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Scouting skiffs were meant to have a crew of four trolls: captain, pilot, gunner, and the comm guy. Vriska figured she didn't need to take orders, so the captain and the comm line were redundant, and the guns had been stripped off, regrettably, so a gunner wasn't necessary. That left Vriska to act as the pilot. She was a great pilot.
The inside of the skiff was dark, the only light from the floodlights outside working its way through the viewports. It fell weakly on the cramped cockpit, and was swallowed up by the passage to the crew's wall-mounted 'coons and cargo hold. Past that, Vriska was hoping there was a helmsblock. As long as the salesman was good on his word, this was her ticket out.
If you counted the helmsman, the skiff was meant to have a crew of five, but you didn't, because a helmsman wasn't a troll anymore. Vriska threw the used spacecraft salesman into the captain's chair. He wasn't a troll anymore either.
She’d scrubbed the dirt out from under her claws, and taken a razor to the overgrown pieces of her hair, sawing it back to an approximation of the military’s neat cut. The third night after she’d taken a long walk away from shore leave, she’d filed down the crooked parts of her horns, but they were still respectably tall and sharp at the tips, now that they had healed up.
She experimentally flicked a few switches on and was rewarded by shuddering lights down in the cargo hold and the trill of low fuel alarms. Luckily, if you had a helmsman, fuel was a trivial backup and speed was easy.
Vriska wiped some of the used spacecraft salesman off of her hands using the back of his chair and set to prying open the door to the cargo hold. Something broke - a locking mechanism or a hinge, and Vriska bent the handle back so that the door would stay open, ensuring clear passage. A warning sign told her this door was to remain closed at all times. Whatever. If there was a hull fire, she'd die a little bit faster this way.
The helmsblock was where Vriska had expected it. Someone had rigged up lights, and stocked the bio-haz cabinets with cheap drugs and nutrient drip. It was just large enough for the helmsman and her life support, the pipes and generators pushing so close that with every breath the cold metal in front of the helmsman's face face fogged.
The helmsman was comatose.
She was rust-blooded, with heavy, curling horns. All the skin on her face was smooth over healthy muscle, but the color was leached out of her horns and claws, white ridged keratin a shock against her black hair; the benefits of Helmsman age-retardant drug regimens. Her hair had grown until it draped over her face in long, dark swags. She looked, to Vriska, like a young dead soldier, fallen to exoparasites on some planet far from home. On impulse, Vriska reached out and lifted the hair away, letting the sweep of the helmsman's pale horns hold it back.
The topor state was being maintained chemically, using the good stuff what the empress's medics had for keeping down berserkers and weaponized psionics. Vriska unhooked that and swapped it out for clean nutrient drip. She tossed the soporifics in the coldbox to sell later.
Some digging in the back of the coldbox netted an emergencies-only dermistab full of uppers. Worked wonders: injected right into the muscle, kicked the system right in the nook and got it going. She emptied it into the helmsman's thigh for good measure, and headed back for the cockpit.
As she walked, the lights brightened and the skiff's atmospheric engines rumbled to life. The silence succumbed to a series of increasingly loud background hums and clicks. A fuse blew out to her left, a blue-white flash like magnesium. The whole skiff shook violently, and Vriska took the ladder to the cockpit at a scramble. She slammed her hand down over the control to pressurize the cockpit, and nothing happened.
The helmsman initiated take-off: ground-to-orbit protocol II, full thrust.
Half the warning lights on the dash lit up, like a hundred grub eyes winking in the dark. Vriska flipped everything that had a manual override switch on, and threw herself into turning the hand-crank that would winch the cockpit hatch shut.
"Slow down, you stupid bolt-bucket," she yelled towards the helmsblock. "Give me two seconds here, this ship is busted in so many ways, you don't even know."
The ship's landing gear lifted off of the cracked pavement, then crashed back into it hard enough that Vriska's teeth clicked together over her tongue. Her blood tasted salty and familiar in her mouth.
"Fuck!" Vriska yelled, not ready for the upper atmosphere, let alone space, and ran for the control panel at the far end of the cargo bay, where the life support was housed. The oxygen was pumped in through a series of automated baffles, and she didn't trust them. She found the main tank and hit the nozzle with a wrench until she could hear it hissing, then hoped that there were no local spark sources.
In the helmsblock, the helmsman was laughing.
Vriska’d flown in two sunstrikes, a destroyer, and a heavy carrier with helmsmen driving them. They’d been larger ships, more than the three bays and two doors (one broken) she had now, all wide open holds with catwalks spanning their dim heights, the kind of thing you put a helmsman in because there was no fuel on one thousand, four hundred and twenty two conquered worlds that would make the colossal bulk move by physics alone. You put a helmsman in a scouting skiff because you had an extra helmsman and no dead general’s name to honor with a new carrier. The free will of a helmsman was debatable; they could choose when to sleep and set off really gratingly annoying alarm bells when they were hungry or infected or bored, but a dog or a pigeon could do the same, and they weren’t people -- they didn’t laugh.
