“Have you ever met a wizard?” Chuck asked the microphone in his hand. He faced a spotlight, the glare blindingly bright. Half of stage performance was getting used to not blinking or squinting. He knew his audience was out there, even though the theater echoed. “Are you sure? Pointy hat, long white beard, can hardly miss ’em, right? Right. Or so I thought.”
He began to pace the stage. Comedy wasn’t an audio-only medium. A comic needed a stage presence, even if he wasn’t up there dancing, using props, or mugging along with his impressions. For Chuck Ramsey, that meant projecting energy, motion, filling the stage with himself.
“Then I run into this kid fresh out of college, business suit, the whole shebang. Bumped into him on the streets of Boston Prime, I fall down. With a wave of his hand, he lifts me back onto my feet like I was a plastic kids’ soldier—you know, the kind your mom told you to keep out of your mouth when you were five, and you were thinking, ‘Why would I eat Sgt. Awesomepants?’ So, I thank him and mention he doesn’t look like a wizard. His reply?”
Chuck paused for effect, both verbally and his gait across the faux-wood floor.
“It takes all kinds.”
He resumed walking, setting the contrast between his in-bit persona and the wizard he’d met by chance on the streets of Earth.
“Well, that got me thinking. Who else has been a wizard all along without me ever knowing?
“The guy who makes my hot sandwiches at Lewie’s Deli? He does this thing with the fry-top spatula, flipping and twirling and… yeah. I’m going with wizard there.
“What about the gal who fixes my omni connection at the Multex Depot? You can’t tell me five taps with your finger did anything that me staring at a help menu for six hours couldn’t. Wizard for sure.”
There was no response from the audience. A miss on that one. The deli bit was a setup, but the Multex Depot payoff was supposed to be a laugh line.
“Oh, and once I started really pondering: my wife. Waves her thumb at a bank scanner, and all my terras vanish. Poof. Definitely magic.”
A lone snicker broke the silence from the 500 seats facing Chuck’s stage. It was an improvement.
“What about my agent…” Chuck looked around, taking in his surroundings. “Definitely NOT a wizard.”
From the same spot out in the sea of chairs, a guffaw.
That’s more like it.
A single spectator clapped as the spotlight winked off and the house lights came up. The only spectator. The only opinion that mattered on Chuck’s performance.
“Not bad, Ramsey,” Ebenezer Finook called out. He beckoned Chuck over without budging from the spot where he reclined with his feet propped on the seat back in front of him.
“So, do I get the gig?” Chuck asked as he drew close.
Finook patted the seat beside him. Chuck obliged and parked himself expectantly. “Yeah. You get the gig. Thirty-five hundred for a one-week run on the starship Nazareth. Now, you proved you could manage a clean set…”
Chuck had scoured this audition set list for innuendo, cussing, blasphemy… Given the nature of his act, that stuff was deep in the bones of his best material. It was more work culling the greatest hits of Williams, Carlin, and the rest of the 20th century’s greats than it was coming up with the wizard bit to cap it off.
“But, I’d like to see if you can trim the priest bit, too.”
“Done,” Chuck replied reflexively. Artistic integrity didn’t buy groceries or fuel rods. He could manage to spend a week pandering to missionaries if it meant taking home 3,500 smackers.
“The One Church underwrites the accommodations, the food, everything. Your honorarium is a tax write-off for me. Everyone wins. Just don’t go making me look bad, capisce? Any questions?”
Chuck could only think of one that might still be a deal-breaker this late in the game. “Room and board applies to my family, too?”
With a smile full of gold teeth, Finook grinned slowly. “No problem. One Church loves families.”
“No drinking, not even the wine they try to hand out. No grifting. No cons. The kids here aren’t like our nomad friends; they’re sitting ducks—God help ’em—and I don’t want you corrupting any of them.”
Brad looked up at his mother, blank-faced.
Mort tried to hide his interest as he pored over the pages of Il Principe, a book he’d read close to a dozen times. The scene around him was a pantomime of parenting and filial duty. Neither parent nor child followed through worth a damn, far as he could tell. Hours from now, Becky would be working the cork out of her second bottle of communion wine, and Brad would be… well, Brad was impossible to predict. That was part of his charm. But it certainly wouldn’t align with anything Becky was “laying on” him right now.
Becky wagged a finger. “That means no taking advantage of their generosity, selling them ‘rare’ galactic souvenirs, or gambling of any sort.”
“What about women?” Brad asked coyly.
“I’d stick to girls,” his mother replied with a condescending smirk.
The living room of the Radio City had its own holo-projector, but nothing on the bedratted thing came close to the firsthand drama that played out within the Ramsey family on a daily basis. Their arrival on the Nazareth merely provided new battlegrounds and battles to fight thereon. Mort couldn’t have paid for tickets to better theater than this.
Clearing his throat, Brad drew himself tall and lifted his chin. “Since I’m a man now, I figured—”
“You’re thirteen, yeah, but we’re not Jewish, and puberty’s got a thing or three to say about that voice of yours before I’d go calling myself a man if I was you. As for the chickadees your own age, knock yourself out. You’ll have all the luck of a woodpecker in a sculpture garden.”
Mort raised an eyebrow behind Becky’s back. It wasn’t his place to jump in, but he’d known a devout One-Churcher or two in his day. Chastity and virginity were more celebrated than practiced from his observations. If Brad caught the mild surprise on Mort’s face, the boy hid it utterly.
The kid made a gesture with his hands that Mort had come to realize was play-acting the use of a datapad he didn’t have at the moment. “I got it on record. Churchie girls are fair game.”
“I never said—”
Brad waggled the invisible datapad in the air. “It’s all right here. She said it, ladies and gentlemen.”
With that, the boy dashed for the ship’s exit.
If they’d been someplace shady or lawless, Mort might have intervened on Becky’s behalf when she gave halfhearted chase. Instead, he chose to offer his sage advice.
“I wouldn’t worry. Girls that age are a better foil to boys than anything a mother could say.”
Chest slowly heaving, Becky fired off a glare in the direction her son had fled. The green pastures of pleated skirts and button-down blouses would find a Visigoth with rampaging intent upon them before long. But it was important to remember that Rome didn’t fall overnight. Neither would its modern champions.
“Yeah. Maybe,” Becky allowed after a moment’s cooling down. “But every day, I hear more Chuck in him.”
Mort shrugged. “It’s usually that way with boys. For me, it was my grandfather, but he was around more in those days. My father was always looking after some mess or other on the Grand Council. Doesn’t change the fact that he’s a wobbly young colt trying to run a derby race.”
Becky nodded along. “Yeah. You say that, and I dig it. But lemme lay this on you… I was an uptight kid on an isolated colony. Religious parents. Sunday school. The whole ball of wax. Then a meteor named Chuck Ramsey hit planetside, and all that square noise The Man wanted me to believe died out faster than the dinosaurs.”
A laugh escaped Mort involuntarily. The idea of Chuck Ramsey as a cataclysmic force of nature just struck such an incongruous note to a man who, arguably, was one. “Sorry. Not laughing at you. Just can’t picture Brad as a world-shattering force of personality sweeping some poor girl into a life of star-hopping debauchery.”
Becky’s features smoothed into utter deadpan seriousness. “Yet.”
Chuck strolled a wide-open thoroughfare that could have passed for a city street if they were planetside. But Father Dougan wasn’t some planet-bound city guide with a million-terra smile and a short-range speaker to address flocks of tourists. Father Dougan was an honest-to-God conduit to God, and the Nazareth was a missionary mother ship due to cross over into eyndar-controlled space bearing the One Church’s message of unity and peace via believing just like them.
Admittedly, Chuck wasn’t paying attention to the priest’s voice so much as he was gawking at the indoor architecture. He’d been aboard ships and space stations aplenty. Some even bordered on swanky. And while he’d seen his share of casino-grade glitz and dinner party finery, the One Church blew those hovels out the airlock when it came to gaudy on a Gothic scale.
In starship design, volume was a luxury. Some needle-head back in Sol had calculated the minimum amount the general population required to avoid mass claustrophobia on a per-person basis, and most ships skirted the edge of that design parameter. For space stations and orbital habitats, that number rose a little. The Radio City probably edged over the lower limit, but for a family of spacers, that wasn’t too big a deal.
The Nazareth had a brilliant glassteel ceiling that had to loom six stories overhead. Just the load on the environmental systems to clean and circulate that much air had to cost a fortune to operate. He hadn’t asked, and Father Dougan might or might not have mentioned it, but Chuck estimated a thousand people could live aboard the missionary vessel without it feeling cramped.
“And this way, we have the cathedral proper,” Father Dougan said, catching Chuck’s attention as if they’d both been in the conversation up to this point rather than it being a priestly soliloquy.
Chuck followed the wave of the priest’s hand and stepped through the entryway and into a waiting row of wooden pews. He knew better than to suspect them of being imitation wood given the gilded doors and bas-relief metalwork stamped into just about every bulkhead. Farmed wood from a conquered Earth-like, he guessed. Maybe Mort’s buddies back at the Convocation could make benches out of Earthwood, but even the One Church couldn’t throw quite that much money around.
“Impressive,” Chuck agreed without having to put on an act.
He wasn’t the sort who popped his head into random religious establishments as a tourist. Felt a little sacrilegious snapping vacation flatpics of people’s prayer rugs and icons. But he and Becky had gotten married by the One Church. That ceremony hadn’t taken place anywhere near as opulent as the cathedral of the Nazareth.
Father Dougan chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking. But it’s important to show the xeno the majesty of the Church. Humility before an unfamiliar savior is one of the hardest barriers for converts to overcome.”
Nodding along, Chuck studied the stained glass backlit from the outside by glowpanels and statuary that looked Earthmade if he had any eye for art. If there was a lesson in humility here, it wasn’t for him. Kings and popes and prophets all took a shit, same as him. It was hard to put stock in the divinity of any creature that you knew had eaten tacos at some point in their life.
Feeling the creeping discomfort that always came over him when surrounded by the gullible pious, he didn’t venture any further down the rows of pews. A scattering of humans and xenos filled the place to one percent capacity with no sermon in progress, each in silent prayer or meditation or whatever anyone did in church when they weren’t dogmatically required to be there.
Either sensing Chuck’s apprehension or simply wishing to get on with a tour that had Chuck footsore and hungry already, Father Dougan led the way back out to the main corridor—if one could even call it that—of the Nazareth.
They passed a small community center and a school before Father Dougan brought them to their ultimate destination.
“And last but not least, this is the theater where you’ll be performing six nights this week,” Father Dougan said proudly. Chuck could appreciate the lack of a Sunday set.
Theaters came in all shapes and sizes. Chuck had performed in a football stadium once—albeit a ruined wreck with seating for a few hundred—and standing atop a picnic table at a colonial nature park. He’d been given his own dressing room that time. More often, he’d prepped for his shows aboard his own ship and hoofed it to the stage in full makeup and his nicest suit.
With all the grandeur elsewhere, this specimen felt out of place. Even before Father Dougan obliquely apologized, Chuck had already sized up the Nazareth’s little setup and sussed out its accustomed purpose.
“We normally use this for school performances. But we’re between theater seasons, so you won’t have to share backstage space with the students.”
“Swell,” Chuck replied deadpan. There was a certain level of professionalism he’d been led to believe would be available for this gig, based on a guy like Ebenezer Finook and the One Freakin’ Church being involved. Thus far, it was falling short. It was like getting invited to a mansion beach house and discovering you were the odd man out sleeping on a cot.
The stage was fine. Lighting seemed to be in order. No squeaks—the kind of off-tempo unintentional comedy that could derail the flow of an act. It had curtains to draw and plenty of room backstage.
It was the seating that bothered him. Capacity of maybe eighty or a hundred; add sixty if people lined the walls. Flat as a tram rail. Anyone beyond the front row was at the mercy of the hairdo in front of them as to whether they could see him at all. Chuck wasn’t much to look at—he was man enough to admit that—but there was a connection involved in live comedy that trying to peek around a spike-do, or just someone a few centimeters taller, that interrupted the feeling that a joke was being told to you and not just an audience.
Still, Chuck wasn’t getting paid by tickets, and xenos probably wouldn’t be posting reviews on the omni. That still brought up an interesting dilemma.
“I can work with this.”
“Excellent, let me just—”
“But I got a question,” Chuck cut in before letting Father Dougan launch into a sermon. “How many of these xenos even understand enough Human to get the jokes?” He intentionally used the more ‘xeno’ term for English.
Father Dougan chuckled. “Oh, maybe a few. Don’t worry, we’re not expecting you to get many laughs.”
This caused Chuck to furrow his brow in earnest. If he hadn’t misheard or misunderstood, he was going to be setting a new personal low. “You… don’t expect me to be funny? I… I am a comedian, after all.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. Some of our people will be at the shows, too, I’m sure. But primarily, you’re a cultural ambassador of the Earth That Was.”
“I am?”
“Yes. Your ancient comedic stylings are a wonderful representation of the simpler, pre-xenoic human era. All you have to do is present a wholesome, lighthearted act that doesn’t offend anyone.”
Automobile brakes screeched in Chuck’s brain. First, he wasn’t expected to be funny—at least not funny enough to get laughs. Now he was being forbidden to offend anyone? Hadn’t this priest ever heard comedy before taking his vows?
But… the money was right. Chuck had a family to support, and this was a nice, safe place free from debt collectors and wizard assassins. If he had to be milquetoast Mr. Smiley Human for the xeno converts, Chuck could jab kitchen knives into his own eyeballs and do it.
He forced a smile. “No problem.”
Brad slowed his pace once he was safely clear of Mom’s cardio limit. She didn’t chase often, but when she did, there was a finite amount of effort she was willing and able to put into running. Now, free from the parental tether, he adopted a manly stroll to take in the sights.
The docking area was pretty standard. Brad had been around. He knew the drill. Maintenance lockers, hydraulic cranes, grav sleds—this place had all the boxes checked. But once he cleared the mobile starport section of the ship, he emerged into one of the nicer colonies he’d ever visited. It wasn’t Earth—Earth had a sky—but damn if it didn’t beat Carson and most of the other places he’d traveled aboard the Radio City.
People tended not to decorate space stations, not all of a space station, leastwise. Sure, there were places like Alamo Geostationary with its Wall of Heroes, and the ten-tier fountain on Ganymede Overlook that made the central commons almost smell like planetside springtime. But for the most part, functional areas of deep-space habitats had a utilitarian vibe. Bare, neutral-tinted metal abounded. Signage was all digital. The floors clanked under foot.
This Nazareth had obviously been built by architects rather than starship designers. Maybe that was the problem with space stations and every other big ship Brad had ever seen from the inside. But where other places kept things basic, these One Church missionaries went all out.
He walked on marble tile.
Storefronts and restaurants had stone facades, elaborately carved with tiny pictures. He could have spent the whole trip just studying the stories they told like an omni comic without word bubbles.
Signs looked hand-chiseled.
Intersections in the street-sized corridors formed roundabouts centered on diverse, tiny flower gardens, each immaculately tended.
And then there were the people.
Brad knew spacers. He knew tourists. He knew smugglers and pirates and outlaws. This was his first real experience with pious people in space. Planetside, he tended to shy away from them. Different worlds. Inflexible rules. Prim and tidy, the passengers on this ship looked like they were permanently wearing their Sunday best. Dressed in a baggy t-shirt and denims, plus a pair of sneakers his feet were wearing holes through the toes of, he felt self-conscious.
Until he came across a knot of xenos.
Following a lady in full priestess clothes—all black with the oversized black-and-white habit—they counted eyndar, vish kinah, and azrin among their number. She spoke to them in clear, practiced tones, the kind of enunciation that nobody uses in personal conversation, as she explained the wonders of Earth culture and the role the One Church played in forming it.
Brad rolled his eyes.
Earth, Earth, Earth. He could have gotten behind the “be nice to the little guy” message of these churchies if it wasn’t so wrapped up in Earth being the center of the galaxy. It wasn’t even the center of the Sol system. And yet, the One Church kept banging the drum of Earth, Earth, Earth until everyone just started tapping their foot along with the beat.
Hearing giggles from behind him, Brad froze.
His pubescent ears knew the sound of human girls on instinct. Turning his head a fraction, he spotted a gaggle of four, dressed identically in knee-length black skirts and white sweaters. About his age or close enough for him not to care. A quartet of young goddesses.
Either they hadn’t spotted him from across the street or they’d chosen to ignore him. Choosing to believe there was an unspoken accord to play coy with him, Brad set off after them. Pursuit was the sincerest form of dating flattery, after all. What were the odds that none of the four would be interested? He was making a numbers play here.
Hoping his trot looked casual, Brad didn’t take things too fast. A grin couldn’t stay off his face. In his head, he tried to review some of the better pickup lines he’d heard in holovids.
Hey, did you fall from heaven? Because looking at you hurts.
If I said you were pretty, would you hold it against me?
Did you escape from prison? Because you stole my heart.
Usually, those were the kind of holos he watched. Brad made a point to brush up on the ones where exact wording probably mattered.
Before any of this could come into play, he lost them.
To clarify, he saw exactly where they went but stopped dead in his tracks, unable to follow. They hadn’t entered a gendered washroom or locker room. They hadn’t even ventured into a lingerie store. The sign at the door read Youth Chapel.
As an aspiring young pilot, Brad experienced the same reaction as if he’d discovered he was on course for a singularity.
However, just as with a black hole, he was caught in the gravity well. Too late. Too close for his curiosity to resist, he approached the door and peeked inside.
“Hello, friend,” a fresh-faced adult, probably in his mid-twenties, called out with an easy smile. “Care to join us? Everyone is welcome.”
There was a group gathered inside, ranging from middle school through high school. Mixed genders. Human except for a couple laaku. All dressed nicer than him, but not rich-people nice. Seated in portable chairs arrayed in rough, concentric semi-circles.
When every pair of eyes turned to look his way, he found himself under the scrutiny of the four goddesses, plus a couple of their friends.
Brad’s moment of dumbstruck indecision passed quickly. “Thanks. I’m new around here and don’t know anyone.”
Becky grunted as she hefted one of the suitcases with the busted wheel. Chuck considered helping but got distracted as a pre-schooler careened off his leg. On instinct, he reached down and scooped up Mike before those light-speed feet of his carried the kid off into unknown parts of the missionary ship.
“Let me assist you with that,” a helpful young lad offered, one of the staffers working for Father Dougan in a nebulously defined capacity. He was clean-cut, decked out in black slacks and a pristine white button-down, walking around in shoes that looked like they got polished fresh every morning—probably by the kid himself.
When had Chuck started thinking of guys in their 20s as kids? The rug rat bouncing on his hip and squirming to get free was a kid. The toddler lurking at the top of the loading ramp as Becky went back to retrieve her was a kid. Hell, even Bradley was a kid, much as he claimed otherwise. The bellhop-for-a-day probably had a college education.
“Sorry about the mess,” Chuck apologized as he led Father Dougan up the ramp while Becky carried Rhiannon past them on the way down. “It’s a family ship, not a starliner.”
The One Church priest chuckled amiably. “Not to worry. We’re just doing our due diligence. We operate on a rather stringent charter. Our agreement with the Eyndar Empire allows our presence, but we have draconian restrictions on passengers and signals. We can’t allow stowaways who may have access to your ship’s comm systems. Aside from that, I’ll do all in my power to respect your privacy.”
Well, since he promised and all, Chuck felt so much better.
The priest wandered at his side, half a pace behind, waving a hand scanner like some kind of medieval water prospector. It hummed and beeped softly. Chuck couldn’t get a good look over his shoulder without making his snooping painfully obvious. Weirdly, it was the priest who should have been ashamed of his prying.
Chuck was the first to admit, in the privacy of his own head, that he was as crooked a stick as any tree had ever grown. If he wanted to pack his ship full of ratatoret stowaways, he felt confident he could have kept a colony worth of the little rodent people from the priest’s scanner. If. He was clean this time—clean-ish, anyway—and felt the keen disrespect of not being taken at his word on the matter.
Rules.
People who followed them blindly were just the worst. Not even whole people. Part of their soul was missing, slap-taped and spray-foamed in with paragraphs and sub-sections and various other legalese.
Yet if any of this discomfiture came through in Chuck’s manner, Father Dougan declined to comment on it. Eyes glued to his scanner, he shuffled through the Radio City with an infuriating lack of urgency.
Good to his word, however, Father Dougan declined to pass judgment on the Ramsey lifestyle.
Becky had cleaned. Sort of. Chuck never did, so he never complained, but she always did a half-assed job of it. A keen palate could detect the lingering fragrance of cannabis over the more potent aura of baby products in the living room. In the main bedroom, the potpourri of aphrodisiacs and coital-assist chemicals likewise drew no comment. The littles’ bedroom warranted the quickest of inspections. Unless someone was hiding among the toys, there was no place else to conceal even a child.
When they came to Mort and Brad’s room, Chuck held his breath.
The wizard hadn’t been flagged when Finook had done a quick background check on the family. Chuck had quietly worried that a more diligent investigation in the interim might torpedo the whole gig.
As Father Dougan scanned, Chuck noticed his gaze wandering.
“Huh… paper books?”
Shit.
Mort was an odd bird. Wizard odd. Normal for his own kind, by all accounts, but no wizard stood up to long scrutiny without coming off as completely monkeys when compared to regular folks. The preference of deadwood reading material over the convenience of datapads ranked right up there with their casual relationships with gravity and fire in setting the magical community on the precipice of madness.
Ignoring propriety, property rights, and the word he’d given less than an hour ago, Father Dougan reached into the stack of priceless Earth antiques and picked up a volume. He studied the front cover, where gold leaf embedded in the leather surface proclaimed the contents.
“The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire? Your passenger is a history buff, I take it?”
“Something like that,” Chuck admitted. “More like a freeloader with pretensions. But who’s going to hire a historian without a degree? I love him like a little brother, but I’m the history buff around here. I think Mort picked up most of those on the cheap from the colonies, hoping to resell them closer to the core. I mean, he’s good with the kids, or we wouldn’t keep him around. Also, don’t buy them. Pretty sure they’re replicas. Plastic or something. C’mon, let’s check out the rest of the ship so I can go get settled in with the wife.”
Father Dougan smiled knowingly. Maybe a little too knowingly. “Of course. I understand completely.” If there was something creepier than the church’s finger-wagging on the subject of extra-marital sex, it was their undue glee at the prospect of the procreative kind. Chuck didn’t discount the possibility that toting three kids around the galaxy hadn’t counted on the already-tippy balance scales speaking to his character.
Setting the book down, the priest resumed his search of the ship. Twenty minutes without any discoveries later, they both exited.
“He’s all clear,” Father Dougan declared.
On the ground, a crew of mechanics waited. As soon as the ship had closed up, they clamped magnetic temp locks on every door and ramp. It was the Centech Justicar X-100 impound lock used by half the galaxy’s law enforcement divisions to enforce parking fines.
Unlike the colonial lawmen’s, this was a two-factor lock.
Once Father Dougan scanned his hand, he stepped aside to allow Chuck to do the same.
“There you go. No one can disturb the contents of your ship or access unauthorized broadcast sources until we’re out of eyndar space.”
“Peachy,” Chuck agreed. “What happens if I remember something I need in there?”
The priest started walking toward the hangar exit. Chuck fell into step lest he allow his question to go unanswered. “If there is truly a need, I can come and allow access. We’ll have to repeat the security process, so I’m sure we’d both rather that not come up.”
Chuck heard the thorn inside those honeyed words. Don’t you fucking make me do that again.
“Oh, no sweat, Daddy-O. Just making sure I play by the rules.”
Mort kept his hands tucked into the front pocket of his sweatshirt, idly strolling the One Church ship like some kind of day-trip tourist in a foreign city. He’d been picking at the printed logo while watching holovids to the point where his affiliation to the Sigma Slashers looked longstanding. Nothing like careworn apparel to convey a sense of the passage of time.
The ship, on the other hand, bore a weird relationship to the concept of time. No one ought to have been able to carry the spirit of ages long past into the modern era. Admittedly, Mort hadn’t been aboard many large vessels, but they were recurrent locales on so many holovids—especially when it was Brad’s turn to pick—that he felt qualified to take note of the discrepancy. This felt less like a travel conveyance and more a wayward town cast adrift in the cosmos but for the feeble propulsion of a few thrusters and a ramshackle star-drive.
Not that Mort had seen the Nazareth’s star-drive. He just assumed that ramshackle was the upper limit of the ridiculous devices’ quality.
“Ahoy!” a jovial and not-at-all-nautical voice called out, at odds with the mariner’s greeting it offered. Mort glanced in the direction of the speaker and found the smile of a priest beaming at him. He was a round fellow, both of face and midsection, with a shiny bald pate and a bushy white beard. Aside from the black vestments, he had more the look of a Friar Tuck than a proper cleric.
Mort inclined his head in acknowledgment and resumed his meandering. Anyone with a modicum of social grace would have taken that as sufficient notice that he wasn’t looking to start a social interaction.
Next thing Mort knew, he had a puppy.
This puppy weighed fifteen stone if Mort was being generous, and it yammered amiably in Old Earth English. “So nice to see new faces around here. Not that we don’t get our share. Just always nice. So, are you here with the juggler, the street troupe, the—”
“The comedian,” Mort supplied, lest the priest find a way to list off more entertainers he had no intention of meeting or traveling with. Taking Cassandra and Cedric to Topsfield for the fair was the limit of Mort’s patience for folksy art forms. And even that was more an exercise in how to eat cotton candy than a tour of heritage performances.
“Splendid. Splendid. I’m Father Laszlo, a humble servant of Our Lord and self-appointed welcome shuttle aboard the Nazareth. So… welcome.”
Mort knew he was past the point of blowing off Father Laszlo without being rude. He kept walking, hoping that he’d either arrive somewhere he could call a destination or draw the priest beyond the limits of his assigned domain. “Nice ship you’ve got here. Fountains. Mosaics. If you don’t look up, you’d never know it wasn’t a village in the Italian countryside.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. You don’t get the smell of the country here. Not for lack of trying, mind you. They’ve put everything in the environmental blowers to try to get the fragrance right. To really bring the sense of being on Earth.”
Mort shrugged. “Just going by holovids.”
“Never been to Tuscany? I figured a man from Boston Prime might have had cause to hop across the Atlantic for a visit. Maybe even a field trip as a boy.”
The blood paused in Mort’s veins. His heart waited a beat before tentatively restarting. “What makes you think I’m from Earth?”
“That Boston Prime accent.”
Mort scowled. “I haven’t got an accent.”
Father Laszlo chuckled. “Precisely. You speak with the carefully tended words of a man who’s avoided the hazards of that particular patois for much of his life. I was only at Harvard for four years, but it’s unmistakable.”
Still not certain this priest wasn’t getting intel on him from an outside source, Mort nodded in defeat. “You got me. Been my experience you can get more work sounding like you’re not from anywhere. No one’s got preconceptions about indeterminate origins.”
Father Laszlo clapped a heavy hand on Mort’s shoulder. “Hah! So true. But I choose to embrace my heritage. All of it. The good. The unfortunate. The past is made of mistakes and the lessons we learn from them. That’s the message of forgiveness and salvation we bring to the heathen xenos out there in the wide galaxy.”
Mort sagged under the weight of the man’s arm. “My grandfather taught me it’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes than make my own.”
“A wise man, your grandfather. But none of us succeed. We are all fumbling, flawed creatures, each seeking his own path to grace. Wouldn’t you agree—um… I didn’t get your name, friend.”
There was no point lying. Chuck had warned Mort that he’d be submitting a manifest to the One Church people for a background check. Since Mort didn’t have a criminal record, and the Convocation was far from integrated with the various interstellar policing agencies, he doubted the name would raise any alarms. “Mort Brown.”
The priest shook his hand. For a large man, he had a soft grip, akin to Mort shoving his hand between the cushions of a couch. “So good to make a new friend.”
“I’m sure I’m keeping you from your duties,” Mort said with a pressed-lip smile. “I’m off to stroll that arboretum I heard you’ve got here.”
Instead of picking up on the parting suggestion, Father Laszlo’s whole face lit. “Truly? You’d be hard pressed to find a more knowledgeable guide. As for my duties… I’m responsible for public relations. Today, you are my job.”
Becky let go of one little hand and its owner shot into the daycare like a jackrabbit. Mike’s little feet pinwheeled at his sides as his awkward running gait carried him toward the other young children gathered in play.
The walls of the “indoor” space were decorated with a continuous mural of paired animals parading onto an ark, where a bearded man and kindly woman ushered them aboard. All the artwork was done in simple, bold colors, and the style was cartoonish minus the thick black outlines. On the floor, kids built with plastic blocks, played with dolls, or engaged in checkers.
“They’re natural friend-makers at that age,” the priestess on duty commented with a faint smile as Mike joined in the construction of some sort of indeterminate structure of colorful stacked blocks. She leaned in and addressed Rhiannon, perched on Becky’s hip. “What’s your name, little miss?”
“Rheeeee!” the girl proclaimed proudly.
“Hi, Rhee, I’m Sister Chloe.” She offered a tiny handshake.
“Rhiannon,” Becky corrected for the official record. “Her brother’s Michael.” Without even meaning to, she used Mike’s full given name with its archangelic connotation. It just felt appropriate here.
The two of them picked their way through the war zone of toys and games to the open far door. Beyond, the playground was a manicured lawn populated sporadically with teeter-totters, swings, and other basic child-friendly equipment for rough-and-tumble play.
Becky sniffed. There was an earthy aroma out of place on a starship. Wriggling her foot out of her moccasin, she brushed the blue-green blades with her toes. “Is this grass real?”
“St. Augustine Grass,” Sister Chloe explained. “It does well in ships, and I’d be lying if I said the name hadn’t played a part in selecting the species. We’ve found that while scientists and landscapers can hardly tell between an artificial lawn and a real one, children seem to fare better with the nature of the Lord’s creations.”
Becky wasn’t too sure God or anyone else would consider a starship playground like this “nature.” It had real grass but a holographic ceiling full of overly puffy white clouds and a smiling cartoon sun.
“And the kiddos’ll be good here all day?” Becky asked, glancing around to see how many other parents were hanging around to watch their kids play. With maybe three dozen kids and half a dozen penguin-clad priestesses on duty to watch over them, she only caught three moms—and zero dads—lingering at the outskirts of the play area.
“Of course,” Sister Chloe assured her. “We have snacks and lunch, with naptime in between. You’re welcome to check in any time. At the end of the day, you can pick them up safe and sound and mostly clean. We don’t do baths or laundry, though.” The latter was said with a wink.
Becky chose to overlook the subtle hint that maybe her smelly little rodents might do with more frequent bathing. “Swell. Be back for ’em around dinnertime.”
As she departed the daycare center, Becky let out a long sigh. Not that she didn’t love ’em to bits, but being a round-the-clock mom could be a drag. Mistakes like the gnarly trip on Carson aside, there was only so blitzed she could get while taking care of two pre-school kiddos.
Now the trick was finding a place on the Nazareth where she could find a hookup.
No one was naïve enough to think the One Church was going to allow open use of recreational chemicals on their ship. Especially not one spreading the Word to alien species. But Becky Ramsey was pretty damn sure they were naïve enough to think they stopped everyone.
Somewhere on this ship there was a layman worker with a side business, a sinner seeking redemption that had smuggled some fun aboard as a backup plan, or simply a hypocrite among the clergy who felt like they could handle their shit well enough to keep their prayers straight.
Becky promised herself she wouldn’t be picky. She’d find what she found. Place like this, beggars could be choosers, but not if they were begging for a high.
Feigning an air of giving a shit about the gaudy starship, she walked the indoor streets, scoping out the digs. Quickly deciding that this place was more space station than ship, she soured on it immediately. Starships could be cozy, homey, a means toward an end of seeing the wide, wonderful Milky Way. These gig ships were as bad as places like Aurora Sky Garden and Ganymede Overlook, where nature was caged, cooped, and counterfeited.
Faking out nature was a bigger deal than any of the myriad lesser sins she’d brought aboard.
Shops and museums, chapels and rectories, dormitories and parks. A medical clinic caught her eye and reminded her to take the kiddos for a checkup before Chuck’s gig ran out. But it was a cafe that offered her the first promising prospects for chasing some weed.
