The shipself wants to visit a particular shipyard for some kind of anniversary — which is to say, the tricentennial of having been drydocked there, and apparently it maintains a cordial relationship with the mechself indwelt-dock structures, so they're making a series of jaunts through the sticky weirdness of deep, most everyone submerged in the tinny almost-sleep of delta wave induction. A select few on the bridge — the Captain, and a few officers — awake with sensory baffles on their insystem, and Hren, with her deepnavigator's para-wired sensorium, full awake and synaethesically tasting the sharp mirror-spikes of stars in the shallow and curving the ship on gentle, efficient, gradient-assisted slaloms through that unmappable space. The shipself can do it alone, of course, but the deepnavigator relationship is traditional.
They bob up into their designated approach vector to Catalogue World Sleep-Green-Furious Arpeggiated Chime, as their voyage tacks along a bureaucratic isocline that grants them sufficient official recognition to move unhindered, and doesn't incur any quarantines, background checks, or undue bribery to continue. Charting through these hazards is the other officers' job, not the deepnavigator's.
Sometimes, the ideal courses align; sometimes not. This voyage is kind, requiring only a few compromises on choice of port; this is one of them.
"It's fine," Nene Red Bat had said, sitting in Hren's rumpled bed brushing her long hair, with Hren's wonderful curly-headed sleeping wife, Two Marks, using her thigh as a pillow. "That is a perfectly good port, Hren."
She said this with her customary liquid tranquility, poise to make your heart skip, even just awoken and not even breakfasted. She looks like a temple carving, the immortalised symbol for this story has a beautiful woman in it.
If lies were mech cores, Nene's heatsinks would melt, Hren thinks, lounging against the doorframe with a glass of water instead of buttoning her shirt and pulling on sandals. Everyone has always known the deepnavigator is scandalous and lazy, so there's no cost in savouring the morning and being a whisker late onto the bridge. Hren's wife and their best girl are in a nest of blankets together; of course she is paused to look, she doesn't have a heart made of paperwork.
Nene rolls her shoulders, perhaps aware she under scrutiny for more than being unfairly attractive. "There are stars you'd rather not approach too close, in the deep," she says. "And there are regions of the Apparat about which I feel similarly."
"Hm," Hren says, and sips her water and enjoys the fluttering weakness that pretty women make her feel.
Nobody ever successfully made Redbat say anything she didn't feel like.
They take the orbital tether to the world's surface, because Two Marks is still new to the travelling life and finds the idea delightful, and stroll around a sunny marketplace.
Hren would rather lounge in the shade with a tasting assortment of jewelled sorbets, but she takes delight in walking with Two Marks, her wife's excitement over simply being somewhere new, and her marvelling at all the things here that can't be bought on her own world. Two Marks wears a simple sundress and hat; Hren, the stereotypical silks and leather vest of the Peninsular Stars, not above playing up her origin beyond the Apparat.
Nene roams around, seemingly paying mind only to the goods and people of the market, but nonetheless always managing to effortlessly be within easy sight. Sometimes as she flits past, one or other of them will catch her hand and keep it for a while; sometimes they keep her between them, each of her hands captured and twined in theirs. She is shimmering, oilslick-coloured resplendent in the scaly mech-fabric of her cockpit sarong, with its combat-resistant weave and its environmental control, no doubt keeping her cool.
"It's practical," she'd said, and Hren had nodded.
Nobody with a brightmark ever made an unconsidered choice of presentation. Nene may as well stand on a box in the market and shout, "Hello! I am a mech pilot!" But Hren is a foreigner, and perhaps Nene doesn't think Hren understands that very well, and in any case: Nene is allowed to wear whatever she likes.
Two Marks is hovering over a display of turquoise jewellery — and Hren has just realised that she means to pick a gift for Nene, and become much more interested — when Nene arrives so silently that even Two Marks, with her uncanny sense for the pilot's nearness, doesn't reflexively reach out for her hand. Instead, Nene touches them both at once, lightly between the shoulder blades, and leans close behind them.
"I think there's going to be trouble," she says softly. "I think you should both go back to the ship, please."
