Chapter 53: Ren’s Guide On Dismantling A Crew

The deck under Aoi’s knees didn’t hum with the clean smooth purr of the Wanderer-7’s core.

It rattled a lot.

The Black Kite was a predator built out of raw slate-iron and stripped-down military drives, and every burn sent a harsh grinding shudder through the cold steel plates and into her kneecaps like dull gravel.

The air stank... stale recycled propellant, scorched insulation and the sharp copper stench of fresh blood.

Her wrists were wrenched behind her back and lashed to a horizontal reinforcement bar running along the port bulkhead of the raider’s bridge.

The coarse polymer rope bit into her skin until her fingertips had gone swollen and white and stretched out along the iron pipe beside her were the others.

All six of them, tied to the same load-bearing beam like cattle in a slaughterhouse chute.

Through the big angular viewport, the black stretched out cold and indifferent with not a single star blinking and not a single thing out there that cared but on the three-meter aft display across the starboard wall, right in the middle of the screen, was the Wanderer-7.

It looked dead in the water with not a single light on it.

Its turquoise plumes were gone... Its running lights had died as it hung in the dark like a frozen iron coffin, airless and powerless, shrinking by millimeters every second as the raider’s thrusters drove them away into deep space.

Leo’s ship.

The ship that had carried them through the Rift and the worms and the Ray and across the whole belt was being left behind in the void, choking on the red chip jammed in its throat.

Beside Aoi, Chloe hung limp in her bindings.

She was slumped forward with her forehead nearly touching the deck.

The bullet wound over her brow had stopped bleeding and knitted into an ugly puckered pink knot, but her shattered knee was still leaking a steady dark puddle across the iron plates, and her white suit was soaked through with her own blood.

Her small shoulders shook with feverish tremors.

Her cells were starving... With no fresh blood to fuel her, the torn bone and shredded ligaments were dragging every drop of life out of her marrow and leaving her skin as pale and thin as paper.

"Leo..." she mumbled through dry cracked lips, her bangs sweeping through the blood under her chin. "Leo... Leo... where... where are you...?"

She cried out over and over.

A broken feverish loop, like a dying child crying for home in an empty room with her lips barely moving and her eyes half shut behind her hair.

Camila was tied right beside her.

Her wrists were raw and bleeding where she’d thrown her weight against the cord trying to reach her.

Tears poured down her cheeks in hot unbroken streams as she stretched her bound arms as far along the bar as the knots would let her with her trembling fingertips just brushing the back of Chloe’s stained shoulder.

"I’m here, sweetie... I’m here," she sobbed. "Hold on, Chloe... please hold on... Leo’s... Leo’s coming... he has to come..."

’He can’t come.’ The terror closed over her head like freezing water. ’He’s floating in the dark without a suit. He’s dead. I told him to be happy... I told him to smile and let Ren help us... I called him KID... God, please, what did I do? What did I DO to him?!’

On Aoi’s other side, Elena knelt motionless.

The proud aristocratic girl who’d held her chin high against the void looked like someone had hollowed her out with a rusty knife.

Her uniform was torn at the collar with her honey-blonde hair falling in wild tangles across her face and her dilated eyes staring glassy and wide at the blood dripping off Chloe’s knee.

’How did this happen...?’

Her thoughts spun in a sick dizzy spiral that made her stomach heave, and the taste of bile burned at the back of her tongue.

’Sterling Orbital... Station Nine... Mother... They were supposed to be OUR people... They were wearing our patches. They were supposed to have drydocks and relays and clean air... They were supposed to save us from that wretched insecure stray...’

A dry choked sob caught in her throat.

Leo’s face flashed behind her eyes.

The cold dead stillness in them right after she’d spat on the memory of his little sister, the quiet way he’d brought the engines to zero and the way he’d stood alone by the companionway, watching them pack their bags... abandoned by the people he’d dragged through five days of hell.

’He told us.’ A bitter scalding agony clawed up her throat. ’He told us not to trust anyone out here. He stood in that hall and told us Dekker was touching the data port... and I laughed in his face. I called him a commoner. I told him he was jealous...’

Further down the pipe, Harper sat with her back wedged hard against the bulkhead and her knees pulled up as far as the ropes would let them.

Her freckled face was dead white.

Her eyes were fixed on the floor between her boots, burning with a self-loathing so much she was biting her own lip until blood ran down her chin, and her fingers behind her back kept twisting and twisting at the rope, getting nowhere.

’I didn’t back him up.’ Every fiber of her talent was screaming in silent useless agony. ’He snapped at me and I threw a tantrum like a spoiled brat. I walked away... I left him standing on that bridge alone... and now he’s out there freezing because I couldn’t swallow my stupid pride.’

Jin-Ah sat beside her, staring blankly at the dark console banks without blinking, her lips white.

’The math was artificial.’ Her chest was tight and suffocating under the weight of her own silence. ’I knew the data was too polite... and I stayed quiet because I was afraid of being wrong.’

’Logic without courage is just complicity in murder.’

The bridge of the Black Kite was dominated by a raised iron dais with a heavy steel-plated throne in the middle of it.

Ren sat tipped back in it with his ankles crossed and his boots up on the edge of the navigation well.

He’d cleaned his pistol with a rag and the slide gleamed with fresh oil under the harsh white ceiling lights.

Chloe’s blood was still drying on the toe of his left boot however he hadn’t bothered to wipe that.

