“Not all that shines is golden.”
Heavy clouds pressed in over the solitary continent of Palan, draping a deeper level of darkness onto the black city below. Shadows upon shadows clung to Walter like a film of oil. They slid across his metallic skin in dark pools as he stole through a dimly lit alley. Just ahead of him, two Senior Pirates led the way, their twisting route curving through the blackest part of the Palan night. Behind, two Junior Pirates-in-Training could be heard padding along after. Walter hurried to create some distance. He already considered himself more like those ahead of him than his fellow inductees behind.
Overhead, another roll of thunder tumbled through the city, reverberating off storefronts shuttered for the rains.
A habitual chill ran up Walter’s skin in response to the noise, his silvery lining pleading with him to get indoors. He ground his teeth and ignored the temptation to hide. There was more at stake for him that night than a mere promotion to Full Pirate.
The two figures ahead paused at an intersection and signaled for the others to stop. One of the moderators peeked around the corner while Donal and Pewder half-collided, half-clung to Walter’s back. The two boys, both Walter’s age, were frequent allies in his illicit raids. They had just enough potential to be useful to him—but not so much potential that they could try out for a clan higher up than the lowly Hommul.
Walter felt an unusual degree of annoyance at their presence. Almost as soon as the final test had begun, they had morphed in his unsettled mind into something other than onetime allies and future clan-mates. They had become rivals to be dispensed with, mere pawns in a game meant for much bigger things.
“Okay, let’s go.”
The lead pirate dashed across the empty street, leaping over the wide Palan gutters with practiced ease. The rest of the column followed; they ran between unoccupied cars leashed to floodposts and across old cobblestones worn smooth by the floods. The five shadowy forms slithered like a single snake into the alley behind the Navy headquarters and gathered amid bags of rotting trash. The two instructors calmly indicated the locked comm box bolted to the rear of the building.
A grumble of thunder rattled nearby windows. The group had little more than half an hour for all three of them to pick the lock and hack their way through the Human Navy’s defenses. If they passed this final test, they would win full status. If not, it would be another year of Junior Pirate menial duties and zero pay.
Walter leaned close with his pick set and noted the scratch marks around the locking mechanism where previous teams had conducted their tests. That year’s graduation challenge was to piggyback the Navy’s longdistance array and send a prank message to Earth HQ. It was elementary stuff. The hard part was to perform with the rains looming and the moderators watching.
Walter chose the proper pick from his set, but before he began his work on the lock, he patted the ID card in his chest pocket to make sure it was still there. Nobody but he knew it yet, but that year’s challenge was going to be quite a bit different from what the Clan leaders had planned. There was more to promote that night than Walter’s status, alone. The entire Hommul clan was about to be lifted by the floods.
And not even Walter knew how far…
UNAUTHORIZED COMPONENT DETECTED_
PROGRAM WILL TERMINATE_
END OF TRIAL PHASE_
Walter hissed at the computer. He slapped its side with his silvery hand. Bending over the terminal, he tried another hack he knew.
The machine beeped. The words INVALID ACCESS_ flashed across the screen, and then the entire unit began shutting itself down.
Now Walter was pissed. He shoved the keyboard aside, pulled out his multi-tool, and ducked behind the whirring unit. There was an access panel there. The first three screws came out easily enough—whoever had last worked on the thing had barely taken the time to hand-tighten them. The last one, though, was stripped bare; the business end of the screw was bored out and smooth, completely ruined by the previous attempt to fix the unit.
“Explains why they tossed it,” Walter murmured to himself. He folded his multi-tool away and pried back the opposite corner of the panel with his deft fingers. He kept yanking on it, bending the panel in half until the head of the last screw snapped off and skidded across the floor.
“Flood me,” Walter said.
He tossed the stupid panel aside, pulled his multi-tool back out, and shined its light into the Automated Breathing Machine’s cavity. A motor inside began dying down, whirring to a pathetic stop. Soon after, the loud air pumps ceased operating. Walter could hear a cooling fan continue to run along in a wheezy rattle, the only other sound besides a steady beeping from the display screen warning him that the machine was powering down for good.
Walter traced the ribbon cable from the display back to a control board. The first thing he looked for was the line out to the speaker cable. He found it and gave the wires a quick snip, shutting the flank out of that stupid beeping.
With it stopped, Walter found he could breathe again, his flush of anger subsiding. Part of him wanted to reach in and mangle the blasted machine, but he couldn’t do that. He needed to get it working again, and fast. He thought about it logically: The ABM was just an artificial lung, right? Beyond the security systems that forced users to pay the lease and upgrade the software, it was just a device for purifying and moving air. He felt along several wiring harnesses and tried to deduce their function. Entire mechanical systems had been replaced in the machine’s belly over time. It looked like three generations of Palans had been cobbling the device along from a poor selection of scraps. He could see parts that belonged to taxicabs, parts that might as well be in a spaceship, parts that looked like they were hand-made right there on Palan. As for the pumps, there were two of them, but the original was little more than a rusted ball. The new one seemed to be working fine, but some sort of trial period had ended, and now it was being rejected like a poorly transplanted organ.
Walter studied the problem. He pulled the knife out of his multi-tool and scraped some of the rust off the original pump. It looked like water coolant from above had dripped all over it for a period of time, destroying the mechanism. Even the electronics board was toast, all the solder connections black, bubbled, and touching. Walter forced his head into the cavity and studied the board more closely. Above him, the last cooling fan sighed to a quiet stop as the machine fully booted down. Walter felt a bead of sweat run through his stubbled head and trickle behind his ear. He stuck the point of his knife behind one of the socketed chips in the original pump board and gently pried it out.
The chip popped free, and he could see the socket had remained dry, even though the connecting pins were completely shot. He turned to the other, newer pump and found the corresponding chip. He pried it out and replaced it with the original, hoping to fool the component detector.
Nothing.
Walter smacked the pump with his fist and cursed. He had another vision of tearing the guts out of the machine, but the sensation soon drained away. He went back to the old pump and scraped around the base of another chip. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but at least it was something. At least she wouldn’t be able to say he didn’t try. He pried out the second chip, a little less delicately this time, and the small black rectangle of integrated circuit fell to the bottom of the unit.
“Flanking flanker!” Walter spat. He reached through the tangle of wire and hoses for the small chip and heard his mother groan in agony.
Walter pulled his head out of the machine and peered around its side. His mom, a half dozen tubes and wires snaking all around her bed, had begun to stir from the lack of air. She clawed feebly at the mask over her mouth, her eyes wide with fear. Walter felt the blood boiling below the surface of his skin. He felt a powerful urge to run to her, to hold her hand while she finally slipped away, but he couldn’t. He wouldn’t let the flanking machine outsmart him.
He dove back into the bowels of the antiquated unit, a medical outcast from some Terran world, no doubt donated to the residents of Palan to assuage away Human guilt for otherwise ignoring them. Walter parted the cluttered web of wire and shined his light into the deep pit of the machine. It looked like the floods themselves had once settled there. Bits of broken plastic and metal formed a jumbled layer in the bowels of the unit. The metal shavings from numerous drillings and cuts were sprinkled over everything, the shiny flakes turning to rust. A black slime seemed to hold it all in place, the drippings of grease and hydraulic fluids having turned into some tar-like substance. Walter played his light back and forth across it all, looking for an innocuous bit of black IC chip. He grumbled to himself while his mother gurgled behind him, asphyxiating. The machine seemed to spin around his head, his world tumbling out of control.
And then he saw it: a speck of black on a ball of orange rust. Walter reached down, his hand shaking with anxiety. He clasped the chip with trembling fingers, even though he had little hope that the piece would actually fix the flanking unit. It didn’t matter. He just needed to be doing something, anything, fixing whatever he could.
He blew on the back of the chip to remove the flecks of rust before turning to the new pump. With his knife, he pried the corresponding chip out of the working control board and let the thing fall into the bottom of the unit. He pressed the rescued chip into the empty socket and waited.
Nothing.
Walter hissed to himself. He turned to his mother’s bed, ready to deal with what he’d been putting off emotionally and mechanically for so many years, when he noticed he wasn’t the only thing hissing. There was a whir of air coming from the breathing unit. A fan had begun spinning, and then a motor chugged to life. A worn belt squeaked over a poorly balanced flywheel. Walter turned to the screen, his heart thumping, and saw green phosphorous text burst across the display:
RESUME? YES/NO_
Walter hurriedly jabbed the “Y” and hit enter. The tubes leading away from the machine lurched and kicked as fortified air surged through them once more. He spun around to his mom, following the wires and tubes, and saw her arms falling to her bed and away from the fogged mask over her mouth. Walter let out a cry of relief, of sorrow and frustration and anger. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his mother’s thin, feeble hand.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everything’s fine.”
As Walter consoled his mother, he looked from the blue veiny web beneath her silvery skin to the machine that had nearly let her down. He watched it chug and whir dutifully, and pictured himself ripping the flanking thing to pieces.
Once his mother was settled, and Walter had regained some semblance of trust in the machines keeping her alive, he stole out through the back door to get some air. The night was already muggy with the looming rains—it had the foul odor of mildew Walter had come to associate with poor pickings. What little tourism Palan got from nearby planets came in a rush right after the rains. Locals on Palan called the foreign invasion “second floods,” and the great mounds of alley trash and filth deposited like seeds by these off-worlders would soon grow until they threatened to clog the streets in their eventual tumble toward the ocean.
For most Junior Pirates-in-Training, the humid stench was a sign to lay low and watch for the rains. For Walter, it was a chance to have the city to himself, just him and the locals with their empty pockets and heads full of rumors. It wasn’t that Walter had a dislike for money, nothing could be further from the truth, it was just that he had a powerful lust for anything valuable. And information could be a wondrous commodity.
Walter exited out of his mother’s alley by the Regal Hotel. He glanced toward the lobby to see if the homeless and low-liers had begun moving in, but there was just the normal amount of stragglers milling about in the flickering fluorescent lights. For him, the Regal Lobby was the ultimate barometer for the weather. You could listen to several dozen predictors and prognosticators to try and time the next rain, or you could look to the Regal for a grand average of all those resources. It was a curious thing, a mob. They tended to heighten aggression, which made them look stupid, but they could also be more accurate than a lone expert, their individual ignorance somehow cancelling each other out.
Walter watched one of the Lobby’s occupants stumble out into the street and nearly fall headfirst into the wide gutter. He shook his head at the thought of so many idiots providing him with reliable information.
He looked the other way down the street and considered heading toward his Uncle’s hideout, Hommul clan’s inglorious basement headquarters. If everyone was asleep, he could do some snooping, or get started on the programming assignment he should’ve completed a month ago. That’s what he would do: get cracking on his finals hack.
First, though, he decided he should go by the market to see if any of the booths had been left untended. He figured it wouldn’t hurt to put off the programming another few hours. He turned toward the spaceport, padding softly past the sleeping cabbies in front of the Regal lest any of them wake and demand what fares he owed.
Walter’s jaunt to the market played out like a pirate training session of sorts, complete with arbitrary and false-serious rules: The sporadic cones of light shining from overhead bulbs were to be avoided at all cost; loose pavement and noisy rubble needed to be spotted ahead of time, lest he be heard by any others roaming the night. Walter practiced these things as if his mother were watching him, the looming specter of her disapproval forcing him to hone the trademark abilities of a Palan pirate. No book reading for him, no sir. Not when anyone was around, anyway. It was hacking until you slept in a haze of code. It was picking the dozen locks on the front door while she watched from her bed, and doing it until he could make it slick as a key. It was going on raids, and smash-and-grabs, and in-and-outs, and bang-your-deads with his uncles. It was whatever it took to keep her alive and happy. Walter had become just one more machine chugging and hissing and propping up her sickness, delaying the inevitable.
