The Jazan’s hull has ruptured. She’s depressurizing. Flames spit from the second through fourth engines. Lasers refract off her cracked metal exterior, shields giving way to fissures of magma.
Ø remembers. From before she met you. From her privateering days, dried ocular fluid on her sorrel hands, freshly escaped from her servitude. Room 10-214’s brocaded fabrics burst with yellow-red tumors. The explosions are unheard by your two companions, napping after a day’s worth of yachting.
The Jazan would capsize, were she still within Salaam’s atmosphere, the oasis planet serving as her destruction’s backdrop. Instead, she keels, pirouetting endlessly, stabilizers shot, languidly rotating as her magazine implodes in a blinding flash. At long last, her bow separates from stern, the two halves of merchant ship drawn backwards, towards the planetary surface from which she has unsuccessfully escaped.
Ø’s senses are overdrawn. She salivates, her cheek fully packed with leaves. The spezie in her veins colors the khat within her cheeks with an artificiel pomegranate’s tart. Drugs supplied by her allies, the collection of tribes and clans wrapped together only temporarily, factions rotating throughout every stage of the Okapi Wars. Her left hand trembles, skin beneath fur white with stress, curled into a fist atop her captain’s console.
The Jazan’s demise clears away stress, melting the ice in her joints. She feels her vessel’s forty-person crew relax through her basirah vision, their whispers semi-audible in her drug-fueled haze.
They’re the many appendages of the ship. From the unfeeling android navigator before her, to the slaves on-loan in the engineering levels. Below, they fog their full-face masks with sweat, blinded to the outside conflict, working off of echolocation. They’re emaciated, burned bodies shot through with invisible atomic grapeshot shedding from the engines.
But as their toil comes to a screeching halt, they sigh like the mare. The back of their teeth tingle with warm breath. The enemy vessel has been dispatched, the fighting easing into entr’acte.
The Jazan’s bow has sunk into the atmosphere. Her bare metal exterior heats to a fiery orange, its dismembered parts are falling stars, a midday meteor shower for those on the planet’s surface.
Of the five ships in the allied raiding fleet, three remain. Here, Ø’s Chang Tsung-ch’ang stands the least scathed. It’s the smallest vessel, but the most maneuverable, suffering only near-misses and three of eight engine failures. Two others in the group, the Qolxad and Jabarta, fight for their lives against the last of the Rassidi Waqf’s merchant flotilla, the plucky Al-Mutahhar, carrying a haul of antique oriental rugs, artisan-milled mustards, and anti-personnel grenades the size of bergamots.
Ø’s allies have cornered their prey. A grave mistake, leaving the Al-Mutahhar to lash out for her life.
The three captains shriek at one another over the open communicators. Always loud, her allies. Either chanting poetry or belting anashid. On this cycle they screech, arguing with each other, their crews panicking as opposition slugs land on target, blowing away sides of blast shielding, flooding compartments with the predatory depressurizations, howls of fear replaced with the unbearable silence of space.
Ø maneuvers the Chang Tsung-ch’ang closer to the scuffle, just within torpedo range of the merchant ship’s flank. She refuses to attack. She’s learned her lesson. It’s been two years of privateering, yet she still impatiently picks her nails, tapping her hooves, fighting against the cultivated, subconscious urge to pursue prey.
Although they shed real tears, communications etiquette nonexistent, her allies would rather fall in battle than be saved by a privateer. They prefer to duel without her hired help. For honor alone, they lie.
So as the Jabarta goes silent, her command bridge suffering a direct hit, functionally disabled, Ø muses that there’s one fewer ship to share in the spoils of another successful raid.
But the killing continues for nothing. The Al-Mutahhar is broken. Her life support has been shot through, the entire ship asphyxiating. Screaming into silence, as the communicators aboard gradually lose their energy, electricity fizzling into nothingness, pleading voices stuttering with electromagnetic interference.
This, of course, is met with the jeers of the Qolxad. The warlord at the helm whoops with glee, gloating his enemies to death, firing slug after slug into the vessel’s dying corpse, its cargo of anti-personnel bergamot bottes igniting at random.
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In his gratitude, with a flair for self-aggrandizement, he will allow Ø to share in the planet-side spoils. Docks filled with unloaded goods, the opposition’s supple supply lines caught unawares in yet another daring incursion. One destroyer, refitted for cargo storage, laden with gold and spezie, will be taken for his own. The Sheekh, he’ll call it.
Within the year, it will be destroyed during a routine patrol. Ambushed in yet another phase of the conflict. Lost with all hands, blood feud begetting a response of equal animosity, forever.
The other, the Sheekh’s little sister, the corvette freshly launched, will be Ø’s. She’ll lift from Salaam’s surface, khat in maw. She’ll holler with murderous joy, spine tingling with the hope of more prizes to be won, spiking herself blind for days, not taking the time to paint over the name on the side of the vessel, named after her victorious allies, who, eager to re-label every prize, re-christened the vessel Cimraan.
