Memorial Day

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men [sic] to die in."
- George McGovern


"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

"Draft beer; not people."
-Author Unknown

"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

"It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate."
-George McGovern

What I'm Working On Tonight

God's War

1.

Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jax, and lost it two rounds later when Jax hit the floor like an antique harem girl.

Nyx lost every coin, a wad of opium, and the wine she’d gotten in exchange for her womb. But she did get Jax to bed, and loser or not, in the desert after dark that was something.

Especially considering Nyx’s profession.

“What are you after?” Jax murmured in her good ear. They lay tangled in the sheets like old lovers, a losing boxer with a poor right hook and a tendency to drop her left, and a wombless hunter bereft of money, weapons, food, and most of her clothing.

“I’m looking for my sister,” Nyx said. It was partly the truth. She was looking for a lot of people.

Jax could only get her halfway there.

Nyx woke sometime after dawn prayer with a hangover and what felt like a wad of cotton in her belly. The pain wasn’t supposed to kick in until noon. She should have started drinking to prep for the pain, but she had another sort of boxer to meet in Faleen, and four women and a eunuch on her tail looking for a womb she’d dumped at the butcher’s. They would take her without the womb, of course, but dumping it kept them occupied in the fleshpots a day longer.

She pulled on her burnoose and pushed into the short hall. Jax was long gone, and the cantina was mostly empty. There was a room charge to pay, the cantina keeper told her. She put breakfast on the tab and slipped out the back.

A girl was selling sand cats in a pool of smoke weeping out from the back end of the cantina. It was a bad day for smog, even this far outside the cities. The thick air trapped the smoke too close, cloying close. Nyx pulled her gutra over her face, tucked it up under the aghal.

“You seen any bakkies on this road?” she asked the kid.

The girl spit red. “You want a sand cat?”

The kittens in the cage were bloody, half-starved. Flies circled them. The girl didn’t look much better.

Nyx was shit and gone from Punjai.

She walked. She looked back, once, at the smoky cantina and the starving girl, and wondered who they were burning back there.

The sun bled across the big angry sky. The road was unpaved, mostly sand and gravel. She had traded her good sandals for directions out of the fleshpots, too dopey to figure her way out on her own. Under the burnoose, she wore little more than a dhoti and breast binding. She had an old baldric - her dead partner’s - buckled too tight.

All the sheaths were empty. Had been for some time.

She was reminded of some proverb about meeting God empty-handed, but morning prayer had come and gone, and she hadn’t knelt. Her knees weren’t calloused anymore. Not from praying, away.

She hitched a ride on the back of a snarling cat-pulled cart just before midday, and by late afternoon she found a bodega and a call box and a sign telling her she was thirty miles from Faleen.

She made a call.

Two hours later, Kine pulled up in a bakkie spewing red roaches from its back end.

Kine leaned over and pushed the door out.

“You’ve got a leak in your exhaust,” Nyx said, sliding onto the seat.

Kine was an unremarkable woman, big in the hips and slight in the bust, average height, long face. Her hands had the brown, worn, sinewy look of old leather, but her face was younger, fleshier. She wore an embroidered housecoat and hijab over her dark hair, but Nyx figured there was very little on underneath the coat. It was a hot day.

“What’s her name?” Kine asked, shifting the bakkie into gear.

“Who?”

“I can smell her,” Kine said.

“I lost a bet,” Nyx said.

“Where’s Tej?”

“Dead. I couldn’t get him back over the border.”

Kine pursed her lips, a thousand daggers of disapproval in her dark eyes. She never frowned, never that, but the tight mouth held back words her God didn’t permit her to say. Nyx knew that well enough. She’d known Kine long before she went conservative.

They blew back out onto the road. The shocks in the bakkie were going out.

“Where am I taking you?” Kine asked.

“Faleen.”

Nyx looked out the window, watched the flat white desert turn to dunes.

“A ship just came in from New Canaan,” Kine said. Faleen was a landlocked city. Only one kind of ship docked there. “If you’re looking for the magicians –“

“Which sect?”

