Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  “Hartham to Fall Island,” she told him, referring to the point of the border on a direct path between those two. Hartham on the Cutter side, Fall Island and Illiya on the other, in Bone territory. “Border stations are far apart there, on account of the storm center. We’ll pass through the cloud just to be sure.”

  Tisker threw his head back and laughed. Colder than his usual good humor, but it was an improvement. “And let Wind Sabre be struck by lightning. You are aimed to meet a god, aren’t you?”

  “It’s not a problem. We’ve made the run before.” She turned around, unwilling to let his judgment attach itself to her back. How many questions did she have to tolerate on account of the fortune in coin sitting right there in the room? “All comes down to the skill of the pilot, doesn’t it?”

  Tisker went silent.

  Sophie was busy examining the wood grain of the tabletop, but she managed a coy smile. “Saw a mermaid in the clouds, once.”

  Tisker tossed the gold bar onto the center of the table. It landed with a single clomp against the wood, then rolled until the uneven end where he cut it stopped its momentum. “Well, Cap, you know I’m game for anything reckless. Border run sounds like a straight good laugh, and I’d like to meet your old drinking buddy.”

  Sure, now that their share of a million presscoins is in question, everyone’s suddenly in line again. But she’d take it. She would never admit it to them, but this wasn’t something she wanted to do on her own.

  “Sophie?”

  “Will the aliens fly with us?”

  Talis shook her head. “We’re escort. Them in their ship, us on ours.”

  “So we won’t get to talk to them much, then?”

  Talis laughed involuntarily, thrown off her prepared arguments by the unexpected question. “You want to get your hands on their tech, you sly imp.”

  The girl’s freckled nose wrinkled above her smile. “It crossed my mind.”

  “I’ll see if they’ll give us one of their language pads. Or two, maybe, in case you can’t put the first back together again. In the morning you can even climb aboard their ship with me.”

  There was only Dug left to voice actual assent. She looked to him. The vote, if there was such a thing, was three to his one if he dissented. As first mate, though, his word had more heft than an equal part. If he backed out of it, the younger Cutters would balk. He’d opened the door to making the run but hadn’t formally thrown his lot in. If he refused, she didn’t know if she could go through with it.

  Chapter 17

  Dug took a deep breath through his nose that inflated his chest, and let it out again in a slow exhale.

  “You have already decided, Captain?” The words were a quiet rumble, a tone he reserved for his enemies.

  She sat back down, returned the plate to her setting, and pulled her chair closer to the table so that she could lean on her elbows. “Yeah, I have.”

  Dug moved for the food. Scooped rice and vegetables onto his plate, topped the mound with a cluster of skewered meat. Slower than she had. But then, his anger always did burn lower and longer than hers. Then he stood, with the serving in his hands.

  “Someone should keep watch up top. Captain.”

  He left the galley.

  Talis took a deep breath. It hadn’t been insubordination. Quite the opposite. He’d deferred to her judgment, even though she knew he might have argued to the point of bloody knuckles. He obeyed his captain. She felt unease settle like a chill between her shoulder blades.

  Sophie spoke when Talis did not. “Should someone—”

  “He’ll be fine.” Talis cut Sophie off. “Come on. Food’s getting cold.”

  The three of them ate in silence until Tisker broke the tension with a wisecrack comment and Sophie joined in his banter. The atmosphere of the room brightened again as the two talked about the aliens. They made deliberately ignorant suppositions about their strange anatomy and culture, laughing until their eyes teared up. When that played out, Sophie pontificated, for a long rambling stretch, about how their ship worked.

  Talis had meant to ask Sophie more about the designs, whether the planks of an airship could be similarly fitted and sealed to make safer salvage dives, but found herself unable to pay attention. She sat in her own fog. Wanted to go talk to Dug about the border crossing, about taking aliens to meet his goddess. But she knew her friend had walked off because he needed to be alone. So be it.

  For a bit. She wouldn’t let him stew too long.

