Page 7 of Reaper's Brat

I change our heading without logging the reason, and I tell the helm to run quiet, drives banked, and I go down to the relay room to check our own transmissions — and that is where the second thing finds me.

The relay shows an outbound handshake. Short. Encrypted past our own keys. Routed through a maintenance node that should not have outbound access at all.

Someone aboard my ship has been talking to someone outside it.

I stand in the relay room with the cold certainty settling into me like water finding its level, and I run the timestamps, and they line up with the dark station, and the betrayal is so neat and so quiet that I almost admire it. Almost. I have eighty-one people aboard this ship and one of them has decided the math I refused to do, and is doing it for me, in secret, in the dark.

I don't yet know who. I am careful not to want it to be Theryn, because wanting makes a man see what isn't there.

When I come up to the bridge, Althea is at the chart table with Caelis, and she has the stolen core open and humming, and a partial string of coordinates floats above it, half-decoded, pointing into a dead region of the Badlands no sane captain flies.

"He cracked part of it," she says, nodding at Caelis, who looks caught. "It's not cargo data. It's a map. Somebody on Armstrong didn't hire me to carry scrap. They hired me to carry that, and they didn't tell me, because the box doesn't need to know what's inside it."

"Seal it," I say. "Now. No one decodes the rest."

"Why." She's already reading my face. She reads me better than my own crew, which is its own quiet alarm. "What's at the end of those numbers that's got you looking like that?"

I don't answer, because the proximity alarm answers for me — a hard tone climbing through the bridge — and the screen swings to aft, and a warship slides out of the black behind us, lean and armored and built for one purpose, close enough already that running was never going to be the plan.

"That's the end of those numbers," I tell her. "Or the start of it."

CHAPTER 11

ALTHEA

The first jolt throws me into Caelis, and the second throws us both into the chart table, and after that I stop counting jolts and start counting the things that are on fire.

"They're herding us," I shout over the alarms. Saren is in the command chair, and he's not panicking, which is somehow more frightening than if he were. "They're not trying to kill us, they're driving us toward —"

"The current," Caelis finishes. There's an asteroid stream ahead, a river of rock running fast enough to peel a hull, and the hunters are walling off every other vector to push us into it. "Captain, the nav's lagging, I can't —"

"Then I'll fly it blind," Saren says.

"You'll fly it dead." I'm already at the nav console, shoving Caelis's hands aside, because this — this I know. This is a salvage run with worse stakes. "I read wrecks for a living. Rock's the same as a collapsing hold, it just hates you faster. Give me the feed raw, forget the lag, I'll call it and you fly it."

He looks at me for the length of a breath. Then: "Call it."

So I call it. Left, hard, now. Up, on my mark. Hold. The stream takes us in and the ship screams in every weld, and I read the rock the way I've read every dying thing I've ever crawledinside, and Saren flies it with a touch I wouldn't have believed in something his size, and behind us the warship balks at the current and loses us in the noise of it.

We come out the far side scarred and venting and alive. And then the cost lands, the way it always does after.

The medical bay is full. Elsyn has more wounded than hands, so I become hands. I clamp and I pack and I hold people down while he sets bone, and these are bodies that wanted me spaced two weeks ago, and not a single one flinches from my touch now. Vasha hauls in a crewman with a crushed arm and watches me work on him and says nothing, but her eyes do something they haven't done before.

"You could have stayed at the nav," she says finally. "Safe. You came here instead."

"There's no safe on a ship this shot up," I say. "Might as well be useful."

"No." She sets the crewman's arm in the brace herself, gentler than I'd have guessed those hands could be. "You came here because you couldn't stand the not-helping. I know the difference. I've spent years pretending I don't have that, and I know it when I see it in someone else."

When the worst of it is stabilized I find Saren in the corridor outside, and he's been waiting, and the moment the hatch opens he crosses to me and stops short, hands flexing at his sides like he's fighting them.

"You're not hurt," he says. It isn't quite a question.

"Bruised. Standard." I'm too tired to armor it. "You?"

He doesn't answer. He lifts both hands and frames my face, careful, so careful, and presses his forehead to mine, and we stand there in the wrecked corridor breathing each other's air, and over his shoulder I see two of the crew watching, and I hear one of them murmur the thing they've all started to think —she'smaking him soft— and I feel Saren hear it too, and feel him decide, for once, not to care.

CHAPTER 12