Time-Out

Several months after Jalena’s death, life had returned to a surface-level normal. Aymon and Obra remained in the capital, spending their days at Stonecourt. It grated.

Aymon and Obra couldn’t avoid each other, so while Aymon’s anger at them quickly cooled into something much more like a tepid annoyance, the longing for what had been lost did not fade. They could be friendly coworkers, but if they were alone in a room together and Aymon happened to meet Obra’s eyes, they would quickly look away.

This left Aymon feeling peculiarly lonely, something he had not been in many years. It wasn’t even just the physical loneliness-- it went deeper than that, as it always had with Obra. If they were unable to even spend too much time alone together without it becoming uncomfortable, they certainly couldn’t meditate together-- that was too intimate by far. He perhaps could have gone to Herault for that, but he was loathe to go to Herrault for any simulacrum of closeness whatsoever. If Jalena had been alive, he would have gone to her without hesitation-- but everything would have been different if Jalena had been alive.

Lonely was a stone’s throw away from bored, which was as close again to destructive. He didn’t do a good enough job at keeping himself occupied, and neither did Herrault or the veritable army of staff who made his schedules. After all, with Herrault, Obra, and himself all packed into Stonecourt, people tended to feel like it was a snub when one of Herrault’s apprentices gave them an audience, rather than Herrault herself. It was different when Aymon and Obra were out in the rest of the galaxy on the Empire’s business.

Herrault maintained her desire to keep Obra and Aymon close, despite how useless it all felt, until one early spring day when she called Aymon to her office, alone.

Even before Aymon arrived, he could tell something was amiss. Usually, when Herrault wanted to talk to him, she would accompany her meeting request with the subject under discussion. This time, there had been none of that courtesy.

The door of Herrault’s office opened without him even knocking, and Herrault didn’t look up at him as he came inside.

“Sit, Aymon,” she said.

He did, though he wasn’t at all cowed by her power play, and just stared at her until she spoke again.

“I had a visit from the young Ungarti Vaneik this morning.”

“What did he want?”

“The same thing that I want: a cooperative and productive relationship between the Imperial government and the Guild.” She looked up at him. “Which seems to be the exact opposite of whatever you are looking for.”

Aymon changed nothing about his posture or expression. “I don’t know why you would think that.”

“Let me see,” she said. “I think it’s quite gauche, for one thing, to admit outright to some of the surveillance that the Guild is under.”

“I did that?” Aymon asked. “I haven’t spoken to anyone from the Guild, let alone Ungarti Vaneik, in months.”

“It’s beneath you to pretend like you have no idea what I’m talking about, Aymon.”

He at least knew the first thing about not incriminating himself, and remained silent. He was going to make Herrault say what she knew before he spoke.

“And I expected better from you.” Herrault’s voice was very, very cold. “The fact that you thought it would be appropriate to cause a major diplomatic incident for the sake of making my daughter look the fool--” She slapped her hand down on her desk. “If Ungarti Vaneik did not have more of a head on his shoulders than you seem to, I do not know if I would have been able to keep you in this apprenticeship!”

He stared at her, his face totally blank.

“Are you listening to what I’m saying at all?” she asked.

“I’m listening.”

“If the Guildmaster found out what games you’re playing, you would be done! He would have the power to demand your head on a fucking plate, Aymon!”

“Then why don’t you send me away?” Aymon said, crossing his arms. “Would it look too terrible? That would show you favor Frae, wouldn’t it?”

He wondered why Herrault didn’t strike him. Her power trembled the air; the pages on her omnipresent notepad fluttered, and then it fell off the desk to the floor. It took a long moment for Herrault to compose herself, breathing deeply through her flared nostrils like a horse.

“Explain to me why you told Frae to give Ungarti Vaneik a half-baked intelligence précis on his father.”

“I don’t know how she got such a thing.”

“Don’t play stupid with me, Aymon.” Herrault pinched the bridge of her nose, her thin black hair falling around her face. “She is exactly as capable as you took her for.”

“Why do you believe I had anything to do with Frae and her interactions with the Guild?”

