The pirates struck just outside the orbit of Mars. We ran to seal ourselves into escape capsules, payoff for endless emergency drills. The bandits who lurked among the asteroids took no prisoners, we all knew. The briefing tapes had included numerous pictures of frozen corpses retrieved from the Belt. They had been expelled into space without suits, thrown defenceless from their ships, death-screams permanently frozen into their faces. Besides that stark warning, there were stories passed from experienced crew to first-outs such as myself. Otto, my crew chief, repeated these tales of rape, vivisection and other atrocities in lowered tones to the engineering section during the long, slow hours of our voyage out.

“Watch out, Kate,” he had told me. “Always know the route to your capsule. Practice running it until you could do it in your sleep – you may have to.” Otto had been an indispensable source of advice to me on the trip out, my first journey further from home than Earthdock. Bald through age rather than choice, with a face so wrinkled you could use it as a heat sink, he was more like a grandfather to me than my boss. He knew more about engine repair than any ten of my academy instructors, and imparted his knowledge with a flair, telling tales of near escapes from engine burn-out and other disasters more hair-raising than his pirate stories. Now I was glad he had made me practice. My feet carried me around the curve of the corridor to my escape hatch while my brain was still frozen with panic at the thought of capture.

I slammed the capsule door behind me, hearing the whoomp of inflating seals and feeling the sudden increase in the capsule’s air-pressure. I swallowed to clear my ears, feeling with my entire body for any change in the vibration of the cerafoam walls around me that might indicate the separation of the capsule from the supply ship. What if it failed to separate?

I pictured pirates, fat and hideous, with long greasy hair and curling fingernails pulling me out through the door and – the capsule rumbled around me. Then, with a shock as thorough and sudden as jumping into icy water, all vibration ceased. I could feel no movement, though I knew I must be drifting, carried by the impetus of my expulsion from the ship. All I could do now was meditate and hope; meditate to escape the boredom of waiting, and hope that the waiting would end in my rescue by another Golden Fields supply ship before my air and water ran out.

The thought of water made me notice that my mouth had gone dry with anxiety. Within the cramped confines of the capsule it took some effort to pry the mouthpiece of the water supply hose from the wall by my head. I was even thirstier by the time I finally managed to suck a drop or two of chill, foul-tasting liquid from the tube. I would have drunk more, but that drop or two was all I got, no matter how hard I sucked. That was when I truly began to believe I was going to die.

I don’t know how long I drifted in space. Long enough to realize the capsule’s cerafoam coating was not providing sufficient insulation against the cold space around it. Thirst wouldn’t have a chance to kill me, after all. I let myself sink into a trance-like doze, hoping to die in my sleep. Instead, the capsule gave a sudden jolt, throwing me nose-first against the interior padding. Though designed to cushion against the shock of a planetary landing, this also proved insufficient. Tears rose to my eyes. As I rubbed my nose, I realized what the jolt meant. The capsule had changed direction. I was being towed, pulled in by a ship. Rescue had arrived.

After a few more bumps and jolts, the capsule’s door cracked open, letting in a flood of bright light and fresh, sweet-smelling air. I knew the capsule must be releasing the reek of sweat, and worse things. Strong hands reached in to pull me out. After the hours? days? I had spent in the capsule, I could barely move.

“Thank you,” I croaked, through parched lips. “Oh, thank you.”

Then I got a good look at my rescuers. They wore what might once have been uniforms, but the multitude of colours designated crew from at least half a dozen companies. The garments themselves were stained, dirty, patched – what kind of crew was this? Then it hit me. I had been rescued by the pirates.

I woke to dimmer light, lying on a soft surface. As I blinked my eyes open I saw a shadow move across the floor, and heard the click of an intercom button.

“She’s awake.”

“I’ll be right down.” The reply crackled, as though the com system needed an overhaul. It sounded just like the system on the Golden Plenty.

