But his heart guides us more than his head these days.
The ship out the viewport is a giant cube five hundred meters at the edge. Most of her decks are exposed to vacuum by design, while superstructure lattice holds together thousands of cargo containers. Her tag IDs her as the Vindabona out of the trade hub Ceres. She sits adrift and dark—a very odd, very dangerous thing in the Gulf. Several wild asteroids the size of cities float between us, ice crystals on their surfaces winking in the dark. We used one to mask our approach. The Vindabona’s civilian instruments would never detect a military ship like ours in this briar patch, but it’s not the hauler that worries me. I scan the sensors for ghosts in the darkness.
“Well, she’s a deepspace mulebitch, all right,” Pytha murmurs in a monotone delivery that erodes punctuation and inflection. “Probably packing a hundred million credits of iron. Slag me but that’s a crew I’d like to be on.”
“Must you swear so early in the morning?” I ask.
“Shit, sorry, moon boy. Forgot to mind my fucking manners.” Pytha is in her late fifties, with distant, pale blue eyes and skin the color of a walnut. Like all Blues, she still harbors the neurodevelopmental sculpting that enhances human-to-computer interaction but impairs communication outside her sect. She doesn’t have the social niceties of the Palatine shuttle pilots.
My teacher grimaces. “Crew will make scratch,” he says. “Captain might get a share to keep him loyal, but that’s a hundred million credits of some trade lord’s coin floating out there.”
“A share, you say. What a novel idea for a captain to snag a share…” Pytha says.
“Pity you’re a pilot and not a captain.”
“Come now, Bellona. Between you and moon boy over here, you’ve got to have a dozen secret vaults. Why else do you think I signed up? Certainly wasn’t your chiseled chin, dominus.” She says the word sarcastically. “I’m sure you eagles have squirreled away some chit in hidden nests.” Pytha snorts a strange little laugh to herself and looks back to the datastream as letters and symbols trickle past. The untrained ear would hear the Martian drawl in her voice and be done with it. But I catch the spice of Thessalonica, that city of grapes and duels that sprawls white and hot by Mars’s Thermic Sea. Best known for the short tempers of its citizenry and the long list of deeds done by its most illustrious sons, the blackguard Brothers Rath.
That Thessalonican swagger is likely what got her expelled from the Midnight School and reduced to smuggling before her path crossed ours eight years ago. When Cassius learned she was Martian, he freed her from the brig of a mining city where she was imprisoned for a smuggling offense, and she’s worked for us ever since. I’ve certainly learned new words since she came aboard.
Bald and barefoot, Pytha leans back in the pilot’s chair, sipping coffee from the plastic dinosaur mug I won her in an arcade on Phobos years back. She’s in gray cotton pants and wears her old sweatshirt. Her limbs are thin as a grasshopper’s, the right bent under her, the left hanging off the side of the chair, which is shaped like half of a hard-boiled quail egg with the yolk scooped out. A second skin of stickers and decals from children’s video games festoons its gray metal backside. The ship may belong to Cassius, but Pytha’s left her mark.
“Sander, what do you think?” My teacher looks back at me.
I examine the ship out the viewport.
Cassius sighs. “Out loud.”
“She’s a VD Auroch-Z cosmosHauler. Fourth generation by my guess.”
“Don’t equivocate. We both know you’re not guessing.”
I wipe sleep from my eyes, annoyed. “She has 125 million cubic meters of hauling capacity. One main Gastron helium reactor. Built in the Venusian yards, circa 520 PCE. Crew of forty. One industrial docking bay. Two secondary tubes. Obviously she’s a smuggler.”
“Sounds like the human encyclopedia’s got a turd up his nose,” Pytha drawls. She pours a cup of coffee from her carafe and hands it back to me. I wish it were tea. “The last of the beans till we hit Lacrimosa. Sip wisely, peevish one.”
I slip into the seat behind hers and take a mouthful of the coffee, wincing at the heat. “Apologies. I neglected to eat supper.”
“I neglected to eat supper,” Pytha repeats, mocking my accent. Born on the Palantine Hill of Luna, I have lamentably inherited the most egregiously stereotypical highLingo accents. Apparently others find it hilarious. “Haven’t we servants to spoon-feed His Majesty supper?”
“Oh, shut your gory gob,” I say, modulating my voice to mimic the Thessalonican bravado. “Better?”
“Eerily so.”
“Skipping supper. No wonder you’re a little twig,” Cassius says, pinching my arm. “I daresay you don’t even weigh a hundred ten kilos, my goodman.”
“It’s usable weight,” I protest. “In any matter, I was reading.” He looks at me blankly. “You have your priorities. I have mine, muscly creature. So piss off.”
“When I was your age…”
“You despoiled half the women on Mars,” I say. “And probably thought it was their honor. Yes, I’m aware. Forgive me, but I find books a passion more illuminating than carnivals of flesh.”
He looks at me in amusement. “One day a woman is going to make a pretty meal of you.”
“Spoken like a man who barely escaped the lion’s jaws,” I reply.
Pytha goes still and stares at Cassius for a long, awkward moment as her arithmetical brain endeavors in vain to divine whether he is offended or not. I sip my coffee again and nod to the ship. “To the matter, no legitimate Mars or Luna corp would send that poor girl out to the Gulf without escort. Not with Ascomanni about. Those Julii-Barca Solar markings are false flags: wrong shade of red on that sun. Should be scarlet, but that there is vermilion. The Syndicate would know that. So, low-rate smugglers. Like Pytha said, probably hauling ore from some off-grid mine to avoid customs. And please, stop testing me, Cassius. At this point, you know that I know.”
Cassius grunts, still stinging from the lion rejoinder. It was petty of me to say, and I feel lesser for having said it. Ten years recycling each other’s air will make the best of men devils to one another. After all, that is why Blues were raised in sects.
“No bloody way that vermilion is an actual color,” Pytha says.
Of course Pytha is as much an exile from her kind as we are from our own. I can’t imagine why.
“Sounds more like the last name of a Silver,” she adds. “Heh heh.”
“Care to wager on that?” I ask gamely.
She ignores me. “Blackhell. You gotta be a special kind of stupid to wander into the Belt without legs to run or claws to fight. Nearest Republic gunship is ten million klicks away.” She finishes her coffee and bites into the ion blueberry tail of a Cosmos Comet caffeine gummy. She offers me the remaining white tail, which I decline. “Suppose the distress signal was an accident? Didn’t last long.”