Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  ‘I see,’ said Alex, and in a voice devoid of emotion, ‘And they slaughtered her, I take it.’

  Quill inclined his head. ‘It was an unbelievably stupid decision,’ he said, with a note of incredulity. ‘I can only think she must have been mad.’

  Quill had known Alex’s wife. He’d been best man at their wedding and one of Etta’s sponsors at her naming ceremony.

  Alex gave a quick, impatient little shake of his head.

  ‘Not mad,’ he said, and the word which went unspoken there was greedy. And that, she was. She had earned a decent enough living as a lawyer in a big firm when Alex had first met her, but that had never been enough for her. She wanted entrée into what she regarded as the upper echelons of society, invitations to dinner at the Admiralty and the Embassy, yachting trips with millionaires and movie stars. She regarded those ambitions as ‘aspirational’. The media would have a field day with her shallow, avaricious lifestyle, though – all about the money, money, money. And her claim to be a heartbroken mum would not stand up against the very obvious fact that she was attempting, again, to exploit the death of her child for financial gain. Alex found it hard to believe that he had ever thought she was clever, beautiful and funny, with that social sparkle he lacked himself and so valued in others, perhaps, at more than its worth.

  ‘Well,’ said Quill, frankly, ‘however much they paid her, it wasn’t worth it. And when the media started running exposés, she started suing them for libel and defamation of character and all that.’

  The media would have loved that. Fuel for the fire, and dynamite to throw on when they won. Then the way Quill was looking at him sank in.

  ‘Ah.’ Said Alex. He would have reached for his own drink to buy himself a moment, but did not think that he could even pretend to sip it. ‘And… me?’

  Quill nodded again, a grim look on his face at that.

  ‘On the day you left Chartsey,’ he confirmed. ‘She brought proceedings accusing you of being behind the media attacks on her. It was thrown out of court, of course. She couldn’t prove that you’d ever talked to the media about this either directly or through an agent, because, of course, you haven’t. And your legal team – the legal team acting on your behalf, I should say – made mincemeat of her. Even got costs, which I gather were massive.’

  The legal people have it all in hand. Marc Tyborne, President of the League, had evidently thrown his weight behind slapping down the gold-digging ex-wife trying to tarnish his hero.

  ‘Anyway, last I saw,’ Quill said, ‘she’d severed with Verace and gone into hiding… far too late, of course. Hard to see how she can pick up either her job or social life after this.’

  Quill was right. Even if she went to extremes, changed her name, her appearance, even moved to another planet, she would have to use an ID with the unique identifying code allocated at birth. There were circumstances under which that could be changed, but ‘I sold my story to the media and now I regret it’ was not one of them. Any potential employer would run that ID through a routine scope for whatever information might come up about that candidate on datanet. And while inadvisable social posts might be screened out as professionally irrelevant, the fact that you’d been the subject of major media coverage certainly would not. She wouldn’t be able to rent an apartment, or join any kind of club, without the same kind of background check. And the media, too, would be keeping an eye, poised to expose her all over again whenever it suited them. The media, in fact, had their own term for a person who’d done this to themselves and then tried to go into hiding. They called them a ‘Running Rabbit.’

  Alex said nothing. His heart was unmoved. This was not the justice he wanted for Etta, of course, but there was a kind of moral justice to it, all the same, if she was suffering now because of another attempt to capitalise on the death of her child.

  Without thinking, he reached over, picked up his drink and took a gulp of it, an instinctive reaction to the tight, dry feeling in his throat. So he could swallow, after all - move, and be, just as normal.

  ‘I am sorry, Alex,’ Quill said.

  Alex nodded. He understood entirely now why Quill had flinched at the sight of him uttering that innocent toast, ‘To our exes!’

