“Yeah, but it takes a pretty sharp ripwing to figure out the buttons. Usually they’ll just short the system with a beakbutt and hope it lets them in. And I don’t smell anything burning.”
“Me neither.” I calibrated the gantry space, the rise of the cargo pods over us. Drew the Rapsodia and dialed it to maximum dispersal. “Okay, so let’s do this sensibly. Let me go in there first.”
“I’m supposed—”
“Yeah, I’m sure you are. But I used to do this for a living. So how about you have this one on me. Stay here, shoot anything that comes out of that hatch unless you hear me call it first.”
I moved to the hatch as carefully as I could on the unstable footing and examined the locking mechanism. There didn’t appear to be any damage. The hatch hung outward a couple of centimeters, maybe tipped that way by the pitch of the freighter in the squall.
After whichever pirate ninja opened it had cracked the lock, that is.
Thanks for that.
I tuned out the squall and the alarm. Listened for motion on the other side, cranked the neurachem tight enough to pick up heavy breathing.
Nothing. No one there.
Or someone with stealth combat training.
Will you shut up.
I fitted one foot against the edge of the hatch and gave it a cautious shove. The hinges were balanced to a hair—the whole thing swung weightily outward. Without giving myself time to think, I twisted into the gap, Rapsodia tracking for a target.
Nothing.
Waist-high steel barrels stood in shiny ranks across the cargo space. The gaps between were too thin to hide a child, let alone a ninja. I crossed to the nearest and read the label.
FINEST SAFFRON SEAS LUMINESCENT XENOMEDUSAL EXTRACT, COLD PRESS FILTERED
. Webjelly oil, designer-branded for added value. Courtesy of our entrepreneurial expert on austerity.
I laughed and felt the tension puddle back out of me.
Nothing but—
I sniffed.
There was a scent, fleeting on the metallic air in the cargo pod.
And gone.
The New Hok sleeve’s senses were just acute enough to know it was there, but with the knowledge and the conscious effort, it vanished. Out of nowhere, I had a sudden flash recollection of childhood, an uncharacteristically happy image of warmth and laughter that I couldn’t place. Whatever the smell was, it was something I knew intimately.
I stowed the Rapsodia and moved back to the hatch.
“There’s nothing in here. I’m coming out.”
I stepped back into the warm splatter of the rain and heaved the hatch closed again. It locked into place with a solid thunk of security bolts, shutting in whatever trace scent of the past I’d picked up on. The pulsing reddish radiance over my head died out and the alarm, which had settled to an unnoticed background constant, was abruptly silent.
“What were you doing in there?”
It was the entrepreneur, face tense closing on angry. He had his security in tow. A handful of crew members crowded behind. I sighed.
“Checking on your investment. All sealed and safe, don’t worry. Looks like the pod locks glitched.” I looked at the crew-woman with the blaster. “Or maybe that extra-smart ripwing showed up after all and we scared it off. Look, this is a bit of a long shot I know, but is there a sniffer set anywhere aboard?”
“
Sniffer
set? Like, for the police you mean?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. You could ask the skipper.”
I nodded. “Yeah, well, like I said—”
“I asked you a question.”
The tension in the entrepreneur’s features had made it all the way to anger. At his side, his security glared supportively.
“Yeah, and I answered it. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“You’re not going anywhere. Tomas.”
I cut the bodyguard a glance before he could act on the command. He froze and shifted his feet. I shifted my eyes to the entrepreneur, fighting a strong urge to push the confrontation as far as it would go. Since my run-in with the priest’s wife, I’d been twitchy with the need to do violence.
“If your tuskhead here touches me, he’s going to need surgery. And if you don’t get out of my way, so will you. I already told you, your cargo’s safe. Now suppose you step aside and save us both an embarrassing scene.”
He looked back at Tomas, and evidently read something instructive in his expression. He moved.
“Thank you.” I pushed my way through the gathered crew members behind him. “Anybody seen Japaridze?”
“On the bridge, probably,” said someone. “But Itsuko’s right, there’s no sniffer gear on the
’Duci.
