The years hadn’t been good to Sin.
She’d been a round-cheeked seventeen when I’d seen her heading out the dormitory that last time, looking unbearably cool to my eleven-year-old self with one bag slung over her shoulder and the world at her feet. I’d always expected to see her in the news, but never had.
Finding her in a jail cell hit me right in my childhood.
Sin had graduated without debt, but it turned out that the galaxy was full of holes a crèche kid with no support network could fall into. I’d been lucky enough to get optioned by the Merchant’s Academy on Tana-Deva and I’d qualified for enough scholarships to keep my indenture period short.
Owing money to the Merchant’s Academy had meant that there had been adults around with a vested interest in my welfare, if only so I could repay my debt. I was an investment, not a burden. It had been an unlikely blessing and looking at her made me feel my luck all over again. It didn’t seem like anyone had cared about Sin’s best interests in a long time.
My informant hadn’t been exaggerating about her condition. She had likely shed some of her baby fat over the years, but not enough to account for the way I could almost see her skull through her face. Her once long brown hair was shaved down to a spacer’s crop. It made her dark eyes look huge and somehow damp.
Her fitness reports didn’t match the profile of an addict. In that regard she was still the same driven and hyper-focused workaholic I remembered from school. That left either malnutrition or an extended illness. I could fix one and help with the other. Hopefully, it wasn’t something that would impact her work. It probably wouldn’t. Drivers could work from a medpod if need be. If that’s what we needed to do then I could make it happen.
Amanda hadn’t recognized Mimir when she’d gone into Sin’s personnel record to do a little surgery and worryingly neither had I. Civilian starship captains kept a close society out of necessity. The regional planetary and station oversight entities didn’t always keep us apprised of regional hazards or pirate activity, so we had to make do for ourselves. If I didn’t know Mimir or her captain then that meant xe didn’t mix with legit spacelane traffic. Given the condition of xir former crew woman, I’d say there was a reason for that.
Sin stayed a quiet half-step behind me as we headed towards the docks. Her hands plucked nervously at the collar of her suit. I wondered what she was hiding under there. Given the company she’d evidently been keeping, I didn’t think it was anything innocuous. Scars from a shock collar? The injection site for a control chip? Doc would want to see whatever it was.
Actually Doc was going to want to see all of her, period. I’d lied about having medpods, but I’d buy one if I had to. There was a support pod in my former driver’s workshop, but that was just for comfort and Sin might actually need the advanced functions of a full medpod. In reality, I’d inherited a real medical suite from Cassandra’s previous captain when Cassandra had been decommissioned as a military officer’s transport and Doc had been happy to stay on with me. Sin would never have escaped xe if she’d been in medical custody.
It was no wonder she didn’t seem to recognize me. I hadn’t really expected her to; hoped she wouldn’t, rather. We’d been in different social universes at the crèche, except for that one notable time and I’d been too embarrassed by my given name as a kid to use it. Maybe it was for the best. I’d left my nickname and childhood insecurities behind me at the crèche and I wasn’t eager to get reacquainted with either.
I got so involved in my thoughts that it took me a moment to realize my new crewmate had stopped following me. A tingle of awareness tugged at the back of my neck so I paused, turned back, and found Sin standing a few meters behind with a distrusting look that made her look like a starving feral cat.
My memory imposed the confident teenager I’d known over her sunken features and it made my throat ache with something that was almost, but not quite grief. It had a little too much in common with rage for that. I struggled with myself a for a minute and backtracked to join her.
“Who are you?” She asked, low and rough. “What do you want with me?”
“I’m Captain Jack Grace of the IMV Cassandra.” I shrugged my professional skin back on. Only then did I realize how much of that pleasant, slightly cocky attitude had come from my memories of the woman in front of me. Would she notice? “Your hopeful prospective employer.”
Sin snorted and, hah, that hadn’t changed. I’d never met anyone else who could project her opinion quite like that. I’d have to talk fast or she’d be gone.
“I work for you already according to my jacket,” she replied, still worrying at the rim of her collar.
“There’s no obligation. You’ll note your contract is ‘at-will’ and expired yesterday. You can leave without penalty…” I spread my hands. “…or you could sign with me and get off the labor queue here. I hear a jail cell is several orders of magnitude above the indigents’ quarters on Fjord in terms of comfort. Cassandra runs light, but all my people have their own quarters. We’ve got water baths, dedicated bunks, a rec center, onboard aquaponics for real food between ports, and last quarter’s crew share was pretty nice. Of course, yours just got absorbed for that repatriation fine I paid on your behalf.”
She started to speak then frowned as she processed that. “Your crewshare last quarter was twenty deci credits?” she hissed, closing the distance between us with a few short strides. Hah. Money always works.
