He doesn’t answer, just grabs my arm and gives it a violent yank to shut me up. It works. Dexter screeches as Piotr and I are pulled away by Dorr and his female counterpart. They take over from the two on the Charger and escort us through Macedon’s corridors. Slate gray, narrow, not as organic in design as the Khan. The ship is nothing but grim activity, and I hear Piotr’s breaths becoming more audible as we go. Mine are the same, ragged in my ears at the sight. The sounds. The injured and the dying, medical personnel and their mobile equipment trailing after them like sheep, and the thrum of the drives, a struggling heart—they all surround us, unavoidable to the senses.
Dorr has his hand tight around my arm, but there’s no point. Where would I run?
We pass a particular jet, and Dorr stops suddenly and shoves me to the bulkhead. “Stay put.” Piotr leans beside me, and the female jet covers us with her rifle. I have nowhere to look but at Dorr as he leans down and snags the arm of an injured jet who’s just sitting on the deck among two dozen others, lining it like pieces of black garbage blown against a wall.
“Rick,” Dorr says, and the jet looks up. It’s shocking when they embrace. The hard grip of grief or comfort.
But these ships know each other. And so does the crew. They’re blood, in their way.
I’m standing there with long arms and a medic in red-smudged gray goes by. She says, “Erret, we need your help. The bays are overloaded, and we gotta move the bodies.”
“I gotta take these pirate asses—”
She eyes us. “They look healthy. We can use them.”
“Fucking pirates!” Dorr says, his hand gripping the other jet’s shoulder.
“He’s one,” she says. “And so’s his friend. And we need all hands. If they caused it, then the least they can do is see what they’ve done.”
“I didn’t cause it,” I tell her, but nobody’s listening, and maybe it’s a lie anyway. In some way. As the blood makes trails along the deck as far as I can see down the corridor. Lines of red, smudged in places. Tears on a mottled face.
“Are you all right?” Dorr says to the injured jet.
“My leg and my arm, but I can stand, and the bleeding’s mostly stopped. I can guard them at least if you need them.”
The medic says, “Do it and come on.” She heads off, pushing through the press of somnambulant crew.
So Dorr hands his sidearm to the injured jet—Rick?—and he hauls himself to his feet, determined and iron-eyed. Dorr waves his rifle at me.
“Good then,” he says. “We’ll work.”
It’s not work, it’s torture. There are people with burns, cuts, and lacerations, and blown body parts. Lost arms or legs or eyes. There are people so covered in blood that you can’t tell gender through the sameness of the uniforms. Slight bodies made smaller by shock and despair.
These people used to have a home, and now they don’t.
Now I don’t.
Dorr puts me through it, me and Piotr, with his friend at our backs, gun pointed. We help one body or the other onto stretchers, into corners, tagging them for triage, or delivering basics like water and sealant. Piotr’s eyes are hollow and shadowed, maybe mirrors to my own. We look at each other occasionally, but there’s nothing to say. I’m glad he’s with me, even though I want to know where Finch is; have they put him to work too among this, or is he still locked in quarters somewhere? I don’t see him in this bay, but there are a few bays, and they are all probably filled. Now isn’t the time to ask about Finch, there are too many bodies and not enough hands to hold or help them all.
There’s a blond in the corner wearing jet black, but for a second when he raises his eyes I think of Estienne in his geisha black, and maybe he sat in his quarters like this while Genghis Khan disintegrated, waiting for me to help him.
After a while the jet really doesn’t need to guard me. Everywhere I go there are dead bodies in one state of decay or another, all dead or getting there, or just dead in their gazes. I imagine the decks look the same for all of us. Flooded.
And I stop smelling the blood eventually, or seeing the injuries, or hearing the sobs and the moans. None of this can be fixed and this isn’t my ship or my deck.
It’s just Mishka and Jascha and Mama I see. On my Moon. Mama. And any minute now she’s going to let go of my hand.
