Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  Almost a year into my command and the route to Slavepoint was a regular one, even though it sat behind the Demilitarized Zone in strit territory. Not all symps were like Otter. I learned since my geisha debut that Falcone dealt with sympathizers on the stritside of the DMZ, and these symps didn’t support the Warboy. In the war where EarthHub outweighed and outgunned the strits when it came to deep-space combat, the strits and their symp allies relied on guerrilla tactics—fast strikes and quicker retreats. With precision weaponry. They hit stations, depots, carriers, and merchant ships that supported the military effort. But they were still basically relegated to their side of space. And the symps that dealt with Falcone wanted to change that.

  We needed somewhere to put the confiscated children when recruitment occurred in droves, as it sometimes did depending on how low-staffed the ships were in the network. Austro was a large pool for recruits, but so were hapless merchants on isolated routes between leap points. Leftovers were bid on, and instead of tramping a dozen pirate captains through Genghis Khan’s decks, Falcone preferred to use Slavepoint.

  He supplied weapons to these aggressive symps so they could better blow up Hub stations and ships, and the symps gave us a planet on their side of the DMZ. It worked pretty well. Carriers didn’t normally run insurgent missions deep past the DMZ, especially with Azarcon’s focus on us, and one planet in a vast space that was partially charted but not visited by Hub ships provided a proper sinkhole to store caches—of slaves.

  Mid-January Falcone ordered Kublai Khan to the planet as an advance tactic before he came later with the weapons shipment for the symps. He had a mission first by Meridia—to ambush Macedon. He’d gotten intel from a contact somewhere in Hub Command; Macedon was going to Meridia for a resupply. Pirates in general were high on a recent victory, Genghis Khan specifically—he’d teamed with a symp marauder and destroyed Wesakechak, a deep-space carrier, out by the Gjoa asteroid belt. Now, once he’d finished with Azarcon, he was going to meet us at Slavepoint. He sent Caligtiera with me to assess some potential new crew for his own ship.

  Every month I went down to the planet to see how the camp was running. Sometimes if Genghis Khan was there, Falcone sent down Estienne to survey the slaves, and Estienne and I would disappear for a few hours in one of the rooms the camp administrators always had prepared for the visiting captains of the various ships. The rooms for the khans were always well stocked with liquor and clean sheets.

  The planet itself was unterraformed, its atmosphere poisonous. It seemed drearier than normal because Estienne hadn’t come down this time. He commed me when I was still aboard Kublai Khan, in orbit, and said they’d got a new geisha that he had to train. “But don’t worry,” he said, with a sly grin. “He’s not nearly as pretty as you.”

  I stuck out my tongue. It made him laugh.

  The children and what adults we kept in the camp were well taken care of—you couldn’t exactly sell damaged merchandise. I took a walk with Caligtiera through the well-lit warren of corridors and rooms, where guards stood at every exit and entrance with rifles. The people in the mess hall or recreation room moved about with the quiet resentment or the total capitulation of criminals in a prison.

  I never looked too closely at the children. I tried not to look them in the eyes.

  We stood in the prisoner mess hall, Cal and I, which was in the center of the prisoner wing. There were only two wings to the settlement—one for the hundred or so prisoners and one for the captors, with heavily guarded gates in between. Nobody could escape to the surface of the planet, so the bottleneck transfer corridor was the only concern. We’d never had problems since 80 percent of the slaves were kids.

  Cal smoked and watched them eating in the pervasive gray-painted room. He said, almost idly, “Was your camp anything like this?”

  I was just lighting my own cig to try and cancel out his weed stink, and shrugged. “Don’t remember.”

  “Ah, come on,” he said, glancing at me. “Don’t tell me you don’t sit awake at night here and think about the irony of the situation.”

  “Oddly, no.”

  “You’re a convincing liar,” he said. “Or maybe not.”

  “And you’re an annoying hole.” I took a deep drag of the cig. “If it bothered me so much, do you think I’d be here?”

  Not even in Slavepoint, but at Falcone’s beck and call.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It could just be that you’re patient.” He paused, blew a smoke ring. “Or cold.”

