“Deal.” The owner spat on his palm and stuck out his hand.
Speaking of worm suck… Who knew what kind of viruses were lurking in that dirty saliva?
“Shake hands with the man, Jelena,” Erick said. “It’s your family’s business and their account that’ll be paying for the ship.”
Jelena stuck her tongue out at him, but she clasped hands with Yun.
“Here’re the digits of one of my accounts,” Yun said, flicking open a holodisplay on a netdisc and tossing it to her. “I’m going to fix my leg, and I’ll find the papers.” He glanced at the sky. “Quickly.”
“This isn’t the name you gave us,” Jelena observed.
“Nope, and it’s not the name on the title and registration, either.” He winked as he hobbled away, still leaning on Erick’s staff. “Come on, Woofus.”
“That went well,” Jelena said when she and Erick were alone.
He looked around at the torn-up, crate-littered ground outside, and the smoke still wafting out of engineering. “Well?”
“You got to look at an engine. And you didn’t get eaten by a snake. Weren’t those the two goals for the day that you mentioned?”
“I don’t think those were my exact words.”
“I’m broadening your range, that’s all.” She waved airily, then lay down on the ramp, stretching out her arms as if to claim it all for herself.
“You’re an odd girl, Jelena.”
Woofus trotted back through the cargo hold on his short legs and curled up under her armpit.
“I don’t know what you mean, Erick.”
He hoped a giant snake didn’t slither up to join them.
Epilogue
The engine was a mess. All of engineering was a mess. No, the entire ship was a mess.
Erick didn’t know where to start. There were some tools in dented cabinets, and he would have loved to fix up the ship with nothing more than those battered hammers and screwdrivers, but he definitely needed his toolboxes from the Star Nomad. Not to mention twenty thousand tindarks in replacement parts. He didn’t particularly want to show up at the Nomad, or back in town at all, until Jelena explained this craziness. And how it had resulted in a huge amount of money being shifted out of her family’s business bank account far earlier than her parents had anticipated.
“Erick?” Jelena called from the cargo hold, or perhaps from outside the freighter.
She’d been helping Yun bandage his wounds, and Erick had heard the roar of a thrust bike a minute before.
“We have visitors coming,” she added.
Grimacing, Erick left the charred, shrapnel-filled engine room. He could imagine all manner of visitors coming to see them, including the local authorities, robots hunting for their missing thrust bikes, and Alliance representatives searching for their cargo—and their missing smuggler.
“Oh, it’s even worse,” Erick said as he joined Jelena on the cargo ramp and saw who was coming.
She was looking toward the nearest dune as a hovercraft sailed down the side of it. Two imposing figures stood inside the open-air craft, a man in crimson combat armor carrying a huge rifle and a man in a black Starseer robe carrying a staff with golden runes glowing on the surface. The unlikely couple appeared posed to jump into battle at any second.
“Well,” Jelena said, glancing toward the dune in the other direction—had Yun headed off that way? “They were going to have to be told about all of this eventually.”
“True, but I was envisioning us triumphantly returning by flying our new ship to the docks with you doing a few lazy loops over the Nomad before we landed.”
“You know I was supposed to be back by dinner, right?” Jelena looked skeptically into the interior of the ship as the hovercraft drew closer.
“I didn’t say my envisioning was practical.”
The hovercraft stopped at the base of the ramp, and Leonidas leaped onto it, his crimson armor gleaming in the afternoon sun. He removed his helmet as Stanislav, Erick’s tutor and Jelena’s grandfather, floated out of the craft, as if he, too, had hover engines and fans to keep him aloft. The breeze pushed back the hood of his black robe.
Leonidas, his short hair tousled from the time under his helmet, gazed very dryly at Jelena.
“Hi, Dad. What brings you out here?” She waved at him and also at her grandfather.
“Stanislav sensed that you were in trouble.” Leonidas considered the battered hull of the freighter and the soot-stained interior, and Erick doubted anything he saw changed his assumptions about trouble.
“In trouble?” Jelena’s brow wrinkled, and she looked to Erick. “I don’t think we were ever truly in trouble.”
Erick disagreed, remembering all too well how much maintaining that barrier had drained him, but he said, “Making trouble might be the more correct term.”
“Oh, I assumed that,” Leonidas said. “Especially when the robot on the docks refused to rent bikes to us for the trip out here. Apparently, we’d already opened an account at its kiosk, and two bikes had been destroyed, thus rendering us in arrears. Imagine my surprise. We’ve only been on the planet for six hours, and we’re already in arrears for something.”
His dry expression had grown faintly exasperated, or was that irritated, and Leonidas frowned at Erick, as if he should have done something to stop Jelena from renting bikes on the family business account.
Erick lifted his hands. It was true he was the older and supposedly more mature one, but Jelena had a mind of her own. And access to the business account. He was merely an employee. How had that robot learned about the state of those bikes so quickly, anyway?
Jelena waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll take care of that. We acquired four other thrust bikes, so we can trade as many as needed to the robot to settle the account. And we bought a new ship.” She grinned and turned, spreading both arms wide to showcase their oh-so-impressive acquisition.
“You bought
