Chapter 5

FIVE

" T hat's the ship we've been looking for?"

Elias could barely make out the vessel clamped behind the bulky docking tube, but he could tell that not all the shadows along the hull were thrown by the grimy plasmix window in front of him. The Blythe did not look particularly blithe. She was smaller than the Chaos , and twice as ugly, without the excuse of a retrofitted ashushk star drive. He did recognize the build, though. She'd be fast in-system, and if she'd gone all the way to Bosun, they'd have been hard-pressed to track her.

"The registration matches the one provided by Mrs. Scott. The Blythe is the only ship to have been docked at Chloris at the same time we were there."

"According to the docking records, she's carrying a crew of two and they don't have a place in the jump queue," Nessa said. Which meant they weren't planning on leaving anytime soon.

"I wonder what they're doing here."

"At least they're not knocking on Marnie and Ryan's door."

Qek clicked. "I assume any such knocking would be figurative."

"One would hope so." Elias turned away from the windows flanking the outer wall of the docking concourse on Petrel Station. "Okay, let's find these bastards." They could wait until someone returned to the ship and joined the jump queue, but the ship and data had been stationary for the thirty-six hours it had taken the Chaos to travel to Petrel. "Pity this isn't an Anatolius outfit. Security codes would be nice right about now."

"Or one of Fixer's hacks," Qek said, blue fingers twitching across the small holo projected over her wallet. "I have some tools recommended by Mrs. Scott, but I am still learning how to use them."

Could they ask Marnie and Ryan to hack station security remotely, or would that leave them too vulnerable to a reciprocal trace?

"I will return to the Chaos and keep you updated from there," Qek said.

"Keep the doors locked and the c-core spinning."

"It is illegal for me to…" Qek's wide blue face wrinkled into the ashushk equivalent of a smile. "I will endeavor to make the Chaos ready to depart at a moment's notice."

"Just don't leave without us."

Elias promised to check in every thirty minutes and led Nessa away from the docks and into the station proper. "Last time we were here, someone tried to kill us," he muttered as he surveyed the main thoroughfare.

"Someone trying to kill us is practically a given in places like this," Nessa said.

"Let's make today an exception." He pulled up a holo map. "Okay, if you had hacked our ship, why would you come to Petrel Station and sit here for nearly two days? Why not go directly to the source?" To Bosun.

"Your guess is as good as mine, Eli." Nessa hugged herself briefly. She didn't look worried, just uncomfortable. "You know, as many times as the trail zigzagged before this point, they could have just been bouncing the data across the galaxy."

"The zigs and zags were all basically in this direction, though. I wish we knew what was in those data packets."

"I'm assuming it's our data."

"Why bring it here?" Elias stopped walking. "Wait." An invisible band tightened around his chest. "This is where we picked up Dieter."

"Yes, I know."

"And a good portion of the stolen data was his journal entries."

"You think they're looking for something he left behind? Why would he leave something on Petrel?"

Elias held up a hand and extended one finger. "Dieter was here for what, two months? And he was working the whole time he was here." He extended a second finger. "Dieter worked covert ops before he was recruited to Project Dreamweaver." A third finger joined the parade. "He was pretty messed up by the time we found him. Blanking and forgetting things. But he was like Marnie. Had backups of his backups." A fourth finger uncurled, but Elias didn't have a fourth point. "Where did Marnie take you when you were here last? Where did you find Dieter?"

Nessa started walking. "This way."

Following, Elias opened a comms channel to the asteroid.

For a change, Ryan answered, his bald head reflecting the light of the holo display. "What's up?"

"We need to know what was in those journal entries of Dieter's the hackers stole."

Fingers plucked at Zed's hair. He ducked away, instinct insisting he did not want to be touched right now, even by Flick—then he moaned. Everything hurt. His wrist was the worst, but his head wasn't too happy, either.

Could have been so much worse.

Flick pulled off Zed's rebreather and tossed it aside. "You've got foam in your hair."

"Fuck the foam," Zed growled.

Flick shot him a dirty look. "I think that foam deserves some recognition. It saved our lives."

Zed grunted and leaned back against the wrecked copilot's chair. The bridge was a mess of disintegrating impact-foam—designed to soften and dissolve once the ship stopped moving—and twisted metal on the starboard side, toward the rear of the bridge. Clearly they'd spun and smacked into something hard. The acrid tang of smoke and burned-out circuits polluted the air. Low-level emergency lighting illuminated the bridge, enough to see the damage and not much else.

"So your wrist and your head? Did you lose consciousness at all?"

"Pretty sure." He remembered Flick holding his hand…then nothing until Flick was pulling softening foam off his face. Might have been the pressure of reentry fucking with him, but Zed didn't think so. "You okay?"

"Okay enough." Flick probed Zed's scalp gently. "Crashing is never fun. Oh, here we go."

Zed bit back a hiss and fought the nausea that surged as Flick's fingers found a knot hidden beneath his hair.

"Damn it," Flick whispered, his voice filled with regret. "The foam should've prevented this."

