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Counterfeit Kings

Chapter 5

Horrocks was up inside the brains of the ship, attempting to fix the heating system. He stood in a closet whose walls were veined with a Gordian maze of pipes. A pot-bellied boiler was stuffed in the corner. He singed his hands the first few times he adjusted the boiler’s controls so he took off his shirt and used it as a glove.

Even though he tightened three hose clamps and sealed hissing leaks in six pipes, Horrocks was certain the ship would be no warmer tonight. The pipes hated him.

Sari’s voice came through the attic’s intercom: “Come down to the cockpit, fast as you can manage.”

“Be right down,” he called out. He put his dirty shirt back on, shut the closet door, climbed down the attic’s ladder and ran to the cockpit.

Sari was in the pilot’s chair, her bare feet curled around the edge of the dashboard. She wore silver toe rings to divert attention from her overlong toes. That morning she had used her fingers to comb her hair and it had dried haphazardly. Horrocks found it carelessly sexy.

“It’s a Gunwitch,” Sari said.

Horrocks looked up at the viewscreen. The slender Gunwitch was shaped like a winged arrow. Her brown hull was striped green with oxidized-copper racing lines. The curved windows that girded the bridge were thick with light. Fat cannons were clustered on both wings and under the bow. The cannons were no longer active; at the end of the Push the king castrated all the Gunwitches to show his subjects that the hostilities were over.

“They won’t answer me. Her trail’s still warm, but she hasn’t moved in hours,” Sari said.

Horrocks eased himself into his chair. “See any movement?”

“None yet. Could be it’s a derelict.”

“A derelict Gunwitch?” he said.

“I don’t think so, either.”

Horrocks zoomed the cameras in. “I’m going to get the suit. I have to board her.”

“Look at the exit hatch. No, not there. Angle it down. Further to the right. There. It’s been caved in.”

“The ship looks safe. If the king’s onboard, this is all over. If not, we find some Ringers—”

“Just sitting there?” Sari said.

“No one drives the Gunwitches but the king or the Ringers,” Horrocks said. “We’re bound to find something useful here.”

“Imminent solar storm,” an artificially masculine voice announced over the ship-wide intercom. “Please take shelter in the bunker. Imminent solar storm. Duration of storm, thirty-one minutes. Please take shelter in the bunker.”

“Fuck,” Horrocks said.

Sari put on a pair of slippers. “The Gunwitch’ll still be here when we get out,” she said but hoped that it wouldn’t be.

Horrocks gathered the dogs and met Sari in the kitchen. She opened the midget door next to the stove that led to the bunker. The bunker was a tube-shaped room hidden inside the propellant tank that fed the engine and both exhausts. The dogs followed Sari inside. Horrocks went last and sealed the door behind him. The Moondrunk was hardened against standard levels of Jovian radiation; the bunker was padded with expensive but necessary shielding that protected its occupants from less frequent but more serious threats like sun squalls that could churn the lethal magnetosphere into an armor-piercing riptide. The dense fuel in the propellant tank added further insulation.

Stone benches ran down both sides of the room. Horrocks and Sari sat facing each other. Horrocks was too tall for the room and his head scraped the roof. Under the benches were jugs of water, enough canned food for two days, and books. At the bunker’s other end was a chemical toilet too small to be used in comfort or privacy.

“Half an hour,” Horrocks said.

“These benches hurt my ass,” Sari said. “I thought we were getting pillows in here.”

“We’re not in here that often.”

“We’re in here now,” she said and placed her hands beneath her buttocks.

The dogs lay down in front of the door.

“Maybe we should just go back to the mine,” Sari said. She had been agonizing over this statement for a day and a half and felt if she held it down any longer she would choke. Having said it, she was afraid of Horrocks’ response. She stared at the bent spines of the novels by Horrocks’ feet.

“Back to the mine?” Horrocks said.

“Doesn’t the queen have people who can look for the king?”

“She’s got us,” he said.

“That’s not true. Hasn’t been true for a long time.”

“Name someone else with my experience,” Horrocks said. “What if the king’s trapped somewhere? What if the Ringers need saving?”

“All they know is safety! The king’s, the queen’s, their own. It’s what they do. Let’s make this someone else’s problem, baby. I don’t want it.”

“Who else?”

“Guilfoyle,” Sari said.

Horrocks rested his palms on the bench. “That’s not funny,” he said.

“I get the feeling this is going to turn dangerous. The Bastards. Guilfoyle. All these people are going to collide with us sooner or later.”

“Go back to the mine,” Horrocks said. “Abandon—”

“Yes, abandon.” She gave Horrocks a deep, angry nod. “The mine’s never worked a hundred percent, but she’s strong. She may not be easy on the eyes—”

“And we could go there and pretend everything’s fine.”

