He nods. Suited and carrying a single case, he can be in any kind of regular business that we trade in. Arms, drugs, information. O’Neil looks like a guard in his more casual black. I know that’s the appearance they cultivate. Rika and Ville don’t question it, but I give them a glance to stay put as I follow O’Neil into his quarters and shut the hatch.
“My gun,” he says.
“Standard protocol. If I let you have it, my crew will be suspicious.”
Typical Ops, he goes on as if what I said didn’t matter. “I’ll need it.”
“Listen to me, O’Neil.” I walk up close enough to infringe on his personal space. He doesn’t move away, but then I don’t expect him to. Men like him operate just as well from short distances. “You’re here, I’m calling it, and I won’t have any Ops running around my deck with a weapon.” I move to the hatch. “None of this means I trust you.”
“You’ll have to,” he says, with arrogant calm. He sits on the bunk and lights a smoke. “If you want to survive Caligtiera. Or Lukacs.”
“Then so will you.” And I’m still not giving you a gun as long as you’re on my ship. I open the hatch and walk out.
They’re both locked in, so Rika allows her rifle to lower, and says, “What was that about?” The private powwow with one and not the other.
I can depend on some aspects of the captaincy. Like terse dismissal. “Business.”
It makes her frown, but it also sets her in her place. “Do you need me or the Hanamachi?”
To work either Lukacs or O’Neil. Most clients would take that bit of hospitality, and I would take any information my geisha could provide.
But. “No,” I tell her. “These men aren’t the type to appreciate that. Just let them be.”
She nods. Ville lingers until the guards show up. And I leave them both to go back to my empty quarters and comm Caligtiera.
Ghenseti’s an abandoned military outpost, a wart among the stars with its half-exploded sections and dead darkness. It’s become a meeting place for pirate deals, two leaps from Chaos Station in the Dragons, gutted and forgotten by the Hub after the last strit attack decades ago that destroyed it one time too many for redevelopment.
It’s the place where Falcone lost his captaincy. Or the beginning of his loss. Chasing after a strit attack group out of rage or pride, he left the base undefended, and a second ambush on the station caused the death of half its people. Worthy of a court-martial.
Falcone never liked to revisit it, but Caligtiera has no such compunction.
So here we are in the one section of the old base that the pirates made breathable and walkable, that wasn’t entirely crippled by that attack long ago. The grav nodes might be a little off, making our steps and our breaths a shade heavier than normal, but we’re not here to set down roots, just shake a deal.
The room used to be a barracks cafeteria. A few long tables are set up, scarred by time and use, the galley black and dusted in the corner. Rack lighting above makes all the surfaces too shiny, revealing cracks in the floor. Caligtiera brings his gray-suited woman and two men with guns. It’s just me, the two agents, Ville, and one of his junior geisha. Ville and the girl stay standing out of earshot by the doors, as do Cal’s men, but the rest of us sit across from each other. I take position on Caligtiera’s right, so there’s no mistaking who’s a pirate and who’s a govie. And whose pocket I’d rather dip into, as far as Cal is concerned.
Lukacs places his razor comp in front of him, O’Neil just sits with his hands under opposite armpits, near his shoulder holster.
We’re all armed here, I gave back their weapons once we hit dock, they weren’t going to come on deck without them. A mutual mistrust.
“Kirov explained,” Caligtiera says to Lukacs and O’Neil, to the point as usual. “But let’s hear it from you.”
Introductions were taken care of at disembark, brisk and cold. But names are still too personal for this meeting right now.
Lukacs passes over his slate with his proposal in it and launches into his spiel. I watch Caligtiera’s face. He’s too good to show whether he’s buying it or not, but he isn’t ordering us shot at least. I can feel O’Neil across from me thinking, My son is on that ship, you bastard. And I don’t entirely trust Black Ops, but neither, apparently, do they. Admitting to me that he might not be on board with his own comrade—maybe it shouldn’t have been so surprising considering the self-serving nature of their lifestyles (and mine), but I think of little else but the possibility Lukacs might be playing both of us, me and O’Neil, so consequently O’Neil is on my side.
