📖 Stories

I spent twenty-seven thousand credits on a Marksman's AA-99 last week and hadn't had a proper chance to use it yet. So when the Denebola I-b lead from the Spacer slate panned out and I found a compound crawling with Spacers on approach, I told the crew to stay with the ship and went in alone.

This was partly practical and partly I just wanted to see what I could do on my own.

The compound had layers — not just Spacers, but a story underneath the Spacers, assembled piece by piece through slates and terminal recordings as I worked through the rooms. There is a figure the Spacers call the Mantis. The name carries weight in a way that a name attached to a real person usually doesn't — it's become mythology, which means it's bigger than whoever originally wore it. The Spacers in that compound were scared of this place in a way that had nothing to do with whoever was currently alive in it.

It... reminded me of Batman.

The deeper I went, the more specific it got. The compound was the Mantis's base. I learned by the end of this that the current (or most recent) iteration of the Mantis was a woman named Dorianne, and she'd died of illness — not in combat, which felt important somehow — and before she died she'd tried to reconnect with her son Leon. She hadn't told him what she was. She'd called him here under the framing of an inheritance, which was true, just not the kind he'd assumed. He came to collect whatever she'd left him without knowing she'd spent her life as a living terror to criminal operations across the settled systems.

Leon's recordings trace his confusion from the surface entrance down into the facility, piecing together the same story I was piecing together a week later. He didn't want it. That comes through clearly. He didn't want the Mantis or the legacy or any of it. He wanted money, not a legacy, not even to understand his mother, and instead he got a lair.

He didn't make it out.

The mother-son angle didn't land for me the way it might for someone else. My relationship with my own mother was not good — borderline abuse at moments, if I'm being honest — and I've spent most of my adult life carrying the faint social guilt of not particularly caring for her. Society is very insistent about mothers. That insistence doesn't do much when the reality doesn't cooperate. I felt more for Leon than for Dorianne. I understood not wanting anything to do with your mother, and then ending up suffering for her instead.

She'd left a clue to the laser hall, though apparently none of the spacers before me figured it out — a corridor of pressure plates that triggered turrets, with no obvious answer posted anywhere. What she'd left was a recording where she mentioned a phrase she loved. Sic Semper Tyrannis.

Thus always to tyrants.

I know that phrase. From Brutus and from John Wilkes Booth and from a history I grew up with — it attaches itself to the most dramatic acts of defiance in the record, for better and worse. That a vigilante had adopted it as her motto, had loved it enough to encode it into her legacy, is something I've been sitting with since I walked out of there.

I spelled out TYRANNIS as I crossed the floor. The turrets stayed quiet.

Past the hall were robots, and past the robots was the inner sanctum, and in the sanctum was the suit.

It's white. I'd expected black — the Batman instinct — but it's white, and clearly designed to unsettle in a different way. The Mantis wasn't hiding in the dark. The Mantis was meant to be seen, in white, in the moment before things went very badly for whoever was looking.

There was also a ship.

I put on the suit before I left.

I didn't really decide to. I was standing in front of it and then I was wearing it. The practical argument exists — Spacers fear the Razorleaf on sight, that's genuinely useful — but I don't think that's why I did it. I think I just wanted something that was mine. Not borrowed, not inherited through circumstance. Mine, because I chose it.

The Razorleaf is not dramatically larger than the Frontier on the inside — I want to be clear about that, because I walked aboard expecting to finally have space and discovered that "larger" and "more spacious" are not the same thing. The crew will fit without someone sleeping in the cargo hold, which is progress. But what I keep coming back to isn't the square footage. It isn't Barrett's ship. It isn't Constellation's ship. Nothing in this century has been mine before this. The Frontier always carried the implicit asterisk of borrowed, temporary, someone else's. The Razorleaf has no asterisk.

I sat in the pilot's seat for a while. Then I flew it out.

The second test run was supposed to end at Mars.

Joe had been telling everyone who would listen about the Taiyo contract for weeks. His neighbour. The guy at the parts counter. The bartender who had stopped asking follow-up questions. Linda's algorithm was going to change everything, he'd say, and then he'd explain it in the wrong order and get the technical details slightly wrong and not notice, because the details weren't really the point. The point was that they'd built something together and it was going to work and after that everything was going to be different and wasn't that something.

Linda was the brains. Joe knew that, said it freely, was proud of it the way you're proud of something that belongs to you. He was the mechanic. He kept things running. Between the two of them they had everything they needed, and that had always been enough, and it was going to go on being enough because that's how things went when you were doing them right.

Jupiter was not Mars.

He sat in the cockpit after the grav drive spooled down and the viewport filled with pale amber and white, and his first instinct — genuinely, before the math caught up — was that it was pretty. His second instinct was that he should call Linda. His third instinct, arriving close behind, was to figure out what he was going to say.

She messaged before he'd worked that out.

Joe. Where are you? The telemetry says Jupiter.

He wrote back immediately, the way he always did, with the breezy confidence of a man who had never yet encountered a problem he couldn't fix given enough time and goodwill: Minor drift. I'm adjusting.

