O Captain My Captain

"When Finnean rose from the dead, they put that hat on his head. They danced all night, they drank all night, when Finnean rose from the dead. When Finnean rose from the dead, all those things they said. They all came out with a laugh and a shout when Finnean rose from the dead."

- from "Finnean's Wake", traditional spacer song

The message-drone they were leaving for the Iron Dreams was a funny little thing. Once Yan left Kino in the greenhouse, after a long stretch of planting beans in the dirt, she had jumped the ship again and then come to find Iri, who was putting the drone together. There was no hope of scrubbing the look of Imperial government make off of it without a complete disassembly, so they had to content themselves with the fact that if anyone other than the intended recipient found it, it would immediately set off alarm bells.

"Does your family have an encryption system that you could use?" Iri asked Yan as she prepared to load their message into the drone.

"Not that I could tell you off the top of my head," Yan said. "I haven't been on the Dreams in almost a year.

"Alright. Guess we'll just have to make do with being cryptic."

Yan laughed a little at that.

"You got a star chart for where we're meeting?" Iri asked.

"Two jumps away," Yan said. "Should be alright." She leaned over to the computer on the workbench and pulled up the starchart she had prepared earlier. Luckily, the file system on the First Star was fairly easy to navigate. Iri loaded it onto the drone's memory, along with her cryptic-but-not-encrypted message.

"Hopefully your family will listen and not panic," Iri said. "Who knows what news is coming from Emerri."

Yan grimaced. "My biggest concern is that we'll have missed them, and that they're on their way to Emerri right now."

"Let's keep our hopes up on that one," Iri said. "You looking forward to going home?"

"You sure know how to ask the worst questions," Yan said, picking up a piece of wire from the workbench and twisting it around her finger like a tourniquet.

"Sorry," Iri said, but her voice indicated that she was not that sorry.

"You don't have to try to be my therapist, or whatever," Yan grumbled. "We could have avoided a whole scene this morning."

"Don't you feel better when things are out in the open? When you're not holding all that garbage inside your chest?"

"That's beside the point. You don't go around volunteering your shittiest secrets." Yan wasn't actually mad, but she didn't want to address the question about her family, so she redirected the conversation as best she could.

"You don't need the burden of any issues I may or may not have," Iri said lightly.

"I know," Yan said. "I'm just saying..." She trailed off.

"We're all just saying." Iri disconnected the drone from the computer and began screwing it back together.

"You don't have to be my minder anymore. You're not like... the person who needs to deal with my emotional problems."

"Good thing I'm not your minder anymore, because I was never that good at it."

"What? Yes you were." Yan was taken aback. "I thought Halen thought you were doing a good job."

Iri reached over and tapped the tip of Yan's nose, very lightly. Yan's cheeks heated up ever so slightly; she knew Iri was straight, and besides, there was everything else, but that was a fairly flirtatious invasion of her personal space. "And that is why we don't talk about my problems, Captain," Iri said brightly.

Yan unwrapped the wire from her finger, which was turning purple. "Fine."

"You ready to jump into Byforest?"

"No, not at all." Yan was not looking forward to holding up invisibility on the whole ship for six hours by herself. It sounded like it would be one prolonged exercise in misery.

"Get some sleep," Iri advised. "You've got bags under your eyes for days."

"Wilco," Yan said. She hadn't actually woken up very long ago, but the day had been full of stressful events already, and she had not slept well the night previous, so the idea of a nap was a good one.

---

Yan followed Iri's advice, settling down in her captain's room for a long nap. She woke up feeling disgusting, but determined fairly quickly that it was due to not eating enough, so she scrounged up some instant noodles from the kitchen. After she was feeling much more human, she set herself up in the bridge to jump the ship the rest of the way towards Byforest.

They weren't going to be docking with the station, for obvious reasons, so her intended jump target was about fifteen light seconds out from the station proper, which was a radius that was safe enough that she wasn't likely to hit anything as she came in, and small enough that their little drone would be able to navigate to the Dreams in a relatively short amount of time, enough to deliver its message.

