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Chinelo Onwualu
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Bruno strode across the causeway, scanning the three land skimmers hanging from their docking harnesses with a critical eye. His footsteps echoed through the cavernous space of the docking bay. The diagnostic reader he held showed the surface vehicles were fuelled and in perfect mechanical condition. They were decades out of date, lacking the smooth, sleek designs of newer models, but they worked—and that was all that mattered.
Bringing passengers on board always set him on edge; they had a tendency to poke about in places they didn’t belong. But running a haulage freighter doesn’t pay much when there isn’t much to haul. Now that the technology for instant matter transportation had improved movement between the five planets of the star system, work was becoming rarer. Bruno needed the money and he had to know that his ship, The Lady’s Gift, was in perfect shape.
He keyed an all-clear code for the docking bay into his reader and sent the message to the main computer. Slipping the flat pad into his tool harness, he headed for engineering. Ronk, the ship’s mechanic, met him at the entrance to the engine room. At almost seven feet of solid muscle, with skin a glossy brown so dark that it seemed to drink in light, Ronk was an intimidating presence. Bruno had no doubt the engineer could snap him in half. Luckily, Ronk was a pacifist.
“How’s she looking?” Bruno asked, though he needn’t have bothered. The burly engineer was scowling, which made Bruno smile. Ronk had grown up on a religious colony whose people believed that life was a burden and death was its only release. They frowned on anything meant to keep one comfortable.
“We’ll live,” Ronk snapped. Bruno watched him lumber back into the dark recesses of the engine room, wondering, as usual, how a man so big could move so delicately.
Bruno continued towards the bridge. Passing through the mess hall, he saw his twin sister, Marley, sitting at the dining table. Her chestnut brown skin was a shade lighter than his and she liked to dye her black hair a vibrant orange, otherwise everyone said she was a female version of him. Which was unfortunate, because the square jaw and broad physique that gave him his rugged good looks, made her look homely.
Marley had taken up half of the dining table with an assortment of metal parts. Knowing her, she was reassembling some machine. He watched her work for a time.
“What’s this?” Bruno picked up an unidentifiable bit of metal.
“This, fearless leader,”—he hated when she called him that—“is a V-26 Skyhammer with 10-volt action, 15-meg rounds and a zoom scope that could see Neptune—if it still existed.”
“Try that again, this time in a language I can understand.”
“It’s a very big gun.”
Bruno nodded and dropped the piece he’d picked up. He should have known. Marley had an intuitive grasp of machinery, focused exclusively on armoury, which made her the ship’s default security officer.
“I’m trying to fix the balance, though. Thing’s so top-heavy, you’d need to prop it over a barrel to shoot it straight.”
“And what’s wrong with the collection of very big guns you already have?”
“Nothing, but you never know when you might need a back-up. This baby could pop a hole in a military freighter—with the right modifications.”
“Marley, we’re a trawler, not the Sixteenth Battalion. Why would we possibly need this?”
“You never know.”
Bruno sighed. Sometimes it was like talking to a very small child.
“Just put that thing back together and stow it. I don’t want any sign of it when the passengers board, got it?
“Aye, aye, fearless leader,” Marley grinned and snapped him a salute.
“And stop calling me that!”
He continued towards the bridge. There, he found Horns, his navigator, frowning over a display console. She was small-boned, at full height she barely cleared his chest, with a round child-like face that dimpled when she smiled. It was rumoured that she was part Scion, the ancient race that had developed most of the technology that underpinned their world, but Bruno doubted it. The Scions had disappeared centuries ago. Still, given her porcelain pale skin, silver blonde hair, and almond-shaped gray eyes, it was clear that someone somewhere in her genealogy had fooled around.
“Did you look at this clearance ticket before you filled the passenger register?” asked Horns. Before a ship could take on passengers, clearance tickets were required from the Imperial Command certifying that none of the guests had outstanding warrants or, worse, unpaid bills.
“Yeah, they checked out. Why? What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it exactly,” she said. “But take a look at the seal.” Bruno leaned over her shoulder to stare at the screen. Her hair smelled like lemons. “Notice the extra cross over there? That’s a top-level Imperial symbol. Only government brass use those.”
“All we’ve got on the register are a widow and her kids.”
“I know. Why would anyone that high up in the Imperial Command sign off for a farmer travelling on a broken-down freighter?”
Bruno didn’t like this. He and Marley had grown up on a smuggling scow in the rough waters of Moonlight Bay on Old Antegon, and it had been a long time since he had been on the wrong side of the law. They had worked hard to get off-planet and he wasn’t eager to go back.
