Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  “If this comm number will translate to your transport, then I’ll contact you. I look forward to meeting Agent O’Neil.”

  And me. Again. His eyes say it. He’s a hunter. Second best to getting Falcone is capturing me. And since the bird is dead already, I promptly move up on the list.

  It takes so little time to comm Piotr as I release Dexter, catch him and tuck him into my jacket pocket even though he squirms. I feel him fluttering in there like a frantic heart.

  Piotr says, “Captain?”

  I move to the hatch. “Do it now.”

  It’s a gamble. You sabotage your own ship to blow up, without going through the authorized self-destruct protocol, and anything can go wrong before you have a chance to get free. But I trust Piotr to know his own limits, to know this ship from plate to plate and bolt to bolt, and if anyone can “safely” bring down a heavily modified merchant from the inside out, it’s him.

  When I get the comm from the bridge I know he’s done it. So I go. Rika is stern but beneath it she’s afraid—Piotr’s told her there is some sort of leak in the drive coolants and if it gets into the grav nodes on that deck, it will destabilize the nodes and things will go boom. Piotr’s colorful language. We have a half hour to fix it, or we’ll have to abandon.

  So I comm Caligtiera. He says he will take us on if we lose the ship, but I should understand that we’ll be under gun for now. That doesn’t sit well with my bridge crew at all. I blame Taja. She should’ve had the Khan checked over more recently. It’s easy to act indignant.

  I order the exodus to the escape pods, just in case, I tell them. “Leave the bridge on remote; if Piotr can’t fix this by now, there is no way in hell.”

  I’m the picture of commanding calm. Inside I wonder if this is the only way to get off my own ship safely. Inside I wonder what makes me think I can just walk away.

  Rika insists on shadowing me when I go to get Caligtiera’s “clients.” “I can do it, sir, you should get to a pod.”

  The girl is too loyal. Or too suspicious. “No, they’re my responsibility, and this deal we have going with Cal is too important. I want to bring them across myself. You get going.”

  “No, sir. Your sister won’t leave you behind.”

  I could order her, but she won’t listen. Two of them and one of me, is her math, and even though I’ll have guards, none of them are geisha. None of them assassins.

  So she follows me to their quarters, and I point her to Lukacs’s. When I open the hatch to O’Neil’s, he’s already standing by it. I slip him a sidearm that he tucks under his shirt, then we’re back out in the corridor and Rika’s got Lukacs in hand. O’Neil gives me a subtle look as we start off in a brisk walk.

  “What is this?” Lukacs says. “What’s going on?”

  “The ship,” I tell him. “It’s gonna blow.”

  “What happened?” Demanding. As if he’s the captain.

  “Taja was a lousy khan. Don’t worry, we’re going over to the Iron Cross.” My dead voice can translate as rage and grief, maybe. Mostly it’s an absence of thought. It doesn’t feel real walking these intestinal corridors, hearing that alert as if the nerves of the ship itself are going into stroke. The entire crew flows around us to their own designated escapes.

  I remember coming aboard for the first time, thinking it was my freedom.

  How am I going to get Rika to another pod? Because if she intervenes, I might have to kill her, and I can’t think of that. It would devastate Ville. It would be one more deep cut on the flesh of my intentions.

  In the last turn before we reach the command pod, Piotr runs up.

  “Captain.” Quick glance to Rika. Caution.

  I don’t know if that tips off Lukacs in some way, but in midstep he turns and spins Rika to the bulkhead, arms going around her in a full nelson. Her rifle dangles from its strap but she drives her heel down toward his foot. It glances off as he moves his leg and all of our guns come out—O’Neil’s, Piotr’s, mine. Pointing at him.

  Lukacs notes O’Neil’s aim. “So,” he says. And in one move he flings Rika toward me and Piotr, yanking the weapon off her shoulder as her arm flies out.

  They fire on each other, O’Neil and Lukacs. Point-blank.

  And both go down.

  Dexter, in my pocket, sets up a squall.

  “Son of a bitch!” I lean down to O’Neil. Rika’s weapon was set on red kill.

  Mine, given to O’Neil, was on paralysis.

  Piotr says, “Captain. We have to go!”

