Marlo Petrak

Role Security-systems subcontractor (ex-Kinetic Logistics); crew member aboard The Albatross — probationary as of Session 6, **staying by his own stated choice as of Session 7** Status alive

Overview

Session 3Buckle Up Motherfuckers

Marlo Petrak’s day had just taken a horrible turn. Charged with finishing the wiring on the last of the alien bricks in the transport’s sealed rear compartment, working late and alone because the job was behind and nobody liked being near the things, it was his misfortune to run into Six. Not that he saw him. That was the whole problem.

One moment there was the hum of the compartment and the cold weight of a brick in his hands. The next there was a hand over his mouth, an arm across his throat, and the deck coming up to meet his face while a man he never got a look at rode him down with the patient economy of someone who had done this before. He went under counting, and lost.

He woke trussed in his own gauge wire, which he might have found funny on a better night. Outside, the compound was ending. Something had walked through it like a hand sweeping a table clear, and through the hull he could hear the exact music of everything he understood going wrong at once, shouted orders, dead systems whining, small-arms fire pattering off the plating like rain. Then strangers were coming up the ramp he had helped power, someone dropped into the pilot’s seat, and a voice told everyone to buckle up.

They took him with them. Petrak spent the climb to orbit lashed in a hold full of the same alien bricks he had just spent a shift wiring, while a pilot he had never met threw the ship sideways to dodge two blobs of the substance that eats metal on contact. He does not know these people. He does not know where they are taking him. He knows he is alive, which on the evidence of the last hour he has decided to count as a win, and that wherever this is going, he is going too. As cargo. To be asked things.

Session 4The Case of the Missing Courtesan

The flight to the station took three hours, and Petrak spent all of them lashed in the hold while the people who had taken him worked around him as though he were part of the cargo manifest. One of them wandered aft partway through, tracing the wire runs out of the navigation computer toward the rear compartment, toward the exact job Petrak had been finishing when the lights went out for him. Nobody stopped to ask the man who had laid those wires what they were for. Another of them sat patching up his own injuries. On the approach, rather than wait the few minutes for the docking ring to seat, the one who had choked him opened an airlock and left through it, crossing hard vacuum to the station on his own thrusters. Petrak revised his working assessment of these people. Whatever else they were, patient was not on the list.

He had built a theory during the climb that he had been taken by criminals, which at least ran on rules he understood, and the theory held right up to the moment the people who took him handed him across to a Federal Marshal and did paperwork about it. Whatever this was, it was official. That was worse. The ship he had helped wire went into federal quarantine at Docking Bay 36. His captors were given twenty-four hours of leave and two hundred credits each, and went to the entertainment district for steak and lobster. Petrak was given a cell.

Not a cell block. A small brig behind Julija Borja’s desk at the Marshal’s Office, a cupboard with a door in it, sited so that he could see the whole office and the whole office could see him. At five in the morning the people who had ended his life as he understood it filed in and stood ten feet away and argued about jurisdiction. He listened to Six refuse to answer questions on the grounds of classified corporate orders, and cite station regulation by clause number at a Federal Marshal. He listened to Borja cross the hall and take Holger Graeme apart at conversational volume through a wall that stopped none of it, and to Graeme explain, in the flat voice of a man who has made this argument before and lost, that company policy sent every report to the station manager rather than the Marshal Service. He listened to Borja work through Six’s written statement line by line with pedantic scrutiny, asking aloud for things the man had already put in writing, and to Six getting visibly annoyed at being asked questions he had already answered.

Marlo Petrak was the only person in that building who had been on Thides III with a brick in his hands, and nobody asked him anything at all. Not one question. He was scenery at somebody else’s meeting.

Session 5Hostile Takeover

Then the station changed hands, and did it twice over in the same hour. A company called Pratrock Dynamics, which Petrak had never heard of and had no reason to, bought MacMillian outright, and Solveig Kaufer read the announcement out over station-wide comms telling everyone to go to their quarters. In the same minutes his own employer’s drop ships detached from a pair of newly arrived transports and locked onto the hull, and Kinetic Logistics infantry and backpack-deployed combat robots came aboard behind them. The gate went under lockdown, every ship on the pad was grounded, the station manager was already dead at his own desk, and two decks away Daniela Akkermans put a knife into the neck of the Federal Marshal who had been holding him. Petrak went from working for a company running an illegal operation to working for the armed wing of a corporate acquisition without moving, without being asked, and without being told a thing.

