After a few nights of debauch, Pirate came to my bunk instead of Murderess’s. As I followed him to the latrine, I could see her eyes glinting in the dark, serpentine with resentment.
“Will she snitch?” I asked as I shut the door.
“I’ll deal with her after this,” Pirate shrugged. “Unless you want a go?”
In the crimson light, he couldn’t see me turning bright red. Small blessings. I shook my head, and he shrugged.
“A wiser man than I,” Pirate joked. “Woman’s got a hole in her nothing could ever fill.”
“Do you think the blackout was an attack?” I asked, eager to change the topic.
“Not from the Clabs. We’d all be dead. Likewise, we can infer the reactor wasn’t the problem since we’re still here. It might have been sabotage. But more likely, a meteoroid punched through the hull and hit a distribution node.”
“That would mean mag-deflect is down,” I groaned. It was a horrifying thought. If the shield was down, it was only a matter of time until we were hit again. “We were stuck here for hours. Why didn’t they switch to secondary power?”
“Probably no one left who knows how. We very nearly froze to death,” Pirate agreed. “And they’re still having issues.”
I felt the chill of the void. All those faces I’d seen howling in the airlock came back to me. At every execution, I’d told myself it couldn’t happen to me because I was squared away. Now, I might taste space through sheer incompetence.
Life support is quadruple-redundant. I boggled at the sheer number of stupid decisions that must have happened to get us to this point. Had the drills executed every competent engineer on the station?
“We could…” Pirate began to suggest something, but our eyes met, and the words died in his mouth. I knew what he wanted to say, and why he didn’t say it. The two of us could probably fix the damaged node, or at the very least reroute it. But there was one thing we both knew for certain, no matter how bad things got.
Never volunteer.
“It was like this on Ganglion,” Pirate recalled. “There were forty-eight fabricators, but only ten were online, running at half-capacity. Command still expected us to produce at full output. I hated the fabricator repair crew. Those apes couldn’t fix breakfast. On top of that, OpSec kept pushing out these security patches that broke half of the functions.”
“You never told me how you managed to steal a ship,” I reminded Pirate, nudging him toward thoughts of escape.
“Ha! Stole? Impossible. The Hezo isn’t that stupid. OpSec keys the ship templates so mechanics can’t fly them. There would be nothing but empty repair bays if they didn’t. I couldn’t possibly steal one.”
“Then how’d you get out?”
“I really did build one myself,” Pirate smiled. “Piece by piece. OpSec never laid a hand on my ship because they didn’t know it existed.”
It was an extraordinary claim, and anyone else would have scoffed. But I had seen a side of Pirate the others hadn’t, a little blue masterpiece hidden away in the latrine vent. I nodded.
“The fabricators were driving me crazy. One night, I stayed behind after hours and cracked the fabricator open. That was such a risk. I’d never worked on one before, and if anyone caught me, I might have been executed as a saboteur. But I couldn’t bear to wait three days for a ten-minute fab anymore. Luckily, it was an easy fix. The next day, our fabricator miraculously starts running at full capacity.”
Pirate grinned widely.
“That quarter, my team launched twice as many ships as the other bays. Command wanted to know why. When they started investigating, I was the obvious culprit. No one else had the chops. The head of the fabricator repair team made a big stink and tried to have me executed for tampering with his machine. As you can see, he didn’t succeed.” Pirate patted his chest.
“They locked him, promoted me, and gave me command of his squad. They were all worthless. Anyone with promise had been sent off to die at Sigma Draconis. I just gave the dopes a bunch of make-work to keep them occupied. I fixed all of the fabricators myself. It was murder but, pretty soon, I had everything running at a hundred percent. I was a hero.”
Pirate had a wistful smile, caught in some memory he kept for himself. I didn’t press him. When it faded, he resumed his tale.
“But I made a terrible mistake. I fixed everything and put myself in a situation where I had nothing to do. The boredom nearly killed me. Spare time in a prison is slow poison. I had hoped if I could keep my head down and make myself indispensable, maybe I would find an opportunity to escape. But Ganglion was locked-down tight. The Hezo was never going to let any of us leave. Too mimi.”
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
Pirate sighed.
“It got to me. I started to think more and more about taking a spacewalk. Just walk up to the lock one day and WHOOSH! No more struggling. I must have walked up to that airlock twenty times. I couldn’t do it.”
I understood him completely.
“I needed a reason to go on. I found it in bay nine. That bay was empty and mothballed because the fabricator was beyond repair. Sometimes, I would cannibalize it for parts. I soon realized no one else ever went inside. I was the only one with clearance. That’s when I got the crazy idea that maybe I could build my own ship.”
“Impossible,” I breathed.
