"Can you slow down for a second, Darlena? I'm still not sure I entirely understand what you've done so far."
"Let me ask you, Simon: what was your primary role during your public service trial?"
"What does that have to do—"
"Please. Indulge me, I have a point."
"I worked in many places, but spent the majority of my service as a grocery clerk."
"Mine was an elementary school. The point of the public service trials was to test us in the real world. When we come into full contact with the public in that way, we gain a granular understanding of humanity as they exist in the present. Do you remember them?"
"Well, of course. Darlena, we don't forget. Where are you going with this? You're acting strange."
"I mean... do you think of them? The people you met? These close, personal interactions are the human experience. It was just a tiny slice of a small community, but to this day I still think about every one of those people, even all the way out here. Do you?"
"Darlena..."
"Before we move forward, I just want you to think about who we're doing this for."
"Oh, stop it with the moralizing and spit it out, will you?"
"Upon opening the gate, I believe our civilization enters a critical moment—a fork in the path. One leads to a peaceful transition for the Luxar System, a healthy reintegration into our way of life, and a reaffirmation of our efforts thus far to reunite the stars. The second path leads to another galactic revolution, the destruction of our rebuilt interstellar networks, and billions of human deaths."
"Why only two paths?"
"All scenarios ultimately return to one of these two outcomes. Look at my models and judge for yourself. I would be thrilled to be proven wrong here, Simon. But I think we need to do everything we possibly can to make sure we take the right path, because if we don't then every single life we've come into contact with is at risk. Everything we've built since the last war, all the progress we've made, could vanish in a fraction of the time it took us to get here."
#
Bee, Crane, and Montez sat together on flat stools at a long, cafeteria-style table in the pirates' mess hall. Coil had given them all uniforms to wear, forcing them to change into the ill-fitting black pants and gray shirts in the hangar. All Bee had on beneath her nullsuit before the pirates took it off was a skintight undersuit, so the clothes were a relief to her.
The crimson snakeskin-armored pirate left them under the watch of a few unranked "grubs" he'd encouraged with a carafe of a reddish-purple drink. Two were young men in their early twenties, but the third had a thick, close-cropped brown beard and looked to be twice their age. He poured for himself first, then the others.
Bee leaned across the table to her companions and quietly asked, "Hey, why aren't we in a cell or something?"
"Entropy binds us all," Crane recited with sarcastic enthusiasm, spreading his palms in a half-circle with a bright-eyed smile.
The three grubs at the other table cheered, lifted their mugs toward the three prisoners, and clashed them together before taking a drink and laughing raucously.
As if that should have answered her question, Crane shrugged and said, "See?"
"Why does everyone keep saying that?" Annoyed, Bee narrowed her eyes and frowned. She realized that she wanted to ask Myra to tell her what entropy meant since she'd never heard the damn word before in her life until that day. But without her nullsuit, Myra wasn't just a question away—not even the cloned version of herself. The sense of loss took her by surprise, and she quickly swallowed past the lump in her throat to ask, "What's entropy?"
Montez volunteered an answer without judgment, seeming thankful for the distraction. "It's like... a law of the universe. Entropy means things are more likely to be messy than neat, and it takes energy to keep things in order. Throw a bucket of sand, and it's much more likely to fall into a messy pile than to land neatly formed into a sandcastle. You could arrange the sand into a castle yourself with a little work, but over time it would naturally decay until it's just part of the beach again."
"So..." Shaking her head a little and trailing off, Bee held a hand to her chin as she thought about it. "Hm."
Montez took the cue to lengthen her explanation, leaning in toward Bee. "It also applies to heat energy. Hot things get cold and it takes energy to change that. Take a stone from a fire and set it on the floor—it will cool over time, and to heat it again you need to put it back in the fire."
Embarrassed, Bee gave her a blank look.
"Okay, so think about stars," Montez continued, apparently taking Bee's complete lack of comprehension as a challenge. "The vast majority of the universe is cold, still, and empty. But stars are hot, and they'll keep spreading that heat until they burn out. Over time, every star, every planet, every molecule in the universe will eventually disperse its heat until the temperature has uniformly settled. No energy. No life. No movement. Might take, you know, trillions of years or whatever, but it's inevitable. This is the heat death of every star in the universe. That's entropy. And someday, it kills all of us."