I was still smug about that payout, although we’d done better in past quarters. One of my academy buddies had turned me onto a great contract running vaccines out to the rimward colonies with a very tight deadline. The vaccines would have paid out plenty on their own, but we had extra space for freight so we’d filled the remainder of the hold with small designer electronics, blank microbots, data chips, and specialty fuel cells; all things the that couldn’t be fabbed on site and that the frontier worlds were starved for, living so far away from the big industrial core. Our first port of call nearly cleaned us out and we’d picked up some local cargoes to fill in the space between the last of our stops to cover our fuel costs. “Nineteen point eighty-five d-creds to be exact.”
Sin’s lips thinned and she backed away. “Sorry, Captain Grace. That sounds a little too good to be true. I’ll be exercising that option to walk away.”
Damnation. I thought fast.
I hadn’t sprung her from jail totally out of nostalgia and general good will. I needed her, not just someone with her qualifications.
Sin was what the headhunters billed as a crew harmonizer. She didn’t cause a lot of trouble on her own and often diffused other people’s melodrama just through her presence and a few wry comments. That was something I was in desperate need of, almost as much as I needed someone to ride herd on my new bots.
I loved my people like family—like one big, dysfunctional, and sometimes incestuous family. Integrating new staff bordered on impossible. I thought I’d hit the jackpot with Jace when he’d lasted a whole six months without begging me to shoot him into the nearest star, but it turned out that he’d just been keeping his head down until he found someone willing to buy out his contract.
Balancing personalities on a long-haul vessel the size of Cassandra was a nightmare at the best of times and this was not the best of times. I could not and would not spend eighteen months at a time locked in a tin can with some of the fitness jackets I’d been given for review. I already had enough odd characters on board.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Good drivers got snapped up straight out of school by the big corporate recruitment firms and planetary governance. They rarely entered the general labor market again. Sin was better than a good driver. It was a miracle she was available.
Even when her fitness reviews were lukewarm, her previous captains had never questioned her ability. Frankly, they’d been so vague about what it was they didn’t like about her that my business partner and I had ended up having to dismiss most of the criticisms in her jacket as code for ‘I don’t like humans/women/mammals/etc.’
I was used to weeding out a captain’s personal gripes from their legitimate concerns when reviewing a candidate’s work history, but Sin’s jacket was the most extreme example of that I’d ever come across.
“Wait, please," I trotted after her. “Hear me out.”
She glanced back over her shoulder, but only slowed a little. I guess that was all I was going to get.
“Look, I need a driver. My ship has some upkeep that can only be done by specialist bots and specialist bots need human oversight. My last guy left without notice and I have a special cargo waiting on the agricultural ring. They can’t transfer it to me without a release from my insurance company and they won’t write one unless I have a qualified Driver. I’m stuck in port until I can find a driver with the certificates I need, but the first ten people on the labor roster with those certs aren’t people I’d expose my crew to.”
That was putting it mildly. Calling them burnouts and malcontents had been generous. ‘Assholes’ was pretty accurate, though. You didn’t end up rotting on a labor registry in the ass end of space by being good at your job or easy to work with.
“The hiring board won’t release any other candidates until all ten of them have been placed. I’ve had a private recruitment agent watching this quadrant for a week hoping we’d find someone, but Drivers are rare and in demand. Your tech scores are impeccable and aside from today I can’t find any evidence of behavioral issues in your fitness report. I won’t be the only person knocking on your door. I’m just the first.”
“My issues aren’t something you can put in a jacket, Captain Grace.” Sin shook her head. “You don’t want me and I’d rather not be between ports when you figure it out.”
“Is that what happened to your last berth?” I bit my tongue a second too late. The question was out.
Her entire expression shuttered, not just her eyes. “Something like that," she said softly and hesitated. “Look. I empathize with your staffing issues, but I’ve got the black spot.”
It took me a minute to place the reference and even then I didn’t quite understand. “…and?”
She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “The black spot," she repeated it slowly, drawing the pronunciation out for my benefit. “The void follows me.”
“Are you being serious?” I wet my lips to keep from laughing. What year were we in? I felt like I’d gotten lost. “That’s old spacer superstition. There’s no such thing as the void.”
Of course I knew about the ‘void’. Anybody who travelled the major spacelanes for long did. Near as I could tell, it was a euphemism that had grown legs at some point and crossed over into myth. When a ship went missing on the lanes you said ‘they were eaten by the void’ because it was nicer than saying they’d been taken by pirates or got vaporized when they jumped into a wandering rock. There wasn’t really a hungry space-dwelling entity out there that ate starships and if there was then there’d be more evidence of its existence than crazy old lane jockey stories.
“It’s real enough to get me spaced," she snapped and then added, “…nearly.”
She tugged the edge of her collar down and I could see the uppermost curve of something that looked a bit like a portwine birthmark in the hollow of her throat only it was a plummy kind of bruise color with a circular lipoma in the center. I recognized it.
