I nodded. “I know that,” I agreed. “But Mace turned twenty-five over a year ago.”
His jaw beneath the trimmed beard rippled again. “I couldn’t just down tools and sprint here, no matter how much I wanted to.”
My heart gave a little squeeze. The two wolves were shifting their snouts from one to the other of us as we spoke. They could feel our emotions and would be puzzled by them.
“Reassure Darb,” I warned Dalton softly.
He put his hand out in a reflex motion, found Darb’s head and scratched it.
I did the same with Vara. “It doesn’t really matter what either of us intended, Dalton. Mace and a shipload of wildcatters are likely to be in serious trouble. That supersedes anything you and I might want.”
Dalton held his breath for a long moment, then let it out with a hard bellow. “I can’t argue with you. Mace is all I can think of properly right now. But Danny—”
I shook my head. “No. You’re doped and tired and stressed. Anything you say now will be colored by that. So don’t say it.”
Dalton let out his breath again and rolled his eyes. “Fiori slipped me something. No wonder I can’t think straight.” His shoulders straightened and I could almost feel his energy pick up. Just knowing it was a drug making him feel useless was helping.
“She did it because you needed it. Fiori knows what she’s doing,” I said. “But I told her not to give you anything else. I need you chilly and calm here on out.”
“I want me cold and calm,” Dalton muttered. He pushed his hands into the deep pockets of the heavy coat he wore—he hadn’t taken it off. “Will Lyssa help you?” There was a faint note of hope in his voice. He didn’t know Lyssa nearly as well as me. She had been an AI shipmind without a body, the last time he’d interacted with her. He had not been there during the dark days on Nijeliya when I had got to know Lyssa better.
“She will help,” I said firmly. “For some reason that escapes me, Lyssa feels she owes me a debt.”
“Half the universe feels that way,” Dalton muttered. His gaze met mine. “I keep thinking of Sam.”
“I know.” Sam was his first son and until Mace, his only child. Sam had died a long time ago, and far from here, and Dalton hadn’t learned that until years later. The wound would always be fresh.
He swallowed. “I don’t know how I…how do I deal with it, if Mace is gone, too?”
My heart ached for him. But I said with a snappy tone, “First, you don’t know what the fuck has happened to him. He and his shipmates could be on the surface, having a week-long party, completely unaware that their shipmind has stopped answering hails, and when we get there, they’ll blink drunkenly at us and wonder what all the fuss is about.” Wildcatters were risk-takers. They liked their parties as reckless as their ventures into unknown space.
Dalton pressed his lips together, suppressing a smile. “Oh, and I will kill him myself if that is all it is.”
I silently cheered at that small sign of spirit. “Second, if the news is bad, if something has happened to Mace, then you’ll deal with it the way we all do. You’re strong, Dalton. You know how to do it.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “A day at a time.”
“Or even an hour at a time. Or just the next minute. You breathe and wait for the minute to pass.”
He nodded.
“But I have no intention of letting you get to that point,” I assured him.
His smile had some of the same spirit in it. “You don’t, huh?”
“Nope.” I brushed that aside. “Let me reach out to Lyssa and ask her to step across the systems from wherever she is. Then we should eat, and we can talk.”
Dalton nodded. Then he tilted his head. “Hang on. What about Juliyana? I thought she was using the Lythion as her ship.”
“Stars, you are out of touch,” I replied, as the concierge panel gave the little three-tone trill announcing that the meal Fiori had ordered was at the door.
Dalton headed for the door. “Then, if Juliyana isn’t using the Lythion anymore, won’t you be yanking whoever is captain now out of their business?”
“Hardly,” I said, my tone dry. “Lyssa fired Juliyana five years ago. Since then, she’s been running the ship.”
Dalton glanced at me as he opened the door, startled. “A sweet little shipmind as her own captain? Doesn’t that scare any potential clients away?”
“Oh, you poor man,” I breathed. “I can’t wait for you to meet Lyssa again.”
—4—
Twenty-four hours later, I packed a jump bag and met Dalton and Fiori in front of docking bay one-thirty-three on the commercial hub. They’d kept Vara with them so I could move quickly and were drawing lots of attention as they stood in front of the big commercial doors of the bay. It was the middle of Melenia’s day and busy on the docks.
I hadn’t bothered trying to talk Fiori out of coming with us. In her own way, she was as stubborn as me. Or Dalton. Mace had been a challenge to deal with when he’d hit the terrible twos, as he’d acquired both their recalcitrant genes.
Besides, Lyssa in medical mode had her limitations. We might need a competent physician who could actually step off the ship. We might need any number of experts. I didn’t know what we were flying into.
I’d spent most of the night turning over the few facts Dalton could give me about the ship and its last location on the outer edges of known space. The location was on the literal edge of the Carina arm of the galaxy. When I had pulled up a stellar
