Whole Lives in Hammered Fragments

by James Beamon

In the narrow confines of the airlock, condemned men go mad.

The darkness is blacker than my ebony skin, certainly darker than the star-sprinkled space behind the doors. The abyssal kind of black that deepens, ripens, stands unopposed, until everything a man imagines, all the demons he conjures in his mind’s eye are tangible.

Maybe I don’t go mad. Definitely, I enjoy my time in the lock. I fly the Herschel Run between Ceres and Pallas again, Kelvin hot on my heels in his Corsair, every beautiful second stretched taut, a collection of successive infinities, my ghosts and demons vividly real. The airlock is the steel veil between two worlds, the closest I will ever get to the stars again. My time between worlds will last forever until, as it always does, it ends at Vesta. Perhaps thoughts like these are madness in themselves.

The lock opens, the doors splitting down the middle with a deafening crack. It is not the side with the unending vacuum and the promise of starlight. This side is full of harsh halogen-diode bulbs that make my eyes squint and leak tears. Two guards, their black uniforms pressed as if they could iron authority into every crease, toss me boots and the familiar yellow jumpsuit. They tell me to get dressed despite it being the only reasonable option I have. There’s a distinction between my wanting something and them telling me to do it.

They escort me down the hall of the prison station. We walk through a decaying, windowless world of rusted cell bars and bent balcony rails four stories high. Every cell holds hushed men whose lives share the same ending. Water drips from the ceiling like tears. Steam pours out of vents in the floor as if to tell us that hell is only a flight of stairs below.

Here, adrift in space, dwell ragtag remnants of a war. Only the Hegemony didn’t call it war; wars are glamorous, glorious in hindsight. War would make us revolutionaries. The Hegemony called it the Piracy Years. There was no big secret why they called us pirates. Revolutionaries die martyrs for causes. Revolutionaries get reprieved when wars were over. Pirates live as criminals, serving sentences in penal ships on the outskirts of the Bracelet. Pirates get flushed like refuse out of airlocks.

They take me to the warden’s office. My time in the lock has seen a new warden replace the one I remember. His mustache is thin, trimmed low with pencil sharp points that make him look like a cartoon villain. His expression is one of perfunctory indifference, an emperor addressing his subjects or a zookeeper feeding the animals.

“As I live and breathe, the legendary Marcus Lyons, in my office.”

He looks me over, just like the last new warden had, probably wondering if all the things he has heard are capable in a frame so slight. I look around his office, trying to find something of substance to measure my time in the abyss besides the new face in front of me. A clock, a calendar. All I find is a coffee mug and a holographic vid stand of the warden and his wife dancing at their wedding.

“Is it true, what happened on Vesta?” he asks.

I say nothing. Truth is always stranger than fiction yet invariably fails to live up to myth. The Hegemony had already stripped me bare until only the myth remained. They would not deprive me of it.

“They say,” the warden continues, “you did it because you were tired of the debate on which Lyons was the greatest pilot alive. Is it true?” he asks, his cartoon mustache curling up at the corners of his mouth as he smiles. “You can tell me. It’s not like I can add time to a life sentence.”

“Do you know what is certain, about the stories?” I ask, my voice hoarse from lack of use.

The warden shakes his head and leans forward, his eyes dancing like a kid looking at the lit candles of his own birthday cake.

“Now there’s no debate on who’s the greatest pilot alive.”

The warden settles back into his chair, eyes me like I’m a waste of time, a waste of presence. It’s a look all the guards grow for us; no doubt the warden spent some time in a perfectly creased uniform. “Aren’t you curious as to why you’re here, Marcus?”

I know why I’m there. I’m only a name when they want something from me. Something more than to see me froth at the mouth from suppression tazes, or stripped bare before they toss me in the lock. When they don’t want anything, I’m just a number. I don’t change my blank expression as I look at him. I know he’ll tell me the particulars whether I’m curious or not.

“I’m about to offer you your one chance for freedom.”

This breaks my demeanor in a hoarse croak of a laugh, exacerbated by rusty vocal cords.

“You and I both know the only freedom I’ll find is when one of the guards ‘accidentally’ hits the outer door button the next time I’m in the airlock.”

