BY
ARKADY MARTINE
LADY, YOU PILE UP HEADS like dust. You sow heads like seeds.
“So the captain was in her quarters—”
“Naked, right?”
“If you were the captain, would you bother with a nightshirt? So she’s in her quarters, and she’s looking at her genitals in the mirror, and she’s like, My cunt is amazing—”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, Sarge—”
“Shut it, I’m not alone there—”
“Let her tell the story. I wanna hear about how the captain took Heaven Dwells Within from the House of An without firing a single shot. That’s what the sarge said, yeah? Not one shot.”
“Not one shot that hit anyone. Captain Labbatu doesn’t need to shoot people to win herself a flagship. She’s as good a thief as she is a commander, see. I remember—”
“Because you are an ancient of days, Sarge.”
“Because I was here when she did it, Technician. Now do you want to hear this or not?”
“I want to hear it. How’d she do it?”
“Well, first, she seduced Ash-Iku—”
“With her amazing cunt, yeah, yeah.”
Ash-Iku’s flat is a glass-walled slice of skyscraper, floating over the smog on this half-used-up planet; he’s got a whole floor to himself, and another three for his people and his business right below. Those don’t have windows at all, let alone open glass to see a dying planet by. Those are safe and shrouded. Labbatu’s filthy from the streets of this place, dust on her leather spacer’s jacket in a thick rose-red film, alley garbage-rot stuck to the treads of her boots. There’s blood on her face, and more blood on her thigh below her holstered gun, and someone else’s well-loved blood soaked through her shirt and dried to stiffening rust. She hasn’t been planetside in years.
Up until this morning—some morning, by some planet’s reckoning, this one will do—she hadn’t needed to be. She’d ridden in her ship over the skyways, the starshot paths from system to system, a small fast ship with a small fast crew. Captain Labbatu, the woman you call when you need a gun or a fuck or a piece of your heart retrieved. The woman you call when you need someone who knows how to win an ugly war and come up smiling. She isn’t smiling now. She’s got crew-blood soaked in her shirt, enough that it looks white-spotted instead of red-stained. She hasn’t got a ship at all anymore. She’s got dust. Dust, and fury.
She looks Ash-Iku’s doorkeep, behind his desk in the lobby, straight in the eyes and says, “Send me up. The hacker and I, we go back, honey.”
Doorkeep maybe hesitates too long; doorkeep gets a good look at the hollow dead eye of Labbatu’s pulse pistol, with its lioness-maw barrel. Doorkeep makes a call. Doesn’t take long for a silken elevator to show up, chrome and clean, whisper-quiet. Labbatu’s going to leave dust in it, and she thinks that’s right, that’s correct and just. She’s going to leave parts of her dead ship all over wherever she goes, now. That’s how she remembers, after all: she reminds.
Ash-Iku’s waiting at the top when that elevator sluices itself open; tumbled curls, olive skin, half-closed sky-green silk robe, his crypto-breaker goggles still pushed up on his forehead. Ash-Iku’s the sort of man who knows everything, or at least knows everything anyone’s tried to ask him; he finds out. He opens up. Doors, files. People. Companies and governments. Security systems. Whatever you like, if it’s what he likes too.
Captain Labbatu, she says to Ash-Iku: “I need to know how to destroy the House of An,” first thing. Not playing it subtle, Labbatu is; she’s not got subtlety left to her. Maybe later she decides to be the House of An, but right then she hasn’t got anything but revenge on her tongue. She swaggers into Ash-Iku’s glass house, parks her dusty, bloody ass on his white leather couch. He gets her a drink. He gets him a drink. He gets them both one of those terrible little crudité platters he’s had left over for a while, mysterious vegetable in pastry cup, mysterious pale pink fish dip, unmysterious celery stick.
“The whole House of An,” he says. “Tall order, Labbatu. Also that includes you, or are you renouncing that particular blood-tie? I don’t do suicides. Bad business.”
“The Heaven Dwells Within killed my crew and took my bounty,” says Labbatu. “Let’s start there. I want to cripple that fucking ship, Ash-Iku. I know you know how.”
Ash-Iku looks her over: sees a woman hurt and diminished, maybe, vulnerable, maybe. He thinks, What can I get first? Or else consider this: Ash-Iku looks her over, sees a business opportunity, a friend who got hurt, but he’s not the sort of man who has friends anymore, even friends like Labbatu. Wishes, a little, that he did. He thinks, Let’s make this fair. Either way works. Depends on how men are.
