Ghosts in the System

[The_gladiator]

Lights tore the room apart in stuttering bursts, a visual mess that would have been a riot if it had been sound. The sound was already a riot. Bass hit like a fist in the ribs and called itself music. Around it moved the usual collection of armed riffraff: Blackstars, pirates to a man, steel and sidearms under party clothes because Lord Gunther liked his celebrations loud and unsupervised. Captain wasn’t enough for him. Lord of the gang was the title that stuck, and what the lord wanted, the lord got.


Captain Brendan Becker pressed his fingers to his temples before he caught himself. He did not do discomfort in public. Imperturbable was the face the crew knew. Tonight the week had been too long, the missions too stacked, and the noise was winning. He could sit a bar. He could put away an ale after honest work. This was neither. For a rare second he wished he ran the Blackstars instead of standing second. He would have told the DJ to kill the feed and lived with the consequences.


To the systems they were partners: G and B Star Way Shipping, a transport company large enough to look legitimate, plus the pilot’s club most independent captains paid dues to. Country club of old Earth, except the members flew freighters instead of swinging clubs. Under that, the truth sat quiet. Star Way moved real cargo in real volume. That volume was the shield. The IGA had been sniffing for years and come away with circumstance and nothing that would hold. Mercenary contracts were not illegal under Intergalactic Authority law. Loyalty inside the crew was. They did not talk to outsiders.


Becker took another pull of the ale and frowned. The good stuff had run out a week ago. Argus Prime still sat behind an embargo, which only made the run more profitable and the beer here more like amber piss. He drank it anyway and let his gaze go back to her.


Danica Caite. That was the name on the papers. He used it because the crew used it, and because professional indifference required a label. He did not believe it was hers. He had spent favors and leaner methods than favors. She did not exist in IGA records. That alone was not rare this far from old Earth — fringe births, ship-brats, people the Authority never bothered to count. What was rare was the rest of it. No one outside the house that had recommended her could confirm a single story attached to that name. She had arrived with letters and documents. Gunther had hired her on the spot, and Becker was reasonably sure it had more to do with full breasts, long legs, and a tight ass than anything in the file. The references folded into dummy corporations owned by someone he still could not name. Only the escort service itself came back clean — famous, polished, one of the best-known houses in the systems. That cleanliness made the blank years before it worse, not better. A cease-and-desist had already come his way. It had not slowed him down.


He had kept his distance since she signed on a few months ago. Distance hid the watching. It also kept him out of Gunther’s path and let him wear the face of a second-in-command who did not care what the lord’s favorite escort did with her nights. Gunther had told the crew she was available and then claimed her anyway, barely weeks in, and the claim had only tightened. Anyone who reached now did it under unofficial threat of worse than a beating. Becker noted that the arrangement likely cost her. Gunther paid. Tips from a whole crew would have paid better. He did not let the observation become a conversation.


He watched when he could. He dug when he could. He did not trust the name or the smile that came with it. Two days ago he had caught a moment with Brice — not Brice making a play. Brice was too stupid to risk Gunther’s temper. The approach had not looked accidental. Brice held the club books and the crew’s real accounts. The men who drew her attention were never the harmless ones. Still, Becker caught himself. Flirtation was the job. Maybe he was seeing a pattern because he wanted one. Time would sort it. Until then he stayed professionally blank.


He had been off-world for days. Tonight he was back, she was here, and Gunther was already drunk. Sooner or later Gunther would need a bed. After that, Becker meant to see whether the slack showed a seam. He raked a hand through short black hair and tried not to grimace at another drop of the bass. Cold blue eyes, ice-chip still, stayed on her without lingering long enough to look like interest. Night had settled. Escorts worked the night. Ladies of the night, if one wanted to be poetic about it. Whatever she thought she was doing, she would do it soon.


She didn’t give him a seam.


Later she walked the room. She smiled. She looked, to anyone not hunting for it, entirely innocent. He learned nothing useful that night. He went to his own bunk still empty-handed and more irritated than the indifferent face allowed.