Yan put in the jump coordinates, sitting cross legged in the captain's chair. No one else was on the bridge at the moment. She put the jump table away for the moment and pulled up the security feeds, checking to see where everyone else was. Iri was floating in a bay, with the drone next to her, waiting to shove it out of an airlock when the time came. She was reading something on her phone and looking overall pretty bored. Sylva was hustling through the hallways, though Yan had no idea where she was going. Kino was still in the greenhouse, though Yan could see that she was done planting seeds and was inspecting the tending robots instead.

Yan paged Iri over the intercom. Iri jumped, as much as one could jump in zero gravity, when she heard the sound of Yan's voice. "Ready, Iri?" Yan asked.

Iri's voice came back muffled, due to the echo-y nature of the bay and the distance between her and the microphone. "You scared me half to death. But yes, let me know when you've jumped us."

"Will do." Yan leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.

Yan had never tried to use the power on a whole ship before. Even during her rampage, when she had stormed the First Star and taken control, the only thing she had done was open doors, a fairly trivial task. "She hoped that the First Star wouldn't mind her intrusion.

She didn't think the ship was alive, not really. It felt like it in the power, along with that achingly familiarity that she couldn't quite place, but that was probably just because of the power that had been given to it by its creator.

As she stretched out her power into the whole ship, creeping it around the outside edges, at the barrier between vacuum and stone, Yan considered how little she really knew about the stardrive that was humming all around her. She had lectures on stardrives while at the Academy, but they had been more of a history lesson and series of dire warnings, rather than an explanation of how they were actually made. This was to stop her fellow classmates from trying to make their own, and inevitably blowing up the whole planet. Yan had never attempted to look at the inside of the Iron Dreams' stardrive, so she had no idea how they were actually constructed. She only knew in vague, theoretical terms how they worked.

Still, they couldn't be that hard to make, considering that Halen had made several of them when he was her age, with no training, and only the equipment available aboard a pirate ship. Perhaps Halen was just extremely lucky as well as extremely talented.

She shook the thoughts out of her head and returned to her task. Even though she tried to push the feeling away, the First Star felt uncomfortably awake. Yan breathed in and out, sinking down into meditation. It was hard work to pull up invisibility over the whole ship, and Yan hoped that she would be able to hold it up for the next six hours. If she couldn't, they'd have problems. She opened her eyes and pushed the button to start the jump countdown.

"Thirty seconds, Iri," Yan said over the intercom.

She tried to relax. The power around her was a warm blanket. She was glad that the First Star wasn't fighting her invisibility-- probably because it had no actual effect on the ship. It was just as easy as placing invisibility on Kino. It was only the light around the body, after all. Simple.

The power swelled as the First Star's stardrive prepared to jump. Deep in her meditation, Yan felt something like a wild joy coming from the stardrive, though perhaps that was simply the feeling of the power, eager to be used. Yan was caught up in it, that anticipation, that blinding heat. She remembered, all too clearly, the memory that Halen had shown her, of the stardrive he had made. But there was no fear here, only that wild, keening joy. Yan was lost in it completely, somehow feeling one with the ship, feeling its stone as her own body, its computer as her own mind.

The wave of power crested. The stardrive laughed in her head. The ship jumped.

The wave broke, and Yan was back alone in her own head and her own skin, knocked out of meditation and breathing heavily. Her invisibility held; she had managed to hold onto that, at least, despite the way she had been seized by something.

She felt exhausted, despite the nap she had taken, as though being caught up in the process of the jump had used some of her own mental and physical energy. She didn't understand what had happened, or why, so she felt vaguely uneasy as she settled down for a long six hours of holding the invisibility. Despite that unease, the connection she felt with the stardrive was also comforting.

This was her ship, after all. It made sense for her to connect with it. Hers. Hers alone.

The idea put a greater warmth in her chest every time she thought about it.

---

If Yan thought that six hours of holding invisibility was exhausting, that was nothing compared to the several days of waiting to see if the Iron Dreams would show up at their meeting spot. She hadn't seen the Dreams docked at Byforest Station, so there was no way of knowing if they hadn't arrived yet, or if they were already on their way to Emerri. Without being able to dock with the station, they didn't have access to ansible logs or ship travel updates.

