"Six Azimuth Falling?" a falsely bright voice says, as Nene tucks herself crosslegged into a niche. She's seated beside one of the stone-veneer paths wandering around cascading pools moulded directly into the deck plates' shapes.
Nene's throat closes.
She looks up at Hren's new wife, silhouetted against the false-colour sky of the stardome: Glass Chiming Verdant Aran Two Marks. "Please," she pushes out politely. "Pilot Redbat, only."
The woman bobs in apology. "Pilot," she corrects herself, and glances at the small sealed bamboo tray beside Nene, then at the identical one in her own hands; the shipself's daily attempt at providing the communal experience of a human meal. Thankfully its avant-garde period is over, and they have mostly settled into a rotation of popular hits: jasmine rice, today, with delicate vat-grown vegetables found nowhere but within the shipself's own centuries-long hobbyist tinkering — distantly bred and selected cousins of the biosupport vegetation twining up the stardome's own tracery of girders — and wholly artificial morsels of woven protein, crackly and sizzling with micropockets of rich fats, laced with piperine and herbal volatiles. "I understand you are taking your meals apart due to...lingering hard feeling, and I thought, perhaps...."
Nobody welcomes her at the pilot tables either, she means. Both because she is from a planet, and because she is wed to the company's deepnavigator, who exists somewhat outside the command hierarchy proper but therefore, by a pilot's reckoning, firmly on the officers' side of the river; and thirdly because in marrying her, the pilots feel deepnavigator Hren has wronged Redbat, who is one of theirs, even if they don't like her for the time being.
Nene has hesitated for slightly too long, and the woman bobs again. "Simply a thought," she says, and laughs a little in an easy, charming, self-deprecating way, and sets her feet to go elsewhere.
"Please," Nene says, schooling away any desire to sigh. "Glass Chiming Verdant, sit." She inclines her hand to encompass a range of places near and not-so-near, to the other's taste, and ignores the dry hiss of childhood tutoring: classically malformed name, coined no earlier than fifth Concordat as a merchant family affectation. Verdant a later euphemistic replacement to expunge some stain of ambient suspicion; probably a substitution for Militant. Low manners. Broken to the expectation that she grind herself to frictionless powder and throw herself into the bearings of social situations for others' benefit.
A smile of guarded hope. "Accountant Two Marks, surely." Two Marks; solid name, actually. Tasteful. A family with modern aspirations.
"Accountant Two Marks." Nene nods gravely, and seeing her tussle with the tray, shows her the knack of popping open the filmy lid, and the faint geometric fold lines prefabricated into it, the origami spoon it can be made into.
"Ah," Two Marks says, frowning at her crooked and flimsy-seeming result. "I suppose with practice...."
"I've seen worse from pilots who've done it every day," Nene says truthfully, peels back the lid of her own tray, folds it with the automatic fluency of fingers that know their own way. "Here," she says, rounding the bowl out with a practised roll of the pad of her thumb, and with a single gesture she plucks Two Marks's spoon from her tentative hand and holds out the handle of her own.
The faults of the accountant's wife, Nene thinks, trying not to think of long cool hands and dark hair, are not the accountant's fault.
"Thank you!"
Nene silently waves it off, and eats her meal easily enough with the accountant's attempt at a spoon.
"Pilot Redbat, would it be an imposition if I asked whether you could explain...some social niceties?"
Accountant Two Marks has gathered that there are things unspoken in the general chill toward her.
Nene runs a thumbnail over the site of her quiescent brightmark, and sighs a little. "The Apparat is order," she says. "A place for everything, everything in its place, correct in relation to all other things. The mech pilot is outside that. For a reason, of course — the outsider-by-design functions as expansion joints in structures do; there is flex over time, and these figures allow that flex without the structure per se breaking or requiring redesign. But the lack of place, the paradoxical apparent lawlessness...one cannot be both a Paramanuensis and a mech pilot, for example," and she smiles thinly. "There arises a cultivated resentment in both directions. You are Apparat. We are mech pilots. I am afraid part of it is the simple snobbery of the legislated scofflaw."
"No, I understand that," says Two Marks. "There's something else nobody will tell me about."
"Yes," Nene says slowly, and Two Marks's brow wrinkles.