The place had no name, just a telltale aroma of coffee and tea in the air. Inside, the smell grew stronger. It had all the trappings of a low-budget colonial coffee shop, minus the retail aspects. The service was cafeteria style, with no affordances for paying for anything. Rather than anything with caffeine, she picked a fragrant mint blend and added liberal amounts of milk and honey.
Scanning the crowded little sipping area, she found a table with a spare seat and some prospects.
“Mind if I join y’all?” she asked sweetly.
The three women seated at the table ranged in age from teenage to older than Becky. Someone was probably someone else’s mom or something. No resemblance, but Becky just had a hunch. The eldest of the bunch, with a young face at odds with her gray-haired bun, turned up a palm toward the vacant seat. “Not at all. Welcome. New to the Nazareth?”
Becky slid into her seat and took a sip of her tea. Bargain stuff. If the One Church had spent less on the decor and more on the catering, that would’ve suited her just fine. “Just this morning. Big ole ship you got. Kinda, like, overwhelming.”
“Oh, you get turned around a little at first, but it all makes sense when you get used to it,” the youngest one of the group replied. She wore a pristine white sweater—which was a bold choice when drinking coffee and eating toast with grape jelly—and a pleated black skirt that probably comprised a school uniform. A headband kept shoulder-length hair out of her face. She wore simple stud earrings that matched the gold of her One Church medallion. Aside from the facial features and personal differences in the application of extremely modest cosmetics, it was like looking into a mirror from Becky’s own past.
“Enjoying the sights?” asked the third of the group. She sounded like an accountant. Some business school had drained her personality the way someone just sticks one of those maple sugar taps in a tree and lets the sap slowly trickle out.
“Not so much, yet,” Becky replied with an apologetic shrug. “Just got settled, and was looking for my Aunt Mary. We traveled together but got separated. Once I recharge a little, I’m heading back to looking for her. Any chance one of you ladies might have seen her?”
It was a long shot. It was always a long shot with this many squares around. These three would probably leave here thinking this was a missing persons case.
The eldest tea-drinker sniffed delicately. “Lot of Marys around here, as you might imagine. What’s her last name?”
“Janeway,” Becky replied without a hitch.
The older one knit her brow and nodded. “Mary Janeway? Hmm, that does sound familiar. If you ladies will excuse me…” She set down her cup half-full. “I’m going to go help our new friend here find her aunt.”
“Thanks,” Becky said, unable to hide her astonishment. Of the three, this was the last one she’d expected. Kids often knew how to get hooked up, even if they were square as a pizza box. There was a whole subculture of “good” kids who’d make you a connection for a few terras. And the soulless civil servant types? They needed uppers and downers to even have a mood.
Becky followed as her would-be savior set a brisk pace. Sensible black shoes clacked along the marble tile. Sometimes the lion’s share of discretion was hiding in plain sight. After all, who’d suspect an uptight middle-aged narc to be connected.
When they reached a secluded garden hemmed in by hedges and awash in the sound of a gurgling fountain, Becky’s escort parked herself on a wrought iron bench. She patted the spot beside her. After a quick glance to check for whoever else might be around, Becky joined her.
“You are new here, aren’t you?”
Becky shrugged. “Don’t worry. I don’t make waves.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. No one likes waves but the surfers.”
Becky cracked a smile. “Accent that obvious?” She’d never surfed, but back home, nearly every boy she knew had.
“The laxity of your manner and your pursuit of illicit drugs didn’t hurt, either.”
A tension gripped Becky’s every muscle. She hated when the squares were hip to the lingo. That was just so bogus. “Slow down. I’m not looking for any—”
“Trouble?” the square asked. “I suppose no one ever is. But you’re looking for easy answers to the troubles you’ve got and borrowing against bigger ones later. I can tell you’re a heathen, but—”
“Whoa,” Becky cut in, already in hot water and willing to dive deeper in search of an escape hatch. “Who said I was a heathen? I was baptized, took communion, and got knocked up younger than that girl at our table. I’ve done the One Church deal. I’m more what you’d call lapsed.”
“My niece is sixteen…”
Oof. Raw nerve. Becky wasn’t backing down. “OK. Fine. Not much older.” She stood. “Look, I’m not here for a lecture. If you wanna keep this to yourself—”
“I keep a great many things to myself,” the woman assured her.
“Far out. Now…” Becky turned to leave.
“How long has it been since your last confession, child?”
Becky cringed. “Shit. You’re a priestess.”
“Archbishop Theodora, actually.”
Couldn’t she catch a break? Becky turned sullenly, like a freshman caught cheating red-handed on a test. “So, you’re, like, in charge of the whole ship?”
“Captain Standish runs the ship. He has an executive officer, Devers. Cardinal Belotti runs the mission. I could be described as his executive officer. Now, about that confession?”
Becky sighed. There was an easy way out of this, and a hard way. She wasn’t even sure which it was she was taking. Her shoulders slumped. “Just take it easy on the Latin, all right? I learned all my prayers in Cronkite’s English.”
Brad’s soul ached like it had run a marathon. An hour and a half of preachy stories, songs, and lame attempts by a clueless square of an adult to relate to a bunch of teenagers. He liked that he could honestly call himself that, even if the title felt new on him. Even if Mom and Dad insisted he was still a kid, he was more a man than Father Hayden. Brad bet himself a cool hardcoin fiver that he could take the weenie priest in a fight.
Not that Brad had let anything show on his face. He had every confidence that he’d kept a rapt, attentive expression as his mind wandered away to leave his body unattended. That was part of what made it all so exhausting.
He’d sung along quietly, referencing lyrics on a datapad they’d lent the newcomer who didn’t know any of the songs.
But it was over.
He’d made it to the end without getting thrown out for causing an argument.
“Glad to have you with us today, Bradley,” Father Hayden said with a parting handshake. “Hope to see you again soon.”
Brad nodded noncommittally. “Thanks for the lesson.”
Lingering with the teacher, he’d fallen behind as the regular students filtered out of the seminar.
Rushing to the door, then slowing to a cool swagger as he passed through, Brad scanned for signs of his quarry. Luckily, many of the other teens hadn’t gotten far, breaking up into cliques that either hung around on the pedestrian mall outside or meandered off with no apparent haste. Among the lingerers was the gaggle of girls he’d pursued into that miserable cloister of piety and virtue.
Going up to them seemed like a loser play. Desperate. Never worked in the holos, despite being stupidly obvious. While admittedly a lot of stuff didn’t work the way it did in the holos, they seemed better about women than they were about dogfights, gunfights, and actual fisticuffs.
He needed a ploy.
Leaning on his natural confusion, he looked in all directions, a consternated furrow fixed on his brow. The fact that this dilemma took place with clear sight lines to the gaggle didn’t need to look like a coincidence so much as it gave the pretense of allowing a receptive audience an opening to intervene.
“You lost?”
Brad blinked as if the speaker had caught him lost in thought more than in shipboard geography. She was the one who’d made eye contact with him while seated in the rigid plastic chairs molded to the ass shape of exactly no one, and who’d smiled once at him when the teacher and her friends weren’t looking. Brad’s heartbeat kicked into overdrive. He swallowed. “That obvious?”
She shrugged coyly. “A little. Where you trying to get?”
Brad had answers that he wasn’t about to share with her. However, he’d had an entire sermon to come up with a plan. “That’s part of the problem. I don’t have anywhere I have to be, and I don’t know what’s worth seeing on this ship.”
She brushed a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “I mean, I don’t have to be anywhere either.”
“That mean you could be up for showing me around a little?”
The flush in her cheeks told the story before her answer came. “I don’t see why not.”
Holy, ever-loving shit! This was working!
“Smooth,” Brad said, bobbing his head like this was something that happened to him every day. “By the way, I never got your name?”
“Oh! Um. I’m May. My parents picked it because it’s the month I was born.”
Brad put his hand out, trying to keep this casual for now, not wanting to come on too strong. “I’m Brad. Near as the omni can tell me, a brad is half a staple, but I don’t think that’s why my parents picked it.”
May giggled as she took his hand. Her skin was warm and soft. “So, what should we see first?” she asked aloud, tapping her chin.
“How about we start with everything?”
Chuck checked his reflection in the basic mirror backstage in the free-for-all that passed for a prep area in the Nazareth’s theater. To either side, there were gendered changing areas for men and women, partitioned off by portable folding screens. Any less immodest updates to makeup and wardrobe happened in an open bullpen. As he made sure his hair wasn’t sticking out and his teeth weren’t carrying bits of lettuce from his ham sandwich lunch, he could watch the small volunteer staff pretending this was some kind of major production.
Chuck had been in big productions. He’d paraded on stage between greats and up-and-comers. The big names like to slum a little, the ones who hadn’t gone utterly commercial and forgotten how they got there. He’d had beers backstage with Jake Snasgaar and made a pass at Samandra Teone that resulted in an epic shootdown that certain corners of the comedy community remembered to this day—though in most versions of the tale, Chuck had been reduced to “some smartass rookie comedian.”
It was cute that the Nazareth volunteers were putting in the effort despite the tiny expected crowd and utter lack of media exposure.
“Mr. Ramsey?” a quiet voice inquired from out of his reflected view.
Chuck lifted his chin and tied his bowtie. He’d opted for the old-timey affectation over his preferred turtleneck, given the locale. Half of comedy was reading the room, and his pre-read on this place was stuffy to the max. “That’d be me. Autographs after the show, if it’s all the same.”
A nervous titter prefaced the reply. “I’m not a fan. I’m your opener.” Chuck turned to see as blank a slate of a young woman as he could have imagined. She had an oval face with washed-out blue eyes. Stage makeup cut the glare from any sheen on her skin but didn’t do her features any favors. She’d opted for a blazer-over-turtleneck look akin to Chuck’s normal stage attire, albeit with an ankle-length skirt and 2 cm heels he never could have pulled off.
Not that she was pulling it off.
“Annabeth Lacey,” she added, sticking out a hand.
Chuck accepted her handshake purely on reflex. “Nice to meet you. Knock ’em dead out there.” If he had ten minutes to go, she had to be running short on prep time.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Shit. He heard it in her voice. “Lemme guess…”
Annabeth nodded hurriedly. “This is my first time on stage.”
Didn’t whoever ran this place know better than to use raw meat to warm up an audience? If they’d warned him in advance, he could have swapped the acts around to do the opener in addition to his regular act. It was too late for that now, though. This was a birdie getting thrown out of her nest to try flying.
“Any advice?”
Stage name that didn’t sound like it was selling cookies. Costume that didn’t make her look like a disembodied head and hands floating around on stage. Planning ahead not to ask for last-second career advice on the way to perform.
Instead of any of that, Chuck went back to basics. “This is comedy. Entertainment. Nobody’s going to live or die based on how many laughs you get. Just shake it loose and have fun out there. Be yourself. Comedy’s the best psychotherapy out there. Assume you’re not going to get a single laugh, and it’s all re-entry from there.”
The look on her face was one of uncomprehending terror. If that was too much for her, this might be Annabeth’s first and last time on stage.
When she just stood there staring, Chuck offered her a thumbs-up. “Don’t worry. You’ve got this.” Then he went back to checking his tie in the mirror.
In the reflection, he watched Annabeth head for the stage. His mind was already turning over ways he could salvage the audience after the shipwreck about to take place out there.
Annabeth most certainly, unequivocally, did. Not. Have this.
Captain Lucretius Standish had a great many assets to his name. He wore a pristine white uniform, the sort the navy would have reserved for dress occasions; where he’d once worn medals, the embroidered emblem of the One Church stood instead. He commanded a crew of over a hundred of the Lord’s dedicated servants. They were laypersons, one and all, but, like himself, employees of the Holy See.
He also had quite a comfortable chair placed centrally on the bridge of the Nazareth, yet by and large he preferred to stand. As with many of the comforts of authority, the trappings were a trap. Grow accustomed to sitting, and sitting would be all you’re good for. Acclimate the palate to caviar, and field rations would curdle on the tongue. Any number of barbers and med techs might have been pressed into service tending to his personal hygiene, yet rituals like a morning shave and the trimming of fingernails kept a body grounded in the foundations of personal discipline.
Many a human enlisted in Earth Navy to fulfill a soul-deep need for service.
Standish had served twenty-five years and never quite scratched the itch that drove him to seek more. Surely, Earth Navy protected lives throughout ARGO space. It was honorable work. A good career. Respectable. Many a sailor put to space and found the answers they needed among the stars.
As the Nazareth approached an invisible line on the galactic map, he knew he’d chosen right in changing careers.
“Fifteen seconds to eyndar space,” Ensign McBride reported.
“Steady on the helm.”
It took a sturdy heart to power at full thrust into battle, responsible for the lives of all aboard and the success of a mission that weighed equally on the soul of a commanding officer. In those days, he could rely on cunning, a well-trained crew, and all the firepower the Luna Naval Shipyard could pack into a Pasadena-class destroyer.
Unarmed, drifting at a crawl in the shallow astral, and about to cross into unfriendly—if not outright hostile—space, Standish had one asset that trumped all the others.
Faith.
The Nazareth was bringing the word of God to the heathen xenos trapped in the Eyndar Empire.
Standish hadn’t been a party to the negotiations that had allowed them safe passage through eyndar space and license to preach to its inhabitants. Surely, a divine hand had guided that unlikeliest of outcomes.
“We’ve entered eyndar space.”
“Stottlemyer, activate the beacon.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Confirm no other outgoing signals.”
“Confirmed. No other outgoing signals, sir,” Stottlemyer replied promptly.
Standish stood beside his chair and depressed a button on the arm. “Your Eminence, we’ve entered Eyndar Empire space and begun broadcasting.”
The message was a simple one, approved by the canids on a narrow basis without much room to deviate. It blurted from the Nazareth once every five minutes, in all directions and seven languages spoken in this region of space. The words were simple, time-honored, and chosen to convey the mission’s purpose and goal as succinctly as possible.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.
Would you like to know more?
Like fishing, the line had been cast. Now began the waiting. The Nazareth kept a steady course, in no hurry and wanting to be found.
Eventually, Captain Standish would be forced to seat himself. His back couldn’t take indefinite stretches on his feet the way it used to. But at the outset, he liked to wait in rapt anticipation of the lives they would influence and the souls they would save.
Hours passed.
Standish felt the ache creeping up. He resolved to adjourn to take dinner with Cardinal Belotti before parking his backside on that too-comfortable command chair. It was a pointless goal other than to reinforce that he had the self-discipline to make it that long. A quick check of the bridge chrono confirmed that a 1730 dinner gave him a little over half an hour to last.
“Captain, we’re being hailed,” Stottlemyer reported. “Lead ship of a six-craft flotilla. Not sure the species, but it’s in passable English.”
So soon? Much as Standish had hoped, he hadn’t expected a response so early in the mission.
“Put them through,” Standish ordered.
“We would like to know more,” came a wheezy canid voice.
A sigh worked its way up from Standish’s toes, cleansing him inside. The pre-mission briefing had warned that their message might be difficult to bring to the eyndar themselves. Their target had been broad, but the expectation had been that the oppressed species living under eyndar rule would be the more receptive. To hear what sounded like an eyndar pilgrim seeking the word of the Lord was music to the captain’s ears.
“We would be happy to share knowledge of the Lord,” Standish replied, then gestured to close the channel. They had permission to receive explicit responses to their beacon, but the Nazareth wasn’t authorized to chat idly in eyndar space. “Transmit a rendezvous point. Ensign McBride, let’s go meet our next converts.”
Mort followed Becky into the theater with an air of deflated expectation. Once beyond the utilitarian hangar zone, the Nazareth had presented a uniformly ostentatious facade. Now, he found himself in a cramped and cozy space wherein perhaps a hundred could have seated themselves in relative discomfort. If the intention had been to showcase human culture, Mort would have suggested alternate ambiance to achieve the effect. Clutching a scrap of printed pseudo-paper with a letter and number on it, he quickly sussed out the numbering scheme and shuffled sideways down the narrow row to find his spot beside Becky.
His host and cultural guide for this venture seemed nonplussed by the shabby accommodations. Nor did any of the other spectators seem to mind the close quarters and hard plastic chairs. Some scientist or another had designed the seats to conform to exactly no one’s posterior, instantly adding an aching tailbone and stiff back to the evening’s entertainment.
“You should have grabbed dinner with us,” Becky whispered to him as the audience filtered in. “It’s all comp, and the chow’s not half bad.”
Mort grunted. He’d had worse. Sure. He also suspected his dinner had been much the same as the Ramseys’, albeit with fewer kiddie portions and less mess and noise. “Lost track of time. I’ll find a dessert or something after the show.”
The buzz of conversation all around made carrying on a quiet chat with Becky unappealing. Instead, Mort watched the fellow sentients he’d be spending the show with. While the ship had thus far seemed like a nearly uniformly human endeavor, the alien species aboard crawled out of the woodwork for this erstwhile lesson in human culture.
Mort kept a mental tally of the species.
Laaku and tesud One-Churchers were hardly news to anyone native to ARGO space. As the only two officially recognized co-equal species with humans, they had plenty of cultural crossover—though humans filtered culture outward far more readily than inward. At least two laaku and one of the tesuds wore clerical robes, full priests of the One Church.
While many Earthlings might have taken a moment of lost thought to come up with the name of the remote vish kinah species, Mort knew the otter-evolved people instantly. Already predisposed to spiritualism, they notoriously had over a thousand “major” religions recognized on their homeworld. Plenty had given the One Church a try. In an interesting twist from human history, the vish kinah considered religion one of the most ridiculous topics over which to fight a war. After all, why start a conflict destined to doom its participants to an almost universally agreed-upon afterlife of punishment?
After those species came the surprises.
Two rows in front of Mort, a tiny construction project resulted in a pop-up scaffolding that allowed half a dozen ratatoret to occupy a single seat. The miniature grandstand didn’t even block anyone’s view. Knee-high to the average human and more fluff than substance, the ratatoret bore an unusual degree of scorn in serious circles. Often dismissed as “cute” or “cuddly”—both dire insults when uttered by a larger species—the ratatoret were a squirrelly people in every sense of the word. But Mort had read enough about them to understand they had a rich and ancient culture. If not for human contact, they’d have conquered the stars all on their own.
The inclusion in the proceedings that caught Mort the most off guard was an azrin. He wore drab brown robes, attire he’d come to understand that the ship provided to any pilgrim looking to join the holy order as more than simply a convert. The Times London kept a constant thread of reporting on the subjugation of the azrin homeworld of Meyang. Fierce, if limited in both technology and magic, the azrin people had the territorial instinct of their feline forebears. To see one joining the largest religion of their conquerors felt… Well, Mort wasn’t quite sure what he felt, but it wasn’t right.
And, of course, there were humans. Humans were everywhere in the galaxy, it seemed. Even eyndar space wasn’t free of their ever-expanding sphere of influence.
The house lights went down. Conversations petered out. Becky stifled a yawn and wriggled into a more comfortable position in her seat.
A young woman in black beamed a nervous smile as she walked out onto the stage. She held an old-timey voice-catching wand, the sort that Chuck had explained were more a part of the act than a technological requirement of the show. “Good evening, Nazareth! How is everyone tonight?”
Halfhearted replies shouted in from here and there in the audience.
Mort had seen a show or two in his time. Mostly Broadway schlock. He’d seen many of the best actors Earth had to offer. If it hadn’t been for his particular occupation, he might not have recognized the animal fear in the presenter’s eyes. It wasn’t the sort of trait that persisted in such outward display if one were to achieve the pinnacle of her art form.
At least this was off the far edge of nowhere, Mort figured. His expectations were already sub-oceanic by the time the comedienne launched into her routine.
Mort allowed his attention to wander, eyes politely pointed toward the performer so as not to offer insult.
Hey, a crotchety old voice snapped in Mort’s head. Pay attention. I’m missing the show.
Mort snorted softly. Figured that Nebuchadnezzar was enjoying the comedy. If Chuck’s style was corny and historical, this was being read off stone tablets unearthed from Mesopotamia. There wasn’t a pun or setup that hadn’t been flogged bloody and left for dead by schoolchildren across Sol centuries ago. Yet, every punchline, the young jokestress paused to allow a truly uncomfortable silence to settle in. Maybe, if she waited long enough, someone would parse the joke properly and laugh.
No one did.
Oh, sure, a few helpful audience members forced a chuckle now and then. The laughs were dutiful and sounded it.
Eternity drifted past.
“Now, let’s give it up for our next performer, coming to you straight from Earth… Chuck Ramsey!”
By the wording and lack of natural cadence, Mort knew Chuck must have coached her on that introduction. She hadn’t quite finished his name when Chuck blew onto the stage like a cool breeze on a hot summer day.
Clapping around a speaking wand clutched in his hand, Chuck called on the audience. “Thank you, Annabeth. C’mon, everyone. Let’s give her a round of applause.” Mort played along and clapped for the termination of the otherwise-interminable set. “So glad to be here tonight. You guys are getting me out of a Solar Revenue Service audit. But seriously… So great to get away from Sol. I mean, where else can you get a synth-meat hamburger with chemically simulated cheese and bacon, soy byproduct fries, and medical treatment for it the same night…?”
Mort blinked as the audience laughed at the foibles of modern Earth.
This was the same joke he’d told at the Orpheum Theater back on Earth. He’d made the barest of changes to alter it for a non-Earthling audience.
As Mort sat dumbfounded, he listened to a Carthusian monk painstakingly copying an ancient text in the form of a comedy routine. Mort replayed that Orpheum show in his head. Time and again, Chuck hit the main points with the least possible work to tailor it to his locale and audience. He skipped one bit about curse words on Mars that probably wouldn’t have sat well with the pious listeners. Other than that, the arc of the show carried on unaltered.
Becky elbowed him. “What gives?” she whispered. When Mort met the question with a scowl of eloquent consternation, she nodded. “Gotcha. Let’s blow. You’re bringing the room down. Chuck won’t mind.”
At Becky’s nudging, Mort crouched low and scurried as unobtrusively as he could out of the row. It had never occurred to him to walk out of the show. Somehow, Becky’s blessing seemed almost inadequate to offset the perceived social offense he was committing.
Outside the theater, Becky breathed a deep sigh and stretched. “Ah. There we go.”
“You weren’t enjoying it, either?” Mort asked. There was so much of the Ramseys’ marriage that eluded him. He’d never have dreamed of abandoning Nancy on stage.
Becky glanced both ways up the street as if she was about to cross Boston Prime traffic. She shielded her mouth with the back of her hand. “It takes a little help to laugh at Chuck’s old shit. And when I tried to book a little side trip on this snooze cruise, I got cornered and suckered into yakking some priestess’s ear off about adultery for two hours.” She frumpled her brow. “Served her right.”
Mort had begun a habit of push-brooming stray words out of Becky’s diatribes in search of a kernel of communication. “I always thought you enjoyed the shows.”
With a snicker, Becky set off down the street. Mort fell into step to keep up. “Usually, it’s no hassle scoring some weed.”
“What now?” Mort asked. Despite his typical independence, he was at a loss in this breach of family etiquette. “Should we sneak back in before the end of the show?”
Becky skipped a pace ahead of him and spun to face him, backpedaling as she spread her arms wide.
“Freedom, baby! Daycare’s stuck with the kiddos until I go back for ’em. Don’t know where I’m hanging tonight. You can come with if you promise not to be a downer.” She whirled a full circle and more until she put her back to him and marched off to parts of the ship unknown.
It was an oath Mort wasn’t sure he could swear, but with little else to capture his attention, he set off in pursuit out of sheer curiosity.
The ship was of indeterminate make. Human design, but so old that Father Dougan wondered whether the manufacturer was even in business any longer. Here and there, hull plates had been replaced with ones that didn’t match the tint of their neighbors. Antenna arrays had been welded on seemingly at random. While no expert on non-ARGO technology, his preparation for this mission had given him enough exposure to eyndar culture and technology that he suspected that the comms were of local origin.
“You make heads or tails of it?” Father Dougan asked his technical lead.
Kip Mason rubbed his chin a moment. “Ganymede Special, maybe an ’07 or ’08? My grandfather’d be the one to ask. He ran a junkyard back during the Kepler administration. Don’t worry. If anything, it’ll make the scan even quicker.”
Father Dougan nodded, then hastily drew himself up tall and composed the smile on his face to his best “beatific.” These newcomers to the flock ought to see the best of humanity on display, welcoming, calm, and free of worries.
Worry.
That was always what Father Dougan fought hardest to overcome. Yes, he had faith that their mission was the Lord’s will. They were doing the right thing. Everyone. But first impressions could be so important. One misstep, one wrong word or unintended gesture could ruin the chances of saving a soul. If he inadvertently chased someone away before they could find salvation, it would weigh on his own soul.
Pressurized gas puffed and hissed. The interlock on the aged ship’s door released. Creaking on rusted hinges, it swung open. Vaguely vulgar grunts and alien muttering sounded from just inside. Rather than fold down or extend from an interior storage space, a heavy steel ladder wobbled its way out the exit, teetering under biological power and guidance.
The ladder tipped. Father Dougan cringed. Steel feet slammed to the bulkheads. Furry hands latched the ladder’s top-end hooks into waiting slots. Soon after, a pair of plouph spacefarers climbed down. The first of them looked Father Dougan up and down.
He’d never seen a plouph in person before. Few humans had. The ones who had numbered among Earth Marine Corps, Earth Navy, and the smattering of borderlands and extra-ARGO traders who’d do business with literally anyone who could pay.
“You holy human?” the plouph spoke in passable English. He was shoulder-high to the priest. His face bore the lean snarl of an eyndar, but rather than lupine, the visage was feliform. Scientists and pro-xeno politicians alike cautioned against judging a species by its evolutionary ancestors. But just as it was no coincidence that ape-descended humans were clannish and prone to bluster, so were the plouph wily scavengers like their hyena forebears.
Father Dougan cleared his throat. “Yes. I am Father Dougan, priest of the One Church. On behalf of His Holiness, Pope Basil VII, I bear the Good News of—”
“Yeah, yeah,” the plouph said hurriedly and clapped him on the shoulder. “You important guy. I like that.” With untoward familiarity, the plouph patted him down the back and hips. “You blaster guy? Nah. No blasters on you.” The frisking finished with a perfunctory grab at Father Dougan’s crotch.
The second plouph finished a similarly indiscreet examination of Kip, ending with the visitor in possession of the mechanic’s tool bag. He yipped and snarled something to his companion in their own language.
Good first impressions. They were savages. They had much to learn, but they wouldn’t be on the Nazareth if they hadn’t wanted to know the ways of both salvation and civilization.
Swallowing the nervous lump in his throat, Father Dougan collected himself. “We are unarmed. We are a ship of peace and mercy for all sentient life.”
The two plouph snickered to one another with that grating laugh their species was infamous for. “Yeah, yeah. Sure. No weapons. Whole ship like that? Or just you marrow-snacks?”
Kip stood with his hands raised to shoulder level as if they were being robbed. “We’re a missionary ship. We inspect every visitor and ship for weapons before allowing anyone on board. It’s to ensure the safety of all the souls in our care.”
It wasn’t Kip’s place to attempt to explain the goals and procedures of the Nazareth to these rude guests. Given the circumstances, however, Father Dougan saw no need to reprimand him. “You are safe here. As soon as you came aboard, we took you into our protection. I know your people have not always found the gentlest of treatment among humans, but I assure you, no one here wishes you harm.”
Hands still upraised, Kip pointed to the vessel’s boarding ladder. “If you’ll just let me aboard to conduct a routine inspection, we can—”
“No need,” the lead plouph informed him. He made a noise from the back of his throat that sounded halfway between a yip and the mooing of a cow. Another plouph appeared at the doorway and lobbed a blaster rifle down. The spokesman of the group caught it and held it out in both hands, just beyond the reach of the two humans. “See? We show you the blasters.”
Another blaster arced from the doorway, and the spokesman’s companion caught it. This time, it was instantly brought to bear and aimed at Kip’s gut.
The next plouph who came down the ladder already had their weapons with them.
Father Dougan’s hands shook. Keeping his motions slow and as steady as his nerves permitted, he pointed to a far corner of the hangar. “If you’d just deposit those in a n-n-neat pile, we can tag them and make sure you get them b-b-back at the end of your stay.”
A chorus of wheezy laughs met his comment, suggesting that most if not all of the plouph understood him just fine.
“Nah,” the spokesman said. “Gonna keep ’em. Blasters are good business. But you… I like you. Got… glak.” He accompanied the untranslated word with the clenching of an upturned, clawed hand. Then, he raised that same arm for all his troops to see and pointed a finger at Father Dougan. “Keeper.”
A rapid barrage reported from a diverse array of mismatched weapons. One second, Kip stood indignantly, awaiting the return of his tools. The next, a sizzling pile of gore collapsed in his place.
On instinct, Father Dougan sketched the sign of the cross in the air before him and muttered the Lord’s Prayer.
The plouph leader startled him with a firm but non-aggressive hand on his shoulder. “Your god is a peace god. Mine’s not.”
Hastily, Father Dougan’s mind raced to recall what he knew of mainstream plouph theology—assuming this lot weren’t extremists of one sort or another. Pagans, the lot of them, yet the pantheons varied wildly from clan to clan, continent to continent. With the scattering of the species to space, who knew what they believed any longer.
Though it had seemed like a contingency against the unlikeliest of events, the One Church had trained its missionary priests for such catastrophes. “Please. I’ll do anything you say. Just don’t harm anyone else.”
“See?” the leader said, raising his voice for all in the hangar to hear—and more plouph came out by the moment. How many had been aboard that modestly sized vessel? Father Dougan might have guessed a dozen. But that number was long since past, and they just kept coming. “Told you this was a good one.” He leaned his face in close and pulled Father Dougan down to his level.
“We’ll take you anywhere you like,” Father Dougan promised, though he knew he lacked the authority to enforce any deals he made. Cardinal Belotti would comply with these pirates’ demands. “Anything we have is yours.”
The spokesplouph snickered. “You can’t deal. You important guy, not boss guy. You gonna take me to your leader.”
Brad crunched the remnants of his cone dutifully. The stuff had the texture and taste of packing foam, but the residue of vanilla ice cream made it bearable. If he’d been alone, he’d have ditched the last of it in the nearest waste reclaim. But, since May seemed to be enjoying hers unironically, he kept up appearances.
“You know, when I said pick anyplace on the ship for dinner, I hadn’t meant to include desserts,” she scolded playfully.
They strolled side by side through one of the secondary passages that might have been described as an alley planetside. However, whereas back streets on a border colony could often be dangerous, this whole ship exuded a weird wearing-your-EV-helmet-indoors vibe of overprotection. Instead of furtive looks and head-down self-absorption, passersby greeted May by name and asked after her new companion. Brad had been introduced so many times, he felt like half the ship must have known his name by now.
How could anyone be in danger if everyone knew everyone else and they were all secretly terrified of being a bad person?
“Hey, you made the rules,” Brad said with a grin he didn’t try to hide. “I just picked the best option from what you offered.”
May checked her wrist chrono. It was a curious device, a mechanical replica of antique design. But since no one seemed to carry datapads around the ship, it made a certain degree of sense. Not as much sense as just carrying around a datapad with no omni connection just for the chrono feature, but it wasn’t a completely bonkers notion. “Gosh. When did it get so late?”
A lifetime living around Dad had given Brad a healthy arsenal for riddling rhetorical questions full of holes. “Sometime between then and now, I suppose.”
“I mean, Mom will understand. You haven’t gotten me in trouble or anything.”
“That’s good,” Brad agreed, though he’d never worried that he had.
She bit her lip. Brad glanced away, resisting the urge to stare. “I probably should be getting home soon…”
“Uh huh…” Brad sensed the “but” coming and didn’t want to spoil it. This was going to be it. His first real kiss with a girl. They’d spent the afternoon on the weirdest date ever, but they’d gone to a park inside a starship, watched a 30-minute theater presentation on Moses that he was going to count as taking her to a holo. Now they’d had dinner, and he’d even made sure her kiss would taste like chocolate ice cream instead of chicken parmesan or fried fish or whatever else she might have eaten at a proper restaurant.
“But I was hoping we could make one last stop.”
“Um. OK. Where?”
