[nano] Corsair

[kittydesade]

[From: Al-Ran Tamerlane, Traveling Operative, Bryce Securities
To: Luella, Personnel, Bryce Securities
Re: Recruitment of Valerie Reynolds

I haven't yet broached the subject of our methods and our more specific goals, but she is already balking at the secrecy involved and the clandestine nature of our operation. She is working under the assumption, at the moment, that the reason she hasn't heard of our operation to begin with is because of the name change, which is at least partly true. However her first assumption was the idea of secrecy and clandestine dealings, and that doesn't sit well with her.

I know what you're going to say, and you may be right. She may not be possessed of the flexible mindset and morality you require for the group. But she is resourceful and she is far more clever and intelligent than most of our prospective employees, and we need every quick mind we can recruit right now. The company's forces are moving to consolidate their positions, and in another year or two they will begin moving if their propaganda proves ineffective.

I would like to read her in on some of my missions, the ones within her posted routes. I believe that if she has a clearer picture and more willing disclosure presented to her that she will be a well-placed asset to our operation. And if she refuses, I trust her discretion.

May it be peace in our time,

Al-Ran Tamerlane.]

[From: Luella, Personnel, Bryce Securities
To: Al-Ran Tamerlane, Traveling Operative, Bryce Securities
Re: Recruitment of Valerie Reynolds

Permission denied.

Luella]




"Is this real glass?" Ran held his shot up to the light, peering at it as if he could tell whether or not it was real glass by the way the light refracted. Which was true; you could tell by look with some plastics, or by sound. Which occasioned the tapping after he couldn't tell from the light, but she only laughed and shook her head.

"You think I can afford real glass on my salary? No, but it's a damn good imitation. The whiskey's real, though."

"Mm," He slammed it back appreciatively. "I can tell."

He had been in a go-fast ship, a two-person fast craft that was probably a company vessel. She didn't think he actually owned a ship at all. Picking him up was easy; he was as good a pilot as she was if not better, and between the two of them they had made docking his craft to the umbilicus easy as landing.

Criss Hedrick had been on shift when he'd gotten in, and gave her a bit of a grin as she turned the station over to him and went down to the umbilicus station to meet him. Valerie had no idea what sort of rumors were flying around the ship right now as to what the two of them were up to but she expected they were juicy. She'd find out later, no doubt, maybe in the mess.

Ran picked up the bottle this time, twisting it around between calloused and sunburnt fingers to see the label. She studied him while he studied the bottle, wondering a little at what she saw. He'd lost even more weight since the last time she'd seen him, or it seemed that way to her. His frame was still broad and his face still rounded, but his cheeks seemed to her more sunken than usual. He had a new scar running from the second knuckle on his index finger to the third knuckle of his third finger, thin and pink and recent. His skin was weathered and brown-pale, the way he'd looked after that one summer they'd spent on the beaches at Wray Cove.

"Do you remember," she said then, not lifting her gaze to meet his but keeping her eyes on his hands. She was more aware than she wanted to be of his eyes on her, though. One breath, leaning her head back to stare at the ceiling. "Do you remember that holiday we spent in … what was it, Jonesy's beach house."

"Y[name]," he nodded. "Wray Cove. I remember that. I remember we went swimming almost all the time there." He set the bottle back down. It sounded heavy on the table, still mostly full.

Valerie smiled as she pointed a finger at him. "I remember you chased me up and down that damn beach. You and Jonesy and what's his name."

"Shasta. Sascha. Something like that. The blond?"

"Him. I think he lived there, actually, I didn't see him at school after that so he must have been one of Jonesy's friends, and I looked…" She shook her head. The blond with the cute smile and the pretty blue eyes. Wide and wild and innocent. The whole holiday had been a little like something she might have dreamed up. Running around in the sunlight, glinting off blue waters.

Ran watched her, then pushed the bottle over to touch the tips of her fingers where they rested on the table. "Hey. You still …"

"Hmm?"

"You still thinking about that blond?"

Valerie chuckled. "Maybe a little. You brought …" No, he hadn't brought him up, had he. Ran pointed at her, laughing softly.

"You are thinking about him again, aren't you."

"Mostly I'm thinking about how nice it was out there. Peaceful. Idyllic," she added, to Ran's snort. Neither of them had come to the Academy very innocent, and both of them had appreciated a small villa on a private beach, in one of the sub-countries of the Aileron Empire. The kind of peace that came from living in a world that had been so stable for so long, those who didn't have contact much with the outside world could believe that life was always that way. Like Jonesy. "Whatever happened to him, anyway?"

Now Ran avoided her gaze, back to playing with the bottle before refilling their glasses. "He recruited me into the organization, actually. Into Bryce. He was part of the original crew, did a lot of organizational work and some designs for improvements on their crafts, you remember, he was an engineering genius?"

"I remember he had some crazy idea about cheap transport ships for everyone, so that everyone could have access to resources. What happened?" It was catching up with her. "You said he was part of the original crew."

Ran took a drink. "He was. There was a raid on one of our offices, material theft, data. He tried to stop the intruders. Poor dumb bastard didn't feel a thing."

