Chaos Quarter

by Welch, David

  “Come on,” he said. “Gotta get him on ice before he stinks up my whole ship.”

  * * *

  Lucius found Chakrika in the common room, sitting on a beat-up old couch against the port wall. She held Quintus, rocking him and rocking herself.

  He was truly unsure of what to do. He had more experience than most of his kind when it came to relationships based on actual affection, but that in no way qualified him for this. From Rex’s words he figured that something must have scared her deeply, more than just the fear of death such attacks bring. He was unsure what speaking to her about it would accomplish and wondered if it would just dredge up horrid memories, causing more pain.

  “Are you all right?” he asked tentatively.

  Her head turned slowly, fixing on him. She said nothing. He moved to the couch, sitting next to her. Quintus slept soundly in her arms, his tiny head fitting naturally against her shoulder. More silence. Unsure of what was proper, Lucius placed his hand on her shoulder, attempting to reassure. She stared at it for a long moment.

  “This hurts,” she spoke, barely audible.

  He jerked his hand back, mentally cursing himself.

  “Not that,” she said and then gestured with her head toward Quintus. “This. Caring for him.”

  Lucius cocked his head quizzically.

  “You always look happy when caring for my son?” he spoke.

  “I am,” she replied. “But it still hurts. Feeding him, looking at him, changing him.”

  He sensed something was coming and figured it best to let her come around at her own speed. She kissed Quintus’s head.

  “I’ve miscarried four children,” she went on, tears pooling in her eyes. They started streaming down her face.

  “I am saddened to hear that,” Lucius comforted her, returning his hand to her shoulder. “I mean that truly. I can only thank you more for helping my son despite your pain.”

  “I look at him and wonder,” she said. “Not that they would have let me keep them, even if they had been born.”

  Her eyes squeezed shut, as if trying to block a painful image.

  “Is-did something-uhm-happen—” he stuttered.

  “I was a slave,” she forced the words out quickly, not able to face him. She stared off into the room.

  “And those ships—”

  She nodded.

  “I would’ve killed myself before they took me,” she whispered, wiping as many tears as she could with her free hand. “I-I—”

  Lucius found himself hugging her. He hadn’t consciously planned to, but nothing else seemed appropriate. Chakrika buried her head against his chest.

  “I wasn’t born on Igbo,” she explained. “I-my-my parents were Maratha.”

  Her head popped up. The muscles in her face quivered as she fought for control.

  “Everyone on Maratha looks like me, except for foreigners. When I was nine, my father’s clan ordered him to become a trader, to make money for them. Sixty percent to him, forty to the clan. They were broke. He took a ship and went and took us with him.”

  Lucius felt his jaw tighten in anticipation of where this was going. It was a common story in the Quarter.

  “We’d barely been out a month when we were attacked. Some pirate band, as small and insignificant as the rest. They boarded us. My father was killed trying to protect us,” she explained. Her efforts to maintain her composure failed, and the tears renewed.

  “They…” she choked out. “They raped my mother and my brother, then they spaced them. Threw them right out the airlock. They made me watch all of it, watch their bodies freeze and their veins burst open in the void. It was awful. I keep seeing it in my dreams. Then…”

  “Shhh,” he said, trying ineffectually to soothe her. ”You don’t have to say anything more if the pain is too great.”

  “They kept me, said I was pretty. They liked my skin. They made me their whore,” she spoke, the words draining all energy from her voice. “…I was nine years old.”

  With that she broke, sobbing uncontrollably into his shirt. Lucius found himself holding her tighter and fighting off images in his own mind of what must have been done to her. The tight squeeze awoke Quintus, who wailed angrily.

  The child’s cries snapped Chakrika out of her breakdown. She straightened up, breaking from Lucius’s grip, and shifted the baby to her other shoulder. After a few moments of gentle bouncing, he was back asleep. More heavy moments passed before she spoke again.

