Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Scar
The message comes at midshift and I read it standing in a gallery on level nineteen hundred with a cutter still in my hand.
Compound. All of us. Tonight.
And then, two lines down:
Hallie’s people came through. Daxon’s coming up on the screen. — Chief
Which on its own means nothing. We talk to Daxon constantly. He’s on that screen for every naming, every claiming, every time one of us has news worth carrying — Hook messages him about absolutely nothing at least twice a moon cycle and Daxon answers every time.
But Chief doesn’t call the whole family in for a chat with our eldest brother.
Chief calls the whole family in when something’s about to happen.
“I’m coming with you,” Mara huffs.
“You’re due next week. You need to stay at home and rest.”
“I’m aware of when I’m due, Cayzor, I’ve been keeping fairly close track.” She’s got one hand braced on the counter and the other on the small of her back. “It’s my plan they’re going to be talking about. It’s my brother. And it’s my grid.”
“What if you go into labor at the compound?”
“Then I will be in a house with four women who have done it, a med tech eleven minutes away, and eight males who would carry me there on a plank. Whereas if I stay here, I’ll be alone, wondering what everyone’s deciding about my life without me.”
I look at her for a while. “Get your boots,” I finally answer.
“You have to do my boots for me.”
I grin. “I know.”
The compound is full.
Everyone’s here. All seven of my brothers, all the brides, the long table shoved back against the wall and every chair in the house dragged into the front room. The young ones are being given toys and screens to keep them reasonably quiet.
Grytel of Thirty-Nine comes up the road at nineteen hundred and Chief lets him inside.
I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely used to it, thinking of Grytel as an ally instead of an enemy.
He looks worse than he did a rotation ago.
The Royal Pigment keep themselves polished — it’s most of what they are — and he’s thinner in the face now, and there’s grey coming into the plates along his jaw.
He stands in the doorway of the house he had a hand in demoting us to and waits to be invited.
“Chief.” Grytel looks at all of us gathered and says, “I am here to bring down the assholes who framed me as the instigator of a takedown of your crew and family. I do not enjoy being played. And I am here to bring down a House on Chronos that has dissolved into fraud and criminality, which is unacceptable. And I will not let them interfere with Illibrium production. We may have been at odds in the past but know that we are working together on this project.”
Then he sits, taking the worst chair in the room.
“Three things, and I’ll be brief, because I know how much you all enjoy my company.
First, the transport schedules for the next two quarters are finalized under my authority, structured the way we discussed.
Second, the Chronos filings are lodged in a way that means if this goes badly it lands on me and not on this family. ”
“And the third?” Chief questions.
“The third is Hallie’s.”
“My contact in the Vaszneth records office came back,” Hallie says.
“Six moon cycles of nothing and then four diurnals ago he sends me a message that they’re asking about Timbur again and somebody’s going to fix what’s wrong.
That’s not a memo, that’s what you say when an operation has stalled and somebody upstairs has become impatient. ”
“Six moon cycles of quiet,” Ines says slowly. “And now they’re moving again.”
“Put Daxon on the screen,” Chief orders. He looks at Grytel. “We’re bringing Daxon in on this because he’s a Bounty Hunter and can get us into Chronos.”
Grytel nods in agreement. “Good idea.”
The wall screen brightens, and there’s my eldest brother. Daxon fills the frame the way he fills everything, and there’s noise behind him because the Hunter Station is never quiet. There’s always some being shouting down a corridor about a docking fee.
He smiles at us. “You’ve all got very serious faces.”
“Because it’s serious business,” Chief says.
Daxon sits up. “Understood. Tell me everything.”
So Chief, Ines and I tell him everything, which means Grytel learns everything too.
The grid. The rosters. Ordek of Six on that list twice, and dead the diurnal before I could reach him.
Andrew Wilson, and the debts, the three payments, and the dates that mean he was bought on New Earth before he ever set foot here.
The money he lost inside a moon cycle. The whole architecture of it laid out on my family’s floor.
Daxon listens without interrupting once, which is not something he was capable of at nineteen. Grytel knew most of it, but I can see that hearing the story as a whole again is helping him to fill in gaps. It’s a large, complex, puzzle and it’s good for all of us fighting for justice for
When it’s finished he’s quiet for a while. “Say the name of the House again,” he says.
“Vaszneth,” Hallie says.
“And they went after Father because he’d found something in the deep levels and started asking about it?”
