36. Saren
SAREN
Daxira's flagship turns its whole armament onto us, and I understand, with the cold clarity that has kept me alive thirty-eight years, that the Hollow Wake does not survive the next sixty seconds.
We have nothing left to answer a broadside with.
The signal is sent; the truth is loose; and none of it will matter if her guns finish us before we can limp out of range.
There is exactly one move left on the board, and I have spent my whole life refusing to be the kind of captain who makes it.
"Vasha. You have the ship." I am already out of the chair.
Her ruined horn snaps toward me, and she reads my face the way fifteen years lets her read it. "No. Whatever you're about to do — no."
"A flagship can't fire what it's bleeding from the inside.
Their guns stop the moment their own decks are the emergency.
" I look at the board, at the six ships, at the one that matters.
"I put myself aboard and make myself a problem too expensive to ignore.
It's the only thing that buys you the time to run. "
"Alone," she says flatly. "You mean alone."
"I mean alone. I will not spend one more of us than the math requires, and tonight the math requires one." For once it is true, and for once the one is me, and I find I can make that trade without flinching when the name on the line is my own.
Althea has heard all of it from the transmitter station, and she crosses to me fast and takes a fistful of my harness — not to stop me.
To be sure of me. "You come back," she says, low and fierce, the bonding-marks still fresh on both our skins.
"I didn't survive a fuse you lit and a whole city falling on our heads just to bury you in the last hour.
Whatever you go in there to do, you do it fast, and you come home and finish what we started. "
"I intend to." I press my brow to hers, one breath, the bond running bright and steadying between us. "I have a future now. I have no intention of dying in the past."
Then I let her go, because Vasha already has the helm hauling us alongside, and I cross to Daxira's ship through vacuum and gunfire, alone, because some debts a captain does not delegate, and because the one way to stop a flagship from killing my crew is to be inside it making a more interesting problem.
Caelis cuts me a hole in their hull with our last cutting charge and I go through it the way I went through the boarders, except this time there is no part of me holding back, because there is no longer anyone aboard the Hollow Wake who needs me to be careful in front of them, and because the woman who taught me I was more than a weapon also taught me, without meaning to, exactly when to be one.
Daxira's people are mercenaries, not believers, and mercenaries do the sensible thing when a Reaper opens their corridor like a tin: they get out of the way. I let them. I am not here for them.
The ones who don't stand aside teach the rest why they should.
I go through Daxira's forward guard the way weather goes through a fence — not with rage, rage is loud and slow, but with the cold economy three hundred years of survival cut into my hands.
I take no joy in it. I take no time over it either.
Somewhere behind me the Hollow Wake is keeping my clan alive by the second, and every breath I waste in this corridor is a breath Vasha has to buy back with our dying guns.
And then I reach the labor decks, and I slow, because I was not prepared for this.
They are chained. Daxira's rowers, her loaders, her menial crew — collared to their stations with the cheap restraint-tech the cartels use on debt-bound labor, left there as the fight turned, expendable the way I was always told my own people were expendable.
Most of them flinch from the gray nightmare that has just torn their guards apart.
A few don't. A few look at me with the flat, exhausted recognition of people who have already met every kind of monster and are only waiting to learn which one I am.
I break the nearest collar with my hands.
Then the next. "The pods are aft," I tell them, in the trade tongue.
"Go. No one stops you. No one owns you on my ship, and there is no debt waiting at the other end of this.
" They stare. Then one of them — an old human woman with a brand on her wrist older than my command — touches the broken collar at her throat, nods at me once, soldier to soldier, and starts pulling the others toward the lifepods.
I let that nod into the part of me Daxira's whole philosophy insists should be empty, and I carry it the rest of the way to her bridge.
I follow the command signals to her bridge and I pull the door off its track and I find her standing very straight in the center of her dying advantage, one hand near a console, the artificial eye recalculating, recalculating, finding no answer that ends with her alive.
"There's nothing in here worth your time," she says. "The archive's already out. Killing me changes nothing. You're a practical man under all the theater — you don't waste effort on nothing."
"You are right that killing you changes nothing.
" I do not move toward her yet. "I did not board to kill you.
I boarded to stop your guns. The killing, if it happens, will be incidental.
" I look at the slave-rigged consoles around her bridge, the labor collars on the crew she didn't bother to free when the fight turned, the people chained to the stations of a ship she's willing to lose. "Who do you work for."
She laughs, and it's almost genuine. "You think it's a name.
It's not a name, Captain. It's an arrangement.
Half the powers that run this arm of the galaxy are sitting on something they did during the war, and Ishana was only one of them, and as long as no one could prove the old crimes, everyone stayed comfortable.
I'm not a villain. I'm a janitor. There will be another me by next quarter.
You haven't beaten a person. You've kicked over a stone and now the whole region gets to see what's living under it, and they will hate you for the daylight far longer than they ever hated you for the dark. "
"Perhaps." I cross to the labor consoles and I break the collar locks one by one with my hands, and the chained crew flinch from me and then, understanding, run for the lifepods.
"But they will hate us as the people who were wronged, and not as the monsters who wronged themselves.
That is the only inheritance I have left to give my children. I will take it over your comfort."
She goes for the console then — for the self-destruct, or the killing salvo, I never learn which — and I am faster, the way I have always been faster, and I do the incidental thing without heat and without pleasure, because a future is standing in vacuum waiting for me to come home to it.
Her flagship is already dying around us, drifting back toward the dead zone's edge where the gravity well waits.
I reach the breach with the freed crew at my back and I throw myself across the dark toward the Hollow Wake with Daxira's ship folding behind me into the same hungry nothing that swallowed the city — a janitor consumed by the mess she spent her life pretending wasn't hers.
I make it aboard with my air nearly gone, and the first thing I see is Althea, alive, reaching for me, and the last calculation of my old life finishes itself quietly in the back of my mind and comes out, for once, in favor of the man instead of the captain.