"I might not have been strapped in perfectly," Zed admitted. "Because of the wrist."

"Slacker." Flick shot him a grin, one that didn't quite meet his eyes, then moved off to find the bridge's first aid kit. He moved a bit more stiffly than usual, but not too badly, considering. Zed let his eyes close for just a second.

"Hey, no sleeping." Flick nudged his knee, setting down the first aid kit.

"I'm not." He squinted at Flick, annoyed that even the dim emergency lighting seemed to be too much for his sensitive eyes. "I'm concussed, but not badly."

He'd had a bad concussion once. It had been a solid couple of months before he'd been cleared for duty again. Weeks after that before he'd felt completely back to normal. This was annoying, nothing more.

Flick brought up a simple medical diagnostic on his bracelet. "Yep. Concussion and a broken wrist. But, lucky you, the bones seemed to be aligned pretty well. Lucky me too," he muttered.

Right? Setting a lover's broken bones wasn't high on Zed's to-do list, either.

At Flick's gesture, Zed reluctantly held out his left hand. He watched as Flick splinted the joint and wrapped it up, thankful that the Apex Rapere had been stocked with an emergency med kit. But no Mendo—the substance that strengthened healing bones needed to be administered by a doctor. A shot of it in the wrong spot…wouldn't be pretty. Flick's fingers were gentle, touching his skin with the softest of caresses. He knew how much a broken bone—even a minor break—hurt. The fingers of his original left hand—the one replaced by his sparkling crystalline limb—had been mangled and all but useless after being broken in the stin POW camp and left to heal improperly.

"Hey, you still with me?"

Zed blinked. "Yeah."

"Want to try a shot of something for your headache?" Flick rifled through the med kit, looking for a hypo.

For a second, Zed thought longingly of the stash of pills he'd once carried with him to battle the severe headaches induced by Zoning. The altered state of consciousness had once had a high price—no more, though, not since the Guardians had fixed his recipe. A cup of humanity, a dash of stin, with a teaspoon of ashushk and a sprinkle of resonance equaled one functional super soldier/emissary.

Okay, maybe his concussion was a little worse than he thought.

"What's in there?"

They quickly determined that the only painkiller in the kit would be burned off by Zed's metabolism before it could do anything. Still, if the headache got any worse, it might be worth trying. Not now, though.

He was about to ask Flick what the plan was when the ship rocked. Flick jolted up and slapped foam away from the pilot's console, trying to get the interface to wake up and give a report. Zed staggered to his feet, cradling his broken wrist to his chest. His vision rocked out of time with the Apex Rapere , so he closed his eyes, hoping to stave off the need to vomit.

"Triple fucking shit ." Flick slammed a palm on the console. "We need to abandon ship."

"What?" Every bit of training that had been drilled into Zed's brain shouted No, bad idea . You stuck with your wreck when you went down so searchers could find you. It was fucking basic . But Flick had had the same training, knew the same shit, so if he was saying it…"Why?"

"Because I overshot your landing strip and we're getting swept out by the tide." Flick turned to Zed and scooped his good arm around his waist. "If the external sensors are still working, outside atmosphere looks breathable. Let's get you out and onto shore, and if we don't suffocate, I'll see what I can recover before she's gone."

"So we crashed… and we're gonna sink?" They bumped into a wall as the Apex Rapere shuddered again, turning Zed's soft chuckles into a hiss. "Man, when you wreck a boat…"

"It's not my fault!"

"Who was flying?"

"Asshole."

"See, if we were married, this cost could come out of a joint?—"

"Really?"

They lurched into a dim, twilit landscape. Zed had an impression of boulders, maybe trees—but damn, it was tough to concentrate when every step on the uneven rocky beach jarred his wrist and his head. Flick deposited him a few meters from the listing Apex Rapere and darted back to the ship without a word.

From the angle of the ship—which grew more acute as the minutes dragged on, the nose dipping downward—Zed could only surmise that the bottom of the lake or sea dropped off significantly a dozen meters or so from the shore. As the tide encroached, waves washing closer and closer to Zed's perch, the Apex Rapere groaned, sliding farther into the water's embrace. Just before Zed got really worried, Flick leaped out of the rear hatch, a pack dangling from one elbow, his arms full of equipment.

He marched past Zed to higher ground and deposited the gear. "Think you can make it up here?"

Yeah, the tide was getting closer and God knew how high the tides on this planet got—though thank God the gravity felt about the same as Earth Standard. Groaning, Zed pushed to his feet and made his way gingerly across the rocks to Flick's haphazard camp. He'd chosen a plateau of sorts, a small one bordered by a pair of large boulders. It was difficult to tell in the waning light, but Zed couldn't detect any tidal marks on the rocks. That was a good sign.

"What'd you rescue?"

"Some comms equipment. The first-aid kit. Some survival gear. I'm gonna go back and get?—"

A loud creak followed by a huge splash and gurgle cut off Flick's words. They watched the Apex Rapere give up her fight to stay above water and slip into the dark waves.

Zed stared, the ramifications of what had just happened sinking slowly into his concussed brain. "Well… shit ."