Virtue Kana is a warrior to the extent that she defends those for whom she feels responsible—her partner, Dayva, and her former partner, General—and what is hers: Artace, her hover boat. But Jessica Reisman reveals Virtue has a secret: someone intended her to be something other than a salvager, and that something would have led to frequent combat.
The twelfth clone of Virtue Kana’s dead lover came to call one day while Virtue and her partner prepped for a salvage run. The light-drenched tranquility of Jumka Docks, on the Coreyal Sea of Samjadsit Space Station, had, until that moment, seemed as remote from Virtue’s home world of Piranesi as the Coreyal from the fabled seas of Earth.
Spreading dark and sinuous to the white-sugar crust of glow along the upcurve of station horizon, the Coreyal’s waters were luminous. The glow came through station wellcore from Samjadsit system’s young sun, to which the vast space station was oriented, axis-wise, like a gaudy bead on a festival stick.
On the deck of the Artace, Virtue readied equipment for a run to the Fortunate Isles for dust while her partner Dayva fed numbers into the nav comp.
“Seems to me I recall hearing someone say that the day she agreed to salvage dust would be the day they could pack her in—let me see,” Dayva held up one hand, “what was it?—‘pack her in the Artace’s carapactic hull and spit her off station into the solar winds.’ ”
“What?” Virtue looked around at her partner. “Why are you ragging on me?”
“Because you’re grinding your teeth and it’s getting on my nerves.”
Dayva had come up out of the gravity well of a little planet named Asp. She had a straight back, a penchant for darkside philosophy, the face of a dark angel, and a fine-boned frame that seemed better suited to dance, or something equally courtly, than the rough work on a hover boat.
A wind frisked along the beach. The whisper of bronze silicate-sand sliding over itself hissed into the air as the Artace rocked at her mooring. Virtue finished a check of the utility skiff and moved to the salvage equipment. Filtered illumination came up through the Coreyal’s waters and reflected warmth along the hulls of other rigs, up into her face as she worked, the scent of heated metal and deep water making her mildly euphoric.
Dayva stretched from her hunched position at nav, dark fingers spread to the station sky. “Be a shame to grind those fine teeth down to nubs, girl.”
“Nothing better to do than kive my offhand comments in your head, D?”
Dayva snorted, delicately—something Virtue had only seen Dayva manage. “You’re the most stimulating company I’ve been able to scare up since coming to this misbegotten slag heap of a space station.”
“Take it up with the tourist board, D.”
“Come clean, Virtue, you took this job just because General threatened to give it to Turner, didn’t you?” She glanced down at the comp as it spit out the numbers kive, then sat in one of the seating hollows and leaned elbows on knees, peering up at Virtue. “You’re a competitive headcase, you know that, right?”
Virtue opened her mouth to answer, but out past Dayva, a spot of motion turned into someone heading down the docks toward them.
Someone wearing dark clothes, looking over his shoulder every few steps, like some other someone might be following him.
Which predisposed Virtue not to like him.
Dayva came up behind her. “Friend of yours?”
Virtue shrugged. “Yeah, you may have noticed, I’ve got so many.” Then she muttered, “What’s it want with us, that’s the issue.”
Their visitor reached the Artace and stepped down on the dock, looking up. He trailed off, uncertain, took a step back at what must be showing in her face.
The grip of her knuckles was white.
Their visitor looked up past her, at Dayva, back to Virtue. He tilted his head, as if to say, well, you’re rude, but I’m a forgiving sort. Then he quirked his mouth like he might say something funny. “Should I go away and come back later? You’re obviously . . . busy.”
The red tide crested and washed through her, leaving a puddle of toxins to shiver her muscles and trace an ache behind her eyes. Virtue swallowed, feeling the shakiness in her limbs. She was still hanging on to the Artace as if they’d just come through a stormwall of heavy weather.
The Rage was hard—supposedly impossible—to subdue.
She pulled her hand, trembling, off the hull, and folded her arms. “Why would Horatio send someone? He has a perfectly good uplink.”
The clone shrugged one shoulder. “He had something he wanted to send personally—not on a delivery transport, I guess. I wanted to get off Piranesi, see some of the universe.” A slightly embarrassed, crooked smile.
Wind riffled across the deck.
It was so familiar, that smile, it slipped behind all of Virtue’s defenses.
She imagined she could hear the infinitesimal whirr and click of biochemical mechanisms. There was that chance, of course, that his puzzlement was genuine, his candor real—so far as he knew. That he didn’t know he was a clone, whose clone, or why he’d been sent to Virtue.