Somewhere in the middle of it the door of his cell opened, and the man who had choked him unconscious in a dark compartment on Thides III was standing in it with an axe, letting him out. He had been rescued. From his own employer’s soldiers. By his kidnapper. He was given about as long to think about that arrangement as it takes to read it, and then went where he was pointed, because every other argument he could construct ended in a corridor with soldiers in it.

They put him back on the ship. The same ship, second time aboard it, still cargo, still nobody’s priority. He was tied to a bunk in the crew quarters while a vortex tore itself open in space beside the station and the whole of the Thides System was replaced by the shifting colours of hyperspace, and the gate closed behind him with him on the wrong side of it. The dead Marshal’s evidence duffel sat on the deck within reach. Six sat across the compartment and said nothing at all.

Ambushed, throttled, trussed in his own gauge wire, flown off a planet, handed to the law, filed behind a desk, left in a cupboard through a shouting match about paperwork, liberated by the wrong side and stolen a second time. From the compound to the compartment to the cell to the bunk, through every pair of hands he has passed through, nobody had yet asked Marlo Petrak a single question.

Session 6The Albatross Takes Flight

Then somebody did, and he immediately wished they had not.

The man who had choked him unconscious on Thides III came and sat down with him in hyperspace, took the gag out, gave him water and a ration pack, and cut the chain between his handcuffs with a vibro-axe in one stroke, leaving the bracelets on his wrists. Then he asked questions. Petrak answered them. He was a subcontractor. He wired things. He had been hired to prepare the ship for destruction, on an order that came down from a man called Doug. The alien device in the cockpit was nothing to do with him, that was Gary Johnson, the systems man, the one they called when the ship needed the clever work.

None of this was enough. Six stood up mid-answer, walked to the nearest airlock, opened the inner door, came back, and took hold of Petrak by the collar. What saved him was Ronin Sanchez, who got a grip on him and won the pull. Six explained, in the flat voice of a man reading out a maintenance report, that Petrak was not useful and was therefore nothing but a consumption of resources, and that the airlock was the logical solution to that. Petrak offered everything he had. Five credits. He could fix security systems. Gary Johnson, again, louder. Ronin talked Six down and took custody of him.

Six closed the airlock, came back, and smiled at him. It was the first smile Petrak had ever received from a man who had clearly read about smiling and never once attempted it. Then Six welcomed him to the crew.

“Welcome to the crew, Marlo. I will not space you. Until the end of your probation.”

Nobody else in the compartment appeared to find anything wrong with that sentence. Rock Lavey carried on sorting a medical kit. Somewhere forward, the ship’s own alien navigation device continued quietly deciding where they were all going. Petrak, who had been employed nine days earlier to wire a cargo compartment and go home, understood that he had just been given terms.

He has been earning it since. He cleaned the ship’s only toilet. He was handed a scrounged spacesuit and a loading torch and sent out onto the hull in hyperspace to weld patches over the blast damage, and he nearly came off the ship three times doing it. Somewhere in the four days between the station and Corwin, Marlo Petrak stopped being cargo and became the newest and least willing member of the crew of The Albatross, on probation, with the cuffs still on his wrists.

What he has had these days to establish, between the toilet and the hull, is that none of these people think anything is wrong.

Rock Lavey spent a day building a hospital out of packing crates and moving blankets, bolting them to the deck so they would not fly about during hard manoeuvres, and was visibly pleased with it. Ronin Sanchez went through a glove box, found a pair of fuzzy dice, and hung them in the cockpit of a stolen ship with no transponder, no registered name, an engine that tears its own holes in space, and a prisoner in the hold. At some point the four of them held a serious discussion about what to call the vessel and settled on the Albatross, and somebody observed that this was either poetic or deeply ominous, and then nobody followed that up. They just started using it.

Six found the ship’s media library and sat through the entire promotional welcome video without moving, from the first frame to the last, the way other men read a briefing. Later he put on a suit and went out onto the hull. In hyperspace. For something to do. Petrak had been sent out there himself with a scrounged suit and a loading torch to weld patches over the blast damage, and had come close to leaving the ship entirely on three separate occasions, and Six walked the exterior of a moving vessel in the between-space with the unbothered competence of a man checking his tyres, cataloguing the empty weapon mounts and describing them over the radio.

Then the ship took itself. Petrak wires things for a living, which meant he was the only person aboard watching the console rather than the window, and what he watched was two competent pilots trying to take back control of their own vehicle and being overruled, again, and again, and again, by a twenty-sided lump of somebody else’s technology. The Albatross went down into a crack in a crater wall with the rock close enough on both sides to touch, landed itself on a pad nobody knew was there, and let the ground swallow it. At no point did anyone aboard suggest that this was unusual.

