Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “What the fuck did you want last night?” Spanich grabbed Austen’s hair, forced the kid’s head back until they were staring eye to eye. “What the fuck did you do?”

  Austen didn’t have a hell of a lot to say at first. Spanich poured some bulb-coffee into him anyway, on principle, while slamming a couple for himself. He didn’t let go of the kid, either, dragging him into the shitter, then the scrubstall.

  When the water hit them at 0.5 Celsius, Austen sputtered into some fairly creative profanity. “You gruyere-scented douchenozzle, I’m going to kick your ass from the throat down, then yank your nuts—”

  Spanich slapped him. “Hush up, dearie,” he growled, dragging Austen’s face so close they might have been kissing again. Somehow, being naked and wet with the kid wasn’t doing much for him this morning. “You know how many times in my life flash brass has rung my bell?”

  Austen found his voice. “Th-they put their jocks on one strap at a time like everybody else.”

  “Maybe. And maybe they have platinum-plated jeweled nut sacks snapped on every morning by hermaphroditic dwarves. How the fuck would I know? Because never in my entire pressure-bleeding life have I had to take a call like that one.” He shook the kid hard, banging that pretty head against the scrubstall’s algaplastic lining. “And I’d bet my last gene scan you have something to do with it. You and your Mayor Eye-breye-um.”

  “Mare Imbrium.” This time he pronounced the name right.

  “That’s Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs, to you, my friend. Shipminds are damned proud, and have very long arms indeed when they’re riled up.” Even talking about it here in the scrubstall made him nervous.

  Spanich dragged the shivering, naked Austen back to his tube, then forced the kid to dress by the simple expedient of bending his fingers back til he agreed. This one would run like a ball bearing if given the chance, and he figured on bringing Austen in as a kind of human shield for whatever it was the Adjutant-Intendant of Estacada Orbital had in mind for him.

  All too soon for Spanich’s taste, they were off among the sweat-reeking passageways of the station’s guest-worker quarters. A person could get almost anywhere in this place without leaving oil footprints on the tourist walkways. Mostly he liked it that way, though if they’d dial the heat up even halfway to tourist standards, he’d have been a hell of a lot happier.

  Austen had given up even muttering, and let himself be dragged along like a second toolbag. Whatever fate was coming, Spanich was pretty sure it wasn’t a surprise to the kid.

  Just outside the lock array for docking boom gamma, Austen made his break. The kid stomped down hard on Spanich’s instep, or would have if Spanich hadn’t been wearing carbon-jacketed boots rated up to sixty gravities of pressure.

  His second mistake was waiting until Orbital Security’s troopers had them in sight. Which was probably what panicked the kid, Spanich realized, as he knocked Austen down and went to one knee of top of the kid’s chest. “Don’t fuck around in front of the troopies,” he hissed.

  The troopies were watching the scene with mild disinterest. Mild disinterest suited Spanich just fine. No hands on weapons, everybody stayed peaceful. He dragged an out-of-breath Austen back to both their feet, then manhandled the kid right up to the troopers.

  Now their interest was neither mild nor dis. “You guys feeling brave?” asked the right-hand cop. Spanich vaguely recognized him from the Bar Gin, dude with space-black skin and eyes that shade of violent green that said that one of his ancestors had come from Falkesen sometime post-Mistake. Nobody from a human norm gene line had retinas that color.

  The left hand cop, a fellow with nubbly skin and tight epicanthic folds, drew his stungun for emphasis. Bad cop, then.

  “Got a call-in,” Spanich said to the good cop, keeping his chin down, his lips closed and his tone quiet. “Adjutant-Intendant wants us up on Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs.”

  Austen squirmed at that, but Spanich knuckled his collar tighter. The kid seemed to get the message.

  “You that Spinach guy?” green-eyes asked.

  “Span-ick. It’s Span-ick.”

  “Whatever.” The weapon was reholstered with the same bored air. Green-eyes gave Austen a long look, making no move to cycle the lock. “Who’s the cyclone ranger there?”

  “My lovely and talented assistant,” Spanich informed his feet.

  “Didn’t say nothing about no assistant.”

