Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

  I played her like a drum, a steady beating of smiles and drinks and eventually sex. A week into it, and I was in her apartment in the executive tower, and she was speaking more openly like the Family she was. And she was only too happy for a young thing like me, someone to divert the passion for her Cause into something that would make her sweat. And I was only too happy to raid her comp when she was asleep.

  They wanted Azarcon humiliated, discredited, and worn. But not dead. Because dead heroes became martyrs, and the man had enough mystery.

  If they only knew his secret. Knew him as I knew him, as one of Falcone’s. Never mind that he was an EarthHub captain now; some part of the pirate must’ve still lingered.

  She asked on that late shift, ten days into our relationship, “Where did you come from?” In that way of sodding romantics. She’s asked about my fan tattoo and found it sad when I told her it was to remember an old girlfriend. My ship tattoos I had covered with those semipermanent cosmetics.

  We were lying in her big bed, typical postcoital laziness, and she was playing with my hair, propped on her elbow.

  This was going on long enough. I needed her to be hooked completely, not nibbling at the bait. She had a sense of injustice about the war, it was what drove her to be a part of a group like the Family of Humanity. They were all indignant about something.

  So I told her, “A refugee camp. Well, not originally. I was born on Plymouth Moon.”

  Of course this impressed her, as it would any Family. The flash point of the war had been on that Moon, strits and humans fighting over resources.

  “They moved the colony from there some years ago, didn’t they.” Soft voice and sympathetic eyes.

  I nodded. “So I grew up on Colonial Grace…’til I was, like, nine. Then I joined a merchant crew, it was the only way to leave that rock.”

  “No family?” She paused. “Or were they…?”

  “They weren’t killed. My babushka, yeah, but my parents and my brother and sister…”

  It had been so long since I’d thought about them that just saying the words made my distant mind falter. I sat up away from her touch. She was a target, though she didn’t know it yet, and I’d said enough.

  I reached to my pants thrown at the foot of the bed, dug in, and took out my cigrets.

  But she prodded. Gently. Looking to comfort. “What happened to your family, Yuri?”

  I’d given her my name. And my old name. Terisov. Because it meant nothing now.

  I smoked hard and shrugged. “Left ’em. We were separated, then I left ’em.”

  And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Mama or Jascha, Papa or Isobel.

  It was Estienne. And I hugged an arm around my stomach, smoking and choking from it because the tears clogged my throat. She sat up beside me and laid her hand on my forearm, stroked the scars there. Hadn’t asked about them, maybe she’d seen something like them before, but her touch was too sensitive on the skin, and I had to get up, get out of there. I pulled away.

  “I’m going. I’ll see you later.”

  “Yuri.” Her hand reached a beat too late, missed my body, and rested instead on the bedsheet as I yanked on my clothes. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Not your fault,” I said, and meant it. The only thing I’d truly meant since I started to play her. But I left and didn’t talk to her for two shifts, just stayed in my den smoking, trying to collect myself.

  But when you were divided into so many pieces, it was impossible to put yourself together.

  She finally commed me at the den. She thought I was a ship mechanic between contracts, and it had helped that I had nowhere permanent to sleep; she was quicker to invite me over, feed me, look after me, spoil me. So she did again, said she wanted to cook a meal for me.

  I told myself I needed to get more information off her comp, so I would sleep over again tonight and dig. I landed up there with some flowers, something expected and sweet, and put on a smile before I kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry for running out like that.”

  “No, no.” She tugged me inside the apartment. “It’s understandable. I got something for you.”

  “Me?” I watched her shuffle off to the adjoining kitchen to put the lilies in a vase, then she came back and took a chipsheet out of her dress pants and held it out to me. I palmed it with a curious smile. “What is this?”

  “I found out where your family is,” she said.

  I stood there, not smiling anymore.