My voice is devoid of sarcasm. Back in the old days, before I was captured and Kelvin was dead, these kinds of accidents happened all the time as news drifted to peacekeepers and authorities of ship seizures which had left their friends and peers as forced labor or corpses drifting in space. The Hegemony has always been about an eye for an eye; a solar system full of floaters proves that.

“We need you to kill someone,” the warden says.

“I’m not an assassin. You got the wrong guy.” I have enough blood on my hands. Even though none of it is innocent, that doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t leave stains. There’s a difference between a guy trying to survive in the deep and killing for profit. The Hegemony never understood the difference, never got that most of us were out there doing what we had to after they left us for dead.

I get up to leave. Leaving without permission almost always earns you a shock taze and time in the lock. But I have heard enough. And I welcome the lock; freedom can come any time.

Strangely, I do not feel the electric bite of a taze. The warden talks, his voice light as if he’s having his say behind the biggest of grins.

“But you are the right guy. It takes a pirate to catch a pirate. And you’ve done it before, you see. We want you to kill your brother.”

∞

Momma used to call the asteroid belt the Hammered Bracelet, said it was her favorite band of jewelry. She’d point to the sky on those nights when a white glow tinted the heavens and afforded the Red Planet looming above our heads a majestic, shining halo. “God’s hammering at the Bracelet again,” she’d say, the creases around her mouth curving up into a smile. She was full of smiles back then, the contagious ones that made Kelvin and me split our lips to reveal tiny tic-tac teeth.

We learned later it was zodiacal light, created from the dust clouds of asteroid collisions, but as kids we would look through the domed glass of Stickney Crater Colony and really imagine a giant man just beyond our sights with a hammer and a forge, remaking the universe right before us if we could only get off this moon to see him working.

But nothing easily escaped Phobos, not even wishful thinking. The high hopes for Mars’ moon and its supply of helium-3 died within the first decade of colonization. The gas died first, about six years after the glass domes sprang up like boom towns for new gold, an energy abundance grossly exaggerated by venture capitalists and investors hungry for quick profits on fusion fuel. The optimism of colonists, who believed the investors of Phobos would convert it into something worthwhile, that lingered on, refusing to die when the helium evaporated.

Momma believed Phobos was salvageable. “If we can’t mine H-three, bring it in,” she said. “Turn this moon into a filling station. A scenic rest stop. Look at that view,” she pointed up at the sky, eyes dancing as she took in the looming, fiery red sphere of Mars. On its surface, the crystalline glass of burgeoning cities like New Olympus and Greater Cydonia sparkled back like pinprick jewels. “Where else can you find that?” she’d ask.

I agreed because she was Momma and hell, she could say no wrong. If she said there was a giant, bearded dude in a robe hammering on jewelry a few miles out, then I’m sure he was on the job. I had no doubt Phobos would work as a lopsided sphere of a gas station.

But the investors forgot about Phobos. The streaking light of ships, like shooting stars across our dusty glass domes, told the tale of the new Manifest Destiny, as these ships blazed trails to Europa and Callisto and Titan and Triton. Better moons, richer moons, resplendent orbs that lay ever closer to the promise of human life outside of Sol.

Momma still believed change was coming. I think clinging to that belief partly killed her. The alternative, to face the fact that she had brought herself and her two young sons to a place whose golden promise had withered away to leave nothing but a glass tomb, was hard to stomach.

I believed with her, until I couldn’t anymore.

∞

“You’ve gone soft in here, Lyons. Weak.” The guard talks casual-like as he walks beside me, escorting me to the cruiser waiting at the prison docks. “Your brother, he’s going to blow your ship apart.” From the corner of my eye, I see his grin grow as he thinks about it. “Blast your bitch ass into frozen meat cubes drifting through the belt.”

“Maybe so,” I say, walking in a swagger step because of the leg chains. The promise of leaving this prison alive is still too surreal for me to invest in. Besides, it’s a Hegemony promise, worth as much as the dirt on Phobos. Instead I invest in my anger, as thick and real as these chains, a reactionary rage triggered by this guard with the gall to speak to me about my brother.

“I was gonna be courteous,” I tell him. “You know, steer around all the Hej goons the Lyonpryde left floating out there. But see, you messed that up. Now I think I’ll just plow through your old buddies.”