“Scrub them through the system again. If anything looks even remotely funny, flag ‘em.”
“Should I drop their booking, too?”
“Heck no! We need the money too badly for that. No, I’ll have Marley keep her big gun handy. Anyone tries to start something on my ship, it won’t be pleasant.”
––––––––
As soon as they walked on to the ship, Bruno knew they were trouble. They were dressed as farmers, but he knew none of them had ever seen a farm. The older woman was too straight. She moved like someone who was used to giving orders—shoulders thrown back and a steady, penetrating gaze. The young man was a soldier. Barefoot, dressed in a threadbare shirt and trousers two sizes too small, he carried nothing more dangerous than a cloth bag, but Bruno had seen too much of war to be fooled. The girl was something else entirely.
She could not have been older than fifteen. Her coal-black skin was so smooth it was luminous. She was bald as an egg with delicate features and a grace that made her seem as if she was gliding. She kept her gaze down for the most part, but for a moment, when she glanced up, Bruno saw that her eyes were as gold as the heart of a flame.
The woman called herself Ana. She introduced the young man and the girl as her children, Drake and Bella. She handed over their identification cards and Bruno checked them one last time. They were clean. Just like her clearance papers. But they had the same high-level seal he had seen on the manifest. Bruno hesitated over the cards, debating whether he needed this kind of trouble. There would be other passengers, surely. Then his eye fell on her payment receipt. The amount she’d paid was more than double what he had charged.
“Is there a problem, captain?” Ana asked softly.
“Not at all, ma’am,” Bruno said. “Welcome aboard.”
Usually, all the crew—except Ronk—would come out to the entrance of the docking bay to welcome new guests, but by the time they reached the loading bay only Marley had arrived. Bruno let out a relieved breath to see that strapped to her back was her big gun. He caught the young man’s face when he saw Marley. His eyes had narrowed at the sight of the gun, but he had quickly smoothed his features into a careful blankness. Bruno resolved to watch him carefully.
“My, that is a big gun,” Ana said after Bruno had made the introductions. She spoke as if she was talking to a slow-witted child. Luckily, Bruno’s twin had no ear for sarcasm.
“Yeah, I call her Jane.”
“That’s a lovely name.”
“Thanks! Hey, follow me, I’ll show you where you’ll be staying.” Marley looked over at Bruno and mouthed: I like her. Bruno sighed inwardly. His sister was such a poor judge of character sometimes. As they headed into the heart of the ship, the intercom in his ear cackled to life.
“I need to talk to you.” Horns’ voice sounded strained.
“Can it wait?” Bruno wanted to keep an eye on his guests and he was in no mood to deal with any more strangeness.
“No, Bruno. It really can’t.” Horns only ever called him by his name when she was being serious. Otherwise it was ‘Boss’.
When he got to the bridge he found Horns pacing. Her pale hands were fluttering like live things. He had never seen his hard-as-nails navigator so agitated.
“I didn’t know, Bruno. I mean, I suspected something was shady, but I had no idea,” she said.
“Horns, calm down. What are you talking about?”
“You’ve got to get them off the ship.”
“Our passengers? Are you crazy? They’ve already paid—and you should see how much. We can finally fix our hyperdrive, maybe even get one that was made in the last decade.”
“Bruno, you don’t understand,” she took a deep breath to calm herself before she continued. “They’re Mehen.”
Bruno’s smile froze on his face. The Mehen di Gaya were the highest class of priests in the Amethyst Order, the religious institution that controlled the Empire. There were rumours that the Mehen even operated a shadow arm of elite warrior monks who could make whole families disappear overnight.
“How can you be sure?” Bruno asked.
“Because I used to be one of them.”
“You’re Mehen? You never told me that.”
“It’s who I was, not who I am now,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Besides, you never asked.” She gave him a sad look.
“That’s not fair, you could have said something if you wanted to. It’s not like you talk about your past all the time. I mean, I don’t even know your real name.”
“Well, there never seemed a good enough time. It was always one crisis or another with you.” She turned towards the control banks and stared out the giant windows. “It still is.”
Bruno thought he heard a hint of tears in her voice. “What do you want me to say, Horns? I run haulage; if it’s not someone trying to ship stolen goods off-planet, it’s not having the right papers, or stowaways, or... there’ll always be something.”
“I know, but sometimes it’s like you don’t have space in your life for anything beyond this ship.”
They had had this conversation a thousand times. He fought the urge to touch her, to wrap her in his arms and feel the way her body curved into his. He longed for the familiarity of her smell and her skin. He had never been good with words, but his touch could make her promises. Yet they had been down that path before. Only heartbreak lay that way.
“Doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, cutting into his thoughts. “We have bigger problems. I think the girl is in danger.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people don’t know this, but the Order started out as the tenders of the fire pits in the old temples, back when people would burn sacrifices in the sacred flames. In those days, the priests would pick a child—a special child whom no one was allowed to touch—and when this child reached a certain age, it was sacrificed, burned in the Holy Fires. When I was a novice, they told me the Order stopped the practice hundreds of years ago.” She turned. “But I don’t think they have. I think they just took it off-planet.”
“So you think they’re going to kill that girl?”
“It’s worse than that. I ran that symbol through the system and I found records going back nearly fifty years. Every fourteen years or so, this symbol would show up in the passenger manifests of a small M-class vessel—like ours—going to the moon of Osiris. The thing is, all the ships would go in... but none of them ever came back out.”
A cold feeling settled at the base of Bruno’s spine. “Are you sure?”
Horns nodded. “They didn’t even bother to hide the records.”
They were silent for a minute or two. “Well, no one’s killing anyone on my ship,” said Bruno. “It’ll raise the insurance premiums.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll figure out something, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” she said, and reached out to touch his cheek. He had forgotten how calloused her fingers were from gripping the navigation console. He closed his eyes and turned to brush his lips against them, but she withdrew her hand too quickly. Her touch lingered long afterward as if he had been burned.
––––––––
“I just don’t see what the big deal is,” Marley said.
“It’s your eternal soul,” growled Ronk.
“I know,” she said quickly. “I just don’t see why it matters. I mean, if I were an ant or a dog or a chimpanzee, nobody would care what my soul was up to. But just because I’m a person, suddenly my soul is important? I don’t get it.”
They had gathered at the dining table, all except the girl; Ana said she was ill and would be eating in her cabin. Tonight’s dinner was a special treat, Ana and Drake had brought meat—dried strips of real meat. Between that and the greens and tomatoes—Horns grew them in a small hydroponic garden on the ship’s abandoned leisure deck—it was almost a true meal. Almost.
Bruno had tried to ignore the increasingly heated conversation between Marley and Ronk, but in spite of himself, he found he was listening with growing interest. Besides, this was the most he’d heard Ronk say in one sitting in all the time he had known him.
“But we are better than animals or insects,” Ronk snapped. “We made in the image of the Creator himself.”
“See, that’s the thing, how do you know that? How do you know what the creator looks like? No one’s seen him. It’s like we looked around and thought, ‘hey no one else looks like us, we must be special.’ But what if we’re not?”
“We are special. We have reason and compassion,” Ronk said in a low voice. His voice seemed calm, but Bruno noticed the engineer was gripping his knife tightly, as if to keep his fist from shaking. “It does not matter that no one has seen the Creator’s face. We have seen the works of his hands. You have never seen the wind, yet you feel its power. Do you doubt its existence?”
“Oh come on, I’m not arguing about whether the Creator exists. I can’t prove that and neither can you. What I’m saying is you can’t know anything about what the Creator is thinking or what he wants just by looking at the universe. Just like you can’t look at my fork and guess what I had for lunch.”
“We do not need to guess. The Creator has told us what he wants of us through the words of his Prophet,” Bruno’s voice broke slightly at the mention of the Prophet. “Those who heed his words, follow in the path of truth.”
“Oh! And that’s another thing, how do you know the Prophesies are right? I mean, we’re talking about a book collected from a bunch of other books, like, five thousand years ago. It’s been translated and retranslated so many times that I’m pretty sure stuff’s been lost. How do you know that what you’re reading is even what was written in the first place? And why choose this book over any other ancient book? All you have is your belief. I’m sorry, man, that’s just not enough for me.”
Suddenly, Ronk stood up, knocking his chair over and juddering the table. He stared at Marley for a moment, his face unreadable. Then, without another word, he stalked off. Bruno watched him go, bemused.
“Oh no! Did I say something wrong?” Marley was immediately distraught and turned to each person at the table. “I didn’t mean to offend him; I was just making a point.”
“I’m sure he’s ok.” Bruno took the opportunity to look over at Ana at the opposite end of the table. “What about you? Do you think everything the Prophesies say are the ‘unvarnished’ words of the Creator?”
The older woman wiped her mouth deliberately before she spoke.
“Oh, I never discuss religion,” she said. “Especially not over dumplings.” She gestured at the young man beside her who produced an insulated food flask filled with dumplings—whose pork might possibly even have come from actual pigs. Amazingly, they were still hot. Bruno’s mouth watered at the sight of them. Now, it was a real meal.
