Tashi Mountains, Paris, West Country

Hard by the university, Durbin’s station was not busy at this season, only a few weeks into fall term. Having booked his fare at the contract labor kiosk, Martin wandered the platform, watching the sparse crowds from the edge of his eyes. A train had just come in; down in the yard, labor cots were unloading its cargo onto hand-trucks. Up here, Lord Holders gathered in shops or strolled along the platform in the crisp afternoon. Durbin, like most of the West Country, was famous for its weather. Even this far into fall, the wind was mild. Hardly any bugs, either, compared to the rest of Julian.

Caught by the scent of baking cakes, Martin lingered near the teashop, its wooden trim painted a festive blue and white, the colors of the University in Durbin. He knew better than to enter. Though Deja kept funds on his clip, what he bought would appear in his file, and Deja had long since decided he liked Martin skinny. The rule was Martin ate only what Deja allowed. He moved on, ignoring the persistent bite of hunger in his belly. A contract nanny steered two holder children around him into the gift shop next door. He stepped back to let them pass before going on toward the clip shop, where the doors stood braced open to let in the fresh fall breeze. While Martin hesitated on its threshold, Julian Transit Security took hold of his arm, hard, just above the elbow.

Martin went still. Four of them. “Move,” the Lieutenant said.

They walked him down the concourse to baggage, down a narrow corridor to a storeroom, shut its door behind them, and faced him against a wall. He let them do it. Never fight back. Rough hands went over him, shoving, searching, unbuckled his belt, yanked it off. Someone jerked off his jacket. He put his hands back up on the wall right away.

“What’s your name?” the Lieutenant asked.

Martin told him. His clip had been in the jacket; he knew they had run it, so they had all his data. They knew his name. They knew everything about him now.

The Lieutenant slapped him across the ear. “Turn around.”

Martin did. He didn’t lower his hands. He wasn’t making that mistake. He locked them behind his head, and kept his eyes down, not looking directly at any of them. One of the Trackbacks was searching his jacket. Another was running his clip. The third lounged against the door, his Lopaka pup not-quite aimed at Martin’s belly.

“Who’s your contract holder?” the Lieutenant demanded.

“Deja Lord Strauss, West Country.”

“Long way from Strauss Estate.”

Martin licked his lips. “Lord Strauss is at the university.”

The Lieutenant smacked him again. “Get your hands down.”

He did, keeping them well away from his body. Don’t put your hands down until you’re told. Don’t put them near you – are you reaching for a weapon? Don’t close them into fists, and don’t ever use them shield yourself, you filthy cot, did you raise your hands to me?

“Pretty clothes.” The Lieutenant said, fingering the hem of dark green jersey Martin wore. “I don’t think I’ve had a cot dressed this sweet before. What is this? Is this a pullover?”

“Jersey, sir,” Martin said.

“It’s a jersey, Collins.”

Collins was the one by the door, with the Lopaka. “What’s that bit at his neck, I wonder? That silk bit?”

“That’s a loop-tie, Collins,” the Lieutenant said severely. “Were you raised in a field?” Taking hold of Martin’s tie, the Lieutenant worked at its knot, making it more even. “Where is Strauss this afternoon?”

“Meeting, sir.”

“Strauss at a meeting, and you’re tailing off to – where is it, now?”

Martin swallowed. “Errand in Paris. Lord Strauss knows – I ain’t tailing it. I’m not.”

“Off to Paris on your own? We’re meant to believe that’s dandy with your holder?”

Martin knew Deja’s permission was on file, that these Security knew he had leave to be out. He lowered his head, trying to think of a way to say so which wouldn’t sound like arguing with a JTS Lieutenant.

Like most Security, these were Service class, with all that entailed. Their bones and teeth all showed evidence of a scanty childhood; and Transit Security did not get the top recruits. Full Security and Parliament Security got those. (Labor Security, as everyone knew, got the dregs.) The Lieutenant, like his men, had a narrow face; two front teeth were alloy replicants. He was dark, with tawny skin, which would not have made his parents happy. Not all Lord Holders were fair, but everyone believed all holders were. Contract blood, that was what made babies dark, and short, and ugly.

Martin himself had been well-fed as a kid; also, he was uphill, from space, which meant he’d gotten the nanotropic treatment given to most kids raised in space. That alone made him twice as healthy, and five times as good-looking, as the average native-born Julian Service class. Which made him, with these as always, a target.

