B.L.A. the Mouse: Thank you very much for the review, and I've left the timing somewhat vague deliberately, but I suppose it starts out a few, maybe five years before the rescue of the Andromeda. Sorry about the confusion!
-o-
A week later, Beka found herself dining at Muyandar, the kind of place that made Cavanaugh's look like a mudfoot paper shack, the kind of place where menu prices were not listed and management was so secure in the restaurant's reputation that they did not impose any kind of dress code.
Darjella Milein sat across the table from Beka in an outfit not so different from something she owned, except that the wear and tear at Ms. Milein's knees and elbows was artfully and precisely designed just so, and the scuffed leather belt cost more than dinner. That included the wine, if Beka had chosen to partake.
"I like that," Darjella said when Beka had refused to split a bottle. "Principles. Limits. Whatever you call 'em. I admire that. It's not something you see these days, outside the Prides and the Wayist monasteries." And neither were very useful to her, her tone said.
"It's not so hard," Beka replied, "when you look around and see your alternatives."
A lesser businessperson might have said, "Like your father," at this point, rubbed Beka's face in her dismal past and rather dreary present, but Darjella was better than that. More than the dinner, this show of tact impressed Beka.
"Well put. Someone who looks ahead like that can go far, but you gotta have friends. And I gotta have pilots I trust with sensitive cargo, pilots who won't sell half the shipment on the side and arrive a week late."
Their first course arrived, pale little squishy things swimming in a savory sauce, and Darjella insisted they not talk business while they ate. Beka had no idea what kind of small talk one engaged in with a crime boss, but Darjella was more than happy to direct the conversation. To her great dismay, Beka found herself warming to the woman and agreed to keep an ear open to any business opportunities Darjella might offer her.
Beka left that meeting confused and conflicted and quite full of delicious things she had never tasted before. Besides the food, Darjella had poured milk and honey down her throat, visions of an exciting career replete with dangerous chases - which she would nonetheless outrun, as the brilliant pilot she was – and substantial rewards waiting at the end. The Maru never put in hock again. Those half a dozen nagging debts finally paid off, and for a change, seven more would not sneak up on her to replace them. Great potential for advancement.
"One day," Darjella had said with a chuckle – kidding on the square, amused but quite serious, "you might be sitting here, recruiting some promising young thing with the right attitude and a twinkle in her eye."
The whole thing, that moment, was so cheesy, so straight out of a rags-to-riches holonovel that Beka had to laugh along. "One step at a time," she had replied because that was what maybe protégés said at this point.
-o-
A little less than a month later, one of Darjella's lackeys dropped by with an announcement, by way of another debt paid off and a few stern words with Beka's debtor, who had threatened to take her payment in kind if she could not scrape together the money. The lackey had a job for Beka, but she was not obligated to accept. The money and the admonishment were a gift from Darjella.
Beka justified her acceptance of the job as payment, keeping herself out of a gangster's debt, gift or no. The stash of perfectly ordinary credit chips in perfectly ordinary amounts of money (but oh, they added up quickly) gave her a crisis of conscience. She told herself that she was taking money away from an intergalactic crime syndicate, and it barely sufficed. For six months, though, she could not active the Maru's improved defenses without feeling a pang of guilt. Drug money. Blood money. Dirty, filthy credit – not that most of her employers were much better, but at least they destroyed people's lives on a smaller scale.
If a certain figure from her past had not appeared around the time another lackey called on her, her path still might have gone in a different direction. Beka was mustering her resolve to tell Darjella's latest envoy in polite but firm language that while she harbored no ill feelings toward Ms. Milein, she would refuse this and any further offers of employment or association of any kind, thank you and have a nice day.
Or if a certain figure from her past had even appeared in a more sympathetic light, appealed to the memory of her dear departed dad and her sweet brother, she might have remembered that Darjella probably supplied Flash to thousands of dealers, who in turn snared millions of people like her father. But Marlyn Enneston had barged onto her ship, had demanded that she fork over a ridiculous amount of money to cover Rafe's latest scheme gone wrong – or she would never work in this system or this arm of the Milky Way galaxy again. Enneston had pulled the same stunt with her father, insisting on recompense for vaguely defined injuries perpetrated by Ignatius Valentine's business associates, followed up with the same threat. Word for ugly word, and now Beka had had enough.
It was not just the money. She was sick of big fish like Enneston picking on little fish like the Valentines. While a temporary slowdown of business from this ass end of Milky way – which was the most he could realistically pull off – was no great peril to her livelihood, Beka knew that it would never really end. They lurked in the reeds as far as civilization stretched, and preyed openly where it did not.
