The Gilded Cage (2 page)

Still, today was the day to play nice. He needed the goofball even more than usual now, and was going to have to ask for the sort of favor that would forever change their relationship. Even Javier would figure that out soon enough.

After all, the man was an excellent poker player. Almost as good as his captain.

Zakhar wondered where they might have ended up if they could have been friends, instead of…whatever they were. Slavery was technically illegal on most worlds. And Javier wasn’t exactly a slave. Close, but not exactly.

Technically correct was always the best kind.

Debt bondage was perfectly legal. A handful of years and Javier’s debt should be paid off. If they managed to loot
A’Nacia
’s orbital graveyard properly, he might even cut that to less than one.

Zakhar considered what this would cost him personally. The two men were both Academy graduates from Bryce. Officers. Gentlemen. Anywhere else, they would be friends. Brothers in arms.

But Javier still occasionally got that look in his eyes, when he thought nobody was looking. The one that said he was visualizing most of the crew hanging from yardarms in a public square.

Perhaps not all of them. Just Zakhar and Sykora and a few others.

Today was not that day. Javier had a smile on his face, almost a goofy one. Presumably, the thought of Djamila Sykora being held prisoner and threatened with execution had cheered him up.

Zakhar sighed internally, where nobody could hear it, and considered the bait he was about to dangle in front of that man.

Even Javier would listen.

Ξ

She hadn’t changed.

Well, she had, but it had been to apparently spend a lot of time hitting the workout machines and doing pushups and sit–ups in the morning. Javier supposed that her time with Sykora might not have been a total waste after all.
THAT
woman was all about running for three hours in full pack before breakfast, just to wake up in the morning.

Javier was practically allergic to that level of effort. Pushing his luck was usually enough exercise. He could hit the machines and the treadmill a couple times a week and be fine.

Wilhelmina looked good. No, freaking fantastic.

This meeting could have been done on
Storm Gauntlet
. She had a conference room the right size and purpose for this sort of thing. But instead, he and Sokolov had waited for the two ships to get close enough to dock, and then crossed over to the little vessel to meet.

Just the three of them.

Normally, Javier would have been iffy about this sort of thing, but Wilhelmina had been living aboard this vessel for several days, and had a nice perfume that had worked itself into every bit of fabric visible, from the pilot’s chair at one end of the room to the comfy sofa he had settled into.

Javier looked around him with a critical eye. He had lived in efficiency apartments larger than the interior of this ship. Rectangle–shaped when looking down from above, chopped at angles at belly–button level, to slope in to a roughly–pointed nose and stern, like a long, blunted diamond laying on its side. Two engine pods sticking out the back, with a jump–drive tucked between them, right behind and above the primary power unit.

Inside, a single room. Pilot station at the bow with a single chair. Sofa on one side wall, kitchenette on the other. Fold–down table and bench for eating. Storage closet on the starboard aft, head on the port aft, not far from the airlock entrance. Everything a muted seaweed green tone.

That’s why it smells so nice. She sleeps on the sofa.

Javier smiled to himself, stretched out, and crossed his legs at the ankles.

Wilhelmina had greeted them both with a hug and a peck on the cheek before retreating to the pilot’s chair. Sokolov ended up pulling the kitchenette bench down and perching on it rather than sitting too comfy next to Javier.

The three of them made up corners of an unhappy triangle.

“So where did she screw up?” Javier asked, to open the conversation.

He was an expert screw–up, but he also treated it professionally going in. Little miss Amazon war–babe was too spit and polish to pull off the sorts of risks he took for granted.

Wilhelmina was apparently thinking the same thoughts. She had pressed her lips together to suppress a smile.

“Perhaps a failure of paranoia,” she replied.

Javier blinked. He blinked again.

Was that even possible with Sykora?

He thought about it some more. Reconsidered everything he knew about the dragoon, aware that the other two people were now staring at him.

Nope
.

“Did you even make it to
Meehu
?” he asked finally.