  He looked up, caught the fellow’s green eyes. “Did anyone say I couldn’t?”

  “Hey . . . ” The cop spread his arms wide, letting go the responsibility. “You want to wave your dick around in front of flash brass, be my guest.” He glanced at his partner. “They tooled?”

  Bad cop had the faraway gaze of someone reading a retinal implant. Finally he spoke, his voice like gravel in an airshaft. “Nothing out of profile.”

  “Your lucky day,” said green eyes. “No cavity search. Hell, not even a pat down.” He leaned close. “We got orders to run light and easy for now.”

  Spanich nodded vigorously. “Light and easy it is, sir.” Well, at least there hadn’t been a murder aboard the starship. Not of anyone important, at any rate. They’d be a lot more sealed up out here if so. He waited while bad cop punched in an access code—not one Spanich recognized—then waved them into the transition tube.

  Waiting for the outer lock to cycle, he leaned very close to Austen. “What are you so afraid of?”

  “You’re going to be sorry you asked,” the kid replied in a low whisper. His words sounded like a threat, but nothing in Austen’s voice, stance or stink of fear-sweat backed that up.

  Not murder then, but something worse?

  They found another troopie at berth eleven. This one didn’t bother to shake out their suits—he just cycled open the lock and let Spanich and Austen go in, not saying a word. Spanich did note that the tote board alongside the berth’s lock had been blacked out. Which was both unsafe, and he was pretty sure, illegal. Not open-flame illegal, but still a safety violation waiting for a monitor to write a fine-and-dine.

  The berth lock opened to the familiar accordion-walled transfer tube. Inside, Spanich’s breath damned near crystallized as he grabbed the lead lines. Air this stupid-cold meant someone had shut off the enviros, probably since he’d left Mare Imbrium thirteen’s deck a shift and a half ago. When there were no troopies guarding access, for one thing.

  And they hadn’t had the stuff back up long.

  “Dommie.” Austen’s voice was pleading as they approached Mare Imbrium thirteen’s hull lock.

  No, Spanich realized, not pleading. Terrified. “Is this where you give it up?” He stopped them, floating in the tube’s microgravity. They had maybe a minute, tops, before whoever was expecting them onboard got unpleasant.

  “We don’t have to d-do this.” The kid’s teeth were chattering.

  “A little late now. You could have spoke up last night, instead of playing rolypoly with me for half a shift. Or anytime before now, even.”

  “You h-have no idea.”

  Close, so close that the kid’s smell began lighting up his backbrain once more, Spanich growled, “So give me a fucking idea, punk.”

  “That w-woman on board. She’s not just some charter tourist.”

  “Who is she, then?”

  “My mom.” The abject terror in Austen’s voice was frightening.

  The little bastard knew this ship all along then. He’d been faking, before. Faking everything, then? Spanich didn’t see much point in asking who the kid’s mother was. “Family reunion time.”

  They kicked off together, heading the last few meters to the hull lock. Spanich was surprised how graceful Austen had suddenly become, for someone who had seemed to know so little about starships and life in space.

  He was even more surprised when the lock cycled at the touch of Austen’s fingertip on the bioscanner. Though, really, Spanich was starting to realize, he shouldn’t have been.

  Adjutant-Intendant Ol
ivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome waited in the passageway beyond. There was no mistaking a flash brass—no one else dressed like them, or looked like them, or stood as if they owned the worlds of the Imperium Humana.

  Which they as good as did, of course.

  The Adjutant-Intendant stood about two meters, forty cents, but didn’t weigh above sixty kilos. It was all whipcord muscle, bred in through the better part of a thousand years of careful genetic planning, since the Mistake. Every schoolchild knew this, because every schoolchild was taught why the Familia Majora—flash brass—ruled over them all.

  His skin was velvety black, similar to the guard outside. These were people who treated chromosomal radiation damage as a preventable disease on the par with influenza or head lice, after all. The Adjutant-Intendant’s eyes had the liquid silver look of someone whose optical nano bloom had been induced in utero, and carefully cultivated ever since.

  If he’d had a few billion Imperial schillings, and some key Writs of Exemption, Spanich could have bought most of that package for himself. Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome wore it all like someone born to two dozen generations of that inheritance.