And maybe he does know a way I can get out of this before bedding down with Cal.
Take my ship and just go? Except some of my crew might protest. Not all of them, but given the opportunity to escape a pirate I think some of them might go. They weren’t trained as hard as me, and a fear of being caught and thrown in prison at this point is probably what keeps some of them still on board. Like maybe Piotr. Stay with what you know if what you know at least keeps you free.
After a manner, free.
Even with Finch somewhat safely away, I can’t yet ditch Lukacs. I can’t yet remove this nanotag from beneath my skin and walk away from what they’re discussing here.
O’Neil is the reminder why. If I can get the exact plan from Caligtiera, I can stop this. There’s no gun to my head. But if there has to be one in order to make me kill sometimes (Bo-Sheng, I don’t think it, not hard enough to show), then maybe there shouldn’t be one to make me do the opposite. Maybe all of my failures before to leave were dress rehearsals, training, and this is my debut. I’m sitting across from Black Ops, sitting beside a pirate, and despite what they think, there are things they don’t know about me. Things they can’t touch. My face is blank, and Finch is away from Lukacs and Caligtiera doesn’t know about Otter and Azarcon, and with my private knowledge comes a lack of obligation to anyone at this table.
This isn’t what freedom feels like. I’m not sure I’d know that flavor. But it’s got a scent of power. It’s got a taste a little like control.
“It’s been leaked among the pirates,” Caligtiera says, pulling my attention more vividly to his words now that Lukacs has been interrupted, “that Kirov’s back in the Khan’s chair and that Roshan is dead.”
“Leaked purposely,” Lukacs says.
“Of course. Already some of the captains are murmuring about whether he and I will start an internal war, but that isn’t so, is it, Yuri.”
“Not at the moment,” I answer.
“But whether or not we care to trust you is another matter. Tell me, what did you have on Kirov that you got him on board for your little proposition in the first place? Just springing him from prison can’t have been it. The govies gave him that opportunity when they asked him to roll on us.” Cal doesn’t take his eyes from Lukacs except to regard O’Neil, while he lights one of his brown cigrets and leans back to set one hand on the edge of the table. “Or is it that he willingly went to you?”
Asking Lukacs while I’m sitting right here, Cal gets to see our dynamic under the heat of the question. I either have some vulnerability that he’s not aware of, or I’m more on the side of Ops than on the network’s best interests.
“There’s a young man,” Lukacs answers smoothly, and I force myself not to react. “Met in the prison. Pretty enough, I suppose, to be of worth. His name’s Stefano Finch. He came along for the ride and is, if I’m not mistaken, aboard Kublai Khan now.”
And now Caligtiera knows. One more thing for him to possibly hold against me.
“Brought down by a boy,” Cal says. “Why am I not surprised?”
“That doesn’t change anything about this deal,” I tell them both. Let them taunt. “The fact is I’m here, and we either do this or get gone. We gonna get our products moving again among our—how do I say it—hypocritical govie clients?”
“It all looks good written down,” Cal says, tapping the slate. Which doesn’t mean he buys any of it
yet. “How about first we get a show of good faith, from both sides. I have a shipment of arms that’s been gathering dust in my hold for a month. The Family of Humanity’s always looking for extras, but at the moment they’re too nervous to take any deals. Arrange something, and I will, in turn, provide one less—concern—about this off-books alliance between the strits and Azarcon. Azarcon and his mice.”
“That concern would be?” Lukacs says.
“I’ll surprise you.”
“Don’t like surprises.” O’Neil speaks for the first time.
Cal looks at him slowly. “It’s a good surprise.”
“By whose standards?”
I tell the Ops, “Take it. Or we end this here.” You got your meeting, Lukacs. Now I’m not looking out for your best interests. Whatever they are.
