"Avast hauling, bemmy!  Wanna snap me a spar?"

Putin shouted from the quarterdeck, fingers intertwined at the base of his spine, legs braced against the erratic surge as, with a minimum of starsail, the desperado backed and filled through the perilous, gas-clotted Deep.

It was the 3rd hour of "graveyards," a period of reduced activity when the least numerous and competent of three watches was on deck.  Yet the hour could not be told, as upon the surface of a planet, from the appearance of the sky through the skeletal pyramid of spars and cabelles overhead.  Through the pulsing purge-field, the sky itself offered a unique display of color and apparent depth, for, over the past days, he and the captain had insinuated their little fleet lightyears into the heart of a forbidding nebula.

Kephov.   Their destination, only a ship's "day" away now, Tzitzeron and Ovidu, circled each other in the gas cloud some distance from a giant star of harsh yellow-white in which philosophers of science might have found interest, had the pursuit of knowledge been fashionable within the imperia-conglomerate comprising human civilization.  It's like was not to be found on any "main sequence."  It would be reasonable to assume it was a young star, destined for a spectacular demise.  Yet the planets within its influence were old.  To the extent any curiosity was ever manifest among the misfits who inhabited them (starsailing officers, doomed to spend their lives a'voyaging, often developed esoteric interests; what few naturalists flourished these days were mostly found aboard starships, even those of desperados fully as subject to physical law and the tedium of long passages as any legitimate vessel), it could be demonstrated, with support of fossils and the like, that the sun that warmed them was no more given to instability than any other.

Kephov.  ​​​​​​​No one might have seen it in the first officer's imperturbable appearance, but his mind was a battlefield of conflicting feelings, not alone because this was the system where he had once been sold as a slave.

Kephov.  Like their extraordinary sun, the planets themselves were anomalous.  Nothing about the otherwise remarkable star they circled (insofar as could be determined) might have led an erudite observer to expect a pair of near-identical worlds, eleven thousand versts in diameter, pivoting about an imaginary point on a mutual orbit around it.  Even the natural expectation that they might long ago have compromised gravitic differences, settling into revolutions which, owing to geophysical imperfections, caused them to display the same face to each other (as with better-known examples), proved incorrect.  Each spun upon its own tilted axis.  The pair, as such, spun upon another.  This, in turn, followed Keplerian tracks about the inexplicable primary, rendering determination of time, date, or season---without recourse to complex charts or custom timepieces--quite impossible.

Of the surfaces of these worlds, what might have been rendered succinctly which would be accurate and valuable?  The most negligible planet is a complicated phenomenon, in particular if, as these did, it harbors life.  Having given birth to its own evolutionary sequence, Tzitzeron and Ovidu each possessed the usual proportions of land, water, desert, and forest; a touch more of the tropical than the arctic, offset by mountainous equatorial altitudes attributable to the astrophysics of mutually orbiting planets.

What stood out about Tzizeron and Ovidu depended more on their location outside the known Deep and the borders of established polities, the nature of their inhabitants (chiefly a certain relaxation concerning fine points of the law), and the manner in which the interests of imperia-conglomerate had led them to an attitude resembling tolerance towards the system.  A cometary "halo" of odd destiny---filled with billions of spinning, sharp-toothed planetary fragments---and the fact the system as a whole was passing through the gaseous remains of an ancient supernova completed its natural defenses.  No fleet admiral would risk speeds necessary to spring warningless upon it against a surety of dashing his ships to pieces.

Even in this wild outlaw port, where theorists might predict nothing but chaotic violence (and---in that most abysmal variety of ignorance, that of the educated (call the condition anarchy), spontaneous order and organization were to be discovered.  Kephov possessed its own complexity of rules, powers, and immunities. Such was not for the likes of Yvan Dragomilov. Putin remembered the first time they had visited here after the boy assumed command.

"Desperado Council be thrust!" This he had snapped in angry reaction to an invitation to join a guild of freebooters.  Its issuers, captains all, had conceived it as an honor, for already Yvan Dragomilov had achieved a species of celebrity.

