LICE PIRATE BLUES

ADMINISTRATIVE COMPOUND, GADSHILL COLONY :: SOUTHERN TERRAFORMATION, ZEPHYRUS :: ARCAS-ASTRAEUS SYSTEM

2406 AD

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, OR SO THEY SAY!” Montañés sang, while a choir of broken corpses kept their counsel at his feet. “And MAN is the warmest place to hide, or so they say, or so th--cut, you vicious bastard, cut!--OR SO THEY SAY!”

The cutter blinked through sheets of sweat as his voice crashed inside his helmet like an avalanche. His hands shook around the barrel of the plasma torch, the slag-boiling cut a jagged line through the center of the carbon steel lockplate. And still he sang. At deafening volumes the song kept him focused, distracting him just enough to push on, to keep cutting, to ignore the grisly tableau gathered around him in the gloom. Just cut, he cursed himself. And sing to save your soul.

Nearly an hour before, his singing had been the stuff of rowdy beer halls, meant only to haze a captain who couldn’t stand an old spacer’s shanty. Montañés had soft, kind eyes in a convict’s face, his squashed nose and ill-tended teeth suggesting a misspent youth on some backwater system. Like most cutters he was thin and wiry, corded with lean muscle but loose-limbed and agile, with a jeweler’s deft touch. Which made all the more curious his ability to sing basso profundo when the mood struck him. He had sung the shanty absently as he double-timed it from the Kamakura to the compound’s eastern maintenance hatch, the closest access point to Sick Bay. But when he knew Captain Lenkov could see him on the external video tap, Montañés had lifted his torch like a drum major’s baton and pumped it up and down in time with the tune.

“And they SAY to resist is the most FUTILE thing, but have THEY ever taught a lice piiiirate to sii-III-iiing?” He had no idea what most of the verses meant--it was an awful song--but the shanty was such fun to sing as he led an imaginary parade in a small circle around the courtyard. “Hoo-RAY, hoo-RAY, for that galaxy FAR FAR AWAAAY!”

On comms, Lenkov’s voice had crashed through his helmet like a round from a slag-thrower. “I swear to god and little baby Xenu if you don’t shut up--”

But by then Montañés had dissolved into gales of oddly gentle laughter, the same sweet silliness that had disarmed a hundred drunken bar fights in as many systems. Even the ones he’d started himself. “I can’t help it, Cap! On a sunny day I can whistle Gilbert and Sullivan right out my asshole!”

“Not with my foot buried in it you can’t,” Lenkov had snapped, but couldn’t keep the smile out of their voice.

Montañés had given the captain a coquettish purr and wriggled his ass at the maintenance bay camera, a gesture entirely lost inside the bulk of his armored radiation suit. Environmental sensors were in the green for a hundred klicks around the compound, but the Merry Men weren’t taking chances. Whatever had punched the colony’s ticket might be airborne or invisible to standard sensor packages, and after all, their target was the facility’s Sick Bay.

“You’d better get that foot on up in here, Cap,” Montañés had grinned, turning back to the sealed hatch. “‘Cause I’m gonna get us that lice in five minutes flat.”

What Montañés had found once he’d cleared the maintenance hatch and sprinted to Sick Bay had snatched the smiles off all their faces.

Now, fifty-six minutes later, his song trilled and wavered with the notes of his rising panic. Just don’t look at them, he thought, his gorge rising. Just don’t look.

The seventh lockplate finally gave. Montañés swallowed thickly and moved to the eighth and final lock, pinning his focus on the work. A blazing corona of gold-white light wreathed the head of his plasma torch, filling his opaqued faceplate with spitting stars; but still…if he side-eyed hard enough left or right, he could see them in the faceplate’s curved reflection. Five colonists, arrayed in a rough semi-circle, their corpses fanned out from the sealed Sick Bay door like the splayed fingers of a hand. The cause of death in each was clear, if inexplicable: some ravenous thing had, with equal parts frenzy and precision, cracked open their skulls like eggshells and made a gelatinous paste of their brains.

Montañés had seen corpses before. Any cutter with even half his time on the torch had seen death a dozen ways, from the quiet and quotidian to the explosively fucking horrific. But this was something entirely different. What iced the cutter’s nerves was the peacefulness--the near artistry--with which these horrors seemed to have unfolded: One by one they’d been felled like trees cut at the ankle, their backs straight against the deckplates, eyes and mouths gaping, each of their chins tipped towards the ceiling until their necks arced with a curve that might have looked graceful until rigor made them obscene. But for their heads there was not a trace of violence on the bodies, but Christ what had been done to those skulls!