“Boy talks proper, Collins, did you notice?” said the Lieutenant. “For a dirty little cot, I mean.”

“I did notice,” Collins agreed.

“Educated cots, Collins, those are the boys who end up in the hills. That’s what I find.”

“Cots what think they’re clever. Too good to pick bugs.”

“Are you too good to work, Martin?”

He dropped his dialect a register. “I ain’t hill-country. Lord Strauss holds me.”

“Is that what I asked you, Martin?”

He lowered his eyes. “Sir.”

“Cot thinks he’s smarter than my questions. Cot thinks I’m too stupid to notice contracts lie. You don’t think I know half you thieves in the cities are working for those terrorists in the hills?” He slapped Martin again. “Is it?”

Martin said nothing.

“Here’s what I wonder,” the Lieutenant added. “Why would Strauss need to dress his secretary so pretty?”

“I bet I can guess why,” Collins said.

The Lieutenant pulled Martin’s shirt out of his trousers. “Is Collins right? Is that why your holder lets you run our cities alone?” The Lieutenant unbuttoned the top button of Martin’s trousers. “And if that’s the case,” he said, “what else are you slipping past your Strauss when he’s not looking?”

Martin tried to swallow. “I’m just his secretary.”

“Let’s try him out,” Collins said. “See what sort a secretary he makes.”

His heart thumping, Martin lifted his head and looked the Lieutenant in the eyes. “Lord Strauss wouldn’t like that.”

The Lieutenant stopped. His eyes met Martin’s. Martin stared straight back. He had seen crew hooks do this, in the mines, in the quarries, when situations had been on the edge of going bad. Sometimes it had worked; sometimes it had not. He knew it was a risky move. He felt the energy in the baggage room gather and shift. Right as it peaked, he lowered his eyelids.

The Lieutenant caught his breath. “Are you threatening me?” he demanded, amazed.

“No, sir,” Martin lied.

The Lieutenant hit him, a smack across the face so hard Martin nearly fell down. “Get that shirt off,” he said, his tone incredulous, astonished. He couldn’t believe what had just happened; therefore, it had not happened. “Do it now.”

Martin took his shirt off, and his undershirt, and waited, apprehensively, to be told to undress further. Instead, the Lieutenant, handing the clothing to his men to search, just sneered. “Nice scars. How did you earn those?”

Martin rubbed blood from his nose. “Mines. And the quarries.”

This was not exactly lying: he had worked slate mines, and sandstone and granite quarries. Most of his scars were not from those contracts, though.

They hit him some more. He was careful not to give them trouble, and careful to let them see they were hurting him, and eventually they dumped him out on the platform, along with his clothing. He had just enough time to catch his train; he might not have, if a porter hadn’t seen him coming and dawdled in the door of the contract truck, keeping it from closing. As long as any door was open anywhere, a train couldn’t leave a station. The open door alarm made its weep-weep noise, and the station manager spotted the porter holding the door. “What’s the issue, Borden? Get that shut!”

“Right now, boss!” the cot shouted back. “Just get this clear, boss!”

“What clear? What are you on about?”

“Bit of trash in the grill, boss! Almost done!”

Martin went up the steps two at a time and was inside. The porter let the door slide shut. Inside the dim space, contracts laughed, muffled. Martin grinned at them, knocking the back of his hand against the porter’s shoulder. The porter smirked. The train hummed and caught power, lifting into action beneath them. Martin moved through the benches, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. Contract trucks, unlike the private compartments Martin rode in when he traveled with Deja, were manky and ill-ventilated, their small windows covered with heavy wire mesh. At least this truck had benches and a pisser, along with a tap of drinking water. Martin had ridden in trucks without any of these. This one wasn’t even very crowded.

He washed up in the pisser as the train gained speed leaving the city, and inspected his face in the tin mirror, trying to decide if Security had left bruises. Deja, he knew, would find some way to make what had happened his fault. In any case, JTS would file a report, and a copy of that would be linked Deja. Better just to tell him.

The porter braced his shoulder in the scrub doorway. “What them Trackbacks want with you, then?”

