Anywhere and Everywhere People: Part Three
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Art Post
The landing pad on Pimpernel is just a paved-over clearing in the middle of an old growth forest north of the colony, and Jared’s little hyperspace ship is dwarfed by the size of the size of the landing strip, used to accommodating huge stolen transport vessels and cargo ships dropping supplies on their way to even farther points of the Omicron system. The planet itself is technically Central Government property, but they had declared it a biohazard site several centuries ago, due to a failed terraforming experiment with irradiated soil. The half-life of the elements involved mean it is now perfectly safe according to every test Rosenbaum has been able to run on the soil, water, atmosphere, and the lush vegetation that has reclaimed the planet. But the Central Government had no interest in taking chances, not when there were so many new planets to mold into human habitats. The government left Pimpernel (originally called Anagallis) for dead, and it lived.
And so it’s theirs now, the slaves’ and the trees’, thanks to Jared’s weird network of activists and thieves and Jensen’s not even sure what else. He knows that it was not wholly Jared’s doing, that the two of them were not the catalyst for the movement, but it’s hard not to be proud of what all of these people have accomplished with Jared’s help, what they never could have done without it.
Jeff meets them at the landing pad, a familiar face in these unfamiliar surroundings. Jensen still has a hard time not referring to him as Dr. Morgan, although legally he disappeared three years ago and his medical licenses with him. Life on Pimpernel seems to be agreeing with Jeff. He’s tan, and his smile goes wide and bright when they disembark. Jared laughs and hugs him, and after an awkward moment’s consideration Jensen hugs him too. “Well, well, it’s good to see you boys again. It’s been way too long.”
“You said it,” agrees Jared, and his grin is huge, like a kid’s. Jensen knew he’d be like this once they finally arrived, no matter how much coercion it took to get him to come. “Is it okay to leave the ship like that? Do you need the landing strip for anything else soon?”
“Not that I know of,” Jeff replies. “And if anyone does, they’ll let you know. It’s not like we’re going far.”
Jensen’s curious what that means. From the air as they approached, the only part of the colony that was visible was one long low building, gleaming metal half obscured by local vegetation and a neatly-plotted rooftop garden. From the maps he’s seen in Jared’s holos he knows this must be the main storage building, a reclaimed government bunker and apparently the only place in the colony with reliable temperature control. But wherever the rest of the colony was, it must be in some direction he hadn’t looked. In theory there are hundreds of people here. Jeff leads them down a stone path curving into the forest, carved out around the roots of the huge trees, much taller and thicker than any Jensen has ever seen elsewhere, with a quiet air of age about them. “This is it,” Jeff says, indicating a painted sign that says, “Welcome home,” in bright, swirling letters. There is nothing here that looks to Jensen like a settlement.
But then he sees a set of mobile steps spiraling up from the base of a huge tree and looks up. From below, the houses of the colony are clearly visible, some little more than tents, spans of taut microcanvas welded together and strung from the branches. But some are much more elaborate, shaped from woven vines and lightweight shielding and wooden planks, connecting the tops of several trees in a kind of mansion of treetop living. It’s breathtakingly weird and breathtakingly beautiful.
“How long did it take to build all of this?” Jensen asks, staring unabashedly at the treetop houses, more and more of them visible now that he knows that to look for.
“Well, the settlement’s five years old now, so about five years.”
“Where is everyone?” Jared asks. The forest is quiet around them, trees rustling and the gentle whine of some kind of machinery in the distance.
“Make sure you’ve got your clocks set right,” says Jeff. “It’s mid-morning here. Everyone’s at work or school, or in the center for the elderly down that path.”
Jensen realizes they’re standing at a sort of crossroads, several stone paths intersecting, each one slightly different in its coloration. The direction they came from is light grey, the path to the left that Jeff’s indicating is slate, the one to right nearly black, and the branching path directly in front of them is reddish, like the jagged mountains they passed over on their way to the landing strip. “They’re color coded?” Jensen says.
“Yep. The paths only go to single destinations. Everything else is hacking through the woods, so they wanted to make it easy for anyone who did lose their way to know where they were headed as soon as they ran across one of these. Mostly it’s for the kids.”
Jared turns in a circle, taking in each path in turn. “So where do the others go?”
“The red paths lead out to the fields and other work areas, and the black goes to the school. There are about forty kids here now, former slaves and children of former slaves. They will be so excited to meet you.”
“I think we’re pretty excited to meet them too,” Jared replies. Jensen’s knuckles skim the back of his hand, letting Jared know he’s there. Already it’s getting easier, less awkward and alien being in the colony. Although who knows what a horde of overzealous children could do to Jared’s composure?
There’s a sound of running feet down the path from the school and a dark-haired man who must be a few years younger than Jared appears around the last bend, looking harried. He pulls up a clock on his wrist interface, grimaces, and keeps going, straight past where they’re standing and on towards a tree with a sturdy-looking house at the top, its walls smooth and its windows evenly spaced along the one wall that Jensen can see. The man runs up a set of mobile steps, trusting them to hold his weight, although each little platform trembles as the young man takes the stairs to the neat little house at the top of the tree. “That’s Kevin,” Jeff explains. “Sweet kid, but well, his family’s a little bit more complicated than the average. I’m sure you’ll find out about that.”
Kevin comes running back down the steps, balancing one hand on the trunk of the tree to keep from falling. He has a large bag slung over one shoulder, something inside it clanking dully. This time he waves as he passes, stopping dead in his tracks a few steps away. “Joe forgot his… Hi, I don’t know you, do I?”
“Hey,” says Jared, holding out his hand. “I’m Jared Padalecki.”
“Oh wow, really? Like, the Jared Padalecki? Did we… was I supposed to know you were coming?” Kevin keeps shaking his hand for a moment too long, brow furrowing.
“I don’t think so,” Jared replies, squeezing Kevin’s hand and letting go. “Was he?” he asks Jeff.
“Nope,” Jeff says. “You said you didn’t want a parade or anything.”
“This is Jensen,” says Jared, and Kevin shakes his hand too, more briefly.
“Nice to meet you,” Jensen tells him. “We didn’t mean to keep you from…” He gestures at the bag over Kevin’s shoulder.
“Oh, right! Yeah, Joe needs these. I’ll see you later!” Kevin jogs off into the forest.
Jensen looks after him. “Who’s Joe?”
“One of his brothers. They’re in school now. Kevin bought them out of slavery and brought them here as soon as he could. He’s a very brave kid.”
“I bet there are a lot of those around here.”
“There sure are.” Jeff looks around. “Why don’t I show you the farms? I know my wife’s been dying to meet you.”
“Your wife? Jeff, we didn’t even know!” Jared exclaims.
“I didn’t exactly invite offworld guests to the ceremony.” He leads them off down the path to the farm, telling them more about his wife. “She’s a civil engineer, so she’s been working on improving our irrigation system, since the rainfall patterns here are still so irregular. She draws up these huge, fancy sketches in chalk on our walls, so she can make changes anytime she needs to without even leaving home.”
“Why doesn’t she use a holo-generator?”
“They’re in short supply, so we keep them for the schools, rather than handing them out to private citizens.”
“You never said you needed them,” Jared protests. “If you’d just told me…”
“You don’t have to jump in to do everything for us, Jared,” Jeff replies. “Chill out a little. Rosenbaum’s supposed to be by in a couple of days with a bunch of stuff. He may even have some then.”
Rosenbaum is a con artist and a smuggler, the most unscrupulous of Jared’s radical friends in some ways. But given that he grew up on the outer edge of the Theta system, poorly served by the central government, outside of the slave-owning culture that had affected even Jensen’s childhood on Ocotillo, he is also often the one among them with the clearest view of the government’s hypocrisy. Plus he has a fast little ship and a knack for talking himself through the security of intergalactic corporations.
Jared doesn’t look totally mollified. “I try to provide the things you need,” he says softly. “I want to give everyone here that. Freedom and a real home and the resources to be anything they want.” He looks guiltily at Jensen because they both well know that Jensen doesn’t have all of those things, although the station is truly as much of a home as any place could be and Jared gives him everything he can. Jensen smiles reassuringly and takes his hand.
Jeff’s wife is covered in red clay when they meet her, her long hair pinned up messily at the back of her head. She’s standing in an irrigation channel next to a small plow, arguing with a man in high boots and a wide-brimmed hat.
“It needs to go west or we’re going to hit solid rock in about thirty feet,” the man is saying.
“And that’s exactly what we expected,” she replies. “There’s no way to get to that quadrant of the farm without hitting some rock somewhere.” She pulls an old-fashioned paper map out of the side pocket of her pants and points to something. “There’s a whole vein of limestone running all along here, and if we want anything to get any water over there, we’re going to have to deal with it.” She looks up and her face breaks into a grin. Jeff offers her a hand up from the irrigation ditch and swings her easily into his arms.
“Boys, this is Zoe,” Jeff says. “Zo, these are the boys you’re always hearing about. Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles.” It’s been so long since anyone called Jensen by his family name that it almost doesn’t register as belonging to him.
“Zoe Saldana,” she says, tipping a little finger salute. “Nice to meet you. Excuse me if I don’t shake hands. You wouldn’t want this stuff on you. It sticks like a bitch.”
“But it makes beautiful pottery,” Jeff points out.
Zoe shrugs in agreement. “Has he shown you his pots yet? He gets very excited about his pots. Which is fine, you know? They’re great pots.”
“Surgeons’ eyes have got to be sharp,” Jeff adds, wiggling his fingers with a lazy grin. “One missed turn or one drop of skin sealant can have permanent consequences for both you and your patients. That’s not good for anyone. I bring the same concentration to everything I do with my hands.” He gives a dirty little wink, and Zoe swipes a clay-covered hand across his chest, leaving a smear of red on his grey t-shirt. Jeff just grins wider.
Zoe shows them around the site, leaping irrigation ditches without even pausing, and Jensen is full of questions he's not sure he should ask. It's strange being in a group of people who assume he can hear and understand. It probably doesn't even occur to anyone else as odd; Jared's used to talking to him like a free person, and Jeff and Zoe live in a colony full of former slaves, but for Jensen the lack of subterfuge in a crowd is novel. Zoe describes the soil contents in detail that Jensen will not remember tomorrow, but the way she looks at him for a polite nod of understanding, that will stick with him.
She shoos them off when a new crew comes by with a collapsible pile driver. Their equipment looks new, if a little sparse, presumably because Rosenbaum is good at what he does, picking and choosing what will be most useful to the settlement and getting it here without getting caught. Jensen looks over his shoulder at the work crews as they leave the site, a couple of dozen men and women so focused on whatever it is they’re doing they don’t even look surprised by off-worlders. And beyond them are the fields, a work in progress, obviously, but bursting with new growth, rows and rows of little plants stretching their leaves out.
It’s only early spring in Pimpernel, and there’s still time to make a lot more happen in this growing season. Jared sees him looking back and takes his hand. “You know, Jensen knows a lot about farming,” he says proudly.
Jeff raises an eyebrow. “Does he? I knew you grew up out in Omicron, but I never figured you were a farm kid.”
Jensen shakes his head. “I wasn’t. My mom ran the local council of agriculture and resources, so we were always out on the farms getting soil samples and checking crop yields when I was little.”
“Huh,” says Jeff. Jensen realizes that perhaps Jeff has never thought about who Jensen was before he was Jared’s slave, the fact that he had a before, when so many people don’t, raised in slaveholding families and knowing to serve as soon as they knew how to walk. “Sounds like you could make yourself pretty useful around here. If you wanted.” He shoots a meaningful look at both of them, the first part of a sales pitch Jensen has been waiting to deflect since they touched down in the forest.
“There are many, many places in the universe I can make myself useful,” Jensen points out. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”
“It’s not that we haven’t thought about it,” Jared adds, but he seems distracted as they reach the edges of the settlement, the first houses coming into view in the trees overhead. As though he’s reconsidering now that he’s seen the place and all it has to offer. Jensen realizes that’s not unwarranted, but he knows all the reasons their lives are twisted up the way they are. All the degrading parties and corporate subterfuge mean he gets to see things happening that no other slave can.