---
Ø’s wrist rotates. The energy comes from elsewhere, from the spin of her hips, abs tightening, whole arm following through. You feel the exertion in your own arm, which involuntarily flexes. It’s the foreign sensation of a dominant left hand.
Her vision transfixes on trajectory. The bottle banks to her right, your left. Its neck rolls, weight somersaulting, pirouetting with the Jazan’s shadow through the evening’s breeze. It’s still light, for being so late on the summer’s day. And so the pathway is lit, the projectile’s arc easily deduced, even with alcohol sweating from your pores, skin and pelt seared by your day aboard the Duchesse.
Your duck is more of a lunge. The side-step leaves the bottle without a target. It collides with the balcony door, its floor-to-ceiling ormolu frame buckling, panes of glass exploding, spitting shards upon the railing outside, letting chunks of opaque shrapnel fall to the earth like a sun shower.
Whatever gasps from passerby reverberate from ten stories below aren’t loud enough to break through your skull, to beat out the ethereal screeches of the drunken mare, to make you forget about the fingers contorting around your throat, pinning you to the floor.
Your guests lounging upon the sofas laugh. They shoot one another bemused glances. Too liquored up to assume anything but a lovers’ quarrel, uncaring for anything beyond the promise of further drinking.
But the mare’s anger never subsides. Even as you retire to the pools, beneath a mural of face cards, laid out in trinity before fedora-clad, impenitent thieves. As always, the dutiful Queen of Hearts blessing the tepid pool’s occupants with benediction.
Ø chews the fig like a severed foot, shredding its skin between sliding molars. Dutchie’s one-sided tirade is drowned out. Her first-hand account of a mid-morning haunting never truly reaches your ears. She drones on about the figures that lurk in reflections of water, Charlie relaxing atop the pool’s surface, yessing her to death.
The glass at your lips is poisoned with a familiar, artificiel pomegranate’s tart broadcast from your mare. Memories of theater after theater. Ø’s prizes listed with nonchalance.
Then a pedestrian memory. The warlord cornering the mare at one of Salaam’s crowded trade ports. He politely explains that the raid was unsuccessful. Their true prize is still at large. The same one three-dimensionally shot across the galaxy, finder’s fee enough to afford fifteen Sheekh’s, laid end-to-end.
A waterlogged piece of debris. Worthless, without context. Half of an ancient forebear’s staff, easily confused with driftwood. Stolen from the clan’s possession, the minor instance of burglary the ignition to a war that still rages in low-intensity.
“I don’t get it,” you admit, vibrating across the water’s edge, staring at her from across the pool. Her litany of hatred finally ends. She balks at your nonchalance.
“What are you, stupid? You don’t steal a clan’s relics.”
She scans your companions. Placid atop the water. Easily dragged under, held in place in perpetuity.
“Let’s just kill ‘em. Get out of the job before we start.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“What?”
“You said this guy was a notorious thief, and now you’re worried he can’t pull off a robbery.”
“I don’t care who he is. He won’t survive once he gets off this planet. You don’t get away from feuds. They’re not fenced. If anyone finds out you’re to blame, it doesn’t matter where you hide, they’ll find you.”
Your mind’s deck is reshuffled. Included between pip cards are jokers, cavaliers. A half-torn L’Amoureu inserted in reverse. An imperfect deck, stained with pear wines and yachting spezie, your hangover arriving early. As the argument’s cards are dealt between the both of you once more, Ø spits into the base of your spine.
“Oh, you think I’m scared,” she divines your guts, or lack thereof. “I’m not,” she bluffs.
“Just tell them we don’t want the job, that we change our minds,” you fold.
“No,” she hisses.
She’s disgusted with your passivity in the face of pressure. Spiteful, sensing your realization that you may have overstepped your boundaries in accepting such a job on her behalf. You’re sober, vulnerable again.
“You just said this is too dangerous, and—”
“I know what I said. So, you can beg them for both of us. Floor’s yours. After all, they’re your friends. They’ll understand if you’re yellow, right?” she chides. Her face contorts into a malicious smile. Her problems are far away when you, acting as souffre-douleur, are close enough to release her nervous energy. She may be stuck with your actions, but she’s grateful to know that you’re stuck with her. Like always. “But just know I won’t save you when a couple of Dutchie’s aides collect their due. After all, you’re the one who wanted action so badly,” she muses, “maybe they’ll even hire me to do it. I bet you I’m a better shot than that donkey-faced salope who keeps inviting you over for coffee.”
“Hey lovebirds,” Charlie chides. “The lady asked if you’re ready.”
“For what?” the mare hisses.
“To scope out the joint.”