Warchild

by Karin Lowachee

  “No. You?”

  “Nah. Wouldn’t know what to do with it.” He shifted and put his hands in his pockets, then removed them again, as if he had too much energy. Maybe he was on something. “I ain’t ever bin farther insystem than Basquenal.”

  I wondered if he was going to open the gate and come in here to finish what he’d started on station.

  “You fight pretty good,” he said, finally to the point.

  “Had to.”

  “You expected to actually beat us?”

  “Give you a challenge.”

  “Why?”

  “Wasn’t that the point?”

  “Nah.” He smiled again. “Point was for Cap to see if you worth the thought. Know what you shoulda done different?”

  “Not run through the shop.”

  “But we had a clear line of sight on the concourse.”

  We. Jets. Even though he hadn’t been there at the beginning. They all thought the same. “I could’ve went into the maintenance tunnels. There was an access point near the levs. Do jets know those tunnels?”

  The smile broadened. “Probably not as good as someone who’s lived in ’em.”

  “So do I get another chance or am I stuck here forever?” I was only half joking. A couple hours was enough.

  “You ain’t stuck. You one foot in the door. Now it’s up to you not to get it cut off.” The brig hatch opened behind Dorr and Captain Azarcon strode in. Dorr didn’t turn, but continued to smile at me. “You should know now, Musey… there ain’t second chances on this ship. Mac is the second chance.”

  “Corporal,” Azarcon said. He could’ve been any jet, in that black uniform and with that young face. But he wasn’t. Erret Dorr’s back straightened slightly, as if by habit.

  “Sir.” Dorr nodded to Azarcon, shot a last, mocking glance at me, and left.

  Azarcon stood on Dorr’s spot and looked in at me. “Cold?”

  “Yes, sir.” And not all from the temperature.

  “I want you to know this isn’t necessarily regular procedure,” he said. “I only brig the suspicious ones. The ones that have pirates in their pasts.”

  I kept my breaths regular, watching him and the shadows that cut his face with black bars. I couldn’t say anything to that. Anything I said would only make it worse.

  He watched my reaction. “So tell me again why you want on my ship.”

  “I have nothing on station, sir. I’ve always wanted back on a ship.”

  “This isn’t any ship. This is a deep-space military vessel. And worse yet for you, it’s Macedon. I’m the god of Macedon. I have no qualms about dumping people into the stars if they get on my nerves.”

  They must have trained arrogance in their academy.

  “Yes, sir. But I don’t want just any ship, sir.” That was truth enough.

  “What kind of ship do you want, Joslyn Musey?”

  “A fair ship, sir.”

  “You think you’ll find it here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why do you think you’ll find it here?”

  “Your jets. In the war. They make a difference, sir. And you command them.”

  “Musey, the only difference you’ll be making for a year is getting my decks clean and my crew fed. Is that going to satisfy your ideals?”

  “My ideals are low enough, sir.”

  He stared at me, long and hard and with undisguised hostility.

  “This ship isn’t fair, Musey. What goes on is dependent on my moods and my rules. You think that’s fair?”

  “I know the military isn’t a democracy, sir.”

  “That’s a pretty line. I expect that from someone who doesn’t know a deep spacer from a damp rag.”

  I stayed silent. He wanted me to trip over my words, reveal something. His whole demeanor hunted it.

  “I know as much of your past that has been recorded anywhere, Mr. Musey. I’ve talked to your instructors and your caseworker, all of whom just have glowing things to say about you. I’m not so easily impressed. Or gullible. I don’t put up with criminals unless they follow orders. You try anything against my ship or my crew and I’ll vent you so fast you’ll fly to Earth. Copy that?”

  I was supposed to gather intelligence on this man and his ship and send it to Niko. He was a pirate in a uniform.

  “I copy, sir.”

  “You still want on?”

  My heart gave a slow, painful beat. “Yes, sir.”

