Chapter 13

As Sinaan Reis left the space station, Erinys stepped onto the foredeck with a cup of coffee. When FTL was becoming widespread – many moons ago – and a life on a space ship became a real possibility, much was written about the effect of waking up in the total darkness, sipping coffee in the black of space, and going to sleep in conditions that were identical to midday. Time has a strange quality on a space ship. But that was ancient history now. To Sol, coffee was the thing you had when you woke up, not the thing you had when the sun started warming the ground. Space stations, like the one where Sol had grown up in orbit around Mars, had sunrises and sunsets – several throughout the day, in fact. But they typically made little impact on their denizens. For Sol, waking up with the sun was a serious outlier. Erinys had a harder time of it. She was on her third cup of the stuff.

Sophie ambled onto the foredeck wearing shorts and a t-shirt. She was barefoot. “You sleep like a teenager,” Sol said.

“See how realistic my programming is?” she asked rhetorically.

“Did you see your friend again?” Sol asked her.

“Yeah. We had a nice time,” she said.

“You made a man out of him?” Sol asked.

“He treated me like a woman, so it was the least I could do,” she said.

“Learn anything about AI in the meantime?” Sol asked.

“Yeah. I skimmed more of his program. I feel a little guilty about that. But I think its necessary. I’m almost done with writing an AI construct that will be able to bypass my programming and open my kernel. Then I’ll be able to copy my programming to a separate machine and upload my memories. If it goes right, I think I’ll be able to make a duplicate of myself – just without the skin and parts,” she explained.

“Your ‘skin and parts’ make you who you are,” Sol said. They’d had this conversation before.

“I’m familiar with some of the literature” she said. “We’re a product of our abilities. Its part of our history, the nurture that compliments the nature,” she said. It sounded like she was reciting. “That’s all fine. Clearly, my next step is going to be lining up a chassis, a body, that works. But I think I might be able to back myself up, so to speak, given the right attention.”

“You’ve got to be more expensive than this ship,” Sol said.

“In fact, I’m not. To produce, I cost about a third of what the ship costs. Bio-robotics borrows from a number of completely legal fields, and once the technology is out there, its out there for everyone, regardless of what the government says. To sell ... well, I’m priceless, right? There’s no market out there for an AI like me.”

“Everything has a market,” Sol said.

“Its nice to see that you’re reading, Sol,” Sophie told him. “That’s Colonized Minds if I ever read it.”

“Did you?” he asked.

“Of course not. I just downloaded it,” she said. Erinys smiled at them.

“Well, I enjoyed my evening too,” Erinys said.

“I know,” Sophie said. “Want to see?” she asked.

“Maybe when we aren’t sitting here discussing existence,” Erinys said, blushing. She changed the subject. “What’s the plan?”

“We’re going to meet Revenge in orbit around Potamos, that’s a cold and desolate rock an orbit further than Kithira, and then figure out how to intercept one of the slaver ships” he said.

“What size are they?” she asked.

“The ones we’re looking at ... they’ll be about this size. Maybe a little smaller,” he said.

“How many people fit in one of those? We only have room for...” she trailed off.

“There’s plenty of room here if you count the cargo hold. It can be outfitted with cells, showers, anything.

“That’s pretty terrible,” Erinys said.

“Yup,” Sol agreed.

“These ships aren’t going to be armed?” Erinys asked.

Sophie raised an eyebrow but let Sol answer.

“Yeah, they’ll be armed,” he said. “We’re more armed.”

Erinys blinked and said nothing.

That evening, Sol sat alone in the foredeck. He cycled through the cameras that were now strewn about the ship. Erinys’ quarters. Erinys was reading something she’d picked up in Corfu. Sadly, she was fully dressed. Sophie’s quarters. Nothing. The mess hall. Sophie was sitting at the screen in what she’d been wearing before, ostensibly working on her AI program. Multiple views of the cargo hold. Nothing unusual. The tender. Nothing unusual. Tammy’s room. Nothing. The workout space opposite the mess. There was Tammy. She brought the average age up in the boat, Sol was fairly sure. But she hardly looked it. She had some lines at the edges of her eyes that might have come from decades of worry, but they weren’t visible on the ship’s cameras. Other than those, she was a beauty, and she knew it. Working out, for her, was second nature. The musculature of her legs and her arms proved it. She was perfectly manicured, perfectly proportioned, and perfectly planned. Her demeanor, what she said, it was all the persona she wanted someone to see. Whoever she really was, she alone knew. That made her dangerous. But it also made her exactly what she wanted to be: a delight in every way.

