“What’s with that dreadful hat?”
“Hey, Ma.”
She leaned in, pinched my chin between two wet, floury fingers, and puckered up. I obliged her, then nodded out of her grasp. My mother, as beautiful and terrifying a woman as ever sailed the stream.
“You must be hungry,” she said, returning to her work. “You missed dinner last night, and you didn’t come home for breakfast or lunch today. Or dinner, either, come to think of it. This town isn’t that big, Mull.”
The guilt-trips never stopped. When am I gonna get away from these people? “You’ll notice by the hole in my hand that I kinda got into some trouble,” I pointed out.
She glanced over her shoulder, frowned, clucked her tongue. “What’d you bring in?”
I slumped my shoulders. “Not a blasted thing.”
“You should be with the Doc, not down here,” she said, hiding her disappointment with nagging.
“Dad mutinied again. Took command of the ship and told me to hide below until we shove off.”
Ma huffed. “I’ll call Doctor Ditmarus. Your father, I swear… we’re supposed to be retired. Doesn’t that man know how to take a moment’s rest?”
I resisted the urge to point out what a hypocritical statement that was, coming from my mile-a-minute mom. Instead I said, “Sometimes I think Dad would like it if I got pinched. For good.”
A moment’s hesitation. “Don’t be silly,” Mom said, shoving a long whisk handle into her wrist port and whipping the bowl of batter like it deserved the punishment. “He loves you.”
“Don’t feed me that crap,” I said. “You’re a better cook than that.”
She called Doctor Ditmarus on the intercom and set the bowl aside. “Someone’s a little grumpy tonight,” she said. “Go lie down and wait for him.”
The whisk shed drops of batter as she waved me away.
I crossed into the crew cabin and set my ugly new hat down on a barrel. Then I pulled off my lone remaining boot and flung myself onto a spare bunk. My mind drifted to the medallion. My medallion. Life would be different if I ever got my hands on it.
I felt the turbines rumble down my spine. My stomach heaved as the boat pitched off and caught the stream. Building a good boat isn’t just a matter of throwing a few scraps of driftmetal together. It has to be balanced. It has to have the right ingots in the right places, size and mass and purity, all in equal proportions. My Ostelle, she was a good boat. Just because Dad had built most of her for me didn’t make her any less mine. I’d financed the endeavor, after all.
Speak of the devil, Dad’s voice came over the intercom. “They’re stopping us. The Civs want to search the boat. Mull, if you’re somewhere where you can hear me, make yourself scarce.”
The marshals caught us? I thought. Not a chance. Ostelle can run and gun against anything the Civs could ever throw at her. Why wouldn’t Dad just haul it out of here and leave them in the dust? Unless… he’s making it easy for them to get to me.
I was the only one in the crew cabin. There was something eerie about being alone. Maybe it was that I felt alone. Abandoned. But he just told me to hide. Doesn’t that mean he wants to keep me safe?
Metal planks on the deck above shrieked under the weight of footsteps. I shouldered a set of webgear and darted into the galley, where Ma was laboring away at dinner as if there weren’t half a dozen Civvy marshals coming aboard to take her only son into custody. When she turned to look at me, there was something strange in her eyes. Sorrow? No, that wasn’t it.
“Better get out of sight,” she said. “Where do you think you’ll hide?”
Looking at my mother then, I realized it wasn’t sorrow I saw in her eyes. It was betrayal. I went numb. I backed away. How could you? I almost said. How much did they have to pay you to turn me in? I could hear the footsteps spreading fore and aft, crossing decks and clunking down stairs.
The flecker was in my hand before I reached the furnace room. Two marshals were questioning Merton and Dorth as the crewmen leaned on their shovels, enjoying the break. I burst into the room and fired an erratic barrage, adrenaline pounding in my chest. All four men held up their hands to shield themselves. The flecker particles melted over them, searing away synthetic flesh like a hair dryer over butter.
With their skin out of the way, I could see that both marshals were heavily augmented, but that was no surprise. I kept shooting until I saw a clear path, then bolted past them. I heard them stumbling after me like a gaggle of anodized skeletons, screaming. I flew up the stairs and across the deck, but stopped short at the railing.
