“Not that kind of meeting,” Ben said. He moved away and stood near the door in a posture that definitely made it look like he was on sentry duty.
“Shank?” Allie asked since he seemed to be ringleader.
“Come on,” he invited her, still holding out his hand.
She wanted to take it. Desperately. However, she grabbed the ladder and climbed down herself. “What is this?”
“Good question,” Mukti Das said. She was the oldest of the crew, even older than Ben, who had to be pushing forty, and for a Nicve marine, that was downright ancient. “What is going on?”
Allie did a quick head count and found Ashwin Little, Lendra Sheehan, and the captain missing. Everyone else stood around with expressions that ranged from alarmed to confused.
“We’re all upset about Commander Waters and Jacqs, right?” Shank asked.
“Oh no.” Allie started shaking her head. She had a really bad feeling about where this was going.
“Lacroix, do I want to be here?” Haslet asked. That was a pretty clear warning she was not willing to bend any more rules.
“I don’t know. Do you agree with everything Command has done?” Shank looked her right in the eyes and waited. Haslet wasn’t a woman to be stared down though. She stared right back, and the two had to be getting eyestrain.
“Enough.” Allie stepped between them. “None of us are going to do anything fatally stupid,” she said firmly. Then she caught the expression on Shank’s face. Okay, most of them weren’t going to do something fatally stupid, and Allie’s chest ached with fear again. “Shank?”
Haslet pushed away from the bunks. “Thank you for inviting me down here for a quick tribute to our fallen, but I should get some rest before I’m back on duty,” she announced to the room before turning her sharp gaze on Shank again. “I’m sure you want to grieve in private without an officer listening in.” She sighed as she looked at him. “Be careful, you idiot.”
Shank grinned at her. “Always.”
Without another word, she turned and left. Ben stepped to the side to let her pass, and then returned to watching the hall.
“What fatally stupid thing are we about to do?” Mukti asked. Leave it to her to get right to the point.
“Go after Zeke and Jacqs,” Shank said. The room fell utterly silent, but Allie could hear the blood roaring through her ears. She clung to the side of the bunk, her legs suddenly unstable.
Karney was the first to break the silence. “Oh, that sounds like a really bad idea. Didn’t Command say that running through bat territory could restart the war?”
Shank shrugged. “If that was the case, the bats would have turned on the pirates already. We’ve raided them since we found them three generations ago. Mostly we don’t kill them, and mostly they don’t kill us. That was true before the war, and it has stayed true for my people all through it. Stealing a couple of slaves away isn’t even going to hit their radar.”
“You’re a pirate?” Dary blurted out, and Mukti was saying something that Allie didn’t hear, and Ben had left sentry duty to look at Shank like he’d just had an arm spontaneously fall off. Slowly gazes turned to her, the only person in the room who didn’t seem particularly surprised.
“I knew,” she said with a shrug. Honestly, she’d been excited when she found out. First, bedding a pirate was a novel experience, and she was always up for a new experience in bed. More importantly, she already knew Shank by then. She understood how his moral code didn’t exactly match with the military’s or even the one her parents raised her to believe, where every life had meaning and value.
“I didn’t see that one coming,” Ben admitted before he turned back to check the hall. “Okay, Pirate Man, let’s hear this plan of yours.”
“You want to hear the plan?” Kev Burtrell sounded panicky. “I definitely don’t want to hear any plan. I have orders to report to the Stellar Three refugee camp. I...I’m not hearing this.”
Allie figured Kev could afford to follow orders. As a logistics tech, he’d be the one sitting in an office sorting paperwork, not the schmuck ordered to shoot civilians trying to get at the food stores. Funny, when Jacqs would let little details slip about how bad the camps were, Allie had thought he was exaggerating, trying to make himself look sympathetic for having grown up in the middle of some hell. Now she suspected that he’d downplayed the true horror.
“Kev,” Ben said sharply, and the man’s gaze went to him. “If you say anything, those people here who might try to pull off a rescue...they won’t only be stopped, they’ll be executed for dereliction of duty. Are you willing to point a gun at Shank and pull the trigger?” Ben rested his hand on his sidearm as he looked at Kev. The man had gone so white that he matched the sheets on the bed behind him. Ben closed the distance and pulled his weapon. People drew back, but Ben kept his focus on Kev as he held it out, butt first.
“I’m the only one talking treason so far, Kev,” Shank said. “So if you’re going to tell what you’ve heard here, I’d rather have you take that gun and put a bullet in my head. That’d be kinder than running to some Command officer.”
Kev blinked, and Allie could read the growing panic in Kev’s face and even in the uneasy shifting and quick breaths of the others around her.
Instead of cutting him any slack, Shank reached out and took Ben’s gun. He caught Kev’s wrist and forced his hand up before slapping the gun in it. “Go on,” he said. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now and do it clean.”
Kev’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Allie had never seen Shank this cruel, yet he showed no sign of sympathy even when Kev was about to have a stroke.
“If you talk later, it will be worse than shooting me right now. Command will be a hundred times worse, especially if they even suspect I know anything about the families,” he said.Families. It took Allie a second to realize he was talking about pirates. It actually made sense that pirates didn’t call themselves pirates, but she was still surprised.
Kev was already shaking his head. “I’m not going to tell anyone. I want you to find them. Jacqs...” He swallowed. “He was an ass, but he doesn’t deserve to get left behind, and the commander is a good man. He was one of the heroes of Siros Two, and Command left him behind like trash. But you can’t ask me...” Kev caught his lower lip in his teeth.
