Tripartite

Author's Note: Written for Yuletide 2016.

After Falcone died, the Send went wild.

"You'd think they'd be celebratin'," Madi had scoffed at the time, but he should have known better. Falcone may have been way up on the government wanted lists but he was an embarrassment that was better to be unmentioned, and anyway, reports on pirates were always relegated down the priority list on the Send.

Humans were good, and Strits were bad. When you started admitting that actually not all humans were amazing people, then maybe all Strits couldn't be bad too, and those sort of thoughts would threaten the way the Send wanted people to think. Or the Hub.

This meant that even though Falcone had committed countless crimes and the long arms of the law had previously demonstrated their inability to keep ahold of him, he was just another victim in all this.

EarthHub's government had to support the peace talks or look ignorant, but the Send didn't have those restrictions. The meedees swarmed the decks on Chaos like angry and persistent bees. Optics mounted in the area had managed to catch some of the battle with the Caliban crew, and some well-connected meedee had got ahold of some damning-looking stills of cleanly executed crew, although not any actual vids, thankfully.

"This was clearly a criminal act. Why has nothing been said about the fact a sympathiser has shown complete disregard for EarthHub laws and killed a prisoner before we had opportunity to gain any intel?" Ha. As if Falcone would talk, except as a fuck you. "Why were the 'traitors' not captured alive to find out why they did what they did? They've been murdered by Strits and nobody cares? This whole thing stinks of a cover up!"

The meedees voices droned on and on, a liturgy of hate disguised as truth, and the masses smiled at the excuse not to threaten their world view, unified in bigotry.

Through it all, I tried to avoid talking about Falcone, or even thinking too much about him. I'd ended up placed in quarters with Evan – maybe because Azarcon and I both knew I couldn't just be a jet anymore even if I wasn't busy with a load of new duties, or maybe because he feared I'd wake up with a knife through my stomach. Or wouldn't wake up at all. I'd walked with the jets for years, and I knew their thoughts towards sympathisers. Jetdeck dealt with its own, and I knew as well as anybody that what words couldn't deliver, violence could. So here I was. With Evan, who always seemed to want to talk about things I wanted to forget.

"Why," he'd asked me once, "do you always just say Falcone died?" In the silence that followed, he added, "You killed him." As if I'd forgotten.

Nobody else would say these things to me, but Evan thought that since he knew me as a kid that he has special privileges. But at least he didn't hate me instantly – or fear me.

And Evan always knew, but he didn't rat me out to Azarcon even if it was only out of desperate necessity. So there's that.

The silence stretched on. There're no words to offer to something that's simply a fact.

"Do you regret it?" The voice was small, but almost defiant. What was he even asking? Did I regret all the fuss and hysteria after? Did I regret the actual act? And to ask me, when he himself knows what pirates are like?

I felt my face going coldly expressionless. Evan flinched slightly, but stood his ground like an idiot.

"Go blow," I told him. My fists were clenched against my legs, lest they got a life of their own and showed what I'd really like to do in response to that question.

Evan didn't speak, but he watched knowingly and under that gaze I felt stripped bare.

Of course I didn't regret it. Falcone was a sadistic asshole. If anything, he should have suffered more. Why didn't I say I killed him? Because I refused to own that man in death as he tried to own me in life. Even as I ran, he planted a seed that crept inside my head, dug in with its roots and tried to poison me with thoughts. In death, I refused to let my thoughts orbit him like planets. I was tired of his damn ghost hovering over my shoulder.

I wasn't Niko's, I wasn't Azarcon's, and I certainly wasn't Falcone's. I was just me.

Some of Azarcon's crew still hated me because I was a symp, and some hated me because I dragged them into this situation yet now I had more freedom of movement than they did. Azarcon and Niko worked me hard, but I could still travel freely between Macedon and Turundrlar and nobody else had that freedom. They didn't need to say it: I felt it in the judgement in their eyes.

I'd chosen Macedon, but some of its crew hadn't chosen me.

