I take a deep breath and blink to clear my vision. “Negative,” I say, forcing my fingers away from my tether. “I copy. Five by five. Momentary… glitch.”
“Yeah, right,” Voller mutters.
I ignore him. “Ready when you are, Behrens.”
Kane retracts the tether, slowly pulling me to safety, even though it feels like the exact opposite.
“What was that about?” Kane asks, as soon as I’m out of the airlock and stripping out of my enviro suit. I hang it, along with my helmet, on the peg that’s marked with my name above it on a curling piece of magnetic tape. It’s hard not to view that bit of flawed tape—and everything else on board—with an overly sentimental fondness, simply because it’s about to be gone.
I avoid Kane’s gaze as I yank my jumpsuit back on over my T-shirt and compression shorts. Blue eyes that bright are rare these days, outside of old film, and it feels like Kane’s see right through me.
“Nothing.” I run my fingers through my hair, the sweat-dampened blond strands sticking to my forehead and hanging in my eyes. Now that I’m back inside, my momentary flight of suicidal fantasy seems foolish and pathetic. I could have put my entire crew in jeopardy by forcing them to attempt a rescue. We may not always get along, but keeping them safe is my job. A job that I wanted so badly I’d been contemplating offing myself at the loss of it.
My face hot, I push past Kane and stick my head over the railing for the ramp to the lower deck.
“Nysus,” I call.
No response.
“Nysus!” I shout.
A second later, he leans out of his favorite hidey-hole, the “server maintenance bay,” which is little more than a nook with a door, near the engine room. “What?” He blinks up at me, spiky black hair rumpled from his hands, gaze dreamy and impatient, still mostly focused on whatever he was doing before I called for him. Probably something on the Forum.
“We set?” I ask.
He nods. “Bank’s open.”
Ignoring Kane still hovering nearby, I turn and head up the ramp to our primary level, then down the narrow alleyway through the small galley to the bridge. Kane follows me but more slowly because he has to bend slightly to keep from smacking his forehead on the overheads. LINA, like all sniffers, is small. We’re a short-term vessel. The haulers bring us out and bring us back, handle resupplies. So, there’s just enough room on board for five crew—pilot, comms, tech, mech, and team lead—and the equipment necessary for our work.
The bridge itself is barely bigger than those old-fashioned space capsules, the ones Verux has on display in their company museum. There’s enough room for three of us in here at a time. Four, if someone’s willing to loom in the doorway. But there are seats only for comms, pilot, and me, the team lead. I end up standing most of the time anyway.
“Status?” I ask Lourdes, who’s folded up in her chair at the communications board, one side of her headphones pressed to her ear. Her curly dark hair has grown in again where she shaved it, and she’s braided it all to one side, away from her preferred listening side.
She swivels to look at me, her expression cautious. A thin gold necklace gleams against her brown skin, the tiny matching capsule at the center containing a tightly rolled scrap of scripture. Her verse, assigned by her church. “Testing alignment and connection now. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say, more sharply than I meant to.
Her eyebrows go up in surprise, eyes widening with hurt, and I relent.
“Just got a little… light-headed.”
Voller, sprawled out in his chair behind the controls, with his safety restraints dangling and dragging the floor, turns to make sure I see him roll his eyes.
Lourdes starts to say something, but then her gaze goes distant and she presses her hand to the headphone against her ear.
“We should talk,” Kane says to me, the second he emerges from the corridor, as if Lourdes and Voller were not present. But even if they weren’t, this is not a conversation I’m having.
I ignore him and look to Voller. “Are we good to go?”
“As soon as you give the word,” he says, cracking his knuckles. It’s his tell in poker. I don’t play with them, but I’ve watched enough to know. This is what he does when he has a decent hand. He’s impatient, eager.
Kane steps closer. “Kovalik…”
“It was nothing,” I say, and try to make it sound like the truth. “You do your precheck?”
“Hey, guys,” Lourdes says. “I think I’ve got something.”
“Yeah, Kane, it was nothing,” Voller says, mocking. “If Kovalik here wants to become a permanent resident of K-fucking-middle-of-nowhere-147, whose business is—”
