I felt the shift in Mack’s head when he decided not to explain, felt a barrier go up between us, as though he struggled for distance. Whether for me or for him, I didn’t know...and I wasn’t going to pry. The man had a right to his privacy.
“Damn right, the man does,” he said, and Tens groaned.
“Seriously? You two really need to sort yourselves out.”
We both glared at him, and then I threw up my hands, and headed out.
“I’ve got some research to do,” I said. “I’ll look into the Wolf Wars, and what sort of shit was flying around back in the day.”
Tens focused.
“And I’ll see if I can find us a reason to pay Alpha Nine a visit, given what the two of you did the last time you were allowed on the planet.”
I wondered if we’d ever be able to live that down, and then decided the answer was probably no.
“You do know they might not let you back, right?”
Yeah, I knew that. I also knew Tens was more than capable of finding a way around it, if he wanted to badly enough. I wondered what it would take to make him want it that badly. Another date with Abby, perhaps?
“Don’t go there, Cutter. Not ever.”
And I got the impression that going there might be a really bad idea.
“I’ll haul your ass out of the computer come training,” Mack said, which reminded me that I still had sparring and time on the range to look forward to.
If I was lucky, he wouldn’t let our pet assassins loose on my ass.
Given that was going to curtail my research time a bit more than I wanted, I hauled ass out of there and headed to the Rec Center.
2—Three Rounds with Tens
The Rec room was rarely quiet. This time, we’d had a bit more down time than usual, and it was pretty busy. I waved away challenges in this sim or that, stopped to check in on Rohan, our other pilot and tech-head, and Cascade, the big mutt that stuck to his side.
“How’s it going?” I asked, and Rohan snorted.
“We don’t find something to do, soon, and I’m gonna find some mischief,” he said.
Well, that brought me up short.
“You what?”
He smirked.
“You heard.”
I reached up and poked him in the chest. Damn, the boy had grown some since I was last paying attention.
“You can come to training with me,” I said, and he shook his head.
“Nah, the old man has me booked solid, later.”
“Another time, then,” I said, wondering how Tens would take being called ‘the old man’, as I headed for a computer cubicle.
“I’ll kick the little rat’s ass,” Tens said, and was gone as quickly as he’d appeared in my head.
Whatever, right?
I booted up the computer, hooked in with the implant, and then figured I should be running this from somewhere more secure, and logged out, again. Another minute later, and I was sitting in a locked booth, logged into a terminal isolated from the Recreation Center, as well as the rest of the ship.
Wolf Wars, I thought, and riffled through the search results.
There was a lot of stuff. Maybe I needed to narrow it, and I meant by a lot. I added ‘Alpha Nine’, and the results almost vanished. I wondered what was hidden on the dark side of the galactic net, and started at the top of the list. There’d have to be something interesting, right?
Nope. Nada. Nothing. Zip. And zilch.
The main reference I found was that the Wolf Wars mainly bypassed Alpha Nine, except for both sides bombarding the shit out of it as they passed.
Oh. That was what the boys had meant when they said anything would be buried deep. Stuff that got used in those wars? Yeah, it kinda had the effect of shifting continental plates and generally disrupting the way the surface formed and fit together. Talk about your extreme makeover.
Well, that was going to complicate things.
I still had a whole pile of nothing when Mack pulled me out of the booth. And I’d thought I was safe once I’d locked the place down. Turns out Mack had made sure he didn’t get locked out of any part of his ship.
“What?” I asked, when he appeared beside me in a shadier-than-advisable auction room.
“Training,” he said. “You’re late.”
“Lost track of the time.”
In truth some of the spaces I’d found in the Underweb had been downright interesting, and some of the prices being offered for leads on Wolf artefacts explained why we were going to chase this rumor to its roots. It also meant that places where such artefacts were found were always on the hunt for leads to more.
It was good to see Tens materialize right beside us—not so good to see him roll his eyes, as he laid a digital hand on our net constructs.
“You’re both a pair of idiots,” he said, and yanked us right back to the ship, his real-time body yanking the connection as soon as Mack and I had arrived back in our heads.
He turned to me.
“You are banned from the Underweb unless Rohan or I are riding shotgun,” and then he’d stalked back out of the booth. “Rohan!”
From the sounds of it, the boy was in for a pretty tough training session. I hope he didn’t hold it against me. I looked at Mack, suddenly aware of just how close he was standing—not like he could avoid it; the booth was pretty damn small. Still, I could feel the heat of him, and it was a bother.
“A bother, huh?”
The man was not amused. He reached out and grabbed my earlobe.
“Let’s go see how much of a bother I can be on the training mats.”
“Why wait for the mats?” I asked, and drove my elbow hard and fast into his ribs.
Grab my ear, would he? Well, I wasn’t having that. I twisted out of his grip, hooked a foot around his ankle and shoved him, hard, in the chest. He