Montañés turned. And looked.

The caps of each corpse’s skull had been peeled up and back in two wet, shingled sections, leaving the brain cleanly exposed to the killer’s intimate perusal. And that seemed to be what the killer had done: scooped the fruit of each skull from its bowl and picked it carefully apart, lobe by lobe, down to its fibrous stem, as if to unearth something hidden. Something precious.

Montañés felt the floor sway beneath him as his gorge rose again. Suddenly the radiation suit itched like a second, peeling skin, a sheath his body wanted to slough off in strips. He’d spent 10,000 hours in hard vacuum welding orbital modules before joining Lenkov’s Merry Men and had never once been sick in his suit. Oh, Jesus, don’t let me fuck this up, not this job--

The sudden bark of live comms inside his helmet startled him back to reality. It was Captain Lenkov. “Montañés, what’s up? Empty tank?”

The cutter gave his head a vicious shake. Sweat spattered the inside of his faceplate and hung there like condensation on a cold glass of beer. Gradually, Montañés realized he’d let his thumb slip off the ignition stud; the torch was dead in his trembling fists. “Uh, no, Cap, no, we’re good,” he said hastily, then knocked his chin against the O-toggle inside his helmet. A fresh stream of oxygen hissed into the suit, PLS fans humming reassuringly. “We’re…good.”

“Listen to me, Monty,” Lenkov said, their tone an urgent whisper in his earbud. “Phan has this entire place painted, he says Colonial sensors are all green, even in Sick Bay. Whatever did those colonists is long gone, hear me?”

Montañés squeezed his eyes shut. He could feel his heart jackhammering wildly against the suit’s carbon fiber breastplate, knew his vitals were streaming to Kearney’s dashboards back on the ship. He had to get it together, get it together, but he was exhaling too much carbon diox--

Sure enough, there was Kearney’s soft Irish lilt in his ear, always the Orchestrator: “I’m gonna vent off some CO2 for you, Monty, yeah? Breathe through your nose for me, pet, slow and steady…that’s it.”

Montañés keyed his mike once to signal assent. Kearney always kept him safe. Lenkov took back comms. “Keep your eye on the prize, Monty, this is the big one,” they said, genuine excitement in their voice. “No more BOOTlegs, no more FreeLoaders, these are the real deal, right? Fresh lice straight from ReNeuAl HQ. This is the shit.”

Through Lenkov’s comms Montañés could hear the Chief’s odd, nasal tone from his seat at the helm. “The Jack Taylor starts tuning in thirty-eight minutes, my loves.”

Fuck me, Montañés thought, the moment Lenkov said it aloud in his ear. The captain continued, their tone lighter. “Don’t make me miss my ride off this asshole of a system, Monty. The Taylor leaves us behind I gotta burn my last legitimate SOS to get us off this dingy fuckhole. And by legitimate I mean--”

“Fake as fuck,” Montañés and Lenkov said together, and Monty found himself chuckling. The Merry Men had all manner of official writs and permits, authenticated tags and tokens from Imperium to Colonial and all the local shitheads in between. All fake as fuck.

“There’s nothing in that room but treasure,” Lenkov said. “Time is our only enemy here, Monty, I promise you. We have got to go, sailor!”

Montañés took a deep, calming breath through his nose and re-ignited the torch. Plasma arced at 22,000 degrees Celsius against cold carbon steel. “Gimme five more minutes,” he said, and then he began to sing.

* * *

On the command deck of the Mikoyan-class Interceptor Kamakura a half-klick south of the compound, Captain Natsu Lenkov muted Monty’s shanty and rolled their squat neck until it audibly popped. “That’s Monty back on the board,” they said matter-of-factly. It wouldn’t be a proper Cut-and-Run without talking at least one of their Merry Men off a ledge. “Run the rest for me, K.”

In the Pit, Kearney Collins twisted her curly red hair into a knot at the nape of her neck and started swiping status panels over to Lenkov’s monitor. “The Twins are inbound, ETA six minutes. A few SNAFUs, nothing they couldn’t handle.” The Twins were Anke and Eike, a pair of blond-and-blue Prussian operators who’d grown up in the final gruesome years of the Augsburg Rebellion, specializing in communications and demolitions, respectively. To the Merry Men they were just Comz and Bomz.