Yan spent most of her time in the greenhouse, trying not to think about anything. Having her hands and mind busy with deciding planting arrangements, getting the tanks up and running, and overall making herself useful made it easier to keep her mind off of it. She assigned tasks to everyone else, keeping them as busy as she could as well. If Iri was inventorying the ship, and Sylva was learning how to jump the ship in case of emergency, and Kino was fixing all the doors that Yan had destroyed, then none of them could be at each other's throats. Even when they were together, at meals and when they found themselves in shared spaces like the bridge, greenhouse, or gym, the tension ever so slowly started to lapse from outright hostility into mere discomfort. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

They were stuck together, like it or not, so it would be good for them to get along.

Still, the anxiety of waiting for her family to show grew and grew as the hours ticked past. Had they found the message drone? Did they understand the message enough to interpret the coordinates? Were they coming?

Yan was in the greenhouse programming one of the tending robots when they jumped in, and Iri was on the bridge. Yan knew what had happened even before Iri frantically paged her; she had felt the wave of power that was a ship jumping in.

"Yan!" Iri said, voice crackling but loud over the intercom. "Your family's here!"

"I know," Yan called back, unsure of where the microphone in the room was. "I'm on my way. Do you have radio yet?"

"In a second," Iri said. "I'm lighting us up so they can see us."

It was helpful for ships to visually see each other, so that they could point their radio broadcasts in the correct direction.

Yan abandoned her gardening tasks and jogged through the hallways of the ship. She was filled with both relief and the familiar familial anxiety. She always felt vaguely bad about her family, for really no good reason, and that was compounded by the fact that she had no idea how they were going to think of her now. She was a pirate, after all, and some kind of abandoner of the Empire, and she had been through... a lot. She felt like she had changed so much since she had last seen them, and she had no idea what to expect.

She hesitated for a second before opening the door of the bridge, but there was no reason or way to put it off, so she stepped inside.

"Who radio?" Yan signed very simply to Iri, who knew only the barest rudiments of sign language. She didn't want to make her presence known to the people on the other side of the call until she had a grasp of the situation.

"Pellon," Iri fingerspelled back. "She's here now," Iri said aloud. Yan grimaced fractionally, then walked over and took a seat in the captain's chair.

"Yan?" Pellon asked.

"I'm here," Yan said, feeling excruciatingly awkward.

In the background over the radio, she heard confused and muted sounds of celebration. Yan looked at Iri, mortified. Iri shrugged in the most nonchalant way possible. The cheering quieted, presumably as Pellon shushed his crew.

"Are you alright?" Pellon asked.

"I'm fine, I guess," Yan said.

"When we came into Byforest, we heard the worst news," Pellon said.

"But you also got our message."

"And thank God for that," Pellon said. "It's a bit of a coincidence, because I had almost diverted us to Hylar to pick up a contract, so we almost missed it entirely."

"You would have gotten it when you went back to Byforest," Yan said. "We were prepared to wait here until you did."

"We should have this conversation in person. Do you have a shuttle?"

"One sec," Yan said, and gestured to Iri to silence the radio. "I can't leave the ship," she hissed.

"Don't be an idiot. Yes, you can," Iri said. "You're going to go talk to your family, so help me God."

Iri unmuted the radio.

"Yes, I have a shuttle," Yan said, somewhat reluctantly. "I'll come right over."

"Great."

"Okay, er, I'll get going then," Yan said awkwardly. "See you in like, half an hour." She glanced at Iri, who rolled her eyes and stopped the transmission.

"Who's coming with you?" Iri asked.

"Sylva likes my family. Definitely not Kino. You can come if you want."

"You trust Kino to hold down the ship?"

"I trust her not to mess with it," Yan said. "Probably more than you trust her."

"That's a statement of fact if I ever heard one. I'll page Sylva and we'll meet you in Bay 1. You can go get the shuttle ready."

"Tell Kino what's going on."

"Will do."

Yan left the bridge and headed toward the bay, making a quick pit stop in the bathroom to check if she was presentable. In the bay, she picked out one of the shuttles and went through the pre-flight checklist on it. She was almost done when Iri and Sylva arrived. She propped the door open for them and they all got in.

