Black Alice loved her ship.
She was thinking about that, how, okay, it wasn’t so bad, the pirate game, and it sure beat working in the sunstone mines on Venus, when she found a locked cargo hold. “Hey, Dogcollar,” she said to her comm, and while he was turning to cover her, she pulled her sidearm and blastered the lock.
The door peeled back, and Black Alice found herself staring at rank upon rank of silver cylinders, each less than a meter tall and perhaps half a meter wide, smooth and featureless except for what looked like an assortment of sockets and plugs on the surface of each. The smell was strongest here.
“Shit,” she said.
Dogcollar, more practical, slapped the first safety orange tag of the expedition beside the door and said only, “Captain’ll want to see this.”
“Yeah,” said Black Alice, cold chills chasing themselves up and down her spine. “C’mon, let’s move.”
But of course it turned out that she and Dogcollar were on the retrieval detail, too, and the captain wasn’t leaving the canisters for Vinnie.
Which, okay, fair. Black Alice didn’t want the Lavinia Whateley eating those things, either, but why did they have to bring them back?
She said as much to Dogcollar, under her breath, and had a horrifying thought: “She knows what they are, right?”
“She’s the captain,” said Dogcollar.
“Yeah, but—I ain’t arguing, man, but if she doesn’t know…” She lowered her voice even farther, so she could barely hear herself: “What if somebody opens one?”
Dogcollar gave her a pained look. “Nobody’s going to go opening anything. But if you’re really worried, go talk to the captain about it.”
He was calling her bluff. Black Alice called his right back. “Come with me?”
He was stuck. He stared at her, and then he grunted and pulled his gloves off, the left and then the right. “Fuck,” he said. “I guess we oughta.”
* * *
For the crew members who had been in the boarding action, the party had already started. Dogcollar and Black Alice finally tracked the captain down in the rec room, where her marines were slurping stolen wine from broken-necked bottles. As much of it splashed on the gravity plates epoxied to the Lavinia Whateley’s flattest interior surface as went into the marines, but Black Alice imagined there was plenty more where that came from. And the faster the crew went through it, the less long they’d be drunk.
The captain herself was naked in a great extruded tub, up to her collarbones in steaming water dyed pink and heavily scented by the bath bombs sizzling here and there. Black Alice stared; she hadn’t seen a tub bath in seven years. She still dreamed of them sometimes.
“Captain,” she said, because Dogcollar wasn’t going to say anything. “We think you should know we found some dangerous cargo on the prize.”
Captain Song raised one eyebrow. “And you imagine I don’t know already, cherie?”
Oh shit. But Black Alice stood her ground. “We thought we should be sure.”
The captain raised one long leg out of the water to shove a pair of necking pirates off the rim of her tub. They rolled onto the floor, grappling and clawing, both fighting to be on top. But they didn’t break the kiss. “You wish to be sure,” said the captain. Her dark eyes had never left Black Alice’s sweating face. “Very well. Tell me. And then you will know that I know, and you can be sure.”
Dogcollar made a grumbling noise deep in his throat, easily interpreted: I told you so.
Just as she had when she took Captain Song’s oath and slit her thumb with a razorblade and dripped her blood on the Lavinia Whateley’s decking so the ship might know her, Black Alice—metaphorically speaking—took a breath and jumped. “They’re brains,” she said. “Human brains. Stolen. Black-market. The Fungi—”
“Mi-Go,” Dogcollar hissed, and the captain grinned at him, showing extraordinarily white strong teeth. He ducked, submissively, but didn’t step back, for which Black Alice felt a completely ridiculous gratitude.
“Mi-Go,” Black Alice said. Mi-Go, Fungi, what did it matter? They came from the outer rim of the Solar System, the black cold hurtling rocks of the Öpik-Oort Cloud. Like the Boojums, they could swim between the stars. “They collect them. There’s a black market. Nobody knows what they use them for. It’s illegal, of course. But they’re… alive in there. They go mad, supposedly.”
And that was it. That was all Black Alice could manage. She stopped, and had to remind herself to shut her mouth.
“So I’ve heard,” the captain said, dabbling at the steaming water. She stretched luxuriously in her tub. Someone thrust a glass of white wine at her, condensation dewing the outside. The captain did not drink from shattered plastic bottles. “The Mi-Go will pay for this cargo, won’t they? They mine rare minerals all over the system. They’re said to be very wealthy.”
“Yes, Captain,” Dogcollar said, when it became obvious that Black Alice couldn’t.
“Good,” the captain said. Under Black Alice’s feet, the decking shuddered, a grinding sound as Vinnie began to dine. Her rows of teeth would make short work of the Josephine Baker’s steel hide. Black Alice could see two of the gillies—the same two? she never could tell them apart unless they had scars—flinch and tug at their chains. “Then they might as well pay us as someone else, wouldn’t you say?”
* * *
Black Alice knew she should stop thinking about the canisters. Captain’s word was law. But she couldn’t help it, like scratching at a scab. They were down there, in the third subhold, the one even sniffers couldn’t find, cold and sweating and with that stench that was like a living thing.
And she kept wondering. Were they empty? Or were there brains in there, people’s brains, going mad?
The idea was driving her crazy, and finally, her fourth off-shift after the capture of the Josephine Baker, she had to go look.
“This is stupid, Black Alice,” she muttered to herself as she climbed down the companion way, the beads in her hair clicking against her earrings. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Vinnie bioluminesced, a traveling spotlight, placidly unconcerned whether Black Alice was being an idiot or not.
Half-Hand Sally had pulled duty in the main hold. She nodded at Black Alice and Black Alice nodded back. Black Alice ran errands a lot, for Engineering and sometimes for other departments, because she didn’t smoke hash and she didn’t cheat at cards. She was reliable.
Down through the subholds, and she really didn’t want to be doing this, but she was here and the smell of the third subhold was already making her sick, and maybe if she just knew one way or the other, she’d be able to quit thinking about it.
She opened the third subhold, and the stench rushed out.
The canisters were just metal, sealed, seemingly airtight. There shouldn’t be any way for the aroma of the contents to escape. But it permeated the air nonetheless, bad enough that Black Alice wished she had brought a rebreather.
No, that would have been suspicious. So it was really best for everyone concerned that she hadn’t, but oh, gods and little fishes, the stench. Even breathing through her mouth was no help; she could taste it, like oil from a fryer, saturating the air, oozing up her sinuses, coating the interior spaces of her body.