Only Grieve

   There wasn’t a pirate law for what happened when the first mate falls pregnant and leaves the captain with a giant hole in her chest. Blair Grieve would know if there were.

What started out as some light avoidance and turned into ignoring every single commlink from Faïza in the past five weeks. That cute chubby baby named Safira had her mom’s impish twinkle and her father’s crooked smile, and she had no clue that her parents were intergalactic privateers on a ship called The Sky Reaper. They used to be, anyway. If the infant needed someone to dismantle a bank ship’s nav system or shoot an arm’s dealer, definitely you should call Grieve. But no one needed that from her, and what she needed came behind the needs of the tiny toothless wonder.

Grieve sat at this backwater bar, wishing she had the taste for liquor right about now. Actually, she didn’t know if she was drinking alcohol or jet fuel. Boidan, a bayou city and home to even less savory people than her, was as far as Grieve could get in one jump. If only that meant she could outrun memories.

A few years ago, the crew had been celebrating a successful job. Sometime around midnight, she and Faïza had a few moments alone for the first time since Faïza began seeing their navigator Ebere.

They were draped across the work bench in the captain’s quarters, staring at the meteor shower outside. She’d asked Faïza, “What did you think of me when we first met?”

“Well, I thought you’d be a lot less of a lightweight than you are. How can a woman as tall as you not hold her liquor?”

She remembered shoving her friend’s shoulder with her elbow, the movement jostled them to the floor in a heap, both of them crying hysterically.

After they’d calmed down, Faïza said, “You scared the hell out of me. I was this mousy fourteen-year-old, and you were this larger-than-life adult to me.”

“Please, I was fifteen and pimply.”

“You know you had a scowl and a mean right hook.”

Grieve conceded that; she’d been six feet tall since the age of thirteen. No one had ever believed she was a child then, so she had become a weapon.

Faïza continued, “You had this fury inside you—still do—that made me jealous.”

Grieve smiled, though it didn’t reach her eyes. That ship, The Star Rover, hadn’t been all she had imagined. She’d been on a star ship since the orphanage had burned down, and as much as she’d taken to the life of thieving and deception, she’d been too naïve in her dealings with men.

“I’ve gotten a little softer since I turned thirty.”

Faïza thumped her ear like they used to do when they were small. “But seriously, promise you’ll never lose that. No matter what happens to me or any of the rest of us, you gotta stay furious.”

“What could possibly happen to you, Zazie, that isn’t also happening to me? If you die, I’ll kill you.”

That hadn’t made either of them laugh like it would have before. Grieve wondered now if that had been when things had changed, when Faïza had started to want things apart from Grieve and The Sky Reaper. Jealousy had never been part of Grieve’s emotional arsenal, so it scared her to feel a hot rush of pain in her limbs and chest, worse than a knife wound because there was no blood. No one knew how Grieve wished that little baby gone the moment she’d held the sonogram in her fists, or that she had spent every month since then trying to erase those thoughts with jobs and fights and money.

Now, Grieve’s ship was low on fuel, and nobody knew her in this whole star system. Around the time of that last job, she’d ordered her crew to take some R’n’R with no end date. She and her fury were only doing fine as long as she was in motion. A privateer’s worst enemy was stagnation, and she was up to the gills in stagnant water.

She threw back the last of her fuel and gagged.

“Sink me,” a raspy voice said from the other end of the bar. “You look like cat puke, Grieve.”

Shoulders tightening, Grieve turned. “Sterling.” His dark cloak made him blend into the poorly lit bar, but she’d recognize his smug self anywhere. His stupid hair flopped over his shoulders like he was posing for a portrait.

If she hadn’t just begun to feel the effects of the liquor, she might have grabbed her pistol from her ankle holster. The last time she’d seen Sterling was about a year ago when he’d confronted her about the fact that she had turned a few key members of his crew into informants. It wasn’t her fault it had taken him so long to figure out how she kept taking all his jobs out from under him, nor was it her fault she had a quicker draw and a better shot.

“’Nother drink, yeah?” The barkeep had returned at some point and plopped another awful concoction in front of Grieve.

Sterling slipped from his stool, eel-like in his movement, then propped himself up on the bar to Grieve’s right. “Funny seeing you here in Boidan.”

His question was implied: why was she here, and was she following him. She had nothing to lose in telling the truth, because she really couldn’t care less what Sterling and crew were doing. What troubled her was that Sterling’s whole aloof princeling look was doing funny things to her brain. It was like running into an unexpected windfall after a job, running into him here on the backside of nowhere. And he smelled like cake.

She replied, “I had a lead on some merchandise, thought I’d check it out.”

His jaw tightened, shaking the shiny gold cuffs in his ears. Rather than take the bait he said, “I heard about Faïza and Ebere. Guess good things can happen to outlaws.”