Martin glanced at him in the mirror, dried his face with the inside of his jersey – he had forgotten his handkerchief, as usual – and came out. All around the truck, sprawled on benches or squatting on the floor, contracts looked up, alert with interest. Martin gave them all details he could; none of these made anyone happy. What he had done, using his mouth, that should have gotten him tanked, not set free. Keep your teeth together, that was the first rule you learned, if you lived to learn anything. “I’ve got Lord Strauss at my back,” he explained. “That’s all. It was a rat mad play. Ain’t should have worked.”

The porter shook his head. “What should, then?”

“Nothing,” one woman said. “Nothing’s working. Them terrorists in the hills, they’re gone get us all killed.”

“Ain’t terrorists,” snapped another woman. “They fighting to end the system. You like being a slave, is it?”

“You prefer dead?”

“Rather slave? Make your choice, bint, stay on those knees.”

The porter hissed and circled his finger at the walls of the truck: meaning the holders might well have feeds live. Everyone shut up, glowering at one another. Martin didn’t for a moment believe the truck was hot – the porter would have shut him up a deal sooner – but he retreated, finding a bench in a corner where he could brace his back, and watched through the small bits of the window as estate fields shot past, interspersed with wide stretches of forest and tawny grassland. The fields, plowed over for winter, were empty. Once in a long way, a herd of sheep spread over some high hill, with two or three cots huddled against the wind trailing in its wake. The estate houses were few and distant. No Lord Holder wanted to live near a train, not as noisy as they were at speed. Those Martin saw were far-off, and shielded by dense trees.

In the truck, contracts had gotten out handhelds. These were not labor cots, but personal contracts, like Martin: house-girls, cooks, physicians. Another had taken out a sint and was messing about with it. Martin hated music. Others had cards or were drawing tup boards on the floor of the truck. Martin did not have his handheld, since Harper still had it. His shoulders drawing tight at the racket of the music, he considered getting in on one of the card games, and went back to looking out of the window instead. He found that, as annoyed as he was at Harper, he was wistful about having to drop the lecture series.

It was his third term, thieving lectures this way. He had started by accident, shortly after Deja had moved them to Durbin: he had been wandering Barton Hall, which displayed rocks in glass-fronted cases along its corridors. Idling, looking at these rocks one morning when he should have been working – it was ridiculously easy to ditch work here at the university, really no sport in it – he had caught the edge of a lecture on the history of science, and moved closer, interested not so much in the lecture as in what it meant. That evening, he had slipped through the university’s nexus, hunting for anything on geology, and had stumbled on the trium recommended for someone aiming at a First in Geology. He had remembered, then, the link sent to Deja when they had first arrived, details about tuition benefits for dependents.

Dependents meant Deja’s children. Martin knew that. He had hunted up the link anyway. He hadn’t bothered with the file on how to apply for admission. Instead, he had gone to the file on putting together a course of study, and, working slowly, because the file was written the way holders wrote everything, obliquely, obtusely, he had put together a course of study for that first term – a beginning math course, a basics of science, an introduction to geology. He had to pick courses he could either listen in on from the corridors, or e-tutorials, which he could use Deja’s password to lurk his way through. Also he had to fit everything around the research Deja had him doing. This all limited his options seriously. Still, he had managed to find sessions to follow each term.

He brooded, now, watching the landscape run past. He supposed he had known he wouldn’t get by with it forever. Started thinking you had a right to it. Walked into that room and used the table like you had some right to be there.

Martin saw Paris from a long ways off, as the train cut across a hanging valley carved centuries before by glaciers. Ski lodges lay along the top of the valley, radiating out from Paris, where buildings shone in the late sun. Limestone, Martin guessed, watching the clarity of that light. Maybe marble. The train had made good time; they eased into the station ten minutes early. Martin slipped through the off-loading citizens snapping orders at their bootboys, keeping a wary eye on Transit Security as he headed for the station steps. The station was marble, he noted, and where it wasn’t, it was limestone.

He went down the steps two at a time and found a kiosk by the street. Running his clip through its port, he waited for the fee to clear and then asked it for the museum location. It wanted extra for a hardcopy, so he memorized the directions displayed on its screen. Paris was a small town, existing mainly to serve the Lord Holders who held the ski lodges; the directions weren’t complex.

The science museum was in a square with a half dozen others, history and art and nature museums, that sort of thing. There was even a law museum. Martin slowed as he went past its steps, wondering if Deja would like to visit a law museum, and wondering, too, what sorts of exhibits such a place would have. A copy of a post? A note someone made one time? The desk where someone died of boredom, reading someone’s file of opinions? He grinned to himself and went on up the steps of the science museum.

