Far be it from me to complain. It was high time there were more of us in space. These girls were young, sure. But as competent as any of the men I’d served under, possibly more. Time would tell—collar pips don’t make a captain—but well, why shouldn’t they be? No, girls like that one, all thick brown hair and taut young curves over well-schooled muscle were first-rate on starships. Hell, they’re first-rate anywhere. I’m not above ogling.
But that wasn’t why I kept watching her. I kept watching her because a poker table isn’t the bridge. Not even close. Not on Cygnus Station. And particularly not at Quadragini’s. Mostly I was keeping an eye on her because there’s this one lesson they never seem to teach at the Academy: doing things “by the book” only works when the other folks around you can actually read.
As it was, it could’ve been a joke: “Did you hear about the new Academy grad who sat down to play cards with a Dassan, two ‘Geuse mercs, and Pinney the Skink?” I shook my head and smiled at the Cheshire-cat grin reflected in the surface of my beer, then made it disappear.
§
“Pinney.” I planted my hand on his shoulder firmly, knowing how he hated to be touched by humans. As long as he was still a little scared of me, though, I could get away with it.
He didn’t turn to look at me, but I saw his blue tongue flicker in the air long enough to catch my scent. “D. A.” he said, managing sibilance somehow despite the lack of esses in my name. “Long time no…”
“Yeah,” I grinned, hunkering down so my head was on the same level as his. “You wanna cut me in?”
I looked around the table. No one was smoking, but there was an ashtray crammed with butts just the same. Part of the Quadragini Brothers’ standard service. They were sticklers for style. The Dassan’s head swiveled in that eerie way they have, and it blinked slowly, one set of inner eyelids after the other, as it stared at me. The brown-haired pilot just looked at me and looked confused. A strand of hair escaped her chignon and fell into her eyes. Her lips were beginning to lose color. One of the mercs kept staring at her tits and grinning that big dumb gap-toothed ‘Geuse grin.
I’d arrived at the right time. She’d gone and done the stupid thing. At Pinney’s suggestion, naturally, but wasn’t it always? That was what had brought me over: I could see her telling herself it’d be all right. She was an Academy grad, after all, no skittish virgin. If worst came to worst she’d just hold her nose and think of Alpha Centauri and take a long shower after and never be caught dead near a deck of cards again. And if Lady Luck took pity on her in the meantime, she’d walk out of Quadragini’s a little bit closer to being just the kind of legend any self-respecting young pilot longed to be. But Pinney was running the game. Which meant that Lady Luck was stuffed in a duct access hatch somewhere with a pair of dirty socks stuffed in her mouth and her hands tied behind her back with H-pump tubing.
The way the ‘Geuse on my left kept looking at the pilot just confirmed it. It’s a cultural thing. None of them can keep a straight face if they think they’re winning. I wondered who the favor had been. If the merc’s last hand had been half as good as he was acting like it had, it’d been someone interesting. Challenging. I tried to recall who I’d seen in the obits lately, but came up empty.
I took a deck out of my sleeve pocket and shuffled. The Dassan glared at Pinney. The mercs looked at me. So did the pilot, whose smooth, broad young forehead furrowed a bit in consternation. Pinney shrugged. “An old friend,” he lied to the table. “She’ll pick the dealer and call the game.”
I cut, shuffled, cut, shuffled, the whirr of the cards reassuring me as I took stock of Pinney and the Dassan and the ‘Geuse boys. I didn’t make eye contact with the pilot until the last moment, when I tapped the cards into a tight stack and extended my hand.
“Deal, pilot.” My smile glittered. I could feel it. “Texas Hold ’Em.”
Her fingertips did not touch mine as she took the deck. Human to human, eye to eye, I could sense her struggle to keep her features still.
She dealt the hand without shaking or fumbling. Good pilots need steady hands, and of course she was good. Probably a little too good. Good enough to think she was better than the rest. Enough to make her a little cocky. Pinney the Skink knew the smell of cocksureness like he knew the smell of his own scaly arse. It was his bread and butter.
I almost felt sorry for her as I watched the blind bets, stabbed the plate with my thumbprint, and bought in. Eight hundred fifty was a bit rich. Not to Pinney, of course. He was used to a world where K-bars played like one-creds. But it was nearly two weeks pay packet for a peon like me, probably about the same for the mercs, and who knew what it meant to the Dassan, whose profession was impossible to gauge. I could hold on for three, maybe four rounds, at eight-fifty. It was a lot.