He wouldn’t have minded the career he’d been born into, of course, but if only he’d been born into it someplace else! Anywhere but Palan, that word of filth built on a bedrock of lies and peopled by a race who had evolved the ability to smell a fib. What did that say about the last few million years of their biological development? Nothing good, that’s what.
For a long time, Walter had complained about the irony of his people’s heightened olfactory sense and the malodorous nature of their planet. Then, one day, it had dawned on him with the suddenness of the floods: the stench they made with their garbage was no accident. It was a blanket, like the shroud of darkness he stole through toward the market. It was fostered by the collective unconsciousness of so many habitual liars, all terrified of anyone sniffing what they were thinking. The putrid stench that drove everyone else away? It was the smell of Palan guilt hiding under a fog of rot.
And Walter hated it. He hated the idea of living out his life on the planet’s only natural continent. To him, the butte of bedrock rising out of Palan’s oceans was no cleaner than the massive rafts of detritus that drifted to and fro on the water’s rough surface. If it was up to him, he would use his wits in other ways. He would’ve stayed in school, kept acing his tests, won a minority scholarship to a Terran world, a world where he could reek of guilt and nobody would ever smell it. A world so ripe with easy pickings, he could steal without even knowing he was doing it.
His mother would kill him for even considering such a scheme. The worst beating he’d ever gotten from her was after she’d found his stash of books in the ceiling tiles. Of course, the lying about them had contributed to the blows, but she was plenty angry to start with.
“Out to enrich just yourself, are you?” his mother had asked him. “Don’t care about the clan your father made, is that it? Ready to run off and live like a Human boy, pink and stupid?”
“I was gonna sell them,” Walter had said—a lie far too ripe for a day so soon after the floods.
Years later, Walter had to grind his teeth as he recalled what had followed. The memory made the moist Palan air adhere to his skin, beading up and dripping through his clothes. Walter wiped his forehead and smeared his palms on the seat of his pants.
“Floods take me,” he murmured to himself. “Floods take me the flank out of here.”
Walter skipped over the last gutter and entered the markets. He quickly scanned the quiet booths and sparse crowds. There weren’t any shuttles standing upright beyond the collection of tents, no passengers coming or going, so the nighttime trading appeared to be as slow as it got. On the surface, at least.
He knew from accompanying his uncle to other, more clandestine deals, that this was a busy time for lucrative transactions. Walter cared little for such Senior Pirate scheming. Who was in charge which month meant little to him and impacted his life almost none. His own clan was too small for it to matter which table the crumbs tumbled from, if they even tumbled at all.
Weaving his way through the center of the market, Walter scanned the shabbier tents for easy pickings. Each one had a guard posted out front, usually a family member from the tent’s clan, but like Walter, all boys couldn’t be expected to care for the family business. He was looking for someone shirking their duty, when he felt a bad presence nearby—a faint whiff of ill intent drifting up from behind.
Walter scooted over to get behind a bald Palan walking slowly in the same direction as he. Surreptitiously, he glanced up at the back of the man’s silvery head and scanned the fishbowled reflection of the crowd behind him.
There! A figure slid over in Walter’s wake and ducked behind another late-night shopper. Walter matched pace with the bald man while he scanned the crowd ahead of him. He needed someone fat. Why weren’t there more fat people on Palan?
Ah, a man in a trench coat, the next best thing. Walter took a last glance in the silvery dome ahead of him, then slid around the bald gentleman. He used him for cover as he angled for the guy in the trench coat heading the opposite direction. As soon as he passed the second man, he whipped around and fell into his shadow, heading back the way he’d come. He hugged the Palan’s elbow, swinging wide as whoever was tailing him strolled past behind their own escort.
As soon as his stalker went by, Walter jumped out and jabbed the kid in the ribs, his knuckles pointed sharp. The unsuspecting youth jumped and hollered with the fear of discovery. Walter smacked him on the back of the head for good measure. “What the flank are you doing, Dugan?”
“Godsdamnit, Walter, that hurt!”
Walter jabbed him with another knuckle between the ribs. “I asked you a question.”
“Floods, man, I was just practicing for next week. I was gonna come ask you if you wanted to play some Rats with me and the other trainees.”
“You were coming to ask me to play a game of Rats,” Walter repeated.
“Yeah, I swear.” Dugan jerked his head toward the deeper markets. “Dalton’s uncle has the gambling parlor shut down until after the floods. He’s letting us use the pits.”
“And I’m invited?” Walter sniffed the air while Dugan thought about his answer.
“Of course,” Dugan said.
Walter smiled. He forced himself to think about cool baths and empty alleys and all the refreshing, happy things he kept at the ready. He exuded positivity and peace for Dugan’s nose. It was the Palan way of thinking: Sustain a world of lies on the mind’s surface and dwell on them while conversing. Use the back of your brain to hear the words of your speaker and form a reply, but do not actually think on them. Thinking on them causes the body to know it’s lying. If, however, you think on other things and just spit out your replies without truly contemplating them, you come out smelling fresh as a flood. Walter was better than most at pulling the trick off. One more talent for his dearest mother to be proud of.
“Lead the way,” Walter told Dugan with a smile. As he said it, he pictured being taken to piles of gold and heaps of fresh food—not to his fellow trainees.
It wasn’t Walter’s first time in the casino, but it certainly felt like it. Without the haze of smoke and the perpetual dinging and clacking from the luck boxes, the place had an altogether different vibe. The absence of a crowd made the stained and threadbare carpets, littered with tables and silent machines, feel like a warehouse just storing things. Walter followed Dugan through the deliberate maze of gambling stations, back toward a distant ruckus.
As they rounded the poker tables with their individual, airtight, and odorless Palan-proof playing pods, Walter saw what looked to be his entire training group, three dozen Junior Pirates or so, gathered around the Rats pits. Those not playing were yelling advice to their comrades, pointing and shouting. Walter followed Dugan as the boy strolled up to the pits and weaved his way through to the railing.
“Look who decided to join us,” someone close by said.
Walter ignored whoever it was and leaned out beside Dugan to see who was winning.
They were playing one-on-one, just two boys matching wits and skill. Each of them had a long Rats pole in their hands with its small, flat paddle on the end. The pit between them was full of a few feet of water that had turned brown and foul with the signs of several rounds played. There were two rats paddling on the surface of the water, their noses twitching for air. One had been painted silver, the other black. The goal was to drown one’s own rat before the opponent killed his.
Walter watched with some interest as the two boys jousted from opposite ends of the oval pool. Neither kid seemed keen on playing straight offense by just holding their rat under. They took turns reaching out and knocking the other boy’s paddle away from his rat while corralling their own animal closer. Wielding sticks a dozen feet long was taxing after a while, so both boys had the same strategy of trying to get the rats to their side of the pool where they could wear out their opponent by forcing them to use a longer reach.
Someone bumped into Walter from behind.
“Excuse me, your heinous!”
Several of the boys nearby laughed.
“I mean, your highness.”
Walter turned and gave Dalton the finger. He’d know his distant cousin’s dry voice and even drier wit with his nose cut off.
“So, the Pirate Queen extended your curfew, eh?”
Dugan turned from the action in the pits. “Flank off, Dalton.” He yelled it over a sudden round of jeers from the boys paying attention to the match.
“I’m talking to my cousin,” Dalton said with a wry smile.
“You’re being a dick,” Dugan said.
“Nonsense. Why would I be rude to my future king?”
Walter ignored him and returned his attention to the pits. Both rats were gone, the boys’ paddles jostling beneath the water’s surface. He couldn’t tell who had what, but the crowd was furious with excitement.
“Forget him,” Walter told Dugan. He pointed up to the scoreboard where the vitals for the silver rat could be seen. Its heartbeat was racing. The betting line began to tilt in that boy’s favor, and a flurry of wagers took place all around, little of it with any potential payoff now that the end was near. The boy with the black paddle released his rat and began pushing and prodding the silver paddle, hoping to free the drowning Earth mammal and win it a precious breath. The silver player had excellent control, however. He leaned into his end of the paddle, flexing it as he poured on his weight.
The black rat bobbed to the surface and began panting furiously for air, kicking at the turbulent water with its tiny paws. The silver rat breathed its last. A steady buzz and flat pulse relayed its victorious demise.
Cheers and groans mixed as the game went final. Walter watched money fly back and forth between the boys, the sight of so much of it making him feel a rush of giddiness. Despite the half-truths of Dalton’s jabs, the reality was that Walter stood to inherit the poorest clan in the history of Palan pirates. What little his father had been able to forge had just as quickly been scrapped by the ineptitude of his uncles. And his mother, despite her drive and brilliance, had been sidelined by a type of pneumonia likened to a slow, inexorable drowning. The running joke, for those who were able to laugh about it, was that her clan was going to go down with her.
Dalton, meanwhile—the descendant of a Hommul clan outcast from so many generations ago—had now been born into the once maligned and now dreaded Smiths clan, which had ruled Palan for dozens of floods. The ironic reversal was not lost on Walter at all. Perhaps that was why he longed to be exiled from his own people: He was envious of what that long-ago action had done for Dalton’s great-grandfather and by extension, his greatest rival.
While Walter mused clan history, he scanned the crowd of forty to fifty boys arranged around the uneven rail of the Rats pit. He wondered which of them his uncle and mother would be able to land for the looming finals. The Smiths, by currently holding power, would get the top picks. The Savages would get next, and so on. None of the higher clans would take Walter, no matter how highly he had scored in prior examinations. Too many clans had been sabotaged from within as distant kinsmen wrested power for their own blood clan. At least it meant Walter didn’t have to do anything to try and impress the clan leaders or his peers. There was that.
“You’re nexssst,” Dalton hissed into Walter’s ear, in English.
Walter reached back and shoved the boy away, then dug into his ear to remove the invasive whisper.
“I challenge Walter Hommul!” Dalton yelled over the pits.
Walter watched the group of boys look up from settling their bets.
Murmurs grew to cheers.
Dugan elbowed Walter and hissed some foul-smelling good luck.
“I just got here,” Walter complained.
Boys normally waited hours for their chance to play.
“And it’s my uncle’s place,” Dalton said, “so I can challenge whoever I like.”
With a dozen prods and pushes, the gathering of boys ushered Walter toward one end of the pool. He hissed at the crowd, but found himself slotted into the little jut of railing leaning out over the black side of the pit. A ratpole was placed in his hands, and someone thumped him on the back of his head. Above the pit, the scoreboard was reset to zero and the names “Hommul” and “Smiths” blinked across the LEDs. Dalton took his place in the silver slot and grabbed his paddle from another boy. He waved the long pole out at Walter, taunting him.
Walter held his own pole out and tapped the surface of the mucky water a few times, getting a feel for the heft of it. He’d played enough Rats in his day to wield a paddle with some skill. He could hold a twenty foot pole with a ten pound paddle at arms-length for half a minute, no problem. He also knew Dalton played every day and could do the same with one hand and for twice as long.
A countdown began on the scoreboard, and the crowd chanted along with the falling numbers. Walter tightened his grip on his paddle and glanced up at the underside of the scoreboard to follow the countdown. Dalton whacked Walter’s paddle smartly, and Walter nearly dropped his pole into the water. He tightened his grip even further. When the crowd got to zero, a hole opened in the scoreboard and two rats fell out, each covered in paint. The animals clung to one another in a feisty, hissing, mid-air ball as they tumbled down and splashed into the pit.