Vriska dragged the helmsblock door open and scowled, too busy for helmsman psycho shut-in bullshit. She remembered there being surgical tape on top of the bio-converter, and she wanted it. "What the fuck is your deal?" she asked. "I’m Vriska fucking Serket, traitor to the New Crown, the one and only Two Faced Bitch, the Scourge, and I am old as balls and I have killed shit twice your size, and I am ordering you to get us into space without exploding our sorry meatsacks in the process, because I am the boss of you!"
The helmsman's pupils were narrow slits and she was breathing hard, but her gaze tracked Vriska across the small room. She was beautiful and dangerous, like a pit viper or a lieutenant with a soft heart. Vriska had put down a lot of beautiful and dangerous things. "I'm Aradia," the helmsman said. "And I don't care."
Vriska got her back to a wall and threw out a lash of power to hold the helmsman still. “No,” she said. “Don’t do that.”
There were new prototypes, humane New Crown designs, some science-fiction romance type bullshit where the helmsman walked and talked and slept in slime. This skiff was honest, efficient Alternian tech; the helmsman stood in a pillar of wire and flesh and she was not supposed to do this.
The back lot outside had a few cumbersome modded civilian craft, with the seats hacked out to make room for smuggling runs, several things that weren’t spaceworthy, half of an Imperial Sunsmasher (not the business end, Vriska had noted, and already mostly gutted for parts), and this blackened, battered four-man scouting skiff.
Nothing at all with guns. Nothing else fast, unless she took her chances with this craft, with its broken helmsman. Vriska thought she had maybe until this planet's next evening before the dogs of the new regime caught up with her. This planet's rotation was brisk, 13.4 Alternian hours, and the night sky outside was going greenish with dawn, but there were stories, among pilots, about moirails and kismeses lost to dead life support and unplanned pleasure jaunts into extremely deep space.
Vriska rolled the dice in her head and they came up all eights with a clatter. She slowly, carefully, let the helmsman free, watching as her lips parted and she ran her red tongue once, twice over her teeth, then her muscles tightened with purpose. Vriska was going to ditch this ship like issuing a dishonorable discharge: fast and clean, no loose ends.
The ship picked itself up, shook like a cholerbear trying to dislodge a tranq dart, and hung in the air, in a moment of perfect stillness. In the reprieve, Vriska made it to the cockpit, tape in hand. She pointed the skiff’s nose at the stars, pulled the throttle back, and taped it so that it would stay. The acceleration plastered her to her seat and made her heart thud, heavy and thrilling in her chest.
“Man the cockpit, would you?” Vriska said to the salesman’s corpse, and swung back down the ladder to strap things down.
*
When they reached orbit the ghosts came out, like afterimages burned into an old husktop screen. Vriska, who had been wrapping surgical tape around a pipe and hoping that the hull was sound, saw behind her the glint of uniform buttons and a seadweller captain's flashy white smile, and then nothing.
Vriska had seen enough ghosts, in her time.
She tore off the end of her tape and went to go get rid of the salesman's body before he too could get in on the haunt party. It was starting to stiffen, and stayed slumped and crooked when she pulled it out of the chair.
At the insistence of military superstition, she scooped his right eye out and ate it, the pop of salty humors washing slickly over her teeth. His ghost would wander in circles, now, and stay on the battlefield, as it were. In the century since Vriska had been a lieutenant on the ground in colonial Pachytene, the superstitions had faded, but some things tailed her no matter how far she went.
Ceremony over, she kicked him slowly into the airlock at the back side of the cargo bay and put him to rest.
The ghost of the seadweller captain followed in the corner of her eye. She had forked horns and long earfins, most visible in the halflight, washed out when backlit. In the true dark she melted away. Her hair was cut military-short, efficient, with no showy purple streak in the front. Whatever wounds had killed her were invisible, like she had died peacefully, on her own terms. Nobody died on their own terms, but if the ghost wanted to think that, it was fine with Vriska.
Every generation the lowbloods came back with duller teeth and sharper minds, running on accelerated generation time and heavier selection pressures. The old vicious streak had faded. So in time the empress's tough skin and long claws weren't enough anymore, and the regime caved, and for the last crumbling sweep Vriska overstretched her loyalty and overestimated the power of brutality.
In the end, both sides had wanted Eridan Ampora dead, but Vriska had gotten to him first, and taken the order from the wrong side. On the command deck the empress's seal had come in on twinned sets of secure comm transfers, while the roster of war criminals wanted for trial shuffled itself nightly.
