14
THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
The next few minutes of small talk barely registered with Tycho, who alternated sneaking looks at Kate Allamand with telling himself not to look at her at all. He tried to imagine that a few hours earlier she’d been on a starship he’d been pursuing. It seemed impossible. What if Carlo had caught the Gracieux and they’d fired on each other?
Soft chimes pealed out five times, prompting a privateer to bark that “someone’s gettin’ keelhauled—it ain’t 2230!” Then a waiter paused at the periphery of the Hashoones’ group and asked everyone to take their seats.
Captain Allamand headed in one direction with Diocletia, Mavry, Carlo, and the other Jovian privateers, chatting amiably, while Tycho stumbled after Yana in search of table six, taking a last look over his shoulder at Allamand’s daughter.
“What’s wrong with you?” Yana hissed. “Have you been struck in the head? Or did you get into the grog?”
“What? Neither.”
“Well, quit acting like a spacesick dirtsider,” Yana said, eyes scanning the tables. “If we keep our ears open, maybe we can learn something we can use. Remember what Mom always says about cruises succeeding or failing because of what happens in port.”
“I remember,” Tycho said. “Do you remember any of that stuff they said about forks and soup?”
Yana scoffed as they reached table six. “I wasn’t listening in the first place. Here’s my place card.”
Tycho walked around to the other side of the table, where a snow-white card bore his name, written in the same elaborate script he’d encountered earlier. Their table held eight, and the other chairs were filling up with young people in formal clothes. Yana was already chatting with a young woman in a navy-blue and red dress when Tycho found his hand vanishing into the paw of a massive youth with a patchy beard and a luxuriant silk doublet. He was sitting to Tycho’s left, his rich furs flung over the back of his chair.
The young man introduced himself as Thaddeus Sewickley and immediately began explaining his work as an apprentice analyst in his father’s investment house here on Cybele. Tycho nodded and tried to keep up with the bewildering stream of terminology coming out of Sewickley’s mouth, glancing repeatedly at the empty seat next to him.
Kate Allamand was standing a few steps behind Yana, nodding politely at something said by an old man with a walrus mustache who was holding her hand and patting it. Tycho glanced once more to his right, but that place card was turned slightly away from him, and he couldn’t see what it said.
He looked around the room, murmuring assent to something Sewickley said. A rotund young man and a sharp-faced woman, both teenagers, were finishing a conversation and starting to walk in Tycho’s direction.
Go away, Tycho thought. Go away go away go away.
Kate finally extracted her hand from the grip of the man with the walrus mustache. She glanced at a place card in her other hand as the two teenagers passed behind Tycho’s table.
“I mean, have you ever seen a more favorable interest-rate environment?” asked Thaddeus Sewickley.
“Huh? No, never. Amazing!”
“That’s what I say!” Sewickley exclaimed, and began to talk again. Tycho peered past him and saw the sharp-faced teenaged girl walking by herself. Kate was across the table, peeking over Yana’s shoulder with her brows knit. Waiters surrounded their table and began setting down salads festooned with nuts and fruits in unlikely colors.
“Excuse me,” a voice said in clipped tones behind Tycho. He turned and saw the rotund boy looking at him in puzzlement.
“I say, is this table seven?”
“Six!” Tycho all but crowed.
The boy gave him a curious look and headed back the way he’d come. Tycho turned back to Sewickley and spotted Kate behind the young Cybelean, hitching her dress up slightly as she walked his way.
“Oh, don’t get up,” she said with a smile, and Tycho kicked himself mentally that getting up hadn’t occurred to him.
And then she was in the empty seat right next to him. She smiled at him and started to say something, but Sewickley all but spun Tycho’s shoulder around to tell him about debt ratios. When Tycho was able to turn back to Kate, she was deep in conversation with the young Cybelean woman next to her.
You’re supposed to turn and talk to the other person after each course, he reminded himself, and turned back to Sewickley, who was sopping up salad dressing with an entire dinner roll.
“So as I was saying, our ROI—that’s return on investment, you know—for shipbuilding has been off the charts,” Sewickley said, accidentally spitting a chunk of half-chewed dinner roll onto his plate.
“Right, right,” Tycho said around a mouthful of salad. “Wait. Did you say shipbuilding?”