We’re not fucking
seacops.
”
Laughter. Someone sang the signature tune to the experia show of the same name, and the rest took it up for a couple of bars. I smiled thinly and shouldered my way past. As I left, I heard the entrepreneur demanding loudly that the hatch be opened again immediately.
Oh well.
I went to find Japaridze anyway. If nothing else, at least he could provide me with a drink.
• • •
The squall passed.
I sat on the bridge and watched it fade away eastward on the weather scanners, wishing the knot inside me would do the same. Outside, the sky brightened and the waves stopped knocking the
Haiduci’s Daughter
about. Japaridze slacked off the emergency drive to the grav motors, and the freighter settled back into her former stability.
“So tell me the truth, sam.” He poured me another shot of Millsport blended and settled back in the chair across the navigation table. There was no one else on the bridge. “You’re casing the webjelly consignment, right?”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Well, if I am, that’s a pretty unhealthy question to ask me.”
“Nah, not really.” He winked and knocked his drink back in one. Since it had become clear that the weather was going to leave us alone, he’d let himself get slightly drunk. “That fucking prick, for me you can have his cargo. Just so long as you don’t try and lift it while it’s on the
’Duci.”
“Right.” I raised my glass to him.
“So who is it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Who you running radar for? The yak? Weed Expanse gangs? Thing is—”
“Ari, I’m serious.”
He blinked at me. “What?”
“Think about it. If I’m a yak research squad, you go asking questions like that, it’s going to get you Really Dead.”
“Ah, crabshit. You ain’t going to kill me.” He got up, leaned across the table toward me, and peered into my face. “You don’t got the eyes for it. I can tell.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, besides.” He sank back into his seat and gestured untidily with his glass. “Who’s going to sail this tub into Newpest harbor if I’m dead. She’s not like those Saffron Line AI babies, you know. Every now and then, she needs the human touch.”
I shrugged. “I guess I could scare someone on the crew into it. Show them your smoldering corpse for an incentive.”
“That’s good thinking.” He grinned and reached for the bottle again. “I hadn’t thought of that. But like I said, I don’t see it in your eyes.”
“Met a lot like me, have you?”
He filled our glasses. “Man, I
was
one like you. I grew up in Newpest just like you and I was a pirate, just like you. Used to work route robberies with the Seven Percent Angels. Crabshit stuff, skimmer cargo coming in over the Expanse.” He paused and looked me in the eyes. “I got caught.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, it was too bad. They took the flesh off me and they dumped me in the store for three decades, near enough. When I got out, all they had to sleeve me in was some wired-for-shit methhead’s body. My family had all grown up, or moved away, or, you know, died or something. I had a daughter, seven years old when I went in, she was ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing by the time I got out. She had a life and a family of her own. Even if I had known how to relate to her, she didn’t want to know me. I was just a thirty-year gap in her eyes. Likewise her mother, who’d found some other guy, had kids, well, you know how it goes.” He sank his drink, shivered and stared at me through suddenly teared eyes. He poured himself another. “My brother died in a bug crash a couple of years after I went away, no insurance, no way to get a resleeve. My sister was in the store, she’d gone in ten years after me, wasn’t getting out for another twenty. There’d been another brother, born a couple of years after I went away, I didn’t know what to say to him. My father and mother were separated—he died first, got his resleeve policy through, and went off somewhere to be young, free, and single again. Wouldn’t wait for her. I went to see her but all she did was stare out of the window with this smile on her face, kept saying
soon, soon, it’ll be my turn soon.
Gave me the fucking creeps.”
“So you went back to the Angels.”
“Good guess.”
I nodded. It wasn’t a guess, it was a riff on the lives of a dozen acquaintances from my own Newpest youth.
“Yeah, the Angels. They had me back, they’d gone up a notch or two in the scheme of things. Couple of the same guys I used to run with. They were knocking over hoverloaders on the Millsport runs from the inside. Good money, and with a meth habit to support I needed that. Ran with them for about two, three years. Got caught again.”
“Yeah?” I made an effort, tried to look mildly surprised. “How long this time?”