The crowd erupted, and Walter and Dalton sparred from opposite sides, using their long paddles to draw the two frightened creatures closer to their own ends.
It was apparent from the start that Dalton was too strong for Walter. Walter could feel the boy’s tugs and shoves through the shaft of his paddle. Already, the two splashing rodents were being drawn toward the other side, and the further away they got, the less leverage Walter would have. He leaned against the rail, the unforgiving metal digging into his ribs, and locked his ankles around the posts to either side.
Dalton separated his silver rat out and pinned it underwater. Walter’s black rat clawed at the surface, its whiskers twitching with deep gasps of air. Walter pushed the animal under, careful not to slap it on the head and get a foul called.
A groan erupted from the crowd as it appeared the two boys would play a game that tested the lung capacity of their rats rather than the wits of the players. Dalton had his rat underwater first, but more depended on what sort of breath each animal had gone down with and their individual lung capacity and tendency to panic while drowning. It did little to satisfy the spectators, but Walter felt perfectly comfortable with the game plan. If he lost, he could blame his defeat on the rat and no credit would go to Dalton.
“How much on yourself?” a boy yelled in his ear.
Walter looked at the betting board. The odds were almost even; Dalton had just a hair of an edge. Even though Walter only had a few bucks on him, he couldn’t not bet on himself.
“Two,” he shouted over his shoulder.
As soon as Walter made the wager, Dalton changed the game, almost as if he’d been suckering him into betting. He let go of his own rat and slashed underwater with his paddle, whacking the side of Walter’s pole. Walter felt his paddle slip off his rat. Both animals briefly bobbed to the surface, and the crowd erupted.
Walter fumbled for his rat, but Dalton had already pulled it further away. The larger kid deftly shifted back and forth between both scrambling swimmers, waving them toward his side. Walter managed to push his rat under, but Dalton slapped him off it. Walter made a grab for Dalton’s rat, but again was knocked aside. Back and forth they went, both animals heading toward the silver side of the pit.
There wasn’t much Walter could do, he quickly realized. The bigger boy could always overpower him, doing pretty much whatever he wanted, especially as his leverage improved. He smacked Dalton’s pole in frustration. Dalton pushed back, then quickly pinned his silver rat below the surface of the water. Walter did the same with his, but now he was using much more pole than Dalton. It would be child’s play for Dalton to knock him off his rat and re-pin his own before it could break the surface and suck in another breath. It was the classic end-game for a dominate Rats position, and one that would cost Walter double his bet.
Dalton didn’t disappoint. He slid his paddle to the side and whacked Walter’s rat free. He then fumbled underwater for his own struggling animal as it bobbed toward the surface. He must’ve caught it, for he leaned back into his pole with no sign of the silver rat.
Walter’s rat, meanwhile, bobbed to the surface before he could corral it. He got his paddle on its head and pushed it back down. His brain whirled with some way to overcome the boy’s strength and leverage. As he pushed his rat to the bottom of the pool, he steered it nearer Dalton’s paddle rather than try and pull it back closer to himself. As soon as it reached the bottom, he felt Dalton strike his pole again, pushing him off the animal.
Walter acted quickly on a sudden idea, a way to use Dalton’s strength to his advantage. He felt his rat bobbing for the surface and pushed it back down, but not to pin it. He touched it to the bottom, then slid over and pinned Dalton’s rat as it tried to swim up. He held the other boy’s rat in place and waited while Dalton performed his own maneuvers beneath the murky water. No rat bobbed to the surface. Walter took his eyes off the poles and watched Dalton, who was sneering with concentration. He was holding something down right beside Walter’s paddle, and seemed intent on crushing it. Walter waited. Just as Dalton was about to look up at the scoreboard to check his rat’s vitals, Walter yelled out: “Twenty on black!” Far more money than he had on him.
The crowd hissed. Dalton narrowed his eyes, and Walter could see his face grow dull with nerves and confusion. Walter’s rat had half the breath of Dalton’s, making it an odd wager. The other boy acted swiftly, taking another good swipe at Walter’s pole, and Walter felt his paddle fly off the silver rat.
Dalton’s rat.
He stirred the water furiously as if groping for the struggling animal, and the crowd began to chant Dalton’s name. Walter caught a glimpse of the rat below the water’s murky surface. He moved his paddle clumsily all around it, whipping the dirty water into a froth of wave and bubble, his seeming desperation a ploy to keep the color of the animal hidden while also allowing it to regain its breath. He fought the urge to yell out an even higher bet, knowing that would appear foolish and suspicious. Instead, he hissed and cursed at himself as he pretended to struggle with the long pole. The chants of “Dalton” and “Smiths” grew furious, the last filling the room with a powerful English-like hiss, which made the hair on Walter’s head stand on-end.
Walter had a brief moment of panic when individuals among the crowd began pointing up to the scoreboard and tugging on their neighbors. Walter didn’t look himself, fearing Dalton would grow suspicious. He concentrated on his efforts to conceal the boy’s rat while Dalton unknowingly worked to drown Walter’s.
The end of the game was a confusing, riotous affair. When the flatline buzzer sounded, most of the kids erupted to celebrate their friend’s victory, and money went flying from hand to hand. An observant minority, however, began working to undo the celebrations. The winner’s light pointed toward Walter, and the scoreboard reflected a truth incongruent to their own eyes.
There was a moment of stunned silence before the next wave of yelling—of angry yelling—began. The kids shuffled bets around and looked sternly in Walter’s direction.
Meanwhile, in the pit itself, a black rat bobbed up, its arms curled and lifeless. Nearby, a silver rat pawed at the rippled and muddy surface, looking for a way out.
Walter dropped his pole into the pits and did the same.
“You’d better run,” a boy beside Walter suggested.
It sounded more like a threat than a warning. Walter scanned the crowd and realized it was a good idea. He also realized he wouldn’t be seeing the two hundred forty dollars he’d just won on the twelve to one odds against. Nobody was amused with how he’d played the game.
As his pole splashed into the pit, Walter pushed his way out of a crowd still correcting their bets. Kids hissed and shouted at him as he forced his way through, but they weren’t about to give chase until their money was squared. Walter ran up the steps toward the luck machines, turned, and scanned the crowd for Dalton. He saw the boy still in the silver outcrop, gripping the rail with both hands and sneering down into the water. For Walter, it was worth at least half the bet he was leaving behind. He spun around and wove through the maze of machines designed to rob men of their money and confidence, and out to the market beyond.
Walter blended in with the light stream of late-night shoppers and worked to slow his breathing. In the hush of the Palan night, the roar of the mob he’d just escaped rang as echoes in his ears. He had left his apartment looking for a bit of excitement and found more than enough to sate him for a day or two. Leaving the markets behind, he skipped over a gutter bridge and shadow-hopped his way back home.
Walter was in such a good mood as he passed the Regal and turned into the alley by its side, that he nearly made a serious Junior Pirate gaffe. He entered the alley with a loud walk and along the edge of a cone of streetlight. There were only a few apartments behind the Regal, so the daily habit of finding it empty had him growing sloppy over time. If he hadn’t seen the figure at the alley’s end moments before the man turned around, Walter would’ve missed out on the heist of a thousand lifetimes.
By the time the man turned to survey the noise, Walter had flushed his skin to dull the sheen of his exposed flesh and moved quickly and silently into the alley’s darkness. He stood motionless, his back against the rough brick of the Regal, while the man at the far end peered past him and out into the quiet street.
Walter waited.
Nothing on him moved, save his eyes. He picked out several darkened routes to his apartment door, just in case. He also sized up the figure crouching a hundred feet beyond his stoop. By his bulk, Walter pegged him as Human, which was out of the ordinary for this time of the rains. He watched the man wipe his brow—and even though the humidity was creeping up, Walter sensed the gesture was as much from nerves as condensation. He took in deep sniffs of the alley’s air, but the figure was too far away for him to pick up anything.
After a long moment of staring his way, the man turned back to something at his feet. Walter took immediate advantage. He danced through the shadows along the blackest route, halving the distance between himself and the stranger. Crouching behind his apartment’s crumbling landing, he peered through the flood-rusted rails and watched the man sift through the detritus in the alley’s dead-end.
Finally, the man stood and scanned the alley. He shuffled noisily in Walter’s direction and could be heard mumbling to himself as he passed. Walter tried to catch a glimpse of the man’s face, but the figure happened to be glancing over his other shoulder as he hurried by. When he reached the end of the alley, the Human looked one direction, started to head off the other way, stopped, then hurried toward the Regal’s entrance.
The pathetic display did nothing to undo Walter’s disdain for Humans. That such a dull, noisy, numb-nosed race prospered while his people languished could only be attributed to the unlucky geography of his planet. He knew from his own studies that Earth had many continents and very little ocean. Rains there came sporadically and rarely flooded. Give his people such a place and see who’s naming other people’s stars, then. Oh, he would love to hear a Human throat attempt to gurgle his native tongue. And to think of never needing to hiss English again!
Walter stood from his hiding spot and glowered after the departed figure. His joyous mood from the game of Rats had eroded, marred by the presence of the Human. He turned and crept down the alley to see if the man had left any traces of his curious actions, sniffing the air as he went.
The first thing he noticed was a reek of paranoia. The man had left behind a braided odor of lies of such density, only one living in abject terror of discovery—discovery of something bad—could have created it. That certainly got Walter’s attention. He followed the scent to its locus: a heap of alley trash seemingly no different from the rest.
Walter stooped to inspect the bag. He wiggled its white plastic mouth open and peered inside. It looked to be normal trash: rotting fruit rinds, balls of paper, a tin can. Walter picked the bag up to look under it, but it was caught on something. He moved some of the neighboring trash out of the way and saw that the bag had been tied down to an iron rod poking out of the pavement. Someone didn’t want the bag moved, even in the floods.
Walter peeked back inside at the garbage. He considered running to his apartment for gloves so he could sift through the foulness, then noticed something odd about the mouth of the bag. There were two layers. A bag within a bag!
Walter’s heart raced with the series of discoveries. He knew, as surely as stumbling across a wallet in the market, that he was about to uncover treasures. He glanced over his shoulder at the mouth of the alley and began digging between the two plastic liners.
At the very bottom, behind the cool dampness of the mucky filth sitting inside the inner bag, he felt a cloth bundle. Walter pulled it out to see what he had lucked upon.
Clothes. A stupid Navy uniform, but the pockets felt heavy. Walter reached in one and came out with a radio. He felt the urge to twist the power on, but radios were poison, too easily traceable. And besides, they were worthless unless you had friends with the same models. He chucked the thing over the wall at the end of the alley, taking delight in the sound of its splintering demise on the other side.
In another pocket, Walter found a neat surprise: A gun. Navy issue. He figured it would fetch at least what he should’ve won at Rats. He slipped the thing into his waistband and rummaged through the rest of the pockets.
Nothing. There was a row of medals above the breast of the jacket, so he took those, just in case any of his friends would be dumb enough to trade for them. He then flicked the useless jacket over another heap of garbage.