***
Aldis doesn't live on Pimpernel, but he has a house there, a complex structure woven out of thick rope, the boards that make the floor bound together with the same rope, like prey in the spiders' webs that had nestled in the corners of Jensen's childhood home. "Pretty cool, huh?" Aldis says, with the pride of every homeowner Jensen's met on the planet. He gestures to the woven walls, sealed with something that might be wax, solid and milky colored between the coarse brown ropes.
"How did you put all this together?" Jensen asks, awestruck enough by the weaving that he doesn't mind sounding a little rude. "It's very beautiful," he adds hastily.
Aldis grins. "Thanks," he says. "We built it on the ground and then hung it, if you were wondering about the basic construction. It would have been nuts to try to weave in the tree. There are a bunch of folks in the colony who came from a textile mill on Hollyhock, skill workers. They’d never done something on this scale, but they know plenty about making sturdy fabric, and it was more fun than traditional construction-don’t tell Zoe and Danneel that, obviously.”
“Have you thought about moving here permanently?” Jared asks, while Jensen’s still inspecting every curve of the almost circular room.
Aldis shrugs. “I’m pretty sure even Rosenbaum’s thought about it at some point. This is a great place to live. But someone needs to be out there, doing the runs, making sure everyone coming here gets what they need before they get here. And that’s something I can do.”
***
The noises of the forest come through the shields and the thin sheeting of the guest house walls. They had the noise cancellers turned on at first, but Jensen found being able to see the trees moving outside and not being able to hear them too strange. Not exactly like the deafness promised to him when he became a slave, but disconcerting. Jensen listens to the movement of the wind through the branches, the slap of a loose piece of microcanvas against rough wood, the steady in and out of Jared’s breath that says he’s not asleep yet.
Jensen shifts a little, nuzzling into Jared’s shoulder, and Jared sighs and pulls him in closer. “I need to help more,” Jared says quietly.
“What does that mean?” Jensen replies. “You spend more time working on things for the Pimpernel colony than you do on anything else in your life.”
“I just spend money and provide ships and comm links. I don’t do anything. I don’t help to disarm slavers, I don’t make transport runs. I just sit at my desk and read about numbers on a holo-screen. I make painful small talk with people I despise at despicable events where the person I love most is publicly humiliated. So little of that is helpful.”
Jensen sighs. “You want to do the flashy side of things. Hair-raising escapes and all? I get that. But never devalue the things you are already doing, the services and support you provide to so many fucking people. Everything you do, for this colony and the anti-slavery movement in general, carries weight, and all of it helps people. And demeaning it to yourself in the middle of the night because you hate your own privilege is not good for anyone. Not for you, not for me, and certainly not for anyone who lives on Pimpernel.”
Jared goes tense. “Is that really what you think? That I’m just trying to do something more glamorous? Fuck, Jensen.” He sits up and puts his face in his hands. “I just want to help. Is that so fucking selfish?”
Jensen sits up, cupping a hand around the back of Jared’s neck. “You are helping so much already. Do you know that? Do you know how much you help?”
Jared rolls his head forward, letting Jensen’s fingers knead up into his hair. His voice is muffled. “I know how much my parents’ money helps. I know how much the resources of my family’s business help. But when we got here, no one even knew me as anything except the money behind the operation. I don’t want that.”
“We could visit more. You don’t have to be going on dangerous missions capturing ships in deep space for people here to know you.”
“They treat me like a hero, Jensen. If they’re going to do that, I want to deserve it.”
Jensen kisses the ball of his shoulder. “You’re an idiot if you don’t know you already do.”
Jared sighs. “You know I love it when you call me an idiot. I just. I have to do something.”
“And how do you plan to go about that?” Jensen asks, a little warily. “Are you just going to beg Danneel to take you on pickups with her? Because my guess is she’ll say no. Possibly after laughing long and hard at you.”
“I’m pretty confident she’ll start to see it the way I do once the laughing’s over. I’m not asking her to load me up with a laser pistol and send me out to defend the ship, but there may be things I know that she doesn’t. Holes in security I can slip through. I have a fair amount of experience with espionage.”
“It’s different,” Jensen says weakly, but he knows he’s losing ground.
***
Danneel’s ship has two boxy rows of crew cabins, mostly used for storing first aid and medical supplies that won’t fit in the equally tiny sick bay one deck down. There’s a central kitchen and a mess hall probably meant for a crew of a dozen, its metal tables strewn with dismantled comm units and other small electronics. She shows it all off with pride, before squeezing them between rows of crates grav-strapped to the walls of the corridor leading to the hold. “We don’t like to have to restock often,” she explains, punching the button that opens the door to the hold.
Jensen is expecting a lot of grubby metal and track lighting, like every hold on the Padalecki station. But the hold has been turned into a whole warren of little rooms, and from the catwalk above it all, it looks like a miniature city, walkways crawling between open doorways, and a branching path connecting it all.
“Wow,” says Jared, and Jensen looks at the open wonder on his face, knowing how much Jared wants to be here, wants to do what Danneel does.
“Zoe designed it,” Danneel explains. “We wanted it to look like anything except a cargo hold, and this is what she came up with. We can house about 150 people here, more if we have to, and everyone gets their own bed and a little bit of privacy.”
Jensen nods his understanding. Jared is still just looking around, taking stock, maybe imagining himself in this place.
“Not a lot of privacy in the slave markets,” says Aldis, coming up the ramp with a bedroll slung over his shoulder.
“Not a lot of that anywhere if you’re a slave,” Jared replies. He puts a hand on Jensen’s hip, thumb tucking into the waist of his pants.
“Well, by the time they get here they aren’t slaves anymore,” Danneel says. “Everyone on this boat is a free person.”
Jared looks at Jensen guiltily. “Except me,” says Jensen. He means it just as an acknowledgment, but it comes out a little cutting. In some ways he knows he’s better at the social graces of serving tea to bigoted business people than he is at talking to freedom fighters.
“Bullshit,” replies Danneel fiercely. “When you’re on my boat, you are a free man. We are outside anyone else’s jurisdiction.”
“A sovereign nation,” Jared adds thoughtfully, and Jensen knows he won’t be able to talk Jared out of this one.
***
Jensen can count on one hand the number of nights he’s spent in bed alone since he and Jared began sleeping together. There was one family wedding at an Ancient WestEarth country home, with slaves quarters on a separate floor. There was the night after Jared broke his ankle playing hockey, and the school infirmary required that he be left alone to heal. There was one time Jensen was ill after eating badly packed seafood and didn’t make it to bed at all. Body slaves are supposed to be an extension of their owners, like appendages as much as people, and however much Jensen isn’t like other slaves, he respects that part of his duties. The night Jared flies out with Danneel for the first time, that makes four.
Jensen lies in bed, sprawled out across all the space Jared usually takes up. He’s set the room pitch black, but he has Jared’s comm unit set to flash if anything urgent comes in. Jensen stares at the ceiling as his eyes adjust to the dark. As the Central Government has started to monitor a broader and broader range of frequencies in the Delta and Epsilon systems, where most of the slavers have been hit, Danneel’s been maintaining a total comms blackout anytime she’s on a run. While Jensen appreciates the safety concerns, it just makes it worse, knowing Jared won’t even be able to talk to him until tomorrow afternoon, once he’s safely left the rendezvous point. At first he’d asked if he could come along, if he could help in some way. But it’s too dangerous to not have either of them on the station; it’s too dangerous for Jared not to have an alibi, and Jensen’s the only person who can give him that. There’s no one else who can fill in for Jared at Padalecki Shipping, no one in the string of assistants who knows enough to form partnerships and soothe hotheaded clients the way Jared can. And even if there were, none of them could be trusted to keep quiet if they knew Jared had disappeared into the black without so much as an itinerary.
After a while, Jensen falls asleep, but somehow he feels worse when he wakes up, still in the middle of the night, the overheard lights not even starting to shade to dawn. There are no messages on Jared’s comm, and Jensen tries to assure himself that that’s a good sign. If they’d had to abort, if they’d had to go back to Misha’s new base on Clematis, there would have been a message, there would have been something. If anything happened, if for any reason Jared didn’t come back, Jensen’s life would be forfeit, and he would have to run as far and fast as he could until he could get in touch with someone from the colony for a pickup. There wouldn’t be time to think or time to mourn, and the possibility of it keeps Jensen awake for a few more long hours.
He handles a morning’s worth of messages on Jared’s behalf, skimming news feeds in between for stories of hijackings and slave theft, but whatever Jared and Danneel did last night, it hasn’t been reported yet. Jensen wonders if this is a new Central Government plan, to ignore everything they’re doing and hope that the movement dies out like a fire without oxygen.
But then there it is, the headline: “Is a New Leader Rising Among the Bandits?” There isn’t anything besides the text story, not even an old-fashioned video or still image. But Jensen knows the person the callers in the market encountered as they tried to defend their wares was Jared, disguised as an elderly man with a grip like steel. Jensen counts every minute until the shuttle dock indicator chimes to indicate Jared’s shuttle is coming back in. He walks purposefully down the corridors to the shuttle bay, eyes fixed forward and down like he’s on an official errand for Jared. But his heart’s beating so fast he expects it to start echoing all over the station, and it’s hard to keep himself to a steady pace. He sweeps his hand through the recognition system on the shuttle bay doors, and as soon as they open he runs flat out across the loading dock and pulls Jared down into a kiss.
Jared’s laughing and trying to talk, but Jensen’s never been so relieved to see anyone or anything in his whole life, and right now he doesn’t even have words to explain that. He sucks at Jared’s lower lip, latches on with his teeth and waits for Jared to give in and kiss him back.
“Okay,” Jensen says finally, pulling back and shutting his eyes so the sight of Jared’s mouth can’t draw him in again. “Now, tell me everything.”
Jared laughs. “Let’s go someplace a little more comfortable. And maybe I could clean up a little more first.”
Jensen runs a hand through his hair, sweat sticky. “I think that would be okay.”
They walk back out into the main corridor of the cargo deck, and Jensen can practically see all the sentences Jared makes himself not start crowding behind his lips. But this is headier stuff than should be discussed - even in code - in a public space of a crowded space station.
Jared puts a comms lock on his suite, so that nothing they say will get out, and he does a quick run through the sonic bath to get the worst of the grimy feeling off. And then he starts to talk.
“Danneel flies like a maniac,” he says. “Jensen, seriously, you should have seen her little ship weaving through the police cruisers when we were leaving the slave market on Marigold. I was so sure we were going to get shot out of the sky, but she just kept finding little gaps to squeeze through until we got out of the atmosphere and she could kick on the thrusters. It was terrifying, but it was amazing too. Are there vids yet? Did we make the newsfeeds?”
“Not the exciting chase, but there was some gossip flying earlier about the old guy holding off everyone in the marketplace.”
“Yeah?” Jared grins. “Wasn’t that cool? I mean, that’s a much better cause for a costume than I usually have.”
“At least no one even suspects it was you.”
Jared hauls Jensen out of his chair and hugs him so hard Jensen’s sure his ribs are going to crack. “I wish you could have been there. I know how much you worry, but I just. I have to do this. All those people, families who were going to be sold, I got to tell them about Pimpernel instead, about all of the amazing things the people there do, about the school and the tree houses and Zoe’s agriculture work. It’s this whole world of possibilities. There was this man, this older man who’d been a field slave all his life, and his whole family was sold after their owner died. He’s never even heard his daughter’s voice. But he will now. I told him about Jeff, and he broke down crying. I didn’t even know what to say.”
“It’s amazing,” says Jensen, but there’s this seed of worry in his belly, this sense of how many things could still go badly wrong and how Jared’s overwhelming enthusiasm could burn him out instead of keeping him going.
***
Some days, it’s hard. Some days they don’t save everyone, and Jared starts keeping a list, handwritten and pinned to the wall in his study, of the ones he watches get left behind; children and parents and cousins and unlikely friends who get lost in the raids or vaporized by an overzealous law enforcement squad. Somehow Jensen hadn’t thought about the violence before Jared started going out with Danneel. The newsfeeds don’t report on that because it’s distasteful, all those dead slaves. The losses are calculated financially. But Jared finds out their names. He says he has to.