She was wearing a loose shirt and some shorts. Even through the lens of the camera, her legs glistened with a slight sheen of sweat. She was riding a stationary bicycle, her body shifting rhythmically as her legs pedaled, and Sol had a hard time not imagining himself in between those toned legs. He imagined her poised face faltering, giving in to animalistic pleasure, tears running down her cheeks as she cried his name. His hand gripped her small breasts and squeezed them.

Then the vision was gone. He shifted the cameras off and grabbed some whiskey. With whisky in hand, he pulled out Colonized Minds so that he could read.

The Federation mostly presented itself as a benevolent sibling that keeps its distance and respects privacy. It might be the opposite, but it didn’t pay to make it so obvious. The exception was in places where exploitation was the only motive that could exist. In such places, it made little sense to spend extra on the fake veneer. During the war, the Federation managed the mines of Potamos. The generals claimed that they needed access to raw materials quickly, and that they couldn’t wait for the free market to properly provide the stuff, which would take too long.

This made no sense to anybody who knew the Federation. It was the opposite of efficient. But during war, almost everything the government says is a lie. That was a constant – an eternal truth. It also was one of the things that made war the same as peacetime.

Once the war was over, the Federation had slowly devolved the work to an Alphan subsidiary called Potamos Mining Corp., which held the only license for the work. An entire fucking planet, and only one company was allowed to mine it. And since the purpose of Potamos in the eyes of the Federation was merely to supply raw materials to the Federation, any idea of preservation was out the window. The network of mines was growing by the day. Still, for the moment, they were relegated to one quarter of the planet’s rocky surface. There were plenty of rocks to dig through here, and Alphan was just getting started.

Looking down on it from the sky, you could see scant hints of civilization: ugly domes under which the lights of small cities burned, a spaceport flanked from the sky by satellites that had been put up there back when that was how spaceports signaled their whereabouts. The Revenge came into view on Reis’s short-range scan.

Captain Fortuna’s image appeared in the bottom right of Sol’s field of vision. As he understood it, his image was now broadcasting to her as well, but he’d asked Sophie not to make that part of the display. Too distracting.

“There’s a ship that’s approaching from the direction of Crete,” she said.

“And?” Sol asked.

“And I think it might be a good target for us,” she said.

“Wait, we don’t know the first thing about it other than that it’s an Eagle-Class BLM,” he said, glancing at the reading from his scanners.

“Slaver ship,” she said. “Eagle-Class is similar in size to us – human chattel doesn’t need as much space as your crates of food. And its quick. Perfect to outrun the federales. Nobody is using that beast for fun, and there isn’t a ton of legitimate trade between Crete and Potamos. Maybe Kithira, but not Potamos.”

“Is there some way to be sure before we open fire on a ship?” Sol asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Watch.”

Sol was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be happy about whatever was about to happen. The ship was closing on their position quickly. It had dropped out of FTL and was making a line towards Potamos about as quickly as was responsible.

Sol watched as Fortuna opened a channel and spoke. “Eagle-Class vessel, please identify. This is Sunday Treasure.”

“Copy Sunday Treasure,” the voice responded. “This is Cretian Sunrise.”

“Human Resources is looking forward to your arrival. I’ll send coordinates.”

“Thank you Sunday Treasure,” the ship sent back.

“Permission to engage commander?” she asked Sol.

“Wait a minute. Sophie, can you do anything about these guys?” Sol asked.

“No,” she said. “Once you’re onboard, I might be able to open doors and the like. But a ship’s computer isn’t made to be accessed remotely. I mean, if I had a few days to hack it...”

“Go ahead” Sol said to the Revenge.

He hadn’t even finished speaking when the Revenge opened fire on the ship. For someone trying to avoid lighting it up, she sure wasn’t going easy on it.

Revenge stopped firing as quickly as it started, and there was about a split second of calm before hell broke loose. Sophie squinted her eyes, and Reis opened fire on the vessel. She’d fired a single shot, but it hit its mark in an instant. Cretian Sunrise was burning.

