“What is your crime?”

“I deserted my post. I stole from the Collective Prosperity Sphere. I attacked vital shipments and jeopardized the war effort. I plundered and reaved.”

“What is your name?

“Pirate.”

“You are a parasite. Take from him as he took from all of us.”

Each of us had lined up in front of Pirate and taken a piece out of him. We were required to grab a tangle of his thick black hair and rip it out by the roots. Once, Glutton didn’t tug hard enough.

I remember the panic in his face, the way he frantically tugged again, hoping the drill hadn’t noticed. Of course, they did. The drill stormed over, hissing curses.

“THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT!” the drill barked, grabbing a fistful of Glutton’s fine blond hair. He yanked so hard Glutton’s scalp seeped blood for the rest of the day. Nobody screwed up the ritual after that. Pirate was a hirsute man, but after a few struggle sessions, it was hard to find a handful of hair anywhere on his body. He looked like a badly plucked chicken.

I hated the other members of the squadron from the start. First, I hated them for robbing me of my isolation. Soon, I hated them for their incompetence, all the punishments I suffered on their behalf. Some idiot lost two sewing needles, and we had to rip the entire barracks apart looking for them, three times in a row.

When they didn’t turn up, the squadron was given twenty-four hours of no rations as punishment. I seethed about it, but what could I do? Nothing but hate, hate, hate, and keep my mouth shut. I fantasized about killing them, but I wasn’t stupid enough to try.

I was the youngest and the smallest by far. Even Murderess was ten centimeters taller than me, and I hated her for that, too. I hated them all.

Except Pirate. The others hated him so much. I liked him just to spite them. When the drills weren’t around, Pirate swelled up with a bottomless confidence. No amount of violent depilation could squelch his swagger.

Every day, Pirate would spin a new yarn as we scrubbed and mopped the barracks until it was as spotless as a surgical ward. He told his tales with a rolling, self-important cadence as if he were reciting the Odyssey. Impossible stories about looting freighters, breaking comrades out of prisons, outrunning pursuers, and bedding a seemingly endless stream of wide-eyed damsels.

You could roll your eyes, you could call him a liar, you could walk away from him, it didn’t matter. The man was in love with the sound of his own voice. He would keep talking, following you around, and there was nowhere to hide in the barracks. I have never met a sober man so utterly impervious to criticism.

The other inmates tried to tune Pirate out, but I liked to wind him up with little nods to keep him going. I started doing it to infuriate the others, but, in time, I realized I liked listening to him. There were always a few maddening kernels of indigestible truth lodged in his bullshit.

Pirate claimed he was the result of a forbidden liaison between two high-ranking Polomen. He fit the mold; wide-set eyes, an aquiline beak of a nose, insufferable vanity. His was an old story. A child of privilege begins life with seemingly limitless potential and amounts to nothing at all.

“I was destined to be a great sculptor!” Pirate proclaimed as the others rolled their eyes and distanced themselves. He shouldered his mop like a rifle. “The greatest! Marvelous marble, beautiful bronze, sublime steel, myriad masterpieces in every media. It was my dream since I was a child!

“I studied under the great L’orze Del Dico! I was her most exemplary pupil, her most passionate lover. Alas, I shone too bright! My application to the Academy of Revolutionary Arts was declined! The cowards knew I would eclipse them! In their pettiness, they engineered to have me drafted. Imagine that, the great Pirate, conscripted as a lowly mechanic!”

Pirate made grandiose gestures at Addict. Addict wheezed and bent to scour a drain grating that was already spotless.

Corrupt watched from across the barracks with an old toothbrush in his hand. He had a smile that always meant trouble.

“Surely there was a greater need for mechanics than sculptors, brother. Are you saying the Hezo was wrong to draft you?” Corrupt angled. His blue eyes gleamed with ill-intent. Corrupt had been cleaning the dust from the aluminum vanes of the radiator. He always slurped up the easiest tasks.

