The Weight of a Gun

There is a sound a Vulture makes that no other ship I flew ever made. A low, patient idle in the two big drives slung either side of the cockpit, like something heavy breathing in its sleep. You feel it in your teeth before you hear it. I had named her Khazam — a child's word, a magic word, the kind of thing you say when you want a thing to be true badly enough that saying it might serve — and I had painted AKIKO under the canopy rail in the same white I always used, small, where only I would see it on the walk-around. A gunship with her name on it. I had not yet understood what that meant. I would, by the end of that day.

This was the twenty-fifth, deep in the cold weeks. I had come to a contested system because the money was loud there and I had gone quiet inside, and the two facts seemed to want each other.

That is the honest reason, and I am old enough now to write it. I did not take up the gun out of conviction. I took it up because for a season I could not feel the edges of myself, and a gun gives you edges. It tells you where you stop and the other man starts. Out in the long black there is no such line — you go and go and nothing pushes back, and a man who is mostly grief can begin to wonder whether he is there at all. So I came in off the dark and let the Empire's quarrel give me a shape. They were always quarrelling somewhere, the great houses and the Federal admirals, over some moon, some refinery, some line on a chart that mattered to men in good coats a hundred light-years from the shooting. They paid in hard transfers for any hull willing to go in and add its weight. I was willing. I told myself it was clean — uniforms, both sides armed, nobody dragged out of the fall by their name like the pirates did. I told myself a lot of things that winter.

Aleyna Schmid was the other half of Khazam that season, and she never once sat in the ship.

I should explain. A Vulture carries a small craft folded in her belly — a fighter, barely a cockpit and two stub wings, that you fling out into the fight to make two guns of one. You can fly it yourself by remote, badly, while your own ship sits dumb. Or you can hire a hand to take it, a pilot who lives in a chair somewhere in the back and feels through a tether what the little ship feels. Aleyna was that. A flat Hamburg voice, dry as a cracker, who had flown for three Imperial patrons before me and buried two ships of her own. She rode in a jump-seat behind and below my left shoulder, plugged in, and when she launched she became the fighter, and the chair she'd left went slack and empty.

I want to be precise about that chair, because it broke something in me and I did not notice for weeks.

The seat beside me — the co-pilot's place, the right-hand chair — stayed empty the whole season. Aleyna sat behind. Her launched fighter flew off my wing, a bright moth, all teeth, and I would hear her in my ear calling marks and laughing low when she scored, and I would turn my head the way you do toward a voice — and there would be the empty seat, the harness hanging open, the white name under the rail catching the instrument glow. Every fight. I'd turn to the voice at my wing and find the seat at my side empty, and for one half-second the two would refuse to be the same thing, the voice and the absence, and then the fight would take me again. I did not have words for it then. I have them now. I had hired a woman to fill the air beside me without filling the seat, and I let it stand because it was almost. Because almost was a thing I knew how to live in.

That morning we ran two contests before the bad one. They are a strange business, a contested zone — you fall in out of hyperspace and the sky is already full of it, two flocks of hulls knifing through each other at closing speeds that turn a heartbeat into a corpse, the surrender-beacons of the broken drifting and pinging, the slag of dead ships glittering like the world's coldest snow. You pick a side by the colour of the friend-marks and you go to work. Khazam was made for exactly this and no other thing. She turned like a slammed door. Her two big guns walked across a Federal Eagle and the Eagle simply stopped being a shape and became a spreading. Aleyna's moth danced in under their bigger hulls where the cannons couldn't depress and stripped them from below. We were good. God help me, we were good together, and the transfers landed fat and clean in the account between waves, and I felt my edges, I felt exactly where I stopped, and for whole minutes at a time I did not think about anything at all.

That is the seduction of it. Not the money. The silence in the head. A fight is the loudest quiet there is.

Between the second contest and the third I scooped fuel off the system's star to keep from having to dock. You hang in the corona on a long shallow line and the heat comes up through the deck into the soles of your boots, a slow furnace pressure, and the hull ticks as it takes the warmth, and far off the broken ships kept pinging their surrender. I ate a protein cake that tasted of cardboard and salt. Aleyna unplugged to stretch and the slack tether swung, and she leaned forward between the seats and looked at the white letters under my rail for a while.

"Who's Akiko," she said. Not really a question. A thing said into the heat.

"The ship," I said.

She looked at me, and then she did the kindest thing, which was to let it lie. "Fuel's green," she said, and plugged back in, and I have thought about that small mercy more than about any shot fired that day.

The third contest was the one with the special hands in it.

You learn to read a fight in the first ten seconds, the way you read weather off the colour of a star. This one read wrong from the fall. The enemy flock had a knot in it that moved differently — tighter, colder, ships that did not waste a metre, that covered each other like they'd been welded into one animal. Veterans. The houses send them when the line on the chart has stopped being about a moon and started being about pride. I should have turned Khazam around in the bloom of the arrival and fallen straight back out into the dark. I had the speed. I had the read.

I went in. I tell you plainly: I went in because the silence in my head that day was the deepest it had been in a year, and a part of me that I am not proud of wanted to see how far down it went.