––––––––
“He hates me,” said Marley.
“He doesn’t hate you,” said Bruno.
“Yes he does. I insulted his religion,” she fingered the strap of the large gun she carried on her back. Bruno had asked her to keep it on her at all times.
“It’s a big religion; it can take a little criticism,” Bruno said, distractedly. He had not seen the girl since she arrived on the ship the day before. Their destination on the small moon formerly known as Ganymede—before it was terra-formed for human habitation and renamed Osiris—was only two days away. He had to draw the girl out and get her away from her captors before then. Once they landed, they’d be in the hands of the Mehen and there was no telling what would happen to them after that. A plan had started forming in his head. It was vague and dangerous, but it just might work.
They rounded a corner and Marley almost collided with Ronk as he emerged from the engine room. She ducked her head, unsure of what to do. They hadn’t seen each other since the disastrous dinner the night before. The big engineer frowned and looked at his hands. He started to speak, but Marley spoke first.
“I’m sorry if I said anything blasphemous last night,” she said. “It’s just... I never think about that stuff—I mean, religion and all that—and you know me, sometimes when I open my mouth I don’t know what comes out.”
Ronk’s frown deepened and he took a deep breath before speaking. “I am not insulted,” he said. He spoke in his characteristic short, clipped sentences. Apparently, only religion brought out his loquacious side, Bruno observed wryly. “What you said last night made me think. I have never truly thought about my faith. When I left the colony, I wanted the freedom to do as I pleased. Now, you have given me the freedom to think as I please. For that, I thank you.”
Marley blinked at him, owl-eyed. Ronk nodded curtly and retreated back into the gloom of the engine room. She stared after him for a moment, and then broke into a smile that made her beautiful.
“Did you hear that?” She turned to Bruno, beaming. “He thanked me. I think I’m going to die of happiness.”
“We all have to die of something,” Bruno said dryly. He continued on to the cargo hold, Marley skipped after him like a little girl. In the depths of the hold, he began moving boxes and crates.
“He said I freed his mind, can you believe that?” Marley chattered as she helped him move the detritus of past adventures. She stopped. “Hey, if we get married, will I have to convert?”
Bruno’s cry cut her short. “Found it!”
“Wait, that’s-”
“Yes, it is.”
“You still have that? You can’t be serious, Bruno. You use that and we’ll be flagged for sure. Captain Moran warned us.”
“We’ll be fine. There’s a lot more going on in this ship than some illegal smuggling.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, fearless leader.”
“Me too,” said Bruno under his breath as he headed back to the bridge. “And stop calling me that!”
––––––––
The young man called Drake was sitting alone in the small lounge in the cabin bay. It was less a lounge than two armchairs and a tiny table in the middle of a rounded cul-de-sac just off from the mess hall. From there one could see all the doors of every cabin in the bay. It was the perfect place to keep watch—if that was one’s intention. He was examining his hands as if they belonged to someone else and looked up as Bruno stepped in.
For all his size, he was much younger than Bruno had initially thought. No more than fifteen, if that. “Drake, right? How’s your sister?” he asked. “We haven’t seen her since you all came aboard.”
“She, she prefers to be alone.”
“Oh? Is she sick?” Bruno moved towards the door, but the boy—for that was what he was, really—stood up to block his way.
“No! I mean, well, she’s just resting.”
Bruno nodded sceptically. He had expected a hard-boiled veteran and had come prepared for a fight. This was not going as he had planned. He studied Drake a moment. “Is this your first time off-world?”
He nodded.
“How old are you?”
The boy blinked in confusion. It was clear he wasn’t often asked personal questions. “Sixteen,” he answered slowly, as if afraid of getting it wrong.
“That’s a good age. You know, Marley and I were about that old when we first went off-planet, too.”
“Yeah?” The boy was impressed, and Bruno could see he struggled not to show it. “How did you leave?” He asked too casually.
“We stowed away on a trade ship not much bigger than this one,” Bruno chuckled at the memory. The captain had been so angry he threatened to put them both in an airlock and flush them out to space. Instead, for three years he had put the two orphans to work, caring for them like a father. It was tough, but they had been lucky. They could have been sold to slavers.
“What about your parents?” Drake asked.
“Never had any.” That wasn’t exactly true. Bruno and Marley had never known their father, but their mother had been a dockside runner on Moonlight Bay, selling charms and trinkets to sailors and spacers when the work was good and selling other things when it wasn’t. One day, when the twins were ten, she’d told them she had found work on a smuggler’s scow. She had Bruno and Marley wait for her on the deck of the ship while she went to see a man about some money he owed her. She never returned. For the next five years, the twins worked to earn their keep on the scow, running errands and hauling small loads to get by.
