Aetherbound

by E. K. Johnston

  “Maybe,” Dulcie said. “But what kind of ship that size has an entirely empty hold when it comes into the only large station it encounters in two decades?”

  “What?” Pendt said. Then she remembered her passage through the lower hold, how everything was clean and there was no sign of any passengers having spent years living there. “Oh, the lower hold. That’s for passengers. They’re usually outgoing, to work on the mining colonies.”

  “If you say so,” Dulcie said. “Anyway, the quartermaster has several options for you, whenever you’re ready. It’s a question of location, really. The places you work on the station are pretty spread out.”

  “Thank you,” Pendt said, accepting the datapad from her. “I’ll take a look and think about what I want. It should probably be nearer operations, though. That’s where I’m needed the most urgently.”

  “True enough,” Dulcie said.

  Pendt bid her goodbye and headed out onto the colonnade. She stopped for a snack at one of the restaurants and sat chewing thoughtfully while she turned her discussion with Dulcie over in her mind. Pendt had been quick to dismiss the foreman’s suggestions in conversation, that there was something shady about the Harland, but now that she was mulling it over, Pendt was forced to admit Dulcie might be right. She didn’t know why she felt so defensive about it. She wasn’t a Harland anymore and she was never going back. But she’d been on that ship for almost eighteen years. Whatever took place on board, she was party to, whether she liked it or not.

  There was one person who might know. Dr. Morunt resolutely refused to discuss his sister with her, but maybe if she explained that it was necessary, he would open up. She hated to ask anyone to access painful memories. She knew how difficult they were to bury and unlearn, but she had a feeling she was going to need answers.

  Pendt finished her snack and turned in her dishes. Several people came up to her to inquire about her health and Fisher’s. She told them that Fisher was doing well—the truth—but that he might be working a bit too hard. This received understanding nods, and she promised everyone that she was keeping an eye on him, which was also true.

  Making her way along the colonnade, Pendt took time to look in shop windows and watch station residents go about their business. It was a system she never tired of: the flow of goods made on the station or imported from Katla, the ebb of conversation and movement in the crowd around her. Today it was even more comforting. Ned was gone, but Brannick Station was able to continue to function because of what he had done when he was still alive.

  At last, she made her way to the infirmary and ducked into Dr. Morunt’s portion of the office. He was sitting at his desk, reading something, and so she coughed politely to get his attention.

  “Pendt, a pleasure,” he said. “Please, sit.”

  “I’m not here for a medical reason,” Pendt said. “If you have important work to do, I can come back.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Morunt said. “I have nothing pressing for a couple of hours, and some conversation would be welcome.”

  Pendt hoped he still felt that way after she started talking.

  “Dr. Morunt, I know this is a difficult time for a lot of us, and I hate to add pressure to you.” Pendt began as diplomatically as she could. “But if you can, if you’re able, I need to ask you some questions about your sister.”

  Morunt stilled in his chair, his face growing several shades paler.

  “Foreman Channing has raised concerns about my family’s ship,” Pendt continued. “And since that would impact my safety and the safety of the station, I was hoping you might be able to help. I know it’s not a subject you are comfortable with, and I understand if you kick me out of your office, but please understand: You are the only person who might be able to help me with this. I wouldn’t put you in this position if it wasn’t important.”

  Morunt said nothing for a few moments, but he was nodding while he turned her words over in his thoughts.

  “All right, Pendt,” he said. “I will tell you what I can. I don’t know very much.”

  “Thank you,” Pendt said. She leaned back in the chair and considered her words carefully. It was probably best to be direct. “How did your sister come to be on the Harland?”

  Morunt closed his eyes to the memories. A small smile curled his lips, and Pendt was glad that not all of his recollections were bad ones.

  “She was a genius, our Sylvie,” he said. “She was the youngest, and my father didn’t want her. We were born on Katla, though, so it wasn’t much of a strain on him to make sure she was educated. If we’d lived anywhere else, things might have been different.”

  He paused and took a deep breath.

  “Sylvie started following us along to our medical classes when she was about ten,” he continued. “Her connection to the æther was about the same as ours, but she had a gift for healing. Eventually the instructors just . . . accepted her into the class. She graduated when she was seventeen.”

  Pendt tried to imagine the Morunt she knew as a seventeen-year-old prodigy, and it was essentially impossible. Whatever spirit she’d had as a child, the Harland had killed off.

  “Then the Harland came into Katla Station,” Morunt said.

  “What?” Pendt said. “To Katla?”

  “From what my father gathered, it was a very special trip,” Morunt said. “They were dropping off something too valuable to trust to another courier. I think that was what drew my father’s attention. He always had an eye for opportunities.

  “Anyway,” he pressed on. “My father spoke to the captain, your grandfather, I believe, and the next thing we knew, Sylvie was dragged out of our quarters and through the Harland’s loading bay. Father didn’t let her take anything with her, said she wouldn’t need it in space. The last I saw my sister, she was screaming against the seal of a Katla airlock. My father had already turned away.”