He swivels on a dime, brings his knee up into my solar plexus. It’s the most effective retort a guard can give and the only response I have is a clinking of chains as I fall to my knees, blinking through tears and spasms as I fight to get wind back.

“Just as I said,” the guard says over me. “Weak.”

He hauls me to my feet and I stumble awkwardly in the chains as he pushes me forward. I have learned in my time here if a guard wants to fuck you up, he or she will fuck you up. Nothing short of murder stops it, so you may as well earn your lumps. I earned that knee, which is the only solace I can take as I walk off the pain enough to breathe again.

At the end of the hallway, the guard waves his biochipped hand, opening the doors which separate the prison proper from the gangway leading to the docks. I stop short, my breath taken away just as surely as if I had another knee delivered to my gut.

The gangway is the invisible floor of a bridge tunnel, all of it made of transparent acrylics and quartz glass. Stars surround me, no longer light I have to imagine in the darkness of an airlock. I drink in their different intensities, glimmering, winking like knowing eyes. I am barely aware of the guard’s prodding as I walk among their celestial fire.

“Can you fly a Croix de Guerre light cruiser?” the guard asks.

“What do you think?”

“I think you better answer the question, convict.”

“If it’s a standard Croix, with a single Ambient fusion engine accompanied by a backup ion drive, then yes. If it’s using a solar thermal engine with uranium fission backup, a configuration called the Dirty Cross, then yes. If it’s using twin Ambient minis, known as the Double Cross and my personal favorite, then yes.”

I hold my shackles up to eye level so he can unlock them. “I’m Marcus goddamn Lyons.” If he has any other questions about what I can fly, that should answer it.

I am either pushing my luck or earning my lumps, the difference sometimes being sliver thin. The guard grabs my shackles in a violent snatch, pulling me close to his face. His lip curls up into a sneer.

“Not for much longer. Soon all you’ll be is so much frozen meat debris.”

He speaks his personal authorization number, which, coupled with the biochip in his hand, unlocks the shackles. He gathers the chains and retreats the way we came, leaving me alone in a twinkling sea of stars.

For long moments I just stand there, taking in infinite space all around me. Ever since Kelvin and I escaped Phobos, this—being among the stars—has always meant freedom. We were a reflection of space and its promise. Our skin, dark like the pitch of the vacuum, our eyes twinkling like distant stars and both of us with fire in our gut running hotter than our nuclear engines, hotter than the sun.

Kelvin. The cost of freedom was always too steep.

∞

Momma paid for our freedom when we were teenagers, years after the currency on Phobos had changed. Money was still money, would always be money, whether it was Hegemony sterlings or Caliphate shekels or Eastern Coalition yuan. But sterlings or shekels or yuan were no longer within reach, not even for hands as outstretched as ours. And currency, the medium of exchange between people, became less paper bills and digital credits to the things that grew like weeds in places that lay dying and discarded at the fringes of society. Skills. Favors. Bodily fluids.

Kelvin and I never asked what Momma’s currency was. And we were thugs. No one dared tell us. It was hard enough seeing what her currency charged her, seeing the flattening of her smile, the light in her eyes dimming to dying embers.

I pretended not to notice. I focused on honing my skills. Lock picking, pickpocketing, fighting, strong-arming. I was good at it. And Kelvin? He was even better.

Then came a time when I couldn’t pretend to not notice Momma. She never came home again for me to pretend. Her body never emerged from a forgotten alleyway or got pulled from a trash disposal unit. She just wasn’t anymore, her fate forever a question.

“It was us,” Kelvin said looking up at the dome, the night sky beyond obscured by the grime coating the glass—the film from a thousand methane and coal fires our overtaxed air recyclers would never fully purify. Kelvin wore his hair half in neat braided rows, the other half unbraided and erupting from his head like a black sunburst. “She left because of us.”

Even though he was only thirteen, I had gotten used to looking at Kelvin as a man. He was one for as much as he’d seen and done. Hearing him talk like this showed me that there was a part of him Phobos hadn’t toughened to gristle.

At that moment, he was a kid, hurt and scared. Betrayed by one of the few things he had placed faith in. I did what a big brother does.

“Are you crazy? No way she’d leave,” I told him. Never mind that I entertained the same notion, that our descent into crime had broken Momma’s heart so many times we had finally driven her from us.

