I appeared in Boysdeck wearing ragged clothes, with no weapons but my switchblade, and prowled the shadows of the station’s transsteel guts like a wraith. What maintenance workers came this way usually came armed, the pollies made sweeps every few months; but the denizens of the black, the graffiti, and the many narrow tunnels leading to dead ends and violence always reoccupied like an ancient town after an army had marched through. The people had nowhere else to go, whether they were criminals, homeless, veterans, or forgotten. And especially the kids.
It was easy to spot the prostitutes, low work imitation geisha without the history or the training. Of course they didn’t know we had something in common, because theirs was a common trade, and mine was not. They had no idea that there could be a higher purpose to their skills. It was just survival for them, and some older kid or destitute adult gathered these kids together, advertised abovedeck in the subtle code these kinds of people knew, and those who were interested braved the dark and the dank, sometimes with bodyguards or escorts. Cocktails, all of them. Rich, sometimes old, sometimes fat, always justifying their behavior.
The kids were easy to talk to, especially the young ones, seven- and eight-year-olds. I told them about the ships, and traveling in space, I took their names and the locations of their hangout spots, and I told them all to keep it our secret because when the time came I would take them away from these dirty tunnels, but if they told, then it might be difficult.
Kids are awfully good at keeping secrets if you give them a good enough reason.
The third goldshift underdeck I got approached by a girl, maybe thirteen years old, who saw me crouched below a sweating pipe that dripped some sort of coolant into a shallow puddle on the cement. I was smoking a cheap cigret, since expensive ones would just make people look twice, and eyeing the lanky boys who patrolled aimlessly past my sight from one nook to another, dealing or searching for something to fill their time. I wasn’t interested in drug addicts, so at least half the kids I left alone.
The girl had dusky brown skin and clear dark eyes, not an addict. Surprisingly well-groomed hair even though her clothes were ragged, threadbare at the elbows and at the collar. She held out her hand to me.
“Smoke?”
You never refused someone a cigret, so I took out the wrinkled pack from my pocket and handed it to her. She pulled out a stick and leaned down so I could snap the end, then she straightened and inhaled and blew the gray toward my face.
She said, “My name’s Delsie. What’s yours?”
Maybe she was looking for a cocktail. “Yuri.” I peered up at her. I didn’t stand. I thought she liked looking down at me, and if I stood the dynamic would change.
“My brother wants to see you,” she said, and jerked her chin. “C’mon.” Then she started off down the tunnel, tapping her cig over the deck.
Her brother could’ve been a pimp or a drug dealer, but I got up and followed. Direct requests I had to investigate. “What does your brother want?”
“Talk,” she said. She didn’t turn around. I could’ve stabbed her in the back, but she didn’t seem to care. Some of the kids watched us with shadowed eyes as we passed. Silent. Maybe envious, though I didn’t know why I’d get that vibe.
“How old are you?” she said, still walking ahead of me, light footfalls. Her shoes had holes in the heels as if she’d played with them until they tore.
“Bio or chrono?”
She shrugged. “Either.”
“Chrono sixteen,” I said, which was a lie, but twenty was a little too old in these circles. Twenty sometimes implied you had intent for being here beyond life sucked, and I didn’t need the added suspicion, however slight. And it was easy for me to pass as younger.
“Tall,” she said.
“Tallish,” I replied, because she was petite, barely up to my chest. Malnutrition or genetics, you couldn’t tell.
She didn’t answer. She led me past a spidery wall of cracks and painted lines, language you’d have to be born here to know. Behind a long mesh curtain tied to the pipes overhead stood a boy, hard to tell how old he was because he was small-boned like her, with the same skin and hair color. He wore a mobile comp, the red eyes fixed over his own, so he might’ve been looking at me or looking at something in the interface.
“This is Yuri,” she said to the boy.
He said, “You’re new.”
Maybe he was some sort of kingpin down here. It might’ve been a good contact. “What’s your name?”