“Because she told me, Aymon.” She took a deep, steadying breath, controlling the anger as it rose. “My daughter is inclined to do many stupid things, but lying to me is not one of them. You told her to explain to Ungarti Vaneik that his father was cheating on his wife.”

Aymon remained silent.

“This was something that Ungarti Vaneik was already well aware of,” Herrault said.

“I know,” Aymon said. “He’d have to be stupid not to be.”

“What were you hoping to accomplish?”

“Nothing,” Aymon said. “I knew it would end badly.” He stared right at her.

“And yet you did it anyway.”

He could have admitted that he hatched this plan two days after they buried Jalena, and that would certainly stop Herrault in her tracks, make her feel her own kind of guilt, but instead, Aymon just said, “I did. It probably cost Frae more than it did me. I suppose that makes it a success.”

“You owe Ungarti Vaneik a lifetime’s debt,” she said.

“Perhaps.” He looked past her, out the dark windows. The small moon was skating across the sky, moving fast enough that he could follow its motion with his eyes, but still slowly enough that it would take a couple minutes to clear Herrault’s long office window. “I probably won’t ever pay it. Obra will likely be First.”

Herrault was silent for a moment. “You did this for Obra?”

“No.” He continued to look out the window. “I don’t have a reason.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re going to pay back the debt,” she said. “At least in part.”

“What punishment are you going to give me?”

“We now owe the Guild a favor. You, personally, are going to hunt their rogue pirate stardrive maker.”

Aymon frowned and turned back towards her. It would take months of useless wandering in space, almost certainly. Hunting a specific ship in the vastness of the universe, especially when there were few leads to go on, would be excruciating. And he would be cut off from every meaningful part of politics. Cut off from life in general. Cut of from Obra. “That’s--”

Herrault held up her hand. “I want you out of my sight until I can look at you without wanting to kill you,” Herrault said. “However long that takes, Aymon.”

There was no point in arguing. Herrault wouldn’t change her mind. “Fine.”

“The fleet ship Whitewater will be ready to take you out in five days. You have until then to gather what you need.”

“Can Obra come with me?” he asked.

Herrault laughed, maybe for the first time in months, but it was a horrible sound. “No.” She turned her face away from him. “Get out, Aymon.”

Aymon knocked on Obra’s door as soon as he got back from Stonecourt. Obra answered it, a pizza slice in hand.

“You could have just come in, Aymon,” they said. “It’s never locked.”

Aymon frowned and stepped inside. “Your bad habits continue, even without reason for it,” he said.

Obra’s rooms were unchanged from the last time he had been in them, months ago, and he followed them to their dining table, where Obra shoved the pizza box towards him. “Eat,” they demanded. “Before you start telling me about how Herrault almost murdered you.”

“How do you know about that?” He obligingly took a slice of pizza and nibbled on it.

“Frae came crying to me when she heard that Ungarti Vaneik had scheduled a private audience with Herrault. I know the story, or most of it. Probably as much as I need.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“I thought it, certainly. But I didn’t, because you’re a fuckup and an asshole, and you deserve whatever Herrault gave you.”

“Ah.”

“What punishment did she give you?”

“I’m going to chase pirates, probably for a couple months,” Aymon said. “I should try to think of it as a vacation.”

“God.” Obra laughed. “How bad was it?”

“Herrault?” When Obra nodded, Aymon said, “I’m surprised it wasn’t worse. I’m surprised she didn’t send me to the Emperor.”

“I’m sure they told her to deal with you herself,” Obra said. “If you want to have a power struggle with her, go behind her back, whatever-- maybe if the Guild wasn’t involved, if it was just you and her, she would take it to the Emperor-- but she has to show her power.”

“I should be grateful, I suppose.”

“You should be less stupid, is what you should be.” They put their chin on their hands, sitting across from him, and really looked at him, for the first time in months. “Why did you do it? Frae isn’t that bad. She’s at least not worth digging your own grave over.”

He just shook his head. Obra sighed.

“I’ll just thank God in my prayers tonight that you didn’t come up with a reason to behave worse,” Obra said after a second.