  “I have connections…” Her eyes hunted mine, unsure, wanting to please. “My people tracked your mother and your brother from a refugee base in the Spokes, about a leap from where you were on Colonial Grace. They’ve resettled on Mars now with your sister Isobel. After your father…” She stepped closer and I couldn’t move. “Well…it’s all in the sheet.”

  She let me access it on her comp and it told me my father was dead. But the rest of them were alive, and as I stared at the columns of information she wrapped her arms around my shoulders from behind and kissed the side of my hair.

  “You can contact them now,” she said.

  As she said it, I knew I couldn’t. What would I say? There wasn’t anything to say to them, my language was lost to anything they might understand. There was no going back, no searching in the womb for answers. Dead things didn’t hatch in birth.

  Besides, my presence in their lives would put them in danger from fellow pirates who wanted me off.

  But I pocketed the sheet to keep, I didn’t know for how long, and maybe I was going to lose it somewhere along the line, or be killed before I could do anything with the information, but it was information, and I dealt in that. I committed it all to memory in the way I was trained. And when I turned around to hug her for it, she rubbed my back like I was a child.

  It didn’t take more than a full shift before Caligtiera commed me with a direct, “Why isn’t he dead yet?”

  I asked back, “Why aren’t you off my ship? Don’t plan on putting down roots, do you?”

  In fact, he didn’t. Rika told me he used some cred he had stashed away from decades of piracy and bought his own vessel. An Orca-class, of all things, that I knew wouldn’t stay its basic shape. The first thing you did when you got a pirate ship was outfit it with weaponry. But while that was happening, with some of the survivors of Genghis Khan, he was still on my ship, and I had a mission.

  I didn’t tell anyone about the contact info on my family. And I didn’t look at it again. The more I looked at it, the harder it became to think of Azarcon’s son as a target.

  So I thought of Estienne instead, even though it hurt. Because it hurt. It hurt enough that I thought Ryan Azarcon should feel it too.

  I followed Ryan Azarcon on the shift of Austro Station’s elaborate Chinese New Year celebration. February 17, 2197.

  I had my list. My tunnel kid. My position on the second-level tier of the flash house. I had optics that cut through the bouncing lights and pinned my sights on the target.

  I saw him there in white, on the dance floor. Suggestive, abandoned dancing as if all the stars and planets were contained in this moment just for him, spinning around his orbit, jeweled in his eyes.

  And maybe they were in some way. He was so close to death. In those moments maybe even God paid attention.

  Kill him, I told my tunnel kid. Go close in the crowd.

  And I watched. Beautiful boy in his beautiful world. This special son. Did he even love his father? Enough to die for him? Enough to kill for him. Did the captain really love him? His bodyguard did, I’d seen it in the animation of their interactions, and it wasn’t true that one shot equaled one kill, a sniper’s body count. One kill meant revenge, didn’t it, that led to other deaths. And if Azarcon didn’t really love his son, he might still take the insult to heart, like all pirates did. It wasn’t about love. Revenge was the greedy child of hurt, and I felt it for Estienne like a scabbed-over wound. My steps were thick through the flash house smoke.

  I followed my tunnel kid dow
n to the floor, through the bodies and their ecstatic arms. They danced all around me, oblivious and innocent. But I pushed my way through until I saw him. In my scopes his eyes were very blue. His laughter wasn’t laced with drugs, not yet.

  Cairo Azarcon’s son, so unaware of why someone would want him dead. He had scars too, but instead of wearing them on his arms, he injetted them into his veins, marred himself from the inside out.

  He was just a little younger than my brother. By two years.

  I just had to shoot him.

  Child of a pirate.

  But I shot my tunnel kid instead. I shot the girl Ryan Azarcon danced with. I shot the lights out, and the crowd rampaged.

  And then I lost him in the madness.

  I told Caligtiera over comm, He had too much security. The flash was too crowded. The conditions were too bad.

  He said, “Why didn’t you pick another time?”

  I said, “You try and assassinate someone on Austro, with hundreds of cam globes and patrolling Marines. This is a rich station with a penchant for paranoia ever since that dock bombing years ago.”

