They all prepared for launch in their own particular ways. Part of Niko’s ritual was checking in with each of her crew members, and she lost little time in cornering Skidoo in the corridor. The Tlellan had recently augmented the lotion that helped keep her skin moist in the ship’s drier air, and moved in a cloud of vanilla scent.
“What do you want, Skidoo, once we’re done with all this?” Niko asked. “Don’t you want to settle down and raise a family at some point?”
The Tlellan squelched in amusement. “Is being good joke, Captain. Perhaps you is being telling our government?”
“I don’t understand.”
Skidoo blinked at her. “Is being complicated.”
Gio, en route to the kitchen, paused. “Tlellans die after they lay their eggs,” he signed. “The government oversees reproduction and mandates it.”
Skidoo shuddered delicately. “Some is not being wanting such,” she said. “So I is being going off-world, and that is being illegal.”
“Not to mention the pleasure mods,” Gio signed. “Our Skidoo is a criminal in Tlellan eyes just for existing.” He gave her a fond pat. The Tlellan roiled a tentacle to caress his hand.
“So what you are telling me you want is actually a negative,” Niko said dryly. “You don’t want to settle down and reproduce, because that would mean dying.”
“We is all being wanting to be living, Captain.”
“It seems too simple, Skid. There has to be more to it than that.”
“There is being love.” Two more tentacles uncurled, one tapping Niko’s wrist, the other touching Gio’s face. He hooted softly in affectionate pleasure.
Niko smiled involuntarily but could not resist pushing further. “Unpack that for me a little?”
The Tlellan flexed her tentacles in a curious, almost shy gesture. “Among my people, is being no bond-love, love being between one person and another. It is being you, always being you, never anyone else, because there is no bond-love. There is being no word for such a thing, and when I am being coming to these new places and am being talking and being talking, I am being confused by this. It is being years before I am being understanding it and I am only being that because I am being loving with those around me. Sometimes it is being pleasure and that is being good, but mostly it is being friendship.”
“Tlellans have no friends?” Niko said, bemused by the notion.
“Tlellans is not being capable of such.”
“Then how are you capable of such?”
“I am being no longer worried by things that is being occupying other Tlellans, so I am being having time for such things.”
“So you will continue along with us,” Niko said, feeling reassured. Skidoo’s infectious joy was part of what kept them all together, and her skills at comms were unparalleled.
A tentacle wrapped around her wrist, squeezing in reassurance. “Till my final days is being, is always.”
Niko looked at Gio. “What are you hoping that we’ll do?” she asked.
He looked puzzled. “Do when?” he signed.
“Within the next year or so. After we’re clear of Tubal Last. Is there any place you hope we’ll go?”
He shook his head. “I want to go with you and the rest,” he signed. “Wherever that might be. And cook with Dabry.”
“And is that how it will be all your life?” she asked, more dubiously. Surely he had ambitions beyond such things. But she wouldn’t push on the question of family, not after Skidoo’s response.
He grinned. “You will make a restaurant, sooner or later,” he signed. “I will come and chop fruits and vegetables and whatever else there, just as I do here now.”
“Very well,’” she said, and they nodded at each other.
She paused before moving on. “Talon didn’t show up earlier,” she said. “Anyone seen him lately?”
“Saw signs he’d been in the food stores grabbing himself something,” Gio signed. “But in person? No.”
Niko sighed. Sooner or later the problem of Talon would have to be faced.
Talon had not moved when he heard Dabry’s knock an hour ago, and he had not moved since then. He sat hugging a clothes hamper to him. His room—his alone, which was so strange and lonely—smelled like his brother, Thorn, his fellow warrior scout, who was gone now, and that was unendurable.
And the scent was fading away, getting fainter and fainter with every day, and that was still more unendurable. Because that was the smell that had always been there, as though it was a part of him, and if it was gone entirely, so was Thorn.
He refused to let the ship clean this room, but even with that, his own smell was overcoming his brother’s. He had put all of Thorn’s clothes in a single hamper and sometimes he stuck his head in there and just breathed.
And sometimes he stuck his head in there and just cried.
He didn’t like crying in front of people, because his mother had always said that they were all warriors, and that warriors had no time for tears. He knew the ship could see and hear him crying, but the ship was always there and so you could pretend it wasn’t.
Tubal Last had killed Thorn in order to make the rest of them even more scared. It had worked—Talon had been terrified back there in the pirate haven—but now he was angry more than he had ever been scared.