  “They would keep me until the novelty of a tiger-skinned girl wore off and then sell me. Again and again. I lost my first baby at twelve. Then another, every year. After the fourth it stopped. I never got pregnant again. Then the king of Igbo destroyed a pirate fleet, and as part of the cease-fire, I was turned over as tribute. The king kept me until he tired of me, and then he gave me to one of his officials, a tired old man who fortunately couldn’t get it up often. When he died I fled, half-way across the planet. I went to Biafara hoping to start over. But-but there’s only one thing I was any good at.”

  She stared sadly toward the floor. Lucius couldn’t think of anything to say. He just sat with her for a while, hoping his presence would be some comfort.

  “When we left Igbo, you seemed mad that Rex had ruined your, uhm, practice,” Lucius asked.

  “I was scared,” she replied simply. “Part of me wants to hate him for hiring me for sex, even though I propositioned him. But he’s the only person who’s ever hired me for anything else.”

  “I do not believe he would treat you in such a way now, if that’s any help,” Lucius replied.

  “No, he wouldn’t,” she spoke, getting to her feet. She moved to Quintus’s makeshift crib. It was an old cargo crate about three feet on a side. Extra blankets had been spread inside. She placed the baby down, then stood over the crate, watching him.

  “Sad as it is, being on board his ship is the closest thing I’ve had to a normal life since I was a child,” she spoke.

  Lucius got to his feet and walked up beside her. They stared down at Quintus for a good minute before he spoke.

  “I can never know how you feel,” he spoke. “But I am sorry such things have happened to you. Nobody deserves that.”

  “Was Rex honest when he said you used to do worse?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She stiffened and moved around the crib’s nearest corner.

  “How?” she asked. “How can anybody do that to somebody?”

  Lucius knelt beside the crate, keeping his gaze fixed on his son. He didn’t have the strength to meet Chakrika’s eye.

  “I was raised to believe that it was acceptable,” he proclaimed. “And I didn’t have the sense to question it until far too late.”

  She didn’t answer, but he had a feeling she was waiting for more of an explanation.

  “The Empire believes that God has a Divine Order, that the nobles are on the top of it. It is believed that we have His sanction to rule, that our wisdom and strength is all that keeps society from descending into chaos. I was once Lucius Alexander Savoy-Habsberg-Baliol, Count of Idoriville-Cabaelon. That was my estate, on His Imperial Majesty’s World of Silesia. I had nine thousand acres of farmlands and a dozen factories. I commanded 250 warriors and five thousand serfs. I believed many stupid things.”

  He smiled at his son, a bittersweet smile. He was glad Quintus was too young to understand any of what he was saying.

  “Like what?” Chakrika asked. Her tears had dried.

  “According to Europan law, all serfs are property of their owner, practically slaves. Serf women were legally wed to me, and I was raised to do whatever I wanted with them. I had a half-dozen of the prettiest women in my house, as concubines. I would have others brought to my soldiers to keep them satisfied and loyal. By Europan law any children these women bore me were of the warrior class, above serfs but below nobles.

  “Right now they are growing up with their mothers. When they are ten, the boys will be taken, trained as warriors, and
then given to a noble as his retainer. I believed nothing was wrong with all of this, and that my birth as a nobleman justified my power over these people,” he continued.

  “They didn’t even have names. Our law forbids it. Even Yvette, the woman I fell in love with, she was called Tall Girl. That was the closest thing she had to a name before I gave her one.”

  “No names?” Chakrika asked.

  “The emperors have always forbidden it. They don’t want the serfs thinking of themselves as people. They do not even allow them to learn English, it’s forbidden by law. They don’t want the serfs to be able to communicate with the wider universe, so they make them speak a language that’s dead outside of one small corner of Earth. They have no names, they cannot speak to anyone but themselves and nobles, they have no right to their own bodies…we stripped them of their humanity and believed that it was God’s will.”