It was a sobering thought. I'd never been a particularly social jet, and Dorr or Aki or Kris used to be the ones who pushed me into going about socialising at all unless I thought I'd be able to get some useful intel about it. What the jets thought about me wasn't a particular problem; however it was disconcerting that people's thoughts could change so suddenly just based on one fact. Even thought they'd known me, before that.

One fact that recontextualised your entire existence, threw all of your motives into question. I couldn't blame them, really – maybe I'd have done the same in their shoes. Still, I could see the issue bubbling over the surface, despite Azarcon's declaration of peace talks and orders to leave me be. If these were the people who were trying to reign in their hate, then what about the rest of the Hub?

In the mirror, I still looked like a jet – black fatigues, and a pale, serious, tattooless face. But when the world looked back, they didn't see a person at all: they just saw a symp.

I got a first hand glance at this view when Azarcon put me in charge of training his son, Ryan. He'd never known me before, lived most of his life on a station as far as I knew, and when he found out that I was interpreting for his father's peace talks his face shuttered completely.

I had a lot of respect for Azarcon even if sometimes he reminded me uncomfortably of Falcone, although in other respects he was nothing like the man. Still, I found his son intolerable at first.

You started this, he'd accused me. Not the war, the peace. But the peace was a bad thing in his head, because he'd been shot at rather than hundreds of others that were simply out of sight, out of mind for him. I spoke to him, in my acquired Austroan accent, and reminded him of the dark, secretive underbelly of the station he'd been living in, and threatened any pretence of safety... or ignorance.

When we were little, on Mukudori, Evan and I used to love watching some old vids – really old ones, from before the Hub spread its wings and cast off from Earth. I never really liked the fake ones, but some had real people moving around and gorgeous views caught by optics. One of them involved a man snatching kids, a Child Catcher. I'd been scared at the time, as if somebody would pop out from behind a corner of the ship and snatch me away, and Evan had laughed and called me a baby; he wasn't real.

Snatched as we were from Mukudori, Falcone had initially reminded me of that concept, of one day living freely and the next having been squirreled away into a nightmare that you couldn't wake from. Only it was worse: it was real. And being snatched was just the beginning.

But I couldn't tell something like that to Ryan Azarcon. He was still trying to cling to the fantasies that he'd been living in, the comforting haze of drugs and Tyler Coe vids. You couldn't have nightmares if you refused to ever shut your eyes.

Fortunately, he opened his eyes eventually, and his ears. And if somebody who had hated as strongly as he could do that, maybe the peace would really have a chance.

It was nice to be able to see Niko face to face after all those years, but it was also jarring to see him. The memory in my head was younger, but here we stood almost toe to toe. He'd made me and unmade me, and I'd rebuilt myself best as I could, a jigsaw with half the pieces missing.

When I was younger, I'd hung onto Niko's every word after I'd got over my fright. I'd gone from a silent rebellion to listening to the influx of thoughts being delivered to me in Ki'hade and really thinking about it. Even back then, I'd worked out that 'aliens' were far preferable to life with Falcone, even as I wanted for the catch. But there was no catch, not for a long time. And then I became a spy. I couldn't even be that mad at Niko for it anymore considering his judgement on Azarcon had thankfully been right. (Even if I did have to reacquaint myself with Falcone along the way, then I'd acquainted him with my knives.)

Sometimes I wondered if Niko's view of humanity had been like my view of sympathisers and the Striviirc-na – and then he found me being shot by a pirate, which would hardly endear them to him further. But Niko had put me there, on Macedon, reasoning and reality calling him more closely than simply fear or hate. Aaian-na could not afford this war forever, and holding grudges would be to its detriment.

I worried that after living so long in camouflage, Niko wouldn't be able to see me – whatever me was these days. I'd fought the Striviirc-na for longer than I'd fought beside them, and that wasn't something that would go away. To some Striviirc-na, I was simply a symbol of the Hub. Taking and taking and taking, and never giving back; wanting everything and offering nothing.

"That is our concern," said Niko when I voiced these thoughts – which just served to confirm what I already knew. "Do not worry, Jos-na."