  ‘All right,’ Alex said, and found to his own astonishment that the gut-ripping monster he’d feared was dwindling away. There wasn’t even anger at what she’d tried to do, even at the final insult of suing him for the media slaughter she had brought upon herself. She had no power to hurt him, not any more. It was just a thing that had happened, but it didn’t involve him. The legal people had handled it. And now she was gone. ‘Thanks,’ he said, because he knew that this had not been easy or pain free for Quill, either.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Quill, again, and there was a long silence between them… sober, at first, but with a quiet sigh from Alex and a wry look from Quill, modulating into companionable, sympathetic.

  ‘So,’ said Alex, eventually, drawing a line which made it clear that that topic was closed, now and for always. ‘How are you finding the Zombies, these days?’

  Quill rallied, managed a laugh, and began to talk about the corporate executives who managed ISiS Corps from the comfort of their Flancer HQ. Their main occupation, according to Quill, was churning out ludicrous quantities of purposeless paperwork… not unlike the Admiralty, he said, in many respects.

  They were talking normally again by the time Quill said goodnight, having extracted a promise from Alex that he would, yes, all right, have lunch at the Temple the day after tomorrow.

  Alex was surprised by how fine he felt after Quill had gone. He had things he wanted to do before he turned in, and he did them. Top of that list was checking up on Silvie, making sure that she was okay.

  She was. Silvie had gone aboard a freighter for the evening… just an ordinary whalebelly freighter. There were tens of thousands of them operating in the League, mostly independents, usually owned by their skippers who worked them as tramp ships, chasing cargo. It wasn’t a romantic life, really, with a lot of hard work, financial insecurity and isolation. But it was a free kind of life – wonderfully free. Many merchant spacers and Fleet people dreamed of owning their own ship one day, and for most of them the ideal would be a whalebelly just like that.

  Alex did not know what had attracted Silvie to visit that particular whalebelly, and it hardly mattered. All that mattered was that she was having a good time over there. Shion was with her, and a discreet enquiry from Alex got an assurance from her that Silvie was fine, enjoying learning about the lives of a tramp-freighter crew and fascinated by their stories.

  There were no problems, anyway. Min, indeed, had already gone to bed… she was usually in bed long before the setting of the nightwatch, even sometimes as early as 2200. But she was up again at four, taking advantage of the quiet hours to do her desk-work without interruption.

  Alex turned in himself, wondering as he did so whether he would be able to sleep or whether what Quill had told him would prey on his mind, keep him awake or invade his dreams.

  And while he was laying there wondering that, his Fleet-trained body recognised time to sleep and shut his over-busy brain down… a fuzzy, drifting sensation, an inchoate thought or two, and Alex was asleep.

  And whatever dreams he might have had that night, he did not remember them.

  Ten

  It was just as well that Quill had broken the news to him, since what happened the following morning would have brought him to it anyway.

  Simmy turned up at 0600 with his coffee. He had tried to get her to stop doing that, but had been defeated by her happy assurances that she was always up that early anyway, went to the gym first thing, and dropped him his coffee on the way. If Alex was still in his bunk she tiptoed ludicrously to deposit the mug on his desk. More often, though, he made sure that he was in the shower.

  He was so that morning, stepping out fully dressed in the groundside rig he’d be wearing for most of the day. Simmy, however, was evidently running late
this morning as she was still there, apparently having just put the mug on his desk.

  ‘Oh…’ she started a little as if he was the last person she’d expected to see in his quarters, then gave him a ‘Good morning, sir.’

  Alex stopped, looking at her with dismay. Simmy’s first greeting of the day was normally a chirpy, almost singing, ‘Morning!’ and she only called him sir, usually, when she felt the formality of a situation required it.

  She was in a state, he saw at once – pale, even paler than usual, with bags under her eyes from lack of sleep and red rims to them from heavy crying.

  ‘Simmy?’ There were situations in which he would pretend not to notice such distress, just quietly prompting an officer or friend of that person to come and take care of them. Not everyone wanted the skipper to be that personally involved with them, after all.

  Simmy, though, was looking at him with such woebegone appeal that he just couldn’t dismiss her. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, and at that, the sixteen year old gave him a chin-wobbling look, tried to speak, and promptly burst into tears.

