> “Let’s talk for a while. Talking makes the world go around.”
>
> ~Hortensia Hora
“Hey there,” said DeMoss.
“No,” Vio muttered, staring intently at her dataslate.
She’d decided it would be more comfortable in the nearby lounge to troll through all the data she’d pulled from the Salieri net. It was. The seats were a wonderful soft velvety texture, the tables were clean, and the drinks were pretty good. Pretty golden sconces on the charcoal grey walls gave the whole place a subdued but affluent aura.
She glanced up to see a tall man back off and move onto the next table. It took her a moment to recognize the coat - black with iridescent green paneling. “Wait.”
Too late. He’d already moved onto chatting up a couple Salieri gunnery officers at the next table.
“Scouting the competition?”
Vio glanced away from the giggling gunnery officers. A brown-faced older woman gestured to the seat opposite Vio. “If I may.”
Vio nodded. “Are you here for the Seneschal position?”
“I am,” the woman nodded. “I’m Hortensia.”
“Vio,” Vio said.
Hortensia held her hand out across the table, and Vio gripped it in a weak, horizontal sort of handshake. Hortensia squeezed her once and let go. “So what do you think so far?”
Her Sibelline had an accent. It leant a strange rhythmic cadence to her speech, certain words were held longer than Vio was used to. Flatter vowels. She couldn’t quite place it. The woman’s clothes, too, were vibrant and ornate, adorned with little flowers of embroidery and small seed pearls sewn into the pattern.
“What? About him?”
Hortensia shrugged. “Maybe. Or not. You seem as if this is a new experience. This is a new experience for all of us I imagine.”
Vio shrugged, half of her attention still on the footage playing on her dataslate. One earphone hung out of her ear, the other dangled just below the level of the table.
Hortensia tilted her head toward the other table. “He is also here for the Seneschal job. I don’t think he is going to get it.”
“Mm,” said Vio. “Why not?”
“I could say it is because he does not seem to have a good grasp of how to speak to other people,” she said. “Or perhaps, he is young and this is a dangerous job. But really it is because before you arrived, those had not yet arrived,” she waved a ring and bangle-laden hand at the gunnery officers, “and I was the only woman here. So what do you know, he come here, to me, ask if he can buy me the pretty lady a drink.” She smiled, already-wrinkled eyes crinkling with amusement.
Vio looked up from her dataslate. “Wait, what?” Her eyes widened. “I didn’t mean like…”
But Hortensia was laughing. “So I suppose it is that men like that, I have a lower thought about them.”
Vio started laughing too. “He came onto you?”
“Yes,” Hortensia chuckled. “I think there is not a one woman he would not approach. But I wonder, he did the same thing to you and I wonder why you asked after him. Because clearly, you are not impressed.”
Vio snickered. “I didn’t notice he was another candidate until he’d left.”
“This place is full of them.” She gestured to a woman with sharp brown eyes sitting two tables over. “This is Arabel. She is the favorite for the position.”
Vio looked. She got the sense Arabel knew she was being talked about. They locked eyes for a moment. “How do you know?” Vio asked.
“The Deacon,” she said. “He is an important man. I spoke with him.”
“You got him to tell you his favorite?”
Hortensia nodded. “It was an effort.”
“How?”
Hortensia looked surprised at the question. “It took a while. I spoke with him and the conversation turned to the people. It is a skill to know how to ask, to know what the answers mean.”
“That’s what you’re doing with me?”
They looked at each other. “That’s why you approached me, right?” Vio asked again. “Scouting the competition.”
Hortensia thought for a moment. “I will do a trade. Neither of us is Arabel. I will show you who the other candidates for the position are, and tell you what I think of them. You will do the same for me.”
Vio nodded. “It won’t be everything you know, will it?”
A wide, genuine smile split the other woman’s face. Little crinkles around the eyes. “Of course not.”
“We’re in competition, after all,” said Vio.
Hortensia nodded. “But neither in first place.” She gestured discreetly at a nondescript man nursing a mug of something frothy by the entryway. “Reeve. I have a sense I know him from somewhere.”
“Me too,” Vio exclaimed.