May pointed. Her timing had been impeccable. She’d stalled just long enough for their leisurely pace to carry them to a spot where a side corridor opened up and offered a view of a tailoring shop—more a booth or kiosk built into the wall between a first aid station and a washroom.
At least he hoped she was pointing to the tailor. Either of the other options for sneaking away for some privacy seemed crass even by Brad’s “I’ll take what I can get” standards.
“If you decide to stay on the ship a while, it’d be nice to have a school uniform. I… I think you’d look nice dressed up.”
Brad flushed. He’d seen the look on the guys in the dogma class earlier and here and there around the ship during their day together. It was nothing gaudy or outrageous. Really, it was just a boys’ cut of a business suit, all monochrome with a starchy dress shirt and a tie.
Wanting neither to disappoint her nor get caught dead converting to the One Church like a sucker, he tried an alternative. Giving her an unabashed look up and down, he declared. “I don’t know if I can pull off a skirt like you.”
May giggled. “You’d get the men’s version, silly.” Diplomatic of her, even though Brad realized he was being patronized.
Thinking fast on his feet, Brad needed something else to divert this one-way trip to disaster.
“Actually, there’s one place I’d been hoping to see before deciding whether or not to ask my parents if I can stay here when they move on.” The words tumbled out. It was a fruit salad of what he needed and what she wanted to hear. It bought time, diverted their next destination, asked a favor, and dangled the promise of convincing him to convert—whether his parents did or not.
She seemed puzzled—and with good reason; they’d practically been everywhere, near as he could tell. “Where’s that?”
Good question. Brad struggled to name a place they hadn’t been. Everywhere on the ship’s “You Are Here” maps had been accounted for. He started to review for places they’d glossed over with a quick point and an explanation when a truly unique option struck him.
“The actual meat of the ship,” Brad said. Her consternated frown deepened. “You know? The parts the mechanics see. I’m gonna be a pilot someday, and this is the biggest ship I’ve ever been on.”
He wasn’t positive on that count, but this wasn’t a debate where he expected to get fact-checked on the fly.
“Um. I’m not sure I’m the best one to show you around the shippy part of the ship. But maybe I could find someone who—”
Brad grinned. “I’ll show you around, then. How can you live someplace like this and not even know what it looks like on the inside?”
“Well…”
“C’mon,” Brad chided. “It’ll be fun. I promise.” It was a double-or-nothing proposition. He was either losing his hook in her or delivering on a good time. Going into that tailor shop was a goodnight handshake waiting to happen.
Speaking of hands…
Brad took her by the hand, relishing the touch of her skin. She clasped on as he took the lead, heading them back the way they’d just come. He was looking for something he’d seen on the way and paid little attention to at the time.
“In here,” he declared.
“But it says ‘AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY,’” May protested.
Brad gave her an easy smile. “No problem. I’m part of the Junior Mechanics’ Guild.”
“So?”
“This ship is registered on Earth, I’m guessing?”
“I think so…”
“I’m authorized for access on all civilian ships with ARGO registry. I’m not going to work on anything, but I’m cleared to show you around backstage.” Before she could object, Brad swung the door open as he swept an arm for her to precede him. “Ladies first.”
Holding his hand, she stepped over the raised, pressure-rated threshold and into the parts of the ship that weren’t on the standard tour for prospective converts.
Brad followed her, fighting back the biggest grin of his life as he pulled the door closed behind them.
“…and they claim they’ll start shooting children if we send a distress call or resist in any way.”
The intercom static cut off sharply, signaling that the button on the far end had been released. An outdated and misbehaving system at the best of times, Captain Standish thanked it silently for the little help it could be in telling him what was going on down in the hangar.
Plouph pirates? On his ship?
Oh, in his heyday, they’d never have dared! Pirates fled the sector at the mere hint that the ENV Brisbane was headed to the area. Well, he liked to think that was why they encountered so few. Nonetheless, he’d never been aboard a ship where the pirates were ever allowed inside except in mag cuffs or biohazard disposal bags.
Standish sat back and depressed the button to reply. “Have they given any demands?”
“Lemme on the talkie!” a gruff canine voice snapped. “Yeah. Demands. I got ’em. You listenin’ good?”
“I am,” Standish replied stiffly. There was always something unsettlingly familiar when a xeno spoke English. Laaku had never bothered him—they were practically human, after all. But even tesuds, longstanding and irreproachable allies at the core of ARGO, never sounded right with human words exiting their reptile mouths. Plouph were even less civilized than most. Yet, here they were, holding a conversation in which the upright hyena held all the leverage.
“Okie. You don’t tell no one nothin’ bout us. Make ’em all go together somewhere. Clear a path. We comin’ to the bridge. Got it?”
Standish swallowed, keenly aware of the eyes of his bridge crew on him, all hearing every word of the exchange. It was a scenario from his nightmares. He trusted in God’s plan. He knew that he would be absolved in this life or the next for doing what he must. Yet, in all his decades of service between the military and the One Church, he’d never felt so utterly helpless.
The Nazareth was the embodiment of the “turn the other cheek” credo. Unarmed, unshielded, their mere presence in this virtually lawless stretch of eyndar space was a testament to their pure intentions. They were an exemplar, a message of peace…
A sitting duck.
“I do. I will order a shelter drill. You’ll hear it momentarily. Will that suffice?”
“You the boss man. Yeah? They listen. It’s all good. See ya soon.” The intercom cut off again.
The day he’d shipped out with the One Church, he’d come close to packing his old navy sidearm, just for the slight sense of security it provided. At the last moment, he’d opted to put it back in the safe of his Toronto Prime apartment. Now, he would gladly have sold his life for one shot from that blaster pistol at the plouph on the other end of that comm.
Instead, he would await the terrorists’ arrival.
Switching channels, he pressed the intercom anew. “Your Eminence, sorry for disturbing your evening, but I must inform you of a grave situation.”
Cardinal Belotti didn’t reply immediately, and he came huffing onto the line when he did. “It’s not Natasha, is it? I’ve been praying for her.”
“It’s not Natasha,” Standish replied calmly. The ship’s penitent mad wizard hadn’t relapsed. Though right about now he wouldn’t have minded so much. “We’ve taken aboard a group of pilgrims who turned out to be armed and in want of an audience under the threat of violence.”
“Oh dear.”
Standish nodded gravely. “Indeed. I’m about to announce a shelter drill. I’d like you to ignore it and await a security team who will escort you to a hidden location.”
“We don’t have a security team…”
“I’ll put one together momentarily.”
“And I refuse to go into hiding when—”
“Your Eminence, please!” Standish snapped. “Time is of the essence, and I have a duty to see to your safety.”
“Mine least of all. Where are these pirates presently?”
“Father Dougan will be escorting them to the bridge, at blasterpoint, as soon as I’ve cleared the civilians.”
“I’m coming there personally.”
“No. Your Eminence—”
“Don’t ‘Your Eminence’ me, child. I will meet with these pirates, and I will convince them that we are not a threat to them.”
“They’re plouph.”
The pause on the line was longer this time.
“No matter. We are all God’s children. We will meet their hatred with love, and if that is not enough to spare our lives, we will die praying for the salvation of our murderers. Is that understood, captain?”
The Admiralty would have considered him a madman. It went against every second of his training as an officer. By all rights, he should scramble as many civilians to the escape pods as possible and activate the self-destruct. “Understood.”
Of course, the Nazareth didn’t have nearly enough escape pods to evacuate everyone. No ship its size possibly could. And far be it from the One Church missionary fleet to allow the inclusion of any device that could cause an interstellar incident.
Realizing he was in danger of angering the pirates, Standish hastily opened the shipwide comm. “All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear. Repeat. All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear.” He also activated the emergency klaxon.
Moments later, Cardinal Pietro Belotti entered, attired in his full regalia. His face was fixed with a scowl that sent officers around the bridge back to their stations in an instant. “Is that infernal racket truly necessary?”
“I believe so, Your Eminence. We need everyone heeding the shelter drill lest the pirates—”
The cardinal fluttered his fingers. “Yes, yes. I was speaking rhetorically. Any sign of our misguided guests?”
“Your quarters are a considerably shorter walk.”
Cardinal Belotti paced. “I don’t want this to escalate. This is our first contact this side of the eyndar border. Rome was very clear on the importance of a first impression. This isn’t how any of us wished to encounter our first challenge of the mission. However, we mustn’t allow an unfortunate hiccup to ruin our chances to save souls within the Eyndar Empire.”
They waited in tense silence until the plouph finally arrived. Father Dougan led the way with the muzzle of a blaster rifle planted firmly against his spine.
The priest cleared his throat. “Allow me to introduce…”
“Bah,” the plouph leader cut in, batting Father Dougan aside and stepping to the fore. “I’m Ventok Eenok Seevok Rawl, leader of the Kerip Tebrell—Chain Traders, to you one-languagers.”
“How may we address you, child?” Cardinal Belotti asked.
“Ventok’s fine. Anything but ‘Scrappy’ is fine. That’s what they called me at the school. First one to call me ‘Scrappy’ gets to measure their loopy guts with their fingers.” He switched his glower—and the aim of his blaster—from captain to cardinal and back again. “But which one of you guys is the bigger boss? Not lookin’ to waste words on the little guy.”
“I am the head of this mission,” Cardinal Belotti said just as Captain Standish replied, “I am captain of this vessel.”
“Huh…” Ventok scratched his scalp with the barrel of his blaster rifle. “Still not sure. Who here deals?”
“If I may,” Father Dougan interjected. “I believe he’s looking to negotiate with someone.”
Ventok patted the priest on his head. “I’ll take ten of this one. He gets it. But he’s no boss. Words it up! Someone be head boss.”
Standish clenched his jaw to keep from lashing out. “What is it you want?”
“Meyang,” the plouph replied casually. “My pals say we can live there. Plenty of room once the humans take a shovel ride. That’s a long goal. Short goal, Imma want some quiet humans, codes for the ship, and shut up the astral antenna.”
“I’m sure we can accommodate you,” Cardinal Belotti assured the plouph. Snickers around the room from the other xeno pirates—including a pair of burly azrin—told the captain that this was exactly what the pirates wanted.
Couldn’t the cardinal see what was happening? This wasn’t a mere religious difference. This wasn’t a cultural barrier they needed to overcome to introduce poor, benighted souls to the path of redemption in the name of the Lord. These plouph were pirates and slavers. Every man, woman, and child aboard was destined for sale in some godforsaken alien black market.
“You won’t get away with—” Standish began.
His words were cut short by a perfunctory blaster bolt to the chest, squeezed off unerringly and without undue aim at point-blank range.
There were gasps around the bridge, but no one leapt into heroism that would have quickly converted to martyrdom. Ventok grinned down at his handiwork, then up at Cardinal Belotti.
“Good. You the boss for sure now.”
“We will do all that you command,” Cardinal Belotti swore. “So long as you don’t harm anyone else.”
Ventok grinned a toothy grin and put an arm around the cardinal’s shoulders, forcing the elderly clergyman to stoop. “You gonna be good at this.”
Mort stretched out his back and groaned. Beside him, Becky snickered. “You’re not old enough to have a bad back.”
“Tell that to the nincompoop who bought the chairs for this overstuffed barge,” Mort replied. They filtered with the rest of the crowd out of the small holo-theater. Though he had little experience with them as public venues, he expected that this was—like the stage theater—a shabby representative of their species.
“You’re not old enough to say ‘nincompoop,’ either,” Becky teased. She looked none the worse for wear despite sitting through the dreary presentation and suffering the ill-conceived chairs.
Mort drew himself tall despite the kink in his tailbone and lifted his chin. “Not for a—” He caught himself, remembering the local stance on the grace of a wizard’s soul. “A man of time-tested vocabulary. Sapere aude.”
“Ahh. ‘Dare to be wise,’” a new voice broke in, one Mort recalled from a recent encounter. Father Laszlo hustled until he bracketed Mort between him and Becky. “So rare to find someone outside the church with a working knowledge of Latin.”
“Just a couple phrases,” Mort replied dryly.
“And your companion just stumbled into a setup for you to use one of them? How serendipitous.”
Turning his back on the priest, Mort hooked a thumb at him. “See? He’s got a case of the high-Scrabble words, too. Why don’t you hassle him about it?”
“Don’t mind him, Father,” Becky said past him. “He’s got a twitchy back, and I don’t think the holo was exactly his bag. Ya catch my drift?”
“Oh?” Father Laszlo sounded crestfallen. “I’ve always enjoyed that one. Must have seen it a hundred times. They got Jules Vance to play Ramses II. His best performance, if you ask me. And they recorded it all in Sol—though obviously not on Earth.”
Mort fought to keep his expression neutral. The historical sites of Egypt had been under the jurisdiction of the Convocation for centuries. If the One Church had wanted to film a large-scale holovid production there, they’d have needed permission that would not have been readily given. Taken as a subtle jab, it was a brilliant needle with which to poke a suspected wizard.
“Why’s that?” he asked, playing dumb.
Father Laszlo chuckled and lifted his shoulders. “Oh. Earth politics. The usual. But I was more interested in—”
Public address speakers blared, drowning out the priest’s next words. “All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear. Repeat. All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear.”
An entirely unnecessary honking assailed the ears with a pulsating din.
“We should get to the cathedral,” Father Laszlo said calmly, raising his voice over the chatter of theatergoers and pedestrians reacting to the warning signal.
“Not sure I see how praying’s going to get the noise to stop,” Mort countered.
Father Laszlo ushered them along with the mien of a man accustomed to shepherding flocks. “It’s the nearest designated shelter. Tut-tut. Move along. Mustn’t set a bad example.”
“My kiddos are at the daycare,” Becky protested as a growing crowd funneling in the same direction carried her along.
“Just a drill,” Father Laszlo said. “Daycare staff has their own procedure. Your children will be well looked after.”
Mort came within a syllable of countering that Brad hadn’t been deposited in the care of any child-minders. But the pedant in him deferred to the logician who hinted that there was a not-insignificant chance that this false alarm had been perpetrated by none other than the Ramseys’ eldest son.
And so, Mordecai The Brown, exiled Guardian of the Plundered Tomes, wielder of the Fires of Prometheus himself, found himself herded to a spaceborne cathedral to cower with the technophiles.
This never would have happened if he’d just stayed on the ship, fooled a few ignoramuses with science detectors. He’d have kept his books and had access to the refrigerator on the Radio City. A week of solitary confinement? A week’s respite, more like. Any wizard who couldn’t keep his own company for a year or more at a stretch didn’t have the mental muscle to command the forces of the cosmos.
“Fill the pews at the front first,” a teenager in a white dress shirt and black slacks ordered at the door, guiding people past in the role of pedestrian traffic enforcer. Mort shot the lad a raised eyebrow that caused him to cringe and not touch the wizard as he had so many in the line ahead of him. No gentle nudge behind the arm of this wizard would be required to keep him shuffling forward.
It took years of study to bend a lesser mind to the will of a student wizard and not an inconsiderable amount of magical finesse to keep the subject from noticing. It took the gravitas of one assured in the knowledge that he could snap a fragile mind like a twig to accomplish a similar effect without so much as a whisper of magic or a stray silent favor from the universe.
Mort ended up in the sixth row, left side of the aisle, crunched between Father Laszlo and Becky Ramsey. Hip to hip, packed like salted minnows in a tin, Mort was at least relieved that there was genuine wood beneath his backside.
A uniformed member of the crew stood up at the head of the cathedral, pointedly not at the altar but in front between it and the first row of pews. Behind him loomed a Roman execution victim in statuary form. A handheld gizmo amplified his voice. “Let’s keep this calm and orderly. No pushing or shoving. The sooner we complete the drill, the sooner we can all go back to our days.”
Outside, the honking persisted.
Knowing scientists, they hadn’t trapped an actual live goose in the ceiling—or even a flock of geese acting as a chorus. Probably, they’d trapped the voices of geese in a bunch of boxes to be released for these safety drills. Hopefully, they hadn’t collected too many honks. The sooner the Nazareth ran out of captive waterfowl voices, the better Mort would like it.
Eventually, the cathedral filled to three-quarters capacity, and no more humans or xenos entered.
Still, the honking continued unabated.
“How long this going to be?” someone called out.
“We’re just waiting for the all clear,” the officer in front of the altar replied, not deigning to use his amplifier. It had not gone unnoticed by a well-trained wizardly ear that he hadn’t answered the question.
“How long these usually run?” Mort asked quietly.
Father Laszlo muttered his reply for Mort’s ears only. “Shorter than this. Please, remain still. I know your kind aren’t prone to idleness, but let us practice patience.”
My kind?
Bloody Lucifer-shat-upon hell. The priest knew.
Mort’s glare must have given the priest pause, because without a word from the wizard, he added an addendum.
“I won’t tell a soul. Just…”
“Fine,” Mort grumbled under his breath. “We wait.”
Chuck raised the hand without the microphone, absorbing a standard-issue round of applause with practiced nonchalance and gratitude. “Thank you, Nazareth!” He strode offstage, not taking his eyes off the audience or the grin off his face.
As soon as he was out of the limelight, he deflated.
Cheeks puffed, he let out a sigh. Tough crowd. Warm as fresh ice cream. The worst rooms weren’t the ones where the patrons were hostile. Passion could be redirected, focused, funneled into something funny. No, the toughest challenge for a comic was apathy. Sure, plenty of the folks breathing out there tonight had meant well. But most had come for a cultural show, not comedy. Chuck was a time capsule of Old Earth. Usually, he played that light in the adverts for his shows, enough to draw curiosity, not so much that he became a museum exhibit.
Museum patrons weren’t there to laugh.
Laughing at history was rude. But there was a key difference between “look at the funny clothes they used to wear,” “they used to put what in their where?,” and the type of comedy that came with punchlines older than Luna Colony.
The stage manager handed Chuck a cloth. Muttering a thanks, Chuck used it to wipe his forehead. While he appreciated the ambiance that authentic period lighting gave, he preferred the low-thermal, modern stage spotlights whenever they were available.
“Great work out there,” the stage manager told him. Chuck accepted a stilted high five with galaxy-weary aplomb.
The next act was already on stage. Teddy was a comedic juggler. He and Chuck had gabbed during pre-show prep. Seemed like a real pro, though perpetually stuck on the borderlands circuit. As Chuck watched the unicycle-and-juggling-pins routine, he could see why. Teddy had the physical talent, but his stage presence was flat. There was just a certain je ne sais quoi that separated a pass-the-hat street act from live on stage in Vegas Prime. Same act. Same corny jokes.
Except that Chuck did understand the difference. It was called charisma. To make the bigs, you needed to fill a room with personality even if you were the only one in it. A top performer could be performing solo in a stadium, and anyone walking in would feel like they were part of a crowd.
“That was wonderful,” Annabeth told him.
Chuck jumped. He hadn’t heard her coming up behind him. “Oh. Yeah. Thanks. It’s all practice. Been doing this since before you were born.”
She cocked her head skeptically. “I’m 23.”
“Thanks, kid. I was shootin’ off at the mouth, but the fact it’s still true just made me feel old.”
“Sorry.”
“Never be sorry. Not in this business. If you say it, it’s gotta be sarcastic. Earnestness isn’t funny. Be earnest all you want anywhere else. Here, you’re a personality. Plenty of flavors of comic, but none of them is vanilla.”
“How do you do it?”
Chuck shook his head slowly. “There’s no how-to, just a bunch of how-not-tos. It takes trial and error to find your act, and all anyone can do is share some of the not-tos with you. Living on this ship isn’t helping you any…”
She furrowed her brow. “There’s a lot of good people on this ship.”
“Yup. Nice and safe. Wholesome. Kind of uniform. Bland. Tell me: which of those words screams ‘funny’ to you?”
Annabeth remained silent.
“See? You wanna succeed at this business, take a sabbatical. Hit the galaxy. Watch people. Borderlands. Core. The other Earth-likes. Watch all the stupid, weird stuff people say and do. The galaxy’s full of silly stuff that doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“Like what?”
“Like practically every laaku you meet speaks better English than a human. Like how the Roman Empire fell a million years ago, yet there’s Rome Omega, Rome XXIII, or whatever on any decent-sized colony. Like starship captains that don’t believe in magic despite relying on a star-drive to get around the stars.”
Chuck allowed her to stew on that a minute as he watched from the wings as Teddy accepted tossed apples from an assistant, juggling more and more, occasionally taking a bite from one without missing a beat. He waggled a thumb in the direction of the juggler. “Like how demonstrating gravity by throwing things around became a form of entertainment.”
Just then, the house speakers blared a message unrelated to the show.
“All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear. Repeat. All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear.”
On stage, Teddy panicked. Apples spewed into the air and rained down around him. His unicycle slipped out from under him, upending the juggler and dumping him on the stage with a thud.
The audience reaction was a mix of laughs, cringes, and samaritans rushing to the stage to see if Teddy was all right. Chuck gave the crowd credit. While he’d seen the same reaction plenty of times across civilized and uncivilized space, the ratio of help to laughter was a lot kinder than usual.
An arm shoved Chuck aside. The stage manager rushed past. “It’s all right, everyone.” He glanced down. “He’s going to be OK. And this theater is a designated shelter location. Everyone just return to your seats and remain calm.”
Chuck couldn’t remain calm. He fumed. First off, where did this outfit get off holding an emergency drill during a show? The Nazareth operated on an Earth-standard 24-hour clock; they had 21 other hours to pick from that didn’t interfere with the variety show he’d been recruited to headline. Second, he was about ready to strangle Brad if he found out the boy was responsible. A missionary ship with a haywire emergency system? That was suspicious as all heaven. What scam or scheme the boy had running, he was going to get what was coming to him if this drill was part of it.
That thinking all went out the airlock when the theater doors burst open. A squad of xenos—five plouph and a one-eared azrin—barged in, blaster rifles in hand.
People screamed.
Chuck dove out of sight behind the stage curtain.
“Nobody move!” one of the plouph shouted in respectably clear English. He squeezed off a round from his blaster and the theater quieted. “Better. Yeah. Be good, nobody get killed. Got it? Yeah? OK. Make the sitting. Make the quiet.”
Holy hell! The ship had been boarded by pirates.
He had to get to Becky and the littles. She’d ducked out of the show early with Mort. He’d thought little enough of it at the time, but now he could only hope she’d gone straight to the daycare and retrieved Mike and Rhiannon.
Whatever Brad was up to, Chuck could only hope the kid had the sense to play along, keep his head down, and stay out of trouble. This had the look of a hostage situation. And while being a hostage was dangerous work, being a hero was damn near suicide. Chuck hadn’t raised some idiot hero.
The way he was turning out, Brad would probably end up with a job working as a fence for whatever these pirates decided to steal.
And Mort… He’d dragged the poor wizard out here. Now he’d gotten the guy into…
Wait just a damn minute. What was he thinking? Mort was the last guy who needed worrying about. Hell, if it weren’t for the fact that he might render the ship an uninhabitable hull of twisted, molten metal in the process, the wizard might be their best chance to fight back against these xeno scum.
The pirates fanned out into the theater, clearly puzzled. “What’s making in here? Fruit auction? Seat-wheel shop? Don’t get it…”
“Apple crime,” another of the pirates suggested. “That one steal, so they make him ride the one-wheelie and whizz apples at ’im.”
“Fun,” another chirped.
“Naw,” the clear leader declared. “This is a play.”
“Actually, it’s a comedy show,” a familiar voice informed them.
Chuck blinked. That had been him. Shit.
This kicked off a debate among the pirates.
“Comedy?”
“Funny guys? Funny humans? Can humans be funny?”
“Dunno.”
Rifle barrels swung around haphazardly as the twitchy plouph inspected the theater and herded the few stray patrons into seats, along with the staff. One errant finger on a trigger and someone could wind up with a hole in them.
From the stage floor, Teddy groaned. The samaritan who’d stayed by his side called out, “He needs a doctor.”
One of the pirates swaggered over. “What wrong with him?”
“He fell. Probably a broken back. We have a doctor on board who—”
A blaster round sizzled.
Chuck watched in horror as Teddy slumped and lay still. The poor bastard was just trying to scrape out a living making people happy. And one on-the-job mishap, and they shot him rather than get him to a doctor for a probably-not-even-fractured vertebra.
“All better now.”
The leader whistled through his pointed teeth. “Listen up. We gonna long time here. Sit. Quiet. Oh… and someone said there was funny humans around here. C’mon, funny humans. Make us laugh.”
Teddy’s physically grounded comedy was probably their best shot at entertaining these rough xenos. The rest of the lineup was rookies, open-mic-night rejects, and has-beens.
And yet…
Having been herded into a front-row seat, Annabeth raised a tentative hand. As she began to rise, a vision of her act flashed through Chuck’s head. Her stage presence had been virtually nonexistent performing for a lukewarm crowd who clapped politely in lieu of laughter because most of them knew her. She’d been scared shitless of bombing in a theater with a capacity of about a hundred. Now, she was volunteering to tell jokes at blasterpoint.
Chuck’s feet were moving before he could think better of it. He navigated an obstacle course of fallen, half-eaten apples and the corpse of a brother-in-jokes. Shutting out all the bullshit as best he could, he plucked the microphone from its stand.
“Good evening, Nazareth. It looks like we’ve got some new faces out there. Let’s give it up for our captors.” He clapped vigorously.
Within seconds, the literal captive audience caught on and played along, applauding the pirates. There was a rule in live performances: The Show Must Go On.
With a theater under siege, the show lurched back into motion with Chuck at the helm.
The guts of the Nazareth looked disappointingly normal for a giant starship. Brad had his ulterior motives, sure, but he’d also hoped to find something a little more unusual once he and May ventured beyond the public-facing parts of the ship. What would have been utterly smooth was if the Nazareth had stone-walled secret passages lit by burning torches, dusty vaults filled with handwritten books, forgotten tombs, or even a real live dungeon with shackles and racks and red-hot pokers.
Instead, he led the way through well-marked, well-maintained, tight-but-navigable passages designed to allow mechanics access to the life support, guidance, and power systems. Everything was outdated tech with modern safety measures slapped over them. They had giant versions of the power distribution nodes the Radio City used, older than Dad, even, but the info placards were live screens listing recent maintenance records.
The nearest hub had been serviced October 19th, 2540—roughly a month ago—and signed off by Chief Engineer Christer Johansson.
“I’ve never been in here before,” May remarked breathlessly. “It’s so…”
“Powerful?” Brad suggested.
“Metallic.”
True enough. While the city-like bulk of the vessel had been decorated like a fancy building, the maintenance passages were all bare steel, dull and monochrome. Color was reserved for crucial information. The yellow of warning signs. Red for hot. Blue for cold. Green for radioactive. Purple for magic.
Brad would have dearly loved to actually find the purple markings for the star-drive and gravity stone. Mort had talked about how the two objects worked. The star-drive sounded intentionally overcomplicated, but the gravity stone was all magic, just a giant sphere of rock carted off from Earth or some other planet with similar gravity, pressed into service providing that gravity throughout the ship.
Brad wanted to try altering it himself.
“Well, it’s all functional. You can’t have all the pretty stuff down here. It would get in the way.”
“You, uh… don’t like pretty?” she asked coyly.
Brad looked over his shoulder. May glanced aside. He grinned. “Nah. But I don’t hold it against you.”
“HEY!” an adult voice barked as they passed an intersection. “What are you kids doing down here?”
May froze.
“It’s OK,” Brad called back with a wave. One of the ship’s mechanics had paused in her duties and hung back at an intersection, a shipping-wrapped piece of conduit weighing her down. “I checked in with Chief Engineer Johansson when I boarded. Need a hand installing that replacement conduit?” He turned to May. “You don’t mind, do you? It’s a quick refit.”
Brad knew two things. First, he’d paid enough attention to Dad’s lessons about not mispronouncing people’s names to use the traditional Scandinavian soft ‘J’ in Johansson, given the clue with the first name Christer. Second, he knew there was no way a seasoned mechanic was going to take help from some random teenager.
“Just don’t touch anything down here,” the mechanic ordered.
“No problem. Good luck with the conduit,” Brad called back.
“Wow. You really know how to do all that stuff?” May asked as Brad led them in search of someplace comfortable to take a ‘break.’
“Not all of it. I mean, I’ve still got plenty to learn. I’ve never recalibrated a fuel regulator, mounted a main drive thruster, core-stripped a computer system. I mean, that’s pretty advanced stuff.”
They kept walking, never finding anything that resembled a mechanics’ break room or a janitorial closet or anyplace that might offer a comfy space to get off their feet.
“OK, smarty-pants. Why do I smell hotdogs?”
At first, Brad thought it was some kind of riddle, possibly a crude one. Most of Dad’s jokes—and all of Mom’s—referring to the low-grade pseudo-sausages weren’t meant for sensitive ears. Then Brad smelled it too.
“Well, it’s one of two things.”
May played along, crossing her arms. “What two things?”
“Either someone’s got poor taste in life-support fresheners…”
“Or?” May asked, clearly unsatisfied with the throwaway suggestion.
“Or the Nazareth uses the maintenance corridors as part of the ventilation return ducting.” He pointed up ahead to a spot near the ceiling where louvred panels let in light from the ship’s interior. He put a fingertip in his mouth and held it up. “You can feel the slight breeze.”
His companion did likewise, eyes widening when she felt the evaporation from one side. “That’s a neat trick. Got any others?”
Brad let his eyelids lower a hair. “Maybe…” Careful not to overplay his hand, he kept things light. Jaunting up ahead, he used a cluster of horizontal pipes as a stepladder and boosted himself high enough to see through the vent. “Check it out.”
“You should be careful up there.” May lurked below like she was going to spot for him at a gymnastics meet. The tentative hand she held hovering behind his lower back wasn’t going to slow his fall, much less save him if he slipped.
“You should come up and see for yourself.” Brad extended a hand. With his other, he kept a grip on a cold-water line that was already draining the warmth from his fingers. “I won’t let you fall.”
He was all of a meter off the ground. Maybe a meter and a half. And they were close enough to the far wall to grab for purchase there if either of them lost their balance. The absolute worst case, he’d have to bring her to the first aid station with a heaping armload of apology.
Indecision played on May’s face. She bit her lip, showing off the top of a smile that had a slight gap between her front teeth. Any year now, someone was going to make her wear magnetoretractors on those teeth, lining them up until she looked like every other girl who hadn’t grown up poor or tech-averse. But she wasn’t too far gone yet, wasn’t a hopeless conformist.
May reached up and took Brad’s hand. She did most of the work herself, using him as a balance and lever, not as a hoist. Good thing, too, since despite her slender frame, Brad was no muscle man. Once May had her shoes planted on the same conduit as him, he wrapped an arm around her, ostensibly for support.
Hormones shot off like fireworks in the enclosed space.
Once his breath slowed, Brad looked through the vent. “It’s like a whole different world.”
Feet and ankles, humans towering like giants, it was an undignified yet fascinating vantage on the Nazareth’s living space. Daring to hold on just to his date for a moment, Brad fiddled with a mechanical lever and adjusted the angle of the louvres for a better view.
“I feel like we shouldn’t be watching everyone like this.”
“Why not? It’s not a washroom or someone’s quarters.”
“I don’t know. It just… I can’t describe why.”
“Because it’s fun? Because no one told you to do it, you feel like you shouldn’t.”
“Maybe…”
“Rules are to keep society from collapsing,” Brad explained, roughly summarizing a lifetime of Dad’s rants into a one-line format. “If you don’t have a rule against something, it’s fine as long as no one gets hurt.
“OK. Try this one. Thou Shalt Not…” Brad paused. “Um. What covers people-watching from a vent?” He’d spent the afternoon subjected to the tedium of her youth pastor’s rambling. He’d absorbed enough to have a pretty good idea that he was in the clear.
“I guess, but—”
“All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear. Repeat. All hands, this is an emergency shelter drill. Report to your nearest shelter location and remain until given the all clear.”
May pulled away, but since he was partly holding onto her for his balance, getting down had to be a mutual act of disentanglement.
“You heard the announcement. We have to get to a shelter.”
Brad barely heard her. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the scene outside. Their hiding spot had a view of the hangar exits. A troop of plouph and azrin mercs marched out as the civilians scattered, presumably to designated shelter locations. The blasters they carried looked very, very real.
“Ho-lee shit,” Brad muttered.
“Watch your—” May said, then drew in a sharp breath.
