by A. D. Bloom
"Are you going to teach me to fence?"
"Fuck, no. I'm going to teach you about twinge."
"What's twin-" She cut him off as she floated forwards quick as lightning and smacked him on the shoulder with the flat of the blade. Even through the shirt she hit hard enough to make a loud smack. "Ow!"
"Yes. Ow, indeed. I bet that hurt." She only had to glide forward at him a millimeter this time to produce an instinctive rush of fear and alarm that started behind his balls and spread outwards like a little wave of panic. "You were expecting to get hit. You feel that little rush of fear that went through you? I sure did. That was the half-second when you maybe felt something like a flash through your nervous system."
There was no warning before the next strike. She knocked his sword aside and before the ringing in his ears even started, the blow came down on the other side this time, slapping and bruising his flesh. She lunged without striking then and the fiery flood of fear was there again, just like she'd said.
"Now we can train you out of the fear, but it's really useful to illustrate the twinge, the alarm reaction you're having whenever you see me move now."
"So you can enjoy smacking me?"
"No, you idiot, the alarm reaction is the same no matter how a person feels threatened. You're expecting pain. A man cheating on his wife might produce that same twinge of internal alarm if you said the name of his mistress in front of him."
"So it's fear?"
"Not always. Sometimes it's more subtle. Sometimes people twinge with sudden interest at the mention of something and you can feel it almost like that wave of fear. It's like a little electrical storm of alarm up and down the nervous system, but it can express perceived significance or worry. It's not always alarm and fear."
"How am I supposed to sense that in somebody else?"
"You already do. Here, I'll show you. Normally I try to keep a quiet mind, but I'm going to let myself enjoy this. You see if you can predict when I strike. If you get it right, I won't hit you."
That made him feel like a dog, but there wasn't time for protest before the next slapping blow came, this time to his thigh. "Son of a-"
"Didn't feel my anticipation? Try and clear away the fear. Look for a little version of that feeling I produced in you but it won't be alarm I'm exuding."
"Now?"
"Nope." The next blow came and went and he honestly couldn't feel anything but his own flinching until just after she knocked the sword aside and her thin body glided forward. Between that moment and the moment when the blow fell, she gave off something he could feel. "I need you to forget the subject and feel the medium," she told him.
"Huh?"
"Close your eyes, Samhain."
"I don't think so."
"They're not helping you much right now, are they? Trust me."
Samhain returned his sword to the ready position and closed his eyes. He suddenly remembered the uncanny period before he woke on the transport because the same way the shapes had glimmered in the void there, something now called attention to itself in the darkness around him. It was a twinge just like the one he'd felt in himself. He knew the alarm was hers when the darkness seemed to part, and surrounding the both of them he sensed what he could only describe as four storms of burning intent. "Four," he said. He opened his eyes to see she'd already lowered her sword.
"That's right. They’re here. Four ships. Let's get those exosuits on."
"Who is it?"
"You bloody well know. The pirates. Devlin's Privateers."
The starry blackness over the hull of the Andrea Laguna looked empty. "They're stealthed."
Scilla opened the trunks that contained their suits. "I won't travel without one." She verified all parts were present and accounted for. "Check yours. It's the same standard issue Staas Company suit you're used to with a tougher skin. Same size as your last."
The first time he looked inside, he couldn't see it because the skin absorbed so much light. "What was wrong with my last suit?"
"It was full of tracking devices and dangerously crufty Staas software. That one can take a bit of enemy fire as well. It's fully charged."
When her eyes went to the window, he looked too and saw the first of them. The Otherworld corsair was made of parts meant for other ships assembled around a spine. The only armored section came from an old UNS frigate. The figures moving in the windows of the bridge looked as close as the people staring up and pointing in the casino and the restaurants and the crystal promenade, now in the shadow of the intruder. She carried three full railgun blocks, two batteries on the bow and one aft. Multiple, hand-loaded torpedo launch tubes had been set along the spine. N-space energy shunting panels set on struts faced outwards in all directions, welded to the exterior hull of every module. "I've seen that ship before," he said.
