It was the dim, cool night cycle in the garden where the crew lingered after mess. By the table one of the tall, antlered linangi grazed while Fathema scratched the ridge of coarse fur at its nape. The pond lapped at its banks in the dark. A little lantern flickered on the table to provide a circle of light around them. The meal cleared away, they picked at a bowl of ripe berries as they talked of the day’s findings.
“Well, I think we’ve gotten what we can from here, then,” Captain Avda said.
Fathema nodded and Sophine asked her, “How long to our next sun, Temi?”
The Helmswoman looked up from the beast under her fingertips, “If we keep on our course toward the violet sun, less than two days from when we set the sails.”
“Anything more interesting on the scopes?” asked Avda.
“I caught sight of those two suns on the far-field. They are so close on the scope, I think they might share a domain.” The linang’s muzzle bumped Fathema’s breast, nipping at her long, loose tunic in irritation. Fathema set her hand back on the nape of its neck, digging into the fur with long, dark fingers.
Avda pushed up from the table and tied her baggy shirt close over her ribs, “I’ll set the sails so we can buy a night.”
“There’s no hurry, Avda,” said Sophine, “On a voyage of years, what’s a night? Take your leisure.”
“I’ve had leisure enough watching the scopes all these last days. Gainful labor will ease my mind more.” She walked away from the table toward the gangway hidden among the tree trunks.
Sophine laughed lightly, “Take care anyway, Cap—.”
“Take up arms and search the ship,” Avda interrupted imperiously. A few yards beyond her, just inside the ring of the lantern’s light, one of the garden’s kleptomaniac tree mice was tugging a length of red cloth through the high grass from the direction of the bulkhead. Fathema leapt to her feet and was a black and white blur as she raced out of the garden. The tree mouse abandoned its prize with an irritated chitter.
Avda scooped up the cloth, and Sophine matched her long-legged gait at a stride and a half to each of Avda’s. She asked, “What is that, Captain?”
Avda kept her eyes fixed on the door ahead, and explained: “It is a ‘scarf.’ They are used in arctic climes to keep one’s body warm.”
Sophine’s face flickered with confusion, “You suspect an interloper? And from the arctic?”
“Perhaps.”
The crew raced through the labyrinth of the Hutana Van’s holds. An hour of searching through empty, untouched corridors cooled the manic energy of their search. They eventually proceeded in careful, methodical paths toward the ship’s depths. A nimbus of lantern light followed them, lit and quenched as as they opened new corridors. They rigorously searched each hold: ship’s supply storage, personal quarters, training room, meditation bay. They even proceeded down toward the less-used holds deeper down: emergency supply storage, engine room, armory, reliquary and lower, where the holds were cordoned off for disuse.
“We go too far. The tree mice do not range so far afield,” Fathema halted them.
“There is the chance that the thing was left here by preparation crews,” Sophine said, “This place swarmed for years with Ezwen’s-all of Hutana’s-best minds.”
Avda did not even give the suggestion consideration, “And what is your confidence in that chance, Arbitress?”
“Admittedly low. Below trivial, but compared to the chances of a stow-away?” Sophine assented, “And while she could be hidden forever in the far decks, Fathema is right: we know she is in the pilfering-grounds of the garden’s mice.”
Fathema nodded.
“But where, then?” Sophine said, “We were able to search the top decks well before we would have given an intruder room enough time to re-position. We know the mice can wriggle their way into the service tunnels, but no one could get in there without the key since the Navy Hazards put them under relic lock.”
“What about a sufficiently motivated Hazard, herself?” Avda asked
They both looked to Fathema, best-versed in the operation of the Hutana Van. She nodded. By way of the reliquary, they took up the service tunnels’ relic-key and returned to the top-decks.
*
It was after a dozen tunnel doors had been pulled from the stone-wood and gilt walls with the relic-key that Fathema called out the alert. Sophine and Avda tensed in preparation. Avda’s hand clenched the hilt of her bright white and gold sword-unwilling to draw it needlessly. Sophine held her needle-thrower close, her fingers at the primer and trigger. Both were a few paces off from the service tunnel’s mouth. Where the relic key had dislodged the panel, it was a sharply defined, square cutout in the smooth wood and gold of the wall.
Fathema crawled out back-wise, her practiced muscles as at home on all fours as two. With a final grunting pull, a second unconscious Hutanari tumbled from the tunnel. She fell limply, sprawled out on the huge pack at her back. Clad in crude, careless leather boots, black stockings, shorts and scanty top, she had the small breasts and slim, angular hips and shoulders that bespoke her youth, topped with a shock of oil-matted pink hair-so close to the hue of the captain’s-held back by a gilt tiara with nodes of reliquary stone-wood set into it at points.
Fathema flowed to her feet and took up her fighting staff to stand alongside the captain. As she and Sophine looked upon the motionless girl, Captain Avda growled and took her hand from her blade.
She snatched the tiara from the girl’s head and asked, “What are you doing here, Rewan?”
The girl, Rewan, was immediately lucid as the relic came free of her scalp. She wiped a glisten of drool from her lip as she leapt to her feet, flashing green eyes taking in the corridor and the ship’s crew before her. Her voice was clipped and business-like, “Well, it’s earlier that I should’ve been roused, but,” she tugged the red scarf from Avda’s hand with a deferential nod and tossed it around her neck to dangle in bright contrast with her aggressively revealing black garb, “But here we are: obviously, Ezwenari Command would not have sent you out into the void without a Hazard to test the relics you will encounter.” She chuckled with her statement’s self-evidence.
Avda seethed, “What are you doing here, Rewan?”
Rewan held up a staying finger, “Daavi: I’ll have you rein in your emotions. Obviously, with all of Hutana’s Hazards angling for a place on this ship, you surely can’t be surprised that one would be selected and installed in secret.”
“Daavi?” Sophine asked, “Do you know this girl, Avda?”
Avda stared at the stowaway for a beat too long to make any convincing denial, “She’s my sister.”
“Rewan Heller-Guidres,” the young Hutanari introduced herself, reaching out a hand to grasp the Arbitress’s wrist, “You are Sophine Arbitress.” She turned and offered her hand to Fathema, “Helmswoman Fathema Zafri.”
Fathema looked to the captain, who-massaging her temples with thumb and middle finger-nodded. Fathema took Rewan’s wrist and inclined her head in greeting.
“Well,” Rewan continued, “If we’re going to hold the formality of an interrogation, might we do so with some food?”
*
Between rambling ‘explanations,’ the young tunnel-dweller slammed food down her throat as fast as Sophine could prepare it. Avda and Fathema-having slipped into the trim blue and white of their Ezwenari uniforms-picked at the herb-seared poptoes and tufa before them for morning repast. Sophine brought the last batch of the poptoes to the table in the garden. It was the full, warm light of the day-cycle above them and the creatures of the garden were invisible and silent in the shade of the fruit trees. Sophine sat down at the head of the table forming an accidental arbitress’s hearing: the accused, Rewan, at her left; her accuser, Avda, at her right; and Fathema at the far end, a witness. All that was missing was the arbitress’s golden censer among them.
“Have you lied to an arbitress before, Rewan?” Sophine asked, breaking Rewan’s train of thought.
“Of course not, Ma’am.” She swallowed the big mouthful of the soft poptoes and firm, sweet tufa.