“Captain Edwards will be down to see you in a minute.” A woman wearing a once-white medic’s tunic moved around into my field of view. “You fainted before he had a chance to invest you into the crew.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, responding automatically to the accusation in her voice.

“No need to apologize.” A man who by his outfit could only be a pirate captain stomped in, feet heavy in old-fashioned mag-plated boots. He wore his tight black trousers stuffed inside the boots, so I could see the polish on the metal locking rings where the boots flared out over his calves.

“Are those still functional?” I blurted out.

The captain laughed. “I hope it’s my boots you’re asking about.”

I didn’t blush. I got that sort of thing all the time from my fellow engineers. I laughed instead, and looked the rest of the way up, past a bright red tunic which was part of no company uniform I recognized, to a face with a square jaw and aquiline nose, topped by completely non-reg length blond hair, plaited through with glittering bits of metal. I could have made a whole mini-comp out of the junk on his head, provided any of it still worked.

The captain grinned, as though he had read my mind. “Captain Nathan Edwards.” He held out his hand.

As he stepped closer, I suddenly remembered he was a pirate. And I didn’t smell bad any more. I looked down, and saw I was now wearing flimsy pale blue med-issue paper coveralls. Something must have shown in my face, because Captain Edwards let his hand drop.

“I’m here to induct you into my crew,” he said. “I hope you’re not going to tell me you have a problem with that.”

“What if I have?”

“Then we put you back in a capsule and let you take your chances.” He frowned. “Only this time the capsule will have a decent water supply.”

“So, now I’m supposed to believe you’re a humanitarian? I’ve heard the stories. I know what happens to your victims.” The words hung between us like drops of blood in zero-g. I hadn’t meant to say them, but he had sounded so scornful. The capsules were serviced every time the ship returned to Earthdock; it wasn’t the company’s fault mine had malfunctioned.

“Try us. I think you’ll find those stories somewhat exaggerated.” All of the amusement had gone from the captain’s voice, leaving it as cold as the vacuum outside. The look he gave me now actually frightened me, but I had to admit the thought of getting back inside that capsule scared me more.

So I duly swore to be a loyal member of his crew, obeying his orders, giving aid to fellow crew in time of need, and a bunch of other things I didn’t really listen to. They gave me my old cabin back, with all of my possessions still intact. I went back to my old job, too. When I got down to engineering, I nearly fainted again, from sheer surprise. Otto was there; also a pirate now.

My first duty under the new regime was to re-fit all of the remaining escape capsules, nearly thirty percent of which had failed to deploy. I wondered how many others had, like mine, launched without adequate water. What a joke – a supply ship with no escape supplies.

A few days later, Captain Edwards showed up in engineering. I was up to my elbows in grease, taking apart a capsule launch assembly. Old, claggy grease – the main reason so many capsules had failed, I suspected, was a lack of maintenance on the launch gear, which should have been cleaned and re-lubricated every time the ship hit Earthdock. This assembly looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in the last ten years.

“Stinks, doesn’t it,” the captain said.

I lifted my left hand to my nose, my right being occupied with a socket wrench. “Smells like grease to me.”

“I meant the way the companies treat their employees.” He flung out an arm to point at the capsule. “You just don’t get it, do you? They sent you out in a ship where only seventy percent of the escape capsules work – for all they knew, none of them worked – and do you get angry? Do you blame them? Hell, you nearly died in one of those tin cans, and here you sit repairing the rest like nothing ever happened.”

“They’re ceramic,” was all I could think of to say.

“What?”

“Not tin.” I reached back into the guts of the launch mechanism, loudly ratcheting the wrench until the bolt came free. When I looked back up, he had gone.

Good. This sort of maintenance wasn’t much of a challenge, but it helped keep my mind off what awaited me when we reached the pirate base. Otto had explained to me why the pirates hadn’t committed any atrocities against our old crew yet. It was one of the bits I hadn’t listened to during my induction – those sorts of activities were strictly forbidden on ship-board. Ship rules didn’t apply on the base, however. So for now I kept my head down, and figured the more of me that stayed covered in grease the better.