Walter patted the pants down next and felt a single item. At first he thought it was a credit chip, and his mood again waxed. When he saw it was a Navy ID badge, his stomach sank and swelled at once. He’d seen them before, mostly from wallets lifted off soldiers on training furlough. They were like lottery stubs, always with the allure of high-ranking passcodes and first-class tickets off Palan, but usually coming up as worthless as the plastic they were printed on. Part of Walter knew that he would access the chip and find useless codes he could just hack in his sleep if he wanted. But another part, the hopeful gambler inside, imagined the man was an Admiral with codes that could summon havoc-wreaking forces with a single dispatch, or admit him to a distant university on some foreign aid GI bill.
Walter clutched the plastic chip, which may or may not contain his dreams, and tossed the black pants as far from him as he could. He thought about rushing to his mother and telling her about the curious man in the alley, but he needed to get to a computer first. There was no point exciting her weakened heart only to let it down when nothing came of the find.
Walter slipped the chip into his favorite pocket, the small one with the silent zipper that he greased daily. He trotted down the alley and considered which computer to use: the one at the library kiosk, or the one at Hommul HQ? And should he try and pawn off the gun immediately, or spread some seeds amongst his friends to drum up the price? Or should he just keep it?
Walter was so distracted by the decisions as he slipped past his apartment door that he didn’t notice it opening. Nor did he note the three large Palans sliding out into the night after him.
“Walter? That you, boy?”
Walter’s heart skipped a beat. He slid to a stop in the alley. He looked for the deepest shadow to dive into, when a powerful, meaty hand slapped down on his collarbone, fixing him in place.
“Aren’t you out a little early to be on a proper raid?”
Walter turned and met the squinty gaze of his uncle, then saw the old man was escorted by two of his large goons.
“And aren’t you a little early to come pay your respects?” Walter asked. He nodded toward his apartment door. “She’s not dead yet, you know.”
His uncle laughed and slapped his back. “Not yet, you are quite right. Doing a fine job of tending to her, I see.”
Walter shrugged. “Some other clan leaders pitched in equipment,” he said.
His uncle wagged a finger at him, and the two brutes to either side shifted their bulk as if eager to put some of it to use. “Careful,” he said. “You know I’d do more if the clan wasn’t hurting like it is.”
The clan wouldn’t be hurting if you did more, Walter thought.
“What’s this?” his uncle asked. One of his fat hands darted toward Walter’s belly and came away with the pistol.
Walter flinched, but it was too late.
“Hey—”
“Very nice,” his uncle said, turning the gun around in his hand to inspect it. One of the brutes stepped closer to get a good look. Walter’s uncle beamed. “Excellent find. I’ll add it to the clan coffers.”
“But that’s—”
“You’ll get your share, of course.” He sniffed the air. “Was there something else you wanted to tell me about?”
Walter shook his head and thought of mintberry shakes and shiny new laptops.
His uncle smiled. “Don’t overdo the pleasantries, Nephew. I’m liable to think you’re plotting my demise.” He handed the gun to one of his goons, his eyes never leaving Walter’s. “Now tell me, Junior Pirate, since you obviously think I’m performing below the watermark—If you were running Hommul clan, what would you do differently?”
One of the goons chuckled. The other looked over the gun before stuffing it into the shadows of his jacket.
“I’d invest in ships,” Walter blurted out. His thoughts on the matter were no secret. He watched the gun—his treasure—disappear.
“You’d sink us with a fleet of ships, would you?” His uncle laughed. “No clan has ever prospered by wasting their spoils on ships.”
“No clan has ever led without them,” Walter said. He looked back to his uncle.
His uncle laughed even harder, his throaty bellow filling the alley and flooding out beyond.
“You think this is about leading?” He pointed out the alley. “Do you think the Smiths own their ships? They don’t. Terran banks own their ships and they own the Smiths with their interest payments. What do the Smiths get in return? The headache of managing this flooding place and the thrill of first recruits, that’s what. You think this is about who’s in charge? Boy, you have no idea. This is about who can pay the rent, who can raid enough to get by. Scrap and salvage, boy, that’s what’ll see us through the rains, not your blasted pirate ships.”
Walter clenched his jaw lest his mouth get him in trouble. His uncle stepped to the side and waved at his apartment’s flood-high stoop.
“Now get along. Go see to my sister in case it’s the last chance you get.”
Walter was glad to. He squeezed past his uncle and between the two towers of goon.
“And no more talk of ships,” his uncle called out after him. “Nobody ever made a dime on the blasted things. They’re just holes in space that suck your money away.”
More laughter filled the alley. It chased Walter up the steps and mocked him for being stupid while he fumbled uncharacteristically with the locks. He hurried with them as fast as he could and took longer as a result. After working the last lock loose, he slipped inside with his mom and the machines, slamming the door shut to block out the awful and humiliating stench in the alley.
Walter concentrated on the locked comm box attached to the back of the Navy building. With another deft tickle from his lockpick, he felt the final tumbler click into place, his torque wrench slide to the side, and then the Human-built Master lock popped open smoothly.
“Who’s the masster now?” Walter hissed. He smiled over at the moderators and pushed the lid closed with a soft click. One of the mods ticked an item off on his clipboard while Pewder switched places with Walter and took his turn at the supposedly impregnable lock. Each kid had two minutes to get the hatch open. Walter had taken less than thirty seconds. He glanced up at the dark and roiling sky and hissed with impatience as Pewder struggled with the mechanism.
After what felt like an hour, the lid to the comm box popped open, and Pewder pumped his fist and turned to beam at Walter. Walter pushed Donal forward, wishing they could just skip to the good part.
It took Donal almost the full two minutes. It felt like longer, but Walter watched as one of the moderators counted down the final seconds with his hands. It was all Walter could do to not reach forward and finish the job himself.
Finally, with seconds to spare, the lock clicked open. Donal started to push it closed again, but one of the moderators caught the boy’s wrist and waved Walter forward.
Walter sneered. Finally. He pulled out his small pouch of electrical gear and freed his alligator clips. First, he placed a button LED inside the comm box and tapped it on. The small lamp put out just enough light to reveal the interior of the box, but not enough to spill past and alert anyone to their presence.
The alligator clips from his card reader were then attached to a set of wires—red to red and black to black. Walter liked to think of the reader as a second type of lockpick, one that slid dexterous programs into the tumblers of electronic firewalls, jiggling them loose. For this final test, each trainee would use their reader to load a hack they’d been working on for weeks. Or, as in Walter’s case, for the last two days.
In one of Walter’s pockets, he had a card with his actual assignment on it, just in case anyone checked. With one swipe, it would bypass four layers of firewall and two security checks before routing a message through the large Navy containment tower a few blocks away. That tower was full of entangled particles whizzing around inside fibermagnetic wires. Those wires were connected to a Bell Phone, which could send the message instantly to Earth, millions of light years away, where the sister entangled particles would accept the transmission. The transmitted code would then seek out and hack a certain mainframe, taking down the Galactic Union homepage and displaying that year’s pwned message for his moderators to validate.
Walter had written the program just that morning, and he knew it would work. But he wouldn’t be using the backup card that held his pristine hack. No, he would be using the one he had written earlier, the one saved on the Navy ID badge pulled from the alley two nights prior, the one that promised to solve Hommul clan’s ship deficiency by making sure no clan had ships.
Walter sneered in the pale light emanating from the comm box. He reached into his favorite pocket and pulled out the card. He held it up to the reader fastened with its alligator clips and prepared to swipe it—
Walter hurried down the alley steps to the basement entrance of Hommul HQ. His family’s pirate offices were drastically below flood level, yet another embarrassing result of his uncle’s maniacal drive to cut costs. He pulled out his pick set and knelt down before one of the dozens of locks on the door. If a non-member picked the wrong one—or even threw the tumblers too far in the correct lock—alarms would sound and deadbolts would engage. In order to enter the headquarters, clan members simply had to pick the correct lock and do so gently. There were few things more humiliating than setting off alarms on one’s own door.
Walter clicked the mechanism aside with practiced ease. As with most skilled pirates, fumbling for a key on a crowded ring would’ve taken him longer. It was much slicker in any case to simply carry a single key for every lock, which is how he thought of his pick set.
Pulling open the door, Walter was greeted with a billowing rush of warm air, a sign that the air conditioner was on the fritz again. He stepped inside and yanked the door shut behind him. The thrum of water pumps vibrated through the walls as he hurried through twisting corridors. It was good to hear the pumps running with the rains looming in a day or two. Hommul HQ had been flooded out twice in the nine years they’d been in the new space. Walter frowned at the thought as he snuck past the Junior Pirate bunkroom. The lights inside were off, the darkness bearing an unoccupied stillness. Walter knew where most of the Junior Pirates-in-Training were—he’d just left them around the Rats pit. The Senior Pirates were probably out staking heists and prepping for the upcoming finals. Whatever the reason, Walter felt giddy to have the place to himself.
His mood sank, however, when he entered the computer room. The place was a wreck.
“What the floods?” he hissed.
He waded through an ankle-deep layer of candy wrappers and empty tin cans of Pump Cola. The two computers had been left on; their fans whirred with an annoying clatter, and both machines were adorned with a half dozen twinkling, blue lights. The chairs in front of each were sprinkled with cookie crumbs and the tell-tell orange smears of Chedder Puffs. The room also reeked of sweaty Palan, of worry and agitation. Walter even nosed a bit of raw dread, the sort of smell he associated with the soon-to-be-dead. He’d seen some nasty last minute hack sessions in his time, but the scene before him beat all. As he lowered himself to the edge of the less-ruined chair, he noted someone’s code had been left up on the monitor. One glance, and he pegged its owner for the one reeking of death-dread. The code was more of a mess than the room.
Walter fought the urge to clean the code up a bit, knowing it was an irrational compulsion and very un-Palan-like. He closed his eyes, bent forward, and blew out as hard as he could across the keyboard. Bits of pizza crust and flood-knows-what-else peppered his face. He wiped his cheeks with both hands and shivered. Part of him considered sabotaging the water pumps prior to the coming flood, just to give the joint a good rinse.
Reaching inside his best pocket, Walter extracted the ID badge, his only remaining bit of loot from a night full of complete busts. First, his winnings at Rats had been denied him. Then, his blasted uncle had nabbed his gun, probably worth an easy two hundred. “You better be worth it,” he told the plastic chip. He shook the card so it would know he meant business.
With a deft one-handed flourish, Walter called up a few macros he’d stored in the computer, and his private card-reading program booted up. He inserted the ID into the scanner. With a hesitant swipe, he ran the magnetic strip through—silently hoping for something good. A ticket off-world was almost too much to dream of, but some info he could sell would be nice. Anything to make up for the night’s losses.
The card’s code flashed across the screen, filling the smeared monitor with lines of green-phosphorous text. Walter’s beady eyes flicked from side to side, trying to tease out the pertinent from the mundane.
Gradually, a glimpse of what he’d stumbled onto began to coalesce out of the lines of code, and Walter realized just what he had.
And he realized he had not been dreaming big enough.
The two moderators crouched close to Walter and peered down at their computers as he slid the card through the reader and loaded his program. He watched the moderators press their refresh buttons over and over, expecting his successful hack to appear on the GU website at any moment.
It will, Walter thought. But his complex program had a few other tasks to perform before it sent anything as mundane as messages off to Earth.