“And would you make the attempt?”
“Of course not, Ma’am.” She held the arbitress’s gaze unflinchingly.
“Of course, because if you lied to an arbitress, she mightn’t be skillful enough to see through to your true intents and motivations. Then she might misrepresent your interests, mightn’t she?”
“Sure.” Rewan’s eyes clearly calculated the measure of the arbitress before her.
“Good,” Sophine smiled at her as a friend, “Then let’s have the captain ask her question once more in that light, yes?”
“…Sure.”
Avda watched sternly, pushing her breakfast around her plate, “What are you doing here, Rewan?”
Rewan weighed her words carefully, “A Hazard should be present on our first voyage out into the greater void.”
Sophine nodded, “Perhaps one should’ve been. We’ll set that question aside, why should that Hazard be you?”
Rewan slammed her fist against the sonorous wood of the table, looking comical with a mouthful of her breakfast still stowed in the pouch of her cheek, “Because while the Navy’s Hazards cowered and the Towers jockeyed for status and position, I studied: every dispatch from the far-sky, I poured over; every analysis of the Hutana Van registered to the library, I transcribed and correlated; every experiment they announced, I made and tested my predictions; but did they administer tests?” She gestured to the arbitress angrily, then swept around to Avda and Fathema, “Did they hold trials? None.” She swallowed the last morsel in her mouth and stretched her lips as sternly as her sprightly features allowed.
“That sounds true. Tell me why you’re angry about it,” Sophine prompted, resting her chin on her arms where they were crossed on the table.
Rewan held her scowl and looked back to Sophine, “I haven’t talked to an arbitress since I entered the Tower.”
Sophine stayed silent. Watching Rewan. Waiting.
The young Hazard slashed off another hunk of popto and shovelled it into her mouth as she thought. Finally she spoke through the mash of popto in one half of her mouth, “Because it was short-sighted.” She corrected herself, “Or… because I thought I would at least have a chance.”
After a moment, Sophine asked, “What was your plan then?”
Rewan gestured vaguely around the garden, and the ship beyond it, “I should’ve been able to stay hidden for two, three months? Then you’d be far enough out to at least give me a chance. Far enough out that I’d have the voyage home to prove myself.”
Sophine nodded with her, “And how would you have proven yourself?”
Rewan stabbed out at the heavy pack slumped behind Fathema, “I brought a bunch of relics that resist testing on Hutana. I can get a reaction from some of them, and I suspect they’re intended for use in the void! The Forebears prepared us for this journey, but we ignore what they laid away in wait for us!”
“We are supplied with relics that have been tested in the void, and the Helmswoman is well versed in their use, all,” Avda said.
Rewan was frustrated, choking down some food to half-shout, “Yeah: boring cones and sample drones and void-sealed jars and so much obvious—” She faltered in her tirade and ended, “obvious shit! What about this very ship? So much left unfinished because she’s just as scout! They were so focused on ‘reliable operation’ that they patched it with common wooden doors and fittings. Some of my ideas they’re even implementing on the Hutana Balozi, and I have my own theories on the lower spars-they’re two more—”
Avda interrupted her, “There will be no experiments on the Hutana Van, Rewan!”
“Sure!” She raised her hands in surrender, “Nothing we don’t need, sure, fine, but things will happen, for all we do know of her, the Hutana Van is just a damn big relic, and they don’t play by our rules! When something does go wrong, what then? Does the fu—” She stopped mid-gesture at Fathema. Rewan took in her long, dark form squeezed into the trim lines of the helmswoman’s uniform, the curves of the sides her breasts pressed out brown and full from the blue and gold of her chestpiece. She softened her appellation: “Does the… honorable helmswoman know how to read the lines of stone-wood when the gold-ducts are blown by a surge?”
Sophine turned to Fathema inquisitively.
“According to the diagrams,” Fathema said.
Rewan pointed emphatically, “Yes! And if it wasn’t described and diagrammed in triplicate? If it escaped their notice because they didn’t know its purpose? Can you read the stonewood? Feel the flow of gold it asks for? Guide it in its regrowth?”
Fathema shook her head matter-of-factly. Wild curls of white hair rolled gently around her face like mist, “I am not a Hazard.”
“Thanks for talking to us, Rewan.” Sophine smiled, “Is there anything else you want to tell us?”
Rewan looked at Avda entreatingly, “Please, Daavi, you know that I’ll help. You know that.”
Avda rose from the table, her food mangled, but untasted. Sophine took to her feet after the captain and gestured around the verdant grove. “Help yourself to anything that Fathema says is ripe.”
The captain and arbitress left together.
*
“We must return her to Hutana,” the captain said without preamble when they reached the arbitress’s quarters.
Sophine sat behind her desk, piled with texts, and drew her legs up to cross under her, “Then we have a decision.”
Avda paced around the piles of scrolls and codices and kicked aside the pillows that were strewn around the floor. The clutter, comforts, and decoration hid any view of the ship’s gold or even its dusty, grey stone-wood with a warm array of color. Avda asked, “You have no advice?”
“You didn’t ask for advice, and in the operation of this ship, your word is absolute, Captain. If there is no alternative, then I have no advice to give.”
Avda adjusted an askance stack of codices into neat square angles, “Certainly there are alternatives.”
“Then, academically, I would be interested in what they would be.” Sophine leaned back in her chair, looking very small in her neat, white dress.
“Well, to keep our course, we could secure her in the below-decks or impress her into service, but those have their own problems.”
“Such as?”
“The ship’s crew was kept limited purposefully: that the garden might sustain us indefinitely, even if the Van was stalled in the void.”
“Yes, but that was planned very conservatively. We have been laying away durable foods with the surplus for a week now.” She laughed, “Today’s gorging aside-which I assume is simply from whatever that relic was doing to keep her in hibernation-I imagine we would still be generously within sustainability with another mouth.” She pulled up her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around, peering at the captain over them, “That seems a weak premise on which to discard alternatives out of hand.”
“In either case, there is her Hazard Tower that the Command would have to deal with upon our return. Even the Command does not impinge casually on the Towers’ domain.”
“Is she still member of a Tower? She has violated the Towers’ embargo of support upon this venture, hasn’t she? She is at worst a Free-Hazard.”
Avda’s step tensed as she stalked the cluttered room, “A Free-Hazard, then! Surely Command weighed the risks and benefits of including a Free-Hazard aboard? Then, why not one aboard? As you say, another mouth is within capacity of the ship, and the benefit is self evident.”
Sophine nodded behind her knees, “You know your sister. Is she a risk?”
Avda stopped and thought, “She is reckless.”
Sophine’s supportive nod slowed, “More conservative members of Ezwenari Command, I’m sure, say the same of your daring. Does her recklessness outweigh her ‘self-evident’ benefit?”
“So you think she should stay aboard?” Avda asked with an edge to her voice.
“I think nothing yet.” She rested her chin on her knees, “But you have… meandered among three reasons to not keep her aboard, each with counterpoints within your grasp. I think you know the reason you discard alternatives.”
Avda stopped. She moved a bundle of scrolls from a chair and seated herself. The captain took a moment and controlled her breath, “There is the matter of the risk to her life.”
Sophine nodded and remained silent, watching the captain with warm, interested eyes.