“You do that.” He ate his pizza and Obra watched him. He dabbed his mouth on a napkin and spoke again, “I asked if you could come with me.”

Obra looked away. “I don’t know why you would.”

“Herrault said no, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Of course she did.”

“You wanted to get away.”

“Yeah, well.” They took another slice of pizza. “You wouldn’t really want me there with you.”

What could Aymon even say to that? “Sure.” And then he stood up to get a glass of water from the sink. With as much false casualness as he could muster, he said, “Anyway, you’ll be needed here to do real work, since I’m sure Herrault’s decided that you’ll be her Second.”

“If she had decided that, you would be gone,” Obra said. “She still thinks you’re worth something. Not sure what, but something.”

Aymon leaned against the counter. Despite the joking tone, Obra had meant it. He shifted uncomfortably, his hand tight on his glass. “Herrault can think what she likes.”

Obra finished their slice of pizza. “Chasing pirates for a few months…” They looked up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t mind a vacation like that.”

“You should get on her nerves more often. She’d put you in time-out too.”

Obra huffed out a laugh. “Did you ever get put in solitary, at the Academy?”

“Once,” Aymon said. “You?”

“No. What’d you do to get it?”

“I nearly got a friend of mine killed,” he said. “During a break, we went camping about an hour away. We decided to steal some boats to go rafting at night.” He shrugged. “She broke her leg in two places. I got solitary for a week.”

“Think chasing pirates will be worse?”

“It’ll be longer,” Aymon said.

A strained silence fell over the room.

“I’ll miss you,” Obra finally said, though they wouldn’t look at Aymon as they said it.

“Yeah.” He finished his glass of water and dropped the cup in the sink, where it rattled against a collection of dirty forks. “I’ll be around for the next couple of days, at least.”

“What ship are you leaving on?”

Aymon’s lip curled. “The Whitewater. ”

“Of course.”

Aymon was lucky that the five day deadline for leaving the planet that Herrault had given him left him very little time to mope. This operation had not been entirely unplanned and dropped on Aymon to invent from whole cloth-- it had been in progress since Guildmaster Vaneik had warned of potential ties between pirates and the separatist movement on Jenjin, as a matter of national security-- but this meant that there was a wealth of material to catch up on, and a whole news staff who were unprepared to suddenly have their plans moved far forward and the leadership of their project become someone far higher up on the Imperial food chain. No matter how disgraced and relatively young Aymon was, his name still carried weight.

The original plan had been to use one of their undercover operatives on Jenjin to try to purchase a stardrive. Ideally, this would have served the dual purposes of flushing out the Jenjin network of contacts, and setting up a sting operation to trap the pirates. As written, this plan would probably take many more months, if not over a year, to actually put into action. They couldn’t push their operative too hard, and communications passed from ship-to-station-to-ship in the black market were slow, to say the very least.

Since Aymon wanted this taken care of as quickly as he could, he proposed a much less sophisticated plan, but one that would allow him to take a much more active role, rather than sitting around in space doing nothing for months as they waited for the long back and forth of black market purchase negotiations. The original plan could carry on as it had been, but Aymon and the Whitewater were going hunting.

His plan was two tiered. He doubted that the ship selling the stardrives would be stupid enough to leave any evidence of how to identify their ship on the stations that they visited, and Aymon was sure that any messages they left or passed would be nigh-untracable. So approaching their stardrive maker upfront would be out of the question. They were not stupid.

But their customers-- their customers certainly were.

It was the opportunistic attacks the pirates had been performing that gave Aymon an opening. There were some clear patterns in where Guild ships were being picked on: at the edges of star systems, right after the ship jumped in, but before they could move close enough to be in fast radio contact with the planet itself. It was a valid strategy: pirates could lie in wait in highly trafficked areas, detect when another ship jumped in, and jump to their location and attack. Since pirate ships tended to be much smaller, and therefore a bit faster, than Guild ships, this also gave them an advantage, should they need to get away.

All Aymon had to do was perform this same trick of sitting and waiting for an attack to happen. Then it would be a simple matter of catching the pirates.