Kid said, “Otter.” Which was a little ridiculous considering the lack of water or wooded areas on a space station. “You’ve been talking to a lot of kids,” he said.
“Yeah. How’d you get that mobile?” They weren’t cheap.
“Gift,” Otter said. Then he just stood there silent, and I realized he was reading something on the interface. Then he said, “Okay. You can go now.”
“Go.” I stared at him, at her.
“You can go, Yuri.”
“What did you ask me here for?”
“Just wanted to meet you.”
Delsie smiled at me, standing at her brother’s shoulder.
So I walked out, and felt at least one pair of eyes on my back.
Nobody talked about Otter, though they all knew of him, aside from mumblings about the fact he led a large gang underdeck. That might’ve been an explanation for the reticence, and it certainly was an explanation for how he seemed to know what I was doing. Any kid I passed or talked to could’ve been part of his gang. I tried to find any common tattoos or other markings that might set them apart but saw nothing consistent. He and his sister were like some kind of dirty little secret that I couldn’t penetrate; so for fear of it getting back to him that I was grilling this child and that, I stopped asking.
The children wore me down. I went abovedeck every other full shift and commed in the possibles from an out-of-the-way public console so Falcone could look over the files. Since this was my first major recruitment, and he wasn’t going to spend resources getting them off station if half of them turned out to be duds, I had to be thorough. So over the shifts I collected data on the kids, kept an eye out for Otter or his sister or anyone who might’ve been their spies, and ran into quite a few political aides and professionals. They’d sneak down to pick up people for their bosses or themselves. From police officials to Merchants Protection Commission officers, the cocktails were wide and varied. Men and women. I noted them too. It was helpful to know when powerful people had certain vices.
I didn’t so much mind reporting on the adults. But the kids. After a full week I just sat up at a café facing the main concourse in Module 7, had a hot drink, and didn’t think about how trusting they were.
Falcone had gone to Colonial Grace, he told me later, to meet with a contact he had there. Even in the refugee camp. Some of the supplies that Hubcentral shipped for the destitute families got diverted to pirates, and his contact helped to make that happen. He’d told me this maybe expecting a reaction, but by then I was numb. I’d killed Bo-Sheng, and the Camp was somewhere distant and blocked off. Best not to think of it. Really best not to let Falcone see me thinking of it, even a little. He liked to test me that way, drop hints of things to do with orphans or rapes or shootings—key words that would tell him if I still had a problem. I guessed I worked through my problems with the cutting and the sleepwalking, because I was able to look him in the eyes, impassive.
All the truth came out in afterthoughts, when it no longer mattered. What would I do with this information now?
I never asked him why he chose me. Estienne had sort of explained a long time ago and when it came down to it, this grand vision of a protégé, of the geisha, was all Falcone. He had in his mind how to restructure the galaxy to suit his own ambition, how to create a fleet of ships that would be cored by specially trained people strongly loyal to captains who were strongly loyal to him—and along with the mind behind that came some sort of instinct. You were supposed to hone it for command.
He’d had an inkling about me, through my dynamic with Bo-Sheng, through talking to my father, through a dozen different signals, all confirmed when I was in training, like these kids I was recruiting were going to be trained. Not in the technical parts of pirating, but the mind-set.
He trained me so well I could recognize it, but that didn’t stop me from living it still. Obviously I wanted it to some degree. Or else how had I got so far? It was who I was now, and maybe it had always been a part of me.
Sitting on a station picking out children like you’d pick out a pair of shoes.
It was too easy to walk among children. They flocked around your legs, even the suspicious ones, if you showed the proper face. Promised them better things.
The people around me at other tables stared at my rough clothing and disheveled hair. Of course I had cred to cover this fake lifestyle, but the appearance set everyone on edge. These were the same people who did nothing to help all those children I was recruiting underdeck. How would they feel if I took their children? I put that in my stare when I looked at them. Maybe I should follow you home and take your children.