“He is the second favorite. His manner, I think, impressed. I believe that he has come here to escape something from Sibellus. He does not speak about himself if he can help it.”
“I haven’t really had much contact with him,” Vio said. “What do the others say about him?”
If Hortensia was disappointed with the level of analysis, she hid it well. “The man DeMoss is convinced he owes a great debt. But to whom, I cannot know.”
“Mm.” Vio twisted her quill.
“I have already shown you Arabel. The Deacon and Salieri are pleased with her. The man Cicero is not.”
“He likes being called Vinnius.”
Hortensia shrugged. “It is much the same.” She tilted her head. “Moving on to-“
“Hey, no fair,” said Vio.
“Sorry?”
“Information trade. You didn’t say much about Arabel.”
“She will not speak to me,” Hortensia said ruefully.
“Probably smart,” Vio muttered. “I don’t have much a read on her either.”
“Let us move on then. You have already met DeMoss. He is certainly afraid of something on the planet for him to be here so young. His bearing reminds me of young lords, used to having everything.”
Vio looked at him. He’d progressed to putting his arm around one of the officers. “You know, we have a word for people like that. Mark.”
She blinked and looked back at Hortensia. “Do not worry,” said Hortensia. “We are all of us criminals here. Nothing new.”
She shrugged. “If he draped himself over me like that, I would have stolen his wallet by now.”
Hortensia chuckled. “There is no need. Razer has already done so.”
Razer was a thin Sibellan dressed all in black. He wore a leather jacket studded with little silver buttons, and there was something Vio recognized in his bearing.
“He’s from the street,” she mused. “Used to hire that type all the time. Combat monkey of some sort. Explains his combat scores,” she added absently.
She caught the glance that Hortensia took at her dataslate when she looked back. Damn it. She was giving all kinds of information away for free. They looked at each other for a moment, and there was not a trace of embarrassment or guilt in Hortensia’s eyes. This is how she worked – people told her things. She got them talking for a while and people told her things. Vio had been warned that it would work and it worked anyway.
Time to salvage this for what it was worth. “What’s your thing then?”
“Sorry?”
“Street kid? Lady House? Running from something?”
Hortensia looked at her for another long moment. “I do know that Arabel knows who Reeve is.”
“Who?”
“I was not able to find out.”
Vio glared, but Hortensia looked at her evenly. “It is the truth. It is also the truth that she knows myself, and DeMoss, and even you. But I do not know what it is she knows. This is something that has bothered the man Cicero.”
Vio thought about this.
“Perhaps I will speak with you later,” Hortensia nodded to her as she stood.
“Yeah, bye,” Vio said, charging her hand.
She picked listlessly at her dataslate for a moment, but she couldn’t focus. Her hand was sparkling again, sending off small fzzt sounds. She sighed and packed her things. She felt tense and exposed here, she needed something to get her head back in the game.
Stealing DeMoss’ wallet from Razer on her way out did a little to lighten her mood.
----------------------------------------
Salieri’s Shadow had been built for war. As a firestorm-class frigate, it stood 1.8 km from prow to stern, weighing just over 6 megatonnes. As a variant of the Sword class escort, the ship class was designed to defend capital ships during naval engagements. It sported a plasma lance, orbital bombardment capability, and secondary weapons designed to fall into the signal-shadow of the forward battery.
As a civilian vessel, however, it was more than enough to serve as the seat of a burgeoning empire. An ambitious Salieri in days long gone had retrofitted it extensively to serve as capital ship for a small mercantile fleet. It was fitted with a command antenna and flag bridge, cargo space easily convertible to hangar bays, and an executive staff room placed just starboard of the bridge.
It was here that Salieri sat in his traditional spot at the head of the table.
The scintillating sun shone through the windows, in that far-but-intense manner that sunlight took from orbit. The Jewel of Calyx was not visible at this time; the planet was not due to drift far enough to starboard for another few hours. The pale light shone over an angular black table. Across from him, a monocolor display on the far wall also stood silent and waiting to reveal data, analyses, maps, or any other necessary piece of information. And close at hand, Salieri had a small dataslate facing him, ready to upload or download whatever was required.