He says, “So what can you give me in exchange, without a ship to go get it with?”
Which is an ugly sort of fair. Labbatu’s not asking for flowers. She wants security hacks, shipmind-killer software.
When Labbatu grins, she’s got blood on her teeth like a lioness after the kill. “How about this, honey,” she says, picking up her drink. “I outdrink you, in my current state, you do me a favor. You outdrink me—should be easy, look at me—and I do one for you instead. Square?”
“Square,” says Ash-Iku, and they get started.
[…]loop ALERT ALERT ALERT → data breach! Credible reports of data breach sector-wide, including access override codes to Lotus-5 Docking Systems, access override codes to Riparian Docker Systems; personnel files at Kissura Shipping Incorporated, Larak Consultants, House of An, Marad Corp.; weapon unlock sequences for Belu Planetary Defense Cannons […]
“Fuck,” says Ash-Iku to his doorkeep, hungover head in his hands, sitting in his disheveled bed, one arm stuck in his green silk robe and the rest of it crumpled under him. His cryptogoggles, discarded on the pillow, are yelling “ALERT, BREACH, ALERT” in a tiny tinny yelp. “Go turn off the alarms and then, like. Hire me some thugs, okay? A lot of thugs.”
“Coffee first, ser?”
“Like a vat of it.”
[…] lionlike she claws at me,
I am plagued by the stinging on my thighs.
Her reddened mouth is killing-hot.
It spreads kisses like seed-crops
bruises that bloom on all the cheeks of my body
sends me scattering.
Sweat-soaked and semen-soaked, falling into heaven.
O queen! Star of the battle-cry!
Your eyes are too sharp.
You sip so deeply that I begin to thirst […]
Fragment, “The Destruction of Labbatu,” attributed to Ash-Iku (contested)
“So she fucked him, and when he was fuck-drunk—”
“No, the captain never fucked anyone she didn’t want to fuck. He was actually drunk.”
“How do you know she didn’t want to, Sarge? You weren’t there. I mean. Slick hack like Ash-Iku, I would—”
“You, sera Miz Third Lieutenant, like dick, which is not an affliction everyone suffers.”
“The captain likes everything, Sarge.”
“Sure, sure. So when he was drunk on her, whichever way it happened, she took the crypto she needed and spent her last credits on a spitfire gunship she found laid up in the port. Nice little ship, in hock to whatever the local tax authority is down there, stranded asset, free-ish to a good home. Captain got off that planet quick, just her and her kid brother in the gunship—”
“The captain has a brother?”
“The captain, Technician, has a twin. Had, anyhow.”
[…]even heaven lashes out,
plagued by stinging insects.
Heaven’s fire is killing-blue.
It spreads rot like seed-crops
bruises that bloom on the cheeks of every sailor
sends captains scattering.
Bloodsoaked and dustsoaked, running to ground.
O, queen! Star of the battle-cry!
Your thorns are too sharp.
You sip too deeply of your house’s blood! […]
Fragment, “The Destruction of Labbatu,” anonymous poem Archives of the House of An
Dead boys come back sometimes, if you know how to call them: Labbatu’s own twin’s more an illusion than a body, has been for a decade now. But he spins himself up visible easy as midday sunlight when his sister calls him up to dwell a while on her new gunship’s empty shipmind. Long-distance call, sure, all the way to the House of An and the mainframe of a very different ship, but Sam’s a sword and a cleansing fire, even more so now that he’s mostly artificial. The ghost of righteousness, he calls himself. This makes him laugh, but it doesn’t do much for Labbatu.
Especially since all that sun-kissed sharpness was the mind behind the guns on Heaven Dwells Within, the guns that took her down.
“Ghost of righteousness,” Sam repeats, sitting in the copilot’s chair and not depressing the cushion even a little; sure, light has weight, but you need more than one twin can summon up to feel it. “You know I didn’t want to. You know I don’t have choices like you do.”
“I know,” says Labbatu. “I’m not angry at you, Sam. Wouldn’t have called you up if I was angry at you.”
He looks relieved. He’s all gold, a sketch-memory of a man, deep-tanned skin, blond hair bleached white by the sun of whatever afterlife weapons get. “You’re pissed, though,” he says, which is sort of obvious: Labbatu still hasn’t changed her bloody, dusty clothes, and it’s been a day and a half since she got off Ash-Iku’s world. Of course she’s pissed. Past pissed into killing-brutal, more like.