Eventually I returned to Boysdeck. And Otter caught me. He sent Delsie again, who bummed another cig and told me to come along. I looked at her narrow back as we walked, looked at the shadows on every side. She took me to the same corner of the tunnels, and her brother was there, without the mobile this time. Instead now he had a gun.
“What the hell is this?” I fingered the end of my sleeve where my switchblade was tucked.
“Sit,” Otter said, pointing with the muzzle of his gun to an overturned crate in the center of the space.
I sat. Kid with territorial issues? I hadn’t seen them all this time, but maybe some of the dross I’d talked to walked their observations to his ears.
“You make an awful lot of comms abovedeck,” he said.
So he had me tailed even there. Must’ve been real good because I hadn’t spotted one. “And this is your business?”
“Who’re you comming?” The gun didn’t waver, and Delsie moved behind my shoulder, out of sight and still out of reach.
So these kids knew their shit. I said, “My ship.”
“What ship?”
I stared at the muzzle. “I don’t like answering stuff at gunpoint.”
“At gunpoint should be the only time you answer stuff,” he said. “So answer.”
“You know a lot for a tunnel kid.” I turned slightly to peer at Delsie over my shoulder. “Who’s paying you?”
This could go on. He knew it too. Unless he shot me. But he wouldn’t until he got his answers.
He didn’t answer my question.
“Who’s paying you?” I stared at him. “I want to know who I’m dealing with.”
“Maybe we’ll keep you until you talk.”
“Black Ops?” He was young, but it wasn’t unheard of. “Some other govie agency? You give me something and I’ll give you something; otherwise, you might as well kill me now and die in ignorance.”
If he had any sort of insight he could see I wasn’t bluffing.
So he said, “I work for the Warboy. Who do you work for?”
That had been the last thing I’d expected to hear. I stared at him and all of his barely shoulder height. He was an ally of the big human sympathizer? The Warboy was at the top of the govies’ hit list, even ahead of Falcone.
“Who do you work for?” Otter repeated. Not just a kingpin. A symp himself. With obvious connections besides the commander of the strit fleet. A part of the sympathizer network on Austro Station. No wonder I hadn’t been able to detect a tail.
“Merchant,” I said. “The Abyssinian.”
“Try again,” he said. “Merchants don’t leave their crew on station, solo, for this long.”
So I said, “Merchant that doesn’t report all of its cargo.”
“Pirate,” he said.
“Technically. But coming from a symp, that’s pretty ironic.”
“Symps don’t steal children.”
I smiled. The way armed people did, though he was the one with the gun. “Just recruit them?”
“This is my home. They don’t steal children. They give us work.”
I didn’t answer.
“Don’t come back,” he said, with a jerk of his weapon.
Which was my cue to leave. So I did.
I had to kill them. I went abovedeck and sat in that café and thought about it.
A long time.
I didn’t know why it was so difficult. Not only were they suspicious of me, but they were symps. It wasn’t hard to figure. Only one answer for a problem like that.
But I sat at that café, unable. Rented a low-end den and slept there, procured a gun from a trafficker we knew, and dawdled in that room popping out the pulse pack and clicking it back in, over and over. Then I tucked it into my waist and went back to the café. I ordered one milked caff and nursed the thing for three hours, just sitting there watching the concourse traffic flow by.
I didn’t see him at first, he was so small and lost among the color, but then Otter peeled himself away from a crowd of tunnel kids loitering abovedeck. He strolled over to my table, stood on the other side of the low gate that separated the outdoor seating from the traffic. “You haven’t come back to kill me?” he said.
This odd kid. I didn’t answer.
“Why not?” he continued. “Don’t want to?” Then he hopped over the gate and plopped down across from me. “Let’s talk.”
“About?”
He stared at me from behind shaggy dark bangs. No sign of the ruby-eyed interface. “You pick.”
