Warchild Read online

  “It’s true,” he said. “Merchants are opportunists. Some merchants ferry information and supplies for the military, because it’s war. The war gives merchants the opportunity to work for the military, against the strits and their symp allies. The war gives me the opportunity to get what I want when merchants are running around for the military, trying to avoid strits. We’re all out here trying to do our best in a bad situation. Do you understand?”

  He didn’t wait for you to answer this time.

  “Some merchants don’t want to get too involved in the war, so they look down on those merchant ships that do. They say those merchant ships that work for the military are wrong. Do you think they’re wrong?”

  Your head felt hot. What did he want you to say?

  “Do you think they’re wrong, Jos, to work for the military?”

  The bag of crackers crumpled in your fist. “No.”

  He smiled again. You didn’t let go of the bag. He said, “That’s right. Some people might say those merchants are wrong, but then other people say those merchants have the right. They’re opportunists and they have the right to work for the military.”

  He paused but you didn’t say anything. You weren’t getting it and if he knew so he might hurt you.

  “So this ship, here”—he patted the bunk—“my ship Genghis Khan is also an opportunist ship. And some people might say we’re wrong for taking the things that we do, and doing what we want, but I say we have the right to it. While EarthHub is running around waging war against aliens, we’re just taking the opportunity that’s in our way—to make a living. Just a living. Now could that be wrong, Jos?”

  All the words swirled in your head. He kept rubbing the back of your hair and down your neck, but it didn’t make you relax like when Daddy or Mama did it.

  He waited for an answer. So you said, “No,” just like before.

  “No what, Jos?”

  “No, it’s not wrong,” you said quietly.

  “That’s right. It’s not wrong. Nothing we do here is wrong. Look at me.”

  You missed Daddy and Mama. You missed them so much your eyes hurt as bad as your heart.

  But you looked at Falcone.

  “You are so smart,” he said, staring at your face, not in your eyes. He looked at your mouth for some reason, and touched it lightly. “Smart kid,” he said.

  The silence was the loudest sound you’d ever heard. It buzzed above your heartbeat.

  The silence was louder even than voices.

  He leaned over to the side-table drawer and took out a pack of cards. They looked well used. “Do you know how to play?”

  Your drink had spilled and the bag had fallen on the deck, but he didn’t seem to care. You moved the wet piece of blanket. “I know asteroids and comets.”

  “Shit. Not kids’ games. Poker?”

  “No.”

  “Watch.”

  He showed you new games. He said these were important When your mind wandered he hit you, so you concentrated. He said you had to learn so he could take you on stations and win people over, that if you won people over he’d do even nicer things for you, more than giving you clothes, food, and a place to sleep. He said to control your face and that was how you won. He rubbed your hair and smiled when you showed you understood, but it wasn’t the same kind of smile Daddy gave you when you did something well.

  Falcone never said what people he meant—it was just my people, or some people, or the people you will meet. You didn’t ask, but you knew he wasn’t talking about people who could’ve been friends of Mukudori. This wasn’t Mukudori.

  You stared at the worn cards and felt him sitting so near, and it was nothing like Mukudori.

  He played the games with you until you couldn’t keep your eyes open. Then he commed someone to come get you and take you to your room.

  “You learn quick,” he said in parting. “See you next shift, Jos.”

  You looked at him until the hatch shut. You thought you were going back to the dark room, but the guard forced you next door to a small quarters, smaller than Falcone’s, but clean and designed the same. He left and the lock outside beeped. It was still a jail but now you had light.

  You crawled under the blankets and curled up. At least these didn’t smell like him.

  * * *

  VIII.

  A woman guard pulled you out of bed, threw you in the shower, and made you wash. Then she put you in the same too-big clothes you’d worn the previous shift, took you back to Falcone, and left you with him. He was setting up a small-screen vid. He sat you on the bed facing the vid and put in a cube.

  “This is it. No mystery.”

  A picture ran. It was of people doing things to each other. You couldn’t blink. You weren’t sure what you were looking at or what it meant. But you knew it wasn’t something people normally looked at except with a lot of whispering and giggling, like Evan did when both of you and his friends watched stolen vids and your parents were away in the lounge. “You’re too young,” he’d say.

  But those vids hadn’t been quite like this one. This one was almost funny, all the noises and faces. Almost.

  You stared and shifted. You didn’t really want to look at it but Falcone was looking at you as you looked at the vid and more than anything you didn’t want to meet those eyes. You sat on your hands on the bed and watched for all the minutes it ran, showing different people doing different things to each other. It wasn’t just between daddies and mamas. Afterward you felt like you needed another shower.

  Falcone said, “You’ll get over it.”

  He put the cube away in his drawer and took your face in his hand. His thumb moved over your cheek but you couldn’t hit him. He’d just hit you back. Or do worse. You had the feeling there was worse.

  “Did you understand what you just saw?”

  “… No.” No matter how hard you tried to forget, those images burned behind your eyes.

  “When you’re older you will. People will want you like that because you’re nice to look at. But you’ll know it’s just a way you can get to them. You’ll be able to get things from them if that’s all they want. Stupid rich people will fall over themselves for your face. Your mama always called you her handsome boy, didn’t she?”