  He sighed and then reached down to caress his son. Chakrika watched his tenderness, seeing the smile that only seemed to come out around Quintus. She quietly moved back to his side, kneeling beside him, arms resting on the crate’s edge.

  “Yvette, ‘Tall Girl,’ she broke you free of all that?” she asked.

  “Not at first. I made her a concubine shortly after I was married—”

  “She wasn’t really your wife?” Chakrika interrupted.

  “According to our laws, she and every serf woman was my wife. But my noble wife was a cruel bitch of a woman named Julia. My father picked her to wed me, said he desired to forge closer relations with her family’s noble house. Really, he just wanted to take her to his own bed.”

  “What?” she asked. “Your father was fucking your wife?”

  “It’s called consortry. Though it is rarely between in-laws. In the empire people do not marry for love, but for power. So each man and woman generally finds another noble to fill their need for love, whom they call their consort. It is an official institution amongst my people, just below marriage in importance. My mother herself was once a consort of my father, which is why I belong to her noble house and not his. It’s also why I was a mere count in charge of nine thousand acres, and not a higher noble,” he explained.

  “OK…” she spoke, confused. “Go on…”

  “He took her as a consort, which suited her fine. I fell in love with a serf, so much so that I dismissed my other concubines and lived as man and wife with her. I literally only went to my ‘true’ wife once a month, when she was fertile. That was all she wanted from me. Instead, Yvette got pregnant and we had a daughter. But my wife learned of how I was living and was infuriated,” Lucius continued, letting out a dark laugh.

  “Coupling with serfs is just fine in our culture, but treating them as equals was considered completely unacceptable. She informed my father. My father was an earl, two ranks above me. He controlled a million acres, ten viscounts, and one hundred counts, myself included. He ordered that Yvette be transferred to him and it was done despite my protests. He raped her and held her down while my ‘wife’ slit her throat and my little girl’s.”

  This time he felt her hand on his shoulder.

  “So I killed both of them,” Lucius said coolly. “My father and Julia—bullet to the brain. Then I stole a freighter and fled into the Quarter. Since then I’ve drifted from world to world, selling my services as a mercenary.”

  “And you no longer believe as you once did?” Chakrika asked.

  “I’ve seen too many normal families to believe it anymore, even out here in the Quarter. Nothing I was taught was right,” he replied and looked at her. “You never have to fear that I would treat you in such a way.”

  “I don’t,” she whispered. Her head rested on his arm for a moment and then she said, “We get to remake our lives, Lucius. If we live as long as Rex says, all the bad years may fade away.”

  “Do you really believe it works like that?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied after a long moment of thought. “But perhaps the good years can at least outweigh the pain of the remembering.”

  “You are a hopeful woman, Chakrika,” he replied. “I thank God for sending you to watch over Quintus.”

  She smiled. They stayed at each other’s side for a long while.

  * * *

  Rex had considered it pretty clever, convincing Second that she now had to obey him since he possessed the person she was actually bound to obey. Then he had figured it wasn’t so clever, since any person with a normal mental state would have seen through it. Then he decided it wasn’t clever at all when Second had started following him around.

  She stood on the bridge now, just inside the door. Her hands were folded behind her back as she stared straight forward, doing little more than blinking and breathing.

  “You do not have to stand there,” he said, his eyes still focused on the viewscreen.

  She promptly sat down on the floor. He turned, spotted her in her new position and squeezed his eyes shut in exasperation.

  “No, I mean you can go somewhere else if you like.”

  “Where do you wish me to be?” she replied.

  “I don’t care. I’m asking what you—you want—hell, you know what, forget it. Sit right there and be quiet,” he spoke, turning back to his screen.