But those are the bad days, and on the other days, Jared’s sure they’re gaining ground, abolitionist politicians rounding up support on the planets hardest hit by Central Government’s debt-settling practices. It’s not a safe thing to do, certainly not on the more central planets of the Alpha and Beta systems, but in spite of government monitoring and headlines on the feeds screaming about the overthrow of civilization by a few rogue individualists, there are pockets of change. Jared wishes he could support it, but any action under his own name would add him to one of the barely classified government Watch lists, and anything done anonymously would bring on too many questions.
Going on raids with Danneel becomes more dangerous. All her custom mods to her ship can’t keep the government from identifying her forever, and as soon as the police bulletins start coming through with lists of suspect model numbers, she has to swap transports in a hurry. New parts take months, and in the meantime a so-called slave uprising on Primrose leaves almost a hundred people dead. They watch the vids in the central gathering room in the newly built community center on Pimpernel, Jared’s hand trembling in Jensen’s. Kevin is sitting on Jensen’s other side. His eyes are wide with shock and his face has gone pale. Beyond him, his brothers are leaning into each other, whispering urgently. “Our family came from Primrose,” Kevin says quietly. “That could have been us.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jensen tells him. “Do you still have family there?”
Kevin shakes his head. “I guess. But only cousins we never really knew well. And they wouldn’t have been involved. None of them ever went into debt the way our parents did, so none of them ever had to worry about things like ending up slaves.” He looks troubled, almost angry, and it’s strange because Kevin has been one of the most even-tempered people Jensen’s ever encountered, even when talking about the awful circumstances that brought him and his brothers here. But something about this makes him mad. “I wonder if they know we’re off-world. I wonder if they’ve even thought that Nick and Joe might be those dead kids on the news.”
Nick looks up at the sound of his name, and Kevin tousles his hair. “I’m glad we left,” Nick says gravely, even as he hunches moodily away from Kevin’s hand, back into Joe’s side.
“They never cared about us,” Kevin tells Jensen. “It was a really hard thing to find out, especially when we needed support from them so badly. They would have let…” He trails off, looking at Nick and Joe. “They would have let whatever happen. To kids. To their own family. I can’t imagine doing that.”
Jensen looks away from the vid, a government official on Primrose talking about property damage and a bill in the galactic senate to mandate more stringent slave tracking. “Can I ask what happened to your parents?” Jensen asks. Almost fifteen years have passed since he lost his family, and the pain is duller now. He wonders if maybe he has something to offer to Kevin and his brothers.
Kevin looks sad. “I’d tell you if I knew. They offered themselves as collateral on our house, so they were taken even before Nick and Joe were. I didn’t know where to look then to track them, so all I know is they were sold off-world. And now there’s no record. Every once in a while, I check with someone who does slaveholder record-keeping, but there never been anything. I think it’s just us now. We’re doing okay.” Kevin smiles at Nick and Joe, who are crowded together in their chairs, thumb wrestling and ignoring everyone else. Jensen wonders vaguely if Kevin is lonely, so wrapped up in watching out for his brothers instead of spending time with people his own age.
“I can see that,” Jensen agrees. “It looks like you’re doing a great job with them.”
Kevin lights up in a grin, ignoring the depressing newsfeed altogether. “Thanks.”
Jared squeezes Jensen’s hand, letting him know he’s listening even though he’s not saying anything. “I figured maybe teenagers weren’t the best at telling you things like that.”
“Yeah. They’ve got a lot going on. I don’t need them to do that for me. I’m just glad they get to be kids now.”
Jensen nods. “Everyone should have that.”
“Everyone should be free too. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way.”
“True.”
They switch from the newsfeed to something light and fictional on the big holo-generator, something easier to watch, and even Nick and Joe turn their attention to the front of the room.
***
“The ambassador’s waiting for you,” Jensen says, leaning in the door of Jared’s study.
“I figured,” Jared replies distractedly. “He can keep doing that.” He barely looks up from his keyboard, and Jensen takes a few steps closer.
“Is something happening?” Jensen asks.
Jared shakes his head and glances up. “I’m not sure yet. Is the ambassador getting restless?”
“I don’t know. He’s alone this time, so he’s not talking. He seems to be keeping himself busy.”
Jared shuts off the interface and stands up. “Let’s see how fast we can get rid of him.” He shrugs into his coat and straightens his tie.
It turns out the ambassador has a new plan for stopping the escalating attacks on slave traders. “I know you haven’t dealt in live cargo since that last bout of hoof-and-mouth disease, but wouldn’t it be worth a little risk if it helps us catch the bastards behind all this? Your ships are the best, and you’re a high-profile businessman. They would go after you. But the difference is you’ve got the connections you need to have a fully trained arms and recon force on every one of your transports. They’d never get away with anything.”
Jared taps his lips thoughtfully with one finger. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness about the safety of my business, but why not provide this service to one of the poor unfortunates whose livelihood is already being affected by those reckless bandits? Surely there is a deserving candidate there?”
“Truly, there isn’t. None that we would trust wholeheartedly as we trust you, we being the central government, of course. Most of the vessels attacked have belonged to private trade and transport contractors working for the big shipping outfits. I wouldn’t trust any one of them with government property. But you own your own boats, so we could outfit them properly and offer the best possible protection and surveillance.”
“I do understand your position, but the hassle of live cargo has not lessened since I decided to stop taking it on ten years ago. The cleanup costs alone are so much higher than carrying nice tidy boxes.”
“Then the government will pay them!” The ambassador seems agitated, and Jared glances at Jensen as he bangs his fist against the arm of his chair. “Dammit, Padalecki, this is important. Those smug little miscreants must be brought to justice. They’re getting bolder every day. Don’t you even care that they threaten our very way of life?”
“Of course I do,” Jared replies vehemently. “But I have already provided the government with the fastest transports I could spare, and I must say, that is more than many private citizens would have done for only market price as compensation.” He’s getting too serious, not the jovial eccentric his clients expect, and Jensen can feel the panic that’s driving him. If he lets the government’s cameras onto his ships, if he lets himself be forced into the slave trade, how long will it be before the government gets too close?
“Your ships proved largely useless in spite of their speed. They were still hijacked, and their cargos were still freed.” Jared raises his eyebrows. “Not that you are to blame for that. No one could have known that little ship had a hyperdrive system. But you must understand the frustration the Central Government is facing. Thieves are making people all over the galaxy think the government is incapable of enforcing its own laws. And that’s unacceptable. If citizens don’t trust and respect their duly elected leaders, who will they trust and respect?”
“People are always finding new idols, in my experience. Just now the fad is resistance against the slave trade. Next it will be anti-gravity hairpieces. I know the economics of the whole thing are dashed inconvenient, but I don’t see how involving one of my crews in the whole nasty business is going to make it go away any faster.”
In the end there’s nothing Jared can say to sway him, not without drawing too much attention to his own discomfort, and already the ambassador has a sly look on his face that Jensen’s sure won’t bode well for anyone. Jared agrees that one of his ships can be outfitted with a set of new surveillance equipment, and he will announce that in light of popular demand due to recent events, Padalecki Shipping will once again carry live cargo.
Back in his study once the ambassador has gone, Jared throws off his jacket and lays his head on the desk. “What the fuck am I going to do, Jensen?”
“That’s what we have to figure out now, isn’t it?” He makes tea, going through a ritual almost as old as government corruption, spooning leaves into the pot and leaving them to steep. He presses one steam-damp hand to the back of Jared’s neck, rubbing at the tension there.
“Do you have a plan?” Jared asks him, and Jensen’s heart aches at the desperation in Jared’s voice. For perhaps the first time in his life, he’s hit on something he can’t talk his way out of, and Jensen thinks he understands how that limitation feels, how confining it must be.
“I’ll always be your alibi, in this as much as anything. If you need to rob your own ship in disguise, I’ll make sure everyone knows you’re safely on the station, shocked and appalled by the audacity of the thieves. You’ll be sending out press releases and planning meetings with law enforcement to talk about the violation you’ve endured. It won’t be any different than any other time.”
“It will though,” Jared says. “They’ll be putting people on my ship. I’ll have to file for cargo insurance for people. That makes everything different. What if we can’t save all of them? What if the fucking security force opens fire on the whole crowd? It’s already so much riskier to hijack a ship in deep space. And to do it with extra security watching and cataloging every move… It won’t work.”
Jensen pours him a cup of tea. “I think it will. I think Danneel is too quick and you’re too careful to accept anything less than success.” Jared just frowns more deeply, and Jensen goes to his knees beside Jared’s chair, squeezing his hands around the meat of Jared’s thigh and looking up into Jared’s face. “It’s scarier. I know it is. Having it be your ship, it has to go right. But it will. You’ll see.”
“And what if the ambassador figures out I hijacked my own damn ship? Isn’t that going to look a little suspicious? Maybe that’s his whole plan.”
“We don’t know what his plan is.” Jensen thinks that’s the worst part, knowing they’re most likely walking into a trap and not having the faintest idea how it’s going to spring on them.
“Then how are we supposed to make our own?” Jared sounds lost, verging on panic.
Jensen pries his hand away from its white-knuckled grip on the arm of the chair, kisses the palm. “If there’s anything we’re good at, it’s working with unexpected contingencies. So really what we have to think about here is the armed guards, the surveillance equipment, and making sure no one knows it was you, right?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Enough doesn’t enter into this kind of thing, does it?” Jensen stands, taps through a few menus on Jared’s holo-generator, and brings up some basic security schematics for the sort of equipment the ambassador seems to like. He’s pitched plenty of systems like this on the capital, and if this one can stop a bunch of high-profile bandits, that would be a feather in his cap. But already Jensen can see some easy points of failure, switches that could be accidentally flipped, wires that could cross, connections that could be mysteriously interrupted. “So if we want to get you on and off the ship without being captured in the surveillance, I think we should start here.” Jensen points, drawing out an idea in the diagram. Just like teaching Jared about black holes all those years ago, Jared watching with rapt attention.
***
Every adult citizen of every known planet has his or her name placed into a lottery for galactic jury duty, and any name can only be pulled once. Most, given the number of adult citizens in the known universe, are never pulled at all. But sometimes when a name is pulled, it hardly seems like the results of a lottery. The year before Jensen’s family died, a woman named Shawn Rodicewicz was poised to become the representative for Omicron to the intergalactic senate when she was called to serve on the jury of a smuggling trial. The three weeks she spent out of contact put her far enough behind that her opponent won easily and spent his term tightening laws about the appropriate treatment of runaway slaves. A few years later, Jared says, the same thing happened to a man who was about to expose a money laundering scam inside the capitol complex itself. It’s not often enough for Jensen to have regarded it as more than an idle conspiracy theory, but when Jared gets the message, a week before his newly modified transport is set to make its first slave run, he has to wonder about the nature of the coincidence.
Jared is devastated. No one can get out of galactic jury duty, and his plan to play dumb and “accidentally” shut down the surveillance equipment on his ship had rested entirely on his ability to be on board. Given the nature of the deal, he tries to persuade the ambassador that it would only be fair to wait until the end of his jury term to do a real test drive of the new systems. As the owner of the company, surely Jared had a right to watch what was being done with his property. But the ambassador was adamant. Putting off the first run would only draw suspicion from the bandits that this was not an ordinary transport. “They’re not stupid, these criminals,” The ambassador points out in their last holo-conference before Jared heads out for the beta system and the elaborate system of courts there.
“Well, of course not,” Jared had replied. “The Central Government would hardly want to spend this much money on stupid crooks, now would they? That would hardly have been one to brag about, eh?”
When he has shut off the holo-generator and set the study to a communications blackout again, Jared turns to Jensen and says, “He knows, doesn’t he?”
“If he really knew, he would have had you arrested weeks ago. He suspects you’re mixed up in it somehow, and if he sticks you in a jury box while he tries to catch some rogue individualists, it will either prove that you’ve got nothing to do with it if everything goes as expected, or it will prove that you’re a criminal mastermind if no one shows up to rob the transport. Either way he’s got valuable information, and no one will ever suspect that there’s anything odd in the way he got it, since after all, jury duty is just a matter of random chance.”