“What’s your name, brother’s messenger?”
“Tao-Jin James.”
Virtue pictured the registry data, in some code-locked, vaulted compfile. James Xu, what—five, ten, thirteen? How many clones had her brother decanted by now?
She leaned forward on the rail. She’d play, until she knew what was behind this latest sally of her brother’s.
“So, what’s he sent?”
The kid slid a sphere the size of an apricot out of his hip pocket. The sphere glinted opalescent cloudy gray, like a brakfish’s eye. A Shiralsky-Deek Modular Coded Comp Messaging Holo. Shiral, for short. A baroque technology, rarely used and fabulously expensive. Horatio used them as an idiosyncratic tic that he wanted to be seen as an eccentricity.
“Virtue—” The tone in Dayva’s voice brought her attention off the problem standing on the dock below her. She followed the slant of Dayva’s gaze and saw Lobren, the Jumka bursar, coming along the dock toward them. Wanting their one-day-past-due dock fee—which they didn’t have, currently. “Void.” Virtue looked down at Tao-Jin James, chewed her lip. Then, what Dayva called her toffish perversity kinked into play. Damn all if she’d let Horatio Kana get any satisfaction out of this. Send her a copy of James, would he? And think to pull her strings thereby?
“Power up, Dayva,” she said. “We’re moving. So, Tao-Jin—you want to go salvage dust in the Fortunate Isles?” She sensed, rather than saw, Dayva’s brows come frowning down as she keyed code into the Artace and the hover boat came to life. Tao-Jin James blinked, trying to read her.
“Either climb on or toss me Horatio’s toy. We’re on a schedule.”
He gave her a hard look, suspicious even. But he slid the shiral back into his pocket, wrapped one hand around the lowest rung and pulled himself aboard in an easy, agile motion.
How well Virtue remembered that agility.
The Artace almost threw him the next moment, though, as the hover turbs kicked in, so she gave him a hand the last rung up.
Shiver of visceral memory as their hands connected. He got a startled look. Virtue’s expression was grim.
In the fourteen gens it had taken for the slowly built sections of Samjadsit Station to accrete into a unity the size of a small moon, some unintended materials had slipped into the mix. Legend had it that in the tenth gen of construction, the sixth region of what would become the Coreyal basin had been caught in the protomatter—whatever that was when it was at home—of a passing galactic phenomenon. The stuff had crusted into the unfinished matrix and never been removed.
Over the course of time and through the working of various chemistries, something came to exist in the isles. Dust. Its properties were variously believed to be restorative, mutative, miraculous.
La Cabeza Azul was offering more than respectable pay for a cache of the stuff—something Virtue definitely needed. Both the Artace and Virtue’s former partner, General, needed new parts—not to mention the dock fees. General, an old station relic before he’d ever become Virtue’s partner, needed them most. It was General who’d asked her to take the run; General who’d offered her his most precious possession—the route to an untapped cache of dust; General who’d cajoled, challenged, and, finally, threatened to give the route to another hover boat operator, Jake Turner. Dayva was right—Virtue was competitive and she didn’t like Turner.
The Artace sailed the air just above the water. Occasional displacements sent a spume of drops over the boat’s pale leading curve.
The vast network of the Fortunate Isles grew slowly closer, a vivid fringe of green under the distant station sky. The numbers General had given them were for a spot deep in the isle network.
“Tell me again,” Dayva said, removing the ear and eye pieces of her kive link to the ship and frowning into the slowly glooming distance, “why it’s a good idea to go so deep in? No one else does, not in a hover the Artace’s size.”
“That’s the spot General gave us,” Virtue shrugged. “The dust caches in the outer isles are all tapped, anyway.” She kept a hand to the Artace’s rudderpad, linked to comp, surveyed her partner’s face. “Scared?”
Dayva nodded. “You should be, too, crazy bitch.”
Tao-Jin James sat leaning over the Artace’s hull, face into the wind. Virtue was used to Dayva muttering unflattering things about her, but he looked around, from one to the other of them.
“What’s wrong?”
Dayva cast Virtue a glance that said, clearly, that’s your piece of ass, you want me to talk to it? Then she did anyway. “The deep parts of the isles are spawning ground for brakfish. It’s near spawning time.”
Tao-Jin tilted his head.
“What Dayva means,” Virtue said, “is that salvage isn’t usually a fish-fighting danger sport and she’s no harpoonist.”
He leaned forward, frowning, moved one hand in a gesture that echoed into her memory.
“So the fish are dangerous?”
Dayva laughed.