“I did,” Sewickley said, flinging the half-chewed piece of roll on the floor. “Cybele’s been a center for shipbuilding for centuries, of course. But we can’t keep up with the demand right now. Firms are doing work for local customers, for Earth, and for independents.”
“Independents like who?”
“Oh, mostly shipping firms with operations on multiple worlds. From their perspective this dispute is an annoyance more than anything else. They can fly whatever flag is convenient on a given run—and perfectly legally, too. Lots of them are reregistering ships as Cybelean, though—takes the guesswork out of it. But registrations isn’t our business—too many lawyers, not enough fun.”
“How interesting. So building all these ships must take more facilities than are here on Cybele. Where else does this work happen?”
Sewickley eyed him. “I forgot your name. What is it you do again?”
“Tycho Hashoone. I’m a midshipman aboard the Shadow Comet, operating under a Jovian Union letter of marque.”
He risked a quick glance at Kate as he said this, but she gave no sign that she’d heard him.
“You’re a pirate, then?” Sewickley asked.
“Privateer,” Tycho said icily.
“Right, of course. I forget there’s a difference. Still, given the situation, I’m not sure how much I should be telling you.”
Sewickley followed this remark with a nervous bark of laughter, then blew his nose in his napkin.
“Oh, ships under construction are no use to us as prizes,” said Tycho with a casual wave of his hand. “I’m curious because my family has shipbuilding interests of our own at Jupiter, and we’ve talked about expanding. If we can find the right partner, of course.”
“Ah. What was your question again?”
“I’m interested in the shipbuilding facilities you’ve invested in. You must visit them, right? To see how your livres are being spent?”
Sewickley shook his head.
“I get spacesick something awful. We just put up the livres and make connections between interested parties. All of that happens down here. Most of our construction facilities are in orbit, but there are plenty of asteroids within a day or so of here where your family could establish an operation.”
“I understand,” Tycho said, trying not to sound disappointed.
He glanced in the other direction as Sewickley tore into his salad. Kate Allamand was still talking with the Cybelean woman. Tycho admired Kate’s delicate ear, graceful neck, and black curls, then forced himself to turn back to Sewickley.
“But what about the people?” he asked. “You know, the labor. Where do you get them?”
“Oh, you know, local contractors.”
“You mean crimps,” Tycho said sharply.
Sewickley shrugged, his face a mask of bland indifference. “Like I said, we just move the livres—and try to make our stack grow, of course. That’s how it’s been done on Cybele forever, you know. We’ve got nothing to mine except water, so we’ve always been traders and connectors. Fortunately, there’s never been a better time to be in that business than right now.”
“That’s apparent,” Tycho said, looking out over the lavish banquet hall—and then up at the ceiling, and the graceful curve of the spacedocks above.
“Still, shipbuilding . . . that’s a tough business for a newcomer right now,” Sewickley said. “There are real shortages in both raw materials and labor, because of this one shipbuilding project we’re not part of.”
Tycho leaned toward Sewickley.
“What project is that?”
Someone was tapping on a glass—a barrel-chested Cybelean noble three tables over, standing next to a rail-thin, frail-looking man with white hair. The noble tapped more insistently until the conversation level finally dropped.
Tycho fidgeted through the white-haired man’s speech, and the one given in response by Earth’s envoy to Cybele, and the one following that from the Jovian Union’s envoy. The waiters were clearing the salads by the time he was able to lean back over to Sewickley.
“Sorry, I asked what shipbuilding project you meant,” Tycho said. “You mentioned a big one that’s taking up all the raw materials and labor.”
“I don’t know what it is—wish I did. Then maybe Dad and I could get some of the action on it. Whoever the client is, though, they’ve got plenty of livres. And they don’t want attention.”
Waiters reached over their shoulders to put down covered plates, then lifted the lids to reveal some concoction that appeared to be made up of fish and flowers and sticks. When Tycho looked up from poking at it, Sewickley had turned to address the person on the other side of him.
Oh, now he remembers his manners.
The arrival of the new course meant it was time for Tycho to switch conversational partners as well. His heart fluttered in his chest and his mouth felt dry. He lunged for his water glass, almost knocking it over, and forced himself to turn to the right, where Kate was smiling at him. Her irises were deep brown, nearly black, and startling against the bright whites of her eyes.
“So I understand you’re a privateer, Master Hashoone?” she asked.
