Chapter Three. The Harpooner
CHAPTER
THREE
The Harpooner
The carbide sting of the blade woke me first. Then the weight of the other woman kneeling astride me. Then the light that shone from every inch of her skin, intricate skeins like maps or blueprints that glowed pale blue and irregular.
“Quis,” she demanded. “Quis es.”
I didn’t know her language, but I knew context. Context, unfortunately, wasn’t telling me how to keep the blood in my veins. “Friend,” I tried. “Friend.”
The electric glow from her markings faded slightly, and she drew her knife just a half inch away from my neck. “Cuius friend es?”
Carefully, I raised my hands. “I won’t hurt you.”
She didn’t look like she believed me, but she looked like she understood me, which was all I could really hope for.
Keeping her weight mostly on my ribs, she took the weapon far enough away that she could only kill me with it on purpose.
Which was about as comforting as a stranger with a knife gets.
“If you let me call the landlord,” I offered, “I am sure he can explain.”
Landlord she got. Although from the expression on her face I didn’t think she liked the man much.
Gingerly, I reached for the intercom and pressed to open the channel.
“What can I do you for?” asked the landlord from the other end with uncalled-for cheeriness.
“The Terran is here,” I said quietly, “and she wants to kill me.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t.”
It’s probably a legacy of my upbringing that I hadn’t expected an Earther to know how a communicator worked, but she spoke into the device as naturally as she spoke to me. “You,” she said to the landlord, “explicare mihi.”
The line went dead a moment. Then the landlord’s voice returned. “The thing is…”
I severely doubted this would end well. In fact, I was beginning to worry that I was fucked, and not in the fun way.
“No,” the harpooner snapped into the communicator.
“I said it was a double room. I’ll give you a discount.”
Her markings were glowing again, paler this time. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.”
“No need to be like that. Calm down. Think of it as extra warmth for the night. Gets mighty chilly here on ’Ropa.”
The harpooner looked like she was about to stab something, hopefully something not me, but in the end restricted herself to giving a cry of frustrated rage and cutting off the channel.
While I didn’t think the landlord had done the best job of smoothing things over, it did seem like he’d given us a mutual enemy. The harpooner moved off of me and sat on the edge of the bed, quietly steaming and glaring at me over her shoulder.
“Friend?” she asked.
I nodded.
“That man.” Her mouth was set in a grim line. “Fur.” Then when it became clear I had no idea what I meant she added, “Thief.”
I nodded again.
For a moment we stared at each other, and I searched her face for answers.
Aside from her markings, which were like nothing I’d ever seen before, she seemed not that different from the hundred other strangers I’ve met in places like this.
Admittedly, the fact that she was emitting light rather than reflecting it made details rather tricky to pick out, but I could tell that she was shaven-headed, that she had a strong jaw and high cheekbones.
Her eyes, lit from above and below with those holographic tattoos, seemed impossibly large and dark and endless.
I didn’t think I was staring, but something about the way she held my gaze made my skin prickle, made me very conscious, all of a sudden, of the way my tongue felt inside my mouth.
I gave up caring how other people saw me long ago, but there, in that moment, I felt so utterly beheld that it was almost unbearable.
I told her my name—the name I was using then—and she told me hers. I’m not going to share it with you. Some things are precious. But let’s call her Q.
Shuffling to one side, I made room for her to lie next to me. Whatever the landlord might have said, it was not a double room by any real standard and there was no way we could share without getting well into each other’s space.
I wasn’t entirely complaining. The landlord had been right about the warmth, and I’ve always had a yearning for touch that nearly matched my yearning for sky.
I curled into her arms and closed my eyes.
For a woman who’d begun by pressing a knife to my throat, she held me surprisingly gently.
But perhaps she thought I was surprisingly gentle for a woman who’d begun by stealing into her bed without asking.
Or perhaps she thought I was trash. That was more likely.
When day came and the dome-lights started bleeding in through the windows she was still holding me. And even though she was a complete stranger, I let myself feel safe.
“It’s morning,” I told her. Because it seemed like I should.
She made a sleepy noise against my shoulder which suggested that, from her perspective, morning could get fucked.
“I need to look for a ship.”
The mention of ships stirred her slightly, but only slightly. “Ships,” she said. “Multae.”
“The landlord said you were a harpooner,” I tried.
Bleary and disinterested, she waved a hand in the direction of a wicked-looking coilgun. “Yes,” she said. “Harpooner sum.”
There were no two ways about it, this was a massive stroke of luck.
My plan for finding work had been to walk the docks until I saw a promising vessel, then see if I could find somebody in a position to offer me a job.
In hindsight, it had been an incredibly shit plan.
And now by chance I’d met a woman who’d already been on the hunt.
Who seemed like she might be willing to help me.
It was almost enough to make me believe in providence.
Carefully, I rolled over to face her. “Do you—would you look for a ship with me?”
Q’s endless eyes met mine. And for a moment I saw something, imagined I saw her seeing something.
Perhaps it was just the morning light, or the still needing to get out of my head, or the long, weird day I’d had yesterday.
Whatever it was, I had an unexplained and powerful urge to kiss her.
I resisted for a dozen different reasons.
For a start, she’d woken me up with a knife.
That’s the sort of thing should put a girl off.
I mean, it didn’t. But I tried to act like it had.
“We should get breakfast,” I said instead. And a part of me regretted it.
We hovered in that space, me not kissing her and her not kissing me either, for moments that stretched out like blown glass, and then she turned away, swung out of bed into the foot or so of space that made up the rest of the room.
She touched the biometric seal of her traveling bag and, from within, produced a small rectangular icon.
It was black, jet black, and almost mirrored.
As she moved her fingers over its surface, I saw symbols dancing across it, and the lines of her markings glowed in sympathy with them.
I had no idea what she was doing. Terrans, I was always told, have little in the way of technology.
How, after all, could they develop it without the churches or the vast incorporated conglomerates of the trade-states to guide them?
I decided, in the end, that it was a religious matter, and waited for her to finish.
“Yes,” she said as the surface of the icon returned to darkness.
“Yes what?”
“I will sail with you.”