He grinned, like a man in front of a fire. “Eighty-five.”
We sat in silence for a while. Finally, Japaridze poured more whiskey and sipped at his drink as if he didn’t really want it.
“This time, I lost them all for good. Whatever second life my mother got, I missed that. And she’d opted out of a third time around, just had herself stored with instructions for rental resleeve on a list of family occasions. Release of her son Ari from penal storage wasn’t on that list, so I took the hint. Brother was still dead, sister got out of the store while I was in, went north decades before I got out again, I don’t know where. Maybe looking for her father.”
“And your daughter’s family?”
He laughed and shrugged. “Daughter, grandkids. Man, by then I was another two generations out of step with them, I didn’t even try to catch up. I just took what I had and I ran with it.”
“Which was what?” I nodded at him. “This sleeve?”
“Yeah, this sleeve. I got what you might call lucky. Belonged to some rayhunter captain got busted for hooking out of a First Families marine estate. Good solid sleeve, well looked after. Some useful seagoing software racked in, and some weird instinctive shit for weather. Sort of painted a career for me all on its own. I got a loan on a boat, made some money. Got a bigger boat, made some more. Got the
’Duci.
Got a woman back in Newpest now. Couple of kids I’m watching grow up.”
I raised my glass without irony. “Congratulations.”
“Yeah, well, like I said. I got lucky.”
“And you’re telling me this because?”
He leaned forward on the table and looked at me. “You know why I’m telling you this.”
I quelled a grin. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know. He was doing his best.
“All right, Ari. Tell you what, I’ll lay off your cargo. I’ll mend my ways, give up piracy, and start a family. Thanks for the tip.”
He shook his head. “Not telling you anything you don’t already know, sam. Just reminding you, is all. This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.”
• • •
He was right, of course.
As a messenger, he was also a little late.
Evening caught up with the
Haiduci’s Daughter
on her westward curve a couple of hours later. The sun split like a cracked egg either side of a rising Hotei, and reddish light soaked out across the horizon in both directions. The low rise of Kossuth’s Gulf coastline painted a thick black base for the picture. High above, thin cloud cover glowed like a shovel full of heated coins.
I avoided the forward decks, where the rest of the passengers had gathered to watch the sunset—I doubted I’d be welcome among them given my various performances today. Instead I worked my way back along one of the freight gantries, found a ladder, and climbed it to the top of the pod. There was a narrow walkway there, and I settled cross-legged onto its scant breadth.
I hadn’t lived quite the idiotic waste of youth Japaridze had, but the end result wasn’t much different. I beat the traps of stupid crime and storage at an early age, but only just. By the time I hit my late teens, I’d traded in my Newpest gang affiliations for a commission in the Harlan’s World tactical marines—if you’re going to be in a gang, it might as well be the biggest one on the block, and no one fucked with the tacs. For a while, it seemed like the smart move.
Seven uniformed years down that road, the Corps recruiters came for me. Routine screening put me at the top of a shortlist, and I was invited to volunteer for Envoy conditioning. It wasn’t the kind of invitation you turned down. A couple of months later I was offworld, and the gaps started opening up. Time away, needlecast into action across the Settled Worlds, time laid down in military storage and virtual environments between. Time speeded up, slowed down, rendered meaningless anyway by interstellar distance. I began to lose track of my previous life. Furlough back home was infrequent and brought with it a sense of dislocation each time that discouraged me from going as often as I could have. As an Envoy, I had the whole Protectorate as a playground—
might as well see some of it,
I reasoned at the time.
And then Innenin.
When you leave the Envoys, there are a very limited number of career options. No one trusts you enough to lend you capital, and you’re flat-out forbidden under UN law to hold corporate or governmental posts. Your choices, apart from straight-up poverty, are mercenary warfare or crime. Crime is safer, and easier to do. Along with a few colleagues who’d also resigned from the Corps after the Innenin debacle, I ended up back on Harlan’s World running rings around local law enforcement and the petty criminals they played tag with. We carved out reputations, stayed ahead of the game, went through anyone who opposed us like angelfire.