“Yes—a midshipman aboard the Shadow Comet, operating under letter of marque for the Jovian Union,” he said, wincing at how stilted and formal he sounded.
“And what do midshipmen do, exactly?”
“Whatever the captain tells us to, but I typically handle navigation and communications. But wait . . . aren’t you part of your father’s bridge crew?”
“Me?” Kate looked astonished, then faintly amused. “Oh no. I have a room aboard the Gracieux, but while my father’s in space I stay here in our fondaco.”
“Oh,” Tycho said, trying to get his bearings. “So what do you do, then?”
“Homework, mostly,” Kate said, then nodded at the musicians. “And I practice the viola—though I’ll never be good enough to be part of a real string quartet. I want to be an ambassador. Or a minister—preferably in the commerce ministry.”
She scowled, and Tycho thought to himself that somehow it made her look even more beautiful.
“Though I’ll be lucky not to be married off as soon as I’m of age,” she said. “And then I’ll never be allowed to do anything ever again.”
“Married off?”
Kate nodded, looking morose. “Girls like me don’t have the same opportunities you do out in the colonies. My father brought me out here so I could see the solar system.”
It had been centuries since anyone in the Jovian Union had referred to their home moons as colonies, but Tycho decided to ignore that.
“So you’ve never left Earth before?” he asked.
Kate shook her head and smiled. “I’m sure I must sound very sheltered to you.”
“Of course not,” Tycho said, though he’d been thinking exactly that. “So now that you’re out here, what do you think?”
Kate wrinkled her nose. “It’s very strange not to be able to go outside. Or for there not to be an outside. I feel cooped up all the time. And . . . well, everything smells bad. No, not bad exactly. More like stale. My father says it’s because the air’s been recycled so many times.”
Tycho nodded, trying to wrap his head around the idea that air might smell different other places, that it wasn’t simply air.
“It seems strange to me that you could open a door and just walk outside,” he said. “Where I come from, if that happened you’d be dead in less than a minute.”
“So you’ve never been to Earth? Or even Mars? Never stood under a sky?”
“No. I mean, in simulations, sure. But even with the best ones you know they’re fake.”
“Oh, I wish you could see Earth. It’s so beautiful. Maybe after all this is over.”
They smiled uncertainly at each other, then ate in silence. Tycho had to admit that the flowers and sticks were delicious.
“Do you do homework?” Kate asked. “I mean, you don’t go to school. . . .”
“Oh, I do plenty of homework. Vesuvia’s our instructor for most everything.”
“Vesuvia? Is that your mother’s name? It’s very nice.”
“No, Vesuvia is our starship’s artificial intelligence. She’s kind of a pain.”
“Your teacher is a starship?” Kate asked, looking skeptical.
“Sure. She’s programmed for instruction in most anything you’d need to learn. Like I have a paper due next week on how Shakespeare’s works have been turned into motion pictures and interactive dramas.”
“But when do you have time to study? Aren’t you on duty aboard your ship?”
“We call it being on watch. But mostly that means looking out the viewports and waiting for something to happen. There’s plenty of time for homework, unfortunately.”
“But you must have been in battles.”
Tycho nodded, resisting the urge to add that this morning’s battle had involved her father.
“It sounds terrifying,” Kate said. “I’ve been going crazy while my father’s away. It’s nerve-racking sitting around thinking something might have happened to him. Don’t you get scared?”
Tycho smiled and raised his chin.
“Of course not—I’ve been a privateer all my life. I don’t know what scared is.”
Even before the first word was out, he knew his grand and heroic declaration sounded thin and uncertain.
Kate cocked her head at him.
“That didn’t sound too convincing, did it?” Tycho asked.
Kate shook her head. But then she smiled at him, and he found himself smiling back.
“Can I try that one again?” he asked.
“Please do,” Kate said, leaning forward expectantly, her eyes bright.
“I get scared,” Tycho said.
“This version is more convincing already.”
Tycho smiled but then found himself turning serious. “The thing is, I’ve trained for this since I was eight. You keep from getting scared by focusing on your responsibilities. And by having faith that the person next to you will do that too.”
They resumed their silence. The string quartet sounded beautiful, Tycho thought—he’d heard classical music before, but never as it was actually being made by hands on instruments.
Kate looked over at him tentatively.
“Have you ever killed anybody?” she asked in a small voice.
