And he said, “No he didn’t.”
So I knew the captain hadn’t told him all the details.
I could’ve shown him. But he had to stay undamaged so his father would know I was serious. Not to touch his little kitten.
So I mocked him instead, just to test, just to see if his mettle withstood a constant pressure.
He moved away from me and shut his eyes.
I left him there in shadows, asleep, to check on my tunnel kids. They told me some pirate had approached them abovedeck to ask about little Azarcon. They said they were told if I couldn’t kill him, then they’d have to. I had to hit the boy and scare the girl to make them believe that I was going to do it, that I was having a little fun first, and that it wasn’t any of their damn business.
When I got back to Junior he was staring at my comp.
And it wasn’t wise but I pulled it away, then realized he’d been burndiving, and as he yelled from the pain, I knew that I’d made him blind.
Damaged him.
Then my tunnel kids showed up, they must’ve followed me, I’d trained them far too well, and Junior cried out and I had to shoot the kids and I wanted to shoot him next but it was a flurry to get him away from these bodies. Maybe I could get him back to Kublai Khan somehow, maybe then Azarcon would listen once our ships were in space. Maybe the trick was to make this boy listen, show him what his father was, show how it could’ve been for him if he’d just been born someone else’s son.
He refused to move, stopped dead in the tunnels with a fixed expression of rebellion on his face, even shining from his blind eyes.
He told me lies. “My father will help you. But not like this.” And, “Docs can fix my sight. You might be surprised what my father can forgive. I’ll speak for you; I’ll make him listen.”
He was desperate. He said anything. He was listening for the sound of other people in these tunnels so he could yell like he had with the kids. And that would be it.
He thought he had sway over his father? If Falcone was swayed by anything, it was because he’d let it. If Cairo Azarcon wanted me dead, it wouldn’t matter if I’d helped his son at all. In any way, even belatedly. To him I might always be Falcone’s protégé, whether I wanted to be or not. What was I good for except to be killed? Especially now.
Ryan would always be an Azarcon.
And I was a pirate. I’d been too long on this station alone, away from my blood. I’d let my world become diluted in ragged hopes of other people’s promises. Like what this kid offered. But it wasn’t an offer, it was a pat on the ass to distract me from the truth. I wasn’t any captain’s son, I was just a protégé.
So I shot Ryan Azarcon in the chest and ran.
Otter, as a symp, didn’t work alone. He sent out droves of his gang to search for me, to help Captain Azarcon, because his symp contact aboard Macedon must’ve asked.
I saw a tunnel exit, framed by the light of the station deck. I was on my way toward it when they shot me in the back.
Paralyzed. Even my thoughts froze as I fell.
I woke up in Macedon’s brig. A jet sat at a security station outside my cage, reading something on his console. It wasn’t that much different from my ship’s brig except it was bigger, grayer. Colder. They’d dumped me on the bunk at least, and when I sniffed and pulled myself to sit up, the jet looked over, then tapped something in front of him.
I could barely move from that paralysis pulse, and a bite of nausea gnawed at my gut. I swallowed a few times, but it didn’t go away. It got worse when the hatch opened and Captain Azarcon stepped in.
Worse when the jet got up and left.
I sat at the edge of the bunk, clutching the mattress as he strode to the gate and looked in at me.
He didn’t say a word.
I stared at him. This man who always seemed too dark around the edges, even when slammed with meedee lights. His features—dark eyes canted slightly at the corners, fine eyebrows, a long nose and gracefully lined jaw, and skin so pale he could’ve been wearing geisha powder. Except he wasn’t, it was the smooth pallor of a shipborn soul. It was a face that knew itself, but not for vanity. For control. His hair reflected the overhead lights in white shards. A piece fell over his forehead like a wing, and I could see, if he were younger, what the appeal would’ve been for Falcone. The face was already younger than it should’ve been, like Falcone’s had been. Deep space was in his veins, and his blood might have run just as cold.