"How's your family doing?" Sylva asked as she buckled herself in the back seat.

"We're about to find out," Yan muttered as she hauled the door shut and locked it. After buckling herself into the pilot's seat, she sent a command to the First Star to begin depressurising the bay, then open the bay doors.

The three women were mostly silent on the shuttle ride over, aside from Yan's communication with the Dreams. The flight controller on duty was her cousin Amira's husband, who she didn't know very well. It was that much easier for the two of them to be professional and not chatter over the radio as he directed Yan into a landing bay. She liked being behind the yoke of the shuttle, and she was almost sad when she settled them gently into the bay and requested re-pressurization.

"Well, this is it," Yan said, killing the shuttle's engine.

"Can hardly be more awkward than when you came back to Emerri," Iri said.

"True." She checked the shuttle's system to make sure they were all fine and turned off, and waited for the pressurization lights to stop flashing outside. When it finished, all three of them unbuckled themselves and Yan opened the door of the shuttle.

She barely had time to react as her uncle Maxes came flying at her, coming out of the door and into the bay with almost dangerous speed. Yan braced herself against the side of the shuttle, and he crashed into her, wrapping her in acrushing, wordless hug. His beaded braids hit her shoulders, and she could smell his familiar cologne. The whole experience made her feel like an eight year old again, but she didn't, surprising herself, resent it.

"I knew you weren't dead," he whispered into her ear. "I knew it."

Yan hugged him back. He seemed reluctant to ever let her go, but she eventually had to squirm a little so that she could see his face and have a real conversation.

"Glad to be alive," she said, with as much emotion as she could muster (not much).

"Are you okay?" he asked, holding her arms and pushing her back so that he could see her whole upper body. "God, what happened to your suit?" he asked, pointing out a particularly grim looking blood spot on Yan's Iron Dreams jumpsuit that she hadn't quite managed to scrub out, even after repeated washings.

"Yeah, I need some new clothes," Yan muttered. "I'm okay. It's been a lot."

"I've missed you so much."

"Hasn't even been a whole school year since I last saw you," Yan said, feeling awkward again.

"You know what I mean," Maxes said, and seemed to be unable to resist hugging her again. "Will you tell me what happened?"

"I guess. Not right here though," Yan said, wiggling out of his grip again.

"Of course. Have you eaten?"

"Err..." Yan didn't remember the last time she had eaten anything, so it probably hadn't been recently. "No."

Maxes smiled. "Everyone will be so glad to see you again."

Yan tensed up. She hadn't actually done the whole 'big groups of people' thing since getting back to the real world, or whatever this world was. She had been allowed to be by herself aboard the Impulse, and Sandreas and Halen had sheltered her from the worst of it on Emerri, she didn't know if she could handle a big party with her entire extended family. She could barely handle just her uncle.

"I hope you haven't set up a whole big thing," Yan said. "Please." She didn't know how they would have even had time to, but spacers threw parties at drops of the hat, so she perhaps should have expected this.

Maxes peered into her face. "You can have dinner first, and you won't have to stay for long. Just make an appearance. Let everyone know you're fine."

"Okay," Yan said, trying to appear graceful but feeling internally resigned. "I haven't been around people much."

"That's alright. We're going to have dinner with Pellon first. We need to talk."

"I know." Yan looked over Maxes's shoulder and saw the rest of the entourage who had followed him in. There were only a few, which Yan was grateful for. It was just her baby cousins, though they were certainly far from babies, since they were nine? thirteen? now; Maxes's wife Jalena (who was deep in conversation with Sylva); and Pellon himself.

Yan fully extracted herself from Maxes's grip and turned to Pellon. She put a brave smile on her face.

He looked at her solemnly, the light in the bay reflecting off of his shaved head, reminding her weirdly of Sid. "As a ship in the night, I greet you, Captain," he said finally, holding out his hand.

Yan had certainly not expected to be met with that traditional greeting, so she fumbled a bit with the response. "With the stars at your back, I greet you, Captain," she said.

They shook hands, and Pellon smiled. "Odd circumstances that I'm greeting my cousin in," he said. He was actually her mother's cousin, but the difference was academic at this point.

"They could definitely be better," Yan agreed. "But they could also be much worse."