It was packed, scores of holder children and their contract nannies. The children, yapping and squealing, towing bright balloons or buzzing bots, ran from exhibit to exhibit: giant replicated beetles from Julian’s prehistory prowling through a replicated swamp; a ghosty-dark asteroid, mined with tunnels (though no replications of the contracts who had dug the tunnels); a farming village from a place called Hokkaido, on ancient Earth; a derelict space ship, supposedly floating between jump points after a Pirian ship had pirated it (Martin noted with amusement that the writing on the abandoned Pirian plasma rifle actually spelled out CHECK TRAYS FOR UTENSILS); the inside of a pig’s eyeball, with big handles so the children could move the lens and watch how this changed the focus. All this, on just the first floor.

Martin wandered these exhibits, staying away from children as much as he could – not easy, they skittered – and finally, when he saw he wasn’t getting anywhere, went back to the door and did what he should have done first, found a kiosk. It told him the serious exhibits were on the fourth floor. He climbed up there. Fewer children. Darker. Not so much flash. No bright toys. He breathed more easily, and began looking around. He found the geology exhibits and stalled, almost not making it to the meteorites at all. This place had good rocks.

He noticed eventually how much time he was using up, and moved on to the special exhibit. As Lord Harper had promised, it was worth the trip. He stayed until Security came to chase him out, saying the museum was closing for the day.

On his way out, he stopped at the museum gift shop and bought a clip that had the whole exhibit on it, it claimed, plus data. He also bought a present for Deja, a stony-iron meteorite, small as a plum. Standing in front of the museum, he felt stupid for having done it. He had never gotten Deja a present before. Well, why would he? It was Deja’s own money. He was Deja’s own. He held the meteorite in his hand and felt like an idiot.

“Martin?”

Tsilla Lord Strauss, smiling at the bottom of the steps. “What are you doing here?”

He dropped the meteorite in his jacket pocket and went down the steps. “Tsilla. What are you?”

“Skiing.” She hugged him. Surprised, he hugged back. She was lots taller. How old was she now? He tried to reckon in his head, meanwhile scanning the crowd for her keeper. He and Deja had been gone from Strauss Estate, it had to be over a year. So she would be – fifteen? He didn’t see anyone glaring, and someone would have been, had Tsilla’s governess been nearby.

He let go and stepped back. “Ain’t you at that school?”

“Well, technically.” Tsilla wrinkled her nose as she grinned. “Aren’t you? Where’s Papa?” She looked past him, up at the museum.

He explained Deja’s absence and asked, “Where’s your, uh…”

“I tailed it,” Tsilla confided, and laughed at Martin’s expression. “Come have dinner. Come on. I’ll buy you piles of food, Papa will never know.”

They set out down the street. “Skiing?” he asked.

“With the Xaviers.” She wrinkled her nose, not with amusement this time. “Mother wants to link me with the oldest, I believe.”

Martin tried to remember who the Xaviers were. One of the estates in the valley, he knew that. He couldn’t recall which, so he didn’t have a hope of remembering what the children in the family had been like. “We’re not liking him?”

“Smug. Also, I don’t like his gait.”

Martin bit down on his grin.

“Well, it is too,” Tsilla said.

“I ain’t say a word.”

“Like an agreement to breed your prize mare. It is exactly like that, and that’s exactly what I hate about it. I’m not here to ski. I’m here to be vetted. And why are you here?” she asked, stopping in front of a bistro.

Martin opened the door for her. Inside, she negotiated with the keeper, getting them a private room with full service. Martin stood back and kept quiet. What Deja would have to say about all of this, well, he would handle that later. When the keeper had gone off to make arrangements, Tsilla turned, eyebrows lifted in polite inquiry.

He wanted to laugh. When he and Deja had left Strauss Estate, Tsilla had been a skinny child in braids, earnest, bright, fierce. This Tsilla was such a miss. He buried the reaction, and told her about the exhibit at the museum, and, after the keeper had seated them, interrupted himself to persuade her against the nine-course holiday meal she apparently had in mind. “Let’s annoy your da more slowly,” he suggested.

Tsilla looked at him across the table. “I won’t be telling him about this.”

