“You’re quitting.” This wasn’t a question.
Amelia’s quartermaster had been a Fleet member longer than Torian had been alive. She was a grizzled old woman with scars cutting into her cheek and eyebrow, tattoos up her arms, and a reputation as cutthroat as her appearance. For all that, she’s always been on good terms with Amelia, an ever-present shadow ready to support.
Now, Torian questioned what Opula thought of therestof the crew.
Or rather, her, specifically.
“Take what you want,”Amelia had always said.
Torian squared her shoulders, meeting Opula’s gaze. “My contract states that I’m allowed to exit Fleet employment at will. I’m executing that clause. Please thank Amelia for all of her help.”
“CaptainPerrosk wasn’t helping you. She was paying you for a job—which you’re leaving without warning.” Opula narrowed her icy eyes.
Celise didn’t have time to waste with advance notice. Torian had a starship; it would be docking in a public hangar any minute now. She set her jaw and stared Opula down. “Are you going to stop me?”
For a moment, they both held each other’s gaze.
Then, Opula turned back to the smuggling crates she’d been assessing. “I advocated for kicking you off this crew six months ago. You’re making my day easier.”
“I did well in both jobs on this ship,” Torian snapped.
“Don’t fool yourself, Razner. You were almost killed in security work, and being a scrap requires no skill at all.” The words were harsh, unforgiving.
Torian bristled, even as humiliation prickled her skin. “Then it shouldn’t be hard to replace me.” With a final glare, she stomped off the ship—a blocky beast of a vessel with hidden guns and an ever-shifting name—and exited the private hangar.
Good riddance.
Private hangars like Amelia’s were expensive as shit, and usually reserved for Fleet members. As such, Torian’s new ship had been towed to a crowded hangar on the opposite side of the station.
She shouldn’t have been surprised that her new starship—ancient, alien, covered in moss—had attracted a crowd. Beyond the gawking bystanders, a dock worker was checking a datapad while a tugboat operator detached from Torian’s new ship. Torian wove through the spectators, nervously approaching them.
“Is everything okay?”
Now that she was closer, she could see that a delivery had already been made to the ship—a crate of food she’d ordered, essentials to last a month, at least. Torian squinted at that briefly, irritated that the delivery person had just…leftit here, in front of a crowd, without making her sign for it.
She supposed she should be grateful for the dock worker’s presence. The presence of an official Colony 13 representative appeared to have deterred any thieves.
“This your vessel?” the dock worker asked, assessing Torian like a roach under her shoe.
Torian didn’t care if something was wrong. She was a captain now, and this washerstarship. She puffed her chest. “I just bought it. The records should have been sent over from the impound lot.”
The woman tapped her datapad with a hand. The holoscreen flickered at the contact, then reset into green words on a black background. “We need a name to register the ship.”
Well, shit.
“I can’t read the name.” Clearly, no one could, since even this woman had to ask for it. But the dock worker crossed her arms, waiting for more, so Torian added, “I was hoping to find a tou’siil to identify the language.”
The woman laughed boldly. “Sure. We’ll all justfinda tou’siil. Good fucking luck.” She gestured at the ship’s unreadable name. “We checked our station’s AI, and it can’t identifythe language either. So—it’s a clean slate,Captain. What do you want to call it?”
Terror filtered into Torian’s mind. “I—I don’t know. What did it register as when it docked?”
“If I could find those records, I wouldn’t be here.” The woman shook her head. “Can you just pick a name so I can get back to my job?”
“Oh, I have one,” a feminine voice said from behind Torian. Her tone seemed warm and pleasant, but held the harshness of artificial light over a garden: too bright, falsely cheerful, even as leaves crisped and plants wilted.
Torian full-body flinched, because fuck,fuck, Amelia was not supposed to find her so fast, and in a perfect world her ex-captain wouldn’t be strolling through a curious crowd, armed to the teeth with knives and a shock stick andtwopistols, dressed in the brown synthetic leather jacket Torian had gifted her nine months ago when she thought Amelia might be her friend and damn, it was a nice thought to havefriends.
(Even after their ill-fated kiss and Torian’s subsequent demotion, Amelia kept wearing the jacket. That was very frustrating to Torian, both because it symbolized something that had already passed—and because it looked fuckinggoodon her.)
