comes out, she gets her a cup, too.
We sit at the table together, no one talking for quite a while.
27
Catherine
“What if we don’t want to do the job?” I ask.
Thraxa tilts her head at me, and Krakon looks like he’s going to blow a gasket.
He tries to speak, but Thraxa silences him. “I can take you back to Glacius. Or just dump you into space. Which do you prefer?”
“Thraxa,” he says. “She’s just…”
“Ignorant,” Thraxa says. “I know. She doesn’t understand how the swarm works. She doesn’t know that it cost me to save you two. She thinks I saved you out of the goodness of my heart, but that’s not how things work here. You both owe me, and you’re lucky that you, weak little human, are able to do anything to pay back your debt to me. Now, do you want bacon?”
Thraxa whistles as she cooks. I whisper to Krakon, hoping she can’t hear me.
“I don’t want to be a pirate.”
He takes a deep breath. “You won’t be. Don’t worry.” He leans in much closer, his voice even lower. “And this will be my last job.”
We eat eggs and bacon. After eating tough bear meat for so long, it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
“Where are you from?” Thraxa asks me, after finishing off her eggs.
“Uh…” I mumble.
“Don’t bother lying.”
“2020,” I say.
“Huh? Is that a hab?” she asks.
“A year. 2020. Earth.”
Thraxa’s eyes widen. Her mouth hangs open. Is she happy, or--
“Oh. Fuck,” she says. “Damn it, Krakon, why didn’t you tell me that? We’ll be on Summer’s Breeze in less than twenty hours!”
He crosses his arms. “I’ll get her up to speed. Don’t worry.”
“No,” she snaps. “I will. You’ll get distracted and waste time that we can’t afford to waste. Why don’t you start researching your role? Shape your clothes. Figure out the details. I will take care of this clueless little ancient woman.”
Thraxa brings me to her quarters. They are nicer than I expect. There are curtains on the window and nice fluffy pillows on her bed.
There’s a chair at her desk, which Thraxa offers to me. She sits on the edge of her bed.
“The approach we are going to take,” Thraxa says, “is that you and Krakon are both from Epsilon Eridani.”
“Where’s that?”
Thraxa takes in a deep breath, forcing her impatience away. “It’s a system closer to Earth than to here. It’s where we first met each other, Cygnians and humans. Humans were there first, but we came soon after. It’s where the centuries-long orgy started before spreading out to Earth and to Arcturus, and it’s come to be the center of the galaxy, so to speak. We’ll have you come from there because it’s so far away that no one on Summer’s Breeze will be able to verify any of the lies that you or Krakon tell. Even if someone there is from Epsilon Eridani, they will probably be from a version of it that is hundreds of years out of date compared to you--you’ll both lie that you just arrived here.”
“I see,” I say. “So being a pirate means you have to lie. A lot.”
I’m not liking this. Freezing to death on Glacius wasn’t great, but at least there it felt like I was seeing the real Krakon. Now it seems that the real Krakon is getting further and further away from me, day by day, and this cold pirate is taking his place.
“You never lied?” Thraxa asks me. “Maybe you lied to protect peoples’ feelings, or to just make your day go more smoothly?”
I shrug.
“Then don’t get self-righteous. These people we are stealing from are not good people.”
“Pirates are better?”
“We are our own society. Our own culture. We have a moral code. Just because we get our hands dirty doesn’t mean we are worse than people who can pay others to keep their own hands clean.”
I don’t want to debate this with her. “Fine, so what is my story? What lies do I tell?”
“You were born on Earth,” she says, but you got on the colony ship to Epsilon Eridani so early that you don’t remember Earth. You grew up on Eukarios, that’s a habitat, and--”
“What’s a habitat? I’ve been meaning to ask.”
I’m dead-tired by the time Thraxa lets me go.
I feel like a computer that has been forced to download way more information than the hard drive can actually hold. The main point is that I will be subservient to Krakon. That’s how it works with the aristocrats anyway: the humans are mostly