They had called her the Upstart, and the Grubling, and the Heiress.
They had called her the Empress Sacrosanct.
They had called Feferi Peixes Hope.
Vriska had not thought she would last. Terezi had thought she would, and there were official documents to record her loyalty to the preemptive empire. Terezi picked up the captaincy after the assassination; Vriska didn't come back after shore leave.
"Prepare to break orbit in 2 hours," Vriska said to the helmsman, "let's blow this frozen syrup stick stand." She could feel her window of opportunity getting eaten away, the certainty that Pyrope and her heavily-armed patrol ship knew she was off-planet by now and were camped behind the nearest moon grating on her senses.
Her comm unit chimed.
> H4V3 YOU CONS1D3R3D TH3 NOBL3 PL34 B4RG41N?
Vriska spun and dropped the comm unit in the helmsman's generator cooling tank. The heavy coolant fluid sucked against her fingers and the comm fizzled and died.
"Afraid they'll kill you?" behind her, Aradia asked.
"Afraid I am going to die of old age before you get us moving out of this system," Vriska said.
Aradia nodded, and stretched her shoulders as best she could. They'd been remodeled to bear her weight better suspended from the ceiling. The titanium and silicone ball and socket was designed to last for several hundred sweeps. Helmsmen usually became obsolete within thirty.
"You're afraid they're never going to catch you," she said. "You’ll have to be free forever and you won't know what to do. What a tragedy, Vriska Serket." Her hair had come unlooped from her horn again, and Vriska wanted to put it back, or cut it off, or pull it taught until Aradia’s throat was exposed and the harsh broken lines of her collarbones were stretched straight again.
"God, what crawled up your nook and overstimulated your pretension gland?"
Aradia's eyes glazed over before she could reply, and the viewscreen to her right scrolled through a list of directives. Detected change in ship mass: 102 kilos, deflection of course: 3.18 degrees. On course for reentry: 348.2 hours. Radar clear. Breaking orbit now.
"Oh, fuck, no, let me at least strap in --"
Vriska's first injuries of the journey were a large contusion on her thigh, a hairline horn fracture from slamming against the helmsblock door, and scraped up knuckles from punching Aradia right in her smug gut, which was reinforced with steel stays worked cleverly into her jumpsuit.
*
The ghosts of the gunner, the pilot, and the comm troll played cards each evening on the rim of the lowest 'coon. Vriska slept in the other recuperacoon, where she could keep eyes on them.
The seadweller captain watched out the cockpit viewport, eyes on the stars.
Aradia turned on the fire alarm for five nights straight while they tracked a course from the Mac-F1 cluster to Colchecine.
*
In Colchecine they were getting food, and cannons to mount on the empty brackets by the nose of the skiff. Vriska was spitting tired of drinking Aradia’s nutrient drip, which tasted like what it was: enriched yeast extract that had been grown in a vat.
The ghosts were gone, fading like the trails of atoms in a cathode tube as they approached atmosphere. The ship seemed louder without their presence, every bang that Vriska made against the protruding pipes noisy even under the rumble of re-entry.
Aradia kindly crashed them in a field. The light on Colchecine was free of radiation from its weakling star, so business was conducted by day, but the atmosphere was heavy and rich in nitrous compounds, making the air heady and dangerous at low altitudes. They were outside a costal city, right at sea level, where the sea fog fell on the buildings like a smothering hand.
Vriska unscrewed the navigation line from Aradia’s helmsblock. “You don’t trust me?” Aradia had asked, pale gold eyes close to Vriska’s own as Vriska reached around her to pull the nav-jack out of its housing between the third and fourth vertebra of her neck. Her breath was hot against Vriska’s jaw and she smelled like blood. Vriska pulled the jack out fast, so she could hear Aradia’s intake of breath and the catch in her throat. If she was going to fly away, she would have to fly blind.
This part of Colchecine was a warren, the local government having long since broken under the weight of colonization. Troll smugglers of Alternian weaponry had set up shop alongside the most beaten-down of the indigenous population, shops for treating nookworm next to big tents where yellowbloods sparked over the cost of a laser cannon. Vriska took her pistol out of her waistband and ditched her military coat before she set foot in the city, and then did what she was good at: she looked big and mean and nobody touched her.
Vriska had been here before, back when she had just hit her stride, freshly promoted and limping from the scars of victory. Terezi had been a green recruit, all enthusiasm. The street signs had been in two languages then, while now they read in only Alternian. Terezi had dragged them deep into the slums and they’d confiscated a queen’s ransom from the greenblood boss who’d been ruling the hivestacks. Then the boss had made a precocious escape, and was in the records as “uncollected, presumed dead.”
The boss was long-gone at this point, dead or old and blind enough to be irrelevant, but her jade-blooded kismesis might still be around. Vriska was going to call in a favor.