Voss leaned his massive bulk against a weapons locker three paces back with his rifle over his shoulder, silent and still as a granite slab.

Dekker sat at the flight terminal with his thin fingers twitching over the thruster controls and that greasy grin splitting his face as he watched their burn.

Aoi lifted her head... It took everything she had left.

Her glasses were smeared with salt and grime and her dark hair was plastered to her wet temples.

She looked up at the man in the chair.

The face that had smiled across the dinner table in Kyoto and the brother she’d spent so much time thinking about.

"Ren..."

It tore out of her cracked lips.

"Ren, explain this. Look at me! Look at your sister and explain what you are DOING!"

He didn’t flinch.

He slid his boots off the console, rested his elbows on the steel armrests and gave the floor a lazy push with his foot, and the heavy throne turned slowly around to face the six of them.

He wasn’t angry and he wasn’t ashamed either, there wasn’t even any cruelty in it.

...He was bored.

He looked at them the way a butcher looks at a row of hanging carcasses at the end of a long shift, looking tired and ready to clock out.

"Explain what, Aoi?" He asked without a shred of malice, it was the way you’d ask somebody to pass the salt. "You wanted to know how deep space works? This is how it works... You survived five days in a tin can and thought you were playing a video game."

He stood and stretched his arms over his head until his spine gave three sharp pops, then strolled to the edge of the dais and looked down at them with his hands in his pockets.

"We got seeded into this sector two weeks ago," he said, pacing a slow two-meter line across the deck. "The people who dropped in with me were useless... Whiny middle-management office drones from Osaka who spent the first forty-eight hours crying about their families and asking who was going to fix the air filters."

He chuckled softly and shook his head.

"I was overjoyed at first, you know... I thought, hey, the universe gave me a starship. I’m the Captain now then I looked at the fuel gauges, the life support clocks and the Level 2 beasts crawling through the rocks... You don’t survive out here holding hands and singing nursery rhymes, Aoi so on day four, I took a wrench to the skulls of three of my crewmates while they were sleeping, dumped the meat out the airlock and flew this raider straight into a mercenary beacon."

Elena gasped while Camila buried her face in her knees and sobbed into the denim.

Over at the flight terminal, Dekker giggled.

A thin high wheezing sound, like a kettle with his bony shoulders bouncing as his fingers drummed on the console like he was remembering something fond.

Voss didn’t do anything at all.

Ren glanced down at Elena and pointed a lazy finger back at Voss and Dekker.

"These two aren’t from Sterling Orbital, Miss Sterling... They’re void scavengers, hired guns if you will... The Federation pays a solid bounty for raw manpower, and Voss and Dekker know how to herd sheep."

Elena’s head snapped up, her tears drying into raw uncomprehending horror.

"The... the patches... Dekker said Station Nine—"

"The patches came off the uniforms of a Sterling Orbital survey crew we intercepted six days ago." His words went into her skull like cold rusty nails. "Ten engineers. Two pilots... We stripped their flight suits, locked them in the cargo hold and sold the lot to a Federation transport for twelve hundred credits."

He shrugged.

"Your mother isn’t on a mothership, Miss Sterling... There is no mothership... There is no survivor council. If your mother didn’t burn up in the upper atmosphere when Earth cracked, she’s rotting in an orbital debris field or scrubbing deck plates in a labor hold."

"No..." Elena shook her head violently from side to side as her composure shattered, and she curled forward until her forehead hit the floor. "No, no, no... Mother... please..."

He didn’t even pause.

He stepped over her trunk like it was a piece of trash in the street, walked three more paces and stopped in front of Aoi, holding up three fingers.

"The Wanderer-7 was our third crew... It’s always the same script, Aoi. It’s almost boring how easy it is. You find a battered panicked ship of survivors. You hail them on an open channel, tell them you’re human, and promise everything they want to hear."

He looked down at Camila, shaking violently against the pipe.

"Tell the farm girl there’s real dirt and hungry orphans." A cruel smirk curled his lip. "Tell the mechanic there’s military lathes. Tell the heiress her mommy’s waiting with a warm bath and then..."

His eyes went cold as ice.

"...you tear their Captain down... Piece by piece... You make him look small. You make him look insecure... You make him look like a jumpy paranoid rookie who doesn’t know how to protect his women and the funny thing is? Most Captains go right along with it... They get so desperate, so terrified of looking weak in front of their girls, that they walk right out to the edge of the plank just to prove they aren’t afraid to shake my hand."

He let out a low mocking laugh.

"Your boy Leo was tougher than the last two, I’ll give him that. He knew something was wrong but he had six women screaming at him and calling him a coward... so he walked to the airlock anyway." He spread his hands. "What an easy kill."

Aoi’s chest seized.

The air in her lungs turned to liquid fire as every word was a jagged shard of glass driven straight into her heart.

She remembered screaming at Leo on the bridge until her throat was raw, she remembered telling him she’d raised Ren and she remembered grabbing his flight suit and begging him.

’Please don’t make me hate you.’

She’d looked into his eyes... hollow and tired and carrying all six of their lives... and she’d forced his hand.

She’d delivered the boy who loved her straight into her brother’s slaughterhouse, and she’d done it with tears in her eyes, thinking she was saving everyone.

Next to her, Chloe’s broken mumbling had suddenly stopped.

Her head was still hanging and her bangs still hid her face completely.

But under the curtain of bloody hair, so quietly only Aoi could hear it, she had started to laugh.