"You don't want to either," she says, as if she'd never considered the possibility. "Oh."
She looks away.
"The deepnavigator," Nene says carefully, "is stranded between the two worlds of the company and the ship, and belongs to a sphere all alone. And, forgive me, I believe that when she is faced with difficulty her immediate response is to pretend there isn't any, and that...may have led her to transgress boundaries in the social contract as viewed by pilots, and then in their eyes to simply ignore having done so, which has not endeared her."
"But you'd rather not say how?"
Nene winces. "I would rather not say how, please," she says. "I'm sorry."
Two Marks looks back at her, squinting a little as if trying to puzzle something out. "Thank you for talking about it at all," she says.
Two Marks is dabbling her fingers in the water of one of the stardome's ponds, watching the small fish dart about.
"Pilot Redbat," she says cautiously.
Nene is still taking little bites of a sweet filled bun the shipmind is experimenting with. It is a little too sweet for her taste, but also it is an excuse to sit a little longer in companionable silence with someone. "Mhm?" she hums.
"When the pirates came aboard, I first saw you with..." Two Marks gestures vaguely towards her own face, "your...."
Nene swallows the last nibble of sticky, slightly cloying paste and licks the tips of her fingers. "The brightmark?" she says. "You're curious."
"I'm sorry," Two Marks begins automatically, and Nene shrugs, dips a fingertip in the water below them, and sketches her nomigram damply on her cheek.
"Oh," Two Marks says in fascinated surprise, and leans closer to stare at the ink suddenly visible, coldly blazing through Nene's skin, proclaiming in formal script the qualifications and duties of a Paramanuensis, along with the mark on her cheek matching her nomigram in her own personal hand, the final touch on the difficulty of forging the identification.
Nene obligingly rolls up her sleeves to the elbow, turns her forearms, showing the bright rubrics and soft ambient amber glow of the skin there, too, kicks off her shoes and points her toes to draw attention to the writing trailing off as it descends from ankle to the top of her foot.
"Where does it—" Two Marks begins, then bites her lip. "Oh, that's a forward question, isn't it."
"Oft heard by budding lawyers in the bars near the great universities," Nene agrees. "The traditional answer is that perhaps you could find out, by buying one more drink." She pats her cheek dry enough for the brightmark to no longer detect her signature on her skin. "Although you have no use for advice on picking up law students, of course," she adds, and waits for Two Marks to start saying something earnest to let her mouth twitch impishly.
The accountant laughs in surprise and flicks water at her.
"What's that you're doing?" Two Marks says curiously, and Nene stops, lifts brush from page, and resists the urge to put it all aside where it can't be seen.
"Only calligraphic exercises," she says. "Vain of me, but I used to receive compliments on my bold hand, and it grieves me to lose it."
"Nomigrams?" Two Marks says. "I don't read them, but isn't that—" her lips move a little as she visibly works to decompose one of the examples on the page. "Falling, there? Six? That one must be you."
"It is." Nene gently tears the top page off the block of thick paper and sets it aside. "Do you know yours?"
"Oh, no," Two Marks says dismissively. "I haven't the education."
Nene purses her lips. "You must be conducting your trade remotely, now," she says. "I can't imagine you'll gain new clients from your home world aboard ship, but when we pass through the Buffer Worlds, they adore the trappings of the Apparat. Advertise your services there as a travelling mech company accountant, by means of your nomigram, and they'll beat a path to your door."
Two Marks looks startled, then disproportionately pleased. "I had worried a little about replacing the clients I'm sure to lose over time," she says, and Nene runs her tongue over her teeth, tasting words about the general thoughtlessness of the accountant's wife, then swallows them.
"Here," she says, loading the brush with just the right amount of ink, and swashes a fierce Neoexpression-style rendition of Glass Chiming Militant, refusing to sully her brush with bowdlerisation; besides, the accountant travels with a mech company, why shouldn't it fit? "Something like that — a little more conservative brushwork, perhaps. If you find a logo designer in the Buffer Worlds, they'll be able to work it into proper shape."
Two Marks takes the paper, wide-eyed. "That's so pretty," she says. "Thank you, Redbat."