“He shouldn’t have done it,” says Labbatu. “Killed my crew.”
“You shouldn’t have stolen something the old man was after too,” Sam says. “He gets jealous when one of his kids outflanks him.”
Labbatu bares her teeth, and her illusion-brother wavers a little, goes to a smudge of gold light for a minute of being scared. “Then he should have stopped me,” she says. “Or gotten away with it before I got there. Our father killed my ship, Sam. My crew.”
“. . . I did a lot of it,” says the ghost of righteousness, and his sister pats him on the shoulder with a hand that goes right through him. He’s his father’s son, but he’s his sister’s brother, too, and he knows how badly she’s been wronged.
“Tell me where he’s holed up,” Labbatu asks. “I want the Heaven, brother-o’-mine. He doesn’t deserve it anymore.”
There’s a long pause. A bad one. Labbatu’s about to cut the connection, shove her twin out of the metaphorical airlock and go it alone like always and ever. Then Sam says, small like a newborn kitten, “I don’t know where we are. He keeps me from knowing where the Heaven is. But if you find us, if you find me, I’ll make sure the crew knows what our father did to you.”
[…]
2792: Anu registered the live birth of twins, one male and one female, each carried in a different belly. The first twin was Eanna-Nin, called the Lioness, daughter of Antum; the second was Utu-Samesh, called the Shining One, son of Ki-Urash
[…]
2815: Utu-Samesh (2792–2815), died in combat.
2815: Utu-Samesh experiences partial resurrection as a shipmind, updating records to Utu-Samesh (2815–present)
[…]
2816: Eanna-Nin (a.k.a. the Lioness, “Labbatu”) disowned and disinherited due to criminal activities
[…]
Partial chronology of the House of An, c. 2891
“. . . so she had to find a navigator who could locate the Heaven Dwells Within, since Samesh—the shipmind—was codelocked from telling her, or anyone else for that matter. And this was no mean trick, kids.”
“We have the best stealth in this sector—in every sector, unless someone’s invented new tech since last week. There’s no navigator who could find this ship.”
“Not saying you’re wrong, Technician.”
“Oh, now? You’re not?”
“In this delightful present day we’re Captain Labbatu’s ship. The Heaven’s crawling with Ash-Iku’s crypto-illusions; of course no one could find us now. But back then—you weren’t even alive back then—”
“Who’d wanna be alive back then? It was shit! You keep saying.”
“We were still fast and smart, but the old man, well. He was no Labbatu. But he hid out in the back of beyond, out where the nebula is, where there’s so much cosmic radiation and debris that no one can see you.”
Can’t take a shipmind to a spaceport bar; shipmind doesn’t have the projection range. Labbatu goes alone, sans brother, sans crew. She’s cleaned up some. Not too much. Rose-choked dust on that jacket isn’t coming out; blood’s got into the leather of those trousers, and they don’t wash, not in a gunship’s galley. But the tank’s a new one, clean white, and she wiped her face clear of blood and alcohol. Saved the soiled rag, after, to remember some broken-bodied beloved by. Captains like Labbatu love all their crew, one way or another.
Spaceport bar is a spaceport bar; looks like the last one you were in, pretty much. They all blur unless a person’s washed up on a very distant planetary shore. This one has the usual drinks and the usual drunks. Labbatu orders a beer. Bar’s classy enough she gets her beer in a twelve-ounce bell glass, foam on the top thick like cream over the dark gold of it. Bar isn’t classy enough that she or anyone else remembers the name of the beer after they have more than one; beer like this is practically barleywine. Labbatu takes her beer and sits down next to a woman so starburnt she looks cured.
“Heard you’re a fisherman,” says Labbatu.
“Have been,” the woman says.
Labbatu shoves her beer down the bar, and the starburnt woman drinks it. When it’s done, Labbatu asks, “You fish this nebula?”
“Since I was younger than you.” The line of her throat is wattled, but when she grins her teeth are white and all present and accounted for. “Good harvest in this one; it’s thick like milk with helium along with all the dust.”
“Think you could find something else besides helium, if I took you looking?”
The woman’s a nebula-harvester, which is a kind of mercenary in and of itself. She knew what she was getting into, and it seemed like a good deal, or at least an interesting one. Interesting enough to say, “Could. Might want to take care of those fellows before we go, though,” and point behind Labbatu with her chin.
