authorities. But he always gave a couple of warnings before venting you. So it was fair, he said.
She shrieked like a strit. It hurt my ears.
He had me watch because I had to learn to stomach it. The girl was a shivering, sweating mess—from fear as well as her addiction. She might’ve been sixteen or twelve, it was hard to tell from her drug-abused body. They stripped her naked and set her in the airlock at gunpoint. Her nipples were like little withered grapes. She screamed a lot. He’d taken the ship to a drop point only he knew. There were dozens, he said, mapped by this ship or the others in the network. Like how Hub ships mapped the Dragons. But the Dragons were big. And she was just going to be one more piece of refuse floating toward some star.
Nothing like that was happening in the fifth meeting though. I knew the routine by then. Before the meeting wrapped Marcus would tell me to go outside and wait for him. I figured it was because they wanted to discuss things that I was still too young to understand, and that was all right, usually by then I’d be so bored I needed a nap. So I stood outside the conference room on maindeck and smoked. And if I had to wait extra long, I always ended up crouched on the deck with my back to the wall, watching the crew pass.
This time Caligtiera joined me for a smoke. He’d done it twice before, just came out while they took a break inside or something, but he never talked to me. He had his own cigrets, small brown sticks that stank up the corridor like a volcanic fart. He hunched there beside me, and muttered something about “Vin getting comms every time they had to discuss payroll,” but then he laughed and I guessed it wasn’t so serious. Half the time I didn’t understand what Caligtiera was mumbling about. He might’ve been Marcus’s second-in-command, but he was a ghost. I barely saw him. And when I did he always looked at me funny and never said much. Like he knew exactly what I was thinking and was amused by it.
“Who’s Vin?” I finally asked him.
“Vincenzo. Falcone. Your captain.”
“I thou
ght his name was Marcus.” I wouldn’t put it past Cal to lie to me just for kicks.
“That’s his middle name.”
“Oh.” Cal probably just liked to make me feel stupid. I shrugged and smoked. At least my cigs smelled better than his. And probably cost twice as much. Marcus bought them for me even though I had an account now. He was generous like that.
“So,” Caligtiera said.
“So?”
“How’s Estienne?”
I glanced up at him. He looked older than Marcus, stout and well lined, like a chair you had kept around for years. It seemed comfortable until you used it and found the hard edges actually bruised. But the clarity in his eyes seemed younger. Or maybe he just kept the things he’d seen well hidden so they didn’t show.
“Well?” he said, flicking ashes so they trailed down near my shoulder.
I scowled and moved away. “Ask him yourself.” I didn’t have to be polite to Caligtiera. Much. And Marcus wasn’t there anyway.
“I’m surprised he isn’t jealous,” he murmured, blowing smoke to the ceiling.
“Jealous?”
“Of you. You know.” He peered at the burning end of his cig as if his fortune was in the glow.
“No I don’t know. And he isn’t jealous. That’s just stupid. He likes me. And he’s older.”
“Mmhm. Likes you even though you’ll surpass him?”
“What does that mean?”
“Surpass. Go by him. Or above him.” His lips quirked. “To the top.”
Because Marcus treated me special? “Maybe I’ll surpass you first. Or instead.”
He held the smoke in his mouth, staring at me. I didn’t look away. Then he exhaled, and it streamed from his nostrils like a landed shuttle venting drive coolant. And the smell made my gut twist.
“I guess we’ll see, little man,” he said.
The hatch to the conference room opened. Marcus stood there. “Don, we’re resuming.” His gaze flicked to me as I stood. “Yuri. You keep smoking that much and it will break the recyclers. Tone it down.”
“Yes, sir. Should I still wait?”
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