27
CALLISTO

Tycho and Yana sewed their brother’s shroud in the cuddy that afternoon. In the evening they buried Carlo in space, with Grigsby reading the Spacer’s Farewell while the Comets stood in solemn lines behind the Hashoones.

The voyage back to Jupiter passed in a crawl of miserable watches and near-silent meals. Yana spent every spare moment belowdecks, demanding that Dobbs push her through more-punishing unarmed-combat drills. Mavry was a constant presence on the quarterdeck, his thoughts his own. And Diocletia vanished into the stateroom on the top deck, emerging only when one of them implored her to eat.

While on the quarterdeck, Tycho stood watches and did homework, offering the meekest of protests when Vesuvia insisted he redo assignments he’d barely paid attention to. When he wasn’t on watch, he spent long hours in the cuddy, listening to the swish of the air scrubbers and feeling the hum of the Comet’s engines as she barreled through space.

It had been two days since Carlo’s death, two days his brother would never experience. He and Yana had done nothing important—only their grief marked these days as different from others in the normal course of their lives, as they had pursued them for years and presumably would do for years to come. And Tycho thought about all the other lives around him, from those of the crewers belowdecks to ones he knew nothing about, lived by settlers on Vesta or Mars or Earth. Somewhere out there Huff was mourning and enduring hours in his relocated tank, and somewhere else Kate was practicing the viola and doing her own homework and thinking of the boy who had betrayed her. All these lives were going on, their stories continuing to be written in ways big and small. But not his brother’s life. That had just ended, without warning. And that seemed impossible to Tycho somehow—that his life and all those others should simply go on while his brother’s did not.

His thoughts kept creeping back to the pact he had struck with Carlo, in that last hour before his death. But he refused to interrupt his mother’s grief to tell her what he had planned to confess—or to sully her memory of Carlo by revealing what his brother had done.

Grasping for something to do that had a purpose, he decided to find a holo of Carlo for the crypt at Darklands. He told Vesuvia to search her memory banks for possibilities, and was looking at candidates on his mediapad when Yana entered the cuddy, red-faced and sweaty from her latest combat session.

“Not that one,” Yana said, peering at an image of Carlo smiling in a formal tunic, before he got his scar. “Something more serious. Maybe from a piloting sim.”

“Vesuvia should have some of those. I’ll show you what I find.”

Yana hesitated.

“What happens now, Tyke? To any of us?”

“I have no idea. Mom’s refused to even read the Defense Force’s messages. But I assume our letter of marque is gone.”

“We don’t need one for what I have planned.”

“And what’s that?”

“Find Mox, of course. Find him and kill him.”

“With what ship?”

“We’ll go to 588 Achilles. We can get a ship and crew there.”

“A pair of sixteen-year-old privateers? Who’d sign on with us?”

Yana shrugged. “We’ll figure it out. This way we find Mox before he finds us. Or finds you, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been thinking about how to tell you. I watched the security vid from Bazaar. There’s audio. It’s faint, but I’ve pulled up fainter signals while running sensors. It took some doing, but I was able to isolate it and enhance it.”

She pulled out her mediapad, but Tycho shook his head.

“I don’t want to see that. Not now and not ever.”

“You think I wanted to? I made an audio file. It’s just the parts you need to hear. Not the rest.”

Tycho wanted to protest but found that he couldn’t. His sister had found something—and if she said he needed to hear it, he believed her.

Tycho knew he’d hear the scraped-throat growl of Thoadbone Mox, but he still jumped at the sound of that voice, garbled and faint but recognizable.

“. . . other two brats. Take the girl alive, but shoot the boy if you find him.”

The reply was inaudible beneath the bang of a shutter.

“They won’t interfere,” Mox replied, and Tycho’s hands balled into fists at the glee in his voice. “All but gave us an invitation.”

“Wait,” Tycho said, trying to keep his hands from shaking. “What did he say?”

Yana played it again, then let the transmission continue.

“We just have to be out of here before the constables arrive,” Mox said. “And they never do nothing quickly.”

The file ended. Yana looked questioningly at Tycho.

“What did that mean about someone not interfering?”

“I don’t know,” Tycho said, though that wasn’t true. He tried to hide his fury, fearing Yana would see it. But his sister was staring down at the mediapad, brows furrowed.

“And why would Mox want to take me alive?” she asked. “Why am I different?”

“I don’t know that either,” Tycho said, telling the truth this time.

Yana pushed her mediapad aside, her thoughts her own.

“You’re serious about going to 588 Achilles,” Tycho said after a few moments, and Yana’s eyes returned to his.

“I am. Like I said, I’m getting a crew and finding Mox.”

“Grandfather will be there—it’s the only place he could have gone.”

His sister’s expression turned hard. “Then he can help. It won’t bring Carlo back, but he owes him that much. He owes us that much.”

Tycho stared at the images of Carlo on his screen. “And Mom and Dad?”