On her way, Vriska terrorized the food cart vendors until she was rewarded with a wealth of meat on sticks, seared on the outside but salty and bloody in the middle, all of it crunchy with cartilage. She peeled the flesh off in short strips with her claws as she trotted deeper into the east side of the city, closer to the docks, the air getting sweeter as she went. The streets here were narrow, and the architecture was cramped, boulevards turned into alleys by tarp-and-plywood extensions to the apartment blocks. It was filthier than when she had last been here.
She wasn’t even going to have to get drunk, she thought, and added a little stumble and weave to her stride.
There were cameras, too, little single-eyed cubes bolted to comm-line posts and tucked into alcoves. Vriska watched them watching her. They had video footage of her killing Admiral Ampora; it was classified, and Terezi hadn’t even wanted her to know it existed. Vriska wasn’t completely stupid, she knew what kind of evidence her blood status demanded.
There wasn’t anyone to explain things to, which was a bummer; even the monotony of space travel had Aradia, and before her, Terezi. Vriska straightened her coat, and then straightened it again, acutely aware of the tempo of her steps.
When the group of thugs she’d been waiting for descended, she miscalculated and shot one of them through the throat, all startle reflex and no style.
“Leave it,” she called, keeping her pistol out in case they decided to stop being afraid and got angry instead. “Not real useful anyway, guy who can’t duck, you’re better off without him. Where’s your boss?”
*
In the really disgustingly early morning, when the flattened grass around her skiff was dewed up and the field smelled heavily of beets, Vriska returned. She was divested of all her credit draw-chips, her ID, and a couple of liters of cerulean blood. She dropped the hovercart with its load of guns, food, and neat alcohol; the cart’s landing struts sank six inches straight into the dirt.
Mounting nose-cannons onto the charred-out, hastily stripped housings in the rising midday sun was a fucking treat.
“You want some help?” Aradia asked, over the speakers. She was not supposed to have speakers, which were reserved for inter-ship communications. Vriska liked the distraction, even when it was laced with insults. She was starting to get little flashing lights at the edge of her vision, thanks to the heat and the atmosphere. The blood loss and the hangover were incidental compounding factors.
Vriska hit a sticky bolt with a wrench, and said “Yeah, lift the skiff two feet and hold it there, thanks.” Aradia picked this skiff up and it swayed gently in the psychic breeze. “Now don’t drop it,” Vriska ordered, and shimmied underneath the housing to yank at the stabilizer struts. Aradia, to her credit, did not drop the spaceship.
It was even charred on the underside, Vriska noticed, and nobody had tried to polish it off down here. “What in all blistering hell did you do to this spaceship, champ?”
“Rocks fell, everybody died,” Aradia said; the skiff shuddered over Vriska’s head.
“Fucking watch it!”
“Am I supposed to be worried about your precious highblood head?”
Vriska slammed the wrench down to loosen another recalcitrant bolt. You were supposed to twist them, but the threads were all stripped out, so Vriska was opting for blunt force trauma. Usually worked. “Whatever, you want these cannons as much as I do, come on.”
The baubles of light in the corners of her vision were getting worse, and accompanied by a high siren-whine.
She mentally declared the housings good enough, and reached to attach the fussy little wire parts, which were all shredded and gross. It was taking too long, she thought. Her fingers should be nimbler than this.
“I don’t need cannons,” Aradia said, and swung the nose of the spaceship around, tearing the delicate wires out of Vriska’s claws. Vriska scrambled out from under the spaceship, and the flashing lights resolved into zippy little police hovercarts, flying in ragged formation.
She watched as rocks lifted from the ground, edges limned with dry, white sparks, and threw themselves at the advancing law enforcement.
“Whoa, nice,” Vriska said, all impressed despite herself. God, the shit air on this planet was getting to her.
Aradia sniffed, a crackly tearing of static across the speakers and chucked a few more rocks. Not about to be outdone, Vriska pulled out her pistol and fired a few potshots at the incoming police, then half jumped, half fell into the airlock. Aradia said, “Give me control of the ship.”
“I hooked the navigational link back up,” Vriska said, eyes on the advancing police. “Take control yourself. You’re the big bad rogue helmsman, man up!”
The airlock closed and Vriska lost her view of the law enforcement, but they kept making their presence known, reaching the skiff to pound on the door. “I can’t take off,” Aradia said, “Something’s wrong.”
In the helmsblock all of Aradia’s muscles were tight and straining, struggling against the ship’s imperatives to stay grounded. The ship spoke to her in a thousand tiny voices, operant conditioning and hormonal triggers and tiny shocks to engineered reflex circuits, over and over and over. Vriska had taken the mandatory seminar on helmsman engineering four times. She knew. The police had hooked up a ignition-kill to the skiff, something brute-force.