He stayed with the ship for what followed, which meant he did not see it and only heard it. Shouting. The particular flat crack of the beam weapons he had spent his career installing around other people’s property. Something heavy falling over. A silence, then more shouting, closer. And then the sound that he will keep, which was somebody cutting the roof off the hangar from the outside, one hinge at a time, while the ship sat under it. The bay blew out into vacuum when the last cut went through. A minute later Six came back in through the airlock and told Ronin they could leave, in the tone of a man who has unjammed a door.

Somewhere out past the crater, running for a system he had never heard of, the crew picked up a piece of routine business news and read it aloud. Kinetic Logistics had been dissolved. Absorbed back into its parent company, whoever that is. The firm that hired Marlo Petrak, sent him to a compound on Thides III to wire alien blocks into a ship that was scheduled to be destroyed, and then left him there to be taken, does not exist any more.

He was kidnapped for being a Kinetic Logistics employee. He is not one. He is not anything. Nobody is coming to trade for him, nobody is looking for him, and the only person who has ever physically protected Marlo Petrak did it by winning a wrestling match against a colleague. He is on probation with four people for whom this has been a fairly ordinary week, and the cuffs are still on his wrists, because the only man alive who could take them off is dead.

Session 7The Goodwin Contract

Then the ship reached somewhere with air and streets, and Marlo Petrak did something nobody had let him do since Thides III: he chose. The crew went into Aethel Starport and he stayed aboard, because a man in a prison jumpsuit and Marshal bracelets does not walk through a scanner lobby, and then he sat down at the terminal and made himself useful on purpose. He re-keyed the ship’s security to the crew’s biometrics, caught Six trying to code the locks to himself alone, and combed the planetary directories until he found the Monroe everyone was looking for. His kidnappers took his findings and walked off to use them. That part felt familiar.

What happened next did not. A junk dealer with a baton on her hip came back to the ship, took a device to his wrists, and on the second attempt the Federal Marshal handcuffs he had worn through every escalation since the compound clicked open. Nobody alive was supposed to be able to do that. He has decided not to think too hard about what that means about her. And then, cuffs off, in a starport with six Marshals and a directory full of transports going anywhere, with every reason and every means to vanish, Marlo Petrak stood in front of the people who had choked him, bagged him, stolen him twice, and nearly spaced him, and asked to stay. He said it plainly: his former employers will see him as a loose end, and standing behind Six is statistically the safest place to be in any situation that turns violent. The crew accepted this without ceremony. He went out for civilian clothes with the man who once opened an airlock at him, and watched him eat a birthday cake in a paper hat.

Session 9Snakes on a Catwalk

The Albatross acquired a legal federal transponder registered to Shackleton Magellan, and for the first time it exists on paper as a ship with a name. Marlo Petrak exists on paper aboard it nowhere. When the crew argued over the next job, Six brought him into the conversation and called him a provisional crew member, which is the word he was handed at the airlock, now surviving a hull weld, a toilet, a starport, and a decision to stay that he made entirely on his own. He has been on probation since the day he was chosen for it.

Two jobs sat on the board of Roselyn Monroe’s network. One paid a thousand credits to Peric IV D, a moon where the weather swings between monsoon and blizzard and the opportunities are small. The other paid five thousand to Betelgeuse II, an ocean world of underwater settlements, and came with two armed guards riding aboard with the cargo. Marlo Petrak has been the cargo. He recommended the safer run. The crew agreed, and Bamboo Union workers loaded the hold with crates stamped with Firetemic logos.

Session 10Six Shooters and Four Arms

The safer run took six days through the gate, and Petrak spent them keeping out of the way of a cargo bay that had become a boxing ring. Six wanted to know what four arms did in a fight, so he explained to Ronin Sanchez the conditions under which he would let him up, and then the two of them hit each other between the pallets for most of a week while Rock Lavey patched the results and remarked that the ship needed a proper medbay. Petrak, who had once been the subject of a wrestling match between those two men, found somewhere else to be.

At Acheron’s Rest there were twenty pallets to shift and nobody told him to help, so he took the pallet jack and helped, because a man on probation does not stand and watch the person who set the terms carry four-hundred-pound crates by hand. It came out the next morning that he had never been paid for any of it. Not the toilet, not the hull, not the locks, not the directories. Six discovered this over breakfast, in the tone of a man finding a fault in a maintenance schedule, and had Shackleton Magellan hand over thirty credits on the spot. Then he announced that the breakfast was a fun mission, a category he had learned about the day before, and bought Petrak whiskey at an hour when the eggs on the next table were still green. Shortly afterwards the four of them drove south in a borrowed truck on a business mission and left him the ship.

