Kris felt a lurch inside her. ‘Rollo,’ she said, overlapping with Olli’s ‘Captain . . .’
‘Let’s call it an academic exercise, see right?’ Rollo said with false joviality. Solace looked from him to the rest of them and stepped up to lean into the cockpit. ‘Twin accelerators here, not much against any serious defences but . . . good. Good for light work. Ready ammo’s limited but there’s a mass stripping system that’ll keep them fed at the expense of . . . well, mass. Mass from the end-segments. There’s a single narrow beam laser that can be powered from the reaction drives. I think . . . seven minutes’ continuous burn at full power before you’re dry. The gravitic drive isn’t adapted for offensive deployment but it’s good for shielding – and segmentation defences are built in too.’
‘I don’t even know what that means,’ Rollo told her briskly. ‘Quite the little gunboat you’ve loaned us there, child. Right now, you’re the favourite of my family.’ His smile was bleak.
‘Captain, what’s the plan?’ Olli asked him.
He stood on the ramp, irresolute, for a few moments, and then sat at the edge of the Joan’s hatch to confront his crew, hands clasped in his lap.
‘Kris told you all the nonsense we went through down there. Crazy shellfish wants to own us, let us earn our own ship back by doing its shit work. Wants to own Idris, too. And I know how those deals go. You never do earn out, on a contract like that. Once owned, always owned.’
Kris nodded, and everyone else was of the same mind. If you got in with the mob you didn’t just walk away. Not unlike what Idris had been saying about the Parthenon, but she knew where she’d rather take her chances.
‘So my Vulture comes in-system in a few hours, most likely, so says our Idris. Then they bring it here, repurpose it, strip it, who knows? Who knows what they want with the Oumaru even – which Crazy Shellfish says it owns. None of our business. We don’t want it, that much I do know. But the Vulture is my bird and I am getting her back. Because the Parthenon, all gods help us, has given us a fighting ship.’
They stared. Probably most of them had seen the direction he was pulling in, but to hear it said out loud was flat-out madness.
‘Idris . . . you flew in the war,’ Rollo said. ‘And Solace, you were a pilot?’
‘Gunnery,’ the Partheni said soberly. ‘But I can fly.’
‘We strip out this junk.’ A thumb jerked at the suspension pods. ‘We tool up with what we can get. We intercept the fuckers, hack the Vulture’s doors open, cut with the laser if we have to. We take back our ship before it hits orbit, and piss right off out of this system and never look back.’
Kittering raised his shield arms urgently. ‘Also Broken Harvest are made enemies forever!’
‘They killed Barney and Medvig,’ Rollo reminded him flatly. ‘They are no friends of ours. And – I want my ship back.’ His shoulders sagged a little. ‘And this is dangerous stuff, my kiddoes, my fry, nothing you signed up for. You want to make your own way, we can drop you at an orbital. Ships go from here to everywhere, every day. Kit will cash you out; you’ll not go hungry. You can cash yourself out too, Kit, if that’s what you want. I’ll hold it against nobody. None of you told me “pirate” when I asked you what skills you brought.’
‘I’m in,’ Olli said, almost before he’d finished. ‘Captain, I will cut that Tothiat bastard a new asshole. I am in.’
It’ll just heal up again, thought Kris, recognizing a thread of hysteria within herself. She looked at Idris, surely the least martial of all of them. He was looking back at her. They came as a pair, after all.
‘Think about it,’ Rollo told them. ‘Nobody’s arm gets twisted on this. No shame in walking away.’ Though every one of them who dropped out would be a hole below the waterline in the plan’s chances of success.
There was a spacer’s dive near the Castigar-patrolled dock, where they’d holed up, and Kris and Idris retreated there to mull it over. Olli stayed with the Joan, already ripping out the suspension beds so they’d have somewhere to muster prior to the proposed action.
‘I think Kit will bail,’ Kris told Idris, when they’d ducked into a corner booth with beakers of acrid, fake kaffe.
He nodded, not looking at her, or at anything really, just staring into infinity in that way he did. So she continued.
‘I think the Partheni . . . I don’t know. I mean she probably trained for this sort of thing. All second nature. She, Rollo and Olli could likely do this with blood to spare. Not her fight, though. But she . . . I think she really wants to be one of us, you know? Which is weird, given she’s basically a secret agent for a foreign government.’