Jared laughs mirthlessly. “I sometimes wish I still believed in things like that. It made life so much simpler, when the government was right and just all the time. Or when I thought it was anyway.”
“Even if the lottery is rigged, you can hope for a short trial,” Jensen offers. “No one has any nefarious control over that. And besides, you’ll have something no one in the Beta courts does.”
“Charm and good looks?”
“An inflated sense of your own virtues, yes. But also a body slave who won’t be affected by any of their communications bans.”
“You would be risking your life to talk to anyone off-world. It’s not worth that.”
“You’re risking your life all the time now. Why shouldn’t I have a turn?”
“Because legally you’re still my property, and they wouldn’t hesitate to euthanize you like a disobedient dog.” Jared’s eyes flash angrily, but Jensen shakes his head.
“Just let me handle this one. If you can go running around on Danneel’s runs, the least I can do is risk my life a little in the justice complex.”
***
The Justice Complex is a space station almost a hundred times the size of the one belonging to Padalecki Shipping. It was built over a period of eighty years, layers upon layers of new construction until eventually it was a sphere the size of a small moon, honeycombed with courtrooms and offices, and at the center, the highest security holding facility in the universe. There are wings and pods for different levels of crime. Although the Justice Complex only handles legal proceedings beyond the jurisdiction of other courts, that can include anything from border disputes to kidnappings to intergalactic smuggling rings. If Jared and the rest of the Pimpernel crowd were ever caught, they would be brought here, and not through the blandly pleasant juror intake facility.
Jared is stripped and all his communication devices removed, along with anything the intake staff deems sharp enough to be dangerous. Jensen’s dummy implant is scanned, and a cuff playing a blocker frequency is clipped to his ear. It is supposed to cancel out the sound of Jared’s voice, rendering Jensen fully deaf, but since he was not actually altered it just produces a high-pitched hum, like some of the summer bugs they encountered on vacation to Hibiscus. It’s vaguely nauseating, and Jensen doesn’t have to fake his look of discomfort as it’s fixed securely to his ear. By the time they reach Jared’s room, a little box with none of the comforts of home, Jensen’s head is starting to pound. Once they’re inside, at least Jensen can take off the cuff. He rubs at his ear. “Let’s hope for a short trial.”
Jared peers into the corners of the room, examining the light fixtures and the creaky handle on the closet door. “At least it’s private in here. No signals in or out. We can be as loud as we want.” He rubs the curve of Jensen’s ear, then drifts up into Jensen’s hair, palming at the curve of his skull.
“You have to go to jury selection. But I’ll keep that in mind. Do you need me to do anything in your absence, master?”
Jared kisses the corner of his mouth. “Just try not to get yourself killed.”
***
It’s easy to travel unnoticed as a slave, even with the security measures within the complex. Actually communicating with the outside is more complicated. There is a communications suite to send messages, but the logs are closely monitored, and Jensen knows that everything he says has to look innocuous and like something a slave could rightfully be writing on his master’s behalf. He’s developed a code with Aldis, and the point-to-point log will show only that he’s communicating with an engineering company on Gladiolus. They’ll be discussing pricing for some prospective modifications to Jared’s heavier cargo transports, but really Jensen is going to track every movement of the Padalecki transport carrying fifty slaves from Amaranth to the market on Primrose. With Jared in court for twelve-hour shifts, Jensen has nothing but time to keep tabs on Danneel’s interception mission, the electrical short that should neutralize the weapons of the ambassador’s soldiers and allow a window for Danneel and Aldis to get the slaves off the boat. And of course there are other messages too, jovial reassurances from the ambassador about the drills his troops are running and the fine quality of the slaves Jared’s ship will be carrying. There’s a vid showing them as they get on the transport, but Jensen deletes it without showing it to Jared. Too many scared kids, nothing that would make him feel better.
“This is my career on the line,” the ambassador says, in a brief moment of candor. “Think of it that way. Even more than that, think about the future of your career! Think how inspiring it will be to other companies to see that someone really can transport slaves safely and without fear. And think how detrimental it could be should the security measures not work.”
That one he tells Jared about. “It’s just an empty threat,” Jared says, pulling Jensen down onto the narrow bed beside him. “He thinks that’s something I’m afraid of. He thinks losing customers is the thing that will scare me most.”
“You aren’t concerned about that? You’ve never had one of your ships hijacked before.”
“That’s why the policy against live cargo was such a good idea. It’s not going to hurt the company any to be proven right about that. Is that really what’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know.” Jensen thinks about the faces of the slaves boarding the transport, frightened or resigned, all of them understanding the life they’re being sent to. “This whole movement. It’s getting bigger. It’s going to be bigger than Pimpernel. It’s not going to be something that can be a secret forever.”
“That’s true. The entire civilization is going to have to change.”
“Doesn’t that worry you? You have a pretty big stake in this civilization.”
“There are other things I have a bigger stake in. That’s what I’ve learned. I’ve been allowed to take so much for granted. And why should anyone be allowed that? Why should any person in the universe be allowed to not think about what they’re doing to their slaves?”
Jensen lies quiet, considering what to say.
“Do you want to go live on Pimpernel?” Jared asks out of the silence, his arm around Jensen’s waist hitching him closer.
“Why?” Jensen replies, surprised.
“Because you deserve to be doing something better than running errands for me. You should be someplace where you can have real conversations.”
“And what about you?”
“I should be wherever you are.”
Jensen sighs. “That’s not realistic.”
“When you’re as rich as I am, realistic loses a little of its meaning. I own a fucking space station. I can be anyplace I want to.”
There’s a chime overhead, and the lights flicker briefly. “Lockdown,” Jensen says casually. After a dinner delivered to the jurors’ room and an hour’s leisure time, the entire station begins to shut down for the night. The chimes are an automated warning; in fifteen minutes all the doors on the station will lock automatically and only open again in the morning. “If you want to run, now is the moment.”
“I don’t want to run. But I want you to think about what you want. In fact, I order you to think about it.”
Jensen sighs. “That’s an old trick.” He kisses Jared, pulling himself up until their mouths fit together just right.
Jared flips him onto his back, settles on top. “No trick. I’m totally serious. Think about it.” He nibbles at the lobe of Jensen’s ear, rubs a hand up Jensen’s chest, tugging at the ring through his right nipple.
“You’re not making thinking very easy like that.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be right now.” Jared moves back to his mouth, kissing him deeply again. Jensen sighs and lets himself be distracted out of arguing, Jared’s mouth sliding down from his, grazing wetly at the side of his neck and the jut of his collarbone. He tongues over one of Jensen’s nipples, tugs the ring with his teeth, making Jensen hiss in pleasure. He loses track of what they were talking about, Jared’s mouth working him, dragging every thought out of his head, making him ache for more. His nipples feel wet and sensitive, every gust of Jared’s breath making him whimper. Jared’s hands sweep down his sides, and Jensen moans, digging his heels into the soft foam of the mattress, opening his thighs a little and making a space between for Jared to settle into. He’s only wearing loose, knit pants, the kind that don’t hide anything about how hard he is, and Jared’s hands come down, framing his hips, pulling the loose fabric tight across Jensen’s aching dick. It chafes a little against the wet, sensitive head, but even that feels good, Jared sucking his nipples and rubbing the soft material of his pants against his cock.
“What do you want?” Jared asks him, and the tone of his voice makes it clear he’s not talking about running away to Pimpernel.
“Anything you want would be pleasurable for me also, master,” Jensen replies, singsonging the answer he learned in training when he was fourteen.
“Don’t,” says Jared, nipping the lobe of Jensen’s ear. “I’m tired, but I want to get you off. I’ve been thinking about it all day, but I don’t want to play power games. Let’s just be Jensen and Jared tonight.” Jared sounds tired, worn thin by his day in court, and Jensen feels sad on his behalf, imagining how it must feel to sit in those straight-backed juror chairs and just listen for hours to the horrible things people are capable of.
***
Jared is in the midst of a third day of expert testimony in a bloody medical malpractice case when Jensen starts seriously haggling over a set of hyper thrusters. He sends out messages to the engineer on Gladiolus, questioning the age and quality of the thrusters, and when he gets satisfactory specs, the messages start getting shorter and shorter until finally they’re nothing but offers and counter offers, strings of larger and smaller numbers. Jensen watches the relative differences between them with hawk-like concentration, and surely whoever monitors the comm. logs for the station must think he is a hard-nosed bargainer of the fiercest kind. But when the message comes through agreeing to his last quoted price after a lag of more than half an hour, Jensen rests his head in his hands for a moment, ready to cry in relief. “A pleasure doing business with you,” he says to Aldis, and he doesn’t wait to get the horrified and apologetic messages from the ambassador that will undoubtedly come soon. He has been caught up in a business deal without access to news, and if Jared doesn’t find out until tomorrow that one of his ships had its cargo stolen by bandits, that is hardly the fault of his humble slave.
“They did it,” Jensen says, as soon as Jared walks into the room.
At once the weariness of the day’s jury duty leeches off his face, replaced by a grin. “Aldis and Danneel? They got the ship?”
“They got everyone on the ship. Sounds like the ambassador’s soldiers-for-hire are feeling pretty sheepish right now.”
“Wasn’t your code with Aldis all numbers? How did you get ‘sheepish’ from price quotes?”
“I used to have to help you with your physics homework. There are mathematical nuances you’ll never understand.” Also a set of non-numerical code words they established to indicate things beyond success or failure, but Jared doesn’t need to know that.
Jared swats playfully at him. “So no one got hurt?”
“The numbers say no. They should be headed for the rendezvous point as we speak, getting everyone checked out and on their way to Pimpernel. And Aldis also says he looked fabulous in one of your crazy costumes.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?” Jared replies. “Now if I can just get through closing statements and deliberation tomorrow, we can get back home.”
***
No one knew how much power the ambassador had until he was unceremoniously relieved of his position and banned from Central Government air space. He’d used up all his chances to pull strings and catch his mysterious bandits, begged good faith and favors from people who were seeing no repayment.
Without a head, the proslavery crusade he’d led among the galaxy elite loses steam. They’re too lazy for real political action, and their slaves are largely old family stock, safe for the moment from bandits. So instead, resistance against the slave trade really does become a fad. Every party is suddenly a costume ball, and every costume is suddenly ingeniously planned for daring escapes and sleight-of-hand distractions. Jensen is both fascinated and appalled. On Pimpernel, everyone seems to think it’s a wonderful joke seeing vids of some of these events.
“I need some anti-gravity shoes!” Joe says, watching a woman in an old-fashioned tuxedo leaping up to touch the low hanging crystals of a chandelier and then running out of the room in midair. “Those would be great for climbing trees!”
“You’d probably kick someone in the head,” replies Nick skeptically.
“It would probably be me,” adds Kevin.
“Yeah, but don’t you always say hard heads run in our family?”
“Doesn’t it bother you that people all over the galaxy are treating all this as a game?” Jared asks later, sprawled out on one of the couches in the main room of their guest tree.
Aldis shrugs. “Rich people can treat anything as a game. If it weren’t emancipation, it would be something else. At least this way, there are cool new gadgets to play with.”
Jared sighs. “Sad but true, I guess.” He’s quiet for a long time, fingers sifting idly through Jensen’s hair. Danneel is stretched out on the other couch, her feet resting in Aldis’ lap. Kevin is hunched forward in an armchair, peering out at Nick and Joe, who are playing a game on the balcony. “You bought your brothers out of slavery, right?” Jared asks him, and Kevin glances their way.
“Yeah,” Kevin replies. “Two years ago.”
“So you’re all legal citizens then. You could live anywhere you wanted. You wouldn’t have to live under the radar like this. So why Pimpernel?”
“They say you can start a new life if you’re bought out of slavery, but everyone will know you weren’t always free. Even if you move someplace new, it’s on record that you were a slave. I didn’t want people to look at my brothers and see slaves. I wanted them to see people. I just want us all to be people.”
“That sounds like a pretty good goal to me,” Jensen tells him. He can see the wheels turning in Jared’s head, see him thinking over what that means to each of them. There’s a universe of possible things to do next. Jensen waits.