Avda did not let the silence linger, “You think me foolish for letting sentiment cloud my judgement.”
Sophine shook her head, “No. I think you are capable to know when there is conflict within you. A fool would let herself give rash orders before she could take the measure of her emotions and the truth. You instead conveyed me back here to make mock orders that you might be freed of that conflict.”
Avda sighed and let herself explore her feelings, “She is my coupled sister. As much me as myself.”
“And has she not been proven the bearer of her own onus, that she cannot yet make her own determinations? She seems not so much younger than I am.”
“Three years ago, she was proven,” Avda nodded, “and she left to join the Hazards that very day. I was at sea.”
“I’m sorry. She sounds motivated,” Sophine encouraged her to continue.
“Ha! Always.” Avda smiled as her eyes lost themselves in the past and in the draping cords of cloth suspended around the arbitress’s ceiling. “She was always harassing the Hazard traders that came through Nchi. I brought her back little trinkets from my voyages—” She shook her head, “-Nothings. Just broken relics utterly without value. Without instruction, just failures and retrials, she got one working again-years before her age of onus—. Filled the whole house with the most… blinding light.” She laughed, “Literally so! Mother Guidres was in the room and couldn’t work for a week for the stars in her eyes.”
The captain’s levity dropped, “And then she was gone.”
“You’ve been to the arctic? You brought her back that scarf?” Sophine asked.
The captain nodded, “When I saw it, I knew. It was half seeing a ghost. The Hazard Towers do not send word when Hazards… fail… in their duties, and we had heard nothing.”
“So you foresee losing her again.” Sophine forced herself to deliver the blow, “And its being your fault.”
Avda nodded and wept quietly.
Sophine came to the Captain’s side and settled onto a pillow at the foot of her chair. She folded her arms over Avda’s legs and rested her head there. After some time there, Avda’s breathing steadied, and then Sophine continued.
“Then, if she feels the same? The same fear for her coupled sister-as much her as herself? Wouldn’t that drive her to take such risks? Would that balance the scale of your fear for her?”
“That’s what you believe of her?” Avda asked the arbitress.
“Perhaps. She is certainly not all lofty ideal for the glory of Hutana and Ezwen. There is pride there. A will to prove herself. But there is more, and I think it’s you.”
“And is that a reason to keep her aboard? Sororal love?”
“No… But it is a reason to set aside your own will to protect her from herself. If you act on that, you just betray her feelings for your own. Pure selfishness.”
Avda sighed a last ragged breath, and the tears left her voice. “Yes. Let us take the measure of what we know and what we might do.”
Sophine unfolded to stand and returned to her desk. She carefully marked her place in the open folio and closed it to make a space for writing. She took a fresh sheet of paper, quill and ink: “Let us begin: How likely is it that a new Hutanari will be a productive member of the crew?”
Avda considered for a moment: “The average Hutanari can be made useful, but accounting for will and experience? Four in ten.”
Sophine nodded and noted the prior and its probability, “And evidence, the first?”
“She is a stowaway.”
“And the likelihood a stowaway will be productive?”
“Three chances in one hundred.”
Sophine combined the chances. “Evidence, the second?”
“She is the sister of the ship’s captain.”
“And its weight?”
Avda considered longer, “Good confidence.”
Sophine translated that into mathematical notation and continued, “Evidence, the third?”
“She is a Hazard.”
Sophine said, “Shall we include in this evidence that she is a Hazard when the ship has none?”
Avda thought and nodded.
“And its weight?”
They traced through the relevant evidence for an hour, and the arbitress kept her tally of their confidence.
*
Back in the warm garden, now all three of the crew were dressed in their pressed, stylish naval blues. In the garden’s clearing they surrounded Rewan, who had managed to make herself look ridiculous with the red and purple of foraged berries smearing her lips and fingers. Avda, tall and formal, stood before her sister who looked up to her from a head and a half less height. The girl bore a slack, listless posture that accentuated the height difference. If not for that same pink hair-and perhaps the resolute cut of their noses-it would be hard to imagine two more different Hutanari.
“We are not so far out from Hutana. Are you resolved to be of use to the Hutana Van and its mission?” Avda asked formally.
“Resolved enough to worm my way aboard and sleep crooked up in a cupboard for a month!” Avda chuckled as she wiped the juice from her lips.
“I will interpret that as a ‘yes’,” Avda said, “Then, as Captain of the Hutana Van, given your enduring presence here, I am forced to impress you into Ezwenari service. Should you decline, you will be confined without privileges until such a time as you may be disembarked in a port of reasonable safety and in the custody of any local authority.”
“In this case, that seems like a pretty dumb option. I mean it’s kind of ‘be impressed’ or ‘be marooned’ out here, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Should you decline, we would be forced to return you to an arbitress of Hutana to be judged for that impact upon the voyage. Your answer?”
“Wait was it a yes-or-no question? I don’t want to answer wrong, and yes-or-no questions can go either way sometimes,” Rewan rambled.
Avda spoke with distinct control, “Do you decline my right to impress you into service?”
“See? That’s confusing! If I say ‘no’ does that mean that I don’t decline or that I don’t think you can impress me!”
“‘I accept’ or ‘decline’ will suffice, Rewan.”
“Okay, yeah, good: I accept, then,” she said.
Avda continued, “You will be a yeowoman in the Naval Command up to the duration of the voyage of the Hutana Van, entitling you to—”
Rewan interrupted, “Yeowoman? Aren’t they the ones that do all the shit-work?”
Avda nodded with a satisfied, narrow grin, “Well, it is not very fitting for the ship’s officers to scrub decks and wash laundry, is it? Do you refuse impressment?”
Rewan looked to the other two for support. Sophine gave her a friendly nod of encouragement and Fathema just grinned with the captain.
“I am a Hazard! I should be an officer!” Rewan said.
“Do you refuse impressment, then?” The captain extended a hand to the little Hazard.
“To be marooned or shuffled back to Hutana? No!” She took Avda’s wrist and shook it once, “You won’t scare me off so easy, Daavi.”
“From now on, that will be ‘Captain Avda’ or ‘Captain’ whenever we are acting as agents of the ship and the Ezwenari Command, Yeowoman Rewan.” The Captain turned to Sophine, “Anything to address before we proceed on our exploration plan, Arbitress?”
“As you were, Captain.” Sophine emphasized the title-a point of naval protocol that she still struggled with.
Avda gave her quick orders: “Helmswoman Fathema, ready the helm. Yeowoman Rewan, come. You will learn to trim the ship’s sails.”
*
In the Hutana Van’s ready-room-one ancient, stone-wood bulkhead separating them from the howling void-Avda rechecked her pack and turned to Rewan’s. The Hazard had already secured the thin, heavy slab of stone-wood to her back with the straps. The filigree of gold on it whorled into a pair of concentric gold circles at its center.
Rewan asked, “These are the void-bubbles? Less resisting than a soapbubble, but strong enough to hold back choking, frozen infinity?”
The captain assured herself of how Rewan had strapped on her pack and said, “Yes.”
“Can I see yours first?”
Avda opened the thumb-pad of her glove and pressed her skin against a circle of gold on the side of her pack. With a whisper, pale pink silk encompassed her in a smooth, transparent bubble. It pressed against the floor at her feet, bulging out at the sides. Rewan stepped toward the captain, reaching out to touch the bubble, but her fingers went through it like air.