“The brakfish,” Virtue said, “is a monster of ichthyofauna, a speciation unique to Samjadsit Station, one which no one knows or claims the breeding and introduction of. The Fortunate Isles are brakfish spawning grounds.”
Dayva rolled her eyes at Virtue’s imitation of a tourist kive and Tao-Jin James smiled.
“Brakfish grow three times bigger than the Artace, and wily with it.” Virtue found she had to look away from James’ smile. She gestured. “Teeth long as my forearm. There are hunting regattas every year, people coming from all over to kill the unexpected miracle of accidental evolution.”
“Usually,” Dayva added, “some one or two hapless humans die in the course of the hunting, too.”
“So that’s a yes,” Tao-Jin concluded. “And they’re from the same place as this dust.” He glanced out toward the isles.
“Maybe that’s why Azul wants some.” Dayva rose to lean near Tao-Jin and peer into the wind. She looked like an icon, with her short white hair and long dark self.
“Why?” Tao-Jin asked.
“To grow something prodigiously large.” She raised one elegant hand, graceful bones turning, and put inflection on her words, drawling a bit. Tao-Jin’s gaze followed her hand, then he laughed. They all laughed.
For all the universe like friends on a joy spin, Virtue thought and then her thoughts snagged on the shiral in Tao-Jin James’ pocket. She wondered if she ought to listen to it. Later, she decided, because the air felt good and Horatio’s voice would take all the joy out of it.
They hit the outer isles shortly after the core went to ninety-five percent polar for station night. The intense radiance melted from the upcurve, fading to a soft, mellow limning; illumination left the water, the solar relays giving only a faint veining of wispy fire to the dark.
Tao-Jin James had been studying Virtue, surreptitiously. He met her gaze, though, when she turned her most impassive stare on him. Eventually he lowered his eyes.
Dayva slowed the Artace as the isles rose around them. The hover boat’s nightlight picked out the bristling shapes of ranga trees and formstone monoliths in the dark, one after another, an endless-seeming depth of them hinted at beyond its scope. The waterways narrowed. Insects spoke from within dense copses. A night bird swept from one isle to another, long silvery feathers briefly etched from the darkness.
Samjadsit Station was large enough, and one of the system’s planets near enough, that the Coreyal possessed tides. The station’s tide and spin motion stabilization systems—what Virtue thought of as the slosh compensators—were in a permanent state of repair and adjustment. There was a betting pool, on the docks, long standing, on whether and when it would be the erosion or the slosh that sent the station critical.
The scents on the Coreyal’s back were never those of a planetary sea. For one thing, the Coreyal was fresh water, not salt; but there was a dense, overcharged feeling to the air Virtue had never known on another station, nor on Piranesi, the planet she left when she was fifteen. Where Tao-Jin James had lately come from, emissary of her brother, who held the strings to a fortune she hadn’t touched since leaving, and—he thought—to things by which he could call her back.
The Artace tracked the specs Dayva had fed to comp until the numbers ran out. Full nav shifted to Virtue’s rudderpad.
“Watch for a jut of formstone that looks like a fat woman,” General had said, lying in his bed, shaping the air with one hand. His other hand, and the rest of him, was looped, plugged, or cybered into various bio support. His voice wheezed out, soft and fragile as ancient cloth. “Just after the breakaway—that comes up sudden-like. Narrow waters there. Skinnier than the Drift Witch’s gullet. Then comes the inlet, all covered over with ranga branches. Skinny, skinny—hard to get through. She’ll groan at you, but the Artace can do, if any can.”
They were in narrow channels now, ranga and other flora, colorless pale in the Artace’s light, rising to either side, closing above in places.
“Dayva, slow her to point five and disengage the hovers.”
Dayva didn’t move for a moment, than said quietly, stating the obvious, “That means setting down in the water.”
“Yes.”
“That’ll—”
“Yes.”
She muttered, but turned back to comp and did it. The hover turbs slowed, disengaged, and the Artace set down gently in a puff of air and a slap of water. Then it was the low hum of the engines, and the slip of water across the hull.
Tao-Jin James looked out into the isles, intent. Virtue could see his nostrils flare as he took in the unfamiliar scents. The posture was echo, mirage. Hair shorter than James ever kept his. He was younger than her memory of James.
None of that mattered.
General’s breakaway loomed, and just beyond it, hidden by a curve of ranga branches and a swarming of vines, his formstone fat woman loomed, a giant figure of rock, seeming to leer at them as they passed. The Artace’s light passed right over the inlet beyond it. Invisible, if you weren’t looking.
