6 
PRETTY, PRETTY PLUNDER
INVICTUS SHIP’S LOG—ENTRY 2 (THOUGH TECHNICALLY IT SHOULD BE ENTRY 345 IF FARWAY WEREN’T SLACKING ON HIS CAPTAIN DUTIES)
ANCHOR DATE: AUGUST 22, 2371
CURRENT DATE: JUNE 11, 2155 (HOW ELSE WOULD WE LAUNCH OUT OF OUR TOP SECRET DOCK LIKE SUPERHEROES?)
CURRENT LOCATION: SOMEWHERE OVER THE ATLANTIC? PROBABLY?
DESTINATION DATE: APRIL 14, 1912
DESTINATION LOCATION: ATLANTIC OCEAN, RMS TITANIC
OBJECT TO ACQUIRE: A PRETTY, PRETTY BOOK
IMOGEN’S HAIR COLOR: AQUAMARINE WITH A HINT OF BUBBLE-GUM PINK
GRAM’S TETRIS SCORE: 354,000
CURRENT SONG ON PRIYA’S SHIPWIDE PLAYLIST: “EVERYDAY PAST” BY ACIDIC SISTERS
FARWAY’S EGO: AVERAGELY INFLATED)PAL.NX^&54LLLLLLLLLL
IMOGEN’S VIEW OF THE SCREEN WAS invaded by cuteness in the form of fur, four paws, and BOUNCING. The red panda danced across her digital keyboard, paws lighting up random letters. Decades of domestication hadn’t prevented these ginger fluffballs from dying out in the twenty-third century, nor had extinction deterred Imogen from acquiring one. Saffron: cutest pain in the tail there ever was.
“Off!” She clucked at the animal, which proceeded to rest his rump exactly where Imogen did not want it. AW;EOFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFJNSKMMMMMM She picked Saffron up by the scruff and set him on the floor, surveying the damage. Nothing a good, long session with the Delete key couldn’t fix.
Delete. Delete. Delete. Back to AVERAGELY INFLATED.
Imogen nibbled at the end of her aquamarine-with-a-hint-of-bubble-gum-pink hair and stared at the entry, trying to scrounge up adjectives to describe her cousin’s most defining trait. Maybe she should create a sliding scale: size-of-a-pinhead-pride to dictator-of-the-month all the way to RED-ALERT-the-wax-of-your-wings-is-melting-and-we’re-all-going-down-in-flames.
“What are you doing?”
Speak of the devil! Imogen twisted around her chair—it was her one nonnegotiable request in joining the Invictus’s crew, a seat that spun—to face Farway. One look and she could tell her cousin wasn’t actually angry. When he was fake-mad his eyebrows trembled. Actually pissed and those suckers would be stock-still.
“I’m writing a ship’s log,” she told him. “Which, incidentally, is the captain’s job. I’ve told you I don’t know how many times that the Invictus’s logs need to be kept. Keeping track of birthdays is hard enough with one timeline, but when you start mixing our cover lives with our historical gallivanting it’s hashing impossible.”
Due to the less-than-legal nature of their activities, the crew kept up with their old jobs in Central time. The result? Three months of life as they knew it—long shop hours and family dinners. Almost thrice that had been spent aboard the Invictus, which made a proper mess of their biological calendars. It’d take more than math, however, to keep Imogen from celebrating a birthday.
“I keep records!” Farway waved at the wall beneath the ship’s vistaport—as dark as the chalkboards of old, covered in descriptions of their missions. Imogen’s hair chalks had been press-ganged into the effort. They weren’t meant for writing with, but that hadn’t stopped her cousin from spelling out his successes in silver and blush, white and aqua. Farway’s highlight reel was bright indeed.
1945: RESCUED GUSTAV KLIMT PAINTING FROM EXPLODING NAZI CASTLE.
1836: BRUSHED ELBOWS WITH DAVY CROCKETT. DUG UP GOLD AT THE ALAMO. HEAVY AS A THREE-HUMPED CAMEL.