“Nothing,” Rewan whispered.
When she took a few steps forward-the bubble taking in her wrist, elbow and then shoulder-the pink surface of the void-bubble wobbled like jelly and then it was a warped ovoid encompassing both of them. Rewan breathed deeply, eyes closed, analyzing.
“That smell,” she said still lost in thought, “the Tower believes that it’s no smell at all-just the pure, clean air that the Forebears breathed, unmixed by our fallen world.”
“That does not seem to be a very fruitful insight,” Avda said.
Rewan’s eyes flashed, ” ‘How does this meet the objective’?” She aped some imaginary fool, “That’s the kind of hyper-focus that keeps the Navy’s Hazards dependent on the Towers.” She too thumbed-on her pack and her bubble popped to life, joining Avda’s in peanut shaped coalescence, “Let’s get on with it, then.”
“Not so fast, Yeowoman,” Avda stopped her. They carefully walked through the process: ready-room tethers secured, pairing tether secured between them, ready-room debris check. Each one checked off, Avda went on to describe what would happen next: At the pull of the lever, the stone-wood bulkhead would open in the blink of an eye. The void would yank the air from the ready-room-and them with it. They would flow with the pull. The facsimile of world-pull that the ship bore would be gone, but the ready-room tethers would catch them and they would swing down to the deck and secure their primary and redundant lines to the deck. Then, they would begin the real work of loosing the sails and hauling them into their places.
“That sounds like just about what I would’ve done anyway,” Rewan shrugged.
Avda was unflapped, “Yeowoman, for all our precautions, we take our lives into our hands every time we step from this door. When separated out there, we will not be able to speak, and you do not yet know the gestures. I need to know that you will follow my orders to the letter.”
“Beasts and blood, Avda, I’m not an idiot! I’ve survived a lot since I’ve been gone.”
“Captain Avda, Yeowoman. And I will have your word on the matter,” Avda said.
Rewan looked solemn, “You have my word that I will not put being cute above our very lives.”
The Captain accepted and forced down the heavy lever. The hidden mechanism slotted into contact and silently they were plucked from the ready room. From there-Rewan’s flailing aside-it went largely as Avda had foretold. Soon Rewan was climbing up the long mast with Avda on the deck below her, the captain’s one hand holding her fast to the decklines and the other feeding out Rewan’s tether. When the Hazard had reached the top of the mast and held her place there, Avda leapt at a single bound to the mast’s crossbeam. Her thighs holding the crossbeam, she pulled herself to “sit upright” with Rewan, their void-bubbles merging into a near-spherical ovoid at their closeness.
“Well why didn’t I get to do that?” Rewan seemed to shout at the invisible arc of the Captain’s leap.
“Because I did not want to wait for you to haul yourself back in when you missed. We will get plenty of that soon.”
Below them-by the orientation of the ship-the Hutana Van was a massive gilt-limned raft of stone-wood. It was a hundred yards at its breadth and over a thousand from bow to aft. The Navy’s Hazards had cleared away much of the mysterious clutter that had decorated the Van’s deck, so that now landmarks were few among the heavily gilded emplacements where unknown relics had once been mounted. At the prow, there was the heavily rigged receiving deck for departing from and landing on the ship in the void. At the center of the prow squatted the massive ballista with the laminite anchors and lines secured along the gunwale. Sternward, there was the huge aftcastle that housed the ready-room and access wells. The rest of the space of the aftcastle was consumed by inextricable Forebear machines only a fraction of which were in use and a somewhat smaller fraction of which were well understood.
“Now comes the exciting part?” Rewan’s eyes glittered.
Avda rumpled her face, “Dancing in the void-weightless and a dragonfly’s wing away from an awful death isn’t exciting, Rewan?”
“Yeowoman Rewan, Captain!”
“Don’t you—” Avda cut herself off and changed her mien: “Yeowoman, first: It is not your place to question your superiors’ application of protocol. And second: no one is purely their rank and role. When you are not actively operating in your capacity as an agent of the Command, you are free to use whatever terms of familiarity you wish. In fact it is encouraged, as it helps differentiate the role and the woman.”
“So when you corrected me before, how do you know that I was ‘actively operating in the whatever’? Maybe I was just saying something random as a woman?”
Avda discarded the obvious answer and instead said, “Now is not the time to discuss protocol, Yeowoman. We will have plenty of time once we have set the ship about its business.” She pointed to the massive coils of thin laminite line bound up to the top of the mast, “First, we need to transfer to the mast-lines and secure the decklines here for our return.”
“Damn! Those must go on for miles!” She gawped at them.
“Nearly so: over halfway around the whole ship, but we will get to that.”
The Captain walked Rewan through the process and they began. They tied onto the mast-lines and secured their decklines taut against the mast. So readied for the broad openness of trimming the sails, they scooted along the long yard extending bow-ward and loosed the massive laminite sail to unfurl and flap up behind them according to its own forces. When they had made their slow progress to the yard-arm-freeing the sail behind them-Avda called for Rewan to stop, and she did.
“You will want to ready the bow hook and keel hook and tuck them in your harness before you release the sail here.”
Rewan did so and looked to the bow, “And then I just jump?”
Avda nodded, “And then you just jump. When you miss your mark on the bow, you may still be able to make your way across the deck if you fall short. If you overshoot? Just haul your way back on the mast-line and I will keep it secured here for another attempt.”
“And if the line gives out?”
Avda gave it some consideration, “If you’re going to worry about the problems that aren’t going to happen, you may as well worry about your voidbubble winking out. Much scarier.”
“Fine: I jump. Then what?”
“Then we haul you back in.”
“What if I make it?” Rewan asked with affront.
“You won’t!” Avda laughed, “A jump like this? Far as I’ve heard it, no one makes it on their first jump. Something about your body so wanting to anticipate the world-pull. Instead you’ll go wheeling out into the void until your line bounces you back.”
“We’ll see about that.” Rewan gathered herself up into a hunker on the yardarm, the hooks of the sail trailing from her harness. She mentally calibrated for a straight leap instead of an arc like on Hutana, tensed, and leapt. But for the stillness of the void-bubble, it was like leaping from a cliff-like a bird in flight. The deck of the Van raced beneath her as she neared, but the trajectory was clear: she would fly far above the receiving deck and out into the void. All her calibration had been futile, betrayed somewhere by her Hutana-bound legs or knees or ankles-some decisionless failure.
The tethering line snapped to tautness above the bow and she bounced away from it. The line vacillated between slack and taut and she was able to position herself to see Avda hauling her back to the yardarm between wafting lengths of the bright white sail flapping between them. Avda added some dramatic over-acting to her hauling. The message was clear, and Rewan decided to ignore it. The next time the flap of the sail revealed Avda, she was staring sternly. She leaned forward and then pulled back hard, yanking Rewan forward. Her momentum carried her forward at a languid, consistent pace and Avda gathered the slackening line into her grip.
Rewan streamed by Avda like a comet trailing her red scarf-ends and the plume of the sail. As she did Avda leapt from the yard trailing her own tether and scooped Rewan from the void. Together they followed the arc described by Avda’s tether to slam side-wise into the stone-wood of the mast’s yard. The air knocked from them, they clutched the wood as the sail billowed chaotically around them. Their void-bubbles once again unified, Avda spoke around her recovering breath.