Hren immediately ducks her head, puts her hands in her pockets, and turns to go; but Two Marks clutches her elbow, looking around wide-eyed. "What do you mean, trouble?" she says. "Are you coming?"
"I don't know," Nene says. "In a little."
Hren reaches out tentatively, and snags the pilot's sleeve. "Nene?" she says carefully, and Nene gives her a startled, sideways look.
"There are public order officials circulating," she says. "I've seen them stop two pickpockets and break up a fight."
"That's their job?" Hren says. Obviously public order servants are public order servants, and Hren doesn't usually bother with Apparat planets, but....
Two Marks inhales meaningfully. "They aren't paid very much," she explains. "That is...unusually diligent."
"Unless they know they're being watched by higher officials," Nene says. "Nobody ever looked indulgent to public disorder by arresting mech pilots."
Hren covers Two Marks's hand on her elbow with her own. "Then why are you staying?"
"I don't have anything firm to report to the Captain yet." Nene thumbs her cheek, where her brightmark is. "And can get myself out of trouble, if need be."
Two Marks doesn't move, and Hren, emboldened by her wife, doesn't either; Nene sighs and leans closer.
"I do not give orders to people I love," she says, very low and deliberate and unusually hard, then softens. "I would like you both, please, to go to the ship."
"We will do that," Two Marks concedes, while Hren's heart flutters and she scarely knows which to look at.
The scarely make it on board the orbital thread; as the thread-car begins to ascend, they see a cordon being whisked around the terminal entrances, and people's papers being checked.
"Oh no," Hren murmurs. "We'd better speak to the Captain—" but that proves entirely unnecessary, because the Captain is already raging by the time they're topside.
"Where's Redbat?" he demands.
"She's downside, Captain," Hren says, squirming. "She said she thought something was going to happen, but she didn't have anything to go by to tell you yet and wanted us on the ship—"
"Well, now look!" He makes an angry gesture that unreels in Hren's insystem into the amalgamated sign of the planetary seal and the head administrators' nomigram, followed by a scroll of text.
"Impounded?" she says, voice thin with horror. "They surely can't! They can't a shipself—"
"I'd ask our resident lawyer," the Captain bites out, "but — read on, deepnavigator."
"Kidnapping?" Hren's voice goes higher. "They say we kidnapped this— oh— oh no— Six Azimuth Falling—"
"What," says Two Marks.
Two public order officials flank Nene as they enter the planetary head administrator's offices, led by a magistrate who scowled at the first sight of Nene and hasn't stopped.
That is fine. Nene hasn't stopped scowling since she was stopped in the street and asked for her identification, then asked to accompany first the one official, then two.
The offices are arranged in a long, gentle slope, with steps up to the inner double doors of each, which are also the outer double doors of the next. A literal climb to the heart of power. The planetary high administrator is moving slowly about their third office, enamelled watering can in hand, gently watering a dozen cultivars of orchid that ornament the room, ær brightmark softly supplementing the sunlight from the huge bay window.
"I am the planetary high administrator," æ says, gently examining the leaves of one slightly wilted plant and seemingly not sparing the slightest attention for anything else, "Meridian Holding Sevenfold Xia Hands Folded. Could you, please, introduce yourself?"
Nene huffs the sharpest sigh, contemptuously licks her thumb, and scrawls her own brightmark to life. Both public order officials quail; only the magistrate, standing in front of her, toadlike smug in having apprehended someone given to him only as a name to apprehend, is oblivious to the sudden shift in the room's apparent status quo.
"Hm," says Meridian Holding Sevenfold, and waters another orchid. "Hello, cousin."
The magistrate stiffens and turns his head just enough to peer at her out of the corner of his eye, then stiffens even more.
"Thank you, magistrate," the head administrator says kindly. "That will be all," and he and his subordinates leave as quickly as they politely can.
Nene angrily smears her brightmark off with the heel of her hand. "I wrote," she says.
"Hm," her cousin says. "A datestamped signature lodged in the sending queue of some public commshop every six months, arranged to be sent on a six month delay? I think some people expected a little more."
"Some people," Nene says coldly, "should be grateful for that."