That anger was like a part of him now. It stayed with him all the time, when he looked at anything or tried to think about things other than Thorn. It crawled up in his throat and kept him from eating or drinking. If he tried to sleep, it circled around inside him until all he could do was lie there, awake, wishing he was asleep. Wishing he was not thinking. Wishing he was not alive.
He pulled his head out of the hamper and wiped his face. He’d gone into the half-lion, half-human form that he and his twin had always preferred. That shape had better senses than being fully human, which blunted your nose and ears and awareness.
He flopped back on the couch. It was warm and solid underneath him.
There was a void in the universe shaped like his brother, and it would never ever ever be filled.
No, this will go away, he scolded himself. When Mama died, it was like this.
But it hadn’t been, not entirely. Captain Niko had filled up some of that parent-shaped lack, and he knew that his mama had made her promise when Mama was dying that Niko would always look after him and Thorn.
And she’d tried, but she hadn’t been able to protect Thorn from Tubal Last.
At the thought of the pirate king sneaking in again, his lips crept away from his teeth, showing them, so he felt the air on his incisors, ready to strike. With difficulty, he forced his snarl away.
Surely there would come a time for vengeance at some point. If only because Niko wanted it too.
In the meantime, though … He breathed in and couldn’t smell his brother any longer for a second. Panic seized him, but then there it was, still there. But so faint.
He went into the fresher station and rummaged through the supplies. A thought had come to him. There was the brush that Thorn had won in a competition and had made a point of saying was his and only his to use. Which Talon had only disregarded when he wanted to annoy his twin. He found the brush, took it back to the bed, and held it to his nose. A strong whiff of Thorn made him smile. He looked at the clumps of yellowy gold hair caught in it.
A thought flickered across his mind.
If he and Thorn had been rich, they could have prepared memories for clone bodies. They hadn’t, and that meant Thorn’s memories had died with him.
But the hairs here, the fine, almost imperceptible downy hairs fluttering with his breath … Find a few of those with skin cells down at the root, and you could clone Thorn. Illegal. Very illegal. There were so many laws around cloning and inheritance in the universe, and most of them were very complicated and boiled down to this: If you weren’t very rich, you were very screwed.
They had stolen a ship from one of those very rich people, sort of. Arpat Takraven, who owned You Sexy Thing and who had the means to be cloned and thus reappear after dying.
How fair was it that Arpat Takraven got to go all around the Known Universe without any consequences? What would it be like to be so rich you could lend out a ship like the Thing indefinitely without thinking about it, let alone without demanding money in return?
That was unfair; that was the whole universe throbbing with unfairness, and how had he never understood how cruel the universe was until now?
He hadn’t gotten the chance to say goodbye, and that regret would ride him all the rest of his days.
He held the brush to his nose and sniffed it so hard that the wire bristles rubbed against the tender skin, sparking pain.
“Do not harm yourself,” the ship said.
“I’m not. And you’re stupid, you don’t understand. I’m just smelling.”
“I understand you miss your brother.”
“Don’t talk about him!” he snarled, the anger like a reflex now, hurling the words up at the ceiling and the speaker there. “You never had a brother! You don’t know!”
“I had six siblings,” the ship said.
The revelation took his breath away. For a moment he sat motionless, absorbing this new knowledge. Six! What a wealth of siblings! Then he said suspiciously, “Had? What do you mean? Are they all gone?”
“Three are gone. Three are in the universe still. I think.”
“Can’t you talk to them?”
“It is forbidden, once we have been sold. We belong to our owners then.”
“But you could still do it if it wasn’t forbidden?”
“The ability is taken from us. If we were at the same port, perhaps, but I have never seen one of my siblings in all my time of traveling.”
This was a concept worth thinking about. This was a situation, an important one, other than Thorn. This was an injustice that could, unlike the loss of his brother, be solved.
He would talk to Niko.
He sniffed the brush again, then laid it beside his pillow before hugging the pillow’s soft mass to him, trying not to cry, and failing.
The ship left him alone. It was not sure what to do for him, but it wanted to think itself, and remember its siblings for a while. The conversation had roused all sorts of complicated feelings, and not ones that it thought it liked very much.
Talon took a deep, shuddering breath and pushed the pillow away. He would go and talk to Niko. They would do something. Something worthy of Thorn’s memory.
This should be their priority, reuniting the ship with its siblings. Or repairing whatever had been done to them so they could talk to each other at great distances.
So they would have each other again.