“But we survived, Marley and me. We had each other. It’s important for family to stick together, isn’t it?”
The boy shifted his weight at that, his eyes darting quickly to the door of their cabin. “That’s important,” he agreed reluctantly.
“Then tell me the truth, what’s wrong with your sister? What’s she got?”
“What? No, she’s not sick.”
“Look, she’s been holed up in there since we’ve been space-borne. You’re the only one who ever goes in there, so whatever she’s got, you can’t catch it. If it’s the shakes, we’ve got ways to deal with it-”
“No, you don’t understand, it’s not like that, she’s fine.”
“Then, let me see for myself,” Bruno made to shoulder past, but Drake remained firmly in his path.
“You can’t go in there!” There was a note of desperation in his voice and a look on his face almost like fear. Otherwise, the rest of him was steel.
“You don’t tell me where I can and cannot go on my ship,” Bruno’s voice was dangerously low. “Do you understand?”
“Is everything all right, Captain?” It was Ana.
“I want to see your daughter.”
“Has she done something wrong?” The crackle of the overhead speakers interrupted his response.
“Boss, we’ve got company,” Horn’s voice was steady, but Bruno could hear the note of fear in it. “Big Brother is here.” He cursed softly. It was too soon.
“I thought you said you didn’t have any brothers,” Drake said accusingly. The boy seemed hurt. He was so young, Bruno realised—younger than Bruno had ever been, even at that age.
“It’s a literary reference, child, from a classic of Old Earth,” Ana said. There was amusement in her eyes. “I didn’t know you could read, Captain.”
“You’d be surprised what I can do,” and with that, Bruno stalked off to the bridge.
––––––––
Captain Alistair Moran was a grizzled veteran of half a hundred battles and you could see every one of them on his body. He wore smoked glasses to hide the cybernetic implants that had replaced his eyes and one of his hands was robotic, though it was impossible to tell which because he wore black gloves all the time. He was a small man, bald—whether by choice or from another accident, no one could say—with a clean-shaven face crisscrossed with scars from laser blades, and a jaw that seemed permanently clenched. He stood rod-straight in his gray Army Ranger uniform, black boots polished to a high shine. Bruno suspected that if anyone cared to measure, they would find that Moran stood at a precise 90-degree angle from the floor.
His ship, the S.S. Gilgamesh had overtaken The Lady’s Gift easily and locked onto them with traction hooks. Twenty of his men had forced their airlock open and stormed the ship through an airtight bridge connecting the vessels. They rounded up the crew in the main hanger bay. Horns and Ronk both had looks of controlled fear, but Marley looked ready to beat someone’s head in. They had confiscated her gun and her lip was bleeding, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. Bruno noted that they had not found his guests yet, but knew it was only a matter of time.
“Bruno Tertian,” Moran’s voice was hard as a leather whip. “What did I tell you about trawling contraband through my sky?”
Bruno chose his words carefully. He was in very dangerous territory; Moran did not like wrong answers. “We don’t want trouble, we’re just on a routine run to Osiris.”
“Oh? And if I search this ship I won’t find anything... untoward?”
“We don’t-”
But before he could finish, Moran’s hand flashed out and pain bloomed across Bruno’s face. Bruno fell to one knee in agony, blood pouring from his nose. He heard someone gasp—Marley or Horns, he could not tell whom. Moran had broken his nose with a casual flick of his wrist.
“Don’t lie to me, Tertian,” he said quietly. “You know how much I hate being lied to.” He turned to his lieutenant, a big, pale-skinned man with a shock of red hair. “Search the ship.”
It could not have been more than a few minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. Soon the big man returned carrying a sealed metal chest. It was very heavy, Bruno knew, but the lieutenant carried it with ease. Behind him, Ana and Drake followed. There was no sign of the girl. Ana showed no trace of fear; in fact, she had a small smile on her face. It grew larger when she saw Bruno on his knees trying to stanch the blood from his broken nose.
“I hope there is no problem Captain...” she hesitated to get his name and the captain supplied it. “Captain Moran,” she finished.
“No problem, ma’am. Did you know this ship was carrying contraband goods?” He nodded to the sealed chest. “A serious violation of the law.”
“I had no idea, captain. We are just humble farmers on our way to a homestead on Osiris.”
“Of course, ma’am. But we’re going to have to take you in for questioning. Just to be sure, you understand.”