“Take the wrench. Hit the pilot controls until they’re broken,” Aradia grit out, “and let me do this myself.”
Vriska balked. “That’s giving you the keys to the kingdom, fuck that.”
“I want to have control of my body and save you in the process, is that too much to ask?” Aradia was breathing hard, bucking within the confines of the wetware.
“And I want the new empress to give me a ride on her glorious holy tits, but that’s not gonna happen either! Where’s the ignition-kill coming in, I’ll disable it another way.”
“It’s coming in everywhere,” Aradia hissed, “let me go let me go let me go.”
Vriska reached out to shuffle through Aradia’s mind, and got thrown against the bunked recuperacoons. “No,” Aradia snapped. “Kill the pilot controls, Vriska. Kill them now.” Vriska tried again, breathing deep, certain she could get at the ignition-hold from the inside if Aradia would just let her do it. Aradia got hold of her by the horns and pounded her head against the recuperacoon filter unit, rhythmically jarring her focus.
“Will you let me do this my way?” Vriska asked, splitting a portion of her powers to make Aradia stop with the psionics.
“You can’t just mind-control everyone into doing what you want! You’re a brute, Vriska, and this time it won’t work,” Aradia shouted, angrier now. The whipcord snap of her voice was familiar, and it burrowed right into the well-drilled part of Vriska’s brain that listened to orders. Aradia did something that made the ship flip, and Vriska hit the ceiling, and then the floor again with enough force to knock all the wind out of her. “Go do it, Vriska,” Aradia said.
The police were going to peel them out of the skiff like a wild boar eating the flesh of a fallen fig: fast and dirty with a lot of teeth.
The dashboard was a maze of tape over the warning lights, wire holding the throttle in place, long strings leading to switches she couldn’t reach without a partner; it had been going so well. Vriska brought the wrench down on the pilot controls and the jolt of acceleration pulled her stomach to her knees.
*
Space travel was a nasty paradox of fast and slow. The skiff hurtled along, plowing through the sparse hydrogen atoms of space like a cloth swept through dust. However, once the sick adrenaline rush of the near miss faded away, there was a week and a half of featureless space to joyride across, and no landmarks, and no company that wasn’t dead or Aradia.
Vriska had tried to re-kill the ghosts, and had thought seriously about killing Aradia.
The plan, she explained, when she was done with rifling through the storage containers for the thirtieth time, looking for meat, was to sprint across a few solar clusters and shake Terezi Pyrope. Then they could fuck off in different directions and never have to breathe the same air again.
Aradia, in response, shrugged and flipped over a card in her complex game of solitaire. She had dug up the physical version of the cards the dead crew played with each night, to keep herself busy. Vriska watched as the whole arrangement collapsed into a pattern, cards lining up in a cascade of pairings. When Aradia picked up the deck to collect and shuffle the cards, the bleached balefire of her psionics outlined all the symbols on the card fronts, bright enough to see in the dim.
"Isn't that cheating," Vriska asked.
Aradia snapped the cards together and cut the deck. "Knowing how things are going to end isn't cheating."
Vriska thought that it definitely was cheating, that was the definition of cheating, and she was an expert at it. Telling Aradia this was a fast track to an eyeroll and a new game of solitaire, so Vriska said instead, "How're we going to end, then. Tell me that."
Aradia held out the deck for Vriska to take the top card. Vriska grinned up at her and smeared the deck into a fan, burying her fingers in the middle to yank out a card.
"We're going to die," Aradia said.
Vriska turned over the black empress in her hand and swore. Bad omens.
"Like the poor fucks who used to fly this ship?" she asked, watching Aradia's face. It went hard and still, like a mask under the goggles and the scarring and the traces of metal under her hair that were invisible unless you looked closely. She looked like a ship, Vriska thought, when she went still like that. She looked deadly. The cards shuffled themselves.
"Like Eridan Ampora," Aradia said, rolling the name out of her mouth like the pop of a shoulder out of its socket, like the rush of blood out of torn gills, like an accusation.
Vriska jolted and put her hand to her waist, where the taped-up holster of her laser pistol hung empty. "How'd you even know that," she asked, bristling.
Aradia silently held out the cards again, and Vriska tore the top card off and ripped the black empress in two. "How'd you know!"
With a brief rattle of keys, Aradia lit up one of her viewscreens; an unflattering picture of Vriska appeared, nose bloodied and dripping on her dress uniform, mouth open, shouting. "Terezi Pyrope is broadcasting your crimes in data packets," Aradia said. "She's not so far behind you, actually. These weren't distorted at all when I picked them up."