Sometimes, a woman’s body was the only ticket off Phobos. Long haul mining crews occasionally stopped by our domes before setting out to work the Bracelet for months on end. Out there, where the amounts of procured helium-3 dictated what a miner made and ever dwindling reserves of food, water and renewable oxygen limited mining time, no one took on passengers. Except a woman, the burden of her food, water and air shared among the crew in exchange for the obvious. It wasn’t easy or dignified work, but after months on her back, she’d find herself in New Olympus or on Old Earth complete with the opportunities that came with it.

“Fucking miners,” I spat. “Think they can treat us like trash. Or worse yet, those sick tourists, who come here looking for little girls, or young guys like us until we leave them with cracked skulls and empty wallets. I can see any of them wanting a Phobos souvenir.”

I don’t know if I was talking to convince Kelvin or to convince myself, but I know I got angry. And I kept talking, about the bootleggers who came to skirt customs, the junkmen who traded broken, antiquated air and water purifiers for exorbitant prices, the drug dealers who brought in crystalline, brimstone coke, and amp while taking payment from our women and what little we could pawn. My rage boiled over. I wanted blood.

“Get everyone,” I said to Kelvin.

For most of the guys, our crew was the only family they had. Now it was the only family Kelvin and I had too. I was done with Phobos, done with the loamy methane stink of it all. Once we got the whole crew and explained our haphazard plan, nobody opted out. We made our way, twenty-two strong, with faces grim enough to make people turn the other way when they saw us coming through their dilapidated street. We leapt and bound through the low gravity, kicking up the chalky moon dust with our harsh landings and hurried launches. The dust particles hung listlessly, stuck in the air as if suspended in time.

The spaceport was the only place under The Sticks that had any decent security, the one rule of law necessary for the steady flow of black market money. Keep the ships landing, full of their drugs and worthless junk and pedophiles.

But where there’s corruption, there are cracks. And cracks could be widened when you apply enough skill. We could widen them; skills were our currency.

We got access through the public yards, where the junkmen stored their wares. Security was the lightest there, it being cheaper to write off stolen merchandise than to pay for the extra security of the private stockyards. We crept through endless rows of stockpiled machinery: refrigerators, sonic plows, purifiers and disposers, piled high without any discernible order. After dodging a couple half-assed patrolmen, we made the perimeter fence, where Kelvin worked with Beagle and Steve to break codes for the gate’s suppression barrier.

I got impatient, seeing the well-lit, well-maintained equipment shining like new beyond the gate while watching them fail again and again on the codes. As we huddled in silence, my thoughts went to Momma, murdered or taking on a ship full of miners just to get away from us. I didn’t know which one was worse; I just knew I’d be damned if I sat there dwelling in it.

I took Primus and Jones with me, the most levelheaded dudes in our crew. We doubled back, found one of those patrolmen. I snuck up behind him and before he knew what time it was, I had him in a chokehold.

I didn’t bother negotiating with him for codes. He wasn’t scared of street toughs; he was scared of failing the people who paid him to keep trash like us out.

“Strip his gear,” I said while the patrolman gasped and clawed at the arm bar around his throat. Wordlessly, Jones ripped the comms off his ear and belt, Primus took his suppression tazer.

I dragged the patrolman to the fence line, choking him the whole way. By the time we got back, they had only gotten through half the codes.

“Open up,” I said as I took my arm away from his throat enough for him to breathe.

“Go to hell, boy,” he spat.

“That doesn’t sound like the code to me,” I said, pointing at the still locked gate. Without ceremony, I shoved him into the fence. The guard’s body tensed up as the defense mechanisms kicked in, filling the air with an ionic buzz that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Keep plugging at the codes,” I told Kelvin, Beagle and Steve, who had stopped their hacking to watch the stuttering, twist-jerk movements of the guard stuck on the fence.

After half a minute, the fence knocked the guard away. He collapsed on his back, the saliva in his mouth cooked to a white froth. I hauled him up and shoved him back in for Round Two.

Suppression fences were supposed to be nonlethal. Mr. Guard was going to test the limits of that claim. Either the gate was going to break under our hacking or the guard was going to break under the fence. It didn’t matter to me which.