Martin stroked the silken embroidery of the upholstered bench, trying to think of a polite way to put it.

“You will?” she asked.

“Yes, miss.”

She studied him. Then, to the kitchen girl waiting for her orders, she spoke briefly, requesting a much smaller meal. When the contract was gone, she said, to Martin, “Why? And stop calling me miss.”

He pushed off his shoes and pulled up his feet to sit cross-legged. The room was snug, with cushioned booths around an inlaid table, a fire on the hearth, and mullioned windows in various jeweled colors, red, blue, gold. “Should I call you pet, as Deja does?”

“You can call me Tsilla.”

Martin looked at her across the table. Then he let out his breath and looked at the fire.

“Why are you going to tell my father about this?” Tsilla demanded.

“Because,” Martin said, “first, a contract doesn’t lie to his holder without a good reason. Second, because he’s probably going to find out. And when he does, what’s he like to think, if I ain’t tell him first?”

Tsilla was frowning. “You don’t lie? That’s—” She shut up.

Anger flashed through Martin’s belly. He hid it. “Right. That ain’t true, is it, miss? All cots lie.” He leaned forward to pick up his wine and drank it off.

She flushed. Temper, not shame. Martin felt fear. Don’t get a holder angry at you. Not even a fifteen-year-old holder miss. Maybe especially not a fifteen-year-old holder miss, he told himself, half-amused, half-terrified, and poured them both more wine.

The kitchen girl came in with the first course, baskets of different breads and a platter with an elaborate arrangement of meats, carved vegetables, and crystal bowls of various oils – walnut, olive, mani, both spiced and unspiced ghee, a tiny dish of lacqui oil. Laying all this out took time, and before she was gone, Tsilla had regained her temper. “Why do you talk that way?” she asked, dipping a bit of flatbread in the lacqui. “I always wondered. You’re off a ship. You shouldn’t speak like a field contract, you should speak Public.”

Martin glanced at her. He had spoken Public, among other languages, for his first fourteen years. Not the dialect used on this planet, which was, frankly, appallingly provincial, but the Public used by the crew of the Ladybird had been nearer to what Tsilla spoke than the field dialect Martin had been speaking by the time he had been a year on Julian.

“Is it just another thing you do to annoy people?” Tsilla asked.

“Try speaking Standard in the tanks, miss. See how long you keep your teeth.”

She arrested, a raw sliver of carrot halfway to her mouth.

“Or in the fields,” he added. “Or to a holder what ain’t think a cot can talk proper.”

“What are tanks?” Tsilla asked. Martin laughed. “Don’t. Don’t laugh at me. I’m trying to…I don’t know anything. Can’t you see I’m trying to understand?”

He rubbed his ear. “Miss, your da finds out I’m talking to you about this, what do you think happens?”

“I won’t tell him,” she promised. He gave her an exasperated look. “All right. Then I’ll tell him I ordered you to.”

“Oh, that should work.”

“Please. I want to know.”

He exhaled. Then he told her about the holding tanks on brigade ships, where the newly captured, newly convicted, or reassigned contracts were all dumped together. These weren’t actual tanks, but more like dormitories, with common areas between every four dorms, and where, unlike in some field barracks, an attempt was made to keep order. “For instance,” Martin explained, “when it was time to eat, Brigade Security made sure no one took your food. Plate got issued to you, you got to eat it.”

“That’s not true in the field?”

“It depends. Your da’s barracks, what I hear, cots get fed. Not many go without on Strauss Estate. Which ain’t true everywhere. Some places, you know, the boss underfeeds the contracts because they think it makes us more manageable. Other places, where the manager or the holder ain’t intervene, boss skims the board money. That happens all the time. It’s happened plenty of the contracts I’ve worked. Other places, cutting rations is one way boss deal with lazy cots. You ain’t work hard enough, or boss ain’t think you’re working hard enough, instead of feeding you stick, boss just cuts your dinner. Sometimes it ain’t even that, though,” he added. “Sometimes it’s just boss can’t bother. This last estate I was on, up there in the North Country, that place, boss just dumped the rations in the yard at night. Your share mixed with everyone else’s share. If you ain’t get your paws on it, hope you like being hungry.”

