The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  “You want to poke around in parts of the universe where you shouldn’t, don’t you? Just to see what you’ll find.”

  “Sometimes you find gold. Sometimes you find spiders. Sometimes you find golden spiders.”

  “You should have called this ship the Golden Spider instead of the White Raven.”

  “You’re right. That’s also pretty good. So. Are you in?”

  “I’m too young to retire and too old to learn another trade, so yes, if you can find me a place to lay my weary head and take my wonderful drugs, I will continue to put the broken people you bring me back together.”

  “Great. How do you feel about becoming a pirate?”

  “Not… good? Not good at all. Bad. Yes. Definitely bad.”

  “Yeah. Me too. But you’ll have to trust me.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Callie was in her room, running through the mental script she’d created, that she’d doubtless have to abandon as soon as reality didn’t match her hopes and expectations. The ship was burning toward what was once the liminal space between the Jovian Imperative and Trans-Neptunian Space, and was now just the edge of the inhabited solar system instead.

  She’d caught up on the news on the Tangle, and there was plenty of coverage about Meditreme Station, but the prevailing narrative was that the station had been destroyed by accident. The Trans-Neptunian Authority was always experimenting with new weapons, or so the inner planets and the Imperative assumed. Rumors had spread of the mass Liar exodus just before the disaster, which led to obvious speculation. Either the aliens had sold the TNA some kind of unstable weapon system, or they’d discovered some deadly flaw in an existing system and hadn’t bothered to tell any of the humans about it before saving themselves; which one you believed depended on how xenophobic you were feeling.

  Several Liars from Meditreme had been tracked down and interviewed, though My Cousin Paolo wasn’t among them. They gave the predictably bizarre range of explanations for why they’d fled: one said it left for a family reunion in colony system seventeen. Another said the ghost of Miranda Tanzer had appeared and given it a vision of a new propulsion system, and it had immediately flown off to a research lab to sell the idea. A third explained that the mass exodus was part of a game the Liars played, a sort of wild chaotic race across the system. A fourth insisted that Meditreme Station hadn’t blown up at all but had merely phased into a slightly alternate dimension.

  The overall consensus was: something had gone boom, and it was an unprecedented tragedy, but it was nobody’s fault. Now there was a big hole in the political system and an area of space ripe for the taking, with some juicy TNA facilities left largely unattended, from asteroid-based research labs to wind farms to icy planitesimals turned into factories, all floating around without clear ownership. So far none of the big players had maneuvered to take over the old TNA holdings, and it was basically lawless out there, once you got beyond the Imperative’s reach.

  Every remaining TNA facility was probably a mini-fiefdom now, ruled by whoever happened to be there when Meditreme blew, and they would remain so until Mars or the Imperative or some kind of joint venture could conjure up the legal status necessary to claim those holdings, or buy them cheap from the few surviving TNA shareholders, before going in with guns to restore order. That would take months, at best; maybe years; some places would probably remain stubbornly, weirdly independent for the foreseeable future. It was sure to be interesting out there.

  Nobody was looking for the perpetrators, though, since no one except a few conspiracy theorists thought there were any perpetrators, and certainly no one was looking for a sect of murderous Liars out in the Oort Cloud. That meant Callie’s work wasn’t done. She still had to get justice for Meditreme.

  Fortunately there was a way to combine her need for a new home with her need for justice, but she wondered how Lantern would take the idea.

  She didn’t have to wonder long.

  “Captain, do you have a moment?”

  “Come on in, Lantern.”

  There was gravity, since they were under thrust, and Lantern waddled into the captain’s quarters. She slumped down on the floor and fluttered her tentacles. “I was able to copy some of the deep archives from the station onto my infosphere. I have been reviewing them since our return.”

  Callie sat on the edge of her bunk. “And?”