Thinking fast, Brad released the cold-water pipe and clapped a hand over her mouth just before May screamed. “Shhhhhhh!” Now holding onto her completely for balance, he whispered sharply, “Screaming doesn’t bring help. It gets us shot. Don’t scream. OK?”
May twitched a jerky nod. Brad took his hand away slowly. “We need to get to a shelter.”
“Um. No? How about not turning ourselves over to pirates.”
“Pirates?”
“What else do you call a bunch of armed guys on an unarmed ship with emergency sirens going?”
“Maybe it’s a misunderstanding.”
The troops were headed their way. Hastily, Brad slanted the vents to block the pirates’ view.
Most xenos had a better sense of smell than humans. Brad had heard that some species didn’t even consider humans to have a sense of smell, their noses just serving to allow them to breathe and eat at the same time. But with the odor of cheap hotdogs in the air and the fact that this was a return vent, not a blower, Brad hoped that was enough to hide their presence.
They waited in tense silence, neither budging from their perch, listening as the discordant march of booted feet and squabbling in multiple xeno languages made their way past.
When they could no longer hear the pirates, Brad breathed a sigh. “I think we’re clear.”
May cast him a sidelong glare. “Then you’re welcome to take your hands off me anytime now.”
Brad let go of her at once and shimmied aside. “Sorry. You hadn’t said anything, so I figured—”
“You figured wrong. Now, what are we going to do?”
With a grunt, Brad dropped to the floor of the maintenance tunnel. He held up a hand to aid May in climbing down, careful to avoid looking like he was staring up at her. She ignored his offer and hopped down to land lightly beside him.
OK. So she’d been playing along when this was all fun and games. Now, with real stakes, she was all business. Brad’s answer was equally dead serious.
“We stick together. We stay hidden. We stay safe.”
“How long are we going to be in here?”
It wasn’t the kind of shout one was accustomed to hearing in a formal setting. Despite the circumstances, Mort still considered a cathedral to be a place for quiet contemplation, even if it wasn’t his pot of tea. But the dissenting voice among the pews spoke a thought cooped up in every head.
This wasn’t normal.
The Library of the Plundered Tomes staff was forced by edict to conduct biannual emergency preparedness drills. It was a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down of a holdover from the earliest days of Earth’s wizards revealing themselves to the plebeian masses. Some bureaucrat tried to apply legislated workplace safety guidelines to magic, and a few of those arcane rules of the mundane galaxy had stuck around despite the best efforts of traditionalists. Among the hardest to shake was the understandable notion that perhaps the librarians ought to be ready in case disaster struck.
Since the Plundered Tomes were a series of disasters preserved for posterity, the logic held. Thus, on even-numbered years—usually at the last moment before the calendar rolled over, during the week between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve—the librarians conducted a drill. Someone shouted, “Oh no, run for your lives,” and everyone had until the designated Ward Sealer completed the Binding of Tartarus to get out of the library.
Despite being unannounced, the drill was only a surprise to newcomers. The hilarity of the reaction of those unsuspecting neophytes was possibly the only reason the practice had carried on as long as it had.
Whatever overripe tradition these One Church people were conducting, it had worn out its welcome for most.
Becky leaned in and whispered into his ear. “You got any tricks for makin’ time slide a little easier, I’m down with it.”
The implication stood clear. But Mort was no chronomancer. Egad, it was bad enough he was a book thief and a murderer. Ancient tales warned of inhuman creatures beyond the veil between realities that came to devour those who mucked around with time.
Resorting to her own parlance, Mort obscured to any eavesdropping ears that she’d meant magic. “I’m not holding.”
“Bummer.” With a sigh, Becky slouched in her seat as much as the cramped quarters allowed.
“Hasn’t this gone on long enough?” someone else shouted, standing and grandstanding. He was middle-aged, human, sort of doughy in the manner of the sessile corporate class. Arms spread, he turned to survey the cathedral for support. “We get it. If this were an actual emergency, we’d need to sit quietly and wait for someone to tell us what to do.”
On cue, the heavy wooden doors burst open. Armed xenos swaggered in like they owned the place. By right of conquest, they probably believed they did. Mort’s quick count numbered them eight plouph and two azrin.
Dogs and cats living together was a tongue-in-cheek sign of the apocalypse.
In his lap, Mort’s hand stiffened into a claw.
Don’t you dare, Nebuchadnezzar snapped from inside his thoughts.
Mort scowled but didn’t deign to respond, allowing his grandfather to quell his urge to lash out and be done with these intruders.
I’m stranded in this overthick gourd atop your neck. You, in turn, are utterly stranded in the Milky Way’s boxer trunks aboard a self-propelled beer can that knits its own air out of Hephaistos-only-knows-what. Admittedly, if you’d gone with your father’s wishes and become a terramancer, you might be able to make enough air to breathe until you get rescued. But since you’re a chip off the old generation-skipping block, don’t go wrecking this bloody ship!
Mort tried to glower inwardly and found the inability to turn his eyes to point at his own brain consternating.
He could murder the lot of them. No doubt in his mind of that.
Whether he could manage without dooming everyone aboard to death by freezing and suffocation was a bet he wasn’t willing to place.
Yet.
Yet… he reminded himself as the space pirates filtered throughout the cathedral. They were a weird mix of undisciplined and orderly. They carried their weapons like holovid props or children’s toys, utterly unfazed by the deadly promise of the devices. One plouph allowed his blaster rifle to hang from a limp hand, letting its barrel drag on the cathedral floor. Another took target practice at the statuary in niches all around the chamber. An azrin passed by Mort and Becky’s pew with his blaster flopping by a strap around his neck as he tore bites from a raw turkey like it was an apple.
“What’re you look at?” the azrin demanded, catching Mort staring.
“Nothing,” Father Laszlo chimed in hastily. “He’s got a condition. Don’t mind him.”
Provoking the azrin bought Mort nothing. This creature lived or died by Mort’s will alone. The only fact keeping him alive was that Mort hadn’t figured out a way to separate the pirates’ fate from the passengers and crew of the Nazareth.
So, Mort played along. He kept his stare fixed in place as the azrin continued on his way.
“Don’t do it,” Father Laszlo whispered urgently once the keen-eared feline was well out of earshot.
Mort turned slowly. “Do… what?” he asked carefully, daring the priest to say it out loud.
“Anything, frankly. No good comes of bloodshed.”
He met the priest’s earnest eyes. “Fine. For now. But, Father, you and I took some very different vows.”
The pirates had commandeered the middle section of the theater, three rows deep. Pirates filtered in and out like this was a break room for the larger invasion force. Not content to pack together like the docile pilgrims, the plouph spread out, lounging, slouching, sprawling, often taking up two or three whole seats apiece despite their relatively small stature. Two azrin also took leave of their piratical duties, flopping languidly and looking bored.
Bored, in Chuck’s world, was a death sentence.
Normally in comedy, dark euphemisms abounded. Killing and dying were relative measures of pleasing an audience, and getting eaten alive was pure hyperbole.
“And the lawyer says to him: if I’d known you were innocent, I’d have charged double.”
Not a laugh in the house.
Chuck tugged at his collar, trying to let the body heat escape his shirt. The humans were scared shitless and hardly paying attention. The pirates just flat out weren’t connecting with his act. They stretched and yawned and jostled and snacked on cafeteria fare lugged in by hostages under armed guard.
Then, as the silence hung following his last punchline, one of them booed.
One of the plouph ignored Chuck entirely, deciding to make his own entertainment. “Hey, Kyow, bet you can’t swallow one o’ them rats whole.” He jerked a thumb at the cluster of ratatorets cowering together in a nearby seat.
The azrin, presumably named Kyow, made a beckoning gesture with claws out. “I accept your challenge.”
Without warning, the plouph grabbed one of the tiny, inoffensive creatures at random. With a grunt, he heaved the three-kilo guy down the row, over the heads of several of his companions.
The ratatoret shrieked out the entire Lord’s Prayer over the span of the two-second flight. Kyow caught the furry One Church convert deftly. It babbled so fast that Chuck couldn’t make out a word of what it was saying.
His own mind raced. Was he really going to stand here and watch? Yet neither could he look away.
Fuck it.
If murdering helpless creatures passed for entertainment to these thugs, this helpless creature was going to go down fighting the only way he knew how.
“You know, Kyow,” Chuck interrupted, catching the azrin as he was measuring the spread of his jaws against the squirming snack in his hand. “I once met an azrin who ate a whole sheep. Oh, they let him shear it first. Wool’s bad for the digestion. But I watched this guy—huge azrin, tough as nails—stuff the sheep down his throat. It got caught on his fangs, but that didn’t stop him. He pushed and grunted and eventually swallowed. Afterward, as he was collecting on all the bets he’d just won, I noticed a pained look on his face. I asked him, how did it taste? He says to me…”
Chuck did his best farm animal impression. “Baaa-aaad.”
The plouph and azrin all burst into laughs.
A knot in Chuck’s stomach loosened. He paced the stage, microphone in hand. “Well, it wasn’t long before that sheep had its revenge. You see, they’d sheared the sheep, but they hadn’t done anything about the horns. A couple minutes later, the azrin runs into the trees and shits out a whole, live, ANGRY ram.”
The criminal sector of the audience hooted and cheered. Wheezy, reedy laughter and hissing snickers were music to a comedian’s ears right about then.
“This human funny. He gets food. NEXT!”
Just like that, Chuck’s set ended.
They escorted him backstage at blasterpoint. The one who’d decided his fate met him back there.
“Hey, funny human,” the plouph addressed him. He wore an open vest and a gun belt with his blaster pistol slung low in its holster.
If Chuck were the heroic type, he’d have overpowered the smaller creature and wrestled the blaster from him, then fought to free the hostages in the audience. Instead, he offered a simple introduction. “Chuck. Chuck Ramsey. Glad you liked the… well, the joke, if not the whole set.”
“I’m Falxis. I noticed you got funny when Kyow was gonna eat your little friend. Why’zzat?”
Chuck tried on a casual shrug to see if it fit him when he was this uptight. “Oh, you know. Just gotta read a room. I ran out of my prepared set.”
“Buttered toast for the bland humans, yeah?”
For the first time, Chuck caught a glimpse into his captors. “Pretty shrewd observation on human nature, my good man. You been around humans much?”
Falxis cocked his head as if Chuck had suggested that maybe spaceships flew in space. “Much? MUCH? Lemme tell ya, Chucky-boy. I wore the collar. I sat the desk. I says all the things the human teacher says to says. Write the words. Sing the songs. Love the human god. Loyal the human governor. Respect the human teacher. Anything else? ZZZ’T.”
Chuck jumped. His startled reaction set Falxis and the guard who’d ushered Chuck backstage into a fit of laughter.
“Well, I’m just the paid entertainment on this flight. And I realized they paid me to butter their toast, not yours.”
“Yeah? Well, my daddy pushed the button.”
“The…?” Chuck didn’t want to let on that Falxis had just lost him. But he couldn’t go blind into a conversation on the plouph’s family.
“Ya know? THE button?”
Chuck spread his hands without letting them get past shoulder-width apart. He grinned apologetically. “Assume for the moment I’m an ignorant, apathetic human with no cross-cultural insights.”
“When Zaktan went boom, it was my daddy. He done did it.”
Part of the reason that the plouph were widely considered to be utterly insane as a species was the fact that, rather than allow their world to be conquered, the pre-space society living on Zaktan chose to unload their nuclear arsenal on themselves when they realized they were outmatched by ARGO forces. By astronomical definitions, the planet was still there; it was just an irradiated wasteland orbited by warning beacons advising visitors against entering the fallout-soaked atmosphere.
But if Chuck was any judge of character—human or otherwise—this Falxis schmuck was full of shit. Taking possibly the biggest gamble of his life, Chuck hooked a thumb back out toward the theater. “Your buddy said the same thing.”
Falxis cracked up laughing. He gave Chuck a backhanded slap to the chest. “See? This is the funny human we want. You a good egg, Chucky. Take five. Eat. Shit. Fuck someone. Then more funny show.”
“My wife’s pretty insistent that when I cheat on her, it’s consensual. But I wouldn’t mind a ham sandwich.”
Falxis snickered. “Or mutton?”
“Long as someone cuts off the horns first.”
The plouph stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. When another plouph stuck his head in with a perfunctory “Yah?,” Falxis jerked a thumb toward the door. “Go, get our funny human some sammiches.”
Chuck’s mind kicked into overdrive. Out on stage, he could hear the heckling as Annabeth attempted to follow up his act. He knew he had the length of a lunch break to come up with a way to pacify these crazy cats and dogs.
Just a pinch of gravity. That’s all it would have taken to crush the heart of the smirking idiot holding the blaster to the back of the gray-haired lady ladling out bowls of soup to the hostages. Might not even flicker the lights.
Mort kept up his dark arithmetic on the consequences of the murder he contemplated. The plouph was a mean little piece of meat. Barely qualified as sentient. Certainly no one would have mourned his passing, probably not even the pirates of higher social rank who’d stuck him guarding the dinner line.
Not that it was dinnertime any longer.
It was psychological warfare, feeding a man the same meal twice. These cretins wanted to control the very passage of time itself.
You’re letting this whole business eat at you. Have the soup. Even a bad soup’s good for the—
SILENCE!
Mort barked the command within the echoing vastness of his consciousness. Whether the word carried the weight of magic or Nebuchadnezzar simply zipped his trap out of a sense of self-preservation, he couldn’t say with certainty. But it was the last he heard of the elder wizard that evening.
The weight of the bowl in Mort’s hands took a sudden jump. He flinched. But it wasn’t him slipping and doing anything to the local gravity. Not a system aboard the Nazareth seemed to notice. Instead, a ladle of clam chowder appeared where none had been before.
“I thought this was miso,” he protested.
“Ran out,” the server—a priestess who probably outranked half the clergy aboard—replied stiffly. “Next.”
Mort stepped aside.
The pirates hadn’t given out spoons. It must have amused them to think of humans eating out of dishes like house pets. Mort perched his atop his fingertips, imagining a long glass stem and treating it as a goblet.
He slurped the creamy broth. The substance in question wrinkled his nose. “Thin.”
Mort should have known better than to expect a proper New England clam chowder this far from Sol. But for claiming to be a cultural exchange and missionary vessel, he’d have expected the church to put forward a better foot than this.
“Eugh,” complained one of the patrons. “I can’t eat this. I have a shellfish allergy.”
A crack of jawbone snapped Mort’s attention to the confrontation. A steel bowl clattered to the ground beside a pilgrim, doing that swirly roll that became the only sound in the cathedral. Everyone froze, awaiting guidance on what to do. Blood dripped from the human’s mouth. Poised above him, the plouph with the blaster rifle was holding it butt-first.
“No food. Drink your own blood. Yeah?”
The pilgrim crawled away, nodding. A pair of the missionaries rushed over to help him up.
“Piece of complaining? Be the same with your dinner,” the plouph announced.
Good for him, Mort quietly cheered. This runt of the pirates’ litter was asserting some authority.
Being a wizard, he felt oddly detached from the proceedings. The pirates were one faction, the pilgrims, crew, and clergy mushed together into another. Then there was him. If one of those pirates took a swing at him, the xeno would find out whether the Nazareth could survive the wrath Mort would repay in retribution. Throughout the cathedral, many of those not eating had hands clasped and heads bowed in prayer.
They should have been entreating Mort for help. If enough sheep from this flock helped the uprising, Mort might not have to play molten origami with the ship’s hull to exterminate an unknown number of hostile threats.
Mort took a seat in the front row. Shabbily dressed in his sweatshirt and dungarees, no one gainsaid him when he robbed the previous occupant, who must have still been in the chow line.
He sat, more drinking his chowder than eating it, trying to assign it any other name to dissociate it from the far superior delicacy from his home in Boston Prime. It was less unpleasant than disappointing. Someone had thickened it with potato instead of flour, and there wasn’t enough onion. Also, despite tasting of clam, his ladle hadn’t had any actual clam meat in it.
Lost in his analysis of the dish, he didn’t notice Becky approaching. She flopped down beside him.
“You sure we want front-row seats to this show?”
“Sit where you like,” Mort replied with a sigh. “No one’s going to stop you.”
Becky looked all around. “S’pose not. Just hoping this chowder sits. The critters’re taking folks to the washroom in twosies. Might wanna wait until it’s one of the azrin. Just saying.”
Mort cocked his head. Though the distinction made little difference to him personally—after all, one charred humanoid corpse smelled much like another—he was surprised at her preference. “Why the azrin?”
Becky lowered her bowl of chowder and wiped her lips with a thumb. “They don’t go in for human girls.”
“Egad,” Mort exclaimed, quickly lowering his voice. “Xenos… do that sort of thing?” He’d heard the stories, of course. Crude tales spread through society at all levels. But he’d always dismissed them as jingoist slander.
Becky shrugged. “Playing my odds. Nothing xenoist about it. No one’s as bad as humans. If it fits, it fucks. Amirite?”
Shaking an admonishing finger, he informed her, “If any of them lays a hand on you—”
“You’re sweet,” Becky told him. “But don’t go busting the whole ship over my innocence. It’s a little late for the poor thing, and besides, I’ve got kiddos still breathing air this wayward city pumps. You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mort replied, only half sarcastically. Her point was taken. If this was to become a ship of horrors, it would be horrors the passengers and crew clung to some hope of surviving. Any charlatan could end a disease by incinerating the patient.
Not wanting to discuss the topic further, Mort returned to his meal, twisting in his seat to watch his captors milling around the outer edges of the cathedral.
“You! Eyes ahead!” one of the plouph snapped.
To his shock, the words came from just a few yards away and had been directed his way. One of the pirates approached with a snarl on his muzzle and a blaster rifle raised butt-first to punctuate his edict with blood.
Before Mort had to decide whether to potentially end all life aboard the Nazareth, a golden voice rose above the din of confusion and fear.
“Be at peace. We can all coexist beneath the infinite mercy of the Lord.” Father Laszlo stood, arms extended and stretched to the sky.
Fingernails scratched the back of Mort’s skull from the inside. He heard English, but if he’d spoken Mandarin, Jiara, or in-Tik, that’s what he’d have perceived instead. This was the Voice of God. The Convocation called it that for two reasons. The most obvious was that it was used by the few wizards anointed by the One Church as priests to deliver their message to the monoglot masses of the galaxy. But it was also often touted as the language spoken in Babel before they built their infamous tower.
Either way, these plouph and azrin, if they didn’t know any better, would think they were being addressed by a human who spoke their native tongue flawlessly.
“Shut him up!” one of the plouph barked. “Break his jaw! That’s a wizard!”
For the first time, Mort perceived not one but two of his fellows aboard the Nazareth. It was easy to disguise a wizard as a technophile if they could keep their lips away from the ear of the universe. Few could. But for Father Laszlo, it had been a matter of self-discipline and religious fervor. The plouph who now exerted his feeble will to steady the local laws of physics against the predations of the meddling priest was little better than a dowsing rod for finding blatant wizardry.
Mort winced as the blaster rifles hammered Father Laszlo to the inlaid marble floor.
When the helpers rushed to the priest’s side, Mort set down his bowl and joined them. Jostling aside some starch-collared lad fresh out of the seminary, he helped lift Father Laszlo by the armpits and drag him to a seat.
Where they got the cloth, Mort hadn’t seen, but the rapidly red-soaking bandage pressed to Father Laszlo’s nose and mouth, barely allowing air for him to breathe, was embroidered with gold thread.
Groggy and with one already swollen shut, he still sought Mort with his good eye. A message, silent and pleading, passed between them.
I did that so you weren’t forced to act. This was the beating intended for you.
Mort honored his sacrifice. He sat quietly in his seat, biding his time. At some point, he’d be forced to make a choice. For now, he would remain patient.
An eerie quiet pervaded the maintenance passages of the Nazareth. Brad had spent more time aboard starships than planetside in his short life. The natural grumbles and whooshes of essential systems became background noise, no more notable than the chirping of crickets or the rustle of leaves in a breeze. The only human sounds belonged to him and May. Her breath came heavy and preternaturally loud in the intimate silence, compounded by the fact that she followed him as close as she could without actually touching him.
They crept along at a tentative pace. Darkness hugged them on all sides. Only a hand lamp they’d discovered in a maintenance locker provided any light at all. The pirates must have cut non-essential power draw throughout the ship.
Or someone had sabotaged the ship to keep the pirates from operating it.
“You think they might be gone?” she asked in a whisper.
“You think they’d have announced an all clear if the ship was safe?”
Her lack of response was all the answer Brad needed.
Both of them walked in stocking feet, shoes removed to eliminate the squeak of Brad’s sneakers and the clack of May’s school shoes.
“Where are we headed?”
It was a question Brad had expected an hour ago. Maybe this was the first time it had occurred to her that he didn’t have some grand plan in mind, that he was lost and feeling his way around by emergency light.
“Dunno, exactly. The kind of place nobody puts on a map or schematic. Mechanics love building little nests in their ships. Places where they can kick back, slack off, relax a bit.”
“Really?”
Brad huffed a sigh and stopped walking, allowing her to bump lightly into him from behind and just to his right. “OK. Your mechanics might be rules-and-regs enough not to. But I’m still hoping someone made themselves a break room with beanbag chairs and a cooler full of snacks.”
A garbled rumble came from May’s belly. “You had to remind me I’m hungry.”
“You’re hungry?” They’d eaten dinner, even if it had been ice cream.
“I had one scoop to your four.”
He hadn’t thought about it that way. Brad ordered what he thought he could finish without busting at the belt. Presumably, she’d done likewise with a smaller appetite. Now, he re-evaluated that supposition.
Where could they find food on short notice? He’d really been hoping against the odds to stumble onto a paradise of slacker mechanics. Maybe even find some of the ship’s crew holed up there. He could wait out the pirate infestation, playing cards and drinking whatever the mechanics let him. Hey, if they were already so far gone as to have their own hidey-hole, maybe they’d let a couple teenagers share their beer.
None of that had happened. Every meter of the ship they searched brought that conclusion into ever-clearer focus. The mechanics aboard the Nazareth were by-the-book sorts. They were probably by the lots of books sorts, now that he considered it.
“Who knows how long we’ll have to stay hidden. If we can’t find a place set up for resting, we’ll have to make one. First things first, we need food.”
“There are plenty of restaurants—no ice cream this time!—but it’s all out there!” She pointed in no particular direction, upward and out of the radius of light that surrounded them.
Brad took a long, slow breath.
“Yeah.”
“What if they’re out there?”
“The pirates?” Brad asked, incredulously.
May nodded. Her earrings sparkled in the lamplight.
“Of course, the pirates are out there. But it’s a big ship. They can’t be everywhere at once.”
“I still don’t like the idea of going out there.”
Laying a hand on May’s shoulder, Brad looked her in the eye. “You don’t have to. I’ll go. I’ll bring back as much as I can carry.”
“Really?”
“Any requests?”
Oof. Even as he said it, Brad’s mind raced off in the hopes that she misinterpreted the question as anything other than food related. He maintained his eye contact with heroic effort until she replied.
“Pastries would probably travel best. Nothing that requires utensils. Bottled drinks. Mom says I should avoid coffee, but if you can get a topped mug, I could use the boost. I guess that means we should get to N.Y. Prime Bagels.”
Brad perked up. “Are they really from New York Prime?”
“Prime style. C’mon. Let’s see where we are, and I can figure out how to get there.”
This was exactly what May needed. Alone in the dark with her thoughts, she was nervous, tentative. With a plan and a goal, she took custody of the hand lamp and led the way. They stopped frequently to check their location, with Brad boosting her to look out the vents. She scanned with the light; Brad congratulated himself for keeping his hands from wandering.
Suddenly, the lamp went out.
“Everything OK up—”
“SHHHH!”
Brad snapped his mouth shut.
Minutes passed.
May patted the hand he kept gently on her lower back, ready in case she slipped. In the pitch darkness, they fumbled until they clasped hands, and he helped her down. She leaned close, like a hug except for the wrapping of arms. “They’re up there. Two went into the bagel shop.”
“They still there?”
She shook her head, hair brushing past Brad’s cheek. “No. They left. I think. I couldn’t hear them anymore. I can’t be sure.”
“You still hungry?”
“Not that hungry.”
“That’s a yes.”
“No. Brad… don’t.”
He pulled out a multi-tool that had come from the same maintenance locker as the hand lamp. “I’m going to open that vent. Close it behind me. Be careful without someone below to steady you.”
“I didn’t need you keeping me steady.”
Brad didn’t know what to do with that information, so he ignored it. “I’m going to get as much food as I can. I’ll pass it down to you, then slide back inside. Easy squeezy.”
May snickered. “How can you be so calm about this?”
“I have way more practice being scared,” he replied without missing a beat. There was something crystallizing about being one wrong move from disaster. Whether the disaster of Dad discovering his “stolen” vinyl records had been pawned to pay a gambling debt or pirates executing him as a spy and saboteur, the net result was the same: existential terror.
“You want your sports shoes?” May asked as Brad climbed the pipes to reach the vent.
“Nah. Quiet’s better than fast. Plouph are deaf as a human, but those azrin ears are our biggest problem.” She didn’t question his knowledge of xenobiology or tactics. He was the galactic one; she was the cloistered tourist on her missionary megaship. Mom and Dad and Jamie had been practically everywhere. It felt good being the one ahead of the curve on knowing what’s what.
He unscrewed the corners of the vent and held the louvred grill, pushing it outward just enough to make room to slide it aside.
When the plan finally went into action, Brad found himself less confident.
The claustrophobic tunnels had felt safe. Hours in the dark with May had been cozy. The illusion of a connection with this girl he’d met earlier the same day had been a surrogate for knowing his family was safe. Some playtime self-image of Brad-the-hero told him that he should locate Mike and Rhiannon, stash them with May, then go looking for his parents before enacting a daring escape aboard the unarmed, unshielded, slow-as-shit Radio City tugged at his thoughts.
As his feet shuffled toward the N.Y. Prime Bagels, his mind blipped off into fantasy. The Nazareth would explode behind them. May would be orphaned. She’d stay with them. They’d be boyfriend and girlfriend a while. She’d go off to college; he’d serve a couple tours in the navy before buying his own ship. They’d reconnect and get married. Have kids. One of them would be a dumbass little shithead who got them in trouble with pirates.
Poetic, really.
The old-fashioned swinging bakery door wasn’t just unlocked, it was held open with a rubber foot that lowered on a hinge. Brad’s socks didn’t make a sound on the marble floors.
Backup power kept some of the lights on.
Reminding himself that this wasn’t a time to be picky, he pulled a clear plastic bag from a dispenser at the near end of the counter. Since this was a miniature rebellion, he bypassed the tongs provided at each bin of bagels and shoveled them into the bag with his bare hands. There was no point in counting; he’d gotten more than they’d eat in days.
Then he shuffled to the drink cooler. He could have used a nice EnerJuice, but all the bakery had was the knockoff Frooti Juice. Good enough. Snagging a second bag, he tossed in a variety of flavors. The plastic stretched until it was in danger of breaking.
Hands full, he scurried across the corridor to the open vent. Lying on his stomach, he handed down the bags.
She wasn’t there.
Brad stuck his head inside. “May?” he whisper-shouted into the maintenance halls.
A gurgle from the cafe adjoining the bakery startled him. Instinct had him ready to dive headfirst through the vent, ready to cushion a two-meter fall that might break both his arms or his neck. Then, he reconciled the missing coffee aficionado with the sound.
With a thud and a clatter, the bagels and drinks hit the floor below. Wriggling back out, Brad hurried over to find May fiddling with the coffee machine.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t expect it to start a new batch on its own.”
Brad rummaged the side counter of the self-serve coffee setup. Plastic disposables. Ceramic dine-in mugs. Packs of stirring rods. Cartridges of refills for the napkin machines. Sweetener packs. Flavor additives. Decaffeinator capsules. Aha! Sealed travel mugs. Brad grabbed a pair of them. “Let’s hurry this up.”
“Who dere?” a plouph voice shouted. “Arfoo? Dat you off your post again, I’m up your ass with dis blaster.”
Brad and May ducked below the counter in unison.
Their eyes met.
Neither saw answers.
This was Brad’s plan. They’d have been lying low, hiding, hungry, and probably praying for help. But they wouldn’t be out of their safe, hidden world of back passages if it weren’t for him. Now, an armed pirate was coming to check on some lazy, work-shirking colleague named Arfoo, and they were going to be there instead.
Time for plan B.
“You still got the multi-tool?” Brad asked, barely putting voice to the words and counting on a little lip-reading to make up the difference.
May nodded. Her pupils were dilated. Her breath was quick and shallow.
“You get inside. Close the vent. I’ll distract him and find some way to catch up with you.”
May shook her head.
There was no telling the source of her objection. Maybe she was scared of acting at all. Maybe it was not wanting to split up, fear over the risk Brad was taking, or something derived from one of those girls-only emotions Mom was always talking about.
Brad took her face between his hands and looked deep into her eyes. “You can do this. You’ll be safe. I can handle myself.”
He was lying to both of them, but they were lies they both needed to hear.
Not allowing her a chance to object, Brad looked away. Scrambling on his hands and knees, he made his way to the employee side of the bakery. Snatching a pair of tongs from a bagel bin, he hurled them to clatter in the opposite direction of him and May.
“Arfoo? You rotten, bear-fucking waste o’ my time! Yer on hangar duty, not snicky-snack duty.”
The race was on.
Arfoo’s friend was on his way. Plouph might have been smaller than your average human, but so was Brad. Fully grown and filled out with muscle, maybe he’d stand a chance in a fight, ambushing the pirate and wrestling away his weapon. However, Brad was keenly aware of his own physical shortcomings. His absolute best-case scenario in a fight was getting his ass kicked six ways from Sunday.
Staying low, slipping for traction in his socks, Brad ran along behind the counter. He hit the door control for the bakery’s store room. Even on backup power, the door still worked. He didn’t go back there.
Panting for breath, muffling the sound with his hand, he waited.
The plouph approached.
Brad edged around the counter as the sound of booted feet circled from the other side.
“Holy disemboweled Yoviss, Arfoo! If I get my hands on—”
“Yo?” a second plouph called out.
From the direction Brad was planning to escape. Suddenly, the far side of the bakery was just as dangerous as the area behind the serving counter.
“Arfoo, if that’s you, then who opened this door?”
“Dunno, Shawby. Maybe it’s a glitchy ship.”
“This look like a glitchy ship, you sausage-brained donkey-fluffer?”
The second set of boots drew closer to Brad’s position. Once they reached the open doorway, Brad was a dead man.
“Get the piss out of your eyes, maybe,” Arfoo shot back. “If’n a door opens, ain’t nobody on either side, what’s that but a glitchy ship?”
“Maybe one of them scruff-balls did it?”
“The humans?”
“The ratatatatatorets. They got ’em. Ventok said so. Smaller’n my nutsack.”
“And just as quick!” Arfoo snarked with perfect comedic timing. Brad had to cover his mouth despite every muscle in his body tensing for a life-or-death struggle.
“And just as clever,” Shawby corrected.
Brad couldn’t wait any longer. There was another exit on the cafe side. Booted feet were making enough noise—combined with the shouted insults—to cover the sound of socks. He made his break for it.
“What was that?” Shawby demanded.
“Was what?” Arfoo demanded right back at him.
The first pirate didn’t answer but strode off in pursuit.
“Was what?” Arfoo repeated, joining the hunt without knowing what he was after.
“Thought I saw a human.”
Brad didn’t know how fast plouph might be. He knew eyndar and azrin and laaku and a scattering of other xeno species. But he’d never gotten into a footrace with plouph before. This was all down to panic, adrenaline, and blind luck.
Rounding the nearest corner, Brad burst into an all-out run.
Oh, how he wished he had a pair of sneakers. One slip at a corner sent him crashing to the floor. Wincing in pain, he grabbed his socks and pulled them off. Bare feet weren’t ideal for a chase, but at least they weren’t an active hindrance. Finally having traction, Brad sprinted.
He had no goal other than to put distance between him and the pirates.
Blasters didn’t care about speed or distance, just line of sight. He took corners where he found them, not making any attempt at navigation. The side passages of the Nazareth rushed by in a blur.
Plan…
Plan…
Brad needed a plan…
If he found a maintenance door, he could get to the network of hidden tunnels with May. But if he led the pirates to one, then their hidden world would soon swarm with searchers. They’d get caught for sure.