I wasn’t going to talk.
He said, “Okay, I pick. We want someone in the pirates.”
I took a sip of my now-cold caff. There was nothing but thick flavor at the bottom. “To serve you cake?”
“To get us information.”
“Why would I do that.”
“There something you’d want from us?” He leaned on his arms, scratched his hair, at every glance a wiry, twitchy teenager.
“Not particularly.”
“Think hard, Yuri. Think of our resources. There’s gotta be something you’d want.”
“Symps can read minds?” I looked at him.
“No,” he said. “Just faces.”
Not my face. “Kid, I’m one minute away from shooting you in cold blood.”
“In public? Go ahead. Optics.” He nodded his chin up at the second tier of the concourse. Of course I knew that, and of course being a symp he knew it too.
I said, “Go back underdeck and maybe I’ll forget we met.”
“You’re here alone? Nobody else from your crew with you?”
I didn’t answer.
He said, “I can get you out.”
I stared at him. “Out?”
“Of your ship. Of your life.” He shrugged. “Out. Don’t most criminals want out in some way?”
No. The immediate answer threaded through my silence. Stitched together my fear.
“I can do it,” he said. And maybe he was just tossing out options, hooks, to see which one might snag. “You can be off this station in two shifts and be on your way anywhere in the Hub.”
My heart thudded.
“I’m not joking,” he said. Then scratched his cheek and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand when I didn’t speak. “Tell me the real name of your ship.”
“Symps are concerned with pirates?” But of course they were. Some of them bought weapons from us.
I didn’t think he was one of them. Not the Warboy’s recruit. “Information never goes to waste,” he said.
That I knew. I wanted a drink. A stiff one. And I thought of Estienne back on the Khan, sleeping alone.
“Offer’s open,” the boy said, then got up from the table. He pushed the chair back in like a polite son. “See you.” He hopped back over the gate and disappeared into the crowd.
I ordered that drink.
His w
ords pounded in my mind so loudly that I began to feel sick. And that meant I was actually considering it.
The alternatives were to shoot him and his sister, or leave them alone and forget about them.
After sending another report to Genghis Khan about what I’d observed in the underdeck (leaving out Otter and Delsie), the following shift I finally went back, wandered the dank gray until Delsie found me. I knew she’d find me. She led me to the same point of contact, which probably wasn’t where they actually bedded down on blueshifts. It was just one of his offices here. He didn’t seem surprised to see me.
“Genghis Khan,” I said, trying not to twitch at how easy it was to offer the name just like that.
His eyes flickered behind the jewel red interface lenses. “Genghis Khan. Yuri. We work together?”
I folded my arms. “Give me a solid proposal.”
He said, “I’ll be in touch.”
Two shifts later he came to my den room with two other boys, older—muscle. Bold and foolish. I rested my hand behind me at my backwaist, where my gun was tucked. And Otter said, “Your info about Genghis Khan. Would you like to trade?”
“For what?”
He said, “I have a contact aboard Macedon. A symp. A spy. He might be able to get you a deal. Talk to Captain Azarcon, and you might not have to go to prison.”
The proposal had changed. No longer interested in just letting me go? Rely on another symp? Walk straight into the arms of the person who had the most reason to hate Falcone? Who knew him maybe like I knew him. Who’d want to own me too in some way, I had no doubt of that. This deal was no good. “The Warboy doesn’t want me for himself, so he shunts me to that bastard? I’m not going to prison either way. You can leave.”
“We want you. Azarcon would need to meet you too. Your kind are problems to us both. But we won’t help you unless you give us something back,” he said.
I barely heard the words as they left my lips, but I felt the shape of them on my tongue. They tasted bitter. “I’m not going to Azarcon. Symp.” That was no offer. And I would probably never get a better one, not for who I was. So how would I live if I left? I didn’t know how to live outside of this. I couldn’t just walk away. Especially to Azarcon, who hunted pirates above and beyond.
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