I paid a terrible price to hear the Legend of Arcturus. I was alone in the barracks that night. Corrupt was comatose in the infirmary, the other inmates were stewing in the waste reclamation tanks. Since the day the others arrived, I’d dreamed of regaining my solitude. Now that it had been forced on me, I hated it.

You’re the one.

I woke up rigid from a dream of mulang Chinci looming over my bunk, wearing only the top half of her uniform. She flashed a fanged grin and commanded me to satisfy her. For days afterward, I struggled to keep that image from rising up at the worst possible moments.

Tsuros’ story had captured my imagination. I couldn’t stop daydreaming about Steel Wave carving its way through the stars. If only I could have flown with them! I fantasized my scrubber brush was a T-GZK burst, scouring collaborator scum off Ursurus instead of mildew off the shower drain.

Just as I finished cleaning the entire barracks myself, the others arrived. They were all filthy and furious, the smell lingered for days. No one would look at me. They hated me now. I wasn’t the one who made them spend all night in the sewage tank.

It didn’t matter. Everything was part of Tsuros’ master plan. In a way, I found that reassuring. He wouldn’t put in all this effort if he didn’t think we could win somehow. I tried to believe again.

Before, I had been careful not to do too well at flight training. The nail that stands out gets hammered down. Once I stopped caring, I smoked them all. I was completing runs twice as fast as Pirate. The others weren’t even close.

It left me with plenty of time to think. I would drift in space, grinding my toes against the footwell as I watched the Murderess and Glutton flounder through the buoy rings. I liked to imagine I was at the helm of Despicable, warming up my cannons to put these mutinous dogs out of their misery.

I’m sure they felt the same way about me. The harder I worked, the worse they looked. If we had another purge, I might be the death of them.

Conversations stopped when I drew near. The others were planning something, their eyes were always on me. Finally, the tension got to me. I spent a whole night awake, clutching the lock-knocker under my thin blanket. But none of them had the stones to strangle me.

Another disappointment.

Instead, they started ignoring our labor rotations, sticking me with the worst jobs. I kept my mouth shut and my head down. Any display of weakness would make it worse. The crooked rotation was bound to bite them in the ass.

It didn’t take long, just a few days. During morning assignment, Murderess marched up to me with the Bayonetta de Basura shouldered like a rifle. This was a two-meter hooked steel pole we used to clean the compactor gears of the refuse chutes. I suppressed the urge to groan.

RC duty was a filthy, dangerous job. The automatic mechanism that used to purge the refuge chutes had been deemed a security risk and disabled. So now, anytime a chute went down, a pair of us had to get in there with the Bayonetta while the gears ran. One slip meant getting chewed up and spat into space.

“You’re on chutes today, Tsuros’ Pet,” Murderess said.

“With who?” I asked. It was a two-man job.

“You’re on chutes today,” Murderess repeated with a grin.

I took the pole from her, wondering how long that smile would last after I impaled her. I looked at the other inmates, wondering if any would speak up for me. This was beyond unfair, it was stupid. It had to be her idea. Pirate’s lower lip quivered, but he remained mute.

So be it. I shouldered the garbage lance and headed for the chutes. When I got the hatch open, I stared into the crusty teeth of the gear-maw and despaired. Even with two people, this was the absolute worst duty. I wasn’t strong enough. I could barely get the chute open on my own.

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I felt the urge to slump against the wall and sob, but if a drill caught me, they would really give me something to cry about. I took a series of deep breaths to try and calm down and regretted it immediately. The chute was ripe.

If there was one consolation, it was knowing Murderess had fucked herself. I could twiddle my thumbs all day and roll on her when the drills came to ask why the chutes weren’t working. There was a one hundred percent certainty I’d take a beating and a twenty-five percent chance the drill would feed me into the chute immediately afterward. But whatever happened, Murderess would share my fate.