~fin~
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Art Post
The landing pad on Pimpernel is just a paved-over clearing in the middle of an old growth forest north of the colony, and Jared’s little hyperspace ship is dwarfed by the size of the size of the landing strip, used to accommodating huge stolen transport vessels and cargo ships dropping supplies on their way to even farther points of the Omicron system. The planet itself is technically Central Government property, but they had declared it a biohazard site several centuries ago, due to a failed terraforming experiment with irradiated soil. The half-life of the elements involved mean it is now perfectly safe according to every test Rosenbaum has been able to run on the soil, water, atmosphere, and the lush vegetation that has reclaimed the planet. But the Central Government had no interest in taking chances, not when there were so many new planets to mold into human habitats. The government left Pimpernel (originally called Anagallis) for dead, and it lived.
And so it’s theirs now, the slaves’ and the trees’, thanks to Jared’s weird network of activists and thieves and Jensen’s not even sure what else. He knows that it was not wholly Jared’s doing, that the two of them were not the catalyst for the movement, but it’s hard not to be proud of what all of these people have accomplished with Jared’s help, what they never could have done without it.
Jeff meets them at the landing pad, a familiar face in these unfamiliar surroundings. Jensen still has a hard time not referring to him as Dr. Morgan, although legally he disappeared three years ago and his medical licenses with him. Life on Pimpernel seems to be agreeing with Jeff. He’s tan, and his smile goes wide and bright when they disembark. Jared laughs and hugs him, and after an awkward moment’s consideration Jensen hugs him too. “Well, well, it’s good to see you boys again. It’s been way too long.”
“You said it,” agrees Jared, and his grin is huge, like a kid’s. Jensen knew he’d be like this once they finally arrived, no matter how much coercion it took to get him to come. “Is it okay to leave the ship like that? Do you need the landing strip for anything else soon?”
“Not that I know of,” Jeff replies. “And if anyone does, they’ll let you know. It’s not like we’re going far.”
Jensen’s curious what that means. From the air as they approached, the only part of the colony that was visible was one long low building, gleaming metal half obscured by local vegetation and a neatly-plotted rooftop garden. From the maps he’s seen in Jared’s holos he knows this must be the main storage building, a reclaimed government bunker and apparently the only place in the colony with reliable temperature control. But wherever the rest of the colony was, it must be in some direction he hadn’t looked. In theory there are hundreds of people here. Jeff leads them down a stone path curving into the forest, carved out around the roots of the huge trees, much taller and thicker than any Jensen has ever seen elsewhere, with a quiet air of age about them. “This is it,” Jeff says, indicating a painted sign that says, “Welcome home,” in bright, swirling letters. There is nothing here that looks to Jensen like a settlement.
But then he sees a set of mobile steps spiraling up from the base of a huge tree and looks up. From below, the houses of the colony are clearly visible, some little more than tents, spans of taut microcanvas welded together and strung from the branches. But some are much more elaborate, shaped from woven vines and lightweight shielding and wooden planks, connecting the tops of several trees in a kind of mansion of treetop living. It’s breathtakingly weird and breathtakingly beautiful.
“How long did it take to build all of this?” Jensen asks, staring unabashedly at the treetop houses, more and more of them visible now that he knows that to look for.
“Well, the settlement’s five years old now, so about five years.”
“Where is everyone?” Jared asks. The forest is quiet around them, trees rustling and the gentle whine of some kind of machinery in the distance.
“Make sure you’ve got your clocks set right,” says Jeff. “It’s mid-morning here. Everyone’s at work or school, or in the center for the elderly down that path.”
Jensen realizes they’re standing at a sort of crossroads, several stone paths intersecting, each one slightly different in its coloration. The direction they came from is light grey, the path to the left that Jeff’s indicating is slate, the one to right nearly black, and the branching path directly in front of them is reddish, like the jagged mountains they passed over on their way to the landing strip. “They’re color coded?” Jensen says.
“Yep. The paths only go to single destinations. Everything else is hacking through the woods, so they wanted to make it easy for anyone who did lose their way to know where they were headed as soon as they ran across one of these. Mostly it’s for the kids.”
Jared turns in a circle, taking in each path in turn. “So where do the others go?”
“The red paths lead out to the fields and other work areas, and the black goes to the school. There are about forty kids here now, former slaves and children of former slaves. They will be so excited to meet you.”
“I think we’re pretty excited to meet them too,” Jared replies. Jensen’s knuckles skim the back of his hand, letting Jared know he’s there. Already it’s getting easier, less awkward and alien being in the colony. Although who knows what a horde of overzealous children could do to Jared’s composure?
There’s a sound of running feet down the path from the school and a dark-haired man who must be a few years younger than Jared appears around the last bend, looking harried. He pulls up a clock on his wrist interface, grimaces, and keeps going, straight past where they’re standing and on towards a tree with a sturdy-looking house at the top, its walls smooth and its windows evenly spaced along the one wall that Jensen can see. The man runs up a set of mobile steps, trusting them to hold his weight, although each little platform trembles as the young man takes the stairs to the neat little house at the top of the tree. “That’s Kevin,” Jeff explains. “Sweet kid, but well, his family’s a little bit more complicated than the average. I’m sure you’ll find out about that.”
Kevin comes running back down the steps, balancing one hand on the trunk of the tree to keep from falling. He has a large bag slung over one shoulder, something inside it clanking dully. This time he waves as he passes, stopping dead in his tracks a few steps away. “Joe forgot his… Hi, I don’t know you, do I?”
“Hey,” says Jared, holding out his hand. “I’m Jared Padalecki.”
“Oh wow, really? Like, the Jared Padalecki? Did we… was I supposed to know you were coming?” Kevin keeps shaking his hand for a moment too long, brow furrowing.
“I don’t think so,” Jared replies, squeezing Kevin’s hand and letting go. “Was he?” he asks Jeff.
“Nope,” Jeff says. “You said you didn’t want a parade or anything.”
“This is Jensen,” says Jared, and Kevin shakes his hand too, more briefly.
“Nice to meet you,” Jensen tells him. “We didn’t mean to keep you from…” He gestures at the bag over Kevin’s shoulder.
“Oh, right! Yeah, Joe needs these. I’ll see you later!” Kevin jogs off into the forest.
Jensen looks after him. “Who’s Joe?”
“One of his brothers. They’re in school now. Kevin bought them out of slavery and brought them here as soon as he could. He’s a very brave kid.”
“I bet there are a lot of those around here.”
“There sure are.” Jeff looks around. “Why don’t I show you the farms? I know my wife’s been dying to meet you.”
“Your wife? Jeff, we didn’t even know!” Jared exclaims.
“I didn’t exactly invite offworld guests to the ceremony.” He leads them off down the path to the farm, telling them more about his wife. “She’s a civil engineer, so she’s been working on improving our irrigation system, since the rainfall patterns here are still so irregular. She draws up these huge, fancy sketches in chalk on our walls, so she can make changes anytime she needs to without even leaving home.”
“Why doesn’t she use a holo-generator?”
“They’re in short supply, so we keep them for the schools, rather than handing them out to private citizens.”
“You never said you needed them,” Jared protests. “If you’d just told me…”
“You don’t have to jump in to do everything for us, Jared,” Jeff replies. “Chill out a little. Rosenbaum’s supposed to be by in a couple of days with a bunch of stuff. He may even have some then.”
Rosenbaum is a con artist and a smuggler, the most unscrupulous of Jared’s radical friends in some ways. But given that he grew up on the outer edge of the Theta system, poorly served by the central government, outside of the slave-owning culture that had affected even Jensen’s childhood on Ocotillo, he is also often the one among them with the clearest view of the government’s hypocrisy. Plus he has a fast little ship and a knack for talking himself through the security of intergalactic corporations.
Jared doesn’t look totally mollified. “I try to provide the things you need,” he says softly. “I want to give everyone here that. Freedom and a real home and the resources to be anything they want.” He looks guiltily at Jensen because they both well know that Jensen doesn’t have all of those things, although the station is truly as much of a home as any place could be and Jared gives him everything he can. Jensen smiles reassuringly and takes his hand.
Jeff’s wife is covered in red clay when they meet her, her long hair pinned up messily at the back of her head. She’s standing in an irrigation channel next to a small plow, arguing with a man in high boots and a wide-brimmed hat.
“It needs to go west or we’re going to hit solid rock in about thirty feet,” the man is saying.
“And that’s exactly what we expected,” she replies. “There’s no way to get to that quadrant of the farm without hitting some rock somewhere.” She pulls an old-fashioned paper map out of the side pocket of her pants and points to something. “There’s a whole vein of limestone running all along here, and if we want anything to get any water over there, we’re going to have to deal with it.” She looks up and her face breaks into a grin. Jeff offers her a hand up from the irrigation ditch and swings her easily into his arms.
“Boys, this is Zoe,” Jeff says. “Zo, these are the boys you’re always hearing about. Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles.” It’s been so long since anyone called Jensen by his family name that it almost doesn’t register as belonging to him.
“Zoe Saldana,” she says, tipping a little finger salute. “Nice to meet you. Excuse me if I don’t shake hands. You wouldn’t want this stuff on you. It sticks like a bitch.”
“But it makes beautiful pottery,” Jeff points out.
Zoe shrugs in agreement. “Has he shown you his pots yet? He gets very excited about his pots. Which is fine, you know? They’re great pots.”
“Surgeons’ eyes have got to be sharp,” Jeff adds, wiggling his fingers with a lazy grin. “One missed turn or one drop of skin sealant can have permanent consequences for both you and your patients. That’s not good for anyone. I bring the same concentration to everything I do with my hands.” He gives a dirty little wink, and Zoe swipes a clay-covered hand across his chest, leaving a smear of red on his grey t-shirt. Jeff just grins wider.
Zoe shows them around the site, leaping irrigation ditches without even pausing, and Jensen is full of questions he's not sure he should ask. It's strange being in a group of people who assume he can hear and understand. It probably doesn't even occur to anyone else as odd; Jared's used to talking to him like a free person, and Jeff and Zoe live in a colony full of former slaves, but for Jensen the lack of subterfuge in a crowd is novel. Zoe describes the soil contents in detail that Jensen will not remember tomorrow, but the way she looks at him for a polite nod of understanding, that will stick with him.
She shoos them off when a new crew comes by with a collapsible pile driver. Their equipment looks new, if a little sparse, presumably because Rosenbaum is good at what he does, picking and choosing what will be most useful to the settlement and getting it here without getting caught. Jensen looks over his shoulder at the work crews as they leave the site, a couple of dozen men and women so focused on whatever it is they’re doing they don’t even look surprised by off-worlders. And beyond them are the fields, a work in progress, obviously, but bursting with new growth, rows and rows of little plants stretching their leaves out.
It’s only early spring in Pimpernel, and there’s still time to make a lot more happen in this growing season. Jared sees him looking back and takes his hand. “You know, Jensen knows a lot about farming,” he says proudly.
Jeff raises an eyebrow. “Does he? I knew you grew up out in Omicron, but I never figured you were a farm kid.”
Jensen shakes his head. “I wasn’t. My mom ran the local council of agriculture and resources, so we were always out on the farms getting soil samples and checking crop yields when I was little.”
“Huh,” says Jeff. Jensen realizes that perhaps Jeff has never thought about who Jensen was before he was Jared’s slave, the fact that he had a before, when so many people don’t, raised in slaveholding families and knowing to serve as soon as they knew how to walk. “Sounds like you could make yourself pretty useful around here. If you wanted.” He shoots a meaningful look at both of them, the first part of a sales pitch Jensen has been waiting to deflect since they touched down in the forest.
“There are many, many places in the universe I can make myself useful,” Jensen points out. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”
“It’s not that we haven’t thought about it,” Jared adds, but he seems distracted as they reach the edges of the settlement, the first houses coming into view in the trees overhead. As though he’s reconsidering now that he’s seen the place and all it has to offer. Jensen realizes that’s not unwarranted, but he knows all the reasons their lives are twisted up the way they are. All the degrading parties and corporate subterfuge mean he gets to see things happening that no other slave can.
