“I just wanted to rid us of their ships,” Walter breathed.
He searched the three faces turned his way.
“I didn’t think we’d be up here.” He widened his eyes for his uncle. “I didn’t know we were getting a ship!”
His uncle’s large hands left Walter’s shoulders and moved to the sides of his head, like he had suddenly been seized by a headache.
“I thought you didn’t want ships,” Walter told him, the excuses beginning to gather like the floods. “This way none of us would have them. We’d be equal.” A new reason popped into his head, and Walter added it to his premeditated list: “You said Terran banks owned them. All I did was send them back.”
“To Earth?” the pilot asked.
Walter nodded.
“From here? With one jump?”
More nodding. The pilot slumped down in his seat.
Walter’s uncle turned and sniffed the air. The stench of fear from the pilot hit Walter a moment later.
“What is it?” the Senior Pirate asked.
“We’ll never hear from them again,” he said. The pilot looked back over his shoulder at Walter, an odd mix of fear and shock on his face as well. “You can’t jump like that,” he said. “People who try are never heard from ever again.” The Palan pilot waved toward one of the screens on the dash. “There’s procedures you have to follow. There’s way too much stuff between here and Earth.”
“So how long before they come back?” his uncle asked.
“Aren’t you listening?” The pilot waved his arms. “They’re not ever coming back. They’re dead.”
“What the floods?” Pewder mumbled to himself.
“I thought you’d like this,” Walter begged of his uncle. The pilot’s words weren’t registering with him at all. He couldn’t think of the possibility that thousands might be dead when he was still facing the possibility of being in trouble.
“I thought I’d be promoted to Full Pirate and Hommul wouldn’t be at the very bottom of the clans. But now look!” He waved toward the empty space beyond the windshield. “We’ll be at the top!” Walter exulted.
Walter’s uncle looked out toward Palan’s most distant moon. He seemed to chew on the consequences of Walter’s actions, on this new power vacuum as real and great as the void of space. He looked to the pilot with a frown, then to Walter, then Pewder. His face grew suddenly serious.
“By the might I have vested in me,” he chanted, “by my wiles and my guiles, by the authority of a clan all mine, I now bestow the privilege of Full Pirate to you, Pewder Hommul.”
Walter watched Pewder positively glow from the hasty but proper proceedings. It wasn’t with all the pomp and circumstance the boys had imagined it, but the occasion was no less momentous. Their lives, everything they did and said around Palan, it was all about to change. They were moving from boys to men, and it didn’t matter to Walter how exactly that had to take place—
“You.” His uncle turned to face him. “You can wait another year. You’re grounded.”
“What—?”
His uncle stepped back and reached into the folds of his jacket.
“How can you ground me?”
A pistol came out. Walter immediately recognized it as the one he’d found on the Simmons guy.
“Wait,” Walter said, raising his hands. “Uncle, please, think on what you’re about to—”
His uncle’s arm came up, the gun pointing out. He swiveled to the side and with a concussive roar made mighty by the confines of the cockpit, he shot a bullet, point blank, into the side of the pilot’s face.
Blood and bone scattered, adhering to the dash and windshield in a wide cone of gore. The smell of burnt powder stung Walter’s nose, the ringing in his ears cutting off the first of what his uncle said next.
“—so that nobody ever knows what you did.” His uncle turned to Pewder. The gun did as well. “Is that understood?”
Pewder’s head nodded so hard, Walter imagined it could pop right off.
“Okay. Now.” The Senior Pirate of the Great Hommul Clan, highest and mightiest of them all, turned to survey the mess Walter had made. “The first job for you, Junior Pirate, is to clean this man’s blood off my spaceship.” He looked back and forth between the two boys, waving the smoking gun at the ship’s controls as he did so. “After that, I might need you to tell me how much you remember of what this man was doing with all these gizmos and knobs to get us out here.”
