Learning the Hard Way 3

by H. P. Caledon

  An egbrasil stood out pretty easily. Even from a distance, Keelan could see the large pores in the skin, looking like green freckles against the light skin. No hair, but thin tentacles... bristly-things, in that case, were fixated into something he’d seen human women tie their hair into. When the egbrasil turned, he saw that it was a male, because the chest bone went down in a point. In the females of the species, their chest bone ended higher, and Keelan guessed it was to make room for offspring in a female’s stomach. Not that he knew enough about their anatomy to simply conclude that by thinking how human women carried a child.

  Danny emerged from his work when Mundurra called him, and then everything went fast. Danny ran between four computers and three racks. He ordered Keelan around to carry hardware to and fro and to move other things around. The tempo of the room was boiling, which suited Keelan better than just sitting still and observing.

  “When did you plan on eating?” Keelan asked when Danny’s stomach growled angrily. Keelan’s stomach had already complained for an hour.

  Danny looked up briefly. “Order from the slaves.” He then returned to his work.

  Keelan sought out a slave, which was easy since they were mostly humans, and the pirates were mostly species. He waved the slave over, ordered food and drinks, and waited. The slave brought food for both Keelan and Danny, and Keelan had to poke Danny once in a while to remind him to take a bite.

  Sometime later, Keelan glanced at his crono, only to realize they’d been there for almost thirteen hours. Danny didn’t seem to notice the passage of time.

  People began whooping around the room as the phases were declared complete. Danny ended his work and jumped around with his arms over his head, singing a song naughtier than any Keelan had ever heard.

  Danny collapsed in a chair next to Keelan and smiled.

  “And... what happened?” Keelan asked.

  “All the bounty hunters and mercenaries we found on our ass... their accounts are now empty. Four ships have been called in for system verification check due to safety reasons, and two are not allowed any landing because we changed their verification codes to that of long route ferries. And we mucked up their personnel lists, too.”

  Keelan snorted. “Did you save a list of who you took what from?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because one of them is on our side. If we steal from him, he might not stay on our side.”

  “I saved the account info, but he has to experience it so he can talk to the others when they start complaining. Didn’t touch his ship, either. Let him think it’s because his security is up to date. We’ll send him a message that his credits are safe and that he’ll be paid back from our forty percent cut. I’m gonna have to cover what Verion looses on that. You’re expensive sex, but worth it.” Danny grinned, getting that devil-may-care look in his eyes. A more tired devil, though.

  Keelan smiled.

  Aclimes came over, smiling. “Very good job.”

  “And now I need to sleep,” Danny said, yawning his way through half the sentence.

  “How long do you need to work on the trap?”

  “I have to be able to think clearly again, but I have an idea. Hopefully, the colors will help me in my dreams.”

  Aclimes nodded, and Keelan thought the wrinkled species looked envious.

  “Verion will transfer the sixty percent when we leave you again,” Danny said, yawning again.

  Aclimes nodded.

  “Can we look at the new ship tomorrow?” Keelan asked.

  “Yes. Are you the one to approve that part of the deal?” Aclimes asked.

  “No, that would be the mercenary. My specialty lies elsewhere.”

  “Yes, I understood as much,” Aclimes said, but Keelan couldn’t figure out the expression or what it meant. If he’d understood Keelan to say that his specialty was to end lives quickly and brutally, then that smile could mean one of two things. Aclimes either felt threatened, or he simply acknowledged it as a fact.

  Right then Keelan didn’t care which the case was—as long as it made Aclimes stay on Keelan’s good side.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sleep eluded Mike, and the longer Keelan and Danny were gone the more he tossed and turned. He had to have fallen asleep at some point, though, because he awoke with a start, and his first thought was to listen for Misery’s voice. But it was just Keelan and Danny whispering, so he got out of bed and joined them.

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine, but we need to call—”

  Danny elbowed Keelan. “A few friends,” Danny finished and gave Keelan a pointy stare.

  “What’s the plan, maestro?” Mike asked and suppressed a yawn.

  “I need to write a program,” Danny said, looking at Mike, who felt naked under his stare. He probably should have worn more than briefs if he hoped to avoid that look from Danny. Mike cleared his throat, and Danny diverted his gaze from Mike’s naked torso.

  “Go shower,” Keelan urged Danny.

  “Okay, but who’s gonna scrub my back?”

  “You can ask the silver slave to do it,” Mike said.

  Danny pouted theatrically and went into the bathroom alone.

  “You’re learning.” Keelan smiled and kicked off his boots. He then looked past Mike and nodded.

  Mike turned to find the silver slave standing ten feet away.

  “You asked me to come?”

  “Do you need anything?” Mike asked Keelan.

  “I can get my own soup.”

  “That would be rude. Would you make two cups and prepare for a third?”

  “Yes.” She turned to leave.

  “Oh, and you can make a cup for yourself, too, if you’d like,” Mike said. The slave turned to face him and bowed her head. Mike thought he’d seen a smile before she left them.

  “Why is it rude to be able to do things yourself?”

  “Because we’ve been given a slave to serve us during our stay. That’s something only honorary guests get,” Mike explained as he took a seat on the couch.