Wilhelmina’s shoulders came down. Javier only now realized how tense she had been, seated over there, when it bled out of her.

What was making her nervous? Him? Really? Weird.

“We did,” she began after a brief pause, apparently to order her notes in her head. “Sykora had made some contacts with local fences to find a buyer for my old ship. The four of us: myself, Djamila, Piet, and Afia, had just finished dinner and were headed back to our hotel when we were ambushed. Djamila was stunned unconscious while the rest of us were captured.”

Javier watched her stop and take a breath, eyes flickering back and forth at some bad memory.

“How did you escape?” Javier asked quietly.

“I didn’t,” she replied grimly. “I volunteered to deliver the ransom message to Captain Sokolov.”

Javier looked around the cabin again. It smelled nice, but it wasn’t the ancient explorer they had set out for
Meehu
in.

“What happened to your ship?” he asked simply.

“It’s still there,” she said. “We had paid for a full month docking fees, expecting to need some time to find the right buyer. But it was too slow to get here, so I hot–wired the fastest runabout I could steal and ran as fast as I could. He still thinks it will take me three or four more days to get here to contact you, so we have at least that much a head start.”

“He?” the captain asked suddenly.

Sokolov had been so quiet, perched on that bench, that Javier had almost forgotten him. And he didn’t look surprised. Maybe she had already told the captain part of her story, and the rest of this was for his own benefit.

“Captain Abraam Tamaz,” Wilhelmina said simply.

But that look, right there, said it all.

One time, Javier had farted really loudly, the morning after an especially–bad rice–dinner–and–all–night–drinking session, and really stenched up the conference room in the middle of a centurion meeting. Sokolov got that same look on his face. Sour disgust, mixed with a dollop of angry, but holding his comments in and not venting them all over the crew.

Too busy being
The Captain
.

“You know the guy,” Javier said to the captain.

It wasn’t a question.

“
Storm Gauntlet
’s former Executive Officer,” Sokolov replied. “A few years before your time.”

“Bad feelings?”

“Tamaz wanted us to be more of a pirate operation and less of a business enterprise.”

“More?”

Javier had a hard time politely wrapping his tongue around that word, considering his place in this
enterprise
.

“More,” Sokolov smiled winter itself at him. “Send out a distress signal, and then massacre whoever shows up to rescue us. Raid small colonies, slaughter everyone, and steal all the hardware to sell to other colonies.
More
.”

For just a moment, Javier was able to pierce the captain’s veil and see the high–wire act the man had to walk every day, keeping an expensive former warship in raw materials and fresh socks, while not always having legitimate cargo to transport. The type of piracy Sokolov practiced was sometimes a lesser evil.

Javier experienced a moment of true empathy for the man. Then he carefully wrapped it up in tissue paper and put it in a box in his mind. That box he stored on a high shelf in a closet. And locked the door behind him when he left.

Sokolov and the rest of that man’s crew were still all going to hang from a
Concord
Fleet yardarm one of these days. Hopefully in low gravity. Javier would see to that when he got free.

And then a little light bulb went on, just like in the cartoons.

Sykora a prisoner, being held for ransom. He and the Captain having a private conversation with Wilhelmina.
Why
the three of them were having this meeting on her vessel, instead of aboard
Storm Gauntlet
.

Witnesses. Loose tongues.

Risk.

Poker was one thing. It was a game of will and perception and luck. Javier made nice spare change off the crew playing poker, especially the engineering deck. Those people were amateurs.

Captain Sokolov was playing chess now. Probably a multi–level version Javier had seen in a bar once, with pieces representing fantasy armies on the ground, while other armies fought in the heavens and underworld. Too much like work, but some people liked it.

Everything clicked.

They wanted his help. Needed it. Absolutely relied on it to pull off whatever crazy stunt they had planned. To rescue Sykora.

Huh
.

Javier actually looked both directions, like crossing the street, and then at Wilhelmina, and then Sokolov.

Time passed.