“Usually a steady, unified pull results in the easiest return.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Rewan asked, frustrated.
She helped Rewan around to wrap her thighs around the yard, and Avda said, “You jump again. You overcompensate more.” She shrugged, “Your body learns. Some have made it on the second try.”
They recaptured the sail and made ready for another jump. Rewan tensed with redoubled resolve. She leapt into flight again and darted toward the bow. She missed again, but this time came crashing down on the web of rigging laid out on the near side of the receiving deck. She was able to catch herself before she rebounded. Finding her feet she gave a silent, void-bound interpretation of an ecstatic leap as she held herself to the receiving deck’s lines.
From there, by Avda’s patient instruction and Rewan’s dogged attempts, each sail was pinned to the bow, aftward-starboard, and aftward-port; then, like flower petals blooming in reverse, they wrapped each down and hooked them to the golden stud at the center of the keel at the nadir of the ship. They pulled their way back up to the top of the mast where the last free-streaming sheets of laminite sail still flowed. There they pulled in the long curls of their tethers and tied off the sails over and around the mast.
When the last sheet of sail was bound into place, it choked off the streaming sun- and starlight and they were plunged into darkness, there on the far end of the mast. Rewan could hear Avda in their shared void-bubble rummaging in her pack.
“The first few returns will be easier with light, and the void-bubble sustains a torch as well as your breath-though it saps them faster.”
With the scrape of a match, a flickering orange flame cast shadows to dancing around the white sheath of sail around the Hutana Van.
“Close your eyes,” Rewan warned.
There was a barely audible hum and the orange shadows gave way to a brilliance that cast the whole of the ship’s deck in stark, white relief from their position on the mast.
“That is better,” Avda said as she quenched her torch.
Keeping the shielded, but still painfully bright white of Rewan’s relic-torch above them and out of direct sight, they recoiled their mast-lines and switched to their decklines. After a quick descent, Avda heaved the lever back up and the stone-wood bulkhead of the ready-room slammed back into place, the world pull returned-dropping Rewan’s off-kilter body to the deck-and the distant unconsciously heard noises of the ship filled their silence-tuned ears.
“And look! No one died!” Rewan crowed.
“Very good,” Avda looked proud and hugged her sister roughly, “That means we’ll still have someone to wash our laundry.”
Rewan leaned into the hug and held Avda tight, “I missed you, Daavi.”
“I missed you too, Rew.”
*
When they returned to the Bridge, Fathema was suspended in the arms of the helm. The articulation of the armature’s rigid gold and stone-wood moved with organic suppleness-at once supporting her at two dozen points and also allowing her complete freedom of motion as if hovering above the floorboards. Her uniform was stripped down to just the band from her neck to the V of her thighs to allow the relic armature to touch bare skin at every point. She made her smooth motions and the helm relayed her inscrutable commands to the ancient ship. Eventually, the arms settled her broad, articulate feet on the floor. She pulled the broad mask from her face, leaving the mass of gilt stone-wood to hang on the umbilicus that spread up in a prehensile funnel of wild relic-machinery that consumed the bow-ward end of the bridge. The angular curls of her hair swept out in release, their white freeness contrasting with her face’s warm, brown severity.
Rewan was unimpressed, “That’s it?”
The helmswoman nodded as she picked up her boots and pantaloons where they were discarded. “The sails are holding in the accumulation of weft-ether, and we can see its echo at our destination,” she explained.
“But—” Rewan looked to the captain and arbitress, standing in attendance as the helmswoman had performed her task, “But that’s it?!”
Fathema seemed unsure of what was expected. “You did very well trimming the sails, young Yeowoman?” She offered.
“But where was the mighty power of the Forebears that bent the span of suns to their will? You just…” She looked like she would lift off with the hot frustration inside her, “You just stood there for a bit and it’s done?”
Fathema looked to the captain for support, but clarified, “Not done yet. We must close the weft once the echo has reached its peak. In two days—”
“Two days!?”
Fathema searched for what Rewan was looking for a moment before giving up and looking to the captain, “If I am not needed?”
Avda nodded her dismissal, and Fathema headed to the bridge’s aftward hewn wood door, ajar to the ageless stone-wood corridor beyond. Rewan was distracted from her disappointment by the helmswoman’s departing ass, cleft and cupped by her chest-piece’s tight white rear straps. She stumbled over herself to follow.
“Uh. If we’re all free, Fathema-uh, Zafri,” she babbled as she caught up, “Do you want to-well, I was cooped up in that hatch for a long time and…”
Her voice faded as she followed Fathema away from the bridge.
“She did well with the rigging, then,” Sophine half-asked Avda.
“With instruction. As well as any of us on our first time in the void,” the captain agreed.
“Do you feel any differently about your decision?”
“Now you question it? Wasn’t this what you wanted?” Avda asked, piqued, but Sophine’s high, gentle laugh softened her.
“I’m sorry. I know an arbitress’s habits can be frustrating, but we don’t need our uncertainties questioned, just our confidences.”
“Well, I’ve no confidence to question, Sophine. She’s as headstrong and willful as ever.”
Sophine wrapped her arms around the captain from behind, “And what’s been the remedy for headstrong and willful crew-women before?”
“Discipline and a watchful eye.”
“Discipline,” the arbitress purred, “seems to fit.”
Rewan returned looking frustrated and rebuffed. “Plainslanders!” She exclaimed as if the conclusion was evident to the others. “Well, what do we do for two days?” She barked.
“We train and keep the garden—” Avda explained.
“We study and maintain the ship,” Sophine added, leaning around the captain’s trunk.
Rewan huffed and rolled her eyes, and the captain continued, “But you need not worry about idleness, Yeowoman.” Sophine pulled herself from the captain at the title, and its shift of tone. Avda said, “I think you will begin with the ship’s laundry.” Avda stepped toward the door to conduct Rewan away.
“You’re kidding. Surely there’s some Forebear relic for that?”
Avda shook her head, “No, no. Not on the Hutana Van-perhaps on the Hutana Balozi? No, we have all done this necessary, but that was before we had yeowoman aboard.”
When they were gone, Sophine let the weight of incalculable possibilities press down on her for a moment. Her shoulders stooped without her show of confident vigor. Then she straightened, fixed her surety on her face, and headed to her quarters. There was study to be done. There was so much she did not know.
*
As the following day-cycle came on rosy and warming in the garden, Sophine fried another breakfast of poptoes on the little stove of the kitchen-cart-this time with a chutney of spiced berries. At the table, Avda was already fully dressed in her captain’s regalia: all blue and white expanses, lined with gold, and one shoulder with the plumed epaulet of her rank. She mused over Fathema’s notes from the previous suns’ domains as she waited. Around them, the garden’s nighttime activity was waning. A vine cat was in a tree nearby, its tail sweeping back and forth in some invisible wind as its eyes followed some equally invisible prey in the tall grass below.
“The yellow, white, red, and blue suns that we’ve seen on the far-scope have matched what we saw in real light and local scopes when we arrived. With that we assumed that the far-scope was simply showing the sun, but this green sun-green on the far-scope, anyway-is white on the near- and local-scope…” She mulled over the reports, leafing among them, “Nothing to set it apart: A stellar archipelago, like many others. Not much more or less than the mean of stone-worlds or storm-worlds.” She muttered as an afterthought: “No green-worlds like Hutana, sadly.”