He remained perfectly still and tried to exude calm, even as another roll of thunder boomed in the distance. While Walter waited, he imagined what was going on in the ethereal realm of code and connected computers. With his eyes closed, he pictured his elegant hack zipping off through cheap copper wire. He traced its route through Palan, knowing where the main trunks were buried from so many data-jacks over the years. The program would round High street, dash down River avenue, then course up Cobble. That’s where it would enter the Navy’s Bell Phone containment tower—
Walter’s heart raced as he suddenly realized his code could not be recalled. His actions could not be undone. He had pulled a trigger of sorts, knowing what the fired bullet would do, but only after having done so did the repercussions fully seize him. Entire clans would be heading to Earth, taking their ships with them. Or was it the other way around? The play on words evaporated Walter’s dread, replacing it with a sudden urge to giggle. He opened his eyes and looked to the moderators, wondering if they could sniff his mix of fear and humor. Hoping to replace the scents, Walter focused on the fact that his secondary program would soon dutifully reach Earth and perform a successful hack of the GU site. He also reminded himself that his program, swirling in the entangled particles of the Navy’s containment tower, would not be there for much longer. Soon, the floods would come and wash them away, the turbulent waters taking all signs of Walter’s duplicity. He thought of these happy, calm facts and tried so very hard to refrain from thinking about what his program would do in the meantime…
Simmons. The card owner’s name was uncomfortable to even think, leaving a residual hiss in Walter’s mind. But that wasn’t what really stood out about the ID badge. What was weird was that the Human had two official names. He seemed to go by Drummond while he was on Palan—at least to the markets, the Regal Hotel, the passenger shuttle office, and the cabbies. To the Navy, however, he went by the name of Simmons, and as far as Walter could tell, he wasn’t even supposed to be on Palan. He was on what Walter would call a rogue mission, and what the Human Navy referred to as “clandestine.”
It was the first time Walter had gotten to rummage through the file of anyone in Special Assignments—the first time he’d heard of anyone getting the chance. But that wasn’t the big surprise, either. The big surprise was how unbelievably sloppy Simmons was to be so seemingly well-connected. Walter hit a goldmine when he came across a file named “Passwords.txt.” He had thought it was some sort of joke until he opened the file up and saw its contents.
The next thing he had to do was immediately raid the snack closet for some Chedder Puffs and a warm Pump Cola. Like his trainees before him, Walter was about to pull an all-nighter.
Simmons, it seemed, answered directly to a Navy admiral, one Wade Lucin. Their entire message history was logged in a Navy database, opened as slick as grease with the contents of the passwords file. It appeared Simmons was on Palan to secure a “package” of some sort. He even had two accomplices heading his way from Earth. Walter scanned these messages, but none of it seemed too terribly interesting. What caught his eye among the terse lines were the words “username” and “password.” For some reason, the Admiral had given Simmons temporary access to his own account. It was a one-time login and no longer any good, but it was enough to get Walter guessing the Admiral’s full-time passcode. He knew from hacking Human laptops that all their passwords were slight variations on a single theme—either their limited noses kept them ignorant to the threats swirling all around them, or they just couldn’t hold more than a few tidbits in their brains at any one time. Walter suspected it was a blend of both.
It took less than a dozen tries to log in to the Navy database. All the Admiral had done was transpose the two words in his password and increase the four-digit number by one. When the login screen disappeared and the master account page popped up, Walter nearly spilled his can of Pump. He whipped around to make sure nobody was behind him, his entire body tingling with the thrill of found treasure. Pulling the keyboard into his lap, Walter began flipping through account tabs. The overwhelming choice of devious tasks to perform made his head spin.
Walter scanned the Personnel page first. The Admiral had almost complete control over what looked to be thousands and thousands of Humans. Walter briefly considered transferring every staff member with an ‘S’ in their name to the front line. He laughed to himself at the thought. There was a massive sub page for Humans ranked as mere “cadets.” With half a thought, Walter could’ve flunked or expelled whichever brats he chose. He thought about changing some grades, or possibly admitting himself to flight school, but like the frontline transfers, these were all ideas that would arouse suspicion and turn out to be no more than practical jokes. Annoyances, sure, but with no real outcome, no payoff other than a locked-down account and someone in Human IT lecturing the Admiral on how not to be so stupid with his passcodes.
The best solution, Walter knew, was going to be to just sell the account to someone off-planet. Take their money and let them deal with the heat their actions might bring. He went to the admin page and set up a few secondary logins so he could access the account even if the primary password was changed. He then went to the Admiral’s inbox and deleted the automated messages warning of the account changes. He also opened the IT log file and removed the entries for his last actions and reset the time stamp for the last logon. Satisfied, Walter went to log out, but after closing the IT tab and just before he exited the Admiral’s inbox, something caught his eye: An older message entitled “Delete After Reading.”
But it hadn’t been deleted.
And with a title like that, there was nothing Walter could do but read it.
TO: Adm. Wade Lucin
FROM: IT Specialist Second Class Mitchell
Admiral,
The alterations to the simulator were completed today, and I even stamped Hearst’s name on the modifications in case anyone looks. I promised I wouldn’t ask about these mods, but I want you to know how hard that promise is to keep. I’m dying to know. Anyway, everything was done remotely and I covered my tracks good. I expect to see those reprimands expunged from my files like we talked about.
As for the hyperdrive question, I can only assume you’re talking about hypotheticals. For the sake of discussion - assuming for a moment you had a drive that could ignore gravitational permutations - there are ways to remotely input jump coordinates and bypass the Navy control boards. It isn’t easy, but it’s doable. The radio interface for sending out coordinate verification can be turned around the other way, but you’d have to come up with a master key for the hack to work. I just don’t see why you’d want to. Why not input the jump arrival directly in the nav computer, as per usual? The only thing I can think of is not wanting a log of the jump - or maybe wanting to avoid those annoying alarms. Does that qualify as a question? Hey, I didn’t make any promises about not inquiring into this. Feel free to tell me more if you need help with this, I’m insanely curious.
Attached you’ll find a classified white paper on jump drive overrides, which might help. I also threw in the hardware schematics you wanted. On second thought, whatever it is you’re doing over there at the Academy, I’m thinking it’s best I don’t know. Oh, and I’ll be pulling my internal affairs file up in a few weeks. It had better be a lot thinner than the last time I looked at it! ;-)
From one war dog to another: Be Easy.
Walter frowned at the message. It sounded like a bunch of military stuff, but the Mitch guy was obviously a coder of some sort. Even if it was boring, he was pretty sure there was something in there for a nice piece of blackmailing—it just wasn’t as juicy as he’d hoped, especially for something with a dire warning to be deleted. He clicked on the attachment, wondering if the schematic might be something he could fence.
The first file was a technical paper, almost indecipherable even to him. There were also schematics labeled “Hyperdrive,” the drawings making even less sense, as they were perfectly laid out and didn’t have a dozen replacement parts tacked-on willy nilly like he was used to. He scrolled past them, annoyed and disappointed, until he came to the lines of code that followed.
Programs. Written in G++. The formatting was perfectly clear, with nested levels of indentation, just how he liked to lay out his own code. Even better, the code was full of detailed comments by the programmers, explaining what the next few lines did for whoever else might be maintaining it. In fact, Walter saw that there was more than one person involved in the writing of the code. As neat and standardized as they tried to make it, some of the lines bore distinctive imprints of their author. One coder stood out from the rest with a much higher degree of elegance. Walter could almost see the program coursing through a piece of electronics somewhere; the syntax practically sang to him, giving him goosebumps.
After scrolling up and down, following the snippets of code as it bounced routines from one module to another, Walter got a decent grasp on the overall function. It even helped to make sense of the schematic attached above. What he was looking at was basically a cryptographic system that took one set of numbers and converted them to another—that was pretty much it. A quantum gate was used for randomization, and there were numerous security measures, but he saw how it went together. The input for the program could be any three-number Cartesian coordinate, pretty much an exact location in space, and the output would be a string of numbers and letters that a physical circuit could format back into a location. It was obviously meant to go into the machine laid out in the neat plans above.
Suddenly, the contents of the message made sense. Walter was looking at the Human Navy’s solution to making their hyperdrives unhackable. The master key was hidden right there somewhere!
Walter had to sit back in his chair and consider the implications. He ran his hands over his head, tickling the stubble there.
“Flood me,” he whispered.
Somewhere down the hallways of the HQ, a distant door slammed, and loud voices echoed their way into the computer room. Walter pulled out one of his flashdrives and plugged it into the computer. He copied the attachments over and wrapped them in his very best encryption. He logged out of the Navy database and erased his steps from the computer’s history one final time. He deleted the entire Simmons account from all Navy servers as well, just to cover his tracks further. His last step was to run a sniffer program from his flashdrive to make sure nobody had installed tracking software on the computers in an attempt to cheat for their finals. A quick scan came up clean.
Walter yanked out his drive and tucked it in his front pocket. He kept his hand on it while the voices faded away, eventually pinched off by the slam of another door.
Walter’s brain tumbled. He thought about what could be done with the knowledge in his pocket. Selling it seemed like the obvious thing, but for how much? And was simply selling it really the most elegant solution? Would it give him the most long-term benefits? Or would it mean that someone else would have the knowledge that for the moment he alone possessed? And how long would it be before the Navy found out their program had been compromised and they changed their design? Would the buyers then come looking for a refund in the worst, most Palanesque way?
The questions swelled, growing like moist yeast and pushing on Walter’s skull. There had to be something better. Something that didn’t require sharing the knowledge. Some way to keep it his.
The obvious predicament was that he had no ships to try the code on, so he didn’t see how this windfall did him any personal good. Of all the Palan clans, his Hommul family was the only one holding out on the relatively new technology. When the GN had arrived, all the other clans had been quick to jump on the new transportation boost. Piracy had left the wide Palan oceans where veritable islands of floating debris were the only scraps worth fighting over and had moved out to space, where far greater treasures seemed to beckon. Could Walter use this code to convince his Uncle to buy their first ship? How would that even help? How could he ensure that his clan matched the level of the others? He couldn’t see any way his new bounty would even lift his prospects an inch from his planet’s surface.
Ah, Walter thought, but that’s not the only way to level a playing field. Just as in that night’s game of Rats, there were two ways of winning any contest. One was to lift yourself up to the level of your competition. The other was to bring them down below you, crushing them in the process.
Walter thought about how he had cleverly won at Rats earlier. There was another option available to him, a way to secure Hommul’s place among the clans. And it was a plan so delicious, Walter couldn’t help but lick his teeth.
Walter waited while the moderators stared at their handheld computers. One of them frowned, obviously disappointed in the amount of time Walter’s hack was taking to display itself on the GU website. His eyes flicked up to Walter’s, then darted over to the comm box, before finally settling back on his computer. Walter held his breath, imagining all that was taking place in the background. A peal of sharp thunder cracked in the distance. The other two trainees shifted nervously, everyone growing uncomfortable with the delay.
Finally, the glow from one of the computer screens dipped, then brightened as the page refreshed with Walter’s hack. The second computer did the same. The two moderators frowned but nodded over the results. One of them quickly turned the screen so Walter could see, then waved him aside and pointed to Pewder, letting the boy know it was his turn.
Pewder tossed Walter a snide look as he brushed past. Walter just focused on thoughts of pure honey. He imagined himself unboxing a new powersurfer, still wrapped in plastic. He thought of anything good he could conjure, keeping all worries of what would follow to himself, even though he knew not much would happen until after the floods.
Another rumble of thunder grumbled much closer to the city. For once in his life, Walter urged the Palan rains along, impatient for them. He fidgeted in place while the other two boys uploaded their hacks, attempting to replace Walter’s web update with one of their own.
Pewder’s worked without a hitch, updating even faster than Walter’s had. Donal’s program may have worked, given enough time, but that was part of the test. The poor boy flushed as the moderator’s fingers ticked down, counting off the last seconds of the half hour. When his fist clenched, the other mod give Donal a slight nod, as if to convey hope for next year. Donal couldn’t even turn to face Pewder and Walter, both of whom were bundles of nervous excitement—even if for different reasons.
