“I wouldn’t be killing you.”
“Yes, you would.” He makes a frustrated sound and pops the top off the container again. “Selah,” he calls. “Come here.”
A moment later, I hear movement, and a little voice pipes up, “Yes, Papa?”
“Oh no,” I say. “No, no, no. Fuck you.” My Traveler, less wise in the ways of manipulative shitheads than I am, is curious where this is headed, while I can already fucking feel it.
“This woman is named Nata,” Ayren says. “She’s the pilot of this ship.”
“She has funny eyes,” Selah says. Way to go, kid. Keep it up.
Ayren grabs me by the shoulder, slices through the netting around my hands with practiced ease. “Were you a cop or—”
He grips my wrist—damn, but he’s got big hands—and drags my hand to rest on a head of curly, thick hair like mine, if longer and fluffed out in a style I’ve always liked the feel of, but could never maintain as a pilot.
“Papa?” the little girl says.
Only it’s not my hand in her hair, it’s Auntie’s hand resting on my head thirty years ago while I sob, Papa? Where’s Papa? Where’s Da? It’s Auntie saying, Girl, it’s time for you to stop crying and be someone again. It’s her laughing as I take her comm unit apart and put it back together and she tugs at my curls with her crooked fingers. It’s her giving me my wings and telling me to not be afraid, after space took my parents and chewed them to atoms.
“Fuck you, Ayren,” I say. I’m not my parents. I’m not Goodluck and Gray. I’m still fucking alive. And I’m not falling for this emotional blackmail.
“You said a bad word,” the little girl whispers, in the same kind of tone I’d expect for an accusation of murder.
“Yes, she did, Selah. But it’s okay, just this once. This nice”—pointed emphasis there, fuck you very much, you tentacock sucker—“pilot is going to take us somewhere safe.”
“Fuck you,” I repeat. It doesn’t sound as strong to my own ears, but that’s because I’m thinking.
“Twice,” he amends. “Just this twice.”
• • • •
“I’m not promising anything,” I repeat. This has become my mantra. They hear it and think I mean that I’m on their side now, but not willing to promise miracles. What I actually mean is that I’m seriously not promising them jack shit. I’ve just shifted gears. They can’t tell where I set our course to, but if I go for a station, it’ll be obvious early enough that Lydia might get punky and scramble my brain for spite. So fine. I’ll take us to a border gate. And then hand them over to whichever side is monitoring the traffic. Let the authorities work for me, just this once. I won’t even be lying when I say I got hijacked.
“Failure isn’t an option,” Lydia says from behind me. I’m really starting to dislike her.
“We know you can do it,” Ayren says soothingly. I’m not too fond of him, either. But they’re both going to be not my problem soon. My Traveler, nervous, keeps constantly updating me on where the two stand, how they shift. It gets on my nerves until I tell it to knock it off.
I slide us up to the Sestira-Iota Empira Gate, balls out and strutting pretty, because I’m not trying to hide. Almost everyone else has been packed back in the shipping boxes, since supposedly those can slide past inspection. It also keeps them out of the way. I tried to talk Ayren and Lydia into going back in the hold, because it’s not like they can see anything in the cockpit. Neither of them would go for it, more’s the pity. You’d think after a couple back-system jumps with rickety gates to get us here, they would trust my technique. They’re probably extra nervy because this gate is the one that will lead to the Seventh Satrapy proper, and will therefore be heavily guarded.
As twitchy as Lydia is—and this time she’s the one with the neural scrambler, oh the joy—I’m glad she can’t see. The modified targeting comp that I used to ping all location tones to me is going absolutely mental. And from the signatures, at least half the ships are military. Welcome to the blockade.
On cue, I get a signal on the nav channel: “Approaching ship, identify yourself.”
They know damn well who I am, because I’ve got my beacon up and running. But it’s an easy way to catch really, really dumb or new crooks—they forget the name of their own ship. “This is freighter Goodluck Gray Pearl, crew of three, requesting permission to gate through to Sestira. Transmitting crew profiles and manifest.” The dumb AI sends them over. I wish I had a chance to doctor the manifest with a little Help I’ve been hijacked note, but Ayren’s been too up my ass and I didn’t want to risk it.