  “Okay. Where’s Misery?”

  “Asleep.”

  “Yeah, what room?” Keelan motioned toward the four doors, and Mike pointed.

  * * * *

  Keelan eased the door open to Misery’s room and looked at her. She was sleeping soundly, and it made Keelan smile. He’d always thought it a luxury when Danny felt safe enough to sleep heavily in Irgang. That Misery, even on a pirate ship, could sleep through him looking in on her had to mean he’d done something right. And Mike, because he was the one who’d looked after her all day.

  Entering the room, Keelan knelt next to the bed. She was wearing one of his t-shirts again. Her clothes were on the chair, and next to it stood her bag. Mike and she had to have emptied the ship for their last unpacked belongings.

  Misery opened her eyes and looked at him. Then she smiled and closed them again. Keelan reached out to stroke her hair before leaning in to kiss her forehead.

  Yeah, he’d done something right.

  Mike was sitting on the couch when Keelan returned. The slave had placed two cups of soup on the table, so he sat next to Mike and took the other cup.

  “We emptied the ship,” Mike said.

  “Yeah, I saw.”

  “What kind of program is Danny supposed to write?”

  “Ask him.” Keelan drank from the cup. Mike just nodded and drank from his own.

  Danny came in, rubbing a towel over his hair. He only had a towel wrapped around his waist as he collapsed in the armchair opposite and sighed heavily.

  “Soup?” he asked when he saw their cups.

  “Coming,” Mike said. A minute later, the slave placed a cup in front of Danny and stepped back, but waited. “We don’t need more from you tonight. You may retire.”

  “Thank you.” The slave left them.

  It struck Keelan that if Misery hadn’t been able to kill the collector, then it could have been her, standing there with a downcast glance and being but a she
ll of a human being, devoid of all personality. It would have been her reduced from an individual to a tool. But slaves were a phenomenon so normal in the Verion Four everyday picture that he had a hard time feeling bad about the woman’s destiny. That it could have been Misery made him contemplate that the woman once had a dad. He also wondered how far he would have gone if he’d found Misery as a silver slave, and found himself speculating about the faceless dad of the woman currently serving them. He then forced himself to think of something else by following Mike and Danny’s conversation about what they had spent the past fourteen hours doing.

  “What’s the program you have to write?” Mike asked.

  “That’s a deal between Aclimes and I, and it’ll remain that way,” Danny said.

  “Okay, just curious.”

  “Mm-hmm, and you get to stay that way,” Danny said, smiling.

  “Thanks,” Mike mumbled. “There’s a bag with clothes for you in your room. Last door.”

  “Thanks,” Danny said, but it didn’t look like he’d registered much. Fatigue had taken over, and his body functioned on muscle memory with not much thought process at all.

  Keelan woke from a sound and lay still, trying to identify the noise. He was sleeping in the room closest to the door because he slept the lightest. Prison mentality, or what Mike called a tuned survival instinct, was probably the reason. But the sounds didn’t come from the front door. It sounded like someone rummaging about in the apartment. He pulled his blade from under the bed and tiptoed into the living room.

  No one in sight. Focusing on the sounds, he placed them as coming from Danny’s room. For a moment, Keelan wondered if they were just private noises. The door stood ajar, and light shone onto the floor in the living room. Keelan made his way there to peek inside.

  Danny stood upright with a vacant expression and dead eyes while his fingers followed lines or drew pictograms in the air. In Irgang, Danny had once said that if they didn’t have to share a cell with Walter, then he preferred to sleep naked.

  It wasn’t until that moment Keelan understood how extensive the tattoo on Danny’s body really was. He couldn’t see one piece of skin where the tattoo seemed broken or unfinished. Even his uncut penis was tattooed.

  The oily colors seemed alive in the dim light, but it didn’t seem like it was the light that made the colors swim within invisible contour lines.

  Suddenly Danny spoke, but it was in a language Keelan didn’t understand. He rattled off a rant of technical lingo so low Keelan could barely hear him. Then he put his hand on the pad and swayed drunkenly. Finally, Danny climbed into bed, turned off the light, and shuffled under the cover.

  Keelan stayed in the doorway for several minutes, listening to Danny’s breathing, and he was fast asleep. Keelan returned to bed, too.

  * * * *

  Since early childhood, Mike had loved being the first person up. He was used to it. Until he met Keelan, who never seemed to sleep, Mike hadn’t had anyone to compete with. Finding Danny sitting on the couch typing away on a memo pad was not something Mike had expected, because the young man was about as punctual as a broken crono.

  Danny looked up, but he definitely didn’t see Mike. His fingers followed something in the air while the other hand kept writing.

  “Good morning.” Misery passed him on her way to the bathroom door. She pulled the handle, finding the door locked. “Damn,” she muttered and shuffled back to her room.

  Keelan exited the bathroom a minute later.

  “Your turn.”

  “Actually, that was Misery,” Mike said, content to wait and watch Danny work. Keelan nodded and went to get her.

  “Forget him, he’s unreachable. Already tried.” Keelan tossed something through his door in the direction of the bed.