“Captain Azarcon,” I said.
He turned his back and went to the security station, pressed something there. My gate beeped. I hauled myself to my feet, but he was fast, pushed aside the bars and came at me. He was tall, deceptively strong beneath the slender frame, and he had me up against the wall before I could take a breath, his arm shoved up under my chin and his free hand pinning my wrist.
“The only reason you’re alive,” he said, “is because my son is too. But I’m still deciding how long to keep you alive.”
He let me go with a shove to the deck. I braced there on my hands and knees before I pulled myself back on my heels and looked up at him.
“Your choice. But you—”
He hit me. I didn’t see it coming and barely felt it for the shock. I leaned on one hand, half-slumped, touching my jaw in reflex. As I saw his fingers clench and unclench I felt it.
“Don’t even try to manipulate me,” he said. “Nor do I have the patience to listen to taunts. I know you’re aware that we have a common past—for whatever it’s worth. So you know you won’t get anywhere with me.”
If I hadn’t before, I knew it now.
He walked to the gate and out, slamming it behind him. “I suggest you cooperate with my crew.”
Macedon’s brig had a reputation, just like its jets. This was the ship that had captured and killed Shiva, among other pirates, as well as its fair share of strits. I looked down at the floor, and it had the scuffed sheen of a surface scrubbed for more than casual cleanliness. There’d been blood here.
They didn’t feed me. The water from the sink tasted metallic, but it was clean. And it could be hot if you waved it on first, though it was timed and shut off every thirty seconds. I used it to warm my hands, splash my face to wake myself up, then I sat on the bunk and waited. Nothing else to do.
The ship was moving from the sound of its drives. And I had no hope that Kublai Khan would ever get me. If they even knew where I was now.
I thought of Dexter. Rika would take care of him. But I pictured him pining for me and dying of loneliness, like Falcone had said lovebirds did if they didn’t bond to another soul—be it bird, human, animal. On the outside it didn’t make sense. But on the inside I felt it. Emotions or lack of them could kill you well enough.
Azarcon sent jets. Two of them came in, in their blacks, a tall blond with the name patch Dorr, and a shorter dark-haired one—who didn’t wear a jet uniform on closer inspection, just black clothes. He held my comp in his hand. Must have been retrieved from the tunnels. Otter.
The blond said, “Falcone Junior.”
And I hated them all, right then, with such purpose and direction that it drew me to my feet to face them.
“I think he’s pissed,” the blond taunted. “He didn’t die well, your big pimp.”
I rushed the bars. I screamed at them and I didn’t know what I was saying, but they kept saying his name, Falcone, and he was dead. Marcus was dead, had died a long time ago, and my resentment for Falcone had laid itself where there’d once been some kind of safety and a child’s sense of love. Protection. There’d once been that, and kindness, shadowed in my memory and brought low from lack of air. From lack of light. You couldn’t grow without some form of kind attention.
He was dead, and it felt cruel, as if he hadn’t deserved it. And it didn’t change a thing, really, what came out of me in rage and tears and violence. Banging the bars, trying to shake them or reach through them, and the jet stepped back, the other one was well out of the way, and they looked at
me like I was mad, like I was some wild creature that needed to be put down.
Until I staggered to the corner and sank into it, pulling at my arms, my hair, one after another, with nothing in my head but Falcone. And Estienne. I couldn’t think of one without thinking of the other.
Ryan Azarcon came to see me. They’d fixed his sight, or I assumed so since he watched me, even though he blinked a little more than average, and the soft skin around his eyes looked sore and bruised. I didn’t know how his father allowed it, probably didn’t, but the kid came anyway for some unfathomable reason—testing himself?—and stood on the other side of the gate and tried to convince me to cooperate with the jets. With what his father wanted—everything I knew. Then he asked me about my family.
He asked me about my family. As if he knew.
But I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to tell.