The first splatter of rain punctuated the end of the exam, snapping the small cluster of pirates out of their reflections. The lead moderator pointed down the alley, his fingers twisting in the shape of “single-file, fast over quiet.”
Donal trotted off first, more wet on his cheeks than could be accounted for by the occasional drops of rain. Pewder went next, beaming with pride, his entire carriage more erect, taller, more confident than it had been when they’d entered the alley.
Walter let the two adults go next, even as they hesitated and tried to wave him along. He stood alone in the corner of the alley, looking back toward the swirling charcoal rainclouds obscuring Palan’s starry night, and felt a drop of rain smack the top of his head and weave its way through his short hair. Before he turned to follow the others, he caught one faint glimpse of a blinking red light, high atop the Navy’s containment tower. As the light was swallowed by the storms, Walter had a sudden surge of doubt. Had he sliced far enough through the flood diverter’s cables? Was there any chance the rushing wall of floodwater would fail to knock them down? Would they hit with enough force to carry the containment tower away completely?
What might become of the tower worried him more than his program, which at the very worst would do nothing, and then nobody would ever know it had been there. But if it worked! Walter felt dizzy with the potential consequences, the assured fallout among what remained of the clans. He imagined those one’s and zero’s he had arranged swirling through the air around him, coursing up through the mighty clouds, racing off to find eager receivers and hyperdrives to infect. He thought about the hapless pilots, inputting jump coordinates to the annual clan meeting, and being whisked off to Earth instead!
Too delicious, Walter thought. He licked the rain from his lips and finally turned to hurry after the others, chased along by the patter of heavy drops of rain and the thoughts of the shift in power that was about to occur. The shift he will have created.
The streets were thick with rain by the time they arrived back at Hommul HQ from the finals raid. The wide gutters gurgled with temporary rivers, their turbulent surfaces dotted with loose trash and debris. The examination group hurried down the stairwell and stood in several inches of water, steady falls cascading down the steps and already overwhelming the gated drain below their feet. Walter fidgeted in place while one of the moderators fumbled with the lock. It was all he could do to not shove the man aside and open it himself.
Finally, the door popped open and the small group of Palans squeezed into the mildew-laden air. The excited chatter of another exam group rumbled down the hall ahead of them. More thunder growled outside until the stairwell door slammed shut, cutting it off.
“Just in time,” Pewder said, smiling and shaking the wet off his hands. His excitement was lost on Donal, who hurried off toward the showers and bunkroom. Pewder shrugged at Walter. “Always next year,” he said.
Walter smiled and nodded, but he felt more in common with Donal at that moment. Passing the stupid finals had never been in question for him. The real nerves were just beginning to creep up as he considered what he had done, the very real consequences that were now out of his hands. While other Junior Pirates would spend that night worrying about their scoring reviews and placement, Walter would agonize over what the future had in store not just for his clan, but all of Palan. He hurried down the hallway toward the bunkroom to change into dry clothes, the comfort of being locked inside for a flood at least affording him the time to rest and contemplate.
“You boys cut it a little close, didn’t you?”
Walter turned and saw his uncle standing in the doorway of his office. The old man’s eyes were the dullest silver, the look of someone who’d stayed up all day.
“Donal and Pewder maxed out their times,” Walter lied. He shrugged and turned to hurry off.
“I heard your hack took its sweet time as well.”
Walter turned back. His uncle was smiling, one hand resting on the side of his ample belly, the other clinging to the doorframe. Walter sniffed the air, but the mildew was too strong. He wondered if the odor was as much due to laziness as he always assumed, or yet another noxious cloud to occlude guilty thoughts.
“Why don’t you step inside for a second,” his uncle said. He moved into the hallway and waved Walter toward his door.
Walter hesitated. He looked down at himself. “Why don’t I go change first?”
“I’ve got a towel inside.”
His uncle took a step toward him, one meaty hand reaching for his shoulder.
Walter hissed; he ducked past his grasp and into the office. He hated the way his uncle liked to pinch his shoulder, hurting him while pretending to be nice.
Inside, he found the office partly lit and fully wrecked. There were piles of papers everywhere: stacked high on the desk, mounded up in the corner, spilling over and suffocating a computer monitor. The only clear surface was his father’s old couch, which looked recently slept in. A dented pillow was wedged by one armrest, a bed sheet knotted up at the other. Walter scanned the room for the promised towel and spotted it hanging from a hook, nestled between two rain slicks. His uncle entered behind him and shut the door. He adjusted the dimmer up a tad while Walter retrieved the towel, sniffed it at arms-length, then used it to dry his head and neck.
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation at your mom’s place the other day.”
His uncle weaved his way around the desk and lowered his bulk into an old wooden swivel chair.
“In fact, I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
Walter ran the towel down his arms, then turned and hung it back up between the slicks. He was having a hard time remembering what in the hell conversation his uncle was talking about. All he could recall was the loss of his blasted gun.
“I may have found our clan a ship.”
Walter turned. That conversation, he thought.
His uncle powered on the monitor, casting himself in a broad cone of greenish light. He reached for the mouse and slid it back and forth. Walter wondered if he was supposed to step around the desk and see something on the monitor.
“I thought you were against taking out loans like that.” Walter glanced at the sofa, considered sitting down, but decided against it. He stood and scanned the carpet for clues among the papery detritus.
“I finally found a ship we can afford.” His uncle sat forward, the chair squealing as he did so. He reached for a sheet of paper and held it out to Walter. “I called in a few debts so we’d be able to pay cash. She’s not much, no arms and no real defense, but she’ll get us to the off-planet clan meetings for the first time in forever.”
That last bit sent a shiver up Walter’s spine. He stepped forward and took the piece of paper, but his body had turned cold, his ears full of cotton.
“When?” he barely hissed.
“When what?”
Walter looked at the piece of paper. “When were you thinking of doing this?”
“Already have.” His uncle stood, grabbed a loose heap of paper and began tapping the sheaf on the desk to straighten it. “The sale went through earlier today. We own our first ship.”
Walter looked at the piece of paper. It was a proof of sale for a GN ship, a class 290. He searched the document for any information on the hyperdrive, but the only details listed were gross tonnage, thruster ratings in Newtons, how much freshwater she held. Nothing on the engine models. He couldn’t believe the awful timing—that his uncle had given in to his idea at the very moment he’d found a different way to level the playing field—
“Something wrong?” His uncle sniffed loudly and set the stack of papers back where they had been. The neat pile slid off the mound and returned to its natural, jumbled state. “I expected a whiff of excitement,” his uncle said. “Not this…” He waved at the air between them. “This dread.”
Walter collected his thoughts. He held the bill of sale back out to his uncle. “It’s just, I don’t want to get the blame if anything goes… badly.” Walter glanced at the couch. He reconsidered his uncle’s offer and sat down heavily.
His uncle walked around the desk and leaned back on its edge, precariously shifting the mounds of paper behind him. “It won’t go badly,” he said. “Your mom and I discussed this last night. We won’t build a fleet that can sink us, and we won’t be taking out any loans. Just one ship. No weapons. We might try some salvage work when fuel rates are low, but it’ll mainly be for status, you know? No more sitting here and twiddling our thumbs and waiting to hear what status the clans relegated to us in their meetings. This time, we’ll be joining the flotilla in our own craft.”
“This time?” Walter’s voice was the barest of gurgles.
“Yeah, why wait another year? We wouldn’t have rushed the sale for any other reason. Of course, we’re gonna have to hire a pilot, but that won’t be a problem. Tomorrow morning, while the floods are cascading over Felony Falls, we’ll be soaring up in our very own starship. The ship you’ll soon become a full Senior Pirate inside of.”
His uncle beamed with pride. For a moment, Walter assumed it was the thrill of the sale, then he remembered the exam he’d completed not an hour ago, the looming promotion, how much all of that meant to his mother and uncle. And then he realized the purchase of the craft was not merely due to his age-old pleadings, but to his graduation! For all he knew, they had been planning this for years and years, all while he bitched and moaned about Hommul not having a ship of its own.
His uncle stepped closer, sniffing the air.
“You feeling alright, Nephew?”
Walter nodded. “I’m fine. Just… a little spacesick thinking about it, that’s all.”
Walter’s uncle loomed over him. He slapped Walter on the back. “Don’t you worry. After a few flights, your belly will be hard as steel. And if not, you’ll soon be running this joint, so you can send whoever you want up into space for you.”
Walter dipped his head. He tried to think of normal dreads, like his fear of the floods, hoping to maintain the ruse of being afraid to fly. He buried deep his thoughts on the following day—the idea that his grand plan had been for naught, that soon he would be whisked off to Earth with the rest of the Palan fleet.
The irony of it all was nearly too much to bear. He’d always wanted to escape to the mystical planet of freedom and riches, but it had always been with a mind of getting away from the other clans. Now he had discovered a way to send them off, surely to be captured in Earth orbit and rounded up while he and his Hommul clan took defacto control over a shipless Palan.
But now Walter was going to get all of his wishes. He was going to get a ship; he was going to visit Earth; he was going to become a Full Pirate, and all on the same day. And all those tasty treats were doomed to mix together like the putrid slop of a restaurant’s flooding alley.
“Look at all that water. You could flood the hyperspace out of something with all that water.”
Walter leaned close to the porthole and peered dutifully out at his receding home. It was a sight he had longed for many times, but now he wanted to be elsewhere. Anywhere.
“You can see more clouds already forming over there.” Pewder jabbed a finger against the glass, pointing to another flood forming on the horizon as the last rains dissipated out at sea. Walter looked from these new clouds to his mud-colored continent, which sat like a dollop of dirt on a bright blue sphere. The clouds were probably less than a week away—a rare double-flooding—but already they appeared big enough to swallow all the lands. The new perspective had Walter marveling that all of dry Palan hadn’t long ago been washed away completely.
He turned away from the sad sight, the fragility of his home too great to contemplate, and surveyed the cargo bay one more time. “I sure hope you didn’t pay too much for this,” he told his uncle. He thought about the fact that it would soon be impounded in Earth’s orbit, anyway.
“We got a fine deal. In fact, I think the Smiths were eager to ditch it.”
Walter sniffed the musky air trapped in the old ship. “Ownership dispute?”
His uncle shrugged. “There was a Human in here this morning claiming the ship was his. The man reeked of lies, though.”
The ship jittered in a pocket of turbulence—or perhaps a bout of poor piloting. Walter’s uncle swayed, his arms out, while he and Pewder clung to the handles by the portholes. They all threw scowls and hisses toward the cockpit.
“This Human,” Walter said. “He didn’t have any ownership papers with him, did he?”
His uncle shook his head. “Forget him. It was just another crazy Human thinking everything not tied down is theirs.” He waved his hand. “Now why don’t you boys go do some proper snooping. See what’s in the bunk rooms.”
Walter lit up at this. He had been looking for an excuse to see if his hack of the ship’s drive could be undone. He turned away from the porthole with its dreary view of Palan and headed toward the back of the ship. He hissed at Pewder as the boy raced past, nearly knocking him down.
Pewder turned into the first room he came to and let out a loot-cry of “Spacesuits!”
Walter stuck his head in the small room, which looked like a place to change clothes. Full-body suits hung on one wall, and there was a sky hatch or something in the ceiling. He turned away while Pewder began patting down one of the suits.