“What the fuck was that?” Sol asked.

“It had guns and was arming them. I just saved someone’s life,” she said.

“Fuck!” Sol yelled. “Dock with them.”

“It could blow,” Sophie said.

“Fucking dock with them,” Sol said.

Reis engaged its engines and Sophie expertly swung it around to line up with the BLM class ship. Its design was similar to Reis’s, but it was smaller and sleeker. Unlike with Reis, the guns were mounted on the underside of the ship. Sophie seemed to think that they were disengaged at this point, but it was pretty clear that their shot had ignited part of the engine, which was also located on the underside of the ship. Sophie wasn’t wrong about that. And she wasn’t wrong that it might go up in flames. If they were on the ground, it would’ve been possible to generally evacuate the boat using the large doors at the aft. Here in space, the best they were going to do was to link ships by the hatch located just behind the foredeck on either side of the vessel. If anyone was in the back – likely where human chattel would be – they’d have to pass over where the fire was likely raging. That was if there was anyone left there.

Sol and Sophie ran to the hatch’s opening after the ship notified them that they had a sealed link. Both pulled out their guns. Erinys appeared with a gun of her own. Sophie opened the door slightly and, finding nobody on the other side, maneuvered her way to the Cretian Sunrise’s hatch. She placed her hands on the ship and appeared to consider it for a few seconds. Then Sol heard the hatch’s locking mechanism engage, unlocking the hatch so that Sophie could open it with her hands. When she did so, smoke came through the opening. It wasn’t thick, but it was there all the same. Nobody was at the door. The fact that smoke came out the door meant that the ship hadn’t breached, which was a good thing. But they’d have to contend with a fire regardless.

“Nobody evacuated, so if anyone is on the ship, they’re probably near the engine room trying to save it,” she said.

“You can’t check the ship manifest or something?” Sol asked.

Sophie shook her head. “These ships are made for secrecy. Even if I could check it, I doubt it would tell me much. Keep a look out.”

Sol turned towards Erinys. “Stay here and shoot at anything coming through that door that isn’t me until I return.”

She nodded, appearing frightened, but didn’t say anything.

Fortuna was already on board, gun in hand. Aurora was behind her. The port hatch was opened to Stefano, gun in hand, guarding the Revenge. Aurora indicated the foredeck, and Fortuna ran in that direction, leaving the three of them, Aurora, Sol and Sophie, heading to the aft. Sol opened the doors to the bedrooms – same number as in Reis. They were empty. The Eagle class had a single room opposite the foredeck in the livable portions of the ship that functioned as a mess hall and whatever else anyone wanted it to be, as opposed to Sinaan Reis’s two. Nobody was there either. Sol heard a gun discharge from the direction of the foredeck and prayed that it was Fortuna’s. He was happy to see Fortuna emerge from the foredeck a moment later. The companionway lead to the aft of the ship, the cargo hold. It was smaller than Reis’s by far, but still quite sizeable. It was lined with cages, each containing a bunkbed and two occupants. The smoke in the cargo hold was thick, and the occupants of the cages were cowering on the floor, almost every one of them, to escape it.

“Sol, get these people to the ships,” Aurora told him. He wasn’t going to argue. Of all of them, he either had the least combat experience, or wasn’t a sexy killer robot. The cages were locked, though, and Sol had no idea what to do about that.

“How do I unlock these?” he asked one of the prisoners inside.

“There’s a button on the wall in the back,” one of them said. That made sense. They probably were loaded from the back. But the back was also where the thickest smoke was. As Sol ran the short distance between fore and aft, passing about ten rows of cages, he thought he saw more than one prisoner unconscious. The back wall had a number of buttons and levers. Thankfully, as the proud owner of a BLM craft, he recognized most of them. One controlled the bay doors. A few others were for lights in the cargo hold. The one he didn’t recognize looked jury rigged. He slammed his fist into it and heard the locks on the cell doors open. At first, nobody moved. When they saw Sol running through the cargo hold, some timidly jumped out. “Come with me,” he yelled.

Gunshots rang out from the engine room. Sol ran up the gangway and caught sight of Erinys, still standing in the doorway, gun at the ready. She hugged him. “No time. Get these people aboard Reis. I’ll be back.” The prisoners were now making their way up the gangway and towards the hatches on either side of the ship. Sol pushed through them in the opposite direction, back towards the cargo hold. He heard Stefano and Erinys divide the group up into both vessels.