Come back. Something's wrong with the algorithm. I need to look at it again.

He looked at the algorithm. He found what he thought was the problem — a small thing, a rounding error, a variable weighted slightly wrong. The kind of thing a mechanic could spot, with the right eye.

He wrote in the ship's log: She didn't say that she didn't trust me to adjust her numbers. But I know what she meant.

He fixed it anyway, with his hands and his instincts and the absolute certainty of a man who had kept complicated machinery running for twenty years through sheer confidence that it would cooperate. He was a mechanic. He knew what things were supposed to do, and he knew how to make them do it.

He didn't tell Linda he'd changed it.

One more run. Then we're done.

Joe, please come back.

Taiyo's contract and we never have to worry again. I've got it, Lin.

There was a pause. He was already running the preflight.

I love you. Be careful.

He grinned and jumped.

The third jump ended somewhere that didn't have a name. Joe checked the star charts for forty minutes before he accepted that his correction to the algorithm hadn't been right either. Not even close. He still had fuel — that wasn't the problem yet — but he was between stars with a navigation system he no longer trusted and the growing understanding that he had made a series of decisions whose logic had seemed sound at the time.

He decided to pull CAPS out entirely. Revert to manual. He was a mechanic; he could fly a ship without a computer doing it for him, and once he was flying manually he could plot a real course to somewhere real and this would all become a story he and Linda told at dinner.

He had not run simulations on what removing CAPS would do to the ship's existing systems. He wrote in the log that he wished he had. The installation had gone deeper than he'd understood — threads of it woven through systems he hadn't expected, and pulling it out meant pulling out pieces of things it had quietly made itself part of. Three days of work to get back something close to functional. He noted this without apparent bitterness, in the methodical way of a man who is keeping busy on purpose.

Then he made the manual jump.

CAPS, somehow, was still in there. Enough of it. The jump landed him nowhere near civilization.

After that he sat in the cockpit and did the math. He'd learned enough statistics from Linda over the years to do it properly. The numbers were not good. He did them again to be sure, and they were still not good, and he sat for a while longer and thought about what to do with that.

He found a dataslate in the emergency kit and started writing.

Linda.

I've been doing some calculating...

He finished the note and read it back twice. It said what he wanted it to say. It didn't say everything — there wasn't enough space, and some of it he didn't have words for — but it said the part that mattered, which was that he knew whose fault this was and it wasn't hers, and that he hadn't spent these last days angry. He'd spent them thinking about her. About the kitchen table and the coffee and her finger pointing at the numbers he'd said he understood.

He set the dataslate on the console where someone might find it, if someone ever came.

He was still there when they did.

An indeterminate time later — long enough that the emergency lighting had started to flicker — a ship pulled alongside. Not a UC vessel. An elongated green thing, quiet on approach, like it had learned to move without being seen. Three of them came aboard. The figure in white went straight to the terminals. The other two — a woman with careful eyes, a robot that moved with unhurried precision — spread through the ship the way people do when they've done this before, checking compartments, cataloguing, not speaking.

The figure in white read all of the logs. Then found Joe. Then found the note on the console beside him.

The woman came back through eventually, done with her sweep. She started to say something and stopped. The robot appeared in the doorway behind her and also said nothing, which, for a robot that generally had something to say about most things, meant something.

The figure in white had the helmet off. Just a man, standing in the flickering emergency light, reading a dead man's letter to his wife. Not skimming. Reading. The kind of reading you do when the words keep meaning something new each time.

He read it again.

Nobody moved for a while.

When they left, the note went with them. The man in the white suit carried it.

Joe stayed.

I was still in Denebola when the distress signal came through.

VASCO fielded it before I'd fully processed what I was hearing. The LIST designation, he explained, stood for League of Independent Settlers — frontier families who'd claimed land out here beyond the reach of the UC and Freestar, trying to build something that belonged to them. He gave me this information in his usual manner, which is to say efficiently and without editorializing, and then waited to see what I was going to do about it.

I set a cruise heading for the signal's origin.

The man who came out to meet me had a rifle leveled before the Razorleaf had finished landing. He held it there for a moment — long enough to make the point — and then lowered it when it became apparent I wasn't a Spacer.

His name was Alban Lopez. He was genuinely surprised that I'd come, which I found strange. You send a distress signal into the dark and then express shock when something answers? I didn't say that. I made a mental note that he was the kind of man who complained loudly about the problems he'd caused himself, and filed it away.

His problem was this: the Spacers had taken over the Denebola system. Not just his land, but the whole system — four settler families cut off from each other, their communications satellites either taken offline or left to decay. He needed someone to get the satellites back up. He needed that someone to fight through whatever the Spacers had left guarding them. And then, if those satellites happened to re-establish contact with the other three families, maybe something could be organized.

I told him I'd handle it.

The satellites were spread across the system. Between each one, I had time to watch the stars drift past the viewport while the Razorleaf cruised on, unhurried, through the quiet between distances that would have taken lifetimes before grav technology made them unremarkable. There is something I keep noticing about space travel: that the scale is so far outside human intuition that the only honest response is to stop trying to feel it and just let it happen.