Currently a harried team of logistical personnel were giving him a status report on the resupply effort. It was going slowly.
Salieri was displeased with “slowly”. The supply management team knew this.
“I have yet to see an explanation, or even an ETA for the food stocks,” he growled, tired of the run-around.
“Sir,” a wide-eyed woman told him. “A failure in the planetary grain crop this year has slowed our search for a new supplier.”
He glanced instinctively to his left, but the seat was empty, the small array of screens built into the table – financial, logistical, budgetary – were dark. Salieri clenched his fists, fingers crushing against palm. “Why didn’t we know about this?”
The wide-eyed woman grew even more wide-eyed. She floundered. Another member of the presentation team opened his mouth, closed it.
“We could try butchers,” an elderly psychic with wrapped eyes suggested dryly. “Reclaimed corpses are a long well-documented staple in times of need.”
“Nowadays it’s mostly vat-grown and mixed with grains as everyone knows,” the navigator said disdainfully. He rarely bothered to speak up in staff meetings, unless it was to sneer at those he didn’t consider voidborn enough.
“I don’t see why that is,” Psyker Summanus said. His voice had a wavering, papery quality, and his tone went from dry to positively arid. “If there’s one thing you people are good at, it’s dying.”
“Not much meat on your bones for the fire old man.”
“Maybe there are imports we could look into,” the tinny voice of 27-Φ drifted from the far end of the table. The ancient Salieri who had designed this room had had some foresight – the cyborg's station was nearest the display on the far wall, where he could readily assist if anyone had trouble setting the input of the screen.
Salieri caught himself glancing again to his left. He focused instead on the logistics and supply team. “Factorum Tethys, is that enough for you to start?”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He got an enthusiastic nod bordering on the violent.
“Then you are dismissed.”
The relief on the Factorum’s face was sudden and all-encompassing. The team packed their presentation materials with a minimum of murmuring; the Lord Captain’s senior staffroom was no place for idle chatter. At his right, the deacon leaned in and said, “given the situation with the Seneschal candidates, it’s no great loss of time.”
Though this was true, Salieri pressed his lips tightly together. “I am eager to make for our next destination.”
“We should have the supplies to go directly there,” 27-Φ said, wiping a slick of machine oil from his beard with his arm.
“Epimethius?” the psychic prompted.
The Navigator blinked bleary red-rimmed eyes and tore his gaze from the window for a moment. “Two months, if the Currents favor us,” he said after a short time.
“What if they have a crop failure too?”
Salieri closed his eyes. “Can someone please look into that?”
“I can tell the logistics team to check it out,” said the deacon.
“It seems our real problem,” Salieri said, “is that we don’t have essential senior personnel. Vinnius?”
The capo snapped upright from his position leaning languidly against the wall to the left. “Alright, boss. Here’s the latest and greatest on the Seneschal hunt. We got a best boy,” he grimaced, “sorry, a best girl. Having a little disagreement about whether she’s really our best shot. And we gotta put some of em in front of you, I figure.”
“Hire her,” Salieri snapped. He paused. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Honestly? I’m still tryin to work out whether she’s going to run to the law right soon as we let her off the ship. If she doesn’t get the gig, she knows enough that I’m gonna space her myself. That woman can cold-read anyone.”
Salieri sighed. “Your team has latitude to do whatever necessary to pick the best, most efficient, most effective, most loyal Seneschal.”
“Everybody else checks out,” Vinnius continued. “We got a couple from the local version of a mafia. Couple freelancers. They been around the block a while, got a history here. Names check out. Old friend-of-friend for the Family. But there’s two, the lady and the guy with the face, you know, everyone thinks they seen him somewhere or whatever. They’re good but I dunno if they’re safe.”
“Pick someone,” Salieri told him. “Someone good.”
“You’re the boss.” Vinnius took that as a dismissal, kicked himself off of the wall, and headed for the door.
“Now,” Salieri turned to the rest of the team, “what else do we have?”
“Two of the gunnery crews are at war again,” 27-Φ told him. “Hawk Forward and Comet Blue. Wee bastards shot m’ mediator again.”
