“Yuri.” His fingers caress the scars on my arm, and I want to pull away, but then what? He’ll only grab me again. “If I don’t joke,” he says, “I’ll be scared.”
“You’re scared anyway.”
He doesn’t answer. There’s truth even in silence.
“Scared of me?” Because he was. He must be.
“Maybe.” A pause. “More scared of the absence.”
The absence of me. Because he’s on a pirate ship, and I’m the only barrier he has. Like in prison. I move to pull away my arm.
“What?” he says.
“You don’t have to do this because you think you need protection.” I sit up but his hand snags the back of my shirt.
“I know we’re not on Earth anymore.”
I shrug, partly to make him let go, partly to dismiss it. He can feel the motion but can’t see it. “You’re not obligated.”
“I’m not asking for sex.”
I need to see his face. I can’t judge otherwise. I call up the lights 30 percent and turn to look down at him. “Then what do you want?”
“I don’t know.” And maybe he doesn’t. “But it’s not that. I mean, it’s not the prison. How could I be asking you for that? I see what it does.”
I reach back and remove his grip from my shirt and turn to put my feet on the deck.
“Why do you cut yourself?”
A lean to the locker where Dexter still sleeps, and I slide my cigrets into my palm, light one. Familiar motion, familiar scent, and taste that calms me just a little. Has he asked me this before? Maybe. Whatever answer I might’ve given him, if I gave him any at all, probably wasn’t a real answer.
“Are you…are you trying to kill yourself?”
I shake my head, and my throat closes up, so I just hold the cigret and watch the end burn. I can’t be brave enough to kill myself instead of doing these things. Hurting people. Selfishness is a flame that makes good intentions into ash.
He touches my back again, and I hear him sit up so his hand slides under my hair.
I can find my voice if the talk is just business. “You’ll need to stay on Austro.”
“I can’t.”
I turn enough to stare at him, to be threatening, exasperated at his stubborn streak, and it’s a mistake because now he stares back too.
“Maybe I should be more scared of you.” He picks up what I thought I left behind in conversation. He’s been thinking of it for these minutes in between. “But what part did I play in that?” He breathes out and leans back on his hands, looking away now. “Maybe what I did to you was just as bad as what my CO did to me.”
“You didn’t do anything to me. I’m the one that screwed you, remember?” So he’s here in my bed out of guilt. I turn back with my elbows on my knees and take a drag.
“I asked. Because—you know what I thought? They say he’s a pirate, so he must want to do this. So then I’ll be fine in here as long as he wants to do it.”
“I don’t hold it against you. I did it to you. I could’ve said no. It’s survival.”
“I’m tired of surviving.”
“There’s nothing else, Finch.” The cigret’s down to a stub, and I should put it out properly, but instead I drop it on the deck and watch it disintegrate.
“There’s feeling. You feel in your sleep what you don’t allow when you’re awake. And maybe…that’s why I can’t be so scared of you. Because I know you’re tired of surviving too.”
Now that my cigret’s gone I look at him again. Clear-voiced. “I could’ve said no. I didn’t. So stop feeling guilty and…” I look at the hatch. Direction.
“You didn’t touch me again.”
“That doesn’t mean anything except it served me no purpose. I’m not a whore, I screwed people for a reason, and when there was no reason, I didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t say you were a whore.” And in my silence he repeats it. “I didn’t say you were a whore, Yuri.”
I am.
“That’s why you cut?”
Full circle. These words. Just spinning in my mind. And how can he turn me around like this so my emotions are all a blur?
“We have to go,” I tell him, standing. You have to go. This is where all the talking ends. This is where I would absolve him from guilt and let him go, except I’m not pure enough to give anything but orders. “None of this might work.” The plan to save Archangel. I might not be good enough even for that. Despite soft touches and emptying words.
He doesn’t answer the doubt. It’s too strong, and we are weak.