Two more pirate vessels appeared to port and starboard, both of them covered in energy shunts like the first and both raft-frame designs like the old junks from the first days of the war, but bigger. The Shediri-made vessel looked to be well-armed. He counted at least twelve batteries facing them from four ships, and all of them appeared clearly aimed at the bridge of the Andrea Laguna atop the tower.
The transmission he heard came over local suit comms and the ship's own squack, emanating from the hidden audio transducers used for ship's announcements that had now been hijacked somehow. "Andrea Laguna, Andrea Laguna. Do not deviate from present course and speed. We're not here to rob you. We're only only here for one man. He knows who he is. He can meet us at your main launch bay. If anyone is fool enough to give the order to shoot at us, we'll kill them first when we blow your bridge off your tower. Andrea Laguna, do you copy?"
He and Scilla stared into the guns until the voice from the bridge finally spoke. "Unknown vessels, do not fire, do not fire. 1397 comms REQ, 1397 REQ and over."
The conversation switched to another frequency he couldn't hear, and shortly after that, the suite and every speaker on the ship rang with a sound that chilled him. The smooth and saccharine female voice of the customer service manager reached into his suite and said, "Mr. Martin Samhain please report to the customer service desk, please." His balls tingled at the sound of his own name in this context, and Scilla almost giggled as the rush of fear spread outwards through him.
"Remember that feeling," she said. "That is a classic fear twinge."
The passages and promenades of the Andrea Laguna were well-nigh deserted on the path from their suite to the customer service desk, actually a ring in its own rotunda just off the ship's reception area. Scilla walked at a brisk pace and pushed him forward when he slowed at the corners without meaning to. The plush carpet seemed to give under the sides of his booted feet so he felt like he teetered through the marquetry friezes of their section on the way to the lifts.
The doors slid open and her hand pushed at the small of his back. "They're not going to kill you," she said. Once the doors closed, the projectors kicked in and for almost ten, incongruous seconds, the elevator seemed to pass through the air over the Montague Resort on Otherworld while the figures on the pebbled beaches below looked up and waved and beckoned.
"How could you be so sure they'd come for me like this?"
"If you made it to Otherworld, Staas Intelligence wouldn't let you out of their sight. They'll have a pretty good chance of getting away clean this way."
The projection ended abruptly after the rise in unchecked inertial gees that told his body the descent was over. Once the doors opened, they found themselves staring down gun barrels. The 3 men that held them were security guards. They stepped back from the door of the lift to reveal a man he'd never seen before but who looked at him as if they'd met. "Please do come quietly, Mr. Samhain. We have no quarrel with your over-aggressive business associates."
"They're pirates, actually," said Scilla, to which the only reply was a polite grin.
"Please, Mr. Samhain. This way to the launch bay."
"We have luggage," she said.
&nb
sp; "Pardon me?"
"We have luggage. Nine pieces. They're all in cabin 51, E deck. I'd like them seen to the bay immediately."
"I'm not sure that's going to be possible."
"Don't you remember?" She said, "The pirates specifically demanded Mr. Samhain, myself, and our nine pieces of plaid, claw-foot luggage." She said it with an uncanny, infectious kind of certainty as if she were reliving the moment.
A questioning expression crossed his face as if she'd just shown him a good card trick he couldn't explain. The same expression was on Samhain's face. While she'd been speaking, he'd almost felt like he'd relived the moment when the pirates demanded those three things in that order. Only a stubbornness usually cited as a character flaw kept him from believing what he was sure was a false memory she'd just given him.
"What other reason would I have for provoking dangerous criminals by insisting you deliver my luggage?" That final question seemed to provide the false logical link the customer service manager needed to accept the version of events Scilla's gave him. He raised his comms to his mouth and gave the order.
"Don't look at me like that," she said to Samhain's sideways glance. "I know very well I could have brought the luggage myself. You know very well that one doesn't travel first class to herd one's own luggage." To the customer service manager, she added, "The room service has been excellent."