Kelvin managed to knock down another cipher wall by the time Round Two was over. Mr. Guard managed to squeak out an “I don’t know” and a shake of his head before I shoved him back into the gate. Apparently, the fence gave the guard a little insider information during Round Three because he came away from his suppression treatment suddenly knowing the access codes. He started mumbling the digits just as the gate slid open, the last cipher knocked down by Kelvin and his hackers.

“What do we do now?” Kelvin asked, looking at the open gate as if he didn’t believe we’d get this far.

“Some bootleggers landed moonside yesterday in a tetra-kite,” I said, letting the guard in my grasp collapse in a heap. “We sneak aboard. We take over.”

“We’ll need them to fly us out. What if they refuse?” Kelvin asked.

I looked at my little brother as serious as life could get.

“We don’t need them. We don’t need anyone any more except each other.” I reached over to Primus, pulled the guard’s suppression tazer from his hand and held it at eye level.

“We either learn to fly it or die trying.”

∞

The Hej monkeys who put this mission together read my file at least. They provided my favorite Guerre, a twin Ambient Double Cross. Seeing irony in this is like seeing yellow in sunlight. As I ease into the oiled leather of the pilot’s seat, I realize I don’t care. My eyes find comfort in the returning familiarity of the steel dials and switches, my nostrils fill with the subtle hints of shellac and alcohol in the treated polymer fixtures. I peer over the dashboard. An infinite universe of stars sparkle, like a lover’s eyes looking back at me.

I imagine this is what coming home feels like.

“Cleared for departure,” a man’s voice chimes over the Interstel link.

“Acknowledged.” I look at the port and aft camera feeds, where my ship is attached to the misshapen gray blotch of prison station. Jupiter dominates the backdrop of space behind the ship, the regal giant’s red eye casting its roving, disapproving glare over us all.

“You had best acknowledge everything, Marcus Lyons,” the Interstel voice says. The smugness dripping over the words forms an image in my mind and I see the new warden’s cartoon mustache curving up with self-satisfied pomp. “Last thing any of us wants is for you to get amnesia or, worse, turn clever.”

I recall the failsafes he briefed me on when I agreed to this. I couldn’t help but remember… after he explained the mission the bastard threw me back into the airlock while the countermeasures to my cleverness were being installed.

“If I try to fly in any direction except toward the belt, the ship will explode. Once I’m in the belt, if I fly out of it, the ship will explode. My Interstel is being monitored. If I try to signal my brother or have some other heart-to-heart that doesn’t involve his ship getting blown apart, I win a prize. That prize is my ship exploding,” I finish, repeating the spiel verbatim. Time in the lock spent to good use.

“Good, good,” the Interstel chimes as I see the prison release its magnetic docking locks, causing my ship to free drift. “Go show us some of that Lyonpryde magic.”

The cockpit fills with the whine of energy building as the engines come to life. I pull away from the dock, fighting the urge to turn my ship and empty my payload into the prison station’s control tower. I figure I’m faster than the warden and his self-destruct button, but why risk it? Right now, I want the same thing he wants.

Kelvin is dead, no matter how often they speak his name. The thought of someone pretending to be my brother, of using his legacy instead of creating their own sickens me. Whoever’s out there in the belt evoking the Lyons name to instill fear is about to learn wrath follows.

Once outside Jupiter’s gravity well, the flight to the Hammered Bracelet is fast and nostalgic. It is familiar country. The swath of space between Mars and Jupiter had belonged to us. Before I know it I am in the belt, navigating past the Four Sisters towards denser formations, old haunts and hideouts.

In its heyday, the belt hosted several clans—the Lyonpryde and the Neo-drakes, Spacer Mongols and al-Ghouti. Now all the clans had been cowed—killed, scattered, imprisoned—and only ghosts live in the Bracelet.

I almost don’t see the Interdictor until it’s too late. The Hegemony’s flagship fighter darts out from a crater of a drifting asteroid, fearsome looking, a blue-steel moth with the face of a bear trap. The ship banks one way while the missile it fires banks opposite.

The One-Man Pincer. It is Kelvin’s signature move. If you move towards the missile to dodge, you’ll find out it’s a proximity activated charge when it blows. Move opposite and you’ll have an enemy ship barreling down at you, its guns already trained on you and ready to blast while you’re still recovering.