Maneuvering the Artace into a passage she could only take on faith to actually be there, Virtue grimaced as ranga roots groaned against the hull, leaf and branch scratching and whining over the upper carapace. It went on for long moments, her hand tense on the rudder, sweat dripping down her sides. The Artace could lead with any end of her curve-framed self, nimble as hover ships came, but a root or vine in the engines would be bad, especially in brakfish waters. Dayva bent over comp; the ship bucked and creaked until, with a final groan, they were through. Both Virtue and Dayva breathed out, relieved.
Skinny passage for a bit, then the channel opened out, widened, deepened, and they were slipping down a tunnel made incandescent by the hover boat’s beam.
“Kill the light, Dayva.”
She did and it was suddenly very dark, the five percent of relayed sun’s light that filtered through the night polar blocked here by the thickness of roots below, branches above. The Artace’s running lights, motes of yellow reflection on the water, didn’t touch the darkness of the isles.
They drifted in the dark, silent. Slowly, here and there on either side, something began to singe at the edges of their sight: a burning of blue threads and embers in the depths of the isles. More and more, until there was enough of the blue glow to see the suggestion of ranga trunks and formstone shapes. Virtue locked the rudder.
Awareness of his presence was like heat on her skin—she couldn’t help herself. She looked over at Tao-Jin. His eyes were wide, lips parted. See the universe’s many wonders, adventure and excitement, you bet. Then he shook his head, at some thought, turned to look at her.
“Dust?”
“Dust.”
“It looks like something out of an Irdish fable.”
She found she had nothing to say to that and turned away to prep the equipment. Dayva set the anchor and started lowering the skiff to the water, the crank whining softly.
Virtue pulled a duck suit over her jump, belted it, hung a palm flash and a catchnet containing three preserving boxes and a scraping tool to the belt; last, she tucked the suit’s long gloves into the belt, leaving the filter hood down around her shoulders. Dust was toxic in its unprocessed state.
“Thirty minutes,” Dayva said. “Then you’re back here.”
“Forty-five.” She slid over the side and climbed down, jumping the last step off the ladder to land in the skiff. Now she could feel the water under her, close and alive in a way it never was on a hover. Over the Artace’s hull edge, two faces peered down at her, Dayva mostly just white hair and brows.
“Don’t forget the hood, Virtue,” she gestured.
Virtue grunted, but her attention drifted to the figure beside Dayva. “My brother send you to talk me into going back to Piranesi?”
“He sent me to bring you the shiral. But—yes, he asked me to try.” He hesitated for a second, like he was going to say more, then didn’t.
“And you don’t know why he might have chosen you—someone I don’t know?”
Tao-Jin shook his head. “Horatio just said—I might do.” His voice carried softly: so, so familiar Virtue forgot to breath until her chest hurt. “It was free passage off Piranesi,” he said. “I’d never have afforded it on my own.”
She wished he was telling the truth, but knew he wasn’t. “When I get back,” she said, “I want a better reason than that. You think about it.”
Dayva shifted beside him, looking nervously up and down the channel. “Virtue—over the side of the hull isn’t the place for this conversation.” She waved her hands in a shooing motion, looking like a witch doing incantation in the blue light. “Get moving.”
Tapping a code into the skiff’s rudderpad to unlock it, Virtue set one palm to its surface. The skiff parted water. A short, silent, gliding while later it bumped up against the jagged formstone that passed for a shore. She knotted a line to a low hanging branch. One glance back to the Artace, the two faces, distant in the dim, still watching her.
She wondered what they’d talk about, and what Dayva made of the whole thing. The things she’d never told Dayva—anyone. General knew, some of it, but the old man had figured it out for himself, knowing a thing or two about the trade on Piranesi. With these thoughts for company, she headed into the ranga copse, ducking branches as she went. It was hard to gauge where the dust was, its burning blueness seeming to float in the darkness, fooling about with the distances. Shining a light on it made dust disappear—poof, nothing there. Dust salvage was strictly a night cycle activity.
Climbing over roots and formstone she could barely see, the roots smoothly gnarled, the stone cool and rough beneath her hands, the mineral scent of stone and soil was in her nose, and the blue burnings swam at the edges of her sight, beginning to seem more and more like ghost fire in her head.
Then she put her duck suited foot down in the ghost fire, slipped and caught herself. A little cloud of blue sizzled up into the air.
A cache of dust spread around her, in the ranga roots, over the soil, in the crevices of the formstone. Belatedly, she remembered to draw the filter hood over her head, pull on the gloves. The sound of her own breath filled Virtue’s ears; the hood’s disinfectant smell, that made her want to sneeze or retch, burned in her throat.