“Yebez. This is God’s war we’re fighting. They want a part in it.”

“God didn’t say anything to me about it. Does the radio work?” Nyx asked. She leaned forward to fiddle with the tube jutting out of the dashboard.

“No,” Kine said. She pinched her mouth again, then - “How did you lose Tej?”

Nyx was bleeding again. She could feel it. She needed something stronger than liquor.

“You have any weapons on you?” Nyx asked. She kicked the radio tube. It rattled. All the news was behind her.

“Who’s tracking you?”

“What is this, the fourth inquisition?”

“Nyxnissa?”

Nyx pulled her gutra free, dipped her head out the open window. The air was clearing up.

“Raine,” she said.

Kine’s face scrunched up like a prune. She shifted gears. The bakkie rattled and picked up speed. Dust and dead beetles roiled behind them.

“You’re putting me in a pot, sister-mine,” Kine said.

“I wouldn’t be blood if I didn’t.”

“I’ll drop you at the gate, no farther.”

The gate was good.

“You never could get a man back over the border,” Kine said. Her expression hadn’t changed. She had liked all of Nyx’s partners, even the men. Kine thought she was a good progressive conservative for putting up with Nyx's male partners.

“Tej was a good boy. The only one of yours I liked. You kill good men for a lost cause.”

“Raine always got us back out.”

“Raine isn’t a bēl damê, he’s a bounty hunter.”

“There’s not much difference.

“It’s all the difference in the world, in God’s eyes.”

They’d turned off the gravel track and onto the 101 Highway that bisected northern Nasheen from the Chenjan border to the sea. Splintered red rock jutted up from the dunes or lay scattered among them. A careful eye could spot the shimmering casings of unexploded bursts lining the highway. The road signs were popular shooting targets for Chenjan operatives and Nasheenian protestors, and most of the metal markers were pocked with bullet holes and smeared in burst residue.

Nyx supposed that there were worse places to go to sell the last of what she had, but she couldn’t think of any. Except maybe Chenja. And she’d already given Chenja enough of her. And enough of everyone else.

She tightened her baldric.

Eighteen miles to Faleen.

Wiscon....

... was great. Had to leave early due to scheduling and life events, and etc. but I had a blast. Got to meet great people, had a great time.

Looking forward to next year. It'll totally rock the house.

Things are great.

What I Love About Wiscon

It's incredibly nice to find your people. It's incredibly surreal to have several people stop you in the hall and go, "Kameron Hurley? Brutal Women? I love your blog!"

Next year, I'd rather they were loving my fiction. But hey, I'll take what I can get.

Next year. The fiction will pay off. I'm passionate. I believe in it. Things can be really different.

And now I will cease drunken posting, in case I get myself in trouble by talking about James Frenkel.

Ahem. Yea.

Also, need to call Simon and Ashley at some point - dude, let's do lunch.

Sidenote

hahah ahah aha

The hotel "decency" filter won't let me view my blog... because it has words like "fucked" in it.

Tell them to join the Real World.

Wiscon

Rocks.

I am a little drunk.

Why Yes, It's Friday Random Quiz Day. I'm Lazy.

Your Birthdate: January 12

Being born on the 12th day of the month (3 energy) is likely to add a good bit of vitality to your life. The energy of 3 allows you bounce back rapidly from setbacks, physical or mental. There is a restlessness in your nature, but you seem to be able to portray an easygoing, sometimes "couldn't care less" attitude. You have a natural ability to express yourself in public, and you always make a very good impression. Good with words, you excel in writing, speaking, and possibly singing. You are energetic and always a good conversationalist. You have a keen imagination, but you tend to scatter your energies and become involved with too may superficial matters. Your mind is practical and rational despite this tendency to jump about. You are affectionate and loving - but very sensitive. You are subject to rapid ups and downs.

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Why Does This Not Surprise Me?

Your Deadly Sins

Pride: 80%

Greed: 40%

Sloth: 40%

Envy: 20%

Gluttony: 20%

Lust: 20%

Wrath: 20%

Chance You'll Go to Hell: 34%

You will become famous - and subsequently killed by a stalker.