"Oh."

That killed the conversation for a good several minutes while they fidgeted. Jonesy had been good people. He hadn't been as naïve as, well, as she'd been thinking he was a moment ago. He'd always been skinny, a scrapper, but she couldn't believe he'd died in a robbery gone bad.

Then again, he'd been working for the same organization that Ran worked for, and she didn't know anything about them. For all she knew, the company had exactly that kind of attrition rate, and for exactly those reasons.

"That kind of thing happen a lot with you people?"

"Huh?" He looked up at her. "No. What, the robbery? No, that was crazy." Ran shook his head, raising the shotglass and then setting it back down again without taking a drink. "No, that was… something else."

She wanted him to elaborate on that. Asking would get her nowhere, though, and being snippy about it (although she was getting irritated with his silence) would make this night more unpleasant than she wanted to deal with. She let it go, and the conversation stalled again.

Ran reached out and covered her hand with his after she sighed audibly. His fingertips were still calloused, but now she could feel the callouses against her skin. Rough-edged, not the hands of a space-farer, too rough even for engineering. She looked over at him and he turned her palm up, tracing concentric circles on the inside of her palm. Three of them.

She smiled.

"Remember that?" he smiled back.

"I remember you got me soaking wet," she retorted, but laced her fingers through his and squeezed his hand. "I remember…"

"It was raining," he smiled down at the amber liquid in the faux-glass container. "We had to all scramble to hide… how many was it, six or seven of us?"

"Nine. You, me, Sienna, Jonesy, Jonesy's girl…"

He laughed. "Mira."

"Maya," she corrected.

"No, Mira. Mira was Jonesy's girl, Maya was…"

Valerie remembered. She laughed, eyes widening. "Maya was her twin, the one you ended up with!"

"Until the end of that term, yeah," he chuckled, shrugged. "She was all right. She wasn't looking for someone to settle down with the way Mira was, she just wanted to have some fun, spend time with someone. I was it."

"You were it," she shook her head. "You really liked her, though. You couldn't keep your eyes off of her."

He didn't seem to like that, or maybe he just didn't like remembering that it hadn't lasted. Ran shifted in his seat a bit, picking up his glass again. "Well, you couldn't keep your eyes off of her either! She was beautiful, remember, with…"

"Her long dark hair, dusky skin, yes, I remember. She had pretty dark eyes, and you couldn't keep yours off of her. Why didn't you go talk to her after we got back from holiday? I didn't hear about a fight between the two of you, she probably would have been glad to see you. Mira stuck around…"

"We were graduating," he shrugged.

"Not till the term after that."

He nodded. "But soon enough. That was her first year, she didn't deserve to be stuck with someone who was graduating in three months standard and moving out to parts unknown for however long a time…"

She squeezed his hand to direct his attention elsewhere, turning their hands so she could press her thumb lightly at the palm of his hand, massaging. "We didn't know where we were going, what we wanted to do, but you knew you wanted to be a pilot. You knew you wanted to do something fantastic. I remember you had all these wild plans, dreams…"

"I wanted to see the galaxy," he smiled, watching her fingers move. "I thought that I could do that with a pilot's license and an aerospace scientist's certification."

Her eyebrows lifted, and she nudged his leg under the table with her bare toe. "You could. You did, remember? We went and signed onto the [something something] Merchant Company and you went straight out and became a navigator on one of their ships. You couldn't wait to leave port that day. I don't think you even slept."

"I didn't," he chuckled. "You know I can't sleep the night before I fly out."

"And yet, somehow, you've never managed to crash into the planet or burn up in re-entry or bollox up your co-ordinates and wind up out in the middle of nowhere, I'm impressed." And to show this she saluted him with her glass.

He bowed. "Why thank you, Captain."

They still had at least half a drink left, each, not that either of them felt inclined to touch it. They were still holding hands, but that was all right.

"So, your flight plan has you listed from Lorentz to Sagan?" She lifted her eyebrows at him for the abrupt change of topic, but she nodded.

"I got hired on to shuttle a Mentalist out to Sagan with some sort of top-secret testimony recorded. They paid enough to cover fuel costs, crew costs and then some, enough that most of these stops along the way are just padding that we took on because they didn't need to be there immediately. Not sure what's going on, but." Shrug. "It's Sagan. Could be anything from corporate to international."

"I haven't heard that the international court is setting up any major trials. Nothing requiring the use of a Mentalist, anyway."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Innocent doesn't work on me, Ran, remember? I've known you since before you changed your name to that stupid…"

"Hey!"

"… ego-driven alias, why did you choose that name, anyway?"

"Okay, first of all, you haven't known me since before..." He couldn't quite say it. He'd lived with the name longer than he'd lived with the other, and it felt strange to talk about it as though it wasn't a part of himself. For her, too, for that matter. "And second of all, it's not stupid or ego-driven.

She rolled her eyes at him, but resumed rubbing her thumb against his palm. "You named yourself after a legendary military leader who may or may not have existed. That's at least a bit ego-driven."