  I looked at him sidelong. Kept staring until he had to look.

  Then I smiled. “How ’bout both. And since you’re so chatty today, how are things aboard the Khan, in the captain’s second chair?”

  Of course he didn’t answer. Not out loud.

  My comm beeped in the middle of my sleep. Three separate times. The first was Taja back on the Khan, telling me the symp marauder had arrived and was simply waiting for Genghis Khan to show up with the weapons shipment. Symps were never idle talkers, so it was only a heads-up. The second time, Cal commed to tell me that Genghis Khan and Beowulf, a bloodmate, had leaped insystem and were now off-loading the weapons. They’d survived Macedon, pummeled it in fact, and made off with prisoners. If Falcone had wanted to talk, he would’ve commed, but he didn’t, so I went back to sleep. Lightly.

  Falcone was going to be in a good mood for the next long while, for getting Macedon. Maybe one of his prisoners was Azarcon himself.

  The third comm was from my ship again.

  Taja said the Warboy’s ship and three other symps had leaped in and attacked both Genghis Khan and its buyer.

  I made it from my base quarters to the main control room in a mad dash, though the walls seemed to have contracted. Five, ten minutes to get through all the automatically locked doors between base sections. Cal was there already.

  He said, “Genghis Khan is dead. We need to get to the landing bay.”

  I didn’t understand his words.

  “Report!” I barked at him, going to the scan. The floating images there showed three different colored blots. Symp red, Hub carrier blue, and Hub battleship green—two of them.

  “That one’s our buyer.” Cal pointed to fleeing red.

  Five symps, two outbound. Our buyer and another symp in pursuit of it. After their own.

  Cal said, extremely calm, “The symps took down the Wulf and started an attack on the Khan. Macedon leaped in and shot the Khan, and soon after these battleships arrived. Our only escape is your ship.”

  Macedon? So Azarcon wasn’t dead. At least not his ship. Not like—

  The words fell from my lips almost before he’d finished speaking. They were ashes cast at sea. “Then let’s move.”

  I always kept Kublai Khan on the dark side of Slavepoint’s single moon, with the specific intention to hide it from inbound ships to the system. It was safe, and we took my shuttle back, a modified transport that resembled a symp design so we could fly around on this side with a little more disguise. But Kublai Khan itself couldn’t face off against that many enemy, so we stayed put. I waited on my bridge as Macedon and the symps left the system in pursuit of our buyer. As soon as they were far enough we sent out rescue squads to the remains of both Beowulf and the Khan.

  There wasn’t much left, and not many survivors. We did as thorough a job as we could, but there was threat of at least one of the Warboy’s fleet ships leaping in to take care of Slavepoint, so we fled. Abandoned the camp and its people.

  I aimed Kublai Khan to the deep and sent it hard. We would hide out at Hades.

  It took hours for my people to wade through the bodies laid out in our primary bay and get to those that were still alive enough to treat. Not all of the crew would ever be accounted for, either blown completely into space or disintegrated from internal blasts.

  I saw Rika and Ville, my Hanamachi Elders, and they both ran up to me past the medtechs and the body bags and threw themselves around me.

  I didn’t have to ask.
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br />   I didn’t leave the bridge and, unless a crisis came up, nobody was going to speak. Not even Taja, who stayed on shift even though I was up. I sat in the chair and listened to the ambient hum of the comps and my crew talking softly into their comms when they needed something. There wasn’t much to do. The ship was moving, the word would be spread: Genghis Khan was dead.

  Caligtiera came up to the bridge, unasked, and leaned down to me, resting his hand on the arm of the chair, avoiding the controls there.

  “One of the survivors said that Falcone was on the symp ship when it fled. Our buyer. He was with its captain.”

  I stared at him. He didn’t say anything past that. He wasn’t going to suggest we go after it—with the Warboy on its ass and Macedon not far behind, escorting that damn symp through Hub space no less. Or hunting it.

  Cal thought of it too.

  The Khan’s death meant more than just the loss of the crew. And unless we sent a strong message back, the network was going to falter.

