Coincidence or Fate

Astarte wasn’t sure if she believed in things like fate, destiny, or the master plan preachers were always going on about. But she had to admit that some of things in her life seemed too convenient to be happenstance. Take her meeting with Karega, a simple kidnapping and ransom turning into the event that changed the direction of her whole life. A simple choice to get drunk and chat with her prisoner turned into a lifelong friendship and a partnership that earned her beloved Astaroth.

Or take her childhood friend Beno, who was a few years older than Astarte and had gone off to be a space sailor. Only to get Shanghaied into Greyson’s crew aboard the Black Saint. He was the one to Invite the Devil girl of New Mombasa into a pirate crew, and even showed her the ropes before his untimely death. It was that connection that led Astarte to Greyson’s side where she could learn the ins and outs of space piracy, and even learn of Greyson’s secret deathworld hideout that would one day become Pandemonium.

Or her chance meeting with the Arbiter’s civilian persona; now a suddenly shy girl completely out of her element.

Astarte had used her cybernetic eye on the Astaroth to peer under the officer’s privacy field and had memorized her face only hours before this party. It was hard to deny the existence of destiny when so many things had lined up just right for Astarte.

The Arbiter’s civilian persona, Rachel, seemed to be an entirely different person. It wasn’t just that the cloak had obscured a lot of her diminutive features and general human shape. But it also seemed to act as a shield against her insecurities. The Arbiter had been a being of cold, tightly contained rage. Ready to brutally beat anyone she came across. Astarte had seen the deep scowl under her cowl, and couldn’t match that face to the uncomfortable girl walking next to her. Her body language was completely closed off, her steps were hesitant, and she couldn’t seem to look Astarte in the face.

Astarte knew very well that sometimes a good costume could entirely change a person’s personality, but this seemed a little too extreme. Maybe she had some sort of mental condition, or maybe she had just repressed her emotions for so long that they manifested as the Arbiter.

Rachel had guided Astarte around the Heart family’s garden grounds, though with how uncertain her steps were Astarte wondered if their arrival had been entirely accidental. Her eyes seemed to be darting about too much to actually be paying attention to her surroundings.

The Heart’s house had so far been everything Astarte imagined a family steeped in hereditary wealth to inhabit. A typical European style mansion, with crawling ivy-like plants, a generic hedge maze, and an uninspired display of unobtrusive fine art and porcelain. There for the impression they gave rather than artistic talent or passion. The home told Astarte that despite the seeming affluence of this family, they found themselves inferior to their peers and worked hard to maintain a crafted façade of idle wealth.

Astarte often noticed that the truly mega rich tended to possess a few eccentricities that differentiated them from the rest of high society. Marshal Penton had his vintage Voidhawk that he worked hard to maintain and improve. Kora had her political aspirations in the Revivalist party. Captain Bell of the Beelzebub had spent her time as an idle multibillionaire working to revive Victorian fashion and art. Even the Hellworlder fleet could be seen as Astarte’s strange fixation, because despite her poorer upbringing Astarte was now in the small echelon of mega rich Humans. It took a certain kind of person to completely slip off societal expectations to pursue their passions, and Astarte could tell that the air of superiority and power the Hearts put on was just a cover.

It would have explained the seeming desperation in Mrs. Heart’s eyes as she sized up Karega. Their position here in the core might not be as secure as it seemed, which could explain why they had let their daughter moonlight as Station Security.

Of course, she could be entirely misreading the whole thing. The Hearts could just be incredibly bland and unimaginative people. But her instincts about people were generally on point.

Astarte glanced back to her guide and sighed internally. It seemed that Rachel was too busy looking for a way out of her situation to properly engage her guest in small talk. “It must get exhausting” Astarte remarked blandly.

Rachel snapped out of her stupor and faced Astarte like a deer in the headlights. “What?” she asked suspiciously.

She thought Astarte was commenting on her secret identity, and Astarte could have revealed that she knew Rachel’s secret right then and there. But she had a better idea. Rachel might revert to her Arbiter persona if Astarte tipped her hand, which would be troublesome. But as the timid and out of her element Rachel, Astarte could subtly probe her for what the SS knew without her ever knowing. Plus she would thoroughly enjoy toying with the Officer who had tried to use the law to bully her way aboard the Astaroth. “The perpetual sunlight here in the core section, it must get exhausting.”