"Forgive me if I don't ask you to recommend us to your friends."
"I completely understand."
After a brief and silent armed escort and a short wait at another bank of tower lifts, Scilla's nine pieces of luggage stepped out and joined them, herded along by a pair of the Andrea Laguna's security personnel. Once they reached the tower's small flight deck, the carpeting disappeared and he could hear the claw feet of her set clattering on the belt-iron steel decks behind them. The little herd struggled to keep up. By the time he and Scilla reached the airlock, they had to wait for them to catch up again before they could cycle through. That gave Samhain time to peer through the portholes on either side of the lock and get a partial view of the bay.
All he could see was the side of the thin-hulled junker, some kind of battered longboat or skiff they sent to pick him up. It had docked right up against the ring of the lock since they weren't expecting him to have a suit. All the patch-welds he could see and the pitting on the hull of the boat, told him it had probably taken collateral splatter damage from railgun sabot impacting nearby. Riding in that thing without an exosuit and helmet seemed reckless.
Before the hatch opened, a face appeared and eyeballed him through the porthole with multiple compound eyes set on the top and sides of a diamond-shaped head that recalled both insect and spider. The Shediri's jaws clacked at him and he realized it wasn't wearing a suit. He hoped it was breathing their atmo and not the other way around. To much neon always gave him a sore throat.
The bug opened the hatch and swayed its stripe-painted torso over them as it shifted on its four legs and cocked its head looking at the luggage. Scilla shrugged and looked at him. "Those bags are my equipment," he said. "And she's with me." He heard the translator it wore close to the aural membrane on its neck repeat his words in Shediri hiss and click with a polite whine at the end like a reed instrument.
Scilla surprised him then. She lifted and tossed the bags and got half of them into the longboat's lock before any of the Shediri's four arms could reach down and stop the others from coming aboard.
The bug hissed and waved in front of its chest, and a small matchbox computer it wore projected a picture of Samhain's face that he recognized from Pavic's file on him. The Shediri compared it to Samhain and waved him aboard with two of its four arms. "I need her," he said, pointing at Scilla. "I can't do what I do without her." It felt like the truth when he said it.
The seats Martin Samhain and Scilla Price rode in had been salvaged from a Staas Company longboat, an old one. Foam bulged and expanded out holes worn over decades. The main compartment of that improvised skiff had only six such seats. There was a pair of low Shediri seats bolted to the deck, like asymmetric mounds over a half meter high and canted forwards. Those were the equivalent of stools for them, Samhain knew a comfortable Shediri chair was larger - large enough that it could rest the bulk of its lower body on it and high enough that its legs could extend at least halfway before hitting the deck.
"My name is Scilla," she said to the grim bug sitting on the left hump, backwards apparently, so it could watch them, "Sssssciiii-laaaaa," she said. Its translator repeated it next to its ear, and it canted its head and gave a wet sort of hiss in her direction that sent spittle onto the deck.
She said, "Was that his name?"
"That was just spitting."
"I thought so. Moments like this must be what lured you to exoanthropology." Samhain twinged when she said it. He felt it that time - like a little rush of heat up and down. She knew why he got into the field and that wasn't it.
To aft was a chitin-covered bulkhead with a 2-meter hatch leading to what he presumed was the reactor room. Up past their new Shediri friend was the cockpit. The pilots up there looked human, but they kept their helmets on and didn't turn around or say anything except to tell their associates they were departing on the return trip.
Between the pilots and the bug was a single, starboard side window. As the skiff launched and puffed out a slow but sharp turn, he got one last glimpse of the Andrea Laguna's gleam and glitter before the only ship in his line of sight was the pirate vessel quickly growing to fill the canopy.
