The Gilded Cage

by Blaze Ward

  Javier watched her stop and take a breath, eyes flickering back and forth at some bad memory.

  “How did you escape?” Javier asked quietly.

  “I didn’t,” she replied grimly. “I volunteered to deliver the ransom message to Captain Sokolov.”

  Javier looked around the cabin again. It smelled nice, but it wasn’t the ancient explorer they had set out for Meehu in.

  “What happened to your ship?” he asked simply.

  “It’s still there,” she said. “We had paid for a full month docking fees, expecting to need some time to find the right buyer. But it was too slow to get here, so I hot–wired the fastest runabout I could steal and ran as fast as I could. He still thinks it will take me three or four more days to get here to contact you, so we have at least that much a head start.”

  “He?” the captain asked suddenly.

  Sokolov had been so quiet, perched on that bench, that Javier had almost forgotten him. And he didn’t look surprised. Maybe she had already told the captain part of her story, and the rest of this was for his own benefit.

  “Captain Abraam Tamaz,” Wilhelmina said simply.

  But that look, right there, said it all.

  One time, Javier had farted really loudly, the morning after an especially–bad rice–dinner–and–all–night–drinking session, and really stenched up the conference room in the middle of a centurion meeting. Sokolov got that same look on his face. Sour disgust, mixed with a dollop of angry, but holding his comments in and not venting them all over the crew.

  Too busy being The Captain.

  “You know the guy,” Javier said to the captain.

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Storm Gauntlet’s former Executive Officer,” Sokolov replied. “A few years before your time.”

  “Bad feelings?”

  “Tamaz wanted us to be more of a pirate operation and less of a business enterprise.”

  “More?”

  Javier had a hard time politely wrapping his tongue around that word, considering his place in this enterprise.

  “More,” Sokolov smiled winter itself at him. “Send out a distress signal, and then massacre whoever shows up to rescue us. Raid small colonies, slaughter everyone, and steal all the hardware to sell to other colonies. More.”

  For just a moment, Javier was able to pierce the captain’s veil and see the high–wire act the man had to walk every day, keeping an expensive former warship in raw materials and fresh socks, while not always having legitimate cargo to transport. The type of piracy Sokolov practiced was sometimes a lesser evil.

  Javier experienced a moment of true empathy for the man. Then he carefully wrapped it up in tissue paper and put it in a box in his mind. That box he stored on a high shelf in a closet. And locked the door behind him when he left.

  Sokolov and the rest of that man’s crew were still all going to hang from a Concord Fleet yardarm one of these days. Hopefully in low gravity. Javier would see to that when he got free.

  And then a little light bulb went on, just like in the cartoons.

  Sykora a prisoner, being held for ransom. He and the Captain having a private conversation with Wilhelmina. Why the three of them were having this meeting on her vessel, instead of aboard Storm Gauntlet.

  Witnesses. Loose tongues.

  Risk.

  Poker was one thing. It was a game of will and perception and luck. Javier made nice spare change off the crew playing poker, especially the engineering deck. Those people were amateurs.

  Captain Sokolov was playing chess now. Probably a multi–level version Javier had seen in a bar once, with pieces representing fantasy armies on the ground, while other armies fought in the heavens and underworld. Too much like work, but some people liked it.

  Everything clicked.

  They wanted his help. Needed it. Absolutely relied on it to pull off whatever crazy stunt they had planned. To rescue Sykora.

  Huh.

  Javier actually looked both directions, like crossing the street, and then at Wilhelmina, and then Sokolov.

  Time passed.

  Captain had a hard look on his face. Javier imagined his own mirrored it. Wilhelmina sat perfectly still and quiet as she watched.

  “I’m in,” Javier said into the quiet whisper of the air systems.

  Just like that.

  Ξ

  One of the advantages to being The Captain, as Zakhar saw it, was generally being able to pick the field of battle. One of the disadvantages was that he occasionally forgot that behind that facile, fast–talking tongue on his Science Officer was a first–rate mind.

  Something had happened to his crew when Wilhelmina Teague had first been found, trapped in cryo aboard her ancient ship inside an even–more–ancient mine field. Even before she had been rescued and defrosted.

  He couldn’t explain what, or why, but it had.

  Sykora had become emotional and flexible about rules that used to be iron–clad. Almost human, at least for a few days. He’d never seen that in all the years he had known her, but she got over it quickly, like a bad flu.

  And Javier had volunteered to walk away from enough money to possibly buy his freedom from slavery. Almost acted like a grown–up, for even longer.

  The two of them had even stopped bickering long enough to make common cause.

  Over Wilhelmina.

  Zakhar had considered hiring Teague. It had made his ship a better place to have her around. But it had also disrupted everything in unsettling ways. He was not a man enamored of sudden, chaotic change.

  He locked eyes with his Science Officer.

  “I haven’t asked yet,” he growled.

  It didn’t help that the two of them tended to think along similar paths at times like this, an outcome of the years at the Academy on Bryce, followed by active duty careers with the Concord Navy.

  Brothers in arms.

  “You will,” Javier replied, now in his serious voice.

