Red Ribbon

Los Talares are El Fondeadero’s open workshops: anyone can use a bench as long as they leave it as they found it. That night the Tejedora Sable Vunn had cleared them out, hung curtains across the doors and placed a crate in the middle, on a welding bench, under the only lamp that was on.

The auction was an hour away. The buyers started arriving early, because nobody trusts arriving late to something they don’t want to miss.

---

21:04:00. Commander Ysolde Kray docked at Las Amarras in her white and gold XASTER, the only ship from El Pináculo in the whole station. No faction post may refuse docking to a ship that asks for it, the Armisticio says so, so El Fondeadero’s stevedores let her dock and stood watching her with their arms folded, the way you watch a neighbour who has turned up to the party in a police uniform.

“Welcome to El Fondeadero,” said one, without any welcome in his voice. “Weapons stay holstered.”

“Understood.”

Kray had a Cátedra credit chip in her pocket with no account number. What was on it would buy a new Tortuga. She had been told to spend all of it if necessary.

21:11:00. Torvun Ekes arrived in a Forge Tortuga with the Polvo de Kharsis finish, covered in soot inside and out, and came down the ramp talking tonnages with the pilot.

TORVUN EKES. “El Fundidor”, the Smelter. Head of The Forge, the guild of mining and furnaces, based at La Fragua Baja. Sixty-one. He was an apprentice welder on the Aurora and counts the first plate they tore off the hull to make shelter as his guild’s true Year 0. What you need to know: metal doesn’t pick sides, and neither does he; he only picks who pays on time.

Behind him floated a sphere of copper and bronze, with forge nozzles welded on either side and an orange lens that looked at everything like someone taking stock.

“FUELLE,” said Ekes. “Don’t talk to him, he’ll tell you how much you’ve wasted.”

“Four grams of boot sole on the ramp,” said FUELLE. “You drag your feet coming down. Every time.”

21:20:00. A young man arrived wearing a green scarf and the face of someone who had read too many of the Círculo’s Verses, and sat alone in a corner without taking his coat off. He was one of the Descarnados, the Nadir radicals, the ones who sabotage the Cátedra even when it costs lives. The Círculo del Fondeadero doesn’t authorise what they do. It doesn’t stop them either.

21:32:00. El Notario arrived, with his black-covered notebook and two of his three-red-stripe lads, and sat in the front row.

“Let it be noted that I have come,” he said, and wrote it down.

21:47:00. Corporal Osk arrived, from the Vanguard, in his olive uniform and with the face of someone who has come to watch. And behind him, in a grey transit suit that hung off her and with a card tied with red ribbon in her hand, came Ada Lys.

---

Vunn saw her come in and smiled the way people smile when the last guest confirms the party is going to work.

“The owner,” she said, loudly, so everyone would hear.

Every head turned. Kray went still. El Notario looked up from his notebook and over his glasses at her, the way you look at an invoice you weren’t expecting.

Ada looked at none of them. She was looking at the back of the room, where Vedma, Chemo and Tais were standing against the wall, like staff hired to watch the door.

“Hello, Foreman,” she said.

Vedma took her time.

“We’re not your friends.”

“Yeah. You said.”

Chemo looked at the ceiling. Tais looked at the floor. Vedma didn’t look away, and neither did Ada, and they stayed like that until Vunn clapped twice.

---

“There aren’t many rules,” said Vunn, in the middle, by the bench. “Everyone has an earpiece with a number. When I turn out the light, I’ll call figures. If you want to go higher, say so quietly into your earpiece and I’ll hear. Nobody knows who’s bidding. Nobody sees anybody. In the dark people bid what a thing’s worth, not according to who’s watching.”

She handed out the earpieces herself, one by one, with a smile for each. Ada got the last. It had a nine engraved on it.

“Very funny,” said Ada.

“So I’m told.”

“One more thing,” Vunn went on. “Nobody fires in Los Talares. Not because anyone forbids it, but because if anyone fires in here, nobody on this station will ever sell them water again. Do the sums before taking anything out of its holster.”

The man in the green scarf stood up.

“I don’t want an auction,” he said. “I’m in a hurry. I’ll pay what you ask now and take it.”

Vunn made an annoyed face that fooled no one.

