Photography by Tomas Heligr-Pyke · Bokeh
A desperate man from Wet Eighteen joins a Habidash crew for Mara, Eli and June and is trapped by a killing used to test his loyalty.
From the 4671 story library. Read the story below, or explore its original reader and connected world.
Howard and the Habidash
At thirty-five, Howard joined the Habidash because Mara, their child Eli and his mother June depended on money his irregular waste-pump repair shifts could no longer provide.
They lived in Habitation Tier 18, called Wet Eighteen by the people who had to live there. Condensation and water-reclamation pipes leaked through ceilings and service walls faster than the maintenance crews could patch them. Mara, thirty-three, tested reclaimed water under a low-status laboratory classification. Eli was eight. June was sixty-one and had spent most of her working life inspecting and patching condensation lines. When reduced shift eligibility cut June’s income, the household leaned harder on Howard. No illness had done this to them. New Atriad’s classifications had simply decided how much work each of them was still allowed.
Their two-room unit was cramped but cared for. It sat against a service wall with access panels that never fitted properly, catch basins beneath the worst leaks and fold-down beds that returned a little floor space each morning. Their work clothes dried beside the warmest pipe because it was the only reliable heat in the room.
Housing and work classifications passed from one generation to the next, binding families to water processing, pipe repair, waste systems and other low-status work across the neighbouring tiers. Severe poverty remained part of ordinary life despite the wealth and power of the lunar capital.
Howard had watched every honest option narrow until rumours of the pirates began to sound less like warnings and more like work. Habidash crews crossed the Sol system taking cargo, ships and lives. They were dangerous, but danger appeared negotiable when hunger was not.
He told himself he would endure them for his family.
That lie carried him aboard.
At first, Howard tried to look only at the part that concerned him. A task was given. He completed it. A superior spoke. He obeyed. The ship moved through the dark between settlements, and Howard counted the distance as though it separated him from responsibility.
It did not.
The Habidash did not simply steal what they needed. They took what they wanted because no one nearby could stop them. Cargo crews were threatened after surrendering. Settlements were damaged after payment had already been made. Violence continued long after it had served any practical purpose.
Howard saw enough to understand that cruelty was not a failure of discipline. It was part of how the pirates kept discipline.
By then, leaving was no longer a decision he could make alone. He knew their faces, their habits and the routes they used. They knew where he had come from and why he needed them. Every day aboard made him more useful to the Habidash and less able to return to the person his family believed him to be.
Then they captured the cargo pilot.
The pilot was innocent. Howard knew that before anyone ordered him forward. There had been no battle worth avenging and no hidden threat to uncover. The prisoner was simply available, and the Habidash had decided Howard needed to be blooded. The killing would test his obedience and make his guilt useful to them.
He was made to take part in killing the pilot while the crew watched.
Howard would remember the pilot afterward in fragments. He would remember the enclosed air, the people watching and the certainty that refusing would not save the prisoner. He would remember that he obeyed.
Whatever the Habidash called the act, it left Howard unable to pretend he was merely working among violent people. Their crime now included him.
He carried it through every passage of the ship. He tried to imagine telling his family and could never reach the end of the confession. He could not explain that he had joined for them without making them part of his excuse. He could not ask for forgiveness while the pilot remained dead. He could not return home and place what he had become at their door.
The pirates had trapped him more completely than any locked compartment could have done. Even escape would not restore the life he had entered with.
Howard began watching his superior.
The plan that formed was not complicated. There was no route out of the Habidash that he could see, so he chose the person directly above him and decided to kill them. Perhaps it was revenge. Perhaps it was punishment. Perhaps Howard needed one final act that belonged to him rather than to the people who had blooded him.
He knew it would not undo the cargo pilot’s death. He did not believe it would make him innocent. It was only the last direction left that did not feel like obedience.
When Howard acted, the clean moment he had imagined disappeared at once.
Gunfire filled the ship. The narrow space gave every shot a hard mechanical violence. Howard fired, moved and lost track of who had seen him first. The Habidash answered from more than one direction. His attempt became noise, impact and the sudden knowledge that he had never controlled what would happen next.
A round struck him in the head.
His body fell before his thoughts did.
In the last moments available to him, Howard did not think about the pirate he had tried to kill. He thought about Mara, Eli and June in Wet Eighteen and everything he had failed to tell them. He imagined the Habidash reaching them. He imagined slavery, exploitation and the worst markets hidden across the system. Fear turned every possibility into certainty, and he died believing that his attempt to provide for them might instead have exposed them to ruin.
He never learned whether that fear was true.
He never returned to confess what he had done, and he never found a way to repair it. The last thing the Habidash took from Howard was the chance to know what became of the people for whom he had joined them.