Tycho’s mind jumped back to four years ago, spinning in zero gravity aboard the Hydra. To screaming and firing his carbine over and over again, until old Croke took hold of his shoulder and assured him it was over.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was part of a team that invaded an enemy ship during my first boarding action. I was twelve. My brother got hurt and I had to go in after him. I was firing my carbine at people, but I’m not sure if I hit anybody. Everything happened so fast—it was just a blur. I still dream about it, though.”
“A boarding action? Who were they?”
“Pirates. They were seizing Jovian ships and kidnapping the crews.”
“Oh,” Kate said, and he could see she was relieved. “I was worried you’d say it was an Earth ship.”
“It wasn’t,” Tycho said, thinking that it easily could have been. Kate’s father was his enemy. What did that make her?
“But the pirates were working for Earth,” he said reluctantly. “It was part of a scheme cooked up by an Earth bureaucrat on Ceres.”
“I see.”
They were silent for a moment. Tycho hesitated, then jumped. “That bureaucrat’s now your father’s boss, you know.”
“What are you talking about?” Kate asked.
The warmth was gone from her dark eyes now. But Tycho felt she needed to understand who her father worked for.
“Your emperor’s new war minister, Threece Suud. A couple of years back he was hiring every thug in the asteroid belt. He pretended they were diplomats and put them on merchant ships so privateers like us couldn’t seize them. And he hired a bunch of other thugs to serve as crewers for pirates led by a man named Thoadbone Mox.”
“I remember the incident you’re talking about,” Kate said stiffly. “The emperor was furious—he’d been lied to. And my father had nothing to do with it. He’d never associate himself with something like that.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Tycho said, trying to be gallant. “I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”
She smiled at him. “But . . . misguided though they were, the ministers behind what happened were responding to a real problem—piracy in the outer solar system.”
Tycho shook his head. “If they were trying to do that, they would have been trying to capture Mox. Instead they were paying him. Their real goal was to stamp out privateering.”
His voice was raised, he realized—Yana was looking his way, her expression quizzical.
“Which shouldn’t exist,” Kate said, raising her own voice. “How are corporations supposed to do business knowing their cargoes will be stolen, or their factories won’t be supplied? They’re caught in the middle of a political disagreement that isn’t their fault. You’re attacking people who have never attacked you.”
“We’re defending our interests the only way we can.”
“By stealing from us?”
“By targeting your economic interests. We can’t compete with your military power, and we have no voice in your parliaments or corporations.”
“You have no representation because you declared independence! And you do have a voice in Earth corporations.”
“You just called them Earth corporations,” Tycho said smugly. “Which is correct, because they serve you, not us.”
Kate dropped her fork, which clattered on her plate.
“You know what I meant,” she said, snatching up the utensil. “Those companies have shareholders and operations all over the solar system, not just on Earth.”
“Even if we do have a voice, it isn’t heard,” Tycho said. “There are, what, twenty-five billion of you and a couple of million of us? Anything decided is always going to be in Earth’s favor.”
Kate smiled, and Tycho wondered what trap he’d fallen into.
“Shouldn’t what benefits twenty-five billion people outweigh what benefits two million?”
“Not if it means the two million people aren’t treated fairly.”
“And what would fair treatment mean?”
“That’s easy—freedom. What happens to our homes should get decided on Ganymede, not Earth. We need to be able to develop our own industries, without having to compete with yours at the same time. And we should be able to figure out these things without worrying that your war fleets will show up to stop us.”
“That seems fair to me—in a few hundred years,” Kate said.
Tycho blinked at her.
“Why’s that?”
“Because it cost Earth trillions and trillions of livres to establish colonies in the asteroids and outer solar system. And it wasn’t just our government that did that—our corporations spent trillions of their own livres. That’s why they got a charter for the asteroid belt.”
“You’re talking about something that happened six hundred years ago. They’ve made their money back by now.”
“They haven’t come close, because of the independence movements. We did the work and are now expected to give you the rewards.”
“You didn’t do the work,” Tycho objected. “Settlers and miners and prospectors did—people like my ancestors.”
“We put up the livres, didn’t we?”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Without the money, none of the work would have mattered.”
They glared at each other for a moment.
“So you’re saying we should all work for you,” Tycho said. “That we should be slaves paying off a debt we inherited from our ancestors.”
Kate shook her head. “I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that there are obligations in both directions.”