Eleven of our crew had been rescued; we tended to congregate at mealtimes, keeping apart from the pirates. Some of our people still held positions on the Bridge. From them, we learned the fate of our captain. His capsule had been one of those picked up by the pirates’ own raider ship. Under orders, he would have refused to sign on as part of her crew.

“Set adrift without a capsule,” Otto muttered, and other senior crew-members around the table nodded.

It was Otto who started the notion that we ought to do something to take our ship back. Though not Bridge crew, he was still the most senior of us survivors, and besides that, the most decisive. We had, according to our pirate hosts, three more days ship-board before we reached their base. By messages whispered in the corridors and the mess-table, Otto assigned everyone their duties.

“How are those capsules coming along?” he asked me on the second day.

“I’ve got three go for launch. Four, counting this one. Why, you don’t think anything will go wrong, do you?” I of course was too junior to know the whole plan, but I had gathered it was to be an ambush of sorts.

“Just in case.” Otto patted my shoulder. “Now, you’re clear on what you have to do?”

“At 0400 I spot-weld the doors shut on all the day-shift pirate officers’ cabins.”

“Good girl.” Otto patted me again, and strolled off down the corridor, looking like everybody’s favourite granddad.

By the end of my shift, I had five capsules operational, having done a rush job on the last one. I hoped they wouldn’t be needed, as even with nearly half of our own crew still missing the number of pirates on board brought the total just over the usual complement of twenty. After replacing the fifth launch assembly in its capsule, I went back to engineering to return my tools to the cabinet. I heard noises coming from the main engine access tunnel and poked my head into the opening to investigate, but it was only Otto, wedged so far in I didn’t bother yelling to see if he wanted dinner.

I washed up and went to eat. My stomach already felt so knotted-up with nerves that I wasn’t hungry at all, but Otto had repeatedly told us all how important it was for us to act normally tonight. So I went to the mess cabin and got my tray of food and sat down to try to force myself to eat it.

The clatter of another tray being set down across from mine made me look up. So much for acting normal. For some reason, Captain Edwards had chosen tonight of all nights to sit with me.

“Not hungry?”

“Of course, I’m just tired is all.” I picked some food up on my fork. Rehydrated pasta in tomato sauce. Not very appetising, even if I wasn’t currently dying of nervousness.

“You’re probably used to much better food than this.”

I nodded. “My mother makes the best spaghetti sauce ever. This red goop probably doesn’t even really have tomatoes in it.”

“Well, to me, this is a veritable feast.” The captain forked a huge mass of pasta into his mouth, chewing with an expression of enjoyment that looked real to me.

“It’s not my fault if you can’t cook.” I sounded more disgusted than I’d meant to, mostly due to his table manners.

“It’s not that.” I had offended him again. I wondered if he would just go now, as he had in engineering, and felt absurdly relieved when he twirled up more spaghetti and kept talking. “Why do you think we raided your ship?”

“That’s what pirates do.”

“No.” The captain slammed his free hand down on the table so hard it made our trays jump, and me as well.

Everyone else turned to stare, and Otto gave me a dirty look. I gave him an it-wasn’t-my-fault shrug.

“Why then?” I asked, when people had stopped staring and gone back to eating their own pseudo-tomato goop.

“Think. What do you have on board that’s valuable?”

I thought. Golden Plenty was only a supply ship; we carried rations for the miners. We had on board only enough fuel for our own return journey. We carried no valuable minerals, no important passengers, not even, despite the pirate threat, any weapons. The ship itself wasn’t even worth enough to defend. “Nothing.”

The captain pointed his new forkful of spaghetti at me, dripping sauce on the table. “This.”

“Bad spaghetti?”

“Now you’re being deliberately obtuse. Tell me something: you call us pirates; and you knew we were out here, but do you know why?”

That was easy. “Because the Belt is a good place for your hideout. It’s a good place to raid the company shipping lanes from.”