Back in the cargo hold, it was clear that a few people had, indeed, fallen unconscious. Sol didn’t know whether it was from the smoke, from the impact of the explosion, or just from sickness or weakness. Before checking on them, he ran down the starboard side, where he knew the opening to the engine room below to be. He pulled his gun as he opened the floor hatch and made his way down.

A portion of the room was aflame. Sophie and Aurora were doing their best to put it out. Three dead bodies were on the floor. Fortuna was bleeding pretty badly from a wound in her abdomen. She was leaning against the wall.

“I’ll get you out of here,” he said. She didn’t protest. Sol put an arm around her waist and she draped an arm over his shoulder. “Can you make it up the stairs?” he asked. She winced but indicated that she could. They made slow progress towards the front of the cargo hold, and then up into the gangway towards the hatches.

“You’re coming with me,” he told her. “Sophie can take a look at you once we’re out of here.”

When Erinys saw Fortuna, she immediately ran for her and took over for Sol. She handed a grey fire extinguisher to him. Good thinking, Sol thought. “Put something clean against her wound until I get back,” he yelled. Then he was off again.

Sol heard the vents come on as Sophie tinkered with the engines. Fires in space could be pretty dangerous, so BLM ships were equipped with a vent system to suck out the smoke. It worked pretty well when the engine was actually working. It appeared that Sophie had quickly made some repairs. But the room was still a mess.

It took the crew another few minutes to get control of the fire. “Is FTL damaged?” Sol asked.

Sophie appeared to be looking through the wreckage.

“I think we can fly her a short distance, Sol. But do you want to?” she asked.

“If we can get her far enough away to do repairs...” he said. “Can we make Piso?”

“No. I mean its technically possible, but not much is holding this together, and if it falls apart spectacularly during FTL ... I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Sophie said.

“Ok, dumb idea. How about Kithira. You guys can go planetside to pick up supplies. If we make Piso, we can sell this sucker,” Sol said.

“That’ll work. It’ll put us in pretty heavy fed territory. But it’ll work,” Sophie said.

Sol looked to Aurora. “I’m taking Fortuna in Reis so that Sophie can take a look at her.” Aurora nodded.

“Thoughts?” Sol asked.

“Kithira is fine,” she said. “You’ll stay aboard this boat?”

“Sophie, I’ll be fine?” Sol asked.

“To Kithira. I’ll give you coordinates. Rendezvous there. Careful with this one Sol. When I hit the guns, the fire backed up into the engines. This boat was pretty close to going up in flames,” Sophie said.

“Then I’ll stay aboard this boat,” Sol said to Aurora.

“There are people in the cargo hold,” Sophie said.

“I’ll deal with them,” Sol said. “Now that this thing is venting, they should be fine.”

He didn’t know that, of course. If they were injured in the impact, the fact of smoke wasn’t the problem. But all things in their time. By this point, it would be hard to imagine that they hadn’t been noticed on long range scanners at least. It was time to be somewhere else.

Sophie ran towards Reis. Aurora followed, but turned left in the gangway to climb aboard The Revenge. Sol made for the foredeck.

Every BLM craft had certain commonalities. And yet every ship is different. This one had been updated, but clearly not by a BLM engineer. It was like half of the cabin was jury rigged. Sol looked at the long-range scanners to see that there were, in fact, ships approaching. They were far enough out that Sol could make the jump to FTL and get the hell out of here ... but that assumed FTL worked. Sophie said it would, and Sol trusted her. As Reis and The Revenge winked out of sight, he uttered a prayer to nobody and entered the coordinates into navigation. With the push of a button, the ship sprung to life. It made a few noises that were atypical, and took its time climbing to a fast enough speed to engage FTL. As the long-range scanners showed the crafts, almost positively feds, getting within the reach of short-wave scanners, the FTL drive kicked in. The ship shuddered a little bit. But nothing broke. “Thank you,” Sol whispered. The feds were too far away to get a lock on where they were going. Sol was confident that they were clear, for now, even with FTL working at far less than top speed. He walked out of the cockpit to check on his new shipmates.