The shock came later, from Gunther, sober enough to be dangerous.


Take her to the ball.


The next antibiotic run needed details that would not be said in a warehouse or over an encoded burst. They would be said in a room full of people who thought they were too important to be robbed. Gunther wanted the picture: shipping partner, beautiful woman on his arm, a man who belonged. Becker heard the order and felt the old wrongness settle in his spine.


The suit was worse than the music. It fit. That was the problem. On ship the tribal work showed — winding, flowing arcs over muscle and bone, ink a crew saw in passing and forgot. In the suit it vanished. Only a hint survived at cuff and collar, enough to look like a man with a past and not enough to look like the man he was. If he did not think about it, the rest came easy. Posture. Glass. The small talk that opened doors. He had spent years making sure no one would look at him and see the other life. Thinking about it made the whole performance feel like living someone else’s truth.


His hand rested at the small of her back because that was what the picture required. He schmoozed because the job required it. He smiled at people he would have rather stripped for parts and told himself it was only another run — not a resurrection of anything he had already buried.


He was not sure why dedication to the act had carried him one step further. He heard himself ask her to dance, and held out his hand — an offer, nothing more, should she accept.

 

[WretchRoad]

He wasn’t the only one who felt like he was wearing a disguise.

Usually, she stood in shady orbital hubs in skin-tight skirts and shirts so small she needed half a roll of boob tape just to keep her tits from falling out, because of her past. A past that didn’t mar her skin or etch long lines around her eyes. Danica never got inked, it looked bad on a resume for the kind of jobs she wanted —until this one came back to haul her back down into the dregs of society.

At least she wasn’t lingering along the edge of a bar with her ass out and a cheap drink in her hand. Today, she wore an outfit bought by the good taxpayers under the tight control of the Galactic Authority. Her black dress was edged with star-cut plasma glass that shone with every step she took in three inch heels (she just couldn’t do six) and a shawl of spun spidersilk wrapped around her shoulders.

She’d heard of spidersilk, that it still needed to be extracted by hand. She wondered if it was still spun on old spinning wheels from an Earth long gone or if machines did it now. It occurred to her she didn’t even know how much it cost, it just came to her in a box with the stern implication that she would wear it. The shoes were the only things she switched out, but she was sure her companion didn’t notice a few less sparkles on her ensemble. He definitely wouldn’t care about the shawl, she suspected he didn’t have the culture or the education to notice. But it felt a hell of a lot nicer than a tube top.

Her hair, grown out for the job, just barely grazed her shoulders in soft, dark, artificial curls. It itched every time one of those strands touched her skin, too unfamiliar after two decades of styles meant to make it easier to wear a helmet. Long hair was a luxury, it meant you sent other people outside the ship or the station or the luxury cruise liner to deal with faulty space nonsense. She hoped she looked like one of the inside people now.

Though she knew style wasn’t everything, it was how they held themselves, how they moved, it was the people they noticed and didn’t. The tray of bubbly might as well have drifted over on a drone for all the attention she paid to the waiter.

She took a sip, then blinked her glued-on lashes at the hand offered to her, extended just far enough she caught the etch of swirling ink peeking out from under the cuff. She noticed, and she knew he noticed her notice. Danica gave him a look that said “That’s who you really are,” a fault in her steady gaze, before plastering on a tight, amused smile.

“Of course,” she answered, slipping her hand into his. But he must know she wouldn’t refuse, she had to acquiesce to every reasonable request in her contract. It meant she had to consider what part of keeping up appearances did this charade fall under. She didn't think he wanted to dance, she didn’t want to dance, and they didn’t have to. So why was he pulling her closer?

 

[The_gladiator]

She took the hand.


That was all the permission the picture required. Becker closed his fingers around hers — not tight, not tender, just enough to look like a man who belonged with a woman like this on a floor like this — and turned them toward the open space between the tables. His other hand found the small of her back again, the same place it had been all evening, and he stepped in close enough that the suit and the dress had to share the same air.


