He was staring back—and looking very uncomfortable. The stars knew what the look on my face must have been like. I could only hope I hadn’t given offense—although who was I to kid myself. Of course, I’d given offense!
“Ease up, Cutter. You haven’t been out of it, that long.” Pritchard nudged the assemblage I’d made of the files and my memories. “Nice job, by the way.”
I felt my lips twitch at the compliment, and chose to focus on the orbital’s rep.
“This meeting,” I said. “I take it you had something you wanted to say.”
Delight elbowed me in the ribs, and the Marine sighed, taking the reins of the conversation before the representative could reply.
“Forgive us, Stationmaster; it has been a very long day, and Cutter is worried about her colleagues.”
“Ah, yes. These allies you claimed were kidnapped by the Star Shadows.”
Delight rested her hand on my thigh, digging her fingertips into the muscle just above the knee. I ignored her, and waited for the stationmaster to continue. When I did not interrupt, he did.
“The reports we received were that the crew of the Shady Marie were wanted because they blew Repair Dock Five at Rigel’s Banter.”
I was tired, the stims finally relinquishing their hold, and I was pretty sure I was about to pass out, soon. At least, I hoped I was about to pass out, because I didn’t want to start throwing up as bad as I thought I might need to. I squashed the nausea back down, and slapped the rep with a couple of hastily cobbled together chunks of memory.
The wolves boarding the ship, from files I’d pulled out of the Marie’s data banks, us off-loading the wolves, Mack surrendering through the blurry glass of a shuttle cockpit, wolf Marines materializing in the hangar, Case’s discovery of the ship being locked down, the contract—the seven suns blasted contract—illegally issued…
Delight stopped me, before I added more.
“He gets the picture,” she said, hitting cancel on the next post—and the rep across from us looked relieved.
I frowned. I didn’t want him to get the picture; I wanted him to get all the pictures. You know? Every. Single. One.
The rep was quick to fill the silence.
“We may have been hasty,” he said, but I didn’t really care.
I pushed back from the table and stood up, only now registering that Cascade was sitting between Pritchard and Delight. I didn’t have time for words; I was just hoping to get out of the room before I disgraced myself. Pritchard hadn’t been wrong when he’d said I’d hate the world when the stims wore off.
At least I got out the door, before I chucked my cookies. Mind you, the door hadn’t closed before I was doubled over and heaving so it wasn’t the perfect exit.
“Are you sure she’s okay?” drifted out of the door behind me, but Delight’s response was cut off as it closed.
I might have been mistaken, but she’d sounded like she was reassuring the orbital’s commander that I was perfectly fine, which just had to be wrong, because any fool with half an eye could see I was anything but. As if she could still hear me, Delight was in my head.
“We found Mack,” she said, like I should care while hurling every single item in my stomach into the corridor… the working-warship-busy corridor.
“Sorry, Wanderer, Siobhan. Sorry.”
The ship’s response was oddly comforting.
“You’re not the one who needs to be sorry,” she said, her tones pissed-off precise. “Now, go study the files. I’ll get this cleaned up.”
The files? What… Oh. Hey, these were really good.
“Cascade fetched them.”
“Cascade is a very good boy!”
“Wuff.”
He was also a very lucky boy, because these things looked like he’d ripped them out of a Star Shadow server, and those weren’t easy to access.
I read through the correspondence between Sharovan’s three conspirators and the wolves, noting when the messages stopped, and the source of the last missive from the security company employees. That one was different.
I pulled it open, and went through it.
“Beckett needs to see this.”
With that in mind, I copied the Sharovan-Wolf emails into a file for the investigator. He’d need those for evidence of their complicity, and to prove the rest of Sharovan remained unaware—the conspirators had added the difficulty of keeping their company unaware to their price. That should keep Odyssey on side with the Sharovan subsidiary, regardless of what the parent company had been up to.
That final letter also made one other thing clear— the wolves had set up a meeting with the Sharovan employees, and the employees had not returned from it. Simon had been left behind to keep tabs on the office while they were out. My guess was that, if he hadn’t died, he would have disappeared, as well.
Maybe the shots that had taken him out hadn’t been so accidental after all. Highlighting the name of the asteroid mining company that had been the meeting’s host, I set it aside for further research. Somewhere, a very distant physical me had stopped throwing up, and was kneeling motionless in front of a disgraceful lake, and, right now, I was going to leave her there, because the second I returned I’d start again.
I pushed back into the files. Maybe there were advantages to losing track of your physical surroundings when you were in the cyber realm.
The next file surprised me. It wasn’t a Star Shadow file. It was direct from Rohan. And Mack. And Tens. And it contained a link I could use to trace them. Several links, in fact. With multiple redundancies built in.
“Cutter. Keep my crew safe—or make sure they stay that way, if you’re coming after me yourself. We both know there’s no point in telling you not to, but my people come first. Get this message to Odyssey. Tell them Captain Andreus Mackenzie Star requests that the company, Odyssey, formerly known as Oberon, fulfils its alliance obligations