“Stand by for scan,” control comes back.
I’m trying to play cool as I taste the scan bounce off and then cut through the hull, going from cold to hot, sweet to acidic, the full spectrum of possible energies. Really, I feel like I’m going to throw up, which is a spectacularly stupid idea in zero-g. This is what I need to do to get these assholes off my ship, I remind myself. Even if the thought of letting a bunch of border guard goons dig through my holds makes my skin crawl even more. It’s still less of a risk than trying a blockade run for people I don’t even like.
The scan goes on, forever and ever, repeating and repeating and I’m pretty sure at this point they probably know what’s in the waste tanks and can tell me what I ate for breakfast five days ago. Ayren’s tapping the headrest of my couch with his fingers, and I’m just about ready to punch him. The wait’s approximately ten years long before the signal comes back: “Manifest is in order. Slave your nav to the system controller to queue up.”
“Affirmative.” I switch the channel off, tell the dumb AI to do as it’s told with a tap of my toes on one of the lower pressure plates.
Ayren breathes out a shaky sigh. “That seems too simple.”
“Shut up,” Lydia and I say in unison. Oh look, something we agree on.
And it is too simple. Lydia’s a pilot. She knows what a gate approach vector will be like. And she feels us shift away from it. “What’s going on?” she demands.
“What do you mean?” Ayren asks.
I already know, but I’ll play dumb. I snap my fingers to signal the other two to silence just in case they decide to start bickering, and open the nav channel again. “Control, is there a reason we’re heading away from the gate?”
“You will temporarily dock with the fleet ship Kai Gregori for visual inspection.”
“There a problem with the scan of our cargo? I’m on a tight timetable here.” Right on schedule, but I feel sick about it, somehow.
“Scan comes back clean, but this is the new standard procedure.” Control’s tone shifts from bored to a sick note of smiling malice. “Keeps the scum out of our systems.”
“Can’t be too careful about scum,” I agree with false cheer, and cut the comm again. “There you go,” I tell Lydia and Ayren.
“What are you doing?” Ayren asks, anxious. “We’re still going in?”
“Your magic shipping containers can stand up to a visual inspection, right?”
“Yes—maybe,” Lydia says. “But we can’t.”
How does the way someone looks define their religious sect? The mind boggles. “I told you assholes you needed to be in the containers.”
“Don’t you—” Lydia starts.
“Please. Now isn’t the time to argue. We need to think.” Ayren, being the reasonable one again. I just want him to shut up and stop acting like we’re in this together.
“Should’ve thought about this before you made me fly your ass to a gate.”
“You knew this was going to happen,” Lydia says, accusing.
I shrug. “This isn’t my regular run. I figured you guys knew what you were doing.” It’s a cheap excuse, we all know it. “But it’s also not my problem.”
Ayren takes in a shaky breath. I’m not sure if he’s scared or angry. “If you let them take us, we will be sent back to the Empire in a penal ship, for execution. And so will you.”
“Going for mutually assured
destruction?” But my stomach’s sinking. All of their words against mine? I should still be able to win, if I’m smart enough about it. I’ve got the innocent blind woman who didn’t know what she was getting into, et cetera card to play.
“None of us needs to say anything. They hate us that much.” That’s Ayren angry, I realize. So angry he sounds perfectly calm. It’s goddamn eerie. “Even if you don’t want to save us, you must want to save yourself.”
I definitely hate Ayren. Is he lying? Does he even need to be at this point? My stomach gurgles with acid. I don’t have any good choices. You can’t gamble money when you’re dead.
“Okay,” I say, thinking furiously. The only solution I can come up with at this point is smuggler’s law number one: Don’t get caught. “Hang on to something.”
There’s no alarm or anything fancy like that to hit. It’s only ever supposed to be me in my ship, so what’s the point? I take a quick scan, listening to the tracking pings, charting the courses of the ships, finding the windows where I can squeeze in between larger vessels, because that’ll make it a lot harder for some overexcited gun battery jock to open fire on me. Then I punch the engines by clenching my toes on the feedback pads and go full acceleration.