***
Aldis doesn't live on Pimpernel, but he has a house there, a complex structure woven out of thick rope, the boards that make the floor bound together with the same rope, like prey in the spiders' webs that had nestled in the corners of Jensen's childhood home. "Pretty cool, huh?" Aldis says, with the pride of every homeowner Jensen's met on the planet. He gestures to the woven walls, sealed with something that might be wax, solid and milky colored between the coarse brown ropes.
"How did you put all this together?" Jensen asks, awestruck enough by the weaving that he doesn't mind sounding a little rude. "It's very beautiful," he adds hastily.
Aldis grins. "Thanks," he says. "We built it on the ground and then hung it, if you were wondering about the basic construction. It would have been nuts to try to weave in the tree. There are a bunch of folks in the colony who came from a textile mill on Hollyhock, skill workers. They’d never done something on this scale, but they know plenty about making sturdy fabric, and it was more fun than traditional construction-don’t tell Zoe and Danneel that, obviously.”
“Have you thought about moving here permanently?” Jared asks, while Jensen’s still inspecting every curve of the almost circular room.
Aldis shrugs. “I’m pretty sure even Rosenbaum’s thought about it at some point. This is a great place to live. But someone needs to be out there, doing the runs, making sure everyone coming here gets what they need before they get here. And that’s something I can do.”
***
The noises of the forest come through the shields and the thin sheeting of the guest house walls. They had the noise cancellers turned on at first, but Jensen found being able to see the trees moving outside and not being able to hear them too strange. Not exactly like the deafness promised to him when he became a slave, but disconcerting. Jensen listens to the movement of the wind through the branches, the slap of a loose piece of microcanvas against rough wood, the steady in and out of Jared’s breath that says he’s not asleep yet.
Jensen shifts a little, nuzzling into Jared’s shoulder, and Jared sighs and pulls him in closer. “I need to help more,” Jared says quietly.
“What does that mean?” Jensen replies. “You spend more time working on things for the Pimpernel colony than you do on anything else in your life.”
“I just spend money and provide ships and comm links. I don’t do anything. I don’t help to disarm slavers, I don’t make transport runs. I just sit at my desk and read about numbers on a holo-screen. I make painful small talk with people I despise at despicable events where the person I love most is publicly humiliated. So little of that is helpful.”
Jensen sighs. “You want to do the flashy side of things. Hair-raising escapes and all? I get that. But never devalue the things you are already doing, the services and support you provide to so many fucking people. Everything you do, for this colony and the anti-slavery movement in general, carries weight, and all of it helps people. And demeaning it to yourself in the middle of the night because you hate your own privilege is not good for anyone. Not for you, not for me, and certainly not for anyone who lives on Pimpernel.”
Jared goes tense. “Is that really what you think? That I’m just trying to do something more glamorous? Fuck, Jensen.” He sits up and puts his face in his hands. “I just want to help. Is that so fucking selfish?”
Jensen sits up, cupping a hand around the back of Jared’s neck. “You are helping so much already. Do you know that? Do you know how much you help?”
Jared rolls his head forward, letting Jensen’s fingers knead up into his hair. His voice is muffled. “I know how much my parents’ money helps. I know how much the resources of my family’s business help. But when we got here, no one even knew me as anything except the money behind the operation. I don’t want that.”
“We could visit more. You don’t have to be going on dangerous missions capturing ships in deep space for people here to know you.”
“They treat me like a hero, Jensen. If they’re going to do that, I want to deserve it.”
Jensen kisses the ball of his shoulder. “You’re an idiot if you don’t know you already do.”
Jared sighs. “You know I love it when you call me an idiot. I just. I have to do something.”
“And how do you plan to go about that?” Jensen asks, a little warily. “Are you just going to beg Danneel to take you on pickups with her? Because my guess is she’ll say no. Possibly after laughing long and hard at you.”
“I’m pretty confident she’ll start to see it the way I do once the laughing’s over. I’m not asking her to load me up with a laser pistol and send me out to defend the ship, but there may be things I know that she doesn’t. Holes in security I can slip through. I have a fair amount of experience with espionage.”
“It’s different,” Jensen says weakly, but he knows he’s losing ground.
***
Danneel’s ship has two boxy rows of crew cabins, mostly used for storing first aid and medical supplies that won’t fit in the equally tiny sick bay one deck down. There’s a central kitchen and a mess hall probably meant for a crew of a dozen, its metal tables strewn with dismantled comm units and other small electronics. She shows it all off with pride, before squeezing them between rows of crates grav-strapped to the walls of the corridor leading to the hold. “We don’t like to have to restock often,” she explains, punching the button that opens the door to the hold.
Jensen is expecting a lot of grubby metal and track lighting, like every hold on the Padalecki station. But the hold has been turned into a whole warren of little rooms, and from the catwalk above it all, it looks like a miniature city, walkways crawling between open doorways, and a branching path connecting it all.
“Wow,” says Jared, and Jensen looks at the open wonder on his face, knowing how much Jared wants to be here, wants to do what Danneel does.
“Zoe designed it,” Danneel explains. “We wanted it to look like anything except a cargo hold, and this is what she came up with. We can house about 150 people here, more if we have to, and everyone gets their own bed and a little bit of privacy.”
Jensen nods his understanding. Jared is still just looking around, taking stock, maybe imagining himself in this place.
“Not a lot of privacy in the slave markets,” says Aldis, coming up the ramp with a bedroll slung over his shoulder.
“Not a lot of that anywhere if you’re a slave,” Jared replies. He puts a hand on Jensen’s hip, thumb tucking into the waist of his pants.
“Well, by the time they get here they aren’t slaves anymore,” Danneel says. “Everyone on this boat is a free person.”
Jared looks at Jensen guiltily. “Except me,” says Jensen. He means it just as an acknowledgment, but it comes out a little cutting. In some ways he knows he’s better at the social graces of serving tea to bigoted business people than he is at talking to freedom fighters.
“Bullshit,” replies Danneel fiercely. “When you’re on my boat, you are a free man. We are outside anyone else’s jurisdiction.”
“A sovereign nation,” Jared adds thoughtfully, and Jensen knows he won’t be able to talk Jared out of this one.
***
Jensen can count on one hand the number of nights he’s spent in bed alone since he and Jared began sleeping together. There was one family wedding at an Ancient WestEarth country home, with slaves quarters on a separate floor. There was the night after Jared broke his ankle playing hockey, and the school infirmary required that he be left alone to heal. There was one time Jensen was ill after eating badly packed seafood and didn’t make it to bed at all. Body slaves are supposed to be an extension of their owners, like appendages as much as people, and however much Jensen isn’t like other slaves, he respects that part of his duties. The night Jared flies out with Danneel for the first time, that makes four.
Jensen lies in bed, sprawled out across all the space Jared usually takes up. He’s set the room pitch black, but he has Jared’s comm unit set to flash if anything urgent comes in. Jensen stares at the ceiling as his eyes adjust to the dark. As the Central Government has started to monitor a broader and broader range of frequencies in the Delta and Epsilon systems, where most of the slavers have been hit, Danneel’s been maintaining a total comms blackout anytime she’s on a run. While Jensen appreciates the safety concerns, it just makes it worse, knowing Jared won’t even be able to talk to him until tomorrow afternoon, once he’s safely left the rendezvous point. At first he’d asked if he could come along, if he could help in some way. But it’s too dangerous to not have either of them on the station; it’s too dangerous for Jared not to have an alibi, and Jensen’s the only person who can give him that. There’s no one else who can fill in for Jared at Padalecki Shipping, no one in the string of assistants who knows enough to form partnerships and soothe hotheaded clients the way Jared can. And even if there were, none of them could be trusted to keep quiet if they knew Jared had disappeared into the black without so much as an itinerary.
After a while, Jensen falls asleep, but somehow he feels worse when he wakes up, still in the middle of the night, the overheard lights not even starting to shade to dawn. There are no messages on Jared’s comm, and Jensen tries to assure himself that that’s a good sign. If they’d had to abort, if they’d had to go back to Misha’s new base on Clematis, there would have been a message, there would have been something. If anything happened, if for any reason Jared didn’t come back, Jensen’s life would be forfeit, and he would have to run as far and fast as he could until he could get in touch with someone from the colony for a pickup. There wouldn’t be time to think or time to mourn, and the possibility of it keeps Jensen awake for a few more long hours.
He handles a morning’s worth of messages on Jared’s behalf, skimming news feeds in between for stories of hijackings and slave theft, but whatever Jared and Danneel did last night, it hasn’t been reported yet. Jensen wonders if this is a new Central Government plan, to ignore everything they’re doing and hope that the movement dies out like a fire without oxygen.
But then there it is, the headline: “Is a New Leader Rising Among the Bandits?” There isn’t anything besides the text story, not even an old-fashioned video or still image. But Jensen knows the person the callers in the market encountered as they tried to defend their wares was Jared, disguised as an elderly man with a grip like steel. Jensen counts every minute until the shuttle dock indicator chimes to indicate Jared’s shuttle is coming back in. He walks purposefully down the corridors to the shuttle bay, eyes fixed forward and down like he’s on an official errand for Jared. But his heart’s beating so fast he expects it to start echoing all over the station, and it’s hard to keep himself to a steady pace. He sweeps his hand through the recognition system on the shuttle bay doors, and as soon as they open he runs flat out across the loading dock and pulls Jared down into a kiss.
Jared’s laughing and trying to talk, but Jensen’s never been so relieved to see anyone or anything in his whole life, and right now he doesn’t even have words to explain that. He sucks at Jared’s lower lip, latches on with his teeth and waits for Jared to give in and kiss him back.
“Okay,” Jensen says finally, pulling back and shutting his eyes so the sight of Jared’s mouth can’t draw him in again. “Now, tell me everything.”
Jared laughs. “Let’s go someplace a little more comfortable. And maybe I could clean up a little more first.”
Jensen runs a hand through his hair, sweat sticky. “I think that would be okay.”
They walk back out into the main corridor of the cargo deck, and Jensen can practically see all the sentences Jared makes himself not start crowding behind his lips. But this is headier stuff than should be discussed - even in code - in a public space of a crowded space station.
Jared puts a comms lock on his suite, so that nothing they say will get out, and he does a quick run through the sonic bath to get the worst of the grimy feeling off. And then he starts to talk.
“Danneel flies like a maniac,” he says. “Jensen, seriously, you should have seen her little ship weaving through the police cruisers when we were leaving the slave market on Marigold. I was so sure we were going to get shot out of the sky, but she just kept finding little gaps to squeeze through until we got out of the atmosphere and she could kick on the thrusters. It was terrifying, but it was amazing too. Are there vids yet? Did we make the newsfeeds?”
“Not the exciting chase, but there was some gossip flying earlier about the old guy holding off everyone in the marketplace.”
“Yeah?” Jared grins. “Wasn’t that cool? I mean, that’s a much better cause for a costume than I usually have.”
“At least no one even suspects it was you.”
Jared hauls Jensen out of his chair and hugs him so hard Jensen’s sure his ribs are going to crack. “I wish you could have been there. I know how much you worry, but I just. I have to do this. All those people, families who were going to be sold, I got to tell them about Pimpernel instead, about all of the amazing things the people there do, about the school and the tree houses and Zoe’s agriculture work. It’s this whole world of possibilities. There was this man, this older man who’d been a field slave all his life, and his whole family was sold after their owner died. He’s never even heard his daughter’s voice. But he will now. I told him about Jeff, and he broke down crying. I didn’t even know what to say.”
“It’s amazing,” says Jensen, but there’s this seed of worry in his belly, this sense of how many things could still go badly wrong and how Jared’s overwhelming enthusiasm could burn him out instead of keeping him going.
***
Some days, it’s hard. Some days they don’t save everyone, and Jared starts keeping a list, handwritten and pinned to the wall in his study, of the ones he watches get left behind; children and parents and cousins and unlikely friends who get lost in the raids or vaporized by an overzealous law enforcement squad. Somehow Jensen hadn’t thought about the violence before Jared started going out with Danneel. The newsfeeds don’t report on that because it’s distasteful, all those dead slaves. The losses are calculated financially. But Jared finds out their names. He says he has to.