“But you just said you carried nothing valuable on your ship. In fact, most ships that use that route are supply ships for the mines. Do you really think we’d come out all this way just to steal food?”

He had a point. Why were they here? Before I could ask, I felt a familiar hand on my shoulder.

“If you’ve finished, I need you to run a check on the port injector valve assembly.” Otto, rescuing me. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or annoyed. I had been getting some real information from the captain, after all. He might have said something useful.

“What’s wrong with the injector valves?” I asked, when we reached the corridor.

“Nothing. I just wanted to get you out of there before you said too much.”

“I wouldn’t.” Annoyance blazed into indignation. “The captain was doing all the talking, anyway.”

“He’s not your captain, Kate, and don’t you forget it.” Otto scowled at me. “I hope you haven’t been getting any ideas about him. You remember what I told you about them having different rules ship-board.”

I nodded. Otto’s reminder was well-timed. No matter how charming Captain Edwards seemed, I had to remember what he really was. “I won’t forget again.”

“That’s the spirit.” Otto gave me a pat on the shoulder; my lapse evidently forgiven. “Now, best get some rest, you’ve got early duties tomorrow.”

I lay down fully-clothed, alarm set for 0300 just to give myself plenty of time to wake up before I had to go get the welding gear. I closed my eyes, but it was too early for bed, and I felt too keyed-up to sleep. I kept running over the conversation with the captain in my head. Why were they here at all? Why not raid luxury liners bound for the Martian colonies? Why be pirates in the first place?

I must have dozed off in the end, because the alarm woke me at 0300 from confused dreams I forgot seconds later. My uniform had gotten all twisted up around me, and my mouth tasted foul. I stumbled out of my quarters and down to engineering still only half-awake.

I got there at about 0310, way ahead of schedule. I didn’t dare go start the welding early; although the plan called for the corridor leading to the pirate officers’ quarters to be clear at 0400, I wasn’t sure if it would be now. To kill time, I went to have a look at what Otto had been fixing in the engines.

At 0330 I was in the officers’ corridor, pounding on the captain’s door, not particularly caring who heard me. The door slid aside at last. Captain Edwards slept in purple silk pyjamas, and he had little indentations all the way down the left side of his face from lying on the bits plaited into his hair.

“Why are you out here?” I asked him.

He blinked at me. “You woke me up at – what time is it?”

“0335.”

“Three-thirty in the morning just to finish our dinner conversation? Couldn’t it wait until breakfast?”

“No, it can’t. Why are you here?”

I must have looked as desperate as I felt, because the captain reached out a silk-clad arm and dragged me into his cabin. “Sit.” He pushed me down on the bunk and sat next to me. “Now, what’s all this about?”

“Just tell me.”

“We were here first.”

I opened my mouth, and he held up a hand to show he hadn’t finished. “Who does your company supply?”

“Integrated Minerals, this run. We also have contracts with Chord and Bomat, and we used to have one with Lowen Ores, until Bomat bought them out.”

“So you supply all of the mining companies which run Belt mining operations.”

I nodded. “But why are you here?”

“Bear with me. In fact, neither Golden Fields, nor its competitors, supply all of the mining operations in the Belt. Apparently they feel supplying the smaller operations just isn’t profitable.”

“But there are no smaller operations.”

“That may be what they tell you. What about the little companies, the ones that just got driven out of business instead of bought? And what do you suppose happened to Lowen’s employees, after the buyout?”

“Well, they’d either have been hired by Bomat or sent back to Earth. Same for the smaller ones, I guess. They’d have gone back to Earth.”

The captain shook his head as I spoke, plaits rattling. “Not sent back. Allowed to buy passage back, if they could afford it. Which, with most of their pay in company stock, they mostly can’t.”

“But –” I stopped, as it occurred to me that two thirds of my pay was Golden Fields equity. Living on company ships, and in company housing on Earthdock, cash wasn’t much use; when it came time to retire, the money would be worth more invested. In the unlikely event of a buyout, I had always assumed I’d get paid its value.

