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 the Duty’s Watch had 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.
The Duty had 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 was technically 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.
“Like a fucking ghost!” he exclaimed, beaming from ear to ear.
His enthusiasm was infectious, and though the idea was fundamentally dangerous to the extreme, the crew punched the air and hugged each other and said: This is how I want to die!
My opinion was not sought, and I felt too tired, too small, too old to argue.
We killed the destroyer that day.
It should be impossible for a Pilot to take a ship in and out of the dark so quickly; impossible for a vessel to pop in and out of existence with such accuracy, let alone while engaging in combat.
I listened to the dark, every time we entered it.
Called out – are you there? Are you with me? Are you proud of what I have become? Look at me. Look at me. I’m killing them. I am killing a ship of strangers – can you see me? Is this what you wanted?
Nothing answered.
Nothing ever did.
After, as we watched the destroyer come apart, leaking gas and frozen bodies to the dark, there was no orgy.
We had delivered weapons of death to the resistance on Nitashi, and no doubt those weapons had killed.
But the crew of the Duty had never quite imagined that we’d become killers ourselves.
Never stopped to wonder how it might feel.
Jahen tried to make a celebration of it, to whoop and dance and scream: fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!
to the battered corpse of our enemy. But it wasn’t real.
It wasn’t happiness, or joy, or ecstasy.
It was mad, desperate, a heart being torn apart, a soul cut adrift that did not know itself any more.
After, Pitt said: “If you were Piloting a battleship, you would be unstoppable. You could kill so many. You could be a monster in this war.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I know.”
And I went to bed, and we never spoke of it again.