"This arrangement smells of another imperium-conglomerate in the making!  I shall have none of it. And it had better steer clear of my presence!"  Shaking their heads (in most cases gray-thrust or snowy), the captains had departed, mumbling and astonished to have their invitation rejected by this man-child.

To serve the Scopa's master as his headquarters on Ovidu---many people must be seen in selling off her plunder and attending her resupply---he had leased an inn at the heart of the small city, two streets from the block (although he had not known it until he and his first officer had gone sightseeing) upon which Putin had once been auctioned for less than he now received in shares from the capture of a lifeboat.

"A cozer and two rubles for your thoughts, Dracul."

Putin came close to jumping.  "Premier take you, Anna, you're the only one I know who can sneak up on me like that!"  Anna's laugh was soft.  As he turned to face her, he heard the echoing chuckle of his other wife, Alice. "What mischief are you two after committing upon me my peaceful quarterdeck?"

Alice gave him a fake frown.  "Have we been forbidden it?  We thought we'd take the air of the late watch, Mr. First Officer Putin, sir.  Not so many feet to get under with the captain away, most officers off duty, and our own dear husband pacing the mesh with time heavy upon his hands."

"You aloft!" he shouted as if arguing with his wife.  "What are you rollballs about up there?  Belay that tomfoolery and see to those reefs, or by the Premier's shrunken dingus there'll be no liberty in Kephov!"

Kephov.  The alien in the mizzenyards waved cheerful compliance to the unnecessary order, carrying on with its duties as before, leaving Putin too steep in the humiliation attendant upon his own display of temper.

Kephov.  Putin's wives were accustomed to his moods, as well as the reasons for them, and would not be put off by any such demonstration.  "In any case," Anna insisted, "we wanted to talk to you before we arrived."

Alice nodded in agreement.  "We wanted to ask you something, Dracul."

He frowned.  In his eyes, love for his wives, concern for their concerns, belied the expression.  It was a rare moment, the watch consisting in the main of non-humans, the captain overseeing repairs aboard the Dzendayn two-decker, and Putin, so used to keeping to himself, for once inclined to talk of things troubling him.  "Could it not wait," he asked, "until the watch-end?"

Anna shook her head.  "It's been waiting, Dracul, my love, at the end of every watch, while we accumulated courage enough to broach it.  Before many more watches have passed, we'll have reached Lusin, and it will be too late."

Lusin was an ice asteroid within the halo of  Tzizeron-Ovidu. Given its size---it was possible to leap, in a vacuum suit, from the quarterdeck directly onto its frozen surface--it was unnecessary to take orbit or lower the repulsorlift for the direction "down" did not exist.

As the twin planets had provided sanctuary to Zilvagabond's mutineers, so here the adventurer and the darkvenger were led by Yvan Dragomilov's Scopa .  The desperado would first heave to---Ayvengo and Gigantea being sent ahead to join others of his fleet---with the purpose of putting off any from the captured ships who, even after persuasion, would not enlist.  Also, she would take on water----at a place where it was cheap and, owing to lack of gravity, easiest to get aboard---without which the innovative use of her boats became profligately impossible.  By long, standing agreement, those debarking would be picked up by a vessel whose captain was paid to stray off course and keep his mouth shut.  In Yvan Dragomilov's view, they were on their own thereafter.  He did not consider that he was operating a charity.  From the merchant starship, they would, by various means, return home to spread the fame, whether he would have it or not, of their erstwhile benefactor.

Putin frowned down at the small, plump woman. "And?"

"Not 'and,' dear Dracul," replied, "'so',"

"So what does he intend," Alice blurted, "with that woman-child he captured aboard the adventurer, the poor thing?"

Putin nodded. "I was wondering when you two would get around to that."

"I keep asking Alice, what can he do?  He's just a little boy himself."

"That 'little boy,'" Putin snorted, "ordered a hundred souls to their deaths just to begin this run.  I won't say they didn't deserve it, but I was glad that I allowed them to sign his articles and mean it."

The women made clucking noises appropriate to their personalities and the circumstances.  "Will he be mad at you for not carrying out his order?"