General had explained the collection of dust in detail—along with gifting her this location, held secret to himself for half his lifetime. Dust was found mostly in tiny caches, little bits of the stuff that amounted to no more than a palmful. Most of the known salvage spots were scraped clean.
Virtue was standing in an unbelievable cache.
Preserving boxes set out and scraping tool in hand, she dug the thin layer of blue fire off a root, scooping it into the first of the boxes. Fibrous when the tool first went in, on contact with it the stuff mutated into a clinging, viscous dust.
By the time the third box was filled with oily, burning blue dust, her skin was sticky with sweat, jump clinging beneath the duck suit. She shook out a cramp in her hand and a twinge in her shoulder. Three boxes full and there was plenty of dust left among the roots, over the soil and formstone.
The lid on the last box sealed with a hermetic hiss and Virtue loaded up to go, the catchnet swinging heavy. Midway back, sudden light leaned through the ranga trees and disappeared the dust—Dayva’s way of calling time.
At isle’s edge, the skiff waited, bumping roots on a gulp of disturbed water. Virtue’s skin prickled and she surveyed the area, but the channel was flat again, netted by the white and gold blaze of the Artace’s main and running lights.
Dayva, with Tao-Jin James lending a hand, hauled the skiff up, rivulets streaming off it in luminous beaded strings. Setting the catchnet on the deck, Virtue stripped off the duck suit and gloves and dropped them in the detam unit. A bitter oily smell clung to the suit and lingered in the air.
“This it?” Dayva looked down at the three preserving boxes in the catchnet.
“That’s it.” They exchanged a silent look. Sitting on the deck was a fortune. More scrip than they might have expected to earn off a job in twenty years.
And there was Tao-Jin James, unknown quantity, in and of whom Virtue suspected any number of things. He stood by the dripping skiff, watching them. Virtue couldn’t tell what she was thinking—wasn’t, maybe. Not, Athra knew, with any portion of her anatomy that thought clearly.
Coming back through the narrow inlet, roots scraping, leaves scratching, hull groaning, tension rode Virtue with steel talons in her shoulders. Tao-Jin leaned over the edge, observing the backwash.
Then they were through, back into the narrow channel they’d come down earlier.
“Hover turbs?” Dayva wanted to know.
Virtue shook her head. “Wait till we get to wider passage. I don’t want to risk her now.”
The channel widened slightly. Then Virtue heard a sound, the ghost of a thump.
“What was that?” Tao-Jin asked. He peered off what was currently the stern.
It came again, under the engine’s low hum, a ghost of a sound, like something big moving water.
“Dayva—”
“Yeah,” she said, fingers moving quickly over comp. They gained speed in suddenly rolling water.
A distinct thump, then, to that portion of the ship under water, like distant, wrong direction thunder. The Artace rocked.
The brakfish rose, off to port, a great shifting just under the water’s surface as it turned back toward them, scales sheened and reflective, an impressive roll of water cascading from a flip of tailfin big as the Artace.
“Engaging hover turbs.” Dayva didn’t ask if it was okay now.
Just as they gained hover, the brakfish bumped the Artace again. The hover turbs went offline and the ship tilted crazily, sending Virtue, Tao-Jin James, and the heavy boxes of dust tumbling across the deck. Dayva hung on to comp with both hands as the Artace hit the water hard, half on her side, then bobbed back.
Flashes of pain as Virtue took the hull hard in one shoulder, then one of Tao-Jin’s elbows in her side. She got a grip on the hull’s edge and pulled herself up in time to see a great shimmer-scaled monstrosity rising out of the Coreyal, water streaming back from a mouth full of teeth.
Teeth definitely longer than her forearms.
The fish dove into them again, screech of those teeth across the hull and again they rocked hard.
“Virtue!” Dayva yelled and flung the harpoon bow at her. The alloy frame hit one palm; she let go of the hull to scramble for it, then wedged herself into one of the seating hollows. Dayva was trying to get some maneuvering room as Virtue pried off the safety, loaded a dart from the chamber and sighted toward the water as the brakfish came round for another pass.
She squeezed the trigger; the shock of recoil punched through her. The dart sailed through the air to wreak no more damage than a rip in the flirting tailfin. Then she had to hang on through another charge. Her hip took the brunt of the hull this time and she almost went over, drowning in a wave of water and losing track of up from down. A hand got hold of her jump and hauled her back.
James.
He ripped the harpoon out of her hands, turned, sighted, and shot as the brakfish leapt, streaming water. The harpoon stood out of the center of one wide, glassy dark eye as the fish floated on the air a moment before them.