  Dug was sitting on the starboard engine house when Talis climbed topside to find him an hour later, carrying a honeyed ginger and turmeric tea as a peace offering. She’d left Sophie and Tisker to wrap up the substantial leftovers, trusting them to stay busy long enough to allow her a private word.

  He accepted the tea with a silent nod, and she hoisted herself up beside him. The space between them thrummed with potential. The right words could cut through and reach him, but she had to pick them carefully.

  “I didn’t take the decision lightly,” she started, but winced at her voice. She sounded pitiful.

  “No, the coffer was quite heavy.”

  She leaned against the engine house. The metal was warm, still, in the cooling air of the docking bay. “Come on, Dug, give me a break. That money takes care of everything. Think of a life with that kind of wealth. No more of this running.”

  “I like this life.”

  That was a lie. It wasn’t the life he wanted and they both knew it. He’d had a wife once, a stunning young Bone woman named Inda, as fierce as he was, and every bit as passionate. They’d started a family. One tiny, wobbling son that lit a fire in Dug’s eyes like nothing else ever had.

  But he was torn between the promise of settling down and the old adventuring buddy that talked him into job after job with her. Goaded him into an easy smuggling run. And while they were off transporting ridiculous harlequin rag dolls stuffed with contraband across the border into Rakkar skies, a Cutter raid left his town in smoldering ashes. Everything they’d found out since pointed to the Veritors.

  He lost Inda. His son. Their home. His future. And in a drunken, grief-fueled rage, he’d destroyed much of what remained of his town. Talis had pulled him down from the stockade where they’d left him to be picked clean by the ravens, and he’d been bound to her fate ever since. That weighed hard on every decision she made.

  She couldn’t give him back the future he’d lost, but she never stopped trying to make a new one for him.

  “Worrying about a growling stomach, busted engines, and an empty cargo hold? It isn’t a life, Dug.”

  He didn’t reply, just stared down into the swirls of spice circling in his mug.

  “Cutter skies are cramped. You knew we’d go back someday.”

  A small nod to that.

  “Oh, come on, Dug. Talk to me. Yell at me. Something.”

  “Captain, what do you expect me to say? The contract is taken, agreed upon. The job is good. Sure to be as simple as you say it will be. Onaya Bone won’t like it, but as you pointed out, her pleasure is not one of the terms of the arrangement.”

  He still wouldn’t look at her. Whatever he had in his sights was far away and long ago. The tea was almost out of steam.

  “Say what’s on your mind. Get it out. Let’s have it and move on, all right?”

  “You know what thoughts I have on my mind, Captain.”

  “Enough with the ‘Captain’ scrap, Dug. This is me. Do I have to take you drinking to get you to talk?”

  He turned to her, and she saw that his eyes were reddened around the edges. His lips were parted but he had no words.

  The docking bay doors rumbled into life, a complex system of chain winches and worn-tooth gears connected to a control panel outside the dock manager’s office. The enormous hatch panels clattered in protest, making an obscene amount of noise as th
ey rolled out of the way for some new arrival outside. While she waited for the din to subside, she lost herself to the same memories that were haunting her friend.

  She slumped her shoulders. “Dug, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened. If I hadn’t—”

  “That is not what this is about.”

  “Isn’t it? Maybe going home will be good for you.”

  “It is no longer home for me. What might have been left for me there, I destroyed myself.”

  He put a hand on his knee, stretched the elbow straight, and rotated the arm. The old scars crisscrossed from forearm to shoulder, obscuring the tattoo that had been there first. The crossing scars extended down his back, too. Unlike the parallel marks over his eye, they had not been earned in combat.

  He’d been tied up, flayed. Punished for the havoc he’d caused, the dishonor of it. If he’d gone off and found the actual killers, he’d have been a hero. But he was on that run with Talis, and the ashes had cooled before he even learned of the attack. The only force to fight was the entirety of the Cutter Imperial Service, and he wasn’t going to win that one all on his own.