There’s only one method I’ve ever found to evade the Pincer. I pull back on the stick, exposing my underbelly as I smash the emergency reverse button. Instead of going either toward the missile or toward the hostile ship, I drop down and out. After a few tense moments of flying backwards, the Interdictor appears on my display.

My thumb automatically glides over the fire button at the sight of the Hegemony’s most feared killing machine. My display chimes in response; all I need is two seconds to get a lock on it.

He fights like Kelvin, but this can’t be Kelvin, not flying a Hej warship. The Interdictor is changing direction, trying in vain to reacquire me before I get a lock. My fingers twitch. My display is a half second from blaring confirmation that my target is acquired.

I push my stick up and my ship swings forward, breaking sights on target. I gun my accelerator, my Guerre charging away from battle, deeper into the belt. I don’t know if that’s Kelvin flying an Interdictor, but I know how to find out.

The asteroids are virtually worlds away from one another until a person starts traveling at these speeds. At half or three-quarters hiz, the rocks in the belt move at a near blur, a constant assault. It is the Herschel Run all over again, with Kelvin eating away at my heels. It must be Kelvin because he doesn’t miss a single beat. I can’t help but smile with glee, the adrenaline surging as we race through the rocks.

I go through the familiar turns, the spins and vaults. Just like when I pretend in the lock, the seconds stretch, each one taut. I lose myself in the infinite.

As it always does, it ends in Vesta. A botched heist on the mining station, a setup really. Hej ships above us, ready to blow the whole place to hell. Kelvin and I, two wanted men with one escape pod between us.

I looked at my little brother and I remember telling myself he had changed. He had grown bloodthirsty, cruel, dangerous in the course of this war. But it was bullshit. He had grown hard, same as me, but the truth, the one waiting for me to discover in the darkness of the lock years later, is I was selfish. I was tired, tired of being a big brother and looking out for him. I wanted something for me. I wanted to live.

That’s when the butt of my gun struck the back of his head. Moments later I hurtled through space in the pod as Hegemony ships rained salvo after salvo down on the station.

The memory stings as I fly, distracts me enough to nearly crash into one of Hygiea’s Disciples. I cut my engines. His flying is unmistakable, but it is not the Herschel Run all over again. It is time I pay him what I owe.

His ship races in front of me, swivels and stops. The ship just hovers, making no move to fire. My Interstel crackles.

“Marcus?”

My display blares the sound of an acquired lock. Missiles from my ship’s underbelly answer his question, missiles I didn’t fire. I shout Kelvin’s name like that will warn him, staring helpless as I watch them fly to blow his ship apart.

The missiles explode before impact, releasing electronic displacement charges. It looks like an angry lightning storm. The lightning ripples across Kelvin’s ship. Moments later, the engine dies and the ship begins to drift.

“Convict 174557E, what did we tell you about heart-to-hearts?” the voice of the warden comes through the speakers.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me he was flying an Interdictor? Or that you’re controlling my missiles?”

“Who are you that I have to explain anything? A convict pilot?” the warden asks. “You’re lucky you’re still useful. Retrieval ships are en route. Monitor the Interdictor and shoot again if its electrical systems appear to come back online. Acknowledge.”

I stare at the helpless Hej ship, looking as lifeless as the small asteroids listing around us.

“You’re two blinks close to freedom, convict. Better swallow your conscience. Now acknowledge.”

“Marc?” Kelvin’s voice comes as a hush through the Interstel, sounding confused and weak.

“Sorry it has to be this way, Kelvin,” I reply. “Trust me; the next missile will hurt me more than it’ll hurt you.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” the warden says. “That sounds like a free man talking.”

What the warden doesn’t know is the code Kelvin and I have. He doesn’t even catch on when I set my missile bay to autofire in three minutes.

Getting shot out of a missile tube is suicidal. The loader isn’t set to handle delicate payloads like people, so the probability of the spacesuit getting ripped is quite high. Factor that in with the disorienting, nausea-inducing thrust and it was certifiably crazy. It was one of the reasons the Lyonpryde was so respected and feared.