  Morunt closed his eyes and two tears ran down his cheeks.

  “We couldn’t stay with our father after that,” he said. “He wanted three sons, and instead he got nothing. After Sylvie left, he could afford a nicer place for us to live, but we all refused. We knew where that money had come from. My two brothers headed towards Hoy, and I came here. It was a foolish hope, but I knew that if I ever saw Sylvie again, it would be at Brannick Station.”

  “I don’t think it’s foolish to hope,” Pendt said.

  “Maybe,” Morunt said. “But if my sister ever comes back here, it’ll mean she’s bringing your family with her, and that’s not going to be good for you.”

  “Your father sold Dr. Morunt to my family.” Pendt had to say the words out loud to make it real.

  “Yes,” he said. “Somehow, he knew that they were buying.”

  The pieces in Pendt’s head began to circle in some semblance of order, the horror of it dawning full.

  “It wasn’t just your sister they trafficked,” Pendt said. “I knew they traded in embryos. It’s how all my cousins and siblings and me were born. But it wasn’t just that either. We never took passengers on board. Those people who lived in the lower hold weren’t going out to Alterra and the other mining complexes by choice. That’s why the hold was empty and so clean when we got to Brannick Station: They scrubbed away the evidence of trafficking because someone on Brannick might notice.”

  “You were a child,” Morunt said, quick to absolve her.

  “I read messages.” Pendt’s voice was dull and she curled in on herself. “Over the intercom to the hold below. I told them when and where we’d be arriving. I thought it was to give them hope, but it was to let them know who they’d been sold to.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Morunt said. His eyes fogged over, and he couldn’t meet her gaze. “My father figured it out because he knew what to look for in a smuggling operation, but you couldn’t have done that. You couldn’t have known.”

  “It w
asn’t your sister’s fault either,” Pendt said. She felt like she was coming apart as her world reordered itself into something even worse than she’d already known. “But she helped them. They would have left her or airlocked her if she hadn’t. And I would have helped too, if it meant half a gram more protein on my plate at dinnertime.”

  Morunt leaned across his desk and took her hands. Pendt felt immediately grounded.

  “There is a difference,” he said, voice desperate. “Between survival and cruelty.”

  Pendt wasn’t so sure. She had experienced so much of her family’s mistreatment in the name of the ship’s continued existence. Everything could be counted for on the scales. But the Harland wasn’t a person. It didn’t have feelings. When she was little, Pendt had wanted nothing more than to make the Harland happy. It occurred to her for the first time that she never could. It was a ship. Her aunt and her mother and her cousins and her siblings—those were the people who had used her, not some ideal of a family legacy that she’d been born to uphold.

  “Thank you,” she said as her world reordered itself again. She felt freer than she ever had, and it had cost a good person some painful memories. “I—”

  “I understand, Pendt.” Dr. Morunt held up a hand. “You were trained from birth to take responsibility for things that were never yours to carry. I’m glad I could help you, even if it hurts a bit.”

  Pendt didn’t remember what she said after that or how she made it all the way back to their apartment. When she arrived in the lounge, Fisher was playing a game on the entertainment console, the first time he’d picked it up again since they’d learned about Ned. He set the controller down as soon as he saw her, though, rose, and pulled her into his arms.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “My family,” Pendt said. “The great legacy and secret of the Harland. We don’t just trade in ore and oglasa. We trafficked human beings. They would have sold me off to the highest bidder for a ‘perfect’ baby, and then used my body and my æther connection to make more Harlands between contracts.”

  Fisher’s arms tightened around her, holding her steady as the storm of her emotions rocked through her. It wasn’t sadness or regret that made her cry. It wasn’t even grief. It was pure, incandescent rage, and when she found a way to target it, the Harland wouldn’t stand a chance.

  22.

  AS PENDT GRAPPLED WITH the realization of what her family’s business truly was, Fisher tried to settle his own feelings. It was easier said than done.

  He was excruciatingly aware of the fact that Pendt had viewed her relationship with Ned mostly as a business transaction. They had liked each other well enough, which was nice, but both of them had been getting what they wanted. If asked, Fisher would also say he was getting what he wanted. He ran the station now, standing alone for the first time since he was born.

  But in the days where he’d got to know Pendt better, before news of his brother’s death had arrived, Fisher started to realize that he wanted something else. Pendt was a hard worker and absolutely dedicated to Brannick Station. She understood him without speaking but was just as happy to talk to him. She felt wonderful in his arms, even now when she was upset about something he couldn’t start to help her fix. She had this way of cocking her shoulder when she was focused on a plant that flipped his stomach over. He wanted nothing more in the universe than to kiss her again. Possibly, he wanted to kiss her forever.

  Except now Ned was dead. And her family was even more monstrous than he’d suspected. She needed his support and his attention, of course, but she was so self-sufficient and so aware of how much space she occupied at any given moment. She seemed reluctant to take any more from him.

  But she had kissed him back. That awful day that had started out so well, when he held her on the sofa, and she overbalanced to put all of her weight on his chest. She had kissed him back. Through all of Fisher’s grief and concern over the uncertainties of the future, he clung to that feeling.

