“You should know I don’t do small talk well.”
He shrugged. “Get a man drunk enough, start him talking about himself, and the scene will write itself.” He downed the last of his drink and signaled for a full pitcher to be brought.
We make a good team. She wanted to say it out loud. She was afraid to say it out loud.
Some feelings were too ephemeral to bind to words. They might vanish like smoke if she tried.
“Let’s just hope he has some useful information,” she said.
“Amen to that.”
Altruism is hardwired into the human psyche, not as sentiment, but as investment strategy. Cooperation provides a competitive advantage, hence success in the evolutionary arena. Nature has taught us that those who share the burdens and risks of human existence are more likely to survive than those who walk alone.
It is when we are being most selfish that we appear most selfless.
ATHENA ROSS
Behind the Mask
HARMONY NODE
HYDRA COLLECTIVE
IVAR FOUND his few remaining crew members in one of the core’s smaller gambling dens. No surprise there. There weren’t that many forms of entertainment on Hydra, at least not that the average scav could afford. Food, drink, drugs, whores, gambling. The patroni with their grand motherships no doubt had a richer selection, but the core of the station was where common folk gathered, rough-hewn men and women whose profits might buy them a week’s worth of indulgence if their last haul was good. It was a necessary pressure valve after the stress of a dangerous run. So were the fights that broke out periodically. When you had a station full of people for whom violence was second nature, and who lived outside the law, peace rarely lasted for long.
This den was small and dimly lit, and it smelled of sweat, alcohol, and a variety of drug vapors. Others might find the mixture oppressive, but to Ivar they were the smells of home, and he breathed in deeply, to counter Shenshido’s stink. But he had been on that station too long, and memories were too deeply embedded in his psyche; they would not be banished so easily. Especially not after Ru had told him he’d spent two years seeing things that weren’t there. That kind of revelation did not sit easy on the spirit.
He was wearing a hooded jacket he’d found in Ru’s wardrobe—her parting gift to him—and had pulled the hood forward over his head, enough to shadow his face. Thus far no one had recognized him. Now, looking around the room, he pushed it back. Most of the people there were too fixated on their games to notice, but one head turned in his direction—a Sinji woman in an aggressively spiked headset—and the look of shock on her face was priceless. “Ivar!!?” Others were turning in his direction now, their expressions ranging from joy to confusion to disbelief. Cards were laid down—in one case dropped on the floor—and dice went unclaimed as all eyes in the room turned to him. The attention bathed his spirit in energy.
“Holy shit!” someone exclaimed. “Is that really you?”
“It’s a fucking ghost,” someone else said. “Ivar’s dead.”
“Obviously not, asshole.”
“Fuck me, Ivar! Where the hell have you been?”
Then there were some people who didn’t look as happy to see him, rivals he’d screwed in the past, as well as people who’d tried to screw him and suffered the consequences. How easy it would be to slip back into the old social patterns with them, as if nothing had changed. But he was skating on his reputation, and that would last only until his old enemies realized he had no ship, no crew, and no patronage. The things that had once made him a force to be reckoned with were mere memories now; he would have to climb up from the bottom of the ladder again, like a newbie.
No. Not like a newbie. He had a world full of enemies and rivals who would cut him down to size the minute he looked weak. Newbies had nothing.
“Over here!” a familiar voice cried. The cry came from a kaltrop table with half a dozen people seated around it, three of whom were from his old crew. But only three. He felt a brief pang of guilt, that so many of his people had died in the Shenshido raid while he had survived. It was an unfamiliar and uncomfortable emotion.
The lanky Algonkian woman who had called to him rose from her seat as he approached the table. Raven was dressed in black—as always—with a headset shaped like her namesake. Long black wings with stylized feathers swept down around the sides of her head, shimmering with iridescent hints of green and copper as she moved. She was one of the best distractors he’d ever worked with, adept at buying other scavs the time they needed to sweep in and claim a disabled ship before official recovery teams could reach it. He was glad to learn she was among the survivors. “Alive? For real?” She reached out and pinched both his cheeks, hard, then turned back to her companions. “Not a ghost!” she announced. As if somehow that was her personal accomplishment.
Second in the trio of survivors was Ghant. The Iothan seemed glad to see Ivar as well, if guardedly so, and got up to embrace him. The third survivor from Ivar’s former crew was Spike, named for the rod that had once impaled his face, going in through his left eye and coming out through the back of his skull. Modern medicine and the luck of the devil had saved the most important parts of his brain, but the empty hole where his eye used to be, covered over in twisted scar tissue, was a paragon of ugliness. Of course he could have had it fixed, or covered it up. But he didn’t. Battle scars were status symbols on Hydra: the more gruesome the better.
Spike didn’t stand, just nodded his head in wary acknowledgment. There was no hint in his expression of what thoughts were churning in his head, but Ivar could guess. “We heard you were dead,” he said quietly. “Glad to hear otherwise.”
“The thought of getting back to all your ugly faces kept me going,” Ivar assured him. Ghant placed a chair in front of him. Spike’s expression was unreadable, but his hands on the table tensed slightly as he watched Ivar’s old crew fawn over him. I valued this man for his ruthlessness, Ivar reminded himself. “You’ve got some new blood, I see.”
Spike’s good eye narrowed slightly. “This is Teek.” A slender Frisian nodded. “Gerta.” That was a stocky Salver, probably female; it was sometimes hard to figure out gender with Salvers. “Maruth.” This one was small-framed and bald; a Belial twin? It was rare to see one of those traveling alone. One or more of his siblings were probably somewhere else on Hydra.
Ivar nodded to them all, then looked back at Spike. “I hear you’re alpha now.”
“So it seems.” There was an echo of challenge in the man’s voice. One of his hands had dropped under the table, presumably to a weapon. Ivar’s own hand twitched toward his knife, ready to respond if necessary. Gunfire was forbidden inside the core, to protect its structure, so any fight that took place tended to be intimate and bloody.