Then another screech of teeth, the ship rocked, and they were thrown back under another drenching. Virtue came up onto her knees, coughing, and found the harpoon under her hands. James’ clone was climbing to his feet over across the deck. She was about to give him the ’poon back, considering his skill with it, when Dayva said, in a tense voice, “Virtue.”
She pointed: another fish was coming down the narrow channel. Another fish.
“Bloody void,” Virtue breathed.
James tugged the harpoon from her grip and fell to his knees, sighting over the hull. Rather than watch to see what damage the clone might do with the ’poon, Virtue flung around to scrabble at one of the seat hollow storage areas. Her fingers found what she wanted quickly, two small chem charges she used for blasting in salvage work.
She turned with one in her hand to see the first brakfish falling back to the water with two more ’poon shafts bristling from the same eye as the first. The first fish hit the water heavily, suddenly graceless, just as the second came for its go at them, mouth open, long teeth bristling.
Her focus narrowed down as her fingers primed the charge. The fish rose and she flung the charge in a sure arc, straight for the dark behind long ivory teeth.
A low-pitched, eeling whine filled the air, and before the Artace had stopped rocking from the last attack, the second brakfish was blown out of the water. A breathless moment later, large pieces of fish rained down. Backsplash washed across the deck, chunky with dead fish and blood; the deck streamed water back into the Coreyal. The smell was atrocious.
Dayva still clung to comp, wet and coughing. James was just gaining hands and knees, having been washed clear across the deck. Virtue, thrown to her back, rolled, found the harpoon bow under one hand, gripped it as she rose, barely conscious of doing so.
She eyed the channel, dripping, her thoughts running ahead and behind, circling.
“Dayva?”
“Working on it.”
“What’s happening?” James coughed the words up with water, climbing to his feet.
“Mother—” Dayva pounded on the comp console.
Virtue’s jump clung uncomfortably, her hair plastered to her cheeks, down her neck.
“Someone put a lure signal on us,” she said softly.
Dayva looked up. “What? How do you figure that?”
“Brakfish don’t hunt in pairs. And they don’t usually hunt ships unless the ships have a lure signal on them—like they use in the regattas. So, someone planted a lure on us. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
She saw the clone’s hand go to the hip pocket of his drenched jump, where the shiral was, a look of horror crossing his face.
As they left the dead brakfish, one floating, a huge raft of scale, the other so much flesh and gore in the water, further and further behind, Virtue regarded Tao-Jin James, standing on her deck, watching her.
“Are you going to shoot me?” he asked.
She cast a blank look down at the harpoon bow still in her grip. Ignore him, she decided, with a desperate, half-rational thought.
“How’s it coming, Dayva?” She went past James to the skiff, unlocked the crank with a savage, left-handed yank, started to lower it. She could smell her own sweat, in the wet jump, and the lubricant in the crank mechanism. Red, red, red, the edges of things, and the center was going dark.
“About ready to go online.”
Virtue heard Dayva, distantly, through deep static.
The skiff hit water with a splash and she waved the harpoon at James’ clone, gesturing down to the skiff she could barely see through red darkness. “Get in.”
Dayva looked over.
He lifted a hand, lowered it, shook his head once. “I didn’t know about the tracer.”
The harpoon was slick with sweat in her grip. “Get. In.”
“Virtue—”
“Dayva, shut up.”
The clone shook his head again. “Captain—”
It’s for your own damn good, she thought, but couldn’t verbalize it. There was too much red; she was going to break apart around it. Holding herself in place was like holding—she didn’t know, but it was hard and it hurt and she didn’t know if she could do it if he didn’t—
“Virtue, what the void are you—” Dayva began, but she put her hand on Virtue’s arm and for a breath, just the thought of a breath, Virtue stopped holding it in and there was a loud crack of sound, a surprised sound—
—then a feel of wind across her wet skin—
—and Dayva was sitting on the deck a few feet away, looking surprised, one long-fingered hand spread over her cheek.
And oh drift, oh void, no—
—and she clamped it back down and forced one sentence out of her mouth. “Get him off my ship.”
Something passed between the clone and Dayva; he set the shiral on the deck and scrambled over the side into the skiff.
He was a dot behind them on the Coreyal, left behind in the dark, when Virtue thought to unprime the harpoon and set it back in the rack. Her hand ached, but it was distant.
There was quiet over in the direction of Dayva, the noisy kind of quiet. After awhile, though, she said, “He doesn’t know the code for the rudder.”
“He should have thought of that before,” Virtue answered.