Session 11The Cost of a Clone’s Life

He had it to himself for the better part of two days, a stolen starship with an alien engine parked crooked across a frontier landing pad, behind locks he had keyed himself, while the weather outside turned to snow. Nobody shot at him. Nobody choked him. It was the quietest stretch of his employment. Then the truck came back with blaster scorches down its side that had not been there when it left, and four people who had plainly had a normal couple of days climbed out of it. Six relieved him of the watch like a sentry changing the guard and put his share of the pay in his hand. Ronin turned up with barbecue and fresh fruit.

The safer run was over, and what the crew did with what was left of the day was take a second job from Aliya Pontecorvo in the back room of a parts shop. Petrak learned the details the way he learns everything, by being aboard while they happened. The ship flew low across somebody’s private land to a landing pad hidden under camouflage, where a line of men with one face between them loaded the hold, and two of them sat down on the crates and stayed there, staring at nothing, all the way to the next stop. The next stop was a station in the shadow of a moon, found by coordinates that a drone sent over after looking the hull up and down from end to end, and run by a man sealed inside a medical suit. The two passengers got off. Different crates came on. The paperwork says mining equipment.

Petrak had recommended this moon because it was the option without armed guards in the hold.

Then, because the gates are watched and the cargo is the kind that people take, they decided to leave the system without one. No gate, no lane, no chart of the far end. They flew out to where there was nothing, pointed the ship at more nothing, and let the engine tear its hole. Four days in the colours, during which the doctor and the surveyor took the lock off a dead man’s rifle and Six offered to teach the doctor how to shoot. They came out in the Katha System on schedule and in one piece, and nobody aboard remarked on it.

Session 12That Would Be a Mistake

The Katha System turned out to have a line of ships sitting at the gate they had declined to use, waiting for somebody, and before anyone could decide whether that was flattering the Republic closed the entire system for forty-eight hours without saying why. The hold behind Petrak was full of crates whose paperwork said mining equipment and whose contents the crew had started calling space meth. The plan they arrived at, with a military lockdown overhead and a prison sentence stacked in the cargo bay, was to go and look at some jellyfish. The surveyor told the starport on Katha V they were tourists, with the transponder broadcasting the ship’s name the whole way down.

Six invited him along, and a man on probation says yes. They had got as far as the security gate at Furosuto Supaia Spaceport when Six explained to the guard that an axe which cuts through starship hull is a tool, was told that tools cost five credits, and walked on without paying. Petrak stood very still while the alarms went and the turrets came down out of the ceiling and found the two of them, and he was still standing there when Six turned round, told a man with a finger on the trigger that shooting would be a mistake, and then walked back and paid the five credits. Nothing had been gained. Six seemed satisfied anyway, and led the way to the tram.

After that it was a day out, which was worse, because Petrak was paying for most of it. He asked the woman at Big Willie’s Jellyfish Adventure where a person could eat, and she sent them to her cousin’s counter on Dock 37, where Six ate a bowl of boiled tentacles like a condemned man and announced to a queue of dock workers that he was enjoying this food. At the safety drills Six shouted at the slower tourists until Bertha begged him to stop, and on the boat he threw a couple’s luggage out of the bunk and got two teenagers in exchange. By five in the morning he was shovelling ground jellyfish into the sea with the deckhands, who mentioned in passing that the big ones eat tourists. Petrak watched Six look at the tourists for some time after that. In the group photograph Six is at the front with both thumbs up and a souvenir t-shirt splitting across his combat armor, and Petrak is in it too, smiling the way the situation required.

Six spent his last credit on gifts. At the face scan on the way back he stopped, held Petrak in place with one hand, watched a woman in a hood until she had gone through, then gave Petrak the bag, told him to take it to the ship, and stopped being visible. Petrak carried a plush jellyfish, a tea towel and a bottle with tentacles in it across a federal starport by himself and asked no questions. Six told the crew about it later in the tone of a man reporting the weather: a woman who changed her face, a man with skulls on his armor, a pair of handcuffs, a jeep. He had decided it was none of his business. The doctor and the surveyor, it emerged, had spent the same night reporting the same woman to station security under the surveyor’s own name.