The screen changed to a list of crimes, scrolling slowly down. Aradia watched it, the words reflecting darkly in her pale eyes. "I'm impressed -- you pulled him apart so well. Thoughtless, though, and cruel, like the rest of you."
"Don't act like you're better than me," Vriska snarled. "What happened to your crew, then, what did you do to them?"
Aradia leaned in, her hair like the pelt of some wild thing as it swung forward. Vriska put her hand out to keep Aradia’s curls away from her face, then curled her fingers into a fist. It was warm.
"I flew us through a star," Aradia said, and if Vriska’d had a single ounce of self-preservation she would have left the skiff on Colchecine and taken her chances murdering the entire police force.
"Helmsblock anti-radiation shielding works from the inside and the outside," Aradia added, an afterthought. They’d gotten closer, close enough that Vriska could feel the cold, humid vapor rising off the wetwork equipment that burrowed under Aradia’s skin. Her hand was still in Aradia’s hair, pulling.
"Did it make you feel better?" Vriska asked. "Did it make you free?"
"Yes," Aradia said, her whole face lighting up in bitter triumph. With a movement like a fox striking, Aradia bent her head and bit Vriska’s hand, catching the meaty part between thumb and forefinger. Vriska drew a slow breath between her teeth, held very still, and didn’t back away. Aradia ground down just hard enough to draw blood, then spat Vriska’s hand out. Vriska wrapped it around her throat, weaving her fingers around the tubes and needles that dug into the veins there.
There was a playing card caught in the net of wires around Aradia’s shoulders, trapped and bent at the corner. Vriska reached to pull it free, turning it to look at the front. The black empress glared with her single eye at Vriska, the lone queen of the deck, whole and un-torn. Vriska dropped the card like it burnt her fingers.
Aradia plucked the card from the floor and settled it back into the deck.
"The gunner used to stack the odds," she said.
*
Aradia flew them a twisty path through an asteroid belt and reported that Terezi hadn’t backed off.
“Her helmsman is very good,” was all she would say before she locked Vriska out of the helmsblock for being a nuisance.
Vriska gutted the cockpit, hacking out the pilot controls, the warning lights, and all the leftover helmsman interfacing that would yoke Aradia to the will of a joystick and a wall of switches. Aradia was quiet through all the modifications, even when Vriska lifted a chunk of dashboard larger than she was and chucked it down the ladder towards the airlock. It was all broken anyway.
When Vriska had been very small, she’d built racing tracks up and down her mountain, and a little cart to careen down them. It crashed, eventually, and she’d gotten a scar that persisted for two whole molts. So she stripped off the steering, the roll cage, and half the engine, and went down the mountain again.
The military had been all regulations and a round peg for every round hole, until they were on the ground in an atmosphere they couldn’t breathe on a planet that didn’t have ground so much as slightly denser gas oceans and everything went pear shaped, regulations or no regulations.
Terezi had been a force against entropy; Vriska was just the part of the equation that made sure disorder always increased when you took the wide view.
Standing in the torn-up cockpit, Vriska watched the captain’s ghost sigh silently through her transparent gills, little huffs that ruffled the linen of her dress shirt. Classic seadweller distress sign, forgetting that they were supposed to be breathing air. She’d fucked it up for real, Vriska thought. She just wasn’t sure if the mistake had been caging Aradia up or letting her get free.
*
Eight days and no good news onwards, Vriska wobbled off of DiOC6 and back onto the ship, high on moon-ice and beat to shit, and crowed to Aradia, “Might be 239 sweeps old, but still got game.” She got a vise-grip of white sparks around her wrist for her trouble, dragging her upright and twisting the pulled muscle in her side. “Hey hey hey,” she complained, and Aradia twisted harder.
“I’m gonna name this piece of shit the Starfucker in honor of...all this,” Vriska said, stumbling into the helmsblock. “Fits the history. Thought you’d hate it.”
“There are a lot of things wrong with you.” Aradia said “What diseased gutter-trash did you pail last night?”
“All of it that had legs,” Vriska slurred, and reached out to scrape a claw down Aradia’s jumpsuit, following the curve of the hatchsign stitched across her chest. “You don’t have legs.”
She’d run into two separate imperial patrols, and hit on a plainclothes operative in a bar, and missed the contact she was supposed to get papers from completely. So yeah, Vriska thought, she’d taken the first tealblood who looked at her twice for a roll in the slime, even though her horns had been curved, not straight, and her hands big and rough at the fingertips.
“That’s disgusting,” Aradia said, and twisted her torso out of reach in a frustrated wrench of bodily autonomy.
Vriska rolled up on the balls of her feet. “Vile,” she agreed, and leered. Terezi was coming to scrape the guilty meat from her bones, and she’d never lived slow. Aradia rolled her eyes, then gave Vriska a slower once-over, lingering on her bloody lip and the vulgar scrape over her collarbones. Vriska shrugged her coat off, working it easy over her swollen shoulder.
