by Dixon, Ruby
"We can work together," Mathiras says boldly. He gestures at his cuffs. "Take these off and we'll work with you. We've got intel on the Buoyant Star that no one else does. You need us if you want to find it, and we can split the treasure four ways."
"Why do I need you?"
"Because you're not very good at playing pirate," Mathiras says bluntly. "And you have a crew that takes orders and won't think beyond obedience."
"Buuuurrrrn," I whisper, using one of Zoey's favorite human sayings. "Super burn, brother."
"Shut up, Adiron," Mathiras fires back.
"Yes, do shut up," Lord Straik says. He focuses on Mathiras. "If we work together, the split will be fifty-fifty—half for your household, half for mine. It's only fair since the ship does belong to my family."
"Yeah, but it's salvage," Mathiras counters. "And if it's been abandoned for three years, it falls under salvage law, which means anyone can claim it. So that doesn't hold. And you need us. We have the frequency they used and star charts downloaded from their navigation systems."
The lord tenses, eyes widening just a bit. "How did you get that?"
"We stole it from other pirates—" I begin, but Mathiras kicks me.
"Doesn't matter," Mathiras overrides, giving Lord Straik his most arrogant grin. "All that matters is that you need us more than we need you. Seventy-five, twenty-five."
"Absolutely not," Straik retorts, pausing in his pacing to glare at all of us. "If we're taking my ship and using my troops, I'm taking on the bulk of the responsibility. Fifty-fifty."
I shake my cuffs at them, because they're starting to hurt my wrists. Plus, I have to take a piss. "Can we figure out the financials later? Some of us are tired of being treated like prisoners."
The lord smiles thinly. "Very well." He nods at his guards, who approach. "I guess you're my guests, then."
"Well, kef me," Kaspar says, and flings aside the cuffs he's managed to pull off and throws them at Lord Straik's feet. He sounds disappointed. "Guess I don't need to bother with that anymore."
5
ADIRON
It takes a week of arguing before Mathiras and Straik settle on a sixty-forty split. In that time, we eat Straik's amazing food, use his fuel, and play Sticks with his crew constantly. So…I guess sixty-forty works, since the sixty is in the va Sithai favor. None of it matters if we don't find the Buoyant Star. I let Mathiras and Kaspar squabble over star charts with Lord Straik and do my best getting to know the crew. After all, if we're in a pinch, I'd much rather rely on the crew than Straik to save my ass.
Plus, they know a lot about their employer.
So I play Sticks and eat in the cantina with the clones. I get to know them and play up being the dumb, easy-going brother. It's not a hard role for me to take on. I am the dumb brother. But I'm not so dumb that I can't learn a little, and so I do my best to befriend our clone friends. I make sure everyone's drinks are full, I lose more credits than I win, and I listen to a lot of gossip.
Seems that Lord Straik is not the most colorful member of the sa'Rin family. Lord va'Rin—the head of the household—married a human, which I'd heard, and pushed Straik down a rung, inheritance-wise, when the human Lady va'Rin gave birth. I knew that much, but I didn't know that sa'Rin threw a temper tantrum after the birth of the youngest va'Rin and refused to mate the female he'd been arranged to be joined to since birth. The family was shamed by his actions and he was cast out of the good graces of society.
Which might explain why he's out here in the middle of nowhere, but doesn't explain why he's so eager to partner up with us. I know something about being the black sheep of a household. After all, me and my brothers come from a good family, but our reputation as corsairs has put a bit of tarnish on things and our sister Vanora won't speak to us any longer. Family tends to frown upon credits made by piracy, no matter how badly the family might need those credits. If Lord Straik thinks he's going to return to his family's good graces by robbing and pillaging through the galaxy, he's got a few things to learn.
And they say I'm the stupid one.
To my surprise, the a'ani army actually likes the lordling. They speak proudly of serving him, and when I inquire about them being slaves, I'm told that he's purchased all of them and freed them, and they earn a wage serving as his crew. That isn't what I expected to hear from a sulky brat of a lord like Straik, but it makes me like him a bit more. They also say he's brave and isn't afraid of a fight.