"He knows all about it.  Those were his orders: feed anyone to the field as won't sign up."  Putin pounded a fist into his palm.   "That 'little boy' happens to be the best Old Man I ever sailed under.  He doesn't care how things are done so long as they get done."

This, Putin thought, was only one of his virtues.  In the span before they had waylaid the Ayvengo, with some help from his first officer, the boy had discovered that he was one of those rare, dangerous natural leaders for love of whom men would leap with a glad shout into the maw of death.  True, Yvan Dragomilov----known to a smaller portion of the galaxy as Zakh Sorokin---was a lad of but fifteen, 3rd and lowest of an attained Oligarch.  Putin had kept a close eye on him as he had risen from stowaway, victim to sadists, gundeck menial, and projector's helper, to commodore of a growing fleet.  Still, he did not altogether understand the boy.

Upon taking command of the adventurer and the desperado he had taken, he transferred the latter, renamed Scopa. Warfare being laid into her very keels, she suited his purposes better than the ship he had first sailed on.  Taking officers and crewbeings with him whom, by virtue of his own experience and at Putin's suggestion, he deemed trustworthy, and restoring her to fitness chiefly by restarting her collectors and disposing of the radiation-ravaged corpses of her crew, he had turned his attention back to Zilvagabond.

Those left aboard were less to be trusted, and in this way his practice of overarming vessels had begun.  He had ordered her fifteen projectibles placed aboard the desperado wherever they fit, behind improvised portals on boat- and liftdecks, on the commanddeck calipretted at right angles to the bow-chasers.  Likewise, the holds soon served as hangars for Zilvagabond's remaining auxiliaries, some of which more to conserve space than from belligerent design, soon boasted small projectibles----the adventurer's chasers----of their own. Later he leavened the ranks of her complement with liberated slaves, victims of pressgangs, and alien life forms.

This developed into a lucky stroke for which he was to feel grateful.  Unable to imitate the noises which served them as speech, he had converted them into something he could write and read.  In this, he had explained to Putin, he found the old letters Terrible Yvan had taught him more useful than the sparse jottings of barcode.  The young man had found that the rollballs referred to themselves as "sleemov."  A numerous and varied people just inventing their own steam engines and combustible gas lighting, they inhabited a young planet (which, to everybody's regret, not even Putin knew how to find) of violent crustquakes and volcanos. Human raiders (or Cossacks, the distinction was lost on the sleemov) had fallen onto the surface of their planet and made off with a whole town.  Nor, if sleemov folklore was to be credited, was it the first time.

While humans made perfect riggers and topmen (maybe owing to their monkey lineage), accounting for their species' preeminence upon the Deep, rollballs were ideal projectors, impervious to heat and smoke, possessed of fine sensibility with regard to the fussy, dangerous projectibles.  As long as he had rollballs serving on the gundeck, calling thrusts from beneath much-modified darthelms, Putin never again lost the use of a weapon to core failure or conductive burn.

From Yvan Dragomilov's viewpoint, the flatzniks---who called themselves "strozad"---turned out even better.  Allowing for arboreal specialization which had biased the course of human evolution, their flatworm shape was as generalized as that of mankind, lending itself to a broad variety of applications.  They were faster getting up the cabelles and out on the spars, spiraling round them like stripes on a candy stick.  Aloft they exhibited limitations.  The appendages they used for hands, stubby tentacularities extruding through apertures all over their surface, were no lo nger than a man's smallest finger.  Upon their own world, each artifact, of course, was built by means of such manipulators and, with that in mind.  They professed to admire the longer, stronger limbs of human crewbeings, as well as the adroit tendrils of the sleemov.

The strozad didn't say much about their home, no, Putin believed, because they wished to hold back information.  Some inadequacy in the common vocabulary, suitable as it was proving to the working of a starship, kept them from it, or humans from understanding them.  If they were to be believed, their culture, although it occupied a solitary world (if that was what they meant), had advanced in technologic arts beyond the imperia-conglomerate; although to the young captain and his first officer it sounded more like sorcery.  It appeared, by virtue of Yvan Dragomilov's rescue, that they could read thoughts, although their denials were strenuous.  Many unanswered questions remained.  How, if they were so powerful and accomplished, had these been captured?  The strozad (Putin continued thinking of them as "flatzniks," hoping, in frustrating moments, that they could read his mind) were unable to explain, beyond bald facts not significantly different from the story rollballs told.  The captain, who spent half his time learning to whistle like a flatznik, would understand someday.  Putin was compelled to imagine a human party of nude sunbathers caught in a surprise attack by cannibals.