  He missed Ned, would miss him forever. In a way, missing Ned was easier than missing his parents. At least Ned’s fate was sure. His parents’ lives would always be hanging over him. There was the threat that someday the Hegemony may use his father to open the Net and that would be the end of Brannick Station as he knew it. Missing his parents required Fisher to acknowledge that someday they might come back. Missing Ned required his grief and that was much simpler to give.

  Pendt didn’t miss the Harland. She hadn’t before, and she definitely didn’t now. But she had to know they’d come back someday. The month was long since up, and now they could literally appear on the scans at any moment. At some point, he supposed, they would have committed to another two-decade run. Maybe that was what Pendt believed. It would certainly keep her sane. She would be nearly forty when the ship came back. The captain might be dead by then.

  She and Fisher weren’t the same, as Pendt had said, but they could understand each other. Ned always accepted him, but Ned was his brother. Fisher knew that didn’t guarantee anything; even before he’d met Pendt, he knew that some families were meaner than his. Pendt’s acceptance was different. She had no reason to trust him that day in the bar, but she had chosen to. And she continued to. She said she didn’t think she’d ever loved anyone, and maybe she still didn’t, but she trusted him, and that wasn’t nothing.

  Pendt’s storm of fury had passed, and when she looked up at him, her eyes were dry. He relaxed his hold on her, giving her the space to put distance between them if she wanted to, but she didn’t move away.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I can’t imagine going through this on my own.”

  “Not to make it transactional,” Fisher said lightly, “but I seem to recall at least one time in the past week when you made sure I wasn’t going through something hard on my own.”

  She rubbed her face on his shoulder.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I don’t mean that I owe you. I’m doing this because I want to. But if it makes it easier for you, you can remember all the things you do for me.”

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully, tracing one finger across his chest, “it doesn’t make it easier. I mean, it would have, even just a few weeks ago. But everything has been different since you kissed me. It doesn’t feel like give and take. It feels . . . permanent.”

  Fisher swore his heart stopped beating for a few seconds.

  “And you’re okay with that?” he asked. He tried not to hold his breath.

  “Yes,” Pendt said. “It’s new for me and it’s a bit scary. In a way, it’s kind of . . . good? I was worried that you might think I had just transferred my arrangement from Ned to you, but the things I feel now are entirely different from how it was with him.”

  “I did not think that,” Fisher admitted. “But that’s possibly because we hadn’t had enough time for me to really unpack it yet before, well, you know.”

  “Will the people on the station think it’s weird?” Pendt asked. “Like I’m betraying Ned or, I don’t know, taking advantage of you?”

  Fisher hadn’t considered that either.

  “I don’t think so,” he said after a moment. “They like you for your own sake, now. If anything, I think it would make everyone more comfortable, to know that both of us are making the best of a sad situation and moving forward together.”

  “Is that what we’re calling it?” Pendt asked.

  “We don’t have to call it anything, if you don’t want,” Fisher said. “But I would like to sit down again, if you don’t mind. I’m exhausted.”

  She laughed and let him lead her over to the sofa. He sat and pulled her down into his arms again. It was cozy.

  “I checked with Dulcie about the legal situation,” Pendt said. “Everything is in order. Now that I know what I know about the Harland, I realize that legality might not be enough, but it will matter to the station. If the Harland can’t trade here, they’d be
exiled to the mining belt forever.”

  “I’m tempted to enforce that anyway,” Fisher said. “I hate to think that we’ve been letting people be smuggled through the station, but it’s unavoidable. Who knows how many of the ships we’ve sent out since you got here have been delivering so-called passengers to your aunt? You said your Dr. Morunt is almost sixty. That’s too long.”

  “We can talk to Dulcie about it,” Pendt said. “She seemed to be right on the edge of making the same conclusions I did. She didn’t know to talk to Dr. Morunt here. We’ll have to tell her, and then she can help us.”

  “I can pass along the information to Ned’s rebel contacts too,” Fisher said. “The only person I knew was Choria, the captain of the Cleland, but if we look through his message history, we might find someone else to talk to. If they aren’t already, they can start looking into people being moved from Katla.”

  “You think the trafficking is that organized?” Pendt said.

  “It would have to be,” Fisher pointed out. “If the people came from Brannick Station, we would miss them.”

  That much was true. Brannick had a large population, but it was mostly a series of interconnected families. If there was trafficking going on, someone would have been missed by now.

  “I’m still going to poke around,” Pendt said. “There has to be someone here who knows what’s going on. Someone had to clear out the Harland’s lower hold.”

  “Maybe they were just contracted to clean,” Fisher said. “If the hold was already empty, there’s no reason for them to know any of the details.”

  “They might still have seen something,” Pendt said. “Even if they didn’t know what it was they were doing.”

  Fisher considered it.

  “That’s a good point,” he said. “I’ll go over the schedule and see who was on cleaning duty that day. You can talk to them, or we’ll have Dulcie do it if you want to stay a bit anonymous.”