by M. D. Cooper
Maybe she was wrong to think of home as a trash heap. It was more like a backwater where bits and pieces collected, powered by the combination of lax law enforcement and easy money.
A barefoot little boy ran past her, darting between bodies in the packed corridor. She just caught the red of an apple cradled against his chest as he ran. Automatically, Fugia looked back for the shopkeeper who must have been chasing the boy, but there was only the crowd, until a bigger boy with a mean look on his face charged past her, his gaze focused at waist-level, obviously following the apple-carrier.
Fugia didn’t like the big kid’s look, so she idly kicked her heel back, tripping him. The kid stumbled and grabbed at a worker, who shoved him away. He fell backward on the metal deck, howling as someone stepped on his hand. He bolted upright and charged toward Fugia.
“You tripped me!” he shouted.
Fugia turned, finding that the boy was taller than she thought. She didn’t like looking up at him, but that was the case with most people for her.
She set a hand on her hip. He was older than he had looked at first, too, just smooth-faced with a fuzzy mustache on his protruding upper lip.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
The jewelry vendor she’d been chatting with moved to one side. The young man’s gaze flicked past Fugia’s shoulder. She considered hitting him then, but didn’t want to start any more of a scene than she already had. People would recognize her here.
The man grabbed for Fugia’s wrist, looking like he wanted to pull her closer to him. She caught his wrist instead, digging her thumb into the pressure point there. He jerked his numb hand back, as she’d expected, so her next attack was to step in and grab his testicles in a move she liked to call ‘grinding the walnuts’. Upon reflection, the name wasn’t that imaginative, but her grip got the response she wanted. From here, she could easily transition to the next move, called ‘starting the lawnmower’. She loved the ancient names for martial arts.
His eyes went wide and he made a gurgling sound. Fugia flashed a half-smile, her visor running his facial recognition through local law enforcement. It came up with a list of low-level syndicate affiliations. A charge of human trafficking jumped out at her. She squeezed his balls until her fingers met in the middle.
“You stay away from children,” she said, adding his name for good measure. He went pale at her recognition.
“Who are you?” he stammered.
“The wrong person to try and push around. I already notified the TSF of your little operation. You had better let those kids go.”
“I take care of those kids!” he said, voice gurgling in pain.
She couldn’t help thinking of Mama Chala, the woman who had abused them all for years while still providing meager food rations and space to sleep in an abandoned freighter, one seal failure away from vacuum. It had only been the other kids that kept Ngoba from leaving, including his stupid friend Riggs.
Fugia hadn’t felt the same loyalty. She’d run as soon as she could, even if it meant sleeping in sewage systems and shipping crates. She’d survived.
She released the boy-man now, shoving him out into the passing crowd. He caught himself and stumbled away, only looking back at her once in terror before disappearing. Fugia sent a check request to the local TSF substation with his address and description, including a picture of the apple thief. Then she turned back to the jewelry vendor and finished her negotiation for a tasteful tennis bracelet of icy diamonds. The man gave her a better price than she expected.
Nodding her thanks, Fugia held up her wrist to admire the bracelet, then turned to continue her walk.
“Looks nice on you,” a deep voice said next to her. “I would have got you a better price, though, for sure.”
She recognized his accent immediately, despite how he had changed. Fugia turned, pushing her visor back into her hair, to find Ngoba Starl standing beside her.
He smiled at the sight of her, face crinkling in a series of deep lines that didn’t match her memory, but the brown eyes were still his. His chest and arms filled out a well-tailored suit of blue linen, with a maroon bowtie and pocket square.
“You’ve got a beard!” Fugia said, which only made Ngoba smile more broadly.
He laughed. “It happens.”
With a smooth motion, he took her arm to lead her down the corridor. Fugia nearly pulled her arm away, then realized the crowd was parting in front of them. She glanced at him anew, running a quick check on her Link. Without the visor, she couldn’t deep dive, but the info that came back was enough to make her pause. Ngoba Starl was now leader of the Lowspin Crime Syndicate. Years of reports flowed across her mind, charting his rise among the various criminal organizations on the station.
A video of him with Crash the parrot hung in her mind’s eye and she quickly saw that her path to solving the equation might have become clear.
“I heard Fugia Wong had come home,” he said, “so I had to come see it for myself. And here you are.”
Fugia felt herself blushing. It surprised her how the feeling of seeing his maglev car disappear back on Ceres came rushing back. She felt like a different person now, and yet some memories hung on like they’d just played out yesterday. Was it because she hadn’t felt that way since he left?
“You look like you’ve done well for yourself,” she said, then added, “Or is this your one good suit?”
Ngoba brushed the front of his suit. He had a soldier’s hands, she noticed, with a few pale scars on his dark skin. His hands looked like they could kill, but he moved with a gentleness she didn’t recall, as if he carried some secret.