How Sinful Are You?

I Get Paid Tomorrow

Oh, sweet lord, thank you.

I've really got to figure out how to pay for dinner dates and books at the same time.

Truly, one of the great challenges of our age.

Kitten WAR

Because every kitten must have its day...

KITTENWAR

Men Are Stupider Than Women, Which is Why Women Succeed in Life and Men Succeed In Business

Oh, I'm sorry, John, wasn't that what you were saying? No?

On average, the women made as much as the men under either system (individual or group money games). But when they were offered a choice for the next round - take the piece rate or compete in a tournament - most women declined to compete, even the ones who had done the best in the earlier rounds. Most men chose the tournament, even the ones who had done the worst.

Because men are stupid and need to glorify their egos, and women are content with their lot.

Or maybe because women aren't encouraged to be competitive, because it's incredibly "intimidating" and "unfeminine" and unless she's a lesbian, she'll never get laid again.

Oh, sorry, not your conclusion John?

The men's eagerness partly stemmed from overconfidence, because on average men rated their ability more highly than the women rated theirs.

Because men are stupid and egotistical, and women are raised with a sense of modesty and Christian self-abasement.

Oh, wrong again.

"Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much," Professor Niederle said. "The men who weren't good at this task lost a little money by choosing to compete, and the really good women passed up a lot of money by not entering tournaments they would have won."

You can argue that this difference is due to social influences, although I suspect it's largely innate, a byproduct of evolution and testosterone.

::insert sloooooow screeeaaam:::

Oh, yes, testoserone, that happy hormone. Let's try this out. Put a bunch of menstrating women in a room with a group of men. This is the time of the month when men's body chemistry is most similiar to women's, hormone-wise.

See what changes.

What, nothing?

OK, pump women full of testoserone, so they grow a beard and get an enlarged clitoris, and then run the experiment again.

Still the same?

Gee, I wonder what the problem could be then!

OK, sit a few female-to-male transexuals down with some men who were born with --

Gee, tougher to control other factors for that one, huh? And a smaller sample.

Oh, dear.

Why is it that everytime somebody argues about "some" men succeeding above and beyond "some" women, that the issue of testoserone comes up? How about the family background of the applicant, how about looking at the amount of confidence their parents inspired in them, or looking at their birth order? Why always concentrate on the sex?

Thoughts on Education

In reading this article at the NY Times about the differences between those who stay and complete college and those who don't, I was reminded of my own experience (and, in fact, continuing experience) with the educational system. Low-income students and students of families who did not graduate from college - unsurprisingly - still have a more difficult time getting to college and sticking with it to get the degree.

There's really no question as to why. If you've got a family who expects you'll go to college, who all graduated from college and - miracle of miracles - who will pay for it if you go, you've got a big social and financial system behind you urging you on. Shit, I had a family who would have disowned me if I didn't get a degree, but I sure as hell contemplated *not* completing my undergraduate degree a couple of times.

Why?

Cause I'm now 30K in debt, and making only 40K a year as a result. In fact, the only reason I even considered graduate school at all was because a collective of relatives agreed to help me pay tuition costs. I still worked for my plane ticket and the money to pay my bills before I headed overseas, but at the end of graduate school, at least my debt rack-up remained the same.

What kept me going when I was 19/20 wasn't so much my love of education (though I certainly have a love learning), it was family pressure to finish. My parents pounded me and my brother and sister over the head about the importance of a college education. My mother had waited to go back to school until she had kids - and she said it was one of the stupidest things she'd done, to try and go to work, go to school, and raise kids, and she didn't recommend that route. My dad finished a couple of semesters of college courses, but it became abundantly clear when he went back on the job market that nobody was hiring anybody without a college degree anymore, and he fought tooth and nail to get a job that paid the bills, even with over twenty years of restaurant experience, five years of that at the VP level.

The job market isn't a fun place.