There were four Civvy sloops and a cruiser docked to my Ostelle. More than a score of them had come aboard, decked out in the red-and-tans of the Civil Regency Corps. I couldn’t help but feel honored by the show of force.
“Drop it and come forward, nice and easy,” said their commanding officer, a dark-haired mustachioed man I knew as Captain Ludolf Kupfer, the biggest law-lover of them all.
I didn’t budge. “Ah, Kupfer. Isn’t this an unexpected surprise? How nice of you to drop in and say hello.”
Don’t judge me. Sometimes you have to match a law-lover’s smugness with a little smugness of your own. Well… you don’t have to. But it’s more fun that way.
Kupfer gave me a pained grimace, as if my greeting had been cliché enough to hurt him physically. “We’ve collected evidence that leads us to believe you’re responsible for the deaths of as many as eleven missing persons, including three security personnel employed by a Mr. Alastair Gilfoyle as part of his Churn-mining operation. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”
Thirteen, I would’ve said. I’m responsible for the deaths of thirteen missing persons. I wanted to thank Kupfer for underestimating my murder tally, but I couldn’t have opened my mouth without correcting him. Plus, I knew better than to put myself at odds with the two dozen rifles his marshals were pointing in my direction.
In my defense, the Churn was what did the killing, I could’ve said, but didn’t. I thought of the dark-skinned man, his funny accent and the equally funny look of terror he’d had on his face while he was falling. And Gilfoyle, that balding, cane-wielding, gold-ring-wearing rotten apple of a mining tycoon who still had my medallion. His medallion. My… medallion.
I looked around at my crew, standing off at the fringes of the conflict, cowering behind the marshals like children behind their mothers’ skirts. I was pretty sure I knew then what Dad’s little meeting had been about; why everyone had gone silent when I’d walked into the captain’s quarters. They’d decided it was time to vote me off the boat. My crew was no longer mine.
‘You’re rubbing mud on your cheeks instead of growing a beard,’ my dear old Dad always used to say. It was his way of pointing out when I was trying to shortcut things instead of taking the time to do them right. I felt like I could’ve said that to him right about then. If he wanted me gone, why hadn’t he just told me so instead of letting these law-lovers do his dirty work for him?
“I’m sorry, son.” Speak of the devil again, Dad emerged from the captain’s quarters and closed the doors behind him. Wind played at the wisps of graying brown hair that had come loose from his tieback. His face was stern and cold as always, but I could see his age lines more in that moment than I ever had before.
“You did betray me,” I said. “How much did it cost them to earn a law-loving keister like yours?”
“No, I didn’t betray you, son. But I am letting this happen. The boys and I have decided we’re going straight, and I knew you wouldn’t agree with it.”
My heart sank into my stomach and boiled there. I felt my eyes go wide and start to water. The wind was so strong I could feel the drips running sideways along my face like rain on a fast window. I wasn’t crying, but I was worried it looked that way. “You’re bloody right I wouldn’t agree,” I said, trying not to shout. The marshals and their guns were the only things keeping me from blowing a gasket. “You can’t make a decision like that without me, Dad. You can’t
take her away from me.”
I felt like a kid again, a spoiled child stamping his foot to get his way. I wasn’t just some kid though, and Ostelle wasn’t a toy. She was my life. From the moment she’d gone airworthy a few months back, I’d been dreaming of the hundreds of new capers and scams I was going to pull. I had things I wanted to get done, and curse Dad if he thought I was going to do them any way but mine.
“There’s good, honest money to be made in privateering,” Dad was saying. “We’ve acquired ourselves an official Regency sanction, and being sanctioned by the Regency has its perks.”
“I ain’t no bootlicker, Dad.”
Dad snorted and spat something onto the deck. “See, I knew you’d never go for it. Some time in lockup will do you good, son. When you get out, Ma and I will be right here waiting for you. If you’ve changed your ways by then, you’re welcome back aboard and you’ll always have a place on my crew. We just think this is the best thing for you right now. Tough love, as they say.”
By about the second sentence in, his words had started to blend together into a meaningless porridge of patronizing gibberish. I bit my lip, shaking my head. “Dad, you and Ma should’ve stayed home. You never had it in you to sit by while your son took the reins of a ship you built yourself. I always got the feeling you regretted giving her to me. Someday soon, you’ll regret taking her back.”
I