Six there, a posse of thugs all in an array when Labbatu turns around. They come in variety-pack: bruiser twice her girth and a wiry martial-artist, a razor-thin chick with a gun that must have come off the nose of a fighter ship strapped across her back in a rig, thickset man running to fat and holding a spitting electric prod, angel-faced lad spinning a suture-thread garrote in one long-fingered hand. Last one’s worst: looks like a kid, but no kid’s got that many teeth, all in rows inside her mouth like a shark, an endless hole of nasty triangles, no tongue.
“You have something that doesn’t belong to you,” says the chick with the gun.
“Which one you thinking of?” says Labbatu, getting up off her barstool. She’s grinning again. She only needs the normal kind of teeth. They’re bad enough, when they’re Labbatu’s. “I have a lot of that sort of merchandise.”
“Intellectual property,” says the angel, and spins his garrote faster.
Labbatu laughs. Rest of the spaceport bar starts clearing out; this is the sort of evening where there’s not much unsplintered furniture or unsmashed bottles left by the end. Easy to tell, if you’ve been in a lot of spaceport bars.
“Tell Ash-Iku I’m flattered,” says Labbatu. “Six of you and only one of me.”
Gun chick’s gun goes up, thunking into place over her head inside its rig. Starts its charge cycle. “Overkill’s all right,” she says, and Labbatu just looks at her.
“Ash-Iku’s not wrong about that,” she says, and throws the barstool like it’s a spear. One leg goes right into the gun barrel. There is a terrible noise, like a great beast choking itself to death.
It’s messy after that. The kid especially. All those teeth to kick in. Labbatu ruins another shirt.
There’s a recording, somewhere on the Heaven Dwells Within. Deep in the archives, buried, mislabeled. The captain gets it out sometimes, flips it over her knuckles like she’s doing a coin trick, and never plays it.
If she did, there’d be about thirty seconds of grainy hangar-bay footage. Gunsmoke and starlight. Old man and not-old-yet woman. No audio, but their mouths are moving. Mostly his.
My lioness, my star of the battle-cry. You turn brother against brother, son against father. Were those people worth this, Eanna-Nin, Labbatu-my-heart? Worth making my son turn against me? Worth poisoning your blood—our blood, Labbatu—with envy and covetousness?
And Labbatu says, “Daddy, you wouldn’t have cared if I died with my ship and my crew.”
Woman unholsters her lioness-maw pistol.
That’s when the scorpion shows up, and the tape cuts out.
Labbatu’s got a long way to go before she meets the scorpion. She and the nebula-harvester walk out of that bar—well, Labbatu limps out. Those bloody trousers are bloodier now, and ripped; no point in washing them. When she peels them off later half the skin on that thigh will come with, and she’ll throw them in the incinerator. But none of Ash-Iku’s retrieval specialists follow them back to the gunship.
(One of them, the martial artist, he gets himself back to Ash-Iku, but fuck, it takes him two weeks, and by then this is all over.)
The nebula-harvester knows her stuff. She’s fished this cloud of stardust for decades, and she’s got landmarks and beacons to guide her. Local guide beats hiding in the dust any day; that’s true for war on all the scales, from nebulae right down to finding the other guy’s village and taking their grain before they find yours and do the same. Labbatu takes her gunship where the nebula-harvester says to go, and they cut through the fog in sector-search, until the Heaven Dwells Within shows up like a jewel, right there, clear as water-ice.
All those guns. Last time Labbatu saw them, they were pointed at her ship.
This time she’s got some firepower of her own.
Ash-Iku’s crypto hacks are the best in the business; better than. They’re knowledge and concept; they’re the language a shipmind speaks when it says This is a trustworthy vessel; they’re the lists of people a ship knows are meant to be there; they’re a scattering illusion, static on every broadcast channel. They carve open the Heaven like it was a ripe peach. Sam helps a little, once he notices who it is that’s slicing up his brain; Sam does Labbatu the favor of showing the destruction of her old ship under the Heaven’s killing blue fire on every screen for all the crew. Scars some of them bad, those visuals. Sure, the Heaven’s a deathship, a knifeship, a ruling-ship, but most of the crew who ride in Heaven’s skin don’t have to see the ship cook a little vessel with the old captain’s daughter aboard to nothing but radiation-scorched ashes. Not usually.