  “No.” My starling. You didn’t want to remember because you might cry.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. You’re my handsome boy now.”

  You didn’t want him to touch you. You didn’t want to know about any people. You didn’t want to feel like no matter how hard you scrubbed in the shower, you wouldn’t get rid of his soap smell. It filled your head, even when you weren’t near him.

  “Here. Read something. You can read, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed you a smaller slate, a child’s slate. It was like the primer you’d had in your room long ago, the one with lots of stories and animation in it.

  “You know how to use one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Someone will bring breakfast. Be good now, Jos, and maybe you’ll get a reward.”

  You didn’t look up. He messed up your hair and left. You wanted to throw the slate across the room.

  Instead you poked the button to activate it.

  * * *

  IX.

  “Manners, Jos. They do love good manners.”

  Your fingers hurt from holding the knife and fork just so. You sat on the other side of his desk, he across from you as if you were at a table in a restaurant. He’d laid out place settings and even a napkin that he said went on your lap. He gave you “good” food to eat: little bits of steak, shell things, and fish. All but the steak tasted funny and felt worse in your mouth. He said the steak was real meat. It wasn’t bad but it didn’t sit as well as the burgers you were used to.

  You knew food like this cost money, because it was always a treat when you ate it on station with your parents. But you didn’t want to eat like this because the creds it took to buy it all could have been Evan’s lif
e.

  Falcone said to forget Mukudori.

  He talked more about them. His people. His people that you were going to impress with how nice you looked and how well mannered you were, and how that was going to make his business dealings easier and that was going to make him happy and he’d give you anything you wanted.

  You wanted to go home, but he didn’t mean that.

  After eating he made you brush your teeth because, he said, you had a pretty smile and he wouldn’t have it rot. You didn’t see why he was so careful about your teeth but let his ship look so bad, but then one shift in a lunch session he said how his crew wasn’t supposed to be comfortable, that comfort brought laziness and inattention. And all the scars in the ship reminded them of that fact.

  You didn’t see anybody on Genghis Khan other than Falcone and the people he called to escort you to your quarters when shift was over. His crew always looked at you like they either wished they were in Falcone’s shoes or they wished they could dump you off and forget about you. They took you to quarters, took you to Falcone, back and forth for many, many shifts. You’d learned the beeping that came from the walls was the ship’s way of signaling shift change. At your goldshift you went to Falcone’s quarters and stayed there learning what he wanted: reading, reciting, eating, dressing, math, and science—until he sent you to sleep or made you sleep in his bunk. He assigned physical exercises for you to do in quarters and made your guard watch until you’d finished them.

  He spent a lot of time on you. It seemed you pleased him, because he never talked about selling you.

  Sometimes he hit you to get a point across, or if your mind wandered, or if something had happened on the ship or at a port they’d docked in that bothered him. You never knew what ports you hit, or how far you’d traveled since Mukudori. You never heard or read the Send so you didn’t know what really had happened to Daddy and Mama. Maybe they weren’t dead. You dreamed that they weren’t, but you knew not to ask.

  Once after a port call he sat you down for breakfast in his quarters, as usual, and talked the whole time. But he wasn’t talking to you. He gestured with his knife as if he wanted to slice somebody up.

  “EarthHub,” he said, “is weak.”

  You sat still.

  “They’re going to lose this war and the damn Joint Chiefs are going to wonder why, when all along they were told, by me, that the only way to win is to get rid of the strits entirely. But blowhards like Ashrafi prefer to take a humane approach to everything. Humane. When we’re dealing with fucking aliens. You know how to win a war, Jos?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He was angry about something that had nothing to do with you, for a change.

  “You know how to win anything? To get what you want? You go right for it without hesitation, without remorse, without quarter. Never regret and never second-guess. These glaze-eyed new captains parade around the Hub with a shit-load of artillery coming out of their asses, and still the Warboy’s fleet is blowing Hub stations and killing Hub citizens. Bloody Hub deserves to lose. They waste time patrolling us when they should use everything against the strits and the symps. That’s how you win.”

  You remembered that Falcone wasn’t just a pirate. He was a captain too. He’d mentioned once in passing that he used to be a Hub captain, but that could’ve meant anything—in the military or a merchant group or even a passenger line, though you thought he seemed most like a soldier. Sometimes he talked about the Warboy, the human sympathizer captain of the alien fleet, as if he admired him. You thought maybe Falcone was a symp too, but then sometimes he talked about mister-this and senator-that in the Hub that he knew, that he was going to show you off to, and he’d swear at the strits and symps like he wanted to beat them all on his own.

  “That’s how you win,” he said again, but only to himself.

  You didn’t move. He looked at you anyway, seeing you now, and said, “Winners get the prize.”

  Falcone had moods. When he was in a good mood he smiled a lot and brought you presents. When he was in a bad mood all the crew seemed to hold their breaths and the ship was a whole lot quieter, and he yelled at you more. When the guard took you to his quarters in that routine you were used to, you could tell if Falcone was going to be nice or not in the first glance.

