“You tell the truth,” Pink continued, “and you let other people make their own choices, and you live with the consequences. You give them what Pete and Tito didn’t give you that day.” She released Eva’s chin, and Eva dropped her gaze again, to the scuffed flooring that no longer held a polish, that should probably have been replaced but that didn’t seem to bother Pink, either.
“You’re right,” Eva said again, her voice just above a whisper. Then, louder, “Do you ever get tired of being right?”
Pink smirked. “It’s like using a muscle; gets easy the more you do it.”
Eva stared at her gravboots, at her hands, at the place inside her mind where she locked away her memories of that day because otherwise she’d never stop shaking. She had always been good at compartmentalizing, at rationalizing her choices, until the day she hadn’t. Garilia was where her life had ended, and started, and even though she’d done things she regretted since then—she’d blown up an entire gmaarg fathership, for fuck’s sake—she’d never gone back to being the Eva who pulled the trigger that won a revolution. Or lost it, depending on whose side you were on.
“Let’s get everyone in the mess,” Eva said. “Might as well get this over with.”
Pink rested a hand on Eva’s arm. “You sure you don’t want to take a minute?”
Eva shook her head and stood, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. They were surprisingly dry.
“No time to waste,” Eva said. “We’ve got shit to do.”
Chapter 10
The Incident at Garilia
“So,” Eva said, once everyone had settled in the mess. No one had gotten food, or drinks, though Pink handed Eva a cup of water and a pair of pills once she sat down. They all stared at her expectantly, and she took a shaky breath, flattening her palms against the top of the table.
Mala jumped up in front of her, startling her into sitting back in her chair. With a smug rattle of her tail, Mala climbed into Eva’s lap and began kneading her thighs.
“Is everything okay?” Sue blurted out. “Are we in trouble? Are we still looking for Josh?”
Eva half smiled at Sue, whose face was blotchy from crying. “We’re looking, and we’re going to find him. Min has already started flying us toward Garilia.”
Sue sat lower in her seat, as if she had deflated slightly from relief.
“Before we get there,” Eva said slowly, “I need to tell you all about something that happened . . . Something I did on Garilia. It may make things easier for us there, or harder. I don’t know. But you may not like me very much by the end of this story, and if you want us to drop you off somewhere, I’ll understand. Even you, Min.” She glanced at the pilot, who had moved her human body to the room to join them, possibly under orders from Pink.
“Not likely, Cap,” Min replied. Sue, however, had paled, glancing at Pink, who leaned back in her own seat with her arms crossed.
Vakar smelled like someone had crashed into a perfume store. Tar, incense, ozone, vanilla, rosewater, mint, licorice; he was all kinds of worried and unsure of what to expect, but with an underlying anticipation that told Eva he’d never dug into this with all his Wraith tools and skills. He’d respected her privacy this whole time, even as she had respected his when he first joined their crew.
He’d almost left her once because she lied to him. She hoped this wouldn’t be a similar situation, even if she didn’t deserve him.
Eva’s hand began stroking Mala’s soft, smooth fur, almost of its own volition. Mala purred, and Eva snorted as she remembered something her father had said once: you were never alone as long as you had a cat.
“So,” Eva repeated, gathering her courage. “Once upon a time, there was a mercenary who thought she was hot shit.”
Garilia was a BOFA-Defended Emergent Ethno-Zone for Noncontributing Undeveloped Technological Species, which was a fancy way of saying it was a planet discovered by the Benevolent Organization of Federated Astrostates before anyone else. Standard procedure was to maintain surveillance until particular conditions were met, then make first contact and offer no-strings-attached protected status, then eventually allow the planet to join BOFA as a junior member with economic incentives but no voting privileges, and so on.
By the time Eva got there, they’d been under protected status for almost thirty years, during which time the various cultures and their respective political coalitions had scrambled to put together a unified central government, in order to cohesively negotiate with BOFA and the rest of the suddenly reachable universe.
This had not worked out well.
Back then, Pete Larsen, Eva’s father, oversaw a sprawling syndicate of various enterprises of dubious legality with his perfectly lawful spaceship-selling operation as its hub. Smuggling was the least objectionable rung on the ladder of criminal severity, but it could be among the most dangerous; that was where Eva and her fellow mercs came in, under the command of incorrigibly competent asshole Tito Santiago.
As far as Eva had known, their task on Garilia was simple: ensure the cargo of the SS Yamamoto reached its destination. Tito had briefed them on the challenges, namely that they were landing in the middle of a rebellion and might have to protect the cargo while fighting their way through to the recipients. The terrain at the drop point was loosely termed forested, with trees the size of skyscrapers whose crowns spread out for hundreds of meters, their branches falling like thick cables halfway to the ground, each leaf the size of an average human. Local buildings were constructed on or between branches, with cable cars or ziplines connecting them to each other. The native sentient species was the xana, who were as susceptible to standard weapons as most people, and whose psychic abilities were intra-species and thus deemed irrelevant.
Tito had a bad habit of deeming things irrelevant when they might have mattered to someone who wasn’t him.
When they landed, a pitched battle was already in progress. Later, they would learn that the world government forces had located the main rebel encampment and launched an offensive, which had pushed the rebels to accelerate their plans to complete their total takeover of the planet’s capital city, Rilia. When they arrived, the rebels were on the run, more or less, pursued by innumerable soldiers from one branch to the next, their own number dwindling as they struggled to survive.
But Tito’s squad were professionals, and they got the job done as long as the pay was good and the danger was surmountable. They located their missing contact, bunkering in a cramped structure in the next tree over from where they had touched down. Between them were clusters of government fighters and the companion animals they called Attuned, some gliding back and forth between branches, others in sniper positions above the rebels, still others setting up complex webs of some sticky substance to restrict movement to particular pathways and airspaces.
All Tito and his people had to do was get through the line, deliver the cargo, and get back to their ship.
Tito informed them that taking out one particular leader of the government fighters would make their job much easier, might even halt the fighting altogether for a while if they were lucky. For the purpose of the mission, she was code named “Mother,” and while her location was uncertain, the rebels thought she might be in a section of the tree they’d been unable to reach since they were pinned down.