The kitchen girl brought in the next course, meat rolled in thin fried bread, sauce on the side. Martin, reminded how much he hated being hungry, put too much on his plate. The nanotropes made it especially bad for him: the treatment he’d had as a kid meant his body healed itself whether he was getting fed or not; meant he’d been driven half crazy with hunger, sometimes, with his body demanding fuel for the ‘tropes, driven to do things he liked to think maybe he wouldn’t otherwise have done. Though, well, who knew? And all ash in the wind now.

Haunted by evil memories, he talked more than he meant to as they ate their way through the evening. Tsilla had a deal of questions: what Martin meant by “actual” tanks; and how often he had been in the Julian Security tanks; why he’d been there, on various occasions; what had happened to him, why he had been arrested, originally. “My mother says what your labor contract says is a lie. She says you’re not really a pirate.”

He warped his mouth. “Well.”

She flushed. “Your contract says that. Convicted for piracy and attempted murder of a Republic Naval Officer in Commission of his Legal Duties.”

He made a show of looking at the elaborately carved mechanical clock over the fireplace. “I need to catch the train. Maybe you could tell us a bit about you now. Your da will want to know.” She looked annoyed. “I answered your questions,” he pointed out. “Fair’s fair.”

“You haven’t! You aren’t! Tell me why you’re in the system!”

“Come on. How’s that school?”

Sudi had insisted on a fancy East Country university. Martin knew why, too: to keep Tsilla away from her da’s university, and more importantly away from her da.

Tsilla flung herself back on her sofa, her eyes, the same clear amber-brown as Deja’s, going hard. The only one of the five children Deja and Sudi had produced that resembled Deja, she shared his long narrow frame, his quick, impatient intelligence, his pale skin and long fingers. All she had gotten from Sudi was the hair, as inky-dark as Martin’s own, and this temper.

“It’s not right,” she burst out now. “My father and my mother used to be happy. Then you come along. Now he’s over here in the West Country and we never see him, and my mother’s alone, and when any of us try to talk to Papa about why, he acts like we don’t exist. Don’t you even care?”

Martin lowered his eyes.

“Answer me!” Tsilla demanded.

“Miss.”

She jumped up. “My mother says you’re a thief and a whore. Is it true?”

“Miss.”

She stamped her foot. “Stop that!”

He drew a careful breath. “I ain’t sure what you want, miss. Do you want me to make your da go home? Because, Tsilla, really, that ain’t something I can do.”

“You can,” she spat. “If you stop being so nice to him, if you – you could get him to sell your contract. You could. And then—”

“And he would go back to your mumma and you would all be happy again?” Martin shook his head. “Or would he buy up some other pretty boy? Nicer than me this time?”

Tsilla opened her mouth to argue, and then scowled, temper and grief mixing. “You just don’t want to try. You just care more about yourself than about my family.”

Since this was the truth, Martin had no argument. Why she thought it should be different was an interesting question. He looked away, down at the table.

“You don’t care about us.” Tears spilled. She pulled a delicate linen handkerchief from her pocket to catch them. “My father loves you. He took you out of those fields, he saved you, and you don’t care anything about him!” She began to cry in earnest, her face buried in the handkerchief.

“Oh, sweetling.” He went to cuddle her. “Of course I care about you.”

Calming her down took awhile, and all the reserves of his considerable charm. He coaxed and hugged and assured her he loved her da, he loved all of them, of course he did, and it got late, and later, and he fed her more wine, and more lies, and finally he had her calm enough to walk back to the funicular up to the ski lodges. He asked again about the school. As he had suspected, it was the school behind half of this. He promised to speak to Deja about moving her to a different school. “Mother won’t like it,” Tsilla warned mournfully. “All her friends like this school.”

Martin assured her that would be reason enough for Deja to have her moved, and she giggled, dabbing tears from her eyes.

Martin gave her a last hug – she hugged back a little too closely for his comfort, considering they were on a public platform – and then she climbed into the car and, thank shit, waved goodbye.

He booked his fare to Durbin, wincing when he saw the hour. He should be walking in the house right this minute. He checked the gate, saw he had ten minutes before it closed, and found a public desk. Lila answered. She said Deja was still with his guests. Martin asked her to take a message, saying that he had met with Tsilla and stayed for dinner with her, so he would be later than he had planned. Lila looked worried. “Lord Strauss is a gentleman,” Martin promised. “If he takes it out on anyone, it won’t be you.”

“Aright,” Lila said, dubiously.

“If he does, I’ll make it up to you.”

