“Because I don’t fuckin’ know!”
The officer stared at him angrily for several moments and finally told him he might as well wait on the shuttle while they inspected the ship.
“I’m sure he’d be much more comfortable coming with us,” Chloe said immediately.
“Why thank you kindly, ma’am! Don’t mind if I do. I don’t suppose you might have some refreshment?”
Chloe smiled at him. “You’re certainly welcome to whatever I have, Mr. …?”
“Bloezo.”
After pointing out the way to the hold, she escorted Mr. Bloezo to the bridge.
“How much?” she asked as soon as the door had closed behind them.
The figure he quoted was staggering. Chloe swallowed with an effort and considered how long and hard she’d worked to accumulate that many credits and finally shrugged. “I don’t have quite that much, but I could transfer 16,000 in credits to your account.”
He thought it over and finally nodded, shrugging when Jared and Kane scowled at him. “It’s what I paid for the damned cyborg!”
And they all knew he’d more than made that back in the time he’d had him, but Chloe wasn’t about to argue with him. Escorting him to the main console, she told the computer to access her account and transfer the funds to Mr. Bloezo’s account. “Give him what he wants in the way of refreshment. I’m going down to see what the officers are doing,” she told Kane, heading out again.
She was glad Jared had thought of the bilge. The bastards spent nearly four hours searching the ship from top to bottom—including the bilge, but they didn’t have any interest, thankfully, in climbing down for a closer look. They merely peered in through the access panel and said they were satisfied.
Mr. Bloezo had wiped out her credits and consumed as much of her stores as he could hold by the time they returned—primarily the fermented brews—and had to be carried back to the port authority’s shuttle. Crossing her fingers that he wasn’t so intoxicated that he decided to babble about his windfall, Chloe bid them farewell, and strode to the com as soon as the bay doors closed behind them.
“Get those men out of the bilge, Jared, before they suffocate!”
“On my way,” Jared responded.
Relieved, more shaken by the inspection than she wanted to think about, Chloe ordered the main computer to fire the engines and headed to the bridge. It took an agonizing length of time to get up their speed again. The ship seemed to crawl for almost an hour before it finally reached the speed they’d been traveling before they were ordered to stop and they were still an hour from the outer rim when they discovered the port authority was on their tail again.
“Shit!” Chloe exclaimed. “Gun it, computer! Calculate a jump and prep!”
“Destination?”
“I don’t give a fuck! Just get us the hell out of here!”
“That does not compute.”
Chloe gritted her teeth and pulled up a star chart. After studying it a little frantically, she finally told the computer to reverse the three jumps they’d taken to reach Thagorous. The craft the port authority was using wouldn’t be able to make a fold. They could send out an alert for her ship, but they wouldn’t know where to look.
* * * *
Damon wasn’t the only one that was thoroughly pissed off by the time the access panel was finally opened and the cyborgs above them called an all clear.
It was unfortunate that the blockheads that had shut them up in the bilge didn’t have the sense of self-preservation to refrain from grinning when they climbed up the ladder and crawled out.
Uttering a snarl of rage, Damon punched the one called Jared in the teeth. Jared flew backwards and slammed into the bulkhead. Before he could get his bearings, Damon charged him. Within a few moments, Kane, and Damon’s fellow sufferers had joined the battle. The ‘debris’ the cyborgs had brought up with them from the bilge, unfortunately, was slippery and detracted significantly from their earnest desire to beat each other to a pulp. Every punch sent someone sliding across the deck and into the wall and it took great determination and dedication to their purpose for them to make it back to the center of the fight to sling a retaliatory punch.
Damon still managed to slug Jared a half a dozen times before Jared managed to get him pinned to the floor in a chokehold. Gritting his teeth, Jared tightened his grip until Damon’s face began to redden with the lack of oxygen.
“What the hell? Oh my god! Jared! What are you doing?”
Jared froze, lifting his head. Chloe was standing in the door, her flight suit covering the lower half of her face in lieu of a gas mask. He stared at her blankly for several moments. “He was choking,” he responded finally, releasing his hold on Damon’s throat abruptly. “I was trying to resuscitate.”
She frowned at him for a long moment and finally glanced around the room at the other men who were picking themselves up. “Does he need a medic?” she finally asked in a choked voice. “Anybody?”
The cyborgs all glanced at each other and shook their heads.