The delivery at Chae-gul 147 took about as long as it takes to say. A supply officer told them to get everything onto the conveyor before security arrived, so Petrak and Six ran crates, and Petrak took over from the doctor, who was slow. Security arrived as the last one went down the belt and asked why nobody had waited. Six told her. He told her whose idea it was, by name, and what the idea had been, and the supply officer was led away, and they were ordered to stay where they were. Nobody had been paid. Six put his helmet on, went outside, and cut the ship off the station with the tool.

They left the way they had come in, through a hole of their own making with company interceptors six hours behind, and came out at the edge of the Dinon System by a margin the surveyor described as a single point. The news on the far side listed five hundred credits against the ship for a docking bay and nothing else, and no fee. Rock Lavey spent the four days being friendly to him, which Petrak accepted from a man who keeps knockout syringes loaded for visitors. Six pinned pictures of tropical beaches over his bunk and took the heads off practice dummies in the hold. The ship is flying in to Dinon I now, low on food, with a bumper sticker on the hull and a fuzzy jellyfish hanging where the dice were. Petrak has been on better crews. He has also been cargo, and on balance he would still take the jellyfish.

Appearances

• Session 3 (Session 03 - Buckle Up Motherfuckers) — Ambushed and choked unconscious by Six in the transport’s rear compartment during the compound raid, bound with his own wire, and carried off Thides III as the crew’s first live prisoner.

• Session 4 (Session 04 - The Case of the Missing Courtesan) — Delivered to MacMillian Station IV and taken into federal custody. He spent the session in the small brig behind Julija Borja’s desk at the Marshal’s Office, visible to the crew throughout their interrogation. Still un-interrogated on screen, and still the only living person the crew have taken from the Kinetic Logistics Compound.

• Session 5 (Session 05 - Hostile Takeover) — Held in the Marshal’s Office cell through the Pratrock takeover of the station — Pratrock Dynamics acquiring MacMillian while his own employer Kinetic Logistics supplied the boarding force. During the coup Six released him from the holding cell and he was taken aboard the crew’s ship. He ends the session tied to a bunk in the crew quarters, awake, staring at Six with profound unease, the Marshal’s evidence duffel beside him. Still never questioned.

• Session 6 (Session 06 - The Albatross Takes Flight) — Finally interrogated, nearly spaced, and taken onto the crew. Six questioned him in hyperspace, cut his handcuff chain, and on judging him unproductive dragged him toward an open airlock. Ronin Sanchez physically intervened and won the struggle. Petrak gave up Doug (his supervisor, who ordered the ship destroyed) and Gary Johnson (the ex-Pratrock Dynamics researcher who installed the Alien Navigation Device). Accepted as a probationary crew member, set to cleaning the toilet and then to welding hull patches during the transit. See The Airlock Interrogation.

• Session 7 (Session 07 - The Goodwin Contract) — Freed, and stayed anyway. Re-keyed the ship’s security to crew biometrics (catching Six’s attempt to code it to himself alone), found Roselyn Monroe in the planetary directories — the lead that delivered the evidence — and had his Marshal handcuffs removed by her device, second attempt, one bracelet having been cut in half. Then announced he wanted to stay with the crew, reasoning that his former employers will treat him as a loose end and that standing behind Six is statistically the safest place in any violent situation. Went into the starport with Six and Ronin Sanchez for civilian clothes and was present for the birthday cake. Whether the clothes were actually acquired is unstated in the export.

• Session 9 (Session 09 - Snakes on a Catwalk) — Consulted as provisional crew. Brought into the crew’s closing debate over the next job. He described Peric IV D as a moon of extreme weather swings and low-stakes opportunities, and Betelgeuse II as a high-end ocean world with underwater settlements, and he recommended the safer Peric IV D run. The crew took it.

• Session 10 (Session 10 - Six Shooters and Four Arms) — Kept a low profile through the transit. Worked the pallet jack at Acheron’s Rest without being asked. Paid 30 credits by Shackleton Magellan after Six found out he had gone unpaid, and taken to breakfast and whiskey by Six. Left aboard The Albatross as ship-sitter when the crew drove south.

• Session 11 - The Cost of a Clone’s Life — Minded The Albatross at Acheron’s Rest while the crew made the Roberts delivery. Six relieved him of the watch and gave him his share of the credits.

• Session 12 - That Would Be a Mistake — Went with Six to see the jellyfish on Katha V as the crew’s probationary hand: stood frozen through the standoff at the security gate, found them Captain Krusty’s by asking Bertha, paid for most of the day, and carried the souvenirs back to the ship. Moved crates with Six at Chae-gul 147 and took over from Rock Lavey. Rock spent the jump to the Dinon System befriending him.