Author: Rachel Bach

The whole thing was too surreal to be believed. I was trying to figure out if I was dreaming again when the captain grabbed my arm so hard I yelped.

“Get in the ship,” Caldswell said.

The command was absolute, and I was moving before I thought to argue, scrambling to gather the Lady’s pieces. Rashid moved to help me a few seconds later, and we soon had my suit together. The captain didn’t move the whole time.

Only when we were both safe inside the cargo bay did Caldswell follow us, which meant I didn’t see his huge pearl-handled disrupter pistol until he was at the top of the ramp. For the second time in as many minutes, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. The gun in the captain’s hand was the same gun he’d given the cook in the bunker. The gun from my dream.

I was still staring dumbfounded when the sound of someone pulling a gun snapped me back to the fight. Rashid had his anti-armor pistol out and was aiming it at the thing across the field to cover the captain’s retreat. I was pretty sure there was no way he could hit the thing from this distance with a sidearm, but before he could even try, the black monster vanished into the dark.

Without my suit, I didn’t have sensors, so I looked at Rashid. My new partner already had his goggles up. He swept across the field, then pushed them down again with a shake of his head. “Gone,” he said quietly. “Like a ghost.”

We both looked at Caldswell then, but the captain was already mashing the button to close up the cargo bay with the butt of his gun. As the door slid down, Caldswell yanked out his com and started for the stairs. “Basil,” he barked. “Get us out of here.”

“Yes, captain,” Basil said, his whistling voice all business.

I wasn’t so calm. “What about them?” I shouted, pointing at the downed HVFP suits as I ran after the captain. “We need to search the bodies at least. Find out why—”

“We’re not investigators,” Caldswell snapped, holstering his gun. “We’re taking our cargo and getting out of here. You each get your combat bonus, and that’s the last I want to hear on the subject. Understood?”

I opened my mouth to say like hell that was the end of this, but Rashid beat me to the punch.

“It will be hard to just let go of being attacked by such a high-grade military team,” he said smoothly. “But my memory is easily addled by large numbers. If the combat bonus was increased, doubled perhaps, it might be enough to put all of this out of my mind.”

I turned on him, horrified. “Are you seriously trying to extort—”

“Done,” Caldswell, pausing at the lounge door just long enough to point his glare at me. “Morris?”

I shrank under the captain’s gaze. If looks could kill, I’d have been sliced to ribbons by this point. But I wasn’t dead yet, and a meek nod made sure I stayed that way.

“Good,” Caldswell said. “Take care of your suit and meet me downstairs in five minutes. As for you,” he turned back to Rashid, “your memory better stay addled.”

Rashid’s smile was cool as ever. “It is already forgotten, sir.”

I was too flabbergasted to do more than stare as Caldswell nodded and marched into the lounge. But while I was dumbly watching the captain walk around the corner, I noticed the cook standing just inside the lounge door. He didn’t look at me, just stepped into place behind Caldswell like he’d been waiting for the captain to come up. But as he turned, I saw that he also had a gun in his lowered hand. A huge pearl-handled disrupter pistol that was almost a twin of Caldswell’s.

“Miss Morris?”

I looked over to see Rashid holding the pieces of my Lady in his arms. “Shall we go? The captain sounds impatient.”

I didn’t honor that with a reply, just turned on my heel and stomped up the stairs.

CHAPTER 5

I had Rashid put the Lady’s pieces on my bunk before sending him off to lash in for launch. It was a bit late—Basil was already pushing the engines—but he did as I said without complaint. I held on to my bunk for the worst of the initial thrust, but the second the gravity evened out, I was on the floor fitting my suit into her case.

Thankfully, it looked like the Lady was only shorted out. I ran a full diagnostic anyway, checking each system before I sealed my suit into her case to let the nano-repair do its work. Once I’d finished everything that could safely be called taking care of my suit, I headed down the hall to meet my fate.

Basil must have lit a fire under someone, because the jump flash washed over the ship before I’d reached the spiral stair to the Fool’s lower deck. There was no destination announcement, not even a notice of how long we’d be in. But while the quick jump meant whoever had attacked us wouldn’t be able to follow, it made me feel worse rather than better. There was nowhere to escape in hyperspace, and I was suddenly feeling very trapped.

I wasn’t ready to face Caldswell. I needed more time—time to figure out what that monster I’d seen across the field really was, time to figure out where I could have seen the captain’s gun other than in my dream. Most of all, I needed time to sort out what was real and what wasn’t, because with the glowing bugs floating ahead of me down the hall, I was no longer sure of anything. But needing gets you nothing, and though I hadn’t felt like much of one lately, I was still a merc and this was still my job. My captain had ordered me to appear, so I squared my shoulders and marched up to his door.

It opened on the first knock, and I stepped inside to see Caldswell waiting at the little table by his window just like before. This time, though, there was a tiny glowing bug crawling up the arm of his jacket. I did my best not to look at it as I stopped at parade rest like I was back in the army.

Caldswell gave me a long look and waved at the couch across from him. “Sit down, Morris.”

I obeyed. The little glowing bug scurried away when I got close, hopping off the captain’s arm to land on the wall behind him. The sudden movement caught my eye, which was why I didn’t see the cook until I was trapped.