He had seen her see the ink.


The look had lasted a fraction too long, then she had covered it with that tight, amused smile and the of course that every escort in the systems learned to say before they learned anything else. He filed it anyway. Most people out here glanced at the cuff and decided he was a man playing tough, some pirate second who had paid for tribal work to look like he had a past. They never read it. The winding arcs were not decoration. They told his bloodline’s history in a language almost no one this far from the core still spoke. That she had looked at them like she might actually recognize the marks — not the toughness, the story — sat wrong in his chest. He kept his face blank. Professional indifference did not flinch at a glance.


The music here was not the Blackstar racket. Strings, something old enough to have a name he refused to use, a tempo that asked for control instead of noise. If he did not think about it, his feet already knew the count. That was the problem. Thinking about it made the whole thing feel stolen. He led anyway, because Gunther had sent him here to look like a partner who could stand in a room full of people too important to rob, and a man who asked a woman to dance and then stood there like a crate was not that man.


He did not pull her closer than the dance required. He also did not leave the space a stranger would have left. Close enough for the picture. Close enough that anyone watching would see G and B Star Way Shipping and not a second-in-command who would rather be in a hold with a crate of embargoed ale.


This was the first time he had made an effort to talk to her. Months of watching, of digging, of wearing the blank face, and he had never given her a conversation to work with. He could not dump a dozen inquiries on her in one turn around the floor. He had to dance the verbal steps the same way he moved through the physical ones — one measure at a time, nothing that looked like an interrogation.


“You dance like you’ve done this before,” he said, voice low enough that it stayed between them, the same even tone he used on a deck when he did not want the crew reading heat. It was not a compliment. It was a probe dressed as small talk. “Or like someone taught you the room came with the dress.”


A beat. Casual, almost idle, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.


“Glad for the night off Gunther, at least?”


Without much conscious thought his hand lifted in the small, precise gesture that asked for a twirl — the kind of cue a ballroom expected and a cargo bay never did. He wondered, in the same unwelcome corner of his mind that knew the steps, how much of this she actually knew. How much high-class etiquette sat under the contract smile. Whether she was more than the escort Gunther had bought.


His thumb did not move at her back beyond that cue. The hint of tribal ink at his cuff stayed where it was, a fault in the disguise she had already spotted. Cold blue eyes stayed on her face the way they stayed on a manifest that did not add up — not lingering like interest, not looking away like guilt.


He waited to see what she did with the step, the space, the question, and the turn. Nothing in his hand or his posture assumed she would give him more than the night required. The dance asked him to ask her for both everything and nothing at all, at the same time.

 

[WretchRoad]

All she learned in her time lingering around the club was that Gunther didn’t know shit and everyone came to Becker for real information. Not that she couldn’t have guessed the guy who called himself “Lord” wasn’t entirely in the loop, but Becker played his cards so tight to the chest she didn’t suspect the buck stopped at him until later in the game. And by then, luckily, Gunther was either bored of her or trusted her enough to pass her along. Whether he thought she was used goods or had earned her place, the result was the same. She got Becker’s ear for the night and his hand on her back.

His touch was more formal than possessive, she noted. Like he wanted everyone to see what he had, but didn’t expect to keep her.

“I dance like I’ve danced before,” she quipped back, too fast. Or maybe it was just right, he didn’t seem like he’d be into cute and bubbly. But would he take a subtle jab? She’d met too many men who couldn’t.

Danica still wasn’t sure what kind of girl he liked, she never could get a read on him, never met a woman at the pilot’s club she could grill for details. Even his dossier came up blank on “relationships.”

Now she had to cover up that misstep before he had a chance to decide he’d rather not have a woman with an attitude at his side, and she’d lose the only In she’d gotten with him so far, since deciding he was the real target.