  “My sect, the truth-tellers… our ostensible purpose is a lie. The Axiom made arrangements to form our organization. They wanted to maintain a core of devoted servants in their absence. A small group of my people were trained, conditioned, and convinced of the absolute rightness and necessity of their purpose: to safeguard Axiom facilities over the coming millennia, while several long-term projects came to fruition. The way the organization is structured, the operational parameters the records lay out… I have no doubt that group is the origin of my sect. I thought we were safeguarding the universe from the Axiom. But we aren’t. We’re– what’s the human phrase? Guard dogs.”

  “I’m sorry, Lantern. Maybe the sect has changed over the centuries. Is it possible they started out as servants, and became protectors over time?”

  Lantern fluttered. “No. We possess perfect institutional memory. Our leaders produce neural buds, and those are passed on to the next generation of leadership. My people can live upwards of two thousand years, anyway – we aren’t talking about countless generations. But the Axiom didn’t foresee everything. They expected most of the Free to die once the Axiom were no longer around to control us – as if we were children, incapable of coping on our own. They did not anticipate the diaspora, or the great flowering of imagined cultures and histories we have produced. My sect was forced to hide its true intentions from the rest of our people, knowing we would resist. They settled on a strategy of paralyzing us with fear about what would happen if the Axiom ever returned. They convinced us that doing the Axiom’s secret bidding was the only way to protect ourselves.”

  Callie nodded. “So, is there just one big boss in charge of the sect who knows the truth?”

  “I don’t think so. There must be knowledge on the local level, at least, in all twenty-nine inhabited systems. It would be too dangerous otherwise. There are sparks of rebellious impulses even among our sect, those who wish to modify our methods, and those must, of course, be ruthlessly put down in order for our secret function to prevail. I argued for non-violent interventions, but violence is central to the charter the Axiom gave my elders: destroy or contain any potential threats to their projects.”

  “That means your elder, back on your station in the Oort Cloud… they know?”

  “Elder Mizori. She must know. I think. I cannot be sure. I would like to find out. I could return, and ask, but how could I compel her to answer?”

  “I could help with that part.”

  “I cannot ask you to involve yourself in this business. It could be very dangerous.”

  “It’s fine, Lantern. I need to see your elder anyway. She’s the one who ordered the destruction of Meditreme Station, right? She’s the guilty party, and she has to answer for her crimes – but I’ll make sure you get the answers to your questions first. How many of the Free are on your station?”

  “Not many. Most of us were on the ship your wormhole generator destroyed. All the junior members of the sect, and most of the more senior as well. All that remains is the elder, and her personal coterie, just four others. It’s likely they know the truth as well. They have always been an inner circle, planning together.”

  “There’s no chance she’s gotten reinforcements?”

  “Our cells operate with great autonomy, for security reasons. We can send messages to the other cells, but it is a slow process, and each elder is expected to handle their own problems. They meet once or twice a century to discuss things, but otherwise we operate independently. Short of the total destruction of our cell, there will be no intervention.”

  “Should be easy enough for us to get in there, then.”
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br />   “I don’t see how. You could drop me off nearby in the canoe, and they would let me in, I think, but I could not force them to answer me. If I come in your company, in this ship, they will recognize the vessel from your engagement with the starfish ship, and will not allow us to enter.”

  “So we force our way in.”

  “The station is formidably defended by terrible weapons. We could destroy it, perhaps, by weaponizing the bridge generator, but that would not get me the answers I need. The White Raven is a fine ship, but it’s not enough. We would need a much larger force to successfully target their defenses and to disable their weapons systems.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Callie said.

  * * *

  Callie lounged in a cockpit seat, looking at the viewport, which had been converted to a screen. The woman on the screen had sneering down to an art. Her hair was all wild spikes, her cheeks were streaked with grease in a way meant to suggest war paint, and her teeth were, somehow, carved into little skulls.

  “We’re not accepting new applications at this time,” the pirate queen said.

