“Since I was younger than you.” The line of her throat is wattled, but when she grins her teeth are white and all present and accounted for. “Good harvest in this one; it’s thick like milk with helium along with all the dust.”
“Think you could find something else besides helium, if I took you looking?”
The woman’s a nebula-harvester, which is a kind of mercenary in and of itself. She knew what she was getting into, and it seemed like a good deal, or at least an interesting one. Interesting enough to say, “Could. Might want to take care of those fellows before we go, though,” and point behind Labbatu with her chin.
Six there, a posse of thugs all in an array when Labbatu turns around. They come in variety-pack: bruiser twice her girth and a wiry martial-artist, a razor-thin chick with a gun that must have come off the nose of a fighter ship strapped across her back in a rig, thickset man running to fat and holding a spitting electric prod, angel-faced lad spinning a suture-thread garrote in one long-fingered hand. Last one’s worst: looks like a kid, but no kid’s got that many teeth, all in rows inside her mouth like a shark, an endless hole of nasty triangles, no tongue.
“You have something that doesn’t belong to you,” says the chick with the gun.
“Which one you thinking of?” says Labbatu, getting up off her barstool. She’s grinning again. She only needs the normal kind of teeth. They’re bad enough, when they’re Labbatu’s. “I have a lot of that sort of merchandise.”
“Intellectual property,” says the angel, and spins his garrote faster.
Labbatu laughs. Rest of the spaceport bar starts clearing out; this is the sort of evening where there’s not much unsplintered furniture or unsmashed bottles left by the end. Easy to tell, if you’ve been in a lot of spaceport bars.
“Tell Ash-Iku I’m flattered,” says Labbatu. “Six of you and only one of me.”
Gun chick’s gun goes up, thunking into place over her head inside its rig. Starts its charge cycle. “Overkill’s all right,” she says, and Labbatu just looks at her.
“Ash-Iku’s not wrong about that,” she says, and throws the barstool like it’s a spear. One leg goes right into the gun barrel. There is a terrible noise, like a great beast choking itself to death.
It’s messy after that. The kid especially. All those teeth to kick in. Labbatu ruins another shirt.
* * *
There’s a recording, somewhere on the Heaven Dwells Within. Deep in the archives, buried, mislabeled. The captain gets it out sometimes, flips it over her knuckles like she’s doing a coin trick, and never plays it.
If she did, there’d be about thirty seconds of grainy hangar-bay footage. Gunsmoke and starlight. Old man and not-old-yet woman. No audio, but their mouths are moving. Mostly his.
My lioness, my star of the battle-cry. You turn brother against brother, son against father. Were those people worth this, Eanna-Nin, Labbatu-my-heart? Worth making my son turn against me? Worth poisoning your blood—our blood, Labbatu—with envy and covetousness?
And Labbatu says, “Daddy, you wouldn’t have cared if I died with my ship and my crew.”
Woman unholsters her lioness-maw pistol.
That’s when the scorpion shows up, and the tape cuts out.
* * *
Labbatu’s got a long way to go before she meets the scorpion. She and the nebula-harvester walk out of that bar—well, Labbatu limps out. Those bloody trousers are bloodier now, and ripped; no point in washing them. When she peels them off later half the skin on that thigh will come with, and she’ll throw them in the incinerator. But none of Ash-Iku’s retrieval specialists follow them back to the gunship.
(One of them, the martial artist, he gets himself back to Ash-Iku, but fuck, it takes him two weeks, and by then this is all over.)
The nebula-harvester knows her stuff. She’s fished this cloud of stardust for decades, and she’s got landmarks and beacons to guide her. Local guide beats hiding in the dust any day; that’s true for war on all the scales, from nebulae right down to finding the other guy’s village and taking their grain before they find yours and do the same. Labbatu takes her gunship where the nebula-harvester says to go, and they cut through the fog in sector-search, until the Heaven Dwells Within shows up like a jewel, right there, clear as water-ice.
All those guns. Last time Labbatu saw them, they were pointed at her ship.
This time she’s got some firepower of her own.
Ash-Iku’s crypto hacks are the best in the business; better than. They’re knowledge and concept; they’re the language a shipmind speaks when it says This is a trustworthy vessel; they’re the lists of people a ship knows are meant to be there; they’re a scattering illusion, static on every broadcast channel. They carve open the Heaven like it was a ripe peach. Sam helps a little, once he notices who it is that’s slicing up his brain; Sam does Labbatu the favor of showing the destruction of her old ship under the Heaven’s killing blue fire on every screen for all the crew. Scars some of them bad, those visuals. Sure, the Heaven’s a deathship, a knifeship, a ruling-ship, but most of the crew who ride in Heaven’s skin don’t have to see the ship cook a little vessel with the old captain’s daughter aboard to nothing but radiation-scorched ashes. Not usually.
Ash-Iku’s crypto gets Labbatu into the cargo bay: PETA BABKAMA LURUBA ANAKU, open the gate for me so that I may enter here. She comes in guns out already, firing suppression, blood and smoke, but she doesn’t need to use them on a single living creature—not one shot fired that hit a body. Sam keeps most of the crew away from her, but he lets Daddy An through every door he wants to open, like usual.
There’s that bit of tape.
And then there’s the scorpion.
A scorpion isn’t like a shipmind. It’s more like a parasite, a dweller under the metal skins of ships. A smart captain can tame one, or at least gentle one. It’s a scuttle of claws, a gun-stinger and a rattle of repurposed ship bits, grown all together with a thing that might have grown up to be a shipmind in it, squatting in the metal. They grow three times the size of a man. Maybe bigger. Scorpion doesn’t stop growing till it dies. A tame one will defend its territory. A non-tame one too, but tame ones are more discriminating about who’s an enemy and who isn’t.
No barstool to throw this time. Labbatu’s lioness-maw gun blows a couple holes in the scorpion, but that hardly slows it down. It leaks oil and hydraulic fluid and spits acid at her. The acid gets the gun, because she’s willing to drop it, willing to watch those lion-teeth melt to nothing.
It takes half an army to kill a full-grown scorpion. Labbatu’s the greatest captain and the greatest thief in the House of An, but half an army she is not.
Turns out she doesn’t need to be. Greatest thief and greatest captain is enough, when being so means having a suite of AI-killing hacker tricks that Labbatu got off Ash-Iku along with the spoof codes to the cargo bay and the personnel lists. Labbatu didn’t want to use them. She knew what they’d do to the shipmind in Heaven: same thing they did to the scorpion.
She says, “INA ETUTI ASBU.”
Dwell in darkness. All that crypto goes to carving knives, and the scorpion’s a pile of scrap on the floor at Labbatu’s feet.