  I was his protégé. Caligtiera had no ship now, and he wouldn’t challenge me here. Not yet anyway. It was my call.

  “Get me Caliban on comm.” It was a Hub ship in Falcone’s pocket, a friend of his from when he was a captain. I’d read that they were assigned, either by accident or not, to replace Wesakechak, the carrier Genghis Khan had destroyed in the deep.

  Now we were going to see how strong the alliance held.

  I had to think of these things now. I had to put everything else aside, this black feeling that had one name. This open mouth inside me that wanted just to scream.

  It wasn’t a good time for pirates to be out in droves. Macedon had been damaged, and every deep spacer that patrolled the Dragons took it as a personal insult.

  But I arranged with Caliban to keep me in touch.

  So they told me Macedon and the Warboy had captured our symp buyer, and the Warboy had taken it. They told me Falcone was on Macedon, and they were headed to Chaos Station. So Macedon and the Warboy were working together after all. It made a sick clench in my stomach. Caliban told me Macedon had arranged to hand Falcone over to Hub authorities so he could be tried back on Earth.

  Azarcon just didn’t kill him? He had more restraint than me.

  But this was good news. We could arrange something between now and then. Like Caliban crew snatching Falcone in the handover on Chaos Station. They didn’t want to do it, but I reminded their captain of Falcone’s stature among the pirates and what would happen to Caliban should he die and some of us decided we didn’t want their alliance. Maybe we could no longer trust them? It would take only one comm to the right authority to get their ship investigated.

  So they agreed, and we waited.

  I visited the injured crew from Genghis Khan, wandered among them in my medbay or the triage tents set up in the hangar, looking for Estienne. But he wasn’t there, and finally Rika came and took me back to her quarters and didn’t leave me alone unless I went to the bathroom or the bridge. She didn’t say a word, and I was grateful. Silence was better than speech. There was nothing to crack it, because if my silence cracked, so would the rest of me.

  Word came down but not from Caliban. From a contact on Chaos that said Caliban’s dockside attack had failed when the Warboy’s crew, moored at the station by Azarcon’s order, intervened to help Macedon’s jets. This alliance would ruin us. It had already begun.

  Falcone was dead, killed by a symp.

  Falcone was dead.

  I should have stayed on bridge, been there with Taja and Caligtiera so they couldn’t, at least, plot to kick me off my own ship.

  But I had to be alone. I had to be in quarters, with the lights down, and lie to myself.

  I was free.

  And Estienne was dead. Dead or lost back in the remains of the Khan that we hadn’t gone back to for fear of the Warboy’s fleet. His body could be among the ruins, waiting. Yet I knew it wasn’t. People didn’t wait like that. They lay with wide-awake eyes. The wakefulness of death.

  And I wasn’t really free. I had a ship full of people, some of whom I cared about, others who wanted me dead now that there was opportunity to advance themselves. Who was going to protest? Not Falcone.

  Estienne was dead, and that part of it wasn’t a lie.

  That was the only truth that seemed to matter, and it threaded through me, a needle. Making holes that gaped and bled.

  Caligtiera came a shift later and stood in the middle of my quarters as I sat on the bunk, my sleeves pulled down, stuck to my skin from dried blood. But he didn’t see that, my sweater was black.

  He said, “You need to take out Azarcon’s son.”

  I nodded. I didn’t have to ask why. It was the way of things. Like all of this, as soon as I’d stepped foot on that ship when I was nine.

  Blood for blood.

  And I was his protégé.

  2.3.2197 EHSD—The Son

  Ryan Azarcon was beautiful, physically. Of course by paying attention to the Send, I knew this, since he was all over it lately, the newest fad-face despite (or because of) the fact most of his candid transcasts lately showed him giving meedees the finger. I almost liked him for that. His mother was the public affairs bigwig on Austro Station, his father was every pirate’s nightmare, and the two of them together, however two people like them even got together, had reliable genetics for a pleasing face. The kid had that, and he knew it. If people didn’t always tell him, I’m sure he saw it when he looked in the mirror.