  Talis had cut him down off the scaffold in the middle of the night, half-dragged him back to their ship. She didn’t give a rusted coin about letting him stay on public display to redeem his honor via a silent death. Her friend was hurting, inside and out. So she took him with her, patched him up, and now he lived among his enemies. Any Cutter might be a Veritor. Might be responsible for his family’s death. Every fight was an outlet for his old pain.

  After that night, he hadn’t spoken for weeks. She didn’t blame him for having nothing to say to her. The violence near Dug’s home island had been threatening to burst for years, and she told him the war he wanted would still be waiting for him when he got home.

  Gods-rotted rag dolls stuffed with gods-rotted alchemical powders for gods-rotted Rakkar scientists in a rush to blow themselves up practicing their gods-rotted forbidden experiments.

  Talis had been trying to make it up to him ever since. How didn’t matter. She got a new ship with different contours so he’d never have to see the same bulkheads or the lift balloons that had taken him away from his family that last time. New crew. Anything she could think of was worth trying.

  And now she was taking him back to that world. Fall Island was far from his old home, but he’d be among his own people for the first time in years. Those old scars were long healed but would forever mark him as a pariah. They were a death sentence among any tribe.

  “You’ll keep watch over Wind Sabre while we’re at Fall Island,” she said, deciding. “Anyone tries anything, you’re the only one who can hold them off.”

  He exhaled a cold, quick breath of mirthless laughter. “True. None will approach me.”

  She cursed herself with an exasperated chuff. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  He took a gulp of the tea, swished it in his cheeks before swallowing, then ran his tongue over his teeth to clear the undissolved spices. When he spoke, there was a strain to his voice that was unlikely to have been caused by any dregs of tea in his throat. “I know, Talis.”

  She nodded. Afraid to say anything else careless, she just sat with him.

  She could leave it at that for now. The guilt would settle back into its usual place soon enough. One day she’d make it up to him. But today she was asking more of her friend than she had any right to.

  After they’d been silent awhile, Tisker came up to collect his plate, and Sophie to take over the watch on deck. So they’d been listening from below. Talis waved a hand at Sophie’s attempts to send her off to bed.

  “This one’s on me, Soph,” she said. “We’re leaving at the first touch of gold, before Hankirk decides to make a move. Take some money from the coffer. Get our refuel moved up to priority. Tisker got you that part you asked for, and don’t forget what you owe him for that. Get back here fast and put it where it belongs. Tisker: prep what you can. If there’s anything we haven’t loaded on, get me a list and I’ll see it filled by breakfast. When you’re done with that, you’ve got my leave to go see if you can buy back any of what you sold. But don’t give me time to wonder if you got lost.”

  The pair scurried off to carry out the orders. They’d been reasonable, after all. If one could focus on just the next step, and the next… Talis turned back to her brooding first mate.

  “I do need you on this one, Dug.”

  He stayed where he was for a short while but said nothing else. A solid dark silhouette against the too-yellow light of the docks. Talis didn’t try to push him. After a minute, he slipped off the engine block and went below without a word. The drafts coming in through the open bay swept in from where he’d been sitting. Shivering, she pulled up her collar and tended her watch.

  As Talis monitored the activity on the docks, her mind offered up anxious thoughts. She tracked any movement. She wouldn’t sleep until they were out of there. Couldn’t have even if she wanted.

  Across the multi-tiered levels of the bay, workers moved crates, refueled tanks, and loaded supplies. They would work through the night. Machinery hummed and clunked. The bay doors moved up and down for a few more ships, both arriving and leaving. Hydraulics whined and systems banged away at their tasks. The movements were the business of an insect hive. Everyone with a job, everyone moving, not wasting time. It was the normal pulse of Subrosa, nothing out of the ordinary. She felt the tension in her sinews start to let up.