She picked up the shiral in a hand that only shook slightly. First she found the tiny transceiver that was emitting the infrasonic brakfish lure, pulled it off and ground it into the deck under one foot.
Then she pressed her thumb into the center of the shiral’s cloudy opal eye. It identified her chemical signature and a line of light chorused through the sphere as it cleared to a brilliant, hard-edged depth in which her brother Horatio appeared, perfect tiny miniature in her palm.
“Virtue.” Just that, for a moment, his tiny, perfect image regarding her. “I’d like to you to come home now. I have some reorganizing to do among the associations.” It was his voice out of the shiral, as if he were there: clipped, creamy tones. It made the skin on her back twitch.
“Your unique gifts can’t be comfortable off Piranesi. Surely you see that you’re better off here. Eventually someone is going to put you down like a rabid dog. Oh, and if you haven’t figured it out already, James Twelve brought a nice little fish lure with him. I hope you don’t kill him too messily—or, I’m sorry, have you already?”
“Hold.” She set the sphere down, carefully, though there was red rage in her eyes and arms, tidal as the Coreyal’s engineered sea. Red as Horatio’s reorganizing of Piranesi’s associations.
Several breaths strung like water on air, in the dark, bloody, shoreless place. After a minute she could see again. Her hands shook as if with palsy, and familiar pain twisted, bitter with the unreleased Rage that had been building for the last half hour. That she hadn’t unleashed on Tao-Jin James. Horatio would be amazed and chagrined. Now, though, her hands were shaking, hard. The red washed slowly from the air. She was crying, it hurt so much.
He’d wanted her to unleash it on James. Again.
That became clear in the lucid moments that usually followed a Rage. If she’d torn James’ clone apart, come out of the fit to see what she had done—Horatio would have had her. Murder. Off Piranesi such things didn’t go unremarked.
At the very least she would have been sent to an Aggregate stew; more likely there’d have been regen for the emotional wreckage killing James again would have left of her.
Or shipped back to Piranesi, where she’d be safe from the retributions of relatively sane society. Horatio would have been sure to have that option covered.
It would have been the second time she killed James.
It gave Virtue a moment of cold joy to know how it must vex Horatio that she’d taken her genetic file when she’d skipped out.
“That was your brother?” Dayva had set comp on auto and come to lean against the slope of the Artace’s upper carapace. A puffy swelling marred the dark skin of her angled cheek where Virtue had hit her. Her voice was stiff, eyes slanted away.
Virtue considered her, let her own gaze slide away. “Rearranging the world from his little gravity sink, yes.”
Dayva was thinking, one silvery brow lifted high, still not looking at Virtue, anger and hurt shading her eyes. “You’re engineered?”
“Yes.”
“To what?”
“Kill.”
Dayva barked a laugh, then gave a sharp shake of her head. “Waste of genetic tinkering. Plenty of ways to kill without making a specialty human to do it. Why?”
“Have you ever been to Piranesi, Dayva?”
“Is that the answer?”
Virtue nodded.
“I see.” Maybe she did. “You really going to leave that kid out there in the skiff?”
Virtue shifted away, shook her head.
“What about the brakfish?”
Stretching her arms, shoulders cracking, Virtue shook her hands out. “If he’s quiet, they won’t notice him.” She turned to Dayva and said, softly, “I’m sorry.”
Dayva looked at her finally. “Explain it to me.” She didn’t need to add: or forget this partnership. The words were clear as day without the speaking.
“The Rage is triggered by certain sets of circumstances, particular goads or spurs. Evidence of betrayal will do it. It’s . . . very hard . . . to contain it once it’s triggered. It’s supposed to be impossible. You interrupted me at the wrong moment.” She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m sorry, Dayva. I . . . ” Falling silent, she looked away. “I’d never . . . not for the world.”
Dayva shifted. Then she said, “Don’t do it again. Ever.”
“Never.” Virtue considered whether she could actually promise that, then said, “Dayva, maybe . . . maybe it would be better if you found another gig.”
Dayva folded her arms, stared out into the dark over the water. “I’ll keep that in mind. Stay for now. My choice.” The staccato statements drifted through soft air. Then she said, “Virtue, not my business, maybe—but I talked to that kid some while you were down in the ranga digging dust. I don’t think he knew about the tracer. Or what it is that’s got you so kinked about him.”
“He knows—that, at least. He must. He was raised in my brother’s household and he was being paid, by my brother. About the tracer, you’re right, he probably didn’t know.”
Dayva snorted. “So he’s not a saint. What is it about him, anyway? Still not my business, but you did nearly get me killed—and you hit me. You owe me.”