Across the hallway, Walter found what he was really interested in: the ship’s hyperdrive. The unit was bigger than he would’ve thought, having only seen schematics of the main board. It looked like a boxy taxicab, and it sat close to the back wall of the small room. There was just enough walkway around the sides to circle the unit, allowing access to all the panels and hatches screwed tight over the unit’s innards. Walter approached the machine, his skin tingling at the sight of it. It was so… purposeful. So whole and complete. Nothing seemed out of place or tacked on over years and years of intermittent operation. Pipes led where they were bent to lead, as if molded for their foreseen purpose. Wires were trimmed to the proper length, routed neatly in parallel lines, and even—floods take him—labeled.
Walter reached out and ran his hands along one of the riveted panels. It felt cool to the touch. He had somehow expected it to be warm, or thrumming with contained energy. Instead, he saw it as a perfectly engineered marvel—a thing with frightful and awesome potential. A means of escape, to take him anywhere he chose.
Walter strolled around the side, looking for model and serial numbers. He found both on a silver plate screwed to the back of the unit. It had the place and year of manufacture, the requisite numbers, and all kinds of cautions and warnings.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Walter said to the plate.
Pewder stuck his head around the rear corner of the drive. “Tell you what?” he asked.
Walter waved him off. “Go check the bunk rooms, you bolthead.”
Pewder sniffed, then padded away without a word.
Walter pulled out his multi-tool and his card reader. He hoped to hyperspace he knew what he was doing. Or undoing, as it were.
Over a hundred pirate ships from all the clans were gathered at the first rendezvous point when they arrived, with more of them streaking their way over from the Orbital Station and up from Palan. Each pirate clan tended to cobble together as many functioning craft as they could for the annual promotion ceremonies. The size of their fleet said much about the potential ranking of the clan and the power they would wield that year, resulting in some absolute clunkers puttering through space.
Kinda like ours, Walter thought to himself as he looked around the cockpit of their own jalopy.
“Looks like the Smiths’ve been boozing it up on the Station.”
Walter’s uncle pointed from the navigator’s seat toward a sizable fleet heading their way.
“How long before we jump out?” Walter asked the pilot impatiently; he wasn’t sure if he’d overridden the Earth coordinates properly, but he was anxious to hurry up and find out.
“They’re already queuing up for the jump,” the pilot said. He pointed to a display on the dash where each ship stood out as a bright blip. It made it easy to see how the dozens of craft had formed a straight line with more forming up at the rear.
“See? That’s the Palan system’s L1 they’re heading toward.” The pilot tapped a finger at a blank spot near the end of the line. The lead blip moved under the pad of his silvery digit. When the pilot pulled his hand away, the ship was gone.
Walter lifted his eyes and searched through the windshield, but whatever had just happened was already over and done with, obscured and pulled off with the timing and mystery of a magic trick.
“Ell what?” Pewder asked. The smaller boy tried to squeeze in past Walter, but Walter stood firm, keeping the kid out.
“A Lagrange point,” the pilot said.
“I wanna see!”
Walter ignored Pewder and leaned closer to his uncle. He wasn’t sure what the Lagrange business was all about and he didn’t care. He tapped his uncle on the shoulder. “Hey Uncle, do you think we could do our promotions right here while we wait our turn?”
His uncle laughed and shook his head. “We might have to jump out one at a time, but promotions are always done together. If we were down on Palan, I’d still be making you wait until the set time. And don’t worry about your friends beating you to Full Pirate—the others’ll wait for us.”
Walter watched another blip wink off the screen on the dash. He thought about the young and hopeful Palans on each ship, them and their uncles and fathers having similar conversations. The thought created some new sensation in his stomach, something similar to the dread of the floods. It only seemed to register, though, when he was thinking on how many Palans were out there in all those ships, how they would soon find themselves rounded up by Earth’s orbital defense. Walter nearly laughed out loud when he thought about how it would look. The Humans are gonna think Palan is invading them!
“Why do we jump out to the moon for the promotions?” Pewder asked, interrupting Walter’s thoughts. The younger boy’s pestering hands were all over Walter’s ribs, trying to find room on one side or the other in order to see. Walter shifted as needed to keep him away from the prime spot he had claimed just behind the ship’s controls.
“It’s the same reason we used to sail out over the seas to do it, back when I was your age,” Walter’s uncle said. “Part of the ceremony, sure, is welcoming a new group of youth into the clans, but what you boys don’t see is how much jockeying takes place among us elders.”
The heavy Palan shifted around in his seat and looked back at the two boys. “When I was promoted, I remember thinking the entire ocean revolved around me, that this was my day—Pewder, are you back there?”
“Walter’s blocking me.”
“Son, let the boy see.”
Walter gave him a two inch vertical shaft of visibility.
“You see, the trip out over the water proved much more about the clan’s health than the new members they were about to induct. Hell, it was ten times harder sailing the stormy seas after a flood than it is cobbling a ship together and hiring a pilot.”
He turned to the pilot. “No offense,” he said.
The pilot shrugged.
“What did it prove about us that we had to do our own ceremony on Palan all these years?”
His uncle turned in his seat and gazed out at the stars beyond the canopy.
“It wasn’t fun for me, I’ll tell you. But hell, I’ve been against the move to space from the beginning.” He held up his hands and looked at his great, meaty palms. “As soon as we stopped sailing, the clans started getting soft.” He sighed. “Then again, I suppose one of my ancestors would’ve been angry that my old ship had hydraulic steering and synthetic sails, like I was some kind of wimp compared to him. Time moves like the floods, boys. You either lift your feet and drift along on the surface, or you drown trying to stay in one place.”
“So there’s really no way we can do the promotions before we jump out?” Walter was dying to at least be a Full Pirate in Earth prison, if that was his fate. He’d be sure to rub that in Dalton’s face—through the bars if he had to.
“You’ve waited an entire year for this, Walter,” his uncle said. “What in hyperspace is another hour gonna do?”
Walter cringed at the thought.
If only I knew, he thought to himself.
As befitting the status of their clan, the lone Hommul ship was the last to arrive at Palan’s primary Lagrange point. A very light smattering of commercial traffic stood nearby, patiently awaiting an end to Palan’s annual swarm around the safe jump point so they could resume their normal business.
Walter had completely forgotten about the non-pirate ships that might be passing through their system. He had never considered the possibility that other craft might get caught up in his web and be sent off to Earth with the clans. He shrugged. Unintended consequences were just a part of life.
He was thinking this and looking out at the distant collection of waiting ships when their newly purchased GN-290 winked through hyperspace. The commercial ships disappeared and the stars beyond jittered to new positions. Off to one side of the canopy, the furthest moon of Palan popped into being silently and sat motionless, its bluish surface dotted with craters and streaked with ejecta.
“What in the—?”
The pilot’s confusion was drowned out by Pewder’s thrill of partially seeing the jump take place. He screamed in Walter’s ear, and Walter’s uncle added to the commotion, clapping his hands together as if his risky purchase had somehow fully redeemed itself with a safe and successful jump.
Walter’s heart pounded with relief. The override of the override had returned things to normal. He had unscrewed himself. The tension in his body slid out like jelly through his arms, which tingled at the sight of all that empty blackness ahead.
The pilot was not having the same reaction to their being alone. He cursed and fiddled with his instruments. Moments later, Walter’s uncle finally noticed that something was missing.
“Where is everyone?” he asked. He looked down at the display that had been full of green blips. The pilot adjusted some knobs.
“Where are they?” he asked the pilot.
“I have no idea,” the pilot said. He pulled up another screen and turned to Walter’s uncle, his posture and voice suddenly defensive. “These are the coordinates you gave me. This is where we’re supposed to be.”
“What kind of trick is this?” Walter’s uncle shook his fist at the vacuum beyond the carboglass, like a sailor cursing the sea.
Walter, meanwhile, was overjoyed. He took in a breath, realizing he had been holding it for what felt an eternity. To him, the empty space outside the ship stood as perfect verification of his accomplishment. It was the ultimate programming rush: He had hacked an entire fleet! He had written a program—sent out via Bell Phone—and it had infected every ship in a star system. Anything with a GN hyperdrive board had received his commands and they had all obeyed him.
He imagined those hundreds of ships in Earth’s orbit right then, clan leaders scratching their heads while they were surrounded by the Human Navy. And that’s when a new fact hit him: the only ship to not show up would be the obvious culprit. Oh how delicious that they would know it had been Hommul who—!
“What did you do?”
Walter’s uncle was out of his seat with a speed that belied his bulk. He came across the controls between the seats and seized Walter by the neck, pushing him against the bulkhead. Pewder screamed and stumbled out of the cockpit, his arms windmilling for balance. Walter got out half a hiss of alarm before his windpipe was squeezed too tight to breathe.
“What in hyperspace have you done?” his uncle demanded. He leaned close and sniffed Walter’s cheek, taking in the reek of his excitement and guilt.
The scrutiny just made Walter ooze more of both.
“I didn’t—” Walter tried to croak.
“Tell me!” his uncle roared. He throttled Walter, lifting the boy’s feet off the decking.
“I can’t breathe,” he squeaked.
The pilot twisted in his seat and reached for the two of them. “Hey, there’s no way the boy could’ve—”
“Stay out of this!” the Senior Pirate thundered. He shook a finger back toward the pilot, allowing Walter to gasp for a breath.
“It was an accident,” Walter whispered.
His uncle’s eyes flared. Disbelieving hands loosened their grip. “Tell me,” he said softly.
Walter looked beseechingly to the pilot, but the other man sat rapt in his seat, his eyes searching Walter for an impossible explanation. Walter, still pinned to the bulkhead, looked the other way to see Pewder standing in the doorway of the cockpit, rubbing one elbow he must’ve bruised in his fall to the decking. His uncle seemed to sniff the collapse of Walter’s resistance. The hands clenched around his neck relaxed further until they were simply draped on his shoulders. Walter looked to the leader of his clan, his mother’s brother, his sometime stand-in of a father, a man he used to know simply as Karl, and he saw in his terrified and shock-glazed eyes the forgotten fragility of the old man. There was a stunned horror there that Walter couldn’t match up with his own fear of his uncle. He couldn’t conceive of the possibility that he, little Walter, had engendered that fear.
“I just wanted to rid us of their ships,” Walter breathed.
He searched the three faces turned his way.
“I didn’t think we’d be up here.” He widened his eyes for his uncle. “I didn’t know we were getting a ship!”
His uncle’s large hands left Walter’s shoulders and moved to the sides of his head, like he had suddenly been seized by a headache.
“I thought you didn’t want ships,” Walter told him, the excuses beginning to gather like the floods. “This way none of us would have them. We’d be equal.” A new reason popped into his head, and Walter added it to his premeditated list: “You said Terran banks owned them. All I did was send them back.”
“To Earth?” the pilot asked.
Walter nodded.
“From here? With one jump?”
More nodding. The pilot slumped down in his seat.
Walter’s uncle turned and sniffed the air. The stench of fear from the pilot hit Walter a moment later.
“What is it?” the Senior Pirate asked.
“We’ll never hear from them again,” he said. The pilot looked back over his shoulder at Walter, an odd mix of fear and shock on his face as well. “You can’t jump like that,” he said. “People who try are never heard from ever again.” The Palan pilot waved toward one of the screens on the dash. “There’s procedures you have to follow. There’s way too much stuff between here and Earth.”
“So how long before they come back?” his uncle asked.
“Aren’t you listening?” The pilot waved his arms. “They’re not ever coming back. They’re dead.”
