TheEmnibloomed and withered, ticking through the seasons. When he was in his winter phase, we returned to Xihana and I tended my garden. In spring, I planted his internal systems with compost mulched from behind my cottage; in summer I watchedthe seeds I had grown blossom in his corridors, and with halls smelling of home, we went back into the stars.
So I continued, for nearly fifteen years, until Pitt found me.
I don’t know which of the loose network of refugee Unionists I had come to know gave him my details, but he was waiting for me and theEmniwhen we returned to my island. Clearly someone in Xi security had let him through, shown him to the boat, given him the usual warnings.
You venture there at your own peril. We take no liability for what may happen to you, once you cross those waters, etc. etc. etc.
He found the pollen of Xihana almost as brutal as I found the flowers of Nitashi, snot streaming and eyes watering even in the bright sea breeze that bent the petals of my garden and tugged at the fresh leaves in the trees. Nevertheless, he did his best to present a stiff, upright bearing as I approached, clapping his hands twice in formal greeting and proclaiming in heavy, lilting Normspeak: “I hope you do not mind my being on your island. You have a beautiful garden here.”
I let him into my cottage, offered him a drink.
He declined politely, informing me that he had tried a few delicacies of the archipelago while waiting, and practically everything gave him the squits. “It’s boiled water and polished grains,” he sighed. “Until the gut adapts.”
“What brings you here, gastric distress and all?” I’d asked.
“I need a Pilot. One who can fly with a reliability and accuracy that others cannot.”
“I can do these things,” I’d replied. “But I do them alone.”
“I heard. But I am from Nitashi. My people are dying. We are dying. Even those who live, they are dying; their land, their language, their children – everything taken from them. They are dying because they are becoming Shine. That is also a kind of death. Even the planet – our forests, our fields. They are uprooting them, replacing them with crops that are more suitable for thepeoples of the Shine. They are starving us. They do not need to keep us alive, because there are millions of them coming to our world every week, expecting something better, expecting to be given all that we had. So I have decided that what I do is important. I have decided to fight. And I have decided that I am going to persuade you to join me.”
“I am very sorry to hear all of this. But I think you should understand, I find it hard to imagine that anything I do matters very much any more.”
“I don’t believe you,” he’d retorted, with absolute self-confidence. “I think if that was true, you’d be trying much harder to kill yourself. Even one such as you – there are many ways to live more dangerously. Thankfully, what I am proposing is so reckless that if you really are convinced of the pointlessness of your actions, you’ll run a far higher chance of dying with me than almost any other captain out there. I really will not take no for an answer, you see.”
And in fairness to him, he really would not.
Chapter 49
Would Gebre approve?
I am a gun-runner. I bring death. Gebre never struck me as especially violent, but then violence had never been the answer to Adjumir’s condition. How much would te have torn apart, how many lives would te have willingly destroyed, to save the things te cared about?
On our twelfth mission to Nitashi, a Shine destroyer was waiting for us.
We were carrying medical supplies – an usual cargo, given the military bent of Pitt and the crew. An Accord donor had felt more comfortable offering bandages than munitions, and though the Nitashi authorities-in-exile had called out hypocrisy, hypocrisy – you’d give us the means to patch up our wounded, but not the means to fight back?! – neither could anyone realistically say no, and so off we’d been sent.
Our blackshield and our dangerously close drop-in point to the planet’s atmosphere should have been enough to keep us safe from Shine patrols, but as was always going to be the way one day, someone, somewhere had betrayed us, and no sooner did we drop from arcspace than the destroyer was on us, guns blazing.
We took a hit to our starboard engine before Pitt roared: “Get us into arcspace!”
We were still travelling fast enough to risk a jump, and so back into the black we went, no clear destination, ship shuddering from the strain.
With the exception of young Maolcas, everyone on theDuty’s Watchhad experienced arcspace travel before they came on board the ship. They knew how the dark should feel: how the shadows should thicken, sounds move in strange directions, how you might turn your head and see something in the corner of your eye – there was always something in the corner of your eye. But not with me.
Not when I Piloted.
The dark of arcspace was as the dark of inspace; a flat, empty thing, without feature or remark. The quiet of it, the absence of wrongness, had at first caused almost as much distress to the crew as the more predictable sound of claws scratching against the hull. They had looked at me askance, whispered:What is this? What is he?
Over time, however, as we had flown mission after mission with an accuracy and ease that would have ripped most ships apart, their attitudes had changed. Now they chatted on the command deck, almost oblivious to the un-place that we passed through. Now, Pitt schemed.
Said: “If we stayed at entry speeds, how close to the destroyer do you think you could get us?”
Said: “What if we dropped out of arcspace, fired the forward cannon, then immediately returned to the dark?”
Said: “We could take the bastards down. We could do it. We could kill one of the fuckers.”
I could not find any fault with his logic. TheDutyhad only one offensive weapon, modified from an asteroid blaster, and the idea of taking on a military destroyer with it was clearly absurd. But Pitt was technically correct: our flights had demonstrated that we could enter and exit arcspace with pinpoint accuracy, and it wastechnically possible to therefore fly in behind the destroyer, now we knew its location, fire a shot, exit to arcspace, re-enter inspace a few seconds later at a different location, fire, exit, fire, exit and so on and so forth, slipping in and out of the dark like a ghost.