He does wear black all the time though. "I'd bet my entire pot that even his underclothes are black," the a'ani captain of the guard states. His name is Dopekh and he's become a good friend. Plus, he's a decent partner in Sticks. I'm sitting across from him with nothing but two credit chips left to my name, the rest of the pile on Dopekh's side of the table. The a'ani shakes his head, grinning. "He's a good leader, but he does have a certain look about him."
"Your entire pot?" I pretend to consider the credit pile in front of him. I don't need the credits and I suspect that Dopekh does, but I do love a challenge. "You're on. Where's his laundry chute?"
Dopekh's brows go up. "You're serious?"
I throw my sticks down. I was losing anyhow, and this sounds like more fun. "Of course I'm serious. Let's see if these underclothes of his are as severe and ridiculous as everything else he wears."
Dopekh hesitates, then a grin spreads across his face. "You think they'd have a cape?"
Underclothes with a cape? I snicker at the thought, because Lord Straik does love himself a cape. "A small one for his tail."
The a'ani laughs and then gets up from his seat, and I do, too. Then we race down the hall, heading for Lord Straik's personal quarters.
Lord Straik sa'Rin's enormous ship is called The Darkened Eye, and I'm not sure if that's supposed to mean something or if he just thinks it sounds impressive. I'm told that the ship has two eyes painted on the front of the hull, which seems pretentious to me given that we can't see the hull, but Lord Straik is a man who loves nothing more than appearances, so I guess I'm not surprised. As Straik's guests, our quarters are between his and the a'ani, and while ours aren't large or posh like his, they're decent quarters. I suspect we all share a laundry bot, though, and when I get to the hall that houses our rooms, I pause, waiting for Dopekh to catch up.
Now that we're in front of Straik's double doors, my companion looks as if he's having second thoughts. I'm not going to let him walk away from his bet, though. Dopekh hesitates, gesturing at the ornate doors. "Those will be locked."
"We don't need the door," I tell him, moving to the closest wall panel and running my fingers along it. I've learned a few things from my years as a corsair—namely that wall panels on a ship can hide anything and everything. Since the laundry bot in my quarters picks up my clothing and disappears into the wall, I suspect it does the same for his rooms. The first panel I pry off reveals nothing but pipes and wiring, but the second one I pull off has the bot I'm looking for.
With a grin at Dopekh, I haul it out of its dock and pull it into the hallway. "This thing weighs as much as your mother," I grunt as I haul it forward.
Dopekh just snorts. "Your insult is useless. I have no mother. And Lord Straik likes clean clothes, I guess." He grins at me again. "You ready to be proven wrong?"
"Absolutely." Though I forget which one of us bet that his underclothes would be black. Don't suppose it matters. I pry the lid off the bot and pull out a few pieces of wet clothing. I don't find what I'm looking for at first, but then at the bottom…sure enough.
I yank the wet black underclothes out of the bot's belly and hold them triumphantly into the air. "I had black!"
"No, you idiot," Dopekh tells me, laughing. "I had black! You took my bet. That means you thought they were another color!"
I twirl the piece of clothing on my finger, just out of his reach when he tries to grab it. "Does it matter? The point is that his ass is just as pretentious as the rest of him."
"What the kef are you doing?" calls an angry voice.
Whoops. Busted.
6
ADIRON
Kaspar stares at me with an expression of confused disgust, his hands on his hips. In this moment, he looks just like Mathiras, disapproving and disappointed in me.
I lower the wet underclothes and toss them back into the bot. "This isn't what it looks like."
Kaspar turns slowly and eyes the large chunk of wall that I've pried the panels off of, then at the wet clothing strewn in the hallway. At the embarrassed clone at my side. "I'm not entirely sure what this looks like," he admits. "But can you not piss off our host? For five keffing minutes?"
"Maybe," I say grumpily and nudge the bot aside with my foot. "We were just having fun."
"I've been pinging your personal comm for ten minutes," Kaspar says, his exasperation giving way to that look of pure excitement on his face. "We've picked up a distress call on the frequency."