This was the one he was sure he'd seen at Alpha Eridani. It had been built around a spine like a Staas Company carrier and had a UN frigate's thinly armored command tower near the bow. As they passed down the ship's starboard side, close to the stealth shunts that surrounded her hull like undersized, sun-shades, he noted the hand-welds and the crude fabrication. Those hadn't been made in a Staas shipyard or factory; they'd been printed somewhere in hiding probably.
Behind the armored command module, doors opened on a cargo carrier section that had been converted into a launch bay with three locks and at least a dozen boats and boarding craft of mixed and improvised design. The pilots turned the nose of the skiff perpendicular to the plane of the bay's mouth and began their line in for landing when the skiff passed close to one of the stealth shunting panels. Even powered down, a blurry-edged blackness spread from it like a stain across the surrounding space.
The bay in front of them came visible again once the nose of the skiff passed the shunts and crossed the edge of the dampening field. After a momentary loss of power, the pilots hit the gas jets for deceleration, spun her sideways, and landed between a pair of boarding craft covered in universal adapter rings and what looked like derricks for the kind of plasma drills miners used.
The Shediri in front of them lifted itself off its seat and chatter-clicked at them. "Up. Out. Now," said the translator it wore. "Absolom."
"Excuse me?"
"That's the name of the ship," said Samhain as they rose.
Only the Shediri went through the airlock with them. It swayed over the backs of their heads as the lock cycled. Scilla said, "What the hell is an Absolom?"
"Not now."
The light blinked green three times before the wheel spun and the hatch popped. It swung open and a man wearing the rank of Lieutenant Commander smiled at them. He hadn't shaved in a few days. The circles under his eyes and his hunger-hollowed cheeks gave him a haunted look. "Absolom was the son of an ancient king - a rebellious son." Late twenties, early thirties, Samhain thought, but he'd have been willing to believed the man had been aged prematurely. Creases had turned to deep and permanent furrows on his slightly dirty face. "I'm LCDR Millet. I'm the XO on this ship; welcome aboard."
He moved back and allowed them room to step through the hatch and enter the steel lined, 4-meter-wide mainsway of the cargo module/landing bay. Samhain followed with Scilla on his arm, and as they removed their helmets, the XO said, "Lt. Tsk, bring their lugga
ge aboard. And search it for weapons, communication devices, tracking devices, the usual. Oh, and that bag, too, please." Millet pointed as politely as possible to Scilla's leather mail bag.
She turned and handed it to the bug without a fuss, hanging the strap over the tri-clawed appendage it extended to take it like it was a hat rack. "Don't look at the sketches in the sketchbook," she said to the Shediri in a parody of a conspiratorial whisper. "He's just starting out."
Millet said, "He's Martin Samhain, but who exactly are you? Nobody could explain over comms why I have two guests. And luggage."
"She's with me. She's my assistant." He blurted it out like he'd been waiting to say it which he had. It sounded like a lie.
"That's partially true." She beamed at the XO. "I'm Scilla Price, adventuress extraordinaire."
"Not many people want to be kidnapped."
"Correct. I'm only one."
The Shediri clacked and whined until the XO's translator spoke its words. "I don't know what to do. I think: get 2. Easy to make 2 into 1."
"That's right," Millet said with all his focus on Scilla. "It's very easy to make two into one. As long as we can keep that thought in mind, I suggest we all make our way to A deck and the bridge. Captain wants a word. And bring your helmets. You might need them."
The ship's XO was three steps down the passageway before Samhain got a chance to ask if that meant what he thought it did. The way the ship slammed him into the side of the bulkhead and then rolled told him they'd been hit by some kind of fire. "They gave you up easy enough, but they sure don't seem to want to let you go. Stealth went up as soon as you docked. They're firing blind."
Through the next set of double hatches that should have been used as an airlock, Samhain didn't like the looks of the transfer tube they had to use to get to the command section. It wasn't much more than a single, stretched membrane around a thin, chitin bridge and the energy drain from the n-space shunts had chilled the atmo in there so everything had a fine layer of ice crystals. "Don't worry about the tubes," said the XO. "The Shediri trust them for a reason. They're surprisingly tough."