Sometimes Niko still treated me like a kid, as if he'd forgotten that the last few years had happened, and was still instructing me in my slate work – and maybe he was teaching me all over again; how to remember my roots, and stubbornly work towards a goal.

Still, I enjoyed the moments with Niko. Not the confererence meeting work, which was just necessity wrapped up in red tape. It had to be done and I was happy to do it, but it wasn't exactly a good time.

"You have done well," he told me once. (Meaning the Macedon mission.)

"You trained me well, Nikolas-dan." A compliment, but I wonder if he takes it half as a rebuke: Ash trained me more, even if I'd never see him as a teacher in the way that I saw Niko.

"I am relieved." I caught the smile on his face, genuine, in the brief instances before it died. Maybe he had thought of Ash after all.

But a peace is worth sacrifices, isn't it? Even if it's your brother, dying to your own hand – or the boy you've trained being reclaimed by the world that discarded him like a broken toy. Now, the hands of the Hub wound me up and let me go, like a reminder that I belonged to the human race, not the Striviirc-na. As if the govies had helped me at all.

Life went on. For a while I was kept constantly busy: in long meetings about a treaty, translating and asking for clarification when needed, then training Ryan. After the Centralists were elected, that all changed: with the peace talks temporarily on hold, I suddenly had a lot more free time, between Ryan and translating in a different capacity.

As I remained on Macedon, I kept in touch with the outside world occasionally via my contacts. I wasn't spying on the Hub any more, and Falcone was dead, but information still came to me and I'd learned not to ignore it. This meant that I wasn't especially surprised to receive information from Otter, but the message itself was a shock.

It was short and to the point, the best kind of message to decode. When decoded, it read:

"Urgent. Bomb on Archangel? Pirates. Informant."

After I read it, I went straight to Azarcon and thankfully he took me at my word and managed to arrange a transcast almost immediately.

Otter's source of information was a man named Stefano Finch. Before he was allowed to 'meet' Azarcon, he got passed off to me: it's not so easy to get an immediate audience with Azarcon. Besides, I was the contact, so I got the job of verifying his veracity. When I saw the image on the screen, one thing immediately stuck out. He didn't look like a pirate. It was the look in his eyes: they were troubled, but not totally dead.

"I'm not a pirate," he affirmed.

"Then how do you know about this plot?" Because pirates didn't broadcast their plans, at least not competent ones.

Azarcon sat off to the side, in range to see and hear yet not actually in sight. That was how we were going to play it, it seemed.

"I know a pirate." And they admitted to being one? It was getting stranger and stranger, but he wasn't flinging information at us like a trap, or dangling it above us for a ransom. That point went in his favour.

"Who?"

There was a hesitant pause; could he get out of giving the name? Sensibly, he decided nor. "Yuri. He told me to go to Otter – they've talked before."

I remembered. The only Yuri I knew Otter to be acquainted with was a pirate, and one people would know if they'd ever paid any attention to the pirate network. Yuri Kirov. Falcone's protégé; the remains of Falcone, in a way. We'd met before, after he kidnapped Captain Azarcon's son and we handed him off for imprisonment.

I saw Azarcon's attention lift even from the corner of my eyes.

"He's in prison," I said.

"Not anymore."

"How sure are you?"

"I'm here. And I'm his bunkmate." In the present tense – interesting. Was there a meaning in that?

I caught the implication, anyway. "His prison bunkmate?"

"Yeah." I appraised him more closely. His eyes were dark and showed little expression, but he looked sincere enough somehow – yet he must have been a criminal of some sort. Which at least explained the relationship with a pirate part. Still, Kirov had been in military prison and the thought of that man as military seemed frankly laughable.

"I need to speak to Azarcon," said Finch, who obviously couldn't be as earnest as he looked.

Azarcon shook his head. Not enough.

"How did you escape from prison?"

This time, it was Finch's turn to shake his head. We'd dragged long enough, it seemed: his patience with our little interrogation was obviously running out. Instead of clamming up, the words poured out like a sickness that couldn't be quelled. "Archangel is your sister ship, right?" He sounded unfamiliar with the term. Probably no ship background. "There is a bomb on board, and not much time! The pirates are going to blow it up!" It, not her.