He was leaning on the frame of Ren’s bedroom door, not looking at me as pointedly as I had avoided the bug. For an irrational moment, that actually pissed me off. He’d been the one who’d put his head on my shoulder, and now he didn’t want to look at me? Fortunately, the revulsion picked that moment to kick in, knocking some sense back into me, and I jerked my eyes away, looking at the captain’s daughter instead.

Ren was sitting on her bed, staring blankly down at her feet. For a moment, seeing her sparked a swell of panic, and I grit my teeth. Was there nowhere safe to put my eyes? Fortunately, the panic eased when I realized that this Ren hadn’t even noticed me. That, at least, was normal.

“Morris.”

I turned back to the captain with a silent curse. Caldswell was glaring daggers at me, and justifiably so. Spacing out when you were supposed to be reporting in was not a wise career move. “Sorry, sir,” I said, giving him my full attention.

Caldswell waved my apology away. “Do you know why I called you here?”

I could think of a lot of reasons, but only one seemed safe. “Because of Rashid?”

Caldswell’s laugh surprised me. “Hardly,” the captain said. “I’ve been employing mercenaries longer than you’ve been alive. If I balked every time I had to bribe one into keeping his mouth shut, I wouldn’t be in business. I actually like him better now that I’ve seen him acting like the usual money-grubbing merc.”

I took a deep breath. So much for safe. “With all due respect, sir,” I said cautiously, “if you’re not mad about that, why am I here?”

Caldswell grabbed something off the couch beside him and put it on the table. It landed with a plastic clack, and when he moved his hand, I saw it was one of the HVFP team’s lightning guns. “Do you know what that is?”

“It’s a charge thrower,” I replied. “Nonlethal anti-armor weapon.”

“And why do you think a military team would attack my ship with nonlethal anti-armor weapons?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it almost immediately. I’d been so caught up in the black-scaled monster and Caldswell’s disrupter pistol, I hadn’t actually gotten a chance to think through the attack itself yet. But when he put it like that, the answer seemed pretty obvious.

“They were after me,” I said, far more calmly than I felt.

The captain nodded. “You were the only target those guns would be effective against, and they must have wanted you alive. Otherwise, it would have been much easier to just shoot you and be done with it.”

I disagreed. The fact that I was still alive after so many combat tours was a testament to exactly how hard it is to “just shoot me and be done with it.” Ego aside, though, I understood what the captain was saying; what I didn’t get was why.

“Why me?” I asked. “I mean, it makes sense to take down the most dangerous target first, but why attack the Fool at all? If they wanted ground nuts, there’s a warehouse just down the road that doesn’t have two mercenaries guarding it.”

Caldswell leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. “Have you remembered anything from the attack on Falcon Thirty-Four yet?”

I wanted to ask him why the hell that mattered, but all I said was, “No sir.”

The captain sighed. “I don’t know exactly what happened tonight,” he said. “But I’m going to make some calls and see if I can’t find out. In the meanwhile, I’m confining you to the ship.”

“What?” I said, horrified.

“Just until I get some leads in,” Caldswell assured me. “You’ll still get on-planet pay, but shore leave and other excursions are out of the question until…”

The captain was still talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore. My upset at being put under house arrest had been momentarily derailed by the sight I’d just caught out of the corner of my eye.

Behind the captain, I could see through the open door into Ren’s room. She hadn’t moved the entire time I’d been here, so when she did, it caught my attention, but it was what she was doing that kept it. While Caldswell and I had been discussing the attack, the little glowing bug had made its way over to Ren’s bed. It had been gracefully bobbing on the sheet beside her when Ren’s hand shot out and grabbed the bug midhop.

She hadn’t even taken her eyes off the floor. Her hand had snatched the bug out of the air blind, crushing it so fast my breath caught before I remembered that the glowing bugs moved through bodies as easily as they moved through walls. But as I was waiting for the bug to drift out of her clenched hand, a flash of light went off like a spark inside her fist. It was so faint and fast I never would have caught it if I hadn’t been staring straight at her. But I was, and now that I’d seen it, I couldn’t help cringing, especially when Ren’s eyes slid over to look at me. With a small smile that cut me to the bone, she opened her fist to show me the empty space where the little bug had—

“Morris!”

I jumped and looked over to see Caldswell staring at me like I’d lost my mind. The cook had pushed off the wall as well, and though I didn’t dare look at his face, I could feel his eyes boring into me. Behind him, Ren was staring at her feet again like nothing had happened.

Caldswell snapped his fingers in front of my face, and I looked back to him at once, blushing furiously. “Sorry, sir,” I said quickly. “I’ll stay on the ship.”

The captain sat back and fixed me with a searching look, and I started scrambling to come up with an excuse for my distracted behavior that didn’t involve glowing bugs. In the end, though, it wasn’t necessary, because Caldswell just picked up where he’d left off.

“As I was saying, we’ll be doing a series of short jumps to be sure we weren’t followed. After that, I’m putting us in at one of the aeon commerce stations so I can try getting to the bottom of what happened on Ample. I won’t need you back on duty for another three hours, so go get some rest. That’s an order.”