I found out the same thing here in Chicago when I tried to get a job, and ended up working for $11 an hour as a temp before this position became permanent. I was so desperate to work that I was ready to apply at Starbuck's - with a Master's Degree.

How fucked up is that?

When it comes to education, for me, it's now all about the money. Where will the money come from? How many more student loan people are going to call me about late payments? How much more financial harrassment will I endure to get another degree, to broaden my horizons, expand my skill base?

My answer is: a lot.

The reason I have that answer is because I've grown up in a family that takes great pride in education, that knows it's worth, and who have raised me with those same values.

For better or worse, I keep going.

It's the money that's a bitch.

Just Drink More Coffee

The lean and the restless.

Wiscon Approaches

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell am ready to get out of town...

And, of course, looking forward to getting paid on Friday. It's gonna be a great Friday. Why isn't today Friday, dammit?

Until You Experience This, You Just Can't Really Comprehend It

The ParaGard may cause a 50 to 75 percent increase in menstrual flow.

Why yes, yes it does.

Heavier and longer menstrual periods, more common during the first 2 to 3 months

Patience, young grasshopper, patience. I figure that it's healthier than being pregnant, and less depressing than a pill. And in three months, I won't be selling all this extra blood for Satanic rituals.

I'll certainly miss the extra income.

Shit I Could Never Do

Be an IT support person. You get the same lameass questions from lameass people who don't read the fucking access directions before they fucking call you.

Home Again, Home Again

I'm in a blistering bad mood. Heading out today at 4pm.

Gonna go get some coffee.

It's just one of those days.

What I'm Working On:

Year of Wonders
____________________________________________

She painted on nonsdays, the day before worship, the day after sex, when her body was loose and her head was clear and she hadn’t yet purged herself of the week’s paltry sins. She liked the light on nonsdays, and she sat at her window in her robe, legs spread, watching the light spill over the city. The breeze was hot and heavy, humid as a den of lovers. The wind smelled of the sea. If she gazed over the blue tiles of the city, gazed just there, between the great towers of the church temple and the storage silos blocking the tail-end of the bay, she could just see the glint of the sea.

All she ever painted was the sea. The light on the sea, the city and the sea. She had moved out of her studio three times, trying to get a better view of the sea, but violence and poverty always sent her away from the core of the city and the beachfront tenant houses. She sat in her rented room and painted a dream of the sea cut through in a sliver of real light. When she slept, she dreamt of the sea.

But her dreams did not sell. Whoring kept her in rent and paint and sometimes bread. She liked her life. She loved her view of the sea. She did not want for lovers, just bread, for sometimes she felt she lived on the view and the dreams, and that was enough.

She was twenty-two, paint-smeared and starving.

When a man knocked at her door asking for a commission, she assumed it was a euphemism for sex, and told him he would have to wait until the day before nonsday. He laughed, and she offered him weak tea.

He sat with her on the floor of the studio and stared at the cluttered wall hung in a splash of canvases; a thousand shades of blue and violet and white and yellow, orange and gray, all dabbed and mixed and lovingly kissed so they could create this: the sea.

“I would like you to paint me,” he said. “As you paint the sea.”

“Impossible,” she said. “I dream of the sea.”

He leaned toward her. He was broad and angular, but not frightening. Men did not frighten her. Only violence. And men knew nothing of violence in the blue-tiled city. That was a woman’s vocation.

“I want you to dream of me,” he said.

He was not beautiful. But then, neither was she. It was not a city for the beautiful.


The Boxing Magicians of Faleen
________________________________________________________

For hours they stood on the edge of the road watching the cars while the dust settled in their hair and cicadas clung to the hems of their trousers. They had come from the boxing in Faleen and their eyes were black shadows and their clawed hands were tinged a faint violet, thick with swelling.

They were magicians, magnificent, resplendent in amber and topaz robes that covered their thick, powerful bodies. The black shadows of their eyes told nothing of where they’d been, why they waited, but you could always mark the boxing magicians of Faleen. They stood in the world like it was a transient thing, as temporary as a dawn wind. They stood as if they would outlast it.