Pirate’s eyes were green, edged with gold. They lit up at the unexpected acknowledgement of his existence. He sauntered over to the radiator with his mop. I smiled as Corrupt winced. The fool had only been fishing for something to snitch about, now Pirate had latched onto him instead of Addict.

“No, comrade! Nothing could be farther from the truth! It was wise, very wise of the Hezo! I became the greatest mechanic in the entire Prosperity Sphere. I had the great honor of being sent to the Tau Ceti Front. I served honorably on the ORB of Ahklys.”

Pirate puffed up his chest, and the barracks grew deathly silent.

“What’s an ORB?” I asked, though I already knew what it stood for. I knew just about everything a civilian was allowed to know about spacecraft, and plenty they weren’t. I just wanted to steer the conversation away from the dangerous course Pirate had charted.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“An Orbital Repair Bay. It was enormous! A hundred times bigger than this dismal disk. We had capital ships in those days. They were glorious! I can remember watching the fleet launch into the ruby dust. Like a grand caravan, vanishing into a sirocco!”

“I never heard of any Tau Ceti Front,” Glutton protested, and Addict chittered in agreement. I don’t think they were teasing Pirate or acting out of malice. Those two were just clueless about anything you couldn’t shoot, snort, or eat.

“There was no Tau Ceti Front,” Corrupt pronounced. Here was the malice. Corrupt and Murderess shared a poisonous glance. Liar had only been half-listening as he scrubbed on the other side of the barracks. When he realized what we were talking about, he abandoned his brush and shrank away into the latrine. Corrupt used to be a governor, Murderess was in logistics, and Liar had been what passed for a journalist in the Hezo. They all knew.

A sound of protest died in Pirate’s throat. Corrupt smiled a serrated grin. Pirate looked toward Murderess for help, but she gave him nothing. Finally, Pirate turned to me, with a childish, pleading expression.

“There was no Tau Ceti Front. You must be thinking of another,” I said, more softly than Corrupt had. I looked from face to face, trying to tell if the others knew how serious this was. If the drills caught wind of this conversation, we were all going to die.

Pirate’s face fell, no one on his side. But then, I winked at him. It wasn’t subtle, and the others all stared at me. I glared back, daring them to snitch. I would gladly drag them all down to Hell with me.

Pirate returned a tight-lipped nod of understanding. He went back to swabbing the floor with sullen swipes of the mop. There was a strained silence in the barracks for the rest of the morning.

Officially, there was never a Tau Ceti Front. There was never even a Tau Ceti, the official Hezo star maps omit it, daring anyone to disagree. But I’ve seen files. I’ve seen footage.

Tau Ceti was a slaughter.

☼

The next day, Pirate was himself again. To punish us for Murderess existing, the drills had ordered us to muck out a hydraulic lift flooded with spoiled bio-oil. It was like swimming in a cesspool.

Most of us wore masks against the stench, but Pirate’s mask had ridden down to his neck. The smell didn’t bother him. He was engrossed in telling us a story.

“…the Hezo ace, Redbeak. The nose of his ship was painted crimson, as if wet with blood. He tracked me across five systems before he caught me. I was low on gas, trying to refuel at Gliese-Songhua. What a beauty! She was a helium Niflheim of burning ice, where thousand-kilometer crystal spires wept away into the void.”

Corrupt made a gagging noise. It was unclear whether he’d been disgusted by the rotting oil or Pirate’s histrionics. I tried to scowl at him to shut up, but the impact was muted by my mask.

“Gliese-Songhua has two tails, like a comet. One gas and one dust. I was in the gas trail, drinking greedily, unaware Redbeak lay in ambush! He waited until my tanks were deployed and I was vulnerable, the coward! I was caught by surprise, but I had a trick up my sleeve, oh, yes! I jettisoned a tank! His first salvo missed by millimeters! My ship was intact, but I was in a desperate plight. I was down to the last dregs of oxygen, caught in a dogfight with a Hezo ace!”