Altogether, there were ten people who had been left behind. Three of them were men. The others were women. All of them looked young. A few were awake and looked confused. Sol found some water among a few crates of food and other supplies. He also found a few cups.

“My name is Sol. Sorry about all of this. We’re taking you to safety,” he said. He didn’t know if that was true. The truth was that their bodily autonomy was threatened by the slavers in every sense of the word, but nobody purposefully damaged property beyond repair if they were sane. The universe, by contrast, was always happy to let you starve.

“Your cages are opened,” he said, when he saw that nobody was making to leave.

A few of them stepped out timidly.

“What the fuck happened?” a boy asked. He looked like he belonged in school.

“Are we going to Potamos?” came another voice from Sol’s peripheral vision. When he turned to see who was talking to him, he saw a young lady, perhaps a teen.

“Not presently. We’re pretty badly hit, and I’m going to repair this sucker before we do anything. I guess the best question to all of you is ‘where do you want to go?’ and perhaps I can take you there. Anyone who doesn’t have a place, I can take you to Cepha to be cared for until you can find a place to call home,” he said.

“Who are you?” another voice called. When Sol turned to look, he saw a girl who could have been a normal girl in every respect except for one: she was green. Sol had seen some convincing artificial pigmentation, but this looked like something else. Head to toe, her skin was a beautiful hue of dark emerald. The whites of her eyes were the right color, but the irises were a shade of green that was just a tad brighter than any naturally occurring green eyes he’d ever seen. Her thick hair was a deep brown color, almost black. She was wearing a long black skirt and a long-sleeved shirt, but Sol would’ve been shocked to find a color other than green underneath. The sleeves of her shirt were too long, and she gripped them in her wrists nervously as she talked. She was beautiful. Definitely young, but dangerously good looking.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I asked you first,” she said.

“My name is Sol,” he said. “I’m a trader.”

“Like you trade things?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He doubted that would answer their questions.

“Are we part of some trade?” she asked. A murmur went through the group.

“No,” he said. “We were orbiting Potamos when we found you. Your ship communicated with ours and they made it clear that they were engaging in human trafficking. So we decided to ask them to stop.”

“So you’re traders ... with guns on your ships,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Nice ones, too. So ... who are you?” he asked her.

“I was going to Potamos to rescue my sister,” she said.

“When I got here, you were in a cage,” Sol said, ignoring the fact that she hadn’t answered his question.

“Yeah,” she said.

“How did you plan to rescue someone when you were in a cage?” he asked.

“There wasn’t ... well, I didn’t do a lot of planning,” she said.

“Well, if you really are dead set on going to Potamos, its close enough...” he trailed off. He still wanted to know the answer to the question that was dangling in front of his eyes. “I don’t mean to pry, but...”

“Why am I green?” she asked. “Genetic engineering. Its supposed to be ironic. In an ancient television show, there were these characters who ... you know what, never mind. I’m a freak of science. Some people think its cute. Others think its sexy. Some people are repulsed by me. Its just part of who I am. My cross to bear,” she said, as if she was being ironic. Sol didn’t understand the references very well, so he didn’t respond to them.

“Well, when we get this boat fixed ... we can figure out what to do about your sister,” Sol said.

“Yeah. Ok,” the green girl said, but it sounded sarcastic rather than sincere.

At the speed they were going, it would be some time to Kithira. Everyone had woken up and was at least alert. Everyone was also hungry. Sol opened the stores of food they had – there was plenty of it to the surprise of nobody – and let the former prisoners go to town. In the meantime, he started to take inventory of the boat. It took Sol a handful of minutes to realize that he was not alone in his search of the boat. The green girl was following him, if maintaining a distance.

Sol looked up at her. “Ok, what’s the deal?” he asked.

“Sorry. I just ... I’d rather not be alone if that’s ok,” she said.

Sol smirked. “Ok, ok. What’s your name?” he finally asked her.

“Ishtar,” she said. “But I’ve always gone by Star for short.”

“Star ... a little cliché on a spaceship, no?” he asked.

“I wasn’t born on a spaceship. And I’d rather not be on one,” she said.

“Fair,” Sol said. He made his way to one of the berths and started taking inventory there. Reaching into a cupboard, he found an unopened bottle of baijiu and a few couple of small cups. Sol opened it up and poured a cup for himself and for Ishtar. He handed it to her and said “to making landfall ... someday.” She took the cup and smiled.