  “Engineering Supervisor Spanich.” His voice had the tone of a man finding a slug under a salad leaf.

  “Reporting, sir.”

  “Were you ordered to bring an accompanist.”

  “My assistant, Jim,” Spanich said, immediately regretting the stupid lie.

  “Jim . . . ?” The Adjutant-Intendant looked Austen over briefly. “Your wit is at least half misplaced, Engineering Supervisor.”

  Spanich wondered if that had been the flash brass equivalent of a joke. “Your comm was urgent, sir. I figured this might take an extra pair of hands.”

  “Hmm.” With a visible letting go—meant to be visible, Spanich was certain—the Adjutant-Intendant continued. “We are aboard because the Mare Imbrium shipmind has declared an emergency.”

  “Thirteen pairs, you cocksucker,” muttered Austen. Spanich could have backjacked the little bastard for that—referring to shipminds that was a prerogative of the highest aristos among the flash brass, a rank thing—but he didn’t want to make this agonizing scene that much worse.

  The look in the flash brass’ eyes could have frozen helium. “Indeed. Mare Imbrium, thirteen pairs. I see why Engineering Supervisor Spanich values your services, Jim. As I was saying, the shipmind has declared an emergency, which it determined only you could resolve.”

  “I was coming back in half a shift, anyway,” Spanich pointed out. “I’ve spent a lot of time in this engineering bay, these past few shift-cycles.”

  The shipmind’s voice echoed through the corridor, a whisper like thunder—pervasive and overwhelming, but not loud. “This seems an opportune time to redirect.”

  The hair on Spanich’s arms prickled. Far more astonishing, even Adjutant-Intendant Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome looked surprised. Austen just groaned.

  “Please escort our new visitors to the wardroom, Markie,” the ambient voice continued.

  Spanich nearly choked. No one called flash brass by a nickname, not like that. Not even other flash brass. From the look of him, much like a man swallowing a live eel, the Intendant-General was no less surprised.

  “Of course,” he said, his voice in the perfect equilibrium that his facial expression had failed to retain.

  Austen groaned again. Spanich was beginning to mightily regret bringing the kid, and was already thinking hard about ways to get out of this alive and free.

  The wardroom hatch slid open. Where the passageway had been utilitarian—hookfabric carpet, grab bars, emergency stations every five meters; all the usual details of space travel—the wardroom was astonishing in its simple, almost terrible luxury.

  A pond. A pond, on a starship. These people weren’t just wealthy, they were insane. The little pool of black water was walled around with rock, filled by a bamboo pipe serving as a fountain. The floor was pebbled like raked gravel, though Spanich’s engineering eye noted that was a texture, not half a ton of loose stone ready to break free in the event of a grav failure. The walls were of some woven reed matting, while the ceiling was draped with a rough, undyed fabric.

  All highly illegal, according to any safety standards he’d ever been lectured about. Illegal, unsafe . . .

  Next to the pond was a low black lacquer table aggressively simple in its lines. A woman knelt behind it, her robes a coarse, raw fabric that almost matched the ceiling. She had an air of extreme age about her—not like the Befores, those crazed, dangerous immortals everyone whispered about, that Spanich had even met one once—but more like an ordinary person who’d lived an extraordinarily long time with very good medical care.

  And eyes like hull-cutting lasers. Eyes that happened to be the same pale violet as Austen’s.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Spanich knew where the Mare Imbrium thirteen shipmind had modeled its voice from. In those velvet tones, he could hear the armies march at a word, feel the bar emptying for a fight to the last man standing. He had to force himself not to kneel.

  Austen did go down on one knee. So did Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome. The Adjutant-Intendant gave Spanich a glance which should have fried skin off his bones.

  What the hells was he missing here?

  “He can be forgiven because he does not know,” the woman said.

  The voice again. And her scent, in this room as subtle as atomized lubricant moving through an air duct. She and Austen were of a—

  He broke off the thought, staring at the kid in horror.

  “Mother,” Austen finally said in a low voice so unlike his usual attitude that if the words had not come out of his mouth, Spanich wouldn’t have known.