Sophine set a hot plate of the colorfully-sauced popto slices before the captain, and turned back to the stove for the next batch. She said, “Nothing but those queer symbols peppered amongst the worlds and archipelago.”
Avda nodded as her fork carved out a wedge from her breakfast. When her mouth was clear, she said, “Which we have seen in other domains-though, yes, no other had even a tenth-part of the symbols we saw at the green sun. Perhaps the sun was green in the time of the Forebears? We know the infinite void was ancient and ancient even at the time of the Forebears, perhaps the sun lost its luster just as we have fallen from the Forebears.”
Sophine laughed as she pushed the sizzling slices around the pan, “You discard what little evidence we have for supposition, Avda.”
“Fine, then there is some invisible aspect of the green sun that causes, on the children of their domain, these mysteries marked on the scopes? Perhaps the Forebears saw something in the sun that our poor eyes do not.”
“That seems nearer to the mark, but you gloss over the Forebears’ own near scopes that showed it in white.”
Fathema slipped through the aftward brush to enter the garden’s clearing. Her face was clouded with an unruly mess of bright hair and her airy tunic was propped up with a turgid half-erection.
“Temi!” Avda called out at her approach, “Do you expect us to find a violet sun when we arrive?”
The glowering helmswoman plopped down at the table with a growled, sub-verbal utterance.
“I agree, Fathema,” Sophine answered, “Speculation before we have any evidence at all seems fruitless-especially when we have three suns to survey before we even arrive!”
“I only ask for her prediction. Surely,” Avda leafed back through the reports before her, “Surely, if she has no intuition it’d be one chance in two dozen to not be violet.”
Fathema growled what might have been thanks as Sophine set the heaping next plate before her.
“Quite so,” Sophine said sagely, “It’s best that we bend our attentions to the yellow sun that we’ll arrive at next.” She returned to the stove where she picked a dark, purple berry from its bowl and savored it between her teeth.
Avda nodded, abstractedly moving food from the plate to her mouth, chewing, and swallowing. She said, “A yellow sun. Like Hutana’s own. Another chance for a green-world, then?”
“A green stone-world like Hutana may be very rare, yet. We only expect to find them because we come from one.”
Avda ate idly between her perusal of the notes. When Sophine joined them at the table, the stove was still warm and sliced poptoes and chutney were set aside for one more portion.
Sophine asked, “Do we expect the young Hazard for breakfast?”
Avda looked to the aft where the garden’s bulkhead was concealed among a grove of half-trees. “She ate like a draft ox at middens, so I’d expect she’s still recovering from whatever that relic did to her. Though she never kept much to the days and nights.”
“She’d finished the laundry by then, what did set her about after that?”
“There’s little enough make-work on this behemoth with just the-now-four of us aboard, so I had her claim a berth and bind and stow the lines in the ready-room.”
“How will you keep her bent to task then?”
“Don’t worry about that: I’ll not be bested by wastrel idleness. If nothing else, I’ll set her to training with Fathema and she’ll be begging for rest that night.”
As if summoned, Rewan stomped through the brush into the clearing still in her clumsy boots and sparse black clothing, her red scarf catching at the low branches. Sophine stood to return to the stove.
“What have you been doing, Yeowoman?” The captain asked over her plate.
Rewan sidled into a seat between the captain and the helmswoman, “Don’t worry, Captain, I re-bound and stowed the lines like you asked.”
“For six hours?”
“And… I found a berth.”
“For six hours?”
Rewan shrugged, “It’s a big ship! But I ended up finding a great one: three feet of solid stone-wood on every side, and cozy! Not like the big cargo bays. Perfect for experiments-probably meant for the Forebears’ own Hazards!”
Sophine laughed. Fathema continued carving and bolting her breakfast away. Avda barked: “You will clear any experiments with me in explicit detail and before they are attempted, Yeowoman Rewan.”
Rewan looked back to the captain from where she was leaning up on the table to watch Sophine cook. “Great, then I have one I definitely want to try today: comparing the burn rate of—”
“You will be much too busy for experiments today, Yeowoman.”
“What? The laundry is done. The halls are clean to be sure. We can’t even go out into the void with the ether filling. What am I going to busy myself with. Clearing the dishes? I can handle that in less than the next twelve hours.”
“Yes, that and moreover: you obviously showed that you are not yet tempered to handle the exertions this voyage might demand. As such, the helmswoman will administer a Naval physical battery to discern what we have to work with.”
Rewan was querulous at first, but that dropped as she turned to Fathema, “I can think of some physical exertions the helmswoman could administer.” She grinned, artlessly highlighting her innuendo.
Fathema looked at the Hazard and snorted, unimpressed. She swallowed her last bite and pushed away from the table, “You islanders talk too much of sex.” The helmswoman turned and with a sweep of her arms she stripped off and discarded her tunic. She plunged into the pond with a dive that gave up hardly a ripple.
Rewan screwed up her face in frustration and Avda pushed away from the table too. “This time, when you are finished with the dishes and the Helmswoman’s battery, you will report promptly to me for your next tasks.”
“You were serious about the blasted dishes? There are, like, four!”
“Then you’ll make short work of it. I’ll expect you shortly, then.”
Sophine set Rewan’s breakfast before her and said with a jocular smile, “Don’t forget the pan-the chutney sticks like glue!”
Avda walked away, “Don’t forget the pan.”
“Don’t encourage her!” Rewan fumed at Sophine.
“And the stove belly could use a scouring!” Sophine giggled.
“And the stove belly,” the captain called from the garden bulkhead.
“What are you doing?” Rewan scowled.
“I really hate cleaning the stove belly,” Sophine apologized, “But if you don’t everything just tastes burnt.”
“It does,” Fathema called from her languid bathing in the pond, where she was pulling her damp, wild hair into curling points.
“Enjoy your breakfast,” Sophine said with a smile on her voice. She kissed the dour Hazard on the nape of the neck and walked away tugging gently on the long shock of Rewan’s top hair between its shorn sides.
“But really: don’t forget the stove belly.”
*
“Well I hope you’re happy, Arbitress.”
Rewan stomped into the Sophine’s quarters in a soft, homespun camisole and panties, looking exhausted and surprisingly normal out of her affected costume. She was squeezing out her damp hair along its central length, the short sides already light and dry. Sophine, seated in the billowy plushness of the bed, set aside the codex she was reading with a slip of densely annotated paper holding her place.
“If the stove’s clean and I didn’t have to do it, then I am!” She lilted with obvious pleasure.
Rewan approached the bed and sat down with the arbitress, “And after the stupid hazing called as an ‘assessment,’ Avda gave me one hour to forage a late lunch, bathe, wash my own sweaty, damn clothes, and report back to her for ‘protocol drills’-whatever cruelty that entails.” Rewan’s small hands pressed up Sophine’s skirts to draw out her panties’ ties. Sophine was surprised at her forwardness, but not unpleasantly so. She parted her thighs slightly to let Rewan work.
“And where do I fall in that list?”
Rewan grinned as she pulled the arbitress’s cock from between her legs, “After lunch. After the bath. Before more laundry.”