“Slim payment.”
“I’m a philosophical girl. That’s what you like about me.”
Virtue stared down at her hands, still trembling. “I loved someone named James Xu. My brother didn’t like the influence James had with me. So he triggered the Rage with the original James in the kill path. Tao-Jin is one of James’ clones.”
Silence, the slur of water under hovers, race of wind. Her hair was almost dry, whipping into her face.
“Hido has said that the more primitive human chemical responses are at war with our most advanced bio-technologies,” Dayva said, apropos of what, Virtue wasn’t entirely sure.
“The esteemed Hido has his philosophical head up his ass.” She wiped her hair back and twisted it into a knot. “Anyway, Horatio secured the rights to James’ gene set when he saw what a good control for yours truly the model was. James died . . . I killed him. But Horatio keeps bringing him back.”
She glanced at Dayva as she fisted and stretched her hands, shook them out once more. “He uses them like one-shot kive chips, disposable, trying to get me to come back to be his personal berserker.”
“Mother void,” Dayva said, and that was all for a good minute or two. Then, “But the Megrath Reversal overturned ownership rights on adult-formed clones.”
“Except on Piranesi.”
“Oh.” That probably told her more about Piranesi than she wanted to know. “So what happened to the other eleven?”
Virtue closed her eyes, opened them, said evenly, “He tortured one and sent me kives of it. Others might not have been a close enough match, psychologically, or they failed before full realization.” She rubbed at the back of her neck, the corded muscles tense. “There’s a sixty to seventy percent failure rate.”
The Coreyal sped beneath them, silver from their light, away into lucid dark and the upcurve of distance. The ache in her hip and shoulder, and one on her hand from hitting Dayva, all throbbed dully. She needed food and was starting to shudder with that need; the Rage used carbs like air.
“You a clone, Virtue?”
She blinked at Dayva. “No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” She frowned, her voice going stiff. “I’m quite sure.”
Dayva chewed her lip. “Maybe that kid knows he’s a clone, Virtue, maybe not. And even if he does—”
“Right, he didn’t know about the tracer,” she said, finally thinking it through. “If Horatio meant me to kill him, he wouldn’t have told him much. James is a smart set. He’d have tracked this whole encounter differently if he’d known. He’d have run the second he was off Piranesi.”
She picked up the shiral, turned it once in her fingers; it had gone cloudy opal again. She heaved it overhand with a grunt, didn’t listen for the splash. Maybe a brakfish would eat it.
They went back for him the next day.
It was full day. The light and heat bouncing back and forth between the water and station sky made it brutal hot at mid-cycle. You couldn’t drink Coreyal water: the first and most frequent warning a tourist got.
His skin was burned, lips swollen slightly; he sat in the bottom of the skiff, knees up, arms loosely clasping them, head down, shirt off, wet and draped over him. He looked up only slowly when Virtue caught the skiff with a hook. She tossed him a water flask and leaned above him on the Artace’s deck. Dayva was over by comp, listening.
“You think of a better answer yet?” She watched him remember what she meant, and the words echoed in her own head.
“And you don’t know why he might have chosen you—someone I don’t know?”
“Horatio just said—I might do . . . It was free passage off Piranesi,” he said. “I’d never have afforded it on my own.”
“When I get back,” she said, “I want a better reason than that . . . ”
Now he drank some of the water, squinting up at her through swollen lids. He said slowly, “I knew. About you and my . . . predecessor. Not that Horatio ever told me. Remember Famke?”
Virtue nodded.
“Well,” he coughed, drank another sip of water, wiped his face with trembling fingers. “She told me, some of it. So, I knew. And I knew your brother wasn’t sending me for any reason that would make you happy. But . . . I never let on . . . how much I just wanted to escape. I was a very obedient clone.” The bitterness sounded almost mild.
“You could have just run, not brought me his message at all.”
He cast another look up at her. “I was curious. About you. The story Famke told me . . . ”
“You didn’t know about the tracer?”
He shook his head, swallowed. “No. Void—I’d never have . . . No.”
Virtue flicked her fingers against the hull. “How long have you been, Tao-Jin James?”
“Ten years.”
“What’s your cell age?”
He touched a blister on his lower lip, gave her an opaque look. “Twenty-five.”
“Does my brother have a hold on you?”
“Besides money, power, and registry title?”
“Title’s not good off Piranesi.”
“Then, no.” He blinked, then grinned with cracked lips. “Not that I know of, anyway.”
Virtue nodded and reached a hand down to him. “Come aboard, then. And welcome.”