My couch jerks at the sudden inertial shift, and then there’s a loud crash as someone hits the rear bulkhead. Sounded heavier, probably Ayren.
The nav channel screams to life with a “Freighter Goodluck—” I don’t even wait to hear whatever control has to say next, just cut it off. I need less noise so I can track the symphony of pings as other freighters sluggishly scatter around me, no doubt reacting to the way I’m shitting all over their proximity warnings. I’m more concerned by the low, bronze tones of the capital ships, smearing their way into motion from port channel to starboard. The only mercy is that they’re moving to protect the gate, and I’m on course to loop around the way station and veer away from it. Which is a stupid move for anyone who wants to live, going in that close to the supermassive point that is a gate, except for two things:
1) I am the best damn pilot I know.
2) I am not mass driver, nuke, or whatever-the-Satrapy-is -using-these-days-proof.
I wring every ounce of power out of the onboard plant, and thank fuck I’ve stripped out all unnecessary systems on the Pearl. By the time the Satrapy cruisers get my course deviation—which slams Ayren into another wall from the oof sound he makes, and okay maybe I shouldn’t be grinning around the sensor probe between my teeth—I’ll be too far out of their reach. Big ships accelerate like pigs.
“What are you doing?” Lydia screams somewhere behind me.
I don’t answer, licking at the sensor probe and getting the shiver of a targeting laser, too strong. I spin us, but it’s not enough. Inertia’s working against me, not with me. A mass driver round clips the port cargo pod. There’s a crash in the cockpit behind me, and Lydia stops screaming. Alarms start yelping as the automated systems come up and cut the cargo pod off from the rest of the ship to prevent further decompression. I smell blood, which my Traveler confirms belongs to Lydia. It better not get into any of my systems.
And for a moment, the ship goes dead in space. One of the power conduits is down, must have been hit by debris from the cargo pod.
“Ayren!” I scream, since my Traveler tells me he’s at least still sort of conscious. “Get your fucking ass up.” I’m already scrambling from the safety netting.
“What is it?” There it is, the suddenly reassuring shiver of warmth from the hand-light’s beam.
“The port power conduit needs to be rerouted. I need you to close off all the junctions manually—they’re not flipping on their own.”
A hesitation that takes way too long. “I can do that.”
“Then go!”
I hear him leave with half an ear. The emergency power comes up, way too slowly, and I start working from my end. There are plenty of conduit lines from the power plant to the engines, but the problem is that most of them aren’t rated high enough for the power draw I need. The whole system shut down to protect from overload-induced meltdown.
And all the emergency power really does is bring the targeting computer back up and give me the low, approaching pings of the Kai Gregori and its friends. “Come on, come on,” I mutter.
The ship’s intercom crackles on —I never bothered to uninstall it, bless past me —and I hear Ayren’s voice, thick with confusion. “Which junctions? Some of them are labeled life support, Nata.”
“Don’t go by the labels. I rerouted everything when I upgraded the plant.” And it wasn’t like I could read those labels. I force myself to take a deep breath and just tune out the frantic pinging of the targeting computer for a minute, mentally counting. I know this ship like I know my own hands. “Number them starting top left, go in a serpentine. You get me?”
“Okay.”
“Flip one, six, eight, ten through thirteen, and fifteen.”
He counts under his breath, each number followed by a crisp snap of a junction flipping over. I count with him, silently, over the ever-approaching sound of the border guard ships. . . . Thirteen . . . fifteen. The Pearl roars back into life.
I don’t bother telling Ayren to hold on this time. He should already know the drill. I max the throttle on the engine and turn us into our drift, making it a long bank that’ll shoot us around the dark side of the gate and take advantage of the gravitational anomaly for extra acceleration. There’s no way in hell we’re skipping through it; all I want now is to escape the local space and regroup at a safe distance.