The deacon sighed deeply. “How bad does she look?”
----------------------------------------
Salieri’s Shadow upper decks were spacious, filled with statues of saints and illuminated manuscripts set open to the scriptures for the day. High arches drew the eye ever upwards, to the disapproving figures set in stained glass and lit with floodlight or voidlight from behind.
The lower decks smelled odd. Savory, perhaps, like thousands of bodies and unscrubbed mold. Like machine oil and plasma arcs and old tinned protein.
In the lower decks, the ceiling was low enough that spindly voiders had to duck through the hatchways and under the different-colored pipes threading just under the ceiling. Vio was short enough that she didn’t need to bend her head, inheritance of a high-grav childhood.
She rounded her corner and flicked a wrist discreetly. A metallic chip-bug flung through the air, magnetizing quickly to the nearest sec cam with an almost undetectable thunk.
Her slate beeped connectivity – so far she had access to most of the feeds on this section. She turned briskly – the next section was just past the cathedral, and she’d have eyes on all the competition.
Hortensia, who could make you tell her whatever she wanted. Who traded secrets like coin, except her own.
DeMoss, good at math but otherwise unremarkable.
Arabel, current first-place for the position.
Reeve, second favorite for the position. Reportedly in serious debt, probably running from his responsibilities.
Razer, freelancer with a probable combat specialty.
All of them signing their lives away from home. Likely forever.
Above them all Lord Captain Salieri, the distant authority. What was he looking for?
She could hear High Gothic chanting getting louder; service was in session and she was getting close. Vio considered the Deacon and the Capos. Absently she shouldered aside a paper-bristled door; prayers affixed to the worn and engraved metal with wax.
The space beyond was large for the underdecks, and roughly hexagonal. A sainted conqueror frowned grimly down upon the chapel, shimmering in stained glass and multicolored light. His sword was done in hues of light and fire, the devastation of his enemies.
He shone down upon the altar on the central dais, where a green and gold robed acolyte led the congregation in sung chant.
“Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus”
She glanced around furtively.
Was this slight sacrilege?
Probably. Each of the six corners of the room was a great pillar carved with a likeness of some holy ancient. Carved cherubim adorned the walls, in frozen swoops between various holy icons glittering with gold and with embedded LEDs. Most seemed strategically placed to hide the shipboard air ventilation.
They glowered down upon her, God's disdain evident.
But just behind a towering feminine winged figure was the sec-cam that would grant her access to the next sector. Sacrilege forgotten, Vio walked casually over and flicked a bug onto the camera.
“Dominus Imperator Sabaoth”
As she checked her dataslate for proper connection, Vio found herself more guilty about checking her devices in church than using a service to cover her data theft. Old habits.
A trickle of dust tickled her ear suddenly. Vio scratched absently and glanced upwards.
Oh that was definitely sacrilegious.
A figure hid behind the flared wings of Saint Serafina. She could dimly make out the faint glow of some sort of electronic screen underlighting a face. Eyes shining a faint grey under the dim light.
“Pleni sunt Coeli et Terra”
The figure blinked first. It glanced furtively from side to side, and then beckoned her up. Finger over lips in shh gesture.
Vio glanced back at the chanting congregation.
The figure beckoned furiously.
“Gloria tua. Hosanna in excelsis.”
What the hell. Vio scrambled up, planting a boot irreverently on a beleaguered cherub, and the figure hoisted her up with strong, warm hands.
“Who the fuck are you?” she hissed.
He shushed her. “It’s starting.”
“What’s starting?”
Now that she had a better look at him, something about him was really familiar, but the underlighting was giving him oversharp features. He was in a plain black collared shirt, too plain for her to work out his job or his rank; it was clean and of decent make, but otherwise generic.
He slouched easily, almost liquid in a little nook between the wall and the leftmost wing, lounging on a luxurious lump of coat.
But the boyish grin he flashed her put her in mind of old candy thefts when she first started on the streets. Of waiting, hidden, where she knew that Enforcers wouldn’t check.
With a quiet, beaming joy, he gestured. “The show.”