  He was nineteen, but not pirate nineteen. He was affluent, catered to, had a personal bodyguard in the form of a young EarthHub Marine, and spent his time mostly in recreation at parties, vid premieres, and cybetoriums. Watching him cavort from one social engagement to another, I thought of Bo-Sheng and me by the lake, tossing rocks and being cold. I let those thoughts fester, watching this rich boy.

  He had an addiction to Silver, or at least a healthy habit. Silver was the number one illegal narcotic for rich stitches all across the Hub, and for the most part he kept it a secret, it seemed, from everyone—but I recognized his dealer at a tech shop called Macroplay. She had a reputation for fine line swack. At least he only put the purest shit in his system. Snobbery even in vice. Drugs just for the hell of it, for recreation. Drugs just because it was the cool thing to do. Drugs to cope with the fact he was his father’s son, maybe, whether he wanted to be or not.

  I’d arrived on station in a fake merchant uniform, hair covered with a cap, eyes down, and bled myself into the routine of the concourse—quickly. The three kids I used from Boysdeck, who I’d trained before for a previous operation—pirate assets on station—were more than willing to be my eyes and ears when I physically couldn’t be. They weren’t part of Otter’s gang. They could go underdeck when I couldn’t. They helped me keep track of Ryan Azarcon and his bodyguard. They were thorough and mocking when they made their reports, usually in my rented room in a low-cred den. I took one of them to range shoot, and he loved it. I taught him about disabling laser trips in heavily secured maintenance tunnels, like the one near the flash houses in the den district’s Red River, where I’d seen Azarcon’s bodyguard.

  My tunnel kid was going to help me in the job.

  I killed a maintenance worker with no family and took his access ID.

  It was a methodical process, like getting dressed in geisha blacks before meeting a client, or inventorying cargo to be shipped in some deal. Planning a hit was just step-by-step.

  I sent reports back to my ship when I checked up on Taja and Caligtiera. Rika and Piotr let me know that nobody had overthrown my captaincy yet. Rika said Dexter missed me.

  Hurry, they said. Everyone is dying to see it on the Send.

  Azarcon’s son. Dead.

  And who were they going to blame? There were plenty of people they could’ve blamed, especially once Azarcon announced that the Warboy and the Warboy’s strits that he’d helped in apprehending our gunrunning symp were going to sit down with him in peace negotiations.
/>   It made me laugh, really, in my den, watching on my comp.

  Treaty. With the Warboy and his strit patrons.

  Caligtiera said, Do it soon. The bastard’s uniting them.

  But I doubted it.

  I watched the grumblings of the Family of Humanity. It wasn’t my specific mission, but with this news of possible peace, intel was at a premium. I told my tunnel kids to trail the ones I knew of in the underdeck, because we ran guns with them too, and followed the thread to a woman in the Merchants Protection Commission. I needed to know how far she was connected with the fundamentalist factions of the Centralists, and if they were going to get in the way of my op. If anyone else wanted to get back at Azarcon, it would be the Family of Humanity and their Centralist allies.

  Don’t let them trump us, Caligtiera said. That kill is ours.

  She was in her midthirties, maybe more, but cured in suspended aging treatments; she looked about fifteen years older than me, small brown eyes and long blond hair about a year out of fashion in its blunt, unremarkable cut. She wasn’t very pretty, a sedentary woman judging from her size—about four or five above ideal. And she liked to decompress from a long work shift at a medium-scale bar called Goldmine.

  One late shift I put on casual dark clothes and found her in the bar. I pretended to jar her elbow as she sat on the high stool. It spilled her drink all over the colormorphing bartop. The basest of beginnings.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to her irritated scowl, trying for an embarrassed smile and sneaking peeks into her eyes. “Really, I totally wasn’t looking where I was going. Here, let me buy you another one. What were you drinking?”

  Her name was Elizabeth, and despite her dowdy looks, which tended to make her seem as if she didn’t care about much, she had a strong sense of purpose and a lot of opinions about the state of the government and the Hub as a whole. That first shift in the bar we talked politics, and I let it slip how disgusted I was that Azarcon would even attempt a peace treaty with the strits after all the grief they’d caused humans on this side of the DMZ.