  “Our contracts are for five years minimum, no questions and no exceptions unless you look at me wrong and I toss you off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The training and rules manual will be memorized and you will have to repeat any section on demand of any crewmember on this ship, at any time on or off shift. That’s how well you will know my rules. You will have no excuses if you break them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Recruit training is eight weeks you will never get back. You still want on this ship?”

  “Yes, sir.” I kept my real answer off my face.

  “If there’s anything more in your past that you think you’ve gotten away with, know now that you won’t get away with it. Once you sign the contract your loyalties will go to me and my ship, to EarthHub Armed Forces, and to the citizens of EarthHub. In that order. I’m the omnipotent presence in your life now, Musey, and I know my crew. I will know you down to your sleeping habits. You still want on this ship?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’ll get worse before it gets better, and then it will be worse.” He passed a slate through the bars with a pen attached. “Can you write your name?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then do it.”

  I wanted to read the contract. As if I had a choice. But he had a manner much like Falcone and I couldn’t help it. He saw me hesitate that split second.

  “There’s nothing in there that I haven’t already encapsulated.”

  I signed my name.

  In a few seconds the brig hatch opened, as if on cue, and Madi came in. Not smiling this time.

  Azarcon took the slate I offered back. “Private Madison will take you to quarters. RT begins next shift at oh five hundred hours.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Azarcon turned away, abrupt as a striv. He didn’t look back. “Don’t thank me, Musey. Wait and see if you’re alive in five years.”

  * * *

  XII.

  So I already knew some things about Captain Cairo Azarcon. He really did take a personal interest in the hiring of his crew, pretty much eliminating the middle men. I was surprised at the amount of contact I’d had with him up to now. If I’d pushed I might have been able to elicit some comments from chatty Madison, but since everything I said probably took a direct route to Azarcon’s ears, I held off. I wondered why the captain signed me on so readily, especially since he’d acted so suspicious earlier. He’d seemed unduly interested in my connection to Falcone. I almost wished I could ask him outright what he knew about Genghis Khan.

  Out of the question, of course.

  It was going to be a sparse report to Niko but that didn’t matter, since I had no access to a comp yet.

  I had eight hours of rest before Recruit Training and I knew I’d need it. Madi walked me back through the narrow, drab corridors. A few jets looked at us as we passed but didn’t say anything. We squeezed around other uniforms cleaning the deck or working at the maintenance grates or pipes overhead. The ones scrubbing didn’t look happy.

  “Punishment,” Madison pointed out.

  I got it.

  He took me to the training deck, which was marked by a small sticker on the hatch that said: Sprigs within. Water daily. He put me in quarters, a gray closet of a space packed with six bunks, three at a height with one narrow aisle down the middle. Storage was webbing on the bulkhead beside each bunk. My duffel bag was sitting on the floor when I entered, along with five others. Madi unhooked a scanwand from his hip and made me stand in the center of the quarters whil
e he ran it up and down my body, slow and thorough, checking for tech. He passed the wand over my face and hair as I held my breath. It didn’t beep a warning and he grinned at me.

  “There’s a guard on the door and if he says to jump your only reply should be ‘out which airlock.’ Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” I looked at him with no cheery pretenses.

  He laughed and left. I took the lowermost right-hand rack, stowed what little belongings I had, and immediately pocketed a small bottle of salve from my personal kit. I knocked on the hatch and met the jet on guard.

  “Where’s the head?”

  He escorted me down the corridor to the communal washroom and stood outside the door. At the long stainless-steel bank of sinks I waved on one of the taps and cleaned out the salve. I filled the bottle with water, took out the optic receptors, and dropped them in. My eyes felt sore, so I blinked a few times and peered at them in the mirror. They were a little bloodshot.

  The jet walked me back to quarters, where another jet now stood at the hatch. She opened it and I passed her, wanting to just fall straight into bed. But my five other roommates had materialized inside. I stopped dead as the hatch shut behind me with a thud and a click.