But those are the bad days, and on the other days, Jared’s sure they’re gaining ground, abolitionist politicians rounding up support on the planets hardest hit by Central Government’s debt-settling practices. It’s not a safe thing to do, certainly not on the more central planets of the Alpha and Beta systems, but in spite of government monitoring and headlines on the feeds screaming about the overthrow of civilization by a few rogue individualists, there are pockets of change. Jared wishes he could support it, but any action under his own name would add him to one of the barely classified government Watch lists, and anything done anonymously would bring on too many questions.
Going on raids with Danneel becomes more dangerous. All her custom mods to her ship can’t keep the government from identifying her forever, and as soon as the police bulletins start coming through with lists of suspect model numbers, she has to swap transports in a hurry. New parts take months, and in the meantime a so-called slave uprising on Primrose leaves almost a hundred people dead. They watch the vids in the central gathering room in the newly built community center on Pimpernel, Jared’s hand trembling in Jensen’s. Kevin is sitting on Jensen’s other side. His eyes are wide with shock and his face has gone pale. Beyond him, his brothers are leaning into each other, whispering urgently. “Our family came from Primrose,” Kevin says quietly. “That could have been us.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jensen tells him. “Do you still have family there?”
Kevin shakes his head. “I guess. But only cousins we never really knew well. And they wouldn’t have been involved. None of them ever went into debt the way our parents did, so none of them ever had to worry about things like ending up slaves.” He looks troubled, almost angry, and it’s strange because Kevin has been one of the most even-tempered people Jensen’s ever encountered, even when talking about the awful circumstances that brought him and his brothers here. But something about this makes him mad. “I wonder if they know we’re off-world. I wonder if they’ve even thought that Nick and Joe might be those dead kids on the news.”
Nick looks up at the sound of his name, and Kevin tousles his hair. “I’m glad we left,” Nick says gravely, even as he hunches moodily away from Kevin’s hand, back into Joe’s side.
“They never cared about us,” Kevin tells Jensen. “It was a really hard thing to find out, especially when we needed support from them so badly. They would have let…” He trails off, looking at Nick and Joe. “They would have let whatever happen. To kids. To their own family. I can’t imagine doing that.”
Jensen looks away from the vid, a government official on Primrose talking about property damage and a bill in the galactic senate to mandate more stringent slave tracking. “Can I ask what happened to your parents?” Jensen asks. Almost fifteen years have passed since he lost his family, and the pain is duller now. He wonders if maybe he has something to offer to Kevin and his brothers.
Kevin looks sad. “I’d tell you if I knew. They offered themselves as collateral on our house, so they were taken even before Nick and Joe were. I didn’t know where to look then to track them, so all I know is they were sold off-world. And now there’s no record. Every once in a while, I check with someone who does slaveholder record-keeping, but there never been anything. I think it’s just us now. We’re doing okay.” Kevin smiles at Nick and Joe, who are crowded together in their chairs, thumb wrestling and ignoring everyone else. Jensen wonders vaguely if Kevin is lonely, so wrapped up in watching out for his brothers instead of spending time with people his own age.
“I can see that,” Jensen agrees. “It looks like you’re doing a great job with them.”
Kevin lights up in a grin, ignoring the depressing newsfeed altogether. “Thanks.”
Jared squeezes Jensen’s hand, letting him know he’s listening even though he’s not saying anything. “I figured maybe teenagers weren’t the best at telling you things like that.”
“Yeah. They’ve got a lot going on. I don’t need them to do that for me. I’m just glad they get to be kids now.”
Jensen nods. “Everyone should have that.”
“Everyone should be free too. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way.”
“True.”
They switch from the newsfeed to something light and fictional on the big holo-generator, something easier to watch, and even Nick and Joe turn their attention to the front of the room.
***
“The ambassador’s waiting for you,” Jensen says, leaning in the door of Jared’s study.
“I figured,” Jared replies distractedly. “He can keep doing that.” He barely looks up from his keyboard, and Jensen takes a few steps closer.
“Is something happening?” Jensen asks.
Jared shakes his head and glances up. “I’m not sure yet. Is the ambassador getting restless?”
“I don’t know. He’s alone this time, so he’s not talking. He seems to be keeping himself busy.”
Jared shuts off the interface and stands up. “Let’s see how fast we can get rid of him.” He shrugs into his coat and straightens his tie.
It turns out the ambassador has a new plan for stopping the escalating attacks on slave traders. “I know you haven’t dealt in live cargo since that last bout of hoof-and-mouth disease, but wouldn’t it be worth a little risk if it helps us catch the bastards behind all this? Your ships are the best, and you’re a high-profile businessman. They would go after you. But the difference is you’ve got the connections you need to have a fully trained arms and recon force on every one of your transports. They’d never get away with anything.”
Jared taps his lips thoughtfully with one finger. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness about the safety of my business, but why not provide this service to one of the poor unfortunates whose livelihood is already being affected by those reckless bandits? Surely there is a deserving candidate there?”
“Truly, there isn’t. None that we would trust wholeheartedly as we trust you, we being the central government, of course. Most of the vessels attacked have belonged to private trade and transport contractors working for the big shipping outfits. I wouldn’t trust any one of them with government property. But you own your own boats, so we could outfit them properly and offer the best possible protection and surveillance.”
“I do understand your position, but the hassle of live cargo has not lessened since I decided to stop taking it on ten years ago. The cleanup costs alone are so much higher than carrying nice tidy boxes.”
“Then the government will pay them!” The ambassador seems agitated, and Jared glances at Jensen as he bangs his fist against the arm of his chair. “Dammit, Padalecki, this is important. Those smug little miscreants must be brought to justice. They’re getting bolder every day. Don’t you even care that they threaten our very way of life?”
“Of course I do,” Jared replies vehemently. “But I have already provided the government with the fastest transports I could spare, and I must say, that is more than many private citizens would have done for only market price as compensation.” He’s getting too serious, not the jovial eccentric his clients expect, and Jensen can feel the panic that’s driving him. If he lets the government’s cameras onto his ships, if he lets himself be forced into the slave trade, how long will it be before the government gets too close?
“Your ships proved largely useless in spite of their speed. They were still hijacked, and their cargos were still freed.” Jared raises his eyebrows. “Not that you are to blame for that. No one could have known that little ship had a hyperdrive system. But you must understand the frustration the Central Government is facing. Thieves are making people all over the galaxy think the government is incapable of enforcing its own laws. And that’s unacceptable. If citizens don’t trust and respect their duly elected leaders, who will they trust and respect?”
“People are always finding new idols, in my experience. Just now the fad is resistance against the slave trade. Next it will be anti-gravity hairpieces. I know the economics of the whole thing are dashed inconvenient, but I don’t see how involving one of my crews in the whole nasty business is going to make it go away any faster.”
In the end there’s nothing Jared can say to sway him, not without drawing too much attention to his own discomfort, and already the ambassador has a sly look on his face that Jensen’s sure won’t bode well for anyone. Jared agrees that one of his ships can be outfitted with a set of new surveillance equipment, and he will announce that in light of popular demand due to recent events, Padalecki Shipping will once again carry live cargo.
Back in his study once the ambassador has gone, Jared throws off his jacket and lays his head on the desk. “What the fuck am I going to do, Jensen?”
“That’s what we have to figure out now, isn’t it?” He makes tea, going through a ritual almost as old as government corruption, spooning leaves into the pot and leaving them to steep. He presses one steam-damp hand to the back of Jared’s neck, rubbing at the tension there.
“Do you have a plan?” Jared asks him, and Jensen’s heart aches at the desperation in Jared’s voice. For perhaps the first time in his life, he’s hit on something he can’t talk his way out of, and Jensen thinks he understands how that limitation feels, how confining it must be.
“I’ll always be your alibi, in this as much as anything. If you need to rob your own ship in disguise, I’ll make sure everyone knows you’re safely on the station, shocked and appalled by the audacity of the thieves. You’ll be sending out press releases and planning meetings with law enforcement to talk about the violation you’ve endured. It won’t be any different than any other time.”
“It will though,” Jared says. “They’ll be putting people on my ship. I’ll have to file for cargo insurance for people. That makes everything different. What if we can’t save all of them? What if the fucking security force opens fire on the whole crowd? It’s already so much riskier to hijack a ship in deep space. And to do it with extra security watching and cataloging every move… It won’t work.”
Jensen pours him a cup of tea. “I think it will. I think Danneel is too quick and you’re too careful to accept anything less than success.” Jared just frowns more deeply, and Jensen goes to his knees beside Jared’s chair, squeezing his hands around the meat of Jared’s thigh and looking up into Jared’s face. “It’s scarier. I know it is. Having it be your ship, it has to go right. But it will. You’ll see.”
“And what if the ambassador figures out I hijacked my own damn ship? Isn’t that going to look a little suspicious? Maybe that’s his whole plan.”
“We don’t know what his plan is.” Jensen thinks that’s the worst part, knowing they’re most likely walking into a trap and not having the faintest idea how it’s going to spring on them.
“Then how are we supposed to make our own?” Jared sounds lost, verging on panic.
Jensen pries his hand away from its white-knuckled grip on the arm of the chair, kisses the palm. “If there’s anything we’re good at, it’s working with unexpected contingencies. So really what we have to think about here is the armed guards, the surveillance equipment, and making sure no one knows it was you, right?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Enough doesn’t enter into this kind of thing, does it?” Jensen stands, taps through a few menus on Jared’s holo-generator, and brings up some basic security schematics for the sort of equipment the ambassador seems to like. He’s pitched plenty of systems like this on the capital, and if this one can stop a bunch of high-profile bandits, that would be a feather in his cap. But already Jensen can see some easy points of failure, switches that could be accidentally flipped, wires that could cross, connections that could be mysteriously interrupted. “So if we want to get you on and off the ship without being captured in the surveillance, I think we should start here.” Jensen points, drawing out an idea in the diagram. Just like teaching Jared about black holes all those years ago, Jared watching with rapt attention.
***
Every adult citizen of every known planet has his or her name placed into a lottery for galactic jury duty, and any name can only be pulled once. Most, given the number of adult citizens in the known universe, are never pulled at all. But sometimes when a name is pulled, it hardly seems like the results of a lottery. The year before Jensen’s family died, a woman named Shawn Rodicewicz was poised to become the representative for Omicron to the intergalactic senate when she was called to serve on the jury of a smuggling trial. The three weeks she spent out of contact put her far enough behind that her opponent won easily and spent his term tightening laws about the appropriate treatment of runaway slaves. A few years later, Jared says, the same thing happened to a man who was about to expose a money laundering scam inside the capitol complex itself. It’s not often enough for Jensen to have regarded it as more than an idle conspiracy theory, but when Jared gets the message, a week before his newly modified transport is set to make its first slave run, he has to wonder about the nature of the coincidence.
Jared is devastated. No one can get out of galactic jury duty, and his plan to play dumb and “accidentally” shut down the surveillance equipment on his ship had rested entirely on his ability to be on board. Given the nature of the deal, he tries to persuade the ambassador that it would only be fair to wait until the end of his jury term to do a real test drive of the new systems. As the owner of the company, surely Jared had a right to watch what was being done with his property. But the ambassador was adamant. Putting off the first run would only draw suspicion from the bandits that this was not an ordinary transport. “They’re not stupid, these criminals,” The ambassador points out in their last holo-conference before Jared heads out for the beta system and the elaborate system of courts there.
“Well, of course not,” Jared had replied. “The Central Government would hardly want to spend this much money on stupid crooks, now would they? That would hardly have been one to brag about, eh?”
When he has shut off the holo-generator and set the study to a communications blackout again, Jared turns to Jensen and says, “He knows, doesn’t he?”
“If he really knew, he would have had you arrested weeks ago. He suspects you’re mixed up in it somehow, and if he sticks you in a jury box while he tries to catch some rogue individualists, it will either prove that you’ve got nothing to do with it if everything goes as expected, or it will prove that you’re a criminal mastermind if no one shows up to rob the transport. Either way he’s got valuable information, and no one will ever suspect that there’s anything odd in the way he got it, since after all, jury duty is just a matter of random chance.”