Our uniforms at the crèche had wide boat necks to accommodate an extensive number of body types. Lots of the human kids had cosmetic birth defects or annoying, yet non-life threatening genetic conditions that couldn’t be corrected in utero and made it hard to re-home them.
Most of us didn’t even realize we were defective until we went out into the Universe and got a much colder welcome than the one we’d been expecting. Sin’s welcome must have been cool indeed.
That… huh. I wondered how nearly that ‘nearly’ was.
None of Amanda’s contacts in the FSA were quite sure how Sin had gotten on station. I was sure that half the reason security had accepted my flimsy story about her getting out of the medpod was because they didn’t have any better answer and were afraid of the alternatives. Sneaking onto a space station was impossible, but somehow she’d managed it.
Near as anyone could figure, she’d just appeared in the public docks. The Mimir had never docked. They’d just stopped for a bit at the outermost ring, took on consumables, did a mail dump, filed some forms, and then moved on.
Amanda’s theory was that someone had dumped her at the replenishment platform. I wasn’t sure I agreed, but it was the only explanation we had.
It was pressurized, so—maybe? No guarantees the air was breathable out there though. There was no emergency tram out that far, but Fjord’s outer safety monitors had been fragged for years now so there was nothing stopping people from exiting their ships out there, aside from the cold certainty of death. In theory security did check to make sure no one got abandoned that way, but there was a lot of things FSA was supposed to do that they didn’t.
She could have hitched a ride to the station on a supply drone. They captured a little atmosphere when the hull sealed. It wouldn’t have been a comfortable or safe ride and might explain some of her current horrible condition.
That would also explain the nebulous ‘issues’ her previous captains had talked circles around in her fitness reports. Sin might not have been the problem.
“Your last crew ditched you at the airlock?”
“Yes," she agreed far too easily, so that meant I’d probably ended up somewhere south of what had really happened. “I was left on one of the outer platforms and used a tram to get into the main station.”
I let the lie pass. Station security and facility management would have gotten an alert if she’d activated a tram even if Fjord had had one she could use. If that had happened then Amanda would have heard about it, but at the same time there was no way Sin could admit to illegally entering the station without getting us both into trouble.
I was going to have to let her lie and hope it didn’t bite either of us in the ass later.
“All right, consider your condition disclosed," I said. “I’d still like to take you on.”
I did not give a damn about old spacer tales and I definitely did not care about this one. Our crèche had been a small transient station; half orbital platform, half space ship. We’d moved from orbit to orbit because it was good press to give sanctuary to a crèche, but no one liked it if we stuck around too long after the regional government got done unloading their unwanted kids on us. If there was a mythical space monster chasing her then I was sure it would have shown up before now.
Sin could not have looked more shocked if I’d slapped her. Fine tremors wracked her hands as she hurriedly fastened her collar back up. She was wavering. I almost had her. I just had to close the deal.
Business really comes down to one point; what does the other guy want? You can’t do business without desire.
Put like that, I realized the obvious. Sin wanted the job. She wanted the security that came with a berth and a paycheck. She for sure wanted off Fjord. If she’d really been afraid of me then she’d have taken off while my back was turned. The fact that she was still talking to be meant she wanted to be convinced, but she was freshly aware of how vulnerable she’d be if she took my offer.
The power differential between Captain and crew is extreme. It makes up for the fact that the Captain is usually outnumbered at least five to one, if not by hundreds. The old spacer habit of describing one’s captain as ‘your master after God’ wasn’t too far off the mark. Interstellar spacelanes operated under maritime law, captains could and sometimes did act as judge, jury, and executioner for the malefactors on their ship. I’d never had to read the Act of Condemnation, but I’d met senior captains who had.
Even if xe’d gotten caught, Mimir’s captain wouldn’t have gotten more than a slap on the wrist fine for marooning her. I wasn’t sure there’d be a Guild investigation even if xe really had thrown her out of an airlock, assuming xir paperwork was good enough. Xe could expect worse repercussions for keeping back her belongings. Murder was one thing so far as the Guild was concerned. Theft was another.
What she needed was reassurance from me that I wouldn’t leave her stranded and in fear for her life the way her last captain had.
I couldn’t trade on our shared past as crèche kids. The chance to tell her about that was past and I still wanted to keep it to myself anyway. I had to prove she’d be safe in my care in some other tangible way.
“I’m willing to add a no-fault termination clause to your contract.” Taj was going to kill me if this gamble didn’t pay off. Hell, forget Taj. Amanda would kill me. “If at any point you want out then I’ll drop you wherever you want to be dropped with your full pay for the quarter, no questions asked.”
She stared at me with nothing going on behind her eyes except exhaustion.
“I’ll look at the contract," she said at last and I knew I had her. “No promises," she added sharply.
I tried not to look smug. Looking at the contract involved walking onto my ship and trusting me not to take off with her in it. If she was ready to go that far then she was ready to sign.
All I had to do now was make sure my troublemakers didn’t change her mind before then.