* * *
JY YANG
LABBATU TAKES COMMAND OF THE FLAGSHIP HEAVEN DWELLS WITHIN
BY
* * *
ARKADY MARTINE
LADY, YOU PILE UP HEADS like dust. You sow heads like seeds.
* * *
“So the captain was in her quarters—”
“Naked, right?”
“If you were the captain, would you bother with a nightshirt? So she’s in her quarters, and she’s looking at her genitals in the mirror, and she’s like, My cunt is amazing—”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, Sarge—”
“Shut it, I’m not alone there—”
“Let her tell the story. I wanna hear about how the captain took Heaven Dwells Within from the House of An without firing a single shot. That’s what the sarge said, yeah? Not one shot.”
“Not one shot that hit anyone. Captain Labbatu doesn’t need to shoot people to win herself a flagship. She’s as good a thief as she is a commander, see. I remember—”
“Because you are an ancient of days, Sarge.”
“Because I was here when she did it, Technician. Now do you want to hear this or not?”
“I want to hear it. How’d she do it?”
“Well, first, she seduced Ash-Iku—”
“With her amazing cunt, yeah, yeah.”
* * *
Ash-Iku’s flat is a glass-walled slice of skyscraper, floating over the smog on this half-used-up planet; he’s got a whole floor to himself, and another three for his people and his business right below. Those don’t have windows at all, let alone open glass to see a dying planet by. Those are safe and shrouded. Labbatu’s filthy from the streets of this place, dust on her leather spacer’s jacket in a thick rose-red film, alley garbage-rot stuck to the treads of her boots. There’s blood on her face, and more blood on her thigh below her holstered gun, and someone else’s well-loved blood soaked through her shirt and dried to stiffening rust. She hasn’t been planetside in years.
Up until this morning—some morning, by some planet’s reckoning, this one will do—she hadn’t needed to be. She’d ridden in her ship over the skyways, the starshot paths from system to system, a small fast ship with a small fast crew. Captain Labbatu, the woman you call when you need a gun or a fuck or a piece of your heart retrieved. The woman you call when you need someone who knows how to win an ugly war and come up smiling. She isn’t smiling now. She’s got crew-blood soaked in her shirt, enough that it looks white-spotted instead of red-stained. She hasn’t got a ship at all anymore. She’s got dust. Dust, and fury.
She looks Ash-Iku’s doorkeep, behind his desk in the lobby, straight in the eyes and says, “Send me up. The hacker and I, we go back, honey.”
Doorkeep maybe hesitates too long; doorkeep gets a good look at the hollow dead eye of Labbatu’s pulse pistol, with its lioness-maw barrel. Doorkeep makes a call. Doesn’t take long for a silken elevator to show up, chrome and clean, whisper-quiet. Labbatu’s going to leave dust in it, and she thinks that’s right, that’s correct and just. She’s going to leave parts of her dead ship all over wherever she goes, now. That’s how she remembers, after all: she reminds.
Ash-Iku’s waiting at the top when that elevator sluices itself open; tumbled curls, olive skin, half-closed sky-green silk robe, his crypto-breaker goggles still pushed up on his forehead. Ash-Iku’s the sort of man who knows everything, or at least knows everything anyone’s tried to ask him; he finds out. He opens up. Doors, files. People. Companies and governments. Security systems. Whatever you like, if it’s what he likes too.
Captain Labbatu, she says to Ash-Iku: “I need to know how to destroy the House of An,” first thing. Not playing it subtle, Labbatu is; she’s not got subtlety left to her. Maybe later she decides to be the House of An, but right then she hasn’t got anything but revenge on her tongue. She swaggers into Ash-Iku’s glass house, parks her dusty, bloody ass on his white leather couch. He gets her a drink. He gets him a drink. He gets them both one of those terrible little crudité platters he’s had left over for a while, mysterious vegetable in pastry cup, mysterious pale pink fish dip, unmysterious celery stick.
“The whole House of An,” he says. “Tall order, Labbatu. Also that includes you, or are you renouncing that particular blood-tie? I don’t do suicides. Bad business.”
“The Heaven Dwells Within killed my crew and took my bounty,” says Labbatu. “Let’s start there. I want to cripple that fucking ship, Ash-Iku. I know you know how.”
Ash-Iku looks her over: sees a woman hurt and diminished, maybe, vulnerable, maybe. He thinks, What can I get first? Or else consider this: Ash-Iku looks her over, sees a business opportunity, a friend who got hurt, but he’s not the sort of man who has friends anymore, even friends like Labbatu. Wishes, a little, that he did. He thinks, Let’s make this fair. Either way works. Depends on how men are.
He says, “So what can you give me in exchange, without a ship to go get it with?”
Which is an ugly sort of fair. Labbatu’s not asking for flowers. She wants security hacks, shipmind-killer software.
When Labbatu grins, she’s got blood on her teeth like a lioness after the kill. “How about this, honey,” she says, picking up her drink. “I outdrink you, in my current state, you do me a favor. You outdrink me—should be easy, look at me—and I do one for you instead. Square?”
“Square,” says Ash-Iku, and they get started.
* * *
[…]loop ALERT ALERT ALERT → data breach! Credible reports of data breach sector-wide, including access override codes to Lotus-5 Docking Systems, access override codes to Riparian Docker Systems; personnel files at Kissura Shipping Incorporated, Larak Consultants, House of An, Marad Corp.; weapon unlock sequences for Belu Planetary Defense Cannons […]
“Fuck,” says Ash-Iku to his doorkeep, hungover head in his hands, sitting in his disheveled bed, one arm stuck in his green silk robe and the rest of it crumpled under him. His cryptogoggles, discarded on the pillow, are yelling “ALERT, BREACH, ALERT” in a tiny tinny yelp. “Go turn off the alarms and then, like. Hire me some thugs, okay? A lot of thugs.”
“Coffee first, ser?”
“Like a vat of it.”
* * *
[…] lionlike she claws at me,
I am plagued by the stinging on my thighs.
Her reddened mouth is killing-hot.
It spreads kisses like seed-crops
bruises that bloom on all the cheeks of my body
shakes me apart
sends me scattering.
Sweat-soaked and semen-soaked, falling into heaven.
O queen! Star of the battle-cry!
Your eyes are too sharp.
You sip so deeply that I begin to thirst […]
Fragment, “The Destruction of Labbatu,” attributed to Ash-Iku (contested)
* * *
“So she fucked him, and when he was fuck-drunk—”
“No, the captain never fucked anyone she didn’t want to fuck. He was actually drunk.”