Redbat stops by the cavernous kidney-shaped chamber of mystifying function which the shipself deems the ship's mess, and picks up the day's food tray from the banks of repurposed organics autofacs; and then, turning around, finds herself accidentally underfoot.
"I'm sorry," she says stiffly, and the deepnavigator laughs awkwardly.
"Oh no," Hren says, "it's all right, I didn't step on you. Picking up lunch to flirt with Aran?" and it is completely unreasonable for Nene to howl in fury and smash the tray of curry over her head.
Nonetheless she finds herself storming out, leaving the deepnavigator stumbled over onto the floor, dripping in sauce and astonishment, and then Nene finds the most obscure corner of the stardome, curls up and cries a little. She knows Hren was joking, however poorly. She is an embarrassment to her name and her company and her Captain, and it's just as well she no longer cares whether she is to her family, too. And now she has no lunch.
It becomes obvious she can't expect any lunch companion, either, which is unsurprising but a leaden weight in her belly. She kicks off her flight jacket and cockpit sarong and shoes and wades into one of the deeper ponds, sinking down and letting the water take her weight until she is submerged up to her nose and can glumly dream that a wish on the correct false-colour star would transform her into a koi. She could nibble pondweed and not care about anything.
"Where are you sitting for lunch, Redbat?" someone says casually the next day, and Nene gingerly accepts the implicit invitation to seat herself with Shaking Leaf and Knock-Knock.
"I don't think I've ever seen you angry before, Redbat," Knock-Knock says admiringly.
"No," Nene says in a papery way, poking unenthusiastically at long strips of some kind of novel vegetable, too chewy and too heavily spiced.
It takes nine days of Nene's fragile acceptance back into the pilots' fold for Two Marks to show her face, and Nene grieves her friendship.
"Pilot?" a wavering voice says behind her, as she works through scheduled quarterly maintenance, the bas-relief datawall simplifying away Koch snowflake arms from the Fault Fractal as she completes standard checks on actuator pressures, fluid reservoir levels, mechanism hysteresis; she halts, withdraws grease-stippled arms from the rangy kinetic linkages of her machine's thigh, raises her head so her eye level skims cautiously over the rim of the opened fairing panel.
"Accountant Glass Chiming Verdant," she says, very carefully.
"No," Two Marks says unhappily, "don't do that. I'd like to talk to you, if — if you'll allow it. When you're not working. I'm sorry, I didn't know when else I could— should—"
"When I finish?" Nene says, trying to sound unhurried.
Two Marks gives her an unsteady smile. Nene drags her teeth over her bottom lip, and tentatively inclines a hand to indicated the padded top of the nearby rolling toolchest. "I do not imagine you've been close to the machines," she says. "If you would like to watch—?"
The rhythm of the work is easily familiar, the machine a place familiarly known, like a tiny hometown. Nene forgets to feel selfconscious, forgets her audience, until she closes the thigh fairing and turns to reach for the correct tool to resecure it; she discovers that Two Marks has quietly unfurled all the tutorial outlines on the datawall to follow along what she has been doing, including the Tools for This Step visual recognition guide. She is leaning back over the edge of the toolchest, a drawer open, already carefully selecting what Nene requires so she can hold it out.
Nene would have had it by now, smooth and automatic and without thought, from long repetition.
"Thank you," she says nonetheless, and finds she means it thoroughly; and works down the knee assembly, the calf, pulls down a cervical SQUID collar from the overhead to tap into her machine, sway its weight to the left, and raise its right leg from the floor for proper access to its two-clawed birdfoot.
"Just to the end of this leg," she says. "I'll finish tomorrow," and Two Marks hums acknowledgment.
They unspokenly coordinate their steps to the quiet of the stardome, and Nene sits with her feet dangling in a pond, leans back on her arms, and softly says, "Here we are."
"Here we are," Two Marks says, and the earlier waver has returned. "...Four years, Redbat? Four years?"
Nene closes her eyes and purses her lips.
"You were so kind to me," Two Marks adds in a quiet, desperate way. "You were so kind in saying that you didn't want to talk about it."
"Perhaps I just didn't want to," Nene says dryly.
"I am so angry," Two Marks says, no more loudly and no less wobbly. "I have told her she should apologise to you, and she won't."