Rachel looked caught off guard and sighed in relief “A little, I live in Silver tower city now so the light doesn’t bother me anymore.”

“You don’t live with your parents?” Astarte asked, her tone mildly interested.

Rachels expression flashed as she briefly panicked, it seemed Astarte had found another hole in her cover story. Even if she hadn’t known the girls secret identity her every reaction telegraphed that she had something to hide. “Well, I’m living on my own right now. Can’t stay with your parents forever.” She laughed nervously.

So the Arbiter lived alone, that was potentially useful. Sometimes people brought work home, infiltrating the Heart residence here in the core would have been difficult, but the apartment of a lone human was much more manageable. Good to know, now for a distraction. “Understandable, I moved out of my mother’s house when I was fifteen.”

“So young? What did you do…” she trailed off as something within her head clicked.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“I got a job and found someone to apprentice under.” Astarte said simply.

Rachel frowned as she connected the dots “On a spaceship?” she asked hesitantly.

Now where did she get the idea of spaceships? Astarte hadn’t mentioned anything about being a ship captain, not to Rachel at least. Of course the Arbiter had seen her aboard the Astaroth only hours earlier. “Yep, my boss took me under his wing and taught me the tricks to being a good captain.” She paused for a minute and they walked in silence for a few meters “You know, now that I think of it I saw some pretty heavy curtains in the manor proper. I guess most homes in the core have blackout curtains so they can get some sleep. Wish I had thought of that. I once had some business on Kaydo where the days are thirty three hours long, I had to rearrange my whole sleep schedule to just to accommodate their rhythm.”

“What kind of business would you have on Kaydo?” their was a hint of suspicion in her voice. It was the sort of tell that said she already had a certain idea of what kind of business the Astaroth did. So the SS was potentially on to their identity as space pirates, that was good to know. Their rough greeting from the ADCU could have been for a variety of reasons, but this narrowed things down. This would change the plan going forward, she would have to wait and gather more info before she could deploy the four Horsemen.

“Corn” Astarte answered plainly.

Rachel blinked, not the answer she was expecting. “What?”

Astarte chuckled softly “I was there to sell corn.”

“Why corn?”

Astarte didn’t answer immediately, Mrs. Heart had obviously been trying to separate Astarte and Karega. Since Rachel had seemed surprised by Aster’s presence she could assume that she wasn’t expecting to see her here. Which meant Mrs. Heart wasn’t aware of her daughter’s suspicions about the Astaroth. That meant she was trying to separate Aster and Karega to try and get one of them to spill a secret or two. The Hellworlders were very secretive about how far their influence reached, but some things were bound to slip out. Still, Rachel was already suspicious about the nature of the Astaroth’s business, it might be a good idea to try and redirect that suspicion. Make her question whether they were really pirates or just strangely armed merchants.

“Most Union food shipments consist of standard rations of processed algae, like the stuff produced in vats around Unity. However I noticed that not many came to the Sol system, that’s because we have a carbon rich world like Venus to set up tower farms for wheat, corn, rice, and other Terran crops. And any excess supply is sold back to the Union as a substitute for some of the ingredients in standard rations.” Astarte began to explain as she and Rachel turned a corner in the gardens and began to walk next to some greenhouses. “I learned that staples like that were dirt cheap, not really worth being prayed upon by pirates, but also hard to turn a profit on unless your shipping them in bulk to the core. But here’s the thing about Femeri, we have the highest concentration of death worlds and deathworlders, and our bodies are evolved to survive off of foods way more nutritious than standard rations are made to accommodate. It’s possible to fill your belly with standard rations and still starve to death. World’s like Kaydo and Balter had enormous consumption rates for standard meals, and were spending a lot of money on storing vast amounts to feed their growing cities.”

“Don’t they have crops of their own? Why not just grow more of those?” She asked, totally invested in the narrative.

“They did, but the Balikstro have a deep respect for the forests of their home world. They live entirely in the highland and craggy coasts of their alpine world, and won’t clear a single acre of forest for farmland. But with improved medical technology their population is booming and there isn’t enough arable land to support themselves. And the Kaydic went through a devastating war before first contact, and the bioweapons they engineered to destroy the enemy’s crop left their species lacking in a large variety of cultivated crops. Besides, neither species cultivated the vast variety of crops humanity did, nor did they breed them as selectively for crop yield and nutrition. So I thought ‘why not buy the cheap staples being sold to the Union and sell it directly to Balter and Kaydo’. Cut out the Coreworld food processing centers and save the two planets millions on food storage.”