  They were so close to Glauketas that there was no noticeable delay in the transmission. Callie snorted. “Of course you’re not. You can’t even feed the mouths you’ve got. Your whole business model was built on robbing smugglers and cargo ships, and now there’s nowhere for smugglers to smuggle anything to, or from, and no cargo coming or going way out here. You can’t prey on Jovian Imperative vessels because they’ve been secretly backing you, or at least declining to intervene, because they liked having you as a thorn in the TNA’s side. You’re floating out there on your fancy rock running out of supplies and wondering what the hell to do next. I bet your crews are getting restless, too. Terrified they’ll have to go to some civilized system and do honest work. Why the hell would I want to climb onto your sinking ships?”

  The pirate queen, who was also called Glauketas, as all her predecessors had been, scowled. “If you don’t want to join us, Machedo, what do you want?”

  “A finder’s fee. You know me. I was TNA security personnel, and I know TNA secrets. I know about secret bases. Facilities that are only lightly defended, because they depended on obscurity as their best defense. Those facilities are full of valuable technology, materiel, and various ill-gotten gains embezzled by TNA executives.”

  “If you have a treasure map, why are you offering to share it? You’re TNA. They’d let you in.”

  “Because lightly defended doesn’t mean undefended. I might be able to trick my way into one or two of the facilities by flashing my old credentials, sure, but word will get around, and eventually someone will blow me out of the sky. I’m thinking long-term. You have manpower and firepower. I have intelligence. Why risk my life, or the life of my crew, when you can risk yours for me instead?”

  The pirate queen was trying not to look interested. “What’s the offer?”

  “I’ll give you the location of a base crammed full of juicy tech. You go steal all their stuff, and give me half.”

  “Half? Don’t be stupid. We’d be doing all the work. Finder’s fees are ten percent.”

  “I guess I could settle for a third, if you also give me docking privileges and a berth on Glauketas. Good quarters, too. As good as yours. My house blew up a while ago, so my people and I are looking for a place to settle.”

  “My crews won’t like sharing space with TNA security scum. A lot of them hate you personally, Machedo.”

  “Please. I know for a fact that at least a fifth of your people used to work for the TNA, before they got fired for corruption or incompetence or using unnecessary force. Consider me corrupted by circumstances, and a big believer in unnecessary force. I’d fit right in.”

  “People on Glauketas earn, Machedo. They don’t lounge around relaxing while others sponge off them.”

  “I’ll earn plenty. I have a nice long list of targets, quadruple-encrypted so only I can access the data – me, alive and well, breathing and talking, without any strain of coercion in my voice, with the file watched over by an expert system that knows me well and won’t put up with any shenanigans.”

  The pirate queen stroked her chin. “You’ll have to prove yourself.”

  “I’m prepared to offer one target, as proof of concept. If you like it, you’ll come back for more.”

  “Give me a good one. Not the lowliest site on your list.” The pirate queen showed off her skull-filled smile. “Impress me, Machedo.”

  “I can do that. I’ve got a secret weapons R&D facility, so it’s going to be better defended than some, but you’ve got enough personnel and ships to overwhelm the defenses.”

  “This isn’t the place where they built the weapon that accidentally blew up Meditreme Station, is it?”

  “No, but what do you care? You can sell the weapons even if they do have a tendency to explode.”

  “True, but I try not to blow up my customers. That sort of thing cuts down on repeat business. All right. We’ll give it a try, and if the results are satisfactory, we’ll discuss an ongoing relationship, and a home base for your ragtag bunch of refugees. Where’s the target?”

  “It’s out in the Oort Cloud…” Callie began.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  They held the meeting around the same long table where Elena had enjoyed her first cup of coffee in centuries, and had her first conversation with Callie. Almost all of them were there, anyway; Ibn preferred to stay in his quarters, seemingly indifferent to his fate, and Sebastien was still unconscious and restrained and being watched over by Shall.

  Callie laid out her plan, and told them if anyone wanted to bail out, they’d arrange that, but of course Elena and the whole crew were in, Uzoma was curious to see how things would work out, and Robin said she didn’t have anywhere else to be, so it was settled.