"Hren," Nene says, and no, that is very personal; "your wife— our deepnavigator is conflict avoidant. That thing is a gravity well she has escaped; to apologise would be to swoop back into it on purpose."
"I don't care," Two Marks says stubbornly.
Nene sighs.
"Are you," Two Marks says. "Do you love Hren?" and Nene opens her eyes for that, rolls her neck to give the accountant a firm look.
"I am not going to talk any more about it, please," she says. "...I miss being your friend, Two Marks."
"I miss you, too," Two Marks says.
At lunch, Nene watches from the corner of her eye for the accountant to scurry in and collect a tray; then deliberately catches her eye, inclines her hand, waits.
Two Marks very cautiously sits down next to her, next to Knock-Knock and Shaking Leaf and Very Roll, and Nene deliberately goes right back to casually discussing the latest things in Twelve-Arms Wrestling league, and it's not the same as the carefree quiet under the stardome, but it's not nothing.
"Red Bat?" says a very cautious voice, and Nene looks up from her brush, where she is attempting to torture nomigrams alluding to fish into a metaphor about the stardome's quiet contemplations. She was never much of a poet, and hopes never to need the skill of Apparat high allusion again in earnest, but she cannot quite bring herself to altogether stop a lifetime of diligent drilling and still occasionally tries.
"Deepnavigator," she says, favouring her with a crushingly sceptical look. She has never seen Hren in this area of the ship before; she ruthlessly cuts off a stray contemplation of how she would look, lying elegantly on the pillowy terraces of oxygenation moss.
Hren hangs her head and shuffles her feet.
"Oh, get on with it or go away," Nene tells her.
"Aran took my heart," Hren says fervently. "That's true and real. I knew it would hurt you."
"Mm," Nene says, and swishes her brush in her little pot of cleaning water.
"I knew it would hurt me to hurt you to your face, and I knew it would hurt you more if I didn't...but I chose that. I did. I'm a coward and sometimes I'm horrid."
Hren is not a bad person, Nene chooses to remember charitably. "You are," she agrees matter-of-factly.
"I'm sorry, Nene," Hren says squeakily.
It's an astonishment, how much easier Nene's next breath comes, just for that. Just for that. She taps droplets off the brush and lays it down.
"Will you say you forgive me?" Hren asks humbly.
"You have an entire wife," Nene says. "You don't need it, or anything from me. And I'm not sorry for covering you in curry, either," and Hren tilts her head and looks at Nene and considers her peaceable tone.
"You do forgive me," she decides.
"I'm not saying it," Nene tells her.
They take a contract to clear an ancient feral mechself out of a rockbelt; the locals are trying to mine there, but it's territorial and unpredictable and won't listen to anyone. Leftover materiel from some long-forgotten war, perhaps. It's cunning, misleads them as to its speed and strength, hides and stalks and ambushes, lunging with scything claws. It's outnumbered, and that's really all it takes, but it gets in its share.
Nene has to coax her machine back home at half speed, spiky with icicles of hydraulic sap, its usual responsiveness gone sluggish and laggy through the control collar. It feels like skimming along the surface of sleep, the machine cold and wanting to rest. It's far from the worst they've taken, but you can't call a sure thing until you're sure; it's a relief to be back on the deck.
Her machine unwraps and she stiffly climbs out, into waiting blankets and a handbowl of piping hot broth. Tall Kettle the medic slaps gel leafs on the backs her hands and her forehead and makes his usual disapproving noises until she finishes the broth and stops shivering. "All right," he says grudgingly. "Leave those on until they dissolve into your skin, we'll log the tail data just to make sure. Off you go."
"Thank you," Nene says, and walks slowly off the flight deck.
Ouside, leaning against the observation shutters, Two Marks is wrapped tightly inside her own arms, biting her lip.
"Hello," Nene says, finding a weary smile. "I'm sorry, were we meeting? I must be late."
"No," Two Marks says. "I just — worried."
Nene gives her a creaky little bob. "My apologies," she says. "Just in need of a bath and a nap."
Two Marks hesitates, then unfolds her arms and hesitantly touches the back of her hand to Nene's face. "You're still cold," she says, then, "you have a dangerous job," as if that's only just become real to her.