  Alex sat her down, got her some tissues when it turned out she didn’t have any, and gave her his coffee. Which was, it turned out, the magic which got her to stop sobbing, though not as he’d intended.

  ‘Errrgh!’ she said, having taken a gulp without realising what it was. ‘That’s disgustin’!’

  It was, admittedly, a mature taste, a strong dark roast, spiced with slightly bitter marin.

  ‘Sorry.’ Alex went to the dispenser tucked away in a locker, asked it what kind of drink Simmy liked and brought her a mug of pink, fragrant tea.

  This worked like magic, too.

  ‘Ta,’ said Simmy, and in the next moment, quite horrified, ‘You shouldn’t be getting me tea, captain!’

  ‘Pastoral care,’ said Alex – she might not really understand that, but his pleasant, matter of fact tone reassured her. He sat down on the sofa, keeping a good distance between them, and seeing that she’d already made several tissues soggy, handed her a fresh one. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Do you think you can tell me what the matter is, Simmy?’

  Her lower lip trembled again, and there was a dangerous little wobble to her chin, but she did her best, drawing in a ragged breath and pulling herself together.

  ‘Sorry, sir – really sorry,’ she said, and attempted denial. ‘It’s nothin’, I’m just bein’ stupid.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ Alex said. ‘But there’s nothing stupid about being upset, Simmy – and if you tell me about it, I might be able to help.’

  She looked at him with the same kind of horror as Quill had when he raised that toast to ‘our exes’, and Alex felt a twinge of something… apprehension? Annoyance? It was almost too quick to be sure.

  ‘Oh, I…’ she was glancing at the door, shifting towards the front of the sofa, making moves as if contemplating a high speed departure. She had suddenly realised that Captain von Strada was the last person in the universe she wanted to tell what had happened. She should never, she told herself, with more severity than any officer would ever speak to her, have let him see that she was upset.

  ‘Is it something,’ Alex hazarded, ‘about the dinner tonight?’

  Somebody, he thought, might have been jibing at her over that, upsetting and undermining her confidence.

  The dinner that evening was, after all, a Big Thing, at least for Simmy. As the captain’s steward she was responsible for preparing the dining room, liaising with the galley staff and supervising the Assegai crew who’d been lent to help as stewards, as well as serving the top table herself.

  It was, of course, ridiculous for a sixteen year old ordinary star to be in such a role. Flag stewards were invariably mature, responsible, discreet and highly trained. Alex fully expected it to be highly entertaining. But it would only be entertaining if Simmy herself was having fun.

  ‘What? No, no…’ Simmy looked miserable again as she thought about how excited she’d been by the prospect of running a dinner – a real dinner, not the informal meals Alex had with the Assegai’s skipper, but a proper posh dinner with dress rig and the drinks and nibbles she’d learned to call opratiffs and horsedurrs. ‘I’m fine, it’s fine…’ she was wriggling again, as if on the verge of running away, but in the next moment, she found her resolve crumbling. Words she did not want to say came blurting out of her mouth before she could stop them. ‘It was just so horrible…’

  It took a further five minutes, several more tissues and prompts to sip her flower-scented tea before Alex really understood what had happened. Simmy had been upset the night before, in her five hour pass to Karadon.

  She had, Alex gathered, gone over there alone. Friends she’d made on the Assegai had invited her to go with them, but Simmy had wanted the experience of exploring the station by herself.

  She had stuck to the lower, freight decks. Even with the station this quiet and very low security risk, the Assegai’s people had been advised that going about in uniform would attract a lot of attention from tourists, and that it would be advisable for them to go around in pairs or small groups.

  Simmy, though, liked to wander by herself – had done so, she confided, ever since she was a little kid, exploring the estates. She’d wanted to see what the freight decks on Karadon were like and to feel, as she admitted naively, ‘like a real spacer’.