Brad promised himself, right then and there, that he’d keep May safe, no matter what. It had flashed through his mind, for a fraction of a second, that he could have used her as bait to get away at the bakery. That little hero Brad always wanted to be wouldn’t allow it. Heroes got others to safety, then worried about their own skins.
He couldn’t even make himself regret that decision.
Escape pods.
Brad stumbled onto a bank of artfully concealed escape pods, lined up in the shadows behind a decorative fountain.
Every kid who grew up in space knew the ins and outs of escape pods. If Mom and Dad said so, get in and launch. If there was a reactor breach, get in and launch. In the event of a massive hull breach, get in and don’t launch. Same went for ion storms and debris fields—the wrecked bulk of the ship was shielding for the fragile pod while its internal life support kept you breathing until help arrived.
For pirates, escape pods were a no-go. Escape pods were target practice or a quickie prison cell, depending on whether they wanted you alive or dead.
When Brad climbed into the escape pod, he had a different plan.
Ten second countdown and instant launch settings beckoned, side by side on the main console. The former allowed time to buckle in before the hammering jets of compressed air jettisoned the pod. The latter was for when you didn’t have ten seconds and could risk the concussion.
Brad pounded the ten-second countdown and climbed back out. He slammed the pod door shut as hard as he could.
The pirates weren’t far behind him now.
Crouching behind the fountain not three meters away, Brad watched the pirates’ reaction to the telltale thonk of an escape pod launch.
“Aw, fuck.”
“Get up to Ventok. Tell ’im one got on a pod,” Shawby ordered.
“Why me?” Arfoo asked. “We lost the human you found. I’s just helpin’.”
Shawby snarled. “Cuz you s’posed to be in the hangar.”
The pair parted ways.
Brad breathed a sigh of relief.
He gave them a minute, then slipped his socks back on and crept through the ship, trying to find a way back into the maintenance corridors.
When he got back to N.Y. Prime Bagels, he was relieved to see the vent back in place.
May had gotten away.
Wherever she was, Brad vowed to find her and—
The vent swung open, rotating around one lone upper-corner screw.
If it was a trap, it was a brilliant one. Brad threw himself to the floor and slid through.
May closed the vent behind him as Brad jostled and tumbled and climbed in a jumble of bodies to get to the floor.
“Thanks, I—”
His words choked off as May’s arms closed around him, squeezing off his air supply. “That’s the bravest thing anyone’s ever done ever.”
When Brad stole enough air, he replied, “You’d have done the same for me.”
The seating arrangement had become fluid. Restless hostages switched places, stretched their legs, patrolled the aisle like caged animals. Quiet conversations had sprung up as a defense mechanism against the terror of captivity.
Becky had joined those taking up extra space along the pews by lying down to slumber.
Mort didn’t know how she did it. They weren’t even his kids, and he couldn’t sleep knowing that Mike, Rhiannon, and Brad were out there, captive and alone, bereft of whatever comfort Chuck and Becky might offer, given the circumstances.
Someone slid into the spot beside Mort. “So, where you from originally?”
“Mother’s womb,” he replied without looking to see who it was who’d addressed him.
“I mean, where’d you grow up?”
Still refusing to turn and face the pesky newcomer, Mort answered, “Fully formed adult. Been sixty years old since the day I was born.”
“Sixty, you don’t look—”
Finally, Mort relented and met the man’s incredulous stare. His verbal assailant was perhaps forty years of age himself, pasty and pudgy and full of nervous self-assurance that his presence would be welcome wherever it graced the universe.
Catching hold of his next words, he swallowed and nodded. “Right. Nice meeting you.”
Mort relaxed back onto the uncomfortably hard wood with his arms crossed. Had he chosen to, he could have extended an arm to either side without touching anyone. Wizards stood apart, whether or not anyone knew who or what they were. Even in his shabby sports-team sweatshirt and unlaundered dungarees, his presence stood out.
Except to the idiot wizard-hunter the pirates brought along. Shout in the Voice of God, and he’d perk up one of those shaggy, floppy ears. Quietly stew in a pew, and he was blind as a mole.
A flash of cloth in his peripheral vision warned Mort an instance before a thud and a groan of protesting wood announced the presence of another visitor. This time, he knew Father Laszlo by voice, “Please join me in prayer.”
“Pass,” Mort grumbled.
In a surprise twist, the priest switched to an ancient language. “But they don’t understand Latin. I tested them.”
Mort offered a glance from the corner of his eye. The priest’s face was splotchy with half-ripened bruises. Gleaming steel zits studded his jawline, testament to some horrible technomedical process that looked worse than the injury. Theoretically, Father Laszlo had taken that beating in Mort’s place.
Both of them knew better, though. Mort wasn’t planning on getting hit, and it wasn’t Mort that the priest had been protecting.
Still, a whiff of obligation hung over their relationship. And if a little yapping could blow it away, Mort was willing to speak with the priest.
“Fine,” Mort replied, allowing that to be his last word from the third millennium for the time being.
Rather than launch into a long-winded explanation—as any conversation in the unwieldy tongue turned out to be—Father Laszlo rose. Mort got up and followed as they headed for the front of the cathedral. The priest knelt on a long, carpeted railing intended for supplication.
Grumbling internally, Mort joined him, bowing his head in imitation of prayer.
“Thank you for agreeing to join me,” Father Laszlo began. Mort caught on that the thanks would have sounded prayer-like to anyone who might have been vaguely familiar with the concept.
“It wasn’t God that took a beating for me. Thank you.” He played along, mixing in the most common trappings of divine begging.
“I could not allow what would have come next.”
“Hey!” the nearest pirate shouted. “No yak yak we can’t listen on.”
One of his fellows intervened. “Aww, let ’em. The more they pray, the less fight they get in ’em.”
With his head lowered, Mort hoped they didn’t notice his smirk. “I might not have killed everyone.”
Father Laszlo tilted his head back and crossed himself. Mort did likewise, hoping that the universe didn’t hold it against him that he was engaging in the superstitious ritual. “Look up. The gray. The astral. Can any of us breathe it?”
“No. No one among us can.” It was hard not to sound like a pompous ass arguing in Latin. “But I might not have sunk the ship. I have a great deal of control.”
“And power. The one among the pirates who claims to feel the flow of power could not feel you, but I could tell the moment we met.”
“I am playing in a nice way. If our non-friends agree to release all of us without harm, I will continue to do so.”
“Pardon? Your speaking is hard to understand.”
Mort ground his teeth. Not this again. “You speak the language of popes. I speak the words of Caesar. The difference is between lantern and volcano. One semester at Oxford would cure you of those soft sounds.”
“Two years at Princeton did not, before I transferred to the seminary.”
Dropping the pretense of staring through the glassteel-domed roof to regard any divine listeners, Mort stared at his companion. “You are not referring to the seminary, are you?”
“No.”
“You had real teaching in magic.”
“Yes. But I saw the sinful ways I was adopting. I saw the light.”
“I was valedictorian at Oxford.” Mort caught himself before divulging his whole resume. Then again, he’d already narrowed down his identity to such a degree that he didn’t bother hiding who he was. “I was Guardian of the Plundered Tomes. If the time comes, we will not die at the hands of our captors.”
Father Laszlo bowed his head again. Mort grudgingly followed suit.
“I believe you. I even believe that you might be able to do so without causing the utter ruin of the ship and dooming everyone on it.”
Mort harrumphed. “If I were so sure, this event would have ceased before now.”
“We are on a mission to save these souls. Yes, even the ones who threaten us right now. ALL souls are sacred. ALL life is sacred. Consider the actions you take that cannot be undone.”
“Are you speaking without humor?”
“Our Father, who dwells in heaven, grant my friend the wisdom not to act in anger, the patience to allow salvation to come to him, the compassion to forgive those who would do him violence. Amen.”
Mort grunted as he stood up with sore knees. He offered the older, heavier priest a hand rising as well. “You’ll be lucky to get one out of three. I’ll try for two. But as for the last… I swear on the soul of my grandfather, I will have revenge.”
A tiny, incorporeal voice in Mort’s head shouted a Latin protest. “Heus!”
“C’mon, boss,” Ventok prodded. “You can’t tell me they don’t know howta fixit. Their whole job is ‘fixit guy.’”
The plouph rested a heavy hand on the back of the ship’s comms officer. Ensign Stottlemyer hunched over his duty station, several pairs of xeno eyes monitoring his every twitch of muscle. “You, uh, heard the same thing I did. Main power’s down. Astral control is down.”
“Now… how’s that happen? Huh? HUH?”
Cardinal Belotti tensed. These plouph were killers, unabashedly waving their weapons of murder within mere meters of the cold, reposed corpse of Captain Standish. The bridge crew hadn’t been allowed to remove their captain’s body, nor had the cardinal been allowed to offer what little comfort he could to the departed spirit of his friend.
There was a loneliness in power. The captain had felt it keenly. He couldn’t find the solace and comfort he sought in the company of the Lord alone. He couldn’t open himself to his subordinates in any way that offered relief. Many an evening, the pair had dined together. It had the intimacy of confession without the necessity of discussing sins or penance.
Cardinal Belotti knew the man’s fears and regrets, the doubts, the hopes, the drive that pushed him beyond the comfort of his home star of Sol to the very edges of the galaxy in search of a mortal purpose to his life, only to finally discover it spreading the word of God among the heathen xenos.
He’d followed Cardinal Belotti to his death.
How many others would join him before this ordeal came to its conclusion? These plouph were psychotic. Their azrin lackeys were… well, they were azrin. Cardinal Belotti had taken the same cultural awareness courses as everyone else on the mission, yet he still couldn’t view them as anything more than evolutionary killers. Three had taken up residence aboard the Nazareth, and even they seemed more feral than saved.
“Sabotage,” Ensign McBride stated grimly. The pirates turned their gazes on him as a pack.
Cardinal Belotti held his breath. Was the ensign to be the next victim? He sat two meters away, knees tucked against his chest, huddled with the rest of the bridge crew under guard.
“That’s what you wanna hear, right?” McBride challenged. “This is a good ship. Old, but we keep it in top shape. Good men and women. And yeah, someone figured out we’ve been hijacked and blew out a few relays to buy time. When Earth Navy finds us—”
The plouph burst into laughter, that grating, wheezy, broken-accordion sound that sent shivers down the cardinal’s spine. “You gotta be kiddin’ me,” Ventok said when he had the breath. “This eyndar space, here. No one startin’ a war over you churchie humans!” The laughter renewed from all around the bridge. Only the azrin muscle seemed unamused.
“Kill one,” the azrin advised. “Rest snap the mouths closed.”
“Naw,” Ventok replied casually. “Let ’em bark. They know they’re beat. We got their pups. No big trouble comin’. We make a habit killin’ ’em, that’s less profit for the big split.”
Profit?
Why would killing result in less profit for pirates, unless…?
“You’re slavers!” Cardinal Belotti accused, rising to his feet.
The laughter died out.
“Really?” Ventok asked, cocking his head. “You just figurin’ this out? Like… NOW?”
Uproarious laughter followed the question. Even the azrin joined in, albeit more reserved than his fellows.
One of the underling plouph spoke up. “How these bald apes run half the planets?”
“Dunno, but we gotta make their ship shipshape. Riggy, take Dorvutch, and go slap the engines back together. Round up any human fixits you gotta.”
Cardinal Belotti found himself standing, ignored, as the plouph carried on with their hijacking. He had to do something. “My child, if you would show mercy, I’m sure we—”
“I not your pup, geezer,” Ventok snapped. “You not dead. Pretty good mercy, yeah? Maybe you get your fixits to help get us goin’, I see about sellin’ all you humans for work stead o’… whatever.”
“What… ever?” Cardinal Belotti felt a duty to know, though he wanted in no uncertain terms to remain ignorant. If there was an Earthly fate he could spare the women and children aboard the Nazareth, he had to try.
Ventok shrugged. “Ya know. Whatever. Hunting. Zoos. Food. Just keepin’ humans around to beat for the squeals. Ain’t no good warlord doesn’t got a couple squealers around to show he’s doin’ the job right.”
The horrors played out in Cardinal Belotti’s mind. He had to convince them of the error of their way. “I know my species has done yours many an injustice. But if you open yourself to the glory of the Lord, you can find salvation.”
Ventok barked a quick laugh. “I prayed to your peace god. Help come? Nope. Got my own god now. A good, plouph god.” The pirate bared his fangs in a grin. “But you humans learned me some good ideas at that school back on Zaktan.”
“Such as?” The cardinal’s voice was barely a squeak.
“Slavin’ as a job. Never would’a thought to make a livin’ selling people otherwise.”
Normally, Chuck would have made fun of a comic who hung onto the mic stand. It was the sure sign of an amateur, and worse, one who was terrified of being out on stage at the center of attention. However, in a room without chronos on the wall, time had lost all meaning. Chuck had been blabbering through a set for what felt like weeks. Every old act he’d studied and memorized. Every half-remembered xenoist joke he’d picked up in a bar. Material he’d cut for not being tight enough, for not being funny enough, for not even meeting the simple standards of decency that even the bluest of dive nightclubs would have tolerated.
Everything.
Comedy was often an outlet for semi-broken comics to bare their souls, a cheap form of psychotherapy crowdsourced from literal crowds.
Chuck turned his soul inside out like it was laundry day and he worried about loose terras in his pockets. He spilled routines that had been in bad taste the day they’d been written, including one that had been used in the Omni Broadcast Association’s guidelines on media decency as a negative example. He used bits he’d cringed at writing upon reading them hungover the next morning. He dredged up the worst he could think of, because those were the only jokes getting laughs.
“And the girlfriend tells him, ‘You put that thing away wet, it’ll rust.’”
The plouph snickered.
Chuck couldn’t even recall the beginning of that joke anymore. And he was damn near certain he’d screwed it up somewhere along the way. It hardly mattered. He just had to keep talking.
The theater swam.
Fire burned down Chuck’s throat.
Someone pushed a glass of water into his hand. “Thanks,” he murmured. It came out as a croak.
The same savior pried the microphone away from him as he drank. “Chuckie the Human, everyone!” It was Falxis, the self-appointed stage manager among the pirates.
Plouph whistled and hooted. Falxis dragged Chuck backstage. Delirious, Chuck still had the presence of mind to raise his glass in acknowledgment of the applause. Even if they were murderous thugs holding him at blasterpoint to perform, it was far from the worst audience he’d ever had.
That time Brad had brought him to school for Parents’ Day…
A single incident had soured Chuck on ever performing kiddie shows again, and Brad hadn’t been back inside a formal school again, no matter how long they were planetside.
“Can’t have you keeling up a lung out there,” Falxis said once they were alone.
Chuck drank. The cool liquid soothed all the way down his throat, like lotion after shaving with a blade. “Wish I’d known that an hour ago.”
“Nah. You gotta earn it. Prob’ly gonna mark you as entertainment.”
Chuck cocked his head in the middle of his next sip. “Thanks?”
“Yeah. You got a good future in the void colonies.”
A cold chill ran through Chuck. Half a million ideas had floated through his head on what these plouph and their azrin friends were planning. No matter where his thoughts ran, this kept coming back to a political issue. A couple thousand human hostages, many from Sol, might be enough leverage for these clowns to negotiate a release of prisoners, a colony of their own, maybe even a withdrawal of occupation forces from Meyang.
He had to ask. “You guys are slavers?”
“Entra Pranoors.”
Chuck shook his head. “I got a wife and kids.”
Falxis’s ears perked up. “Yeah? Pups are great. You humans’ll do anything for pups. Be a good boy, they be all safe. Got it?”
“Hey, you agree to dump my kids in an escape pod, I promise, me and the missus’ll breed in captivity.”
The answer to his opening offer was a fang-filled grin and a wheezing laugh. “See? Gonna be all good. You funny human. We gonna show you the pups. Pick yours. We DNA test so you don’t claim extras.”
Chuck rubbed his chin. “The littles, sure. But I’ve never been positive on my oldest. Doesn’t look a thing like me.”
The plouph wasn’t taking anything Chuck said seriously; his laughter deepened.
“No. I mean it. I had him tested, but I’m not convinced Becky didn’t pay the guy off. It was on this shitty little colony with a Med Alliance free clinic. Can’t imagine any doc working the place wouldn’t be open to a—”
“I don’t care about your shitty family, ass-brain. Be funny. Get sold for easy work. Funny human better life than mining human, than floor-scrub human, than food human.”
Chuck shook his head vehemently. “Plouph don’t eat sentients.”
Falxis shrugged. “Yeah. But we might sell you to someone who does.”
The bagels were stale.
When the jitters of adrenaline had drained from their systems, Brad and May had resumed their shipboard spelunking, finally deciding that the corridors were just going to have to do. Backs pressed to tangles of conduits and pipes, they sat with knees bent, elbows brushing, the bag of rock-hard bread-donuts within easy reach of both. The hand lamp was left on, face-down on the floor by their feet. By the halo of brightness around the edge, the corridors were a tableau of shadows.
“How’s yours?” Brad asked after forcing down a mouthful of cinnamon raisin permacrete softened by weak, mango-flavored juice.
“Wish we’d brought an auto-toaster and soy spread.” She spoke with her mouth full, frantically making her way through the makeshift emergency rations.
Brad forced a chuckle. “I get it. Authentic Earth-chow and all that jazz. But give me a carton of Powderi Puffs any day.”
“My mom says those are pure junk.”
“Pure delicious junk,” Brad corrected, raising a finger he wasn’t even sure she could see in the darkness. “But they taste the same today or a year from now. No kidding, my dad got a deal on a shipment of Friendli Foods snacks from ’21.”
“That’s gross.”
“I didn’t eat a vegetable for a month.”
“Double-gross.”
Brad sighed wistfully. “I didn’t grow up on a fancy, big One Church ship. Sometimes, my parents had to juggle between food and fuel. They’d settle on a little of both.”
OK. That was pretty much entirely a lie. Brad had never gone hungry. Dad always found a way to scrounge up what they needed, often combining creative social relationships and a loose interpretation of property law in the process.
But that made a bad story.
“Sorry,” May replied softly. “I try not to take my circumstances for granted. Mom makes sure I do plenty of volunteer work, and I buy local when we visit the border colonies, and—”
Brad burst out laughing.
“What?” May demanded indignantly. “What’s so funny. I’m baring my soul here.”
Brad controlled himself. “Sorry. It’s just… you’re baring a nice shiny clean soul. It’s not your fault, but it sounds like you’ve got a pretty easy life.”
She held up her hands. “Oh? And where’s that gotten me?”
OK. That was a fair point. They were stowaways on a pirate-owned ship by now. One wrong move. One noise too loud. One unlucky break, and they were done for.
“Just goes to my larger point,” Brad continued, still not having decided what that larger point might be.
“Which is?” May asked on cue, ruining the mystery and suspense for both of them.
Brad cleared his throat. Why couldn’t he conjure up wisdom from ancient songs on command the way Dad always seemed to?
Probably because Dad was a plagiaristic old charlatan without an original thought in his head, and he’d had his whole life to listen to his Early Data grooves until the grooves in his brain resembled the grooves in those vinyl records.
“You gotta make bad decisions to make the good ones matter. All those people you help volunteering, they can tell when someone’s lived it.”
“Lived what?”
“Life.”
May didn’t say anything right away. Instead, she took another bite of bagel and a sip of her strawberry juice. In the relative silence of the maintenance tunnels, he could hear every chew.
“You really think I haven’t lived life?”
“Not for me to say,” Brad replied. “But lemme ask you: have you ever piloted a starship?”
“I’ll take learner’s classes when I turn 15.”
“Slept in a bed made for another species?”
“Um. No. Why would I?”
“Gotten drunk?”
“The only wine I drink transubstantiates.”
Brad stumbled over that one a moment but decided that counted as a “no.” Then he hauled out his big hitter. Swallowing a lump that had suddenly developed in the way of his words, he managed to ask, “Ever kissed a—a boy?”
He’d almost slipped and said “man.” But except for a few select corners of human culture, thirteen didn’t qualify Brad as anything other than a neophyte teenager.
“Well, I—wait, how is that any of your business?” May demanded.
In the wordless aftermath of the question, each could hear the other breathing quicker. The silence answered itself. They faced one another. Faint light from the downturned hand lamp caught the white of one eye, the glint of one earring, the outline of half a face.
A faint gravitational effect drew the pair together, slowly, tentatively.
Brad closed his eyes.
A firm hand shoved him backward. He landed hard, elbow first, on the deck plates. “Ow!”
“What do you think you’re doing?” May demanded, not doing a thing to keep her voice down.
Brad scooped up the hand lamp and flipped it. Suddenly, the atmosphere changed. Gone was the illusory intimacy of a candle-lit dinner. Now they were just a couple teenagers hiding out in some grubby access corridors for the Nazareth’s maintenance staff, surrounded by the crumbs of barely edible bagels and uneaten specimens that would only get worse the longer their sequestration lasted.
“Living?” he replied, not sure how else to explain it if she wasn’t sure.
“You tried to kiss me.”
“Words,” Brad scolded. “Say something. I’d have stopped. But you were clearly making a move, and—”
“Was not.”
“Was too.”
“I don’t even have moves, thank-you-very-much.”
“Well, you stumbled onto one. And dammit, that hurt.”
May took a breath and calmed. “Sorry I shoved you.”
Brad rubbed his elbow sullenly, playing up what at worst might end up being a bruise that would last until they found a basic med kit. Then, struck with an idea to break the tension, he froze. Twisting in the tight quarters, he held the offended elbow out to her.
Obviously aware of kid-rated home remedies, May caught on instantly. Her initial scowl melted into a reluctant huff. Quick as a woodpecker, she darted her head forward and planted the briefest of kisses on the wound.
“Apology accepted,” Brad replied, flexing his fingers and arm to make sure everything still worked.
May slumped back against the wall. She plucked a bagel from the bag and lobbed it halfheartedly into the darkness. “What now?”
“It all depends.”
One raised eyebrow was all it took for Brad not to wait for the semi-obligatory, “on what?”
“We can either wait here for help that might never come, or we can look for some way to save ourselves.”
He really had no read on this girl. She was, quite literally, from a different world. Betting on her choice was doomed to lose him money. May bit her lip as she pondered.
“What could we do?” she asked at length.
Brad brightened. “I have no idea. Let’s come up with a plan. Together.”
Becky woke groggily, bringing an arm to shield her eyes before daring to open them. Her head hurt. Her back hurt. Her mouth was dry.
“I gotta quit the cactus juice,” she mumbled.
“I think it was sleeping on a wooden bench,” Mort replied from nearby.
In her attempt to sit up, Becky whacked her elbow on a hard wooden wall. Upon further investigation, it turned out to be the backrest of a pew. Goddammit. “That wasn’t a nightmare?”
“Depends,” Mort said noncommittally. “Were you being held hostage by pirates?”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else?”
This was a hangover foul. No interrogations before coffee. Although, as her thoughts cleared, the symptoms sorted themselves out to suggest a simple bad night’s sleep on a hard surface. Her brain shook itself free of the remnants of slumber. “Kids missing.”
“Also real.”
“Chuck missing.”
“Yup.”
“Talking fish tacos.”
Mort chopped a finger down at her. “Uh, that was a dream. And you’ve made me hungry. Were the tacos any good?”
Becky shook her head, already struggling to recall the details of the dream. “Nah, they were spouting a bunch of Earth First crap.”
Blowing a sigh that puffed her cheeks, Becky searched the queasy feeling in her stomach to determine a remedy. Hungry? A little. Chemical imbalance? She doubted these pirates were liable to fork over the candy she needed to get her mind really right. But maybe a little something-something to settle the tummy.
Nah.
What Becky needed was to see her kids.
Not bothering to voice her plans, she stood and scooted past Mort and a couple strangers to reach the aisle.
“Yo, big man,” she called out to the largest plouph in the cathedral. “Got a minute?”
“What?” the lead plouph snapped. He aimed a finger past her. “Line for the piss-can’s back there.”
“I haven’t seen my kiddos since you lot rounded us up.”
The direction-giving plouph finger adjusted its aim.
She’d been revving her engines for a confrontation. For the plouph to refuse. She was ready to go all Chuck on these assholes, twisting them around a knot of lies until they let her visit the daycare or delivered the kiddos to the cathedral. This unexpected response prompted curiosity.
The brawny pirate had directed her to a gaggle of women crowded together at the side of the cathedral. Becky made her way over, keeping one eye on the guards, who in turn watched her every step of the way.
When she arrived, Becky found a datapad at the center of attention. Someone had propped it up on one of the pews. On the screen, there was a feed from the daycare, presumably live.
“Which one’s yours?” one of the mothers asked quietly as Becky squeezed in for a look.
The screen was regular size, nothing like having even a residential holovid set to flatpic mode. Squinting, she searched the scene of public-use toys and subdued children. While most were playing and many seemed oblivious, there was an air of wrongness that the older children carried, pervading the playroom.
Could it have been the plouph with the blaster rifle standing guard at the edge of the room?
She spotted little Rhiannon, napping on a mat not two meters from their guard. What a champ. She was too young to be remembering this down the road. It took some time before she spotted Mike, by himself in a corner, sullenly ignoring a toy starship at his feet.
Becky pointed out the pair of them. “Sleeping Beauty there, and the wallflower. Wish little Mikey’d play with the other kids…”
“There was a little incident,” one of the moms informed her.
“Incident?” Becky echoed. Even given the circumstances, and seeing Mike was physically fine, she didn’t like the sound of that word.
“Well, he took one of the Mary Mercy dolls, and when one of the little girls came to have a turn, he wouldn’t share.”
Becky’s heart cracked. “Aww, he probably wants his Susie Sunshine. Wonder if they’ll let me go up to our room and bring it to him. I packed it, thinking we’d be off the ship a few days, but—”
“Isn’t he too old for dolls?” someone asked.
“Sister Chloe gave him the spaceship.”
Becky’s cheeks warmed. “He’s four!”
“That’s a big four.”
“Takes after his dad,” Becky snapped. “And who cares how old he is? I played with dolls until I was, like, I dunno. Nine?”
“You’re a girl.”
“So? Mikey doesn’t like starships. He likes Susie Sunshine.”
Someone put a hand on Becky’s shoulder. “It’s good for a boy to—”
Becky twisted out from under that patronizing hand. “Don’t lay that square bag on my kid. My oldest played with the same dolls, and she ran off to go play soldier in the navy.”
“We appreciate her service.”
Becky clenched both fists. She was going to come unglued if she couldn’t take the edge off soon.
Backing away from the infuriating datapad, Becky turned and headed for the lectern where the priest would give sermons if this cathedral weren’t a prison camp. She bent and searched for a catch or release or—
Aha!
A concealed cabinet door popped open. Inside, a small cache of wine bottles gleamed at her. She ignored the accompanying crackers as irrelevant.
“What are you doing?” one of the guards demanded, pointing a blaster at her cheek from centimeters away.
Keeping her motions slow, Becky withdrew one of the bottles. “Chill out, man. It’s prayer wine.”
The pirate narrowed his canine eyes. “How do I know it’s not poisoned?”
She held it out to him. “If you’re worried we’re trying to off ourselves, you’re welcome to try it first.”
That one took him a while to puzzle out, then he snarled. “Fine. Drink. Pray. Soon as we fix the ship, you see how much praying did.”
The Nazareth wasn’t moving? Propulsion was the only “fix” these pirates could possibly care about. Life support smelled fresh and fine. The ship didn’t carry weapons or have shields—they boasted about it, even. The sky visible through the glassteel cathedral ceiling was gray, a sign they were still in astral space. All that was left was engine troubles.
When the guard relaxed a little, Becky retrieved a corkscrew.
The guard shoved the blaster rifle right back in her face. “A weapon?”
Becky dangled the device between thumb and forefinger, letting the plouph examine it. “If y’all think I can take a single one of you with just this little doodad, you got bigger problems, man.”
Finally allowed to retreat to the pews with her prize, one of the priests rushed over to intercept her. It wasn’t Father Laszlo, so she initially ignored him. There was plenty of wine left in the stash, and he was welcome to the corkscrew when she was done with it.
“That’s sacramental wine!” the priest protested.
Becky shrugged.
“You can’t drink it! It’s blasphemous.”
Shifting the corkscrew in her grip, she managed to raise a finger. “I dig it, Father. You pray, this turns to blood. I’ve taken Communion.”
“Then you know that this is a sacred—”
“But if you don’t pray, if you don’t invoke nothing, just let it be, then this here’s some cheap-ass booze, and the best we’ve got right now.”
“This is no time to abandon faith and turn to the temptation of the grape.”
Becky lifted the bottle and squinted at the label. “This is all synthetic. Never met a grape. And y’all have been praying for a full day now with nothing to show for it. I’m gonna try my way.”
With a few expert twists and a swift tug, the cork slid from the neck of the bottle with a satisfying poonk. Then she tilted the bottle back and hoped to find peace of mind somewhere down at the bottom.
Mort didn’t often find himself at the center of scrutiny. At least, that didn’t use to be the case. Most of his colleagues avoided him casually, in the same manner that house guests avoided eye contact with the guard dogs. He was presented with problems, and he handed back solutions. Sometimes, it was a book disappearing behind expertly tended protective glyphs in a library vault. Others, it was the authors of those books vanishing into ash blown away on some distant planet’s winds.
Lately, too many people had been in his business.
Busybodies like Chuck and Becky were forgivable. He shared their home, ate their meals, spent considerable time around their impressionable youngsters. The Convocation had been exercising their oversight with annoying diligence and regrettable inflexibility.
Father Laszlo, on the other hand, was welcome to snort incense.
“That wine won’t help them escape,” the priest commented, watching Becky working at getting her fellow captives “blitzed,” as she would have called it. “But true healing, emotional, spiritual, and physical, won’t happen until this unfortunate incident passes.”
“You know, I keep changing seats to avoid you.”
“I know.”
The pair were currently in a middle row on what would have been the bride’s side of the aisle, had this been a traditional wedding. The priest looked garish, less for his wounds than the science that had nailed him back together afterward. Mort wondered how he looked, dolled up like a hockey hooligan who didn’t own a change of clothes. The couple they must have made to anyone watching.
“I like keeping watch over my flock, both the residents and the guests.”
“I’m not part of anyone’s flock.”
Father Laszlo nodded. “I know. But you’re what they require watching from right now.”
“I’m not endangering anyone…” Mort replied. As always, that silent yet loomed over the conversation.
Father Laszlo shook his head ever so slightly. “I wonder at times, what goes on in a mind of one such as yourself.”
“Mathematics, mostly.”
The priest cocked his head at this unexpected news. “Really?”
“Math without numbers. Without even Greek letters. It’s like Anubis with his scale, weighing the hearts of the dead. I keep trying different hearts and different feathers, seeing what weighs what. Weigh two hearts against one another before sending them to challenge the feather. Turn the feathers to iron, to stone, to lead, seeing if I find a combination that lets me pass.”
“Have you considered lightening the heart?”
Mort cocked an eyebrow, daring the priest to plant his feet in those tired old footsteps.
“Confession can lighten the heart. If you’d like, I could—”
“Listen. Given what you people consider sins, I’d have to start with my earliest memories and catch you up to this week. If we were manacled together and bound for a lifetime of indentured servitude side by side, I wouldn’t have the time to recount it all.
“But I’m not going to risk catastrophe until I’m sure five particular individuals are safe.”
Father Laszlo looked him dead in the eye. As a practitioner himself, however lapsed, it was a direct challenge to Mort’s mystical authority. “You will harm no one. All life is sacred.”
“Life has the value it earns. And before you pull the ‘who are you to decide which lives are worthy’ card, I’ve already told you who I was.”
“I can’t stop you, but I’ll try with every breath in my lungs, drop of blood in my veins.”
Hold your horses, Nebuchadnezzar screamed inside Mort’s skull. Don’t suck his brain out. Last thing we need is a priest stuck in here. Bad enough I’ve got Tweedledee and Tweedledum for company.
Mort broke eye contact and turned his head aside. “Do what you have to. I’ll do the same.”
Brad couldn’t feel his left arm. When he tried to flex it, a heavy weight pressed down, holding it in place. An attempt to sit up elicited a groan that came from beside him.