“How rude.” She sighed. “Very well. For people in a hurry there’s direct sale. It’s double.”

“Double.”

The Descarnado took out a chip and put it in Vunn’s hand. Vunn looked at it, weighed it in her fingers as though credits had weight, and nodded.

“It’s yours.”

The Descarnado grabbed the crate off the bench with both hands and lifted it.

Then FUELLE spoke.

“That crate’s empty,” he said. “I can tell you without opening it.”

---

22:03:00. The first thing to move was the green scarf.

The Descarnado dropped the crate, which hit the floor with the dull thud of stone wrapped in a blanket, and pulled a pistol from under his coat. The front row stood up at once. One of El Notario’s lads drew his. Kray drew nothing: she put her hand on her holster and left it there, still, which is the most threatening thing a Commander of the Guardia Vertical can do. At the back, Tais had her rifle on the Descarnado’s gun hand before anyone saw her move.

“Not empty, darling,” said Vunn, still smiling. “It’s got eleven and a half kilos of first-class neolith in it. Best neolith from the Espejos de Rocío. You could make grenades for your whole cell.”

“Where’s the real one?”

“Somewhere nobody pointing a pistol at me is going to find it.”

“That crate is mine,” said El Notario, rising slowly. “The real one. It’s in my notebook, dated and signed. The Tejedora owes it to me.”

“The Tejedora paid you for it,” said Vunn.

“The Tejedora paid me a price that was no longer the price.”

“And what price is the price?”

“Whatever everyone else pays.”

“Everybody stay still,” said Osk, without raising his voice, without drawing anything, without moving from the door.

Nobody took any notice, because nobody ever takes any notice of the Vanguard until it’s too late.

In Ada’s earpiece, very quietly, a flat voice spoke.

“Nueve.”

Ada froze.

“Hold. Left. When it goes dark, run.”

“Mamparo?”

“The lights in here are Matriz. Old controllers. Like the seven’s.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Switch off.”

---

22:04:12. Every light in Los Talares went out at once.

It wasn’t the half-dark of an auction in the dark. It was black, completely, the kind that makes you wonder whether your eyes are open. The lamp over the bench went out. The emergency lights over the doors went out. The bench screens and the welders’ pilot lights went out. Someone shouted. Someone knocked over a chair.

A shot rang out.

The muzzle flash lit the room for an instant, like a photograph: the Descarnado with his pistol raised, El Notario crouching, Vunn standing still in the middle with her arms folded, Kray already moving left, Tais with her eye to the sight and her finger off the trigger. Then black again. The bullet had burst a water tank in the crops hanging from the ceiling, and it began to rain on everyone.

“Left,” said Mamparo in the earpiece. “Ten steps. Door.”

Ada ran left with her hands out in front of her. She tripped over something soft that swore in Chemo’s voice. She kept going. She found the door with her forehead.

“Corridor. To the end.”

At the end of the corridor, a long way off, an amber light came on.

It wasn’t a lamp. It was an eye. Round, faint, steady, glowing in the dark at the end of the corridor the way it used to glow in section seven when it was time to run. Ada knew it. She had seen it come on once, in a decompression drill, when she was fifteen. A warning light. So people would know which way to run.

She ran towards it.

---

22:04:40. In the room, El Notario found the crate by feel on the floor, wet, where the Descarnado had dropped it. He hugged it the way you hug a child.

“Let’s go,” he told his lads. “Now.”

“Boss, that’s the one with the rocks.”

“That’s the one I’ve got. The one I’ve got is the one that counts. So noted.”

They went out through the back door, in the dark, carrying eleven and a half kilos of neolith and the conviction that they had won.

22:04:51. Vunn hadn’t moved from the middle of the room. Rain fell on her. She felt someone go past her very fast, to the left, and didn’t need to see to know who. They smelt of El Pináculo nutrient paste.

“Commander,” she said quietly.

“Tejedora.”

“The real crate’s never on the stage.”

“I know,” said Kray, without stopping. “That’s why I’m going to the hold.”

---

The hold was the one on Vunn’s Challenger, a white Challenger cargo ship moored behind the storeroom, ramp down. Inside, among sacks of seed and drums of Kharsis resin, was a padded transport crate with its lid open, and in the crate a sphere with an amber lens lit.

Ada arrived out of breath.