Lenkov gimbaled their monitors into the upright configuration and stood with a groan. The captain was short and compact, with the squared shoulders and thick, powerful legs of a human born and raised under New Chiba’s nearly 2 gravities. With an Earthlike 1.2 g pull, Zephyrus made Lenkov feel almost buoyant, but the command chair still made their ass ache. They scanned the Twins’ dashboards, then said: “SNAFUs, huh? Gimme specifics.”

Kearney shrugged apologetically. “Comz said the beacons were acting weird, so she just cut them altogether. Mission specs said loop an All-Clear for the CDF but she couldn’t get the feeds to stop talkin’ shite, so, yeah…” Kearney scrunched up her freckled nose. “She just fragged ‘em.”

“And Bomz?”

“Weirdness, too. He was gonna blow the landing pads on synchronized timers in case we caught chaff on the way out, but they were all scrambly, he said.”

“Scrambly how?”

Another shrug. “Scrambly-fucked, I guess?”

“Just the timers?” Lenkov said. “The ordinance is hot?”

Kearney bit her bottom lip, twisted a strand of hair around one long, pale finger. “I guess we’ll find out once we dust?"

Lenkov clenched their fists, pulled a long, slow breath through their nose, and glared at the facility map. Their eyes flicked over the four icons pinning the team in their places around the compound. One pair was moving quickly down the access road towards the LZ; one--Montañés--was stock-still at the Sick Bay doors; the fourth seemed to be pacing back and forth inside the compound’s Network Operations Center. Lenkov rapped a knuckle against the screen. “What the shit is Tommy doing?”

Kearney raised her eyebrows sheepishly.

“Weirdness?” Lenkov shouted, leaning around the rack of monitors until their shadow fell ominously across the Pit. Kearney winced. “Put him on the 1MC,” Lenkov ordered, and turned their face to the overheads. “Tommy? What the fuck.”

The ship-wide Main Circuit crackled, then, “Hey, Cap! Look, no worries! Just, uh, wrapping up here!”

Lenkov’s knuckles went white with tension. Tommy Phan was their blackhat, an ex-Colonial Defense tech who could sweet-talk any network into spreading its legs for him. Like most blackhats Lenkov had ever known, he was also an insufferable prick. He’d gone in 30 minutes ahead of Montañés with a custom deck and a headful of Colonial back doors to disable every virtual and physical security system in the compound. The only thing he couldn’t disarm online was the quarantine seal on Sick Bay, with its eight carbon steel cock-blocks.

“I’m, uh, just trying to download the Sick Bay feeds to my deck, yeah? See what did those colonists?” Phan seemed distracted; he wasn’t wearing cams, but Lenkov could tell from his voice that he was fiddling with something complicated. “But the chảnh chó qbits on this thing are…”

“Weird?” Lenkov seethed.

“So weird, right?! The eigenvalues are all over the spectrum, nothing will sync up, I’ve never seen--”

“Be quiet now,” Lenkov barked, swiping for the Twins’ panel. “I don’t give a good goddamn what killed those colonists, as long as it isn’t in Sick Bay with my lice. Get back here now.” Lenkov went to close the channel, then added: “But talk to the Twins on your way. See if all your weirds connect somehow.” Lenkov dragged Tommy’s icon into the grouped bubble that was Comz and Bomz and punched out of 1MC.

It was suddenly very quiet on the command deck.

Lenkov slowly unclenched their fists and shot a glance over their left shoulder, where Chief of the Watch Danny O’Bannon nested in his helmsman’s couch like a wild-eyed little rodent. Of all their crew, Lenkov had worked with Danny the longest, almost since the first hour they’d put on Kamakura’s engines. “How much weird have you got, Chief?”

O’Bannon showed his palms in a gesture of helpless submission. “Only the weird I brought onboard, Nat. Which I guess is quite a lot.”

“Yes, it is,” Lenkov smiled. The Chief’s odd, sing-songy tones always soothed their nerves. “We still getting out of here?”

O’Bannon rolled his head lazily to one side, read a panel, rolled it back. “Jack Taylor’s right where she’s supposed to be, she surely is. They go on the Loom in thirty-three minutes, as planned; our flightpath is locked for sixteen minutes eleven seconds, dust-to-dock.” He put his palms together and touched his pianist’s fingers to his chin, smiling beatifically. “We just need that lice and all is nice.”