Nene wants to say: It's alright, or perhaps: Paramanuensis was worse.
She touches her own hand to Two Marks's outstretched upper arm, instead. "Home safe," she says simply.
Still Two Marks's frown does not dissolve. "I want," she says, and stops, and starts again, "After your bath and nap, would you come to dinner? With Hren and I."
Nene is not too cold or tired to hook an eyebrow to the sky.
"Please?" Two Marks says, making big worried eyes.
"You are overdoing it," Nene tells her, and sighs. "This will be so awkward, Two Marks, you know it. Only because you're my friend."
She digs out a bottle of wine she's been keeping in case of an occasion worth keeping a bottle of wine for, goes and knocks at Hren's quarters and is oddly relieved to find the deepnavigator wearing the same faint dubious air when she answers the door.
"Is this all right?" she murmurs.
Hren looks through her lashes and gives her a cryptic smile. "Aran was worried about you," she murmurs back. "I'm all right if you are."
"Is that you?" Two Marks calls happily from Hren's little kitchen.
They drinks wine and eat steamed dumplings and play a few hands of cards. It is, Nene thinks, nice. Perhaps she could get used to having them as friends, as a unit.
"Oh dear," Two Marks says cheerily. "Look, that's all the wine gone. Just a minute, I'll get the glasses out of the way in the kitchen...." and in the lull, Hren stretches and sighs.
"I didn't think you'd ever be back here," she says quietly. "You're good company, Nene."
"Mm," Nene says, and looks at her, and frowns. "Have you — were you wearing that all evening?"
Hren is wearing plum-coloured lipstick. Hren only wears plum for it to be kissed off.
"You shouldn't have let me interrupt—" Nene says, making to rise, and Hren holds her hand out.
"Please sit," she sighs.
Nene narrows her eyes. "If you're thinking you could steal a kiss from me while your wife's not looking, you'll learn more about Apparat duelling culture than you'd like," she warns darkly.
"Oh, Nene." Hren shades her eyes with her hand and laughs, in a weird strangled kind of way. "Nene, lovely, no. This is all Aran's evening."
Nene is still glowering at her when Two Marks sits on Nene's other side, close enough to lean against her, and Nene looks around quickly, suddenly regretting the wine; Two Marks is smiling at her, and her lips definitely weren't a shimmering complementary jade before.
"What," Nene says, and it comes out as a squeak, and she can't even finish.
"Would it be dreadful to ask if I may call you Nene?" Two Marks says softly.
Nene stares for what feels like a long time. "I don't think that would be dreadful, Aran," she says unsteadily, voice barely coming out of her, and lets Hren's wife tangle their fingers together.
"I thought today about the danger of your job," Aran Two Marks says. "I thought what I might regret, if you were hurt. I have a wife and I love her, but I am greedy, Nene. I will not regret asking for more."
Nene shivers. "More?" she says.
"Mm." Aran tilts her head in, as if telling secrets. "I want to know how far the brightmark goes," she murmurs. "I want to see you in the dark, glowing like a city at night." Closer still, and her voice even lower. "I want to walk that city with my wife."
Nene gasps for breath, and after a moment she starts to disentagle their hands.
"I told you," Hren says quietly, "she doesn't forgive me that much," and Nene reaches behind her to blindly grab for a handful of the deepnavigator's sleeve.
"I need an eyeliner pencil," she says shakily, "if you have one...."
At an entirely reasonable time of morning, the Captain chirps Nene's insystem to report to the bridge with her report on yesterday's action; and she scrambles, yelping, out of the epicentre of a warm skein of limbs, into last night's clothes, and desperately finger-combs her hair as she dashes all the way there.
"Pilot Redbat," the Captain says sternly.
"Captain!"
"I would usually have things to say about one of my pilots arriving late and covered in a married woman's lipstick."
Nene makes a horrified noise and makes as if to cover a lip print, confused somewhat by having no idea where she should be doing so.
"However, unless the deepnavigator is much less lazy in the sheets than on the bridge, I doubt she's doing costume changes midway through. Howling ancestors, Redbat." He shakes his head. "How much trouble does one pilot need?"
Nene is sure she will never stop blushing. "Still less danger than lawyering, Captain!" she says.