  Danny looked up at Keelan. “I have to write the program today, but I can’t write it here. Do you want to come again?”

  “Preferably, but I’d also like to look at ships with Mike and Misery.”

  “We can do that first,” Danny said. “Gives me time to think of this detail.” Danny slid into his own world as he continued—the last of his sentence being less and less comprehendible. “Gotta talk to Mundurra, that code... ”

  Mike gave up trying as Danny had returned to muttering and drawing in the air. “Did you feed the slave?” he asked Keelan.

  “She knows where the food is.”

  “But she probably won’t eat without permission, as the slave rules state.” Mike walked toward the kitchen. “Come to me.”

  The slave exited the kitchen and stopped three feet from Mike.

  “We would like breakfast served. When we’ve eaten and you’ve cleared the table, then make something for yourself. Something you like.”

  “Yes.” The slave smiled and withdrew.

  “Something she likes?” Keelan asked. “You think she’d make something she doesn’t like?”

  “You never know what she’s been ordered to do, so we might as well spoil her rotten. We have no idea what her days are like.”

  “Aha,” Keelan grunted and plopped down on a chair.

  For someone who’d grown up on a planet with slaves everywhere, Keelan sure didn’t know jack about how to keep one. Again, the differences between their upbringings stood clear to Mike. His family hadn’t been rich enough to own a slave, but he’d still known about the slave rules from a friend’s household, and not just the varanuides next door.

  When Aclimes came to collect them a few hours later, the tempo through the tubular halls was slow enough for Mike to take in more of the details of the many symbols. They went into what looked like a newer part of the ship, where the symbols only adorned the top of walls that were more square. He still couldn’t recognize any of them, but he found them fascinating and wondered about their conception.

  Aclimes showed them to a dock next to the one they’d been caught in. Their Hunter had been moved there, and Mike glanced around at the other ships.

  “Find one you like,” Aclimes said.

  Mike noticed Keelan feeling the side panels of a ship’s landing module. It had definitely seen better days.

  “Is this the one?” Misery asked.

  “Junkbucket, definitely not,” Mike mumbled.

  Keelan looked at him.

  “Okay, look and learn,” Mike continued. “Sharp four, four, two, the newest model is a four, nine, four and has stronger cell shields and three more clusters of star jump cells. And remembering the last time I tried teaching you this, you now get fifteen minutes before I come back and you go through a pre-launch visual checkup for me.”

  “Okay.” Keelan walked to the rear of the ship.

  “You could practice by taking Misery through it.”

  She smiled and followed Keelan while Mike continued down the line of ships. Aclimes followed while Danny stayed behind, finding someplace to sit.

  “You sound like a picky one to trade with,” Aclimes noted.

  “With the ship you get in trade, I have every reason to be,” Mike said.

  “Oh, we usually don’t trade with the people we take in.”

  Mike turned to face him. “But you won’t short deal a Techno Chiromancer.”

  Aclimes did not seem pleased with Mike’s statement. “Have you seen him work?”

  “I have.”

  “So you know what he can do.”

  Mike nodded while eying a ship that could make the list of possible trade-ins, because even with a Chiromancer in the details of the deal, there was no question that the trade would be in the favor of the pirates. He memorized the lot number and moved on, still trailing Aclimes.

  “I was wondering something. You don’t have to answer, of course, but... how long have you existed?” Mike asked.

  Aclimes chuckled and continued another ten steps before he stopped to run his hand over the hull of a ship. “How long does the military think we have existed?”

  “Five to ten years. But this ship is older,” Mike noted, looking at the internal st
ructure of the dock. Not that it in any way looked old or worn.

  “What do you know of us?” Aclimes asked.

  “Nothing other than you’re pirates.”

  “What does the military know of us?”

  “You expect me to tell you that?” Mike smiled at the wrinkled captain.

  “You are curious, I am curious. You didn’t expect answers from me without giving any in return, did you?”

  A long pause followed.

  “They know you’re technologically superior. You dominate the black market.”

  “Technologically superior, yes.” Aclimes looked around. “This ship, for example, is a part of the technology. Some of it, anyway. Other aspects are learned since.”

  “Wow, and here I grew up with my granddad’s stories of pirates with wooden legs, sailing the seven seas, who hid golden treasures and made treasure maps where X marked the spot at the end of a dotted line.”

  Aclimes laughed loudly, the booming sound ending in little gurgling ones.

  “We have a treasure, as you call it, but the map is not drawn, and there is no X marking a spot for anyone to dig.” Aclimes stopped and looked at Mike. “Does the military have any idea where we hide?”

  “No one does, and you know that. Four Spec Edit ships looked for two months in the Desolate System, but no one found even a trace of you.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Is your treasure gold?”

  “Only humans are obsessed with gold. Every species has its own idea of value. This ship is a mixed crew, yet we all have the same idea of value. Our treasure is to protect it. Or protect others from it, I’m not quite sure.”

  “It? The ship?”

  The captain looked at Mike, amused before shaking his head. “Do you like to read, merc?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your favorite story?”

  “One that hasn’t been written down. My granddad told it, and I think he made it up, because every other year when we were on vacation, more was added to it.”

  “Did you get the ending?”