38 · Near Palan’s Furthest Moon
By the time Walter had the dash clean—filling two large garbage bags with nasty wads of paper towel in the process—the three Palans had argued enough over the ship’s controls to realize they had no idea how to get themselves home. Pewder and Walter took turns pointing out that their uncle could just as easily have shot the man after they’d landed back on Palan. Their Uncle Karl didn’t want to hear any of it. And during the argument, Walter was dismayed to see how quickly Pewder had begun talking down to him.
“You missed a bit of skull there, Junior Pirate.”
Walter grabbed the offending piece, imagining it a gold coin to keep the kill scents out of the air. The next year would certainly be the longest of his short life, he realized.
With the dash clean, the crew of three began to deduce the functioning of simpler systems. The changing room turned out to be an airlock. Once they dragged the pilot’s body inside, Walter took great pleasure in figuring out the hallway controls and opening the outer hatch. The vacuum sucked hungrily at the body, the arms and legs whacking limply at the jamb as it was yanked out into space along with a misty fog of crystalized air.
One of the only other devices to succumb to their combined wit—the hyperdrive being something not even Walter could summon the courage to fiddle with—was the radio. It soon transmitted a load of lies and the honest promise of future reward to any pilot willing to come fetch a poor, stranded crew in distress.
The ensuing flight back had been a deathly silent affair, the smells of rotted flowers and dirty dishes wafting through the confined space. Walter spent the time dizzy with the wrongness of his punishment. He had given his uncle power beyond the wildest hopes of his schemings, and the reward had been practically a demotion from the true rank he’d honestly earned. That, plus a year of being grounded. Not to mention a year of hearing it from Pewder, and of now never being able to outrank him in seniority, even when he eventually took over the clan—!
Thoughts like that were too much to take. Walter practically vibrated from holding it all in.
Their new pilot set the ship down in the spaceport, and Walter was the first out the ramp. He ran across the tarmac and through the market, bumping off busy shoppers as he went. He ran out into the streets, the pavement still shimmering from the passing floods, the gutters gurgling the last inches of water down their drains. He skipped over the crumbling bridges and through the crowded sidewalks, churning his legs for home. He had one last chance to make things right, to get the rewards he deserved for bringing all of Palan’s pirate clans to their knees while lifting Hommul above the rest. His mother, surely, would understand what he’d done and duly lavish him.
He ran past the Regal Hotel, disgorging its lobby of low-lifers, then around the corner and into his alley. Walter wheezed as he clomped up the steps to his door. His picks shook in his hands while he tried to unlock the deadbolt.
“Momma, I’m home!”
He yelled the greeting through the stubborn slab of wood. Tears of frustration were already welling in his eyes as he secured the first tumbler.
“I’m back from promotions, Momma!”
Walter still wasn’t sure how he was going to break the news that he hadn’t been promoted. The next tumbler succumbed to his frustrated machinations. Walter bit his lip and concentrated on the third and fourth, his damned hands shaking like a Junior Pirate’s.
Finally, the lock clicked open. Walter threw his picks in his pocket without bothering to arrange them back in their case. He shoved the door open and rushed straight for her bed, not noticing how quiet the machines were as he weaved around them to get there.
“Momma,” he gasped, wiping his nose and plopping down on the foot of the bed. “You’ve gotta do something about Uncle. You’ve gotta talk to him. The Hommul Clan is—”
Walter reached for his mother’s hand, but stopped himself just before grabbing it.
“Momma?”
The plastic bubble of a mask stood over her nose and mouth, its surface dry and clear, not fogged with her breath as it normally was. Walter could see the dull shimmer of her slightly parted lips through the clear shell.
“Mom?”
He shook her knee. His mother’s body felt like part of the furniture: still and lifeless, absorbing his movement and dissipating it to nothing. His mind, already stunned by the day’s disappointments, could not wrap itself around the obvious.
“Momma, wake up, I need to talk to you.”
Walter slid up the bed and wrapped both hands around one of hers, holding the wires and tubes along with her fingers. So much of the apparatus had become a part of her, anyway.
“No,” he said. He shook his head and patted the back of her hand. “Momma, wake up.”