1511: EVADED THE SWISS GUARD TO RETRIEVE MICHELANGELO’S PAINTBRUSH FROM SISTINE CHAPEL SCAFFOLDING.
There were thirty such descriptions, each a testament to some treasure and the trouble they’d gone through to get it. Imogen appreciated the list’s multihued aesthetics, but in terms of record-keeping it was… smudgeable. A brush of Saffron’s tail had turned Blackbeard’s name into Bla—rd and cutlass into cut-ass. Imogen giggled whenever she saw it.
She choked back the laugh as she addressed her cousin. “We need something more bona fide than your brag wall. Records that capture our comings and goings, the day-to-day spirit of the Invictus.”
“Oh.” Farway leaned in to read the text. “Bubble-gum pink? Looks more coral to me.”
“Coral?” Imogen gave a mock gasp. “In what world would this color be considered coral? Are you sure you don’t need to have your vision checked?”
“I’ve got eagle eyes and you know it.” Farway pressed the Delete key.
Good-bye, AVERAGELY INFLATED. Nice knowing you.
“Hey!” Imogen dropped her not-coral hair and swatted at her cousin’s knuckles. “I spent, like, thirty seconds typing that.”
Farway endured her assault, kept typing: FARWAY’S EGO: RIPPED TO SHREDS BY CRUEL, UNFEELING COUSIN. RIP. Imogen was positive her cousin would’ve droned on with his pride’s digital eulogy if Saffron hadn’t decided to tackle Farway’s calf.
“Crux!” He swore as ten claws needled his shin. “Get the cat off me!”
A snicker came from across the room. Gram, the Invictus’s Engineer, cleared his throat and pretended to be wholly engrossed in his Tetris game.
“Red panda.” Imogen leaned down to remove said creature from Farway’s pants. “Ailurus fulgens in your mother tongue.”
Her cousin’s expression soured, not so much with pain as with the word mother, made all the more aching by Imogen’s use of Latin. Neither McCarthy child needed translation tech for the language because Aunt Empra always spoke it with them. Imogen could still conjugate the shazm out of words in her sleep, though she hadn’t used the skill in eleven years. Neither of them had since the Ab Aeterno had vanished. Thinking about her aunt’s disappearance made Imogen’s throat tight. She couldn’t imagine how Farway felt about it.
He brushed the subject off like he always did: “So what’s the scoop? Or were you too busy doing my job to do yours?”
Right. Imogen should probably add DASH OF CROTCHETINESS INDUCED BY RED PANDA CLAWS to the day’s tally. She’d do that later, when Farway wasn’t watching. He’d never read the logs anyway.
“Boss-man’s got you going after some pretty-pretty.” Imogen pulled up the mission specs Lux’s assistant Wagner had downloaded into the Invictus’s mainframe during their last stint in Central. “The Rubaiyat. Also known as the Great Omar. It’s a book of Persian poems. This particular edition went down with the Titanic in 1912. Bookbinders in Britain spent two years snazzing it up with gold and semiprecious stones and then sold it to an American. Obviously it never actually finished the journey across the pond. The bookbinding firm tried to make a second version, but it was crispified down to the jewels during the Blitz in World War II. Rumor has it the book was cursed.”
The image was a drawing based on archival descriptions. Three peacocks flocked across the cover; their proud tail feathers sprayed with amethysts, topazes, and rubies. The book’s edges were detailed with golden embroidery. Most of the things they stole were pretty, but this was by far Imogen’s favorite. Hence the extra pretty.
“Cursed or not, it’s got a lot of bling.” Farway whistled at the sparklies; Saffron cocked his head at the sound. Imogen scooped the red panda into her lap before he could play pincushion with Farway’s calf again.
“Over a thousand jewels,” she told her cousin. “It was worth about 405 pounds at the time. But I had Gram run the numbers, and he’s guessing with inflation and overall rarity it’s well over eighty-five million creds.”