"Very true. I'm glad to see that Ms. Calor and Ms. Maedes survived their journey."

"They found me," Yan said.

"So, more than survived. I can't wait to hear all about it."

"Er. Yeah," Yan rubbed the back of her neck. She really, really, really was not looking forward to rehashing her months of trauma that had led her here. She wished she could have someone else give them a supersummary, and then have no one ever talk about it, ever again. She wished the information could be deposited in people's brains, simply to satisfy their curiosity, but making no impact on the way they treated her. "Did you hear the news out of Emerri?"

"Several pieces of news," Pellon said with a drawn expression. "All of which I can assume are fake."

"Probably," Yan said. She abruptly realized that she was going to have to decide how she was going to handle information. Did she want to spill the Empire's secrets to her family? Some of it was already very much out of the bag, but she hadn't even considered the fact that her family only had the story that she was taken by pirates, the official Imperial lie. Yan glanced at Iri, who was listening in on the conversation. Iri discretely shrugged, then flicked her finger at her waist to point at Yan. So, it was her choice.

"We received a very alarming letter from First Sandreas informing us that you were dead," he said. "It included a very graphic picture."

Yan felt nauseous. "God."

"Indeed."

"The half of your face that was intact was very convincing."

"I'm sorry," Yan said.

"What are you apologizing for?"

"For making you worry."

"I hardly think that's your fault. But I do think that you need to tell us the truth about what's going on. At least before we go claim your corpse and give it a funeral."

"Your suite?" Yan asked.

"Private enough. Say hello to your cousins though, first," Pellon said, pointing at the young Jaden and Sion, Maxes and Jalena's sons. "They've missed you more than they'd probably admit."

Yan went over to the two boys. They were so tall, coming up to her chin. She found it hard to believe both how young they were and how old they were at the same time. "Hey," she said.

"I did think you were dead," Sion admitted. "Sorry." It was an odd opening line, but Yan wasn't going to begrudge kids their weirdnesses. She could see that he sincerely meant his apology, and that it had clearly been haunting him.

"It's okay," Yan said. "If I was you, I definitely would have too."

"I didn't think you were," Jaden said, nudging his younger brother. "I knew you were coming back."

"I'm glad you believed in me," Yan said awkwardly. "I missed you guys. School going alright?"

"Fine," the two said in unison, then looked at each other and laughed.

"They letting you fly shuttles yet?" she asked Jaden.

"Once," he said proudly. "Dad said I did a good job."

"Glad I wasn't a passenger," Yan said.

"You're a captain now?" Sion asked.

"I guess so."

"Can I come on your ship?"

"Maybe just to see."

"What are you going to haul?" Jaden asked, curious, clearly not understanding the politics of the situation at all. "What route do you run?"

"My ship's a little small for hauling," Yan said. "I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet."

This answer seemed to stymie both of the boys, and neither of them had any idea how to respond. The concept of a ship that wasn't hauling things was completely foreign to them. To be fair, it was pretty foreign to Yan as well, but she was the one in control.

"Okay," Jaden said. "Are you sticking around?"

"No," Yan said. "I don't think I'll be staying much more than tonight. You have to get to Emerri, and I just came from there."

"That sucks," Jaden said.

"Just think of it like I'm still at school. You'll probably see me around."

Sion tugged Yan's arm and pulled her down so that his mouth was level with her ear. "Dad is the worst when you're not around. You should stay."

Yan smiled sadly and shook her head. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sure you'll get along fine without me."

Sion frowned, but nodded. "Coming to the party?"

"I don't even know how you put one together so fast," Yan said.

"Aunt Eman is really good at that," Jaden said.

"I'll be there to say hi later. I have to talk with Captain Pellon first, though."

"About what?"

"Would you be mad at me if I said boring adult stuff?"

"Yes," Jaden said.

"Unfortunately, that's what it is. Some weird things might happen on your trip to Emerri," Yan said. "I have to make sure he knows what to expect."

"Okay," Jaden said, unconvinced. "I'll just ask Dad about it, later."

"You do that." Yan reached out and hugged them, first Jaden, then Sion. "You two are great. Hold down the ship for me, okay?"