Ash-Iku’s crypto gets Labbatu into the cargo bay: PETA BABKAMA LURUBA ANAKU, open the gate for me so that I may enter here. She comes in guns out already, firing suppression, blood and smoke, but she doesn’t need to use them on a single living creature—not one shot fired that hit a body. Sam keeps most of the crew away from her, but he lets Daddy An through every door he wants to open, like usual.
There’s that bit of tape.
And then there’s the scorpion.
A scorpion isn’t like a shipmind. It’s more like a parasite, a dweller under the metal skins of ships. A smart captain can tame one, or at least gentle one. It’s a scuttle of claws, a gun-stinger and a rattle of repurposed ship bits, grown all together with a thing that might have grown up to be a shipmind in it, squatting in the metal. They grow three times the size of a man. Maybe bigger. Scorpion doesn’t stop growing till it dies. A tame one will defend its territory. A non-tame one too, but tame ones are more discriminating about who’s an enemy and who isn’t.
No barstool to throw this time. Labbatu’s lioness-maw gun blows a couple holes in the scorpion, but that hardly slows it down. It leaks oil and hydraulic fluid and spits acid at her. The acid gets the gun, because she’s willing to drop it, willing to watch those lion-teeth melt to nothing.
It takes half an army to kill a full-grown scorpion. Labbatu’s the greatest captain and the greatest thief in the House of An, but half an army she is not.
Turns out she doesn’t need to be. Greatest thief and greatest captain is enough, when being so means having a suite of AI-killing hacker tricks that Labbatu got off Ash-Iku along with the spoof codes to the cargo bay and the personnel lists. Labbatu didn’t want to use them. She knew what they’d do to the shipmind in Heaven: same thing they did to the scorpion.
She says, “INA ETUTI ASBU.”
Dwell in darkness. All that crypto goes to carving knives, and the scorpion’s a pile of scrap on the floor at Labbatu’s feet.
“Oh, lady,” says the old man. “You pile up heads like dust.”
And somewhere the last of Utu-Samesh goes into the dark like a stone skipped on a lake—far, and far, and farther still, and sinking.
“And what then, Sarge?”
“Well.”
“Well, what.”
“Well, then she won.”
“Obviously she won, she’s our captain now, but how? Scorpion’s dead, she’s killed her kid brother in the blast, and then what?”
“Scorpion’s dead, shipmind’s crippled and might as well be dead, yeah.”
“Yeah. But the old man—”
“The old man was like, Fuck this for a loss, keep the ship as your inheritance and I’m done with you—”
“Which is why we’re done with him!”
“Labbatu’s the greatest of all the mercenary captains that ever came out of the House of An!”
“—pretty much—”
“She kill him, Sarge?”
“Oh, fuck no, she stuck him on her gunship and spat him out in the nebula to suck up enough helium to buy a ticket somewhere civilized. Old man’s somewhere on some rich soft planet now, minding his own business. Last I heard.”
“I don’t believe it. Our Labbatu? After what Daddy An did to her first crew, she just lets him slide?”
“He was the only blood family she got left, after what happened to Utu-Samesh. After she happened to Utu-Samesh. I think—and I never asked her about it, seems really impolite—she didn’t want to bathe in kin-blood ’less she had to. Robbing him of his power and this flagship was enough.”
“Huh. Maybe. . . . And Ash-Iku? What happened to him?”
“Oh, him. Him, he hears from his thug, the one who has a mouth that still talks, and he’s like, Fuuuuuck me, Labbatu, I guess you won this one.”
“More like, Oh, please, fuck me, Labbatu, your genitals, look how amazing they are, I admit I’ve been overmatched, girl, dang—”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Anyway he’s like, Your greatness is unparalleled—”
“And so is your cunt!”
“It is the captain. No one could compete with our captain anyway, in genitals or in anything else. . . .”
against those who are disobedient to her
she stirs confusion and chaos
she speeds carnage and incites the floods
she is clothed in terrifying radiance, a furious storm, a whirlwind,
she is clothed in the garments of ladyship.
She cuts to pieces those who show her no respect.
A south wind, an unharnessed lion, a leopard of the hills
a pitfall for the rebellious, a trap for the hostile.
My lady, let me proclaim your magnificence.
Who can compare with you?
Rest upon the lapis lazuli of your dais
let your divine dwelling place say to you:
Be seated.
Anonymous praise poem, adapted from the Sumerian
(Old Earth, approximately 4300 years before planetbreak)