“Timni!” an old acquaintance — another ship captain — says casually, sauntering up as she waits in the harbormaster’s office of the latest stop. “Good to see you. How are you? Good, good. I was just about to grab some grilled fish sticks; you want to come?”
“Oh well,” Timni says weakly, waving a hand at the chatterer leaning on the desk and flirting with the harbourmaster, holding her up. “I would—”
The excuse is a relief. Timni recognises the twinkling eye of someone with questions.
“Oh, don’t worry!” her fellow captain says genially, and grabs the papers from her hand. “Hey! Hey, sir! Can you give Timni a stamp on her documents? Yes, yes that’s right — yes, which berth is it, Timni? — there we are—” and so Timni ends up towed along and loitering near a food stall, clutching a hot roll filled with pan-charred greens and a chewy puck of shaped fishmeat, a pouch of local soft drink in her other hand and a wincing smile of unwilling gratitude on her face.
“I hear you’re travelling with a fancy gun-henry,” her acquaintance says, and waggles eyebrows at her.
“Oh,” Timni says, vague and meek, and takes a big bite of fish roll to save her from having to say anything else for a bit. She gives an ambiguous shrug, chewing slowly.
The Empress mostly doesn’t bother Timni’s attempts at trade deals, any more. She’s too busy striding down the gangplank onto each new port’s docks and cutting a dangerous figure into the distance, dust swirling in her wake, hatted and face-scarfed, beaded poncho rattling and glittering.
Roaming gun-henries advertise their terrible dangerousness, sometimes, with ribbons trailing from the grip of their weapons. Gilt-bordered for bounties, plain for killings unmotivated by profit; artery-red for other — possibly less-sanctioned — murderers brought down, poison-green for various purveyors of physical cruelty, white for mass endangerment (arsonists or toxin-dumpers on space stations, say). Black ribbons are for other gun-henries — or Omnijanissaries, if one is criminal enough to do so and bold enough to brag. Other colours, Timni’s not even sure about.
Timni largely doesn’t ask about the dismaying multicoloured proliferation adorning the Empress. Timni would rather not know. What Timni does know is that the Empress seeks out this new line of work wherever they land, is paid handsomely for what she does, conceals a dizzying and ever-growing array of weapons about her, and is gathering a reputation.
Timni would also rather not know about the reputation. Timni would rather be far away from it.
“They say she’s very impressive,” Timni’s acquaintance says, smirking.
Timni makes a dispirited noise through her mouthful of fish.
“I said to myself, Timni certainly likes them…impressive.” The other captain takes a cheery bite of their own, and keeps talking with their mouth full. “They say she saw an Omnijanissary beating a shopkeeper’s son on Kifona Prime to make them pay protection money, and she threw the pig through a front window of the barracks, stuck on his own spear like a kabob—”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Timni says hurriedly, looking furtively around at whoever might overhear. As much as possible, she doesn’t know. She does know that the Empress came back aboard at Kifona full of seething rage at the corruptibility of the Empire’s spear-wielding hands, concocting the fragments of some self-soothing explanation that her own betrayal was the result of the Empire’s ground-up irrectitude, an upward-creeping taint originating in the little and the low, the moral stain of — well, of people like Timni, whose existence and lax conduct so tarnishes and corrodes the great wheels of Imperial function that they deviate from their allotted destiny of upholding the Empress and all other rightful things in the rightful places.
Timni is more disinclined than ever to disagree, now that the Empress has taken to killing people with her own hands. Timni is little and low, and self-admittedly of no quality; she is the definition of a person who will leave the Empire a little less grubby when disposed of.
“Not like you to sport with anti-Imperial agitators,” her acquaintance says, and Timni chokes a little, eyes watering as much from sudden terror and dismay as from inhaling fragments of roll.
“They’re saying — no,” she croaks, fumbling with the drink pouch to soothe her throat. “Oh no, they can’t say that about her!” She stares at the rest of the food in her hand, feeling too sickened to contemplate ever eating again. “I’m going to take my last breaths under an Omnijanissary’s fists,” she tells it in numb dismay, voice rough and wobbly.
“Oh, hardly,” the other captain scoffs. “Don’t be such a fraidy-mouse, Timni, you can’t think the Jans spend all day lurking on corners to beat people for saying boo to the Empire!”
Timni makes a little noise that’s easy to pass off as a painful cough, thinking dizzily that she cannot explain that the Empress will have Timni arrested herself, the very moment she has the seat of Empire rightfully back beneath her buttocks, for allowing such a reputation to cling to her. Timni can exactly picture her scowling face about it already.
“Life has so far rewarded me with an anxious and pessimistic mien,” she croaks instead, and wretchedly coughs some more.