I take one flight team to shuttle us from our sinkhole at Hades, and we leap once to get to Austro Station. Orlando-registered, the shuttle’s skin ID says to the station. I’m not thinking of Lukacs though; I can’t focus on anything except the fact that Finch can quit as soon as he’s on station and never look back. He doesn’t even have to meet up with Otter. Sixty thousand people here? I don’t have the manpower to find him if he runs. He should run. His records from the prison would say he committed suicide, if Lukacs did his job, and all he’d have to do is find new ID. Not impossible, especially on Austro, with their healthy underdeck criminal activity.
I almost ask him again to do it—order him—as we wait for the shuttle to dock. Just go. And don’t look back.
But I’m selfish, maybe, or a coward, and stay silent.
Once we’re on deck, passed through Customs with the IDs Lukacs supplied, there isn’t any time to dawdle. For all I know Lukacs has eyes on us even now, so I just look at Finch. We’re surrounded by a crowd on the busy concourse heading to shops or eateries, businesses or the dockring. We’re just two people in the shadow of a tall support column with the comfortable screening noise of activity all around.
He knows to find a maintenance access and just slip in. He won’t have to look far for the sympathizer kid. Otter knows the underdeck like it’s all his domain. And in a way it is. Those few who know he’s a sympathizer refuse to mess with him. He is the Warboy’s. Everyone else thinks he’s just the head of a gang (which he is), and they stay wide of him for that. Finch can find him. I gave him a gun just in case, along with my commcode. I can change it after a time, when I decide that I truly want to let go. Maybe he won’t use it anyway except to tell me if he got through to Otter.
“You’ll come back and get me?” he says, the question he held to himself all the way over from Kublai Khan.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Of course.”
Of course it’s a lie. I won’t say it aloud, that he should not be around me. I won’t say it now. But I can say it in my absence from him and not have to look at his face. Because in this odd warmth he’s made me selfishly kind. And I don’t have the inclination to ruin it with words. Even ones like, Be careful. They’re useless now. And they aren’t anything that’s not understood already.
He understands. His eyes are a bit too wide as he looks at me, maybe he wants to memorize my face like I’m trying to do with him in an unblinking stare that feels all too intimate in this busy open. We don’t touch. We have the memory of my quarters.
But now he goes, when not even the memory can hold together against the inevitable, swallowed by the crowd. And I watch his back until it’s one of many. Until I can’t tell which one is his anymore.
I arranged to meet Lukacs at the Hart & Hunter pub in the den district. Pubs are dark, private, and generally ubiquitous on stations. People go off shift, there’s always just enough noise to mask level conversation, and it’s not out of place to see two or three men simply sitting by themselves with drinks in their hands talking. We could be off-duty pollies, businessmen, furloughed crew off some military ship in dock.
Both Lukacs and his blond partner are waiting for me. I slide in the booth across from the blond man, with Lukacs on my left.
“Order first,” Lukacs says, without any other greeting. Must keep up the appearance that this is friendly.
So I punch in for my White Russian and after the barista brings it by, Lu
kacs says, “Congratulations on getting your ship back,” without a hint of remorse at Taja’s death. He has to assume Taja’s dead if he knows anything of how pirates operate. But he’s still confident, still assuming I need him in some way. And I guess I do, if only to discover exactly what his game is.
“You knew exactly what to tell her, didn’t you.” I sip the drink, roll the milk on my tongue before swallowing, sweet velvet with that burning underbite.
“She was rather desperate at that point,” he says. “How’s Finch?”
“Alive.”
This makes him smile as if it’s a bit unexpected but still something pleasant. “Tell me what went down with Caligtiera.”
“First you should probably know the man plans on destroying Archangel.”
“What?” the blond agent says. A low voice, but fixed attention, leaning forward over his beer. I watch his fingers whiten around the glass. “When?” Harsher.
“I don’t know.” I watch Lukacs’s face. It’s blank compared to the other one. I look back at the blond.
He says, “You better be telling the truth about that, pirate.”
“The fact I’m even telling you at all should convince you.”