Dorr’s friend is named O’Neil. Rick O’Neil. He gets called over by the corporal and I stare at his eyes, and they are blue like his father’s. I catch the stark similarity in the lines of his frown. Why didn’t I notice before? Because his father’s was another death I witnessed, and I don’t want to see any more.
It’s strange the connections we encounter. As if the universe is trying to tell you something but you’re too blind to see it without touch.
He’s never going to forget this shift, this jet. Rick O’Neil. He’s going to live with it for a long time. Because now I have to tell him. Who else is going to tell him? There’s nobody else here that knows, and maybe it’s better to hit him with it when there’s already so much numbness seeping into his system.
I leave Piotr at a body bag and approach O’Neil and Dorr. O’Neil’s stripes and badges say he’s a sergeant. “Sir,” I tell him, it comes naturally this respect. Or maybe it’s just a mutual acknowledgment. If he was on a pirate, he’d have to call me “sir.”
Dorr says, “What the hell do you want?”
Even when I was across the bay I felt his eyes on me.
“I need to—to talk to Sergeant O’Neil.”
O’Neil looks at me, surprised, hobbling on his injury with a faint grimace on his face, but the kind that comes with familiarity. His physical pain is nothing compared to the other kind.
“His father,” I start, and I have no idea how to finish it.
“My father what?” He stares at me, and it’s so much the same as the dead agent that I can’t hold it, suddenly. I didn’t know the other O’Neil for long, and we were barely helping each other at the end, but this is his son, this is something I never thought I’d face in this way, with conversation. From someone else. The grief of a child at the loss of a parent. “My father what?” he says again, sharper, and Dorr’s hand snaps out and cuffs the side of my head.
I stagger a bit, but catch myself. Tangle one hand in my hair and look up. “Your father’s dead,” I tell him, O’Neil. “I’m sorry.” The apology might’ve been something you always say when you precede it with what I did, but I don’t know that I’ve ever meant it as much as I do now.
He glares in shock. Dorr glares in rage. “Please.” Listen. A strange word for this, but I say it anyway. “Please, on my ship, he—”
“You killed him?” Dorr takes a step forward, but the sergeant has more sense or maybe he sees something in my eyes, because he grabs the corporal’s arm, holds him back. I can’t break my gaze from his face, it’s like watching my own confusion and tears, the things I feel at a distance.
“How the hell do you know my father?” he says. “And how could he be dead?”
He has no idea what his father was.
This has become too much to say, as if it weren’t enough already. This is a plummet of words too weighted by revelation; but I’ve started now, and they both wait, a hair trigger away from shooting me for beginning in the first place.
“Your father,” I tell him, disembodied voice, shaking hands, “your father was a Black Ops agent, and in the end we were working together against—against Caligtiera…” Does he even know that name? But I see recognition in both their eyes. “—and his partner, a man named Andreas Lukacs who…he’s on Cal’s ship right now I think, if he got out…” If Rika managed to get him out with the others, and maybe she did, I hope she did, that she got out and she’s there and maybe at some point we can meet and she won’t want to kill me. “…and we weren’t sure if they were working together or…” This ramble about nothing.
O’Neil snaps me back, his voice thick. “You’re a twisted, lying son of a bitch. My father’s a security chief for
my mother’s company!” Yelling it into my face.
I step back and suddenly there are two more jets there, drawn to the distress of their comrade. I spy Piotr in the corner, still and standing, under gun.
“I’m not lying.” I look at O’Neil, hoping he’ll see that it’s not out of pleasure that I open my mouth to speak. “I swear I’m—”
Dorr moves to me like a cat, rifle up, but a voice flares out in sudden command from a short distance away.
“Corporal!”
And there’s no mistaking that tone or the owner of it.
I turn, no more relieved than a moment ago when I thought I was going to be shot.
Captain Azarcon approaches.
I’m aware that I’m covered in blood as he gets closer, threading his way through the bodies both healthy—his crew—and not. I’m surprised he even sees that it’s me. Maybe he commed Dorr first. Dorr, who stepped back immediately at his captain’s command, and now both he and O’Neil just stare at me, pale death.