But eight-fifty wasn’t a lot for a brand new pilot. It was everything. First couple years out they flew on the government billet: three squares a day, uniform, and a room to call your own, but as for cash, barely more than pocket change. The imbalance of poverty and prowess left them feeling shortchanged, made them easy marks for Pinney’s kind.
The Skink didn’t want them for himself. The thought would’ve repulsed him. No, it was the stink of their humiliation he relished. It made his muscular blue tongue flicker in anticipation. He loved how they smelled when he won them, while he made them wait for him to deliberately and slowly gamble them away, and finally, when they thought it was all over, when he’d show up, all solicitous apologies, to make sure they had an escort back to their ships. Revolting. You’d have thought the girls’d learn. But they had too much to prove, I guess, or maybe there weren’t enough of them and they didn’t see enough of one another to pass the word along. Or both.
But sometimes I was around. And unlike some people I could mention, I don’t dope my decks. Maybe it might spring Lady Luck from her bondage. I enjoyed the possibility of playing guardian angel almost as much as Pinney enjoyed the prospect of playing pimp.
The pilot turned the flop. Queen of diamonds, the deuce of spades, nine of hearts. The Dassan folded early, impenetrable. Pinney, the bastard, didn’t even blink, much less look at his cards, just flicked the bet plate. Both of the ‘Geuse snickered and leered and anted up. I tapped my cards on the baize and did the same. The pilot looked down at her fingernails.
“Your bet rides, Commander,” Pinney oozed, inclining his head to the pilot. The mercs let the lewd cackles fly. Having gone all in and then some, folding was no longer an option. Win or lose, she could not refuse to play.
The pilot took a slow, deep, even breath and straightened her posture, centering herself. Admirable. And well trained. But she couldn’t hide from Pinney’s tongue. Every time he breathed he could taste both the crust of her resolve and the bubbling of the loathing and humiliation underneath. You could see it in the way he narrowed his eyes. I wanted to kick him. I made a silent vow to accidentally step on his tail the next time I had the opportunity.
She flipped the turn. Jack of clubs. One of the mercs folded out. Pinney at least picked up his cards that time. He grunted. We both stayed in.
It was time for the river. You never really knew whether you’d be strutting or limping home until that fifth card went down. I held my breath in spite of myself as the pilot turned it face up. For some reason I always do.
Queen of spades. Pinney flicked his tongue over his dry lips. “Commander?”
The pilot lay down her cards: two of diamonds, seven of spades. The other merc showed a black eight and a red six.
Pinney sat back and extended his hand, flicking the cards just onto the edge of the table. Jack of hearts, ten of diamonds. If I hadn’t seen it before I wouldn’t have known to look for it, but his tail wrapped snugly, smugly around the base of his chair. He thought he’d won on the straight. “You know I hate to take your money like this, D.A.”
“Won’t be necessary, old man,” I smiled, slowly overturning my hand. The queen of clubs and the queen of hearts smiled up from the table as I lazily let my hand fall palm-down on the bet plate just long enough for the scanner to run. “Looks like it’s ladies’ night.”
The groans were loud around the table as I rose and extended my hand to the young pilot, her well-composed expression replaced with one of saucer-eyed surprise. “Commander?”
She stood, unsure, but took my arm. I wasn’t interested in staying around long enough for anyone, particularly Pinney, to get the idea to ask me to play again double or nothing. “Don’t worry about a thing, Pin,” I yelled as I steered the pilot toward the concourse door. “Deposit’s fine, I don’t like to carry K-bars. I’ll eat the rest at home.”
I felt her stiffen on my arm as howls and catcalls ushered us into the brightly-lit halls of the night.
§
She walked as fast and as effortlessly as I did. The walk to my room was not short. It surprised me that she did not try to disentangle her arm from mine along the way. I told her she didn’t have to. She shrugged, and kept walking, the warmth of her palm on my forearm making me smile in spite of myself as we strode wordlessly through the busy broad corridors of Cygnus.
I didn’t ask her any questions. It would’ve been rude. Away from the thick air of Quadragini’s and the stench of unwashed merc even I could smell the disgust and the stress wafting from the micropores of her red and silver flightsuit. She wasn’t going to protest being won by a female. That part didn’t seem to give her pause. Or at least not any more than having been won at all. That was the part that stung.
And well it should have. Some medicine can go down with a spoon of sugar and still work. Some medicine has to go down bitter. My pilot walked like she was on her way to get bad news from the clinic. Stiff and angry, her eyes never wavering from some point directly in front of her but far, far, away, it wasn’t her disheveled brunette updo or the healthy curves under that flightsuit that drew stares.