Lukacs sips his drink. Not beer, but some sort of deep red concoction. “How does he plan on doing this?”
“He has schematics of the carrier. I’d assume some sort of sabotage. Bombs would be easiest. Bombs by the drive towers.” It’s how I would do it. “It must be an inside job. Someone he bribed, someone who’s disillusioned with Azarcon.” They’re sister ships. It isn’t incredible to believe that crew so close to Macedon’s might take exception to Captain Azarcon’s actions lately. And be more incensed because their own captain supports him. You don’t spend years fighting strits and suddenly renew your thinking just because someone calls a cease-fire. “Maybe someone at their last resupply or maintenance stopover, even. And Cal has cred.” Falcone’s cred. “He can bribe them.” That’s always a possibility. Very few people don’t come with a price.
The blond agent says, “Is that everything you know?”
“Yeah.”
He moves to slide out of the booth.
“Wait.” Lukacs holds the man’s arm. “O’Neil.”
So that’s his name.
Lukacs gazes at me, and O’Neil tugs his arm free. Lukacs says, “If this plan is stopped, will Caligtiera assume the leak was through you? Who else has he got in on it?”
“I don’t know. But he’s not a man to brag. He’s interested in the deal if it’ll give him a solid foothold, and he knows it’ll only come through me. So this might be a test.” It is probably a test. “To see if I’ll tell you, then to see if you’re in earnest about wanting a deal.”
O’Neil gets up.
“Wait,” Lukacs says. Sharper.
“To hell with you.” He walks off. I stare after him, and Lukacs slides out of the booth and follows at a steady clip. Not fast enough to attract attention but fast enough to catch up to the other man’s long strides.
This isn’t the reaction I expect. But I sit there and watch as Lukacs talks the other man toward a shadowed corner. I can’t read their lips, but their body language says plenty. Lukacs is trying to speak reason and O’Neil wants to deck him. In a few seconds O’Neil simply walks out of the pub, and Lukacs comes back to me with a dark frown.
“There are six-thousand-plus people on those carriers,” I remind him. And this is why Finch has gone to Otter. Because I’m not sure we can depend on Lukacs to do the decent thing.
“Yes,” Lukacs says simply. “Now when will we depart?”
I stare at him.
“My colleague is none of your concern. We’re still going to meet Caligtiera. I want it to be soon.”
I wonder what he’ll do if he finds out I let Finch go.
Probably get some other Ops agent to track him down.
So I keep my mouth shut and play along, finishing my drink before rising. “Meet me at the Orlando shuttle in an hour.”
I have idle thoughts about going to find Finch, but that would be—useless. To show my face in the underdeck where Otter’s gang would probably recognize me. Useless to go back to Finch as if I have anything to offer other than probable death. Protection in the prison, but a death warrant in space.
But I wonder if he’s found Otter. I wonder if he’s worrying. Like I’m worrying. And wondering. And thinking, What if I try to disappear too.
My feet take me on a meandering path in the general direction of the dockring. They don’t lie even if my mind does. I’m going back.
I can go back to the shuttle and just wait for Lukacs to arrive, but I don’t want to sit, I’ve been sitting in holding patterns long enough, switched on and off in intervals by other hands. The station is full of my immediate life before Earth and that prison, and so I pull the hood of my sweater over my hair and walk. Ordinary people on an ordinary schedule, some life that’s as foreign as strits and their eyes. What does it mean to be oblivious? Instead of shaping something out of someone else’s clay. This is one last tour before Lukacs and Caligtiera and my hand in their alliance.
My ship. Just think of Kublai Khan and the fact it’s mine for me to go back to. Even if it isn’t for long. If Finch succeeds, and Azarcon succeeds in warning Archangel, my ship and my life likely won’t be for long.
There are no convictions in my thoughts.
I don’t get far in the shopping district before a hand closes about my arm. I jerk and turn and see O’Neil, blue eyes just centimeters from mine.