“Yes we do, Chief.” Lenkov blew out a long breath, one it felt like they’d been holding for ten hours, since the start of this bullshit run. They had just over fifteen minutes to wrap this thing up. Lenkov punched for Monty’s comms. “How we looking, cutter?”

Montañés was mid-verse, his rich voice booming across the command deck; Lenkov had accidentally put him on the 1MC. “And where is the TRUTH? It’s not HERE! It’s OUT THERE!”

“For fuck’s sake, Monty--”

“Almost there, Cap, ninety seconds!” the cutter barked. “Warm up the engines!”

Jesus Christ, the captain thought, dropping back into their command chair. We just might make it.

Lenkov scrubbed a hand through the gray scrim of hair that limned their head like a stocking cap and closed their eyes, mining for calm. Fifteen years they’d been stealing personas and dealing in hot licenses for those who couldn’t afford ReNeuAl, like they were some bullshit Robin Hood handing out cut-rate resurrections in the black markets of New Chiba and Aesop Prime. Fifteen years of dodging the Imperium and greasing Colonials, robbing the rich to seed the poor. That’s all it was, Lenkov told themself: a tiny seed, planted in human soil, a wetware miracle that would grow into a fully functioning personality. Not the Latest and Greatest, with all the new tweaks and features a legal license bestowed; only Regenerative Neurological Algorithms, LLC, SA, GmbH of Silicon Center, Neu Lausanne, and Frankfurt am Main offered that kind of care for the mindless young Husk.

If you could afford it.

But you couldn’t. Almost no one could. Unless you wanted to tithe your young Husk to the Curia so that they might forever serve the Imperium as a newly-minted minion of the Church, your options were slim. So you bought from thieves like Lenkov and their Merry Men and you took your chances. Maybe you ended up with a Beta, a dozen or more generations behind the latest ReNeuAl code and buggy as fuck, but with the encryption worn down to nothing; good enough for the FreeLoaders and BOOTlegs, cheap enough for a day-laborer who couldn’t afford to feed a Husk but refused to give him up to the Curia. Day-laborers like Lenkov’s father; Husks like their little baby brother, born without mind or memory, just one of billions born shucked of their sentience in the aftermath of the Erasure.

Lenkov sniffed, pushed one wrist against their nose. Their eyes stung.

Fifteen years of making Husks whole again with the cheapest, shittiest lice Lenkov could steal. And now this? A Cut-and-Run on a failed colony for a shiny box of bleeding-edge ReNeuAl personas at a hundred times their usual rate? No license thief--or lice pirate, for the Robin Hood romantics--could ever dream of a score like this.

Which meant they were fucked from go.

It had all happened with blinding speed and suspicious competence. Lenkov’s usual broker on the New Chiba gateway station had the contract and the transport, with only one catch: It’s got to be now. When Lenkov pressed the broker for details, they got nothing but vagaries and finally threats; if they didn’t like the money, he’d just find someone else, time was wasting. Lenkov’s only lead on their next job was maybe a fistful of 10th-generation personas some shithead trafficker down the gravity well was holding for a rainy day, a run that would barely cover the cost of Kamakura’s fuel. They were tired of just squeezing by. They had one of the best cut-and-run teams in the galaxy--hell, they had the PhanTom himself!--and their crew deserved more than beer money.

Lenkov took the job.

Their transport was already in-station. The Jack Taylor was a century-old refitted naval assault carrier with an empty hangar and a working Loom drive, all they needed to run the Weave out to the crashed colony on Zephyrus. They had the Kamakura docked and locked less than 90 minutes after Lenkov had signed the contract; another ten, and the Jack Taylor’s Tapestran navigator was tuning its Loom for the jump to the Arcas-Astraeus system. It had all happened so fast.

Fucked from...

“Bad news, loves,” Danny shouted, the unusual dread in his voice cutting through Lenkov’s reverie. “The Taylor is breaking GSO.”

“Captain, Tommy needs an urgent word,” Kearney announced, almost on top of O’Bannon.

“Stow that, Collins,” Lenkov said, suddenly in full captain mode; Tommy Phan and his technobabble bullshit could wait. “Chief of the Watch, what is our transport’s position?”