"And your pirate friend told you this?"

"Yes! He doesn't want it to happen either." That didn't sound like the Kirov I'd met, or anybody connected in any way to Falcone by choice either.

"If you want to speak to Azarcon, tell me how you escaped." It might have at least given us some more information about Kirov, who may have inherited Falcone's extensive list of contacts.

"I don't fucking know!" As desperate as he suddenly sounded, this was the first thing that sounded one hundred percent honest, without the filter of considering what to say. And, in spite of myself, I believed him. I thought Azarcon may have too. "I wasn't even supposed to be there," he continued. "Black Ops struck a deal about getting them inside the pirates and let Yuri go to help. And Yuri struck a deal about me coming along."

So this Finch was important then, in one way or another, but we were missing far too many pieces of the puzzle. I listened wordlessly, but Azarcon reacted visibly to the mention of Black Ops. So ask about that then; I didn't need to words to translate that.

"Black Ops?"

"They want in with the pirates, and the pirates are planning to take down Archangel! His stare was designed to guilt; what are you wasting time here for? I'm giving you information. "And Yuri, he doesn't want Archangel dead. He's-" He stopped abruptly, as if weighing up if his words were a betrayal or a confirmation of this pledge of allegiance to us. "He's pretty torn up about it. So he said we'll go to Austro, there's this tunnel kid Otter who knows this symp spy on Azarcon's ship who could get a message to him-" 'And you haven't yet' remained unsaid. He'd abandoned all pretences of avoiding saying anything that could implicate him or me now. Good thing that Azarcon already knew I'd been a spy.

Azarcon stood up. Something about Finch's voice, or maybe his words, seemed to strike Azarcon as sincere too. Even if we'd have both preferred them to be lies. He stepped into view of the screen as smoothly as an ice skater from old vids. "Tell me about the plan."

And maybe there really was some military in him somewhere, because he didn't make the mistake of confusing Azarcon with somebody else due to his lack of visible insignia. He could recognise authority even in an obviously unfamiliar face. "They want to blow Archangel, sir. The pirates. And Ops will help them-" A pause. "Well, one of the Ops men will. The other doesn't want to. I think he has family on Archangel, maybe a son."

"Name."

Frustrated: "I don't remember."

"Convenient."

Finch's eyes changed as Azarcon spoke, and I noticed the pent up rage within him trying to surge to the surface. Issues with authority, and definitely not voluntarily having this conversation with Azarcon.

"Can you afford to wait on this? If I'm telling the truth, then Archangel-"

Azarcon held up a hand. He knew. Even with the time delay over the transcast, it was clear that Finch stopped as soon as he saw the signal.

"I'm well aware. We'll look into the situation." He refused to be more forthcoming with his information, one of several tactics I remembered from my initial meetings with him when I was just a suspicious-looking recruit with a pirate past.

"That's all I'm asking. Sir."

"We'll be Leaping to Austro imminently to secure you."

A beat. "What?"

Azarcon said dryly, "You claim to be an escaped prisoner – a danger. I can't in good conscience leave you there, terrorising the residents. And since you brought us news of this supposed plot and are adamant that you don't want it to happen – then we may as well tackle the situation together."

From the intelligent gleam in his eyes I suspected that Finch knew the other reason for this generous offer: if he was pulling our legs about this, he was immediately in custody and we could control whatever he may have to gain by telling such outrageous lies. Even if neither Azarcon nor I believed he was lying, not really. Because the peace talks may have been a reality, even though they had now halted, but one war had stayed largely hidden yet never really paused: us all against the pirates, and their fights not over borders or rights, but simple stealing cargo of any description. Even cargo like Evan, or me.

Finch was right. Archangel blew. Since we'd been rendez-vousing with them and had made the captain aware, we at least managed to save some of their personnel, even if we had no time to stop the actual plan. We recovered bodies, both living and dead, but some were just walking corpses; life was still happening to them, while their minds were elsewhere.