With a small flourish, he tapped a dataslate once. He had it set up comfortably within reach, along with a small bowl of crunchseed and a couple cans of ale.
Condensation beaded on the surface of the cans.
Vio glanced back down at the chanting acolyte. “Um. What show?”
The other man popped a tab on one of the grapeseed-ale cans. “Give it a minute. Want one?”
“Um. No thanks.”
The man took a hefty draught and shrugged. “Suit yourself. Only I wouldn’t go down there.”
He tossed some of the crunchseed into his mouth, munching with a satisfied air.
“Why not?”
The other man gestured, eyebrows popping upwards.
Vio turned. There was a bit of a commotion in the crowd.
One of the congregation fell to her knees. “The Holy!” she cried. “He comes! He walks among us!”
The acolyte leading the ceremony paused. “Ah,” he said uncertainly.
“Praise be,” another man cried out. “The saints!”
“Oh, blessings upon us all, that I live to see this day,” yet a third wiped tears from her eyes.
Soon the murmur of the crowd grew too loud, too exultant and too indistinct. People stood, arms raised high. Others knelt, weeping with rapturous joy. Laymen hugged their neighbors.
The acolyte raised his arms, thudding his staff of office against the ground. “Rejoice,” he cried. “That God has blessed us so!”
Vio held out her hand without tearing her eyes away.
A can was pressed into it. She popped the tab. “What’d you do?”
He giggled. “Check the vents,” the other man snickered. Vio peered over the rim of a great feathered wing cast in plasteel.
The ventilation to this room was all open, fans running at full. And there was a faint pinkish haze, an odd tint to the air.
She took a sip of the ale, pleasantly surprised by the bitterness and the depth. Good stuff. “Come on, what’d you do?”
Grinning, the man showed her a fist-sized cylindrical object.
“Fuck,” Vio jerked back. “You’re gonna grenade them?”
“No,” he said, mock-exasperated. “What would be the fun in that?”
“You’d be surprised,” Vio grimaced darkly.
He grimaced for a moment, and then grinned. He tapped the grenade, indicating the symbol on the side. “Hallucinogen gas. High doses, you get terror and imaginary monsters.”
A minor theological debate had begun in murmured tones and escalated to stiffened fingers thudding into books. What to do if a saint returned. The many Scriptures did not hold a satisfactory answer.
Vio peered over the edge of the wing. “Low doses you get saints?”
He shrugged. “Little euphoria, little sense of transcendence, and yeah maybe some saints.”
Oh this was such total sacrilege. The funny kind, which somehow made it even less okay. Vio snickered, appalled. “What’d you do, shove a bundle up the ventilation shaft?”
The other man looked hurt. “Not just that. Little bit of tech-working, getting the vents all lined up. Keeping the effects confined to here. Making sure the inflow and outflow are aligned properly. Doing the math on what dosage for the space. Don’t wanna hurt anyone.”
“And shoving a bundle up the ventilation shaft.”
“And that.”
She leaned back, taking another sip, watching the acolytes scurry to find what scriptures to read in case of a Second Coming. Watching the tears of joy at the Great Angel's return. One woman had gotten into an intensive philosophical debate with a nearby icon, something about the sons proceeding from the father.
A runner was sent for the Missionary’s guidance, but quickly lost his sense of direction and returned singing some of the more aggressive hymns.
“So what’s your name?” the other man asked. “Are you a maintenance crewman?”
“Vio,” she said. “Actually I’m here about a job.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. She turned away from the show below.
He was looking at her, surprised. “Ah,” he said. He shifted, pulling his coat out from under him, shrugging into it.
“What?”
She looked at him as he came to some internal decision. Below, the runner was sent back, with strict instructions and directions for the bridge. He responded by singing louder.
The debate with iconography had gotten heated. The woman slapped at the painted icon, and then stumbled backwards to her knees, begging forgiveness.
“I think we’re here about the same job,” he said, pulling an arm into a black, green-paneled sleeve. Suddenly, she knew where she'd seen the face. The green-paneled coat.
She hissed between her teeth. “DeMoss.”