“They’re not going to let Mom fly for a long time, if ever. You know that. They may never let any of us fly again.”

Tycho nodded.

“I’m sorry, Tyke. It’s strange how it worked out. You were going to be captain, and now none of us will be.”

Tycho turned away. His sister didn’t know the secret he and Carlo had shared, and what they’d planned to do.

Tell her. If you can’t tell Mom, at least tell her.

But to his shame, he found he couldn’t do it.

He reached halfheartedly for the screen of his mediapad to look for more images of Carlo. But Yana leaned forward and grabbed his wrist, forcing him to look up.

“You’re not going to be captain, and neither am I,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to spend the rest of our lives as dirtsiders, Tyke. There’s another way. Come with me to Achilles and we’ll find it. Together.”

His sister’s grip was surprisingly strong.

“All right,” Tycho said, putting his hand over hers. “Together.”

Two days later the Comet eased into her docking cradle above Callisto. Tycho and Yana mustered out the crew, thanking them for their service and their kind words, and then returned to the quarterdeck, where Mavry was sitting in silence at his console. He raised his eyes and nodded at them, fetched Diocletia from the top deck, and then piloted the gig down in silence.

A grim-faced Defense Force officer was waiting at Port Town’s transportation hub, flanked by two soldiers.

“Captain Diocletia Hashoone?” she asked.

“I knew you’d be here,” Diocletia said.

“You are charged with piracy, illegal destruction of property, and unauthorized hostile action against a sovereign regime. Such charges are a violation of your family’s letter of marque, which is hereby declared null and void, and your performance bond as a privateer is now forfeit.”

Diocletia simply nodded and stepped forward, arms outstretched so they could handcuff her. But the official shook her head.

“That won’t be necessary at the present time, Captain Hashoone. By order of Minister Vass, you are to consider yourself under house arrest pending resolution of this matter. You are forbidden to leave your homestead without specific permission from the Defense Force. Are these conditions clear, and do you agree to abide by them?”

Diocletia nodded. The official turned and signaled to the soldiers, who strode away.

Parsons, to his dismay, didn’t know how to access the program that added holograms to the family crypt—he explained that Huff had always insisted on handling such things.

Tycho wasn’t going to ask his parents or Carina, and Yana was in the simulation room fighting imaginary enemies. So he descended to the gloomy chamber alone, connected his mediapad with the hologram pedestal, and began struggling with the unfamiliar controls.

Machinery whined inside the pedestal, and the image of Johannes Hashoone shimmered into existence. Tycho glared at his great-grandfather. He’d been a thief and a murderer, and it offended Tycho to think of him immortalized alongside Carlo.

But then, Carlo hadn’t been perfect—he’d spent the last morning of his life tormented by that. Tycho had broken family covenants held sacred for generations. And Huff had made mistakes—terrible ones that had led to Tycho standing there in the darkness by himself.

Why did you do it, Grandfather? Why did you let Mox go?

On the third try he managed to get Carlo’s hologram loaded, allowing himself a small smile as Johannes rippled and vanished, replaced by an image of Carlo at his console aboard the Comet, control yoke held loosely and confidently. His brother’s expression was serene—he was exactly where he’d wanted to be, doing what he’d loved to do.

But then Tycho couldn’t get the pedestal to save the hologram—it would only display it from the mediapad.

His frustration boiling over, Tycho brought his fist down on the control panel. It hurt badly, and he grimaced and rubbed the bruised heel of his hand. The panel was beeping now, and he could hear static.

Great, I broke the stupid thing.

“About time you checked in, Huff,” a man’s voice said from a speaker in the pedestal. “Our sympathies about your grandson. He was a fine pilot—and would have made a good captain one day. Now, what do you have to report?”

Tycho looked at the control panel in horrified realization. His grandfather had come here each time the Comet returned to Callisto, but it hadn’t been to commune with the departed.

“Who are you?” Tycho demanded.

Silence, broken only by static.

“Never mind—you all use fake names anyway. I don’t know who you are, but I know who you work for. You’re my grandfather’s handler for the Securitat.”

After a moment the man on the other side of the comm found his voice.

“Tycho. Look, kid—”

“Shut up. Just shut up. You had my brother killed. He told you he’d made a mistake and wouldn’t help you anymore, and you let him die for it.”

“You saw the tape, kid. Mox killed your brother.”

“I heard the tape. Mox killed my brother, but you let him do it.”

Silence.

Tycho leaned closer to the pedestal, the image of his brother looming overhead. He wanted to be sure the Securitat agent on the other end of the transmission could hear him.

“I don’t know how you ensnared my grandfather, or exactly what dirty deal you forced him into,” he said. “But I’m going to find out. To honor what my grandfather was, before you ruined him, and to honor what my brother could have been.”

The Securitat agent remained silent.

“I’m going to find out—that’s a promise. And then I’m going to bring all of you down.”