“Don’t sweat it, Cutter.” Case sounded almost impatient, and I realized she’d pulled the thought out of my head.
“Not you, too?”
Case took Mack’s seat and gestured at the seat Mack usually had me take.
“Captain’s privilege…or so Abby says.”
I decided Abby knew far too much about the way Mack ran his ship, and wondered where she was getting her information.
“Trade secret, sweetie.”
Case pulled our attention back to the problem at hand, and Abby laid out most of what she’d found by ransacking her opponent’s connections. Not all of those shapes had been programs launched in the site’s defense. Some of them had been real people.
“They’ll live,” Abby told me. “I don’t kill lackeys.”
She highlighted the message and corporate structure.
“Not when I know who the real culprit is.”
Case cleared her throat, and I got the impression Mack’s assassin-pilot, wanted Abby to come clean.
“Fine. I did kill one. That kind of predator shouldn’t be tolerated, not even if he’s small and unimportant. And I sent Odyssey to fetch his toys before his friends got wind he was out of the picture.”
“Toys?”
“People had debts,” Case said. “Some of them paid with whatever they had to hand—their children, if they didn’t hide them fast enough. We got them out. Odyssey will put them back together.”
“And Odyssey and Dasojin will go hunting,” Abby declared. “There are enough predators in the universe, without humans preying on what they should protect.”
“Easy, girl,” Case said. “It’s done, we’re fixing it, and we have much bigger fish to fry.”
She tapped the table, but in my head, she tapped the picture of Terrence Costoganzi.
“Him, for example. We’re going to have to take him out of the equation.”
“We can’t kill him!” The thought of cold-bloodedly murdering a man just because he’d contracted a hit on us, didn’t seem right, and Case rolled her eyes at the ceiling.
“I suppose you’re going to do a Mack on me, and tell me we have to give him the chance to withdraw the contract on his own.”
Mack would ask that?
“Kid, that man is a white knight in black armor. He just can’t forget where he came from, or accept that the universe doesn’t work the way he wants it to.”
“But he keeps you on board.” I hesitated, then added, “and Stepyan.”
“Yes, he does,” Stepyan said, coming into the mess, and I realized Case must have had him copied in on the conversation from the start, “but he put Case in charge of keeping the crew safe, and you put me in charge of seeing that what was needed got done.”
The hardness I remembered noticing on our first meeting was out on display for everyone to see. Anyone would have thought we were at war… Oh, wait…
“But…”
Stepyan held up a hand, and his face softened.
“He knew what he was doing when he brought us on board, kid. He knew there would be times when he could not bring himself to do what needed to be done—and we accepted that there would be times when he would keep us leashed.”
He looked around the mess, and then back to me.
“In return, we keep the ship safe, and he keeps us…out of sight and out of mind. Right now, he’s not here to hold the leash, and he knew what he was doing when he put Case in charge.”
The smile he shot me was not a smile, and his expression went back to being harder than I’d ever seen it. The pleasant smile he’d stuck on didn’t fool me for a second—and would never be enough to mask the glacial look in his eyes.
“The only question we have is whether you can do what you need to do to break Mack free, while we do what we need to do to keep his people safe.”
“Eh hem.” Abby cleared her throat, drawing Stepyan’s attention. “That’s all very well and good, but we first need to make sure we have the right person. Right now, we only have evidence that two of his companies are involved. I would hate to take him out, if it’s merely an over-ambitious underling.”
Stepyan stared at the intercom, and then lowered his chin in a single nod.
“You have a point. Your plan?”
“Cutter and I go to Depredides and see if the source is from inside Sharovan or located elsewhere. We already know one of Sharovan’s officers issued the contract at Mishamblin’s request, but we don’t know how far up the chain of command he went, before he issued the contract. We don’t know if he issued it on his own, or under instruction. All we know is that the Star Shadows took it. We’ll see how far the request went, before we let you loose on the tycoon.”
Stepyan looked over at Case, and I caught the understanding that passed between them. It was a look that reminded me far too much of Delight. As if they heard that thought, they tilted their heads and looked over at me.
“Delight would already be on her way to kill the man. We, at least, are giving you the chance to verify the target.”
The idea that Delight would go after a target without verification was mildly disturbing, but Case shook her head.
“She’d be verifying while hunting, ensuring the capture while deciding if the kill was needed. We’re just being polite.”
Oh, they were, were they?
Looking at them, I was kinda glad they had to stay with the ship. The thought of them roaming the universe in pursuit of unknown targets was frightening—especially since I wasn’t sure of Costoganzi’s guilt.
“Neither are we,” Case said, “but I’m getting to the point where I’d rather shoot first and ask later, because, once the wolves catch up with us, there won’t be time for questions. Only the contract—and none of us are going to be allowed to walk away from that.”
I nodded, and changed the subject.
“How did the jump go?”
“We’re in orbit,” she said. “I got Abs to help bring in the Marie. It’s how you almost got yourself killed. We took
