Featured in The Copper Press, 14 July, 2077 A.M.

I'll tell you what nobody tells you about the smuggling life: the paperwork is worse than the gunfire.

Not the kind of paperwork that sits on a desk – I haven't had a desk since I deserted – but the kind that lives in your head. The manifests you memorize because writing them down is a hanging offense. The patrol schedules you reconstruct from bribed harbor masters and nervous dockworkers and the way certain lights go dark at certain hours along the Cordoban coastal grid. The weight calculations, the fuel margins, the seventeen contingencies you run through before a job because the one you don't think of is always the one that tries to kill you.

Miranda does the real math. She always has. I fly the ship and talk our way out of trouble and make the decisions that need making in the half-second before thinking becomes a luxury. She runs the numbers that make those decisions possible, and she does it in her head, while doing three other things, while arguing with me about something else entirely. I have known this woman for eleven years. I have been married to her for seven. I am still not entirely sure how she works.

The job came through our usual channel – a fence in Havana's Corrales district who dealt in information the way other men dealt in spice, carefully and at considerable markup. The cargo: three crates of Cordoban arcanotech, specifically a batch of targeting arrays that had walked off a military logistics train somewhere in the East American interior and were now looking for new employment in the Quebec industrial market. The arrays were worth more than the Spring Wind on a good day. The risk was proportionate.

“Amazonian patrol density on the northern corridor has been up since the Caracas bombardment,” Miranda said, not looking up from her charts. We were in the captain's cabin, which is also the navigation room, which is also where we eat when the weather is bad, which in East America is most of the time. “I want to route through the mountain gap at Lobo rather than the coastal lane.”

“Lobo adds four hours.”

“Lobo does not add a Cordoban intercept frigate.”

I looked at the charts. She was right. She is usually right about the charts. “Lobo,” I agreed.

She made a small sound that was not quite satisfaction but was adjacent to it, and went back to her calculations, and I watched her for a moment in the lamplight the way I still did sometimes when she wasn't paying attention – the focused line of her jaw, the pencil moving across the paper in quick certain strokes – and thought, not for the first time, that I was an extraordinarily lucky man to have convinced this particular person to throw her lot in with mine.

The Spring Wind lifted out of Havana on a warm evening with a full tank and a crew that had been together long enough to move around each other without speaking. We had seven aboard that night – me on the helm, Miranda on navigation and tactical, the others distributed across the envelope watch, the engine room, and the gun deck we technically weren't supposed to have. Nobody spoke much at departure. That was habit. Sound carries farther than you think over open water, and old habits are the ones that keep you breathing.

We ran dark through the Florida straits and picked up altitude over the interior, climbing into the cold air above the cloud layer where the stars were sharp and the war beneath us was invisible except for the occasional orange bloom of artillery along the eastern horizon. The Foreverwar has been burning so long that most people don't look at those blooms anymore. They're just weather. Part of the landscape. I grew up looking at them too, back in Lemuria, across the water – the distant glow of a conflict that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the world I'd eventually have to live in.

I stopped looking at them the day I stopped wearing a Cordoban uniform. That was a different kind of paperwork.

Miranda came up to the helm around the second hour, two cups of coffee in hand, the battered tin ones we'd been using since Atlantis. She stood beside me and we didn't talk for a while, just watched the dark ahead and let the ship do what ships do when you leave them alone long enough to remember they know how to fly.

“Fuel margins are good,” she said eventually.

“You already told me the fuel margins.”

“I know. I like saying things that are true.”

I took the coffee. It was too strong, the way she always made it, the way I had long since stopped complaining about. Ahead, the first ridgeline of the Lobo range materialized out of the dark, black teeth against a slightly less black sky.

“We're going to be fine,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I did the math.”

We were not fine.

The Amazonian intercept came out of nowhere, which is to say it came out of the cloud layer to our west, which I should have watched more carefully, which Miranda did not say to me then or afterward because that is not who she is. A patrol cutter, fast and lean, running its own dark protocol – no lights, no hail, just the sudden hard lock of a targeting system painting the Spring Wind in frequencies that made the hull sensors scream.

“Contact west, two hundred yards, closing,” came from the envelope watch, with the particular calm of someone who has been in enough bad situations to know that panic is a luxury.

Miranda was already at the tactical board. “They haven't fired. They want the cargo, not a kill.”

“That's generous of them.”

“It means we have maybe ninety seconds to be somewhere they aren't.”

The Lobo gap was ahead and below – a narrow channel between two ridgelines that the Spring Wind could thread and a patrol cutter could not, not at speed, not without scraping hull on stone. I had threaded it twice before. Once in daylight. Once not entirely sober, which I do not recommend but which did teach me the line.

“Drop altitude,” I said. “Everyone brace.”

What followed was not elegant. Elegant is what happens when a plan works the way you drew it. This was the other kind – all instinct and noise and the particular sensation of a mountain passing close enough to a wingtip that you can hear the difference in the air. The cutter followed us down, which I hadn't expected, which meant their pilot was either very good or very angry, and the first ranging shot went wide and hit the ridgeline to our left in a cascade of rock and green fire that lit the gap like a photographer's flash.

Miranda's voice through the speaking tube, steady as a compass needle: “Fifteen degrees starboard, now.”

I gave her fifteen degrees starboard. The second shot went where we had been.

“Ten degrees port.”

Port. The gap narrowed. I could see individual rocks on the face of the left ridge.

“Hold.”

I held.

The Spring Wind came through the gap like a thread through a needle, and behind us the cutter pulled up hard and banked away rather than commit to the stone, and then there was just the open valley beyond Lobo and the sound of our own engines and seven people breathing again after a period of not particularly wanting to.

I became aware that my hands hurt. I had been gripping the helm with sufficient conviction to leave marks.

Miranda came up from the tactical board and stood beside me again. Neither of us said anything for a while. The valley opened ahead into the long dark approach to the northern corridor, and the stars were exactly where they were supposed to be, and the fuel margins were still good.

“Fifteen degrees starboard,” I said, eventually.

“That's what the gap needed.”

“How did you know the exact number?”

She looked at me the way she sometimes looked at me when she thought I was being deliberately obtuse for the entertainment value. “I did the math, Barnaby.”

I laughed. It came up from somewhere lower than I expected, the way relief does when it finally arrives, and she laughed too, and for a moment the Spring Wind just flew herself through the dark while the two of us stood at the helm and let the tension out of our bodies and into the cold air where it belonged.

This is what nobody tells you about the smuggling life. Not the manifests, not the patrol schedules, not the seventeen contingencies. The thing nobody tells you is that it can be like this. That you can be flying stolen arcanotech through a mountain gap in the dark with a Cordoban patrol somewhere behind you and an Amazonian cutter somewhere to your west, and the person beside you can say I did the math and you can believe her completely, and the whole enterprise can feel less like survival and more like living.

We delivered the cargo to the Quebec contact three hours ahead of schedule. The payment was good. The coffee on the way home was terrible, which was Miranda's fault, and I told her so at length, and she was entirely unrepentant about it, which was one of the ten thousand things I loved about her.

The Spring Wind put down in Havana at dawn, and I watched the light come up over the water, and I thought: I would do this every day for the rest of my life and never once want it to be different.

I thought that a lot, back then.