frustration he inspired in most onlookers, herself included. “Well, he won't be missed. It won't be long before everyone knows you're here though, with or without him flapping about it.”
“You're right. I'm glad we chose to land here. At the very least, I have Patrizia’s respect and she’ll help protect us if we can stay on her good side.”
“Oh boy. Well, I never did experiment in College,” Ayan commented with an exaggerated show of piqued interest. “This might be my opportunity.”
“I’m not sharing,” Jake said in a low, serious tone that sent a shiver up her spine.
She closed her eyes and simply enjoyed the massage for a few moments. His hands moved down her back, kneading as they travelled. A thought occurred to her then; “There won't be much point in hiding here any longer by tomorrow morning. You'll be moving about the moon making deals and forming ties without my help.”
“Disappointing?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you disappointed?”
“No, I was right out of my comfort zone today. Seeing the cities was amazing, but I couldn't enjoy it. Had too many things to do, and most of our problems don't have easy solutions.”
“Well, I hate to tell you, but you’re still going to be in the hot seat when you wake up tomorrow. I have to go into hiding. Multi-million credit bounties have reach, especially in ports like this. I don’t know how long I’ll have to hide either, so you’re going to be the representative of the crew for as long as we’re here, maybe longer. Even when the Triton gets back. We're going to need a home port, especially while we try to perform repairs.”
She let that sink in for a moment. Home port. “Here?”
“If we can get set up. We saw worse places even before the Eden virus broke out. Looks like they're over that here, on to rebuilding.”
There it was again, the years she knew little to nothing about. Those years in command of the Samson that helped shape Jake into the person he was as much as the memories he inherited from Jonas. She’d spent an entire night talking about those times with him and felt there was still so much she didn’t know. “I’m going to need your help, often. You have so much more experience out here, sometimes it feels like I’m a hapless tourist.”
“Your instincts are good. Don’t worry, you can make sure there’s always someone around. I won’t be able to be on comms with you all the time though, or be seen staying on the same ship. I’m going to have to blend in with some of the crew so people can’t pick me out, Stephanie and most of the Samson crew will be doing the same.”
“You know what would help, I think?”
“What’s that?”
“Tell me more about your time on the Samson. What was it like?”
His hands stopped half way on their way back to her shoulders. “That's a big question,” he replied quietly.
Ayan wouldn't let him escape it. She pulled her arms around her tightly and slid backwards, resting against his chest. “That's why I'm asking,” she whispered.
He stretched his legs out and got comfortable around her. The arms she'd drawn around her waist weren't just resting in place any longer, they were holding her. “Nothing stayed the same for long,” he whispered. “The ship always needed work, there was never enough time, or there was too much time. You know the routine of ‘hurry up and wait.’ We’d always be really busy in port then left with days in hyperspace. Crew came and went all the time. The longer the trip, the more the crew would get at each other, so I had to keep finding small jobs and bounties between the bigger ones so they'd have something to do other than stare at each other and get into each other's business.”
“So there was a lot of fighting aboard?”
“More during the first couple of years.”
“What did you do about it usually?”
“You can't really separate people for long on a ship like that, but I tried. Confined a few people to quarters a couple of times, but if I had to do that for two people, one of them would get a cot in the machinist's closet.”
Ayan couldn't help but chuckle a little. The mental picture of a crew member locked in a small, dark, greasy closet with a cot as punishment for misbehaving was unexpected, but she'd seen the inside of the Samson, and it fit. “I guess that's a bit too severe.”
“It was, but I still did it every once in a while. Stephanie locked someone in there once for bringing a grenade into Sarcost Port. Got her whole team held up in quarantine and I had to go pay the processing fees before we could do business.”
“There was a weapons restriction?”
“Oh, yeah, there was, and everyone was told about it before they left. There was no point in carrying anything but a sidearm anyway, Stephanie's team was only following a lead on a repo job to get a little shore time.”
“Who was the crewman who brought the grenade?”
Jake thought for a moment and nodded to himself. “Rooni, never got to know him. He was killed about two weeks later on the same job when we caught up with the Evening Crooner.”
“Did that happen a lot on repo jobs?”
“No, most repos were easy. We'd wait until the crew put into port and the ship was almost empty then use the manufacturer codes to take control of the security systems. Tracking the ships from system to system was usually harder than the takedown. The captain of the Evening Crooner had replaced half her systems though, and he was paranoid, so he never let more than a quarter of his crew leave the ship. When we thought we had control of his ship it was really a copy of the operating system installed on a computer with a receiver and the interactive manual.”
“So it looked like everything was normal.”
“Yup, he was a piece of work. Went away for nine years after we took his ship. I guess he really did have to stay on the move, he should have kept up with his payments. I always planned on borrowing that security system idea for the Samson, never got around to it though. Can't really hack into the Samson using her serial numbers and manufacturer codes anyway.”
“I guess paranoia was catching in your line of work.”
“Nothing paints a bullseye on your back like being freelance law enforcement. It was good money for us though, especially since we didn't stay in one place for long.”
“That's another part of hunting? Moving around a lot?” She intertwined her fingers with his heavier digits. Being there, in his arms, hearing about a way of life that was completely foreign to her as it was spoken in whispers, it was the kind of thing sharing she wanted with him ever since they met on Pandem.
“No, it's the hardest way to approach the business. If you're lucky you land somewhere and work the leads without anyone figuring out what you're up to. If you're unlucky everyone already knows who you are and what you're about, so whoever you're there for is already on their way off world. Most bounty hunters stay in one place for their entire careers, get to know the different law enforcement agencies, learn to work with other hunters and have a good lay of the land. Some worlds even have hunter syndicates. Makes hunting safer, especially when you can bring in more than one team and the syndicate makes sure everyone gets paid equally. That would have been better, settling into a nice, active solar system but I was looking for Alice.”
There was a heavy silence as she waited for him to go on, tried to think of something to say. The daughter of strange origins who she never met, who she wished she could know almost as much as she wanted to know Jake. His grief was still fresh, and she was the only one who knew its depth. “I'm sorry,” she whispered finally.
“It's all right.”
It wasn't, she knew. It wouldn't be for a long time, but she'd have to let him close the wound in his own time. All she could do was make herself available to him, make sure that he could trust that she would listen and not judge.
“I didn't have much to go on, but it was a purpose. Asking questions was second nature, and before long I learned how to find the right people, people who might have answers. The first crew of the Samson gave me a lot of trouble, especially since I tried making money by doing anything that came along. Hauling cargo, repairing satellites, claiming salvage, you name it. I kept on getting back to bounty hunting though, it was what I was best at. It wasn't my favourite kind of work, mind you. I ended up delivering a lot of good people to their accuser's doors,