  Three other boys and two girls, looking only a couple years older than me. They eyed me warily, standing as aloof as they could in such a cramped space—except for one boy who’d already appropriated a top bunk. Dark blue battle dress utilities had also appeared on each bunk, along with standard-issue magnum boots and underwear. I moved to my rack. One of the boys stood in my way, not for any other reason than the close quarters. He was brown-haired and smooth-faced, and had the oddest gold-brown eyes I’d ever seen. Maybe they were gene-tampered.

  “Kris Rilke,” he said casually, with a slight smile.

  I really needed to sit but he didn’t move. “Jos Musey.”

  He nodded. The others seemed to take a cue, and introduced themselves. Nathan Jelilian was on the topmost bunk already, smoking a cigret without asking anybody’s by your leave, one arm behind his unnaturally blond head. The last boy in the group, skinny and dark-skinned, took the opposite bunk to mine across the aisle and mumbled his name; I only caught “Cleary.” One of the girls tossed her pack above him on the middle rack and stuck out her hand to me. I looked at it strangely and she smiled crookedly.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot Austroans don’t shake.” She took my hand and tugged a bit, releasing it before I could properly react “Aki Wong-Meiton. Aki’s fine.”

  The other girl said shortly, “Iratxe.” I heard it, Ee-rat-chay.

  Jelilian yawned. “Now that we’re all acquainted, shut off the damn lights.”

  I said, “You’re not all from Austro.”

  “No,” Aki said. “I’m from Kane.”

  That was a Spokes colony on the Earthward side of the Rim, a couple leaps from Austro.

  Kris Rilke tugged off his sweater and tossed it at the foot of his bunk before swinging up and in. “I’m Austroan, same as you. What module did you belong to?”

  “The orphanage.”

  He looked at me a moment before pulling the blanket over his chest. “Ah.”

  Jelilian said, “Can we do this show at another time? I need my beauty sleep.”

  “Won’t do you any good,” Iratxe said.

  “Maybe not for you.”

  He had an accent I’d never heard; I had to pay attention to understand him. His cigret smoke made my head hurt but I was in no mood to argue with him. I sat on my bunk, hunched over because the one above wasn’t high enough that I could sit under it. Resigned, I tilted over onto the pillow, ribs aching worse now that I was forced to pay attention to them.

  “They work you over?” Rilke asked. He hadn’t taken his eyes from me since I’d entered.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “A little. When they finally caught me I didn’t fight. I’ve seen gauntlet runs before. If you fight they just kick you worse.”

  “And you lot wanna join those jets.” Jelilian snorted.

  “I didn’t see any of you before now,” I said.

  “They kept us in rec,” Aki said.

  That must’ve been where the nonsuspicious ones went.

  “Lights, zero,” Cleary said, and the quarters went abruptly dark.

  Now we were disembodied voices in a room full of quiet anxiety.

  “Aren’t you going to be a jet?” I asked Nathan Jelilian.

  “No way. I’m a pilot. I’m already a pilot. This is just a transfer for me.”

  “But you’re still going through RT.”

  “Macedon rules. Everybody’s fem no matter what unit you’re lookin’ to get into or where you been before.”

  Aki laughed. “We don’t wanna know where you been, Lilypad.”

  “Come yin me yang, Aki-bird. Oh, yeah, right here.”

  I shut my eyes and blocked out the banter. Their scents filled the small quarters: Jelilian’s cigret, someone else’s soap or shampoo, day-old clothes, and the lingering spice of another’s long-eaten lunch, the smell attached to their skin. From above me came regular breathing, then the silence of bodies settling into oblivion. Even though I couldn’t hear all of them breathing I felt they were all asleep.

  The sleep of the innocent.

  Bunkmates, like I would’ve had on Mukudori when I was old enough to move out of my parents’ quarters. Some part of me remembered the smells of these corridors, the sound of the levs when we rode from deck to deck… small differences from my homeship, maybe, but not enough to be totally foreign. Human voices everywhere I went, young males and females, harmless insults and peacocking. The rituals of the pack that I’d found so fascinating from an eight-year-old’s point of view, an eight-year-old who liked to trail after Evan, his brother Shane, and all their friends. I used to run up and down the corridors trying to catch up. Evan gave me piggyback rides sometimes, or chased me with toy guns and monster masks.