  Rika: “The hell is this, Yuri?” She retrieves her rifle from Lukacs’s writhing form. The pulse hit him in the chest, but his limbs still twitch. It’s spreading.

  But he manages to say, “Traitor.”

  Me or O’Neil, I don’t know who he means. But O’Neil has a large rifle-shot wound in his chest, and his eyes are wide-open. That clear blue.

  “Captain!” Piotr reaches down and grabs my arm.

  I shake him off. “Get to Cal,” I tell Rika. “Go!”

  “Where are you going?” A blazing look. Confusion and shock and not a little anger.

  Azarcon would brig her or worse, because she’d go on his ship firing.

  “Pick him up.” I motion to Lukacs. Looking at Piotr.

  “Yuri,” Rika snaps. And suddenly steps over the body, blocking Piotr. “What the hell are you doing?” Her rifle comes up.

  The ship says we have five minutes.

  “We go now,” Piotr says. “Or we die. This is not a time for debate.”

  She isn’t going to move. She sees it’s a client of Caligtiera’s, and I have no intention of joining her on his ship.

  “Yuri,” she says. But the gun doesn’t lower.

  There isn’t anything to do but turn my back. I won’t kill her. “I’m sorry, Rika,” I tell her. Inadequate, maybe dishonest words. Sorry for some things, not for others. I still go. Piotr covers me as I open the hatch to the pod. I wait to hear the pulse, but she doesn’t shoot before it closes again.

  I pilot the pod as we streak away from the collapsing ship. Dozens of similar pods arc out like blood spatter from all points of the Khan’s skin, dots along the wall of black. So many, and the Iron Cross will take them all and not even notice one pod veering away from the group on its own separate trajectory. He won’t know until Rika tells him.

  I take my bird from my pocket and let him perch on the flight console. He screeches at Piotr, but the man ignores it, too busy checking our lifesystems.

  “We’re good for a week,” he says.

  “We won’t need that much. Macedon will come get us.”

  This shocks him. “Yuri,” he says, “that wasn’t what I had in mind exactly.”

  None of this is what I had in mind exactly. Since I was four. I stare at my ship. Already little thunder and lightning flashes can be seen through the partially imploded hull. Chain-reaction explosions from within. It would be almost pretty if it weren’t so devastating. It won’t be destroyed in one complete boom. Death like this takes time. It took me a lifetime.

  It gets smaller the faster we go, as we build up to a full flight velocity.

  Fleeing to Macedon. None of this was what I had in mind when I blooded the captain’s son. I might have shot him to kill, like I am killing my ship, but it was I who bled. I am the one who’s bleeding.

  A BREATH

  1.13.2196 EHSD—Boysdeck

  I got my second and third ship tattoos after killing Bo-Sheng. A brand or a collar, in a way, or maybe just a reminder like you’d wear a wedding ring. Tattoos were that. My second was a smaller version of the one over my heart, the rampant black horse, and Mnemosyne inked it just below the inside of my right elbow. The ship’s nanocode went into the ink and beneath my skin. A mark of ownership. Falcone dealt violently with the people who touched his possessions, and that was what we were. My geisha fan tattoo, inked at the same time as the one on my arm, said I belonged to the Hanamachi. We all belonged to the ship.

  I was chrono twenty,
but it didn’t mean a thing. I’d worn the first tattoo for six years, and been on Genghis Khan for eleven. And that was my real age. Eleven years in service to the Blood.

  Estienne told me not to show them my tattoos when I went to Austro Station, down into Boysdeck, so we covered them up with that semipermanent industrial skin that actors and physical trauma victims sometimes used. The people on station might not recognize the geisha fan, but chances were someone might know the two from Genghis Khan. There were some ex-pirates underdeck (not from the Khan, since Falcone didn’t just let people go), or people who dealt with pirates, and the less they knew about me the better.

  I got a new name. Yuri Kirov. Not Terisov. Nobody would recognize me, not even Papa. He said I wasn’t allowed to try to contact Papa or find Mama, and the threat was implicit. It didn’t matter. I had new Family now. I didn’t want to talk to my family because what would I say? They wouldn’t understand what geisha meant. They couldn’t know what I did.