  Whether the freight decks had been all that she’d hoped for or not was unclear, but it seemed she had looked into the Freight Club, found herself a bit shy, there, so had ended up in what she called a coffee bar and which Alex worked out was probably a rest room. Karadon Freight employed a couple of hundred people, working round the clock on handling all the freight which was always moving on and off the station. Pretty much every ship that came in, other than the smallest yachts, either had cargo in transit to hand over, cargo for sale, or space in their holds for whatever cargo they might buy. There would be thirty or forty people on duty at any time, with rest areas here and there where they might take their breaks.

  Simmy had evidently happened upon such an area, mistaking it for a coffee bar. And any spacer coming in would indeed be made welcome, given a drink and chatted to. Many of Karadon Freight’s staff were spacers themselves, working there temporarily, as they would say, while waiting for the right ship opportunity to turn up.

  There had been ‘four guys’, Alex gathered, and understood too from what Simmy said that they’d been engaging in what spacers called ‘the goss’. This began by establishing spacer bona fides by finding some kind of common ground – ports they’d both been to, ships they knew, mutual acquaintances – and then, of course, sharing all the latest gossip. Simmy had been happy with that at first, but then ‘the guys’ had started talking about stuff… she avoided looking at Alex and her voice dropped at that… stuff at Chartsey, which she didn’t want to talk about. And they’d told her things, things about the captain, about him, which had really upset her.

  ‘I knew about…’ she gave a betraying look at the holoframe beside his bunk, blank and silent now as it would always be when there was anyone else in the cabin. ‘But I didn’t know… how awful it had been…’

  What had she thought, then? That a three year old could die in any circumstances that were not awful?

  Alex reminded himself that she was hardly more than a child, herself – she might have been an adult for two years now, legally, and old enough to join military service now, but her emotional maturity was, in his estimate, still that of an adolescent.

  ‘I know,’ he said, and found himself, not for the first time, having to comfort someone else over the death of his child. ‘It is sad – awful, yes. But we have to learn to cope with such things, Simmy – and you shouldn’t allow it to upset you like this. I am fine, you know.’

  ‘But she’s just horrible, evil,’ Simmy wept. ‘How could anybody do that, do that? How could she ever even forgive herself?’

  Alex would have been at a loss, had it not
been for Quill telling him the night before what was going on. The evil one, he understood then, was his ex-wife. It wasn’t a description he found himself inclined to argue with.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alex said, and was amazed even as he said it to find that it was true. Whatever had been worked out in his subconscious overnight had left him with what felt like a clear, new-day perspective. ‘What she says, what she does, what happens to her – that’s nothing to do with me, Simmy. Nothing at all. It doesn’t matter to me, I’m not even interested. And if I’m not,’ he smiled as she gaped at that, ‘there’s no reason for you to be upset by it, is there?’

  He gave her a minute to think about that, merely prompting her to have another sip of tea, and after puzzling it through, Simmy came to a slow, uncertain realisation.

  ‘You… really don’t care?’

  ‘No,’ said Alex. ‘I really don’t.’ He handed her another tissue to replace the damp one now screwed up into an unusable ball. ‘So, cheer up,’ he said. ‘And the next time anyone tries to talk to you about this or about anything else you don’t want to talk about, you just do this, all right?’ He held up his hand, palm outward. ‘Back off, Buddy.’

  The magic was transformative, this time, generating a giggle and a look of amazement.

  ‘How do you,’ she marvelled, ‘know about that?’

  ‘That’ was the catchphrase he’d used, the ‘Back off, Buddy.’ which had originated in a sitcom which was so much a part of Subter life that you were weird, on the estates, if you didn’t watch it. ‘You watch Subs?’ Simmy asked, with a note of incredulity.

  ‘No,’ Alex said, with an apologetic smile. ‘It’s just something I picked up from one of my crew on the Heron.’

  He had done so, in fact, through an incident, minor in itself, in which a Sub had objected to the forceful hand and ‘Back off, Buddy!’ as aggressive behaviour from a rating, and only when it was explained as a sitcom catchphrase had the matter been resolved.