The Lopez satellite had three Spacer ships waiting. I cleared them and made the repair.

With comms re-established, Alban pointed me toward the remaining three.

The Banda satellite had three more. Same result.

Chanda Banda — a name that his parents either loved him very much or not at all to give him — seemed surprised to hear from anyone, let alone Lopez after I'd re-linked their comms. The conversation was brief, with Alban recommending a meet up.

The Lemaire satellite had three ships. I took them down and made the repair and waited on the comms.

Jackie Lemaire came through sharp and tired in the way of someone who had been holding things together through force of personality alone. She had words for Lopez even over comms, but agreed to meet in person.

The Wen satellite had no ships guarding it.

I noticed that on approach and understood what it probably meant before I'd finished the thought. I made the repair anyway. Ran the full sequence. Sent the connection request.

No response.

The system stayed quiet on that frequency. I sat with it for a moment — the particular silence of a signal that goes out and finds nothing on the other end — and then set a cruise heading for the rendezvous point.

The meeting was aboard a Lemaire family ship, which Jackie had insisted on and nobody had argued with. The three family heads were already in the same room when I arrived, which meant Lopez and Lemaire had been in the same room for several minutes, which meant the argument was already well underway.

Jackie's position was that Lopez was a scammer, that she wouldn't give him an ounce of Helium-3 if her life depended on it, and that she saw no reason to formalize an arrangement with people she didn't trust.

Chanda wanted everyone to work together and said so with the steady optimism of a man who had learned not to lead with how tired he was.

I let it run for a while. Then I talked to Jackie.

She had the most ships. She knew it. She'd framed that as having the least to gain from an alliance — if they were already the strongest family, why share? — and she wasn't wrong, exactly. I told her she had that backwards. The strongest family was the most visible target. The one the Spacers would come for first when they finished consolidating. She had the most to lose if this system didn't hold together, not the least.

She was quiet for a moment.

I may have also mentioned that driving Spacers out of an entire solar system was, objectively, a good story to tell.

She laughed. First real laugh I'd heard in that room. Then she said fine, she was in, but if Lopez pulled anything she'd leave him to the Spacers herself.

I told her that seemed fair.

Alban told me there were two clusters of Spacer ships that needed to be cleared before we could move on the station. He offered to send ships from all three families.

I told him to save them.

This was partly confidence. Partly I didn't want to be responsible for what happened to anyone else's family members if the fight went wrong. And partly — I'll be honest about this — I wanted to see what the Razorleaf could do in a real engagement, with something actually at stake.

Eight ships. Two groups of four, stationed at different points in the system. I cleared them in order, cruising between them, and by the time I reached the second group I'd found a rhythm that left me feeling unbeatable. A dangerous mindset, perhaps, but a boon in confidence for certain.

When I reported back at Lopez's farm on the moon's surface, he was excited to have won a bet with Chanda. At least he bet on my success, I suppose...

He then informed me that he hadn't been idle while I was risking my neck. he'd used the commotion to triangulate the location of their base of operations. That would be our next target, and this time we'd send everybody.

The base, a derelict star station in orbit over Denebola II, was the kind of structure that Spacers adopt the way rats adopt abandoned buildings — not because it's good, but because nobody else wants it. We came in together: the Razorleaf, and the ships from three families who two hours ago hadn't been sure they could share a room.

We cleared the ships around it. Then we boarded.

Muira was at my side through the interior. We'd done enough of these now that we had something like a system — I don't think either of us had named it, but it existed. She took one side, I took the other, and we met in the middle, and the Spacers in between had a very bad few minutes.

The station had been used as a staging point for a while. There was gear, supplies, weapons. There were Galbank safes ripped from somewhere and stacked against a wall, which raised questions nobody left alive was going to answer. I found the key eventually and discovered they were full of credits and good weapons, which I distributed between the Razorleaf's storage and crew.

When it was over I spoke with Alban on a bridge in the station. The system was clear. The families were talking. Something that looked like a future was taking shape out here in the dark, which is what they'd come out here for.

He offered the reward credits.

I told him to keep them.

He started to argue — out of form, I think, more than genuine protest — and I said what I actually meant, which was that their survival was less certain than mine. They were going to need those credits more than I was. The Spacers would be back eventually, or someone like the Spacers, and when that happened I wanted them to have every resource they'd earned.

He accepted that without making it sentimental, which I appreciated.

On the way back to the Razorleaf, Muira walked beside me and said nothing. Part of me wonders if she was disappointed with me for not taking the credits.

I thought about the Wen satellite on the cruise back out of the system. The signal that went out and found nothing. Four families who'd come out here together, and now there were three.

I don't know their names. There was nothing in the station records that helped. Somewhere between the dream and the attempt, the Wen family ran out of time, and I arrived too late to matter, and all I could do was make sure the same thing didn't happen to everyone else.

That's the job, I think. You can't save everyone. You do the math on what's still possible and you work the problem in front of you.

It doesn't make the silence any easier to sit with.