“Oh I don’t think there’ll be any need for that. If you just confiscate the contraband, you can let us go on our way.”
“That won’t be possible ma’am.”
“I’m sure your command will understand,” Ana said, and produced an ID disk that Bruno had never seen before. It was a dull metal grey with no holographs on it except for a strange symbol in one corner. She flashed it at the captain, smiling broadly.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but rules are rules.”
Ana’s smile died. “Who are you?” She demanded, but the truth had begun to dawn on her. “Where are your badges? What command do you belong to?”
Moran smiled thinly. He still wore his Ranger uniform and still flew his military-class schooner. He made sure all his men wore their uniforms and that they carried standard-issue ranger rifles, but it was all a ruse. Alistair Moran hadn’t been an employee of the empire for a very long time.
He turned to Bruno. “I’ve warned you, Tertian. Don’t let me catch you in my sky again. Next time, it won’t be your nose I’ll break,” he nodded to his lieutenant. The big man tucked the chest under one arm and grabbed Ana with the other. She squealed in pain as he twisted her arm, marching her off towards the airlock.
Bruno almost felt sorry for her. “What are you going to do with her?” he asked.
“Whatever I want,” Moran smirked. “The Red Priests are the reason I had to leave the army. They owe me.”
“What about the boy?”
Moran examined Drake closely. The boy was expressionless, but the old pirate seemed to see something in his face.
“He’s yours. Not my type anyway.” With that, he marched off. His soldiers filed silently after him. They still retained their military discipline, Bruno noted.
He sighed with relief as the last of them walked through the airlock, sealing it shut behind him. He heard the metallic thonk as the traction hooks disengaged. Horns rushed to his side, helping him to his feet. The pain in his nose was now a dull throbbing. It was no longer bleeding, but he knew he had to tend to it soon.
“Everyone all right?” Bruno asked his crew.
“A bit roughed up, but fine,” said Horns. Marley gave him a thumbs-up, grinning. A bruise was forming on her jaw, he saw. Ronk noticed it too. He touched it gingerly; she winced in pain but did not turn away.
“Good, let’s get out of here.” Horns nodded. Reluctantly, she let him go and headed to the bridge. Ronk headed to the engine room while Marley went down to the hold to check to see how much of their supplies Moran had taken.
It was just him and the boy left. Drake looked lost and scared, but there was a determined cast in his jaw. He would be fine, Bruno knew.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” Bruno said.
“She was not my mother,” Drake’s voice was hard.
“What happened to your sister? How come Moran didn’t find her?”
Just as Drake opened his mouth to answer, the ship was rocked by a violent blast that that sent them both stumbling. High above them, the skimmers swayed dangerously in their harnesses.
Horn’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Bruno, they’re firing on us!” she cried.
“Get us out of here!”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can get the shields up, but nothing else is responding-”
Ronk’s voice cut in. “Captain, they disabled the engine systems. They destroyed every control bank down here.”
Bruno cursed under his breath. He knew it had been too easy. “Can you fix it?”
“It will be difficult, but I think so. Otherwise, we will all die,” Ronk almost sounded pleased.
“Do it,” he snapped. Haulage freighters were not usually equipped with weaponry, but then again, most haulage freighters didn’t have Marley. “Sis? Tell me they left something behind.”
“Never fear, fearless leader,” Marley’s voice was light. Chaos was her element. “They took our food, our meds and all our spares—they even took Martha—but Jane and the rest of the family are still here.”
Another blast rocked the ship, but they held on to the walls for support and kept their feet.
“Can you handle a gun?” Bruno asked. Drake nodded. “Good, follow me.”
Bruno had never liked the bio-suits—they smelled like old bananas and they made him feel claustrophobic, though he would never admit that to anyone—but they were their last hope. Bruno and Drake met Marley in the ship’s lowest cargo hold. Marley hadn’t been exaggerating about her collection, Bruno realised. Over the years, she had collected and modified dozens of high-calibre weapons, making them lighter, more accurate, and above all, more powerful. She picked out the two largest. The gun she’d been modifying was big, but it was hardly the largest in her arsenal. That honour went to the one she gave Bruno; it was the size of a small cannon.
“I call her Bertha,” Marley said, grinning.
There were more hideaways, pockets, and vents, on the ship than Bruno could count. It had been modified and refitted dozens of times and every time they wrenched out and replaced an old system with something smaller, faster, and more efficient, those old spaces would be closed off or converted to storage. One of these retrofitted spaces was the series of tanks from when the ship still used liquid fuel. They were massive carbon-fibre drums with two outlets: one at the top to allow for manual checks, and the other at the bottom where intake nozzles fitted. Located on the ship’s underbelly, they were the perfect place to slip out unnoticed.