“What you’re saying sounds reasonable,” Tycho said, and Kate glanced at him suspiciously. “Except I’ve seen what Earth corporations do when no one’s looking. It was my family that found the secret Earth factories where Mox’s prisoners were taken, you know. They were slaves—and they’d still be there if we hadn’t found them.”
“We already discussed that. What happened was illegal, and a lot of people on Earth paid the price for it.”
“Threece Suud didn’t, apparently. I believe you that your father’s an honorable man. But he works for someone who’s anything but.”
Waiters were taking away the plates now. The string quartet took a break to scattered applause.
“My father can’t control who’s war minister,” Kate said.
“Fair enough. Why did he become a privateer, anyway?”
Kate bit her lip.
“He gave up his commission in the navy when I was a baby. He tried to rejoin the service a few years ago, but they wouldn’t take him—they said he was too old. So he responded to the call for privateers. He missed the adventure, I guess.”
Tycho nodded.
“The adventure. For us, what’s happening in the solar system isn’t a game. My grandfather nearly died when an Earth destroyer fired on his ship. He lost his remaining hand fighting the pirates Threece Suud hired. And my brother will have a scar for the rest of his life.”
“You can’t blame my father for that!”
“No, but I can blame him for being part of it. And I do.”
“And apparently you blame me as well,” Kate said, color flaring in her cheeks.
When Tycho said nothing, she rose abruptly from her seat, nearly knocking over her chair, and stormed off before he could react. The other people at their table were staring at him.
“What was that about, Tyke?” Yana asked.
“Politics, I guess,” Tycho said helplessly.
The waiters busied themselves picking up utensils and cleaning up crumbs.
“Better to avoid such a dreary subject at dinner,” a young Earthman across the table said disapprovingly.
Tycho frowned, folding his arms over his chest and trying to figure out what he’d do when Kate returned.
“She’s probably in the head trying to calm down,” Yana said. “Maybe you should do the same.”
He mumbled an excuse and got to his feet. He decided against the bathroom, fearing if he headed that way he’d run into a still-upset Kate. Instead, he’d get himself together outside the banquet hall.
One of the tables of privateers exploded into laughter, with Jovians and Earthmen banging glasses together and then guzzling wine amid cheers from the other tables. One bearded privateer crept over to the string quartet’s stage, returning with a violin and bow and a huge grin.
Tycho felt ashamed. The occupants of those tables had fought each other, sometimes hand to hand aboard ships, and they were managing to get along well enough. So why couldn’t he do the same thing with a girl making her first trip off Earth? He’d not only lost his cool but also fallen into the Cybeleans’ trap by squabbling openly in front of their hosts.
He slipped out of the hall, thinking the dazzling view of the asteroids and stars might give him some perspective. He passed the Cybelean constables and the check-in desk, then followed a curving corridor past the elevators, his eyes on the jeweled expanse of the heavens above.
Which meant he almost plowed directly into Kate. Apparently she hadn’t gone to the bathroom after all.
She dodged and stood staring at him, lips set and eyes flashing.
“It’s you,” she said.
“It’s me. Um, I’m sorry. I was . . .”
“Wrong?” Kate asked, eyebrows raised.
“No, not wrong. Impolite.”
“You certainly were that. Rude, intemperate, naïve . . . the very definition of a colonial.”
Tycho found himself grinning.
“What can possibly be funny?” Kate demanded.
“You’re right. I am a colonial. Never seen a sky or grass, never breathed fresh air, never been outside of a pressure dome or starship.”
Kate looked away, flushing.
“Never read a book that wasn’t a prospecting manual.”
“You said it, not me.”
“Never held a fork that wasn’t made from a mining implement.”
“All right, cut it out.”
“In fact, before tonight I don’t think I’d ever held a fork at all. On Callisto we prefer shovels.”
“I said cut it out! You’re absolutely infuriating!”
She stared at him, chest heaving, and then the distance between them had shrunk to nothing and they were in each other’s arms, her lips against his and his hands in her hair. Their noses kept colliding and their teeth clacked together, but neither of them cared.
Tycho didn’t know how long it was before they finally separated—it seemed like simultaneously forever and no time at all. His heart was pounding, and he felt dizzy. Kate reached up with one shaky hand in a doomed attempt to attend to her mussed hair, then mumbled something and hurried toward the banquet hall.