  I doubted he believed me.

  I stayed on the station even after Azarcon blew in, collected his son, and took my target away.

  I stayed, and ran the op on Elizabeth, who had so many tales to tell (in her comp if not in her bed) about what the government was doing with terrorists, and the longer I was away from my ship, the easier it became. Madness lulls in isolation, and my world was calmer alone.

  4.15.2197 EHSD—The Captain

  Elizabeth had recent correspondences in her comp to other Family members of the terrorist cell on Austro, all of them regarding a plan to assassinate Azarcon’s wife. She also had a few messages exchanged with an ex-jet from the carrier who was willing, for the right amount of cred, to talk about jet security protocol.

  She was soft with me, but in her comms to her allies she said, Get Azarcon back to the station. Take out Junior and send a clear signal to back off.

  I thought about warning Captain Azarcon.

  I thought about it until Caligtiera arrived on station, met me in my den, and occupied me with news of the network, my ship, how they were going to step up their attacks in protest of this treaty and Azarcon’s involvement with Falcone’s death.

  I said, “It was a symp that killed him.”

  Some symp, it said, aboard Macedon. Otter’s contact? How many symps would’ve been aboard a Hub carrier?

  Cal said, “It’s all over the Send that Azarcon was a pirate.”

  Yeah, I’d seen. New Centralist President Damiani made it an excuse to rail on deep spacers.

  “It’s good for us,” Cal said. “Falcone would’ve been happy.”

  If he wasn’t dead. If so many people weren’t dead already.

  And it wasn’t going to stop.

  The radical Centralists with their Family of Humanity ties assassinated Azarcon’s wife, on the station, and pointed the finger at the pirates. Because now that Damiani was in power she wanted no part of the Family, even in suspicion. Even though the links went deep. Even though, Cal said, the Family talked about an alliance with us to keep this war going for the benefit of all. Exterminate the aliens, capitalize on the occupied fleet, drive Azarcon to some dead moon, and let him rot.

  Azarcon came back to station, with his son, and the funeral was long and publicized.

  And Elizabeth had written in her comp to take out Ryan next. I read these things while she was asleep in the bedroom, copied what files I could to my own chipsheet, and in the goldshifts she made me breakfast and kissed me under the artificial sunlight that showered from the ceiling. And I started to think that this must be how normal people lived, how it might’ve been if you weren’t lying in every gesture and word. Doing small things for each other in safe places. Dancing in this innocent manner.

  But she was a liar too. She was a murderer like me, except she did it for high political ideals, and I did it for blood.

  She wanted to get Ryan Azarcon on the way back from the funeral, when he was the most vulnerable, when it would make the biggest statement. When he was right beside his father.

  The man would be traumatized, they thought.

  Didn’t they know what he’d been through with the pirates? Didn’t they have a clue what it meant to be Falcone’s protégé?

  I’d watched him on the Send deflect all the rampant diatribes about his past. I’d heard of his attacks on pirates and his ruthlessness with the strits, when he’d been at war with them. I’d seen Falcone’s hatred for him steep to such a strong taste that it could’ve only been born of a sense of betrayal. Azarcon had left the pirates, left Falcone, and not just left—surpassed him.

  Azarcon wouldn’t be traumatized. He’d be brutal in his revenge. An estranged wife was bad enough. For his son, he’d kill.

  Caligtiera said, “Do it right this time.” He brought out a contact of ours on station and told the man to “help” me. What he wanted was insurance that I’d finish it. He didn’t know about the govie plans. He was too busy trying to bed them for his own purposes. Rika said, “Come home. Taja’s getting delusions of grandeur.”

  But I stayed, and used the pirate contact Cal set on me to help with Ryan Azarcon’s assassination—this time.