  “What will I ask, Aritza?”

  “We’re going to go rescue Sykora. You want my help. You want me to do something nobody else on this crew can do.”

  “And you’re in, just like that?” Zakhar asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand why,” Javier replied coldly, as if from a great and remote mountaintop.

  Zakhar agreed with that assessment.

  He carefully pulled himself back from an unnecessary emotional confrontation. Aritza and Sykora had taken their hatred to a new and dangerous place because of Wilhelmina. Before that, it had almost turned into a teenage sibling rivalry. With him as the father in a sitcom.

  Now they were comrades in arms themselves.

  Unsettling.

  “We could use words like honor, or duty,” Javier continued, his tone dropping to almost a whisper. “You own my ransom, so you have both a carrot and a stick, should you choose to exercise it.”

  “And you’ll volunteer to help rescue her, just like that, and then come back to Storm Gauntlet as if nothing happened? As if you weren’t thinking about your own freedom and an open door? Or taking this runabout and disappearing?”

  “That’s right,” Javier said flatly, glancing over at Wilhelmina in some random and unexplainable way.

  Just what the hell had happened between Aritza and Sykora?

  Zakhar had the feeling he would go to his grave with that question unanswered. Perhaps God would be willing to explain it for him, if he made it there.

  Zakhar looked at the woman as well.

  She was carefully not moving, as if to not disturb the emotional balance of the room. She had changed as well, but he hadn’t spent that much time around her from the time she was defrosted until she had left, in order to baseline her behavior now.

  Older than he had first thought. Possessed of a stillness he attributed to her being some kind of missionary, a Shepherd of the Word. Whatever that meant now, five centuries later.

  Brilliant and broadly educated. Charismatic, and entertaining, and exotic all a
t once.

  Poised.

  “Wilhelmina?” Zakhar asked simply. “You’re sure about this?”

  She nodded once. “I am, Captain Sokolov.”

  “Aritza,” he continued, turning now to the other thorn in his side. “Wilhelmina has asked me to send you with her back to Meehu, to help rescue Djamila. As you said, your return here is a matter of honor. Something between gentlemen of Bryce. Will you honor it?”

  Javier stood up from the sofa, suddenly every inch a Concord officer, probably more so than he had ever been when he had worn the uniform.

  “I will, captain.”

  Wonder of wonders.

  Zakhar stood as well. Two short strides put him close to the man. He stretched out a hand.

  Javier shook it.

  “Good luck, Javier,” Zakhar said quietly.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Javier considered things, smiled.

  “Cavalry will be three days behind you,” Zakhar said firmly. “Tamaz is not someone I would miss. Nor would the galaxy.”

  Zakhar turned and found Wilhelmina close.

  He started to say something, but she engulfed him in a hug. Zakhar had forgotten how much taller she was until she leaned down and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she whispered in his ear.

  Zakhar smiled at her and walked to the airlock door. He glanced back and watched the emotions in the room swirl.

  Being a pirate was so much easier.

  Part Four

  Wilhelmina considered the scene after Captain Sokolov departed, leaving her and Javier alone.

  Javier was far too nervous around her. Had been, from the first moment she could remember anything after waking up from a nap that had lasted four hundred and eighty–eight years.

  She considered approaching him, initiating physical contact. She knew he found her attractive. Most men and many women did: tall, vivacious, and redheaded.

  But there was an air of cold reserve around the man, like a fog, shielding him.

  They locked eyes across two meters of space. Whatever it was, that remoteness, that coldness went all the way to the bottom of his soul.

  In the end, she retreated, ceding him the field of battle. This was too important. The captain’s chair beckoned, warm and protective. She moved next to it, but didn’t sit.

  Javier had taken up a spot next to the bench where Sokolov had sat by the time she had turned around.

  The silence stretched, uncomfortable and taut in ways she hadn’t been expecting.

  Wilhelmina had spent nearly six weeks aboard Storm Gauntlet, recovering herself and preparing. She still felt like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, but the crew had treated her well, far better than she had expected, especially once she’d realized they were pirates, at least in their spare time. Six weeks had been a lot of time to recover, and to prepare.

  After all, how often do you lay down to sleep, and wake up five hundred years later, hale and hearty? But the crew had accepted her, almost adopted her.

  Javier had been goofy and witty, but also protective. He had seemed to like girls, but kept the space between them carefully professional, not that she hadn’t considered making the effort. He was a good looking fellow, dark and well–built.

  But there was a gulf now. And she hadn’t said or done anything, except return.

  She had returned without Djamila. And the wars between those two were almost legendary, to hear the crew tell it. Especially Javier’s assistant, Ilan Yu.

  Wilhelmina considered the emotional chasm between them.

  “Did I make a mistake?” she asked finally, leaving all the linguistic options open to interpretation. He was one of the few men she had ever known who could use it as an artistic palette.

  “No,” Javier replied, his tone flat and hard, but not angry at her. “You did what was appropriate. What comes next will be necessary.”

  The emphasis on that last word sent a chill up her spine. This wasn’t the Javier she’d known. He wore the man’s shape, but there was another soul there. Something deeper, unseen. Almost malevolent.