Details clicked into place. Brad froze. May shifted slightly and continued to sleep.
This couldn’t be good for his arm. Sooner or later, complete loss of blood flow would result in it shriveling and falling off. He’d be stuck with a dumb robot arm because his parents couldn’t afford a cloned replacement. And that would be the end of any racing career. No team or sponsor would trust the tiny lag introduced in the neuromechanical link and any system that could be ruled a competitive advantage.
No-win scenario.
But that was background noise to a greater truth that revealed itself in Brad’s head. When he got access to a chrono, he’d check the date and remember it for the rest of his life: the first time he’d slept with a girl.
When May had vetoed Brad’s suggestion of sneaking into one of the hotel rooms or crew quarters aboard the Nazareth, they’d settled on a cold night in the maintenance tunnels. Brad used the empty satchel of a med kit as a pillow. May had, in turn, used him.
To prove it wasn’t a dream, she was still here.
Pride swelled inside him at this rite of passage. However, the numbness in his arm prevented him from basking indefinitely.
“May,” Brad whispered.
No response.
He twitched a shoulder, jostling her head slightly. “May… wake up.”
May stirred and stretched. Then, suddenly, she froze. Seconds later, she bolted upright, propping on an elbow to look down at Brad in the dim light spilling through the vent above them.
“Morning,” he replied casually. He squirmed his arm from beneath her and flopped it to start the blood trickling back through his arteries. The prickly, “hit by a stun blast” feeling tingled and stabbed all down his arm.
May ran her fingers through her hair and cupped a hand over her nose and mouth to check her breath. The latter provoked a wince. “Ugh. I’m a mess.”
Still working on restoring his arm to full functionality, Brad wriggled into a seated position. “Why? Because you slept?”
“I need a shower and a tooth-scrubber. I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes. I don’t even have a hairbrush. I’m almost glad there are no mirrors down here. You’re the only one who has to see me. And that’s embarrassing enough.”
“I don’t mind.”
“That’s because it’s dark.” The tiny tilt of her head allowed Brad to imagine the eye-roll that went with the remark.
“Nah. You can’t look like a Hollyworld actress every second of the day.”
“You’re just—wait. What? Who looks like an actress?”
“You.”
“Which one?” May challenged.
Brad didn’t have to scramble to come up with a name. They’d spent hours exploring the vast network of mechanics’ access tunnels and crawlways, and his mind had wandered to that very question more than once.
“Stacie Janos.”
May burst out in a single, incredulous scoff. “Hah! As if! Name one thing I have in common with Zenia the Pirate Hunter.”
Frankly, Brad was impressed she’d even heard of the Zenia holos. They were over-the-top action and had been one of Jamie’s go-tos when it was her turn to pick the family’s evening entertainment. Somehow, he struggled to picture May cheering as fighter pilots blasted pirates out of the Black Ocean.
Just as Brad opened his mouth to begin a list, May cut in, “Besides the fact we’re both ladies.”
Well, that killed number one of Brad’s list. “Same eye color. Cheekbones. Hair…” He was spitballing here, throwing out features uncritically.
“Zenia’s blonde,” May corrected.
“Lt. Zenia Daystrom is blonde. Staci Janos’s hair is the same color as yours. Um, unless you color yours.”
“It’s natural. And why do you know so much about her? You like gawking at actresses on the omni?”
“My sister did. The one who’s in the navy now, actually hunting pirates. She had a flatpic on the wall of our bedroom. Every time I see her now, I’ll think of you.”
May shook her head. “You’re exaggerating. I’m nothing special. I’m just a plain old nobody with a cardinal for a great-uncle, which makes me absolutely nothing. I don’t have to worry about vanity. Staci Janos has a smile that sells out holovid theaters, and I’ve got crooked teeth that Mom won’t let me get fixed until I graduate high school.”
“It’s a tiny little gap, and it’s cute.”
May’s rant broke orbit. “What? Cute?”
“Least favorite part about actresses is how phony perfect they are. Everyone’s fucked up.”
“Language!”
Brad pressed on in spite of her admonishment. “You’re perfectly imperfect, and I wouldn’t want you any other way.”
May looked away and brushed a lock of hair over her ear. “You’re weird. And I’m hungry.”
“I can live with weird, but the hunger thing, not so much. I think it’s safe to call the bagels a lost cause.”
They’d carted along the last three bagels forlornly in their clear plastic bag. They were like soldiers lugging the body of a dead comrade, unwilling to leave their friend behind but also not knowing quite what to do with the remains.
“Yeah. We need real food. I’ve already got the jitters.”
They trundled along until Brad found an access hatch for the waste reclaim. “Hold your breath,” he warned. He inhaled deeply, then popped the release lever. Instantly, the tunnel was awash in the foulest odor Brad had ever experienced in his life. He pitched the bag in and closed the hatch.
Putrid fumes lingered, causing a fit of coughing and watery eyes for each of them. They stumbled headlong until they could breathe freely again.
“We leave it, next time,” May declared. “Anyone tracking us, or even thinking to look for us at all, just got a huge, stinky clue.”
“No argument here.”
May took over navigation again, this time leading them toward a storeroom that supplied the various restaurants and cafeterias scattered around the ship. The prospect of eating sandwich meats straight out of food-processor cartridges sounded better than another venture into an eatery liable to be pressed into service by the pirates.
When they arrived at the nearest vent to the storehouse, Brad climbed up the pipes and got to work with the multi-tool loosening the screws. May climbed up to collect the screws and make sure none got lost.
“Shh!” she hissed.
Brad stopped instantly. He was beyond the point of asking why. Idiots spoke that question aloud when told to shush. Chuck Ramsey hadn’t raised an idiot.
A plouph voice grumbled in plain enough English, “No more delays. No help is coming. All the comms are off. No one sent a distress call. You either fix the engine, or we start cutting things off the pups.”
Two sets of booted feet clomped past. A third set dragged, their owner—a human—suspended by the arms between two plouph who looked to be having trouble wrangling the mechanic’s bulk.
“I-I-I need to convert to alternate fuel. The thorium intake system is completely slagged, and we’d need a Class 4 shipyard to—”
“Words, words, words, boss wants the ship moving.”
“I’ll try. I mean… I’ll do everything I can.”
The boots stopped. A meaty thud and the accompanying groan painted a picture in Brad’s head that the myopic view through the slits of the vent obscured: a heavy fist buried in an unsuspecting stomach. Either the mechanic was intentionally letting the plouph feel tough, he was some kind of weenie, or they’d somehow caught him off guard when even Brad knew it was coming when he mouthed off, then everyone stopped.
Expecting it, Brad bet he could have taken a punch from a full-grown plouph. And those were plouph voices. If it had been azrin, that would have been a different story. Fuck azrin. Brad would have promised to peddle the ship wherever the pirates were headed.
“You gonna fixit, fixit. We gettin’ paid by the human, but one or two missing to get the rest doin’ what they told… Yeah. Maybe we do that. Don’t wanna be missing, do ya?”
There was no verbal reply. Brad imagined the mechanic shaking his head.
Bootsteps resumed.
May waited beside him in silence until Brad finally spoke first. “You hear all that?”
“It’s awful. They’re going to sell us. We’re going to be slaves in some forsaken—”
“Not that,” Brad cut in. “They blocked comms. There was no distress call.”
“More awful news.”
Brad nodded along. “You could look at it that way.”
“What other way is there?” May challenged.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than what he had before. “Well, it means that if we can send a distress call, maybe we can get help.”
“How do we do that?”
Brad hopped down, then gave May a hand joining him on the floor. “First things first, I’d say we need a datapad.”
May looked back up at the vent. “Um. First things first, we still need breakfast.”
A gurgle in the quiet that hung afterward could have come from the stomach of either of them. Brad climbed back up and resumed work on the vent screws.
“Right. Food. Then datapad.”
Huffing and wiping his brow, Chuck plunked his ass down in a folding chair backstage, gratefully accepting a plastic cup of water from one of his fellow captives. He had to be repeating stuff out there by now. The plouph were grumbling. He was missing his edge, and there wasn’t enough material in his repertoire to keep things fresh. Still, maybe if he tried funny voices or impressions, he might disguise the same joke in a new suit.
Annabeth paced the prep area, mouthing words and gesturing with her hands.
“What’re you doing back here? Thought you joined the audience a couple sets back.”
She waved away his concern. “You’re in no shape to keep going back out there. Even I can tell you’re—what’s that old term you used?—right, bombing on stage.”
Falxis ambled over and loomed. Chuck stiffened, even though this was by far the most personable of his captors. “Nice jokes. Gettin’ slow out there. Scrawny female’s turn.” He whistled between clawed fingers and hooked a thumb, ordering Annabeth onto the stage.
The pair of them watched her set, if one could call it that. More, it was a slice-of-life, funny-at-the-reunion series of family anecdotes. A subtle undertone of “you had to be there” pervaded each. Feelings of exclusion simmered among the pirates in the audience.
Then, the heckling kicked in.
Chuck had dealt with hecklers of all manner throughout his career. It was hard to transition from open mic to headliner without an arsenal of tricks to keep someone in the dim seats from stealing the spotlight. Early on, Chuck had diverted a few comments into dead ends that allowed him to continue his act as planned.
Annabeth wasn’t similarly armed, and the audience smelled blood.
These pirates were mean-spirited, to say the least.
“She’d be funnier with her tongue cut out.”
“If my wife was so dull, I would find a new one.”
Another of the plouph replied to this heckler, “If I was your wife, I would be dull on purpose,” drawing a roar of laughs at the first one’s expense.
“Eating her would be funny,” an azrin snarked, cutting short the laughs. “Humans taste like rancid bird meat, but they scream so pretty.”
Annabeth’s mental computer threw up an error code, leaving her standing there staring in terror. She stammered a restart, then started retelling one of Chuck’s jokes from earlier. That was enough to settle down the audience, at least for now.
They were getting unruly out there. Sooner or later, these slavers and killers would decide that they had plenty of slaves and could afford to kill a few for amusement. With pirates unconcerned for human life, anything was possible.
Taking his life in his own hands, Chuck grabbed Falxis by the jacket to get his attention. “I need something.”
Falxis glared down at Chuck’s hand until the comedian self-consciously withdrew it. “You need what I tell you to need.”
He pointed out to the stage. “I can be way funnier with that.”
“You’re half dead. When you’re back to a quarter dead, you can perform again. Yeah?”
“No,” Chuck shot back. “I’ve got stuff in my luggage that’ll get me back better than you’ve ever seen me.”
“What’s the trick?”
Chuck spread his hands. “No trick.”
“Not letting you go anywhere.”
“Send one of your boys. There’s this inside pocket, cleverly folded so you don’t notice it. Inside, there’s a tiny bag with a white powder in it.”
“Poison? You think you’ll get away to the Gates of Hodo that easy?”
“Poison? Kinda. But the long-term kind. Short term, it’s like plugging your brain into a power conduit.”
The pirate grinned lopsidedly. “Ah. A human drug. Whassit called?”
“It’s a traditional one, nothing fancy and modern. Let’s just call it Go-Go Powder. Now, if one of your guys can grab it out of my suitcase in Room 8E—”
“Rooms been cleared out.”
Chuck combed his fingers through his hair and tried to think. His luggage, lost amid all the other belongings aboard the ship.
“Hold up,” Falxis said. He whistled again, this time summoning one of the azrin from the audience. With a gesture to Chuck, he ordered. “Give this one a snort.” The azrin complied without hesitation. Chuck froze as whiskers brushed his cheek.
“Smells like human.”
Falxis tapped Chuck on the skull. “Find his stuff. Luggage, right?” Chuck nodded. “Bring it here. We gonna get a good show.”
“I grow bored of this one.”
“All the more reason to bring me back the pick-me-up I need to give a tip-top performance. The kind of ace human comedy you fine people deserve.”
Chuck and his plouph stage manager waited in suspense and boredom, respectively. Annabeth was giving it her all out there. Kid had a phenomenal memory, parroting Chuck’s purloined comedy routines as if she’d plagiarized them herself. However, her delivery was stiff. There was no shaking the utter certainty that she was terrified to be out there. Only the mild amusement at her discomfiture kept the pirates entertained.
Then, the azrin bellhop returned with five suitcases. “These all smell like him.” The overburdened creature allowed all the Ramsey family luggage to tumble from his arms in an avalanche.
“Where is it?” Falxis demanded. Chuck guided the search of the correct suitcase and the hidden pocket concealed therein. “Huh… don’t look like much.”
“Fancy capsules and auto-injectors don’t make a drug good. It’s all about the biochemistry. Now, I don’t know about science, but I do know what to do with this.”
There were no tables backstage. Chuck got down on his hands and knees and brushed a spot on the floor clean. Scavenging a drinking straw from a kiddie-pack beverage, he ripped open the baggie and herded it into a rough line.
“What in Fellop’s name are you doing?” Falxis asked in wonderment.
The azrin glowered down at him. “It’s a child’s game, played with anthills.”
Putting the straw to his nose, Chuck swept it down the line as he gave a mighty snort. He rocked back to a seated position, rubbing his nose and blinking his eyes.
“How long until—?”
But Chuck was already raising his arms for a lift to his feet. The pirates obliged.
Before he knew what he was doing, Chuck marched onto the stage. “Thank you, Annabeth. Let’s give it up for Annabeth.” He started clapping. “She managed to keep everyone from forgetting which way the spotlight was pointing.”
Halfway to safety backstage, Annabeth shot him a hurt look over her shoulder.
Geez, the kid had thin skin.
But the audience chuckled at her expense.
“I’d like to thank Falxis for letting me come back out and perform. He’s truly the kindest, smartest, best-fucking plouph in the galaxy—or so he keeps telling me.”
This time, they broke out in genuine, horrible laughter.
Coming to the front of the stage, he picked out one of the pirates at random—well, not completely random; he chose one of the plouph, not wanting to throw dice over an azrin’s sense of humor. “You, sir, what’s your name?”
“Kin’Gerok,” the pirate shouted back.
Chuck put up a hand to acknowledge the response, then gave the pirate a thumbs-up. Nice, simple, human gestures, but easily translated for these clearly human-literate xenos. “Kin’Gerok, I’ve been seeing you sitting there all this time, and I’ve gotta ask you… do you always dress like that, or only when your wife isn’t here to pick your outfits.”
“I have no wife!” Kin’Gerok replied indignantly.
Chuck nodded knowingly, wagging a finger in the air as he casually strolled with his back to the crowd. Then, he glanced back, addressing everyone else in the seats. “Well, that explains it, now, doesn’t it?”
The uproarious laughter that followed set the tone for Chuck’s entire set.
These pirates were boisterous, mean, crude, and yet somehow unpretentious enough to bear the laughter of their peers with good grace. If only he’d picked up on it earlier.
Mind abuzz, Chuck saw in five dimensions, speaking things he hadn’t thought of yet, and planning a dozen jokes in advance. His anti-heckling toolkit became his game plan. So long as he insulted all of them, none of them could take personal offense. In fact, once the first few were out of the way, anyone who protested would only make themselves look foolish.
“…and if I were your size, I’d carry a rifle that big, too…”
“…I’d like to tell you how dumb you look, but I don’t think you’d understand me…”
“…If I had to listen to these guys all the time, I’d cut an ear off, too…”
Somewhere in Chuck’s addled brain, he knew he couldn’t keep this up forever. He was a holding action, easing the pirates’ attitudes toward their prisoners until either a rescue came, or they arrived at wherever the pirates planned to sell their captives.
Chuck just had to keep going.
This ship just kept going and going. Brad didn’t want to admit it out loud and sound like an old man, but his back and feet had had it. Still, with May keeping up an unrelenting pace, he didn’t feel at liberty to complain.
Lunch had been sandwich meat and cheese, leaving aside the bread that had been fresh-baked two days ago. May had opted for thin-sliced turkey; Brad had his first non-synthetic roast beef ever. Technically, their meal probably should have counted as breakfast, but nothing about it felt like a breakfast. No milk. No cereal. No bacon or eggs. No factory-made pastry in a carton.
They’d taken turns in a public washroom, each standing lookout for the other. While on a purely theoretical level, he knew girls had to do all the same gross stuff in there that guys did, hearing May using the facilities strained his psyche. In fact, the past day and a half had been a steady process of dragging his perfect angel back into realspace.
Presently, it was his last remaining perception of being the one protecting them that faded away. If it came down to running or frankly any physical activity besides maybe arm-wrestling, May was better off on her own. Shipboard life didn’t come with regular phys ed classes or open spaces to run around. If they had a ship to fly or a blaster to fire, he’d be their champion again. In the meantime, he had become the junior partner in this stowaway heroism.
Not that Brad expected to find a blaster lying around. The One Church people had a pretty hard line on violence, and the pirates they’d observed from afar seemed particularly fond of their personal weaponry.
May pulled up short, allowing Brad to catch up the five paces he’d fallen behind. “OK. So, we know they’ve got hostages in the cathedral, the arboretum, cargo holds 6 and 7, the daycare, the theater, and since I haven’t seen any senior officers, presumably the bridge. But still no sign of where they stashed all the datapads. Is it possible they dumped them all out an airlock?”
A puzzled frown fixed itself on his face. “Why would they do that?”
May threw up her hands, banging one on a pipe and wincing. “Ow! I don’t know? Why can’t we find them, then? I can’t think like a pirate!”
There it was. The lingering tension that had lurked between them since first meeting in that youth sermon. “You think I’m a pirate?”
“Well… maybe? The way you talk about stuff, the stories about the people you know…”
“Do I know pirates? Probably. Do they admit it socially? No. And my dad’s a comedian. We fly around show to show in a cheap, hundred-year-old wreck.”
“You just said yourself you probably know some.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’m out of ideas. How are we going to get a distress call out if we can’t find a datapad?”
They’d already tried public terminals and found them locked out. May had a point. They needed to get their hands on some basic tech, and these pirates wouldn’t have flushed tens of thousands of terras worth of black-market resale out into astral space.
Huffing a sigh, Brad slumped against a wall, heedless of the pipe fittings and grime. Not being a pirate and Dad not being a pirate didn’t keep Brad from having a much better idea of what pirates were like than she ever could.
So, if Brad were a pirate, what would he do with all the confiscated datapads?
First, he’d pick through them and steal the best ones for himself. Duh. No point in taking a couple thousand datapads and selling all of them. A few dozen pirates wouldn’t put a dent in the haul. After that… maybe crate them up for wholesale fencing? Brad knew that Dad pawned stuff with guys who took stolen goods. Half the used-tech dealers in the galaxy took trade-ins; there had to be a way to keep stock without relying on random travelers looking to sell.
Then where would that put the datapads?
“You’re not going to like this,” Brad replied after thinking the matter through.
“What have I liked since the pirates got here?” May challenged, resting her fists on her hips.
Rather than come up with a list, Brad allowed her a small victory. “We need to get to their ship.”
“No way!”
“Well, think about it. It’s probably their base of operations, or at least the ship they’re planning on keeping when this is all over. If I were rounding up stuff I could sell—besides people—I’d gather it all up and pack it for travel.”
“You were right. I hate this more than usual. Can’t you… I don’t know, hack into the ship’s comm system and get us a—”
“I’m no good with computers. I’m barely competent with basic repairs.”
“But I thought you were in the Junior Mechanics’ Guild.”
“I said that to get down here to see the insides of the ship.”
“You WHAT? I trusted you!”
“And now we might be the only two humans on this ship who’re still safe. You’re welcome.”
“How can I believe anything you say?”
“Use your judgment. Think for yourself. I lied so we could spend more time together. And I do like looking at the guts of big ships, but not nearly as much as I liked hanging around with you. But I haven’t lied since things got serious. I’m willing to risk my neck to get a distress call sent out. And if we can get our hands on a couple blasters, I’m willing to shoot pirates to defend us.”
May shook her head. “Killing is always wrong.”
“Sure,” Brad shot back. “But sometimes it’s less wrong than not shooting someone. Good people wouldn’t sin if there was always an easy answer. And I’m not looking to go all Omicron Squad here. I’m a good shot, but I’m no soldier. I just want to find a way to save my brother and sister, my parents, my friend Mort, and you.”
May’s voice was small. “Can we save my mom and Uncle Pietro, too?”
“In an ideal galaxy, we’d save everyone. But unless we something quick, sooner or later someone’s going to get this ship moving and drag us to a slaver depot in eyndar space, and there’ll be no saving anyone. Can you find us a way to the hangar where the pirates parked?”
May nodded. She didn’t budge, didn’t look away.
“Sorry for lying to you,” Brad said, realizing the holdup. “Can you forgive me?”
She smiled. “What kind of missionary would I be if I couldn’t? The first step to penance is acknowledging your sin.”
Brad jerked his head in the direction he sort of remembered the hangars being. “C’mon. First step in surviving a pirate attack is finding help.”
They hadn’t been all that far. Twenty minutes put them up on a set of pipes, looking through a vent that opened into a hangar with an ugly runt of a vessel. The pirates had come aboard a piece of utter dogshit, the kind of scrapyard salvage that couldn’t get licensed to fly in secure ARGO space. One look at the rusted, twisted, ill-fitting outer hull plates, and Brad would have bet fifty terras it wasn’t airtight.
Unfortunately for everyone aboard the Nazareth, it had been spaceworthy enough to get the pirates this far.
Beside the ship, stacked on shipping palettes, were sorted personal possessions being prepared for transport. As they watched, a pirate came in with an armload of clothes and personal tech. A plouph quartermaster tapped away at a datapad as the delivery pirate dumped his haul into the appropriate piles.
May cupped her hands over Brad’s ear, relying on his hand around her to keep her balance. “How do we get to the datapads?”
They contorted to swap positions. Brad whispered back, “We need a distraction. One of us needs to draw them away from the stuff; the other’ll go in and grab all the datapads you can carry.”
May pulled away to look him in the eye with a scowl.
Brad put his hands back around her ear. “Of course, I’m going to be the distraction. If things go wrong, I do my best thinking in a blind panic. If things go right, I’ll meet you here. If we have to scatter, meet me at the ice cream place.”
Their eyes locked again. A test of wills took place. May didn’t want Brad being the one to risk his neck intentionally getting the pirates to come after him. Brad wasn’t going to allow her to be the bait despite being faster and knowing the ship better than him. After a brief series of glances, glares, raised eyebrows, pursed lips, and headshakes, May sighed.
Then, to Brad’s shock, she planted a kiss on his cheek. “For luck,” she mouthed.
Brad gave her a thumbs-up, then loosened the screws on the vent. He’d have left her the multi-tool to do it herself, but he’d need it wherever he decided to create his distraction, and they hadn’t picked up a second one.
Slinking down the maintenance tunnels on his own, Brad had a thought that made him feel like an utter ass.
This is the best day of my life.
Other than the pirates, he wondered if anyone else could even remotely share his sentiment. He couldn’t even delude himself that May could have said the same. She had a life that must have been filled with birthday parties and Christmases littered with presents, pony rides, sleepovers with best friends, and beach trips where her mom had the money to pay for parking.
Brad got lost twice before finding the corridor outside the hangar bays. A long, bare corridor lined at wide intervals with cargo-sized doors stretched farther than he could see from the vent.
All but one of the screws came out and disappeared into the pocket of Brad’s jeans. The upper left screw he loosened halfway and swung the vent cover up like a butcher’s cleaver. It chopped down slowly, gently settling into place after Brad crawled through.
The coast was clear.
Up ahead, the bay door was open to the plouph vessel.
Brad decided he ought to have a plan more cunning than shout-and-run.
Voices argued, coming from a side corridor and rapidly heading toward Brad’s exposed position.
Thinking quick, he ducked to the near side and pressed himself behind a structural support that jutted a couple dozen centimeters from the wall. Many a time, he’d wished for a bulky, masculine frame packed with muscle. At that moment, he was grateful to be a scrawny proto-adult a few sandwiches past emaciated.
“I swear, if we don’t get movin’ quick, Imma take me one of them extra ships and quit.”
“You ain’t gonna.”
“Gonna,” the first plouph protested. “Too close to human space. Gives me the tall-hair.”
“You get tall-haired going piss in the public pisser.”
“Shaddap.”
“You first.”
In their bickering, neither noticed Brad. Passing through his corridor only took them a few seconds. Brad missed maybe three or four breaths before allowing his lungs back to work.
Think.
He needed a distraction, preferably one that wasn’t explicitly him.
If Brad had been a real mechanic, he could have rigged up some kind of overload or remote-activated trap. Something flashy. Something with bang to it. Actually, a flash-bang grenade would have been smooth right about then. Of course, he had nothing of the sort.
What was loud, insistent, impossible to ignore?
An alert pinged in Brad’s head.
Could it be so simple?
Outside every hangar door was a panel. Most passengers and crew would have focused on the computer screen that displayed the identity of the vessel parked inside, with readouts and data access, and probably a ton of other features. Without registering it, anyone would have known the basic door controls that A-tech and P-tech systems used with virtually no change for centuries.
But there was also the fire suppression manual override.
In the event that auto-suppression systems didn’t catch a fire on their own, anyone prepared to fill out datawork afterward was authorized to pull the hand lever and set off the manual system. The same applied to anyone willing to risk detention, expulsion, or their parents having to pay for damages.
Brad found the lever nearest his escape hatch and pulled.
A blaring alarm bell clanged madly—an actual, physical series of bells, it sounded like. Brad spotted one of the curious, archaic devices overhead as soon as the system triggered.
Snapping his attention away from his amazement that in 2540, someone still relied on a physical bell for an alarm bell, Brad scrambled for the vent.
Shouts from the hangar let him know he didn’t have much time. Brad slid through the vent and lowered himself to the floor before making the climb back onto the pipes where he could reach the cover.
“Da fuck is that noise about?”
“Alarm!”
“We under attack?”
“Dunno? Where’s it comin’ from?”
“All over. Fuck. My head’s crackin’ with this racket.”
Brad held the vent in place, hoping no one spotted his fingertips. But he couldn’t risk the loose vent rattling as running feet pounded past.
Once three plouph had stampeded past, with shaking fingers, Brad tightened the vent in place and rushed back to find the hangar with the datapads.
Light spilled freely through the open vent. It was easy to find. Brad raced to the climbing spot and peeked through.
May stood at the heap of datapads, sifting through them like a picky shopper at an outdoor produce market. Brad waved for her to come back. Who knew how long those pirates would take to figure out an alarm reset or to at least send someone back to guard their plunder?
She didn’t look up.
“Come on!” he dared call out.
“Just a minute,” she replied. Datapad after datapad, she lifted from one spot and discarded politely in another. She did it in haste, but not the kind of desperate haste or decisive looting he’d been expecting.
This was no time to comparison shop.
Brad pulled himself up and into the hangar. He rushed the ten meters to May’s spree-free shopping, ignoring the stench wafting from the plouph’s poorly-kept vessel—were they burning chemical fuels?
“C’mon,” he told her. Picking up as thick a stack of datapads as fit in one hand, with the other, he took her by the wrist.
“Aha!” she cheered quietly, lifting a single datapad in triumph.
The alarm cut out. Silence stripped them of their armor.
“Great. Now move!” Brad ordered.
Making sure May was first inside, Brad dove through the vent. She climbed and swung it shut behind them and joined him panting for breath on the floor.
They put some distance between them and the hangar before either dared speak.
“What was that all about? All you had to do was grab one.”
“I found my datapad.”
Brad couldn’t believe his ears. “You just needed any datapad. Any model. Any shape. So long as it worked, that was good enough.”
“But I know my passcode.”
“Any datapad can send an SOS. You don’t need to unlock it.”
“We’re not thieves,” May replied defensively, albeit quieter.
Brad held up his haul. “Yes, we are.”
May had already started tapping on her device. “Time to officially call for help.”
Brad joined her, grabbing a Juniper X-4 from his pile and using the tiny, inconspicuous icon that enabled emergency mode. “Fuck. No signal.”
“Language,” May chided, not looking up from hers. “Hmm, my last incoming message is from a couple hours before the pirate attack. Looks like they cut the relay.”
Brad flung his X-4 down the corridor like a Bernoulli disc. “Great. No signal; no distress call.”
“Hey, that belongs to someone!”
“I’m sure they’ll be really upset about that in the labor camp they get SOLD TO!” He huffed and gritted his teeth. How could they have been so dumb. Of course, the pirates had control of the ship’s comms. They were too far out for a handheld device to connect to the omni directly.
“What do we do now?”
Brad had a short list of things he wanted to do before he died—or got sold into slavery, he supposed. Most of them weren’t available right now, and the most prominent one, he was in no mood for.
“Without a relay, we’re screwed.”
“Can we… I’m just thinking out loud here… maybe make one?”
Brad chuckled silently. He could swap fuel rods and jettison waste rods. He could work a multi-tool and operate a plasma welder without hurting himself. Cobbling together a makeshift comm relay was so far out of his league it might as well have been magic.
“We’d have better luck tying two aluminum cans together and flushing one out an airlock to get someone to hear us.”
“Do… do other ships have relays?”
“Sure, but where does that get us?”
“Doesn’t your family have a ship docked here? Does it have a comm relay?”
Brad blinked. He’d really never thought about it. The datapad he shared with Mom worked just fine in the middle of nowhere, and that meant that the Radio City must have had one.
“Uh. Yeah. Great idea. Now all we have to do is find a way aboard.”
Drunken laughter didn’t belong here. They were being held at blasterpoint. The pirates had all but explained that they were getting sold into slavery as soon as they got the ship moving again. To top it all off, this was a One Church cathedral!
Despite downing more than her share, Becky was more lucid than her newfound drinking companions. They sat cross-legged or leaned against the altar or lounged sprawled on the floor, passing bottles of cheap wine back and forth.
“…and so Andrew tells him, ‘You’ll be hearing from my attorney,’…”
The other mothers cackled. Becky snickered along. She hadn’t paid attention to the story. Her thoughts weren’t even in the cathedral anymore. A light buzz had floated her mind through the ship to the daycare center where Rhi and Mikey were probably wondering whether they’d ever see their mom again.
Becky wiped her eye with the back of the hand holding her bottle. She wasn’t sharing. This wasn’t a two-puff situation. There wasn’t enough wine stored in the lectern to keep the others occupied and get her properly smashed. Not enough to make her forget her kiddos were scared and missing her.
Grabbing the lectern for support, Becky wobbled to her feet.
“Where you going?” Linda asked. Geez, it had been so long that she was starting to remember their names. “They haven’t announced a new five.”
Five at a time. That was the rule for washroom breaks. The guards took them in groups or not at all. No idea why. Didn’t care. Becky felt the same about the question. Didn’t answer.
“Yo,” she called out to the nearest guard. She’d been picking up their names too. “Deeko, I need to talk.”
“Whatchu want?” He glanced at her wine. “Better not be thinking that a weapon.”
Swaying ominously, Becky bent at the waist and set the near-empty bottle on the floor. It hit the marble with a clank that made her cringe. But the bottle didn’t shatter. A wave of dizziness upon rising forced her to extend her arms to the side for balance before advancing to a conspiratorial distance to the plouph pirate.
“I gotta see my kiddos,” she whispered. Her heavy-lidded gaze met Deeko’s. Interspecies barriers prevented any light going on in those canine eyes that suggested he was taking the hint. “What do I gotta do to make that happen?”
“You see them on the pad.” He jabbed a finger toward the propped datapad broadcasting a feed from the daycare.
Becky shook her head languidly. “My kiddos aren’t this big.” She showed a gap with her thumb and forefinger. “They’re this big.” She held a generous hand at waist height, far taller than Mike but a safe height for not toppling over from bending again. “And they’re not flat, they’re fluffy little cherubs I can squeeze and touch. And I’m asking you what you want in return for letting me see ’em.”
“If you want to join the food bringers, fine. But no one sees the pups.”
Becky rested a hand on the pirate’s chest. “You ain’t picking up what I’m laying down here. Lemme spell it out. You know when one of your guys took Ashleigh for a little ‘solo washroom trip’?”
“The one who vomited?”
“Sure… sure,” Becky played along. That was Ashleigh’s story. But if Becky were one of these uptight squares, she’d have made up a cover story for her friends, too. “But you’ve been on shift for hours now, and you must be tired, pent up. I can relax you, babe.”
“I am on duty, and you will obey. Sit. Be silent.”
