Her lover was gone, and Torian was my primary focus now. I withdrew from Colony 13’s system and gave her my entire processing power.
Time to lay on the charm.
CHAPTER 4
With little else to do, Torian pressed the button on her remote to enter her starship. The cargo ramp slid out, and she towed the food crate inside, feeling hollow and unbalanced. Everything with Amelia had been complicated, butthatconversation unfurled a whole new layer of confusion.
And now, they’d never get to resolve it.
There were other things to focus on now. With a grounding breath, Torian pushed the crate of food into the corner and turned toward the interior of her new ship.
The damp, earthy air was different enough to calm her nerves, new enough that optimism seeped back into her soul. Starship Day was a success, and now it was time to explore her new vessel properly.
“First thing,” Torian said to no one, dropping her duffel bag on the mossy floor, “I need to figure out how to seal these doors.”
No one had dared to approach Torian with Amelia there, but now that she’d left, Torian was alone… and a starship staffed by one half-assed ex–security guard would be an easy target. This wasn’t a Fleet vessel, and after that conversation, astute observers would know it. That also made it asafetarget.
Plus, it was hard to take a ship for a joyride when the front door was wide open.
“Is there a switch…?” Torian mused, scouring the immediate area. But the moment she said that, a panel on the wall illuminated automatically.
Which was… weird.
The instructions to power on the starship in the impound lot had seemed random, too. Was the ship voice-activated? If so, how did it know human languages? There wasn’t a universal one—every human spoke whatever they were raised with, but translators over their ears shifted conversations into something everyone could understand.
An alien ship, especially an ancient one, shouldn’t have access to those languages.
Unless it was smart enough tolearnthe languages at the impound lot.
Torian cautiously approached the panel. Holographic words unfurled. Before her eyes, the alien language translated into something she could read—and a series of commands for the ship appeared.
So, ithadlearned. Did aliens use AI like humans did? Torian wasn’t sure what to expect here.
Focus. One section said:Cargo Bay Doors. Torian tappedClose, and the big double doors slid shut. It was a smooth motion, soundless, and they locked together securely. A follow-up request appeared on the panel:Activate energy barrier?
An energy barrier. It shouldn’t be a surprise; the ship lacked an airlock, so it had to have something in its place. But a rush of excitement swept through Torian anyway. For twenty ionite bars, she’d bought technology some humans dreamed of examining.
Well… nerds like her, anyway.
She tapped an affirmative, and instantly, a blue energy barrier appeared over the cargo bay doors, creating a perfect seal. “Oh, wow,” Torian breathed, inspecting the edges of it. But it was seamless, sliding right through the moss growing on the metal walls.
With a shield like this, Torian could open the cargo bay doors in a vacuum and still have a safe view of the stars. It was more than most human pilots could claim.
“Incredible.” Torian laughed, giddy, and checked the panel again. The rest of it seemed self-explanatory: a pressurization gauge, a temperature level, oxygen numbers. The air here waspleasantly warm and slightly humid, which was shocking. Humidity was a distant dream in space.
Torian left the panel to meticulously explore the rest of the small ship. She started in the cargo bay, as any good ex-scrap would—butthisship didn’t appear to have double walls with hidden entrances. (Double walls weren’t needed on Colony 13, the Fleet’s not-so-secret headquarters. But other space stations had enforcement and crackdowns, and pirating in space was always a possibility. Rival smuggling syndicates never hesitated to steal cargo if they had the chance.)
But this… this was a normal cargo bay, for a non-smuggling crew.
After seven years in the Fleet, that was weird… and oddly refreshing.
The hoverpads were in various states of disrepair, so she spent a few moments moving the haphazard crates to magnet holders along the back wall, instead. The food crate was stored near the front of the pile, easily accessed but still secured. Better for space travel if everything big was bolted down, after all.
She slid the small hoverpads—silver discs with complex electronics inside—in an empty storage box beside the stairs. Ideally, she’d fix them, but that depended on their base technology.
After that, Torian climbed the staircase to the main living room, a round space framed with a couch and kitchenette. Her eyes caught the windows on this starship—they still didn’tlooklike glass, and it piqued Torian’s curiosity. From the exterior, these windows had appeared opaque again, but inside she could see through the tinting.
One-way glass? Or some kind of alien substitute?
