The link was gone before I had time to go looking for Delight. Apparently, that girl could make nice with a pissed-off starship, chair a meeting with an irritated orbital chief, and ride shotgun in my head.
“Amongst other things,” she added, and was gone.
Apparently, that girl’s resources also had their limits.
Which reminded me that hiding in my implant was only going to last for so long before the simple biological reaction to whatever they’d given me took over and hauled my mental ass right back to the real world.
“Not right now, it’s not,” Pritchard murmured. In my head. Taking a fast copy of every file Cascade had brought, and stowing the others in a ‘Read Later’ file, before forwarding Beckett the file marked with his name, and Abby a private message from Tens that I hadn’t got to opening yet.
“And nor will you,” Abs told me, spiriting the message away. “Give the dog a hug. He’s missing his boy.”
He was?
I reached out to hug Cascade, and Pritchard eased me out of my own head.
“You need to be here for this.”
I did?
Have to admit, the first thing I noticed was Cascade leaning hard up against me. The second thing was the sense of overwhelming tiredness. The third thing was the newly cleaned floor and the med team standing by.
Why the Hell did I need to be here for any of this?
“Because your sense of reality has taken a hammering and I didn’t want to risk you being caught up in the location your boys are at.”
My boys, huh. Where were they, again?
“Don’t worry about it. Wanderer will get you there, but you need to sleep so you can deal with it, okay?”
This time, I managed words.
“Okay,” and I was out the instant they left my mouth.
Felt like I was back in a blink, and it was nice not to wake up in a tank…or in a cell, come to that, given what they’d been discussing when I’d left the conference room. How had that gone? I wondered.
“We traded fines,” Delight said. “They waived damages, the sentence for theft of station equipment, the fine for piloting through orbital airspace without permission, the fines and jail terms for reckless endangerment and dangerous flying, the fine and jail term for unauthorized access to the orbital’s external spaces, the fines and jail terms for possession and use of a deadly weapon, attempted hijacking of a space craft and threat to life of the crew of such…” She paused, as though thinking. “I don’t think I missed anything, there.”
“No,” Pritchard added. “Sounds like you got it all.”
I didn’t bother to wait, just sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Nice to find I wasn’t in the old ship suit anymore, but I still stank.
“I need the san,” I said.
“You don’t want to know what we traded the fines for?”
Actually, I did, but I wanted the san more.
Delight got that.
“It’s over there.”
“Ta.”
I made it in time to throw up, again, and then took a moment to clear my mind. After that, it was an easy step into a short steam-and-dry, which left me smelling a whole lot better than when I’d gone in—and the dilemma of what to wear, because I really didn’t want to put my clothes back on, and I didn’t want to head back out to Delight and Pritchard, stitchless bare.
It took me a minute to try shoving my clothing into the san unit, and a minute longer to stop swearing when it was sucked down into the waste disposal unit.
Delight was laughing fit to bust when she opened the door and passed me a replicator-fresh replacement.
“Pritchard sends his compliments.”
I glared at her, took the suit, and got dressed.
“Nice,” I said, and didn’t sound one bit impressed.
Delight’s smile faded.
“You’ve lost your sense of humor,” she said. “Come on.”
I followed her out.
“So, what was the trade?”
“We didn’t charge them the appropriate fines for being a place of illicit trade, hosting war criminals, harboring a hostile company, and trafficking in sentient lives—and we didn’t do a full audit on every business they currently had on, or off, their systems. It was more than fair.”
“I still think we got ripped off,” Pritchard told her, but Delight just smirked.
“You haven’t seen what the Hack Team did to every single one of their operating systems, or the hitchers we put on every ship and shuttle in dock. We got a lot more than they bargained for.”
I wondered how the orbital and its clientele could not have seen this coming, but Delight had that covered.
“Some people just don’t know us very well,” she said, “and the ones that do didn’t think we be here quite as fast as we were.”
Well, sucked to be them, I thought. What I said was, “So, what’s next?”
“Don’t you want to know where the boys are?”
At least she wasn’t calling them my boys anymore.
“Mack would be disappointed,” she added, and I rolled my eyes.
Sure he would. But I was pushing away memories of his arm around my shoulders when the arach boarded, of waking to find him waiting at my bedside after every major injury—and that, even when he knew I wasn’t going to run away—of me just wanting him close by.
“What’s next?” I repeated, my voice coming out harder than I’d meant—and I was thankful when Delight and Pritchard didn’t comment on anything that had just crossed my mind.
Delight headed for the door.
“Wanderer put the location on the edge of wolf space. There was some very interesting fine print in that contract. Took us some time to drill down to it. Once Costoganzi verified the catch, the wolves get the bounty and to dispose of the Shady’s crew for their own profit. The only caveat was that the wolves were to ensure the crew were never to regain their freedom or be able to call for help. If