“Over here,” he says, directing me to a side corridor toward the public washrooms. He pushes me in, not roughly but not with any opportunity for refusal, and quickly checks the stalls. One is occupied, so he turns on the tap and washes his hands while I light a cigret. When the guy leaves O’Neil goes to the door and leans against it. “My son is on Archangel,” he says.
I stare at him, blowing smoke. You mean your kind can spawn?
“He’s a jet,” O’Neil says. “We’re going to stop that sabotage.”
“Did you comm him?” So that’s what they were arguing about.
“They’re silent running. I sent a comm to his last link code, but I haven’t got any confirmation. He might be on maneuvers; he might be anywhere.”
“Don’t you know the carrier’s link?” Mr. Black Ops.
He scowls. “Since this shite with Damiani and Azarcon they’ve been changing their codes every day. Don’t know who to trust among govies these days.”
Govies who technically are the ones giving orders, even to deep-space carriers. Not that it’s true in Azarcon’s case or his allies among the deep spacers, but carrier security protocols are the same whether they’re insystem or in the Dragons.
“Is Lukacs going to let it blow?” Even I didn’t think the man would be so coldhearted—if he’s genuine about working in the Hub’s best interests. Wanting to dismantle the pirate network. “Are you positive he’s playing this right?”
O’Neil doesn’t answer.
“You know his cover for me.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“What are you doing in this?” The question that I wondered since in the prison. “What angles are you playing?”
He might not answer me completely. He might not answer me at all. But maybe he went into this thinking I was one way, and this little meeting has proven different.
“I’m in it to dismantle the network,” he says finally. “Lukacs… I’m not so sure.”
“Yet you work with him.”
His smile is nothing but muscles moving, an emotionless expression. “We have similar goals…elsewhere. But maybe now two completely different ways of achieving them.”
I’m not going to get more enlightenment than that. “I have a man on his way to sending Azarcon a heads-up. So if you can’t contact your son or Archangel, then that should pan out.” If it isn’t too late. If Finch can convince Otter he’s genuine. I’m counting on the fact that even if Otter doesn�
��t trust him, he will still tell Azarcon as a matter of course. Threats like that can’t be taken lightly.
“You’ve got contact with Azarcon?” More suspicion than disbelief. Skeptical about the veracity of it.
I have no intention of giving Black Ops a position on Otter. They might not know about the kid’s usefulness to Macedon. “Pirate intel isn’t half-bad, you know.” Especially for a geisha.
He straightens from the door. “I’ll be keeping tabs on you on your ship while Andreas brokers this deal with Caligtiera. You work the pirate, and I’ll work my partner. At some point we’ll get verification of this threat.”
He says it like it’s a foregone conclusion.
“Lukacs would really let a pirate destroy a carrier to further his own agenda.” And that’s not a question either. But I still want confirmation from the person who knows Lukacs best between the two of us.
“Yeah,” O’Neil says. “In this case, yeah, if he’s in it for an alliance, not an infiltration. Which is why if it comes to that, he’s my kill.”
On the ride out of Austro’s system I sit in the cockpit with my flight crew, away from Lukacs and O’Neil, staring out the viewport as the station hangs distant and lit, flat curved modules birthing ships at different dockrings. It’s oblivious to my thoughts or the hard clench in my chest, and too soon it gets smaller. I stare until it disappears.
Rika and Ville meet us as we disembark in the hangar bay. They’re visibly armed with handguns, and her eyes assess Lukacs and O’Neil. Questions there that she won’t ask now. She frisks them and takes their sidearms. O’Neil isn’t pleased about that, but he doesn’t comment.
“The clients,” I tell her, leading the way out. “I’m setting them up in quarters on maindeck. I want a guard rotation there.”
Lukacs doesn’t protest because now he’s on my ground.
“Separate quarters,” I add. In case I want to say things to O’Neil that Lukacs doesn’t need to hear.
“Yes, sir,” Rika says.
With my command codes reclaimed I override the locked quarters and put Lukacs in first. “I’ll tell you when Caligtiera’s ready to meet.”
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