“I lead a group called Lowspin now,” he said. He waved a hand. “Import, export. Salvage. Those sorts of businesses.”
“Uh huh,” Fugia said, her sarcasm sneaking back in.
Her Link served up the local reports on the Lowspin Syndicate; not the largest private business on Cruithne, but size wasn’t everything.
“Where can I take you?” Ngoba asked. “Are you here for business or pleasure?”
“Both,” Fugia said. “Always.”
He grinned. “That’s my Fugia.”
Fugia got her pulse under control as they walked. She didn’t like how the sight of him made her lose her cool; she didn’t like losing herself to emotion in general. It was a sensation she was unaccustomed to, and she added it to her list of things to control, although she couldn’t seem to stop noticing the muscle in his arm as it pressed against hers.
The corridor led into the center of the station. They were passing through the old cargo and mining areas, not far from the Crash hangar where they had worked their first job together. She half-expected a young Riggs Zanda to run up behind them at any moment.
“How’s Riggs?” she asked.
Ngoba’s face darkened. “Doing business,” he said vaguely. When he caught her pointed expression, he added, “Working for Heartbridge mostly. Transport operations out to various dark sites. I’m aware of it, but I don’t follow the details, for obvious reasons.”
“Right,” Fugia said.
She pulled away from his arm to take her visor off. Her scalp itched, and she scratched furiously for a second, then pushed the visor back into her hair as a headband. She didn’t like that Ngoba made her so aware of her body.
The corridor opened into the outer edge of Night Park. The fountain on the far side towered above the twisted labyrinth of booths and stalls. The humid air was full of the smells of cooking food.
Ngoba took a deep breath and patted his flat stomach. “Night Park always makes me hungry,” he said. He pointed at the fountain, where they could barely make out the grey and red blur of a parrot on the topmost branch, with black ravens arrayed beneath. “I see my friend Crash is in attendance.”
“That’s right,” Fugia said. “You are friends, aren’t you?”
Ngoba gave her a sideways glance. “I believe I shared all my strange parrot conversations with you back on Ceres.
”
“I believed you back then, too.”
“I distinctly remember you calling me crazy for talking to a parrot,” Ngoba said.
“I had my reasons,” Fugia said. “But now I’m here to talk to Crash.”
Ngoba nodded, not acting particularly surprised by the news. Of course he already knows, she realized. He’d come to meet her, after all.
“He’ll like that,” he told her.
“You still talk to him?”
Ngoba nodded. “Quite often, as it goes. I like to take meals down here every few days. I keep asking Crash to come perch up in my office during meetings, but he won’t do it. I want a parrot advisor. How many businessmen do you know with a parrot counselor perched beside the desk, staring down anyone who comes in the office?”
Fugia gave him a sardonic smile. “Not many, Ngoba.”
When they were halfway through the bazaar, the stylish man stopped abruptly. Distracted by the swarms of data dancing around her, Fugia kept walking. Ngoba touched her arm.
“What is it?” she asked.
Ngoba leaned toward her, giving her a serious look. “Tell me the truth,” he said. “I want to know that you aren’t going to hurt Crash.”
Fugia pulled her head back. “Why would I hurt him?”
Ngoba raised a finger. “Because in all the years I’ve known you, I would say that nine times out of ten, you put information before people. And Crash isn’t just people. He’s something special. He’s one of a kind.”
“I’m not going to hurt him,” Fugia scoffed, angry with him for suggesting it.
“You might think that for yourself,” Ngoba said. “But think about the people you work for and whatever it is you’re after.”
“All I want is information,” she said. “According to you, anyway.”
She could see in his face that he was operating from an assessment of her that was over twenty years old. But had she changed that much since she left him on Ceres? Probably not. Her being here was proof enough of that. She was a Hoarder. She was here to verify information and feed it to the Mesh, where it would live forever.
“Can we go?” she asked.
Ngoba gave her a hard look, then nodded slowly. “Of course,” he said.
* * * * *
The plascrete fountain on the edge of Night Park was the only clear area in the bazaar. The birds had cleared a ten meter perimeter around their gnarled tree and were hurling insults at anyone who ventured too close. For some, the ravens and grey parrots were a source of dark amusement. Those with thin skins kept their heads down as they slid around the fountain.
“Big nose,” the ravens cawed in chorus as Fugia and Ngoba approached, walking behind a man with a hooked nose. “Big big nose!”
The grey parrots focused on a short man in a tight shipsuit, squawking, “Big old booty! Booty so big!”
Fugia found herself hesitating, not excited about becoming the focus of a bird roast. Ngoba, however, didn’t pause. He walked directly up to the dry fountain and set his foot on the stone lip like a newly arrived conqueror.
“Crash, my friend,” he called, gazing up to the top of the stone tree. “Come down and see me.”