  Wilhelmina considered the fairie tales her grandmother had told her once upon a time, in the dim recesses of history. Javier struck her as a Doppelgänger now. The shape was right, but there was a stranger sitting before her. He reminded her of no other man so much as Sokolov.

  Perhaps that was what it meant to be an officer of the Concord Navy now. Hard men, facing a hard universe.

  Had she turned Javier back into the man he used to be? Before he was happy?

  “I need your help,” she said finally. “Tamaz is a bad person, surrounded by bad people. I wanted to gather good men to my banner.”

  It almost sounded like a recruiting speech, but five months ago she had still been Shepherd of the Word, assembling good men and women in the cause of civilization. That everyone who had heard her speak that last night had been dead for hundreds of years didn’t change anything. There were still monsters in the darkness, and civilization needed paladins to protect it.

  Even the most unlikely of paladins.

  She smiled at Javier. He had puffed up a bit, as if he could read her mind.

  “The Word has been forgotten,” he replied softly, almost apologetically.

  “No.”

  She shook her head in harsh negation, eyes locked with his.

  “The speakers have been forgotten, Javier,” she replied, moving slowly closer to the man. “The Word will never be lost.”

  “Why me?”

  She let go some of the tenseness in her back. They had just moved past the hard part. Javier was willing to help, to go on this quest. Wilhelmina felt like Queen Isabella, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Elizabeth One.

  She could do this.

  “Two reasons. First, Tamaz doesn’t know you, and I’ll be in disguise. We can get closer to him than anybody else on the crew could. Second, I wanted someone I could trust with my life.”

  She watched one of his eyebrows arch, rather eloquently.

  “It took more than a week to get to Meehu in that old ship, Javier,” she said. “Djamila and I had a lot of free time to talk. You came up a lot.”

  His face got even more distant and cold. He understood what the two women had discussed.

  She sighed inside.

  “I wanted to say thank you, Javier,” she continued. “For letting me live. For giving me the chance to continue my mad quest. For sending me on my way with your share of the treasure, when it could have bought your freedom from them.”

  Them was obvious.

  He said nothing.

  Wilhelmina cursed inside, unsure how to break through, to reach him.

  Moments of emptiness passed.

  “Are you ready? Time is wasting, Javier,” she said hopefully into the vast, emotional space.

  They were close enough to dance, if he would just relax.

  Some mad fire finally lit in the back of his eyes.

  “If we’re going to rescue Sykora, I don’t even had an overnight bag, madam,” he smiled up at her finally.

  “I stole enough clothes for both of us, you know” she tried to leer back at him. “You won’t have to slut walk home.”

  “That works,” he said as he turned and moved away from her. “I need to grab a couple of things from the ship. Fifteen minutes and we’ll be in free–flight.”

  It felt good to flirt with the man, even if there was some manner of icy bulwark between them. Wilhelmina would just have to figure out how to melt it.

  Djamila had never once suggested anything other than hard fire between she and Javier, and Wilhelmina knew there were no other crew members he was more than occasionally involved with. She had checked.

  Could a relationship based on hatred be as fulfilling as one based on love?

  Javier paused at the airlock hatch and studied her face.

  He nodded to himself, turned, and disappeared through the opening.

  Wilhelmina let her long legs coll
apse, dropping her butt into the captain’s chair with an explosion of air from her lungs.

  She’d had men reject her advances before, for a variety of reasons, but never once because it might get in the way of his vengeance.

  She would need to work on that.

  Part Five

  It was the dead of night shift.

  Sleep eluded Javier. Or rather, the dreams would not let him sleep. And there was no booze aboard the little vessel that could help him relax enough to pass into darkness and stay deep.

  The lights were low.

  Javier didn’t need to be awake. The ship was in the middle of a jump that would finally drop them at the far distant edge of the Meehu system, one or two jumps out from their target, but not for another three hours. If they missed the alarm clock, the ship would just sit there, waiting for someone to tell it what to do next.

  It wasn’t intelligent, not like Suvi, but the vessel was automated enough that someone with no experience could figure out how to make it fly. If she was as smart as Wilhelmina.

  Javier sat in the pilot’s seat, spun around backwards to he could rest his feet on the edge of the inflatable bed that had been hidden inside the sofa. Where he could watch Wilhelmina sleep.

  Where he could brood.

  With the bed inflated, there was no other room in the space, so they had ended up sharing it. It was like sleeping with your sister when you were kids. Even dead asleep, his lizard–brain kept him from rolling over and snuggling himself up against her bottom. That she slept nude didn’t help. He was wearing orange sweat pants and a purple t–shirt with Surat Thani Angels printed on the front. Apparently, they were a professional, minor league skyball team from a far–distant sector.

  Javier watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed. Even her nudity barely distracted him, which said a lot for his state of mind.

  None of it good.

  More than once, he considered their next hop. It would be simple enough to bypass Meehu, make a hard run lateral across the sector, and get back to the civilized part of the galaxy in just over a week. He wouldn’t have his chickens, or his trees, but he had Suvi. They could start over, fresh.