Captain had a hard look on his face. Javier imagined his own mirrored it. Wilhelmina sat perfectly still and quiet as she watched.

“I’m in,” Javier said into the quiet whisper of the air systems.

Just like that.

Ξ

One of the advantages to being The Captain, as Zakhar saw it, was generally being able to pick the field of battle. One of the disadvantages was that he occasionally forgot that behind that facile, fast–talking tongue on his Science Officer was a first–rate mind.

Something had happened to his crew when Wilhelmina Teague had first been found, trapped in cryo aboard her ancient ship inside an even–more–ancient mine field. Even before she had been rescued and defrosted.

He couldn’t explain what, or why, but it had.

Sykora had become emotional and flexible about rules that used to be iron–clad. Almost human, at least for a few days. He’d never seen that in all the years he had known her, but she got over it quickly, like a bad flu.

And Javier had volunteered to walk away from enough money to possibly buy his freedom from slavery. Almost acted like a grown–up, for even longer.

The two of them had even stopped bickering long enough to make common cause.

Over Wilhelmina.

Zakhar had considered hiring Teague. It had made his ship a better place to have her around. But it had also disrupted everything in unsettling ways. He was not a man enamored of sudden, chaotic change.

He locked eyes with his Science Officer.

“I haven’t asked yet,” he growled.

It didn’t help that the two of them tended to think along similar paths at times like this, an outcome of the years at the Academy on Bryce, followed by active duty careers with the
Concord
Navy.

Brothers in arms.

“You will,” Javier replied, now in his serious voice.

“What will I ask, Aritza?”

“We’re going to go rescue Sykora. You want my help. You want me to do something nobody else on this crew can do.”

“And you’re in, just like that?” Zakhar asked.

“You wouldn’t understand why,” Javier replied coldly, as if from a great and remote mountaintop.

Zakhar agreed with that assessment.

He carefully pulled himself back from an unnecessary emotional confrontation. Aritza and Sykora had taken their hatred to a new and dangerous place because of Wilhelmina. Before that, it had almost turned into a teenage sibling rivalry. With him as the father in a sitcom.

Now they were comrades in arms themselves.

Unsettling
.

“We could use words like honor, or duty,” Javier continued, his tone dropping to almost a whisper. “You own my ransom, so you have both a carrot and a stick, should you choose to exercise it.”

“And you’ll volunteer to help rescue her, just like that, and then come back to
Storm Gauntlet
as if nothing happened? As if you weren’t thinking about your own freedom and an open door? Or taking this runabout and disappearing?”

“That’s right,” Javier said flatly, glancing over at Wilhelmina in some random and unexplainable way.

Just what the hell had happened between Aritza and Sykora?

Zakhar had the feeling he would go to his grave with that question unanswered. Perhaps God would be willing to explain it for him, if he made it there.

Zakhar looked at the woman as well.

She was carefully not moving, as if to not disturb the emotional balance of the room. She had changed as well, but he hadn’t spent that much time around her from the time she was defrosted until she had left, in order to baseline her behavior now.

Older than he had first thought. Possessed of a stillness he attributed to her being some kind of missionary, a Shepherd of the Word. Whatever that meant now, five centuries later.

Brilliant and broadly educated. Charismatic, and entertaining, and exotic all at once.

Poised.

“Wilhelmina?” Zakhar asked simply. “You’re sure about this?”

She nodded once. “I am, Captain Sokolov.”

“Aritza,” he continued, turning now to the other thorn in his side. “Wilhelmina has asked me to send you with her back to
Meehu
, to help rescue Djamila. As you said, your return here is a matter of honor. Something between gentlemen of
Bryce
. Will you honor it?”

Javier stood up from the sofa, suddenly every inch a
Concord
officer, probably more so than he had ever been when he had worn the uniform.

“I will, captain.”

Wonder of wonders.

Zakhar stood as well. Two short strides put him close to the man. He stretched out a hand.

Javier shook it.

“Good luck, Javier,” Zakhar said quietly.