There’s a crack in the captain’s façade when he looks at me, surrounded by this. And maybe there’s one in mine too. He doesn’t say anything but, “Come with me now.”
And so I go.
His office has a black desk, a sheer smoothness that reflects the lights overhead. His comp is up, and there are holocubes at the corners of the desk surface. I catch glimpses of his son’s face in some of them, and in others his dead wife.
He motions me to sit even though I might stain. But I take the offer and he takes his seat and there is nothing between us but that desk and my words. I tell him everything I told O’Neil, just letting the last twenty-four hours pour out as if I’m serving him some delicate drink. If I spill any of it over the confines of the glass, it will drown us both. “Cal’s still free,” I finish, “but I know his coordinates. If he’s still there…”
“We’re in no shape to go after him at the moment.” Still loading bodies. Refugees.
“The ship…” Archangel. “Nothing’s… I mean, the captain…?” I get images of the woman on her bridge watching sections of her ship exploding on some internal scan, where I might’ve stood if I’d stood to the last, that old notion of going down with your ship and your crew. Perhaps she had. When I glance into Azarcon’s face I can see that she had.
“She’s lost,” he says, meaning both the captain and the ship, maybe, and he doesn’t have to define it further. They are one and the same.
It’s one thing to be shot at and lose. It’s another to do it to yourself, in suicide.
“Survivors from the Khan?” he asks, reading my thoughts. Or more likely just my face.
I shake my head. Then have to shrug. “On Cal’s.” This false nonchalance that neither of us believes. “Would you have?” All my words come stilted, severed. The limbs of my syllables flail distant from their bodies. But he understands.
When you left, you didn’t lose a ship. When you left you just killed yourself in some way? And there he sits with his own ship, in exile. But it’s his and he is alive. As I sit here feeling like less.
“If I could have,” he says, “I would have killed the Khan before I went.”
I wonder if he’d had an Elder Brother. But it’s not something he will tell me or that I have a right to ask, and it’s a wonder maybe that he confessed that much. Maybe because it’s obvious. Of course you’d kill the thing you no longer want to be.
I look into his face, and suddenly all of that is secondary to the question pressing at the back of my eyes.
“Finch?” I ask him. And it must be that I’m tired or everything else, but the name pours through me like water when I hear it aloud, and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I cover my face, elbows on knees. My head bowed. Dry breaths, don’t break down in front of this man, some part of my mind keeps saying. Except I don’t care. I don’t care anymore what he sees or what he wants or even what he might exploit in me.
My hands start to shake, and they won’t stop.
The silence persists from his side of the desk.
“You want to see Finch,” he says at length, not really a question.
I nod.
So he stands, and whatever else he wants to say to me will wait. He isn’t feeling vengeful, apparently, despite Archangel. What I see in his eyes when I finally look up is mercy.
Walking through Macedon’s corridors escorted by her captain, we get a lot of looks, but nobody says a thing or approaches. The way this crew regards Azarcon could be similar to the way it was when Falcone walked his ship, except here there is more open respect that isn’t grounded in fear or intimidation. And he walks me himself, the captain, with no other escort. He’s armed and I’m weary and even when we get to crew quarters where there are less crew, all of them on maindeck helping survivors, he doesn’t balk. He shows no sign of hesitation.
Instead he opens the locked hatch with his command override, and after I step through he shuts it behind me.
Finch sees the blood all over me, but I don’t try to explain. As soon as he stands from the bunk I just lock myself in his arms and he can feel that I’m not injured, that the bleeding’s not from me. He can feel that I’m whole like he’s whole, and solid, and just there.
It’s a long time like that, in the kind of silence you get on a deep-space carrier. It isn’t absolute, it echoes your insides.
“Are you all right?” Quiet question, an encompassing one.
I can’t speak. Because the answer isn’t simple, at least not on my side. But his hand slips into the back of my hair, entangles there, holding my head to his shoulder.
