Chapter 4 – Silver’s Culling

Hals took about an hour to get to Li-Cha’s place, an elegant little pod on the Green Crescent limb of the station. If she hadn’t been injured from her fall it would have been a lovely brisk walk through the most beautiful part of the station; but as it was, she hated every inch of distance she had to travel. This was where all the plants grew and the food was produced, and it was also the only place with actual walkable parks. It was where everybody wanted to live; and how Li-Cha managed to afford even a tiny place here was beyond guessing. Or at least, it wasn’t polite to guess.

Despite it being well into the station’s night cycle, the flow of ships into and out of the space around the various crescents and their long, protruding piers was still steady. While in theory Adumon Station could have any day/night cycle it wanted, like most it stuck to the standard 25 hour day the core planets used. In space, most ships used a similar split to help crew sleep and stay consistent with whatever port they’d be docking with next. But Flagless pirates weren’t known for keeping the usual hours.

Hals finally made it to Li-Cha’s street. She’d been hiding her ZSO-1 in her jacket as she walked, but the butt of it still stuck out enough to make people who saw give her a wide berth. This wasn’t the dangerous part of the station; this was where security guards were employed to keep rabble like her out. And she was lucky not to have run into any of them.

She pinged the bell to Li-Cha’s living pod. It was an upscale version of her own apartment, all curving edges and graceful slopes instead of cheap metal panels and durable but ugly building materials. Li-Cha wasn’t working the graveyard shift that night, which was why she opened the door by the third ring. She was still dressed in her serving outfit. She’d probably only gotten home an hour ago.

“Hals?” she asked. She took in the bloody clothes, obvious weapon, and exhaustion and pain in a single glance. “Come inside at once. You’ll scare the neighbors,” she said.

“Already have. I think I was getting tailed by a security drone or two.”

“Whose blood is that?” Li-Cha asked. She swept Hals through her tiny living room and into the bathroom, and started to undress her at once. Hals thought about protesting for modesty’s sake, but she was too damn tired; and the Maiden’s Lament uniform slid off easily enough.

“It’s a Flagless spacer’s. Fifth, the girl from the bar. Her crew came looking for her.”

“And so you shot them?”

“They tore up my apartment trying to find her. They’re kidnappers; she thinks she’s off on a wild adventure, but they’re ransoming her back to her papa. She’s a paycheck to them, and when she went missing, they came hunting.”

“Where is she now?” Li-Cha started her shower and stuck a hand in to test the temperature, taking it back out quickly and wincing. “Damn heater never works,” she said.

“Asendor’s keeping her for me,” Hals said. “I should have stayed there, but.”

“But you had to collect your things, I see,” Li-Cha said, tapping the bag with her toe. “Hope it’s full of stolen jewels, for your sake.”

“No,” Hals sighed. “It’s not. I have a little reyfinite I got a while back, but that’s supposed to be for when I really need it. Emergencies.”

“And you would call showing up to my home in the darkest hours of night, what, pray tell?”

Hals sighed again. “Yeah.”

She waited a moment to see if Li-Cha would leave her to her shower. When she didn’t, Hals started to strip her underthings off. Li-Cha watched her unapologetically.

“You’ve got a lot of bruises,” she said, as Hals stepped into the shower. “And a full set of deflector nodes. And… scars.”

“Like tattoos, but with better stories,” Hals said, trying to smile. The water wasn’t very warm, but compared to the temperatures outside, it felt great. She sighed and stepped in, enjoying the slowly warming water. Li-Cha sat against the floor, her hands twisted into a tight knot.

“Look, I know we keep things light, try not to pry into the past,” Li-Cha said. “But Hals, this is….”

The water heater must have decided to start working, because the water started to feel magnificent to Hals, and the room started to fill with steam. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d become, traipsing around the station in the snow. She looked down at herself, at the small trickle of red that was rinsing off of her skin and skating around the drain, at the fresh bruises on her side and knees. And at the scars that covered her body; the blaster burns on her right leg, and the strangely smooth skin covering her left. Grown by Asendor himself over her prosthetic. She prodded at the puffy puncture scar where she’d been stabbed in the stomach.

“Hals,” Li-Cha said, slightly insistently. “This isn’t something we can avoid.”

“Go ahead and ask,” Hals said, grabbing for the shampoo and working it into her hair vigorously.

“Okay; your nodes. You’ve got a full complement, unless I miss my guess, which means you might have been military. And you’ve got a ring shield that’s way nicer than the one you usually sport at work, I notice. So space corps? But that doesn’t feel right.”

Hals gestured for her to keep going.

“You couldn’t afford that kind of hardware; hells, you wouldn’t need it unless you did a job that was really, really dangerous,” Li-Cha said.