“What the floods?” Pewder mumbled to himself.
“I thought you’d like this,” Walter begged of his uncle. The pilot’s words weren’t registering with him at all. He couldn’t think of the possibility that thousands might be dead when he was still facing the possibility of being in trouble.
“I thought I’d be promoted to Full Pirate and Hommul wouldn’t be at the very bottom of the clans. But now look!” He waved toward the empty space beyond the windshield. “We’ll be at the top!” Walter exulted.
Walter’s uncle looked out toward Palan’s most distant moon. He seemed to chew on the consequences of Walter’s actions, on this new power vacuum as real and great as the void of space. He looked to the pilot with a frown, then to Walter, then Pewder. His face grew suddenly serious.
“By the might I have vested in me,” he chanted, “by my wiles and my guiles, by the authority of a clan all mine, I now bestow the privilege of Full Pirate to you, Pewder Hommul.”
Walter watched Pewder positively glow from the hasty but proper proceedings. It wasn’t with all the pomp and circumstance the boys had imagined it, but the occasion was no less momentous. Their lives, everything they did and said around Palan, it was all about to change. They were moving from boys to men, and it didn’t matter to Walter how exactly that had to take place—
“You.” His uncle turned to face him. “You can wait another year. You’re grounded.”
“What—?”
His uncle stepped back and reached into the folds of his jacket.
“How can you ground me?”
A pistol came out. Walter immediately recognized it as the one he’d found on the Simmons guy.
“Wait,” Walter said, raising his hands. “Uncle, please, think on what you’re about to—”
His uncle’s arm came up, the gun pointing out. He swiveled to the side and with a concussive roar made mighty by the confines of the cockpit, he shot a bullet, point blank, into the side of the pilot’s face.
Blood and bone scattered, adhering to the dash and windshield in a wide cone of gore. The smell of burnt powder stung Walter’s nose, the ringing in his ears cutting off the first of what his uncle said next.
“—so that nobody ever knows what you did.” His uncle turned to Pewder. The gun did as well. “Is that understood?”
Pewder’s head nodded so hard, Walter imagined it could pop right off.
“Okay. Now.” The Senior Pirate of the Great Hommul Clan, highest and mightiest of them all, turned to survey the mess Walter had made. “The first job for you, Junior Pirate, is to clean this man’s blood off my spaceship.” He looked back and forth between the two boys, waving the smoking gun at the ship’s controls as he did so. “After that, I might need you to tell me how much you remember of what this man was doing with all these gizmos and knobs to get us out here.”
By the time Walter had the dash clean—filling two large garbage bags with nasty wads of paper towel in the process—the three Palans had argued enough over the ship’s controls to realize they had no idea how to get themselves home. Pewder and Walter took turns pointing out that their uncle could just as easily have shot the man after they’d landed back on Palan. Their Uncle Karl didn’t want to hear any of it. And during the argument, Walter was dismayed to see how quickly Pewder had begun talking down to him.
“You missed a bit of skull there, Junior Pirate.”
Walter grabbed the offending piece, imagining it a gold coin to keep the kill scents out of the air. The next year would certainly be the longest of his short life, he realized.
With the dash clean, the crew of three began to deduce the functioning of simpler systems. The changing room turned out to be an airlock. Once they dragged the pilot’s body inside, Walter took great pleasure in figuring out the hallway controls and opening the outer hatch. The vacuum sucked hungrily at the body, the arms and legs whacking limply at the jamb as it was yanked out into space along with a misty fog of crystalized air.
One of the only other devices to succumb to their combined wit—the hyperdrive being something not even Walter could summon the courage to fiddle with—was the radio. It soon transmitted a load of lies and the honest promise of future reward to any pilot willing to come fetch a poor, stranded crew in distress.
The ensuing flight back had been a deathly silent affair, the smells of rotted flowers and dirty dishes wafting through the confined space. Walter spent the time dizzy with the wrongness of his punishment. He had given his uncle power beyond the wildest hopes of his schemings, and the reward had been practically a demotion from the true rank he’d honestly earned. That, plus a year of being grounded. Not to mention a year of hearing it from Pewder, and of now never being able to outrank him in seniority, even when he eventually took over the clan—!
Thoughts like that were too much to take. Walter practically vibrated from holding it all in.
Their new pilot set the ship down in the spaceport, and Walter was the first out the ramp. He ran across the tarmac and through the market, bumping off busy shoppers as he went. He ran out into the streets, the pavement still shimmering from the passing floods, the gutters gurgling the last inches of water down their drains. He skipped over the crumbling bridges and through the crowded sidewalks, churning his legs for home. He had one last chance to make things right, to get the rewards he deserved for bringing all of Palan’s pirate clans to their knees while lifting Hommul above the rest. His mother, surely, would understand what he’d done and duly lavish him.
He ran past the Regal Hotel, disgorging its lobby of low-lifers, then around the corner and into his alley. Walter wheezed as he clomped up the steps to his door. His picks shook in his hands while he tried to unlock the deadbolt.
“Momma, I’m home!”
He yelled the greeting through the stubborn slab of wood. Tears of frustration were already welling in his eyes as he secured the first tumbler.
“I’m back from promotions, Momma!”
Walter still wasn’t sure how he was going to break the news that he hadn’t been promoted. The next tumbler succumbed to his frustrated machinations. Walter bit his lip and concentrated on the third and fourth, his damned hands shaking like a Junior Pirate’s.
Finally, the lock clicked open. Walter threw his picks in his pocket without bothering to arrange them back in their case. He shoved the door open and rushed straight for her bed, not noticing how quiet the machines were as he weaved around them to get there.
“Momma,” he gasped, wiping his nose and plopping down on the foot of the bed. “You’ve gotta do something about Uncle. You’ve gotta talk to him. The Hommul Clan is—”
Walter reached for his mother’s hand, but stopped himself just before grabbing it.
“Momma?”
The plastic bubble of a mask stood over her nose and mouth, its surface dry and clear, not fogged with her breath as it normally was. Walter could see the dull shimmer of her slightly parted lips through the clear shell.
“Mom?”
He shook her knee. His mother’s body felt like part of the furniture: still and lifeless, absorbing his movement and dissipating it to nothing. His mind, already stunned by the day’s disappointments, could not wrap itself around the obvious.
“Momma, wake up, I need to talk to you.”
Walter slid up the bed and wrapped both hands around one of hers, holding the wires and tubes along with her fingers. So much of the apparatus had become a part of her, anyway.
“No,” he said. He shook his head and patted the back of her hand. “Momma, wake up.”
He turned to the machines around her. One or two were still running, monitoring the awful. Walter could’ve read their screens and graphs at any other time, but right then, the silence was deafening. His head thrummed with the lack of whirring; it roared with the absence of kicking tubes and fan-compressed air. There was a whole lot of nothing going on in the room. The machines that kept his mother alive had all gone dead.
Dead.
It was the first time his brain nudged up against the concept. He pushed away from the bed and stomped toward the breathing machine. The screen showed an auto-shutdown procedure, responding to an input from the pulse monitor. It wasn’t Walter’s prior nemesis that had let him down—it had been another machine.
Walter turned to the pumps that kept his mother’s lungs dry. That machine was also calling out at him with its silence. Its screen showed an error message, an indecipherable code of digits and letters that might mean something to whoever possessed the manual. Walter spun around to the back of the unit, his multi-tool materializing in his hand. He fumbled for the screws, his mind spinning.
“Hold on, Momma,” he said. “Hold on.”
Tears coursed down his face, obscuring his vision. He dug and gouged at the screws, working them loose in fits and starts.
“We’re gonna get those lungs dry,” he told his mom. “Don’t you worry. You just hang in there.”
He ripped the panel free once the last screw was loose. Walter threw it out of his way, sending it clanging and skidding across the cracked tile floor. The stench of electrical fire, of charred silicon chips, wafted out of the machine. Walter shined his light into the bowels of the pump unit, scanning the miss-mash of cobbled gear, antique spares, hasty wiring, and deep scratches haloed with rust. He sniffed hard, tracking the odor to the offending part, when his cone of light caught a tiny gray wisp of coiled smoke rising up from an electrical board.
Walter stuck his head in and turned to the side so he could get a good look at the board.
It obviously didn’t belong.
The board was affixed in place with ugly gobs of yellowed and aged glue. In fact, the board wasn’t even being used for its original function. It was a piece-board, something Palans did when they wanted to use individual components on a PCB board without taking the time to remove the pieces. A tangled web of colored wires were soldered to the board here and there, hijacking the use of a resistor or a capacitor, three wires soldered to what looked like a timing chip. Walter felt a wave of relief as he realized he could just replace the components with spares ripped out of one of the other monitoring machines.
“You hang in there,” he told his long-dead mother. He reached in and pushed the wires to one side so he could see which unit would need which transistor or rheostat. He bathed the board in the full glare of his light, memorizing the location of each component—
And that’s when he saw for the first time just what he was looking at.
The board.
He was seeing it straight-on, all the chips arranged just so.
And he’d seen it before. He’d seen it in a schematic, laid out so pretty and clean. It was just the sort of Navy hardware that made for a perfect piece-board. Just the sort of top-secret, unhackable device one could only use for a spare part, a resistor or two.
Walter gazed at the barest whiff of smoke rising up from the fried unit. He watched it spiral its way out of his cone of light, up into the darkness of the machine’s innards.
The hyperdrive board sitting before him was dead. It was as dead as the hyperdrive boards in all the other ships in the Palan system. It was as dead as his mother.
And Walter had killed it.
One of the wheels of his food cart spun with a mind of its own. It would rise from the uneven floor of the prison hallway and do a spastic dance. It would make contact once more, jittering the cart sideways. Then it would squeal out, jump back in the air, and do it all over again.
Walter watched the unbalanced wheel go through this routine. He kept his head bowed, the weight of his shoulders supported mostly by the other three wheels as he pushed the cart along. He followed the crazy wheel’s rise and plummet, its howling complaint, its inability to do what the other wheels did, and he wondered—as if the wheel had a mind of its own—why it bothered.
On top of the cart, tin cans sloshed water dangerously up their sides. Other cans of brown food pellets rattled as the unappetizing nuggets did their little dance, jiggling themselves deep into their brethren while other pellets jostled up to take their place. Walter scrutinized this interplay for a while, imagining each pellet like a pirate clan enjoying its brief stay up top before it was swallowed by the rest. He thought about how long that ordeal had persisted, probably as far back as his people had grown legs and crawled out of the muck.
Walter shook his head and sighed aloud. None of the metaphors were apt any longer. He had seen to that. Palan was in chaos. The loss of pretty much every ship in the system was nothing compared to the clan heads that had gone missing along with them. The pilot of their own ship had been right: None of them were heard from. They didn’t show up at Earth. They were just gone.
And now Junior Pirates were trying to be Senior Pirates. Outcasts were muscling back into old clans. And the coming of a second flood so soon after the last had been seen as an omen of sorts, a harbinger of more turbulent years ahead. Already, the meteorologists and armchair prognosticators were saying many more floods were on their way. What had been a slow year was now forecasted to be one of the most severe in centuries. They said it was a thousand year cycle, but Walter knew better. All it had been was a hack with the best of intentions. A program that had come with unintended consequences.
But unintended consequences were just a fact of life, Walter thought.
He let out another sigh and watched the kernels of food jostle, all of them going in circles.
The wheel of his cart set down and screamed, then rose back up, spinning idly and silently, if only for a moment.
Walter pushed his cart.
He had new prisoners to feed.
He figured he always would.