In all of this, we picked up Kirov. He hadn't been able to stop the plan, but he'd wrecked his ship and come running back to the place that had started his trek to prison in the first place. Despite this, he barely resembled the man who I'd met less than a year earlier. He also brought a single member of his crew, an engineer, and while surely Kirov wasn't stupid enough to stage a takedown of Macedon via a crewman who hadn't even tried to hide his role on Kublai Khan, eyes still remained quite firmly on him. Suspicion did not simply fade away on Macedon; I knew this more than perhaps anybody else.

I ended up on guard duty for Kirov. In one way it would almost seem funny; I had more reason to hate the pirates than many on the ship, but Azarcon would know that I would also have more sympathy than others. Not everybody ended up on pirate ships by choice, and Azarcon had paid forward a kindness to me. Now it was my turn to help to pry somebody else away from Falcone's cold, dead hands. Even if we were now at a point where it wouldn't need much prying any more. Kirov couldn't go back from what he'd done, even if he started to regret.

He recognised a kindred spirit in me immediately, and that bothered me. Had I been talked about, or had Falcone's hands, so far removed from me, left an indelible imprint that would forever tie me to him despite all my best efforts? I didn't ever ask how he knew, because in the end I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer.

Nonetheless, he looked upon me with eyes that saw too much, and I didn't like it. It had been a long time since anybody had looked at me and thought "pirate". It brought a bad taste to my mouth, since it also served to forcibly remind me that this was still how a lot of the crew saw Evan, even years after we recovered him from Shiva. No wonder he'd settled back into pirate-taught habits of survival that made me shy away from him even now.

I escorted him up the corridor alongside Finch, the bunkmate who was now a bunkmate again – an unexpected bit of compassion from Azarcon that nobody had quite expected. I saw Kirov's suspicious eyes, looking for the trap in the arrangements, and wondered if that's why the Captain had done it – to get past this hurdle sooner rather than later. Or maybe it was a gesture like giving me my parent's tags – a present, and an apology: "sorry for what you must have gone through".

"You're about as beloved as me," Kirov pointed out one time, his eyes roving and taking in as many things as they could, like we were enemy territory and he had to grasp every speck of information that he could. Some things took time to change, after all – you can't change your core way of thinking within a few days, not without a lifetime of doubt stringing together and weakening your string of resolve for a long time.

Kirov wasn't wrong, either. Of all of us, generally the one who caused least visible objections was Finch, despite his tiding of bad news. I supposed that in their minds, at least he tried. (As if Kirov didn't.) I didn't answer.

"Of all the ships you could have joined, why the one that hates pirates this much?" He continued. "They clearly know you were one."

That wasn't the reason for the glares, of course. Finch glanced sharply at me. The message in that was obvious: you're a pirate? Kirov obviously hadn't discussed this fact before, and Finch and I had only made acquaintance as symp and pirate passenger. He also wasn't stupid enough to not have picked up on how I felt about pirates.

"I've no issue fighting pirates."

"But you're not a jet." And soljets were the ones who fought, not people like me in a uniform that simply served to befuddle people if they looked at it too closely and didn't know me.

"I used to be." This hammered home the point that I knew how to fight, though he'd have thought that already – I was pretty certain that Azarcon had initially thought that Falcone had trained me to fight when he saw the results of my gauntlet run. The irony wasn't lost on me.

He stared at me hard for a moment. "One day, I gotta hear your story."

That wouldn't be happening. My life was my own, no matter how many people tried to own it. Too many people looked at me and simply saw a symp, and hated on principle. Now Kirov saw a pirate, and showed a grudging respect – it felt like an insult. Even on Aaian-na, some people just saw the Hub when looking at me (or even Niko, from some of the more extreme anti-human Striviirc-na). They didn't see me.

One day, we would push the peace treaty through, silencing the extremists on both sides one way or another. On that day, we wouldn't see other people as their individual pieces, but properly as a whole. I didn't know when it would come, but Niko and Azarcon and I would keep working towards it whatever distractions occurred, and surely that would be the first step to a brighter future.