An alarm sounds, warning of a coolant leak, more damage from the mass driver hit. I tap it off with one finger and keep pushing. I know the power plant like I know the sound of my own heart. It’s still good for another three-percent draw: I feel the pitch of it in my bones.
• • • •
Lydia groans. Drama queen. “You better not fucking vomit,” I growl between my teeth.
Then it’s just me and the pattern, speed and space and the thousand sounds and tastes and pressures that make the Pearl a living part of me.
We fly. We live. We never die.
• • • •
“Lydia’s got three broken ribs, a concussion, and a shattered collarbone,” Ayren says.
I grunt. I’m stretched out in the port maintenance conduit, feeling the coolant line inch by inch, searching for the crack or piece of shrapnel that had it leaking. The ship is dead and quiet around us, only the hiss of air exchange still going. I kept us limping to a safe distance from the gate and parked us in with some asteroids for camouflage. We’re still on the wrong side of the Empire/Satrapy divide, but we’re alive, so that’s something.
“We lost twenty people when the cargo pod decompressed,” he continues.
Well, most of us are still alive. “Do you want me to say I’m sorry?”
“Are you?” he returns. He doesn’t even sound angry at this point. Just tired.
“No.” Yes. A little . “Was your daughter in there?”
“No.”
I feel a little relieved in spite of myself. For a moment, instead of tubing under my fingers, I feel the tight curls of her hair. It’s not fair. It’s fighting damn dirty. Because it reminds me that from here, I could cut the starboard cargo pod free too. I wouldn’t even have to come out of the conduit. Ayren wouldn’t know until it was too late, and then it would be just him versus me, and I’m pretty sure I could take him in my own ship. I’m a spacer born. I know how to fight dirty in zero-g. “Good for you.”
“Nata—”
“Shut the fuck up, whatever you were going to say. I never asked to have you assholes on my ship.”
He sighs, like I answered a question he hadn’t actually asked. “I know. We invaded your home.”
I’m not sure how I feel about Ayren whipping out the mind-reading shit. No, I do know. I hate that too. “Yeah. You did. And then held a fucking gun to my head.”
“It was a bad idea to do that, and I�
��m sorry for it.”
I hadn’t been expecting an apology of any sort. “Thanks,” I say dryly.
“But home isn’t just a place, Nata. It’s people. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. Keeping our home alive. Who do you go home to?”
My parents have been dead several times longer than I knew them alive. I haven’t seen Auntie in a decade. I bounce between stations and have my little fantasies about taking lovers, but that’s all they are: fantasies. At the end of the day, it’s just me rolling in to Bara’s joint and having a cup of their finest swill, shooting the shit with them and letting my bones unkink because that’s all I really want. A place other than my ship where my skin fits. Fuck Ayren for making that sound like it isn’t enough. “Fuck you.”
“Why do you hate us?” Ayren asks quietly.
“Because you’re going to get me killed.”
“If you wanted to live a safe life, you wouldn’t be a smuggler.” I can hear him shifting around outside the conduit. He’s probably uncomfortable about not having this conversation face to face. He can deal with it. “So it’s more than that.”
“My parents would have wanted to help you,” I say, grudgingly. “That’s the kind of people they were. And that’s why they’re dead.” I feel my Traveler hovering near my shoulder, and this is one hell of a time for it to decide it wants to play angel instead of disinterested, observing devil. I ignore it.
“How?”
“They diverted course to investigate a distress beacon, and it was a trap. They got me into an escape pod. They didn’t make it.” Child me had been scared as hell and screaming her head off. Adult me, knowing what I know now about the kind of people out here in the black who do that kind of shit to people like my parents, feels sick and angry.
“Ah,” Ayren says. “There’s a saying among my people, Nata: Who destroys a soul, it is as if they have destroyed an entire world. Who saves a soul, it is as if they have saved an entire world.”
It feels like getting punched with words, and I don’t like it. I’m floundering, going down for the count. “All of this sounds a lot less philosophical and wise when I know you’re just saying it because you want me to help you,” I point out, trying to disguise how shaken I am.
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 15