  “Tranh Shankakini Clovis McVail Austen deLacey sub-Rachman sub-Nagona,” she replied.

  Somewhere in that welter of flash brass name, Spanich picked out the kid. He’d been fucking a runaway, and from the length of the name, one of the highest-placed runaways possible. How had the kid managed to seem so normal, instead of gene-modded to hell and gone like the Adjutant-Intendant?

  Austen bowed so low his head almost touched the floor.

  Clovis, thought Spanich. She’d said Clovis. He nearly shit himself. These people were Imperial family! There should have been a battalion outside the lock, not two bored station troopers.

  No wonder the Adjutant-Intendant had been glaring him to death. Clumsy, shivering, clammy with sweat, Spanich dropped to one knee as well.

  “Mare Imbrium tells me that you are working to set her drive to rights, Domitian Spanich.”

  “Ma’am. I’m . . . ” He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t qualified to work on a starship carrying members of the Imperial family.

  The shipmind spoke. “There is nothing wrong with my drives, Engineering Supervisor Spanich. But I thank you for your work.”

  “All a ruse, I am afraid.” Austen’s mother smiled at him. He was ready to lay himself at her feet if she’d just do it again. “Necessary to keep us in port without question while certain rumors were . . . traced.”

  Spanich glanced over at Austen. The kid was pressed to the floor, his voice a whisper when he asked, “Why tell me now?”

  “So you would understand what must happen to you next,” she replied, her voice now steel-hard. Austen took a sharp breath, then fell completely silent. The Adjutant-Intendant moved slightly, still on his right knee but shifting his weight in preparation for action.

  In that moment, Spanich’s future became very narrow and very short. He stood, shaking off the spell of that voice, and reached slowly for his toolbag. Austen’s mother nodded slightly at the Adjutant-Intendant, who then spoke, his voice harsh. “What are you doing, Engineering Supervisor Spanich?”

  The words slipped out of him like bullets dropping from an open clip. “Preparing to die like a man.” Truly, he had no idea.

  “Mother,”
Austen said, his voice so low it was almost a squeak.

  She gave Olivez Marquessa Inanometriano Parkinson sub-Ngome another significant look. Spanich took his cue and swung the toolbag hard, letting the strap pay out so fifteen kilos of metal and ballistic cloth took the bastard right in the temple. Two dozen generations of exquisite germline engineering dropped to the floor like a stunned drunk.

  “Guess you’ll have to kill me yourself,” Spanich said, breathing hard. Austen was splayed flat on deck, hiccuping or laughing or crying or something. “Or is it Princess?”

  “Is this how a man dies?” she asked, deceptively conversational.

  “Yes.” Spanich tried to catch up to his adrenaline, slow himself down. “On his feet, fighting for his life.”

  “Don’t,” moaned Austen.

  “Do you care for this man?” his mother asked, curiosity filling her voice. Spanich let the bag swing on its strap, but she ignored the makeshift weapon utterly.

  “No.” Austen whimpered, practically embracing the floor. Then, “Yes. No.”

  Her gaze met Spanich’s again, and he wondered how he’d ever confused this woman for human.

  “I’m very sorry, Engineering Supervisor Spanich, but my son does not seem to be speaking up for you.”

  He expected to be shot in the back, but the hatch continued to fail to open, and hordes of guards bristling with armament did not leap into the room. “I can speak for myself, ma’am. I’m as much a citizen as you or he.”

  “Then go.” Her voice was almost a whisper now.

  “Just like that?” Spanich blurted.

  “Who would believe your story?” A laugh was hidden in her words somewhere.

  On impulse, he reached down and grabbed at Austen’s shoulder without taking his eye off the old woman. “You coming, kid?”

  “I—”

  She interrupted. “My son is not free to go.”

  Feckless impulse rose inside of Spanich on a red wave of anger. “He’s a citizen, too.”

  The Adjutant-Intendant groaned, then stirred.

  Austen’s mother glanced at the man, then turned her attention back. “Walk away, Engineering Supervisor Spanich, with your unbelievable story. You’ve won that much in standing up to authority. Take your life and go.”