"Okay."

Yan grinned at them, then headed back towards Pellon. She passed Sylva, and caught a snatch of her conversation with Jalena.

"You didn't kill anyone, right?"

"I'm sorry to announce that I actually brought another pirate into this world," Sylva said, shaking her head with mock sadness.

"Oh, you're a midwife too, now?"

"It was a surgical birth," Sylva said. "Very bloody."

"Glad I was not within a hundred light years of it," Jalena said.

Yan nodded at her, and she smiled back then waved her towards Captain Pellon. Yan smiled and headed back over. Captain Pellon gathered up the smaller group who would be going with him back to his suite for dinner: Yan, Sylva, Iri, Maxes, and himself. Jalena took her two sons out to the party.

Walking through the halls of the Iron Dreams was a melancholy experience for Yan. It was so familiar, and it had once been home. But it was not home now, and it never would be again. There was no going back to the past, no matter what halls she was walking down. No matter how much she felt like a small child in her uncle's arms. No matter how in awe she still was of the man she thought of as Her Captain. It was all the same, but so different at the same time.

Pellon let them in to his rooms. They were, for the most part, unchanged since Yan had last been there with Sylva, before her apprenticeship even began. There was a table already set and a hot dinner already waiting, kept warm with heating pads underneath large trays. Everyone sat down at the table. Pellon was at the head, Yan at his right side, Maxes at his left. Sylva was next to Yan, and Iri was on her other side. It was a cozy little group they had.

"I won't keep you waiting on your dinner," Pellon said. "Yan, would you like to say the blessing?"

Ah. Fuck. Yan was still not exactly ready for that.

"I'll say it," Sylva said with a smile, knowing Yan's discomfort and taking on that burden for her. Sylva's voice was clear and beautiful. "Oh Lord of all creation, you have brought us here together in your great mercy. You guard the roads of darkness, you watch the paths of light. Wherever we go, you are there. Keep us all on our journeys until we meet again in some other season, under some other sky."

It was not a traditional food blessing, but it certainly was appropriate for the situation.

Pellon smiled at Sylva, then opened up the trays and served them all. It was curry and rice, and it was delicious. They all ate in relative silence for a few minutes, with only the mildest of meaningless chatter passing between them. Yan noticed that Pellon did not serve any of them wine. Yan was hungrier than she had expected, and ate a lot of her meal by the time they were ready to settle in to real discussion.

"So, Yan," Pellon said. "I assume by the way that the Empire is calling you dead, and the fact that you are in possession of First Sandreas's private ship that you are on the run."

"Yeah," Yan said, pushing some of her rice around on her plate with her fork. "Not the greatest situation."

"I suppose my first question is, then, to ask if my crew are in danger." His voice was light but deadly serious.

"I don't know," Yan said. "I think if Sandreas were going to kill you outright, there would have been a Fleet ship waiting for you at Byforest."

"That's one good thing," Pellon said.

"We're all certainly grateful that we didn't die unexpectedly," Maxes said.

"I think it would have been a fairly bad and obvious thing, if he had ordered you killed. Even if he made it look like pirates. I don't think the Guild would like that, open war on their ships," Yan said.

"The Guild has been a mess since the elder Vaneik died," Pellon said. "I find it hard to believe that anyone with any clout would be able to muster up the will to care, should we disappear."

Yan caught herself before she began to discuss Vaneik's murder. "I'm not saying you should disappear, but maybe try to stay out of the spotlight for a while."

"When have we ever been in the spotlight?" Maxes asked gently.

"Only when I put you there by accident," Yan admitted. "I'll be keeping as low of a profile as I can, certainly."

"Thank you," Pellon said. "Now, there is the matter of the funeral."

Yan sighed, scraped her fork along her plate, forming her remaining rice into one soggy mound. "You can't exactly not have one," she said.

"Yes. And First Sandreas will certainly attend."

"He'll know that you know," Yan said. "His bodyguard, Halen, he can tell what people are feeling. If you aren't feeling sad enough, he'll understand right away that I was in contact with you." The secrets she was continuing to keep and the secrets that she was giving away felt like they were being decided at random. She didn't know if she should still feel loyalty to the Empire, she didn't know what secrets would be actively dangerous to gift to her family.