“With or without the dumb coat,” Aradia said, “you still look like an asshole.”
Vriska kissed her mouth, then, licking between her teeth into the odd nothing-taste of a mouth not used to eat anything. Aradia bit and moaned and wrapped Vriska’s horns in white sparks, making her skull creak. This close Vriska could hear the whisper of Aradia’s thoughts, all of them shivery-calm with old stubborn anger. Vriska kissed her until she knew all the slick places between Aradia’s tongue and teeth. Vriska nicked the inside of Aradia’s lip with her teeth and sucked hard on rich, ferrous blood, feeling heady with triumph.
She was close enough to see the serial number carved into Aradia’s bone-white horn. “You look like a machine,” she whispered in Aradia’s ear, and then regretted it, because there had been nothing that wasn’t hot and animal and alive in her until the reminder.
Aradia snarled and picked her up, a crackle of power, then threw her in the recuperacoon. She held Vriska under the slime until she passed out.
When Vriska woke up with a pounding headache and a prickling, irritable feeling of wanting. The dead crew had settled around her, horns brushing the bunk above as they shuffled through their ship’s log. Their faces were indistinct, black smears of eyes and dull highlighted cheekbones, but the hands were perfect, all the contours of knuckles and claws picked out in brassy light. Their wounds, the places where they had burned and screamed and died, were absent. Ghosts held onto the strangest things. “Aren’t you pissed at how she killed you?” Vriska asked them, muzzy and sleep-addled.
All the ghosts turned and stared at her.
The pilot reached out and put her hand over Vriska’s left eye.
Vriska sat for a moment, transfixed, then busted out of it and scrambled out of the recuperacoon still wet with slime. She fell on her ass halfway to her ratty towel. Talking to ghosts was the worst idea, she was going to have bruises on top of bite-marks on top of bruises.
Aradia laughed like something with jaws that could crunch through antelope bone.
*
Right before the mortars dropped, it was always like this: Vriska would be eating something spicy and steaming out of a foil sachet, and there would be somebody with their boots off scraping at whatever xenofungus had gotten into their feet, and someone would crack a joke, or make a bet, and she would wonder for a moment at how little this shit changed, blue sky, pink sky, black sky, it was all the same.
Then there would be a long high whistle, and people would be dead.
This time it was not very different.
Vriska was pounding with a sledgehammer at a bit of interior hull that she wanted out of the way, to better fit the new cannon controls. She and Aradia had come to an accord by sabotage and screaming that Aradia flew the ship and Vriska manned the guns, because a civilized crew worked as a team.
On a downswing, she felt a shudder as something hit the outer hull, and then a flash, and searing brightness along her left side.
Then it hurt.
In the haze of blood and pain, between the heat of her bones and the biting cold of space, Vriska knew she’d fucked it up. She could see the white haze of Aradia’s psionics in between the flames and the hot metal and she swore, bitterly. Her face flushed hot with failure, and she screamed, “Aradia, you bitch! I’m going to be the death of you for this! I’m going to tear you apart, I’m going to sell you and let someone else wrap your brain in chains you fucking machine --”
“Not me, it wasn’t, I didn’t -- ” Vriska heard Aradia wail, cut off suddenly, like she was in pain, and it lanced all through Vriska, made her get up, because there was one person who was allowed to hurt Aradia, and Vriska was not going to share. She made it to her knees before she realized that the reason she felt light along her left side and why she couldn’t see straight was because most of her left side was gone. She curled away from the trauma, gasped, and threw up. She fell down the ladder to the cargo bay because the fingers of her right hand were slick with blood and she didn’t know how to navigate it with only one arm; when she landed at the bottom she felt something crack.
The helmsblock door opened and Vriska tumbled through it, bleeding and swearing and crying. The ghosts poured in after her; the gunner, the pilot and the comm troll fell in a pathetic heap against the coldbox, but the seadweller captain pressed her back to the door and trembled with the force of keeping her spine straight.
Above her, Aradia hung loose in her block, eyes glazed over, peaceful. Vriska hauled herself up by a fistful of Aradia’s jumpsuit and didn’t garner even a twitch, no flash of teeth bared in protest or crack of psionics to whip her away. “Wake up!” Vriska yelled in her face, “Wake up and fix this, wake up right now!”
There was a little flashing light beside one of Aradia’s viewscreens.
>> termiinal open
>> port: 11011110 AA
>> transmii22iion:
>
> VR1SK4
> VR1SK4
> VR1SK4 P4Y 4TT3NT1ON
“No,” Vriska said, sliding down to lean where she could see the screen. She was leaving smears of blue everywhere. Someone was going to have to clean her up, later. “Get out of my ship. Get out of Aradia, give her back.”