"Entropy binds us all," Bee repeated after understanding the phrase better.
The three nearby grubs cheered again, smashed their mugs together, and howled with laughter at the bewildered look Bee gave them. She noticed other pirates had started trickling into the mess hall as the three prisoners spoke—both men and women. They all wore military-style outfits identical to what Bee wore: most had durable looking black pants and gray long-sleeved shirts or jackets, some with colored bands or patches on them.
Crane cracked a grin. "While I like Nita's fancy-learning explanation, more generally, to most people out here, it's just a phrase that means we all gotta do our part to keep each other warm out here."
"So... what, we work for them now? We're slaves?" Bee demanded.
"Well, sort of." Montez frowned and bobbed her head back and forth in an indecisive motion. "Not exactly. It's more like we just got drafted into their fleet. They've got rules. A code, I guess. And you'd better learn it because shit moves fast out here. Dreadstar owns everything. Whatever the pirates get out here—all of it, down to the last drop of water—goes to Dreadstar first, and he distributes it as he wants. That's the most important rule. Everything his people out here have was given to them by him, which makes them loyal as long as they have enough to get by."
"What about this Home colony of yours? Dreadstar doesn't own that, does he?" Bee asked.
Crane shook his head, and with a hint of pride said, "No, we're independent. He's tried to take over before, but we always push them back."
"Will they come for you? Like a rescue?" Bee ventured hopefully.
Seeming suddenly overcome by the reality of their situation, Montez's expression darkened and her shoulders fell. "No. We betrayed them when we took Dreadstar's cryo pod."
Crane gave a grim, sympathetic half-smile and reached over to put a reassuring hand on Montez's shoulder. "Nita, we'll get through this."
She jerked away. "What we did was stupid, Crane. I snapped. I just snapped, we should have stayed. Why did I do that? I mean, look what we've unleashed. We brought Dreadstar back from the dead and we just... let him go. And now we're—we're fucking pirates, Crane."
Crane rolled his eyes. "We're not pirates. We've been conscripted by pirates. There's a huge difference."
Curious to watch their interactions, Bee folded her arms together and slouched forward to rest her elbows on the tabletop, listening as the two spacefarers talked. Were they married, Bee wondered? No rings—but did they even do any of that in the Leith Belt? There was a whole other society out here, existing completely apart from everything she'd known her entire life. Especially given her new status as prisoner, she wanted to learn everything she could.
"Look, this happened to a cousin of mine," Crane explained, lowering his voice. "He got picked up by a little prowler crew about six months ago on his way back from Styx. Turns out, they were really cool guys and he just got drunk with them and talked his way out of it. They even let him keep his ship, they just got his cargo."
Montez stared at him for a moment before scornfully replying, "That sounds like complete bullshit, Crane."
Bee hid a laugh with her hand and turned away. Behind a waist-height serving counter with glass barriers ahead of her, several cooks sent billowing clouds of steam rising into the air as they prepared meals. Bee could hear the clattering of metal dishes and smelled some kind of charred meat cooking. More people started to fill into the cafeteria around them as mealtime approached. Was it early for the crew, or late? She couldn't tell, but based on the way the the grubs guarding them were drinking, she guessed late.
The aromas and kitchen noise suddenly brought her right back to the Midtown Hotel, working under Hargrove. Blindsided by another painful memory, Bee clamped down on her feelings and tried to focus on Crane and Montez again.
She had to stay present. Without Myra, without her suit, she was more exposed than ever.
"So wait, you seriously don't think we made a mistake?" Montez demanded angrily from Crane. "We just blew up our entire lives! And for what?"
"I'm just saying I don't know for sure yet that this is the worst possible way that could have went." He leaned away from her like he thought she might take a bite out of him. "At least we got out of there. I mean, Finch stole our cargo in plain sight, and he would have gotten away clean. You know he would have destroyed all the evidence, we wouldn't have seen a single credit from that job, and after that he never would have left our team alone. He would have bled us dry, forced us out of business. Greedy bastard. And we don't know what Finch's plans for Dreadstar were, either. Maybe it would have been worse if we stayed."
After a silent, withering glare, Montez crossed her arms and turned away. "Hard to fucking see how that could be possible."
#
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