The Fleet ship Whitewater was small and sleek when compared to any of the Guild ships that Aymon had seen. Without the need for massive cargo bays for hauling raw ore, Fleet ships, especially attack vessels like this one, could be made from a much smaller body of shielded rock. The Whitewater was roughly cylindrical, to accommodate the rotating rings that provided gravity to the ship’s occupants while presenting a minimal profile when faced head-on. The center of the ship was nearly hollow, providing space for the army of manned and unmanned shuttles and fighters that lived within her berths.

The captain of the Whitewater was a short, stiff-backed man named Robin Calais, who didn’t seem to think much of Aymon, from the scowl on his face, but who made it clear that the Whitewater would do Aymon’s bidding, to the best of the ship and crew’s ability.

It was a very boring first month on board the ship. Aymon could be a gregarious guest when he wanted to be, and so he was pleasant with the officers on board, and listened to them carefully when they offered suggestions. Of course, there wasn’t much to suggest: everyone knew this plan was make-work, to some extent, and that it was only going forward because Aymon needed something to do.

He knew it was embarrassing to be in disgrace, but the only thing worse than that would have been to admit it.

But, at last, while they waited in Galena Starzone, far enough from the star that it looked just like any other in the sky, and its emissions were merely a quiet hiss on their radios, their highly sensitive gravimeters picked up the telltale signs that they had been looking for: two ships, jumping in to the same place, one right after the other.

They were far enough from the actual event (about ten light-hours away) that even if they had jumped in immediately, the battle between the spacer ship and the pirate ship would have already been concluded. If both parties survived, they would be slinking away to nurse their wounds. So, when the Whitewater jumped towards the place where the battle had taken place, it wasn’t surprising that it was totally empty. Even whatever debris had been left from the engagement was now cold and invisible against the blackness of space, pieces of scrap metal that only showed up when they passed in front of the stars and blocked their light.

But left behind after any ship jumped was an undeniable trace: a peculiar twist in the fabric of space that could be detected with even fairly rudimentary instruments. After time, a few days at most, the trace would fade to nothing. The Whitewater arrived with plenty of time to pick up the signal. One ship had jumped back towards the planet Galena-- the Guild ship had survived the encounter, then-- while the other headed out into interstellar space. Now that they had the pirate ship’s location, it was only a matter of hunting her down.

The Whitewater was only a little faster than the average pirate ship, so if the pirates had been jumping away every second that they were able, it would have taken quite some time to catch up with them. But without any reason for haste, the pirates would probably stay in one place a few jumps away for a while to repair any damage to their ship or do other routine tasks.T

So, it was only a day and a half later that the Whitewater came upon the pirate ship, trying to time their arrival to just after the pirate ship had jumped for the last time, so that they wouldn’t be able to get away.

Aymon had been invited to the bridge for the event, and he watched on the displays as the stars of one part of the galaxy blinked out and were replaced by another, a completely seamless jump.

And there was the pirate ship, an ugly, gnarled chunk of rock sitting in space, lit by its own few running lights and blocking out the stars. The Whitewater had nearly jumped right on top of her.

As soon as the jump had been made and the presence of the pirate ship confirmed, the great doors at the fore and aft of the Whitewater opened, sending out hundreds of small ships to attack the pirate ship, immediately latching on to its sides and blasting open its bays to force a landing. The crew of the pirate ship had no time to react.

Most battles between ships were really fights between dogfighters, with the aim of keeping landing parties away from the ships itself. But as the pirates had not had a chance to launch their dogfighters, they were nearly defenseless. Aymon watched with fascination the efficiency with which the Fleet soldiers opened the ship and entered. It took less than ten minutes for the exterior of the ship to be breached completely.

Aymon was able to help, in his own small way. While the shuttles were still breaching the ship, he reached his power out across space into the pirate ship. He was able to sketch out a few, very rudimentary, maps of the rabbit-warren interior of the vessel and give a number of crew that the soldiers might expect to encounter.

Inside the ship, the Fleet soldiers were ruthlessly efficient, cutting a path to the center of the ship where the stardrive lay. The Whitewater received grainy low-light footage from camera helmets the soldiers were wearing, along with sparse radio chatter.