“We’d be safe,” she said. “I’d be there now if you knew how to fly this thing.”

“I pilot her just fine. Think about it, if the king’s not found in fifteen days—”

“That foreman told you he was shot. You don’t know how bad. He could be dead,” Sari said.

“He’s not dead, but we don’t find him in fifteen days he may as well be. Fifteen days they’ll declare him dead and the queen’s too weak to keep everything together. The Bastards’ll take the mines by law or by force.” Horrocks put his hands between his knees and leaned forward. His legs were inches from Sari’s. “We won’t have the king’s ships to protect our mine and we’ll lose it. We have to find him. If we don’t, we’ll lose—”

“Stop,” Sari said.

“If the Bastards don’t come for our mine, Rouen will. He could starve us—”

“Stop!” she said and pulled her legs up on the bench. “Such a dark perspective.”

“I’ve sacrificed more than I’ll ever get in return for that mine. I’m going to do everything I can to keep it.”

Sari’s expression changed from contempt to exasperation. “I’ve sacrificed plenty myself. You’re not the only one.”

“I didn’t say I was.”

“Sounded like it. I hate that fucking mine, Horrocks. I know you don’t like to hear it. I fucking hate the mine. The only reason I agreed to it was to stop you from chasing those floating crypts.” She brought her legs in closer and put her arms around them. “Crypts that collapse and leak and implode.”

“I saved a lot of people during the Push,” he said and leaned back so that his neck was against the wall, his legs akimbo. “Worked hard to get that mine.”

“Why?”

Horrocks ran his hands down his thighs. “I’m sorry you hate it,” he said.

“I don’t want to have my baby there. It’s not safe.”

“You just said it was safe.”

“Shut up, Horrocks,” she said and put her head on her knees.

They sat in silence. Horrocks listened to the fuel splash against the bunker.

“I wonder how the mine is,” Horrocks said.

“Don’t you think De Cuir can handle it?” Sari asked.

“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Horrocks said. He picked up one of the paperbacks and leafed through it.

“Where to next, then?”

“The king felt unsafe, he’d want to leave the area completely. Best bet would be—”

“The Longliner,” Sari said.

“Today’s the twenty-seventh. Next one leaves in three days, end of the month. We can make it to Longliner Station before then.”

“Why do you feel you owe the king anything?” Sari said. “Someone does something nice for you once and you love them forever, no matter what. Porphyria’s blackmailing you with guilt, with dead memories.”

“I’d still be a drug mule if it wasn’t for the king. So would you.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s infallible. Doesn’t mean I’d scour the universe to find him.”

Horrocks ripped the book in half. “Do you know how many packets I swallowed?”

“They were too big for me to swallow. Guess where I hid them?”

“He got us out of that crappy life. We’d be dead now.”

“I’m not denying that, but our debt to him and the queen is over. He saved us, we became their bodyguards. He saved us so that we might someday save them. So we could die protecting them.”

Horrocks threw the torn book at the toilet. One of the dogs got up and used the book halves as chew toys. “This is about our mine, not the king,” Horrocks said.

“I don’t know why everyone calls him king. He’s no fucking king,” Sari said. “And how did he thank you for years of loyal service? He insulted you. Nothing regal about that.”

“He didn’t insult me.”

“Asking you to become a Ringer? That’s an insult,” Sari said.

“He thought I would’ve been a good match ‘cause we spent so much time together I could imitate—”

“That was just an excuse. He wanted to own you. Sick power play. Wanted you to look like him the rest of your life. Knowing how you feel about anything fake, to ask you that,” she said and shook her head.

“I admit I was hurt. I didn’t expect that.”

“Nobody did. It’s medieval. It was a stupid idea from the start.”

“They’re better bodyguards than we were,” Horrocks said.

“It’s disgusting. Who would want to look like the king permanently?”

“Or the queen?” Horrocks said. “Although you’d have been better off looking like her.”

Sari laughed in spite of her anger, took off one of her slippers and threw it at Horrocks’ face. “Porphyria never used her Ringers. We should have gone out to the Deeps. You did good work during the Push, saved a lot of people, saved some money, but we should have left.”

“It was too risky,” Horrocks said, though whenever he defended that ancient decision he was shamed into thinking that his attachment to the mine was an overexaggeration. That it was just a ploy drummed up by his conscience to smother the admission that he’d made a mistake for not leaving immediately after the Push. Horrocks feared that he was wrong and Sari was right. They should have left. “Nobody knows anything about the Deeps. We got the mine. We were lucky to get the mine.”

“And what did the king make you pay for it?”

“You may safely return to the ship,” the intercom said.

The door clicked open.