His footsteps rang down the corridor, measured and heavy, and a second later the cargo hold door sealed with a soft mechanical thud.
She let out the breath she’d been strangling and folded over the console.
The laughter hit all at once.
It tore out of her in helpless bursts, forehead pressed to her arms, shoulders shaking hard enough to rattle the chair. Hysteria, mostly. Stress. Exhaustion. The whole ridiculous, impossible situation finally found a crack and poured through it.
Still felt good, though.
I liked him better when he thought I was your mate, Fred said directly into her implant, his voice dropping to the private channel. He was more respectful.
She swiped a tear from the corner of her eye and gasped for breath. “Oh, fudge off, Fred.”
I am stating a fact. His respiration is inefficient. He wastes oxygen.
That got one last broken laugh out of her.
Then it faded.
She sat back up and scrubbed at her face with her sleeve while the last few chuckles died in her throat. Quiet settled over the cockpit again.
She waited for yelling, for pounding on the bulkheads, for something… anything. But there was nothing, just the gentle hum of the ship. Frowning, she reached for the secondary monitor. One flick across the screen, and the internal camera feed bloomed across the screen.
He wasn’t pacing or punching walls. Instead, he sat on a crate by the rear bulkhead with his elbows braced on his knees and his hands loosely clasped between them, staring at the floor. Then, after a moment, he turned his head and looked up directly at the camera.
She stabbed the kill switch for the feed so quickly that her finger ached.
The screen went black, but his stare seemed to stay there anyway.
She turned back to the main console and looked at the fuel projections still crawling across the display, she didn’t see them. All she could see was the alien guy sitting on a crate in the cargo bay.
Shit, she didn’t even know his name.
A cartridge.
Raaze stared at the scuffed floor plating between his boots. He’d been jealous of a draanthing circuit board.
A circuit board with opinions and a weapons lock and the personality of a disapproving uncle, but still, a piece of hardware. They’d paid him a hundred thousand credits a week. The highest in three generations. And he’d just squared up to a box the size of a ration pack and told it to come outside.
He turned his right hand over. Palm up. Palm down. It was a playing habit. Check the grip… check the control before the next play.
He had neither because he’d misread the whole field. He’d assumed a protector where there was none, which meant that she had been bluffing him from the moment he’d walked up to her on that landing pad.
Static cracked overhead as the ship’s comms opened.
“Priority alert,” Fred announced in a monotone voice that was loud enough to wake the dead. “Incoming transmission. Broadcast is system-wide. You might want to hear this.”
He lifted his head as a different voice filled the air.
“Repeat: Stolen freighter, registry K-774-L. Pilot is a human female identified as Cait Rhenn. Vessel flagged in connection with the escape of a high-value prisoner from Parac’Norr. Suspect is an Izaean male. Considered extremely dangerous. Any sightings to be reported immediately to Sector Command. Vessel is to be grounded on sight. Repeat: Vessel is to be grounded on sight.”
Stolen.
He pushed off the crate before the loop could start again and headed for the cockpit, eating up the corridor in long, silent strides.
He stopped in the doorway.
Cait stood at the console with her back to him. Rigid with both hands braced on the metal edge, knuckles pale… listening to her life get dismantled one sentence at a time.