Her cousin inclines ær head neutrally. "Lucky it's only me you've run into," æ says, and Nene growls in her throat, earning herself an actual, startled glance. "Oh! Oh. You're not going to — be violent, are you?"
Nene's cockpit sarong has a number of offensive functions. She has a splinter pistol at the small of her back, two Devouring Hands tucked in her sarong, and a piezocatalysed slap-knife curled softly around the top of her thigh like a garter belt, and has been drilled in ship-boarding technique on top of her childhood's self-defence training.
She also knows perfectly well that her cousin could match her hand-to-hand, will be somehow armed, and that the mechself indwelt-administative centre is equipped to contain or obliterate threats. She is merely being insulted for lack of restraint.
"Fortunate," Nene says, letting the growl run through it, under silky poison, and Meridian Holding Sevenfold sighs.
"Cousin Red Bat, no, please," æ begins, and is interrupted by the mechself indwelt-there, chirping both their insystems.
Please excuse. Shipself indwelt-Goatfish Eats the Sun is calling for the head administrator?
"Oh," says Nene's cousin, eyebrows rising and pinching together, somewhat consternated. "Please."
Hello, the shipself chirps them. Hello, mechself indwelt-administrative centre. Hello, head administrator Meridian Holding Sevenfold. Hello, Pilot Redbat.
"Hello, ship," Nene says.
"This is a rare honour," Meridian Holding Sevenfold says.
I am a shipself constructed in the Second Concordat, the shipself says. Noble houses, older and more powerful then than yours now, fought wars with one another for merely the chance to build the mechself indwelt-fabricator the size of a moon which joyfully ate itself to nothing to make me from its own stuff. Many of them no longer exist. Some of them are so lost to history that no memory or record remains of them anywhere. Several were sentenced to this at the hands of Apparat censor-magistrates for total disgrace in the eyes of society. Three met this fate because I decided for them to suffer it, and made it so.
There is a silence.
"That is a magnificent threat," Meridian Holding Sevenfold says, carefully and politely.
You've made my deepnavigator's wife cry, the shipself says. I've never had an accountant before, I don't want her to cry. I would also like my mech pilot back.
"Oh no," Nene says, even before taking gratifying notice of the alarmed and astonished look her cousin is directing at her. "Please tell her I am quite all right."
Two Marks says to tell you 'Four years' and not to tell lies to her, the shipself says, and Nene covers her face with both hands and coughs out a dismayed laugh.
"Oh no," she says.
"Shipself, there is no need for any unpleasantness, please," Meridian Holding Sevenfold says. "There is simply some...miscommunication to be smoothed away. My family were perturbed by an unusual contract filed in my cousin's name, resulting in the capture of some notorious pirates; I understand there is a reward to be collected for their apprehension, but some confusion over who exactly it's due to—"
"Right of first refusal to the shipself," Nene says immediately, still behind her hands, "else the company," and schools her expression enough to drop her arms to her sides.
Meridian Holding Sevenfold winces minutely and delicately, in a way that says Nene is perfectly correct, and any difficulty interpreting things has been disingenuously fabricated; not that Nene needs to be told so. "Hm," æ says. "You see, Cousin Red Bat...Grandmother Dragon-Dragon might have been led to believe that your absence was less committed than has become apparent."
"That," Nene says austerely, tucking her schadenfreude away close to her heart for later warmth, "is neither my doing nor my problem."
"Hm," her cousin says dismally.
I would like my mech pilot back, the shipself says.
"Of course," Meridian Holding Sevenfold says. "Cousin, please, you don't think any of this was my idea? Grandmother wanted your calligraphic talents for some new house branding exercise, and your mother had — obscured the extent of your, ah. Abdication. And so things may have been muddied in the aftermath of that?"
"Hm," Nene says. "If the house would like some work done, they can contact my Captain to discuss a contract with the company for services."
The Captain is very excited about the kidnapping charge, the shipself says.
"Ah," Nene's cousin says, flinching, and meets her eyes. They look at each other in silence for a few seconds, then Nene conspicuously licks her thumb and re-lights her brightmark.
"Shipself," she says pleasantly, as Meridian Holding Sevenfold wilts. "Tell me all about that, please."