“Yes.”
“Hm.” Daxon shifts. “Then you’ve all got the order wrong.”
“What order?” I question.
“The order it happened in. Scar, you’ve been running it from the murder forward. Everything in your file starts the night our parents died.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the middle.”
“Think,” Daxon says. “What was I, before?”
“You were head of the Miners’ Union,” Grytel growls.
“Yes, I was head of the Miners’ Union. Elected.
Two terms. Eleven thousand Margol on this rock and I was the male who stood between them and Admin, and I was good at it, and Grytel’s predecessor hated me so thoroughly he tried three separate times to have the position abolished.
” A pause. “Ask yourself what a House with plans for that mine does about a male like that.”
“They remove him,” Ines says.
“They remove him. And they do it first, before anything else, because as long as there’s a union with a Margol leader who can call eleven thousand miners off the rock in a diurnal, you cannot phase the Margol out of anything.” He looks at me. “So who removed me?”
“Kryzon,” I say.
“Our cousin Kryzon. Who brought the charge. Who produced the manifest that never existed. Who stood up in front of the union board and said he was doing it for the good of the workers and was very sorry about it.” His jaw works.
“And who took my seat about four diurnals after they put me on a transport.”
“I have been chasing this for eight rotations,” I snarl.
“I have never once put it in this order. Buy Kryzon. Kill our parents. Banish Daxon on Kryzon’s charge…
and Kryzon takes the union. Demote the family to the end of the road, where nobody has to look at us.
The Miners’ Union of Timbur run by a male who did whatever Minecorp Admin wanted, and no Margol leader with any real power left to ask a single uncomfortable question about anything. It was one operation. The whole time.”
“The union wasn’t ran by me,” Grytel interjects. “When you say Minecorp Admin, that was not me. Kryzon barely spoke to me during his entire tenure. He was obviously in contact with someone else the whole time.”
“Gods,” Roxy says quietly.
“Who has it now?” Daxon asks.
Chief looks up. “Has what?”
“The union. Kryzon’s been in a cell two moon cycles. Who’s got the seat?”
“Nobody’s taken it.” Heavy spreads his hands.
“There was talk. Two of the level supervisors put their names forward and then both withdrew inside a fortnight and neither of them will say why. Admin’s been running the shift boards direct since the arrest.” He looks uncomfortable.
“It’s just, empty. It’s been empty since they took him. ”
“So what do you want from me?” Daxon questions. “We all know the entire story of what happened and what House Vaszneth wants to do to the Illibrium. Why am I here?”
“We called you in because of Andrew Wilson, the brother. He’s off-world, six moon cycles gone, and we cannot reach him.”
Ines takes over. “He left on a legitimate transport under his own name, he wasn’t even hiding, which tells you how little anyone was looking.
Two more movements after that, both clean, and then nothing.
Best guess is he’s somewhere in the Chronos orbit, being kept.
Not hidden. Kept. Parked somewhere cheap while beings decide whether he’s still worth feeding. ”
“And?”
“And we can’t get him.” She counts it off.
“There are no charges against him anywhere in the Four Sectors — none, not one, because every employer he ever robbed chose the quiet exit. Minecorp security has no authority off-planet. Grytel can’t detain a being on Chronos, he’d be arrested before Andrew was — “
“Correct,” Grytel says.
“ — and every male in this room is bound to Timbur by a demotion order that says they cannot leave this rock without Admin’s written permission, which Admin will not give.” Ines looks up at the screen. “You’re the only one of us who can go anywhere.”
“Because I’ve got a ship.”
“Because you’ve got a license,” Mara says.
Every head turns.
She’s been quiet almost the whole time, one hand resting on the top of her belly, doing the thing she does where she stops listening to the room and starts listening to the problem.
“Sorry,” she says. “But that’s it, isn’t it? It’s not the ship. Anyone can have a ship. It’s the license.”
“Go on,” Daxon says, and there’s something new in his voice.
“You’re a licensed Bounty Hunter.” Mara sits forward as far as she can.
“Which means you have legal authority to pursue, apprehend, and transport a target across sector boundaries. Including into Chronos space. Under an authority that has nothing to do with Minecorp, nothing to do with Timbur, and nothing to do with this family.”
“There’s not another instrument in the Four Sectors that reaches into a House’s own orbit.”
“There is not.”
“So we don’t need a ship,” Mara says. “We need you.”