“Fifty-one-point six degrees latitude and moving fast, Captain. The LZ is no longer in geosynchronous orbit with the Taylor.”

What the fuck. Lenkov gimbaled the monitors in close. “Chief, run a Deep Resonance Scan, see if there’s a Weaveway inbound. And start a fresh plot, how long to their new position from dustoff?”

“Aye, Captain, scanning,” the Chief said, both his long-fingered hands working across two separate consoles. “Time to target now eighteen minutes twelve seconds…thirty seconds…looks like they’re turning!”

No good. Turning meant harmonic alignment; they were getting ready to run. “Patch me through.”

O’Bannon swiped for the Taylor on an encrypted channel. “KNIFE, this is VARIABLE, how do you read?”

A short chatter of static, then: “Five-by-five, VARIABLE, but we’re short. Make it quick.”

O’Bannon punched for the 1MC and nodded at the captain. “Lenkov here, I don’t have time for codeword bullshit, are you turning for a jump, Taylor?”

In the pause that followed, O’Bannon had just enough time to say, “DRS confirms one inbound Weaveway harmonic. Something’s coming.”

“Yeah,” the signals officer on the Taylor said over the main channel, “and it’s big. Confirmed, Kamakura, we are adjusting position to find some music.”

Lenkov licked their lips, their eyes darting between tactical readouts. Fucked from go…

“Captain, really,” Kearney pleaded from the Pit, “you need to hear this--”

“One minute, K!” Lenkov snapped, then, lifting her head and punching for Montañés: “Cutter, grab my lice and run. I mean run.”

“I’ve got the quarantine locks off but I need Tommy to cycle the air-seal!” Montañés said. He was panting, his voice splintered with anxiety.

Lenkov grunted, shot daggers at the facility map; a dashed red line ran in a constant animated circle around the Sick Bay door. “Kearney, put Phan on the--”

The Orchestrator had been waiting for a crack in Lenkov’s defenses and wasted no time. Kearney swiped and a sudden cacophony of overlapping voices rang over the 1MC, Phan and Bomz shouting excitedly at each other on the shared group circuit: “--sort of anomaly, it’s all in the clocking--”

“Right, same on the timers, like the chip couldn’t decide what the fuck--”

“That’s what I’m saying--”

“Shut up, both of you!” Lenkov shouted, gripping the back of their neck with both hands. “Tommy, ETA?”

Phan was breathing heavily; it sounded like he was sprinting now. “I had to stop for a sec, I’ve got a simulation runn--”

“Fuck that simulation, can you cut the Sick Bay air-seal from your deck?”

“What? Captain, no, no, we’ve got to get Monty out of there!” Phan cried, gasping for breath inside his suit. “Like, now, that’s what I’ve been trying to--”

Tactical override cut through the local channel as the Taylor came back online: “Kamakura, we’ve got tone. Harmonic cohesion in…eight minutes. Acknowledge.”

Lenkov spun towards O’Bannon, who was already shaking his head. “She’s twelve degrees off position, we’ll never catch her in time.”

Okay, that’s that, Lenkov decided, slamming the hatch closed on Get the Fuck Out of Here Now. They’d have to burn that SOS and hope whatever had spooked the Taylor didn’t give a shit about their narrow asses. Now Lenkov’s only concern was Secure the Lice. “Jack Taylor, this is Kamakura Actual, acknowledged and safe travels. Thanks for the lift in-system.”

“Roger, Kamakura Actual, and good luck.” The encrypted channel went immediately dead.

And suddenly Montañés was singing triumphantly over the 1MC. “--They SAY to resist is the most FUTILE thing--”

Lenkov glanced at the facility map. The Sick Bay air-seal blinked green. They could hear the shearing hiss of decompression above Monty’s rejoicing; the door was cycling open.

Tommy Phan was suddenly on deck, helmet off and hands on his knees, gasping for air. He was shaking his head furiously. “Wasn’t…me,” he said, over and over again. “Wasn’t…me.”

Fucked from go.

“Kearney, put his cams on-screen,” Lenkov croaked, a knot tying itself off in their throat. Kearney swiped.

The 360° feed from the cutter’s suitcams blinked on. Something imperceptible shifted in the room, as ineffable as a collapsing wave function. And then the air in Sick Bay misted with Monty’s blood, and grew thick with the sound of his screams.