  But then there was a prickle on her neck. A lone, still figure caught her eye. Two levels above, on the promenade of a dockside bar. Hankirk sat at a small table overlooking the docks. Watching her.

  Chapter 18

  It was a long night. Though Sophie came back to relieve Talis of her watch just after midnight, there was no rest to be had. She had supplies to restock and angry suppliers who didn’t like to be rushed, even if they ran their businesses straight through the night for customers just like her. She agreed to more priority fees getting tacked onto her account than she’d have tolerated if she had the energy to argue.

  All the while, Hankirk was up there. Doing nothing. The nothing was worse than an outright attack.

  Talis tried to catch an hour of sleep once all the deliveries had been arranged and there was little else she could do until they arrived. The end of Sophie’s watch toned on the ship-wide comms. Talis heard light conversation outside her cabin: Dug taking over, Sophie bidding him goodnight.

  She spent an hour pretending there was any hope of falling asleep, but the menace of the nothing pervaded the quiet of her cabin until it finally drove her out of bed. She selected a new pair of pants from the drawer beneath her bunk, because the previous day’s clothes were smudged with dirt and needed beating, potentially washing. She slid into a short, sleeveless shift that she could wear beneath her clothes later that day and then padded, barefoot, to the galley. The earthy scent of coffee led her to a full pot on the hob, the steel carafe still hot. Freshly brewed.

  “Peace offering?”

  Talis whirled around at the unexpected voice. Sophie stood in the galley access, one hand clutching the other wrist in front of her hips. Her face, streaked with coal dust, was uncomfortably formed into a questioning smile. But her eyes were still guarded. Defiant.

  “Huh,” said Talis. She was exhausted, stretched too thin, not sure she could be trusted to speak. Anxiety hadn’t put her in any better a mood than the last time she and Sophie had faced off in the galley. She swallowed against the memory of the words they’d exchanged and the acid it brought up in her throat.

  Sophie brushed past her, fetched two ceramic mugs out of the cupboard near the stove, and poured them each a cup of the steaming bitter drink. Talis lowered herself to the padded bench along the bulkhead, taking Tisker’s seat rather than her own at the head of the half-folded table. Across from where Dug and Sophie usually sat. It had the second-best vie
w of the door, which made her feel slightly less cornered.

  There was no sign of the previous night’s dinner. The manifests were out, a pen neatly tucked into its inkwell nearby. Talis picked up the book and skimmed the log. As she’d trusted, Tisker and Sophie had it covered. Sophie’s barely legible handwriting inventoried the engine part. Tisker’s tiny print recorded the fuel, water, groceries, and sundries taken on. Talis saw that a couple of the deliveries she’d arranged herself had already arrived and been put away. She took a deep breath.

  Sophie sat and picked up the pen. Talis pushed the log book back over. Sophie made a couple of quick marks next to a line item, noting the locations in the hold where the crates had been stored.

  Talis loved when Wind Sabre was fully stocked, but the weight created drag. She chewed her lip. Suddenly she was feeling as though they would need to run. With the ship’s belly hanging low in the skies, she felt vulnerable. At least their only new cargo was the Yu’Nyun payment. But that only made her want to fly faster. There were no secrets in Subrosa.

  Sophie finished her notations, fanned a hand over the wet ink for a moment, then pushed the book aside. Her right hand gripped her coffee mug, and she picked at the edge of the table with the thumbnail of her left.

  “Listen, Captain,” she started.

  “Stow it,” Talis said. “I’ve had no sleep, and I don’t want to start that again.”

  She raised the mug to her lips. The liquid was still too hot, but she didn’t want to be seen hesitating in any decisions in front of Sophie just now, so she let the coffee burn her tongue and then lowered the mug back to the table without reacting.

  Sophie took the pause as leave to keep going. “I need to apologize. To you. I already did to Tisker.”

  Talis thought of the logbook. Entries made in two different pens. The last line Sophie had entered was the engine part; only the price was in Tisker’s hand.