Bitter Angels (25 page)

Kapa faced his crew, those who were still breathing. They had all crammed themselves into the crew cabin of Amerand’s shuttle and sealed off their own ship. What was left of it.

Aware he was facing five dangerous people whom he had promised wealth and freedom, Kapa struggled to think against the pain. It burned in his broken wrist. It spread out from his broken nose. He gasped and wheezed to get enough breath.

Unfortunately, the only thought that came to him was:
I’m dead
.

Either their client was going to kill him for his failure, or his crew was going to shove him out the air lock to make themselves feel better. They’d still be all in a battered can out in the middle of nowhere, but at least the fuckless wonder who’d brought them there would be dead.

Kapa understood the feeling very well. He grinned, showing all his teeth. He’d take at least one of them with him.

“Ship!” cried Isha so suddenly Kapa thought she was just cursing. But she pointed, and he pivoted. On the screen glowed a sleek silver ellipse, lights shining from its windows and its multiple scopes.

While his crew gawped, Kapa forced his boots to move. He dragged himself one-handed up into the cockpit, and fell into the pilot’s chair. Someone had followed him up the
ladder. He didn’t turn his head to see who. Pain blurred the edges of his vision and he shook his head hard. He couldn’t black out. Not yet. His good hand shook as he tapped out one of the few standard commands he remembered from the academy.

One of the shuttle’s scopes zoomed in on the approaching ship.

“Fuckless,” Kapa croaked. “It’s the saints.”

It was a very long, very uncomfortable wait, even without the drama of worrying if we were going to be able to keep breathing by the end. We were exhausted, we were battered, and more than a little frightened. The pirates who had donated their engine core to us had not followed good safety protocol and it was deficient of things like water, emergency rations, and sanitation facilities. Siri hadn’t said anything during that last hour, she was so sunken in on herself, and I just had to hope her Companion was taking care of her.

I struggled not to think. I just wanted to stay alive. I could think later. I had plenty of subjects to choose from: how we were relying for emergency care on a doctor sent by the Blood Family, but known and trusted by our minder, who had just given a very clear indication he was ready to switch sides; how we’d been kidnapped by a smuggler (or a pirate, depending on your definitions), who was also a friend of that same minder.

The rescue ship was only a little less spartan than the core itself, but it had air, food, water, and a functioning sanitation system. Most important, though, they
didn’t
have pitch, yaw, or spin. It was another twelve hours in another tin can, but we were feeling almost human again by the time they opened the air locks onto the sloping tunnel that led to Dazzle’s port yard.

Liang, Orry, and Commander Barclay were there to meet us. I hadn’t liked Barclay all that well when we met, but as a med team made up of Solarans from Liang’s crew surrounded us, I was prepared to revise my estimate. With our doctors came a fleet of carts with stretchers and O2 and about everything else we could need, no matter what state we arrived in.

As soon as I was sure that Siri—grousing about being treated like an invalid for a couple of bruises and accompanying headache—was in the hands of our own people, I looked for Emiliya Varus. I wanted to thank her.

Actually, I wanted to find out where she stood.

When she wasn’t actually checking on Siri, Dr. Varus had stayed in her emergency cradle, saying little. I hadn’t pushed her. Siri had a concussion, and albeit more slowly than at first, was being spun and sloshed around in a way that could not have been good for her. I didn’t want my unwelcome overtures making our doctor careless or reluctant.

But as I looked around the port yard, I couldn’t see her. We were a crowd of Solarans, secops, and Clerks. The slim woman in her medical whites had vanished.

To say disquiet set in would be putting it very mildly. I
turned, intending to ask Amerand if he knew where she went, and almost crashed into Orry Batumbe.

“God and the Prophets, Terese!” He grabbed me by the shoulders and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I thought we’d lost you!”

“Not this time.” I shook him off, but I smiled as I did. “Orry, did…”

He cut me off, sure what I was going to ask. “You’ve got two messages from your David waiting for you, and no, I didn’t send anything out. I wanted to be sure what to send.”

The blood drained from my face.
Messages, from David? What kind? Why?
I squeezed my eyes shut, and Orry put a hand on my arm. I’m sure he thought I was overwhelmed by emotion, which I was. He just didn’t know which one.

Orry’s grip on my arm tightened and I opened my eyes. One of the Clerks was gliding up to us: a pale woman with short, straight brown hair and hard, bright eyes. So hard, in fact, I wondered for a moment if they were badly made cameras.

“Field Commander Drajeske,” she said, completely ignoring Orry. “I have recorded that you made an unauthorized transmission from the peeled core at 11:20:34:12:09, local time and date.”

“Yes. That was to our people stationed in Habitat 2. I wanted to see if there was any way they could reach us more quickly than the ship from Flight Control.”

The Clerk didn’t even blink. “And why was that?”

“Because we were going to run short on air,” I answered. “I was hoping to save lives.”

“It was unnecessary,” said the Clerk.

“I didn’t know that at the time, did I?” I answered, working
to keep my voice even. That I had also told our people to get busy and find the pirate ship if at all possible was nothing this person needed to know.