  And all it took was some distraction, a separation from his main phalanx of security. I let this other pirate smoke the captain and his son and their smaller security into blindness, and the pirate grabbed the son, and I shot the pirate and took the son, because this didn’t involve some stooge of Cal’s, this was mine. My decision. A desperate sort of move, I knew it, but every time I commed my ship, and they asked me to come back, I thought of being back in that world without Estienne. I thought of being set adrift by Falcone’s death and how any pirate who wanted my seat would gun for it because I had no implicit superior to protect me. The head of the family died, and the son became fair game.

  His eyes were almost unnaturally blue, kitten-large, as he sat across from me in the tunnel, as he breathed and I smoked and he tried not to piss his pants in fear. I’d read that his eyes were genetically tampered because he sure didn’t get that color from his parents. He didn’t like me staring, but I wondered what it was like to be the son of Cairo Azarcon. I wondered what he thought of his father being a pirate.

  “Did you kill my mother?” he said.

  And it was funny, in its way, considering I’d wanted to warn his papa about it in the first place.

  “No,” I said. “That was the govies.”

  He had attitude. I told him I was saving his life because other people had bad plans for him, and he said with a well-honed sarcasm, “You could save it by putting me back with my father.”

  And that amused me somehow. This kid amused me. In the face of fear he managed to summon his teeth and his claws.

  He was Azarcon’s son. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  Somewhere along the line I’d made the decision not to go back to my ship. Maybe it was from watching this kid live out his normal existence and wanting to kill him just for that, but it was ridiculous to think that way; he didn’t ask to be born where he’d been any more than I had. Maybe if I’d been Cairo Azarcon’s son, I would never have done the things I’d done. Maybe it was something inherent that made you capable of committing atrocities.

  Ryan Azarcon looked at me as if I was going to do one on him.

  It helped that his papa thought so too. I took Big-Eyes to the cubby in the tunnels I’d scoped out for myself, far away from Boysdeck or most of the underdeck traffic. I commed Macedon using the code I’d lifted from Elizabeth’s comp, and while it took some finagling to access from that point of entry, eventually I got the ship’s general comm. Azarcon came on, I kept the visual off, and he demanded, of course, that I return his kitten.

  I told him, “I was in contact with a boy in the underdeck named Otter about a year ago, who was in turn in contact with a symp spy aboard your ship. I’d offered to deal Falcone in exch
ange for exoneration.”

  He said he remembered. So my message had got through; I just hadn’t followed up.

  “Obviously that didn’t work,” I said, then lied: “I had to cut contact when Falcone got suspicious.” If I admitted I had just changed my mind, he would’ve been even less inclined to hear my offer now. I wished suddenly I could see his face. “You know what I want.” How did you get out?

  He said in a flat voice, “You want out. Falcone’s protégé. You’ve kidnapped my son.”

  And I should’ve known then. He was never going to believe me. I should never have taken his blood.

  I managed to deal with him, at least. Told him to find out himself about the pirates, the Family, and the Centralists, because it was all there for someone like him to find. Last gasp, maybe. With his kid looking at me like I was crazy.

  I’d saved his life. There were people out there trying to kill him, they’d proven it with his mother, but this wasn’t much of an argument when I was the one who had him in a dank hole. But you never showed your doubts to people like Azarcon—or Azarcon’s kid. Laugh, if it helped. Flirt to make the kid uncomfortable. Taunt him even. Better that they were scared of you or wondered about you. Better that if it came down to it, I could make the hard decision and kill my hostage.

  I could always go back to Kublai Khan.

  Junior said, “You would really kill me?” Doubting my threats. Even though he was cuffed to the pipes on the wall. “How far do you think you’d get if you killed me?”

  He was so naïve. And rather untouched. I had to touch him. I wondered again if he loved his father, even knowing what he’d been. If he even knew what it meant. I put my hand on his soft long hair and ran it back to the ends. I told him, “I don’t have to kill you to hurt you.”

  He recoiled. As if I would rape him. I considered hitting him just for that. Instead I reminded him, “Don’t be so repulsed. Your father did the same in my position.”