“Depends on how you define ‘good.’”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Anyway, since when are you an outlaw, Richard? You always have interplanetary contracts coming out your ears.”

She knew he hated his given name—he’d cut off some fingernails if you called him anything but Riz or Sterling—so she was gratified when his eyes darkened.

“You know me, Blair,” he said with his maddening posh accent. She ground her teeth; only Faïza used that name. “My government contracts have benefited from your dry spell. The twins are earning their weight in ore, and I get all the false documentation the senator and her spies could ask for.”

So he’d made the Ushmana’a contract permanent. And with the twins. Grieve knew they wouldn’t be out of work long when she sent them off, and she didn’t envy anyone having to talk sense into those talented boys. “They still seventeen going-on-twelve with half a person’s common sense?”

His pinched lips seemed to agree.

The barkeep clanked a flagon of something sickly and orange in front of Sterling before disappearing again.

Sterling eyed it, scrunching his nose at the smell. “Orange does not improve the flavor of the swill they serve here. In case you were wondering.”

She snorted before she could stop herself.

Across the room a small flash of silver caught her eye. Apparently, it had also caught Sterling’s, as he discreetly checked their perimeter and nodded at whoever was flashing a light against a mirrored comm unit across the room.

Ah, so he was on a job. Grieve might be drunk, but she could appreciate a scam in progress in any state of consciousness. She cast another glance around the room, noticing suspicious folks: the person with the comm in blackout glasses, a woman by the kitchen door in a faux-distressed jumpsuit, a few teens playing cards by the porch with half eaten tray of frog legs between them. Interesting, she thought, that her instinct to disappear had dropped her in the middle of whatever scheme Sterling had going. If she didn’t know any better, she might think he was also running from something, coming all the way past the outer edges of civilization.

Examining him again, she saw the tension in his shoulders under his customary dark jacket. Leather, she observed. You could take the boy out of Planet Posh but never the poor little rich boy clothes. Still, he was much more haggard than usual, with dark circles under his gray eyes and early signs of a beard.

Sterling threw a hunk of credits on the table for the bartender. “So this was good craic, but take care, Grieve,” he said with a type of detachment she recognized all too well. Also, he hadn’t missed a chance to take a dig at her with the craic comment. “Be sure to switch to water at some point. There are pickpockets, and you’re an easy target here.”

As he walked away, she remembered the last time he’d called her an easy target. He’d switched out her comms for a tracker and gotten the drop on her crew before they could meet their contact. By the time she’d arrived, the contact had been in a meeting with Sterling’s right hand woman, and that loss had cost her fifty grand.

Wasn’t going to happen today. She kicked back the gross orange drink and scooted toward the exit. Outside in the shadows of the alley, she fiddled with an oblong drive. Even drunk she was a better pickpocket than these hillbillies. Whatever this was, it was important enough to hide in Sterling’s inner jacket pocket.

A quiet hum from her own pocket interrupted Grieve. She knew it was a comm, but part of her was still too drunk to realize it could be from Faïza, so she read it before thinking.

“I know you’re in Ka’rhen Major,” the text said. There was a screen grab of her coordinates, likely something Ebere pulled for Faïza. Some kind of pirate Grieve was; it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d been in Boidan long enough to be tracked. “This is not what I meant when I told you to stay furious. Call me back, B.”

Grieve slumped against the wall, dizzy from the movement. She couldn’t hold her anger back, and it was nice not to focus it on herself for once. Last she’d seen Faïza, they’d could joke like the old days. But Grieve had forgotten the new state of affairs and brought up how absurd they thought it would be to become mothers. They made fun of anybody who thought they could just quit the Life.

Faïza said with no irony, holding a tiny toothless newborn, “I’m not quitting, B.”

Grieve had laughed a little too forcefully before she’d noticed her friend wasn’t. “No,” she said. “Zazie…”

“I told you this wouldn’t change things, and I meant it. Ebere and I can just take turns on the job, keep Safira safe off grid.”

“It doesn’t work like that. You’ll be vulnerable to threats we can’t predict. Remember how we got that heist in ’40?”

They were silent for a beat, recalling how that job went much more smoothly after they had blackmailed the police officer with information about her son. She’d handed over the intel within hours.

“I’m not those other people, first of all.” Safira cooed and snuggled deeper into her mom’s shoulder. “Secondly, you know I won’t leave you out there. You are my sister.”

She grabbed Grieve’s hand, reflexively pulling it close. They knew how Grieve would respond to this argument, and still neither spoke. When you had known someone over twenty years, how did you find the words to say it was time for things to change?

According to how they left matters, Grieve had left the door open for Faïza, but that was not the case at all now that Grieve had let all the rest of the crew go. It couldn’t be anyway but this: Grieve would let her friend have the life she wanted. And Grieve would continue on alone.

She dropped her comm on the ground and smashed it with her boot heel.