Aiden took a calming breath and spoke up a bit louder than necessary. “Anyway, Ceras. We can resupply and refuel, and I may have a contact there. Someone who can apprise us of the local scene. And if she doesn't happen to be there, we're no strangers to digging up information.” He shot a long-suffering look Lana's way. “Who knows, maybe we'll even start with a bit of legitimate work until we can sniff out some targets to hit. Or at least, semi-legitimate.”
“Better be quick about finding them,” Belix grumbled. “I didn't sign up to be a trader, or even a smuggler. I'm a pirate . . . I want to profit off other people's hard work.”
“Privateer,” the captain said sternly. “We fight on behalf of the Preservationist cause, whether it's still around or not, and everything we do is aimed towards weakening the Movement so their regime can be toppled.”
The elfin woman rolled her eyes. “Of course. Thanks for reminding me,” she said sarcastically, then mimicked her twin in speaking audibly under her breath. “As if you ever let us forget.”
Barix raised his hand. “Question. We've got an entire Deek task force breathing down our necks. Even if we left them behind in our old stomping ground, isn't now a bad time to be strutting around out in the open, pretending to be legitimate? We can disguise our ship, even ourselves, but your DNA is on file. Which means the gunner's will also be raising red flags.”
“I don't leave DNA traces to be found,” Dax said. “That sort of carelessness would be disgraceful.”
“So that's one less person who might be a security risk,” the slight man said, unfazed. “Void, mine and my sister's biometrics will probably be drawing more attention than we'd like. And for all we know, even Lana might've been high profile before she was nabbed and wiped.”
“I doubt a gutter tramp snatched from the streets of a miserable hole like Helios 4 is wanted by anyone,” Belix said wryly. Then she winced and glanced at Lana. “No offense.”
Oh no, how could she possibly take offense to that? Although honestly, Lana didn't much care about her life before her mind was wiped. She felt like she probably should, but every time her thoughts strayed in that direction some part of her mind steered her away.
Maybe deep down, she wanted to focus on her new life. A better life, especially now that she had Dax. Even if it involved being a pirate and potentially getting killed.
Barix made an impatient sound. “I could gladly spend all day hypothesizing about Lana's miserable past, in all its lurid details. But I was making a point . . . manhunt, flaunting our ship at legit spaceports, bad idea?”
“Sometimes the best place to hide is out in the open,” Aiden said curtly. “Besides, Ali will make sure we're in the clear by hacking into the station and making sure we don't raise any red flags. And while she's at it, she can pick up a lot of useful information we can use going forward.” He turned to his companion. “Speaking of which . . . why don't you reassure everyone that our anonymity is secure.”
The prototype adult companion, impossibly beautiful with her dark blue eyes, long, night black hair, and luscious curves, stood and moved gracefully to join the captain inside the hologram. “Well first things first,” she reported, “I was surprised to confirm the Captain's suspicion that we'd picked up some kind of virus or backdoor. An incredibly sophisticated one, probably an AI . . . it didn't even leave any footprints, only the most subtle hints of its presence that I had to scour the ship's computer to find.”
“How is that reassuring us about our anonymity?” Barix demanded.
“Looks like the incredible sex robot isn't perfect after all,” Belix agreed, more spitefully than she'd probably intended. Then again, knowing her maybe not.
The companion didn't respond to the taunt, of course. “Since I was barely able to discover it was even there, I have no way of telling what it did. But I think it's safe to assume that it probably sent sensitive information about us to the Deek task force, then wiped itself. That weird burst of noise from the Vindicator right before we jumped was probably a trigger for it.”
“And moving forward?” Aiden asked. “It's no longer a threat to us?”
Ali hesitated, which didn't seem like a good sign to Lana. “Normally I'd say with 99.9% confidence that if it existed on the computer at one point, it no longer does. However, before I discovered these traces of it I would've insisted with the same confidence that I could protect the ship's systems against anything.”
“In that case, we should operate under the assumption you can't, no offense,” the captain said grimly. “So we go back to the security measures we used before we got you.”
Everyone else was nodding, and even Dax had a thoughtful look as if he was planning ahead to what work needed to be done. Lana looked between them. “Care to explain, since that was before you “got” me, too?”
Aiden simply looked at her boyfriend, as if putting it on his broad shoulders, and Dax leaned closer to her. “We used to regularly wipe the ship's computer, isolated all comm activity when we were in an inhabited system so a virus or backdoor couldn't betray our location or information, hire expert hackers to do regular scrubs on information about us from local and allnet sources, the works.”
Lana frowned. “Couldn't you have protected the ship yourself?” As far as she knew, there wasn't anything the young man couldn't do.
Dax looked almost defensive as he replied, although even with as well as she knew him it was sometimes hard to tell. “Hacking is a bit different from most other skills. It's, ah, dynamic. I could've been encoded with all the knowledge about hacking that had ever been recorded throughout history, and it would still have only