He kept coming back, like that blond jet Dorr and his silent partner who knew a thing or two about comps, because they got past my password gates to even the most embedded files and asked me about what was in there. The woman I’d been spying on, my contacts on Austro, my little network on Boysdeck.
Maybe if I cooperated, and it got out, I would just die in prison. If I went kicking and screaming, at least I had some honor left among the pirates. Threadbare though it was. And Azarcon and his jets didn’t deserve a thing from me.
Especially when Dorr came into my cell and kicked me off the bunk while the other one watched without a word.
“You nearly killed our captain’s kid,” Dorr said, staring down at me. “You pale-arsed pirate whore.”
And what could I do? I couldn’t deny it.
I didn’t speak, and they bruised me. They kept the lights on, they strung me up, they let me sleep but not enough, they fed me just enough to keep me alive and once in a while they dragged me out to the showers and doused me. Then they put me back, and it all began again. It all frayed my nerves. It made whatever was alive inside of me blow out like a row of overburdened lights. One by one. Shift by shift.
And Ryan Azarcon visited. Twice, three times, and by the fifth I wondered enough to ask, broke my silence and just shouted at him, “Why’re you here?”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. Kitten eyes in a self-aware face. But not pirate-trained. Meedee-trained. Maybe a little inherent Azarcon guile. The intensity of his stare was much like his father’s, despite the blue eyes.
He said, “I don’t think anyone’s ever believed in you, at least not for the right reasons.”
I was tired. Maybe his deceptive benign questions were just another angle to this torture, to bring me out of myself and make me his father’s whore. One captain to the next.
So I kicked at the bars. “Get out of my face! You sick little wank! I’m not your pet project!”
He backed up, but didn’t flee.
So I banged the bars with my fists and screamed at him. “I should’ve shot you in the head!”
That made him go. And he didn’t come back.
His father returned. I had no idea how much time had passed, but they got no information from me. And it warranted a visit from the captain himself.
He looked in at me again, much like the first time. Much like his son. He said, “You’re going to Earth for trial.”
I shrugged. “They tried that with Falcone, didn’t they.”
“Yes, but this time it’ll stick.”
So sure? Kill me yourself. I wanted to ask him, just to see if he would if he were taunted enough. I kept my eyes to the deck, not out of deference, I was just too weak to lift my head.
“Why don’t you kill me,” I managed to ask. Why hadn’t you killed Falcone when you had the chance. “Isn’t that the way it’s done?”
“Only if you’re a pirate,” he said. “It’s easy to be a murderer. All you do is lose control.”
“It takes plenty of control to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger.”
He said, “You don’t think everything he ever told you was a lie? Even now?”
Now I looked up and stared through the bars. Bo-Sheng with my gun to his head. His child’s face in quarters, begging me to leave with him. Falcone had lied from the beginning to get us off the Camp. But people lied all the time, didn’t they, just to get off in one way or another.
I got up from the bunk and shuffled to the gate. Azarcon didn’t step back even though I could’ve reached through, at least my hands, and grabbed the front of his shirt. He stood that close. Like a dare.
“His lies? Compared to what?”
He said, “Compared to the truth. His words are lies. They may be wrapped up in some sort of twisted logic, but at the heart it’s only a lie.”
I peered into his eyes, but there was just a wall. He was no cocktail, no client. Nothing but a wall. “Then everything is a lie, and there is no truth. Because even you—”
“Even I what?”
I felt my lip curl. “You stand there in judgment when all the Hub knows you did exactly as I did. Exactly. Except I did it better. And maybe it’s just a matter of perspective. It’s easy for you to brush off the dirt when you’re on the other side of this gate.”
“And how do you think I got here? By swallowing those lies? That man can control you if you let him, even in his absence. Is that what you want?”
I couldn’t answer beyond, “I don’t wanna be in this brig, but I’m here anyway.” Some things you just couldn’t control. Like who you were born into, who you fell in love with, and when your loved ones would die.
