After years of travelling alone, it was strange for space to feel quiet. Space was always silent, but this was different. Previously the quiet had always been time alone to think, an almost meditative time between flashes of action on the job. A time when I took apart the guns and checked every notch and scar they'd gotten in fights. A time when I could distract myself and do something without the idea that my life might be on the line at any given moment.
This should have been one of those times; sitting in the asteroid belt, just behind the wreckage that acted as Station 26's backdrop, should have given me the opportunity to take a deep breath and consider what was coming.
Instead, I'd been pacing and unable to do anything other than that for the first hour. Then I'd pulled part of most of the armoury and started tearing each gun apart, recounting the stories that painted each scratch to myself as a way to drown out the silence.
I would have to put most of them back together, but there was time for that; after all, the shift the Viedesshai had bought in the Crash wouldn't be coming around for hours, and it needed to look like I was gone either way.
No, I'd done so many things on my list halfway to eat almost none of the time that I was supposed to be alone, and I hated it.
I hadn't hated being alone for a long time. I'd gotten used to it. Now I was used to managing someone else. People had always told me that adaptability was one of the best traits of humans in the galaxy.
It didn't feel good right now.
I stared at the empty armoury wall, the hooks and latches that were supposed to keep everything neat and in its place. It had always been excessive, especially considering half of the guns were collector's pieces as opposed to anything I would bring with me on a mission. I'd needed to put everything right where it belonged, so it felt like I was in control of my fate when I pulled one of the guns off the rack.
And yet, I'd spent a long time running away from the reckoning of what happened at Songlai, and now, with the excessive armoury wall finally empty, I could almost hear the firing pattern from back then.
After all, the armoury hadn't finished giving out guns; it just looked like it.
I took a deep breath and felt the cold steel of the hardlight harpoon in my hand. If I was going back to Songlai for anything other than an accident. Then I wouldn't go back empty-handed.
When hardlight hits metal, a brief flash swallows everything else; in the heat of battle, I never noticed it, but in the middle of the quiet ship, it cut across my vision and burned into my eyes.
A deep red and hot scar ran along the armoury wall, with the sheared metal peeling in either direction. The harpoon rang in my hand, crackling with energy as it attempted to reconstitute after cutting into the hardened wall.
I tried to keep my breath steady as I gave technology the time it needed. I'd wanted to make angry swings, a consecutive volley that would have turned the armoury into molten slag, but that wasn't how it worked. I didn't get to do this fast.
The second strike flashed brighter than the first, cutting through more of the metal, and I peeled the middle of the armoury wall into a haphazard x, sparks pouring onto the floor as I took a haggard breath.
I'd spent so long telling myself that I wasn't going to go back. Convincing myself that the closest thing I could do to making things right in Songlai was to remove myself from it. That anything I did there would have the stain of the era we caused.
Maybe that was the case; maybe I wouldn't be able to do anything to make what I'd done better, but-
The third time the harpoon crashed against the steel wasn't as dramatic as the first two, as I lopped off the already melted steel at one of the corners of the x. The metal slammed to the floor of the ship, burning the finish on the floor. I heard the emergency fans come to life to suck out the smoke.
I tossed the harpoon to the side, letting it clatter on the floor beside the metal I'd just taken off the wall.
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When we'd been travelling together, Dvall had always asked me why I kept the armoury fully analog when others always had computer systems keeping their stock and filing their weapons away. I'd told her that organizing relaxed me, and eventually, that had been true, but that wasn't the reason I'd started.
Behind the dummy wall of flat steel I'd put up to cover the interior of the Gunboat Diplomat, there was a functional armoury wall with a lone gun in the middle.
An emerald green Mako.
I tightened the Ovishir wraps on my arms to ensure that none would hang and touch the molten steel before I reached into and grabbed the gun's stock. It was colder than I remembered, almost painful to the touch after spending years locked away outside the heated cabin of the ship.
I pulled it free, and for the first time in years, the Mako I'd remembered at Tordivan's gallery saw light. My breath left rings on the freezing but polished exterior of the gun, keeping my reflection out of it.