When the door closed behind us, she stood near it. Waiting for orders, maybe waiting to run.
“Take a load off,” I offered, sitting down in one easy chair.
“Do you want me to take my clothes off first?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t mind, you know. I’ve been with women once or twice. I lived in the dorms at the Academy.”
My left eyebrow arched as I crossed my legs, ankle over knee. “And this is important to me because?”
She pulled some pins from her hair and shook her head. Waves of almost-sable fell down around her shoulders. “I don’t want to seem like a total newb, that’s all. Men don’t care. But I hear women do.”
“Ofercrissakes,” I muttered. She seemed bright enough. I hadn’t anticipated having to spell it out.
She reached for the pull at the top of her flightsuit zip and tugged it down an inch or three. “I’m serious. It’s okay with me that you won. I’m not going to try to welch on the bet. I was stupid. I made a stupid bet. I was a total idiot to even go into that place. But you won. And fair’s fair.”
I got up and took the zip pull out of her hand and pulled it back up to her throat. “Just stop. Keep your clothes on. Or take them off if you’ll be more comfortable that way, I don’t really care. But listen to me when I tell you that I didn’t butt into that game so I would have a chance at getting into your flightsuit.”
Her eyes followed me. I took a box of maki out of the cold cube, fished around for a tank of beer. The tank hissed when I popped the seal and set it down. I levered the top off the maki, dipped a chunk into the indentation that held the soy sauce and sat down. “Help yourself.”
She didn’t sit. But she did drink my beer and stare at me. She seemed hungry. But she didn’t reach for the maki.
I pushed the box toward her. “Last piece. It’s eel.”
“Real eel?”
“The real eel deal.” Her eyes smiled a bit as she popped the seaweed-wrapped roll of rice and rich meat into her mouth. “My great-grandparents were from Edo. They’d never forgive me if I ate vatfish.”
“I never would’ve guessed.”
“Yeah, well, my other great-grandparents were mostly from Iowa.”
“No, I can see it now. When you hold your head like that.”
“It’s more obvious when my hair’s shorter. It’s usually shorter than this.”
I felt her fingers brush the salt-and-pepper side of my head. It had grown out some, starting toward shaggy. Her touch was light, noncommittal. “You keep it that short because of the rigger helmets?”
“Nah. I keep it that short because I’m butch.”
She giggled. I wanted to be mad but couldn’t quite manage it now that I had some food in me. Or maybe because she was a pretty girl with a fabulous smile and she was smiling it at me. “I didn’t think people still used that term.”
“I do.”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t think we have a word for it any more. Just that one. The old-fashioned one.”
“Yeah, well. There are lots of things we don’t seem to have words for any more. Me, I like the old words. Always have.”
“Like ‘butch,’ instead of just being called a female?”
“Like that. Like ‘lady.’ Like ‘gentleman.’ Like ‘saving a girl’s honor.’”
The pilot’s young face softened, her eyes somber. The pieces fell into place and she looked down at me with real respect. “Like ‘falling on your sword’? ”
Deal.
I nodded and stood and walked toward the holowindow—no way I could’ve afforded a room with a real porthole—and stared at the ships tethered to the drydocks, their silhouettes sharp against the vast black. “Not too hard. I would’ve folded out if I’d had to. But I was willing to risk a lot.”
Bet.
Her lips were so soft on my cheek that I could’ve cried. Her fingers on my bicep were solid, intentional. “What would you call that?”
Flop.
I opened my eyes, feeling the blush rising up from below my work shirt. “What would I call what?”
Her grip tightened on my arm and her free hand turned my head toward hers. The kiss was short and definite, firm, and smooth as real cream. “That.”
Raise.
“I would call it noblesse oblige.”
Her nose wrinkled and her thick eyelashes fluttered as she looked down at her hand on my arm. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that term.”
Turn.
“It’s French for ‘Ask me again some other time when I can be sure you mean it, pretty girl.’”
Her pout was almost as charming as her smile. “But I like you. And you did win.”
Raise.
“No. I didn’t so much win as Pinney the Skink lost. Which means you get the bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
Check.
She turned and walked toward the sleeping alcove and pulled back the curtain along the bunk. “This time.”
She was strong and lovely and it would never work. Or perhaps it already had.
“Fair enough,” I allowed. I watched her take off her boots, then turned my back on the rest. She’d deal me the river later, one way or the other. I could wait until then to hold my breath.
Copyright Hanne Blank 2006-2007, All Rights Reserved.