“Excellent deductions so far,” Hals said. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the tension leaving her muscles. She felt safe, and warm. It was nice, and a little strange given what had just happened to her.

“And you’re comfortable dealing death. That’s not unusual, here, but…. But the way you talked about it… I shot a mugger last year and had nightmares for months.”

“I remember that,” Hals said quietly.

“So if you weren’t a soldier, you must have been a pirate of some kind. Maybe a bounty hunter, but I don’t know why you’d quit that life if you were. Bounty hunters at least have a good reputation in the Core, don’t get arrested on sight. Pirates, on the other hand….”

“Right,” Hals said. For a long time, there was nothing but the sound of the shower. Hals eventually turned it off, and Li-Cha passed her a big, fluffy towel. She wrapped herself in it gratefully and stepped out. Li-Cha was staring at her, tapping a manicured finger against her lower lip.

“Why’d you stop?” Li-Cha asked.

“Stop?”

“Flying around with a crew. Pirating.”

Hals let a big sigh out. “They all died. I got scooped up in an escape pod by some of the Mad King’s privateers, and soon after I landed here.”

Li-Cha’s mouth opened in surprise, but she closed it without a word. Her purple eyes seemed to be drinking Hals in. Heat rose in her cheeks, and Hals turned to her reflection in the steamed over mirror. She wiped it clear and took a look at herself.

“I look like I did back then,” Hals said quietly. “Not just the wounds, the bruises. But, I look thin. Stretched. Like there’s not enough of me to fill up this body.”

Li-Cha hopped up and slid behind her to look, too.

“You look like you need a lie down,” she said. She put her hands on Hals’ shoulders and gave them a tentative rub. Hals closed her eyes and sighed. The tension her muscles had built up since finding Fifth finally started to release. She was acutely aware that Li-Cha’s body was pressing against her as she started to massage her shoulders.

“When you left work, I figured you were just saving another stray. Like that blind pirate who needed his eyes fixed, or when you got whats-her-name a job at Pennikin’s House, so she could stop selling her body mods to pay for rent. She was missing a bunch of fingers and her nose, right?”

“Her name was Thyst,” Hals said. Li-Cha continued to work on Hals, pulling her towel down so she could keep rubbing her back. Her fingers traced around the deflector nodes along Hals’s spine, which made her shiver. Heat was rising in her that had nothing to do with the steam in the room.

“Why’d you come to me, and not back to Asendor?”

“I worried they might follow me.”

“You killed them all, hon.”

“I let one go. A kid.”

Li-Cha nodded. “So you wouldn’t want them to come to Asendor’s place, but leading them here was okay?”

Hals shook her head. “No, I meant that, only– look, it’s that there’s guards here, and–”

Li-Cha gave Hals a little squeeze. “I’m teasing. But you did scare me.”

“I scared me too, tonight. The fighting, the death... I thought I put all that behind me,” Hals said. “Easy, Li-Cha. It was easy.”

“Our old lives aren’t as far away as we think,” Li-Cha murmured. Her voice was low, and her fingers found the tops of Hals’s hips. Li-Cha started to work her thumbs into Hals’ lower back, making small circles that felt heavenly. Hals let out a tiny groan and leaned against the sink to take the weight off her legs. Li-Cha got closer, her lips almost-not-quite touching Hals’s ear.

“I’m not sure about what else you see in that mirror, but you don’t seem stretched out to me, or too thin. Your body is…”

Hals flushed and made eye contact with Li-Cha in the mirror. The taller woman was staring at her, her purple eyes almost drawing Hals into them. She was acutely aware that the towel was no longer around her at all; she’d let it drop to the floor. And Li-Cha’s hands were still on her hips, making little circles, getting tighter and lower.

“Li-Cha,” Hals said in a low voice. “Should--”

The room shook violently, and someone screamed outside. Hals moved at the same time as Li-Cha, both of them reaching for the little bathroom door; Hals pausing briefly to scoop some clothes out of her emergency bag. She grabbed her ZSO-1 as well, just in case. Li-Cha ran to the living room and they heard another scream, this time a man, then several folks shouting. The distant bark of laser cannon fire echoed. A ship was shooting close enough to the atmosphere that they could hear it. That was bad news.

“What in the hells is that?” Li-Cha asked. Hals finished dressing and ran to join her in the living room. Had the Flagless managed to follow her? Maybe that young one had gotten back to his new commander, and they were here…

Hals stopped short, staring out Li-Cha’s primly decorated bay window at the sky above Adumon Station. There was a ship floating in the space between the four tips of the station’s docking crescents, and it was larger than any she’d ever seen. It looked like an asteroid had popped into existence in the space where ships typically flew, except it was a matte blue and white, and covered in dozens of docking bays, gun turrets, and various other protruding bits that looked very threatening. Deep sockets all along the ship’s face held the fading glow of a propulsion system, a Neverspace rift generator the size of which Hals did not even know could exist.