  It was dangerous for pirates—especially now. Shiva was dead, captured by Captain Azarcon, the thorn in every illegal deep spacer’s side. Word seemed to pass from one carrier to the next that the strits weren’t all that important anymore; instead, they must track down pirates and their caches. Falcone raged.

  He wasn’t Marcus anymore.

  This is what I did. I recruited for him.

  And everything Bo-Sheng had told me seemed to plant under my skin and wither there for lack of light. So black and twisted and small not even Estienne felt it. Or if he did, he learned to ignore it like geisha could.

  There were a lot of things different now that I was allowed to go on station and recruit for the ship, now that I was physically not a child anymore and I’d cut as many people for getting in my way as I had scars on my arms. I never went anywhere without my switchblade, and once I even stabbed someone in my sleep. I didn’t know when it began, but I started to take walks in my sleepshift. In my sleep. Someone tried to wake me up or touch me or something—I couldn’t remember—and I’d reacted like I was awake. I woke up next shift back in my quarters, and Falcone called me into his office and told me a man was dead, and I had done it, someone had seen me from in the shadows. And they said I was a ghost.

  So then Falcone began to lock me in and put a guard on my hatch, so even in sleep he had me caged, and Estienne was the one who opened it for me in the goldshift—if he didn’t sleep over. I told Estienne maybe he shouldn’t stay over in my sleepshift because of my walking. But I couldn’t put a real threat behind it. I liked him there too much, and I wanted him to lie to me in that way he’d been doing since I got on board. They were good lies, tangled in truth. They were the kind you could feel calm about in the dark.

  The crew basically left me alone. Word got around that I could kill even in my sleep, and it became a bit of a grim joke.

  They left me alone because after Bo-Sheng there were others, names that I chose to forget in waking hours, on Genghis Khan alone. Then one time a geisha kid on Shiva, when that ship was alive, didn’t like the way I criticized her work when Falcone sent me over to review their Hanamachi and their protégé. This geisha kid was so new and not yet so unafraid because Shiva was no Genghis Khan, and she called me a bitch and a high-handed mother, and I slashed her on the face so badly they didn’t want to use her anymore, even with a bot-knitter fix. After that Shiva didn’t give me problems, and her captain picked better geisha.

  They all got in my way or up into my face for one thing or another, and Falcone had always said that if you didn’t take care of things right at the flash point, you just got burned later on. Even Caligtiera stopped mocking me quite so much, and Taja sure as hell stayed clear—of me. Not of Estienne I was sure.

  With all my tattoos and the freedom to walk off the ship anytime I wanted as long as Falcone okayed it, Estienne deferred to me. He asked me if he could sleep in my quarters or if we wanted to stay in a den together on station when we got leave or if there was anything I wanted, and sometimes it hurt because he was my Elder Brother, but I was the protégé, and now if he ever drew a knife on me, I could kill him and not be punished.

  Sometimes I had to go away on stations for assignments like recruitment or finalizing of shipments; that took me even as far as Hubcentral, where many of the arms dealers originated. Shipments of guns from Earth, the planet that battled on its surface in a hundred different conflicts, and what weapons you used in ground combat could easily be used on a station. Cutters and howitzers and high-tech bombs for terrorist protests. After a while it became almost as routine as sitting in senior staff meetings, taking notes, or checking up on ship division commanders to report back to Falcone.

  But those weeks away from the ship took me from Estienne and always before I left he told me he’d be there when I came back. As long as I came back to the ship, he’d be there.

  Boysdeck was going to be my longest assignment away from the mother, off ship and not counting leap time, at least two weeks of recruiting in Austro Station’s underdeck. Estienne said the shift before I left, “Just be careful,” and “I’m going to miss you.”

  “Of course I’m going to be careful,” I said, curled beneath his arm in my quarters, in bed. “It’s not like I’m meeting clients.” There was always a danger in clients, if not for us, then for them. I hadn’t killed any more for fucking with me, but one or two I’d had to cut or shoot for screwing Falcone on a deal. I said, “I’ll miss you too.”

  In the dark I just felt him push his nose against the side of my hair. “Guess what,” he said.