Arran had seen them as soon as they alighted from the bus. They emerged from the cloud of roaches spewed from the bus’s exhaust and remained on the far side of the ditch, speaking low among themselves and watching the traffic coming back out from the city after afternoon prayer.

“You think we should offer them something, mother?” Arran asked the woman working beside him. He held the basket of roach eggs as she repaired the burst walls of the house, sealed the eggs over with mud and straw.

She was a big woman, fleshy in the hips and thighs, broad in the face and heavy in the bosom, her breasts so large that Arran once dreamed that he suffocated against them in her warm embrace. He had not known her long, only a season. His birth mother worked in government, somewhere in Punjai on the edge of the desert, along the Chenjan border where the worst of the skirmishes still blazed. He had been farmed out to families further inland from the fighting, to be raised up until he was old enough to go to war and kill the Chenjans that left his birth mother with no time for children. It wasn’t long off, he was nearly fourteen, and he’d seen the sixteen year old men marching off to war along the road after their graduation in Faleen. Not long. Not long at all.

This new mother spared a black look at the magicians, and spat a red pulp of kaj onto the dirt. “Offer them water. Magicians don’t go for liquor, this time of day. Go ask your sister to dole it out. And don’t linger. Magicians don’t like boys.”

Arran abandoned the basket and bolted around the back of the house to where his sister Jax was sparring with some local girls. They said that magicians could tell the future. They could tell you how you’d do in the war, how many Chenjans you would kill, how much honor you’d get back in Nasheen, how long you would be remembered.

“Jax, ma says to dole out some water,” he said.

Jax parried a blow from her partner with her left forearm, dipped away, pushed back from the sparring circle

“What?” she said. Sweat poured down her long, flat face. Her dark skin was covered over in a fine reddish dust. She had twisted her dark hair back into a knot of braids. All the girls did their hair that way, these days. He’d once begged to be allowed to grow his hair long, but every mother he’d had scolded him for it. What would a boy do with long hair? Get it caught by some Chenjan, likely.

“There’s magicians on the road!” he said, and immediately regretted it.

The other girls looked over at him. Jax’s sparring partner, and the three watching.

“What kind of magicians? From Faleen?” Jax said. She retrieved her long robe and rubbed her face with it.

Arran rocked back on his heels. “Mother wants water for them. She says I should –“

“We’ll take it out,” Jax said. She nodded to the girls, grinned. “You want your fortune told? I heard they give you good ones, if you bring them some bugs. Arran, give me your locust.”

“No,” Arran said. He’d caught the locust a month before, when a swarm came through and he and Jax and their mother had gone out to cover over the fields with organic netting. The locust had clung to the sleeve of his jacket, and when he saw it spread its amber and lavender wings, he caught it up in his hands and knew he had to keep it. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“Don’t be a maggot,” Jax said. She shrugged into her robe, cut a look at her sparring partner, some lanky girl named Trinh who lived at a farm an hour’s walk away.

“It’s mine,” Arran said. “Just give me the water. Ma said –“

“Piss on what ma said. Let’s go see what these magicians are like,” Jax said. She nodded to the girls, and they bled past Arran and back around to the front of the house.

Arran hopped after them. “Don’t! Ma said I...”

Jax unlocked the well and pumped out some water into a bowl at the base of the house. She handed the bowl to Trinh.

“Shut up, Arran,” Jax said. “What do you think they’d have to say to you? Boys all end up the same, dead and buried in Chenja. Who gives a fuck about a boy’s future?”


Cheira-Cheira
______________________________________________


Cheira had named the ship after herself, and she still sat at mealtimes in the hub with lists of names at her elbows and a mask of liquor vapor in her hand. None of her crews had ever seen her eat. She did not keep her crews long (nameless bodies abandoned; deep space) because after a time they became dull and desiccated (and she left them on the crust of a colonial waste wearing thorns in their hair, clinging tightly to the lead rope of a solitary ox the color of old blood). She’d named the ship without any hint of irony. The idea that Cheira had any irony left was a riotous laugh even without knowing the ship's moniker, and her Second, Roman, amused himself often at the expense of her baptizmal humor.

