“PSSST!”

I listened to the whisper in the dim red light, making up my mind what to do about this new development. Through half-lidded eyes, I watched Pirate creep up to my bunk to see if I was awake.

I was always awake.

I’d lied to the drills when I told them I was dead to the world at night. I barely slept at all. When I did, it was very light, a twitch between dreaming and waking. Pirate and I were the night owls of the squadron, the others usually slept like stones. It had been a week since I’d been discharged from the infirmary. We were all back in our routine.

I had expected at least one of us to be executed, but no one was. Instead, Rehnquist lost his buddy. Nordall took the fall, that was all. The others still had no idea why we’d been questioned.

I learned I was the only one the drills interrogated for more than a few hours. The rest had rolled almost immediately. They thought I was brave for holding out, but really, I just liked to be hurt.

Ahem.

For months, I’d watched Pirate fidget in the dim red glow of lights-out, wondering just what the hell he was doing. Were those tiny movements of his shoulder blades some kind of tantric masturbation? Was he twiddling his thumbs? Sobbing to himself? Whatever it was went on for hours, the motions too intent to be mistaken for sleep. Tonight was different. He had been lying awake, tossing and turning. Waiting for me.

“You wanna see something?” Pirate offered, his voice a hair-thin whisper.

It would have been wiser to refuse. While I’d never really subscribed to the official party line homosexuals were an abomination, I was pretty sure I wasn’t one.

But I had been in prison for a long, long time. Every night, I stared into the red-tinged darkness, hoping morning would never come. Whatever Pirate intended would be a break in my listless melancholy. I decided I would see what he had to show me.

Luckily, it wasn’t his penis. Pirate led me into the latrine. In his hand, he held the short-handled mop we used to clean behind the radiators. My muscles were tense, ready to go down fighting. But instead, he sprang onto the toilet lid with surprising grace.

I nearly panicked as he worked the screws off the latrine vent. Had he found my stash? Instead, Pirate angled in the left-hand side of the vent with the short-handled mop. I had always used the right-hand side.

From his movements, I could tell he’d done this many times before. He retrieved something from deep inside the duct and brought it over to the sink counter.

“Shut the door and turn on the light,” Pirate said, his voice low. No one ever turned on the lights at night, I wondered if it would rouse the others. But it was Pirate’s show. I flicked on the lights, worried the drills might burst in at any time.

When my eyes adjusted, I looked at Pirate, his green eyes were bright with anticipation. Along the edge of the sink, there was a row of three bright blue plastic dominos. Each was arranged so it sat in its own pool of light from the overheads.

They weren’t dominos! They were sculptures. Each was about the size of a playing card, around twenty millimeters thick. Pirate had carved friezes into them. They were impossibly intricate.

My breath caught. How had he done this?

“It’s thermoplastic. You can handle them, but only the outer edge. Try not to breathe on them,” Pirate advised.

Pirate had carved each tiny sculpture with a thick outer border so they didn’t deform from handling. In total silence, I lifted each and marveled at them. I held each up to my eye so I could soak in all the glorious detail work. In the dim red glow of lights-out, he’d worked as delicately as a jeweler. The man had to be part cat.

The first sculpture was abstract. The carving began as a stylized flowing curve, then it broke into three streams. One had scales like a fish, the next had sharp musculature like a climber’s torso, the last a river of curly, flowing hair that twisted into a braid. The three streams met at the upper edge of the sculpture and morphed into sharp-edged lines, like the faces of crystal.

In the spaces between the three streams, Pirate had carved entirely through the plastic, separating them with emptiness. This was the practice piece where he got a feel for the material. A mere doodle that must have taken months.

Poking out from the edge of the sculpture were his tools, the two missing sewing needles. It felt like a lifetime ago we’d caught hell for them. I wasn’t annoyed about it anymore.

The second sculpture was an antique, three-masted sailing ship, tossed on stormy blue plastic seas. It was a perfect reproduction, from jib to driver. The sails appeared to billow, and I could almost hear the howl of the tempest overhead. It filled me with longing for a world I’d never known, for seas long gone.

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The third sculpture was the one that got to me. I held it up to the light for as long as I dared, drinking in every curve. When I set it down, there were tears rolling down my cheeks.

In tiny slivers of stolen time, Pirate had managed to carve a shred of hatch cowling he’d filched from a disused airlock into a miniature Venus of Urbino. The original painting was a woman reclining nude on a couch, with her hand between her legs. Her expression was inscrutable and indelible, like A Bar at the Folies-Bergere or Girl with a Pearl Earring.

I stared at the swell of her stomach, the slight rise of her breasts, the tiny signet ring on the pinky of the hand poised above the great divide.