  “Hm, what.”

  “I heard the captain talking. He thinks you’re almost ready to get your own ship. So this assignment? It might be one of the final things.”

  “What kind of ship?”

  “Komodo. Like this one.”

  “Are you serious?” I turned my face to him, just to feel his breath, and somehow I knew he was smiling. Then I heard it in his voice.

  “Yeah. Full crew…so recruit those kids wisely, they might be under your command.”

  It set my heart racing. My own end of the operation. “Am I the first?”

  “First what?”

  “He’s never had a protégé that went this far, has he?” It was a risk for him then, with me.

  Estienne said, “No. The first one, remember I said? He betrayed the captain long before he got to this stage.” Silence. Then he said, “You know who the first protégé was, don’t you?”

  “No…you never said.”

  “Azarcon.”

  I stared into the dark. “Liar.”

  “No. But don’t talk to Marcus about it.”

  I had to let that sit. I could barely encompass it. And yet there was a certain symmetry to the claim. Azarcon had a reputation for disobeying Hub Command orders, recruiting avidly from the least desirous sections of the population like orphans and petty criminals, and his jets were notoriously ruthless. “Why doesn’t Falcone tell the Hub? It would ruin Azarcon’s career, and he wouldn’t bug us.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because nobody would believe it? Or maybe because he was the first… Marcus has this old-fashioned notion sometimes of dealing with people directly. Like for revenge. I think he’d like to just shoot Macedon himself.”

  That made sense—for Falcone.

  But the irony of it made me laugh, that Falcone would be screwed over now by a former protégé in the shape of a Hub carrier captain. Estienne had to shush me, as if he were afraid somebody might hear. I said, “So when I get my own ship, it means he trusts me.”

  “Yeah,” Estienne said.

  “What about the Hanamachi?”

  “Well, you’d make your own.”

  “But I can’t be a captain and train geisha at the same time.”

  “No, I mean, you’d have your own.” His arm tightened.

  “You? You’d help me?”

  Silence.

  “Estienne?”

  “No… I’d have to stay on the Khan. Here.”

>   “Why? You could be the Elder Brother of my Hanamachi, and I’d be the captain, and it’d be perfect. We’d run ops for Falcone but we wouldn’t have to…” Do everything he said. But I stopped because that sounded disloyal.

  “I can’t, Yuri. This is my Hanamachi, Marcus recruited me, and I can’t leave it. But you would take one of your brothers or sisters, or one of each, and they’d become Elders on your ship. That’s how it’ll work.”

  “But I want you.” I felt for his shoulder in the dark then slid my hand up into his hair, gripped it. “Maybe I can talk to the captain.”

  “No,” he said. And I didn’t know why he was so against it. “This is the way it is. The protégé will have his own ship, and his own Hanamachi, and Rika or Ville or Jonny or Yasmin have to advance. That’s how they advance. And then I’ll have to recruit more here.”

  “Why can’t Rika or Ville or both of them advance, and you and Elder Sister Hestia come to my ship?”

  “Because,” he said, “I belong to Falcone. We belong to Falcone, Hestia and I.”

  And it was that simple, and that cruel.

  He kissed me, but in the dark he missed my mouth and caught my cheek. And I said, “Don’t you want to come with me?”

  “Of course,” he said, trailing kisses down my neck.

  To distract me.

  So I let him do what he wanted, but I couldn’t let myself get caught in it like I usually did. His distraction only made me think that now it wasn’t going to last.

  Boysdeck was a section of the underdeck where mostly orphans roamed. There were a lot of orphans in this war, and maybe not even specifically because of the war. Pirates made orphans too. I knew that now.

  If we had crew to fill we kept the kids young enough to mold or old enough to seduce with promises of empowerment through violence. On the system that had wronged them. Community, I told them. That was what we had. And I wasn’t even lying.

  The ones who still grew up hating, plotting, or otherwise rebelling, if Falcone was in a good mood he simply sold them to other ships or illegal establishments on stations (brothels, gunrunners, drug cartels), or dumped them at sinkholes. In a bad mood, he vented them into space. Either way, though, we were never at a loss for kids.