I. Lave
The tree grubs of Lave are the size of a forearm and taste, everyone
agrees, of nothing much at all. Kaira Vell had spent four years
packing them into crates on the equatorial plantations, and in all
that time the only thing she had learned worth knowing was that the
crates went up and almost nothing came back down.
She watched them go from the loading yard: a freighter lifting through
the rain haze every afternoon at four, dwindling to a bright point,
gone. Someone was up there. Someone was always up there, and it was
never anybody from the plantations.
The ship cost her everything. It was a Cobra Mk III with a hundred
thousand hours on the frame, a pulse laser that had been fitted twice
and repaired four times, and a previous owner who had signed the
transfer without once looking up. The station clerk gave her a hundred
credits of settlement money, a fuel tank filled to seven light years,
and a manual she never read.
She had expected to feel something at the transfer. What she felt,
mostly, was the specific dread of having no plantation to go back to.
"First ship?" the clerk said.
"Does it show?"
"You're the only one smiling." He stamped the transfer. "Rating,
harmless. Don't take that personally, everybody starts there. Some
people stay."
II. Diso
She filled the hold with liquor because it was cheap and because the
chart said Diso was three and a half light years away and industrial
enough to be thirsty. The jump itself was nothing — a lurch, a smear
of light, and then a different sun in a different place, hanging there
as though it had always been hers to look at.
What nobody had told her was how far out you arrive. The planet sat
ahead of her like a coin held at arm's length, and it stayed that size
for a very long time. She learned the torus drive from the panel
markings, the way you learn anything when there is nobody to ask, and
she learned it a second time twenty minutes later when it cut out
without warning and dropped her back to a crawl.
The reason it had cut out was drifting a thousand metres off her port
side, and it was a Sidewinder, and it was already turning.
Here is what nobody tells you about the first time. It is not
frightening in the way you have rehearsed. There is no music. There is
a shape on a screen that was not there before, and a small polite
chime, and an enormous quantity of time in which to make one decision
badly.
She was not brave. She wants that on the record. She hauled the
throttle back, opened the cargo hatch, and threw eleven tonnes of
decent Lavian brandy into the dark. The Sidewinder broke off to gather
it up. It never fired a shot, and neither did she, and she reached
Diso Station four hours later with an empty hold, forty credits, and
her hands still shaking on the stick.
She sold nothing at Diso, because she had nothing to sell, and spent
two days in the station bar working out what she had actually learned.
It came to three things. Pirates want the cargo more than they want
you. A pulse laser is not an argument. And the reason the old hands
all fly the same three routes is not that they lack imagination.
The docking took her six attempts. On the fifth, she understood at
last that the station was turning and she was not, and that the
letterbox would never come to her — she had to become the same shape
as it. On the sixth she went in clean, and the bay lights swallowed
her whole, and she sat in the silence afterwards for a full minute
before she could unclench her hands.
Afterwards she sat in the bay and laughed until it turned into
something else, and then she went and found a terminal and looked up
how much a docking computer cost. It was four hundred credits. She had
forty. She wrote the number on the back of the transfer papers and
carried it around for eight months.
III. The Milk Run
Leesti to Zaonce is three and a half light years and the most boring
stretch of space in the eight galaxies, which is exactly why it made
her.
Leesti is industrial and poor; Zaonce is industrial and rich and runs
the banks that own most of what passes between them. Nobody grows
anything on either. So the trade is furs and liquor in one direction
and computers in the other, and the margins are thin, and the run is
safe, and you can do it four times a week until you have enough money
to do something stupid.
Kaira did it for five months. She learned the market the way you learn
a language you are not being taught: that prices move day to day, that
a world with a poor economy pays more for what it cannot make, that
the fat margins on the board at any given moment are usually
contraband, and that the two commodities with the best returns in the
entire galaxy will get your hold scanned at the first station with
police worth the name.
She also learned the thing that is not in any manual, which is that
the run is where you practise. Every approach to Zaonce Station was a
docking she did not have to survive. By the end of the third month she
was going in at speed without thinking about it, matching the roll on
the way down the axis, and the six attempts at Diso had become a story
she told against herself.
Beam laser. Large bay. Fuel scoops. E.C.M. In that order, because in
that order each one paid for the next. She never did buy the docking
computer.
IV. Riedquat
Four months later she had a beam laser, a large bay, and a habit of
checking the scanner before she checked anything else. She had also
acquired the specific arrogance of a pilot who has survived exactly
enough to be dangerous to herself.
Riedquat is an anarchy. Everyone knows this. The chart says so, the
bulletins say so, and the old hands in the Diso bar said so at some
length, which is probably why she went.
They came out of the dark on the way in — three of them, in good ships,
spread wide enough that turning to face one meant turning her back on
the others. That was the moment she understood the difference between
pirates and a gang. Pirates are opportunists who happen to be
in the same place. These flew like a single animal with three heads.
She had time to think, with great clarity, that the arithmetic had
changed — that everything she knew about pirates had been learned from
opportunists, and that these were something else, and that the
difference was going to be measured in seconds.
Her aft shield went in the first eight seconds. She rolled, hard, put
the fresh face towards them, and ran for the planet with everything
the drive had, and the only reason she is alive is that the station's
Vipers were already scrambling, and that pirates who have decided the
arithmetic has changed are entirely willing to leave.
She docked with her energy in the last bank and a hole where a fuel
scoop used to be. The mechanic looked at the damage and then at her.
"Riedquat," he said. Not a question.
"I wanted to see it."
"Everybody wants to see it." He was already writing the bill. "Rating?"
"Competent, as of this morning."
"And you went to Riedquat." He tore off the top copy. "Look. The
rating goes up when you take fights you could lose. It doesn't say
anything about fights you couldn't win. Those are just dying with
extra steps."
He laughed at that — not unkindly, the way you laugh at somebody who
has just told you they are halfway up a mountain when you can see the
rest of it behind them.
V. Tionisla
There is a graveyard at Tionisla. It is not a metaphor. Two thousand
ships in slow orbit, hulls opened to vacuum, name-plates still legible
if you fly close enough — and pilots do fly close enough, all the
time, because the one thing every commander wants to know is what the
end looks like.
Kaira went at the end of her first year, on a whim she could not
explain. She took the ship in slow among them, running dark, reading
the plates. Traders. Bounty hunters. A Constrictor with its whole
spine laid open. A Cobra Mk III much like hers, older, with the name
Second Thoughts across the nose, and beside it, welded to the
frame by somebody who had known the owner, a plate that just read:
SHE WAS COMPETENT, AND THEN SHE WASN'T.
She sat with that for a while.
The graveyard is very quiet. That is the part people leave out of the
story afterwards, because it is not dramatic and it is the only thing
you actually remember: two thousand ships, absolutely still, and the
only sound your own air handling. Every one of them had been somebody
who filled a hold at Lave and thought, right, and went.
She thought about the clerk, who had been kind, and had been telling
her the truth, and had been wrong about which part mattered. Most
commanders make Competent and stop. That is not a warning. It is a
description of the exact place where the game either ends or begins,
and it is a choice, and almost nobody notices they are making it.
Then she turned the ship around, laid in a course for the far side of
the chart, and went looking for the rest of the mountain.
— and that is where you come in.