I was awestruck. Into a scrap of blue plastic no longer than my thumb, Pirate had carved everything I’d wanted but couldn’t express. She was everything missing in my life. Another man might have made a joke, but Pirate only nodded at me. He understood.

It meant so much more, knowing what he’d dared to make these. I don’t even want to think about what the drills would have done to Pirate if they caught him tearing bits off an airlock seal. The danger hadn’t passed. They could barge in at any time, and it would be instant death for both of us.

Too soon, Pirate gathered up his miniature masterpieces. I couldn’t find my words, I could only watch him climbing back on the toilet to push his treasures out of reach with the little mop. I cut the light and cracked open the latrine door as he climbed off the bowl.

In a different time, Pirate would have started a movement. His personality was even bigger than his talent. A meta-material Matisse, or perhaps a polymorphic-paint Picasso. Instead, we were inmates, condemned to death. There’s no waste like a war. I wanted to gush and tell him what his sculpture meant to me, but I couldn’t find the words.

“How?” I managed at last as we stood in the dim light together. If the drills burst in now, we’d claim we were ships passing in the night on the way to the latrine. We’d still be punished but probably not executed.

“I roll the needle between my fingers to get the point hot enough to carve. Very fine work. I told you, I would have been great,” Pirate said with a rueful grin.

No boasting now, with the others asleep in their bunks. There was a vast sadness in his eyes. It was a part of him he only let show in the dead of the night.

“Why did you show me this?” I asked, wondering why he hadn’t picked one of the others.

“You always listen to my stories.” He shrugged.

I stared back, sensing there was more he wanted to say. He was nervous to continue but, at last, he obliged me.

“While they were interrogating us, the drills turned the barracks upside down. Like they’ve never done before. It took days to get everything back together. I’ve been worried they’ll come back and look deeper. I can’t stand the thought no one but me will ever see my work. A drill would just crush them and throw them in a refuse chute.”

I nodded. It was exactly what a drill would do.

“But why me?” I pressed, wondering if he suspected. I had a paranoid flash this was just another setup, that Tsuros had put him up to this.

“You’re the only one who didn’t flip. The rest of us were back in the barracks within a few hours. We thought you were never coming back. Tsuros?” Pirate asked. He tapped his left temple to mean the deep bruise on the side of my face.

“Tsuros,” I confirmed. The man left his mark.

“The rest of us rolled on each other immediately,” Pirate said unhappily. “All our little secrets. We were eating shit the whole week you were in infirm. The drills were still unhappy afterward. I don’t think they found what they wanted.”

“Any idea what it was?” I asked. My mouth had gone dry.

“No clue. Probably one of the drills did something, and they tried to pin it on us.”

“Sounds about right,” I agreed quickly.

A flicker of uncertainty went through his face, and there was an uncomfortable silence. Pirate glanced back in the direction of the barracks, then nodded his head towards Murderess’s bunk.

“I almost showed her my sculptures. So stupid. I’d be dead now if I had.”

“Why her?” I asked. Murderess was the absolute last person I would ever confide in.

Pirate shrugged, and then cupped the air in front of his chest with both hands.

“All men are fools,” he said, sounding a little wistful. “I thought she might have a thing for artists.”

“I don’t think she has a thing for anyone but herself,” I countered. Pirate stifled a laugh.

“Maybe so. Anyhow, my secret is safe with you, right?” Pirate tried to be casual, but he had really taken a terrible chance here. He was having second thoughts.

I made the little gesture of turning a key in the side of my mouth and throwing it away.

“Thank you,” Pirate said, visibly relieved. “You always keep it close. You still haven’t told anyone who you betrayed to get that name.”

“And I never will,” I said.

Pirate shut one of his eyes and tilted his head in invitation. He was dying to know. I shook my head.

“Were you really stationed on Tau?” I changed the subject. Pirate was always happy to talk about himself.

“Initially, yes. Want to know something funny? It actually gave me a lot of practice. Ship repair isn’t far from sculpture. Performing an endoscopic bursectomy on a shrapnel- riddled hull lining is about as hard as rendering lace in marble. A thorascopic sympathectomy of a reactor shield membrane is like carving a block of clay, where a single bad stroke will kill everyone on the dock. There’s art everywhere if you go looking for it.”

I was already interested, but when Pirate talked about working on ships, I hung on his every word.

“What was it really like there?” I whispered.

His expression clouded.

“It’s a dangerous story. Drills might kill you if they find out I told you,” Pirate warned.

“Twice?”

He shrugged with his bottom lip tight. Pirate couldn’t really accept we were condemned. I didn’t press the issue. Then a sound made both of us freeze. Somewhere up the corridor, two drills argued with each other.

“Tomorrow,” Pirate promised. The two of us slipped silently back to our bunks.