He turned to the machines around her. One or two were still running, monitoring the awful. Walter could’ve read their screens and graphs at any other time, but right then, the silence was deafening. His head thrummed with the lack of whirring; it roared with the absence of kicking tubes and fan-compressed air. There was a whole lot of nothing going on in the room. The machines that kept his mother alive had all gone dead.
Dead.
It was the first time his brain nudged up against the concept. He pushed away from the bed and stomped toward the breathing machine. The screen showed an auto-shutdown procedure, responding to an input from the pulse monitor. It wasn’t Walter’s prior nemesis that had let him down—it had been another machine.
Walter turned to the pumps that kept his mother’s lungs dry. That machine was also calling out at him with its silence. Its screen showed an error message, an indecipherable code of digits and letters that might mean something to whoever possessed the manual. Walter spun around to the back of the unit, his multi-tool materializing in his hand. He fumbled for the screws, his mind spinning.
“Hold on, Momma,” he said. “Hold on.”
Tears coursed down his face, obscuring his vision. He dug and gouged at the screws, working them loose in fits and starts.
“We’re gonna get those lungs dry,” he told his mom. “Don’t you worry. You just hang in there.”
He ripped the panel free once the last screw was loose. Walter threw it out of his way, sending it clanging and skidding across the cracked tile floor. The stench of electrical fire, of charred silicon chips, wafted out of the machine. Walter shined his light into the bowels of the pump unit, scanning the miss-mash of cobbled gear, antique spares, hasty wiring, and deep scratches haloed with rust. He sniffed hard, tracking the odor to the offending part, when his cone of light caught a tiny gray wisp of coiled smoke rising up from an electrical board.
Walter stuck his head in and turned to the side so he could get a good look at the board.
It obviously didn’t belong.
The board was affixed in place with ugly gobs of yellowed and aged glue. In fact, the board wasn’t even being used for its original function. It was a piece-board, something Palans did when they wanted to use individual components on a PCB board without taking the time to remove the pieces. A tangled web of colored wires were soldered to the board here and there, hijacking the use of a resistor or a capacitor, three wires soldered to what looked like a timing chip. Walter felt a wave of relief as he realized he could just replace the components with spares ripped out of one of the other monitoring machines.
“You hang in there,” he told his long-dead mother. He reached in and pushed the wires to one side so he could see which unit would need which transistor or rheostat. He bathed the board in the full glare of his light, memorizing the location of each component—
And that’s when he saw for the first time just what he was looking at.
The board.
He was seeing it straight-on, all the chips arranged just so.
And he’d seen it before. He’d seen it in a schematic, laid out so pretty and clean. It was just the sort of Navy hardware that made for a perfect piece-board. Just the sort of top-secret, unhackable device one could only use for a spare part, a resistor or two.
Walter gazed at the barest whiff of smoke rising up from the fried unit. He watched it spiral its way out of his cone of light, up into the darkness of the machine’s innards.
The hyperdrive board sitting before him was dead. It was as dead as the hyperdrive boards in all the other ships in the Palan system. It was as dead as his mother.
And Walter had killed it.
39 · Felony Falls Penitentiary
One of the wheels of his food cart spun with a mind of its own. It would rise from the uneven floor of the prison hallway and do a spastic dance. It would make contact once more, jittering the cart sideways. Then it would squeal out, jump back in the air, and do it all over again.
Walter watched the unbalanced wheel go through this routine. He kept his head bowed, the weight of his shoulders supported mostly by the other three wheels as he pushed the cart along. He followed the crazy wheel’s rise and plummet, its howling complaint, its inability to do what the other wheels did, and he wondered—as if the wheel had a mind of its own—why it bothered.
On top of the cart, tin cans sloshed water dangerously up their sides. Other cans of brown food pellets rattled as the unappetizing nuggets did their little dance, jiggling themselves deep into their brethren while other pellets jostled up to take their place. Walter scrutinized this interplay for a while, imagining each pellet like a pirate clan enjoying its brief stay up top before it was swallowed by the rest. He thought about how long that ordeal had persisted, probably as far back as his people had grown legs and crawled out of the muck.