Rachel watched Astarte suspiciously “And that worked? If it was that simple why didn’t someone else do it?”

“Well I’m not sure why the big corporations buying the food didn’t realize this, maybe being in the Core blinded them to the opportunities in Femeri. As for other smaller shipping companies it was probably the threat of piracy. Big corporations have super freighters and Union escorts, so they don’t fear losing shipments. But its different for small companies, they have to deal with the threat of piracy on every run, so instead of making numerous small runs of cheap product with slim returns, they make fewer runs and move more expensive product. Less margin for loss.”

“And you, how did you find away around that?”

“I didn’t, my ships face pirates on the regular. The difference is that instead of skittish non-deathworlder crews, I crew my ships with hardy Terrans and give them more than enough weapons to fight off their pursuers. Most pirates are used to crews dumping their cargo to flee, they don’t know what to do with armed ships ready to fight back. My crews don’t get a standard hourly rate, instead they earn a percentage of every sale. So they’re invested in the success of the company. After a while the pirates learned to avoid our ships.”

“So that’s your secret, you sell corn to death worlds by sending ships who are willing to fight back?” she asked incredulously.

“That’s how it started, we went from corn, to beef, to luxury goods like chocolate and coffee. Then we applied our success to moving industrial goods, we would find one company to support, move their product around until their competitors went under, then bought them out and abandoned the first.” It was half of the truth. The other half was how she had used the Hellworlder fleet to harass the shipping of those companies to make them go under faster. She stashed their goods on Pandemonium, and once she bought them up she sold the stolen product under their banner. This made it look like she was boosting the productivity which earned her more investors.

Rachel looked thoughtful, completely enraptured in Astarte’s narrative. “that’s smart, but if you ever stop it’ll all come apart.”

“That’s how most things are anyways, a rolling stone gathers no moss. Stagnation equals death.”

“What a deathworlder thing to say.” Rachel muttered under her breath.

Astarte frowned at that outburst. Part of her wondered if it had been a calculated statement, a quiet jab at Astarte’s background as a deathworld street rat. But something about the spontaneity told her that there was little forethought put into those words. She mentally filed it away for later.

They finally passed by the greenhouses and arrived around an ornately decorated fishpond. The species within were unfamiliar to Astarte’s eyes as they were all non-Terran. Upon closer inspection she noticed that all of the flowers, vines, and hedges were unfamiliar. Even the grass beneath her feet wasn’t the kind she was used to seeing on Earth or Mars. It was more yellow than green and grew more like the intertangled mass of moss than the short stalks of Terran grass.

As Rachel led Astarte to a sitting area she took a moment to forget about any convert manipulations or information probing and just enjoyed the view. City above her, city below her, city filling the horizon of the vision, with a million smaller shuttles and barges flying in between.

“Does this view ever get old?” she asked in wonder.

Rachel squinted in confusion at Astarte and looked up to try and see what Aster was seeing. “Sooner than you’d think.” She murmured.

Aster turned to look at Rachel. For the first time since Astarte met, either as the Arbiter or Rachel, she saw the woman under the mask. No rage and anger, nor apprehension and discomfort. Just the face of a woman who couldn’t marvel at the wonders of the world around. Tired, sad, and beaten down by life.

For a minute Astarte felt a little ashamed of how she had been manipulating Rachel.

They were broken out of their quiet contemplation by the soft fall of footsteps. Astarte turned to see a tall man approaching them. He wore his fine dark blue kimono as if he had been born in it. He had his dark black hair pulled up into a top bun in the fashion of Japanese samurai, and Astarte felt somewhat unnerved by the sharpness of his gaze.

“Rachel, your mother said I would find you here” the man said in common as he approached.

Rachel blinked in surprise “Ju… Gin-sama.”

Astarte felt her heart stop at that name. she began to study the man once more, she studied the somewhat familiar features of his face and compared them against her own. The shape of his eyes were exactly like her own, his hair was of a similar shade to Astarte’s, and his skin was just slightly darker than Astarte’s.

Astarte wasn’t sure if there was such thing as destiny or fate. She wasn’t totally convinced that there was some divine force shaping events. But if there was she was certain that it had a twisted and fucked up sense of humor. As not only did she meet the Arbiter’s civilian persona today, but also the man who was potentially her father.