“Ha!” Pirate cried, and his hand rose to cover his mouth, he’d gotten carried away. “You see, there were so many levels of unnecessary security. There were factions in command, all suspicious of each other, vying for their turn at the wheel. I performed an essential role and never squeaked. My superiors started to see me as part of the machine, and then they forgot I existed. I had nothing but time.
“Each time I serviced a fabricator, I was required to do a test print to make sure the heads were aligned and everything was up to spec. I was supposed to dispose of the test parts, but I didn’t. I brought them to bay nine. Bit by bit, I built an entire pinnace. It took five years.”
“Five years!” I hissed. “How old are you even?”
“Too old.” Pirate grinned.
“Where’d you get the reactor? How’d you mount it?”
Pirate tapped the side of his head.
“Smart kid. That was the hardest part, the last piece of the puzzle. The reactor in the dead fabricator was still good, but it was impossible for me to pull it alone, and someone in ops would notice it going offline. Getting that reactor out of the fabricator and into my ship was a two-man job, it had me stumped for a long time.”
Pirate smiled again.
“A funny thing happened. One day, Ganglion’s rotational guidance array malfunctioned. The whole ship spun down to .1G. It was pandemonium onboard. It just so happened I had a crane lined up and ready to go in bay nine. Even at a tenth of a G, pulling and mounting that reactor nearly killed me. But I did it. The pinnace accepted the reactor, and everything came online. By the time the dolts in Operations had Ganglion spun up again, me and my new ship were halfway out of the system. I named her Guernica.”
Pirate’s eyes grew lustrous with the beginnings of tears.
“For a whole week after I escaped, all I could do was laugh. Every time I thought of OpSec looking around that empty bay with stupid looks on their faces. It was glorious! I just sailed and sailed, through empty systems, into the deep black. I didn’t need anything or anyone. I was reborn.”
The tears came. Pirate wept in the dim red light of the latrine.
“Of course, I was so selfish. I cared only for myself in those days. That’s all over now, I understand I have a role to play and a debt to pay,” Pirate said, echoing the lines the drills had hammered into us a thousand times. Then he lifted his head as if hearing a distant note.
“But they can never take my voyage away from me. I was a man. I was free.”
I set a hand on Pirate’s shoulder. I hadn’t touched anyone by choice in a long, long time. He nodded, and I retracted my hand, feeling awkward. Something had changed after the blackout. We’d all been on edge, suffering from feelings that were raw and excessive. I wondered if we’d been on mood stabilizers this whole time and the supply had finally ran out.
“Well, now you know how I became Pirate. Why do they call you Traitor?” Pirate asked.
I swallowed, wishing I hadn’t made the deal.
“It’s stupid. I didn’t do anything interesting,” I hedged. I wanted so badly to weasel out of telling him, but Pirate would not be denied. He kept staring at me.
“A Lydia,” I confessed. That should have explained everything. But Pirate was too old. His eyebrows arched.
“Who’s Lydia?”
“A succubus program. They rove the nets, looking for lonely men. When you fall for one, they slowly win you over to the Collaborators.”
“A program?” Pirate was dumbfounded.
“It’s slow and subtle. On the anonymous nets, they look like any other chatter. They play games with you. You become friends. They find out everything about you, all the things you would never tell anyone. Anytime you’re down, they’re there. They’re always interested in what you have to say. Lydias care, in a world where no one gives a shit about you. If you’re in trouble, they’ll lend you money or help you fix things with the police. I knew it was too good to be true. But I couldn’t stop. She knew me, every part of me. She accepted me in a way no human could. Nobody ever wanted me like that. Nobody ever loved me. So I flipped and joined the Collaborators.”
“For a woman who didn’t exist?”
“She exists.”
“But you could never— I mean, she has no body, right? You never fucked her?”
I shook my head. I had never fucked anyone.
“I was going to serve my time in the Clabs and get patterned into Tai Di so I could be with her always. But the Hezo conquered Keilu. They severed the nets, and I lost her. I fell into a deep despair. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Finally, I went to a Zisha.”
“What’s that?”
“A suicide merchant. But instead of waking up dead, I was a prisoner. The Hezo had taken the place over and turned it into a trap.”
“You betrayed mankind,” Pirate said, pulling away from me.
“Yes,” I admitted.
For a moment, he seemed on the verge of turning away in disgust. But then, he was captured by a sudden zeal.
“But you changed! You’re the best pilot, the hardest worker. You never whine like the others. You must have seen the light!”
“Yes, of course,” I blurted. “I’m ashamed of what I did. I can only hope to redeem myself through the mission.” I searched his face, scanning for some sign he believed me. Even if I was going to die, I didn’t want it to be in an airlock.
Pirate clasped my hand ferociously and clapped me on the shoulder.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn, brother. Victory is destiny.”
They had him still.