“Eighty-five?” Farway straightened and looked over at the Engineer. “Eighty-five mil?”
Gram was doing three things at once: running pre-Grid numbers, flipping a T-shaped Tetris piece so it fit between two I-shaped ones, and shrugging a reply. “Easy. Could even inch up to one hundred if Lux fences it to the right buyer.”
“A cut from that would buy us a real nice vacation.” Imogen nudged Farway. True to the agreement he’d struck with Lux, they got one free trip to any time they wanted for every heist they pulled. This was the Invictus’s life between the hair-chalk letters: thirty R&Rs for thirty snatches. India, Walmart, the Maldives, the Giza Plateau, China’s Bamboo Sea. Imogen couldn’t recall every place they’d been—her memory was going slippery before twenty, bad sign; she needed to remember to ask Priya for fish oil pills, if she could remember to remember to ask—which was why she’d decided to start keeping the ship’s logs. These trips were worth documenting, though lately their extra comings and goings had erred on the side of errands. Going back to the 1990s for a vintage replacement part to Gram’s busted NES console, picking up specialty food for Saffron, and… looking for Farway’s mother.
The last one was never voiced aloud, but Imogen knew it for what it was. They’d been to third-century BC Egypt three times, and it wasn’t a coincidence that was the last date and location stamped into the Ab Aeterno’s official Corps logs.
“Somewhere nice,” she went on. “Somewhere fun.”
Gram looked over his shoulder. His dark eyes widened, urging her on. She was hardly the only crew member who wanted a vacation. It was easy to get cabin fever in a ship as small as the Invictus.
What looked like some hulking, iridescent snow dragon from the outside was actually… not as big on the inside. Their TM was stuffed to the brim with stuff. The bow held workstations: Imogen’s database and the blank-faced dummy she coordinated Farway’s mission outfits on; Gram’s U-shaped console, where the Engineer ran numbers and systems checks before weaving them through the Grid; Farway’s captain’s chair—facing his wall of accomplishments, the vistaport above—though he hardly ever used it. Priya’s infirmary was port side, attached to the engine room. Her time there was spent patching up Farway’s scrapes, keeping the Invictus’s fuel rods from turning them all into radiated fritters, and creating playlists for “team morale.”
The TM’s starboard was a washroom—smeared with the fluorescent remains of Imogen’s former hair colors—and a small kitchenette, where rations were stored. Most of the cabinets were filled with recycled nutrient meal blocks, which tasted like plastic foam and lasted just as long. Usually the stock stayed untouched, for EMERGENCY—if you’re on your last HANGRY legs and anything within arm’s reach is edible—situations. Nicking fresh ingredients from days-past was a much more popular option.
The central common area was where they ate meals, sipped tea, watched datastreams, and plotted their next vacation. The space also doubled as a wardrobe. Clothes from all eras hung from the ceiling pipes, long enough to brush the crew’s heads every time they moved from one end of the Invictus to the other. It wasn’t rare to spot Saffron’s tail hanging in the mix. The rest of them bunked at the stern of the ship. Their cabins were stacked in a honeycomb formation, each large enough for a bed and half a crouch. Too tiny to do anything except sleep and snag some alone time.
There wasn’t much solitude among four souls, one mannequin, and a red attack panda. Something was always happening. A heist, or dinner, or a clandestine snogging session between Farway and Priya, or Gram hitting Tetris’s highest score in record time, or Saffron getting into Imogen’s hair chalks thinking they were treats and staining the floors and pipes with pastel-yellow paw prints for days afterward.
The Invictus was family, life, home, and despite its cramped quarters Imogen wouldn’t trade it for anything. Unless anything happened to be a nice vacation.
“We could go mingle with artists in Belle Époque Paris. Or go diving in the Great Barrier Reef.” Imogen realized she was still staring into the Engineer’s eyes. Their darkness had a mesmerizing quality—much like a sustained cello note— flowing into his hair, his skin. Too many beats she’d held his gaze, and now her face was aflame. Such snitches, her cheeks! Blushing at every inopportune moment… “Or Las Vegas before the great drought?”