It was a suboptimal play. I could snitch directly to Tsuros, but then I really would be Tsuros’ Pet. I could never win the other inmates back if I went that route. I would become a permanent pariah.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I suspected most of the other inmates didn’t actually hate me. They hated themselves for fucking up, and I was a convenient proxy. If I snitched, that would change. As I considered it, I realized Tsuros wouldn’t even help me. Weakness disgusted him. He’d probably end me himself. I didn’t want to go out that way.

There was nothing left to do but figure out a way to clean the chute on my own. I tried to visualize how all the gears and armatures inside worked, how they would react when I cleared the jam. When I’d done this with a partner, one hooked the jam, the other helped yank them back. I needed to figure out how I could do that alone without getting sucked into the gears.

It took a whole morning of fiddling, propping up the hatch with a mop, and wedging the sealing ring with the lock-knocker. Then I had to crawl halfway into the chute, tethering myself with an extension cord shibari’d into a makeshift harness. When I tried breaking up the jam, the gears freed up suddenly and almost ripped the garbage lance out of my hands. It took all my strength to hang on, and I nearly dislocated my shoulders.

When I climbed out of the chute, I had to hug my knees and weep for real. If I’d lost my grip and let the Bayonetta get ripped into space, I might as well have hopped in after it. Losing a tool meant getting skulled.

One by one, I worked the other compactor heads free. I took my time with the other chutes, slowly chipping at the jams until every muscle fiber in my body screamed. It was better to be sore than spat into space.

At the end of the day, I dragged myself to the showers, scuffed to hell and covered in a second skin of grease and gunk. The squadron was already there, sporting a fresh crop of bruises. There was a purple-green starburst hematoma on Murderess’ right tit that caught my eye. That had to be Tsuros’ handiwork. I had to grin. I knew this would happen.

“What the fuck are you smiling about?” Murderess hissed.

“Hop on and find out,” I said, grabbing my crotch.

For a second, it looked like she might try and tear my eyes out, but Pirate guffawed so loud it startled us both. His laugh was contagious, soon the whole flight was laughing at Murderess. The moment passed. I was too filthy to fight anyway.

Corrupt returned from medical that night, a little glassy-eyed but as annoying as ever. The next morning Murderess’ reign was over. Corrupt put us back on the normal rotation and no one argued. They needed me.

After flight training, the squadron was ordered to clean the entire ship bay. While the others swept and mopped, Pirate and I climbed into the gantry to clean up a winch battery that had exploded. We were supposed to swap it for a spare, but there were none left in the supply room. The drill who’d let us in only shrugged when I asked where we could find another. Most of the shelves were bare.

Thirty meters in the air, Pirate and I wore rags over our mouths. We cleaned the corrosive residue with plastic scrapers.

“What happened to you yesterday?” I asked, my voice low. We would pull our heads back, suck in a deep breath, then scrape for a bit before coming up for air. I got the story out of Pirate one huff and puff at a time.

“We were on our way here to sweep the bay. Rehnquist and Nordall ambushed us in the corridor and press-ganged us into cleaning the projector room. Rehnquist had a black eye. Even the drills aren’t safe from Tsuros now.”

I knew at once what had happened.

“I bet you missed the rust on the ceiling bolts,” I guessed. Pirate’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“Shit! That was Glutton’s fuck-up. What a beating. Wish you’d been there. To catch the error, I mean. Not to share the beat.”

Pirate took a deep breath and went back in, chipping at a clump of gel that had partially crystalized. Sparks flew off it. I could smell the ozone through my mask. Pirate pulled away, and I took a deep breath to take my turn.

“It was that OB’s stupid idea to put you on chutes. I argued against it, but no one would listen. They all think I’m a fool.” Pirate sighed.

I nodded as I worked the scraper.

“I bet she’s next,” I huffed. Now that her star had fallen, I was sure Murderess would do something crazy and get herself locked.

Pirate paused, then shook his head.

“I think it’s Glutton.”

“You wanna bet a meal on that?” I ventured. Glutton’s times were trash, but Murderess was more volatile than the gunk we scraped.

“Easy money,” Pirate said. Under his mask was a grin.