“Yet you did anyway.”
“Yet I did anyway.” Jason put that chess piece back down. “To be fair, it looks like you’ve done pretty well for yourself. The old girl’s still in one piece.”
Jason hoped to get a laugh from his brother. No such luck.
“What do you need?” Tyler asked.
“I need transport.”
“Where?”
“Frontier’s Reach.”
Tyler’s mind seemed to wander. “Why would you possibly want to go to Frontier’s Reach? There’s nothing out there.”
“Not necessarily.”
Tyler looked at him expectedly. Jason knew he wouldn’t get anywhere without explaining himself.
“At the end of the war, the Raptor was hunting a war criminal by the name of Benjamin Tyrell. They attacked our ship, and I ordered my friend to go after him.” Jason paused. “Nash never made it back.”
“Tyrell killed him?”
“Yes. However, the wreckage of his pod was soaked in what has become known as Iota particles.”
“Which means?”
Jason frowned. “I don’t know.”
Tyler furrowed his brow. “So, what has this got to do with Frontier’s Reach?”
“A few days ago, I got a message from an old buddy. Those Iota particles have reared their head again. In the Reach.”
“And you want to go there? Why?”
Jason had asked himself the same question several times. “I don’t know. Closure, I guess.” He knew he wasn’t producing a strong case. “Look, I have money. It’s not a lot, and it wouldn’t get me transport aboard another ship, but it’s yours if you take me.”
Tyler bit his bottom lip. “I could very well tell you to get off this ship and never come back again.”
“You could. And I’d understand.”
Tyler sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’ll need time to think about this.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” With a nod of understanding, Jason left the Argo to find a bar that would open a line of credit for him while he awaited his fate.
Six
Cargo Ship Argo
“He wants us to go where?”
Conrad’s Althaus’s voice echoed against the bulkheads of the cargo bay as his hands clenched into fists. Tyler prayed his didn’t use one of the tritonium containers as a punching bag.
After Jason left the Argo, Tyler did some thinking about his brother’s request before asking Conrad and Kevin to join him. He’d filled them in on everything. Conrad’s reaction had been exactly what he anticipated.
“It’s out of the question. Do I need to remind you I’ve secured a consignment of forty thousand liters of this stuff?” Conrad banged on the tritonium container beside him.
“No, you don’t.” Tyler considered the fully stocked cargo bay around him.
“That’s not to mention the thruster assemblies, the guidance systems, the—”
“I get the point.”
“Do you? This is a big payday I’ve got lined up. And we have to get this stuff to the Tau-Zeta System on time if we want to cash in.”
Tyler couldn’t argue. It’d been one of the better consignments the small cargo crew had secured in a long time. For years the crew of the Argo scrimped and scraped for work, but occasionally something like this came along that would make them enough money to see them through to the end of the financial year.
“What do you think?” Tyler asked Kevin, who’d been unusually quiet.
The Argo’s pilot put his data tablet by his side. “Well, we know we have to get this order to Tau-Zeta. That in itself will be a long journey,” he said with all the reason Tyler expected from him. “If we take a detour to the coordinates Jason has given us, we’d add about a month onto our trip.” He looked at Conrad. “You could ask if we can get an extension on the delivery.”
Conrad’s eyes rolled. “How did I know you’d side with him?”
Kevin ignored him. “How much did you say Jason would pay us?”
“He sent me his latest bank statement and it looks like he’s been able to put twenty-seven thousand credits together,” Tyler said.
“If we were going to transport someone out that far, how much would we normally ask? Thirty-five thousand? We wouldn’t go out there unless we’d make good money from it. But even with what Jason pays, we’ll still do okay.” Kevin shifted his gaze to Conrad. “I need not remind you that every penny counts at the moment.”
Both had good points. They’d been great mentors since his father died and years later were still dishing out good advice. But their differing points of view weren’t helping Tyler. He glanced over at Conrad. “Rebuttal?”
His uncle’s face had become a deep shade of red. He knew the value of money just like everyone else on the Argo. But it didn’t take a FTL professor to realize that he didn’t want Jason back aboard. “You do remember what he did ten years ago, right?”
Tyler didn’t have to be reminded. But he knew he would be told again, regardless.
“Your father died, and your so-called brother flew off for the academy—”
“Is it really necessary to go over this again?” Kevin interrupted.
“It is necessary, because now he comes back. And what does he want? To go to Frontier’s Reach to chase some ghost from the past? It’s ridiculous.”
Tyler sighed. He’d already had it out with Jason and didn’t need to go over it again with Conrad. He and Jason were raised in a world without their mother, and their father had taken care of them. Benjamin Cassidy had been a far from perfect dad, but he did the best job he could while being captain of his cargo ship. Kevin and Conrad were a great help after his mother’s passing. Both were vastly different to one another. Conrad was hard but fair. Tyler got on with him more often than not. And Kevin. Well, everyone got on with him.
If it hadn’t been for those two when Jason left for the academy, there was no way Tyler would’ve grown up to be the man he was today. The ship would have been sold for scrap, and everyone would be out of a job on some backwater planet somewhere. He respected the hell out of them, and that was why he valued their opinions
