Akila

Sam Coe is a contradiction that mostly works.

He's the kind of man who quotes frontier law and then solves problems with a rifle, who wears his principles like a work jacket — practical, a bit worn, never coming off. His daughter Cora is eight years old and has opinions about everything and is not wrong about most of them. She told me within twenty minutes of meeting me that my ship's paint job was a classic. I don't think she meant it as a compliment. I told her I couldn't change it because that's the Mantis's Ship. She seemed to decide that was an acceptable answer and moved on to having opinions about something else.

Akila City is the capital of the Freestar Collective, which means it is, by definition, the largest concentration of people in the settled systems who have decided that the UC can mind its own business. The walls are not symbolic — there are things outside them that will kill you, and the city has learned to live with that fact the way frontier settlements learn to live with most facts: practically, without making too much of it. Inside the walls it feels like a place that built itself up from the ground rather than down from a plan. I liked it immediately.

The maps Sam needed were locked in a GalBank vault — part of the legacy of Solomon Coe, Sam's ancestor and the founding figure of the Freestar Collective. A Ranger. The kind of man who has statues. Literally, in fact, he has one in the middle of Akila city. Sam had the family name and, apparently, a claim to what Solomon had left behind.

Unfortunately this very Galbank was being robbed by a gang when we arrived.

Fortunately, it was a bunch of two-bit Shaw Gang members who I was able to convince to stand down before they made things any worse, so we didn't have to bloody up the bank. I am genuinely unsure how I managed to do it, I was sweating bullets the whole time. Thankfully we spoke through a sort of doorbell system on the outside so the gang members couldn't see it.

Once that was over, what we found in the vault instead of the maps was a message from Jacob Coe, Sam's father: come say it to my face.

Jacob and Sam look nothing alike at first. Jacob wears the Coe name like a title — the vault, the legacy, the praise of everyone in the one city he never steps foot outside of. Sam wears a rifle and a work jacket and hasn't been home in years. You'd think they'd disagreed about everything and gone separate directions.

Standing there watching them go at it, I started to think it was the other way around. Jacob has the statue. Sam has the life — out on the frontier, solving problems with his hands and his principles, answering to nobody. Solomon Coe didn't build the Freestar Collective by sitting at home. He built it the way Sam lives: moving, deciding, not waiting for permission.

Jacob doesn't want to give Sam the maps because Sam left. Sam left because he didn't want to be the descendant of a great man. He wanted to be a man. The argument they were having sounded like it was about the maps, but the longer it went on the more I realized it wasn't about the maps.

I talked Jacob around eventually. He's not unreasonable — just certain, and certain men respond to having their expectations met far better than to a counter-argument. I told him the sooner we got the maps, the sooner Sam would be out of his hair. He handed over the maps like it was his idea.

Back out in the dusty air of Akila City, Sam spread the maps. Solomon Coe had noted a scanning anomaly on his first arrival — the kind of thing you log and come back to. That anomaly was almost certainly the artifact. It was also, as it turned out, the current location of the Shaw Gang's base of operations.

The Shaw gang had set up outside the walls, in the cave system where the artifact was buried. They weren't there for the artifact specifically — from what I could piece together, they'd stumbled into the location and decided to make it their base because the artifact's field kept the local wildlife away. Practical, in its way.

They had numbers. Guns, robots, turrets — the full setup of people who expected to be left alone and had made arrangements accordingly. Only Sam was with me. We didn't discuss a plan so much as read the same situation and arrive at the same approach.

It took a while to get through. The cave ran deep, deeper than I'd expected, and they'd had time to layer things properly. By the end of it the place was quiet and we were at the bottom, where the artifact sat embedded in the rock like it had been there since before anyone thought to build walls against the wildlife.

Shaw herself was waiting on the way out. She looked furious, but cautious. If she had JUST been furious, it's likely her dozen or so men would have opened fire the moment we walked out. But this was already over and the only remaining question was how it ended for her specifically. After some exchange of words, She let us pass.

Unfortunately, the Ashta that came to scout out this now artifact-less encampment were not so big on words. I helped Shaw take out the beasts, for which she was grateful, and we finally made our way back to the starport.

He was at the bar when we got back to the starport.

Same suit. Same stillness. I recognized him before I’d fully registered why, the way you recognize a feeling before you name it. I sat down a few seats away and he turned toward me, or did whatever the suited equivalent of turning toward someone is, and we picked up roughly where we’d left off in New Atlantis — as though the conversation had been paused rather than ended.

He said something that I’ve been chewing on since. That everyone, always, was trying to implement their own vision of how the world ought to be. The Freestar Collective wanted freedom — and would kill to protect it. The UC wanted order, and had built a military to enforce it. Constellation wanted knowledge — and sent people into danger to get it. The difference between the honest ones and the rest was just whether they admitted what they were actually doing. Most people dressed it up. Called it duty. Called it the greater good. The honest version was simpler: “I want this. I’m willing to use force to have it.”

I didn’t push back the way I had in New Atlantis. I wasn’t sure I disagreed.

He left before Sam found me.

Sam shook my hand when we got back to Akila. Not the both-hands shake Barrett does — one hand, firm, the way you shake hands with someone you've decided is worth shaking hands with. He said he wanted to come along.

Cora, from somewhere behind him, announced that she had already packed.

I told them both to get aboard the Razorleaf.