“Aright,” Lila agreed.

On the way back to Durbin, Martin had a dream about the ship, probably from Tsilla bringing it up. His mother, wheeling in the dark, slashing with a knife, just a small knife from the kitchen, not even a combat knife. The Republic Naval Officer laughed, his gun pushed against her head, and it blew apart and he must have made a noise, because the man spun, gun immense. His mother’s blood danced in the air.

He opened his eyes. The truck, like the one going up to Paris, was scattered with personal contracts, though fewer so late at night, and quieter. These weren’t playing sints or games; they were sleeping or talking or linking about on their handhelds. Martin went to the pisser, where he washed his face at the tap. He could remember almost nothing of what the Republic Naval Officer had done to him. To be fair, he tried hard not to remember. Only after these dreams did any of it come back: the man’s fist in his shirt, the smell of plasma, burnt blood and bone, his own terror hot in his mouth. He leaned on the sink, his fists gripping its metal sides, nausea sharp as broken glass in his belly.

Not really a pirate.

He vomited, abruptly, violently, into the sink. He managed, as the second spasm hit, to vomit into the pisser. The violence of the vomiting, as always, shook him. He held onto the walls, tried to rest between spasms. Eventually it was over. He cleaned up the small space as best he could and washed his face.

Outside, the contracts either had not noticed the noise or were pretending they hadn’t. Some were still asleep. Others, low-voiced, muted, were telling stories, the sorts of stories that did get told whenever cots got together: a half dozen field contracts had run from an estate in the West Country timber yards, been caught by Labor Security and though they had fought – they had armed themselves with thieved cutters, retooled so that they would fire short bursts, an inept sort of plasma weapon: every cot knew how to do that to a cutter, much good it did them since Security had to get within a few meters for it to be useful – they had been captured, three of them still alive, and dragged back to their estate, where, as was the usual practice, the runaways were put on their knees by the flagpole, shot in the back of the head, and their bodies burned.

After that a cook told another story, about a cook she had heard of in the Bragg Mountains who had mixed poison in the food of her holder’s family, killed all of them, four children, holder, holder’s wife, that fast, the physician didn’t have time to arrive. “It was because the holder had been raping her,” the cook said, “every night, that’s what I hear. Redbacks came in on helos, but before they could tank her, Lord Holders in the town got her.” The cook paused dramatically.

Martin didn’t really need to hear how this story ended. The rest of the truck was waiting, though, their eyes wide.

“Didn’t bother shooting her. Dragged her through the town,” the cook said. “Yelling names at her, howling. Poured the coal oil over her and lit her up still alive.”

Gasps and curses through the truck.

“After, they tore her body apart and carried bits away. That’s what I heard.”

Other cots had other stories, this contract attacking his boss in the field, this holder and what had happened here. Martin didn’t exactly want to listen, but it was hard not to. Only a few stories got told about those who made to the mountains and might be mounting a resistance. Martin never knew whether to believe in these contracts or not. Certainly Julian Security acted like they were actually up there. Certainly the few times Deja had taken him along, the Julian Parliament acted as though the Contract Revolution was real. But Martin knew better than anyone how paranoid and delusional Republic politics could be.

Tired, sore from vomiting and from dealing with Tsilla, he moved away to lie on a bench in the rear of the truck. He was thinking what Tsilla had said, how he didn’t care about her family. He put his hand over his eyes, over the hot pain behind them, trying not to remember what had been done to him. He had been fourteen when the Republic Navy had boarded the Ladybird; fourteen when he got sold for the first time, to that fucking stonecutter, on an Educational Labor Contract: that was what it had been called. It had been educational, all right.Not that the stonecutter had been the worst. Martin wished he had been the worst of his holders. Third holder had been the worst – what had happened to him on that estate, he still didn’t know. Things so bad he only remembered them in the worst of his dreams.

None of his holders had been cakes and tea. This contract, though, Deja Lord Strauss, was soft enough: plenty of clothing; indoor work, easy to ditch; and maybe he didn’t get enough to eat, but he got fed every day; not to mention, now that they were away from Strauss Estate at least, he hadn’t gotten the stick in months.

And Tsilla thought he should push Deja into selling him? He cursed under his breath, fighting the pain behind his eyes and the nausea and the memories that wouldn’t quit drumming.After a bit, he got up and went into the pisser to vomit again.

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