  Three hours until he could jump. Physicists didn’t know much about what actually happened in hyperspace, as anything that entered it seemed to cease to exist temporarily, or at least ceased to exist as far as people in this reality could tell. Luckily they’d discovered early on that if your folded two points of space together and tore open a hole between them whatever entered at one spot emerged at the other. Always. And it happened pretty much instantaneously. He remembered reading that the amount of time that actually passed during a jump could be measured in millionths of a second. Now why and how this all happened, they had no idea. For centuries the best egg-heads had tried to solve the problem and for centuries they’d come up with nothing that made sense according to the laws of physics, or at least according to the laws of physics in this reality. Clearly it made sense in whatever type of reality hyperspace was, otherwise it wouldn’t keep working. Part of Rex wondered if the universe did this just to screw with scientists, giving them this wonderful gift of faster-than-light travel, only to make its mechanics completely beyond them. It was enough to drive a man nuts.

  Whatever the case, the fact remained that hyperspace jumps worked. And over the centuries they’d learned much by trial and error. You couldn’t fold space in on itself for any distance less than 1.35 light-years, the minimum distance a ship could jump. You couldn’t send energy waves of any sort through hyperspace. Any communications had to be radioed to a drone or ship. That vessel would then jump to the desired system and retransmit the message to its destination.

  Perhaps the most annoying thing was that you couldn’t safely jump within three hundred million miles of a star, or within thirty million miles of an Earth-sized planet. Gravity wells distorted jump paths. If you jumped within those distances, you never ended up where you planned to go. You’d end up light-years off course. Occasionally, as a few early experiments had demonstrated, you reentered normal space inside of a star. You couldn’t jump across a space where a major gravity well sat, so if you wanted to go from one system to another you usually had to go through it and past the star in its center whose gravity would distort your jump path and send you off into oblivion. So most of the time a person spent when traveling through space was in long, boring cruises to a suitable jump point. Once you jumped you again embarked on a new, long, boring cruise to your next destination.

  When you had your own jump engine, it wasn’t that bad. Rex could usually jump in not far from the inner solar systems of major stars, avoiding the crazies who tended to infest the moons of gas giants and random rocks floating around at a system’s edge. When you didn’t have a drive, you had to use established jump points. These were space stations or ships stationed in one place that opened jump points that ships could then fly through.
/>
  Problem with these was that enemies often disguised their ships as civilian vessels, so most planets in the Quarter built their jump points at the system’s edge, to protect themselves. That left anybody who wanted to travel in the system at the mercy of pirate bands and any petty tyrant you happened to fly past. He hadn’t been able to believe it when he’d first come out here. Back in the commonwealth, commercial jump stations were placed as close to the habitable inner worlds as possible, for quickness of travel. Pirates and tyrants and all that crap just didn’t happen back home.

  He spent most of the long cruising time reading books on the viewscreen or watching one of the ten million movies the computer had stored in its memory. He’d run out of fuel before he ran out of entertainment, and he had enough frozen hydrogen to last him six months of hard burn.

  “I spoke with her,” Lucius’s voice spoke from behind Rex. He strode onto the bridge, pausing next to Second.

  “Why is she sitting on the floor?” he asked.

  “I told her she didn’t have to stand there,” Rex replied with an incredulous shake of his head.

  “All right…” Lucius replied, moving to his seat. “Perhaps you should have your sick bay examine her?”

  “It’s on my to-do list,” Rex replied.

  “Well, I can understand why Chakrika appears older than her nineteen years. Her life has not been a pleasant one,” Lucius explained.

  “How bad?” Rex asked.

  “If you are the honorable man I believe you to be, you would kill without remorse many of the people she has interacted with,” Lucius explained.

  “Is she OK?”

  “As well as can be expected. When she was young, she was—” Lucius began.

  “Did she tell you to tell me this?” Rex asked.

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t need to know. She trusts you with it. If she meant for me to hear it she would have told me,” said Rex. “Same goes for you.”

  “You have mentioned often how my background could cause you trouble,” Lucius recalled. “And you seemed anxious to learn of us in the sick bay after Igbo?”