There was dried blood on the barrel of the gun, and on the butt of it, a mix of colours from different species that had collectively faded to brown, donated by all the people in the last firefight before Jie'd taken her seat at the top of the Pent.
Would it even work?
Would it be better if it didn't?
Only one way to find out.
I took a deep breath and put the Mako down in the center of my work table, nudging the chassis of the Hammerhead out of the way to give it the space it needed. Then, I sat down to get to work.
First, I pulled back the vent to ensure that there was still coolant in the gun, which sparked the gun to life. After so much time, I'd expected it to sputter or complain, but it never had after-hours in a firefight, and it wouldn't start now.
The Mako didn't just come to life; it erupted, freezing air pouring out the side and crystalizing the edges of my wraps before I slammed the chamber shut.
I realized I'd been holding my breath.
No point in that now.
Human weapons were built to get field stripped with a single tool. Frankly, technology had passed the need for in-mission cleaning long ago, but we'd kept it around nonetheless. For my case, it just made it easy to pick up the Hammerheads adjustment tool and-
No, this was the Mako's adjustor. I'd never bothered to buy a new one for the Hammerhead. I wasn't repurposing something new. It had already been repurposed.
The Mako cracked open, and I pulled off the rear quarter panelling, revealing the inside. From memory, I understood that the interior of the Mako was usually a complicated web of colours, but instead, it was just a caked series of bloodstains that had faded over time. It really did get everywhere.
I took a deep breath and grabbed one of the many cleaning scalpels I had on the table, flicking it on. Hardlight hummed at the blade's edge, and I hovered it just over the bloodstains.
Was there a point in cleaning it?
No.
I pressed the blade down onto the blood, and started to burn, revealing the gun's gleaming, untarnished interior plating. Each stroke took away layers of blood, evaporating it into smoke to get filtered away by the ship. A quarter inch at a time, I erased.
Which stains belonged to the Ovisir girl who'd tried to stop me from breaking into the warehouse where the Dorkatta had been hiding stims? I hadn't realized how young she was until I'd already pinned her against the wall, and at that point, I was already pulling the trigger.
Did that come from the man I'd thrown off the stairs into the Foundry after he'd stabbed Galle in the middle of the crowd? Hell, maybe it was Galle's blood in the first place.
How much of it came from the first days? The days when a lot of the people involved still weren't wearing shields and bringing a Mako to the fight had been a wild escalation by Jie from shouting and bar brawls.
Was any of it mine?
How many of them had deserved it?
I took a deep breath as I replaced the back panelling. I knew the answer to that, so why couldn't I keep thinking about it? It was none of them. I'd cleaned this gun a hundred times before I'd shut it away. The only place this could have been from was the last assault on the Casino.
The first time I'd installed a hardlight knife on the front of the damned thing.
At least everyone who'd run into that fight understood what was happening. That was after Jie had signed the deal with Polidian to join forces with them in taking over the place. That said, a lot of the people who'd stood across the firing line from me that day had been standing beside me in-
I closed my eyes, and somehow, the black was better than staring at the gun. I turned off the scalpel and sat back in the chair for a moment. I was sweating. A single bead dripped off of my hair and down into my lap.
The cleaning was half done at this point. The Mako needed more attention, and even though I thought it might be okay without the cleaning, I understood that, without a perfect interior, I wouldn't be able to trust it. I'd walk away from it again and grab the Hammerhead instead of bringing the right tool for the job.
I flicked the scalpel on again, and it hummed in my hand, but this time I ignored the blood in the interior of the gun and instead scarred it across the emerald paint I'd added back then. The blade burned through the varnish and down to the white, then through that to the platinum exterior of the gun. I pulled down and cut a single line down the right-hand side, a bright silver scar surrounded by the burned emerald.
Then I stopped.
If I got to that point, I wanted her to recognize it.
And to get to that point, I needed it to work.
I put the blade back against the blood and started burning it away. I was going to bring this gun back onto the Station, and then I would make things right for everything I couldn't think about that had happened back then.
And if I couldn't do that, I'd at least make Jie pay for it.