“Crystal,” she said, frowning at the tangle of wires behind the panel. “Raaze, can you grab the toolkit from the service locker by the door, please?”
Raaze retrieved it, and she popped the lid. Standard kit components. Nothing special. She wrinkled her nose, wondering how the hell she was going to do this. She needed to pop the transponder out and change its coding to make it appear like something else. Removing the transponder was the easy part. Like everything else aboard the H4-RPY, it was modular—plug-and-play. But recoding it? Yeah, she had no idea how to do that. Hopefully Fred would be out of his snit, or she was shit out of luck.
Two minutes later, she had the transponder out and on the console in front of her. Okay, this is where it got dicey. The closures weren’t screws or bolts, but hexagonal instead. Rare, but not like a unicorn or anything.
“Hexagonal… hexagonal,” she murmured as she scanned through the toolkit. Perhaps she could jam a standard multi-tool blade through the widest part and open it that way? “Gotcha.”
She grinned as she spotted a hex tool, and within a minute, she had the back of the transponder panel off. She handed it to Raaze and looked inside.
“Shit.”
She knew the theory of transponder swapping, but she’d assumed there would be an input screen in here for her to make the change. There wasn’t. Instead, there was a blank plate with a weird type of pin connector.
Frowning, she looked into the toolkit again. The connector was female and longer than anything she’d seen before. Perhaps she could use two shorter male connectors and hook them up to the main console or something?
Her gaze caught on a tool tucked in the back of the compartment. It had a matte-black handle and a single-purpose connector port. She’d seen it a thousand times and never looked at it properly. Single-use tools were rare in ship kits, but she’d never thought to ask why the maintenance kit carried something so specific.
She picked it up, turning it over. It had a long, male pin connector. Her frown deepened as she compared it to the transponder input. “Fred, what’s this tool for?”
“I have no idea, Captain. I can’t see it.”
She sighed, biting back her retort. Sometimes Fred could be too literal for his own good.
“Look at it.” She held the tool up so the ship’s cameras could see it through her eyes. “This isn’t on the equipment manifest, is it?”
A pause. Fred never paused.
“So, what is it? I know you know.”
“That is a transponder interface tool, Captain. It has exactly one function: swapping transponder codes.”
“And exactly why do we have a transponder interface tool on board, Fred?”
He sighed. “This ship was equipped for a cargo run your brother was going to make. When it was transferred to you, he forgot to remove his ‘extras’ from the ship. Like that adapted toolkit.”
“So why would he need…”
She stopped talking. She knew the answer. Her brother had been running black-market this whole time. That was why Kian’s numbers always beat hers on the same routes. He’d been cheating, and their father had been praising him for it.
The laugh that escaped was sharp and brittle.
“Cait?” Fred sounded concerned.
“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. Not right now. But she would be. “Let’s get this swap done.”
Her hands moved on autopilot. She slotted the tool into place, watched the diagnostic lights flare green under Fred’s guidance. The work kept her focused and kept her from thinking about how many times she’d defended her family’s honor to outsiders. How many times had she told herself she just needed to work harder and prove herself?
And it had all been a fucking lie.
Raaze shifted closer. His presence filled the small space, warm and solid at her back. “Cait.”
“Not now.” She kept her eyes on the panel. “Tell me what you’ve been chewing on since the Healer’s Hall. I can hear your brain working from here.”
He sighed.
“The evidence can’t go anywhere it can be buried,” he said. “Officials can be bought. Investigations can be suppressed. The R’Tev operate in the dark.” He paused. “But a celebrity operates in the light. I built my career on that machine. I know how it works.”
She glanced up at him. “Keep talking. What are you thinking?”
