“Delivery.” He motioned to the bundle.
He smiled, all lean angles and that casual stance that said he could stand there all night and never get tired of being looked at.
Biological threat assessment complete, Fred said in her ear. He’s injured. Left forearm. Field dressing. Blood loss nominal.
She’d already noted it. Shut up, Fred.
“You got the part,” she said.
“Obviously.” He folded his arms over that wide, scarred chest and rocked back on his heels. “Told you. Not a problem.”
She crouched by the bundle. The knots were vicious… pulled tight with the kind of brute force that suggested he’d throttled the fabric into obedience rather than learning how knots worked. She picked at them while he loomed over her. He’d probably call it standing guard, but it was looming. There was a difference, which was about two feet of unnecessary proximity.
At last, one knot gave. Then another. The cloth slumped open.
“Well,” she said. “Yeah. That’s… a lot.”
It was a pile of junk. Not metaphorically. It was actual junk. There was a coil of flexible piping, a box of heavy-duty fuses, three steel tubes that looked like legs from a shelving unit, and one heavy block of metal crusted with valves she didn’t recognize.
Hydraulic intake manifold, Fred supplied. Class 4 mining drill. We don’t have a Class 4 mining drill.
No. They very much did not. They also didn’t have a water reclamation unit or a garrison-grade power grid, but here it all was, piled at her feet like the world’s worst care package.
“Options,” he said. His jaw tightened. The movement was tiny, barely there, but she saw it. “I brought options.”
“I see that.” She lifted the flexible piping, and it sagged in her hand with all the dignity of overcooked pasta. “This is plumbing.”
“Fluid transfer.”
“For a sink.” She dropped it to one side and picked up the fuses instead. “And these are for a garrison-grade power grid. If I plug these into the freighter, we won’t just blow the cylinder, we’ll blow the galley microwave and probably Fred alongside it.”
I resent that implication, Fred muttered. However, the assessment is technically accurate.
She dug deeper. It looked like he’d brought everything. Literally everything. He’d just gone along the shelves with an arm and swept everything into his bag. Uh… It wasn’t a bag, she realized. It was a jacket. The one he’d been wearing earlier.
Then her fingers brushed machined steel near the bottom, and she stopped.
There, wrapped in a rag and jammed between a useless servo and a floodlight bracket, sat a hydraulic cylinder. She pulled it free and turned it over in her hands. It was scuffed and battered, but the bore was clean, and when she tested the piston, it moved smoothly. Not a Mark IV. Mark III. But it was compatible, and compatible was good enough.
She held it up. “This will work.”
He grinned, a flash of sharp white teeth. “Told you. I know what I’m doing.”
She bit the inside of her cheek and, setting the cylinder down beside her knee, reached into the pile. She hauled out the heavy block of valves. The mining drill intake. Holding it up to the light, she turned it.
“And this?” she asked, glancing up at him through her lashes. “What was the tactical application for this one?”
He looked at the block. Then at her. “Backup.”
“Backup.”
“System redundancy is critical in high-stress environments.”
“It’s a drill intake. We’re not a mining ship.”
“Multi-purpose,” he said, and his voice didn’t shift a fraction, but she could see right there in the tight set of his mouth that he knew exactly how full of crap he was. The laugh building in her chest was not going to get the satisfaction.
Setting it down, she picked up the shelving tubes instead and held them up.