My eyes widen and I go still. "On THE frequency?"
Kaspar nods. "That very one. If you're done playing around with Lord sa'Rin's laundry, can you join us in his war room?"
"Right. Sure." I wipe my damp hands on my trou, hoping they don't smell too much like soap, and give Dopekh a sheepish look. "Uh, I've gotta go, buddy."
The clone just rolls his eyes. "I'll put everything back together. But if anyone asks, I'm blaming you."
I just laugh, because he might as well blame me. When you're the stupid one, you also get to get away with a lot more. "I guess you get to keep your credits for now," I tell him, reaching over to ruffle his hair like I would Zoey. He looks a bit like her, given that he doesn't have horns or mesakkah plating. Sure, he's bright red, and male, and a lot taller, but…he could be an overfed human. In a way, it makes me miss Zo because she was always up for my bone-headed schemes. "I'll catch up with you later," I tell Dopekh and jog down the hall to meet Kaspar.
My brother is already leaving, heading back the way he came, his tail swishing with impatience. I'm used to running after Kaspar, though, so I catch up easily and nudge him with my shoulder. "So, a distress signal?"
"Yes. Which you'd know if you spent more time on the bridge with the rest of us."
I make a face. "You really don't want me there." I'm not good with star maps. One quadrant looks much like another in my eyes, and I'm bad at charting fuel-efficient courses. The last time they let me navigate, I burned through all of our fuel because I wanted to get a good look at a double-ringed planet. I mean, if you can't enjoy the view, what's the point?
Kaspar doesn't answer, mostly because we both know I'm right. "The distress signal has to be from the Buoyant Star. It's the only thing we've picked up on this particular frequency. And it's in this quadrant, too. We're really close." He lifts his hands and cracks his knuckles, like he always does when he's antsy.
"I'm surprised anyone's still on board after three years. What're they saying?"
"Nothing. It's just the signal. There's no voices at all, which I thought was weird." Kaspar shrugs. "It might be that there's no one alive to turn off the signal."
The small hairs on the back of my neck stand up. "So it's haunted."
"It's not haunted."
"It might be. You said it's in this quadrant, right?" I gesture at one of the windows we pass by as we head for Straik's quarters. "Look around you, brother. This quadrant is utterly abandoned. You said yourself the only thing in this particular system is a couple of Class C planets." Class C means low resources and not eligible for colonization at this time.
He nods. "And the only one that supports life is an ice planet with poison air. No one's visiting this system at all. It's totally deserted…which is why it makes sense that the Buoyant Star is out here. Who's gonna look for her near a shitty little binary star on the fringes of a forbidden system? No one, that's who." His eyes light up with enthusiasm. "Except us."
"Still say it's haunted," I grumble, but I leave it at that.
We enter Lord Straik's apartments, and my brother Mathiras is standing next to Lord Straik, both of them regarding the star map up on screen with intent faces. Over the last few weeks, while I've been befriending the crew, Mathiras has had his head down with Lord Straik, insisting on going over every star chart of the Slatra system. He seems to be handling the loss of the Little Sister better than myself and Kaspar, who's still bitter about the fact that our ship was abandoned. "We'll get her back," Mathiras has told us a half-dozen times. "Let's focus on getting the Star and making our fortune, and then we can retrieve the Sister at a later date. No one's going to find her this far out off the beaten path."
I'm not so sure about that. I suspect Zoey is gonna come looking for us after not hearing from us for a while, and she's gonna be super pissed if all she finds is an empty ship. But Mathiras is the smart one, so I don't point this out. Personally, I think he likes working with Straik. They both seem to be cut from the same plas-film. They both take things way too seriously, spend all their time planning for everything, and basically don't enjoy life much at all.
"I'm here," I announce as I approach them. "Let the fun begin."
Both Straik and Mathiras shoot me disgusted looks.
"About time," Straik says.
"Why do I smell soap?" Mathiras asks.
"You don't want to know," Kaspar replies.
I rub my hands, doing my best to look as excited as the others. "So. Where's this distress signal? Can I hear it?"