And that’s all I need. It’s all that I want, and he gives it.
Dexter’s in the quarters with us, asleep and still in his box. So jets have a sense of mercy too. Finch and I sit on the bunk, and I tell him, “They got Archangel.” In case he hadn’t heard.
The worry in his eyes darkens, but he doesn’t say anything. There’re no words for atrocity. All language is just abstract.
“I was helping.” The blood on my shirt, it’s dry and stiffened now, encrusted in the folds of the fabric like they line the skin of my palms. Lines of blood that I stare at, flaking at idly with my fingernails. “We should help.” I look up because maybe he can’t. Maybe it’s too brutal, and I don’t even think I can handle it, another hour or two or five of shuffling those bodies, dead or alive, from one kind of care to another. I don’t know if Azarcon would let me again, but I can’t sit in here now.
I can’t just sit.
And maybe Finch is scared, he feels scared in the coldness of his hand when it closes over mine. Or maybe it’s just because he hasn’t been touched so much in a way that makes him warm.
“All right,” he says. “We can help.”
I knock on the hatch in the off chance there’s a guard out there, and it’s not a guard, not a jet anyway. Captain Azarcon. He waited, knowing maybe I’d want to talk or confess or ask for something that I have no right to ask for. I tell him we’d like to go back to the hangar bay, and he sees Finch behind me, looks a long moment before staring back into my face. He doesn’t say anything but, “Good.”
When he takes me and Finch there he calls O’Neil over and the two of them leave the bay. I turn and first see Piotr, on his way over from a triage tent, then Dorr, following with his gaze where O’Neil and the captain went. His eyes are red at the corners, his face tight from the effort of holding in his emotions. He turns to me, pale restraint.
“What do you think you’re doin’ back here, pirate?”
I don’t rise to his anger. Instead I walk over to a relief station and gather a few envelopes of water to distribute to the crew. Finch follows behind me and piles some into his arms, staring concertedly at the deck instead of at the bodies. They seem to have multiplied since I left. More refugees.
“What’re you doin’?” Dorr says again, behind me now.
“What I need to,” I tell him.
And he lets me pass.
I lose time in the wo
rk. Then Dorr approaches, looking as ragged as I feel. He says, “Come with me. All three of you.”
We weave our way through the encamped survivors, uniforms of black and gray and blue. They’re bruises all over the skin of this deck; touch them, and they wince.
Dorr leads with two other jets behind us, through the corridors again, these unmarked corridors, plain and gray and military compared to the bone architecture that Kublai Khan had been. Finch’s arm bumps against mine in fatigue, his gaze bleary and fixed ahead of him so he doesn’t, probably, walk into a bulkhead.
The jets take us to a full washroom. Showers and sinks and clean unbadged shirts and fatigues. They are all deep blue, laid out in front of each stall.
It takes no explanation or encouragement.
The water feels like forgiveness, but it’s cycled and timed, and the cold bites heavy through the steam.
A fresh squad of jets escorts us afterward to one of the conference rooms on the same deck, maindeck, and inside is Captain Azarcon and a youth I vaguely recognize. Maybe I’d seen him before when I was on Macedon the first time. He sits behind a black razor comp, a pencil-thin interface wand tucked against its edge.
I sit with Finch on my right and Piotr on my left, and even cleaned up and wearing Macedon surplus I feel like a criminal across from the captain. Maybe it’s the look on his face. Mercy doesn’t come without reprimand sometimes, and I don’t expect absolute grace from him.
Even with the horrors of what we’ve been doing the last few hours, he doesn’t give us more than the minimum rest. He says, “This conversation’s being recorded. Yuri Kirov, please recount the events leading up to your release from the Kalaallit Nunaat Military Prison on Earth and everything that occurred thereafter.”
I drag my mind together, hands clenched between my knees beneath the table. I want to shut my eyes and put my head down and just not think.
But my words start fractured, and the more I talk, the more they break.
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