"You just try it," she said in a low, fierce voice. "See if I'm begging in the space lanes a year from now. You and me, we'll compare notes, and see which one of us is blowing an FTA subcontractor for a chance to haul the Trade Council's silken delicates." Beka rarely allowed herself such an emotional and… colorful display, but she was pissed.
Marlyn backed away in shock and muttered something as he huffed back to his own ship. Over dinner that night, she told Yizendra to expect her at Tears of Tara in two days. Bright and early. Marlyn had passed the café then, opened his mouth no doubt to shout something vulgar through the open façade, but he paled when he saw Beka's dining companion. He hurried off without a word or a backward glance. Yizendra watched the exchange with mildest interest and did not comment on it. They both knew she did not have to.
-o-
Six months after that meeting, Beka had mostly quelled those guilty pangs, and a year later, she discovered Darjella's larger plan.
"You're looking for a replacement?" she asked incredulously, lifting her sunglasses to peer at Darjella's supine form. They were enjoying a weekend at a very exclusive spa, La Porte d'Argent, and were currently engaged in absorbing what the spa literature purported to be the most healthful starshine in the Known Worlds.
"Not until I found you," came the sleepy reply. "It'd never occurred to me before, but when we met… it just hit me. You can go far, Beka. It's more clear to me than ever, and…" she paused to yawn, "I'm amazed to discover that I don't feel like standing in your way." Darjella stretched luxuriantly and turned to lie on her stomach. "I'm thinking of buying a lifetime membership to La Porte, along with a little ship and a few pieces of prime real estate, then letting go all but my favorite few bodyguards."
Beka gaped. "But I'm just a pilot. I don't know anything about…" she shrugged helplessly.
"Running the farm?" One of Darjella's quirks was the great amusement she took in calling her criminal enterprise 'the farm'. It was so pervasive among her employees that Beka found herself using the term; it was, after all, a safe word to bandy around with associates.
"If I asked you what I should do about that annoying Nightsider collective carving up Triangulum at their leisure, what would you say?"
Beka threw her hands up in exasperation. "I don't know! Buy a few of 'em off, turn 'em against each other. I have no idea how you would go about accomplishing any of that." She paused and then continued in a thoughtful tone. "Don't Nightsiders eat their siblings?"
"Exactly! And yes, they do. Now, if I asked you what I should do about Marlyn Enneston harassing some of my people, what would you say?"
Bright anger flared inside Beka at the name, and brief visions of a good old-fashioned breaking of knee caps danced in her brain, tempting her away from the correct answer.
"Enneston's a bully, but he's not completely stupid or completely unconnected. At most, you could blast his ship while he's out shaking down our guys. Show him we mean business, but keep it businesslike." Oh God. When had she started thinking of Darjella and her people as 'us'?
"See? You know what's going on at your level and probably a little above. When you're in a position to shut down overdressed rodents, you'll know what to do, and you'll know how. The details will come with time."
They lay in silence for awhile, basking in the dry heat and fragrant air. "The only variable I can't predict," Darjella continued, "is your conscience. Farming isn't for the faint of heart, it's a dirty business, et cetera. None of this is news to you."
"No," Beka replied faintly.
She fell quiet again and thought. She allowed herself to really think about her father for the first time in a year. She saw him – vital, funny, a bullshitter with the best of them. On a screen inside her skull, she watched him fall from not quite perfect to perfectly abysmal. And she saw him at the end, replayed every excruciating detail she could scrounge up, and realized when she was finished that she was tired of watching those scenes.
So tired. She was done with all that. Slowly burning in the sun on that lounge chair, she finished atoning for her father's mistakes. Rafe was his own man, she added for good measure, free to repeat history or not, as he liked, and she knew that he had known this for years. She let him go, absolved him if she could not quite forgive their abandonment.
When she opened her eyes, Darjella was gone, and her front was burned a violent red. She winced as she stood and tottered back to her suite to slather on some cooling ointment. A spa employee passed her in the hall and quietly inquired if he could show her to the infirmary, where a medic could heal the sunburn in half a minute. She did not stop to think but accepted his help. She was tired of enduring unnecessary pains when the means to heal herself were within her grasp.
The next day, Darjella introduced Beka to her first full-time bodyguard, a hulking Nietzschean with long hair and more weapons on his person than Beka could believe. On some Nietzscheans, the bone blades – often encased in jeweled sheaths – looked like glued-on ornamentation, but like everything else on him, his blades added to the shadow of menace that surrounded him.
"Beka Valentine, Tyr Anasazi. You'd better size each other up now, and get it out of the way. If everything works out, this is going to be the only person you can trust, including me. Of course," she added carelessly, "one of you might be planning to sell the other to the Nightsiders. Trust takes a while."