“I used to work for an outfit called Minncor. Bought out seven years ago by Lowen Ores. What goes around comes around.”

That explained the odd colour of his tunic. Small company, cheap uniforms. “Otto’s set the engines to blow when we slow to orbit your base,” I said.

Captain Edwards took me by the shoulders, staring down at me as though trying to read the answer off the inside of my skull. “And I wondered why you were so set on fixing the escape capsules. Can you undo it?”

“Yes. Just don’t slow down.”

He opened the door and took off at a run, nearly tripping over my welding gear. “Was this for if you didn’t like my reply?”

I shook my head. “I was supposed to weld all the doors ten minutes ago.”

He was already waking the rest of the pirates, pounding on doors until he had several henchmen to help him fight through to the Bridge. “Stay there.” he said over his shoulder, as they left.

I sat on his bunk, staring at the rumpled sheets. I knew I had just saved at least eighteen lives; maybe twenty-three considering the chances of a capsule getting rescued this far from the shipping lanes. I believed the so-called pirates were not the monsters the briefing films made them out to be. At least they hadn’t tried to kill us yet, which was more than I could say for Otto. So why did I still feel like such a traitor?

When the pirates had all of my old crew-mates rounded up, I went down and removed Otto’s booby-trap from the engines. I was the only one who had not taken part in what Captain Edwards referred to as the mutiny. None of the others believed me about the pirates.

Otto himself had been the only one to get away, having launched in one of my repaired capsules around the time I should have been welding doors shut. Captain Edwards declined to pick him up again. As the leader of the insurrection, Otto would be allowed to take his chances of company rescue. It amounted to a death sentence.

All the while I took the device apart, I kept thinking maybe I was the one who was wrong. If Otto was right after all, perhaps death would have been better. From the way the device was triggered, Otto had meant the explosion to damage the pirate base as well as destroying the Golden Plenty. Had I just prevented a heroic sacrifice in order to save my own life? Even worse, had I done it to save the life of a monster?

I spent the remaining few hours of the journey in my quarters. All my friends were locked up, and I couldn’t face the pirates. Instead I lay on my bunk, and reminded myself it was my fault Otto was going to die of thirst, if he didn’t freeze to death first. I had fixed the launch mechanisms, but I had never gotten around to re-filling the water supplies. I felt the engines fire up, lending their bass rumbling to the vibration of the ship. Any minute now, we would reach the pirate base.

Someone knocked on my door. When I didn’t get up to answer, it slid open anyway, revealing Captain Edwards standing in the corridor.

“We’re home,” he said. “Better pack up, you’ve already been assigned engineer’s quarters.”

I jammed everything I owned back into the duffel it had all come out of months before, when I first boarded the Plenty. It probably would have taken less time if Captain Edwards hadn’t stood there and watched.

“Finished?”

I nodded.

“Good. I’ll show you the way.” He grabbed my duffel before I could protest, swinging it up to his shoulder.

With the captain carrying my things, I really had no choice but to follow him to my new quarters. The airlock opened onto a makeshift ramp leading down into, surprisingly, a fully-pressurized, interior docking bay. While it cycled, I looked through the view-panel in the door and saw pirates, in their tattered, multi-hued clothing, many with hair plaited like the captain’s, glittering with tiny ornaments. Men, women, and even children moved to and fro through the bay.

“It’s an old mining station,” the captain said. “Invern abandoned it when they went bust, so we moved in.”

The first thing that hit me when we left the ship was the smell. The air on ship-board had been Earth-fresh by comparison. I breathed in and started coughing. My eyes teared, stinging.

“Your life-support needs repair,” I said, as soon as I got my breath back enough to speak.

“It’s only meant for a population of fifty.” The captain sounded angry, or perhaps he was merely short of breath as well.

There had been more than fifty people just in the docking bay. “How many do you have here?” I gasped out.

“Just over three hundred.”

That explained why they had trusted Otto and me. They needed every engineer they could get, just to keep this place running. They had none to spare for captured ships.

