“Let’s go check on this ship they stole,” Zeke said. He tugged on Jacqs’s arm. They looked at each other, and Allie could feel the heat between them.
Then Jacqs grinned. “It couldn’t be worse than theCandiru. That bucket of bolts was like to fall apart anytime. I hope you got some real big guns on her.”
Shank smiled back, but that wasn’t all that surprising since ship guns were his favorite subject. “Front turrets only, but we have Gibson lasers and a full complement of projectile weapons. She’s a deadly little beauty.”
“Front turrets only? Whose dumb-ass idea was that?”
“Whoever built her before Claire stole her,” Shank said with a shrug. They started up the stairs, and Allie was left to follow with Zeke. Ben nodded at her, silently promising to take their six.
“Gunners. They never change,” Zeke said in a loud whisper. Jacqs made an obscene gesture in their direction without interrupting his conversation with Shank.
“How is everyone?” Zeke asked.
“Everyone’s fine. Copta and Becca are the only other crew to come along, but everyone was healthy and not unhappy last we saw them.”
“Lieutenant Taylor?” Zeke asked in a hushed voice. Shank and Jacqs were waxing poetic about Gibson lasers, so Allie doubted either was paying attention to her conversation. She hoped not because they sounded happy, and she didn’t want to interrupt that with bad news.
“We never heard back from the SC medical team. The last we heard, he was still in a chemical coma.”
Zeke pressed his lips together.
“The ship’s being decommissioned,” Allie added, eager to change the subject. “Some personnel were being rotated home. Others were looking at new postings.” She tried to keep her voice light, but Zeke gave her a sharp look as they passed through the fancy living room out into the dry air of Eclipse. The rings cast a diffuse light on the whole planet, which made everything weirdly shadowless.
“Rotated where?”
Allie shrugged. “We hadn’t received orders yet.” Zeke didn’t need to know the rumors—that their gunners and logistical people were being sent to try to keep order in the hell of the refugee camps. She trotted to catch up with Shank and Jacqs and then slipped in close to Shank. He draped an arm over her shoulders, but she noticed that his gaze stayed on the horizon as he watched for enemy.
“So you signed up as a bat slave,” Shank said.
Allie’s mouth about fell open. When they got back to their quarters, she was going to beat him to death for being the most insensitive jerk in all of history, and she was including Jacqs in that comparison.
“Yep,” Jacqs said easily. For someone who’d just been called a slave, he sounded pretty unoffended, and Jacqs generally took offense to everything. “Pretty good perks. It was a hell of a lot nicer than the first time I got nabbed.”
Allie blinked. Okay, that had not been the reaction she’d expected.
Shank nodded. “My folks always said you shouldn’t grab up people unless you could offer them a better life than they had.” Shank seemed to eye Jacqs rather oddly.
Jacqs crossed his arms and gave Shank a narrow glare. “If’n your folks are looking to pick us up as slaves, I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said sharply.
Both of Shank’s hands went up. “What? No. Just...no. My father died, and my mother is not going to do anything like that. Not to you.”
“Ignore the idiot,” Allie interrupted. She followed that up by backhanding Shank across the arm. “We just want you home safe.”
“Home,” Jacqs said softly. He frowned, and Allie wished she could read his mind.
He always had been a mystery, and before Shank she had generally solved mysteries by sleeping with them. Sleep with someone, and windows to their soul opened. You got to see the real them. She’d always been too afraid to look into Jacqs’s soul, afraid she would see the sort of moral rot he sometimes projected. It meant that now when she needed that key, when she needed some understanding of who he really was, she didn’t have it.
“You’re heroes,” Allie hurried to say. “Maybe Command didn’t want that, but two frontline soldiers who gave their berths on the last ship out in order to save children...that made the news vids. The people you saved pretty much made you sound like the second coming of the savior.”
Jacqs grunted and rubbed a hand over his face. “Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Shanks agreed.
Allie looked back and forth between them, hating the feeling that she just didn’t get them. Okay, she didn’t get Jacqs, but Shank was hers. Maybe he saw her distress, because he smiled and slipped an arm around her waist.
“People are going to expect you to be all heroic now,” he said with a small smile in Jacqs’s direction.
“Worse, they’re going to go filling that man of mine with thoughts about how he has to be that perfect every damn time,” Jacqs said with a groan.