Lukacs doesn’t look at O’Neil as he takes his slate back from Cal. He just says, “Very well. Give me a shift to arrange the meet with my Family contact.”
“That’ll work,” Cal says.
I motion Ville to come closer so he can hear. “Take them back to the shuttle.” And take their weapons too. He knows that. Hopefully O’Neil can grill Lukacs in some way while I have equal time alone with Caligtiera. Soon the agents and my guards are gone, and I light a cigret and look at Cal sidelong. “Works for you?”
“They’re completely untrustworthy,” Cal says.
“Yeah, but so are we.”
He shrugs. “We’ll see how far this will go.”
I stare at the side of his face. “When’s it going down?” His end of the deal.
Caligtiera smiles and doesn’t even bother to look at me. He just taps his ashes on the table. “Go home with your agents, Kirov. We’re not so friendly yet.”
A silent trip back and my hangar bay seems to yawn its disapproval as we disembark into the cold cavern of its mouth. There is my flight deck crew, severely decimated now, and the depressing sight of shadowed outriders hunched near the bulkheads like tranquilized beasts. Once fierce, now just kind of sad in their inactivity. At the height of it my ship would never be asleep. There was always cargo to ship, prepare for, or off-load. There was always a deal ongoing in some way that kept the whole crew busy.
Now there is Black Ops, and the two of them on my deck, even if nobody else knows who they are, feels like some sort of capitulation. Of course it is. But I tell myself they are the stones I need to skip in order to gauge the ripples of what I want. Of my actions.
Rika meets us on dock and trails us again with Ville, back to the assigned quarters. The other geisha melts away. This time I get Rika and Ville to pack O’Neil away while I follow Lukacs into his q.
Once the hatch shuts: “Happy?”
He sets his comp on the small desk and lightly dusts the front of his suit as if being on that station with us created some sort of residue. “It’s an acceptable start. Now if you leave me alone, I’ll make that contact in the Family. I’ll need a coded link to insystem, by the way.”
“You’re on my ship now,” I remind him. “Just in case you think you can still control me when my crew outnumbers you. What’s O’Neil’s problem?”
“Not aware he has one.”
“I see, so that little tango in the pub was my delusion?”
Now he stares at me. “O’Neil is my concern.”
So he’s a concern. Because he has a son he cares about? Naturally I don’t say that.
“And you call us piranhas.” They’ll turn on each other just as readily.
“Kirov.” His eyes are impatient though the rest of his face is studied and bland. “I need that link.”
I hit him, a fist to the temple that rocks him on his feet until he sits heavily on the bed. And wisely doesn’t come at me, since I’m the one with the gun. But his expression isn’t bland anymore.
“Don’t fuck with me,” I tell him. “I know you’re thinking about it. I know you must be running something else. You can tell me what it is and save yourself the trouble.” It’s cast out there, I don’t expect a bite. Not from someone like him. But punching him felt bloody good.
He stands again, blinking a bit from the reverb of that hit. “My deal stands. Give me my link.”
I could beat him senseless, but it wouldn’t get me any closer to stopping Cal or figuring Lukacs’s real agenda. For his training that would take weeks. I can’t do anything but depend on O’Neil where that’s concerned, and it burns. Operating in darkness.
“My comm officer will contact you for your code.” And you better know we will try our best to piggyback any outcomms you make. I leave him to it and meet Rika outside. She’s waited with the guards, but Ville’s gone.
“This deal,” she says.
I look at her. And wait.
“This deal. These men seem twitchy. Like they haven’t dealt with us before. With Cal, even. They new?”
Geisha eyes that can read bodies and faces where other people see only masks.
“We’re pirates. They’re not. Of course they’re twitchy.” I start to walk toward the bridge.
“We got Cal’s back, then?”
“As long as it’s good for the ship.”
She says, “You got Cal’s back?”
I stop and look at her. “What is this, Rika?”
She doesn’t blink. “Where’s Finch?”
“Where he needs to be.”
“I said to put him off on Hades, not Austro Station.” Where he can go straight to authorities.