"Murdering those people," Alice objected, "he must hate someone terribly.

Putin nodded.  Punctuated by kinergic thrumming, Yvan Dragomilov's first months as a desperado had streamed by in a river of blood, his reputation for implacability well earned.  Appreciating less and less the alleged differences between contending imperia-conglomerate, he extended his attention to ships and installations of Romanova's arch-enemy, the Empery-Cirot, to its supporting polities, as well as to those of Romanova and their many lesser rivals.

Everywhere he went, any time he won a victory in the Deep, or later, as his prowess and resources grew, upon the surfaces of outpost planets, he liberated slaves---by w whatever euphemism they were called to deny the injustice of their social status.  Common folk, no better off---Romanovan, Dzendish, others all alike, were victims like himself.  Whatever retribution he visited upon their masters, he left them unmolested.  Often he spent time recruiting those he liberated, persuading them to become shipcrews for his fleet or his eyes and ears on planets ruled by their masters.  He gave special and mysterious assignments to aliens he set free, and to humans whose peculiarities suited them to whatever task he had in mind.  Putin pitied anyone whom the captain calculated still owed him a moral debt.  Those who acted for the premiers were not long in responding.  Hunted by two dread imperia-conglomerate, Yvan Dragomilov's infamy as a buccaneer, starship-robber, and desperado continued to swell. 

Tzitzeron and Ovidu, accustomed to husbandly idiosyncracies other than bad-tempered outbursts, waited in patience for Putin to break his courteous silence.  "No doubt, my dear, and with good reason.  Yet he delivered himself of the order as a housekeeping matter---you know prisoners in any number, let alone a hundred, are a knotty problem aboard ship---as calm as he'd order the shortening of starsail."275Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLQKrqVPS8f

"The way he's followed about by those flatznik things," Alice shuddered.

"They saved his life," he answered.  "He takes comfort in their company, as they do in his, being lost to their own race as they are."  Anna opened her mouth, about to say something, but Putin interrupted her.  "And before you remind me, yes, Yvan Dragomilov gives many a human order.  Such as his policy with slaves and pressed beings.  But he offers only cold pragmatics for a reason. There's no more humanity in his many kindnesses than there is malice in his many cruelties."275Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCJbRgOEC78

Anna Putin wouldn't be put off.  "And the little girl?"

Putin shook his head.  "Anna, I've driven pressed crews into the yards and to duties belowdecks for most of my life.  I've been, as you well know, a slave myself, first sold in the port Khepov we're bound for.  That this was not my choice in the matter is irrelevant.  Had I dwelt on my qualms, and not on the discipline and working of the ship, I wouldn't be discussing it with you now, as I would still be enslaved, or, far more likely, dead."

Anna stepped closer.  Alice rested a commiserating hand on his arm.  Even as he spoke, Putin sensed within himself the poison of moral compromise which, addicting one and all within the imperia-conglomerate, allowed continuation of institutions that should have been smashed centuries ago.  Compromising was not the only addiction a man could suffer, he thought bitterly.  Maybe he should never have led a mutiny nor rescued Yvan Dragomilov from the Deep.  An accommodation he had earlier reached with what he had conceived to be unchangeable had been breached.  Forever afterward, anything he undertook which failed to measure up to those moments would smack to him of cowardice.

He shrugged.  "We've got no more to say about that lady than of how he spends his share of what we garner in shipraid, for that's what she is, his share from our attack on the Ayvengo."  He stared up into the purge-field. "Now hush up, darling spouses, and get belowdecks.  Here comes the captain's gig and over there the pilot in his boat who'll be taking us down to Lusin.​​​​​​​"