“I am, glad for a night away from his highness,” she didn’t loosen up on the sarcasm, either. She wanted him to know that she knew how things really worked, and maybe Becker was bristling under the heavy boots of the Lord Gunther, and he was looking for a low-stakes confidant like her. A woman who didn’t matter and shouldn't care. “How ‘bout you?”

 

[The_gladiator]

The jab landed clean. Too clean.


Becker did not smile. He also did not punish it. He let the twirl cue die on his fingers when her body didn’t take it — no yank, no correction — and turned the measure into a smaller step that still belonged on a floor like this. His hand stayed at the small of her back, formal, unchanged. He did not tighten. He did not claim.


“His highness,” he repeated, dry as the cheap ale back on the ship.


Not agreement. Not denial. Just the phrase, held up to the light.


Glad for the night off Gunther. That part he believed. Anyone who had spent a week under the man’s noise would. The rest of it — the way she said it, the way she watched him after — felt like she was offering him a place to complain. He did not take it.


“I don’t ever take a night off Gunther,” he said. Deck-voice. No heat for anyone watching to read. “What I do take is orders. Easier than arguing all the time.”


A half-measure more, because leaving it dead would look like something too.


“He’s loud. The music’s worse. This is quieter. That’s the whole review.”


Cold blue eyes stayed on her face while they moved. Inventory. The blank. He did not ask what she meant by his highness. He did not ask why she was saying it to him. One question at a time. He had already spent two.


His thumb did not wander.


“You always this honest when the contract puts you on a floor,” he asked, almost idle, “or only when the lord isn’t in the room?”


He left her the step and the next line. Nothing in his hold assumed she owed him an answer.

 

[WretchRoad]

Her grip, more friendly than familiar, tightened a notch. Then, far too late, she twirled all on her own, out of time with beat.

When she came back to him, she feigned a missed step and smiled “I spin when I want to spin.”

She hadn’t had that much to drink, but she could pretend she was a flimsy sort of woman if it meant she didn’t look like she was digging anywhere she shouldn’t, not on purpose.

His small admission was just enough to leave her wanting more. “The client paid me to keep you happy tonight,” she remarked lightly, “So, if you don’t want to vent about the boss, what would make you happy, Becker?”

 

[The_gladiator]

He shot her a look, almost lifting one eyebrow.


“So I’m to believe that either you or Gunther actually cares about my happiness?”


He was supposed to be imperturbable. Unreadable. The disbelief still got into the words.


He caught her after the off-timed twirl. Becker didn’t know if it was intentionally off or bad timing meant to look intentional. He said nothing. Filed it away for later. His hand found the same place at her back it had left, formal, and the step settled as if the measure had always included a woman who turned when she decided to.


“I don’t think happiness is in the cards for me tonight, Miss Danica. This dance might be the highlight though.” Flattery never hurt. “Otherwise it is stuffy small talk with pompous trade bureaucrats over exotic fish I have to remember which fork to eat with, and I doubt there is an ale good enough here to make me happy.”


Cold blue eyes stayed on her face. Inventory. The blank, cracked only by that one lifted almost-brow and the honesty he had already spent.


He left her the next line.

 

[WretchRoad]

“It depends,” she shrugged as he stilled her. “If happiness can be bought, or if it needs to be… inspired.”

That tipsy move was ill-conceived, she’d be spending the next hour remembering to act off-balance to sell an act she wasn’t sure he’d ever buy. Though, it won her the privilege of talking a little more, of opening up and blaming it on her cups.

She switched sides, placing her hand on his waist, and took the first step in the lead. Would he allow that? Or would he consider how it looked? She wanted to find out.

“Do you think someone who buys your approval really cares how you feel? At least I have to work for it, so you’re welcome for the highlight,” she failed to show she was pleased, instead the look she gave him was dry as the void. “Here’s me working for it, then: We leave as soon as it’s polite to do so and find the closest hole in the wall with the filthiest taps to drink until it's impolite to do so.”