At the sound of his voice, all the birds on the fountain flapped their wings, shifting from one clawed foot to the other, and shouted in chorus: “Ing-go-ba! Ing-go-ba!”
Ngoba laughed. “Who’s Lowspin, my friends?”
“We’re Lowspin! We’re Lowspin!”
Fugia crossed her arms, shaking her head in amazement. She also noticed the four security guards standing at evenly spaced points on the fountain’s perimeter. She hadn’t seen them following her, which meant they were good. When Ngoba glanced at one wearing old-style aviator’s glasses and then nodded, receiving a nod in return, she realized they worked for him.
He really has become the gangster he always wanted to be.
Of course she’d read the feeds and checked his public data, but she hadn’t quite believed it. She couldn’t jibe this cocksure man in front of her with the sweet, angry, beat-up boy she had known growing up.
Crash the grey parrot squawked from the top of the tree and hopped off his branch. Spreading his wings and red tailfeathers, he swooped out in an arc around the nearest booths, then glided back to Ngoba and landed neatly on his shoulder.
Ngoba turned to face Fugia, grinning with obvious joy. Crash nuzzled Ngoba’s curly black hair with his beak, which made it look like he was whispering in his ear.
Karcher, the bodyguard in the aviator’s glasses, fell in behind Ngoba while the others faded back into the crowd.
Crash was smaller than Fugia remembered. Despite his ongoing presence in her thoughts, it had been a long time since she had seen him.
His grey feathers shifted with subtle color variations under the harsh overhead lights, making his red tailfeathers that much more striking. He bobbed with Ngoba’s gait, seeming to be listening to music only he could hear.
“Hello, Crash,” Fugia said.
“Hello! I love you!” the parrot squawked back.
Fugia said.
The little parrot radiated joy over the Link.
Ngoba scratched the back of the parrot’s head, which he seemed to enjoy greatly.
“Well, look at that,” Ngoba said. “You already charmed him. I don’t think of you as a charmer, my dear.”
Fugia rolled her eyes. “I’m very charming when I want to be.”
Crash’s physical presence was unsettling. Without seeing him, Fugia had begun to imagine him as human—he wasn’t. Every pause or unique turn of phrase reminded her that she was talking to an inhuman consciousness.
From one perspective, it was amazing they could communicate at all, and with almost the same subtlety that she would talk to anyone. On the other hand, she had to keep reminding herself of something Crash had said when they first started trading messages: ‘Parrots don’t want the same things humans do.’
Parrots might not want human things, but humans should want parrot things, she thought.
the parrot told her. He turned a gold eye to study her.
Ngoba clapped his hands together and laughed heartily. Behind them, the ravens and remaining parrots took up the laugh, following the same rhythm in a disconcertingly sentient manner.
Fugia said.
Crash said, tilting his head.
Then a laugh rolled through Fugia’s mind, and Crash bobbed his beak up and down.
The parrot chuckled in her mind without malice.
Crash said,
Ngoba led the way between the tightly-packed booths, stopping eventually at a vendor who had la
id out heaps of fresh fruit on a narrow table. Ngoba made a great show of dancing his fingers among the papayas, before selecting a large, soft orange fruit and passing it to the parrot.
Crash gripped it expertly with one claw, maintaining his balance on Ngoba’s shoulder, and dug into the fruit with his hooked beak.
Ngoba laughed with relish, rubbing his hands together. He nodded to Karcher, who tipped the vendor well. As they continued walking, Ngoba spread his hands and grinned broadly.
“Look at this,” he said to the crowd around him. “Ngoba Starl has finally fully manifested the spirit of the all the ancient privateers and pirates. I have a parrot on my shoulder and a pistol at my hip. Look at this, Fugia!”
She rolled her eyes but couldn’t help grinning at him. His joy was infectious. He was so different than the boy she had known…he had become a fully realized version of himself. She found herself envying his obvious ease in his own skin, the easy way he moved through the Cruithne crowd, his familiarity with a rare wonder like Crash.
She could only shake her head. “You’re a crazy person, Ngoba Starl.”
He straightened his bowtie and nodded, still grinning. “I love it, Fugia. Life is good.”
She hated that she had to tell him life was about to get bad.
* * * * *
Ngoba Starl’s office was in the executive suite of a long-dead maintenance company. A series of high, narrow windows behind his desk looked out over a shipyard full of ghostly, floating vessels in various states of salvage or repair.
Karcher positioned himself in the hallway outside the door, not following his boss inside. He nodded to Fugia as she passed him.
Crash hopped from Ngoba’s shoulder as he walked through the door, and glided to a shelf. The parrot carefully navigated a collection of objects that included several books, a jagged chunk of metal that might have been flak, an ancient clock with a spinning counterweight, and a tiny elephant made of dark jade. Crash paused to test each item with his beak before sidling around it.