“Should I be honored to be at least—” her voice caught as Rewan gripped her and ran her tongue from the head of Sophine’s dick down the shaft to the break of the soft lips at its base, “-at least third on the list.”
Rewan looked up from between Sophine’s thighs, the arbitress’s firming cock held casually aside, “It didn’t seem polite before the bath, and I was hungry.” Her eyes, so close upon it, stared at Sophine’s cock, “Shit, you’re pale!”
“So your sister tells me,” the arbitress scoffed as Rewan got to her knees and tugged loose her own panties, her thick brown cock popping free. She knelt on either side of Sophine’s hips and guided the arbitress’s length between her legs.
“You should get some sun-or whatever the garden gets anyway.”
“So Fathema tells me,” Sophine’s chuckle choked off into a purr.
Rewan looked distracted as she slid up and down Sophine’s dick.
Sophine worked her hands up Rewan’s satiny, earthy flanks to under her camisole, “You seem frustrated, Rewan.”
Rewan blew out through her nose as she rose and fell, “It’s Fathema. She won’t have me, and aside from her it’s just my sister.”
Sophine twitched her head as if slapped and cocked an eyebrow, “Just her? What about me?” She gestured to their coupling.
“Okay, obviously, yeah, there’s you, but that doesn’t count,” her confidence waned as she saw Sophine’s confusion, “I mean: you’re an arbitress.”
This did not clarify the matter to Sophine as well as Rewan obviously thought it would.
“And what does that have to do with anything?”
Rewan nearly stammered as she tried to explain, “I mean, it’s kind of your job, right?”
Sophine grabbed Rewan by the hips and brought her down hard, arresting her bouncing ride and eliciting a high, pleased squeak, “Rewan, do you think I’m obliged to have sex with you?”
“No!” Rewan hedged as she rocked her hips on Sophine’s dick pinned inside of her, “But, I mean, isn’t that one of the things arbitresses do?” Rewan could see this was not going well and tried to explain better: “Like a public service?”
Sophine rolled her eyes and held Rewan fast, trying to still her subtle, maddening motions, “No, Rewan! Arbitresses are not expected to service their wards. Why would you think that?”
Rewan closed her eyes as she acclimated to the rocking pressure, “I don’t know, I guess an arbitress has never said ‘no’.”
Sophine growled and shifted their weight to roughly throw Rewan under her in a pile of pillows and sheets. The arbitress’s cock was still lodged inside Rewan as she asked, “Maybe they just thought you were cute!” Sophine punctuated her last word by sliding up to her hips into the Hazard’s tight warmth.
Rewan’s whole body tensed with pleasure, but when she recovered, she said, “Not just me! Anyone!” Her breath came faster as Sophine swept her hips back and forth with little slapping sounds. She spoke between shallow gasps, “Unless they were busy-or the woman asking was-involved in a dispute-I’ve never seen an arbitress-turn someone down!”
Sophine was thoughtful, but did not interrupt the tempo of her hips, “I suppose we’re so trained to see someone’s true needs and desires-to see what makes a woman good and what she wants to be and what makes her worthy of love.” She halted her musings and her hips with them, “Is this a common understanding? That our personal relationships are a public service?”
Rewan’s eyes snapped open with yearning as Sophine stopped. The Hazard replied hazily, “I mean, I’ve never heard someone say it just like that, but… ” she shrugged, “Yeah?”
Sophine bit Rewan sharply on the foot where she was holding it against her shoulder for leverage.
“Just so we’re clear—” She slowly resumed her thrusting.
“This is not an arbitress’s duty.” She rotated Rewan beneath her so that she could slip a slim pinky into her ass and stroke her cock on the other side.
“I just think you’re cute—” Her long, driving thrusts picked up speed again.
“And I see the great woman you see yourself becoming—” Her hips slapped noisily on Rewan’s firm butt like a drum-beat between her words.
“And I see your great capacity for love—” Rewan panted and clenched the sheets beneath her, writhing around Sophine’s pounding, stroking, and probing.
“And I want to share in that.” Rewan’s body curled back on the bed as a scream faltered into a gasp. Her short, hard cock spewed over the bedclothes and pillows.
The spark of consciousness lit in Rewan’s eyes as she opened them. She leapt off Sophine’s lance and whirled around on all fours, her little brown butt bare as her dick dripped between her legs. She scooped Sophine into her mouth.
Sophine chuckled low, “You don’t have to pay me back. It’s—” She quivered when two of Rewan’s fingers plunged into her pussy and Rewan’s mouth swallowed her cock as much as her throat would allow, “-not a trade… either.”
It was the arbitress’s turn to squirm. As the tension built in her, one hand clutched Rewan’s shoulder and the other took a firm, guiding grip at the roots of the Hazard’s heavy, still-damp shock of hair. Unknowable words died on her parted lips. Her pale bottom grinded into the sheets and she braced herself with her hand on Rewan’s shoulder as she shuddered. Already thrilled and teased by the stop-and-start play with Rewan, Sophine could not hold herself back. She released her grip on Rewan’s hair and the young Hazard pulled back only far enough to cup Sophine’s head in her lips as the long, pale cock quivered and poured itself out in a handful of pumps like slow heartbeats.
Rewan gulped in small, practiced goes and stroked Sophine-squeezing on the pull up. When Sophine was truly empty and giggling breathlessly at Rewan’s tongue playing at her over-sensitive head, Rewan pulled back to sit on her heels. She swallowed a last time and grinned, proud of herself. Sophine gave a fatigued, encouraging round of applause as she recovered her breath.
“I think you’re cute,” Rewan said, “And all those other nice things you said, too.”
Sophine’s spent smile turned to mock confusion, “I don’t think all those things apply to me—”
“Beasts!” Rewan whipped around snatching up her panties, “How long was that?”
Sophine shook her head and leaned back against the high footboard, “Should I have been timing?”
Rewan danced to her feet as she tied on her panties over her relaxing penis. She headed for the door, doubled back, and gave Sophine a quick kiss on the freckle just below her eye, “Thanks!” And she bolted from the room.
“Thank you!” Sophine chuckled as Rewan disappeared. She looked at the sloppy mess sprayed across her bed sheets and her chuckle redoubled. She’s going to have to clean these, she thought, and reached across the bed to take up her codex with a satisfied sigh.
*
The quavering, wistfully sad strains of Avda’s improvisation on her chiba filled the night-cycle garden. In the long, quiet coda of her breaths, the scuffle of night-creatures and the crackle of the fire chimed in their music. Fathema added clipped, mournful, wordless keening at the song’s apices. Sophine took the spitted fish from the fire and with quick strokes split fresh flesh from bone as she nestled it among thin layers of herbs and vegetables in the pan. Splashes of water hissed off the steaming dish. The water bound the flavors together and the susurrus mingled with the notes of the airy flute.
Rewan crashed back through the bulkhead underbrush, her lungs heaving.
The music died in the air as Avda pulled the mouth of the chiba from her lips, “Welcome back.” Rewan gulped down air to prepare a reply, but the captain continued, “In the face of a foreign vessel bearing arms, but no presentation of aggression, what is the fitting engagement?”
“I’m hungry!” Rewan panted, leering at the dish Sophine was serving to Fathema.
“All the better motivation to get one right-or as close as can be expected-Yeowoman.”