They took Aleyna's fighter first. That is how you know real hands — they kill the small gun before you understand you've lost it. One moment her moth was carving and her voice was bright in my ear, and the next there was a flat white wash off my left wing and her voice clipped to nothing mid-word, and the launch cradle in Khazam's belly read empty, and the slack jump-seat behind me went from a person to a thing. She was alive — they always are, the rebuild takes them, lighter in the account, heavier in the chest — but she was gone, ripped out of the fight in a half-breath, and now it was Khazam and the empty seat and me, and three of the cold ships peeling off the main flock to come and have me.

I have been hunted. Pirates had pulled me out of the fall by name before, and would again. This was not that. A pirate wants your hold; he plays you, he leaves you a door. These wanted the hull dead and nothing else, and they flew like men with no door in them at all. They boxed me. One high, two crossing low, so that every turn Khazam made tightened the box instead of breaking it. Her two big guns are useless on a ship you cannot keep in front of you, and they would not stay in front of me. The shields went in a slamming series I felt in my spine — three hits, four, each one a fist on the back of the seat — and then the shields were a memory and it was bare hull, and the heat alarm came up under the cooling alarm under the hull-stress alarm until the cockpit was just one flat scream of light and I could not hear the breathing of the drives anymore, which is the thing, that is the thing, when a spacer stops hearing his own reactor he has begun to die.

A cannon round went through the canopy frame an arm's length to my right. Through the empty seat. It took the harness and the seat-back and the white letters under the rail — AKIKO, gone in a punch of decompression-shriek and sealing-foam — and the wind of the cabin going out grabbed me sideways against my straps so hard I bit through the inside of my cheek and tasted hot copper, and my body did a thing my mind had not authorised: it screamed her name. Not the ship's. Hers. Out loud, into the howl, into the dark, the way I talk to the dark when I think no one is flying near enough to hear — and there was no one, the fighter was dead and the seat was shot to ruin and I was alone in a box of cold professional men who wanted me to stop existing, and I called into all of it for a woman who was not in the seat, had not been in the seat, the empty seat now blown open to vacuum and full of nothing the way it had been full of nothing all along.

I do not remember choosing to run. My hands chose. They throttled Khazam over and down and away from the box on the one vector the three of them had left uncovered because no sane gun would take it — straight down into the slag-field, into the drifting wreckage of the morning's dead, where a hull my size had no business at that speed. Things hit me. Debris off the dead ships drummed the belly and one big piece took a drive-housing and the patient breathing on my left side guttered and went ragged. But the cold men would not follow into the slag — they were too good to die for one fleeing hull, that is the other face of professionals — and they peeled up and away and let the dark have me, and I fell out of the bottom of that fight trailing my own atmosphere in a thin silver line, both alarms screaming, the empty seat sucking and whistling where the canopy had been holed, and I made the system's edge on a drive that hitched like a bad heart and I fell into hyperspace barely, barely, the tunnel smearing the stars, and on the far side of the jump there was nothing. No flock. No marks. The silence after a jump that no human noise reaches.

I sat in it a long time. The cabin had sealed itself down to a survivable cold. My cheek bled into my collar. Where the white name had been there was a black puncture and a crust of grey sealing-foam, ugly as a wound, and I looked at it and I could not stop looking at it.

I had put her name on a gun. I had carried her — the idea of her, the hope of her, the painted almost of her — into rooms whose entire purpose was the ending of men, and I had taken the house's clean transfers for it and told myself the uniforms made it different from the pirates. And the black, which does not care whether you live, had reached in through the one seat I had left empty for her and shot her name off my hull to show me what I was doing with it. I do not believe the dark sends messages. I want that on the record. The dark is cold and it is indifferent and it sends nothing. But a man can be shown a thing by an indifferent universe all the same, if the thing is true enough, and the thing was this: I had been spending her to feel my edges. I had been buying the silence in my head with war coin and calling it work.

I limped Khazam three jumps to a yard in quieter space, the ragged drive complaining the whole way. Aleyna found me on the comms there, rebuilt, dry as ever. "We getting back out," she said, "or are you done." And I heard in the flatness of it that she already knew, that she had flown for enough broken men to read the answer in the question.

"I'm done," I said. "I'll see your contract paid full."

A pause, and the tether-hiss of her station behind it. "You're not a gun, Rakasa," she said. "Took you a hull to learn it. Some of them it takes more." And she signed off, and I have never seen her since, and I hope the Empire's quarrels were kinder to her than they were honest.

I sold Khazam at that yard with the puncture still in her rail. I did not repaint the name first. I could not put white over that hole, could not pretend it back, so I let her go marked, let the next man wonder what the grey scar under the rail had been, and I took the transfer and stood a long while in the recycled air of a station I would not remember the name of, smelling someone's cooking three decks down, my cheek scabbing, no gun on my account and no edges to me at all.

And then I did the only thing that has ever made the silence in my head into something I could live inside instead of something I had to feed. I went down to the broker and I bought time on a long-range explorer's hull — fuel scoop, jump range, a single seat and a second one I would leave empty on purpose now, knowingly, the way you leave a chair for someone you are still looking for. I plotted a course out. Not toward a war. Toward the unmapped black, where no flock waits and no house pays and the only thing out ahead of you is a world no one has ever named, and the chance — small, cold, real — of being the first eyes that ever fall on it.

I would paint her name fresh on the new hull before I left. White, small, under the rail. But I would not carry it into another fight. I had learned what she was for. She was not a weapon. She was a direction.

I filed for the deep black before the scab on my cheek had healed, and for the first time that whole winter, when I lay back in the seat and felt the drive come up to its breathing, I did not need a single thing in front of me to shoot.