Roman would come into Cheira’s quarters after the purging of every crew, his long face set in a dark, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood.

His visage was his gift to her stagnation.

"Why don't we go on," he would say. "We can manage the cortex on our own. Engineers take up space. I can handle repairs. And the mercenaries… You're a better miss than any of them."

"There's the matter of the prisoner," she would say.

And he would throw up his broad, scarred hands and sigh and say, "Yes, there's the prisoner."

It was Cheira’s duty, her obsession, her vocation, to tread down the tongue of the spiraling stair from the cortex to the holding tank every six hours. She greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous green fluid with a blank stare and an unconscious moue she had seen Justice wear in propaganda posters during the war.

The body’s eyes were closed, its sex indeterminate, its face a morass of dark, thread-like tubes and wires. Most sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the long black tube suctioned against the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of fulfillment. Sometimes, it did not react at all, but remained still, unmoving (a mermaid trapped in ice).

After recording the convulsion - or lack of one - Cheira often went straight back into the cortex. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat, purring recording console that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become. She lost track of time (in these intimate reveries), often. After twelve hours of contemplation, she would hear Roman do a sensor sweep of the ship. He would find her alive and intact, and perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the engineers or concocting a filmy liquor the tarry consistency of fuel oil. They were a pair of two, a crew of three, picking up floatsam and jetsom in the seams between the stars.

When the next filler contract arrived in Cheira’s room, Roman wanted a new crew. He was lonely, he said, after she left the last of his engineers on a paltry rock the color of foam.

She let Roman pick the crew, and he navigated them a path into Stile, a dusty ring of settlements on the edges of an asteroid belt circling a bloated, dying star. His brother worked in the scrap constellations around Stile, digging through old ships, piecing together their innards, selling them as pirated vessels imbued with the spirit of cheap colonial grit.

Cheira had not seen Roman's brother in a decade, when speaking of the war, of genocide, in terms outside the propagandic, was still new and unsettling and got them thrown out of establishments whose whores and buggers and creep cleaners called them void, diseased (marked for a dry asphyxiation in a torn cargo hull aboard a drifting ship in limitless space).

She did not greet Roman’s brother when he came aboard, but waited until he sought her out in the cortex. She stared out at the projection screen, the long loop of the asteroid belt. Bits of space debris bumped against the hull, bits of rocks and bodies, glass shards and scraps of metal so small they were worth less than the energy to gather them.

She heard him walk up the stair into the cortex. Heard him hesitate on the threshold.

"This your ship?" he said.

She had expected to feel nothing at his voice, but like the body in her hull, she was sometimes surprised at what was fed to her. She felt a sort of pain.

She swiveled in her chair. He did not take up the doorway as Roman did, but inhabited it in the loose way he inhabited all spaces, wrapping it around himself like a shroud , blurring the edges of his surrounds. He had once had the body of a dancer, but like all of them, he had atrophied, and though he was thin, it was a thinness borne of hunger and the loss of muscle. His eyes were black as Roman's, but their color was the only feature they shared. He was coffee black to Roman's sallow cream, slight in the hips and shoulders, delicate in the wrists and ankles, with the doe-like eyes of an oversized marionette.

He stepped into the cortex, and the ship hummed. She patted the console, and it quieted.

"You look terrible," he said.

"I was thinking the same of you," she said.

"Roman says you need an engineer."

"We don't, but we do."

"Cryptic, intriguing. I brought my work."

"Desecrate the hull and I'll have your sack."

"Haven't you had it?"

"It's been a long time."

"I have no doubt."

She regarded him. Something inside of her stirred, something dark, a gray gauze. "Where are the others?" she said.

His name was Luck.

#

Roman's tastes were predictable in their disparity. He brought up his foundlings to meet with her, the first: a pale, freckled girl of a pilot whose yellow hair was a startling burst of color. No one remembered the last time they'd seen yellow hair. The war, maybe.

