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Refashion him into a machine, a weapon to be used for one’s gain. Then burn the memories out. Use the lie of getting them back as a lure to make that human serve you. But stranger things had been done during the initial occupation of Earth.
    Now you’ll be having those back. You want to know who you were.
    You want more than just the one they left you to whet your appetite.
    Your first encounter with the Xaymaca Pride ’s crew is an intense-looking engineer. Small scabs on her shaved head show she’s sloppy with a blade, and there’s irritation around the eye sockets, where a sad-looking metal eye has been welded into the skin somewhere in a cheap bodyshop.
    “You’re the mercenary,” she says. “Pepper.”
    You’re both hanging in the air inside the lock. The pressure differential slightly pushes at your ears. You crack your jaw, left, right, and the pressure ceases. The movement causes your dreadlocks to shift around you, tapping the side of your face.
    “I’m not on a job,” you tell her. “I don’t work for anyone anymore.”
    But you used to. And there’s a reputation. It’s spread in front of you like a bow wave. Dopplering around, varying in intensity here and there.
    Five years working with miners, stripping ore from asteroids enveloped in plastic bags and putting in sweat-work, and all anyone knows about is the old wetwork. Stuff that should have been left to the shadows. Secrets never meant for civilians.
    But that shit didn’t fly out in the tight tin cans floating around the outer solar system. Everyone had their noses in everyone else’s business.
    “The captain wants to see you before detach.”
    Probably having second thoughts, you think. Been hard to find a way to get out of the system, because the new rulers of the worlds here want you dead for past actions. You can skulk around the fringes, or even go back to Earth and hide in the packed masses and cities.
    But to go interstellar: you eventually get noticed when you’re one of the trickle of humanity leaving to the other forty-eight habitable worlds. Particularly if you’re one of the few that’s not a servant of the various alien species that are now the overlords of humanity.
    The bridge crew all twist in place to get a good look at you when you float into the orb-shaped cockpit at the deep heart of the cylindrical starship. They’re all lined up on one plane of the cockpit, the orb able to gimbal with the ship’s orientation to orient them to the pressures of high acceleration.
    Not common on an average container ship. Usually those were little more than a set of girders cargo could get slotted into with a living area on one end and engines on the other.
    The captain hangs in the air, eyes drowned in shipboard internal information, but now he stirs and looks at you. His skin is brown, like yours. Like many of the crew’s. From what you’ve heard, they all hail from the Caribbean. DeBrun has been smuggling people out of the solar system to points beyond for a whole year now.
    “I’m John deBrun,” he says. “You’re Pepper.”
    You regard him neutrally.
    DeBrun starts the conversation jovially. “In order to leave the solar system, I need anti-matter, Pepper. And no one makes it but the Satraps and they only sell to those they like. They own interstellar commerce, and most of the planets in the solar system. And according to the bastard aliens, you do not have interstellar travel privileges. I’ve let you aboard, to ask you a question, face to face.”
    You raise an eyebrow. It’s a staged meeting. DeBrun is putting on a show for the bridge crew. “Yes?”
    “Why should I smuggle you from here to Nova Terra’s Orbital?”
    A moment passes as you seem to consider that, letting deBrun’s little moment stretch out. “It’ll piss off the Satraps, and I’ll wait long enough so that it’s not obvious you’re the ship that slipped me in.”
    DeBrun dramatically considers that, rubbing his chin. “How will you do