> W3 4R3 W41T1NG FOR YOU TO G1V3 US 4 R34SON NOT TO BR1NG YOU DOWN
> FOR 1NST4NC3
> PROM1S1NG TO N3V3R K1LL 3R1D4N 4MPOR4 3V3R 4G41N
> OR COM1NG HOM3
“Thanks for the offer, Pyrope, I really appreciate it. I know you’re actually deep-down grateful that I put that eel out, because honestly I did the whole fucking empire a favor, but I’m fine, I don’t need your help.”
> VR1SK4 YOUR SH1P 1S 1N B1TS
“And whose fault is that, huh?”
> OK4Y 1 4M SORRY 4BOUT TH4T
> W3 W1LL G3T YOU 4 N3W 4RM
> YOU 4R3 NOT DO1NG 4 V3RY GOOD JOB W1TH TH3 R34SONS, BY TH3 W4Y
“Fuck you,” Vriska said, sliding farther down so that she was sitting on the ground. She felt really cold, and her bloodpusher was doing funny things, probably on account of most of her blood being much farther away from it that usual.
> S4Y YOU W1LL SURR3ND3R 4ND TH3 TR14L W1LL B3 F41R
> YOU D1D WH4T YOU THOUGHT W4S R1GHT
“Just get off my ass for a second and let me talk to my helmsman. How are you even in here, I cut all the comm lines.”
> MY H3LMSM4N 1S V3RY GOOD
>
>> port: 11011110 AA
>> termiinal clo2ed
“Yeah yeah, whatever, heard that one before, I’ll be here, dying, when you get back.”
At her back she heard Aradia thrash once, hiss through her teeth in pain, and fall still again. Vriska didn’t turn to look; she was dancing a fine line of consciousness, and everything hurt too much. She stared through the seadweller captain’s torso at the rivets on the door, and wondered how thick the lead sheeting was.
“She thinks the Empress won’t kill me because it’s against her new laws. Terezi’s real smart, but she doesn’t get it,” Vriska said, without turning her head.
She could feel Aradia breathing, complete with little jabs of pain at every shift. “I guess you’ll have to take that chance, then.”
“You, though. You they’ll reoutfit. The Empress isn’t really so stable, she can’t afford to toss out her little toy soldiers. Won’t that be nice? New hardware, faster ship, bigger block. I heard they can flavor the nutrient drip, now.”
That netted no reply. The ghosts shrank a little farther into the corners of the helmsblock, and the seadweller captain bared her teeth. Vriska risked upsetting her nice minimally-painful posture and tilted her head back until she could peer, upside-down, at Aradia’s face. It was set, all stony with despair.
Vriska took a long shot at a casual tone and said, “Aradia, I would --” then it caught in her throat; she coughed, swore, and started again, “If someone’s going to kill me, I would really rather lose to you, you murderous bitch.”
Aradia blinked and sniffed once, hard. “You’re bleeding out. I think it’s moot, now.”
“Fuck that,” Vriska said, without moving. “I’ve survived worse. One time I got brain parasites, and I’m still here. Come on, Terezi’s gonna get back online via your brain in like half a minute, what’s your brilliant plan?”
“I’m going to fly us through a star again.”
“That’s a terrible plan, you’re a lunatic.”
“I know.”
They couldn’t beat Terezi’s ship or her missiles for long, but they were not terribly deep in space, and there was no scarcity of stars. Aradia picked up speed, and threw them at a little green one.
The ghosts clung to each other, their vague features bewildered with hope, while the star raged impotent outside the thin film of lead and magic coating the skiff.
Aradia was incandescent.
*
The char from two trips through the outer corona of a star painted the skiff a deep carbon-black. Against the midnight sky of Enderid’s first moon, it vanished without a gleam. When they’d kicked out the other side of the star, Aradia alight with triumph and the skiff alight with non-metaphorical fire, the ghosts had petered out, haunting all spent. The skiff could use a little more crew; somebody for muscle, maybe, when they settled down in a system to terrorize. Maybe someone with connections. Somebody whose record also said things like “traitor” and “confirmed dead.”
Vriska pounded on the cockpit with her new metal arm, then dragged a metal claw through the soot to scrawl a big looping version of her hatchsign. She was going to get some blue paint and do a proper christening for it, right on the nose.
Aradia swore at her over the speakers.
Vriska made another flourish and swung up into the cockpit, which fluidly sealed itself behind her. “We’re rogue agents now, stop whining. You love it! Let’s blow something up.”
From the helmsblock, there a distinct lack of protest. “There’re helmsman outfitting facilities on Enderid,” Aradia said.
“Okay, fuck it, that’ll be fun,” Vriska said, and with a bright ping of metal on metal, flicked the ignition switch.