The tanks normally held the ship’s extra water, but right now one of them was nearly empty. They climbed down into it and, amid an increasing barrage from Moran’s ship, put on their bio-suits. The three of them slipped out of the ship through the intake valve. Marley immediately headed for the starboard side, while Bruno and Drake headed for the port side, the tiny air-jets on their suits propelling them through the zero gravity of space. Bruno tried not to look out at the vast blackness beyond the ship; it always made him dizzy.
Soon, he could spy Moran’s ship just over the bow. The Lady’s Gift was facing the S.S. Gilgamesh directly and her front shields were taking most of the blasts. They were holding, but Bruno could see more sparks every time they took another hit. They would not last much longer. Bruno manoeuvred the large gun off his back. He snapped on the suit’s magnetic boots and they held him fast to the hull. A few feet away, still near the underside of the ship, Drake did the same. Bruno knew that on the other side, Marley was doing it too.
“Ready?” Bruno called to the others through the suit’s intercom.
“Aye, aye, fearless leader,” sang Marley.
“Ready, sir,” came Drake’s voice. The boy had taken on a military precision that Bruno knew could have only come from long years of training—likely since childhood.
“Horns, on my signal, lower the shields. One... two... now!”
In a flash of light, Marley fired her gun. Moran had not been expecting return fire and hadn’t bothered to raise his shields. A spot of fire bloomed on the other ship’s hull and was quickly quenched by the vacuum of space. Marley was right; Jane really could pop a hole in a military freighter. Then, Bruno and Drake fired their guns. Their aim was true. Both rounds hit the same spot on the ship that Marley’s had. Suddenly, all the lights on the S. S. Gilgamesh went out.
Bruno smiled grimly, snapped off the boots, and jetted towards the nearest airlock.
“Captain, I have made some adjustments,” Ronk’s voice crackled over the intercom. “We cannot go very fast or very far, but we can fly.”
“Then let’s get out of here.”
The girl Bella was waiting for them when they returned. It was the first time Bruno had seen her since she arrived on the ship. Standing in the light, Bruno could see that her skin was darker than he’d first thought. She was coal-black—like something burned to a crisp—and she had no eyebrows. She was dressed in the same clothes she had worn when she boarded. But it was as if she was a different girl. Gone were the hunched shoulders and downcast eyes that had made her seem like some small, hunted, haunted thing. She stood straight, her red-gold eyes boring into him.
“The red woman, is she gone? Truly?” Her voice was low, almost masculine, and smooth as silk slipping through the fingers.
Bruno nodded.
A look of sadness passed over her face. “She was broken inside,” she said quietly. “I could have fixed her, but she would not let me.”
As Bruno took off the bio-suit’s helmet, it brushed his broken nose, sending a lance of pain searing across his face. In all the excitement, he had completely forgotten about it. He let out an involuntary grunt.
Bella moved like silent lightening. Suddenly, she was in front of him, reaching out to touch him, ignoring Drake’s shout. It was as if time slowed down for Bruno. He was aware of Drake’s voice, of movement behind him, but somehow it did not matter. As her hand crept closer to his face, his skin began to prickle and his hair stood on end, as if he was too close to a high-voltage wire.
Her touch was electric. A searing light burned through him—as it passed he could feel the cartilage in his nose crunch back into place, the old laser blade wound on his shoulder melt away, the pitted scars on his hands from his childhood as a dockworker knit back up, the first beginnings of arthritis in his knees loosen—and then it was gone.
Bruno sagged to the ground; he would have fallen over had Marley not caught him in time. The girl stepped back, cradling her hand against her chest. Then she smiled and broke into a laugh. It was the most beautiful sound Bruno had ever heard.
––––––––
A few weeks later, as Bruno made his way up to the leisure deck, he passed Marley and Ronk sitting at the mess hall dining table. She was sitting on his lap.
“I did not leave the table in anger,” Ronk was saying. “I just needed to think. So I went to down to the cooling vents in the engine room.”
“Oh yeah, I think better when it’s noisy, too. I like to go up to the main air turbine shaft. I have to be careful ‘cause I could get sucked in if I stand too close.”
Ronk laughed at that; it was deep and rich like soil. It was still strange to hear him do so, but Ronk was a man transformed. In some ways they all were.
“So, I’ve been meaning to ask you, what does ‘Ronk’ mean?”
“It’s short for Aderonke. It’s Yoruba...”
Bruno continued on.