Whatever this ship was, it could only have been built in the Core. Which could only mean one thing: it was a ship from the Centurium, and it was here to wipe them out. As she watched, laser blasts from various Flagless pirate ships started to pepper the huge vessel. They were flinging pebbles at a giant. Their blasts twinkled against the giant ship’s shields without so much as a vacuum explosion or shield spark.. Hals felt her stomach heave. They were in deep shit.

“We gotta go, now,” Li-Cha said.

Hals’ mind started to spin. She needed to get to Asendor, grab him and Fifth, get onto a ship somehow before the soldiers on that craft took the station over completely, and…

She stopped.

“How’d they know where we are?” she asked.

“Who the hells cares?” Li-Cha asked. “Help me pack, we need to get out of here. I’ve got enough saved--we should be able to buy passage on a ship. If not, you can shoot our way on. But I’m sure as shit not--

“No, listen to me,” Hals said. “Adumon is on the move constantly so this kind of thing can’t happen. Somebody popping out of Neverspace in her blind spot, so the defenses are useless? The odds of that are… impossible.”

“Clearly not, Hals!” Li-Cha said, waving her hands wildly at the dozens of blasts that were now sparking against the Centurium ship. “As soon as that thing opens fire, we’re absolutely screwed, so–”

Hals heard her legible crackle to life, and at the same time, the viewing screen Li-Cha had in her living room did the same. Both of them displayed static and a loud hiss, which quickly resolved into a shouting man.

“-mn you, get this working now!”

A distant voice replied in the affirmative, and the picture got clearer. It was someone Hals recognized. Not a Centurium admiral, but one of the Flagged pirate lords: Ilum Redblink.

“You Flagless pisspots quit shooting at my ship, and quit panicking too!” Redblink barked. “I’m in command of this vessel, not some scummy Core pilot. How the hells else do you think I was able to land it here, right here? I thought some of you would be smart enough to figure it out.”

The person off screen spoke again, and Redblink turned his signature synthetic eyes right to the camera and leaned close. He grinned slowly, a menacing, inviting smile that promised mischief and mayhem both.

“Don’t you want to celebrate with me, and me crew? We’ve nabbed a planet crusher, right from the noses of the Centurium! So come greet us!”

He barked a laugh, and the picture faded out. Li-Cha and Hals were frozen, staring at the viewing screen. Li-Cha had grabbed a few data nodes that held pictures and videos of her older brother and started to stuff them into Hals’ bag, but now she stood slack-jawed. Hals knew how she felt.

“So we’re not all going to die,” she said.

“Probably not today,” Hals said.

“But how’d he capture a ship like that? How’d he manage it?”

“I suppose we’ll have to ask,” Hals said. “Bet the pirates are eager to get off the ship and tell the tale.”

They stood still for a moment, just looking at each other. And then they turned and ran toward the door. A ship the size of the one that Redblink had just arrived in was large enough to warrant the use of three of the four biggest docking piers the station had. Even as Hals and Li-Cha ran toward the nearest one, they could see it, and the other two, extending and anchoring with the huge spherical ship. Hals and Li-Cha weren’t the only ones headed for the piers. Anyone who’d been awake when the announcement was made, and most who were woken up by it, seemed to be filling the streets. Some were bleary eyed and wearing their pyjamas, while others looked like they’d just gotten off of work. A wave of people were moving toward the docking pier now, and Hals and Li-Cha got there just as the final pneumatic hiss completed syncing the artificial gravity of the extendable gangway. The doors on the massive ship snapped open, and at once, pirates spilled out.

They were uproarious, cheering and brandishing their weapons. Many were wearing treasures of gold reyfinite, traxium, and shimmering starglass, and their fists were full of O-marks and other coins. A few tossed handfuls of money at the crowd, and people started cheering, screaming questions, shouting congratulations. All at once, Redblink’s pirates were among them, and there was revelry on a scale Hals hadn’t seen in years. The tide of pirates swept away from the ship and onto the main concourse of Green Crescent, where an impromptu parade started. The bleary stragglers were surprised to encounter a tide of jubilant pirates, a few of whom had started to wave the flag of Redblink, a jawless skull and crossbones with a pair of glowing red eyes.

Hals maneuvered next to one of the pirates and grabbed him by the collar. He leaned into her and closed his eyes for a kiss, and she shoved him back.

“No you idiot, I want to know what happened? How’d he do it? How’d Redblink capture a planet-taker?”

“You’ll have t’give me a peck to find out!” the pirate said lecherously. Hals pushed him off and tried to find someone else who could tell her what happened.