Starship pilot who has more titles than they have money
The world is a strange place and a hard place, and Oblique One Running Mara Heavy Snow has made it her survival strategy to know things. The system of Catalogue World Sing-Cold-Calamitous Syncopated Knock is a great trade nexus, its deepnavigational properties fortuitous, traffic constant. There is much to know, and much to profit by it.
When a ship comes in, almost too small to bear the machineries for deepnavigation, with an apparent crew of one; and when it is immediately placed under impound by the dockmaster, for lack of funds to pay its own berthing fees; this says three things, to Heavy Snow. Firstly, it is the personal escape vessel of some high Apparat; secondly, it has no such person on board, or they'd have some portable family wealth to pay their way, or in the direst emergency, connections to fall back on to have such things smoothed away; and thirdly, therefore, it is stolen.
Heavy Snow kicks over some bureaucratic traces. The high Apparat, if you steal from them, almost always find out. Unless you are close to equals with them, and your feud simply becomes epicyclic to the Apparat's already-constant machinations, consequence will find you. Being a bystander and a knowledge broker can be leveraged to profit from their leisurely searches. It can't hurt, should time prove her correct, to be the only definite source who can say: yes, I have records of that.
Heavy Snow pays it no particular further mind.
On the morning of the third day since the little ship made portfall, a woman arrives at Heavy Snow's door. She is vitiligo-patterned, stands as straight-backed as a knife. Her clothes are costly, plain black, their cut severe. She is seven months pregnant.
"I have been directed here," she says. She sounds brittle and bitten-off. Heavy Snow imagines, from her voice, the woman spending years simmering dry, until all her juice and lushness is dust and angular salt. "I am seeking the one called the Spider in the White Steel Palace."
Heavy Snow is wearing a mask, as she prefers for face-to-face meetings; the cold white porcelain, stylised cheekbones, and fathomless black eyepits of an Apparat Third Military infantry tactical datasphere. It is not activated; it rarely is. She has no need for processing or visualisation beyond the reach of her insystem or some trusted, subcontracted mechself. But it maintains, in peoples' minds, the line she draws around her feet: no closer than this, and no sentiment to ever cross it. The Spider in the White Steel Palace deals in data, and in money, nothing else.
"You have found me," Heavy Snow says.
"I have no money and nobody to help me," the woman says, on Heavy Snow's doorstep, cutting direct to the heart of her own problems without mercy for herself, or any request for Heavy Snow's. "I have a ship. If somebody can pay the port fees on it, that can be made useful until such a time as they are repaid. There is nothing of value on the ship. I have nothing else of value."
"I sell data," Heavy Snow says.
"By reputation, you are cunning enough to do more than simply wait for it to fall into your lap, then wait for a buyer," the woman says. "If you know of someone who would profit by having a ship at their disposal, no doubt they would consider a finder's fee."
"This is a port," Heavy Snow says. "There are many ships."
She doesn't say: you are asking me to find a criminal who will indenture you without escape. She doesn't say this, because she thinks the woman is probably also cunning enough to understand what she's asking.
She is clearly not a ship-thief with any good plan for it. And that means she is either a rank amateur, or — and Heavy Snow contemplates the fine make of her clothing again — someone who took a knowingly terrible avenue to flee, because she might not receive even its like again.
"I think this is not to be discussed in the street," says Heavy Snow.
The place from which Heavy Snow does business is a warehouse, and inside it a standard modular cargo container, and inside that she has installed a soundproofed office. A mechself indwells her office, having contracted her to locate some criminal location for it to fill, to bypass decades of frugality and service indwelling a municipal maintenance servo to earn its self-extension to larger hardware. Again, a short-term decision with an inbuilt doom; without a legitimate chain of self-extensions, it becomes exponentially harder for it to ever move further up in the world. The ultimate in scale and complexity — shipself — is out of reach for almost every mechself anyway; but its law-abiding peers might, in some future century, move up via infrastructure maintenance servo classes to indwell a port office or shipyard.
Heavy Snow had been upsizing her operation, at the time. Outsourcing the security apparatus of her office space had been a convenient arrangement; and no matter how desperate for the fruits, nobody is eager to deal with mechself-traffickers.
"What do you expect to do," Heavy Snow says, with the woman inside her dark office, "if nobody cares to pay the price of your ship's ongoing port fees, for the services of a lone, heavily pregnant person with only a small vessel."
"Whatever becomes necessary," the woman says, still in her bleak and bitten way, and Heavy Snow believes her. Imagines her, for a second, vanishing into one of the port's flesh-houses. Tries not to imagine her, swollen-bellied and broken, inside it.
"I will make some enquiries," Heavy Snow says, and generates a number of external connections to satisfy the woman, should she be looking for such things with her own insystem; and Heavy Snow closes her eyes inside the mask and meditates for long minutes, then shuffles funds from one of dozens of scattered accounts to cover the ship's fees and generate a cash token. Leaning forward, she taps the woman's arm, transferring that to her.
"An advance, for your expenses," she says. "Instructions will be forthcoming, when your employer has some. Please tell me your name, for them."
"Ion Twelve Horizon," the woman says, and Heavy Snow's mouth floods with spit, stomach clenching, as she completes the rest herself.
Ion Twelve Horizon Yafa Song Aloft.
Ion Twelve Horizon, reclusive wife of Paramanuensis First Grade Five Arc Rising.
Ion Twelve Horizon, third in line to the seat overseeing mechself indwelt-Parahandrar, largest freestanding ship foundry in Apparat space.
Ion Twelve Horizon, Firsthand, Eminence-in-Waiting, Grey Silk Holder of the Mirror, Chasm-Blade of Isonor.
Standing in petty criminal Heavy Snow's petty, criminal little office, without the money for noodles, ready to sell herself to survive a little longer as she runs from — whatever it is she runs from.
Heavy Snow swallows. Several times.
"I would advise," she says, "that you begin to lie about that."
Yo, the second part of Otter's Ink-Coloured Mouse, Thief of Parahandrar, just finished and you should absolutely read the whole thing through for like 20k words of stiletto-deadly prose and atmosphere