Bella and Drake were in the cabin bay lounge talking heatedly in low tones.
“Captain!” Bella called out when she saw him and bounded down the short hallway to meet him. Dressed in a mix of Marley and Horns’ hand-me-downs, she almost looked like a normal teenager. “I have the most wonderful news.” She spoke like someone who had learned to speak out of a book—an old, old book.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Have you ever heard of the Acolytes of Oshun?”
“Aren’t they the priests who run a high-class prostitution scam?”
“No, no! They are honoured servants of the Goddess of Love,” she said, her face animated by excitement. “They are priests and priestesses who dedicate their bodies to service; they spend years learning the intricate arts of pleasure, which they use to help bring devotees closer to divine. Their main temple is on Mars.”
“That’s nice, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
“I want to join them!” she burst out—and clapped her hands to her mouth as if she’d spoken without thinking. “Please, please, please may I join them?”
“I don’t know Bel, you sure that’s what you want?”
“Captain, I’ve spent my whole life craving the touch of others,” she said. “The life of an Acolyte would be paradise for me.”
“What about your... abilities?”
She shrugged and stuffed her hands in her pockets. “I can only fix those who want to be fixed,” she glanced at Drake who folded his arms and turned away.
Bruno noted Drake’s tense shoulders and obstinate scowl and resolved to talk to him later. He knew Drake had been trained as a warrior-priest. Though the warrior part had stuck long after the priest part had fled, he had spent his life keeping Bella safe from accidental contact. Would he be able to handle her new role? Bruno hoped so. The Amethyst Order was most likely still looking for them and she would need his protection.
It would be a few weeks before they wrapped up their current job and at least a week before they reached Mars. He had some time yet.
“If that’s what makes you happy, Bel. Let’s talk about this later, huh?”
She beamed and nodded.
Horns was waiting for him among the greenery of the hydroponic garden, tending a plant in the far corner of the room.
“You said you had some information for me,” Bruno said, greeting her with a kiss.
“I’ve finally found Drake and Bella’s files with the Order,” she pointed at a reader on a nearby counter. Bruno thumbed through the different screens.
“Not a whole lot here,” he said.
“I know, it’s deep cover stuff. Most of it is Drake and Ana, really, all I managed to get on Bella is her name.”
“Nefertiti? Huh. What kind of name is that?”
“Well, once you become Mehen, you’re given a ‘true’ name, something more spiritual.”
“What was your true name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Come on, Horns, if you don’t want to talk about it...”
She laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Honestly, Bruno, I don’t remember. I paid a guy in Qom 600 credits to have that memory erased.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to be reminded of my former self. I was an enforcer—like Drake. I did some pretty awful stuff.”
“Did you torture people?” Bruno had been tortured once. A job had gone wrong and he’d ended up owing money to the wrong people. It had been the most hellish few hours of his life. He had often wondered about the blank-faced man, who had methodically pulled out his fingernails, who he was in the life outside that room.
“Torture doesn’t work,” Horns had gone curiously blank, as if something in her had closed off her true self. Bruno knew he was looking at the Enforcer she had once been.
“I’d disagree.”
“Physical torture, I mean. The threat of pain will only get you so far. Once you start inflicting it, people will say anything to make the hurting stop, and it’ll usually be lies. If you really want to find out the truth, you threaten what they love. And it doesn’t always mean going after their families. You could go after their ideals or their sense of security. If they know anything, they’ll tell you. If they don’t, they’ll be more than eager to help you find it.”
There was a silence between them.
“You were good, weren’t you?”
“I was the best.”
“So why erase the one memory?”
“It was all I could afford. And by the time I got enough money for more treatments, I realised that I didn’t want to forget my past. My memories make me who I am. Without knowing how bad it was then, I can’t appreciate how good I have it now.”
“You’re amazing, you know that?” Bruno said, and Horns smiled. He watched the blankness dissolve and was filled with tenderness for her. The force of it hit him like a blow to the gut. There was an odd relief on her face and Bruno realised just how much she had risked in telling him about her past.
“I love you,” she sighed and slipped into his arms.
Bruno smiled and wrapped her in his arms. He began to kiss her, slowly and softly. His touch could make her promises, and this time, he was sure he could keep them.
––––––––
Chinelo Onwualu is former journalist turned writer and editor living in Abuja, Nigeria. She has a BA in English from Calvin College and an MA in journalism from Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in Saraba Magazine, Sentinel Nigeria Magazine and the 2010 Dugwe Anthology of New Writing. Follow her on her blog at www.chineloonwualu.blogspot.com.