“We’ve managed to increase the size of the base by pressurising some of the old mine-workings.”

“Can your life-support handle that?” Stupid question. Obviously it couldn’t.

“We’ve augmented it whenever we can get parts. Your ship’s air-scrubbers are worth even more to us than the food. I’m afraid one of your first duties will be to help cannibalise her.”

I shrugged. Golden Plenty held nothing but bad memories for me now.

Engineers evidently rated accommodation actually designed as such due to our essential status. We had reached an area of the base which had seemingly been left as it was; the jerry-rigged tubes and wiring I had seen on the way over had gone, and the wall panels still bore Invern logos. My door even had a bracket holding a card with my name on it.

I opened the door and waited outside as the captain deposited my duffel on the bunk.

“Look, you really can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened.” He flung his arms out, then let them flop to his sides.

I didn’t say anything. All of my old crew-mates were now in the base prison, except for the ones who were dead. Which was my fault, whatever Captain Nathan Edwards said.

“There’s someone here I think you should see.” The captain came back out into the corridor and took my arm.

I went along – it was easier than fighting. He towed me through the maze of permanent and makeshift corridors and tunnels that comprised the base. I wondered if I would ever learn to find my way around alone. When I saw where he had taken me, I did pull back, trying to wrench my arm out of his grip. Behind a security desk, I could see a long corridor with barred cells on either side. We had reached the prison.

“We have an interview appointment at 1400,” the captain said to the pirate at the desk.

“Go on into room two.” The pirate pointed to a door opposite the cell corridor. “He’ll be there in a minute.”

In the interview room, the captain let go of my arm.

I rubbed it ostentatiously. “Who could I possibly want to see here?”

“How about your old captain?”

“Captain Trent? He’s dead. You ought to know that.”

“Who told you he was dead?” Captain Edwards sounded genuinely astonished, then disgusted. “Oh, Otto, of course.”

Somehow it had never occurred to me this might be one more of Otto’s lies. But – “How come he’s in prison?”

“Because he can’t swear on as crew.”

“Does that mean if I hadn’t sworn in you’d have just put me in the brig? Why tell me you’d put me back in a capsule?”

Nathan looked at me then in a way that made hot shivers go through me all the way to my toes. “I really wanted you to sign on.”

“Oh.” I could feel my face getting hotter, until I thought it must be as bright as his tunic, but I couldn’t look away from him. Of course, on ship-board, the rules had prevented him from saying anything. I should have known it wasn’t just me.

He looked away from me instead, staring at the floor. “Although, now that you know I really am a cold-blooded murderer...”

I looked down, too, and saw those absurd mag-boots of his. “No.” I took a step towards him. “I am. I’m the one who didn’t refill the water supplies on the capsules I fixed.”

“He’d have frozen to death first. You know the insulation on those tin cans is totally inadequate.” His arms went around my shoulders, and somehow mine ended up wrapped around his waist.

“They’re ceram–” I couldn’t finish the word; he started kissing me in the middle of it.

“I’d offer to marry you two, but we’re not on a ship.”

I jumped, and pulled away from Nathan just enough to see Captain Trent standing by the door. He looked shorter than I remembered out of his uniform, and more human.

“I never knew.” He shook his head. “All these years a loyal company man, and I never knew.”

“I –” I wanted to confess, to tell him how ashamed I felt of my own disloyalty, that I had betrayed my old crew for love of a pirate, but I didn’t know where to start.

Captain Trent grinned at me. “Katie, I’m glad you figured out which side is the right one.”

I tilted my head up and saw Nathan looking concerned, and suddenly I knew I had made the right choice. The choice where my crew-mates lived to find out, as Captain Trent and I had, that we’d been wrong about the pirates all along. The choice where I had a chance to make a real difference to three hundred people, not just make money for a company that didn’t give a damn about me or any of its other employees. And the choice where I’d get to see what Nathan looked like underneath the purple silk pyjamas.

“So am I.” I smiled back, at both of them.