It is only after I have been successfully launched from the bay, fighting nausea while praying the loader didn’t make any microleaks, that the warden catches the meaning behind my words to Kelvin. The ship explodes behind me, but it is too far away, too late. The force of it only pushes me faster to Kelvin’s ship, where the airlock is sitting open, waiting for me to enter. The airlock closes behind me and I enter a dark ship. I head to the bridge, guided by wan, flickering lights. I enter the bridge and my heart jumps into my throat.

Kelvin. My brother is silver bones and dark flesh protruding out of a steel captain’s chair. The chair is fused along his spine, neck, the back of his head, fitted with dials and lights and exotic wiring. Kelvin is a skull of erupting wires and mechanical eyes, lidless, staring at me as I gape at him. His face is locked into a grinning rictus.

“It’s good to see you, Brother.” The words don’t come from my brother’s smiling, open mouth but from the Interstel speakers around us.

“Jesus, Kel…” I say looking at the seamless fusion of man and ship. “What happened?”

“If I could shrug I would,” the Interstel says. “I remember Vesta then falling. After that, dreams. Lots of dreams. Some of them good, like the Pallas Run, the Danbury Heist. Mostly bad. A lot of dogfighting, Hej but not Hej, not really… more like wars with smudges and smears. One day I woke up from the bad dreams, into this chair. The real nightmare.”

“Marcus Lyons,” the warden’s voice comes in over Kelvin’s. “You need to stand down while we complete retrieval of our Interdictor. In fact, you will wait outside the ship. Failure to do so will be taken as hostile.”

“Interdictor? You mean my brother, you bastard? Are all your Interdictors like this… host to captured, programmed men?”

I already know the answer. So this was how the Hegemony won the war. It takes a pirate to catch a pirate. They used insiders to discover our hideouts and headquarters, flush out the smuggler dens and chase down the supply runners adept at hiding among the rocks.

Only Kelvin’s programming failed. He had become himself again. They wanted him back and that’s where I came in: the best pilot alive versus the best pilot that ever died.

“Stand down, Lyons,” the warden repeats.

“Don’t let them get me, Marcus,” Kelvin says, “You can’t imagine the pain, the trapped feeling… like being on Phobos with no end in sight.”

“There’s your answer Warden, straight from your Interdictor,” I say. I look at my brother. “Block his feed, Kel.”

It’s all talk if I can’t get him out of this. “Can you fly?”

“I’m afraid not, Brother. The electrical systems are down outside of battery backup. They’re coming back online, but it will be at least twenty minutes.”

Getting those twenty minutes would be nothing short of a modern miracle. Hej ships close distance rapidly. I look at his display and see a dozen blips in the periphery.

“Unknowns approaching,” Kelvin says. “Fourteen minutes out.”

“I can shoot us out manually,” I say. “What are you armed with?”

“HX missiles. Six left. Not enough.”

I look out of the bridge window as if the rock fragments drifting in their lazy orbit have an idea for me. There’s freedom here, always has been among the scattered hosts of the Hammered Bracelet. My brother says their programming is the opposite of freedom, tantamount to life under the glass dome of Stickney Crater. It is something I will not abide.

“We’ve got enough missiles for the delubrum incendia,” I say. It was a derelict ship tactic I developed and Kelvin named back when he was learning Latin. I couldn’t remember what delubrum meant, but incendia, that was something no one forgot after they saw the maneuver.

“Yes, the shrine was always fun,” Kelvin says. “Are you sure?”

“Give me a little of your battery backup power,” I answer. “Light the way to your missile bay.”

The lights make the trips back and forth from missile bay to bridge manageable, my hands full of equipment, my rush making my breath fog against my helmet’s faceplate. If the Hej knew what I was capable of they’d keep their distance. But they don’t, which makes my plan perfect.

The Hegemony never understood our premium on freedom, anything about us really. Maybe that’s why they developed the Interdictor, to bridge the gap just enough to end the people on the other side of the bridge. I look out of the window, at the approaching Hegemony ships, almost close enough to board us. Maybe it is too much to ask that the warden was on one of them, but I ask for it anyway. I’d love to show him some Lyonpryde magic.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Kelvin, “about what happened back on Vesta.”

“Funny,” he says, “I can’t remember a time when I haven’t forgiven you.”

There is nothing else to say. I look around the room at a bridge littered with wires running through reappropriated HX missile warheads. My thumb glides over the detonator.

This time, I do what a big brother does.