"Is there any possibility that you wouldn't immediately get in contact with us?" Pellon asked.

"I don't know," Yan said. "But I clearly did."

"True. How much is this likely to get us in trouble?" Pellon asked.

"I think that depends on what you know, and what you decide to do with that information," Yan said. "If you can demonstrate to First Sandreas that you're willing to play along and keep your head down, I think he'll leave you alone."

"Play along?"

"Do the funeral. Pretend like I'm dead. Don't say anything to the contrary. I'd recommend you advise him to hold the funeral on Emerri, and you have a select few trustworthy people attend."

"So no Jaden and Sion," Maxes said with a slight smile.

"Yes," Yan said. "It's unfortunate that everyone here knows that I'm alive, because that secret is going to be hard to keep, but do your best."

"And what other information are we talking about?"

"I'm willing to tell you things," Yan said, though she wasn't sure if that was true. "Imperial secrets. It's all tied up with where I was, and why I'm here now. But I'm not sure how much you actually want to know."

Pellon steepled his hands, looked at Maxes. "How secret are we talking?"

Yan glanced at Iri. "You know the Fleet? If you join the Fleet, they put a little chip in your brain, one that you can't ever get out, that stops you from ever talking about it." She couldn't keep the bitterness out of her voice, not quite, and she instinctively rubbed the back of her neck.

"Would there be any benefit to you telling us this?" Pellon asked. "Or would it just be bringing trouble that we won't be able to deal with."

"If I don't tell you," Yan said, "I can't tell you where I was, why I'm here, or where I'm going." She couldn't quite answer the third one regardless, but it was poetic to put things in threes. "If I don't tell you, you won't be able to make the choice to help me, or to leave me."

Pellon nodded slowly. Yan was grateful that he didn't immediately say that he wouldn't abandon her. It was oddly comforting to know that he would, if it came down to it. In a choice between his crew and Yan, Pellon would choose his crew every time. Yan was glad of that, because it gave her a sense of stability in the world, and the knowledge that she didn't have to be responsible for the actions of the Iron Dreams. They could make their own choices. This wasn't her home anymore.

"You can't tell us anything?" Maxes asked.

"I would stick to the lines of the official report," Yan said. "I don't like it, but it's all tied up together."

Pellon was thoughtful. "There's no way we would be able to find out this information without you telling us directly?"

"There are some leaks, if you're willing to get in bed with pirates. But not very many. Not enough. You wouldn't get the whole picture."

"And who has the whole picture?"

"Kino," Yan said immediately. Kino was the one who had the most information, the most contacts, the most complete image.

"I remember her. Quiet," Maxes said. "Is she still with First Sandreas?"

Yan laughed bitterly. "No. She's on my ship. Most of her, anyway."

"Why didn't you bring her here?" Pellon asked. "Is she gravely injured?"

"That's all tied up with information I don't think you want," Yan said. "She's on my ship for her own protection."

Maxes raised an eyebrow at that. "She's your prisoner?"

"She doesn't have anywhere else to go, if that's your definition of prisoner," Yan said.

"Protection from whom?" Pellon asked.

"You would probably be pretty angry if you had the whole picture," Sylva said, chiming in on the conversation for the first time. "I certainly am."

Yan sighed and nudged her with her elbow. She had thought they were mostly on peaceful terms, but Sylva seemed riled up by this conversation. "Don't worry about it," Yan said to her family members.

"I'm your uncle," Maxes said. "I have to worry."

"I'm somewhat concerned about what forces you're planning to join up with," Pellon said. "I don't know what they are, but none of this sounds encouraging."

"Trust me," Yan said. "I'm ten thousand times more concerned than you are." She thought about the Mother, who she liked. Then she thought about the Green King, who she absolutely did not. They were all theoretically on the same side, now. The enemy of the Empire, even if she didn't want to think of herself as one, was probably her acquaintance, if not her friend.

"So Kino is on your ship, and you're here. Where's the other one? Welslak, right?" Maxes asked.