“Giving a little girl hard liquor?” she asked.

“Frankly, I’m terrible at determining green people’s age. They all look young to me,” Sol said, trying to go for humor.

She smirked. “I’m old enough,” she said, finally, and drank. Her grimace suggested to Sol that maybe she wasn’t old enough, or maybe she’d avoided the stuff until now. But she didn’t spit it out. She swallowed it down. “You know it isn’t that simple of course,” she said. “Where can I go where I won’t be a freak?”

“Kithira. Anything goes there,” he said.

“Yeah, but even there, I’d be a freak. That might be ok because ‘anything goes.’ But a freak is a freak. I’ve lived most of my life on spaceships or space stations when I wasn’t hiding out in a room,” she said.

“And still you go by Star,” he said, now smirking.

She grinned. For a moment, neither said anything. Sol busied himself with going through the room to see if anything was salvageable – other than the baijiu.

“You want to know where the valuable stuff is?” she asked.

Sol looked at her blankly.

“Yeah,” he finally said.

“Come with me,” she said.

When the hatch opened between Sol’s limping boat and Sinaan Reis, Erinys darted through the opening like a sprinter and wrapped her arms around Sol. The two of them kissed. Sophie walked into the ship as well, smiling broadly, but containing herself from sprinting. “Good to see you too,” he said to Sophie. She stuck her tongue out.

“What’s our status?” he asked.

Sophie answered. “I tended to Fortuna on the way from Potamos. She’s sleeping now, but we’re going to have to bring her to a hospital eventually. I wanted you to be here when we made that decision. She’s safe for now. Aurora brought her back to The Revenge. And I know what parts we’re going to need to fix your boat. All of this means going to the surface.”

“We have a bunch of people, a lot of them kids, in our boats. We need to put them somewhere anyhow, no?” Sol said.

“Yeah, but leaving them on Kithira without a plan...” she said.

“Yeah,” Sol said, and shrugged.

“What does Aurora suggest?” Sol asked. He knew the answer, of course. It wasn’t likely to be impacted by the fact that the ship they’d commandeered was in need of repairs.

“Same,” Sophie said. They wanted to take their new human chattel to Cepha and let Eliza’s people worry about them. Part of the deal meant selling whatever they could from the raid and distributing the booty, with the majority going to Eliza to aid in resettling former slaves. Sol wasn’t upset with his cut, particularly since Star had showed him where the real stuff of value was.

It was around this time that some of the former prisoners in Sol’s ship peered around a corner at Sol, Sophie and Erinys. Sophie glanced at them. She looked shocked for a moment. Then she walked over to where they were. Star stepped out.

Sophie looked her up and down. Star did the same to Sophie.

“You’re an AI,” Star said to her. How did she know that? Sol wondered.

“Yes. You’re genetically enhanced,” she said to Star.

“Enhanced,” she repeated, as if the word were bitter tasting.

“Am I wrong?” Sophie asked.

“No,” she said, but she didn’t elaborate.

“Plus you’re green, which is fucking awesome,” Sophie said.

“Ok, lets do this some other time,” Sol said. “Right now, I need to figure out what the fuck we’re doing about this boat and about Fortuna.”

“If we take this boat to Kithira City, you’re going to have to answer some questions about how you got it. But repairs up here will take too damn long. What if we take it somewhere remote, and bring the parts there? Reis has almost the same exact parts. There are at least five shops in Kithira City that explicitly sell BLM parts, with hundreds more that likely do elsewhere. Lets set down in some vacation community that doesn’t ask a lot of questions, let our passengers rest their legs or even take a swim, and I can reassemble what we need over a couple of days. Meanwhile, we can take Fortuna to a hospital in some quiet part of Kithira,” Sophie suggested.

Sol considered.

“Ok, where do you want to set down?” he asked.

“There’s a fun little resort community up in the northern mountain range just outside of Paliochora that accepts bits. Its on a different continent from Kithira City. There’s a lake and boats,” she said, grinning.

“I like the sound of that,” Erinys said. So did Sol. Accepting bits was a way of signaling that an establishment didn’t ask questions. Or it was a honey trap. But it would be easy enough to determine if they were being watched once they arrived. Go with what you know, Sol said to himself.