“Listen to that?” Becky pressed. “All tense. You need something to release that tension. I can do that for you.”
“Huh?”
OK. This one was dense. Just because they spoke some English apparently didn’t mean they could pick up on innuendo. “Sex. I make you happy, you make me happy by letting me see my ‘pups.’”
Deeko lowered his voice. “You are wine-washed. Go back to your place.”
Becky shook her head. “You’re a pirate. No rules, amirite? If you never had a human before, no worries, man. Mammals are mammals. If you’re not into it, just close your eyes.”
“So you can steal my weapon.”
Becky snorted. “Please… I never fired a blaster. I’m a lover, not a fighter.” Deeko still wasn’t letting his guard down. The plouph’s hands were tight around his blaster rifle. “Look, man. On the level; I’m having a bad day. Taking an interspecies pole ride won’t make it any worse. I’ll do pretty much anything to see my kids. Whatever a plouph likes, I’m into it. Have some fun. Brag to your friends about it someday. ‘Lemme tell you all this crazy shit I got a human chick to do to me.’ Ya know? Just, c’moooon. Cut me a deal here.”
Deeko backed up a step. Becky wobbled forward to keep the distance.
Why wasn’t this working? Any human pirate would be pulling his pants back up by now. “Have you got a friend who might—”
“Fine,” Deeko snapped. Then he lowered his voice. “I will have all the small humans brought here. You will speak no more of this offer. Return to your companions.”
“Groovy,” Becky replied. She swayed her hips as she made her way back to the gaggle of mothers, gritting her teeth in concentration as she dipped briefly to retrieve her wine bottle.
“What was that about?” Fran asked.
Becky smiled. “They’re gonna let us see the kids.”
As she accepted her congratulations from all sides, Becky’s relief at the prospect of seeing Mike and Rhiannon was tempered only slightly by wishing Deeko had taken her up on her proposition.
She had needs, too.
Mort hadn’t wanted to sleep. Neither had he wanted to remain awake. For most humans, the only other option was a chemically induced state somewhere between the two. Luckily, Mort had an alternative to the alternative.
Eyes shut, he drifted away from his physical body, tumbling backward and inward, not so unlike those crazy divers who plumbed the ocean depths with nothing but rubber flippers and a bit of hose clenched between their teeth. Just like those intrepid numpties, he had some idea what he’d find waiting for him—but never a complete picture.
The forest was new, or at least larger than the last time he’d ventured fully into his mental landscape. He didn’t care for it here. Its very presence reminded him of the price he’d paid for reading; its principal occupant bore primary responsibility for Mort’s plight.
“Nebuchadnezzar!” Mort bellowed. “Show yourself. I’m not in the mood for playing Hide and Seek.”
The underbrush rustled.
Mort swiveled his head to glare at the source of the noise. Had his grandfather conjured up critters to populate the phony ecosystem, or was the old coot trying to sneak up on him?
Neither, as it turned out. A familiar pair of hooligans emerged from cover behind the trees, menacing with bow and arrow.
“What we got here?” Laurent asked in a hammy, overwrought accent too phony to attribute to any particular time or place.
Sterling snickered. “Looks like a lost littl’ noble dandy. How much coin ya got in ya purse, milord?”
Mort scowled and shook his head. “What the bloody blazes is this nonsense?”
“I don’t think he wants to pay,” Laurent stated to his partner.
Stepping forward like a director unhappy with the performance on stage, Mort inspected his two unfortunate inmates. They had cloudy, vacant eyes and dumb animal expressions on their slack faces.
“Maybe a stick in the belly’ll loosen them purse strings.”
Two twangs. Two arrows flew. Two arrows stopped midair a foot from Mort’s chest—neither had even aimed for a belly wound despite their threatening boast. “You two are idiots, but you’re not this kind of idiot.”
With a wave of his hand, the highwaymen’s eyes cleared.
“What’m I—?”
“Who’s—oh shit, it’s HIM!”
Dropping the bows and leaving their existential crises unresolved, Laurent and Sterling fled into the woods. Mort let them go. If Nebuchadnezzar wanted to play Robin Hood with the mental flotsam in Mort’s head, good for him. Matters outside needed attention, consideration, and a second set of wits to twist them ’round and look for loopholes.
A rumbling of wooden wheels and the clop of hooves heralded the arrival of a carriage. Mort spared a glance down to find a pair of ruts in the soft forest soil, with him standing right between. Rather than accede to the fantasy and step aside, the wizard held his ground.
Whinnies and the shouted “whoa” of a driver accompanied the sudden halt of the carriage just short of running Mort down. The charger stood 17 hands and had nostrils that flared like the bellows of a forge. It pulled a carriage lacquered black and trimmed in gold. With a snap of his fingers, Mort denied the existence of both.
Nebuchadnezzar wore a doublet and hose, had sleeves with those silly slits that showed a different colored fabric beneath, and sported a pair of ankle boots with curled toes. At his hip, he carried a bejeweled scabbard. He appeared in a seated position, five feet off the ground, and gravity promptly deposited him on the turf.
“Oof! What’d you do that for?”
“Enough clowning around!” Mort snapped. “And do you even know how to use one of those?”
Nebuchadnezzar brushed himself off and drew the blade. Despite the gaudy trappings of its sheath, the weapon was a utilitarian fencing saber. “Freshman elective at Oxford. Rodney Dershwitz taught the class. I wasn’t as good as Hippolyta Greenweald, but she didn’t make the varsity debate team until junior year, whereas I—”
“Shut up,” Mort ordered.
“But you asked—”
Mort cut him off with a raised finger. “I didn’t draw the very essence out of those lowlifes for your entertainment.”
“Waste not, want not…”
“I have a real problem.”
“I’m aware. But you seemed intent on ignoring me, so I stiffened my upper lip and carried on as if you were acting like a proper wizard and not some namby-pamby afraid to wreck a starship just on account of needing it for air and transportation.”
“You think I ought to begin lighting funeral pyres, bystanders be damned?”
Nebuchadnezzar waved a hand, then furrowed his wrinkly old brow. He tried again, staring at an empty spot beside him accusingly.
Mort performed the same gesture, and a pair of comfortable easy chairs appeared. The two wizards settled themselves as the forest faded around them, replaced by the guest faculty break room at the Harvard School of Wizardry. Both of them had given lectures while working for the Library of Plundered Tomes, and Mort had always preferred the decor over the equivalent at Oxford.
“I was going for a park bench.”
“Why I didn’t let it work,” Mort grumbled. “Now, as to business. How can I purge the damn space boat of its rats?”
“Fire.”
“Without turning the hull into a colander and spilling all the air into astral space.”
“Make more.”
“You and I both know I’m not cut out for terramancy.”
“You packed for emergencies.”
“I left that necklace in my luggage. And it’s really only enough for one or two people. And it smells like zebra shit.” It had been a joke purchase by Nancy on a trip to the Kilimanjaro Preserve. He’d hated every minute of the trip, and upon opening the gift once they got home, he’d been greeted with an aroma that brought the whole ordeal vividly back to life. She’d laughed uproariously at his reaction, and he couldn’t even be mad. It was a good joke. Now, it was a lifeline that might spare Mort a suffocating demise. “I need a way that keeps the Ramseys safe, too. Or at least the children. I swore an oath.”
Nebuchadnezzar clucked his tongue. “See? This is what happens when you promise Person A to keep Person B safe. Never do that. Promise A you’ll keep A safe, B you’ll keep B safe, and swear each to silence on the matter. You’d be shocked how frequently you can get away with failing to fulfill an oath when the only other one who knows about it is dead. To date, I’ve never had one of them come back, tap me on the shoulder, and say, ‘Excuse me, you deceitful old fuck, but you said I wasn’t going to die going in first.’”
“You’re horrible, you know,” Mort deadpanned as a cup of tea delivered itself. The Harvard faculty lounge enchantments were efficient as always, even in fictitious replica.
Nebuchadnezzar spread his arms in an admission of guilt, then took a proffered cup himself. “Thank you,” he said to the enchantment. “You see, your problem is you’re trying to eat the cake you’re saving for later. Whereas the appropriate response is to simply eat the cake, then procure another just like it.”
“People aren’t interchangeable.”
The elder wizard shrugged and spoke past the cup at his lips, held with pinkie finger upraised. “They very much are.”
“I need a better plan.”
Decades prior, this wizard had been him. He’d seen portraits, heard comments. They looked alike at a given age, sounded alike enough that old friends confused them at gatherings. Would another sixty or seventy years floating around the galaxy jade Mordecai The Brown just as thoroughly? Had it been a mistake, looking backward for advice instead of seeking his own path?
“You’ll never know the outcome ahead of time. What lurks below the water’s surface, you’ll never see until you take the plunge.”
“I was thinking water analogies when I got here,” Mort replied, narrowing his eyes.
“Your every stray thought infects this place. I had to stitch a seaside diving school up to a castle I’d been working on. Made it one of them wave-kissed cliff fortresses. Shoved the mid-second-millennium boat out of the way since it refused to disintegrate like a good little ship. My point stands: you need to act. Then, when you know how it shakes out, react. Solving your pirate problem might cause a thousand different problems, and fussing over which ones they’ll be won’t burn up any pirates. Simply deal with your spacefaring scallywags, then see what needs dealing with next. Seriously, Mordecai, it’s how all life goes when you boil it right down.
“And few problems are as straightforward as killing the magically inept when everyone around you wants them dead.”
“What do you propose I do when the ship breaks up and I’ve got thousands of innocent bystanders gasping for air?”
Nebuchadnezzar shrugged. “Start a pocket of air, then collect minds. Water’s fine in here. I could do with the company. More minds like cauliflower, fewer cabbages. Not that I’m in any position to be picky, but egad, you foisted a couple of window-licking lummoxes on me. Can’t even playact without a dose of sorcery to Cyrano their de Bergerac for them.”
“Kindly stop that.”
“Look, I can make my own fun. But with only those two clods for company—”
“I told them they’d be free to live out their existence here in relative peace. That was the deal for the information I needed—and may occasionally need in the future—from those two. So knock it off with the mind control charms.”
Nebuchadnezzar fluttered a hand. “So be it. I’ll find some other pastime. Maybe something of a seaside village, now that we’ve got a sea.”
“Do you have any ideas on how to dispose of the pirates without damaging the ship?”
Nebuchadnezzar’s sigh was wistful. “Afraid not, my boy. Subtlety was never your forte. Spacefaring tech or the fires of righteous justice. Have your pick. I’m afraid this is what you get, stranding yourself on a science barge.”
Four eyes, paired in twos, kept a vigil on the hangar hallway. The vents had become their second home, their domain, their lone advantage over the pirates. Had the passengers and crew of the Nazareth beat feet for the maintenance tunnels at the first sign of trouble, Brad would have sworn the plouph never would have found them.
From chatter, he knew the pirates were trying to get the ship back up and running on more than backup power. The ones out in the public areas of the ship were more outwardly concerned with crowd control and plundering. If the two groups could have gotten together, they could have swept the ship for stowaways and saboteurs.
Brad was convinced of a saboteur. The ship was fine when the trip started, and it had been over a day since they’d been moving. Shit like that didn’t happen by accident. When he was captain of his own battleship, he’d remember to search the whole ship for unwanted guests, not just the easy parts.
Unfortunately, their ubiquitous spy portals didn’t come with a choice of view. The nearest vent was three hangar doors down from the one that granted access to the Radio City. As the pair huddled together, holding their breath, they watched a load of treasure plundered from the ships glide past on a grav sled.
At first, the stolen junk was just scenery. Clothes, appliances, kitchenware. The pirates didn’t seem picky. Half the things they stole wouldn’t get the time of day from any pawnbroker worth his license. As they made the trips, he watched for signs, patterns, anything they could use to make their way past the pirates and into Hangar 14.
Brad noticed May’s lips were moving.
Once the current pack had patrolled past, he whispered, “What are you saying?”
She issued a quick “shh” and resumed talking to herself silently.
A short while later, the grav sled came back, warning of its impending arrival by the telltale hum of repulsors.
Once they had gone past, Brad looked over again. May continued, her words defying Brad’s amateur attempt at lip-reading. Probably praying, he figured. Just watching her mouth move fascinated him. So close. So, so close…
They’d developed a foxhole familiarity, as Dad called it. Rules of societal behavior relaxed. Normally, putting an arm around someone of the opposite sex and pulling close to them was taboo if you didn’t have some kind of arrangement. Physical attraction being involved was a strike against, not for. But if May wanted to hold onto the vent with one hand and him with the other, he wasn’t going to object.
The next time the workmanlike thieves strolled past pushing a sled full of other people’s possessions, May stopped.
“Five minutes, eighteen seconds round-trip,” she declared quietly. “We have gaps of…” He watched the math in her eyes as she glanced upward with a slight frown. “Seventy-one seconds at their ship, just over two minutes when they’re looting. What can we do with that?”
What was she asking him for? She was the one with the clock in her head. “How sure are you of those times?”
“Mozart’s Spring Song is 60 beats per minute. That’s what I keep in my head when—”
The grav sled hum approached, and they both shut their mouths. Once the sound departed, May picked up the conversation and addressed Brad’s skeptical raised eyebrow.
“What? I practice piano. Don’t you play an instrument?”
“Not anymore,” Brad replied with a restrained huff. “Those assholes just carted off my dad’s guitar.”
“They’re at your ship!” She sounded excited that all his best stuff was going to be sold in some out-of-ARGO black market.
“Swell…”
“No. This means that once they’re done, they won’t go back there!”
OK. A plan. A shitty, losing-all-his-stuff plan. But a plan nonetheless. Brad nodded his assent.
They waited.
Oh, the pain of that wait.
What pirates wanted with hand-me-down clothes that once belonged to Jamie, toddler toys, and dad’s plastic music platter collection, Brad couldn’t imagine. But it was the load that included the holo-projector that did it for him.
He gritted his teeth the whole time it drifted past. He continued gritting until the grav-sled hum faded from the human audible range. Then, he screamed inside, and the tiniest piece of that scream leaked out between his lips.
“Those. FUCKERS!” he whispered at the bottom of his lungs.
May rubbed his back. “It’s OK. They’re just things. Things can be replaced.”
“Not on what my dad pulls in…”
“One problem at a time.”
Despite himself, Brad grinned at her. She was growing into quite the pragmatist. Maybe there was hope for the suckers in the One Church after all.
They settled back in and kept watch. More loads went past. Brad identified the objects while trying not to associate them to memories of his brother and sisters. It was seeing Mike’s toys that hit him hardest. While he supposed he must have played with the blocks and whirligig doodads they gave Rhiannon to keep her occupied, he didn’t remember them as his toys. Most of what Mike played with had been Brad’s. Of those, a goodly percentage had come from Jamie.
“That stuff’s someone else’s,” Brad declared of the first load that didn’t grab him by the heartstrings on the way by.
“You sure?”
Brad nodded.
“Let’s wait one more load to be sure.”
“No. They’re done. Let’s get moving before we lose our window.”
“We’ve already lost a chunk of it arguing. Besides, the longer gap is the other direction.”
Brad thought a moment. She was right, but he couldn’t cave quite so quickly. “OK. Fine. You win. But let’s get the screws ready.”
They loosened the screws on their vent and waited.
Next time the grav sled passed, they made their move.
Brad went up first by silent accord. The pushing he received to boost him through involved hands placed where Mom had raised him not to touch a girl. Once topside, he took May by the hands and pulled her up to join him. Dad claimed he could tell so much during a simple handshake that it bordered on wizardry. In trying to explain it, he’d passed along a few tips; Brad took May’s clammy hands to indicate nerves.
Way to go, Dad wisdom. Some real Svengali stuff helping him figure that one out.
They raced on stocking feet into the open hangar where the Radio City stood with its ramp down. Neither of them even knew where they’d finally abandoned their shoes. The security lock applied by the One Church mechanic lay plasma-burnt and discarded on the deck plates.
Brad went aboard first, more because he knew his way around rather than in case they ran smack dab into the pirates. Last thing they needed was a Goldilocks Incident, where they woke a lazy pirate who’d crashed on the Radio City couch.
The couch was practically all that had been left behind. Had the ship lost hull integrity, less would have been sucked into the Black Ocean than the pirates removed. Major furniture, the fridge, scattered trash that looked more like it had been dropped than intentionally left behind. Brad tried not to think of all that had been lost.
“It’s… nice,” May commented.
Ignoring the robbers’ carnage, Brad marched straight for the bridge. He fought back the temptation to check his room, his most personal possessions. The grav sled had been piled haphazardly; there hadn’t been time or opportunity to get an inventory as they trucked it all past.
Brad flopped into the pilot’s chair. Despite being well-formed to Dad’s larger frame, the crushed cushioning of the seat was the most comfort he’d felt since this ordeal began. Involuntarily, his eyes closed, and he let out a groan.
“No time for a nap,” May chided, slipping gingerly into the co-pilot’s chair. “The console’s dead. How do we get it started?”
“I just need to input the—”
“I saw one go inside!”
The two of them froze. Their eyes met.
Oh shit! Brad conveyed eloquently with the whites of his eyes.
What do we do? We’re cornered! May shouted with her frantically dilated pupils.
Squeezing through the narrow gap between the cockpit chairs, Brad pushed off and zipped into the living room, taking advantage of his socks to slide to a halt. Dropping to his knees, he popped a catch that was no longer concealed by a snack-stained play rug for the littles.
“A secret compartment?”
Duh. Brad gestured for May to climb inside. She didn’t hesitate. Brad scrambled in after her and pulled the panel down. A soft click, and Brad fumbled for the manual lock to seal them safely inside.
They jostled and wriggled until they found a mutually comfortable position. The pirates probably hadn’t found the hidden latch. Dad kept the compartment empty as a matter of due course, just in case he needed to smuggle something—or in instances such as this, someone.
Footsteps.
Boots.
“Where are you, little human?” The voice was azrin. The plouph might get bitchy about them hiding on them, but they wanted slaves to sell. They were merchandise, something to be handled, if not with care, then at least with not-killing. With a pissed-off azrin, there was no way to be sure of that. “Come out of hiding. Go back with the others. Make me waste time, and I will—”
There was a pause. A long, ominous pause.
Brad could hear his breath, could hear May’s, could hear the faint creak of aged steel under a heavy weight.
A booted step. Then another. Too slow for walking. The azrin was searching.
A dull thud. Claws scratched against metal. “Come out, little humans. I can hear you down there.”
Brad closed his mouth, held his breath. May let out an involuntary yip, then did likewise.
More scratching. A clack, where the azrin must have found the latch.
C’mon, Dad. Tell me you didn’t get a “deal” on that lock.
“So, a smuggler hatch. Clever humans. I should come back with a cutting tool. Burn you out. But I’m no plouph. Stay there. Fear makes the meat soft.”
A horrible scraping sound reverberated through the compartment, followed by a thunderous thump.
The azrin’s laughter faded along with the sound of departing bootsteps.
Lungs ready to burst, Brad let out his breath and panted to catch it again.
“What do we do now?” May gasped. “I’m pretty sure that was your couch that just got dumped on top of us.”
“Probably,” Brad agreed.
“It sounded heavy.”
“It is.”
“We might not have long. If that pirate comes back… We have to push and see if we can lift the couch off us.”
Brad wished he had the kind of muscle to pull off a stunt like that. “I have a better idea. Scoot over.”
“Over where? I’m as far over as I can go.”
In the pitch darkness, Brad could understand the mistake. “No, you’re not. It’s a dual compartment. There’s, like, a doorframe sort of thing, but you can slide between sides. Just kind of… up and over it.”
This wasn’t how he envisioned wrestling with a girl in the dark, but after several contortions that resulted in elbows and shoulder blades digging into ribs, faces, and arms, May rolled over the structural support and into the adjacent compartment.
“What now?”
“Feel around until you find the release. It’s just a quarter-turn lever. Hand sized. I’ve been able to twist it since I was eight.”
“Found it. It’s… it’s…” May grunted. “Stuck.”
“Shit. My bad.” Brad fumbled around and released the security lock. “Try now.”
Ka-thunk.
The hatch popped open. May sat up, then pulled herself out. Brad commando crawled through and exited, then headed straight to the cockpit.
“What’s the plan?” May asked.
They retook their seats, not bothering to shut the smuggler’s compartment behind them.
“Simple. We send a comm.”
“Like an SOS?”
“Not a general distress call. No one will believe it on a private channel.”
Brad finished entering the Radio City’s activation code. The console lit, drawing on battery power without the main engines powered up.
“What then?”
Already tapping at the comm controls, Brad maintained his concentration until the sequence of letters and symbols was complete, then hit SEND. “I only have two comm IDs committed to memory: the general ship ID for the Radio City, and the one I just entered.”
“Who’d you call?” The panel didn’t show it as a known ID. This was, as far as the Radio City computer was concerned, a stranger.
The comm connected before he could answer. “Hey, Fartface, what’s the buzz?”
Caught between thoughts, Brad’s brain stumbled. “What if I’d been Mom or Dad?”
“Risk I was willing to take,” Jamie replied. “Now, make it quick. I’m on duty in five.”
“Look, I know you’ve got no reason to believe me, except this time I need you to believe me.”
“Jesus, what’s up your ass?”
Brad was on a quick clock, and he didn’t know which was shorter, the azrin deciding to come back for them or Jamie ending the comm to go back to playing navy pilot.
“Jamie… I need your help.”
Sailor 3rd Class Jamie Ramsey buttoned her uniform top, realized she’d offset it by one button, then undid it and tried again. Half a meter away, Martinelli was having better luck getting his pants on.
“Shit,” Lopez mumbled from the top bunk on the opposite side. “I’m in that EV safety briefing in ten minutes. That’s what I get for being polite.” She slid off and squeezed past Jamie, jostling with an offhanded familiarity that neither gave a second thought. Sharing a cramped 4-bunk with someone tended to have that effect.
“Hand me my shirt?” Martinelli asked, pointing past her.
Jamie grabbed the garment just as the opening notes of a familiar song warbled from Jamie’s navy-issued datapad. It was a genre of music she couldn’t hate no matter how hard she tried, but she didn’t need to wait for the chorus to know it was from the Radio City.
It was certainly too late for THEM to say they were sorry.
“Trade you,” Jamie replied. Martinelli lifted the device from Jamie’s lunch-tray-sized nightstand and exchanged it for his shirt. She hooked a thumb at the door. “Now git. This is personal.”
Not that the sex hadn’t been personal. It was just a different sort of personal. Like talking about your counseling sessions at the firing range; some things just didn’t mix.
Jamie accepted the stolen kiss and playful grope as Martinelli made his way past. As soon as the door shut behind him, she accepted the voice comm.
“Hey, Fartface, what’s the buzz?”
“What if I’d been Mom or Dad?” Brad protested.
“Risk I was willing to take,” Jamie answered calmly. “Now, make it quick. I’m on duty in five.”
It was more like thirty-five, but Brad didn’t need to know that. Kid could talk the microphone off a fast-food kiosk if you let him get going.
“Look, I know you’ve got no reason to believe me, except this time I need you to believe me.”
“Jesus, what’s up your ass?”
“Jamie… I need your help,” he blurted.
Jamie winced. This was the one contingency she’d made for him, just in case. One comm ID to memorize. If he ever needed to hit the escape pod on the Good Ship Lollipop, she didn’t want him joining up with a pirate gang or getting into organized crime to make it to adulthood. “Was it Mom or Dad?”
“They’ve got both!”
“Shit, where are you? Don’t let Child Services send you to Peractorum. I’ll arrange leave, maybe get dispensation for a planetside post until—”
“Shut up and listen. I’m in eyndar space. Dad booked a missionary cathedral ship gig, and we got boarded by plouph pirates. I don’t need you to adopt me. I need you to hop in a Typhoon with a bunch of your navy buddies and kick some ass!”
Jamie’s throat closed. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. When she regained the power of speech, she issued a threat. “If this is another prank like the Silde Slims people looking for me or that phony Bronze League recruiter on my birthday…”
“Pirates,” Brad reiterated. “We’re aboard the missionary ship Nazareth, just into eyndar space, 1 AU deep, and you can disown me as a brother if there aren’t like a hundred pirates on board!”
“Maybe more like fifty. It’s a big ship, and we’ve been mostly hiding,” a second voice added.
Well, that changed things. Brad might have been able to put up a friend to helping with a scam, but this girl sounded earnest. More than that, she sounded scared.
“It’s my ass on the line if this is fake,” Jamie warned.
“PLEASE! Just send Earth Navy!”
Jamie swallowed. Prankster for sure, but Brad was a pretty levelheaded kid. This didn’t sound like bullshit for once.
“Relay me your transponder—never mind; I remember the Radio City ID. You hang tight, don’t make trouble, and wait to get rescued. Help is on the way.”
“Thanks, sis, you’re the—”
She felt awful cutting him off mid-sentence thanking her, but her finger had already descended toward the END button on her datapad. There was just no time to waste on pleasantries.
Racing through the corridors of the ENV Nairobi, Jamie headed for the next link in her chain of command. She paused only once, when she crossed paths with Cmdr. Owens, Martinelli’s boss and leader of the Nairobi’s resident squadron of Typhoon fighter pilots. Her salute was brief but properly given and returned with a certain “I know you’re sleeping with my wingman” weariness.
It occurred to Jamie to deliver news of a civilian vessel under pirate control just two star systems away right then and there. But with navy datawork loops, it might take longer to get to someone who could make the call to divert course and enact a rescue.
Jamie arrived at the security station on Deck 3 panting for breath.
“You’re late, Ramsey,” Lt. Bergeron informed her.
“Sorry, sir,” Jamie responded smartly, a reflex developed since enlisting that hadn’t existed within her previously. “But I received a personal comm that constitutes a civilian distress call.”
“You what?” the lieutenant demanded. He rose from his monitoring station and took the datapad Jamie proffered.
It being a navy-issued device, her datapad took a transcript of all her conversations. Was she proud of every word it recorded? Hell, no. But was it worth a thorough review of her correspondence to make sure Brad, Mike, and the rugrat got out of eyndar space with their skins intact? Fuck, yeah.
She watched in tense silence as Lt. Bergeron’s eyes scanned back and forth. He didn’t hand the device back, instead opening a comm to the bridge. “Captain, we’ve received a distress call via non-standard channels.”
Captain Loralee Kim responded promptly. “Relay it to the bridge and report in person, immediately.”
“Aye, sir,” Lt. Bergeron replied before closing the comm. He rose and leveled a finger at Jamie. “You’re with me.”
“Aye, sir,” Jamie responded, falling into step as they double-timed it to the nearest lift.
Jamie had been all over the Nairobi. But context mattered. On duty, standing guard over vital areas of the ship, she was furniture. Now, she was being brought to the bridge as a witness, as a character reference for her idiot kid brother. But Lt. Bergeron had read the words. He knew her reservations about Brad and the shit he’d been known to pull.
Sometimes, you just have to believe the wolf is out there and be willing to be fooled again.
Lt. Bergeron led the way onto the bridge. He pulled up beside the captain’s chair. “Sir?”
Cpt. Kim had her datapad out, no doubt containing a copy of the transcript. “Crewman Ramsey, this message was from your brother?”
Jamie stood at attention. “Yes, sir.”
“You believe him to be something of a troublemaker?” Cpt. Kim asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Yes, sir,” Jamie answered truthfully.
“But not this time.”
“No, sir.”
The tactical officer, Lt. Cmdr. Krejci, called out, “Captain, we have record of a One Church registered vessel, Nazareth, crossing into Eyndar Empire space 37 hours ago under a cultural exemption per Section 38-J of the Barren Moon Treaty. According to the listening station at Gamma Eridani, their last recruiting broadcast was 35 hours ago.”
“Didn’t take them long to find trouble,” Cpt. Kim remarked. She turned to the helmsman, “Plot an intercept course. Last known coordinates from Crewman Ramsey’s comm.”
“Captain, I’d like to remind you,” Cmdr. Savard, the ship’s executive officer, stepped in. He was ancient by active-deployment standards, a hard, wrinkled walnut of a man whose current position exceeded every ambition, and who walked the ship as a living embodiment of ‘by the book.’ “Armed vessels are forbidden from entering eyndar space. We’ll be in violation of the treaty.”
“What of it?” Cpt. Kim demanded.
Savard just shrugged. “As I said, it was merely a reminder. Someone had to point it out for the record. Damned if we ought to leave one of those missionary ships to the mercy of the dogs’ protection. Hell, those pirates are probably privateers.”
The captain turned to the comms duty officer. “Peverly, transmit a report to high command. The Admiralty ought to be aware of some datawork coming their way. But if they eyndar didn’t want us intervening, they shouldn’t have allowed pirates to attack ships that are guests in their space. Miller, drop us to wartime astral depth.”
As the view out the front windows of the bridge faded to a deep, rich gray, Jamie couldn’t contain herself any longer. Protocol be damned, she spoke out of turn.
“Thank you, sir.”
Cpt. Kim looked at her with steely eyes. “None of us enlisted to watch across imaginary lines as civilians fend for themselves. That brother of yours… how old is he?”
“Twelve, sir. Um. Maybe thirteen.”
“Well, if we arrive in time to save that ship, he’ll be a hero. Estimated time to intercept?” the captain called out the latter.
“Seventeen minutes,” Miller replied.
Jesus, it was fast down in this part of the astral. No civilian got to see the sky outside their freighter window look frightful. There were ghost stories of ships with failed astral drives stranded down so deep that no one ever found them again. The Nairobi skirted the very edge of the magically possible, all on the word of a punk kid who would be lucky to reach 14 without a police record.
“I won’t let him get a swelled head,” Jamie promised.
The buzz wore off. It always did. Time and again, such a realization merely launched the search for a new high. The next high. It didn’t need to be bigger, better, different than any other. It just needed to shut off the loud for a while. Becky considered that she might not find another decent mind-fuzz. These pirates were looking to sell, and buyers were unlikely to be the sorts who spent extra to get their slaves a little fried when they needed a mental break.
Rhiannon raced up and down the central aisle in a game with the other children that mostly seemed to consist of screeching and velocity.
“Mommy, look what I made,” Mike exclaimed.
Becky collected her thoughts as they clung like a castaway to the wreckage of her sinking mellow. Mike proudly held up a shoelace he’d removed from his shoe and tied into a tangle of knots. “That’s bitchin’, babe. Nice job.”
Without warning, the lights in the cathedral brightened. A rumble in the floors reestablished the long-absent normal of a ship under power, so often ignored that its renewed presence served to highlight the oddity of existing on backup batteries.
At age four, all that was insufficient to distract Mike from his project. “Do you know who it is?”
Oh, Lordy. It was a sculpture. Becky accepted the shoelace artwork for closer inspection, squinting and giving it her best appraising mom-look. Despite her foggy brain, her instinct guided her. “Looks just like me.”
Mike beamed. “I’m gonna make one of Daddy, too.” He began the laborious process of unlacing the other shoe.
Becky didn’t care. If it kept him busy and from being scared, she was willing to sacrifice a couple shoelaces for the cause. Damned if she’d be the one to untie that knot, though. Half the point of kids was pawning off drudge work like that to the older ones. And if Brad wasn’t up to the task, maybe the wizard could manage.
“Not good,” someone in the pew behind her said. “The ship’s powered up again.”
“Maybe something else’ll come up,” a second someone back there replied. “I don’t want to die here, but I don’t see letting myself or Rita get taken as slaves.”
Despite no one asking, Becky felt compelled to butt in. Slouching, and with half-closed eyes, she watched the astral out the cathedral ceiling. “We’re all born dying. You can only guide the journey, not change the destination.”
“Go crawl back into a bottle, lush. People like you should—”
“Ree-bee-kuk Ram-say,” a plouph shouted for all the cathedral to hear.
Becky flopped an arm into the air, wrist limp. “Present.” Seconds later, the plouph appeared with an azrin for a bodyguard. “No need for the muscle, man. Like, I’m half not here. Little lemon and garlic butter and you got scampi, cuz I’m totally noodles right now.”
All business, the plouph checked his datapad. “You are the co-owner of the vessel known as Radiocity.”
Becky put up two hands, a word’s length apart. “Radio.” She moved the hands to the right. “City. Like, it’s a place, not a disease. Why’s that so hard?”