Jared laughs mirthlessly. “I sometimes wish I still believed in things like that. It made life so much simpler, when the government was right and just all the time. Or when I thought it was anyway.”
“Even if the lottery is rigged, you can hope for a short trial,” Jensen offers. “No one has any nefarious control over that. And besides, you’ll have something no one in the Beta courts does.”
“Charm and good looks?”
“An inflated sense of your own virtues, yes. But also a body slave who won’t be affected by any of their communications bans.”
“You would be risking your life to talk to anyone off-world. It’s not worth that.”
“You’re risking your life all the time now. Why shouldn’t I have a turn?”
“Because legally you’re still my property, and they wouldn’t hesitate to euthanize you like a disobedient dog.” Jared’s eyes flash angrily, but Jensen shakes his head.
“Just let me handle this one. If you can go running around on Danneel’s runs, the least I can do is risk my life a little in the justice complex.”
***
The Justice Complex is a space station almost a hundred times the size of the one belonging to Padalecki Shipping. It was built over a period of eighty years, layers upon layers of new construction until eventually it was a sphere the size of a small moon, honeycombed with courtrooms and offices, and at the center, the highest security holding facility in the universe. There are wings and pods for different levels of crime. Although the Justice Complex only handles legal proceedings beyond the jurisdiction of other courts, that can include anything from border disputes to kidnappings to intergalactic smuggling rings. If Jared and the rest of the Pimpernel crowd were ever caught, they would be brought here, and not through the blandly pleasant juror intake facility.
Jared is stripped and all his communication devices removed, along with anything the intake staff deems sharp enough to be dangerous. Jensen’s dummy implant is scanned, and a cuff playing a blocker frequency is clipped to his ear. It is supposed to cancel out the sound of Jared’s voice, rendering Jensen fully deaf, but since he was not actually altered it just produces a high-pitched hum, like some of the summer bugs they encountered on vacation to Hibiscus. It’s vaguely nauseating, and Jensen doesn’t have to fake his look of discomfort as it’s fixed securely to his ear. By the time they reach Jared’s room, a little box with none of the comforts of home, Jensen’s head is starting to pound. Once they’re inside, at least Jensen can take off the cuff. He rubs at his ear. “Let’s hope for a short trial.”
Jared peers into the corners of the room, examining the light fixtures and the creaky handle on the closet door. “At least it’s private in here. No signals in or out. We can be as loud as we want.” He rubs the curve of Jensen’s ear, then drifts up into Jensen’s hair, palming at the curve of his skull.
“You have to go to jury selection. But I’ll keep that in mind. Do you need me to do anything in your absence, master?”
Jared kisses the corner of his mouth. “Just try not to get yourself killed.”
***
It’s easy to travel unnoticed as a slave, even with the security measures within the complex. Actually communicating with the outside is more complicated. There is a communications suite to send messages, but the logs are closely monitored, and Jensen knows that everything he says has to look innocuous and like something a slave could rightfully be writing on his master’s behalf. He’s developed a code with Aldis, and the point-to-point log will show only that he’s communicating with an engineering company on Gladiolus. They’ll be discussing pricing for some prospective modifications to Jared’s heavier cargo transports, but really Jensen is going to track every movement of the Padalecki transport carrying fifty slaves from Amaranth to the market on Primrose. With Jared in court for twelve-hour shifts, Jensen has nothing but time to keep tabs on Danneel’s interception mission, the electrical short that should neutralize the weapons of the ambassador’s soldiers and allow a window for Danneel and Aldis to get the slaves off the boat. And of course there are other messages too, jovial reassurances from the ambassador about the drills his troops are running and the fine quality of the slaves Jared’s ship will be carrying. There’s a vid showing them as they get on the transport, but Jensen deletes it without showing it to Jared. Too many scared kids, nothing that would make him feel better.
“This is my career on the line,” the ambassador says, in a brief moment of candor. “Think of it that way. Even more than that, think about the future of your career! Think how inspiring it will be to other companies to see that someone really can transport slaves safely and without fear. And think how detrimental it could be should the security measures not work.”
That one he tells Jared about. “It’s just an empty threat,” Jared says, pulling Jensen down onto the narrow bed beside him. “He thinks that’s something I’m afraid of. He thinks losing customers is the thing that will scare me most.”
“You aren’t concerned about that? You’ve never had one of your ships hijacked before.”
“That’s why the policy against live cargo was such a good idea. It’s not going to hurt the company any to be proven right about that. Is that really what’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know.” Jensen thinks about the faces of the slaves boarding the transport, frightened or resigned, all of them understanding the life they’re being sent to. “This whole movement. It’s getting bigger. It’s going to be bigger than Pimpernel. It’s not going to be something that can be a secret forever.”
“That’s true. The entire civilization is going to have to change.”
“Doesn’t that worry you? You have a pretty big stake in this civilization.”
“There are other things I have a bigger stake in. That’s what I’ve learned. I’ve been allowed to take so much for granted. And why should anyone be allowed that? Why should any person in the universe be allowed to not think about what they’re doing to their slaves?”
Jensen lies quiet, considering what to say.
“Do you want to go live on Pimpernel?” Jared asks out of the silence, his arm around Jensen’s waist hitching him closer.
“Why?” Jensen replies, surprised.
“Because you deserve to be doing something better than running errands for me. You should be someplace where you can have real conversations.”
“And what about you?”
“I should be wherever you are.”
Jensen sighs. “That’s not realistic.”
“When you’re as rich as I am, realistic loses a little of its meaning. I own a fucking space station. I can be anyplace I want to.”
There’s a chime overhead, and the lights flicker briefly. “Lockdown,” Jensen says casually. After a dinner delivered to the jurors’ room and an hour’s leisure time, the entire station begins to shut down for the night. The chimes are an automated warning; in fifteen minutes all the doors on the station will lock automatically and only open again in the morning. “If you want to run, now is the moment.”
“I don’t want to run. But I want you to think about what you want. In fact, I order you to think about it.”
Jensen sighs. “That’s an old trick.” He kisses Jared, pulling himself up until their mouths fit together just right.
Jared flips him onto his back, settles on top. “No trick. I’m totally serious. Think about it.” He nibbles at the lobe of Jensen’s ear, rubs a hand up Jensen’s chest, tugging at the ring through his right nipple.
“You’re not making thinking very easy like that.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be right now.” Jared moves back to his mouth, kissing him deeply again. Jensen sighs and lets himself be distracted out of arguing, Jared’s mouth sliding down from his, grazing wetly at the side of his neck and the jut of his collarbone. He tongues over one of Jensen’s nipples, tugs the ring with his teeth, making Jensen hiss in pleasure. He loses track of what they were talking about, Jared’s mouth working him, dragging every thought out of his head, making him ache for more. His nipples feel wet and sensitive, every gust of Jared’s breath making him whimper. Jared’s hands sweep down his sides, and Jensen moans, digging his heels into the soft foam of the mattress, opening his thighs a little and making a space between for Jared to settle into. He’s only wearing loose, knit pants, the kind that don’t hide anything about how hard he is, and Jared’s hands come down, framing his hips, pulling the loose fabric tight across Jensen’s aching dick. It chafes a little against the wet, sensitive head, but even that feels good, Jared sucking his nipples and rubbing the soft material of his pants against his cock.
“What do you want?” Jared asks him, and the tone of his voice makes it clear he’s not talking about running away to Pimpernel.
“Anything you want would be pleasurable for me also, master,” Jensen replies, singsonging the answer he learned in training when he was fourteen.
“Don’t,” says Jared, nipping the lobe of Jensen’s ear. “I’m tired, but I want to get you off. I’ve been thinking about it all day, but I don’t want to play power games. Let’s just be Jensen and Jared tonight.” Jared sounds tired, worn thin by his day in court, and Jensen feels sad on his behalf, imagining how it must feel to sit in those straight-backed juror chairs and just listen for hours to the horrible things people are capable of.
***
Jared is in the midst of a third day of expert testimony in a bloody medical malpractice case when Jensen starts seriously haggling over a set of hyper thrusters. He sends out messages to the engineer on Gladiolus, questioning the age and quality of the thrusters, and when he gets satisfactory specs, the messages start getting shorter and shorter until finally they’re nothing but offers and counter offers, strings of larger and smaller numbers. Jensen watches the relative differences between them with hawk-like concentration, and surely whoever monitors the comm. logs for the station must think he is a hard-nosed bargainer of the fiercest kind. But when the message comes through agreeing to his last quoted price after a lag of more than half an hour, Jensen rests his head in his hands for a moment, ready to cry in relief. “A pleasure doing business with you,” he says to Aldis, and he doesn’t wait to get the horrified and apologetic messages from the ambassador that will undoubtedly come soon. He has been caught up in a business deal without access to news, and if Jared doesn’t find out until tomorrow that one of his ships had its cargo stolen by bandits, that is hardly the fault of his humble slave.
“They did it,” Jensen says, as soon as Jared walks into the room.
At once the weariness of the day’s jury duty leeches off his face, replaced by a grin. “Aldis and Danneel? They got the ship?”
“They got everyone on the ship. Sounds like the ambassador’s soldiers-for-hire are feeling pretty sheepish right now.”
“Wasn’t your code with Aldis all numbers? How did you get ‘sheepish’ from price quotes?”
“I used to have to help you with your physics homework. There are mathematical nuances you’ll never understand.” Also a set of non-numerical code words they established to indicate things beyond success or failure, but Jared doesn’t need to know that.
Jared swats playfully at him. “So no one got hurt?”
“The numbers say no. They should be headed for the rendezvous point as we speak, getting everyone checked out and on their way to Pimpernel. And Aldis also says he looked fabulous in one of your crazy costumes.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?” Jared replies. “Now if I can just get through closing statements and deliberation tomorrow, we can get back home.”
***
No one knew how much power the ambassador had until he was unceremoniously relieved of his position and banned from Central Government air space. He’d used up all his chances to pull strings and catch his mysterious bandits, begged good faith and favors from people who were seeing no repayment.
Without a head, the proslavery crusade he’d led among the galaxy elite loses steam. They’re too lazy for real political action, and their slaves are largely old family stock, safe for the moment from bandits. So instead, resistance against the slave trade really does become a fad. Every party is suddenly a costume ball, and every costume is suddenly ingeniously planned for daring escapes and sleight-of-hand distractions. Jensen is both fascinated and appalled. On Pimpernel, everyone seems to think it’s a wonderful joke seeing vids of some of these events.
“I need some anti-gravity shoes!” Joe says, watching a woman in an old-fashioned tuxedo leaping up to touch the low hanging crystals of a chandelier and then running out of the room in midair. “Those would be great for climbing trees!”
“You’d probably kick someone in the head,” replies Nick skeptically.
“It would probably be me,” adds Kevin.
“Yeah, but don’t you always say hard heads run in our family?”
“Doesn’t it bother you that people all over the galaxy are treating all this as a game?” Jared asks later, sprawled out on one of the couches in the main room of their guest tree.
Aldis shrugs. “Rich people can treat anything as a game. If it weren’t emancipation, it would be something else. At least this way, there are cool new gadgets to play with.”
Jared sighs. “Sad but true, I guess.” He’s quiet for a long time, fingers sifting idly through Jensen’s hair. Danneel is stretched out on the other couch, her feet resting in Aldis’ lap. Kevin is hunched forward in an armchair, peering out at Nick and Joe, who are playing a game on the balcony. “You bought your brothers out of slavery, right?” Jared asks him, and Kevin glances their way.
“Yeah,” Kevin replies. “Two years ago.”
“So you’re all legal citizens then. You could live anywhere you wanted. You wouldn’t have to live under the radar like this. So why Pimpernel?”
“They say you can start a new life if you’re bought out of slavery, but everyone will know you weren’t always free. Even if you move someplace new, it’s on record that you were a slave. I didn’t want people to look at my brothers and see slaves. I wanted them to see people. I just want us all to be people.”
“That sounds like a pretty good goal to me,” Jensen tells him. He can see the wheels turning in Jared’s head, see him thinking over what that means to each of them. There’s a universe of possible things to do next. Jensen waits.
~fin~
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Art Post