“Mamparo.”

“Nueve. You’re late.”

“You’ve switched off a whole station.”

“One room. The station carries on.”

Ada knelt by the crate. Her hands were shaking. All of her was shaking.

“At El Faro Roto they told me something. That the Aurora wasn’t in its corridor. That it went between the two fleets on purpose, with its lights on.”

Mamparo’s lens didn’t move.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The captain switched on the lights.”

“Why, Mamparo?”

“I don’t open the seven.”

“Sod the seven.” Ada wiped her face with her sleeve, which was wet. “I’ve been asleep forty-seven years, I’ve had my ship stolen twice in three days and everyone knows something they won’t tell me. Tell me.”

“I don’t open the seven until someone comes who doesn’t shoot,” said Mamparo. “They’ve shot in here.”

Ada was about to answer when a hand took hold of her wrist. Firm. Without hurting.

“Unharmed,” said Commander Kray, behind her.

---

22:06:30. Vedma and Tais reached the Challenger’s ramp half a minute later, soaked, with a torch. The torch lit Kray standing in the hold, Mamparo’s crate under one arm and Ada’s wrist in her other hand.

Tais raised her rifle.

“Let her go.”

“If you fire, you’ll hit her,” said Kray, without moving.

“I aim fine.”

“And do you fire?”

Tais didn’t answer. The rifle barrel didn’t waver. Nor did her finger move towards the trigger. She stayed like that, aiming at the Commander’s forehead, for three very long seconds.

“Leave it, Tais,” said Vedma.

Tais lowered the rifle.

Ada looked at Vedma over Kray’s shoulder. Vedma’s hair was plastered to her face and the torch was in her hand, and she didn’t look away.

“She’ll take you to El Pináculo,” said Vedma. “Nobody fires there. It’s the safest place in the system.”

“Nobody’s waiting for me there either.”

“Nobody here either, Nueve.” Vedma stepped back from the ramp to let them through. “Nobody here either.”

---

22:09:00. Kray went back through Los Talares on her way to Las Amarras, with Ada by the wrist and the crate under her arm. The emergency lights had come back on. It was raining less. The Descarnado had gone. Osk was still at the door, exactly where he had been, with the face of someone who has seen it all and is going to write it up in a report.

Vunn stood in the middle, wringing out her hair.

Kray took the Cátedra’s credit chip out of her pocket and threw it to her. Vunn caught it without looking.

“For your trouble,” said Kray.

Vunn looked at the chip. Then at the other chip, the Descarnado’s, still in her other hand.

“Always a pleasure selling twice,” she said.

Ekes was sitting on a bench, boots in a puddle, FUELLE floating beside him, watching the crate go out of the door.

“Forty-six years of hull fatigue data,” said FUELLE. “From a Flota ark. Going out of that door.”

“I couldn’t give a damn who shot the Aurora,” said Ekes, without raising his voice. “I only wanted to know how much the metal took.”

---

22:31:00. In the hold of the Conforme, two thousand kilometres from El Fondeadero, El Notario finally opened the crate, pulled back the wet blanket and stood looking at eleven and a half kilos of grey neolith from the Espejos de Rocío.

He said nothing for a while. Then he opened his notebook, found the Tejedora’s page and wrote in his small, neat hand.

OWES: one crate. Again.

---

22:40:00. The Commander’s XASTER left El Fondeadero with two people aboard, for the first time in six years.

Ada was in the right-hand seat, the gunner’s, her hands free because Kray hadn’t bothered to tie them. Mamparo’s crate was strapped behind the seats. The cockpit was bigger than the Tozuda’s and much cleaner, and it smelt of nothing, like everything from El Pináculo.

“This seat,” said Ada. “Who was in it before?”

“My gunner.”

“What happened?”

“Kaldrek.”

Ada didn’t ask anything else. Kray didn’t say anything else.

After a while, as the engine charged for the jump, Ada spoke again.

“You said the Chancellor wants to see me.”

“Yes.”

“What would a Chancellor want with me?”

Kray stared at the canopy, where the stars were beginning to crowd forward.

“That,” she said, “is what I’ve been asking myself for three days.”

Behind the seats, in the crate, Mamparo’s lens came on for a moment.

“Destination: El Pináculo,” he said. “I don’t like it.”