Session One — The Woman on the Gantry

The Boats N Hoes came into the party's hands on a gray Hartemple morning at Gantry 4, handed over by a shipwright with more grease under his nails than words in his mouth. He pressed a bottle of something sharp and unlabeled into Tauon's hands, muttered something that might have been a blessing or might have just been relief at getting the thing off his slip, and walked off without waiting to watch her fly.

Captain Chet Roosso took her up first, easing the caravel to two thousand feet for a shakedown run that left him grinning like a man twenty years younger, calling it wild ecstasy under his breath more than once. Below decks, Arkady went hunting through the ship's guts and came up with a full accounting of her: the Workshop, the Navigation Suite, the Laboratory, the Magazine, the Infirmary, and tucked beneath a false floor barely large enough to notice unless you already knew to look, the Concealed Cargo Compartment. From the air, Asher picked out the mouth of their Smuggler's Cave along the coastline, and Chet dropped her low enough on a rope ladder for a quick look before easing back toward home.

She flew a slight list to port. Nothing that would kill her. Chet said as much and nobody argued.

Hartemple was waiting for them when they came back around, and so was someone else.

A woman stood alone on their private gantry when the ship settled home, wrapped in a long duster against the wind coming off the harbor, watching the *Boats N Hoes* come in like she'd already decided what she thought of it. Asher was first down the gangway, first to ask what brought her to their dock.

“You do,” she said. “I was told you were capable men.”

“Not at all,” Asher said.

Something flickered behind her eyes at that, a fraction of impertinence she didn't bother hiding, the look of someone taking a measurement and finding the number came in low. She didn't introduce herself yet. She asked to speak somewhere private, and the party brought her aboard, into the Navigation Suite, where the real conversation started.

She kept her ultimate goal to herself, she said, for their own safety. What she needed was simpler on its face. A man, somewhere in Havana, who needed finding, and depending on how things sat when they got there, possibly protecting, possibly pulling out entirely. He kept company with the wrong sort. That was all she offered up front, and she offered a modest retainer alongside it, seven thousand gold paid out in platinum coin.

Tauon didn't hide his skepticism at the number, and for a moment the woman's composure tightened around it, the closest thing to offense she allowed herself before a little more convincing talk from the party eased her back. She didn't warm exactly. She conceded. Said their caution showed a kind of wisdom she could respect, even if it cost her patience to sit through.

The party took the job. Only then did she give them a name to put to the duster and the flat, unreadable eyes.

Miyake Harrier.

There was something about her age the party couldn't settle on then, and still can't. Crow's feet said one thing. The set of her shoulders, the economy in how she moved, said another. She wore whatever years she'd lived like she'd decided a long time ago that no one else needed to know the count.

They left Monday morning, the thirteenth of July, following a set of navigational charts Miyake had drawn up herself, routing them down past Haspar and on toward a refueling stop before the long leg to Havana.

Scout noticed the charts first, or rather noticed what wasn't supposed to be on them. Alongside the Havana route, Miyake's maps carried detail on Northern Straya and stretches of the Mediterranean, regions with nothing to do with the job in front of them. She caught him looking more than once and said nothing about it, which told him more than an explanation would have.

She was testing them the whole way down, in small ways that never quite announced themselves as tests. On the second morning she asked Asher, almost idly, whether he knew the Low Down, a piece of navigator's craft most working sailors only knew by reputation. He knew the theory. Admitted, honestly, he'd never had cause to fly it.

“That's okay,” she said. “I don't need navigators. I need capable men.”

It wasn't unkind. It also wasn't a compliment.

They put in at Salthaven Tuesday morning, a refueling stop that doubled as a trading post, and Tauon and Arkady worked the local merchants for a load of spices to run as cover, the kind of legitimate cargo that makes a ship's business look like exactly what it claims to be. Miyake didn't like it. Wanted to know who, exactly, they thought needed convincing. Tauon told her it wouldn't slow them down. She let it go, but the friction sat there afterward, the first real crack in how she saw the crew she'd hired, half competence, half a group moving slower and more carefully than her own instincts would have liked.

Later that evening, on watch, Asher said what half the party had been thinking since the gantry.

“You're kind of a bitch.”

“I know,” she said. “I've spent my life sharpening that blade.”

She told him, in pieces, what she was. A privateer. Someone who'd worked alongside military outfits without ever wearing their colors, who'd built a career on picking her own jobs and her own reasons. Everything she'd ever done, she said, she'd cared about the why.

Asher asked what her why was this time.

She smiled at him, practiced, pleasant, and entirely closed, and the conversation ended there.

The Caribbean Straits gave them the first real trouble of the run, a thunderstorm heavy enough on its own before the shard-dust in the clouds turned the lightning green and wrong. The party made the call to climb rather than push through, driving the caravel up toward the edge of what she could take, past what Chet would have chosen on his own account.

She held. Barely, but she held, and above the worst of it the crew leveled out into clear air and looked back down at what they'd just climbed out of.

It wasn't behaving like weather.

Sections of the storm were moving on their own logic, independent of the wind driving the rest of it, patches of cloud sliding against the grain like something underneath was steering. Nobody had a name for what they were looking at. Nobody suggested going back down to find out.

They held their course for Havana, the storm beneath them, the shape of what they were flying toward still mostly a woman's word and a locked jaw. The icy-cold, high-altitude air biting at their heels.