“Don’t worry about it,” Tristan said. “Let’s get that shit bandaged up.”
“Thank you,” Aden said to Henry.
“For what?”
“For not trying to take his head off. I don’t think he was talking big. He absolutely meant it.”
“Oh, I know he was,” Henry replied. He got out of his chair and looked at the atrium entrance for a moment. Then he flexed his hands and balled them into fists.
“How’d you know?” Aden asked.
“He walked up to six people and started talking about killing them and taking their ship,” Henry said. “Anyone who does that is either insane or really sure of their skill. And that man wasn’t insane.”
“Ceramic blades,” Tristan said. “Only two kinds of people really use those. Cooks who are too lazy to sharpen their steel every day. And professionals.”
Aden didn’t have to ask what sort of profession Tristan meant.
“Well, he didn’t look like a fucking cook to me,” Maya growled.
“We should split up,” Aden said a little while later, after Tristan had patched up Maya in the sanitary suite and gotten everyone a round of expensive Rhodian whisky. “Junk our comtabs and get new ones. Rent different rooms every night. Make it hard for them to track us.”
Captain Decker shook her head.
“We’re better off staying in a group. Watch each other’s backs. Switching comtabs won’t do us any good without different ID passes to link to them.”
She tilted her glass and watched as the liquid’s surface changed its angle as well, beholden to the gravity of the planet.
“We don’t have many options here. Rhodia is going to grab us as soon as we dock there. Gretia is blockaded—not that I want to go to that shithole anyway. We can’t go to Hades because we don’t have the shielding for the approach. We’d just toast the ship and give ourselves a radiation overdose. That leaves us with Pallas and Oceana.”
“We’ll have a hard time making our operating budget with Oceana-to-Acheron runs,” Tristan said.
“Or we stay on Acheron for now,” Tess suggested.
Henry shook his head. “With the docking fees and everything else, we’ll be burning up our operating budget inside of a month.”
They mulled the situation while sipping the whisky Tristan had provided. On the floor underneath Maya’s chair, Aden noticed a few drops of blood that had dripped from Maya’s side onto the Alon, where they had formed an irregular little pool of crimson.
I can still go my own way, he thought. Ditch the comtab, disappear in the crowd, get passage to Oceana or Hades. I have enough in my ledger to stay somewhere for a year, maybe two if I live cheaply.
But then what? And how many nights would I spend awake, looking at the ceiling and wondering what’s happening with the rest of them?
“The way I see it, we have two good options,” Decker said. “Because turning over the ship to these people isn’t one. We either head home to Oceana and lay low for a while. Or we go to the Rhodies, turn over the ship to them, and try our luck with their legal process.”
“That sounds like one good option and one sure way to spend the next ten years in a Rhodian prison,” Tristan grumbled. He looked at Maya.
“You could ditch us,” he said. “Take a long leave of absence. This is your home planet, after all. You’d be safer here. We’ll make for Oceana and hole up somewhere for a while.”
“Not likely,” Maya said. “I can’t leave. None of you can fly the ship for shit.”
That got the first chuckle out of them since Milo had appeared next to Maya at their table.
“We have two weeks to figure it out,” Decker said. “But Maya isn’t bailing on us, and none of you are asking to cash out right now and get the hell away from this mess. So whatever we do next, it looks like we will do it together.”
The sun was coming up by the time they left the bar and walked out into the plaza below. The sky on the other side of the dome was a roiling sea of orange and red currents, constantly intermixing and flowing apart again, an endless kaleidoscope of atmospheric fury. The streets were as busy as they had been any other time of day. The encounter in the bar felt almost surreal to Aden in the daylight, like a bad dream after one too many glasses of liquor, but the bloodstain on the side of Maya’s flight suit served to anchor the event back in reality when he glanced at her.
“Well, crap,” Tristan said. “We’re on two shit lists now. The Rhodies and whatever fucking gunrunner cartel sent that prick with the knives. This will be an interesting month.”
“Your idea of ‘interesting’ doesn’t really overlap with mine,” Henry said.
Aden could tell by the swaying and the unsteady gaits that all of them were still more than just a little drunk, even Maya, who usually nursed a single beer all evening.
“It was a pretty good evening, though,” Tess said. “I mean, except for the part with the knives and the blood and the death threats.” She was walking next to Aden and using him for balance control by holding on to his arm, and he found that he didn’t mind at all. He knew that if they had ended up in a fight, he would have jumped in front of her, or Maya, or any other member of the crew without hesitation.
And I’ve only been with them for three months, he thought. Until this moment, I never would have thought about taking a knife for anyone except Solveig.
He thought of his sister, who was just a few kilometers away, probably asleep in her hotel suite. The fates had deposited them both here in the same city at the same time. If she couldn’t go back to Gretia at the end of her negotiations, maybe it meant they’d be able to
