She rubbed her hand over Shank’s knee, and his fingers moved down to gently stroke her neck.
“If’n you don’t mind someone who only shoots straight when someone ain’t shooting back, he’s great,” Jacqs pointed out, still talking about Chet’s shooting skills.
“Hey, the last round of six was under live fire,” Chet defended himself.
“And you didn’t get a-one of those into the bull’s-eye,” Jacqs said without any sympathy.
“You should be training on the tech stuff,” Becca complained softly. She might not push things further than that, but with her, Ben, and Copta sharing quarters, Allie figured Copta or Ben would go out of their way to make Becca happy, even if that meant clipping their youngest crew member’s wings a bit.
“You never know when you need another gun hand,” Chet said, and Allie smiled. He sounded so much like Shank in that moment that she could imagine both brothers driving their mother insane with their complaints and their demands to be allowed to do more.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer woman, she thought rather snidely.
Copta spoke up. “And if the ship is damaged, you never know when you need someone who took tech training more seriously,” she said. “If you can pass your next set of tech competencies, you can go back to shooting things.”
“Tech training is miserable. I spend all day trying to fix things in tiny crawl spaces while the simulator tries to shake my brains hard enough to make them fall out my nose.”
“That’s an accurate description,” Becca agreed. “I’ll see you at the tech training for some brain shaking first thing in the morning.”
“Actually,” Shank said, “those of us from theCandiruare due at medical for some genetic resequencing.”
Someone grunted. It sounded like either Ben or Jacqs, but Allie was too tired to open her eyes.
“I thought that was in two weeks,” Zeke said.
Copta answered. “They moved it up.”
Allie forced her eyes open. SC didn’t change their schedules unless there was damn good cause. They were particularly inflexible when it came to Allie and Bitter—theUnktomi’s two navs. SC ships did some impossible math on the fly, and Allie was almost sure they could pull that same thread-jumping trick that the family ships used. Only the SC training seemed to be leading up to doing that sort of stupidity with full-size ships. No nav could take a whole battle cruiser thread-hopping, but Allie suspected she could do some damn fancy moves with theUnktomias soon as she had the training to pull it off.
“So, what’s up with the change of plans?” She tilted her head to look at Copta. The woman was tapping away on a data pad.
“They have an investigation that would be worth our time.” Copta sounded completely calm, but a shot of adrenaline hit Allie’s bloodstream. She pushed herself upright with a long groan.
“They’re sending us on a mission?” Jacqs demanded. “Fuck. We ain’t even finished training yet.”
Ben had his feet up on a table. “Training never ends. The longer we stay, the more rigorous the training gets, but I’m pretty sure the SC guys never run out of ways to torture people into better performance.”
“And the case is interesting,” Copta said. “Someone is hunting those criminals who the SC has been keeping track of in hopes of turning them into assets at some point in the future.”
“Are we on that list?” Jacqs demanded.
Zeke gave a little bark of laughter. “I think we got taken off the list of criminals who could be assets and got put on the list of actual assets.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Do you really want to take this case?” he asked Copta.
She shrugged. “It’s interesting. Someone is trying to grab power, and those that would try to use the SC’s own intelligence against them would seem dangerous. But I only know that I would be willing to take my ship into the area. It would be up to the captain to decide if the mission is worth the risk.”
Ben grunted. “Someone trying to raid SC lists sounds dangerous. I vote we check it out.”
“I’m more concerned about these people,” Allie pointed out. “No offense to anyone in this room who happens to work for the SC, but the SC is more than a little manipulative. How many people on that list got backed into a corner? And now someone is hunting them. I don’t like that thought.”
“We have to start somewhere,” Hotah said with a shrug. “This sounds like as good of a mission as any.”
Zeke looked over. “Shank?” he asked.
“We’ll have to find something illegal to do if we want to keep our cover, but as long as we can steal, smuggle, or counterfeit something, I’m in.”
“Drugs,” Kimi blurted out. The woman rarely said anything, so everyone looked toward their med tech.
“I ain’t running no poison,” Jacqs said in the sort of deadly calm voice that usually meant someone was getting taken down to the sparring mats, and Jacqs was going to beat the snot out of them.