  All the little scenes surfaced like dead fish, bobbing just below the touch of daylight.

  But daylight didn’t exist on deep-space carriers.

  * * *

  XIII.

  Reveille sounded at exactly 0500 hours, an incessant staccato buzzing. Then the hatch whipped open and a loud man came in.

  “On your feet, children!”

  He blew in like a storm wind, immaculately clad in a buttoned-up black BDU with a white T-shirt peeking from under the collar. I tried to roll out of bed, wincing at my bruised, protesting body, and felt a foot brush my shoulder before Nathan Jelilian landed right on the spot I was looking to appropriate in the cramped quarters. I unfolded out beside him, with Iratxe dropping down on my right. Across the narrow aisle, Kris Rilke, Cleary, and Aki Wong-Merton wearily, but hastily, mirrored us.

  “Hit the showers!” the man barked, as if we were all deaf. “What’re you waiting for? Take your gear and be back here in five!”

  We grabbed our gear issue, which most of us had left at the foot of our bunks, and double-timed it. The jet on guard at our hatch escorted us to the facilities. I set my uni, boots, and kit on the bench outside one of the shower stalls and began to strip down. No time to be shy. Everyone else was doing the same, the five from my q as well as others I didn’t recognize, who had run in after us from other quarters, I assumed. The shower wasn’t much more than a quick turn under the time-released water, a brief soap, and a blast of hot air from the body dryer before we hopped on our dark blue training unis and boots and bolted out of there. Nobody said a word, though I thought of a few very specific ones—in more than one language.

  The jet took us back to our quarters where we saw the man- handing over all the personal gear we’d brought on board to another jet. She left before we could say anything.

  My gut writhed. There went my optic receptors. Who knew if I’d ever get them back. Or if they’d remain undiscovered.

  And they had better not “misplace” the ID disk with my parents’ image.

  The man in the immaculate uniform brushe
d past us.

  “Fall in, recruits!” His voice echoed up and down the corridor in a commanding tone I had not even heard from Captain Azarcon. Other small groups of young men and women lined up as we did, rushing out of other hatches, backs to the bulkhead and eyes forward. At a glance I counted about a hundred of us. Looked like Macedon had actively recruited at ports on their way in from deep space.

  More jets spilled out of hatches and followed the one who’d taken our gear, disappearing into a caution-striped lev at the end of the corridor.

  The man glanced over us, then turned his back. “Two columns, follow me.” He started to walk briskly.

  We fell in. The recruits on one side of the corridor made their own column to parallel ours. Armed jets flanked the man ahead of us and brought up the rear. Not one of us would ever go unsupervised on this ship, I realized, until we’d completed the training. And perhaps not even then, if we had probation. My days of any semblance of privacy were over, at least for eight weeks.

  The sick feeling in my stomach didn’t go away.

  Our leader marched us up deeply inclined, perforated towersteps, not on the levs, and through a maze of straight gray corridors, some of which had familiar grub-clad crew scrubbing and polishing the scored deck and bulkheads. I tried to memorize where we were going but after ten minutes of walking the route became hazy. Pain lanced from my midsection to the back of my teeth. I needed another injet of painkiller. I hoped I’d get some before we began exercises.

  Finally we landed up outside the mess. Our leader stepped aside just within the doors and barked at us again.

  “Fifteen mikes, move!”

  In a rushed, somewhat orderly line we went to the serving counter, grabbed trays, and shuffled by while the cooks dumped our breakfast as we passed. I had little appetite through the pain, despite the fact I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten anything.

  “Better chow down,” Kris Rilke muttered as we took our seats at the benches of the free tables. Crew at the other tables laughed at us. “We’re gonna need it.”

  Bullying jets. I thought of the knife in my hand and what I could do with it.