The other was a mercenary, a tall, long-limbed man as dark as the girl was light. His head was shaved bald, and he wore a silver circlet above his ears; half of one ear was missing. He carried a charged gun at either hip, a shotgun across his back. He smelled of blood and metal.

"Do they have whole names?" Cheira asked Roman.

"Hanah Tohl," the little pilot said, holding out her little hand. It was a rude affectation picked up by a lot of the young, to touch when first meeting.

The other one, the mercenary, sneered at the open hand, said, "Dax Al-hamin. And in whose service are we?"

"Cheira's," Cheira said. "The ship and I."

"Cheira, is that a Kip name?" Hanah said. She had pulled her hand back in. She was smiling broadly. Her teeth were too white, not her own.

"It's nobody's but hers," Roman said. "And the ship's Cheira-Cheira. You'll say hello to her later."

Cheira sat with the new crew over supper. She unrolled her lists. She wrote Hanah Tohl and Dax Al-hamin.

Roman filled Cheira's vapor tank. He had not given her a plate.

"You ain't eating?" Hanah said.

Cheira merely raised her eyes. She put the mask to her face, inhaled.

"Cheira doesn't like questions," Roman said. "Don't ask them."

"You say we are in transport," Dax said. “I signed on for a job.”

Cheira pushed her vapor canister at Roman, and he stood and refilled it.
Roman said, "We have an indefinite transport contract with the Authority. We take on odd jobs to supplement that."

"What did you do before?" Hanah asked.

"There was nothing before," Roman said. He set Cheira's canister back at her elbow.

"So what happened to your crew?" Hanah asked.

Dax snorted.

Cheira looked sidelong at Roman. She picked at her teeth, heard someone behind her, glanced back.

Luck slipped in through the vibrating door, a tardy shadow.

“Food looks recycled,” Luck said.

“You expected something else?” Cheira said levelly.

“There’s no before, and no crews,” Roman said, clearing up the obnoxious pilot’s question. “We take on crews only as we need them. We’re being asked to deliver cargo to some Authority swanks. We’re taking you all on to assist with pickup and transport.”

“Where we going?” Dax asked.

“Tutara,” Roman said.

Dax leaned back in his chair, crossed his big arms. “They still have cargo on Tutara?”

“We’ll find out,” Roman said.

“Cargo? What sort of cargo?” Hanah asked.

Dax fixed a black stare on her. “Bodies,” he said.

“Whose bodies?” Hanah said. She fiddled with her liquor mask. Cheira wondered if Roman had watered it down to crew rations yet. Best not get them used to excess.

“Abandoned colonists,” Roman said. “The ones who took the slow boat to the outer systems. Bad timing on their part, and bad tech.”

“We invented faster drives while they slept,” Luck said.

Cheira frowned at him. Luck had never invented anything of the sort.

“And when they arrived,” Roman continued, “the terras they’d intended to settle were already colonized by faster ships run by their great-grandchildren. Colonizers who set down first get first rights, so extraneous cargo was diverted to Tutara.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Hanah said.

“What, salvaging?” Roman said.

Cheira wondered if Hanah had ever sold her womb. It was practically the same thing. Just body parts. Dumb tender kid. Where had Roman dredged up this one?

She finished another canister of liquor and shook it. It was time to feed the prisoner.

She pushed back from the table.

Roman caught her eye. “You’ll excuse Cheira. She has an engagement. I’ll finish the briefing.”

Bodies in space (It was always an interesting ride).
_______________________________________________________

$1.94

The amount of money I currently have in my checking account until I get paid on Friday, just in time for Wiscon.

Oh, joy.

And also: first monthly bleeding with an IUD - ha ahaha oh, what joy, what fun for everyone! With all this blood, I could throw a party, or take part in a Satanic ritual. Blood rites, indeed.

Straight women really get screwed on this whole contraception deal. I'm told it'll be 1-3 months before I even out. It beats depression, but it sure as hell knocks ya flat the first month.

I Don't Worship Your God!

(via Nicky)