The pirates that the soldiers encountered might have had an advantage in size, but they were unprepared, even as the Fleet soldiers got deeper into the ship. None of them had had time to put on body armor of any kind, and so all they carried were their wicked knives. The Fleet soldiers killed them without hesitation, using guns where they could, and their own long knives where they couldn’t.

There was no point in showing mercy: the punishment for piracy was death, and Aymon doubted that there would be anyone on board this ship who would prefer to stand before a tribunal.

The only complication came as the Fleet soldiers came closer to the center of the ship, converging on it from just a few of the hallways that they had breached and navigated. Over the radio, Aymon heard a somewhat startled soldier say, “They’ve got a sensitive in here!”

The Whitewater ’s mission coordonator, a woman named Valarie BarHath glanced at Aymon, who was the only sensitive on the ship. “Is that possible?”

“There shouldn’t be one,” Aymon said. “I didn’t see one when I swept the ship before. What’s happening?”

BarHath requested a more detailed report, and it was delivered to her earpiece rather than to the comms out-loud. “They keep getting shoved back when they get close to this one area of the ship,” she said. “The stardrive is just a little ways past there according to your map, but they can’t get by.”

Aymon frowned. “Let me check. There are plenty of ways to deal with sensitives, if there is one.”

Aymon braced his hands on the console in front of him, then closed his eyes. He tuned out all the noises of conversation on the bridge and just pulled his power to the surface of his skin, then pushed it out in a long line towards the pirate ship. In space, with no turbulent atmosphere filled with information , he had a much longer reach than he would have had on a planet. The bulk of the pirate ship was harder to reach through, but with some mental strain he could push past the crushing bulk of rock, the tang of metal, the soft fizz of air, and identify the lights of life that were the pirates and Fleet on board the ship.

The area where most of the life remained concentrated was near the center-- as expected, the Fleet soldiers were converging near there-- but there was a room packed full of trembling lights, one which the Fleet soldiers had surrounded. This, then, must be the saferoom, where all of the very young or very old of the pirate clan, those unable to fight, would retreat in an emergency. Aymon could have laughed. Their sensitive was trying to protect the saferoom. But where was the sensitive?

They couldn’t be far, since the further the sensitive was from things they were trying to affect, the harder it would be. Aymon’s first thought was that they were in the saferoom, but none of the lights in there, when he passed over them, had the singing feeling that he associated with power users. He swept his gaze further out from the saferoom and-- there it was. He did laugh aloud.

“Our stardrive maker didn’t neuter their stardrive,” Aymon said, opening his eyes. “It’s the ship herself that’s doing it, protecting her crew.”

“That doesn’t seem like it should be possible,” BarHath said, almost tentatively.

“Possible or not, it is what’s happening,” Aymon said. “Luckily, half the job has already been done for us-- the ship is already busy protecting the saferoom. The standard procedure for dealing with sensitives is distraction. They can only broadly do one thing at a time. Keep the ship occupied with the saferoom, while another team goes around to kill the drive. Try to be fast, but as long as you can get some genetic material for me, do it however you see fit.”

His instructions were relayed to the team. Aymon thought about volunteering to go deal with the stardrive himself, but since the Fleet soldiers seemed to have the whole thing under control, by the time he got suited up, in a shuttle, and brought over, the whole thing would be done.

He watched in his own mental vision as one group of soldiers turned and went a different direction, taking a circuitous route to approach the stardrive from the other side, away from the saferoom. Aymon had wondered if the stardrive would decide to protect itself or the people hiding in the saferoom, when it came down to it.

The stardrive noticed the intruders, and for a minute it tried to fight them off, halting the soldiers’ forward progress.

“You should be able to get into the saferoom now,” Aymon said. “If you start killing people in there, we’ll probably be able to break through. If not, I’ll come and deal with it myself.”

This order was relayed, and just as Aymon had expected, when the soldiers finally did cut open the saferoom door, the stardrive did its level best to throw them out, but abruptly stopped when the other group of soldiers managed to crack open the drive’s casing and put a bullet through its brain.