The Clerk just stood there staring at me. She blinked once. “That is an acceptable explanation at this time.”

I bowed. “Thank you. If I can be of further assistance, you know where I’m stationed.”

The Clerk did not even nod. She just turned away and rejoined her fellows. I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly and tried to shift my mind back to the situation at hand.

“Are they all like that?” I murmured to Orry.

He shook his head slowly. “Rumor has it they’ve been tightening the reins lately. Too much water smuggling, or maybe they think the OBs are going to try another breakout. Or maybe it’s just for your benefit.” He tried to say that last like a joke.

I touched Orry’s shoulder. “Give me a second, will you?”

Orry followed my gaze, and when he realized who I was looking at, he raised his eyebrows significantly. “Pardon-pardon,” he said in the local dialect. “I’ll be with the transports.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked. Even though Amerand was standing still, he seemed to vibrate, as if he’d found the energy that had been drained from the rest of us.

“The first thing I’m going to do is check on whether Kapa’s been found by the Security.” He sighed, and something of that energy faded. Reminders of reality will do that, I guess. “Or whether whoever sent them got there first.”

“Any ideas who did send them?”

“Could be any of a hundred.” Amerand shrugged and gestured broadly. “You could be seen as valuable in any number of ways.”

I managed a sour smile. “Always nice to be wanted.” I chose my next words carefully. I had not forgotten for a minute what he’d said in our lifeboat. “Will you help?”

He nodded. “As I can, yes. But you need to know…I permitted my ship to get seized by smugglers. I may not have a commission after my next meeting with my commander.”

Favor Barclay, whom Siri had pegged as a coward. “I understand. If I can help…”

“Thank you,” he cut me off. “But probably not.”

It was my turn to nod. “Either way, will you come down and find us?”

His smile was sharp, more determined than glad. “Either way, I will.”

“Thank you.”

He looked at me mutely, that new energy visible again. By then I thought I could put a name to it.

Amerand Jireu saw me as someone who brought him hope. It had been a very long time since I had been on the receiving end of such a look. The reality and the responsibility of it twisted together tightly inside me.

We both turned away from each other a little too quickly, like we couldn’t stand to look a moment longer. I climbed into a rattling little electric cart with Siri and Orry, and we started down through the thoroughly repurposed casino city to the home base of Common Cause Relief.

Somewhere on the way, I realized what had been wrong with the scene up in the port yard. Amerand had been there. His commander had been there.

His Clerk had not.

There had been Clerks, and there should have been one with him, following him. I’d run through hours of recordings on the flight from the Solar System. I needed to know what normal looked like in the place I was coming to. A captain of the Security should have his own Clerk standing right behind him while he was on the home station.

The disquiet I’d felt before returned and redoubled. I needed to talk to Siri, but I couldn’t say anything at the moment. I hung on to the bar beside my seat as Orry eased our way over the creaking bridges and poorly propped-up balconies until we were finally down on solid stone.

The Common Cause base was a dramatically curving building whose central dome helped hold up the erratically lit “sky.” Greasy green flocks of parakeets shrilled and shrieked, and rose in indignant clouds at our approach. Orry had to navigate around a curving queue of people who
carried jugs, buckets, and bottles. They’d hung empty containers in great clusters from their belts or from yokes balanced on their shoulders. A lucky few had pushcarts piled high with empty vessels. All of them waited for their turn at the single shiny spigot sprouting out of a shallow basin that had probably once been part of an ornamental fountain.

They had probably waited in line most of the morning, and would wait the rest of the day. One look at them was enough to make my particular set of problems seem very, very small.

Poverty does not change no matter where human beings have gone. It is hollow eyes and stained teeth and hands that will break if you take them roughly. It is scarred, and its sores are open and won’t heal. It stinks of shit and sour breath. It is wary, afraid to hope, terrified to trust, but too weak to do anything else. When you arrive with your boxes of nutrient powders, your vitamin-infused rice, and your pills, it will kill you if you’re not careful. Not for its own sake, but for the sake of the children, the brothers and sisters, the fathers and mothers, who are dying because they do not have what you do.

In low-gravity environments, it is also incredibly fragile. The three hundred years Erasmus had been inhabited were not enough for the human physiology to adapt. Bone and muscle loss were real problems. I could tell by looking that most of the people here were doing their best to force their bodies to be stronger by weighting their clothes. Their tattered hems were bulky with stones. Metal plates had been attached to robes and leggings. Rough mail shirts and kilts of twisted wire draped all but the youngest children, but they were all still too thin, and too small.

Even in the middle of all this, the too-small, too-thin
kids were being kids. At least a dozen had hoisted themselves up the pillars and the buildings, chasing one another in a three-dimensional game of tag. They shrieked and made spectacular leaps from one handhold to another. One child of indeterminate sex jumped carefully down from a second-story perch and ran up to their parent. I saw the white flash of eggs slung in the fold of a ragged cloak.

I thought about Fortress, sitting in the middle of an entire world of wealth and water, and my weary and sickened stomach turned over hard. In that dizzy moment I wondered if I’d judged Bianca and Bern too harshly.