“Vegas?” Priya’s voice drifted from the infirmary, along with the syncopated beats of her playlist. “I second Vegas! Poolsides, parties…”
“Motion denied. For now,” Farway said, loud enough for the whole crew to hear. “We can start thinking about vacations once this job is out of the way.”
Imogen swiveled her chair 180 degrees in the opposite direction, where Bartleby the mannequin stood, fully clad and faceless. At least she could blush in front of him. Being eyeless and unjudgy and all.
“You’ve got two outfits. The Invictus will drop you off on the smokestack closest to the first-class promenade, so you’ve got to be a bit snazzed up.” Imogen pointed to the swallowtail coat with a top hat, white waistcoat, and cane, before she unbuttoned the dress shirt. “You’ll be wearing worker clothes underneath, so you can strip down once you leave the first-class section of the ship. Trousers, suspenders, and a button-down I greased up in the Invictus’s engine room. It should get you easy access to the cargo bay.”
“That’s where the Rubaiyat is being held?” Farway asked.
“Probably. Problem is there’s no record of where the book was actually stored. All we know is that it’s on the ship.” Imogen brought up the Titanic’s layout on her screen. It reminded her of Gram’s everlasting Tetris game: stacks and stacks of cabins, forced to fit together in block formation. She pointed at the highlighted areas. “The only thing documented in the specie room is opium, so you shouldn’t bother with that. The cargo bay is down here, by the post office. I’ll guide you through the comms. We’ll drop you off at six PM April fourteenth, 1912. Everyone will be preoccupied with dinner and you’ll have hours to look.”
“Before it sinks.”
“Yep.”
Farway sighed. They both knew an earlier landing time wasn’t an option. The entire point of collecting history’s lost treasures was to let history believe they really had been lost. Not stolen.
“You’ve survived worse,” Imogen reminded him. The wardrobe above the common area was testament to that. Sleeves edged with singe marks, a tricorne sporting a musket-ball-sized hole through one corner, pants pocked with blood from Blard’s cutass. War, pirates, burning buildings, disgruntled gangsters… Farway had faced all these and more with minimal damage. He was pretty hashing lucky for a person who swore off the concept of luck altogether.
“Any Recorders?” her cousin asked.
“None that we know of.” Which meant none sent before or during 2371 AD. Future missions might well have landed there. Imogen wouldn’t have been surprised. The sinking of the Titanic was tragic in the most magnetic of ways. A serialized datastream of the event would make billions.
But it was also a landmark moment, prone to all sorts of interference. Lots of deaths. Lots of lives saved. Lots of press. It was the kind of event the Corps tended to shy away from for fear of altering the future. Lux hurled them into such scenarios without hesitation. It always came down to the same two things: money or fear. Which one was stronger?
Farway was fearless in a way Imogen simply could not grasp. If she were the one who had to put on that suit and descend into that soon-to-be watery grave, she—she just couldn’t. She was comfortable being a Historian, guiding Farway through the comm, dealing with danger sans bullets and adrenaline.
Her cousin watched this screen, which would soon be linked to his corneal implant, showing Imogen history through his eye.
“How close are we to the landing coordinates?” he called out to Gram.
“Autopilot’s got us ten minutes out. We’ll be ready to jump in fifteen.” Sonatas and cedarwood. That was what Gram’s voice reminded her of.
Oh hash it all. Her cheeks were going red again. Imogen buried her face into Saffron’s fur to hide it. The red panda chirruped and, instead of being a cooperative muff, hooked around her neck like an old woman’s stole. Gram hadn’t even looked up from the numbers he was running. Imogen didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. Maybe both?
SUCCESSES IN IMOGEN’S LOVE LIFE: 0. BLARGH.
“Right, then.” Farway grabbed Bartleby by the waist and started dragging the mannequin toward the washroom. “I better get suited up.”