Corrupt yawned theatrically. Beneath the muck, I checked him with the blade of my shovel, making satisfying contact with his shinbone.

“Sorry!” I faux-pologized.

Corrupt hissed at me, and I tightened my grip on the shovel. For a few seconds, I thought the two of us might go at it. But any fight here would end with both of us coated in rancid oil. I was willing, Corrupt wasn’t. Pirate continued on, oblivious.

“For what felt like hours, we darted through the trails of ice and fog, seeking one another. Pass after pass, guns blazing, like knights tilting through the mist. At last, my head pounded, there was a clawing in my chest, and I knew it would be my final chance. I took that last turn at full throttle. My vision went gray, and I thought I’d died from acceleration alone.”

“When my sight returned, there was Redbeak, dead in my sights! He was executing the same maneuver, but he was a split-second less daring than I. It was the death of him! The bloody-nosed hunter fell into the gravity well in a thousand pieces, and I was triumphant!”

Pirate raised a fist, his eyes blazing. I’d stopped bailing muck to listen to him.

“My victory was nearly pyrrhic. I barely had the strength to activate the reclaimer. Then there was a terrible hour where I lay motionless at the controls, trying to conserve every molecule of oxygen. I am certain I was less than ten breaths away from suffocating when the reactor caught up with me. Bless the man who invented triple-alpha conversion!”

“Her name was Antoinette Bakers-Lin,” Murderess sniped. From the tilt of her eyebrows, there was a fierce scowl beneath her mask.

“No, it was a man. Fred Hoyle,” Liar argued, never missing a chance to antagonize Murderess. But they were both wrong, and they were in my territory now: ships. I saw a rare chance to pile on both of them at once, and I leapt on it.

“Hoyle discovered the process, the 7.656 MeV carbon-12 resonance. He used to run around claiming it meant there had to be a superintelligence responsible. You know how that turned out. Bakers-Lin created the first real proof of concept for a converter, but her version was inefficient, and no one adopted it. Back then, we were building generation ships and mass wasn’t as much of an issue. It was only when the UNESECA came out with nimbus-folding reactors someone remembered her idea and refined it. Triple-alpha conversion was a big factor in the spread of the UNESECA empire. They could field much smaller ships than their rivals. We don’t know who invented the modern design, but it has little in common with the Bakers-Lin prototype.”

I rattled off my little history lesson without pausing to consider the wisdom of doing so. I was just annoyed at Murderess and Liar for interrupting Pirate’s story. Now, the others stared at me, and I realized I’d slipped up.

“How do you know all that, kid?” Murderess asked, eyes narrowed.

I knew this conversation would make its way into a drill’s ear. I needed to attempt an evasive maneuver of my own.

“That’s basic history, ma’am. You should have learned it in primary school, but you never pay attention. That’s why your flight scores are like this,” I motioned to the knee-deep filth we waded in.

Her face grew molten. I had her. In reality, I had never gone to school at all. Everything I knew, I had learned sifting through the illegal nets on Keilu.

Murderess fumed at me for hours, and I pointedly ignored her. The others kept growling at her to shut up. If the drills showed up, we would all suffer. They were all mad at me, too, for setting her off.

I didn’t care. My gambit worked. The jibe made Murderess so angry, she forgot all about what I’d said before.

It was a miserable morning. A harpy bitching in my ears, the whole squadron mad at me, and a seemingly endless supply of vile swill underfoot. I kept shoveling, daydreaming about dogfighting in the twin tails of Gliese-Songhua.

If only I could be Pirate for a day, to finally separate truth from fiction! But it was more than that. I wished I had his confidence, his seeming invulnerability. I wanted all the things about him that were so much more than me.

I thought about it with the same lurid hunger as when I imagined taking a shower in Murderess’ body. Ever since I was a boy, that’d been my favorite mind-game, imagining myself as others to pass the time. Anyone else would be an improvement.