Before she knew it, Becky was on her feet, being dangled by the armpit from the hand of the azrin bodyguard. It was the azrin who addressed her. His breath stank of meat. “We need codes to your ship. You will give.”
Focus came only with effort at such close range. She met the azrin’s eye. “Find me my purse.”
“The codes are in a purse?” the plouph asked.
“Got a little packet. Teensy tablets. Peppermint scent. Fix that breath right up. Shh. Our little secret.”
The azrin shook her. “The code!”
With her free hand, Becky waggled her fingers. “It’s a finger thing. Like a song you can sing, but when you’re not singin’, you don’t know the words? It’s like that.”
“Fine,” the plouph snapped. He looked to his azrin buddy. “Take her to her ship. Get what you need from her.”
“Excuse me,” a familiar voice called as Becky’s stumbling feet started down the aisle, barely bearing any of her weight. “But I don’t think you’re taking her anywhere.”
Gaudy, gear-twisted hell, Mort wished the universe would make up its mind. Put him on the block at an eyndar slave market, he’d have a clear mandate to end the situation in flame. Let the plouph start executing prisoners, same. Or, conversely, maybe some of these yappy-lipped churchies could talk the blasters out of the pirates’ hands. Stranger things had happened in the Milky Way, albeit not within Mort’s purview.
The longer he sat amid the weeping, yammering, hand-wringing masses, the closer he got to picking an outcome of his choosing and allowing damnation to claim its prize early.
Shaking and haggard, Father Laszlo parked himself beside Mort on the otherwise empty pew. The longer this all wore on, the less welcome the wizard’s company had become. He wished the effect extended to the tiresome God-botherer.
“I need your help,” the priest gasped out in a whisper.
Mort looked him up and down. “Wet cloth and an ice charm. That’s what my mother did when—”
“Not that. My discomfort comes not from my injuries.”
“Try one of the other priests if you’re scared.”
“Listen to me,” Father Laszlo snapped, fighting to keep his voice down. “Can you not feel it?”
Shutting his eyes, Mort played along. Yes, when he calmed his thoughts, searched the vicinity, and examined the cathedral with finely honed mystical senses, he recognized the struggle taking place. “Ugh. I’m not here to break up playground fights. Let the twerp use his magic. If that plouph can unzip his pants without both hands, I’d be surprised.”
“Not him. Her.” Father Laszlo aimed with his finger low, below the top of the pews, where none could see his target but Mort. Not turning his neck, he glanced in the indicated direction. There was a woman, maybe his age, seated with her feet up on her pew, knees hugged to her body. Dark hair fell as she hunched, obscuring her face.
“Lemme guess…”
“She’s a ward of the church, seeking sanctuary from her own dark temptations. This was information I held in strictest confidence, yet I must divulge it because I require your aid.”
Mort snorted. “That slip of a thing.”
“Magical power has nothing to do with the earthly vessel. Natasha is—”
“She’s a wisp of mystical power wrapped in a wisp of a body. Truth in advertising. Better than the toothsoap adverts. And don’t lecture me about assessing magical power. The two of you working together couldn’t pull a card trick with me around.”
“Good,” Father Laszlo gasped. “Because Natasha is too much for me, an elephant who’s outgrown the twine that once kept her in check. If she decides to fight me… well, it’s all I can manage to quell her instinctive tugs.”
Two pats on the shoulder, and Mort shuffled past the priest, heading for the amateur wizard so scared of her own powers that she turned to the One Church to deny her own existence.
Plouph and azrin pirates had become decor as much as polished wood and pious statuary. Mort paid them no mind, and they did likewise. Frankly, he was doing their work for them, pacifying one of the hostages.
“Mind if I sit here?” Mort asked softly, coming up from her blind side.
“Go away,” Natasha mumbled.
Mort sat down anyway. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Quiet. Calm. Leave the rules as they are for now.
The universe heeded. Arcane powers that thrashed like a wolf with its foot caught in a trap suddenly stilled as if frozen in a block of ice.
All the lights in the cathedral brightened. He blinked to clear his thoughts. No. That had to be a coincidence. He couldn’t will broken science back to working, could he?
Natasha looked up then. Unbrushed hair fell across her face, but he could still tell by red-rimmed eyes that she’d done her share of crying. “What happened just then?”
“I’m like you,” he assured her. It was a lie. She was like him in that both saw holovids while technologists were stuck in a flatvid world. Beyond that, she was a bucket of water to an ocean, a candle trying to outshine a noontime sun.
“He promised.”
“He needed help.”
“Because I’m a monster. Like you.”
That drew a chuckle. “You’re right on one count, young lady.” He’d been right on one count in his initial assessment. She was his age at the least, possibly approaching her forties, depending how many of those age-disguising techno serums and elixirs she used. But wizardry was nothing if not condescending. Age lent power; power lent age. “But you’re no monster. Be nice and spare the old starch-collar straining his puny mind to the breaking point trying to stop your flailing.”
“But…” She gave Mort the once-over.
“I don’t care to spend the breadth of this sob-story play pinning the laws of physics to the marble over your objections. Take some control of yourself, or I’ll just turn you loose, stop Father Laszlo from stopping you whatsoever.”
“You wouldn’t!”
Mort shrugged. “I don’t see why not? I don’t find anything wrong with magic. Quite the contrary, in fact. This sort of suppression is rude, bordering on the vulgar. It’s meant for bowling alleys and darts at the pub, courtrooms and battlefields. You’d like to burn these pirates, wouldn’t you?” He made sure his voice didn’t carry beyond the two of them.
Natasha shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Pity,” Mort said with a huff. “You’d feel better.”
“Ree-bee-kuk Ram-say,” a plouph shouted for all the cathedral to hear. Mort spared a glancing scowl, wondering what the bastards were up to now.
“Present,” Becky replied merrily, sounding like a hungover college co-ed who’d arrived just in time for roll call.
She shook her head wider, slower, more emphatically. “No. Killing and magic are both deadly sins.”
“Not arguing otherwise. Aboard a ship, it’s twitchy. Fuzzles the science making air and all that. But killing someone who threatened you, who wished you harm? Damn right, that feels good.”
“The code!” one of the azrin pirates bellowed.
Mort looked up to see Becky hanging by the upper arm in the grasp of one of the brutes. “Pardon me a moment.”
“What are you going to do?” Natasha asked.
Mort shrugged with his lips pursed. He had too many options, none of them any good. Which he selected might depend on how the mood struck in the moment.
“Take her to her ship. Get what you need from her.”
Mort strode down the aisle with growing confidence. He couldn’t decide when it might be the right time to potentially end every life aboard the Nazareth, but he had one simple, short-term goal upon which he could set his sights.
“Excuse me, but I don’t think you’re taking her anywhere.”
“Sit down, human!” The plouph had the gall to aim a blaster rifle at him.
“You’re not going to shoot anyone. You want slaves to sell. Egad, man. At least decide what kind of villainy you’re about. You can either—”
Mort had just enough time to clench his jaw and turn his head before the butt of the plouph’s blaster rifle struck. It took considerable willpower not to incinerate the lot of them on the spot—and likely a fair number of nearby hostages, too—in a reflexive wash of retaliatory flame.
Stumbling in a daze, Mort caught himself on the back of a pew as his knees gave out. As he pushed himself back up to his feet, another blow to the back of the head stunned him.
They want me alive. Beaten is an example; dead is a waste.
It was a tough sell to a hardened killer like Mort, but Mort knew Mort well enough to close the sale. Finding himself facedown on the floor, he rolled onto his back, swallowing a mouthful of blood that spilled from his nose and the insides of his cheek.
He stared upward. A rifle butt poised above him, ready to descend again should he decide to rise. Beyond his attacker, Mort had a spectacular view of the cosmos. Technophiles claimed that the astral was a dull, flat, undifferentiated gray, yet he saw beauty in the subtle currents and flows that escaped them. The cathedral’s glassteel dome allowed a wide view.
And he was the first to see a giant vessel of ARGO design emerge from the deeper astral just above them.
Mort grinned up at his tormentor with bloody teeth. “Last chance. Surrender, and I’ll take you prisoner.”
“Stupid human!”
As the blaster rifle tried to come down, its owner rose.
Bones cracked. Screams choked off.
Becky stumbled free of her azrin captor.
Mort rolled and pushed himself to his hands and knees.
“It’s Earth Navy! We’re saved!” someone shouted, pointing toward the transparent dome above.
Just then, the PA system blared, “Attention pirate scum. This is Captain Loralee Kim of the ENV Nairobi, we have disabled your engines. Stand down and prepare to be boarded.”
“No!” a distant pirate exclaimed.
The floor shook. That navy ship was shooting at them.
Another of the pirates took charge. “Round up them hostages. We gotta deal!”
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary! I love the peace god now!”
Wobbling as he gathered his wits, Mort stood up and cackled. It was manic, repressed rage, leaking out in glee. The azrin and plouph who’d bothered Becky crunched like dry spaghetti in Mort’s telekinetic grasp. All the lights in the cathedral extinguished. The only illumination came from the pale ambient glow of astral space, and the dome providing that glow groaned ominously.
Fires blazed, clutched in the hands of the fallen Guardian of the Plundered Tomes. “Oh, no. There’s no sanctuary from ME!”
“What now?” May asked.
The question hung in the air between them. As questions went, it was brilliant. Unsubtle, yet with hidden nuance just beneath the surface. It could mean anything to either of them, and if those meanings missed one another in the dark, none would be the wiser. It was a surgeon’s laser of a question.
Brad studied her posture, her figure, the features of her face. Tension tugged every muscle. Her shoulders hunched forward toward the main console. She rocked ever so slightly. One hand clasped the wrist of the other in her lap.
Clearly, she needed to unwind. “Wanna make out?”
That perked her up. “What?”
“I was just thinking—”
“How can you think about that… that sort of thing at a time like this? Our fate hangs by a horse’s hair. What if your sister can’t convince them we’re telling the truth? What if that azrin comes back before help? How long could it even take them to get here? And your first reaction is you want to sit around kissing me?”
Brad scratched at the back of his neck and shrugged. “Yeah?” he replied with a cringe. “I mean, most of that stuff we can’t control. Jamie knows there’s only so far I’d go to joke with her.”
“Didn’t sound that way…”
“And they’ll get here quick as they can. No idea how long. I trust Earth Navy, and I trust Jamie.”
“What if that’s not quick enough?”
“Then I power the engines and lift us off right here in the hangar. Use the ion wash to blast ’em.”
May folded her arms. “And you’ve done that before?”
“Never to hurt anyone. But have I spun tornadoes in a closed hangar before… yeah. Cost me a month of no-flight time. You gotta loosen up. Want me to see if the pirates left any beer? Fridge is a built-in, so they probably left it completely alone.”
“Beer? At a time like this?”
“My dad always says, when it comes to beer, every time is a time like this.”
May folded her hands and closed her eyes.
With a sigh, Brad headed back to the living area and rummaged. The pirates hadn’t even bothered to open the fridge. There was half a week-old sandwich, juices for the peewee league, fizz drinks, and a few cans of LaGrange L4 Lager. It wasn’t Dad’s best beer ever, but on the whole, it was above average for the Radio City. He plucked two cans from their plastic joiners and headed back to the cockpit.
One can, Brad set on the console in front of May. The other, he popped open for himself. At the sound, May opened one eye, glared at him, and resumed praying silently.
“Ah,” Brad gasped after a sip. Being perfectly honest with himself, he didn’t care for the flavor of beer. “Unrefined palate,” Dad called it. But he’d never get to liking it if he didn’t sneak one here and there on the regular.
Brad took a few more sips. After each, he let out the most satisfied sound he could manage.
From the corner of his eye, he noticed an outstretched hand. May still had her head bowed and eyes closed. “I’ll try a sip of yours. Just quit that.”
Brad handed it over readily. He watched for her reaction.
May peeked at the beverage, casting Brad a skeptical look before lifting it and giving the opening a sniff. Her nose wrinkled. Treating it like a trial of will, she put the can to her lips and took a quick sip.
“Eughch.”
She passed the LaGrange back.
“I didn’t promise it tasted good.”
“Then why are you drinking it?” May inquired with a level of skepticism rarely experienced in Brad’s lifetime.
He’d never examined his motive closely. It was an adult thing to do, and he clearly had skeptics on the topic of his manhood. Those dots were connected implicitly. Instead of admitting that, he gave Dad’s answer, “It gets you through when times are tough.”
May’s smile was wry. “I’ll stick with prayer.” She closed her eyes again.
Taking a swallow to make his point, Brad considered her answer. “Serious question. If Earth Navy shows up, who gets the credit? Is it because you prayed, or because we sent that comm?”
“God works in mysterious ways. Maybe that’s how we were able to send that comm.”
Still wasn’t adding up. “But if that’s the case, why are you still praying?”
That got her eyes to open. She shot him a look that wasn’t quite a glare, wasn’t quite an admission he was right. “Gratitude? It doesn’t hurt.”
Covering your bases was a concept he could accept. Nodding along with her explanation, he nevertheless felt no compunction to join in. When they first met, he kept up a pretense of maybe converting and seeing the galaxy her way. In the day and change they’d spent together, each had seen beneath the surface-level interactions of the other.
And she hadn’t ditched him.
It was odd. In such a short time, she’d gotten to know him better than any of his friends. May had seen him as he chose for others to see him and how he coped when clinging to a slim hope of life and freedom. Only three, maybe four people knew him better: his parents, Jamie, and possibly Mort.
You could never tell with a wizard.
“Mind if I put on some music?” They were past the point of keeping silent. If that azrin came back, Brad wasn’t bullshitting when he said he’d take off in the hangar. What he hadn’t mentioned was his super-emergency-dumbass-hero backup plan: Seeing how sturdy the hangar door was by attempting to ram his way through it.
“It’s your ship.”
“No worries. It’s nothing unholy, just some Early Data stuff my parents keep around.”
He didn’t make a selection, just turned on the system. Immediately, it started playing Billy Joel. Brad slouched and tried to ignore the taste of his beer as he worked his way toward emptying the can.
“Is… is this song about what I think it is?”
Brad started listening to the lyrics. Based on the tone of her question, it probably was. He waved her comment off. “This old music is all metaphors. Just enjoy the sounds.”
When Bad Company came up next, Brad remembered that this was Dad’s music, after all. Half of them were love songs; the other half were sex songs. He advanced the set list, and Foreigner came up. Then Fleetwood Mac. Damn May for suggesting he pay attention to the lyrics. Even knowing the words to most of these songs, he’d rarely processed what they were saying.
The next time he reached out to switch the song, May’s hand stopped his. “It’s OK. I’ve heard love songs before.”
Brad swallowed. “I just… well, I just didn’t want you thinking I was—”
“Hoping to kiss me?”
“Trying to trick you. You said you didn’t want to, and—”
“I never said I didn’t want to. I said this wasn’t the time.”
Neither spoke for a moment. Their eyes met. In the background, he tried to forget that his little sister was named after this song.
Out in the hangar, the lights brightened. The world rumbled.
So… this is what it was like.
Songs, holovids, they all tried to impart this feeling, and they’d done a shit job of it.
Drowning out the music as it switched to REO Speedwagon, the hangar’s PA system boomed.
“Attention pirate scum. This is Captain Loralee Kim of the ENV Nairobi, we have disabled your engines. Stand down and prepare to be boarded.”
Brad pumped a fist, “Hell yeah! We did it!”
“We’re saved!”
“And it’s all thanks to—”
Brad lost his next words. May slammed into him, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing for all she was worth, cutting off his air supply. He hugged back. When she eased up, he didn’t have time to voice his thoughts before he found a pair of lips pressed against his own.
After that, things got a little hazy.
Chuck lay on his back, spotlight baking him like a lizard under a desert sun. By angling his head, the glare wasn’t blinding. He could see up into the recesses of the upper theater, where period rigging consisting of cables and pulleys operated the curtain.
“I heard once that humans used to be cannibals,” he croaked out through his parched throat. “Pretty common, once upon a time. A warrior would kill his enemy, eat his brain to get stronger. I told my wife, and she says she hopes the azrin never find out, otherwise we’re history. They’ll figure out they can eat our brains and get strong enough to beat us.”
There were some grumbles in the audience, but Chuck didn’t let them last long.
“Nah, I tell her. That’s why they sent human marines. Nothing for them to eat.”
The plouph laughed. Despite being half a punchline, he caught the hissing laughter of a couple azrin as well.
A vibrating feature activated in the floor, a weak version of a cheap motel amenity.
From the theater speakers, an announcement cut in, broadcasting over Chuck’s act and buying him time to come up with his next joke.
“Attention pirate scum. This is Captain Loralee Kim of the ENV Nairobi, we have disabled your engines. Stand down and prepare to be boarded.”
Without missing a beat, Chuck raised his voice as loud as he could make it. “Falxis! You were supposed to play that recording three hours ago!”
A few laughed. Plenty didn’t. Shouted orders from outside the theater roused the pirates to action.
Amid the commotion, Chuck lay still. Sheer exhaustion caught up and carried him away.
When he came to, a rough hand was slapping him gently on the cheek. “Chuck? Chuck, no time to play dead. I can see you still breathing. Get up.”
Fumbling for a hand to help him to his feet, Chuck instead found himself borne upright by unseen forces. Mort had a look in his eyes that said he wasn’t bothering to pretend he wasn’t a wizard anymore. Also, the theater was dark except for the light of a torch clutched in the wizard’s hand.
Upon closer examination, Chuck drew back from his friend. “Is that… a bone?”
“Azrin femur,” Mort replied. “Power’s out all over the ship. Had to bring my own light.”
Dead weary and sore all over, he followed the torchlight when Mort led the way out into the rest of the Nazareth. True to his word, everything was dark except for the astral glow from the skylights that ran over the main walkways.
“Couldn’t you have used something… else?”
Mort pulled up short and fixed Chuck with a puzzled frown. “Yeah.” Then, without further explanation, he marched off again. “You’ll find a wife and two out of three children holed up in the cafeteria. The smell in the cathedral was too much for sensitive noses.”
“And Brad?” Chuck didn’t need telling to know which of the three was liable to be off on his own.
“No sign, yet. But he’s got a good head on his shoulders. I’ll keep an eye out as I search the ship.”
“That message about the navy being here?”
“Saw the ship,” Mort attested. “That’s part of my rush. Don’t want any of these fuckers getting off easy.”
Chuck blinked. “The penalty for piracy is death. That navy captain’s liable to space any that surrender.”
“Too good for ’em. This old tub’s holding air better than I’d feared, or I’d have done this yesterday. I can accept that I’ve been reduced to a passenger in this galaxy—at least for the time being—but I’ll be damned if those varmints don’t die in fire for making me a hostage!”
With that, Mort stormed off.
“Which way is the—?” Chuck called after him, but Mort already had a finger outstretched, pointing the way to Becky and the littles.
Chuck remained in a stupor as Mort disappeared from view. His legs barely held him up. Moving was a negotiation, not a given.
Which was closer, the cafeteria or the temporary lodgings offered by the One Church aboard the Nazareth? He’d have trudged off for his own bed on the Radio City if he had it in him to fight with the port locks the damn mechanic had installed.
A rumble in his stomach reminded him that fatigue wasn’t his only enemy.
Cafeteria it was.
Chuck shuffled along, fighting for each step. He could only pray that Becky wasn’t too high to keep the littles off him while he ate an authentic Earth-style hamburger, grilled to within an inch of its life.
In the distance, he heard screams.
At least they weren’t laughs…
Jamie Ramsey stalked the hangar section of the One Church missionary vessel Nazareth. At her side, decked out in black body armor of laminated layers of plasticized steel and energy-dissipating electronics and a matching helmet with a clear visor, was Crewman Blake. They were a pair, one of the security details sweeping the ship for signs of the pirates reported to have taken over the vessel.
At one of the open hangar bays, Jamie pulled up short. “Mind giving me a few?”
“Yours?” Blake asked.
Jamie nodded. “Grew up on that ship. If my brother’s got any sense, he hid after sending that SOS, but I bet he’s still aboard.”
Blake nodded. “I’ll be on comms if you need me. Nobody’s finding anything but charred corpses and babbling witnesses.”
Jamie didn’t know what had happened on this ship. The details were above her pay grade. Right now, all that mattered was finding Brad and making sure he was OK.
Her feet knew the way whether they were in civilian sneakers or boots issued to security personnel by Earth Navy. She clomped up the boarding ramp but stopped short of fully entering. “Hey, in there. It’s just me. If you’re armed, don’t shoot.”
“Hi!” a panicked Brad shouted back hastily—guiltily? “Just a minute. Hold on.”
Jamie advanced up the ramp. “I’m not delivering pizza. This is a fucking military intervention. One you called us in on.”
Once she entered the ransacked living room, Brad’s evasions fell into place. It had nothing to do with the strewn junk, the open smuggling compartment, or the couch being on the wrong side of the room. That shit would take a forensics team to fully unpack. But the girl fit a narrative that was all too simple.
She was milquetoast teenage averageness incarnate. School uniform, starter-kit makeup, a hairdo straight out of “How Not to Get Noticed.” However, the uniform was disheveled, cockeyed blouse beneath a sweater, one side of the collar poking out and not the other. Her makeup didn’t account for the deep blush in her cheeks as she hustled past Jamie while avoiding eye contact. And that hair looked like it had just had a sweater pulled over it.
“Nice-to-meet-you-thank-you,” the girl blurted on her way past.
Jamie turned to watch her go. She noticed the girl wore a pair of Becky’s lace-up sneakers, but the laces were just tucked down the sides instead of tied. “Nice to meet you, too.” Never hurt to be nice, just in case.
Once they were alone aboard the Radio City, Jamie found Brad in the cockpit, feet up on the console, chugging one of Chuck’s beers.
“You look insufferably proud of yourself.”
He scowled when he caught sight of her. “When did you join the marines?”
“I’m ship’s security.”
“It’s smooth. Nothing can bother me today. Anyway, you look badass in that getup.”
“Who was the girl?”
“A friend,” Brad replied with melodramatic nonchalance. “We evaded pirates for two days and snuck aboard the Radio City to let the outside world know of our plight.”
“Wow,” Jamie marveled. “You really have grown up.” Brad grinned despite himself. “You didn’t used to know the word ‘plight.’”
Brad chuckled. “Fuck off. Admit it. I’m a man now.”
“You are just so begging for me to ask whether you slept with her.”
Brad bit his lip and looked dreamily up at the cockpit ceiling, counting with his fingers. “Well, sleeping and sex are two different things… but we did both.”
Jamie crossed her arms. It was tough with the body armor and the strap for her blaster rifle. “OK. Depending how much of my stuff you cleared out, there’s no-scent disposal wipes in a hidden compartment above my bunk. You’ll also find a leather-scented spray to cover the smell. Hit a shower, change into fresh clothes, and wipe up in here. The spilled beer will piss Chuck off, but it’ll—”
“What’re you talking about?”
Jamie laughed at him. “You’re far from the first one to get laid in that cockpit. That doesn’t mean you won’t catch hell for it.”
“I was planning on bragging to Dad,” Brad protested.
Jamie was already shaking her head. “Nope. Noooope, nope-nope-nope. You just cross your fingers and hope you never hear from her again.”
Brad reached down beside the pilot’s chair and pulled up a datapad. It was nicer than any she’d ever owned living at home. “But she left me her datapad with her comm ID still in it. So we can keep in touch.”
Jamie pulled off her helmet and knelt beside her brother, who sat up properly in the chair. “Listen to me. I saw the necklace. That girl, whoever she is—”
“May Belotti. See, I’m not that kinda guy who doesn’t even know her last name.”
“She’s a One Churcher. Right?” Brad nodded. “And you know their whole deal with unmarried sex.”
Brad rolled his eyes. “Anything fun is a sin. Yeah. It came up one or a million times.”
Jamie looked him straight in the eye. “That means they don’t just go handing out hormone regulators at puberty.”
“But—”
Jamie shut him up with just a knowing nod.
“No way! Come on. That was just… well, it was just the weirdest experience of my whole damn life. And the smoothest. And I’ve definitely got game.”
Jamie fixed him with a weary sigh. “Yeah. She looked more embarrassed about me walking in than disappointed in you. Yay. Congrats. You’re turning into Chuck.”
“Fuck off with that! Dad’s a comedian with no sense of humor. I’m gonna be a racing star.”
Jamie stood. “Just keep up your piloting practice. I graded out at 96 on the firing range and only an 85 in flight eval. So I got routed into security instead of flight school. And I’ve got a zone to finish sweeping.” She secured her helmet. “Take care of yourself, Fartface, and if you’re not a total asshole, check in on that girl in a couple months.”
Once she turned her back on her brother, Jamie broke out in a grin.
That little bastard.
Solomon answered the door himself. He’d barely arrived home and hadn’t gotten past the hook where he hung his autumn cloak. To no small lack of astonishment, he discovered one of the nameless underlings that populated the Technical Liaisons’ Office.
“Milord,” the young woman said with a curtsy, despite wearing trousers. She handed him a rolled scroll. “For her ladyship. Utmost urgency.”
Immediate attention.
Her eyes only.
Confidential business.
Grand Council authorization.
The platitudes and blanditudes and attitudes rolled ever onward. It was a bingo cage pick as to which a given messenger would wrench from their posterior pocket to vex him with.
Solomon handed back the scroll. “I haven’t got a notion where she might be, search the house for all I care.”
“It’s all right,” Wenling called from the second-floor landing. “We had nothing planned but an evening in. A little unexpected spice never hurt anyone.” She swept down the curved stairway with the grace of a debutante and the gravitas of a tsarina.
The messenger met her at the bottom step and knelt like she was about to be knighted, presenting the scroll as her sword.
Inwardly, Solomon sighed. There was a scattering of this sort throughout the Liaison’s Office. Closet monarchists, playacting sycophants, and amateur thespians, the lot of them. He honestly couldn’t tell which among them thought that a gluteal hickey would earn them a step up the social ladder and which were true believers. Both camps sickened him.
Wenling read as if her veins ran with coffee instead of blood. In no time at all, she clenched a fist and crushed the parchment, then set it aflame without so much as wincing at the fire. “I want that ship detained. Complete search. No one boards the Nairobi without authorization from Wizard Azrael.”
Solomon scowled, searching his memory for the roster of wizards assigned to Earth Navy. It was a point of pride as a Grand Councilor’s husband to know the disposition of friendly forces. He would never be caught socially unaware of whose families would be grieving when the space sailors lost a boat. “I thought that was Wizard Ptolemy’s post.”
“It was. The Guardian’s post is open until Wizard Mordecai either dies or officially retires. If that pinch-faced Morpheite wants the job, let him do his part earning it.” She turned to the messenger. “Deliver a verbal message to Azrael Copperfield at the Library of the Plundered Tomes. I want him on our fastest vessel within the hour. He may bring a team of his own choosing.”
“As you command,” the messenger replied with a curt but earnest bow. She was gone in an instant.
“What if it’s another false alarm?” Solomon asked as soon as they were alone. He followed as his wife led the way toward the dining room and the scent of Sexton’s pheasant au vin. “Won’t the One Church object to this kind of treatment?”
He could picture the scene, priests and influential parishioners squaring off with Earth Navy over jurisdiction, both rankling at Convocation interference.
Wenling pulled up short. She turned. Where Solomon expected fire, he saw weariness. “They can’t all be. But a piracy attempt had been thwarted within the past hour, using what Wizard Ptolemy described as ‘an apocalyptic orgy of destruction’ and resulted in the foundering of a starship larger than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Who else could it be?”
Solomon kept his guesses to himself. They were few and impolitic, either upstanding citizens well accounted for or villains whose very existence embarrassed Wenling at their mere mention.
“And you’re sending young Azrael to see about him?”
Wenling arched one delicate eyebrow. “He’s free to bring whomever he likes. Strong as Mordecai may be, there’s still only one of him. Care to volunteer?”
Solomon forced a grin. “Best of luck to him.”
Mort’s search had shifted course around the time the Nazareth began to overflow with black-clad knights in plastic armor. He had to trust that any pirates he’d overlooked by now had earned their right to die in a hail of blaster goo or an unescorted walk out the nearest air-free exit. Instead of shunning the navy meddlers, he waded upstream through them.
They came in pairs. Children, mostly, grown but fresh-faced, innocence and righteousness and animal ferocity radiating from eyes too young to boast crow’s feet. They hid behind clear visors as if they wanted to watch the proceedings on the holovid rather than be present on a battlefield.
None of it fooled Mort. They were museum patrons touring his art exhibit, even if every work was signed: Anonymous.
He passed what had to be the twelfth pair of foot soldiers, a curious coterie for a ship purportedly filled with sailors. As with his other encounters, Mort held up a datapad that showed a recent likeness of Brad Ramsey. It was easier to convince rattle-skulled minions to accept the illusion pasted over the screen of a fried techno-tablet than to present it freestanding like the Convocation sigil that earned a free meal or a tailored suit at any respectable establishment.
“You seen this boy?”
“Check the shelters,” one of the soldiers replied.
“You should get to one, sir,” the other added. “Let us handle collecting everyone. This ship isn’t secure.”
Mort harrumphed. “Checked the shelters. And I said I’d look after the boy. Been negligent enough on that count already. Rest assured, you’ll hear the most terrified scream if I run into a leftover pirate.”
“See that you do, sir. Good luck finding your boy.”
Mort saw no reason to correct such densely packed inaccuracy. It certainly wouldn’t be him doing the screaming. And while he liked the boy, Brad was a project and a half to reclaim from the nonsense Chuck and Becky had instilled in him. Mort would take no credit for ownership.
Continuing on his quest, Mort headed for places he hadn’t yet explored.
The hangar area had been a likely hunting ground, yet he simply hadn’t had the time to reach it on foot before the toy soldiers piled aboard. The ship was too damn big for its own good, and he’d wanted to clear up known gatherings of hostages—more pointedly, the hostage takers—along the way.
He encountered another pair of patrolling patsies and held up the datapad. “You seen this boy?”
One shook his head, the other raised her blaster rifle. “Who wants to know?” she demanded.
Never one to be intimidated by gadgetry, no matter how ill the intent of its creator, Mort didn’t panic. In his lack of panic, he took note of the name badge on the soldier’s chest. In bold block letters, it identified the wearer as: RAMSEY. Assembling disparate stories in a snap, combined with the striking resemblance to Chuck when one looked for it, he knew at once whom he was addressing.
A side glance caught the eye of the male soldier. The lights in the corridor flickered. Blinky science lights on both blaster rifles winked out.
“What the fuck did you just—?”
“Jamie Ramsey, I presume?”
She backed away a step, training her blastless blaster at Mort’s head. “Who are you?”
“You heard of guardian angels?” Mort asked with a sweet smile. Jamie nodded warily. “I’m the other kind.”
“Avenging angel?”
“Guardian devil. Your father helped me out of a jam once—a pretty bad one. Now I travel with them—in your bunk; hope you don’t mind—and keep them out of as much trouble as a lone wizard can. Presently, the rest of your family is safe and accounted for. I just need to account for your brother.”
“No need to worry about him. He got himself aboard the Radio City, fired off a distress call, and while he waited for a rescue, spent his time drinking beer and boinking some churchie he picked up. You might want to join him. It’s not safe on this ship until we clear it of pirates.”
Mort hooked a thumb at her partner. “You think I need help?”
“Uh, yeah. Nice trick, but there’s a shipload of pirates aboard. You can’t whammy them all. Leave this to the pros.”
“Child, I will let you in on a secret, so that you can trust that your family is safe out in the galaxy. My name is Mordecai The Brown, deposed and disgraced Eighth Chair of the Convocation Grand Council and Guardian of the Plundered Tomes, until someone tears that title out of my lifeless heart. The only reason there was a standoff aboard this vessel in the first place was that I was worried it might not hold breathable air when I was done incinerating the invaders. When you stumble across the charred remains of the miscreants, know that each and every one of them suffered horribly at my hands for what they did—and tried to do—to the Ramsey family.
“If you’d be so kind as to lend whatever aid you can in keeping that secret out of official reports, I’d be happy to continue protecting them.”
Jamie nodded rapidly. “Sure. Yeah. No prob.”
Mort graced her with a close-lipped smile. With his first stride down the corridor, he snapped his fingers, releasing Jamie’s soldier buddy. The soldier blinked in confusion.
“Thanks anyway, total stranger!”