"I think he's still on a Fleet ship out of ansible range. He doesn't know anything about any of this. I mean, he kinda does, but none of the developments that have happened in the past..." Yan thought about it, decided her sense of time had been destroyed from having an inconsistent sleep schedule aboard the First Star, and rounded, "ten days."

"So he's still with First Sandreas."

"In terms of alignment, yes," Yan said. "I don't know if they'll be able to get him back for the funeral."

There was a brief lull in the conversation. Pellon looked at her. "What are you going to do, Yan?" he asked. "One captain to another. What's your honest plan?"

It was very odd to be acknowledged as an equal. "I don't know yet," Yan said. She ran her hands over the tablecloth. "I think I need to meet up with some people, connections that Kino has, that I have. I know I'm an enemy of the state, but I don't know how far I'm going to push that."

"Okay," Pellon said. "I think that I don't want to know any of your information, then," he said.

Yan nodded, grateful immediately to be let off the hook. "Thank you," she said, sincerely. "It's probably for the best."

"How likely is this to come back to the Guild?"

"I think I'm going to have a talk with Guild leadership at some point," Yan said. "If I can swing it." Now there, thinking about the murderous Thule, was a bedfellow that Yan did not want, but she knew that the Guild would be a powerful ally.

"When?"

"Not for a long time, probably. But I wouldn't say that they won't be involved," Yan said. "Eventually." The scope of this whole problem, and the scope of her position, it was all beginning to calcify in her head into something hard and difficult. The Guild would be a powerful ally, but bringing them in would only happen if... If things had already gone so far down a long road.

"Is there anything that we should do?"

"Stay within inhabited space, but be ready to run. Avoid pirate ships. Don't trust anyone," Yan said. "Don't take on new crew or passengers," she said, thinking of the way that Sylva and Iri had infiltrated the pirate ships they had travelled on.

"So, be vigilant," Pellon said. "We can do that."

"Will we be seeing you again?" Maxes asked. "Do you want more crew?"

"No one is going aboard her ship," Pellon said, looking at Maxes directly. "You understand."

Maxes looked at his captain, then looked down. "Yes."

That was a twist at Yan's heart, actually. She had half thought, maybe, that her uncle would come with her. But he couldn't leave his kids and wife, and Yan didn't want to put her young cousins in harm's way any more than she already had. It was a foolish want, and she didn't even know how she felt about her uncle to begin with, but she just wanted... She wanted. That was all.

"I'll get in contact with you," Yan said. "But for obvious reasons, I'm going to vanish and be uncontactable."

"I'll miss you," Maxes said.

"I'll miss you too. But it is the way it is." There was still so much of her that cried out that it didn't have to be, but it was.

"I understand," Pellon said. "This is something that you feel that you must do?"

"Once I figure out what I am going to do, yes."

"And is there anything else that we can do for you? Aside from new clothes," Pellon asked, looking pointedly at her outfit. Yan laughed.

"Actually, there is one thing." She pulled a data stick from her pocket, and she slid it into the middle of the table. Iri raised an eyebrow at it, and Sylva frowned. "At the funeral, please give this to Halen."

"Certainly that will expose that we've been in contact with you," Pellon said. That didn't matter, for reasons that Yan had already articulated, but she could understand Pellon's hesitancy to utterly expose the ship.

"Give it to Banmei Olms, then, and he can give it to his daughter, Yuuni. She has a direct line to Sandreas's ear."

"What is it?"

"Just a letter," Yan said, feeling slightly guilty, though she didn't know why. "I needed to explain myself."

"Are you sure that will do anything good?" Iri asked.

"I don't know," Yan said. "But I had to-- You know what? It's not really relevant. I just would like it delivered, if you can."

Maxes picked up the data stick, twirled it around in his fingers and glanced at Pellon, who looked at him neutrally.

"I'll deliver it," Maxes said.

"Thank you," Yan said, genuinely grateful.

"Is that all?" Pellon said.

"I'd like for you to break the news to the rest of the crew that they have to keep my existence a secret," Yan said.

Pellon smiled. "Of course. Shall we head down to see the celebration in your honor?"

Yan was reluctant, but since she had somehow, some way, managed to avoid rehashing the worst several months of her life, she was feeling slightly better. "I can try," she said.