“Why am I the only one doing protocol drills?!” She whined.
Avda turned to Fathema, “Helmswoman, in the face of a foreign vessel bearing arms, but no presentation of aggression, what is the fitting engagement?”
Fathema set down her fork, laden with a dripping bite, “Section the ninth, Engagements Beyond Command, sub-section the third, conclusion: ‘Thus, that future relations betwixt foreign powers and the Command might not be impeded, such engagements should be approached cautiously as to the objective of establishing any reasonable, mutually beneficial trade barring laminite, powder, or relics.”
Rewan had recovered enough breath to complain at more length, “She’s been a navywoman for years! What about Sophine?”
Avda looked to her at the kitchen where the smaller fire sizzled the next batch, “Arbitress? Given irrecoverable damage to the ship, but landing in desert harbor, what is to be the disposition of the crew?”
Sophine thought as she arranged the slanted, layered log in the pan, “I don’t know the protocols to the sub-section and letter, but my understanding is that: In the face of active hostility, naval order is maintained until hostility is abated, and in only natural opposition, each Hutanari is her own mistress to better the chances of all?”
“She just made that up!” Rewan inched closer to the ring of the fire and the promise of dinner.
“That is two you’ve missed, allowing others to field them for you. Take a lap… to the engine room and back, and we shall try again.”
“But that’s half the ship and,” her mind mapped the increasingly familiar ship’s layout, “a dozen decks down!”
“Then you will have plenty of time to meditate on the protocols you have learned. That was an order, Yeowoman.”
Rewan raged a throaty scream and turned to jog from the fireside. Her feet were slowing and heavy before she even reached the bulkhead.
When she was gone, Sophine served Avda and asked, “How long will this go on? This is the second night you’ve run her ragged past dinner.”
Avda thanked her and cut at the delicately layered dish, “Until she begs to study the protocols on her own time. The promise of this every night will make her love her studies. Only the hard-nut cases take even this long to ask for a copy of their own.”
Fathema nodded.
Sophine smiled and shook her head as she returned to the kitchen cart, “The Navy is a different thing than the rest of Ezwen.”
“And that is why a captain rules the ship and an arbitress rules only the captain,” Avda agreed.
“I know: a ship ever faces crises, so every conflict cannot be settled before an arbitress, but—”
There was a shuffle of grass nearby that neither Sophine nor Avda would have noticed, but for Fathema’s sudden rigid attention. She rounded the chair she had been leaning against, dropped to all fours, and darted into the dark, her strangely-tuned muscles bulging beneath her wind-caught tunic.
Avda nodded good hunting to the helmswoman and Sophine continued, “But seeing it… it seems to make her less than Hutanari.”
Avda thought as she chewed, when she finished, she agreed, “She is made less to be a part of something more. Any who take a public role more than freewoman does the same. Lady Waste is more organ of the people than her own woman. My every action is not my will, because I am a part of the Navy. Even you must bend your will to your duties.”
Sophine served herself and came to sit by Avda and the fire. The last portion sat on the hob, slowly keeping its warmth.
“But the way you seek to break her, re-form her into a tool. My role was my choice, and I grew into it. Lady Malkea Waste-her role was the result of decades of choices, and at every one she shaped herself into it. Every mayor and hetwoman, every tradeswoman, craftswoman, and freewoman-the same. Only the Navy-and the Hazards, whatever their ways-take that from you. Are you here by your own choice-your own growth?”
They ate silently. When Avda was done, the chiba returned to her lips and the slow melody filled the air again. As each composition played its part and departed on her intake of breath-by purpose or subconscious habit-a full count of meditation passed. When she spoke, her answer was carefully composed.
“I want to say that I am, but there was a time when I was broken. I was broken by my own choice, yes, but broken nonetheless. I was formed anew that I might be a tool in the hand of another-another that I had chosen. If the knife quailed and questioned when it was put to its task, would not its product be diminished? When the order to tack or trim is questioned by the rigger in a storm because she has not the knowledge or experience of the helmswoman calling out, is the ship any less lost because the rigger knew not why she ought to have obeyed?
“Even the common militias, when the beasts roil and rage in their masses, do the militiawomen not follow the word of their marshall or hetwoman to the letter? Of course. Because it is in their interest, and the dangers are clear and snarling before them. It is the same for the Navy, but that the dangers might be beyond the horizon, they are no less urgent. Out here in the void, doubly so. Here even I know not what dangers might beset us, but that is all the more reason that I must have confidence in the immediate action of the women of my crew-and all the more that I must bear up under their faith in me.”
Rewan flaggingly stomped once more through the brush and into the clearing.
Avda looked to her, “Good time. Your endurance, at least, is bolstered where your understanding of protocol is not.”
“So…” She sucked at the air, “Hungry…”
“Then: given a circumstance of rationing,” Avda proffered another practicum, “By what order ought food and water be dispensed?”
Rewan gasped and shrugged, “I don’t know.”
Avda’s chest filled beneath her loose, buttoned blouse to give the order to run and Rewan attempted to humble herself, “Captain… delegates of Command… and officers before the Crew-women?”
Avda nodded, “A good attempt!” Rewan brightened. “But no: a portion of remaining supplies commensurate to the physical exertion of her required role.”
Rewan sagged.
“For a strong attempt, Yeowoman: Take a lap to the bridge and back.”
“That’s the reward… for a strong attempt?!” Rewan breathlessly whined.
“How often has complaining of an order availed you, Yeowoman?”
Rewan’s shoulders fell and she ran from the Garden with another inarticulate shout.
“She’s trying,” Sophine said while working at her food with dainty cuts and bites.
“And trying is but a good first step to doing.” Avda said.
Sophine gave a little laugh, “That’s not an arbitress’s utterance. Navy maxim?”
“A Heller-Guidres maxim,” the captain thought, “Or rather a Guidres maxim. Mother Heller used it more ironically-mostly when Mother Guidres would casually use the word ‘try’.”
Fathema dropped back in around the fire to finish her plate. It was impossible to tell by her face if she had caught her prey and released it or simply been outplayed by the vine cat.
“Will you let her eat eventually?” Sophine asked.
“Like I said: when she gets one right.”
Sophine swiped Avda’s head gently, “Avda, the girl will starve!”
Avda ran her fingers through her own hair to resettle it into its neat part, “I’ll ask her one from yesterday. If she’s been paying attention…”
Avda played the chiba, Sophine ate, Fathema stared into the fire over her empty plate, and Rewan did not get the next one right. But the one after that, she did. Rewan revelled in her triumph-a triumph she would have scoffed at a few days before. She devoured Sophine’s fastidiously prepared dinner with both hands and snapping, bestial teeth.
The following day, when Rewan came to see Sophine, the arbitress made sure to make her codex of naval protocol clearly visible from the bed, and Rewan took the bait. She made good use of it throughout the day, in anticipation of the afternoon’s protocol drills. When the afternoon arrived, though, the drills did not. Rewan passed a few minutes in the empty garden, almost disappointed to not have the opportunity to show off her new-if far from complete-knowledge of the protocols. When she arrived at the bridge to complain, however, she was just in time to see Fathema whirl around in the helm’s armature and pull its mask from her face:
“The third stone-world is green-like Hutana,” Fathema’s face was as enthusiastic as if she were on a hunt.