Lord Straik turns back to the star map and touches a small section of it. The screen sharpens, zooming in on the area he touched. "It's coming from the vicinity of this particular binary star, right at the edge of the ice belt." He touches the screen again, zooming ever closer. "In fact, it might be too close. Perhaps that's why it was never heard from again."
"It iced over?" I ask. "What's an ice cloud doing out here?"
"Sometimes a planet disintegrates," Mathiras tells me as if I'm a child who's never cracked open a vid-lesson. "With the pull of the sun—in this case, twin suns—being too great for it to handle, it falls apart and creates a debris belt. In this case, it's ice." He gestures at the screen. "Nothing but pure ice as far as the eye can see."
"Sounds like Kaspar's last date," I joke, nudging Mathiras.
Both of my brothers—and Straik—glare at me.
"Oh come on. That was a good one."
"Can you be serious for a moment? Just one?" Mathiras puts a hand on the console and taps it. A noise comes out, the particular unique, ear-screeching klaxon used for all distress signals, followed by the ship's registry number and name, read aloud by the ship computers. Normally, though, a distress signal is followed by a statement from the distressed ship, but there's nothing but silence from the Buoyant Star. Mathiras turns to me. "Well?"
"Ghosts," I say again. "Definitely ghosts."
Kaspar lets out a pained sigh.
"It's not ghosts, you noodle-brained idiot," Straik snaps. "Ghosts don't exist. Someone's on board that ship or it's been abandoned. Either way, I need to get there and recover her. That is my family's legacy."
"Why do you care so much about your family's legacy if they kicked you out?"
Straik glares. "No one kicked me out. We had a disagreement or two. That's all."
Kaspar coughs into his hand. "Not what I heard."
Mathiras glares at both of us.
Why does he care so much about his family's legacy? It hits me and I laugh. "You want to buy your way back into their good graces, don't you? That's what this is. You don't give a keffing flip about what's on that ship, you just want to show Mommy and Daddy that you're a good son and you can be invited back to Homeworld again."
"Someone shut him up." Straik rubs a hand over his face. "His constant nattering is giving me a headache." He gestures at the screen. "Besides, it could be a trap."
I snort. "Are you kidding? It's most LIKELY a trap." Glancing between my two brothers, I continue. "How many times have we chased a distress signal only to find that it's more pirates waiting on the other end?"
"Dozens," Kaspar admits. "But that just means more people to rob. More credits for all of us."
Mathiras gives him a dirty look. "Here's the thing. I know it seems too good to be true. After weeks of searching every nook and cranny of this keffing end of the universe, it doesn't make sense to find her just sitting so quietly out here. It sounds like a trap for sure." He glances at the map and then touches a portion of it again. "Here's the thing, though. It could very well be a distress signal. Look at how close it is to the ice belt. Now, compare this map to one that's ten years old." He flicks through a few images on the screen and then lines the two up next to one another. "The ice belt is moving in rotation, no doubt being pushed along by the force of the other planets." He gestures at a point on the map. "The distress signal is coming from here."
"Right in the path of the ice belt."
He nods, a thoughtful look on his face. "If they get swallowed up, it's going to be a constant barrage of comets and asteroids hitting the craft. It'd tear anything stationary to shreds in a short matter of time. That could be why they're sending out a distress signal instead of just leaving the area. Maybe they can't. Maybe their engines died and they're just floating and waiting for rescue." He pauses. "Or…it's a trap."
"I know which one I think it is," Kaspar says, grinning. He cracks his knuckles again. "But if it's a trap, there'll be more than just one ship. And that means more for us to take home."
"We can definitely make our fortunes," Mathiras admits, and he's got a smile on his face. At Straik's scowl, he adds, "Or at least sixty percent of a fortune."
"The Buoyant Star was the largest cargo ship of the va'Rin fleet," Lord Straik says, crossing his arms. "Whatever cargo it has on it, it should belong to my family."
"Except the laws of salvage declare that whoever finds it at this point gets to keep it," I point out. Even I know that. “You get forty percent. Not more."