“I said he’s where he needs to be. Why are you ragging me? Do you know Caligtiera? Did you work with him?” Were you Falcone’s protégé? I step toward her, and she moves back toward the bulkhead. “I know what the hell I’m doing, and you don’t need to know all the details. If that bothers you in some way, then you’re welcome to get off my ship.”
I remember how she took me to see Doc Wachter after that first time with Estienne. I remember when I stopped being scared of her because I knew just as much as she did about how to kill somebody.
“Austro changed you,” she says. That year I was away from the Khan. Maybe it was Austro. Maybe it was before, but I can’t tell her that. I can’t tell her anything, and it’s not just because I’m captain, and she’s not.
I walk off without looking behind. “You were never in Macedon’s brig.”
Once I ditch Rika I circle back to O’Neil’s hatch and override the lock code. He isn’t surprised to see me, standing in the middle of the space with his arms folded.
“Well?” I ask him.
“He doesn’t give up his angles that easily.”
Clearly. “What is it. Specifically. The part you’re not telling me. When you two came to me on Earth you both had something else beneath your offer. Maybe he’s working an extra angle, but I want to know what you know. I need to know everything if you want me to work this properly with Caligtiera.” Ignorance helps nothing in this case.
He purses his lips and makes the decision in the flicker of his eyes. “We were told by the director of the Agency to forge an alliance with the pirates. Exactly what your cover says. Andreas and I—at least, what I believed of him—didn’t exactly agree with that. We haven’t agreed with the Agency for some time. So we built and ran our own op: you. To infiltrate the pirate organization under the guise of doing what the Agency told us. In the end we hope to dethrone the current director and basically dismantle our own organization. And then build it back up with us at the head of it.”
Layers upon layers.
“Andreas,” he says, “is the type to sacrifice one Hub ship for a greater good, which he considers bringing down all the pirates one ship at a time, one contact at a time. To him, that’s worth more in the long run than one deep-space carrier or so he says.”
“Even if your son’s on it.”
“You learn,” O’Neil says, “as I’m sure you know, to put personal concerns aside.”
Except we can’t. We don’t. We get to a point, and the only thing keeping us breathing is the personal.
/> “Not everyone thinks that way.” Falcone didn’t. Caligtiera doesn’t.
“No,” O’Neil says. “But whether he’s been playing me all along in order to expose me to the Agency, I don’t know now.”
“Why you specifically?”
He says without any kind of arrogance, just as fact, “I’m a star-ranked field operative.” And that’s all he says.
He’s in some sort of long-term operation then, something more pressing even than this. Star-ranked? Years of training and experience. If he’s going rogue with personal feelings, and the Agency knows it, they might go to all this trouble, yeah. To find out what he knows, who else is involved, and what they can use on him.
Like his son. Which Lukacs now knows is not acceptable collateral damage to O’Neil.
“Your predicament sounds familiar,” I tell him.
“You reach a point,” he says shortly. No need for elaboration. And adds, “We need to leave your ship before this shit comes down.”
“Cal didn’t tell me anything. He won’t. This is his show.”
“Then we need to find a way to let Archangel know conclusively, or Azarcon.”
“It’s Finch,” I tell him. “I left Finch at Austro to contact Azarcon through a sympathizer I know of. If he gets through he’ll comm me to let me know.”
He considers this briefly. “Either way, I’m not staying aboard if that carrier doesn’t blow and Caligtiera turns his torpedoes on the Khan.”
“And Lukacs?” If he’s on the up.
O’Neil says without a blink, “Even if he’s still working our original op, he’s going about it the wrong way.”
And can fend for himself.
“We have to meet Cal again…maybe I can get more from him.” Although I’m not counting on it.
O’Neil isn’t either. “Every time we meet with that man it adds opportunity for suspicion and for something to go wrong. This is a bad deal.”
It doesn’t take a long time to figure these things. If something smells rotten, all you have to do is take a breath to know.
Cagebird Page 29