Maybe he thought it too, in some way. He said, “All of your actions impact something. It’s up to you in what way.”
And he left. Given up on me or just disgusted. His voice lacked emotion, he wouldn’t allow himself to feel anything around me, he just wore all his words with a cold as bitter as this brig.
He put me off on Archangel, his sister ship, because apparently Macedon was on the run after illegally locking down Austro Station when I’d kidnapped his son. EarthHub—or President Damiani—wanted him out of the stars. The jets talked as they escorted me to my new home. I pieced it together, even as I felt myself falling apart.
Archangel would take me to Earth, personally, a deep spacer going insystem. Far insystem, it went, to the narrow core. Narrow as a lack of choice or the gaze of an enemy.
MY DREAM
4.20.2198 EHSD—Bird
This might be what it feels like to wait for death, Piotr and I in our pod, some kind of preparatory coffin ready to be shot to the sun. Space makes ambient noise if you know how to listen, with instrumentation, but otherwise it’s a muffled darkness so vast you are stifled in its arms. I can’t see my dead ship anymore, which is a mercy. We’ve drifted out of reach and out of sight, and this part of space looks like any other, maybe, like the embodiment of what took me to Earth less than a year ago.
When Macedon left me behind. I wonder if it will do the same here, or simply sneak up and shoot us without question.
But the comm from Azarcon comes soon enough, we’ve barely dug into the pod’s stores. He sends a Charger to pick us up, and the carrier turns out to be only a leap away from our position near Ghenseti. Piotr and I sit in the crew benches behind the cockpit with two jets guarding us, silent, with silence from the flight crew. Dexter rustles in the equipment case they’d given me for him, the lid up, but he has sense enough not to fly here. Then the jets must’ve heard something on their pickups from the pilot because they suddenly look at each other, straightening a bit where they sit. Rifles haven’t lowered toward us, but now their attention becomes doubly fixed.
“What is it?” I have to ask.
They hesitate, but the senior of the jets stares at me. A woman.
“Your kind just blew our sister ship.” More rage at this point than immediate grief. Rage is so much easier to handle. And for a second I dread that they will kill us right here and orders be damned.
But then I think of that carrier and sink back against the bulkhead. Pio
tr says nothing, doesn’t move, he trusted me enough to follow me, and I might be killing him too. There’s no getting around death once it marks you as a child. You succumb, or you serve it. I can’t look those jets in the eyes.
“We’re meeting up with Macedon at the site,” the second jet says. “And you better pray the captain’s feelin’ magnanimous this shift.”
Somehow I doubt it.
Because I wouldn’t be.
I look out the small square view window in the Charger as we tilt—after a manner of speaking—on approach to one of Macedon’s hangar bays. The angle happens to sweep on half of Archangel in the near distance, hunter-killers and bombers and Charger APCs all buzzing around the bodies of the two ships like carrion flies. Guarding and gathering.
Six thousand and more people. The carrier’s honeycombed by explosion damage, hollowed out in places, and the debris floats around like magnified dust specks made of transsteel and—bodies. Whole bodies, probably, sucked out from hull breaches, spinning in an inertial danse macabre.
I look away, and thankfully the Charger tilts again, and the clang of the grapples taking hold jars us for a bit. As soon as the lights brighten in the compartment the jets stand. The back ramp hisses and growls as it lowers, and the guns are on us, motioning us ahead.
I can already hear the noise in the bay, even before we emerge into brighter light. We disembark under guard, two more jets there—and I go still because one is Dorr. He stares at Dexter in the case. “What in bloody hell is that?”
It seems a ridiculous answer, even though it’s the obvious truth. “My bird.”
He transfers that stare to me for a second, then motions one of the jets from the Charger to take the case.
“Please.” I’m desperate now, a sudden stab of panic, and I don’t care that they see. “Please don’t—”
“Shut up,” he snaps, then tells the other jet, “Take it to that other one.”
“What other one?” Finch? “Dorr—”
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