  “What’re you good for?” was a frequent question when things didn’t seem to be going right for Falcone, when either the Hub fleet or the strits were harassing him somehow. Sometimes he shoved you or flicked his fingers on your chest because he knew it bothered you, or if he was in a nasty mood he put his hand in your hair and caressed it because he knew that bothered you the most. It made the blood swim in your ears and all under your skin so you felt it. You hated it when he touched you. You hated it so much you thought about blood and Falcone, Falcone covered in blood, the ship blowing up, and all kinds of things you couldn’t make happen because you were still a kid—even though you dressed grown-up, and learned to talk well and eat neatly, and follow orders like one of the crew.

  Falcone’s pet. That was what the guards called you. They made animal noises and looked at you sometimes… sometimes one or two of the guards looked at you like they wanted to ask you questions. Or do more than ask.

  When that happened you never slept. Because they had the code to get into your room.

  Falcone’s pet. What’re you good for?

  “I know what you’re good for,” the guard sometimes said, and stuck out his tongue in a way that wasn’t telling you to get lost.

  It seemed you grew but you couldn’t be sure since Falcone gave you new clothes when you did something well, and these clothes weren’t two sizes too big.

  He’d taken away your tag a long time ago.

  One shift he came and got you himself, waited while you showered and handed you the clothes he wanted you to wear: a blue sweater and smooth black pants. He liked you in blue because your hair was dark and it also matched your eyes, he said.

  “Congratulations. You lived to be nine.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He liked to be called “sir.”

  “Since you’ve excelled so admirably you get a gift. We’re going on station. Put your boots on.”

  You sat on the bed to do so. Going on station where pollies were—excitement made your stomach flip, until you wondered if you were going to finally meet one of his business-people. You really hoped not. Not if they were like the guards. Or like Falcone.

  When you stood he came up close to you and put his hands on your shoulders. You didn’t flinch much anymore when he did that. He didn’t like it when you flinched.

  “I’m proud of. you, Jos. You’ve turned out to be a good investment. So far.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “If you do anything to jeopardize me, I’ll shoot you— right on the dock if necessary. Copy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He smiled into your eyes and touched your cheek. Then he took your hand. “Let’s go.”

  It was the first time in a year that you saw more of the ship than the one corridor your quarters were in. He took you down the lev and through more corridors that looked the same as the one you saw every shift: stark and battered, with low ceilings that made the lights seem up close and more dirty. Here his crew walked around, some of them bare-armed. They weren’t in any uniforms. They talked loudly, laughed, and stared at you. Many called out “sir” to Falcone as you passed. They all made way for him as you neared the airlock.

  A station. Pollies were on station. Your parents had said if ever you were lost and couldn’t find Mukudori or crew from friendly ships, you had to go to the station pollies.

  Guns weren’t allowed on station but it wasn’t really enforced—EarthHub was at war, after all. You knew Falcone had a gun somewhere or else he would not have made the threat. He crushed your hand in his as he strode down the lock ramp toward the customs officer. The woman there looked you over and took the small cards Falcone handed to her. You knew they were passports and merchant licenses and the in
formation encoded was a lie. You stared at the woman, hoping she would look at you. She did, but all she seemed to see was a ship brat. You wanted to shout: It’s a pirate ship, can’t you see that? Why can’t you see that? But the grip on your hand numbed you all the way to your tongue.

  She scanned the passports, her pen beeped, and she waved you on.

  Falcone led you around the high, wide dockring to the main doors. You read on the walls, between ship locks: Chaos Station.

  You almost stopped walking. You kept staring even when you had to turn your neck. From the starmaps he’d made you memorize you knew that Chaos was in the Dragons— where stations were few and far between, but military space-carriers were not. Deep space. You knew from school on Mukudori that Hubcentral was closest to Earth. Then came the worlds and stations of the Spokes, then the Rim, which had been Mukudori’s main trading sector. The Dragons saw most of the war with the strits, because the strit homeworld was in deep space. Mukudori had never been in the Dragons. Most of it was unchartered.

  Falcone had to be crazy. A pirate on a station where spacecarriers docked? You looked up at the ship listings as you neared the doors that led to the inner station. Lit on the boards were ship names like Yeti and Shiva—merchants you didn’t recognize. But there were other names that gave hope, the ones with the endings of EHV and a registry number— EarthHub Vessel. Spacecarriers.

  Next to pollies they were the best things if you needed help on station. They had soljets who could protect you, who were sworn to protect EarthHub and its citizens. You knew soljets by the black uniforms they wore and the patches on their arms that bragged their homeships. Or you saw the tattoos on their wrists. That was proof when even uniforms could be faked, because nobody did the tattoos like their own shipboard artists who coded the designs somehow.

  Your parents had told you this long ago. You looked at those military names with hope. Archangel. Macedon. Archangel was scheduled to undock in five minutes. The station comm blared it. Falcone took you off the dock and onto the concourse. You glanced up and saw him smiling, the face of someone doing a dare and having fun with it. But his hand gripped even tighter as you moved into the stream of people.