----------------------------------------
Vio sipped at her 'caf.
It was decent stuff. Made the city stuff taste like what it was – sawdust and paper soaked in water, loaded in sufficient sugar and plasticream to make it taste palatable.
Once she’d sugared this stuff to a degree that had nearby patrons’ lips curling in disgust, it tasted rich. Complex flavors, aromas, aftertaste. Vibrant sensations flowing past tongue and nose. It was an experience.
She sat curled catlike on a bench in the lounging area of the shipboard café Malfi Rose. For some reason their logo was not a rose; it was a skyline. Weird.
“Hi,” said Razer. He looked apprehensive; it didn’t fit his face. The cut of it wasn’t suited to unease.
Vio uncoiled her legs. “You wanted to meet?”
“Meetings are proximity and words, at the heart of it.”
“What?”
“I, yeah, uh, I wanted to meet.”
It was the right time for it. Hortensia had beaten her without her even knowing they were fighting. DeMoss was confusing. Razer…
She looked at him for a moment. Razer felt out an armchair without looking, sat down in it stiffly. For a moment he looked surprised as he sank more deeply into the cushions.
“Yeah, I wanted to meet because I think you’re a freelancer. Like me.”
Razer was familiar. Vio knew how to deal with the Razers of the world.
He continued, somewhat awkwardly. “Um. And we’re not on the shortlist, and we both know that. So I was wondering if you wanted to team up.”
Vio took a long sip of her 'caf. It really was incredible. The bitterness had been chased into a low richness by the cream and sugar. It was smooth, first nutty and then a little fruity, something like raspberries. The smell was evenly chocolate throughout. “Like a runner team?”
“Yeah.”
A two person team. It could work. Vio had been on a lot of runner teams, and the fundamental unit was always intel and muscle. Demo, heavies, psyop, hacker, or face could join to bolster the team, widen the net of intel that could be gathered or the plans that were available, but if you couldn’t think and you couldn’t fight then you weren’t a balanced team.
“Let’s play this out,” Vio said. “What happens if we get on the shortlist then?”
“What would you like?”
She took another sip. “Dunno, you came to me. So how’s this gonna work?”
Razer floundered once more. Uncertainty did well on him, Vio decided. The sharpness of his eyes, the angles of his cheeks leant him a lean lethality. But those lines had broken into curves, the persona stuttered, and it was actually totally adorable. From an objective standpoint. She did what she could not to snicker.
“My,” Razer said slowly, “preference, uh, is that we not interfere with each others’ candidacy. At that point we should be hired on merit, I guess.”
“But not everyone else.”
“Huh?”
“Nobody else gets hired on merit, because we’re gonna screw with all of them,” Vio said happily.
Razer thought about this. “Yes,” he said eventually.
“Arguably if they suck enough for us to mess with them, then they didn’t have any merit to begin with.”
Razer nodded a little. “Yeeees,” he said.
“How do I know you won’t screw me?”
His eyes darted up a little too quickly, looked surprised for just an absolute instant before understanding her intent. Aww, Vio thought. You absolute cutie pie. She wasn’t yet totally sure, but if he did have a bit of a crush, if she played this right, she totally had him.
“My preference is not to, but preference is but dust to action. Whatever you are, you’re not muscle, so that makes you intel. Between the two of us, you’re more capable of screwing me than I am of screwing you.”
Vio couldn’t help herself. She smirked. Razer looked intently at the floor for a bit, which was a shame because what she could see of his face was deeply uncomfortable.
“Maybe I’m demo.” Demolitions was more muscle than intel.
Razer looked like he hadn’t thought of that. “Uh…”
“Just kidding. Code.”
“Oh. Right. That’s good.”
She took another sip of 'caf, finding it cool enough drained the entire cup. All the sugar she’d dumped in had settled to the bottom, producing a sweet, slightly chocolatey sludge at the bottom of her cup. She darted her tongue in and licked up what she could reach, then popped the ceramic onto the bench beside her.
Hortensia wasn’t even the favorite of the candidates. She sighed.
“You know what? Fuck it. Welcome to the team, Razer.”