"It is not." He pouted. "I've never wanted to be a military leader."

They stared at each other for a moment. Then they started laughing.

They echoed off each other; every time one of them managed to regain his or her breath they looked over and set the other off, laughing again. By the time they were wheezing for breath they managed to stop. He was kneeling on the floor in front of her and she was almost bent out of her chair, one hand resting on the back of his shoulder. Another breath and he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her onto the floor with him. She elbowed him in the side.

"Ow!"

Which sent them off into giggles again.

It ended with both of them sitting up braced against her bunk and leaning against each other, her cheek on his shoulder. She hadn't laughed so hard in a long time, maybe since the last time they had been in the same place at the same time. Her ribs held a pleasant ache, and she could hear him wheezing still.

"You are an unrepentant bad man," she told him, poking him in the side.

He laughed, leaning a little bit away from her finger and then settling back, taking the opportunity of shift to slide an arm around her shoulder. "Oh, that's why you keep me around, darling," he said. His head lolled back against her mattress while she remembered he hadn't called her that in at least a few years. "That's why you keep me around."

After a moment or two. "I don't keep you around. You keep coming around. Like a puppy that doesn't know when to quit."

"That would be me, yes."

They stayed like that until her arm had crept around his waist and his cheek was resting on the top of her head. "I did have a room set aside for you, you know," she told him as her eyes were starting to close. Then she tried to open them. This repeated itself two or three times before she gave up on it as a useless effort and settled in against him, eyes closed, feeling his hand rubbing slowly up and down her shoulder.

"Yeah, I know," he said, somewhere after her eyes had been closed for a while.

And then, "It's probably more comfortable on the bed," she mumbled. Neither of them moved.

And finally, some time between ship-board nightfall and when her soft-voiced alarm tried to wake her, he poked her in the ribs.

"You're snoring again."



They were walking along the beach, and the sand squelched between her toes. Tide had come in and was going out again, and they were walking between darker and lighter sand, little white ribbons marking the edges where the water had come up and left wet sand and fading foam.

Her fingers slipped through his, and she squeezed his hand. He looked over at her and smiled.

His shoulders were hunched and his jacket was still on, but they both had their shoes off (he was carrying both pairs) and their pants legs rolled up against soaking. He still had knobbly toes that were unsightly to most people, and just sort of added to his quirks and endearing bits. Little strands of dark hair. Neatly trimmed toenails, though. Valerie smiled.

"You're staring at my feet again."

"I can't help it if you have nice feet," she protested, looking up to see him grin at her. He had a really nice smile, too.

Ran pointed the tips of their shoes at her. "Your feet are prettier."

She looked down at her feet, long, for a woman, though not large out of proportion to her body. "I have duck feet," she told him.

"Your feet are perfect. Just like the rest of you." And he freed his hand from hers to put his arm around her shoulders and hug her lightly against him. They were still walking, so she was forced to put her arm around his waist to keep her balance. It didn't work so well on the gradual slope of the beach and with the shifting sands, but they staggered together for many steps further than they maybe should have.

"Shouldn't we get back to the house?" she asked, after they'd walked so far she couldn't see their further-apart footprints anymore, and the sun was starting to set below the water. "They'll be wondering where we've gone off to."

"They can wonder," he shrugged. "We'll be back eventually."

There was a note in his voice that made her put both arms around him, which made walking all but impossible. She hugged him anyway, heard his chuckle deep and echoing against her ear pressed to his chest. The sunset made shifting stippled patterns of yellow, brown, orange and gold along the sand. Her feet were warm, but his hand was cold against her arm.

"Are you chilly?" she asked when she realized that. "It's going to be cold after dark."

"I'm all right," he told her. "Don't you worry about me, darling. I'm fine."

"If you say so."

They stopped when it was dark and they had run out of beach houses to pass. There was a pier a little ways in front, old and half crumbled into the water, and with the light almost gone the wood looked blacker on the black night-time waters. Gray sand. Moonrise, soon. He'd stopped walking first, and she stopped with him, assuming they'd turn around and walk back, soon. There was a light coming up behind her, and time did a funny warping thing inside her mind. It wasn't dawn already, was it?

She remembered. Oh.

"Hey," he rubbed her shoulder as she stiffened and turned to face him. Night time meant she saw the pale moon shape of his face and the shifting shadows as he smiled, but little else. Knowing what she now knew, she preferred it that way. "Hey. I know what you're thinking, and you can stop that right now."

"What if I don't want to?" she snapped. "What if…"

"Valerie."

Quiet and smooth, soothing. The tone of voice he had used when she was in hysterics over an exam, worried about her job application to the company, waiting for a status report on her ship.

Standing at the block on the pirate ship, waiting for her. As always. He'd spent over half his life waiting for her.

"I'm sorry…"

"Don't be." He pulled her into his arms though she'd turned her face up for him to kiss her, just pulled her close and held her tight. She curled her fingers into his old brown corduroy jacket and cried against his shoulder. "Don't be sorry, darling. I didn't miss a moment."