  Elena sat on Callie’s right, Stephen on her left, and the others were arrayed around: Ashok, Janice and Drake in their closed mobility device, Robin, Uzoma, and Lantern. “So we think the plan worked?” Callie said.

  “Pretty much the whole force on Glauketas departed,” Ashok said. “They’re burning toward the Oort Cloud. They left one ship, but it’s being repaired: there are drones scuttling around its hull. We only have the TNA estimates about how many pirates call the asteroid home, but assuming our intel is good, and knowing how they favor overwhelming force, I’d say they left just a handful behind to guard their base.”

  “So let’s steal their house,” Callie said.

  Elena rested her head on Callie’s shoulder. “I wish you weren’t going in alone. I worry about you.”

  “I fought alien brain-spiders. I blew up an Axiom space station. The kind of pirates who get left behind on a mission like this? I can take them.”

  * * *

  The White Raven moved in close to Glauketas. The pirate base was lumpy and unlovely, a roughly potato-shaped asteroid riddled with old mining tunnels and bristling with antennae and guns and airlocks. Predictably, the asteroid fired on them when they approached, and, just as predictably, they missed by kilometers, because of the displacement technology the Raven employed. While the defenders on Glauketas puzzled over their failure to connect, Callie took the canoe, piloted remotely by Shall, until she was close enough to use her teleporter to jump into the base itself.

  She appeared in a tunnel, once bare rock, now lined with metal to reinforce the asteroid’s structure. She floated along, her active camouflage making her invisible. Glauketas was tiny compared to Meditreme, but it could house fifty people comfortably, so it would feel like a mansion once she’d cleaned out all the rats. She crept into a chamber, full of looted comforts, and found one pirate sleeping in a hammock. She woke him up and put a sidearm in his face. “Hi. You’ve been boarded. Why didn’t you go on the field trip? Let me guess, too smart and valuable to risk on such a mission, right?”

  He was unshaven and red-eyed and staring at the gun like it was the source of all knowledge in the universe. The rest of Calli
e was invisible, so it made sense that he’d focus on the weapon. “My hangover was too bad. I couldn’t stop throwing up. Please don’t kill me.”

  “Give me an accurate accounting of personnel currently on this rock, and I’ll put you in a pod and send you on your way. Lie to me and I’ll put you out an airlock.”

  “You’ll do that anyway.”

  “No, I won’t. I used to be the cops, and I haven’t gone all the way feral yet.”

  He shrugged. Pirates, in her experience, were brave in numbers and less brave when cornered alone. “There are only four of us. The others are probably all in the control room. There was an all-hands alarm a few minutes ago, but I didn’t answer it, because I’m sick.”

  “How were you lot ever the scourge of the spaceways? I guess the ones left behind are the dregs, though, aren’t you?”

  She’d impugned his pride, and he glared. “When the queen comes back, you’re dead. She’ll kill you slow. She likes that. She might let us all help.”

  “I wouldn’t count on your people coming back. Not all of them, anyway. Where’s the control room?” He told her, and she hogtied him with zip ties and gagged him with a dirty shirt before leaving him in his hammock.

  She crept up on three pirates, all looking a bit more capable than the one she’d disabled, clustered together in a round room full of screens and control panels. They were arguing and pointing at the screen, trying to figure out why the White Raven refused to explode when they shot things at it.

  Callie considered killing them, and she considered wading in throwing elbows and head-butts, but hand-to-hand combat in an environment suit was awkward, so instead she lifted her non-lethal gauntlet, shocked one, and darted the others.

  She did a sweep of the rest of the station, just in case her informant had tried some pitiful attempt at disinformation, but Glauketas was otherwise unoccupied. She opened up the airlock, and the White Raven parked close to the surface and let Ashok and Lantern and Elena and Robin in. The ship retreated to a safe distance, and they made their preparations. Because Callie had promised, they put the pirates in an escape pod and set its course for Io, one of the Jovian moons that stubbornly insisted it was independent, and generally held to be a miserable place. Then they familiarized themselves with the station’s weapons systems, and left Ashok manning the consoles.